Movie Buff: Classic Cinema

I thought I'd do a short little post on some golden (or at least silver age) movies I've seen of late. First, if you want an in-depth review of something more recent, check out Undiscover This for a fairly good review of The Social Network, followed by some truly excellent, excellent commentary. And now my reviews:

Ice Station Zebra. John Sturges' 1968 Cold War flick, in which an American submarine races to retrieve a spy satellite's film from the titular station where it crashes. Starring Patrick McGoohan as the British special ops leader, Ernest Borgnine as his right hand man Russian defector, and Rock Hudson as the submarine commander and Guy With a Really Cool Name. The second half is pretty good, especially the tense confrontation between Borgnine and the leader of the marine team, but the first half, in which the submarine slowly, slowly reaches the station, isn't nearly as exciting as the music score tries to tell you it is.

A Boy and His Dog. The 1975 post-apocalypse film directed by L. Q. Jones and starring a young Don Johnson of Nash Bridges and Miami Vice fame. Also starring Tim McIntire as the voice of the adorable dog. Without giving anything too much away, the general plot is that in the wake of a world ravaged by World War IV, the boy encourages his telepathic dog to find him a woman to, well, rape, but ends up with more than he bargains for when he winds up in an underground colony best described as a parody of a parody of Americana. Yeah, it's pretty weird. The dog is one of the great things about the film, reaching just the right level of sardonic humor.
I like the inversions of social order at work in the film. For example, the dog is elevated to the importance of human, while in the colony, "gone to the farm" is no longer a euphemism for pets that are no longer with us, but for people sentenced to death for breaking the society's fascist laws. Not that they carry the euphemism very far--they basically announce the sentence, and then a robotic hillbilly walks up and crushes the offender's neck with its bare hands. No, really. The movie is based on the short story of the same name by Harlan Ellison, and while the movie is definitely the best out of this set, I prefer the story. While I appreciate the truly insane expansions the film indulges in, the story had a much more powerful ending, while containing pretty much the same actual events.

Okay, the next two require a bit of explanation. I'm currently in a disagreement with one of my roommates. He says that Leslie Nielson's best movies were the Naked Gun films, whereas I prefer Wrongfully Accused. (Blasphemy, I know. But I'm sticking to it.) In my mind, the only way to determine which of us is right is to watch every movie Nielson has been in that's available. Problem: according to imdb, he's had 238 roles. Even removing the TV roles, that's a lot of film. I can't even find some of the more obscure ones, but I'm trying to view what I can.

I'm also doing it in chronological order, which means that I start with his early work as a handsome leading man. As someone who was introduced to Nielsen through the Due South TV show wherein he played an flatulent over the hill Mountie, the idea of him as the chisel-jawed hero is somewhat jarring. That's probably why I've only made it through two such films so far. And here they are:

Forbidden Planet. The 1956 sci-fi "classic" directed by Fred J. Wilcox. Commander J. J Adams (played by Nielsen) brings his crew to visit the colony of Altair IV, but upon landing, find the only inhabitants are Dr. Morbius and his daughter, Altaira. And a robot named Robbie. Morbius continually warns the commander to leave the planet, but the commander would rather get to know Morbius' daughter--and of course, terrible things start to happen to the crew. There's a clear Shakespearean Tempest theme going on, with Morbius and Altaira playing the roles of Prospero and Miranda, and even a subplot where Robbie gets the ship's cook extremely drunk on synthetically created alcohol. And the special effects reach that pinnacle of hilariously bad in retrospect that only old sci-fi films can reach. Also: Robbie is awesome. But despite these elements, the film really drags in places. And when your 98 minute film drags, there's a problem. Nielsen's fine in it, though he really doesn't stretch himself beyond the "stalwart star captain" prototype.

The Reluctant Astronaut. The 1967 comedy starring Don Knotts as Roy Flemming. Roy, a man who makes a living manning a space simulator for children at the county fair, is entered into the space program by his father. The only problem is--he's afraid of heights! Actually, the problem is that his father accidentally entered him into NASA's janitorial staff, and much of the film consists of him trying to keep up the astronaut charade for his friends and family back home. Leslie Nielsen plays the square-jawed astronaut that befriends him. The plot thickens when NASA receives word that the Russians are sending an ordinary man into space in order to demonstrate the efficiency of their automated system, and suddenly Flemming is flying high. While the movie definitely aged better than Forbidden Planet (and Ice Station Zebra, for that matter), most of the comedy comes from Don Knotts being Don Knotts rather than any really jokes. I suppose the space-related stuff would have been more interesting to the audience at the time, but if you want space-related comedy, The Simpsons did the "average man in space" better (though admittedly this movie is a clear influence), and more recently, Community did the space sim better.

That's it for now. The next Nielsen movies on the docket: Poseidon Adventure, and Day of the Animals.

Later Days.

Bibliophile: Idle Hands at Kwantlen Polytechnic University

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

We go over a university's new books, and pick out some highlights.  We are discerning and conscientious.  We are Bibliophile.

This week, we're looking at BC's Kwantlen Polytechnic University.  More after the break.

This Week In Panels

Let's try out a new (old?) feature and see if it's got some legs. Introducing the almost-certainly sporadic series "This Week in Panels," in which I choose panels or pages from comics that have come out that week. We've got three this time round, all Marvel-based:

Hawkeye 11:

Matt Fraction and David Aja. Aja's been drawing the hell out of this series for a while now, but this issue takes the cake. It's from the point of view of Hawkeye's Dog, Lucky, and I think it really sells the animal-based POV. Basically, it does so through three ways, all of which are present in the page above:
1. The dog (and thus the reader) only understands a very limited vocabulary, which means that--like an animal--we have to get most of the conversations from body language and tone.
2. The panels are, for the most part, wordless--a simple technique, but a useful one, as it foregrounds the importance of the images.
3. You've got the schematic-like, abstract depiction of the human characters following their first appearance, which represents a combination of the dog's scent association, and its memory. I'm not sure I agree with the notion that dogs think in so schematic a fashion, but I do like the idea that they conceive of the world in simpler, more iconic ways, and that it's all about associations. If nothing else, it really sells the notion we're seeing a nonhuman interpretation.

By Mark Waid and Chris Samnee. This is another series that has really been pushing the visual aspect of storytelling, although the more interesting stuff has generally been drawn by Paolo Riveria. Daredevil gives a unique challenge for an artist, because they need to convey the visual experience of someone whose defining trait is that he can't see. This panel isn't really showing that at all, though. I highlighted it mostly because it's the culmination of Mark Waid's run up to this point. For at least the past decade prior to Waid starting on the title, Daredevil's defining trait has been that his life is depressing as hell--his secret identity was ruined, his wife was driven insane by his enemies, and everyone he cared about ended up abandoning him or dying. Waid opened with a simple premise: Matt Murdock can either choose to enjoy what he has, or go mad. And he toyed with both extremes. The last few issues had Daredevil's enemies once again closing in on him, but this single page shows how he's overcome them, by refusing to be brought low. The size of the page--the single panel image--is also much more open than the rest of the comic, with a lot more open space, again symbolizing his reclaimed freedom (although that is a ridiculously long staff).

Young Avengers 6

By Keiron Gillen and  Kate Brown.  This is yet another young Marvel series that's really been pushing the envelope in terms of the visuals. Usually, though, Keiron Gillen's partner in crime is Jamie McKelvie; check out this feature at Comics Alliance.  My favorite is Marvel Boy's 2 page spread, numbered fight, though the panel-breaking Loki is also a highlight. But Kate Brown's proven she's up to filling McKelvie's shoes, and providing her own style. There's a number of pages that I could have picked for this one, but I went with the two page spread showing the speedster's perception of time when he's moving at high speeds. Time is a tricky thing to show in comics, because the images are, by the nature of images, static. And yet without the passing of time, nothing in a comic can happen. There's a number of ways to convey time; Scott McCloud devotes a whole chapter to them in Understanding Comics. Brown uses a few different ones here. If you look close at the images, his hands are slightly blurred, which is a pretty common device. She also uses the size of the panels--the smaller panels suggest not only speed, but fine detail, performing fragmented close-ups, contrasted with the larger panels that show "normal" time. And the whole page is laid out in a way vaguely reminiscent of a microchip, reinforcing the assembly that our speedster's performing. I also like her use of expressions: even without the word bubbles, Tommy's arrogance shines through, from his facial expressions to how he flings around the cup of coffee. David, the onlooker, in contrast doesn't say a word, but still conveys a mix of skepticism and slightly unsettled. I wasn't familiar with Brown before this issue, but I'll be keeping an eye out for her from now on.

I love that this sort of play with the comic form is happening at Marvel, in superhero comics, a genre of comics that tends to be rather traditional. Granted, it's all in decidedly "B-list" titles, but I think it's a good sign of the industry's creative health, if not financial health.

Will this feature ever return? Why not COMMENT AND LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK?

Later Days.

156 Thoughts about The Last of Us

So a friend of mine decided to be kinder to me than I deserved, and lent me his copy of The Last of Us, the Naughty Dog developed Sony released PS 3 exclusive zombie apocalypse game, to play until he returns from camping next Thursday. I started on Saturday, and finished it today. And I kept a running set of notes on the game as I went. It's partly critical, and partly a first reaction to events as they unfold. Spoilers abound.

156 Thoughts about The Last of Us, after the break.

A Year of Villain Songs

 I've been engaged in a project, of sorts, for the past year. I was looking at a list of top "villain songs"--broadly defined as songs sung by or about a story's villain--and thought to myself, I could do better than that. And so I did. Every day, for 365 days, I've been posting one villain song, and a link to a video of it on Facebook. (I'm sure any subsequent drops in my friends is purely coincidental.) And, for the last half or so, I tweeted the links as well. For posterity's sake, I thought I'd post the list here. A few provisos:

1) This is a numbered list--to make sure I've got all 365 songs--but not an ordered list, because, frankly, finding 365 villain songs was enough work without creating some master rubric to evaluate them all. I burned through a lot of my favorite at the beginning when I wasn't sure how many I'd be doing. Beyond that, I tried to pick "special" ones for momentous numbers, generally at multiples of 25.  And the last ten or so are the best from my remaining pile.

2) Some of them have links, and some of them do not. This is largely because--see 1), making the list was enough work. They're mostly findable through a google search, if you're curious.

3) This list is not quite the order they were originally presented. I didn't keep great records of the whole list until I was fifty or so songs in, so that order's messed up a bit, and I'd do things like count 124 twice, and not notice till much later, then skip ahead accordingly. But it's close to the original order. Pardon the errors; I've marked the ones I've noticed. 

4) Favorite songs are marked with favorite.

5) There was a rather large number of songs that didn't make the 365 cut. For the most part, it's because I'm less familiar with them. If you've got something that you think should be added to the overall list, by all means, let me know and I'll put it in the extras.

Here we go, then.