Review: Hellraiser

I saw Hellraiser for the first time this week. It had long been on my third-tier, "maybe-get-to-it-eventually" movie list, due to its apparent weirdness. But when I learned Andrew Robinson (Garak from DS9, and the killer in the first Dirty Harry) was in it: well, more urgency, naturally. Having seen it, I'm not going to prioritize its sequels much higher than that third tier, but maybe a little—another DS9 alum, Terry Farrell, is in one of them.

I don't think Hellraiser could have come into being without A Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th. Certainly, it outclasses its forebears in every respect: better acting, stronger mood, freakier freakiness, and one-liners that are both more memorable and more seamlessly integrated into the story. I am already saying "We have such things to show you" in everyday conversation, and "Don't look at me!" has such obvious utility that I've already been using it for years.

Review: Men in Black 3

You have to understand that I almost never go to the movies. All the expenses and annoyances of the big-screen experience have managed to largely overcome the movie-house-magic; whether I'm merely getting old or society is getting shittier, who can say, but I guess what I'm getting at is, get off my lawn.

Which segues nicely into this Tommy Lee Jones-focused movie that Tommy Lee Jones is barely in. (It's a time-travel plot; Josh Brolin plays the younger version of Jones' character, Agent K.) And so much the better, because his makeup here was kind of ghastly.

I Am, I Think (To No One There)

All truth is conditional, all knowledge mutable. It doesn't take a lot of reflection to arrive at these simple, yet significant, conclusions. Where you go from there is more complex.

Consider truth. I'll use an example inspired by a movie I saw recently. We can say it is a "truth" that humans have the capacity to directly inflict on one another suffering so monstrous as to defy description—but (the condition) in reality that capacity isn't realized except in unusual situations, e.g. extreme external social pressures or extreme internal mental disorder. We can say it is a "truth" that death is inevitable, but that too may only be because medical science hasn't advanced enough. Already, multiple research avenues toward medical immortality are beginning to yield fruit, and that doesn't even acknowledge the possibility of purely electronic means of death avoidance (brain uploading).

Now consider knowledge. Any day now, physicists or astronomers could make a discovery that overturns much of what we hypothesize about the universe, or even of the history of our own planet. Or, on the more mundane scale, that close friend or dear relative who you "know" could never do such a thing? You really never know. (As others will tell you after the fact.)

Review: The Dunwich Horror

If anyone's made a really good Lovecraft movie, I'm not yet aware of it. It isn't this very '60s Corman flick, which stars an amazingly young Dean Stockwell as the creepy villain and Sandra Dee as the college girl he enthralls for dark purposes.

Through Netflix I saw a far superior, though still not great, retro-silent indie entitled Call of Cthulhu, but this was many years ago and all I remember was that (1) it was kind of slow initially, making a valiant effort to build suspense despite budget and acting limitations and (2) the big reveal of Cthulhu was disappointing. Of course, there's also Re-Animator, but I view it as more in the Evil Dead league than truly Lovecraftian.

If I didn't know better, I would argue that Lovecraft is inherently unfilmable. The terror of the unknown is so foundational to Lovecraft's good stories that movie versions, dependent as they tend to be on visuals, would seem unable to fully succeed at the task of adaptation.

We Had to Destroy Star Trek in Order to Save It

When I left the theater at the end of the first installment of the Abramsprise franchise, I had already decided the following:

That was a technically proficient action movie with almost no real characterization or heart, barely any actual sci-fi except for being "in space," and no meaning at all. Every other Star Trek film, and the vast majority of the episodes, had some kind of meaning.

The conceit allowing Abrams to rewrite continuity is a clever one, reminiscent of a better-than-average fanfic—but the profit imperative will mean that subsequent films will use that conceit as carte blanche to go in thematic and stylistic directions Roddenberry would have gone postal over.

The Trek franchise will from now on resemble the Transformers movies more than anything else.

Judging from the Twitter response to the new teaser for Star Trek Into Emptiness, I'd say my conclusions were right on. Not that it stopped the first one from being a colossal hit, or the second one from being made.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying awesome action and ships crashing into stuff have no place in Star Trek; some of the best DS9 episodes are full of that kind of asskickery. I will admit to being impressed, visually and tonally, by the new teaser. And with mere seconds of screen time so far, Khanberbatch is already far more interesting than (*chortle*) Nero.

But I can't conceive any conditions that would motivate me to pay theater prices to see this. I might not even be able to bring myself to Netflix-Instant it, depending on what reviewers I trust have to say.

I guess I'm a dinosaur, but not every genre property needs to be completely drained of its original raison d'etre. We could leave some stuff alone, couldn't we? An Abrams sci-fi franchise based on, oh, I don't know, original settings and characters could have been just fine, couldn't it? What's next, Disney turning Star Wars into a tender rom-com involving a precocious puppy?

Review: Lawless

It helps to not know a lot, but to know just enough, about Lawless going in. To that end, I'll be sort of vague here. (Plus I often find it tedious when reviews spend half their time recapping the plot.)

A violent Prohibition-era drama about bootleggers, Lawless is scripted by Nick Cave (which explains the prominence of the bleak music) based on a historical novel, which is itself based on real characters and events.

If it wasn't for that key point, I'd have found the movie (especially the climax) much more dull than I did, and much more derivative of Scorcese's crime films. I mean this thing is so Scorcese-esque that it's positively Scorcesian.

Are You Eatin' It, Or Is It Eatin' You?

Check out this great blog post about agency and, perhaps more important, our perceptions of it. Here's just one of its cool insights, something I'm definitely going to try during my next few deadline crises:

All of us are fighting distractions – web sites, noises, snacking, minor tasks, watching episodes of Bad Lipreading: – anything that momentarily seems more attractive than the task we are supposed to be working on. It is slightly paradoxical, but I have found that endowing these distractors with agency helps me to politely but firmly dismiss their attempts to grab my attention. Maybe it’s not so paradoxical – if resisting distractors requires willpower, it is not so fanciful to think that it is easier to resist an agent than an inanimate attractor, if only because we have lots of practice and techniques for opposing other agents.

A major theme in the piece—or at least, one I took away from it—is that we Earthlings have a truly dizzying multiplicity of different ways to misperceive reality, and what's worse, we can and often do develop emotional attachments to our particular flavor of delusion—and I posit that those attachments, and that multiplicity, are why any vision of universal human harmony is pure fantasy. (If it should ever be achieved, then those who achieve it would probably be posthumans, not humans.)

This in itself is no great revelation, but the various ways we frame agency are listed and dissected systematically in the post, to great effect. I always enjoy reading the ruminations of people who are much smarter than I am but whose perspectives and preoccupations are mostly similar to mine (in this case, the ongoing effort to reconcile the seeming stability of science with the obvious chaos of human nature).

My Hobbit: The Expected Journey

So The Hobbit I comes out next week. I'm not sure I can fully convey how much I love the LOTR trilogy—I recognize its flaws yet am entranced by it on every viewing. Not many movies have a special place in my heart. Just the LOTR trilogy, probably Seven, and if I'm being honest with myself, Manos: The Hands of Fate. It's actually fortunate I don't have any Fierce Tolkien Nerds as friends, because if I did, we'd get into vicious debates where I defend the movies and the friend is boring.

Naturally, therefore, I won't wait long to see Rise of the Hobbit, but, it being a big movie event, I've felt it necessary to devise a plan. Here it is, if anybody cares:

1. Reread The Hobbit. [Completed weeks ago]

2. Watch the special Colbert Hobbit-week episodes, which began last night, on the Comedy Central website.

3. Studiously avoid reading reviews if I can possibly help it. I find that taking in others' opinions of a movie about which I am certain to develop strong opinions has a tendency to make me remember the opinions of others far longer than I want to.

4. Next Thursday night, temporarily uninstall the Twitter widget from my smartphone. When it comes to spoilers for something like this, I trust no one, especially on Twitter.

5. Next Friday, surf no web, and engage in no socializing with anyone I know who might have seen it before I will.
   COLLEAGUE: Hey Z., good morn—
   
   ME: (holding up hand) EMBARGO!
   
   COLLEAGUE: …okay, I was done talking anyw—
   
   ME: What part of (holding up hand) "EMBARGO!" don't you understand?
   
   COLLEAGUE: All of it?

6. See it for the first time early Saturday, in 24 FPS if I have a choice.

7. See it again a week or so later, in 48 FPS. If the framerate is as striking as everyone says it is, I don't want to take the chance of having the initial experience sullied—yet I insist upon having the new "way of the future" experience as well.

8. Refrain from posting a review here unless I unexpectedly experience crushing disappointment. I really doubt I'll be able to be objective enough to write anything useful.

Review: The Comedy

Have you ever wondered—and I mean really sat and pondered and extrapolated the consequences—about what your life would be like if you had an effectively limitless amount of money?

While watching The Comedy, I thought about this, and found myself thinking of sandbox-style video games in which you can use cheat codes, like Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto. Whenever I cheat at those games, the normally immersive and addictive experience suddenly becomes much emptier, and I find myself fucking around with NPCs in much the same way The Comedy's protagonist fucks around with everyone he encounters. He's totally the kind of guy who would pick a house's front door lock, wander into the dining room, ignore the occupants' demands that he leave, and shout "FUS-ROH!" at the dining table just to watch all their shit go flying everywhere.

Review: Duel of the Titans

Among the notable names of the 1960s Italian sword-and-sandal scene was Steve Reeves, who played Hercules in two movies familiar to MST3K fans. I was delighted last week to discover a movie on Netflix Instant—Duel of the Titans—that not only stars Steve Reeves but also Gordon Brown (whom you might remember as the awkwardly-named secret agent Bart Fargo from another MSTed Italian '60s flick, Danger! Death Ray). In Duel of the Titans, they play the legendary founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, respectively—and while all the ingredients are there for another baffling, disjointed Hercules Unchained-esque spectacle, it actually turned out to be pretty good.

Review: Knives of the Avenger

As stupid sword-and-sorcery movies go, Knives of the Avenger (on Netflix Instant) is less stupid than many, but short on both swords and sorcery. It's also short on story—its simplicity and predictability make the film seem as if it may have been intended for children, except for the rape.

The sorcery is entirely dispensed with early on, after a tediously long opening sequence involving some sort of soothsaying witch. It's her cryptic exposition that clues us in that this is supposed to be a Viking movie. She persuades some Bond-girl-esque queen and her strange-looking son to flee the land, just before the antagonist (Argin? Argyle? something like that) shows up to mock and torment the witch.

Why all this is happening isn't revealed for what feels like an hour, after our hero has finally been introduced. He's played by Cameron Mitchell (Captain Santa Claus in Space Mutiny and head evil guy in Stranded in Space) in a bad dye job. His character's name is Rorik or Rurik or something, but that's technically a spoiler—not that you will care. You'll be too distracted by his terrifying similarity to Zapp Branigan in the hair and skirt departments.

Review: Wreck-It Ralph

First off, Pixar is awesome. Second...this isn't Pixar, but it's still better-than-average Disney.

Any doubt about whether this could be Pixar is resolved in Wreck-It Ralph's most execrable moment: the Rihanna song. Every other "Disneyish" attribute could be overlooked—the misfit protagonist, the cute and sassy sidekick, the too-easy marketability of characters and chase sequences—but for the Rihanna song, to which one's attention is inescapably drawn, even, I have to guess, if one lives a Rihanna-intensive lifestyle. Pop songs in movies whose settings are anything other than contemporary are always out of place and always take us out of the moment. Pixar understands this, and while we can (and in my view, must) criticize Pixar for their overuse of Randy Newman, at least he's not Rihanna.

Review: The Killing Fields

So last night I theorized that the best way to dull the inevitably depressing impact of another election night would be to watch a movie sure to be more depressing than any exercise of democratic rights, no matter how empty. I watched The Killing Fields :D

In retrospect I think this may have been a kind of brilliant ploy to combat election fatigue, and to put all the breathless coverage into perspective. This is one of those movies that's full of unrelenting, historically-accurate brutality arising from the rapid breakdown of a society. So completely did it inoculate me against overreacting to every little announcement last night that I'm now thinking, in four years, I'll want to make sure I have Hotel Rwanda handy.

Review: The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption

Netflix recently sent me The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Scorpion King or whatever it's called. About twenty minutes in I shut it off because I realized I'd already seen it. That I could remember nothing at all about it didn't deter me from moving right on to Netflix Instant for The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption, which should convey something about the degree to which I care about this franchise.

To be clear, though, my full opinion of the franchise is that The Scorpion King was good, stupid fun, and is one of those The Rock movies that you can just watch and enjoy: decent action, only slightly insulting dialogue, and adequate performances all around. Both of TSK1's direct-to-video sequels lack The Rock, however, and must be approached with the appropriate level of caution.

About the second one I will say nothing except that it's a prequel (the origin story of the Scorpion King, so The Rock's successor is younger) and that some other pro wrestler plays the villain, who is supposed to be history's King Sargon. From the opening scenes I saw (and had apparently seen before) his performance is as nuanced and believable as those of the very finest actors in, say, Birdemic.

First Post

Welcome to my new blog!

...That's all I got for now. Just testing out the software and hammering out the layout.

Eventually I plan to use this space for reviews of movies & books, maybe some rambling opinion pieces... Sometimes you just gotta write something.