Oscar Nominations…

I’ll just come right out and say it: It’s incredible that Joker received the amount of nominations -11!- that it did.

In fact, everything about the film has been a shock and/or surprise, from first hearing it would get made, to the casting of Joaquin Phoenix, to the rumors Martin Scorsese would produce it (he didn’t, in the end), to the early release and positive words, to the formal release and the blockbuster take, and now the film is the most nominated feature of this year’s Oscars!

Who would believe Todd Phillips, the director of Hangover II and III, the two Hangover films I saw and absolutely hated (never caught the first, which my wife swears was hilarious), could turn around and be behind what is arguably the most talked about film released… and this in a year where other fantasy type films included Avengers: Endgame and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker…!

I have yet to see Joker, though my eldest daughter has and says it was good. Others haven’t liked it quite as much and I suspect I’ll eventually get to it.

Still, an amazing thing!

The one film I figured would get some Oscar love was The Lighthouse. Alas, it seems the only nomination it got was for cinematography, which nonetheless is very much deserved.

A more complete rundown of the Oscar nominations can be found here, in this article found on io9.com and written by Beth Elderkin:

Joker sweeps Oscar nods

New David Bowie releases…

The news is a couple of days old but I should have been expecting it.

David Bowie had a thing for celebrating his birthday, January 8th, with the release of new material. Indeed, his very last album, Blackstar, was released on January 8th of 2016 and, sadly, Mr. Bowie himself passed away two days later on January 10th at the age of 69.

This past January 8th would have been Mr. Bowie’s 73rd birthday and it was announced that two “new” albums would be released featuring live material he made while rehearsing for his famous 50th birthday bash, where he had a concert filled to the brim with guest star artists (Lou Reed, Billy Corgan, David Grohl, Robert Smith, etc.) singing along to many of his biggest hits.

Frankly, I’d love to have that album but, for now, what we get -eventually- is an intriguing release featuring rehearsals for that very show. The songs will be released one each week and two albums will contain the music and be released a little later this year. Over at pitchfork.com you can read up on the details:

Rare and unreleased David Bowie songs collected on new Album and EP

Count me in!

For now, the first release is what I consider one of his all time best songs ever. In fact, I’d probably rank it as my own personal favorite David Bowie song (though there are plenty of strong contenders!).

Here then, is the first release from that upcoming album, the rehearsal of The Man Who Sold The World

Perhaps I said it before but I’ll say it again: For me, the David Bowie gateway opened with the release of the album Let’s Dance back in 1983. I went absolutely wild for that album and played it over and over again back in high school and whenever I drove around (much to the eventual annoyance of the people who accompanied me on those drives).

Back then there wasn’t an internet and you couldn’t google “David Bowie” and have at your fingertips all his albums to listen to. Being curious about his previous releases, I headed out to record stores (yeah, they used to exist back then!) and slowly began to acquaint myself with his previous albums/songs.

I was surprised to find I was familiar with many of them, including Changes, Space Oddity, and Lady Stardust (to this day I don’t know why that particular song stood out to me, but when I heard it after buying the Ziggy Stardust album, it was the song I knew I had heard before and was familiar with while the rest of the songs were “new” to me).

One day I found a cassette of The Man Who Sold The World (I’ll refer to it as TMWSTW from here on), Bowie’s 1970 album which, to my mind, is the first “real” David Bowie album. Note he did release a number of singles, including his groundbreaking Space Oddity (single and album) before that album, but with TMWSTW, it seemed David Bowie truly found himself as an artist and following that album came Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust and the legend only grew from that moment on.

Returning to TMWSTW, I loved that album to death and, in particular, the song the album was named after. So much so that I even named a character I co-created with a friend after my mishearing of a line in the song (the character has never been used formally and may never be, so I’ll keep that little tidbit to myself!).

Regardless, when Nirvana famously covered the song years later and it suddenly blew up and became famous, I was nodding my head and smiling.

Not to sound like a smart ass or anything, but the world had finally caught up to how great that song was…!

And here it is in its original album version:

And, what the heck, here’s Nirvana’s version, which really brought it to audiences!

What a way to begin a year…

As I’ve said before, I try to be an optimistic guy. Realistic, but optimistic.

2019 was, to put it mildly, a very unpleasant year, though it was more of a function of world events. It seemed the nations of the world were engaged in some kind of major dumbing down.

Stepping away from the trees and looking at the forest, it occurs to me this may be in large part a result of what is coming rather quickly: A major generational shift.

The “boomers”, those born after World War II and up to roughly 1965, are getting older. They represent a very large group and they benefited from a unique set of circumstances, both good and bad, which allowed them to for the most part flourish.

However, they are getting older now and those born from 1966 on are beginning to assert their power. Some of the very younger generations, including the so-called millenials, have vastly different ideas as to what governments could and should do. They are concerned with wages and fairness, with climate change and pollution, while it seems the boomers could care less about any of those things.

Generational shifts are a historical trend, though and there is no stopping the passage of time.

Today’s elderly politicians have only so much more time left to their days in office and power before the new waves come in and inevitably make their marks on the halls of power and the general direction of humanity, even if it may be limited to their own locality.

I suppose what I’m saying is that I remain an optimist.

I don’t like much of what’s going on in Washington nowadays but it feels to me -and I freely admit I could be proven very wrong- that the outrageous actions we’re seeing today are the result of a generation’s death rattle.

It ain’t pretty and, frankly, its more than a little exasperating, but in time it will be over and others will step up to the proverbial plate.

Will the pendulum shift and things important to the younger generations finally come to the fore and be addressed?

I certainly hope so.

Let’s work toward that end, why don’t we?

Ad Astra (2019) a (mildly) belated review

Having finally reached our destination and spent nearly a week with family, it was time to fly back home. The flight to our destination was marked with a five hour delay in what amounted to a 2 and 1/2 hour flight and afforded me the opportunity to catch up on a couple of films (Starcrash and The Lighthouse).

As we usually do when flying, we arrived at the airport early and made it through security relatively quickly and got to our gate. Soon enough, the airplane was there, visible in its position awaiting our boarding. We still had a little time and had a light meal before returning to the terminal and wait for boarding.

…and wait…

and wait

The hour of departure was coming very close and while we saw the luggage placed within the aircraft, it didn’t seem like there was any movement toward letting passengers in.

Then we received the message: The Captain wanted to check something out with the engines and passengers weren’t allowed on the craft during the wait and yadda yadda. The ground crew moved away from the aircraft, the plane was left alone on the tarmac, and then the Captain revved up the engines a few times before shutting them down.

Then all was quiet.

…and we waited some more…

Finally, the bad news came, some hour after we were supposed to already be in the air: There was some mechanical problem so we were going to be using another aircraft that was en route to our location and we wouldn’t be boarding for another couple of hours until then.

We were, to say the least, livid.

We had so much free time that we decided to have an early supper (as I stated before, the previous food we had was more of a light snack).

We got back to the boarding area to see our airplane look like this…

Yeah, the airport fun this time around, eh?

Another few hours pass and then we get the news that they fixed whatever was wrong with the engine and we’d be boarding soon.

Yeah, another five hour delay on a 2 and 1/2 hour flight.

The fun never stops, right?

Anyway, once on board the flight, we found that unlike the flight over, this one had a robust entertainment system and after checking out the various films available to be seen, I decided to see Ad Astra (you knew I’d get here eventually, no?).

Here’s the movie’s trailer:

Featuring Brad Pitt in the role of Roy McBride, an astronaut who is the son of a very famous astronaut (played by Tommy Lee Jones) who went missing following an important mission some twenty years before.

McBride, we find, is a very unemotional man. This makes him a good astronaut as even in the most extreme emergencies he keeps his head and follows through on the mission. However, this unemotional facade hides deep cracks. His marriage is on the rocks and he doesn’t know how to deal with its break up. Part of his emotional vacuum is related to the loss of his father coupled with the complicated feelings he has for the man. He views him as a hero, yet the loss stings even to his adult age.

Odd electrical arcs descend upon Earth, causing considerable destruction and McBride is brought in for a top secret meeting. Turns out the electrical arcs are coming from further out in the Solar System, and the government fears their source is the scientific mission McBride’s father was on when he disappeared.

Then, the shocker: They think McBride’s father is still alive and, worse yet, is responsible for these electric attacks.

The news that his father might still be alive is a terrific blow to the stoic McBride. He is asked to fly to Mars and send a message to his father in the attempt to get some kind of response.

The reality is that Mission Control on Earth wants to get a location where the elderly McBride is so that they can take him, and the ship he’s in which is sending out the deadly electrical bursts, out.

When Ad Astra was making its way to theaters, there was talk this movie was a sci-fi version of the Joseph Conrad novel Heart of Darkness, which itself was the basis for the movie Apocalypse Now.

The idea of a person going out to check on someone who has gone rogue/native is the heart (pardon the pun) of Ad Astra and Apocalypse Now so the similarity is not unmerited.

When the film was finally released, critics seemed to love it, giving the film a robust 84% positive on rottentomatoes.com. However, if you check out the reviews from audiences, they had a far more dim view of the film, giving it a pretty weak 40% positive score.

In fact, many of the commentary boards I frequent had people ripping the film, saying its terrifically boring or silly, that the whole “father issue” is played out too thickly and that the film simply was terrible.

Still, I was interested in seeing it and decided to do so during the very delayed flight.

Unfortunately, the viewed wasn’t optimal. The screen would freeze now and again for a few seconds which the movie played and there were interruptions from the Captain when we hit some turbulence (yeah, flight from hell, eh?) and later when multiple announcements were made that we were going to land.

Ad Astra is a long film, just over 2 hours in length, and as we were coming in for a landing I feared I’d miss the very ending. As it turned out, I just got to the credits when the wheels touched ground.

Lucky me!

Given all the irritants dealt with between the delay in the flight to the interruptions to the at times marred film presentation, what did I think of Ad Astra?

I liked it. Quite a bit, in fact!

Was the film perfect? No. At times they did lay the emotions -and lack thereof- on rather thick. There were several action sequences in the film which, while exciting on their own, were obviously put in place to keep the film’s forward momentum going. If you step back and think about it, several of those sequences could have been cut from the film itself without taking away from the central and main plot of the film.

Further, the whole electrical attacks on Earth (and later, Mars) were never explained to my satisfaction. How exactly does a scientific vessel create these electric waves and shoots them out at Earth?

For that matter, why would the elderly McBride do this exactly? I mean, like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, he’s lost his mind and engaged in some very horrific actions. However, the scientific vessel he was commanding didn’t seem to be engaged in experimenting with electrical waves… so how come he’s using them now? Why is he firing them off toward Earth and Mars?

Those are the film’s negatives.

If you can look past them, however, you have a hypnotic film that puts you in the younger McBride’s shoes. You long for the lost contact with McBride’s father. You feel the frustration of his inability to express his emotions and the (paradoxical) fear of what he will find when he eventually goes in search of his father.

Ad Astra isn’t a shallow space opera with laser beams and fighting ships. It isn’t Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers and it most certainly isn’t Star Wars and I think that was in part why so many reacted negatively to the film.

What Ad Astra is is a more cerebral, introspective film with a few action sequences which carry things along. It wants the audience to sit back and admire the wonder of space and the hurt of isolation and loss.

In that, it succeeds, and for that reason I recommend it.

The Lighthouse (2019) a (mildly) belated review

Continuing on with the films I saw while flying (part 1, Starcrash, is here), after a 4-5 hour delay in getting into our airplane for a 2 and 1/2 hour trip, once we settled in I pulled out my trusty iPad and considered the next film to see. I decided on The Lighthouse, the critically loved 2019 film directed by Robert Eggers and co-written with his brother Max. Here’s the movie’s trailer:

This is Robert Eggers’ second film following the also critically loved 2015 film The Witch, which (no pun intended) I haven’t seen yet.

How did I like The Lighthouse? So much so that I immediately purchased a digital copy of The Witch and, as time allows, I fully intend to watch it as well. It isn’t often I’m so blown away by a film that I wind up seeking out the director’s previous work to check it out as well!

The Lighthouse is a relatively “small” film. There are two actors/characters who take central stage: Robert Pattinson’s Thomas Howard and Willem Dafoe’s Thomas Wake. A third actor, Valeriia Karaman, also appears in the film but I won’t spoil her role for those who haven’t seen the film.

The plot is simplicity itself: Howard and Wake arrive at a wind-strewn island to take over the lighthouse on it for a few weeks. Thomas Wake is a crusty man whose life is the lighthouse while Thomas Howard is a novice. This is his first shift at the lighthouse and, over time he, as well as the more experienced Wake, appear to lose their grip on reality.

Or do they?

I truly don’t want to get into too many SPOILERS because the film is incredibly surprising as it plays out. While on the surface it appears to be a “horror” film, it really is not. There are some uncomfortable scenes and eerie happenings, but the film’s primary goal isn’t to scare you.

Indeed, if anything there are more laugh out loud scenes in the film than those that will make you squirm in your seat as the two Thomases face off against each other. At times their relationship gives off homoerotic vibes, but they’re not overt. At other times they are fierce rivals, the young one who wants to supplant the older one, the older one who envies the young one’s energy. At times, there are hints of Lovecraftian horror, of weird things happening just outside our view and deep within the shadows.

As their time together extends, the two Thomases share -perhaps overshare- who exactly they are and what they’re up to. Wake is possessive of the lighthouse itself and will not allow Howard inside, while Howard longs to see what exactly lies up there… and whether he can take over.

Did I mention the film has several laugh out loud scenes?

Truly this is what amazes me even now about the film: It is incredibly funny at times. I read someone mention the film was like a homosexual rom-com and while I don’t think that’s totally true, the humor in the film is there and it is quite robust.

I’ve already noted that I loved the film so much I picked up the director’s first work and very much intend to watch it as soon as possible, so its obvious I highly recommend this film.

But going into it, I would urge anyone who does to check up on the mythology of both Proteus and Prometheus. The later’s myth, in particular, makes The Lighthouse’s ending make complete sense.

What are you waiting for? Go see The Lighthouse!

Starcrash (1978) a (wildly) belated review…

Part of my vacation involved flying and, as my incredible good luck would have it (extreme sarcasm…off!) I had plenty of time what with delayed flights to watch movies.

I had a few films I downloaded to my iPad (legitimately bought digital copies of films, by the way!) and chose as my first film to see the 1978 cheesy “classic” Starcrash. Here’s the movie’s trailer:

Right off the bat let me say: I seriously doubt many modern viewers are going to watch this film and give a crap about it. Those who do will likely hoot and holler and make fun of what they see.

The film, to be very clear, was made to cash in on the sci-fi craze that started with the release of the original Star Wars in 1977. Starcrash was clearly meant to evoke (or, if you’re less forgiving, completely rip off) Star Wars along with Barbarella, Jason and the Argonauts, and the general vibe of cliffhanger serials such as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.

Only… the film had a super low budget, subsequent cheesy effects, and questionable acting.

The cast of the film is incredibly robust. You have Marjoe Gortner, who was a semi-big star in the 1970’s, smiling like a maniac throughout most of the film (He seems so genuinely happy throughout his time in the film that it feels wrong to accuse him of being stoned or worse). You have Christopher Plummer, yes, that Christopher Plummer, in what amounts to a semi-extended cameo role delivering his cheesy lines as if they were heavy Shakespearean drama. You also have David Hasselhoff (yes, that David Hasselhoff) in one of his earliest roles acting -believe it or not- the most naturally of everyone.

And then you have Caroline Munro as the movie’s protagonist.

Related image

Caroline Munro, for the uninitiated, was a popular star through the 1970’s and into the 1980’s. Perhaps her best known role was that of the deadly helicopter pilot in the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me.

She was, in my humble opinion, incredibly beautiful and the movie wisely choose to show off her… uh… assets in bikini wear like this. Note, though, Ms. Munro, for her entire movie career to date, refused to do any nudity so despite the cheesiness and the cheesecake, the film is strictly a “PG” affair and clearly the movie’s makers spent a lot of time figuring out the proper attire for interplanetary travel…!

The movie’s plot goes something like this: The son of the Galactic Emperor goes off with his ship to explore some planet, said ship is destroyed but not before several lifeboats are released. Meanwhile intergalactic criminal Stella Star (the lovely Ms. Munro) and her assistant Akton (Marjoe Gortner, natch) are captured for some smuggling they were up to but are subsequently released to help find the Emperor’s lost son… and face off against a meglomaniac who intends to destroy the Empire.

The movie makes little sense but if you’re willing to ride with it and have fun, you will find it, though again I caution everyone who is more used to modern fare that this film isn’t terribly quick moving and the effects are, even for their era, hardly revelatory.

Still, Starcrash is innocuous fun, a film not meant to be taken seriously and made by people who clearly were trying hard to evoke another era.

If you’re in the right frame of mind, Starcrash is a hoot.

If you’re not, then you best stay away.

And I’m back…!

It’s been a whirlwind of a couple of weeks, what with traveling to see family and spending nights on either blow up beds or couches, etc. I guess I could have rented hotel rooms but given the short times we had together, it was best we remain close to get all those fun trips done in/around the areas where they lived.

But it was exhausting! Worse, I spent most of the time with a cold that, even to this day, is somewhat lingering.

Yesterday we drove home, arriving in the evening, and feeling pretty wiped out but realizing the next day (today), we’d be out the door and off to work.

Yikes.

You know the saying about needing a vacation after your vacation? That applies here.

Still, glad to be back and ready to get to work!