Monthly Archives: April 2009

Colossus: The Forbin Project

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If literature tells us anything, it’s that as soon as Google achieves sentience, it will destroy us.  The theme has been pretty well explored, from 2001, A Space Odyssy, to Battlestart Galactica.  We create something intelligent, and it rises up and destroys us.  This summer, Skynet will take another shot.  Maybe Mary Shelley thought of this first.  If you can adjust to the writing style, it’s still one of the best tellings of the story — second only to Battlestar Galactica.

One version of the story was the movie, Colossus, that came out in 1970.  Steeped in both cold war paranoia and 50s-style scientist-hero myth, this could have been done as a Twilight Zone episode.  A really good episode.  This is not an action movie, or an atmospheric horror piece.  It’s more of a deconstruction of the confident, proud scientist soldier, holding up under the pressure of a creation gone bad.

Colossus is a giant computer, designed to take over control of all the country’s strategic missiles.  Thus, there would be a precise, objective response to any attack.  Viewers may instantly think this is a bad idea, but the confidence of the scientists seems very reassuring.  Even though we know things will go wrong, we sort of believe they did the right thing.  They figured it out, and they have excellent vision.  But Colossus finds a buddy, the Soviets have built one also.

The progress of bad things is done without the usual pyrotechnics, but feels real and inexorable.  After nuking one town in Russia, the computers can order humans to do pretty much anything.  How the good looking, super-smart scientist tries to fight this takeover is a fairly well-grounded game between humans and computers.  No “24″ style plot-magic here, almost every move and counter-move sounds like what people would really do.

The direction this movie takes at the end raises it to a higher level.  This is a movie that pulls no punches, and may reflect our relationship with many of the great technologies we’ve created, then become dependent upon.  Twilight Zone had some pretty damn good stories, stories that didn’t just scare us, but looked a bit closer at our relationship to the world around us.  This movie, though not a big-budget masterpiece like 2001, really gets to the relationship between creator and created, much like Mary Shelley did.

Mongol: review

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It’s hard to argue with the weight of critical opinion, not to mention Oscar nominations. But I will argue.

Mongol loses points for being, essentially, a love story. We have lots of love stories. Anybody can be the subject of a love story. Complex love stories can also be woven into to tales of great human events. But love is not what’s interesting about Genghis Khan. Sure, he loved his wife. And liked his other wives. But he also united a bunch of nomadic tribes, conquered a whole bunch of Asia, and created an empire.

Genghis Khan was a great military tactician, master of alliances, a leader who could inspire loyalty in not only his own people, but in those who had recently defeated. He created an effective systems of administration, and helped create the Silk Road, which was important to several civilizations. The movie didn’t really get this. There were battle scenes, but they were personal. Genghis Khan was probably a good warrior, but that’s not what elevated him above all the other warriors of his time.

There was one large battle, but the movie attributed the victory more to mysticism and thunder than anything else.

The acting was quite good, and some of the sequences were compelling, but the geography quickly got lost. As action moved back and forth, over the years, there was no sense of how large an area was being covered, or of the relationship between the different locations.

Review: Crank 2, High Voltage

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I love this movie.  I’m unable to say why.  I can link superlatives together, describe awesome over-the-top scenes, but the magic is in the attitude.  From the opening credits which took the last scene from the first movie and did it 8-bit video-game format, we knew exactly what level to take the movie.  Everything after that was crazy-ludicrous.

At some point, when a shoot-out in strip club is the obvious next scene, there are, for no apparent reason, strippers shooting automatic weapons.  It’s not the last time strippers show up to a firefight, and no explanation is given.  You don’t need one in a movie like this.

This is the kind of movie where you can take a living head out of the tank of fluid in which it was living, and drop kick into the pool.  It makes perfect sense.  And, when Chilios calls the doctor and finds out that one way he can re-charge the internal battery that is powering his temporary artificial heart is by rubbing up against someone else, you think: of course.  Of course that would be it.

The movie may not be a great movie, not in terms of storytelling anyway.  But it is art.  There are so many moments here, like being trapped in a police car by protesting porn stars.  These are the moments I can talk about.  But the greatest scene, for me, was the completely incomprehensible shift to classic Japanese monster movie.  No reason, it’s just that they could, and it works.

Two final words: Chicken and Broccoli.

Polymorph

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I just finished watching Polymorph, a straight-to-video cheapie made in 1996, for a budget that must have been under $100,000.  It was a pretty standard mish-mash of alien body-snatcher, psycho drug dealers, and the band of attractive interns that alway seem to attract killing.

I gave it five stars on Netflix.  The acting was actually pretty good, the action kept moving, and the denoument worked.

[Next day] I had to come back and add a note to this “review”.  This movie grew on me overnight.  Sure, it’s barely more than a student film in terms of production quality, but the plot, which seems pretty simple, has a bit of depth.  It takes the viewer on a journey, a fairly short journey maybe, but one that undercuts your assumptions.  And, though some of the conflict scenes were pretty over the top, and some of the emotive stuff a bit messy, it felt as if it was at least trying to imitate real life rather than other movies in the genre.  The balance of forces was perfect for the tension built.

I started watching the movie as if were a Sci-Fi original (don’t know what we’ll do when they change their name to Syphyllys Fy), using it as background while I worked on my laptop.  But, soon enough, I was engaged.  Put the laptop down and wait for what happens next.  A lot of movies with much higher production values fail this simple test.

Save Dollhouse? Only if you promise to make it better!

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Betty Page Shows How to Handle a Whip

Last night, someone mistakenly thought that Eliza Dushku would look convincing as a dominatrix.  She didn’t.  She looked like that mousy girl who shows up at parties and tries to get attention even though she’s actually not that smart.  So she tries dressing in ways completely out of character and is just more awkard.

But she did the right thing for most of the show, stood around a waved.  Dollhouse is going off the rails, after a very brief period of actually being good.  It’s a shame because there were actually a couple good scenes in the episode:

  • Helo finding out that his lasagna-bearing neighborly girl-friend is actually a sleeped doll.  That scene was very compelling, even sad.  His character is great, because he sort of has that “beautiful mind” level of obsession, but when he turns around it turns out that even the person he trusts is part of “them.”
  • Echo doing the interrogation of the staff.  Usually Eliza Dushku (spelling may vary) seems out of her depth, but she seemed to carry this segment off pretty well.  But, as some sort of compensatory effect, Sierra crossed over from cool to ludicrous.  Only Victor was still engaging.

But there were so many bad parts:

  • Dominic was not that convincing as head of security, he was even less convincing as an NSA plant.  It’s not the actor’s fault, the scripts gave him wildly inconsistent motives from show to show, and the explanation for being an agent was too thin for even this kind of show.
  • Echo was once again, at the end of the show, lauded as being ‘special’.  Why?  Because she gave Tofu an idea?  She is seriously becoming the stupid one that everybody likes so they act like anything she does is just brilliant.  Even though everyone knows better.
  • That chip.  In this universe, apparently, anybody who is technically smart can identify a piece of average-looking electronics as “super-secret NSA” stuff.  Not only that, but why do these fall off of agents and get found?  Do they flake off the skin?
  • The gun shot.  Really?  He shot her, blood splatter across the window, and it turned out to be a small puncture wound?

McDonald’s Versus Long John Silver

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Once again I’ve got “Give me back my little fish” stuck in my head.  I’m not sure that’s the actual lyric, but it doesn’t matter.  You know it, the McDonald’s fish song.  Long John Silver tried to bust out with a new series of commercials that pretty much attack the McDonald’s Fillet O’ Fish sandwich.  The commercials went product to product, using the best line-that-should-have-worked: “Is that even fish?”

We’ll set aside for a moment the one astonishingly bad idea, the theme of splashing the customer with water.  Everything else about the commercial should have completely sold us on how much better and tastier the LJS product is.  More fish-like.

But with fast food, the actual substance rarely matters.  McDonald’s isn’t selling us fish.  If you want fish, go to a sea-food restaurant.  McDonald’s is selling a combination of magic and crave-satisfaction.  Setting the actual food product aside, would rather get splashed with a bucket of water while holding a tray full of food?  Or would you rather eat something, with obvious satisfaction, while the magical fish sings to you?  And, to top it off, your friend comes in and watches you with envy?  Because he’s not in the secret magic-singing-fish club.

McDonald’s wins with the most important fast-food demographics:

  • Kids love magic.  They don’t care if what they eat is closer to real food, as long as it’s breaded, salty, and reminds them of a magical singing fish who wants part of its body back.
  • Stoners need satisfaction.  Late-night stoners and drunks want something that will give them that sense of satisfaction you see on the guy’s face, as he stares down the singing fish.
  • Parents want their kids to shut up.  See point #1
  • Cubicle rats want something they can take back to their desk.  Something that doesn’t seem too messy.  The fillet o’ fish may not be food, but it looks tidy.  LJS splashes you and your food with a bucket of water.

I Didn’t Know it Was Supposed to Be Embarrassing!

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I’ve been looking for a new roommate, which can be a painful process.  Like dating, but without any possibility of sex.  I was corresponding with one woman, who seemed really interested, and she asked me my age.  I told her.  She said, and I quote:

“Thank you for your honesty, but…”

WTF?  Okay, there are several things wrong with this.  First, was she looking for a roommate or romance?  Maybe a new BFF?  Whatever, apparently it had an age cap.  The funny thing is, a lot of people would accept that as perfectly normal.  Why allow anyone who is outside my generation into my world?  Why not live in the eternal world of Gap commercials, interacting only with people who are within a few years of my age?  Because it makes you parochial.   Or provincial.  Whichever.

I’ve always had a lot of friends who were older, younger, more conservative, more liberal, and from many different cultures and backgrounds.  People who believe they grow best in a world populated only with near-them clones are usually due for a shock.  At some point, they will encounter a world of people who don’t share their beliefs, their predilections.  I was at dinner once with a bunch of people.  A woman, visiting from out of town, came from a sequestered liberal environment.  She was not the most liberal person at the table, and she wasn’t in the minority.  But she went into shock because her beliefs were not held by everyone in the group.

Of course you might say that, even if you want friends who are different, you’d like a roommate who is pretty much the same.  But that brings us to the second f’d up thing.  She thanked me for my honesty.  Implying I was admitting to something less then pure about myself.  My age is higher than hers, so I should just be more embarrassed about myself.  Really?  She’s in her 20s.  Should people outside of that bracket be hidden away?  Trotted out only for family gatherings where they can be socially placed and excused?  It’s not just her, I really see this in a lot of twenty-something culture.  They see the world as a playground that is only ruined by older people.  I was like that, myself, as a teenager.  But then I grew up a little, joined the world of adults.