Deep-Thought's Reviews

Caronte (2017)

24 May 2023

Caronte is the Italian, Portuguese and Spanish name of Charon, the boatman of Hades, who appears in numerous versions of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. It's also the name of a computer game being played by Debbie's younger brother Nicholas in the real world: it's the name of the fighter spacecraft the computer character Lieutenant Arsys commandeers with which she escapes an alien space battleship and flees home while fighting off the full force of the alien space fleet. Debbie is the stereotypical sullen, peevish, self-involved adolescent: concerned only about herself, her cell phone, and her social media. She is especially rude to her younger brother Nicholas, whom she sees as nothing but a nuisance, and in fact this is not surprising, because Nicholas IS an annoying little twerp. He is constantly making weirdly superstitious statements like, "If I can cross the street while stepping only on the white lines, we'll have chips for dinner," or, "If I can score 3 times in a row, you'll automatically pass." No 11-year-old I've ever known, including myself, acts like that. It's a plot contrivance, and not a felicitous one. The irksome Nicholas takes the game wherever he goes, including the back seat of a moving car, where Debbie rudely rebuffs Nicholas's plea for help finishing the game, which leads to the last (and crucial) annoying superstitious remark: "If I can finish these last two levels before the sun goes down, Debbie will always be with me." Again: what normal 11-year-old boy says things like that? (In fact, the sun already IS down, but we'll skip over that.) But it's the bit of dialogue that motivates the final part of the plot, because after Debbie is left the only survivor of a disastrous automobile accident, she feels bitter remorse at the way she took her family and her brother for granted.

So "Caronte" is the interweaving of two stories: The real world of Debbie and Nicholas, and the computer-game world of "Caronte." It's a great idea, but its execution falls short. The Arsys sequences are fantastic, but they lose quite a bit of their excitement by being intercut with the distractingly slow pace of the real-world scenes. When the computer-game scenes are viewed by themselves, with the Debbie-and-Nicholas scenes cut out, they are absolutely spectacular, much more so than when they are interrupted by the real-world story. The idea here, obviously, is to contrast the two stories by meaningfully alternating between them, but each story does not provide the best counterpoint to the other story.

This short is definitely worth watching (on YouTube), but despite all the fireworks and the skill that went into making it, it is just not quite satisfying. Still, I would love to see the Arsys story fleshed out into a full-length film. The juxtaposing-contrast plot of the short, I think, would be extremely difficult to develop to feature-film length.

(Note: Melina Matthews, who plays Arsys, is Spanish but speaks perfect British English because her father is Welsh. Everyone else speaks perfect American English, so you'd think that the film was made in the States, but in fact it was made in Spain, where the Lardner kids, who play Debbie and Nicholas, also live.)

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The Favourite (2018)

5/10

Decent script, well acted, but just not that good

12 January 2022

"The Favourite" is not your grandad's period piece. Queen Anne was the last monarch of the House of Stuart to reign over the British. This was pre-Victorian, and this film is post-Victorian, meaning that while the couture and the architecture are elegant and grand, not much of anything else is. Is this humorous exaggeration to the point of absurdity, or is this the way it really was? It may be more like it really was than we'd like to think. In fact, it's a parade of cynical, conniving, vulgar, spiteful, loathsome characters. It's also gloriously foul-mouthed; in particular, there is liberal use of two ancient English words that are considered so vulgar that they did not appear in a standard English dictionary until the 1970s.

Nevertheless, despite all that, despite it's being well written and well acted, with major stars of British and American cinema, its parts never quite add up to a satisfying whole. Instead, the sum of its parts is pallid entertainment. The promised dazzle and sparkle are almost but not quite there; you wait for them to bloom, but they never do.

British and Australian actors can do convincing American accents, whereas I find the opposite not to be true; however, Emma Stone's British accent sounds quite convincing. What a native Brit would think, I don't know. Anyhow, I was quite disappointed; I expected to enjoy this film, but it didn't deliver.

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Total Recall (I) (2012)

4/10

Nonstop action that wears mighty thin

2 November 2021

This is the second film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," and it owes more to the first "Total Recall" with Arnold Schwarzenegger than the original story, which has no violence, only the threat of violence, and that is brief and understated; the story is all dialogue. Both movies (loosely - very loosely) follow the plot until about two-thirds in, when Quaid goes to Rekall, Incorporated, to be implanted with false memories of a trip to Mars. From there on, the violence-drenched plots are a complete departure from the story: they are wholly the inventions of the filmmakers. The original story really does explore the question of true and false memories. Most of that doesn't make it into the films, which are rock-'em, sock-'em, hyperkinetic shoot-'em-ups. As Quaid/Hauser, when Colin Farrell is not shooting, dodging bullets, or engaging in hand-to-hand combat, he is jumping from things and landing on other things, more often than not glass ceilings or windows that shatter. That's the problem with this film, and it's the filmmakers' fault, especially director Len Wiseman: The nonstop action quickly wears thin and becomes drearily monotonous. The film would have been much better with maybe half as much violence as it contains, if not less; that would have made the violence and the nonviolent interludes much more meaningful, and the fight choreographers would not have run out of invention before the end, which they obviously do. But I guess a thoughtful movie was not what the filmmakers were after.

Quaid's name is Quail in the original story. His wife's name is Kirsten, which was not a popular girl's name when the story was written. Her name is Lori in both films. It's not clear whether Kirsten is in on the deception or not; she doesn't try to kill Quail, she just dumps him. The character of Melina was created for the 1990 Total Recall. In the 2012 version, you wonder why the two roles were cast with two actresses (Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel) who bear more than a passing resemblance to each other, down to their hair and clothing. In the Arnold version, it was easy to tell the difference between blonde bombshell Sharon Stone and black-haired, fiery sex goddess Rachel Ticotin, and in any case, the two characters lived on different planets, unlike here (and the original story), where Mars is only talked about, not shown.

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The Chair (2021)

8/10

Maddeningly funny

26 September 2021

If you are sick and tired of decades and decades of Americans not listening to one another and considering their own self-involved ignorance to be as good as somebody else's wisdom, and saying whatever they want regardless of reality, this show will drive you over the edge. If you like to watch intellectual cockfights the way mulleted muscleheads love to watch WWE, this show is for you.

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The Sunderland Experiment (2014)

3/10

It just doesn't hold together

22 September 2021

Reviews of this film are mostly favorable. Those viewers must have understood the film much better than I did.

The plot (sort of): Ten years ago, an alien came to Earth, and set up shop in the isolated town of Sunderland (get it? Sunderland; like it's sundered from the world), somewhere in the southwestern desert (hence the original title of the film, "The Sunderland Experiment"). The people of the town call it the Angel. The town is now fenced in with a keyed electric gate. All normal life has ended there. The Angel has taken over the minds and bodies of the adults, and now that the children are growing up, they face a choice: They can attend "school" to learn the teachings of the Angel, and "be blessed" or "evolve" like their parents, or they can "fall," meaning live their lives in the wasteland at the edge of town, where their small rebellions are tolerated as long as they remain within the confines of Sunderland. To be "blessed," the Angel feeds them something from its own body that joins the human's mind, and even the human's body, to its own, promising a life of transcendental bliss. Of course, don't you believe it: The adults are now zombielike drones, mentally linked to the Angel, who are raising their kids to suffer the same fate. When a person dies in Sunderland, they're "planted" - literally. They are reborn as plants, with the person's head at the top of the stalk.

The town is beyond squalid. That keyed gate is the only working electrical device in the area. It looks like the town has been without electricity, running water, or telephone service for the whole 10 years since the Angel arrived. Nobody ever changes their clothes. Ever. In fact, it's forbidden to take them off. But the clothes don't look nearly filthy enough. People sleep on worn-out mattresses on the floor. Someone from the town is allowed to go out and buy supplies for the townspeople. How do they cook? Do they now have outhouses in place of bathrooms? (You don't see any.) They have practically no possessions, but they DO have ammunition for their guns. Also, has no one on the outside, like the post office or the authorities, noticed that the town of Sunderland has fallen not just off the grid, but off the map? After 10 years, don't you think they'd be curious?

The special effects and the little bit of CGI are well done. But except for a handful of scenes, I found the film to be essentially incoherent. Some of this, I think, was the clumsy editing; but a good film starts with a good script, and this film either didn't have one, or it got fatally diluted on the way to the screen. I had trouble keeping track of who was who, of who'd been killed and then reanimated and who hadn't, of what was real and what a character hallucinated, and which characters had had little spidery things implanted by the Angel and which didn't. The behavior of some of the characters was completely illogical, even for an illogical imaginary world. The acting is quite amateurish, which isn't surprising in a low-low-budget film like this one, and you have to accept that.

This is an ambitious film with a great premise and a few good moments, but on the whole, "Exile" falls far short of its ambitions.

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The Isle (2018)

6/10

A windswept isle, slow and atmospheric

7 September 2021

With "The Isle," the filmmakers have striven to create a simple story that is spooky, moody and atmospheric. The script borrows loosely from Celtic, Scandinavian and Greek mythology: The island setting is straight out of Scottish folklore; I mean, how could this have been set anywhere but one of the bleak islands off the Scottish coast? There is a curse, and a ghost, and supernatural possession, and an island from which there is no escape, and a poetic double suicide. The story evokes reminiscences of silkies and other characters of Celtic folklore; from Greek mythology, there is an obvious allusion to the myth of Odysseus and the island of the Sirens, and a direct reference in the script to the myth of Persephone. In contrast to familiar myths, where sex is usually implied (e.g., Zeus appears to some maiden in the form of a bull, and the child born of the union, etc.), there is some frank but understated sexuality in the film. The main quibble I have with this film is the sloppy scriptwriting: four-letter words are used sparingly, but I'm not sure they would have been used at all in mixed company in the 1840s. But I am almost positive that no one in Britain would have used, or even known, the word "okay," which was only just coming into use in the United States where it originated.

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The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

8/10

Absolutely preposterous, but a lot of fun nevertheless

11 August 2021

I steered clear of this movie for a long time because the plot seemed so preposterous, and because the title seemed like a cheap lift from a Philip Marlowe story ("The Long Goodbye"). And I was right: The film piles one preposterous plot element on top of another, almost daring the viewer to object. And I know that disliking films with this much violence and pyrotechnics seems almost un-American. Nevertheless, despite the fanciful plot and the violence, this movie IS a lot of fun. Geena Davis was 40 when she made this film, and I don't know how much we're watching her vs a stunt double, but she seems physically quite up to the part. When the film begins, we're following two parallel plots, one involving Samantha (Geena Davis) and one involving Mitch (Samuel L. Jackson). When the two plots come together to create the main arc of the story, I found Jackson's shtick quite annoying, because it distracts from what seems like the important plot, which is the one about Samantha. But this wasn't Jackson's choice; it was the director's choice. If Renny Harlin had wanted Jackson to tone it down, he undoubtedly would have. I don't happen to agree with the choice, but I wasn't the director. And it does set up the contrast between his character's early arc and his later arc in the film. I would have liked to see Charly/Samantha give Timothy (Craig Bierko) one more chance to acknowledge Samantha's daughter, the child he never knew he had, but oh, well. Melina Kanakaredes has a very small role in the film; I would have liked to see more of her. But this was still a couple of years before her breakout role in as Sydney Hansen in "Providence." There's really room for only one female character in this film, and that's Geena Davis's.

So, as I said, don't expect to see anything truly believable in "The Long Kiss Goodnight," but still, it IS a lot of fun.

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Cosmos (I) (2019)

8/10

Not what you think it'll be about, but still good

11 August 2021

"Cosmos" is not for everybody. "Three amateur astronomers are perplexed when the newest member of their team intercepts radio signals of seemingly impossible origin." That's a truthful description, so if you're expecting to see aliens in the flesh, you'll be disappointed. This is a very human drama. The film takes place over one night, when 3 men discover the presence of an alien spacecraft in orbit around Earth. These 3 men, whose friendship is deeply strained by professional vicissitudes, also renew their bonds of friendship in the process of their extraordinary discovery.

Harry is an astrophysicist who is trying to exploit his hobby of amateur astronomy to increase his chances of keeping his research funding. He is joined by his friend Mike and former friend Roy. Aside from very high-tech stargazing, using both radio and optical telescopes, the night - naturally; after all, this is a MOVIE - is the scene for the resurfacing of old grievances and misunderstandings. It is nice, for a change, to see 3 adult males settling their differences through civil and rational conversation.

But the main event in this film is the astronomy. And although it's something of a letdown to realize the film ends just as First Contact begins, it's gratifying to see a film that respects science and scientists and takes scientific verisimilitude seriously. All the computer work, the controlling of their tiny radio telescope and their almost as tiny optical telescope, and the look and feel of the screen graphics and sound effects are absolutely believable. Although the talk and electronics did hold MY attention, I guess the screenwriters thought that wasn't enough, because, believe it or not, they wrote in a pretty standard climactic frantic car ride, including near-misses in city intersections, to retrieve a power unit for their equipment when their own power pack fails and they have only about 20 minutes of battery life left before they lose all their irreplaceable data. And of course, they make it with just seconds to spare. It reminded me of a James Bond movie. Did it really help the plot? That's a matter of taste.

So if you're not satisfied by anything less than actually seeing aliens in the flesh à la Close Encounters, you may find that this film doesn't really measure up. If you really love all the tech-y stuff in Star Trek, Star Wars, and the rest of the vast effluent of high-tech stuff coming out of Hollywood, you may enjoy seeing it done right for a change.

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The Hollow World (2018)

1/10

A hollow movie

11 August 2021

"When the Solar System is attacked by an overwhelming alien force, astronaut Xander returns to a looted Earth to search for what matters most." That's the thumbnail description. It must be about some other movie, because it has very little to do with this one. First of all, it's not the solar system; it's just the Earth and the Moon. The overwhelming alien force is this gauzy netlike thing that comes out of nowhere and blankets the Earth. We see it from space; bright lights on the night side. What's happening? Cities are being obliterated, leaving bit holes. We see exactly one of those. Second, Xander, a Scottish astronaut on the ISS is awakened by alarms blaring. Hull breach: Abandon ship. He does so. Fortunately, he lands in Britain! His girlfriend Kyla had a terrible injury; she's been "asleep" for 7 months. She wakes up about the same time that he lands. And then we and they discover that - oh, no, not again! People have been turned into ZOMBIES. How disappointing. These days, zombies are the go-to solution for the unimaginative in the movie business. Xander and Kyla spend most of the film wandering around separately, encountering a tiny handful of weirdos whose behavior is completely illogical; especially Sadie, a woman Xander rescues from a hole in the ground, and who is so relentlessly unpleasant as to be almost unwatchable. The dialogue is utterly empty and meaningless; you keep waiting for something meaningful to happen, but it never does, except maybe that the couple are reunited. I ought to admit that this is a spoiler, but it doesn't really matter a bit. Then you find out that maybe it was all a dream; or more accurately, a nightmare from which there is no escape for the hour and a half or so that this movie drags on. This is obviously a low-budget effort, but whether small-budget or big-budget, if you don't start with a good script, the film will fail. Like this one. A more "hollow" and pointless film you will rarely find. It doesn't even qualify as desperation fare for insomniacs.

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Dark Matter (2015–2017)

8/10

Not great art, but definitely worth a look for hard SF fans

24 June 2021

Although there's nothing in "Dark Matter" that you haven't seen in some form somewhere else; and it's not a perfect work of art (what is?), nevertheless, the various elements show a lot of imagination and fit together quite respectably: The far future with both its progressive and its seamy sides, spacecraft designs that make sense, FTL, AI, crew amnesia, alternate universes, martial arts, warfare, corporate politics, a good mix of characters, bioengineering, the interstellar economy of the future, with its wealthy and entitled and its poor and downtrodden. It's a shame it was not allowed to play out its planned 6-season story arc.

The main annoyance is the way they talk about "the galaxy" this and "the galaxy" that. Star Trek: Discovery did the same stupid thing. Our solar system is located in the Orion-Cygnus arm. Even though it is a MINOR spiral arm of the Galaxy, it's 3500 light-years across and approximately 10,000 light-years long, and contains about 800 million stars. That's way more than enough room for any future fictional space travelers to knock around in. But no, it's always "the Galaxy."

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The Babadook (2014)

5/10

Just so-so

12 June 2021

Samuel is about to turn 7. When his mother Amelia was in labor with him, his father was driving her to the hospital when he was decapitated. It's never clear how this happened, but I find it difficult verging on impossible to believe that she survived the crash. Oh, well.

On the cover of the DVD is a quote from William Friedkin (The Exorcist, remember?): "I've never seen a more terrifying film than 'The Babadook.' It will scare the hell out of you as it did me." Really, Bill? Sorry to have to disagree, but The Babadook is pretty much a run-of-the-mill horror flick. It is certainly NOT the most terrifying film I've ever seen.

The film bristles with familiar horror-film tropes: A mother who has never accepted her husband's death and has never grieved, who gradually loses her mind; a sinister demonic spirit (the Babadook, of course) who gets into the house and terrorizes the residents, whom only the son can see at first; the son Samuel, whose terrified obsession with monsters is so disruptive that his school wants him out; a creepy house with an even creepier basement; an evil artifact (in this case, a book - you guessed it, called "Mister Babadook") that comes back after it's thrown away; lights that crackle on and off for no reason except that it's "spooky"; really BIG kitchen knives; numerous loud bumps in the night; strategically placed shadows everywhere, including in the closet where the demon takes shape and lunges toward the camera; a TV that shows increasingly horrific imagery as the film progresses; disbelieving policemen and government employees; and so on. You get the idea. The message that builds up in the arc of the story seems to be that only by finally experiencing her grief can Amelia defeat the Babadook; but at the end, you're not sure what actually happened. And then, instead of ending, the movie just stops.

To sum up: The Babadook is a well-crafted, decent-quality, no-big-surprises horror film. That may be entertainment enough for some people. But don't get your hopes up that it will be the scariest horror film you'll ever see.

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Nightflyers (2018)

2/10

The reason is obvious

11 June 2021

I think I've figured out why the corporate pinheads who run Syfy cancelled "The Expanse" and green-lighted this show: Jealousy. They only like series where the characters are stupider than they are. It makes them feel smart. "Nightflyers" goes right up there with "Childhood's End" as an example of how NOT to run a sci-fi channel.

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The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)

7/10

Beware of "THE CREEPING UNKNOWN!"

29 May 2021

Beware of "THE CREEPING UNKNOWN!"

I love sci-fi movies, but let's face it, the vast majority of science fiction movies are trash. Older sci-fi films have an even greater burden: Not only are most of them bad, but they have dated badly, making them even worse. You have to take this into account when watching old sci-fi movies. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that The Quatermass Xperiment, despite being dated scientifically, culturally and cinematically, has held up remarkably well after 65 years.

The film is based on a British science fiction serial broadcast by BBC Television in 1953 (and re-staged by BBC Four in 2005). The Quatermass films were made by that packager of potboilers, Hammer Films when the studio was in its "prime." The idea of a life form just floating in space that somehow gets into a spacecraft and infects an astronaut, gradually transforming him into a different organism, may not be as credible as it may have been back then, but it's still a decent premise. The support systems necessary to launch a rocket into space, and the design of the rocket itself, are absurdly simplistic compared to what came later in reality, but that was true of all other space movies of the period as well. The process of transformation of the astronaut into a monster today seems almost amateurish compared to later special effects, but it isn't utterly ridiculous. The props are reasonably good. And most importantly, the characters actually act logically. There are no Idiot Plot devices to move the action forward. You WILL notice the very dated, very stiff and mannered British comic relief that is regularly injected into what is otherwise a deadly serious plot.

This was the first of two Quatermass movies that starred American actor Brian Donlevy as Bernard Quatermass, head of the British-American Rocket Group, which launches its first manned rocket into outer space. Quatermass was originally British, played by Reginald Tate in the BBC TV series; why they changed him to American may have had something to do with financial backing, but that's just a guess. Throughout the film, Donlevy never smiles once. His Quatermass is so humorless and imperious that it's ultimately irritating. Donlevy was about two-thirds of the way through his career; he would go on to appear in many TV shows and, unfortunately, more B-list than A-list movies. The same thing happened to the gorgeous Margia Dean, who plays the wife of the American astronaut Victor Carroon. Carroon was played by British actor Richard Wordsworth, but he got away with it because the character never speaks an intelligible word. Nevertheless, Wordsworth achieves the most powerful portrayal of individual suffering I've ever seen on screen. Carroon is in terrible pain and distress at what he is becoming, but is compelled by the alien organism that has taken over his body to infect others and kill to protect himself. Other familiar faces include a young Lionel Jeffries and a very young Gordon Jackson, who sounds less Scottish than he did later in his career, as well as an uncredited Jane Asher playing a young girl with a sickeningly snooty British accent. It is best watched in a restored version in order to appreciate fully the beautiful black-and-white cinematography.

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After Darkness (2014)

3/10

Not really a sci-fi movie

12 May 2021

The Sun is going dark. It's always night outside. It's getting really cold. Worldwide, society is breaking down and the human race is descending into chaos - except in the Beaty home, where most of the movie takes place. A weird doublethink is going on: At the same time as the family waits for the phone call informing them that they will be picked up to go to some caves that serve as underground shelter, the tyrannical head of the family insists that everything and everyone carry on just as if Snowball Earth isn't imminent. The Sun-going-out thing is just a gimmick to set up this talky, contrived, humorless character study of an extremely dysfunctional family. They're practically boiling over with repressed anger and unresolved conflicts, and you wait for the confrontations, but they never come. You want someone to scream, "Why the hell are we going through this meaningless, futile charade if the world is about to end? Why can't we be real?" But no one does. I don't know whether this film was adapted from a play, but it certainly feels like one, right up to the fake melodrama and scenes that just stop instead of ending. So to end where I began, if you watch this expecting it to be an authentic science-fiction movie, you'll be disappointed - and probably annoyed.

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Star Trek: Discovery (2017–2024)

5/10

Mistitled series

28 April 2021

I am most of the way through season 3 as I write this; and in my opinion, the three seasons need subtitles (not language-translation subtitles, but subordinate descriptions of the each series). I would call season 1: "Fungus Follies and Gay Blades;" season 2: "Technobabble Tsunami"; and season 3, "The Further Adventures of Agnes Tilly and a Lot of Other People Who Aren't So Important."

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Altered Carbon (2018–2020)

4/10

250 years? Really.

25 September 2020

Just started Season 1 (finally), and right away a certain element of believability goes out the window. Kovacs is revived after 250 years. Yet the local vernacular hasn't changed; styles haven't changed; customs and traditions haven't changed; technology hasn't appreciably changed; Kovacs is right at home. Imagine someone from 1750 being somehow brought forward to the year 2000. Would (s)he feel right at home? (S)He wouldn't, would (s)he? Just about everything would seem hellish and/or incomprehensibly magical. Even being on ice for a tenth that long, 25 years, might be a shock. Imagine some latter-day Rip van Winkle falling asleep in 1995 and waking up in 2020. Even that short interval would require a major adjustment, once the culture shock had passed. And some really stupid things happen for the sake of the plot; e.g., Ortega's clumsy landing of the aircar in episode 1 to show that she's not really a chauffer (she's a cop). If a Boeing 777 autopilot can land automatically at the push of a button now, wouldn't landings be automatic in the distant future?

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The Invasion (I) (2007)

3/10

Not much fun even for sci-fi newbies

6 March 2016

Right at the beginning of "The Invasion," the thought comes that "I've seen this before." A couple of minutes later, the thought comes that "I've seen this before, too." Alas, folks, the plot is a slightly adapted recycling of the 1997 TV miniseries "Invasion" starring Luke Perry with some "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" thrown in, along with a pinch of 1986's "Lifeforce" (a really, really, really bad film) and a dash of "Species II." This film might be entertaining to viewers unfamiliar with the above titles, but even taken on its own terms as a distinct work, it doesn't work. The direction is clumsy, the editing is choppy, the pacing is ponderous, and the filmmakers mostly fail to deliver anything scary or suspenseful.

The two lead actors, Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig (just beginning his career as James Bond), are both gorgeous, but both appear to be pretty much phoning in their performances; the same goes for most of the rest of the cast.

Message to any newcomers to SF reading this review: Your time is better spent seeking out the original "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Yes, it is rather dated, but it's still scarier than this film.

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Childhood's End (2015)

1/10

Arthur C. Clarke rewritten for the Lifetime channel

23 December 2015

Warning: Spoilers

Old Arthur must be retching in his grave. They've taken his good hard science fiction and turned it into mush and ooey-gooey. But then, I should have known better than to expect Syfy would do justice to Childhood's End. Why did they EVEN bother? The original novel was published in 1953. Would younger viewers who haven't read it even be interested in a TV version? Because readers of the book, who would welcome one, may suffer severe intestinal distress watching this massive disappointment.

Clarke's original story is really unfilmable without modern CGI. You couldn't do justice to the Overlords and their home planet without it. So great, is this a miniseries using the latest CGI to be true to the story? No siree, bob. We want to make Childhood's End, but we're SYFY. So it'll be just like the book, but completely different.

Brilliant as the novel is, it was published in 1953, and so any adaptation for the screen would need a lot of updating. That's fine, but that's not what's happened here. The original plot has been mangled beyond recognition. The novel's characters are people of all ages and several nationalities, including Finnish, French, Scottish, Trinidadian, and South African. No, that won't do; our viewers won't IDENTIFY. So let's change ALL the characters into the demographic we're targeting: Earnest young and youngish Americans with personal problems, angst, and RELATIONSHIPS. We GOTTA give them RELATIONSHIPS. So we introduce a whole slew of touchy-feely subplots inhabited by new characters (all women, see below) and furthermore, they've gotta SUFFER, or it's boring. Never mind that this pushes Clarke's grand story of alien arrival and human transformation into the background while characters are busy emoting in the foreground. This is Arthur C. Clarke as rewritten by Shonda Rimes. Steak has been turned into Jello.

Clarke wrote "hard" science fiction. And his readers know that, for better or worse, practically all his stories are about men; women are usually subordinate characters, rarely of major importance. Clarke was great at the "beyond the infinite" stuff, but touchy-feely he most definitely was not. RELATIONSHIPS almost never advance Clarke's plots. If the producers wanted to introduce female characters into the story, they should have made some of the male characters women. That would have worked just fine. A principal character in the book, Rikki Stormgren, the 60-year-old Finnish Secretary General of the UN, is transformed into Ricky Stormgren, a 35-year-old Missouri farmer. Why? 'Cause 60-year-old Finns aren't sexy, that's why. The writers also gift Ricky with a dead first wife who comes back to him in Overlord-created visions, a live second wife who's not happy with the situation, infertility, and a fatal disease caused by exposure to Overlord technology. And when comes at last the death scene and you think that the maudlin is maxed out, they pile on more: Karellen suspends Ricky at the moment of death, and the whole thing drags on for minutes longer, so Ricky can mourn his dead wife all over again and have a last chat with Karellen, while ethereal Vienna Boys' Choir-type music plays. It really is that bad.

There is a lot of really annoying agonizing by people of faith that wasn't in the book; that's bad; but one of the female agonizers actually SHOOTS AND KILLS an Overlord; that's worse. And THEN, the Overlord is brought back to life through an act of sacrifice by one of the humans. Another character is brought back to life as well, AND healed of his paraplegia, in another treacly backstory that wasn't in the book. That character was at least in the original story, although again, he's almost unrecognizable, and of course in the film, he has a RELATIONSHIP. Just like Clarke's original novel, only completely different.

The Overlords do a lot of "Close Encounters" stuff that they never did in the book, where the manifestations of their power are much subtler and more interesting. Clarke's Overlords are much bigger than humans, at least 9 or 10 feet tall, black not red, and they have small wings because their home planet has much lower gravity than Earth (hence the remark about CGI above). In the book, we meet several Overlords; but in this TV version, there are only two: Karellen on Earth and Vindarten on the Overlord homeworld, because they couldn't get away with just one Overlord (if they could've, they would've). When you see the actors in full Overlord regalia, you know why: Making up and costuming more than two actors like that wasn't in the budget. Clarke brilliantly portrays Karellen as a being whose full mental powers are beyond human comprehension. He is wise, noble and always master of every situation. He never makes mistakes, never visits anyone in a barn, never says anything as stupid as "My bad," and never puts himself in physical jeopardy. On Syfy, Karellen doesn't act like a superbeing whose gifts approach the divine; as played by Charles Dance, he acts and talks like a weary English professor who has seen and heard everything and is just trying to hang on until retirement.

The climax and anticlimax are as badly botched as the rest of the piece, with the entire sequence on the Overlord homeworld – which admittedly would have been tough to do under any circumstances, but not impossible – cut out and replaced by a quick tete-a-tete with the Overmind, which is something that could never happen in the original. And the writers have replaced Clarke's words with some of the most banal dialogue you will ever hear on TV, and that's saying something.

This miniseries misses being a successful adaptation of Childhood's End by several light-years. Clarke aficionados must face the likelihood that no one will ever have both the will and the means to bring the real thing to any screen, large or small.

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Dolly Parton's Coat of Many Colors (2015 TV Movie)

3/10

Mawkish is putting it mildly

10 December 2015

"Coat Of Many Colors" takes us back to Dolly Parton's girlhood. Dolly is played by the cute-as-a-button Alyvia Alyn Lind, who obviously had parents in the grip of the current vogue of thinking they're being creative by deliberately misspelling their kids' names. We see Dolly at a time in life before she habitually wore wigs and before she developed her spectacular female endowments, when she had only a pretty face, a pretty voice, and spunk. I hate spunk. This TV movie is an example of why: It presents a treacly, sanitized, Life-Saver-colored version of life amidst the fields and valleys of Locust Ridge, Tennessee, when all the family had was love, t'baccy, music, and the Bahble. Jennifer Nettles plays Dolly's mother, a woman whose youth and beauty are ridiculous to behold, seemingly untouched as they are by the Parton family's hardscrabble existence and eight children. In voice-over, the adult Dolly – who is nothing if not a savvy, pragmatic businesswoman – professes a simple-minded faith in a loving Jesus that a lot of people are likely to find more insipid than inspiring. She attributes that faith to her mother's influence; but the glaring inconsistency is that her mother's faith didn't prevent her from languishing in a protracted state of despondency after the stillbirth of a child. It also begs credulity to think that a 15-second admonition from her husband that her family needs her could just snap Mom out of it.

Rick Schroeder puts in a dutiful performance as Dolly's father Lee; Schroeder goes through the film with an expression that strongly suggests that what he's thinking is, "Well, it's a living." Singer Jennifer Nettles hasn't acted much, but she does a serviceable job here. Aside from Dolly herself, the other characters are of necessity mere sketches.

Dolly Parton is one of the greats of American country music, but this movie is about as convincing as Cinderella. Someone really needed to drill a hole in it and let the sap out.

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Feeding Grounds (2006 Video)

1/10

I will be brief

21 September 2015

A motley group of young people head for a remote desert cabin where they plan to kick back for a couple of days, which means drinking even more, and using even more drugs, than they're consuming before they get to the cabin; and where the guys plan to put the move on the girls, except, of course, for the clearly defined sharp-tongued Plain Jane. Naturally, something hungry is lurking out there in the desert; something that makes an awful lot of noise chewing and swallowing.

The average episode of SpongeBob Squarepants has better writing and acting, and more depth and complexity, than this dreck. It's as if the cast, director and crew who are making this movie are out there only as an excuse to do for real BEHIND the camera what the actors are pretending to be doing in FRONT of the camera: namely, cursing, drinking cheap booze, and taking a variety of drugs, while the guys haplessly strut about putting the moves on the girls, who act suitably coy, until they get tired of acting coy, and so of course suffer the usual fate of pretty young women in movies like this, which is to be devoured a minute or two after foreplay has started. (Actually, calling them "actors" is being generous.) The filmmakers did themselves and their film no favors by naming their production company Brain Damage Films.

Actually, now that I come to think about it, this dismal dog of a flick has improved my life, because watching it, I had to confront the question of whether I really, truly, absolutely, positively have nothing better to do with my time than to watch drivel like this.

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The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

3/10

Why bother?

10 August 2015

I held off from watching any of Peter Jackson's Hobbit films for a long time because I was so disappointed with his Lord of the Rings films, especially when it turned out that he intended to make a trilogy based on The Hobbit. So first he mashes and squashes each volume of LOTR into a single film. Here he's doing the opposite: He's taking the much less substantial fabric of The Hobbit and padding it out until it's almost unrecognizable. The leisurely, majestic, richly detailed, LOTR trilogy he ruined by racing through it at breakneck speed. Here he takes the written Hobbit, which is much less complex and moves along at a good clip, and makes it sprawling and ponderous. The spectacular vistas and bloody battle scenes that stretch away to the horizon are absurdly overdone for the scale of the story. None of it looks any different from the LOTR effects. You get the feeling that Jackson is still feeling impelled to say, "Look, no hands!" Filming Tolkien's saga of Middle-Earth isn't like adapting a modern novel for the screen. Even a book on the New York Times bestseller list will be read by relatively few people. Filming Tolkien is more like filming Shakespeare or the Bible. The Hobbit and LOTR are so well known and so beloved that the astute director should know that however faithful as (s)he tries to be to the author's vision, whatever winds up in the can won't satisfy the imaginations of many of the rabid Tolkien fans out there who know every detail of every book as well as they know the Pledge of Allegiance. Jackson is not stupid, so he must be incredibly arrogant to think that he can out-Tolkien Tolkien. Tolkien was one person; why on Earth do you need four, count 'em, four screenwriters for this film (the same thing was true of the LOTR films)? What traces of Tolkien's plot and dialogue remain have all been chopped up and moved around. Why, for heaven's sake? Why would you undertake film dramatization of Tolkien's books if you don't intend to make films of Tolkien's books? The novel The Hobbit has been called "enchanting." Even at its darkest and most suspenseful, it's light and humorous, sort of like an Indiana Jones movie. Well, there's nothing light or enchanting about An Unexpected Journey: It's immense, bloated, sprawling, and Wagnerian in its mood and its crashing music. It has sweeping, interminable battle scenes that just make the viewer impatient to get on with the story. It has a cast of thousands, most of whom aren't in the book, and who are mostly a hindrance to the plot, or what's left of it after Jackson and his writers have twisted it all out of shape. In short, unlike the literary Hobbit, this movie is a real downer.

There are really ludicrous character contrasts: For example, Thorin, unlike his character in the book, is dark, broody, angry and combative; and yet the twelve other dwarfs in the company look and act as if they were straight out of a Disney cartoon. Martin Freeman's diffident performance as Bilbo is similar to his screen persona as Dr. Watson in the modern "Sherlock" series and as Arthur Dent in the dreadful film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It doesn't really work for Bilbo. As played by Ian McKellen, Gandalf the Gray really is rather gray; he is tentative, uncertain, almost timid at times. And I thought I'd thankfully seen the last of Elijah Wood as Frodo, whose performance for some reason makes me cringe; but here he is, shoehorned into this movie like so many other supernumerary characters.

Maybe someday the BBC, or HBO, or Netflix, or some other creative organization will produce, say, a ten-part miniseries of The Hobbit and LOTR that will be true, or at least truer, to the plot, characterizations and dialogue than Peter Jackson. This film here is another leaden, flat-footed failure.

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Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You (1970)

2/10

A fairly short review

11 July 2015

The first time I remember seeing the name "Rod Amateau" was in the credits of "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis." I lived in Beverly Hills for a few years and Amateau was a family friend of one of my classmates at Beverly Hills High. My friend told me that Amateau was one of the funniest men his family ever knew. No sooner would he come through the door than he would start making people laugh. I believed him as I was young and utterly lacking in judgment or taste in film or television entertainment. And so, judging by his oeuvre, was Rod Amateau.

I saw "Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You" at a drive-in movie theater, long since defunct, that was located on Third Street a little bit east of the Farmers' Market. What can one say about this you-should-excuse-the-expression film except that near the end, the main character says, "This is a nightmare. I'll wake up and it'll have all been a dream." That line applies to this film in general.

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The Yellow Wallpaper (II) (2012)

4/10

"Days of Heaven" this ain't

2 April 2015

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a 6,000-word short story by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's physical and mental health.

This film adaptation of the story was directed by Logan Thomas, who has done mostly short films. And since the estimated budget is reported as $1.5 million, I'm prepared to be generous in my critique. But even a charitable attitude can't lift this film out of the cinematic doldrums. It is limp, shapeless and draggy. The scriptwriters have drained the story of its blood. The writing is stilted and flat-footed; the plot has been transformed from that of a woman gradually descending into madness into a fairly plodding ghost story. Any perceived feminist message is gone. The yellow wallpaper with which the female protagonist of the story becomes obsessed is definitely there on the walls, but it hardly figures in the film at all. The film perks up a little at the end, but only a little.

Speaking of being generous: Calling the acting turgid and barely above amateurish IS being generous. In fact I thought that the 3 leads were amateurs until I looked them up. The female lead, Juliet Landau, is the daughter of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain. In this film her character Charlotte is supposed to be deep in the throes of despondency and PTSD after witnessing her daughter being burned alive in a house-fire. But in her performance no suffering is apparent; she's either very morose or a little less morose. She looks like a young Greta Scacchi after a serious illness. Aric Cushing projects no energy at all; he's just unkempt and phlegmatic in the extreme. Of the three leads, only Dale Dickey has any luster whatever on screen. Michael Moriarty shows up at the beginning of the film for about 3 minutes, and Veronica Cartwright has about 10 minutes of screen time near the end.

The film's setting is lush: A house set back in the woods (somewhere outside of Atlanta), but compositions lack focus, not to mention clarity. The sound is poor; the dialogue mostly is distant and muffled. The fact that most of the dialogue wasn't looped and the sound remixed as should have been done may reflect the low budget.

If this were a student film, I'd give it about a C-plus.

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Enigma (2001)

5/10

Disappointing if you know the real story

28 December 2014

In 1995 the British declassified Station X, the ultra-secret WWII Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park, 50 miles from London. In 1999, the BBC aired a 4-part documentary about Station X. I first learned about Alan Turing when Nova (the American equivalent of the BBC's Horizon) aired a version of "Station X" cut down to a single 2-hour episode. "Enigma" was released in 2001, well before the present surge of general interest in Bletchley Park and Turing's extraordinary life that has given us "The Imitation Game" (December 2014). Back then it must have been easier to create a fictitious character (Tom Jericho) based on Turing, the eccentric, painfully socially awkward mathematical genius who was one of the stars of Station X. Unfortunately, "Enigma" isn't spectacular even if you don't know anything about Alan Turing.

The plot: In March of 1943, codebreakers at Station X discover to their horror that the German navy has changed the code sets used to communicate with U-boats at sea. These were based on the famous and diabolically complex encryption machine known as the Enigma. (That actually happened.) Authorities enlist the help of a brilliant young mathematician, one Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott) to help them, as they put it, find their way back into the code. The possibility of a spy in Station X uis raised, and Tom's love interest, Claire (the 6-foot-tall Saffron Burrows), has disappeared. To solve these mysteries, Tom recruits Claire's best friend, Hester Wallace (based on the historical person Joan Clarke and played by Kate Winslet). While investigating Claire's personal life, the pair discover personal and international betrayals involving the now-infamous Katyn massacre in Poland. Of course, Tom and Hester fall in love.

Dougray Scott actually looks more like Alan Turing than does Benedict Cumberbatch ("The Imitation Game"), but there the resemblance to Turing mostly ends. Turing's sorry, shabby reward for the instrumental role he played in winning the war for Britain was to be persecuted during the Cold War because his homosexuality was viewed as a security risk. He committed suicide at the age of 41. Tom Jericho is most assuredly NOT homosexual, nor is he borderline autistic, which is how Turing is played by Cumberbatch.

The film does well something that had not been done before, namely to recreate the physical setting at wartime Bletchley Park, especially the Enigma machines themselves and the now-famous decrypting machines Turing invented, the "Bombes."

While "Enigma" looks good and plays fairly well as an espionage yarn, the viewer who knows the factual background of this piece of fiction will be dissatisfied. It is surprising that this rather wan film is the work of Tom Stoppard and Michael Apted; they have done better.

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The Final Cut (1995)

Fair to good B movie

20 February 2004

A classic B movie, or what used to be called a B movie. These days, a B movie is called `made for cable' and is often shot in Canada with American stars and Canadian supporting actors---like this one! In The Final Cut, Vancouver doubles for Seattle (clever, eh?). We've seen all the pieces before: Mad Bomber plants explosive devices in densely populated locations and stymies the police bomb squad. Rugged, hard-boiled, world-weary, careworn John Pierce (Sam Elliott), former head of the bomb squad, reluctantly allows himself to be pressed back into service to stop the Bomber. Of course, he is framed as the Bomber himself, and in the process of clearing himself and catching the real bad guy, he must face some of his own personal demons. Sam Elliott is always watchable and this film is also graced by the presence of three beautiful women: Anne Ramsay effects a complete reversal of her role as ditzy Lisa Stemple in Mad About You. She is great here as the athletic, gun-toting, resourceful chick cop. She is allowed to get covered in perspiration in scenes that don't involve sex; how often does that happen in films these days? (Contrast The Matrix, in which Carrie-Ann Moss does incredible acrobatics without so much as breaking a sweat.) The gorgeous Barbara Tyson comes in like a lioness but unexpectedly almost disappears from view after some very hot early scenes; I wonder if some of her scenes wound up on the cutting-room floor. Finally, the lissome Lisa Langlois, who seems to specialize in victim roles, has another one here, as a human bomb. At least this time she gets to survive rather than being slashed, dismembered or incinerated.

This movie is just good enough to hold your attention till the end. It's ideal for insomniacs who watch cable at 2 a.m. in order to get sleepy enough to go back to bed.

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