Spread of Activation VII: The Earth Day Edition

It's Earth Day and let's celebrate by bragging on how much aliens love our planet. They do! They can't get enough of it, from War of the Worlds to Independence Day they want the whole thing. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind they love us so much they're willing to travel light years, lots of 'em, just to say "Hi." Awww. In This Island Earth, despite being much more advanced than us scientifically, they want our help with their own planet Metaluna, and a couple of our best and brightest oblige. Sometimes we're naughty, and since they love us so much they feel the need to show us the error of our ways, like in The Day the Earth Stood Still where they gently but firmly tell us to stop our warring ways or they'll kill us. Gee thanks Dad! And in 2001: A Space Odyssey those aliens... well, okay who knows what in the hell they're up to but whatever it is, we're the centerpiece of their master plan. Yes, Science Fiction, beloved here at Cinema Styles, has always operated under the conceit that you just can't find a better planet than good old Mother Earth.

The great thing about most science fiction is that outside the gobbledygook of the basic plot they don't try to explain too much. It's usually kept to a couple of sentences revolving around our natural resources or danger to the rest of the galaxy or something stupid like that. And it's a good thing too because when you think about Earth centered sci-fi plots they never actually make much sense. For instance, take the "destroy and conquer" plots.

War of the Worlds and Independence Day are all about alien races envying what we've got here and wanting to take it for themselves. In War of the Worlds, they apparently buried tripods a million years ago with the intent of taking over the planet. Why they didn't just do it then when they would have encountered NO technological resistance I have no idea. Why they didn't research the environment to realize that bacteria present here would kill them is another mystery for the ages. They have the technology to form an invasion plan from millions of miles away over a thousand centuries but didn't bother to research the environment and how it interacts with their own biology. Wow, that's monumentally bad planning!

And how about the Independence Day dullards? They too can construct fleets of ships and massive mother ships to invade a world for it's resources when the gathering of resources from planets and asteroids is something even we already understand but lack the technology and money to get enough ships to the asteroids and planets to collect the resources. The aliens of ID4 do realize don't they, with their advanced technology, that they can strip mine the galaxy for all the resources they need without once having to actually mount an invasion? They realize that right? Oh no wait, of course they don't because Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich are the guys that provided them with their motivation in the first place.

Or how about the "Earth is a danger to the rest of us" plot of The Day the Earth Stood Still? Ha! That's a laugh. People seemed to think in 1951 that nuclear weapons could destroy the universe. Your average humdrum star, going through the process of nuclear fusion constantly, produces more heat and radiation in a second than every nuclear weapon on Earth combined could ever hope to do. Which makes me think of The Day the Earth Caught Fire.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire has nothing to do with aliens, I know, but this ain't called Spread of Activation for nothing. See, in The Day the Earth Caught Fire, which is a great and underrated movie by the way, the Earth is thrown off of her axis by two hydrogen bomb tests by the United States and the Soviet Union done at the exact same time at the North and South Poles. Okay, first of all, even if a nuclear bomb could somehow move an object with a mass of 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms (6E+24 kilograms / 1.3E+25 pounds), and brother would that need to be one HUGE-ASS nuclear bomb, the fact that you have two at opposite ends would simply result in the two offsetting each other, further resulting in, well, nothing. For the plot to work it should just be one bomb, not two. Oh well, at least with a destroyed Earth no aliens are going to want to take it.

But what about destroying the Earth? Does Sci-Fi have anything to say about that? But of course it does! Everyone loves apocalyptic Sci-Fi. From asteroids to global warming to nuclear warfare Sci-Fi loves destroying the planet Earth. There's a new one coming out soon, 2012, and like the other ones it looks pretty stupid. My favorite in the field is probably the aforementioned The Day the Earth Caught Fire but for instant destruction I'll go with Deep Impact.

Deep Impact was released in 1998 in competition with another asteroid destruction movie, Armageddon. Deep Impact gets 5.9 on IMDB and Armageddon gets 6.0. This is important because it reminds me that most people who rate movies on IMDB are idiots and it's always good to remember that. Who knows, one day it may save your life. I don't know how, but I'm not ruling it out. Anyway, Deep Impact is a pretty good disaster flick as these things go. They do have their cake and eat it too of course by having the smaller non-planet killing asteroid hit so we can all enjoy the special effects and having the bigger planet killing one destroyed so we can all enjoy the happy ending. That was kind of chickenshit in my book but hey I understand the need for it. Besides in the instant destruction sub-genre you've got to show something to the audience. I mean, we paid money to see the planet killed, or at least injured. Which takes me to my final category, the slow death of the planet as exemplified by films such as Silent Running and Wall-E.

These don't work as well for me. Wall-E has an interesting nugget of a sci-fi idea but focuses on the robots instead of the people, which makes sense since it's mainly for kids. But for me it's like watching Star Wars where R2-D2 and C3PO are the main characters and everyone else is a bit player. Silent Running on the other hand has a very interesting main character played by Bruce Dern but a hard to swallow plot device: The Earth is now devoid of all plant life. Uh huh. As Carl Sagan said in Cosmos, "We need the trees much more than they need us." Without us the plants would be fine. Without the plants, and all apologies to Coruscant, we wouldn't be here. The idea of a functioning planet without plants is ludicrous but it's still a good movie with an interesting central character and a trio of droids (Huey, Dewey and Louie) that predate those previously mentioned Star Wars droids by five years. And it's one of the first major Sci-Fi movies with an environmental theme which makes it a good one to wrap up with on this Earth Day.

So Happy Earth Day everyone! Watch an Earth destruction Sci-Fi movie today. Sometimes the best way to appreciate what you've got is to see what it would be like if it were taken away.

Spread of Activation V: The Uninspired Edition

I'm not dead yet. I'm still here. Just a little off-center this week as personal matters have taken priority over blogging matters. This whole week has been a bit discombobulating and next week won't be a lot better and as such my brain is in a scramble as to what to write about. Let's start with a reminder: On Monday, March 16th the illustrious Boudu Rick Olson of Coosa Creek Cinema will be hosting the 3rd featured film of the The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club, known around these parts as TOERIFC. Rick will be putting up a piece on Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning. If you know it well or have just watched it please join in the discussion. But a reminder, these discussions delve into the details of the film in question so please make sure it's either a recent viewing or a film known very well to you if you choose to join in. I'll give Boudu another look before Monday and can hardly wait to read Rick's piece.

Reminders aside I've spent some time in the last week catching up on movies from the last couple of years that I didn't get around to upon their release. One from fairly recently was Wall-E and if you've read anything I've written on CGI movies before you'll probably not be too surprised by my reaction which was tepid. However, I can say this: It's probably the best CGI movie I've seen, I didn't dislike it, and most importantly, it helped me to finally figure out what I can't stand about CGI movies, and it has nothing to do with the CGI part of it (except in live-action movies where the CGI is usually a lazy way to produce filler). It's the goddamned anthropomorphized characters! That's what I hate! Why did this movie finally reveal that to me and none of the others did? Because I love science fiction that's why! I kept thinking if only this were live-action and the robots were simply that, robots, used to collect samples and the Captain and/or a couple of other people on the starship Axiom were the real main characters investigating what Earth was all about and slowly discovering to their horror that it was all lost - Now THAT'S A MOVIE I COULD GET BEHIND! But instead I got lot's of cute back and forth between two fluffy floppy eared bunnies named Wall-E and E.V.E. in the guise of robots for an hour and a half and an ending far, far, FAR too easy for a story with this one's implications. And once again I was left concluding that either the state of film criticism in this country is at an all-time low or maybe this is as good as it gets. I mean, if this thing was coming in near the top of lists at the end of the year then I can only conclude standards are pretty low. It's fine, done well and I don't hate it. But it could have, and should have, been so much more.

Speaking of science fiction another movie I saw was Danny Boyle's Sunshine which left me tremendously disappointed. I can say with little doubt that I have rarely been so annoyed at a director's visual choices as I was with the last 15 minutes of Sunshine. There has been much talk of a genre shift in the last act of the movie but a genre shift can be an invigorating thing when done well. No, what people didn't discuss enough of was that there was a stylistic shift and that's what made the difference. We've all seen films that go from comedy to drama and back again, or a thriller that ends up a romance and so on. A genre shift is not a bad thing. What Danny Boyle does that is unforgivable at the end of Sunshine is a stylistic shift, and that's not a good thing. It's incompetent. Like doing two-thirds of a painting expressionist and then doing the last corner as an abstract. In the last act we shift from general third person setups where the camera centers its characters and frames the action in an unobtrusive way, over the shoulder, two shots, etc to herky jerky bizarro POV shots where we are told who the killer/monster is - that's important, we are told who it is - and yet Boyle hides his face and figure from us. Remember now, WE KNOW WHO IT IS!!! There is no reason to hide his face unless for some reason you are an incompetent buffoon behind the camera who doesn't understand even the simplest notions of third act payoffs. I suspect of course that Boyle is no incompetent buffoon which makes his blurred visual shift in the last act even more confusing. Upon reflection I believe Boyle knew the screenplay took a nose dive near the end and by providing jarring and confusing imagery the audience might be distracted. And on a personal level, I don't like pretty boys playing physicists. It tears down the fourth wall for me.

Finally, by way of sci-fi/monster movies I saw Cloverfield and finally came away satisfied. Not absolutely and completely but enough to call it even and walk away with some sense of accomplishment. I didn't feel the extended opening party sequence added a whole hell of a lot to the movie (the same character relations and connections could have been made in half the time) but nevertheless, the pace was quick, the creature unexplained and the characters kept the movie alive. They didn't interest me on any personal level but they felt real enough to keep me going with it. In the end, I don't know if or when I'll watch it again (it feels like a movie that may be more effective if seen only once - that make any sense to anybody?) but I thought it was good and probably the best monster movie I've seen in years.

And then, lots of personal stuff happened that has kept me from blogging but I am writing. What, I don't know but I'm writing. I don't know how much of it is about movies, but it's therapeutic and I'll force it all on you sometime next week. And one final note: Name that Movie will be taking the week off. TOERIFC discussions usually occupy the whole day, at least for the first two (No pressure or anything Rick) so I don't want to interfere with that. As a TOERIFC founding member and supporter I must stick to my policy of no posts on discussion day, except a reminder post letting everyone know where I'll be and what the discussion is all about: Boudu Saved from Drowning at the Creek. Be there!

Spread of Activation*

So I see on Coosa Creek Mambo Cinema that top ten lists are hitting the airwaves and I think to myself, "I never see enough new movies to do one of those but I enjoy reading them." Then I think, "Maybe each year around this time I could pick another decade exactly 40 or 60 years back like 1968 or 1948 and do a top ten from that year. And each year pick another decade so that next year I would do 1959 or 1929." Works for me. I think I'll do one this year but haven't picked a decade yet.

And speaking of 1959, for some reason the first movie that pops into my head from that year is Compulsion, starring Dean Stockwell, Bradford Dillman and Orson Welles, who chews the scenery so voraciously it's surprising there was a set left standing when the cameras stopped rolling. You know who directed Compulsion? Richard Fleischer. His birthday was this week, December 8th. He would have been 92 years old (he died on March 25, 2006). God I love 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (he directed that too). It's one of my favorite adventure movies of all time even considering it has Kirk Douglas singing Whale of a Tale which should have been enough to kill any movie but Fleischer did such a good job with it you didn't even notice. Well, almost didn't notice.

Fleischer was already in my mind the last couple of days anyway because he directed Tora, Tora, Tora which recounted the attack on Pearl Harbor whose anniversary was December 7. It's a movie that flopped badly with critics and audiences alike but for whatever reason I like it and I 'm not afraid to admit it. I think a lot of it has to do with the great models and miniatures used for the attack sequence at the end. I'm a sucker for old school special effects.

Which of course puts me in mind of new school special effects and CGI which I don't like. That made me think of Wall-E which, I probably don't need to tell you, I haven't seen. But I will see it soon. You see, as mentioned on this blog earlier, my wife and I have decided to revamp the DVD collection and we're currently purchasing old movies we want to see and renting the new ones, instead of wasting Netflix rentals on movies we want to own anyway. So I cleared my Netflix cache - yep, I cleared it - and started adding in nothing but movies from 2007 and 2008 that I hadn't seen yet in an effort to catch up with the present. Wall-E is one of those movies. I have absolutely no desire to see it, despite its good reviews, but when it shows up I'll give it a look anyway. At least it's Sci-Fi. I'm always game for Sci-Fi.

Speaking of Sci-Fi, one of my favorite cheesy effects Sci-Fi flicks from the seventies is Logan's Run. What's not to love? Filmed in a Dallas, TX mall it's got Farrah Fawcett, tunics and jumpsuits, soft porn, Roscoe Lee Browne providing the voice of Box (the slowest most awkwardly maneuvering robot imaginable and yet somehow it's killed dozens of runners), Jenny Agutter, hordes of cats at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. and lines like "Run runner!" Did you know they're remaking it and apparently are going to stick more closely to the book? And they've dropped the drop-dead age from 30 to 21. I'm sorry, but I had a hard enough time believing any society could properly function with only people aged 29 and under but 20 and under?!!?!?!? Sorry, but that place is going to be a wreck. I don't care how many computers are running it, I've got teens and I'm telling you that society will be a disaster on a minute by minute basis! I hate to judge a movie in advance but who else is with me on this assessment: Logan's Run the remake will totally suck. Big time.

Hey, that reminds me, Fox did a post on remakes recently and brought up Scarface. I didn't like that remake much but I did like the original and soon someone will be writing about it because it's an early Howard Hawks film and Ed Howard is doing the early Howard Hawks blogathon in January (details here). But here's the thing. I know as a bonafide classic Hollywood buff and a thirties movie lover I'm not supposed to say this but... I never really cared for Paul Muni much. I thought he was a good actor and I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is one of my favorites, and one of the best, of the early thirties dramas. It's just that Muni's performances seem very mannered to me. Around the same time Clark Gable and Gary Cooper and Spencer Tracy were breezing through their lines in movie after movie there was Muni, enunciating every syllable or adopting a thick accent that immediately signalled to the viewer, "I'm acting!" So I'm just not a big fan of him or his movies like I am with so many others of the thirties.

And speaking of thirties movies I love, I just recently purchased The Lady Vanishes to add to my collection. It's a favorite early Hitchcock of mine, one that has apparently been used for its plot devices in one way or another many times, including the recent Transiberian, which according to Arbogast did not live up to the standards of Hitchcock or even basic good-movieness (I just coined that word, use it if you like) so I guess I won't be seeing it on any top ten lists this year.

Which brings back to mind those top ten lists that started this spread of activation. I still don't know which 8th year I'm going to do this time, but 1938 is starting to sound like a good one. After all, I already have a movie to put on it, The Lady Vanishes. Thanks Arbo.

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*According to psychologists J.R. Anderson and P.L. Pirolli "Spread of activation refers to the cognitive process of retrieving memory. When one part of memory is activated, other parts that are associated with that memory are partly activated as well. "