So while my wife was stuck working yesterday, I watched 1982’s The Thing – yep, another John Carpenter movie. While I’m not much of a horror movie guy – this one, being just as much about sci-fi in most ways, is a bit of an exception.

So a few interesting trivia – the movie is a remake of a 50’s monster movie by the same name. But here, the story is much closer to the original short story by John W. Campbell – ‘Who Goes There?’ But if you’ve read any HP Lovecraft, you will recognize Campbell’s story as being more than a bit derivative of his novella ‘At The Mountains of Madness‘. And fans of the X-Files (1st movie) will also remember a flying saucer in the Antarctic at one point in one of the movies also – not sure whether inspired by any of these stories/movies or not, but it’s there.

Finally, the most silly far-fetched reference I can think of is in Godzilla: Final Wars, where at the start of the movie an advanced submarine about to be destroyed by Godzilla ‘buries’ him far beneath the ice by blowing up an ice cliff over his head – later in the movie they are forced to blow him out of there to save Earth (because in the meantime, aliens have taken over all the other crazy Kaiju monsters and now seek control of mankind, too). Of course, Godzilla literally ‘walks’ (ocean depths notwithstanding) to all these various cities on different continents, defeats the other monsters, then helps a crazy team of Japanese kung-fu mutants (led by an even more ridiculous American soldier who looks like the white trash cousin of GI Joe) defeat the aliens and save earth.

But back to The Thing – this movie’s closer adherence to the John Campbell story means far more gore and tougher special effects than the 50s movie. At one point a guy’s head melts off and turns into a spider to run away – great stuff! Basically a shapeshifter alien infiltrates an American Antarctic research base and begins killing/imitating everyone – the Americans start to fight back, led by Kurt Russell, but it’s a tough battle. Wilfred Brimley (who now largely sells life insurance on tv) is the scientist who figures out what’s going on (but then weird stuff happens).

If you haven’t seen this movie, rent it sometime – but not for kids, definitely – unless you want to be up all night with them crying. The cast is great and the atmosphere of the flick really creates a sense of what it would be like to be isolated in a research base like that while being stalked by a killer – who could look like anyone!

oh and yes, Merry Christmas! 🙂

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Well, the day finally arrived, and we saw TRON: Legacy tonight. Given that there’s already quite a few reviews out there (here, here, here, here and here for starters), I will add my two cents as well.

First, the good:

1) Music and effects are great. The look and feel of ‘the grid’ is as unique as ever (just like it was the first time around in 1982) and Daft Punk provide a great soundtrack. They apparently even got a cameo as the DJ’s in the nightclub where Sam Flynn and Quorra go to meet the mysterious ‘Zeus’ (who turns out to be a semi-albino Willy Wonka sans top hat, but I still liked him anyway). The light-cycle scenes are very cool, again, just like last time, and it was great to see the Recognizers get their moments in the sun again too (although they aren’t really as ‘malevolent’ as in the last film).

2) Jeff Bridges generally is good, although they don’t really give him enough to do IMHO. Yes, he’s the central character (in more ways than one) but barring the opening narration, we don’t see near enough inside his head – and that’s a real missed opportunity. And Bruce Boxleitner is even more in the same boat, given that he’s a sideman as before, despite being the namesake of the two movies (Tron).

On to what didn’t work as well:

1) On the one hand, I give them props for not making the movie into one action scene after another (a la the second and third Matrix movies) at the expense of storyline and character development. Despite what some of the reviewers above may think – the original TRON really tried – if you are paying attention while watching it, and had the benefit of growing up back then – to really imagine what it would be like to ‘live inside a computer’, and came up with a unique vision of that, which has influenced a LOT of movies since, the most obvious being The Matrix but there are plenty others.

But in attempting to get inside the characters more, you have give the audience more to go on. There is a scene where Sam talks to Quorra about Flynn’s book collection – but they don’t explain why she likes the books or thinks they are important? By the same token, yes, Clu (Flynn’s self-created perfectionist computer doppelganger) is Flynn’s opposite number (in misdirected megalomania) but even so, he’s never ‘evil’ the way the MCP and Dillinger were in the original. In that movie the MCP ultimately is calling the shots in BOTH the digital and human worlds at one point? The villains here just don’t compare in that respect.

2) Flynn’s hideout brings back a lot of Blade Runner (an original TRON contemporary, it was two years later, flopped about as badly at the time and since has influenced everyone else to an equal if not greater degree) in its look and feel to me. And the scene where Flynn, Quorra and Sam are eating dinner is reminiscent of near the end of 2001 where Discovery astronaut Dave Bowman is eating dinner/rapidly aging in the Louis XIV dining room – all that white on white.

3) As discussed with fellow moviegoers after seeing it, the big ‘Clu rally’ scene where he reveals his plans is right out of Lord of the Rings, with Christopher Lee rallying the Orcs and monsters to attack as they stamp their weapons and yell (not like this type of scene doesn’t happen at least once or twice in each LOTR movie, for that matter :)).

And this brings up my continual point about supervillains – why? When General Zod and his buddies kicked everyone’s ass in short order in Superman II, they were then seen lounging around the White House with nothing to do? They had already beaten all the lame humans, taken over the US (and of course by implication the world – helps when you make the movies in Hollywood that you can imply that) and are bored out of their gourds until Superman shows up to give them something to do?

So what was Clu going to do if he managed to pull an ‘Agent Smith’ and get back to the ‘real world’? Smith was similar – what was he planning on doing? After killing Neo and turning everyone in The Matrix into duplicates of himself, then what? Here there is lip service paid to Clu/Flynn’s vision of ‘perfecting the system’ – but they don’t really explain what that means or why it ultimately ‘twisted’ Clu in the end?

4) The scene of Flynn talking to Clu (near the end) about where things went wrong – I hate to point this out, but it really smacks of Keanu confronting Patrick Swayze at the end of Point Break, with the speech and how ‘Bodie’ can’t be caged, etc. – that movie is cornball from the word go (despite otherwise being great entertainment) – but if you agree with my point (and you may not), it makes Flynn’s self-confrontation somewhat less effective.

5) The son of the original movie’s Dillinger/bad guy is wasted here – they have but one scene with him (played by an uncredited Cillian Murphy, making the waste DOUBLE because he’s always such a great bad guy) – I was half-expecting a weird twist where it is shown that Dillinger’s son is ultimately behind Clu’s betrayal, not Flynn’s vision of perfection. And then it might have made some weird attempt by a ‘revived’ MCP worth trying in turn? In any case, it could have been very cool.

6) In an earlier post, I noted an article where apparently the Pixar guys were brought in to discuss plot and character with the director and writers. Not sure if it did any good here, or whether they actually took the suggestions and used them? To me, if someone like Brad Bird is giving you free advice on a movie – you TAKE it! It would be like being a newbie actor and having Dustin Hoffman, De Niro or similar in a bit part but on the set for a week or two – I’d be hitting them up or trying to learn by osmosis, hello? Just sayin’.

7) Yet another movie where the 3D is largely ‘meh’. I really don’t think it adds much of anything – you’re already in a huge screen, big sounds, special effects. etc. – it’s not like this is the Star Trek holodeck where you’re ‘in’ the action directly or something – I think the whole 3D thing is eventually going to go the way of the original Cinerama process, if more slowly.

8 ) It’s weird how much of the last 20 minutes or so of this movie are nearly identical to the first one. They have a big getaway on the Solar Sailor; the Recognizers and bad guys chase them; they get to the portal and have a big shootout. Here there is a bit of speeching at the expense of action (in the first one, Sark turns into a ‘giant’ (with the help of the MCP) and is about to crush Tron permanently when Flynn hacks the portal and ‘ends’ the MCP for good). If only the speech had told us more…..

Ultimately for a sequel like TRON, this is a good question to ask – how much of the original movie do you pay homage to while (trying, anyway) to craft a new story? Or do you? The recent Incredible Hulk movies (having seen none of them) were all but back to back remakes (notwithstanding the 70s TV series) within 5 years of one another?

All in all, I’m glad I saw it, but like so many movies (e.g. parts of Matrix 2 and most of Matrix 3, among others) – there’s a lot of missed opportunities here. It was definitely better than Avatar though, although it may have cost even more to make ($237M for Avatar vs. an est. $300M for TL)?

candybowl

finally got around to watching Escape from New York (yes, the 80s cult classic) last night. Always meant to watch it, have read about it, seen a few clips here and there but never the whole movie. For those souls hiding under a rock the past 30 years, basically Kurt Russell is Snake Plissken, an ex-military hero who is actually on his way TO the prison (for robbing a bank) when Lee Van Cleef enlists him to save The President, because Air Force One crashed in NYC, now a max-security prison for the entire country.

Some thoughts:

1) do *NOT* watch the ‘extras’ until AFTER the movie! While I already knew mostly what happens (the movie is 30+ years old after all) there were a few spoilers in the featurette (interviews with John Carpenter, Kurt Russell, and others from the movie/writers) that unfortunately did their evil work. Doh!

2) it isn’t a super high-budget movie. But for what it has, it’s not bad. And it has the advantage of depicting NYC as a prison (versus trying to depict a future robot theme park on a budget), so you expect things to be thrashed and on fire, etc.

3) The fight scene with Kurt Russell and the big wrestler guy is lame. I guess it was inevitable they had to have *some* big ‘fight’ in a movie like this – but they should have had some crazy alley battle like the ridiculous one in They Live (also by JC but later) or some square-off between Isaac Hayes (the ‘Duke of New York’ – has a ’70s big-ass Caddy with chandeliers mounted on the hood – I am not making that up) and KR.

4) Harry Dean Stanton is always good, he plays great freaks. Ernest Borgnine (‘Cabbie’) was kind of wasted in his part (who takes cabs in prison? And how has he been driving a cab in NYC for 30 years – did he just decide to stay when they converted it into a prison?)

5) Like the featurette says – Snake Plissken is a great anti-hero, and KR definitely plays up the Clint Eastwood aspect (as he admits). Minimal dialogue, maximum attitude. Would that we could all be Snake Plissken 🙂 But I’d toss the eye-patch – I like having depth perception, myself. Get some scary tattoo or wear goth clothing or something.

6) it’s a bit weird to see SP land his glider on the Twin Towers, given that they aren’t there anymore. And the chase across the bridge to ‘escape’ seems like an awfully small bridge? Foot bridge? Every car/transit conduit into Manhattan I’ve ever seen is at least FOUR LANES? Even the smallest bridges in Seattle are four lanes? Just sayin’.

All in all, an entertaining watch – it’s always interesting for me (having been there first time around) to see how well the ‘tech’ ages in movies like this. Here, they don’t really play that up, save for some computery-looking fonts on some of the signs and computers – and a few terminals that were obviously stolen from a nearby airport for the early part of the movie. SP’s radio is a bit on the big side as you might expect, and the ‘phone’ Lee Van Cleef uses to call him on later almost covers the side of his entire head and neck – now THAT’s a phone! One he could call with *and* use as a TV tray for his dinner while waiting for SP to get back?

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Oh, if only. 🙂

Finished this book today, very entertaining read and right up my alley. It is a ‘generic superhero’ story (meaning no Marvel, DC, etc. ‘traditional’ superheroes in there) – not *too* far removed from The Incredibles, but not focused on a family or played near as much for laughs as TI was.

The story is told from two first-person points of view; the perspective of Dr. Impossible, the smartest/greatest/most powerful/you get the picture supervillain of them all, and Fatale, a female cyborg and most recent new member of The Champions, the current ‘Superfriends-like’ group who protects the world from villains like him. Both characters are developed far more than the rest of the others – either villain or hero – but the others are pretty interesting too, as their origins and back stories are revealed throughout the book.

While this book has more than a few similarities to the ‘traditional’ superheroes of yore (The Avengers, The X-Men, and even the far more cheesy Saturday-am ’70s cartoon Superfriends) it also invokes the more nerdy tastes of The Watchmen in more ways than one. It also goes further than most traditional hero stories in that these heroes and villains inhabit a world with TONS of heroes and villains, most with superpowers (and several charlatans on both sides to boot) – the only series I’ve seen that implied this were the X-Men movies to my knowledge (world ‘full’ of mutants beyond the X-Men themselves).

I don’t want to spoil anything – of course this book has the usual superhero story touches (supervillain is bent on taking over the world, crazy technology, freak accidents that create superpowers, etc.) – all the right stuff. If you liked The Watchmen (graphic novel, movie or both), or other superhero/comics, you will like this story. In other words, you’ve seen this story before in other forms, but this is yet another page-turning way to tell it, and is pretty darn good. Enjoy!

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Saw the new Narnia movie this afternoon – not bad, pretty entertaining. As I haven’t read any of these books, I can’t really say whether they are true/not true to the books – although I have heard the first two movies were pretty on-story. I think this one veers a bit off (per Salon’s review) but I still found it a pretty solid story and not cluttered with meaningless extra details and simply too much “CGI for spending money’s sake” (pretty every POTC movie excepting the first one, the second trilogy of Star Wars movies, you name it). The characters are sympathetic (even Eustace by mid-movie) and even Tilda Swinton manages a couple very brief appearances as Edmund’s evil nemesis, The White Witch.

I may never get around to reading the books – already have too many on the nightstand as it is – but the movie is definitely a good one. It will be interesting to see what happens with the next one, given that none of the original kids will likely be in it (they aren’t in the next books)?

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less than a week now – getting stoked!

Seattle Cinerama

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