Tag: review

Dark City (1998) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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This is one seriously strange movie.  It co-stars three actors you may know (William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland and Jennifer Connelly) but most of the rest of the cast including the protagonist aren’t familiar names.  It starts out as a film noir with a murder mystery and a man with amnesia.  But then it starts getting very weird and keeps getting weirder right up to the final scene.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

John Murdoch (played by Rufus Sewell) wakes up in a bathtub in a hotel room that also contains the body of a call girl who has been murdered and her body carved on by a maniac.  Murdoch has no memory of who he is.  He hears the phone ring and picks it up.  A man calling himself Dr. Schreber tells Murdoch that he can explain what is happening to him but that he must leave immediately because “they” are coming to get him.  So, he runs away and finds out that the police are looking for him for a string of women’s murders.  And then he meets them; the Strangers.  They’re tall, thin bald men who look slightly inhuman and have telekinetic powers.  And Murdoch finds out that he also has these powers.

Police Inspector Frank Bumstead (played by William Hurt) is hunting Murdoch and he interviews his wife Emma (played by Jennifer Connelly).  She claims Murdoch couldn’t be the killer.  Bumstead uses Emma to find Murdoch.  But he escapes.  By the end of the movie Murdoch is caught by the police but he eventually convinces Bumstead that the world they live in is a simulation because of anomalies like the lack of daylight and false memories of places like Shell Beach which do not actually exist.

Eventually the Strangers come to Dr. Schreber and demand that he inject Murdoch with new memories to solve his problem.  It’s obvious that Schreber works for the Strangers but he seems a reluctant partner.

Over the course of the movie what we learn is that the Strangers have built the city to study humans.  They are an alien race that has kidnapped humans and housed them in a city that is never in daylight but always night.  They have Schreber inject them with their false identities and every midnight they render the whole city asleep and then “tune” it by modifying the physical landscape (buildings appear and disappear) and people are given new identities or altered memories.

The Strangers are trying to understand the human “soul.”  Apparently, their race is dying out and becoming more human is their solution to survival.  At the end of the movie we find out the city is a construct floating in interstellar space completely separate from Earth.  There is a final showdown between the Strangers and Murdoch and he destroys them and takes control of the city.  In the final scene he meets up with his “wife” who now has new memories that don’t include him and he strikes up a conversation.  And they head for the mythical Shell Beach where his false memories told him he had led a happy boyhood life.  Only now he has created it and brought out the sun to end the endless night.

This is some strange movie.  The film noir atmosphere of the beginning of the movie is quite well done.  The transition to a science fiction theme is somewhat jarring but interesting.  I’m not sure I’d characterize the whole experimental scenario with the Strangers altering the city and its inhabitants every midnight as a reasonable plot.  I guess it’s almost like the delusion of someone with extreme paranoia except that the paranoia is based in fact.  All in all, I’d say it’s a bit overdone.  But I didn’t hate it.  As far as a recommendation, I’d have to say most people would be looking at a fifty/fifty shot at liking it.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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My goodness.  1982.  Has it been that long?  I think I saw this movie in the theater but I’m no longer sure.  Okay, so this movie shows all the signs of riding the crest of Star Wars making sci-fi exciting again.  The theme music is obviously aping John Williams’ theme from Star Wars.  Well, of course they did.  They’d have been nuts not to.  This was the second Star Trek movie and after how boring the first movie was, they must have decided they needed to get back to the original formula that made the tv show work, action/adventure with a little science fiction thrown in for window dressing.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

When the movie begins “Admiral” James Kirk is observing cadets responding to a simulation of a space emergency.  Captain Spock is testing his Vulcan student Ensign Saavik to see if she can reconcile reality with regulations.  During these simulations Kirk tells Dr. McCoy that he feels old now that he’s behind a desk instead of commanding a starship.

Meanwhile the USS Reliant’s Captain Clark Terrell and first officer Commander Pavel Chekov beam down to evaluate a planet to see if it is lifeless as required for the next test of the “genesis device.”  This is a system that can take a lifeless planet and both terraform it and create life on it.  But it turns out that the planet is actually the planet that Kirk marooned Khan Noonien Singh and his group of genetically modified supermen on, twenty years earlier.  The reason that the Reliant’s crew didn’t know this is because some cosmic instability blew up one planet and moved Khan’s world where it had been.  This also made Khan’s home a death sentence that he only avoided by his incredible intelligence.  But the death of his wife Khan blames on Kirk.

Putting “super earwigs” into the ears of Chekov and Terrell, Khan takes control of their minds and forces them to betray their ship into Khan’s hands.  Finding out where Kirk was and about the genesis device, he hatches a plan to destroy Kirk and the Enterprise and use the genesis device to destroy the life on an already flourishing world.  Apparently, this is the dark side of the device and why only lifeless worlds must be treated.

Khan captures the genesis device and lures Kirk into an attack by the Reliant.  After almost destroying the Enterprise Kirk uses some trickery to take over control of the Reliant’s bridge and damages that ship enough to get it to retreat.

Kirk manages to rescue the chief scientists of the genesis project.  They happen to be one of Kirk’s old girlfriends and her son who also happens to be Kirk’s son.  The young man despises Kirk for not being a pacifist geek like himself.  Finally, the showdown arrives.  The Enterprise is heavily damaged and can neither outrun nor outfight the Reliant.  So, Kirk lures Khan into a “nebula” where the Enterprise’s weakness will not be decisive.  Kirk manages to get enough potshots off to destroy the Reliant but Khan decides to activate the genesis device in order to destroy the Enterprise which without warp drive will not have enough time to escape its destructive force.

Seeing that time was of the essence Spock leaves the bridge and heads for engineering where to the horror of McCoy and Scott he intends to enter the warp drive containment room.  Spock uses his Vulcan neck pinch to disable McCoy and then uses the Vulcan mind meld to give McCoy some kind of subconscious suggestion and we hear him say to McCoy, “Remember.”  Spock then enters the radiation area and removes the safety housing from the warp drive and with his face and hands in the radiation field, “fixes” the warp drive manually.  As soon as it comes on line, the bridge crew uses the warp drive to escape the genesis blast by a split second.

Then McCoy calls Kirk over the intercom and tells him to come to engineering in time to say goodbye to a dying Spock.  The rest of the movie is Spock’s funeral in space where after the eulogy by Kirk, his coffin is shot out of the ship toward a planet that the genesis device somehow produced out of the nebula where the Reliant was located.  After that Kirk and his son have a reconciliation.  When asked again by McCoy how he feels Kirk says, “Young, I feel young again.”  In the last scene we see Spock’s coffin on the ground in an idyllic setting on the new planet.

Okay.  So just as a point of departure, Star Trek: The Motion Picture; the movie that preceded this one was awful because it was boring and nothing much happened.  So, this movie had lots of action and stuff happens left and right.  I read that they achieved this by kicking Gene Roddenberry upstairs and not letting him play with the script.  So good for them for figuring that out.  Ricardo Montalbán as Khan Noonien Singh is a wonderful hammy villain.  The crew of the Enterprise were very much their old selves from the tv show.  So, what’s not to love.  And the tragic farewell of Spock to Kirk is the climax of the movie.  Sure, it’s hammy tv acting at its worst.  But it’s wonderfully satisfying for any fan of the old show.  How the young respond to it I won’t speculate on.  I highly recommend it to all fans of Star Trek TOS.

Dredd (2012) – A Fantasy Movie Review

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Okay, let’s start with the basics.  This is a comic book hero film.  That’s the excuse for an action movie.  The “universe” this takes place in has a city stretching from the Boston locale to where Washington D.C. was and is called very poetically, “Mega-City One.”  It is walled in and surrounded by an irradiated desert.  There must have been a nuclear war or something.  Somehow it supports 800 million inhabitants and most of them seem to be third world refugees living awful lives surrounded by drugs, gangs and general depravity.

Law and order are in the hands of the “judges.”  They are law enforcement officers who also can dispense justice as judge, jury and executioner at their own discretion.  They ride around on motorcycles and have weapons that can dispense munitions ranging from standard bullets, to armor piercing rounds, to gas rounds to incendiary devices.  They tend to kill a lot of criminals in the course of their work.

In this story a judge named Dredd is bringing a female rookie named Cassandra Anderson on a trial assignment.  She also happens to be a psychic.  This seems to be linked to her parents having died from the effects of radiation.  She doesn’t wear her armored helmet the way Dredd does because it interferes with her psychic ability but mostly because we wouldn’t be able to see her blonde hair.

The gist of the story is that Dredd and Anderson have captured a member of the Ma-Ma Madrigal gang.  Anderson can tell that he’s guilty of some recent murders so he’s being brought in for interrogation.  But Ma-Ma knows that he would end up spilling the truth about her involvement in the deadly “slo-mo” drug distribution.  So, they lock down the 200-story housing complex where she resides and traps the two judges inside.  The rest of the story is Dredd’s fight to stay alive until help can arrive from outside.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Alright, the spoiler alert is kind of silly.  This is a comic book movie.  Judge Dredd kills all his adversaries and ends the movie virtually the same as it begins, walking off to fight crime in Mega-City One.  In between we meet Ma-Ma, her henchmen and a few of the hopelessly oppressed residents of Mega-City One.  At the end of the movie Dredd approves Anderson’s probationary service.  But when she hands in her shield at the end of her probation I couldn’t tell if she still wanted to do the work.  Oh, and at the climax Dredd throws Ma-Ma Madrigal off the 200-story building to her death.  Of course he did.

Alright, who is this movie for.  Well, it’s for comic book movie fans.  I guess most action movie fans will enjoy it.  People who don’t like gratuitous gun violence probably won’t.  By and large I’ll say I enjoyed it.  It was mindless fun.  A little crude and full of the usual vulgar language so not for kids but no harm for grownups.  Your milage may vary.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) – A Movie Review

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“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” is in a lot of ways the last great classic Western.  Directed by John Ford, Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne star with a swarm of excellent supporting cast including Vera Miles, Edmond O’Brien, Andy Devine, John Carradine, Strother Martin and Lee Van Cleef.  But heading up the supporting cast is Lee Marvin as the poisonously evil Liberty Valance.  It is a tale of the closing of the old west when the cattle barons tried to hold onto the open range by standing in the way of statehood in some unnamed mountain western state; possibly Montana or Wyoming.  Here the cowboys are the dead-enders holding off progress and the future is with the farmers and townspeople.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

The plot involves the coming to the town of Shinbone of the state’s senior United States Senator Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart).  He’s come with his wife Hallie to attend the funeral of their old friend Tom Doniphon.  The local newspaper owner wants to know what would bring such an important personage as Stoddard to Shinbone for the funeral of a complete unknown such as Doniphon.  And the whole movie is a flash back to Stoddard’s arrival in Shinbone as a young man and how this changed his and everyone else’s lives.

Ransom is headed into town on a stage coach that is held up by infamous criminal Liberty Valance and his gang.  When Stoddard attempts to stop the thieves from stealing a piece of sentimental jewelry from a widow he is savagely beaten by Valance, ending with a lashing from a whip that Liberty always carries with him.

In the next scene Tom Doniphon brings the seriously injured Stoddard into town on his buckboard for medical attention. Now we meet Hallie who helps treat Stoddard’s wounds.  Meanwhile Stoddard insists that the town marshal Link Appleyard (played by Andy Devine) should arrest Valance for robbery and the assault.  But we discover that Appleyard is too afraid of Valance to even consider arresting the outlaw.  Doniphon explains to Stoddard that the only way to stop Valance is with a gun.  But he also makes it clear that the only one Valance fears is Doniphon himself because of his superior gun hand.  He advises Stoddard to leave town.  We also find out that Hallie is Doniphon’s girl.

The movie moves on to a town meeting to appoint delegates to the state election convention where the representative to the federal government will be selected.  Valance attempts to intimidate the townspeople into selecting him as delegate.  But with Doniphon’s help Stoddard and the owner of the newspaper, Dutton Peabody (played by Edmond O’Brien) are selected.  Valance explicitly tells Stoddard that he is going to come gunning for him that night and Hallie and Doniphon both warn him to leave town.

Valance returns that night and destroys Peabody’s newspaper office and beats him savagely.  Stoddard finds Peabody and calls for the town doctor then gets his gun and heads onto the main street to shoot it out with Valance.  Valance toys with Stoddard.  He fires a shot at a flower pot hanging near Stoddard’s head from a long distance.  Then he shoots Stoddard in his shooting arm, allowing him to recover his gun with his left hand.  Finally, he says, “This one will be right between the eyes.”  Stoddard fires first and Valance is hit and eventually dies.

Now Hallie feels guilty that Stoddard risked his life because of her disapproval of his idea of leaving town.  And it becomes clear that she has shifted her affections from Doniphon to Stoddard.  Doniphon sees this emotional change and goes to his ranch and burns down the home he had been building for his married life with Hallie.

Despite their wounds Stoddard and Peabody attend the meeting at the territory capitol and Stoddard’s name is advanced as a candidate.  John Carradine plays an orator working for the ranchers who characterizes Stoddard as a murderer who does not deserve such a high office.  Stoddard feels guilty for killing Valance and walks out of the meeting.  Doniphon follows him out and confronts him about leaving.  When Stoddard admits his feelings of guilt, Doniphon reveals the truth about the shooting of Valance.  In a flashback scene we witness Doniphon shooting Valance from a side street with his rifle a split second before Stoddard’s ineffective pistol shot was fired.  Relieved to know he hadn’t killed another human being, Stoddard returns to the meeting where he is selected representative.

The movie flashes back to Stoddard telling this story to the newspapermen.  The editor thanks Stoddard but tells him he won’t reveal the truth about who shot Liberty Valance.  He says, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Ransom and Hallie leave town after the funeral and it is clear that she still had very deep feelings for Tom.  And they both decide to return from Washington and finish their lives in Shinbone.  The parting shot occurs when a railroad official is complimented by Stoddard on the excellent service he had received on the train.  The man replied, “Nothing is too good for “the man who shot Liberty Valance!”

I will say that this movie was something of a throwback for the year it was made in 1962.  Despite younger stars like Vera Miles, Strother Martin, Lee Van Cleef and Lee Marvin this looked and felt like Golden Age Hollywood western.  The biggest difference was the post-cowboy theme with the ranchers as the bad guys.  And of course, Stewart and Wayne were a little long in the tooth for the characters they were playing during the flashback scenes of the movie.  But I will say this is a very enjoyable film.  I’d say the highlight is watching Lee Marvin getting his comeuppances on the streets of Shinbone.  He does play a satisfying bad guy.  I’ll call this movie highly recommended for anyone who likes a classic western.

The Danger of “Best Of” Lists

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Recently I went on-line and found a best twenty-five modern science fiction movies list.  And I went through it and found half a dozen movies I hadn’t seen.  And I gave the list to Camera Girl and told her to submit it to her friend the local librarian to get me the DVDs through interlibrary loan.  Well, the only movie they had the first day was “Children of Men.”  Last night we watched it.  Oh boy.

I knew that it was a dystopian alternate history movie where humanity become completely infertile.  What I didn’t know was that with the exception of Michael Caine I would hate everyone in the movie.  It takes place around London in the year 2027, I think.  London is stewing in a smoldering revolt by the illegal immigrants that are being deported.  The plot revolves around a pro-immigrant terrorist group that has found an immigrant girl who is pregnant and the attempt to assist her to escape to an international group called the Human Project that intends to cure the world’s infertility.

I won’t go into a lot of detail because this isn’t a review.  It’s just a rant.  Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and Chiwetel Ejiofor play main characters and I found myself disliking them ever more deeply throughout the movie.  Basically, this is a pro-immigrant, anti-western civilization diatribe with environmental hand-wringing thrown in for good measure.  And the whole film is ugly, brutal and depressing from start to finish.  When it was over I apologized to Camera Girl for not shutting it off after the first five minutes.  As I mentioned I liked Michael Caine’s character.  He’s an old hippie-stoner which isn’t great but it is Michael Caine so he makes him lovable.  But that’s hardly a good reason to watch this mess.

Well, I guess I should go back to that list and get a better idea what the rest of the movies are really going to be like.  If the guy who made this list thought this was a good movie, then his judgement is certainly suspect from my point of view.  You know, if all of a sudden, every woman on Earth became infertile, I’m guessing that all of the biologists in the world would be working on that problem night and day and I’m pretty sure they’d at least figure out what the cause was.  In the movie they don’t even know that.  This alternate history is so depressingly bleak that I can’t see why anyone would make this movie.  I’m left with the idea that this was some kind of moral lesson to let us know that not treating illegal immigrants like members of the family is so evil that Gaia will punish us by making us sterile and wiping us off the planet.  That isn’t science fiction.  That’s propaganda to make the Left feels virtuous.  The only part of the movie that I liked was at the end where the protagonists are leaving a battleground where the immigrants are battling the British Army and suddenly a few fighter jets go overhead and rain down death and destruction on the immigrants.  I think I gave out a little cheer.

Iron Lung (2026) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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Today I went to see “Iron Lung” with grandson prime.  He is a big fan of the writer/director and star of the movie Mark Fischbach or as he’s known on YouTube, Markiplier.  Mark has about 35 million followers on YouTube and leveraging that much support he was able to make the movie with his own money (~ three million dollars) and get it distributed to over 3,000 theaters in the United States.  It’s been in the theaters for a couple of weeks and has made already something like thirty million dollars.  Estimates say it’ll end up at forty million dollars.  After giving the theaters half of this he’ll get twenty million dollars which is six times what he invested; an unheard-of return on investment for a motion picture in this day and age.

All very interesting.  How was the movie?

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Full disclosure.  This movie is not for anyone who doesn’t know the background “mythos” from the video game of the same name.  The visuals, the dialog, the “easter eggs” that the story revolves around will be difficult-to-impossible to understand without prior knowledge of the plot elements that only the die-hard fans of the game know beforehand.

The plot revolves around a convict being promised a reprieve if he will allow himself to be welded into a small submarine and dropped into an ocean of human blood that has been found on a “moon” somewhere out in interstellar space.  And this is being done in the hope that the convict will find something in this ocean to help explain and potentially remediate the result of the “Quiet Rapture.”  And what this refers to is the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of all the planets and stars that humanity had colonized in interstellar space.  The only humans remaining are one that were off-planet in space stations and ships.  This remnant of humanity is attempting to marshal its remaining numbers and resources to attempt to save the human race from extinction.

Once the prisoner (Simon) is submerged he looks for anything that could help explain the rapture.  And during his voyage he encounters harsh working conditions of the craft, hostile life, proof of the bad intentions of his mission handlers and the existence of some malevolent intelligence that is undermining his grasp on reality and even his sanity.

Eventually we discover that his handlers really never intended to rescue him at the end of the mission and we also discover that the intelligence he senses emanates from contact with the extra-dimensional creatures that killed off humanity and eliminated the stars and planets of our universe for the sake of their own plans for our space.  And the ocean of blood is all that remains of the murdered human race.

At the end, as both Simon and his handlers face destruction at the hands of these malevolent beings all he can do with his last efforts is eject from his submarine a flotation device carrying the records of what he’s discovered for the sake of some follow up mission that might try to use the knowledge gained to help mankind in some unspecified and apparently hopeless effort.

Wow, bleak!  As I said earlier, no one but fans of the creator of this movie will know what’s going on.  It’s too confusing and intentionally cryptic.  And talk about your depressing story.  This is the ultimate.  But at the same time there is a huge and enthusiastic fan base for just this story.  Mark’s viewers and the video game’s players are literally LEGION!  So, if you’re not in those categories you won’t and probably shouldn’t go to this movie.  And if you are you almost certainly will go and maybe several times with friends of the same persuasion for company.  And as I’ve said before this may be the beginning of a new way to make and target entertainment.  Gen Z likes its own things.  And they aren’t as interested as the Millennials in being preached to by movie studios about what they should like and what they shouldn’t.  And good for them.  The interesting thing is that Mark Fischbach wants to create more content that entertains his audience and produce other people’s stories for this audience.  Maybe I should send him my “screen play” for the “The Sniper.”

The Sniper Marketing Campaign is Live!

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Keywords have been added, categories have been refined and Amazon Ads are garnering thousands of impressions and dozens of clicks. Even a few sales have been registered! Now it’s time for anyone who has bought a book to give their opinion on its entertainment value as a review on that mega-information portal; Amazon.com.

So for anyone who has bought the book please give it a great review as soon as possible to enhance the effect of the advertising.  Amazon only credits people who have bought the book into their review algorithm.

The link below will bring you to the Amazon sales page.  Near the end is the review section.  Clicking on this link will not cause you to buy the book, just bring you to the sales page.

Thank you.

The Honeymooners – Complete Series Review – Episode 06 – The Sleepwalker

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This is a very simple story.  Ed Norton is walking in his sleep and because of this Ralph is being forced by Alice and Trixie to go out on the roof and lead him back to bed.  But Ralph is apoplectic because of all the sleep he’s losing.  The climax of the story has Ralph sleeping in Ed’s bedroom to prevent him from sleepwalking but even in his sleep Norton is too clever for Ralph and escapes.  Finally Ralph summons a psychiatrist to get to the root of Norton’s problem and after being administered Pentothal he regresses to his childhood and we find out that he is pining for his lost dog Lulu.  The psychiatrist thinks Norton should be psychoanalyzed for several months to ascertain the correct treatment but Ralph dismisses him and says he’s going to get Norton a dog to replace the lost Lulu.

In the final scene Trixie has come down at midnight to thank Ralph for his idea about the dog and to announce that Norton and Lulu are upstairs sleeping like babies.  After she leaves Ralph announces that he should have been a psychiatrist and that he’s going to have some warm milk and get a good night’s sleep.  But as Alice goes to put a milk bottle outside their door Norton sleepwalks in carrying Lulu.

Now this is a very minor episode with a very limited appeal.  The scenes with Norton sleepwalking are mildly amusing but nothing more.  I’d call this one of the weakest episodes in the series.  Lulu!