Tag: movie

What I'm Watching: Lost in Space

Why are they crash-landing in the ship's mess room, not in the control room, trying to pilot? How can an interstellar journey from Earth to "the colony" (later stated to be on Alpha Centauri) miss and still hit another habitable planet? Even by my usual standard of "FTL is magical bullshit", this is magical bullshit. SIGH.

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
—Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

Every scene builds pseudo-tension of an improbable danger just barely missed. Then drags on with people weeping or bickering to dramatic music for a half hour.

The alien planet is Canada ??, as usual. Glaciers, then Rockies or Cascades pine forest. They didn't even try to make it look like Not-Canada. That was a stupid running gag in Stargate SG-1, but this is really kinda inexcusable.

The sets look like trendy gyms and cafeterias, except for the ubiquitous flooded Jeffries Tube. The glass screen UIs aren't bad. Production is fine, but not amazing, lot of junky plastic gadgets that could've been made in the 1990s.

The robot is fairly shitty, a gunmetal-and-black, pseudo-organic, insectile death machine with Warhammer 40K spiky bits, so it doesn't have to look like anything that works. I really liked the original Robot, and its predecessor Robby in Forbidden Planet. Nobody would ever love this thing.

Will Robinson isn't supposed to be fit for stress, but in practice he's totally calm, icewater in his veins, face of a sociopath. Or of an 11-year-old child with no comprehension of his scenes. Maybe he's the real robot.

Taylor Russell (from the Saved by the Bell remake) as Judy, the adopted girl for diversity (there are so far 2 black women and one hispanic soap opera actor in a world of honkies) is the only competent one, and initially extra aggressive and adventurous, and then hit with PTSD and a bit too much caution. Competent actress, as well.

Parker Posey as "Dr Smith" is a very different kind of fraud, but so far not as dangerous as the original, and I've always had kind of a thing for her.

Penny is a moron with no survival skills or common sense. Mom is a bossy engineer, Dad's an absent almost divorced soldier, and their bickering and stiffness don't make them endearing.

I am horrorstruck at the total lack of security on everything, like airlocks and other destructive ship systems which work with a single button press and a fail-bad abort button. Except the 3D printer, which won't make a gun after an emergency crash-landing because alien planets don't need guns? No tech or physical security people consulted on this series.

As of S1E4, I don't hate this, but I have zero investment in most of the characters so I check out when Judy or Dr Smith aren't on screen.
★★★☆☆

Santa Clarita Diet

"If you cancel again, it might look like you don't know what you're doing."
"We know, Abby, we're bad at everything because we're your parents."
"No, it's because prior to this, you led a mindlessly happy suburban existence, which left you fundamentally unprepared to deal with the life-and-death decisions that now plague your every waking moment."
—Santa Clarita Diet S2E4

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

The movie has something for everyone, a comedy tonight, but I'm actually talking about:

Blogging is sometimes very different from "social networking", and one of the key things is that there are no private conversations. On the technical side, that's basically impossible: A blog post is public, or it wouldn't show up in feed readers, search engines, or micro.blog. And even "private" messaging in Twitter or Facebook is stored in plaintext on the server, where the staff can read it for laughs or social engineering or selling you to advertisers and Russians.

In the socially stunted worlds of Twitter or Facebook, often someone posts, and the first person to respond may feel like they "own" the conversation, anyone else responding is a "rando", and the lack of proper threading makes conversation very difficult so they just hate everyone. There is, I fear, not much that can be done for many of these; they grew up feral in an innately hostile environment, and won't or can't read about how to have longer discussions. Robert's Rules of Order this is not.

Blogging is about people contributing to a public dialogue. As we had in web forums, or USENET, or college dorm halls, or actual forums going back to Rome and ancient Greece. Threading and arguments about ideas are not just OK, but encouraged, just don't hit below the belt.

You may be able to learn from USENET netiquette (somewhat old link, but anything quoting Eugene Spafford is good).

When being sarcastic, if there's any danger of misinterpretation, use a smiley. Excessive sarcasm is often counter-productive and hurts people's feelings, even when it's unintentional.
—a rule I sure don't live by

What I'm Watching: Hap and Leonard

I watched S1 when it first came on, I love Joe Lansdale and an adaptation of his dirt-poor '80s Texas dark comedy/mysteries should be fantastic.

Sadly, S1 was pretty dull, there's some treachery but a lot of forgettable driving around Texas, and most of the supporting cast were the worst kind of walking meatsticks rather than actors. But it was great having Michael Kenneth Williams (Omar Little) playing cowboy Leonard, and James Purefoy (foppish Mark Anthony in Rome) as ex-hippy Hap has aged into a passable Fred Ward-like tired old hooligan. ★★☆☆☆

S2 is massively better. A kid's body under Leonard's dead uncle Chester's house leads to these two knuckleheads trying to investigate, as Chester had previously, with a mob of women with missing kids led by… no small personage… And there's a carnival which is always fun/terrifying, and my own biases confirmed when they get down to the killer.

This time most of the cast are competent; the killer is, sadly, one of the walking meatsticks and not convincing. MeMaw's great. The flexible redhead in the carny is amazing and I may be rewatching her a few times. Even the shitheel Texan pigs are complex for shitheel pigs and played out well enough.

Only real complaint is even at 6 eps, it's too long, this could be done in 4 or less.

S3 is going to be the KKK story, which should be fun, in a Blazing Saddles, Fletch Lives, Django Unchained kinda way.

"I tell ya. I ain't never been more proud to be an atheist than I am today." "Amen to that!"
Hap & Leonard in a church parking lot

★★★★½

What I'm Watching: The Titan

In grim future world, LA is uninhabitable (is funny joke: LA's been the Hellmouth since the 1960s), and Earth is dying, except for the nice wooded river and pristine forests they keep visiting in this dumpster fire of a movie. Soldier boy Rick is gung ho to be converted into a genetic superman so he can colonize Titan.

Saturn's moon, Titan. Which yes has an atmosphere, but there's 0% Oxygen, not the 5% this dumb movie says. It's so fucking cold -179°C your flesh would crystalize and shatter. There's no Sun or even Saturn itself visible under the atmospheric haze, we know because we dropped the Huygens probe in and saw a muddy haze! No energy for plants, and if there's life it'd be cold, slow, alien microbes or fish. Titan is not a place you can just bioengineer a person for. Mars might be dry and cold, but it's a sunny day in Antarctica in comparison.

Actual Landscape of Titan:
Titan-Huygens View

Mystical Wonderland Titan at end of movie:
the-titan-mystic-wonderland

The military base at the end of the world looks an awful lot like a suburb with a couple nice houses the filmmakers rented, and some industrial ugly office building. Zero set decoration effort.

Everyone walks around spouting short technical phrases learned from Wikipedia, but clearly neither the writers nor the walking meatstick "actors" know what they mean. When anything goes wrong, these supposed mid-21st C scientists & soldiers all turn to prayer. To what god?

The "what went wrong" meetings after the soldiers start going wrong are hilariously bad, unlike any conversation you'd have about a failing project. "Catch up or stop holding me back!" "Nature is unpredictable. Everyone evolves in a different way." ? Evolution works on populations, not individuals, you stupid stupid, STUPID writers.

Then suddenly the soldiers are all freaky Abe Sapien mutants with tentacle fingers and flying squirrel membrane wings, and it turns into a half-assed and joyless slasher flick.

★☆☆☆☆ and I wish I had the chemical lobotomy drug from the movie so I could unsee this.

How to Recover from the Ready Player One movie

  • There is a Youtube app for Playstation, presumably other consoles. Go in, hit Music, then a genre like '80s Pop. MTV is back, baby! Minus the cool bumpers. I just watched A-Ha's "Take On Me", Police's "Every Breath You Take", and Culture Club's "Karma Chameleon" as if it was 1984.
  • Get out Atari Classics or MAME and play thru every game.
  • Get Blu-ray, DVD, downloadable video, or preferably VHS of good movies, like The Last Starfighter (tonight's entertainment), Real Genius, WarGames, Ghostbusters, etc.
  • Reread the book, and pretend a good filmmaker or game developer will adapt it decently in 20 years.

  • Drink a lot. Working on that.

  • The Last Starfighter: CGI 34 years ago was low-poly and glossy or phong shaded, but honestly no worse for storytelling, as long as they didn't try to show living things. And the aliens in latex look FANTASTIC, so much better than the CGI chars in RP1.
    The orchestral soundtrack by Craig Safan is really quite good, it carries the film as much as the CGI does. Like Christopher Franke's Babylon 5 soundtracks, the mood swings from ominous to war to comedy can be a little abrupt.
    Far more character development is given to each of Alex Rogan, Maggie, Centauri, Grig, and even mad, traitorous Xur. I'm not especially a fan of the Beta unit's dating comedy. Short shrift is given to all the dead, maybe interstellar society is just that callous but we're not. But the fate of the Beta unit, the war, and the ending, are much more emotional.
    ★★★★½

Ready Player One

I loved the book of Ready Player One. It plays with deep matters of '80s nerdery, namely original and "Advanced" Dungeons & Dragons and especially S1 Tomb of Horrors, old microcomputer, arcade, and home video games (and the very different kinds of games on them), and Rush's more esoteric albums. It's kind of incomprehensible if you weren't alive in the '70s and '80s and into these specific things. It's pretty brilliant if you were. It's a story of logic puzzles, careful research, and follows much of the story structure of WarGames.
★★★★★

The movie is none of these things. It's a very pretty film, largely CGI inside the OASIS MMO, but replaces the intellectual challenges with a very stupid car race; a very precise and funny adaptation of a cinemaphile but not geek movie which was NOT in the book and very out of Halliday's interests; and a final battle, well adapted in scale and craziness, but the final key being in… is this a spoiler if it's in section 0000 of the book? Adventure for 2600. Well, it's kind of too obvious to even mention, if you're looking for an Easter Egg. Did IQs drop sharply in the Spielberg-verse?

SUPER picky detail (but this is in fact what the book is about, being super picky): In the funeral/contest video, the quarters on James Halliday's eyes in the movie were, if my eyes did not deceive me, from 1972. Book says:

"High-resolution scrutiny reveals that both quarters were minted in 1984."

Why change it? Because either they didn't care, or because Spielberg is literally older than dirt, older than rocks, older than "Steven Spielberg is old" jokes, so old that he thinks 1972 is "better" than 1984 (it is not). Everything else about the funeral video is wrong, too, but that's beside my point here about picky detail.

Ogden appears like a Willy Wonka at the end, in a fairly crappy, formulaic ending. It's fucking Spielberg, so you know it's going to be schmaltzy and fall apart at the end, but the extent of the failure is almost epic. The hobbits^W corporate research drones cheering Wade at the end is nonsense filmmaking.

The music varies from great '80s pop music, sometimes in appropriate places; a few pieces of '80s soundtrack music in exactly the right place; to poorly-timed, almost counterproductive incidental music. I loathe Saturday Night Fever, as previously mentioned, and having another dance scene based on it is annoying; the book does mention "Travoltra"[sic] dancing software, but you don't have to see or hear it. I felt nothing from the incidental music. Did Spielberg go deaf in his extreme old age? His old films at least had good scores, but this was vapid.

The final "rule" of disabling the OASIS, the global center of business, education, and entertainment, on Tuesday and Thursday is so stupid only a very stupid old filmmaker could conceive of it.

There is no Ferris scene after the credits, which would have been a great place to at least leave us smiling, instead of "huh, that was not good".

It lacks the brains, heart, and music of a classic '80s film. Go watch TRON or WarGames instead.

★★½☆☆ only because it is so very pretty, ★☆☆☆☆ for plot. Validates my movie policy that book adaptations are always worse than the book, and adds a new one: Don't watch anything by Steven Spielberg. Will some kind nursing home attendant not just put a pillow over his face and end our suffering?

What I'm Watching: Stupid Superheroes Edition

I really shouldn't watch superheroes. Well, Amazon supposedly has Garth Ennis' The Boys in production, and The Boys cured me of reading superhero comics forever, it's the best but last superhero story you'll ever need to read. And I'm expecting Deadpool 2 to be the best sequel to the best romantic comedy superhero movie ever. I don't really count the Marvel space fantasy comics or movies as "superheroes".

But otherwise, it's a disappointing genre. No, I haven't seen Black Panther, not a fan of tyrants worshipped as demigods holding bloodsports in their isolated resource-extraction-economy kingdoms. I wouldn't want a movie aggrandizing Dr Doom any more than I want a T'Challa movie. I loved the Joker in The Dark Knight because he's an anarchist and having so much fun at it, but the real villain is WayneCorp's stranglehold on the world economy, run by a crazy billionaire with military hardware beating up poor people "to stop crime" instead of, say, funding schools and jobs programs, and paying and screening cops to end police corruption. Gotham can only be a shithole if the Batman wants it that way.

Man, I miss the two Richard Donner/Chris Reeve Superman movies, and the two Tim Burton/Michael Keaton Batman movies.

So anyway.

  • The Tick: The Amazon series is weird. S1 was confused, almost grimdark '90s foil-cover "Superman Is Beaten to Death Like Jesus and We Mourn for 24 Issues" shit, nothing like the surreal parody comics or the insane Warner Brothers-level zany animated series, or even the half-assed but occasionally funny Warburton live series. S2 is less confused, but still not good. Most of the show balances right on the edge of too serious to enjoy, with moments of ludicrousness.
    The Tick and Arthur have a good dynamic, but the Tick comes off strange, not wacky. I like his journey of discovery of self, but it's in the wrong show. Arthur's inadequacy and neuroses are semi-crippling until the plot demands him to act, and then he just does HEROISM while whining a bit. Any chance for humor is stepped over.
    Overkill's a parody of Frank Castle, sure, but he's not any funnier than the real one; in fact, I think Frank in all grimdark Netflix Daredevil and Punisher is funnier. Miss Lint is consistently smirk-worthy but not fully sexy, terrifying, or funny at any time. At one point some marketing people pitch an ad deck to archvillain The Terror, and commit violence at minimal provocation, which gets a "menacing chuckle" from Terror. Which is how I respond to this. Dangerboat's behavior with Arthur plays out creepy and rapey rather than funny HAL-9000 with a cyber-boner parody which maybe they intended. Superion's a smarmy bastard, but then lets his guard down to show… basic decency? He's just not funny. The mad scientist has a funny physical condition, which gives sight gags but no jokes, probably just as well since they'd be offensive.
    Played completely straight, which this almost is, this could be just another shitty Marvel or DC series. Played for humor, this could be a great adaptation of the comics, they have the budget, CGI, and actors. But Amazon just dumped it down the middle.
    ★★☆☆☆
  • Jessica Jones: Started to watch S2E1, but it's even more grimdark and seething anger, without any attempt at humor or irony. I got up to a douchebro asshole picking a fight with Alias and she gets arrested, bailed, and charged in the same day (man, the justice system in Marvel is fast, in my reality it'd take weeks to get on a court docket after an arrest). Nothing fun here, can't take this bullshit right now.

What I'm Watching: Film Noir Edition

Went for some rewatching of good films instead of trying to dig up a new Netflix binge. Spoilers spoilers everywhere. I'm sure nobody needs another commentary on either of these, but it's my blog and I like writing these, so fuck it.

  • A History of Violence: Quiet (too quiet and long) start, then we see small-town diner jerk Tom Stall exhibit skills no small-town diner jerk should have, and all the shit in the world comes back on him.
    The stairway sex scene is the canonical "is that sex or rape?" borderline: It sure starts rapey, but takes a turn, and is the opposite of the earlier cheerleader outfit scene, because the wife has to learn who her husband really is; Cronenberg's sex scenes are the most important character tests in his films, Crash most obviously but just as much here or in Videodrome.
    The boy's inherited talents/same fight choreographer as his dad are impressive, but I don't think he'd have that vocabulary. The ending moves in like an oncoming train. Just a malevolent noir flick. I'm glad Cronenberg didn't fully adapt the very cartoony ending (chainsaws and 20-year tortures!) of the John Wagner & Vince Locke graphic novel, even if in other of his films that'd be a relatively mild scene. ★★★★★
  • Pulp Fiction: "None of you fucking pigs move, or I'll execute every motherfucking last one of ya!"
    "Say what again! I dare you!"
    "Why do we feel it's necessary to yack about bullshit in order to be comfortable?" "Do not be bringing some fucked-up puba to my house!" I don't really like the Mia Wallace date. She's a little too in control to be a cokehead, Vincent's too alert to be a junkie on new good shit. Disco dancing is still and always dead, but hey, Tarantino wanted to make one scene of a film he loved (speaking of films full of indifference to rape, don't ever watch Saturday Night Fever). Even back in the day, a lot of people didn't understand why snorting heroin like coke was a bad idea, but that baggie instead of balloon setup was like a ticking time bomb. Amusing set decoration: Operation and Life games in the dealer's house in that scene.
    "Five long years he bore this watch up his ass, then he died of dysentery." The book Vincent was reading is Modesty Blaise, so it's a hardcover comic collection? Just a prop making a cool reference? I dunno, I read Modesty when it was in the paper in my youth, and some collections more recently. Sex and quick bursts of violence were her MO, but not otherwise thematically connected to the film.
    "Bring out the gimp." Eeeny-meeney is a bad way to go. What's the gimp's story, anyway? This whole segment is just a lesson of why you don't ever go in a building with Confederate flags up, even to save your life, because Southern Confederate traitors are all same-sex rapists, as also seen in Deliverance. "You lost all your LA privileges, hear?"
    "You read the Bible, Brett?" This part of Ezekiel "25:17" being faux-quoted was recently covered by The Bible Reloaded — possibly this episode or one very recent to it. I have a problem with Vincent's shitty firearm safety, nobody carries a gun with their finger on the trigger. "You know what's on my mind right now? It's not the coffee in my kitchen." Jimmy's coffee and The Wolf are fucking amazing.
    "Then I'm gonna walk the Earth. You know, like Caine in Kung Fu. Walk from place to place, meet people, get in adventures.": Why didn't someone made this TV show, Jules in a modern Kung Fu?! Yeah, Sam Jackson was too expensive even then, but he's gotta have an understudy who could do the actual series, like Eric Pierpont played Mandy Patinkin's part in the Alien Nation series, or Michael Shanks played James Spader's part in SG-1. Did you even notice or care it wasn't the original dude? Nope.
    I don't even need to give stars to my 4th favorite movie of all time.