Blogorium Review: Ex Machina

 There's really only one way that Ex Machina can end, and it does. It would hardly be fair to hold that against a film that poses so many intriguing questions about mankind and our relationship towards (if not, eventually, with) machines. For ninety or so minutes, we watch a Turing Test play out, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, with parameters that aren't well defined, and based on agendas we can't necessarily predict. And yet, despite the "all is not what it seems" atmosphere which is as pervasive throughout the film as it is in the trailer, writer / director Alex Garland (The Beach, 28 Days Later) manages to address concerns as the narrative unfolds without betraying the audience. After all, there's only one way it can end, but how it gets there is best part.

 Ex Machina is ostensibly the story of Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson, Frank), a code writer for Blue Book, the largest search engine in the world. He wins a company raffle - of sorts - and is sent to spend a week at the estate of Blue Book's creator, Nathan (Oscar Isaac, Inside Llewyn Davis), for purposes undefined. There are clues in the opening scene that something else is going on, some subtle, some less so - although we don't know why until later. Nathan, who lives in the midst of a fortified compound in the midst of mountainside land (as the helicopter pilot explains when Caleb asks when they'll be at Nathan's property, "we've been flying over it for the last two hours!"), is very strict about who he allows to visit. Custom made ID badges are required, and they don't always grant access to rooms. Nathan himself, a coding prodigy who built Blue Book as a teenager, lives in isolation, exercising and drinking in equal measure. To say the least, Caleb is intimidated. This man is his boss, trying to talk to him like a friend, but under specific parameters. Parameters he's not always willing to divulge.

 But Caleb isn't really there to hang out with his boss for a week. No, Nathan's invited him for a very specific purpose, one that explains the need for no windows and a self-sustaining generator. And no cell phone service (can't leave that one out). Nathan's been working on an advanced artificial intelligence, and he's chosen Caleb to be the man to administer a Turing test. Can Caleb determine whether Ava (Alicia Vikander) passes for human or not? Nathan's already decided to bypass some of the original rules Alan Turing designed for the test: he's confident that if Caleb couldn't see Ava, he'd be convinced, so instead Caleb has to interact, to see. Ava has a human face, human hands, and fee, but is otherwise clearly a machine. So the question becomes, can Caleb, knowing he's talking to a machine, discern the presence of intelligence and be convinced that Ava is more than artifice?

 In writing the last paragraph, I caught myself trying to write the word "she" when referring to Ava, which is a nagging pet peeve I have, even for myself. The concept of trying to anthropomorphize, to gender identify, something which is explicitly identified as non-human is still difficult to shake. Pay attention to how many people refer to Apple's SIRI as a "her": because a woman recorded the audible responses that SIRI provides, we give it a gender. But SIRI is not a human being, and neither is Ava, which became the first philosophical point of contention I thought I would have with Ex Machina. Why sexualize Ava if all Nathan wants to do is prove its intelligence is genuine? Ava has a woman's face and hands, contoured plastic breasts and buttocks, so even if the arms and torso are transparent, even if the top of the head is, too, Caleb's eyes are going to be drawn to some degree to the fact that Nathan made a specific decision to gender-ize Ava.

 As it turns out, just as I was beginning to really think about the conscious decision to give Ava a gender, Garland chose to address it by having Caleb come right out and ask Nathan about it. The film is broken up into "sessions" between Caleb and Ava, punctuated by conversations with Nathan or sequences where Caleb learns more about the house. It's not far into the movie - maybe the second or third session - before the conversation comes up, and like many things which appear to be adhering to "audience expectation" tropes, there's a method to the madness. In fact, as Garland slowly reveals, there are several: Nathan has a specific reason for making Ava look like a young woman, one tied to the nature of the testing. But there are other reasons as well, although I'm not going to SPOIL much about Ex Machina. Suffice to say that many of the plot points I thought were or would be problematic turned out to be better thought out than your average screenplay.

 Ava is, indeed, quite impressive, and Caleb finds himself conflicted. On the one hand, he understands his role as the skeptic - he has to evaluate Ava from all possible angles, including whether Nathan's programming is responsible for its "flirtatious" behavior. By the same token, maybe Nathan is right that Caleb is "the first man Ava has seen" other than him. Nathan's a little looser when it comes to talking about Ava, and sometimes says "her," but I'm trying to refrain from that. They don't just talk about Ava, and it's very clear that Nathan has a secret agenda. He's also condescending and dismissive, except when he's not. There's something Caleb just can't trust about the parameters of this "test," which is confirmed when the power cuts out during a session with Ava. Ava warns Caleb that he shouldn't trust anything that Nathan says or does, which sets off the second half of Ex Machina. But which one of them is more trustworthy: the creation or the creator?

 Unfortunately, Caleb's only other point of communication is with Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) - Nathan's housekeeper / cook / assistant, who can't speak, read, or understand English. Nathan prefers it that way, as it allows him to "talk about trade secrets" without fear of any leaks. Astute readers are already working out her role in the story, but since Kyoko appears so early in the film and there are so few characters, it would be unfair to leave her out. While attempting to negotiate his living space, or the fact that the television in his room only shows CCTV footage of Ava, Caleb continues his sessions, becoming more smitten with Ava's apparently genuine expressions of intelligence. Ava draws, turns lines of questions around on Caleb, and begins to blur the line between machine and human. In the last instance, literally: Ava puts on a dress, stockings, and a wig (left in a closet, one might assume, purposefully), which obscures much of the artificiality. The results on Caleb are somewhat predictable, although by that point he's far more concerned with Ava's status as "captive" in Nathan's home.

 Although I said there was only one way that Ex Machina could end, I'm not going to address it in this review. In fact, what has been covered leaves out a number of plot points, because there's a great benefit to not knowing much more than what you see in the trailer. That might even give away a bit too much, although the "what" of what happens is more interesting when the pieces of "why" it happens come together. It goes without saying that Caleb is also being tested, Nathan is being far less than straightforward, and that Ava is taking advantage of that. Or are all three of them manipulating the others, and themselves? There are a number of interesting Biblical allusions in the film, as well as nods to Frankenstein, The Allegory of the Cave, Star Trek, Blade Runner, and Oppenheimer's famous "now I am become Death" quote. There are also some smaller references to Wittgenstein, Close Encounters or the Third Kind, and Hoffmann's The Sandman.

 With such a small cast, it's hard to really say any one of the three leads stands out, although much of the credit goes to Alicia Vikander, who has to appear to be human without being human. Considering that most of her on-screen performance is a visual effect, Vikander manages to sell her role in /as the effect. The reasoning behind how Ava is capable of reproducing human expressions has its own interesting plot device, but Vikander's slow evolution on camera as Ava is most impressive. It's hard to tell who is the cat and who the mouse, as Gleeson slowly moves from star-struck rube to man in crisis to his own sense of (possibly misguided) agency. Isaac appears to have the more one-note role, playing Nathan mostly through intimidation - physically, mentally, and emotionally - but there are a few moments in the last act that shed light on him. Some for the better, some for the worse, but I feel like his last conversation with Caleb is a better glimpse into who Nathan really is than the diabolical puppeteer we've been taking him for. It all depends on whose side you take during Ex Machina - and don't worry, the title is quite appropriate - to how you react to the inevitability of its conclusion. Like I said, there's only one way it can end once the pieces are in place. Discovering how it gets to that point, however, is what makes the film worth your while.

Some Other Movies I Saw in 2014 (Part One: The Less Worse, I Guess)

 It's fair to say that you might see the first few movies on this list and say "really, _____ made it on your 'Worst' list, but that didn't?" That's fair, I suppose; I could hide behind the veil of "subjectivity" and argue that this is my list, not yours, but the name of the blog isn't "General Cranpire's Den of Filmduggery" (note to Cranpire - that's a great title and you should use it, post-haste), so that should be obvious who the opinions belong to. Spoiler Alert: The Highest Bidder! But yes, okay, it's under a weird criteria that I determined where to stop the "worst of" without including one of last year's Liam Neeson movies (not the one where he fights vampires, I assume strictly from the title). That's how I roll, kids.


 So it makes sense to just get Non-Stop out of the way, and by that I mean mostly just link to my review from earlier this year. It was short enough to sandwich in with Bye Bye Birdie and Die, Monster Die!, so while I didn't hate it, clearly the movie didn't make much of an impression, review-wise: but, looking back at it, it's way longer than needs to be in a recap. This section of the review does seem to sum things up pretty well:

"It's almost ridiculous enough to recommend in and of itself, but the fact that the first half or so is also a decent game of "cat and mouse" works in its favor. In the "Liam Neeson, man of action" genre, it falls somewhere between Taken and Taken 2 - neither as enjoyable stupid as the former, nor as inane and redundant as the second [...] If you're inclined to enjoy movies like this, or saw the poster and said "I'll rent that," you're better off watching Non-Stop than, say, Drive Hard. If you're more predisposed towards, say, Neeson in The Grey, this is not going to be your cup of tea, but if you liked Flightplan... well, um, you liked Flightplan. Congratulations?"

 Fading Gigolo is a movie I'm guessing most of you didn't see, because it came out not long after last year's "is Woody Allen a pedophile or not" row that was everywhere between the Golden Globes and the Oscars but was pretty much gone by the time Magic in the Moonlight came out (a movie I'll be discussing in another part of the recap). At this point I'm going to stop talking about that, because I learned what a bad idea it is to mention the words "Woody Allen" or "Roman Polanski" and "controversy" on the internet. But yes, Woody Allen is in Fading Gigolo. He did not direct it - John Turturro did, along with writing and starring as the titular character, Fioravante. He's a florist, and his friend Murray (Allen) just lost his bookstore and needs money. Fioravante agrees to become an escort with Murray as his manager, in the service of eventually fulfilling the fantasy of Murray's dermatologist (Sharon Stone) and her friend (Sofia Vergara) to have a three-way.

 That's probably enough of a movie right there, but Turturro also includes an entirely separate plot about an Orthodox Jewish woman named Avigal (Vanessa Paradis) who Fioravante falls in love with, much to the chagrin of Dovi (Liev Schreiber), a community police officer. At some point, a council of Rabbis get involved, and it plays out like a bizarro version of being confronted by the mob, complete with Murray needing his lawyer (Bob Balaban) to save him from charges of being a pimp. It's a mostly harmless and sometimes amusing movie, even sweet sometimes, but not something that stuck with me for very long afterward. There's a better movie with John Turturro that will be showing up later in the recaps, so stay tuned for that.

 While we're on the subject of "better movies," I feel like there's a better movie somewhere in Alexandre Aja's Horns. Maybe it got lost in the editing, or maybe it's just inherent in the adaptation of Joe Hill's novel, but the finished product just don't quite work. It's as though Aja made a bitterly funny, black comedy, and also made a more generic, teen-friendly story of good and evil, and then smashed them together at the worst possible junctures. For the opening twenty minutes of Horns, you're probably going to think the movie is great: it has a wicked mean streak, Daniel Radcliffe is spot on as a guy everyone thinks is a murderer, that embraces the horns he grows and the power that comes with it. The way people react, first telling him their darkest fantasies and then acting on them when he says they should, is often hilarious.

 And then we hit the first of what turn out to be several, lengthy, flashbacks, giving us the backstory of Ig (Radcliffe) and Merrin (Juno Temple), leading up to her death - the one everyone assumes Ig is responsible for. Everyone, including his family - played by James Remar, Kathleen Quinlan, and Joe Anderson - is positive he did it and that he's lying, with the exception of his friend, Lee (Max Minghella). The "whodunit" is pretty easy to work out for yourself, even if Aja, Hill, and screenwriter Keith Bunin throw in a number of red herrings. I bet, without telling you anything else, you can guess who the real killer is. That's not the problem, so much as the flashbacks that put the mystery together. There's a massive tonal shift from black comedy to slightly tragic story of temptation and of good and evil (on a biblical scale), and for some reason, ne'er the twain shall meet in Horns.

 I can understand how it might have worked in Hill's novel - which I haven't yet read, but plan to - but as a film, the structure of the story is at times jarring and disruptive. Maybe there was no way to properly balance the two in a film, because Horns alternates between wicked and bland, between clever and obvious, without ever finding a good middle ground. There are some fantastic moments sprinkled throughout the film, and the cast is game for anything, playing both the best and worst versions of themselves as they encounter "evil" Ig, but Horns gets away from them. It's never quite the movie that it could be, so I'm left feeling ambivalent with the end result.

 Speaking of ambivalent, here's a good time to mention Bad Words, a movie people seemed to like a lot more than I did. While it's true that I liked Horrible Bosses 2 less than Bad Words, Jason Bateman is jerk instead of beleaguered everyman was not novelty enough to win me over what is essentially a one-note joke. If Bateman hadn't directed the film and the star was, oh, let's say Billy Bob Thornton, I somehow doubt anyone would even be talking about this, another film in the "bad" series of comedies. (For the record, that review is probably NSFW, just based on the first sentence).

  The best thing I can say about Automata is that it's a better version of I, Robot than I, Robot is. Actually, there are a lot of things to like about the film, which is not-so loosely based on I, Robot, but for some reason the film as a whole is underwhelming. There's little doubt in my mind that the film is trying to skirt by under the radar without people noticing the similarities to Alex Proyas', kinda loud, kinda dumb Big Willie Style / Shia LeBouf CGI action fest, including scaling back to rules of robotics from three to two (and changing one of them to suit the narrative - that robots can't self repair). It's a visual feast, for what I have to imagine was not a large budget (director and co-writer Gabe Ibáñez shot the film in Bulgaria).

 Stop me if you've heard this before: in the future, there's been a catastrophic global weather shift, which caused most of Earth to be irradiated. People live in cramped cities, with some living in zeppelin-like housing units. Robots help humanity, although they've so permeated the culture that they're considered just as useless as any of the other trash (shades of Elysium, if you remember that movie from, you know, last year). Cop Sean Wallace (Dylan McDermott) finds one repairing itself, and blows it away, causing the ROC Robotics Corporation to send insurance adjuster Jacq Vaucan (Antonio Banderas) to investigate. What he finds could change the ROC corporation forever, as well as endanger his boss, Robert Bold (Robert Forster) and his wife Rachel (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen) and their unborn son.

 And what does he discover (SPOILER???): that the robots are evolving, some past the point where they require humans at all. But they just want to be free, man. This doesn't sound familiar or anything, so I'm not going to belabor the comparisons to I, Robot any more. You get it. It's a more visually stylish, more sober approach to the story, after Jacq is rescued by the robots (one voiced by Melanie Griffith, who is also another character in the film, and one voice by Javier Bardem, although I didn't realize that until I saw his name in the credits). The ending is kind of predictable, but it feels like there's more at stake than in I, Robot, and that violent ends can and will come to any character.

 So why didn't I like it more? That is an excellent question, and I'm not convinced I can give you a good answer. Despite the fact that it does almost everything I, Robot does, but better, in part by giving is a Neill Blomkamp sheen or grime and decay over everything, there's something strangely inert about Automata. I can't quite put my finger on it, but instead of being invested, I found myself distanced, at times bored. It wasn't that you can see where the movie is going a mile away - that can be said of Horns, too, which is at least partly a fun ride - but that despite all of the effort into making the film look great, Ibáñez never quite makes the humans interesting. Banderas certainly gives it his all, but neither he nor the robots are all that gripping as characters. It's a very nice film to look at, and has a lot of things I would recommend about it, but I hesitate to recommend it over any of the better science fiction films released in 2014. And there were a lot, as you'll see when we get near the top of my list.

 There's a degree to which I enjoyed Batman: Assault on Arkham, one of the better DC Animated films that I've seen in a while. Despite the misleading title (this is, make no mistake, a Suicide Squad movie that Batman pops up in periodically), it's fast paced, sporadically funny, surprisingly violent, and pushes the PG-13 as far as they can with animated sideboob. Being that it's a Suicide Squad story - one tied to the Arkham games, and specifically Origins - the death toll is quite high, including many of the main characters. Unless you're a massive DC fan, you probably won't know many more characters beyond Harley Quinn and Deadshot. Maybe Captain Boomerang, and if you didn't, yes, that's a real thing. It has the odd distinction of having Kevin Conroy as Batman but not Mark Hamill as the Joker (although Troy Baker does a fine job) - also odd because Conroy isn't the voice of Batman in Arkham Origins, which ends with the setup for this movie. It's short, and I'm struggling to remember much more than a few offhand references to The Dark Knight and using the layout of the asylum you'll immediately recognize from the first game. So, uh, recommended?

 On that decisive note, we'll leave it here for now, but there's more. Next time, I'll move a little farther up the list, to mixed-positives that you might want to check out (with some caveats), although I have the feeling that one of them might be more contentious than anything included in this section. Until then...

Blogorium Review: Interstellar

 Christopher Nolan really does seem to be swinging for the fences with Interstellar, a very ambitious science fiction tale of human exploration beyond the reaches of our own galaxy. To push the baseball metaphor a little further, let's imagine that he's stepping to the plate with bases loaded, hoping to hit a grand slam and end the game in dramatic fashion. Instead of knocking it out of the park, Nolan ends up bouncing the ball off of the top row, resulting in a ground rule double. Two runners still score, and overall he's done a good job for everyone involved, but it's not the statement victory everybody was hoping for. Whether that's a bad thing or not is up to what expectations you bring when you sit down to watch Interstellar.

 This is going to be a review with SPOILERS because that can't be helped. Nolan's mostly cryptic trailers tell you very little about what transpires during Interstellar, and while I enjoyed the film overall, two of my biggest problems with the film happen during the third act, and neither of them are addressed at all in the advertising campaign. I would advise you to go in knowing as little as possible, so be aware that past this point I will be discussing Interstellar in its entirety.

 To quickly cover the basics, Interstellar is the story of Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a test pilot who crashed or had some sort of incident at one point that prevented him from being an astronaut. Luckily for the engineer, he also had a farm he could work on, where he lives with his father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow) and two children, Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and Murphy (MacKenzie Foy).

(For the record, Cooper goes by "Coop" and Murphy by "Murph," because I guess monosyllabic names work better in this family).

 Mom's out of the picture because we're in the near future, where dust storms have wiped out all but the most rudimentary technology and almost all plants are dead. Coop's farm is growing corn, one of the last holdouts from the new dustbowl (Okra goes early into the movie, which from where I'm sitting is no big problem). There's not a lot of discussion in the film about how this happens, and Interstellar is strictly middle-America and space, so don't ask about what densely populated cities are doing. Nolan and his brother Jonathan keep the script focused specifically on the Earth being unsustainable, but since we've abandoned wasting money on space exploration, what can we do?

 Nolan does a pretty good job of setting up the world of the future without showing too much: the beginning of the film is presented like a PBS documentary, with lots of "talking head" shots of old timers telling us what it was like when things changed. At least one of them was way more famous than I'd expected to appear at the beginning of the movie, but it turned out she was a sneaky third version of a character we'd be meeting later. They cover all sorts of things you wouldn't think of but would probably be doing if there was an inch of dust over everything all of the time, like put your dishes out on the table upside down (maybe there are no cabinets in the Midwest?). It gets the job done pretty well.

 It's a sparse world that Coop and company live in - other than lots and lots of corn, you don't really see anybody. There are no animals in the film at all, and the town he lives near seems pretty deserted early in the movie. I can't remember seeing any other students at Tom and Murph's school; only the principal and Murph's teacher, who asks Coop to tell her the Moon landing was a hoax (the Room 237'ers win in the future and textbooks are rewritten to talk us out of believing space exploration existed). The only crowd you ever really see is at a baseball game (see what I did there? hint: first paragraph), where John Lithgow complains that popcorn isn't something you should have at a baseball game. He wants hot dogs. Well guess what, corn farmer, you should be grateful people are buying your product - you know, the only available one. The players are wearing Yankees hats, but I don't know if they're supposed to be that Yankees or just some local guys. It doesn't matter, because the game is interrupted by a huge dust storm. There's not crying in baseball, and also no finishing the game because of dust delays.

 Coop brings down a drone because he's a mischievous sort, but a strange magnetic incident in the house (Murph calls it her "ghost") leads them to a secret NASA facility where his old mentor, Professor Brand (Michael Caine) is working on humanity's last chance: a ship capable of travelling through a wormhole near Saturn. How or why the wormhole got there is mentioned, but not speculated on, but NASA sent twelve astronauts into another galaxy in the hopes of finding a new home for humans. Three signals (Dr.'s Mann, Edmonds, and Miller) have come back indicating likely candidates, so Brand wants Coop to fly the ship into the wormhole and investigate. The crew of the Endurance also includes Romilly (David Gyasi), Doyle (Wes Bentley), Brand's daughter (Anne Hathaway), and TARS (Bill Irwin), a robot on loan from what's left of the military. One of the first things TARS does during takeoff it to make a joke about shooting Coop out of the airlock, just in case you didn't think Nolan was aware that Interstellar is often reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

 That, it turns out, is not a bad thing, at least for the first half of Interstellar. Once we get into space, Nolan stretches out a little bit for some big time spectacle filmmaking, and if you thought you needed to see Gravity on a big screen, Interstellar demands the largest one you can find. Also, one with comfortable chairs, because with the trailers and ads and everything else, you're looking at a three hour minimum investment. But for a lot of the movie, it's worth it. We've seen the vastness of space before, but Nolan's choice to keep the camera attached to the ship most of the time (like we see it in actual NASA footage*) adds a verisimilitude to the proceedings that helps sell the science fiction elements. McConaughey's folksy twang and a more dialed-back than usual Anne Hathaway also help in that regard. They're scientists, but they aren't science types, if that makes sense. They understand the consequences of their actions and have to weigh the adverse effects of their decisions while soaking in the fact they're in another galaxy.

 If I'm being honest, I would have liked more of the exploring the other planets instead of the part of Interstellar that you don't necessarily get from the trailers: the back and forth between Coop in space and his family on Earth. Instead of focusing on relativity and black holes, we have to keep jumping back home to see that Murph stills hasn't forgiven her father and now she's grown up and is Jessica Chastain (Tom is now Casey Affleck disguised as Ben Affleck in Argo). Murph is working with Professor Brand on how to save everybody on Earth because they haven't heard from the ship in 23-ish years (2 years to Saturn plus another 21 thanks to a disastrous turn of events on the first world they land on). It's here that the Nolan brothers introduce the theme of Interstellar that isn't about exploration: that love may be a tangible concept that transcends dimensions and we just don't understand it yet. Oddly enough, the internet's least favorite person (Anne Hathaway) delivers the best monologue about it, but it leads Interstellar down a path I maybe could have done without. The space exploration was so much more interesting, and the Earth plot isn't.

 Since we've moved to the "gripe" stage, it would be nice, just once, for writers to drop the well worn science fiction trope of "scientist from the previous mission goes insane and nearly ruins the mission." It nearly derailed Sunshine, an otherwise sober, intelligent movie that drastically shifts into a slasher film near the very end, complete with its own Freddy Krueger. The Nolans don't do anything quite so drastic, but it's clear from the moment that Dr. Mann (Matt Damon) wakes up from cryo-sleep that he's not selling Coop, Brand, or Romilly an honest bill of goods about his planet or his agenda. Not only is it predictable what he's eventually going to do, but the "turn" is almost comical as he leads Coop out to the middle of nowhere for a fistfight. Instead of, oh, I don't know, appealing to the team that losing one of the four remaining scientists tasked with keeping the human race alive is detrimental to all of them.

 This works to a certain lack of logic that is, I must admit, typically when you think carefully about Christopher Nolan films, from the Batman series to Inception, or even back to Memento. After an impassioned speech by Brand about why they should fly to Edmonds' planet instead of Mann's (they only have enough fuel to pursue one of the remaining leads), Cooper and Romilly reasonably determine that Mann's reports are better than Edmonds'. If we were to approach the same reasoning to Cooper's decision to go back to Earth on the off chance that he can disprove the "Plan A can never work" argument that conveniently surfaces right after they've revived Mann, there's no way the other three would allow him to go back through the wormhole. Ignoring the convenient timing of Murph's message, we already know that there's no guarantee of when Cooper would be returning to Earth, or even if there's enough time to come up with a plan to save humanity.

 This brings us to the second part of Interstellar that I can't quite give a pass to: after Mann tries to steal the ship and blows up part of it when he tries to open the airlock without docking, Cooper pulls off a near impossible feat of docking while the wheel is spinning (think of a sped-up version of 2001) and decides to send Brand to Edmond's planet using the black hole's gravitation to slingshot her (remember, not enough fuel). This means that Cooper and TARS have to pilot the other two shuttles and sacrifice themselves by being sucked into the black hole, where we've been continually told is a singularity they really would love to know more about. Invariably, Coop is sucked into the singularity and finds himself outside of the ship, floating in a strange, multidimensional space. Upon further investigation, he realizes he's behind the shelf in Murph's bedroom, and that (wait for it) he can slightly effect physical space around her throughout her timeline. Yes, Coop is his daughter's "ghost," and if he can communicate with her, he'll be able to save humanity where Professor Brand failed.

 I wouldn't have so much of a problem with this part of Interstellar were it not for the point when TARS chimes in over the radio and Coop begins explaining what's happening and what he's going to do. Like, out loud, literally explaining to the audience exactly what they're seeing, it's implications, and how he can communicate with grown up Murph (through a watch he left behind, using Morse Code). Nolan takes all of the ambiguity out of the sequence, and flat out tells us (through Coop) that humans evolve to the point where we can see beyond all dimensions and create the wormhole to save ourselves. I'm not spoiling anything because that's what McConaughey says, almost verbatim. At the outset of the "ghost" section, I really thought "he's not going in this direction, is he?" but by the end, when even the cheap seats are being spoon fed the plot, it was almost too much.

 And had Interstellar not regained some of its footing at the very end, when Nolan successfully pulls at the heartstrings (at least for the Grinch-like Cap'n), there's a strong possibility I would have come out hating this movie. The emotional manipulation is transparent at the end, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't, but Nolan finds a way to make Cooper meeting the old version of Murphy (Ellen Burstyn, who I did not recognize at all**) poignant enough that I could overlook the Saturn space station that looked like Elysium, dumb baseball callback, and implausible ending where Coop steals a spaceship to go find Brand. Looking back on it, I'm not sure why I'm okay with that, because when you apply logic to it, that's a really stupid way to end a movie that tries hard not to be dumb, scientifically. But that's how Christopher Nolan films are, I guess: they're fun to watch, offer astounding visual spectacle, and make about as much sense as Bazooka Joe gum in retrospect.

 The acting is solid all around, and if you're one of those people who inexplicably hate Anne Hathaway, this is not going to be on your "Exhibit A" YouTube videos. On the other hand, if you aren't down with the McConaughnissance, you'll find plenty of "all right, all right, all right" in his sometimes mumbled dialogue. I thought he was fine, but something about his drawl is always going to invite the "he's just stoned" reaction, and this won't change that. Jessica Chastain has a lot of screen time in the second half, but Murph is such a cipher of a character that she doesn't have anything to work with. Casey Affleck gets even less, and he registers about as much as Wes Bentley, who has half as much screen time and dies (hey, I said SPOILERS a long time ago). Nolan sneaks in a bunch of well known actors in small roles, well beyond the "oh, I forgot Matt Damon was in this!": David Oyelowo (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) is Murph's principal, William Devane (Payback) is a member of NASA, and for no discernible reason, Topher Grace (Predators) just appears as Murph's friend late in the film. I guess he's the doctor that she mentions can look at Tom's kids (dust clouds, as it turns out, are bad on the lungs), but he's just suddenly there, and you think, "wait, is that Topher Grace?" Yep, it is. He's in Interstellar. Who knew?

 This isn't really a negative review, but I guess it's not quite positive, either. In his filmography, I'm inclined to put Interstellar somewhere in the middle, above Insomnia but not quite near Memento. Visually, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it, but if you have persistent issues with Nolan (as much of the internet and some of the critical community do), this isn't going to win you over. All of his highs and lows are on display, and it depends on how you weigh them whether that's enough to make Interstellar worth three hours of your time. It falls short of 2001, the film it's trying to come closest to, but I give Nolan a lot of credit for trying to make a movie about ideas, even if some of them are hoary or clumsily handled. This is mass audience entertainment that isn't just going to the lowest common denominator (*coughrobotdinosaurscough*), so that counts for something.

 At this point in his career, I imagine most of you know where you fall in the Christopher Nolan spectrum. Through no clear action of his own, he's become a very divisive filmmaker, in part because in a world of increasingly skimpy Hollywood output, he's afforded carte blanche as a filmmaker and every new movie he makes is treated like an event. This seems to magnify both the positives and negatives inherent in his style of filmmaking, and reactions are equal parts "that was great!" and "the emperor has no clothes!" which enter the echo chamber of the internet and are magnified. I don't know that I would have devoted this much time to a review that was this mixed if there wasn't something to Interstellar worth talking about, good or bad. Believe me, there are films I could have reviewed that you'd probably be very surprised to hear I wasn't crazy about (Boyhood, Gone Girl), but that I'm just not sure I have much to add to the discussion. With this film, at least Nolan gave me something to talk about.

 Interstellar isn't the best science fiction film I've seen this year, but 2014 has been a surprisingly fertile year for great science fiction. I'm going to go out on a limb and say you should probably see this over Ouija, but I haven't seen Ouija so I could be totally wrong. No, wait, I couldn't. For all of it's faults, there's no way that Interstellar is not way better than Ouija. Cheap shot at Ouija? Easy target? Probably, but I don't know if Interstellar holds its own against something like Snowpiercer, but it was made with a different size audience in mind***. It may not win the game in a grandiose fashion, but Christopher Nolan delivers another solid, mostly impressive film. For some people, that's not going to be enough, but for most it's better by a long shot than most of what passes for "crowd pleasing" movies.




 * Unless that is also faked - thanks, future textbook editors. You just gave conspiracy theorists years worth of material...
** All the more confusing, because you can totally tell it's Ellen Burstyn in the "documentary" footage at the beginning. You just don't know she's Murph at that point.
*** Or not, but I guess we'll never know since the Weinstein's sat on Snowpiercer after trying to cut it to pieces, and then half-heartedly dropped it in a few theatres.

Cap'n Howdy's Best of 2013: The World's End

 I mentioned somewhere in the "middle" recap that This is the End was probably the funniest comedy I'd seen in 2013, but The World's End is the smartest. By a mile. The final chapter in Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's loosely connected "Cornetto Trilogy" may not be as consistently hilarious as Shaun of the Dead or as audaciously violent as Hot Fuzz - which is not to say it isn't still frequent with the belly laughs and contains some serious carnage - but it's easily the best thought out of the three, the most thought provoking in its themes, and the most heart felt in its relationships. If, for some reason, you haven't made The World's End a "blind buy" on DVD and Blu-Ray (I know you didn't see it theatrically, because the numbers bear that out), do it right now. I'm going to spoil the ever loving hell out of The World's End, and I'd rather you see it without knowing where the movie is going.

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 I'm Warning You! SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

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 Back? Wasn't that great? Yes, it was. If you just went ahead and skipped to the next paragraph, shame on you. I told you to watch it and you didn't, and now you're just going to have to see it knowing everything. But because you cheated, you'll be able to watch The World's End armed with some of the cleverly hidden easter eggs and thematic set-ups and payoffs that come from seeing it more than once. And you'll be seeing it more than once, cheater.

Okay, so here's a quick recap for the cheater: Gary King (Simon Pegg) is one of those guys who never quite got over the "glory days" of high school. In fact, his adult life is so underwhelming that the cajoles his old friends Oliver "O-Man" Chamberlain (Martin Freeman), Steven Prince (Paddy Considine), Peter Page (Eddie Marsdan), an Andy Knightley (Nick Frost) to join him in reliving a pub crawl they started, but never finished: The Golden Mile in their hometown of Newton Haven. The guys don't want to do it, but some stretching of the truth gets them all back in "The Beast" (Gary's car from high school), and they find themselves being dragged along by the ne'er do well as they try to finish a pint at The First Post, The Old Familiar, The Famous Cock, The Cross Hands, The Good Companions, The Trusty Servant, The Two-Headed Dog, The Mermaid, The Beehive, The King's Head, The Hole in the Wall, and finally, The World's End. But Newton Haven isn't the way they remembered it, at all. With only Oliver's sister Sam (Rosamund Pike) to help them, but guys are in for a long night, one they'll be lucky to survive, let alone drink through.

There are many place I could start with The World's End, but let's deal with the science fiction element that makes it part of the "Cornetto Trilogy" (Zombie movie, Cop Movie, Science Fiction Movie). I had the good fortune of seeing The World's End with a friend of mine who didn't know anything beyond the Golden Mile premise, so when the film takes a turn while Gary's in the bathroom, it caught him completely off guard. And that turn? Well, it's robots.

  Robots. Yep, getting that right out there, even though the replicants (?) don't like being called "robots," and the aliens behind the machines replacing humans in Newton Haven have (arguably) the most peaceful take-over planned in all of science fiction film. But it's not to be, of course, because humanity has a right to want not to be civilized in the galactic picture. In that way, one could argue that The World's End is a middle finger from mankind to the end of The Day the Earth Stood Still, with roughly the consequences that Klaatu promised as a result. It is, in essence, the pawns rebelling against a benevolent world-creator (well, mostly benevolent - all of the characters replaced by robots are fertilizer, which seems a little harsh) to the point that the creator (literally) says "Oh, fuck it."

 What's so very impressive about The World's End is how well structured Wright and Pegg's screenplay is. Like Shaun of the Dead, they lay out the entire story in the prologue, and pack in a dozen other small details that are referenced so quickly you wouldn't be faulted for missing them the first time around. On top of that, not only do all of the names and signs of the bar hint at what's going to happen inside (and have corresponding numbers to the phases of the Golden Mile hidden somewhere), they also reference, in varying ways, the twelve steps of recovery that we don't exactly know Gary is going through until near the end of the film. The last one isn't really covered in the "Signs and Omens" extras on the disc, which will help you if you don't have time to watch The World's End three more times this weekend, but came from another friend of mine who was in a similar situation to Gary.

 And, oh yeah, it's very funny. Put aside the densely layered script, the folding back on itself, the metaphysical subtext of humanity in the universe, and you still have a laugh out loud comedy. I love that Frost and Pegg switched character types for The World's End: Frost the one who has it together and doesn't trust Pegg, the perpetual loser who pushes his likability to the very limits over and over again. If the "Three Musketeers" scene in the trailer made you chuckle, wait until you see how they alter the phrase "rob Peter to pay Paul" and the shit-eating grin that Gary closes the scene with.

 However, it's not Pegg or Frost, or even Freeman who walks away the VIP - it's Paddy Considine. Admittedly, I'd seen less of him than Freeman, Marsdan, Pegg, Frost, and even Rosamund Pike, but he has some of the best lines, many of the best reactions, and ends up with the most to do in the story. The World's End is centrally about the fractured relationship between Gary and Andy, and the event that drove them apart, but Steven's longtime crush on Sam is the heart of the movie. I keeps Andy and Gary alive in the end, and Steven is the final vote that saves humanity (or dooms them, depending on your reading of things).

 That, in turn, brings us to the ending, which turns The World's End from science fiction film to my second favorite sub-genre (behind anthologies): Post-Apocalyptic Cinema. This seems to be a point of contention for some people, because it's such an abrupt left turn for the movie, but thematically it fits perfectly with what everybody in the story wants. Gary gets the gang back, Andy's with his family, Steven and Sam are together, Robot Oliver is basically the same (with a Wilson-esque head), and Robot Peter is pretty much where he started. Yes, humanity is without technology, and communication across long distances is almost impossible (until Kevin Costner comes to the rescue, we can assume), but they seem happy. Humanity continues, on their own terms.

 I'd like to mention that while I wasn't impressed with the characters in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the staging and filming of fight choreography that Wright honed in making that film pay off in spades during The World's End. The fight scenes (and there are a few) are dynamic, with fluid camera work that manages to shift from one character to the next without ever losing a sense of geography in the (basically identical) pubs. The poor robots and their blue blood (?) are torn asunder, bashed, smashed, cracked, and beaten to pieces repeatedly, and Wright covers it all in a way that might not have been possible had he not made Scott Pilgrim. So bully for him.

 Even though we're neck deep in spoiler territory, I'm not going to tell our cheaters about the surprise characters in the film. I will say that in keeping with the tradition started in Hot Fuzz, there's another James Bond in the film, but I won't say who, nor will I tell you where the other cast members from earlier "Cornetto" entries appear, although most of them do. The World's End, of the three films, benefits the most from re-watching, and is an easy call to put in when you have friends over. Like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, it didn't light the box office up, which is a shame, but since I gave Scott Pilgrim fans so much grief for saying the same thing, I won't lament it. Let's hope it has a long life on home video, just as its predecessors have. King Gary would want it that way.

Blogorium Review: Pacific Rim

 So by now you've heard of this "Pacific Rim" movie; you probably didn't see it, but you've heard of it - I think I can count on one hand the number of people I know who saw it, including me. That's okay, because I totally get why you didn't go see it, and I kind of sympathize. You see, the Cap'n was torn about seeing Pacific Rim myself (tense switch!). Since you've heard everybody else's opinion, I guess you can hear my rationale and then maybe I'll talk about the movie. But it was pretty good if you aren't feeling patient (but be patient. C'mon.)

 On the one hand, I've seen every one of Guillermo del Toro's movies, and really liked to loved most of them. By most, I mean that some of the more "mainstream" joints aren't my favorites. I like Hellboy a lot, but I don't love it. I really don't like Hellboy II: The Golden Army. I enjoy Blade II and it's definitely better than Blade and Blade Trinity, but it's not my "go to" movie in his collection. If I'm being honest, I'm much more inclined to sit down with one of the more intimate, "smaller" films like The Devil's Backbone and Cronos. Pan's Labyrinth too, but I can't honestly call that a "small" movie. Maybe less epic in scope than Hellboy, right?

 Even though I don't enjoy Hellboy II, it didn't stop me from seeing it in theaters, just like I did with Hellboy. I support Guillermo del Toro whenever I can because he brings a distinctive vision to his films and is fond of fully fleshed out worlds, well beyond what happens in the direct narrative. When possible, I try to support the films he produces, like The Orphanage (pretty, pretty good) or Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (pretty, pretty okay) - I haven't seen Mama yet, but I'll get around to sooner or later.

 The problem is that I don't really care about "Giant Robot" movies. I didn't see the Transformers movies, and while I often cite my polite disagreement with Mr. Michael Bay about what constitutes a "movie," I also never really gave a shit about the source material. I had a few Transformers, including the one that was a boombox, but... eh. My tolerance level for robots beating each other up is pretty much however much of Robot Jox is left on the Sci-Fi Channel late at night*.

 As much as I'd like to pretend this wasn't the case, kaiju movies are also not really my bag. I like the first Gojira movie, but not so much the sequels and definitely not Godzilla 2000 or Final Wars or the Matthew Broderick one. I guess I kinda liked Mothra and Gamera  and maybe Destroy All Monsters! but I'm not a devotee to this stuff. That's more of my brother's wheelhouse. In fact, he should probably review Pacific Rim for you guys, but since he's not here, I'll do it.

 So you know my handicaps going in: will watch any Guillermo del Toro joint, but don't care about giant robots and am politely ambivalent towards kaiju. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'm so ambivalent that on this very blog I mistakenly used the term "gaijin" ("non-Japanese" / "alien") interchangeably with "kaiju" ("giant monste"r?) because I didn't realize the difference. Sorry, astute readers. That must have been very confusing. Anyway, my desire to support the director (and co-writer) did win out over the non-appeal of giant robots fighting kaiju. And you know what? It's a pretty good movie.


  While I never saw the Transformers movies, I do remember hearing how fucking stupid they were from people I did know who still saw all three of them. This (and Robot Jox, and let's be honest, Real Steel) confirmed my theory that Germans Love David Hasselhoff... wait, no... that movies with giant robots fighting each other or monsters is just going to be inherently moronic. And if I'm going to watch inherently moronic, I can do it with more entertaining films.

 Luckily, Guillermo del Toro didn't get that memo, so he approaches Pacific Rim from a non-sarcastic direction, leaving irony behind and just focusing on building a world where giant monsters come up through the pacific ocean via a "breach" and start destroying things. How would we adapt? Would be build giant robots to fight these monsters? Sure, why not? Would it work? Pretty well, at first. Would we get complacent because said monsters are losing? Probably.

 That's the prologue to the film, which I appreciate - 99% of the time in this modern world of "franchise building" in movies, the first ten minutes would be the entire movie. They would intentionally withhold information or set things up with no intention of paying them off in the two hours of THIS movie, but instead save it for the inevitable sequel. Not when del Toro and co-writer Travis Beacham are making the movie - they give you some well designed exposition dump and then drop us into the height of humanity's hubris.

 We meet our protagonist, Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam) and his brother what's his face (Diego Klattenhoff) as they take their Jaeger (giant robot), Gypsy Danger, out for a stroll around the coast of Alaska. SPOILER ALERT FOR THE FIRST FIFTEEN MINUTES: They then get their asses handed to them by a kaiju who also kills what's his face and leaves Raleigh in a bad way.

 (Note: I had to look up the name of the character that Hunnam was playing because I couldn't remember it. Honestly I don't remember hearing it much because, let's be honest, it's a pretty stupid name)

 We jump forward five or six years when the governments have given up on Jaegers to defend us from kaiju (who get designations not unlike hurricanes: category 4, etc). Instead they're going to just build huge walls and hope that does the trick, until one of the kaiju cuts right through one in Sydney ("like butter") and luckily the Ausrtailan Jaeger manages to beat it to death. This gives Stacker Penetcost (Idris Elba - seriously, that was his character's name?) his one chance to throw a last ditch effort to use Jaegers and bombs to close the breach once and for all, so you know he's going to have to recruit Raleigh out of retirement.

 And just describing that sounds stupid. But somehow when you watch Pacific Rim, the inherent silliness of the plot just makes sense. They explain "drifting" - the process two Jaeger pilots use to control the machine in tandem - well enough that you buy it would kill someone to do it alone. Basically it amounts to a mind meld but if the connection is strong enough they can work in unison, so lines like "I'm in you brain, remember?" don't feel so dumb as they do out of context, like in this review.

 Look, I'm doing a bad job of not making Pacific Rim sound as dumb as you thought it did when you decided not to see it, but it's really a lot of fun to watch and not just because "Robot punch Monster! Yay!" I'm sure that on some level, Pacific Rim does appeal to our "Lizard Brain" sensibilities, but del Toro also includes all of his favorite fetishes in the film, like Hannibal Chau (Ron Perlman), who deals in kaiju body parts on the black market. Or the dueling scientists (played by Torchwood's Burn Gorman and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Charlie Day) who should just be comic relief but do actually impact the storyline in important ways. Day's subplot, in fact, is probably more interesting that just watching Jaegers filled with Chinese, Russian, and Australian stereotypes punch kaijus.

 The main event is still seeing how Gypsy Danger gets back in action and how Raleigh gets his groove back with the help of his new co-pilot, Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), who has a similarly traumatic experience in her life, one that may or may not include a crab kaiju and a mentor character who plays a prominent role in the film with a name that rhymes with Packer Spentaflossed. I will say that the fights deliver, are mostly coherent, and more importantly don't feel like CGI for 20 minutes at a time, which they almost have to be. I will fully admit to being totally invested in the fight between Gypsy Danger and 2 kaiju in Hong Kong, right up to and including the "no way they put that weapon in there!" moment.

 The characters are, by and large, not developed or at best wafer thin, but they serve the story well. At least one of two of them get moments that give you some perspective on why they do what they do, and some of them even change a little bit during the story. Honestly, I think I liked Day's Dr. Newton Geiszler the most, followed closely by Hannibal Chau (who explains why he chose that name), which works out because they're on-screen together for a healthy chunk in the middle of the film. I even cared about Mako's back story and liked that she's as much - if not more - of a liability than Raleigh is inside of Gypsy Danger. The ending was satisfying, and despite it being reasonably well wrapped up, could be okay with more adventures in this world.

 Which is a shame, because there's no way that's going to happen. Why? Because people thought "wow, that looks like a stupid movie" and went to see Grown Ups 2 instead. Sometimes I sarcastically point out that Box Office Numbers are the C.R.E.A.M. of Studio Executives lives, but in this case it's probably true. To them, this movie failed only slightly less than The Lone Ranger, and it gives them a rationale to argue that Guillermo del Toro is better suited to make "smaller, " "art house" fare that critics love and nobody loses millions of dollars on, rightly or wrongly.

 And that's fine, because as we've established, I REALLY like those movies. But I wouldn't have minded seeing what del Toro's version of The Hobbit looked like, and I desperately wanted somebody to give him the chance to make a big budgeted, hard R version of At the Mountains of Madness. He couldn't convince Universal to give him the money to do it even with Tom Cruise starring and James Cameron producing, so the implied "failure" of Pacific Rim isn't going to bolster his case. That kinda sucks, if you ask me. And you don't have a choice because I'm the one writing this.

 Thanks for sticking it out to the end, by the way. I'm sure some people left during the preamble, but you didn't. So thanks for that. You should go see Pacific Rim, because I bet you'd enjoy it. I mean, before long it'll be at the $2 theater which will no doubt make your decision easier, but I implore you to check it out. It's much better than you assumed it would be, and probably better than I thought it might be. I'm not even going to use the "it's not perfect" qualifier because perfect movies are pretty hard to come by as it is, and that shouldn't diminish the really damn good ones by comparison.

 So go see Pacific Rim - if you already saw the Transformers movie, you owe your brain that much. If you haven't seen a Transformers move - kudos to you! Go see Pacific Rim to celebrate it! 



 * Wait... they changed the Sci-Fi Channel? To what? You mean where all those shitty "Crocappotamus vs Ninja Squirrel" movies play? Bummer.

Summer Fest 5 (Day One): Starcrash

 Starcrash (which I keep thinking I need to separate into two words) is one of those knock-offs of Star Wars that you'd like to pretend Roger Corman would be doing even if George Lucas hadn't struck box office gold two years earlier. In fact, I went so far as to "pretend" that Starcrash clearly wasn't a rip-off of "a galaxy far, far away" until I looked at the tagline for the film, one that describes it thusly:

 "Star Wars meets Barbarella in the ultimate inter-galactic adventure!"

 So never mind, let's stop pretending that Starcrash (and for that matter, Battle Beyond the Stars) is anything but a crass attempt by a legendary B-movie producer to cash in on a more popular film. It's not as though Corman was the only guy trying to make a buck off of a "space adventure" film in the late 1970s / early 1980s, he just does it so transparently that you can't even pretend Starcrash is its own movie devoid of the obvious comparisons.

 In fairness, I should point out that Roger Corman didn't direct Starcrash - that distinction belongs to Luigi Cozzi (Contamination, The Killer Must Kill Again), under the pseudonym "Lewis Coates." I suppose it's meant to hide the fact that this is an Italian co-production, although there's a degree of suspicious dubbing mixed throughout the film (that, or Shout Factory's Blu-Ray goes out of sync repeatedly during scenes with very specific actors).

The "Barbarella" component of the film comes, I suppose, from Caroline Munro, who plays Stella Star, one half of a.... uh... smuggling (?) duo of space ne'er do wells. Alongside Acton (Marjoe Gortner), her robot (?) friend, Stella cruises around the galaxy until she's captured by bounty hunter Thor (Robert Tessier) and robot policeman Robocop "L" (or, according to IMDB, "Elle"). They're tried and sentenced to separate prisons, which is really an excuse for Munro to change one skimpy bikini out for another (it really seems inappropriate for hauling around giant balls of radium, but what do I know?), something she'll continue to do for most of Starcrash.

 It's not really important why, but Stella manages to kill all of the prisoners AND guards in her prison while escaping, and then inadvertently destroys the prison itself only to be picked up by L and Thor. They've come to release her so that she and Acton can help the Emperor (Christopher Plummer) to defeat the evil Count Zarth Arn (Maniac's Joe Spinell). If they have time, they should also rescue the Emperor's son. First, they'll need to travel to the "haunted worlds" in order to find his secret weapon, which is really an excuse to visit different planets with different "menaces."

 For example, there's the planet of the Amazon Warriors, the Ice Planet, the Planet of the Cavemen, and finally some other planet where the secret weapon is. Or maybe that's the cavemen one... look, the movie doesn't make a sustained impression, I'm afraid. Mostly they serve the purpose of having cheesy fight scenes, to demonstrate some adequate stop motion animation, or to freeze L and Stella Star for the express purpose of thawing her out very slowly. It's nice to know that the defrosting machine conveniently placed in the middle of the ship can also restore her hair to optimal volume despite being covered in something that loosely fits the definition of "ice."

 In one of Starcrash's many "oh, now you're telling us this?" moments, we learn that Acton knew which planet the weapon was on THE ENTIRE TIME but neglected to tell Stella Star this. I think he just got a kick out of hearing L complain about how nervous everything makes him. He's really a pretty poorly programmed Robot Space Cop, but at least they got that "good ol' country" accent right.

 Given provocation, I could go on for days about the things in Starcrash that made us scratch our heads while watching this movie, but instead I'd like to focus on the extended cameo of Christopher Plummer. You've probably heard the phrase "phoning it in" when referring to an actor who is clearly doing a movie because he owes somebody a favor or was caught doing something he shouldn't, but Plummer really takes it to a new level.

 Apparently inspired by the stories of Marlon Brando filming The Godfather*, Plummer seems to have asked for his lines to be written on cue cards, often placed above eye level or well above the camera. He's constantly looking around at nothing, delivering a line, pausing, and then looking around again. As Starcrash progresses, it seems like having more than one line per cue card was too much for Baron Von Trapp, so he delivers one line, then looks around aimlessly until he finds the next cue card, and then reads that one. Sometimes he looks directly into the camera.

 My favorite moment is when Plummer, as a hologram recruiting Stella Star and Acton, finishes a monologue, begins to walk away, and then does a one-quarter turn back to our heroes to finish a thought. As a hologram.

He also happens to have the kind of useful weapon that could, oh,, you know, prevent THE ENTIRE FINAL BATTLE OF THE MOVIE - the ability TO STOP TIME. But he only uses it to help our heroes (and himself) escape the Count's weapon when he shows up to what is clearly a trap. He tells them "you don't become Emperor without having a few tricks up your sleeve" or something to that effect, and then freezes time on the entire planet so that they can return to his ship before it explodes.

 His son isn't much brighter, but he is David Hasselfhoff, in a third act reveal (although, if you're paying attention, you know it's the Emperor's son because he's the only hero we've been introduced to since Stella Star and company left the Emperor's ship). When Stella is captured by the cavemen (who, no joke, say "ooga booga"), the Hoff appears with a golden helmet that shoots lasers to scare them off. When he and Stella escape after they return (and in greater numbers), he promptly THROWS THE HELMET AWAY and picks up a club to fight them with. Fortunately, Acton has a lighsaber</.s> laser blade, so the fight is much shorter.

 Pretending that Starcrash is some hidden gem from the post-Star Wars era is not something you're likely to see me do (ever), but I'll admit it has its dumb charms. The film is too long and unnecessarily episodic for such a flimsy narrative, and the acting is not great, but it's watchable. You'll have a hard time not filling in the Star Wars lines that Starcrash sets up but tries very hard not to get caught copying, and with properly lowered expectations, I'd daresay you might enjoy the experience. I'm sure Roger Corman enjoyed the money I gave him to buy Starcrash on Blu-Ray, something which raised more than a few eyebrows at Summer Fest**.

 Up next, Miami Connection, a movie with a story more compelling than anything on-screen, but my goodness what ends up on-screen is something special indeed...


* Pure, but not unfounded conjecture, based on the available evidence onscreen.
** By that I mean the "why is Starcrash on Blu-Ray" eyebrow raising.

Horror Fest VII Day One: The Boogens and Moontrap

 Forgive the shortness of the following reviews but here at Blogorium headquarters it's getting a little late... okay, much later than that to be honest, and I don't have much to add to The Boogens beyond what I wrote here and here.

 Moontrap, well, let's just say that there's not much that ever needs to be said about that movie, but I'll give it the old college try.

 But first, a few random thoughts on The Boogens: I watched it tonight with two people who hadn't seen the film before, hadn't ever heard of it, and most importantly didn't know what a Boogens looks like (yes, I am assuming that since the old man just calls them Boogens that the singular is also Boogens and if necessary the plural is Boogenses). They both confirmed what I and everybody who ever reviewed this film firmly believes: that if you knew what the creatures looked like at any point before the end of the film, you wouldn't be able to pay attention to the story at all. You'd be too busy waiting for the next time you saw a Boogens, so you could laugh at it (or, as they agreed, think it looks kind of adorable).

 While it's a long held belief in horror that the less you see of the monster, the more effective the film is (Alien, Jaws, Halloween), The Boogens relies entirely on the fact that it's creature is so goofy looking that there's no way to show it before the very end of the film. Without knowing that your creature is a half turtle / half octopus with saber-tooth tiger incisors, you're able to be vaguely invested in the story of Mark, Roger, Trish, and Jessica. Even Tiger, the stupid dog that everybody hates (including the main characters) has some level of empathy when he (SPOILER) gets it.

 Also, because I don't think I mentioned it last time, we spend a while trying to suss out where Silver City, Colorado was (because it doesn't exist and Trish would have to drive four hours to get back to Denver if they were in Silver City, New Mexico - the closest actual place) but the movie was film in Park City, Utah. I've mentioned the fact that The Boogens feels like a porno with all of the sex scenes removed (or tamed down) but it was nice to have someone else point out that so many parts of the movie have dialogue that sounds like a set-up for getting down only to cut to the next scene. I still contend that there's a This Ain't The Boogens: A XXX Parody out there somewhere.

 Finally, Rebecca Balding (Trish) was also in The Silent Scream, and Anne-Marie Martin (Jessica) was in Prom Night, Halloween II, The Young Ones, and most importantly, Sledge Hammer. Fred McCarren (Mark), in addition to looking like a long lost Duplass brother, was in Xanadu, and Jeff Harlan (Roger) was in Auto Focus and did voic-eover work for Batman Beyond. Jon Lormer had quite a prolific career doing television and film before playing Greenwalt, the old man (actual credit) in The Boogens, but chances are you either remember him as Professor Dactyl on Batman or as the old man who wants his birthday cake in Creepshow. Clearly the former over the latter.

 Okay so I had a lot more to say about The Boogens than I thought I would, which is good because Moontrap is pretty terrible. Well, by "pretty" I mean "really" and by "terrible" I mean "borderline unwatchable." While it's not uncommon to have conversations during the movie, I rarely get into a long discussion of the relative merits of Prometheus at the expense of the film at hand. Sure enough, we realized that we'd been ignoring Moontrap and, little to our surprise, we hadn't missed a thing.

 Written by Tex Ragsdale (which I assumed was a pseudonym for the person who really wrote this and realized how horrible it was, but apparently it's not) and directed by Robert Dyke (who is a real person that worked on miniatures for Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn), Moontrap is the nonsensical story of Colonel Jason Grant (Walter Koenig) and his flight partner Ray Tanner (Bruce Campbell) - nicknamed "Einstein" and "The Penetrator," if you were curious - two NASA pilots is the presumably near-future that come across a derelict spacecraft in Earth's orbit. It's from the moon, specifically the "Prometheus Crater" (you can see how the discussion started, I hope), and contain the corpse of a 14,000 year old mummified human astronaut, as well as a pod housing a robot. The robot escapes the NASA underground lab and uses the corpse to become a Cylon knock-off (that, or if you prefer, something the modern Battlestar Galactica ripped off in their Centurion design) that Jason and Ray help destroy.

 Ray and Jason are then allowed to fly to the moon to discover the origin of this ship, where they find a giant pyramid and a preserved woman named Mera (Leigh Lombardi) who doesn't speak English or understand why two astronauts are carrying space Uzis, but doesn't really seem to care and joins them. The robots, in the meantime, steal their lunar lander, kill Ray, and leave Jason alone to have sex with Mera in his handy space igloo, before capturing them and taking them on their ship to Earth to unleash an army of killer robots that will assimilate humanity and wipe them out.

 Wait... maybe I'm getting this all wrong. Maybe Prometheus and Battlestar Galactica ripped off Moontrap, and not only that but Tex Ragsdale and Robert Dyke beat Star Trek: The Next Generation to the punch with the whole "Borg" thing. Or maybe Moontrap is a sloppy mess of screenwriting where one plot point rarely leads to another, characters do next to nothing that makes sense, and depending on whether the budget can handle it or not, there is or is not sound in space. There is definitely Walter Koenig voice-over that's used in order to trick us into thinking he's saying something while floating around the derelict ship. I know that much, because his mouth isn't moving but he's clearly addressing Ray and not the audience.

 We watched Moontrap because of a request, and I like to entertain requests when possible, but this certainly was just as bad as I remembered it being. Maybe worse.

Spoiler for the Day: Jason X

 Super Jason and Brodski fight while falling into Earth 2's atmosphere, which burns both of them up. Jason's mask lands in Camp Crystal Lake 2, closing out the film.

Tomorrow's Spoiler for the Day: Freddy vs. Jason

Robots and Plants, Oh My!

Things have not progressed well in finding our mystery science-fiction film. I tried to search the "plot" section of IMDB, to no avail. I've pored through a dozen or so sci-fi related websites that claim to list "every movie with robots ever!", to find nothing. I even plugged the following sentence into Google:

"low budget space movie with robot that turns astronauts into space zombies"

Alas, the Cap'n found nothing. No trace of this movie anywhere. If I had not seen it with my own eyes and did not have documentation (photos by Major Tom, to give belated credit where it's due) one could reasonably convince me that no such film ever existed. But it does. I know it does, and it's alternately comforting and baffling that it's so hard to identify a movie in the age of information.

But seriously, how could you not want to find out the movie responsible for these images?



Please help. I'd love to share the video, but it's so hard to follow the movie without our inane commentary, but if it comes to that, I will put that up if it helps you identify the film.

---

My brain and throat are unpleasant, so it's just about time for the best "From the Vault" you could ever hope for...

See, last year I promised not to mention M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening on the Blogorium for a year, and that year is up. For those of you who are intimately familiar with my coverage of The Happening, I hope you enjoyed the sabbatical.

For those of you who aren't aware of my unique relationship to Night's first "R" rated film, I happily re-present the first of two reviews for The Happening. Tomorrow I'll post the second review. One of them is the absolute truth, and the other is a total lie. I'll leave it up to you to figure it out.

Blogorium Review: The Happening

There's a common expression on the interweb for a person who posts a positive review of a movie almost everyone else is panning: PLANT!

Typically, this is to imply that the person who gives the thumbs up to something universally reviled is actually an employee of the studio releasing the movie; hence, their review is "planted" on sites like CHUD or Aint It Cool in order to swing the negative trend.

It's particularly fitting that I'm likely to be hit with "plant!" for what I'm about to write, considering that the menace of M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening may or may not also be leafy and green. Moreover, I do not work for or know anyone at 20th Century Fox, and while it's going to be an uphill battle convincing you, I really feel like The Happening is the victim of "piling on".

As you probably noticed in the last few days, I was in no way interested in seeing The Happening: as a person who was not a fan of Signs and didn't bother seeing Lady in the Water or The Village, I had pretty much given up on M. Night and was buying into the sea of negative press his new movie was getting. Could an R rating actually make the difference for a guy who had apparently lost all sense of storytelling?

Well, I don't know about the R rating, but The Happening is waaaaaaayyyyy better than you've been hearing. I might go so far as to say it was amazing, but then you'd think I was drinking the Kool Aid or something. The catch is that this movie is being advertised as this sort of Hitchcockian thriller, ala The Birds or something like that, and The Happening isn't that at all.

Going in to this The Happening, you should probably have movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers on the brain, because that's what Night is doing here. The Happening is a hyper-stylized film, and it seems like most of the reviews are missing that. Yes, everyone stands around like a deer in the headlights and delivers lines like they weren't just in the scene preceding this one, but it's uniformly corny. It's not like one person is acting like people normally do in this movie; everyone is acting like they're out of a 1950s "Red Scare" science fiction film. You might also want to consider Soylent Green.

I can honestly say I sat riveted through the whole film, as did Daniel and Leckie. Even though there's no M. Night "twist", he finds ways to keep the menace creepy and (largely) unseen. The plant angle is pretty much where the film goes, but they keep other possibilities floating around so that you have options to follow. I also dug little moments and, no pun intended, signs like the one that reads "You Deserve This" on a real estate billboard.

The mass suicides are effective mostly because Night drops you right in on them. The world is pretty much exactly like the one we recognize, and right off the bat crazy shit starts happening. It would be like if Steven Spielberg cut the awkward opening off of War of the Worlds and just got to business wiping out people. The R rating may be less for the stuff you've seen in the trailer and more about the two brutal shotgun killings (of kids, no less) and the "lion" scene.

Well, I know you aren't going to believe me, because everyone else is hating on the film. That's fair: if they want to beat up on Shyamalan because that's the path of least resistance, so be it. I'll stand up proudly and recommend all of you see it and judge for yourselves. It's the only way you'll know for sure. Feel free to ask for more information. I promise you I did see it and I could not turn away.

Help Me, Blogorium Readers! You're My Only Hope!

It's nice to know that even in the digital age, where almost everything is instantly available on disc or downloadable, cross-referenced on 400 different websites and immediately recognizable to millions, that sometimes the unexpected can happen. Take last night, for instance, when I was showing off some of the scripts available for PlayOn, software that streams video from your computer to your PS3.

There's one script devoted to programs from around the world, and if you go digging into the United States channel, you'll find one called Sci-Fi Movie Channel - which is not to be mistaken for the SyFy Channel - that shows random, arcane, and forgotten science fiction movies most of us didn't know existed. What's even better, is that in the age of instant information, the fact that there are no commercial breaks or bumpers to indicate what you're watching means you're going to stumble across movies you have never seen and may never see again without knowing what the movie is.

Considering that I genuinely believed that possibility to be lost, it was quite a discovery last night for me, Nathan, and Major Tom to find a movie none of us had ever heard of or seen before. That, however, is also a problem. A BIG problem.

See, this movie is an instant, no-questions-guaranteed-show for Bad Movie Night. This little ditty (which we're placing somewhere in the early 70s) has it all: a pathetically low budget, awkward shot composition, barely lit outdoor footage, and bad dubbing of English speaking actors.

The plot (so far as we can surmise) has something to do with an expedition into space by one or more ships. The ship that landed (we think) ends up on some planet where a Giant Robot is terrorizing some half naked dudes who are painted green and their telepathic leader who leave in an irradiated city and nearby cave. After the astronauts meet the robot and destroy it with a slingshot (seriously), the planet starts "crumbling", so we assumed it was almost over. But not, once they got back on the ship, all of the people the robot killed came back to life as Space Zombies (we think) and then it kept going. It was late, and we had to call it a night.

But I NEED to know what this movie is. We watched about half an hour (or more) of this ridiculous movie, which is further than we ever got into Vampire Men of the Lost Planet, and despite its craposity, the movie was immensely enjoyable and never dull. Stupid? Oh yes. Cheap? Uh huh. Nonsensical? Oh, you bet! But we couldn't stick around on the off-chance the credits had the title anywhere, so we have NO IDEA what this movie is called. And I want to know so I can share it with all of you.

There's no Channel referent, so I can't find it that way. The plot is too convoluted to describe, so Google's not going to help. So I'm turning to you, oh readers of infinitely more time and resources than the Cap'n. Please help me find this movie and I'll make it worth your while.

I'm including twenty screen-grabs (we took pictures and recorded some video, which has our snarky commentary, which I may share down the line). If they help you in any way, I'll be ever so grateful. Help this "cult" film grow from a cult of three outward and outward. If this movie is on DVD I want to know it, so I can buy it. You must see this, and I won't rest until we locate it!