Review – Eye of the Needle

The set-up in this spy thriller is actually quite good. A Nazi secret agent (Donald Sutherland) discovers that an “army” under Patton’s command is actually an elaborate ruse intended to draw German forces away from the real location of the impending D-Day invasion. For awhile the story stays interesting as the anti-hero evades capture and tries to sneak photos of the fake invasion force out of England. But eventually he ends up hiding out in the isolated home of a disabled RAF veteran (Christopher Cazenove) and his lonely wife (Kate Nelligan). Creepy love triangle gives way to a relentless game of cat and mouse, an unfortunate, non-thrilling end to a picture that was reasonably entertaining up until then. Mildly amusing

The eight biggest media moments of 2010

This has been a crazy year. Truth be told, I’ve been so caught up with non-media stuff that a lot of the things I’d normally focus on got ignored. Still, it was an eventful year. Here are the highlights.

Show death – Several of the shows we regularly watched ran their final episodes this year. Oddly, none of them got the rug yanked out from under them. So at least they got the chance to wrap things up in tidy, story-arc-friendly ways. Lost was the most notable casualty, Abrams and company running out of weirdness and calling it quits even though they probably could have kept drawing audiences for another season or two. Likewise The Tudors concluded with Henry VIII’s death, a natural enough place to stop even though they could have continued to follow the Tudor monarchies with additional episodes if they’d been inclined.

More show death – On the other hand, 24 met a more traditional slipping-ratings death. In its heyday it drew a ton of attention and more than a little controversy, but by the end it passed on not with a bang but a whimper. They could have killed it more dramatically, but honestly it wouldn’t have mattered. Too bad, too. When it was going strong it was actually fairly entertaining.

The Lawrence Welk Easter show – Easter weekend was a strange time for me. That Saturday the strangeness was compounded when I found myself in a waiting room while a nearby television screened KCPT’s broadcast of an old Lawrence Welk Easter show. His cadre of abnormally cheerful regulars all dressed as giant, brightly-colored, fuzzy bunnies, ducklings and chicks singing about Peter Cottontail and Abbot the Rabbit … well, it was all just a little much.

My semi-triumphant return to the movie theater – For the past few years I’ve been avoiding movie theaters. Though this change in my media habits was completely justified, I admit I did miss the big screen experience a bit. So with the assistance of some fellow filmgoers I managed to make it to a few more theater-screened movies this year. Though it wasn’t exactly a “thank goodness I decided to come back” experience, it was at least a little nice to be back.

The death of the printed version of the Advocate – I’m a big fan of dead tree newspapers. Thus it was with great pain that I helped the staff of the student newspaper I advise to make the transition from print to web-only. Though it saddened me greatly to make the change, the time for change had come.

The Tea Party on the dance show – For some reason Sarah Palin’s daughter’s appearance on Dancing with the Stars seemed to cause quite a stir. Sure, she was talentless. Yes, the Tea Partiers out there kept calling in and voting for her. That’s America. If nothing else, it should serve as a sobering reminder that “Palin should run in 2012 because Obama will beat her easily” could be famous last words.

Midterm elections nonsense – And speaking of elections, we sat through another one. They just seem to get more and more vicious each time. It makes me shudder to think about what we’ll be “treated” to the next time around.

The phone, the phone – For the longest time the Lens household resisted any kind of Internet presence in the house. It just seemed too much like work creeping into our personal lives. But in June the time came to replace our old cell phones, and we made the jump to smart phones. That got the ball rolling, and by the end of the year we had a WiFi hub in the house. Time and tide.

Review – Stepping Out

Though this might have been good fodder for a not-especially-talented high school theatre class, it worked neither on Broadway (73 performances) nor as a movie. Liza Minnelli plays an aging never-was teaching an ensemble of talentless tap students. When the class is offered the chance to perform in a charity benefit, the teacher struggles to whip them into shape. A series of contrived plot twists and cliché character developments ensues. The cast features several familiar faces – not to mention Richard Harris writing the screenplay based on his own original theatre piece – but overall the cake gets left out in the rain. Mildly amusing [note: upon further investigation, it turns out that the Richard Harris who wrote this is a different guy from the Richard Harris who sang “MacArthur Park.” Still, the line is good enough to leave it in.]

Review – Ice Quake

If I’m going to watch a SyFy movie, I want one of two things: apocalyptic destruction or entertainingly dreadful CGI monsters. This production delivers neither. Instead we get an underground river of liquid methane that’s expanding, causing earthquakes and other disturbances. To be sure, this would suck if it was really happening. But it’s nowhere near dramatic enough to make an amusingly bad movie. See if desperate

Review – Tell Tale

The title may be Poe, but the plot is an awkward graft of Body Parts and Coma. A heart transplant recipient (Josh Lucas) discovers that he recognizes people he’s never met and remembers things that never happened to him. With the help of a homicide detective (Brian Cox), he slowly – ever so slowly – uncovers the connection between his donor and a criminal conspiracy as ludicrous as it is boring. The production values are reasonably good, so it’s a shame they weren’t put to use making a picture a little truer to the alleged source story. See if desperate

Review – Philosophy of a Knife

I rented this (or streamed it from Netflix to be more precise) based on the mistaken assumption that it was a documentary about Unit 731, the infamous facility in Manchuria where the Japanese military performed horrible medical experiments on prisoners during World War Two. So imagine my considerable annoyance when it turned out to be an extended exercise in industrial noise video and torture porn. The picture revels in graphic recreations of torment – particularly sexual abuse – with almost no historical context or other redeeming quality. Indeed, the old Russian guy they interview no doubt to lend some sense of legitimacy to the visceral “thrills” appears to have little or no firsthand knowledge about 731’s activities. The result is an ugly, nasty mess intended solely to entertain audiences with sexual proclivities that require the intervention of mental health professionals. In the interest of full disclosure, I acknowledge that this is actually a review of only the first half of the video. After two hours of filth and degradation, I wasn’t prepared to prolong my misery. Avoid at all costs

Review – Salem Witch Trials

The subject of religious persecution and the presence of Kirstie Alley in the lead had my Scientology detector turned up to 11. However, this seemed to be a fairly straightforward telling of the title tale. The trials are portrayed as motivated by religious fanaticism in the service of land-grabbing greed, particularly on the parts of Rev. Parris and Thomas Putnam (Henry Czerny and Jay O. Sanders respectively, who are hard to tell apart in their Puritan outfits). At least it wasn’t quite as arty-stuffy as Arthur Miller’s version. Mildly amusing

Review – The Duellists

So is there a law or regulation somewhere that requires all movies about the Napoleonic era to be deadly dull? Director Ridley Scott starts with a source story by Joseph Conrad, but everything in the movie except the duels themselves are as boring as Kubrick’s adaptation of Thackery. Two French officers (Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel) get crossways of one another and duel on several occasions as Napoleon seizes and then loses Europe in the background. Like Kubrick’s failure, this too is a visually stunning but otherwise unrewarding production. Mildly amusing

Review – Twins of Evil

I wonder exactly when the good-twin-evil-twin thing first became a cliché. Given that Alexandre Dumas was using it in the late 1840s, it’s fair to assume that by the time Hammer brings it to bear in 1971 that it was already trite beyond all excuse. And in fact this isn’t the studio’s finest hour. At least they got actual twins (Madeleine and Mary Collinson) rather than forcing us to endure an endless parade of stupid split-screen setups. They also got Peter Cushing, though they don’t give him much to work with by casting him as a misogynistic witch hunter ill-equipped to deal with the local vampire infestation. The use of nudity is strange as well, absent where one might expect a great deal but then cropping up unexpectedly toward the end of the movie. Overall this isn’t the worst work Hammer ever did, but it’s a far cry from the best. Mildly amusing

Review – Wolf Moon

Title and cover art notwithstanding, for the first half hour I wasn't even sure I was watching a werewolf movie. Instead it appeared to be some kind of desert Southwestern drama about rednecks tippy-toeing up to the verge of sexual assault. Though I recognize the shape-shifting sub-genre's potential for sexual savagery, this is less The Howling and more beer-swilling assholes on any given Saturday night. Even when the fangs and fur do finally emerge, they're a bit on the lame side. The result doesn't come anywhere near justifying the two hour running time. See if desperate

Review – Alone in the Dark 2

At least it isn't quite as terrible as the first one. That's due in part to the absence of Uwe Boll in the director's chair (though he's a producer). But more than that, it's easier to swallow because it doesn't take itself so seriously. This is a crappy cheese fest and it knows it. The plot has something to do with a magic knife and the vengeful spirit of an evil witch, but as usual the plot really isn't the point. Though if your next question is "Okay, what is the point?" well, um ... see if desperate

Review – Circle of Eight

A new woman moves into an apartment building that appears to be a blend of movie set and insane asylum. All her fellow tenants seem to have three things in common: they're all at least a little off somehow, they've all mastered the inappropriate share, and they're all creepily obsessed with the protagonist. Is she nuts? Is she the sane victim of a complicated plot to drive her insane? Could the truth be something even less interesting? Only 90 minutes' worth of patience with some highly mediocre filmmaking will uncover the answer. See if desperate

Review - The Final Countdown

The title of this production is a puzzlement, as the picture lacks a countdown of any kind, final or otherwise. So really the only purpose the title serves is to dig up an earwig from Europe. The story, on the other hand, is an odd little tale about an 80s era aircraft carrier sucked through an unexplained time warp and deposited between Pearl Harbor and the Japanese fleet on December 7, 1941. Should they let history run its course, or should they use their vastly superior firepower to intervene and stop the attack? From the summary alone you can already tell that this plays out like a Twilight Zone episode that goes on five times longer than it needs to. Mildly amusing

Review – Shatter Dead

So the Zombie Apocalypse is going to suck even if the walking dead aren't actively trying to eat us. Unfortunately the threat of being eaten isn't replaced by anything more interesting than a lot of nonsensical plot twists and some of the most dreadful dialogue ever written delivered by some of the most wooden actors this side of a marionette show. No wonder few of the folks listed in the credits appear to be going by their actual names. Seems like there was some serious indie hype surrounding this when it first came out, though now it just looks like every other low-budget zombie crapfest. See if desperate

Review – The Illustrated Man

This is nowhere near as good as the source collection of stories. Of course when they start with stories by Ray Bradbury, it's only natural to fall a bit short. But whatever chance they might have had is swiftly squandered on a lot of wasted screen time. For example, it takes nearly half an hour just to get past the opening bracket and on to the first actual story. The production also suffers from 70s era fuzzy visuals and laconic pacing. What a shame. Mildly amusing

Review – Tales that Witness Madness

Reviewers that witness bad movies. Donald Pleasance plays a psychiatrist who brackets the stories of four mental patients with eerie back-stories. Or perhaps it would be better to say “eerily familiar.” The first bears a strong resemblance to John Collier’s “Thus I Refute Beelzy” only with an imaginary-or-is-it tiger rather than a demon. The next has a distinct under-taste of D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking Horse Winner.” The other two aren’t quite as closely tied to anything specific (at least nothing I recognized), but they’re nonetheless born clichés with completely predictable outcomes. I was in the mood for a murky British horror anthology piece when I watched this, so I may have liked it a bit better than I should have. Mildly amusing

Review – In Search of Lovecraft

Well, at least this features some vague references to actual Lovecraftiana. It's still icing on a standard horror cake, but at least it's spread on fairly thick. An aspiring newscaster gets saddled with a Halloween puff piece about the influence of H.P. Lovecraft on modern horror. So of course she accidentally uncovers a sinister cult trying to conjure up an unspeakable eldritch thing. However, lacking the budget for an unspeakable eldritch thing, the filmmakers instead ask us to settle for some run of the mill pseudo-Wiccan skullduggery. What a shame. The set-up had some potential. Mildly amusing

Review – Impact (2008)

Okay, let me see if I have this straight. A meteor slams into the Moon, which causes its mass to double. This starts causing gravitational anomalies on Earth, which turns out to be the least of our problems when the Moon’s orbit starts to decay. Nuclear missiles fail to fix the problem, so a squad of scientists have to go on a suicide mission to somehow dislodge the meteor and set things right again. And somehow this nonsense got stretched out into a four-hour miniseries on SyFy? Well, I guess that last point isn’t that hard to believe. Needless to say, this was better as background noise than it was as actual video entertainment. See if desperate

Review – A Christmas Carol (2009)

I liked this better than I thought I would, due in no small part to a surprisingly close correlation between the script and Dickens’s classic tale. Indeed, the only serious departure from the original text is an interminable hearse chase that serves no function other than prolonging the fourth chapter. Doing the whole production as a high-dollar computer animation also allowed the production to more faithfully recreate Dickens’s vision, particularly for the amorphous Spirit of Christmas Past. On the minus side, there’s the voice work for Scrooge (Jim Carrey) and the Spirits of Christmas Past (Jim Carrey) and Present (Jim Carrey). Overall I still like the Sim version better, but this has some good things going for it as well. Mildly amusing

Eight reasons why books are hard to review

Even a quick scan of this blog’s contents cloud shows one thing clearly: I have a lot more movie reviews than anything else. That’s in part because my book reviews are on Goodreads rather than here. But it’s also partially because I don’t read as many books as I’d like.

Oh, and books are harder to review. Much harder. Here are eight reasons why:

Educated people are taught to respect books – For the vast majority of the thousands of years of recorded human history, books – in one form or another – have stored our knowledge for us. Keeping this tradition alive requires what all living traditions need: a certain measure of reverence. Parents pass this sense of respect to their children, and teachers pass it to their students.

One of the few lectures I still remember from high school all these decades after graduation is the lesson one history teacher taught us about the crime of book burning. “Never burn a book,” he admonished. “Even if you don’t like it, that book might have something important to say to someone else.” To this day I have trouble throwing away even outdated phone books.

I notice this bias creeping into my reviews as well. While a talentless filmmaker can expect to get kicked rapidly to the curb, a similarly incompetent author is far more likely to get an “at least they tried” response.

They require undivided attention – A good movie commands complete attention while it’s on. But the vast majority of movies out there don’t merit such an intense time commitment. Instead, one can easily attend to something else (such as writing a top eight list) while keeping an eye on a movie playing in the background just to make sure that nothing especially good or bad gets missed. Books can’t be handled that way. You’re either reading it or you aren’t.

They take longer to finish – In addition to their resistance to “multitasking,” books are simply slower going. I know some folks can speed read (and others think they can), but I’m not among them. At full steam I can finish a book a week, though life’s little distractions often keep me at a slower pace. In that amount of time I’ll typically watch and review seven to ten movies.

They’re more emotionally involving – Because books require such a high commitment of time and mental energy, the reader often ends up in a “mini relationship” with them. “Books are our friends” sounds like it should be followed by “but they won’t pick you up at the airport.” But in a way we do make friends with the books we read. To be sure, some of them are friends we dislike for one reason or another. I admit that as I type this several weak books stare down at me from my shelves. They’re there because I had the experience of reading them, so now for better or worse they’re part of my life.

Even the bad ones can be good – Bad books have something to teach us. For example, I admit to being defeated by Henry James. I simply cannot bring myself to attempt any more of his stories. However, James teaches us by counter-example the importance of paragraph structure, narrative flow, and the wisdom of the old adage “brevity is the soul of wit.” Bad movies often cause the audience to merely lose interest, especially at home where distractions abound. Writing – from the best to the worst – is harder to ignore.

Sometimes the good ones are actually bad – By its nature the written word stimulates critical thinking. It makes our neurons fire in ways that most other media simply don’t. When watching an uninspiring movie that critics adore, it’s easy to keep one’s opinions to one’s self. Nod and smile and pretend you saw the Emperor’s fine new suit that everyone else seems to think is so grand. Books demand more from us. At the end of a “classic” that left you flat, you should be able to find specific fault with what you read, not merely shrug it off with a diffident teenager’s “that was boring.” Like a long distance run, the experience may not have been the most fun in the world, but at least it was good for you.

I find it easier to empathize with writers – When I was a lad I imagined that someday I would be a big-time movie director. The writing I’ve done for the last four and a half decades – combined with the extensive catalog of movies I never made – leads me to conclude that I may be a writer rather than a filmmaker. I’ve found this “defeat” easy to live with. I like words. I like sentences and paragraphs and stories and essays and novels and articles and you name it I probably like it. Even poetry, which I find hard to wrap my brain around, holds its charms. Thus I sympathize with the plight of anyone who struggles to bend words to her or his will. And I enjoy being in the company of the fruits of their labor.

Books need all the love they can get – Nobody reads books anymore, right? Wrong. The book publishing industry is thriving. Unfortunately, currently it thrives on garbage. Witless screed from pundits of all stripes. Celebrities who assure us we too can be fabulously famous if – like some wooden puppet in a Disney movie – we just believe with all our hearts. And any number of other similarly unworthy tomes biding their times on bookstore shelves and remainder bins. In this landfill of the mind, finding a book that genuinely calls to you is a moment to be treasured, and parting with a book – even a bad one – at the conclusion of the final page is a bittersweet moment.

Review – Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

I think I’m turning into a history nerd. This movie started off on my bad side by leading with a map of the Achaemenid Persian empire, but it swiftly became clear that the movie’s reality (to the extent it had one at all) was in fact several hundred years later. Of course picking at historical details in a brain-dead effects fest makes no more sense than reading the nutritional information on the back of a candy bar. The title character (Jake Gyllenhaal) discovers that the title substance allows him to back up a few seconds in the time continuum, something that occasionally comes in handy during a fight, though it gets used up too quickly to be a serious tactical advantage. In other words, conceptually this might work okay as a video game, but as a movie it’s a little like watching someone else play a video game. Mildly amusing

Review – The Inglorious Bastards (1978)

So there are these guys who are like prisoners or something kind of like that Dirty Dozen movie only they break away from the MPs and form their own band and at first they’re just trying to escape and they encounter a bunch of naked chicks in a river only the chicks turn out to be Germans and when they find out the guys are American they start shooting machine guns at them and then later the guys are led by a commando officer and they have to bust a couple of their dudes out of a castle and then they dress up like Nazis and sneak aboard a train that has secret Nazi A-bombs on it and they have to blow it up but then ... hey, if you’re going to watch a movie written for (and most likely by) 12-year-old boys, you might as well get a review written with the target audience in mind. This relic is so terrible it’s actually funny. Mildly amusing

Abandoned – The Uninvited

Approximately 20 minutes in I determined two unwelcome facts: first, this was a really boring indie movie about a woman who suffers from a really boring mental disorder, and second, IFC is now showing ads during movies. Boo to both.

Review – Porco Rosso

Though this isn’t my favorite Miyazaki movie, it’s still an entertaining piece of work. The setting – an alternate 1930s world where airplanes are the primary mode of transportation and air pirates threaten the skies over the Mediterranean – is a big part of the draw. Fortunately truth and justice are championed by the title character, an ace cursed to have the face of a pig. As usual, the animation is terrific. However, the story has a few slow spots. And it ends abruptly, almost as though the picture was supposed to be longer but they ran out of money. Worth seeing

Review – Iron Man 2

I must have been drunk when I saw the first one. No, I remember what it was. I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull  that same afternoon, and by comparison Iron Man was a work of staggering genius. Sadly, this one is baked from a virtually identical recipe, and without an inept fiasco alongside it to make it look good, the flaws stand out all too sharply. Once again Tony Stark (once again Robert Downey) battles bad guys and inner demons of assholism. On the plus side, Scarlett Johansson was a nice addition. Replacing Terence Howard with Don Cheadle was a push. But Mickey Rourke just gets more talentless and harder to look at with every new movie he makes. Further, Jon Favreau needs to stick to directing dumb Christmas movies. I suspect comic book fans will get a kick out of this, or at least I hope so because it doesn’t appear to have been made for much of anyone else. See if desperate

Making the holidays special (encore)

A couple of years ago, before I got distracted by imminent icy death, I was musing about Christmas specials. Though I managed to exhaust the list of stuff I loved, I still had a little farther to go. So if it ain’t out of keeping with the situation, here’s a list of eight I’d frankly prefer not to see again.

Special episodes – I suppose this is a natural enough inclination for writers (especially the folks working on sitcoms) every December: devote an episode to something with a Christmas theme. Odd that it works as seldom as it does. The Invader Zim Christmas special is an exception, but only because the fanatical little alien’s constant attempts to take over the planet are a good counterpoint to the usual holiday treacle. For a quick example, sample the lyrics to the show’s only musical number: “Bow down, bow down, before the power of Santa, or be crushed, be crushed, by his jolly boots of doom.”

Far more typical, however, is the dull flatness of the Christmas episode of WKRP in Cincinnati. Station owner Arthur Carlson is in a particularly stingy mood, but then he falls asleep and dreams that he’s visited by three successive cast members who show him how miserable the place would be without the show’s warm, family-like ensemble atmosphere. And as long as we’re on the subject of cheap Dickens reheats …

Any funky adaptation of A Christmas Carol – Producing a straight adaptation of this Christmas classic is an iffy proposition. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But nothing dooms a retelling of the tale faster than trying to jazz it up. I don’t want to see Scrooge recast as Mr. Magoo or Fonzie or the diva of the week. Bob Cratchet doesn’t need to be played by Micky Mouse or Kermit the Frog. As noted in the list of my eight favorite Christmas movies, I’ll carve a small exception for Scrooged. But everyone else needs to either do Dickens the way he wrote it or don’t bother doing it at all.

PBS Christmas concerts – Anyone who’s watched public television for more than a few minutes already knows that the sudden appearance of interesting shows on the PBS schedule is a sure-fire sign that they’re in the middle of a pledge drive. I guess I don’t blame them for pulling this stunt when people are naturally in a giving mood. On the other hand, it takes some impressive performances and transforms them into a balloon animal a bum brandishes at your kids in order to weasel you out of a little cash.

Sequels and match-ups – This is simply an extension of a society-wide weariness with such obvious, pandering attempts to make money. In this season of kindness and charity, who wants to be reminded that TV producers regard us all as sheep with credit cards?

Frosty the Snowman – There’s just something about Frosty that pisses me off. It might be the awful quality of the Rankin/Bass cell animation, which thoroughly lacks the charm of their model work. But I think the title character himself is more likely to blame. I can’t stand the Magical Dumbass character in any of its many guises. Innocent simplicity is praiseworthy. Willful stupidity, on the other hand, accounts for a lot of what’s wrong with the world. So conflating the two is unacceptable. Still, there’s one glimmer of hope here. The media typically force Black people into the Magical Dumbass role. Frosty’s about as non-black as you can get.

Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey – If you’ve never seen this particular “treat,” simply imagine the most miserable elements of Bambi (dead mother) and Dumbo (physical deformity as source of humiliation) combined into a single special. And what’s Nestor’s reward for enduring all the misery in his life? He gets to lug a pregnant woman around. I guess if she’s the Virgin Mary the hefty burden is a little easier to bear. But still.

The Little Drummer Boy – Somehow this song managed to escape mention in the list of Christmas carols I don’t like, a grave injustice considering just how bad this one is. Something about the minor key, the relentless, monotonous rhythm, or perhaps an ineffable awfulness. In any event, spinning it into a Christmas special just makes it worse. A grim little orphan with no talent other than beating a drum learns the true meaning of Christmas when he’s called upon to annoy the Christ Child. Only Jesus himself could find warmth or entertainment in the worst act of percussion since the “Drummer Boy” number from The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band.

Any Charlie Brown holiday special other than the original Christmas show – Like a particularly good firework, this was impressive the first time around, but after that it was just burned out. The Great Pumpkin mess is instructive. Linus’s constant harping about “the most sincere pumpkin patch” is cloying and dumb, almost as though they’re making fun of (or more likely trying ineffectively to exploit) the simple sentiment that made the Christmas special such a success.

But Halloween is a birthday present compared to Thanksgiving. I don’t know whom I want to punch more: Peppermint Patty for inviting herself and her friends over for a Thanksgiving meal or Charlie Brown for passive-aggressively allowing his dog to serve toast, popcorn and jelly beans for dinner. And did anyone else notice that Franklin has to sit Judas-like by himself on the side of the table opposite everyone else? The final icing on the cake is the lame speech Linus delivers about the first Thanksgiving. Luke Chapter Two it ain’t.

To make matters worse, in order to stretch the holiday merriment out to a full hour they’ve added a Peanuts recreation of the Pilgrims’ voyage to America and hardships upon arrival. The animation back in the 60s and 70s wasn’t great, but it was high-quality anime compared to the cheap-ass art in the sequel. Further, the story comes across visually and structurally as a Thanksgiving edition of the “Elbow Room” Schoolhouse Rocks.

I think they did something similar to extend the original Christmas special, but I’ve never been able to bear the thought of watching it.

Review – Rain of Fire

Y’know, if I want to watch The Omen, I’m pretty sure I have a copy of it lying around here somewhere. Further, I don’t remember it including quite as many shots of Kirk Douglas’s butt (or any shots of Kirk Douglas’s butt, for that matter). A wealthy industrialist irks environmentalists by setting up a nuclear power plant. Too late he discovers that the thing is some kind of key to the Apocalypse, paving the way for the Antichrist in his family. Some of the juxtapositions of the plant’s towers with the multiple heads of The Beast are fun in a cheap effects sort of way. Otherwise this is Cheez Whiz to the fine brie of Damien Thorne. Also released as Holocaust 2000. See if desperate

Review – Arctic Predator

As the title implies, this is a SyFy dumb blend of themes “borrowed” from The Thing and Predator. An arctic squad of researchers and military support staff unearth an invisible alien monster. The picture is completely devoid of clever twists, interesting characters or anything else that might have redeemed it. See if desperate

Review – Mirrormask

If you’re really into Neil Gaiman’s words and pictures, you should get a real kick out of this movie. Personally, I thought it was an over-arty rehash of themes familiar from The Wizard of Oz and a handful of other movies. The blend of live actors, computer animation and Henson costumes works reasonably well. If only the story had been a little more engaging. Mildly amusing

Review – In the Loop

I should have hated this movie. I’m no fan of actor improv, and the British angle usually wouldn’t have helped matters. But this worked for me in a really big way. Peter Capaldi and James Gandolfini are the most recognizable faces in the ensemble cast playing diplomatic factotums to a T. The picture is loosely based on director Armando Iannucci’s TV series “The Thick of It,” though you don’t have to be familiar with the show to get a kick out of the movie (which is a good thing, as the show isn’t currently available on this side of the Atlantic). Overall the movie is as plotless and meandering as anything Altman ever did. But the small details, the funny situations or clever bits of dialogue supply more than enough entertainment to keep things interesting. Buy the disc

Review – Ride with the Devil

Needed way more devil. Despite the horror movie title, this is a tedious drama about the rough lives of Confederate bushwhackers. Though not quite as badly bewildered as Josey Wales about the overall morality of the War Between the States, it still liberally indulges in the Union-bad-slave-states-good ethos. Every once in awhile the production conjures something of historical interest, such as the reenactment of Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence. For the most part, however, it’s a slick but tedious parade of the-war-that-pitted-brother-against-brother clichés. See if desperate

My eight favorite robots

One of the most startling discoveries I made as a kid was that robots weren’t a 20th century invention. I’d assumed that the concept of a mechanical person would depend so heavily on electronics and other modern marvels that previous ages wouldn’t even have dreamed of such a thing.

But when I started reading Greek mythology, I found this wasn’t so. Thousands of years before such a thing would have been practically possible, spinners of myth were pondering the idea of building people out of metal.

Of course this discussion could rapidly devolve into hair-splitting about what can and can’t be considered a robot. Indeed, the term itself comes from a play about artificially created but non-mechanical workers, creatures that wouldn’t fit the image that the word now brings most readily to mind. Though the “replicants” of Blade Runner almost made the list, the robots here are all of the more standard mechanical ilk.

 

Robby – If you could have only one robot, Robby would be the guy. Living on a planet – even a forbidden one – with a deadly supernatural force is a small price to pay for owning a mechanical servant who can do most anything from cooking dinner to manufacturing diamonds in his spare time. Sure, his tone is a little smart-alecky at times. But that just gives him personality. He also deserves to top the list because he was the first big robot success story, a character that paved the way for cinema automatons everywhere.

C3PO – Sure, R2D2 is more popular. I can see why. Even a three-legged trashcan that can’t speak in anything but squeaks and beeps is still more likely to win the hearts and minds of moviegoers than a prissy android perpetually locked in fret mode. But hey, when Star Wars first hit theaters I was 11 and tended to fret too much myself. So it seemed to me like “goldenrod” was making good points about not getting into trouble. Besides, he looked more interesting than any of the other robots in the movie.

Huey, Dewey and Louie – This trio of walking boxes helped Bruce Dern tend to the last remaining fragments of wildlife in Silent Running. The movie overall is depressing and dumb (hence no review), but the robots in it are an odd combination of utilitarian and cute. It takes a little doing to give individual personalities to cubes with legs, but they manage to make it work.

The Terminator – I think we all knew Arnold Schwarzenegger would look like this if he ever peeled off his rubbery hide. And that’s when the Terminator gets really impressive. He’s okay when he can still pass for human, but when he gets stripped down to that shiny chrome skeleton, now that’s a scary robot. The scene in number one when the monster is chasing our heroes down a long, dark hallway is the stuff nightmares are made of.

Gort – On the surface, Klaatu’s sidekick from The Day the Earth Stood Still doesn’t seem to have much to him. He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t water flowers or fix dinner. But for silent menace he can’t be beat. His design is particularly brilliant, his smooth, deco surfaces emphasizing just how attack-proof he is. I’d still rather have Robby in the kitchen, but Gort would be my choice for sentry to stand next to my cars while I’m asleep.

The Runaway spiders – I’m a big fan of the BEAM approach to robotics. The idea here is that it makes more sense to create lots of little, cheap robots for specific tasks than it does to make big, expensive, multi-purpose androids. Needless to say, such personality-free gizmos aren’t common in movies, where the need is greater for robots that can be characters that are voiced by actors. But in Runaway, the bad guy uses some BEAM-ish spiders to do his evil bidding. The plot even points out the big advantage to the BEAM scheme: a ton of tiny terrors is harder to evade than a single, human-sized opponent.

The Minoton – I’m surprised (and a little disappointed) that Ray Harryhausen never did more with robots. His Dynamation effects techniques were particularly well suited to mechanical creatures. But though he did some robot-like creatures from time to time – Talos in Jason and the Argonauts and the Kali statue in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad – the only real robot he ever did was the Minoton from Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. It’s sadly under-utilized; a mechanical minotaur could have been a kick-ass bad guy rather than an elaborate outboard motor. But the design is still hard to beat. And true geek confession: I have models of all three of these aforementioned creatures sitting on a shelf above my desk.

Evil Maria – The robot in Metropolis is the ultimate in cinema injustice. She’s one of the first mechanical people ever to grace the silver screen, and her design set the bar impossibly high for every movie robot that followed. Further, the scene in which she’s transformed into a doppelganger of the heroine still impresses even in an age of computer effects a million times more sophisticated than what Fritz Lang had at his disposal in the 1920s. The rest of the movie is great as well, but I could sit through nothing but the robot sequences and still come away happy in the end.

Review – The Boston Strangler

Two things stand out about this telling of the tale of Albert DeSalvo, accused of raping and strangling 13 women in the Boston area in the early 1960s. On the positive side, director Richard Fleischer’s use of split screen editing – while visually jarring – works better than such gimmicks usually do. On the other hand, the production doesn’t stick as closely to the truth as most true crime stories at least attempt to. I don’t necessarily need a thorough examination of every aspect of the investigation, though at least a mention of the questions about DeSalvo’s guilt might have been nice. But the storytellers here make some details up out of whole cloth, such as the notion that the killer suffered from Multiple Personality Disorder. Tony Curtis as the strangler and Henry Fonda as the chief of the task force convened to catch him both bring plenty of talent to the table. But the section that should have been tailor-made for them to shine – an extended dialogue between the two that takes up most of act three – instead falls victim to lackluster writing. Mildly amusing

Abandoned – How the Grinch Stole Christmas

After only eight minutes I was ready to punch everyone involved.

Abandoned – Quintet

Any soft-focus, post-apocalyptic borefest is bound to evoke Zardoz. And without the giant floating head ... 33 minutes.