Blogorium Review: Jurassic World

 Jurassic World is a pretty good movie and a great example of corporate filmmaking at its best. That is to say that it reflects the kind of movie that fulfills all quadrants, offends nobody, and coasts along on enough charm that it does not bore or annoy audiences. Just don't think to hard about it, and you'll be just fine. It's weird, because I feel strange saying that I thought it was enjoyable. I've watched the Screen Junkies debate and I watched Red Letter Media's Half in the Bag review, and to be perfectly honest, I can't mount a defense of any of the problems raised about Jurassic World. The characters are barely one note, the contrivances and narrative conveniences are at time embarrassing, and yeah, there are plot holes you could drive a truck through. I'm not even going to try to defend the movie from the type of criticisms I'd normally hold it accountable for. I can't. By the same token, I've tried to talk myself out of the fact that I did enjoy it, and it's not sticking.

 Let's get the elephant out of the room right away: I don't view Jurassic Park with rose colored glasses. I feel like that's important to point out, because I didn't watch Jurassic World through the lens of nostalgia. I think Jurassic Park has some fun moments, mostly the suspenseful ones, but have always felt like most of the characters are broadly drawn cartoons who dress in such a way that you can easily tell their toys apart. I'm the weird person who still kinda likes the mostly terrible The Lost World, even though I just watched it again, and yeah, it's still pretty bad. The "Spielberg does Godzilla" part still makes me laugh, because it's such a stupid, audacious way to close out that movie. But I didn't really care about seeing Jurassic World. I wasn't interested at all, and when I did see it, my thought process was "what the hell, I just watched The Lost World yesterday, and it can't be worse than Jurassic Park III." And it's not. Unlike just about every review, I'm not going to say that Jurassic World is better than the sequels but not as good as Jurassic Park, because I don't hold the first one in the same standard as most people. Bear that in mind as we move forward, because your mileage may vary.

 For starters, I guess I do like the premise: Ingen finally got its shit together and John Hammond found somebody to reopen the park. His name is Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), and he's immediately not like the usual sleazy businessmen you've seen in the other Jurassic movies. He's one of those carefree billionaires who is managing the money and taking care of Hammond's vision, but mostly just wants to show off that he's almost finished his helicopter lessons. He leaves the actual running of the redubbed "Jurassic World" to Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), who is a numbers, spreadsheet type that thinks of the dinosaurs as "assets" and is concerned about the bottom line and appeasing investors. In other words, the character we're probably not going to like but since she's a main character, she'll eventually see the error of her ways, right? Eh... maybe not so much. Back to that later. Claire is supposed to be hanging out with her sister (Judy Greer)'s kids, but she doesn't have time and foists precocious Gray (Ty Simpkins) and moody teen Zach (Nick Robinson) on her assistant Zara (Katie McGrath). They have VIP passes, so they can go anywhere which is a good way for us to see the park. It beats seeing the control room, which is where comic relief audience nostalgia surrogate Lowery (Jake Johnson) works. (He bought a Jurassic Park t-shirt on Ebay and has dinosaur toys on his work station).

 Anyway, nobody cares about the characters, because there's a new dinosaur. Like, a new, genetically modified dinosaur that never existed, and as dumb as Indominus Rex ends up being a lot of the time, but reason for her existence is actually a pretty sound one. In the universe of Jurassic World, the park reopened two years after Jurassic Park (well, actually they completely rebuilt it, as we find out) and it's been a tourist attraction with a cruise ship that takes people to Isla Nublar every day since then. Claire is explaining to investors from Verizon (no, really) that after twenty years, the allure of dinosaurs has started fading, and they want something new. Audiences want something they've never seen, something scary, so Dr. Wu (JP alum BD Wong) cooked up the I-Rex, a mystery hybrid that has super powers. We'll also come back to the convenient super powers later. The reasoning behind creating the new dinosaur plays like a commentary on moviegoers today. I mean, the novelty of seeing dinosaurs in a movie has pretty much worn off, so lets make them bigger stronger faster scarier. More CGI. More mayhem. Jurassic World the movie is the proof that Claire the character isn't wrong: people went in droves to see it.

 Indominus has been raised in her paddock, alone ever since she ate her sibling, and Masrani wants Claire to have ex-military consultant Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) to check it for security before the consider opening it to the public. Claire doesn't like that because of course they went on a date when he started working there and of course it didn't work out because she's into designing itineraries and he's into the Matt Foley school of living life. But he's Chris Pratt so we mostly like him and he's capable and manly and cracks jokes, etc. He cares about the dinosaurs and has raised a pack of Velociraptors from birth and is their alpha. Just in case we don't get that, their names are Echo, Delta, Charlie, and, uh, Blue. I guess maybe they thought audiences might not understand why a raptor was named "Bravo" or maybe the network said they couldn't use it, so it has blue markings instead.

 The raptor subplot is actually a lot less stupid than the trailer made it look, because Owen just barely keeps them in check for most of the movie. It's established early on that they accept him as the alpha, but only to a degree. They listen to him, but he still has to roll under the closing gate to get out of their pen when he saves some idiot who falls in. They know he's not like them, but he's their alpha, so it's a tenuous balance. You've seen the part in the trailer with the motorcycle, but that happens because he's following them as they follow the scent of the I-Rex, and that happens as a matter of last resort. Mostly thanks to subplot we didn't need in this movie character Hoskins (Adventures in Babysitting's Vincent D'Onofrio). His "lets militarize dinosaurs" contractor guy feels like a leftover plot thread from the abandoned John Sayles draft of Jurassic Park 4 with the human / dinosaur hybrid Dirty Dozen*.

 But anyway all of these characters have to converge so of course the kids are out in a gyrosphere rolling around when the I-Rex gets loose and Claire has to evacuate most of the park while the Asset Containment Unit gets slaughtered. See, the I-Rex can mask her thermal signature if she wants to, so she tricks them into thinking she's not in her cage and Owen can see how dangerous she is when she eats a fat slob red shirt (seriously, this dude has a tie that's not on straight, a barely tucked in shirt, and a safety hat that's tiled at an angle: he's clearly getting eaten from the moment we see him). I-Rex goes on a murder spree, killing everything, in a once again reasonably explained way. Owen correctly points out that having been raised in captivity with no contact at all, Indominus Rex has never encountered other dinosaurs (or anything) before, and doesn't know its place in the food chain. And they really don't want her to find out.

 Anyway, dumb kids somehow go "off road" and Claire and Owen have to find them. Hoskins takes over the control room, and everything goes straight to hell. This leads to the disaster part of the movie, where people die horrible, horrible deaths. Like, I was surprised how horrible in some instances. There's one character whose death is wildly disproportionate to their behavior in the movie, unless being inattentive means you should be pecked apart by Pterodactyls and then swallowed alive by the Mosasaurus, the Sea World-like attraction. I mean, the dude who grabs his margaritas while running doesn't even get it that bad. He might not die at all, and there's no way he ordered both of those drinks for himself, if he ordered them in the first place. There are people who totally deserve to have their arms bitten off or to be dino-stomped or Pterodactyl impaled**, but there's dome disproportionate brutality going on. Maybe director Colin Trevorrow had a bad vendetta with somebody or just hates Mary Poppins or something.

 Well, now's as good a time as any to transition into the "why people think this movie sucks and I can't even argue with them" part of the review. I'm going to start with two pieces of dialogue from the dumb kids who are only in Jurassic World because the movies are ostensibly aimed at kids (and not their 30-something parents who saw Jurassic Park twenty years ago). I'm going to slightly modify what they say to point out what incredible plot conveniences they introduce, but if you're SPOILER averse, you might as well skip ahead to the last paragraph.

 "Hey, do you still have those matches neither of us ever mentioned at any point before now even though we just got away from the I-Rex by jumping into water?"

 "Do you remember that time we fixed up Grampa's car which would totally mean we can repair this Jeep we found in the old Visitor's Center from Jurassic Park and then drive back?"

 Putting aside the fact that any theme park that offered a "gyrosphere" attraction without a guide should have a way to bring said gyrosphere back when the park is unexpectedly closed, those two lines are indicative us just how lazy the writing in Jurassic World is. They both happen within five minutes of each other, and I think they were hoping we'd be too caught up in fact that "hey, it's the old Visitors Center! I remember Jurassic Park! Omg!" to really think carefully about how contrived those plot points are. Almost as contrived as Indominus Rex, who is white (except when she's not), can mask her thermal signature (once), pulls out her own tracking device, and is part Raptor. How do we find out she's part Raptor? Someone in the movie has to say it. In fact, here's what Owen says:

 "No wonder they didn't tell us what's she's made of: she's part Raptor..."

 This happens at the end of the motorcycle scene, when the Raptors find I-Rex and, even though she's never seen a Velociraptor before, she begins communicating with them. Guess there's a new Alpha. Oh wait, that's also something Owen says. The Raptors of course turn on Owen and Hoskins men and kill them, and then go all the way back to their paddock to chase Claire and the stupid kids who are sitting in a truck that the boys for no apparent reason won't close the back doors of. It's one of the many, "wait, what?" moments that Jurassic World hopes you won't ask questions about, like "where did the other helicopter pilot go if Masrani and the helicopter are still on the island?" or "wait, wasn't the Mosasaurus attraction further away from the main park area?" or "would you really stop to comfort a dying dinosaur when there's nothing you can do to help at all and you're searching for two children that may or may not be in mortal danger?" Yes, the last question is the closest scene Claire has to a humanizing moment, and it may be the only dinosaur in the entire movie that isn't CGI, but if you give it a moment's scrutiny, why does it need to happen?

 And yet, I didn't really mind while watching it. Yes, in retrospect, the film compounds so many lazy, convenient, or "we hope you're not paying attention to this" moments that you probably won't even remember the loose plot thread they leave for the next Jurassic sequel (hint: BD Wong). Does it really matter what happened to Lowery? Eh, I didn't even think about him in the last scene. In truth, most people are only going to remember the final battle, and to Jurassic World's credit, it takes the humans out of the equation and goes for full on dino fight. And it's a pretty good fight with a great (if implausible) conclusion. You'll be excited, you won't care about product placement - I mean, have you been to a theme park? Is the Jimmy Fallon scene really that out of place? - and if you loved Jurassic Park, you might even cheer when T-Rex makes her grand return by crashing through a Spinosaur skeleton. Take that, Jurassic Park III. You never forget that everybody hates you. I'm sure there's tons of press material where producers and the director and four writers talk about making the fans happy, and that lip service is expected, but this movie was created by committee. And to be honest, for what it is, it's better than it has any right to be. I cannot pretend that it's a well constructed, well thought out film, but Jurassic World gives you what you came for. If you're the nostalgic type, there's a chance you might like it even more than I did. It's not really the best or the worst, which I know the internet hates, but that's how it is sometimes. Every now and then you get a mostly happy middle, and for reasons I can't quite fathom, Jurassic World was entertaining, in spite of itself.



 * I am not making that up.
 ** Although, if we're picking nits, one was done in The Lost World and the other was the original ending of the film before Spielberg took T-Rex to San Diego.

Things We Learned from Prometheus (and Some Other Reactions)

  I never thought I'd write the sentence "I'd rather be writing a review for Men in Black 3 right now" but you can't throw a virtual rock anywhere in the internet right now without it hitting something about Prometheus. And, at least in my experience, 90% of it has been negative. The hostility that the Ridley Scott / John Spaihts / Damon Lindelof prequel to Alien but not exactly movie has been deafening since Friday night, and while I don't argue with the reasons why commenters and reviewers and discussion board posters have been tearing Prometheus apart, I'm astonished at their ferocity.

 There are a few different points of attack, but many of them fall along the following lines: a) Ridley Scott hasn't made a good movie in years and this falls far from a "return to form" that we (the internet) were promised, b) The script is laughably bad, with one or two developed characters and a bunch of people that only do what the narrative needs them to do regardless of their "role" in the story, c) It isn't scary, d) It embarrasses the Alien series more than Resurrection (okay, I laughed out loud at that one*), or e) The movie lacks an ending and instead resembles Lindelof's strategy on the show Lost of "we'll save this for the next one" raising answers and plotlines they have no intention of addressing in Prometheus.

 With that in mind, I'm going to look a a few things to take away from Prometheus, some of which are tied to the criticisms listed above, and some tied to last week's post about Alien and Prometheus. Until the echo chamber of negativity dies down, I don't think I'm actually going to review Prometheus, even though I enjoyed it more than seemingly most of the chatterverse online. It's funny, because I liked it and my friends liked it and everybody I've spoken to that I know has seen it liked it, but if I start looking around online, Prometheus is the "WORST MOVIE EVAR ALL CAPS!!1!!!11!!"

 So let's get into it, starting with the indefensible:

 1. The Writing in Prometheus is a Mess - One of the most cited problems with Prometheus, even in positive reviews, is that the writing is anywhere from half baked to terrible. And you know what? It's true. I can't even begin to argue this, and no amount of thematic "Big Ideas" can overcome basic story problems (speaking of "Big Ideas," if you're looking for an interesting breakdown of the religious / philosophical / mythical references in the film, I suggest reading this post). They fall into two categories, one of which I'm not sure who is responsible and the other seems to follow the M.O. of Lindelof, but let's deal with the first part, the one where characters do things that don't make any sense.

 The primary offender here is Charlie Holloway, who along with Elizabeth Shaw is responsible for the Prometheus being there in the first place. It's unclear in the film itself whether both of them are scientists or if Holloway is the scientist and Shaw is the believer that pushes him forward (I've seen this idea floated out there in a few reviews). I'm inclined to believe that both of them have some interest in ancient civilizations, but Shaw is also apparently capable of overseeing a dissection / genetic analysis of one of the Engineers (Space Jockey) without question by the other scientists aboard the Prometheus. This is kind of a side note, but other than Janek (Captain), Chance (Pilot), Ravel (Pilot), Milburn (Biologist), and Fifield (Geologist), it's not clear what the other "scientists" / non-Weyland personnel do. Does anybody have an idea what Ford does? She's in the pyramid, is involved in the genetic analysis, and delivers exposition about how toxic the air is on LV-223. That's all we know.

 Anyway, I got off track. So the premise is that Holloway and Shaw convinced Peter Weyland to pay a trillion dollars to design a state-of-the-art research ship (hence the holographic displays and fancy equipment that, let's be honest, you aren't going to see on the mining ship Nostromo or the war ship Sulaco) and send 17 people two years into space to follow a space map. They arrive, find a pyramid with a skull on the top, David activates a holographic projection of Space Jockeys / Engineers running from something that ends with one of them being decapitated. They open a room with a giant head, murals, a sculpture that looks like a xenomorph, and jars filled with a black liquid that reacts to the change in temperature. They're forced to leave the room because of the reaction, but the body of the decapitated Engineer is roughly 2000 years old. They leave the pyramid structure because a storm is coming in, but Holloway and David are both lingering. David wants one of the jars, and Holloway dismissively declares "this is just another tomb."

 From this point forward, after being in the pyramid once (after he insisted they go in immediately after landing), Holloway becomes a drunken cynic, convinced everybody is dead and that he'll never be able to "talk" to the Engineers. After being in the pyramid once. Having explored one room, a few hallways, and being forced to leave because of external circumstance, Holloway gives up and starts drinking. His inexplicably newfound fragile mental state allows David to slip him some black liquid and let it do... whatever it does. Decode DNA? Recode it to create new life? Guarantee miraculous births? Look, I don't have any quarrel with the ambiguity of the opening of the film, whether it takes place on Earth or not (Scott says it doesn't matter where it is), and I'm even okay with the obvious horror movie setup of leaving Milburn and Fifield behind (in fact, it plays into two of the most known horror tropes paying off: smoking pot and having sex, the former in the pyramid and the latter preventing Janek from knowing they were in trouble).

 That said, Holloway's turn is arbitrary and only really seems to exist so that he can drunkenly insult Shaw and then get them together in bed so we can get to the "medical pod" scene in the film. It's a perfunctory character shift that doesn't make sense in the story, either as a scientist or as a "believer" - Holloway simply doesn't have enough evidence to leap to the conclusion he does, and since Weyland clearly pushes David to "try harder," it's not hard to see that Charlie giving up gets him out of the way midway through the film. It's logistical, not organic, and I can't get past that.

 The other problem, the "Lost" issue, is part of this notion that everything should be "sequel-ized" for continued franchise use. I fully admit this is nothing new and that complaining about it is like Clint Eastwood chasing hoodlums off his lawn in Gran Torino, but Damon Lindelof seems to be approaching Prometheus like it's a guaranteed ongoing series (and hell, it probably is, it's tied to the Alien franchise that 20th Century Fox has been desperate to reboot), and like he did with Lost, Prometheus raises lots of questions with no intention of answering them. In this film. That's the distinction between Alien and Prometheus. Yes, Alien never explains who the Space Jockey is or how the alien life cycle works in specificity (Aliens does, kinda) or how the derelict got there or a number of other questions, but Alien wasn't made with Aliens in mind.

 Prometheus doesn't even really have a beginning, middle, or end: it has an ambiguous opening shot, an earthbound introductory sequence, and jumps forward to the ship at the end of its voyage. Again, I don't have much of a problem there because the logistics aren't that important. I'm cool with the ambiguity about David's motives (actually, I love that and the tiny ways Scott ties how Shaw and Holloway treat David to the way Replicants are regarded in Blade Runner), the quick way the scientists are introduced and the plan Shaw and Holloway have, but once they land on LV-223, the narrative collapses. We're continually introduced to mysteries, one after the other, as characters are shuttled back and forth from the Prometheus to the pyramid, and instead of addressing these problems we get perfunctory explanations from the strangest sources. Yes, Janek is right that the Engineers are developing weapons in a pyramid with a skull on top in the middle of nowhere (how do I know this, read the previous piece where Scott repeatedly asserts in the Alien commentary what his reading on the derelict is), but is he the only person who realized this? Vickers is content to stick around under Weyland dies, even though she figures out pretty quickly how badly things are going to end.

 Okay, let's take a step back. What do we know about the Space Jockey / Engineers at the end of Prometheus that we didn't know in Alien? Okay, they engineered us for reasons we don't know (but are constantly reminded by characters in the film is VERY IMPORTANT), they were planning on wiping us out with biologically engineered weapons of mass destruction (including creatures that will evolve into the facehuggers and Xenomorphs we recognize from Alien) for reasons we don't know (but again, Shaw finds this VERY IMPORTANT) and that they're incompetent. How are they incompetent? Well, taking what we know from Alien and what we learn in Prometheus, they have no idea how to contain the weapons they create and as a result their WMDs end up killing them.

 That's it. We're given the carrot that Shaw and David aren't going back to Earth, but will instead fly one of the "bombers" to the Engineers' home planet (which isn't LV-223) to get answers that Lindelof, Spaihts, and Scott have NO intention of addressing in the film. We get lots of puzzle pieces, a promise that the story will pick up in the next movie, and a final shot introducing us to a proto-Xenomorph to give the audience something to be excited about when they leave realizing that Prometheus didn't actually end so much as throw up a "to be concluded..." ala Back to the Future Part 2.

 Side Note: I only call it a bomber because there's a distinction between the ship at the beginning of the film and the U-shaped, Giger designed spacecrafts, so let's assume that if several ships that look like that are stationed at a weapons facility that they're designed to haul volatile cargo to targets.

 Okay, so I watched six seasons of Lost that continually pushed the "we'll address this next year" only to get to an ending that failed miserably. But that's not my quarrel with the "sequel-izing" of movies. It's more fundamental than that. A movie with sequels can still have a beginning, a middle, and an end, even if it's designed to be part of a larger story. For example, while I don't know why you would do it, you could watch The Empire Strikes Back without seeing A New Hope or Return of the Jedi and feel like you've seen a narrative arc for every character in the film. It still raises questions, it leaves one character frozen in Carbonite, but it's still satisfying as it's own film.

 Movies that intentionally set themselves up with sequels in mind can fail. Case in Point: The Golden Compass. The writers decided they'd leave a bunch of open ended plot threads for the future installments of the His Dark Materials trilogy, and in the process forgot to make a satisfying film for audiences. As a result, the other two films were never made. They probably never will be. The same goes for Push, Jumper, and I Am Number Four. Prometheus will almost certainly get its sequel, but if Lindelof, Spaihts, Scott, and anyone else involved in future entries into this franchise don't tighten up the films so that people can enjoy them on their own (again, that's WHY people argue about whether Alien or Aliens is better, because they work in tandem but also as their own distinct experiences), I don't know that I want to be dragged along for two more hours.

 2. Other Things from the Last Post - Well, I think I've covered that LV-223 is not LV-426 and any speculation about where they are in relationship to each other is still up in the air (depending on which wiki site you visit, it seems to vary, but Google LV-426 and LV-223 and go to any link other than this to keep looking). Speaking of which, a friend asked me what the LV stood for, and even after digging around, I'm still not certain. If you know, please leave a comment for other readers and I'll also try to incorporate it into this section. I would gather it's the classification for planets discovered in the Alien universe, but the the "L" and "V" mean, I'm not sure.

 Since the mission of the Prometheus ends with Peter Weyland, his daughter Meredith Vickers, and the rest of the crew dead (at least as far as Earth is concerned), one can see how Yutani moved in to merge with Weyland Corporation in the absence of the family who ran the "Company." We can probably guess that Weyland-Yutani took the information David gathered about the "weapon" and that leads us into their obsession with bringing a Xenomorph back for research.

 It may sound silly to say this, but Prometheus is a prequel to Alien, just not in the way people expected. This is possibly why expectations are met with such vicious reactions, because other than the mid-section, Prometheus isn't really strictly trying to be a horror film. It's a film more fascinated with the origin of humanity, even if it has very little to offer other than more questions. Where it becomes an explicit prequel is a little white lie that Ridley Scott told about there being "No Xenomorphs" in Prometheus.

 Let's say it's safe to say that if you're still reading this after I broke down most of the major plot points (the Prometheus crashing into the Space Jockey's ship is in the trailer, but since I haven't mentioned it yet, there you go), so it's not going to bother you to mention the last scene in the film. After an obvious homage to Alien - Shaw recording voice-over explaining what happened to the crew playing over a ship leaving - we cut back to the last surviving Space Jockey, last seen on the losing end of a fight with an oversized facehugger. Its body begins shaking, and instead of a chestburster, a scrawny version of what we recognize to be a Xenomorph emerges, stands up, and screams (with second mouth). It's not "technically" a Xenomorph, just like the big tentacled thing wasn't "technically" a facehugger (although if it's anything like the tiny one in the pyramid, it has acid for blood). Therefore, Scott was only kind-of lying.

 What I'm a little curious about is that if the Alien wiki sites say about the chronology of the films (Prometheus taking place thereabouts 30 years before Alien). What we see at the end of Prometheus is are creatures that will evolve into facehuggers and Xenomorphs, but with only thirty years for the species to evolve to that point? Well, they're aliens, so I guess we should just ignore that. Also, I hope that this particular facehugger / Xenomorph combination don't have anything to do with what the Nostromo eventually encounters. Seriously.

 Just think about that: the "alien" in Alien is descended from Charlie Holloway and Elizabeth Shaw, with some tinkering from David, a Weyland Corporation android. It makes it a little less "Alien," doesn't it?


 I don't want to end things on a sour note, because despite the story problems I have with Prometheus, I completely disagree that it's not a good movie. I think Ridley Scott did a fantastic job with the 3D, bringing LV-223 to life, and in generating the tension when Prometheus moves into horrific territory. The medical pod scene is pretty disturbing, as is what happens to Milburn and Fifield in the pyramid (less so the Sunshine-esque reappearance of Fifield later in the film. And it's Fifield, not Holloway - I've seen that mistake made in a few reviews). I really enjoyed watching Prometheus, and would like to see it again. It's true that there's a lot going on in the film that would benefit from another viewing, but I'm not enough to cover story elements that don't make sense. So it's a very good film, but not a perfect one. It's certainly not the travesty or failure that I keep seeing online, but that's just my take. I'm happy to hear your thoughts.



* So I liked Alien Resurrection as a strange, heightened take on the Alien films by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, but I'm in the minority. You have to REALLY be able to get past how wildly uneven the film is, how the combination of Jeunet's direction and Joss Whedon's screenplay - and I could probably write another entry just about the script - drains any sense of tension and replaces it with overacting and incongruous jokes. That, and the hybrid. I can't defend the hybrid. Anyway, it is not better than Prometheus**. What's next? Are the AvP defenders going to see their opening and go after Prometheus?


** Why yes, I put a post-script in a post-script, but where else should this go? I do think it's funny that various comments and forum posts insisted that only Alien and Aliens were now "canon" for the series and that Prometheus would assure that. Why is it funny? Because one of the things we see David doing while he's waiting for the crew of the Prometheus to wake up is wandering around with a basketball and eventually doing trick shots on a bicycle. Rather than this being an arbitrary decision, I choose to believe Scott made a conscious decision to pay homage to the silliest moment in Alien Resurrection, thus validating its existence in series "canon."

Blogorium Review: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

 There's supposed to be such a thing as a "law of diminishing returns"; if a hit movie continues to produce sequels, they rarely if ever are as good as the first film. From the eleven-and-a-half Friday the 13ths to the Die Hard and Indiana Jones and Alien quadrilogies all the way back to the Thin Man films, it's a dicey proposition to keep going. Even in the rare cases where a Godfather Part II or Evil Dead 2 manage to match the original, the third film is imperfect. The James Bond films have lows that match their highs, and it tends to happen that the "diminishing returns" play out with each successive 007.

 I bring this up because this is the fourth Mission: Impossible film, and it's a toss up as to whether Ghost Protocol or M:I:III are the best entries yet. You could really argue either way, but it's strange to think that the third and fourth Mission: Impossible films are not only that much better than the first two films, but better than a lot of action cinema in the last decade. This comes from a fan of the Bourne films, the Jason Statham cycle (Transporter/Crank/Death Race/etc), the Sherlock Holmes buddy-cop reinvention, The Expendables, Rambo, Predators, and yes, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace. While these are all fun in their own right, I'm still prepared to take Ghost Protocol over them right now.

 Call me a prisoner of the moment, but it's rare to see a film that doesn't mind being action packed and funny without one undermining the other. It's also nice to see that Brad Bird transferred the breathless action from The Incredibles to the real world, in what is (reported to be, anyway) as realistically as possible. Tom Cruise was dangling from the walls of the world's tallest building in Dubai, although how or why any insurance company would allow that is beyond me.

 Okay, we're four paragraphs in, so let's explain what happens in Ghost Protocol: Ethan Hunt (Cruise) has been cooling his heels in a Russian prison for a few years, following the death of his wife Julia (played by Michelle Monaghan in M:I:III), when he's released by IMF agents Jane Carter (Paula Patton) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg, returning from M:I:III). The agency assigns the team the mission of breaking into the Kremlin in order to find some evidence of the mysterious "Cobalt," a terrorist who may have a nuclear device. "Cobalt" has successfully been erasing all evidence of his existence, and when Hunt is caught in an explosion while trying to escape from the Kremlin, IMF and the United States are implicated in an assault on Russia. Hunt is informed by the IMF Secretary (?) (Tom Wilkinson) that the President is issuing "Ghost Protocol," and that the team will now be considered "enemies of the State" unless they can covertly intercept "Cobalt," nuclear expert Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist) before he begins a new world war. Hunt, Carter, and Dunn are joined by William Brandt (Jeremy Renner), an analyst who may be more than meets the eye, but their resources (and time) are limited. Oh, and the Russian police agent (Vladimir Mashkov) is hot on their tail.

 One of the things I enjoy so much about Ghost Protocol is the way that nothing goes according to plan: from the opening, where Lost's Josh Holloway is "Estevez'ed" because his face recognition software warns him an assassin (Léa Seydoux) is coming while she's pulling her gun out. He's distracted and killed, so Carter and Dunn's first mission is botched, necessitating Hunt's release. Ethan won't just leave the prison when Benji unlocks the cell doors by remote: he insists that the person releasing him (he doesn't know it's Benji, which is a nice conceit between what the audience knows and what the characters know) also open the door for Bogdan (Miraj Grbic), causing an otherwise smooth escape plan into a full fledged prison riot.

 And it just keeps going. Little things like the mission brief not self destructing to the mask maker jamming to accidentally killing a key informant to sticky gloves that don't stick keep compounding and making life harder and harder for the team. They can't do anything about it, so they have to improvise, grin, and bear it. So the building in Dubai they need to control the elevators in has a room you can only get into from the outside - Ethan can use the stick gloves to break in so Benji can hack it. They have 30 minutes before the assassin arrives to sell the launch codes to Winstrom (Samuli Edelmann), and one of the spider-man-like gloves stop working halfway up. It's a good thing Ethan was rock-climbing in M:I II.

 This works in Ghost Protocol because it adds serious tension to the film. They manage to be too late, make silly mistakes, and only sometimes manage to succeed by the skin of their teeth. It's less of the "oh shit, they have his wife" from M:I:III and more of "there's no back up coming if you screw this up" as is evident when Wilkinson's secretary is killed and Renner is forced to join the ragtag group. He doesn't have anywhere else to go now.

 While Pegg is a consistent source of laughs in the film, Renner also brings in some much needed levity as an IMF analyst befuddled by the half-baked desperation ploys during the film. His "secret" isn't actually all that important, especially when one considers the coda for the film (for which I do recommend you catch up with characters from M:I:III), but it does explain how Hunt knows he's more than just a number cruncher. Ethan pulls a gun on Brandt and isn't surprised at all when he's promptly disarmed.

 The rumor was that Renner was brought in to continue the series after Ghost Protocol, but then Cruise had so much fun making the film that they may continue with both of them. That's fine with me, because if we're not going with the Maggie Q / Johnathan Rhys Meyers iteration of the team (Ving Rhames' absence from Ghost Protocol is explained without suggesting he's out of the series), I could watch more Mission: Impossible films with this lineup. Cruise, Patton, Pegg, and Renner have great chemistry and work together as a (dysfunctional) team. Like the last film, each member serves more than one purpose and nobody feels superfluous, even if some of the set pieces sometimes do.

 Which brings me to the weaknesses of Ghost Protocol, and there are a few: Benji and Brandt are involved in an infiltration scheme reminiscent of the "sensor room" in the first film, but instead of suspenseful it's joke-y and ultimately proves to be another red herring. Hunt's showdown with Hendricks in an (admittedly cool looking) elevated car port is anticlimactic, but that may be due to the fact that Nyqvist is stuck playing a character that barely figures into the movie. He doesn't say much, he's mostly in the background, and the threat he poses is globally more dangerous but doesn't have the same emotional resonance as Philip Seymour Hoffman's Owen Davian. He doesn't register much at all, and certainly doesn't have the impact of Seydoux's Sabine Moreau, a much smaller character.

 In fact, it's entirely possible to play out Ghost Protocol without a "main" villain. The film is more or less the disavowed IMF team racing against the clock to stop a missile from launching, and while their attempts to stop "Cobalt" / Hendricks from getting to the point he can do that are entertaining, I don't know that his presence is even necessary. Like the Russian police who show up at inopportune times for Ethan, Hendricks is more effective as an abstract threat. There's one scene that really gives Nyqvist anything to do, and while it's a clever closer to a great chase scene, that's about all that the moment amounts to.

 Still, I highly recommend Ghost Protocol, which is consistently entertaining despite these flaws. To be honest, I didn't really notice them while I was watching the film - it was only in retrospect that it occurred to me that some elements of the film (including a character played by Slumdog Millionaire's Anil Kapoor introduced in the third act) were maybe superfluous. It never feels superfluous when you're watching the film: the script by André Nemec and Josh Applebaum and Brad Bird's direction keep you swept up in the race to stop nuclear war. Tom Cruise is again hard at work demonstrating why he's so essential to this series. He's a little bit older than he was last time and things are a little harder for Ethan Hunt to bounce back from, but he's still climbing up the side of buildings to entertain us.

 If this is any indicator of what J.J. Abrams and Tom Cruise (as producers) want to keep bringing to the Mission: Impossible series, it's entirely possible that "diminishing returns" aren't on the horizon as they push towards a fifth film. There's certainly enough that happens in the last five minutes of Ghost Protocol to imply there's more story to be told, so keep the quality level high and I'll be back for more.

Retro Review: Mission: Impossible: III

 Why am I writing a "Retro Review" of a movie that's barely six years old? The reason is twofold:

 1. I hadn't seen Mission: Impossible: III (actual title) since it first arrived on home video.

 2. I had recently watched Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, which is the closest thing to a "direct sequel" that you're going to find in the series, and while I had a comfortable grasp of the characters who appeared or were mentioned, watching that film really made me want to revisit the previous entry.

 The Cap'n had not planned on seeing Mission: Impossible: III, the directorial debut of J.J. Abrams (Lost, Felicity), because of my lukewarm feelings about the first two M:I films. While having no real connection to the show, I had seen Brian DePalma's Mission: Impossible in high school and generally liked it but was totally unimpressed with John Woo's Mission: Impossible II, a hollow and pointless exercise in slow motion action and motorcycle-fu. The latter held sway in my mind over the former, so there didn't seem to be much of a point watching the third film in a series I wasn't that invested in.

 It wasn't until I started hearing good things about the sequel, combined with my affinity for Dinosaur Island that I thought I'd give it a shot. Good call, it turns out.

 People say that Mission: Impossible: III is a feature length version of Abrams' spy series Alias. I can't confirm or deny that, as I've never seen Alias. I would imagine it has something to do with the way the film begins: dropping the audience in the middle of a tense stand-off between Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman), where the life of Julia (Michelle Monaghan) rest on whether Hunt delivered something called The Rabbit's Foot to Davian or not. We have little to no context, only that the typically nonplussed Hunt is helpless to stop Davian from killing Julia (wife? girlfriend? fellow IMF agent?) and that nothing he's promising seems to sway his captor. The film then launches into opening credits and we begin M:I:III in earnest.

 The "drop you in the middle of the narrative without context" is something that I associate with Abrams, mostly through Lost, but one could argue that Star Trek pulls a similar narrative conceit by opening with the arrival of Nero before we even know what Federation ship we're seeing him destroy. It's a refreshing break from the action set pieces from the first film (entire team wiped out) and the second (extreme rock climbing) that focuses on character over mimicking the 007 series. It's not the only way that Abrams and screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman improve on the M:I franchise.

 From my recollection, the first two Mission: Impossible films were largely the Tom Cruise show, featuring "the team," of which I can only recall Ving Rhames being a constant. Other people showed up to betray Ethan Hunt or to be (I love this term) "Estevez'ed". M:I:III, on the other hand, centers in on the concept that the team is important and that Ethan might lead the group, but he needs everybody to carry out the mission (should he choose to accept it). Unlike the first two films, I can remember every part of the IMF team in III: Ving Rhames returns as Luther, Johnathan Rhys-Meyers is Duncan, Maggie Q is Zhen, and in a cameo appearance, Simon Pegg enters the series as Benji. Instead of having one assigned "role," everybody works as a unit to ensure that covert operations like invading Vatican City go off smoothly. It's a refreshing break from the "hero with some window dressing" I remembered  (this also applies to Ghost Protocol, but I'll get to that in a few days).

 This is not to say that there isn't some familiarity: Abrams sneaks in his "good luck charm" Greg Grunberg early in the film during Ethan and Julia's engagement (?) party, and Felicity herself, Keri Russell, has the distinction of being the "pupil of Hunt who gets captured and introduces the lethal threat," a bomb inside your head, that kicks off the film. Hoffman is a merciless arms dealer as Davian, unafraid of Hunt even in the face of death, promising to punish him and anyone he cares about for having the gall to catch him. The Rabbit's Foot, a MacGuffin to say the least, is the focus of everybody's attention, from Hunt's team to Davian to Director Brassel (Laurence Fishburne) and deputy director Musgrave (Billy Crudup), but Agent Lindsey Farris (Russell) alerts Ethan that a mole in IMF is working for the other side.

 All of this comes at a fast and furious pace, and the film never feels like two hours. The action is easy to follow (quite a feat considering that the Bourne Supremacy ushered in "shaky cam" two years before) and the stunts are mostly practical. Even a rooftop leap in Shanghai that was mostly green-screen involved Cruise taking a considerable fall before being mapped onto the background. The film is more accomplished, story-wise, than Star Trek, with actual stakes being introduced when Hunt loses Ferris and then (we think) Julia, but there's a similar breezy charm in the middle of the film and at the end that keeps things from being too dour.

 In particular, I like to point out the scene where Hunt (disguised at Davian) and Zhen drop off a crucial briefcase to Luther. The way that Hoffman delivers the line "what's up?" still makes me chuckle, almost as much as Monaghan's reaction to what IMF is an acronym for. Actually, in general I also would like to point out that despite the fact everybody had it in for Tom Cruise around that time, he's still essential to the success of the M:I films and handles it admirably.

 Watching the film again, I was surprised how caught up I was all over again, even as the twists and turns of M:I:III started coming back. It's a very entertaining action film in a way that I don't remember the first or second film being, and because of that I welcomed Brad Bird's live action debut with Ghost Protocol. I'm glad I did, but I'll get to that later. It is fair that you don't have to see M:I:III again to enjoy Ghost Protocol, but the end of the fourth film benefits greatly from being up to speed on who's who in the third film.

Retro Review: Wishmaster

 Today's Retro Review is a special one for two reasons:

 1. It was the first movie I watched with Professor Murder, and largely the reason we became friends shortly thereafter.

 2. For better or for worse, it's the catalyst for Cap'n Howdy becoming the "trash savant" that you dear readers will assume is going to watch literally any shitty film that comes out. And you're right. Sometimes.

 While it is true that I would rent nearly anything from Carbonated Video that looked interesting for years prior to the release of Wishmaster, young Cap'n Howdy had a slightly more discerning taste when it came to seeing something on the big screen. I stopped hanging out with a friend in high school because he tricked me into seeing Biodome and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls on separate occasions (also, he stole my yearbook and burned my German textbook after borrowing it). To be fair, I also saw 12 Monkeys and Pulp Fiction with said person, so you can understand why I'd fall for two proto-Trappenings.

 It is also true that I saw McHale's Navy earlier in 1997, and while that is barely a watchable film, the large group I went to see it with all went for the same reason: Bruce Campbell. We support our Bruce, even when he's a third banana in a Tom Arnold TV-make.

 What distinguished Wishmaster from those films, and what began a regular trend afterward, was that the entire reasoning behind seeing a movie that in no way looked good was predicated on The Rocky Horror Picture Show experience: see the shitty movie, mock the shitty movie. It's a low-rent version of MST3k, another show I was (and am) a huge fan of, and one that continued for years and years.

 (For the record, we have certain rules in place when we do this: we always sit close to the screen, usually three rows back, so we'll never be louder than the movie. We also try to keep ourselves separated from the poor souls who wanted to see something like Lost in Space or Ghosts of Mars so that we don't ruin your experience of a horrible piece of shit. We don't like to be interrupted during movies we like, so we limit our interaction with said schlock to our own sphere).

 At the time, I knew of Professor Murder* from high school drama productions but didn't actually know the guy. We were actually kind of at odds - the musical he was starring in was preventing our smaller production from being able to rehearse, and we'd received word that he thought our Literary Revue was "stupid." When he leapfrogged from Drama 1 to Drama 3 between the 96-97 and 97-98 school year, we found ourselves in the same class, and didn't really know how to navigate that.

 The solution came when we both signed up for a series of classes on Shakespearean acting from Burning Coal Theatre, who was putting on a production of... Love's Labours Lost, I think with a student who graduated two years before me. As we were the only students from our school (and we were riding with our drama teacher every day), we got to know each other, our senses of humor, and the many ridiculous interests we had in common.

 One day, after getting back early and having time to kill before our rides got there, we decided to walk from high school to the nearby Imperial Theatre (now The Galaxy) to see a movie. And why not see Wishmaster? It was produced by Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street), written by Peter Atkins (Hellbound: Hellraiser II), directed by Robert Kurtzman (the "K" in KNB Effects), and featured cameos by many of the "big names" in horror, and was about an evil Genie. How bad could it be? Very, we hoped.

 And bad it is - I remember we had a nearly constant running commentary about the logic gaffes, bad acting, and the scenery chewing Djinn, played Andrew Divoff. Whether in his Djinn "monster" makeup or his "human" form of Nathaniel Demerest, Divoff was a hoot as the deliciously EEEEEEVVIIIILLLL villain that tricked people into making wishes so he could punish them ironically. There's the girl who wants to be beautiful forever (he turns her into a mannequin), the guy who wants to escape (he gets put into a tank full of water), and the guy who wants to see him "walk through him" (he turns him into glass or something).

 The last two are interesting because they were played by Tony Todd (Candyman) and Kane Hodder (Jason Vorhees), who appeared alongside Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger) and the voice of Angus Scrimm (The Tall Man) in Wishmaster. Also appearing: Reggie Bannister (Phantasm), Ted Raimi (Army of Darkness), Joe Pilato (Day of the Dead), Danny Hicks (Evil Dead 2), and uhhh... Verne Troyer (Pinocchio's Revenge)! I'd also like to point out something I just discovered, which is that Andrew Divoff was not only the Djinn in Wishmaster, but also Mikhail, the one-eyed Russian from Lost. I did not know that.

 It's a loaded cast (and crew) for a movie that amounts to surprisingly little - it's a slasher movie structure but with a supernatural genie that can make anything happen as long as someone wishes for it. He needs to collect souls or something to become real or take over the world... honestly I don't remember. It's bad of the Cap'n to not go check but let's be honest, there's only one scene that sticks out for me, and it involves Kane Hodder as a security guard who won't let the Djinn get by. The genie says "ask me for something", and Hodder replies "I want you to leave."

 The Djinn, forced to walk away, begins saying "no, no, I have to get inside," setting up the ironic kill. It's hilarious. In fact, here it is (the encounter begins at the 2:26 mark, but you might want consider watching the scene in the police station too, which is also silly).

 After Wishmaster, the Professor and I were on the same page, and we banded together with the rest of the gang to see terrible movies and give them what-for, even if only for our personal enjoyment. It also meant we intentionally sought out movies that were worse than Wishmaster and accordingly earned us a reputation of being willing to see every terrible movie that someone released (in theatres or on VHS / DVD). I cannot say that we didn't earn the rep, but I've been living that down ever since. The Professor? Well, he doesn't really care. He's the reason I saw Satan's Little Helper, Monsturd, and Dinocroc vs Supergator. Then again, I'm the reason he saw ThanksKilling, so I'd say we're even.

 And Wishmaster? Well, there are three more sequels, only one of which I've seen part of. Wishmaster 2 somehow sends the Djinn to prison, so that Divoff can spend most of the movie without his makeup and grant wishes like "I wish my lawyer would go fuck himself," which of course literally happens as the lawyer is trying to get the guy released. Divoff couldn't be bothered to play the Djinn again in parts 3 and 4, and I guess I couldn't be bothered to watch them. Someday... they're probably good Cranpire Movie candidates.




 * I don't use his actual name because of the sensitive work the Professor does, but most people familiar with the Cap'n know exactly who I'm talking about. I also can't claim any credit for the nickname - he earned it while away at school.

(in)Frequently Asked Questions (part 2)

Greetings, readers! If you missed out on yesterday's post, I (the Cap'n) am answering ten of the most frequently asked questions about the Blogorium. Questions 1-5 were answered yesterday, and Questions 6-10 are today. Enjoy!

6. Okay, so I saw these tags that say "Horror Fest", and you seem to mention that all the time. What is it, and do how can I get in?

Horror Fest began in 2005 when I lived in The Apartment of Solitude, although it had unofficial versions going all the way back to 1999. It's typically a three to four day event - usually taking place the weekend immediately before, during or after Halloween - where we watch horror films from around 7 pm until we can no longer stay awake. The record for a Horror Fest was during Horror Fest 2, where we went from 6 pm until 7:30 am of non-stop film action.

I tend to break my "once a day" rule for Horror Fests and will post after every single movie (if I can), although lately because the events tend to draw more people every year and for longer periods of time, I may condense several movies into recaps.

While Horror Fest is heading into its fifth year, there are also two other "event" or "marathon" nights:

Bad Movie Night, which I try to celebrate around my birthday. It's exactly what it sounds like, a night (or two) of some of the most awful - yet watchable - films I can find (last year's installment included Troll 2, Mac & Me, The Giant Claw, and Crank: High Voltage). There will, alas, not be a Bad Movie Night this year (I just don't have time), but hopefully in 2011 it'll come back, as I have some really special titles saved up...

Summer Fest, which is the July equivalent of Horror Fest. Typically devoted to "horror comedies," Summer Fest is considered to be a lighter atmosphere than Horror Fest and is a break from typical 4th of July festivities. If I can have one this year, Summer Fest III will probably be the last in current Blogorium Headquarters. (sorry I don't have a specific tag for Summer Fest, but you can find almost all of them under "Horror Fest").

While I can't say for certain how to "get in" other than paying attention to see if they're happening, readers of the blog who are willing to travel and don't mind sleeping on couches can come as long as they respect others, if not always the films.

7. Can I be a guest blogger?

As I said yesterday, I typically like to generate most of the writing here on the Blogorium, but I'm certainly happy to take a look if you've got something you'd really like to share here. Every now and then I'll put up a contest that is asking for someone to write their own review, so keep an eye out for that.

If you'd like to pick up the So You Won't Have To portion of the Blogorium and make it a more frequent part of the site (perhaps because you have a penchant for watching more awful movies than the Cap'n does), I'd certainly welcome that. Just leave a comment or drop me a line.

8. Come on, seriously; you're Grampa J, aren't you?

I get it, really I do. It does seem like some kind of Andy Kaufman-esque gag where I'm posting to both blogs in order to mess with your heads or to make some comment on identity, but I assure you that I am NOT Grampa J.

9. If I recommended something to you, would you watch it?

Sure. I will tell you right now that I'm not going to watch Avatar or any of the Twilight movies, but I'll consider pretty much anything else you think I'd enjoy or would like to see the Cap'n review.

10. How much does this pay?

Nothing. I write these every day for free, both meaning free to you and free to me, which means nobody is paying me to do this. It would be nice if somebody would pay me to do this, since I hope I'm demonstrating that I can consistently write quality reviews, essays, and content, but right now that's not happening. The good news means that no one is asking me not to write something.

The bad news is that once school is over with and I have to work two (or more) jobs to make end's meat, it's going to be much harder to keep writing every day. Believe me, I treat this like it is a job, but I don't make any money from it. Studios don't even send me movies, which I guess most DVD sites do have as some kind of arrangement. Of course, I can't prove that thousands of people come to the Blogorium, so why would they pay me?

However, what matters to me is that you're reading it, and that you're enjoying it. If it ever turned into a paying gig, that'd be awesome, but in the meantime I'll keep going as long as I can.

and finally, a special "bonus" question:

11. I finally realized that when you say "Dinosaur Island", you mean Lost, so why do you keep calling it that? There are no, and never will be, dinosaurs on the island. What's wrong with you?

It's called Dinosaur Island because there are dinosaurs on the island. I don't really understand what it is I have to explain here. There's nothing wrong with me because I happen to know that there are dinosaurs on Dinosaur Island which is precisely why the show is called Dinosaur Island. Yeesh.

A Few Scattered Thoughts

The Cap'n has a pretty good "Video Daily Double" for you tomorrow, but until then here are some odds and sods.
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Two things I forgot to mention about Black Dynamite:

- I didn't bring up the music at all (which is fantastic), in part because almost every review has a section devoted to it. To be fair, the soundtrack - which is a combination of catalog music from the era and newly recorded songs / score which blend in so well that I daresay it's difficult to choose what's what - is at the heart of keeping Black Dynamite so entertaining. The songs in particular really sell some of the ridiculous plot developments, including the description of Black Dynamite finding Jimmy's apartment broken into as he's walking in. It's reminiscent of the Hard 'N Phirm songs from The Haunted World of El Superbeasto, but more appropriate to the plot and in a much better movie.

Also, you're going to have the "Dy-No-Mite!" refrain stuck in your head for days after you watch Black Dynamite. You've been warned.

- The more I think about it, the best comparison to the kind of parody/satire in Black Dynamite may be Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox story. Black Dynamite really does for Blaxploitation films what Walk Hard does for Music Biopics, which is cleverly spoof the cliches and over-exaggerate the overused tropes to the point that it's clear no one should take them seriously any more. The fact the both movies use the "I'm going to have a great life" speech right before a character dies horribly should give you some idea of what I'm saying.


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"The Big Lebowski is one of those rare movies that rewards repeat viewings. Every time you come back to the film it's possible to notice something that you didn't before." - Herr Doktor

What did I notice this time that I hadn't caught in the many, MANY times I've seen The Big Lebowski since 1998?

Mark Pellegrino, of Dexter and - more recently - of Lost fame (he's Jacob), is the thug Jackie Treehorn sends to The Dude's apartment that doesn't pee on the rug. He's the one dunking the Dude's head into the toilet and saying "where's the money, Lebowski? Bunny says you're good for it!"

Despite the fact that I've clearly seen him in Mullholland Dr, The X-Files, Ellie Parker, Lethal Weapon 3, Twisted, Capote, and National Treasure, for some reason Pellegrino never registered on my radar until last year, and accordingly, I never noticed that he was also in The Big Lebowski. Weird.

Oh, and David Thewlis, which I swear that I had to have known, but also keep forgetting. He's Knox Harrington, the giggly guy in Maude Lebowski's apartment with the shaved head and John Waters moustache.

But I did know that Aimee Mann was the nihilist that lost her toe for the kidnapping scheme.

One of these days I'm going to write up a proper piece on The Big Lebowski that collects all of the reviews from 1998, well before it was the cultural touchstone it is now. Once upon a time the consensus was that The Big Lebowski was "okay, but it's no Fargo..." I swear it.

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Some things I neglected to mention about Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XVII last week:

- The Crawling Eye is episode 101, which means it was the first episode to air outside of KTMA, on what I'm guessing was (at the time) The Comedy Channel, later to become Comedy Central. I have it on a tape somewhere, and while primitive, it is a worthy addition for series fanatics like myself.

- The Final Sacrifice is apparently for Sci-Fi Channel / Mike era Mistie fans what Mitchell is to Comedy Central / Joel era fans. I confess that after a while, I simply lost track of MST3k on the Sci-Fi Channel, and as a result never really "got" the whole Rowsdower phenomenon. I missed most of the 9th and 10th seasons, and while I'm familiar with the shirt, volume XVII will be my first encounter with The Final Sacrifice and Zap Rowsdower. While I consider myself a "Joel" kinda guy, I'm welcome to see what it is the younger generation of fans are so buzzed about.

- One of the extras for this set is a panel discussion with "The Two Crows", Trace Beaulieu and Bill Corbett, which to my knowledge is a first on-camera (unless I'm forgetting some interaction from the 20th anniversary panel). I'm quite looking forward to that, as it marks for me one of the only divides in eras of the show that remains untapped.

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And so we end another day. Back tomorrow with two cracking good videos and some more nonsense.

Flim-Flammers Yammer

Greetings, my little Katzenjammer Kids! Hope you didn't mind the Cap'n taking the night off out of laziness giving you a blast from the past last night. Actually, considering how long it's been since You're All Doomed magazine actually existed, it might have been brand new for 90% of you. Those reviews are totally legit, by the way. The Cap'n wouldn't lie to you, would he?

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I know, I know; The House of the Devil. I so promised a review shortly after the disc arrived, and then... life happened. It has a nasty habit of doing that, and my plans to set aside 95 minutes for a movie I've been assured I'm going to dig the hell out of have kinda been put on the back burner. But soon, I promise. Like, on the other side of a paper due on Thursday.

By then, A Serious Man should also be here (it would already be here, but UPS has a curious policy of sometimes leaving packages and sometimes leaving notice for "signature confirmation") and I'd like to see Bronson soon. If you'd like to play a fun game, put bets down on how many of them I actually see between now and "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" on Saturday*.

Oh, and Black Dynamite comes out next week on DVD and Blu-satility-Ray-Disc.

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To follow up a smidge on that "Criterion Out of Print" business, I noticed that next week brings two Blu-Ray releases from Lionsgate of former Spine Numbers: Contempt and Ran. They're being released under the Studio Canal banner, which I suppose is a fancy way of distinguishing them from the likes of Cabin Fever and Frailty. The extras seem to be pretty close to their Criterion dvd counterparts, save for conspicuously missing commentary tracks.

I suppose that this bodes well for some of the "marquee" titles leaving Criterion, like Grand Illusion; there's a reasonably good chance we'll see Blu-Rays after all, and possibly with most of their original supplements. It's not radically different from Disney's release of The Rock, which carried over all of the Criterion extras. The question that remains is if there's somebody out there who is willing to make new covers to put in the BD sleeves so we can pretend they're still part of the collection?

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Finally, I don't know about you guys, but I'm pretty sure that the pill Jack tried to swallow was totally a Velociraptor egg, thus proving my theory that they don't call it Dinosaur Island for no reason!


* Hint, I could just show Bronson and A Serious Man on Saturday, so hedge those bets, folks...

The Oscar's Destiny Fulfilled.

It's the Dinosaur Island season premiere tonight. I think you can understand if I keep things short and to the point. This show is the only vice I'm allowing myself during the school year.

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Let's do a quick once-over on the Academy Award Nominations, some of which were pretty surprising (in a good way):

Best Picture for 2009:

Okay, I'm still on the record that the "bumping the nominees from 5 to 10" doesn't really change anything. More exposure? Maybe. Does it make it harder to guess the "front runners"? I don't think so. Still, it did allow for one genuinely unexpected nomination:

Avatar
The Blind Side
District 9
An Education
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
Precious
A Serious Man
Up
Up in the Air

I'm very happy to see District 9 on that list. I can't imagine in a million years that it's going to be the Best Picture, but if Moon's not going to be anywhere come March, it's good to have another excellent science fiction film that's not the Highest Grossing Movie of All Time on the list. I don't necessarily get nominating Up when it's the front-runner in Best Animated Film, the category created so that this sort of thing didn't have to happen. Forgive me for not understanding The Blind Side's inclusion, as it is so not the kind of movie I'm going to watch.

What do I think is going to win? No idea.

Sorry gang, but I don't do the Acting Categories. That's total Neil territory.

Best Direction:

Avatar - James Cameron
The Hurt Locker - Kathryn Bigelow
Inglourious Basterds - Quentin Tarantino
Precious - Lee Daniels
Up in the Air - Jason Reitman

Look, I don't know anything about Precious, but it certainly seems like the odds-on favorite if Bigelow doesn't win for The Hurt Locker.

Best Original Screenplay:

The Hurt Locker - Mark Boal
Inglourious Basterds - Quentin Tarantino
The Messenger - Alessandro Camon and Oren Moverman
A Serious Man - Joel and Ethan Coen
Up - Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Tom McCarthy

I haven't watched The Hurt Locker yet, but I'm planning on getting to it soon. Inglourious Basterds was a very well written film, and I've heard nothing but good things about A Serious Man. Still, Up does manage to entertain, enthuse, and tug the heart strings effortlessly. Hard to say...

Best Documentary:

Burma VJ
The Cove
Food, Inc.
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
Which Way Home

Don't know. I haven't seen any of these documentaries, but I notice that none of my favorite docs from last year are even mentioned near this list.

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There are more categories, but Avatar seems to have many (if not all) of the technical categories locked up, and I don't much care about the adapted screenplay (either Up in the Air or Precious), short subjects category, or even the Animated Picture (as I've said, I thought Coraline was very good but it's no Up, and I didn't see The Fantastic Mr. Fox). Over the last few years I've been increasingly off when it comes to predictions, but award season isn't really what I focus on. If there's an Oscar Party, I'll let you know.

In the meantime, I desperately need to convince myself to do homework and not watch Doctor Who: The End of Time or The House of the Devil.

Horror Fest IV Day Two: The Stepfather and The Monster Squad

After an episode of Tales from the Darkside called "Halloween Candy" (which set up Trick r Treat nicely for later), we sat down to watch the recently arrived on dvd copy of The Stepfather. While Adam and Cranpire are considering seeing the remake because of its Nip/Tuck associations, the rest of us were excited to see a pre-X-Files, pre-Millennium, pre-Dinosaur Island Terry O'Quinn doing what he does best: being a seemingly nice but secretly menacing psychopath.

Jerry Blake is just that man. He spends most of the movie being disappointed by the worthless families he marries into, so he kills them and then moves on. It seems fair: all Jerry wants is the "perfect family", and they constantly fail him. On top of that, these obsessed losers keep trying to track him down and expose his serial killer ways, so Jerry's constantly being barraged by the inane and the unworthy. It's really no wonder he beats people to death with a 2X4.

The Stepfather starts out with some great suggested brutality, while simultaneously giving audiences and idea of how Jerry operates. The camera follows Jerry as he shaves off his beard, cuts his hair, and sets off on his new life. Only as he's walking out of his old house, whistling "Camptown Races", do we see the indication of what happens when a family fails to live up to his standards, specifically the shot of a very dead child.

He sets up shop near Seattle with Susan (Shelley Hack) and her daughter Stephanie (Jill Schoelen). Stephanie is suspicious of Jerry, not only because he's her new stepfather, but also because she witnesses Jerry having a freak-out during a party. Unfortunately, she's kind of a troublemaker; Stephanie is constantly getting in fights and being kicked out of school, so her word is a little suspect, especially considering how "perfect" Jerry is.

Admittedly, when Jerry isn't being a psycho, he really is a great dad. All he wants is a happy family, and he works to keep them happy even when things invariably fall apart. But Stephanie's psychiatrist is trying to blackmail Jerry and this other drifter is also trying to smoke Jerry out, so he has to kill them.

Terry O'Quinn is great a Jerry Blake for many of the same reasons he works so well elsewhere. He seems perfectly nice and normal, if a bit "off", but when that switch turns on and psycho-Jerry shows up, the shit hits the fan and you do not want him to be angry at you. No sir.

Adam identified with Jerry a lot, which is kind of scary. Just ask Phillippi.

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I don't have much to add about The Monster Squad, other than the fact that Dracula really does come off as just some dude in a fancy suit who loves dynamite. You only see his fangs once, and most of the time he tools around in his car or periodically becomes a bat. Adam really didn't like The Monster Squad this year.

Horror Fest IV Day Two: Matango and See No Evil

We kicked off Friday with a double dose of not-goodness by watching a one-two punch of Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People and See No Evil. Both were, shall we say, underwhelming.

If there's anything to be gained from Matango, a movie where nothing happens until the 75 minute mark (and the mushroom monster doesn't appear until nearly the 45 minute mark), it's that the producers of Lost may have borrowed from its playbook. Allow me to explain: at first, Matango looks like a Japanese Gilligan's Island, but once their schooner crashes and they land on Dinosaur Island Mushroom Island, they spend the next hour debating how to survive, they find a crashed vessel from long before, and there are flashbacks.

Eventually you see the smoke monster Matango, and people go crazy eating the mushrooms and then (SPOILER ALERT) becoming mushrooms themselves! The one survivor makes it back to Japan and is in an insane asylum. At the very end it turns out he too is turning into a mushroom person. (WHAT A TWIST!)

The only thing See No Evil has that Matango doesn't is more violence in roughly the same running time, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Oh sure, there are some decent kills, and maybe the gimmick of a hulking brute with a hook and chain that steals peoples' eyeballs could work, but not in this movie.

For some odd reason, See No Evil thinks it would be funny to let the characters you like the least live until the end, and everyone else dies. The twist involving a character you can see coming a mile away had most of us saying "well, duh" when they finally got around to the reveal.

I guess WWE Superstar Kane isn't that bad, but since all he has to do is skulk around and drag people, there's not much room to gaffe it up. The direction is a mess: Gregory Dark, a former video and porn director steals liberally from the Saw camera tricks playbook. Alas, if you've seen one speed ramp, ill placed jump cut, and "attached to character" cam, you've seen pretty much all you're going to.

Oh well, things are headed to an upswing next, as we watch Terry O'Quinn in The Stepfather.

Relying on Your Expertise

The announcement of a new film by John Landis (The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London) is generally cause for celebration, even if this one is tinged with curiosity. Landis is casting Burke and Hare, two nineteenth century serial killers / grave robbers. So far, we only know who he tapped to play Hare and Burke, but it's pretty good: Simon Pegg and David Tennant.

Why this is so curious to me is that the timing of this comes awfully hot on the heels of I Sell the Dead, the Dominic Monaghan / Ron Perlman / Angus Scrimm movie I meant to watch on Video on Demand but never got around to. Films tend to do this every now and then; a run of two or more movies about roughly the same thing, like Deep Impact and Armageddon, or The Illusionist and The Prestige. Still, 19th century grave robbing isn't really in the cultural zeitgeist in the same way that asteroids or evil babies or messed up European torture porn are. Maybe turn of the century magicians though.

I guess it isn't a gripe so much as an observation. Teaming up David Tennant with Simon Pegg is a great idea, and John Landis has always had a knack for the funny which he supplements nicely with the scary from time to time.

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Arriving on the old digital versatility disc and Blu-Ray isn't an acronym for anything are four horror movies, two of which I'm keen on and the other two I'm asking for your input on. Believe it or not, I don't have time to watch everything, and I haven't seen everything. In fact, the last day or so I've been not watching movies and playing too much Fallout 3. Seriously, that game is dangerously open-ended...

Where were we? Oh, right! New release Tuesday. Stay frosty.

- After last July's field trip, it was a foregone conclusion that I'd pick up Drag Me to Hell when it came out on Blu Ray. Sam Raimi served me a heaping helpful of "WRONG" for doubting his ability to make a new horror movie, and PG13 at that. For everyone not named Cranpire, DMTH is a clever balance of shrieks and laughs, designed and executed to ratchet the tension all the way up, subvert the "shock" scare, and then hit you when you least expect it. It's also funny in a way Raimi hasn't been since Evil Dead 2. Not that Army of Darkness isn't funny, but it's more jokey than scary. Drag Me to Hell brings them both, and I'll happily eat crow on its behalf.

- I also wasn't going to hesitate picking up ordering The Stepfather online (cheap local stores aren't carrying it). I already ordered, watched, and enjoyed Stepfather 2: Make Room for Daddy last week, and I haven't seen the original Terry O'Quinn as unbalanced-psycho-dad-from-hell since the glory days of Carbonated Video.

For some reason, I never connected him from The Stepfather to The X-Files or Millennium until the first X-Files movie, and even then it was "That guy". Of course most people know him now as "that dead guy impersonating Locke from Dinosaur Island", so it'll be much more fun to watch than when Neil and I watched Saw to see "Ben Linus from Dinosaur Island" as Jigsaw's patsy. True story!

Okay, there are two movies I know very little about. I have been reading an inordinate amount about them online, and at least one of them sounds like a genuine "cult classic" that slipped through the cracks, so I'm reaching out to anybody that's seen them.

- I swear I'd never heard of Hardware until three weeks ago. Ever. No Dylan McDermott / Lemmy Kilmister / Android-Cyborg-Killing Machine whatever movie existed, as far as I knew. I was living in the ignorant bliss of Chopping Mall, but now there's this movie from 1990 by Richard Stanley that reviewers are calling a lost gem or better than you'd think, so my interest is piqued.

Plus, Severin put the dvd and Blu-Ray out, and if you haven't heard of the company, they're responsible for those very nice editions of The Psychic and Nightmare Castle dvds. They also put out The Inglorious Bastards (with an "A") and call themselves "The Criterion of Smut"! How can you go wrong with that? Okay, plenty of ways, but I have good reason to trust them.

My question is, has anyone seen this? It's been around for almost twenty years, so I'm guessing one of you must have seen it. I mean, Major Tom had seen Terrorvision, and I'd never heard of that until last summer. Get back to me.


- Happy Birthday to Me is a title I'm more familiar with, but it's one of those slasher movies I just never got around to seeing. If I understand the premise correctly, the movie is trying to mimic the Italian giallo style, and promises bizarre and memorable kills. The guy with a barbecue skewer in his mouth on the cover is certainly promising, but I've seen my share of slasher movies that promise a lot (like Splatter University's "Get a Higher Degree... In TERROR!") but then rarely deliver.

What I'm really asking is, am I going to get The Burning or Visiting Hours if I rent Happy Birthday to Me? I like the former, but was bored to tears by the latter. On the other hand, if the kills are really good, I will sometimes give a lesser movie a pass (like the original My Bloody Valentine), so what's the word hummingbirds?

Have you heard about Hugo and Kim?

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Tomorrow: a review of Anvil: The Story of Anvil, another excellent documentary that won't be nominated for anything next spring.

Also, Shecky's brother, Yankel Shecklestein, is out of prison and reunited with his brother. Pictures of the reunion to follow.

Horror Fest Day Two: “Live or die, your choice” SAW

The cult of SAW loves them. The rest of the world hates them. Some call it "reactionary horror", or horror with no redeeming social value, and therefore not worthy of discussing or even of giving credence to.

I hadn't seen Saw since the first time at The Grande three years ago, but I remembered liking it well enough. The traps were clever and the premise interesting: a killer who allowed his victims to do the murdering themselves. The structure judiciously doles out information, which keeps you guessing, or, if you're watching the second time, paying attention.

Mostly I picked it up because I didn't realize Michael Emerson was in it (he plays Zep in the movie). Many of you know Emerson as "Henry Gale" or Benjamin Linus on Lost, so I thought it would be interesting to rewatch it. And it was worth rewatching.

It's not a great movie, or without its flaws (Cary Elwes's accent drops more often than Keanu Reeves's in The Devils Advocate, and there are logic gaffes about) but in the end I have to say that even so-called reactionary horror can be enjoyed on a strictly entertainment level, so if the academics choose to dismiss it, then so be it.

I haven't seen Saw III yet, but I really didn't enjoy the second movie: I thought the acting was uniformly terrible, even if the traps were interesting, and while the twist was interesting enough (Amanda, not the surveillance), overall I just didn't feel it.

Off to a party for a few hours, then more company arrives. In the meantime, there's some MST3K playing on the VCR, just waiting for my return...