Category Archives: Movies

Streaming Review: They Cloned Tyrone

Written by Juel Taylor & Tony Rettenmaier and directed by Juel Taylor They Cloned Tyronecaptures the spirit of 70’s Blaxploitation with a 21st century approach to cinema, storytelling, and metaphor.

Fontaine (John Boyega) is a low-level street drug dealer in the community of the Glenn. Haunted

Netflix

by past tragedy and absent any support systems of people his life is one of ruin, repetition, and violence. While attempting to recover cash owed to him from pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) and sex worker Yo-yo (Teyonah Parris) Fontaine is ambushed by rival drug dealer Isaac but the fallout from the attack leads Fontaine, Slick Charles, and Yo-yo to discover a vast racist conspiracy at work on the people of the Glenn.

With a supporting cast that includes Kiefer Sutherland and David Alan Grier They Cloned Tyrone is a sharp social satire dealing with the African American community’s twin issues of assimilation or annihilation. In the best tradition of Blaxploitation, the ultimate conflict is between the marginalized community and ‘the man’, ‘the system’ and everything that those terms represent. Stark in its violence, unflinching in the community’s despair, and cutting with both its humor and its satire the film is an excellent outing for its first-time feature film director. Boyega delivers a naturalistic and compelling performance filled with a subtlety that reveals an inner life for Fontaine that he cannot bring himself to speak. Parris is unrecognizable here from her more well-known role as Monica Rambeau from the Marvel Cinematic Universe fully immersing herself into Yo-yo a woman of hidden talents. Foxx of course delivers another talented performance, giving this film’s trio the star power to sell it to both studios and audiences.

If there is a fault in this film, it lies with cinematographer Ken Seng.

Photographic dark-skinned performers can be a challenging task for cinematographers, and this is magnified with scenes that are primarily in darkened room or at night. It is possible that in a properly calibrated auditorium the entire film would present in a dark clarity but They Cloned Tyronewas produced for Netflix, intended for streaming on home screen that vary greatly in their quality and settings. The truth of the matter is that in several scenes I found it impossible to actually see the performances. These are all very talented actors and depriving the audience of the expression is a crime against such a cast.

Aside from the cinematography I found the entire film quite interesting, engaging, and compelling. I would favorably compare this Boyega’s pre–Star Wars film Attack the Block.

They Cloned Tyrone is streaming on Netflix.

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

Movie Review: The Last Voyage of the Demeter

In development for more than two decades The Last Voyage of the Demeter, adapted from a chapter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula finally arrived in theaters last weekend.

Universal Studios

Told from the point of view of Doctor Clemens (Corey Hawkins) a late addition to the Demeter’s crew, as the aging ship transports 50 crates from Transylvania to London, unaware that one of the crates harbors the vampire Dracula. In addition to Clemens the crew included Captain Elliot (Liam Cunningham) a captain near retirement, Tobey (Woody Norman) the captain’s eight-year-old grandson and cabin boy, Wojeck (David Dastmalchian) the ship’s mate. Upon discovering a woman, Anna (Aisling Franciosi) that they believe to have stowed away on the vessel before it sailed, they crew turns fearful and superstitious. Once animals and crew begin dying and vanishing is mysterious manners the fear transforms into terror and the crew find themselves locked in a battle for survival against a creature that defies rationality.

I am notoriously picky and finicky about horror films. It is a genre that I adore but a great many of the fare leave me cold. While much of the horror community raved about ‘X’ I found it a rather standard slasher and uninteresting. The Last Voyage of the Demeter a film and subject I have long wanted to see is neither a great horror film nor is it a terrible one. The is much to admire in the film and the craft of those that created it. André Øvredal’s direction is sharp and sure. He moves his characters confidently both in their blocking and their emotional space, never leaving the audience at sea for what is transpiring in the scene or in the minds of the cast. The script by scribes Bragi Schut jr, and Zak Olkewicz is well structured, wastes little time while still providing enough establishment and backstory to flesh out the characters as people. They also avoid the trope of conveniently having a person aboard familiar with the legends and myth to act as an instructional guide to the others. All of the crew and Anna are clueless in the monsters weakness and true nature. Tom Stern’s cinematography is excellent. With much of the story occurring at night the simulated darkness is as convincing as that performed for Jordan Peele’s Nope, utterly credible and never too murky to see except for when it is by design. When the film revealed the full cast with the ship committed to its doomed voyage, I mentally predicted an ending that if it came to pass, I would have proclaimed as ‘trite’ or ‘unexpected,’ and I can say that ending did not arrive. The filmmakers showed the courage to go places with their script and story that I would have thought invoked a terrible storm of executive’s notes.

And yet with all this going for it, I cannot say I loved this movie.

Some quality, some element was missing that prevented me from fully engaging with the piece. I never lost myself in the story that played upon the screen, remaining detached enough to analyze as I watched. Where other horror films fully pulled me into their nightmare dreams, Get Out, Hereditary, and the like The Last Voyage of the Demeter just missed that mark. This is in all likelihood an idiosyncratic reaction and I have no doubts that many a horror fan will enjoy this film. Even with my own lukewarm response I do not feel my time was wasted and it deserves to be seen on the big screen.

From Soulless Monstrosity to Nerd Rapture

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds‘ reinterpretation of legacy characters from the original series has certainly intrigued me. I find I am most fascinated by the new version of Nurse Christine Chapel. Jess Bush’s portray of this Christine, along with a more detailed and varied backstory and motivation has placed her as one of my favorites in this new series. No slight to Mrs. Barrett-Roddenberry, she was given precious little to work with in the original series. Beyond pining for Spock her role possessed no character.

Except of course for episode eight, or seven depending on how you count them, season one What Are Little Girls Made Of?

First aired in October of 1966 the episode centers of the Enterprise searching for the lost humanitarian scientist Dr. Roger Korby, coincidentally the fiancé to Christine Chapel. It is revealed that Korby has discovered the ruins of an ancient and now vanished civilization and from their remaining technology can produce android nearly indistinguishable from humans. He has a nefarious plot and by the end of the episode is defeated and revealed to be an android himself. Fatally injured he had used the technology to transfer himself into a mechanical body a process with which he expected to create practically immortal humans. Kirk and Christine are horrified by the revelation that Korby had been a machine the entire time. When Spock arrives with a rescuing security team Kirk informs him that ‘Dr. Korby was never here.’

It is an interesting question when did our attitude toward ‘uploading’ ourselves into machines change?

What Little Girls are Made Of spends no time debating if Korby is in fact still Roger Korby. Once it is shown that he is a machine his pleas that he has remained himself fall on the deaf ears of Kirk and Chapel. The premise of the episode is that his actions, plotting to replace people until his android society is too advanced to resist, are accepted as proof that he was never Korby ignoring the simple fact that people change. Or that five years of isolation can unhinge even the strongest of minds. Only the fact that he is a mechanical machine instead of a biological one is enough to ‘prove’ he was never Korby. A machine person will always, at that time, be regarded as a soulless monstrosity.

Today the concept of ‘uploading’ yourself into a tireless and immortal machine housing is pretty much a technological rapture, a promise of eternal, blissful life for the those with faith in the limitless capability of the computational sciences. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier neither Rogers nor Romanov, or the audience for that matter, question if it really is Dr. Zola addressing them from the vast computer banks at the end of the film’s second act. It is simply accepted that with advanced enough super-science of course a person, the entirety of them transferred into another receptacle. Zola’s monstrosity was a product of who Zola was and not from the mechanical nature of his afterlife.

I wonder when did that state change occur in out collective thinking? When did we accept that it is our memories and sense of continuity that defines the ‘real’ us?

B Movie Review: The 27th Day

The 27th Day adapted from the name of the same name by John Mantley is a mostly forgotten Sci-Fi B Feature that presents an alien threat is a quite unique manner.

Five people are abducted from the Earth and given each a container with three capsules that when armed and fired have the capability to annihilate every person on the planet while leaving all other life untouched. The unnamed alien presenting these devices explains that his own world is doomed and will soon be destroyed by a natural event. His culture’s ethical standards will not permit them to kill humanity and take the Earth as a replacement, but should humanity kill itself, then the Earth would be free for his people to use to save themselves. The five abductees, a newspaper reporting, an English woman, a Soviet solider, a Chinese Peasant woman, and a brilliant German Scientist, are under no compulsions or influence. Once returned to the Earth they may do as they will, free and unencumbered. The containers given to each of them can only be opened by its assigned person but once opened the weapons are usable by anyone. After 27 days the weapons will become inert. The abductees are then returned to the location from which they were taken. Shortly thereafter the alien hijacks all global electromagnetic communications to announce that the five have been given each a powerful weapon, naming each of the abductees and their city of residence, sending the planet into chaos, panic, and paranoia.

I stumbled upon this movie by accident and after watching it was intrigued enough to track down a copy of the novel and give that a read.

For the most part the film is a fairly faithful adaptation of the novel, except for the ending. To discuss this and way I think in the end the movie was a disservice to the novel I will go into spoilers for the ending and the alien’s motivation.

BEGIN SPOILER SECTION

The German scientist, convinced that there is something more than just death in the capsules, persuades the newspaper man to give him his package and deciphering the mathematical notation etched on their surfaces works out the capsules true potential and, without anyone’s approval or pre-knowledge, fires them, blanketing the globe.

In the movie everyone who was an ‘enemy of freedom’ is killed but all other people are left untouched.

In the novel, no one is killed, but rather each person altruism is heightened. Selfishness vanishes from the human race and people who hoarded resources, be they gangster or corporate overlord, surrender their excess for the betterment of all.

In both version the Earth then invites the alien race to come a share the planet with humanity.

In the film’s version this is nice but ultimately doomed. The concept ‘an enemy to freedom’ is far too slippery to come even close to establishing the sort of human nature that would not fear alien and treat them with the hatred we launch at each other over things as inconsequential as skin tones.

The novel’s notion that a more empathic and altruistic humanity is a more open and accepting one is far more interesting and poses far more challenging ethical questions. With the film’s conclusion there’s only a debate over what does it mean to be ‘an enemy of freedom’ but with the novel’s there’s the argument is it right to fundamentally change a person or a species without their consent even if the results is a universal good?

In 2008 a remake of the classic SF film The Day the Earth Stood Still was released and attempted to change the message of the film from one fearing nuclear annihilation to one of environmental disaster and the result was a disastrous movie. Hollywood would have been better served remaking The 27th Day with its themes of greed and hoarding over attempting to hijack a classic.

“Magical” Effects in ‘Soft’ Science Fiction

‘Hard Science Fiction is the sub-genre where no detail contradicts the know laws of physics. in this there is no faster than Light travel or communication or any form of telepathic psychic ability. It is a rigorous artform practiced by only a few. Once you diverge away from ‘Hard’ SF and into less rigorous applications of scientific fact and theory the art because far wider, encompassing everything from Star Trek the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Often at some point a piece will require some extraordinary effect that upends expectations, introducing new and often unreproducible effects. What is interesting is that in various historical periods there has often been a consensus on what can produce these transformative events.

In the first few decades of the 20th century ‘Rays’, light beyond the visible spectrum, were a common fantastical effect. In 1931’s Frankenstein, Victor boasts of discovering a ray beyond the violet and ultraviolet, a ray that first brought life and one which he harnesses to give life to his creation. In Captain America: The First Avenger is the writers tip their hat to Frankenstein and use a period appropriate ‘Vita Rays’ as per of the process that created Captain America.

By the post-war era ‘rays’ had become a tired trope and in the new atomic age ‘Radiation,’ which really were rays all along, because the empowering effect that grew insects and people to impossible proportions, created powerful mutant abilities, reanimated the dead to cannibalize the living, and endowed several comic book superheroes with the flashier abilities.

Radiation, like the rays before them, eventually passed out of favor as the magic system of less than demanding science fiction stories.

What replaced ‘radiation’ as our go to we need something fantastic to happen here effect?

Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum Mechanics, and in particular the many worlds interpretation of wave form collapse, had been used the furious wave hands and craft stories are in effect blatantly impossible. You want a ‘rational’ reason why the devil is in a jar of goo in the basement of a Los Angeles Catholic Church? Quantum Mechanics. You need a method of time travel to collect some shiny stones and reverse the villain’s victory? Quantum Mechanics. You want a musical episode where the characters react to diegetic musical and sing their truths? Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum Mechanics is no more likely to induce a ‘musical universe’ than gamma radiation is to transform a normal man into an eight-foot tall several hundred-pound monster. These are artifacts of very soft science-fiction employed to wave hands past the impossibility of it all in order to deploy the story the writers want to tell. As long as we remember that these stories are not reality, not a possible future, but the modern equivalent of ‘Once Upon A Time…’ then we can enjoy them for the myths that they are and remember that truth that matters in these stories is not the science but the emotions of the human condition.

Where Barbie and Star Trek Intersect

This post will contain spoilers for both Barbie (2023) and Star Trek: Insurrection (1998).

The movie Star Trek: Insurrection centers on a conflict between the Ba’ku a species of alien luddites rejecting all technology and the Son’a a specie that hates and despises the Ba’ku and who have allied with Federation elements to steal the Ba’ku’s planet which bestows eternal youth and immortality. During the unfolding of the plot it is revealed that the two species are in
fact the same and that the Ba’ku faction exiled the Son’a for not sharing their luddite philosophy condemning that faction to death. The Ba’ku created their own mortal enemy and at no point in the movie is this concept acknowledged in any fashion. The filmmakers elide past the concept that it is morally acceptable to effectually sentence to death a people for the crime of not believing as you do. The Son’a campaign of revenge who not justified is understandable.

Barbie interrogates the power dynamic between men and women contrasting Barbieland a fantasy domain of unquestioned matriarchy with the ‘real’ world. It should be noted that even the film’s depiction of the real world is strewn with elements that reveal it is as fantastic as Barbieland such as the view from the Mattel offices.

Ken, who has been dismissed and whose feelings have disregarded by Barbie, after visiting the ‘real’ world returns to Barbieland and transforms it into a fantastic and exaggerated version of patriarchy. In the film’s third act Barbie frees the other Barbies from the influence of the corrupted Ken but also comes to understands that her apathy towards Ken’s hurt and pain contributed to his own fall. It is important to note that Ken does not get what he wants, Barbie’s feelings towards him remain aromantic but his feelings are acknowledged he is no longer ‘just Ken.’

The writers and filmmakers of Barbie have a firmer grasp on causality and how pain transforms into anger than the people who crafted Star Trek: Insurrection. With Barbie there is understanding and even eventually empathy for how one becomes a villain where with Insurrection there is only the unrealistic view that good and evil are simplistic ideologies. What a world we live in where a film based on a toy presents a more nuanced and complex take on morality that a leading SciFi feature film.

Movie Review: Barbie (2023)

Great Gerwig’s 2023 film Barbie exits in a state of quantum superposition. Observed from one perspective it is a light, frothy summer movie, exploding in pink and pastels, full of fun, escapism, and the ahistorical innocence for childhood. From another perspective it is a slashing, scathing satire, scorching its targets with sharp, pointed commentary, ridiculing the inflated egos of the self-important and mocking the political patriarchy. And from yet another perspective is nearly a platonic example of everything wrong with modern cinema as a grubby I.P. driven cash-grab, weaponizing naive nostalgia as it concocts from a plotless, storiless, corporate property a feature film script joining the ranks of Battleship, Clue, and The Country Bears.

This is a very difficult film to discuss as its three natures are all worthy of intense study and interrogation.

First let’s review the film in a non-spoilers fashion, covering nothing that was not one of the several trailers.

Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) lives a perfect life of frolic and fun in her dreamhouse in Barbieland alongside all the variants of Barbie and Ken. Disturbed by intrusive morbid thoughts which disrupt her ability to live carefree Barbie journeys with Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling) to the ‘real world’ in search of answers. Their adventures and transgressions across the realities endanger Barbieland and Stereotypical Barbie returns to Barbieland hoping to repair the damage and restore its perfect existence.

The film is a masterpiece in the cinema arts. Production design and cinematography embraced the candy cotton nature of the script, abandoning all attempts at ‘reality’ within Barbieland and in doing so created a suspension of disbelief that allowed the film to achieve a verisimilitude that transcends all artificiality. The actor’s stylized performances, particularly while in Barbieland, create their superposition state being both unreal and emotionally truthful. Gerwing’s direction and Rodrigo Prieto’s camera work are flawless, capturing character, scene, and story in a seamless fashion that belies the difficulty of their objective.

Barbie has been called, liberal, leftwing, and ‘woke.’ This is so blindingly obvious and intentional that film might as well be wearing a beret, speaking in a French accent, with knuckles bloodied from street fights with Fascists for how proudly it wears it political and philosophical colors. Criticizing Barbie on such accounts is as ridiculous as disparaging the conservative nature of 1984’s, Red Dawn as it is the point of the project. It is a film with a message, one it does not shy away from, one it does not attempt to slip unnoticed into the plot, one that it fervently believes in.

Barbie is also a two-hour commercial for Mattel’s doll and its sundry accessories, an I.P. focused product intent on producing profit from already possessed property, joining the ranks of G.I. Joe, He-Man, and Pirates of the Caribbean. Its self-awareness and its cutting satire add value and depth to the film but do not erase the corporate goals it also incorporates.

It is easy to see how Barbie infuriates some, from its appropriation of cinema classics such as 2001: A Space Odyssey to its dismissal of the Snyder edit of Justice League the film stakes out positions and holds them with conviction. The movie that came to my mind as I watched Barbie was not its cinematic fraternal twin Oppenheimer, but 1998’s Star Trek: Insurrection and the relationship between the pair I will have to explore in spoiler containing post.

Barbie is several films coexisting together on that silvered screen, all of them expertly crafted and worth the time and money to see in a good theater,

Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Raiders of the Lost Ark remains the best film in the Indiana Jones Franchise. The order of the following four movies in the series then depends upon personal taste. I would list the second-best entry as being The Last Crusade and third best would go to James Mangold’s Dial of Destiny.

After an extended sequence set near the end of the Second World War, with digital ‘de-aging’ to present Dr. Jones (Harrison Ford) as he might have appeared in that period and establishing some critical characters and events, Dial of Destiny is set in 1969, with a world that looks to futures in space rather than antiquity and Dr. Jones retiring from academia. Jones is no longer the man he once was, in addition to living alone in a dingy second-rate apartment, his once infectious charm has vanished, and he is unable to inspire even his student bored and listless in his class.

When his goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) arrives looking for information on a device that Jones and her father discovered in loot stolen by then Nazis, a globe spanning adventure begins as the pair are pursued by CIA agents, murderous thugs, organized criminals, and Nazi scientists bitter over the war’s outcome. The fate of the world will once again be determined by Indiana Jones and his ingenuity.

Director James Mangold (Logan, Ford v Ferrari) does a perfectly serviceable job helming this adventure. The film’s most serious weakness in my opinion is that some of the chase/action sequences are too lengthy. The character work is on point and there isn’t a scene with Phoebe Waller-Bridge that I did not find delightful. Mad Mikkelsen, as always, delivers a credible and threatening villain. There are enough call backs in the film to be fun without feeling that it lived only for ‘fan service.’

Dial of Destiny is ahead of the thematic breaking Crystal Skull and the continuity breaking Temple of Doom, (Isn’t it amazing that Dr Jones doesn’t believe in that hocus pocus stuff after his encounter in India?) but doesn’t quite have the personal character growth and arc of either Last Crusade or Raiders.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is playing in theaters.

Movie Review: Asteroid City

I do not have a deep history with Wes Anderson having seen only two of his films before yesterday’s screening of Asteroid City. (The two films being Rushmore which did not emotionally connect with me in any manner, and The Grand Budapest Hotel, which I thoroughly enjoyed.)

Asteroid City is more like The Grand Budapest Hotel in tone and visual style than Rushmoreand as such I was happy to roll the dice and see this in the theater with my sweetie-wife.

The film is structed as a story within a story with the framing narrative a television broadcast,

Focus Features

presented in black & white and in television’s aspect ratio, about the writing and performance of the play Asteroid City, which deals with a collection of disparate and quirky characters that fate has brought together in the titular town and is the interior narrative of the structure.

The film struck me as more of an expression of tone than rather a more traditional narrative exercise. While there are character arcs and plot obstacles in both the frame and the interior stories, neither are presented as the principal reason for experiencing this production. Rather it is the emotional reaction that is the driving force of the script. Anderson frames, films, and directs the performances of his immensely talented cast in a manner that creates an unreal artificiality, informing the audience that while the events are heightened abstract versions of plot elements but leaving the emotional resonances untouched.

Asteroid City is not a film for everyone. It’s highly stylized production and performance will be distancing to some but charming and engaging to others. However if The Grand Budapest Hotel, which utilized very similar devices, worked for you than it is likely your will find your time stranded in Asteroid City equally enjoyable.

Movie Coming in 2023 That Interest Me

I am a cinephile and there are several film due to the be released yet this year that have levels of interest for me from ‘That could be fun’ to ‘I can’t miss.’ Here are a few in release order.

The Flash I am not a big fan of the DC films. A few have been good; several have been terrible but the more I hear about this one the more intrigued I become.

Asteroid City, Of this director’s work I have only seen, The Grand Budapest Hotel, but this one has tickled my interest.

Indian Jones and the Dial of Destiny This franchise is tired and frankly I suspect that there is little chance of a truly good movie, however it is helmed by the man that brought us Logan and Ford v Ferrari, both of which I really liked, so he’s getting a shot with this one.

Oppenheimer Nolan has only bored me once, Following, and he’s earned my interest with this dramatization of history.

Barbie Is this a melding of Lynchian imagery with crass commercialization? I don’t know but I will find out.

Last Voyage of the Demeter an entire film from a single chapter in Dracula, you have my curiosity.

Dune Part 2 The conclusion of the adaptation of Herbert’s novel with more major stars and talents brought in to complete the story.

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Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur