those meddling kids! – candybowl

The summer of 2012 looks like it will be a bang-up collection of good-to-great movies, even if several are getting the jump on summer by starting a couple months early – to wit:

April: We started with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – starring Gary Oldman, who like his fellow Brit Alan Rickman, is one of those ‘chameleonic’ actors that seems to morph into something completely different in nearly every film (although Mr. Rickman keeps that unique, uber-distinctive voice no matter what he does – and we love him for it!).  This film, based on a John LeCarre novel of the same name (I have never read any of his books) is very interesting, although it took me a while to understand what was going on.  Unlike say, James Bond or Jason Bourne movies, even though a spy movie, this isn’t an action thriller really at all – no, this movie is far more subtle (but no less devious!).  Always good to see John Hurt (he was the spymaster ‘Control’) and Tom Hardy was also good.  And as Kerewin pointed out afterward, this isn’t a story of black & white/good & bad – everyone has flaws, everyone does things that aren’t necessarily on the up and up.  Definitely worth watching!

Next on the list was The Descendants, starring George Clooney and set in Hawaii.  Ah, I want to go back to Hawaii so bad!!!  This is a story of serious family dysfunction but with hope and some eventual redemption (it is a Hollywood movie, after all – the acting is good and believable, and it’s easy to see why this movie was in the running for Best Picture among other awards this year.  It’s not a ‘happy’ movie by any means – but it’s definitely worth seeing – and thanking that your own family (immediate or otherwise) isn’t in the same boat.  I still wanna go back to Hawaii.

Next, we saw The Hunger Games.  Astute readers will remember the Battle Royale review here from last August – this movie is very similar, but based on a trilogy (sequels on the way I’m sure) and set in a future rich-guy-rules-poor-guy-gets-f’d America, rather than Japan.  Both movies have more than a few similarities to Lord of the Flies, the book that arguably inspired most such stories way back in the ’50s.  I’m not going to rehash the plot – but rather, muse a bit on what this movie made me think about.

1) if the book’s author and movie-makers are trying to send a message of the kind of country we could become if we don’t deal with income inequality in the USA (now!) – well done.  Certainly this dystopia is an extreme endgame with many sci-fi overtones to boot, but without reading too much into a pop culture movie – the risk is real, guys.

2) Another movie/story this reminded me of was The Handmaid’s Tale.  That movie, while nowhere near the budget and production values of this one (I couldn’t make it through the entire book, either) has equally scary scenes and VERY evil central characters too – Victoria Tennant most prominently, but Robert Duvall also takes a turn as a cynical military commando at the highest ranks of the religious government – unlike Hunger Games, Handmaid’s Tale is much more about a religious takeover, not far from the Heinlein classic “If This Goes On…”

3) What’s also interesting about these dystopian stories generally is the attention (or lack thereof) paid to the ‘downtime’ – that is, what is everyone doing when they aren’t doing ‘the main event’ the story is about?  Are the poor just making gruel and crappy bread all day in their districts while the rich live completely off the fat of the land and run around to endless parties and socializing?  I honestly can’t think of any human society, totalitarian or not, that has managed to survive for many decades without at least minimal change – even the last remaining “Communist” countries have embraced tentative steps into free enterprise in the past several years, for various reasons.  It’s one potential flaw to these dystopian scenarios – save for possibly those that include the world being ruined in some way (Terminator movies, Matrix, etc.) – but The Hunger Games doesn’t appear to be about the environment, it’s about power and exploitation, plain and simple.

The next major movie was The Avengers, seen last week.  This isn’t any ‘message’ movie by any stretch of the imagination (e.g. there are Norse gods in it, hello?) but just the first of the pure mindless entertainment summer movies to debut (that I care to see, anyway).  And despite some minor flaws (would SHIELD really fly a ‘stealth’ aircraft carrier, really?) it mostly delivers.  I was also surprised how much I liked the Thor and Hulk characters – I still haven’t seen either Hulk movie (nor do I plan to) and the Thor movie wasn’t really in the cards either, and then Conan O’Brien made SURE I didn’t want to see it .  But here Mark Ruffalo is a great Bruce Banner/Hulk, and I liked Chris Evans as the ‘serious but somewhat ignorant’ Captain America – very different than his portrayal of The Human Torch in the FF4 movies of a few years ago.  Robert Downey is the same smarta** he was in the two previous Iron Man movies, and is still very good.  The Black Widow and Hawkeye characters are obviously ‘lesser’ as they have no super powers, but whatevs, they are still good too.  All in all, a very good movie – I still think the first Iron Man was easily the best of these so far, but time will tell….

Onward, movie summer!

yeah – get your a** on those Underoo’s!

candybowl

candybowl

candybowl

so true! (remember to hover for the ALT-text):

I can’t think of what his snappy answer to that stupid question might be, but this is a great interview in any event. Glad he’s still kicking and doing what he (and we) love – just like Schulz – his chosen profession allows a loooooong career!

From CNET:

Al Jaffee: Snappy answers to (not) stupid questions

candybowl

candybowl

I didn’t know there were ‘lawyers for kids’!

candybowl

I thought I had seen nearly all the dystopian/computer-ruled-future sci-fi movies out there, especially that of the 1970′s (the decade that pretty much invented the genre) but recently came across one I had not – 1970′s Colossus: The Forbin Project.

While this movie is a bit dated given its Cold War theme (the USA builds an invincible computer to run our missile defense system – then we find out the Soviets have done the exact same thing) and the fact that it’s 42+ years old now, it still presents a somewhat different take on the now-common TRON/Terminator/Matrix vision of man handing off control (either by mistake or on purpose) to technology, and then having to fight to regain freedom.

Here, the computer(s) (Colossus from the USA and Guardian from the Soviets) ‘discover’ one another, begin communicating (we never find out what about, save that they progress through simple math into subjects alleged to be beyond human capability within a day or so and never look back) and then start taking over as they gain sentience.  When the humans try to regain control, well, that doesn’t work out so well of course.  Finally Colossus forces the technicians to install a weird-looking speech unit, and issues an edict to the world by the end, that it is ushering in a new era of peace, ‘on my terms’.  Enforced by control over the world’s nuclear arsenal, which is re-aimed at countries still not under its control computer-wise.

The difference to me on this movie was the ‘peace enforcement’ angle – usually all-powerful computers want to enslave or worst case, exterminate all humans once they gain power, right?  Here Colossus hints that he’s going to force Dr Forbin (his creator) to evacuate Crete and build an even bigger, autonomous computer complex there that will control all world communication within 5 years.  To which Dr. Forbin naturally replies – ‘never!’

So on the positive side, the plot is pretty decent, although there could have been a bit more editing of somewhat tedious long shots after the main sets are established – I really liked the opening of Dr. Forbin walking around the huge Colossus complex as it goes online – you really get the impression of scale (it’s an impregnable fortress in the Colorado Rockies). The acting is generally effective, with even a few familiar faces, including Marion Ross, James Hong and William Schallert, although only the latter gets much to do.

What’s also amusing in these movies (and in similar books – helped by hindsight of course) is how the ‘humans never learn’ – they always go creating something magnificent to solve some enormous problem – and it ends up creating far more problems than it solves – and they wonder why? But it must be human nature (or a time-honored/tiresome element of sci-fi plots) to try and try again….

On the negative side – the main computer interface they use is similar to those neon ‘announcement’ lights you see by the side of the highway or in a shop window, backed by typing sounds.  Even 2001′s HAL (from several years earlier) had a much more advanced interface (those all-too-menacing ‘eyes’ located all over the ship) than this.  And that Colossus doesn’t learn to talk until about the last 15 minutes of the movie?  And that we never see or really hear from Guardian (the Soviet computer) at all, save that it effectively becomes Colossus’ partner in world domination by the end – why not have it be a rival instead?  That would be another interesting take – most movies have computers vs. humans – why not computers vs. each other, with us caught in the middle?  While the Matrix addresses that theme a bit, we never really know WHY the computers in that movie decide to help us out, it’s really just assumed that some are ‘good’ and some are ‘bad’…?

Anyway, this was an interesting movie, if you like old-school sci-fi and don’t mind that the Cold War is now over (replaced by the ‘invent-a-war’ nature of the world now, arguably more unstable in some ways)….

Other reviews:
The Chicago Reader
Eccentric Cinema

candybowl