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.