Spacetime for Hitler

Heh. There is something so weird about seeing a sci-fi movie set in 2018 -- especially one that had as weird a premise as this one had.
(After all, it is not like we see movies about Nazis on the moon all the time.) Granted, Iron Sky was first released in 2012 but still when it is seen from the viewpoint of 2019, it seems even weirder than it was originally intended to be.

That said, this was one of those movies that -- surprise, surprise -- was not as good as the trailer. Granted, it was supposed to be a comedy and no doubt the rather obvious Sarah Palin jokes were meant to be quite daring back in the day. However, that part of the movie had not aged well and while the movie was not really painful to watch, much of it seemed surprisingly meh considering its premise.

Plus the makers of this movie chose to include that old movie cliché from the 1960s -- the Nazi with a heart of gold -- only this time the Nazi in question was a woman. That cliché had not aged well either though it did make for one of the more surreal moments in the movie.

And yes, as one trailer for this flick hinted, it did contain a variation of an old Harold Saxon quote. But for some reason, it did not come across as strongly in the movie as it did in the trailer.

Knowing Me, Knowing You

My favorite response to the 2009 movie Knowing came from an anonymous movie-goer here in Dallas who said, "Jesus, please don't send your crazy alien angels to save us."

Personally, I must admit that I liked this story better when it was titled "The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes".

As for the religious angle, I'm surprised that a certain film critic of Scandinavian descent didn't even try to equate the "Adam and Eve" figures at the end with the Norse entities Lif and Lifthrasir. Come to think of it, those pagans used to come up with a lot of nasty theories about how the world would end with little if any input from the Left Behind set. But I am sure that was just a coincidence.

For that matter, I could not help viewing the ending of this movie without thinking of the old Neil Young song "After the Gold Rush". Which probably was not the screenwriters' intention...

In any event, there had been at least one effort on the Internet to compare this movie by director Alex Proyas to a famous science fiction short story written by Robert Heinlein which was called "The Year of the Jackpot". The short story in question had no angels, no children, and took place near Los Angeles around the year 1952. However, like the movie, it had a mathematically talented man who stumbled upon a statistical way to see bad things coming, a correlation with ancient prophecy, a young twentysomething woman who was caught up by events, a road trip that was made against incredible odds, and a last-day revelation that the sun is about to explode... Of course, I had actually read that same short story as a teenager and I still did not make the connection. Perhaps because Heinlein and Proyas had such different attitudes towards their material. Heinlein treated the whole end of the world thing as some sort of surprise ending while Proyas dwelt on it and dwelt on it. Plus there was a certain matter-of-fact tone to Heinlein's story that Knowing could have used in place of its more melodramatic attitude. And considering the fact that Heinlein's short story essentially argued that a large group of women removing their clothes in public was a sign of impending doom, that's saying something.

However, to each his own.

Look on That Ending, Ye Mighty, and Despair!: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Now that I'm finally the last person in America -- apart from my mother and my youngest sibling -- to have seen last year's Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom:

It didn't seem all that bad. Predictable, yes, but I have seen worse -- including the third movie in this series.

It did seem to go all over the place for a dinosaur movie: here's a scene for The Purge fans, here's a scene for people who like old horror films, here's some characters for Millennials and nonwhite fans to identify with, here's a scene for disaster movie buffs...

Granted, Steven Spielberg used to do the same a-little-something-for-everybody routine in his movies but the director of this movie ain't Spielberg. (Of course, after seeing a small glimpse of Ready Player One on cable recently -- a movie I ultimately found to be unwatchable -- I'm not sure that even Spielberg is still Spielberg nowadays.)

I must admit that I would have liked to have seen more of Zia Rodriguez the Latina dinovet (played by actress Daniella Pineda). (Yay, representation!) For that matter, I would have liked to have seen Bryce Dallas Howard's "first time I saw a dinosaur" speech delivered by someone like Laura Dern or Julianne Moore. And I still rather not see Chris Pratt in anything that doesn't have Aubrey Plaza in it. (Apparently having two Latina actresses in a movie like this would have broken the universe or something.)

However, in the end, I liked what I saw better than what I didn't see -- although I must admit that I don't know what to make of the -- ahem -- pro-life ending. Seriously, was that supposed to be a happy ending? Or else the director's subtle metaphor for global climate change?

A Brief Philosophical Comment About Rampage

This movie's "of course the wolf flies" line will undoubtedly go down in history as one of the great philosophical quotes of our era, ranking right next to such classic quotes as Indiana Jones' "Snakes? Why does there have to be snakes?" and St. Patrick of Ireland's "I'm tired of all these motherfuckin' snakes on this motherfuckin' plain."

Of course, there are some conservative grumps who would argue that the only philosophical lesson to be learned from this movie is "When in doubt, let George do it." But they're probably just Creationists anyway.

Was This Movie Really Necessary?: Guardians of the Galaxy 2

Most decent movie sequels make me feel bad if I never got a chance to see the first movie in the series. This isn't one of them.

It managed to take almost every element of a successful comic book movie and make it annoying. Then it had the nerve to wrap everything up with a shamelessly contrived -- and not quite believable -- pro-family message. Even the presence of Karen Gillan of Doctor Who fame and the obligatory rip-off -- er -- homage to Hitchcock's North by Northwest couldn't save this film from being amazingly unwatchable. Any indication that it might prove otherwise was dashed to pieces by the opening sequence which managed to make what could have been an exciting action piece seem dull -- and don't get me started on the merits of any casting director who would have Michelle Yeoh play second fiddle to the likes of Chris Pratt. Add to that dialogue that made the Three Stooges sound like refugees from the Algonquin Round Table and you had one real stinker of a movie.

And if you're tempted to watch it because of the talking raccoon, go rent Over the Hedge. It's a lot more funnier and more entertaining and it won't make you feel like a sucker for watching it.

Los Ricos También Mueren aka The Rich Also Die

I must admit that I liked this movie far better when it was called The Most Dangerous Game. After all, the original Richard Connell short story by that name still manages to grip me in a way that its more recent remakes do not. Anyway, if you are going to dedicate a whole movie to the idea of people hunting people, why not call it The Most Dangerous Game?

Of course, writer/director James DeMonaco is not just interested in borrowing a gimmick from an old short story. He is out to make some serious social commentary -- which might explain why the working title for this movie was actually Vigilandia, a rather cool title which implies a similarity to the word Gringolandia, a not too flattering synonym for the USA which is rarely found outside of Frida Kahlo biographies. Unfortunately, it is a cooler title than the movie deserves which might be why the powers that be chose to change its name to the current title -- The Purge -- which sounds like the name of a documentary about Soviet Russia. Of course, a more accurate title might be Look at All the Scary White People, if not Stuff Scary White People Do. But the producers of this movie are not interested in accuracy or even believability, and it shows.

Thus the director spends more than a few minutes establishing that the nice neighborhood that male lead character James Sandin and his family live in is also a multiracial neighborhood, only to pile on a ton of stuff about scary black people later on in the film. He tries to establish one group of villains as the scariest folk since the Super Posse that pursued the title characters of the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, only to have them dispatched with surprising ease. And of course, he devotes the entirety of the movie to an implied message about the evils of wealth without one real glimpse of what life is like in the poor neighborhoods.

For what it is worth, the movie does manage to come up with some creepy images. Then again if one aims at a camera at a bunch of mask-wearing individuals carrying knives and guns, one would have to be a pretty bad cameraman not to capture any creepy images.

Besides, there is something shamelessly self-congratulatory about this movie which makes it hard to dismiss as just another B-movie with intellectual delusions of grandeur. Most people who have told me horror stories about their fellow men don't live in rich neighborhoods but in poor neighborhoods. Yet most American horror movies about home invasions inevitably focus on the rich so-and-so who doesn't deserve such a fate -- and not the poor so-and-so who encounters far worse trouble with little help from society. And although DeMonaco attempts to subvert this theme by making Sandin a rich salesman for security devices who ultimately witnesses the failure of the very devices which have previously proven to be his bread and butter, he shows as little interest in the fate of the poorer people with whom he supposedly identifies as his movie's villains do. The only difference, of course, is that the villains are more honest about it.

Reflections on the Revolution in Brazil

George Orwell has been referenced by both sides of the Anglo-American political fence so often that if he had never lived, he probably would have been invented. I have always found it especially interesting how often both sides ignore that side of Orwell which is most politically inconvenient. For example, conservatives don't like to remember that Orwell was often as stern a critic of capitalism as he was a critic of communism while the liberals don't like to remember that the incident that ultimately turned Orwell against communism was the destruction of Orwell's Socialist kindred spirits in Spain by Stalinists who were supposedly on the same side of the Spanish Civil War as Orwell and his comrades.

Needless to say, you don't see that side of Orwell depicted in many popular movies. Indeed, most movie adaptations of Orwell's work tend to focus around his classic novel 1984, which is about a futuristic dictatorship whose control over its subjects is so complete that not even death can free them.

Unfortunately, 1984 is so familiar to most Anglo-American moviegoers due to its having been taught in so many high school and college literature courses that it would be hard to make a movie adaptation of it that most adults would not find predictable. Indeed, when I had the chance to watch the 1984 film version of 1984, I remember finding its first few minutes so predictable that I turned it off right away -- and it did not help that the movie itself came across as a thinly disguised campaign ad for 1984 U.S. Presidential candidate Walter Mondale.

Fortunately, Terry Gilliam's 1985 movie Brazil was not so predictable. Indeed, I could argue that its plot owed as much to author James Thurber as it did to George Orwell because its protagonist -- Sam Lowry (played by Jonathan Pryce) -- spends so much time having the type of fantasies that Thurber describes in his short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." In fact, it is tempting to argue that Brazil takes the usual Walter Mitty story to its darkest conclusion because so many characters -- including Sam Lowry -- suffer such dire consequences as a result of Lowry's attempts to act out his fantasies. That is not exactly the type of conclusion I expected to find in a movie made so close to the "don't dream it, be it" era of the 1970s, much less in an era when it was popular for filmmakers to wax nostalgic about the various dreams of the 1960s.

Nor was its Aesopian moral as predictable as I expected. It took me quite a few viewings of the movie to catch on to the fact that Gilliam was not content to promote the same old "fight the power" clichés we have seen in so many bad science fiction movies. Instead, his political message was more complicated. On one hand, he obviously did not expect his audience to approve of the dictatorship for which Lowry worked. Nor did he expect us to approve of Lowry's politically neutral attitude. Yet when Lowry became romantically obsessed with a female lorry driver named Jill Layton (played by Kim Griest) and tried to help her by joining in "the revolution," it was not entirely a coincidence that Lowry's actions not only led to the death of an innocent man but ultimately made things worse for Jill, one of the most sympathetic characters in the movie. Indeed, I have long suspected that the true reason for Lowry's breakdown toward the end of the movie was not so much fear of torture but the suspicion that his actions throughout the movie not only failed to prevent the tragic fate of a woman he loved but actually hastened it.

Of course, it might have been easy for Gilliam to give Lowry a more crowd-pleasing story arc but that was not the type of tale he wanted to tell. And in an age which has seen all too many revolutionaries succeed in making things worse for the people they were supposedly fighting for, I don't know that it is a bad thing to remind people who would fight against the powers that be to be careful what they wish for lest they end up like Sam Lowry.

Of course, Brazil is noteworthy for other things besides its political commentary. For example, it is difficult today to watch the various scenes in which Lowry's co-workers watch old movies on their computers and not be reminded of how often modern office workers use the Internet for similar purposes. Indeed, their use of computers as just another source of entertainment always seemed more realistic -- even in the days before the Internet became so popular -- than the usual "evil computer" movie that was so popular back in the 1980s.

For that matter, I loved how the director threw in a visual reference to an old Marx Brothers movie by having it show on the TV set that Jill was watching while she was taking a bath. Given the frequency with which Brazil is referenced by both liberals and conservatives, I can't help but wonder how much of a coincidence it was that he had the most likable character in the movie watch a movie starring the guy who took pride in not wanting to be a member of any club that would have him for a member.

Gilliam used so many visual details to make the world of Brazil believable that it seems depressing that it was not more of a hit at the box office. But then the most popular movies are not always the most deserving movies and it could be that Brazil hit too much of a nerve to be popular with all but the most serious of moviegoers. Then again many potential fans could have been scared away by its length. After all, not everyone likes long movies. And of course, some of the moviegoers who were less than impressed with it could have been like the blonde art student I met at a local book store in the late 1980s who -- despite looking like a long-lost twin of Kim Greist -- admitted that she fell asleep during the movie. It could be that Brazil -- like most very long movies -- works better on DVD or VHS because the viewer always has the option to turn it off at a certain point and then return to it at a later time the same way one would return to a beloved novel that one just can't finish reading in one sitting. But that could just be wishful thinking on my part.

In any event, I find it amusing to note how much the movie seemed to have anticipated the recent War on Terror and the propaganda that accompanied that. Indeed, the opening sequence in which a government spokesman accuses the masterminds behind the latest terrorist incident of displaying bad sportsmanship was much on my mind during many of the months after the 9/11 attack in New York City -- especially whenever I spent too much time watching the Fox News Channel.

However, I don't find it so amusing to note how little most people in power seem to have learned from it. Then again the lessons it has to teach are not the type of lessons that are likely to appeal to a person in power. Indeed, like most great satires, Gilliam's Brazil seems destined to be deliberately misunderstood by those who most need to learn from it. But then such lessons are never easily taught so it is just as well that the movie exists to reach those few who will learn from it. And perhaps those few will be enough to make a difference for future generations.

The Flight Not Taken: An Alternative View of Planet of the Apes

Does anyone who has ever seen the original 1968 version of Planet of the Apes ever remember Lieutenant Stewart, the blonde female astronaut (played by an uncredited Dianne Stanley) who was killed in her sleep by an air leak?

I must confess that I remember her fate from the first time that I saw PotA but I did not remember her name nor even her hair color until I rewatched PotA a few weeks ago. Since then, I can't help but wonder how different the movie would have been if Stewart had survived her time in cryosleep and Taylor (the character played by Charlton Heston) had been the one to perish.

Not that I have anything against Charlton Heston -- he did a great job with the part he had been given and it's no surprise to me that his role in this movie was one of his most memorable roles ever.

But just suppose Stewart had survived in his character's place. Would she do the same things that Taylor did? Would she laugh at the fellow astronaut who had planted an American flag on the shore where they had landed? Would she be so quick to utter misanthropic statements?

Would she be so casual about removing her clothes in an alien environment just so that she could go for a quick swim? Would she be so casual about nudity, period, whether it was in front of her fellow humans or in front of the apes themselves?

Would she be more aggressive than Taylor when she was captured by the apes? Would she try harder to communicate with her captors? Would she attract the attention of her female captor as much as Taylor did and would she be “rewarded” by said captor with a mate of the opposite sex? For that matter, would she welcome such a reward? Would she earn the nickname “Bright Eyes” like Taylor did or would the apes be more fascinated with another part of her anatomy?

For that matter, suppose she and her group had not been captured. Suppose she was more cautious than Taylor and managed to avoid the apes. Would she and her fellow astronauts be able to survive on their own in an ape-dominated planet? Would she survive long enough to become the new Eve or would she suffer an even worse fate than Taylor's companions suffered in the original movie?

For that matter, suppose Dodge (the black astronaut played in the original movie by Jeff Burton) survived the attack by the apes instead of Taylor. Would he do anything different from the things Taylor did? Would he be more wary about dealing with his captors? If he escaped capture, would he play Adam to Stewart's Eve? Or would Stewart choose to play Eve to both surviving males?

Come to think of it, if playing Adam and Eve was such an important part of the mission upon which Taylor's crew were sent, why did they send only one female? Why not send two? Or three? Why not send a predominantly female crew? After all, one would think that it would make more sense to send a group of female astronauts into space than to send a group of males for no other reason that the average woman tends to be lighter and shorter than the average man. Given all the fuss sci-fi writers like to make about the “cold equations” that govern space flight, one would think that it would save more fuel to send someone who was lighter than the average male than to stick with the status quo. Then again, we're talking about 1968 (not exactly a progressive time in regard to feminism). And anyway, people don't always think logically just because they profess to be more scientific.

I could probably spend all day writing what ifs about Planet of the Apes but at the end of the day, I would have to admit that it is still an interesting movie in its own right. Granted, the first time I heard about the movie, I was just a little kid and every time I heard about it, I could not help envisioning a movie about a world full of giant apes. I suppose I should admit to having been just a little disappointed when I first found out what the movie was really about, but I still remember the movie having a huge emotional impact upon me, regardless of my original impression. Indeed, the first time I saw it, I literally could not go to sleep for a long time afterward because of all the thoughts produced by the movie's final image.

I wish all movies were as thought-provoking as the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes. Indeed, it says something great about the flick that though it has been the subject of many parodies, it still holds up to multiple viewings. Of course, it does help if said viewings are at least a decade or so apart. It helps even more if you don't try to take the premise too literally. Even as a kid, I knew that apes would be no more immune than humans to the disaster hinted at in the original movie and that the movie worked best as an allegory about the horrors of atomic war and not as a thinly disguised science lesson. But then one would have to live in a madhouse to think differently, right?

The Great Brain Robbery

Oh, no, Boris! Please don't put part of that gangster's brain in your best friend's skull. After all, you have no idea where it has been.

Nevertheless, Boris Karloff insisted on doing just that in the 1940 movie Black Friday. At first, Boris Karloff's character -- Dr. Ernest Sovac -- was just concerned about saving the life of his best friend George Kingsley (played by Stanley Ridges), a kindly English professor who taught at the local college. Then Dr. Sovac discovered that the brain he used to fix his friend's injured grey matter belonged to gangster Red Cannon, the only man who knew where $500,000 in stolen loot has been hidden. Of course, Dr. Sovac did not want the money for himself but he was not exactly eager to turn it over to the authorities either. Instead Dr. Sovac tempted himself with the thought of all the lab equipment he could buy with that stolen loot. And so it went.

This being the Hays Code era, it does not really seem like much of a spoiler to note that Dr. Sovac's scheme did not exactly go off without a hitch. For one thing, he found that he was able to summon Red's personality into Professor Kingsley's body through hypnosis but he was not so good at controlling Red while he was in there. Moreover, Sovac and Cannon were not the only ones searching for the loot. The rest of Red's gang -- led by gangster Eric Mornay (played by Bela Lugosi, natch) -- were searching for it too and they could be every bit as brutal as Red too. Would Dr. Sovac be able to beat them to the dough? And if so, how long could he hold on to it?

Like most scientific horror films made in the 1930s and 1940s, much of the plot details seem almost laughable by today's standards. After all, the film would have you believe that Dr. Sovac managed to singlehandedly put off an operation on not just one but two human brains without arousing the suspicions of any outsiders. Not once did a nurse or orderly interfere or show up at the wrong time and of course, Dr. Sovac had no trouble keeping everything sterile and operating at the same time. Moreover, though Dr. Sovac was said to have transplanted part of a gangster's brain into Professor Kingsley's skull to replace brain matter that was too damaged to survive, there seemed little concern on his part about whether or not his friend's true personality would survive just an operation. Indeed, the possibility that Red Cannon's true self might live on in his best friend's brain came almost as a complete surprise to Dr. Sovac though I would think that the opposite result would be more unlikely.

In any event, the true purpose of this movie was not to tantalize viewers with the possibilities of future medical advances but to issue the same old warning about meddling with things man was not meant to mess with that we always seem to get from horror films of this era. However, for a change, Dr. Sovac seemed to worry more about the risks such an operation might pose to his medical license than the notion that he might be punished by a higher power. Then again, this being a Hays Code picture, he got enough punishment as it was.

Robbing Michael to Play Paul

About ten minutes into the movie Paul, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost meet a Hispanic bellboy who proves to be one of the few people in the entire picture who knows nothing about ufos. By some odd coincidence, he always happens to be the film's only Hispanic character as well -- though to be fair, I was kinda surprised to see Pegg and Frost include such a character in the first place, given the fact that they do not exactly hail from a country with a large Hispanic population. Anyway, the scene with the bellboy struck me as puzzling because on one hand, Pegg and Frost were savvy enough to avoid the inevitable joke about illegal aliens. On the other hand, the scene seemed to come mighty close to including such a joke and indeed, the scene ends on such an awkward note that I could not help wondering why Pegg and Frost included it.

If that was the film's only flaw, I could have happily ignored it. After all, I have always liked Simon Pegg and it does not hurt that Frost and he both starred in Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, two of my favorite films of the last decade.

Yet this latest film they made together just did not work for me. Perhaps it was because the humorous side of aliens have been explored in the movies far more than Frost and Pegg's previous subject matter. Or perhaps it was because Pegg and Frost really did not have a lot to say about this subject that was all that imaginative. Occasionally, they came up with a nice sight gag and some witty dialogue but all too often they depended on the same rude humor that almost every other recent movie comedy has used.

Moreover, the main gimmick of their movie seemed to echo the gimmick of the atrocious Nora Ephron movie Michael: a traditionally asexual being comes down to earth and starts acting contrary to asexual tradition. The main difference, of course, being that instead of the being being an angel as in Michael, the being in this case is an extraterrestrial. Occasionally, Frost and Pegg tried to add a bit of social commentary by making the alien visitor -- an extraterrestrial nicknamed Paul -- an enlightened being who mentally and emotionally liberates almost everyone he comes in contact with -- a subplot the audience is undoubtedly supposed to find funny since the alien's chief form of liberation seems to involve encouraging people to cuss a lot, have sex and partake of illicit drugs. In short, Paul encourages the humans to do the kind of things they normally would have wanted to do anyway.

Even that would not have been so bad if so much of the movie's humor did not seem directed at a more sophomoric audience than the people who watched Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead. Thus, in place of the witty dialogue we have come to expect from Pegg and Frost, we get endless shots of Paul mooning the humans and doing various other off-color stunts. Plus we get the umpteenth ripoff of X-Files and Men in Black in the form of a subplot involving mysterious agents -- feds, natch -- who are attempting to stop Paul and his human companions when they are not acting as childish as the movie's intended audience.

Nevertheless, Paul has enough laughes that I can readily see why many people might enjoy it. I just wish I could honestly say that I was one of them.

Love in the Age of the En-Lightning-Ment

When we last left Tyrone Power, he was playing a journalist named Stephen Fitzgerald who was journeying to the Emerald Isle to meet cute with his future love interest. This time out in the 1951 movie I'll Never Forget You, he is a scientist named Peter Standish who is visiting Mother England in order to participate in a very important atomic experiment, only to end up traveling back in time via lightning bolt to the Age of Enlightenment where he promptly changes places with a rich American who is preparing to wed a charming young damsel who just happens to be the beautiful daughter of a local aristocrat. Nice work if you can get it, eh?

Unfortunately, life in 1784 England does not quite suit Standish as much as he would have supposed and to make matters worse, he keeps giving away the fact that he knows so much about the locals' future. In short, he is just ignorant enough of eighteenth century ways to attract the suspicions of the locals and too knowledgeable enough about things his counterpart would not know to win their trust. As if Standish's life is not complicated enough, he finds himself falling for the sister of his counterpart's intended, a scandalous complication in any century.

Will Standish be able to win over the good people of 1784 London? Or will he end up in an insane asylum?

Since this movie is not billed as an example of alternative history, it does not take a lot of imagination to guess that the eventual ending will be a less than happy one. Indeed, this movie has one of the most depressing endings for a romantic movie that I have seen in a long while.

Yet it gives nothing away to note that it hints at an ultimately happy ending for Standish as well. Add to that the witticisms of Dennis Price as Standish's British “cousin” -- one of those black sheep relatives who is inevitably more fun to listen to than the white lamb kinfolk -- and the movie is actually quite watchable. After all, it is hard to hate a movie that has enough confidence in its audience to not only include Dr. Samuel Johnson as a character but to do so without going out of its way to explain who he was or why he was so famous. And I must confess that I find it amusing to see yet another old movie which treats marriage between cousins as no big deal while most modern Americans I know would regard the same idea with horror.

Besides, after having seen my share of “time travel for dummies” movies, I could not help finding it refreshing to finally see a movie that had a fairly realistic attitude about how a visitor from the future would be received in real life. After all, as my father used to note whenever he and I were watching old syndicated reruns of Time Tunnel, it is not like we sophisticated people in the modern era would automatically accept the word of a person who claimed to be from our future. Indeed, if such a person turned up in Washington D.C., he or she would be very lucky if he or she did not vanish into the clutches of Homeland Security. And that is just one of the more optimistic scenarios.

While I must admit that it would be fun to see a movie in which such a traveler actually did change history, I am not sure I trust modern Hollywood to bring off such a story with the same panache we see in I'll Never Forget You. Mind you, I will admit that title needs work. But apart from that, I found it quite memorable.

If Brevity Is the Soul of Wit...

Some short stories aren't meant to be made into full-length movies. It doesn't matter how many really serious subplots you add; they don't really work unless they're short subjects.

Richard Matheson's “Button, Button” is one of those short stories. The original short story worked best as a brief entry in the John Collier “Gotcha” School of Storytelling. The premise was simple: a stranger presented a married couple with a mysterious box one day. They were both told that they have only to push a button on the box and they would get a huge cash reward but in return, someone they didn't know would die. The couple debates the morality of this offer until one half finally gives in and pushes the button. Afterwards...

Well, actually the original short story didn't talk much about what happened afterwards. It just presented the reader with a quick “betcha didn't see that coming” ending and then faded out. And no doubt that's how it should have ended. Any longer than that and the story just gets too pretentious. Moreover, it loses any real suspense since the longer you draw out the answer to key questions, the less the average person actually cares about the resolution of said questions.

Any argument to the contrary can be disproved by the 2009 movie The Box, which is based on the same Matheson short story. On one hand, the movie deserves props for being more philosophically ambitious than what usually passes for science fiction nowadays. After all, it just doesn't want to be yet another cheap thriller about mysterious men in black who want to manipulate us into doing God knows what; it wants to be the ultimate version of such a thriller. And it doesn't hurt that the movie never really answers the obvious question concerning who created the box. Was it God? The Devil? Aliens? The movie never really says and yet it gives us a lot of evidence to support each theory.

And yet because the movie draws out its storyline so much, it ultimately seems less than satisfactory. It doesn't want to upset the women in its audience by implying that they're all sociopathic button-pushers and yet its attempt to imply a similar thing about men doesn't quite work either. Instead of coming away with some big lesson about the nature of human morality, we're instead left with a story which pretty much implies that both sexes would push the button under the right circumstances and that there's no point in expecting better of mankind because we're all a bunch of selfish losers anyway.

Granted, it's hard to watch the evening news at times and still convincingly argue against such a worldview. Then again The Box is hardly the first movie to present such a pessimistic view of mankind and it doesn't even present it in a particularly original way. Which makes me wonder if the real test lies in how we respond to this movie. Do we say, “Yeah, those mysterious box-makers got us pegged, all right. So why bother?” Or do we prove them wrong? Personally, I'm siding with the “prove them wrong” faction but then that's just me. And it's not like I have a box.

Babes and Bathwater

I'm usually a big sucker for movies in the “lovable loser” comedy genre but here's the thing: the losers in said movie have to be actually likable, if not lovable. They cannot be jerks, blowhards or generally unlikable people. They have to be the type of people you would root for in real life, not the type that would make you cringe if you found yourself sitting next to them at a party.

Granted, the bar for the lovable loser genre has gotten low over the last few decades and heaven knows there has been way too many movies in which the one likable thing about the comic protagonist is his affection for his grandma. But last year's Hot Tub Time Machine is so pathetic it does not even bother to include the grandma. Instead we get one suicidal loser who has done his best to alienate almost everyone in his life except two friends -- and his two friends, who are not all that much better. Along for the ride is one friend's fatherless nephew, who seems to be the one person in the group with a sense of humor and a genuinely likable personality. So naturally it is a running gag of the movie that he ends up getting dumped on through most of the movie by the suicidal loser.

Then the group gets the opportunity to go back in time to the 1980s via the time travel device mentioned in the movie title and alter history for their young selves. But unfortunately, they prove just as obnoxious in their 80s incarnations as they were in the present, and they not only almost blow their chance to change anything but prove themselves even less worthy of success than they were in the present.

It would be nice to pretend that this movie was funny despite all this but it was not. Most of the pop culture jokes concerning the 1980s were just old hippie jokes from the 1960s retooled for a different decade and to add insult to injury, almost every female character that the group encountered in the 1980s -- including a group member's sister! -- was depicted as being little more than a brainless bimbo. (Because apparently no other kind of female existed back in the 1980s as far as HTTM's writers were concerned.)

As a result, the film's happy ending made me feel as if I had just found out that the worst bully I knew from high school had won the lottery. Because, in effect, that was what happened. The most unlikable character in the movie stayed behind in the past to change things -- and ended up altering history in favor of himself and his chums. Which would not have been so bad if this was supposed to be a dark comedy, but it was not.

Oh, well. Perhaps it is just as well that the movie did not include a grandmother. After all, it is hard to imagine HTTM's writers being all that more respectful toward senior citizens.

Inversion of the Body Snatchers

Apparently the scariest thing Kevin Williamson ever encountered in high school was a naked teenage girl. Moreover, it was obviously a white teenage girl because apparently there was not much race-mixing at the place where Williamson went to school.

Okay, none of that is necessarily true, but if you wish to do a quick penny-ante analysis of Willamson based solely on his screenplay for the 1998 sci-fi film The Faculty, it’s tempting to come to that conclusion. Of course, it wasn’t Williamson who came up with the original story for The Faculty; that dubious credit goes to two others fellows named David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel. Williamson only wrote the screenplay.

Thus there are a lot of references to sci-fi movies and literary science fiction -- more so than I usually expect to see in a movie like this, where all too often sci-fi references seem to begin and end with the inevitable shout-outs to Star Wars, Star Trek and The Matrix. Plus there are the inevitable celebrity cameos including a quick glimpse of cybercritic Harry Knowles and a slighter longer view of my beloved Salma Hayek as the school nurse, not to mention a view of an early Jon Stewart as a science teacher in a part which must make Jon Stewart foes rub their hands with glee.

The result is not the most watchable science fiction b-film I have ever seen. In fact, I suspect this film actually played better on DVD instead of the big screen because of its slow pacing.

Nor does it help that neither director Robert Rodriguez nor Kevin Williamson seemed quite sure whether to stick with the same parody style that worked so well with Williamson’s previous effort Scream or to try something new. This last part was a shame because halfway through the movie, I got the impression that the movie had great potential to become a lot more than yet another mediocre Invasion of the Body Snatchers parody, especially when it starts subverting the usual B-movie tropes by, say, implying that alien possession might actually improve some people. For example, the football coach became less of a type-A personality and more of a “I’m o.k.-you’re o.k.” type of guy. The repressed English teacher suddenly started expressing her sexuality. The school nurse suddenly lost her cold and even the most emotional teenagers stopped acting out so much after becoming possessed.

A line in the script blamed these changes on the havoc the local climate played with alien neural systems and the way it thus made the alien-possessed humans more open to expressing their most repressed impulses. Yet I could not help but wonder what would have happened if Williamson had further explored this theme instead of sticking with more tired horror tropes like surprise murders and disappearing corpses. If only he had had the chutzpah to hint at a world in which alien possession might actually seem like a tempting alternative to the status quo rather than just another rival system of conformity to be stamped out, this might have been quite an intellectually provocative movie.

For that matter, I also couldn't help wondering why some obvious impulses -- for example, ones involving interracial romance and same-sex affection -- never seemed to get acted upon. One could argue that this movie was set at the one American high school where such impulses did not exist but that would require a greater suspension of disbelief than alien possession. Besides, it seemed strange that a movie which seemed to be about a group of outsiders proving their worth by defending the school against an alien foe seemed to approve of some real-life outsiders more than others -- and that the group of outsiders it did approve of just happened to be all white heterosexuals. (What? None of the nonwhite or gay students had enough school spirit to fight back against alien invaders?)

After seven seasons of Buffy and a single season of Freaks and Geeks, any movie kvetching about the hellishness of American high school cannot help but seem a bit obsolete. Yet I found myself liking The Faculty more than I expected. True, it is more the type of affection one feels for a runty little puppy but then not every B-movie can be the equivalent of the award-winning show dog and some of the ideas hinted at in Williamson‘s script showed great potential.

I just worry that Williamson might have learned the wrong lesson from The Faculty. That in the future, he might feel more comfortable pandering to his fans with another Scream sequel like the one he is supposedly working on now rather than taking a chance on a story which has not been done before. That would indeed be a shame if that happened. Yet, short of an alien invasion, I do not really see things turning out differently.

The Dwarfs of Wrath

Mommies don’t do that. Mommies don’t hurt their own children.
--Samantha Eggar, The Brood (1979)

It says a lot about the depressing number of news stories that argue otherwise that my first response to that line was “Bullshit!”

But enough of real life. What, you may ask, has all this to do with the 1979 movie The Brood?

Well, The Brood is one of director David Cronenberg’s first entries into mainstream horror. The running theme of the movie is maternal violence and it is supposedly based on a true story. Not everything that happens in this movie literally happened in real life but Cronenberg himself admits to having being inspired by his real-life experiences with his ex-wife while writing the screenplay of this movie.

The movie concerned a man named Frank Cavert (played by Art Hindle) whose wife Nola (played by Samantha Eggar) was undergoing treatment at a mysterious retreat run by Hal (played by Oliver Reed). One day Frank arrived at the retreat to pick up his daughter Candice only to discover when he got home that she had been beaten. When he asked Candice about it, he received no answer. When he tried to confront Nola about it, he got stonewalled by Hal who threatened to deny all visitation rights if Frank made an issue of this.

Later on, Hall talked to Nola and confronted her with Frank’s accusation. At first, Nola was in denial. What? Her? Hurt her own child? Surely Hal was joking.

Then Hal confronted Nola with the stories she herself had told about the abuse she suffered at her own mother’s hands. Stories that still had an active influence on Nola. So much so that she found herself expressing more and more anger at that parent.

Meanwhile, Art had a conversation with Nola’s mother, a doting grandmother who seemed awfully defensive about something. She accused Nola of making stuff up and yet seemed to drink quite a bit for someone who had nothing to feel guilty about.

For some odd reason, Frank left her alone with Candice. Candice and her grandmother were looking at an old family photo album when their quality time was interrupted by some mysterious noises in the kitchen. Grandmother excused herself to investigate and then...

Kids? What kids?
--Art Hindle, The Brood (1979)

The rest of the film involved a series of murders committed by homicidal dwarfs. Dwarfs small enough to pass for children from a distance yet far more cruel than even the worst playground bully. All of their victims were people with whom Nola was angry. Yet apart from strange dreams, Nola had no memories of the deeds the dwarfs committed. And yet the people they killed were still dead.

Frank accidentally came across one such killer while it was in the process of dying. Apparently once the dwarfs’ rage was dissipated, they began dying. Yet there were so many targets for their rage. Even imaginary ones... And according to the local coroner, they were physically incapable of seeing things in anything but black and white. No shades of gray were possible. They had no room for soft answers turning away wrath. In fact, it was tempting to wax political and compare the dwarfs to some real-life humans I could mention.

But all that was besides the point.

What’s been happening to me has been just too strange... too strange for me to share with anyone from my old life.
--Samantha Eggar, The Brood (1979)

The Brood was allegedly inspired by the real-life custody battle Cronenberg underwent for his daughter Cassandra, a bitter conflict in which he allegedly went so far as to kidnap Cassandra from his ex-wife. Although Cronenberg tried to give his characters shades of gray (for example, he had Frank at one point admit that his ex-wife’s mental issues may have rubbed off on him and had the not very likable Hal perform a very gutsy -- if not heroic -- deed), it still seemed obvious which character he most sympathized with (Frank) and which one he most disliked (Nola).

To make things more complicated, we never learned how much of Nola’s stories were true and how much were not. Her parents did act awfully guilty for people who considered themselves the victims of false accusations and yet Nola herself was not always truthful. Indeed, she was all too ready to condemn and execute someone who was herself innocent of the deeds Nola attributed to her. Granted, Nola never consciously order that such-and-such individual be killed. But the results of her “dreams” were such that she might as well have.

And what about Frank? Though Frank seemed like the closest thing the movie had to a conventional hero, he ultimately resolved the problem of Nola and her wrathful dwarfs in a way that was not exactly chivalrous. True, his deeds could be justified on the grounds that they were the only realistic way Frank could keep his daughter from getting killed. Yet his deed did not keep Candice from undergoing a horrific experience.

Indeed, it seemed quite evident at the end of the film that while Frank’s deed saved his daughter’s physical life, it might well have also set off the same genetic qualities that ultimately gave Nola her murderous powers. And so the cycle of violence moved from grandmother to mother to daughter. I guess it is a good thing that things like that rarely happen in real life, right?

To Boldly Go Where We Have Been Before

I liked Star Trek: The Original Series well enough when I was in my teens and I liked the Star Trek movies very much when I was in my twenties. But I never loved the series the way others seemed to love the series and I never got the appeal of watching certain episodes over and over again even though I had a number of favorite episodes I did not mind seeing more than once.

When the new Star Trek movie by Alias creator J.J. Abrams came out last summer, I found myself somewhat surprised by my indifference toward the new movie. Even my mother -- who was never much of a science fiction fan, much less a Star Trek aficionada -- was more interested in the new movie and while I will not pretend that watching the new movie was the equivalent of pulling out my fingernails, I cannot really pretend that it revived my interest in the series. At best it was a watchable -- but not particularly memorable -- movie which was good for an occasional Saturday night rental -- but not much else.

Why should this matter?

Because last year's Star Trek movie made enough money to already provoke rumors of a sequel. And while I must admit that I would rather see yet another Star Trek movie than another Hot Tub Time Machine or 40 Year Virgin, I cannot help but wonder about the projects that we will never see because of Hollywood's insistence that successful sci-fi = Star Trek. Or Star Wars. Or X-Files. Or any idea that has already been done before.

For example, what would be wrong with a new sci-fi movie that is not part of the Star Trek universe? (Or for that matter, the Star Wars universe, the X-Files universe, etc.)

Why not adapt a novel from author Philip Jose Farmer's classic Riverworld series? Or Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land? Or Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light? Or better yet, some original sci-fi idea.

As much as I liked Star Trek, there is something about the endless chain of sequels, spin-offs and remakes of that series that turns me off. After all, the main appeal of science fiction has always been that of an universe where anything can happen. So why do so many fans of that genre seem to prefer going to the same old places over and over again? I will admit that Star Trek was one of the better sci-fi series to air on TV and I will even admit that Star Trek the movie was one of the better movies to come out last year.

But it was not that good.

And even if it were, is not it time to try something new? Or should we choose to boldly go where everyone and his cousin has already gone before?

Dysgenics for Dummies: Idiocracy

The main problem with being a smart person like myself who has been trained since childhood by his Mensa member father to think for himself is that one doesn’t always like the same movies that other smart people like. Or at least one doesn’t look at such movies the same way that other smart people prefer to look at them.

Take, for instance, Idiocracy, the latest effort from film auteur Mike Judge. The standard take on this movie from most smart people is that this film is a daring effort at exposing the current American trend of “dumbing down” and where it is likely to lead us. Of course, a truly smart person, or at least one who is familiar with the concept of lateral thinking, can’t help but wonder if a movie arguing against dumbing down is all that daring. Has there ever been a film that argued in favor of dumbing down? A film that argued that we need more stupid people in this country or that our education system asks way too much of its students?

Okay, it could be argued that such films exist. But they are not necessarily the type of films people think of when they think of such films. Good Will Hunting, for example, is generally considered a smart person’s movie but it hardly presents smart people in a flattering light and indeed, the conclusion of that movie would seem to suggest that smart people would be a lot better off working on their people skills and making out with the opposite sex than they would be if they just concentrated on increasing their academic skills. Apparently, it is okay to be smart, that film argues, as long as you don’t actually do anything beneficial with your smarts apart from using them to argue with intellectual wise guys and impress women.

Of course, that is not the type of movies smart people like to think about when they’re looking for examples of anti-smart-people sentiment in America. And anyway, if such people were truly smart, they would have read enough to realize that most of the issues dealt with in Idiocracy are not exactly new. People have been fretting about the possible mental inferiority of future Americans since the turn of the century. Only back then it was argued that it would be recent immigrants that would lead to the intellectual downfall of America. The idea was that mentally inferior immigrants were outbreeding intellectually superior native-born Americans and that we were doomed to become a nation of morons because of this.

Of course, many of those “mentally inferior” immigrants eventually raised children who proved to be just as intellectually capable as any college-educated native-born. Indeed, it soon became obvious that the differences between such immigrants and the natives often had more to do with class, language, and education than with anything else. If you were born into the right class, spoke good English and had parents who could afford to provide you with a college education, you were automatically presumed to be smarter than people who were born into the “wrong” class, spoke little if any English, and had parents who could barely afford to send you to public school, much less college. Of course, this is not how America was supposed to work, but unfortunately, few smart people of the time bothered to argue that point. Perhaps because they were afraid that by doing so, they would run the risk of not being considered smart any more.

Of course, there are people who still think that way today, the most obvious example being former U.S. English member John Tanton. Like Judge, Tanton liked to argue that America ran the risk of being overrun by mental morons because all the dumb people were producing babies faster than the smart people. The only difference being the two being that Mike Judge does not pretend to single out a particular ethnic group to blame for such a result while Tanton preferred to single out Hispanic immigrants -- especially illegal Hispanic immigrants -- as being the “dumb people” in question.

To be fair, science fiction author C. M. Kornbluth made a similar argument to Judge’s in his famous short story, “The Marching Morons.” Like Judge -- and unlike Tanton -- Kornbluth refused to put the blame on any one group for the dumbing down of future America. Indeed, Kornbluth could not resist hinting that the few smart people who existed in such an America were likely to be racially mixed. Nor did Kornbluth pretend that any attempt to correct such a situation would be bloodless. Indeed, it could be argued that “The Marching Morons” was originally intended to satirize the eugenics arguments of the early twentieth century and that the true point of the story was not to warn against a tide of overly fertile dumb people but to warn that any attempt to come up with a “final solution” for that problem would be far worse than the actual problem.

In any event, Kornbluth wrote his short story back in the 1950s which puts Judge’s Idiocracy in the odd position of being a wildly imaginative restatement of a story that has already been told. To be fair, Judge’s version is a lot more light-hearted than Kornbluth’s story and has a happier ending. Moreover, he tosses in a lot of modern references for the benefit of those movie-goers who would just as soon not read anything from the 1950s -- or for that matter, not read anything, period. Indeed, it could be argued that Judge essentially “borrows” the concept of the original Kornbluth story and “dumbs it down” for the sake of twenty-first century moviegoers. Moviegoers who never once question how a society of people too dumb to figure out a jigsaw puzzle can maintain complicated machinery like computers and electric cars. Of course, some might argue that to consider such issues in a movie like this is to spend way too much time thinking. And, of course, the last thing Judge apparently wants viewers of this film to do is to think.

Or at least he does not want them to think too much. Otherwise, they might miss out on his movie’s message -- which is really funny when you think about it…

Not EVE, EV-A!

Yes, I finally saw the latest Pixar movie and believe me, that magician's bunny was fun-ny. And oh, yes, the other movie, WALL·E, was excellent too.

Not much I can add to what has already been written about it except to note:

1. The “female” robot's name is spelled “EVE” yet the title robot pronounces it “EV-Ah.” As in Eva, the Spanish name for Eve. Coincidence or what? It would be nice to think that in the future even the robots would be Hispanic, but hey I'm probably pushing it. Still the trigger-happiness on the part of EVE does seem to tie in with the old Hispanic stereotype. And I'm quite sure I saw WALL·E carrying a knife during one part of the movie. And of course he never once showed his birth certificate or his green card when he got on board that ship...

2. Could WALL·E and EVE be the robotic equivalent of Candide and Cunégonde? That ending did seem a bit Panglossian.

3. That title robot, WALL·E, looks so much like the robot in the old Short Circuit series that I was actually surprised to find out that the movie was good. Sure, it's a Pixar movie and Pixar movies are always endowed with the essence of quality -- but this could have been the one movie that proved an exception to that rule. Gracias a Dios, it didn't.

“Indy, The Torch Is Going Out”: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Ok, I'm not going to pretend that I didn't enjoy certain aspects of the new movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It was fun hearing the familiar John Williams theme again. It was fun seeing Karen Allen again. It was nice to see a tip of the hat given to the late Denholm Elliott and his character of Marcus Brody. It was nice to see Harrison Ford go through the same old how-the-heck-is-he-going-to-get-out-of-this-one routine even though he's getting to the point where he's not exactly young enough to make a convincing action hero. And it was fun to see actress Cate Blanchett play Soviet villainess Irina Spalko, a character whom I kept wanting to call Evil Ninotchka if for no other reason than the fact that she's already inspired way too many Natasha Fatale jokes on the Internet.

Oddly enough, my mother was more eager to see this movie than I was. In fact, she and my sister saw it the day before I did. (In view of the way I had to talk her into seeing the first Indiana Jones movie, I can't help but find that ironic.)

So what didn't I like about the movie? Well, if you have to ask, you obviously haven't seen the movie yet.

No, seriously, there is a lot to dislike in this movie, including the not-so-entertaining secret traitor subplot -- which was only believable if one believes Indy got hit on the head once too often during the course of his career -- and the rather arbitrary Chariots of the Gods subplot. There is even a rather clumsy attempt at political commentary that doesn't quite work as well as one would like. (So much for the suggestion that Spielberg is going to be following in the footsteps of the late Sydney Pollack.)

After seeing how well actress Elisabeth Sladen was photographed in recent episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures, I couldn't help but find it a little disturbing to note how unflattering Ms. Allen (a far younger actress than Ms. Sladen) looked by comparison. Was this just misogynistic camerawork or does Ms. Sladen have a far better makeup crew than Ms. Allen? Inquiring minds wish to know.

Nor did I care for the inevitable illegitimate child subplot though the filmmakers make up for this with a rather nicely done audience-pleasing sequence toward the end of the film. Then there is the fact that none of Indy's Soviet foes -- not even Evil Ninotchka -- are ever as convincingly characterized as the villains in the first Indy movies. (Indeed, even the rather vanilla villains of the last Indiana Jones movie seem like Iago compared to these guys.) There is a rather scary sequence involving a couple of Peruvian graverobbers who had obviously seen Casino Royale once too often. And there also exists the inevitable shout-out to Indy's fear of snakes.

However, the grand finale just didn't grab me the same way the grand finale of the first movie did. Perhaps the film will grow on me the same way the last two Indy movies did. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

And though it might be argued that this Indy movie was better than any of us skeptics initially feared, I could not help thinking as the end credits rolled: all this time and this was the best they could do?

Yes, I know. I'm hard to please.

V For Vendetta: El Libro Fue Mejor

I saw the movie last night and I found myself gravely disappointed. Somehow, I knew not to expect too much, but even my low expectations weren't quite met.

Indeed, watching the movie V for Vendetta if you're an hardcore Alan Moore fan like myself was like hearing one's favorite Stevie Wonder songs sung by the contestants on American Idol: you want to like the results but geez, some things just shouldn't be encouraged...

Some scenes lifted verbatim from Moore's original graphic novel worked okay, but the scenes in which the filmmakers tried to “update” or “improve” the original material just didn't work that well.