THE AWESOME SIX-MINUTE CLOUD ATLAS TRAILER YOU REALLY OUGHTTA WATCH

Hooooooooooly smokes. Thanks in advance for the birthday present, Wachowski/Tykwer/Wachowski. (It releases on my birthday, is what that means.) This looks like something we're all gonna get in massive fights about, but I gotta say based on this I want to see this fuckin thing six ways from Sunday. Time will tell if I ever actually get around to finishing this book: been trying for six goddamn years now.

(h/t The Playlist)

FORM, CONTENT, AND GENRE: THE HONEYCOMB TRILOGY

Front: Bill Cooke (Sean Williams), his daughter Ronnie (Becky Byers). Back: "houseguest" Conor (Jason Howard)

Both my parents were (and Mom still is) ardent fans of genre fiction: crime for Mom, SF for my late Da. Mom never had much use for SF and Dad constantly snarked about crime fiction—this disagreement is kind of a tip-of-the-iceberg signifier of their eventual divorce—and while it sucks to have people you love fighting with each other and all that, the reason I bring this up is that, by accident, I ended up having a zillion conversations about the characteristics of two different genres with two very intelligent, knowledgeable people.

All these deep thoughts on the nature of genre have led to me founding and becoming a firm believer in the Cat/Biscuit Principle (“you can put a cat in the oven but that don't make it a biscuit”) of Genre: the presence of familiar genre elements do not necessarily place a given work within that genre. For example, Michael Bay's Transformers pictures are not science fiction in spite of having robots, aliens and Shia LeBeouf fucking his way through the Victoria's Secret catalog. (Let's not dwell too long about my theory that the Transformers movies transcend genre due to Michael Bay's auteurism overwhelming any attempts to categorize them as anything but his; his authorial signature may be the vague feeling that his work is the product of a pair of quasi-sapient testicles dipped in cocaine, but it is a signature nonetheless.)

There is also another level of achievement for genre pieces, once they pass my standard to be allowed to even exist—oh, trust me, the best part of creating your own aesthetic theories is getting to be a total fucking prick, don't let anyone tell you any different—which is: being good. This sounds simple, but if it really was that simple, nothing would suck, and lots of things suck, so, y'know, QED and shit. So, how does something become good? To use an example from film, let's not fuck around at all, let's look at Citizen Kane. One key reason why it's so great is because, as the story of a bold, innovative man, it used bold and innovative techniques. It's a movie about trying to unearth secrets, and makes masterful use of shadow. Also, everybody turning the whole “Rosebud was his sled” thing into a joke can stick their dick in a boat propeller; having the dying thoughts of A Great Man™ be of the last link to his childhood innocence before he was taken away and had greatness thrust upon him is true, simple, and profound, and it's a final not-so-subtle “fuck your expectations” finger wag at the audience.

So what does Citizen Kane have to do with three independent theatre pieces in Queens seventy years later? Aside from being awesome, the only tangible link is in melding form with content so that neither exists (or at the very least, is as strong) without the other. The Honeycomb trilogy, consisting of the plays Advance Man, Blast Radius, and Sovereign, sprang forth from the mind of playwright Mac Rogers, and was brought to life by Gideon Productions, which aside from Mac consists of Sean and Jordana Williams (the latter of whom directed all three plays), Sandy Yaklin, and most recently Shaun B. Wilson. In the interests of full disclosure, I need to mention that these people are all friends of mine, but we should be perfectly clear about one thing: this is not me praising my friends because they're my friends. I've already told them in person how much they rule, on many occasions, some of which I wasn't even drunk. But here's the thing: all three shows and the totality they comprise considered as a whole are something uniquely great and about a hair away from being perfect.

The Honeycomb trilogy is an alien invasion story, and one unlike any other I've ever seen or read. Your bog-standard alien invasion story has the aliens come to Earth, fuck some shit up, and eventually get defeated by the pluck of the spunky, outnumbered humans. While it may sound a little like hair-splitting, there's a difference between an alien invasion story and a story about aliens. The act of “invasion” reflexively gets most people's back up, and being people, we tend to side unambiguously with people. Fuck aliens, they come from other planets, that shit's fucked up. What Mac (sorry, it's weird to call him Rogers, and even weirder to call him Mr. Rogers, for obvious reasons) does with the Honeycomb plays that's so great is back up the moral nuance truck and just unload: the aliens—or, as they call themselves, “the people of the Honeycomb”—are a hivemind that remembers everything that has ever happened to any individual, where all are one and one is all. They are a peaceful race, enlightened in many ways humans are not, but they are not by any means perfect. Prior to the events of Advance Man, the Honeycomb finds itself stranded on Mars, its own planet long since fucked, where they're discovered by the first manned mission from Earth to Mars. Earth being pretty fucked up too, the astronauts let the Honeycomb talk them into coordinating a covert invasion, after which the re-vitalized Honeycomb will assume control of a “terraformed” Earth (or whatever the Latin is for the Honeycomb's home planet, since “terra” is Earth, making terraforming Earth sound a little like dividing by zero), with humans in a subordinate capacity. The trade-off for humanity, kind of a brutal one, is that we get to stave off ecological disaster . . . but a whole fuckload of us have to die. Considering that the Honeycomb, like any living entity, wants to stay alive at all costs, the existential quandary of having to kill a bunch of people is something they'll regret but will nonetheless totally do. Their human collaborators' existential quandary is similar: unless a bunch of pretty fundamental things change, humanity is going to fuck the Earth uninhabitable, so the only way for humanity to survive is for a bunch of us to die. Of course, not everyone's going to just happily accept that, which is why the astronauts have to plan the whole thing in secret.

This all happens before the first play, Advance Man, even starts. The play itself takes the form of a living-room drama, a staple of naturalist/realist theatre, and takes place entirely in the living room (natch) of the Cooke family. Bill, the patriarch, was the lead astronaut on the Mars mission and the covert invasion plans. Telling the story mostly from the perspective of Bill's teenage children, daughter Ronnie and son Abbie, and wife Amelia helps keep the parceling of information gradual and organic. Not to mention, having a range of characters provides a range of perspectives on the increasingly ominous behavior of Bill and his colleagues, especially the mentally damaged (or is he....?) Conor. The sensitive Abbie has a close bond with Conor and has been, unwittingly, drawing pictures that closely resemble the Honeycomb and its insectoid people for years. Ronnie is the stronger sibling, creating not only a neat reversal of typical gender expectations but someone to question the strange goings-on in the Cooke household, with that desire arising from character rather than simple plot expediency.

That, in a nutshell, is what makes the Honeycomb plays work as drama rather than an essay about the uneasy human relationship with The Other, be it terrestrial or extra-. It's also what lends such emotional weight to the climax of Advance Man where, the cat decidedly out of the bag (Ronnie's running around with a gun desperately trying to put a halt to the conspiracy), Abbie pushes The Button that's going to trigger the invasion just to see what happens. It's a moment that's true to the character as already established, and to the whimsical, stochastic nature of existence itself: the end of the world as we know it happens, in large part, because one guy said what the fuck.

Blast Radius picks up many years later, with the Honeycomb firmly in control of Earth, and humanity existing in a post-technological state in which a lot of people can barely remember The Time Before, Abbie is a big Vichy muckety-muck (and in a long-term romantic relationship with Conor, who as revealed in Advance Man is in fact a Honeycomb consciousness occupying Conor's human body; with the telekinetic link to the Honeycomb severed, “Conor” now finds himself developing a kind of hybrid consciousness deriving from the experience of the Honeycomb within the limitations of the human mind). Ronnie is a key figure in the human resistance, which is centered in houses devoted to caring for pregnant women, in part because the people of the Honeycomb—known colloquially by the epithet “bugs” by non-Vichy humans (note: the Vichy parallel is my own, not Mac's)—are icked out by human childbirth. The former Cooke household has become one such house, which is how Blast Radius is set in the same (albeit distressed by the apocalypse) room as Advance Man. And, in that room, we observe Ronnie and Abbie's conflict, Conor's increasing empathy for humanity, and even the resistance, which seizes on the discovery of a fatal Honeycomb weakness to launch a counter-attack. Of course, nothing being simple, that weakness consists of a chemical reaction whereby a Honeycomb byproduct the people call “bug water” (I'm not sure exactly what it is, though it doesn't matter; its semiotic value is the important thing, not exactly how it works), when ingested by a human being, causes that human being to explode. And so, Ronnie's counter-offensive consists of recruiting 51 human suicide bombers to blow up Honeycomb installations. In persuading them, she faces the obstacle of this being something she herself is not going to do (being pregnant), as she plans to lead the resistance in the aftermath. Of course, nothing being simple, the father of her unborn child ends up having to be one of the 51. As does Conor, leaving Abbie without the love of his life as well. Yeah, the end of Blast Radius is fucking intense.

The final installment of the trilogy is where we really get into unexplored (or extremely rarely explored) territory, in SF terms: what happens after the good guys win, not to mention the question of whether we, humans, are the good guys, and they, the aliens, are actually the bad guys. Sovereign picks up after the revolution, when humanity is back in control and the “bugs” almost completely eradicated. Ronnie is hard at work re-establishing a working government, and serving as regional governor, when her security forces capture Abbie, a wanted man for his service to the Honeycomb. With the bulk of the play consisting of Abbie's trial for whatever they can pin on him—as he points out, quite accurately, the stuff he did wasn't illegal until his side lost—Sovereign wraps up the trilogy by explicitly examining who was right and who was wrong, and because the whole trilogy has centered on Ronnie and Abbie (and Ronnie has appropriated the Cooke home as her headquarters and thus the action once again takes place in the same room, now featuring a memorial to “the 51” from Blast Radius), that question ends up boiling down to whether Ronnie and Abbie were/are right and/or wrong. Of course, nothing being simple, they're both right in some ways, and wrong in others and ultimately, there's no place for either of them in the world, and all they have is each other, bringing the trilogy which, for all the world-building and the dozens of other great characters that populate what we see of that world, has essentially been about them to the perfect emotional point of closure.

Taken as a whole, the Honeycomb trilogy is one of the finest and most singular works of science fiction that I've ever encountered. It's a story that can only be SF, and as currently constituted, a story that can only be told in the medium in which it was: the stage. Each play was written specifically as a particular kind of play: Advance Man, as above, was a living-room drama, Blast Radius quite Shakespearean in form if not language (which was colloquial modern), and Sovereign Greek in the same way. They each are in every way works of and celebrating the stage. It sounds redundant, but a work must be what it is before it can be great; by “be what it is” I mean it needs to be fundamentally of its medium. That's why Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made and that's why the Honeycomb trilogy is a—maybe the—masterpiece of science fiction theatre.

And it's one I don't really want to see turned into a movie or TV show. It'll cease to be what it is if it's “opened up” (a phrase describing a process that can be a mixed blessing for a play adapted to film; sometimes a play is too fundamentally a play to be “opened up”). This is not to say that I don't want to see Mac Rogers write for TV or film. I do. I think he'd be great at it, and eagerly look forward to the day when he does, and not even as a barnacle or anything, as a fan.

I know this piece has been primarily about the writing in the Honeycomb plays, and I don't want to slight any of the other artists whose work contributed to the productions. Here are the pages for Advance Man, Blast Radius, and Sovereign. Every single person listed on all three of those pages ruled at what they did. And they all should be damn proud. I know I get excited about stuff but nothing you've just read is an exaggeration.

Well, maybe the boat propeller thing.

JESUS CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, AND ACTUAL PROMETHEUS SPOILERS

This weekend, I swear. For about 72 consecutive hours I've either been trying to avoid, actively engaged in, or stewing about some sort of impassioned discussion about Prometheus. And, before that, I'd been sitting around since Tuesday night trying to figure out what the fuck to write about it. And before that there were the months of faux-viral video clips and Stephen A. Smith bellowing about it during basketball games and the filmmakers being coy about it. It would have been too bad if after all that, the movie was just another boring, business-as-usual blockbuster. But that's the thing. It isn't. And it kind of is.

A movie that's at odds with itself about what the fuck it actually is is going to provoke some discussion. And holy cow did Prometheus ever set off a shitstorm. I saw it last Tuesday at an all-media, and after the whole clusterfuck of getting our phones back was done, my friend with whom I saw it and I spent the next hour or so walking to the subway and riding back to Park Slope repeatedly asking each other, “Why did Prometheus suck so bad?” Then, after we got back to our respective apartments, we hit each other up on Gchat to ask again: “WHY DID PROMETHEUS SUCK SO BAD?”

So, I had a couple days to think about it, which was actually really valuable because the review I ended up writing for Tor had evolved beyond that initial negative reaction and developed a bit of nuance. That extra time to think allowed me to sort the things that pissed me off about the picture and weight how important each was to the whole thing. Also, it allowed me to assess Prometheus in relation to Alien, to Ridley Scott's career as a director, and to the median 2010s-vintage Hollywood blockbuster. The result? I really respect what Prometheus (mainly Ridley Scott, Dariusz Wolski, the designers, and the cast) gets right. (Ed. Note: if only there was a way to make the incipient “but” in 400 point boldfaced type with an mp3 of Samuel L. Jackson hollering “BUT” when you clicked on it . . .)

BUT, Prometheus has some of the dumbest writing, from inexplicable character behavior to unnecessary and poorly-placed plot twists to clunky big-idea-conveying to those ideas not being as big as they would seem in more competent hands to an ending that can go fuck itself in the severed android neck, since Tommy Wiseau's proud nadir, The Room. I don't invoke St. Wiseau the Lowest of the Low in vain, believe me. Here's a partial—complete would take us all day—list of dumb shit in the Prometheus script (and in case subtle hints like the title of the fucking post didn't convey this, spoilers in the following):

—Despite having no reason to do so, CEO Guy Pearce of Evil White Guy Industries (a pre-Yutani merger Weyland Corp.) stows away on the Prometheus and only reveals that he's on board near the end of the journey. The reveal has no dramatic impact, no purpose whatsoever: it just happens and suddenly Guy Pearce is doddering around in Andy Garcia Dead Again makeup and everyone's acting like he's always been there. Why wasn't he?

—When all the scientists go down to the planet, the air isn't breathable, so they wear their space suits. Then they get inside what turns out to be an alien spacecraft and suddenly, whaddaya know, the air's breathable. Far out. The scene where some dude cracks open his space helmet to breathe air just like back home on Earth is a staple of SF. So some dude cracks open his space helmet. Then everyone else does. Even after they discover alien shit so alien it killed other aliens, they're still lollygagging all over the fucking place with their helmets off touching stuff.

—Per the last, to repeat, they're scientists.

—The “ticking clock” is a time-honored suspense device. Alien had a literal one that counted every last second until the Nostromo blew up. But in Prometheus, near the end when Noomi Rapace is running around while shit blows up, her helmet tells her she has like thirty seconds of air left. She keeps running around doing all kinds of strenuous shit like trying not to get killed by various kinds of aliens (at some point the fact that she was supposed to be running out of air kind of becomes a non-thing) and trying to convince Michael Fassbender to fly another dormant alien spacecraft (hold that thought) to the head aliens' home world to ask them “Seriously, what the fuck, guys?” Despite the fact that this is totally retarded and Fassbender's head, back when it was attached to his body, thought it was a good idea to convolutedly impregnate her with an alien squid thingie either to kill her or just because what the fuck, he agrees to set up the sequel with her. (It's okay, take an Advil, I'll be here when you get back.)

—Per the ticking clock point, the whole point of the climax was that there were two spaceships on the planet: the Prometheus and the flying alien death croissant. Idris Elba, Benedict Wong, and the other guy made a whole big deal out of kamikaze-ing the Prometheus into the flying alien death croissant so it wouldn't go to Earth and turn the sequel into a Roland Emmerich movie. So, Idris et al take one for the team. The aliens maybe get killed. Then Fassbender's head just tells Noomi Rapace “Oh yeah, and there was no need for Idris and everyone to get killed.”

—Last, and most fundamentally, there's a way to do the whole “larger forces are at work here, and they may be beyond our ken, and thus this movie shall lay things out allusively rather than run the risk of the explanation for shit being stupid” thing. Stanley Kubrick was up on that with 2001, and 2001 was awesome. If you look at 2001, it's all right there: A leads to B leads to monolith acid trip leads circularly back to Strauss in a clean, orderly fashion. Who the fuck the aliens are and what their whole deal was is left alone, because there was no answer that was going to be cool enough, and leaving it ambiguous has been giving us stuff to yak about for almost 45 years now. Prometheus wants to be this thing—which is why I graded it on the curve for ambition; they might have fucked it up but they at least tried—but, as that bit inside the em-dashses alludes to, they fucked it up. The movie over-explains who the “Engineers” are, literalizing them as these big white emotionless humanoids who somehow are a 100% match for human beings genetically and also started the evolutionary process that led from primordial ooze to us jagoffs (in case it's been a while since you took biology, those are mutually exclusive conditions except under staggeringly improbable circumstances; the whole “they created us but evolution is still a thing” is total bet-hedging controversy-averse screenwriter dicklessness). And yet, in spite of defining the terms of the explanation in such a way that there's shit that needs to be explained, it just leaves everyone hanging. Anyway, tl;dr Prometheus' handling of its own mythology is a total misfire. (Thank fuck they cut the part about Jesus Christ being an Engineer . . .)

So, yes, the script is a shitpile. The handful of wholly negative reviews have focused on this, to the exclusion of all other aspects of the movie, as in the case of this tantrum over at /Film. The whole thing focuses on stuff like I listed above, ending with the dismissive, “But boy, it sure is pretty.” To recap, that's six words devoted to any aspect of Prometheus that isn't the script. Writing a review of a movie and focusing solely on the script is almost like writing a review of a movie based on what the wallpaper looks like in each scene, or what kind of chairs everyone's sitting in (yes, the script is more important than the art direction, and if you'll note I actually agree with a number of the points the dude made, but come the fuck on, THERE ARE OTHER ASPECTS TO THE MEDIUM).

On the other hand, Roger Ebert (and others, not to beat up on ol' Rog) giving Prometheus four stars isn't any better an indicator of value. I mean, this happens every now and then, everyone's fretting about an uneven balance of quality between different dissonant elements of a given film and Ebert chimes in like “FOUR STARS! I WAS TRANSPORTED!” and everyone else is like, “Uhh . . . ok.” (Also, unlike the /Film review, to the former's marginal credit, Ebert spoiled nine kinds of fuck out of the plot before any civilians had had any chance to see the movie, and without warnings, either. Naughty, naughty, sir.) Prometheus' champions are almost all saying “meh, fuck the script, the movie's awesome, it's Ridley Scott's best picture in years and truly beautiful filmmaking.” And that's all true. The photography is gorgeous, and finally there's no reason at all to bring up Dances With Smurfs in the discussion of best use of 3D, because Prometheus raised the bar really, really high. The only problem with that is . . . the script really, really sucks. There's a degree to which direction, photography, sound, design, and the other elements that make cinema cinema can overcome a shitty script, and when all of those elements are at an elite level, as they are in Prometheus, that degree can be nearly enough complete to make the overall experience enjoyable. But with an elephant turd of a script like Prometheus', it can never close the circle and make for an unqualified masterpiece.

Prometheus is a frustrating one, for sure. It's too ambitious to be dismissed out of hand, but the train-wreck script undermines those ambitions and makes them seem more commonplace than they actually are. If it makes money, maybe someday someone else gets to make a big beard-stroker R-rated SF movie that actually works better. But the fact that it's out, and we all saw it, means that at the very least we don't all have to keep fucking talking about it coming up. Also, everyone had to re-watch Alien to prepare, and that's a net gain, because Alien fucking rules. Prometheus will never fuck that up. So, hey. Life goes on. Now let's all spend a month and a half driving each other batshit (get it?) talking about The Dark Knight Rises.

LOVING THE ALIEN: WHEN A CLASSIC REALLY IS A CLASSIC

Ellen Ripley, Warrant Officer of the Nostromo, Admiral of the USS Ownage

Monday night, I was watching basketball—as I do—and one of the weirdest fucking things I've ever seen happened. Stephen A. Smith is an ESPN personality whose presentational style can best be described thusly: If you were jackhammering without earplugs at a My Bloody Valentine concert while fighter jets flew continuously overhead, you'd have to tell Stephen A. to shut the fuck up so you can concentrate. He doesn't do play-by-play, so when he was suddenly shouting at me during a commercial break I was like “GAAAHH” for a second and dropped my remote control. When my composure returned, I realized Stephen A. was talking about Prometheus. And that was a sign that Prometheus hype had gotten out of fucking control. As I'm a man of taste and discretion, I'd gotten my big preparatory geek-out ritual out of the way earlier that day, taking in Alien at Lincoln Center, as part of their pre-Prometheus whole-career Ridley Scott retrospective.

Whether or not Prometheus is any good is something I'll be finding out at some point within the week, but what is certain is that holy balls Alien rules all the ass there is. Its place in history is massive: one of the best science-fiction movies ever made and one of the best horror movies ever made, not to mention one of the best, if not the best, genre hybrids. It established Ridley Scott as a commercially viable feature director (his first feature, The Duellists, was gorgeous and awesome, though nowhere near the hit Alien was). And it gave us Sigourney Weaver (pictured above), and Ellen Ripley, without whom cinema would be lesser.

The thing about movies like that, though, is that every so often critics need to check in with them to make sure they're still all that. Someone I respect greatly recently revisited Bonnie & Clyde (a massively important movie, historically) for the first time in forever and it didn't go so well for him; I like the movie, but can see where parts of it could be jarring. No picture should be an unquestioned classic. Go into Citizen Kane questioning whether it's Citizen Kane. I mean, the answer is invariably yes, because it holds up under even the most powerful scrutiny, but still. It's Citizen Kane because it's motherfucking Citizen Kane, not because it's some special snowflake. Same with Alien. I didn't go in looking to find fault with it, obviously, but I went in ready to scrutinize it as a movie. And I did. And it still fucking ruled.

From a strictly experiential perspective, watching it on 35mm film as opposed to a cleaned-up digital version added to the grittiness of the movie and the rough-around-the-edges scruffballs that make up the crew of the Nostromo. The print was perfectly fine, and seemed like a well-maintained old one (I should be clear: I'm so warped by digital projection and DVDs my ability to accurately assess a print ain't what it once was). The apparent age and lived-in quality of the print only added to the experience.

As for the movie itself, I mean, what can you say. The production design is exquisite even at its most grotesque and decaying, equal parts standard 70s SF (the computer room brings to mind Nic Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth, the suspended animation couches Kubrick's 2001, which managed to be 70s SF in the 60s because Stanley Kubrick don't give a fuck what year it is motherfucker) and the groundbreaking, visually pessimistic futurism, all darkness and water dripping from the ceiling with big swinging chains and everything looking all fucked up like a bunch of roughneck sailors have had the run of the place, which is exactly the case.

The camerawork is a lot more flexible than a lot of later-period Ridley Scott, where the compositions are polished and relatively static, even if the colors and subjects within them are gorgeously lush. DP Derek Vanlint's camera actually moves quite a bit in Alien, all to excellent effect, either building tension to the point where you just want to fucking scream, or, toward the end, mirroring the agitation of the ever-dwindling crew.

What I noticed more than anything else this time through is the sound. Ho boy is sound used to great effect in Alien. The pitch of the blips and beeps from the computer and equipment is just so that each one of them is alarming. The score agitates, rather than soothes. The sounds of the ship and the odd non-diegetic cue give the Nostromo a heartbeat, which is sometimes a character's, but really the audience's: it's a nervous speed. Added with the other technical elements, we're already about to fucking lose our shit and we haven't even gotten up to the alien yet.

Before we do, it's important to note that when your premise, at its most basic, is “a bunch of people trapped in an enclosed space with a relentless, voracious alien,” if we don't give a shit about the people we ain't got a movie. The emotional core of Alien is its cast, which is absolutely spectacular. H.R. Giger's creature design is awesome and everything, and the technique is nonpareil, but the fact that this terrifying monster with acid for blood is fucking up people we care about is what elevates Alien from “merely” a technical masterpiece to “holy balls this is amazing” all-time classic status. Due to the logistics of its setting—a spaceship in the middle of space, that lands on an uninhabited planetoid and then takes off back into space—only seven human beings appear in the movie (not counting the Alien, who at the end was played by an actor in costume, and the cat, who was played by a cat, oh, yeah, and one humanoid, too), so there's no extras or anything, just principal cast.

The thing that's great about the cast is that they seem like grown-ass adults, primarily because they all are. Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton were already well into their 40s at least, John Hurt was just about to turn 40, and the younguns, Veronica Cartwright and Sigourney, were both around 30. They really make the characters seem like a bunch of people who've spent way too much time with just each other for company. They bitch about money, being under-appreciated, and the shitty food just like real workers. The two women, who statistically you'd think would be a natural pair of friends, especially around all these rough-and-tumble dudes, clearly loathe each other, but not in the contrived screenwriter-y kind of sexist way it's usually done, rather in a way that comes out of really good acting based in real human interaction. Especially with a genre piece that's as far out as Alien is in terms of real-life experience—a spaceship that, judging by what's said about distance traveled and time, must not be bound by Einsteinian relativity, not to mention the fact that they run into a fuckin alien with acid for blood—it's essential to ground things as much in reality as possible. That way, whether or not you're sitting there thinking “whoa, this is excellent, organic, naturalistic acting” (if you're a doofball egghead like me) or thinking at all, the emotional impact, the thing that transcends respect for a movie and becomes love, is achieved.

And yes, to paraphrase David Bowie, I love the Alien. It's the rare picture that is enriched by its scores of imitators; watching movies that tried to replicate Alien and then watching Alien again only serves as a reminder of “oh, yeah, this is how you do that well.” Getting back to the above discussion of historicity, Alien is Alien because it's Alien, not because people say it is. If that one sequence where we cut from the dummy severed head to [name of actor redacted] playing his final, harrowing scene talking in hushed awe about the structural perfection of the Alien, and then back to the dummy severed head is jarring because the dummy severed head isn't [redacted], you know what? Fuck it. Some of the effects look like they were made 30+ years ago because they were made 30+ years ago. This is the way of the world. The movie still fucking rules. It's still scary as hell. All other SF, horror, and SF/horror pictures must genuflect. Prometheus got one big spacesuit to fill.

IF THE PLAN DOESN'T WORK, IT CHANGES

Twas two years ago today the series finale of Lost aired. Revisit my wrap-up if you like, but seriously, the above interview with Damon Lindelof is what's really essential. Fascinating stuff, and really, the fact that he's that candid when he doesn't need to be kind of rules.

"BACK OFF, MAN, I'M A SCIENTIST": THE ENDURING APPEAL OF GHOSTBUSTERS

I'll spare you the details, but I had the kind of day Wednesday that makes one go, “fuck it, Ghostbusters is on Instant. This is what's required.” You've all been there. Maybe it's a different movie, but the stars aligned just so where I was like, “I need to fucking watch Ghostbusters right now.” There was a bit of a delay between the decision and actually being able to start watching, which of course meant I had time to wonder if it would hold up. It's been a while since I actually watched it—the last time I saw it, in 2009, is inadmissible, as it was at about two in the morning under extremely do-not-operate-heavy-machinery circumstances—and so the possibility that the experiential memories of the movie may have outweighed its actual quality had to be taken into consideration.

Because I have many happy memories of watching Ghostbusters. The first time in the theaters I don't remember so well (I was 5, I think) but I remember liking it enough that I was very excited when my elementary school got a 16mm print and made kids get permission notes from their parents to watch it after school; as not everyone's parents signed off, I was one of the “cool” kids—a fleeting pleasure in 2nd grade, believe—which only added to the enjoyment. Then there was that most recent time, whose aforementioned inadmissibility is in large part due to the thing I remember most about that viewing was successfully blowing pot smoke rings during the scene where Sigourney Weaver's levitating in that off-the-shoulder red thing (pot smoke is difficult to blow rings with, due to its texture, which is why I was so proud). Still, fun as all that is, it still begs the question: is Ghostbusters still awesome?

It is with great pleasure that I report back that the answer to that urgent and essential question is: of course Ghostbusters is still awesome, what the fuck did you think? One of the great things about having grown up with Ghostbusters is that all the parts that I dug when I was young—Bill Murray being Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis being co-gods of all nerds, Sigourney, the ghosts sliming everything, “Yes, it's true, that man has no dick,” and all that—are still great. Even better than that, though, is that all kinds of little details that flew right over my head as a kid (or stoned to the point of mental regression) landed perfectly as an adult.

The thing about being the age that I am (born in 1978) is that I was around for all of the 1980s, in all that decade's loud, ridiculous, head-up-its-ass splendor. For most of it, though, I wasn't in a terribly culturally aware place (to put it mildly; I didn't start reading the paper on a daily basis until the '88 presidential election, and even then stuff went over my head, and even then it was the Post, so there's that too) but I was still physically present experiencing and observing. I'm able to piece together through analysis and context what feels “real” and what misses the mark from cultural artifacts of the era. You can sit there and go “oh, what the fuck do you know about Ghostbusters' capturing the early-mid 80s zeitgeist, motherfucker, you were in kindergarten?” all you like. In so doing you forget a couple things: a) I'm really, really, really fucking smart, b) I was then, too, as well as observant c) even if a) and b) make you roll your eyes at my egotism, they're irrelevant, because lots and lots of other people will back me up on this.

Movies become hits—genuine hits, not just marketing-driven box-office numbers—by resonating with large numbers of people. They do so by tapping into universal truths, and by getting people to react, rather than think about what they're seeing (which is not to say that when you think about it, said hit doesn't hold up, it's that the feelings are running point and the intellectually substantive stuff is the fleet trailing just behind). One way to do that, as Ghostbusters does, is to ground things sufficiently in the given place and time, and by having a fundamental understanding of that place and time.

Ghostbusters was written, produced, and released during Ronald Reagan's first term, which is the early 80s (his second term, even though it mostly spanned the years one would normally think of as the mid-80s, was the late 80s; Reagan was president for the entire 80s in cultural terms). The early 80s were a time when the number of people who thought Reagan was a dangerous asshole who was cavalierly playing nuclear chicken with the Soviets was comparatively small, and where a whole lot of people, whether they want to admit it now (or even five years later) totally bought into the whole gung-ho money is everything trip. Also, it's important to not that depiction does not always necessarily mean endorsement, so the fact that Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis get their asses booted out of “Columbia” (the university isn't named in the movie, but it's totally shot there) for reasons more economic than academic, leading them to have to quickly figure out a way to monetize their paranormal knowledge is perfectly in keeping with the time. What helps audiences in less avaricious times (if any such indeed exist) identify with this profit motivation is the fact that the lads have a marketable skill: Harold Ramis does some math with his cool little gadget and figures out that they can in fact imprison ghosts, if they can catch them. So, taking out some ridonkulous mortgage on Dan Aykroyd's family house to raise some quick capital actually isn't suicidally stupid, it's just risky (also, as Scott Tobias pointed out, the way Dan Aykroyd says “You didn't even bargain with the guy” afterward is hilarious, and points up Bill Murray's immature recklessness perfectly), especially because, conveniently enough, the library specter in the first scene was the herald of a lot more paranormal activity in New York.

We all know the rest of the story. Bill Murray's hare-brained idea and the unethical way he shanghais it into existence makes them celebrities (another extrapolation very much of the movie's time; the branding of the Ghostbusters, like this iconic image—

—was part of the movie's central creative process rather than being subcontracted to a marketing department), and requires them to hire Annie Potts (who's great, and does a perfect if caricatured NYC outer-boroughs accent) to answer the phones and Ernie Hudson (who replaced Eddie Murphy when he had to go do Beverly Hills Cop instead, but who brings a lived-in prole-y world-weariness to the role that Eddie simply wasn't old enough for at that point) to help with the workload. And of course there is Sigourney.

Sigourney Weaver is very important not only because she may have laid the groundwork for my lifelong passion for refined, slightly repressed brunettes, but because she brought a very formidable feminine energy to science-fiction/fantasy in the 80s. Her role in Ghostbusters is less groundbreaking in that regard than it is as Ripley, and she does veer a little close to a kind of damsel in distress business that's beneath her, but what saves it (to the degree it needs saving in this context) from collapsing into a sexist mess is that she represents an aspirational goal for Bill Murray. Not in the dumb sense of him “winning” or possessing her or any of that fuckin shit but because she's an actual grownup. And he's not. Ghostbusters is a companion piece to Stripes in a number of ways (Harold Ramis, being really fucking funny), most importantly as pertains to Bill Murray specifically in that he's playing another puer aeternus wiseass who has to, by hook or by crook, grow the fuck up before the Commies or Gozer win. While part of Stripes' charm is that he manages to squeak by without maturing past the age of 12, in Ghostbusters the stakes are a bit higher, where that Ziggy Stardust lookin ass Sumerian demigod is literally going to end the universe (which despite what Ronald Reagan would have had you believe is a little more severe than driving Bulgarian cars and wintering in Irkutsk). Fortunately, the desire to impress Sigourney leads Bill Murray to kiiiiiiiiiiiiind of grow up (enough, anyway) before the shit hits the fan.

One great benefit Ghostbusters has had, as any movie must that would become an enduring classic must, is the advantage of the culture evolving along with it, and/or meeting it halfway. In the case of Ghostbusters, it was one force among many driving that evolution, being as it is one of the movies that would be on Mount Nerdmore, were there such a thing, and were reification such that a movie could have a face. The reason for Ghostbusters' nerd appeal is simple: the Ghostbusters are giant, giant, giant nerds. Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis represent two distinct genera of nerds here: Aykroyd the effusive, guileless enthusiast and Ramis the otherworldly, super-serious obsessive. Bill Murray doesn't seem to fit within this immediately, but for all his glib charm he doesn't fit terribly easily in society, and if you'll recall he has to go to rather extreme lengths to get that nice blonde girl by herself in that early scene and does absolutely horribly in his initial attempt to hit on Sigourney. He's kind of a nerd too, just in a very Bill Murray sense of the term.

At the same time that a certain degree of continuing relevance benefits a would-be classic, there's also (complicating the already near-impossible balancing act even further) a requirement that the given movie recall a distinctly irretrievable past. Ghostbusters fulfills this with room to spare in two ways: one, the pre-CG special effects, which look fake in a far more appealing way than all but the most perfectly-done CG (and, because the filmmakers understood that special effects are, you know, special, they made sure effects shots were only there when they absolutely had to be), and two, its portrayal of pre-Disneyfication New York City. New Yorkers complaining that New York isn't like it used to be has probably been going on since some old drunk Dutch dude in the 1700s bored the tits off English colonists telling them shit was only real back when Peter Stuyvesant was around. But there is an actual difference between the New York City before Rudy Giuliani's take-the-good-with-the-fascism reign as mayor and after, at which point the violent crime that had long lent a “once more into the breach” air to every venture outside one's apartment in New York was no more. It was, however, replaced by a Manhattan by, for, and of the extremely rich, which is even still rapidly expanding to Brooklyn and Queens, a place that is safer to live unless one disturbs the moneyed elite, but arguably missing that ineffable quality that made New York New York once upon a time. None of Ghostbusters' three primary protagonists have anything even remotely resembling New York accents (to be fair, it is never concretely implied that any of them are actually from here) but they—and the many locals they encounter, like Annie Potts, and the “that must be some cockroach” guy with the cigar waiting by the elevator, and Ernie Hudson—all have that kind of “what the fuck” swagger that New Yorkers all like to think they possess even now. Whether or not that's real or illusory is beside the point: it's a shared positive perception of what New York was at the time, at just the right pitch to resonate with audiences far and wide.

All of which is to say, man, Ghostbusters is still really fucking great. It's just lovely. Even if the parts that are loveliest go from “tee hee hee Bill Murray” to “wow Laszlo Kovacs sure knows how to use the wide screen and man Elmer Bernstein's a god with the tunes,” it's still about as good as pop cinema gets. The fact that the best parts change over time too is another sign that Ghostbusters is one of the great classics of its decade. Long may it reign. Who ya gonna call.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH NETFLIX VOL. 9: IN TIME

I'm telling you nothing new when I say, and you no doubt have guessed from the enthusiasm that pervades my writing over at Tor.com, I rather like science fiction. As literature it provides an excellent framework for everything from social commentary to philosophical meditation. We're long past having to defend science fiction as serious literature. Kurt Vonnegut put a hollow point behind the ear of that argument, after Robert Heinlein tied its shoelaces together and Ray Bradbury kicked it to the ground. Stanley Kubrick similarly made the case for science fiction as serious cinema, for all those people with short memories who forgot about The Day The Earth Stood Still (to say nothing of Metropolis, or shit, Journey to the Moon, aka one of the first fucking movies ever). But SF cinema is a slightly iffier proposition. It's not that it can't be great (see Kubrick and many, many other examples) it's just that the difficulty curve is high; a book can stop in its tracks and take a couple paragraphs to explain shit, but too much of that kind of thing can make for a really dull movie under the wrong circumstances. This is why there's an occasional disconnect whereby SF movies can be good SF or good movies while failing somewhat in the other half of the equation. Sometimes, to quote The Wire gratuitously, things just be that way I guess. But, on the upside, that means, in a way, that SF movies have two chances to be good. That's why it's a shame that Andrew Niccol's In Time flunks both halves of the equation, in a weirdly reciprocal (to say nothing of paradoxical) fashion: it's bad SF because it's too committed to being a movie, and is a bad movie because it sacrifices too much of its connection to this world out of a mistaken belief in the profundity of its one-trick SF premise.

It's not like In Time has nothing to go for it. It sucks, but it sucks in a way that demands in examination into exactly why that is so. IN A WORLD that, despite being at least a hundred years in the future, still looks pretty much exactly the way downtown Los Angeles looks today (I kind of blame a recent viewing of Thom Anderson's fascinating Los Angeles Plays Itself for making me as sensitive to that; the only thing really wrong with the way Niccol uses his locations is that it simply doesn't look like it's that far in the future in any appreciable or convincing way), science has completely conquered the process of biological aging. Everyone, once they reach the age of 25, stays 25, in perpetuity. The catch is, everyone's given an allotment of time, which has replaced currency. Goods and services are exchanged for their value in time. When one's clock—located in a glowing green subcutaneous LED readout on one's left arm—reaches zero, one's body functions immediately cease, and one dies on the spot. There are haves, who are essentially immortal, with hundreds and occasionally thousands of years on their clocks, and have-nots, who labor daily for enough hours to be able to wake up alive the following morning.

Our hero here is one Will Salas, played by Mr. Justin Timberlake, a working-class lad living with his ma, Ms. Olivia Wilde, who due to the nature of this whole eradication of aging, looks basically JT's age, because she is. A few minutes of world-building ensues, until one evening out at the bar with one of the guys from The Big Bang Theory, JT encounters a rich guy on a bender throwing time around like a drunken sailor. Some dudes come in, led by Alex (I Am Number Four) Pettyfer (who can, amazingly, be seen to be giving progressively less of a fuck in every single one of his scenes in this picture) and make like they're going to fuck the rich dude up and roll him. For no apparent reason whatsoever, JT intercedes and helps the rich dude escape. Once they're clear of Alex Pettyfer and his thugs, the rich guy lays a suicide trip on JT, who doesn't quite know what to make of the guy and his angst; not having to worry about suddenly dropping dead at any moment is kind of a First World Problem. They drink some of the rich dude's good booze out of his schmancy flask and pass out. JT wakes up, alone, to find that the rich dude has transferred all his time (over a hundred years) to JT's clock, and JT looks out the window to see the rich guy's clock expire, after which he swan dives into the L.A. River.

The cops, led by the always awesome (he walks away with this movie, twirling it on his finger like a gun) Cillian Murphy, show up and immediately conclude that JT rolled the rich guy, just like Alex Pettyfer's dudes were planning on doing. A series of events that includes one of the most shamelessly melodramatic scenes ever filmed (I'm not exaggerating; “the scene when Olivia Wilde starts running” should replace “Lilian Gish on the ice floe” from D.W. Griffith's Way Down East as the cliché shorthand for melodrama) leads JT to the utopian New Greenwich, where all the rich fucks stay. JT encounters an intriguing young lady in a truly horrible wig (Amanda Seyfried), who it turns out is the daughter of the head evil white guy in charge (Vincent Kartheiser, reinforcing his ability, as first demonstrated in Mad Men, to wear the fuck out of a well-cut suit), who initially rather likes JT, and is impressed by his ballsy pursuit of wealth. Evil White Guys In Suits are drawn to their own kind, after all. Only JT's not evil, and Cillian Murphy's a good cop, which means in short order everything and everyone goes apeshit.

Now, none of the above is anything that wasn't in the trailer, so I'll stop the plot recap there. In any case, everything the movie is trying to say about the importance of living one's life in the moment and being appreciative of all life has to offer, and about social justice and how Evil White Guys In Suits manage to adapt to any sociopolitical scenario and stay in charge fucking over proles is all set up by that point in the narrative. The rest of the picture is just noise anyway (and a half-reprise of the above mentioned Most Melodramatic Scene In The Fucking Universe) until it ends in kind of a limpdick sequel setup, with nothing really resolved and no particularly deep conclusions to any of the picture's Big Questions. It ends up being silly and disappointingly fluffy given the potential beard-scratcher posed by literalizing the time-is-money conceit. And though the cinematography is pretty sweet (by the great Roger Deakins, natch), the things being photographed are kind of unimaginatively conceived; put it this way, I was really surprised to find out that Andrew Niccol had a $40 million budget, as it looks like he's trying to scrape by on about 10 at most. 

More than that, though, the thing that really fucks In Time up is the way things happen because the story needs them to. When JT saves the rich guy, okay, let's say he does it out of the kindness of his own heart, all right, maybe I'm just cynical. But him subsequently being able to outwit, outrun, and make fools out of a bunch of armed gangsters is a little convenient. As is the fact that apparently the cops of the 22nd or 23rd century or whenever this is, despite having far more reason to reinforce the societal status quo, have inferior surveillance technology to what would be at their disposal today. Even if you presuppose that, having essentially conquered death, the ruling classes would stagnate intellectually and pursue nothing but their own pleasure, you have to think that self-interest at least would lead to them setting up some kind of at least half-assedly fail-safed system to ensure that any potential Justin Timberlakes who might come along and challenge their hold on power at least have to sweat a bit. Because, come on, when Timberlake decides to go to the Evil White Guys In Suits' motherland, he gets all the way there and almost fully insinuated into the good graces of the most Evil and Whitest of them all before anyone even knows who he is or what he's done. Not only would it make more logical sense for it to be a lot more difficult for JT to do so, it would make the movie more suspenseful too. Even if, as it begins to appear by the third act, the whole time thing and the movie in general is just a parable for living in the moment, it'd still be nice if details rendered secondary by that being the case to not be as dumb, or as brushed past. Having the villains be this incompetent and weak weakens JT as a hero.

And yet . . . in spite of the fact that it fails as a movie and as SF and has The Single Most Melodramatic Scene In The History Of Cinema (not only once, but twice) In Time isn't that much of a chore to watch. Justin Timberlake does a damn fine job with what he's given in the lead; his getting-there-slowly-but-surely acting skills are more than up to the task here, as what the role really requires is star power, which he, of course, has in spades, though his character's so thin it isn't really worthy of his talents. Cillian Murphy is so good as the cop, now I want to see him play the hard-bitten grizzled cop with weekly heart attacks and monthly divorces and all other essentials in a good movie. And, of course, I'd watch Amanda Seyfried read the phone book. It's not just pretty and talented actors, either. Despite the movie's bilateral failure, it has its moments that work in between the things that don't. At times, when the lo-tech future isn't presenting fundamental challenges to the entire premise of the story it allows for isolated, engagingly real moments with the characters, specifically between Cillian Murphy and his other cops.

All of which leads to the kind of reductive kind of contradictory state of affairs where In Time sucks, but I didn't hate it. I don't know what to tell you. Timberlake can carry a picture even if it isn't necessarily this one, and I'd rather see a good director (see Gattaca for reference) swing and miss than see a shitty director's best. Sometimes things just be that way, I guess.

BOOK TO FILM: THE HUNGER GAMES

I finally saw The Hunger Games Tuesday afternoon. It's not perfect, but I'm certainly not going to begrudge it the holy-moley-great-balls-of-fire-fuckgantic box office gross it's racking up. For all we want to be cranky old people farting at the younger generation for being nekulturny nihilistic retards, sometimes the shit the kids are into is pretty good. Hell, Justin Bieber doesn't suck. Yeah, I said it. Sure, “If I was your boyfriend I'd never let you go/I can take you places you ain't never been before” ain't exactly William Butler Yeats, sure it's funny when Bieber uses the word “swag” (as in swag-ger, fellow olds), sure he looks like a lesbian. But “Oh yeah, I'll tell you something I think you'll understand/When you say that something, I wanna hold your hand” is stupid too, no one knew what the fuck “gear” meant even at the height of Beatlemania, and Paul McCartney looked even more like a lesbian than Bieber until he died in that car crash and his slightly butcher doppleganger took his place and grew a mustache. Sure, John Lennon could have melted Biebs with telekinesis, but the kid makes perfectly competent pop music. He's way the fuck better than the pop music teenagers listened to when I was a teenager—I don't care how female and how twelve years old you once were, the Backstreet Boys are war criminals—and moreover, you couldn't get kids to read books at gunpoint in the mid-90s. The Harry Potter books changed all that, proving that as long as you didn't try to get kids to read Paul Bowles, they would read. Publishing companies went “whoa, shit, let's try that again,” and while that meant we have to suffer the shame of being a species that created the Twilight series, it also meant a bunch of other YA properties are out there keeping books in kids' hands. One of which, and arguably the premier non-Potter out there, is The Hunger Games trilogy.

Thus far I've read the first book and a chunk of the second, and I gotta say, they don't fuck around. Suzanne Collins, with sparse, direct prose, renders a genuinely dark and scary far-future dystopia, where a totalitarian regime has divided North America into 12 (formerly 13) Districts, each devoted to producing a resource needed to keep the wildly luxurious Capitol in the lifestyle they require. In the other corner, weighing in at a lot less than she would if she had enough to eat, representing District 12 (the poorest District, whose raison d'etre is its coal mines) is Katniss Everdeen, 16 years of age. Katniss provides for her mother and younger sister by sneaking out into the woods and hunting, which while illegal is tacitly permitted by the local Peacekeepers (read: cops), since District 12 is widely considered too backward to be dangerous to anyone. All this changes forever, very early in the first book, when it comes time for the Hunger Games, held annually, which involve each District providing a boy and girl between the ages of 12 and 18 to fight to the death on TV until one champion remains. The champion then returns to his or her District and lives in government-underwritten splendor for life. Katniss' younger sister is selected to compete, at which point Katniss volunteers to take her place. Katniss and her male counterpart, baker's son Peeta, are whisked away to the Capitol to get a crash course in media relations before being tossed into the arena for the Games.

When reading The Hunger Games, one (fairly dorky movie industry inside baseball) thought kept recurring: “How the fuck are they going to bring this in as a PG-13?” At one point in the Games, after a party I won't name does something that really pisses Katniss off, she shoots him in the throat, yanks the arrow out, and watches (reasonably dispassionately) as the guy chokes to death on his own blood. Now, I'm definitely on the “more the merrier” side of the ownage fence, but that's an R to me. So I knew that bit probably wasn't going to be in the movie (at least until Gareth Evans does the reboot with Iko Uwais in drag as Katniss) but at the same time, the thing Katniss is pissed off about is A Really Big Deal, narrative-wise, so if she just gives the dude a wedgie the significance of the moment is lost. There are a few other key moments where things get a bit bloody, too. It's not so much that I thought a movie version would be soft, it's that I was impressed with how dark the book gets. It “goes there.”

And, as much as ratings board issues and length restrictions made changes in the adaptation mandatory, the movie does too. Working from a script on which he collaborated with Collins herself and the very talented screenwriter Billy Ray, director Gary Ross made the cinematic equivalent of what The Hunger Games was as a book: an exciting, occasionally rough, but fiercely compelling SF action picture. Freed from the first-person narration in the book that limits the action strictly to what Katniss does, observes, and remembers, the movie is able to provide context to the world of the story, though this is a bit of a double-edged sword, as knowing more about what's going on kind of takes the edge off certain aspects of Katniss' path through the Games, and some of the more frightening surprises. Still, it's a damn solid movie.

Its one major debit as a movie is its overuse of handheld camera. Now, I'm not as militantly anti-shaky-cam as some, and it doesn't give me motion sickness or anything. But there's a time and a place. (Ed. Note: read that last sentence in your head as Paul Henreid. You're welcome.) I think the real problem is that Hollywood needs to either a) start cutting its cocaine with something a little more chemically equanimous, like, I don't know, Valium or something, or b) stop giving its camera operators quite so much of the shit, because man, the camera in The Hunger Games is jittery. Combined with the quick cutting, a lot of the movie is lost in a blur. Weirdly, the action sequences (some of which were directed by Steven Soderbergh, who's kind of the Energizer bunny of cinema; I pictured him coming up to Gary Ross being like, “Man, principal photography doesn't start for my other four movies for like three days, man, I need a fix, man, I need to shoot something, I don't give a fuck, man, I'll shoot second unit for you man, please, man, I'll suck your dick!”) are more visually clear than the bits where Jennifer Lawrence is just walking down a path in District 12 moodily contemplating her downtrodden existence. You get used to it (if you're able to) after a while, but the bit when they're arriving at the Capitol and seeing just how much more it is in ever sense than anything Katniss or Peeta have ever seen would have worked a lot better if the damn camera wasn't doing its coke-freak-out tarantella all over the fuckin place.

But anyway, enough of the problems. There's plenty that's awesome about The Hunger Games, and it all starts with the aforementioned Ms. Lawrence. Jennifer Lawrence is made out of movie star. She's gorgeous, she can act, she's got terrific physical presence. And there's this air of “wait . . . you're serious? You mean I get to make movies? That's ridiculous, and awesome, but I mean, come on. You're not seriously letting me be in movies, right?” about her that seems totally unaffected, and is endlessly endearing. She'll play along with the “joke” and keep being in movies until someone yells “psych!” at which point she'll shrug it off and go right on doing whatever. Except if she keeps being this awesome in everything she's in (Winter's Bone's still out there to watch, too) no one's yelling “psych” for a long, long time. Everyone's good in the movie, especially Lenny Kravitz, who's just terrific in the small but key role of Katniss' stylist Cinna, Woody Harrelson, quietly peaking as one of the best character actors alive as the drunken and haunted mentor and ex-Hunger Games champion Haymitch, and a young actor named Amandla Stenberg, as Rue, a District 11 competitor Katniss befriends over the course of the Games, who turns in a really affecting performance without the benefit of a ton of dialogue, but all Rue's subtext shines on the screen.

Most of the core story of The Hunger Games is right there on screen. A number of details of the story are presented with little or no explanation, which is fine as fan service, but might leave people who haven't read the book out in the cold. The only two worth mentioning (and it's something that could quite easily be addressed in the next movie) are, first, the pin Katniss acquires early in the movie, that she gives to her sister for luck, only to have returned when it turns out Katniss is going to be competing in the Hunger Games, and which is subsequently incorporated into one of her costumes by her stylist. It's identified as a “mockingjay,” though it's never explained what a mockingjay is. The book explains a mockingjay is a hybrid bird genetically engineered by the Capitol as a means of spying on the people, only it proves uncontrollable and slips the Capitol's grasp, living on as a signifier of the frailty of totalitarian rule. Also, Mockingjay is the title of the third and final book in the series, implying that it's pretty damn important. Still, with the first movie being entirely concerned with Katniss competing in the Hunger Games and finding that to be just the beginning, with the rebellion of the Districts (briefly addressed in the movie, in a scene not in the book that ends up being one of the movie's most powerful moments) coming mainly later on in the series, there is still time for the explanation of the significance of the mockingjay.

The second omission is a little more problematic. In the books, food is an enormously important thing. Katniss and nearly everyone else in District 12 is constantly on the brink of starvation, even though the ruling regime could feed everyone with little more difficulty than a snap of the fingers. It's a reminder of the power of the Capitol, and virtually every moment of Katniss' day at home is given over to acquiring and trading for food. The Hunger Games are so called because the winner never has to go hungry again, and as a reminder that their (optional) hunger is a symbol of the power the contestants' (and everyone else's) rulers have over them. The movie doesn't have as much time to address this as the book, with that exposition having to share room with all the other crap the movie has to pack into its first act, and while Jennifer Lawrence tells her mother “Don't let [my sister] starve!” that's about it. It wouldn't be that big a deal—any book loses pages on the way to the screen—except the movie's called, ya know, The Hunger Games.

That narrative shortcoming, and all that “holy shit give the fuckin camera operator some Thorazine” camerawork, are the only things really holding The Hunger Games back from being legitimately great as opposed to just really good. And, in a way, the jittery camerawork is the equivalent of Suzanne Collins' occasionally clunky prose, which cancels it out as a deal-breaker for the movie, which has the benefit of the book's dark, intense relentless narrative momentum. It's a damn easy movie to get caught up in. Damn, damn easy. And that's a blockbuster's job. I can nitpick the camerawork and the vagaries of book-to-film adaptation all the livelong day, but the most important thing about The Hunger Games is, it's the kind of movie whose strengths inspire a great big I-don't-give-a-fuck about its weaknesses. And, much like at the top where I compared Justin Bieber to Paul McCartney, allow me an additional sacrilege: The Hunger Games inspires a similar level of I'm-caught-up-in-it-so-fuck-the-parts-that-don't-work as Star Wars. By which I mean the real Star Wars, the one from the 70s.

Now, there's no way The Hunger Games can have the same cultural impact as Star Wars, which literally reinvented the movie industry almost singlehandedly. But if the kids who are the same age now as the kids were who made Star Wars into the institution is today grow up venerating The Hunger Games movie equivalently to Star Wars, it's not that they're assholes, or they don't get it (to reference an earlier movie featuring the actor who played Peeta, the kids are all right.) It's a legit comparison, speaking strictly as cinema.

All inflammatory nerd provocations aside though, here's to Jennifer Lawrence, movie star, who'll keep The Girl On Fire burning forevermore. May the rest of the movies in the series work as well as pop cinema as the first.

A NOBLE (BUT INCOMPLETE) ATTEMPT TO WATCH GREEN LANTERN

I was home not being a drunk shithead last night, which meant that at about 12:30 I was looking at the channel guide on TV; I was nearing the end of Dazed and Confused, a really fantastic movie that I should someday give a proper rewatch without commercial breaks and censored fucks, and looking for something else. Lo and behold, I found something. And before it even started, I regretted it:

Already feeling like the decision to watch GREEN LANTERN on HBO at 1:25 is a mistake and it hasn't even started yet.

I don't know whether it was morbid curiosity, self-flagellation because all anti-St. Pat's rhetoric aside I could have kind of used a drink, or what, but the die was cast. Despite being determined to go through with my plan, I knew it was probably a bad idea. My friend Jon Hoche, an actor, playwright, and a nerd of far purer heart than I, saw my tweet about watching Green Lantern and immediately started warning me against it; this, for those of you without the privilege of knowing Mr. Hoche, is a really bad sign with any comic book/geek property. But what is St. Patrick's Day if not a day to make bad decisions, and verily to do things that may induce vomiting? This, then, is the record of that horrendously ill-advised decision:

The opening of GREEN LANTERN is reminding me of what the opening of HEAVY METAL would be without a sense of ironic perspective.

Speaking of HEAVY METAL, I just had the horrifying realization that there are no gratuitous nude scenes in this movie.

(This led to me briefly brainstorming, with Isaac Butler, a live-action version of Richard Corben's Den starring Ryan Reynolds. Genius never sleeps, people.)

So all of a sudden Blake Lively is playing Goose in a heterosexual variation on TOP GUN. #GreenLantern

Holy shit, the Loch Nar is looking for Ryan Reynolds! (Ed. Note: the Loch Nar was the little green spherical thing that appeared in various iterations in the Heavy Metal movie that caused a variety of sin and perfidy; the weirdly dark tone of Green Lantern had me thinking the Lanterns were actually the bad guys.)

The military-industrial complex is kinda toothless here. Real evil white guys in suits would STILL be tasering Ryan Reynolds in the nuts. "Oh, you crashed our billion-dollar plane for no reason! Okay, we're not even going to yell at you, we'll let Blake Lively do it." Sure.

I don't wanna say these cats are wasting money, but if you gave me $200 mil and a camera Cecil B. Demille would rise from the fucking dead. (Ed. Note: I want to reinforce this point; the CGI was almost as bad as it was in the Telugu fantasy picture Once Upon A Warrior, which cost like 8% of what Green Lantern did and had cooler swordfighting and a better girl character than Blake Lively. If you gave me $200 mil, you would see that $200 mil on the screen. For better or worse.)

Peter Sarsgaard and Angela Bassett just had a ferocious bad hairstyling duel.

Ryan Reynolds just straight up murked three proles with his fancy Loch Nar ring. Maybe this IS a remake. Maybe Blake Lively WILL get naked! (Ed. Note: this is an important point, that Cracked also made: Ryan Reynolds gets his ass kicked by these three dudes who lost their jobs because he pulled his I-play-by-my-own-rules fucking bullshit and crashing that massively expensive plane, completely unnecessarily. This would be a fine moment for Ryan Reynolds to take a beating as character-building. But no. He whips out his Green Lantern ring . . . and fucking kills the three guys. They're fucking dead, they're not just knocked out. I mean, what the sociopathically self-absorbed fuck. And the movie doesn't dwell on this at all. It's just like, hey, if you fuck with Ryan Reynolds, you get got. Yeah, cool story, bro.)

British aliens were better when they were dudes in metal suits, man, fuck your computers. (Ed. Note: this is when the aliens whisk Ryan Reynolds off to their planet to tell him he's one of them now.)

Though I will say, having the infodump in a British accent was a very smart move. It adds "class."

"What is THAT?" "It's a computer-generated effect, Mr. Reynolds. Now allow me to recite a few non sequiturs in my melodious British accent."

Why's Mark Strong dressed like a hemorrhoid & talking about nuking THE PARALLAX VIEW? What did Warren Beatty ever do to you, motherfucker?

Peter Sarsgaard has a fivehead and is possessed by Something Alien. Gotta say if somebody's gotta do it, might as well be him.

GREEN LANTERN is an evocative movie. It evokes the desire for sleep. I'm out at the hour-ten mark; no idea what's going on & don't care.

One last parting thought: it is truly remarkable how awful everyone's hair looked in that movie.

And that's it. I couldn't make it past the big scene when Tim Robbins (as the Evil White Guy In A Suit, except with the murky moral tone I couldn't tell whether him being evil had anything to do with anything or whether it was just because they noticed how awesome an EWGIS Tim Robbins is now that his hair's gone gray) is getting some thing at a banquet and Blake Lively is made up to look like Jennifer Lopez's younger sister for some reason and some shit or other starts happening. I just had to say fuck it and pull the plug.

All this being said, it's probably an outstanding picture to smoke weed to, so if you're so inclined, knock yourself out. As for me, whose days of blazing are mostly a thing of the past, I couldn't hang. I did try, though.

A VERY HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO DAVID ROBERT JONES

The following was originally written for Tor.com, who are kicking off a whole week of David Bowie love in honor of the great man's birthday. Unfortunately, due to me misinterpreting my instructions, I had written this whole thing before discovering that a couple other writers had basically covered all this and made it redundant, so it will not, alas, be part of the Bowie fawning (I gotta say, I love working for people who are even bigger Bowie fans than I am). But, rather than just let this gather virtual dust sitting on my hard drive, I figured, what the hell. Here, then, is a brief piece about David Bowie's music as relates to science fiction:


From the very beginning of his career, David Bowie's career has had close ties to science fiction. His first commercially successful single, “Space Oddity,” a sprawling, haunting tale of the doomed astronaut Major Tom (on the literal level, at least; there were heavily metaphorical undercurrents of drug addiction as well, but that's Bowie for you, he's rarely if ever only doing one thing.)

Bowie's penchant for both vivid visuals and science-fictional themes and allusions in his lyrics was at its most consistent in the first few years of his fame, spanning multiple stage personae. After Major Tom, and a few references here and there on The Man Who Fell To Earth, Bowie wrote two explicitly SF-inspired songs for his extraordinary album Hunky Dory: “Oh! You Pretty Things,” which looks forward to an apocalyptic shift from the human race as it currently exists to the next stage in evolution (while also simultaneously, and more overtly, being a middle finger to homophobes), and the epic drama “Life On Mars?”, another portrait of (general and sexual) otherness where Bowie first employed the metaphor of an alien world to illuminate the separation that kind of otherness causes with the rest of society.

He proceeded to extrapolate this metaphor, most obviously and famously in his Ziggy Stardust alter ego. His next album, The Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, over the course of whose 12 songs—peppered with a number of oblique non sequiturs—tells the titular story. Whether or not Ziggy and the other spiders were literally from Mars was a bit beside the point; they were sufficiently not of this earth that only an SF metaphor would do do describe them. Much, it should be noted, like Bowie himself.

The strange and, in more ways than one, alien sexuality of Ziggy combined with perfect timing and the fact that the album was really good made Ziggy Stardust a massive success. It put Bowie in a position where he was forced to either stay Ziggy forever or evolve. He chose the latter, subtly at first. His follow-up album, Aladdin Sane, featured a logical continuation of many of Ziggy's musical ideas, but with the overt SF imagery confined almost exclusively to the title track; “Aladdin Sane” being a play on the phrase “a lad, insane.” Inspired by the Evelyn Waugh novel Vile Bodies, the characters in which Bowie saw as consumed by a meaningless, doomed lifestyle that was both caused by imminent global catastrophe and at the same time the cause thereof, “Aladdin Sane” looked forward to World War III both lyrically and in its spooky, furtively experimental music, that managed to evoke both Berlin cabarets and the apocalyptic future.

For his followup, Bowie—a bit addled by drug use and the pressures of the commercial music industry—wanted to write, and worked out a few rough sketches of songs for a stage musical of George Orwell's 1984, but was denied the rights by Orwell's estate. Then he planned a concept album set in and around a post-apocalyptic city. Upon completion, Diamond Dogs would be a combination of both ideas, featuring a good deal of SF in the lyrics and a couple killer singles.

Although he had not maintained his Ziggy persona throughout this initial period—which also featured covers album Pin-Ups—his shift to “blue-eyed soul” singer was a much more significant shift, and the first such that could be described as a reinvention. This period, consisting of the album Young Americans, didn't traffic in the same SF references as before, primarily because they'd always been a mark of Bowie's sense of his own otherness, and now he was trying to assimilate. That being said, the idea of Bowie co-writing songs with Luther Vandross was sufficiently (and awesomely) strange that it seemed like something out of parallel universe SF.

Bowie would not stray long from SF, as his very next studio album, Station to Station, originated in an attempt to write a song score for the SF movie The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which Bowie was playing the main character, the alien Thomas Jerome Newton. A combination of preparing for his first lead role as an actor and his debilitating drug regimen led to Bowie's arguably most fascinating—and least sustainable—persona: that of The Thin White Duke. The Thin White Duke was from another planet much like Ziggy Stardust, but rather than the former's relatively benign mission of sex, drugs, and rock n roll, The Thin White Duke was up to something far more sinister and mysterious. The music on Station to Station was forward-thinking and packed with spooky (and spooked) futurism. Everything about this iteration was less explicit, more elusive, which oddly made Station to Station and the following period—Bowie's “Berlin trilogy,” over the course of which he gradually weaned himself off cocaine and returned to relative sanity—nearly perfect soundtracks for SF cinema, both real and hypothetical.

A sane, sober Bowie was not much for the science-fiction imagery, even going so far, in “Ashes to Ashes,” to turn his back on the entire period with the line “We know Major Tom's a junkie.” Still, he didn't abandon SFF completely, turning in a haunting, beautifully rendered performance as a dying vampire in The Hunger (a movie otherwise only notable for being the feature directing debut of Tony Scott and for the legendary sex scene between Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon; something's wrong when David Bowie isn't involved in the sexy parts of a movie) and his indelible turn as goblin king Jareth in Labyrinth, for which he also wrote the songs.

Labyrinth is an extremely important movie for reasons I'm sure I don't need to explain to anyone still reading at this point, and its soundtrack has its ups and downs, though those ups are very, very up indeed. “Magic Dance” is one of the greatest things to ever exist. Bowie takes elements of every one of his previous personae for his character and—to a lesser extent—songs in Labyrinth, ending up with a result that somehow manages to carry undertones of his old dangerous sexuality and yet still be (kind of) suitable for a kids' movie.

Still, fairly or not, the period in Bowie's career in which he made Labyrinth was one of his critically least successful. Almost a decade later, he was at a point at which his own career and shifting popular tastes in music required a “comeback” album, for which he reunited with producer Brian Eno. In trying to recapture his 70s glory, the album—written entirely in the studio—was linked by the overarching theme, detailed by Bowie in a short SF story that he included as liner notes, of a dystopian near future, with songs told from the perspectives of several different characters.

While regarding Outside as a “comeback” album slightly devalues the work Bowie had been doing at the time—among which were the under-appreciated album Black Tie, White Noise and the excellent, adventurous soundtrack to the BBC adaptation of Hanef Kureishi's novel The Buddha of Suburbia—it is nonetheless a return to Bowie's explicitly science-fictional lyrics. Being vastly more lucid than he was in the 70s (when he wasn't at all) makes Outside at once less thrilling an evocation of an SF universe than its predecessors and a far more coherent one. It's a big, long experience that evokes, far more clearly and consistently than any of Bowie's other concept albums, a science-fiction movie. The album isn't only the score but the script and cinematography as well.

Outside was Bowie's last grand statement in musical SF. His subsequent work has occasionally alluded to SF and related themes, but not to the extent Outside or his 70s period did. Still, Bowie's manifest, wondrous strangeness has led many a filmmaker, and specifically an SF filmmaker , to use one of his songs for the soundtrack, since there are certain situations where only David Bowie will do. Even in the non-SF comedy Zoolander, there was a point of debate about who was cooler than who, leading Bowie to step into frame and say “Perhaps I can be of assistance.” An expert consultant, if you will.

It was also a lovely touch in Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, set so far in the future that humans have interstellar travel (and are united under one highly fascistic planetary government), that the band playing the high school prom before all the 30 year old high school students go off to war is covering Bowie's “I Have Not Been To Oxford Town.” It's at least a century in the future, and Bowie's still cool. It warms the heart.

And last but not least, one use of a Bowie song that I think speaks volumes of his supremacy not only as the last word in cool but his status as the rock star laureate of science fiction, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, which absolutely beyond any doubt qualifies as alternate history SF, even if it isn't immediately apparent as such. The movie is Tarantino's typically feverish blend of literary and cinematic pastiche, lengthy dialogue scenes, and extreme violence, assembled meticulously and with intelligence. It does, at the climax, take a turn from historical fiction to alternate history, a turn that satisfies the savage wish-fulfillment aspects of the story. It still requires something to grease the wheels a bit, to mask how implausible the climactic action is, to set a tone of ultimate cool, of seductive danger, of otherworldly strangeness. It is thus that, at the perfect moment to do so, the soundtrack starts playing David Bowie's “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” featuring, at the exact moment a plot involving incinerating the entire German high command is nearing completion, the line “Putting out fire with gasoline.” Watching that scene, the movie's already been great up to that point, and at the exact moment the thought “Wait . . . that's David Bowie!” enters one's mind, it becomes clear that the rest is going to be even better. Which, at long last, brings us to the point: there is nothing that David Bowie cannot make better. Nothing. At. All.

GUY PEARCE SURE CAN TAKE A PUNCH

A EuropaCorp SF movie starring Guy Pearce, Shannon from Lost, and Peter Stormare as the Evil White Guy In A Suit? FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YES.

KUBRICK WEEK AT TOR.COM!

Image (c) Tor.com

Hey y'all! My rewatch of all of Stanley Kubrick's SF (and related) movies is done and all week, the reviews will be posted. So mosey on over to that fine place and check 'em out!

SUMMER'S ALMOST GONE: SUBVERSION, GORILLAS, & WOLF-GORILLAS

In a summer movie season mostly characterized by the phrase “well, that didn't suck,” two pictures really stood out. It wasn't the surreal box-office tallies generated by Pirates of the Caribbean 4 or Harry Potter, or any of the seemingly nine billion fucking Marvel comics movies—I mean, Thor was okay, but I didn't see Captain America or Matthew Vaughn's X-Men/Mad Men slashfic thing with January Jones running around in her underwear and am not exactly sweating blood waiting to Netflix them—or even the mighty juggernaut The Help, the picture that made it safe to not feel like a racist again.

(Actually, before going any further, I do need to address the fact that I still haven't seen The Help. I am not calling it racist, or that it proactively supports a racist view of the world. Some lady got so pissed off at the thing I wrote about not wanting to see The Help that now she won't let my buddy Hudak see a movie in Tampa ever again or something, and even though Hudak was just happy to be notorious and didn't really give a fuck, I just want to be clear, when I bitch about The Help, I'm bitching less about the movie itself—which I haven't seen—than I am the bullshit detente in the discussion about race it provoked. I know the people who like the movie because it was well-crafted and had good performances and all that stuff are defensive at all the people saying it's morally lazy about the issue of racism and liberal auto-fellatio and so forth, but them getting defensive about it is kind of stupid because the movie's making a shitload of money and will probably be nominated for a bunch of Oscars. It's like Christians complaining about being persecuted by the tiny minority of atheists in this country when no one can be elected president without yapping constantly about Jesus. That's the one thing that slightly annoys me about Barack Obama; much as I love the guy and his valiant B-minus first term, I really wish he'd shut the fuck up about Jesus. On the other hand, I like it when Kanye West talks about Jesus because it's funny. But the digression train jumped the track a couple sentences ago, so let's get back on topic.)

The thing about the way The Help completely hijacked seemingly the entire bandwidth of this summer's cinematic discourse is that it, much to my dismay, completely overshadowed two really great movies that had just started generating lots of interest. This wasn't terribly surprising, in that both of the pictures I'm championing here are quite subversive in their own ways, something neither The Help's critics nor its defenders would say of it. The fact that one of them actually was #1 at the box office is a slightly encouraging sign, and the fact that the other has yet to see wide release in the US means we still gotta see about it. So I'm gonna use what influence I have to make sure motherfuckers NEVAR 4GET these two pictures.


First, Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Yes, the title is fucking retarded. I cracked on it in my Tor review, saying I wanted each sequel to add another “[verb starting in R] of the” to the beginning of the title, acknowledging how unwieldy it is. And yes, it has James Franco as the top-billed actor, and I admit, even though I defended the cat for as long as I could, his “I'm a performance art philosophy grad student butterfly” act started wearing thin the second it became clear he wasn't going to bother to wake up to host the Oscars. And the Tim Burton movie blew gorillas for quarters and gave back change, no question. I mean, seriously, there are a whole long list of really compelling reasons why this movie should have sucked.

But ho boy lemme tell ya. It doesn't suck at. Fucking. All. It's one of the most exhilarating pieces of studio filmmaking that I've seen in years, bursting at the seams with love for and mastery of cinematic technique, and not in some jerkoff flashy “HEYYYYY LOOK @ ME GUISE I'M AN AUTEURRRRRRR [fart]” kind of way, where the director's all performing for the audience and shit (seriously, only a handful of directors in the history of the medium can get away with that shit and even Jean-Luc H. Christ Godard can be annoying sometimes). Apes director Rupert Wyatt teamed up with Peter Jackson's crew and FX people from the Lord of the Rings (who also were responsible for the only parts of Avatar that didn't suck) to do something people thought wasn't going to be possible until the Singularity (when human consciousness merges with artificial intelligence and Phase 2 begins): abolish the uncanny valley, the ineffable ability the human mind has to determine which is human and which is created.

Actually, I don't know whether Apes so much abolishes the uncanny valley as it does convince the audience to not give a fuck. Protagonist Caesar—played by actor Andy Serkis and chimped out by the FX nerds—doesn't look like a “real” chimp. But whatever he is, you can see him thinking, you can see him feeling, you can see him developing the sense that Western civilization has no place for him, you can see him establishing and developing comradeship with his fellow primates, and you can see him leading La Resistance into motherfucking battle. Seriously, if I ever see anything in a movie as dope as when Caesar charges out of the fucking fog on the Golden Gate Bridge ON FUCKING HORSEBACK, shrieking “down with the pigs” or whatever in chimpspeak, I may faint. The whole climactic battle sequence features something that's literally never been seen before on screen: computer generated characters showing genuine, genuinely massive, organic, balls. It wasn't just special effects, either; we've all seen some fancy special effects these last couple decades. What made the apes so special was that the director and writer(s) had developed them as characters, so that when they went about special effecting it up, the audience actually gave a shit. Friend of the blog RVCBard and I were barely forming words when the movie was over, and after about twenty minutes when we could talk again we both said something like “damn I wish the American Left had Caesar on its side” simultaneously.

Therein lies the reason why it vanished from popular discourse the second critics and entertainment media had something else to talk about. Engaging with Rise of the Planet of the Apes on its own terms, independent of the baggage of previous Planet of the Apes movies, independent of the James Franco narrative, means engaging with a movie whose protagonists are in direct opposition to Western culture. For good reason. And win. And it's totally a happy ending. The epidemic that wipes out humanity is relegated to one of what the Marvel movies have immortalized as the “Nick Fury shows up” scene in the middle or at the end of the credits, but in Apes instead of Samuel L. Jackson showing up in an eyepatch to recruit Caesar for the Avengers, we see an airline pilot with a nosebleed and then a not-entirely-mournful graphic showing the spread of the epidemic all over the fucking planet. Night guys! Drive home safe! We're all gonna die!

Where Apes, though its action takes place all in the San Francisco area, takes a global view on the question of whether the existing order should, ya know, fuck off, the other picture on my mind takes a more local one. Extremely local.


Second, Attack The Block

Made for a seventh of Apes' budget, this focuses entirely on one housing project. There's more linking the two pictures beyond Apes featuring an impressive gorilla and Attack The Block featuring “wolf-gorilla motherfuckers” (as Pest calls them) that come from outer space and fuck people up. Both feature protagonists held down by society, straining against the roles they've been assigned by the existing power structure.

But Attack The Block has the balls to present its heroes first as villains, as Pest, Dennis, Biggz, Jerome, and Moses set upon and mug a nurse. The mugging is interrupted by an alien landing in the middle of a nearby car, and Sam the nurse escapes while the gang confront and kill the alien, which then leads to a shitload of wolf-gorilla motherfuckers coming down from space to fuck shit up. I covered this one for Tor as well.

The thing about the kids in Attack The Block is . . . they're kids. The media loves portraying project kids who turn to crime as predatory animals who need to be locked up and have the key thrown away. In reality, kids are kids, and if society smiles upon one group of kids, they smoke weed and obsess about girls they're too dorky to talk to at Daddy's beach house. If society doesn't smile on that group of kids, they'll smoke weed and obsess about girls they're too dorky to talk to in some fucked up publicly-funded ugly-ass apartment block. Far as I'm concerned, nature vs. nurture isn't an argument at all. Give a project kid the resources rich kids have and an environment where he isn't made to feel self-conscious, and there will be no discernible difference whatsoever.

My favorite thing about Attack The Block is that it makes the above point in a far less didactic and far more entertaining way. Its mugger protagonists and their victim, Sam, team up and develop a plausible mutual respect through their struggle against a common opponent, the wolf-gorilla motherfuckers. By the end of the picture, Moses is a legit hero and Sam tells the cops so. And I was wiping a tear away, cuz hey. Sometimes you cry tears of triumph.

But back to those wolf-gorilla motherfuckers for a second. Another link between Attack The Block is that they both utilize their resources perfectly, and integrate their special effects into the movie seamlessly. It's a considerably more impressive feat in Attack The Block, considering that it was made for $13 mil US instead of 90. But the wolf-gorilla motherfuckers never look cheap or stupid, a really impressive feat for low(ish)-budget horror or SF. Part of this is because the creature design is very simple: they're balls of black fuzz with glow-in-the-dark teeth their only visible feature. The other, more crucial part is that director Joe Cornish and DP Thomas Townend light the fuckers amazingly well, so that the black of their fuzz is seemingly blacker than any black that exists on earth; it's the black of outer fucking space, my friend.

And, ya know, the kids are all terrific and Jodie Whittaker's great as Sam and Nick Frost plays a weed dealer (“What's Ron's weed room?” “It's a room, filled with weed, and it belongs to Ron.”) And the script is in love with language and pop culture references (but not in the old-fashioned stupid 90s way where it's a dick measuring contest to see who can unsheath the most cringingly fucking kitschy bit of “ironic” pop trivia from the 70s, in this it's a way that actually has a connection to the way actual people actually talk) and a couple of the bangin'-est catchphrases this side of “May the Force be with you.” The way Moses says “allow it” fucking owns. And all the people saying John Boyega is like a young English Denzel are totally on point; if the entertainment business is in any way a meritocracy we're all gonna be working for that kid within the decade.

This brings us to one of the reasons Attack The Block has only grossed about $5 mil worldwide to date, aside from a marketing campaign based more on word of mouth than actual marketing: the hero who saves the day is black, and the white people are either support staff, comic relief, or cops. This isn't the only reason—a bigger P&A budget could have turned Attack The Block into a massive hit and, actually, may still—but it's a big one. A lot of people just can't process a black hero who mugs a white woman and yet is the hero who saves the planet, and not all of those people are overtly racist, they just need to open their minds a bit and be ready to entertain the idea that reality is more complex than initial, stereotype-assisted, impressions. Oh wait, fuck there we go right there, there's your reason why Attack The Block hasn't made back negative costs yet. I forgot, thinking makes people's heads hurt.

So that's your dispatch from the Department of Silver Linings. The summer may have had a bunch of sequels, comic book movies, and remakes I didn't give a fuck about, and the gigantic atomic turd that was Cowboys & Aliens, and it may have culminated in a big ugly argument about whether The Help was racist or whether the people who like it are racist, or whether the people who don't like it are sexists who are only criticizing it because it's not the movie they wanted it to be and blah blah blah boy I really can't wait for the Next Big Thing we're all talkin about to come along because if I never have to read another fucking word about The Help I'll be very happy. But in spite of all that shit, there were two bonafide fucking awesome movies this summer. And one of them was even a remake! Wonders never cease. Long live Caesar and Moses.