Live from Austin!

Idiocracy is Mike Judge’s new live action movie. Well, I say “new”; I gather it was pretty much finished in 2004, and since then he has been battling with 20th Century Fox to get it released. Right now, it’s showing in a handful of cities, probably a contractual obligation release before it gets shuffled off to DVD or buried outright. One of the cities is Austin, so we went to see it last night.

The premise of the story is the observation that smart people pretty much aren’t having children, while mouth-breathing idiots can’t seem to stop doing so. A supremely average guy from the army is chosen to be the subject of a suspended animation experiment in 2005. Unfortunately, after he is put into the suspension chamber the military end up forgetting about it, and our hero wakes up in the year 2505—and discovers that the world has gotten so dumb that he’s now the smartest person on the planet.

So we get to see a future where the cities are like giant trailer parks, the only clothing that exists is sports gear festooned with dozens of corporate logos, and nobody can even comprehend the idea of drinking water without coloring, sugar and flavoring added. Language has devolved into strings of rap clichés, disconnected phrases, and grunts, and the President is a pro wrestler.

I laughed more than I have in months. The pace starts to flag after about two thirds of the movie, but it’s still pretty damn entertaining if you like satire. On the other hand, if you’re the kind of person who thinks monster truck rallies are legitimate entertainment, then you’re probably not going to appreciate having so many barbs fired in your direction.

Celebrity-obsessed entertainment publications like JAM! Showbiz and Entertainment Weekly have panned the movie, all too aware that it sets out to mock their readers. It rips into Hollywood too, and has made a few corporations unhappy. Starbucks seem to have taken the jokes in their stride, like they did with Austin Powers, but Pepsico have clearly forbidden any of their trademarked logos from being shown in the movie. As such, the Negativland Dispepsi approach is followed, with significantly disguised parody logos being used and the real product name referred to only verbally. I daresay a good few jokes were removed or muted by the corporate censors too.

Still, probably worth going to see, and definitely worth renting on DVD.

An experiment in cloning goes awry: director Kurt Wimmer attempts to clone The Matrix and inject it with Brave New World DNA, and ends up with a truly ghastly piece of derivative sci-fi that takes a noble premise and turns it into exploitative cartoon violence. What plot twists exist are telegraphed so far off you’d need to be heavily sedated to miss them.

Like the uneven but popular movie it slavishly copies, it can’t decide whether it wants to be intelligent and philosophical, or to just revel in pointless unrealistic violence; and whereas the original at least had a plot device to explain the unreality, the cheap knock-off has no such excuse. Netflix thought I’d rate it 4/5, but adequate acting and special effects can’t drag it above a 2.

I find myself wondering whether Roger Ebert actually watched it before giving it 3 out of 4 stars, especially as he mentions a memorable scene of the protagonist listening to jazz. In the scene in question, the music played is Beethoven, the guy even mispronounces “Ludvig Van Beet-hoven” before putting the record on.

If James Brown is the hardest working man in showbiz, Richard H. Kirk must surely be the hardest working man in electronica. He seems to be able to effortlessly drop an album or two every year without the quality suffering. I noticed the other day that most of his back catalog is now available from the iTunes music store, generally priced way below what you can find the limited release CDs for.

Meanwhile, Leningrad Cowboys Go America is finally available on DVD…in Finland. Or from an online store in Denmark, which wants $32 plus shipping. Ouch.

TELEX have a new album out later this month, How Do You Dance? (answer: badly). No sign of it appearing in the US. There’s also a single and a video, can’t find any trace of those either. $19 for the CD, plus shipping from France, equals ouch again.

I suppose I should be grateful that Kraftwerk’s complete remastered box set hasn’t appeared yet.

In a word, avoid. Unfortunately it’s a competently executed movie, at least as far as acting and cinematography—so sadly, I must break with etiquette and provide a synopsis. It’s the only way to explain how truly bad the movie is.

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Snakes On A Plane. You can just imagine the pitch meeting.

Turner: I have got this killer idea for an action horror movie.

Ellis: Sure, hit me.

Turner: OK, here’s the setup…there are a bunch of people on a plane. And the plane is carrying a load of, like, poisonous snakes. And the snakes are accidentally let out.

Ellis: Are you drunk?

Turner: No, listen, there’s more. Samuel L. Jackson is on the plane. He, like, kicks the snakes’ asses.

Ellis: I’m not sure snakes have asses.

Turner: Tails, then. But you get the idea…Samuel L. Jackson. In a plane. And the plane is full of snakes.

Ellis: So what’s it called?

Turner: Snakes On A Plane.

Ellis: I knew it, you’re baked.

Turner: No, it’s marketing genius. Nobody reads what it says on posters, we don’t need reviews, we don’t even need trailers—it’s, like, all there in the title. Snakes…On A Plane, man!

Ellis: Wow. It’s almost Zen-like in its minimalism. So outline the plot for me.

Turner: You’re still not getting it. I just did! It’s snakes…on a plane. Obviously I’ll get a few of my friends to help pad it out to an hour and a half, but it’ll practically write itself.

Ellis: OK, sounds good, get me a draft. Anything else?

Turner: Sure, and you’re going to love this. One word: sequels.

Ellis: Oh, yeah, I’m liking that.

Turner: There’s no telling where this baby could go. Snakes On A Boat. Snakes On A Train. Snakes On A Bus. Snakes In A Restaurant. Snakes In A Goddamn Movie Theater, and we drop rubber snakes on the audience half way through! It’s fuckin’ genius, man!

Ellis: Oh, yeah. I think I just creamed my pants. I’m taking this to New Line, Emmerich will green light this faster than Terry Gilliam can blow a budget. Let’s do lunch next week.

Let’s predict a few key bits of plot:

.

• Snake emerges from aircraft lavatory.
• Oxygen masks drop down, only some of them are snakes.
• Constrictor gets into lifejacket, is worn around neck.

My Netflix queue contains over a hundred items. As a result, it’s often the case that by the time a movie appears in my mailbox, I’ve completely forgotten why I wanted to watch it in the first place, or even what it’s about.

This was definitely the case for Timeline. I can’t think why I would have put it in the queue; I’m not a big fan of anything mediaeval, I’m not wild about director Richard Donner’s previous movies, and Michael Crichton has written some pretty cheesy SF.

I certainly didn’t pick it based on reviews. The movie got a complete critical savaging; you’d think it was Battlefield Earth 2 from some of the comments:

“No film in recent memory has cried out this much to be mocked.”

“Timeline may not be the dumbest movie to be released this year. But it’s certainly not for lack of trying.”

I find it interesting that there’s a massive disparity between the critics’ reviews, and the average rating given to the movie by ordinary people. I think the critics are way out of line on this one. If you want to see a really excruciatingly bad SF movie, one that’s so wildly implausible it makes Timeline look like an episode of Scientific American Frontiers, consider The Core. That stinking piece of cinematic excrement got way better reviews from the pro critics than Timeline, which tells me that there’s something seriously wrong with the critics’ sense of judgement.

[Spoilers follow, if a movie as badly reviewed as this can be spoiled.]

There’s one criticism that leaps out as wildly inappropriate:

“It looks like cheesy ’60s television, with paper-thin characters and crummy special effects that wouldn’t even have made it in the last season of Star Trek.”

—Stephen Whitty, NEWARK STAR-LEDGER

Since I’ve had the benefit of watching the documentary extras on the DVD, I can reveal that there really weren’t any special effects in the movie. They got the special effect of medieval trebuchets launching projectiles by actually building a bunch of full-size trebuchets and having them launch flaming projectiles. They got that unconvincing effect of a castle blowing up by actually building a full-size castle and blowing it up. The people fighting in a burning smoke-filled courtyard? Well, they set the courtyard on fire, then had a bunch of people fight. The metal swords? Yes, they were made of aluminium, but they were still actual metal swords. And so on.

Make no mistake, there are a lot of grounds for criticizing this movie; but physical verisimilitude isn’t one of them. Still, let’s get a few of the valid criticisms out of the way.

First the plot. It’s easy to say that the foreshadowing is heavy-handed and the outcome predictable, so let’s put some numbers to it: I worked out the major plot twist and knew the basic outline of what was going to happen 12 minutes into the movie. (I jotted a note of the time.) Really, as far as the story goes there’s nothing you haven’t seen in dozens of episodes of Star Trek—right down to the two red-shirted security officers who get killed almost immediately, and the anachronistic object found on an archeological dig. (At least this time it’s not someone’s head.)

Then there’s the medicine. My history teacher (yes, the one who’s now in jail) always used to say that if you did travel back in time, the first thing you’d notice would be the stench. Yet somehow, disease is never a factor in this story—the peasants all look clean and healthy, and today’s bacteria and viruses, with their 600 years of evolutionary head start, fail to impact the people of the past in any way.

Then there’s the language issue. The heroes take back a French guy to help them talk to the locals. The trouble is, we’re heading to the 1300s, when English looked like this:

Love is a gretter lawe, by my pan,
Than may be yeve of any erthely man.
And therfore positif lawe and swich decree
Is broken al day for love in ech degree.
A man moot nedes love, maugree his heed,
He may nat fleen it, thogh he sholde be deed,
Al be she mayde, or wydwe, or elles wyf.
And eek it is nat likly, al thy lyf,
To stonden in hir grace, namoore shal I,
For wel thou woost thyselven, verraily,
That thou and I be dampned to prisoun
Perpetuelly, us gayneth no raunsoun.

I’ll let you extrapolate to French. Maybe you can piece together what most of the above is saying—but speak it? With passably correct pronounciation, good enough to fool knights on the lookout for foreign spies? I don’t think so. Yet nobody in this movie, whether English, French, Scottish or (god help us) American, has any significant trouble understanding anyone else’s accent or vocabulary. Which is a pity, because the situation could have been so much more tense and menacing if they had. I mean, why use authentic medieval costumes of sackcloth and leather, and get genuine heraldry from England, if you’re going to have medieval French people speak modern English with a modern French accent?

Finally, there’s the essential countdown to doom caused by technological limitation. You’ve seen it in countless Bond movies (and movies based on Michael Crichton stories), but let’s overlook the cliché. Instead, let’s think about the fact that a team of half a dozen engineers somehow manage to rebuild a destroyed multi-million dollar computer-controlled time machine, one which it took years of research to construct. And they do it in under 5 hours. In reality, they’d still be installing Windows XP Service Packs by the time everyone got permanently stranded in the past.

Then there’s the acting. Yes, some of it is pretty bad, but what do you expect? It’s a Hollywood action movie. Trying to believe that Paul Walker is Billy Connolly’s son is like trying to believe that Keanu Reeves is the spawn of Sean Connery, but we can probably write off that lousy piece of casting as a market-driven attempt to appeal to the teen and early 20s audience who liked 2 Fast 2 Furious.

More troubling is the complete inability of the cast to make us believe they have a convincing enough motivation to step into an experimental time machine and go through a wormhole in space that they’ve been warned will rip them into electrons so that for a moment they won’t even exist. In the documentary, Richard Donner mentions that in Crichton’s book the technological detail and the characters arguing over what to do ran to around 100 pages, but that they managed to condense it down to 5 pages of movie script. Well, yes, I guess technically all the essential plot points were left intact, but…

Enough negativity! Because if you can somehow look past all that, it’s really not that bad a movie. The medieval detail is well done, and there’s something about real buildings and tunnels and mud and thatch, something about real explosions and smoke, that computer graphics still can’t duplicate. The pacing is evenly fast, so you don’t get bored, and there are some satisfying moments.

So in summary: it’s some painstaking attention to detail that really belonged in a better movie. Sadly, it was stuck into this overgrown B-movie instead. It’s an enjoyable but mindless couple of hours, basically a mid-point between The Messenger and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. And I promise you, it’s better than The Core.

Star Wars barf bags. Official ones. Frankly, they should have handed them out in theaters before Episode I.

Some time ago I read about someone who gets lots of review copies of books set to her for free, because she writes good reviews of them on Amazon.com. I thought at the time that that was pretty cool. It made me wonder just how much I’d have to review to get free stuff, and whether my reviews would all have to be breathless Joel-Siegel-style enthusiasm.

I got my answer. Amazon and Disney sent me an advance copy of the new remastered DVD release of Bambi to review. Yes, Bambi. I can only assume they didn’t pick me based on what I’ve reviewed in the past. Either that, or they noticed I’d been browsing for books and movies about skunks, which would be worryingly efficient of them.

Anyhow, I watched the movie and reviewed it. Hey, why not? Ignoring the plot, the animation is beautiful, and I’m a sucker for anything with a cute animated skunk in it.

So when my RSS aggregator picked up on a review on filmcritic.com, I decided to take a look, just to see if my conclusions were the same as other reviewers. Let’s just say that the guy who wrote that review clearly hasn’t watched the movie since he allegedly saw it as a kid; not even the first five minutes. How can I tell? Well, Bambi is male. He’s referred to repeatedly as the new young Prince of the Forest right at the start of the movie. Bit of a giveaway, that.

I know it’s crazy, but I kinda feel that movie reviewers ought to watch at least part of the movie. I can understand book reviewers not finding time to read the entire book in every case, but come on, how much effort is it to watch “Bambi”?

Meanwhile, I could get to like this Amazon reviews thing. Maybe next time they can send me something from the other end of the tastefulness scale. There’s a new unrated edition of Orgazmo about to be released…

We finally got to watching A.i.: Artificial Intelligence. We’re probably the last people alive who haven’t seen it, so I trust you will allow me the indulgence of a few spoilers in the course of my criticism.

Let’s start with the big issue: the movie has the most egregious deus ex machina ending I have seen in years of movie-watching. It’s so hideous that it could be used as the canonical example when educating future generations of movie makers in what not to do. Apparently the ending was part of the Kubrick script for the movie, but Spielberg gave it that final saccharine twist. I’d like to think that Kubrick would have seen sense and removed the whole thing, like he did the original pie fight ending to Dr Strangelove.

A.i. is supposedly some kind of tribute or homage to Kubrick…but of course, the problem is it’s hard to pick two directors whose styles are as dissimilar as Kubrick and Spielberg, unless you start talking about (say) Errol Morris and John Waters.

Visually, there’s really nothing Kubrick to see. The fight with the bike gangs is a frenetic MTV cut-up, rather than a sequence of smooth menacing tracking shots. Even when David finds rows of boxed Davids, and Spielberg finally tries to use a Kubrick-style tracking shot for effect, he keeps the camera too high and the result is merely tedious. In fact, it brought to mind the groundbreaking camera work of Ed Wood, as lovingly recreated by Tim Burton.

Perhaps the worst thing, though, is that Spielberg just can’t seem to avoid the temptation to try and make every single story into a kid-friendly movie. Thus a male robot prostitute suddenly takes David to visit the cartoon head of Albert Einstein, voiced by Robin Williams, which we’re told is conveniently situated in the middle of the biggest red light district on earth. No, that’s not the noise of Stanley Kubrick spinning in his grave, it’s just the whirling pulleys as my suspended disbelief comes crashing to the ground.

In the original script, the mother’s an alcoholic, and the robot kid inadvertently feeds her problem when he keeps making her Bloody Marys just the way she likes them, in a futile attempt to get her to love him. Yeah, that would have worked. What doesn’t work is making mom a nice mug of coffee. Not even if you whirl the coffee containers around in an inexplicable fashion in the middle of the shot. But problem drinking is an Adult Situation, so we can’t have that in a Spielberg movie.

Yes, it’s a fairy tale, but I’m old enough to remember that fairy tales used to have wicked witches and evil monsters in. C’mon, Mr Spielberg, I know you can do better.

We just found the time to watch Battlefield Earth. As I mentioned a while back, this movie is allegedly worse than Xanadu, which I had rated as the absolute worst movie I’ve ever watched. So, how does Battlefield Earth compare? Well…

The first thing to note about the movie is that the entire thing is shot in tilt-o-vision. Every single scene has the camera at an odd angle. Not just slightly, either—we’re talking 30 or even 45 degrees. The only rational explanation I can come up with is that they were unable to find enough people willing to work on a Scientology-backed movie, and ended up employing a cameraman with one leg.

If you think about the process of moviemaking, you’ll realize that there’s a major problem with shooting at odd angles: it makes it really difficult to edit the material seamlessly. As a result, what you get in Battlefield Earth is a funhouse maze of cuts. One moment John Travolta is sloping to the left; we cut for a reaction shot, and when we cut back he’s sloping to the right.

Once you get into a fight scene, of course, you’re continually trying to work out what the hell is going on—are they going to leap on the enemy from above, or are they hiding at ground level? Can the guards see them or is that piece of machinery in the corner of one of the shots supposed to be hiding them? Just working out the geometry of what’s supposed to be happening is taxing. Perhaps that’s just as well, because it’s the only mental stimulation you’re likely to get.

Sometimes the effect of the sloping is just comical—like in the opening scene, where it seems as if the primitive humans are so regressed that when they put up a tent on a hillside, they drive the poles in perpendicular to the ground; or later on, when John Travolta bangs his head on a piece of scenery getting up, but it looks as if he slid down into it.

The fascinating thing is that at some point, someone must have sat and watched the early rushes and thought “Hey, this is great, yeah, let’s do the entire movie like this.” They spent enough money to make the special effects look good, but somehow couldn’t find the cash for a tripod.

Another thing that apparently seemed like a good idea, is that every time something exciting happens the movie goes into slow motion. Gunshots, explosions, individual punches in a fistfight, people jumping off stuff—all slowed down. It’s like watching the movie with an eight year old kid playing with the remote control. Yes, I found slow motion fascinating, back in 1980 or so.

The acting? Oh, the acting is competent enough. I mean, this is sci-fi, so you can overlook the Shakespearean scenery-chewing whenever an old human guy talks about Our Great Heritage. Everyone even manages to act with bits of string dangling from their noses, because that’s what someone in props decided the breathing masks ought to look like.

Anyone can make a crappy movie by putting crappy actors in it. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Start with an award-winning screenplay; hire Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves and Ethan Hawke; drop them into the mix, and watch them work their magic. What impresses about Battlefield Earth is that they’ve made a film where everything else is awful, but the acting’s not bad.

Let’s talk plot.

Again, this is sci-fi, so we’re not expecting perfection, but a little attention to plausibility would have been appreciated. OK, so mankind was enslaved by an alien race who wiped out all our defenses in just seven minutes, it’s now the year 3000, and the remaining men and women live as scattered nomadic tribes in a post-apocalyptic wilderness. I can buy that. What I can’t buy is an alien race advanced enough to have teleportation technology, who still communicate by carving their messages into cast metal plates.

These aliens are smart enough to travel across intergalactic space—but dumb enough to give a spaceship to a bunch of humans who have already tried to escape several times, set them down in the middle of nowhere, and leave them alone for two weeks to mine gold. They have advanced surveying sensors which can locate gold seams in the unpromising geology of North America, and they know all about our history, but somehow they missed the fact that Fort Knox was sitting there filled with gold the whole time—oh, and the dying human guards conveniently left all the safe doors open too.

The humans find a military flight simulator that’s still in perfect working order after a thousand years, and the electricity’s still on too. Yeah, right. The non-literate humans use the flight simulator to learn how to fly a Harrier jump jet in combat conditions, in only seven days. Mmm-hmm. And then they find an entire fleet of armed and working Harrier jets, also totally undamaged by an alien invasion followed by a thousand years of neglect.

A giant glass habitation dome has a bomb detonated on its framework. Every single pane of glass shatters, yet somehow all the shards stay in place. Then a hero flies a hoverplane into it, and the entire thing explodes. Ohh-kay.

I’m not trying to be picky, I just really see a few minor implausibilities. Well, let’s be honest, huge gaping plot holes. It is, as more charitable reviewers have said, “a little unbelievable“, like a 50s sci-fi B-movie is a little unbelievable. Unfortunately, L.Ron wrote the book in the 1980s, and it’s a safe bet that Travolta did his best to make sure the great man’s masterpiece was translated to the movie screen with plot intact.

But all that aside… Is it worse than Xanadu? Well, yes and no. Xanadu has plenty of moments where I found myself cringeing with embarassment for everyone on the screen. However, Battlefield Earth impresses with its constant level of awfulness. It avoids being bad in all the easy ways, yet sustains a steady wretchedness for almost two hours. It’s an amazing achievement, and I wish the MST3K team were still around to give it the review it really deserves.