Review – The Darkest Hour

Aliens attack Moscow, much to the chagrin of American tourists who happen to be there at the time. The aliens are invisible, but you can tell when they’re around because they cause electrical disturbances. See, they’re here on Earth looking for ... okay, you caught me. I lost interest long before they ever got around to explaining exactly what the aliens were up to. My attention started to wander when it turned out that the aliens were blinded by metal and apparently lacked the attention span to follow anything that moved behind a metal object. And though I liked watching them turn their victims to powder, they would have been better off had they stayed invisible. Once they were drawn out from behind their force fields, they proved to be only slightly less dumb looking than Langoliers. See if desperate

Review – The Legend of Lucy Keyes

This is one of those ghost stories that doesn’t manage to sprout a ghost until two thirds of the way through. So for the first hour it’s whispers about hauntings and whining about how bad pigs smell when you feed them with clam bellies. Seriously, there’s more crap in this movie about pig feed than there is in industrial movies about pig feed. See if desperate

Review – Green Lantern

The title character was never one of my favorite superheroes when I was a kid, so I didn’t come in with a lot of expectations. Perhaps that’s a good thing, because the thought of Ryan Reynolds playing a superhero I actually like just sets my teeth on edge. On the other hand, Reynolds seemed acceptably suited for the Van-Wilder-esque hero of this picture. As with many other pictures of this ilk, I’m not sorry I saw it but I’m not anxiously awaiting a sequel either. Mildly amusing

Review – Anonymous

The thesis here is that Shakespeare’s plays were actually written by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. I’m no expert on the Bard or Elizabethan England, so I had trouble following what was actually based on fact, what was conjecture and what was pure dramatic invention. This is also yet another production that pops liberally back and forth in the time stream, occasionally making the story hard to follow. On the other hand, I enjoyed the elaborate, effects-intensive recreations of 16th century London. And it warmed my heart to think the insinuation that William Shakespeare was actually a fraud and a dumbass would severely ruffle the feathers of an undergrad English professor for whom I didn’t care. Mildly amusing

Review – Immortals

As if the Clash of the Titans remake wasn’t bad enough, now the video-game-reheat-of-Greek-mythology-thing is truly getting ridiculous. The tale of Theseus is submerged in a vast mess of effects-intensive nonsense. If you’re having one of those lazy weekend afternoons where you’re not feeling bright enough to follow anything good, this movie might be just what you want. Otherwise it does nothing that hasn’t been done better elsewhere. Mildly amusing

The soft, luminous glow of the apocalypse

How can we go on without masterpieces like this?

The 8sails staff meeting is online this week, as a scheduling conflict prevents our usual Friday get-together. Despite the odd venue, we have important business to deal with: the passing of Thomas Kinkade.

Dead at 54 of "natural causes"? Who the hell do you people think you're fooling? Apparently behind the twinkly born-again glow the guy was a serious alcoholic and poon hound. My favorite tidbit: he was ejected from a Disney theme park for urinating on a statue of Winnie the Pooh. Given the character's name, perhaps we should be grateful it was just urine.

So now I envision a painting. Sunset. Pine trees twinkling in a gentle breeze. A babbling brook. Old-timey pick up trucks parked around a ramshackle building, a warm glow emerging from the open doorway. And up top, another kind of warm glow shines forth from a neon sign announcing "Live Nude Girls." Thomas Kinkade's "Love Shack."

What a fraud, Beria says. I hope that when portal to the motel of the mysteries is first breeched, the future Carnarvon isn't assailed by the scared religious paintings of Thomas Kincaid or videos of the orgiastic gospel weltanshauung  of Lawrence Welk. They'd just pull the backhoe up and bury the whole mess.

So now I find myself wondering if civilizations get some kind of advance warning when their time comes, sort of like individuals who can sense that the end is near.

Pharaoh: Okay, everyone. I just got the word from on high. Our civilization is going to come to an end, so we need to tidy the place up a bit. We don't want archaeologists 2000 years from now to think we were a pack of idiots, so I need you all to get rid of anything that might make us look bad. Take all those velvet paintings of "Ammuts playing poker" and "My dad drowned chasing Jews across the Red Sea and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" apparel out into the front yard and set fire to it.

We should be so lucky.

Review – The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)

I wish there was some way to watch this movie without knowing anything about it going in. Knowing how it ends makes every positive moment ironic rather than joyful. And though this may be a natural consequence of setting a drama entirely in an attic, the production has a theatrical quality to it. I would also have liked to have been able to view this from the perspective of an audience member in 1959. Nowadays we have no shortage of media treatments of the Holocaust, but back then this was groundbreaking stuff. Still, the story is amazingly emotionally effective even today. Worth seeing

Review – The Debt (2010)

I’m a sucker for any kind of Nazi-hunting drama, so I thought I’d like this better than I did. It had enough Munich flavor to compare unfavorably to Munich. But the big problem was the amount of screen time devoted to the romantic woes of the three Israeli operatives sent to kidnap a former concentration camp doctor. Action movie, fine. Espionage thriller, better yet. Soap opera, not so much. Mildly amusing

Review – Girl 27

Here’s another chapter of Hollywood history that I’m sure Tinseltown would prefer to forget. In 1937, the newly-Hays-Code-regulated movie industry was hit with an ugly scandal when aspiring actress Patricia Douglas reported that she’d been raped at a party for MGM executives. Documentary maker David Stenn somehow managed to find Douglas decades later living a sad, lonely life cooped up by herself in an apartment. An uncomfortably large amount of the movie is about Stenn, and he also throws in a couple of other Golden Age Hollywood scandals as if trying to establish himself as some kind of latter-day Kenneth Anger. Still, Douglas’s story is interesting enough when Stenn bothers to tell it. Mildly amusing

Review – 1911

Like many other audience members on this side of the Pacific, I was drawn into this movie by Jackie Chan. However, I enjoyed it despite the fact that it isn’t exactly a typical Chan picture. Instead, it tells the story of the Chinese revolution that did away with the bureaucratic monarchy and established a provisional democracy. As this is the last period in history that both Communist and non-Communist Chinese people seem to agree on, the subject makes for interesting filmmaking. I don’t know all that much about the subject, so this was a good lesson for me in addition to being an entertaining action movie. Mildly amusing