KyleJelle.com

Are you tired of movies that have nothing going for them but big robots, bigger explosions and occasionally Megan Fox?  Have you had enough of swoopy starships that can escape from black holes, but never from plot holes?  John Scalzi says:

The answer to that is actually the solution, which is that if you want studios to make those sorts of movies, go out of your way to see them in the theater, rather than just waiting until they wash up on Starz or HBO. It’s not that humans are getting stupider, it’s that people interested in entertainment that doesn’t EXPLODE aren’t going into theaters. So, you know. Go.

So I went.  This afternoon I saw Moon.  Phenomenal movie.  Directed by Duncan Jones, and starring Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, the movie’s main, and very nearly only character, Moon hearkens back to the more realistic SF style exemplified by Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, except where Kubrick created a movie grand in sweep, and distant in its view of humans, Moon turns the formula upside down to focus on character, and shows us a man who gets to spend far too much time isolated on the far side of the Moon, getting to know himself.

And he is in quite a predicament, the nature of which will not be revealed here.  Rockwell gives a terrific performance.  He has a gift for simply being sympathetic, even when the characters he plays should be annoying – like Guy Fleegman, the whiny second string cast member from Galaxy Quest - or could be outright repulsive - like Zaphod Beeblebrox, quite possibly the most egotistical character in all of fiction, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  This time he’s just playing an ordinary guy with the worst job on or off Earth, stuck a situation that’s hellish enough before the accident that sets off the events of the movie.  Once Sam begins to understand the true nature of his situation, he goes through the emotional reactions you’d expect, but without the overwrought melodrama that so often characterizes these things in the movies.  This is helped along by a clever script by Nathan Parker that doesn’t waste time belaboring the obvious, and leaves things that can go without saying unsaid.

The only major character in the movie other than Sam is GERTY, the HAL-like robot that functions as Sam’s assistant and caretaker, voiced by Kevin Spacey.  Here again, the usual clichés are deftly avoided.  The company Sam and GERTY work for may be as soulless as Weyland-Yutani, but GERTY’s motivations are far more complex than than those of Ash, the Weyland-Yutani robot that served the crew of the Nostromo to the xenomorph in Alien, another of this movie’s antecedents.

Sigh.  I hate to bring this up - I know Jones must want to be known more for his own work than for his family - but there’s no getting around it.  The movie may be vastly different in detail, but the feel of it - simultaneously bleak and optimistic, lonely and isolated and enraptured - captures perfectly the emotional range of his father’s first big hit:

For here
Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet earth is blue
And theres nothing I can do

Though Im past one hundred thousand miles
Im feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Tell me wife I love her very much she knows

I know better than this.

War of the Worlds. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I, Robot. Starship Troopers. The Puppetmasters. Watchers. Watchers II. Watchers III. 2010. Dune.

So many great books. So many bad movies. They’ve adapted Dean Koontz’s Watchers three times and still couldn’t produce anything worth… um… watching.

I know better than to get excited over the prospect of a great novel being adapted into a movie.

And yet, as an old-school acolyte of the Shrike cult, this just gives me the shivers in a good way:

Producer Graham King has set up Dan Simmons’ award-winning science fiction book series Hyperion Cantos at Warner Brothers, with Trevor Sands on board to adapt the first two books as one feature, according to The Hollywood Reporter. King is producing via his GK Films banner.

The first book, Hyperion, won the Hugo Award for best novel in 1990, while the second, The Fall of Hyperion, was nominated for a Nebula Award for best novel.

Hyperion deals with a space war, with most of the action taking place on a planet named Hyperion, known not only for its electricity-spewing trees but also for the Time Tombs, large artifacts that can move through time. The tombs are guarded by a monster called the Shrike, which impales people on metal trees.

King acquired the rights to the series several years ago, but its structure–inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales–and its multiple timelines made the task of adapting it into a feature unwieldy and challenging.

I hope that they understand that they really—really—don’t want to piss off the Shrike.

Don’t worry about a thing. Every little thing gonna be all right.

Those words, from Bob Marley’s 1977 classic, Three Little Birds, echo through I Am Legend as a perfect counterpoint to the action on the screen. Robert Neville, as portrayed by Will Smith, should worry. Very little will ever be all right again. Not when he lives in a world where a genetically-engineered virus, designed to cure cancer, has mutated into the most deadly plague in history, killing off over six billion people. Not when only one percent of humankind possesses a natural immunity to the disease. Not when those survivors are massively outnumbered by the half-billion infected who have reverted to a savage, feral state and kill normals on sight.

Neville is the last normal in New York City. He thinks he may be the last normal on Earth. As a military virologist, he may be the only person left with the skills to cure the disease, if only he can keep his sanity about him. I don’t think it’s giving away much of a spoiler to say that it won’t be easy.

This is where I Am Legend deviates from most apocalyptic zombie-motif movies. It doesn’t bring the violence of 28 Days Later, or the gut-wrenching gore of the Dawn of the Dead remake—or Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead for that matter. Instead it relies more on the psychological story of a man against himself, fitting more comfortably into the same catagory of endurance movies as Cast Away, or Touching the Void. Except with zombies.

Okay, technically not zombies—as in 28 Days Later, the infected aren’t dead, just sick—but they behave like zombies, and thus fit the zombie archetype, so I’m calling them zombies. The only characteristics they share with the vampires in Richard Matheson’s classic novel is their vulnerability to light, which blinds them due to eye dilation being a symptom of the disease, and in the form of UV light, provokes severe burning of their skin.

That keeps them indoors, and out of the way, for most of the movie, giving us a chance to get to know Neville in his quieter moments—hunting dear from a Ford Mustang in lower Manhattan, knocking golf balls off the wing of a Lockheed A-12 sitting on the deck of the U.S.S. Intrepid, fishing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He’s got one friend he can talk to, and that’s Sam, his German Shepherd, and his only anchor to the world. It’s a stunningly good portrayal by Smith, by turns humorous, then deeply moving, then horrifying, when the monsters finally do come out.

And don’t worry. They do. That part’s inevitable.

I’m a frequent critic of novel-based movies that deviate from their source material, but only because the results of that deviation are usually markedly inferior to the source material. I Am Legend the movie barely uses anything more than the name of the main character, and a rough similarity in concept, from Matheson’s novel, but it turns out to be that rare thing, an adaptation that is as good as its original despite the deviations. The only things really wrong with the movie were some sub-par CGI used to depict the monsters—what sold the creatures was not their slightly video-gamish complexions, but the fluid and inhuman way they moved—and Neville’s penchant for taking long, hard falls onto concrete without taking much damage from the impact, but then Will Smith is an action star, so I suppose we have to expect things like that.

Um…

300 Leads Saturn Nominations

Zack Snyder’s 300 led the field of nominees announced Feb. 20 for the 34th annual Saturn Awards, with 10 nominations by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix followed with nine nominations, and Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street got eight nods.

In television, ABC’s Lost dominated, with seven nominations. Showtime’s Dexter received five nods, and NBC’s Heroes scored four.

I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade here—and congratulations to all the nominees, really—but can someone please explain to me why a historical drama, even one based on a comic book, is leading the nominations for science fiction, fantasy and horror awards?

Patton Oswalt on Star Wars:

I agree with every word of it. Every word.

Don’t hold back, Harlan. Tell us what you really think:

Taken from Harlan Ellison’s online community, reproduced in its unedited entirety below:

HARLAN ELLISON ON THE WRITERS STRIKE SETTLEMENT

YOU HAVE MY PERMISSION TO RE-POST THIS ANYWHERE:

Creds: got here in 1962, written for just about everybody, won the Writers Guild Award four times for solo work, sat on the WGAw Board twice, worked on negotiating committees, and was out on the picket lines with my NICK COUNTER SLEEPS WITH THE FISHE$$$ sign. You may have heard my name. I am a Union guy, I am a Guild guy, I am loyal. I fuckin’ LOVE the Guild.

And I voted NO on accepting this deal.

My reasons are good, and they are plentiful; Patric Verrone will be saddened by what I am about to say; long-time friends will shake their heads; but this I say without equivocation…

THEY BEAT US LIKE A YELLOW DOG. IT IS A SHIT DEAL. We finally got a timorous generation that has never had to strike, to get their asses out there, and we had to put up with the usual cowardly spineless babbling horse’s asses who kept mumbling “lessgo bac’ta work” over and over, as if it would make them one iota a better writer. But after months on the line, and them finally bouncing that pus-sucking dipthong Nick Counter, we rushed headlong into a shabby, scabrous, underfed shovelfulla shit clutched to the affections of toss-in-the-towel summer soldiers trembling before the Awe of the Alliance.

My Guild did what it did in 1988. It trembled and sold us out. It gave away the EXACT co-terminus expiration date with SAG for some bullshit short-line substitute; it got us no more control of our words; it sneak-abandoned the animator and reality beanfield hands before anyone even forced it on them; it made nice so no one would think we were meanies; it let the Alliance play us like the village idiot. The WGAw folded like a Texaco Road Map from back in the day.

And I am ashamed of this Guild, as I was when Shavelson was the prexy, and we wasted our efforts and lost out on technology that we had to strike for THIS time. 17 days of streaming tv!!!????? Geezus, you bleating wimps, why not just turn over your old granny for gang-rape?

You deserve all the opprobrium you get. While this nutty festschrift of demented pleasure at being allowed to go back to work in the rice paddy is filling your cowardly hearts with joy and relief that the grips and the staff at the Ivy and street sweepers won’t be saying nasty shit behind your back, remember this:

You are their bitches. They outslugged you, outthought you, outmaneuvered you; and in the end you ripped off your pants, painted yer asses blue, and said yes sir, may I have another.

Please excuse my temerity. I’m just a sad old man who has fallen among Quislings, Turncoats, Hacks and Cowards.

I must go now to whoops. My gorge has become buoyant.

Respectfully, Yr. Pal, Harlan Ellison

The movie we’re all waiting for:

Did I just see a car chase through the warehouse from the end of Raiders?

While composing the previous post, I stumbled upon this:

Downright poetic, it is.  I will never forgive Emmerich and Devlin for that piece of crap.

Cloverfield is a clever movie. Let’s start with the premise: a daikaiju hits New York, but instead of seeing it from the point of view of characters trying to stop it or at least control the chaos it creates, we see it simply from the point of view of the people caught up in the destruction. This is a brilliant concept. It’s kind of mind-boggling that in the 75 years since King Kong, or even the 54 years since Godzilla, no one else has done this. This is a complete subversion of the giant monster genre, and for that I salute Matt Reeves, Drew Goddard and J.J. Abrams.

It’s fun to watch, too. Many reviews have complained about echoes of 9/11 being somehow disrespectful of the real thing, but all I saw was an attempt at verisimilitude. We all have vivid memories of 9/11, even if we only watched it on TV, and if a giant monster knocks down a skyscraper and it doesn’t produce a billowing, all consuming cloud of debris like the real thing, that’s going to look fake. One wonders what these critics have in mind as an alternative. They’re probably still mourning the death of the death of irony. They probably need to get over themselves.

That’s not to say it’s a flawless movie. It doesn’t suffer much from this because the film makers wisely kept the monster off screen most of the time, but they came up with a monster that looks kind of boring. The movie isn’t a tease—they do show the monster clearly at times—it’s just a kind of disappointing monster. Its fleas are a genuine delight—and isn’t that a lovely idea, giant monsters with parasites—but they’re not quite enough to make the monster itself satisfying.

And then there are those characters. Let’s talk about female characters traipsing through a monster-plagued disaster area in party dresses instead of using any of a number of opportunities to find more practical clothing. Let’s talk about characters racing into the most hobbesian survival environment they’ve ever faced without so much as picking up a stick to carry as a weapon. Let’s talk about characters tending to a wounded friend in a workplace break room with bottled water and paper towels instead of looking for the first aid kit that is required to be there for real medical supplies. Let’s talk about the guy who’s too dumb to stop filming while he’s running for his life. People keep complaining about how shallow these people are, but their real offense is stupidity.

I’m not actually sure they’re as shallow as they look. I do have serious conversations with my friends and family, but all we ever videotape are vacations and birthday parties, environments that aren’t exactly conducive to deep thought. We don’t really know who these characters are, or how deep they go, with the possible exception of Hud, the camera guy, who, over the course of the movie, reveals himself to be a blithering idiot through and through.

This brings us to the heart of the movie’s flaws, which is the cheesy home video concept. This seemed like a clever idea back when The Blair Witch Project came out, at least until I saw the movie and realized what a dog it was, but it just doesn’t work. All the artifice of traditional film making—all the close ups, panning shots, cut aways, angle shifts, montages, flashbacks—Hey J.J. Abrams, you do know what a flashback is, right?—these things exist for a reason, and that is to help tell an effective story. This cinéma vérité crap deprives film makers of critical tools, and gives them what, exactly, in return? A more conventional version of Cloverfield might have avoided the worst of this one’s failings without even trying.

This is a fun movie, and worth seeing, but Star Trek had better be better than this.

Okay okay, having seen what cancer and cancer treatment did to my mother, I wouldn’t call the depiction of the disease in The Bucket List remotely realistic. If you’re looking for depressing depictions of actual suffering and misery, look elsewhere, because this is a comedy. It’s about bonding. It’s about hope and redemption. It’s about missed chances and lost opportunities, and living life instead of just waiting for it. Don’t expect anything deep, but do expect simple, honest truths that are all too often forgotten in the daily rush.

Do expect a movie that uses the strengths of Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. Nobody’s playing against type here, but both bring genuine warmth to their roles. The movie’s tight and well-paced. The movie’s structure, based around the list of things the main characters, Carter Chambers and Edward Cole, want to do before they die, works exceptionally well, and is the one true standout of the film. Some of the items on that list are fulfilled they way you’ll expect them to be, others in surprising ways.

It’s easy to criticize a move for not being great cinema, and The Bucket List, if you look too closely at the nuts and bolts, doesn’t really pass for great cinema. But it doesn’t need to. It’s a warm and uplifting movie that made me laugh, cry and walk away feeling good.

It also has one truly outstanding piece of advice: You’re never too old to make a complete fool of yourself. I’ve only had once chance to apply it, but so far, I’m very happy with the results.

Okay, this one’s for real:

Go to Moviefone for a larger version.

Update: And here’s what it comes from:

Get the inside scoop on Star Trek at TrekRumors.com:

On-Screen Endorsement Deals Rumored for Star Trek XI

A studio document obtained by our sources shows that the following brands have paid for on-screen placement in Star Trek:

• General Motors (Specifically Chevrolet)
• Red Bull
• Samsung
• LG
• Motorola (for the communicators?)
• Swanson’s Frozen Dinners
• Culligan Water
• Bose Home Audio

While this may look like an invasive amount of endorsement, the memo we’ve obtained discusses making the placement in the feature as seamless as possible as to not detract from the audience experience. While fans may protest sight unseen, it’s obvious why such things have to take place. Star Trek XI’s budget, when combined with fiscal concerns on Paramount’s part, means that the studio needs to take every chance it can to get outside financing.

Yep. I believe every word of it.

The 305:

From the opening sequence, to the inevitable “Come with me if you want to live,” Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles gets the tone and pacing exactly right, which puts it light years beyond Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

I doubt if Lena Headey and Thomas Dekker are going to make anyone forget Linda Hamilton and Edward Furlong—you know, the way Sarah Michelle Gellar ’s Buffy eclipsed Kristy Swanson’s Buffy—but I don’t think Nick Stahl’s John Connor is going to be missed at all, and it works surprising well without the Governator. (This should not be taken as any personal criticism of Nick Stahl, who was good in In the Bedroom and Sin City, he was just miscast in T3.)

The story begins two years after the events in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Sarah and John are on the run, not just from the usual robot assassins, but also from the law. Sarah in particular comes off as a kindred spirit to Kate from Lost, a tightly-wound mixture of paranoia, fear of commitment, and resourcefulness, but what sets her apart is the one thing she remains fiercely committed to—her son John. He is, after all, what the story has been about from the beginning. John is a little bit older and wiser than he appeared in T2, but he is recognizably the same character, and it’s again possible to believe this guy will grow into the hard-edged military leader described in the first two movies. It should be as much fun to watch that transformation as it was to watch Octavian grow into Augustus on Rome.

Then there are the terminators themselves. The producers made a wise decision to stick with the classic “hyperalloy combat chassis” style terminators rather than the “mimetic polyalloy” T-1000 type. This is not only consistent with the T-1000’s status as an advanced prototype, but it’s also a good idea to hold something like that in reserve as a special threat for sweeps week. That, and I’m just sick of obviously digital special effects.

But, of course, the most special terminator of them all is Cameron. That whole name-as-homage-to-franchise-creator thing is a bit heavy-handed, but I’ll let it slide. Summer Glau captures the physicality of a terminator in a very different package well. In a way it’s a waste of Glau’s natural dancer’s talents—so exquisitely displayed in Serenity—for her to adopt the “Hulk Smash!” fighting style of the terminators, but she’s lethal either way, and always a pleasure to watch. I suspect it would be quite amusing to see the future John Connor’s decision making process. “Let’s see, I’ll send Reese back to protect Sarah, I’ll send this big guy back to protect me as a kid, and let’s see, what will I send back to protect me as a lonely teenager?”

Ultimately, the plot is what sells it. It begins as a plausible continuation of the story from T2, packs in plenty of cinematic action and suspense, and ends with a solution to the can’t-bring-machines-back-through-time problem that’s just too clever for me to spoil.

It’s too early to call the show a complete success—it could go downhill fast if the writing doesn’t hold up—but after seeing so many great franchises ruined by awful prequels, sequels and remakes, this was a refreshing change.

You’ll want to see this movie again and again:

The first thing you see in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is blood. Blood dripping down a window, across the floor, squeezed through gears, dripping down into the sewer. There’s so much blood, I couldn’t help thinking that the filmmakers were overselling it a bit. No way could this movie have enough blood in it to live up to such a gory title sequence.

I was, of course, wrong. The blood budget for this movie must have been astronomical. I haven’t seen this much blood in a film since the gusher of blood death scene in Johnny Depp’s first movie. Don’t worry if you have a weak constitution, though. Like everything else in the movie, from the gray pallor of the main characters to the way people break out into song and dance, it’s highly stylized and shouldn’t give you nightmares unless you have a pathelogical fear of musicals.

I used to have such a phobia. It wasn’t broken until I saw Moulin Rouge!—prior to that the only one I tolerated was Rocky Horror—and I still don’t particularly like most musicals, but this one’s an exception, and it’s partly because of lyrics like these:

There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit
and the vermin of the world inhabit it
and its morals aren’t worth what a pin can spit
and it goes by the name of London.

That tells you where you are.

This cast of actors, not generally known for their singing skills, does an excellent job with the music. Especially Depp. Chalk up another point for his versatility. is there anything this guy can’t do? Helena Bonham-Carter turns out to be good, too, as is the otherwise unknown Jamie Campbell Bower. Jayne Wisener’s voice is a bit too high pitched for my ears, but she’s lovely to look at, er, gander:

Judge Turpin: Oh yes… such practices. The Geisha’s of Japan, the concubines of Siam, the catamites of Greece, the harlots of India. I have them all here, drawings of them. Everything you’ve ever dreamed of doing with a woman. Would you like to see?
Anthony Hope: I think there’s been some mistake.
Judge Turpin: I think not. You gandered at my ward, Johanna. You gandered at her. YES, sir, you gandered!
Anthony Hope: I meant no harm.
Judge Turpin: Your meaning is immaterial. Mark me! If I see your face again on this street, you’ll rue the day you were born.

Everything else works beautifully. Sacha Baron Cohen is a bit more low-key than I expected, but that’s okay, it’s not supposed to be Borat. Nobody does sinister like Alan Rickman. Timothy Spall is absolutely disgusting, as he should to be. The only thing that really stretched my credulity was Todd’s resistance to the entreaties of Ms. Bonham Carter, on whom I have had a crush since Fight Club, but that’s a personal idiosyncrasy and needn’t interfere with anyone else’s enjoyment of the movie.

The Dark Knight cometh:

Okay, here’s the real one: