Sci-Fi Archives - Page 22 of 33 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

The Invasion (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

February 5, 20082000s, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi, Thriller

½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam, Jeffrey Wright
screenplay by David Kajganich
directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Jack Finney's 1955 novel The Body Snatchers has proven itself to be of durable stock. Over the course of its first three official adaptations, it's managed to tap the cultural vein–to distil the zeitgeist–in its tale of soulless pod-people replacing loved ones and figures of authority. Something about this specific fear has been an Aeolian harp, essaying the Red Menace of the Fifties (Don Siegel's original Invasion of the Body Snatchers), the new-age cultism and air of paranoia of the Seventies (Philip Kaufman's 1978 masterpiece), the modern military-industrial complex (Abel Ferrara's underestimated 1993 revamp), and now the over-medicated upper-middle classes in German director Oliver Hirschbiegel's The Invasion. If it weren't for the inherent elasticity of the source material, in truth, there wouldn't be anything to recommend the new picture, what with its ridiculous screenplay (by first-timer David Kajganich), deadening proselytizing, and mawkish performances from an assembled cast of luminaries. The Invasion is hopelessly fucked-up in the only way you can fuck this story up: by having a bunch of halfwits impose themselves on it in the vain belief they can reinvent the wheel. It isn't the worst film of the year so far, just by far the most disappointing, and while I really admire Nicole Kidman in some of her independent film choices, her track record of picking real, bona fide stinkers in the mainstream continues with this, her widely-publicized entrée into the $17M/picture club. The irony being–and letting Kidman off the hook a little–that a well-publicized 17-day reshoot with none other than The Wachowski Brothers and their protégé James McTeigue at the rudder transformed what was reputedly a poor-testing, "documentary-like," low-key political thriller into this bullshit.

Swamp Thing: The Series (1990-1991) – DVD

January 8, 20081990s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, DVD, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Superhero, Television

Image B- Sound B Extras C
"The Emerald Heart," "Falco," "Treasure," "From Beyond the Grave," "Blood Wind," "Grotesquery," "New Acqaintance," "Natural Enemy," "Spirit of the Swamp," "Legend of the Swamp Maiden," "The Death of Dr. Arcane," "The Living Image," "The Shipment," "Birthmarks," "The Dark Side of the Mirror," "Silent Screams," "Walk a Mile in My Shoots," "The Watchers," "The Hunt," "Touch of Death," "Tremors of the Heart," "The Prometheus Parabola"

by Ian Pugh In many ways the anti-Darkman, Wes Craven's Swamp Thing also saw a comic-book scientist irrevocably transformed into a monster at the hands of hoodlum saboteurs. Alas, unlike Sam Raimi with his masterpiece, Craven is unable to strike a balance between seriousness and silliness, falling too far in the latter direction before the picture finally collapses under its own snarky weight. It is, however, the film that enlightened me as to why B-movie anti-appreciation is such a worthless endeavour, since Swamp Thing never bothers to pretend that it's anything more than a couple of dudes in rubber suits wailing on each other. When you're making a movie in the "MST3K" mindset, as Craven appears to be, you don't really have a movie in mind, per se–you're just positioning actors as they recite lines from a script.

Underdog (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

January 3, 20082000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Family, Sci-Fi, Superhero, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jim Belushi, Peter Dinklage, John Slattery, Patrick Warburton
screenplay by Adam Rifkin and Joe Piscatella & Craig A. Williams
directed by Frederik Du Chau

by Bill Chambers Whereas the gigantic Underdog balloon that hovers over New York City during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade is at least conceptually interesting (American commerce's idea of a Stalin statue), Underdog, Disney's charmless live-action resurrection of the beloved super-mutt, has no subtext, just a bunch of mercenary actors and technicians who can barely disguise their contempt for the film's screenplay, which lazily embellishes the extraordinary-pet genre with scatology while weaving a maddeningly derelict patchwork of recycled tropes like the grieving widower/orphan, the unattainable hottie, and the disgraced cop. It's fair to say I hate Underdog, but I hate it because it doesn't even have the will to finish what it starts. Only two things about it are kind of fascinating, and only then from a largely extratextual standpoint. The first is that in taking the title character out of the cartoon realm, the digitally-manipulated slapstick pratfalls and clumsy landings look grotesquely painful for the beagle(s) playing Underdog. They should've gone the Scooby-Doo route and fashioned a 3-D likeness of the 2-D prototype, since the sight of man's best friend hurtling through panes of glass really has no intrinsic comic value.

Sunshine (2007) + The Simpsons Movie (2007)

December 17, 20072000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

SUNSHINE
***/****
starring Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, Chris Evans, Troy Garity
screenplay by Alex Garland
directed by Danny Boyle

THE SIMPSONS MOVIE
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
screenplay by James L. Brooks & Matt Groening & Al Jean & Ian Maxtone-Graham & George Meyer & David Mirkin & Mike Reiss & Mike Scully & Matt Selman & John Swartzwelder & Jon Vitti
directed by David Silverman

by Walter Chaw I had the great fortune to revisit Michael Almereyda's astounding Hamlet the other night with a smart, engaged audience, and more than once during Danny Boyle's Sunshine it occurred to me that Almereyda should've directed it. Almereyda, after all, would've made the movie beautiful and intelligent–wouldn't have leaned on genre conventions like a late picture boogeyman too much like Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty (and Blade Runner's just one of the dozens of pictures the film cribs from). He would've had sufficient faith in the premise to not muck it up with one metaphor for the fall of man too many. Sunshine is gorgeous for much of its run, however, good enough to merit comparison to Soderbergh's Solaris (though not Tarkovsky's, mind you–it's never that introspective) in its careful juxtaposition of human frailty against the awesome, insensate inscrutability of the universe. Set in a not-too-distant future where the sun is suffering from the need for a little jump-start, the picture opens seven years after the first expedition to save the world, the badly-/poignantly-named "Icarus I", has disappeared and a second expedition carrying the last of Earth's fissionable material ("Icarus II", natch) has been dispatched. Once they've encountered the rescue beacon of their predecessor, the ship's crew of seven–three of them Asian, which is really kind of amazing (a fourth is Maori)–gradually comes to realize that they're on a mission to touch the face of God.

The Golden Compass (2007)

December 7, 20072000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Sam Elliott, Eva Green, Daniel Craig
screenplay by Chris Weitz, based on the novel by Philip Pullman
directed by Chris Weitz

by Walter Chaw The newest entry in the "what the fuck" hall of fame is Chris Weitz's deplorable, dull, nonsensical, unwatchable The Golden Compass, which comes packed to the gills with meaningless terms, arcane concepts, stupid names, and a narrative patchwork that plays like a game of "make-up" improvised by a hyperactive child. Arriving on a wave of controversy as right-wing hard-ons decry its anti-Christian tendencies (where were they for Beowulf?), the picture's full-on attack on good taste and coherent filmmaking are what they really should be protesting. Adherents will thrill, I suppose, although I doubt that atheists are as natively stupid as born-agains–but without a good working knowledge of the Pullman books upon which the film is based, I can't imagine anyone having a chance with this stuff. Impenetrable ain't the least of it. Weitz is completely outmatched by the material, trying too hard to cram all the gobbledygook about daemons and dust and witches and armoured bears he possibly can into every crevice available between the CGI sequences while leaving out huge, gaping expanses of necessary exposition in the process. If this wasn't bad enough, consider the sequence that begins with a 900 lb. polar bear wisely suggesting that a thin ice shelf can't support both his weight and that of his 80 lb. rider (sage, indeed)–thus necessitating their splitting up–and ends with said 900 lb. bear materializing out of nowhere to somehow surprise a bad guy from the front. Even with full knowledge of the Pullman books, the way the movie's put together is plodding, non-sequitous, inept.

Meet the Robinsons (2007) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

November 20, 20072000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family, Japan, Music, Musical, Sci-Fi

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
screenplay by Michelle Spitz, Stephen J. Anderson, Jon Bernstein, Nathan Greno, Don Hall, Joe Mateo, Aurian Redson, based on the book A Day with Wilbur Robinson by William Joyce
directed by Stephen J. Anderson

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover You can't really get angry at a movie like Meet the Robinsons. Unlike most of the painfully credulous product that rolls off the Disney assembly line, it isn't interested in killing you with its dubious moral or bullying you into some dreadfully conformist position. But if it isn't ridiculously invested in all of the things that make kidpix horrible, those elements remain present and accounted for–just held at bay long enough to stop you from lobbing a brick through your monitor. Even the film's attempts at ironic wit come off as forced, as though the filmmakers could think of no other way to leaven the schmaltz. (This despite lacking the sensibility needed to pull it off.) The best you can say about Meet the Robinsons is that it appears to have been made with good intentions–but we all know about the road that's paved with those.

RoboCop (1987) [20th Anniversary Collector’s Edition] – DVD

November 14, 20071980s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Satire, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B- Extras A+
starring Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Daniel O'Herlihy, Ronny Cox
screenplay by Edward Neumeier & Michael Miner
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Walter Chaw I feel like I must've seen RoboCop, one of the key films slotted into my moviegoing sweet spot, at least two dozen times one summer on a shitty bootleg I made by hooking two VCRs together–the now-defunct Orion being one of those companies that apparently never adopted Macrovision to discourage such a thing. I watched it in regular rotation with the big movies of 1986¹ (Aliens, Big Trouble in Little China, Highlander, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Manhunter, Cronenberg's The Fly², Blue Velvet) and 1987 (Predator, The Untouchables, Evil Dead II, Angel Heart, Innerspace, Near Dark, The Hidden, Full Metal Jacket, The Princess Bride, Hellraiser, Raising Arizona, The Living Daylights, The Big Easy, and Lethal Weapon). Those years in which I went from thirteen-to-fourteen in a haze of hormonal delirium (9½ Weeks, No Way Out, and Fatal Attraction are in my onanistic hall of fame) I consumed more film than I ever would again until fashioning movie-watching into a pastime resembling a career. I developed the ability to distinguish between popular movies and movies I was supposed to like (Manon of the Spring–the medicine of it going down smoother thanks to the not-shy Emmanuelle Béart) and began keeping journals of my adventures at the cineplex (Union Square Six, Green Mountain Six, Westland Two, Lakeside Two, Cinderella Drive-In–all gone now), carefully stapling my ticket stubs to the page as some tithe to my flickering, twilit devotionals. Movies were the angel/devil at war on my shoulders: morality and venality; virtue and hedonism; good and evil; Apollo and Dionysus; the sun and the moon. I ebbed and flowed with them. It would be another five years before I fully understood the import of cinema in articulating a good portion of my worldview–not to mention almost all of the strategies with which I deconstructed other mediums. I was lulled by the popular opinion of my generation that movies were not worthwhile objects of devotion and so I channelled my attention in formal education into poetry and literature–but the space between mattress-and-box-spring was always stuffed with this secret totem.

Spider-Man 3 (2007) – Blu-ray Disc

October 28, 20072000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Sam Raimi, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Thomas Haden Church
screenplay by Sam Raimi & Ivan Raimi and Alvin Sargent
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw It’s hard for me at this point to look at the Spider-Man franchise literally. Literally, after all, it’s riddled with inconsistencies, plot holes the size of Buicks, abrupt shifts in tone, important subplots given short shrift, and on and on. But as iconography, as allegory (who can forget the timeliness of the first film’s 9/11 parable?), as an essentially self-aware product of our image-ravenous culture, it achieves a kind of spectral, magical grace. Though I prefer the personal evolution of the second picture (and the third Harry Potter film for the same reasons), the trying-on and jettisoning of father figures along the path of boy-into-man, there are moments in Spider-Man 3 so supremely well-crafted as visual poetry, so gloriously tangled and knotty, that they batter defenses raised against another Iraq War tale of unimaginable losses and the cold comfort of vengeance. The whole of the film is a case of rolling with the punches, really, of choosing early whether to hang with director Sam Raimi’s sense of broad slapstick melodrama and greeting-card symbolism or reject it as incoherent, populist mugging. If you accept its roundhouse swings and Evil Dead-era zooms at face value, though, it has for you in return a moment where something struggles to be born, but can only finish its nascence with the help of an image of its sick daughter; a breathless action sequence that revolves around the recovery of a sentimental artifact; and, as a bonus, a “Three Stooges” bit where old pal Bruce Campbell plays an unctuous, over-eager maître d’.

Face/Off (1997) [2-Disc Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

October 26, 20071990s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: John Woo, DVD, Nicolas Cage, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring John Travolta, Nicolas Cage, Joan Allen, Gina Gershon
screenplay by Mike Webb & Michael Colleary
directed by John Woo

by Walter Chaw Arriving right smack dab in the latter half of a decade in American cinema that saw digital “reality” supplant filmic “reality” (and appearing the same year as James Cameron’s Forrest Gump: Titanic), Hong Kong legend John Woo’s high-camp Face/Off directly (and presciently) addresses issues of identity theft, terrorism, and the digital corruption of reality and indirectly addresses Woo’s émigré influence on the modern action film. It’s a key picture in a ten-year cycle obsessed with mercurial personality shifts–with sliding effortlessly in and out of various personae according to expediency and whim. (Michael Tolkin’s awesome Deep Cover being the pinnacle of this trend.) Gauge the state of the nation from its most democratic entertainment; for his part, Woo–struggling to translate the heroic bloodshed of his HK work for western audiences and revealing himself in the process to be a starfucker with questionable taste in Hollywood stars (Christian Slater? John Travolta? Nicolas Cage? Seriously?)–went the self-parodic route with Face/Off (is that Joe Bob Briggs as a lobotomizer in a futuristic supermax, by gum?), wisely un-harnessing Cage’s and Travolta’s intimidating inner hams in turn to roam free-range through the picture’s exuberantly ridiculous tableaux.

28 Weeks Later (2007) – DVD

October 8, 2007****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Zombie

****/**** Image N/A Sound A Extras B
starring Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, Idris Elba
screenplay by Rowan Joffe, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, E.L. Lavigne, Jesús Olmo
directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

Walter Chaw It's phenomenal. Where 28 Days Later… was saddled with ambition that exceeded its reach and, in Danny Boyle, a director who not only disdained the genre but has otherwise proven himself a grade-A tool as well, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's sequel 28 Weeks Later is brutally graceful in its vision of a nuclear family's dissolution as the metaphor for a broader, collective unrest. The triumph of the picture, though, is that it's as succinct and eloquent as a heart attack; as a parable of the Iraq War (popularly called "The War in Iraq," a subtle semantic distancing technique particularly trenchant to this discussion), it's all about aftermath and occupation. It's impossible to not compare it to the years and tens of thousands of fatalities since the declaration of "mission accomplished" when the picture begins with the reassurance that everything's peachy in dead-as-a-doornail England. Repatriation and reconstruction have begun six months after the outbreak of the first film's "rage virus," reuniting two kids, Tammy (future superstar Imogen Poots) and Andy (Harry Potter-named Mackintosh Muggleton), with their tightly-wound da', Don (Robert Carlyle). In an end-of-the-world opening in what only appears to be night (it's the first of several brilliant reversals), we see how a fissure develops in Don's marriage to wife Alice (Catherine McCormack), and of how that stress fracture becomes the foundation for the rest of the picture's relationships and politics.

Heroes: Season 1 (2006-2007) + Superman: Doomsday (2007) – DVDs

October 7, 20072000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero

HEROES: SEASON 1
Image A Sound A Extras C
"Genesis," "Don't Look Back," "One Giant Leap," "Collision," "Hiros," "Better Halves," "Nothing to Hide," "Seven Minutes to Midnight," "Six Months Ago," "Fallout," "Godsend," "The Fix," "Distractions," "Run!," "Unexpected," "Company Man," "Parasite," ".07%," "Five Years Gone," "The Hard Part," "Landslide," "How to Stop an Exploding Man"

Superman/Doomsday
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
screenplay by Duane Capizzi
directed by Bruce Timm, Lauren Montgomery & Brandon Vietti

by Ian Pugh "Heroes" is perhaps best described as a network-television attempt to recast Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's seminal Watchmen for the mainstream market. It actively reworks that masterpiece's major plot points for mass consumption, yes, but more to the point, it tries to bring superheroes into real-life situations–all the while harbouring, very much unlike Watchmen, an uneducated contempt for comic books. Offering lame turn-arounds and mocking references to superhero clichés without any apparent knowledge of comics published after 1960, "Heroes" believes that the medium is, now and forever, uniformly steeped in silly costumes, fatuous storylines, and unambiguous divisions between good and evil. This contrarian attitude towards its perceived progenitors leads it to pawn off its own superficial characters, scenarios, and rambling diatribes about fate and destiny as infinitely-superior and more complex alternatives. The fact that the final episode of the first season gives us a slightly-tinkered version of Evil Dead II's hilariously downbeat ending should leave no doubt as to the essential falseness of "Heroes" and its pretense of originality: the desire to move what is seen as a cartoonish enterprise into a more mature arena has already been explored countless times by countless artists over the last few decades, often from within the medium itself.

Reign Over Me (2007) + TMNT (2007)|TMNT – DVD

August 5, 20072000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Hong Kong, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

REIGN OVER ME
**/****
starring Adam Sandler, Don Cheadle, Jada Pinkett Smith, Liv Tyler
written and directed by Mike Binder

TMNT
*/****
written and directed by Kevin Munroe

by Walter Chaw In response to the charge that critics are "downers" because they're too judgmental, a colleague and friend said on a panel that I participated in that some films only deserve judgment. It's a wonderfully bleak declaration, and dead on–think of it as an expansion of Pauline Kael's belief that no one ever takes the time to bash terrible pictures. But there's more to it than simply that brittle shattering of cinema's impregnable mythic mystique. I think certain movies deflect even judgment–movies that are the exact equivalent of, say, Michael Bolton and Kenny G collaborating on a cover of a Richard Marx song. Rail against them if you must, but there's no sport in it, and definitely no swaying of the assembled masses. There are films that are what they are, deserving neither praise nor condemnation in providing precisely the comfort of a tattered terry cloth robe worn ritualistically until disintegration. It's possible to meticulously, ruthlessly, intellectually deconstruct the aesthetic and functional properties of a favourite pair of sneakers, you know, but it's masturbatory and redundant and like swatting a fly with a Buick. I suspect that deep down everyone knows films like Reign Over Me and TMNT are as worthless as a plug nickel, that their appeal lies entirely in the fact that they'll present no surprises along with their usual meek payload of cheap emotional prattle and pocket uplift. And I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with that, either–I'm just saying I feel like I don't have much more to say after reviewing the same fucking movie about a dozen times a year.

Live Free or Die Hard (2007) + Transformers (2007)

July 3, 20072000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Michael Bay, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller

LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD
***½/****
starring Bruce Willis, Justin Long, Timothy Olyphant, Cliff Curtis
screenplay by Mark Bomback
directed by Len Wiseman

TRANSFORMERS
*/****
starring Shia LaBeouf, Tyrese Gibson, Josh Duhamel, Jon Voight
screenplay by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
directed by Michael Bay

by Walter Chaw I remember the way I felt as a lad of fifteen when I saw John McTiernan's Die Hard, that tingly excitement of not being able to figure out how we were going to get out of this fine mess. The bad guys were smarter than the good guys, their plan was perfect, the henchmen were ruthless eurotrash, and the hero didn't have shoes. Understand it wasn't fear that the baddies would win, but trust that the filmmakers knew what they were doing even though their methods were mysterious: I could let myself relax because the heavy-lifting was already done for me. I felt the same way as Live Free or Die Hard (hereafter Die Hard 4) unspooled its tale of computer hackers running the world from the basements of their mothers' homes: if the bad guys could hijack anything controlled by a computer (that is, pretty much everything), then what hope would a bald, 52-year-old, Luddite cop with an estranged family and a worn-out smirk have? The film plays on that despair and, unlike in the second (awful) and third (excellent) instalments of this series, John McClane (Bruce Willis) seems fresh again, a walking revelation that even action heroes get old and obsolete to the point where they're cautionary tales for young studs and metaphors for their own careers. Remember Harrison Ford in Firewall? Instead of acknowledging that the world eventually passes you by, leaving you embittered and bellicose (as Die Hard 4 shows), Ford's character in Firewall is not only good with a knuckle sandwich, but also a "with it" computer stud. As miscalculations go, that's more pathetic than most.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) + Evan Almighty (2007)

June 22, 20072000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Germany, Sci-Fi, Superhero, UK

Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer
4: Rise of the Silver Surfer
½*/****
starring Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, Michael Chiklis
screenplay by Don Payne
directed by Tim Story

EVAN ALMIGHTY
½*/****
starring Steve Carell, Morgan Freeman, Lauren Graham, John Goodman
screenplay by Steve Oedekerk
directed by Tom Shadyac

by Walter Chaw The question arises as to whether the choice for comic book adaptations has to be between "existentially tortured" and "dumb as a bag of hammers." It's a given on which extreme Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (hereafter FF2), already lauded for being blissfully free of gravitas and subtext, resides; what's troubling is the underlying inference of this philosophy: that people deserve and want entertainment that's beneath them. It's easier by far to condemn the audience as morons, forking over their cash like roughneck flyovers voting for Big Business, but I prefer to look at the situation as a tragedy–a by-product of a generation of fervent anti-intellectualism that's made smart people afraid to question their own judgment. Far from a malady unique to Hollywood, it's more a reflection of the culture that would elect someone most perceive to be, if not outright stupider, then certainly more thoughtless, than themselves to the highest office in the land. Discouraged to exercise the foundational, instinctively American inclination to criticize our leadership, we're left without enough of a nutsack to properly place a work of art in its social context. I'd offer that FF2 is a symptom of a potentially mortal illness, another being the ghettoizing of the idea of "nuance."

Frankenstein Unbound (1990) – DVD

May 3, 20071990s, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

Roger Corman's Frankenstein Unbound
**/**** Image A- Sound A
starring John Hurt, Raul Julia, Bridget Fonda, Catherine Rabett
screenplay by Roger Corman and F.X. Feeney, based on the novel by Brian Aldiss
directed by Roger Corman

by Alex Jackson Dr. John Buchanan (John Hurt) is a brilliant scientist in New Los Angeles, circa 2031. One of his experiments fractures the space-time continuum, sucking him into nineteenth-century Geneva, where he meets Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Raul Julia), who's busy conducting a few experiments of his own. In the meantime, the Frankenstein maid is on trial for the murder of Victor's brother. Nobody knows how she did it, though they figure it's witchcraft. Because he read the book (Frankenstein, of course), Buchanan knows that Frankenstein's monster (Nick Brimble) is the true culprit. Frankenstein is refusing to admit to his failed experiment, however, and would rather allow this girl to die than confront his crimes against God. Exasperated, Buchanan goes to Mary Shelley (Bridget Fonda) for help. As for the monster, he's terrorizing Frankenstein and insisting that the scientist create him a female companion.

Decoys 2: The Second Seduction (2007) – DVD

March 19, 20072000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Decoys 2: Alien Seduction
½*/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Corey Sevier, Tobin Bell, Dina Meyer, Kim Poirier
screenplay by Miguel Tejada-Flores
directed by Jeffry Lando

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Sometimes a symptomatic reading is the only thing keeping a critic from hurling himself out a window in the contemplation of drivel. Frustrating when it's not simply banal (and often both at once), Decoys 2: Alien Seduction (promotional title: Decoys: The Second Seduction) is one of those times. As with the first Decoys, it's loaded with revelations about the Canadian fear of sex and the national stereotype of the snivelling, eternally-discouraged male. Good thing, too, because it's almost completely intolerable in every other particular. I defy even the most devoted B-fancier to sit through its tiresome sophomore humour and lame attempts to get the girls' kits off. That it embodies Canuck cynicism towards male-female relationships is pretty much its only point of interest.

The Illustrated Man (1969) – DVD

February 22, 20071960s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi

Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Rod Steiger, Claire Bloom, Robert Drivas, Don Dubbins
screenplay by Howard B. Kreitsek, based on the book by Ray Bradbury
directed by Jack Smight

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man (hereafter The Illustrated Man) lays its cards out on the table right from the start. There's not much going on, just a couple of drifters named Carl (Rod Steiger) and Willie (Robert Drivas) taking a dip in the river, unaware of each other's presence. It should have been fairly simple to communicate this, but director Jack Smight is no simpleton: he throws the cuts at you, struggling to achieve with sweeping helicopter shots and other ephemera an effect he ultimately can't articulate. This pretty much sums up the movie, a series of attempts to look like somebody's working when nobody has any idea why they bothered. Coupled with Steiger's obnoxious persona and Drivas' blankness, The Illustrated Man is largely a hole in the screen that turns Ray Bradbury's gripping anthology of the same name into something sluggish and unpleasant to behold.

Looker (1981) – DVD

January 29, 20071980s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras B-
starring Albert Finney, James Coburn, Susan Dey, Leigh Taylor-Young
written and directed by Michael Crichton

by Bill Chambers Michael Crichton's Looker is a kinky paranoia thriller in which an unlikely sleuth teams up with the nearest bimbo to solve a murder mystery. It is, in other words, vintage De Palma, and if he'd actually helmed it, legions of cinephiles would've flameproofed it by now. At the risk of further estranging myself from De Palma geeks, I must admit I rather enjoyed watching a Body Double without Armond White guilt-tripping my subconscious–which is not to say that Looker circumvents an auteurist reading altogether, but the idiosyncrasies that betray it as 'Crichtonian' (like a novelistic conceit that starts off each new act with a placard indicating the day of the week^*) are less than venerable and thus hardly lend themselves to an apologia.

Sundance ’07: Fido

January 24, 20072000s, Authors: Alex Jackson, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, Sundance, Zombie

*/****starring Carrie-Anne Moss, Billy Connolly, Dylan Baker, Tim Blake Nelsonscreenplay by Dennis Heaton, Robert Chomiak, Andrew Curriedirected by Andrew Currie by Alex Jackson The first five or ten minutes of Fido are pretty terrific. Therein, an educational film depicts the "zombie wars," a time during the Forties in which space-dust turned our dead into zombies. The living won the ensuing conflict; and with the invention of the domestication collar by mega-corporation Zomcom, the zombies could be made to serve man. This movie-within-the-movie is in Academy ratio and grainy black-and-white, and when it finishes a grade-school teacher turns on the lights…

Children of Men (2006) + Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

January 5, 2007****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Clint Eastwood, Drama, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, War

CHILDREN OF MEN
****/****
starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Charlie Hunnam
screenplay by Alfonso Cuarón & Timothy J. Sexton and David Arata and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby, based on the novel by P.D. James
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
***½/****
starring Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase
screenplay by Iris Yamashita, based on the book Picture Letters from Commander in Chief by Tadamichi Kuribayashi and Tsuyoko Yoshido
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Stop on any single frame of Alfonso Cuarón's remarkable war idyll Children of Men–a film that's rarely in repose, sometimes seeming composed of one long, frantic shot–and I suspect the sharp-eyed, educated viewer would be able to cull a reference to modern art, most likely one about men reduced to their base animal nature. For me, the two visual landmarks come in the form of a cue to the cover design for Pink Floyd's 1977 "Animals" when hero Theo (Clive Owen) goes to see his industrialist cousin Nigel (Danny Huston) for help and a re-creation of Richard Misrach's remarkable series of 1987 photographs documenting, among other things, a dead-animal pit in Nevada purportedly used to dispose of victims of a plutonium "hot spot." Both share a space with surrealism in the positioning of animals (artificial or deceased) in industrial spaces (London's Battersea Power Station is the iconic backdrop of the "Animals" cover) as mute commentary, perhaps, on man's destructive relationship with his environment–a read that jibes comfortably with the thrust of Children of Men, in which we're told that one day in the not-too-distant future, humans suddenly stop reproducing. (Fertile ground for science-fiction, this obsession with progeny (see: everything from Frankenstein to I Am Legend).) The picture opens with a Fleet Street terrorist bombing, a little like Terry Gilliam's dystopic Brazil–though rather than take the easier route of satirizing our current state of instability and free-floating paranoia, Children of Men makes a serious attempt to allegorize it.