Visually, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow were perfect in their leading roles. Paltrow had a level of that early 20th century glam to steal the hearts of the viewers, except she was too boring, too simple, too wrong. The same happened to Jude Law, his look was perfect for the Art Deco postmodernism attempting to be recreated, but the part and the acting were all wrong.

I have this sense that Kerry Conran was really only interested in the way this movie looked, which was, by the way, fantastic. The muted colors and diffused edges. The feel was excellent. It reeked of 1930s. The production design was just top notch. Sometimes the CGI wasn’t quite as seamless as one would hope but I sense that’s more the movie telling it’s age than anything. We’ve come a long way in the last 5 years. Too bad about the script which Conran actually wrote.

The basic premise is that scientists have been going missing and the rambuncious reporter Polly Perkins is on the story. She’s been given a hot lead that gives her some clues to begin unraveling the mystery. After a meeting with a scientist claiming to know what’s behind the mystery she stumbles into a wave of giant robots flying over, then walking through the streets of New York City. These robots are of course impervious to all damage until our brave hero “Sky Captain” shows up to fight with his array of Batman-esque toys.

Sky Captain it turns out is a mercenary with a base driving distance from New York City which houses dozens of planes and several airships. Polly drives out and startles Sky Captain with an unexpected meeting in which she of course demands to be brought along on the adventure to “get the scoop” for her latest story about the mysterious robots and it’s connection to the missing scientists. This arrangement turns out to be more than Polly bargains for and old feelings of love for Sky Captain are rekindled.

Basically the story oozes with cheesy pulp sci-fi glory. The problem is that it doesn’t. The story sounds perfect for what it is, but the way it’s played out, the jokes that fall flat and the dialog unbelievably dull and ineffectual. I love that era and the movies it produced. I love the sharp dialog, the flawless women and fearless heroes. There’s a charm to be had in it, but this missed it. The characters lacked that charming flawlessness and the hero was dull. He didn’t have a sharp wit or cadence to the way he spoke. Polly came across as curt instead of dry and funny.

This is probably the only time I’ll ever say this in my life, but, Where were the PUNS? That would have been gold in this movie. Goofy puns everywhere. Punny quips and punning comic relief. But alas, there were no puns, no comic relief. This movie was just dank old iron where it we wanted gold.

Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow was effectively one of the greatest let downs to me in recent movie watching experiences. Which is sad because I honestly didn’t expect much. I just wanted good clean fun that managed to keep that early hollywood charm. Ok maybe that is a lot? Regardless, this movie failed to deliver. If you just mute the movie and made up your own dialog you might have something, in fact, it could be something great. But as it is, this movie is beautifully shot rubbish. As a friend recently reminded me, the top of the trash heap is still trash. Too bad for this movie which barely rises above the caverns of the trash heap.

For starters, James Cameron is talented. Very talented. He managed to bring life to a story I saw coming within the first ten minutes. He managed to make it interesting, heartwarming and very much engaging. The world was interesting and fresh, even if the story was tired. Somehow he managed to make me look past the thousand plot holes as I sat in the theater. My mind was fixated on the Na’vi and the inevitability of their story.

Visually it was pretty significant (it’s what everyone is talking about), the use of 3D mixed with live action was impressively done. The use of CGI with live action didn’t strike me as especially great or ground-breaking but I’ve seen a lot of movies so maybe that has something to do with it. Biologically I think his world had issues. For instance, why did all of his creatures seem to be carnivores despite mass quantities of jumbo size vegetation? But that’s nitpicking. The world is beautiful, fun and fairly scientifically accurate.

I hate that this film was so socially and politically charged. I like social cause movies and when it’s done well it can really be great. I think of “Hotel Rwanda” which though it wasn’t really accurate it shined a light on a grim reality; which I think is always a good thing. Avatar though didn’t shine light on a grim reality; it was preaching to the choir. The people who agreed with the message would cheer and those who didn’t would groan or get angry.

If you don’t know much about the story I’ll try not to spoil it but I will give a basic run down. There’s a mining company trying to get at an apparently rare and expensive mineral called, yes, “unobtainium”. It’s about as dumb of a name as possible but I forgive it. For one, it’s only mentioned about 4 times, and for two it was obvious Cameron was trying to make a point about pursuing what we maybe “can” get but “shouldn’t” get. I could have seen Dr. Malcolm sitting there making a speech about how their “scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could; they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

This company has brought in a large regime of hired soldiers to keep the natives in line while they do their mining. There are scientists trying to help bring a diplomatic solution to the natives by showing interest in their world and their story. The Avatars are hard to explain, it’s a creature that looks like the natives, but is remotely controlled by the scientists. It’s a strange but very neat idea. An ex-marine finds his way into an Avatar working with the scientists because his brother was a scientist but was killed just before being deployed to the alien planet. There are some rules about the Avatars and their genetic make-up so that it was fortunate that this particular man had a twin who could take his place and the Avatar wouldn’t be a total loss.

So a marine ends up in the diplomatic side of the mission, he’s not fully trusted by the scientists and is seen as an agent by the military side. Against all odds the marine finds his way in with the Na’vi (the natives) better than any of the previous scientist had. The natives are intrigued that he was a warrior unlike the others.

So he’s playing almost a triple agent as he works for the mercenaries of the mining company tries to help the scientists and learning the ways and culture of the natives. I won’t tell which side wins out, but I probably don’t need to tell you either.

The movie drags this idea out for over two hours. There’s a major scene in which I was positive we’d started to wrap the movie up only for me to look down and realize there was nearly an hour to go.

The problem I had here was the main plot about the mining company. Not only, as I mentioned before, was it a plot preaching to the choir and boring everyone else, it was just not that interesting. I would have been happy to watch two hours about his attempts at integration with the native culture. I enjoyed him learning a new perspective on life or at least understanding a different people better. It was fascinating, interesting and worth watching, of course I’m a bit of a tree hugger.

I have to admit my crush on Natiri by the end of the movie. She was pretty awesome, even if she was computer generated, blue and about 11ft tall. Of course that could have been helped along her being scantily clad; who can say for sure.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression. The movie was actually good. It’s easily in my top 10 for the year; however I’m not sure that it will make my top 10 for the last 2 years, let alone among top ever made (as has been said by many).

There’s a lot of good and a lot to enjoy despite it all. I have to generally agree with my co-reviewer here, Daniel Roos. This is a movie that’s worth seeing in theaters if you just have to see it. But if you miss the theater showing you life will not be worse off for just not seeing it.

It comes down to this:

Avatar is the best made average movie I’ve ever seen.

A bold statement I know. That makes it better than Batman Forever. Better than Spy Game. Better than the new Pelham 123. Better than Broken Arrow. It’s even better than Confessions of a Shop-a-holic. Does that make it good enough for $15/ea to see in 3d? You decide.

An iRiff, for those who have not enjoyed our first effort on the Asylum classic Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, is a downloadable audio commentary that syncs with a particular film, a la Mystery Science Theater 3000.  I was first introduced to Monster Squad when friend and fellow Pwner recommended Monster Squad when we were throwing around ideas for movies to riff.  One viewing and I knew Monster Squad was perfect.

It has everything you could want: It stars a motley crew of pre-teens who for some reason hold the key to whether evil will be defeated or will reign over the Earth.   There’s an older, super-cool high school kid (Fonzie level hipness is inferred) who inexplicably wants to be in the titular Monster Squad to hang out with geeky pre-teens, and subjects himself to a “monster test” in order to gain admittance.

There’s a veritable cavalcade of ye olde time Universal movie monsters, featuring Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman, the (utterlyl pointless) Mummy, and the Creature of the Black Lagoon.  Dracula is the lead bad guy, trying to rule the world or something like that.  Wolfman, the Creature, and the Mummy are relegated to useless henchmen.  Frankenstein is portrayed as a simpleton who opts not to obey Dracula’s commands and instead proves a ineffective force for the good guys.

I don’t think it’s possible to make a case that Monster Squad is a “good” movie, but it’s equally hard to argue that it’s not fun.  Sure the plot has holes big enough for Jabba the Hut to build a summer house in with room for a swimming pool; sure the rogues gallery is completely anemic other than Dracula, and even Drac uses his amazing powers to do stuff like lighting the fuse of Acme dynamite; sure the heroes are snot-nosed brats whose primary weapon is a kick to the nardulars and a compious serving of luck; sure there’s homophobic dialogue and oodles of cruelty to the fat kid constantly referred to solely as “fat kid;” and sure there are plenty of other “sures” I’m sure I left out.

If Monster Squad was part of  your childhood experience, what better way to relive it than with the dulcit tones of Yours Truly, Brian Alterman, and Tom Stephens poking fun at it along the way?  If you’ve never seen or heard of Monster Squad, what better reason to go check out it and endure — I mean, enjoy — it for the first time with the hilarious iRiff from your favorite cinematic masochists, the aforementioned Your Truly, Brian Alterman, and Tom Stephens?

Check out the Youtube sample here, embedding is disabled for reasons we can’t seem to fix.

Primer is a film crafted on the most meager of budgets imaginable, $7,000 for the entire production according to imdb.com. What Primer lacks in finances it makes up for with a razor sharp script and keen, low-budget film making ingenuity.

The story of Primer involves two scientists and friends, working out of one’s garage as part of a quartet who pool their knowledge to create and sell relatively pedestrian products to scrape out a living. In a total accident, their latest experiment results in a small-scale time warp, capable of sending a tiny item backward to an earlier point in the device’s existence.

This alone is an interesting hypothesis, that the theoretical “time barrier” would be broken largely by accident by two genius’ pursuing alternate goals.

The invention presents a cornucopia of possibilities, opportunities, and dangers to the friends, who decide to exclude their two other partners and explore this perilous, potentially profitable project alone, without mentioning it to anyone.

Without divulging too many details — as I heartily recommend you rent and experience this gem for yourself — inevitably one of the two will take the technology to the next level, building a device large enough for a human to travel into. The result changes the two’s relationship in surprising ways as they explore the possibilities, wrestle with ethical concerns, and debate making changes with past events.

Primer is intellectual brain-candy for the thinking viewer; the movie does not attempt to fully explain every aspect of the technology and the events that take place. A mysterious (but ultimately revealed) narrative running throughout calls the logic behind one confounding event “unknowable.” This may frustrate some who demand concrete answers, but this is gold for those of us who appreciate a film that is prime fodder for enthusiastic debate.

One of the great charms of independent features is that poverty can often be the mother of invention (when this axiom proves false, the end result is invariably atrocious, pretentious, or unwatchable).

The talented filmmaker, like Primer’s director, writer, and co-star Shane Carruth, will devote their resources to the elements within their realm of control, indispensable elements such as plot, characters, and dialogue. It is often the wealth of riches in terms of talent and finances that can lead to profligacy and ruin. For the perfect example, take the year’s most bloated of blockbusters, Transformers 2, which genuflects at the altar of excess for an obscene two and a half-hours. The makers of Primer could not afford divas too narcissistic to come out of their trailer or comedic robots to hump their legs, these guys had to use a healthy percentage of their budget to rent a storage room for filming.

Belated kudos to Mr. Carruth and his merry band of collaborators (I say “belated” as the film first appeared in 2004, winning many well deserved awards on the independent circuit, yet Primer only happened upon my “to watch” pile in the last few weeks). Here’s hoping Mr. Carruth, who’s remained dormant since Primer gained acclaim, can emerge from independent features and create mainstream, creative gems in the same vein as fellow, former indy auteur Christopher Nolan (whose progression from clever, 1998 indy “Following” to 2008’s cerebral and entertaining blockbuster The Dark Knight has been a pleasure to behold).

– Lawrence D. Oso

Radioland Murders is the brainchild of Star Wars creator George Lucas, which isn’t always a good thing (see the last Indiana Jones movie and the latter Star Wars trilogy for proof).  Released in 1994, Radioland Murders is caught somewhere between slapstick comedy and dark comedy, which is often an uneasy mix.  For better or worse, the imbalance is offset by the frenetic pace, which launches the audience from scene to scene and joke to joke, so if you don’t like one there’s a different one seconds later, and maybe you’ll like that one.

The setting is a 1930s radio station on its first night attempting to become the fourth national station.  The premiere is a red-carpet affair at a theater (yes, audiences actually used to attend radio events in person) and is not only fraught with madcap antics and catastrophes bordering on hilarity but also . . . (dramatic pause) . . . murder!

The protagonist is Roger (Brian Benben), one of the underpaid writers who are ordered to do complete re-writes just as they are going on the air because the humorless, primary sponsor doesn’t think they’re funny (in fairness to the sponsor, the material isn’t funny, but that’s where the humor lies).  Roger tries to juggle re-writing scripts with winning back his estranged s wife Penny (Mary Stuart Masterson), the station owner’s do-it-all secretary who thinks Roger had an affair.  This is all complicated when they get caught up in the series of grisly and often comedic . . . (dramatic . . . pause) . . . MURDERS!

People start dropping dead just about as soon as the curtain goes up, each murder preceded by a mysterious voice hijacking the broadcast to deliver a riddle worthy of Edward E. Nigma to tease the identity of the next victim.  Penny tries to keep the show running as Roger starts looking like the prime suspect, and the more he tries to clear his name the more he looks like the guilty party.  (The actual killer admits that they never planned to frame Roger, it’s just that “he made it so easy!”)

The cast of Radioland Murders lacks any real star power but is chalk full of countless “Hey, I know that guy!” recognizable faces.  Michael McKean (Spinal Tap) is the showman bandleader; Ned (“Squeal like a pig”) Beatty is the station owner, the eccentric General; Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future) is the foley artist (sound effects) Zoltan; Larry Miller (Best in Show) is the stage manager; Corbin Bernsen (Major League) is the pompous announcer; Dylan Baker (Spider-Man 2 & 3) is one of the bumbling detectives on the case and steals several scenes he’s in; Jeffrey Tambor (Arrested Development) is the incompetent director and son of the General; Stephen (“name five movies I haven’t been in, go ahead, I dare you”) Tobolowsky is the loyal producer; Peter MacNicol, Harvey Korman, and Bobcat Goldthwait are some of the writers; and George Burns, Joey “Whoa!” Lawrence, and Rosemary Clooney are among the performers on stage.  It’s like a supporting character actor convention in here!

By comparison to the cavalcade of not-quite-stars but doggone familiar faces that inspire imdb.com surfing to figure out just where you remember them from (“Oh yeah, the guy who played Lt. Cross is Michael Lerner, who was Mayor Ebert in 1998’s Godzilla!”); the three actors with the most screen-time, leads Brian Benben and Mary Stuart Masterson along with Scott Michael Campbell as Billy the plucky page, are downright obscure, unless you happen to be a fan of Benben’s 1990 team-up with Dolph Lundgren, I Come in Peace.

The humor is hit or miss, with a lot of 1930s rat-ta-tat-tat dialogue fired at the screen, some hitting the mark and a lot falling flat.  There’s a lot of actors hamming it up, determined to not be out-hammed by the rest of the Supporting Players All-stars.  (For the record, Dylan Baker and Christopher Lloyd get the most laughs, Corbin Bernsen and Larry Miller are the most annoying.)

An example of some of the good material is when script pages being rushed to the set gets mixed up, and two sweet-voiced, motherly types recording a live, soap opera drama on stage boldly press forward despite the fact that one of them mistakenly got a script for an unrelated adventure serial:

Lady Number One: “Abandoned by Jim, my husband of twenty years, and recently disturbed by the news that Ellen, my loving daughter, is marrying Jim’s illegitimate step-son, I find myself mired in a week long depression.  Tell me, Mom, what should I do?”
Lady Number Two: “Die, infidel.  Die like a dog writhing in pain from the horror that is known as the Curse of Nebuchadnezzar.”
Lady Number One: “Thanks, Mom!  You always know what’s best.”

When suspected killer Roger discovers the identity of the real culprit, he crams the revelation into a script for the show about a caveman named Gork, who goes forward in time and becomes ensnared in a murder mystery at a radio station.  Part of the dialogue read by the actor playing the caveman includes: “Gork peace-loving caveman.  Must unmask real killer.  Clear self.  Find way back to prehistoric wife.  Convince her to stay married.”

Radioland Murders isn’t a lost classic, but it’s an overlooked, “hey, that’s pretty funny” comedy.  And sometimes ain’t that enough?

–Daniel J. Roos says after watching the below trailer he found on Youtube, it’s no wonder this movie totally bombed in the theater:

I’m not making fun of this as much as it might seem. I wish I was cool enough to wear skinny jeans and clever enough to have ironic t-shirts, but instead I just wear normal jeans and a button down shirt. I wished I had shaved to have cool facial hair of some sort, but alas I had to just be me. Then as we arrived and looked around, I didn’t see a single pair of skinny jeans, and since most everyone was in a uniform for the festival the ironic t-shirts had been left in the closet. I was acceptable.

Interestingly New York Lately was still much the type of movie I imagined those non-existent stereotypes would produce. It was along the vein of movies like Babel and Magnolia. It’s the story of several people whose lives intertwine in some intricate way to produce a story that paints the picture of modern life with its connections and isolation. The problem is that few of these characters seemed real and the stories didn’t really intertwine at all. So it was more like the make-believe stories of disjointed people.

The film played on some very tired clichés, like the soullessness of the office and the favors a young and budding actress is often expected to make. The movie had the chance a few times to take some old stories and breathe fresh life into them with a simple shift in direction when as the viewer we don’t expect it. But instead it just wandered down familiar territory.

Daniel and I discussed this movie quite a lot because we had some time for food afterward and had been given some insight by a short Q&A period with the director and a couple of the actors. We both tended to agree that the film wasn’t without merit but rather that it probably tried to do a lot of things when it should have kept the story smaller and to just a few. The subplot of a man who was blustery and all talk, slept with hookers and treated his friends poorly was misguided I think. The man was generally unlikable, but not in the way some characters you dislike engages you. Rather you just wished he would get off the screen.

The best story in the film was about a shy Asian man who works in HR. He’s helping a friend deal with his recent breakup. He’s struggling to maintain his sanity while he assists with the layoff of hundreds of people, one of them being a personal friend. He meets a cute, honest, budding musician who works at a local coffee shop. Their exchanges are sweet and personal. She all but begs him to ask her out but he’s quiet and reserved and just can’t work up the courage.

This was the real story in the movie, the one I wanted to see finished. But in a film like this it’s just another subplot, another piece to a web that’s destined to fall from its own weight. They tried to get a little overboard with a few interesting ideas, pound them in too hard. The friend who was dealing with a recent breakup kept seeing her in any female with whom he conversed. It was interesting the first time, really confusing as the movie continued. Maybe we were supposed to feel confused like the character, but in the end it just became annoying.

Gary King, the writer/director, has talent and I’d like to see more from him. But first I’d like him to not be trendy and tell the story to which he’s really connected. In the Q&A we found that he worked in HR laying people off. That’s why this part of the movie worked so well I suspect. It was something he really knew.

I guess when everything is said and done my biggest issue with this movie was that I felt like I had seen all of it before, only in pieces in different movies. In fact in closing I’ll quote some of the notes I made during the film:

“How many times do I have to see this same story?”

“groan…”

“Really, this again?”

The Fog is a ghost story about lots and lots of mundane yet somehow spooky coincidences, which are only somewhat validated by the fact that there are some undead ghost pirate lepers that kill some local yokels.

The film opens with an actual ghost story where some old dude (John Houseman) straight off of posing for the Old Spice bottle covers, tells a bunch of kids the tale of an old pirate vessel that their town founders destroyed in order to found the very town they are living in.  And soon the entire town is besieged with a fiendish evil of inconceivable proportions as the uncanny, procrastinating pirates use their newfound supernatural prowess to exact extremely tardy reprisals on the inhabitants of the town 100 years after they were wronged.   Ooooooooh!  I will have my revenge on the inhabitants of Antonio Bay, in a century or so, we don’t want to rush anything — ooooooooh!

How does the hideous evil manifest itself?  TVs turn on! *gasp* Gas pumps itself . . . and not into a car!!!  A guy sweeping up a grocery store after hours is startled when various things rattle!  The horror!  The horror!!!!

My favorite of the odd, vaguely paranormal events that besets the town in the precursor to bloodletting is the dislodging of a founding father’s diary that basically falls in the lap of current town priest, Father Malone (Hal Holbrook).  The diary is equal parts plot convenience expediter and broad confession, and I assume it’s not a coincidence that the diary is dislodged at the preamble to the foggy vendetta.  So one can infer that the avenging spirits wanted someone to understand their motivations, perhaps because they otherwise would have felt self-conscious about slaughtering the innocents for the sins of their great-great grandparents.

An eerie fog rolls into town, becoming the harbinger of easily escapable death.  It’s important to remember that behind that smoke is nothing but John Carpenter’s ghost pirates, not to be mistaken with his later work, John Carpenter’s The Ghosts of Mars.  They don’t move very quickly and a brisk walking pace seems to be the best defense.  Their primary weapon appears to be swords, and I think if they were a little better at being pirates they wouldn’t be GHOST PIRATES who waited a hundred years after their demise to avenge themselves on the hapless descendants of their killers.

The little town they invade with their unique brand of foreboding menace appears to be populated entirely by the descendants of the founding fathers who offended the ghost pirates, which means that there’s an awful lot of revenge to be wreaked but there’s been an awful lot of inbreeding over the last century, which should make aforementioned revenging a lot more easy.  And boy is it easy!

The hunky hero is Nick (Tom Atkins), a rather unexceptional holdover from the 70s who makes me long for the day when a doughy, unexceptional looking man could be the hero of a movie, battle supernatural ghost-pirates, and hook-up with the hot hitchhiker passing through town, Elizabeth (Jamie Lee Curtis).  Together with the helpful lighthouse operator/disc jockey (no, that’s not a joke) played by Adrienne Barbeau, they beat back the undead horde with some hokus pocus supernatural cure-all that satiates the undead ghost pirates not from mars.  Until they come back for one last scare in defiance of their being dispatched from their vendetta, of course.

The Fog isn’t scary or spooky, and neither is the movie of the same name.  It’s certainly watchable, though if you’re like me your mind will wander to thinks like: Did guys of the 80s really think Adrienne Barbeau was gorgeous?  Did I leave my iron on?  Would a woman of the 80s really hitchhike into fishing towns and allow themselves to get picked up by guys like Tom Atkins?  Do I own an iron?  Who the heck is Tom Atkins?

–Daniel J. Roos is not Tom Atkins

The idea here is a preposterous if entertaining “What If?” scenario, not unlike the series that Marvel Comics would publish back in the day, like what if Dr. Doom was a hero, what if Wolverine shaved his sideburns, or what if Winnie the Pooh was exposed to Gamma Rays instead of Bruce Banner.

In this case, the question is: What if infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper escaped 19th century justice by using H.G. Wells’ time machine to come to modern times (well, “modern” as of the film’s release in 1979)?  

It would be pretty easy to puncture holes in the premise with such simple reasoning as H.G. Wells was a novelist who wrote about a time machine not an inventor who had any design at creating such a device, or that while Jack the Ripper is shrouded in mystery it is agreed by the majority of historians that he was TimeTravelaphobic.  I mean, that’s common knowledge, right?

But when you enter the genre of breaking through the time barrier, I say everything is fair game.  So you want to use two iconic characters from the late 19th century as protagonist and antagonist, I say more power to you.  Heck, throw in Huckleberry Finn while you’re at it!  (If Tom Sawyer can star in A League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as a secret agent gunslinger, what’s off limits?)

In the opening, we see Jack the Ripper (David Warner) claiming his latest victim in Victorian England prior to attending a dinner party at the estate of his old friend H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell).  This just so happens to be the night where Wells announces that he’s going on a trip through time, in his new time machine that he shows off to his astounded guests. Wells tells them the machine can go backward in time or forward in time (remember this tidbit for later mockery).

When the cops show up on the trail of the killer, Jack the Ripper uses the only means of escape at his disposal, the Time Machine.  Due to some plot contrivance, since the Ripper doesn’t have Wells’ key, the machine returns to its point of origin after the trip, so Wells knows when the killer has gone, and goes to 1979 in tepid if well-mannered pursuit.

When Wells uses his machine, he finds himself stepping out not in his native England but San Francisco of 1979.  Why?  Because the physical time machine itself is on display at an H.G. Wells exhibit in San Fran.  This could be perfectly viable for a fantastical time travel theory, that the craft itself does not travel through time but it enables those within it to travel through time while inside the confines of the craft.  But, it this were the case, that would raise several logic questions:

How could you travel BACK in time if time travel depended on the existence of the newly created time machine?  It would seem to me you could only go back as far as the doggone thing existed.  Also, if Wells knew that he would emerge from wherever the device rested 90 years in the future, why would he not leave any special instructions as to the preservation of said device prior to mysteriously disappearing while inside his laboratory?  If the machine gets dismantled would that mean that Wells never materializes? And why, why, why did the machine itself disappear with him and with Jack the Ripper and when did it reappear so that it could be discovered and put on display?????? *Sigh*

On the positive sighed I enjoyed seeing underrated actor David Warner chewing the scenery as Jack the Ripper stalking discos while wearing leisure suits. That ends the “positive” section of the blog.

Strongest on the negative side is the HG Wells character, which drove me nuts.  Malcolm McDowell as Wells was fine for a supporting character rounding out an ensemble cast, but he’s the lead actor on-screen for 98% of the film. I couldn’t stand watching Wells as the perpetual, bewildered fish-out-of-water humorously amazed by modern contraptions. What’s this?  A horseless carriage!  A woman working at a bank?  Astounding!  An electric toothbrush?  What will these Yanks think of next!

HG Wells the foppish gentleman is not a great protagonist, either in wooing San Franciscan lass Mary Steenburgen or politely suggesting that the mass murderer/maniac accompany him back to their time to face justice.

My favorite nonsensical Wells action came when he took his 1970s girlfriend Steenburgen to the near future — next Saturday — to prove his outlandish time traveling tale to be true.  While in the future, the duo stumbles over a newspaper article announcing that she had been killed by the Ripper the previous night.  Aghast, Wells wastes no time in rushing her back into the time machine and going back to their proper time, where his love-interest is hours away from being murdered.  Once back in the time where she’s on the verge of being murderized, they plot ways to keep her alive.

Uh, dude, I know you’re H.G. Wells with one of the most fertile imaginations of all-time, but wouldn’t it be smarter to leave the girl you’re trying to protect in the near future we’re she’s not in danger of being killed because she’s all ready been killed?  Why not take her back to your house in 1890 until you can sort things out in 1979?  That’s two off the top of my head, and I didn’t even write “War of the Worlds!”

It’s rather annoying to watch Time After Time’s hero defeated and hopeless when Jack the Ripper has the upper hand, and the hero has control of the frickin’ time machine the whole time.  At one point, the Ripper offers to trade Wells the girl for control of the time machine, and Wells accepts.  Dude, seriously!  Just go back to yesterday and the problem is solved!  *Sigh*

Please forgive me a digression from the movie to talk about the real life H.G. Wells, since I’ve been reading a lot of history around the 1920s-1930s: H.G. Wells was a tool.  It’s briefly touched on in Time After Time, when the character speaks about his dream of a “socialist utopia,” but the real Wells believed in socialism and spoke highly prior to the Second World War of Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, and Soviet Communism.  H.G. Wells believed if his utopia was to be brought into existence, “Swarms of black and brown, and dirty-white and yellow people . . . have to go.”  He also stated in a charming endorsement of eugenics, “It is in the sterilisation of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.”  Yikes!  One of Wells’ less regarded novels, a future history “The Shape of Things to Come,” envisions a one-world government creating a utopia science rules and religion is gradually eradicated for the good of mankind.  Huzzah! 

My point being, the real H.G. Wells isn’t such a great guy.  Sure, he wrote a lot of groundbreaking novels with lots of innovative concepts (The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau, War of the Worlds, the Time Machine, etc.), but the guy isn’t exactly hero material. 

–Daniel J. Roos strongly suggests Harriet Beecher Stowe if you’re looking for an action hero from 19th century authors. Rumor has it ol’ Harriet could toss one mean roundhouse kick! (Cast Kathy Bates and you’ve got box-office gold.)

Simply put (too late, I know), I only watched Lost Treasure because: 1) it was on TV, 2) it starred Stephen Baldwin and future Desperate Housewife Nicollette Sheridan, 3) and it had a stupid description under Program Info: “Brian’s brother Carl is abducted after they find a map to a legendary treasure on a Caribbean Island.”  Come on, try and tell me you’re not sold already.  There’s the link to buy the movie, so what are you waiting for?

As an added bonus, I was stunned to discover in the opening minutes that some exteriors this lost cinematic treasure was filmed in my city, Charlotte, NC!  Forgive me for being excited, but we usually don’t get a lot of movie crews or movie stars around here.  The last two in the area that I heard of were Will Farrell filming part of his racing movie, which was so proud of Charlotte’s involvement that it was dubbed “Talladega Nights”; the other was Whoopie Goldberg’s basketball comedy Eddie, where the Charlotte Arena stood in for Madison Square Garden, with Whoopie playing the coach of the Knicks (not Larry Brown).

Not surprisingly, this low-budget adventure film also uses Charlotte standing in for another city . . . Los Angeles?  (I assume L.A. was the town we were supposed to be in when a scene in the police station was broadly labeled L.A.P.D.  Perhaps the Charlotte P.D. was simply using surplus L.A.P.D labels, but I don’t think that was the case.) 

Now I know there are some cynics out there, who refuse to believe that a movie would deceive its audience and say it’s taking place in Los Angeles but instead be shot in Charlotte, NC.  So, the obvious question is: All right, Film is Pwn Conspiracy Theorist Nutjob, how do you know the exteriors were taken in Charlotte?  For one thing, in the background you can see street signs for Charlotte streets S. McDowell, Church ST, and other familiar, local shops.  If that’s not enough, there’s a bus involved in an opening car chase heading to downtown features prominent banners reading: “Charlotte Metro,” “Charlotte.com,” and local radio station 107.9.  If you need more, there’s a clear, prolonged shot of Panthers Stadium.  If they can fake the moon landing, they can fake Los Angeles.  Don’t feel too ashamed, they even fooled the late Walter Cronkite (not about the moon landing, Cronkite knew that was fake, but he did think Lost Treasure was filmed in L.A., the poor sap).

The Charlotte scene features a truck with stolen art being pursued by cops.  Hilarity ensues when the truck driver is told by his boss: “Do not stop until you reach the Marina!”  The nearest Marina from Charlotte is approximately a four hour drive.  Also, the driver is heading away from “downtown” — and how stupid is that?  Charlotte has no downtown, we have an “uptown.”  What’s the difference between an “uptown” and a “downtown?”  I’m not sure, but you definitely can’t get to either with a sidecar.  Thank you, I’ll be here all week.

To get the plot under way, our hero is maverick, kleptomaniac police officer Carl (Coby Ryan McLaughlin) who is one of those rogue cops who lives by his own rules, cracks wise better than he cracks cases, and has the requisite best friend/minority partner bound to get killed.  After defying his boss’ orders and causing the getaway truck to randomly explode for some reason, Carl is saddled with finding out what one of the stolen items – a map-like thingy – is.  (Hint: it’s a map!)

Luckily, Carl’s estranged brother Bryan (Stephen Baldwin alert!) happens to be a very wealthy mapologist who spends his free time looking for lost treasure.  Bryan very quickly gets over the fact that Carl owes him ten and agrees to help out with looking into the map-like thing that’ we later learn is a map, which he believes is a map (!) to where that lost treasure of Christopher Columbus is buried.  Yes, even Columbus had a lost treasure – it’s not just for pirates any more (or perhaps Chris did some pillaging on the side when he wasn’t stumbling over continents; it’s important to have something to fall back on when the one thing you’re good at doesn’t work unless you’re not trying to do it).

The scene where Carl and his soon-to-be-deceased partner Joey (Billy Williams) are pursued by evil minions leading to Carl’s kidnapping features the characters intercut with a wooded background crawling with trees as well a barren industrial complex.  Classic stuff, which looks like it was taken from two different, equally low-budget movies and loosely taped together with Scotch tape.

To make a long story short, villainous villains take Carl to the deserted island where the treasure is buried, even though Carl doesn’t have the map.  Bryan goes to the island with the map, chartering a plane from future love-interest Carrie (Nicollette Sheridan) and with future comic relief Danny (Mark Christopher Lawrence).  What follows is an insipid game of cat and mouse that involves crashed planes, treacherous CharL.A.P.D. cops, a looming hurricane, and assault with coconuts. 

To sum up Lost Treasure, it isn’t one of those ultra-fun/bad movies where most anyone can enjoy it, like Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.  You need professional training to endure and appreciate Lost Treasure.  Be warned, viewer, this one is for Film Is Pwners and Stephen Baldwin enthusiasts alike (both categories I fall in to, of course).

–Daniel J. Roos

I’ll always remember seeing the first Fast and the Furious with Tom Stephens and his brother Steve, who spent the whole film saying things like, “Ooooh!!! Is that a BMW Blah Blah Blah?” “No, that’s a Blah Car Blah Blah!” “You can only get that Blah Blah Car Blah Blah in Norway from a guy named Sven!”  Seeing as how I’m not a car guy, this proved a wee bit tedious.

What was worse is there was nothing else on the screen to draw their attention away from the nigh pornographic, exotic automobile display that would shame the programming director of Cinemax.  I couldn’t change the subject from cars to plot, because there was no plot to speak of.  The story was just an excuse to talk cars, race cars, and massage cars.

I think there was something about Paul Walker being an undercover FBI agent being paid to infiltrate a gang of street racers, a plot line taken straight from Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze’s opus Point Break (“The FBI is going to pay me to race cars?  Whoa!”).  Hint to future filmmakers, if your plot bears similarities to a film featuring both Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, you might want to start from scratch.

And that’s about how I feel about the fourth installment, it’s sort of a non-movie exhibition of cars, testosterone, and recycled action cliches.  Nothing wrong with recycled action cliches — I greatly enjoyed 12 Rounds which unabashedly plundered the Die Hard playbook — but I still faced the general problem that a Ferrari cannot induce an orgasmic response with me.

The fourth film is brilliantly titled “Fast & Furious“, as opposed to its predecessors “THE Fast & THE Furious“, “2 Fast 2 Furious“, and “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift“. This is the sort of thing our friends at The Asylum would do, simply removing the word “THE” from the title in order to create brand confusion, similar to what they did by making their version of “The Terminator” and dubbing it “The TerminatorS.”  You’ll note that legitimate franchises don’t do this kind of stuff, as you’ll never see a sequel to “The Godfather” called “Godfather,” but Fast & Furious is no legit franchise.

The plot of the fourth film has faded remarkably quickly in my brain, having made the mistake of seeing it a couple of days ago and penning this blog tonight.  I know the four leads from the first installment (Vin Diesel, Paul Walker,  Jordana Brewster, Michelle Rodriguez) as the tagline boasts ”New model, original parts,” as if that’s a lot to brag about.  I assume Ms. Brewster and Ms. Rodriguez must have really been flattered to have the movie include the word “model” in its four-word tagline, but they are  billed as “original parts.”

As I think awfully hard on the subject, one of the four leads is killed off in the early going, and everyone seemed pretty upset about it, perhaps because those original parts like to stick together.  There’s a villain, who is definitely a dude with various appendages and the ability to speak . . . beyond that, the details of the film are a little fuzzy.

I’m sorry, but I can’t get any more solid details, and the longer I think about Fast & Furious the more my head hurts.  There’s a lot of car chases and cars that blow up real good, if that helps.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go lie down for a while.

–Daniel J. Roos recommends that if you purchased a copy of Fast & Furious, you take it to your local car dealer to see if it qualifies for the “Cash for Clunkers” program.