When we queued up Treasure of Monte Cristo/Roaring City/Sky Liner (1949/1951/1949), I didn’t realize that we were getting a short seminar on director William Berke. It turns out he was one of those B movie masters who just cranked them out. According to Wikipedia, he once got a big budget and relaxed shooting schedule, and still turned the picture around in 12 days. He also seemed to go for real fun rousing adventure movies.
Treasure of Monte Cristo is a great example. It starts with a little narration about the Edmund Dante’s treasure, now lost. Then we meet Dante’s modern day descendant, Glenn Langan (The Amazing Colossal Man), a sailor on shore leave in San Francisco. He hears a woman in trouble and goes to her rescue. When he drives off her attackers, she (Adele Jergens) tells her story: She is an heiress, but her people control the money until she is 25 or married - but if she dies, they get it. She finally begs Langan to marry her, in name only, so she can get control. When he marries her, she disappears, leaving a note letting him know where she is being held. When he gets there (climbing the building into an upstairs window, a man is murdered, and he is left to take the rap. Crooked lawyer Steve Brodie defends him, but actually throws the case, leaving him on Death Row.
I’m sure you can see where this is going - he was framed so that she, his widow, can get the treasure he didn’t know he had. There are intrigues, courtroom scenes, fist and gun fights, prison escapes, and everything you could want from a B movie adventure.
Roaring City also set in San Francisco. Hugh Beaumont has a place on the docks where he rents boats and does favors. A man comes in and asks him to place a large bet on a has-been boxer, so that word won’t get around that the fight is fixed. But the boxer drops dead, the young defender is found murdered, the bet was placed in the name of... Actually, I couldn’t follow this one. But it was full of exciting stuff. Also, it seems to be based on the old Jack Webb radio shows “Pat Novak for Hire”/“Johnny Madeiro”. There’s even the old drunk professor that does some legwork. There isn’t a lot of Webb’s poetic hardboiled dialog, but there’s enough.
In Sky Liner, FBI agent Richard Travis must retrieve stolen top secret papers from an airplane going from Washington DC to the west coast, aided by stewardess Pamela Blake. The movie isn’t set 100% on the plane, but a good amount is. Of course, since it is the 40s, they land several times, and also, there’s a lot of room to wander around. This may not have been the best of the batch, or maybe it’s just that we were getting Berke fatigue. Still a fun B if you like that kind of thing.
And that concludes by movie blogging for 2018. I’ll try to do a wrap up - after resisting for years, I now embrace the year-end post. See you in the new year.
Saturday, December 29, 2018
Thursday, December 27, 2018
Cossacks Carrying Horses Around the House
We watched Taras Bulba (1962) for pretty much 2 reasons:
It starts with a battle - Poles vs. Turks, and the Turks are winning. Then the Cossacks come sweeping in and save the day. The Poles offer to allow the Cossacks to become subjects to the Polish crown. When they refuse, the Poles turn on them, and take the steppe for their own. Cossacks, in disgrace, cut off their topknots. Cossack officer Taras Bulba (Brynner) retreats to the mountains to live quietly.
Years later, the Poles allow the Cossacks some freedom, even to wear the topknot. Brynner tells his sons, Tony Curtis and Perry Lopez, to go to school in Kiev, to learn the ways of the enemy. They are not treated well there, and get into amusing scrapes. Also, Curtis falls in love with a Polish princess, Christine Kaufman. Finally, they are forced to flee for home.
There, they find that the tribes are gathering. There is drinking and merriment, and a beautiful white horse is presented (inside the house) to Brynner. That’s where one Cossack shows off by lifting the horse off the ground. Ms. Spenser was very disappointed: one horse, not horses, lifted, not actually carried around. Oh well.
The gathering is to decide whether to help the Poles with another fight. Some are ready to go - a fight is a fight, after all. But Brynner wants to attack the Poles when they are pre-occupied. So they go off and route the Poles, driving them into a walled city. The Cossacks set up a siege.
Curtis finds out that his princess is in the city and suffering under the siege conditions. He sneaks in and finally agrees to break the siege for the Poles. So we have a father/son fight, leading to Curtis being killed. The Cossacks prevail, and Curtis is buried there, now on Cossack soil.
Frankly, this is not a great movie. Brynner is amazing, with his bare chest and topknot. But there isn’t enough of him. I don’t know why they keep casting Curtis in these roles (“Yonda lies da castle of my faddah”) - maybe his “dark good looks” used to be considered “exotic”. There are a few stirring battles, slightly marred by obvious dummy men and horses falling off cliffs. Also, the anti-Semitic angle (Pole = Jew) has been erased, but the smell remains.
Still, we do have a Cossacks lifting a horse.
- Yul Brynner
- To hear the immortal line: “Some day Cossacks will have better things to do than carry horses around the house!”
It starts with a battle - Poles vs. Turks, and the Turks are winning. Then the Cossacks come sweeping in and save the day. The Poles offer to allow the Cossacks to become subjects to the Polish crown. When they refuse, the Poles turn on them, and take the steppe for their own. Cossacks, in disgrace, cut off their topknots. Cossack officer Taras Bulba (Brynner) retreats to the mountains to live quietly.
Years later, the Poles allow the Cossacks some freedom, even to wear the topknot. Brynner tells his sons, Tony Curtis and Perry Lopez, to go to school in Kiev, to learn the ways of the enemy. They are not treated well there, and get into amusing scrapes. Also, Curtis falls in love with a Polish princess, Christine Kaufman. Finally, they are forced to flee for home.
There, they find that the tribes are gathering. There is drinking and merriment, and a beautiful white horse is presented (inside the house) to Brynner. That’s where one Cossack shows off by lifting the horse off the ground. Ms. Spenser was very disappointed: one horse, not horses, lifted, not actually carried around. Oh well.
The gathering is to decide whether to help the Poles with another fight. Some are ready to go - a fight is a fight, after all. But Brynner wants to attack the Poles when they are pre-occupied. So they go off and route the Poles, driving them into a walled city. The Cossacks set up a siege.
Curtis finds out that his princess is in the city and suffering under the siege conditions. He sneaks in and finally agrees to break the siege for the Poles. So we have a father/son fight, leading to Curtis being killed. The Cossacks prevail, and Curtis is buried there, now on Cossack soil.
Frankly, this is not a great movie. Brynner is amazing, with his bare chest and topknot. But there isn’t enough of him. I don’t know why they keep casting Curtis in these roles (“Yonda lies da castle of my faddah”) - maybe his “dark good looks” used to be considered “exotic”. There are a few stirring battles, slightly marred by obvious dummy men and horses falling off cliffs. Also, the anti-Semitic angle (Pole = Jew) has been erased, but the smell remains.
Still, we do have a Cossacks lifting a horse.
Wednesday, December 26, 2018
Wasp (Not Wasp)
Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) is a nice follow up to the original. The first was bright and fun and uncomplicated. This one is a bit busier, but still fun.
It starts with Ant-Man, Paul Rudd exploring a microscopic world with his daughter, Abby Ryder Fortson - except it turns out to be an elaborate cardboard fort. Rudd is under house arrest, and having trouble keeping his little girl entertained. When he sticks one foot outside the fence, the Feds, led by Randall Park, come down on him. They are sure that he is a super-criminal, because of the events at the airport in that Avengers movie.
Meanwhile, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) is searching for his wife, Janet van Dyne, the original Wasp, who has been lost in the Quantum Realm. He had given up rescuing her, but since Rudd came back, he is encouraged. While he is trying to open a portal, Rudd has a dream about van Dyne in the realm, and wakes up when Douglas calls him. He is clearly quantum entangled with her.
Pym’s daughter Evangeline Lilly goes to the black market to get some special parts, and sleazy dealer Walton Goggins tries to take the money and not deliver. This leads to a nice fight, but new character enter: a white costumed woman (Hannah John-Kamen) who phases in and out of existence. And she gets away with the goods, a full physics lab shrunk to the size of a suitcase.
So Douglas recruits Rudd, leaving a human-sized ant with the ankle monitor, to provide the proper day-to-day activity. Rudd just wants to serve out his sentence (he has two weeks left, I think), but gets whisked away and stuffed into a glitchy experimental suit. This makes for some fun fights, where Rudd can’t exactly control his size.
The fights are in general, a lot of fun. Our size-shifters shrink to avoid blows and grow to giant size to return them, beautifully choreographed. Add in a character who can phase in and out of existence, and you’ve got a movie.
Michael Pena is back as Rudd’s reformed criminal friend. He has a few good scenes, but not quite as many as the last time. He gets dosed with a mix of drugs that make you talkative and suggestible, but, the bad guys insist, is not a truth serum. So of course, he just starts free associating. Rudd has a similar scene, where his phone keeps ringing during a tense interrogation (by Laurence Fishburne) and he insists on taking it, because it’s his daughter, who lost her soccer shoes.
I’ll skip spoilers, but we do eventually get Jan van Dyne back, and she turns out to be played by Michelle Pfeiffer. She is iconic, of course, but had a kind of bad-ass Earth Mother style. My Janet van Dyne is a fashion-obsessed madcap heiress, which doesn’t really fit. Well, she said she changed a lot during her time in the realm.
And it all ends happily - until we get to the tie-in with the rest of the Marvel-verse. But that’s a story for another time.
It starts with Ant-Man, Paul Rudd exploring a microscopic world with his daughter, Abby Ryder Fortson - except it turns out to be an elaborate cardboard fort. Rudd is under house arrest, and having trouble keeping his little girl entertained. When he sticks one foot outside the fence, the Feds, led by Randall Park, come down on him. They are sure that he is a super-criminal, because of the events at the airport in that Avengers movie.
Meanwhile, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) is searching for his wife, Janet van Dyne, the original Wasp, who has been lost in the Quantum Realm. He had given up rescuing her, but since Rudd came back, he is encouraged. While he is trying to open a portal, Rudd has a dream about van Dyne in the realm, and wakes up when Douglas calls him. He is clearly quantum entangled with her.
Pym’s daughter Evangeline Lilly goes to the black market to get some special parts, and sleazy dealer Walton Goggins tries to take the money and not deliver. This leads to a nice fight, but new character enter: a white costumed woman (Hannah John-Kamen) who phases in and out of existence. And she gets away with the goods, a full physics lab shrunk to the size of a suitcase.
So Douglas recruits Rudd, leaving a human-sized ant with the ankle monitor, to provide the proper day-to-day activity. Rudd just wants to serve out his sentence (he has two weeks left, I think), but gets whisked away and stuffed into a glitchy experimental suit. This makes for some fun fights, where Rudd can’t exactly control his size.
The fights are in general, a lot of fun. Our size-shifters shrink to avoid blows and grow to giant size to return them, beautifully choreographed. Add in a character who can phase in and out of existence, and you’ve got a movie.
Michael Pena is back as Rudd’s reformed criminal friend. He has a few good scenes, but not quite as many as the last time. He gets dosed with a mix of drugs that make you talkative and suggestible, but, the bad guys insist, is not a truth serum. So of course, he just starts free associating. Rudd has a similar scene, where his phone keeps ringing during a tense interrogation (by Laurence Fishburne) and he insists on taking it, because it’s his daughter, who lost her soccer shoes.
I’ll skip spoilers, but we do eventually get Jan van Dyne back, and she turns out to be played by Michelle Pfeiffer. She is iconic, of course, but had a kind of bad-ass Earth Mother style. My Janet van Dyne is a fashion-obsessed madcap heiress, which doesn’t really fit. Well, she said she changed a lot during her time in the realm.
And it all ends happily - until we get to the tie-in with the rest of the Marvel-verse. But that’s a story for another time.
Tuesday, December 25, 2018
It’s a Wonderful Movie
I'll Be Seeing You (1944) is a lovely Christmas movie that I discovered by accident. It also has an interesting link to the last two movies we’ve seen.
We meet Ginger Rogers in prison. The warden lets her know that she can be furloughed for the Christmas holidays because she has been a model prisoner. She gets on a train to her aunt and uncle’s place in the country (Texas?). The train is a rowdy affair with a bunch of soldiers goofing around. But she winds up sitting across from Joseph Cotten, a quiet, reserved serviceman (although he does try to chat her up a bit). She doesn’t want him to know she’s a prisoner, so she tells him she’s a traveling sales lady. He says he’s going to the same town as her to see his sister.
Rogers reception from aunt Spring Byington and Uncle Tom Tully is warm, but niece Shirley Temple (in her teen years) is superficially friendly but doesn’t want her using the same soap as everyone else. When Cotten calls, Rogers invites him to dinner. There he confesses that he doesn’t know anyone in town, he just got off the train to spend some time with her. He doesn’t want to talk about his war experiences. We know that he has been hospitalized for battle fatigue.
Later, on a date at the ice cream parlor, they meet soda jerk Chill Wills, who has a facial tick, due to shell shock in WWI. Cotten can’t stand the thought of being permanently disfigured and runs out. He finally tells Rogers that since his experience, his “timing is shot”. He tells her a little about his experience, and feels better. But then he tries to shy a stone at a lamppost and misses, but Rogers hits it. He rudely rushes off.
This is pretty much how things go. Cotten has to work through his PTSD, and Rogers wants to tell the truth about her incarceration, but she’s becoming afraid of losing him. They have a Christmas with her family, go to a dance, and so on. For instance, there’s a sweet scene in a dress shop where Rogers and Byington vie to secretly pay for Rogers’ dress. I won’t spoil the end for you, but maybe that doesn’t matter. The important things are the joys of family, small town life, and budding love overcoming all. It also features the song, “I’ll be Seeing You (in All the Old Familiar Places)”.
It’s funny, because I thought this was another woman in prison goes to small town on Christmas movie, Remember the Night, with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. That one isn’t available through Netflix. Maybe next year.
Merry Christmas, all.
We meet Ginger Rogers in prison. The warden lets her know that she can be furloughed for the Christmas holidays because she has been a model prisoner. She gets on a train to her aunt and uncle’s place in the country (Texas?). The train is a rowdy affair with a bunch of soldiers goofing around. But she winds up sitting across from Joseph Cotten, a quiet, reserved serviceman (although he does try to chat her up a bit). She doesn’t want him to know she’s a prisoner, so she tells him she’s a traveling sales lady. He says he’s going to the same town as her to see his sister.
Rogers reception from aunt Spring Byington and Uncle Tom Tully is warm, but niece Shirley Temple (in her teen years) is superficially friendly but doesn’t want her using the same soap as everyone else. When Cotten calls, Rogers invites him to dinner. There he confesses that he doesn’t know anyone in town, he just got off the train to spend some time with her. He doesn’t want to talk about his war experiences. We know that he has been hospitalized for battle fatigue.
Later, on a date at the ice cream parlor, they meet soda jerk Chill Wills, who has a facial tick, due to shell shock in WWI. Cotten can’t stand the thought of being permanently disfigured and runs out. He finally tells Rogers that since his experience, his “timing is shot”. He tells her a little about his experience, and feels better. But then he tries to shy a stone at a lamppost and misses, but Rogers hits it. He rudely rushes off.
This is pretty much how things go. Cotten has to work through his PTSD, and Rogers wants to tell the truth about her incarceration, but she’s becoming afraid of losing him. They have a Christmas with her family, go to a dance, and so on. For instance, there’s a sweet scene in a dress shop where Rogers and Byington vie to secretly pay for Rogers’ dress. I won’t spoil the end for you, but maybe that doesn’t matter. The important things are the joys of family, small town life, and budding love overcoming all. It also features the song, “I’ll be Seeing You (in All the Old Familiar Places)”.
It’s funny, because I thought this was another woman in prison goes to small town on Christmas movie, Remember the Night, with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. That one isn’t available through Netflix. Maybe next year.
Merry Christmas, all.
Monday, December 24, 2018
20th Century Schizoid Men
Just by coincidence, last weekend we managed to program three movies about men suffering from symptoms of PTSD. Let me tell you about two from the end of the last century - I’ll save the one from mid-century for separate post.
Gun Shy (2000) stars Liam Neeson. We meet him in an airport restroom, having a freak out. He’s trying to get out of undercover job - he was rumbled during the last meeting, stripped naked and laid on a bed of watermelon with a gun to his head. A DEA team got him out, and killed everyone who could talk, but he isn’t ready to go back into the lion’s den. He has disasterous psychosomatic digestion problems and just wants to retire. But his boss talks him into getting on the plane.
There he meets a psychiatrist, who convinces him to seek help, so he starts going to group therapy. He also goes to a doctor for his stomach and meets Sandra Bullock, who gives him an enema and tries to get him to try alternative therapy.
Meanwhile, he is in the middle of a deal between the Colombians and the Mafia (Oliver Platt). These guys are serious, but the money man, Andrew Lauer, keeps trying to ply them with women and champagne. But maybe they are trying to cut out the booze, and they actually respect women. And the Colombians don’t want to seem like stereotypes.
There’s a lot of fun, sharp writing in this - it has a Shane Black feel. The writer, Eric Blakeney, who also directs, seems to have mainly done TV. He did a lot of Moonlighting, which kind of makes sense.
Sadly, Bullock is very under used - she is barely a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. But she does give Neeson the confidence he needs to get back in the game.
Tom Hanks in Joe Versus the Volcano (1990) doesn’t have an exciting job like Neeson. He works in a disgusting anal probe factory. He has a depressing office, a horrible boss (Dan Hedaya), and a vague set of psychosomatic ailments. He goes to the company doctor and discovers the horrible truth: his symptoms are psychosomatic, probably due to his previous high-stress firefighting job. But he actually has a symptomless brain disease which will kill him in weeks. So he quits his job, invites the secretary to dinner, and gets ready to die.
His new devil-may-care attitude fascinates the secretary (Meg Ryan), but when she finds out what’s up, she can’t take it, and dumps him. Then a mysterious millionaire (Lloyd Bridges) shows up: His company needs a mineral only found on an isolated Pacific Island. The natives, descendants of an ancient Roman expedition and their Jewish and Celtic passengers, need to sacrifice someone to the volcano. Hanks is going to die anyway, so Bridges offers him a large sum of money to take the leap.
So Hanks goes on a shopping spree, buying everything he can think of, and four waterproof steamer trunks to put it in. He meets with Bridges daughter, the kinky, freaky Meg Ryan again. She is also intrigued by Hanks until she finds out he has a fatal illness and splits, delivering him to her half sister, Meg Ryan again, who will be sailing Hanks to the island in the family yacht.
The yacht is struck by lightning and sinks, but Hanks and Ryan survive - the steamer trunks float and serve as a raft. Hanks gives the unconscious Ryan sips of Pelligrino from the bar in the trunk, until he succombs to the sun and thirst. When he wakes up, Ryan has revived and is touched by his sacrifice. And together they watch the moon rise over the wide Pacific.
They get to the island and meet chief Abe Vigoda and his right-hand man Nathan Lane. Now he must make the ultimate sacrifice, although he may have met the love of his life. The ending is unbelievable and fantastic, in the literal sense. But a lot of fun.
I thought it interesting that men’s emotional pain was such a big seller at this time, but the next post will show that it isn’t particular to the end of the century.
Gun Shy (2000) stars Liam Neeson. We meet him in an airport restroom, having a freak out. He’s trying to get out of undercover job - he was rumbled during the last meeting, stripped naked and laid on a bed of watermelon with a gun to his head. A DEA team got him out, and killed everyone who could talk, but he isn’t ready to go back into the lion’s den. He has disasterous psychosomatic digestion problems and just wants to retire. But his boss talks him into getting on the plane.
There he meets a psychiatrist, who convinces him to seek help, so he starts going to group therapy. He also goes to a doctor for his stomach and meets Sandra Bullock, who gives him an enema and tries to get him to try alternative therapy.
Meanwhile, he is in the middle of a deal between the Colombians and the Mafia (Oliver Platt). These guys are serious, but the money man, Andrew Lauer, keeps trying to ply them with women and champagne. But maybe they are trying to cut out the booze, and they actually respect women. And the Colombians don’t want to seem like stereotypes.
There’s a lot of fun, sharp writing in this - it has a Shane Black feel. The writer, Eric Blakeney, who also directs, seems to have mainly done TV. He did a lot of Moonlighting, which kind of makes sense.
Sadly, Bullock is very under used - she is barely a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. But she does give Neeson the confidence he needs to get back in the game.
Tom Hanks in Joe Versus the Volcano (1990) doesn’t have an exciting job like Neeson. He works in a disgusting anal probe factory. He has a depressing office, a horrible boss (Dan Hedaya), and a vague set of psychosomatic ailments. He goes to the company doctor and discovers the horrible truth: his symptoms are psychosomatic, probably due to his previous high-stress firefighting job. But he actually has a symptomless brain disease which will kill him in weeks. So he quits his job, invites the secretary to dinner, and gets ready to die.
His new devil-may-care attitude fascinates the secretary (Meg Ryan), but when she finds out what’s up, she can’t take it, and dumps him. Then a mysterious millionaire (Lloyd Bridges) shows up: His company needs a mineral only found on an isolated Pacific Island. The natives, descendants of an ancient Roman expedition and their Jewish and Celtic passengers, need to sacrifice someone to the volcano. Hanks is going to die anyway, so Bridges offers him a large sum of money to take the leap.
So Hanks goes on a shopping spree, buying everything he can think of, and four waterproof steamer trunks to put it in. He meets with Bridges daughter, the kinky, freaky Meg Ryan again. She is also intrigued by Hanks until she finds out he has a fatal illness and splits, delivering him to her half sister, Meg Ryan again, who will be sailing Hanks to the island in the family yacht.
The yacht is struck by lightning and sinks, but Hanks and Ryan survive - the steamer trunks float and serve as a raft. Hanks gives the unconscious Ryan sips of Pelligrino from the bar in the trunk, until he succombs to the sun and thirst. When he wakes up, Ryan has revived and is touched by his sacrifice. And together they watch the moon rise over the wide Pacific.
They get to the island and meet chief Abe Vigoda and his right-hand man Nathan Lane. Now he must make the ultimate sacrifice, although he may have met the love of his life. The ending is unbelievable and fantastic, in the literal sense. But a lot of fun.
I thought it interesting that men’s emotional pain was such a big seller at this time, but the next post will show that it isn’t particular to the end of the century.
Sunday, December 23, 2018
It Conquered the Invasion of the Puppet Masters
I’m not sure I should admit it, but I’m a big fan of science-fiction author Robert Heinlein. Although he was a bit of a kook and politically questionable, I’ve read and enjoyed pretty much everything he wrote. So I’ve been eagerly awaiting a chance to see The Puppet Masters (1994), based on his 1951 novel. In fact, I was surprised that this was made in 1994 - I feel like I’ve been waiting since the 70s.
Donald Sutherland plays “The Old Man”, leader of a secret US intelligence operation. He calls on Eric Thal, his best agent and son, and exobiologist Julie Warner to investigate a flying saucer that supposedly landed in Iowa. When they get there, they find a crude mockup, built as a tourist trap. They almost go in, but Warner has a bad feeling and they skip it. Good thing too, because they soon find that there was a real flying saucer, and the aliens are stingray/slugs, who attach themselves to your spinal chord and take over your mind.
These aliens are pretty fun, although they do kind of call to mind the flying bat-rays of It Conquered the World. Come to think of it, so does the plot.
Of course, each of the main characters gets taken over by the slugs, as they are called. When Warner is taken, Thal goes into occupied territory to get her back. The infection spreads outside of Iowa, leading to paranoia - anyone could be infected. Of course, if you get them to take of their shirts and turn around... It’s funny that enforced social toplessness was acceptable in a 50s novel, but beyond the pale in the 90s. I guess it would have been a little uncomfortable for the only woman in the cast, though.
Also, it’s funny that the original novel has more character development than the modern movie, since early sci-fi was famous for strong plots and wooden characters. In the original, there was a real sense of dread and paranoia, and the horror and unclean feeling of being mind-raped by ther slugs. That’s present in the movie, but far in the background. In exchange, you get some pretty fair action, car chases and helicopter fights.
Donald Sutherland was probably the best thing in the movie, but even there, he might remind you of his role in Body Snatchers. I’m afraid I’m going to have to mark this as “for Heinlein completists only”.
Donald Sutherland plays “The Old Man”, leader of a secret US intelligence operation. He calls on Eric Thal, his best agent and son, and exobiologist Julie Warner to investigate a flying saucer that supposedly landed in Iowa. When they get there, they find a crude mockup, built as a tourist trap. They almost go in, but Warner has a bad feeling and they skip it. Good thing too, because they soon find that there was a real flying saucer, and the aliens are stingray/slugs, who attach themselves to your spinal chord and take over your mind.
These aliens are pretty fun, although they do kind of call to mind the flying bat-rays of It Conquered the World. Come to think of it, so does the plot.
Of course, each of the main characters gets taken over by the slugs, as they are called. When Warner is taken, Thal goes into occupied territory to get her back. The infection spreads outside of Iowa, leading to paranoia - anyone could be infected. Of course, if you get them to take of their shirts and turn around... It’s funny that enforced social toplessness was acceptable in a 50s novel, but beyond the pale in the 90s. I guess it would have been a little uncomfortable for the only woman in the cast, though.
Also, it’s funny that the original novel has more character development than the modern movie, since early sci-fi was famous for strong plots and wooden characters. In the original, there was a real sense of dread and paranoia, and the horror and unclean feeling of being mind-raped by ther slugs. That’s present in the movie, but far in the background. In exchange, you get some pretty fair action, car chases and helicopter fights.
Donald Sutherland was probably the best thing in the movie, but even there, he might remind you of his role in Body Snatchers. I’m afraid I’m going to have to mark this as “for Heinlein completists only”.
Monday, December 17, 2018
Ready or Not
Before we watched Ready Player One (2018), I had listened to several podcasts about it, including the Mike Nelson/Conor Lastowka “372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back” podcast about the book. Now I haven’t read the book, nor do I intend to. But I was perfectly ready to hate the movie. Actually, it wasn’t that bad - I’ve enjoyed worse.
It is set in the Future - 2045, when everything has gone to pieces and people all live inside virtual reality, called OASIS. OASIS was invented by Mark Rylance, an uber-geek who has recently died. As his will, he set up a massive puzzle game in OASIS, with three Easter eggs. The person who solves the puzzles and finds the eggs will inherit control of the OASIS and a bazillion dollars.
Teen Tye Sheridan is Parzival, an egg hunter, or “gunter”. This neologism seems to annoy most people more than anything else about this story. He has a friend who he’s never met in person, Aetch. They are typical teens, doing typical teen things in virtual reality. Sheridan meets up with Art3mis, a cute and somewhat famous gunter, and they bond. Together they solve the first puzzle, a racing game. Then they visit the Archives, where a robot curator shows them everything known about Rylance. This lets them solve the second puzzle, set in The Shining’s Overlook Hotel.
This gives director Steven Spielberg a chance to do an extended riff on Stanley Kubrick, which is rather sweet.
Meanwhile, the evil IOI corporation headed by Ben Mendelssohn is trying to solve the puzzles too, by throwing armies of gunters at it. When they see Sheridan getting close, they try to buy him off, then threaten him, bombing the stack of trailers where he lives in real life - so big body count here. He survives, but Art3mis is captured and forced into virtual servitude. With the help of a pair of virtual ninjas, they break her out, and go on to win the game (oh, SPOILER).
When Sheridan meets Aetch in real life, it turns out that “he” is a large black woman, Lena Waithe, which is cool. But what if Art3mis isn’t hot in real life? As it turns out, she has a birthmark over her right eye, but is otherwise totally hot. Again, cool.
The hook to the book is that the puzzles are all based on Rylance’s obsession with the 1980s. So Sheridan drives a Delorean, flies the Millenium Falcon, and Aetch builds an Iron Giant, which, wait a minute, wasn’t really 80s at all. But there really wasn’t a lot of this. I figured Spielberg would stuff his frames to bursting with references. But it was all very restrained.
In fact, we enjoyed this quite a lot. There were some plot deficiencies, but nothing that took me out of it. It was fun, exciting, well made. I don’t think I’ll watch it again, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. Like Wagner.
It is set in the Future - 2045, when everything has gone to pieces and people all live inside virtual reality, called OASIS. OASIS was invented by Mark Rylance, an uber-geek who has recently died. As his will, he set up a massive puzzle game in OASIS, with three Easter eggs. The person who solves the puzzles and finds the eggs will inherit control of the OASIS and a bazillion dollars.
Teen Tye Sheridan is Parzival, an egg hunter, or “gunter”. This neologism seems to annoy most people more than anything else about this story. He has a friend who he’s never met in person, Aetch. They are typical teens, doing typical teen things in virtual reality. Sheridan meets up with Art3mis, a cute and somewhat famous gunter, and they bond. Together they solve the first puzzle, a racing game. Then they visit the Archives, where a robot curator shows them everything known about Rylance. This lets them solve the second puzzle, set in The Shining’s Overlook Hotel.
This gives director Steven Spielberg a chance to do an extended riff on Stanley Kubrick, which is rather sweet.
Meanwhile, the evil IOI corporation headed by Ben Mendelssohn is trying to solve the puzzles too, by throwing armies of gunters at it. When they see Sheridan getting close, they try to buy him off, then threaten him, bombing the stack of trailers where he lives in real life - so big body count here. He survives, but Art3mis is captured and forced into virtual servitude. With the help of a pair of virtual ninjas, they break her out, and go on to win the game (oh, SPOILER).
When Sheridan meets Aetch in real life, it turns out that “he” is a large black woman, Lena Waithe, which is cool. But what if Art3mis isn’t hot in real life? As it turns out, she has a birthmark over her right eye, but is otherwise totally hot. Again, cool.
The hook to the book is that the puzzles are all based on Rylance’s obsession with the 1980s. So Sheridan drives a Delorean, flies the Millenium Falcon, and Aetch builds an Iron Giant, which, wait a minute, wasn’t really 80s at all. But there really wasn’t a lot of this. I figured Spielberg would stuff his frames to bursting with references. But it was all very restrained.
In fact, we enjoyed this quite a lot. There were some plot deficiencies, but nothing that took me out of it. It was fun, exciting, well made. I don’t think I’ll watch it again, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. Like Wagner.
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