Light Sabers Make No Sense

If you can use the Force to guide your laser sword, you can use it with your pistol. And make something less clumsy and random, while you're at it.

Still, light sabers work in the Star Wars universe. The light saber duel at the end of Empire was the high point of the movie. Vader and Obi Wan crossing swords again, after all those years, made the original feel like it really was part of a bigger story. For all the bitching and moaning about the prequel movies, every time the light sabers come out, the movies work.

Last night, at the Grand Illusion, I saw Space Battleship Yamato. We saw the mid-20th century battleship - one of the best two or three ever built - refitted as a space ship and sent into space.

Launch Yamato!

The movie is a live action remake of a 1974 Japanese cartoon, imported to America as Star Blazers in the late 1970s - and it was tremendously fun! It had a real 1980s Star Wars feel to it. They left a lot out, especially remaking the Gamalons into a less personal enemy.

Our heroes launched the Black Tiger squadron and fought their way through Gamilon ships. Captain Avatar (with his actual Japanese name) got too sick to lead and passed the mantle to our hero. They fought their way to the dying world of Iskandar, fought through the Gamilon ground forces, and got the CosmoDNA (called something else in this version), then hauled ass back to earth.

The movie includes everything from the show, but it didn't feel like they were checking off boxes (I'm looking at you, Pacific Rim).

The characters did their things and could have, but didn't, ruin the movie, but the star of the show was the Yamato, raised from the dried ocean bed to save all mankind. They pulled out the wave motion cannon early on - so we wouldn't be waiting for it - and later we saw the big guns cut loose, holding off the Gamilons long enough to jump to safety.

You can probably guess that I watched the Americanized version, back in the day. I watched many things, back in the day, but they are forgotten, even by me. Star Blazers had something of worth to offer.

Launch Yamato!

Your Honor

Finishing up Heroes and Villains month, we have a cowboy movie, with a stoic hero, a wacky sidekick, and an oily villain.

But let’s start with the women folk.

There are three female characters in Decision at Sundown. We meet Lucy on her wedding day, at the chapel, getting ready to marry our oily villain. Her gown isn’t white, but its an awfully pale blue, so let’s round her up to virgin.

Ruby is the other woman we hear from - the oily villain’s mistress. She’s taking his wedding in stride, mostly. She knew he wasn’t going to marry her and doesn’t want to make any trouble - but she does plan to go to the wedding. Oily Villain agrees - since he can’t really stop her without making more of a stink about - but he insists she not make a spectacle of herself by sitting up front.

Enter our hero, the cowboy, Bart.

The cowboy is an American hero - at least, we've laid claim to him for the last century. From the Virginian on down, we know the story. A feller leaves the east behind for the wide open spaces of the west. Out there, there isn't so much law, but cowboys live by a code of honor, so they don't need as much law.

And Bart tells us, more than once, how a man should act like a man and how that means he has to kill the villain, no matter what. As a cowboy, you see, he even has to warn the villain, give him a fair shot - so to speak - to defend himself.

This kind of cowboy embodies an honor society. In an honor society, men establish and maintain honor through feats of bravery and women do so by defending their chastity. Bart needs to avenge his dishonor - since Mary, his wife, killed herself after taking up with the villain.

It turns out, though, that Mary fell down on the second count. While Bart was a war, she took up with more than one man. The villain was just the last before she killed herself. When Bart realized that his beloved wife was a tramp, killing the villain became optional.

And Ruby put a stop to it by shooting the villain in the arm, so he couldn’t hold a pistol.

It’s not like Bart could shoot an unarmed man.

The Rise of Darth Guffin

The McGuffin is a term Hitchcock coined for an object that didn’t have anything to do with the movie, but that moved the plot along. There was that weird statue that showed up at the end of North by Northwest, full of microfilm, or gefilte fish, or something. The stolen money at the beginning of Psycho was a McGuffin - what, you don’t remember the money at the beginning of Psycho? That’s because it had nothing to do with the story of the movie - it just moved the characters around.

Lots of filmmakers use McGuffins. In The Maltese Falcon, the titular falcon statue had nothing, really, to do with the story. The letters of transit in Casablanca make no sense, but they keep things moving. And that suitcase in Pulp Fiction has McGuffin written on it in letters so large you make them out from the International Space Station.

The director for the next Star Wars movie has been named - J. J. Abrams - and I’ve been a fan since Alias. There’s a lot of good stuff to say about him as a choice, especially in light of the two movie franchises he participated in - Mission Impossible and Star Trek.

Both great movies that I enjoyed.

But he McGuffinized both stories.

In Mission Impossible 3, everybody is after an identified weapon of mass destruction. The characters don’t even try to figure out what it is, they just run after it.

And in Star Trek, the romulans use Red Matter to travel through time and blow up planets.

So, I am worried that I’ll be sitting in the theater in a couple of years saying, “Ah, the Vorpnolian Compression. Of course! How will they ever wrest that from Darth Guffin?”

Let's Blame Zorro

Episode 4 of Zorro's Fighting Legion in a sprint:

Zorro pulls the fuse out of the gunpowder in time to save the mine and is blamed for attacking the mine in the council the next day. Don del Oro decides to capture a shipment of weapons for the Yaqui by sending a note to the council that the shipment has been delayed, diverting all the solders to search for Zorro and the Titular Legion. Zorro follows clues to discover this plot at a local armory. The forces of Don del Oro pursue him to a suspension bridge and cut the ropes, making him fall . . .

Don del Oro is . . .

Character Leftovers

My wife and I attended the Eighth Annual Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Film Festival (2013) here in Seattle. I’m doing reviews of some of the shorts we saw there.
What do you think about how people turned on M. Night Shyamalan? Everybody loved him when he did The Sixth Sense, but by the time he did Signs, everybody was so over him. For the record, I liked Signs and The Village and I like The Lady in the Water once.
Shyamalan’s best directed movie was Unbreakable, with Bruce Willis as a superhero who could not be hurt, except by water. People might complain about the other movies, but they don’t bother with Unbreakable. The thing that I didn’t like about it was that everything about Bruce Willis’ character contributed to the plot.
There is a famous quote (Chekhov, I think) that, if you show an audience a gun in the first act, it must go off in the third. I guess that’s right - but you can take that sentiment way too far.
Willis’ character in this movie is so tightly connected to the plot, every aspect of him fitted so perfectly to the clockwork mechanism of the script, that there is nothing left over. Take away the plot, and the character is gone.
And that is at odds the idea that drama is about real people - that it could be a day in the life of someone, someone like you or me.
Which brings me to this posting’s review:

88:88
Joey Ciccoline
URL
Woman makes changes to her apartment, securing her bed to the floor and securing the door against intrusion. That night, aliens attempt to abduct her, as the seem to have done in the past, but a trap that she set for them wounds one. While the aliens attack, appliances malfunction, making her digital alarm clock read 88:88.
Establishes world: Yes.
Character leftovers: Yes.
Tells a story: Yes.
And what I thought
The woman comes home with supplies – hardware, tools, restraints – and we can only guess what she means to do with them. She installs extra locks and bars the door. She secures straps to the bed. Does she mean to hold someone prisoner in the room, in the bed? Then she chains herself to the bed. Is she a werewolf, ready to change? What's that mirror for?
When the alien comes, everything falls into place. It was nicely done.
Which brings me to the character leftover. We learn from a phone message that she’s had a fight with someone, boyfriend, perhaps. She makes all her preparations alone. The aliens turn out to be one of her problems. While she has to deal with the abductions, she has to deal with the disbelief of her boyfriend. You can believe that this character had a life before this film and will after.
That’s why leftovers are a good thing.

Short films reviews

Yesterday, my wife and I attended the Eighth Annual Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Film Festival (2013) here in Seattle. Although I had to miss the Secret Matinee at the Grand Illusion this week, there is no reason that this blog should suffer.

The festival had 21 short films in two sessions. I’m going to do longer posts for my favorites, and then summary reviews of the others over the course of the next week or two.

Three things kept occurring to me as I watched the various films, so I’m going to give them their own entries. More later on what, exactly, I mean by each of these:

Establishes world: How well does the film ground us in its reality?

Character leftovers: Take away the plot and is there anything left of these people? Could they be real people, in some way, or are they just puppets to carry out the plot?

Tells a story: These are short films, so the stories are correspondingly short, but there is a difference between a story - even a tiny one - worth telling and one that make you wish it were a better story.

To start with, my favorite of the festival:

Foxes (Here’s a trailer)

Lorcan Finnegan
A husband convinces his wife that they should buy a house in a new development, but the development went bust and they are now isolated. They can barely cover the mortgage, since her work as a photographer isn't going well. A pack of foxes is getting into the garbage and the wife is taken with them, eager to photograph them. She is drawn into their world and becomes feral. After she disappears, her husband is alone, but we know – and maybe he knows – that his wife has become one of the foxes.

Establishes world: Better than I could have imagined.

Character leftovers: We know how they came to be where they were and we can guess why they don’t just leave. There are only two characters, but they work.

Tells a story: The story is the setting, but it has direction as we watch nature — in the form of the foxes — take back the last of the houses from encroaching humanity.

“Where did they film that?” I asked my wife while we waited for the bus.

This is a film of its time. Over the last five years, we have heard and heard again of people stuck in houses they thought they could afford. We've heard about how neighborhoods empty out, and watched streets littered with For Sale signs.

"Foxes" turns all this up to eleven. We see a housing development abandoned, with brush growing up about the sidewalks and filling back yards. I wonder if Ireland is even worse than hard-hit places in the US.  In the film, we don’t see other cars, we don’t see other people. The place is abandoned. In one scene, we see the outside of the couple's house as they turn off the lights, leaving the whole block dark.

So, we know what these people are doing here. The husband persuaded his wife that they needed to get in this great deal, be the first ones in the new housing development, right before the bottom fell out. And it makes sense that they stay. If they can’t afford to move, it must be super, super easy to cling to anything they still have, distracting themselves by nursing their resentments for each other.
And then the foxes circle in.

The foxes aren’t threatening as such. They go away when people are about. Like the brush growing in what should have been flower gardens, you can get rid of them, but they keep coming back.

The husband drives to some kind of job every day, but the wife can't get clients to come all the way out there for portraits. But the foxes let her take pictures. They welcome her.

We watch the wife go feral just like the rest of the neighborhood — and eventually become a fox while her husband just stumbles through his days. It’s not a twist ending that she transforms. By the time we get there, I was rooting for it to happen.

The only thing that was a little heavy-handed was a clue as to what happened to the wife — she had one blue and one green eye and so did the fox she turned into. I didn't think we needed that, but the filmmaker must have been afraid people wouldn't get it.

This was a fun and creepy film, easily the best of the festival.

Episode 2: The Flaming Z

The local commandante denounces Zorro as a criminal and puts a bounty on his head and the heads of the titular fighting legion. One of the men is caught hiding his laundry, so Zorro used instant messaging, in the form of a z shaped fire, to call the legion together. The legion breaks the man out, using hives of bees, but the forces of Don del Oro hack their communications and lure the legion to a trap in the form of gunpowder bombs under the old mission (which I wou ld have thought would be the new mission, since this was a long time ago.) Zorro's figures it out, but he gets trapped after his sidekick faints and is trapped I n the building. We watch it explode.

Who is Don del Oro?

Adventures of The Magna Carta

I’ve read that Robin Hood was probably not a real person, but that Prince John - later King John - was. King John is nobody’s favorite king, since he seemed to have trouble winning wars. It was so bad that his subjects wanted to rise up against him, but encountered a problem. The usual thing to do, back then, when you had a bad king was rally behind another king and push the first one out.

There wasn’t, though, a good alternative to John, so they made him sign a list of laws, instead. They might have call it the charter, but there was already a charter about forests. Since it was longer than that, they called it the bigger charter.

As much as we might like codes of law, they don’t do a good job of swashbuckling, so we need a person-hero to stand up to John instead, in the person of Robin of Locksley. Errol Flynn swashes and buckles from beginning to end in his signature role. We don’t waste any time getting a reason for him to turn outlaw - not that kind of movie - but we do spend time with him convincing Lady Marion (Olivia DeHavilland) that John is a butthead and that taxes are too high. I suppose she has hair, but I don't think we can actually tell that from the movie itself.

Our villain this week is - Basil Rathbone, again, this time as Sir Guy of Gisbourne. Prince John, Sir Guy, and the Sheriff make an ineffective team against Robin Hood and his merry men.

After Zorro, last week, I wonder a bit about what makes a hero. At least, a movie hero. Robin is a better archer and better swordsman than Sir Guy - and he’s more honorable, refusing to run Guy through when Guy loses his sword. In stories, we don’t get to ask whether we should follow someone for being decent and honorable. They are always better fighters, as well, so we don’t have to make the hard choices.

And, once again, I kinda miss the point. The Adventures of Robin Hood is a fun, fun movie.

Week 1: The Feature

This week's feature - The Mark of Zorro.

The theme for the first month of the matinee series is Heroes and Villains and here is our hero - dashing Tyrone Power as Don Diego Vega, better known as Zorro (the Fox). Our villain is a two-fer: Basil Rathbone as Captain Esteban Pasquale and J Edgar Bromberg as Luis Quintero.

I had a hell of a time summing up the plot of this week's Zorro serial, but the plot of the feature is pretty straight-forward. Greedy governor Quintero, backed by his ruthless enforcer, plunders the local farmers for taxes. Nobody can defeat Pasquale and his soldiers, and good people do not even try, because Quintero operates under color of law. As harmless fop Don Diego, Zorro infiltrates Quintero's household, while the masked fox steals ill-gotten tax revenue from Quintero's men. When the time is right, Zorro bests Pasquale with a sword and leads an uprising, casting down Quintero and restoring his father as the rightful authority.

I started writing a bit about heroes and villains - such as the fact that Zorro steals and terrorizes the governor, even though he is the hero, but that is beside the point. My wife was quite taken with Tyrone Power’s wonderful hair and pretty eyes, and he delivered a hilarious performance as the fop. The sword fight with Basil Rathbone moved fast and looked good, from drawing their swords to Zorro running Pasquale through - under the Z, titular Mark of Zorro!

The foppishness of Zorro's secret identity pays off lots of laughs. Also, it works as a plot device. Not only does Don Diego get close to his enemies without danger, but he can also tweak them personally and play them against each other. He was obvious about pursuing the wife of Quintero taking her affections away from Pasquale. (I do have to wonder what the arrangement was between these three people - Quintero, Pasquale, and Quintero's wife. Pasquale offers to take her away with him to Spain. They go riding every day. Quintero can't be unaware.)

There I go, getting serious again!

The Mark of Zorro was a swashbuckling good time!


The cool bits: Tyrone Power talking about shopping. Zorro jumping his horse off the bridge into the water. The already-mentioned sword fight. All the scenes with Basil Rathbone and the governor. Something about a June morning.

The movie experience: Ever notice moments of silence, now and again, when everybody stops talking at once? There are quiet moments in movies, too, when a scene fades to black with no music. Just as one of those moments came on, we heard - "Will you stop kicking the back of my chair? It is very distracting."

Comedy gold: An intemperate priest - I mean “Padre” - kept angrily declaring how he would kill the governor or his men for their terrible wrongs. Then he would cross himself and say, “God forgive me!” In the melee at the end of the film, every time he hit a soldier he crossed himself and said, “God forgive me!”

Movie Trivia: When this movie played in theaters in 1940 and 1941, after 373 women swooned at the sight of Tyrone Power’s glorious hair and pretty eyes, theaters required all female patrons to sign waivers of right to sue. Maribeth Sampson refused to sign and sued a theater in Arizona. The Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice of the United States Charles Evans Hughes, held that, if Maribeth Sampson refused to sign the waiver, she could only attend the movie wearing a blindfold.

Week 1: The Serial

Zorro's Fighting Legion episode 1: “The Golden God” in a hundred word sprint:

Central Mexico, after independence. Mexico needs gold, but the only route from the only mine to Mexico City is beset by Yaqui Indians at the behest of their new leader, the golden idol Don del Oro. Don Diego is a fop, but as Zorro, he leads the titular legion. He wields a whip and sword, but Volita thinks he's gay. The gold train (one mule) is almost to the pass, where villains use barrels of black powder to blow up the ridge just as Zorro tries to warn the train.

Don del Oro is . . .

The cool bits: The Golden God shows up in an underground cavern with giant doors to reveal him to his followers and a bottomless pit for former followers.

The confusing part: There were a bunch of men on the council. I’m not sure what all their jobs are, although one of them probably has “Don del Oro” on his business cards.

Ah, they’re doing that again: Zorro’s horse likes to rear up on his hind legs. A lot.

The movie experience: When Zorro's secret identity shows up to prance about, I leaned over to tell my wife, "He's a fop." Then Volita told her maid, "Santa Maria save us, he's a fop!"

Movie Trivia: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded this episode a special award for Least Stirring Speech Imaginable Given by a Commander to the Troops. That award was not given again until 1996 for Bill Pullman’s speech in Independence Day.

Next, our feature, The Mark of Zorro.

What’s This, Then?

I show my series pass, and pay for my popcorn. Coat folded over my arm, I stop at the condiment station. Popcorn, here, comes lightly salted, popped in some noble oil, served in small, medium, and large paper bags. Choose your flavors. There is salt, of course, and buttery flavor, but I always go for the curry powder - shaking it over my medium popcorn bag, then tapping the bag, getting the curry to settle, shaking more curry on, tapping again, until I know the popcorn will taste of curry-goodness.

And I go in.

Last winter, this was my every Saturday, at the Sprocket Society's Saturday Secret Matinees at the Grand Illusion Cinema. Every week, another old movie. The Mole People, First Spaceship on Venus, Gorath, and many others. Every week, an episode of Buck Rogers and the Planet Outlaws.

They don't announce the features in advance. Last year, the series began with Earth Vs the Flying Saucers. "A classic!" I whispered to my wife - who joined me for the first film and one later in the year.

Whatever you do, don’t watch EvFS alone. Have some friends over. Eat salsa. The movie is a classic, but not for acting or story. Ray Harryhausen did the special effects, most importantly, the titular flying saucers. The movie follows a rocket scientist as he develops an energy weapon to defeat the invaders.

About five minutes into the film, the screenwriters treated us to some clumsy sexual innuendo and the audience laughed at it.

"Daddy, why are you laughing?" demanded a young boy in the row behind us. For reasons the little boy would not understand, the audience laughed harder at that.

This is the kind of moment that only happens when you see a film with other people. It makes seeing a movie in a theater different from watching the film at home on a TV or computer. The whole series was quirky and fun.

I thought about blogging the series last year, but I wanted to be in the movies, instead of aware of them. This year, though, I’m going to try to do both. So, if you check back to this blog over the next few months, this is what you will find:

• Posts about the features. This year, the themes are Heroes and Villains, Exotic Lands, and Alien Encounters.
• Posts about the serial, Zorro's Fighting Legion.
• Posts about the theatre and me watching the matinee. The Grand Illusion is a funky little non-profit in Seattle’s U-District. I guess I’ve already talked about the popcorn.
• Posts about dinner and drinks before or after the film.

Although I plan to get a series pass, I will miss two of the weekends, but for one of them, the SIFF/EMP Sci-Fi shorts is at the Cinerama and we have tickets. Expect reviews.

Finally, in early May, I plan to make it down to Portland for the H. P. Lovecraft film festival. I’ve been a couple of times, and it’s been fun. If this blog is going well, I’ll finish it up with reviews from that festival.

And that will be the end of this blog. I’ve tried to do ongoing blogs and I do run out of steam for a topic. I have better success with a project blog. Three months, plus HPL as a coda.

As for the first film in last year’s series, Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers, later in the film, the aliens use a mind control crystal on a captured earthling. The scene involved the man's skull turning transparent so we could see the brain inside.

It looked just as hokey as you imagine.

From the row behind us, I could hear the father of the little boy comforting him. I didn't look around, but I think the kid sounded scared - of a hokey, black and white glowing crystal projected on a small screen in a theater roughly the size of my living room.

Ten years from now, that little boy will be a teenager with a flat screen TV almost as big as the Grand Illusion's screen. That teenager may choose any movie ever made, but I doubt he’ll ever be in a movie the way he was that January morning ten years earlier.