The Martian (2015): Now With 75% Less Science!

Matt Damon in The Martian.

Or something like that. I expect a film based upon a book that relies heavily on things like math, biology, and orbital mechanics for its plot to get dumbed down for the big screen, but with The Martian, screenwriter Drew Goddard, and director Ridley "Go Home, You've Been Drunk for Thirty Years" Scott managed to gut the driving force of the plot, and turn a gripping story of human ingenuity, perseverance, and bravery into just another basic survival movie where even the science they leave in is at best half-assed, and at worst just plain wrong. Matt Damon does a solid job, but lacks the power to captivate for long periods alone on screen (see Tom hanks in Castaway for an actor who actually can), but the cut-aways to an Earth full of big movie stars in supporting roles manage to support Damon's performance handsomely. All in all, the movie is fine, but if you really want a gripping, edge-of-your seat space thriller, read the book.

Housebound (2014): A Dark and Funny Kiwi Fruit

Left to right: Rima Te Wiata, Ross Harper, Morgana O'Reilly, and Ryan Lampp in  Housebound..

To make up for the trauma of Fantastic Four (2015), tonight we watched Housebound, a quirky, laugh-out-loud-funny, and really creepy horror film from New Zealand, directed by Gerard Johnstone. This was a delightful film with wonderfully developed characters and very human relationships that were well and quickly drawn. Great camerawork, tremendous use of lighting (or the lack of it) with more than a few twists in the very original story. It's streaming on Netflix right now. You should go watch it.

Fantastic Four (2015): Just Don't

These people had careers once.

Just back from Fantastic Four, which is (unbelievably) even worse than Fox's 2005 attempt. Not only it it an insult to the source material, it is an insult to the medium of film itself. Bad CG, bad acting, bad editing, appalling storytelling, nonexistent direction, baffling musical score, and writing that was turgid enough to clog an industrial toilet, which is where this film belongs. Do not go see this movie. Do not rent or stream this movie in the future. Instead, slam your foot in your car's door over and over again for 100 minutes while shouting "flame on!" and you will enjoy the same experience for much less money.

What's Really Wrong with Abrams' Star Trek

So Mockingbird and I went to see Star Trek: Into Darkness this weekend, and unlike the majority of film goers, we weren't that impressed with the movie. So being who we are we spent the rest of the weekend debating the film with friends on Facebook, and trying to nail down exactly what we didn't like about it in a series of rambling conversations. Turns out, there is quite a lot we didn't like, and she goes into some of it in a post on Unfettered Brilliance which you should go read. Personally, I have been ambivalent about J.J. Abrams' reboot of the franchise since his first film, and after Into Darkness, I think I have finally figured out why. FAIR WARNING: this post may get spoilery, so if you haven't seen the movie, and don't want to be spoiled, don't continue after the jump.

William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

The problem is that Abrams has gotten away from the heart of Star Trek, and a big chunk of that missing heart lies in the fact that Abrams and Chris Pine's Kirk doesn't read. Instead he moodily rides motorcycles in picturesque settings, stares into glasses of whiskey in dive bars while wearing cool leather jackets, sleeps with tailed twins, and other manly-type things. Gene Roddenberry and William Shatner's Kirk, on the other hand did all of that, could quote from the classics, and school Spock on American history. Star Trek has traditionally been a very literate and literary franchise. In "Where no Man Has Gone Before" (1.03) Gary Mitchell describes Kirk in his Starfleet Academy days as "a stack of books with legs," and the value and importance of books and reading was emphasized both overtly as in the hardcopy-loving lawyer Samuel T. Cogley who defends Kirk in "Court Martial" (1.20) and Spock's gift of A Tale of Two Cities to Kirk in The Wrath of Khan, and more subtly in the stack of books that was always seen on a shelf in Kirk's quarters aboard the Enterprise. Kirk was as much a man of letters and science, of wonder and poetry, as he was the dropkicking, quick-drawing space western action hero.

This literacy and humanism was one of the key factors in the success of Star Trek: The Next Generation's success and popularity. Remember Picard's own vast knowledge of literature and general intellectualism as displayed perhaps most wonderfully in "Darmok" (STTNG 5.02) where Picard is able to recount the story of Gilgamesh from memory, and finishes the episode reading Homer, which, of course, he has in hardback form in his ready room? Not to mention Data's search for humanity through the plays of Shakespeare  the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, classical music, and painting. Star Trek is one of the great works and proponents of humanism in American popular culture, and Abrams abandons that in favor of more and more action, with less and less thought.

Finally, let's not forget that Star Trek's literacy has historically informed its villains as well. Remember Kodos the Executioner, the mass murder who went underground as the leader of a Shakespearean travelling troupe in "The Conscience of the King" (ST 1.13)? Or Garth of Izar and his Shakespeare reciting Orion lover Marta in "Whom Gods Destroy" (ST 3.14)? Or the brilliant "Mr. Flint" of "Requiem for Methuselah" (ST 3.19) who quite literally was  DaVinci, Bhrams, and Alexander the Great? Christopher Plummer's Shakespeare quoting General Chang stole every scene he was in for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and finally, as much as I truly loved Benedict Cumberbatch's viciously intense Khan, he comes nowhere close to the power of the original, who goes down quoting from what is arguably the greatest novel ever written by an American:

That's Herman Melville right there, straight out of Moby Dick. That's the literate Star Trek, and the heart and soul of the franchise that Abrams and Co. have, sadly, forgotten.

Solomon's Discs: Cross of Iron (1977)

Hello, Readers Mine!

Well, the grad. school tradition of DVD's over live TV continues, as does my self-directed study of war films. This week, I watched Cross of Iron, by the late, great Sam Peckinpah (aka, the guy Quentin Tarantino has been trying - and failing - to be for his entire career.)

James Coburn as Unteroffizer Feldwebel Rolf Steiner in Cross of Iron

Cross of Iron was Peckinpah's anti-penultimate film, and the only war film that he ever made. Peckinpah is best known for his work in the western genre with such classics as Ride the High Country (1962), The Wild Bunch (1969), and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), and for his sometimes hyper-realistic portrayals of violence. During filming for The Wild Bunch he famously rejected the Warner Brothers gunfire sound effects, which had remained unchanged since the 1930s, and demanded that new effects be recorded using each type of weapon which would appear in the in the film, thus bringing a level of realism to the screen that had never been seen before. Peckinpah's obsession with realism continued with Cross of Iron, which was largely filmed in Yugoslavia because the Yougoslav army had preserved a multitude of World War II era weapons, including Soviet T-34 tanks, specifically for use in films. The German and Soviet uniforms, weapons, vehicles and tanks are all period-accurate, something that was particularly rare at the time (for example, see Patton (1970), where Rommel's 1942 Afrika Korps is using M-47 and M-48 "Patton" tanks, which were not produced until 1951, and were, you know, American tanks).

Interestingly enough, despite the almost continual skirmishes, attacks, counterattacks, shelling, etc that occurs throughout the film, the story has very little to do with the war, and is instead an examination of class. Sargent Rolf Steiner (James Coburn) is a soldier's soldier, the quintessential and mythologized NCO who survives whatever gets thrown at him, keeps his platoon alive, and is only fully alive when he's at war. His nemesis is Captain Stransky (Maximilian Schell), a member of the Prussian officer-aristocracy, who has transferred from a cushy, safe post in southern France to the Russian Front in late 1943, where the Red Army was steadily throwing the Wehrmacht out of the Taman Peninsula. Stransky wants to win the Iron Cross, a medal for bravery highly prized by the Prussian aristocracy, but seen as so just so much metal by fighting men like Steiner and his regimental commander, Colonel Brant (who, in the finest tradition of WWII films, is played by the very British James Mason). Despite his overweening pride in his ancestry, Stransky turns out to be a miserable failure as a line officer, and so blackmails his homosexual adjutant into signing a false statement qualifying him for the Iron Cross, and also puts Steiner's name on the necessary forms. Steiner, proletarian to his core but well educated, and possessing a command of poetry and philosophy, refuses to corroborate Steiner's story.

In the mist of almost daily death and danger, Stransky plays out his petty game, because he cannot face his family if he returns form the war without the Iron Cross. Stransky believes that after the war things will go back to the way they have always been, with the aristocracy at the top of the socio-political heap and everyone else below. Steiner knows that the war has blasted all of that apart for good, and his opinion of the upper class both within and without the army is summed up in the line "I hate all officers." Cross of Iron is an astonishing film, and as with all of Peckinpah's work, asks probing questions about the nature of manhood and masculinity. Steiner, the hard-working, hard-fighting proletarian is full of all of the many virtues, from bravery to strength to sexual prowess to manly love for the men under his care. Steiner is cold, manipulative, self-centered, and obsessed with appearances above all. Peckinpah gives the viewer a powerful, if broadly drawn psychodrama, and reveals the class structure not just of the Wehrmacht  but of all armies, particularly during World War II, when the separation and distinction between officers and enlisted men was rigidly maintained even by the American "citizen-soldier" Army. Coburn delivers an incredible performance as Steiner, and is one of the Great Sergeants of war films, right up there with Lee Marvin, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Audie Murphy.

Cross of Iron was sited by Tarantino as his inspiration for The Inglourious Basterds (2009), and although the film did porly upon its release in 1977, Cross of Iron's reputation has been on the rise for the past decade or so. The film's portrayal of combat is highly realistic, especially for the time, with battle scenes that are desperate, confused, frantic, and bloody. It's not for everyone, but for anyone interested in the war film genre, Cross of Iron is a must see.

Solomon's Discs: Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War

Hello, Readers Mine, and welcome to what is the first installment in a regular series of posts here at Solomon Mao's. When I finished up my Associates Degree in 2010 and started in on my last two years of undergraduate work at UNC-Greensboro, during the week I lived in a great little place without cable TV. So Mockingbird and I went out and bought me a little 22-inch HDTV with a built in DVD player, and I subscribed to Netflix. Mock' insists that I am constitutionally incapable of watching live TV, and I am not one to channel surf. When I want to watch something, I want to sit down and watch it. Now my graduate apartment here at ETSU has Dish TV, but I still rarely watch live TV. What I do watch are films and TV series/seasons on DVD. My schedule is such that I can usually find two or three nights a week to settle in and watch a movie, so little red envelopes come in and out of my place regularly.

The great thing about Netflix is that their selection of DVDs is truly impressive (not so their streaming service, however) so when I go on a kick for one particular director, actor, or genre, I can go deep. For most of a year now, I've been on a self-taught course in film studies focusing on war films, sparked by a paper I wrote on Joss Whedon's The Avengers (yes, it's a pretty classic American combat film piece), and reading Jeanine Basinger's excellent The World War Two Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. Since last May (2012), I've watched a bunch of war films, beginning with American movies, which pretty much created the genre and still exert a heavy influence on the style of war films worldwide, but I've also been branching out into foreign war films as well. Which brings me to last night's DVD: Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War.

Directed by Kang Je-kyu and starring Jang Dong-gun and Won Bin Tae Guk Gi is a story about two brothers whose lives are are thrown into bloody chaos by the Korean War. This is "America's Forgotten War" as seen from the Korean perspective, and I get the sense that in South Korea, the war is anything but "forgotten." The film is not for the squeamish. Though the violence, blood, and gore are not gratuitous, they are highly realistic, and modern war is not kind to the human bodies which get caught up in its meatgrinder.

Jin-soek Lee (Won Bin)is the youngest child of his family, just 18 in 1950 when the film begins. He is the hope of his family, an excellent student, and college-bound. His elder brother Jin-tae Lee (Jang Dong-gun), became the man of the family as a teen when their father died. He works the streets of Seoul shining and repairing shoes while his mother, mute since his father's death, and fiance run a small noodle shop, with all of their efforts focused on enabling Jin-soek to complete his schooling and thus move out of the ranks of the working poor. Theirs is a very traditional Korean family knit together by bonds of duty, sacrifice, and deep and affectionate love. 

When the war breaks out, Jin-soek Lee is swept up by an official conscription gang, and, unable to get his brother out, Jin-tae Lee joins up too and devotes his military career to protecting his brother. His appeals to his regimental commander result in Jin-tae being offered a deal: if he fights hard and bravely enough to win the Medal of Honor, then the commander will discharge Jin-soek and let him go back home. Fortunately Jin-tae discovers in himself a true talent for war, and becomes the stuff that Medal of Honor winners are made of by November of 1950, just as the Chinese People's Volunteer Army enters the war, ensuring that all deals are off. Unfortunately, along with that talent for war comes a hatred for the enemy that makes Jin-tae grow harder and colder as the war progresses.

Tae Guk Gi is a true masterpiece of the genre, and the story of the Lee brothers (only vaguely and incompletely outlined above - you should really see the film) is deeply moving. Kan Je-kyu refuses to flinch from showing the true horror of war and the damage it does to those fighting it and those caught in between. Nor does he ignore the madness that gripped the South Korean people as they informed on, imprisoned, and summarily executed many of their fellows, men, women, and children who were labelled as communists for the most spurious of reasons. Tae Guk Gi is a film about a nation gone mad, where both sides in the brutal conflict speak the same language, and slaughter each other en masse. Above all, Tae Guk Gi is a humanist piece, and never blinks at the realities of human beings caught up by deadly forces far beyond their control who only wish to survive and return to some semblance of normalcy. The Lee brothers are Everymen from every family, from every nation, in every war, and their love for one another leaves the viewer in tears by the end of the piece.

I've only given you the smallest of taste of this film here, and you should put it on your queue immediately. At two and a half hours long, be ready to settle in for the evening, but I promise you it is worth every minute. I fully intend to add some more of Kang Je-kyu's films to my own queue, especially any featuring the lead actors in Tae Guk Gi. In the final analysis, this film puts Saving Private Ryan in the shade, and for my money rates as one of the greatest war films ever made. Go forth and watch it!

Meth Monday No. 14: The Ecstasy of Gold, Seasons 1 - 5A (beta)

Okay, Reader's Mine, I've got a treat for you this week: the latest version of Wojtky's "Ecstasy of Gold mash-up where Breaking Bad meets Ennio Morricone, by far the most gripping, brilliant bit of Breaking Bad fan-art on the web. Enjoy, and subscribe to Wojtky's You Tube channel here. I think you'll agree that this is plenty for one week, so I'll see you next Monday! Oh, and you're gonna wanna see this one in full screen mode.

Trust me.

Book O' the Fortnight: Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors

Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors
 by Jennifer K. Stuller

Regular readers will recognize the author of the current Book O' the Fortnight from previous mentions here in connection with Slayage and Geek Girl Con, and it is well known that she's one of my favorite people. I met Jennifer K. Stuller at Slayage 4 in St. Augustine, where she gave an incredible presentation on pop culture influences on Joss Whedon's works. At the same conference, we bought her book Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology, which she was kind enough to inscribe for Dale and me. I'm kind of ashamed to say that it took me until late last year to sit down and read it cover-to-cover. Don't get me wrong, her book wasn't sitting idle. I dipped into it regularly, reading a chapter here, skimming a section there, diving from index to mid-chapter to see what she had to say about a particular interest here and there, but I just hadn't settled in for the entire journey.

I'm glad I finally did!

Stuller self-identifies as a pop culture historian, and Ink-Stained Amazons  shows the truth of that claim. Her research and methodology are impeccable, and she presents her findings in a narrative that is both fascinating and fun, using a wide ranging, multi-disciplinary approach that sets her work firmly within the changing historical context of the past century or so. More, her writing is immediately accessible, and thoroughly enjoyable. She begins by briefly outlining her focus, being female characters in popular culture which meet at least two of four criteria: 1.) a narrative that "borrows from, or resonates with, classical themes and/or elements of world mythology," 2.) has "an element of the fantastic," 3.) "a uniquely identifiable skill or power," 4.) and "a mission or purpose that benefits the greater good." These criteria set, she then gives the reader an excellent historical overview of female superheroes from William M. Marston's Wonder Woman to Dark Angel's Max Guevara, covering kick-ass female heroes in comic books, comic strips, books, movies, and TV along the way. Importantly, Stuller places the development of these figures within the larger socio-cultural context of (particularly) American culture and the emergence, growth, and change of the feminist movement.

Stuller is also unflinching in her analysis of the successes and failures of both the larger culture and the feminist movement's various "waves." She maintains an admirably clear and unbiased historical lens throughout (which trust me, Readers Mine, is an incredibly difficult thing to do when writing about a subject  that one is passionate about!). From classic historical narrative, Stuller moves in the second section of her book to the mythological and cultural underpinnings and story-structures of female superheroes, combining history, feminist criticism, Jungian archetypes, Campbellian comparative mythology, and fan-love into a powerful in-depth analysis of the successes an failings of specific characters and narratives, from The Avengers to Modesty Blaise, to Xena the Warrior Princess, Charlie's Angels, Buffy the Vampire Slayer,  Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman, and Dark Angel to name just a few. She examines the strange lack of female to female mentoring, positive maternal figures, and realistic female relationships in popular culture, as well as pointing out where such stories have appeared.

With some of the problems and potentialities of fdemale superhero narratives outlines, Stuller concludes with a look at the women who are creating the modern crop of female superheroes. From actors like Nichelle Nichols, Whoopi Goldberg, Lucy Lawless, Lynda Carter, Sarah Michelle Gellar, among others, all of who take their positions as potential role models very seriously, to writer/blogger/activists like Mary Borsellino, Gail Simone, Trina Robbins, and Angela Robinson, who are on the front lines of creating today's female superheros and working against old tropes and entrenched male-centric storytelling, Stuller gives the reader an inside look on the still growing, still evolving history of the female superhero who today is more and more often being brought to life by women.

Stuller's final chapter asks the question "Where do we go from here?" Which she answers with an unflinching "foreward!" In spite of failures, in spite of resistance, in spite of steps forward being accompanied by steps back, the next step is to continue, that each of us, whatever sex, whatever gender, may find in these modern myths the stories that inspire us, and that, in Jennifer K. Stuller's own words, enable us to  find "heroes to relate to, and ways to live heroically."

It is a remarkable, fun, moving and inspiring book, one that I'm glad is on my shelf, and who's author I am so very proud to call a friend. Go buy it.

Filmic Adventures

So during the recent way-too-many-plates-spinning-at-once hiatus from Solomon Mao’s, I did manage to watch a few flicks, so I thought I’d take a moment here and spout off some reviews.

Bridesmaids: F

Sometime in September, Mock’ and I lost count of just exactly how many people had raved about this movie to us, so one night at Family Video we broke down and rented it. Rest assured that if you are one of the people who recommended this move to me, you will pay. So women can do gross-out comedy as well as men. Okay. What else you got? Look! Women in groups are bitchy, fake, manipulative, insecure, and jealous of and among each other! Isn’t that funny? Nope. Not really. What else? Oh, I see, this film is a TWO-trick pony, and both of them are bad. Look, people, this isn’t character-driven humor, it’s characters written around a style of humor, and badly. I think Mock laughed three times in the first forty-five minutes, and I admit to laughing once, but the laughs weren’t all that hearty, and once we’d seen all two of the movies tricks—repeatedly—we turned the thing off and went on to better, and funnier things, like clipping our toenails. I can count on one hand the number of films that were so bad that I just couldn’t finish watching them, and Bridesmaids is one of them.

Hanna: D

Oh look, its The Bourne Identity meets Run Lola Run, only with better actors than the former and much less interesting than the latter! Not to mention plot holes large enough to steer a Maersk container-ship through. For instance, why, exactly, is it necessary to activate a radio-homing beacon and thereby let the evil CIA-Bitch (played by the usually amazing Cate Blanchett, who really disappoints here) know where young Hanna is when Hanna and her “father” have managed to disappear so successfully for at least thirteen or fourteen years? Seriously, if they can’t find your cabin in BF-Finland, they probably won’t be able to catch up to you in, say, London, either. Also, what’s with the awesomely ineffectual Euro-trash, metrosexual assassin whose habit of constantly whistling loudly would seem to provide any target plenty of warning that he’s in the neighborhood. Rather than creepy, that little tick turned out to be clownish. I’m not sure I get the press about Hanna being such a strong female character, either. The entire film revolves around Hanna doing just exactly what her father has trained her to do and the bad guys expect her to do. Hanna is more puppet than empowered female.

Inception: C

The theory here seems to be that if the action and pacing are kept fast, are combined with some truly stunning visual effects, and aided and abetted by the skills of Leonardo DiCaprio and Ken Watanabe, the audience will fail to realize exactly how little sense the premise upon which the entire film hangs makes. In truth I’m a big fan of both DiCaprio and Watanabe, but neither actor is anywhere near the top of his game in this film. I’m going to step aside here and let Trey Parker and Matt Stone finish this review with a clip from South Park’s “Insheeption” which pretty much sums this movie up:

Insheeption
Get More: SOUTH
PARKStan Marsh,Mr. Mackey,more...

The Bad Sleep Well: A

Ah! Thank God for Akira Kurosawa! (NOT the first time I've said that.) This very dark piece from 1960 is a tale of greed, revenge, and murder. Koichi Nishi (played by the incredible Toshiro Mifune), enacts an elaborate ruse in order to take revenge against the corrupt post-war Japanese corporate system. The film is a surprisingly brutal indictment of a corporate culture in which loyalty to the company is the ultimate measure of a man’s worth, more important than friendship, family, love, or any traditional moral code. Decades before No Country For Old Men, Kurosawa crafts an evil which is equally disturbing, and perhaps even more horrifying than the Coen brothers’ Chigurh for being so ruthlessly mundane. Warning: there’s no happy ending here, just brilliant, scathing filmmaking.   

Puss in Boots (2D): A

To wrap up with the most recent film here, it’s a delight to have enjoyed this animated adventure as much as I did. Puss (voiced by a scenery-chewing Antonio Banderas), turns out to be from a place that resembles Extremadura more than a little, and has all of the legendary traits of the region. He is dashing, daring, proud, foolish, undefeatable, and absolutely sure of himself. He is also unapologetically male in the Don Juan mode. Puss meets his match, however, in the dangerously lovely Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek), as he becomes involved in the twisted and nefarious schemes of Humpty Dumpty (Zach Galifianakis). The film has some lovely bits, particularly a flashback sequence in which Dumpty is revealed to have been in the background of every major plot point of the story, the rotundly ovoid puppet-master leading Puss to disgrace and dishonor. The cast obviously had tremendous fun with the film and it shows in every frame. The story was very well done, and I don’t feel as if I missed anything by eschewing a pair of clunky plastic spectacles. 3D had nothing to add except the usual “oh look, it’s kinda like it’s coming near me, sorta,” and I’ll pass on paying three extra bucks for that!

So, anyone else been watching movies lately?  

Apollo 18: "A-"

Russian poster for Apollo 18,
where it apparently was first released!

To celebrate a long weekend together, Mockingbird and I decided to take in a movie (among other things), and since we were looking for more of a popcorn flick than art film, we decided to check out Apollo 18. The film’s premise is pretty straightforward: after Apollo 17, the last official moon mission, NASA and the Department of Defense sent another Apollo mission to the moon, this time in secret. Ostensibly there to set up a series of early-warning devices to detect a Soviet nuclear ballistic missile launch against the US, the intrepid three-man crew discovers… something else.

I have to say that we were pleasantly surprised by the film. The back-story is that the audience is watching an edited version of some eighty-five hours of video files recently uploaded to www.lunartruth.com (which, in a further touch, has apparently been “blocked,” making it unavailable), exposing the mission, so all of the film is ostensibly from the cameras aboard the Apollo module and lunar lander, as well as a battery of hand-held and spacesuit-mounted 16mm cameras, and some tripod-mounted automatic cameras which the astronauts set up here and there. This leads to one of the more brilliant aspects of the film, as it has been meticulously made to appear as if it was actually shot using this equipment, and the film “stock” has been appropriately aged to give it an early 1970s unrestored archival look. The viewable area of the theater screen is even cropped to a square area with rounded corners to further the effect of watching old 16mm film. The technical work done here is astounding, as is the films attention to detail in recreating the living conditions of the Apollo astronauts in what were truly tiny metal shells fully equipped with such delicacies as “ham paste.”

In a nice change from frantic SF pacing, the movie builds slowly and evenly, ratcheting up the tension through several seeming climaxes which serve only to wind things a bit tighter still. It is as much a psychological thriller as it is an alien menace piece, and director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego does a brilliant job of using the strange mix of claustrophobic spacecraft and utterly inhospitable lunar space to work on both the astronauts and the audience. I was also pleased to see lead actor Warren Christie, who can also be seen weekly on SyFy’s Alphas, get some big-screen time, and prove that he has the chops to be there. Christie brilliantly portrays the deep confusion and mistrust of a young career military officer who has been badly shaken by the Watergate scandal, reminding the audience that the film is set in a time when the now habitual mistrust of the American government on the part of its citizens was only just beginning to take root, and betrayal by that government was as unexpected as it was bitter.

I give Apollo 18 an “A-” over-all, however, because there were unfortunately times when the close-ups of frantic astronauts had me thinking “Look, it’s Blair Witch in Space!” but that has more to do with brief visuals than writing, directing, acting, or overall cinematography. Also, there remains the somewhat glaring plot-hole of just exactly how the footage from the hand-held and suit cameras made it back to Earth! Overall though, Apollo 18 is a thoughtful thriller that relies on acting and artistry to achieve its chills, and takes the time to build a real story rather than endless shrapnel-filled explosions and plucky-humans-against-evil-aliens clichés. Go see it.

At the Movies

This week, Readers Mine, let me start out with a bit of advice: never watch two cinematic masterpieces during the course of a week, and then follow them with James Cameron’s Avatar on the weekend. The latter’s weaknesses, already quite visible, become glaring. That being said, it is hard to imagine a film that would stand up well against Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Ikiru is the story of a 30-year career bureaucrat, Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) who is diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer and realizes that, despite being an old man, he has never lived. In Japanese, “ikiru” means “to live,” and the remainder of the film is devoted to Watanabe’s search for a way to give meaning to his life in the six months he has to live. I scooped up the Criterion Collection edition of the film on DVD as a late birthday present, so I got all sorts of extra goodies with the film, including a nice little booklet in which a noted historian and biographer of Kurosawa proceeded to misinterpret the film as a modern existentialist statement. Instead of a negation of meaning, however, Ikiru beautifully renders what is a core tenant of humanism: that the meanings of our lives are found in what we do with them, in the meanings we choose to imbue them with. As the inimitable Joss Whedon would have it, “if nothing that we do matters, then the only thing that matters is what we do.” As Mockingbird pointed out to me, the first half of that line is existentialism, the second, and dominant, half is humanism. Watanabe does indeed imbue his life with meaning in a mere six months, even as his cancer kills him, and gives the film its soul in the wonderful line:

“I can’t afford to hate anyone. I haven’t got that kind of time.”

If you should get a chance, see this wonderful film, made by perhaps the greatest film auteur of the 20^th century. Personally, I still see Red Beard as his humanist masterwork, but Ikiru is a thing of beauty to light the modern soul with hope, and how can you not fall in love with such a film?

Next we turn to a film which I’m ashamed to say I’d never seen until this week, Vertigo. One of the ways Mockingbird and I are dealing with our Commuter Marriage is to try, once a week, to watch the same movie on the same night in our separate digs, so we have a kind of date night and something to talk about in the following days besides work and school. We’re trying to go through the films neither one of us has seen but for one reason or another think we want to or ought to. (Avatar was part of this too, and now that we’ve seen it, we never have to see it again.) So this week was Hitchcock’s disturbing masterwork Vertigo.

I always like it when a film that is billed as disturbing really disturbs me. The ability to make me actively uncomfortable is a sign of great narrative filmmaking, and Vertigo does this in spades. The film tells the story of a retired police detective (James Stewart), who is hired by an old college buddy to follow his psychologically unstable wife (Kim Novak). Hitchcock leads us gently along the garden path with his easy pacing for the first half of the film and then throws us into a house of mirrors-maze and locks the exits for the second. It becomes a frighteningly intimate portrait of a shared descent into madness, obsession, and control that had me squirming in my seat, not least because of what Jeff Bussolini has called the “intertextuality of character” inherent in Jimmy Stewart, who is far afield from his normal, lovable, aw-shucks-merry-Christmas-everybody characters, and into deep, dark waters indeed. Plus, Hitchcock actually manages to make Kim Novak over into a cheap, frowzy broad with some hair-color, bangs, and exaggerated eyebrow-penciling, while Novak herself shows some serious acting chops as she moves from personality to personality throughout the film.

Perhaps the most striking thing to my eye, however, was Hitchcock’s use of color, and particularly the capabilities of Technicolor, where you can get not just blue, but !!!BLUE!!! Hitchcock uses the technology with tremendous artistry, keeping the colors muted and realistic for most scenes but using the full glory of Technicolor with the surety of a Fauvist master. A bed of red flowers there, emerald cocktail dress here, a sticky day-glow neon green from a neon sign there, until the color itself becomes a character in the film, wrapping you round and drawing you into an uncomfortable intimacy of creeping insanity. This is a creepy, creepy film, and if you’ve never seen it, you are really missing one of the highlights of American Cinema.

So now I’ve done some quickie film reviews here, which full-well count as scribblings, and was a lot of fun to boot. Mock’ and I have a bunch more movies coming this semester, so maybe there’ll be more of these in future. Until next time, be well.