Category: Movies

So, yesterday, I watched Escape From L.A., another film that came out during my adult years that shocked me in how old it was (and by extension, how old I’m getting).

The film came out in 1996. It was set almost 20 years in the future: 2013 (which means this was a good year to watch the film). Of course, when it came out, it had been a long time since Escape From New York (1981). By my calculations, that means it’s been longer between Escape From L.A. and the present day than between the two films.

Also, I can’t help but note that the film deals with an evangelical President who leads us into a Totalitarian state that bans smoking, drinking, and whatnot. Rather like a 2013 book that predicts the same. Somehow a progressive Democrat state (or progressive Republican-for-convenient-election-to-mayorship Independent) never does that in fiction.

As an additional whoa, I digitally recorded this film in one of my spates of recording large numbers of films when I had an extensive satellite package. I’d run through the program guide, record everything in a two-week stretch that looked cool, and then they’d languish for months until I’d watch one, think it was cool, and record everything that looked cool for a two-week stretch. I trimmed the satellite package because I don’t watch television or movies that much these days, and now, apparently, I’m cutting the films I recorded down at a rate of one a year. Considering I have 40 Humphrey Bogart films alone, I’m set until my retirement ends.

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Ms. K..

If you View from the Porchians aren’t into dystopian academic bubble misinterpretations of the Real World, maybe you’d be more interested in my novel John Donnelly’s Gold, a caper heist novel about four software company workers who seek revenge upon their (former) CEO after their layoffs.

None other than Roberta X. said about the book:

Where Larry Correia’s fictional world postulates our world with a barely-hidden subculture of every monster you ever heard of, the only “monster” in Brian J. Noggle’s John Donnelly’s Gold is a passing mention of the eponymous job-placement company. Nevertheless, it, too is quite an adventure and one that will have you wondering how it all turns out until the very end.

Available in paperback, Kindle, and iBookstore forms starting at just $.99.

Instapundit links to an Amazon deal, the “The Ultimate Matrix Collection” on Blu-ray.

You know what I call “The Ultimate Matrix Collection”?

A DVD of just The Matrix.

I found this on YouTube while researching a bit of the family Christmas classic Lethal Weapon. It’s a scene not found in the film, but it’s got the right look to be something trimmed and left behind:

Maybe it’s on the DVD I have as a deleted scene; maybe it’s been held back for the six-disc Blu-Ray package to be released someday. But it’s kind of satisfying to come across something new featuring the characters, look and feel, of a film I’ve liked and enjoyed for decades.

It’s kind of like fan fiction. Only real.

It extends the enjoyment and the storyline when I thought it was set and immutable. What a treat.

This is some sort of quiz to see if you’re an old man or not. You ladies especially.

Take the list of the top 100 films of 2012 and identify which of them you have seen. I have done this in <strong>, which is orange. Not much orange at that.

Then, identify those that you even know what they’re about. I’ve done this in <em>, which shows up in italics right now.

The list:

Marvel’s The Avengers
The Dark Knight Rises
The Hunger Games
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2
Skyfall
The Amazing Spider-Man
Brave
Ted
Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted
Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax
MIB 3
Wreck-It Ralph
Ice Age: Continental Drift
Snow White and the Huntsman
Hotel Transylvania
21 Jump Street
Taken 2
Prometheus
Safe House
The Vow
Magic Mike
The Bourne Legacy
Lincoln
Argo
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island
Think Like a Man
Flight
The Campaign
The Expendables 2
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Wrath of the Titans
Dark Shadows
John Carter
Rise of the Guardians
Act of Valor
Life of Pi
Contraband
Looper
Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Witness Protection
Battleship
Mirror Mirror
Chronicle (2012)
Pitch Perfect
Hope Springs
Underworld Awakening
The Lucky One
The Dictator
Total Recall (2012)
Titanic 3D
American Reunion
ParaNorman
This Means War
Project X
The Woman in Black
Paranormal Activity 4
The Devil Inside
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
The Odd Life of Timothy Green
The Grey
Red Tails
The Possession
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
Sinister
Beauty and the Beast (3D)
Savages (2012)
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Moonrise Kingdom
The Three Stooges
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (in 3D)
Here Comes the Boom
Resident Evil: Retribution
The Cabin in the Woods
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
Red Dawn (2012)
Finding Nemo (3D)
End of Watch
Rock of Ages
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
Lawless
That’s My Boy
Trouble with the Curve
The Watch
Step Up Revolution
Tyler Perry’s Good Deeds
Frankenweenie
2016 Obama’s America
House at the End of The Street
The Pirates! Band of Misfits
Joyful Noise
Chimpanzee
The Five-Year Engagement
Cloud Atlas
One For the Money
Alex Cross
Katy Perry: Part of Me
Sparkle (2012)
Premium Rush
Big Miracle
The Secret World of Arrietty
Haywire

Most of the films I even can suss out what they’re about is because they’re sequels, remakes, or titles depicting well-known fairy tales. I probably even consider that I knew what the film was about in some cases if I just knew it was a movie.

Or, in the case of The Transporter on a bike, because I saw the trailer and mocked it.

We can certainly teases this out into a number of blog posts about how Hollywood might make movies whose brands are recognizable on title alone to hit low information infrequent movie goers or how perhaps I’m not really the target audience for Hollywood anyway. We could, I mean, but I’m not going to.

I’d make a list of people who acted in them, but I bet it’s a list of fewer recognizees. And I am the pop culturally literate one of the family. Which is why our house is full of classical literary allusions instead.

So we watched some football on Sunday, and they ran the commercial for the remade Red Dawn (in cinemas now!).

I’m with a wise man who long ago said:

By contrast, the long-stalled remake has become a sick joke. To wit: MGM has taken the extraordinary step of digitally scrubbing the film of all references to Red China as the invading villains — substituting dialogue, removing images of Chinese flags and insignia etc. — because “potential distributors are nervous about becoming associated with the finished film, concerned that doing so would harm their ability to do business with the rising Asian superpower.” All without the PRC even uttering a single word of protest.

And who are the new invaders? North Korea. That’s right, the starving-to-death, massively brainwashed “Hermit Kingdom.” I imagine at this very moment, Hollywood script doctors are working on a revised first act in which Kim Jong Il decides it’s a good idea to let hundreds of thousands of his captive countrymen travel to America.

The invasion would last about until the invading armies discovered the American concept of the supermarket, wherein they would all eat themselves sick or into a nap where even 21st century American high school kids could win against them.

The conceit offends me. Apparently, it did not offend enough people to make it the bomb it deserves to be, but those 21st century American moviegoers might lack enough understanding of logistics, current events, and history to think that North Korea might actually pose a threat to the United States outside of maybe Hawaii.

But you know what would make this film a must-see movie for me?

If, instead of reshooting the scenes referring to China, they dubbed over them. Badly.

I would go to see it if every time the characters referred to the origin of the invaders, the actors’ mouths would say “China,” but a deep male voice in the audio track would say “North Korea.” I’d even nominate it for a People’s Choice award, if I’m eligible as a people to do that sort of thing, if the dubbing would include obvious mistakes such as referring to the capital of the invaders’ country incorrectly. The actors’ mouths would say, “Beijing,” but that deep voice (even if it was a woman speaking) would say, “Seoul” or “Manila.”

That, my friends, would be awesome.

This film is a B-movie, direct-to-video piece from 1988 fit into those post-apocalyptic desert wasteland films from the era. It stars David Carradine in between his Kung Fu television shows as a clone warrior looking to rescue his wife from a Warlord who has arisen after the nuclear war. I’m not really sure why the film’s title is plural, as there’s only one warlord, really. The story is pretty simplistic and the whole thing smacks of being low budget, but that’s kind of what you get with the genre.

So I can’t help but compare this to Hell Comes To Frogtown, one of the standouts in the field and a film I felt affection for since seeing it on USA Network’s Up All Night in the late 1980s.

Overall, its effects budget, story, and whole bit are less than the gold standard that is Hell Comes To Frogtown.

But if you’re into the genre, it’s a fun little hour and a half.

My beautiful wife is traveling for business this week, which means it’s film festival time at Nogglestead. In the olden days, I’d watch two or three a night, but now I have children who like to get up at 5:30 in the morning, so it’s only one a night. Last night, I watched the James Cameron film The Abyss from 1989 (twenty-three years old? How old am I then?).

I hadn’t seen it before, but I found it to be a perfectly serviceable little action/science fictioner. It’s a real bummer that the “bad guy” in this is really just a Navy SEAL suffering from temporary insanity induced by the pressure change being under the sea. As such, I really felt kinda bad for him throughout the film and hoped he’d be redeemed somehow.

But that’s neither here nor there. As I’m watching the film, I’m struck by some of the meta considerations about the actors and whatnot in the film.

Consider:

• Mary Jane Mastratonio has appeared in two films involving hurricanes: this one and The Perfect Storm where she plays the role of Linda Greenlaw (whose book The Lobster Chronicles I read three years ago.
   
• Ed Harris has played more men named Virgil than any other actor in Hollywood, probably. His character in The Abyss is named Virgil, and he played Virgil Cole in the 2008 western Appaloosa, which I watched in January.
   
• In a tense moment in the film, Mastratonio’s character says to Harris’s character, “It’s not an option.” Failure, that is. A couple years later, Ed Harris would say “Failure is not an option” in another film, and it would become overly quoted. Was it homage to this film? Perhaps.
   

At any rate, it was a good enough picture, but I suppose it could be said that it did not draw me into the world enough so that I would forget the actors in it and that it was a movie with its place in history.

Allow me to prognosticate: Premium Rush is going to bomb.

It’s like The Transporter, but it’s about awesome bicycle riding. And you know who likes awesome bike riding? Hipsters. And do you know what kind of movies hipsters like? Foreign language films screened in shabby little single screen cinemas.

This film has too much English in it and, judging by the fact that they’re advertising it during preseason football on ESPN, too much advertising budget and too wide of a release to garner the support of the sort of people who wear their Spanx® on the outside and crush their testicles against hard plastic for hours at a stretch.

(Isn’t that a lot of smack talk from someone who has seen enough of the film Breaking Away to be able to call it to mind instantly? Shaddup.)

What, no attempt at Die Hard on a Bike? C’mon, a tandem bike where the back seat has a terrorist in it and the front seat has Don MacLivane in it? Hey, how about you throw a little Speed in it and they can’t go less than 22 mph or a bomb will blow? And maybe a little Collateral in it where they have to stop every once in a while and kill someone, except that would ruin the Speed bit of it? C’mon, the screenplay writes itself.

UPDATE Thanks for the link, hipcarryster.

Entertainment Weekly presents a list (come on, it’s really a quiz!) called 50 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen (warning: gallery form).

I got a perfect score. That is, I haven’t wasted my time on any of them.

I am no modern cinemataste. I prefer my best movies no one else has seen to be seventy years old and in black and white.

I have to admit, though, that as I got further and further into the gallery, I was a little afraid that it might include something like Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but whoever compiled the list is a real aficionado (that is, he or she likes to flaunt his or her familiarity with the obscure) and really seems to favor British films and documentaries.

Now, let’s discuss my imperfections: I have not seen every Adam Sandler movie, although I have seen Click and Going Overboard, so I’ve knocked off some of the harder titles.

Last night, I watched Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s 1920 silent film about a dystopian society. I’ve not soaked in the moisturizing dish liquid of Cinema, but I have watched a couple of silent films in my time, which puts me ahead of most people. These films include:

• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. When I was young, I dated a girl who took a film appreciation class, which meant that we got to watch important films. This particular item was a high example of German surrealism or expressionism or something like that. Marinated cinematistes (I just made that word up. Like it?) could better explain its importance. I remember quite a bit from the film, though, which means it made more of an impression on me than most films with Jason Statham and/or Matt Damon in them. And, friends, we watched this film before Netflix existed, which probably meant we had to go to the old Bijou movie rental place up in University City or reserve it through Blockbuster or something.
   
• Juno and the Paycock (where paycock is British for peacock–couldn’t they just have put an extraneous U in it and left it at that?). An old Alfred Hitchcock film, but without crime in it. I bought a boxed set of Hitchcock films about ten years ago and started watching them. You know what boxed set means, don’t you? It means old films we couldn’t sell standing alone.
   
• The Lodger, a film sort of loosely based on Jack the Ripper, wherein there’s a serial killer terrorizing London (in 1927). A strange lodger moves into a boarding house and might be the killer. This film is most notable because it starred June Tripp.
   
• The Ring, a boxing picture, also in the Alfred Hitchcock boxed set. Notable because it gave me a nickname I used to use on my second child. You know, I think I watched these last two films when he was a newborn because I could watch them with the television on mute. Huh, I just remembered that as I was typing.
   
• Metropolis. You don’t have to be a cinematiste to recognize that this film was seminal in framing science fiction films for decades after it. Or at least see that certain tropes you see in modern films existed eighty years ago. The text frames refer to robots, a term that was only seven years old at that time, but it must have gained enough currency to be in the popular mind by then. As I watched, it occurred to me that this was filmed at the time when H.P. Lovecraft was writing, and I can see shared elements–descending staircases, catacombs, and so on. An interesting enough film.

So that’s three British silent films and two German ones. I don’t know if I’ve seen an American one. I suppose I should sit down and watch some Charlie Chaplin or something to round out my silent film bona fides, but I’m a modern man, and I really need to be in the right mood for a silent film. I don’t get that many film-length stretches of time, and when I do, I’m inclined to watch something I’ve seen a million times before and love or a comedy or action flick I own and have yet to watch before I’m inclined to broaden my mind.

But if I happen upon one at a garage sale, I’ll pick it up and have it on hand in case the mood strikes me again sometime in 2015.

I have only seen 10 of the 11 films on the Guyism.com 11 movies every guy needs to see.

I am missing two. The Wild Bunch and The Bridge on the River Kwai, which is very, very strange considering that I listen to the River Kwai march several times a week (that’s a story for another day).

I think I have it DVRed, though, so I should fix that up sometime soon and will become 100% masculine according to some twee Internet posting, which frankly is the highest standard I can reach some days.

(Link seen on Ace of Spades HQ.)

Somebody on the Internet posted a list of 8 Movies Every Geek Should Watch (And Love).

I’ve done a number of books-you’ve-read checklists and haven’t fared so well, so I thought I’d stack the deck and make this into a checklist since I’ve done well on it.

The list below includes the list at the post. Bold means I’ve seen the film, italics means I own the film and will get to it.

1. Office Space
2. Cube (I didn’t like it. Geek demerits for me.)
3. WarGames
4. Blade Runner
5. THX 1138
6. Dark City
7. Moon
8. They Live

So, how do you do?

And as a geek point of order, the poster of this list makes cranky noises about the changes Lucas made to THX 1138, but he doesn’t have anything to say about which version of Blade Runner is definitive. This, my dear friends, is a serious lapse in geekery and might reflect someone who can bash Lucas because it’s currently coolly demigeek to do so.

On Facebook the other day, I saw a link to a piece entitled How ‘The Fifth Element’ Predicted Lady Gaga And Everything Else About Modern Life—Back in ’97.

I postulate that anyone writing for money on an Internet site is 25 years old or younger. Why? Let’s use this piece as an example.

The article says that The Fifth Element, a fine film that I’ve seen many times, predicts:

• Yes, a fashion model can carry an entire movie.
  But fashion models have been in films for decades. Ever heard of Racquel Welch? She modeled before she carried films. Jane Fonda? I know, if you’re like me, you think Nat King Cole carried Cat Ballou, but her name was over the title.

  If you go out on the Internet and conduct a search for models who became actresses, those lists written and poached by 25-year-olds do only include fashion models who became actresses in the late 1990s.
   

• We love Divas
  

  Is Diva Plavalaguna from the movie any less weird than Lady Gaga from Earth? Or Nicki Minaj, for that matter?

  What on earth? People who appreciate divas did not appreciate divas before 1997? Good lord amercy, what about Diana Ross? Does he mean only lady singers who look weird? Maybe this writer’s granddad can explain Wendy O. Williams or, frankly, any pop singer from the 1980s to him. Sarah Brightman. Cher. Madonna. Come on, this is where divas started?
   

• And cruise ships.

  Behold this howler:

  The cruise ship industry was still in its infancy in 1997.

  Uh, what? 1997 is 20 years after The Love Boat debuted on television. Royal Caribbean was founded in 1967. Carnival Cruise Lines was founded in 1972. That’s a damn long infancy.
   

• Terrorists!

  Another howler:

  In 1997, terrorism was something that happened in far away place, to other people.

  Keep in mind, 1997 is four years after the first World Trade Center bombing and two years after the bombing in Oklahoma City. It’s some number of years after the bombings in the late 1960s and 1970s. A couple decades past airplane hijackings in the United States.

  The author goes onto say:

  Since 2001, however, it’s been on the cultural frontburner almost continuously.

  Movies before The Fifth Element didn’t feature terrorists (or fake terrorists)? Uh, Die Hard, Delta Force, Invasion USA, True Lies, and so on and so forth.

  In the news, one never heard about the 1972 Munich Olympics, the Iranian Hostage Crisis, constant kidnappings throughout the Middle East, or the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro (of course the author didn’t hear about this, since it took place on a cruise ship before the industry was in its infancy).

  No, indeed, The Fifth Element was the thing that brought terrorists to our attention.
   

• The real estate crisis.

  Silly human, the real estate crisis only involves New York City.

  In future New York, we see that apartments for ordinary people are reduced to tiny cubicles. Not too different from the current New York!

  In 1997, all New York apartments looked like the sets of 1940s films. Every studio was a three-bedroom penthouse. But in 2000, Rudy Guiliani sold 75% of Manhattan to New Jersey to buy its silence in covering his affair with Judith Nathan, which resulted in the small sizes for domiciles that continues to this day. Or something.
   

• Reality TV
  

  People forget that reality TV as we know it now didn’t exist in 1997.

  Cops debuted in 1989. The Real World debuted in 1992. I mean, really. A quick search of Wikipedia gives you a history of reality television. As to shameless self-promoting television hosts, come on. We can go back to Morton Downey, Jr. Or Geraldo, who got his nose broken on his television show in 1988.

  I mean, the Howard Stern show was syndicated eleven years before the film, and it features a hucksterish outrageous personality transmitting his thoughts via radio waves to your receiver.

  Who could have seen this coming? Only the divine oracle that is The Fifth Element.
   

The other things in the list are about Bruce Willis’s lingering popularity (well, he’s still working, but I wouldn’t say he’s still “huge”) and the lingering popularity of the Leelo costume for Hallowe’en (coincidentally, it covers little of the feminine physique).

Like so many things, the piece has a certain cultural myopia that can’t see anything before the middle 1990s and comes off, at least to this old man, as annoying because of it.

But it does reflect an adolescent viewpoint that says, “All history began with my birth or self-awareness” that cripples our contemporary society and discourse.

NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Mr. H. I’m not sure if he means I’m not self-aware or not. Which might prove that I am not.

UPDATE: Thanks, also, for the link, Ms. K.

This DVD is billed as a double feature: A Carol Alt film and a Rutger Hauer film. Closer inspection, that is watching the films, shows that this is actually a Carol Alt double feature since she is the female costar of Beyond Justice as well. Both are Italian pictures.

Bye Bye Baby is billed as a comedy. At least, that’s what I get because the DVD box says it has more than one uproarious scene. I didn’t see any of that. It’s the story of an Italian businessman with an attractive woman doctor wife (Alt) who throws him out. After the divorce, which she doesn’t really want, he goes onto a relationship with a professional pool player (Brigitte Nielsen), and she gets involved with a doctor at the hospital where she works. Eventually, she and he rediscover their passion for each other and they (uproariously!) try to get their current mates to fall for each other as the former spouses get back together (while still seeing their new relations). Then, he gets hit by a car. But doesn’t die. So there’s hope they’ll get back together. The end. Not a lot of laughs, but a lot of Carol Alt ca. 1988. Which might be worth a watching just for that.

Beyond Justice is an eighties action film a couple years past the 1980s. The son of an American businesswoman is kidnapped by Arabs, and her ex-husband knows more about it than he lets on. Seems he’s the son of a northern African emir, and when the boy turns 13, he’s supposed to be returned to his tribe to begin his real education with the tribe. Rutger Hauer is Rutger Hauer, and he agrees to help find the boy. Along the way, guns are shot, respect is gained for former adversaries as they band together in the face of new threats, and Omar Sharif. The film has more depth than one would expect given its lineage, but not bad at all.

The offshoot is that I’ve achieved a certain balance in my life that not many people have: I have watched as many Carol Alt films as Kathy Ireland films (those being Necessary Roughness and National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon I).

And as an off-shoot, I also have the urge to look into the spaghetti Rambo films that I might have missed until now. And, maybe, the Carol Alt films. It looks as though she’s done a lot of work in Italy.

Books mentioned in this review:

I could not make it through this film in a single viewing.

I started watching it three or so years ago, back when I lived in Old Trees, and I got probably 2/3 of the way through before I thought of something better to do, or before my wife returned from wherever she was and I spent the time with her instead.

So the second viewing, the film had a certain familiarity with it. It was like a movie I’d seen before.

The plot: James Bond, with Timothy Dalton at the helm, helps a high-level Russian defect only to see the Russian snatched back after explaining the plot of another Russian honcho to start killing British and American spies. Bond knows the plotting Russian and thinks him incapable of the betrayal, so Bond goes roguish with a Russian cello player to find out what the Russians are up to.

Dalton’s low on my list of Bonds, so he doesn’t get that much of my innate affection that I feel for the franchise. I made it through the second viewing, but I won’t watch it over and over again.

Strange, though, how squicky these films make one feel 25 years later. Remember when those plucky Afghan freedom fighters were the good guys? James Bond helped them. Rambo helped them. Only a quarter century later and those plucky Afghan freedom fighters are blowing up Americans, and it’s hard to sympathize with them.

Books mentioned in this review: