Category Archives: Movies

B Movie Review: The 27th Day

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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 Columbia Picturesworld 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.

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“Magical” Effects in ‘Soft’ Science Fiction

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‘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.

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Where Barbie and Star Trek Intersect

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

Paramount StudiosThe 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 Warner Brothers Studiosfantasy 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.

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Movie Review: Barbie (2023)

Warner Brothers Studios.

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,

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Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Disney/LucasFilm

 

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.

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Movie Review: Asteroid City

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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.

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Movie Coming in 2023 That Interest Me

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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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Classic Noir Review: Don’t Bother to Knock

 

Nell (Marilyn Monroe), a young woman shattered by grief and with only a tenuous grasp on

20th Century Fox Studios

reality, has, thanks to her Uncle Eddie (Elisha Cook Jr.) an elevator operator, been hired to baby sit Bunny, an eight-year-old, in a posh hotel while her parents attend a convention banquet. Elsewhere in the hotel Jed Towers (Richard Widmark) is coming to grips with his lady love, Lyn (Anne Bancroft) ending their relationship because Jed is not empathic with a cold heart. Spotting each other in their respective hotel room across a courtyard, Jed and Nell begin a flirtation that dangerously unhinges Nell from reality with potentially lethal outcomes.

On screen, I have seen Ms. Monroe in all sorts of emotional states, she has been ditzy, she has been sexy, she has been conniving but until last night I had never experience Marilyn Monroe as frightening. More than once in the film when Nell, disturbed and distraught, viewed her babysitting charge as an impediment the cold, calculating, and evil intent upon her face as she contemplated murdering a child was more horrific than many modern blood and gore movies.

The simple, spare direction of Roy Ward Baker, here simply credited as Roy Baker, elevates the taunt tension filled atmosphere of the film. With its brief running time and limited set, the entire story unfolds in the hotel over a single evening, Don’t Bother to Knock could very have been a B picture but there is nothing ‘B’ about Marilyn Monroe’s chilling performance.

Don’t Bother to Knock is currently playing on The Criterion Channel as part of the collection ‘Starring Marilyn Monroe,’ and available on VOD for rental elsewhere.

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Noir Sunday: Death of a Cyclist

Hailing from Spain in 1955 Death of a Cyclist follows a couple having an affair, Maria Jose de Castro (Lucia Bose) who, by marrying Miguel Castro, (Otello Toso) has become wealthy and privileged, and her paramour Juan Fernandez Soler (Alberto Closas) an adjunct professor of mathematics. While returning from an evening’s assignation, with Maria at the wheel, the couple run over a cyclist and in their panic at being discovered flee, leaving the man to die at the side of the road. Paranoid at being discovered, each descends into trouble and crisis as their carefully managed affair and lives are consumed in the tangle of their crime.

An excellent character study and noir Death of a Cyclist presents the elements of noir that I find most compelling, ordinary characters caught in a web of extraordinary circumstances propelled forward by a flaw of character that prevent them doing to right thing as their compulsions push them to an inevitable conclusion.

The film is not without its own flaws, however. It does not bear to think at all upon the ages of the actor. The lovely and talented Lucia Bose was a mere 24 when this film was released in 1955 and would have been but 5 at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil war, hardly a fitting subject for a soldier’s affections. Aside from the disparity in ages Death of a Cyclist is an excellent foreign noir. Shot with expressive intent by Alfredo Fraile the film, while eschewing the typical using of shadowed bars across the characters manages to capture a stark and isolating sensation mirroring the characters’ psychological states as they are consumed by their guilt and paranoia. Written and directed by J.A. Bardem Death of a Cyclist is often referred to as a social realist film but it equally fits the bill as a film noir expressing the universality of human cynicism.

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Potpourri of Thoughts

I awoke with a headache today and so I have little in the way of coherent thoughts to post, so once again some unconnected ramblings.

Current Politics:

Everything in my mind comes down to one theme: The only good Republican is an unelected Republican.

May The 4th:

Happy Star Wars day, and another on the 25th which is the anniversary of the release. It was months after the release before I saw the film in 1977.

The WGA Strike:

After following screenwriting podcasts for a few years, I am solidly with the WGA on this. It sucks for the consumers but if we want high quality product in the future, we need to endure the pain today.

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