TV/Movies Megathread

[Sheilbh]

Sheilbh: I think that's the best, most accurate, nicest (?) thing anyone's every said about my reviews. Everyone has an angle, and I reckon populism is mine.

Well, meant with fondness. I do enjoy your reviews, but I don't think I'll ever really agree with someone who thinks Dredd needed to be trashier or a more wide-ranging meditation on justice. I reckon populist didactics

[CountDeMoney]

http://www.theonion.com/video/the-onion-reviews-12-years-a-slave,34261/

[Ideologue]

Things To Come (1935).  Despite a fair few flaws, a magnificent cinematic paean to progress that has probably never been equalled, that perhaps no one has attempted to equal.

It begins in 1940, CHRISTMAS Eve (you must adore the colossal text that so often blasts onto the screen in this film).  This was then the future, and war is coming, as we are reminded by approximately one million newspapers and posters and sandwich board operators, before meeting our central characters for this era, one John Cabal and Pipper Passworth, who discuss the probability and improbability of war.  Well, before Christmas Day comes, an unspecified foreign power comes with all their air forces and blows their town--their Everytown--to smithereens.

I was initially annoyed by the hilariously inept manner by which they attempted, or did not attempt, to repel an aerial assault.  Gas masks are distributed upon the event instead of as a prophylactic measure, no blackout is called and the lights of cinemas and department stores keep burning, the flak teams are clearly unready and poorly trained and situate themselves in the center of the town, i.e. the place they're most likely to get hit by bombs, and the civil defense men instruct the populace to return to their homes instead of a fortified shelter or at least the underground.  What I'm trying to say is that they all deserved to die.  Even the little kid.

And it makes you wait for it, but eventually we do see the bomber stream, and it is glorious, in their unnumbered multitude.  Unfortunately, when we get closer, some of the aircraft are not as futuristic or even as contemporary as one might have hoped, and many, perhaps most, are biplanes, and all have fixed landing gear; the latter was still relatively common in 1935, but biplanes were well on their way out even then.  It would have required no great leap to imagine Hurricanes and Spitfires or the Dornier Do 19, then in development, the first of Nazi Germany's great, abandoned Ural bombers.

A curious and affecting interstitial scene then depicts a rather preposterous event in air war, as two enemies meet on the ground after one is shot down by the other.  A small acting moment happens as the poison gas from the downed aircraft's ruptured bombs threatens to overtake both men as well as a little civilian girl.  The victorious interceptor pilot first reaches for his own gas mask, but hurriedly decides against it, deciding to first fix the wounded man's gas mask to his face.  In return, the dying bomber pilot gives up his gas mask to the girl.  As a final gesture, the interceptor pilot leaves the bomber pilot his pistol.  Before the end, the bomber pilot laughs at the absurdity of giving up his mask to a girl whose family he might well have slaughtered with the very same poison.  Offscreen, we hear the gunshot.

Then the movie moves forward in time, and I'm annoyed again by Wells' (?) silly belief that the annihilating total war he's envisaged could continue for some two decades.  I use a question mark, because it had been my understanding that in Wells' novel the air war was over in months as cities and populations were bombed out of existence.  Well, it's no matter, really.

We come to the future of 1967.  Civilization has cracked, a zombie plague has come and gone (no, really), the effectiveness of lethal quarantine is, it seems, conclusively established, and Britain is now ruled by local warlords who are profoundly stupid, deride the engineers that try to keep their armies and air forces working, and fight amongst themselves for no obvious reason.  Whoever was in charge of set design went far too far in creating Everytown after the rain.  Though their scientific and engineering resources are strained, we are left to believe that benighted proletarians cannot do so much as rebuild a Goddamned house.  Years later, it's still a bombed out hellhole.  Citizens of Bartertown think these yokels live in squalor.

But a man comes now, flying a black plane, suited in black leather science fiction gear, utopian or dystopian we can not yet be sure, who has bathed recently, who calls himself the Wings of the World.  He is full of the confidence that comes from a good STEM education and the possession of airpower.  He tells Everytown's warlord he's going to clean things up, or, if he cannot, then those he represents will.  We know that he is, in fact, John Cabal, once the pessimist, once the pacifist--and, once this warlord business is concluded, to be so again.

Through subterfuge, beautiful speeches, and alliances with the local engineer and doctor, respectively, Cabal gets word to the nascent world power--the United Airmen.  It is to my great, great, great regret, that the director mishandles the reveal of the SUPERPLANE, by showing it at base first, instead of, as he later does in an effort to redeem himself, emerging majestically from a cloud bank--followed by dozens more in a seemingly apocalyptic stream of airborne victory.

But not so: instead they use the Gas of Peace, as if dealing with recalcitrant Chechens.

Then we are treated to the best montage ever, five solid minutes of bombastic orchestration and unknowable, promethean machines moving earth and steel, tended by men in dangerous engineering suits.  One of them waves at the camera!  You can feel his hard skills.  It's brilliant.

As the music rises to a fever pitch, it is 2036, and the immense accomplishment of a half century is unveiled all at once--Everytown, a subterranean metropolis of white marble and shining steel.

Then some asshole says "I've had enough of this progress!" and I told him, out loud, to shut up.  He doesn't.

This abominable luddite is frustrated by the neverending march of human achievement.  On the eve of another space launch from Everytown's space gun, he starts a giant vlog and rails against the seemingly, at present, rather premature prospect of citizens being conscripted into colonization of other worlds that have not even been discovered yet.  His incitement to dissent could have been something that cuts to the heart of human fears a little more than putting a Gagarin into orbit--perhaps, say, I don't know, eugenics.

But apparently anti-space sentiment strikes a chord in a sizable faction of the masses, he gets a million unique views in just hours, and they all march upon the space gun.  Too late: the grandson of John Cabal, the enlightened despot/elected leader/or something of Everytown, despite the protestations of his friend (a descendant of Pipper Passworth, still a little fat, even in the future), shoots his daughter and Passworth's son to the moon.  He warns the would-be saboteurs to clear out, but they advance regardless; he fires anyway.  The implication is that the concussion kills all of the anti-progressives, and Cabal does not give a fuck, which is amazing.  Instead, he makes the film's eightieth impassioned speech about SCIENCE and DESTINY and it ENDS on a note of CHOICE: do we conquer EVERYTHING, even the mysteries of the MIND and SPACE, or do we lay down, like any other animal, after snatching whatever happiness we can, and DIE.

It's a very good movie, and current.  Now more than ever is it time for the rule of the airmen and a new life for mankind.  Tear down these liberal arts colleges and in their place build underground cities of science!  We have 23 years before we will have failed in the eyes of H.G. Wells.  Let us use our time wisely.

B+

(Oh, it could have been an A, if only it had not lacked the human element, and if the 2036 chapter had been much, much, much longer, exploring that fantastic world far more, and through characters that were not personified points of view.  Also, that botched first appearance of the SUPERPLANE was a real amateur move.  It bummed me out.)

[Syt]

SHE and Things to Come in short order? Did you pick up the same Harrihausen 2-pack as I did?

[Ideologue]

Nah, although I may.  She's on Netflix and Things To Come is on Youtube.  It's crummy, but it served.  Might get the Criterion disc on the next sale, though I may be better served with the cheaper version (much cheaper, considering it's half the price and a 1080p version of She and--apparently--a 480p version of The Most Dangerous Game [!], comes with it) if you can tell me if the transfer, picturewise, is acceptable.

[Ideologue]

Ide, I want a review of Shivers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfglzsgahSA

WATCH IT NOW IT'S AMAZING

I"VE GOTTA WATCH THE MAN WHO LAUGHS BRO

And The Phantom of the Opera ('23), Le Mans, Shame, and The Last Stand.

But good looking out, and I will see it.  Cronenberg, particularly pre-Existenz Cronenberg = yes.

I've still got a bootleg copy of A Dangerous Method my dad made around here somewhere.  Need to watch that at some point.

[Sheilbh]

I saw the Man Who Laughs with a live soundtrack by Goldfrapp. One of the best cinema experiences I've ever had

[jimmy olsen]

Ide, what's your opinion of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow?

[Ideologue]

I saw the Man Who Laughs with a live soundtrack by Goldfrapp. One of the best cinema experiences I've ever had

I don't wanna talk about it.

Ide, what's your opinion of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow?

Overlong and intensely boring, which is so very sad, because I should have loved it.  It was trying to be a Flash Gordon but it felt like it had no heart.  I liked the last scene, though, that was funny.  Cish.

[Ed Anger]

Masque of the Red Death

Vincent Price chews the scenery.

A

[Malthus]

I saw the Man Who Laughs with a live soundtrack by Goldfrapp. One of the best cinema experiences I've ever had

Heh, Goldfrapp was a favorite for drugged dancing back in the day. Nothing quite like dancing to a song about lab rats zapping their own brains' pleasure centres for kicks. 

[Darth Wagtaros]

I was very much looking forward to Sky Captain.  It was a great disappointment that it sucked.

Things to Come was one of the very first VHS tapes I bought.

[Josquius]

Shimokita Glory Days- Another Japanese drama which nobody else who I know will ever watch. Yey!
I stumbled on this one by accident due to it being named after an area of Tokyo I'm fond of.
Each episode is half an hour long and it is basically a live action harem comedy- improbably chaste young guy improbably finds himself living in a house with a selection of improbably attractive stock characters. There are lots of awkward situations of falling in such a way that he sees up a girl's skirt, walks in on them getting changed, and so on.
It's quite funny really.
Interestingly most of the actresses make their regular living in rather more, ahem, grown up, entertainment. I recognised the name of one of them right away, no need for googling, she is probably the most famous Japanese porn star there is.

[The Brain]

Is she a lady?

[The Brain]

Oh, and surely there must be some great uplifting movies in which lawyers build the world of tomorrow.