Monthly Archives: March 2023

Movie Review: 65

 

Movie Review: 65

Adam Driver plays a pilot from an alien civilization that crashes on Earth 65 million years ago at the end of cretaceous period and must save himself and his sole surviving passenger while fighting off dinosaurs.

That single sentence description far more action and entertainment than the delivers. I went into the auditorium expecting a fun, mindless, ‘popcorn movie’ but discovered that 65 failed to deliver anything approaching even the barest minimums of engagement. It would be difficult for me to remember a screening that had left me as bored as this one.

Driver’s character, Mills, is given a perfunctory and cliche backstory, presumably to create emotional engagement and to misdirect the audience as to the exact nature of his emotional distress. After encountering another tired, worn, and idiotic cinematic cliche from bad 50’s Sci-Fi films, the ‘uncharted meteor storm,’ his ship is disabled and crashes on cretaceous Earth, an equally ‘uncharted’ planet. The passengers, all in some sort of hibernating sleep capsules, are killed save for the one that will have emotional resonance with Mills. However, this star-faring race with faster than light travel apparently never invented a manifest and so he has no idea who she is, where she’s from, or even which languages she might possibly be familiar with. Now this ersatz father-daughter duo must transverse on foot less than 10 miles to escape this deadly planet.

What should have been a sequence of set pieces with thrills, tension, and scares quickly becomes a tedious pattern of nothing exciting. Oh, Mills and the girl do face danger at every turn but nothing that was supposed to be tense ever possessed the least amount of actual tension. Mills has advanced technology to assist, except for when the scrip requires it to fail, which it does just long enough to cause trouble and then the tech resumes proper function. There is a piece with a waterfall that I honestly thought. “Oh, they ripped this off from the Universal Studio’s ride, and the ride did it better.”

The third act bring in the Chicxulub impactor, the asteroid hypnotized to have cause the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, as an additional ‘ticking clock’ and a futile attempt to inject tension into the flaccid fairytale.

Nothing that happens in 65 is in the least bit surprising, original, or even entertaining. It is a movie constructed of bit and bobs from better films and wasted 90 minutes of my limited time on the planet.

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Animal Cruelty in Film and that Kangaroo Hunt

 

 

It has been more than a week since I watched Wake in Fright and the film remains in my thoughts. I have sought out and listened podcasts discussing the film, its troubled launch, its status as a ‘lost movie,’ and its eventual rediscovery, restoration, and honors from the likes such as Martin Scorsese.

No aspect of the film is more controversial that the third act Kangaroo hunt depicted in savage, revolting realism because it was an actual, government sanctioned, kangaroo hunt.

The film’s director, Ted Kotcheff, is a vegetarian and reportedly, even at the time, quite concerned with animal rights. It is quite clear that nothing in the hunt is filmed in such a way as to glorify its violence or brutality. The sequence, critical to the character’s arc, is about John Grant’s final descent into a mindless, drunken state that surrenders all pretense of civility, rationality, and Ash in Alien might pronounce, ‘all delusions of morality.’

The controversy is could have Kotcheff, already a veteran director with three feature film and more than a dozen television episode under his belt, achieved the same dramatic and moral effect with a simulated hunt?

The cinematic technology of 1971 hasn’t yet dreamed of the fantastic capabilities computer generated imagery and Jaws with its robotic shark lay 4 years in future and with a budget 8 times that available to Kotcheff. Given the technological and budgetary a graphic, ‘in your face’ depiction of the Kangaroo hunt could only have been achieved with a real slaughter.

Was the goal worth the killing?

That’s a question without a clear objective answer. The hunt was not conducted for the film’s benefit. It was an already scheduled event that would have transpired with or without the production’s participation. Not filming it would have prevented no cruelty, It could be argued that the production taking part in the hunt actually saved some Kangaroos.

There are reports that the hunters drank heavily and in a drunken state began carelessly and cruelly wounding the animals and that this so offended and sicked the production team that they engineered a ‘power failure’ stopping the hunt. It is also possible that the presence of the production helped to encourage the drinking and rowdiness contributing to the violent orgy. We can’t know what would have happened without the production present.

How about the audience? It that level of graphic content necessary to provoke a response?

For people already concerned or disposed to care about animal cruelty, that level of graphic repulsive violence is not required. But perhaps for the large percentage of the population who gives it little or no thought, what have not experienced or envisioned what slaughter and cruelty actually look like, it might need that stomach turning sequence to shake them out of their complacency. Had Wake in Fright been a massive international box office hit it may have sparked an awareness in the public in the manner that Jaws launched a hatred and killing of sharks that the novel’s author regretted for the rest of his life. However, with the film not finding acclaim or success until the next century any impact from its intention is minimal to non-existent.

We can say at least Kotcheff tried to make a statement, an impression, to awaken public apathy to animal cruelty but another film has none of those reasons or excuses for its on-screen brutality to animals.

Michael Crichton’s 1979 film The Great Train Robbery, adapted from his own bestselling novel is a fictionalized account of a daring gold heist in Victorian England. One sequence of the film involves find the moral weakness in what appears to be an incorruptible man and that failing turns out to be ‘he’s a ratting gent.’

Ratting is the brutal sport of betting on terriers in a pit with rats and wagering on how many rats the dog can kill.

Crichton says on the laserdisc commentary that he was unaware that they would be filming actual ratting until they reached the set but if he knew in advance or not I still find it reprehensible. The sequences served no greater purpose in the film than to uncover this man weakness. It was not an advancement of the protagonist’s emotional growth or understanding, it was not to shock sensibility into the audience. It is a cruelty that I consider wholly unjustified.

I am conflicted about the hunt in Wake in Fright but not at all about the ratting in The Great Train Robbery. Film is wonderful and wonderous, but it does not justify abuse and cruelty to animals or people.

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I don’t Normally Comment on The Oscars

 

It’s not that I have some great animosity towards the Academy Awards nor is my silence a protest over to whom the awards are presented. There are a great many overlooked films and persons involved in film production with many unjustly not considered for these elaborate peer group affirmations. That’s what all awards are, peer-groups reflecting the pride and prejudices of their times and members expressing collective opinions about what they approved of. These are not objective measures but as with everything associated with the arts subjective impressions and reactions.

A24 Studios

With all that said, it warms my awards cold heart that Everything Everywhere All at Once took home so many of those little golden funny men this year.

EEAO won the Best Picture, Best Director, Supporting Actor and Actress, Lead Actress, Original Screenplay, and Editing. That is an impressive sweep and for a genre film that sways from the deeply profound about the existential dread that can lie at the heart of human existence to very silly gags about butt-plug powered martial arts, those wins are ever more impressive and less likely.

It is no secret that in the arts, stage, screen, television, and publishing, genre material, science-fiction, fantasy, and horror is often cast out to a ghetto. All too often the entity of the genre is judged as no better than its worst example. For EEAO to overcome that bias is a true achievement. EEAOwore its genre proudly on its sleeve. There was no fuzziness about its categorization with terms like, ‘elevated horror’ or ‘psychological thriller’ deployed to justify celebrating a horror film such as The Silence of the Lambs. This movie shouted its geekiness and its absurdity while pulling tears from our eyes with the truth that merely living is simultaneously both joy and agony.

We can quibble and debate which person should have won this or that award but for the moment let’s just celebrate that for this brief shining moment genre is seen as equally worthy of respect as any ‘normal’ dramatic tale.

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My Strange Relationship with The Last of Us

 

A new prestige television series from the creator of the fantastic Chernobyl? You would think that I would be right there every Sunday evening, devouring the newest episodes.

The truth is that zombies of all stripes have worn rather thin for me, particularly the setting of the zombie apocalypse. Yes, I know that these are not technically zombies, they are not magically reanimated corpses but aggressive, disease-infected individuals. The cast looks

HBO

fantastic and there’s no doubt that the series is winning praise from both within and without of the genre communities. And yet I really am not interested in watching it. I never played the game. Games with prolonged story arcs are less appealing to me due to their intense commitment in time. I play first person shooters, never completing their ‘campaigns’ but simply enjoying the on-line matches against hyper-competent players who nearly always leave me beaten and broken.

So, it sounds like I have no relationship with TLOU, but that’s not accurate either.

Craig Mazin, the principal writer and showrunner, co-hosts a fantastic podcast on screenwriting called Scriptnotes. For Chernobyl he launched a companion podcast for the limited series to help illuminate the history and where the show explored fiction. The podcast was a success and helped promote the series and naturally HBO wanted another for The Last of Us.

So, without watching a single episode of the series, or having played the game one second, I am a devoted listener to the series’ companion podcast.

The podcast features Mazin, Druckman ho was the creative force behind the game and co-runs the series with Mazin, and the voice actor who first gave life to one the game’s and show’s principal characters, Joel. Episodes by episode they break down what happens, why they made the creative decisions that they did in staying true to the game or driving far afield from it, and expounding on, in their view, what makes foe compelling stories.

While I may not be interested in fungal zombies overrunning the world, I am thoroughly and utterly fascinated by the process by which that premise becomes so compelling to so many and the secrets of the story telling craft these men so clearly understand.

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Terrible Days Lay Ahead

Terrible Days Lay Ahead

I have been voting since the 1980 elections and throughout that time there have been those that conflate ‘conservative’ with ‘fascist.’ To be fair it was with equal abandonment that ‘liberal’ was conflated with ‘communist.’ Both conflations were the product of the ‘us’ vs ‘them’ mentality that required political opponents be treated as enemies rather than people with different views, opinion, and premises. A natural consequence is that the weight of those terms evaporated. If everything conservatives, right or wrong, is fascist by sheer frequency of occurrence fascism becomes more commonplace and therefore less terrible.

Now, the fascists that always hid inside conservatism have taken the movement and its devices. This was not a bolt from the blue because of a single presidential candidate or election. This is the result of decades of tolerating hatred, bigotry, and cruelty because it yielded electoral benefits. Eradicating fascism from American political life will be long, arduous, path requiring an unending commitment to its defeat at every level.

Because this is a long war, dark days are coming.  The fascist war on people, currently the focus is on the Transgendered community, but should they win, they will move against their next target, is not a war about any sort of sane policy or principled stand. The fascists, as fascists have always done, are fixated on myth, lies, and a history that never existed. They have created a prior existence and view of the world that is no more real that Camelot’s Court or Wakandan Science.

From 1980 through 2003 I was a registered Republican, though I scarcely agreed with everything the party argued for. (IF you do agree 100% with a political party I seriously doubt that you are critically considering all aspects and are more of an ‘us’ vs ‘them’ mentality.) To me it was clear that the growing authoritarian movement within the GOP was ascendant when they embraced torture of prisoners. A political philosophy capable of torture is capable of any terrible atrocity. The intervening two decades has only strengthened my conviction on this matter.

The fascists are going to win some of the battle ahead. There will be setbacks for liberty and freedom. At times all will seem lost, but we must never stop fighting. Only by thoroughly crushing this poisonous ideology and idolatry can we move forward to a future where everyone can live their true authentic lives.

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The Rig: Concluding Review

 

Two months ago I posted a review of the streaming series The Rig about ancient threats from Amazon Studiosthe ocean’s floor endangering the crew of a North Sea Oil Rig. At the time I called the first couple of episodes an intriguing start.

Sadly, I can’t say that the season ended well.

It did not end terribly either.

It sort of petered out, revealing some things, establishing its deeper mythos and lore, but clearly more focused on a second, or possibly even more, season that crafting a tale well told.

I do not insist that every season of a multi-part project be presented as a complete story. Game of Thrones first season certainly ended with loads of unresolved plotlines, but it also had a finality to it that gave it a sense of ending. The Stark’s time in King’s Landing had ended, that chapter was done, and the tragedy had befallen the family.

The Rig, while superficially, presenting the same sort of season close had none of that emotional weight. The oil rig is abandoned, some characters survived, some did not, but none of it felt like a close. It reeked of ‘cliff hanger,’ something I truly despise.

Endings are critical. I personally cannot start writing a short story or novel without knowing the ending. It is the culmination of all those hours of reading and watching. It is the treasure that is the artist’s gift to the reader and audience. It is the bow that completes the wrapping.

An ending doesn’t have to be ‘happy.’ Michael’s at the conclusion of The Godfather is far from happy. He has become everything he said he was not, but that transformation is the point and that’s what we see fully realized in the ending.

The Rig gave me nothing but the dangling thread that more was to come but without the character arc, without the human transformation, more to come is far from enticing.

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Streaming Review: Wake in Fright (1971)

 

Adapted from Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel of the same title Wake in Fright is a psychological horror set in the vast Australian Outback, centered on machismo as a smokescreen for insecurity.

John Grant (Gary Bond) is a young, timid, and naive man teaching school in the isolated settlement of Tiboonda. As a condition for receiving a college education from the Australian government John posted a $1000 bond pledging to serving two years as a teacher in the arid, isolated, Outback. During the scorching Christmas break John leaves Tiboonda on his six-week holiday with visions of Sydney, beaches, and Robyn filling his dreams. During an evening’s stopover in the somewhat larger city of Bundanyabba, dubbed ‘The Yabba’ by locals, John crumples under peer pressure to drinking and gambling. He awakes to find that he has lost all his money, cannot fly out to Sydney, and must survive the Yabba and its drunken, rowdy, men.

Wake in Fright is a study of men without hope, without futures, for whom the entirety of the universe has collapsed down to a singularity of drink, gambling, and violence with even sex relegated to a mere after thought. John’s timidness and naivete and his attempts to break the cycle of drunkenness fails utterly under to social pressures of burly men who measure their manliness in the ability to drink and fight. There are few women that John encounters in the Yabba, barmaids and counter clerks, with the exception being Jeanette, a woman for whom the men of the Yabba have scarred and who seems more of a shattered shell than a fully realized person.

The themes and metaphors of Wake in Fright come crashing together in the Kangaroo Hunt. John, having drunkenly boasted of his shooting skills, accompanies two rowdies and the Yabba alcoholic doctor (Donald Pleasence) into the wilds to hunt kangaroo. This is no measure, careful display of skill and wilderness craft. It is men nearly too inebriated to stand, tearing through the arid landscape in a battered automobile, slaughtering the animals they encounter. It is not for food or sustenance but a display a savage cruelty inflicted on the helpless.

(It should be noted that this sequence will be very disturbing to many people as it is not a simulated kangaroo hunt but one that the filmmakers captured from reality, save for the Kangaroo wrestling sequence in the evening. The Kangaroo Hunt is the most controversial aspect to the feature and weather is finds the filmmakers intended purpose of revolting the audience against the practice or glorifying it will reside in the mind of the viewer. It has been reported that the film crew engineered a ‘power failure’ to stop the hunt. Personally, I found it revolting but believed it could have been achieved by less cruel means.)

Director Ted Kotcheff and Cinematographer Brian West have achieved an admirable effort in capturing the dusty, isolating, and scorching heat of the Australian Outback. The audience is as alien to the setting as John Grant. Even in the comfort of my living room on a cool evening the photography and setting felt hot, dry, and oppressive. West utilized wide lenses, just shy of being fisheye, to not only capture the vast panorama of nothing that is the Outback but also inducing a mild edge of frame distortion that kept the film unreal and unsettling.

Gary Bond is credible as Grant but at 30 perhaps just a bit too old for the recent college graduate and naive character. Pleasence chews up the scenery as the drunken, chaotic, and destitute doctor. The doctor is a character who has abandoned all pretense that he might become a better person, and instead has surrendered himself to his vices, addictions, and fleeting whims.

Wake in Fright is a searing indictment of toxic masculinity long before that term took hold in popular culture. Not a traditional horror film, perhaps not even a folk horror, Wake in Fright‘s lies in the human heart, the condition that pushes men to surrender to their worst impulses and desires. Surprisingly free of sexualized violence, this film and its theme is about the violence we do to ourselves when we surrender out self-control.

Wake in Fright is currently streaming on Shudder.

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A Trip to the Zoo

 

Over the weekend a new lens I ordered arrive and I had a chance to try it out on the weekly Zoo trip.

I seem to have about the usual ratio of photos taken to photos work showing, that is to say 1 photograph in ten was somewhat decent.

In the new children’s section, (there was one before, but this was a massive redesign) we found an enclosure with a pair of Western Burrowing Owls.

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s one the Zoo’s gorillas, looking very much like the old man of the mountains.

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s a small monkey that appears very contemplative.

 

 

 

 

 

And though the quality if the last photo is lacking I’m happy to have the pic of a Fishing Cat. We’ve been going to the Zoo for years and this animal is very shy, rarely visible in his enclosure. Often the best you get is a bit of the tail or a leg exposed from its’ hiding spot. Sunday however we caught the cutie walking around. Sadly he settled on a ledge that had terrible lighting and I had to push the ISO to 1600 and artificially open up the exposure to get anything decent at all.

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Concerning Chocolate Factories and Super-Spies

 

 

Last month a controversy erupted with the publishers of Roald Dahl’s children’s books announce that new editions of the classic novels were to be released with the language modified for current sensibilities.

It was reported that the changes were guided by sensitivity readers from an organization called Inclusive Minds. Sensitivity readers are people from a community that helps authors and artists to walk the minefield of art that takes place or utilizes communities outside of the author’s personal experiences. Just as with editors sensitivity readers can be a tremendous boon to a work, helping to avoid serious, ignorant, or even hurtful mistakes, but not all sensitivity readers are equal, and some are not up for the tasks for which they have been engaged. This is even more exponentially true when dealing with collectives where individuals may be incentivized to find more and more examples of problematic language or scenes to ‘validate’ their own sensitivity.

Another group if sensitivity readers working for another publisher has recommended changes and deletions to the Bond franchise of novels written by Ian Fleming. Again, this is an attempt to bring these works into accordance with modern sensibilities. These, like Dahl’s writings, are notmodern works. The period is which they were written and published does not, in any manner, excuse their racism or their sexism.

There are those of the period that criticized these works but the works as they were written and published are historical artifacts of what was acceptable at that time. To change them is to lie about what was acceptable, to lie about the history of what became popular, wildly popular. These altered texts, done without the artists input, advice, or consent, are not the texts. They are adaptations fraudulently presented as the texts.

Roald Dahl has been dead for 33 years, and Ian Fleming for 59 years neither man profits from these changes and therein to my eyes lies the real trouble, what we have done to copyright.

The publishers and the estates of these men have the legal right to do whatever they wish with these novels and creations because we have lengthened copyright absurdly. Life of the author plus an additional 70 years means that James Bond doesn’t begin to fall into publics domain for another 11 years and it will be another 37 for Dahl’s works. If both these collections were in the public domain then people who believe in the alterations could produce their editions and other could continue to produce the original texts and both needs could be satisfied, but this insane extension of ownership three generations beyond their creators has distorted everything beyond reason.

I am not defending any of Dhal’s choices, actually I have never read those children’s novels, and I am revulsed that Bond as a character feels that rape has a ‘sweet tang.’ These works have serious issues but serious issues do not vanished by sweeping them out of sight.

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Movie Review: Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania

 

 

The Marvel Cinematic Universe released its 31st feature film with Ant-man & The Wasp: Quantumania boasting an impressive cast, a fantastic adventure, a realty-twisting setting, and lacking in emotional weight.

As shown in the trailer, our heroes as pulled into the fantasy setting of the Quantum Realm by an ill-advised experiment and there must discover a way home while dealing with a new threat to the MCU.

Directed by Payton reed who helmed the previous two, and quite enjoyed, Ant-Man entries into the MCU, and written by Jeff Loveness, as his feature film screenwriting debut, Quantumania has action but feels empty. The element that had elevated MCU movies above other attempts at silver screen adaptations of comic book heroes is the devotions to characters and story. Even,

Disney Studios

or perhaps more importantly, the lighter films such as the Ant-Man franchise have never forgotten that it is related characters with relatable issues that engaged the audiences. In the first film Scott Lang certainly battles and defeats villainous characters but it is in healing his relationship with his family that mattered. In the second movie family again is at the heart of the story with the rescue of Janet from the Quantum Realm and the found family of Bill Foster and Ghost.

Quantumania has no such theme. The characters enter and exit their adventure unchanged, showing no arc, no growth, no emotional scars for their challenges. This movie, like a bad Bond, is all plot (How do we escape? How do we win?) and no story (Who are we and what does this matters to us?).

Screenwriter C. Robert Cargill who wrote the first Doctor Strange film when asked about how much integrating he was told to do for that movie reported that the directive was write the best Doctor Strange movie he could, and the studio would worry about how it all fit into the MCU.

Quantumania feels the exact opposite of that. It is all set-up, exposition, and establishment for further franchise forays and sacrifices everything on the screen that might resonate with an audience for that overarching goal.

When I walked out of Quantumania and had lunch with my sweetie-wife I placed this film in the third quarter of the MCU’s feature film but as the days have passed and less and less of the film remains in my head to any impact, I must categorize this is belonging in the lowest quarter of the MCU. I have seen worse big budget massively produced movies but for Marvel this is a miss.

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