Hit & miss: 2 movie reviews

Attack the Block

This is a story that could not be told in America. In America the kids in the projects would have guns and the movie would be over in 3 minutes. These kids in the south London "block" (council estate) have kitchen knives and super soakers. Okay, one of them has a samurai sword.

Not much more to say other than this movie is heaps of fun. It's all about the characters, not the ray guns and army tanks (which there are none of either) and has a sort of Pitch Black redemptive flavour to it.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

This is a movie about chimps with anger issues, and misplaced anger at that. I recall the cinematic trailer being quite intense, but the movie has none of the epic feel of the classic series (to which it's a prequel - not of the stupid recent version set on another planet, but of the original). The plot is pure Disney. It's Project X on speed and Free Willy with machine guns. 

Eclipse: morality obliterated by sparkly lurv

George Takei, who rivals James Earl Jones in the "I'd listen to him reading a shopping list" voice department, sends out a plea for Star Trek and Star Wars fans to unite against the mutual threat of... Twilight. "There are no great stories, characters or profound life lessons to be had in Twilight." He's right.

I have read the first two books in the saga and last night watched the third movie, Eclipse, thinking to further my education. I'm writing this assuming the scene I'm about to highlight plays out more or less the same in the book. Once again I was stunned by the moral bankruptcy of the very people we're supposed to be rooting for - the Cullens. While the hero is busy impressing us all by saving himself for marriage, something happens at the end that makes me wonder just how badly characters can behave without readers noticing because they're - I don't know, blinded by the greatest love story ever told?

The head of the clan, Carlisle Cullen, has made it his life's mission to encourage and train vampires to not eat humans. He has assembled a family who follow his ways. In Eclipse, Carlisle and his wife Esme offer sanctuary to a "newborn" vampire (a 15-year-old girl named Bree) following a major showdown with the evil vamp Victoria. Victoria has been forming an army of newborns with the sole purpose of killing Bella, as vengeance against Edward for killing her true love (in the first book). Bree is shown in the movie hiding out during the battle. The Cullens take pity on her and she surrenders.

Then the head vampire clan, the Volturi, show up to see what the fuss is all about. They aren't friendly to the Cullens because of the Bella situation, but they don't like Victoria and her army either because they've been drawing attention to themselves. Vampires are supposed to munch on humanity under the radar. The Volturi feasted on a roomful of tourists in Book 2, and I've had a thing or two to say about that - specifically Bella's reaction to it, and the Cullens' complete disinclination to stop such behaviour. This time around, the Volturi decide that Bree must die because she was part of Victoria's army. Carlisle makes a vague protest about how he's given her asylum. The Volturi ignore him and one of them steps forward and kills Bree while the Cullens... all stand back and let him.

How are we supposed to feel anything but disgust for a man who offers zero resistance when a 15-year-old girl, who's already shown the potential to be turned to the good side of the force, has her head snapped off under his pale sparkly nose? Exactly what does "offering asylum" mean?

The take-home message: virginity before marriage = good; preventing the murder of innocents = not even a blip on the moral compass.

Do readers notice these things? Do they care? Why don't they care??

Terra Nova's upside-down premise

I've been hanging out for a good sci-fi show for nine years - ever since you know what was canceled. So I've been watching Terra Nova. It's 2149, the world is a horrible place to live, and a one-way time portal is discovered that goes back 85 million years. Dinosaurs - yay! (We are asked to ignore the point that living among big hungry dinosaurs without adequate weaponry to deal with them is kind of silly.)

Deadly dinos aside, the world of Terra Nova is a nice one - these people are essentially colonists on a new world, and I'm up for that. They appear to live a self-sustainable lifestyle without being too annoyingly hippie. I've enjoyed most of the episodes although they are remarkably forgettable.

In a recent episode we discovered the (alleged) true agenda of the "Sixers" - a band of outcast rebels working for evil people back in 2149. What is the evil agenda of these evil people? To mine resources from Terra Nova and bring them back to the future once a two-way portal can be developed. Billions of people need these resources to survive. Taylor, the leader of Terra Nova, finds this idea abhorrent and refuses to cooperate.

Some awkward plot holes are apparent in light of these revelations. Firstly, the evil ones have had multiple opportunities to send back an army to take over Terra Nova and do with the past whatever they want. Instead they sent a bunch of rebel misfits who are now banished and live in tree houses, talking tough but accomplishing nothing. Another time they sent an elderly one-armed general to kill Taylor, and Taylor promptly shot him. That's it. That's all they've done to forward their grand mission.

Secondly, just because your plot is all conservationist and such, doesn't mean it's right. What is so bad about sending resources back to 2149 to help humanity, which is facing extinction? It's been established that Terra Nova is a different timeline, so it won't affect the future. There are only a few hundred people in Terra Nova and they don't need a planet's worth of resources. Nor do the dinosaurs. Apparently there are no plans to send everyone in 2149 to Terra Nova - presumably it's not possible - so why not use Terra Nova to save the bulk of humanity?

The lucky ones in Terra Nova are only there in the first place because they're rich, clever, or lucky (a few won the lottery for a ticket). Why should those privileged few get all the goodies and leave billions of innocent people to live miserably and die too soon? Isn't that exactly what's happening in 2149 as well?

I just don't get the moral dilemma here. (Brannon Braga developed both Terra Nova and Star Trek Enterprise - I've had problems with the latter's weird ethical code too.)

On the positive side, the show is filmed in Australia's tropical north-east and it looks great (it should - it's very expensive).

Review: The Time Guardian

The Time Guardian is an 80s Australian movie starring the man from Snowy River, a pretty Aussie woman, and, for reasons unknown, Carrie Fisher. I never quite figured out what was going on in this movie and I'm not going to watch it again to find out. I think it was trying to be Australia's answer to The Terminator.

In the far future, cyborgs have killed all of humanity except for some stragglers in a time-traveling city, which the cyborgs continually attack because they want the power source. Our hero Ballard, a soldier, makes a garbled speech that involves a plan to travel to the Aussie Outback circa 1988 - I honestly don't know why but he's very angry and very earnest about it, so it must be their only hope. He and Carrie Fisher go on ahead a day or so to build a rock pile so the damaged city can land without toppling over.

Yes, the fate of all humanity depends on two people building a rock pile.

In 1988 Ballard meets Annie, a cute geologist in pleated (arrgh!) white (arrgh!) cuffed (arrrrrgh!) shorty-shorts who's already been treated badly at the tiny outback township where half the action takes place. This town consists of one street and a dozen buildings, but has three, count 'em, three cops, all of whom are gun-totin' dicks. I can buy one or even two being dicks, but all three? There's a Confederate flag in the police station office. I'm not sure an Aussie audience would even recognize what that is, and I don't know what it's doing there.

Ballard needs an "earth transposer" to make his rock pile. On their way to town to find one, Annie and Ballard come across a truck with a dead driver. The guy was electrocuted or frozen or something by an energy whirlpool from a time disturbance. Or something. They put the body under a tarpaulin in the back of Annie's truck and drive it into town, where the cops are kind of suspicious even though Ballard says "It's not what you think."

The local earth-mover-store owner won't take credit, so Ballard throws him about 30 feet through a plate glass window, badly cutting up his face, to make him change his mind. Now, I can buy that Ballard would use violence because he's desperate (if he doesn't build his rock pile, the entire future will change, which come to think of it doesn't really matter when you can travel about through time at will). But Annie's reaction is to laugh about it as they drive off.

This kind of thing really really bugs me. See here and here.

After watching Ballard abuse an innocent man and beat up a couple of cops with his kung fu mojo, she's ready to have sex with him. Because, ya know, that's all it takes. He's not so sure until she whips off her top and shows him her wares. Then he's all for it.

Forgot to mention that some cyborgs followed Ballard and Carrie Fisher back in time and are hiding out until it's dark (they are light-sensitive, the poor dears). Also forgot to mention that Carrie Fisher gets shot early on and is out of commission for most of the movie, which is okay because she's not convincing me with her performance.

Actually, no one is convincing me, let alone elucidating the plot for me. We keep crossing back to the future where people are wearing puffy quilted costumes with big circles stitched on them and are yelling and speechifying and there's an old scientist who dresses in a duck suit, and he's trying to convince people that he can use the energy from the timestream to thwart the cyborgs but they just won't listen! He only now came up with the idea, which is a bit odd, but it turns out to be important.

Back in 1988, the nastiest of the cops gets pulled into the future by a cyborg arm that reaches through a fragment of one of the giant beach balls the cyborgs use to move through time. His demise serves no plot purpose, which is annoying. We never see him again. We don't know if he gets his just desserts for feeling up Annie in jail (see below) or if he becomes the cyborg overlord. We just don't know.

So, Annie and Ballard end up in jail - I don't remember why, probably because of the dead body. A handful of cyborgs arrive at the police station thanks to one of the cops setting off a beacon while he's fiddling with Ballard's futuristic armband. This armband serve two functions: (1) it sets off a beacon that the cyborgs respond to, which is frankly a stupid feature, and (2) it sends you to sleep when you've been injured, which is more useful but somewhat unrelated to (1). It's like having a gum boot that also hangs curtains.

Our favorite couple escapes and Ballard finds the police station's arsenal of semi-automatic weapons. In case you didn't know, every outback town has one of those. While he has fun with his new toys, he leaves Annie defenseless in the kitchen. She upturns a fridge to no avail, and then sets a cyborg on fire from the handy dandy stove and throws a propane bottle on it. It explodes. Yay. (These cyborgs seem rather easy to kill.)

At some point the rock pile gets built, no thanks to Ballard who spends his time shoveling sand from here to there, there being half a meter from here. The city from the future materializes, the cyborgs show up, and a dramatic battle ensues. Did I say dramatic? I meant to say dorky. Idiot Annie refuses to leave and gets herself into trouble, which inspires Carrie Fisher to suicidally leap into the arms of a cyborg in order to save her.

The scientist/duck, who has been shot, tells Ballard about his under-appreciated idea with the timestream energy. Ballard goes off to stick his arms in the timestream and before you know it he's wielding a big fat energy cannon. I don't know how that happened. Just take my word for it. He vaporizes the cyborgs, but not before making an angry earnest speech. All the cyborgs stop fighting to listen to it, which makes them easy targets when the vaporizing begins.

Annie puts on a futuristic outfit (admittedly an improvement over the shorts) because she's going to live in the future now, and kisses her man. (That's Ballard, in case you're not following me.)

I couldn't help but notice that the entire plot - the time travel, the rock pile, the cops, the fridge, the geologist and her nipples, all of it, although possibly not the duck suit - is totally irrelevant. The timestream energy cannon that saves the day has nothing to do with anything else that happens. Also, who the hell puts a dead body they just found into the back of their truck? 

But there's a happy ending: I picked the DVD out of the bargain bin - only $2 for a painful yet hilarious night's entertainment for myself and MCP.

Nostalgic for comics

Comics... not superhero stuff. I never read those and today I can't follow them when I try. I'm talking about comics for girls, or picture stories, which I think are just called magazines today. In fact, I'm not sure the comics of my childhood even exist any more. Today they're about make-up and pop stars. Then, they were mostly about orphaned girls enduring terrible hardships at the hands of mean relatives.

My older sister bought the comic Mandy every week during the mid-to-late 70s. I had a couple of favourite artists, and the way the strips were drawn was sometimes more important than the story. Wikipedia lists some of the stories - I don't recognise most of them so I think they must not be from the era I was reading. One of my favourites - it may have been called "Darla" - was about an alien named Darla who joins the household of our heroine. Everyone else is brainwashed into believing that she has always been there, the younger sister, but our heroine knows better. I think Darla could blast mind-control rays from her eyes. The heroine learns that relatives far from home don't know who Darla is, so the brainwashing only extends so far. She eventually discovers two people from the town have been replaced by aliens, and along with Darla are plotting an evil takeover of some sort.

Some of the stories were rather more mundane. "Rita the Record-Breaker" is determined to break a world record - any world record will do. One of her attempts involves eating a lot of macaroni cheese. In the end I suspect she broke the world record for attempted world records. "A Ticket For Timmy" is about a family emigrating to Australia who can't afford the £100 ticket for their dog. Our heroine finds ways to raise the money herself, week by week. And how's this one for a great YA novel idea? I don't remember the title but it's about an orphan living with cruel relatives (of course), forced to be the voice of her talent-free cousin. During stage performances, she stands in the wings and sings into a microphone while her cousin lip-syncs.

I also remember stories about a girl with a terrible scar on her face, a girl terrorized by the ghost of her dead twin sister (who turns out not to be dead), a girl faking deafness, a girl faking blindness, and the touching story of a magic music box that has been passed down 13 generations from mother to daughter, and takes the heroine back in time to meet each of her ancestors, where she has to help them out with some problem.

And that, along with Enid Blyton's boarding school and secret club stories, comprised the literary influences of my early childhood.

I now recall that Mandy was also my first publishing success, although I didn't receive a penny. The comic published a letter of mine in about 1980.

At any price?

There are a few TV shows I don't miss - my favourite right now is probably The Big Bang Theory, which is unusual for me because I don't normally go for sitcoms. But this one is just so funny. I used to love House but it's getting repetitive. Incidentally, both shows provide evidence for my theory that overtly atheistic characters on TV must be portrayed as either grumpy old men or weirdo nerds (viz. Becker, Bones, Dexter)*. (Futuristic shows are the exception, where religion seems to fall by the wayside on a regular basis.)

One show I tried to watch was The Mentalist. It's about a guy who once earned a living by using his keen sense of observation to pose as a fake psychic, but now uses it to help solve crimes. (This premise has been copied a few times since, e.g. Lie to Me and Unforgettable, and is itself a rip-off of the awesome show Psych, which makes the occasional hilarious meta-reference to The Mentalist.)

From what little I saw of the show, I gather the main character Patrick Jane (Aussie Simon Baker) is another atheist. He's not a nerd, and certainly not a grumpy old man, but he is an eccentric weirdo. This is probably because his wife and child were murdered by a serial killer. And that's why I couldn't stick with the show, despite being in agreement with Jane over the redundancy of the term "fake psychic". But Jane's background is just too much. As a viewer I can't recover from it. I can't watch a character with that sort of torment in his past. I think it's because in this story, the hero can never win.

Anyway, in an early episode I remember he came up against a "psychic" who held seances to contact the dead. At the end of the show, she gently tells Jane that she's talked to his dead wife, who told her his daughter was never scared during the double murder, that she never woke up. I waited for Jane to tell the woman to shove it. Instead, he listened stony-faced and cried when she left the room.

Such a cop-out.

Today I happened to catch a more recent episode and I'm sorry to say the cop-outs continue. A woman consulted Jane ten years ago when she was trying to conceive. He used his "gift" to tell her she would have a son called Connor and it came true - she believes in his powers even when he confesses ten years later. She does finally accept that it was all a trick. He says (from memory), "Sorry about deceiving you." Instead of replying, "Yeah, well, I was eager to believe", she says "Oh, but you gave me hope!"

To rub salt in the wound, after Jane points out to his cop partner that he didn't give her hope, he sold her hope, the cop says "I think hope is worth it at any price."

How nice it would've been to hear Jane retort, "I think truth is worth it at any price."

Oh well. The episode guest-starred Kelli Williams, who I've liked ever since seeing her on Earth 2.

*I've now found two examples of young, attractive TV atheists:

Dr Cameron from House (but she's kind of nerdy)

Britta from Community  (but she's kind of not always likable)

The younger generation

My husband's nephew and his wife, a couple in their early 20s, are staying with us for a few days. While browsing through some Netflix options we discovered that, despite being SF&F fans, they've never seen Blade Runner or Aliens. I'm speechless!

We watched Aliens with them, followed by... Zardoz. MCP assured us this is a cult classic. I'm not sure when that phrase has ever been a recommendation. Well, all I can say is that it has Sean Connery in it...in a red diaper.

At one point he appears in a lacy wedding dress, but I suspect most viewers today will never get that far into the viewing experience.

Hard to believe that this movie is only 12 years older than Aliens and is so dated it's almost unwatchable. On the other hand, the only thing about Aliens that's dated badly is Paul Reiser's hair.

French eye candy for real

Searching Netflix for good science fiction isn't as easy as I thought it would be. One movie we accidentally came across recently was Suspension, which has a sci-fi "widget" but is otherwise pretty much a character study. It was very watchable. And then... did we really sit through that godawful thing from the 80s with Dennis Quaid about dream research the other week?

Last night we ended up choosing the French near-future action movie District B13 (Banlieue 13). Made in 2004, it's set in 2010 as an excuse to change (or perhaps simply exaggerate) the social structure of a major metropolis--Paris. Beyond that, there's nothing science fiction about it. It's a pure action story.

Loved it! It features several amazing parkour (urban mountaineering) sequences that pretty much make the film. The simple storyline probably wouldn't stand without those visuals. In fact, there's not much else to say about the movie except that it's hugely enjoyable and just the right length at 85 minutes.

Actor David Belle is one half of the protagonist duo, and is credited with coining the term parkour, a style based on the "obstacle course method of [French] military training," itself based on African tribal agility skills. Watching the "stunts" in this movie made me realize how much fun it is to see people throwing their bodies around for real instead of relying on CGI. It has about as much character development and moral preaching as Avatar (that is, not much and quite a bit, respectively) but for me it works much better as an action flick, and just as well as a visual feast. Not to mention it's over one hour of two pieces of perfectly cast muscular eye candy.

As a side note, I studied French for 7 years and could barely understand a word they were saying.

Exploding heads

I'm not one for exploding heads, but District 9 is a good movie and I can forgive.

Wikus is a hapless bureaucrat at a military contracting firm, sent into District 9 to serve eviction notices to one million aliens ("prawns") who've been living in squalor for 20 years ever since their mothership broke over Johannesburg. His opinion of the aliens varies from annoying pets to dangerous pests, depending on how they're behaving themselves. In his enthusiasm for routing out illegal activities in the slums, he exposes himself to some alien gunk and begins an icky transformation, and suddenly everyone's after him - to cut him up, to kill him, even to eat him.

That's when heads start exploding. Alien weapons will do that. But the more interesting story is Wickus' journey from a bumbling, casually racist desk jockey to a desperate hunted man forced to depend on the aliens, one in particular, for help.

The movie is filmed in gritty documentary style, for the most part, using news footage and interviews to effectively convey a sense of realism. Oh, and did I mention that it's gritty? I love gritty.

Like Moon, District 9 is a low-budget movie that relies more on story and character than special effects. I live in hope that the upcoming James Cameron movie Avatar, which cost many times more, strikes the same balance.

Man on the moon

Yesterday I saw Moon at The Loft, our local movie theater. We were in the upstairs screening room, which is even more loft-like than the lower. Small with fraying decor, and if you don't mind sitting up front you can lounge on bright red sofas.

I'd seen a couple of scenes from the movie online, before the musical score was added, so I already knew Moon was going to have a bit of a 2001: A Space Odyssey feeling about it. It certainly does feel retro. Director Duncan Jones also claims Alien, Silent Runing and Bladerunner as influences. The movie cost $5 million and is all the better for havng a low budget. The interior sets are wonderful, gritty and lived-in, just the way I like them. There are no expensive firefights or chase scenes - and really, who cares about those when the story stands on its own? Well, movie distributors care, so the movie will have no commercial success.

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), sole caretaker of Lunar Industries' mining operation on the far side of the moon that provides helium-3 for most of Earth's power needs, has two weeks left on his three-year contract. He's lonely and bored and can't wait to get back home to his wife. Gerty, a HAL-like robot that uses smiley faces to express emotion, is his only companion. Gerty is at first as sinister as you'd expect a robot voiced by Kevin Spacey to be, but admirably feigns compassion and other suitable emotions.

After an accident on the lunar surface, Sam wakes up in the infirmary with no memory of the incident. A few days later he recovers an injured man from a crashed rover - a duplicate Sam Bell in rapidly failing health. Sick Sam and Healthy Sam have to figure out what's going on - what the company is up to, whether there are any more Sam Bells, and what they're going to do about the situation.

There are no huge surprises, no twist ending, but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. In some respects Moon reminds me of a watered down The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Ursula Le Guin's short story), although by "watered down" I just mean that the main theme is played out on a smaller stage. I hope Duncan Jones remains on the path of making thoughtful science fiction movies, because hardly anyone else is walking it.

Vatta's War

I've been reading Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series. Currently finishing up book 3, Engaging the Enemy. The series revolves around Ky Vatta, daughter of an interstellar trading family, whose father gives her a ship after she's thrown out of Fleet Academy. The ship, though, is bound for the junk yard - not much of a first mission. Everything goes horribly wrong, of course, and by book 3 Ky is not so much trading as assembling a fleet of privateers to take on a bunch of pirates who are menacing the trade routes.

The books have a quasi-military feel but are mostly what I label "procedural" - very detailed descriptions of ship life (from the captain's perspective, anyway) including finances, trading deals and other interactions. The first third of the first book, for example, is simply a series of shopping trips to prepare for the voyage. The action amounts to only a handful of incidents in each book.

If I've made it sound kind of boring... well, this is not the usual guns-blazing all-out action you might expect from "sci-fi adventure", especially that with a military flavor, but I'm finding the series compelling for a whole other reason. The worlds are incredibly well realized, and it's easy and exciting to imagine what it might be like to live in them.

One gripe: no romance for poor Ky! She's too busy saving the galaxy...

Living long and prospering

Saw the new Star Trek movie today. Lots of fun, especially the first half as the characters were introduced. Halfway through I suddenly realized - no Scotty! (Yet.)

They have messed with Trek canon just a bit, but this is explained by [minor spoiler alert] a time-traveling accident that means all of the movie's events happen in an alternate timeline. Very convenient when it comes to future movies, because they can basically do what they like.

There was a fair attempt to establish relationships and personalities, but I don't think it went far enough (particularly between the Big Three - Kirk, Spock & McCoy). Still, as an introduction it was fine.

But the funny-faced ewok? BAD.