Isaac Asimov's Nightfall

Movie: Isaac Asimov's Nightfall (2000)
Watched with: Angelo

In between smoking joints with Thoreau or whatever, Ralph Waldo Emerson once mused, "If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!"
Thoreau was too busy starring at some ants or something to really listen, but a century later, Isaac Asimov wrote a short story based on that premise, about a civilization with a bunch of suns that goes crazy when they experience a millennial nightfall.
This was then expanded into a Roger Corman-produced TV movie in 2000 (apparently the third film adaption of the story, though all the internet will tell me about the other versions is that they suck). For added hilarity, Kung-Fu's David Carradine stars.

The problem with this whole business is that basically that Emerson quote sums up the entire thing. Once upon a time it wasn't night for a long time and then it was and everyone went crazy. Curtain.
They drag that out to an hour and a half by having Carradine lead "the university" in conflict with a powerful religious group, while his daughter and a monk from the group go off to the desert for archaeological purposes and promptly bone. But it's just not enough material to fill out even the meager running time.

Two weird little things:

--It's shot on some kind of strange film stock that makes it look like it was made in like 1975. Before looking at the box, we established the general era of its production based on the hairstyles (Jennifer Aniston hair seeming to have reached a galaxy far far away), but it was odd.

--This movie continues the annoying movie tradition of having non-white (Indian and misc. Asian, for the most part) extras while having almost all of the important roles go to whiteys. The main antagonist appears to be Indian, and I guess David Carradine's a quarter Chinese or something, but all around, it comes off as vaguely prejudicial and just dopey.

Lathe of Heaven

Movie: Lathe of Heaven (2002)
Watched with: Jessy

This movie isn't going to make anyone's top 10 list, but it was really great for a B scifi movie.

It was well-scripted (I don't know how much of that's due to the source novel, but another Ursula Le Guin book was made into the abysmal Earthsea (2004), so the Lathe people did something right), well acted (James Caan gets top-billing and does an amiable job, but the lead kid's good too), and it looks really neat.

For the exterior locations, I think they pretty much did the Gattaca thing, where you portray the future by selectively filming buildings with unusual architecture (like you often see on college campuses) (though Lathe also throughs in some arbitrary Asian stuff for a kind of Blade Runner cyberpunk feel). It didn't look terribly expensive, but it was interesting and relatively believable.
Then for the costumes, they basically realized they had no hope of plausibly depicting future fashion, so they evoked stereotypical future costumes, but in a more stylized way. If you can imagine clothes from The Jetsons not looking (too) ridiculous, it's kind of like that.
It didn't make logical sense, but it was very effective and cool.
Furthuer complimenting the visual look, but of the protagonists were pretty, which is kind of a dumb thing to approve of in a movie, but it usually doesn't hurt.

The story, about a boy whose dreams can alter reality, the girl he loved and dreamed away, and the therapist who takes advantage of him, was slightly dopey but thoroughly interesting and well-told.

Check it out if you get a chance.

The Shining

Movie: The Shining (1980)
Watched with: Angelo

I'd never seen this all the way through before, but I knew most of what was going to happen from that one Simpsons episode. Oh well.

In a lot of ways, The Shining reminded me of 2001. They're both about a group of three (the family in this one, the two astronauts and HAL in 2001) in a large confined space, one of whom then becomes homicidal.
When Dave is about to deactivate HAL, HAL says, "Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over."
When Jack is chasing Wendy up the stairs, she says, "I just want to go back to my room to think things over," and he replies, "You've had your whole fucking life to think things over, what good's a few minutes more gonna do you now?"
That almost has to be a deliberate reference. It's funny how it's inverted, with the protagonist now wanting to go "think things over" and the antagonist now suggesting otherwise. But if that means anything, I'm not sure what (that Wendy is too submissive to be a hero?).

I really liked the style of the movie. Kubrick's really great at building atmosphere, and there were times when I think the eeriness was more effective than in 2001, simply because the settings are less innately alien (no pun intended).

Where Kubrick is less successful is, as always, the characters.
It seems like the story would be a lot more effective if we could understand and sympathize with Jack, making his descent into madness more disturbing, whereas here he just seemed like a jerk who got jerkier.

I really liked the ballroom scene--I'm fascinated by the idea of people being trapped repeating things that happened in the past--and I kind of felt like it was the core of the movie, but it didn't get developed as much as it should have. I understand what's supposed to have happened (I think), but I wish they'd explored that more instead of just trying to be unsettling.

I think it's a really atmospheric and interesting movie, but I don't think it's a great film (unlike, say, Alien Apocalypse). Though maybe it'll grow on me, I don't know.

SIDE NOTE: According to IMDB, "Stanley Kubrick composed and shot this film in the negative ratio (1.37:1) format so that in TV we see it in 1.33:1, but in the cinemas wee see it in 1.85:1 (aspect ratio). When a film is shot in 1.37:1, the top and the bottom of the frame are intended to be masked off in the cinemas to create a widescreen version, but are not masked off in the TV - VHS - DVD version."
I guess he figured that would make a better video experience, which it kind of does, but it's really strange to watch because everything's composed like a feature film, but not shaped like one.
There's also a part at the opening when you can very clearly see the shadow of helicopter filming it, which probably would have been cut off in the theatrical version.

SIDE NOTE 2: What the hell was up with the ghosts of the old man and the guy in a bear suit? A bear suit? Peter Hyams better direct a mediocre sequel to explain that.

Alien Apocalypse

Movie: Alien Apocalypse (2005)
Watched with: Angelo and John

Renting this was kind of a compromise, cause while I like the movie Starship Troopers, I feared if we rented the cartoon based on it, we'd have to seriously re-evaluate our lifestyle.

Alien Apocalypse was a TV movie made by the Scifi Channel, about Bruce Campbell and a crew of astronauts landing back on Earth after 40 years in space (while, due to relativity or whatever, remaining the same age), only to find the planet ruled by CGI insects who want to mine all the wood and ship it back to their planet (their planet doesn't have wood).

My favorite part of the movie was when the crew first meets the aliens. Human guards bring them into a weird insect hut, and some kind of alien bureaucrat asks which district they're from. The captain says he's from Michigan. The alien says something like, "That's a long way from this district! We are in Ore-gon!" They explain that they were astronauts in a space probe. The alien says something like, "We saw that probe when we were coming to your planet but did not check its message!" Then the captain gets belligerant and the alien eats his head.
I enjoyed that the alien was excited to know what probe they were talking about. It was like he'd realized they had the same friend in high school or something.

Other than that, the movie was really dopey, but was kind of better than I expected, so I can't complain.

What I found strange about it was that it was clearly influenced by some socially conscious (or at least wannabe socially conscious) movies, most notably Planet of the Apes, yet had no politics of its own whatsoever.
In a story where a deposed US president is a central character, you'd think some kind of political viewpoint would be inevitable, but you wouldn't be the writers of Alien Apocalypse.

All around, I don't regret watching it.
And you can put that on the box, Scifi Channel.

Titan A.E.

Movie: Titan A.E. (2000)
Watched with: Angelo

There was a brief period right around the turn of (this) century where all the second tier cartoon studios, and even Disney sometimes, tried really hard to make rousing Lucas/Speilburg style adventure stories as cartoons.
Some of these were pretty great (Iron Giant) some were mediocre (Treasure Planet) and some were sort of bad (poor Atlantis: The Lost Empire).
But whether they were good or not, they were at least artistically interesting.
The visuals were imaginative, the stories were simply but engaging (though they could've been better), and it was an all around fun experience.

The problem was, these movies didn't make any money.

Treasure Planet was Disney's biggest loss ever on a movie, and poor Titan A.E. here actually caused Fox Animation to flat-out close down.

While this was going on, Pixar was still making cute but intelligent CGI movies, which were pretty good. The problem was that all the studios that copied Pixar replaced "intelligent" with "filled with pop culture references" so you'd get a movie about Sharks or whatever voiced by celebrities and eventually that degenerated into, like, Doogal.

Cartoons have always been for kids, but now (with the occasional exception like The Incredibles), they're for little kids.
Financially, this makes sense, but it's kind of sad.

Titan A.E. isn't a great film, or even a great scifi film, or even really a great animated film, but it's darn neat.
The characters are cooly drawn and the locations are awesome (though you can occasionally see where they cut corners; sometimes the backgrounds are all CGI and sometimes they look like an old episode of Scooby-Doo...not that that's a bad thing). The story is engaging (two of the three writers were Firefly's Joss Whedon and The Tick creator Ben Edlund), and overall, it just makes me kind of sad that it could never happen again.

Unfortunately, Titan commits the Dreamworks sin and its cast is populated with arbitrary celebrities. Matt Damon pulls me right out of the space opera and right into Good Will's Harvard or at best a scene from Dogma, though Nathan Lane is funny as a menacing alien, cause you don't think of Nathan Lane as menacing but he pulls it off.

Also, I found the movie's attempt to make the bad guy ambiguous kind of silly. Once it's revealed that he's bad, his personality completely changes. It'd be a lot more compelling if he seemed like he was being true to himself while still running in opposition to the protagonist.

But then, it is a cartoon about spaceships, and one can't be too picky.

X-Men: The Last Stand

Movie: X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
Watched with: Angelo, John, Jessica

How much you enjoy a movie is so dependent on the circumstances in which you see it.
I'm sure that X2 is a better movie than this one, but I watched that one on DVD while working on my comic (which I guess is a little ironic) and couldn't bring myself to care, while I watched this one at the drive-in and it was a good ole time.

(spoilers, I guess)
I like Kelsey Grammer as Beast, basically acting how he does in everything only blue.
I liked how the President was just "The President" without any furthur explanation.
I liked Mystique turning from weird blue naked chick into regular overly-made up strategically-filmed regular naked chick.

I didn't like most of the Phoenix subplot, even though I know it's from the comics, cause it just wasn't very interesting.
Even more so with the dark-haired girl and the useless guy who go iceskating.
In a movie where so much is happening, those characters accomplished absolutely nothing, which would be ok if they were engaging or believable, but they were too vaguely sketched for that to be the case.

Overall, it was a pretty good time. Not great, but definitely worthwhile drive-in fair.
If you can make John pay for you, I suggest you see it as well.

Shaft

Movie: Shaft (1971)
Watched with: Angelo, my dad, Elisa

Shaft was pretty entertaining.
The problem I had with it was that it was a little too serious to laugh at and a little too goofy to take seriously.
But it had some awesome moments and was all around a pretty good time.
For blaxploitation, I think I still prefer Coffy (1973).

So, I'm probably the only person who would think this was a good idea, and I only do cause of the movies I've just been watching, but why don't they make a blaxploitation scifi or fantasy movie?
People act like there were no black people in midieval Europe, but there were also no dragons and that hasn't stopped anybody. And actually, there were black people on the Iberian Peninsula at least, so I could see it working.

Better yet, remember how I said I, Robot was like a dumber Blade Runner? Why not kick it up a notch and replace the Converse product placements with the hero boning babes completely at random, while the robots are, I dunno, part of Whitey's evil plan which the hero has to fuck up?

It would be the greatest of films.

The Hills Have Eyes

Movie: The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
Watched with: Angelo

Some of my favorite movies are horror movies (just like how some of my best friends are any given minority!).

The problem, I think, is this--

If your movie has boring characters, no one cares.
If your movie has interesting characters, having them all get killed one-by-one is about the least interesting thing you could possibly do with them.

Hills has a fairly cool concept, with its savage mutant family hunting down an RV-driving family in the deserts of Nevada, but once you get the gist (say, 15 minutes in), it's just a matter of waiting for everyone to die.

I wish one of the people in the van was a young MacGyver, and his desperation to survive and stop the mutant madmen jumpstarted the inventiveness that would be his trademark on television a decade later, and in syndication for all time.

They did a remake, which just came out on video, but IMDB doesn't say Richard Dean Anderson's in it, so I probably don't care.

Fire and Ice

Movie: Fire and Ice (1983)
Watched with: Angelo

This fantasy cartoon was designed by the guy who created Conan the Barbarian (Frank Frazetta) and animated by the guy who did Fritz the Cat (Ralph Bakshi, not Robert Crumb)

It's about an evil queen and her son (I think?) who try to take over a good kingdom and then the good king's daughter escapes into the wilderness wearing only a thong, and then some barbarian guy helps her or something.

They were pretty gender-egalitarian with the near-nudity, with most of the characters wearing loinclothes, but only the girl got gratuitious buttshots, which really aren't very appealing on a cartoon, even a rotoscoped one.

Other than that, it was pretty uninvolving, and surprisingly unepic considering all the barbarian warriors and undead armies and stuff.
The one plus was that the good guys rode around on pterodactyl things which I think were called "dragon hawks".
Any movie is improved by the presence of pterodactyls.
That's why Orson Welles put them into Citizen Kane (he really did, look it up!).

The funniest thing about this movie was that it's backgrounds were painted entirely by two people--Dinotopia's James Gurney and...
Thomas Kincade!
Yes, that one.

Return of the King (1980)

Movie: Return of the King (1980)
Watched with: Angelo and John

This animated Lord of the Rings movie is really not very good, but it has some great songs in it.
Here's some YouTube videos that feature them:
Where There's A Whip, There's A Way (Orc Marching Song)
Frodo of the Nine Fingers
I wish there was a way I could obtain the soundtrack, but as far as I can tell it's not available anywhere.

The whole thing felt really weirdly jumbled cause it had like 3 narrators (a balladeer, and Gandalf and then I think Sam but maybe I made that part up cause I kind of fell asleep), and while they cut out huge chunks of the book to make it fit into the running time, they felt bad for cutting them out so they had the characters make oblique references to them.
Yet they found time to play each of those songs at least twice. Which is ok, mind. Since they were really good.

I, Robot

Movie: I, Robot (2004)
Watched with: Angelo

I, Robot has very little to do with Asimov, except for the 3 Laws business, and a lot to do with the writer of Batman & Robin trying to make a dumb Blade Runner. I don't know how they got the Dark City guy to go along with that, but whatcha gonna do.

That said, I was actually pretty satisfied with it, because it had Will Smith saying "Aw, hell naw!" while wearing "2004 vintage Converse All-Stars" in the Terrifying World of the Future, which is basically what I want from a movie.

The one thing I really think it needed was a hip hop remix of "Mr. Roboto", but that's probably why they don't let me make movies.

I also watched some Steven Seagal movie on TV with my dad, but I don't know if that's worth blogging about. He was middle aged, had a hot young girlfriend and a hip urban prison buddy, and he hit some guys. That's all I remember.

During the summer, I watch a lot of movies. After awhile, they kind of run together, so I decided to do little write-ups of them here.