My thoughts on Elysium

Just saw this via Netflix. This movie could have been so much more. I loved the idea of it – the ultra rich have left the planet and live on an idyllic space station while Earth is a cesspool of poverty and violence. I loved District 9 (a film by the same director), and if you haven’t seen District 9, I highly recommend that you do. Perhaps that’s my trouble. The director, Neil Blomkamp, set the bar so high with District 9 that my expectations skyrocketed for this film. My main trouble with Elysium is the portrayal of Earth as a hell hole. It just wasn’t bad enough in my eyes. Yes, there’s poverty. Yes, there’s police brutality. Yes, the system is unfair and broken in this film. But little things bothered me. Why does Matt Damon’s character look so healthy if he’s living in a third world slum? Why does he have running water in his home (that looked pretty clear) if things are really so bad here? He even has some access to health care. Maybe Damon is meant to be portrayed as one of the relatively lucky ones amid a sea of even less fortunates. But I didn’t get that vibe throughout the movie. The concept is great, but what is missing are compelling characters and a coherent story. Telling us that Max (Damon’s character) has longed to live on Ellysium his whole life is less effective development to my mind than effectively portraying how truly awful life on earth is. Could have been a good film. I think Blomkamp was befuddled by his own big budget on this one. I know District 9 was made on a relative shoestring. Not a great film, but not a horrifically bad one, either.

A night at the theater

Skyfall

            I applaud the Daniel Craig series of Bond films for taking him in a new direction, even if I do not think it is an entirely successful direction.  Bond is back, and Bond is very human.  In Casino Royale, but truly falls in love and actually has to convalesce from his wounds for an extended period of time.  He even has to be saved from poisoning by his love interest.  Skyfall continues along this same vein.  This is a Bond that feels, a Bond that bleeds, a vulnerable Bond at times.  This makes the endless chase scenes more exciting, because we are keenly aware that this Bond could fail (perhaps even die?)

            It’s hard for me to evaluate a modern Bond film because of my memories from boyhood.  My mother took me to see my first bond film when I was around 11.  I can’t match the enthusiasm or willingness to suspend disbelief that I had then.  To my failing, jaded adult eyes, this film scores a solid B.  I don’t give A’s to many films, and Skyfall never approaches anything nearing perfection.  The talents of Judy Densch and Ralph Fiennes are largely wasted in this film.  Oh, their characters are likeable enough, but I wanted much more from their interactions with each other and the rest of the cast.  These are heavyweight actors in an action fantasy, I know, but why cast them if you’re not going to let them reach their full potential.  There is a deliberate lack of gadgets in this film (which is the source of some self-referential humor in a brief scene between Bond and the new Q) and I’m ambivalent about how that plays out.  I like exploding pens and cars with ejector seats.  More of that, please.  That’s not what this Bond is about, though.  He’s about blood and guts, real blood and guts, and he demands the suspension of your disbelief through shock and awe as Bond is battered by forces that are largely beyond his capabilities to effectively confront for much of the film.  Roger Moore never seemed to so much as spilled a drink on one of his suits.  This Bond goes to work with bullet holes in his.  One is left to wonder, in fact the very question is posed by more than one of the characters in the film, why Bond perserveres through it all.

            If you’re looking for a fairly innovative take on the Bond character, go see this film.  The old theme music is worth hearing at a theater.  If you’re at all nostalgic for cars that turn into submarines and watches with lasers in them, you’re going to be disappointed, but perhaps not entirely.  There is a notable cameo from Goldfinger towards the end of the film.  I could have lived with shorter car chases if it brought the film down to 2 hours instead of nearly 3.

            Thanks to Coach for taking care of Lily while Kim and I saw the film.

Review: The Prophecy

It seemed like a bargain - 6 movies for 5 dollars.  Of course, all six movies were The Prophecy 1 through 6, but my brain ignored that inconvenient fact (along with the fact that this was a grocery store hawking dvd's in a bargain bin) and I happily deposited the 6-movies-on-3-DVDs set in my cart.

Mind you, I still have a 6 month old in my house and have zero time to watch movies.  That, and the infant currently sleeps in the same room as the main DVD player.  (Incidentally this is the reason I've watched T.V. exclusively on mute with closed captioning for the last 6 months.)  I thought I could make it work.  I saw my opportunity when my wife left for a few hours with the baby for a support group for (relatively) new moms.  Dishes be darned, laundry be darned, porch in desperate need of sanding and painting be darned, I was going to watch a movie and get my .833333 cents worth. 

My view could be squewed by the fact that I was giddy to be watching anything with the sound turned on, but Prophecy wasn't exactly bad.  Well, the 30 minutes of it I watched weren't bad.  Then I stopped.  I doubt this is a spoiler to anyone who cares, but the film seemed to be centered on certain angels, led by Gabriel (played by the ever-creepy Christopher Walken) instigating a second war in heaven (the first having been led by lucifer).  I got to the point where Walken fries a hapless Eric Stoltz (who is an angel on the 'good' side, if any side is good in this film) and stopped watching.

An asside:  there are certain things I don't watch, ever, even if they're corny.  One of them is the show Ghost Hunters, because I refuse to take ghosts seriously or watch anyone else who does the same.  This is because I am weak minded and would have trouble sleeping for the rest of my life if I believed for a second that there were dead people from every past generation floating around houses just waiting to cover me in ectoplasm.  Another thing I don't watch are films that take certain liberties with certain... figures, let's say. 

Gabriel, I'm told, was the angel who let Mary know she would soon be pregnant.  Gabriel is an archangel, right up there with Michael and pre-fall lucifer.  There is no way he turned into Christopher Walken, no matter how bad a day he had.  It just couldn't happen.  If they had made up a name for Walken's character other than Gabriel, I might not have taken issue with the film.  There are other films with angels in them that I've watched -  Constatine, for example.  Now that's a bad film (that I enjoyed watching), and exactly why that was palatable to me and Prophecy wasn't is a thing I can't exactly put into words.  Perhaps I can't take a film seriously with Shia Lebeouf in it.

I'm sorry that this is a review of a film, rather, 30 minutes of a  film that I stopped watching due to my own foibles.  There aren't many.  Add Prophecy movies to the list.  There you have it.  There were cool parts, like a recent suicide victim acting as Walken's lackey for a time with the promise that he'd be really dead once his service was over.  I liked that angels perch on things like ravens while they're observing things. 

Yep.  Might be a cool film.  I'll never know.  And I'm not watching the other 5 to find how they turn out, either.

A Night of Mario Van Peebles

I am a new dad, and as such I have been spending more time watching television between the hours of 1 and 5am than I have since... well ever.  My infant daughter hardly wakes for her 3 feedings/diaper changes during my shift, and I'm left holding the bottle and staring at the screen (which is muted) in the dark.  Last night was a rare treat - a Mario Van Peebles double feature.  This event was not planned either by myself or the networks who aired an old episode of the Outer Limits (staring Mario) and the early 80’s film “Exterminator II” (in which Peebles plays a well-muscled villain who leads an evil street gang that leaves a big ‘X’ on all their victims).  This type of fortune cannot occur through the planning of executive bigwigs but rather is the perfect concordance of luck, sleep deprivation, and the fact that Mr. Van Peebles had to pay the bills somehow at both ends of his carrer.

Now, my knowledge of the plot of either of these delicacies is going to be very limited since the volume was muted and for some reason no one thought either of these gems was worth closed captioning.  The first feature I saw was the Outer Limits episode (the 90’s remake, not the black and white original although I have the option of viewing that every night as well).  I learned through Google that this was titled “Bodies of Evidence” and first aired in June of 1997.  Jennifer Beals costars as a lawyer charged with defending Peebles who is accused of murdering three of his subordinates while serving on the space station Meridian.  Peebles was already a bit past his prime at this point, and the contrast between old 90’s Peebles and early 80’s Peebles had me wondering at first if they could really be the same guy (thanks again Google).

Anyhoo, I really dig the 90’s Outer Limits.  There’s always a bit of a mystery to unravel, even if it’s ineptly presented more often than not, and I’m a sucker for all things fantasy and sci-fi.  The mystery in this episode (and the unfolding of events aboard the Meridian in reverse throughout the trial) is whether or not Peebles was driven crazy by ‘space psychosis’ (I’m going to go out on a limb and guess this is not a real disease) and killed the crew himself, or if, in fact he is telling the truth when he states that a shape-shifting alien with psychic abilities tricked them all into killing themselves.  I’m going to go ahead and spoil everything for you because unless you are an insomniac who just had their cable shut off you are never, ever going to see this episode.  If you bet on shape-shifting alien being the whodunit, you win a kewpie doll.  This is not revealed until after Peebles is exonerated of all crimes but then committed to a mental institution for his insistence on the existence of aliens when the alien in question shows up at his cell to give him the raspberry as Peebles is dragged away in a straight jacket.

The second film (the silent version on my TV) got all of one and a half stars in the IMDb database (and worthy of every half-star in my opinion) and stars John Eastland (never heard of him, not going to Google him) as a garbage man or possibly and out-of-work steel worker who confronts a New York drug lord (Peebles).   Peebles has one expression throughout the film, which I interpreted as wide-eyed and crazed contempt for anyone watching network television this late at night.  Eastland is a blue collar type who's had enough and welds a bulldozer blade and several machine guns onto a garbage truck to turn a street gang into an instant barbecue.  If I am any judge of a film from which I never heard a single syllable of dialogue, the writers drew heavily from Taxi Driver and Mad Max.  De Nero and Gibson could only wish for the body count Eastland achieves with grit, a little elbow grease, and lots and lots of flamethrowers and bazookas.  (Another spoiler ahead, so please avert your eyes if you are masochistic enough to still want to view this film in its entirety.)  Peebles finally gets his wide-eyed come-uppance in the form of a booby-trapped bag of stolen loot that explodes, sets him aflame, and then impales him on a steel girder.  My daughter was actually asleep for the thrilling climax, but even sleep deprived as I was I couldn’t tear myself away.

I’m told this phase in a baby’s development is over quickly.  I can only assume that persons with experience are also victims of ‘baby psychosis’ – a condition that causes parents to forget what having a newborn was actually like for the sake of duping them into furthering their own gene pool with additional progeny after the first.

Now if you will excuse me, I need to change into a shirt that has no spit-up on it for work.