Matt’s Week in Dork! (3/30/14-4/5/14)

    Another good week for this dork.  Too many sleepless nights, though.  I can’t believe the insanity of the times we live in.  For dorks like me, this is a wonderful and weird time.  Marvel Comics are hitting the big screen to critical and financial success.  Science fiction movies are starting to be taken somewhat seriously, and there are even occasional good ones.  It’s wild.  But it brings with it some negative elements, too.  I recently went back and watched some classic Doctor Who, just to remind myself why I love that show.  Like late-coming comic fans who claim their favorite superhero is Hawkeye (NOBODY’s favorite hero is Hawkeye!), the new Who has produced a good deal of new fans who make older fans like me feel kind of awkward and uncomfortable.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m glad the new show is a success, and I love that it’s bringing in new generations of fans.  I am.  I just can’t relate to them.  What they love about the show is not at all what I love about the show.  In fact, more often than not, what they love about the show seems to be the stuff that’s making me less and less of a fan of the new series.  Still, young nerds are our future.  I should remember that.  Anyway, on with the week.

Put the screwdriver away and use your brain!

    Sunday morning, I read the first two volumes of Abe Sapien.  It’s OK.  At best.  For part of the Mignola universe, it’s pretty disappointing.

Grand Hotel:  This pioneering ‘all star cast’ film is full of wit and charm and fun characters.  It’s gorgeously produced and keeps a good pace.  There isn’t a plot, so much as a bunch of characters going through various arcs of their life over a couple of days stay.  From residential folks to temporary guests, the quirks and concerns of people give way to humor and drama.  Everyone is so good, but my personal favorite is John Barrymore, who is so charming and so sad as the down on his luck baron in desperate need of some quick cash.  A must see film.

Doctor Who: Paradise Towers:  Ultra 80s with a strong dose of J.G. Ballard, this is one of the few good stories of the last few years of classic who.  There are gangs, oppressive guards, robots, cannibals, and a cowardly action hero.  I like the look and general vibe, which I’ve said before, reminds me of 2000AD comics.  The late years of Doctor Who make me kind of sad, but this is one of the few bright spots, and so earns some marks.  It’s what Who could have been in the late 80s, as opposed to the lackluster stories that were much more common.

Mulholland Drive:  “It’s been that kind of a day.”  In many ways this film is Lost Highway Redux.  It covers some of the same themes, similar storytelling techniques, and general mood.  The major difference is the lesbian angle, which seems to be what made critics who hated Lost Highway love Mulholland Drive.  It is some wonderful David Lynch madness, and it’s got some great performances and great scenes.  But it doesn’t feel as smooth, or as (I can’t believe I’m going to use this word) coherent.  This is a nightmare turned into a film, and as such, it’s kind of beautiful, but also very frightening in a way horror films rarely are.

Noah:  This never gets as bugnuts crazy as the source material, but it is high myth-fantasy, and as such isn’t bad.  The first two thirds of the film is the best.  Honestly, once the Flood happens (sorry…spoilers) the film drops several gears and I found myself just waiting for the eventual end.  But up to that point, it was entertaining.  I wish the Watchers and that armored dog thing weren’t the only creatures, though.  Jewish myth and a lot of early proto-Christian mysticism has so much crazy I’d have loved to see them attempt.  Where were the Nephilim?  Where were the ‘wheels within wheels and covered in eyes?’  Still, flame-burst swords, drug-trip conversations with the divine, and Rock-Ents.  Oh, yeah.  Drunken Russell Crowe.  Awesome.  Ray Winstone and Anthony Hopkins play exactly the same character they play in all these historic/fantasy films.  Not great, but not bad.  And easily the best thing Aronofsky has done since The Fountain.

Drink blazing hot redemption, sinners!

The Legacy:  Typical, boring 1970s horror movie, The Legacy features the conspicuous credulity of protagonists that was common in the time.  Everyone seems perfectly willing to simply accept that there’s a witch cult, that they’re doing black magic, and that everyone’s in on it.  No question, no ‘this can’t be happening,’ nothing.  The leads are super dull, and Sam Elliot does NOT work as a romantic interest.  It’s competently shot, but ultimately dull.

Captain America: The First Avenger:  I still wish this movie was a more solid Captain America film, and less of an opening chapter for The Avengers.  I wanted the whole thing to be set during World War II, and for those couple of montages to be spread out into the meat of the film, the battle against Red Skull.  That said, watching it again, and looking at the film as part of a greater whole that Marvel/Disney is building, the film works much better.  That’s something I’m finding interesting about all this crazy business.  They’re making movies that are individually OK, that when taken as a whole are kind of amazing.  All the connections, all the world building, all the ground work being put in place for an ever expanding series of films.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier:  This is a sort of nerd nirvana that is still blowing my mind.  The story in this is OK.  It’s a pale shadow of Ed Brubaker’s Winter Soldier comic, but it’s not bad.  Characters get more time, we see Cap deal with some of the effects of his dislocation in time, and we get many nods to various comic characters and ideas that I need a guide to figure out.  I really enjoyed the addition of Falcon, and I liked him and Cap as a team.  I’m still not really sold on Black Widow in the films.  I don’t know if it’s the actress or the writing, but whatever the case, she’s typically the most iffy part for me.  There’s much more of her in this film, and while not bad, it wasn’t holding my interest.  Which is too bad, since I’d liked her so much in the Captain America comics I read.

Black Plague (aka Anazapata):  “Don’t look at us! There’s none of us can write.”  A kind of run of the mill Medieval mystery/drama.  It’s well made, I suppose, and fairly well produced.  But it’s simply not all that interesting.  And as the movie goes on, you start to realize it’s another one of those movies where all men are monsters and all women their perpetual victims.  And the film isn’t even French.

Moby Dick: “From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee!”  Obsession and madness drive men to their graves in this adaptation of the nautical classic.  Like Joseph Conrad, I’ve never been able to get into reading Melville, but also like Conrad, I find elements of story and theme that resonate, even if the writing doesn’t.  The finale of the film is pretty awesome, and I love the look of the whale and its violence.  However, it felt like the movie was overall, a bit too stodgy, a bit too traditional.  It’s a story that begs for a more Gothic or even Noir style.  I wanted the extremes of the men to be echoed in extremes of design and cinematography.  Instead, the somewhat utilitarian filming seems tone deaf.  That is, except for Orson Welles’s opening sermon and the film’s climax, which are pretty wild.

Dredd:  This is the hardcore, ultra-violent cyberpunk movie I’ve been hungering for since Robocop.  They finally get Dredd right, get his world right, and make a heck of an entertaining movie.  The cast is good, the effects are kind of beautiful, and the violence is crazy…and also beautiful, it its way.  Grim, bloody, and tough as hell.  I love it.  It’s developed quite the cult following since hitting DVD.  Here’s hoping that gets enough attention to get a sequel.  But I doubt it.  Still, we got a proper Judge Anderson, finally.  Even if it is as a rookie.

Forbidden Planet:  I was kickin’ around when this popped up on TCM, and I had to watch it.  Great movie.  I’ve seen it many times before, and I love it every time.

    I had Forbidden Planet on while I was working on my list of hoped for Marvel movies of the future.  And after working on it, and thinking about Captain America 2, I had to put on my copy of Trouble Man.

What if Marvel Madness happened in the 70s?!

Trouble Man:  “T is the last man in this world I want looking for me.”  Mr. T is one seriously bad dude.  He’s got the world on a string, but somebody is looking to start some trouble.  As he unravels the conspiracy, he chews through the underworld.  Robert Hooks is super cool.  This one is right up there, near the top of the list when it comes to great Blaxploitation films.  I don’t know why it isn’t talked about as much as some of the others.  It should be.  See it.

    And that’s it.  This ended up being a bit of a weird week, where plans fell through a couple times, and a lot of stuff ended up playing out differently than I’d expected.  But it all worked out.  And I did finally, finally get a little sleep.  I’m still trying to get more reading done.  After that surge of comic reading last week, I’ve been somewhat lax.  And I really, really need to finish Lord of Light, which I started a dogs age ago.  But it’s tough.  You need to be focused, and I’m not.  Anyway, next week is already shaping up to be a good one.  So, ‘til next time.

-Matt

Two More Fistfuls of Favorites! (Matt’s Picks)

    In the Spring of 2012, as Brad and I were still riding high on 2011’s great movies, we got all mushy, and put together our lists of all time favorite films.  Of course there were classics like Jaws and Commando, but there were also some odd choices.  What do you expect from two Dorks like us, who hope with shivering anticipation that the Saw franchise comes back (Saw X needs to be in SPACE!!!) and that there will be a Crank Meets Transporter prequel set in the Wild West?

    Anyway, Brad got to thinking we should do another list, but this time doing our next round of favorites.   Our 11-20.  Cool.  I like making lists (like Liam Neeson).  If you’re so inclined, take a look back at my top 10 films, and here are my next ten favorites:

20.  Howard the Duck:  This movie takes all kinds of guff from every which way (including loose).  But, as I’ve said before, F the haters.  I absolutely love this film.  Lea Thompson is adorable, Howard balances charm and snark.  And I just love the whole look and feel of the film.  You can’t watch it with even an ounce of cynicism.  I know people hate it.  And I don’t think I can come up with an argument for the film that equates to much more than “Oh, come on! It’s awesome, man.”  Because it is.

19.  Forbidden Planet:  What was happening in science fiction literature for decades finally got screentime in this classic science fiction retelling of The Tempest that would pave the way for galaxy adventures like Star Trek and Star Wars.  Postulating a future where it wasn’t just about getting to space, and maybe, just maybe landing on another planet, Forbidden Planet takes us to a time when Humanity has reached out to the stars and established an interstellar civilization.  Amazing special effects, crazy experimental music, and great characters.  A watershed moment in science fiction cinema.

18.  The City of Lost Children:  Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro raided my dreams and came up with this amazing visual feast of chronologically untethered retro-fantasy.  A circus strongman and an orphan thief search the tumbling labyrinth of girders and rust that makes up the city, looking for a young boy who just wants a snack…well, all the snacks.  Along the way, they meet and battle an impressive cast of strange and deviant folk.  Religious zealots, clones, brains in fish tanks, and the Octopus.  It’s beautiful and strange, and it’s wonderful.

17.  The Thing:  It’s hard not to just gush about this movie.  Almost as hard as it was for the thing not to gush out of that Petri dish when exposed to heat.  It may be a ‘perfect film.’  Not only is it intensely unnerving, beautifully shot, and bloody intense.  But it also has great music, excellent effects, and a crackerjack script.  It does what too few horror movies do, and makes a large cast of interesting and endearing characters I find myself caring for.  When one is hurt or dies or turns into a giant mouth that bites someone’s arms off, I’m bummed out.  When that one guy is a little upset that he has had to go through a major ordeal while TIED TO THAT F*&#ING COUCH, it’s funny in a sad sort of way.  And then there’s the ending.

16.  Metropolis:  When all I had seen was the hacked up, 90ish minute version of this film, it was one of my favorites.  Now that I’ve seen the complete (99.9%) version, it’s so much more.  The story transcends time, the set design is gorgeous, and world created remains a tremendous achievement.  The head and the hand must work together.

15.  Streets of Fire:  The 80s and the 50s come together in a rock fueled fantasy world of the city and the streets.  Back from The War, a young man comes to the aid of his sister.  It seems his old flame, a messianic rocker-girl, has been kidnapped by the demonic leader of a motorcycle gang.  Assembling a crew, he has to go into hell to bring her back.  The movie is so 80s you need to wear legwarmers while watching it (that’s a law), and like a lot of movies I love, you have to check your cynicism at the door.  As it says at the beginning, it’s a Rock & Role Fable.  Plus, it’s got the best hammer fight ever.

14.  Conan the Barbarian:  Arnold’s best movie, and the only attempt at adapting Robert E. Howard’s classic Conan stories that got anything at all correct.  With one of the all time great movie scores, top notch, old-Hollywood production design, and so much awesome violence, Conan the Barbarian isn’t just one of the best fantasy films ever made…it’s one of the best films.  Take that, Annie Hall.

13.  Touch of Evil:  Citizen Kane really is a great film.  I do not begrudge its place on many ‘best movie ever’ lists.  But my favorite Orson Welles film is still Touch of Evil.  Heston is great, Welles is disgusting.  The women are fascinating.  The hoodlums are horrible.  Dennis Weaver is shooting his Norman Bates all over the place.  There’s that tremendous single-take scene that opens the film.  So good.

12.  Lost Highway:  “Who the hell owns that dog, anyway?”  This is my David Lynch.  It was the first Lynch film I saw on the big screen.  It led me to read Barry Gifford.  The soundtrack is amazing.  It has one great scene after another, one quotable line after another.  And it’s seriously weird.  Years later, I still can’t tell you quite what it’s about, or quite what happened.  You want me to draw a timeline?  Timespiral?  I got nothing.

11.  Logan’s Run:  “You don’t have to die.  You can LIVE!”  Utopia is running down, the system is less than perfect.  But for a society of pretty young things, everything seems A-OK.  Except for those few who donn’t want to ‘renew,’ who want to ask questions.  What starts as an undercover mystery turns into an odyssey.  I love every moment of this film, except for the awful Farrah Fawcett, who has never been worse.  The film has a magic so many are lacking.  Something more than the sum of its parts.

(See 1-10 here and 21-30 here).

-Matt

Movie Review: The Cage/Where No Man Has Gone Before

    This time around I’m going to do something a little different.  Instead of the feature films I normally review, I’m going into some detail on the two pilots for the original Star Trek TV series.  I think it’ll serve as a good transition between Forbidden Planet and my next selection.

    The original pilot for Star Trek was noticeably different from the show that was to come.  In fact, the only character you might recognize is Mr. Spock, though even he isn’t the emotionally dead alien we all know and love.  It takes many cues from previous science fiction, mostly books.  But you can’t help but notice similarities, especially in design, to the groundbreaking Forbidden Planet.  It didn’t exactly go over well with the powers that were, but apparently it had something, because they commissioned a second pilot and eventually the show that would become so popular.  The Cage fell into obscurity, only a few parts seen in flashbacks during a two part episode of the regular show.  It didn’t see broadcast until sometime in the 80s.  Like the original pilot of Lost in Space, there are a lot of ‘what might have been’ moments in The Cage.  The most striking things, of course, is Jeffery Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike.  Though I don’t know that network television of the time could have dealt with sustaining a character like Pike in any meaningful way.  But I like this captain who is at the end of his rope, ready to quit.  He’s seen too much, done too much, lost too many people.  Kirk, for all his cool, was really a typical action TV hero of the time.  I like Pike’s bitterness.

    The storyline again echoes Forbidden Planet at the beginning, with the crew investigating a lost ship.  There’s even stuff about a long lost super advanced civilization (their hallways are even the same shape as the Krell).  But things take a different road once those aliens, iconic 50s/60s style giant headed aliens in sparkling robes.  With Pike captured and the crew left to figure things out, we go into an exploration of what it means to be a Human, to be a free and independent being.  There’s a lot of stuff about illusion and memory, and what those things mean to us.  Apparently the executives who saw this originally thought that it was ‘too cerebral.’  Too cerebral?  I guess in the world of I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners, maybe it was.  For science fiction, like film and TV has pretty much always been, it was 20 to 30 years behind the literary times.  It had a woman serving as First Officer (execs couldn’t live with that), something that wouldn’t have been too shocking for any sci-fi reader of the day.  It had an alien working on the ship, another thing that wouldn’t have been too strange for readers, but didn’t sit too well with the suits.  I’d have preferred they keep the lady and the alien, but they had to pick their battles.  The resolution of the story is a bit too quick, too easy.  A bit of a deus ex machina with the sudden translation of the ship’s computer followed by a ‘woops, our bad’ on the part of the aliens.  Yet it still manages to pull out a bittersweet element with the blonde and her fate.

    With the second commissioned Star Trek pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before, we meet the new, more dashing captain of the enterprise, James (here R.) Kirk.  Also, the first appearances of Scotty and Sulu.  And Spock is more like what he would become, uncomfortable with Kirk’s ‘Earth emotions.’  We see much more of the ship’s interior in the episode, and a taste of the interesting lighting and color pallet that would be a hallmark of the show.  The story features another lost ship, this one swept beyond a weird energy barrier at the edge of the galaxy.  There’s some stuff about people with ESP (popular at that time) who are effected by the strange energy.  After the Enterprise goes through the barrier, it too is effected, or at least, some of its crew are.  Many die, but one, Kirk’s old school chum Garry Mitchell, gets a major league brain boost.  How does one deal with a man who may be becoming a god?  How does a man deal with that transformation in himself?

    Though I really love this episode, it does feature a movie/TV science fiction cliché that drives me a bit nuts.  In movies and TV, any superior machine or person is automatically amoral (rare) or evil (frequent).  Though the literature features robots and super-beings with good intentions, film and TV seems totally void of even the potential of benevolence among superiors.  I don’t see why superior intellect would not also feature superior morality.  We’re smarter than our ancestors and a hell of a lot more moral, why would our descendants (genetically and cybernetically advanced though they may be) be different?  Now, in the case of Garry Mitchell, one could easily see that he had some deep flaws in his emotional make-up right from the start.  The kind of thing that might never have turned ugly; but when power is thrust into his hands, allows him to be corrupted faster and more completely than normal.  Dr. Dehner, for example, seems like she might have retained her moral center if given the chance.  Mitchell seems like the kind of guy who walks through life without much hassle, not having to work for the things he gets, and resentful of the things that challenge him.  That’s a man made to abuse power.

    Something about the script and pacing of this makes it feel more ‘cinematic’ to me than Trek ever felt until The Motion Picture.  In fact, I thought a modified version of this could have made an interesting feature film.  I’d like to see some of the issues dealt with in a deeper way, especially the reasons for Mitchell’s fall into power-fueled madness.  I guess they addressed the complaint that The Cage was ‘too cerebral’ by having a big fistfight ending.  That kind of set the stage for a recurring theme in the rest of the series.  I had an odd realization while watching this, actor Gary Lockwood is playing a human being uplifted to a super-being that turns evil.  A few years later, he would play the doomed partner of a man who is uplifted to a super-being with the potential for good in 2001;  2001, which features a supercomputer that goes murderously rogue, while also featuring an uplifted human with the potential to save mankind.  Kind of a mixed message, there.

    I don’t think Star Trek has ever quite lived up to the potential represented by these first two pilots, at least not more than a few times.  It’s a great show and has some really good episodes.  But few capture the sweep or emotion of these first two stories.  City on the Edge of Forever (often cited as one of the best, though not my favorite) is probably the closest.  Watching them makes me wish things could have been different, better writing, more structured stories, more planning.  I know TV of that day didn’t work like that, slavishly devoted to the episodic, wrapped up in an hour, watchable in any order way of things.  But science fiction is often about ‘what if?’  So what if these two stories, The Cage and Where No Man Has Gone Before, had been more of an indication of the show to come?  Not the show of silly crap like Charlie X or Catspaw, but a more serious science fiction adventure show.  More Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, etc.  Less Shadow of the Gun, Omega Glory, and Spock’s Brain.  What if?

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (3/31/13-4/6/13)

    Things didn’t quite go as planned over the weekend, but that let me finish off Rome’s first season on Sunday.  Good times.  Heck of a show.  It makes me want to watch some more solid historic stuff.  Agora, Centurion, Spartacus (the movie!), that sort of thing.

Rome Season 1:  “Let his heart be filled with sacred rage.”  Getting past the clean, civilized veneer slathered on Ancient Rome by Renaissance painters and Hollywood production designers, Rome reaches into the history to show the underbelly of lived-in antiquity.  Life was cheap, justice was not, and the people were hardly more than savages, for all their creativity and cunning.  I think lewd graffiti gets at the heart of Rome.  Here was a powerful city built by champions, spawning heroes, that delighted in large phalluses and dirty jokes.  A city where the tastes and smells of the known world, stretching from the Atlantic to Asia, from the brutal lands of central Europe to North Africa, where blood sacrifice and public murder were embraced and the lauded political forum could daily explode in bodily violence.  Of course, there’s the shrewd machinations and back stabbings one expects, with powerful and spiteful women working behind the scenes, while daring and charismatic men inspire great public works and grim massacre.  The series also puts a more human face on many of the names out of history, while telling the story of two soldiers (the only two addressed by name in Caesar’s war chronicles).  Pullo, the gregarious lout and Vorenus, the honorable man, forced together by circumstance, forged by conflict into best of friends.  Their struggles with turbulent times, with perfidious and tumultuous women, and with societal expectations of masculinity, along with their seemingly god-favored ability to survive, thrive, and be in the right place at the right time, makes for a compelling narrative.  It’s interesting that we hold Rome up as one of Humanity’s heights of civilization, when the histories seem to show it was rather savage, even for the time.  Alexandria seems to have been a far more civilized city, for example (still a warren of superstitious savagery).  I’m a little bummed they skipped over a great deal of the Cleopatra/Julius Caesar story.   None of her visit to Rome in the days leading up to Caesar’s assassination, for example.  Though I gather she features more in the second season, she seems to be little more than a footnote in the first, which from what I understand shouldn’t be.  Still, they only had twelve episodes, so I guess they couldn’t get into everything.  “I believe I shall go home and stupefy myself with wine…Good day to you all.” -Cicero

Forbidden Planet:  “Sorry Miss.  I was giving myself an oil-job.”  It doesn’t get much better than Forbidden Planet.  Taking inspiration from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, it pushed special effects technology to whole new levels, and set the stage for science fiction to come, especially and particularly Star Trek.  This wasn’t, as so many other 50s movies, about a rocket ship to the Moon, or even a first voyage to Mars.  This was set in a future where those things had already long been accomplished.  This was the sort of future history Asimov and Heinlein were writing about, where Humanity was living among the stars, finding all sorts of marvelous things.

French Quarter:  Holy crap, the narration in this film is infuriatingly crappy.  I think it’s supposed to sound like some kind of ‘down home’ wisdom, but it just sounds like a dumb old man jibber-jabbering.  He refers to a person as ‘half child, half girl, all woman.’  What?  TV guest villain of the week Bert is looking for a topless dancer, and a desperate blonde bimbo is all about it.  Then there’s time travel or something.  This movie was obviously put together by someone in love with old timey New Orleans, it’s music and sleaze.  Sadly, it wasn’t put together by someone who could write or direct a film.  Even the ‘sexy’ bits are kind of awkward and weird.  Still, the film has its charm.  Not really, but the girls are cute enough...I guess.

The American Astronaut:  “It was soft and round.  Now get back to work.”  A somewhat surreal science fiction musical, this oddly charming movie is the kind of crazy that goes on in my head when nobody is looking.  Weird moments, crazy dialog, catchy tunes, and a distinct visual style.  If I had two pennies to rub together, this is the kind of thing I’d love to be making.  Not for everyone, but for those few, a treat.

    Hanging with Brad on Monday, I had the profound misfortune of catching the season finale of The Walking Dead.  There’s a show that sucks.  After a fairly promising start, this show quickly did two bad things.  First (though I understand the need) it departed drastically from the comic series.  It might not have been so bad, had they not cut the emotional impact of every major character event that remained.  Second, they seem to have hired writers with absolutely no sense of character or drama.  The only thing I can manage to feel about anyone on the show is rage and contempt.  The women are all shrill monsters and the men all petty dullards.  I’m glad I quit this show.

My smartness done dripped out my eye-hole.

This Gun For Hire:  “And people ask me why I back shows.”  Dang nasty opening.  Another Graham Greene story on the silver screen, this time about a nasty piece of work hitman, foreign agents, a pretty dame, and all kinds of baddies.  Everyone is after something, and looking to screw everyone else over in this Noir type caper.  The actors are awesome, playing their fractured and demented characters.  I love the somewhat charming, delicate fat man, who abhors violence while orchestrating murders.  This is not one of the better genre films I’ve seen, but it’s pretty good and worth a watch.  Some nice bad behavior.

Rome Season 2:  “I recognize your symptoms.  I have the same sickness.”  Vorenus and Pullo are back for more blood and twisted morality.  In the aftermath of Caesar’s death, Rome and its people are in a bad way.  Vorenus descends into some very dark places, and Pullo is there, watching his back.  The friendship of these two unlikely heroes is the heart of the show.  With all the other fascinating and strange characters going about their back stabbing and grand stage horrors, two soldiers take on the world together.  Very cool.  There are some truly vile people, too.  Atia’s crocodile tears are perhaps the most disturbing of all.  A truly vicious and foul human.  But her son, Octavian makes for a compelling historic figure.  A strange and sullen, sometimes sickly boy, more wrapped up in his books (scrolls) than politics, he none the less contained a heart of iron and a will to rival the greats.  The universe mistreats Pullo and Vorenus on a grand scale.  Seeing them battle the forces set against them is harrowing but most satisfactory.  There are some elements I wish had been explored a bit more, including Cleopatra’s role in things.  She’s little more than a footnote in this series, her relationship with Julius Caesar almost non-existent.  Still, with only a combined 22 episodes for the whole series, they didn’t have enough time to go over everything.  There have been a great many portrayals of the Greek/Egyptian queen, each trying to capture some essence of a mysterious but terribly important figure in the history of the age.  Here, she exists as some kind of half-mad hophead, like some manic pixie dream girl of antiquity.

Centurion:  “Her soul is an empty vessel.  Only Roman blood can fill it.” Not finished with Rome when the show was over, I had to pop Centurion in the DVD player.  Based on the myth of the Ninth Legion’s disappearance, it manages to be a darned fun adventure film, with lots of nasty violence, all with just enough historic trappings to satisfy this viewer.  It’s also got one of those great collections of UK character actors these sorts of films always manage to attract.  Sadly, it does rely somewhat on CG blood.  Not as bad as some, but it’s there, none the less.  It’s especially frustrating because there are a lot of well done practical blood.  The movie looks good, moves quick, and is generally good, if not amazing.  One technical problem with the film is subtitles.  They’re so crazy small that they’re hard to read when not on the big screen.  An HD TV would probably be OK.

    I watched another disk of The Clone Wars.  Frustrating show in some ways.  It’s so good, but is so weighed down by how crappy the prequels were.  99% of my problems with the show are directly tied to its connections to the films.  Season 4 isn’t as good as some of the earlier stuff, but it’s still pretty good.

Broken Arrow:  Jimmy Stewart faces off against the Apaches in this fairly typical Cowboys & Indians Western.  This is really the sort of thing that turned me off to Westerns as a kid.  Shockingly there’s a hot Native girl played by a hot non-Native girl who needs to learn about kissing and wearing nice dresses and such.  I guess it took movies like this to help change people’s perception of Native American, but it’s still awkward and weird.  The romance with the young Native girl storyline always plays out pretty much the same.  Lead guy shows up, girl falls head over heels in love with him upon first sight (for no discernable reason), she’s promised to another, they defy cultural expectations, the previously betrothed guy dies, paving the way for a happy ending.  The only variation in this is the final end of the Native girl.  On rare occasions (like ‘very special’ episodes of 80s sitcoms), she dies to give the movie Oscar bate acting at the end.  Usually, they both ride off together, letting you know that all will be perfectly well between the Natives and the White Man.

    “What do you know about gods?!”  I watched two original Star Trek pilots as part of my movie review series.  Yeah, they’re not feature films, but it’s my article, so…bam!  I really dig those first glimpses of Trek.  Had the show only lived up.  I love the original show.  There are some great episodes.  But too few that reach for it the way The Cage and Where No Man Has Gone Before do.

The Big Heat:  “You’re on a hate binge.”  Glen Ford and Gloria Graham revenge the hell outta everyone dumb enough to cross ‘em in this ugly, ugly Noir classic.  Don’t scald a drunken hottie with coffee, ‘cause she will mess your stuff up.  And if you’re gonna blow up an honest cop, make sure you don’t take out the wrong person, or he will take you down.  Punks, thugs, thieves, and jerks of all kind get theirs and get it good.  It goes in directions that twist your guts around.  Great stuff.  Lee Marvin’s woman slapping hood is an especially loathsome heavy, too.

Space Academy:  Not as good as Jason of Star Command, this is an OK 70s sci-fi kids show.  It’s about on par with Ark II, which means it’s more often disappointing than cool.  The idea of the show isn’t bad, but the cast and the writing aren’t there.  And Jonathan Harris.  That is just an actor I can not get behind.  His acting is so broad, so stilted, I don’t know.  It wasn’t good.  He’s not awful in this show.  Not like his many terrible guest appearances in other sci-fi shows, or his dreadful starring role in Lost in Space.  But gah.

Wozzeck:  “Brandy is my lifeblood.”  War man.  It messes with the head.  Alban Berg’s strange opera gets a super strange 1996 presentation, with spinning CG blocks heralding scene changes, disturbing masked children, little houses, shifting stages, and generally disturbing images.  Franz (Dale Duesing) is a nice guy, but the world keeps crapping on his head.  I do love all the scenes with Dr. Coffin-nail.  By far my favorite character in the opera.  He should get his own opera.

The Mist:  “Stoning people who piss you off is OK.  They do it in the Bible don’t they?  And I got plenty of peas.”  The only way to watch this movie is in black & white.  Frank Darabont tried to release it that way, but was not allowed.  However, on DVD he was able to put it out officially.  There are some movies that just look better this way, or at least look great.  Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Phantom Menace and yes, The Mist.  As far as the movie itself, this is a pretty good old-style monster movie, part siege film, part Lovecraftian nightmare.  I’m not the biggest Stephen King fan (read: not a fan at all), and this movie does feature some of his particular failings, especially when it comes to the Marcia Gay Harden character who is outright infuriating from moment one.  It’s the story of a weird mist that comes down out of the mountains, bringing with it something strange.  A bunch of random folks (played by half the cast of The Walking Dead) end up trapped in a shop in a small Maine town.  The vocabulary is right for Maine (WZON, Portland, etc.), though the appearance is all off (it’s apparently Louisiana).  Unfortunately, as the movie goes on, it relies more an more on characters being as appallingly stupid as humanly possible.  Stop screaming.  Stop going slow.  Stop backing up.  Just go, go, GO!  I wish there was more of the last 5 or so minutes, with the walker in the mist, and all that, than there was of the middle hour, with all the Marcia Gay Harden and the stupid people.  Still, some cool monsters and a great, totally mean spirited ending.  One interesting thing is that two of the most heroic deeds in the film are done by supporting characters.  The supporting cast is quite good, actually.  I just wish the middle of the film and the heavy handed, anti-human stuff were better done, or largely excised.

Bikini Girls from the Lost Planet:  “I do read comic books.”  This may come as a surprise, but in spite of the title, this is not a good movie.  I don’t know why I recently thought, ‘why don’t I rent a Fred Olin Ray movie,’ but it happened, and this is the result.  Of course, the director is listed as Nicholas Medina, so I have even less idea why I got this.  Is that a pseudonym?  I do not know.  A bunch of porn actors make a not-quite-porn movie.  All the bad acting, plastic surgery, and fake boobs; none of the ‘substance.’  Oh, boy.  And I’ll bet you $1. that Frosted Tips’ first choice was not pretending to have sex with a woman.  Was the space ship set left over from another movie?  Because it looks pretty good, and far, far better put together than anything else (including the women) in this film.

Looking at the cover, I don't know how this wasn't great.

    For the next graphic novel club meeting, I read the first trade of the new Hawkeye series.  I guess I won’t talk about it here.  I’ll post the review after the meeting.  But after that, I went on to read the sixth issue, since Brad had passed it on to me a while back.  Again, it’s OK.  Kind of funny.  The whole Russian mob thing is weird.  Is that building to something?  I don’t know.  I still hate the art.

    I also finished volume 3 of Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing.  Good stuff.  The final story, Strange Fruit, is a bit broad, a bit heavy handed.  Still, the overall volume is good.

    After what seems like a bloody eternity, the final issue of Godzilla: The Half-Century War finally came out.  Nice explosive finish.  The issue is super action-heavy, without a heck of a lot of dialog, so it ended up flying by a bit faster than I’d have liked.  This is one of those comics where part of me wants it to go on longer, while the other part of me worries greater length might have diluted the cool.  Still, I think a ten issue run, instead of five might have been better.  But what we got was a really great ground level view of the world under the shadow of the greatest Kaiju of all time.  It does for Godzilla something of what Marvels did for the Marvel Universe.  A nice storytelling technique for such a venerable franchise.

    I also read the third issue of the new Star Wars ongoing series.  Not bad, though I don’t think the writer has quite captured Han Solo.  Maybe I’m off on that, but something doesn’t seem quite right.  Still, I like the art, the time period it’s set in, and the story seems solid.  This is the kind of Star Wars story I like to see, even if it does focus on the movie characters (I would generally prefer they use the setting, but expand the universe with new characters and story lines unrelated to the films).

-Matt