Escape from New York

Escape from New York is a cult classic directed by John Carpenter and starring Kurt Russell as criminal Snake Plissken.

The story takes place in a United States that is so full of violence that the entire Island of Manhattan has been converted into a prison. The worst criminals are shipped there, and allowed to roam freely, as they are unable to leave the island.

The President of the United States’ plane has an accident and take the unfortunate turn and crashes on the island. The president is able to escape in a lifepod, but is now trapped on the island.

Over the years, the prison has evolved its own, bizarre culture. The Duke controls much of the island, the prison’s de facto ruler.

Plissken, a criminal, has been “recruited” by the government to help rescue the President of the United States (Donald Pleasance) from the clutches of the self imposed Duke of New York (Isaac Hayes), because the top secret knowledge he has. Plissken is implanted with a device that will kill him if after 24 hours. It will be removed when he has completed his mission. He makes his way onto the island by flying a glider onto the top of one of the World Trade buildings. As the movie progresses, he begins to make headway into the society that has been festering. Ernest Borgnine plays a cabbie, who helps Plissken out around the city.

John Carpenter wrote, composed, and directed this film. As such, the film fits right on in with most of his films, containing the same style, and the same synth music.

It truly is one of the quintessential 80s action films.

*** 1/2 out of *****

Done the impossible? A sequel to "The Descent"

Harold and Kumar go to White Castle

Being a fan of the restaurant White Castle for almost two decades, I was stoked when I first heard about this project. I mean extremely stoked. A film where the title characters entire drive is to get to White Castle? How the heck did they sell this to the studio? At any rate, I’m quite happy that they did.

The film, and the concept are “stupid,” I will give you that. The movie’s title characters, Harold and Kumar, are roommates who just want to relax after a stressful week. Well, at least Harold’s week was stressful. Kumar is a typical slacker roommate, who bums around and makes the hard working roommates’ life a living hell. Harold plays the Hollywood typical “hard working” Asian stereotype, who gets dumped on by his co-workers with extra work.

Kumar’s perfect weekend is to just sit around and smoke pot, and wants Harold to partake. Since Harold has been forced to take additional work, he wants no part in it. After much convincing, Harold joins Kumar in the “fun.” Soon afterward they begin to get the craving for, you guessed it, White Castle burgers. Sounds like a simple task, doesn’t it?

Apparently getting White Castle is harder than it looks.

Now, I remember a funny story from the first time I watched the film. After it was over we tracked down the closest White Castle. Of course, driving 6+ hours and 4 states to get White Castle as a poor college student just wouldn’t have cut it. Thought it might make a good movie.

The sequel, by comparison, is not nearly as good.

Dark Knight hits $1 billion at box office

I knew it would happen eventually. Batman has finally crossed the billion dollar mark. Occasionally I checked out the box office numbers for the film, and saw it ever so creep closer and closer to the billion dollar mark. Just a few days ago I saw how close it was, with just thousands to go. Very impressive!

Madea Goes to Jail earns $41 million in one weekend

Perhaps there is no God. A the very least, I sense the Devil at work here.

Save us Watchmen!

Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park, adapted from the book of the same title written by the late Michael Crichton and directed by Steven Spielberg. While I hope that by 2009, everyone would know this groundbreaking 1993 film, I’m sure someone out there who should know this film who honestly doesn’t.

This film was one of the first films to really showcase computer generated effects as a viable use of so-called special effects in a film. The dinosaurs which appear in this film are a mixture of computer effects as previously mentioned, and animatronics. A great deal of the advancement of computer effects in modern films has to do with the work that Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) put into this film.
Sam Niell plays Dr. Grant; Laura Dern as Dr. Satler; Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm; and Richard Attenborough as John Hamond. Samuel L. Jackson, B.D. Wong, and Wayne Knight also star in the film.

The film itself is wonderful, even over 15 years after it has been released. Has it really been that long? I remember seeing this film in a second-run theater, at around the age of 11. On a side note I do also remember walking into the theater way later than I would even consider walking into today. Ah well.
The characters were well developed and believable, with one reason going for that due to the limited number of people that actually do appear in this film. Everyone feels so isolated, which in a way, creates the perfect atmosphere for the characters being stuck on an island

The book and film, like almost all adaptations, are different. However, there are a few changes that just don’t make sense. Some characters that die in the book don’t, while ones that survive in the book die in the movie. However, my qualms are small potatoes in the long run since the film is extremely good.

This film convinced George Lucas to return to the Star Wars franchise and “complete” the first three parts of the saga. Whether or not this is a good or bad thing is hard to really say. It’s all up to your personal preference.

The film is followed up by “The Lost World: Jurassic Park”, which is a hybrid of both the Jurassic Park novel sequel, The Lost World, and takes heavily from the original “Lost World” story –however it is more commonly compared to King Kong instead of the Lost World. The third film, Jurassic Park III isn’t nearly as good, and for the last four or five years there have been rumors of another film being made, but so far, the project seems pretty dead.

Shaun of the Dead

Shaun of the Dead is an English comedy homage to old zombie movies. The film was written by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, the masterminds of the British series, "Spaced." As such, the film fits nicely within George Romero's "Dead" series.

Personally, I think that the film is the second best zombie movie, with only Night of the Living Dead as the only better film in the genre. It is capable of transcending comedy and delving straight into drama with no problems at all. Not all films are capable of doing so. It pulls at the heart strings as only the best films can, but moments later can be making you laugh your butt off.

The film centers around Shaun, a loser who has never really made anything of himself, in a dead-end job, just out of a relationship with someone who he cared very deeply for but was unable to actually mature enough to stay in it, and lives with his old childhood friend who is nothing but a deadbeat loser who sits around doing jack all day.

Everything appears to be going as normal for Shaun, who does his daily routine with no hiccups. He gets up, plays some video games, goes to work, does his daily routine, and goes home. Unfortunately, without thinking, he’s not only forgotten his girlfriend's anniversary, but also his mother’s birthday. In a rush to rectify this, he's put in a spot that destroys his relationship with his girlfriend. Strange events have been happening all around Shaun for the last few days, but being who he is, he is completely unaware of the events unfolding around him.
This is when the fun starts.

He awakes to find the city in chaos, and goes along his normal routine, being none the wiser to the events unfolding around him. When he finally does realize that there are a bunch of zed-words roaming the streets, he decides it’s time to gather up his friends and family, and find the safest place they know to hide.

Hilarious, entertaining, and a must see film. Catch the film "Hot Fuzz" as well and the television series, "Spaced."

Super Mario Bros.

Oh Super Mario Bros. How I despise thee. Not the wonderful game that I wasted my youth on, but the 1993 film "based" on the game in question. This is the kind of film that makes me realize how many horrible films that my parents had to sit through when I was younger. Yes, it is that bad. I can only imagine this is just the kind of film that eventually led to Uwe Boll types, making crap adaptations that are not very faithful to their source material.

I personally don’t believe I could own this film, and yet I personally believe that it is perhaps a film that everyone should see at some point in their life. A film to see and relish in its over the top campiness. It is bad, and yet, in many respects I can see where they attempted to make a "good" film.

The film stars Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, and Dennis Hopper, so the casting is there. Hoskins plays Mario, Leguizamo is Luigi, and Hopper plays King Koopa. How they were convinced to be in this film after reading the script, aside from a steady paycheck, is completely unknown to me. Oh yeah, Samantha Mathis is in the film as well. However, on second thought I wonder how the script originally read, and if the finished product does not do it justice, or if the production just could not give a faithful adaptation to the script. The film has humanoids with incredibly small heads. Who thought that up?

The movie's story revolves around Mario and Luigi, two New York plumbers. They are contacted by Princess Peach, who enlists their help to help in fighting Koopa, the king of "Dinohattan," a dinosaur version of Manhattan. Get it, "Dinohattan!" The only halfway enjoyable portion of the film is the Bob-omb sequence. If I thought that was the best part, then the film has to be bad!

I'll be interested if Nintendo revisits this franchise, and attempts a more faithful adaptation.

* out of *****

Image of Horror

This image brings horrible ghastly spasms to my body:

Alias: The Season breakdown

I figure I must delve slightly deeper into the series, to give a better idea of what I was talking about as to the unfortunate quality dip in the series.

Season 1
There is very little for this season to be critical of. I watched this with my brother in under 3 days when he first acquired the DVD boxset. Yes, I know I could have finished this faster, but I "wanted to stretch out the experience." Yes, stretch it out to three days. From start to finish the season has the right mix of everything that makes a series fantastic. The only thing I didn't like was some of the music selection, mostly in the "hangout" moments that occurred when Sydney went home to her unwitting roommate/friends and talked about how much her Bank sucked. The series had a very cinematic quality to it, which, compared to shows even today, is hard to find. "The Box" episodes were some of the better written stories on television at the time, and could have even made a great theatrical film with the kind of care they put into the script.

Season 2
The major downturn of the series began with the second season episode "Phase One". Apparently the 'phase one' part of the plan the producers and writers had was to remove the single aspect that really made Alias what it was. They removed the main plot element that really brought the series together - the secret organization, SD-6 was destroyed. Yes, the series wouldn't survive very long with Sydney being a double agent forever, however this is usually the fatal flaw that occurs in quite a few series. They wrote out the main element of the series, the piece that makes the series what it is, and I think the show was not quite the same after that point.

A season and a half just didn't use the full potential of SD-6 and the Alliance, the organization that SD-6 was part of. The best thing they could have done was to have either destroyed the entire organization at once later on in the series and have a real competent evil organization that would last more than one episode take over, or only destroy part of the Alliance, and have other cells remain and deepen their resolve, etc. This would add the benefit of both Sydney and Sloane's lives. What we were really left with was a poorly developed organization run by "The Man", which, unfortunately I have completely forgotten if it was really controlled by the character Irina Derevko or not. The rest of this season wasn't too bad, as it was mainly trying to capture Sloane, and eventually leads to one of the best cliffhangers of a show's season finale ever.

Season 3
Sydney wakes up and finds out she's been gone for 2 years. Interesting premise, but much of the potential disappears immediately afterward, with Vaughn falling for Sydney all over again even though he's married (e.g. cheap plot device). Sloane is a good guy, Dixon is in-charge of a CIA's branch, and Marshall - a socially inept person - is going to be a father, alright. Much more of the punch disappeared from this series around the middle of the season, where I believe they over explained too much to the audience, and unfortunately their explanations were not satisfactory.

I don't know what caused it, but the writing got sloppy, such as Vaughn's much hated wife all of the sudden turned evil (bad twist and equally bad follow through), which I believe was done, regardless of what the writers claim they intended, to give a sense of justification for all the fans who hated the character. You know, hating the wife of a character who the fans have decided "must" be with the main character. Sensible things.

The ending to this season was underwhelming compared to the previous seasons' ending. What's worse is what they did with it in the next season.

Season 4
The biggest mistake of the series: making Sydney's new found half-sister a series regular. She was an uninspired character that did little to add to the show. The promise of the season to "go back to Alias' roots" by bringing back a SD-6 type organization, this was APO. To put it frankly, it didn't work on almost any level. First off, for being such a secret organization, it does seem a little fishy that all the former SD-6 affiliated CIA agents quit at the exact same time, and still hang out constantly, apparently not doing anything for employment. With APO located in one of Los Angles's Metro stations, is everyone in that universe supposed to believe that they now are Metro employees?

The cliffhanger from the previous season makes it clear that the documents that Sydney discovers at the end of the episode are not "assignation orders" as we are lead to believe 5, maybe 6, episodes into the season. That's right - they resolved the finale almost 1/3rd the way through the season.

Note to the producers: We stopped caring when you didn't even attempt to resolve the loose threads in the first two episodes of the season. Later, it turns out that the "assignation" we thought occurred never happened, and was some sort of ruse used in a convoluted plot line to keep something or other secret. In other words, it was a cheap cop-out from the writers. Not a lot of other stuff happened other than defeating the "new worldwide threat" in under 60 minutes only to have another "worldwide threat" pop-up in the next episode. And thus, it repeated pretty much uninterrupted for the remainder of the season.

I gave up regular viewings of the show in this season, only being drawn in occasionally, usually with much hesitation.

Season 5 (i.e. Final Downfall)
The only positive aspect of the new season was that Nadia (Sydney's sister) was not going to be a series regular anymore. Jennifer Garner gets knocked, so she take a backseat for much of the season. Vaughn "dies" in a very pathetic way - meaning it's pretty clear that either the writers messed up entirely on the real impact of his death, or it was a contrived, cliche way to get him to "disappear" and reappear later in the series. Gee, I wonder what route they ended up taking.

This is coupled with the issue that now the audience doesn't trust or believe the writers that anyone can die which in my opinion brings Alias down to the level of a daytime soap opera. The final result to the changes, "brand new cast members!" Of which, almost all are useless additions. Now, going on an almost 4 year memory of these events, I'll try my hardest in giving an accurate account of what I do remember from the show by this point. I was really only watching one or two episodes here or there, and the show did not have me absorbed as I once was.

And the new male partner replacement to Vaughn is unnecessary since Dixon or Jack can do, and did do, everything he has done. Great job! The new "recruit" is basically a less useful Sydney-clone (not an actual clone, but same character type). They added a French woman, who brought little to nothing to the series.

When the show was finally canceled I was not surprised.

I watched the finale, and was appalled with the results. Even La Femme Nikita, a show that bares striking similarities to this series from just about every aspect of production, writing, and scripting, and in many cases the same sorts of problems, had a better ending than this did.

Good Riddance.

Alias, how we didn't know ye

It is disappointing when you find a show that is actually good, and sadly, ends up spiraling down to the point where the show's quality is seriously damaged beyond all repair.

By the end I was genuinely relieved that I did not have to tune into a show I loved so much for another season. Yes, that show was Alias. This is one of those shows, like many I loved from the start, which began it's downturn around it's third season. It now joins the ranks of "Earth: Final Conflict", "Andromeda", and "Hercules" as other shows that started off with promise, but ended up imploding. Lucky for Alias, I continued to watch the show regularly for quite some time longer into the show's run compared to the other aforementioned shows.

The overall plot of the series revolves around Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) a spy who was recurited to an organization called SD-6. The organization claims to be a secret branch of the United States CIA, but in actuality is a criminal organization. SD-6 is run by Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin) who is one of the few who know the truth - with most of his underlings completely unaware that they are working for anyone other than Uncle Sam.

Other main characters in the series are Jack Bristow (Victor Garber), Sydney's father; Marshall Flinkman (Kevin Weisman), the tech guru; Marcus Dixon (Carl Lumbly), Sydney's good friend in SD-6; Michael Vaughn (Michael Vartan), Sydney's liason at the CIA once she discovers the truth.

Additional reoccuring characters in the series are David Anders as villian Julian Sark (he is later cast in Heroes as super villain, Adam Monroe). Merrin Dungey as Sydney's friend, Francie Calfo and Bradley Cooper as Will Tippin. Greg Grunberg shows up as CIA agent Eric Weiss from time to time.

The show should have ended after season 3, when the show had some semblance of focus to it left. After that point it took a nosedive and just was not the same ever again.

If I had to rate the entire series, I'd have to give it three stars out of five. If it were just the first two, it would get five out of five, and if it was the first three, it would be four out of five.

Green Lantern finds a director

I've known for the last few weeks and months that a Green Lantern film was in the early stages of development, finally breaking WB and DC's seemingly ineptitude in getting just about any comic property they've created to the screen, Batman and Superman being the only two franchises that they've bothered with, and it took over 15 years to get a new Superman film out to the public.

Conversely, Marvel has been pumping out films for the last 11 years. They've had many successes and some failures, but at least they've put forward the effort. DC's film division has been, in my opinion, lacking as of late.

So it was a shock when I heard that they were doing a Green Lantern film. Martin Campbell, director of the two most recent Zorro films and best known as the director of GoldenEye and Casino Royale, has been pegged to direct.

This film will apparently star the Hal Jordan incarnation, the second Green Lantern and the Lantern from the late 50s to the early 80s.

Personally, DC should take a page from Marvel, and get whoever they sign to play Jordan signed to do a follow up film which may or may not include a Justice League film, if they ever bother with one. Marvel is tying their film properties into a single Avengers film, so all the stars of each single film will appear in one movie.

CAPRICA coming to DVD April 2009

I have just read from GALACTICA SITREP that the prequel to "Battlestar Galactica" will be released first on DVD April 21, 2009.

Interesting that they are doing this, since I fully expected it to first be debuted on the SciFi channel before making this to DVD, much like "Razor," a tie-in Galactica film which was aired back in 2007, and if I am not mistaken, was released on DVD soon afterward.

There does not seem to be any word yet on a High Definition release yet.

The Wrath of Abrams

The following 'rant' is a compilation of thoughts and discussions I've had concerning the new Star Wars Trek film.

What has been bothering me quite a lot lately is, in reference to the new Trek film's fanbase, is the complete disregard to concerns about the direction the film is taking. Most of the problems are stemming from a clear lack of respect for the source material.

San Francisco Fleet Yards is now conveniently in Iowa. Ignoring the lack of geography skills, there are more pressing problems with the film.

Kirk's backstory

Or now how Kirk is recruited into Starfleet by Pike, and apparently serves on the Enterprise while in the academy, and receives his command shortly after graduating.

In "Where No Man Has Gone Before," Mitchel and Kirk discuss Kirk's class at the academy. In "Court Martial," Kirk explained that he served on the Republic as an ensign. In "Obsession," the entire episode revolves around when kirk served as navigator on the Farragut under captain Garrovick. I believe Kirk also had his first deep-space assignment (post-Academy) under Garrovick.

What has been seen and explicitly said about the film is that Kirk is *in* the Academy (black uniform), on the bridge behind Pike, and at some point in the film takes command of the Enterprise after apparently Pike is injured and he eventually dons an actual Starfleet uniform.

Expect them never to mention the life-changing massacre he was part of out there on a completely different planet when he was 12. Apparently in the new film he just wrecks antique cars at that age.

Romulans
Or other minor things like having the Romulans attacking Vulcan a year or two before they attacked the Federation for the first time in decades during "Balance of Terror."

The one of the main elements of the dramatic tension in "Balance of Terror" is why Spock looks like the Romulans. They're shocked because they've never *seen* one before.

Chekov
Chekov is apparently already a graduate of the Academy and on the Enterprise while Kirk is still just a cadet. There is supposed to be at least a 10 years age difference between the two.

Is canon really important?
Personally, I think the excuse that Star Trek has been lazy and never really bothered to keep facts straight is a serious injustice to Star Trek's franchise history.

From time to time yes, things were "ignored" - but as many people have been trying to say for (years), these issues came up because of poor fact-checking and an incomplete review of continuity before the episode/movie was released for nearly all instances of "errors" in continuity. I'd gather that 9 times out of 10 if you could ask the writer, director, or producer who oversaw any of those problems, they would tell you that if they had realized their mistake, they would have fixed it.

Compare that with these guys (the writers of projects of dubious quality such as Transformers, The Legend of Zorro, and Xena) who claim they spent hours and hours on Memory Alpha studying the backstory of the series and it's characters - yet seem to have completely ignored huge swaths of it - because it's the easy way out by using a tired plot device - time travel.

Do they honestly think new fans will by "time travel?"

Making things more confusing instead of less
The only thing this will do is do the exact opposite that DC comic's "Crisis on Infinite Earths" did, which was a comic book miniseries created to 'simplify' the comic book's "established continuity." That is, to take a multitude of contradicting, and alternate storylines (multiple version of the Flash, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman) and merge them into one coherent universe. The "confusion" came directly from "rebooting" them every few decades, like they're doing here.

The example would be better put if this was 2040, sometime after the 4th or 5th reboot of Star Trek which involved a storyline that 'eliminated' all the 'conflicting' and contradicting details of Trek. Like deciding whether or not the "true" time line would include Pike being injured on a J-class training vessel or on the Enterprise with Kirk taking over for him in command. Or a universe where Kirk lives on Tarsus IV or one where he doesn't. And so on.

I've actually seen people use "Crisis" as a defense for doing what Abrams, Orci, and the rest are doing to Trek.

Who wins?
The devastating thing is that the only winner in this whole thing in the long run is Paramount. Since the film will have little to do with the original series and any of the works that followed the show, except Enterprise which would still "exist" in the same universe as AbramsTrek, why the heck would anyone want to watch TOS? However, their huge cash cow is getting old fans to re-purchase the same thing over and over again, so even if the film isn't a success, you'll see people line up for the BluRay release of this, then the box set with the first 6 films and the new one, then the new box set with the seven already mentioned and the 4 TNG films. And so on and so forth.

Remember, the storylines will not match up with anything that occurred in the film. They'll be lucky to pull in 10% of the "new" fanbase to be consumers of the original series. That is, if they're not busy seeing any of the other films that don't have the stigma that Trek has that come out in May - X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Angels & Demons, Night at the Museum II: Escape from the Smithsonian, and Terminator Salvation along with many others.

Bottom Line
But then again, if the film isn't successful, our points are moot and the universe goes away just like the "wrong" alternate universe went away in "Yesterday's Enterprise."

Listen, if they had just come out and said "we are remaking Star Trek" back in 2006 instead of pussyfooting around and saying "oh, remember in Back to the Future Part II when they go to the 'alternate 1985' - that's what we're doing in this film, so don't worry the Kirk you grew up with exists in an alternate reality" - you'd find a lot less annoyed people. Especially since the crux of their argument is that due to Quantum physics, an infinite number of universes exist - which means that Old Spock's entire role in the film doesn't fit into their theory. Old Spock shouldn't give two rat's asses about this alternate universe if he's from some other reality. In the past the show has repeatedly stated that the "right" universe is the one that the TOS, TNG, VOY, DS9, and ENT universes exist in, and any deviation to the timeline is strictly verboten. And no, we're not talking about a universe where the only change is that a pond now has fish in it as opposed to one that doesn't - one that has a real impact in storyline, characters. Not only that, if Old Spock's mission is to "correct" the timeline - then he fails since the producers and director have stated that this film allows for a different look and direction that can deviate from established storylines at the conclusion of the film.

A "reset" where everything is back to the way they were (no Romulan attack, corrected backstory, etc) is doubtful, as such a plot twist would hardly be appreciated by the non-Trekkie fanbase that this film seeks to pull in.

Oh well.

Time will tell.

Nothing to see here

I haven't had much inspiration to write anything new lately, so it's been kind of a drag.

I've been watching a backlog of movies and TV shows that I've been buying over the last few months and that I've finally had time to watch, so I'd suspect I'll have quite a few posts coming soon. Work has been crazy and I just don't feel like sitting at a computer after doing so for 9 hours a day.