At least a year or more ago, I read Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil.  This is an interesting thriller with a somewhat ridiculous plot – Joseph Mengele and other escaped Nazis living in South America carry out a sinister experiment to clone a bunch of ‘baby Hitlers’ based on saved cells he had obtained from Hitler during the war.  Then when old enough, the babies are farmed out to foster parents in the USA and Europe with similar background demographics to that of Hitler’s original parents, and monitored to attempt to duplicate AH’s upbringing as much as possible to bring about the desired result (Hitler rises again to power and brings back Nazi control, of the world this time around).

A movie was made of this book in 1978, starring Gregory Peck, Lawrence Olivier and James Mason.  While naturally the movie cuts some of the details a bit short, it’s an entertaining view.  Other actors include a VERY young Steve Gutenberg as a cub reporter monitoring the Nazis in Paraguay; the familiar Walter Gotell (played the Russian spy boss in several Roger Moore James Bond films); Denholm Elliott (may remember him as Dan Ackyroyd’s butler in Trading Places, among his many other films, including at least a couple of the Indiana Jones movies).

IMHO Gregory Peck is the main reason to watch this movie.  Not only is he playing against type (here he’s the E-VIL arch villain, normally he’s the good guy everyone roots for) he goes for broke in playing the character, probably not unlike the real Mengele (who apparently was still alive in South America when this movie premiered in the theaters).  There are a number of scenes where he all but loses it (or DOES lose it) and goes apes*** – great fun and way over the top.

I thought Laurence Olivier was good too, but while he’s the good guy nazi-hunter, his character is a bit whiny and somewhat annoying – maybe that’s the way the real Simon Wiesenthal was?  Not sure.

It was also fairly surreal to see Bruno Ganz in this movie as a minor character in this movie – given that much more recently he played Hitler himself in Downfall, and of course starred in all those ridiculous ‘Hitler meme’ videos on YouTube as a result.

It’s always interesting to watch ‘alternative history’ movies generally (unless they really suck acting-wise or just present way too lame a plot premise) – this one doesn’t disappoint.

Other views:

Rotten Tomatoes

FeoAmante

candybowl

So now with YouTube, we usually have the ability to watch (even more) TV than we otherwise would, because all those crazy people out there with too much time on their hands spend uncounted hours uploading classic (and lame, to be sure) TV shows up there.  I’d sure hate to see YT’s power bill to keep all that crap online 24-7.

Anyway, for whatever reason I was thinking about The Six Million Dollar Man a few days ago and did some searches, specifically for an episode where he meets Bigfoot.  Bigfoot turns out to be a sentry for space aliens who live in a cave in the California mountains and study the human race from this hidden vantage point.  Naturally they want to examine Steve Austin – so Bigfoot (and some weird spinning tunnel) captures him for their nefarious needs.

Who is The Six Million Dollar Man, you say?  Well, he’s Steve Austin, an astronaut who crashed very badly in the California (Nevada?) desert during a test flight and had to be ‘rebuilt’ as a cyborg (new eye, arm and legs) to survive – this is all explained in the show opening sequence.  Naturally Steve then becomes a government agent for an elusive agency (OSI) and has weekly adventures on TV as a result.  Kind of like an early 70s Knight Rider without the computerized Trans Am, KITT, and without the mulletized Hasselhoff in a leather jacket (this being the early 70s, Steve was more a leisure suit kinda guy).

So back to Bigfoot.  The nice thing about YouTube (and DVDs for that matter) is that it lets you zip past boring plot points and/or stupid stuff.  Since T.S.M.D.M. were hour-long shows, and this was a two-parter, it meant not having to watch two whole hours of it – meaning not having to watch Steve Austin’s lame battle against Bigfoot (Bigfoot was played by Andre the Giant – cool!) and, all the footage of SA running around the woods in slow motion (a regular staple of this series to give the impression of great speed) and using his other bionic abilities (eyesight, powerful arm) to the requisite repeated sound effects for each – if you’ve ever watched this show, you know what i’m talking about.

This show was out in the early ’70s, so the special effects are ok, but obviously way dated given their age.  Lee Majors was the breakout star here (he had been in some TV before but this was a major role and god knows they marketed the HELL out of it then – you could buy nearly any action figure, toy, lunchbox, you name it).  What’s also weird is that given the time period – the hairdos and clothing makes everyone look so much older, even given that Lee Majors was only early 30s at best?  Kind of like the original Captain Kirk looking a lot older than his recent movie replacement did?  Or that i’m now older than both so I don’t know what the (blank) I’m talking about? 🙂

Anyway, it was weird watching that show again, probably first time i’ve seen any of the episodes *since* the early 70s, as unlike say, Star Trek – I don’t remember that show really going into syndication?  There were weird miscues in the sound effects – Steve Austin throws a large tree branch at Bigfoot during one of their ‘melee’ scenes – and it makes a sound like an incoming air missile?  Huh?

Also, part of the plot involved some missing scientists who Bigfoot/the aliens ultimately kidnapped – those scientists were researching a big earthquake fault line, which in part two they set off a NUKE to keep it from causing an even bigger natural quake that would have killed thousands along the California coast otherwise.  Really, a nuke?  Funny how everyone is only a mile or two away (likely less) according to the plot, and they show no mushroom cloud, the nukes are only buried a few feet deep?  Come on, people – even a 10 year old knows what a nuclear explosion looks like (and that you have to be a bit farther away from it)?

Finally, there’s a token phone call scene with The Bionic Woman (Jamie Sommers, played by Lindsay Wagner) where she wants to come help find Steve Austin (cooling his bionic butt in the aliens’ cave at the time with Stefanie Powers, who plays one of the aliens) but their boss tells her to just stay at home (like a good bionic girl – it’s not stated but that’s sure what he was telling her).  So the US Govt. spends all this money to build TWO bionic people and then tells one to stay at home and mind her knitting?  Really?  I guess the episode budget was already too high (given Andre the Giant, aliens and ‘special’ effects) to afford more than one scene from Lindsay Wagner – why even bother?

Apparently there is a second two-part Bigfoot episode from the next season also on YT – don’t hold your breath for me to watch it, though.  Eventually i’ll watch the better one from The Bionic Woman where she battles a HAL-like killer computer; or when she takes on the ‘fem-bots’ made by some mad scientist (arguably the second coming of Westworld).  Far more interesting.

Ah, tv……

candybowl

I thought I had seen nearly all the dystopian/computer-ruled-future sci-fi movies out there, especially that of the 1970’s (the decade that pretty much invented the genre) but recently came across one I had not – 1970’s Colossus: The Forbin Project.

While this movie is a bit dated given its Cold War theme (the USA builds an invincible computer to run our missile defense system – then we find out the Soviets have done the exact same thing) and the fact that it’s 42+ years old now, it still presents a somewhat different take on the now-common TRON/Terminator/Matrix vision of man handing off control (either by mistake or on purpose) to technology, and then having to fight to regain freedom.

Here, the computer(s) (Colossus from the USA and Guardian from the Soviets) ‘discover’ one another, begin communicating (we never find out what about, save that they progress through simple math into subjects alleged to be beyond human capability within a day or so and never look back) and then start taking over as they gain sentience.  When the humans try to regain control, well, that doesn’t work out so well of course.  Finally Colossus forces the technicians to install a weird-looking speech unit, and issues an edict to the world by the end, that it is ushering in a new era of peace, ‘on my terms’.  Enforced by control over the world’s nuclear arsenal, which is re-aimed at countries still not under its control computer-wise.

The difference to me on this movie was the ‘peace enforcement’ angle – usually all-powerful computers want to enslave or worst case, exterminate all humans once they gain power, right?  Here Colossus hints that he’s going to force Dr Forbin (his creator) to evacuate Crete and build an even bigger, autonomous computer complex there that will control all world communication within 5 years.  To which Dr. Forbin naturally replies – ‘never!’

So on the positive side, the plot is pretty decent, although there could have been a bit more editing of somewhat tedious long shots after the main sets are established – I really liked the opening of Dr. Forbin walking around the huge Colossus complex as it goes online – you really get the impression of scale (it’s an impregnable fortress in the Colorado Rockies). The acting is generally effective, with even a few familiar faces, including Marion Ross, James Hong and William Schallert, although only the latter gets much to do.

What’s also amusing in these movies (and in similar books – helped by hindsight of course) is how the ‘humans never learn’ – they always go creating something magnificent to solve some enormous problem – and it ends up creating far more problems than it solves – and they wonder why? But it must be human nature (or a time-honored/tiresome element of sci-fi plots) to try and try again….

On the negative side – the main computer interface they use is similar to those neon ‘announcement’ lights you see by the side of the highway or in a shop window, backed by typing sounds.  Even 2001’s HAL (from several years earlier) had a much more advanced interface (those all-too-menacing ‘eyes’ located all over the ship) than this.  And that Colossus doesn’t learn to talk until about the last 15 minutes of the movie?  And that we never see or really hear from Guardian (the Soviet computer) at all, save that it effectively becomes Colossus’ partner in world domination by the end – why not have it be a rival instead?  That would be another interesting take – most movies have computers vs. humans – why not computers vs. each other, with us caught in the middle?  While the Matrix addresses that theme a bit, we never really know WHY the computers in that movie decide to help us out, it’s really just assumed that some are ‘good’ and some are ‘bad’…?

Anyway, this was an interesting movie, if you like old-school sci-fi and don’t mind that the Cold War is now over (replaced by the ‘invent-a-war’ nature of the world now, arguably more unstable in some ways)….

Other reviews:
The Chicago Reader
Eccentric Cinema

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Watched the one-off anime movie The Silent Service last night.  Made in 1995 and based on the manga of the same name, this movie tells the story of an advanced sub, the ‘Sea Bat’ – ultimately renamed the ‘Yamoto’ – built as a cooperative venture by the US Navy and the Japanese Self-Defense Force.  It is staffed by an all-Japanese crew, but an American captain is included as (presumably) an overseer.

{{Spoiler Alert}}

As the post-WWII treaty between the US and Japan forbids Japan to have any nuclear weapons (not sure if this is in fact really true, but it seems likely), this sub is to sail under the command of the US 7th fleet, but the story implies it is effectively a Japanese vessel, given its crew. And its captain states that belief outright during a conversation, then shortly thereafter steals the sub – the rest of the movie concerns the various diplomatic and international situations created by this action.

This is an interesting movie, for several reasons.  First, it plays like a combination of ‘Red October meets Red Storm Rising‘ given the regular interplay between the military action vs. the diplomatic wrangling.

It’s also well written (but for a couple minor gripes, see below) – I really didn’t know what the heck Captain Kaieda was going to do at any turn once he stole the Sea Bat/Yamoto.  While the characters are otherwise fairly typical anime (one or two silent know-it-all guys; many more pride-filled, over-the-top guys; a few raging crusaders; a few moderates stuck in between all the rest) and none are close to being three-dimensional, within the confines of this story their limitations don’t get in the way.

The animation is fairly standard anime – no CGI in this one, probably a bit early for that – nothing spectacular but otherwise fine.

Minor nits:

1) One of the American motives here is revealed to be the ‘recolonization of Japan’ – WTF?  Is that really a concern after all these years (or even in 1995, or ‘ever’)?  Despite the Americans in this anime obviously being the bad guys, that’s really reaching, guys.

2) The American president has a little ‘rage session’ of his own in the bathroom near the end – and he brags to himself that despite the outcome of the sub chase and confrontation(s), the USA still has enough nukes to destroy Japan many times over.  Again – even transposing the recent departed war-mongering, civil-rights-trampling, corrupt Bush Administration into his shoes – I cannot believe Bush (or the even more despicable Cheney) would ever say (or even think) such a thing to even themselves!  This is just too much…

It’s interesting that even the Japanese players here (Prime Minister, Captain of the Sea Bat/Yamoto, other rival JSDF sub captain, and at least one of the high-level administration bureaucrats – all have competing visions as to what to do with this sub – naturally the guy *driving it* prevails with what happens, but it definitely adds to the story and keeps the viewer guessing.

One reason I was interested in watching this once I came across it in a random search – was that I used to play the Amiga computer game Silent Service – based on sub wars in the South Pacific during WWII.  The feel of this movie is very similar – although the players are reversed – and cool!

The only other downside is that they never made the rest of the manga into more anime footage, so I guess I’ll have to hunt it down to find out what happens later to the characters.  Still, this story is complete and stands alone quite well.  Check it out!  I found it at Scarecrow but I’m sure it’s elsewhere….

candybowl

After all the monster movies I’ve seen over the years (many multiple times – after all, WWGZD?) I finally got around to watching the original Rodan movie yesterday. They reissued it on DVD with both the original Japanese version (english subtitles) and the dubbed American version and conveniently, the SPL had it.

My review here is going to be short – simply stated, there wasn’t near enough monster/destruction/mayhem! So rather than try to write more words about too little action – I give you a far better Rodan review (word and wit-wise) courtesy of Stomp Tokyo! Other reviews by these maniacs are linked off the blogroll on the lower left. Enjoy!

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Recently read the nonfiction book The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll. Not sure where I actually found the book, but it’s definitely an interesting read, despite dating from 1989. The book details Mr Stoll’s experiences at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he signed on as an astronomer, but worked also at a Unix systems administrator in the IT department. One day in managing his systems he noticed some anomalies, and over a short period of time, identified what he believed to be a hacker in his system. From there the trail simply kept getting more complex and weirder by the month. Despite the age of the book I won’t spoil it for you – if you are a nerdy type (or like a long, drawn out mystery) – this is it. And it’s hard to believe in some parts of the book that this is an actual true story, given what happens to Cliff’s quest and interactions with his boss, the government, and others who become involved.

Other things about the book I found interesting include all the computer talk – reading this book is like taking a trip down memory lane, although much of what he’s working on here predates my use of computers too, really. The Mac had barely appeared at this stage (we were using them for Biology lab graphs and statistical testing during my college experience at this time) and as noted in the book, the other predominant system was the Digital VAX (our computer lab had them too) – PC’s were even newer than the Mac at this point. The level of detail and monitoring he had to engage in to track the hacker kind of boggles my mind – but it’s pretty interesting nonetheless.

It’s also neat to read a bit of the NoCal lifestyle he was living at the time (he lived near Berkeley, didn’t have a car, rode his bike everywhere, lived with his girlfriend and another woman, and generally had a ‘free range’ lifestyle probably considered stereotypically Californian, especially when looking back. Rough. 🙂 But it sounds like despite the nauseating end of the Reagan years at the time, it was a fun time to live near and work at Berkeley.

Cliff’s interaction with govt. agencies in numerous cases I suspect is a dramatic difference than it would be today, and that’s sad. While I suspect many of them have the same ‘do right by the American people’ sense of justice they did back then – many others sadly do NOT, that’s patently obvious, even if 9-11 hadn’t dramatically accelerated the process while doubling down on privacy invasions and creating a long-term police state mentality from which we have yet to recover. Very, very sad and alarming.

But finally – Cliff himself is interesting. His mental struggles with what was going on, why or why not it was important to continue, and his long-term quest to figure things out through multiple creative means are engaging and often amusing to follow. And he persists in many cases on simple naivete and curiosity – while maintaining a healthy skepticism and sense of right and wrong. But he keeps a dogged focus on his objective and a positive attitude despite many obstacles, and that’s probably why we’re reading about the story instead of having suffered some dramatic consequence instead.

Piqued your interest? Check out the book!

candybowl

Saw Hanna last night on DVD. Not bad, definitely a thriller movie with few pauses in the ongoing chase/pursuit throughout. The movie itself was fairly different than what I expected (I expected a long-winded revenge movie – it’s definitely not that) but I guess my main beef is that the plot was somewhat predictable and they don’t really develop the characters enough. In some ways, the main character is a much-younger, female Jason Bourne but without the ability to steal cars, hack computers and thwart law enforcement at will – Hanna is a bit more vulnerable.

I liked the main two adult leads – Cate Blanchett is always good, here fairly different with red hair and an American accent (almost perfect but still slipped a couple times – talk to Colin Ferrell about faking an american accent, he’s got it down pretty much perfect). Eric Bana was also good as Hanna’s father – he totally reminds me of someone else in an older movie but I just can’t place it – doh! I also liked the Chemical Brothers soundtrack, although I didn’t completely recognize their influence until the credits. It must be an increasingly common thing now with techno bands getting soundtrack gigs – e.g. this one and Daft Punk getting the work in Tron:Legacy (with an excellent job there-done). The on-location stuff in Berlin was also cool – I recognized the ‘wind tunnel’ test facility from Aeon Flux during an early part of this movie too – cool stuff.

anyway, don’t expect an Oscar nod but definitely entertaining. Note that kerewin liked it on a level beyond me, so I may be completely out to lunch on this review :).

candybowl

Again with the sci-fi movie series, eh? So (now) having seen all four of them (not talking about Alien vs. Predator, which I have also unfortunately seen) I can truly say that only the first two are worth watching. Alien (from way back in 1979 – Black Hole vintage) was a great horror story in space, and has lots of (now) famous actors in it, including Tom Skerrit, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto, John Hurt and of course Sigourney Weaver (ultimately the star of all the movies). The somewhat obscure (at the time) bio-mechanoid H.R. Giger art and set design really made Alien a unique movie – and with Dan O’Bannon as a key writer plus Ridley Scott as director (this was several years before Blade Runner) were a great combination.

Aliens, the next movie, was directed by James Cameron and took a different tack to turn the saga into an action movie, this time including Michael Biehn (Terminator alum and regular Cameron movie actor). Here, Ripley gets to be a badass and save the day again, despite a squadron of Marines sent to ‘protect’ her and Paul Reiser (who plays a great corporate douchebag, and thankfully ‘gets his’ from the aliens themselves – ha!). And who can forget the classic “game OVER, man!” from Bill Paxton? One of his classic goofy movie roles.

Alien3 was pretty bad. interesting premise (Ripley, Hicks and Newt’s ship is diverted somehow to a prison colony but only Ripley survives the crash – Lance Henrikson shows up again now as the scientist trying to continue the research on the aliens but Ripley ends up as the ‘Christ figure’ and kills herself to thwart him). Interestingly enough, Wired has an article on David Fincher (the director) this month, where he’s still fairly pained about the whole experience – it’s safe to say that the low quality of the movie upon release is probably not his fault based on this article.

Which brings us to Alien (4): Resurrection. Pretty simple plot – yet *again* the ‘Company’ is trying to do experimental research on the aliens (they just can’t learn that lesson, can they?) but this time they are also using clones of Ripley to incubate the alien babies as their hosts. They also seem to be trying to ‘meld’ Ripley WITH the aliens along the way, as she finds out later. A ship of baddies arrives at the military research ship where all this ‘research’ is being conducted – but then when Ron Perlman gets his face popped by Ripley after being a smartass – someone gets trigger happy and the baddies effectively kill most of the guards. However, only Winona Ryder knows about the aliens onboard and what’s really going on – and that Ripley is a clone (200 years have apparently passed since the original Ripley died on that prison planet, after all). So then we go into lengthy chase/confrontation scenes where we find out WR is a robot (remember Ash from the first movie and Bishop from the second? Same deal). We also find out that one of the objectives of the alien research was to allow the alien to have live babies(?) instead of laying all those eggs with face-huggers in them – wtf? After all this useless/?? plot tedium that kills about 45 minutes, the survivors almost get away in the smaller ship only to have an alien on board (again) but manage to kick it out the airlock (again) and then see a sunrise on earth, where the movie ends.

So, while the movie wasn’t near as cheesy as ST:Insurrection – it lacked nearly any original plot and many moments of WTF all over the place – I like many of Joss Whedon‘s writing creations, most notably Firefly/Serenity, but he’s really grasping at straws here (and drowns in the process). He doesn’t include enough plot to make it more a straight horror movie like the first one (and really, now having had 3 previous movies, how could you build onscreen terror in that sense anyway?) nor any real interesting action sequences that even come close to matching the second one. We’ll just politely ignore the third movie altogether. 🙂 And most of the dialog is pretty throwaway too – save the new ‘malevolent’ Ripley, who as a clone with alien blood had a much darker tone and personality than her original – but they never really explore it to any degree, the most she ever says at once is maybe a sentence?

Oh well….

candybowl

Altogether too rare, but definitely fascinating. As linked by Boing Boing….I will have to read this through a couple more times to truly get the gist but again, fascinating…..

The Paris Review – William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No. 211

I especially like the Blade Runner comment….

candybowl

So I watched the movie Monsters this evening. I had never actually heard of this movie, even though it apparently came out in 2010. It was on the DVD rack while I was walking out of the library, so I checked it out. While I don’t think it will be contending for The Academy anytime soon, it’s an interesting movie for a number of reasons.

The plot is pretty simple – NASA detected evidence of alien life several years ago and sent a probe, which returned to Earth but crashed in the general region of the US/Mexican border, and caused an alien infestation. As a result, a big swath of territory – mostly in MX but some across the southwest US – has become the ‘infected zone’ and is walled off on the US side, while heavily bombed and monitored by US and MX troops to attempt to control the aliens. The central character(s) are a young(er) freelance photographer in MX (trying to take closeups of the aliens he can cash in when back in the US) and a young female, possibly a marine biologist (hinted at but never confirmed) – whom he retrieves from a hospital on behalf of her father (his publication employer back in the USA) and together they try to get back to the USA – he to his estranged young son, she to her fiancee so she can get married and resume her life.

So while this story has been done in quite a few variations, not all of them science fiction (e.g. road trip, quest/journey movies, etc.), there are interesting departures from even the recent versions of this theme.

First, while the monsters here largely look like huge, 100-ft+ walking octopi with many extra tentacles, you don’t get much of a sense of them as characters (e.g. unlike District 9) nor much variation (unlike Cloverfield), although they seem to have a stationary incubation form too. The ‘infected zone’ here is much more a quarantine rather than an implied racist encampment as was the case in District 9 (or even the much earlier Alien Nation).

Second, the film goes out of its way, possibly due to a lower budget (not sure) to have long sequences of bleak music and no dialogue between the characters or their Mexican handlers (a variety of boat, truck and caravan drivers/armed guards help transport them north for much of their journey). While sometimes this gets a bit repetitive – other times it provides moments of reflection and identification with the main characters – what would YOU do in such a situation? How would the world deal with such an ‘infected zone’ if it actually existed? Would the Mexican govt. tolerate frequent American jet-bombing raids over their country in the name of killing aliens? The main two characters discuss at least some of this with their handlers around the campfire one night, and again, while not much dialogue there either – it still provokes thought for them and the viewer – the mexican perspective is quite different.

The end sequence with the aliens is also different than most such movies (certainly way different than Cloverfield’s end and any Godzilla/kaiju movie I’ve ever seen) but it doesn’t explain much, either. It leaves the interpretation up to the viewer – but at least a few of those have to be on the optimistic side?

The effects are on balance pretty good but I suspect they kept alien activity to a minimum to save on money. Nearly all the movie seems to have been shot on location and this is pretty effective – I have to believe that the burned out neighborhoods they show in the infected zone had to have been (still) leftover, abandoned housing from Katrina or similar. Certainly much of the journey would not have lent itself to special effects, although it’s not clear whether they are really in Latin America or not. There is at least a decent amount of hand-held camera work, again reminiscent of Cloverfield, but not nearly as frantic in most cases.

What’s also interesting is that the various Mexican characters – almost none of which have names or many scenes, they usually function to keep the plot rolling forward in most cases – seem to take the situation in their same ‘live life as it comes’ way they always have. Even as the Americans proceed deeper and deeper into the infected zone, there are still people living there and trying to survive, same as always. A veiled commentary on the US? Perhaps….

Ultimately, the overall impression is one of a world even more paranoid and unstable than the one we already live in – not unlike that of 28 Days Later or Children of Men, especially the latter’s very bleak, dystopian view of the future world.

Anyway, if you like such movies, you may like this one as a quick view – it’s only 90 min. or so long.

candybowl