A Fistful of Influence! (Brad's Picks)

A couple of days ago I was tagged on Facebook by my buddy (& former co-cineAWESOMEr) Jeff Wildman to whip up one of those "15 Movies That Stuck With You" statuses.  I started to type up my Top Ten films, but stalled out...as much as I love those movies, I got nothing else to say about them right now.  They're great.  They sum up my tastes perfectly.  Still, Jeff's status got me thinking.  What are the movies that molded me into the Film Freak that's currently clacking away on this blog post?  Last year, I was lucky enough to capture Martin Scorsese's Jefferson Lecture at the Kennedy Center.  He called it "The Persistence of Vision," and a good chunk of was devoted to discussing the movies that shaped him as a director.  I've been mulling over these films since the lecture, and Jeff's status was just the excuse to get them up on ITMOD.  Again, these are NOT my all time favorite movies.  These are simply the films that steered my tastes.  Some of them seem obvious, a few others maybe not so much.

5.  Pickup on South Street:  Growing up an 80s/90s kid, Black & White was old & boring.  I wish I could claim a youth filled with culture and erudite thinking, but I pretty much matured strictly on a diet of Schwarzenegger & Star Wars (more on that later).  During those early years on the planet, I managed to catch a few of the inevitable classics (Psycho, Casablanca), but they never connected with my dumb kid brain.  In my teen years, as I (and everyone else) was obsessing over Quentin Tarantino, I discovered Samuel Fuller through the documentary The Typewriter, The Rifle, & The Movie Camera.  As guys like QT, Jim Jarmusch, & Tim Robbins gushed over his genius, I got curious.  I first watched The Big Red One, Shock Corridor, & I Shot Jesse James.  I thought they were interesting, but I still didn't understand the big deal.  Pickup on South Street knocked me out.  Despite a plot firmly rooted in The Cold War, Pickup is a mean little crime story with a very modern sense of cynicism.  "Don't Wave That Flag At Me!"  Richard Widmark is one of the most likable unlikable characters ever.  A beautiful bastard that sent me running into Film Noir - The Big Heat, Kiss Me Deadly, Sweet Smell of Success, Touch of Evil.  This set off a chain of events that lead me all the way to Citizen Kane - a movie that genuinely lives up to the hype, as Citizen Kane really is The Citizen Kane of Movies.  Black & White = old & boring?  Only children & idiots believe that.

4.  Death Race 2000:  Kids love all kinds of movies (unless they're Black & White as established above) - Indiana Jones, Airport, Plan 9 From Outer Space.  Good, Bad, Wonderfully Bad. They all live on the same playing field when you're young.  Some kids grow out of the crap films.  Some grow into ironic enjoyment - a nasty trait that I sometimes fall into.  But I'm pretty sure I would be a hipster asshole if not for Roger Corman.  His movies represent a can-do spirit that I find tremendously uplifting, and no other film embodies that "Where There's A Will There's A Way" attitude better than Death Race 2000.  You may not have the budget, you may not have the talent, but you've got an idea.  That's enough to make entertainment.  I love that.  If the world blesses me one Death Race 2000 for every Transformers I have to suffer through than All Is Right.

3.  Hellraiser:  It was a big deal the first time I sat down to watch Clive Barker's original horror.  I was a born scaredy cat.  When I was probably far too young, I braved a peek at both The Shining & Alien, and survived thanks to some strategically placed hand blocking.  Horror held an attraction, but I also worried that it was all Devil Music, a one way ticket to a fiery inferno. Then one day a classmate of mine told me that Hellraiser was cinema's greatest achievement.  I'm not so sure that's true, but to shut him up, I got my hands on the VHS.  It was scary...really freaking scary.  And it was badass.  The makeup.  The gore effects.  The monsters.  I'd never seen anything like it.  I went running to the books. I read the original novel, as well as The Damnation Game.  Clive Barker finally got me to Stephen King, and Stephen King pretty much cemented my interest in spook stories.  It's a genre I don't deal much in lately.  Modern Horror stories feel repetitive if not redundant.  I've got my favorites, I dare you to do better.

2.  Reservoir Dogs:  Before Quentin Tarantino I pretty much got all my entertainment through action movies.  Five minutes into Reservoir Dogs, I discovered that I could get as much enjoyment out of a conversation about Madonna as I could from a lightsaber duel.  1992 was a game changer.  Independent Cinema.  The Auteur theory.  I started reading books about filmmaking.  I became a movie nut, not just a fan.  When Pulp Fiction finally came around I was already preaching Tarantino's gospel.

1.  Star Wars:  I can't even remember a time before Star Wars.  Almost all of my early baby photos feature me clutching upon some Kenner action figure.  Simply put, I would not be ME without George Lucas.  I'm sure the same can be said for a lot of folks my age.  However, I don't really talk too much about it these days.  I spent the first 19 years of my life obsessing over Luke, Han, & Leia but the hurt of The Phantom Menace was so strong that it took several years before I could even watch the original trilogy without the sting of remorse.  You'll probably never see a Star Wars film get recognized on one of my Top Ten lists.  Not just because of the Phantom Menace burn, but because Star Wars is practically fused with my DNA.  I may say that Unforgiven is my favorite film, but Star Wars probably floats in the ether right above it.  It's time to drop the baggage, I need to give Lucas' originals another watch.  100, 200, 300 views?  I can do 301.

--Brad

Matt’s Week in Dork! (10/20/13-10/26/13)

    I’ve been trying to get a lot of reading done, and I have.  But I’m not finishing a lot.  Too many things going at once.  Still, when it comes to geeky stuff, this was a pretty good week for this Dork.  And as I've given it more of a listen, I've been really digging that new Devo CD I picked up.  Which is handy, as it plays right into some of the reading I'm doing about AI and robotics.

In the Mouth of Madness:  “God’s not supposed to be a hack horror writer.”  The last great John Carpenter movie, this Lovecraft inspired journey into madness is fantastic.  It’s just the right mix of creepy, weird, and pulpy, with a great Lovecraftian hero in insurance investigator John Trent.  Nobody pulls his strings.  And he’s on the trail of Stephen King type bestselling horror writer Sutter Cane.  Cane’s writing seems to be having an effect on his readers, and that effect is becoming more pronounced and more violent.  Can Trent find him, find his last manuscript, and get back to civilization?  Or is the Door about to open, letting the Old Ones spill back into our world?

Niagara:  Joseph Cotton and Marilyn Monroe play a horribly dysfunctional couple who seem to be falling apart in their hotel room by the famous titular falls.  When a happy young couple shows up, their worlds collide.  I can see why this movie isn’t necessarily talked about a lot, but it’s pretty good.  It’s got a kind of second rate (and I don’t mean that in a bad way) Hitchcock vibe to it.  Not up to snuff with Hitch’s best, but in that spirit.

The Wall (Die Wand):  Oh, my gosh.  This is a danged sad, danged depressing, and danged fine film.  There are elements of those ‘man alone’ films like Jeremiah Johnson or Omega Man.  But it goes so, so much further.  A grim meditation on profound loneliness, it’s also a sort of love letter to the natural setting of rural Europe.  A woman wakes up to find herself the only living human, locked within a mysterious invisible bubble.  Her only companion is a skittish dog.  It’s a heck of a fascinating movie, and worth seeking out.  Beautifully shot, well acted, and fascinating to see.  And brutally, emotionally devastating.

Gun Crazy:  Two young people go on a bullet flinging crime spree.  A guy with a love of guns and a dame with a taste for money are a match made in Noir heaven.  I really like the way this film is shot.  The sequences where the camera sits in the back seat and just lets them talk as they head into or flee a crime scene are quite good.

    Read volume 1 of the New 52 series Shazam!  I definitely did not find myself as into it as co-Dork Brad.  I think something in the air or water has simply soured me to DC and Marvel.  Could it be the high frequency of terrible stuff they seem to put out?  I’m not sure.  But I’m feeling less forgiving toward them.  If I’d read it a year ago, I’d probably have enjoyed it.  Right now, however, they’d have to be writing some mighty fine stuff for me to give two shakes, and this isn’t it.  I also read (or skimmed, anyway) volume 2 of Aquaman, which saw a drastic drop in quality from The Trench.  It became scattered, confusing, and ultimately, boring.  Sad, as volume 1 was one of the big surprises from the New 52.

Neither the Sea Nor the Sand:  There’s some lovely footage of the UK coast.  Otherwise, it’s a bunch of unlikable, unrelatable characters in weird relationships.  It feels like a student film that got a big budget for reasons I don’t understand.  While well made, it’s quite grating.

    On Thursday night, Robert hosted Triple Horror Movie Night, an annual celebration of October.  Each year, he, Brad and I choose a movie each; one fabulous (Robert), one classic (me), and one scary (Brad).  This year, we changed it up a bit, and I brought the scary (or sleazy) movie, while Brad brought the classic.  A few others joined us, and while I think everyone enjoyed the social aspect, I don’t know if everyone was prepared for just what it is that we were going to be watching.

Brad’s Pick

Macabre:  The plot for this film is just too danged complicated, with too many characters, too many previously dead people, and too many cooks in the kitchen.  It’s also not very scary, even looking at it from the 50s horror movie perspective.  There are flashbacks where you’re not quite sure it’s a flashback, cuts to other scenes where it seems like it might be a flashback…but isn’t.  It’s weird.  Not great.  But worth a watch if you like William Castle movies.

Robert’s Pick

Vampire Boys 2:  If you thought Vampire Boys was poorly made and featured lots of bad acting, you haven’t seen anything yet.  This crappy sequel looks like it was 'filmed' in someone’s basement.  And that’s probably the best thing about it.  Everyone is shot in close-up and nobody has the face for it.  When anyone tries to act, it’s hammy.  And the story is dumb, dumb, dumb.

Matt’s Pick

Cat People:  I absolutely love this movie.  The longer I live with it, the more I enjoy it.  I love the cast and all the characters they play.  I love the kinky love story and the even kinkier obsession story.  New Orleans has never looked better or more like somewhere I’d actually think about visiting.  The slow build takes it to some powerfully strange places.  And the ending is so crazy.

    Then Friday night was the latest meeting of the graphic novel club.  We read the New 52 Aquaman (first two volumes) this month.  The reactions were mixed.  I liked the first volume, but not the second.  Lisa didn’t like the 4th wall break in the first volume (blogger talking about how much Aquaman sucks).  Many found the second volume needlessly complicated and scattered.  But many also came away with a new appreciation of the character.

    After an extremely stressful week (and last couple months), I decided to do a sort of Horror movie day.  I sat on my couch, ate Boo Barry cereal (thanks to Robert), had some snacks, grabbed a Firehouse sub while I was out for a walk in the middle of the day, and enjoyed a day of watching various horror films.  A nice way to spend a Saturday.

Taste the Blood of Dracula:  Three bored rich guys looking for kicks get way more than they bargained for in this Hammer Dracula film.  Overall, it’s not bad, though not especially interesting.  I like that the tale has an unusual plot progression, though the atmosphere is still mainline Hammer.  Fans of the studio’s Gothic thrillers should certainly watch it, but it’s not one of those ‘rush right out and get it’ titles.

Doctor Who: The Talons of Weng-Chiang:  Victorian London is the scene of some sinister goings-on involving a shadowy Chinese cult and a horrible little thing.  It’s a cool story, rooted in Sherlock Holmes tales and that sort of thing, but with plenty of the usual Doctor Who madness.  You would not be wrong to say that there is some outright racism on display.  In part this is reflective of the time the story is set within, but of course, Li H’sen Chang being portrayed by a guy in ‘yellow face’ makes things pretty awkward.  Still, this is the kind of ‘historic’ story that worked best on Doctor Who.  I usually prefer the more out-there science fictiony tales, but the horror themed histories work fairly well.

The Fly:  A reclusive scientist falls for a plucky reporter, then has dirty, unsafe sex with his own genes, getting pumped through of inhuman DNA.  Jeff Goldblum is do danged awkward, and things get really nasty pretty quick.  Watching it, I was struck by how danged weird it was, and how a lot of pretty out-there stuff was made for mainstream audiences in the 80s that would likely not fly today.

Godzilla VS Destroyah:  “What radioactivity!”  Every time I watch one of these later films in the series, I can’t help but pine for the older ones.  There’s some really cool stuff, but the production feels shoddy, the ‘science’ is so extremely stupid, and the human stories are totally uninteresting.  I feel like a lot of the creature sequences would never have flown in the original run.  I like the introduction of a hoard of little creatures, more human sized problems in this one.  Of course, by the end, it’s a giant monster that has to go up against Godzilla.  But it makes me want to see a better Godzilla film that features little things for people to deal with, too.  There have been hints of that before, with radiated parasites left behind my the big guy, but it hasn’t been very well explored.  The Godfather-like assassination of Godzilla is weird, too.

Hellraiser III:  I stalled on my attempted re-watch of the Hellraiser series a while back, in part because I knew this was the next on the list, and I remember really disliking it.  Well, things haven’t changed.  The script for this one, as well as the acting and production design all feel very made for Canadian TV.  The creepy, mysterious, and weird are replaced with awkward cheese.  Totally lacking in any kind of passion or imagination, everything feels so bland and by the numbers that at no point do I care what happens to anyone.  Lifeless.  That’s the word for this movie.  And as a side note, why the hell did Doc get turned into a Cenobite?  There was no indication that this was a path he was on.  It doesn’t just happen to random victims of Pinhead.  It happens to those who seek it out.  F’ing stupid.

Rodan:  Rodan has what I’m looking for in a Kaiju film.  It takes its time, develops a bunch of human characters and follows them through their investigation of strange events.  Then, quite a way into the film, it brings out the big guns and starts the mass destruction.  But the ‘ground level’ story is still a major part.  Rodan is a giant bird, and some kind of master of the wind.  So this movie features lots and lots of stuff getting blown to pieces, which is strange, but kind of cool.  It’s also steeped in the post-Hiroshima fears of fallout and poisoned earth.  Giant mutant grubs are the first thing that tips people off to the problem, and they’re disgusting and creepy.

     I read the first issue of The Star Wars, which is right up my ally.  It's an attempt to adapt George Lucas's original Star Wars script into comic form.  You can see a lot of similarities, but there are also some pretty big differences.  I don't know if it would have worked as well, and maybe some of those changes were needed.  But I like some of the characters more, especially Luke, who isn't a child.

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (7/14/13-7/20/13)

    With co-Dork Brad and many others on the left coast this week for the Nerd Jamboree, Comic-Con, I have remained here, keeping the light on.  Not a particularly exciting week, but not a bad one, either.

Game of Thrones Season 2:  Watching a regular episode of this show can be stressful, because you know anyone could die at any point, but watching the last couple episodes, you know death is riding.  The second season of the show is quite good, though it gets off to a wonky start.  Look, I love me some nudity and I’m no prude, but the first two episodes had me looking at my watch thinking, ‘can we please just put the tits away and get on with the story?’  And then they do, and the rest of the season keeps it balanced pretty well.  Peter Dinklage remains my favorite part, though there’s plenty to love.  His character is probably the most interesting and he plays it with gusto.  I haven’t read the books, and frankly, have no interest.  But my hope is that Tyrion Lannister is the last man standing to claim the throne.  If you don’t mind wall to wall swearing, violence, and sex, this series is a great companion to the Lord of the Rings films.  It feels like Middle Earth in the centuries after the King.

King Kong:  One of my all time favorite films, I was super excited to see it on the big screen.  However, some awful, literally snot-nosed little kid that couldn’t keep still pretty much ruined it for me.  Whatever.  Still one of the great movies, and a must see.  But parents, either don’t take the kids, or serve as a buffer between them and strangers.  Don’t let your hyperactive, sinus-shunt needing spawn ruin a someone’s 30 year aspiration.  Dick.

FDR: American Badass:  “I’m a motorcycle of death.  I ain’t got no sidecar.”  You have to know, going into this, that a movie called FDR: American Badass is not going to be some classy discussion of the life of an American president.  It’s about a guy who gets polio from Nazi werewolves, becomes President, smokes Lincoln inducing weed, and personally leads the attack on werewolf Hitler and Mussalini.  It’s crass, stupid, goofy, awkward, extremely cheap looking, and pretty much straight up awesome.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II:  “The mind is a labyrinth.”  This is a profoundly strange movie.  It’s an old favorite of mine, and I totally get why.  But after probably a decade without seeing it, this rewatch put how bloody strange it is into perspective.  The editing is all off, the story hops in weird ways, the acting and dialog are very wonky, and the music is bugnuts.  It’s totally anti-climactic and has several pretty big problems.  But I still find it very compelling, like a very gory adult fairy tale.  All the puzzle/riddle/maze stuff is great, and I think handled the best of all the films in the series.  It doesn’t shy away from physically traveling to hell, as most movies of this sort would; teasing for an hour and ten minutes, then giving a couple brief glimpses in the last reel.  No, this time we spend a third to half the film in the twisting strangeness of mat paintings and forced perspective.

Evil Dead (2013):  As soon as the Paul Dano looking chump opened the book and it was revealed to just be garden variety Satanism, I pretty much checked out.  One of the things I always liked about the original Evil Dead films was the Lovecraft hints.  The movie looks nice, but otherwise is just a bunch of boring retreads.  I’m not against remakes.  But Evil Dead 2 and (to a lesser degree) Army of Darkness already remade Evil Dead, and both movies had 100% more excitement and fun.  Skip it.  Watch the original.  Nothing to see here.

Jack the Giant Slayer:  Another ‘revisionist’ fairy tale, this by the numbers snooze-fest looks and feels like a made for TV movie from 20 years ago (10th Kingdom, Gulliver’s Travels, etc.).  A cast of better-than-this actors phone in performances, dishing out lifeless dialog that doesn’t even have the good taste to be memorably bad.  CG used where practical effects would have likely been easier, cheaper, and certainly look better.  Ho-hum.

Welcome to the cutting edge of 1992.

    Friday night through Saturday, I was on mission.  Co-Dork’s lair.  Blu-ray player.  Chinese food.  Like John Rambo before me, I got the job done.

Melvin & Howard:  Man, can I pick ‘em.  I thought this movie was going to be about a guy hanging out with Howard Hughes, not a s#!+ kicking hillbilly without the sense (or cents) to get his slack-jawed life together.  Between his soft-headed first wife, sleazy bosses, and own lack of brain cells, it’s a wonder our grease stained blue collar hero can drive and sing crappy songs at the same time, much less succeed in life.  As the movie progresses toward its climax (?!), the filmmakers rely on the viewer to be well versed in the actual shenanigans the film is inspired by…which I’m not.  This was up for Oscars?  This WON Oscars?  Maybe I can stop using Geena Davis’ win as my example when I point to how moronic the Oscars are.

My 2 minutes are the best part.

Jubal:  A good cast does a good job with a fairly standard collection of Western tropes.  There’s not really a heck of a lot to this movie, nor a lot to make one take note, beyond the excellent cast.  It was fine, and perfectly watchable, but not especially memorable.

Videodrome:  “Nobody on Earth was made for that show.”  Cronenberg’s grimly disturbing, and creepily prescient vision of the entertainment industry is quintessentially 80s in its execution, but timeless in its vision.  James Woods only thinks he’s an amoral would-be TV tycoon, peddling sleaze to the lowest of the low.  But when he discovers Videodrome, he may have found a line even he isn’t willing to cross.  Is it simply broadcasts of sadistic murders, or is it the beginning of a new political/religious/evolutionary force?

The Video Dead: A really, really weird 80s zombie movie, it’s not very good, but it’s certainly …um…unique.  A cursed TV, wandering zombies, the Garbage Man, a cowboy.  OK.  This isn’t a great movie by any means.  But it’s a fun 80s weirdo, with a cover you probably remember from poking around video stores 20 years ago.  Worth checking out for the strangeness, if nothing else.  And it doesn’t play out as one expects these films to go, which is a nice surprise.

French Stewart!  What happened?

    After my return from the abode of my counterpart, I finally cranked out the last few pages of da Vinci’s Ghost, from the author of The Fourth Part of the World.  Good, entertaining and informative history.  Da Vinci seems like he’d have been fun to hang with.

Fantastic Voyage:  The slow pace might be tough for some, but this voyage into inner space is pretty good.  Nice effects and a solid cast, as well as some rather overblown theatrics of Science! help sell the crazy.  There’s also a good dose of Cold War paranoia.  The opening of the movie feels like it dropped right out of a spy film.  It goes astray in the last act, and I can’t say that the resolution is especially satisfying.  But all in all, a fair sci-fi adventure flick from the 60s.

    Other than that, I’ve been addicted to Prog Rock all this week.  Started reading a book, Yes is the Answer, which is spawning more interest than usual.  It’s interesting going back to this music as a total outsider.  I don’t use drugs.  I wasn’t alive when Prog was at its height (or, I was just being born).  But I feel a certain connection to it.  The grandiose storytelling, the operatic sound and theatricality, the more Classical than Country composition.  Love it.

-Matt

A Fistful of Titans! (Matt’s Picks)

    Guillermo del Toro’s Kaiju VS Giant Robots movie Pacific Rim has finally hit theaters and it was a whole heck of a lot better than I expected.  So this week, we’re looking at the coolest giants to lumber onto the big screen.

5.  Leviathan (Hellraiser II: Hellbound)  is Lord of the Labyrinth and not shy with irony.  It’s probably a good idea to avoid going to hell.  If that doesn’t work out, at least try to keep out of Leviathan’s black light beams.  Trust me.

4.  Shai-Hulud (Dune).  Bless the Maker and His water.  Bless the coming and the going of Him.  May His passage cleanse the world.  May He keep the world for His people.

3.  Kronos (Kronos) was one of the original Greek Titans and the source of Zeus’ daddy issues.  But Kronos was also a giant space robot that rampaged across the Southwest back in the 50s, and he was pretty cool…I mean, nasty.

2.  Cthulhu (The Call of Cthulhu) spends much of his time sequestered in a secret location (I’ll give you a hint, it’s not in North Carolina).  But once in a while, he likes to come out and see how the world is progressing, how those stars are turning.  Hold on to your soul!

1.  King Ghidorah (Ghidora the Three-Headed Monster) takes the Kaiju cake.  When Ghidorah dropped down from space, it took the combined might of three other giants to drive the three headed monster away.  A great, golden dragon shooting lightening out of three heads while flying around Japan.  Awesome.

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (6/16/13-6/22/13)

    On Sunday, in preperation for the next meeting of the graphic novel club, I thought I’d get myself into a Thor mood by digging up a few single issues of Thor comics I somehow acquired.  I read issue 600, which wasn’t very good.  The main story has to do with Odin’s father coming back into the world, but it doesn’t seem to go anywhere, at least nowhere interesting.  The issue is then padded by a mildly enjoyable goofy comic and some bloody awful Stan Lee ‘classic’ stuff.  Meh.  Issue 601 wasn’t much better, but it was less cluttered.  J. Michael Straczynski is a frustrating figure.  He wrote one of the great sci-fi TV series, Babylon 5, but seemed (seems) unable to do much of anything else worthwhile again.  The pile was missing issue 602, but I got the gist.  603 was pretty much more of the same, though there was a really funny bit about a guy wanting an omelet.

Man of Steel:  “You can save them all.”  So, if you’ve been keeping score, with a few recent exceptions, I generally don’t like Superman.  Most of the time he’s straight up boring.  The rest, he’s bloody awful.  He’s been written by a lot of people for film, TV, comics, etc. and I haven’t ever been a fan.  Director Zack Snyder has made a bunch of movies I’ve really enjoyed, but his last film was Sucker Punch, one of the worst films in the last decade.  The trailers for this film felt like they were trying to go for that mythological, melodramatic, epic feel I dig.  And having just read All Star Superman, which also goes for that, and does such an amazing job, I was ready.  Sadly, this movie only gets part way there, stumbling almost as often as it succeeds.  It’s good, but not great.  And it felt like it should have been great.  One problem surfaced right away.  Hand-held.  No, Hollywood.  Stop.  Do I have to roll up a paper and thwack your nose?  Bad!  No hand-held!  I don’t want to get motion sickness while I’m watching a movie.  They have tripods and other rigging.  Use ‘em.  The second problem was the action.  I know this is a weird thing to say about what is basically an action movie, but there was too much of it.  The action scenes went on entirely too long.  The battle in Smallville, which seemed to accomplish next to nothing in terms of moving the story along, must have taken five minutes.  And the final fist-fight was interminable and unnecessary.  It felt like the movie had climaxed and was ready for final resolution…then another battle!  Ugh.  I was ready for the wrap-up and instead we have a second attempted climactic battle.  That’s one climax too many.  Cutting out that final battle, and trimming the other action bits by say a third, I think the movie as a whole would have been better.  And while Superman has always had religious overtones, Krypton being lost Israel, Superman being kind of a parallel of the Jewish experience in the States, then later shifted toward a Christ figure, the religious iconography and allegory got to be a bit much in this.  The scene in the church where he’s talking with the picture of Jesus right by his head…not subtle, guys.  Now that all sounds pretty negative, I know.  But I did actually like the movie, and it has a lot of good parts.  I liked Amy Adams and the Lois Lane character in general.  She’s less abrasive and harpy-like than I’m used to with Lane.  The rest of the cast all did a fine job, and it was fun picking out That Guy actors, including some Battlestar Galactica regulars (filmed in Vancouver?).  I liked the emotion and the Shakespearian grandiosity.  I liked that they did a lot with building Superman as a hero in the Nietzschian mold, something to be striven for, but not a god or a king; an ideal to build oneself into.  There is even a paraphrasing of that great line from All Star Superman, ‘They will race, and stumble, and fall and crawl and curse, and finally, they will join you in the sun.’  I also like that the film gave lots of moments to everyday human heroism.  It wasn’t just a matter of Superman saving people, it was people saving each other.  Though there was plenty of staring and screaming and running, this wasn’t the typical crowd, unable or unwilling to do anything without a superhero’s help.  So again, a good, but not great Superman film.  Certainly the best film adaptation of the character to date…but that’s not really saying much.  Next time, put the camera on a danged rig and hold it steady, and maybe have a more interesting foe.

Pirates of the Caribbean On Stranger Tides:  “Oh!  He’s even more annoying in miniature.”  Though Johnny Depp’s turn as Jack Sparrow in the first Pirates movie seems to have redefined his recent career, turning the once versatile actor into a DeNero style self-parody, I enjoy the crap out of this series, and would be back every couple of years for a new adventure without any reservation.  They’re fun, light entertainment that do something rarely done before…make pirate movies fun to watch.  I know there was a time when these types of films were a dime a dozen, but I don’t know why.  Even some of the more famous, ‘classic’ pirate films are extremely boring.  While this series manages to play on all the genera tropes, it has lots and lots of fantasy fun with them, giving us not only adventures on the high seas, but all the myths and monsters of the era as well.  I’d have liked more Ian McShane and less Penelope Cruz, but it’s still a great deal of fun.  It would be difficult for me to care less about the young missionary and the mermaid love story.  I like working mermaids into the mythos, but their story is dull and the actors lack charisma.  The screen time wasted on them could have been used better focusing on McShane, Depp, and Geoffrey Rush.

    Monday night, I started watching The Mod Squad.  It’s a fairly fun cop show, and I enjoy the out of touch vision of then modern youth culture.  The ‘long hair’ rich boy who just looks like a garden variety actor and clearly is not ‘hip.’  Awesome.  Peggy Lipton is pretty in that way that would become more common in the 70s.  And I’ve always liked Clarence Williams III, so it’s cool seeing him in an early role.

    Tuesday night, I went through another disk of Space: Above & Beyond.  Had my first straight-up good episode, and the first episode where I didn’t hate Hawkes.  It’s a show that does seem to get better as it goes, though the three leads are still pretty weak.  I do wish this series had come along a decade later.  It probably would have been more consistent.  Maybe some day someone could do a Colonial Marines (from Aliens) TV series.  I imagine it would have a similar vibe/structure…though hopefully more interesting characters and better special effects.

Two Moon Junction:  “I’m not a princess.”  My Twin Peaks journey drove me to check out this bit of late 80s trash.  Bad ADR and harsh lighting make it look made for TV.  But at least the story is stupid.  No bleach-blonde young socialite can resist the rugged charm of a be-mulleted carnie (I know.  Richard Tyson just has long hair, not a mullet…but I’m in it for the laughs).  Sherilyn Fenn is darned cute, though she looks super-weird as a blonde.  I guess it’s a sign of what actors do, but I don’t really find her especially compelling or attractive (we’re talking charismatically, not aesthetically) in this film, like I do in Twin Peaks.  Richard Tyson is a very 90s actor (his diagnosed shirt allergy is tragic).  I don’t know how else to describe him.  He’s bland and slightly abrasive…like that decade.  But I’ve always been kind of surprised he didn’t do better in the 90s.  And holy crap!  Little kid Milla.  Weird.  It feels like this movie was the basis for Cinemax.  Like everything that came after it, Animal Instinct, Wild Orchid, and all of that, spawned from this dumbass film.  No surprise from the guy behind The Red Shoe Diaries.  She’s naked.  He’s holding a puppy.  It’s so romantic.  Oh, wait.  I mean stupid.  For an ‘erotic’ film, this movie lacks pretty much anything I would call eroticism.  It’s like a boring episode of Thirtysomething…with boobs.

The Pit and the Pendulum:  “How can they confess if they don’t have tongues?!”  One of the first Full Moon movies, and along with Aliens, the beginning of my Lance Henriksen fandom, this is a pretty good low budget take on the classic story.  It’s all about the Spanish Inquisition, and the insanity of religious bureaucracy gone too far, and power put into the hands of a zealot.  It’s pretty darned over the top, but a lot of perverse fun.

Hellraiser:  “We have such sights to show you.”  If the stars shifted, the Old Ones returned, and I found myself in charge of a major film studio, there are a few remakes I’d like to do.  One would be, like Peter Jackson before me, to do my own version of King Kong.  Since he beat me to it, I may just have to pass on it now.  Second would be to do my own version of The Creature from the Black Lagoon.  Oh, man, would I do an upsetting version of that film.  Eat your heart out remake of Cat People!  But third on my list would be either the Phantasm series or this, Hellraiser.  Clive Barker’s adaptation of his own novel, The Hellbound Heart, is interesting but not actually all that good.  It hints at more, at better things.  The sequel picks up on some of those, but still misses the boat.  I would love to get my hands on it.  The idea that the Cenobites are more than just demons or angels, that they are some kind of extradimensional beings, explorers in the realms of sensation and experience, is full of potential.  And the box is a powerfully iconic artifact that could be explored in lots of different ways (I actually do like a bunch of what was done in Hellraiser: Bloodline).  Kirsty Cotton (ignoring where the series takes her) is not an especially interesting protagonist, nor are her uncle and stepmother especially powerful villains.  Her dad seems like a nice guy, and her boyfriend is a snore.  The movie is really best looked at as a treasure trove of ideas.  Sadly, most of those ideas don’t bloom here.

Heat:  “That lady who wears dark glasses at night asked me to give you this.”  Burt Reynolds, man.  Burt Reynolds.  It’s weird to see him picking on someone because of a bad hairpiece.  It’s a strange film.  He’s a hired goon who needs money to move to Italy.  His hooker friend gets all stove up and wants revenge.  That nerdy guy from Ghostbusters II is nerding it up.  The plot wanders around a bit, with people coming in and out.  It feels a bit ‘slice of life’ in the way the story progresses.  Honestly, Reynolds is pretty good in this.  It’s not a great movie, but it’s watchable.  And Reynolds does harpoon a dude with some rebar.

Man of Steel:  OK, so friend Ben didn’t get to see this the first time ‘round, so I accompanied him to what was my second viewing.  My first and biggest complaint is still the shoddy hand-held camerawork.  It’s atrocious, and makes me feel seriously ill on more than one occasion.  My other complaints remain, as do my positive assessments.  The second viewing does make me realize that I actually really like the movie up until one specific point, marked by the death of someone close to Clark and the re-introduction of Zod and cronies.  From that point on, the movie goes from a solid B (marks off for shaky cam) to a C.  The wanton and callous destruction does seem a bit much.  In another movie, like a disaster, war, or alien invasion film, it might have felt a bit more on target, but the fact that Superman doesn’t seem to take much note of what must be millions of people being blown up, squished, gravity gunned, burned, and otherwise ended, seems a bit odd.  That he takes the time to make out with his girlfriend in a wide open field that seems to be made of the ash of millions of dead people also seems…ill advised.  This could have been better with a few tweaks to the plot, a few re-workings of the dialog, and a frickin’ tripod for the camera.  It’s OK, but it could have been good.  This second viewing is probably enough for me.  While almost certainly the best Superman movie, it’s still not that great, and I still don’t give two shakes about the character.  If there’s a sequel (ha, ha…if), I’m sure I’ll be there to see it.  But it won’t be making my most anticipated list…Unless things get really dark in the land of movies.

    I read the science fiction short story The Little Black Bag by C.M. Kornbluth.  It’s an odd one, and has a great nasty ending.  It would probably make a really good short film.  And on Friday morning, I finished the fourth and final volume of B.P.R.D.’s Plague of Frogs epic.  Man, that series is waist deep in the apocalypse and still charging forward.  Can’t wait to see what the rosy sounding ‘Hell on Earth’ storyline will bring.

    And finally, on Saturday, I rejoined the modern world with the internet.  I imediately plunged into an orgy of time wasting, blankly looking at all the various sites I haven’t had time to regularly check up on, poring over old blogs, and watching episodes of Q.I. into the deep hours of the evening.  I’m back.

-Matt