Dancing into a Red Dawn

So they’re remaking Red Dawn, an uber-absurd film about a Soviet invasion of the United States in 1984.  As a kid, I thought it was awesome, because those teens were just like me and they killed a bunch of commies.  Pure coolness.

After killing all those Ruskies, Patrick Swayze* and Jennifer Grey started dancing.  Total lameness.  And yes, dear reader, rumor has it they’re remaking Dirty Dancing too.

*Update: Unfortunately, Swayze passed away a few hours after my post.

Here is a list of decent but could-have-been-better movies that are more deserving of a remake than these two turkeys:

• Heavy Metal (1981)– teenage wet dream fantasy.  (A remake is rumored.)
• Big Trouble in Little China (1986)– Kurt Russell shakes the pillars of heaven.
• The Parallax View (1974)– terrific political thriller.
• Looker (1981)– the evils of plastic surgery and a beauty-obsessed culture.  And a very cool ray gun.
• The Deep (1977)– Robert Shaw, Nick Nolte, and Jacqueline Bisset search for sunken treasure.  Great flick.
• Demon Seed (1977)– turns the The Matrix inside out.
• The Face of Fu Manchu (1965)– first of five films.  For great villains, you can’t beat the Fu.  Sorry, never bought Christopher Lee in the title role.
• Flash Gordon (1980)– One of America’s greatest icons deserved a better film.  In the end, it was just a giant piece of crap.  Dump the script and start over, but keep the soundtrack.
• Sleepaway Camp (1983)– it may not be possible to improve on the best damn ending in movie history.  But dammit, someone should try.
• Phase IV (1974)– Saul Bass directed this hard-to-find gem about intelligent ants.

Watching Movies with Your Kids

Have you ever found yourself watching a movie with your kids and something happens on the screen (sex, violence, language) that makes you want to crawl under your chair? Check out Kids-In-Mind.com for helpful reviews, not written from any particular religious or political perspective.

Ben Kenobi’s Last Words to Luke Skywalker

The inconsistencies in the six-movie Star Wars story line have been discussed ad nauseum, but here is one problem no one has dealt with as far as I know.*  Ben Kenobi’s last words (as a corporeal person) to Luke Skywalker make perfect sense when interpreted within the narrow context of Episode IV, but when viewed through the lens of all six films, they become incomprehensible.

*I didn’t do an exhaustive search on this point, so if  I skipped your brilliant analysis, just post a link in the comments.

In the Death Star Command Office, our heroes have overpowered several storm troopers and a gantry officer.  R2D2 locates the source of the tractor beam that prevents the Millennium Falcon from leaving.  Kenobi leaves to deactive it, but not before this brief exchange with Luke:

BEN: I don’t think you boys can help. I must go alone.

HAN: Whatever you say. I’ve done more than I bargained for on this trip already.

LUKE: I want to go with you.

BEN: Be patient, Luke. Stay and watch over the droids.

LUKE: But he can…

BEN: They must be delivered safely or other star systems will suffer the same fate as Alderaan. Your destiny lies along a different path than mine. The Force will be with you…always!

Here’s the problem.  According to Episode III, Kenobi has gone into exile on Tatoonie for the express purpose of keeping an eye on the son of Anakin Skywalker.  Near the end of Episode III Kenobi and Yoda discuss their nearly hopeless options:

OBI-WAN: And what of the boy?

YODA: To Tatooine. To his family, send him.

OBI-WAN: I will take the child and watch over him. Master Yoda, do you think Anakin’s twins will be able to defeat Darth Sidious?

YODA: Strong the Force runs, in the Skywalker line. Hope, we can . . . Done, it is. Until the time is right, disappear we will.

By the time Episode IV opens, Kenobi has lived in isolation for nearly twenty years keeping watch over the Most Important Person in the Galaxy, the boy who might have enough natural ability with the Force to defeat Darth Vader and release the galaxy from the iron grip of the Emperor.   (Leia, the “other hope” from Episode V was apparently only a dim hope at best.)  And yet, Kenobi leaves Luke in the hands of “destiny” as he wanders away to turn off a tractor beam.  Does not compute.

The answer to this problem is obvious.  George Lucas never had the full, six-film story in mind at any point in the development of the Star Wars saga, despite his consistent claims to have been working on a story too big to film in its enterity in 1976.  I’m sure Lucas had a long, general story in mind, but at the level of fine detail, I think he was essentially making it up as he went along.  Thus, inconsistencies abound.  And for this reason, Star Wars can never be considered the kind of monumental literary success as Lord of the Rings and Dune, multi-episode fantasies with much tighter, consistent story lines.

So let’s rewrite the Command Office scene to make Kenobi’s last words to Luke more consistent with the end of Episode III:

BEN: I don’t think you boys can help. I must go alone.

HAN: Whatever you say. I’ve done more than I bargained for on this trip already.

LUKE I want to go with you.

(Ben gives Luke gives hard stare, then gets right in his face.)

BEN: All right, beotch,  listen and listen good.  I pissed away twenty of my life in that f***ing desert making sure you didn’t wind up a black spot on a canyon wall because you misjudged your speed in a skyhopper and that you didn’t get your damn head blown off by some drunk with a blaster and good aim.

LUKE: Huh? [Flustered.]

BEN: Shut-up!  You’re the only person who can stand up to Darth Vader, which probably means we’re f***ed in the butt big time given your reckless nature.

LUKE: Sorry . . . [Looking at his feet; turning red.]

BEN: You need advanced Jedi training, from either me or Yoda—

LUKE: (softly) Who?

BEN: —otherwise we’re all f***ed, so you follow my instructions.  Got it?

LUKE: Okay. [Starting to get choked up.]

BEN: (forcefully) Do not leave this room.  I don’t care who knocks on this door or what that stupid robot says to you.  Stay here or I swear I will come back and stick my light saber so far up your ignorant butt you’ll need surgery to get it removed.  Understand?

LUKE: Geez! Okay! [Really embarrased.]

BEN: Yeah . . . that’s right, beotch.  Twenty years in the desert.  No way I’m pissing all that away to watch you get blasted by a stormtrooper.  Stay here!

(Ben gives the room a hard look, then leaves.  Luke slinks over to a corner.)

CHEWBACCA: Growl.

HAN: Dude.  You just got owned.

End scene.

Movie Review: The Happening

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008) is a goofy, boring, ill-conceived film that recalls some of the concepts realized in better movies such as The Birds (1963) and War of the Worlds (2005). Shyamalan does not spring a surprise ending, providing the essential explanation for the “happening” in the first 30 minutes. And the explanation makes no sense scientifically, morally, or dramatically; neither does this film. At least The Village (2004) made a moral point: you can’t eliminate evil by walling yourself off from the outside world. There is no moral point in The Happening, because the protagonists and antagonists have literally no interaction, and no one—literally no one— in the film traverses anything close to a character arc.

Spoilers below the fold.

Movie Review: The Eye

The Eye achieves a kind of Hollywood miracle you don’t see much of these days. It’s so stupendously awful the English language cannot contain it. Breaking free of the confines of human thought patterns, it prohibits mere mortals such as myself from crafting the similes and metaphors needed to communicate its utter stupidity. Perhaps one day a race of immortal aliens will develop the symbolic logic needed to probe the depths of this film’s idiocy. Only time will tell. In meantime, I will do my best to describe the worst turkey I’ve seen since The Forgotten (2004).

Five-Sentence Movie Reviews: Special Edition–The Mist (2007)

Yes–this review is longer than five sentences. Sue me.

* * *

The Mist (2007)
“You don’t have much faith in humanity, do you? None whatsoever.”

The Mist is based on a Stephen King novella of the same name. King’s story runs 133 pages, and leads the collection of horror tales in Skeleton Crew (1985). The movie was written and directed by Frank Durabont, and faithfully follows King’s text except for the ending. In a small New England town, a particularly violent thunderstorm is followed by a thick mist that rapidly descends on the townspeople before they have a chance to figure out what’s happening to them. The story focuses on a group of about thirty people trapped in a supermarket. Outside, the mist contains an assortment of bizarre, lethal creatures that attack anyone who wanders into it. Inside, the trapped occupants quickly divide into two factions, one falling under the spell of a religiously insane woman who interprets the mist as an apocalyptic judgment from God, and the other led by a level-headed graphic artist who attempts, as best he can, to reason his way through the nightmare.

Five-Sentence Movie Reviews (vol. 2)

It’s Friday, so if you have nothing to do this weekend but watch the Red Sox screw up the universal yin-yang even more by actually winning another World Series, allow me to recommend three great movies for your viewing pleasure: Spirited Away (2001), Night of the Demon (1957), and 12 Monkeys (1995).

Five-Sentence Movie Reviews (special edition)

My five-sentence movie reviews are normally reserved for DVD titles, since I don’t get to the theater too often. But today, I give you The Kingdom.

The Kingdom (2007)
“This is a very bad neighborhood.”

Lollipops and marbles figure in this action-packed version of “CSI” goes to the Middle East. After putting all its creative energy into the opening credits, The Kingdom offers 90+ minutes of Hollywood shoot-’em-up cliches: the good guys are indestructible expert marksmen, never run out of bullets, ever, and never get shot, until it’s time to make the audience cry. One character suffers a horrible ordeal that would send any ordinary human being into several years of psychiatric care, but through the magic of the movies he recovers with nary a mental scratch. Indeed, this same individual seems to exist only to twice ask an invasive and insensitive question, the second time so as to set up the final 30-second sequence in which The Kingdom makes its Big Point. It’s well taken, but after watching this film phone in its morality with two or three montages of dreamy music and sad eyes, all I could think of was, hey, this is where the remake of Night of the Living Dead (1990) ended up. But The Kingdom is well-executed on a technical level, so I enjoyed not liking it.

Five-Sentence Movie Reviews (vol. 1)

This is the first post in the series. You have no time to waste, so I’m getting right to the point with these puppies. Every now and then, I’ll throw in a sixth sentence at no charge.

Dark Star (1974).
“Don’t give me any of that intelligent life crap, just give me something I can blow up.”

John Carpenter’s directorial debut began as a student film in the early 70s. The producers demanded new scenes, but the DVD has Carpenter’s cut. Weary space travelers, twenty years out from Earth, contend with boredom, a lack of toilet paper, an alien beach ball, asteroid storms, and an artificially-intelligent bomb that has decided to detonate before leaving the ship. One of the astronauts (Doolittle) engages the bomb in a hilarious philosophical debate about its own existence. If you’re in the right frame of mind, Dark Star is a gem; otherwise, it’s just an oddity from a director known to occasionally lose his audience.