January 9, 2008 - 10:20 pm - Posted by Administrator
OK, so I’m gonna admit right up front, I had about five beers and a couple of margaritas in me, and it was about one thirty in the morning before I finally sat down to watch Final one night. I think I DVR’ed it from the Independent Film Channel if I remember right. It’s possible that I don’t because of the beers and margaritas, but if you’ve been reading much of this blog, you probably already know I’m full of shit, so no point pretending I’m informed now.
Occasionally I take notes while I’m watching movies so I can refer to them later when I blog it. Here’s what I wrote for Final:
I don’t know if I can buy Denis Leary in this type of role.
What the hell is going on in this movie?
What the fuck?? Is that Jim Gaffigan?
Is something going to happen soon?
This is a science fiction movie without special effects!
After that my writing trails off on the page and ends in a stain that can only be the drool from where I fell asleep at about three am.
Here’s the deal. Final is one of those concepts that was borne out of a love for science fiction, minus the money to do it properly. Final is as low-budget as they come. Denis Leary is Bill, a man who wakes up in something that’s not quite a prison, but a little more than a hospital. We do not know exactly what Bill’s malady is, but we are treated to flashbacks from his life where he appears to be going through a very tough time. He’s the outcast of his family, he’s broken up with his fiancee, his father has died, and eventually he flashes back to his own apparent attempted suicide.
His therapist Ann (Hope Davis) is in charge of deciding whether he’s “recovering” or not. She begins work figuring out why he has delusions of being cryogenically frozen for four hundred years, and why he believes he will soon be executed. Just as you’re about to go, “OK, what the fuck??” and hit the stop button on the DVR, the story unfurls itself all at once and you find out that Bill hasn’t been frozen for four hundred years, but he is going to die soon.
The pacing in Final is terrible. Nothing seems to happen for the first half of the movie, then they reveal, like, ten plot points all at once, then there’s a long slow slide to the end. It’s like Denis Leary said “I’ve been frozen for four hundred years” and the doctors said “No you haven’t. Seriously.” Then as the movie viewer, you go “OK, whew. Cuz that would have been weird.” Then the Doctors say, “Instead you’ve been in a coma, your mom died, your girlfriend abandoned you to a science experiment and got remarried, we froze you, there was a terrible epidemic that ravaged the world, now we woke you up, but we have to kill you so we can save the world with your tissue cells because you were frozen before the pandemic burned into the human genome.” And all of that is revealed in less than five minutes. Nothing else happens. And the entire movie (except the brief flashbacks) happens in the hospital. Jim Gaffigan plays a hospital orderlie who hardly ever speaks.
But then maybe I was just drunk.
** Two Stars
Posted in Pandemic, Post-Apocalypse, Suspended Animation, The Future, Time Travel, Two Star Rating | No Comments »
January 7, 2008 - 11:04 pm - Posted by Administrator
I saw Wolfen for the first time on HBO, when I was a pimply pre-teen. That was back in the day when HBO from the cable company cost an extra ten dollars per month, and all you got was HBO… one more channel. Plus, you had to get up and walk to the TV and flip the little black switch on your gold and faux-woodgrain HBO box to descramble the signal.
I was home alone (my parents must have been out drinkin’ at Fridays or the Torchlight), perusing the paper HBO-guide that they mailed to subscribers every month. I saw a movie called “Wolfen” and flipped it on. What I saw that night was a movie which to this day is begging for a remake. It’s also the source of a good obscure sci-fi factoid you can use to brain-bust even your nerdiest friends. I’ll get to that in a moment.
Wolfen is set in late-seventies New York, at the beginning of the redevelopment which would eventually transform the Big Apple into a cleaner, safer, and better smelling metropolis. It’s a movie about two cops, played by Albert Finney and Gregory Hines. They’re investigating several gruesome deaths–apparent animal attacks. Their investigation leads them to the city’s darkest neighborhoods–neighborhoods where ninety-nine percent of the residents have fled.
****Spoiler Alert****
Someone, or something is stalking the citizens of New York. We are treated to point-of-view tracking shots that show us the dark New York skyline, somehow enhanced by the predator’s vision, and populated by unsuspecting victims who stroll along unaware they’re about to become food. If I had to describe the effect, I would call it a more subtle version of the effect from Predator, when you see through the hunter’s eyes.
As the bodiess stack up, the investigators encounter a tribe of Native Americans which includes Eddie Holt, played by a very young Edward James Olmos. They are a superhuman species, capable of shifting shape at will. And they are killing to protect their hunting ground. By the way, if seeing full-frontal nudity from Olmos as he prances around a beach is too much for you (it almost was for me), consider this a warning.
The setting and and story for Wolfen are pretty good. Unfortunately, the casting and the special effects are seriously lacking. What are supposed to be gory death scenes now look dated. Although a fine actor, Albert Finney was not a good match for the role. Plus, in the climactic attack sequences the shapeshifters assume the shapes of… well, ordinary wolves. The movie establishes the superhuman strength and savage nature of the deaths well in advance, so when the killers turn out to be what look like ordinary wolves, it can seem a little anti-climactic.
Which brings to me to how this movie is begging for a re-make. Now that special effects have caught up, this movie could easily be fixed and re-made with a heavy dose of big, savage, computer generated Wolfen-creatures. Not wolves, but wolf-like monsters.
Now, that obscure factoid I alluded to… in 1987, you may remember seeing little grey alien heads everywhere. Remember? Every book store you went to was hawking the novel Communion by Whitley Strieber. It prominently featured the face of a grey alien on the cover. I remember it because I had to straighten the damn books when I worked at Target in high school. And Communion was high on the “I must fuck with this book” list for our customers I guess.
Communion was pitched by Strieber as a true story of alien abduction, his account of being personally abducted by aliens. It gave a serious boost to UFO culture and re-awakened the abductee phenomena. But, from the outset, there were those who were skeptical. Some even alleged that Strieber’s novel should not be taken as a true story of alien abduction, because Strieber was an established writer, and published novelist. He was a master storyteller. Indeed, he even had one of his novels turned into a movie. That movie was Wolfen.
*** Three Stars
Posted in 1981, Three Star Rating | No Comments »
January 7, 2008 - 12:36 am - Posted by Administrator
After the world witnessed the horrors of the second World War, the science fiction genre became a psychological sounding board, reflecting nuclear nightmares and a fear of technology. Moviemakers populated their films with mushroom clouds and UFOs, harbingers of our inevitable technological doom. These are the movies I grew up with.
Unknown to me were the movies of the previous generation, the post-World War I movies which portrayed the horrors of the day. Poison gas attacks. Things to Come is one of those movies.
Filmed in 1935, and released in 1936, as Europe was on the brink of another World War, Things to Come is the story of one hundred years in Everytown, a city which is popularly believed to be a thinly-veiled London.
Things to Come is based on The Shape of Things to Come novel by H.G. Wells, and the movie was written by Wells himself. Director William Cameron Menzies [Around the World in 80 Days, Gone with the Wind] was said to have entertained Wells suggestions during the production process as well.
The story covers a timeline that stretches from 1936 to 2036, and that timeline is the main shortcoming of the script. The movie becomes an unceasing parade of new characters and they can become laborious to keep track of. In the beginning, Everytown is an idyllic community of peaceful citizens. They spend Christmas in fear of a war which eventually decimates the city. The war goes on for thirty years and is followed by a plague called the “Wandering Sickness” which runs rampant for years more. They slowly become isolated from the world, communication is cut off, and the survivors shun technology. Things to Come is, to my knowledge, the first post-apocalyptic science fiction film. Although many would argue Metropolis deserves that honor, this is the earliest one I ever saw which looked… dirty. Like Mad Max. A crucial component for any post-apocalypse picture.
Eventually the local techno-phobe warlord who rules Everytown is surprised by the appearance of a stranger in possession of high-technology–most notably, futuristic airplanes. The stranger is able to convince the citizens of Everytown that social order is making a comeback in other parts of the world, and technology plays a big part of it. He brings a message of hope for a future tech-savvy civilization–”Wings Over the World”.
After Everytown’s World War I-era air force is easily defeated by the highly-advanced Wings Over the World Air Force, the citizens embrace technology whole-heartedly and begin rebuilding Everytown Utopian-style, underground and highly futuristic. The movie comes to a conclusion in 2036 as humans prepare to send our first astronauts to the moon via a giant “Space Gun”, as yet another group of techno-phobe citizens threatens to revolt.
Many have called Things to Come cheesy, the story preachy, and the dialogue corny. All of those things are true at times. Honestly the choice of costumes for the futuristic characters is a little too Flash Gordon for my taste. I don’t get into the whole Toga-and-Shoulder-Pads look. And the dialogue is generally too wooden and, well, 1930s-ish. However, the real legacy of Things to Come is the look. If you were mesmerized by the visuals in the otherwise-terrible “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” then you will enjoy Things to Come. The first time I watched it, every ten minutes I had a light-bulb moment… “Oh, so that’s where they got the idea for that…”
Director Menzies would go on to contribute to the motion picture industry primarily as a producer, and especially in the field of Art Direction and Design. His flair for the artistic shows. The sets, models, and locations used in this movie are nearly unparalleled, and I had to keep reminding myself that this was a movie filmed in 1935. In Things to Come, you’ll see portrayals of Auto-Gyros (an early type of helicopter), super-highways, flying wings, elevated monorails, moving sidewalks, flat screen video monitors (transparent no less), and more. Watch for the 2036 scene where the guy turns on his video monitor to show his granddaughter what Everytown used to look like, and you can see through the screen from the back. Prophetic. Keep in mind, this is during a time when nobody had a television.
Anyway, this is not your movie if you need today’s special effects and dialogue. The sound is especially bad in this movie. But if you can appreciate it for its occasional moments, definitely check it out. It’s a science fiction classic. If I could split it up, I’d give it three stars for story, but four stars for the look.
Posted in 1930's, Four Star Rating, Post-Apocalypse, The Future | No Comments »
OK, so I’m gonna admit right up front, I had about five beers and a couple of margaritas in me, and it was about one thirty in the morning before I finally sat down to watch Final one night. I think I DVR’ed it from the Independent Film Channel if I remember right. It’s possible that I don’t because of the beers and margaritas, but if you’ve been reading much of this blog, you probably already know I’m full of shit, so no point pretending I’m informed now.
