Saturday Matinee: There and Back Again, with Martinis

Here’s a trick question for you - how long does it take for the earth to rotate once around its axis? The answer is about 23 hours 56 minutes.

Like me, you might think, whoa, dude, doesn’t it take, like, 24 hours from noon to noon? Yes, I say the word “dude” that way.

It does take 24 hours from noon to noon, and we’re used to thinking of it that way. The earth revolves around the sun, right? So, like, the sun is fixed, right?

Right - except we’re revolving around it - at a rate of about four minutes per day.

I don’t think it would be so much of a trick question before the telegraph and the railroad, back when every town would have something like this.

This is a sundial that I walked by on my way to the Secret Saturday Matinee on Saturday. It’s in playground in a park by Ravenna ave. A hundred and fifty years ago, every town would have had one of these to tell local time. Inevitably, there would have been a time-nerd who would explain to you, if you couldn’t get away, how, if you measured according to the stars, a day is really only 23 hours and 56 minutes long.

So, I got off the bus and headed south toward the Grand Illusion. It was a sunny day, and I wanted to walk. As I went down University Way (“the Ave” to those of us who remember Mr. Nose). I walked through the Saturday farmer’s market (which is not a secret) to the theater to buy my series pass and popcorn. A few years back, when I bought a series pass, there was an actual series pass - a bit of paper that said “Series Pass” on it.

Now, they just take your name and write it down - and they kind of recognize me, anyway.

And sat down and took my picture.

I’ve already talked about Doctor Satan’s Robot, so let me say a bit about the serial for this series. Last year was a Zorro serial and the year before was Buck Rogers and the Planet Outlaws.

This year, it is Batman and Robin - this week, Episode 4, in a sprint:

Batman is electrocuted twice and falls down a hill. Robin infiltrates the enemy’s, er, cabin, and sees The Wizard, a masked villain who wants the formula for an explosive to use as an industrial energy supply. The local news media spills secret information about the location of the formula and the duo fights guys in suits to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.

There is a photographer in this episode named Vicky Vale. Kim Basinger was nowhere to be seen.

But who is The Wizard?

So, the film is out and - I went over to the District for a martini. The District is an agreeable martini bar in an art deco hotel. Unfortunately, it doesn’t open until 5:00. I should have consulted my sundial.

Instead, I met my wife at Kai’s Bistro, a fun place with a friendly bartender a few blocks away. We’ve only ever had drinks and appetizers there, but it is always a hit.

I had this and my wife had a gin drink with a cherry.

So ends my first week of this year’s series. Next week, a Fritz Lang movie that isn’t Metropolis. Yeah, surprised me, too.

Who is The Copperhead? And why is it a secret?

Near the end of Kill Bill, Kwai Chang Caine delivers a mini-lecture about Superman and his secret identity. Clark Kent, he expounds, is Superman’s commentary on humanity: weak, indecisive, cowardly. I think he had it wrong, though.

Superman likes being Clark Kent. He likes being a reporter.  After all, being a reporter is something he chose to do and something that can challenge him. If he can lift thousands of tons, it’s not because he studied hard and paid attention. He seems to like his family and friends - although he has only work friends.

And to do all this, he has to keep his identity a secret, since his mother would be in danger if people knew he was Superman, plus everybody at the Daily Planet would be asking him to open jars and stuff.

Batman has a different problem. After he puts on the cowl, he breaks the law a dozen times in a quiet night. We’ve seen Batman, in various incarnations, threaten suspects with grave bodily harm. No matter how strong your Stand Your Ground Law is, Batman entering private property without permission to beat up bad guys can’t be legal.

And the Batmobile does not have a license plate.

In this week’s matinee, Doctor Satan’s Robot, we meet Bob Wayne (no relation to Bruce), who is, secretly, The Copperhead. To hide his secret identity, he wears a sky mask that we are to pretend is chainmail.

As The Copperhead, Wayne fights Dr. Satan, who turns out to not be a good guy. Dr. Satan forces his henchmen to kill for him by using control disks that monitor and can kill them. He drugs his prisoners and turns them against their friends.

His most dastardly plot is use the terrifying robot he created to take over the country. I’m trying to only use pictures that I take for this blog, instead of just swiping them from the internet, and I don’t have one of the robot. Instead, imagine that the pans I’ve stacked are taller and have arms and legs.

Only one things stands in Dr. Satan's way - he can’t control the robot at a distance. Instead of inventing a way to do so, which he seems like he would be able to, based on everything else he invented, he spends the movie trying to steal a remote control cell from the good guys.

But The Copperhead is on the case, thwarting him at every turn. He punches Dr. Satan’s henchmen. He saves the good guys from Dr. Satan’s traps. He warns the good guys of Dr. Satan’s plans.

What I can’t figure out is why Wayne needed a secret identity in the first place. He’s not doing anything illegal, like Batman. As Wayne, he works with the DA and the police. They’re happy to have him around. They even take orders from him, although he doesn’t have a job, exactly.

He’s not protecting his family, since he has no family. The only friends he makes are they guys from the DA’s office. Sure, Dr. Satan might threaten these guys, including Wayne, but he already knows that they work with The Copperhead.

This movie was a re-cut of a serial from the 1940s, making 100 minute film out of a 12 episode series, which meant there were a few too many set pieces for a movie of this length.

One thing that this movie has was a room with a wall that closes in to crush Our Hero. This showed up in the Zorro serial from last year, making even less sense there than it did here.  I wonder if this is a serial trope - the audience wouldn't be happy at all if they didn't get the trap room where the wall crushed somebody.

The robot in Forbidden Planet can still look cool today, and Gort can be kind of scary, but the walking hot water heater in this flick was only good for a laugh. At least it could install itself, I guess.

The Secret Matinee in Exile: Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto, domo, domo

Here's a picture of a salt shaker:

No, this isn't a Jimmy Buffett reference or some kind of coded message. It is a picture of a salt shaker that I took at the Blue Water Bar and Grill in Friday Harbor. My family met up for a day out, yesterday, and I joined in - 

Which means that the Secret Saturday Matinee is still in exile - so back to
the Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival. 

Today, a robot.

Movies have always liked robots. A robot can be whatever you want it to be -

In Metropolis, a mad scientist creates a female art-deco robot. We know its female because it has boobs and a feminine face and boobs. He then animates it by using the soul of a woman, Maria, a school teacher from the morlocks. The scene is still one of the most famous and enduring of the cinema in the twentieth. After they boot up the robot with Soul OS 1.0, it goes wild, fornicating left and right.

In Forbidden Planet, Robbie the robot provides all the characters’ needs so we don’t have to ask what Walter Pidgeon eats on an otherwise desolate planet.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Hal is the implacable adversary and the only character that we can feel anything for. Hal is the last obstacle for mankind before they go beyond the infinite: mankind’s own technology, turned on it.

In Short Circuit, Number 5 is struck by lightening - and that makes it more than just circuit boards. The line between human and robot seems like an important line to cross.

So, what are we to make of Robota?

A woman lives in a room, white, featureless, except for the technology she lives with and the large fish tank that dominates the room. Every morning, she feeds her carp and then goes about her day in her modest room.

An R2 D2 style robot sees to her needs through the day, feeding her, giving her pills, providing entertainment. At night, the robot monitors her dreams and tries to make them come true the next day.

When she dreams of light bulbs, the robot gives her light bulbs for breakfast. When she dreams of the carp, the robot gives her her pet carp for breakfast.

It’s never clear whether she is a guest, a prisoner, or a pet, and whether the robot is her servant or her keeper.

But taking away her pet, the carp, is the last straw. In a fit of rage, she destroys the monitor over her bed and, I think, the robot, itself.

The Secret Matinee in Exile: And then he _steps_on_ the banana

Something you can do in a film that you can’t do in a story is a sight gag. A sight gag is a surprise communicated with a visual. Usually, these are funny, since surprise contributes so much to humor. Many of the films in this year’s Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival had awesome sight gags.

Of course, describing a sight gag is like explaining a joke. Even if you do it really, really well, you lose a lot. But we’ll do what we can -

In Bless You, Godzilla rampages through a city at the behest of the city’s celestial creator. Like most of the fun movies this festival had to offer, most of what makes it fun is visual. The monster is cute bordering on darling as it rampages through the city while the creator looks on. The main sight gag plays off the title - since “bless you” might be about the god-like celestial being, or not.

In Mirage, the main character - an Inuit boy - and his dog wander into a world of wacky things, where water falls up, carrying fish along with it. The boy instantly sees a big time saver for him in his fishing, stringing a net across a hole in the ice and having the water fill his net with fish. This - and a ton of other very funny gags - make this film hilarious without a word of dialog.

Remember 2001: A Space Odyssey? Astronaut goes through perils in space to reach a portal to some other kind of place?  It was a very visual movie. The film showed docking with a space station over classical music - and just let it play out in its own time. Later in the movie, we see the ship in space, floating along. We see the crew, running and eating. Finally, the climax of the movie is visions of the universe beyond what we know.

Spacetime Fabric Softener is the same thing, but more fun. Presented as minimalist animation of a suited figure on his football-shaped rocket, our astronaut navigates through dangers to reach a portal to other realities. We watch the considerably more zany visions pass in front of the astronaut on his way beyond the infinite.

Werewolf!

There wolf. There castle. There hotel.

See what I did there? My word gag plays on your knowledge of the genre of monster movies. Honeymoon Suite does just the same, as a man checks into a luxury hotel during the full moon. Between the reactions of the hotel staff and the other guests, the film offers us a bunch of gags and - once we’ve had some fun - brings the story home with a more soulful moment. The werewolf hasn’t always been this way, and he is, still, fundamentally a good person.

Some of the movies that I’ve talked about have been little more than the gag itself. Maybe you can tell from my tone that I enjoyed these movies. Sight gags are well suited for short films, when you have space, but not time, to tell a story.

The Magic Salmon was one gag after another and they did not wear thin, although they might have in a longer film. The story was in the form of a chapter of an old-timey serial. Fun, but if not for this exile, I would be watching an actual episode of an old-timey serial.

The Secret Matinee in Exile: Death’s Cold Hand

A few reviews from the festival - SPOILERS - I give plot summaries that give away stuff that I don't think will ruin anything for you, but SPOILERS anyway.

And thanks to Laurel, from whose blog I swiped the URLs for the movies. Go see her reviews, here.

Some of the films in this year’s Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival followed a theme of mortality. I don’t just mean that people died or could die. That is a given. You have a long a life and a short death - but the latter can’t help but take up some of your head space.

For instance, in Emit, we find a world where people live backwards, the stork brings an old woman to the hospital to die - and meet the husband she’ll be married to for her entire life, along with their son and seven year old granddaughter. The husband-to-be is overwrought at meeting his bride-to-have-been, but his granddaughter reassures him.

She remembers when she met her husband - and it was wonderful.

The hospital is still a place of beginnings and endings, deaths and births. The grandfather has so much to look forward to - back on - but his children know that there’s only seven years before they have to give up their daughter forever.

And she knows it as well.

Extra points for making every woman - and some of the guys - compress their legs together when the characters were right outside a birthing room. Think about it. Yeah.

For two brothers in Red Summer, the end of the world is a long way away. That’s what their mother and grandmother are determined to convince them.

The family wile away the summer days under a red sky. The adults cling to normality, telling the boys nothing, and there aren’t many other people still around to tell them. They do decide to have Christmas in July this year. After all, why should you wait for presents?

In a poignant ending, the older brother promises to protect his little brother from catastrophe with a magic charm - just as the adults tried to protect them.

No surprises, here, but if you can’t surprise, then be honest.

When The Decelerators were children, they thought they had forever, as well. This group of twenty-somethings, feeling their lives rushing by, invent machines that let each of them freeze themselves in time at one perfect moment. The narration explains all this - running from beginning to end, enhancing the video and being enhanced by the video. Each person chooses a perfect moment to live forever and each moment chosen says everything we could know about the person.

And there was one person left behind, who didn’t believe she could find a perfect moment, now that everyone else was gone. She discarded her decelerator and resigns herself to living - what she thinks of as - a diminished life, until the time stream, itself, decides to remove her.

But not everybody takes mortality lying down.

In Drain, we see two plotlines, both disturbing.

One follows an old woman, in a wheelchair, wrinkled and worn with time, and young man, who seems to be a technician of some sort.

The other follows a baby being abducted, taken to a safe house, cared for by a woman who seems sweetness and light, and then delivered, on order, to someone else.

Then the procedure, where the old woman is zip-tied to her chair and given a bite-block.

After an induced seizure, the woman is young and vital. We know, now, what the plastic tub with tubes must contain.

If it had ended here, this would have been a fun and effective little horror story, but there was a grace note, if you will. You see, we didn’t need to know the old woman’s motive. Living in terror of death, feeling it come up on you - those would be motives enough, even if we think that nobody would do such a horrible thing.

In the final scene, we see her walking on the beach, in a bikini, smiling at the surfers.

She got young and now she’s going to go get some.

The Secret Matinee in Exile: What is she wearing?

Yesterday, the Grand Illusion starts its Secret Saturday Matinee. For twelve weeks, there will be a different fun movie, along with an old time serial of Batman and Robin. This is superheros month. Superhero movies from an era before digital effects.

But I had to miss it because yesterday was the Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival at the Cinerama in Seattle. Laurel and I go every year - except for the year when we thought we could just buy tickets at the door.

Although missing the matinee makes me the Sad Panda, we have a lot of fun movies to see.

Before we get to that, let’s talk about the costumes.

This festival is run together with EMP which includes a Sci-Fi museum. Every year, they display some costumes from their collection in the lobby of the theater. Here were the ones on the south side of the concession stands:

The costumes are The Dude, Leeloo, Tyrell, and Robin Hood.

One clarification - when production company makes a movie, they don’t just have the costume designers make a single costume for a character. According to the Lord of the Rings additional material on the DVDs, they made ten copies of the same costume for Frodo in good, clean condition, and then ten in torn, dirty condition. Since movies are usually filmed in a different order from the order of scenes in the final movie, you have to have clean costumes for scenes early in the movie. And you need several to allow for wear and tear. And for Lord of the Rings, there also had to be matching costumes for stunt doubles and for other doubles.

So, the costume on the left there might or might not have actually been worn by Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski. They may not have needed as many as the Lord of the Rings movies, but still.

That said, it’s kinda nifty to look at the costumes and recognize artifacts from Battlestar Galactica or Blade Runner. These are the shows and movies that I grew up with.

Notice the second costume from the left?

Well, that’s from The Fifth Element, where Bruce Willis saves the whole galaxy and Lola in a remake of the cult classic Heavy Metal. (No, the actor isn’t actually the same as in Run Lola Run. The Fifth Element woman did go on to be Alice in the Resident Evil movies, though.)

So, what’s that orange thing she’s wearing?

I recognize a shirt, even without its midriff, and extremely tight pants, but what’s that orange thing? It doesn’t hold anything up. It offers no protection that I can ascertain. It seems well suited to ride up into Milla’s butt crack and lady parts, but I’ve been told that women are ambivalent about that. If it’s supposed to be attractive, somehow, well, there are articles of clothing that are uncomfortable to wear, not very useful, and extremely sexy, but this ain’t one of them.

I may have needed to read the plaques to recognize the Dude or Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood, but the ones on the north side of the lobby, I knew all those right away:

That’s Commander Adama, Rachael, another replicant, and Seven of Nine. No, I can’t name the other replicant without looking it up.

Next time, some of the short films.