Brad's Two Weeks in Dork! (3/17/13-3/30/13)

Hey ITMOD readers, long time no see.  Glad Matt's been keeping this place tidy & organized, but I've just come off a long streak of work and even though I managed to watch a crap ton of movies & tv I really haven't had the time to shove it into the void of the internet.  Saw 6 2013 new releases, but with the exception of Room 237, each theatrical outing proved to be a disappointment.  It's April now.  Side Effects is still my favorite film of the year.  This cannot continue.  I need quality filmmaking stat.

The film that's really grabbed my noggin these past couple of weeks was Holy Motors.  I'm still trying to process all the crazy contained in that surreal headtrip, but what is certain is that Denis Lavant is a beautiful monster.  Just look at that mug up top in the header.  That's a dude who's lived a life.  A strange, wild, absurd life but one I want to see played out in a franchise of Holy Motor limo rides.  And while we're at it, why don't we pair his gorgeous mug with Nicole Kidman's red eyed rage face from Park Chan Wook's Stoker.  That film may not have been what I was looking for, but the climactic closeup of Nicole Kidman's contempt for her offspring sent chills down my spine.  Make it your wallpaper and you'll become entranced by her Lovecraftian nothingness.  But before we get to Stoker, we must suffer through banality...

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone:  Steve Carell, he's funny right?  I've enjoyed him in movies.  Brick in Anchorman, love that guy.  Crazy Stupid Love, there's a dad you root for.  The 40 Year Old Virgin, that's me...or was me until I tricked a lady into coming back to my toy filled apartment.  But Burt Wonderstone...he's an unfunny ass.  I certainly enjoy the world he inhabits.  I've been fascinated with stage magic since I saw my first Penn & Teller show.  And the debate between old school vs new school (Chris Angel, give me a break) is ripe for comedic exploration.  But this film is chuckles at best, yawns at worst.  Steve Buscemi is in Adam Sandler mode here.  I love you Steve, you're doing your finest work on Boardwalk Empire right now, but this stuff is way beneath you - come on, you're beyond funny face yucks.  Jim Carrey is violently disgusting as the Brain Rapist street magician, and if you've been missing the days of Fire Marshall Bill than you'll probably enjoy his assault.  Olivia Wilde, do better movies!  Alan Arkin is the only guy who gets away with it.  The man's a working actor.  You win some, you loose some, you certainly move on to the next paycheck.

Blacksad - A Silent Hell:  Private dick John Blacksad and Weekly the reporter travel to the Mardi Gras hell of New Orleans to investigate the disappearance of Blues musician, Sebastian "Little Finger" Fletcher.  Another solid Blacksad mystery.  Guarnido's art is lighter & brighter down south, but as the dope fiend conspiracy spreads into medical malpractice manslaughter, the shades get sour and the gin joint panels go pitch black.  All Blacksad tales feel more style over substance, but they can survive on the beauty of mood.  How much you love these stories probably depends on how much you love noir, and how open you are to furry interpretation.  I will say that A Silent Hell is too brief to contain its Dark Horse Hardcover and the sketchbook back half is not profound enough to warrant the 20 dollar price tag.

Stoker:  Park Chan Wook makes beautifully upsetting movies.  I still hold Oldboy as cinema's greatest revenge film.  And Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is pure sadness on screen.  Thankfully, for his first English language feature, the director brought his steadfast cinematographer Chung Chung-Hoon with him across the pond and they've crafted another pretty picture.  Unfortunately, a pretty picture does not make a good movie.  Stoker is utterly forgettable in terms of plot.  After her father dies in a mysterious car crash, Mia Wasikowska must suffer the flirtations between her emotionally empty mother and her sexual predator uncle.  Not to mention her own violent tendencies bubbling to the surface.  I think what I wanted was Oldboy USA.  Instead what I got was Henry - Portrait of a Serial Killer.  Is that the film's fault?  No.  But Stoker is as emotionally empty as its players.  Nicole Kidman might give an epic speech of Greek Tragedy child hate, and Matthew Goode might have the perfectly quiet eyes of the devil, but what does it all amount to?  A girl with a gun.  Blood splattered flowers.  A pretty picture.

My Amityville Horror:  Ghosts.  I'm not a believer.  I don't want to get into it too much, but I've certainly never experienced anything in my life to hint at the existence of Caspers.  Every time I see a spook story "Based On Actual Events" I role my eyes and try to enjoy the fiction.  In this documentary, Daniel Lutz attempts to explain the phenomena that's haunted his life ever since the release of the "classic" ghost story The Amityville Horror.  He talks about the ghosts, the flies, and the blood he witnessed when he was 10 years old.  He talks about his mother, his stepfather George Lutz, and the fame they sought after they became minor 70s celebrities.  It reeks of bullshit.  But it's sad bullshit.  How much does he believe?  How much reality was implanted by the film and its endless sequels?  How much of it is his own grab for acceptance?  The film certainly doesn't leave me with a belief in the supernatural.  Daniel Lutz was defined by an event that occurred when he was ten.  That's a depressing thought, a sad curse for sure.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds "Push The Sky Away" @ The Strathmore:  A few years ago during the Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! tour, The Wife & I were lucky enough to see The Bad Seeds at the 930 Club.  We got right up to the stage, and Nick Cave screamed his songs above us - the shepherd leading his flock.  It was an epic dork experience.  The finest concert I've ever been a part of.  Now they're back.  But The Strathmore is not the 930 Club.  It's a concert hall.  Big, spacious...BIG.  And The Wife & I had seats way up in the balcony.  Looking down on The Bad Seeds as they quietly pushed the sky away was like watching a concert on MTV (you know, when MTV actually televised concerts).  It was a good time.  But it certainly wasn't epic.  Their latest album is a soft spoken poem.  Cave whispers his words.  It's hypnotic in its own way, but it's not the punch to the gut I often look for in The Bad Seeds.  For the first half of their performance they stuck to the new album.  The best tune from that part of the show was "Jubilee Street" The Bad Seeds couldn't help but ramp up the song, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear them transform the ballad into a rock opera - beating and bashing a crescendo.  The second half of the show were the classics.   Red Right Hand.  Deanna.  Stagger Lee.  Even way up high, it was easy to thump to those beasties.  A good night out, but not a religious experience.

Lawless:  After the high of the Nick Cave concert, I needed more of his lyrical grit.  I could have snapped up the nightmare landscapes of The Proposition or The Road, but chose Lawless cuz I've also been craving Tom Hardy's mumble mash dialog.  I want to love this movie.  I love the period.  I love the look.  I love the cast.  Even Shia.  But it's lacking in the narrative.  And it never gets as brutal as I desire.  I want the whole film to be Tom Hardy & Jason Clarke covered in mobster blood.  You get a brief glimpse, but it never descends into proper moonshine hell.  John Hillcoat & Nick Cave made a masterpiece in The Proposition.  They may never equal that beast again.  I'm okay with that.  But hopefully they'll scrape the surface of the sun again.

Justified - Season 4 "Decoy":  Raylan Givens, Deputy Bob, & Rachel attempt to flee Drew Thompson from Harlan County.  Theo Tonin's goons patrol the skies in their helicopter, and Boyd Crowder unleashes sniper Colt upon a decoy of Marshall SUVs.  This is the most intense chase we've seen from this show yet.  And even though we get some machine gun fire and a molotov cocktail, the greatest action of the show occurs without a bullet being fired.  Timothy Olyphant shows off his badass side once more with a grin, and some harsh words directed at the Detroit Mafia.  Seriously, just when you think this man can't get any cooler he pulls another trick out of his bag.

Rust and Bone:  This film is curious.  Marion Cotillard is a whale trainer who drinks too much when she goes clubbing.  Mathias Schoenaerts is a street fighter bouncer with a bratty kid and an unstoppable sex drive.  After a horrible killer whale accident severs the legs of Cotillard the two find friendship (if not love) in the sex act.  Not to mention some serious dough in the art of bum fighting.  What the hell?  I don't get it.  Both characters feel like manipulations to poke my heartstrings, but Rust and Bone fails to capture my emotions.  Cotillard & Schoenaerts are sooooo not good for each other and as the film marched towards its climax I did not care if they found comfort in each other or not.  Then the ice breaks.  More sadness.  Shoulder shrug.  French, man.

Holy Motors:  "I Have A Plan To Go Mad." I man wakes up in his apartment, he opens a secret door in the wall, and steps into a cinema. Denis Lavant enters his Tardis-like limousine, he travels the passageways of Paris. When he exits the limo he's someone else. A female beggar. A flower gnashing maniac with a hard-on...I mean, an appreciation for cemeteries and fashion models. With the help of his chauffeur and vanity mirror he takes on various appointments; wild trips into cinematic genre where he might encounter Kylie Minogue one moment and battle off track suit gangsters the next. What does it all mean? I have no idea right now. But I already have a strong desire to rewatch the film. The interlude in which Lavant leads an Accordion Gang down a corridor while rocking the Doctor L cover of RL Burnside's Let My Baby Ride is hypnotizing. A youtube classic at the very least.

Prometheus:  A trip to Toys R Us yielded a Michael Fassbender David toy into my collection.  Why do I bother to collect action figures for a film I find so frustratingly mediocre?  Cuz I have hope in my heart, and that maybe my next viewing of Prometheus will reveal a genuine masterpiece.  There is so much to love about this film.  Fassbender.  David.  This should have been his story, and in turn the story of man's continuing evolution.  Instead Noomi Rapace bungles about the spaceship hiding from her tentacled fetus, swinging an axe at whatever Frankenstein storms out of the shadows.  Lame.  And Guy Pearce, stay outta this picture!  You and your makeup have no place here.  Ridley Scott certainly knows how to film sci-fi, and I really don't need to dump on screenwriter Damon Lindelof any further.  The man has taken his lumps.  And I'm sure he's not the sole credit to this film failure.

Olympus Has Fallen:  How much do you love the sight of the American Flag being burned, torn, tossed, and riddled with bullets? How much do you love seeing skulls popped with gun fire? How much do you love seeing emotionally crippled secret serviceman jab knives into the brains of evil grinning Koreans? If your answer ranges from a lot to a fuck ton than you will absolutely adore Olympus Has Fallen. Gerard Butler is the only man strong enough to survive an onslaught of tourist butchering North Koreans, and he manages to blast his way into the fallen White House where platoons of GIs and Navy Seals could not. This is a ridiculous film. To call it jingoistic doesn't even scratch the surface. Melissa Leo, face-punched, screaming, crying, and hailing the pledge of allegiance as she's dragged off to her execution is fascinating in its humorlessness - this is bonkers, absurdist entertainment. And if you're hipster enough than you'll find joy to be had in the Mars Attacks! toppling of the Washington Monument and Gerard Butler's "This Is Sparta" terrorist bashing.

Deadwood - Season 2:  It might be hard to believe, but season two is even better than the first.  As the stage carrying Mrs. Bullock and her son William arrives to Deadwood, Sheriff Bullock & Al Swearengen bash on each other in the thoroughfare after a casual exchange of insults.  The brawl leaves Bullock with a couple lumps, but pretty much puts Swearengen out of commission for the first round of episodes.  Al's absence allows for an agent of George Hearst to sink his talons into the business of camp.  New villains appear, and Bullock is too busy not putting the screws to The Widow Garrett to notice the evil descending.  Garrett Dillahunt returns, but not as the killer of Wild Bill, but a new character far more sinister, the geologist Francis Wolcott.  He steals nearly every scene he's in, and I love how uncomfortable Powers Boothe is in his presence - if you make Powers Boothe squirm than you are a genuine devil.  Season 2 puts each Deadwood player through the meat grinder.  This is not the kind of show where people get knocked down and dust themselves off.  They get knocked down, wallow in the mud, and dig themselves straight to hell.

Law Abiding Citizen:  This film comes oh so very close to being the great contemporary update of Michael Winner's Death Wish.  A home invasion takes the life of Gerard Butler's wife and daughter.  He survives the attack, but his eye witness testimony is deemed circumstantial and Jaime Foxx's huckster D.A. pleads the killers into a short jail term.  Butler begins plotting.  Law Abiding Citizen is not concerned with simple revenge.  In fact, Butler dispatches the scumbags who took his family pretty early in the proceedings.  Mr. Butler's anger is larger than an execution.  He sets his sights on the justice system.  Judges.  Lawyers.  Mayors.  These are the real criminals.  And the film does an excellent job putting them on the bad guy side of the screenplay.  As the heads of fat cat judges pop and sleazy defense attorneys smother, Gerard Butler's Death Wishing finds great satisfaction with the audience.  The problem is Jamie Foxx.  Apparently he's the real good guy.  Not the way I see it.  The screenplay should let Butler slaughter his way to victory - screw Foxx's sense of "good."  I want Butler to break authority.  I want him to be Charles Bronson on top.  Law Abiding Citizen pretends to have a morality.  And that's where it fails.  This just isn't the type of story where good beats evil.  Still, the first 2/3rds of this flick are so close to 70s pessimism that it's worth a watch or two.

Gamer:  Now here's a film that revels in its amorality.  Set in one of those "Not Too Distant Futures," Gamer introduces a world in which players live the bodies of Slayers, controlling their movements on a kill crazy field of combat.  Gerard Butler is Kable, a Slayer with just three kills to freedom.  But, of course, there's no way master blaster Michael C Hall will allow such a victory.  Directors Neveldine & Taylor treat extras like chum, and they make violent exploitation pictures rarely seen in this day and age.  Having just days before whimpered at the CG blood spatter of Olympus Has Fallen, it's a treat to see a flick like Gamer gush with splashes of stringy Karo syrup.  Real squib work equals flinchy revulsion.  But it's not all blood & guts.  Gamer actually has some biting truth or commentary to it.  If this technology was made available to us, I am 100% positive we'd have large chunks of the population signing up for the Sim City wannabe, Society.  In relishing the grotesque, Gamer succeeds in properly mocking our whackjob internet culture.  A culture I'm firmly and terrifyingly a part.

Spring Breakers:  Here's another flick I'm still processing.  Is there something more to this than sexploitation?  Is there something more to it than just seeing Selena Gomez & Vanessa Hudgins in bikinis?  My first reaction is, no.  No matter how much Terrance Malick dialog overlaying occurs or how much James Franco K-Feds the scenery, Spring Breakers is little more than a navel gazer.  What's the deal with Spring Break sexuality?  I have no idea.  It's a cesspool of free will.  Add machine guns and wannabe gangstas and you've got dumb people killing dumb people.  Girl empowerment?  Don't think so.  Just an excuse for these actresses to shed their goodie goodie personas.  But they leave the real dirty work for Rachel Korine and the nameless jigglers on the fringes.  The perverts who show up for the Disney princesses will be sorely disappointed.

Justified - Season 4 "Peace of Mind":  Drew Thompson might be safely in custody (well, that's what we're left to believe), but poor Ellie May is still floating out there in the Holler.  She quickly becomes the season's final grab, with Boyd & Ava desperate to plant her in the ground and Raylan's crew doing their Law & Order routine.  But this episode's highlight really belongs to Tim & Colt.  Ron Edlard's junkie goon has struggled all season to find his place in Boyd's gang.  Does he find redemption here?  Or doom at the end of Tim's barrel?  Either way it's a proper button for his role in the season.  Now all we have to worry about is Nicky Augustine, the long arm of Theo Tonin.  He's got to die.

Fatale #13:  Another peak into the past of the Fatale universe.  Black Bonnie is a bandit of the wild west.  Possibly a descendent of Josephine, or at the very least a female gifted the curse of power over men, Bonnie falls in with a snakeoil salesman and a redskin warrior.  Naturally they can't stay free from the clutches of the cult and we get a pretty brutal showdown.  I was really looking forward to this Western tale, and even though it was solid stuff, issue 13 doesn't add much to the mythology.  It certainly wasn't as Earth shattering as the previous issue - I want more Lovecraftian terror at the point.  Still, Fatale is the best book on the stands and even a weak entry in the series is still better than 90% of the other books out there.

Batman Incorporated #9:  John Layman, Peter Tomasi, and Scott Snyder might have all had the first cracks at depicting Batman post-Damian's slaughter but the only voice that matters on the subject is Grant Morrison.  No matter what anyone tells you, those guys are working in a different reality.  Damian Wayne didn't die in The New 52 - he got gutted in the Morrison arc, & that's where the emotion of his absence is really going to be felt.  Issue 9 jumps back and forth in time.  In once scene Bruce, Tim, Dick, & Alfred are burying the boy's body in the backyard.  In the other Bats is going toe-to-toe with the Damian clone, jabbing fingers into eyes, stomping swords bare footed.  Both transactions are brutal and painful.  Morrison's epic run is winding down.  As stated before, it's had its peaks and valleys, but for the most part this saga has been stellar.  Batman might have already died and come back in his tenure, but nothing has hit the solar plexus quite like Damian's execution.  And Batman is going to destroy Talia Al Ghul.  Bitch got to die.  And then he's gonna salt the Earth with the hot toasty ashes of the Damian Clone.  F that thing.  But first he has to tell Bat-Cow that young Damian is dead.  And, damn, that's one sad moo.

G.I. Joe - Rise of Cobra:  This movie sucks.  Marlon Wayans.  Cobra Commander Rex.  The mindwarped Baroness.  The Mech Suit hippity hop.  Snake Eyes has lips.  I hope Stephen Sommers has been properly banned from Hollywood.  You know, tarred, feathered, stoned, drawn & quartered.  Each body part shipped off to the far corners of the Earth.  Buried and consumed by graboids.  I'm not saying that the GI Joe cartoon or its toy line deserves great amounts of our respect, but there was potential for a really silly & fun action film here.  A wide array of weirdo characters battling it out with green and red lasers.  I can take stupid.  Hell, I love stupid.  But I've got no place for lame.  And GI Joe - Rise of Cobra is lame.

G.I. Joe - Retaliation:  "Does Brenda get a vote?"  This is going to sound weird, but I was hoping that director Jon Chu would bring some of that Step Up 3D flow to the action of Retaliation.  There are some moments (Flint's parkour charge, the cliff top ninja assault) but for the most part GI Joe Part 2 is depressing in its banality.  Yes, The Rock was unable to save this franchise cuz it's certainly not Fast Five.  Sure, the toys get more play here.  Cobra Commander looks like Cobra Commander.  The Rock gets a badass tonka truck to tread.  And Jonathan Pryce was obviously having loads of fun on set - he hasn't hammed this hard since his Tomorrow Never Die days.  But Bruce Willis only pops up for his one day of filming.  The Rock never gets a beatdown brawl to battle despite a quick tussle with Ray Stevenson's Firefly (seriously!?!? Titus Pullo vs. The Tooth Fairy oh hell yeah!!!), and Snake Eyes saga goes way awkward with the inclusion of The Rza's latexed Blind Master.  Retaliation is a little fun, but I was hoping for some gonzo entertainment.

Homicide: Life on the Street - Season 1 & 2:  I've been craving to revisit The Wire but before I re-explore that depressing ass world I thought I'd give this ahead-of-its-time drama another spin.  Easily the best procedural to come out of the 90s, Homicide excels cuz it doesn't wrap each story at episode conclusion.  One of the early proponents of season long arcs, the Adena Watson murder never quite has  a solid resolution and what little it does have takes nearly 9 episodes to reach.  Meanwhile the players involved are left tortured and psychologically beaten.  I absolutely adore how cruel or ambivalent the show can be.  It's pure character work.  You don't watch to see who winds up behind bars.  You watch because you want the bickering of Munch & Bollander, or to witness the pride behind Pembleton's excellence.  I cranked through these two short seasons in a matter of days.  I'm already well into season 3.  Just great television.

LOST - Season 1:  Looking back it's easy to pick at the flaws of LOST.  Rewatching Season 1 with The Wife (our nighttime tv successor to DS9) it's stunning to ponder all the balls dropped from the narrative.  Walt's psychic "specialness."  Claire's baby.  And nearly all the various flashback stories.  Who cares about the countless reexaminations of Jin & Sun's marital problems.  At the same time, all that flashback mumbo jumbo is a lot of fun.  This is where our love for these characters begins (or disdain, cuz Michael was a punk from the very first episode).  The rewatch also reveals John Locke to be possibly the saddest creation in television history.  What a chump.  Easily my favorite character throughout the series, but damn, he's proven to be the fool.  Yet, LOST is Dharma.  I need to get into the hatch.  I need my Desmond.  I need the sci-fi crazy.  Cuz that's the best thing about the original watch of the series.  You knew something kooky was going on (polar bears, roaring woods, French women), but you had no idea how batshit sci-fi it would all become.

Room 237:  Absolutely fascinating.  And bonkers.  Director Rodney Ascher details nearly a dozen weirdo theories surrounding Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's psycho saga.  One individual claims The Shining to be Kubrick's confession for having filmed the moon landing.  Another guy is adamant that The Shining is a violent condemnation of America's genocide of the Native American people.  And another chap sees Minotaurs along the outskirts.  Whatever.  Room 237 doesn't promote such madness.  But it is a celebration of cinema, or more to the point, our passion for cinema.  I love the frenzy The Shining has sparked in the film conversation.  I love how one man can see rocket ships in the number 42 and another can see mass murder in a can of Calumet coffee.  This is craziness.  But hypnotizing.  And you'll immediately want to watch the flick (in HD!) upon completion.

--Brad

Matt’s Soapbox- The City of the Future

    When Brad and I started this blog, I had always intended to feature more science items in my posts.  Brad is dorky about comics (so am I, but not as much), action figures, music (which he should discuss more), Westerns, and fan art.  While I’m more dorky about science fiction, history, scientific and technologic advancement.  I’ve posted a few book reviews (which admittedly have strayed into soapbox preaching), but I haven’t done much in the way posting about science.  This is an attempt to amend that in a small, if long winded, way.

    Cities may not be the ultimate expression of humanity, but they’ve got to be in the top 5.  Civilization may have had its origins in hunting groups, jewelry making, domestication of animals, and the first attempts to cultivate crops, but it didn’t get moving until the first cities were built.  Why?  I’m sure there are a million reasons, but I think the most obvious is the old proverb that ‘two heads are better than one.’  One amazing, creative genius living in seclusion is likely to make little difference in the grand scheme of things.  A hundred, a thousand, ten thousand living in close proximity, sharing ideas in a feedback loop of creativity can, have, and will change the very course of Human history, the Earth, and the stars.  The city is like a canvas upon which history is painted.

    To give a bit of background, I was born in a small city (perhaps a large town) called Bangor in the New England state Maine.  I grew up in the late 70s through the 80s, where the hope and excitement of the 50s and 60s was on its last, staggering legs.  My neighborhood had a few distinct features that set the tone of my childhood.  Most of the people were older; the broken, grown-over bones of long-gone industry were literally a few feet from the edge of my back yard, a drug infested slum was just around the corner (in both directions), and there was a shabby, rundown playground from a generation before that had become the haunt of homeless, junkies, and the closest thing Bangor could manage to gangs.  Maine had been (and with the exception of a few hope building then dashing bumps, has continued to be) on a downward spiral of entropic decline since the early part of the (20th) century.  Each year, something died its last death, something closed, some industry moved on or was made irrelevant.  Once upon a time, it had been a bustling state with several strong industries and somewhat diverse population.  Bricks, lumber, ice, potatoes, granite, paper.  Maine had it.  But who builds with brick?  Why would you buy lumber that costs so much more than the stuff from Canada?  And who even uses that much lumber anymore?  Who needs ice in an age of electricity?  Who uses paper in a world of computers?  It all went away, and though there were always a few scattered voices of reason, begging people to adapt and change with the times, those voices were candles in a hurricane, lost in the vast onslaught of status quo loving, ‘not in my back yard’ singing voices.  All that was left were the tourists, who we hated for their alienness and rude intrusion while we swindled them like Tombstone whores for every cent we could pinch (seriously though, Canadian tourists were assholes; you’ve got to give me that).  Bangor was not the idyllic postcard image of a New England town.  It’s former glory was long tarnished, old mansions turned into slum apartments, roads broken, parks in disrepair, sidewalks grown over, train yards silent, bridges rusted.  It was strip malls, and parking lots, and empty storefronts.  Kids with nothing to do spent their time causing trouble, using drugs, and having babies.  But I would hear all the time, ‘it’s so much worse out there; big cities are full of danger; we know how to live.’  And for a long time, I believed it.  My few visits to Boston did nothing to change my feelings.  Boston is everything I dreaded about The Big City.  It’s crowded, stifling, and dirty.  So dirty.  “If this is the city, if the city is what I see in movies, if it’s the stories I hear from old people, then I don’t want any part of it.”  It’s no wonder I was so into science fiction as a kid.  When you come from a poor family, from a town full of broken dreams, and everything beyond is shrouded in paranoid fear, you want to look to a hope filled future.  In my late 20s, I realized something had to change.  I was hearing all these stories from friends who had left and gone to greener pastures.  My job (or jobs; at one point I had four but still couldn’t pull in enough money to eat) was going nowhere and showing no signs of ever going anywhere (actually, other than a theater and Toys R Us, everywhere I ever worked is now closed).  Not being into drinking and drugging, my social life was limited to a handful of gamer friends.  And when it came to women, I was getting tired of trailer-trash gals who were looking to get knocked-up so they could get another welfare check, who spent their free time listening to country music and complaining about how Mexicans were stealing their jobs (there are like three Mexicans in the entire state of Maine and no jobs, so I’m not sure what kind of job thievery was going on), while asking me questions like ‘wha’tchu readin’ for?’  (And yes, that is a bit of an exaggeration.  That description fits only 90% of the women I met.  Working in a book store and a game store, I did meet women who could read on occasion.).

    I came to the Washington DC region because I had the opportunity.  It wasn’t my plan.  I was thinking, “I’ve got to get out of here and I’ve got to get out of here, now!” not “I need to go to DC?”  One of my brothers had moved to the area years earlier and was able to help me get a foothold.  Otherwise, I was thinking about Arizona, a Pacific island (seriously), or some other small, out of the way, reclusive place.  I didn’t want to move to a city.  I’d seen cities on the big screen, on television, in stories.  I’d been to Boston.  Heck, hadn’t DC been ‘murder capital’ of the US a few years back?  But when I got here, something else changed in me.  No longer did I simply need to get out of Maine, but I fairly quickly saw that there were aspects of living in a city I’d never imagined.  Being me, one of the first things I noticed was the women.  Everywhere around me was a rainbow of beautiful women.  For whatever reason, from whatever part of the world, they were all here, in a 20 or 30 mile radius.  I also realized I didn’t see fat people.  Not many, anyway.  An old boss once told me that when he got lost at an airport, he was able to find the Maine terminal because he saw a line of fat people.  Poor people tend to be fat.  Between depression over their life sucking and their access to cheap crappy food, they tend to be fat.  Add to that a pedestrian/cyclist hostile public works department (try riding a bike across Bangor sometime; it sucks), crappy weather patterns, and limited access to…well everything, Maine has a LOT of fat people.  And I’m not talking jolly or overweight in a comic way.  I’m talking sweaty, drooping, need a scooter to move around, makes you physically ill to look at, ‘I clean myself with a rag on a stick’ kind of way.  A Jerry Springer special kind of way.  Losing 30 pounds in the first month I was living in the DC area (because I was actually able to bike to and from work every day, and had miles and miles of easily accessed bike paths for pleasure) drove home how different things were.  Back in Maine, my friend Rob and I would load our bikes in the back of his truck and drive 30 or 40 minutes to a college campus to find biking environments half as inviting as what I found strewn about everywhere I looked here (frustratingly, where I live right now is on the edge of an old, unplanned city and isn’t very bike friendly…still better than Bangor, but not great, however it’s getting better, not worse).  And then there were the people I met.  Everyone was from somewhere else; everyone had come to this area for a chance at something better.  And everyone was so nice.  After just a bit over a month, I had two invites to Thanksgiving from people I’d hardly met, but they knew I was new to the area.  I had people willing to help me move.  I had people offering me whatever they had to give.  I still do.  When I was having roommate trouble, a friend’s parents, who I hardly knew offered me a place in their home.  And I still get invites to dinner/lunch on every holiday, from multiple people.  This isn’t because of my winning personality, but because these people are constantly willing to go out of their way for others.  And I had new friends.  I figured it would be a long time before I made new friends, but I had friends in the first month.  I had a roommate who would go on to be my co-Dork on this blog within six weeks of setting foot in the greater DC area.  This was the beginning of a tectonic shift in my way of viewing cities, the people in them, their place in our world, and their place in our future.  It was more than just being able to see obscure movies on the big screen, or having musical acts I actually gave a rat’s ass about play gigs within a half hour’s drive, or being near a kickass comic convention.  It was more than walking down the street and seeing the most beautiful Korean woman I’d ever seen, followed by the most amazingly gorgeous Latina, followed by a knock-out Scandinavian, followed by a smoking hot African.  All that helped.  But there was more to it.

    Counter to popular opinion, I would say that cities are the best place to live, and that in the future, this will become more and more true.  They’re not only the best place for us as individuals, providing access to amazing technologies, culture, and experience.  But they’re good for the environment and they’re good for the advancement of Humanity.  Now, this isn’t universally true right now.  And what I propose is to learn from the very real and very ugly mistakes of the past, but not be blinded by them.  L.A. and Boston are examples of cities that don’t accomplish what I’m talking about.  I’ve never been to L.A. so my understanding of it is limited and based on secondhand information.  But, with everything spread out and that network of long winding roads, it is exactly not the kind of city I envision.  This is simply a loose, half-formed proposal for some elements of a city of the future.  The DC area, which I think has a lot of things right, still has major problems, not the least of which is absolutely awful traffic flow, and frustratingly ineffective public transit (it’s getting better, but it has a LONG way to go).  As with all technological advancements, there is the risk of abuse.  But if we didn’t open ourselves up to risk, we’d still be in the trees; or worse, the ocean.

    First, why build and live in a city?  I covered a bit of this above.  Having more, diverse people in a small area creates opportunity for connections and cultural experiences that are considerably more rare outside of cities.  Within five minutes’ walk of my apartment I have two grocery stores, Thai, Chinese, Peruvian, Ethiopian, Japanese, and Italian restaurants (plus three burger joints, a pizza joint, two sub shops, a wine shop, a liquor store, a pharmacy, a movie theater, a hobby store, a music store, a high-end gym, and dozens of other shops and services.  I don’t have to drive to any of them, which means I don’t spend gas on any of them.  I also have a bus stop at the end of the road I live on, which connects with a Metro line.  I can get from here to the heart of DC in maybe 45 minutes without ever getting in a car.  Now, the public transit in the greater DC area leaves a LOT to be desired, but I’m looking toward the city of the future, not the city of today (and it doesn’t shut down at 6PM, like the busses in Bangor, which is still better than all the towns that don’t have a bus at all).  The area I live in isn’t actually very well set up.  It’s not all that pedestrian or cyclist friendly.  But Reston, where I lived with co-Dork Brad for a year and a half, had arteries for foot and bike traffic everywhere.  I could get almost anywhere I’d ever need or want to go within 30 minutes on the back of my bike.  And I’d be safe the whole time.  No riding in the roads with side-mirrors whizzing past me inches away at 45 miles an hour.  Yet, I don’t live in the city itself.  When I’m in the city, the availability of everything is even more profound.  I’ve walked across large sections of Washington D.C., passing hundreds and hundreds of interesting shops, bars, hotels, and museums, seeing thousands of people, and enjoying pleasant sunny days, without ever having to get in a car.  This is one of the things a city can do.  With a proper public transit system and safe walking areas, there is little need for personal motor vehicles.  In fact, they become something of a hassle.  If the Metro ran 24 hours, like in New York, I don’t think I’d ever drive into DC.  In my city of the future, a 24 hour a day subway/bus system would keep all segments of the city connected in a timely and convenient way.  Much, if not all of the city would be off limits to personal vehicles.  Busses, bikes, perhaps some form of cab, and official vehicles.  That’s it.  Perhaps parking complexes would exist near the city’s edge for travel outside its limits.  Or, if there were something like a highway cutting under (yes, under) the city, parking areas might be built along it.  But within the city, you walk, you bike, or you take public transit.  This is good for you, for the city, and its good for the environment.  You’ll be healthier, pay less to get around, and there will be a substantially smaller draw on natural resources, while also limiting pollutants created by vehicles.  The city of the future will be built with pedestrians and cyclists in mind.  This could change a great deal, giving rise to more elevated walking areas (like the Inner Harbor in Baltimore), covered passages, designated bike paths, etc.  It would also mean building closer, less spread out cities.  Again, Los Angeles and its urban sprawl is exactly what I want to get away from.  Or, again, Bangor, where it takes an hour to walk from where I lived to where I worked, there is only one sidewalk between the city proper and the Mall area (where most of the jobs are), the buses stop at 6PM (most businesses close at 9), and most shops are nowhere near where anyone lives.  If you want to go grocery shopping, pick up a new jacket, and maybe go to the bank, you might be driving around town for two or more hours, because everything is so spread out.  If you combined close construction, pedestrian focused layout, and excellent public transportation with high speed rail to connect cities, you could eliminate a great deal of the need for personal transport.  I know that some people love their cars, and love driving.  And there will certainly still be a need for roads outside of the cities.  But a lot of us could, and should be able to live without ever needing a personal vehicle (and if/when we did need one, we could rent).  If I’m in Gotham, and I need to get to Metropolis, walking, bussing, or taking a metro to my local train station, hopping a high speed train, and arriving in Metropolis in half the time it would take me to drive, while using substantially less energy to get there, would be ideal.

    What about food?  The much lamented American Farm is dead.  It’s dead.  The sooner everyone accepts that and moves on, the better we’ll all be.  That way of life is over.  It’s never coming back.  Nor should it.  It’s over because it didn’t work.  It worked well enough for a while, but was always doomed.  Just as the brick and lumber industries in Maine were destined to die, so was traditional farming.  It’s not efficient enough, it costs too much, it’s too unpredictable and it’s a massive source of pollution and environmental destruction.  You have some people saying, ‘let’s go back to traditional, organic farming.’  No.  Let’s not.  Let’s go forward to more sustaining, less damaging forms of farming like hydroponics and aeroponics., and yes, perhaps genetic engineered crops.  And, instead of vast tracks of land in distant parts of the country, lets grow the food where the people who are going to consume it live.  As proposed in Dickson Despommier’s book The Vertical Farm, we need to build our food growing needs into the very infrastructure of the city of the future.  No need for massive, fuel consuming refrigerator trucks to carry heavily treated plants from the Midwest to the East Coast, inevitably losing a large percentage to spoilage and damage.  Grow that food in a building at the end of the block, sell it, eat it, and send the waste back to be burned for energy without ever leaving the neighborhood.  Fresh grown food all year round.  No need for pesticides.  No need for preservatives.   No need for large scale transportation.  No need to destroy massive ecosystems for a couple years of growing before the land is leached of its nutrients.  In controlled settings, we could be eating healthier, more consistent foods without need of a lot of the bad stuff we do to it.  Sure, not everything would work.  Cows, for example.  But a lot would.  And with so much transportation and shipping cut out, the costs on many foods could be substantially less, while stuff like beef might become a more expensive, specialty food.  Reduced demand for massive farmland would allow environments to repair themselves, increasing much needed biodiversity and helping restore some of the smaller sources of food that require a level of wilderness, like honey.  It might also make so called ‘free range’ food more economically and environmentally feasible in some areas, again as a specialty food.  Decentralized food production could be safer, healthier, better for the environment, more reliable, and potentially more economically sound.  And with advances being made in the technologies, it might even taste better.  People’s fetishistic attachment to ‘the land’ simply isn’t feasible in a world populated by billions.  There are too many of us to feed using traditional farming, especially using ‘organic’ methods.  So, unless you and 4 or 5 billion of your friends want to volunteer to die right now, so that everyone else can eat, you need to shut the hell up about, and let the adults talk.

    Where do we get our juice?  Cities could go a heck of a long way toward making themselves energy independent.  Major advancements in solar (and this with a long time hostile treatment of research by a political system largely bought and paid for by oil interests), have opened the way for solar collectors with the potential to approach and possibly exceed fossil fuels energy levels, according to Michael Belfiore’s book about DARPA, The Department of Mad Scientists.  Numerous other technologies have made similar strides.  Wind is much more efficient and safe than it ever was, there are less ecologically damaging options for hydro.  Biofuels and even waste incineration have their place.  The city of the future will not be held hostage by reliance on only one means of power.  It’s not solar or bust, wind or bust, natural gas or bust.  Diversify and decentralize.  This makes good economic sense, it’s less susceptible to terrorist attacks or natural disasters, and it’s less damaging to the world as a whole.  If buildings generate their own electricity, even if just for lights, or just for air circulation, it would reduce the demand on the overall power grid by massive amounts.  And that’s within the reach of current, on the market solar and wind technology.  The stuff coming along in the next few years should be able to do much, much more.

    What will the city of the future look like?  More and more, scientists are looking to nature for inspiration in technological advancements.  Be it the feet of geckoes or the structure of the leaf, they’re finding that evolution has forged some pretty impressive and useful designs through eons of trial and error.  My suggestion would be to embrace this.  Find design that echoes and blends with nature.  Bring plants and life into the city, and create places that don’t segregate us from the natural world.  When I first moved to the DC area, I was amazed while riding my bike.  There were multiple times where I felt like I was riding in the country, nowhere near my fellow human beings.  The smell of the trees, the singing of the birds, the quiet.  How strange it was when I glimpsed a four lane road not ten feet to my left through a break in the trees.  How odd it was when I looked across a field and saw a bustling neighborhood, or turned a wooded corner, into a busy town center.  Something as simple as trees, and ‘green corridors’ can do that here.  Imagine what could be done if it were planned out, built into the very design of the city.  Not occasional patches of green, but a surrounding synthesis of nature and architecture.  Clean air, soft breezes, colorful flowers, and the smell of soil, and a million of your fellow humans just on the other side of that tree.  Since moving here, I’ve felt more like I live in the country than I ever did back in Maine, yet there are more people in just Fairfax County than in that entire state.  I see deer, birds of every type, and trees everywhere.  On hot summer days, I can feel the cooling breeze of wooded glades wash over the W&OD Trail.  And again, this in a place where most of these benefits were retro-fitted.  I propose making them part of the design from the beginning.  Buildings should be designed to harness wind and sun, walkways and paths should lace the city above ground.  Assuming cleaner running (not to mention far fewer) vehicles, roads could be built below ground level, along with train/subway lines.  Without assuming automated vehicles, lights could be powered by wind or solar without too much difficulty.  Above ground might feature covered walks, preferably with solar collectors, as well as open air.  There wouldn’t necessarily be need for parks, which are sort of islands of nature in the middle of concrete and steel seas.  Much of the above ground environment would already be green and bustling with life.  But for the sake of birds, bees, and such, green corridors could also be designed.  These might form a sort of grid pattern across the entirety of the city, allowing someone, if they were so inclined to walk from one side to the other without ever crossing a street or entering a building.

    What about all that crime?  Crime is actually on the decline nation wide.  Those gang-run open war city streets of every ‘near future’ film from the 80s never happened, and show no sign of happening (Detroit aside).  And what causes crime?  Well, I’m no expert, but poverty is obviously a factor (not the only one, but a big one).  A new style of city won’t stop crime.  Unless or until human nature changes, we will always have crime.  Just like we will always have poverty.  All the utopian idealism in the world ain’t gonna change human nature.  At least, not any  time soon.  No doubt there will be crime in my city of the future.  I don’t have a fix for that.  But I have heard many reports of research done in poor neighborhoods where simply by improving the appearance of the buildings and parks, they’ve helped to reduce the local crime.  This city should do that.  And with easy access public transportation, and less demand on energy, one would hope employment wouldn’t be as much of an issue.  Still, that is not a given, and is an area someone more versed in social behaviors might have something to add.  But I would hope the open, fresh air, and green everywhere, would help those who live in the city build stronger community ties, which could only help reduce overall criminal activity.  And again, living in a small area that has as much population as the entire state I came from, I feel safe like I never did on the streets of Bangor.  The crime rate here is far lower.  Yet, there’s still poverty.  But the area is cleaner, nicer, and less depressing.  There is a lot to do, and its within reach of younger people.  And that really seems to help.

    The social environment created by cities is another amazing feature one could write volumes on (and some have).  Even in my limited way, I’ve had contact with people from all over the world, eaten new and exciting foods, and seen movies that would never have played at the local multiplex in Bangor.  I’ve seen my favorite living musical artist, P.J. Harvey, in concert.  I saw Henry Rollins and Nine Inch Nails.  I’ve watched silent films with live musical accompaniment.  I’ve been to comic conventions and horror conventions.  I saw Casablanca, Metropolis, Logan’s Run, Blade Runner, and Evil Dead on the big screen.  I’ve seen exotic animals.  I’ve seen famous pieces of art up close.  And with the exception of one brief excursion to Philadelphia, I haven’t been much more than an hour away from DC in almost six years.   In my city of the future, this would be even more true.  Connected by a web of public transportation and footpaths, a massive variety of social and cultural experiences would be just a brief bus or train trip away.

    The question becomes, how does one make the city of the future?  I don’t have an answer.  Off the cuff ideas would be to OCP Detroit, or find part of an existing city like DC, Seattle, or even New Orleans to build a new core, with the possibility of expansion built in.  In my heart, I think the first such city should be built somewhere in the center of the country, to serve as a hub that will reach out with high speed rail to existent and newly formed cities.  I’m not an architect, geologist, or ecologist.  Nor am I an economist.  There may be any number of factors that I’ve never thought of in the selection of a location or specific design.  But thinking about the city of the future is the first step in making it a reality.  And maybe some functional elements of it could be used to improve already existing cities.  Here’s hoping the soon to be open expansion of the Metro will put public transit back on the radar of people in the DC area.  And let’s hope spiraling gas prices and continuous war will get people looking to other means of running the world than black gold.  If we take away the need for Middle Eastern oil, and in fact, the need for oil in general, we take away a big part of the reason our kids are getting chewed up in those deserts.  Applying simple sayings in our daily life isn’t a bad idea.  Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.  When did you first hear that?  Why do we work so hard to forget it?  It was sound when we were toddlers and remains so throughout life.

    If we are, as some scientists say, on our way into a mass extinction event (that may have started 10,000 years ago), well designed and crafted cities may just be a means to ride it out.  Of course, there will need to be other measures taken, including the absolutely necessary step of off-world colonization.  The technologies needed to create self-sustaining cities will be essential in the creation of self-sustaining colonies (and self-sustaining space stations).  And understanding how biological life has shifted the environment in various ways through Earth’s storied history may be the key to crafting new environments (over long periods of time) on new worlds.  By building our cities to embrace and be embraced by the natural world, we can help not only ourselves continue through turbulent ecological times, but help other species ride the inevitable waves that are coming.  In her upcoming book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, Annalee Newitz explains that extinction events have happened before and they’ll no doubt happen again.  But we are uniquely positioned to do something about it, like no species has ever been in the past.  If we are the cause of our current ecological problems or not is somewhat irrelevant.  We should find out, if only to better understand the causes and figure out solutions.  But the blame game does no one any good.  Hand wringing and self-hatred is completely unproductive, and a luxury only high school students can afford.  The rest of us, we need to accept facts, learn from our past, and prepare for the future.  Part of that involves planning how we will feed ourselves, live together, survive, and thrive in the near and distant future.  Traditional farming doesn’t work.  Traditional city designs don’t work.  Hiding our heads in the sand and pretending there isn’t a problem doesn’t work.  Pointing fingers at everyone doesn’t work.  Facing facts, learning to adapt, and working together to create a better world just might do the trick.

-Matt

Movie Review: Forbidden Planet

    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.

    Our crew of 50s military types, led by a slightly stuffy Leslie Neilsen, take their flying saucer past the speed of light, out into the universe.  There they are tasked with finding the fate of a long lost space ship, Belerephon.  The only survivors are a scientist and his daughter, who are less than welcoming.  The mystery of the Belerephon’s crew and their fate, as well as the secret of Dr. Morbius and his daughter’s success, and their robot servant Robby, make up a large part of the film.  That, and the nature of a strange killer that hunts Neilsen’s crew upon arrival.  Technologies that seem far in advance of what Morbius should have is a hint that something deeper going on.

    The make-up of the crew, the general look, and the future setting where some faceless organization sends ships out on missions of discovery would all serve as inspiration a decade later for Star Trek.  There’s even a bit of the triumvirate, the Executive Officer, the Doctor, and the Captain, going off to explore while the rest of the crew stays behind.  Walter Pidgeon is hostile, yet charming as the good doctor.  He’s perfectly civilized, if unhappy for visitors.   Anne Francis is cute as heck as his young daughter, Altaira, who is desperately hungry for experience with new people.  It’s still the 50s, so there’s obligatory drunk humor involving the ship’s cook, and awkward, somewhat rapy romantic fumbling on the part of the crew when they meet Altaira.  Lieutenant Farman out skeeves the worst Kirk pawings by a mile.

    Once the first death happens, things get rolling pretty fast.  Ancient civilizations, strange monsters, budding romance, and some cool super-tech.  And that’s where the special effects really shine.  Deep under the surface of the planet are vast complexes brought to life in an excellent mix of model work, animation, and live action.  Few science fiction pictures before this grasped at anything like the scope.  Things to Come, maybe.  But not much else.  I can only imagine what it must have been like seeing it in the theater on its first run.

    The production design is amazing, with cool sets, beautiful backdrops and mat paintings, and good costume work.  No surprise Robby became an iconic movie robot.  He’s quite striking.  And the weird electronic music gives the movie an otherworldly flair.  This is one of the big ones.  You have Metropolis, Things to Come, and Forbidden Planet.  There were other science fiction films, like Woman in the Moon, The Time Machine, etc.  But when it comes to tectonic shifts, I think it falls on the former.  Until everything changed with 2001, they were the top of the line.  I love that it creates a universe with a history, without ever explaining most of it.  Who were the Krell?  While the question is central to the film, it is never really revealed, only implied.  Part of me thinks they were amorphous, the Lovecraftian in me hopes they were cephalopodish.  But who can say?

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (3/24/13-3/30/13)

    On Monday night I went to see a school play directed by the Bride of Dork, Lisa.  Cute stuff.  School plays are a fascinating thing.  I remember doing a couple performances as a kid.  It was super stressful and extremely difficult.  But I look back and think how easy everything was and how little it mattered.  I wish I’d been able to simply enjoy it.  But I couldn’t when I was that age.


Olympus Has Fallen:  OK, I know this is a broken record here, but seriously, they’ve got to stop using CGI blood in action movies.  It NEEDS to stop.  This had the potential to be a really fun 80s style crazy action movie.  There are hundreds of acts of violence, but the CG robs them of their power.  It’s still fun, but not nearly as much as it should be.  And frankly, the final act doesn’t live up to the jingoistic silliness of the first half.  If only the villain could have been stabbed with an American flag, or at least be killed in front of a painting of Washington or something.  But the finale ends up being more generic shooting and punching.  It’s an extremely dumb movie, but it was mildly enjoyable.  With bloody squibs going off, it could have been much better.

Doctor Who: Season 7 Part 1:  “1938.  We just bounced off it.”  I’m still having fun watching this show.  But, it has some flaws, and those flaws are becoming more profound.  Part of the problem is a lack of grounding; a melodramatic streak that gets wider by the episode keeps shooting over the top so many times it has become like the proverbial boy who called wolf.  At some point, the cry ceases to be scary or impressive.  The rousing speeches and sudden resets after the story has been written into a corner steal the impact of any later dangers.  It all becomes too easy to fix.  A third of the population dies in an instant?  Wave a magic wand (sonic screwdriver) and suddenly, all is well.  Really?  Any drama is eroded by that kind of thing.  Again, the show is fun, but I’d like to see some changes; maybe writing staff, companions, tone.  I’m not sure.  While I don’t want a return to ‘the way things were,’ I’d like a return of some of the things that made the show successful.  I want crazy ideas, yes.  That’s Who.  But I also want interesting characters and plots, where danger feels real and the potential for failure (no matter how slight) feels like a possibility.  The Weeping Angels episode from this season was better than the previous.  I didn’t like the one (season 6?) where you actually saw them move.  They’re much creepier when you see them from the perspective of their victims, always frozen when you look at ‘em.  But otherwise, there weren’t any particular standout episodes.  Not really.  The dinosaur episode was amusing, but I wanted more Silurians and less friends from history.   I found the exit of Amy and Rory a bit of a letdown.  It’s OK.  There have been much worse.  But it left me cold.  Probably just an echo of my general feelings on recent seasons.  And when are they going to have a really interesting companion?  Enough with the pretty, 20 somethings who spend their time pining after the Doctor, subbing for the squeeing ladies who have (admittedly) helped propel the show into its newfound popularity.  (By the way, ladies, there are plenty of guys just as dorky around you every day, but they’re emotionally available, so you may want to keep clear).  Where is the new generation’s Jamie, or Leela, or Romana (I or II), or Vicki?  Martha and Rory are probably the best new companions, and they’re good.  But why do we have to keep meeting their family, and how about someone who isn’t from today’s UK?  After tantalizing us with Jack and River, even a few crazy possibilities like that girl stuck in a Dalek body, they’ve never lived up by giving the Doctor someone really wild to partner with.  In the classic run, he’s had two future dwelling super-geniuses, a savage girl from a failed human colony, a math wiz from another dimension, a Highlander, and a Time Lord (two regenerations worth), among others.  The new show could use something like that.  And a bit of restraint on the melodrama.  And an end of magic wand waving/reset button finales.

Onmyoji:  “I hear you have quite impressive skills.”  Demon haunted ancient Japan is in trouble.  It’s up to the Onmyoji, a bunch of astrologer/wizard/priests who like to smile at each other to save the world from all those danged monsters.  They smoke a lot of scrolls in the combating of evil.  There’s some weirdass crap for sure.  An interesting look into the more fantastic, magical side of the Samurai myths and stories.  This is some Twin Peaks Red Lodge kind of crazy stuff.

Magnum P.I. Season 2:  “Higgie Baby!”  Oh, man.  I just love this show.  The cast is so much fun to watch.  The wink & a smile stories and infrequent but well used Fourth Wall breaks, along with healthy helpings of early 80s cheese, make it intoxicatingly watchable.  I especially love episodes when Higgins gets in on the action.  The typical exasperated interplay between him and Magnum is great.  But when they work together the adventures are that much more fun.  Whenever the Magnum theme starts playing, I can’t help but have a giant smile on my face.

2010:  “Something is going to happen…Something wonderful.”  Destined to be a letdown, thanks to the all consuming love of the first film held by most cinefiles, 2010 is actually a very good, fairly realistic science fiction film.  It’s well made, well acted, and well written.  A great companion to movies like Alien, Outland, etc.  It obviously did not deliver what fans of 2001 wanted, but I think it delivered the goods, none the less.  Go in with an open mind and I think you’ll enjoy it just fine.  The last act is a bit iffy, but not bad.  Also, is Max gonna be a new Star Child?  And I do like that Time cover that shows the US and Russian leaders.

Ronan Gai:  “Samurai noodles!”  This homage to classic Samurai films does an excellent job of capturing the look and feel those venerable, violent epics of the 60s and 70s.  You would never guess it was made in the last 80s.  Four former samurai have fallen on hard times, their honor tarnished, their purses empty, their souls broken.  The film is a sad look at people who have lost their way, lost their purpose in life.  The four leads are some of the saddest sadsacks to ever sad up a movie.  The weird murder-gang story that slowly builds over the course of the film feels random, in spite of being integral to the, uh, plot(?).  I’m not sure if it’s cultural, something about the script, or what.  But I really didn’t get half of this movie, what was going on, who was doing what, or why for a large chunk of time.  Everyone seemed to be truly awful and vile, and whatever they did seemed bad.  But that is one nutty, drunken Johnny Depp samurai fight at the end.  He’s so tired and drunk and sweaty and half naked.  Whatever the problems with the film, the ending is pretty cool.  According to the trailer, “the last 17 minutes are the biggest massacre in history!”  I think if I was a) Japanese or b) more versed in Samurai culture or film, I’d have probably understood it more.  But even so, the overall feel of the passing of an era, the collapse of a societal system, is hard to miss.  These old warriors’ time has passed, and they have nowhere to go in the new world.  Very sad.

The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption:  “I smell delicious.”  The Mummy 2 hinted at some crazy fantasy adventures in the spin-off movie The Scorpion King.  Instead, we got a boring Xena episode, with pretty much no fantasy adventure at all.  Just guys with mullets and a lot of slow-mo.  The Scorpion King 2, which went straight to video, at least featured some weird elements, but they cast off the Egyptian mythology for over-used Greek stuff.  Combined with the prequel storyline, it seemed more like a Young Hercules movie than Scorpion King.  This movie tries to bring things back to the Mummy movies, if only in a few details.  There’s still precious little Egyptian mythology or weirder fantasy elements; no monsters, no gods, just a bit of magic and some resurrected warriors.  Once again, more Hercules & Xena, blending random bits of history and art from unrelated places and times.  The script is really bad, and the acting steps up to the plate, matching it swing for swing.  Like Abelar: Tales of an Ancient Empire (see my Week in Dork for March 3-9), this feels like somebody’s D&D group wrote a movie.  There’s way too much dialog.  A lot of scenes would have been better served by characters shutting up instead of saying especially stupid things.  Temuera Morrison and Ron Perlman show up to cash some checks.  But Billy Zane is there for other reasons.  Billy Zane is there for Art.  Sadly, the movie is really stupid.  Another chance to do a fun fantasy film squandered with bad writing and poor planning.  Also, it’s rated PG-13, so it can’t even attempt to make up for shortcomings in script with violence or T&A.  And that’s just lame.  But, when Billy Zane takes center stage as the villain, he elevates the movie to Nicolas Cage levels of class and subtlety (how much stuff does he have stashed in his crotch?).  For some reason, he seems to be playing the role as a slapstick comedian.  It’s so jarringly wrong for the movie, it somehow becomes right (could this be his On the Waterfront?).  Somehow, as stupid as the movie is, and as bad as the script is, Zane grabs it, breaks it like a wild horse, and rides it into the sunset of B-movie glory.  After this, I can see Zane dressing up in a bear suit and punching women or ranting about blood in his urine (see Nic Cage’s magnificent performances in the Wicker Man remake or Port of Call: New Orleans).  This is the Billy Zane who hangs with Derik Zoolander.  His performance alone almost makes up for how blah the rest of the film is.

    “You have no concept of the depth of my ire.”  With all this excitement, you might think I didn’t have time to start watching season 3 of Magnum P.I.  How wrong you’d be.  Shot shorts, mustache, baseball cap, sunglasses and all the cool millions of years of evolution could pack into one man’s body.  The first episode features an odd, extended sequence of TC doing his job (flying).  It’s actually pretty cool.  The scenery is amazing and it’s kind of fun to see TC just enjoying himself without Magnum messing with him.  The flashbacks get pretty intense in this one, with a bunch of racist lingo thrown around.  I’m not a fan of the flashback episodes.  But this one is so danged brutal.  And the ending.  Hardcore.  Then episode 2...Simon & Simon crossover!

Star Trek:  I’ve been a Trek fan since I was a wee lad.  My favorite of all is the original series.  So, keep that in mind when I sing this film’s praises.  While I love the original show, I’d hardly hold it up as ‘intellectual’ science fiction.  It was as much an action show as TV had in the 60s, with much more attention paid to fast moving stories and often heavy-handed morality than to well thought out scientific concepts and their ethical relationships with humanity in the future.  This film, like Wrath of Khan and First Contact, keeps the action rolling fast enough that you don’t worry about occasional logic leaps (have you watched Star Trek?  Logic leaps are not new).  It sets up an alternate timeline where Kirk’s life is drastically altered by a time event.  Ripples of that event  effect the universe in various ways, but fate seems to be determined to bring some people together.  I’m not a big fan of Kirk’s character arc in the film.  I don’t like the reluctant hero archetype, and I don’t like that they shoehorned Kirk into it.  Other than that and that the film’s plot follows the basic Wrath of Khan mold that most of the films have, I don’t have any major complaints about the movie.  It has a distinct look and feel, a solid cast who manage to avoid imitation while capturing the essence of their characters.  I would like to see filmmakers get back into space exploration and problem solving, as opposed to space battles and fist fights.  Still, if they’re gonna do action, they could do worse.

Quicksilver:  Kevin Bacon and his amazing mustache blows it hard at the stock exchange.  But through his fall he learns a life lesson, that being a bike messenger is the key to freedom.  As a warrior-poet once said, ‘breaks are death.’  Like everyone who was anyone in the 80s, he lives in a crazy unique apartment, occasionally lives via montage, and has great hair.  This has that feel, that magic feel that 80s movies had.  Some combination of the fashion, the movie making technology, I don’t know.  But it’s there.  Am I nuts or do they suddenly end up in San Francisco during a street race?  That doesn’t look like New York, and I think Alcatraz is in the background of one shot.  When I watched Premium Rush a few months back, I kept thinking how 80s it was, and kept remembering Quicksilver.  I’d never seen it, but the poster was up for years at every video rental shop around.  Premium Rush was clearly inspired by this film.  They both come from the same headspace.  I found myself enjoying this movie quite a bit.

G.I. Joe Retaliation:  After the travesty that was the first film, the powers that be must have listened to the backlash and said, ‘how about we make a movie where we actually use the property it’s based on for inspiration?’  This, unlike the first, is actually a G.I. Joe movie.  It’s like the cartoon made live-action.  The plot is ridiculous, the action silly, the resolution completely stupid.  Just like the show.  Cobra takes over the White House, old guys lend a hand, lots of stuff blows up, and Jonathan Price is clearly having the time of his life.  We finally get a real Cobra Commander doing his usual silly crap.  I could have dealt without all the ninja crap, but I never liked that in the cartoon, either.  However, I know a lot of the fans like Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes.  Me?  Meh.  The movie is stupid and silly.  And it’s exactly what I wanted.  Now there has been a G.I. Joe movie.  And about time.

Godzilla VS. Megalon:  Deep under the ocean, the white robed people of Seatopia watch interpretive dance and bow before Easter Island heads while they stew in their hatred of surface dwellers.  A couple of swell chums (and their awful voiced ward) have invented a silly looking robot with a name that really fits him (just ask them), Jet Jaguar.  When the Seatopians unleash their skyscraper handed, star headed bug monster Megalon, it’s up to size expanding Jet Jaguar to save the day.

    I finally popped Rome on.  I watched a few episodes a long time back, but never got around to watching the whole thing.  Figure I’d better get started.  HBO, man.  They make some fine shows.  If only they would get hold of something like Conan, and give it a serious take.  I feel like, in large part due to movies, we have this vision of Romans as these supremely civilized folk, where in fact, they seem to have been bloody barbarians.  Just successful ones.  Watching this series helps make real the descriptions of Rome seen from the recent Cleopatra biography.  Close, dirty, stinking, and brutal.  Its façade of civilization all surface, with a beast’s heard beneath.

Quantum of Solace:  “I don’t have any friends.”  I’ve talked a lot about my love of Daniel Craig’s take on Bond, and these new movies.  They’ve gotten back to the best things about Bond, dropping the bad.  And how cool it was that this movie didn’t try to redo Casino Royale, serving instead as a continuation of its story.  So I’m not going to go into any of that again.  Instead, I’ll just talk about a) how hot Olga Kurylenko is and b) how much I like Mathieu Amalric’s sleazy villain.  Olga Kurylenko is so hot.  I really like Mathieu Amalric as the sleazy villain.  There.  Check the movie out.

The Quiet American:  “I’m English.  I have habits.”  I know I should so something about it, but I have never read any Graham Greene.  Put him on the list.  I enjoy Brendan Fraser, in spite of all his crappy roles.  And obviously, Michael Caine is awesome.  The exceptionally awkward friendship/rivalry between the two is gut wrenching, and such an odd counterpoint to the sweep of history going on around them.  The conflict that will eventually explode into the Vietnam War grinds away while two men vie for the love of a woman.  Caine is kind of a monster, but a monster one can sympathies with.  While Fraser is aw gee shucks swell, but kind of a bastard at heart.  And Phuong…well, she might just be the most monstrous of all, beautiful on the outside, but a soulless tormentor.

Earth VS. The Spider:  “There’s a rubber glove; put it on.”  A surprisingly bloody opening sets the stage for this Atomic Age monster movie.  Cut to cute bobbysoxer Carol and her doofy boyfriend wander the downtown of Middle America.  Mike can’t help but put his foot in it, because he’s a dimwit.  Cut to Mr. Wizard’s class, full of 30 year old high school kids for a lesson in Electricity! that I’m sure will not come back to be important later.  Mike is such a dolt, you keep hoping Carol will pitch him in a bottomless grotto.  In the spider’s defense, if it hadn’t been for his web in that cave, those two dumb kids would have plunged to their death.  So, in a sense, the spider is kind of a hero.  And you can put ‘waking up a dead giant spider’ on the list of things that can be accomplished if you rock hard enough.  I’m not a fan of movies that use real animals and trick photography, so this had a pretty big strike against it on the creature front.  But there are a few effective moments.

War of the Colossal Beast:  “Get the picture?”  I hardly remember The Amazing Colossal Man, but this sequel is about on par with the silliness.  Our giant mutant is now seriously injured and seemingly mentally challenged.  I guess getting half his face blown off effected him quite a bit.  More Bert I. Gorgon MST3K fodder.

    I got in a bit more Fraggle Rock.  That’s another show that just makes me feel happy.  It’s extremely charming and good natured, without being dull or stupid.  One of the best kids shows I’ve seen in part because it doesn’t dumb things down.  If I ever had kids, this would be on the list of things I would feel good about letting them watch, as it teaches good lessons in creative ways, and is entertaining as well.

Speed Racer:  Whenever I’m down, I can just pop Speed Racer in and things feel better.  I love that this movie about racing, something I couldn’t give two shakes about, ends up being this amazing martial arts film at its heart.  This movie is about kung fu, and one young man’s quest for enlightenment.  The sweet family dynamic, Christina Ricci being as adorable as she has ever been, Matthew Fox and his suave cool Racer X.  That’s all great.  And the insane, colorful explosion of visual effects blasting at your eyes makes for a fun watch.  But at its heart is Speed learning to reach the essence of excellence, transcend skill, and become an artist.

    On Friday I tried a nearby bike path again, hoping maybe it had improved in the four years since the last time I rode it.  Sadly, no.  It’s randomly paved, often covered not in gravel but rocks, and difficult to get to.  And so far as I’ve found, it doesn’t connect with anything, so when I reach the end, I have to turn around and follow the whole thing back, instead of making a circuit, as I would prefer.  I don’t like retracing my steps on recreational bike trips.  Annoyingly, it’s also the closest one to me.  My place is in this horrible dead zone, some of the only territory in Northern Virginia that doesn’t have good biking.  I don’t like the idea that I need a car to go to a bike path.  I think the problem is that this city is old, and while there have been a few scattered attempts to modernize, it’s still basically a car town, like my hometown of Bangor.  It’s not as pedestrian/cyclist hostile as Bangor.  But it’s not friendly, either.  To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t a foot path that would allow me to walk to DC, for example.  At least, not without traveling miles and miles in a different direction first.  Even though I’m close to at least one main road that goes right into the city.

-Matt