On Deadly Ground (1994), Rambo (2007)

We should have known, from the moment that the camera panned up Steven Seagal's body from his black boots to his black jeans to a fringed buckskin Mohicans jacket, that this thriller about oil interests in Alaska would be a terrible abuse which gives a bad name to environmentalists everywhere. I bought this DVD in Bull Moose Records on a trip to Portsmouth, NH, and got really excited by the description on the back: Seagal directed, Michael Caine starred as the evil oil company honcho, and everything looked copacetic (despite the evidence that Joan Chen starred as the Queen of the Esquimeaux - once again, Hollywood casts an Asian person as an Inuit without a blush of shame). But no, it's an awful mess. The Inuit still use dog sleds and live in some sort of skin-covered huts. They take Seagal into these huts and minister to him with Mystical Medicine, then take him on a hallucinogenic trip into the Nature World where he discovers that his true Mission is to save the Earth from evil corporate types. (The Inuit couldn't do it, because they're primitives. Der!) Seagal's spirit animal is, of course, a bear. (Nobody's spirit animal is ever a lemming or a caterpillar or something.) Joan Chen in tow, he proceeds to tear up the offending oil rig and kill the smooth-faced, duplicitous Caine. Big shocker.

I would be less disappointed in this movie if we hadn't recently seen the new "Rambo," which Stallone directed and which also stars a large cast of non-Euro actors - in this case, Burmese and Thai. This "Rambo" is truly disturbing in a profoundly violent way. The evil insurgents who Rambo fights are terrorizing Burmese villages, and nobody from the outside will do anything about it. Except, of course, Rambo, who has been living in the country employed in gathering poisonous snakes for poisonous-snake fighting rings. He's convinced to intervene in the bad situation by a missionary group who really wants to help. He proceeds not to help much (it seems like the situation is pretty much FUBAR) but does manage to rescue at least some of the missionaries. Despite the fact that every time Rambo did something Rambo-esque we felt compelled to shout "RAMBO!" really loud, the movie was really something on a different level - unshrinkingly dark in its vision of the trouble that the people were living through. Definitive proof: Seagal is no Stallone.

The Mist (2007)

I have wanted to see this for a while, because I kept hearing good things, and Nick finally gave in and brought it home the other day. It's a Frank Darabont-directed movie - he did "Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile" and is kind of, as Nick put it, "a Stephen King auteur," which is a funny idea. (And indeed, when we watched the special features at the end, with Darabont and King, it was truly embarrassing to see D. kiss K.'s ass - I had to scream at Nick to turn it off.)

Regardless, this is truly terrifying and affecting, and even Thomas Jane's habit of acting by moving only the middle parts of his eyebrows could not mar that for me. Jane and his little blond child (a boy probably about seven) go to the supermarket, and while they're there a mist falls over the small New England town where they live. After a couple of bad incidents, the people trapped in the supermarket figure out that the mist hides some terrible creatures, and they start to freak out.

In the best apocalyptic-movie sense, the worst and scariest things that happen are things that could have been avoided, but for the human propensity to become irrational in the course of trying to self-preserve. Marcia Gay Harden plays an evangelical Christian who sees the invasion as her chance to convert people before the Apocalypse comes to pass - and she succeeds, much to the chagrin of the few people in the supermarket who don't drink the Kool-Aid.

The relationship between the boy, who spends most of the movie crying, and the dad, who tries to figure out how to explain what's happening to his son, is truly affecting, and feels very real. It's wrenching almost (but not quite) on the order of Haneke's "Time of the Wolf."

Darabont says in the interview with King at the end that he had to extract a promise from the studio and take a pay cut in exchange for them allowing him to keep the ending the way it is. I can see why - it's certainly not kid-friendly, for example, and it may make some people feel like throwing up - but I can't imagine the movie without it. Oh yes, actually, I can - it would be a lot like "I Am Legend."

Blood Car (2007)

Sorry I haven't posted in so long. (Who am I apologizing to - Cristie? Bridger?) Nick wrote a paper about remakes of 70s movies, and so we spend a month or so sort of half-watching the two versions of "The Longest Yard," "Alfie," "The Stepford Wives," etc. Nothing I really wanted to write about - though I did get to see both "Shaft"s, and the first "Shaft" is awesome. (Did you know the photog Gordon Parks directed it? I didn't!)

Last night we watched "Blood Car," a campy low-budge film about a guy who discovers a way to make cars run on blood. We got really excited when we saw the movie in "I Love Video," because there was this awesome moment at the end of the Peter Fonda movie "Idaho Transfer" when future humanoids use people as fuel for their cars. It was totally terrifying, and by far the best moment in the movie (the rest of it was kind of boring).

This "Blood Car" is about a future in which gas costs 32 dollars a gallon, and so nobody drives. Not much commentary on possible other effects of this change - nobody talks about not being able to see relatives in distant places, dying b/c of not being able to get to the hospital, whatever; the kids are still in school, the society still basically functions. People are just annoyed that they can't use their cars.

To me, this failure to look at the problem holistically kind of indicates a lack of ambition of the part of the filmmakers - and maybe that's okay. This is just a movie about a cute, mild-mannered, skinny vegan schoolteacher who is so desperate to get laid that he kills people in order to power his car, which in turn garners him the sexual favors of a hot, unlikeable young thing named Denise.

There are funny moments, to be sure, and the concept is still basically fascinating, but a bigger-budget movie could do much darker things with the plot. (Though of course, shooting kids in the head in order to get fuel is pretty dark.)

Silent Running (1972)

Dir. Douglas Trumbull, co-written, interestingly, by "Deer Hunter"'s Michael Cimino. This was a way better idea than execution, and it kind of kills me, because half of me really wants to use it in a class about seventies environmentalism or environmental disaster or ecophagy (new word I learned from the Wiki entry I read on "Screamers"!), but the other half of me knows that the undergrad mind would not easily handle the sections where Bruce Dern, wearing a druid-esque gown, communes in the garden with bunnies and the box-of-junk-looking robots he talks to. Why, Trumbull, why?

Dern is a biologist who's responsible for maintaining a giant spaceship which holds several biospheres. The ship, one of a fleet, is charged with saving what's left of non-human nature from the "poisoned soil" of Earth. The thing is, nobody except Dern's character cares anymore about non-human nature. His three co-workers on the ship are yahoos who only like to run around in little go-karts, trampling the gardens, and are ecstatic when the decision comes from Earth to jettison all of the biospheres and return home so the ships can be put back into commercial transport. Dern kills all of them in order to save some non-human nature, although he does have sad, guilty second thoughts about having done so.

The movie is very careful to make sure that you think of Dern's character as just as much of a man as the yahoo crewmembers (he can beat them at poker, and he beats them in a fight). Just because he eats cantalope instead of the processed food provided for them doesn't mean that he doesn't have testicles, etc. Ha! I love the seventies. Total disconnect between human and non-human nature; burly yet caring man; nerdy proto-robotics technology fetish.

Screamers (1995)

Dir. Christian Duguay (who also directed the sequels to "Scanners" - who knew they existed?), made from a Philip K. Dick story, "Second Variety," that was probably way better than the movie ended up being. (There's also a documentary with the same name from 1996 that's about a tour by System of a Down. Screamers indeed!) Peter Weller is a tough-as-nails corporal in the army of miners and scientists that's fighting against a giant corporation that wants to mine berynium (sp?) on a distant planet and release all the deadly radiation sideproduct that everybody knows is released when you mine berynium. Weller is the kinda guy who kills tons of people but also has a desk that's got a giant pyramid as a pedestal, at which he sits with his legs propped up and listens to classical music as he looks at his coin collection to pass the time.

The "screamers" in question are "autonomous swords" that the good guys have implanted in the sand all over the planet. They race toward anything with a pulse and dismember it. Somehow, only the good guys have figured out the special tech that will disable a screamer (a wristband that screws up your pulse until you don't sound tasty to a screamer). The bad guys are still vulnerable to being all ripped up. Meanwhile, the screamers themselves have evolved, until they're no longer a little animal-looking thing and instead have figured out how to manifest themselves in form of a pathetic little kid clutching a teddy bear, a tough-guy soldier with teardrop face tattoos, a hot-girl soldier, and basically anything else they want. (Where's the missing link, I ask you?)

I don't even really feel like I can properly criticize the movie, because it was so low-budge. I always love an interplanetary resource extraction plot, but I credit Dick with that. But mostly, it made me want to see "Starship Troopers."

Margot at the Wedding (2007)

Directed by Noah Baumbach. I was so, so, so resistant to seeing this movie. I thought it was going to be like a mix of a Wes Anderson movie, a Neil Labute movie, that bad book The Emperor's Children, and "You Can Count on Me" (which, paradoxically, I remember loving, so what's my problem?) I just found the idea of watching a bunch of yuppies unload on each other so un-fun. And I guess now that I've seen this and liked it, I should probably watch "The Squid and the Whale" like everybody says I should.

Nicole Kidman (Margot) and Jennifer Jason Leigh (Pauline) are two sisters with a poisonous relationship who should probably stay very far away from each other, but seem unable to do so. Pauline is about to get married to a sorta loserish guy, Malcolm, played by Jack Black, who, although he is far less successful than Margot at his chosen artistic pursuit, is one of the only people in the movie who seems like he would actually be fun to hang out with. Margot is a terrible person, mean to her poor tween son, critical of everybody, including herself, and unable to stop poking her nose in other people's business. Pauline is less objectionable, but I still found myself wondering why she would put up with her sister's obnoxiousness. The women are at the tail end of their sexual desirability, or at least they think of themselves as being there, and that influences their relationships with each other and with men. However, you get the sense that they may have been crazy when they were young as well, which saves the movie from being one which points fingers at addled, high-strung middle-aged women (a vulnerable demographic indeed, and one which I will inhabit within the decade or so, so I'm sensitive).

Overall, the dialogue clicks, there's enough happening without the movie being overloaded with event, and the movie, and the planned wedding, take place on an unnamed island in New England, where the family has an old beach house of the genteelly shabby type. This made me pleasantly homesick.

Escape from LA (1996)

Fifteen years after his triumphal extraction of the American President from the prison-island of Manhattan, Snake Plissken is, as the poster says, BACK. This time, the powers-that-be control all of the United States and exile all undesirables to Los Angeles, which has been cut off from the rest of the country by an apocalyptic earthquake which was predicted by the evil religious President. LA is now an autonomous island (sound familiar?) ruled by freaks, gangs, and prostitutes. A South American instigator named Cuervo Jones (that name is the textual equivalent of the scene in "John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars" [2001] when the guy goes to chop into a tin can to impress a girl and chops three of his fingers off instead) has invaded the dream virtual reality-space of the President's daughter Utopia and convinced her to steal an important black briefcase from her dad and meet him in LA with it. Snake is supposed to find the black briefcase and bring it back to the powers-that-be, and he only has half a day to do it in, because they've injected him with some sort of slow-acting virus that will eventually kill him unless he gets the antidote.

Russell delivers every line with a scornful hiss at the end, and there's a scene where he and Peter Fonda surf through the streets of LA, and Cuervo forces him to play a form of elimination basketball in which the penalty for not making enough baskets is death (guess what, Snake beats the system!) It's totally cheesy and delightful, and the end, when Snake decides that he is going to activate the device in the black briefcase and cut off every piece of electronic equipment in the world, thereby destabilizing everything and wrecking both the President's and Cuervo's dreams of control, only made me wish that we could see what happens next.

10,000 BC (2007)

The only good thing to come out of this movie was us. Early.

Chopper (2000)

On the heels of loving the Jesse James movie, I wanted to see "Chopper" all the more, since Andrew Dominik directed them both. I also have a strong affection for Eric Bana, for some reason, so I had been pushing for us to see "Chopper" for a while. Nick finally agreed after some resistance, since he hadn't liked it very much the last time he saw it.

Although I had no reason to think this, I had this impression that there was a motorcycle in this movie, and since I knew the film was Australian and about prison, I pictured sort of a Mad Max scenario: a convict riding around liberating people from prisons in the outback, shooting people. Lots of blood, I thought. I was right about the last part, but not the motorcycle. No motorcycle was involved.

Bana, who seems both taller and fleshier than he was in "Munich" and "Troy" (please, no laughing), is indeed a convict, who earns the name "Chopper" when he gets another convict to cut off the outside edges of his ears so that he will get sent into the prison hospital. Inside and outside of prison, Chopper leverages his charisma and his willingness to be more violent than everybody else, emerging embattled but yet untouchable (in this way, he's like Jesse James, and we kept noticing similarities between the two movies - yet another piece in the "Australian outback = American West" equation). Eventually, he becomes some sort of a media phenom, with DVDs and books produced about his story (apparently this happened in real life too).

There's a scene where Chopper's ally turns on him and shivs him repeatedly in the chest, while Chopper continues to stand up and look at the friend with reproachful eyes, finally stripping off his shirt so that everyone can see the blood pulsing out of all of his stab wounds. He's like a tree whose bark is being ripped off piece by piece. Or Christ. That's what I'll probably remember from the movie, along with the scene when Chopper pulls his flaccid penis out of his pants in order to impress a lady in a bar who's looking his way. Laughing maniacally, he watches as she tries to suppress her obvious interest, attracted as much by his madness as by the dangling member. Probably not Bana's actual banana. But hey.

Gone Baby Gone (2007)

The Casey Affleck-fest continues! This movie was directed by bro Affleck, the other one, what's-his-name, the Garner one. Casey is Patrick Kenzie, a private eye in Dorchester, MA who's called in to investigate a case of a missing four-year-old girl. Twists and turns ensue as Kenzie, his girlfriend/partner Angie, and three cops navigate Dorchester looking for Amanda.

I thought I would not be able to extract the character of Robert Ford out of Casey Affleck, and that I might find him repulsive and a bit frightening forevermore. And while occasionally, when Kenzie is at a loss for words, I expected Bob Ford's stock phrase "I'm sorry you feel that way" come out of his mouth, I mostly was able to accept the transition. The callowness of Ford, the youth and cockiness that made all of the people in "Assassination of Jesse James" want to beat him down on sight, continues in Kenzie, who pisses everyone in one bar off so much that he has to pull a gun on them to get away. But there's a much more likable moral depth there, as well.

The main problem I had with this movie was with the casting of Michelle Monaghan as Affleck's ever-present but silent girlfriend/"partner," Angie, who never does anything but just sit with him while he asks the questions. She is so much prettier than everyone else in this movie that it ruins everything every time the camera lands on her. One character, after realizing that they went to the same high school, asks Angie "Still a bit conceited, I see?" This line is trying to make the willowy, OC-esque girl actually belong to this world in some way, but since she has no back story, no accent, no feeling, no words, it's really hard to see her as a part of it. Affleck is too attractive, as well, but in his Adidas jackets and with his incipient forehead lines, you can kind of see him as a fresh-faced Irish Bostonian about to go to seed. You could, that is, if Michelle's character weren't right next to him the whole time. Together, the two look like they've been cut out of another, prettier, teen-ier movie and inserted into this one.

Apparently some people from Boston were mad that Affleck made them look so ugly. And I'm a little mad that the Afflecks, from Cambridge, claim to speak for Dorchester (am I splitting hairs?) But it's funny that this article, from Slate, which defends Dorchester from Affleck's sometimes ugly portrait, is written by Patrick Keeffe, who I happen to know grew up in Dorchester but then went to my fancy-pants high school alma mater, Milton Academy. How close does somebody have to be to a place in order to defend it or portray it properly? That's one of those koans that will never be answered, but I like what Patrick Keeffe says here: "It's Dorchester by way of Diane Arbus." Yes: there's the same sense of dirty fascination with the goings-on inside those row houses as one gets when looking at Arbus photos. The comparison is particularly apt when the film gets to the point when Affleck enters the boarded-up house where a child molester has kept a seven-year-old boy hostage. Must the child molester have a rounded head with overly slitty eyes, like he's bordering on mongoloidism? Pedophiles aren't a different phenotype, so far as I know.

But anyway. I think the film is saved from charges of exploitation by the ending. Don't read this if you don't want it spoiled. Okay. Kenzie faces a choice: take the child, Amanda, back from the kindly police captain who has kidnapped her with the help of her uncle, and give her back to her slatternly mother; or leave her to grow up a nice, middle-class life. He chooses the former, which enraged me as much as it does Angie, who leaves him for it.

But the way I read it, Kenzie has to choose to give the child back to the mother, because if he chooses the other way, he's basically saying that Helene, the mother, and tangentially, Dorchester itself are inherently toxic and dangerous. He's demonstrating faith in human nature and faith in his community. Although the film leaves you questioning whether Kenzie made the right choice, there's still a sense that in some way, the director is demonstrating his faith in Dorchester as a real, non-sensationalized place, where children don't have to be "lost" permanently.

Michael Clayton (2007)

Directed by Tony Gilroy, this movie got Tilda Swinton an Oscar and I kind of feel like it should have gotten more people involved with it more Oscars. I couldn't understand, before seeing it, how there could be such a thing as a legal thriller that was "quiet," but after viewing, I completely get it. Although the film is "Insider"-esque in its intense portrayal of the power inherent in corporations with lots of money, there's also the compelling moral journey of this Michael Clayton character.

Clayton/Clooney is an outsider in a monied world, sort of a hired legal thug who "fixes" problems that arise for his big-fancy-pants law firm (problems like undocumented nannies, drunken car accidents, etc). When he's asked to "fix" a problem involving his friend Arthur (Tom Wilkinson), a senior lawyer at the firm who's gone off his medication and begun to blather about how the firm is wrong to be defending U-North, a giant pesticide company, against a multi-plaintiff lawsuit, Clayton begins to have second thoughts about his life. The best parts are the ones where he goes to family reunions at shabby suburban houses in upstate NY, or interacts with his cop brother, or has man-to-man talks with his little son (I told Nick that one particular conversation of theirs was one of the only on-screen parent-child sentimentalities I've ever felt moved by).

One problem only—the movie has a weirdly inverted structure—there's an intro, and then a "four days earlier" screen, a la "Alias"—which feels unnecessarily "Memento" and unneeded.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

This move got totally shafted by only getting one Oscar. We both thought it was incredibly beautiful to look at—it won the statute for cinematography—but it was also a sort of brain-bending, quiet, sad human story.

Robert Ford, played by Casey Affleck, joins Jesse James' band of outlaws right at the tail end of their exploits. He's a handsome young man who nobody likes or wants to be around, because he is so insecure that he seems dangerous, like a stretch of quicksand or a bridge held together by string. Affleck's eyes shift around constantly as he tries to ingratiate himself into the gang. Despite his good looks, he's completely unappealing.

Watching Affleck's Ford reminded me of the phenomenon childhood studies scholars talk about in questioning people's reactions to being around young children. They point at the horror that adults feel upon realizing that a particular child seems to be faking cuteness in order to be loved. That moment lays bare all of the assumptions that the adult has had about adult-child relationships and their naturalness and goodness, by exposing the power dynamic that's always present. Like the cute-faking child, Affleck's Robert Ford tries to play the part of the handsome young gunslinger, but the responses of everyone around him show that he is failing. And like that child might, Ford lashes back by becoming more and more angry and confused. He loses his initial hero worship of James, and as he begins to think that James is going to kill him and his brother (played by the awesome Sam Rockwell), he forms the resolve necessary to kill James first.

Meanwhile, Brad Pitt's James is mercurial, likeable at one point, unlikeable at the next, and always in control of every situation. By playing off of Ford's hero worship and insecurity, James creates a situation in which he practically aims Ford's gun at his own head and pulls the trigger.

The barren, muddy old-West landscapes (the movie was actually filmed in Calgary, Edmonton, and Winnipeg) and and the cold, unvarnished frontier interiors make every scene look paradoxically clean and perfectly arranged.

Right At Your Door (2006)

Dir. Chris Gorak. There's a bunch of bombs that go off in LA! They have dirty-ness in them, some undefined disease! (I thought dirty bombs were supposed to have radium in them, or something, but maybe I was wrong?) There's a couple, and the husband stays at home because he's an unemployed musician, and the wife, a real ball-breaker, goes to work in her convertible, and ends up stuck in the middle of the melee. When she comes back to the house, the husband has already sealed it up with plastic and lots of duct tape, like Tom Ridge told him to do, and he refuses to let her in. I thought that a lot of the movie was supposed to involve them debating their relationship and its flaws, but there's really only a second or two when they actually do that. Mostly they're crying and trying to figure out what to do.

The movie's major flaw is that it doesn't have enough budget to show the destruction of LA in proper apocalyptic style. Instead of real visions of destruction, we get exposition about the whole scene from media outlets or from the wife ("I went to the hospital! They weren't letting anyone in and people were jumping into the windows from parking lots nearby!" Nick said, "That would be really cool, if you showed it!") The "destruction" that's on this poster never actually shows up. Instead there are a couple of shots from the couple's house toward the street of what looks like smoke from a smoke bomb set off by a production assistant a couple streets over.

This wouldn't matter as much if there weren't major holes in the plot, like when you find out at the end that the husband is the one who's actually screwed because he sealed himself into the house with a particularly deadly strain of the virus—yet, he hasn't been at all sick, while the wife, who's been outside the whole time, has been coughing to beat the band.

I still teared up when she talked on the phone to her brother, though, but mostly because I have been playing phone tag with my own brother for two months and I miss him.

Klute (1971)

Directed by Alan J. Pakula, this movie has a young Donald Sutherland as a detective from Palookaville, PA (actually, Tuscarora), who investigates a missing-persons case in the Big City. Jane Fonda is a jaded prostitute/model/actress with a connection to the missing man. Sutherland and Fonda slowly form a working relationship, as she takes him into the Underworld to follow various leads. He's a total straight man - literally jug-eared, and wearing dorky jackets, he is out of place in the wild partying seventies underground dives she brings him into, but has a masculine, old-school sense of purpose that somehow forces her to yield and help him with his investigatins, and eventually to sleep with him. For fun! Not for money!

There are a couple good what-is-the-sex-industry-all-about moments in here, like when Fonda meets with her psychiatrist and talks to her about her inability to get out of the trade (she likes the sense of control that she has over events, which the film opposes quite well to the moments when she gets passed over at modeling calls and auditions). But overall, it chafes that she's the ultimate woman-on-her-own who figures out that she can't really hack it without a man for protection. "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," from 1977, seems to be sort of a more violent spiritual sequel to this movie.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (1984)

This movie, directed by W.D. Richter, is about a man, played by Robocop Peter Weller, who is a genius scientist, rock guitarist, neurosurgeon, adrenaline junkie, and samurai, and who is supposedly half-Japanese and half-American but really only looks very Aryan (if I were an Asian guy I would be mad that this awesome role went to a not-half-Asian guy from Stevens Point, Wisconsin).

Banzai and his team of cool scientists (all guys, except for the love interest) travel around the world pushing the edges of knowledge and are the subject of comic bookery. In this movie, Banzai has figured out how to get into the eighth dimension; it comes to light that there are aliens living there, on a parallel plane with humanity; then there's some stuff about how the bad aliens want to take over some distant planet and Banzai's action has given them an opening, while good aliens try to help close the gate, blah blah.

Watching this movie reminded me yet again of how my media exile during the 1980s rendered my tastes irrevocably different from those of the rest of my peers. I can see how it would be appealing and nostalgic to watch this so that you could revel in the funny suits and the short-haired, wide-shouldered love interest, and the sort of cheesy production values and the funny synth music etc etc, but I just find it kind of grating. Am I still bitter that I got left out, so many years ago? Maybe.

Dude! Not only is Peter Weller weirdly an art historian (though not a PhD), but he plays in a jazz band with Jeff Goldblum sometimes! If Wikipedia is right, anyway.

Last of the Mohicans (1992)

A test: can an American Studies person find it in her heart to like a move that eviscerates James Fenimore Cooper's plot, meaning, and style as thoroughly as Magua does one of his enemies on the battlefield? My friend Josh holds that one should like this movie because Fenimore Cooper's book sucks anyway, and it's interesting that people in the 1990s like this movie for the same reason people in the 1820s liked the book (it's all about the frontier - it's just that the valences have shifted and people don't mind seeing Natty - oops, sorry, "Nathaniel" - fall in love and settle down instead of wandering restlessly).

I don't know. Believe me, I liked seeing the longhaired Daniel Day Lewis kissing the equally longhaired Madeline Stowe after they had about two conversations and "fell in love" (well, I guess maybe fighting evil Hurons together might have brought them some sort of a bonded feeling). But Cooper's Natty Bumppo was remarkable in his singularity partially because he was neither white nor Indian, neither straight nor homosexual, neither settled nor tribal - he was nothing, really, and because of that he was everything. I might be making too much of it, but I felt sort of betrayed.

I also felt betrayed to see Russell Means, ex-AIM activist, occupier of Wounded Knee and Alcatraz, as Chingachgook, making a speech about how his people would vanish into the sunset and others would come but it would all be the same, etc etc. What happened?

Twelve Monkeys (1995)

I saw this when it came out, which must mean that I was in high school, and I have to say, I didn't "get" it back then (just like I didn't "get" Moby-Dick - pearls before swine, I tell you). Nick recently made me watch "La Jetee," the short film made by Chris Marker which was the inspiration for this movie, and after seeing that I couldn't wait to revisit this longer version. There's the same basic plot and structure, but obviously this version is much more elaborate, since it's, like, seven times the length.

The conceit in both: an apocalyptic event (in "Jetee", nuclear war; in "Monkeys," a virus) has forced humanity underground. Evil scientist figures (in "Jetee," you barely see them and they're characterized mostly by their rapid-fire whispering in German - awesome; in "Monkeys," they're a fully visible council of learned evil-doers) keep people in prisons and force them to "volunteer" for fact-finding missions focused on figuring out what happened and retrieving a magic bullet to help humanity survive and be able to get aboveground again.

The human-guinea-pig-in-a-pen scenario is neatly paralleled, in "Monkeys," with the mental institution that the Willis character ends up in after being sent back in time for information-gathering. (The kind psychiatrist, Madeline Stowe, asks the Willis character whether he's been institutionalized before - the answer, of course, is far more horrific than she can imagine.)

There's something neat about imagining, hey, what if all the prophets of the apocalypse throughout history have been TIME TRAVELERS sent back to save humanity, and we're ignoring them at our peril? But the movie is also great in its visual style - the institution, the underground tunnels, even the airport are all more-beautiful versions of their actual grungy real-life selves, just like how in "Brazil" even the gross housing projects feel like pretty sets in some underlying, arranged way.

Or maybe I'm just a sucker for movies in which animals take over the earth. Hey, it worked for "I Am Legend." Or did it?

Black Robe (1991)

I watched this because I just read the book Middle Ground, by Richard White, about Frenchmen and Indians in the upper Midwest in the seventeenth century, and I remembered that I had heard about this movie a while ago and never followed up. Sure enough, here we have a foresaken Jesuit lost in the Michigan frontier and trying to convert Indians who want nothing to do with him.

This movie does a good job of not idealizing the lives of the Native Americans - they are at war, they trust obviously-ridiculous sorcerers, etc - but also making it clear that the Frenchmen are no saviors. The piety of the Jesuit remains incomprehensible throughout. He often says things like, "This country is damned by the devil," when the camera is showing gorgeous river/mountains footage. Good reminder that for seventeenth-century Europeans, wilderness was not a good word yet.

This was directed by Bruce Beresford, who apparently also directed "Driving Miss Daisy," though you could have fooled me. I guess there's some sort of races-understanding-each-other theme going on, but "Black Robe" can be pretty brutal - arrows through the neck, torture, quasi-rape. Of course, there's a lovely Indian maiden, played by an actress who's actually Asian, who ends up falling in love with the younger Frenchman who accompanies the Jesuit on his mission. (She's the reason for the quasi-rape, as she uses her wiles to get the group out of captivity when they're about to be killed by the Iroquois.) Apparently some Native American groups objected to the torture scenes. I object to the fact that the movie does that thing where the actors speak to each other in French-accented English when in real life they really would have been speaking French. I hate that thing.

The Invasion (2007)

The Invasion got a real bum rap, and it might have sort of deserved it. The remake of the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers was directed partially by Oliver Hirschspiegel, who directed Der Untergang (2004), the awesome movie about the interior of Hitler's bunker during the fall of Berlin. But halfway through the direction, the studio thought it wasn't big-money enough, and sent in the Matrix/Wachowski Brothers to "fix" it. This means that there are some really good, foreboding, what's-wrong-with-humanity scenes, with the texture and intent of Der Untergang, and then there are some really cheesy moments, like car chases and subway chases (with a be-heeled Kidman running like crazy) and a scene where Kidman's six-year-old son gives his mother an adrenaline shot through the sternum (which, if you watched Pulp Fiction, you happen to know is really, really difficult to do).

Nicole Kidman will just never be believable as a mother to me, even though I have few illusions about the sanctity/softness/sweetness of motherhood. It was better when she was a mean, evil mother in The Golden Compass (which also starred Daniel Craig in the sorta-romantic other lead). There are many character development issues, including the question of why Kidman's character wouldn't go for Craig's romantic propositions. Hey! I almost wrote "Clinton" when I was supposed to be writing "Kidman"! Heh.

The Andromeda Strain (1971)

From the Crichton book of the same name, which was published in 1969 and which was his first Big Break. I'm not sure I should even be patronizing anything attached to Crichton, given his weirdo ostrich stance on global warming, but I cannot resist his crush on science. This movie would never have been made the way it was now (and particularly not post-Outbreak - there is simply not enough vomiting of organs in this film, and nobody's suit gets cut with a scalpel, at least not unintentionally). The pace is incredibly slow, dwelling lovingly on each scientific procedure, and especially on the equipment.

The film starts with soldiers observing a slumbering town named Piedmont, in New Mexico (the look of which I swear was copied from Ansel Adams' "Moonrise in Hernandez, New Mexico" - see pic). Turns out Piedmont is not actually asleep - everybody has died because they were exposed to bacteria which came down on a super-secret satellite sent up by army guys trying to explore the possibilities of alternative types of life extant in outer space. (Maybe they were also trying to find biological weapons, but that's not really clear till later.) A crack team of scientists is assembled, including the mastermind who has been involved in the government project to collect these extraterrestrial organisms. (Can I just say that I love the scene in movies when a crack team of scientists is assembled? I hope one day to be part of either the assembling or the assemblage of a crack team of somebodies. I'm pretty sure at this point it won't be of scientists, but hey.)

After a couple of these scientists explore Piedmont and find two survivors, the action moves underground, to "Wildfire" - a top-secret facility constructed to investigate extraterrestrial lifeforms under ultimately sanitary conditions. The movie spends about twenty minutes, it seems, on showing how the scientists de-bacterize, including a gross scene when the outer epidermis is basically burned off.

The rest of the film follows the crack team through every minute of their scientific discovery process, showing the microscopes, the animal testing, the titrating, the hypothesizing. Finally, the crack MD figures out what the two survivors (an old Sterno drinker and a constantly crying baby) have in common - blood that's out of kilter, Ph-wise - and discerns the way to kill Andromeda. By that time, though, the disease has mutated to a different, plastic-eating format, and isn't a threat to humans anymore. The scientists thwart Wildfire's attempt at self-destruction by nuclear bomb, and then everything's all right - except, that is, a floating mass of Andromeda off of the coast of Mexico, which the powers that be propose to kill by seeding clouds with alkali rain. Always a solution!

There's a weird, not-too-explored sixties subtext to this film - the crack team is always cracking wise about protestors and radicals, to little effect. I kind of couldn't believe that there was never an outbreak - maybe I'm too conditioned to expect really bad things to happen to the protagonists of my movies. But hey, this was rated G.

Rollerball (1975)

No, not the lame Chris Klein version, the awesome James Caan version (dir. Norman Jewison, from a short story by William Harrison). This film has the hairy-chested Caan competing in a game created by the corporations which also rule the entire world—ROLLERBALL! The sport is intended to channel spectatorial aggression, so that the people of the world don't rise up against the autocrats with big bushy eyebrows who pull all the strings of their lives. Caan's character, Jonathan E., is a rollerball *star*, and that worries the corprocrats, because if there can be stars, then the concept of individual achievement is still dangerously alive.

The thing that I thought this movie does well is the non-sports stuff - the seventies futuristic world of luxury that Jonathan E. inhabits, where gorgeous women with major cheekbones and long, flowing dresses appear at his ranch house to service him and spy on him for the Energy corporation; where the pretty people who surround Jonathan get together at night-long debauched parties to take unnamed pills and incinerate pine trees with flamethrowing pistols; where living room decor features giant leather couch-beds and crystal globes, etc. etc. I'll leave it to Nick to hopefully elaborate on the radicalism of the plot, which really is pretty anti-business. I can't imagine that the Klein version is the same, though I haven't seen it. Yet.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)

Dir. Byron Haskin, recently released by Criterion: This film follows a stranded US astronaut ("Christopher Draper", played by Paul Mantee) who finds himself on Mars after an accident, with only the monkey Mona for a companion. (Mona looked like a doll at some junctures, but the credits say that she was played by a real simian, "Barney, the Woolly Monkey".)

After a funny scene in which he watches a useless instructional video provided by the Navy on the subject of survival in a foreign land, Draper solves the problems of shelter (cave); air (a yellow Martian rock, when burned, releases oxygen); water (Mona finds an underground pool); and food (Mona's pool grows funny seaweed with summer sausage-looking pods in it). Then he starts feeling isolated and having funny dreams with the captain of his spacecraft in them (who is played by Adam West, of TV Batman fame, though Nick had to tell me that).

Just about this time, conveniently, Draper discovers a skeleton buried in the desert with metal bracelets on it, and shortly thereafter sees alien spacecraft in the sky. (I thought these looked like the ones in the 1950s "War of the Worlds", and Wikipedia actually backs me up - though these have grids which emit lasers, instead of menacing stalks on top.) The American investigates, and the ships seem to follow him, blasting holes in the rocks around him. Eventually he stumbles upon his human Friday, a slave of the alien mining corporation, which sent the ships and can track Friday by his bracelets. This human-slave-of-aliens plot is much like the Stargate movie, except there's no interesting ambisexual Ra behind the scenes manipulating things with a cat in his lap. Or is it an allegory about Communism? Crusoe comes on the scene to rescue those in oppression and tell them about the possibility of another life? Regardless, the deus ex machina/American spaceship comes to rescue them before they ever see the alien overlords, which is kind of disappointing.

The film was made in Death Valley, our own baby Mars. Daniel Defoe gets a writing credit, leading me to imagine what would have happened if Defoe had lived in the 30s or 40s and had, Faulkner-like, ended up in H'wood, pounding out scripts in the winter of his discontent. Ha!

Rocky Balboa (2006)

In this movie, Sylvester Stallone, who also directed, is a shambling, endearing weirdo with extensive plastic surgery on his face. His character wears a maroon blazer and entertains visitors to his restaurant (named "Adrian" after his erstwhile wife, who died of what he calls the "woman cancer") with old fight stories. Rocky is a local hero, and intimately connected with South Philadelphia, where all of the houses seem to remind him of Adrian, and there's something truly pathetic and moving about his quest to recover a sort of meaningful life after Adrian's passing.

I didn't really buy the idea that this quest would lead Rocky back into the ring to fight the current champ, Mason "The Line" Dixon (AWESOME), a young black hotshot who has never really gotten to fight somebody of his own caliber and is trying to prove himself. There's a lot of talk on the part of The Rock about fire in the belly and feeling like you haven't finished what you started, but in real life, wouldn't one fight just lead to "just one more"? It would for me, and that's the pathos of human nature: you always think "just one more" will satisfy you. Not Rocky - he really does want only one more, and when he's done, and has taught Dixon the meaning of tenacity, he can go back to his restaurant and his stories and maybe a romance with "Little Marie", the local girl who's platonically present throughout the film.

There's also a lot of weird race stuff in here - from the black champ's posturing and obnoxious posse; to the group of white kids in a bar who harass Rocky and who speak in affected hip-hop slang, who are supposed to signify the downfall of the neighborhood; to "Little Marie"'s son Steps, a biracial kid who serves as sort of a scarlet A signifying Marie's fallen status as single mom and ex-mate of a Jamaican. Rocky's fight is sort of a resurgence of white masculinity in the face of all of this degeneration, a la James Jeffries, the Great White Hope, who came out of retirement to fight Jack Johnson in 1910 in order to prove, quote, "that a white man is better than a Negro." (Jeffries, by the way, lost; this film lets Dixon win, but only in a split decision.)

Whatever. I still love Rocky's weird verbal tics and "yo"s and awkward posture and kindness to run-down old dogs. And I found out during this movie's training montage that Nick could once lift 615 pounds, which is valuable information and worth the watch.