What good is building a classy brand if you can’t whore it out for big bucks?  Clothing manufacturers do it,  chefs add their names to canned soups.  Why not Imax?  The latest controversy is that “Imax” movies are being shown on relatively small screens, for full price.  The Imax experience used to mean one thing.  Giant screens, up close, with amazing picture quality.  But now they’re selling some of us something much less.  Something like [insert designer label] Express.  But the trick is, they don’t tell you which screens are the real Imax, and which are fake.  The story was reported back in October, but didn’t get much traction, then.  But Star Trek happened.  When you have a super-geeky, detail-obsessed audience paying extra for something, their going to look at their reciepts.  They noticed, and they don’t stay quiet.  Word spread through the blogosphere, and on Twitter.

I went to see Star Trek, for the second time, at the AMC Hoffman in Alexandria.  We went there because we wanted to see the movie on an Imax screen.  Sadly, the AMC Hoffman offers Fake Imax.  Now, it wasn’t a complete rip-off.  Fake Imax still looks better than the digital projection screen we’d seen it on the first time.  But it was a long ways from being a real Imax experience.

The movie itself holds up magnificently.  There is one long section, beginning from Kirk’s exit from the Enterprise, and going at least until he meets Scotty, that is just painfully bad.  A mish-mash of un-motivated action, stunning coincidence, and exceptionally bad physics/astronomy, I just had to bite my tongue and wait it out.  When the movie gets it’s feet back underneath it, the awesomeness returns.

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.

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.

Another campus humor website has posted a list of the 64 Manliest Movies to Date.  The list is not a bad collection of guy movies, but “guy movies” and “manly movies” are not at all the same thing.  Worse, the commentary shows a bit of confusion about what movies appeal to women.  Also, the list falls apart as it climbs to the top.

First, manly implies toughness.  Adventure is manly.  Heroics are manly.  Horror isn’t manly.  To enjoy horror, you have to let yourself be frightened and vulnerable.  Die Hard is manly.  Braveheart is Manly.  Gladiator is Manly.

Boobies, while awesome in almost every way, are not manly.  Even Woody Allen likes boobies.  A movie with boobies is a guy move, but not necessarily manly.  Porkys is not manly.  It’s funny, it’s a guy movie, but it’s not a manly movie.  Gator is a manly movie.

Also, really bad movies are not manly, not matter how much blood and gore is involved.  The remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre just sucked.  Boondock Saints is just ludicrous.  Not manly.

I realize I saw awesome too much.  To me, many things are awesome, at least in the moment.  Later the experience fades and I can compare the awesome moment with many other moments, and awesome fades to average.

The latest Bond movie, for instance.  We walked out of the theater, to a nearby restaurant, without anyone commenting.  Once seated, I said “I’ll open with a bid of ‘Awesome!’”  My snarkiest friend said she’d open with “pretty good.”  We turned to another friend who seemed to be resisting the urge to say anything.  Finally, “I did not like it,” he said.  He did not enjoy it in the least.

Talking about it, I realized I had seen many flaws, but had buried them while watching.  The plot runs on, there is an inconsistency in how the scenes are shot.  Some are over the top bids to be great art, and much of the action is too close up, like the Bourne Identity but without the intensity.  There is at least one character who is a complete throw-away.

But I had enjoyed it, hadn’t I?  I love the story between Bond and M.  The story started in Casino Royale, is carried forward here, and promises much more.  So I’m still loving the new Bond series.  Maybe that’s it.  Perhaps, even though this was not a good stand-alone movie, it still gave me the pleasure of being part of the ongoing story.  Like an average episode in a great television series, it still keeps you moving towards the next.

Speaking of movies with action, guys with whips, and an ancient artifact, I watched The Rundown again the other night.  Originally, I told people that it wasn’t a great movie, but I liked it.  But after seeing Indiana Jones fall apart with a huge budget because of an utter lack of story, I appreciate more the simple focus of Beck (the Rock) trying to bring Travis (Seann William Scott) home to his father.  The story never forgets that that is Beck’s primary motivation, even though he keeps getting pulled into other struggles.  In Crystal Skull, on the other hand, we’re not sure why Indy is doing what he’s doing as he bounces from one action set-piece to the next.  Duane Johnson’s Beck is an interesting character who could be either self-serving or heroic and you’re never sure which way he’ll go.  Sort of like Han Solo.  Harrison Ford’s Indy, on the other hand, has been thoroughly defined and explained.  He’ll do the right thing, as soon as he thinks of it.  And he’s afraid of snakes.  We get that.  All of the character development was done in the first and third movies, the only thing left here is to have him walk through his paces. 
    Then there’s Christopher Walken.  In any role, he’s fun to watch.  Even Domino was fun when Christopher Walken was in it.  This time, he’s the bad guy, and he’s perfect.  Where Cate Blanchett played a generic, slightly threatening Ukrainian bitch, Walken is the ultimate plantation-style overseer.  He has charm, but he’s ruthless.  Inside, he thinks he’s doing the right thing.  Then there’s the sidekick.  Indiana Jones has to develop tension with a punk biker, played moderately by Shia LaBouf.  But the two are neither much alike, nor are they natural antagonists.  Really, LaBouf serves mostly as an audience for the greatness of Indiana Jones.  Seann William Scott is a perfect foil for the Rock.  He’s annoying, funny, and obviously in trouble.  The plot puts them at odds, and both play that very well.
    I had thought of The Rundown as one of those movies that I really like, but understand that they aren’t that good.  Like Hitman, Resident Evil, and Blade Trinity.  But now I’ve changed my mind.  This is a genuinely really good movie.