Anvil and Sprocket Movie Review

Q: Are we not men? A: We are… Daft Punk?

On a bizarre, alien planet, a quartet of blue-skinned rockers are getting everybody to get up off their butts and jam. In fact, their entire world is so entranced by their music that they don’t notice an oncoming alien invasion until it’s far too late. In minutes, the live audience is gassed and the band abducted. With a spacebound hero hot on their heels, the aliens take their captives to their home world – Earth – where they change the colors of their skins, fabricate Earthling memories, place them under the influence of mind control devices, and set them loose as a hit pop act called “The Crescendolls.”

“For my next trick, I will make Christian Bale disappear.”

Cris was born with an unusual talent. He can see two minutes into his own future. He knows that if his talent were to be revealed to the world, he would spend the rest of his life in a lab being poked and prodded by scientists eager to actually “understand” and “learn.” Of course he’s having none of that, so instead he decides to hide in plain view as a magician in Las Vegas.

I read Christopher Priest’s The Prestige some time ago. It took me awhile to get into it. Even though the idea of a novel about a rivalry between stage magicians during the turn of the 20th century was attractive, the book also had the words “Christopher Priest” in front. He’s not a bad novelist but he does meander a bit.

I wear my…

“I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.” I’ve heard this line in many contexts. But I’ve never heard it delivered more woodenly than in They Live, where Roddy Piper ad-libbed the line into our cultural consciousness.

They Live is characterized elsewhere as a “satire” or “parody” of consumerist culture, but I don’t think it rises to that level. Philip K. Dick wrote such satire. Vonnegut, rest his soul, did such satire. They Live is the half-developed anti-consumerist fantasy of a trenchantly cynical fourteen-year-old. See, aliens are controlling humans by embedding subliminal messages like “Obey” and “No Thought” in advertising! Wow, that’s, like, so deep. And probably true! Is there any pizza left?

Yeah, the 80’s were hard on all of us.

The modern landscape of DVD releases – in addition to true treasures of nostalgia – features a vast wasteland of broken childhood memories. Movies and shows that are nowhere near as good as the viewers’ memories of them still sell by the truckload. For every “Muppet Show” that actually lives up to (or surpasses) the memories, there is a Saturday morning “Dungeons & Dragons” cartoon (or other such show) that proves to be stunningly worse than remembered. Or, at least, worse than I remembered.

Is it live or is it Memorex?

Kurt Wimmer strikes again, delving deeper into the mysteries of Gun Kata: the martial art of using firearms to dispatch circular firing squads most effectively. Ultraviolet cranks up the action (and tactical illiteracy) discarding such fripperies as original dialog, plot, common-sense, or even sets. It is a movie that makes you sound like a four-year-old: “Why did her hair turn purple?” “Why did her suit turn red?” “Why is Nick Chinlund wearing an itty bra on his nose?” And so on in a fit of interrogative lalomania.

The kind of easy that makes you want to send back your check.

John Preston (Christian Bale), dressed in a pure white high-necked uniform, enters the inner sanctum carrying an assault rifle. Bodies of men in black body-armor litter the hall behind him. Dupont (Angus Macfadyen) grins from behind his desk. “You really should learn to knock,” he says, as Preston drops the rifle and saunters into the room. From behind columns, six more soldiers surround him. They are dressed in post-fascist gray and keep their swords sheathed, hilts angled menacingly towards Preston. Preston smiles his dreamy smile, then lunges for the hilts of two of the swords. And thus falls the purely ornamental honor guard.

Should I tell him he looks like a cartoon coyote in a bat suit?

For years my friends and I have joked about how many points particular pedestrians were worth. We’d sit stopped while people crossed in the crosswalk and argue over scores should be based on how difficult the target would be to catch (bicyclers score high) or how obnoxious they were (Rollerbladers score high). I don’t know which one of us came up with this slightly disconcerting game, but I was surprised to discover that it was, basically, the setup for a mid-seventies David Carradine / Sylvester Stallone film called Death Race 2000.

They said this scene couldn’t be filmed. And they were right.

The title sequence from the original Aeon Flux MTV cartoon series features a tight closeup on Aeon’s eye as she traps a passing fly in her eyelashes. The fly struggles against the bar-like lashes as Aeon’s eye dilates to focuses on the insect. This brief sequence was iconic of the aesthetic and spirit of the show. The scene is recreated in the opening of 2005’s Aeon Flux live action film, but here it just demonstrates how the studio missed the point.

Someone’s not a morning person.

Any discussion of Zardoz, a strange piece of 70s dystopian science fiction, probably has to start with the giant floating stone head. The stone head is the avatar of the Zardoz, god of post-apocalyptic Ireland. The stone head floats over the landscape, pausing periodically to issue paeans to violence and sermons against sex while vomiting firearms and ammunition. Sean Connery is Zed, an Exterminator and disciple of Zardoz, who decides to hide in the giant head one day and see where it goes. He ends up inside the “Vortex,” an alternate society where immortal humans called “Eternals” live the communal Woodstock-meets-Ayn Rand ideal and are — because of their immortality — horribly, horribly bored. At least until Sean Connery shakes things up.

Someone’s not a morning person.

Any discussion of Zardoz, a strange piece of 70s dystopian science fiction, probably has to start with the giant floating stone head. The stone head is the avatar of the Zardoz, god of post-apocalyptic Ireland. The stone head floats over the landscape, pausing periodically to issue paeans to violence and sermons against sex while vomiting firearms and ammunition. Sean Connery is Zed, an Exterminator and disciple of Zardoz, who decides to hide in the giant head one day and see where it goes. He ends up inside the “Vortex,” an alternate society where immortal humans called “Eternals” live the communal Woodstock-meets-Ayn Rand ideal and are — because of their immortality — horribly, horribly bored. At least until Sean Connery shakes things up.