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Reviews
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
Best dystopia ever, but now double-plus ungood
You may note that I have rated this film as an 8. It would be a 9, maybe even a 10 if the b@stards in charge of home video for the studio had gone with the "washed-out" look of the theatrical version. For some reason known only to their own Eastasian (Eurasian?) selves, they went back and tweaked the original masterpiece so that it looked like it was filmed in warm, happy Technicolor.
Shades of Minitrue. Or, as Colbert would call it, "Truthiness".
I consider myself lucky to have seen "1984" as it was originally presented (on cable, I wasn't old enough to see an R-rated flick in 1984), with the original look that the filmmakers intended. It was SUPPOSED to look awful!! London was SUPPOSED to look like it was falling apart! That's what happens in a Dystopia!
When Spielberg went for the de-saturated look in "Saving Private Ryan", he won an Oscar. Ask yourself what that movie would look like if it was a vibrant, Technicolor extravaganza along the lines of "Raiders" or "Jurassic Park". Now you understand the ruination that was foisted upon "1984".
City Lights (1931)
Ultimate Chaplin
(Do you really need to post a spoiler warning for a movie that as of tonight is 77 years old?)
I haven't read other reviews so forgive me if I repeat any previous postings. "City Lights" is, with nary a doubt, the greatest love story ever told. Forget "Casablanca". Forget "An Affair to Remember". Forget "Love Story". (For the love of Christ, forget "Love Story".) This is a movie about the purest love.
We have the simple, ubiquitous Tramp. He is smitten with a blind flower girl, who has mistaken him for a wealthy man. There is a new operation that "cures" blindness, and the Tramp will do anything to help Flower Girl regain her sight. He tries to win a boxing match in which he is clearly outclassed. In an era that is forgotten in modern times (pun gleefully intended), he cleans the streets of dung. (One of the best sight gags in screen history happens when the Tramp has to clean up after an elephant.) Finally he steals from a wealthy man to get the money he needs to pay for Flower Girl's operation.
And then, after he has spent many years in prison, the Tramp is reunited with Flower Girl.
My fellow males, this is a wonderful "Chick Flick." If your lady friend isn't reduced to tears by the last 4 minutes of this movie, you need to find a new lady. I've seen it a dozen times and it always gets to me.
Battlefield Earth (2000)
Bleah...
(My original review was deleted, as it was a little too harsh on "Elron" and the Scientologists. What follows is my original review, with a few additions and most of the naughty bits removed. Read at your own risk. If you're easily offended, maybe you should clear off and skip to the next review. Of course, if you're THAT easily offended, you probably avoided this movie altogether.)
What more can be said? This movie is beyond preposterous. It makes "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" look like an epic. The only funny thing ever uttered by Jon Stewart was in regards to this movie. He called it a combination of "Star Wars" and the smell of ass.
Bad Sign #1: Everything is tilted at an angle. It's as if the director was paying homage to that milestone of dramatic entertainment, the "Batman" TV series from the 60s. Yeah buddy, great move.
Bad Sign #2: John Revolta. If he's not playing a thug ("Pulp Fiction") or a dumb Brooklynoid ("Grease") he's worthless.
Bad Sign #3: L. Ron Hubbard. So this was his magnum opus, eh? Well, good science fiction requires good science and good fiction. Hubbard provided neither. An atmosphere that explodes in the presence of radiation? Puh-LEEZE!
Those are just the opening bad signs. It gets worse. For the grand finale, we are expected to believe that cavemen can learn to fly 1000-year-old Harrier jets against the "Psyclos". To quote Holden McNeil, "I don't think I'm alone in the world in imagining this flick may be the worst idea since Greedo shooting first." A good friend claims to have read this book (poor fellow), and tells me that the movie ends only halfway into the story. Lucky us.
Nip/Tuck (2003)
Houston, we have jumped the shark...
(Spoiler warning)
I'll admit, I watched N/T from the beginning. And I watched the long downhill slide, too. The first season wasn't so bad, but things got screwy in season 2, in more ways than one. It seemed that the writers were obsessed with showing people's bare bums, usually while getting it on with another character. The profanity seemed to kick up a notch as well. (Or a notch down, depending on your opinion.) It seems that characters on cable TV can show everything but full-blown (*ahem*) penetration and say everything but the big "F-bomb", and the writers took full advantage of both.
That was all well and good. I could get past the screwing and the swearing. After all, people screw and swear in real life. Maybe not as much as on N/T, but it happens. Why, I've been known to drop an F-bomb or two, as well as "get my groove on." But IMHO, the show officially jumped the shark when it turned out that Ava was having an incestuous relationship with her son.
Normally, I'd watch a two-hour movie titled "Paint Drying" that consisted of nothing more than Famke Janssen reading a book to herself while sitting in a room whose walls had a fresh coat of Sherwin-Williams' finest. Her supernatural good looks tend to overshadow her talents as an actress, but this was too much. I said "That's it!" and I haven't watched a nanosecond since. Since then, a friend has told me the truth about Ava. And now I'm REALLY glad that I don't watch the show anymore.
Having grown up in a medical family (Mom was a nurse), I confess that I found some of the surgical procedures fascinating, particularly the conjoined-twin separation (guest-starring the real-life Schappell Sisters). But I don't really give a damn about the characters. So Sean McNamara is losing his family? Serves him right for banging one of his patients! So Christian Troy got his face carved up? (I gathered that from the other user comments; it must have happened after I stopped watching.) His boat and his car vandalized? His "son" Wilbur taken away from him? Serves him right for being a pretty-boy misanthropist who skipped through life on his looks! And don't even get me started on Liz the (obligatory) Lesbian. Geez Louise, at least I was able to feel some pity for poor little Alex in "Clockwork Orange." The only character I don't hate in this tripe-fest is Annie, the McNamara's rarely-seen daughter.
((Sigh)) If only F/X Networks had invested as much in the vastly under-rated "Lucky" as they had in "Nip/Tuck."
Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Hopelessly naive...
"Do we have plans to invade the middle east?" I watched 3DotC not long ago. (In glorious widescreen, the ONLY way to watch pre-homevideo era movies.) I had to sit through nearly two hours of movie to get to this question. When I was a young, liberal, almost radical college student, I thought this was the deepest, most meaningful cinematic question since Scarlett asked Rhett wherever would she go and whatever would she do.
One grows up.
Events of the last few years have shown that the question is as naive as I was back then. OF COURSE the CIA has plans to invade the middle east. Plans on top of plans. Hell, the CIA probably has a plan to invade Norway. (Confidential to the CIA: As a patriotic American of Swedish descent, I'll be glad to help that operation in any way I can, assuming you'll find a use for a 33 year old sofa spud with a bad back and astigmatism.)
In any event, the point of having plans to invade countries is to take them out as quickly and with as few lives lost as possible. We proved this in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003. (Too bad there aren't any plans for what to do AFTER you've invaded, but that's another topic that has little to do with the movie at hand.)
This point is lost on Redford and Pollack. Their little spy movie tries to portray the CIA bureaucrat (Cliff Robertson), whose job is to safeguard those plans, as less moral than the assassin who just does it for the money. As Joubert (Max Von Sydow) said, "I don't interest myself in 'why'. I think more often in terms of 'when', sometimes 'where', always 'how much'." That's morality according to Hollywood, a town where the question is ALWAYS "how much".
The filmmakers' heartbreaking naiveté is on full display in the scenes that actually take place /inside/ the World Trade Center. I can't watch this movie without wondering who may have jumped from the window of Cliff Robertson's office. I can't watch Robert Redford standing on the 2nd level balcony without seeing people fleeing on that same balcony in Jules and Gedeon Naudet's amazing film, "9/11". (That was the only camera crew to not only capture footage INSIDE the towers after the attack, but they caught the first plane's impact.) And I can't watch the movie without realizing that Redford and Pollack's political allies spent the 26 intervening years doing everything they could to hamstring the CIA and the FBI.
I don't fault the talents of anyone involved in 3DotC. As has been noted here before, the fight between Redford and "The Postman" is one of the best choreographed scenes in filmdom. This is especially true in these days of "The Matrix", its knockoffs, or any Jackie Chan movie you wish to name. The fault, dear Brutus, really does lie in the stars. In this case, the stars are those people we presume to know more than us because they are flickering images on a screen. "Three Days of the Condor" is more than ample proof that they know more about entertainment than they know about reality.
Total Recall (1990)
THE BIG SPOILER
The big debate about "Total Recall" is whether or not everything after the trip to "Rekall" is real, or a hallucination. Well, if you watched the movie closely, you already suspected the truth: Everything after Rekall IS a dream.
When Ah-nold is getting ready for his "Ego-Trip", you hear a tech in the background say "Hey, that's new...blue sky on Mars." At the end of the movie, when the frozen oxygen core of Mars (Huh?) is thawed to create an atmosphere, the sky is blue. (Quite a trick, considering that it's the NITROGEN in our atmosphere that gives our sky its blue color.)
Also, when the "girl" program is loaded (athletic, brunette, sleazy, and demure), the screen briefly shows us a full-face shot of...Rachel Ticotin! As Arnie says later in the movie, "She's real! I dreamed of her before!" So the computer at Rekall picked up her image from the dream that opened the movie, and implanted it in Arnie's Ego Trip.
Those are the little clues, to say nothing of the description that the Rekall salesman gives about bad guys, mutants, aliens, and all that stuff. The Big Clue, the one that tells you it's all a dream, comes at the very end. Instead of fading to black, the screen fades to white. As Verhoven explains on the commentary track, this is Quaid (Arnie) getting lobotomized, just as the Rekall technician predicted.
All right, now that I've established that I'm a TOTAL movie geek, let me just say that I liked the movie. Somewhat. It was no "Star Wars" and it certainly wasn't "Alien", or "Blade Runner". But it was OK. The jokes were good, especially the babe with the three hooties. (A sly nod to "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", which gave us Eccentricia Gallumbits, the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon 6.) I also loved Arnie's line "Relax, you'll live longer." I've used that one many times, and it comes in handier than "I'll be back."
It's not Verhoven's best, but give it a try. At least it's better than "Showgirls".
Space Cowboys (2000)
Space Cow-pie (Spoilers)
OK, that's not quite fair to the movie. The first half is quite entertaining as we get to see how NASA trains its astronauts with Eastwood, Jones, Garner, and Southerland cheerfully dishing out the fried ham.
There are two big drawbacks in the first half: James Cromwell and Marcia Gay Hardin. Cromwell's problem is pandemic in Hollywood: the utter inability of any actor born north of the Mason Dixon Line to deliver a credible southern accent. Sure I live in Minnesota, but I spent 6 years in Arkansas and I can spot a fake twang a mile away. They're even more annoying than the real twangs.
Hardin's problem is a bit more complex: She's a lousy actress. I know she won an Oscar (obviously not for this piece of cine-manure), but based on this movie I can't imagine how. (Casting couch?) Watch her reaction to discovering that the "secret mission" is now on the front page of the USA Today: "Oh, sh*t!" Well she got that right.
I was willing to overlook those two horrendous performances because I knew that their roles would be greatly reduced by the time they got off the ground. But then we get to the next Big Problem: shortly after liftoff of the "Daedalus", the movie goes into full-time suck mode, perhaps as a result of their proximity to the vacuum of space. They made every conceivable scientific error. From the obvious (the re-entry scene, even before the loss of "Columbia", was beyond ridiculous) to the obscure (astronauts go from the shuttle {normal atmosphere, 14.7 PSI} to EVA {pure oxygen, 4 PSI} without suffering from a crippling case of the bends), to just plain sloppy film-making (crew member in the shot, behind Eastwood, just after they get inside the constipated Russian satellite).
I saw one reviewer here refer to the final scene as wonderfully artistic. Well, maybe it is. If your only knowledge of the space program comes from bad movies like Space Cowboys. I'll give this one 3 out of 10, but I'll only go that high because I loved Donald Southerland's line about a woman's infinite supply of orgasms.
The Quiet Earth (1985)
So I liked it (Some spoilers)
I feel sorry for that poor bugger who shut off the VCR during the "Cardboard crowd" scene. If s/he'd just held on for another 5 minutes, s/he would have been in for a treat.
The first time I saw this movie would have been around 1987 or so, on the now-defunct cable channel "SelectTV". (Mom and Dad had a satellite dish in the days when they were fiberglass monstrosities 10 feet across.) They showed Swarzenegger vehicles like "Commando" during the day, soft-core porn at night (which, in the late 80s, was merely edited-down hardcore porn from the late 70s), and then they'd throw in the odd film gem like "The Quiet Earth." I guess you could say that it was my first foray into "foreign" films.
Having been a sci-fi fan from the very day I first saw "Star Wars" at the tender age of 5, I found this to be a very intriguing movie. No warp drives, BEM's (Bug-Eyed Monsters), laser cannons, or annoyingly cute robots (see "Silent Running"...<<shudder>>). Just an end of the world story about a man who may have contributed to the end of the world. Things get spicy when he meets one other survivor, a plucky redhead who appears to be attracted to balding, paunchy scientist-nerds. Oh what the hell, it led to the greatest bare-bum scene in filmdom, until it was surpASSed by "Braveheart".
Another guy shows up, a Maori warrior, and the triangle is in motion. Amazingly enough, plucky redheads prefer big black men over shlumpy white men. (And if I were her, so would I.) Then the solution to the "What happened to the whole world?" problem appears to fling the scientist-nerd to a far-off world that orbits around a Saturn-like ringed planted. You can see it in his face in the last scene: NOW what the hell will he do to get home?
The first half is excellent, the second half is, as many here have opined, somewhat weak. But the whole is better that the sum of its parts. Look carefully at the SciFi section of your local video store, you may be lucky enough to find that they have a copy.
The Day Reagan Was Shot (2001)
OK, I'll "Prove It"
I'll get to the movie in a minute. First, someone wanted "proof" about Clinton's comments at Georgetown, where he claimed that the USA "deserved" the 9-11 attacks. Well, here's what Clinton said:
"In the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was a Muslim on the Temple Mount. I can tell you that story is still being told today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it."
WE'RE still paying for it? Whaddya mean "we", paleface? The Marines didn't storm the Temple Mount.
But in truth, Clinton never really came out and flatly said that we "deserved" 9-11. Like all his statements during his presidency, he IMPLIED that we deserved 9-11. Just point out "fact" A, B, C, and maybe D, and let the listener deduce that they must add up to conclusion X. When in truth, most of Clinton's "Facts" added up to guacamole.
But that's beside the point. We're here to talk movies, not politics. Unfortunately, when Oliver "Captain Conspiracy" Stone does a movie, you can't escape his warped politics. It was only a matter of time before he focused his paranoia and bitterness on the Reagan Era, and what better time than when Stone's dreams almost came true, on the day Reagan nearly bought the farm. Unable to find any nefarious plots or schemes in Hinckley's assassination attempt, he invents one with Al Haig. From a simple misunderstanding of the chain of Constitutional authority, Haig is transformed from a public servant who really should have brushed up on his remedial civics into a raving megalomaniac. You almost expect Haig to rub his hands together like Montgomery Burns and tell Cap Weinberger to "Release the Hounds." Stone even recruits the smarmiest person in Hollywood to play our former Secretary of State, Richard Dreyfuss. A guy you love to hate on sight.
Overall, the movie is OK. Average, hovering on below average. Don't bother renting or buying. Try to catch it on cable. 4 out of 10.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Still Great
Most movies from the 70s don't hold up well. Especially the comedies. But MP&THG still hangs in there as one of the funniest movies ever made. The credit sequence alone is funnier than much of the tripe that Hollyweird cranks out. (Legally Blonde 2? Puh-LEEZE!)
I first saw this movie when I was 9 years old. Sure, plenty of the humor went over my head. It was years before I figured out Dennis the Peasant's lecture about the superiority of constitutional law over a monarchy. But it was still great. I loved the coconuts!
Speaking of the coconuts, that's the litmus test. Just watch up to the discussion of tropical fruits and migratory birds. If you don't get the joke by then, you won't like the movie.
(For everyone on AOL, this movie has the greatest replacement for the annoying "You've got Mail!" Find yourself a wav.file of Eric Idle's line "Message for you, sir!" and use that instead. Just make sure you have the arrow sound to go with it.)
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
Spockalypse Now (Some spoilers)
"Star Trek: The Motionless Picture." Or, "Where Nomad Has Gone Before." OK, we've all heard about how this movie sucked. In retrospect (and in comparison to later Trek movies), it did. But now with the magic of DVD, we can see a vastly improved "Director's Cut". Someone at Paramount should send a big "Thank You" tribble to George Lucas, whose revamped and enhanced "Star Wars" was certainly the impetus behind the revised ST:TMP.
There are plenty of scenes that weren't included in the theatrical release, most famously the scene of Spock's tears and the self-destruct order. But unlike Star Wars, Trek 1 gets a trim as well. The scenes that needed tightening, were. Just a nip and a tuck, here and there, but it helps out the pace of the movie tremendously.
Oh yeah, the special effects. Well, there are a few digital tweaks here and there. Vulcan looks better. SanFran looks better. And the Enterprise has grown a warp nacelle, visible outside the Officers' Lounge window. (There are others, but I won't spoil them for you.) Unlike the infamous "Greedo shooting first", all the tweaks work. But the effects are now, as ever, the film's weakest point. It was released two years after the original "Star Wars" and it fell into the trap of overdosing on special effects. This made an already boring movie nearly unbearable. (In a delicious twist of irony, the latest installments of "Star Wars" have fallen into the same trap. But at least we get to ogle Natalie Portman's abs.)
My advice is to fast-forward thru the more interminable FX scenes. Epsilon 9, the other space station, the endless cloud formations of V'ger, etc. This kind of home-editing makes the Directors' Cut highly watchable. The original theatrical release rated about 5 out of 10. The new DVD version is a solid 7, bordering on 8.
Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? (2001)
Putrid
Poor Mitch Pileggi. This must have been his contractually obligated "turkey" that Hollywood makes its "stars" do, just to prove who's in charge.
So you think we faked the moon landing?
So you saw the flag flapping in the "breeze" on the airless moon. No you didn't. The flag had a rod through the top and a weight at the bottom corner so that it would look fully deployed. And the "flapping" you saw was due to the astronaut TWISTING THE FLAGPOLE INTO THE LUNAR SOIL for better placement. As soon as the twisting stopped, guess what? The flapping stopped too!
And try this one on for size, airboy: Ever drop some flour in the kitchen and notice a cloud of dust hovering over the floor? Well if the astronauts were REALLY on a soundstage with a flag that was REALLY flapping in the breeze, you'd see dust flying all around too. But you didn't, because there wasn't, BECAUSE THEY WERE ON THE (AIRLESS) MOON!
So you thought the lighting of the Astronauts was too perfect, as if it was a studio job. Well, the lighting and the shadows would be a little wonky, considering that there are THREE sources of light in the photos: The sun (natch), the Earth (much the same way the full moon illuminates the night sky), and the moon itself. That's right, all that moonlight that we see here on earth was shining right up into the astronauts' faces and giving their spacesuits a nice, soft-light look.
Oh, that's also the reason you don't see any stars in the moon photos. The surrounding moonlight was so bright, the shutter speeds on the cameras were set very fast. It would be like taking a picture out your living room window at night and expecting to see stars in the photo. Ain't gonna happen.
So you think that there should be a great big crater under the LEM. Well I hate to break this to you, but the LEM didn't land at full power. Most of its fuel load was spent in deceleration from orbit, and in hovering over the landing site. They only needed a fraction of its power to make a nice, soft, 1/6th gravity landing. They didn't even "land" under power. Each of the landing "feet" had a thin rod that would signal the astronauts that they were just over the surface. They would then cut the engine and drop the final 18 inches unpowered. ("Contact light! OK, Engine Stop!" Remember that from the Apollo mission tapes?)
And then there's the matter of the ascent stage, popping off the moon as if it was on a cable. See, once again you're taking what you've seen (launches on earth) and projecting them onto what you THINK you've seen. It takes a ridiculous amount of thrust to start moving up. So when rockets launch from earth, they are held down for a few seconds. It's the same as starting your car when you're parked on a hill. Hold your foot on the brake and give it a little gas so you don't roll back. Well, you don't need to do that on the moon with its one-sixth gravity and when all you're moving is an ascent stage. Throw the switch and ((woosh!)) you're off.
Oh, and the reason you don't see any flame from the ascent rocket is simple: real rocket fuel doesn't burn, it's hypergolic. In a nutshell, 2 chemicals that are otherwise inert come together and expand rapidly. If you focus and channel it the right way, you get thrust. (It's not easy to do, but it can be done. That's why the phrase "Rocket Scientist" has such a mystique in our society.) But it doesn't produce a visible flame. The dramatic, flaming liftoff of the Saturn 5 rocket from Cape Kennedy came from the fuel mixture of the first stage, which used kerosene. And that WILL produce one heckuva flame, unlike the Eagle's ascent rocket.
There's more, but I think I've proved the point. Every so-called "Fact" on the show is easily refuted when you happen to know more than the average X-Phile about real science.
Showgirls (1995)
Should be required viewing at Film School...
...for how NOT to do a movie. I can see the lesson now: "If you have a bad script, bad actors, and an over-rated HACK director, throw in a lot of gyrating breasts and market it as a sexy romp."
Paul Hootenvooten and Joe Ass-Smell-House should have been run out of town for foisting this vile, steaming loaf of antelope offal upon the moviegoing public. This movie is bad, Bad, BAD on SO-O-O-O-O many levels. The ONLY way to watch it without gnawing off your left leg (to get your mind off the agony)is to treat it like the Swarzenegger vehicle "Commando" and tell yourself that it's a satire. It HAS to be a great big joke, because no one could make a movie this bad and be serious about it.
What were they trying to say? That everyone in the "Adult Entertainment" business is a scumbag? Do they think we didn't already know that?
Deep down we all know that Tony Soprano is a worthless scumbag, but he has a few decent qualities, and he occasionally tries to redeem his poor, rotten soul. It is for this reason that we grudginly cheer for him and hope that he can save himself. Even poor little Alex, leader of the Droogs in "Clockwork Orange" has a deep love of classical music and with this one tiny spark of humanity, we can accept him as the anti-hero and we can "feel his pain" when the whole world seems to collapse upon him. This moral redemption is utterly absent from Showgirls. While there may be a few times you aren't actively hating the main characters, there aren't any times that you're liking them.
There's only one person I don't hate in this film: The change girl who asks Nomi if she wants to try some dollar slots. She's not screwing anyone over, she's just trying to be helpful and do a job. Ten seconds of redemption in a two hour movie...typical Verhoven.
Doctor Who (1996)
Britons Forgive Us, We Know Not What The Hell We're Doing...
*** Some Spoilers***
I really wanted to like this. Really. When I was 12 I fell into a near-suicidal depression and the only thing that saved my life was waiting to see what The Doctor would do in Today's Thrilling Episode. (Hey, I was only 12.)
This Tele-Movie was so disappointing. Granted, we got to see Sylvester McCoy take two in the chest, and that's always a good thing, but the show goes down from there. (Half-human?? Where did the writers come up with this tripe?)
Americanization may have breathed new life into the James Bond series, but it killed Doctor Who. With the non-success of this venture, we have been spared a TV movie of "Blake's 7" or even (shudder) "The Tomorrow People".
Point Break (1991)
World's longest 2-hour movie
Some people would say that there's something wonderfully Zen about "Point Break". But the truth is that there's something far more Einstein-esque in this movie. From the start of the "Fox Fanfare" to the end credits' roll, it's just a hair over two hours in real time, but in observed time, it feels more like five hours.
The funny thing is that it doesn't drag. Unlike other James Cameron projects like "Titanic" (where you were practically begging the iceberg to make its cameo) or "Terminator 2" (Please get out of your dream, Sarah, and go waste the evil computer programmer) the lulls rarely last more than a few minutes, and faster than you can say "hands up!" we're back to some action. (This pretty much confirms the theory that executive producers just sit back, take the credit, and don't do a whole helluva lot. But I digress.)
Certainly the casting was inspired. Getting Keanu Reeves to play a dopey/stoned surf dude gave new meaning to the phrase "a role he was born to play". Sort of like Madonna playing a foul-mouthed floozy in "League of Their Own."
With bank robbing, surfing, midnight beach football and guns lots of guns, grab some junk food and enjoy some junk entertainment. But be prepared to spend more time than you think you need. (7 out of 10)
Babylon 5 (1993)
The Thinking Person's Star Trek
More accurately, it's "Star Trek" for people who...well, let's just say that they haven't gotten so involved in their "hobby" that they've pretty much taken the Deltan Oath of Celibacy.
I'll admit that I didn't watch Babylon 5 during its initial run. Fortunately the SciFi Channel started running them in order (and in glorious widescreen!) I had the luxury of getting five years' worth of entertainment in just a few months.
What a series! Unlike "Star Dreck" (as I've come to know it), the characters don't warp off to next week's episode totally unchanged, with last week's developments all but forgotten. (Remember Worf getting a spinal cord transplant in one episode, and then kicking butt in the very next one?? Arrrrrrrgh!) This isn't a show with twenty-two episodes in a season for however long it runs, this is one story told in one-hour chapters. It's a concept that ST could never even consider. DS9 (aka "Duplicate Straczynski 9 Months Later") tried but could never quite pull it off; it brought too much baggage from its previous franchises.
The "Science" part of "Science Fiction" has always appealed to me, and B5 satisfies that need quite well. There aren't any cop-outs like convenient artificial gravity, they have to get their gravity the old-fashioned way: centrifugal force. Unlike "Star Wars" X-wings with the engines at the center of the craft, the Star Furies have the engines on the outside, where they logically should be in a weightless vacuum. Even the fantastical Jumpgates take the Doppler Shift into account: when you enter the gate, the maelstrom is red, and when you leave, it's blue.
In a day and age when we're fed crap like "Armageddon" (no gravity on the asteroid, but there's some pretty damn convenient gravity in their ship!) These little touches are nice to have. The overall quality of Television would take a quantum leap ahead (no pun intended) if the writers and producers respected our intelligence as much as Harlan Ellison and J. Michael Straczynski did on "Babylon 5"
Eye of the Needle (1981)
Such Wasted Potential...
"Eye of the Needle" was such a good book that the movie was obviously going to disappoint. In the ham-hands of Richard Marquand (Return of the Jedi), that's what happens.
How could you not be hooked by the initial premise? Henry Faber, Germany's top spy, has discovered a secret that could ruin the D-Day invasion. (For history buffs, he discovers the huge FAKE army in Eastern England, designed to make the Nazi's think that the invasion will occur at the Pas de Calais instead of Normandy.) Faber plays cat-and-mouse with MI-5 (Britain's wartime Counter-intelligence department) across Great Britain to an island off the Scottish coast where he waits to be picked up by a U-boat. The island's only inhabitants are a double amputee, his (sexually unfulfilled) wife, their child, and an old man. It should be the perfect place to wait for a U-boat to Germany, but (and you can see this coming a mile away) a love triangle develops between Faber and Lucy Rose.
The first third of the movie moves along as crisply as the book, but quickly gets bogged down with the triangle subplot. Remember all those plodding scenes in "Jedi"? Luke talking to Leia about their family tree. Vader talking to Luke about the Dark Side. Yoda's death monologue. This is the movie in which Marquand took his practice swings.
I'm not ripping Marquand for the lousy job he did on Jedi, and I'm not trying to speak ill of the dead, but this movie is just plain...**THUD**. Do yourself a favor and read the book instead. I give it 5 out of 10 stars.
Rear Window (1954)
The Master's Best
What more can be said of the original "Rear Window"? It is without a doubt Hitchcock's best, even better than "Psycho".
Younger viewers (younger viewers? Hell, I'm only 29!), who have been raised on pablum like "Mission Impossible 2" and "The Matrix" may think that this is movie is too boring to be a thriller. Look again. There's an actual PLOT! There are actual CHARACTERS! This movie wasn't focus-grouped and the characters aren't cardboard cutouts. And there has yet to be a better close-up in all of movie history than that of Grace Kelly moving in for The Kiss.
Outstanding. 10 out of 10.