Movies

Direct Beam Comms #32

Direct Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVJuly 17, 2016July 16, 2016

TV

Stranger Things Grade: A

The new series Stranger Things debuted on Netflix last Friday (July 15) and currently all episode are available to stream.

It’s 1983 and something’s not right in the town of Hawkins, Indiana. Outside of town sits a government installation out of which something has escaped. This thing found young Will (Noah Schnapp) riding home from a game of Dungeons & Dragons one night and stole him away leaving Will’s mother (Winona Ryder), the town police and Will’s friends searching for him.

Also escaped from the installation is a seemingly normal girl only known as “Eleven” (Millie Bobby Brown) from the tattoo on her arm who can do weird things like affect electrical appliances around her and has agents after her led by Dr. Benner (Matthew Modine) who’s willing to kill anyone who gets in his way if it means getting the girl back.

So far Netflix has promoted Stranger Things as a sort of TV version of Steven Spielberg’s movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extraterrestrial and Spielberg produced Poltergeist. And while Stranger Things does borrow elements from this period in Spielberg’s career I’d say that Stranger Things takes more from the work of the other pop-culture titan of the 1980s: Stephen King. Well, King by way of straight to VHS horror films mixed with a pulsating synth keyboard driven soundtrack.

Part of Stranger Things were scary. Really scary.

In the beginning of the first episode when young Will’s being chased by the something I can only described as a human-looking shape, I found the hairs on the back of my neck standing at attention. And at another part of the show when Winona Ryder’s character gets a weird phone call I took a breath so that I could hear every creepy thing emanating from the receiver.

That’s not to say that Stranger Things is strictly a horror series, though if I had to peg it in one genera I’d peg it squarely there. It also has elements of sci-fi and a definite sense of nostalgia for the early 1980s and young geek life before video games and the internet changed everything. But it’s not simply some nostalgia throw-back series.

Stranger Things is a show that’s set in the early 1980s but it’s not something that’s defined by that. The series could easily be set present day or the 1960s and would work just as well.

I wasn’t quite the age of the 1983 middle schoolers in Stranger Things but having grown up in Indiana the series gets a lot of what it was like in small town life back then pre-cable. Adults are really into basketball and you may get to watch your favorite show that night or the TV might be on the “fritz” and you might not. If you wanted to talk to your friends and you didn’t want to call their home phone letting the parents know what’s up you had to be creative. And if you were a geek the details in pop-culture matter. In the first episode two characters get into a fight over whether the Mirkwood was in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings which really struck home for me. The details matter to a pre-teen pop-culture junkie, even the seemingly inconsequential ones.

After having watched the first episode the only negative I can see with Stranger Things is that it’s going to be hard — REALLY HARD — to only watch one episode of this series a week and not blow through all eight in a packed Saturday.

The Bureau aka Le Bureau des Légendes Grade: B+

This French series that’s available on iTunes, the first episode of which is free, is an interesting show about spies that feels a bit like the classic British drama The Sandbaggers.

In The Bureau, French operative Guillaume (Mathieu Kassovitz) has returned home to France after eight years abroad on assignment for the DGSE (the French CIA) in Syria. He tells his teenage daughter, with whom he’s trying to rebuild his relationship with, that his job was to “make friends” of certain people and glean any information that might be useful to France from what they might say. He was less James Bond than someone looking to score a little intel for his side. But in Syria he made one mistake; it wasn’t falling in love with a Syrian national, it was lying about ending the relationship to his superiors.

Back home in France things are in a bit of a disarray at the DGSE where one of their operatives has gone missing also in Syria which might act as a domino and bring own several other operations he knew about. At the same time Guillaume, who’s now working as a case officer inside the DGSE, finds out that his love from Syria is also in France attending school. Which begs the question — is Guillaume being played by the other side?

It took a bit for The Bureau to get going in the first episode, and even when it did “get going” it was a slow, but satisfying burn. Here, the agents are less using secret gadgets, gambling at casinos and drinking martinis and more just getting close to important people to glean even the tiniest detail that might somehow be beneficial to France as a whole. But even if their job isn’t like James Bond’s, it’s just as dangerous as since capture of a DGSE agent outside of France might mean death.

And like I said it’s the slow burn, the bureaucracy of governmental work and the life and death stakes of the characters that reminded me somewhat of The Sandbaggers. Though admittedly by the looks of it the budget of an entire season of The Sandbaggers probably wouldn’t cover one episode of The Bureau. 😉

My only quibble with the series is that it’s not easily available here in the US. Overseas in the UK it’s apparently available on Amazon Prime but here it’s only out on iTunes. Which means if I want to watch the rest of the first season it’s going to cost me $20.

So, it looks like I’m going to be out of $20 in the near future.

Star Wars Rebels season 3 preview

Star Wars: Rogue One “Sizzle Reel”

Cool Sites

Saturday Morning Cartoons: “A collection of Saturday Morning (or Saturday-Morning-Like) cartoons and animated episodes.”

The Reading List

This week in pop-culture history

1984: The NeverEnding Story premiers in theaters
1985: Day of the Dead premiers in theaters
1986: Aliens opens in theaters
1996: The Frighteners opens in theaters

Aliens Week: Mondo Aliens posters

MoviesJuly 16, 2016July 14, 2016

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Aliens Week: James Cameron’s Aliens at 30

Feature, MoviesJuly 15, 2016July 14, 2016

The first time I saw the movie Aliens I was 12 years old. It was a Saturday night and me, my brother and a cousin were all camped out on our living room floor one Saturday evening as we always did that summer. That particular night Aliens was set to premiere on HBO and we three had made it our mission that weekend to watch it since none of us had seen it yet.

And Aliens did not disappoint. Myself as a 12 year old loved it, my brother at eight was a little too young to get it but I think he liked it since his big brother liked it. But I think Aliens hit my ten year old cousin a little hard. When we finally decided to try and get some sleep after the movie had ended it was getting late and we all climbed into our sleeping bags in the dark of the living room. I’d begun to doze off when the air conditioner in the living room clicked on. At the time we had several window units around the house and when they’d automatically turn on from time to time there’d be a loud “snap” then a growl as the unit powered up and came to life.

To my cousin, this must’ve sounded like one of the alien monsters, which made him literally scream in reaction, jump up and dive for cover by the couch. It was only a momentary fright and he regained his senses a few seconds later and sheepishly came back to his sleeping bag and endless hours of ribbing from my brother and myself over him thinking the air conditioner was an alien.

That’s my strongest memory of the movie Aliens that turns 30 this year.

To me, Aliens is a seminal film. Before I always thought sci-fi was mostly things like Star Wars and re-runs of the original Star Trek. The universe of Star Wars might have been a lot dirtier than that of Star Trek, but both were similar in tone. The good guys always won and no one died who didn’t deserve it — or at least died in order to move the story along.

Aliens was quite a different “beast.”

The setting of Aliens from space ships to space stations to far off worlds feels real and lived in. Like a place that real people in a real future might call home. And in Aliens lots of people die — most of them just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just like in real life, the universe of Aliens is a harsh place where things happen unexpectedly and not always fairly.

Even today I still watch Aliens about once a year and it’s still one of my favorite films. From the vistas of outer space to the Colonial Marines duking it out with the alien creatures to the character of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), whom we knew had a strong survival streak in her from the first outing in Alien (1979) who gets to go into her “tough as nails get in her way and she’s going to throw you aside” persona Aliens works from start to finish. Even today in the era of movies costing hundreds of millions of dollars to create using specialized computer effects, the analog FX of Aliens are, dare I say, superior to what’s used in movies today.

The budget of Aliens in todays dollars is something like a little more than $40 million. To put that number into perspective, Captain America: The Winter Soldier cost something like $170 million.

And I think it’s these real special effects of real people in real environments fighting these “real” creatures that makes the movie work so well. Everything in Aliens feels believable and there’s nothing that happens that feels out of place or there to “show off.”

What I find fascinating is that the original Alien was brilliant and the different but also great Aliens was amazing, that none of the films that followed were ever able to match either the original or Aliens brilliance. I think that those two movies set such a high mark in the franchise as it were that everything that came after from Alien Resurrection to Alien vs Predator is simply trying to redo what was done so well in Aliens back in 1986.

View my Aliens fansite from 1997 here.

Jack Nicholson & Michael Keaton on the set of Batman (1989)

MoviesJuly 13, 2016July 9, 2016

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Direct Beam Comms #31

Direct Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVJuly 10, 2016July 9, 2016

TV

The Night Of: Grade B

CmxsN4NUEAEfioA I don’t watch any procedural series like NCIS or Chicago P.D. While I’m willing to suspend my disbelief, to me, the stories of those shows move so fast they break the bonds of believability. I caught part of an episode of NCIS once when I was out where the squad was involved in a stakeout where they caught a guy dropping money off at a club, they interrogated the guy and found our where they money was coming from, one of the characters found out that his father died and he flew home, where he went through his father’s things while at the same time the NCIS squad was back out trying to take down this money-moving ring.

And all of this was supposed to have taken place in less than 24 hours and all happened before the halfway mark of the episode. Which to me is way to fast to even be remotely realistic. These stories seem like the Cliff-Notes version of a longer, more satisfying story.

Which made me think — what would happen to these single-episode stories if they were opened up and “let breath” over the course of an entire season? That these procedural series single-episode stories might actually be interesting over the course of many episodes. (And I suppose the opposite is true too, the first season of True Detective could probably be condensed down into a single episode of something like Chicago P.D.)

That’s what I think is happening with the new HBO mini-series The Night Of which premiers tonight (Sunday, July 10). It’s essentially a single episode of something like Law and Order but instead of it all happening in one episode is being told over the course of eight.

In The Night Of, college student Naz (Riz Ahmed) goes out one night to a party and on the way meets a beautiful women and the two both go back to her apartment for a night of drugs and debauchery. Only when Naz awakens early the next morning he finds the woman brutally murdered with blood literally on his hands. What follows are the police investigating the murder and Naz just happening to cross paths with defense attorney Jack Stone (John Turturro).

Which sounds like every other procedural series out there, but I think that since The Night Of is going to play that story out over the course of an entire series might be a really interesting series. With one caveat.

The first half of The Night Of is pretty bad. That part focuses on Naz pre-murder where he’s not just a college student, he’s a college student who tudors student athletes. And he’s only invited to the party because of the athletes. And he only steals his dad’s cab because a friend can’t drive them to the party. And he only accidentally picks up the girl because the “off duty” light on the cab is broken. And he only takes the drugs the girl offers and goes back to her place because she’s beautiful. And because of all this he wakes up in her blood covered apartment charged with murder.

Which to me is a lot of coincidence. Like the creators of the series are so desperate to show Naz as this bright, shining light of character that he’s made almost too good. Less of a real person and more of a martyr not deserving what’s about to happen to him in the criminal justice system.

However, once past this The Night Of gets really good.

Turturro’s character of Jack Stone is really interesting. A lawyer who wears sandals because of his eczema and only takes the case because he happens to be at the police station the night Naz is brought in. Equally compelling is Bill Camp as Detective Box, a cop who’s less world weary and more a cop who’s good at his job but isn’t all that emotionally invested in the cases he investigates.

After watching The Night Of I had to look Camp up since I knew I’d seen his face before and he’s absolutely wonderful in this show. I’d last seen him in the WGN series Manhattan but has been a working actor since the 1990s and has recently been in films such as 12 Years a Slave and Black Mass.

I think if the first episode of The Night Of had ended before the introduction of Stone or Box I would have been done with it after the first episode. Instead I’m really intrigued as to what the future holds for this show.

Cleverman: Grade B

L-R_-Jarrod-Slade-_Iain-Glen__-Koen-West-_Hunter-Page-Lochard_-and-Waruu-West-_Rob-Collins_-photo-Lisa-Tomasetti I’m not even sure exactly how to review Cleverman, the first season of which just ended on Sundance. This series takes place in a near future Australia where a species of human(?) named the “Hairies” have emerged from the outback and integrated themselves into society. But instead of being welcomed, these fur covered super-strong people are instead ghettoized and discriminated against.

Cleverman is an interesting concept and I stuck with the series to the end but there were a few things that bothered me. Like with the Australian specific cultural stuff I was mostly lost. From what I can tell the “Cleverman” who’s a kind of shaman for the Aboriginal Australians is real, but I’m assuming they don’t all have powers like being invulnerable to harm. And I’m assuming that maybe the “Hairies” might be some cultural thing in Aboriginal culture like maybe Bigfoot is here?

Still, the series was enjoyable if a bit over the top with an evil government, mad scientists looking to splice “Hairies” DNA with ours and monsters roaming the countryside ripping the hearts out of unsuspecting Aussies.

Movies

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Ultimate Edition): Grade: C+

The world of Batman v Superman is very much like our own. It’s a world full of terrors, mass executions and violence. And with every fiber of its being the message of Batman v Superman seems to be that this is the way things are, it sucks and there’s nothing you, or any superhero can do about it. Which to me is a big problem with Batman v Superman — that a fictional reality has superheroes like Superman and Batman who could seemingly do something about these problems, yet they spend most of the movie trying to figure out the best ways to punch each other in the face than actually do anything about their planetary troubles.

With visuals and tone seemingly taken from Se7en (1995), the story of Batman v Superman is a little odd. It’s 18 months after the events of Man of Steel (2013) leveled Metropolis and killed what had to be millions in the process. Superman’s (Henry Cavill) been framed for a crime he didn’t commit and a pill-popping and hard-drinking Batman (Ben Affleck) wants to take the alien down since there’s a possibility that he’s so powerful that one day he’ll enslave humanity. Much of the movie follows the super frame up by Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) which comes to a head with Batman battling Superman. But the plot of Batman v Superman is so paper thin and full of holes and the reason that Superman actually ends up fighting Batman is so dumb that it seems as if at every point the story of Batman v Superman started to work something would happen to derail everything and send the story crashing back down again.

I honestly feel like Batman v Superman is really an 1990s Image Comics movie and not a DC one since the movie really fits better with those Image comics than DC ones. Here, Superman and Batman exist mostly to grit their teeth and go after one and other no matter what the cost is to the general public. Be it Batman crashing through buildings with the Batmobile, which I’d assume some would have people inside, or beating seemingly innocent security guards so violently that one dies and has to have CPR by paramedics to try and save them. Superman is no better here. He has no qualms about crashing through buildings to go after terrorists who threaten Lois Lane (Amy Adams) or even fight and try to kill Batman when he feels like he has to do so.

Superman actually does go after terrorists here, which are a big part of this movie, but only when they threaten Lois Lane. I guess if you’re not her you’re on your own!

Whatever happened to the Superman willing to lay down his own life to protect others, or a Batman so affected by the death of his parents that he too would die if it meant saving just one life? Those aren’t the characters in Superman v Batman who’re ready to shoot/punch each other first and ask questions later be damned whoever gets caught in their colossal fisticuffs crossfire which is essentially the plot to every 1990s Image comic.

The one character who does come across as somewhat unscathed in Batman v Superman is that of Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot). She at least seems to be connected with her comic book source of being a fierce, independent warrior who doesn’t take guff lightly. I think the reason she comes off so well is that she’s got a lot less screen time than either Batman or Superman and thus less a chance of the writers of this film having her character do something stupid.