MOVIES- TRON LEGACY part two

So, enough about a 28 year old move. What does the new TRON have to offer?

Well, it does succeed where the old TRON failed. It is a visual spectacle to anyone sitting in the audience. But unfortunately it fails where the original succeeded.

Where the original tried to be a good, old fashioned good guys vs. bad guys romp, the new movie strives for profundity and fails miserably. As a headline on fark.com said: "Tron Legacy Director Says He Aimed for Bold Concept- Made Tron Legacy Instead." The religious allegories take center stage instead of the passing wave the first film gave them. Flynn has become a holy man, a zen Lebowsky, trapped in a world of his own creation. This creator has two sons- his artificial progeny Clu, who has fallen from grace and decided to make the world perfect through fascism, and his human son, Sam, who holds the capacity for salvation of this microcosmic world and is transfigured into a simple program who is yet so much more. Like Satan, Clu is the ruler of this fallen world. He walks to and fro, back and forth in the earth, but his mouth doesn't work quite right and his face looks kind of freaky.

And there's the second problem for TRON redux. While AVATAR may have jumped the uncanny valley in a single bound, TRON LEGACY falls to it's death in the chasm. You might believe Clu as a soulless program, but you're never for a minute fooled into thinking he's the embodiment of a young Jeff Bridges. In TRON Bridges was funny, exciting, and droll. His face was expressive and (dare I say it) animated. Clu looks just a little bit more like a young Jeff Bridges than Jason in the FRIDAY THE 13TH movies looked like William Shatner (look it up). I never quite got away from the idea that it was somebody wearing a young Jeff Bridges latex mask. Or that rather than CGI that they had just given Bridges whole face Botox injections. It's a great idea, but everything is in the execution. And whoever thought audiences would be taken up in all this pseudo-religious claptrap or taken in by the digital youthening of the leads should be executed.

And then there's THE MATRIX.

You see, just over a decade ago they made a sequel to TRON. It was called THE MATRIX. It was about a computer uprising, where a programmer was trapped in a computer generated world, and had god-like powers. It came at a time when computers were becoming commonplace, when a worldwide network of them had entered the zeitgeist, and when pseudo-religious claptrap was becoming mainstream. THE MATRIX was the right movie at the right time to catch the imagination of the general public. And it had visually spectacular special effects. Neo fought using Kung-Fu, not day-glo frisbees. Neo lived in a completely realized computer world indistinguishable from reality, not a black light Salvadore Dali painting. Neo fought for the salvation of mankind from a monolithic, inhuman, oppressive, totalitarian state; not to prevent a bunch of 8-bit programs in an antiquated CRAY mainframe from getting into our cell phones and iPads.

And where THE MATRIX and its sequels tried to actually present some of the philosophical questions inherent in the story- mind-body dualism, determinism, messianic complexes, systems of control, whether consciousness is an emergent or intrinsic property, the nature of reality, subjectivism vs. objectivism- TRON LEGACY doesn't even give lip service to any of the ideas contained in its scenario. The closest we get to a philosophical idea is when Flynn says, "The only way to win is not to play." A bon mot so deep and insightful that they lifted it directly from another movie released around the same time as the original TRON- WARGAMES. The world Flynn built in his antiquated mainframe is a molecule deep at best. Shiny, but without substance.

And in addition to not giving the story even the depth of the original TRON, let alone THE MATRIX, they also seem to have borrowed a lot of the look of the film as well. TL's virtual world is a place where the sun never shines, where the sky is filled with roiling clouds all the time, and even interior rooms are dimly lit. It's like the "real world" from the MATRIX only with better urban renewal. The only place in the Mainframe that's brightly lit is Flynn's villa, and it resembles, more than anything else, the hotel room from the end of 2001. That's what passes for a visual metaphor in this movie.

I think that it's pretty clear that the people who made this movie knew they had been beaten to the punch.

And even the one part of the movie that was almost sure to add some depth, that it's in 3-D, didn't come off well for me. A lot of folks online have praised the 3-D effects as adding to the story. I didn't see it that way. Having the parts of the movie set in the real world in 2-D (mostly) and the parts in the computer in 3-D was a neat idea- WHEN THEY DID IT WITH COLOR IN THE WIZARD OF OZ 70 YEARS AGO! Taking a darkly lit movie and darkening it further with 3D, missing the fact that depth of field is compromised in a dark environment anyway, and still missing the fact that out of focus foregrounds and backgrounds are a way to have 2D cameras simulate depth and don't work in 3D films because in a real place your eye is able to focus on whatever it looks at automatically, whether near or far, just adds further to the feeling that nobody associated with the movie really gave a damn about anything except OOHHH LIGHTCYCLES.

The filmmakers must have known this was a problem. Before the movie started they had a disclaimer (here I quote from memory, so it may not be entirely accurate): "There are parts of this movie that were shot in 2-D and parts that were shot in 3-D. We realize this is going to be weird and disorienting to the audience so we're asking you to keep your glasses on and just go with it. Let's face it, we don't really know what we're doing. And that Cameron dude came along last year and changed all the rules and how were we supposed to know that was going to happen after we were two years into production? Anyway, we fucked up. Just go with it, like we said. You've already paid for the ticket so what have you got to lose? And by doing this little disclaimer where we claim that we meant to do it all along, we can say that it isn't us, it's you if you spend most of the movie wondering why things look shitty."

Now, don't get me wrong. I got a thrill out of seeing the old Lightcycles updated. I enjoyed seeing programs on the game grid shattered into cubes. I liked the new Solar Sailor, the dogfight with the virtual AT-10, the new lightcycles defying gravity and acting like, well, REAL motorcycles (except for the gravity defying part). I'm as much a victim of geekstalgia as anybody. And there were a couple of nice things about the movie. Olivia Wilde is pretty. And I'm a sucker for bowl haircuts. Michael Sheen was entertaining as Ziggy Stardust (the Merovingian? Oh yeah, Zuse), the bar owner. It's nice to see him getting work impersonating Brits besides Tony Blair. Garrett Hedlund is fine in a pretty flat role, although he keeps morphing from looking like Trip from Star Trek: Enterprise when shot straight on to Jon Stewart when shot in profile. Unfortunately Jeff Bridges, who was the standout performance in the original and who I like in just about everything, sleepwalks through the whole thing. Maybe he's overdosed on the Botox they gave him for the Clu scenes.

So what's left to say? TRON LEGACY isn't a bad movie if all you want is eye candy, lots of shiny vehicles going fast, and attractive people dressed up in funny costumes saying things between trips in other shiny vehicles going fast. And there isn't anything wrong with that. But if you are looking for anything more, it just ain't there.

Top Twenty Movies of the Decade

The Top 20 (Fantastic) Movies of the Decade

IMDB published their list of the top grossing SF and Fantasy movies of the decade a few weeks ago and I thought they might be worth a look. For some reason I can’t imagine they have omitted THE DARK KNIGHT and SPIDER-MAN. And AVATAR came out just after the list did so it isn’t included even though it would sit at the top already. In case you don’t have IMDB Pro- here’s the list (with short commentary or links to longer previous reviews).

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen-
Haven’t seen it. Probably will.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith-
The best of the prequels even if everybody in the world already knew the ending. Jon Stewart interviewed George Lucas on The Daily Show the other day and Lucas is sticking by his guns that the difference between the original trilogy and the prequels is mainly that the fans of the originals aren’t 12 years old anymore. I hate to say it, but I think he’s right. I took my teenaged daughter to the re-release of the originals in the 90’s and she was totally underwhelmed. Part of that, I think, was that she had grown up seeing so many movies that used the same tricks, often better. And part of it was that she’s a GIRL (never really SW’s main audience). As they say, the golden age of science fiction is twelve. I think the last Indiana Jones movie got a lot of grief for the same reason. I didn’t think it was any sillier than the others, it just could have never lived up to the memories the audience had of the originals. All in all, EPISODE III isn’t as bad as the first one, but truthfully, none of these movies are great works of art. Arguably they aren’t even great works of pulp adventure. But this one isn’t too bad if you don’t expect anything more from it than that.

Transformers-
What saved this movie is that it struck the right note of being funny and lighthearted without making fun of itself. Why it and the sequel are so far up this list is a mystery for all time, however.

Iron Man-
Three words: Robert Downey Jr. Full review here

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones-
If not for Jar-Jar and Mannequin Skywalker in the first one, this would be the worst Star Wars movie of all time. As it is, it’s only half as bad because it only has one of them. True, Mannequin is being played by a different actor, but the “acting” he does is so wooden it’s easy to think that it’s the same person years later. Isn’t helped by the dialog in the romance scenes, which has been given so much hate over the years that there’s no need for me to pile on. This movie’s place on this list is proof that you can slap the name Star Wars on just about anything and it will sell.

The Matrix Reloaded-
The reason this movie is here and not the third one (REVOLUTIONS) is because everybody loved THE MATRIX and couldn’t wait for the sequel. After seeing this, they just didn’t care anymore. Personally I think it was a missed opportunity that could have easily been fixed by combining both the sequels into one 2-hour movie. I was impressed that the Wachowski brothers tried to take their concepts a little deeper, most filmmakers would have been happy to just have Neo and friends have new adventures in Matrixland, but the movie winds up being boring because it’s too long. The audience leaves every fight and chase more exhausted than the characters doing the fighting and chasing. Fortunately the ANIMATRIX collection exists as the true sequel.

Star Trek-
There are three attempted reboots (not counting the Star Wars prequels as a reboot attempt) on this list and of the three this is the only one that works. And the funny thing is that it’s because it’s not really Star Trek. Oh, the set pieces are all there, the Enterprise, the characters we love, the rousing space opera, but ST was never about running around and blowing shit up and this is. Still, it was a welcome change from the snoozefest that Trek became at the end. Where Lucas sucked all the fun and humor out of Star Wars, Abrams put it all back into Star Trek. I just hope that JJ Abrams and Co. can overcome the urge to redo Khan for the sequel. Isn’t ripping off that plotline once already enough? Full (kinda) review here.

I Am Legend-
Where Will Smith’s other foray into literary SF this decade decided to throw the source material away to ill effect, here staying closer to Richard Matheson’s book pays off. In fact, the weakest part of the whole thing is that they changed the ending and thus eviscerated the whole subtext. Luckily the original ending is on the supplemental materials included with the Blu-Ray, so you can see more of what the writer intended.

X-Men: The Last Stand-
Another movie that would have been better served by staying closer to the original material. Too ambitious, too scattered, and too many mutants. Wolverine pared down the cast and at least tried to have a story, so maybe they learned their lesson.

The War of the Worlds-
Of the two literary SF adaptations Spielberg and Cruse did this decade I prefer Minority Report over this one. But this is a pretty good movie hurt first by the fact that Tom Cruse is only able to play Tom Cruse in movies. He isn’t so much an actor (he once was, remember TAPS?) as a special effect. I can’t see him as anything but Tom Cruse. Even in Valkyrie, with the limp and the eye, it’s was just Tom Cruse trying to kill Hitler. So that’s a problem. The second problem is that the source material is so dated. Wells novel was kick-ass over a hundred years ago but the alien invasion thing has been done a thousand times since then and the shock has worn off. In spite of this Spielberg stays pretty close to the original (except for the obligatory kids in danger fetish he has) and more or less pulls it off.

Signs-
This is the one with the aliens and the crop circles by M. Night Shyamalan and Mel Gibson. Is there anything else that needs to be said?

Wall-E-
I didn’t think Pixar could make a better movie than The Incredibles, but somehow they did. One of the best movies of the decade and it should have won an Oscar. Full review here.

X2: X-Men United-
X-Men movies carry their quality rating as their sequel number.

Superman Returns-
One of the movies in the reboot trifecta that stayed too close to the series it was trying to kick-start and failed as a result. Brian Singer didn’t so much make a Superman movie as he made the third movie in the original 1978 Superman movie series. Most people take issue with Lois Lane’s kid, but I could have forgiven that. The real problem for me was Lex Luthor. From his continuing obsession with real estate (That’s the best you can do? Really?! A supervillain that wants to be a land baron? And of an ugly piece of rock in the middle of the ocean? Shit!) to Kevin Spacey’s pseudo-Gene Hackman portrayal (in which none of Hackman’s charm and wit was evident) Luthor came off as a buffoon. Comic books are only as good as their villains and this one wasn’t much of a match for the most powerful superhero of all time.

Monsters vs. Aliens-
Didn’t see it. Probably won’t.

Men in Black II-
Another sequel that was a missed opportunity and got such big box office numbers because people loved it’s predecessor. The first MIB was original, inventive and funny. This one wasn’t, wasn’t, and wasn’t. You’ve got to bring the FUNNY, Barry!

The Day After Tomorrow-
Like comic book movies, disaster porn is another up and coming sub-genre. I expect that just like it did in the ‘70s, disaster movies will blow themselves out in a couple of years.

Jurassic Park III-
Honestly I can’t remember much about the Jurassic Park sequels. But hey, everybody loves dinosaurs, even creationists.

Planet of the Apes-
And the third fumbled reboot. Frankly I never cared much about the original series of movies. The central conceit was kind of silly and there is good reason Pierre Boulle isn’t considered a great SF writer. Still, the original had the benefit of Rod Serling’s scripting and that classic final scene. This one has been hated on a lot but I never really understood why. The plot isn’t any more of a mess than the original, and the ape costumes and acting are (at least) up to the level set in the previous series. (Can you say Tim Roth vanishes into the role when he’s hidden under 40 pounds of make-up?) And anyway, who goes to a Tim Burton movie for the story? You go to see his visual styling. And in that respect, I thought this movie was fine.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine-
This is another movie that wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be. I don’t know what people expected. Sure, it wasn’t SPIDER-MAN II, THE DARK KNIGHT, or THE INCREDIBLES. Hell, it wasn’t even WATCHMEN. But it wasn’t DAREDEVIL or CATWOMAN EITHER.

Now you can take what you want from this collection of movies. John Scalzi takes the idea that almost everything on it is that Hollywood has no originality left.

If you remove remakes, sequels, and comic book adaptations out then all you are left with is SIGNS, WALL-E, MONSTERS VS. ALIENS, AND THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW. But saying that Hollywood has no originality isn’t really very, uh, original, is it? OTOH, his generalization isn’t without merit. The first thing that leaps out at you is that movies made from comic books have become a serious sub-genre. Eight of the movies are made from comics. (Yeah, Transformers is actually a comic and cartoon made from a line of toys, but if you want to swap out those two for DARK KNIGHT and SPIDER-MAN you are welcome to.) And if you look at the release dates you see that this trend is accelerating. Countering this trend is the fact that only two works of literary SF that were made into movies hit the top twenty. Hell, the X-Men alone beat that! And while these two adaptations are pretty good (not great in either case) the other notable big budget literary adaptation was I, ROBOT, and it was an unmitigated disaster.

MOVIES- AVATAR

As far as a movie, AVATAR is a pretty typical James Cameron movie; which is to say that it’s an excellent action movie. Cameron’s gift has always been to make the most outlandish settings simply vibrate with verisimilitude. TERMINATOR had convincing cyborgs. ALIENS had a plausible futuristic alien war. The ABYSS showed us what an underwater drilling rig might be like. TERMINATOR II expanded on the CGI of the ABYSS to go from “solid water” tentacles to “liquid metal” robots that somehow never strained your suspension of disbelief. And TITANIC showed people what it might have been like to actually witness such a disaster.

AVATAR takes this visual veracity two steps further. The first amazing thing about AVATAR is the not at all realistic but completely believable world of Pandora. From the plants and animals to the 10 foot tall blue humanoid natives, the sections of the movie set on this alien world showcase some of the greatest animation ever put to film. So often CGI has a sort of unreality that reminds your hindbrain that you are seeing something that doesn’t exist. Here the plants and animals almost never exhibit the subtly wrong lighting, unnatural physics, or strange blurring that so often telegraphs a CGI sequence. And in the most amazing part of this tour de force of animation, Cameron and his crew of artists leap the uncanny valley in a single bound. If the humanoid creatures of Pandora ever exhibited for a moment the kind of dead-eyed, cadaver-skinned characteristics that have plagued Robert Zemeckis’ last several films, the jig would be up. But they never do. The computer generated world so brims with the feeling of the real that you not only buy into it as being as real as the scenes shot on soundstages, you even buy into such patently absurd ideas as floating mountains, plants with fast twitch reflexes, and dragons. Peter Jackson was able to come close to this level of CGI with the RINGS trilogy and KING KONG, but smartly desaturated his palate to hide some of the weaknesses of the technology. Cameron, on the other hand, gives Pandora a vivid, at times luminous, color palate and sets most of the scenes in bright sunlight. And like his films ABYSS and TERMINATOR II, he creates another evolutionary step in computer special effects. It is truly worth going to see AVATAR just to visit the world of Pandora.

The second step toward making you buy into the movie is the 3D. I don’t really know if it’s a breakthrough in 3D filmmaking. It’s only the second 3D movie I’ve seen (not counting Captain Eo) and the other was BEOWOLF- perhaps the ugliest movie ever made. Personally, I think that 3D is a gimmick that adds little, if anything, to a movie. The technique is better than it was in the 1950s, using polarized glasses rather than red and blue lenses, but the techniques for using that depth is really pretty much the same. Stuff sticks out of the screen or flies toward you or gives you environments that tunnel away from the viewer. Cameron uses the depth to good effect and few shots give you the idea that the considerations making an eye catching 3D shot were more important than the considerations of staging and composition as they relate to the story. About an hour into the thing you forget that you are watching a 3D movie and just start watching a movie. That’s where Cameron creates a new paradigm in 3D moviemaking. He makes you forget about it.

Of course, since it’s a Jim Cameron movie it has all the typical shortcomings of his other movies. The plot isn’t original. I’ve heard it called “Dances With Aliens” and that’s all the plot synopsis you really need. Another problem is Cameron’s tendency to “borrow” ideas from other creators. IO9 has already mentioned the similarities between Pandora and some of the fantasy artwork of artist Roger Dean but I didn’t really understand how much of Dean’s work Cameron had “borrowed” until I saw the movie (I come to find out that this is not lost on Mr. Dean since the front page of his web site now includes this link.) I’d always been skeptical of Harlan Ellison’s claims that Cameron had ripped off the Outer Limits episodes DEMON WITH A GLASS HAND and SOLDIER that he wrote*, but somewhere around the halfway point of AVATAR I actually was taken away from the movie because I got so pissed off at how blatantly Dean had been ripped off. Floating mountains with waterfalls, blue people, biological creatures with mechanical characteristics, mixing spirals with landscapes, gigantic world trees, none of these are original creations of Roger Dean, but when you see the way Cameron visualizes these motifs there is no question that he was familiar with Dean’s art.



And if you aren’t familiar with Roger Dean’s art then you should visit his web site and treat yourself to some of the most lyrical and beautiful fantasy landscape watercolors ever done. Dean became famous during his long association with progressive rock group Yes, for whom he did numerous album covers. He first came to my attention one Sunday when I was listening to that group’s Relayer album. While listening I looked at the album cover and suddenly realized that the three songs on the album related in a very visceral yet completely tangential way to the image I was concentrating on. A limited edition signed print of that painting hangs over my desk downstairs right now. It got me interested in watercolor as a medium in my own art and prompted me to buy his retrospective book Views and his later book Magnetic Storm. Dean’s artwork is sublime and if Cameron is going to be a thief at least he has the good taste to steal from Dean and Ellison.

And while Cameron has made a spectacular 3D movie, he still hasn’t mastered some of the problems of the format. The first thing is that he’s still filming with a normal camera’s depth of field in some shots. This results in objects in the very near foreground being out of focus. In a normal 2D movie this gives the viewer a sense of depth. But in the real world whatever you look at, whether near or far, is in focus. That’s one of the magical things the eye does without us realizing it. When you are watching a 3D movie you should have the same sort of natural ability to look wherever you want on the screen and see things clearly. But sometimes you don’t. This is like early CGI of human movement. Every character walked like a robot because they hadn’t yet figured out that human joints and limbs compressed slightly when they moved. Eventually this problem was realized and appropriate compensations were made. Sooner or later somebody is bound to figure this out and start using some sort of multiplane process in 3D movies.

But you can’t expect James Cameron to get everything right in one fell swoop. He got so much right and made yet another classic film. Isn’t that enough? If you haven’t seen this movie you should go see it tomorrow. I’m going on Wednesday to see it in IMAX 3D so I can take more time drinking in the visual spectacle. That’s what’s so special about this movie. It’s a throwback to STAR WARS and BLADERUNNER, a SF film that wows viewers with the visuals in spite of decades of becoming jaded by one after another films that tried to do it and failed.

* I love, simply LOVE Harlan Ellison. I’ve always had a soft spot for hella smart, smart-assed, take-no-prisoners, agent provocateurs and Ellison has been those things all his life in spades. He’s also a damn fine writer. I personally consider Repent Harlequin, Said the Ticktockman to be the finest short story of the last half of the twentieth century. But Harlan sometimes does go overboard. And when he does he does it like he does everything else- overboard over the top. He threatened Cameron for Terminator II because he seems to think he invented the idea of soldiers from the future coming to our time to fight and cyborg warriors. He didn’t. He also had a famous feud with Gene Roddenberry over changes to his script for the original Star Trek’s most celebrated episode when, in reality, the changes that were made were minimal. In fact, like many artists, he isn’t aware of what his actual strengths are. Harlan isn’t a great inventor of ideas. Truthfully, most of his most famous stories have central ideas that are more archetypal than inspired. He’s written masterful stories about things like: the last few people alive being played with by a sentient supercomputer, a post apocalyptic world inhabited by youth gangs, going back in time to talk with yourself when you were a child, a man who finds out that being irresistible to women isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, a fellow who is always late, etc. Hell, I’m no writer but even as a child I fantasized about being visited by my adult self. No, Harlan’s strength isn’t his ideas, it’s his prose. He writes about the same sort of things that other writers of fantastic literature write about, he just puts words together better than most.

MOVIES- Primer

The first thing I have to say is- SEE THIS MOVIE! It’s available for instant viewing on Netflix.

So many movies nowadays are not so much dumbed down as downright stupid. You’d think that even if you are a moron, if you are going to spend 100 million dollars (or 200 or 300 million) making a movie then you’d want to spend a buck ninety-five on having somebody with a couple of neurons to rub together have a look at it to make sure you weren’t being stupid. But the great advantage of stupidity is that it makes it’s own circuit- it’s both conductor and insulator. So every year the majority of movies made are of an intellectual level that makes the average Marvel comic look like Dostoevsky. Even most SF movies, movies modeled on the literature of ideas, are abysmal logical failures.

Primer is exactly the opposite. It’s challenging. In fact, it’s a mystery that doesn’t tell you the solution. It’s also the first movie I’ve seen in a long time that I watched twice in the same day. After having done so I can vouch that the movie is at least internally consistent and that it makes perfect sense. I wasn’t sure at first. I was so used to movies that you had to make excuses for rather than having to understand. But trust me, the answer is all there.

But it isn’t plain. In fact, it’s purposefully not plain. That’s one of the problems. Another is that the main motivation of the characters is rather weak. And there are characters referred to that are never (or only briefly) seen and that further muddies the narrative. There are even loose ends that are never explained and can’t be deduced from the clues provided. Finally, some of the pivotal action takes place off-screen and has to be inferred. I’m sure all of this was intentional on the part of the writer-director-star of this first attempt movie. But considering how convoluted the story is and how involved the central conceit is to start with, it’s perhaps too much. Had the story been told as plainly as possible it still would have required far more from the viewer than the average movie.

Without giving away too much (because this is a movie that simply has to be experienced) I’ll set the stage. (A plot synopsis would be impossible.) A group of engineers who work for a high-tech company are working on a side project trying to build a new technology in their garage so they can form their own start-up company. At first they think they’ve found a way to deflect gravity, and spend some time trying to figure out practical applications of the new technology. But while they are doing that they realize there is an unexpected side effect. Gravity isn’t the only thing affected by the machine they have built. Things inside the machine also have their passage of time changed. (The rate of the passage of time is affected by acceleration and gravity so it makes perfect sense. Einstein, bitches!) Without trying to, they have invented a time machine. But one that only lets the object inside cycle between the time the machine is turned on and off. If you put your watch into the machine for a minute over 22 hours passes during that minute for the watch. But if you put a person inside the machine he can leave at the moment the machine was turned on, no matter how much later he enters.

It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the basic premise. So, what do you do with a machine that will let you relive any amount of time that’s passed since you turned it on? From this simple (?) beginning the story starts to twist in unexpected directions and take on multiple levels.

My own problem with the story was that I couldn’t believe the motivation for the characters. The event that most of the movie centers on is rather trivial compared to the lengths the characters go to in order to change it. They even as much as admit it at one point. But if you can accept that it’s important to them then you can go on to delve into the more interesting parts of the puzzle.

And it is, basically, a puzzle. The movie was made by a fellow named Shane Carruth for $7000. As a first attempt by a fledgling director/writer/actor it is a tour de force. Even if you don’t cherish the intellectual puzzle box that he’s built, the movie is involving and while it starts slow, it continues to build gradually until you find yourself sucked into the lives of the characters. But be prepared. There are scenes that are poorly focused, others that have overlapping dialog that makes it hard to tell what’s going on, and the whole thing indulges in poor color balance and editing tricks that obscure an already obtuse narrative. In spite of this it has the many of the benchmarks of good independent cinema. Compositions are strong, dialog is naturalistic, and the acting is understated and realistic. But while most independent films rely on emotion and drama to make up for expensive production values, this story relies on internal consistency and rigorous ideas to make up for lack of special effects. A SF movie without a single alien, explosion, space battle, or fantastic vista yet is more SF than a dozen or a hundred such movies usually manage.

This isn’t a movie for people who think SF is Star Whatever (Wars or Trek). This is a movie for fans of Phillip K. Dick’s writing, Cornwainer Smith’s stories, and who aren’t afraid to test their powers of observation and reason to gather the reward of a little neocortical exercise. I can’t believe how much I loved this movie. I wouldn’t want every cinematic experience to be this one, but when you’ve seen too many GI JOES and toys that turn into cars and robots in the last year it’s nice to find a movie that actually challenges you rather than simply appealing to the reptilian need for sex, carnage, and bright colors.

Have you noticed a tendency for me to swear for emphasis in my writing? I hope not.

SEE THIS FUCKING MOVIE!

TELEVISION- Neverwhere

Neverwhere is a television series Neal Gaiman wrote for the BBC that originally aired in 1996 and is now available on Netflix. Like most geeks I’ve had affection for Gaiman’s writing since he was working on Sandman. But to be perfectly honest, his writing has never really grabbed me the way it does some people. Watching Neverwhere I was reminded of why.

Let me start by saying that I enjoyed the program. Considering how much really dreadful SF and Fantasy gets produced and put on TV, it was nice to see something that was interesting and didn’t insult the viewers’ intelligence. True, it has that “BBC look” that has come a long way in the last few years but was still pretty dreadful in the mid-1990s. You know what I mean- the sets look like they were built by a repertory troupe in an abandoned warehouse somewhere and everything is lit blue on one side and green or red on the other like the only lighting equipment they had was left over from some discotheque of the 1970s. Occasionally there will be a matte painting and when there is you almost can’t see the line where it begins. Still, the production values are much better than the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series’, or the earlier Dr. Who programs’ where often things looked so bad it would interfere with your enjoyment of the story.

The acting is also an obvious intermediate step between what passes on BBC genre television today and what they were doing in the 70s and 80s. It isn’t quite as natural and what they are doing on Dr. Who nowadays, but it’s far better than the line readings from a decade earlier. I won’t say that anybody here is exceptional but Patterson Joseph, who plays the Marquis de Carabas, does stand out.

But now, back to the heart of all this. What is it about Neil Gaiman’s writing that keeps me from considering him as great as my all time favorites? Tell me if you’ve heard this one: an ordinary fellow makes an unusual decision on the spur of the moment and as a result meets someone who takes him on and amazing adventure into a world he was completely unaware of, filled with strange, dangerous characters that are vaguely familiar yet oddly different from the way one would normally think of them.

I’ve just told you the plot to everything Neil Gaiman has ever written.

Oh, he does it well. In Death: The High Cost of Living it was easy to get caught up in Death’s personality and how different and appealing it was compared to any other personification of Death. In American Gods it was fun traveling all over the country visiting with the aged visages of familiar deities, some who had gone sour and weird in their dotage. In Sandman it was intriguing to see Morphius travel from heaven to hell in the DC Universe visiting with familiar characters of the macabre who were all as fun-house (of Mystery) distorted as he himself was from the guy in the 1940s with the gas-mask and squirt gun we remembered The Sandman as being.

But I digress.

In Neverwhere we watch a clerk in some soulless London company help a homeless girl lying on the street, drawing the ire of his yuppie shrew girlfriend who stomps off and leaves the pair to draw a door on a brick wall (Betelgeuse! Betelgeuse! Betelgeuse!) and step into a journey through the London Underground (Subway for us Yanks) that will wind up determining the fate of an angel. (Ghad! I ought to write blurbs for book jackets!) Along the way we will meet a pair of eternal assassins, the owner of the cat named Puss-in-Boots, a cadre of female vampires, the traveling miracle fairs of the underground, and lots of other stuff that is imaginative and strange but really doesn’t have anything to say about anything other than “Look at us! We’re imaginative and strange!!”

In fact, the closest thing to a moral in the story is ‘how you can’t keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree’ (or in this case the London subway system), or ‘you can’t go home again’. That is if there is a moral at all, which really there doesn’t seem to be. And the cleverest bit of allegory is that the Undergrounders can travel in the world of normal London because the mundanes “don’t pay any attention to them”, which makes them effectively invisible. It’s clever and glib, which is better than most television, but still not much.

It seems even to me that I’m being unduly harsh. After all, it’s just a friendly romp through a fantasy landscape. And at six half-hour installments, it moves quickly and has way more structure than crap like Lost and Heroes that just meander around everywhere in hope of doing something interesting eventually and take an investment of a significant piece of your life for you to get anything from them. In fact, I think this format- shorter (3-6 hour) self-contained stories as miniseries- is a much better way to tell genre stories on television. And if you have Netflix then it’s free through their streaming service. So if this were a review I’d recommend it. And if this were a critique I’d be wondering if Neil Gaiman has anything else up his sleeve.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog reprise

The Return of Dr. Horrible

I’ve been remiss on the blog at not mentioning the Emmys, or more especially a particular segment of the Emmys. I’ve mentioned Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog here previously. I have to say that my fondness for this little 45 minute musical has only grown in the intervening months. In fact, I’d have to say that it’s probably my favorite thing that I’ve found on the net this year. The songs are catchy and well sung. The performances are spot on. The humor is truly funny (not the sad clown antics of Will Ferrel, the retarded man-child humor of Adam Sandler, or the Charlie Brown shtick of Ben Stiller) and grows naturally out of character and situation. And it makes fun of a few things I hold dear- geek culture* and silly romanticism. If you haven’t seen it yet- Shame On You! Go to the previous link and watch it right now. You’ll be glad you did. And if you have but you missed the Emmys, here is the funniest thing in a very entertaining broadcast (for an awards show).



(For those not in the know, I’ll explain a couple of the geekier jokes. (Hey, explaining the obvious is what this blog is all about!) Fill(Capt. Hammer)ion’s comment about CSI: Miami is because he’s currently starring in a show on another network at the same time. It’s titled Castle and I can’t comment on it because I haven’t seen it. Dr. Horrible actually won the Emmy for “Outstanding Special Class - Short-format Live-Action Entertainment Programs” whatever-the-hell-that-means. (It also won a People’s Choice Award.) “Athletic yet luminous hosts” is NPH (figure it out, couch monkey) referring to himself, the host of the Emmys. And at least two (I don’t know how many you actually see on the net) of the pauses for buffering were in the actual Emmys telecast (it was a joke, see?).

Whedon (apologies for spelling it wrong all over the first post on the subject) has said there will be a sequel and that there might even be a movie. I can only hope, since it’s the best thing he or any of the cast has ever done as far as I’m concerned.

*I had a conversation about the terms “geek” and “nerd” with a good friend a few years ago and realized that even though they have become synonymous in common parlance the actual meanings have somehow reversed. I attribute this to the movie REVENGE OF THE NERDS for some reason that I can’t back up. For the record. Geek is the term for a social outcast with antisocial habits. It comes from carnival geeks who were known for biting the heads off chickens in sideshows. Nerd is a term for someone who is also a social outcast but shows unusual single-minded expertise in science or technology. It was actually invented by Theodor Geisel, also known as Dr. Seuss, in his book “If I Ran the Zoo” published in 1950.

Where else can you get such an encyclopedic knowledge of useless facts? I may not be able to remember my own phone number if asked, but if I’ve read it in a book thirty years ago I’ll never forget it.

MOVIES- District 9 Review

ALIVE IN JOBURG- Neill Blomkamp’s original short film


Bookending the Summer Sci-Fi Sweepstakes, DISTRICT 9 presents a counterpoint to STAR TREK’s optimism and shiny, polished Starfleet Academy 90210 story with a gritty, documentary style action film. Also, ironically, DISTRICT 9 tries to give lip service to the kind of allegorical SF that the Star Trek television show was famous for but the movie didn’t bother with. Unfortunately the lip service is brief. Contrary to a lot of the early buzz, the movie isn’t really about apartheid, first contact with aliens, soulless corporate avarice, the similarities between black market commerce and the legal kind, or any of the other issues touched on. Because the only thing the movie does is touch them while it’s on it’s way to a conventional man-on-the-run-from-the-law plotline. The first twenty minutes are excellent, evoking the feeling of a sympathy for the prejudice against the aliens while still making them seem unreasonably downtrodden. But as soon as the plot gets rolling the mood is buried under a hail of shell casings. It’s not an uncommon flaw in low budget SF. Children of Men also established an interesting SF premise only to abandon it for the sake of making a chase movie. So I guess I can’t gripe too much about it. You have to take a movie on its own terms.

And as an action film DISTRICT 9 is pretty damn good. Neill Blomkamp does a fine job in his feature film directorial debut. The movie is exciting and you don’t really know what to expect next. Yeah, there are a number of silly plot holes (when you are framing an employee, making him the most wanted man in the city, remember to revoke his access to your top-secret lab) and some tired SF cliches (the magic of CGI still hasn’t liberated imaginations from humanoid aliens and if I see one more giant robot in a movie this summer I’m going to scream), but it also has some nice touches (I especially liked the blurb about one interviewee awaiting trial for revealing his company’s illegal experiments) and the pace never slows down. The token attempts to give the movie a little heart to go with all the carnage come off more as jokes than pathos, but Sharlto Copley does an excellent job of transitioning his character from an inept bureaucrat to a desperate man on the run who is literally losing everything, even his humanity. And what the hell, you really came to see people explode like water balloons dropped from the Trump Tower when hit by a lightning bolt from an alien weapon anyway, didn’t you?

So if you’re looking for serious SF that makes thoughtful statements about apartheid with aliens in the role of the oppressed minority, you’re going to be disappointed. But if you want a popcorn movie that has some great special effects and cool Ratchet and Clank weapons then line up and buy a ticket.

MOVIES- Knowing is better if you don't know, you know?

Here there be Spoilers. If you can spoil this movie by giving away any of the plot points, which all telegraph themselves so clearly as to be anticlimactic. No, the pleasure of this movie (and there is some pleasure to be enjoyed watching this movie, even if it is guilty pleasure) is simply by sitting back, putting your mind in a jar for the evening, and watching it transpire.

KNOWING is the same kind of movie that Hollywood has made a lot of lately. Pseudo-serious, pseudo-smart action flicks that try real hard to look like they have something profound to say but don’t have a single idea in their itty-bitty heads. Adaptations of Phillip K. Dick stories sort of started this trend. MINORITY REPORT, PAYCHECK, and the Cage vehicle NEXT were all examples of this type of movie. Lift the central conceit out of a Phil Dick story, ignore all the subtlety and ambiguity to dumb it down for a moviegoing audience, and fill it out with standard movie clichés (the dead wife, the estranged father, the protagonist playing the part of Cassandra as the rest of the world thinks he’s crazy, a couple of chases). Dan Brown’s DA VINCI CODE was a better-done version of this, while The National Treasure movies were among the dumber examples of this mini-genre. Take a fringe idea like that the Founding Fathers of the US were Masons and that Masons are in league with the Illuminati and the Tri-lateral Commission to run every government in the world and they put a treasure map with the location to the Masonic treasury on the back of the Declaration of Independence. (Or something. Who the hell knows what the mish-mash the plot of NATIONAL TREASURE was?) Drop in the parent sub-plot and some car chases and VIOLA! You’ve got a movie.

The “idea” in KNOWING is two-fold. First, it eschews the Cassandra motif to directly rip off the Cassandra story. Nick Cage knows the future but no one believes him and he can’t change it in spite of his foreknowledge. But that’s just smoke and mirrors for the grand larceny of the payoff. This is what science fiction readers call a “Shaggy God” story, one of the most egregious SF cliches there is. Yes, after two hours of father-son angst, scenes of someone watching late night TV with a liquor bottle in their hand as shorthand for the grief and loss of having a spouse die, Nick Cage screaming at people, rushing from place to place very quickly for no apparent reason, etc, the payoff is “And she called him Adam, and he called her Eve”. There’s even a capping scene where the future parents of mankind are running through a golden field wearing white homespun smocks toward a lone, iconic tree. All that’s left out is a serpent, which is another aspect of the “shaggy God” story- a tree of knowledge without an adversary. The story is a complete waste of space. There’s no real drama; people just say what they’re feeling. There’s no clear-cut through-line; the movie jumps from sci-fi to horror to mystery instead of taking an idea and running with it. There’s no sense of real people being informed and changed by the events of their lives; every character is the sum total of their relationship with their parents, their job, and whatever traumas they have had.

None of this is anything new for director Alex Proyas. His career has been a litany of visually interesting movies that are ambitious in concept but completely oblivious to cliché. Ironically, I still continue to watch his movies because they are so visually interesting, not because there’s going to be any meat beneath the skin. But at least he tries, which says more about how worthless most commercial films are than how great his films have been. He first came to attention with THE CROW, an adaptation of a graphic novel that was basically I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE with bad art and purple prose and enough supernatural bullshit thrown in to make it palatable for comic book sensibilities. In those aspects, the movie was a faithful adaptation of the book, except with better visuals. Next was Dark City, a better-than-average SF film that was dark and moody, brutal with it’s characters, and ultimately ended with a SF cliché that was already old when John Campbell was still editing Astounding. Then came the much maligned (and rightfully so) I, ROBOT. Again, this was him taking Campbellian SF and putting its central concept (the Three Laws of Robotics) out so he could put it through the sausage grinder of commercial movie stupidity. All these are genre movies that are visually arresting but so mired in mediocre stories that they can only manage to be a little better than average. It’s not an uncommon problem with SF films. There have been numerous SF films about the earth being hit with a comet or meteor: ARMEGEDDON, METEOR (both the 1979 and 2009 versions), and DEEP IMPACT to name a few, but nobody has bothered to adapt Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s incredible Lucifer’s Hammer. Why keep making inferior (vastly inferior) stories when such an excellent story about the scenario has already been written?

So the bottom line on KNOWING is that it’s not a bad popcorn movie but it isn’t a particularly good one. It has a good airplane crash in it, and I have a personal failing that if a movie shows me a good plane crash I feel more generous toward it than I should. (I used to have recurring dreams about seeing a plane crash when I was younger so I guess there’s something Freudian there.) And at least Proyas doesn’t lead up to the destruction of the earth and then have it saved at the last minute. (Oops, spoiler. But only if you aren’t the kind of person who would tune in for a good look at the end of the world. If you are, and I am, then it’s actually not so much a spoiler as a teaser.) Don’t expect much (And how much could you expect? Nick Cage is in it, for God’s sake! Is there a better litmus test for low expectations than that?) and you won’t be disappointed.

MOVIES- Watchmen on Blu-Ray (Twice, like Dr. Manhattan)

WATCHMEN* is being released on Blu-Ray in a couple of weeks. It’s billed as the Director’s Cut but in a strange piece of pissing-right-there-in-your-Wheaties marketing an advertisement for the Ultimate Double-Secret Super Director’s Cut is included in the box! At least there’s a $10 coupon for the more complete edition included. Or is it a coupon for K-Y Jelly?

It’s easy to be snarky about DVD marketing. Rarely is a movie released nowadays that doesn’t have at least two variations on disk. First there were the widescreen/pan-and-scan variants (disk has two sides = problem solved). Then there were the theatrical/director’s cut flavors (DVDs have this thing called Branching technology that allows them to random access different parts of the disk so different versions of the same movie can co-exist on the disk). Then there was just the constant re-release of movies, often with little or no difference even in the special materials, just new cover art. I believe much of the problem of slow acceptance of HD disk formats such as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is due to consumers having been so burned that they figured it was just another way for Hollywood to re-sell them movies they already owned again. After years of VARIANT COVER nonsense even comics fans figured out they were being played for fools (thought Marvel and DC are still in there swinging at the low hanging fruit), can movie fans be that much stupider?

I used to say that if I wasn’t buying a movie on DVD, just licensing it’s use, then whenever a new edition came out I should be given that version either gratis or at a substantial discount. After all, I already hold a license to use it.

And that’s why it’s easy to be snarky, but it isn’t exactly fair to be, when it comes to the new WATCHMEN release. True, Warner Bros. isn’t exactly advertising that they already plan for a bigger version of the same movie to be released in less than six months but you can’t really blame them for that. And they are softening the blow for anyone unaware of the later edition by including the coupon (which harkens back to my “I already own a license” idea). There are some value-added advantages to owning the earlier Blu-Ray- such as participating in the 2009 Comic Con showing via BD Live, in addition to satisfying the childish ‘I want it NOW’ feeling we all succumb to from time to time. The special features look fantastic, it does include 24 minutes of added footage (although not the Tales of the Black Freighter story-within-a-story from the graphic novel) and Amazon is even sweetening the pot by allowing you to watch the movie via internet on the day of release if you’ve pre-ordered the disk.

My first impulse was to wait for the expanded edition. I’ve vowed that I wasn’t going to repurchase any more movies that I already own except in extreme circumstances. (Do you have any idea how many copies of Terminator 2 or Blade Runner I’ve bought since owning them on LaserDisk? Neither do I.) But since buying the version with the Black Freighter included and commentary by Dave Gibbons** is a certainty and since the net cost of the first version is only $13 on Amazon when you consider the coupon, I have to say that somebody will be getting a slightly used copy of WATCHMEN- the Director’s Cut on BD for Christmas and I’ll be buying two copies of the same movie this year after all.


* Original review of WATCHMEN here. I honestly have never figured out what all the hate was for this movie (except for the possible reasons mentioned in the review). Sure, it’s not Citizen Kane, but it’s a damn fine comic book movie and had it not been an adaptation of such a revered graphic novel I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t have done better. I loved Dark Knight, but Watchmen was everything everyone said about DK- moody, serious, literary, visually fantastic, morally ambiguous, and nuanced- only more so. Sure, I could quibble too. The soundtrack was much maligned but nobody I’ve read picked out the biggest soundtrack mistake I noticed- that if you were going to play Simon and Garfunkle over the Comedian’s funeral scene you should have played The Boxer rather than Bridge Over Troubled Water. Watchmen is one of the ten best comic book movies ever made. (In no order they are: Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, X-Men, Iron Man, SpiderMan II, SpiderMan, X-Men II, Superman II, and Road to Perdition.) If you can’t enjoy it then you need to examine why.


**…and all I have to say to Alan Moore about being such a party pooper about the whole thing is that I would have loved to hear you talk about the movie on the audio track and I would have been proud for you to be financially improved by a small bit of the money I’ve spent and will spend on the fruits of your imagination. But seriously, you’re taking yourself way too seriously. You wrote some entertaining comic book stories and, yeah, you may even be the best writer comics have ever seen. But get over yourself. Lighten up. The world would be a much better place if self-important assholes like you would just try to contribute to the total amount of fun that exists instead of going all teen-aged angsty and pouting for the last half of your life. William Faulkner went to Hollywood and wrote screenplays! Sure, he was a drunken reprobate, but in my experience drunken reprobates are more fun than egomaniacal goth “wizard” shitheads any day of the week. Why don’t you crawl up J. D. Salinger’s ass and then have him crawl up the ass of James Joyce’s rotting corpse so all of you can consider yourselves kings of infinite space there in your nutshells? In short- Fuck you, Alan Moore. What a crybaby!

MOVIES- Terminator: Salvation

A Review.

It’s really a shame that since Cameron left the franchise each TERMINATOR movie has gotten steadily worse than the last. I don’t know how much potential the series really ever had. The second movie was arguably better than the first but only because it was a remake of the first with an appropriate budget. The set pieces didn’t change much (Arnold steals somebody’s clothes, gets a motorcycle to look cool riding around on, has a number of car chases where somebody chases a car on foot, somebody drives a truck through stuff, various vehicles blow up real good, some cyborg gets alternately fried and frozen) and while the first was inventive, the second was impressive. Then Cameron figured that continuing to do the same movie over and over wasn’t really the way he wanted his career to go. Other, less talented people didn’t feel the same way. The third movie had desperation written all over it. “Lets give John Connor a love interest!” “Howsabout we have a girl terminator this time?” “Don’t forget the truck chase, it’s tradition!” But at least the third movie tried to add a little to the mythos with the surprise (yawn) ending of having the war start while emo John Connor and his squeeze (a totally wasted Claire Danes) twiddle their thumbs at the bottom of a bomb shelter.

The fourth movie couldn’t even be bothered to do that. Instead it’s just a lot of blowing things up and running around fighting a war that is surprisingly little seen. I actually caught myself nodding off in the theater! All the set pieces are there, even a completely stupid scene where John Connor hijacks an automated motorcycle sentry by using a trick that was old when they used it in 1920s westerns, and then pulls something off the top of it and drives away on it. Did nobody wonder why an autonomous motorcycle would have controls to allow a human to use it? But they didn’t seem to put any thought into anything else in the movie, so why start there? The storyline consists of pulling bits and pieces off the first two movies and reshooting them. Even little bits of business like a terminator driving a truck with a broken windshield and pushing it out so that he can see the road. And if you are looking for a war movie where a rag tag group of freedom fighters squares off against a horde of artificially intelligent killing machines, rent the ANIMATRIX and watch THE SECOND RENAISSANCE parts 1 and 2. It’s much better and actually had some thought put into it.

Director McG and writers John D. Brancato & Michael Ferris don’t limit themselves to only stealing from the first two Terminator movies and old westerns, they also lift from the Abyss and even include a giant Transformer that appears to be made of junk and can’t shoot worth a damn. Christian Bale also steals his performance from a block of wood, never managing to evoke any sympathy or charisma for his character. Not that there is much chance for that to happen in the script. The one thing that the filmmakers didn’t bother to steal was Cameron’s attempt to put a human face on the conflict. There are no character defining moments like the love story in the first movie or the boy gets mechanical killing machine surrogate father subplot in the second. Even when there are places where such relationships might grow they are announced and then discarded. (Mostly because they don’t make sense. Tell me, are you honestly going to fall in love with somebody right away and then remain faithful to your feelings when you find out he’s a robot designed to kill you? Talk about abusive relationships!) The result is that the movie has as much soul as Skynet itself. With no characters to care about and nothing interesting in the plot it seems more like spending two hours at a combined gun show/Nascar race than a movie.

It seems obvious why the movie is called TERMINATOR: SALVATION. It’s nothing but an attempt to salvage a dying franchise. Obviously nobody gave a damn about making a movie, just putting the corpse of the previous movies on life support until they could harvest the organs. And they are so sure there is still money to suck out this cadaver that it even ends with a flock of helicopters flying into the sunset and a John Connor voiceover that basically says, “Tune in next time for more thrilling adventures.” Too bad nobody connected to the film bothered to give anyone any reason to see this movie or the inevitable sequels they have planned. Almost everything J.J. Abrams did right in his reboot of Star Trek, McG ignores in this retread. It’s dead, Jim.

MOVIES- Star Trek lives

(Might be spoilers here, but not of plot points.)

So, I finally saw Star Trek at the 10:20 PM show at the local cinema. I was surprised by a number of things, not the least of which was that it was almost a private showing. I saw Watchmen twice the first week (one digital and one IMAX) and the theater was packed both times even though both were matinees. Last night there were only two other people in the theater. I did pick the last showing on a Monday night to avoid the crowds, I just didn’t expect to be that successful.

It’s gonna be hard to discuss this movie without giving anything away that might ruin it for anyone. But the novelty of having a Star Trek movie that actually has the potential to surprise anyone is so unique that it’s worth preserving. Episodic television is perhaps the most formulaic and cliché prone form of entertainment in history. So usually TV shows rely on soap opera or the likability of the cast to attract viewers. The problem with doing that with SF is that it has not traditionally been character driven, instead depending on strangeness to draw an audience. Shows like Battlestar Galactica and Babylon 5 have tried to overcome that by placing more emphasis on character and striving to have plotlines that actually change the status quo over the course of the seasons. But back in the 60s the constraints of television were to rigid for the latter, even though Star Trek was perhaps the first genre series to attempt the former. When Roddenbury, and perhaps even more importantly, Gene Coon, established the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triumvirate as action-intellect-emotion (or id-superego-ego for you Freudians) it was one of the first times in SF TV or movies that the characters were anything other than their job descriptions. Sure, it was two-dimensional, but in a format where one-dimensional was the norm it was still a whole lot better.

Which isn’t to say that the show wasn’t full of cliches. We all know better. You could write a book on all the plot devices ST beat to death- Kirk’s cosmic libido, Spock’s raised eyebrow, driving computers mad with illogic, planets that parallel earth in every aspect but one, last minute technological solutions as a literal deus ex machina, beam me up, I’m a doctor not a -, fascinating, godlike alien menaces, people in other people’s bodies, time travel, the list goes on and on. OTOH, for every cliché they made famous it seems there was a new (for TV in those days) idea somewhere too. Multi-cultural crewmembers, women in positions of power, a military that was more diplomatic corps than fighting corps, continuing setting SF with aspects of the anthology series’ morality plays, aliens that weren’t monsters but instead just thought differently than we did, a non-imperialist philosophy of non-interference, heck, even the idea of taking it all seriously was different. It’s hard to imagine it now, but ST’s main competition was LOST IN SPACE! LOST IN for God’s sake SPACE! A “space family Robinson” with kids and a pet mad scientist and robot comedy team, marooned on a planet made from cardboard rocks that was visited every week by a space aliens which ranged from pirates to sentient rutabagas. And the ratings were neck and neck!

But because they took it seriously, it’s hard not to say that ST was the most influential SF in history. Computers you could talk to, Space “Shuttles”, communicators that look like cell phones (or vice versa), medical equipment built right into beds, there’s a lot of our world in that crazy old television show. And perhaps that’s a lot of the problem. The new things in ST became cliches as well. Until just about all that was left after six TV series and ten movies were the cliches. So Paramount gave the franchise over to J.J. Abrams for a restart.

If you’ve read the reviews you know that they have been almost universally positive. Rotten Tomatoes has a composite score or 95%. There’s no basis for comparison between this and previous ST movies since the tomatometer only goes back to 2002 and the only other ST movie is Nemesis (at a deserved 35%). But considering first weekend grosses and all the praise, this looks to be the most successful movie in the history of the series, beating out ST IV- So Long and Thanks for All the Whales.

The problem is that the movie doesn’t really deserve it. It isn’t a great movie. Hell, it isn’t even the best movie of the series. I suspect that a lot of the praise is the result of closet fans, who had grown so tired of the cliches that they just couldn’t go there again, being relieved that they could come back through the door and keep their self-respect. Not that the movie is bad. For a Star Trek movie it’s in the top three. And not that Abrams didn’t do a hell of a job walking the tightrope he had in front of him. Most of the roads taken by other reboots in the last years weren’t really open to him. Had he stunt-cast Spock as a woman or shown us a dark, gritty, morally ambiguous Federation I have no doubt that he would have been burned at the next ComiCon as a heretic. More than that, he would have made something that wasn’t Star Trek. Trek was never really science fiction; it was space opera- Roddenberry’s western in space. It took itself seriously but never too seriously. It wasn’t afraid to have a little fun on the way to places no one had ever gone before. Abrams greatest success may be that he kept that lightheartedness intact.

Abrams ST isn’t so much a reboot (though it is that in a literal sense which is one of the most clever things about it) as it is a remake. And ironically for the prodigal fans who think they can now return to the fold, all the cliches are still there. ALL the cliches. But it’s OK because they are all turned just enough to make them seem fresh again. The whole movie is an odd combination of familiarity and disorientation. You’ve seen it all before, but you have no idea what’s going to happen next. Once again, for the first time, there’s a sense that you can be surprised by what’s about to happen and it allows you to actually give a damn again. And that’s what’s been missing from Trek for a long time.

So it’s still Star Trek. Ah, but therein lies the rub. It still has all the old gotchas plus a couple of new ones. Star Trek has always been something you had to take at face value. If you start asking questions like “Doesn’t transwarp teleportation make spaceships obsolete?” or “Howcum Checkov knows more about using the transporter than the transporter crew?” you start to treat it as a real movie rather than as Star Trek. Just as I suspect a lot of the praise if born of relief that it’s not a failure, I suspect that as soon as the shine starts to wear off a lot of fans are going to go back to that age-old tradition of picking the nits. I’ve always felt that was one of the enjoyable things about ST. It wasn’t afraid to make fun of itself so it invited the fans to poke a little fun at it as well. So, in that spirit, a few other questions and observations that occurred to me.

Again, doesn't transwarp teleport make spaceships obsolete?

And why do the innerds of every spaceship look like a water treatment plant or metal refinery?

Why levitate spacecraft over the Iowa plains when you could, I dunno, build them in orbit? It's a cool shot but doesn't make much sense. Plus, the enterprise would have to be built out of neutronium to support it’s own weight in a gravity well.

Just how big are these spacecraft anyway? The Kelvin had 800 crewmembers on board? Then how many does the Enterprise hold? It’s the new flagship, so you’d imagine it was bigger. No wonder everybody runs everywhere in the corridors. Thing’s probably a half mile long.

And what’s with the magical technology like "Red Matter" that creates quantum black holes. Set the doubletalk generators to kill. I also have a problem with the inertial dampeners on the transporters. If you can’t account for gains and losses of potential and kinetic energy then a lot of crewmembers are going to materialize only to fly off the pad and hit the opposite wall of the room like a water balloon dropped from the Sears Tower. Somehow you can beam from a planet to a ship going hundreds of times the speed of light without a problem but when you beam up someone who is falling you can take away just enough of their kinetic energy to keep them from being killed hitting the floor but not enough to keep them from hitting the floor altogether.

Why does everybody know more about transporter technology than the transporter crew? Checkov (Checkov, for pity's sake) has to leave the helm to show the transporter experts how it's done. OTOH, I can live with Scotty reinventing transporter technology from a character point. He always was a whiz with those things (like the way he saved himself so he could do a guest shot on TNG) but Checkov?

Sulu can't remember to take off the parking break!

Gravity sucks, inverse square law be dammed. And the final escape is a silly as TOS Kirk driving computers insane with bad syllogisms every three months. I’m not going to say how they did it but it was stupid and implausible in every way.

The new costumes are kinda ugly. The new Enterprise is kinda ugly. The new bridge is kinda ugly. I know they had to put their artistic stamp on the look of the movie, I just don’t agree with some of the aesthetic choices. One of the things that set the original series apart was the design. The Enterprise wasn’t really like any other spaceship before it and had the kind of clean simplicity of design that has survived near infinite variation for over 40 years. This one looks like just another fan drawn variation for variation’s sake. Likewise the new bridge is a mess. The pleasing design and simplicity of the round, split level design and the strong lines and shapes have been replaced with a crowded mess. Why is there somebody in a phone booth over Kirk’s right shoulder? Is the thing actually round or what, you can’t really tell. And what the heck are those red gee-gaws on the helm? They look like the taillights of a 1950s Buick.

And did they actually put a big picture window in the front of the bridge? Even if it doubles as a viewscreen, a window?

Bottom line? It's a good Star Trek movie. Go see it. But don't expect it to be a great movie.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog shows Mamma Mia How It Should Be Done

So who says they can’t make a 46 minute superhero musical that is cool and rocks? Well, I guess nobody ever said that, now that I think of it. But IF “they” had said it, “they” would have been WRONG.

Yah, I know. This is old. It was first released almost 10 months ago, which is about five and a half years in dog time and roughly that much in internet time as well. (Its funny, until the internet the only people who worried about being the first to check out new media were high school and college age kids. Grown-ups were busy with unimportant stuff like career and family and knew that if you saw a movie or read a book you could talk about it with other people who had enjoyed it for months, if not years afterward. Now everybody is texting and twittering and the discussion space on the net has shrunk to only a few days. The result is that everybody now has the attention span of a 12 year old.) In those ten months the film paid for itself (almost a quarter of a million dollars- in case you thought you could be an internet video sensation without big name stars or a sizable wad of cash and without being hit in the nuts in a new and entertaining way), and won a Hugo and a slew of other awards (including being #4 on Time Magazine's list of best television in spite of never being closer to a television than your computer monitor- new media, who knew?). Neil Patrick Harris is a known singer, having been in numerous Broadway shows such as CABERET and RENT, but if you are only familiar with his TV appearances you might be surprised at his vocal power. Other surprises are Nathan Fillion’s (from Firefly) ability to sing and the smaller part of Moist played by Simon Helberg who plays Wallowitz on the sitcom THE BIG BANG THEORY (and who here portrays a supervillan with the most useless power since Marvel Comics’ Black Hole in Howard the Duck, who had the rallying cry “The Black Hole SUCKS!”). It also features Felicia Day, an excellent singer who has those kind of accessible good looks that geeks go nuts for. And Judd and Zack Weadon, brothers of Joss Weadon and masterminds of this madness, as the Cowboy henchmen singers singing one of the best lyrics ever written:

The Evil League of Evil
is watching so beware,
the grade that you receive’ll
be the last we swear,
so make the Bad Horse gleeful
or he'll make you his mare...

Not since Slim Shady rhymed orINges with syrINges has there been a more inventive rhyme than “evil” and “receive will”.

Anyway, to the folks who read this blog (all two of you) I encourage you to see this if you already haven’t (and if you are reading this blog you probably haven’t because looking to me for what’s new on the web is like asking your grandmother about sex- she might not know the newest positions but she has a pretty good idea about what works and what doesn’t). We strive for quality, not novelty.




And because NBC has decided, for reasons only bureaucratic managers could understand, not to allow SNL to be embedded, you have to click on this link. Even if you don’t like people pretending to play musical instruments you should stay for the punchline.

BOOKS- The Anthology at the End of the Universe

Douglas Noel Adams died about six months before the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. It would have been interesting to see what effect that event and subsequent related events would have had on his writing. But we’ll never know. As it is, we were left with the five book Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy, a couple of Dirk Gently novels and THE MEANING OF LIFF (a book explaining strange place names) as his legacy. These books are mostly rooted in the world and politics of the 1970s and 80s.

But, you say, those books are Science Fiction.

Or, you say, those books are comedic.

Or, you say, who is Douglas Adams? (In which case you should just stop reading right now, dust off your internet surfing eyeballs, put on some pants, get in your car, and go directly to your closest bookstore to buy everything ever written by the man. The COMPLETE HITCHIKER’S GUIDE is a recommended omnibus edition which includes all five novels, a short story starring Zaphod Beeblebrox, comes with a nice leather binding- no doubt made from the skin of sentient cows that feel there is no greater use their integument could be put to- and is the approximate size and heft of a concrete block.)

It’s strange that there isn’t more humorous science fiction. When at their best both disciplines hold a funhouse mirror up to reality to let you see aspects that are usually tucked away from superficial examination. But both disciplines are notoriously difficult, making the fusion of the two at least difficult squared. Attempts had been made prior to the Hitchhiker’s Guide and since. Asimov tried comedy in a SF setting a couple of times. Fredrick Poul and Cyril Kornbluth made it a staple. Neil Gaiman has tried it and Terry Prachett has made a career out of it. But it’s hard to imagine anyone who could find as much comedy, pathos, insight, prescience, commentary, or downright laugh out loud humor per page as Douglas Adams.

The BenBella SmartPop book THE ANTHOLOGY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE reminds us of this. It also reminds us just how much of a genius Doug Adams was. In one of the introductions to a Harlan Ellison anthology, Stephen King complements Harlan by saying that his voice is so strong that after reading Ellison’s work he has to be careful not to write like Harlan. The analogy he makes is that he’s like cottage cheese placed too close to something stronger in the fridge. The cottage cheese takes on the smell and taste of the strong odor it has come in contact with. It’s not that King is so malleable, it’s that Harlan’s voice is so strong that it overpowers the reader. I understand this since I have to be careful not to draw like Neal Adams after I’ve been looking at Neal’s work. His vision is so strong that it starts to superimpose itself on my own view of the world after being around it. Likewise Douglas Adams. Easily half the essays in the BenBella book SOUND like Doug Adams. I don’t even know if it’s conscious on the part of the writers. I hope it’s not, since if the writing is intended as pastiche it’s kind of lame. I think it’s actually that after re-reading the Hitchhiker’s Guide these writers are simply taking on the smell and taste of a stronger voice they have sat too close to for too long in the fridge.

Ironically, this happens more in the first half of the book and the more enjoyable essays are in the first half of the book. Right off the bat Mike Byrne nails the prescient yet completely relevant nature of much of Adams’ humor. He sights a passage by Adams where the evolution of radio controls develops from buttons and knobs to being controlled by mere gestures- requiring the listener to sit stone still while listening to avoid changing the program. Byrne is especially aware of this phenomenon because he is a PhD in psychology specializing in ergonomics. He immediately follows up this fictional situation with two real world scenarios that came years after it was written but that verify its veracity. First he mentions car stereos that have remote controls not because the face of the unit is out of reach but because the faceplate is so complex as to defy navigation in a moving car. Then he relates an experience with an early text editor that had such an arcane command structure that typing “edit” at certain points would delete the entire document (E-edit, D-delete, I-insert, T-the letter “t” which made the one level undo command superfluous). Anyone who lived through the transition to Windows 95, which moved the MINIMIZE, MAXIMIZE, and CLOSE to the upper right hand title bar of a window knows what I’m talking about. Adams had glommed onto a basic tenant of modern life a good dozen years early- that as systems become more complex, their usefulness seems to diminish. Any user of a piece of software through numerous generations is familiar with the idea that with each iteration new features are added yet old problems are never fixed. Byrne explains this as well.

Explanations abound in this book. Explanations of the significance of the number 42 (but none of why it is only 6x9 in base 13- an affront to basic number theory and bilateral symmetry at the same time), how quantum foam and loop-surfaces and semiotic (semi-odd? Ick!) explanations for towels can jibe in Einsteinian four-space, how Adams influenced computer science for two generations, why Wikipedia was an outgrowth of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, why you can read both the holy trinity and Zen Buddhism into the books, how everything you need to know you can learn from the trilogy (quintology?), why the human race is anything but “mostly harmless”, why it’s a bad idea for a woman to wear a transparent tee-shirt that says “Don’t Panic” on the front (mind you this was published before Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is little that mammals will panic over more than exposed mammary glands), why Adams’ writing is mired in an era that rejected 17 years of Labor party rule in Great Britain for the Margaret Thatcher/Ronny Raygun paradigm, and the most re-told joke in the whole volume:

“You know,” said Arthur, “It’s times like these, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.”

“Why, what did she tell you?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t listen.”

THE ANTHOLOGY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE is one of the best of the BenBella SmartPop books in spite of the fact that it falls flat half way through. I’ve said before that the worth of these books is directly proportional to the worth of the subjects covered and here is the exception that proofs the rule. The Hitchhiker’s Guide is a soaring pinnacle in humorous SF and a rarely equaled accomplishment in either genre separately. But even half a book dedicated to such a worthy tome is better than a whole book dedicated to a lesser accomplishment. This book stands at the top of the SmartPop heap with BATMAN UNAUTHORIZED so far.

MOVIES- Star Trek so far

Have we slunk so low already that we’re doing lists? What’s next? A CHIRISTMAS CAROL adaptation?*

So I catch Star Trek III: the Search for Spock the other day on the Universal HD channel. (Made back in the days when they had the common decency to number sequels the way god intended. I’d watch the Harry Potter movies but I can’t figure out the order they come in.) I’ve probably seen it as many times as the characters in FREE ENTERPRISE (1998) have but I hadn’t seen it in HD yet so I gave it a roll. The movie was a revelation in many ways after all these years. It was the first ST movie directed by Leonard Nimoy, who would go on to direct STAR TREK IV: THE JOURNEY HOME, the highest grossing of all the Star Trek films. It was the follow up to the Louis Mayer opus STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN, which had taken the franchise from failure to victory. It was the first time the Enterprise has been destroyed (a cliche for the series, both as a bluff in the Original series, and as an actual thing in the movies). But it set me to thinking. Now that the series is over and in anticipation of the release of JJAbrams’ (Lost) reboot of the franchise, how do the movies actually rate? So…a list. I’ll talk about the individual movies later, probably as I get to see them in HD so I can approximate as closely as possible the original viewing experience. But now is the time for an overview of folks interested in the series that might not have seen all the movies.

In order of quality/merit/satisfaction. (Starting with the last and working up to the best is a gimmick.)

1. STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN
Nicolas Mayer’s reboot of the franchise. Mayer was unfamiliar with the Star Trek mythos; so he sat down and watched all 79 original episodes. This was the result- an outsider’s view that did almost as much to encapsulate what we know as the best of Star Trek as Gene Coon did. Action grows out of motive and motive grows from character. Kirk deals with middle age and learns of a son he never knew. McCoy continues as his emotional conscience. Spock pays the ultimate price. The greatest starship battle before or since in a Star Trek movie. This one has everything.

2. STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK
Nimoy takes the helm as director and lauches a new career for himself. In fact, this is perhaps the best directed of the series, along with #2. The supporting cast gets at least one scene each and good lines are distributed widely. The mind meld scenes are done perfectly. And Nimoy is even able to wring the best performance out of Shatner that he would give in the entire series (perhaps in his career). While not as good as Mayer’s Horatio Hornblower in space, the most nuanced Star Trek movie ever made.

3. STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME
In the tradition of THE TROUBLE WITH TRIBBLES, ST scores its biggest box office bonanza with this lighthearted romp through contemporary San Francisco (pre cell phone and iPod). While the campier aspects are what it’s remembered for (Nuclear Wessels) the real treat is the timing Shatner and Nimoy have in the comedy bits. As good as anything the true comedian of Star Trek (Brett Spiner, did I really have to tell you?) would ever do.

4. STAR TREK I: THE MOTION PICTURE
Also called “Where Nomad Has Gone Before” and “ST: The Motionless Picture”. Originally maligned for being too slow, then overly praised in the DVD director’s cut re-release on DVD (it was a couple more special effects shots- the critics had been bitching about it being too special effects heavy to start with!?!). I stood in line on December 7th, 1979 to see it. And it was glorious. When the film opened and those Kingon ships flew toward that immense cloud a cheer rose up from the crowd. Then as each character made his first appearance, another cheer. Plus we got to see the size of the Enterprise for the first time. But it IS too slow, it DID steal the plot from an old episode, and the characters are underused.

5. STAR TREK GENERATIONS (ST VII) (Unfortunately they gave up on the Roman numerals when they fell out of vogue. Shame, that.)
The Original Series and The Next Generation, together again for the first time. (And for the first time I know of, this Yogi Berra-ism is literally true. ST:TNG (The Next Generation) had met several of the characters from ST:TOS (The Original Series) but had never met Kirk.) This was the point where the torch was handed to the youngsters (such as they were). It also had a good villain in Malcolm McDowell and a decent McGuffin for a Star Trek Movie.

6. STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY
Nick Mayer makes another Star Trek film. And this time he attempts that ol’ Star Trek relevance trick (you know, the one that gave us Frank Gorshin with his face painted half white and half black). Kirk and Spock witness the end of détente with the Klingons but nothing interesting is really said about turning points in history. Instead we get the “old warriors hate peace” bromide with a silly mystery tacked on and a detour into Klingon jail. BTW, the “undiscovered country” in Hamlet isn’t the future, as Mayer frequently said in interviews, it’s death.

7. STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT (ST VIII)
This is almost a tie with #6. Nothing is egregious but nothing is really interesting. The biggest mistake this movie makes isn’t giving us a completely retconned view of Warp Drive pioneer Zefram Cochrane. (In the original series we meet Dr. Cochrane as a clean cut 1960s astronaut type in his mid to late 30s.) The biggest mistake is overplaying the Moby Dick allegory to the point that it makes the Paradise Lost references in ST II look subtle in comparison. Riker and Troy get a couple of good comedy bits and Data learns about sex (allegorically) from the Borg queen (ick).

But it’s worth it to hear Zefram Cochrane, just having been told by the TNG crew that he’s about to change the course of human history more than any man since the invention of fire, says, “So you’re all astronauts, on some kind of star trek?”

8. STAR TREK: INSURRECTION (IX)
Just another TNG episode. Picard finally falls in love with an age appropriate woman, but it’s doomed anyway. David Warner enters into competition with Mark Leonard (in TOS) and Jeffrey Combs (DS9, Enterprise) to be the first to portray every species in the ST Universe.

9. STAR TREK: NEMISIS (X)
Picard clones, dune buggy chases, and a big surprise at the end (yawn). Only notable for being the last ST movie they will ever do featuring TNG (until they re-cast the roles in 40 years). My own perfect version of this movie has the Romulans and the Klingons both growing Picard clones and artificially accelerating their growth to be Picard contemporaries. The Klingon Picard is played by Sir Ian McKellen and the Romulan Picard is played by Sir Ben Kingsley. In the ensuing conflict, the two knights quickly subdue the commoner Stewart, and then set about to rule the universe together. There is a real story arc here, so whoever hands out contracts for Star Trek Novels- CALL ME.

10. STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER
Just as Mayer’s WRATH OF KHAN was almost so good that it surpassed the franchise, this is, by a wide margin, this is the worst ST movie ever! Shatner takes over the director’s seat and embarrasses himself badly. There are blue horses (the number of horses in a ST movie is directly proportional to Shatner’s influence), aliens playing pool on flooded pool tables, Uhura fan dancing, and the crew meets god- AGAIN. In the book Star Trek (Movie) Memories, Shatner offers a plethora of reasons why the movie was doomed. He leaves out the fact that he was only mouthing those words for all those years without ever having a clue what science fiction was really about. This one is only good for a laugh.

Well, there it is. We’ve gone from the Original Series to the Next Generation and stand on the cusp of The actual Next Generation of Star Trek. The franchise is about to be taken over by people who not only didn’t work with Roddenberry at any time, but weren’t even alive when that first episode aired on NBC over 40 years ago. I was personally disappointed when Michael J. Straczynski didn’t get a chance to implement his ideas for the series, but we’ll see what J.J Abrams has up his sleeve.




* The phrase “jump the shark” has entered the popular lexicon as the point at which a television series (or any series, for that matter) passes a point of no return in quality. The phrase is based on an episode of Happy Days where Fonzie was supposed to jump his motorcycle over a shark tank. Actually I always thought there was an earlier indicator of when the when a television series had the wheels come off the wagon. And unlike “jumping the shark” this signpost is ubiquitous and specific. I call it the Dickens Horizon. It’s when a series does an adaptation of Dickens A CHRISTMAS CAROL for its Christmas episode using their own cast for the parts. EVERYBODY has done this and it’s NEVER interesting. But it does show that the series has completely run out of creative juice.

MOVIES- Earth Girls Are Easy

EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY is a science fiction film in exactly the same way that THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW is a horror movie. And it wants to be ROCKY HORROR so badly. It’s the same type of Rock musical- satirical, silly, and Southern California all the way. But it’s ROCKY HORROR by 80s MTV culture instead of 70s counterculture. And so it’s not ROCKY HORROR at all.

But it’s still interesting in a sort of not-as-bad-as-I-remember-it kind of way. The swipes at SoCal culture are dated, the songs are abysmal, and the whole thing is terribly juvenile. But the direction is sprightly, the musical numbers are staged well, and the performances make the material watchable. And there are even a few genuine laughs hidden in there. For instance when a child at a gas station is yelled by by his mother, Michael McKean (playing the fortyish burnout surfer dude- swimming pool man) yells, “Leave home kid.”

But at best it’s a trifle. Notable more for it’s trivia surrounding its characters than for any cinematic accomplishment.

Some of the trivia is sad. Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum wasted the height of their careers on this movie. They had finished THE FLY two years earlier to rave critical and moderate box-office acclaim. And by the time EARTH GIRLS was released Gina had already stared in another surprise genre hit,Tim Burton’s BEETLEJUICE, and would be up for an Oscar for her supporting actress performance in Laurance Kasdan’s THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST (also released that year). Both would go on to star in bigger movies and bigger roles; Davis would headline Ridley Scott’s THELMA AND LOUISE and also star in Penny Marshal’s A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN with Tom Hanks. While Goldblum would turn up in roles in even bigger movies such as JURASSIC PARK and INDEPENDENCE DAY. But the beginning of the 1990s saw their divorce and the end of the 90s didn’t see them much at all. After the blockbusters it seemed casting directors had Jeff Goldblum fatigue. And lets face it, what had started as a unique delivery quickly became a self-caricature. Davis, OTOH, married Rennie Harlan and his influence killed her career like cyanide. ‘Nuff said. Hasn’t been in a hit movie since.

The movie was really a vehicle to launch the career of Julie Brown (an MTV favorite) but instead was the place that Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans would get the notice of the public. Carrey would also get the notice of Wayans, who introduced him to his brother Keenen Ivory Wayans. It just happened that said brother was trying to get a TV show called IN LIVING COLOR launched. The show wound up being home to both for several years and also wound up making both famous. Wayans would work in movies steadily during this period but Carrey didn’t really do much while working on IN LIVING COLOR. However, after leaving the show Carrey would make two movies in 1994 that would launch him into A-List status- ACE VENTURA: PET DETECTIVE and THE MASK. Damon Wayans would eventually get his own TV show, which would break the mold (set by Tim Allen and followed ever since) of the sitcom man of the house being a retard that his wife and kids had to constantly save from virtually infinite stupidity. Both would still be viable actors to this very day. Julie Brown, on the other hand, is now a question for Trivial Pursuit.

I caught this on cable in SD the other night so it was the worst possible way to see a movie that depends so heavily on its visual presentation. It was a good reminder why movies transferred to television by the “pan and scan” method are so disappointing. There are multiple scenes where either a reaction shot is lost or the camera has to jump frenetically from one side of a composite shot to the other to cover both sides of a conversation. An artificial two-shot where once there was a master. You don’t have to have graduated from film school to know that such major changes must matter.

But really, here, they don’t. This is a movie built around the master shots, not the coverage. A director trying to move into a new medium by attempting what every new director has attempted since Orson Welles. To show the old folks how it’s done. That’s why the loss of the wide screen matters in a movie shot during a time when video was driving everything, and most directors were being careful to compose shots that would translate to the conventional home screen and it’s 4:3 aspect ratio. MTV was also trying to find its way; as its original paradigm of being a video version of traditional radio was aging badly. In spite of all this, director Julien Temple would follow the path of Davis and Goldblum rather than Wayans and Carrey. For the rest of his career he would direct more music videos and produce long form music video and compilations. For all intents and purposes his movie career was over. And it may have been a loss. We’ll never know. All that we can say is that EARTH GIRLS could have easily been an embarrassment if not for his ability to give the audience a pastiche of the right style with enough new flourishes to keep it from being silly. Camp is perhaps the hardest form of comedy to do correctly. Here Harlan does it almost effortlessly.

I’m not recommending that you hunt out EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY on Netflix. It really isn’t worth that kind of effort unless your favorite movie is ROCKY HORROR or your favorite director is John Waters. But if you come across it some lonely evening, it might be worth a look.