Review: Never Say Never Again

The essence of the famous non-Eon Bond film Never Say Never Again is that, in attempting to justify its existence, it tries to out-Bond the real Bond movies in several respects, and fails resoundingly at each of them. It tries to be sexier, but ends up more juvenile, prurient, and icky. It tries to be funnier, but ends up stupid. It tries to be more action-packed, but ends up jumbled, implausible, and often confusing. It tries to use cooler gadgets, but ends up sad and laughable. (Bond plays a video game in this movie. And I thought it was undignified when he dressed as a clown.) It tries to be more epic in scope, but ends up plodding.

That last one's the real stake through the heart. I'm pretty sure I've never been as bored by any Bond movie, and I saw Quantum of Solace—and the '60s Casino Royale. And that boredom's not just due to this movie being a remake of Thunderball. Yes, much of the story is the same, but most scenes have no direct analog in the original, and some entire plot developments are new. It's all just…so dull. The main reason I didn't give up on this movie at the hour-thirty mark was just in case I'd miss another scene as batshit as the video game. (Also, it was directed by Irvin Kershner—director of The Empire Strikes Back, the best Star Wars film. Didn't help.)

I will answer your franchise-apostasy questions below, so that idle curiosity does not compel you to waste two-plus hours on this.

Review: 2001: A Space Odyssey

Rewatching 2001 recently, I was struck by just how slow it is. I mean, you can't not notice it, but this time through it almost felt like it was daring people to finish it (as was, inarguably, Barry Lyndon). I don't think this is, as Nicholas Carr would allege, a symptom of my personal overexposure to the Internet and its having conditioned me to expect lightning-quick gratification. Indeed, I felt less impatient with 2001 than I have during any previous viewing. But the slowness is one of the things that intensely stands out, and newcomers to this legendary film should account for it before idly sitting down to it.

The shot from this rewatch that's haunting me is the immediate start of "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite." Preceded by a creepy but not overly dramatic mission recording from Dr. Floyd, this segment of the film opens on a monolith flying around Jupiter space, accompanied by an amped-up reprise of the "Love Theme from the Monolith" (you know, the one that goes "eeeeeeeeee eeeeeee eeEEE EEEeeee eeeeee eeeEEee"). The shot tilts downward and we see the Discovery, dwarfed by the Jovian worlds, and (because it's Kubrick) the shot lingers so long that the viewer's imagination begins to fill in context—an opportunity so few movies afford anymore—and we realize what Bowman must be feeling: isolation to a degree never before experienced by a human. He cannot go home, as far as he is aware; he can't even contact home. Not to mention abject terror at what he sees—remember, he only just learned about the monolith. I mean, Christ, how many movies achieve such a primal, visceral effect? And all this without seeing Bowman's face (because it's Kubrick).

This may be what I enjoy most about Kubrick movies: the space to imagine. That what we imagine should terrify the ever-loving fuck out of us is merely an added bonus.

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.