Posts on hold

I am temporarily halting my movie review posts until the WGA and SAG/AFTRA strikes are resolved. Once the strikes are over, I’ll review what I’ve been watching in the interim, back-dating them so I can keep track of what I watched when.

No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to fail.

The following questions appear in Sporcle’s “James Bond Trivia” quiz. The whole thing is a ton more fun if you’re willing to get creative with the answers.

Actual answer: Orson Welles

Better answer: American Ornithologist James Bond

Actual answer: guns

Better answer: Roger Moore’s daughter, Deborah Moore

Actual answer: a toupee

Better answer: a monkey

Actual answer: made of licorice

Better answer: stuntman Bob Simmons

Actual answer: MI6

Better answer: David Bowie

Actual answer: Goldeneye

Better answer: Orson Welles

Actual answer: a body double

Better answer: men wearing blonde wigs

Actual answer: stuntman Bob Simmons

Better answer: a monkey

Actual answer: a member of the Nazi party during WWII

Better answer: a monkey

Actual answer: a laser beam

Better answer: a monkey

31 movies for October

Seems like every year the Internet floods with lists of 31 movies to watch in October. So who am I to buck the trend?

Obviously the list draws almost exclusively from the horror genre. But these aren’t necessarily my favorite horror movies, nor is this a list of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen. Instead, these movies all have a certain Halloween look and feel to them. It’s hard to define, but it’s kinda a mix of seasonal setting and campfire tale quality.

Unless otherwise noted, titles refer to the original version rather than remakes, reboots and the like. Also please note that the first two entries on the “kid-friendly” list are rated R, so the MPAA and I disagree about how appropriate they are for children. I’d say tweens and older or those two.

Kid-Friendly Fare
Sleepy Hollow - Tim Burton’s take on Washington Irving’s classic tale
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark - Kid moves into a mansion full of monsters
Something Wicked This Way Comes - One of the strongest October-themed movies on the list
Beetlejuice - Ghostly fun without too many bad scares
The Addams Family - The family that was practically designed for an October movie marathon

Classics
House of Wax - Vincent Price at the top of his game
Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors - An oddly unsettling British anthology piece
Freaks - Todd Browning’s tour de force, not necessarily for everyone
Dracula - Bela Lugosi is the iconic Count Dracula
Bride of Frankenstein - No October marathon would be complete without Frankenstein's monster
The Mummy - Boris Karloff is wonderfully creepy in the title role
Cat People - 1942 original is a masterpiece of subtlety, 1982 remake is more visceral
The Omen - The demonic king of evil kid movies

Ghosts
The Fog - A classic ghost story told in classic ghost story style
Poltergeist - A fun combination of ghost story elements, too intense for its PG rating
The Frighteners - Guy who can see ghosts starts to really wish he couldn’t
House on Haunted Hill (1999) - Spending the night in a haunted asylum is a bad idea
The Ring - Watching a video causes an evil ghost to kill you in seven days

Monsters
Dawn of the Dead - Or if you’re in the mood for a triple feature, add #1 and #3
The Crazies (2010) - Oddly better than the Romero original
The Howling - Sayles writes, Dante directs, Bottin makes the werewolves. Great stuff!
Candyman - Creepy combination of urban legend, Clive Barker story and Phillip Glass score
Bram Stoker’s Dracula - Do fangs make it hard to chew scenery?
Fright Night - For real. One of the few vampire movies that’s both fun and scary
Creepshow - Romero directs Stephen King’s take on EC-Comics-style storytelling
From Hell - The Hughes Brothers adapt Alan Moore’s telling of the Ripper myth

The Final Five
The Burrowers - Settlers beset by a new kind of horror
Cabin in the Woods - A meta mash-up of horror clichés that’s actually original and entertaining
Exorcist III - Consistently frightening, it features one of the best jump scares ever
The Crow - A murdered man seeks vengeance on his killers during Devil’s Night in Detroit
Halloween - Because what else would you watch on October 31?

New reviews

Just two: Maggie and Ex Machina.

I’d walk a mile for a Morlock

Awhile back a friend was driving down Kansas Avenue when he happened to see a Morlock driving the car next to him. Or at least he thinks it was a Morlock. It had stringy, white hair. It had a shriveled face. It looked like it had never seen the light of day.

Trouble was, it was smoking a cigarette.

This prompted a discussion about whether or not Morlocks smoked. Certainly we never see them doing so at any time during the George Pal production of The Time Machine. But that doesn’t definitively answer the question, because all the Morlocks we see in the movie are at work. They’re on the Eloi-boiling production line, and of course in the food service business you can’t smoke on the job.

Further, I’ll bet Morlock smoke breaks are short. Eloi boiling seems like the kind of job where if you and your co-workers wander off for even a couple of minutes that you’d have the boiling foreman all up in your business.

“You Morlocks need to keep busy. I can’t have you Morlocks loafing off. If the boss comes up here and sees you loafing off, he ain’t gonna yell at you. He’s going to yell at me. So get back to work. Those Eloi ain’t gonna boil themselves.”

Thus they only get to really bust out the Winstons and relax in the car on the way home.

New this week - A lot of bad movies

And last week. And the week before. They weren’t all terrible. Just most of them.

• Pacific Rim
• The Croods 
• Iron Man 3 
• Man of Steel  
• Carrie (2013) 
• Augustus 
• Last Stand 
• The Lone Ranger 
• Emperor 

On the brighter side, I finished reading a good book: Photojojo!

Eight media moments to watch in 2013

Let me start by confessing that my crystal ball is faulty at best. Of all the items on the 2012 list, I would have predicted few if any of them 12 months ago. Still, the following eight items deserve attention even if they don’t turn into major media moments.

The current month is likely to leave a couple of interesting points unresolved. In early December the United States backed out of talks about a new international telecommunications accord. At the outset of the consideration the terms seemed completely uncontroversial, the sorts of things that would interest only telecom nerds. But then a coalition led by Russia and China began building references to the Internet into the language. Though the accord wouldn’t have imposed an actual duty on any government to censor the net, the idea of incorporating content restrictions into a purely technical bargain rubbed the United States and several other countries the wrong way. As of this writing the deal looks dead, but it’s worth keeping an eye on. At least it’s nice to know that someone in our government understands the issues at stake.

Less comforting is the FCC’s current stance on ownership deregulation. Rumors from DC suggest that the commission is poised to further relax the rules governing how much of the country’s media markets may be dominated by a single company. The name Rupert Murdoch keeps coming up in criticism of the anticipated move, though of course Newscorp isn’t the only player that stands to benefit. So far the commission hasn’t made an official announcement, so this stands to be big starting early next year.

With the election over and politicians less immediately concerned about their popularity with voters, we need to watch closely for a brain-eating-zombie resurgence of SOPA. Recall that big media companies want this draconian crap something fierce, and folks with that kind of money generally aren’t great at taking no for an answer.

The net neutrality question will also probably continue to percolate. AT&T’s back-track on the FaceTime front feels more like a strategic retreat than a genuine surrender. I don’t know exactly where the next battle will flare up, but I nonetheless feel it coming.

A couple of media industries bear watching in the coming year. For some time now I’ve been wondering exactly when non-media corporations were going to start taking a closer look at the value of advertising. With budgets tightening and audiences migrating, I expect more and more companies are going to start asking hard question about the effectiveness of spending money on ads. I’m not predicting some sudden, momentous collapse of the entire ad industry. Still, this is an area worth keeping an eye on.

The movie industry also may be making some changes. For decades now Hollywood’s revenues have steadily increased with only a few relatively small hiccups here and there. But in 2011 the studios saw a decrease in box office receipts for the first time in years. The final numbers for 2012 aren’t in yet, but if they show continuing downward progress then we may start to see some changes.

One of the more disappointing trends to emerge during the election this year was wholesale disregard for media aimed at Hispanic audiences. Spanish-language and other Hispanic-oriented TV networks saw only a small fraction of the total money spent on campaign advertising. This was likely tied to efforts by the parties in power to prevent Hispanic people from voting (because if you can’t vote, why would anyone bother trying to talk you into voting for his candidate?). That might reflect the short-term status of this crucial demographic, but it isn’t sustainable in the long term. This segment of the population is growing too rapidly to be successfully marginalized forever. So wise media planners will monitor the growth of Hispanic-oriented media.

And finally, I’m counting the days until Google Fiber actually arrives. The company’s web site currently indicates that I can expect my fiberhood to get hooked up sometime this coming fall. Let’s hope the process stays on schedule. Because if it does, the “biggest moments” list in 2013 is likely to have at least one obvious entry.

And on that cheery note, I wish you all a happy new year.

My eight favorite Thanksgiving movies

Thanksgiving lacks movies. Halloween? Plenty. Christmas? Oh please. But the holiday in between doesn’t have a clear cinema tradition other than the common practice of fleeing family gatherings for the relative peace of the movie theater. So let’s remedy this injustice. The holiday is about three things: gratitude, togetherness and eating. So at this festive time of year let’s get together and be grateful for movies about eating.

Specifically, movies about people eating people. I’m not trying to do the whole vegetarian “imagine the turkey was you” thing (though it is at least something to think about). It’s just that movies about cannibals tend to be more fun than movies about gourmets. To keep things simple, this list excludes people-eating zombies (after all, as Dr. Millard Rausch pointed out in Dawn of the Dead, “They don’t eat each other”). I don’t care for Italian shock movies from the 1970s, so the list also omits that particular sub-set of the cannibal sub-genre.

Still, that leaves us with a lot of movies to pick from. Especially these eight:

Texas Chainsaw Massacre – Rough as it is, this is still the ultimate “country folk will eat you” picture. Loosely based on the crimes of Wisconsin cannibal Ed Gein, this movie will leave you with at least a scrap of doubt the next time you eat a hot dog, sausage or any other kind of mystery meat.

Something from the Ed Gein list – Speaking of the Butcher of Plainfield, Gein has served as the inspiration for many a movie, some better than others. In keeping with the theme, I suggest one of the productions that sticks closer to the true story (Deranged or Ed Gein) rather than the looser, classier adaptations (Psycho and Silence of the Lambs).

The Hills Have Eyes – The Web tells me someone made a movie directly based on the exploits of Sawney Beane and his cave-dwelling, cannibal family. However, IMDb doesn’t have a listing for it, which suggests that it hasn’t been released yet. While we’re waiting, we’ll just have to be content with The Hills Have Eyes, a Beane-inspired desert romp directed by Wes Craven.

Motel Hell – It does indeed take all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent’s fritters. You’ll be a huge hit at the family dinner table if you volunteer to say grace and then offer up “meat’s meat and a man's gotta eat!”

Parents – Most of the rest of the movies on this list assume that cannibalism is something you encounter only if you’re foolish enough to venture outside the safety of the suburbs. This entry brings the threat right into the wholesome family kitchen. And of course Thanksgiving leftovers can’t help but bring one mindful of the “leftovers to be” line from this movie.

Sweeney Todd – I didn’t want to go the whole list without one big budget production. And what would the holidays be like without musicals? Needless to say, the list of big-budget musicals about cannibalism is fairly short.

Ravenous – In honor of the Thanksgiving myth about the Wampanoag generously (if foolishly) sharing food with the Pilgrims, the last two entries feature the Wendigo. According to Algonquian legend, anyone who eats human flesh risks becoming possessed by an evil spirit that brings with it a horrible hunger that can never be satisfied. This picture pits the monster against a small band of soldiers on the 19th century frontier.

“Skin and Bones” – If you’re watching this whole set as a Thanksgiving Day marathon, then by now you’re probably ready for something shorter and lighter. This episode from Fear Itself meets the short requirement, but it’s by far the creepiest entry on the list.

Eight reality checks for low budget horror filmmakers

I have a great love for good horror movies and a great loathing for bad ones. Sadly, my quest for the former has saddled me with a great number of the latter. The problem is particularly prevalent in the world of low-budget productions. Sometimes a movie that lacks professional polish can turn out to be outstanding work that takes the genre in directions Hollywood wouldn’t dare to tread. More often than not, however, lack of polish merely betokens lack of skill.

I understand that there’s a sizable market out there for stupid movies, and far be it from me to deprive anyone of the opportunity to cash in on the demand. But if you happen to be an aspiring filmmaker who might actually want to make something that isn’t a piece of unmitigated crap, a few basic reality checks can solve a lot of problems.

You aren’t funny. This may be the hardest pill to swallow, so choke it down at the outset. The failed horror comedy typically springs from one of two sources: either you think you’re way more clever than you are, or you’re trying to cover your incompetence by pretending that you’re deliberately making a bad movie as a joke. You can detect the first problem by comparing your humor level to the kind of thing you thought was funny when you were 12. Same kinds of jokes? Then you haven’t achieved cleverness yet. And if at any point you realize that what you’re creating sucks, your best course is to stop or at least rethink rather than hoping for a “so bad it’s funny” response from the audience.

Your friends are not actors. I don’t care how many community theatre productions they’ve done. They can’t act, and they’re going to look stupid in your movie. Their stiff, play-it-for-the-back-row delivery of your dialogue is going to ruin any chance that your characters will be sympathetic or believable in any way.

Nor are they musicians. See what your high school drama club buddies are doing to your script? The guys in your garage band are doing the same thing to your soundtrack.

Your effects look bad. If you’re thinking at all realistically about production values, you’ve already accepted your inability to compete with Hollywood’s vast legions of effects wizards. But believe it or not, you can actually turn this one to your advantage. Even a bad monster suit can be highly effective if you employ a little subtlety. Shadowy lighting can help transform cheap latex into a genuine scare. And please oh please don’t overuse your creation. Every shot you include of that carnival-attraction-worthy masterpiece moves your monster away from plausible and toward “Attack of the Guy in a Rubber Suit.”

Boob shots do not supply gravitas. Back in the day when the slightest hint of overexposed cleavage would send the Hays Office censors scrambling for the “Nope” stamp, boobs were a big deal. But in the age of the Internet, pornography is so easy to access that it adds no value to your movie. Not to mention that half your viewers can get the same view by standing in front of a mirror and taking their shirts off. And if you’re shooting a nude scene solely so you can get a woman to undress for you, that’s just sad. Try using this simple test: if the scene wouldn’t be in your movie if the character was a guy, then it’s in there for the wrong reason.

Self parody isn’t wit. Many times I’ve seen characters in bad horror movies say something like “Wow, this is like we’re in a bad horror movie.” Acknowledging that you suck doesn’t make you not suck. Such self-effacing, reflexive nonsense tells your audience that you’re fully aware you’re wasting our time. Don’t rub our noses in it.

I like the rug right where it is, so don’t yank it out from under my feet. If the characters are in a haunted house and one of them starts screaming, the commotion should probably be over something genuinely menacing. You can only do so many shocks that turn out to be bugs or mice or the characters scaring each other or being scared of nothing at all. Once maybe. Twice is pushing it. More than that and you’re seriously cutting into your audience’s willingness to play along with you.

You must actually watch the movie you just made. Seriously, before you show it to anyone else, watch it yourself. Does it look like a real movie or a bunch of kids playing around with a camcorder? Does your editing allow your shots to flow together? Do your characters work? Does your story make sense? Your answers must depend not on “good for a beginner” but by actual, professional quality standards.

This is the most painful part of the production process, because it’s hard to take an honest look at something that’s consumed a significant chunk of your life and tell yourself that it needs more work. But coming to grips with it yourself is a lot less agonizing than showing unpolished work to the public and then living with the sure knowledge that you’re regarded as a talentless amateur.

Stealing from other movies makes you look bad. I’ve got three copies of Dawn of the Dead (four if you count the remake). So if you don’t do anything that George Romero (or John Carpenter or Tobe Hooper or Mick Garris or whomever you’re “borrowing” from) hasn’t already done, all you leave me with is the strong feeling that I should have re-watched a good movie instead of taking a chance on your work. Though this isn’t the worst offense on the list, it can be the saddest because it kills movies that might otherwise have stood a chance. Even good acting, good writing and all-around competent filmmaking can’t save a production that doesn’t amount to anything more than a pale imitation of something else.

Originality is the one thing you’ve got going for you. Writers and directors working inside the system are under tremendous pressure to churn out something that tastes just like every other cinematic hamburger everyone’s ever eaten, because the corporations they work for know that people love hamburgers. You aren’t backed by the studios’ vast marketing machinery, so if you’re going to get noticed at all you should really plan to do something the studios aren’t. The whole point behind independent production is that you can take a gamble on your own voice. Why squander that on a doomed attempt to sing someone else’s song?

Bad movies on my mind

Pauline Kael has been on my mind lately. She came up recently in a conversation with one of my former students. More than that, a trio of strangely related movies I watched last week reminded me that Kael used to write reviews exploring thematic connections between three or four pictures. So out of respect for her excellent work, here’s my poor attempt to follow in her footsteps.

Statistically speaking, the 1899 Cleveland Spiders were the worst team in Major League Baseball history. In the last season of the 19th century, they got off to an 8 - 30 start, lost 40 of their last 41 games and finished the season at 20 - 134. Thanks to changes in the rules, some of the Spiders’ records – such as their 101 road losses – can never be broken. Thus they will forever stand as a shadowy counter-argument against any fan who thinks her team is doing particularly poorly. No matter how bad the Kansas City Royals are, no matter how many times they finish in the cellar of the American League, they’ll never have the honor of being the worst ever.

The word “honor” in that last sentence is only partially ironic. There’s a certain distinction in being the worst ever, in setting the standard for terribleness against which all other awful efforts will be measured. Because if you can’t excel at excellence, at least maybe you can excel at sucking.

The creators of Best Worst Movie recognize the value of being awful; even the documentary’s title sets up the apparent contradiction. When he was 12, director Michael Stephenson appeared in Troll 2, one of those terrible little indie horror pictures that were somewhat common back in 1990 and now clog the “horror” catalogs of outlets from Netflix to whatever remains of local video rental stores. As noted in the review, this is a bad movie. However, its degree of badness isn’t distinct from the legion of other poorly acted, poorly scripted, poorly directed horror movies before or since.

But movies aren’t baseball teams. They don’t have offensive and defensive numbers that admit mathematical evidence into disputes. Even stats such as Rotten Tomatoes ratings quantify subjective opinion and thus don’t measure by objective standards. Enter the connoisseurs, the folks who always know where the best coffee beans come from, which trendy shops stock them for “special customers” and which baristas know just the right proportions for perfect lattés. In movie world, these cineastes know not only the best films by the greatest directors but also what dwells at the opposite end of the scale. They may have seen every movie Werner Herzog ever made. They may have walls bedecked with Jim Jarmusch posters. But they savor low budget horror junk food like Dublin Dr Pepper and Mexican Coke.

A cult of such people developed around Troll 2, clogging art house revival screenings and hosting Troll 2 parties. The documentary makes the whole phenomenon look like a response-line-free version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And at the center of this ersatz adulation is Stephenson’s former co-star, actor-slash-small-town-dentist George Hardy. This guy seems never to have developed beyond a credulous inability to tell when he’s the butt of a joke, a problem compounded by his fans’ inability to figure out whether they love something because it’s genuinely lovable or only because their hipster self-image depends on their ability to savor garbage.

This would seem like the same condescending bad taste that turns the kid with cerebral palsy into the high school football team’s “mascot” except for one part of the picture: Claudio Fragasso, Troll 2’s director. Despite all evidence to the contrary, this guy seems to genuinely believe that he made a good movie. He regards himself as an artist. He regards Troll 2 as a work of art, not in an ironic, poseur way but as something that’s genuinely worth watching.

This takes us to the heart of what we mean by “bad art.” It also takes us across the Atlantic and around 50 years backward in time. In 1940 German director Viet Harlan created one of the most notorious propaganda movies ever made: Jüd Süss. I’ve never seen this vicious piece of anti-Semitic filth, nor do I intend to. But I did recently watch Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss, a documentary about the director. Or to be more precise, it was a documentary about the director’s family (in much the same way that Best Worst Movie was about the cult response rather than the picture itself).

Harlan’s case raises serious questions about the responsibility artists bear for their art. It also forces us to think a little harder about what we mean by “bad movie.” Troll 2 and Jüd Süss are both bad movies. But while the Troll picture was a matter of simple incompetence, Nazi propaganda is infected with a moral rottenness that isn’t likely to amass a cult of ironic fans.

This says nothing good about us as connoisseurs of bad movies. In Fragasso’s case, it shows that we’re not too good to pick on someone for being weak, behavior we should probably have grown out of back in elementary school. Nazis are far more worthy of our scorn. Yet six decades later, we still find ourselves whistling past Harlan’s graveyard.

My eight favorite Martin Luther King Day movies

We just managed to survive a month largely dedicated to one specific holiday. Every year Hollywood cranks out still more Christmas-themed movies, further adding to the hype and hysteria. Nobody in their right mind wants to see Martin Luther King Day receive similar treatment.

For starters, by now we’re all sick of holiday craziness. One of the beauties of MLK Day is that it automatically comes with built-in dignity, a welcome antidote to the month of December. Further, many suggest that we treat King’s celebration as a “day on” rather than a day off. The idea is to get out into the community and do something good for someone rather than sitting around the house watching holiday-themed movies.

However, there are at least a handful of films out there that celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dedication to social justice, racial equality and nonviolence. Enough at least to allow you to devote some TV time to something more than mindless entertainment.

In a way this list wrote itself after I set one simple standard: each movie had to be primarily about somebody who wasn’t white. It’s amazing how frequently movies about civil rights struggles turn out to be about a white person’s experience of the problem. Cry Freedom and Mississippi Burning come immediately to mind. Fortunately, I was able to come up with eight exceptions (even if half the pictures on the list were directed by Spike Lee).


Gandhi – Both Dr. King and this movie were inspired by Mohandas Gandhi’s nonviolent revolution in India. Ben Kingsley does a great job in the title role, helping audiences truly appreciate the man and his importance not only in his homeland but in the world as a whole.

Malcolm X – Dr. King and Malcolm X are often inaccurately treated as the carrot and the stick of the civil rights movement. And of course as the stick part of the equation Malcolm X often gets cast as a white-people-hating demon. This movie does an outstanding job of considering its subject as a multi-dimensional person rather than a cardboard boogeyman. What a shame nobody (to my knowledge) ever made a movie this good about Dr. King.

Catch a Fire – For the next three entries we cross the Atlantic to Africa, where many places have racial problems that make America’s still pretty bad situation look like a birthday present. This movie about an anti-Apartheid rebel does an excellent job of examining not only institutionalized racism but also the root causes of violence and the true value of pacifism.

Hotel Rwanda – And then sometimes the violence gets completely out of control. How can anyone keep a peaceful spirit in the middle of a world given over to mass slaughter? This tale of a hotel manager trying to rescue people from genocide demonstrates the value of nonviolence even in the most extreme conditions.

Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony – This documentary about protest music in South Africa is an excellent portrait of a brutally oppressed people finding subtle ways to fight back. Though I don’t think Dr. King would have thought much about the violent content of some of the lyrics, at least singing about violence is a step removed from actually committing it.

When the Levees Broke – Back home now. In the United States we have a genuinely astounding ability to pretend that problems aren’t actually happening. This epic documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina reminds us that no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves that we’ve erased race and class lines (or at least rendered them irrelevant), they’re still very real and have very real consequences.

Bamboozled – The mainstream media really don’t take criticism well, not even when they richly deserve it. Thus it came as no surprise when this movie got buried in initial release (I’d never even heard of it until I happened to notice the disc in the video store). The production paints with a broad brush, satirizing racial ignorance by suggesting that a TV show designed to be as racist as possible could turn out to be a smash hit. Oh to live in a world where such a thing seemed less possible.

Do the Right Thing – And finally, here’s the “if you see only one” moment. More than two decades have passed since this movie’s theatrical release, and in that time the film industry (even Lee himself) has seldom if ever had anything this honest to say about the uncomfortable subject of race.

Eight movie characters’ jobs I’d love to have

Here's a question that often surfaces whenever the topic of discussion is "the movies" and someone needs an ice breaker question. If you could be any character in any movie, whom would you be? An action hero like Indiana Jones? A romantic lead like Ilsa or Rick from Casablanca? Someone noble like Atticus Finch?

Not me. I want to be a Honky Horn Guy.

You've seen these musicians in every historical epic ever made. They stand there in the background, looking snappy in their ornate uniforms and big, snazzy hats (they always get the best hats). They have the ultimate in job security. Archdukes and senators can get their heads lopped off left and right, but even the maddest monarch never bothers with the Honky Horn Guys. And best of all, their job is about as easy as it gets. These things aren't trumpets or saxophones or something that takes actual talent to play. As near as I can tell, it's strictly a case of "put your lips on it and blow." Caesar approaches! Do do do do do WAAAAAA! His majesty will now pronounce his verdict! Do do do do do WAAAAAA! So let it be written, so let it be done! Do do do do do WAAAAAA!

I can do that.

If there aren't any openings in the Honky Horn Corps (and that's gotta be a job in high demand), then I'm willing to settle for Palace Mumbler. These folks never seem to have anything to say right out loud until the trend of current events becomes clear. Then ever-so-softly they speak the collective mind. Moses is being dragged away in chains to be exiled to Sinai? Someone has to stand there muttering "Do not look upon him" or "Traitor to Pharaoh" while he slowly makes his exit. Cecil B. DeMille was especially fond of these folks. So fond, indeed, that every once in awhile he'd give such a person an actual line to deliver.

If I could be just one of these one-line wonders, it would have to be the Captain of the Guard from The Ten Commandments. When they're evicting Dathan The Chief Hebrew Overseer (Edward G. Robinson) from his house, Dathan naturally wants to know where he and the rest of the Israelites are going. "To hell, I hope!" is the guard's only reply. Oh to have le mot juste come so trippingly to my tongue and be able to utter it without fear of consequences!

On a related career path, one of the cushiest jobs in moviedom is Castle Guard for the Wicked Witch of the West. Sharp-looking uniform. Bad-ass halberd. And the job description apparently consists of "march up and down chanting oo-ee-oo-ee-oo-oo." I mean, their employer is a witch for crying out loud. It's not like she needs any actual guarding. Maybe throw yourself between her and a bucket of water every once in awhile. But that's it.

Working for a witch naturally raises a more general question about the benefits and drawbacks of playing for the wrong team. For example, the easiest job in the Star Wars series is the Imperial henchman who follows Darth Vader around and cleans up the bodies of the dudes he mind-strangles. Someone pisses Vader off, he Forces them to death, and out come the guys in black uniforms to cart off the corpse. Talk about a cushy detail. The only trick is to make sure to store up your leave and take it right before the rebels blow up the Death Star.

Another good way to avoid heavy duty is to be a character in a crowd scene directed by someone who can't do crowd scenes. The next time you're watching Scarface, keep an eye on the "energetic" participants in the riot scene in the beginning. My personal favorite – my movie job role model – is the one who lackadaisically waves his arms like a member of order Mustelidae and then quits entirely once the actors with lines make it past him.

Perhaps I could combine the pursuit of lassitude with my childhood ambition to be a spy. Obviously being James Bond or Jack Ryan isn't in the cards, but heroes like them have a need for people like me. As the bad stuff goes down and the protagonist is out in the field battling the forces of evil, back at HQ the head of Central Intelligence / MI-6 / Mossad / whatever stands around nervously monitoring the mission's progress. And in the background they always have a hearty compliment of men and women in suits who do nothing but look intense and mumble things to one another.

Given the circumstances, one could be forgiven for assuming that whatever they're saying must be of great importance. But then I used to think the same thing about mound conferences in baseball. When the manager walks slowly to the center of the field to have a brief palaver with a struggling pitcher, I always figured that out there where the fans can't hear he's drawing some brilliant parallel between the Athenian victory over Xerxes at Salamis and the importance of keeping the runner close at first. But after actually hearing audio recorded during some of these mound trips, I note that they tend to be more like "Hey, Mike. Everything going okay?" "Yeah sure, Ed." "Okay then, go get 'em."

I'll bet the Spy Movie HQ Mumblers are doing the same thing. Sure, they look like they're hashing out the details of bringing NATO's nuclear arsenal to bear in the event of mission failure. But if the boom mic accidentally drifted in their direction, all we'd learn is where they're going for pizza after work.

Every once in a rare while I wake up on the right side of the bed and sally forth into the world looking to actually accomplish something. And when such a rare mood strikes me, the movie job I want is Prosecuting Attorney in a Tense Courtroom Drama. For starters, these folks are almost always smart and almost always cynical. On a good day I can a mange that. But the real attraction of the job is the moral stance. After years of watching the Royals play the Yankees, I've become thoroughly convinced that being right is more important than winning.

And that's the prosecutor's job description in a nutshell. No matter haw talented or intelligent she is, the DA is going to lose to the wily defense lawyer. Ah, but the final twist more often than not is that the defendant really was a vicious psychopath whose acquittal places innocent lives at risk. If only that stupid jury had listened to me ...

However, if I could really be one movie character, one guy who would be cool and fun rather than merely easy, I'd pick Kyuzo the master swordsman from The Seven Samurai. This guy is the ultimate Feudal Japanese badass. He's the best at what he does – which just happens to be killing bad guys – and he never loses his total sense of calm and control. Never draws his sword unless he has to, but when he does things are usually over quickly. If a mad scientist somehow gene-spliced Bruce Lee and Mr. Spock and then endlessly drilled his creation in kenjitsu, Kyuzo is what you'd get.

For that I'd even be willing to give up my dream of joining the Honky Horn ranks.

The Conspiracy Rules

Awhile back I got started watching Jesse “The Body” Ventura’s TV series on conspiracies. As noted in the list of my eight favorite conspiracy movies, I’m fond of this kind of stuff. However, Ventura and his crew go more than a little overboard.

In their defense, it’s hard to make an entire series out of a subject like this without delving at least a little into the realm of pure bullshit. Further, they do raise some questions about things that deserve to be questioned. And of course it’s wrong to expect high-quality intellectual analysis from a former professional wrestler.

However, Ventura’s show does serve admirably as a petri dish full of specimens of the logic errors that form the basis of the Conspiracy Rules. Just to make them easier to remember (in case you need to apply them during a cocktail party conversation or when accosted by a pamphlet-wielding true believer on the street), I’ve narrowed it down to five rather than the usual eight.

Conspiracy Rule One: Anyone who has a motive to lie is lying
Along with means and opportunity, motive is an important part of establishing an emotional (if not a legal) presumption of guilt. However, it’s nowhere near as self-sufficient as conspiracy nuts seem to think. The government fails to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about a crime? That must mean the government committed it.

Now, obviously anyone who lies about something does tend to create a presumption of complicity. However, even that presumption is subject to rebuttal. For example, Jim Garrison managed to do a fairly convincing job of proving that Clay Shaw was sometimes less than honest. However, he failed to make a distinction between lying about being involved in an assassination conspiracy and lying to cover up his homosexuality. In any event, a presumption of bad action by a liar is not the same as a presumption of lying by anyone who might have any reason to lie. Listen for statements such as “Naturally he’d say that; he stands to turn a big profit” or “That’s just what you’d expect a conspirator to say.”

Conspiracy Rule Two: Anyone who has no apparent motive to lie is telling the truth
This one’s the natural flip side of Rule One. If someone stands to gain nothing by lying, then what he says must be accurate. This can be used to validate all sorts of “expert” opinions. After all, why would anyone devote his entire life to the useless pursuit of some minute detail unless there was something to it?

Two problems. First, people are motivated by all kinds of things. Covering up complicity in a crime is a solid motive (though again, see Rule One). So is turning a solid profit. But people are also motivated by simple obsession, a need for attention, and sometimes even mental illness. You don’t have to spend much time in the company of true believers before you develop an appreciation for the true nature of belief.

The other problem of course is that if anyone with no motive to lie is telling the truth, that allows for all kinds of different (and mutually incompatible) truths. Do a search on “Dealey Plaza” and discover the meaning of “plethora.”

Conspiracy Rule Three: Lack of evidence is evidence
Anything that can’t be clearly documented is automatically evidence of a cover-up. For example, many 9/11 conspiracy “experts” dwell endlessly on the absence of video images of the plane striking the Pentagon. It’s an argument with some emotional appeal. After all, there are literally thousands of photos and videos of the attacks (at least the second one) on the World Trade Center. Yet even the Pentagon’s own security cameras didn’t capture the airplane right at the moment of impact.

This legitimately raises a “why not” question. However, it doesn’t prove that the damage was actually caused by a cruise missile. Nor does it answer a ton of other questions raised by the conspiracy theory, such as “if the plane didn’t hit the Pentagon, what did happen to it?”

And speaking of questions …

Conspiracy Rule Four: Questions are evidence
We’ve already met one form of this: “why would she say that if it wasn’t true?” But using questions as proof goes far beyond Rule Two.

Again let’s turn to JFK, specifically the death of David Ferrie. Why would Ferrie leave two suicide notes, Stone’s Garrison wonders, and then kill himself with a poison that leaves no trace? That must be evidence that he was killed by a conspiracy. The coroner’s response reveals one of the big problems with this rule: “If it’s a suicide, Jim, I’ve seen stranger.” Sometimes the answers to these supposedly unanswered questions are more than a little obvious.

More directly to the point, they aren’t proof of conspiracy because they’re simultaneously proof of a lack of conspiracy. Ferrie’s death is a perfect case in point. If you were going to murder somebody and make it look like a suicide, why do it in a way that raises questions at all? Why not leave one note and simply hang the guy from the nearest convenient chandelier? None of that proves anything.

Conspiracy Rule Five: False dichotomies are gospel
All the rest of the rules ultimately stem from this one, so if you can just remember Rule Five you’ll be in business. Conspiracy nuts absolutely love absolutes. Everything is black or white, right or wrong, truth or lies. Either nothing at all is going on at Area 51, or the government is hiding a flying saucer there. Either Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone or he was a patsy set up by a conspiracy that went all the way to the highest levels of American government. And so on.

In most cases, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to come up with at least one explanation simpler than the conspiracy-oriented extremes. For example, maybe Area 51 is being used for secret aircraft prototype testing. That simultaneously solves many of the problems with the “nothing going on at all” and “dead space aliens” theories.

Mind you, if Jesse Ventura is on your front porch demanding that you tell him “the truth,” logic may not be your best defense. Whatever ethical advantage you might obtain isn’t likely to impress the target audience.

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.

My eight favorite aliens

To the question “Are we alone in the universe?” science fiction offers up a resounding “no.” The genre has served up innumerable inhabitants of countless worlds, everything from colossal beasts to dangerous microbes.

With so many to choose from, selecting eight was no easy task. I tried for a mix of different kinds of aliens, from the nearly human to the not-at-all. I also tried to choose creatures from movies that were worth watching (though in a couple of cases I had to bend that criterion at least a little).

And still the set suffers from weak spots. For example, some of the best aliens are the ones who come in peace to teach us something valuable about the universe and about ourselves. However, most of the visitors on this list are the other kind, the sort that seeks to subdue, study or just plain old eat us.

A quick note on the politics of the list: I’d made my choices and written most of the descriptions when I noticed that seven of the eight aliens were uninvited guests on Earth. This naturally raises questions about the parallels between movie xenophobia and real questions about undocumented immigrants, the folks who used to be called “illegal aliens.”

Space creatures have – for good or ill – occasionally stood in for marginalized members of society. They’ve also played other allegorical roles; for example, in the 1950s they frequently served as the Red Menace. More often, however, they’re intended to be exactly what they are: something more powerful than us with which we must contend or at least interact.

In any event, the closest any of the aliens on this list come to anything politically incorrect would be the immigrant street crime elements of Predator 2 (which didn’t actually make the list, though it has a class of creature in common with one of the following eight).

 

Aliens – It isn’t every species that can presume to go by the generic “Aliens.” But these bugs pull it off nicely. It helps that an artist – and a weird one at that – designed them. Plus they’re four aliens in one: the face hugger, the chest burster, the drone and the queen. After the second movie the series loses me a bit, but even in the bad ones the aliens still kick butt (indeed, the swimming alien was the highlight of number four).

Predator – If we’re going to include Aliens, then we’re also going to have to toss in their buddies the Predators. While most of Earth’s guests from outer space either come in peace or want to take over, all these guys want to do is get a little hunting in. I’ve seen these movies dozens of times (except for number three, for which I didn’t particularly care), and I still can’t quite decide if Stan Winston’s design of the creatures’ faces – the ultimate vagina dentata – is a “oh, cool!” or “ew, nasty!” moment. Still, I do love their M.O.

The Mutant from Metaluna – Most of the aliens in This Island Earth look just like we do (except they have bigger foreheads). But even though they show up claiming to need our help to save their planet, they turn out to have a scary-looking henchman. This “mutant” is the archetypal Bug-Eyed Monster with its huge, brain-looking head, fearsome claws and shiny space suit.

Martians – Of our three closest constant neighbors in the solar system, Mars seems to be the most constant source of alien invaders. At one point we figured we’d find people on the Moon when we got there, but they seldom seemed to have much interest in making a call on us. And of course Venus filled the heads of unimaginative screenwriters with visions of Zsa Zsa Gabor in an outlandish outfit that no inhabitant of a man-free world would ever put on. But Mars, ah, there be monsters. And they’re none too shy about engaging in a little interplanetary imperialism, either. Of all the denizens of the Red Planet, my favorite are the obnoxious little creeps from Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks. They indulge in just about every evil alien cliché in the book.

The Blob – One of the most unfortunate tendencies of timid filmmakers is the inclination to anthropomorphize visitors from outer space. In a universe of nearly limitless possibility, I find myself consistently disappointed when the aliens turn out to be guys with rubber appliances glued to their foreheads. Thus anyone with the guts to break out of this mold commands at least a little respect. I concede that this movie suffers in the execution, turning into a story that seldom rises above Rebel Without a Cause versus A Giant Wad of Red Jell-o. Nonetheless, it musters a good-sized dose of creepiness solely from the extra-alien nature of the alien menace.

The body snatchers – On the other hand, alien invaders can also maximize their scariness by looking exactly like us. Indeed, the main awfulness of the body snatching menace is that they want to take our places and become us (or at least a weird simulation of us). Though this theme has been explored with varying degrees of success (and in the name of different psychological and political agendas) over the years, it always inspires a shudder or two.

It – Now consider the opposite thesis. The aliens in It Came from Outer Space look nothing like us, and as nonhumans they’re inherently to be feared. But then it turns out that the few humans who are willing to overcome their instincts and extend a little trust turn out to be correct about the nature of the visitors. Because all the other aliens on this list are out to do us harm, I wanted to include at least one intelligent example of the other possibility.

The Thing – This one is every imaginable form of alien menace rolled into one. It can be a ravening monster or look exactly like us. It can infect us from within before we even know what’s happening (not unlike The Andromeda Strain, a different kind of alien that nearly made this list). It’s a BEM, a body snatcher and an advanced case of AIDS. And it doesn’t exactly hurt that the movie going on around it is pretty good as well.

My eight favorite spaceships

If we’re going to the stars, we’re going to need a way to get there. That’s a simple enough proposition, but it gets complicated quickly. Physicists remind us about the trouble with traveling fast enough to get anywhere else without taking ages to get there. Psychologists and physiologists fret about the effects of spending long periods in the absence of Earth’s gravity.

Fortunately for us, movies seldom if ever concern themselves greatly with such weighty inquiries. They simply assume that in the future scientists will come up with something that violates Einstein’s speed limit and keeps us stuck to the floor while we’re on our way. Freed from worry about how we’ll make spaceships work, we can focus on more entertaining questions such as what they will look like and what they will do.

Here are eight particularly entertaining answers.

 

Saucers, saucers and more saucers – This could be a list all by itself. The notion of saucer-shaped spacecraft runs like a river through the genre. Aliens show up in them. They use them to freak us out and attack us. They try to leave in them. And for that matter, once we take to the stars ourselves we sometimes take a page from the aliens’ book. Though it’s impossible to pick just one example, the saucer had to be on the list.

The Space Ark - Of course the other “classic” spaceship design is the rocket, that long, skinny, shiny tribute to man’s desire to penetrate the heavens. Stainless deco rockets show up just about everywhere from Destination Moon to Bugs Bunny cartoons. But if I have to settle on a single example, I’ll go with the Space Ark from When Worlds Collide. It has the look and feel we need plus an out-of-the-ordinary horizontal launch track. Its role in a fun – if somewhat far-fetched – movie doesn’t exactly hurt, either.

The Executor – I’m guessing most Star Wars fans offered a choice of vehicles from the series would probably opt for the Millennium Falcon. I hate to say it, but I sorta share Princess Leia’s initial impression of Han Solo’s dragster. Instead, for my money the baddest ride in a galaxy far, far away is Darth Vader’s personal star destroyer, the Executor. The name’s a little awkward – is he going to execute people or just make sure their estates are properly distributed? – but for a combination of smooth design and awesome firepower this ship is hard to beat.

The Martian war machines – This one’s a bit of a cheat, because technically the Martians don’t use these to cross the vast gulfs of cold, empty space. Instead they use them after they arrive to trash the place, making them more like tanks than spacecraft. Though H.G. Wells had something more like the machines from the Steven Spielberg version in mind, I strongly prefer the smooth, deco styling of the George Pal production. These things kick our asses and look good doing it.

The moon bus – As noted in the list of our eight favorite sci fi movies, one of the great appeals of the genre is the implication that the extraordinary may someday become ordinary, that in the future we (or perhaps our descendants) will be able to journey to other planets with the same ease with which we currently travel to other cities. One of the big draws of 2001: A Space Odyssey is that it presents us with just such a world. Pan Am will be able to rocket us off to an orbiting hotel, and later we can visit the Moon. While we’re there, we’ll get around on moon buses, transports that look like a cross between a spaceship and a subway car. The familiar ordinariness of the thing is what makes it so appealing. In the present I might take the bus to work, but in the future I’ll use something similar to get around a place that now I can just dream about.

The Nostromo – On the other hand, the spaceship in Alien takes this almost too far. It’s a grim, greasy, dark place guaranteed to send shivers down the spine of anyone who’s ever worked in a factory. Who wants to imagine a future where the job market will be as miserable as it is today? Still, the industrial look and feel – combined with the quibbling in the script over Human Resources issues – make the setting and the monster eerily realistic.

The Thunder Road – I vaguely remember when I was a kid and I still had a sense of wonder or at least an imagination. Explorers combines a child’s ability to turn a pile of junk into a spacecraft with just enough alien tech to make the thing actually work. The aliens’ ships are clever as well. I wish I’d seen this movie when I was young enough to really appreciate it.

The Enterprise – To be completely precise, the original TV version of the Enterprise will always be nearest and dearest to my heart. Still, the slightly modified ship from the first couple of Star Trek movies is close enough for government work. The design incorporates both the saucer and the rocket into one awesome starship. But the thing that’s always intrigued me the most about it is the fact that it makes no sense from the perspective of those of us who live with gravity and aerodynamics. On Earth this thing would never fly, but in the boundless freedom of outer space it works perfectly. That makes it as forward-thinking as the series of which it was a vital part.

My eight favorite sci fi movies

So now here we are, in the century that was going to be the future. Actually, we’ve been here for a decade now, so by rights this list would have been more apropos ten years ago. But 8sails didn’t exist back then, so we’ll just have to play catch-up now.

“Science fiction” covers a lot of ground, from optimistic, outer-space extensions of Manifest Destiny to horrifying visions of future dystopias. A list of eight movies could never encompass the entire genre or even all the sci fi movies we like. These eight, however, all stand on their own merits in addition to being excellent representatives of their genre.

 

A Clockwork Orange – Though I don’t think Anthony Burgess’s novel should ever have been made into a movie, if a movie it had to be then this is the best it could have been. Malcolm McDowell turns in a delightfully over-the-top performance as a Teddy-Boy-of-the-Future robbed of his free will by a cruel experiment. From a sci-fi perspective, however, the real draw is the art direction. The picture’s world is Mid Century décor and architecture gone to hell, an eerily plausible alternative reality. The soundtrack’s creepy synthesizer distortion of familiar music doesn’t exactly hurt, either.

2001: A Space Odyssey – Sticking with Stanley Kubrick movies, let’s backtrack a picture to a more optimistic vision of the future. The Slab is the big star of the show, and of course the end sequence will probably continue to dazzle stoners for generations to come. But for my taste, the best parts are the small touches. For example, the space shuttle and space station both become more interesting via the addition of corporate logos. The suggestion is that this future isn’t entirely dissimilar to the real present, and someday we might be able to fly a Pan Am shuttle to an orbital Hilton just as easily as we can take a trip to Club Med now. It didn’t turn out to be true, but it was still a nice thought.

The Empire Strikes Back – I pretty much had to put one of the pictures in the Star Wars series on this list. The first one was a cultural phenomenon. This one was a better movie. This one won the spot.

1984 – This picture enjoys three big distinctions. First, it’s a remarkably faithful adaptation of Orwell’s famous novel. Indeed, where the two differ the movie is sometimes better than the book. Second, it was shot in the year referenced in the title and on the locations envisioned by the author 36 years earlier, making it the only production (as far as I know) to ever pull off this particular stunt. And third, it’s a really good movie. Depressing as hell, but still well worth a look.

Metropolis – This is the great grandmother of all science fiction movies. Though it isn’t the first sci fi movie ever made (Melies started playing around with trips to the moon two or three decades before this), it’s a watershed moment in the genre’s development. Fritz Lang demonstrated that script, acting (naturally somewhat diminished by the conventions of the silent era), special effects and politics could be combined into a single production.

The Day the Earth Stood Still – Speaking of politics, it must have taken some guts to stand up in the middle of the Cold War and produce a movie suggesting that “the enemy” might be just as human as us, if not more so. The simple premise – that a species capable of surviving long enough to develop interstellar flight would almost by definition have to be both more powerful and more peaceful than us – is cleverly advanced by a plot full of entertaining twists and turns. Paranoia has rarely been so gently exposed or so aptly punished.

Blade Runner – This one already made the list of our eight favorite movies. Thus I’ll just add that it’s an important part of the genre’s history as well. The art direction makes it a key moment in the movement afoot at the time to break away from the deco-clean visions of tomorrow and make the future a grimy place not entirely dissimilar to the present.

Forbidden Planet – I think I’ve seen this one more often than all the rest of the entries on the list put together, which is saying something because several of these are part of my personal collection. It’s just such a wonderful combination of elements: the story, the script, the acting, the robot, the monster. Even the dated elements – such as the Theremin and some of the effects – still hold considerable charm. And on top of its individual merit, it’s also a seminal piece of sci fi cinema. Star Trek in particular owes this movie a considerable debt.

Check your flossing

Making movie lists isn’t as easy as it looks. Even after watching thousands of movies, I still find myself at a loss when trying to put a simple list of eight together.

Thus my initial inclination was to cut Mental Floss some slack when the latest issue sported a cover story on “The 25 Most Powerful Movies of the Last 25 Years” (which sadly as of this writing is not available online). I particularly appreciated the effort authors Carina Chocano and Mangesh Hattikudur put into staying consistent with the magazine’s general trivia orientation. Rather than focus on movies of earth-shattering importance, they tended to pick pictures with interesting background stories of one kind or another.

For example, the tale of how Lara Croft Tomb Raider managed to turn a profit before it was ever released was far more fascinating than the movie itself. Similarly, I enjoyed the official Kazakhstani reaction to Borat and the Taliban’s reaction to Titanic.

On the other hand, a handful of the entries were somewhat problematic, movies that for one reason or another seemed not to merit the accolades they received. I’d reclassify them as follows:

The Truman Show – The movie that helped popularize an otherwise obscure neurosis
In a world that doesn’t always make a lot of sense, it’s easy to vaguely suspect that the whole mess is a big, elaborate joke of some kind. The Truman Show caters to the adolescent fantasy that everything around us has been set up for our benefit, that everyone we know is actually a robot or an actor. Most of us grow out of this peculiar delusion. Some folks get stuck with it on a more long-term basis. However, matters aren’t helped when mental health professionals name the illness after a Hollywood movie. That just helps sell it to psychiatric hypochondriacs.

The Silence of the Lambs – The movie that was nice to bugs but hateful to the rest of the universe
I liked the trivia about how carefully the moths were handled off screen. However, treating moths with care doesn’t do much to make up for the movie’s brutal on-screen treatment of women, cops, a dog, and so on.

Sideways – The movie that … aw jeez yuppies, get over yourselves
An indie comedy about annoying wine nerds? How did I manage to avoid seeing this one? The fact that one character’s foolish whining led to a drop in sales for a perfectly serviceable grape merely makes the movie more disgraceful than it already was.

Sex, Lies and Videotape – The movie that assured independent producers that it was okay to be boring
The only reason this didn’t make the Eight movies to put you out of the mood for sex list is that when I was putting that list together I forgot this movie even existed. I saw it when it first came out. Or was it when it was first released on video? It’s been so long I don’t remember. In any event, it would have been right at home with the eight non-sexy sex movies that did make the list.

Brazil – The movie that didn’t do what Mental Floss said it did
I like Terry Gilliam’s work in general and this movie in particular. But the Mental Floss article gives it credit for starting the steampunk movement. Uh, no. If nothing else, 1984 – which came out a year earlier – featured a much more realistic depiction of alternate-reality technology. And of course more purely steampunk visuals go at least as far back as the drawings of Albert Robida, which predate Brazil by a century or so.

The Blair Witch Project – The movie that murdered the helpless tripod
For some reason some critics who don’t regularly follow horror movies seem to think that this picture is a seminal moment in the genre’s development. But in truth it spawned few successful imitators. Even its own sequel is a more traditional production. It’s notable as a great example of making a movie on the cheap and then turning a tremendous profit via viral marketing. But beyond that all it really contributes is an unfortunate plug for the notion that shaky camerawork is a legitimate art form. Burp.

The Big Lebowski – The movie that gave hope to useless white men everywhere
The Floss article observes that this one started a spurious religion on par with the Church of the Subgenius and the Flying Spaghetti Monster thing. On a less formal level, it assured over-privileged, indolent white guys that they were somehow heroic. The next time you visit Lawrence, Kansas – or a similar neo-hippie-infested college town – feast your eyes on why this is a bad idea.

Pulp Fiction – The movie that managed to hypnotize the world into thinking Quentin Tarantino had talent
Actually, I have no quarrel with the authors’ analysis of this entry. They say Pulp Fiction “reinvigorated the independent film movement, spawned hundreds of Tarantino wannabes, jump-started John Travolta’s comatose career, and brought surf music back to the radio.” If you could add “kidnapped the Lindbergh baby” and “sold missiles to Iran” to that list you’d have a complete set.

My eight favorite Halloween movies

Just about any horror movie ever made could arguably be a good movie to watch on Halloween. However, this list is made up of movies that meet two additional criteria. First, they should have an October feel to them. The viewer should be able to feel the air grow colder and smell the smoke of burning leaves. At the very least, part of the movie should be set during autumn.

Second, the movie should somehow reflect the pre-movie pastime of telling ghost stories around a campfire. Plots should be simple and straightforward. Emphasis should be on the creepy, not necessarily the gory. It also wouldn’t hurt for the movie to be okay to watch with the whole family in the room (though I admit two or three movies on the list flunk that standard).

 

Halloween – Well, duh. Here we have that perpetual childhood favorite, The Boogeyman. Only here he’s real, come back to his old hometown for his favorite night of the year. This picture is actually fairly tame by current standards (though still maybe a bit much for pre-teens). The body count is low. The blood flows, but not by the bucketful. But back in 1978 it helped give birth to generations of slasher movies with supernatural villains. And yes, I’m talking about the John Carpenter original, not the Rob Zombie remake.

Creepshow – In the finest campfire tradition, here we get five short stories instead of one long yarn. Writer Stephen King modeled these stories from the immortal mould (or mold, if you prefer) established by William Gaines’ EC Comics (which also spawned the “Tales from the Crypt” TV series), and director George Romero gives the production a distinct comic book flavor.

Sleepy Hollow – Washington Irving’s classic tale of the Headless Horseman gets a new twist at the hands of master-creep Tim Burton. The original made a nice Disney cartoon (which you might consider adding as a warm-up), but the new take on the familiar story adds some entertaining elements to the mix. With Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci in the lead roles, this one has the cast that will be most familiar to 21st-century audiences.

Something Wicked This Way Comes – Sure, this one’s got some flaws. It’s one of those annoying movies that looks as if it was directed by a committee that never could quite manage to agree on what it was supposed to be. The result is stiff in spots and jumpy in others. But author Ray Bradbury’s “October People” are the heart of Halloween, the dark forces that roam the countryside as the evenings grow longer. Here they’re at their worst, masquerading as something innocent: a harmless carnival for children. Jonathan Pryce does an especially good job as Mr. Dark, the story’s arch-villain.

Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors – No Halloween would be complete without at least one dreary old British horror picture, and this is one of the best. It’s another anthology, serving up a spooky story salad with something for everyone: a werewolf, a killer plant, a vampire, voodoo, and a disembodied hand out for revenge. The movie was directed by Freddie Francis and stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, all three staples of the low-budget English horror sub-genre.

The Fog – Ah, if only the good people of Antonio Bay hadn’t cheated those cranky lepers out of their money, they wouldn’t have to bar their doors and windows against a little night mist. I don’t want to overload you with Carpenter movies, but the list needed a good ghost story. And this one does the trick. What the production lacks in bloody violence and special effects it more than makes up for with a solid script and decent acting. Here’s another good example of an original that holds its own against a flashy, tech-intensive remake.

The Evil Dead – Send the kids off to bed before screening these last two. Here’s the no-budget masterpiece that gave Sam “Spider-man” Raimi his start. Though the production values are about as low as you can get, this picture has chills you can’t buy with the world’s biggest expense account. The plot – college students on a weekend trip to the back woods accidentally evoke bloodthirsty demons – takes me straight back to the sort of stories my friends and I would make up during sleep-overs when we were kids.

The Exorcist – Though this one’s famous for the big, dramatic stuff, I like the small touches. The Iraq sequence in the beginning is way creepier (and scarier, if you think about it) than all the soup-puking demon junk that happens later in the picture. This is the least light-hearted production of the lot, its seriousness a grim reminder that lurking in the background of Halloween is something more sinister than donning a costume and bobbing for apples.

My eight favorite movie monsters

I can’t let October go without doing some sort of horror-related movie list. This year we pay tribute to movie monsters, those creature feature creatures that don’t fit easily into one of the genre’s more popular niches (vampires, werewolves and the like). Some might fit into categories – such as “alien” or “zombie” – with a little straining, but for the most part these beasts are one of a kind.

This uniqueness gives them a serious advantage in the scare department. When the protagonists square off against a vampire they go in with a good idea of what they’re up against – what it does, what it wants, how to kill it. Such familiar evils are no match for that scariest of all things: the unknown. A monster that doesn’t play by the rules? What would save us from it?

 

The Thing – Calling this a “space alien” doesn’t even come close to describing it. Instead, it’s the perfect embodiment of Reagan-era paranoia: a mimicking embodiment of the AIDS epidemic, a sentient infection that steals your body from the inside, a deadly menace that could be sitting next to you at the dinner table and you’d never know it until it was far, far too late. The claustrophobic Antarctic setting and the absence of the genre’s usual misogyny were also strong contributing factors.

Godzilla – This guy isn’t The King of the Monsters for nothing. The endless parade of sequels – some better than others – have cemented Godzilla as a pop culture icon. But the original movie – unsophisticated, black-and-white, badly dubbed, intercut with footage of Raymond Burr to help it sell in the States – is a brilliantly-chilling portrait of the Atomic Age gone horribly wrong.

Frankenstein’s monster – Thanks in no small part to James Whale’s clever direction and Boris Karloff’s patient makeup-sporting, Universal Studios transformed Mary Shelly’s “Modern Prometheus” into one of the most recognizable monsters in the world. Unlike most of the rest of the beasts on this list, Frankenstein is multi-dimensional, even sympathetic in parts (not bad for a basket full of sewn-together corpse parts). And though several of his list companions appeared in sequels, the monster enjoys the distinction of putting in a second performance as good as the first.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon – Decades before Jaws, this walking coelacanth posed all the menace of a giant shark with the added threat of being able to chase its victims onto dry land. The movie suffers from some of the usual weaknesses of 50s era horror, particularly rampant sexism and racism. But oh that monster. The underwater sequences are particularly noteworthy examples of edge-of-your-seat menace.

Gremlins – These guys have a few weak spots, particularly their photosensitivity. But their vulnerability is more than made up for by the ease with which they multiply. If they were serious about killing people rather than merely making dangerous trouble, they’d be an awful menace. Even as they are they aren’t anything you’d want to run into in a dark alley.

The Burrowers – Think about it: when was the last time you saw a truly innovative movie monster? These things qualify. Their appearance is bizarre in a way that would have been difficult to achieve – particularly for an independent production – before the age of computer-generated effects. And their modus operandi? Ugh.

Fluffy – This creature is probably better known as the monster in “The Crate,” the fourth segment in Creepshow. It would look like some kind of ridiculous white punk rock simian if not for two things, long claws and a huge mouth full of needle-sharp teeth. It’s strong, it’s fast, and it plays off that deep-seated childhood fear: all it wants to do is eat people, and the more the merrier.

The Id monster – It’s unstoppable. It’s invisible. And it’s been summoned into existence for one purpose alone: slaughtering the heroes. For a chunk of the movie one has to use a little imagination to truly feel the threat. But when it walks through a powerful force field that does nothing to stop it but temporarily renders it visible … nightmare city. And the best part is that it's actually part of a really good movie.