E.R. Torre's Blog, page 149

Phantoms (1998) a (very) belated review

When one thinks of the movie 1998 movie Phantoms, I suspect its more for this very funny self-referential line delivered by one of the movie’s stars, , in the film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back:

“Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms“.

Funny stuff and one suspects that Mr. Affleck (given how his character in this scene takes down the critically acclaimed Oscar winning -for him!- film Good Will Hunting just beforehand) doesn’t think all that much of Phantoms and/or his acting in it.

I have only a vague recollection of Phantoms coming out in theaters back in 1998.  I didn’t see it then because I had read the 1983 novel the movie was based on a couple of years before and found that although Mr. Koontz’s story started off extremely well, its second half/resolution proved a big disappointment.

Why see the movie version of a novel that disappointed you?

I nonetheless caught bits and pieces of the movie on TV in the intervening years and found what I saw neither terribly bad nor incredibly good…even though the film did indeed feature the “bomb” presence of Mr. Affleck.

The other day one of the cable stations was airing Phantoms and I decided to finally sit down and watch the whole damn thing.  By now enough years had passed and my distaste for the novel’s conclusion had evaporated and I could watch the film “fresh”.

And what I saw wasn’t all that bad.  That’s not to say the film, except for that great Ben Affleck quote, is a “forgotten” masterpiece in horror.  It isn’t, but its a decent enough time killer.

The plot of the movie (as with the book) goes like this: Dr. Jennifer Pailey () brings her younger sister Lisa () from L.A. to the quiet and small town of Snowfield, Colorado.  There is tension between the siblings but it is forgotten very quickly when they arrive in town and find that it appears completely deserted.

There is absolutely no one to be seen and when the sisters get to their house, they find a corpse and realize something very sinister is afoot.  Soon, they are joined by some deputies who have just arrived in town (including Mr. Affleck and playing a whacked out weirdo Deputy).

Eventually the group is also joined by Dr. Timothy Flyte ( looking shockingly old and frail…I can’t help but wonder if he was experiencing some health issues while making this film).  Flyte is a disgraced academic scientist who is now forced to write for a “National Enquirer” type rag wherein he espouses theories of a mysterious creature that lives underground and may be responsible for the disappearance of entire cultures/cities/groups of people in the past.

Guess he was on to something, no?

Anyway, Phantoms’ story plays out like a cross between Alien and The Andromeda Strain.  You have your mysterious/unbeatable monster who’s hunting people down one by one and you also have the town whose inhabitants mysteriously perish, along with a “scientific” resolution to the problem.

The movie presents some good shocks but isn’t overwhelmingly gory.  There are also several very effective creepy moments sprinkled throughout.

On the minus side, there are also plenty of logical holes in the story.  One of the bigger ones: Why exactly does the creature leave certain people alive, especially after they’ve served their purpose (I’m trying to dance around SPOILERS)?  And if we are to believe the creature is capable of doing what it does, why would it allow our heroes any movement, especially the ability to find a way to defeat it?  I suppose what I’m really saying is this: Dean Koontz created a creature that was simply too powerful to be defeated in any logical way.

There are also too many characters populating the film.  When an author writes a novel, they have as much time and space as they desire to breathe life into their characters.  Unfortunately, when producing a film, you have a limited amount of time to tell your story and sometimes streamlining characters/events helps to tell a more effective story in the allotted time.  In the case of Phantoms, one of my complaints is that it felt we were dealing with too many characters.  While, I have nothing against either Joanna Going or Rose McGowan or their acting within this film, Phantoms might have been more effective film if it merged their two characters into one.

Anyway, the bottom line is this: While not the greatest horror film in the world, Phantoms is among the better adaptations of Dean Koontz novels.  If you’re in the mood to see Ben “the bomb” Affleck as the hero in a horror film, you’ve certainly come to the right place.

National Board of Review’s Best Film of 2015 is…

…Mad Max Fury Road?!

When word came out this movie was elected best film of the year (you can read the entire article and find the other award winners here), I was…I don’t know.

I like MMFR.  However, as much as I like it (and you can read my full review of the film here), there were things about it that didn’t work for me and I mentioned them in my original review.  Nonetheless, I came away liking the film and recommending it.  I further noted the best Mad Max film remains Mad Max 2 aka The Road Warrior.  Even to this day I find it hard to sit through that movie’s final chase sequence as it is both incredibly brutal and emotional.  Characters I’ve come to love perish in that final chase and, to prove how damn effective that film was, I can’t bear seeing them die.

That’s a movie that (excuse the language) has you by the balls.

Interestingly, many of the comments following the National Board of Review’s decision to name MMFR the best film of the year have shown there’s a deep schism between the film’s admirers and detractors.  Those who love the film really love the film while those who don’t openly wonder just what it is others saw that was so great in it.

Which means I fall somewhere in the middle.  I’ll be honest: I don’t know if MMFR deserves to be considered the best film of 2015.  On the other hand, I haven’t seen any of the others on their list, which are:

Bridge of Spies

Creed

The Hateful Eight

Inside Out

The Martian

Room

Sicario

Spotlight

Straight Outta Compton

As with all things, one’s feelings for a work of art are deeply personal.  I thought MMFR was a very good film that didn’t quite live up to the high ceiling director George Miller set with Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior.  That doesn’t mean I think MMFR is “bad”.  Nonetheless, I suppose I’m closer to the detractor side than in agreement with the National Board of Review.  MMFR is a very good film but the best film released this year?

I don’t know about that.

C’est la vie.

Found in Time (2012) a (mildly) belated review

I absolutely love the concept of time travel and feel it makes for some wonderful storytelling.  In fact, of the short stories I’ve written, my favorite is Dreams Do Come True, which happens to be a clever (IMHO!) take on time travel/revenge.

I’ve heard it said never to write a time travel story, that so many people with incredible talent have taken on the subject that the likelihood of you doing something original and/or interesting with a time travel story is virtually nil.

I don’t agree though I can see the point.  There have been an awful lot of time travel stories made and, as with all things, many of them are at best forgettable and at worst terrible.

But when they’re good…

Found in Time (2012) is a very low budget time travel film that, I take it from the closing credits, was made through crowdfunding.  The low budget, for the most part, doesn’t hurt what we see with one major exception (I’ll get to that in a bit).

The plot of the film, in some ways, reminded me of the oddball structure of Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys, even as the central plot doesn’t come close to Gilliam’s apocalyptic urgency.

The film follows Chris () an oddball “psychic” vendor who lives in a weird pseudo-New York.  He lives with Jina () a girlfriend he intends to propose to while working on a street corner next to RJ () and, eventually, Ayana ().

Psychic vendors, we learn, are people who have a unique talent for figuring out what others need and giving it to them.  RJ, for example, offers cups of coffee that he creates which help people with their current needs, whether it be humility or pep or strength, etc.  Chris, on the other hand, collects oddball items, from small rubber balls to postcards to string to rocks to (significantly) nails and magically knows when people will need these items.

Chris, as it turns out, is also stuck out of time.

His world moves illogically and he may suddenly find himself a day into the future or past.  Further, he eventually finds he can dictate the future based on his actions in the past.

As mentioned, he lives with Jina but, as we eventually find, she isn’t all she appears.  The whole “stuck outside time” problem Chris has sometimes causes him great headaches and he controls this by using drugs.  Jina insists he see a Psychiatrist specializing in people like him and, we find, she works in that field as well.

Is she with him because she genuinely loves him or is he a subject of her studies?  And what happens when Chris discovers he’s about to commit a crime…can he alter his past to allow himself a brighter future?

As I mentioned before, Found In Time is a very low budget affair but the lack of special effects is unimportant.  In fact, the one “effect” the movie does give us, a bizarre safety mask worn by the psychiatrists, is rather laughable and probably should have been discarded as it was truly unnecessary.

Instead, we’re given a film that features a bizarre yet recognizable New York setting and a society and characters that are intriguing enough to propel us through the film.

Is Found In Time a great work?  I don’t think it quite reaches that point.  The story is at times a bit confusing although after the viewer gets his/her bearing they should understand what’s going on but in the end what you’ve witnessed isn’t necessarily earth-shattering.

Still, Found In Time is an intriguing yet small film that dares to explore a well worn topic in a unique and interesting way.  While it may not be a great film, it is good enough to give a try, especially if you’re looking for something different.

That new Batman v. Superman clip/mini-trailer…

Here it is if you’ve been living in a rock for the past day or so and this is your first foray into the interwebs…

What to make of this?

Well, the look remains good.  I’ve not had any complaints against the look director Zack Snyder is going for.  Indeed, everything I’ve seen so far,including this far longer trailer…

…have looked pretty good.

Further, I’m excited to see, for the first time (ignoring the 1979 TV Legends of Superheroes) on the silver screen Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman –THE three best superheroes ever created which, IMHO, form the cornerstone of almost all superheroes that followed- together at last in a big budget film.

And yet, I have a terrible confession to make considering how much I love the characters: We may be reaching a point of superhero (ahem) supersaturation.

The mini-trailer/teaser presented above is interesting but I get the feeling it represents some kind of “dream” that Batman/Bruce Wayne is having.  From the bits and pieces I’m gathering in the longer trailer, it appears this movie is very much a continuation of the previous one.  In Man of Steel, Superman and General Zod essentially destroy Metropolis and, the critics/fans noted, must have caused the deaths of many thousands of people in their wake.

This movie takes that idea, which was essentially ignored in Man of Steel, and runs with it.  It would appear that Bruce Wayne witnessed the destruction and faced very personal losses when one of his buildings went down.  Needless to say, he isn’t coming into this film looking at Superman as a great savior.

Anyway, so are those small sequences of Batman in chains (come on, Batman would get out of those chains in seconds!) part of a nightmare Bruce Wayne has regarding what will become of Superman?  That he will use his powers to make himself a god (note the security guards who bow before him when he arrives) and therefore he has to be stopped?

Or could it turn out that this film isn’t as dour as it seems and that in reality it is a lighthearted tribute to the 1950’s comic books?  You know, where the “real” plot involves Mister Mxyzptlk and Bat-Mite uniting to mess with our heroes’ heads and having them fight each other before Wonder Woman pulls them out of their alien-made mess?

Nah.

But it sure would freak people out, no?

Political correctness or a more sober view of history?

If you’ve read my postings for any length of time, it should come as no surprise that I’m a big fan of the writings of one H. P. Lovecraft.  To me, he along with Edgar Allan Poe are the two most influential authors to delve into the field of horror.  Their works are poetic, lyrical, and burrow deep within your head.

H. P. Lovecraft’s work is greatly admired, though the author never enjoyed that admiration while he was alive, something I find rather tragic.

However, having said all those nice things about Mr. Lovecraft, he was also a racist.  So much so that I’ve written about it before (you can read one such posting here).  In that posting, I take the position of separating artist from art.  The fact is, there are works of art out there that are incredibly good and were made by people who were/are, at best, not all that nice at all…if not terrible.

Distinguishing one’s “work” from the person they are is now seeping into, of all things, politics and universities.  Recently, Princeton University students protested Woodrow Wilson’s name on residencies and academic units as we know he displayed a strain of racism that even in his time was startling.

Now, students are turning their attention to Thomas Jefferson, whom students feel was not only a racist, but also a rapist.  This article, by Scott Jaschik for Slate.com, goes into the details of what’s happening at The University of Missouri-Columbia and the College of William and Mary:

Why Honor Thomas Jefferson?

I’m of two minds here.  The fact is that Thomas Jefferson was a GIANT of his time and was one of the most influential of the founding fathers.  Much of what we have here in the United States today can be attributed to, among others, Mr. Jefferson.

On the other hand, there is no denying he was a slaveholder, a racist, and had affairs (which we can label non-consensual) with his slaves.

I don’t pretend to offer answers here.  I can certainly see, just as I could in the case of H. P. Lovecraft, why some would shun the idea of having awards or places named after a person who, in “real life,” espoused/displayed reprehensible ideas.  On the other hand, I still enjoy H. P. Lovecraft’s works though I know the man behind them wasn’t a great guy.  I also relish the country I live in and it is in no small measure to the works of Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers…many of whom were hardly saints in their personal lives.

Perhaps the middle road is the one best taken: Acknowledge the good a person does but do not ignore the bad.

In some cases, we are dealing with different times, and in Jefferson’s case the times were indeed very different.  But it doesn’t mean we should excuse his failings nor should it be a reason to ignore the positive legacy he left behind.

The Mystery of China’s Levitating Cars…

If you’ve been spending any significant amount of time on the internet of late, you’ve probably seen this video from China:

Pretty damn weird, eh?  Levitating cars?  How?  Why?

Looks like the mystery’s been solved.  From The Telegraph:

Mystery of cars “levitating” in bizarre accident solved

Though I urge you to read the article to get a better understanding of what exactly you’re seeing, it has to do with this…

Yup, a cable got caught in a street cleaner’s vehicle and that’s what had those cars levitating.

You can’t make this up!

’tis the season for…

…oh my…

The above is an actual, honest to goodness ad for Bloomingdale’s.  This is not “new” news, just new to me and I found the article (originally posted on 11/15/15) at Jezebel.  The headline alone tells you everything you need to know about this very wrong very bad ad:

Bloomingdale’s Apologizes For Maybe Encouraging You To Date Rape Your Friend

Speaking of the sordid topic of rape (and also found on Jezebel)…

Porn Star Stoya Accuses Her Ex-Boyfriend James Deen of Rape

followed by…

Porn Star James Deen Vehemently Denies Ex-Girlfriend Stoya’s Date Rape Claim

I’m certain there are those who will read this and say/think somehing to the effect of “Well, they’re Porn Stars!  Their career is screwing!  Given those circumstances, how can anyone in the industry accuse anyone else within it of rape?!”

Which leads me back to the last post I wrote before the whole Thanksgiving holiday hell (the reason, by the way, I haven’t posted from that point until now has nothing to do with me “enjoying” the holidays.  Unless, of course, your idea of “enjoying” the holidays entails working longer hours and much harder than before because several people chose to enjoy their holidays and left you severely short staffed):

I’m referring to the frightening sexual/physical assault against porn star Christy Mack by MMA fighter “War Machine” aka Jonathan Koppenhaver (you can read about that here).

The fact is that regardless of your profession, even if it involves sexual performance before a camera, your “real” life is a whole other matter.  Though Mr. Deen isn’t accused of the life-threatening physical beating Mr. Koppenhaver allegedly delivered to Ms. Mack, rape nonetheless is a heinous act and it should -it seems too obvious- not be tolerated.  It seems too obvious to say that in any relationship, one should respect one’s significant other.

Wow…

In this world, there are obviously all kinds of people and they run the gamut from good to not so good to the downright…terrible.

War Machine, aka Jonathan Koppenhaver, may well fall into that later category.  Mr. Koppenhaver was a mixed-martial arts fighter who a year ago allegedly sexually assaulted and severely beat his ex-girlfriend, porn star Christy Mack.  This is what she looked like afterwards:

Porn Star Posts Graphic Pictures of Brutal Attack by Fighter Ex-Boyfriend

Mr. Koppenhaver fled the scene and was eventually tracked down and arrested and has been in jail ever since.  He is now in court and facing trial and while there…

War Machine Blew a Kiss to the Prosecutor During His Trial For Sexual Assault and Attempted Murder

Sheesh.

I don’t know.  Does this man think he’s living in some kind of WWE cartoon where its “fun” to play the role of the crazed villain?  The crime he’s accused of committing is shocking enough but to show such contempt for those who will work to put him in jail for the rest of his life…well, that’s crazy taken to a whole new level.

Chilling, to say the least.

Politics…

We’re a little less than a year from the presidential elections and, frankly, its been nothing short of a horror show.

There was a time I could look at a Republican or Democratic candidate and, because back then I wasn’t fixated on parties, consider each for their own merits and choose which felt like the better leader of the free world.

This was a very long time ago.

There is no chance I’d consider any of the current crop of Republican candidates for the presidency.  Well, maybe John Kasich but the way he’s polling, it’ll be a really cold day in hell when he becomes the Republican candidate.

That’s not to say the Democratic side is looking all that much better.  While I’m perfectly willing to support Hillary Clinton (considering the Republican alternatives, she’s looking at this moment like a combination of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt), it bothers me that in a nation this large and with so many people willing to serve we have only one legitimate counterpoint to her candidacy in Bernie Sanders.  Now, I like Bernie Sanders.  I like his passion and like many of his ideas, but I never felt he’d have a chance of snatching the nomination from Mrs. Clinton.  In the end, I like to see competition as this brings out the best in others and offers us choices.

So at this moment in time and obviously subject to change, we’ll likely have Mrs. Clinton as the Democratic candidate for the presidency, and TBD as the Republican candidate.

The Republican party, quite unlike the Democratic party, have a surplus of candidates.  I’m thankful for this because we are seeing all kinds of opinions…almost all of which run the gamut from just plain idiotic to Texas Chainsaw Massacre frightening.  The good this creates, of course, is making my choice all that much easier regarding who to vote for when the elections come around.

At this moment, the TBD candidate for the Republican party is Donald Trump, a man whose greatest superpower is his ability to zing others (his takedowns of Jeb! Bush, IMHO, are the sole reason Jeb! has languished in the polls and his candidacy is, to now, stillborn).  And just like almost all the other Republican candidates, he’s presented us with plenty of soundbites and, of late, some outrageous lies, none greater than the amusing one Brendan O’Connor for Gawker feels is his most “outrageous”…

In His Most Outrageous Lie Yet, Trump Suggests His Supporters Are Smart

Ok, I only presented this link for the headline.

Trump supporters may not find it quite as humorous… Oh well.

Infocom

Does the above word, the name of a now defunct software/gaming company, ring any bells?

It sure does for me.

Infocom was an early software developer/gaming company perhaps best known for classic fare such as Zork and its sequels and The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy game.  Here’s Zork, in all its glory:

Scintillating stuff, no?

Well, for early gamers such as me, it was for its time.

Back then graphics were at best rudimentary in both computers and video games and to develop an involved, “deep” game, it was sometimes better to eschew graphics completely and design a game that worked as Zork did, with words alone.

Anyway, if you’re curious about the company, which closed its doors in 1989, you can…

Dig Through the Archives of Infocom

By the way, I found this link at the below article, by Luke Plunkett and for kotaku.com…

http://kotaku.com/dig-through-the-archives-of-a-closed-developer-1744308843

Interesting, at least to me!