Rant on Stuff by the Head Bad Guy

This movie, based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, comes off as a weird hybrid of 1984 and Zorro: The Gay Blade. Set in a futuristic, post-capitalistic Britain, where the police are brainless thugs, the Anglican Church has turned into a weird pseudo-Nazi regime, and women have been relegated back to the roles of baby factory and housewife, V (Weaving) is a former convict and disfigured byproduct of hideous experiements in genetic engineering. Freed by a prison fire, he leads his life underground, plotting flamboyant acts of terrorism against the British government in the mold of classic British anti-hero Guy Fawkes. Evey (Portman) is his unlikely sidekick, at first rescued, and later abducted and tortured by V as part of his Jedi-like quest to transform her into the perfect terrorist. But, since the government in this case is totally corrupt and evil, it’s OK to be a terrorist, right? Or something.

Once again the Wachowski brothers (who wrote the screenplay) seem hell-bent on convincing us that they are, like, so freakin’ deep, man, but I’ll admit that I found the philosophical points in this movie less irritating and obvious than in The Matrix. Some well-directed, albeit incredibly violent action scenes keep the movie humming along. V’s philosophical ramblings are at best goofy, often boring, and Portman’s acting is wooden as ever. Great production design and costuming helps to keep this movie afloat. I just wish it hadn’t taken itself quite so seriously.

If you’re willing to suspend your disbelief to the Nth degree (how exactly does V afford to clothe the entire population of Great Britain in Guy Fawkes cotumes, let alone afford the FedEx fees?) or don’t care very much about feminism (why does Evie become so enamored of V after being heinously tortured?) this can be a fun little film. But, unless you’re a huge fan of the Wachowskis I wouldn’t hesitate to wait for this one on DVD.

Natasha Richardson stars in this Futuristic Dystopia about the US being taken over by a group of Right-Wing Fundamentalists. In the “recent future,” (?) industrial pollution in the environment has rendered 99% of the female population sterile. The United States, now called The Republic of Gilead, is a religious Oligarchy controlled by a handful of powerful military “Commanders” and their Tipper Gore-esque “Wives.” Since the wives are all infertile, the few remaining women who can still procreate are herded up by the government and forced into slavery as surrogate mothers, in a bizarre reenactment of an Old Testament story.

Kate is one of these “Handmaids” who was captured by the police while trying to cross the border (into Canada? I want to claim political asylum in CANADA!) with her husband and little girl. She’s sent to live with Fred and Serena Joy, and renamed “Offred” (kind of like Off-White, I guess…) Unfortunately, however, Offred fails to become full with the seed of Fred, which probably means that he’s infertile, too. Desperate for a baby, (to eat, probably) Serena Joy sets Offred up with Nick, Fred’s Chauffeur. She gets preggers and has to fight for her unborn baby’s freedom, yadda yadda yadda… I won’t spoil the dramatic climax of this movie!

I never read the Margaret Atwood book that The Handmaid’s Tale is based upon, and it’s probably a good read. However, the movie itself is a schlockfest of Lifetime Television Networks proportion! You can’t help but stare dumbfounded at things like cattle vans full of screaming women, waving frantically through the bars of their cage, as you ask yourself the question, “am I really supposed to take this seriously?” And as much as this movie is supposed to make a deep feminist statement, it pretty much drives home the idea that women are all just helpless martyrs at the hands of men. For instance, Offred doesn’t particularly want to do the nasty with Fred; she’s just trying to stay alive. But when Serena sets her up with Nick, she jumps happily into the sack with him, even though he spent the first half of the movie leering at her nastily and making dirty remarks. So I guess men really can say whatever they like to women, as long as they’re young and hunky.

But you can’t help but cherish moments like a crowd of frenzied Handmaids ripping off the head of an accused murderer, or references to “Baptist Guerillas” and greetings like “Blessed be the Seed!” All in all, this movie was a nice Grim Vision of the Future mixed with a little Religious satire. I just wish the filmmakers had sprung for a box of 100-watt light bulbs! It’s impossible to see what’s going on throughout half of the movie! I like a Dark Portrayal of Things to Come as much as the next guy, but this was taking it a little too far!

OK, OK– this movie isn’t set in the future, but I’m still calling it “Futuristic.” So sue me! It didn’t really fit into any of the other categories so well.

This is the story of a small town in the mountains called “Springville.” The people there get all their water from the same spring– a spring with magical healing properties. Sick people who swim in the spring are instantly healed. People who drink the spring’s water can live indefinitely, in a perpetual state of youth and beauty. However, nothing lasts forever, not even in a made-for-TV movie. Long ago, the residents of Springville signed a “covenant” that promised no resident would live to be more than 100 years old. Each citizen, on the morning of his 100th birthday, must “cross the stream,” i.e. drown himself in the fountain, with the aid of his closest friend. They even throw an all-night party and everything! It’s very cute.

Enter Dennis Conway (MacLaughlan) and his son Nick. They were driving through the mountains when they encountered a strange couple in a vintage car, stuck in the ditch. While towing them out, they couldn’t help but notice that their trunk was full of bottled water. After the strange couple takes off, Nick discovers one of their bags still in the ditch. So, they decide to be good Samaritans and return it.

When they reach Springville everyone treats them very strangely. Josh, the mean cop (Pearl,) follows their every move and interrogates them. There’s no motel in town. The mysterious couple aren’t home, and the cops are surveying their house. Dennis gives the backpack to the cops and decides to head out in the morning.

Unfortunately, over breakfast the next morning, a truck carrying tree trunks dumps its load all over his son, Nick– and Sophie, the pretty lady at the diner (Eastwood) turns out to be a doctor. Nick is rushed to the Springville Hospital, where, big surprise, his father and the doctor fall in love. OK, but why is there a hospital with doctors in Springville? Why not just truck all the sickies directly to the Spring?

Meanwhile, Josh is tailing the mysterious couple. When he finally catches up with them at a motel, their skin has taken on the texture of fried chicken, due to lack of Springville water. Josh sneers “Happy Birthday!” before suffocating them with pillows.

Dennis can’t help but wondering about the mysterious couple he pulled out of the ditch, and about why no one in Springville will tell him about them. Soon he’s looking for clues everywhere. He rifles Sophie’s desk and discovers all her snapshots. Like a good little girl, she has little framed pictures on her desk representing all the major decades of the 20th century– Sophie in front of a WWII bomber jet, Sophie at a 50’s cocktail party, Sophie in bellbottoms… Dennis is indignant. “I just want to ask you something! What were the Roaring Twenties like?! And the Great Depression– was it really that depressing?!?!”

Now that Dennis knows the Springville secret, he wants to stay there and live with Sophie. But will the residents of Springville allow him to stay? And what about Gus, the mechanic with whom Dennis is forming a close, homoerotic friendship– will Dennis be able to help him “cross the stream?” And what is Sophie’s dark secret? You’ll just have to stay up late at night watching cable and eating Cracker Jax to find out!

Our story opens with a guy waking up in a strange room… He opens a hatch and goes into another room just like the one he was in… then he gets sliced up like a hard-boiled egg in one of those wire egg slicers, and in a fit of bad computer graphics turns into a bunch of little chunks. I had a hard time deciding what category to put this film in. It defies category. Or, rather, it’s so vague it can fit into just about any category.

It starts out with your basic disaster film formula. A motley crew of Canadians are dumped without rhyme or reason into a large structure that looks like it could have been built by Rubik after he was assimilated by the Borg. It is a collection of rooms, identical except for they are different colors. I think the main reason the rooms are different colors is so that it looks like the filmmakers didn’t have to built just one set.

Anyway, we have the basic disaster film characters: the whiny girl who panics a lot, the guy who takes charge, the silent cynical one, the pessimistic guy who spreads panic, and the good doctor. Later on we learn, through minimal plot development, that one Canadian is a policeman, another, an escape artist (but he gets his face eaten off by acid early on), one is a mathematician, and another designed the outer shell of the cube. Later on they are joined by whom everyone thinks is your average retard, but he turns out to be an idiot savant who saves the day. Unfortunately, there’s no real disaster to put this movie on the level with, say, The Towering Inferno.

Some of the rooms are booby-trapped, but Math Girl discovers that the rooms are numbered in a certain way. Only the rooms that are labeled with prime numbers are booby trapped. Sounds like a math nightmare, right? It gets worse. The math starts out sounding relatively plausible, but then goes off into concepts my 500-on- the-math-portion-of-the-SAT- achieving brain can’t comprehend. However, I do know that a number that ends in 5 can never be prime (except for 5), a fact that takes Math Girl several seconds of hardcore brain-wracking to figure out.

I was tempted to label this film a futuristic dystopia, but one of the main points is that it’s taking place today. Yes, even today mild-mannered Canadians can be snatched from their beds and dumped into a big cubical math camp. Of course many bumper stickers have reminded me that The Future Is Now, so maybe this could be futuristic dystopia after all.

Cube is not really a ‘monsters- human and otherwise’ film , because there are no real tangible monsters. I gathered that Cube was supposed to be a psychological thriller, owing to the fact that no enemy is visible. The threat is perceived, and the Canadians turn on each other. The scary part of this movie is supposed to be that there is no real threat.. Who built the cube? “Like Scaramanga- from The Man With the Golden Gun, some rich psycho” is one suggestion. Doctor Lady says “Only the government could have built something this ugly…”

But the scary thing is there is no big conspiracy going on. Whoever built this made a big mistake- each part was designed by a different person who didn’t know what anyone else was doing. The result was a big accident, or rather, “It’s a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan.” So why kidnap innocent people and dump them into the big accident in nothing but underwear and army jackets with their names stenciled on the pockets? “Because they had to do something with it.” Was the answer. I didn’t buy it. Whatever.

One of the most annoying things about this movie is that the characters are constantly chewing on the buttons from their jackets. They do this to stimulate their salivary glands so they don’t dehydrate. As a result, they are always chewing, and the buttons make little clicking sounds against their teeth when they talk. This is really distracting. The buttons come in handy, however, when Math Girl has to figure math problems,. She scratches them out with the button against the metal wall. These must be no ordinary plastic buttons! They can scratch metal as if they were as sharp as nails!

This film has plenty of speeches on morality, pep speeches, as well as other speeches (another convincing argument to place it firmly within the Disaster category). However, the dialogue is totally cheesy, the characters undergo rapid personality transplants, and the plot has many little holes in it, thus meriting it many a Swiss cheese. Did I mention the irritating music? It was a loop of a woman whispering over ethereally synthesized music with what sounded like teeth chattering in the background. Basically, stick Enya in a freezer with a Casio and you’ll come out with this soundtrack. But all in all, this was a very nice cheesy low budget flick!

Cube. The Matrix. Yes, Technology is the new threat. Everyone’s making films these days about people being menaced, or otherwise swallowed by technology. Maybe it’s because of the incredible popularity of Internet porn these days. Or maybe it’s just because of AOL.

This is a movie about computers evolving into a life form which ultimately takes over and enslaves humanity. If you think I’m “spoiling” the movie by telling you this, think again. It’s all spelled out for you within the first half-hour of the film. Then the movie becomes one long action scene, with many un-dramatic plot twists.

Our hero is Keanu Reeves (his name in the film is “Neo,” but let’s just call him Virtual Ted.) Virtual Ted is spending all of his free time in front of his ergonimically designed keyboard, searching for an Entity online known only as “Morphius.” (Larry Fishburne.) Morphius is also searching for Virtual Ted, so it doesn’t take very long for the plot to develop in that respect. VT encounters a variety of action-adventure scenes in which he’s abducted by weird governmental dudes, and a cybernetic jumbo shrimp is implanted in his belly. This part of the film was actually pretty cool, since I had no idea what was going on, and I was still under the impression that I’d have to work hard in order to understand what the film was about.

Unfortunately, not so. Once Virtual Ted hooks up with Morphius, we learn that the entire world is just one big computer simulation, invented by computers to keep us occupied while they use our physical bodies as electrovoltaic cells. You see, there was this big war, and the computers won… now they farm us as a natural resource. We find this out way too soon. You see, the computers need us for power, since we nuked the sky to keep them from getting solar energy. There’s a cute little computer animated shot of a dead urban skyline with black nuked-out clouds roiling over it. It’s all very twee.

Anyway, I started to get irritated with this film, and then I liked it again. Why? Because it became obvious to me that it’s a total cheesefest. When Neo (OK, I got tired of typing “Virtual Ted” all the time) and his friends download themselves into the computer simulated New York, they want to be as inconspicuous as possible. So they dress like pimps and hoes. My favorite character was Trinity, who wears a black vinyl dominatrix outfit replete with tube-top. Neo also gets martial arts downloaded into his brain so that he can fight the evil computer cops. There’s a great scene involving him and Laurence Fishburne in a virtual dojo. I’m actually giving the filmmakers credit here, since I assume they were trying to be campy.

ANYWAY… the other thing about this film is how much it borrows from other futuristic dystopia films. I think just about every film that I like was ripped off by the Matrix. A few of the early scenes are straight out of Brazil, and the entire storyline is completely Twelve Monkeys in effect… (which movie was seriously scary and thought-provoking) there’s also a visual reference to THX 1138… basically, you name it, and The Matrix rips it off. I could go on and on, but you’d better just see the movie yourself to completely understand.

All in all, I had fun at this movie, once I stopped taking it seriously. It wasn’t the seriously scary cyberpunk epic that I thought it would be. If you can deal with watching Keanu Reeves for two hours at a time, and you like action-adventure flix with lots people getting shot, then you’ll probably get a kick out of this one.

When I was in the video store, I overheard someone say “This makes The Matrix looks like child’s play!” Of course, I thought to myself, “Elmo in Grouchland makes The Matrix looks like child’s play,” but that’s another story. The Thirteenth Floor is another one of those films that takes the old bumper sticker command “Question Reality” way too seriously. However, because of this, much cheese in involved!

The film starts out with Hannon Fuller, a rich old guy (Armin Mueller-Stahl) getting killed. We don’t know who did it, but we’re certain that it’s not our protagonist, Douglas (Craig Bierko,) Hannon’s right-hand man. As things unfold as we learn that the company for which the two men work is developing a virtual reality type game where you can travel back into the Depression era and have sex with hookers (at least that’s what the old guy was up to.) So why was he killed? Did it have something to do with his virtual experiences? Why does Doug keep blacking out for 3 hours at a time? Did he really kill Hannon and not realize it?

Eventually, Doug jumps into the Depression era himself to find out what’s going on. He discovers that one of the characters in his virtual reality has discovered that he’s not really ‘real.’ This brings up an ethical, philosophical and moral dilemma that has been the plot of so many Star Trek the Next Generation episodes. What is real? do we have the right to go around creating humans only to destroy them? I figure Commander Riker already solved this problem for us years ago, let’s move on, OK? Warning: if you don’t want to discover the “surprise” plot twist, stop reading right here. Go make yourself a sandwich and read the paper.

So why does Doug keep blacking out? If it isn’t totally obvious to you now, you need something stronger than a sandwich! It’s because…dum dum! He’s in a virtual world as well! People from the outside word jump into the characters in the virtual world, and someone’s been doing it to him! His body is actually a murderer, although his personality is not! How confusing is that?

Jane, Hannon’s daughter/the girl who works in the supermarket after whom Doug has been lusting is actually the woman who runs his virtual reality show. And to make matters worse, she’s in love with him as well. Ugh. It turns out that “Doug” was a character based on her husband. Jane’s husband used to be a kind and good man, but now, since he’s gotten a taste of the virtual world, he’s become a homicidal maniac, and retreats into his virtual world to slaughter people at random (note: maybe you should take the Doom and Tomb Raider game CD ROMs away from the males in your household.) Since Doug is how Jane’s husband used to be, Jane becomes teary and sentimental, as she spends time with the Man She Fell In Love With (only better.) It causes all sorts of sappy touching scenes as Doug and Jane say stuff like “I feel like I’ve known you for years!” and other things that many people dismiss as cheesy pickup lines. So remember, the next time you’re in a bar and someone says “I feel like we’ve met before!” it might not be just a line to get into your underwear… it could be the voice of your virtual spouse!

Anyway, this movie has a nice cheesy happy ending. It also tries to make you question reality. Am I really living in a virtual world? What is real? But then you think… if someone would go to all the trouble to invent a virtual reality, I’m sure they would have created a more interesting job for me.

I actually watched this movie twice. The second time I saw it, I hadn’t realized that I’d already seen it a couple of years before until about half-way through. Even then, I finished watching it again simply because I couldn’t remember any of it. So here I am, trying to write a review. The thing that stands out most in my mind is the fact that a bunch of guys in kilts played “the Kesh Jig” on highland bagpipes in one scene. After I saw Strange Days the second time, I remembered that from the first time as well. But what else happened in the movie? I must have blocked it out due to the presence of Juliette Lewis.

These strange days take place around December 31st, 1999. The fact that they do so is fairly inconsequential to the plot, if I remember correctly. I think the big plot climax had to take place during a big crowd scene, so why not make it in Times Square on New year’s Eve, 1999? Ralph Fiennes plays Lenny Nero, an ex-cop who now makes a living dealing in “playback”– virtual reality discs that allow you to experience other peoples’ sensations as they do things you normally don’t do, like rob restaurants and have sex. You hook a network of electrodes called a “squid” to your head, which allows you to see, feel, taste (and presumably smell) everything the people on the discs are experiencing. Naturally, this form of entertainment is illegal. Naturally, it also eventually fries your brain.

Lenny comes across a disc of a hooker being raped and killed. He is repulsed by it, yet also fascinated. It gives this movie a plot, which I think is really complicated. I don’t remember anything more, until the bagpiping scene near the end. I think I figured out what the problem is here– Ralph Fiennes is one of my favorite actors. Yet, Juliette Lewis causes me to run screaming for cover. I think the combination of the two in this movie neutralizes it, and makes it completely leak out of my brain. But it is 1999, and virtual reality technology has come along amazingly since the dark ages of 1995. Maybe I’ve just been doing too much “playback.”

This is my new favorite movie. I mean it! This film has everything! It’s the year 2000, and the United Provinces of America are gearing up to watch the most popular event of the year- a cross-country road race. The racers get bonus points for hitting pedestrians.

How could you not love a movie where old folks are set out in the middle of the road on “Euthanasia Day” for the racers to splatter? The racers themselves are the best part, though. David Carradine plays Frankenstein, our protagonist- a racer with so many race- related deformities and injuries he has to wear a leather body suit. There is also Myra, the Nazi who yells “Blitzkrieg!” as she runs over her opponent’s navigator, and her co-pilot Buzzbomb, played by Fred Grandy (remember Gopher from “Love Boat”?) Even Sylvester Stallone is in this film!

Death Race 2000 was banned in Sweden, maybe you should see it for just that reason! I cannot say enough good things about this film. I am not worthy. This movie changed my life.