sci-fi

Hardware (1990)

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fourhalfstar

In last year’s fascinating film industry documentary Lost Soul, director Richard Stanley is made out to be something of a madman auteur. Over the course of the film Stanley watches his first major Hollywood production crumble both from behind the camera and as a masked extra snuck back onset after being unceremoniously removed from the project for his supposed ineptitude & lack of mental stability. It’s unclear whether or not Stanley’s very particular vision for The Island of Dr. Moreau would’ve been any more successful than the madhouse delivered after hothead actors Val Kilmer & Marlon Brando hijacked & derailed the production. It’s certainly true that Stanley did have a specific vision, though, and it was one steeped in his upbringing bent on his mother’s fascination with both anthropology & the occult. I can’t speak for the finalized version of The Island of Dr. Moreau eventually directed by John Frankenheimer, but looking through the documents of the film’s production throughout Lost Soul, I couldn’t help but be spooked by what was happening onset, as if I were witnessing a real life account of black magic gone horribly wrong, a verifiable case of a malicious curse backfiring.

I mention all this because it feels like it was a window into understanding the power of Richard Stanley’s debut feature, Hardware. Existing galaxies outside the typical live action comic book adaptation as we currently understand it, Hardware is far less interested in telling a story than it is in exploring its own Luddite philosophy as a source for horror. This is a film born of the same late 80s technophobia that made the rise of industrial rock & noise music such an era-specific success. Its plot is thin. The characters’ motivations can be unclear. However, this is undeniably powerful filmmaking that can chill & shatter your bones if you allow yourself to lock onto its wavelength. I can’t explain how, but Hardware seemingly casts a spell on its audience, a sentiment I mean quite literally.

If you’re going into Hardware expecting the black cinemagic I just promised you’re likely to be confused for at least the first fifteen minutes. In its opening jaunt of uneven worldbuilding the film feels like a dirt cheap amalgamation of Mad Max & The Terminator (and a boring one at that). Dylan McDermott stars as some kind of futuristic hardware scavenger that combs the desert either in search of roboparts or a site for the first Burning Man festival. I’m not entirely sure. He ends up returning to his longtime, distant girlfriend, having moved on somewhat emotionally, forming a newfound domesticity with their shared bestie/80s sidekick, Shades. Shades trips out on meditation & future-drugs as the couple attempt to rekindle their relationship (by boning). If you can’t tell by my flippant attitude, none of this matters in the least.

What is important is what happens after Dylan McDermott hits the road, somewhat romantically spurned. While smoking legal future-weed, his kinda-girlfriend works on her found object sculpture art and, after including a scavenged piece of robotics brought to her as a gift before the ceremonial boning, she mistakenly gives birth to an evil arachnid droid with a helmet in the shape of a human scull & a thirst for more, more, more blood & gore. This is when Richard Stanley’s evil spell takes hold. The onslaught of roboviolence that dominates the final 2/3rds of Hardware is a chilling glimpse into Cronenberg’s America. Hardware‘s basics are very simple: a damsel in distress is trapped by a scary monster (robot) and any attempt to rescue her leads to more bloodshed. As trashy & campy as these genre films can be, however, Stanley manages to make them uniquely terrifying & unnerving. Hardware is both exactly just like every other creature feature I’ve ever seen before & not at all like any of them. I don’t know what to say about the film’s particular brand of horror other than it subliminally dialed into a part of my mind I prefer to leave locked up & hidden away. Stanley’s debut feature is both a schlocky horror trifle & an unholy incantation that puts the ugliest aspects of modernity to disturbing, downright evil use.

A lot of Hardware is difficult to decipher as either a cliche or a trendsetter. The film’s monochromatic desertscape isn’t an exactly unique vision of the future, which tricks a modern audience into thinking it’s got the film figured out before it really gets rolling. All I know is that once you’re locked in that surveillance state fish tank apartment with that robotic spider monster the results are transcendent. If it weren’t for the trashiness of everything that surrounds that central quest for robosurvival, the film could almost match the fear of the unknowable mastered in John Carpenter’s The Thing. That’s not too shabby for a debut filmmaker the industry tossed off as disorganized & mentally unstable. Richard Stanley has very few feature films attached to his name, but with Hardware alone he deserves to be recognized as a powerful, destructive force. I enjoyed laughing at the film’s sillier flourishes just as much as I did being terrorized by its technological paranoia. This is well calibrated schlock and it’s a shame we don’t have more of it.

-Brandon Ledet

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016)

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fourstar

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is doing dismal numbers at the box office right now, but so did the cult classic comedy it most closely resembles: Walk Hard – The Dewey Cox Story. The Judd Apatow-penned John C. Reilly comedy Walk Hard applied ZAZ-style spoofery to the musician’s biopic genre and wound up covering the entire history of rock & roll from its blues origins to its Vegas crooner swan song. Popstar picks up exactly where Walk Hard leaves off, mixing ZAZ spoofery with a Spinal Tap documentary format to skewer the modern state of pop music as it has developed since Walk Hard‘s release nearly a decade ago. It’s a shame both of these films failed to make waves financially (Popstar‘s seemingly complete lack of advertising couldn’t have helped there), but they do promise to hold onto a more significant longevity among their respective comedy nerd fandoms. Case in point, just look to the other The Lonely Island film that failed at the box office & found a second life among dedicated fans, Hot Rod. Popstar is just as funny as Hot Rod & just as primed for repetitive viewings, so there’s no doubt in my mind it’ll get the same cult comedy treatment as that militantly goofy title in the long run.

The really interesting thing about that lack of immediate financial success, though, is the way it plays directly into Popstar‘s plot. In the film former SNL player Andy Samberg embodies a versatile stand-in popstar archetype that covers enough ground to resemble any popstar of note you could name from Kanye to Bieber to Skrillex to whoever. Samberg’s titular popstar struggles to repeat past success with a solo record & tour that only do a fraction of the numbers landed on his hit releases. Over the course of the film he learns to put past grudges & current hubris behind him & give the people what they want: a cash-in reunion of the Beastie Boys-esqe pop group that first made him famous. In a lot of ways Popstar itself is Samberg’s way of giving the people what they want. Presuming that Hot Rod didn’t make as much money as it could have because its delightfully moronic daredevil subject matter isn’t exactly what audiences would expect from a The Lonely Island movie, Samberg & company return to their roots here to construct a full-length version of what made their SNL sketches & comedy albums popular decade ago: pop music parody. According to the film’s fantasy version of this well-deserved cash-in, they should be making absurd amounts of money right now, but that’s not exactly how things are working out despite the product being on-point.

Box office numbers & middling reviews aside, Popstar stands as Andy Samberg’s greatest achievement to date. His deeply silly magnum opus lovingly skewers the totality of hedonistic excess & outsized hubris on the modern pop landscape. The film nails the feel of modern pop documentaries in terms of style coopting the on-screen text & social media illustration of titles like Amy along with talking head “interviews” with folks like Nas, Questlove, and Pharrell, the exact kind of contributors you’re likely to see pop up in films like Fresh Dressed. Popstar builds a solid, believable base to hang its gags upon & that in-the-know confidence allows the humor to go as broad or as absurd as it needs to in any particular moment without throwing the audience off track. You’re never entirely shaken by a throwaway gag like a baby playing drums like Neil Peart or an artist responsible for the “brilliance” of catchphrases like “#doinkdedoink” having the self-confidence to declare the Mona Lisa “an overrated piece of shit” because the movie is well-calibrated enough to support those kinds of over-the-top indulgences. The format, the character, his world, and our own pop music terrain all back up each ridiculous gag Samberg throws at the wall,  making the film out to be an efficient little comedy machine in comparison to the sprawling, Apatow-dominated landscape comedic cinema’s been exploring to death in recent years. There’s certainly loose improv afoot in Popstar, but it’s arranged & edited into highly functioning efficiency.

I don’t think I’d call Popstar my favorite comedy of the year so far (it’s got the looming presences of Hail, Caesar!, The Mermaid, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, The Nice Guys and The Bronze to deal with there), but I do think it outshines its closest comparison point in recent months: Zoolander 2. My main complaint with Zoolander 2, a movie I quite enjoyed, was that it gets “a little exasperating in its never-ending list of cameos & bit roles […] The film is overstuffed with both celebrity cameos & SNL vets dropping in for a dumb joke or two.” Popstar somehow adopts that exact cameo-saturated format & makes it work like gangbusters. It’s impossible to review this film without name dropping some of the musicians (RZA, Usher, A$AP Rocky, Arcade Fire, etc.) & comedians (Sarah Silverman, Eric Andre, Bill Hader, an actually-utilized Tim Meadows, etc.) involved, but their presence is actually necessary for the format to work instead of being distracting & dilutive the way they were in Stiller’s film.

Popstar smartly & lovingly dismantles the entirety of pop music’s current state of ridiculousness from EDM DJ laziness to the devastation of a negative Pitchfork review, to Macklemore’s no-homo “activism” to U2’s invasive album release snafu. Celebrity obsession & absurd acts of cartoonish hubris play right into that surreally vapid world, so Samberg has established a work here where needless cameos &  unhinged silliness are a necessity just as much as they’re an indulgence. Long after the lack of critical or box office buzz are forgotten, Popstar might just stand as Samberg’s greatest to work, the most efficient application of his distinct sense of humor put to record.

-Brandon Ledet

Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession (1973)

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fourstar

Self-described as a “non-science fiction, not quite realistic, and not strictly historical film” and a “comedy of anxieties” Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession (sometimes distributed under the ridiculous title Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future) is both just like & completely unique from every zany comedy title that immediately comes to mind. It’s easy to see echoes of the film’s sense of flippant, whimsical humor in works as varied as Monty Python, Scooby-Doo, and ZAZ comedies, but at the same time I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything exactly like it before. I’m not sure how many Soviet Russian slapstick comedies the average American movie buff watches in their lifetime, but this was a first for me.

Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession is remarkable for its ability to dabble in the same visual play & artistic pranksterism as titles like the infamous, surreal Czech comedy Daisies while maintaining the accessibility of a sketch comedy show or a weekly sitcom. It’s about as fun as any crossroads between camp & high art as you’re ever likely to see and it’s one that boasts an unlikely specificity & context due to its USSR setting. Rarely is a comedy this artistically rich so recommendable for its entertainment value & basic humorous appeal to audiences who would normally turn up their noses at the idea of watching a hoity-toity foreign film outright. I could easily see it sitting among the works of folks like Michel Gondry & Wes Anderson as the perfectly attractive gateway drug to drag youngsters into a life of art cinema geekery. Basically, I’m saying I greatly enjoyed this film as an adult, but really wish someone had shown it to me in high school. It would’ve saved me a lot of time in helping define & develop my own cinematic tastes.

The film’s plot is an exercise in cartoonish artificiality. A scientist/inventor risks losing the attentions of his beautiful actress wife by constantly hammering away at his latest project: a time machine. On the first, disastrous operation of his “apparatus”, the scientist opens the wall to his apartment to a hundreds-years-old castle setting and, through machinations not worth describing in detail, winds up swapping the places of his landlord, Ivan Vasilievich, with the 16th century dictator Ivan the Terrible. The landlord has a difficult time adjusting to his new digs. He’s initially mistaken for a demon by his newfound contemporaries before he disastrously assumes the throne of Ivan the Terrible in disguise (in addition to sharing a name & similarly predatory occupations, they also share an exact likeness). The “real” Ivan the Terrible, by contrast, does fairly well in the modern world. After briefly struggling with confounding inventions like recorded music, lightbulbs, and racy pin-ups, he somewhat comfortably settles into a world that still finds his demanding, violent attributes disconcertingly appealing. While the befuddled scientist struggles to return both Ivans to their proper places in time, the film bifurcates itself into being both a fish out of water comedy in modern times & a violent comedy of errors in ancient ones. It’s all very silly.

It’s difficult to describe the plot of Ivan Vassiliech without making it sound like a very thin, minimal work. Indeed, even certain gags within the film feel like something out of Benny Hill sketch or a mimicry of silent-era hamming. What’s most incredible about this film to me is in the way it distinguishes itself in the details. Its central time-bending apparatus is bizarre mess of sciency vagueness that makes Rick Moranis‘s goofy shrink ray in Honey I Shrunk the Kinds look downright realistic by comparison. Visual techniques like alternating between color and black & white film and mixing live action photography with animation heightens the film’s consistent playfulness to its own unique artform. The shattered fourth wall & movie-within-a-movie meta structure leads to inspired gags like the “real” Ivan the Terrible auditioning for a leading part in a movie about Ivan the Terrible. Ivan Vasilievich is flexible enough to both impress the idea with its meticulous, color-coded set design & to inspire guttural laughter with lines like “Please don’t put me to death, kind sir!” It’s an old-fashioned song & dance comedy that leaves enough room for genuine awe in its majestic Russian castle settings, which are used almost like a playground. Even the would-be bummer of a cop-out ending is significantly softened by the very polite concluding title card of “Ciao! Thank you for your attention.”

Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession hits that perfect sweet spot of smart, well-crafted cinema that’s also eager to please & easy to digest. As soon as the first watch I felt like it had already been in my life for decades, like a fuzzy memory triggered by a particular scent. That kind of instant familiarity is difficult to come by, especially with a product this silly & this finely tuned.

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 13: 2001 – A Space Odyssey (1968)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is referenced in Life Itself: On pages 88 & 395 of the first edition hardback, Ebert mentions that the film’s infamous, evil A.I. robot was built at his alma mater, writing “Chills ran down my spine when I first heard the voice of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey announce that it had been born in the computer lab at the University of Illinois in Urbana.” He also mentions on page 153 that 2001 was one of the biggest “event” films of his early, formative years as a professional film critic.

What Ebert had to say in his reviews: “Kubrick’s universe, and the space ships he constructed to explore it, are simply out of scale with human concerns. The ships are perfect, impersonal machines which venture from one planet to another, and if men are tucked away somewhere inside them, then they get there too. But the achievement belongs to the machine. And Kubrick’s actors seem to sense this; they are lifelike but without emotion, like figures in a wax museum. Yet the machines are necessary because man himself is so helpless in the face of the universe.” -from his 1968 review for the Chicago Sun Times

“The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn’t include a single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies, ‘2001’ is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe.” -from his 1997 review for his “Great Movies” series

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“Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.” – Ancient proverb

The arthouse space opera 2001: A Space Odyssey is madman auteur Stanley Kubrick’s magnum opus. Or, wait, maybe that’s The Shining. Or maybe Dr. Strangelove. Kubrick boasts too many crowning achievements to definitively rank any particular one as king beast, but 2001 certainly inspires that kind of lofty thinking, just in mere acknowledgement of its grand scale ambition. It’s a film that attempts to encapsulate the totality of time– past, present, and future– and does a fairly successful job of it. Its iconic scenes of space epic obfuscation have in time become so seminal that they now almost feel cliché, considering the one million and ten times they’ve been referenced & parodied in later, lesser works. This film is an unimaginable technical achievement for 1968, however, and I’m still scratching my head over the practicality of how some of it was accomplished through practical effects. Because each scene in the film is so overly-familiar to the public lexicon at this point, it’s near impossible to tell if I’ve actually watched it from front to end before. I do distinctly remember falling asleep to it once or twice in high school at the very least. As majestic & awe-inspiring as any particular achievement in 2001 can be, the film is also a slow, plodding, dialogue-light downstream drift that dares you at nearly every turn to lose focus & nod off. This is more or less the definition of challenging cinema. It takes a determined effort to stay on board for the journey, but the destination’s rewards are bountiful.

The funny thing for me on this most recent watch was that the movie I always think of as being 2001: A Space Odyssey, the movie where a crew of astronauts are murdered by an evil A.I. named HAL 9000, is just one segment of many in the film’s cinematic patchwork. 2001 functions almost like a horror anthology, with each of its four separate segments providing only a small window into its larger narrative. Each section of the film is dominated by the throughline talisman of the monolith, but they each stand as rigidly divided works of art, just in the same way Kubrick allows nearly every shot of the film to hang in the air like an isolated, precious object worth examination. 2001 is an art gallery just as much as it is a narrative motion picture.

In the first segment the film takes poetic license with evolution & the Dawn of Man and depicts the all-important monolith teaching humanity’s primate ancestors how to use tools, a development that immediately leads to the world’s first coldblooded murder. In the second segment a second monolith is discovered by astronauts on the moon and its effect is largely shrouded in mystery, other than the signal it projects that points to Jupiter. As this film was released just one year before the real moonlanding (an event some eccentrics believe Kubrick himself had a part in “faking”), the mysterious terror of this piece points to modern anxiety about what comes next on the frontier of scientific discovery. The third segment answers that question loud & clear, proposing that our near future will be dominated by pompous A.I. robots with murderous intent. The closing segment, beautifully titled “Jupiter & Beyond the Infinite” is a somewhat-open-to-interpretation trip though religious transcendence, a gateway into the next step in our evolution. The lucky astronaut who endures that final chapter’s monolith as a test subject emerges on the other end as some sort of unknowable space fetus. The future of humanity is left open-ended here, but given that all previous monoliths in the film were directly followed by murder, the outlook is just as chilling as it is majestic.

Much like how the monoliths transformed the state of humanity at several points throughout the film, 2001 transformed the state of sci-fi adventure media. Long gone are the days of Flash Gordon & Buck Rogers, although they would later return with 2001-esque special effects in George Lucas’s Star Wars franchise. The HAL 9000 segment of 2001 functions somewhat like a genre film if you squint at it the right way, but the other 3/4s of the picture are so gloriously obscured & open-ended that Kubrick’s version of a space adventure is a much stranger, more artful beast than the examples that preceded it. There is a clear narrative progression here in the evolution of humanity, but the source, nature, and purpose of that evolution is so immense & mysterious that the “odyssey” of the title is more figurative than it is literal. I’m sure Arthur C. Clarke’s novelized version of this story (which he wrote for the film as a collaborator) is much clearer than what’s onscreen, but I feel like any concrete, extraterrestrial explanation of what transpires would cheapen the movie’s poetry. The aliens in this film may as well be an all-knowing god or The Will of the Universe, considering the immensity of what’s onscreen. I left the film with few solid answers and took delight in that ambiguity.

Not everyone feels that way. Ebert noted in his “Great Movies” review of the film that there were several walkouts during the 1968 Los Angeles premiere he attended. Most notably among the miffed was an especially exasperated Rock Hudson, who was visibly livid that the couldn’t pin down the film’s exact plot. Indeed, 2001 feels determined at every turn to spurn its audience, like an ornery mechanical bull in a dive bar (except one bucking in spectacular slow motion). This is a film that will either bore or terrorize you depending on how game you are for its journey. As much as I loved it as an immersive cinematic experience I’ll even admit that a couple dialogueless shots where the soundtrack was dominated by heavy breathing & mechanical whirs tested my patience a great deal. I’d even go as far as to say it got on my nerves. That’s not to say this is  humorless, highbrow work without a touch of pedestrian entertainment value, though. I think the shock of starting the film among the unevolved primates was something of a sly joke, maybe even serving as Kubrick’s way of poking fun at human folly & hubris. Hal 9000, however creepy, is subtly funny in its own cold, biting way, even downright bitchy in intonations of phrases like “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that, Frank.” There’s even an honest-to-God, outright gag in the film where a character perplexedly reads a long list of instructions for a zero gravity toilet.

Of course, humor & genre thrills are not likely to be anyone’s biggest takeaway from 2001. For those who can stay on board for its demanding runtime, glacial pace, and deliberate obfuscation, the film delivers a perfectly crafted, near-flawless glimpse into the unknown, which is a rare treat for any kind of art, much less a cinematic space adventure. The violence on display here ranges from blind rage to cold calculation, but never for a minute feels exploitative. The visual effects & smooth, spinning camerawork are dizzying achievements of technical prowess, but feel more purposeful than showy. An old-fashioned overture & intermission feel entirely earned given the scope of the film’s ambition. I’m not sure if 2001 is Kubrick delivering a passionate work of narrative art so much as a perfectly calibrated machine that begs to be gawked at as it functions with divine precision. Either way, it’s a real beaut.

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Roger’s Rating: (4/4, 100%)

fourstar

Brandon’s Rating: (4.5/5, 90%)

fourhalfstar

Next Lesson: Cool Hand Luke (1967)

-Brandon Ledet

 

 

The Lobster (2016)

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threehalfstar

Fail to fall in love with The Lobster within the first 45 minutes & you’ll be transformed into the miffed geezer complaining that he had just seen “the stupidest movie of [his] life” while standing next to me at the world’s most telling critical forum: the post-screening urinal. Personally, I enjoyed the film, but it took a lot of willingness to give into its off-putting deadpan style to get there. Here’s a list of things you have to be okay with seeing depicted to enjoy The Lobster: high-concept absurdism, twee preciousness, animal cruelty, romanceless intercourse, abrupt & ambiguous conclusions, heartless violence, purposefully awkward & stilted acting, a muddled mix of sci-fi & fantasy, the world’s strangest rape joke, and Colin Farrell. You still with me? A lot of the elderly folk I shared a theater with last Saturday morning weren’t, making this one of the most disharmonious screening I’ve been to since listening to the genre-minded horror hungry grumble at The Witch. Just like the film’s central premise promises/threatens, there’s a lot of pressure to fall in love with The Lobster against the near-insurmountable odds or else your personal experience could turn quite ugly, even beastly.

As is true with a lot of high-concept sci-fi & fantasy, I mostly enjoyed The Lobster as an exercise in world-building. In the film’s dystopian reality, being romantically unattached is punishable by law. Only couples are allowed to live in The City. Single people are forcibly enrolled in a program at a resort hotel that attempts to pair them off in life-long romantic bonds. Failure to fall in love within 45 days results in being turned into an animal of their choice through surgical procedure. More time can be added to their stay at the resort by hunting down defecting loners who chose to live in isolation in the wilderness. Seemingly, no one is truly happy. There’s a fierce, biting allegory to this premise that combines the most effective aspects of sci-fi short stories & absurdist stage play black humor to skewer the surreal, predatory nature of the modern romance landscape. It takes a certain sensibility to give into The Lobster‘s many outlandish conceits, but it’s easy to see how the film could top many best of the year lists for those able to lock onto its very peculiar, particular mode of operation, despite the sour word of mouth at the post-screening urinal. It’s basically 2016’s Anomalisa, with all the positives & negatives that comparison implies.

Just like Anomalisa, The Lobster is difficult to connect with on a personal, emotive level due to the distancing nature of its befuddled protagonist & its high-concept conceit. (Both films also boast the two of the awkwardest sex scenes I’ve endured in years, but that’s another matter.) I would say that the central problem with high-concept allegory is that it cuts into the audience’s ability to empathize with a film’s romance & humanity, but that’s not always true. Just look to Spike Jonze’s Her for a work that has its cake & eats it too in that regard. The Lobster is purposefully distancing & impersonal. It intentionally takes the audience out of the story at every given opportunity to gawk & scoff at the absurdity of modern romance. I know that I personally would’ve been more enthusiastic about the film’s rewards if it injected a little more heart into its satirical black comedy reflections on the predatory nature of romantic coupling, which didn’t even match the somber not of Anomalisa in terms of genuine emotion. Not everyone will feel that way, though, and a great deal of folks will perfectly enjoy The Lobster on an intellectual level without needing to engage with it on an emotional one.

Sci-fi romance horror has become a pet favorite subgenre of mine lately, best reflected in titles like Possession, Spring, and The One I Love. The Lobster does the genre one better & injects an unhealthy dose of black humor into the formula. A lot of my favorite moments in the film are when it pushes the surreality of its central premise into the familiar territory of a solid comedic gag: masturbation punished with a bread toaster, a Zero Theorem-esque headphones dance party in the woods, the idea that certain species are endangered because most people choose to become dogs, an over-the-top fairy tale narration that pokes fun at the absurdity of needless voice-over, etc. I also respect the film greatly for not shying away from the consequences of its cold, bloody violence, despite what you might expect from its tightly controlled Wes Anderson/Michel Gondry-type meticulousness & whimsy. The Lobster sets the tone early with an opening gun shot, a vindictive act of violence that chills the room before its absurdist humor has a chance to warm it up.

Still, I can see what the wheezing geezer at the urinal was getting at when he complained that the film, particularly the ending, was a letdown. The Lobster is not a romance for the ages titled The Lobsters or a yuck-em-up comedy titled My Brother the Dog, though it could’ve easily gone in either direction. It’s an uncompromising, absurd trudge through ennui & romantic dread, one that makes very little effort to bring the audience along for the deeply somber ride. It takes a leap of faith to enjoy the film. I enjoyed it a great deal myself, but I’ll admit that I was also a little miffed at the way it wore the “Not for Everyone” tag like a badge of honor every chance it got. I get where you’re coming from, angry urinal critic. I understand.

-Brandon Ledet

Daikaijû Gamera (1965)

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fourstar

campstamp

I’m far from an expert in kaiju cinema, but recently catching a couple outliers in the genre, Reptilicus & Pulgasari, has sparked my interest a great deal. I’ve sen a good number of films that feature Godzilla & King Kong, who seem to be the top brass of kaiju fare, but there are so many other giant monsters of creature feature past that I’m missing out on between those borders. You can’t only listen to The Beatles & The Stones and claim to know the totality of rock n’ roll, right? As many times I’ve seen drawings or action figures of kaiju like Gamera, Mothra, and Mechagodzilla, I don’t think I’ve ever given their originating films a solid, up-close look, which feels like a blind spot in my horror/sci-fi film education.

Daikaijû Gamera (literally translated Giant Monster Gamera and re-cut & released in the US as Gamera: The Invincible) doesn’t do much to buck the idea that once you’ve seen one kaiju film you’ve seen them all. It plays remarkably like the original Godzilla film (which was then a decade old) in terms of tone, production, and plot. The most crucial difference between the two works, of course, is the design of their titular monsters. Yes, Daikaijû Gamera is essentially a too-soon remake of Godzilla, but it’s a Godzilla remake that features a gigantic, fire-breathing turtle that can turn its shell into a flying saucer. I don’t think I need to explain any more than that to get the film’s basic appeal across. It’s a concept that pretty much sells itself.

Illegal Cold War nuclear activity in the Arctic frees an ancient beast known a The Devil’s Envoy, Gamera. Yes, The Devil’s right hand demon is a gigantic, fire-breathing turtle that once plagued the lost continent of Atlantis (according to the Eskimo tribes that witness his rebirth, at least). Scientists expect that the nuclear fallout that freed Gamera from his icy prison will be the creature’s very undoing. That is not the case. Gamera not only breathes fire. He inhales it. All weaponry, industry and nuclear destruction thrown in his path only make him stronger. Nations must put aside their potential World War III tensions to peacefully plan Gamera’s undoing, calling into question the way the unnatural power of nuclear war can loosen & anger forces of Nature like typhoons, dead aquatic life epidemics, and fire-breathing turtles the size of mountains. At one point an observer asks, “Something must really be wrong with Earth, huh?” The answer is a resounding yes and a lot of anxieties about the destructive nature of modern life is clearly on display here in the guise of giant monster mayhem.

Although Daikaijû Gamera is a direct echo of Godzilla & in many ways feels like a standard issue kaiju flick (on the sillier side of the genre), it also did a lot to establish that standard in the first place. There’s a brief scene involving a beatnik surf rock band & a major storyline about a little boy obsessed with turtles (and turtleneck sweaters, apparently) that telegraph a lot of the winking camp tone in kaiju films to come. At this stage of kaiju cinema the monsters are supposed to be majestic & terrifying, but Giant Monster Gamera hints at a future world where they function as heroes of children & monsters with a sense of humor. Godzilla may be the most looming influence over the entire spectrum of kaiju as a monster movie subgenre, but Gamera‘s impact is a lot more readily recognizable in the DNA of the genre’s goofy, 70s future in titles like (my personal favorite) Godzilla vs The Smog Monster.

Again, though, there’s really no need to sell Giant Monster Gamera as an innovator or a historical landmark to make its genre thrills feel worthwhile. You can get its basic plot in any number of 1960s kaiju movies, but where else are you going to get a giant, fire-breathing turtle that occasionally functions as a flying saucer (besides its eleven sequels)? This is a genre that survives on the strength and/or novelty of its monsters & Giant Monster Gamera did not disappoint on that end, not one  bit.

-Brandon Ledet

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

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There’s a certain retro-futuristic aesthetic that sets neo-noir visuals to a sci-fi context that I definitely have a soft spot for, but I don’t know exactly what to call by name. Captain America: The First Avenger & Batman: The Animated Series are the only titles that fit in this particular genre that were especially successful financially, as most examples I’d group in with them were notoriously disastrous flops: The Rocketeer, Tomorrowland, Predestination, The Phantom, etc. Although I don’t know exactly what to call this subgrene (future noir? fart deco?), its tropes are as clear as day to me. It’s a pure style over substance formula that intentionally matches the exquisite art deco architecture & fashion of the 1930s with the hammy swashbuckling of old comic strips & radio serials; extra points are awarded if the plot involves robots, aliens, or time travel. Imagine the pulpy dime store version of Metropolis and you have a decent idea of what I’m getting at.

True to form, the 2004 visual feast Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow flopped hard at the box office, but stands as an immaculate example of the future noir/fart deco aesthetic I’m vaguely describing here. One of the first Hollywood productions filmed almost entirely against a CGI backdrop (which is more or less the current industry standard for summertime blockbusters), the film masks its almost instantly-dated visuals with the soft focus haze of the era it intentionally evokes. The film has a falseness to it that it emphatically embraces instead of shying away from. Its absurd use of lighting & extreme Dutch angles gives the film the same surreal comic book context that recently wowed me when I first watched Sam Raimi’s goofily masterful Darkman. This “live action” cartoon landscape is thoroughly impressive, from its gorgeous/impossible architecture to its chintzy, child’s toy ray guns. It feels simultaneously old fashioned and newfangled and that exact air of self-contradiction is specifically what wins me over in this subgenre every damn time.

The film’s plot is set in an alternate universe version of the late 1930’s where an invading Nazi-esque threat invades US soil with gigantic laser-shooting robots & mechanical warbirds. Bold dame news reporter Polly Perkins (Gwenyth Paltrow, who has recently been growing on me thanks to her turn as the similarly-named Pepper Potts) follows this story down the proverbial rabbit hole, where she discovers a vast, world-threatening conspiracy that involves, among other things, dinosaurs, miniature elephants, and a gigantic Noah’s arc-type rocket ship. Her partner in this journey is a maverick airplane pilot (played by Jude Law in a goofy version of his Gattaca mode) hell bent on taking out our foreign invaders single-handedly like a true American. Will our two leads find love despite their stubborn, self-serving quests for independence? Does their potential romantic connection matter any more or less than saving the world? Do these questions matter at all in the face of the film’s towering attention paid to over-the-top visuals? Even if you haven’t seen the film I’m confident you can answer those questions yourself. The two leads are remarkably charming here, with a chemistry that only gets more potent as the plot rolls along, but they’re not at all what makes the movie a unique treat.

Critics were mostly kind to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow upon initial release, but audiences’ wallets were not. Even so, it seems almost criminal that the film stands as the only feature credit of director Kerry Conran. Kerry Conran is a fully functional auteur here, building a gorgeous, amusing world from scratch and it’s a shame to think we didn’t get to see how his work would’ve evolved along with CGI technology were it given the chance. I’ve tried to pigeonhole his sole film here into a hyper-specific subgenre, but that’s honestly selling the film’s idiosyncrasy a little short. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow might pull its visual references from long-gone eras of cinematic sci-fi, but I think its goals and accomplishments are much loftier than pure pastiche. At one point the film intentionally evokes comparison to the innovation of The Wizard of Oz, but that connection essentially stops at the novelty of its CGI backdrop. I actually think a better comparison point would be a more fartsy, less artsy version of what Guy Madden does. Just like with Madden, Conran’s visuals & ideas can be a little overwhelming to endure at feature length, but in isolation they each land with surprising success. I just wish there were more Conran-helmed visual feasts to go around, whether or not he continued to work in the fart deco subgenre I grew to love so much. Even those who don’t fall in love with Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow as a finished product are bound to recognize potential in its individual moving parts. Sadly, that particular world of tomorrow hasn’t yet arrived.

-Brandon Ledet

The Flesh Eaters (1964)

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“There’s something in the water that eats flesh! I said ‘eats flesh’! People!”

The 1980s were undeniably the glory days of gore in horror cinema, but they weren’t necessarily the root of extreme on-camera violence. George Romero is often credited as being the godfather of gore, ushering in the era of special effects that paid great detail to exposing the insides of horror’s actors/victims. Romero’s seminal work, The Night of The Living Dead, was released as early as 1968, well before onscreen gore reached its Reagan-era fever pitch. Before The Night of the Living Dead hit the theaters, however, it was originally titled The Night of the Flesh Eaters and subsequently changed its moniker to avoid confusion with a film simply titled The Flesh Eaters released just four years prior. The Flesh Eaters shares no resemblance with the zombie-centric plots of Romero’s Living Dead series in even the vaguest sense, but it does beat the director to the punch somewhat in terms of onscreen gore, so it’s somewhat appropriate that they almost shared a name.

The Flesh Eaters is horrifically violent for a mid-60s creature feature, paying great attention to the special effects of its blood & guts make-up. Many credit the film as being the very first example of gore horror & it’s difficult to argue otherwise. The anachronistic-feeling intrusion of extreme violence in what otherwise feels like a standard Corman-esque B-picture is beyond striking. Although I’ve seen far worse gore in films that followed in its wake, the out-of-place quality the violence has in The Flesh Eaters makes the film feel shocking & upsetting in a transgressive way. I don’t know for sure if Romero was at all inspired by The Flesh Eaters or if he even had seen it before making The Night of the Living Dead, but his work certainly wasn’t the first gore-soaked spectacle in town, not by a long shot.

A drunk movie starlet, her overworked assistant, and a cocky airplane pilot are temporarily marooned on a small, mysterious island. It’s there that they encounter a creepy scientist fella experimenting with a microscopic, weaponized life form that greedily eats human flesh clean off the bone. At first the only evidence of these tiny mutant bastards is the washed-up skeletons that arrive picked-clean on the shore. Soon they reveal themselves as tiny spots of nuclear glow that can only be described by their potential victims in the vaguest of terms: “that shiny stuff”, “that little silver stuff”, etc. Without revealing too much, I can promise that these tiny, evil, glimmering somethings eventually snowball into a much bigger, stranger problem that a small crew of shipwrecked amateurs stand very little chance of surviving.

Directed by the guy who voiced Papa Racer on the 60s Speed Racer cartoon (Jack Curtis) & partially funded by his winnings on a long-forgotten television game show, The Flesh Eaters is largely a labor of love. There are some details to what it delivers that relegates it to a camp cinema context: some nonsensical asides about Nazis, a beatnik caricature that would’ve made even the extras in Corman’s Bucket of Blood blush, some bathing suit oggling, a William Castle-style distribution gimmick in which audiences were armed with “instant blood” to feed the flesh eaters in case of attack, etc. As goofy as The Flesh Eaters can be in moments, however, what truly makes it unique is the ahead-of-its-time attention paid to its special effects. Holes are poked into film strips themselves to indicate the flesh eaters at work. Blood & gore ooze out of victims in a horrifically stark black & white. The scale of the third act mayhem far exceeds what you’d reasonably expect based on the budget. The Flesh Eaters suffered many setbacks, including years-delayed distribution & a hurricane disrupting production, but it was well worth the effort. It eventually stood as a must-see landmark of horror cinema that would in its own way predict where the genre was headed in the decades to come and it still plays remarkably fresh today because of that grotesque innovation.

-Brandon Ledet

Star Trek Beyond, and Beyond

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Okay, folks, let’s talk about Star Trek.

When I was a kid, I was really into fantasy books. I loved The Chronicles of Narnia, The NeverEnding Story, and the Oz books (Tik Tok of Oz was my favorite) and I read them over  and over again. Then, the summer after I turned nine (1996, if you care), I spent the days with a trio of home schooled boys and their mother, who ran a de facto home daycare out of her home. Our days were pretty structured, with outdoor time and reading time, and we would watch a movie every day after lunch; frequently, this consisted of watching various Star Trek films, usually Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock, or The Undiscovered Country (I had actually seen The Voyage Home many times before, as it was one of the few VHS tapes we owned, but had never connected it to a larger franchise, thinking of it only as “the whale movie”).

An obsession took root and hollowed me out. When the local NBC affiliate started syndicating reruns of The Next Generation in the afternoons, I suddenly had direct access to the franchise every day. My family didn’t have a lot of money, but they did their best to help buy action figures of the characters; the ones I didn’t have I made out of Happy Meal toys by painting Starfleet uniforms on them. I built a custom bridge playset out of  discarded scraps from my father’s woodworking and created new worlds for my favorite characters to explore. We didn’t have UPN, so my aunt who lived in Raleigh would record episodes of Voyager on tapes and mail them to me, and I watched those same twelve episodes until I could recite them by heart. I lived, ate, and breathed Star Trek for the better part of a decade, much to my father’s chagrin, with only occasional bouts of superhero interest. Later that year, I was taken to my first convention (with guest George Takei!) at the now-defunct Baton Rouge Hall Convention Center, where I was one trivia question away from winning an original script from the filming of classic Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror.” Knowing that the captain of the Reliant was Captain Terrell was not enough; knowing that McCoy’s daughter was named Joanna was not enough. Can you imagine how much smaller my student debt would be now if I had a Takei-signed copy of a “Mirror, Mirror” script? My developing brain learned a new lesson that day: every bit of information about Star Trek must be absorbed and stored, for the rest of forever, in case it came in handy again.

After the premiere of Battlestar Galactica, I had to take some time away from Star Trek. BSG was just so unlike it (or anything else) and so steeped in the contemporary political landscape that, to my cynical teenage self, Star Trek seemed immature in comparison. It didn’t help that the last TV series, the prequel Enterprise, had been reprehensibly awful for nearly all of its run; Star Trek was a dead franchise. There’s a reason that I wrote my master’s thesis on Battlestar and not Voyager. And so, with the last two feature films with the cast of NextGen being colossal failures (Insurrection received mixed reviews initially, but 2002’s Nemesis was the lowest grossing ST feature of all time), the well was capped in 2005, with the airing of the series finale of Enterprise. For the first time since 1987, there was no new Star Trek.

I’ve touched on this briefly in a few other things I’ve written here (and on my personal blog, and on bathroom walls, and interjected verbally into conversation without invitation), but Star Trek is an optimistic, progressive vision of humanity at its very core. From 1966, when the original pilot for the classic series saw a woman as second-in-command of the ship (an idea that NBC executives immediately rejected) and the series proper showed POC and women in positions of authority and respect, the show has tested the boundaries of social stigmas by pushing against them. The original series saw the first scripted interracial kiss on television in the episode “Plato’s Stepchildren,” and, despite being a Cold War product, saw a passionately patriotic Russian crewman take his place on the bridge alongside characters representing various ethnicities and backgrounds. The show was not without flaw in this arena; on the one hand, instead of casting a real Indian woman as Lieutenant Rhada in “That Which Survives” and “Requiem for Methuselah,” it appears that they cast a white actress and put her in brownface and a bindi. On the other hand, given the era in which the series was being broadcast, it’s commendable that some effort was made at all. Another example is Mexican actor Ricardo Montalban, who was cast as Indian Khan Noonien Singh; although this is problematic in that it it endorses the idea that POC of different ethnic backgrounds are interchangeable, it was groundbreaking and progressive for its day, and that humanism and progressivism is Star Trek’s best quality. No other media franchise has done so much for the cause of representation. In her autobiography Beyond Uhura, Nichelle Nichols called the series “a vehicle for [progressive] ideals about equality, freedom, and personal accountability,” for “audiences to enjoy, cherish, and incorporate into their own hopes fot the future and humanity.”

What I’m getting at here is that I’ve spent large portions of my life thinking about the world of this franchise, its implications, its role in society, it’s fictional society’s role in the text, etc., for better or worse. I’m not a Star Trek fan, I’m a Star Trek academic, with all the intense scholarship and rigorous thought that such a term implies. I’ve spent time pondering the role of the capitalism-free Federation in the larger galactic economy, what it’s like to serve aboard a starship as a civilian scientist, and whether or not it makes any sense that Sisko’s father could really run a Creole restaurant in the French Quarter (represent!) given that no one uses money. I’m a proponent of considering Galaxy Quest the tenth Star Trek film in order to maintain the integrity of the odd/even law of quality. If you want my quick rundown: the original series is Star Trek at its purest, NextGen is Star Trek at its best, DS9 is Star Trek at its smartest, Voyager is the Star Trek with the most squandered potential, and Enterprise is Star Trek at its most tired. Wrath of Khan is undoubtedly one of the most literary science fiction films ever made and is a personal favorite. My favorite author in the extended universe is Peter David, and his New Frontier series is a delight for a long term fan; I also highly recommend Greg Cox’s Rise and Fall of Khan books and anything by Diane Duane. The best fanseries is Star Trek Continues, although Renegades is laudable for its concept even if its goals are a little lofty, and Of Gods and Men gives me the warm and fuzzies. Are we all on board now? Are my credentials well established? Ok.

I considered watching and reviewing all of the Star Trek films that came before in the leadup to Star Trek Beyond, which will premier this summer. I ultimately decided not to do so, not simply because there are so many and the time between now and then is so short, but because the last thing(s) the internet needs are more reviews of the Star Trek movies. If you took all of the reviews of the films that that have ever been written, then printed them out at size ten font on a strip of ticker tape paper, the text would go all the way to Romulus and back (don’t question my math or astronomy). That’s a fact.* I do think it’s a good time to talk about the reboot in general, however, with the sequel looming on the horizon and a Bryan Fuller-produced TV series set to begin airing next year. So, let’s talk about JJ Abrams.

Abrams is a real, Spielbergian film-maker. I know that there are some who consider this heretical, and I understand their objections on the grounds that their output is of significantly different qualities. Cloverfield may have had equivalent cultural impact to Jaws, one could argue (in that both hit theatres and changed the landscape for years afterward with regards to style and tone), but it couldn’t come close to having the same kind of longevity and quality. As much as Super 8 (a movie that is 95% perfection) apes E.T., it had no hope of ever being as well-beloved. Until The Force Awakens, nothing Abrams made had the kind of staying power that Spielberg did; this is despite the similarities between the two men. I touched briefly (in my Blood Massacre review) on the fact that Abrams wrote to Don Dohler and composed the music for his Galaxy Invader, but that’s really only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to his interest in getting into film from an early age. Abrams is undoubtedly passionate about his work and his features are generally enjoyable if fleeting in their relevance.

Was he the right man to reintroduce Star Trek to the masses? Even in hindsight, it’s not really clear. The last time the franchise had any real mainstream penetration was with Deep Space Nine, as both Voyager and Enterprise were considered niche television in comparison to the relatively well-known shows that had preceded them. As a result, it had been nearly ten years since anyone outside of insiders had thought about Star Trek in any real way, and Abrams was riding high on the surprise success of Cloverfield when his name was bandied about to direct the reboot. To look back at the franchise’s history for a comparison, consider what happened British novelist Nicholas Meyers was hired to take over the film series and direct the first sequel, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The first film, Robert Weiss’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, wasn’t well-received critically but generated sufficient revenue to warrant a second picture; Meyers had a reputation as a man who could bring a film in on time and under budget, so Paramount tapped him to bring the entire Star Trek franchise to its conclusion. The young director had never seen a single episode before, so he watched the entire series from start to finish to get a clearer idea of how to pay homage to the show and create something that would appeal to the masses and long term fans.

To do so, he chose to bring back longtime favorite villain Khan and make the film a direct sequel to the 1967 episode “Space Seed.” In it, Kirk and company find Khan and his acolytes in suspended animation in space, genetically engineered supersoldiers left over from a catastrophic war on Earth in the dark days of the 1990s (time marches on). Khan and his coterie attempt to hijack the Enterprise; when Kirk eventually defeats him, he mercifully maroons Khan and the others on an idyllic world where they can live out their lives in relative freedom rather than in a prison cell. Meyers took this idea and turned it into Paradise Lost writ large across the Star Trek universe, interpreting this as Kirk literally casting Khan down from the heavens and crafting his film around the return of Khan as a somewhat sympathetic figure of evil who seeks Ahab-like revenge against Kirk. The truly genius thing about the narrative is that the knowledge of what happened in the series adds to the intrigue but is not required for the enjoyment of the film overall; as a result, the film was such a critical and financial success that Paramount decided to make more sequels, extending the franchise and leading to its further growth.

In comparison, JJ Abrams’s Star Trek is not as successful. Abrams freely admitted that he didn’t spend much time revisiting the Star Trek of yesteryear for thematic or narrative inspiration. Instead, his first film focused more on echoing the cinematic aesthetics of the original 1977 Star Wars film, including the destruction of planets, frenetically energetic action scenes, cantinas with strange aliens, and other ideas that, arguably, don’t belong in Star Trek. There was a distinct lack of the philosophical humanism and social commentary that characterized what this franchise is supposed to represent. So did I hate it?

No, actually. The 2009 Star Trek film is delightful, in my opinion. Yes, it’s different from the canon. Yes, it’s not “my” Star Trek. Yes, it makes a lot of mistakes. Yes, its reboot/requel nature means that the only element of the franchise that remains in canon is the regrettable prequel series Enterprise. Yes, a lot of the elements make no real sense (why the hell would you build a starship of that size in a quarry in Iowa instead of in orbit?). Yes, it’s loud and kind of dumb. Yes, it was sexist in ways both obvious (nuKirk isn’t just a horndog, he’s a straight up creep) and small (Starfleet crewmembers’ rank is shown by the pleating on the wrist; by making women’s uniforms sleeveless, the film literally strips them of their rank). I’m not ignorant of or necessarily “okay” with all of that.

But for me personally, the first film in this new series did not have to be philosophical in the way that the original series and its descendants usually were (First Contact is a straight up zombie body horror movie set in the Star Trek universe, and I love it despite its tonal inconsistency with the rest of the films). Abrams’s Star Trek had one job: to get people interested in Star Trek again, to bring to the masses a sense of excitement and majesty and wonder about this world and its characters. And, hey, mission accomplished. The movie didn’t have to address human nature or racism or the inherent evils of totalitarianism or the rights of sentient technological intelligence or the importance of tolerance. The film needed to grab attention, so that Abrams could address all of those things in the next film, returning Star Trek to its humanistic and optimistic roots.

But Star Trek Into Darkness didn’t do that. Instead, it doubled down on the blockbuster elements of the first film, with more fights and more out of character moments. Having Spock fly into a rage in the first film, in defiance of what that character should do, was an interesting moment, but having him do the exact same thing in Into Darkness was a huge mistake; how is the audience supposed to set a baseline expectation of who the notably stoic and logical Spock is supposed to be when he flies off the handle in every appearance? Having Uhura pester Spock about their relationship in the middle of a mission damages all of the positive work that was done expanding her character in the first film. And, worst of all, they made Khan a white guy. And not just any white guy; the most British, whitest, most casually ableist, classist actor out there: Benedict Cumberbatch (I’ll be writing more about this soon, when I finish a write-up about why we won’t be performing an Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. review of Doctor Strange until after the film is out of theatres). Yes, as discussed above, Khan was originally played by a Mexican actor and not a Hindu one, but that was progressive for its time, and casting a white actor in a Hindu role, the way that Into Darkness does, would have been regressive two decades ago. There are a lot of fun moments in Into Darkness (and if you don’t have a fetish for Chris Pine in a wetsuit, get ready to develop one), but it failed utterly on the whole to be Star Trek, instead just being a forgettable sci-fi action adventure wearing its clothes. As The Mary Sue recently asked, where are the radical politics of modern Star Trek?

In recent months, we’ve heard very little about the upcoming third film in the reimagined franchise. Concerns that were raised early in the production, like those that arose from Abrams handing the reins over to Fast/Furious franchise director Justin Lin, were largely put to bed when it was revealed that cast member (and notable “one of us” nerd Simon Pegg) would be working on the screenplay. Since then, there’s largely been a dearth of information about the film. That’s not a good sign. This year is the franchise’s 50th Anniversary (and the 20th Anniversary of my induction into the fandom), but where is the hype? Compare this to the lead up to the 50th Anniversary Special of Doctor Who from a couple years back, which featured retrospective specials, an anniversary team-up, a new line of merchandise, and the introduction of a new direction for the franchise. We’ve got a new film coming out in less than three months, and so far we’ve had one trailer, which was met with a collective “meh.”** As Gizmodo recently asked, why aren’t we hearing more about this movie?

Overall, as a Star Trek fan, I’m cautiously optimistic. Beyond could be the return to form that we’ve been waiting for all this time. But to be honest, I’m more excited about the upcoming television series, for a lot of reasons. For one thing, the film franchise will continue to be beholden to the skeleton of the original series, which means sticking to the characters from that show and not being able to expand as much as a new series would. For another, a new series means more material, with new Star Trek to watch every week rather than every few years. Further, Bryan Fuller has previously said that, given the opportunity to helm a Star Trek TV series, he would love to cast Angela Bassett as the captain, which is an idea that I am so on board for. More recent news has led to speculation that the new series will not be a continuation of the NextGen chronology but take a step back to cover the adventures of the Enterprise-B under the command of Sulu’s daughter Demora; this would be set during the middle of the century jump from Kirk to  Picard, and would also be the first time that we had an Asian (specifically Japanese) captain. (News that Demora will be mentioned, and perhaps even seen, in Star Trek Beyond has further fueled this belief.) In even more recent news, Nicholas Meyers, who brought Star Trek back from the edge of death before, has been announced as a consultant on the new series; frankly, there’s no reason to suspect that the new series will be anything other than perfection, and I’m really looking forward to it.

What are your thoughts on Abrams’s Star Trek, and the Star Trek that is to come? Are you excited about Beyond?

*No, it isn’t.

**It’s time for everyone to accept that there will never be a sci-fi/Beastie Boys mashup better than the BSG music video treatment of “Sabotage”. Here’s the side-by-side comparison, just for your edification.

-Mark  “Boomer” Redmond

Thoughts on The Congress (2014) and the Question of What, Exactly Modern Celebrities are Selling

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One of the most wildly imaginative sci-fi films in recent memory, for my money, was the often-overlooked, “technophobic” film industry satire The Congress. In the film, Princess Bride actress Robin Wright plays a fictionalized version of herself facing an exponentially shrinking list of potential career options thanks to an industry that has a long history of underserving women as they age past their 20s & 30s. Wright’s agent uses this professional crisis to pressure her into allowing a major movie studio to digitally capture (or, in the movie’s lingo, “hermetically scan”) her very essence, essentially selling her tangible soul to a media conglomerate. This leads to a psychedelic existential crisis involving an animated wonderland of dystopian terror that makes The Congress one of the most visually bizarre films I can remember from the last couple of years.

As eccentric as The Congress‘s visual pallet can be, it isn’t exactly what’s been keeping the film fresh in my mind since I first reviewed it last year. There’s been a recent string of news stories reminiscent of the ways The Congress depicts movie studios owning actors’ likeness that feel oddly off-putting in a way the film seemed to forewarn, keeping it fresh in my mind. For example, during the press tour for the recent Zack Snyder debacle Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, eccentric Lex Luthor actor Jesse Eisenberg went into great detail about the fake Michael Shannon body double used in the film. Shannon, who played the villainous Emperor Zod in Snyder’s Man of Steel, didn’t fully reprise his role in the sequel as Zod’s corpse (who could blame him?), but instead allowed the studio to include him via lifeless dummy created based off his headcast. Where it gets really creepy is in Eisenberg’s description of the fake Michael Shannon, which appears in the film completely nude. According to Eisenberg, the Shannon doll was entirely, unnecessarily anatomically correct to the point where the detail was a little disturbing (long story short, he had a penis).

There are, of course, even more direct comparison points to Robin Wright’s fictional plight in the way celebrity actors are being represented & altered digitally. Actors appearing posthumously in commercials for beer, junk food, vacuum cleaners, etc. is crass enough of a concept in itself and has been around long enough to likely have influenced some of The Congress‘s digitizing paranoia. Things have snowballed even since the film’s production, however, including two high profile instances of actors being digitally inserted into feature-length works they didn’t live to see completed (Paul Walker in Furious 7 & Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Mockingjay Pt II). Even actors who did film their role to completion are being subjected to digital alterations in post-production. Sometimes this can be as simple as removing a pimple or a blemish or the effects of aging with computer magic (Paul Rubens in Pee-wee’s Big Holiday is a recent example) or as horrifying as the very recent reports of Paramount & DreamWorks allegedly testing a digital technique to make white actors appear “more Asian” in post-production for the already-controversial live action Ghost in the Shell adaptation starring Scarlett Johansson. Whether or not you agree with the actors’ decision to accept those roles/paychecks in the first place, you have to admit it’s super shady that the studio attempted to dress them in digital yellowface after the fact (presumably without their knowledge or consent).

The question at large here is what, exactly are celebrities selling to movie studios when they sign a contract for a big budget role? In the past (and, indeed, in smaller current productions) actors were strictly selling a performance, a record of work delivered. Modern celebrities, however, seem to be selling much more than that. They’re not selling a record of their work so much as the rights to their personalities & essence. This current era of digital recreation & the ownership of celebrity likeness is on much shakier, creepier ground and it’s difficult not to think of The Congress‘s sci-fi celebrity culture dystopia as each of these news stories crop up. The film didn’t do so well critically or financially upon initial release, but I find that its pointed satire about Hollywood’s future gets more eerily relevant on almost a daily basis. It’s difficult to say for certain exactly why The Congress failed to strike a chord with a larger audience. I’ll admit that it plays a little off-balance & unsure in moments, but if nothing else I greatly respect the film’s tendency to swing for the fences even when what it delivers lands way off target. I also am continuously taken aback by just how much the film has to say about modern celebrity culture, especially when I see modern celebrity culture talking back.

-Brandon Ledet