Tag Archives: Movies

Streaming Review: The Dig

The Dig is a dramatization of the discovery of a 6th century burial ship on an English estate by a self-trained archaeologist, Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) and the estates owner the widow Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan.) The movie details their struggles with acceptance, resistance from the accredited community, and deteriorating health all as England the world plunge into the cataclysmic horror of the Second World War.

This is a quiet, sedate, drama without anyone pulling a weapon or even raising their voice and it still crackled with tension as the characters faces trials and tribulations. It is a perfect example of that uniquely British style of drama that is motivated by class and manners, where the stakes are defines by expectations and the cost of defying them. In years past The Dig would have played to great success on the silver screen but not only due to the pandemic but also changing audience patterns niche channels and streaming services are now the home for this sort of dramatic fare. The truth of the matter is that fewer and fewer people are willing to pay more than twenty dollars a piece for non-spectacle cinema. That is not a slight on spectacle films but rather an acceptance that audiences have changed.

The performances in The Dig are superb. Fiennes adopts a Suffolk accent that is simply charming, Mulligan radiates sympathy a widowed wife facing not only the challenge of raising a son alone with also while dealing with a terrible condition all without ever devolving into maudlin pits of self-pity. The supporting cast is equally talented including Lilly James as a young archaeologist faced with sexism from academia and the horror that she has married the wrong man.

Cinematographer Mike Eley captures haunting and lovely images of the English country giving the fog a ghostly and timeless luminosity that feels as though it has passed through the centuries with the buried burial site.

Screenwriter Moira Buffini’s script shows a deft competence and subtilty that trusts the audience to understand the situation and the characters’ inner lives and motivations without needlessly wordy exposition.

Under the helm of Director Simon Stone all of these elements come together for a moving portrait of people and an age that has now passed.

The Dig is streaming on Netflix.

The Two Most Influential Science-Fiction Films of the Silent Era

This will be the first in hopefully a lengthy series of essays as I yammer away about which two SF films of each period I consider to be the most influential. Naturally ‘influential’ is a quite subjective measurement and you are welcome to comment, argue and suggest films that you think had a greater impact than the ones I suggest.

I will start with the silent period, covering basic 1890-1930, but after that I intend to tackle the question decade by decade.

A trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune) – 1902 – George Melies

I consider this one of the most important SF films from the silent era because this is really the movie that kicked off SF as spectacle. The science was ludicrous and no one making did so under the illusion that this was a reality based adventure. This was about the wondrous and magical effect that the motion picture camera afforded the filmmakers. This is a short film, just 13 minutes long, but it cast a long shadow across the landscape of cinema. This film is the birth of special effect and special effect from this moment onward would remain at the heart and soul of SF cinema.

Metropolis – 1927 – Fritz Lang

Director Fritz Lang is a towering figure in film. The visionary man behind such classics as ‘M’, the film that made Peter Lore an international star, Lang always had a deep and sincere love for Science-Fiction. (In fact it was Lang who convinced Robert A. Heinlein to start writing Young adult novels.) I would argue that Lang’s better SF movie was 1929’s Woman in the Moon (Frau in Mond.) Woman in the Moon is less didactic and pays a closer attention to scientific details while delivering a better story and adventure. (This film was also a favorite of Werner Von Braun who saw it as a teenager and right up through Apollo copied the paint schemes for rockets from this movie.) However, Woman in the Moon simply has not impacted to trajectory of SF films in the manner that Metropolis did.

Metropolis, a sprawling massive production set in a future city divided between the exploited poor and the extravagantly wealthy, set design and social models that were to be copied for decades, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner look and feel can be trace directly back to Metropolis. The sprawling, towering city of the future was born here in this film.

The original print was lost for decades until 2010 gave us a restored version that is close to the original running time, but not quite. 1984 gave us a version where musical Giorgio Moroder revived the film with a soundtrack that included Queen’s Freddie Mercury, Adam Ant, Pat Benatar and many others.

Your thoughts?

A bygone age

Last night I did not video game as late as usual because I was suffering from pulled muscles that made sitting forward uncomfortable. I ended up surfing the channels on my TV looking for something to watch while I waited to unwind and get ready for bed.
On TCM (Turner Classic Movies) I spotted something that could have been a low-budget horror film from the late 50’s or early 60’s, but alas it was what looked a murder mystery. (Turns out to have been Girls On The Loose)

For the first time in years I thought about my Saturday night as an adolescent in Ft. Pierce Florida. Every Saturday night at 11 pm the local TV station would start Creature Feature. A double bill of horror and genre films that would play into the early morning hours.

I saw many an entertaining movie late Saturday night with a bowl of popcorn by my side. It was on Creature Feature that I first saw many classic movies such as The Creature From The Black Lagoon and quite a few of the Roger Corman ‘Poe’ Movies from the sixties.

Those days are gone. Late night TV now is a collection of infomercials — one of the sins of the Reagan era — and second rate TV shows. There isn’t much in the way of a Creature Feature with classic and cheesy movies I haven’t seen before. Now I know that we have DVD, Blu-ray, Movies on Demand, and Instant View movies on Netflix and I utilize all of those in my movie watching habits, but there is a real shortfall in this aspect of home video. It only shows me movies I have asked it to show me.

I never get surprised or exposed to a new movie this way because I search out the films I want to rent, buy, or view. Oh there is the occasional that I find by surfing the sites or rarely one that is recommended to me by the software actually looks interesting, but this is a different dynamic than the Creature Feature.

Every Saturday night I would lay back on the couch, the rest of the house asleep, and I was watch a genre movie. I usually knew no more than that when the features started. It was genre and that was enough to spark an interest. Sometimes the movies would be so bad or dull I would go to be, most of the time the movies were forgettable and have now been forgotten, but occasionally the movies would leave an impression that echoed through the decades.

I remember watching Planet Of Vampires on Creature Feature, a stylistic though flawed Italian SF movie. Years later I found it on DVD and bought it for a friend. We watched the film and man the makers of Alien were clearly influenced by this movie. Sadly I did not buy a copy of the DVD for myself and it is now out of print. I never would have seen this movie had it not been for Creature Feature.

This is terribly saddens me. Young people growing up today will not get the same exposure to the classic genre films that I got. They’ll see remakes of the really big name movies, such as The Day The Earth Stood Still, and perhaps track down the original, but that random sf/horror film of the weekend is a thing of the past. Many films that are not classics are going to be rarely seen just because of the death of Creature Features across the country. While The Killer Shrews is a film with more flaws than charms I am still happy that I saw the movie and when it turned up in a 50 movies boxed set I bought I was happy to watch it again.

Perhaps this is why I am a fan of our local club, San Diego Vintage SF, though my life has made it tough to attend in months. Every month a genre film from before 1968 is shown, along with a serial and cartoon. (Frankly I could skip the serial as it was never part of my movie going experience.) However SDVSF does not make up for the Creature Feature.

It would be wonderful is TCM did a regular program dedicated to SF,Horror, and Fantasy films. They already have these movies and they play them, but not as part of a generalized programming about them with a host, introduction and such. There is a richness in the genre and it extends beyond the recognized classics. A treasure likely to be rarely seen and forgotten with the years.

Sunday Night Movie: Dog Soldiers

So a while back I was working on a werewolf short story, A Taste Of Tears and Blood, (If fact my writing page horribly out of date indicates that is my current project) and as part of my research I was watching all sorts of werewolf films.

One film I put on the Netflix queue but never got around to seeing as part of the research was Dog Soldiers from 2002. This weekend I had is shipped from Netflix and my sweetie-wife and I watched it early Sunday evening. (I was unable to watch a film later by myself as it my habit because I was so terribly exhausted.) I was a little surprised when my sweetie-wife expressed an interest in the film, gory violent horror film are not her usual cup of tea. She is much more attracted to projects based upon the actors and the nationality of the production. This film had an actor she very much like to follow, Sean Pertwee, son of Dr Who actor Jon Pertwee.

This film was written, produced, directed and edited by Neil Marshall, who has gone to direct such movies as The Decent and Doomsday. If you like or hate Dog Soldiers it’s really just one man’s fault.

Personally I really liked Dog Soldiers, much more than I had expected. The direct was quite aware of his limited budget and knew the limitations of his production. He stayed very much inside those limitation rather than attempting cheap and cheesy digital effects like we see when we’re inflicted with SyFy.

The story is about a fix man army squad that had been dropped into the highlands of Scotland on a routine training mission. The squad is led able veteran Sgt harry Wells (Sean Pertwee) with the capable assistance of Private Cooper (Kevin McKidd of ROME) a young man recently bounced from Special Forces training for ethical reasons. The squad quickly find themselves in serious trouble when they are confronted with a werewolf pack and all the squad is armed with is blanks.

There is one wonderfully British moment when the squad has found temporary safety, and Cooper temporarily in command is ordering men to do this and do that to secure the building and orders the last man to ‘put a kettle on, we can all do with a cup.’

My biggest quibbles with the film is occasionally the characters posses superhuman capabilities and survive the sort of events no human being has any business surviving. That said the film transcends these fault by having neat and interesting characters, a nicely thought out premise, and a relentlessness about the doomed situation the characters find themselves in. I was disappointed that the Blu-ray disc did not have any bonus feature on it. I searched on line fro a collectors edition or some such, but none was to be found.

Surprisingly the gore in this film was restrained. There was lots of blood thrown about, but only a few shots of graphic violence. Again I think this was a function of the director understanding his limitations and using them to his advantage rather then foolishly ignoring them

I look forward to seeing more movie from Mr Neil Marshall.

Sunday Night Movie: The Sword and The Sorcerer

So last night I was in the mood for something fantastic. By that I do not mean something of such tremendous quality that decades later people ares till amazed with the filmmaking, but rather in the mood for a film that dealt with a fantastic premise.

Thanks to my new nifty database program, I was able to sort the movies by time, I was looking for something under one hours fifty minutes, and then I just scanned the titles until I saw something that struck my fancy.

So The Sword And The Sorcerer is a fantasy film that came out in 1982 about the same time that Conan: The Barbarian was released into theaters. While Conan was a big budget film, 20 million dollars, which grossed nearly 40 million dollars domestically, The Sword And The Sorcerer was a much more modest production. Reportedly The Sword and The Sorcerer was made for the price of a single set on Conan: The Barbarian, and yet it still gross 39 million dollars domestically as well. Clearly the better return on investment went with the little film that could. Continue reading →

Databasin’ fool

So I have spent a few hours this morning databasing my DVD/Blu-ray collection. I have according to the database 222 movies in my collection, but this number is not completely accurate. The database software counts boxed sets as a single entry, so for example my boxed set of the Star Wars movies is one entry, but it has three movies.

Given that my feature film count is closed to 290 from boxed sets. (The el cheapo 50 ‘classic’ horror films bosted that count by 49 alone.)

The database software is Movie Collector and I love it. After the jump is a screen capture of what it looks like. The software cost me $30 so it is not pricey. You can enter films by title, barcode number (typing it in by hand) or by scanning the barcode on the box of the DVD/Blu-ray. I bought a cheap barcode scanner off Ebay ($8) and it took me just a couple of hours to enter all the films. Continue reading →

Sunday Night Movie: 2012

So being a fan os disaster movies, and to a somewhat lesser degree a fan of disastrous movies, withe the release of 2012 on Blu-ray I had to make that movie my Sunday Night Movie this week. (before anyone thinks I slipped a cam and actually bought the Blu-ray, I ordered it via Netflix. That’s one of the reasons I have Netflix, so I can see movies I would not ordinarily pay for.)

As I have said in other posts I thin Roland Emmerich is in a race with Michael Bay as to who can make more stupid movie. After Michael Bay raised the stakes with Transformers : Revenge Of The Fallen, Emmerich had no option but to go all in with 2012.

Like all really classy disaster movies this one has a diverse cast from all sorts of walks of life caught up in the disaster. They struggle to survive, many failing and ending up in either noble moving deaths if they were likable characters, or ironic fitting deaths if they were jerks. There isn’t a single surprise in this entire films save for the level of stupid.

For example, the scene picture above. Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) failed writer whose HARDBACK book sold less than 500 copies (a face many people know in the film, no matter how divorced those characters may be from the publishing business.) is running to catch the plane with his ex-wife, two kids, and their new step-dad in order to escape the eruption of the super volcano beneath Yellowstone National Park. Behind the character is the slowest pyroclastic flow in the recorded history of vulcanology. In real life this effect can have speeds up to 750 km/hour. Jackson has managed to outrun the bit of disaster in an old RV. Crashed the RV into a fissure from the eruption, climb out of the fissure, chase down the plane with family et al aboard, and still manage to escape the deadly winds, pressure, and temperatures of up to 1000 degrees C. Now to paraphrase Morbius from Forbidden Planet: Prepare your minds for a new scale of stupidity values. What I just describe was the most CREDIBLE disaster/action/escape sequence in the whole film.

I laughed my way, and I mean that quite literally laughing out loud, through this entire movie. From the ridiculous psuedo-science (Sub-atomic particles do NOT mutate Mr. emmerich, they decay.) to the ignoring of the vast distances involved this film gets everything wrong and does it in the most over the top manner imaginable.

It is filled with stock character, not one of which has any spark of originality and life. It ignores the consequences of its own stupid actions and stands. SPOILER ALERT.

Continue reading →

Movie Review: The Ghost Writer

Today my sweetie-wife and I went to the movies and saw The Ghost Writer. This film is a political thriller directed by controversial director, Roman Polanski. (The link is to Mr. Polanski’s IMDB page, but if you want to do a Google search you’ll easily turn up the nature of the heated controversy surrounding Mr. Polanski and he decades long flight from US law.)

Adapted by Roman Polanski and Robert Harris from a novel by Robert Harris, The Ghost Writer is about an author, The Ghost (Ewan McGregor) who has been brought on to complete an autobiography for a retired Prime Minister of England, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) after the previous ghost writer has died in a accident at sea.

When the ghost arrives he finds that the political teams he is to work with is in a state of siege as a former member of Lang’s cabinet has leaked documents accusing Lang of war crimes while in office. (The plot here is very topical with the war crimes being handing terror suspects over to the Americas for torture.) Lang’s chief of staff, Amelia Bly (Kim Cattrall) run the operation with a ruthlessness that suggests her name should more properly be spelled Bligh. Lang’s wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams) is estranged and distant clearly in a contest against Bly for her husband time and possibly affections.

Naturally there are secrets afoot and perhaps the death of The Ghost’s predecessor was no accident. As I said this is a political thriller. (Ripped from today’s headlines as the cliche goes.)

Overall this film was well made and entertaining. The casts delivered really sharp and tight performances and there was very good use of modern technology in this sort of search for clues thriller. However, that said this film in the end did not work for me.

At the heart of the story is a conspiracy simply to fantastic to be believed. I went in prepared to let a largish conspiracy go by my suspension of disbelief. When you are dealing with political thrillers, conspiracies are the rule of the day. For most of the film I was drawn into the plot and the characters and even the conspiracy itself. Polanski had done a fine job of not sending me into eye-rolling, you-can’t-expect-me-to-buy-that land. Then in the last thirty minutes of the film, they reveal the big turn, the big surprise and it’s simply ridiculous. Governments, hell any organization, simply cannot perform to this sort of competence and long range planning.

To make matters worse in literally the last five minutes of the film they turn things around again with a series of clues that if you think about make no sense what so ever. I have no idea what the writers were thinking or smoking when they conceived this ending. IT simply makes no sense.

As such I must down check this movie. Going out with my sweetie-wife was pleasant, but the film was not.

I’m Back

Well, the last two days have been quite a tour de force of headaches for me. Yes my new glasses still have not arrived from the lab and so I have been suffering my daily headaches at this time of year. Friday got to near migraine quality and I left work a couple of hours early so I could do nothing and let my eyes rest.

The most frustrating part of the last two days is that it brought production on Cawdor to a halt. Thursday night was reducing to typing in edits on the chapter 3 and no original writing. Friday my head hurt far too much for me to even think of stringing words together.

However, by a bit of luck I woke up this morning without a headache. I intended to spend some quality time with my sweetie-wife, as I have not been the most fun to be around lately, and later a double feature of films with friends.

A friend and co-worker, Rachael, (No that’s not a typo that’s how she spells it.) Is both a fan of Zombie movies and The Terminator franchise. Yet somehow she has never seen the 1978 Dawn Of The Dead and even more surprising she has never seen The Terminator. This is going to be rectified today.

Then in the evening it will be card and board games.

Sunday Night Movie: Sibiriada (1979)

So this is a quite different kind of selection for my Sunday Night Movie series. Sibiriada is a sprawling Russian epic about four generations of families in a small isolated village in Siberia. The image presented in the post is of the character known as The Eternal Old Man and he is the one constant in the story of change and revolution. ( I joked as I watched this film with my sweetie-wife that in a western remake he’d be played by Anthony Hopkins. It would be a better role that that of Sir John Talbot, I can tell you that.)

When I describe this movie as a sprawling epic I am not giving in to hyperbole. The Running time for this film is 275 minutes. That’s 4 hours and 35 minutes of Russian characters, names, and history. It far too much for my sweetie-wife and I to watch in one sitting and so this sia film we have digested in bits and pieces.

The film starts in the 1800 when the Czars still ruled Russian and it introduces to the feuding families, the wealthy and prosperous Solomins and the poor and unfortunate Ustyuzhanins. Across the decades we watch the families feud and fight, why possessed by their passion for the land of the small forgotten village of Elan.

We watch as each generation deals with the hardships of their age. The brutal police of the Czars, the chaos of revolution, the struggle for survival in WWII, the desperate search for resources in the fifties and sixties to satisfy the central committee and finally the treat of the land itself being eradicated in the name of progress.

This is not a film for light viewing. It’s dense with a strange narrative structure. There is an element of the mystical — as seen in part by The Eternal Old Man — which seems at odds with the normal Soviet insistence on realism and scientific processes. (Though the Soviets were horrid about perverted that process for political ends.) However if you like dense films with dozens of foreign characters to keep track of and no sense what so ever of the three act structure, then Sibiriada may be for you.

Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur