Gattaca

I remember seeing Gattaca around when it first came out & liking it fine.  I think it was the first sci-fi movie to really give me hope for the genre doing something serious (I hadn’t re-seen Blade Runner or Alien as an adult at that point & I generally think of The Thing as a horror movie & while I love Starship Troopers (which came out the same year) it’s more of a fun movie than a serious one).  But oddly there isn’t much I could remember about it.  I know it’s dystopian & I assumed it was Philip K Dick (it’s not) & I remembered it having interesting lighting.  The main thing I remembered though was this girl I was going out with at the time got all hot & bothered by Jude Law & got mad when I referred to him as “the gay dude” (it ends up I guess he’s not gay, just British).

Re-seeing it, wow, this is a different film than I remembered.  I didn’t remember at all that Ethan Hawke is there doing his coffee shop intellectual narration like he did in Before Sunrise.  I haven’t quite figured out how I feel about Ethan Hawke, I generally avoided anything with him back in the 1990s but the things from that era I’ve seen relatively recently (Before Sunrise & Great Expectations, even the Precinct 13 remake) seem fine.  I guess back then I saw more coffee culture intellectuals than I run into now & so I found that stuff way more annoying than I do now & that pretty much seems to be the character he always plays.  I also didn’t remember the first third of the movie before Ethan Hawke is impersonating Jude Law & why he was impersonating him in the first place.  I really forgot a ton of plot points that I am not sure if I should give away in case somebody might re-watch it that has also forgotten them.  So I guess what I’m saying is “spoilers.”  So the murder investigation… I was 100% sure that it was done by Uma Thurman because she was also an illegal impersonator & I was shocked that she wasn’t an impersonator nor the murderer.  I also feel like I wasn’t paying attention because I didn’t realize the one cop was Ethan Hawke’s brother until the reveal.  I did like that there wasn’t a happy ending romance wise (because I believe Ethan Hawke will die before the end of his trip in space) & I was surprised by Jude Law incinerating himself.  This movie is pretty solid & I don’t know why it isn’t put up as one of the top ten sci-fi movies (or at least top twenty) in a lot of lists & instead seems to be drifting towards obscurity….

Trancers

 

I don’t know when I first saw this movie.  I would guess I saw it in 1986 or 1987 on the local indie station before Fox took over it’s programming.  I do know I liked it & as low budget local stations seem to like to do, they gave me the opportunity to see it five times in a month.  I eventually saw Trancers II & Trancers III, but somehow never saw the original again even though I recommended it on a regular basis.

This movie is straight forward enough.  A criminal from the future comes to the present to kill the ancestors of political enemies so they’ll never be born, so they send a cop back in time after him. In this movie time travel works by sending your mind back in time into an ancestors body & possessing it (I guess like Quantum Leap, though this does pre-date that). Oh, & the criminal can turn people into zombies. Oh, & it takes place at Christmas & the love interest in it is Helen Hunt about ten years before Mad About You. Anyway, this movie is just about perfect. It doesn’t try to be anything more than it is. It’s a low budget time traveling cop 1980s action flick & if that doesn’t sound awesome, I’m not sure what does.

Cyborg

I first saw this movie in the dollar theater with my son’s mother.  It was over a year after my son was born (we’d given him up for adoption because we were kids) & almost a year since her family had moved to another city.  She was in town for a couple days visiting her grandmother & it happened to be near the theater & I walked the three miles to meet her for the movie.  I was 14 & the post-apocalyptic nihilistic savior vibe of the movie was great.  It was the last time I’d ever see the girl.  She lived an hour away & writing letters for over a year just wasn’t a sustainable relationship for two high school kids not old enough to drive.  I like to think it was her that stopped writing first, but to be honest I can’t remember.

So this movie came back on my radar because I was hanging out with my son before he was moving across the country to go to graduate school & the house we were hanging out at had a collection of B movies including Cyborg & I pointed it out to him & told him his mom liked the movie.  Then almost a year passed & he came back to town for spring break & we played a house show together at that same house & there was the movie still sitting on the shelf.  So I felt compelled to re-watch it.

There’s a couple of odd things about this movie.  It’s called Cyborg, but the cyborg in it really doesn’t have to be a cyborg for any reason – though I guess if you titled the movie Genetic Scientist Trying to Get to Atlanta it doesn’t sound as cool – & isn’t even really a main character.  According to Wikipedia this movie was made in an attempt to recoup costs from two cancelled movies, so I’d guess the cyborg prop that appears in one scene was probably something they had lying around.  Most of the characters in here are named after musical instrument companies for some reason (Gibson Rickenbacker, Nady Simmons).

Now I know this movie isn’t good in the same way as Alien or Blade Runner, but it is good in the same way as Return of the Living Dead Part 3 or Soldier.  It stars Jean-Claude Van Damme & it’s directed by the guy who did the Masters of the Universe movie.  Well, here’s a confession, I like the Masters of the Universe movie.  I also like this movie.  It doesn’t have incredible style or great production values or anything.  But the character Van Damme plays is a little more sophisticated than being a simple bad ass, somewhat reminiscent of Mad Max in the original Mad Max.  Also like Mad Max or Soldier it’s more of a post-apocalyptic western than a sci-fi action flick.  Somewhere between Shane & The Terminator I guess.  I spent a good portion of my life the twenty years between my viewings of this movie trying to like arty movies & re-watching this lets me know me liking something has nothing to do with technical merit & what I want is something that is just competent & satisfied with what it is.  Probably because that’s what I’m seeking for myself, to be competent & satisfied with my lot in life.

War of the Worlds (1953)

So I first saw this movie when I was seven.  The city where I lived had just gotten its first indie television station & they played all the Godzilla & other disposable sci-fi movies every Sunday afternoon.  This one wasn’t holding my attention as it was lacking in action.  It was probably about half way through when my brother (five years older than me) walked in & said, “Oh, this is the one where the common cold kills the aliens.”  So the ending being given away I went to play with my Star Wars action figures.

I’m not really sure why I never re-visited this movie before.  One of my favorite comics as a kid was the Killraven series that was a sequel to War of the Worlds (about the Martians coming back & there being a group of four or five revolutionaries trying to survive & be a thorn in the Martians’ side).  I was pretty intrigued by the 1988 television show based on it.  I read the Orson Welles radio play for school.  I saw the Steven Spielberg version of the movie from 2005 & I kind of dug that as well. Around 2007 I finally read the original book.  So yeah, this movie, presumably my first taste of the horror survival genre (note the genre the book was originally classified as is “invasion literature”), you’d think it would have been something I would have gone back to; but I remembered it being so slow & boring that I never went back.

So tonight it was on television & I put it on while I did some work laying out some comics.  As a person who has become a fan of old movies, this isn’t that slow; but I cannot imagine it being of interest to a child.  Is it dated as an almost 70 year old movie that relied heavily on what were the best possible special effects of the time?  Yes, in the same way most big budget sci-fi movies are when they’re as little as ten years old.  One thing that was strange is there’s a lot of weird religious elements thrown in here about God designing the world to have bacteria to fight aliens if they ever invade & people’s prayers for a miracle being answered.  I can’t remember if that’s in the ending of the book (or the Spielberg movie) or not.  To be honest, I can’t remember the endings of any of them because it is such a cop out ending to make this huge big bad & then just have it die suddenly. (Though what are the alternate endings?  Total decimation of the human race (try getting that published in 1898!) or the humans magically have superior technology to aliens?  I guess the cop out is as good an ending as any.)  It’s interesting that this movie doesn’t really work on the quasi-political fear angle at all (the original book was about the fear of a foreign nation (presumably Germany at the time) developing superior war technology & destroying England).  In fact this movie doesn’t really seem to have any kind of message behind it, it just feels like a summer blockbuster.  That said, this movie really has nothing wrong with it, but unless you want to look at it for some nostalgia or historical purposes I really can’t give it a recommendation.

Grosse Pointe Blank

I first saw this movie in the early 2000s. It seemed like every time I came home from a show it was half way done & I’d have it on while eating some ice cream or something like that. I loved John Cusack from High Fidelity (I was slow to get on the John Cusack train) & the black comedy hitman aspect was of course super awesome as well. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's the story of a hitman going to his ten year high school reunion & trying to get back his high school sweetheart.

I’m not sure exactly how I ended up owning a DVD of this movie & I never actually watched it even though it has been sitting in my room for years. Watching it was odd because while I’m 90% sure I’ve seen the entire movie before, I’m also 100% sure I’d never seen the whole thing in one sitting much less without the commercials. I’ll be honest. I think I preferred this when my drunken mind had put the bits together into a cohesive whole. There were major plot points that were missing in my mind. I’d forgotten about the psychiatrist & that John Cusack had assassins after him because of killing a dog (I thought it was just for not joining Aykroyd’s assassin guild). It wasn’t quite as good as I remembered, but the 1980s semi-shoegazery soundtrack (The Cure, Echo & The Bunnymen, Siouxsie & the Banshees, The Pixies, etc.) was a lot more fun than I remembered. I kinda wish this was still on the television regularly when I got home from shows.