Justin Robinson's Blog, page 11

Lifetime Theater: Liz & Dick

Maybe the most damaging thing to the Lifetime brand is that every Lifetime movie looks, well, Lifetimey. The oversaturated colors, the wide frames, the sunlight streaming in through a McMansion’s palatial windows, and even the fortysomething actress who’s been forced from more prestigious entertainment by the ruthless demands of the box office. As it turns out, there is one thing more damaging than a Lifetimey Lifetime movie. It’s when they decide to get arty.

When this week’s entry, Liz & Dick was released in the distant year of 2012, we were all dancing to the strains of a new craze called the Mitt Romney, while the great serpent Quetzalcoatl feasted on our entrails. Ah, 2012. It really was a simpler time. It might have also been the first time social media and the Lifetime network got their chocolate all up in each other’s peanut butter, uniting what had once been a shame-ravaged nation solo-watching the new offering on a quiet Saturday night to a global party going Tom Servo on a hapless TV movie.

You could not have picked a better movie to do it with either. That’s probably what the whole zeitgeist was waiting on. Ironically, it’s the least Lifetimiest of Lifetime movies, so many of the flaws that make it such a baffling 84 minutes are unique to it. The point is, it’s not just bad, it’s not just trainwreck bad, it’s a train full of ebola monkeys slamming into an orphanage on Puppy Day bad. I can’t prove it, and doing even the slightest bit of research would unavoidably elevate the tone here past the Doritos-dust-encrusted level I like it at, but I’d imagine they actually tried to make this movie for real. Like for HBO or at least Showtime. They might even have made it, and found no one was interested. Every frame oozes the rank stench of desperation. Or possibly botox.

We should start with the elephant in the room, by which I mean Lindsay Lohan and not a literal elephant somehow cramming itself into my tiny bungalow. Lifetime has gone on record as saying that they will get every good actress “on the way up or on the way down.” While it’s tempting to say they failed and in fact nabbed Lindsay not on the way down but at the very bottom, with Buffalo Bill leaning over the lip of the cistern, lecturing her about proper skin care. (Also, threatening Lohan with hose is not effective. Ba-dum-tsh.) This is seven years since Lohan’s fall from grace, a plummet so precipitous Michael Bay nearly filmed it slamming into the Sunset Strip for Armageddon 2: This Time It’s Biblical.

I’ve discussed a bit about Lohan’s ill-fated comeback attempt when her co-star (the only one worse than her) headlined his own Lifetime offering. It’s worth stating again that while the movie is terrible, the accompanying article is fantastic. You’re always in trouble whenever the story of the making of the movie is far more interesting than the movie itself.

Also called “The Troy Duffy Effect.”

Lohan’s fall is tragic. It’s also hilarious, if, like me, you’re an awful person. As a connoisseur of trash, I am grateful for things like Liz & Dick, Georgia Rule, and I Know Who Killed Me, none of which would have been made had she embraced her destiny as a modern day Lucille Ball. Now, watching a face calcifying from plastic surgery, listening to a voice ravaged by cigarettes, and absorbing a performance crippled by hacky outbursts and Walken-esque pauses, I wonder if she was ever the star we thought she was. It’s impossible to know, but one thing I can say: Don’t watch The Canyons. That movie is terrible.

Lohan brings her unique blend of stone-faced acting, demerol energy, and disturbing anti-charisma to Liz Taylor, a woman so charismatic and vital she effortlessly seduced men into her dotage despite looking like Lucille 2. Liz & Dick tells the story of the tempestuous romance between Taylor and noted drunk who acted a bit Richard Burton (Grant Bowler, prompting one to ask, was Richard Roxburgh too expensive?). The story begins on the set of famous flop Cleopatra, when, despite both stars being married, they nearly instantly begin having the kind of sex only big time Hollywood stars are capable of. Not that you could tell from Lohan, who looks like she’s wearing a mask of herself.

This is as animated as she gets.

The movie is also painfully aware of who it stars. While the paparazzi were an essential part of the real story, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that this is about the first tabloid fodder starring one of the most notable paparazzi burnouts in recent memory. I think it’s supposed to be a joke when one character is forced to explain what the paparazzi are to another character. That’s the problem with bad movies: when they become self-aware, they become less fun.

It’s tough to do a love story about two of the most glamorous people on the planet on a Lifetime movie budget. This movie features a level of compositing I haven’t seen since Wayne and Garth strolled along the fake streets of Delaware desperately trying to come up with the state’s stereotypes. There are numerous shots of Liz and Dick in “Italy,” but it’s totally just someone’s backyard. I wish they’d just run with it, and had them at the bottom of an active volcano, or riding some dolphins to safety, or stuck in the middle of a Hong Kong heroin deal.

The arty part I alluded to earlier is a bizarre choice of framing device. For a story like this one, a framing device isn’t a terrible idea on the surface. It’s unlikely most audiences are up for the Soderberghian technique of just throwing scenes in rough chronological order and expecting everyone to keep up. In this case, it features the two stars, all in black, on a black stage, each sitting side-by-side in director chairs. They offer occasional commentary on what’s going on, and are you fucking kidding me? Seriously, think about the madness required to think that was a good idea. Lohan never met a line she couldn’t mutter in a bored monotone, now she gets to act as her own Greek Chorus. It’s like Inception for idiots.

While it would be tempting to wrap everything up with a meditation on the ephemeral nature of fame, and the way both Lohan and Taylor wrestled with it, this isn’t that kind of place. No way, no how. I”m finally getting around to one of the bad-movie cultural events of 2012, and here I am to say that it totally holds up. Or doesn’t hold up at all. Whatever is the one that makes you want to get a nice big cocktail, sit down, and watch Lifetime try to make an art movie.

So what did we learn? Don’t date that cad Richard Burton.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Cleopatra, Dick, Elizabeth Taylor, Grant Bowler, infidelity, Lifetime, Lifetime Theater, Lindsay Lohan, Liz, Liz & Dick, Richard Burton

DAUGHTERS OF ARKHAM is available!

My brand new book, co-written with David A. Rodriguez, is out!

http://www.amazon.com/Daughters-Arkha...

Now Fear This: The Hitcher

Seems legit.

The desert, by definition, is a place of extremes. Of environmental extremes most obviously, as its a place where life has taken root despite lacking the one thing all life on Earth is based on. Of light and darkness, and heat and cold. In the daytime, the sun is as vengeful as an old god. At night, the sky turns cold, black, and then bright with stars, practically begging for the creation of religion. Of wealth and poverty, of towns abandoned to the dust, and casinos rising like mirages. And, of peace and violence.

This week’s movie, 1986’s The Hitcher, understands these extremes. Director Robert Harmon shows us the desert, lingering on the puffy clouds in the endless sky more than once. He’s showing us the extremes, the stark beauty, and more than anything, the insignificance of the people in the grimy little play unfolding in this punishing environment. Whatever happens to them, Harmon says, the desert will endure.

The desert is the only known origin of the villain of the film, the titular hitcher, the psychopath traveling under the probably-made up name “John Ryder.” While there is nothing overtly supernatural in the goings-on, there’s a great deal that comes awful close. Ryder is able to sneak into a sheriff’s station, slaughter three cops, and unlock a cell without waking protagonist Jim Halsey. Locks pose absolutely no barrier, nor do armed men; the only impediment to Ryder’s behavior is Ryder himself, and he is as unpredictable as a chimpanzee who got into the meth. He has no past, and through the film desires no future. He can be interpreted as a simple psycho killer, the devil himself, or simply some kind of murderous spirit spat out by the desert one stormy night.

The story opens on that stormy night (the film was inspired by the Doors song “Riders on the Storm”) when Jim picks Ryder up hitching by the side of the road. The exhausted Jim clearly needs something to keep him awake on this lonely stretch of blacktop, and has he pulls over, his first words — the first in the script are — “My mother told me never to do this.” Why? Because fundamentally horror is all about people being punished for breaking rules. Whether we’re talking about high schoolers getting hacked up by a maniac for drinking and fucking or an entire spaceship crew being rape-murdered by a xenomorph for bad quarantine procedures, there’s a sick part of the psyche that needs to know, somehow, that the victims deserved what’s coming.

The ride starts out pretty strange, but it gets violent when Ryder pulls a switchblade on Jim. Ryder is playing with the precise fears of 1986 in this scene. Hitchhiking had already become the exclusive purview of serial killers, and the switchblade had become an atavistic phobia entirely out of proportion to its rather modest size. In addition, he peppers the threats with enough sexual innuendo and rape subtext that it later creeps out the cops in the third act. It’s not quite gay panic, but it comes uncomfortably close, with Ryder’s actions seeming halfway between a concerned (and deranged) father who wants his protege to grow up, and a spurned boyfriend who just wants to stick something in his smooth young friend.

Ryder spends the rest of the film following Jim. He frames him for several crimes, but always comes to his rescue when the cops come to close. He watches as Jim shacks up with Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a young and helpful waitress, before murdering her in the film’s most famous and still shocking scene. What Ryder appears to want more than anything, what he begs Jim to do in nearly every scene, is to kill him. Ryder wants to die, but more to the point, he wants Jim to kill him. It’s like a twisted version of a manhood rite, one Jim does not want to participate in. Yet as Ryder’s torments continue, he burns out the bits of Jim that were young, innocent, and soft. By the end, Jim is a grizzled, traumatized survivor. Ryder wins.

Fundamentally, that is why I like this film. In 1986, one would expect a kid getting revenge on a psychopath to finish on a triumphant score. Here, Jim’s eventual slaying of Ryder is portrayed as a tragedy. The music is soft, eerie, and sad, with Jim’s thousand-yard stare saying he’ll never be happy again. In fact, the movie was originally supposed to end with Jim killing Ryder execution-style, but to avoid an X rating, Harmon had to compromise with the stereotypical “not dead yet” cliche that mars a lot of the movies of that era.

C. Thomas Howell plays Jim as an average guy stuck way in over his head. He’s not the greatest actor, but he does a decent job of modulating the performance. In the beginning, he’s admirably shameless, allowing Jim to whimper, scream, and sob in a way the hyper-masculine ‘80s shouldn’t allow. By the end, he has the dead eyes and vacant look of another desert-spawned killer. The film even broadcasts Jim’s changeover with a costume switch, going from a soft flannel hoodie in the beginning to a harder brown leather bomber jacket after a nearly-literal baptism by fire.

Rutger Hauer is the real gem here. There might never be another actor with the singular ability to elevate a film like he has. This might be an unpopular opinion, but without Hauer, Blade Runner isn’t a classic. He brings the same intense energy and uncomfortable sexuality that he had with Roy Batty to the role of Ryder. Supposedly, Howell was afraid of him on set, and I can’t blame the guy.

I can’t get through this without noting the writer, Eric Red, wrote my favorite vampire movie of all time, Near Dark. While that one has slowly gained a deserving cult (not sure if it’s too famous to qualify for this feature or not), The Hitcher is largely dismissed as a curio of the time. That’s a shame, as while it is not a genre-hopping masterpiece by an Oscar-winning director, it’s a great little film that deserves a rediscovery. Far more admirable is the way both Harmon and Red know what not to show, leaving Ryder’s worst depredations to the imagination.

The film begins and ends with Jim lighting a match, a simple event bookending his ultimate transformation, and cementing fire as an important symbol in the story. The question is, what will he become? Though Ryder has no past, he prominently wears a wedding band to which he never refers. Did another man torment him into this? Or was he the ghost of the desert’s vengeance? Is that what the desert turned Jim into? The only thing for certain is that Jim walks out of the desert a different man than he went in.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: C. Thomas Howell, cops, desert, Eric Red, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Now Fear This, Robert Harmon, Rutger Hauer, The Hitcher

CITY OF DEVILS is on sale!

All October long, for $2.99.

There's more coming this month too!

http://www.candlemarkandgleam.com/201...

Liner Notes

Did you know I’m an author? Seriously. I have nine books you can go out right now and buy, and the next one is due in October. Crazy, right? Whenever a new one comes out, I like to share the thought process behind it, sort of like those liner notes from albums when the guys in the band would tell you exactly what drugs they were on when they wrote each track.

Sadly, for me, the answer is always iced tea. Always.

Undead On Arrival

A bone-crunching ultra-violent noir set after the zombie apocalypse. Chapter one, our (anti) hero gets bitten, and over the next twenty-three chapters, he’s slowly turning into a zombie while he tries to figure out who set him up.

The Dollmaker

Maybe the most disturbing thing I’ve ever written. A postmodern take on Frankenstein, about an emotionally crippled genius who uses pieces of his soul to create beautiful women out of the inanimate.

Mr Blank

He works for every conspiracy, secret society, and cult on the planet, doing the crap jobs no one else wants to do. On one of these errands, someone tries to kill him — bizarrely — and now he’s on the clock to find out who.

Nerve Zero

My first book is a science fiction noir set on a zero-gravity space station whose inhabitants have grown so used to weightlessness that they’ll suffocate in a normal environment. Their planet has been enslaved, and now one of the native sons returns home only to get sucked into the strange politics of his home.

Coldheart

A secret world of powerful mages and their inhuman servants fight an eternal war in the shadows. The first in an open-ended series exploring immortality, loyalty, power, and sometimes just good, ripping yarns.

Everyman

A broken man learns he has the ability to steal the lives of others. One of his victims grows steadily madder as his body mutates into a new and terrifying form. A woman tries to save her husband, but can she fight madness?

City of Devils

Los Angeles, 1955. Monsters are real. Werewolves are cops. Phantoms are musicians. Crawling eyes run the studios. Doppelgangers are actors. Humans are the downtrodden minorities, preyed on and changed. Now the last human detective is hired to find a missing mummy, and the whole city wants him dead.

Get Blank

The conspiracies only get weirder in the sequel to Mr Blank. When Blank’s girlfriend gets framed, he’s back into the crazy world he thought he’d left behind, threatened on all sides by Satanists, deranged movie stars, a self-help cult, and, of course, Bigfoot.

The Last Son of Ahriman

The first book in a trilogy, this is the origin story of a new kind of hero. Fighting fire with fire is a thing people say. In this one, he fights Cthulhu with Cthulhu. It wasn’t supposed to be him: his brother was killed forcing him into the mantle, but he does his job anyway.

There’s a peek behind the curtain! Enjoy.

Filed under: Level Up, Nerd Alert Tagged: author, books, City of Devils, Coldheart, Everyman, Get Blank, Liner notes, Mr. Blank, Nerve Zero, The Dollmaker, The Last Son of Ahriman, Undead On Arrival, who I am

Tread Perilously Grab Bag: Lost – Stranger in a Strange Land

Continuing their break from Doctor Who, Justin and Erik land on the Island of Lost fame and face what might be the single worst episode of the series — “Stranger in a Strange Land.” Learn why Justin will always apologize to Erik when “Jack’s tattoo” or “Bai Ling” are invoked. Marvel as an hour of the heavily serialized show fails to move the plot but for a step or two.

The discussion leads to the theory that Lost is a fulcrum point between 21st Century television and what it looked like in the previous century. Bottle shows, Battlestar Galactica and Babylon 5 also get a mention.

Click here or subscribe to The Satellite Show on iTunes.

Filed under: Transmissions Tagged: babylon 5, bai ling, battlestar galactica, jack, lost, tread perilously

Extra #3: The Best Worst Movies (You’ve Never Heard Of)

Audio from our Long Beach Comic Con Panel, featuring Clint Wolf, Sarah Madden, Justin Robinson and Louis Allred. Erik moderates a look at four fine Yakmala films — that is, films of questionable quality, but entertaining nonetheless — Ninja Thunderbolt, Shanty Tramp, TalHotBlond and Song of the Blind Girl. Plots are discussed. Favorite scenes are described. Yakmala is defined and Justin once again reveals his love of Lifetime movies.

Click here or subscribe to The Satellite Show on iTunes.

Filed under: Transmissions Tagged: Long Beach Comic-Con, Ninja Thunderbolt, satellite show, shanty tramp, song of the bling girl, Talhotblond

The Best Movies Never Made

Occasionally, I like to make up fake movies that are far too awesome to exist. Sometimes I take things a little too far.

’89 Bullets

A cop on the edge. A Jamaican voodoo posse. A rain of lead.

The Mighty Thor

*something in Old Norse*

Caveman Cop

One cop goes Pleistocene on everyone’s ass.

Hitlertaur vs. the Apache

None of this makes any sense at all.

Brometheus

They went for a weekend in Cabo. What they found could be our end.

The Velocirapture

This summer, sin isn’t just original. It’s primordial.

Clown Syndrome

Tonopah, Nevada: a clown without pity.

They don’t exist… yet.

Filed under: Level Up, Projected Pixels and Emulsion, Puffery Tagged: '89 Bullets, Brometheus, Caveman Cop, clown syndrome, Hitlertaur vs. the Apache, the Best Movies Never Made, The Mighty Thor, The Velocirapture

Tread Perilously Grab Bag: DS9 – Meridian

Taking a break from series, Erik and Justin reach into the grab bag and tread Star Trek: Deep Space Nine perilously with the Season 3 episode “Meridian.”

Dax falls in love with a man who is only corporeal for a few days every sixty years. She ends up choking in space. Quark tries to model Major Kira for a special private holosuite porn program.

No joke.

The discussion leads to sexual mores of the 24th Century, the lack of Latino representation in sci-fi and praise for The Flash‘s Cisco Ramon. Justin and Erik also admit to a certain level of Trekiness, even if neither one watched much Voyager or Enterprise.

Click here or subscribe to The Satellite Show on iTunes.

Filed under: Transmissions Tagged: star trek, star trek: deep space 9, the flash, tread perilously

Yakmala: Kindergarten Ninja

If the cover art is out of focus…

In Yakmala, we occasionally run into something where we have to debate whether or not what we just watched actually qualifies as a movie. Kindergarten Ninja makes those things look good.

Tagline: Where Discipline Becomes A Code Of Honour

More Accurate Tagline: I can think of two things wrong with that title.

Guilty Party: Kindergarten Ninja was made with the assistance of D.A.R.E., which if you didn’t grow up in the ‘80s, is an acronym for Drug Abuse Resistance Education. This was a program designed to keep kids off drugs and provide stoners with suitably ironic t-shirts to wear. In more irony, you’d need some hard drugs to make this watchable. I’m not even talking about normal shit like weed, or coke, or PCP. I’m talking about that weird stuff you can only get in Russia, that’s made out of whale testicles that makes your asshole flip itself inside-out and everything look like Keith Olbermann singing Carmina Burana while his face turns into snakes.

Synopsis: Before we go any further, I need to point out that the main character’s name is Blade Steel. Yep. That means that his name is officially more ridiculous than Blade Rogers, the parody name of a porn star in a Kids in the Hall sketch.

Right, so Blade Steel is a football player, and supposedly a really good one. Despite this, he lives in a shitty apartment and can only seem to afford to take his numerous dates to fast food restaurants for french fries.

After getting pulled over for an illegal U-turn and offering the traffic cop some beer, it’s time for heaven to get involved. That’s not a joke. The movie cuts to an idyllic garden with a helpful “HEAVEN” on the screen, which to be fair, is a better try than we’ve seen previously. It looks like some of the main denizens are Charlie Chaplin, George Washington, Elvis Presley. and, most importantly to the plot, Bruce Lee. The actor accomplishes the difficult task of being Bruce Lee by neither looking nor sounding like him, and just being filmed from behind or the neck down, a technique pioneered by auteurs in the field of terrible cinema.

God — who looks more like an aging dentist who thinks he looks like Tom Selleck — sends Bruce down as a spirit guide to rehabilitate Blade Steel in the best way possible: by teaching him how to beat the living shit out of everyone. Blade Steel accepts that he has a ghost Bruce Lee now pretty quickly, but then Bruce pawns his responsibilities on his mortal student Master Chosen One, a blind kung fu expert. Bruce is now done with the movie, making this the first time someone ever cared so little about becoming an angel they subcontracted it out. Imagine if instead of helping George Bailey, Clarence just picked up a day laborer at Home Depot? That’s basically what’s going on here.

Blade Steel also starts working at a place that the movie can’t decide if it’s a school or community center, but the one thing it’s definitely not is a kindergarten. He starts hitting on Linda, the one teacher the place has. Meanwhile, a new mafia, led by Hector Machete, uses local kids to sell this new designer drug “buzz” to other local kids.

Blade Steel decides to become a superhero, but his costume consists of mom jeans, a light windbreaker, and a receding football hairline. He and Master Chosen One beat up Hector’s guys. For some reason, Hector never remembers that as a crime boss, he should have access to at least one gun. Nah, if karate is good enough for the heroes, it’s good enough for Hector Machete.

Then, a series of titles in the end let us know how everyone ended up. In a weird twist, Linda breaks up with Blade Steel. I guess that’s their little nod to realism or something.

Life-Changing Subtext: The best way to deal with organized crime is hand-to-hand combat.

Defining Quote: “Call me Blade.” No, I will not, sir. That’s a ridiculous name and it demeans us both.

Standout Performance: During the climactic battle when Blade Steel and Master Chosen One infiltrate Hector Machete’s warehouse, Blade comes upon a nameless drug enforcer. Blade gets him in his flawless technique of “headlock, then punches in the gut until he vomits up his own gall bladder.” The best part is after each punch, the drug enforcer utters a little, defeated “Oh no!” It’s funny the first time, but like Sideshow Bob and the rakes, it keeps getting funnier.

What’s Wrong: Look, if you’re going to call your fucking movie Kindergarten Ninja, there better be a ninja in kindergarten, a kindergarten-aged ninja, or either a kindergarten or a ninja somewhere in this goddamn thing.

Flash of Competence: I’m pretty sure most of the people in the movie have at least taken karate down at the Y. There’s not a lot of awkward shin-kicking in this one.

Best Scenes: We open with Robert Maginnis, the San Leandro Police Chief introducing the story. The performance is positively Grinterian, complete with frequent glances down at his desk, where he’s got his lines written.

At one point, we get the hint that there might be some high-level corruption supporting Hector Machete and his Buzz Empire. The film accomplishes this with a little light racism and a title appearing on screen, showing us “Mayor Crookalini.” Don’t worry. At no point does Mayor Crookalini get his comeuppance, but then again, the end of the movie threatens us with a sequel. Maybe they were saving up. Or maybe they were developing the rich Kindergarten Ninja mythology.

Transcendent Moment: It takes about forty minutes into this thing before you realize the creators thought this was a comedy. I can only assume their senses of humor were murdered in a tear-stained warehouse for the jaded amusements of a handful of wealthy perverts. This whole thing is about as funny as a kitten holocaust.

When Blade Steel finally gets Linda to go out with him, he asks her to Clark’s by the Bay, a restaurant that looks a bit like a hotel banquet hall where you took Nana to learn all about those great time shares. As Blade Steel asks Linda to this place and starts talking it up (they must have great french fries at reasonable prices), the phone number of the restaurant scrolls by at the bottom of the screen. I hope your soul was worth the price, Clark’s by the Bay.

I’m Mayor Crookalini and I approved this message.

Kindergarten Ninja is not for the bad movie dilettante. This is something to seek out only after the normal kinds of bad movies lost their thrill. It’s basically the Buzz of terrible cinema, so maybe they were trying to tell us something the whole time.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion, Yakmala! Tagged: Blade Steel, D.A.R.E., Don't use drugs, Kindergarten Ninja, Stay in school, Yakmala!