E. R. Torre is a writer/artist whose first major work, the mystery graphic novel The Dark Fringe, was optioned for motion picture production by Platinum Studios (Men In Black, Cowboys vs. Aliens). At DC Comics, his work appeared in role-playing game books and the 9-11 Tribute book. This later piece was eventually displayed, along with others from the 9-11 tribute books, at The Library of Congress. More recently he released Shadows at Dawn (a collection of short stories), Haze (a murder mystery novel with supernatural elements), and Cold Hemispheres (a mystery novel set in the world of The Dark Fringe). He is currently hard at work on his latest science fiction/suspense series, Corrosive Knights, which features the novels Mechanic, The Last Flight of the Argus, and Chameleon.
A little while back came the interesting news that a Brit cleaning out his chimney discovered the remains of a pigeon within. The pigeon carcass proved extraordinary because on the remains of the pigeon’s leg was found a message holder and, within, a coded message.
The code and pigeon, it was established, were from WWII. Experts analyzed the code but found it too difficult to crack. They opined that without the proper code books, many of which changed daily during the war and were subsequently lost to time, there would be no way at all to decode the message. Ever.
That is, until Gord Young, a Canadian historian, saw the code and in a whopping 17 minutes (according to the article!) cracked it. What did he find? Well, the article below tell you it “details the position of German troops based in Normandy”, but does not offer the actual deciphered message. I suspect the message itself is a little too technical, but still, the article and the story are incredibly fascinating. The full article can be found here:
Humorous and horrifying stuff. I think #4 is perhaps the most bizarre…though not so much for what happened afterwards but rather related to the conversation the man on the date related regarding his mother.
La vittoria trova cento padri, e nessuno vuole riconoscere l’insuccesso. (Victory has a hundred fathers, and no one acknowledges a failure.) 1942 G. Ciano Diary 9 Sept. (1946).
After a truly great run of movies from 1975 to roughly 1984, director Walter Hill reached the proverbial bump in the road. While it was a pretty damn good film, 1984’s Streets of Fire didn’t light up (ouch) the box office. Nor did many of the films he directed that followed, including the truly bad sequel to his biggest box office success, Another 48 Hrs. Mr. Hill was hardly hurting. He was, after all, the producer of the original Alien and Aliens, and would go on to produce all “Alien” related movies, up to and including last year’s controversial Prometheus.
But before the Alien universe truly blew up with sequels and Predator related spin offs, Mr. Hill made his thus far one and only directorial foray into sci-fi with Supernova. Yes, Streets of Fire had a quasi-sci fi/alternate 1950’s type reality, but Supernova was a full on sci-fi spectacle complete with starships, alien worlds, and…horror.
I caught the film many years ago on DVD and found it an intriguing mess. Mr. Hill’s original cut of the film was deemed unsatisfactory by the movie studios and they called in others, including Francis Ford Coppola, to re-edit it into something they were more comfortable with. Ultimately, Supernova’s director credit was listed as “Thomas Lee”, a pseudonym not unlike the infamous Alan Smithee. (That, folks, is the reason the quote is listed above)
The DVD I saw featured the “uncut” version of the film. The other day, while watching oddball cable channels, the theatrical version of Supernova aired and, like a moth to light, I sat through it. The theatrical cut differs from the “uncut” version in that we see a little less nudity from Robin Runney and, if memory serves, a slightly less gory death of (SPOILERS!!!!!) Lou Diamond Phillip’s character. Otherwise, it was mostly what I remembered watching years ago.
And a fascinating watch it is.
The difference this time around, however, is the release of Prometheus. When I first saw Supernova, Prometheus, of course, did not yet exist. Now, however, watching Supernova proved something of a curious revelation. For in Supernova I couldn’t help but notice that some of the movie’s elements wound up appearing in Prometheus. That’s not to say that Supernova is something of a “rough draft” of Prometheus, just that you can see some of the elements coalesce.
To begin, Supernova involves a group of “space medics” who receive a distress signal from some far away planet (this is not unlike Alien, too!). They head to the planet and find one person, Karl Larson (Peter Facinelli) who had a previous relationship with Dr. Evers (Angela Bassett), one of the members of the medical crew. She finds Larson, however, very different from what she recalls. Their relationship had grow very sour before he left her, but now, as she finds him, he looks very different…younger, stronger. If you’ve seen Prometheus, this particular element of Supernova bears at least a little echo in the relationship of Shaw and Holloway.
Larson, we find, has discovered a strange object on that mining planet, a thing left behind by some alien culture. In the course of the film we find that the object was made by an alien race to effectively eliminate other races they don’t want to have continue -and compete- with them. In Prometheus, the alien engineers were upset with humanity and wanted to eradicate it with their oddball biological weaponry. In the case of Supernova, the alien race (which in this movie remains unseen) has created a device that will entice its discoverer to take it to the heart of humanity, where it will detonate and destroy the offending race -and pretty much all the universe!- and then creating a “new” context for alien life.
What follows in Supernova is the cast and crew being killed off one by one by the infected Larson. The way the villain is dispatched by the movie’s end is particularly groan inducing. It involves “Flyboy”, one of the more bizarre (and extremely silly) concepts in Supernova, a robot that for no reason at all looks like a World War I flier enticing Larson into a hold before blowing him up.
Other than curiosity, it’s hard to come right out and recommend Supernova. This is a genuinely flawed film (not that Prometheus wasn’t, as well!) that features some really good special effects but an obviously toyed with presentation. Nonetheless I am curious about Mr. Hill’s original version of the film. Given the fact that Supernova was a big flop, I doubt we’ll ever see a “special edition” of the film featuring Mr. Hill’s original cut.
But if one is ever released, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious to see it. Now, “enjoy” this truly awful trailer for the film. The musical choices, none of which were in the film itself, really do no services for this already flawed film:
Interestingly, as I looked around YouTube, I found this, the alternate ending for the film. I vaguely recall finding this on the DVD release mentioned earlier, and it features a far darker ending than the recut theatrical release:
Finally, this is another interesting cut sequence from the film. Again, I’m getting vibes of Prometheus here, when the cast first meets up with the alien engineer creature. Perhaps its just me:
I love reading reviews of movies, books, and music, the three forms of entertainment that most occupy my increasingly minimal free time. With reviews one can, at best, glean an interesting insight into the creative work, be it what elements make it a success or, conversely, where the creative minds behind the work may have lost their way. At worst, reading a review involves wasting only a few minutes of your time but almost always gives you an insight into someone else’s thought process. After many years, I’ve no doubt read many thousands of reviews. Interestingly enough, there are parts of only two reviews that I can quote almost verbatim, small sentence length thoughts that to my mind perfectly captured the flaws of two particular movies.
The first such review came from a local TV personality who was reviewing the 1989 James Cameron directed film The Abyss. While he loved most of the film, he had this to say: “Watching The Abyss is like seeing a runner have the race of his life, well ahead of all competitors, but stumbles and falls only a few feet away from the finish line.” To me, that was The Abyss in a nutshell, a potentially great film hobbled by a muddled ending. An ending made no better by the extended version offered in the home video release.
The other such film was the original 1997 Men In Black. Upon seeing it, a now forgotten (by me) critic stated this film felt like watching “an extended preview of a great film.” The original Men In Black, to me, felt exactly like that. The movie had some astonishing special effects, a truly bizarre, almost Looney Tune level craziness, but the film felt…undernourished. It was like going into a restaurant expecting a heavy buffet but being served a chocolate bar. There should have been more there there.
The movie’s sequel, released in 2002, was considered by many less of the same: Another wild and crazy special effects extravaganza…but with less of a story than the original film. It seemed like the whole Men In Black franchise was done…until this year.
There were some scary rumors concerning the creation of Men In Black III. Most frightful was that there was word filming began without a complete script. The budget of the film was also very extravagant, rumored to be well over 200 million dollars. Add to the fact that the last film in the series came out some ten years before and you couldn’t help but wonder if the film was a fiasco in the making.
In the end, the film did well, grossing some $600 million worldwide and earning a very healthy 70% positive rating among critics and a similar 72% positive rating among audiences at Rotten Tomatoes.
Having finally seen the film, I would tend to go positive. Strangely enough this film, even though filming was supposedly started without a full script, feels the most complete of the three Men In Black films, story wise. Yes, you still get those wacky aliens and even wackier special effects, but the story feels far more complete and features Agent J (Will Smith) going back in time to the late 1960’s to save his partner Agent K (played in the present by Tommy Lee Jones and in the past by Josh Brolin) from being killed and wiped out of time.
No, the story isn’t some kind of blazingly original concept…in fact, it seems most filmed time travel stories nowadays involve the old “going back in time to kill someone so they don’t exist in the future” saw. In fact, we saw this similar plotline in Looper, also released this year.
Still, I have to give Men In Black III credit: It is a generally fun and breezy film, the type where you put your mind in neutral and let things happen and, if you don’t think about it too much, you should have a good time. On the other hand, I kind of hope this is the last of the Men In Black films. As enjoyable as this film was, I couldn’t help but feel the premise is a little used up. Worse, Tommy Lee Jones looked really old and uninterested in the whole thing this time around. Given how truncated his role was in favor of Josh Brolin, one can’t help but wonder if he did this film more as a favor/paycheck than anything else.
The bottom line is this: Men in Black III turns out to be a surprisingly good popcorn film despite the by now familiarity audiences may have to this particular subject matter and whatever intrigue happened behind the camera. If you’ve got an hour and a half to kill, you could do far, far worse than spend some time with the Men In Black.
(The trailer below, by the way, features a sequence involving a grafitti artist. This scene was not in the home video cut of the film I saw)
According to TMZ, David Hester, one of the main bidders involved in the hit “reality” show Storage Wars, is out…and he’s filed a lawsuit against the company making the show claiming that it’s rigged:
I happen to like Storage Wars, though there wasn’t always a sense that things we saw on the show were always on the “up and up”. For example, if you watched some of the earlier first season episodes, you found that the protagonists weren’t always prone to having hardball rivalries between themselves. Indeed, I recall one episode where one of the bidders, Darrell I believe, actually tried to help out Jarrod with a locker’s value. But as the episodes/seasons drew on, the participants became more characters than people. They were more and more presented as trying to either outbid or screw their rivals and there was a feeling -at least to me- there was a real attempt to mold their behaviors for the purpose of being more entertaining. Backstabbing, after all, can be hugely entertaining!
With that in mind, it doesn’t surprise me too much to hear that there was, at least according to Mr. Hester in his lawsuit, “planting” of items in the storage lockers being bid on. Again, if the show’s makers are happy to create personalities rather than people, why stop there? Why not also show “incredible” discoveries in the lockers…discoveries that may well have been planted?
In the end, viewers must always beware. It should be no big revelation to say that “reality” shows are often as “real” as all the other fictional shows presented on TV.
The first part of the above headline happens to be one of the more obvious take downs one can expect an unimpressed critic might use for the review of the new Peter Jackson directed The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first of his three part (!) cinematic adaptation of the J. R. R. Tolkien “prologue” to his famous Lord of the Rings trilogy series of a few years past. Certainly its the headline used by Dana Stevens of Slate Magazine for the review of this film (check it out here), but its hardly an original insult, seeing as how this was the title of a parody book published way back in 1969.
I haven’t seen the first part of this new trilogy, but given some of the early writings regarding the movie, I suspect I’ll pass. Not that I dislike the whole Lord of the Rings thing, be it novel or cartoon or movie. On the contrary I was very impressed with the first two Lord of the Rings movie adaptations. They were incredibly ambitious in scope and scale and presented some great cinematic fun. The only complaints I heard were from Lord of the Rings purists who felt the movies at times did not follow the spirit of the books as well as they should have. Regardless, I really liked those first two Lord of the Rings films.
Unfortunately, the last of that original film trilogy, The Return of the King, really, really tried my patience. Indeed, even many of those who liked and/or loved this trilogy were bothered by the way this concluding film had something like twenty climaxes/conclusions before finally…FINALLY!…reaching its actual end. It was at that moment, when I realized I loved The Fellowship of the Rings and The Two Towers but didn’t like The Return of the King, that I feared director Peter Jackson may have become a little too enamored of his work. So enamored that he might have developed a hard time “stepping back” and shifting what should remain in the final cut of his film and what didn’t need to be there. Or, to put it another way, he lost the ability to edit down his movies.
Mr. Jackson followed the original Rings trilogy with a remake of King Kong, and my fears were further confirmed: King Kong clocked in at an eye-popping 3 hours and 7 minutes in length versus the original, which ran a little over an hour and a half. When I heard he was taking over the direction of The Hobbit, I was curious but worried. Would this film be more like the first two Ring films rather than the third?
When I heard it would be two films, then three, I feared Mr. Jackson was once again going to deliver a bloated, too long production.
Given the words of some critics, this may well be the case. And we’re only into the first of threeHobbit films!
But before it feels like this blog entry is nothing more than a slam piece directed against Mr. Jackson, let it be noted that he would be far from the first -and certainly far from the last- creative person who may have fallen under this spell. Criterion, the gold standard in home video releases, just put out Michael Cimino’s notorious studio-killer Heaven’s Gate, a film that many feel is the very definition of creative hubris. Despite the fact that it was a mega-flop when it was released, the movie does have its admirers, but there is no doubt that this two and a half hour film tried many people’s patience. In the realm of books, I’ve also seen writers -too numerous to name- who have disappointed with either undernourished or overly bloated works. And in music, I’m sure just about anyone can name a few albums featuring normally very creative individuals who created a bloated train wreck of a work, at least in your opinion.
If there’s any sort of conclusion to made regarding this topic it is this: Creative folks are as fallible as the next person. They’re as capable of making mistakes as everyone else and they’re certainly as capable of getting too fond of their work, to their own detriment, as anyone else.
Somewhere along the line when I first started writing I too realized that there was a danger of falling into this trap. One of my earliest novels took an inordinately long time to create, then it sat in the disk drive for a few years. When I came back to it, I realized the first third of the book was waaaay too long and I chopped it down to a minimal size. Originally I was incapable of seeing the bloat, but the passage of time allowed me to move away from the work, to become less tied into it and to see it from a fresh perspective.
Hopefully, I learned my lesson and my subsequent works have been crisp and to the point…something I feel any good novel should be. But let there be no doubt: The most difficult thing in the world to do with your creative works is to examine them with a cold and clinical eye and not be afraid of taking a chain saw to your “babies” and cutting down whatever should be cut down and expanding where it may be needed.
As a big fan of Football, I’m sober enough to realize in these past few years this sport has reached something of a threshold moment. Football, in its current incarnation, is actually relatively new, with the first SuperBowl held in 1967. Back then, the players were often “part time” professionals and it was not uncommon to find them doing things like selling cars in the off-season to earn some extra cash.
But the sport grew and grew and grew, and as it did the money involved grew as well. Player salaries skyrocketed and, suddenly, your average Football player no longer had to find alternative off-season work. Instead, they had the freedom to devote their off season time to condition themselves even more. Diets were improved and training exercises were perfected. The money rewards meant more and more young people tried out for Football in High School and College, and thus the pool of talent was deeper, meaning there was more talent at the top. In the end, the athletes on the field today are superior specimens of strength and speed versus the previous decades’ worth. Jim Mandich, part of the legendary undefeated 1972 Dolphin team, himself said before his untimely passing that just about any modern Football team would not only defeat but smoke his beloved undefeated team of the past. No question about it.
Unfortunately, with these stronger, faster, and more skilled athletes arises a big problem which the NFL is currently dealing with: Injuries. Specifically, head injuries. For you see, when you have athletes conditioned to be their strongest and fastest running full speed into other athletes also conditioned to be their strongest and fastest, the one part of their body that one cannot condition to take physical punishment is the brain. It seems silly to say, but let’s be clear: There is no exercise out there that can make your brain somehow “stronger” or better capable of taking hits. Almost any hits. Sure, the helmets used in the NFL today are very high tech, but the reality is that the brain essentially “floats” on liquid within a person’s skull. Running as fast as you can and abruptly being stopped by slamming into another player may send the brain against the skull wall. Do so many, many times over a few years as a professional player and there is a likelihood your brain will sustain some kind of damage.
Because the league is relatively young, it is only now, with the passing of time, that an awareness of the types of injuries sustained over the long term to NFL players is being realized and is becoming an issue. The league is being sued by former players who note that in the past they were ordered to play on despite concussions and other potentially -as well as actually- serious injuries sustained on the field. I suspect the biggest worry about the NFL is that if these players of the past that are exhibiting signs of mental and physical problems related to injuries is just the tip of the iceberg. What happens a little down the road when the current crops of much stronger and faster players drift into their old age? Will we begin to see even more evidence of head and other trauma symptoms?
In recent years, the NFL has become more proactive and is trying to limit head on head hits as well as a host of penalties for hitting players that are particularly vulnerable to injury. Some worry that the NFL will eventually become something akin to flag football.
The latest idea floated by the NFL is to do away with Kickoffs entirely. What effect will doing so have on the game? Brian Burke of Slate Magazine offers some fascinating analysis of just that:
There is little more to add. I still enjoy watching Football. However, a small part of me realizes that this is a sport caught in transition. What we may see of it in the next decade may be very different from what we’re witnessing today.
What’s worse: (a) A low budget film featuring a cast of unknowns in what turns out to be a mediocre to poorly conceived action/adventure story or…
(b) A very big budget film featuring well established actors in what also turns out to be a mediocre to poorly conceived action/adventure story?
For me, (b) will always be worse. In the case of (a) I tend to go easier on the people before or behind the cameras for I suspect they had to deal with more difficulties regarding creative choices…if only because of budgetary limitations.
But with films like Safe House, one comes away wondering what it was that drew all this talent and big money to make what turned out to be a very predictable and ultimately disappointingly mediocre film. How predictable was Safe House? Let me put it this way: If you can’t figure out who the “real” bad guy is the very moment he first appears on the screen, you’re clearly a movie newbie.
The film’s plot goes like this: Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) is a young CIA agent stationed in South Africa whose job it is to sit bored for hour after hour at a secret CIA “safe house” and await any sort of “company” company. He’s little more than a high tech housekeeper as he’s been at this obviously very boring job for a few months now and nothing has happened there. In the brief glimpses we have of him, we’re to understand he’s itching to move up the CIA ranks.
Meanwhile, we’re introduced to Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington), a renegade ex-CIA agent wanted for treason who appears in South Africa, contacts an ex-MI6 agent, and is given some kind of microchip with some kind of “explosive” information on it. Before he can leave clean with his prize, he is assaulted by a mysterious group of killers and is forced to retreat into an American Embassy and admit who he is. From there, he is cuffed and taken to, you guessed it, Weston’s safe house and soon all hell breaks loose and the young agent has to move the seasoned (and dangerous) ex-agent/traitor away from the killers.
The movie strives to be perhaps a more “serious” attempt at something along the lines of the Bourne films, but the action sequences never really resonate and, after the first fifteen or so minutes, the film falls into a groove and never really rises or falls below that level. We move from one scene to the next and are never as invested in the characters or the situation as we should be. Ultimately, the film climaxes in another safe house and the “real” bad guys -you know, the one’s you should have figured out a very long time ago- are revealed and…well… it doesn’t really amount to all that much.
While Safe House is certainly not a terrible film, it never engages or surprises. It never rises above being another mediocre action film, in spite of the big budget and A-list cast. What a disappointment.
Of the movies in this list, I’ve seen a grand total of two of them, the romantic comedy/spy drama hybrid This Means War and the Disney mega-flop John Carter. Frankly, I disagree with their inclusion in this list. To me, both This Means War and John Carter were hardly “terrible” films and were hardly the worst movie experiences I had this year.
On the other hand, were either of the films “great”?
Absolutely not.
This Means War, to me, was a rather typical romantic comedy that benefited from a clever concept and the charisma of its four leads. And I won’t lie: There were times I grinned at the silliness presented on the screen and, yes, even managed a couple of laughs. Would I see the film again? No. But having seen it once and suffered through some truly execrable romantic comedies, I can faithfully report I’ve seen much, much worse.
As for John Carter, there is no doubt the movie was a box-office train wreck of massive proportions. No one wanted to see it despite boasting a huge budget and a director who had worked magic with Pixar animated films. As with This Means War, though, I didn’t find John Carter to be the colossal catastrophe others proclaimed it was.
Was it a great film? Absolutely not, though I suspect part of the problem modern audiences had with it lies in the sad fact that many of the ideas and concepts found in the writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB) have been copied and pirated by for so many years now that when John Carter finally was released, less aware viewers might have felt this film was a “rip off” of concepts found in other, more popular sci-fi films. But that’s only part of the problem. Another big issue was the terrible, terrible promotion of the film. Well before the film was released potential audiences already sensed the movie was a bomb and, thus, a self-fulfilling prophecy was made.
Getting past those two big issues, though, gets us into what I feel is the movie’s ultimate main problem: The lack of charisma between the two leads. Unfortunately, the stars of this film never gave off the sexual sparks they should have to make the audience root for their romance overcoming the many obstacles thrown in their way. The best of ERB’s writings, from Tarzan to the Martian novels, not only featured grand adventure but also a strong sense of sensuality/sexuality. In John Carter, it seemed like the puritanical shadow of a chaste Disney was looking over the proceedings and making sure the two leads never got too hot and heavy.
Having said that, I reiterate: Time’s inclusion of this film in the “worst of” movie list seems wrong. Certainly John Carter belongs in the “Biggest Financial Bombs” list of the year, but in spite of the lack of chemistry between the two leads, an overly familiar story, and horrific promotion, the movie itself was hardly a complete wreck, at least in my opinion.
Of the eight remaining films on the list, the only one I sorta/kinda want to see is Cloud Atlas. Some critics absolutely loved the film while others loathed it. I’m willing to give it a try when it reached home video.
As for the other seven films on the list, I doubt I’ll see any of them, at least based on plot summaries and trailers. One of those films in particular, The Odd Life of Timothy Green, looked to me like a complete train wreck. Another Disney film. Go figure.
