Review: Man of Steel

Though I've never read a single frame of Superman in his comic-book form, I know enough about the franchise to perceive significant departures from it when I see them. Man of Steel features several, and while some work and some don't, it departs even more dramatically from what I would consider sensible narrative practice when your studio is endeavoring to start its own Marvel-like compound franchise.

The Avengers assembled (YEP I WENT THERE) its constituent hero team from a scattered group of uneven but generally successful superhero movies connected by rather thin and easily-ignored tendons of in-universality. This strategy obviously worked in terms of getting butts in the seats, but more than that, it worked for each hero-specific film: it freed up each filmmaker to pursue styles and stories independently for each feature, with really very little need to worry about stepping on the compound franchise's toes. This not only gives each feature a freshness that one doesn't get in more limited and repetitive franchises (such as Harry Potter) but also opens up the potential for pretty impressive feats of long-form storytelling. I personally don't feel that the Marvel films have achieved any such feats (though Iron Man 3 was a step in the right direction), but the potential is there, thanks to the Marvel formula.

Review: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Now that Western popular cinema has entered the post-Marvel, post-LOTR age—where serialization is not just accepted, but expected, in our blockbusters—it's interesting to look back on an era when such things were still pretty new. The original Star Wars trilogy began the modern version of the trend, and, alongside the Indy trilogy, the Star Trek film franchise reinforced the trend, proving it to be a viable strategy and not a series-specific aberration.

No film in any of those three franchises is quite as "serial" as Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, a.k.a. "the whale one." Each Star Wars installment began with a crawl, reminding us of Where We Last Left Our Heroes; the Indy movies had almost as little connection with one another as the Bond movies; and even Star Trek III took the time to show us a clip from the pivotal ending of Star Trek II, and worked in lots of in-narrative review of that film's events.

Contrast this with the comparatively abrupt opening of Star Trek IV. The opening council scene with John Shuck's Klingon ambassador provides some indirect summary of the previous two movies, then Kirk's first captain's log says "We're in the third month of our Vulcan exile," never fully explaining why they're exiled, let alone why the planet Vulcan would be harboring them. Ironic that the most financially successful Trek film (up until 2009) opens in a fashion so impenetrable, almost hostile, to the uninitiated viewer. It's not as though they could have assumed that every audience member saw The Search for Spock. (Indeed, it seems they even tacked on a weird prologue for the foreign markets under the assumption that too few people overseas had seen III.)

Bat-Dream

(The following actually transpired in my dream last night. Observations and analysis provided in footnote form.)

It's the pilot episode of Wayne Enterprises, a TV semi-reboot of Nolan's Batman franchise featuring a younger and more marketable actor as Bruce Wayne¹ and an emphasis on smaller-scale threats to Gotham—some villains, some mere troublemakers, but no supervillains. The gist is, this is what Batman does in between blockbuster-scale threats.

Open on a boardroom, discussing a thorn in the company's side: a take-no-prisoners alternative-media journalist (MADtv's Debra Wilson) who seems bent on portraying Wayne Enterprises in the worst possible light, using flimsy and out-of-context evidence. They call her…"Bane."²

Bruce tells the board (via a flashback) that he's met her, at some clothing store in what he's now convinced was no chance encounter. But he assures the board that she's probably willing to listen to reason, and therefore not a serious threat to the company, and that either way, he'll handle it—ignoring their perplexed reaction.

Cut to Bruce driving his own limo, as incognito as Bruce can be—but the limo's sort of a Batmobile Jr., outfitted with all kinds of high-tech controls in both the driver's compartment and the (currently unoccupied) passenger compartment. Bruce has used his considerable means to identify Bane's car, and is following it at a discreet distance on a freeway. He initiates an infrared scan of her car using a Bond-like outfolding center console…and detects an anomalous heat signature on a rear edge, close to the gas tank. The limo's computer calculates a high probability that it's a bomb.

Bruce is genuinely surprised, and considers two possibilities. One: Miss Bane here is a terrorist and/or industrial saboteur, about to bomb some facility that's part of Wayne Enterprises' interests. Two: Bane's about to be the victim—has some other target of her nosy reporting decided to dispose of her? Either way, Bruce has to intervene.

Then I woke up.

1 - Throughout the dream, I perceived things from Wayne's perspective, initially as the character, then as myself observing this TV show, but in neither case was the actor identified.

2 - On account of some old dude on the board saying "She is the BANE of our existence!", I'd guess. And maybe they don't want to try to pronounce her real name or something.

Review: American Warships

Those of us who are cursed to occasionally find ourselves in the mood for an Asylum mockbuster could do worse than American Warships, which came out the same time as Battleship and likewise concerns naval warfare with aliens—in this case, centered on the aging USS Iowa. Cheap and dumb by any measure, American Warships nonetheless displays minimal competence in story, pacing, some of the dialogue, and the leads' acting.

The leads in question are Mario Van Peebles in the Adama role (oh yeah, this movie also completely rips off the BSG pilot) and Carl Weathers in the "Trapped Forever in the Situation Room" role. Both actors maintain total seriousness throughout, which feels more forced coming from Van Peebles—but maybe that's just because he spent the whole shoot dreading the line "You're not gonna sink my battleship." Whatever the case, they're both perpetually watchable and they mostly retain their dignity, no matter how hard the rest of the film tries to strip them of it. Though I am still perplexed by Weathers' grizzled-prospector-style profanity.

Review: Dungeons and Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness

As cinema, the Dungeons and Dragons films are a bit of an oddity, existing as they do for the primary purpose of driving viewers into the waiting arms of Wizards of the Coast's flagship product. Yet each sequel assumes a higher level of familiarity with D&D tropes and concepts than its predecessor.

The astoundingly bad first film (Dungeons and Dragons, most notable for Jeremy Irons' absurd performance) assumes basically no familiarity at all, and indeed was likely perceived by the hardcore D&D nerds to be nothing so much as a soulless cash-in, borrowing franchise elements but not their context. See also either one of the J.J. Treks.

The far lower-budgeted, but surprisingly decent, second film (Dungeons and Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God) actually resembles many D&D campaigns in tone, rather than resembling all the worst things about The Phantom Menace as its predecessor did. Yet it doesn't assume much D&D knowledge of its audience. There's even a scene where a character explains the difference between arcane and divine magic, which would've seemed insulting to the hardcore fans if they hadn't already seen the first movie and thereby known true insult.

Review: Star Trek: Into Darkness

Readers: if you happen to possess an affection for American cinema as an art form…what are you doing even reading this review in the first place?

You know it's gonna be dire. You remember the first J.J. Abrams Star Trek vehidebacle (term © Fraught Experiments LLC), and you learned to expect more of the same from the sequel's ubiquitous promotional material. You know it's just another schlockbuster (term © somebody else, probably), one which at best—at BEST—possesses a tiny glimmer of ambition and heart.

Let me just nip that optimism in the bud right now. If Hollywood is doomed, as some say, it will be because of movies like J.J. Trek In2 Darkness. The warmest words I have for it is that it seems like J.J. & Co. wanted to appear to evolve their franchise.

I say this because, Into Darkness is arguably about something—intentionally or not. This is notable when we remember that the Trek franchise pre-J.J. had always tried to be about something. Specifically, Into Darkness is about the morality of targeted killings.

Review: Star Trek (2009)

I wasn't really a nerd in school. I had to gain acceptance into their social stratum—I had to work up to nerddom (indeed, I never even played a tabletop RPG until college). This is largely because I moved from city to city and state to state so often that, statistically speaking, at any given point in my academic history I was probably the New Kid.

Table 1.1: School Social Strata ca. Reagan-Bush-Clinton Era

Stratum Name (Descending Order)	Access to Sex, Liquor, or Non-Homemade Drugs	Trek Franchise Investment
JOCKS	Complete	None
JOCK AFFILIATES	Moderate to Extreme	None
JOCK WOULD-BES (& Vo-Tech Hicks, Where Applicable)	Low to High	None
ARTY COOL TYPES	Moderate to High	None to Low
NERDS	None to Low	Low to Extreme
NEW KIDS & UGLIER FOREIGN EXCHANGE STUDENTS	None	None to Extreme
UNTOUCHABLES	That's Pretty Funny	Let's Just Say, Probably Writes Letters to Counselor Troi

(Don't worry, I'm going somewhere with this.) You will notice that the second and third columns above represent two major forms of escapism, for members of all strata, from the meat-grinder hellscape of their shared environment. You'll also notice that each of them is roughly inversely proportional to the other. That Star Trek was almost completely rejected by all but the lower strata is, I'm certain, a large part of Paramount's decision to not just reboot, not just reimagine, but thoroughly reinterpret the franchise with 2009's embarrassing film.

Review: Europa Report

My biggest fear about Europa Report (in which a monster is eventually discovered under the ice of the Jovian moon Europa, and don't think that's much of a spoiler, 'cuz it's not) was that it would prove to be fanciful and absurd a la Event Horizon. It's not that I don't enjoy Event Horizon, or sci-fi horror/thrillers of its ilk, but the market's a little saturated.

Moreover, I found Gravity compelling and realistic enough that other sci-fi thrillers will hereafter have a high standard of realism to live up to. This is why I'm reluctant to see Ghosts of Mars even though I know I should for several reasons.

But back to Europa Report. I'm pleased to…um…report that it's not ridiculous. It's got some structural problems, and many of its characters are ill-defined, but I found it engrossing and tense.

Review: Innerspace

Eighties movies run the gamut between "charmingly '80s" and "painfully '80s." Innerspace is kind of all over that gamut, which makes it a densely representative example of '80s cinema.

A thoroughly dopey sci-fi comedy, Innerspace stars Dennis Quaid (who I never realized was so leery) as a hotshot test pilot, shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the ass of a nerdy grocery-store clerk (Martin Short) via a series of improbable circumstances. Quaid establishes communication with Short, and their interactions (during their quest to figure out how to get Quaid out and un-shrunk) provide much of the film's amusement.

Fraught Experiments: YOU'RE 1!

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of this blog's launch! HUZZAH! And what better time to tell you that I'm not going to be posting as frequently for the foreseeable future!

For one thing, October was horror month, so the high number of reviews was a bit of an aberration. Additionally, things are going to get busy IRL for me.

But never fear! The growth rate of my Netflix queues may have slowed, or even plateaued, but they are nowhere near exhausted.

Review: Brain Dead

What a cast in this movie. Bud Cort! George Kennedy! The guy who wanted to take Data apart in TNG: "Measure of a Man"! The fast food cashier from Falling Down! One of the pirate buddies from Pirates of the Caribbean! And according to IMDb, Kyle Gass played one of the anaesthetists, though I didn't spot him.

And our leads? The oft-confused Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton. This movie's actually a helpful mnemonic for those of you who have trouble remembering which is which: who'd make a better head-in-the-clouds neurologist vs. who'd make a better corporate shark?

Pullman is the neurologist, Rex, whose livelihood is threatened by shady goings-on involving his old college buddy turned plutocrat, Jim (Paxton). Soon, Rex's very sanity is on the line; he begins to experience hallucinations after agreeing to perform experimental brain surgery on a company drone (Cort) who knows too much.

Review: Castle Freak

Director Stuart Gordon wants frequent collaborator Jeffrey Combs to play Edgar Allan Poe in a biopic for which they are currently raising funds. Castle Freak, a film they did together in the '90s, would actually feel very Poe-esque were it not for the typical gore-flick misogyny.

It's still an engaging, sorta creepy haunted-castle kind of movie. It features a solid story, overall avoidance of the most tired horror cliches, and a memorable antagonist. I just wish it had dispensed with the bad taste.

Review: Warlock III: The End of Innocence

The third Warlock film damn nearly could not be more different from the first two. Warlock and Warlock: The Armageddon were both rollicking rides through a wacky world of time travel, coin-eating, visits to Amish country, purposeless murders, lamewad druids, mystic tomes, magic stones, and salt assault. The direct-to-video Warlock III: The End of Innocence is by contrast as conventional a horror film as you could hope for, a youths-in-a-creepy-house story we've seen countless times. Yet it's also mildly scary on several occasions, unlike its predecessors.

Review: Pontypool

(Note: this review is as spoiler-free as I could make it. Which is to say, it hints at spoilers.)

Many indie horror films end up being more horror and less indie; they aspire, not to artistic profundity or hipster cred, but to scares, gore, and frequently, reliable genre tropes. Indie zombie movie Pontypool is largely the inverse of that.

I have mixed feelings about indie movies; even those I've liked, I've often found slightly irritating. And initially, I wasn't even going to do a full review for Pontypool because its ending bugged me so much. Upon further reflection, however, much of the first hour-plus was engaging and effective enough that I changed my mind. Its indie-ness is less overwhelming than it could have been, resulting in a watchable and quite different movie, which is a rare enough combination to merit attention by itself. It helps that, despite its miniscule budget, Pontypool is occasionally scary, and in a distinctive way.

Spend enough time in a nursing home or a psych ward, and there's a good chance you'll encounter some individuals exhibiting the same behavioral oddity that distinguishes Pontypool's zombies from others. Thus, despite its concept being even less plausible than that of more typical zombie narratives, its brand of scare works—and is likely to feel even more unsettling than most zombie movies to those of us who've seen people do this.

Review: Leviathan (1989)

1989's Leviathan borrows so much from Alien, The Thing, and similar futurey-horror blockbusters of its age that if you've seen a couple of them, you can safely skip Leviathan, because it adds pretty much nothing to your personal catalogue of filmwatching experiences—except possibly the ability to link Daniel Stern directly with Richard Crenna for Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon purposes. But then, I just told you that, so you don't have to see it after all…unless your rules variant requires you to have actually seen the movies you reference, which, wow man, let me into THAT game.

Review: Warlock: The Armageddon

Challenge: Make a Warlock sequel that's simultaneously more boring and more batshit than its predecessor.

It may seem impossible, but that's the impressive feat achieved by Warlock: The Armageddon. A predictable and unoriginal story accompanies ludicrous setpieces and greatly amped-up gore, but those aren't the only ways in which this sequel differs from Warlock. In fact, if they'd cast someone else as their warlock, you'd barely be able to tell that these two movies take place in the same universe at all—no direct reference whatsoever is made to the events of Warlock, and the only slight hint about those events is the fact that the Warlock seems to know a little bit about late-20th-century materialism and motor vehicle operation.

Review: The Cabin in the Woods

(Warning: major spoilers ahead. If you were interested enough to get this far, and you haven't seen it, go see it now. It's on Netflix Instant.)

What do we mean when we talk about "sacrifice"? And what do I mean when I say "we"? "We" could be modern Western media-savvy types—Joss Whedon's usual audience. "We" could be modern Americans.

"We" could also be all of humanity, but in rewatching The Cabin in the Woods, I began to think in terms of premodern versus modern peoples (to use very broad categories). For premodern peoples, sacrifice means abject terror before dark forces you can't control, and feebly offering blood in the hope of placating those forces, under the assumption that they want blood, since they're obviously dark and all—what with their plagues and floods and pyroclastic flows.

For modern Americans, perhaps modern peoples generally, sacrifice means soldiers, firemen, and cops. What if both meanings of sacrifice are the same? What if the dark forces to whom we now sacrifice our young (mostly) men are war, random fiery destruction, and man's inhumanity to man, respectively? And was there an early version of this script where one of the cabin visitors was a veteran of a recent war?

Review: Warlock

Warlock is a cheesy-ass 1989 fantasy/horror flick with a story so dopey that it makes the movie more fun than it has any right to be, largely because you're never sure what's coming next.

To encapsulate the experience: a warlock is about to be executed in Boston in 1691, but while confronting a vengeful witch-hunter, the warlock summons evil powers and (apparently inadvertently) teleports both of them to 1988 Los Angeles. It seems the forces of darkness can be budget-conscious too.

So upon arrival, the warlock is thrown into a house that just happens to contain one of the three pieces of the Grand Grimoire, an evil book with earth-shattering powers. The warlock proceeds to kill the homeowner just for the sake of accessorizing, then acquires the pages and ventures off to complete the book. But the witch-hunter is hot on his trail, thanks to a vaguely Hellraiser-esque warlock-compass contraption.

Review: Gravity

Alfonso Cuarón (director of Children of Men and the best Harry Potter film, Prisoner of Azkaban) proves his chops once again with Gravity, a space thriller that I'm choosing to categorize as sci-fi even though it's not futuristic in any detectable way.

Indeed, it's a movie of its moment, particularly so if you're an astronomer or an astronaut, I'd imagine. The narrative's antagonist is the Kessler effect—the phenomenon of space debris crashing into other space debris and causing a cascade reaction as tiny, superfast pieces effectively multiply themselves. Part of me was hoping that, following the harrowing climax, the survivor(s) would address a session of Congress about the urgency of cleaning up our way-too-polluted orbital space. But that would have been preachy and lame, which is why I wasn't disappointed when it didn't happen.

Review: Room 237

Evidently the product of one too many dormitory pot parties, Room 237 purports to expose hidden meanings in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining by intercutting audio from interviews with "experts" alongside a few diagrams and (mainly) footage from assorted films by Kubrick and others. (MST fans should be on the lookout for Urbano Barberini, a.k.a. Tarl Cabot, in one occasionally re-used shot.) While I can honestly say I've never seen a movie quite like this, that's far from a compliment.

What I have seen are a few of the wall-of-text, black-background Shining analysis websites that Room 237 mentions, and even these virtual watering holes for crackpots are more persuasive than just about anything presented in this film. Room 237 runs the gamut from the Native American motif (intentional, and therefore not hidden) to Danny imagining literally everything (if so, kid's got some serious psychosexual baggage for his age) to supposed subliminal minotaurs (I guess if you have astigmatism, maybe) to the Holocaust (which everything can be about if you try hard enough) to the Kubrick-faked-the-moon-landing theory (can we PLEASE be done with that now). Moreover, every interview subject seems to think that an observed (or imagined) connection inherently counts as proof. I haven't seen this much reaching since my last trip to Sam's Club.

S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Gambles of Television

By now, my four or five regular readers (hi guys!) know that I'm a bit of a Netflix fiend. I don't have cable and I almost never watch network TV. I am surely one of thousands for whom a simple cost-benefit analysis demonstrated that subscribing to Netflix, providing as it does a wealth of readily available viewing goodness (and shittiness when the mood strikes), without commercials, is an easy choice versus a usurious cable subscription, mandating as it does tuning in at a particular time and putting up with advertising that you basically paid to see.

And I also cannot be the only person who's been a Netflix subscriber for enough years that I've developed an allergy to commercials that's so acute, I can no longer listen to the radio and do my best to tune out the trailers in front of movies on the (increasingly rare) occasion that I go to the theater.

I began to wonder just how commonplace I am in the above ways while I was watching the series premiere of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. last night. The show itself? Eh, kind of promising. Much of it felt…routine, unexpectedly, but the casting's good overall and the occasional Whedonish touches were noticeable. I do have my doubts about the degree to which fanboy enthusiasm for the Coulson character in Marvel films will translate to small-screen viability over an extended period.

Which brings us to the thing that really fired my imagination as S.H.I.E.L.D. ended and I switched off the opening moments of The Goldbergs. It wasn't wondering about Lola's background, or Mike's destiny, or whether the techie characters with the heavy accents would make it past the pilot. Instead, motivated by this rare hour of commercial exposure, I imagined what the future might bring for TV—and the adaptable little mammal to its overspecialized dinosaur, the Internet.

Review: The Wild Blue Yonder

Though 2005's The Wild Blue Yonder is a Werner Herzog film, don't go into it expecting any of his trademark narration. Though it largely consists of documentary footage, it can't really be called a documentary. And though it has a narrative—described by the opening titles as "a science fiction fantasy"—it is in no way a traditional one.

The story is self-evidently not meant to be taken at face value, as is the case with most science fiction. Let me explain. The Wild Blue Yonder has one actor—the always-adorable Brad Dourif—portraying an alien from the Andromeda galaxy. While standing in front of bleak terrestrial settings (like a seemingly abandoned town and a mobile home apparently hit by a tornado), Dourif explains—to the camera—how his people came to this planet, how the government launched a secret expedition into the far reaches of space in search of an alternative to Earth, and how this expedition discovered Dourif's homeworld. His exposition is overlaid with appropriately otherworldly footage from a space shuttle mission and from an Antarctic diving expedition, along with occasional snippets of interviews with astronomers.

Review: The Grandmaster

Here's how little I knew about Ip Man going into The Grandmaster, the latest of many biopics about him: when I saw the Netflix Instant cover art for the film Ip Man, with the title in all caps, I guessed that it was a wry mockumentary about a superhero charged with enforcing copyrights by going after internet pirates around the world.

Of course, Ip Man was in fact a legendary Chinese martial artist (and Bruce Lee's teacher). And as The Grandmaster unfolded, I began to feel that it may be precisely the worst way to start learning about Ip Man. Partly, this is because the movie really should have been called The Grandmaster's Girlfriend.

Review: Deep Cover

A would-be West Coast Goodfellas, Deep Cover is a '90s crime drama informed by the Reagan/Bush years (specifically their darker side, and you'll note I didn't just say "dark" side, because then it's like "which one?"). Its political undertones don't really emerge until about an hour-plus in, and the degree to which they are unsuccessful is debatable. Whatever the case, they don't fully succeed, and the other plot points contribute to the sense that Deep Cover, whatever strengths it has, mostly misses the mark.

As the title implies, the protagonist cop (Laurence Fishburne) goes deep undercover to try and bring down a chain of coke dealers. Along the way he partners up with a lawyer (Jeff Goldblum) working for one of his targets, and the lines between crime and justice begin to blur, as they are oft wont to do. Before long he's facing down Latin American druglords and corrupt senators, though sadly without any McBain-esque one-liners or defenestrations.

Review: Hansel and Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft

Meet Fivel and Booboo Stewart, lead protagonists of Hansel and Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft. Fivel wants to be a screechy pop star, and performs the closing credits song. Booboo was born with an unfortunate condition that makes him look like every sullen '90s teen ever. (Yes, Fivel's the girl and Booboo's the boy. Don't ask me.) Wikipedia suggests one or both of them are actors, though judging by their commitment on-screen, the twins themselves could take it or leave it.

And David DeCoteau has a plan for them.

Review: Riddick

The new third Riddick movie (titled Riddick, as if it's an album or something) is in my view a step backward for the franchise, despite its effectiveness at pitting scary monsters against rough space thugs. I'm a real fan of the Riddick character and both of the previous films, but this new one is problematic, and the essence of its problems is that, in trying to be more like the first film and less like the second, the character's growth is stunted, and the stakes of the story with it.

Review: The Lives of Others

There must be some cosmic significance to the fact that Netflix sent me The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) just in time for me to watch it late yesterday, around the time that the latest, and gobsmackingest, NSA revelations came to light. It's just as well that I wasn't aware of the latter until this morning, otherwise I would've been curled up and sobbing midway through the movie.

The Lives of Others is an absolutely stellar drama and a good bit of evidence for fancy-pants cinema aesthetes to employ when making the argument (as they must at least want to from time to time) that foreign films are mostly better than American films. It's about the Stasi—so we're not exactly talking about light viewing. (Oh man am I glad I didn't put off watching it. Never coulda got through it tonight.)

Review: Goon

I don't care about sports—in some respects I actively dislike the entire concept, though I've been known to enjoy live baseball and hockey. Still, the thinking behind serious sports fandom eludes me. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay to the fun hockey comedy Goon is that it's one of those sports movies (alongside the similarly skillful Miracle) that makes the non-sports-fan really understand, if only for a moment.

Based on a real-life career, Goon stars Seann William Scott as Doug, a soft-spoken, good-natured lunkhead with modest aspirations—sort of a less imaginative Andy Dwyer. Except he sort of has a superpower.

Doug, as it turns out, can withstand—and dish out—superhuman amounts of physical punishment. He's therefore recruited by the Halifax Highlanders, a fictitious minor-league hockey team. This basic premise is an effective foundation for Goon to construct a comic sports tale that's surprisingly sweet considering its subject matter.

Review: Dredd

In Dredd, a futuristic cop/jury/executioner/JUDGE with the improbable name of Dredd takes a psychic rookie under his wing—and into a deadly fortress controlled by vicious killers who are somewhat reluctant to allow the judges to escape alive. Surrounded on all sides by death, they're about to discover that the only thing they can count on…is each other. And bullets. Thousands and thousands of bullets.

I'm by no means a comic book nerd, or even dilettante. This means that, though I've long been aware of Judge Dredd's graphic-novel origins, my personal understanding of the character is limited to the Stallone version and a few glimpses of the scowling comic version of Dredd. Casting-wise, Karl Urban's definitely an improvement; his scowl is more consistent and believable than Stallone's…pout? grimace? Let's just say "Stallone-face."

Review: A Talking Cat!?!

I…

That w…

Why d…

I don't know where to begin.

A Talking Cat!?! (presumably available on Netflix Instant only because Netflix has a demonstrated sense of humor) is a kid's movie about a cat whose unexplained ability to talk "brings two families together" and somehow solves the problems of its entire six-person cast, headed by the over-the-hill neighbor duo of Phil and Susan. Its budget is only exceeded in thinness by its screenwriting, directing, "99 Discount Movie Background Music Tracks" score, and entire concept. It's not hyperbole to say this may be the worst film I've ever seen. And, as you should know by now, I've seen some doozies.

Days of Future Past

I just watched the Deep Space Nine two-parter "Past Tense" again recently. Though it's not DS9 at its very best, and it's preachy even for Star Trek, it's always affecting—and it seems like every time I watch it, it becomes more plausible.

I'm not referring, of course, to the "chroniton envelope isolating the Defiant from the changes to the timeline" business, or even the idea of "changes to the timeline" making sense. If time travel is possible, nobody but the time travelers would ever perceive "changes to the timeline," because the act of traveling into the past would spawn divergent timelines that cannot be re-merged, but instead only be made to seem identical…but that's a discussion for another time. (Maybe when I finally get around to watching Primer, that can be part of my review.)

No, the plausible part is all the 2024 Sanctuary District stuff. The last time I watched "Past Tense" was probably four or five years ago, and what felt plausible then is no less so now:

"It's not that they don't give a damn, Doctor. It's that they've given up. The social problems facing them seem too enormous to deal with." - Sisko

"We had to cancel our trip to the Alps this year because of the student protests in France." - the female party guest

"Jobs. You guys want jobs? When are you going to figure it out? There are no jobs! Not for us, anyway." - B.C.

Review: Oz: The Great and Powerful

It seems, based on passing mentions of him here and there, that the James Franco backlash is well underway. I thought he was likable and pleasant in the few things I've seen him in (obviously I haven't seen Spring Breakers), and I'd include Oz: The Great and Powerful on that list too; he's essentially the one consistently above-average factor in this mostly mediocre Huge Disney Event. So whatever the backlash is due to, I'd be mildly surprised if it was his acting.

That's not to say Franco is perfect for the role of the Wizard. He's charming and invested, and though the CG sidekicks' voice acting was solid, none of the other human cast did nearly as well as Franco at reacting plausibly to the fantastical goings-on. That said, Franco's "carnival showman" persona feels forced—which may have been intentional, but an actor with a little more genuine power and menace would have suited the character better, especially near the end. Franco also speaks and behaves in too modern a fashion, which I wouldn't mind if it wasn't so obvious that Oz is trying to directly act as both prequel and homage to The Wizard of Oz. Surely some young actors somewhere are capable of '30s-style speech and acting—but perhaps not the most marketable young actors.

Review: Miami Connection

I have a standard operating procedure when confronted with a film so astoundingly, unforgettably inept that it is destined for a special place in my heart. I refer to the likes of Birdemic, The Room, Teen-Age Strangler, or The Beast of Yucca Flats—a film I adore so much I've created a second Twitter account in its honor. That procedure is to ask myself, not in sarcastic bafflement (though there's that, too), "How/why did this get made?" I often feel that I can't fully evaluate a cinematic turd until I've been able to come up with at least a plausible answer to this question.

In the case of the preceding examples, the answers are (in order) "somebody thought he was both Hitchcock and Al Gore"; "somebody wanted to get aspiring naked actress flesh all over him"; "a small town thought they could come together and make a swell picture just as well as Hollywood"; and, well, "I'm Coleman Francis; I don't need a reason."

Which brings us to the glory and the power that is 1987's musical-action spectacular, Miami Connection.

Imagine a Miami where rival synth-pop bands, vying for the choice gig at a particular club, enlist cocaine-funded motorcycle ninjas and gangs full of Mad Max extras to assault one another seemingly at random.

(Did I have you at "motorcycle ninjas"? Maybe skip to the end, then. Otherwise, stay with me.)

Review: The Whistleblower

The roughest of the many rough scenes in The Whistleblower takes place in the dungeon-like back room of a Bosnian sex traffickers' bar, where trafficked women are forced to watch as one of their number, who took the chance of talking to UN authorities and wound up recaptured, is viciously assaulted as an example to the others.

I mention this off the top because The Whistleblower is based on a true story, and that, combined with how rough it gets, may challenge some viewers' capacity to handle the movie. Those who can, and who are patient with a slow build, will find it a gripping and harsh look at a terrifying world, not unlike a particularly uncompromising episode of Law & Order: SVU.

Like other fictionalized versions of true stories, I have to guess that The Whistleblower would seem less striking to viewers who know the ins and outs of the true story. I'd never even heard of Kathryn Bolkovac, though, which meant I was soon absorbed—wondering exactly how the titular whistle would be blown (and by the way, um, spoiler alert, movie?) and at what cost. Throughout, the plot points remain realistic enough that you come away from this movie feeling like Taken just never should have even been made. (Though Taken is, admittedly, more fun.)

Review: Mulan

Other "Disney Renaissance" films have aged better than Mulan, which I found oppressively formulaic but otherwise watchable upon my first-ever viewing of it last week. A lot of my lukewarm reaction is probably owed to Mulan just not quite getting off on the right foot. The first half-hour felt so much like a note-perfect parody of Disney movie formula that I actually made a comment to that effect to Mrs. Fraught BEFORE the butt-injury gag.

The early part of the film also establishes the songs' weakness and the too-numerous animal sidekicks, most of whom don't speak and therefore are weakly defined as characters (beyond the standard attributes of "wacky" and "fun"). Of course, since they thought it would be a good idea to give the one speaking animal role to Eddie Murphy, perhaps we should be thankful that the other animals didn't talk.

Review: Body Armor (a.k.a. The Protector)

I'll wager there are better, and less offensive (on multiple levels), representatives of the "cheap action film with a stuntman actually given a lead role" genre available on Netflix Instant than Body Armor, an adolescent tale of one man's struggle against a villainous big-pharma-industrialist and his plot to unleash fearsome viruses so he can sell the vaccines. Body Armor is the Netflix/home video title, though in its original made-for-cable state it was called The Protector, and neither title suits it very well. Here, then, are some ideas for better, more medically-themed titles:

The Infector – which would put more emphasis on the one mildly interesting character, the villain.

Blood Vengeance – as in, the action scenes have blood, and he's got a virus in his blood; see what I did there?

Critical Attack – as in, how we might expect film critics to respond.

Lethal Strain – as in, sitting through it is such a strain, I wouldn't recommend trying if you have a heart condition.

Feel free to use all of those, movie. Obviously you don't care what people call you.

Review: Superman Returns

A fan of the first two Christopher Reeve Superman films will find Superman Returns to be a fun, affectionate follow-up. A fan of the other two Christopher Reeve Superman films does not, so far as I am aware, exist—so this will be the last mention of them.

Briefly, the setup is that Superman left Earth to scope out the remnants of his homeworld, which took five years. In the interim, Luthor got out of prison, Lois got a human mate and had a kid, and all the other heroes in the DC universe were apparently also on long space voyages, because bad stuff kept happening. Early in the film, Superman Returns; this naturally entails some adjustment for everyone involved.

One might think this film to have been a general failure, considering that this film came out only seven years before yet another reboot (Man of Steel, which I'll be waiting for home video to see). While it's pretty evident why Superman Returns failed to spawn a franchise, on its own merits, it's actually fairly competent. Some sequences are truly cool, the effects are weak only once or twice, and it lacked a lot of the sorts of cliches we've gotten so used to that we don't even complain about them anymore. (Well, it had one big one: a female lead too young to be believable as her character. When did Lois start working at the Daily Planet? When she was twelve?)

Review: The Mist

Based on a Stephen King novella, The Mist is a skillful and gripping monster/horror flick directed by Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption) that you should definitely see if you fall into any of the following categories:

you are familiar with, and enjoy, the "survival horror" genre

you like Stephen King's style (e.g. small town in Maine, every minor character is known by name to every other minor character, families in crisis due to monsters, etc.)

…and especially if

you like a really great fuck-you ending.

I've mentioned the fuck-you ending on this blog before. The fuck-you ending is the wonderful device whereby the filmmakers craft the story such that the audience thinks "Well, they can't POSSIBLY end the movie THAT way," and then they go ahead and do it. Drag Me to Hell had a very apt fuck-you ending in which a major character, well, justifies the movie's title.

Review: Pacific Rim

If you've ever said to yourself, "I enjoy Godzilla movies for their camp value, but why hasn't anyone ever made a more realistic one, with modern special effects?", then you obviously weren't paying attention in 1998 when the execrable Godzilla remake starring Matthew Broderick came out. However, you're in luck, hypothetical monster movie aficionado, because Guillermo del Toro made Pacific Rim just for you, and you'll be satisfied by it. The rest of us will have more mixed feelings.

Pacific Rim is undeniably effective at doing what it sets out to do: make huge robots punch huge monsters and make it look awesome and believable. My giggles of enjoyment occurred during these scenes, which demonstrate skillful design, flawless digital imagery, and imaginative storyboarding. Unfortunately—in this age when special effects are no longer special, but expected—it needed to do more than that to win over that segment of the audience who DOESN'T enjoy Godzilla movies for their camp value, represented by a couple guys we overheard leaving the theater, one of whom said "Well, that was the stupidest movie I've seen in a long time."

Review: Seven Below

Some years ago I watched the late-era Val Kilmer movie Spartan because I'd always been a fan of Kilmer but I'd seen some online scuttlebutt to the effect of "Hey, hurr hurr, how 'bout that washed-up loser Val Kilmer, huh? Look at these complete shit movies he's makin' now," so after I finished Spartan, I thought, "Well, okay, that wasn't GREAT, but it was far from complete shit, and Kilmer was pretty darn good in it; so, Internet haters? What the hell?"

Well, this. This the hell.

The infinitesimal-budget horror flick Seven Below (or 7 Below, as it's known on Netflix Instant, not that I'm advising you to look for it) involves a group of tourists heading into the wilderness of Minnesota but winding up "trapped" by "dangerous" weather in a creepy old house full of booze and ghosts and bad acting. I give it credit for having a cast of characters not comprised entirely of oversexed high-school kids, but the cast we do get nevertheless fails to be interesting. At least they fit in well with the similarly uninteresting story, music, direction, dialogue…

Review: Cosmopolis

I did like the music. Gotta say that right up front. There wasn't enough of it, but what was there, I liked. It contributed to the intermittently dreamlike mood.

But otherwise? Cosmopolis is a pretentious mess, a string of disjointed scenes whose purpose feel less like narrative advancement and more like "let's bring in this actor now." The thematic continuity, such as it is, tries to seem like it's got its "finger on the pulse" of contemporary American issues like class warfare, sexual politics, and crazed lone gunmen. But if educators in future generations decide this movie represents our time, then I feel bad for the students forced to watch it.

Maybe my vitriol is partly due to the concept's inherent appeal and potential. Cosmopolis concerns a brilliant and amoral young Wall Street bazillionaire whose financial empire begins to collapse all around him while he spends most of the movie in his borderline-sci-fi limo surrounded by riots. AND it's directed in a sterile, sleek fashion by David Friggin' Cronenberg. I can imagine a universe where I love the shit out of that movie.

Review: Side Effects

Readers of my previous reviews may have noticed how often I comment, usually unhappily, on a film's structure. I'm not sure why this is so often a focal point for me. Maybe it's because most ineffective movies fail in predictable and routine ways, so it stands out more when a film suffers from a bizarre, disjointed, and/or lopsided plot structure.

The other side of that view is just as valid: that effective movies with unusual structure get noticed for it. Pulp Fiction is an obvious example, and Side Effects is too, but not in the same way. Not only does Side Effects have structural weirdness of a different flavor (its chronology is linear), but the weirdness it has exists for a very good reason, as opposed to Pulp Fiction's showier, more indulgent structure.

Review: The Dark Knight Rises

After the impressive Batman Begins and the stellar Dark Knight, the Nolan Batman franchise ends on a sour, bleating, almost brown note with The Dark Knight Rises—a textbook study, in my view, of the tendency for highly successful film franchises to eventually lead their auteurs into disaster, presumably because success breeds yes-men and auteurs need constructive criticism.

That's the most likely-seeming explanation I can think of for the surprising number of failures evident in TDKR, and while I could probably go on a marathon rant about each one of them, in the interests of page loading time I'll instead focus on the most significant.

(Note that I am not a comic-book nerd, so my sense of what Batman "should be" plays little part in what follows. At one time I was kind of a film-and-TV-Batman nerd, but not enough that I would have avoided rejection by the REAL Batman nerds.)

Review: Dark City

And now, another one from my "I Put It Off So Long that It's Probably a Little Past Its Freshness Date" movie pile.

The prospective viewer should know that Dark City is not so much a noir film (despite its visual palette) as it is a mysterious sci-fi/fantasy film. That sentence probably gives away too much, but a fan of noir who dislikes films that delve too deeply into the realm of the fantastical will be disappointed with Dark City. However, the inverse is also true; I'm only mildly fond of noir but I liked Dark City more than either true noir or Dark City-esque films like The Thirteenth Floor and The Matrix.

Structurally, the film reveals just enough at just the right times to maintain the right balance of interest and confusion. Had it tried to be more opaque—for example, had it omitted the shot of the weird creature during one of the early chase scenes—it might have kept me from guessing as much about the explanation as I did, but it also might have turned out too plodding.

Review: Shinobi: Heart Under Blade

I recently found myself in the mood for a "ninja movie," and while Shinobi: Heart Under Blade does have ninjas, and is a movie, it wasn't quite what I had in mind. Next time maybe I'll do more research.

Not that Heart Under Blade is bad or anything. But I'd hoped for more of a "ninjas doing badass shit to non-ninja mooks" kind of movie, rather than "ninja clan vs. ninja clan, but with lots of talking and romance-y moping, and also they're superhuman." That said, if you're in the mood for the latter, look no further.

The Netflix description nails it for once, describing this film as Romeo and Juliet meets the X-Men. The lead characters, Gennosuke and Oboro, are the star-crossed lovers (and yes, they use that phrase a couple of times, just in case the influence is unclear). They belong to rival ninja clans populated by a host of bizarre characters, including a Wolverine analogue with rapid healing, a male Mystique analogue, a poisonous Rogue analogue, and Sleeve Guy—whose power is telekinetic control over the fibers in his sleeves. (I'm not enough of a comic book nerd to know the relevant X-Man for Sleeve Guy.)

Review: The Specials

I like James Gunn, and I really like Slither, but The Specials? A total mess.

The loser cousin of Mystery Men, The Specials is a low-budget superhero comedy starring Thomas Hayden Church, Rob Lowe, Judy Greer, Jamie Kennedy, and the director himself (as one of the more self-deprecating heroes of the supergroup). They are among "The Specials," a B-list supergroup with so many members that the film has to spend half its running time just trying to distinguish them—and doing so via feaux-Whedonesque conversation and intermittent talking-head shots.

Review: Mr. Bean's Holiday

You know how, when an American comedian's act becomes successful enough, he gets a sitcom and sheds all of what made his act praiseworthy in exchange for becoming more widely accessible and family-friendly? Mr. Bean's Holiday can be seen as the English version of that phenomenon—watching it made me realize to my horror that, in some parallel universe, there's a Monty Python Land at Disney's Hollywood Studios.

A cute but never hilarious film, Mr. Bean's Holiday comes off as Rowan Atkinson using a Mr. Bean movie as an excuse to go to the south of France. To provide a semblance of plot, there's also a wiseacre kid who Bean has to reunite with his father after his own bumbling separates them. Later in the film there's even a love interest, which means all it's lacking is a dog or a monkey or something to complete the Family Movie Trifecta.

Review: Hellraiser: Bloodline

Well, I said I wasn't gonna watch any more Hellraisers. So what are we doing here exactly? What strange appeal do these adequate-at-best movies have that keeps me (and presumably enough audiences to justify eight sequels) coming back? Is it the hint of a vaster and more mysterious mythology than what we see in the first three movies? Is it the hunch that these villains have not yet attained the heights of scariness that they're capable of?

If either of the above are the answer, then I'm definitely done after the abysmal Hellraiser: Bloodline, the fourth installment in the franchise. Really, in my case, I think what's kept me vaguely curious enough to make it this far is the non-Cenobite cast members. I watched Hell on Earth for Terry Farrell, and learned a short time ago that Bloodlines has Adam Scott (Ben on Parks and Recreation and the Defiant's helmsman in Star Trek: First Contact). As it turns out, he dies quickly, but not before getting a few slightly entertaining scenes.

Review: Crackerjack

Oh Die Hard, what hath ye wrought?

Crackerjack tells the timeless tale of a gang of terrorists being outmaneuvered and eventually defeated by a lone Cop on the Edge—our titular "Crackerjack," Jack Wild (I can't decide which of the character's names is more ridiculous). Crackerjack makes for a cracking dull protagonist as portrayed by Thomas Ian Griffith, whose career seems predominantly defined by soaps. (The hair is kind of a dead giveaway.)

The setup is that McClane Crackerjack has come to L.A. Colorado from New York Chicago for a vacation with his estranged wife brother's family. His nemesis is a smiling East German terrorist played by Alan Rickman Christopher Plummer. They engage in spirited banter and taunting over walkie-talkies while the L.A.P.D. Marines (who initially don't trust our hero when he calls them from inside Nakatomi Tower the ski lodge) bungle an attempt to save the hostages. In the end, not even the villain's long-haired assault-weapon-wielding male models can save him from defeat.

If MST3K were still on, this would belong on it. The performances are continually laughable, the plot is dumb without being agonizingly slow, the corny synth score actually sounds lifted from Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders, and the superfluous nudity would be easily edited out.

Review: Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue

If you're a horror film buff, you should probably see the documentary Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue, but mainly because it's a fun historical review of American horror cinema, and not for any especially profound genre insights. You'll see clips from a few titles you might not be familiar with, and you'll enjoy the convention-panel-like ruminations of legends like John Carpenter and George Romero, discussing their work in the context of their personal lives and their perceptions of American history.

I've never owned a copy of Fangoria, but I enjoyed this documentary on the above basis. Where it lost me was in some of its attempted connections between American history and the trends in American horror films. When those connections seemed legitimate, it was largely because the films in question were so beat-you-over-the-head-with-something-rusty obvious about it—e.g. the '80s consumerism satire The Stuff, whose creator Larry Cohen is among those interviewed (not to mention the wonderfully endearing They Live). When those connections were more strained, you feel like you're watching the audiovisual version of an undergraduate film studies essay, and a fairly insightless one at that.

Review: License to Kill

After re-watching both Timothy Dalton Bond movies—this one and its predecessor, The Living Daylights—I have to say I think Dalton gets over-maligned as Bond. He's not completely right for the role, at least as the role came to be defined by earlier films, but the Dalton installments themselves are a welcome respite from the increasingly ludicrous Moore installments that preceded them.

License to Kill has a stronger story and a more interesting cast than Living Daylights. In a pretty atypical pre-credits sequence, Bond is attending the wedding of his old friend, CIA agent Felix Leiter, when they learn a notorious and untouchable drug lord, Sanchez (Robert Davi), is in the vicinity. They work together to nab Sanchez and make it to the wedding at the last possible moment, naturally via parachute—and then the Binder titles begin, so we know something's amiss.

Review: Sneakers

Sometimes you notice an unexpected similarity between two very different works that you happen to consume around the same time; when I re-watched Sneakers recently, I had just finished reading Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work, a once-controversial book from the mid-'90s concerning inevitable changes in the world's economies as a result of ever-more-efficient automation. (Short summary: most people will lose their jobs, and we have to move beyond the entire notion of jobs ASAP, or huge and enduring economic disaster will ensue.) I'm no economist and I rarely read this sort of thing, but the book was tough to put down in spite of its often encyclopedic feel—largely because I like to think about all the ways in which the world has changed since recent technologies came along. Rifkin only mentions the Internet once, yet his book, remarkably, isn't very dated at all. In much the same way, and for some of the same reasons, 1992's Sneakers isn't as dated as I feared it would prove to be when I re-watched it. I guess we have Wikileaks and Anonymous to thank for that—or maybe they have movies like this to thank for their own conception.

Review: Timestalkers

This is a fun one for all the sci-fi nerds out there. Just let me emphasize that, by "fun," I don't mean "good."

Timestalkers is a cheesy 1987 made-for-TV movie about a history professor and Old West hobbyist (William Devane, almost completely miscast) who, after the death of his wife and son (the boy from Who's the Boss), finds himself recruited by a time-travelling fashion model (Lauren Hutton, sadly wearing a cap over her tooth-gap) to help her stop the assassination of some 19th century person to further the vague career goals of her deranged, homicidal ex-colleague (Klaus Kinski, looking like Doc Brown's psycho brother).

Kinski and Hutton alternately employ unnecessarily gaudy time-travel technology to make the plot appear to develop. Even before this, however, we are treated to "flashbacks" from Devane's antiquing road trips that depict what Kinski is (simultaneously?) doing in the Old West. The part that's by turns endearing and irritating is that each flashback is accompanied by an explosive screen effect and the stolen sound of a TIE fighter cannon firing.

Review: The Terminators

Every time I start one of these obviously-terrible titles on Netflix Instant, I battle with a sense of dread, asking myself "Am I about to waste an hour-plus of my life?" In the case of The Terminators, I'm happy to respond to myself, "Not entirely," mainly because they had the good sense to cast A Martinez.

For those of you who think that's a typo, A Martinez is his actual screen name. He's a well-known soap actor, and was on One Life to Live during the short cluster of years that my wife was following the show. His acting style has always been understated and detached in a kind of tough-guy fashion, and it's even more the case in The Terminators—yet not carrying the undercurrent of boredom you might expect from a real actor, like Martinez, reflecting on his presence in an Asylum movie. It's frankly a bizarre performance, but intentionally so, and I'm giving The Terminators a whole half-star just for the fact that his cop character turns out to be an android. It's a pretty well-handled reveal in a film of this calibre, and it's quite nice to see a real actor make a deliberate acting choice like that in the sort of movie where deliberate acting choices are infrequent.

Review: Lincoln

What fascinates us so much about Abe Lincoln? It can't just be the pivotal times he lived in—otherwise we'd be just as fascinated by Truman, and we're not. It can't just be his assassination, either, though its circumstances were certainly more dramatic than others.

I think it's his weirdness. You look at this guy, you learn about what sort of life and attitude he had, and to think of him as "Savior of the Union" inspires a certain cognitive dissonance. Had the Civil War been further delayed, he might have ended up as merely an oddball presidential footnote. Instead, America's favorite president is this cadaverously gaunt hillbilly who—in an illustrative early scene in Spielberg's Lincoln—tells depressing jokes to citizens visiting his office.

I was surprised by how affecting Daniel Day-Lewis's performance here was. I went in figuring it was going to be stellar, and as so rarely happens, my heightened expectations were met. Lincoln tells some four or five stories during the movie and they're among the best moments. His "now, now, now" speech (glimpsed in the trailer) really hammers home the stakes of the plot. He's the kind of Lincoln that makes you think, "I don't really even care anymore how historically accurate this is; he's just awesome to watch," like the audio-animatronic Lincoln from Disneyland, only less terrifying.

Review: Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth

Horror films can be fun, or scary, or sometimes both. Really great horror can either focus on one (The Shining) or aspire to both and succeed (Evil Dead II). Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth was trying for scary, to be sure, but the efforts at "fun" were so imbalanced that I remain unsure how much of it was intentional. And while I'd be lying if I said I didn't have any fun during Hellraiser III, the problem was that those moments were clustered largely toward the end, and failed to fully compensate for the earlier tedium.

Like the first movie, Hell on Earth introduces us to a single relatable character (Terry Farrell, Deep Space Nine's Dax, playing a TV reporter) and a broadly unpleasant supporting cast. Most unpleasant of all is the rich nightclub owner J.P. Monroe (Kevin Bernhardt, who my spidey-sense tells me has edited his own Wikipedia page). Monroe acquires a mystical pillar containing Pinhead (Doug Bradley) and one of those puzzle-boxes around which the first two movies revolved. Naturally, they don't stay in the pillar for long (though considerably longer than we viewers might expect/wish). The carnage that eventually ensues surpasses either of the previous films, and the justification for Pinhead's much more active lifestyle here seems to be that, at the end of Hellbound, Pinhead's essence was separated from that of his original human self, WWII officer Eliot Spencer. Thus, without the moderating influence of Spencer, Pinhead's much more Pinheady, I guess.

Review: Thunderball

I can't be the only hardcore MST3K fan who occasionally enjoys undertaking side-by-side comparisons of MST-ed features with the decent and/or popular mainstream films they're trying to be like.

MST-ed Feature	Decent and/or Popular Mainstream Film It's Trying to Be Like
Warrior of the Lost World	Mad Max
Time of the Apes	Planet of the Apes
Gorgo	Godzilla
Cave Dwellers	Conan the Barbarian
Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell	Conan the Barbarian
Outlaw of Gor	Conan the Barbarian
Space Travelers	Marooned

Operation Double 007 (a.k.a. OK Connery, a.k.a. Operation Kid Brother) isn't the only MST experiment from the '60s that tries to cash in on the Bond franchise, but it is the most directly comparable, and Thunderball is the specific Bond outing it's most directly comparable to—because both films have the same actor, Adolfo Celi, playing the villain. Double 007 also features Bernard Lee (the original M) and Lois Maxwell (the original Moneypenny), playing vague versions of their Bond franchise characters who recruit Neil Connery, playing the brother of their "top agent." (Yeah, it's weird.)

R.I.P. Roger Ebert

I woke up this morning to the news that Roger Ebert has died. To the vast public recognition of his impressive life and career I will add only this: that since I was a boy, his was the one and only face of film criticism. (Sure, Gene Shalit had what we'd call today a stronger "visual branding," but Ebert's reviews had more substance.) I was sad when Gene Siskel died and I'm sadder now.

The Onion A.V. Club has a very good piece collecting thoughts from their staff.

Review: Argo

I haven't yet seen any of the other Best Picture nominees for the recent Oscars, so maybe they're all kind of lackluster, but I find it slightly strange that Argo won.

I say "slightly" because it does relive a tense historical moment that would be well-remembered by Academy voters, and it does celebrate the power of Hollywood to make a difference in the real world. So maybe it's not so strange.

Yet Argo feels dry and workmanlike compared with other films of its type. I may have been spoiled in a sense, because years ago I read the article on which the screenplay was based. But considering the setting, it should've felt more thrilling than it did.

Not that it was entirely free of thrills. A lot of credit goes to the actors playing Argo's "house guests," escapees from the stormed U.S. embassy; their edginess is continually palpable, and to the script's credit, Ben Affleck's stoic CIA character handles their anxiety with a minimum of cliché.

Affleck deserves credit too. The excellent cast manages to make their characters feel real, as historical dramas require, and Affleck does it as well as the more seasoned screen standbys here (Bryan Cranston, John Goodman, and the indispensable Alan Arkin).

Review: The Norseman

Once in a great while, a motion picture comes along that reminds you of why you watch movies of its type—a transformative cinematic experience that leaves you wondering why it took you so long to get around to seeing it. Such a film is 1978's The Norseman; not since Citizen Kane have I seen a film that left me feeling this way—and that it lacks a Wikipedia page seems a travesty to me now.

Why, you ask?

Review: The Paper

Ah, '90s ensemble dramedies. I've seen so many of you, and you are all so similar, that it takes getting through half of one of you before I can tell whether or not I've already seen you specifically. The only way I could have been more confused on this point while watching Ron Howard's The Paper would have been if one of the Three-Name Marys was in it (e.g. Mary Stuart Masterson, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Mary-Louise Parker, etc., and if you're planning to start a '90s-style alt-rock band, yes, you may call it Three-Name Marys.)

Indeed, I wasn't completely certain I'd seen The Paper before watching it the other day until I got to the Jason Robards scene, close to the end. That probably doesn't reflect too well on the story.

Review: Mega Piranha

If you're actually reading this rather than scrolling past it, you're doubtlessly asking yourself the same question I do whenever I see one of these Asylum cheapies on Netflix Instant:

"Is it fun-bad, or just bad-bad?"

I'm happy to report this one is solidly in the former camp. You get:

• A ridiculous story involving exponentially-growing piranha developed by well-meaning scientists whose goal was…to feed the poor? Maybe they left out the rest of that line of dialogue ("…to the piranha").
• Has-beens and Never-wases as our leads: '80s pop star Tiffany, one of the Brady kids as the senator, a villain who periodically forgets what kind of accent he's supposed to have, and a (snicker) Navy SEAL hero who I can only assume is a stunt actor. We'll call him Sgt. Meatface, because it suits him.
• Truly laughable special effects—as in, not just groan-inducingly bad. You'll blurt out in astonished, yelping laughter just like you did in Birdemic, although not as often. (Don't think for a moment that Mega Piranha out-Birdemics Birdemic.)
• Whimsically obvious errors like the Venezuelan junta (look, I don't know, ask them) driving SUVs with California plates.

Review: Skyfall

You may have heard that Skyfall is one of the better Bond movies. I agree, though the breathless praise it seemed to garner inflated my expectations a little too much. But I found myself ruminating about the entire history of the franchise while watching Skyfall (a natural reaction, and one the filmmakers clearly meant to instill), which led me to a hypothesis.

I would like to posit, here in my first Bond review for this blog, that the rubric for determining whether a Bond movie is "one of the good ones" consists of only two essential and fairly straightforward criteria:

Review: The Paper Chase

1973's The Paper Chase is a drama set at Harvard Law School, and despite its setting (and age), the film is relatable if you have ever:

• been in an academic pressure-cooker intense enough to make fellow students turn against you
• had a teacher who you simultaneously admired and feared.

While I never had aspirations to go to law school, I've been in both of those situations a few times (and once, both at the same time, and why yes, it did suck), and I did enjoy the one law class I took; thus, I was more engaged by The Paper Chase than I expected. (I also kept myself amused by imagining a friend of mine in the protagonist's place who has identical hair, often identical attire, a similar smile, and even had that 'stache for a time.) I have to guess that actual law students would find it scarily accurate, even if their study time is now dominated more by computers than giant stacks of identical-looking books. (Do they still even have those? Are they just props for commercials now?)

Review: Star Trek: Generations

Generations may be the toughest Star Trek film to review. Maybe that's why I picked it first. (Don't worry, I'm sure a ranty J. J. Trek review is just waiting to come out of me.)

It's tough because there's a lot to like here, yet there's so much to question and doubt. As you'd expect, Trekkies seem to disagree strongly about this one. (I may be the biggest Trek fan I know, but I'm no full-on Trekkie. I have, however, witnessed Trekkie debates in online contexts.) Some like it while admitting its shortcomings; others consider it at least as bad as V—or TFF, as Trekkies probably refer to it, to prevent confusion with V.

On that spectrum, I'd have to count myself near the middle. I find watching Generations to be an exercise in frustration and tedium punctuated by moments of Trekly goodness.

I'll start with the good: