Tom's comments (member since Oct 19, 2008)

Tom's comments from the Science Fiction Films group.

The film doesn't follow the book very closely, taking mainly some character names and the basic premise. The novel is very interesting, and well worth a read. There are some very alarming elements in it, including a terrifying sequence at a government sponsored mass suicide where the participants don't seem to be as voluntary as they are supposed to be. It gets a bit stuffy in places, as most of P.D. James' novels tend to do, but there are some really remarkable imaginative flourishes in it, some stuff that really lingers in the memory.

My review from my blog:

CHILDREN OF MEN

"Bazooka." "I was just getting used to Froly."

CHILDREN OF MEN is Alfonso Cuaron's film adaptation of P. D. James' dystopian 1992 novel, set in a future where no more babies are being born and society is collapsing fast. Cuaron and his co-screenwriters pretty well jettison James' perhaps over-intellectualized story, keeping only the barest bones of the narrative, and creating a far more threatening world of terrorist attacks and generalized despair. An informed viewer will be able to catch echoes of Gitmo and Abu Ghrabe as well as of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR.

The new story centers on Theo Faron (Clive Owen), a low-level bureaucrat at the British Ministry of Energy. He is gradually drawn into an underground conspiracy to protect the only known pregnant woman in the world from the clutches of the pretty plainly untrustworthy government of which he is a part. This involves a series of increasingly hair-raising action sequences, including one ingenious sequence involving an escape and chase via a car that refuses to start.

Cuaron, whose HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN is the only one of the franchise worth seeing more than once, keeps CHILDREN OF MEN full of fascinating details (a kitten that gradually claws its way up Owen's pantleg, graffitti taken from Picasso's Guernica, lots of interesting animal imagery, including a reference to the cover of Pink Floyd's album Animals) that never seem shoehorned into the film for their own sakes, but seem designed to help keep the film alive, from sinking into a mass of genre cliches. Make no mistake, there is a lot more to this film than Spielbergian Big Set Pieces. It is interesting to compare the ending of CHILDREN OF MEN with the ending of Spielberg's WAR OF THE WORLDS, to see the difference between a film that ends on a note of genuinely moving if qualified optimism, rather than sheer pandering knee-jerk sentimentality.

See it. See it now. Turn off your computer and watch it.

I rather like old Box. Roscoe Lee Browne had one hell of a voice. I can still hear him talking about harvesting "Plank-Ton From The SEA!"

I recently downloaded the original HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY radio series in two large parts from itunes, and have gotten a lot of very good laughs out of them both so far. A few dry patches, to be sure, and the story just kind of lurches along. But nothing can dim the brilliance of the best parts. The sequence at Milliways is a joy, just a pure bloody joy, and Anthony Sharp's glorious performance as the supercilious waiter is only one of the great pleasures in store.

"They say that every actor who plays Jesus on film is cursed to fall into mediocrity, lets see if this happens to Jim Caviezel."

It didn't really happen with Max von Sydow, but mediocrity would be a step up for Jim Caviezel.

That remake has been in the works for quite a while now, with Ian McKellen and the block of wood known as Jim Caviezel. Here's a preview, I can't say it made me enthusiastic:

http://www.amctv.com/videos/the-prisoner...

I like this series a lot, I remember watching it when I was a child, and repeat viewings made a great impression on me. There's a lot of good stuff in the series, with very few episodes that aren't worth it. I've always appreciated how the show never entirely sacrifices its sense of humor.

Actually, Jim, based on the PDK I've read, sad and depressing is about what I'd expect. He's not exactly a cheery writer.

Hardly analyzing it to the point of hating it, more like noticing bits of weakness in the storyline that make it far less interesting a movie than it initially appears to be on a first viewing.

But if blindly accepting what filmmakers spoonfeed you is your thing, go right ahead.

Right, I remember the pod disconnecting from the ship well enough, I just don't remember it being clear that it was knocked off accidentally. Was it knocked off accidentally?

Did the humans in DISTRICT 9 ever ask the aliens about their social structure? Was any attempt ever made to figure out what that ship was doing hovering over J-burg, or to gather any information about the alien culture that is suddenly going through their garbage?

Was anyone in charge of that ship? Was it Christopher? Was he the pilot of the pod as it disconnected?

Sorry. The more I think about these questions (which keep coming up) the less I like the movie for seeming to demand that I not think about them.

Well, I finished VALIS, and liked a good deal of it, but my patience with religious stuff is very very limited, and the further out the religion goes the more limited it gets.

Taking break from Mr. Dick, moving on to Pynchon's INHERENT VICE which looks like good fun so far. I'll probably give FLOW MY TEARS another shot in the coming months. Can anyone recommend CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST?

Philip, I don't remember the pod being knocked off, but I may be wrong.

I liked DISTRICT 9 pretty well. The holes in the story didn't really announce themselves to me until later. A good summer movie, mainly.

But---

a couple of the holes I've noticed are really bugging me. For example, I'm still not sure what the story is with the aliens themselves. Yeah, they're pretty well trod on, but we're never shown that they've ever demanded anything better.

And what's up with Christopher Jones? Is the ship's commander? How come he's the only alien shown to actually seem to have any sense at all? Why does he need to search for fuel? Did it get lost? Wasn't there any in the little pod that separated itself from the ship?

Why did the pod separate from the ship? What is the pod? An escape pod? Or is it the command pod? What happened to the commanders of the ship? Were there any?

The more I think of things like this, the more things like this there are to think of. I don't like talking myself into disliking a movie, but that's increasingly what is going on. Oh dear.

BLADE RUNNER

"Gosh, you've really got some nice toys here."

I often have cause for gratitude for living in NYC, as NYC was apparently one of the few cities to have gotten full-out screenings on big screens of the (probably and hopefully last) Final Director’s Cut of BLADE RUNNER, which of course later came out in a big old multi-DVD package. They've done a final digital clean up, erasing little problematic bits, like visible wires holding up supposedly airborned police cars, etc. They even added Joanna Cassidy's face to the body of the stuntperson who runs through all those big sheets of candy glass, and it actually works. I was worried that there'd be even more serious tinkering with the story, but no, Ridley Scott hasn't done to his magnum opus what George Lucas did to his. So BLADE RUNNER is back, its visual and sonic beauty undimmed and even enhanced, and its problems still unresolved and in some ways even magnified.


1. BLADE RUNNER really is something from a purely technical standpoint. It is one of the most gorgeously made films ever. And it really really really can only be appreciated on a BIG FUCKING SCREEN. DVDs of this film are a waste of DVDs. It is like LAWRENCE OF ARABIA or BRAZIL or 2001 or BARRY LYNDON in that regard. This cleaned up version looks great, sounds great, and is just a joy to behold, especially in these days of hand-held camera quick cut nonsense. And the big-screen engagement at NYC's Ziegfeld was a marvel: crystal clear digital projection, great sound, goodness gracious me and mine, just an ecstatic orgy of sight and sound and gorgeousness and gorgeosity made cinema.

2. BLADE RUNNER is not a very good movie in pretty much every other way. Harrison Ford's performance is lackluster to say the least, he seems completely lost, veering from existential despair in one scene to low-comedy mugging in the next, and not in a good way. The character remains enough of a cipher for the director to be able to claim, 25 years after the fact, that he isn’t even a human being. The story is pretty well dumbed down from Philip K. Dick's remarkable novel DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP, replacing Dick's satiric edge with a world-weary noir aesthetic that was really horribly cloying when the film was burdened with a tiresome faux-Chandler cliche-feeling narration.

3. It struck me that the movie's attitude toward women is not particularly positive. They are either replicants or repulsive. The only two (apparently) human women with speaking roles in the film are an aged Asian woman who gives Deckard information about snake scales and a thickset woman with an eyepatch who sells Deckard a bottle after he retires Zora. The three female leads are all replicants, all three of them are murderers, all three of them are used rather degradingly for sexual purposes. Zora is a performer in a sleazy nightclub whose routine involves a snake (“watch her take the pleasures of the serpent that once corrupted man!”), Pris is referred to as a standard pleasure model for military recreation. Rachael starts the film as a bold, confident woman, but her self-realization as a replicant is combined with a chilling descent into mechanization: she is finally turned into a sex toy with no will of her own. She can't even speak for herself during that really hideous rape scene (I’m afraid it can’t really be called anything else) and in her final appearance as she and Deckard run off into the elevator. Now this could be part of the point about the woeful way in which the replicants are treated, purely as things, but it never really comes across as the point, somehow.

4. Ridley Scott has gone on the record claiming that Deckard is a replicant, that he was always a replicant. And there are assorted little clues scattered throughout the film, to be fair, but they have always felt more like an attempt to draw a parallel between Deckard and the replicants he is hunting, more as an attempt to add some moral ambiguity to the story. There is one little clue that sticks out like a sore thumb, a waking vision that Deckard has of a unicorn, which is apparently intended as a piece of installed memory in Deckard's artificial memory banks. Uh huh. Well, sorry but I ain't buying that bullshit. If Deckard is a replicant, Scott should have shot something somewhere to indicate this just a little more clearly than he does.

And anyway, if Deckard is actually a replicant the whole film goes out the window. It is like having Victor Fleming say that Dorothy is a witch, that she was always a witch. Actually, no, that really makes more sense, as Glinda seems to recognize some kind of magical powers in Dorothy ("Are you a good witch or a bad witch?"). Bottom Line: If Deckard is a replicant, Mr. Scott might have made it into an actual part of the film itself, not something that one can only recognize by reading an article in the New York Times 25 years after the film is released.

So what is the thrill of BLADE RUNNER? Well, for me it is purely the visuals and the soundtrack. I don’t “prefer” technique to story or emotion, by any means, but I’ll admit to being fairly susceptible to the seductions of pretty pictures on a big screen, and to needing some time to overcome the initial “whoa!” factor. My father pointed out to me many many many years ago that I am a sucker for spectacle, and I can’t entirely disagree. I’ll get carried away by the pretty pictures, I’ll admit it. I don’t think I’m as bad as I used to be about it. I could see through the pretty pictures in drivel like BARTON FINK and THE HUDSUCKER PROXY to the gaping empty derivative disasters that they are when they were first released. I still watch HUDSUCKER sometimes when it is on, just to look at the prettiness, and there is a lot of it, but the film is a train wreck. I’ll see a movie for the technique alone, hey, why not, but I ain’t going to pretend even for a moment that a film like BLADE RUNNER, as radiantly gorgeous as it is, is anywhere near a 2001 or LAWRENCE or NASHVILLE or or or or or or or, and could never be a RULES OF THE GAME or a 400 BLOWS or IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE.

I'm now reading VALIS, and finding it rocky going after a brilliant opening. It feels less like a novel and more like a lot of meandering typing about religion. Any advice on how to approach this novel?

Erik, interesting point, but I'm not sure what you mean by the "non-verismilitude of the book genre."

WATCHMEN is different from many films in that it comes from a graphic novel, and is thus already completely illustrated and exists as a visual work from start to finish in a way that few other works of literature ever are, and the generally inept Zack Snyder all too often settles for merely re-creating the designs of the graphic novel onscreen, as he did in the utterly foul and purely EVIL film 300, a film which I'd gladly see every print of burned into ash and rammed down Snyder's throat. Donner's SUPERMAN movies aren't as bound to the comic books in a visual sense as Snyder's comic-book adaptations are, and neither are Burton's BATMAN films, and live on their own in ways that Snyder's films never can.

But of course, Donner and Burton are competent filmmakers. Snyder is, well, I think you get the idea by now.

Mr. Goode is British, and he seemed to be rather hamstrung by a perceived need to nail an American accent. A shame, really. Any sensible director would have simply given the role to Patrick Wilson, and found someone else for Night Owl.

Wilson is a very fine actor, and physically much closer to the Ozymandias as presented in the novel. I'd have loved to see Wilson play a son of a bitch for a change.

See, Alex, I remember Ozymandias as being a far more interesting and energetic character from the graphic novel, hardly the chinless narcotized zombie that Goode and Snyder brought to the screen.

Points very much taken about the story, which I like a good deal and which I won't give Snyder any credit at all for preserving mostly intact. Even a hack of such utter scumminess as Snyder must have realized that he'd have been strung up if he'd made too significant changes. I didn't have a problem with the changes made, especially to the nature of the global disaster at the end.

My review, for what it is worth, from my blog:

I don't pretend to be an expert on graphic novels. I read WATCHMEN a while back. I remember lots of splendid detail, every single panel crammed with lovingly chosen details that beg to be noticed, and a batch of characters whose backstories were interesting and elaborate enough for me to not mind the rather simplistic murder mystery plot at the story's core. The big climax seemed rather anti-climactic, a big statement about ends justifying the means or something, I couldn't help feeling that the creators had bitten off more than they could chew. Over the years rumored film versions were bandied about, including one from Terry Gilliam, but nothing ever came of it.

And now the movie is actually here, and I was simply dreading it. It is directed by the publicity-anointed "visionary" director Zack Snyder, who made the bizarrely successful and thoroughly evil film 300 two years back. WATCHMEN impresses occasionally with a simple competence that I wouldn't have expected from Snyder. There's a lot of crap to wade through, make no mistake, as our "visionary" packs on the "cinematic" stuff all over the place: he makes damn sure that each shot is a big showstopper. It isn't enough for Snyder to show a cemetery, he has to begin on a closeup of rain running down a statuary angel's face and then pull back and back and back through the wrought iron gate and all the way back up and out so we can see the hearse at the cemetery gates, with "Sounds Of Silence" on the soundtrack, yet.

For all Snyder's slavish attention to stuff like this, there's something inert about the movie, hyper-choreographed slow-motion fight scenes and bloody violence and big set pieces notwithstanding. The nudge-nudge references to other films (certain scenes involving the the President discussing impending war are set in a mock up of the famed War Room from DR. STRANGELOVE, for example) don't really add much besides the satisfaction to a quick viewer of having Gotten It. I think that the film's biggest problem is pretty simple: it is hard to get terribly invested in the people being shown onscreen, largely for the simple reason that we never learn much about them, or never seem to learn enough, somehow. Only Jeffrey Dean Morgan's grinning sociopath The Comedian, Jackie Earle Haley's splendid Rorschach and Billy Crudup's CGI-enhanced Dr. Manhattan manage to generate much in the way of interest. The sections concentrating on these characters (Rorschach and the Dr. especially) are far and away the best in the film. Haley manages to project a very real danger out of thin air with his empty stare, and Crudup's sweet dreamy voice is a nice surprise. Alas, Patrick Wilson is left high and dry in his sputtering romance with the appalling Malin Akerman: I dare you not to be reminded of Andy Garcia valiantly trying to romance Sofia Coppola in GODFATHER III. Wilson and Akerman's slow-mo love scene, accompanied by Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" is painful to watch.

And someone named Matthew Goode delivers the worst performance of the year and possibly the decade as Adrian Veidt aka Ozymandias. He seems to have graduated from the Gerard Butler School of Acting, where all lines seem to have been learned phonetically and all actors seem to be overcoming heavy accents or serious speech impediments or both. The character's solemn pronouncements seem rather silly when expressed in a bizarre monotone with bad diction. Goode is aiming for some kind of Dark Superman but comes off more like a luuded out Elmer Fudd.

I couldn't escape a degree of "so what" about the film, ultimately. This sort of thing has been done before. Films like Tim Burton's BATMAN RETURNS and Nolan's Bleak Chic reboot of the franchise BATMAN BEGINS and THE DARK KNIGHT have pretty well stripped costumed heroes of any romantic notions we might have had of them, and Brad Bird's brilliant comedy THE INCREDIBLES lifts big chunks of WATCHMEN's plot outright. It seems that these films owe a big debt to the pioneering example of the original WATCHMEN. What a shame that the pioneering work that made such interesting films possible has been brought to the screen in such lackluster fashion.

Alex, you saw the Director's Cut of the film, which I've been curious about seeing. I may give it a watch to see if more is more or just less.

I did not see the film, but my good friend JP did. Here is his review:

To achieve the same affect as this movie, throw some colored tee-shirts and some pots and pans into a laundrymat dryer, and watch them flop around while listening to the clanks and bangs. The movie is not only terrible, it is nauseating. The camera swirls and whirls and pans in and out constantly. The story makes very little sense. Things happen for no reason. I shed a tear for John Turturro, who I consider to be a great actor. I guess they gave him a ton of cash, and if they did, then I guess he did the right thing. I know that if someone came in to my house and offered me $10 million to be in Halloween XXIV, my ass would be in Halloween XXIV.....