Month: November 2004

Some quick media reviews (which have been banging around in my Palm and online for a few days) of my British Airways movie entertainment:

The Bourne Supremacy

• More conspiratorial spy action with super-death-on-two-feet Jason Bourne, courtesy of still-baby-faced Matt Damon.
• Bourne plays less of a center-stage role, as we spend more time with the CIA team trying to pin him down for a crime they think he committed, along with others plotting Bourne’s demise or seeking their own ends. That’s unfortunate, as it makes Bourne more of a comic book super-man type of character than in the first flick. He’s more in control of the situation, and therefore less sympathetic (if more “cool”); there’s never any real sense (to me) that Bourne is in significant danger.
• Plenty of plot twists and turns this time out, though, especially for folks who like conspiracy theories. Too many twists, perhaps, as plot is layered on plot in a way that just feels messy, not clever. By the end, though, the movie seems to have run out of steam a bit, just like the eponymous hero.
• The criticized super-jiggly-cam school of cinematography is not as noticeable on a little LCD screen on an in-flight aircraft.
• A much better to film to simply let flow, rather than think about it. On that level, it’s a lot of fun — and gives me some good ideas for my IDC game …
• Rating: 4 bullet holes out of 5.

I, Robot

• This would have been a fine film if they’d simply drawn on Asimov’s concepts (even given him a “dedicated to” line) and bypassed the title. Ironically, I think more SF fans were turned off by turning Asimov’s tales into a Will Smith action flick than were drawn to see it on that basis.
• There’s a very literate film, questioning what it means to be human and what the value of human effort is and what the very nature of human morality might be, lurking in I, Robot. Unfortunately, half it had to be chopped up to show some great shots of Will Smith blowing some robots apart with his gun.
• I take it back — more SF fans were turned off by turning Susan Calvin into a clueless Bond girl than were turned off by use of the title.
• Alan Tudyk does a nice job channeling Roddy McDowell in a rather dull role. Will Smith tries his best to rise above being a wise-cracking action hero, but the director and screenwriter succeed in dragging him back down into it. The plot is clunky, and the surprise twists are clumsily executed (and not all that brilliant to begin with).
• Guys, we get it when the robots are being good vs when they’re being bad. You don’t have to color code the good robots as blue and the bad robots as red. For that matter, the robots are just not convincing — they look too CG, they don’t move realistically (ballistically), and the cool glowy plastic they are partially sheathed in shows up nowhere else in the 2035 technology base, thus making them look even more out of place.
• Interestingly, the exploration of some long-term ramifications of the Three Laws was paralleled by some of Asimov’s later books (back when he started — mistakenly, IMO — merging the Foundation series with the Robot series). There are, though, hints of it back in the early Robot shorts — indeed, the very nature of most of the Robot short stories was how the Three Laws could get folks into a lot more trouble than would seem obvious.
• Rating: 3 platinum-iridium sponges out of 5 (4 for effort, 2 for execution, 3 if you’re just looking for a cool CGI shoot-em-up)

Troy

• To be fair, I watched about 15 minutes near the beginning, and flipped it off in bored disdain; I then flipped past it later on and decided to watch about the last 15 minutes. It might have been brilliant the whole rest of the time, but I seriously doubt it.
• Acting and writing more wooden than the horse. Not only did I not care about a single character I saw (except for maybe Peter O’Toole’s Priam), but I wanted the city to burn down with the invaders still inside. Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, Eric Bana — plenty of talent here, all wrapped in bronze and dropped to the bottom of the wine-dark sea.
• The writers couldn’t decide whether to be faithful to the Illiad or faithful to writing a Hollywood Sword-n-Sandals epic, and thus managed to grab the worst elements of both. It’s convoluted and littered with too many characters, who alternate between being aloofly classical and soap-operatic. Greek pottery is more lively and engaging.
• The battle CG is a lot less realistic than the LotR flicks, which is kind of ironic, given that it’s all humans up there. The city of Troy suffers from “Look, here’s a major city with no surrounding roads or outbuildings or huts or anything,” just as did too many locales in LotR, but here it’s even more obvious on the arid Turkish (Maltese) coast.
• This film has probably done more to damage popular interest in the classics than any education reform of the last fifty years.
• Rating: 2 improbably-fashioned swords out of 5. And that’s being generous out of a respect for both the source material and the genre.

I probably severly date myself by saying that I think The Dick Van Dyke Show was pure comedy genius. That Carl Reiner was the inspiration, executive producer, occasional writer, and occasional actor (and, indeed, originally wrote the Robert Petrie role for himself) is a big part of it. That Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Rose Marie, and Morey Amsterdam were/are geniune talents themselves is a big part of it, too.

I spotted The Best of the Dick Van Dyke Show, Vol. 2 in the $5 bin at Best Buy, which should be a crying shame, except they’re now releasing full season DVD sets. The disc has four episodes, which may be short on overall minutes, but is still a steal:

1. “Where Did I Come From?” — One of the standard “flashback” episodes, as Rob and Laura tell Richie about the day of his birth. Overly-Anxious Dads is a comedy trope done to death, but even today, over forty years later (eep!), Van Dyke’s rendition is priceless. Part of it is that he’s such a physical actor, in movement and expression. He also has a great sense of comic timing. For any guy who’s been waiting for his wife to say that it’s time to go to the hospital (or for the wife in question), this ep can only provoke grins.
2. “That’s My Boy??” — Classic farce, as Rob (again in flashback) is convinced (with good reason) that the hospital has given them the wrong baby. The particular resolution to this one (pre-DNA-testing) gets some serious laughs even today.

3. “It May Look Like A Walnut” — My favorite DvD ep of all time, as Rob has a nightmare (or does he) based on the creepy late night horror flick he and Laura were watching. Guest stars another executive producer, Danny Thomas, and a delightfully hammy Mary Tyler Moore never looks better resting in a huge pile of walnuts spilling out of the closet.

4. “October Eve” — Laura discovers that a nude painting of her (she didn’t pose nude, of course; it was artistic license) not only wasn’t destroyed, but now is on sale for big bucks at a large downtown NYC art gallery. Rob finds out, Carl Reiner guest stars, and embarrassed hilarity ensues.

I would put DvD up against any sitcom on the air today, and these episodes are, in fact, among the best. Folks may feel free to pick up any other $5 specials of this series for me for the holidays (or, heck, I’ll just add the Season Sets into my Amazon Wish List … 🙂 )

Farscape is going into syndication, though it’s a shame it’s a year away.

(via Julia)