Heckler and Kochk

Do Not Adjust Your Bureau

2012-01-26T03:08:00.000-08:00

0. Kochk Introduces

Before The Adjustment Bureau, Sky Movies showed a brief "Matt Damon introduces" piece in which Matt Damon came up with something to say about the film. Apart from saying it was fun to make, he suggests we watch Emily Blunt, as her performance is the most important thing in the film. Eventually I will circle back and review his introduction, but since I am the only person[1] in the world who is interested in it first I'll talk about the film. Will there be spoilers? Not if someone adjusts this piece first.

1. Your Destiny Is In The Script

Matt Damon's character, David Norris, is introduced in a montage of his political career, culminating in him losing a race to be Senator for the state of New York due to him playing a prank on his old college buddies. He meets a mysterious woman in the men's toilets which inspires him to go out and give the kind of concession speech (about paying consultants to advise on his wardrobe, focusing on his tie[2] and on the $7300 to advise on the amount of scuffing on his shoes) we all wish politicians would make. No, forget that, he gives the kind of speech they should make before they have to concede.

We skip to Norris' first day at work, and the sinister hat-wearing men of the titular adjustment bureau plan to make him spill his coffee on his shirt[3]. The agent assigned to do it falls asleep, so Norris catches the bus, meets the mysterious woman, gets her name (Elise) and number, then arrives early at work to discover the sinister hat-wearing men have frozen everyone and are busy changing the mind of his boss[4] with a mysterious device. There's some running and chasing[5], with people appearing where they shouldn't and the top floor office door leading into an underground garage where there's a bit of discussion why they can't just wipe his memory or something, and then they explain the premise of the film to him.

The premise is this: that everyone has a destiny and the job of the adjustment bureau is to make sure that chance doesn't take them away from that destiny. Norris and Elise[6] are not destined to be together. They take away and burn the number and threaten him with making him mad if he tries to tell anyone anything.

Because this film is squarely in the mainstream tradition of American cinema, Norris will Not Submit To Authority, especially because he is in True Love. So one man sets out to oppose a mind-and-space-twisting conspiracy of unknown size that can determine the results of your decisions before you make them.

2. True Love Conquers All

As I said, we're right in the middle of Hollywood filmmaking. So the question is not can Norris defeat this conspiracy and be reunited with his love, but instead how will he do it and, more importantly what will it cost him and who will he have to become?

Since he appears to have no life outside work, running for office and chasing the woman of his dreams who he met twice for about ten minutes in total, it seems that all he has to sacrifice is his dull, uninteresting life. Here's where Damon's assertion that the film is all about Blunt comes in. When she appears the film is transformed. Partly that's the filmmaking techniques, partly it's that she's easy on the eye and a good actress, but in part it's the way Damon's performance changes when he's with her. To say that he's dull without her exaggerates the situation, but his character becomes animated, interested, fascinated, and eventually driven. We believe that he will be the man to ride the same bus for three years on the off-chance that he will spot the same woman, and having found her will fight fate to be with her. Blunt's performance is vital to the film, but she's only on screen for half the running time, while Damon is in nearly every scene. We need Blunt's luminous presence, but without Damon's reflection it would be without context. So much for "Matt Damon Introduces".

3. My Destiny is My Own

The destinies of mankind, as it turns out, are set by the Chairman. Who the Chairman is remains a mystery[7]. The reason for the longlived adjustment bureau members taking control of history is eventually explained; twice before they've let human determine their own destiny; once during the Roman Empire, then again in 1910[8]. We humans promptly made a big mess of things.

The exact plan is never made explicit. We assume it is generally good (dark ages bad; WW1 and 2 bad; they change Norris' boss mind from being vaguely against funding the solar energy proposal to vaguely in favour), but most of what we're told is about things we don't see, future things that haven't happened yet and may not happen and from the adjustment bureau itself, an organisation with mysterious powers. Taking them at face value though, it seems that the plan is to make Norris president, and Elise a great dancer and choreographer. This, though, will only happen if they are apart.

A chance meeting between Norris and Elise spirals out of control, with the bureau trying to fix things. Firstly it seems that they will be confirmed off plan if they have a kiss "a proper kiss". An interruption transforms the kiss from a "proper" one into a "goodbye" kiss. Norris is then kept from her dance practice by accidents, traffic lights, a fake policeman[9]. Nevertheless he gets there and goes off plan after seeing her dance.

Thompson, the troubleshooter played by Terrance Stamp, then turns up and tells Norris exactly what the relationship between him and Elise will cost; her dance career. To make the point, she then slips and sprains her ankle. Norris leaves her.

Meanwhile we discover that the reason they are so drawn to each other is that in earlier versions of the plan they were meant to be together. So the reason Norris wants, and is able, to be with her is that they're destined to be with each other. The adjustment bureau is fighting it's own plans. Norris is rejecting one destiny determined by the adjustment bureau in favour of another destiny determined by the bureau.

4. Fight Fate with Fate

For no very good reason bureau member Harry Mitchell (Anthony Mackie) decides to help Norris, explaining the hats (allowing the bureau to use doors as shortcuts) and giving him a chance to interrupt Elise's wedding[10]. On the run, Elise and Norris get into the adjustment bureau headquarters and try to see the Chairman. Then Mitchell reappears and tells them that the Chairman has seen what they've done, they've passed their test, they can make their own destiny now etc. etc.

I found the ending a little weak. Norris and Elise are willing to give up everything for their love, so the Chairman sends someone to say "Fair enough, good luck with that kids." Deus Ex Machina. Roll credits!

5. I Knew You Were Going To Write That

Like the film, I don't really have a conclusion. It's about free will and fate. There are doors that go where they shouldn't. There's a secret behind everyday life. The film has a lot of The Matrix in it's DNA, and that's not a bad thing. The bureau can't tell what's going on when water is about, which may be a metaphor for the way our lives flow and change, but can also be channelled, or it may just have been an excuse to film some gorgeous New York waterfronts and gloomy rainfilled streets. There's some great shots, especially when Norris, on the run, keeps heading through shortcut doors into more and more iconic and outrageous New York situations. Blunt and Damon do a great job of the love-at-first-sight scene, and then carry this through. It's a good film. It raises interesting questions and leaves some of them unanswered. The ending is a bit abrupt. That is all.

[1] Person in this case including the set of fictional internet enabled movie reviewing firearms.
[2] It looks like the kind of tie you'd end up with if you paid a consultant to pick out your wardrobe. It's almost as if there was a professional wardrobe person picking out the clothes in the film.
[3] Forget Galactus or Blofeld, this is the kind of villain I take personally.
[4] Who was his campaign manager and is also the closest thing to a friend Norris seems to have. It looks like it's some kind of investment bank.
[5] There's a lot of that in the film, almost as though they're trying to show that he's trying to outrun his fate.
[6] We don't find out Elise's surname for quite a while.
[7] This being based on a PKD story, then it's aliens, or God, or possibly aliens that are God.
[8] Here's an amusing game; pick two historical dates that spring to mind at random, then assume the adjustment bureau stopped controlling either just before or just after those events. Generally this is nearly as convincing as the dates given. Also, for a depressing game, play it several times.
[9] In a hat.
[10] I'm a sucker for a good interrupted wedding scene. This is not an interrupted wedding scene. Disappointing.

Mannequin: A Film From The 80s.

2011-11-23T10:36:00.000-08:00

On Saturday we watched Mannequin. Kim Catrall is an ancient egyptian woman who doesn't want to marry a camel dung dealer so the gods hear her prayers and reincarnate her as a shop dummy 4500 years later. Andrew McCarthy, who made her, saves the life of a store owner who gives him a job. He finds the mannequin, which he considers his finest work of art, and she comes to life. She helps him make brilliant window displays that turn the fortunes of the store around. However she turns back into a mannequin whenever anyone else sees her. The film is quite consistent on this.

The store's rival, the security guard, the corrupt vice president and McCarthy's ex-girlfriend are the antagonists. The climax comes when, furious with jealousy, the ex- steals and tries to destroy the mannequin.

The film features jokes about impotence, veterans with PTSD, animal cruelty and sex with mannequins. It also co-stars a flamboyant homosexual with no visible boyfriend who explicitly states that he sleeps alone in order to prevent him being too transgressive. There is comic violence, women in their underwear and one excellent car stunt. I quite enjoyed it. Suitable for V_.

This music video is associated with the film, and also avoids the necessity of actually seeing it.

Heckler had this to say: "I noticed that the mannequin could speak modern day American as opposed to ancient Egyptian which is questionable. Also I doubt there were redheaded princesses in ancient Egypt but I'll let that go," and also "Also I was so tired I didn't see the end and went to bed."

I note of course that red hair was associated with the ancient Egyptian god Set; although not common red hair was not unknown to the ancient Egyptians.

Superheroes Or Van Full Of Guys?

2011-10-25T03:47:00.001-07:00

Previously on Heckler and Kochk we have rated things for our friend V_ who doesn't like gruesomeness, or people being embarrassed or a handful of other things, but those are the main ones. This has spun off into the V_ film classification board which cannot be made public as it would blow your tiny mind, and some of the people on it want more control over their personal information than two fictional sci-fi reviewing firearms can provide.

I reviewed the series premiere of Alphas for it, which I will now reproduce, slightly redacted:

[Recently] I saw the Feature Length Series Premiere of Alphas, a superhero TV show based on the X-Men template, a bit like Heroes. It opens with the team existing, thus avoiding a long boring origin story sequence and allowing us to get straight in with an impossible assassination. The team consists of Bill, an FBI agent who gets very sweaty, and also strong, when under stress; Gary who is Aspergers and can see electromagnetic signals, except Nokia; shy Rachel who can concentrate on one sense at a time allowing the camera to zoom in, or show a special effect to highlight a CLUE; and confident good-looking Maddy who has an actually useful superpower of getting people to do what she says solely through the use of her Hollywood Actress Good Looks. They're led by a hippy psychologist, who likes herbs and vinyl records, but his "hey, can't we all get along" exterior hides a spine of steel; after all we're set in New York, the Super Hero Mecca, rather than California.

The episode involves chasing an assassin, de-brainwashing him, recruiting him to the team (he has super gymnastics, but has a mental block which ruined his baseball career), chasing the brainwasher and discovering that when you chase a brainwasher people who come in contact with him get brainwashed. The team is kind of amateur, which Bill the FBI agent complains about, and their powers are low key enough that they can't just solve problems and be back to the donut shop by the first ad break. There's plenty of inter-team conflict, conflict between the professor and the FBI agent who sponsors the team and can't bring himself to say anything clearly ("Talking with you is like a Beckett play" "I don't know what that is"), and some kind of opposition called "Red Flag". If I can be bothered to care about the characters, and they don't degenerate into soap opera, then it could be quite good.

It contains a couple of shootings, a stabbing and a man falling to his death, none of which are gory, but also some creepy scenes where people have been mind controlled and one of them kills themselves in a nasty way. Other than that one scene I would declare this Suitable for V_ (SfV).

This lead me to thinking which of these characters and their superpowers could be replaced by a van full of specialists and equipment? In the commentary I went on to say:

We could replace Bill's super-strength-when-under-stress with five ex-army guys and a a van with winch, bolt cutters, battering ram, riot gear etc. We could replace Gary's EM stuff with a 8 guys and a van filled with $1M of ex-soviet electronic warfare equipment[Ed: In Joke]. We can replace Rachel with a CSI van and lab, so a 5 person team. So far 3 of our superpowered guys could each be replaced with a small team and a van of equipment, which would also give the team more depth and numbers.

and

Hicks superkinethesisiesies [sic] is more problematic. In theory everything he does could be done by, say, the team that replaces Bill, but since he is the equivalent of an Olympic athlete in several disciplines, they would have to be really, really good ex-army guys.

and

Finally Maddy would need to be replaced by Derren Brown backed by a multi-million dollar ad-agency and even that wouldn't be as reliable and swift. I salute you, one superpower whose effects can't be reproduced by a team of guys in a van! It's also the superpower most likely to break the plot.

This is now my benchmark for low-powered superheroes. If their effects can be reproduced by a bunch of guys (by which I mean highly trained specialists; let's assume we have the hiring power and resources of a multi-million pound company) in a van, then you are officially low-powered on the Kochk Superpower scale. I should note that I consider this a good thing for storytelling purposes.

The most obvious one would be Batman; if we had a van with a world-class detective, a martial artist of the Martin Riggs or Chan Ka-Kui schools, an engineer to build, maintain and operate the equipment and a billionaire mastermind to fund and direct the team, we could recreate Batman on a gross level. On the other end of the scale, Superman would be impossible to recreate, no matter how many vans we had (although this wouldn't stop Lex Luthor pushing ahead with his Vanpocolypse).

Life Imitates Art

2011-05-10T08:04:00.001-07:00

Action-adventure heist series Leverage has been introduced to movie nights (which seem to be running at about 5 a year at the moment). On Maundy Thursday we watched the episode The Snow Job, in which at one point the bad guys move money from one account to another. This goes all wrong for them and their accounts end up frozen. So sad.

However, earlier that day Heckler had tried to move some money from one account to another. This didn't go to plan, and it ended up with him being unable to withdraw any money the next day (which, like the following Monday was a bank holiday, leaving him having to borrow money from Beretta for the weekend).

Clearly, if this continues it would become a problem. As such I will be checking if any of the following activity/episode pairings are likely to arise:

Air travel - The Mile High Job

Court appearances (Heckler's speciality) - The Juror #6 Job

Church attendance - The Miracle Job

Heckler visits the bank to try and get his money back - The Bank Shot Job

Conversation of the Movie Night

2010-10-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

Heckler: He fired 7 shots.

Kochk: He might have non-standard revolver, such as a LeMat.

Heckler: Ah, the LeMat.

Kochk: If I recall correctly it has a 9 round cylinder and an extra barrel which you can load with a round of your choice.

Heckler: Mine would be cheese.

Kochk: Usually it's a shotgun round... Would that be an actual cheese bullet...

Heckler: Of course it would.

Kochk: ...because if you were just storing it there, you'd need a long spoon...

Heckler: I'd shoot him and he'd go "Ah! What's this on my chest? It's cheese!"

Kochk: That would definitely need to be hand loaded. Oh wait, you don't like cheese.

Heckler: No.

[Kochk wonders whether to mention the three big handfuls of cheese in the fish pie they'd been scoffing down, but decides to leave it and instead stick it on the internet]

LeMat: [Says nothing]

Barbarella Blogging

2009-08-27T02:48:00.000-07:00

I would have thought that I'd have noticed the video to the 1994 Kylie song Put Yourself In My Place as it recreates the famous opening scene of Barbarella. Apparently I missed it at the time as it was considered "too raunchy"[1]. Well blimey. We can't show that kind of thing here, can we?

(Link as embedding lowers quality)

You know, I would have thought that one of the advantages of travelling in deep space would be that you could strip off without having men in spacesuits perving at you through the window.

[1] Source, musicman278 who put the video up on youtube.

Family-Surgery-Revenge-Tragedy-Drug-Rock Opera

2009-04-08T03:15:00.000-07:00

If I were thinking of exploring themes such as elective and non-elective surgery, rampant capitalism, the relationship of media to both, drugs, grave-robbing, and scantily clad females I might well come up with the idea of a near-ish future SF story. It would likely involve organ failure diseases which can only be cured with genetically engineered organs. These could be bought from the company which created them, but if you fail to keep up on the payments, they can be legally, bloodily and fatally repossessed. It's quite likely I'd come up with some sort family story, with many secrets from the previous generation winding around the main story. Having got this far, I'd quite likely go down the Revenge Tragedy route[1], as there's already lots of cutting and a family with conflicts. And I might even decide to make it a musical. Of course after all that I'd sober up and realise that the idea is silly for many reasons, the most important one being that to get anywhere near pulling it off I'd have to be unspeakably talented.

The people behind Repo! The Genetic Opera are unspeakably talented.

I'm not going to talk about the story (if you want more than I've hinted at above you could try here) but about the spectacle and the songs and a little about the cast. It looks fantastic. Apparently it was done on a small budget of both money and time, so maybe the slightly shabby dark-grunge-goth look isn't just about creating a Bladerunneresque atmosphere for the film, but is because shadows hide flaws in the set. Still, if it works both ways, that's a bonus.

The back story is framed with cartoon interludes, drawn by co-writer, co-composer and actor Terence Zdunich[2], which painlessly fill us in on needed information while adding to the atmosphere. On the other hand, I think they draw us out of the fiction. This isn't as much of a problem as it might be in another film as we also have some of the slightly unfamiliar conventions of opera doing the same - so for example, every character about to die gets a song about their regrets.

My usual problem with musicals is that if a song contains an important story or plot point, I don't always get it as I miss the lyrics the first time around. One way around this is to repeat the important bits in the song half a dozen times, in which case I tend to hear it the first time and then sit around waiting for the song to finish so that something will happen rather than them keep singing about whatever it is they're doing. Repo! is mostly successful in avoiding these problems by 1. stating clearly the important points in songs; 2. repeating then extending each point; and 3. making sure the action on screen is as interesting as the plot points in the song. As an example, here is the aforementioned Zdunich as the dual narrator/character Graverobber explaining the use of the drug Zydrate to Shilo (Alexa Vega) followed by the arrival of Amber Sweet (Paris Hilton previously appearing in a Heckler and Kochk review here) to re-iterate the use of the drug and tell us something about Blind Mag (Sarah Brightman) in the song Zydrate Anatomy.

And I tell you this now; if you liked that clip, you'll like the film. If it's too much; too loud, too blatant, too bloody, too sexualised, too grungy, too much going on; then you probably won't like it as there's more than that in some scenes. In addition, as with most musicals it stands or falls on it's songs so if you're on the fence check the soundtrack on youtube or favourite music provider.

There's one final pleasure in the film, and it's Anthony Stewart Head. His dual role is revealed fairly early on, but look away now and come back for the next paragraph if you don't want it spoiled. Okay? Anyway, he's brilliant as the Repo-man, the surgeon/butcher/serial-killer who repossesses organs from those who fail to keep up payments and he can sing well enough to keep up with Sarah Brightman (who, so far as I can tell, isn't holding back).

Anyway my final verdict: it's a little rough around the edges, and the default choice is excess (more blood, more volume, more goth, more sex, more grotesquery) when a little moderation might have done better. But it adds up to a satisfying whole (even if we can see the stitches). I intend to try and introduce this to movie night as soon as possible.

The V_ classification board rates the film as gruesome.

[1] I'd probably write it in blank verse at the rate of about 4 lines a day, so would take me about 5 years to write the first draft. Fortunately this is all a hypothetical.
[2] Have I used the phrase "unspeakably talented" yet in this review?

Attending A Showing Of The Moving Picture Watchmen

2009-03-29T10:00:00.000-07:00

So in brief, Watchmen is fine as a film, but probably unnecessary. Let me unpack that a bit for anyone who wants to know more than a one sentence summary.

The film takes as many scenes and sequences as it rationally could from the comic[1], but, more impressively, puts forward many of the messages and themes explored in it. So we have the essential impotence of superheroes[2]; that to fight evil, we must commit evil; that those with power must be held responsible. But while we get these, most of the plot, action and soundtrack is turned up to 11 distracting us from it's message. I will demonstrate my thesis in as vivid a way as possible, by using as my example Doctor Manhattan's penis.

Once you have an 18 certificate and a naked man wandering around, it makes sense that it appears on screen. Once we got over it's more unusual attributes (it's blue! it glows!) Heckler pointed out that it's larger than in the comic. We checked when we got back and, by golly, it is.

Now the penis is CGI[3] so it's size is at the whim of the director. We might consider the scenario in which Crudup asks Snyder to endow him more generously and Snyder says "Alter a single part of the Greatest Comic Book Film adaption ever made, my Magnum Opus based on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's Magna Magnum Opus that I wish to alter for the screen as little as possible, because you feel inadequate? Well okay". We might consider the change just crept in from one or other sketch or storyboard picture. But more likely this decision was deliberately made by the creative team. So why?

Doc Manhattan is a force of nature as much as a character, with no limitations other than his own conscience and authorial fiat. Yet ultimately he is as ruled by fate, destiny and the impersonal forces of history as the rest of us, if not more so as he can see through the illusion of free will. Yes it's potence and impotence again; Doc Manhattan doesn't need a big penis as he has all the power in the universe; his small penis represents his powerlessness[4].

In the film, we get the lack of power, but it's overwhelmed by the sheer kinetic action of the characters; we get the time and period cues, but the music plays at full volume even when a song in the background would make the point better; and in Zack Snyder's book, there's no action sequence that can't be improved by slow motion. And that, in my opinion is why the penis is bigger; because bigger, louder, more violent, more in-your-face is the default choice.

As I said, it's good. But you don't need to see it if you've read the book, or if you've watched The Dark Knight which covers much of the same ground. If you want to see it, with everything turned up to 11, you'll probably enjoy it. So there you have it. Thanks to my talking about penises a lot I've managed to review the film without resorting to any stupid lines like "Who watched the Watchmen? We did!"

Oh, toss.

[1] Which is not to say that they haven't been altered to make them properly cinematic. Snyder and his team don't seem to have lost sight of the most important thing; making what appears on the screen work as a film.
[2] A colleague felt the sex scene was completely gratuitous; well yes. But, as it turns out, that's what the gaudily costumed masked adventurers are; gratuitous, unneeded, mere decoration. Their potence turns out to be completely powerless before the forces of history.
[3] No, it's not motion capture. Although Billy Crudup's performance was indeed motion capture, he wasn't walking around in a skin-tight-around-the-parts suit, but a crazy futuristic blue LED covered suit with a standard crutch (assuming that docu-ad I caught the last 15 minutes of wasn't lying to me). The performance is motion capture; the penis isn't.
[4] Or maybe it's easier and less embarrassing to draw, I don't know.

What I Learnt From Battlestar Galactica

2009-03-28T02:10:00.000-07:00

Everyone else in the BSG-watching blogosphere has had their say; now it's time to find out what I learnt from watching the remake of the classic 70s space opera TV show.

- The new Battlestar Galactica is a long, high quality drama exploring themes of interest to both the general public and to science fiction fans. It combines soap opera style storylines with spaceships shooting at each other, while contemplating the meaning of being human, and the nature of god. No, seriously.

- Building artificially intelligent robots is a bad idea, especially if you treat them like slaves. They will inevitably rise up and try to destroy you.

- God is not keen on the whole destruction thing.

- Or maybe God is okay with the creation, destruction re-creation cycle. I'm not sure. The theology was left a bit fuzzy.

- Which is the way I like it.

- Frak is used as an exact synonym for a common but vulgar English obscenity, but for some reason is more acceptable on TV.

- You should never get drunk and nearly be seduced by your brother's girlfriend.

- It all happened a long time ago[1] in a galaxy far far away[2].

- On third thoughts, God isn't into the creation/destruction cycle, but only does the bare minimum to hint what need to do to stop it, as it's our decision at the end of the day.

- The bare minimum including prophetic visions and dreams, bringing people back from the dead and encoding clues in a child's DNA.

- Bob Dylan is God.

I know for sure that Heckler learnt at least one more thing, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for him to reveal it here.

[1] 150,000 years
[2] 1,000,000 light years

A Heckler and Kochk Shopping List

2009-03-21T08:16:00.000-07:00

After attending a early evening showing of Watchmen last Saturday, Heckler and I called in at a local supermarket to purchase essential supplies for continuing a movie watching evening. The full list was:

12 x Lagers
3 x Real Ales
1 x DVD of Snakes on a Plane
1 x Bottle of Margarita mix
8 x Fab Ice Lollies

Our watchlist for the rest of the evening was Beowulf and Zombie Strippers; all three films deserve reviews for differing reasons. I will endeavour to provide such in the near future.

We Join The Battlestar Galactica Debate By Asking The Only Important Question

2009-03-13T15:01:00.000-07:00

So, is the new Battlestar Galactica simply a very long science-fictional exploration and analysis of the themes in the Bob Dylan classic All Along The Watchtower?

I don't have a problem with that actually. Firstly that lets me figure out what happened in the 70% or so of the episodes I've not seen. And secondly, that should give us a nicely ambiguous ending; nice for me because I like ambiguity* and nice for the studio because it leaves room for inferior and exploitative spin-off movies.

But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.

Tomorrow I'll recycle most of this post by looking at the musical themes explored in Watchmen.

All Along The Watchtower links: Hendrix; Dave Matthews Band; Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young; Paul Weller; Bryan Ferry; U2 (sorry Heckler); Dylan himself; and, of course, Bear McCready's BSG version.

* Or do I?

Steampunk Detective Comics

2009-02-23T04:00:00.000-08:00

Warren Ellis released another one-off tale from his Apparat comic line[1] last year, a steampunk detective tale called Aetheric Mechanics. in 1907 Doctor Watcham returns to London from the Ruritanian war to join his friend Sax Raker, London's Greatest Amateur Detective solve the most puzzling mystery of his career - the Case of the Man Who Wasn't There. Some of this may sound familiar and there's a reason for it. As the climax reveals, this is a mainstream science fiction story as much as a steampunk tale and all the better for it.

Highly recommended. This is a 48 page self-contained story - again part of Ellis' attempts to create and test alternative formats to the 22/24 page monthly title that is standard in comics.

This year there is a Hugo award for Graphic Story; if you're eligible to nominate I suggest you get down to your local comicbook store and read this as it is the strongest example of science fiction sequential art published in 2008 that I am aware of.

[1] Previously mentioned here - briefly, comics as they might have been if they weren't completely taken over by the superhero subgenre at some point in the past

Hiat? Us?

2009-02-05T06:46:00.000-08:00

Um.. nothing's going on here at the moment. If you're looking for some bad sci-fi, you could do worse than to, ahem, pop over here where a close associate of mine has assembled 10 Science Fiction Music Videos.

Eventually there will be some proper updates here, but we're busy with non-sci-fi related things so it may be some time.

Heckler And Kochk 2009 AD

2009-01-02T04:30:00.000-08:00

Some of the Heckler and Kochk irregulars were together at New Year, although at least we managed to get out to the pub rather than sit around watching movies. Thanks to this we have our New Year messages for this site already and it's only the 2nd of January! That's what I call "organisation".

Firstly LeMatt says "May the New Year hold many sh*tty movies for us," a sentiment we can all agree with.

Beretta says "No Patrick Swayze night, no Kevin Bacon night." Noooooo! I guess we'll just have to watch them when she's not there. Nothing more manly than a group of guys getting together to watch Dirty Dancing and Ghost.

Heckler has welcomed in the New Year with a drawing which I'm hesitating to post. It is captioned however "Indiana Jones and the Backpack of Booze".

I don't have a New year message, except to say that I'm going to try to be more regular, more frequent and better, or at least more interesting, at reviewing things, and I'm going to fail, probably at all of them, although hopefully not all at the same time. This has been Heckler and Kochk reporting from 2008; Welcome to the World of Tomorrow!

The Father Of All Christmas Movie Nights

2008-12-21T03:37:00.001-08:00

On Friday we had our Special Christmas Movie Night and I've finally got the will power together to write about it. Three children's films about Santa Claus: Miracle on 34th Street, Santa Claus the Movie and The Santa Clause.

Miracle On 34th Street (1994, Dir: Les Mayfield) is a remake of a 1947 film of the same name, and stars Richard Attenborough as Kris Kringle, a white haired man who replaces a drunk Santa Claus and goes on to be the best Cole's store Santa ever. There's a little girl who is the daughter of the marketing manager of the sore who doesn't believe in Santa, so they try the experimental method: she asks Kringle for a father, a house and a brother. Meanwhile the evil store across the road uses every means, both fair and foul... actually, they just use foul means, which is probably why they're the evil store. Frankly, the boss of the evil store ("Shopper's Express") doesn't seem to have a very good handle on marketing, or even on how capitalism works. He seems more interested in destroying his competitors than, say, making money. Meanwhile, after Kringle advises a customer that they can get a certain toy cheaper elsewhere and they swear undying loyalty to Cole's, Cole's come up with a compromise: If they don't have it, they'll track it down for you. It's a great bit of PR, and the best part is, they didn't have it, so they wouldn't have sold it anyway.

Still, enough economics. Let's get to the heart of this film: the court case. Heckler, who has some experience of being in court, was surprised by the events in the courtroom, and most importantly by the fact the court was sitting a all on Christmas Eve; in this country judges are too work-shy to hold court on Christmas Eve (exception: to my knowledge magistrates will hold hearings to determine bail). There's much amusing evidence (a reindeer as a witness; the prosecutor's son identifies Kringle as Santa Claus etc.) Eventually the little girl bribes the judge with a $1 bill, which happens to have "In God We Trust" circled on it, and he makes this the slightly incoherent precedent for ruling that Santa Claus exists, and also exists in the person of Kringle.

Anyway, kid's film based on a 1947 film. I've not seen either film before, but after about 10 minutes I started describing the changes each character would go through until Beretta told me to stop. But the predictability is part of it's charm, and despite everyone getting their Christmas wishes at the end, and a court ruling to that effect, the question over whether Santa Claus exists or if he just exists as the Spirit of Christmas in all of us is left open-ish. 8/10 Humbugs (That's good by the way).

No such ambiguity in Santa Claus The Movie (1985, Dir: Jeannot Szwarc); we begin with the Santa Claus origin story. A big jolly bearded guy called Claus who likes giving gifts to kids on Christmas Eve finds that he's been prophesied to become a big jolly bearded guy who gives gifts to all the kids on Christmas Eve, only some elves will make the toys and look after the reindeer and stuff[1]. All goes well until the 20th century when an elf called Patch (Dudley Moore) tries to automate the toymaking. All the toys fall apart and the ~~bratty kids~~ unfortunate children all burst into tears. Patch leaves and decides to make a toy so good that Santa Claus will have faith in him again. He falls in with an evil toymaker[2], who, by coincidence, is the uncle of our female child lead, the only friend of our male child lead, a streetkid who has been befriended by Santa Claus.

Of course the evil toymaker makes Patch's toys explosive, but eventually good triumphs and evil is punished and Christmas is safeguarded forever hooray! Anyway, pleasant enough, but I saw it back when I was 12? 13? something like that and felt it was for younger kids. 4/10 Humbugs (disappointing)

Finally The Santa Clause (note final "e") (1994 Dir:John Pasquin). I'll note that I voted for some Muppet Christmas nonsense before every film, but no, Heckler had to keep on with the theme. Tim Allen is giving his son a rubbish Christmas, when he scares Santa Claus, who falls of his roof and dies. Allen fails to read the smallprint, gets into the sleigh, dresses in the clothes travels to the North Pole, delivers all the gifts etc. etc. His son loves this. His ex-wife thinks he's going crazy and has Allen's visitation rights terminated[3]. Allen grows a beard and gets fat. Eventually he convinces even his ex-wife and her new partner, a psychiatrist, he is Santa Claus by giving them the gifts they didn't get when they were children the Christmas they stopped believing (The Dating Game board game and an Oscar Meyer wiener-whistle). Frankly, why is this the film that spawned two sequels? Heckler suggested we watch the sequel (it was what, 1 in the morning by then?). I said if we do, we have to watch Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause immediately afterward. He folded. 3/10 Humbugs (Bah!)

Anyway, we've fulfilled our contractual requirement to have a Christmas special, and that's the important thing. Best part: Mulled Cider (If I say so myself). Luckiest viewer: Beretta who saw half of Miracle and about a quarter each of Claus and Clause as she fell asleep, poor thing; I suspect that that was a much more interesting film, albeit a less coherent one, than any of the films we saw. She was unamused to wake up with the Santa Claus beard and hat on.

Have we learned anything from these films? Firstly, you can have too many Santa Claus/Spirit of Christmas films in one evening. Secondly, you shoudn't call elves elves, instead "the little people" is the correct term[4]. And finally, that the ony place Christmas occurs is New York City and it's surroundings, the North Pole and cold and snowy historical Scandogermany.

[1] As opposed to the actual origin story, which is slightly more interesting.
[2] We see before the senate subcommittee on toy standards, a toy panda stuffed with sawdust, nails and broken glass.
[3] "What sort of Mickey Mouse court is this?" asked Heckler. It's a Disney movie.
[4] I disagree; I understand the preference is for "The Fair Folk"; "The Little People" is to avoid confusion that arises using the term "Fairies".

Review From The Past: The Secret Service

2008-12-13T04:00:00.000-08:00

(Parts of this borrowed from a very close friend of mine who remains pseudonymous)

In the 1969 series The Secret Service, Father Stanley Unwin is a middle-aged Model-T driving priest who moonlights as a spy, or more specifically a counter-spy stopping various foreigners and criminals from doing bad stuff to British commercial interests. This Gerry Anderson series mixed puppets and live action.

So the usual things to happen are; Father Stanley Unwin's first response is to shrink Matthew, he uses Stanley Unwinese (a made up language demonstrated in this scene from a Carry On film) to get out of difficult situations, his Model T Ford, Gabriel drives across Westminster bridge and B.I.S.H.O.P (British Intelligence Service Headquarters Operation Priest) gives them an unlikely task.

As an example, I've put together some sort of review for my notes for the episode School For Spies. In this episode, foreigners have created a school which trains spies to blend into English society by pretending to be priests, but rather than answering to BISHOP, they're lead by the evil Archdeacon. One of them gives themselves away by preferring pop music to hymns. As is often the case, Father Unwin smuggles Matthew into the bad guys headquarters in his briefcase, but they fail to check his luggage. Trailer

For some reason this wasn't picked up for a second series, which left Gerry Anderson free for his next project UFO.

Reviews From The Past: Star Maidens

2008-12-12T04:00:00.000-08:00

I note in this post Heckler promises that reviews will follow. But they haven't. Clearly it's time to deal with that.

He says "Star Maidens - a 1970s social commentary on sexism "

Well I suppose so. It's a 1976 Anglo-German sci-fi series in which two men from the planet Medusa, which is ruled by women in glitter, mini-skirts, sequins and outfits with holes cut in them, escape to Earth. During one of the efforts to recapture them, an Earthman and Earthwoman from the Institute of Radio Astronomy[1] end up on Medusa.

Essentially neither side can believe that the society of the other works; partly this is because Medusa is completely crazy, and partly because it's Earth in the 70s. Frankly most of the episodes were overlong, incoherent and full of predictable cliches and table-turning "You didn't act like a man at all - you showed courage and... I almost felt like an equal down there." "Thank you Octavia." "Get that man back to some useful work."

We watched this so you don't have to. If you like camp, dated, silly shows from the 70s, go ahead - the episode where some radical feminists on Earth get hold of Medusan gun and attempt to stage some sort of revolution, while 2 Medusans are trying out Earth lifestyles is especially recommended. Otherwise you can probably get by perusing this site which gets bonus points for daring to ask this question about the show "Wasn't it a bit... well, pervy?"[2]

[1] With the unfortunate acronym IRA. I can imagine their call to the Ministry when they detect the approaching spacecraft. "Hello? This is the IRA. We have an urgent warning for you..."
[2] Damn it, forgot to mention the "Perving scene" in Alien Apocalypse.

The Secret Origin Of Heckler And Kochk

2008-12-11T04:00:00.000-08:00

Like all ~~superheroes~~ movie review bloggers, Heckler and Kochk have an origin story. Sadly it isn't that local news outlets, hearing of our wit, charm, and encyclopedic knowledge of the last 100 years of film, drove a truck full of money up to the entrance to our movie-lair[1] and begged us to send them the least of our thoughts on sci-fi and whatever else came to mind in receipt of which they would toss bundles of banknotes in our direction. Until now the true story has remained a mystery but now I can reveal it.

It was, unless I'm very much mistaken, Thursday 10 April this year. According to my notes we dined on Chinese take-away and pink fizzy wine. We watched two episodes of Star Maidens, the film Slither, three episodes of the Secret Service and one of Buck Rogers (the 30s version).

Frankly, looking at that list, I'm surprised we came out alive, let alone formed a blogging partnership. We may have been celebrating as we had finally finished both the Secret Service and Star Maidens that night, and decided to recount our experiences for others so they wouldn't have to sit through them. Hence: We Watch Bad Sci-Fi So You Don't Have To.

As for Heckler and Kochk, we took those names in honour of the Wheelsey Police Department, who, when confronted with the fact that Grant Grant has turned into an invincible squid beast who mutilates cattle, open up their gun locker to reveal a whole set of mismatched guns rather than the rack of identical weapons we're taught to expect. Our attempts to identify them included the "other" H&K and someone blurted out "Heckler and Kochk - We Watch Bad Sci-Fi So You Don't Have To."

We spell Kochk differently to avoid search engine results for people looking for gun who can spell, and also because it amuses Heckler. He likes knob jokes.

Heckler tells the story differently, but he's wrong, or at least wronger than me.

[1] Heckler's flat. I note that it is a basement flat, or secret bunker as Heckler prefers to call it.

Review From The Dawn Of Time: Slither

2008-12-10T04:00:00.000-08:00

For a variety of reasons I was looking at my notes and discovered the reviews of the things we watched the very night we decided to name ourselves Heckler and Kochk! As might be expected they're almost incomprehensible, firstly because it was dark when I made them, but also because we'd been drinking pink fizzy wine[1]. Nevertheless, let's take a look at our work from the very dawn of H&K.

Our main feature was Slither [2](2006, Dir: James Gunn) starring Nathan Fillion (Firefly, Desperate Housewives, Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog), a comedy/horror/sci-fi monster movie. Here are my notes, as I can best make them out

Asteroid or Meteor?
I've been to karaoke nights like that.
I honestly don't believe V__ was wearing a skirt that short[3]

At this point the picture appears in my notes.

"I'm surprised you're able to lift a mug, you've been carrying that torch for so long."[4]
Nice Bra - She's a bit ropy looking.
She's getting a horrible thing in her belly-button
Huh huh breasts huh
If only D__ would stop running his life like a 30s serial villain.[5]
Heckler and Kochk gun
Subtly knob-shaped mountain[6]
The Curling Tongs! Yes! That's the last thing it's be expecting!
It's like watching a film with a small child or possibly a giant penis on legs[7]
"Well that is some fucked up shit."
She's hidden those scissors in her pants!
He's merely full of alien semen.

Anyway, the plot. An alien arrives in some rural American town and takes over Grant Grant. Grant then impregnates a local woman with his tentacles, and she gives birth to lots of alien slugs who take over the townsfolk turning them into zombies. There's also a love triangle as Bill Pardy (Fillion) is in love with Starla Grant, Grant's wife, and despite being an alien, Grant is still in love with Starla.

But is it really the plot we're looking for in this type of film? And is it comedy-horror or horror-comedy? The trailer can't seem to decide either.

All this is beside the point of how and why we named ourselves Heckler and Kochk, although I've subtly hinted at the exact moment, but I'll answer that question another time.

Anyway the important things: The V__ film classification board has rated this film as "Gruesome". enjoyed it a lot; in general I'm bored by horror films about 45 minutes in, but this one entertained me. However Heckler disagreed, and, as in my notes, here he gets the last word: "I'm not impressed by that film for this reason: it seemed neither a horror nor a comedy film."

[1] It's the manly thing to do!
[2] Not to be confused with Slither (1973 Dir: Howard Zieff) a comedy-crime-thriller starring James Caan, or for that matter Sliver (1993 Dir: Phillip Noyce) a silly thriller about voyeurism and surveillance starring Sharon Stone and William Baldwin.
[3] This was some byplay involving Star Trek figures recreating a scene from a night out.
[4] Corrected to conform with the IMDb quotes page.
[5] I'm not sure if this was byplay or our occasional "joke" in which we identify a character in the film with a friend.
[6] This is a reference to a Tank Girl script in the back of the Tank Girl Novel Armadillo.
[7] Why we chose "We watch bad sci-fi so you don't have to" as our subtitle over "It's like watching a film with a small child or possibly a giant penis on legs" I don't know.

The Day The Earth Stood Still: One More Time

2008-12-09T04:00:00.000-08:00

Remakes are generally bad. Worse still, from the Point of View of Heckler and Kochk, are remakes that are bland; versions of films that are not only less interesting than earlier versions, but give us nothing to stick the stilettos of our wit into.

The Day The Earth Stood Still is released on 12 December 2008. For some reason we have not been invited to any previews. Regardless, we endorse the Crotchety Old Fan's The Day The Earth Stood Still To Watch The Original Movie on 10th December. How can you compare remake and original if you haven't seen them both?

(I note that there is some good stuff in the trailer, but it being an explicit remake means that 1. it must be compared to the original and 2. it must explain why Gort, a robot, is wearing underpants. These are the rules; I don't make them, I just enforce them.)

Howl's Moving Castle

2008-12-08T04:00:00.000-08:00

Howl's Moving Castle is a 2005 Studio Ghibli film, based on a Diana Wynne Jones children's book (that I haven't read). Howl is a wizard who encounters our heroine Sophie. Everyone knows that wizards steal the hearts from beautiful girls[1], but this isn't the danger she finds herself in; instead the Witch of the Waste ages her from 16 to 90 years old[2], and tops off the curse by making her unable to tell anyone about it. Sophie leaves town and heads into the waste to look for a wizard to help her and comes across Howl's Moving Castle (Trailer has some good shots of the castle)

Sophie under the transparent alias "Grandma Sophie" becomes the castle's housekeeper, and meets up with an enchanted scarecrow, Howl's apprentice and Calcifer, a fire demon who powers the castle. Unable to tell anyone about her curse, she ends up having to help Howl when a war breaks out and he's drafted under two of his aliases.

It's a great cartoon, and I find it visually fascinating as it shows a fantasy-European 19th century kingdom seen through the eyes of Japanese animators. Best of all, although so brief and backgrounded that you can almost miss it, is that at the end it's revealed that the story we thought we were watching might actually be a subplot of another, bigger story that we thought was a subplot; since we've just seen a magical and entertaining film this other story is even better in my imagination.

The American cast for the English version are very good. Highly recommended.

[1] This turns out to have a grain of literal truth, as well as the obvious metaphorical truth
[2] This is Sophie, a teenager's, estimate; I'd say more like a fit 70 years old. From the interview on the disc with Diana Wynne Jones it seems this was based on something that happened to her in her 40s - from memory she hurt her back and suddenly had to walk everywhere slowly, painfully and with a cane, as though she'd suddenly become 90.

No Movie Night: Shampoo

2008-12-07T04:00:00.000-08:00

I can't make movie night this week, and last time when that happened and I didn't think Heckler was taking this blog seriously enough (which admittedly isn't very serious) I posted about a music video. Guess what?

(Link)
It's Shampoo's 1994 hit Trouble. They were pretty much one hit wonders in this country, but were big in Asia for a while. Wikipedia says:

Shampoo combined a poppy girlishness and a love of all things plastic, kitsch, and pink (the album artwork for 'We Are Shampoo' featured a collage of Barbie dolls and sweet wrappers) with a punk sensibility.... Playing on an image that was part Johnny Rotten, part stubborn infantilism, part lipstick lesbian and part razor-sharp wit, Askew and Blake tended to confuse both journalists and record-buyers as to who exactly was their target audience.

Getting any of that from the video? Here's what I notice:

1. Although these are grown women the video makes them look like teenagers dressed up as women. Partly this is the makeup and clothes, but partly it's that the camera always looks down on them to make them look shorter. Note also that the camera always looks UP at the Dad who's waiting for them, making him look taller. Also, the girls are never in shot with the Dad.

2. Despite this, they stride across the London landscape like they own it - full of confidence.

3. I love Jacqui Blake's suit - it's really Glam.

When I hung around the College Radio Station we got sent one of the forgettable follow-up singles, Viva La Megababes (which I've just listened to for the first time in 14 years). Frankly it's rubbish. But the B-side[1] was a storming version of East 17's House of Love (I can't find a free version of Shampoo's version on the internet, although I bet I could if I knew any Japanese). Two good pop songs is more than most pop groups ever manage. Anyway I've dug myself in far enough; hopefully the next post will have some actual Sci-Fi!

[1] It was actually on a single-sided 12" picture disc.

Tron

2008-12-06T04:00:00.001-08:00

Tron (1982). Jeff Bridges is sucked inside a computer, where he discovers that all the programs look like the people who wrote them. The evil boss has a master control program that is doing all kinds of evil stuff. The only one who can stop it is the Tron program, programmed and played by Bruce Boxleitner. To do this they have to fight there way through a variety of computer games.

It's a Disney film and, if not entirely for kids, certainly kid-oriented and is rated "not Gruesome" by the V__ movie preview board. It looks fantastic - some of the objects look dated, but they look like a CGI company today made some retro-looking space invaders. The plot makes no damn sense at all. Bridges and the Cindy Morgan's program seem to have a romantic subplot, but it doesn't go anywhere, and when he comes out of the computer, she seems to be equally good friends with Boxleitner and Bridges. We enjoyed it immensely. Here's the iconic Lightcycle scene.

It's a must-see if only because it is constantly referenced in computer-nerd circles.

The Mystery of Steve Trevor Junior

2008-12-05T04:00:00.001-08:00

We've now finished the first series of Wonder Woman, in which she fights Nazis in WWII both as Wonder Woman and Yeoman First Class Diana Prince, with the aid of Major Steve Trevor, who appears to be part of USAAF Counter Intelligence, although he seems to perform security audits and spy hunting missions wherever something odd, unusual or just plain silly occurs. In Series 2, we move forward to "The Present Day", 1977, and Wonder Woman again leaves the amazon society of Paradise Island to find out what the hell the Society of Men is up to, and especially why they're messing about with nuclear energy. She joins up with Steve Trevor Junior, who works for the Inter-Agency Defence Command who perform security audits and spy hunting missions whenever something odd, unusual or just plain silly occurs; as Diana Prince she works for IADC as well.

During some of the ~~more boring~~ quieter scenes we thought about this. In 1942 Major Steve Trevor has no obvious wife or other romantic liaison, except for flirting with Diana occasionally. Clearly Steve Trevor Junior is not Diana/Wonder Woman's son, or she wouldn't have been quite so surprised to see him[1]. We're clearly meant to think that Major Trevor, shortly after Wonder Woman left got married and had a child in, say, 1944. This would make Steve Trevor Junior 33 years old. And here's the problem. Steve Trevor doesn't look to be in his early 30s, he looks to be in his early 40s (unsurprisingly as Lyle Waggoner, who played him, was born in 1935 - see pictures). Obviously, he might just look old for his age, but I have a more interesting theory.

Let's give Steve Trevor Junior a 1935 birth year. The question is now, where were Major Trevor's wife and child during the first series. And the answer is somewhere in the western US[4] after a messy divorce. The messy divorce that, despite being an excellent pilot and a complete idiot when it comes to investigating and the greatest war in US history starting, got him transferred out of his unit and to a dead-end desk job in Washington with USAAF Counter Intelligence. (I note that his boss, General Blankenship is smart but rubbish at managing hotheaded idiots like Trevor, which is why he's heading counter-intelligence rather than attempting to command a wing or air division of hotshot fighter pilots).

Clearly his many run-ins with Nazi agents, and the end of his association with Wonder Woman lead to some kind of reconciliation, to pass on the stories of his time with Wonder Woman to his son.

That's my theory, based on the very slim evidence available. Any thoughts?

Finally, no Wonder Woman post is complete without a video of her in action. Anyone for Bullets and Braclets?

[1] How do the amazons of Paradise Island reproduce anyway[2]? If Steve Trevor Junior, who appears to be the twin of Major Steve Trevor, were the son of Trevor and Wonder Woman, then I'd try and think through some sort of cloning/parthenogenesis theory, but as he isn't and it makes no sense, I'll stop here.
[2] Queen Hippolyta sculpted Diana[3] out of Clay but she also has a younger sister; despite the incredible longevity of the amazons, new ones do appear.
[3] Amazon society appears to be mostly Greek in origin, and Wonder Woman is 2700(?) years old, so why is she Latin Diana rather than Greek Artemis?
[4] Taking my cue from Lyle Waggoner's biography, it would be Kansas City.

You Ask, We Answer

2008-12-04T04:00:00.001-08:00

Somebody turned up on Heckler and Kochk from Ask.com with this question

Was having discussion with someone about the cello and we both remembered that Stringfellow Hawke always played this classical piece for the cello on Airwolf that I really like but neither of us could remember the name.

Previously this site was almost worse than useless on this topic, but I'm now going to try and answer. Google is my friend on this one: the track is Eagle's Serenade and so far as I can tell the composer was Sylvester Levay. You can hear it in this youtube video.

Sadly, the person wanting this information has probably left, and will never return. Still, if anyone has a question for H and/or K, let us know and we'll come up with some sort of response.

On related note, the visitor counter tells me someone has gone all the way back through the archives. I can only apologise.

Heckler And Kochk Theme Song

2008-12-03T04:00:00.000-08:00

As I'm sure you've all worked out, "Heckler and Kochk" scans to the theme tune of "Blankety Blank". So every movie night when we're grabbing beers from the fridge, pulling down the screen and cleaning the whiteboards, Heckler and I dance around to this tune. There tend to be slightly less circa 1980 minor celebrities amongst our guests though.

As it happens "Mystery Guest" also scans to it, so whenever we have a mystery guest, that's sung too.

After all that, bad sci-fi looks much more appealing.

Judge Dredd: Goodnight Kiss

2008-12-02T04:00:00.000-08:00

Back when I was in school, especially in the 3rd-4th years (age 13-15) the weekly arrival of 2000 AD was one of the highlights. As far as I can recall I never actually bought a copy[1]. As we all knew, Dredd was too obvious, too blatant, a hero for 9 year old boys and politically unaware violence fetishists. Johnny Alpha in Strontium Dog was where the action was at: a strip for both male and female teenagers and politically aware violence fetishists.

Obviously they killed him.

Dredd though is still going strong[2] and Heckler acquired Goodnight Kiss, a story of Judge Dredd co-starring Jonni Kiss, a judge killer who ~~kills judges by snogging them~~ kisses his victims before killing them, then passed it on to me.

So, yes. Violent. Blatant. Mostly unsubtle. Dredd has a few moments of introspection when he's crucified and hallucinates everyone he's ever killed (a bodycount that even impresses Judge Death). There's also an homage[4] of the crucifiction scene from the Conan story A Witch Shall Be Born (recreated faithfully in the movie(from 3:00)). The closest to a moment of sadness belongs to the Lawmaster bike of Dredd's partner, requesting clarification of the location of the partner. Other than being very tough indeed, Kiss only plan seems to be to get a gang of dupes to weaken his target before he performs the coup de grace.

I enjoyed it quite a bit. Not quite enough to buy more Dredd (not for a while - maybe when nostalgia overtakes me or the TV claims there was a film) but maybe it's time to track down some Strontium Dog collections...

[1] Something else I'm not an owner-reader of.
[2] In theory many of the stories in 2000 AD run in realtime, so having been published for 31 years, Dredd is 31 years older than in his first strip. In Goodnight Kiss, Dredd points out to Kiss that he's 30 years older than him, and has been shot, stabbed, burnt, electrocuted and had every bone in his body broken more times than he can remember[3]. The wikipedia intro is probably enough information if you're not familiar with Dredd. However, the entry seems to have been vandalised as it claims there was a film. There is no film. There is no film. There is no film.
[3] Does this include the ossicles?
[4] Or theft if you like.

Candle In The Wind: A Very Brief Review Of House Of Wax

2008-12-01T04:00:00.000-08:00

House of Wax is a very loose remake of the 1953 film House of Wax, itself a remake of the 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum, based on a short story or a play by Charles Belden called The Wax Works[1]. It has extraordinary wax effects and a superior cast grafted onto a fairly standard Teen Horror plot (kids on a road trip break down near a weird old town, they split up and nasty things happen to them). I don't have the notes with me, so can't tell you the exact time when it becomes gruesome[2], or the time that Paris Hilton starts running around in her bra and pants[3] (a role for which she won both the Teen Choice Award for Choice Scream Scene, and the Golden Raspberry for Worst Supporting Actress). All in all, missable but some excellent effects towards the end. Some good stuff on the soundtrack too - Beretta noted New Dawn Fades by Joy Division.

From Youtube: The Trailer (gruesome), The Gag Reel (which shows one or two bits with wax effects), a pretty funny video where one of the actors has qualms about being covered in hot wax, the final bit where the House of Wax, which is made of wax, burns down (from maybe 2:40 onwards) and Joy Division's New Dawn Fades. All the videos in a playlist and also below, but it doesn't always work when you embed a playlist:

Update: I've changed the footnote numbers so they make sense. Hooray!

[1] I've done a swift google, but frankly don't feel the need to go further to track down the origin, unless we start to work our way backwards through the predecessors.
[2] I think we may have disagreed; the prologue is pretty unpleasant but more by implication than actual nastiness. V__ wasn't with us to give a definitive answer.
[3] This caused more disagreement. "Nudity at 1h4m (or whatever it was)" said Heckler. "Nude?" says I, "She's running around in her bra and pants. They're clothes! Covering up her rude bits!" "You write what you want in your notes," said Heckler, which I had no answer to.

Bruce Campbell Double Bill

2008-11-30T10:00:00.000-08:00

Seeing how long it's been since we saw the films, it's likely that I won't finish listening to the commentary tracks on Alien Apocalypse and Man With The Screaming Brain. Heckler reviewed AA back in August, giving it 9 Bela Lugosis on his bad sci-fi scale (very bad).

The two films have things in common, other than the fact they were sold to me as a double bill for £6. Both star Bruce Campbell, and he directed and co-wrote TMWTSB. Both were financed by the Sci-Fi channel, but despite this are genuine sci-fi, if bad examples of that genre. Both were shot in Bulgaria, to save money. Both were stories that had been floating around for 15 years or so before being made in 2005.

I've briefly commented on AA via the whiteboard. To recap: after 40 years in space, Bruce Campbell and his fellow astronaut crew members return to Earth to discover it has been taken over by insectoid aliens who find wood a delicacy and so have set up a slave logging camp[1]. Other things they like to eat include heads and fingers. Unsurprisingly there is a very high mortality rate amongst the slaves, so the astronauts are captured and enslaved. Campbell's character escapes meets up with a woman in a chamois leather bikini and they go looking for the legendary leader of the Resistance "The President". They find him, but he's an old, tired man hiding in he woods so Campbell has to start the rebellion himself. In the nick of time the president and the surviving members of the US government turn up and show off their archery skills (which we always appreciate at H&K) and overthrow the alien oppressors.

From the half hour or so of commentary I heard, the references to Planet of the Apes were deliberate homages[2], the costumes in paticular and there were homages to other films as well that I forget. I admire their choice to make a new film using some of the themes and ideas of POTA rather than simply making a crap remake.

I thought I had a conclusion, but apparently not, so I'll simply warn that this film, and the following clip, contains a fair bit of headbiting and is rated as "Gruesome" by the V__ Movie Preview Board.

(This Scene lead inevitably to the comment "If the aliens can't get wood, they get head")

Man With The Screaming Brain is Bruce Campbell's directorial debut, and it shows. To a certain extent he plays to his strengths, playing a stereotypical American-abroad who judges everything by the standards of America; this despite the fact he's gone to Bulgaria to buy things up cheap from the sale of ex-state infrastructure leftover from the communist era. He's the CEO of a drugs company and a couple of stereotypically crazy scientists have invented a drug that prevents brain-transplants from being rejected and try to get him to buy it. Meanwhile his wife is bored and has sex with the stereotypically rude guide/taxi driver/ex-secret policeman. Then she walks in on Campbell snogging the maid, a stereotypically vengeful gypsy. For reasons I forget, Campbell is beaten over the head with a pipe by the gypsy, who then kills the taxi-driver who is her ex-.

Did I mention that many of the characters are stereotypes?

The scientists acquire the bodies and replace damaged brain tissue in Campbell's brain with tissue from the taxi driver. As might be expected this leads to two personalities in one body, and include Bruce Campbell recreating the scene from Evil Dead where he fights his own hand. Meanwhile his wife, thinking he's dead, confronts the gypsy who kills her. Not having a body, the scientists put her brain into a robot body. After this the film gets too silly to explain.

I'd say MWTSB is the superior of the two films as it never takes itself seriously, but just follows it's plot to the next joke, stunt or set piece. Unfortunately this gave us less opportunity to mock it as the film kept getting there first. Damn you Bruce Campbell! As for inspiration, I see some of Steve Martin's The Man With Two Brains in both the title and the film. This film is classified as "Gruesome" due to the scenes of brain surgery (visible in the trailer):

[1] logging slave camp?
[2] On the other hand, in the 300 commentary track, Zack Snyder keeps referring to stealing ideas, shots etc. from other films and keeps being corrected "You mean it's an homage".

What's Wrong With Heckler And Kochk?

2008-11-29T14:30:00.000-08:00

When I ask what's wrong with Heckler and Kochk, I of course mean why hasn't it been updated for ages, not what's wrong with it; that's fairly obvious. Well partly we've not been having movie night very often for a variety of reasons. Partly Heckler is a very busy man. Partly I've been ignoring a bunch of half-written reviews in drafts.

But fortunately we have a more important question to distract you from our laziness. That question is:

What's Wrong With Death Proof?

We had been warned that Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror is the superior of the two films in the Grindhouse double bill. Nevertheless we were surprised at just how far from the exploitation film mark Tarantino got with this film.

Here's what Wikipedia says about Exploitation films:

Exploitation film is a type of film that is promoted by "exploiting" (often) lurid subject matter. (The term "exploitation" is a common film marketing term, used for all types of films, meaning promotion or advertising. Thus, films need something to "exploit", such as a big star, special effects, sex, violence, romance, etc.)

The problem, such as it is, is that we go in expecting a film about a killer car or a killer driver or maybe a car duel or something, with scenes of automobile-related mayhem linked by Tarantino's signature conversations about nothing much (See Trailer, also at the bottom). Instead we get a tiny bit of mysterious and creepy following of several attractive women who then spend 40 minutes talking about nothing much. Oh, and Kurt Russell explains the title of the film. [Next paragraph has spoilers]

Then there is a short period of automobile-related mayhem. (At this point the film is rated "Gruesome" by the V__ film preview board). It's violent, kinetic, and bloody. This pitch is unsustainable, so Tarantino doesn't try to sustain it, and we meet up with another group of women who spend a lot of time talking abut nothing much (although the nothing much is slightly more plot relevant and the revelation of character through talking about nothing is more to the point as they don't all die). Then (finally) there's a long car chase ending in violent and bloody death.

What we seem to be exploiting is Tarantino's reputation rather than silly and violent car stunts. This good for neither the car stunts nor the reputation.

Tarantino is famed for the excess in his movies; what is less obvious is his restraint (for example: what is the scene we don't see in Reservoir Dogs?). Here he is too restrained in the first part of the film when it comes to action, and shows no restraint for characters talking about his obsessions. All in all a failure with some points of interest.

My favourite line: Lee having been left alone with Jasper a surety for the car her friends are taking for a test drive says (says, not performs): "Gulp." (Here - shot from 7:23 to 7:48)

The Sontum of Qualace

2008-10-30T11:47:00.000-07:00

You know, when I googled Sontum of Qualace last week, I could have sworn nothing came up. But now I get a link to this video of the theme tune:

This suggests it's not the new Qualice and Gromit film, as suggested by Heckler.

As might be expected Heckler and Kochk were not invited to the royal premiere last night. Which leaves us short on excuses on why this blog hasn't been updated recently.

Her Name is Modesty

2008-09-15T13:34:00.000-07:00

We haven't had movie night for two weeks due to Heckler's domestic arrangements, and we aren't having it this week, and probably not next week as he's off to Oktoberfest in Munich. Clearly, it's time for me to catch up with all the things I intended to write up and never did.

A week or so ago, I finally sat down and watched all the way through the TV Movie Modesty Blaise adaption My Name is Modesty. If you don't know who Modesty Blaise is, there are two not quite consistent versions - one in a series of novels and one in a comic strip. You can choose which version you want, or both, or neither. Both series began and are set in the sixties. Modesty is a retired criminal mastermind who uses her skills and contacts to defeat actually evil criminals and Bond-style villains.

My Name is Modesty is a Modesty Blaise origin story. It's set before, or as it turns out, as she begins her career as a crime boss of her organisation The Network. She is working as hostess in the casino of the leader of a gang, when her boss is killed and a group of thugs rob the place. Modesty has to keep the leader talking to keep the other casino workers alive, until the combination of the safe arrives; intrigued by her lack of fear he asks for the story of her life.

One problem with the film is that Modesty's origin was always kept in the background of the books. This meant that whenever Modesty needed a new skill or contact, it was revealed that during her time with The Network she'd done a job/deal that involved whatever was necessary. Putting her life story (up to the age of 19?) up on the screen just feels wrong. Another problem is that her partner-in-crime Willy Garvin doesn't appear as he only joins her when she's running The Network. The relationship between Willy and Modesty is one of the things that holds the books together. Lastly, the actress playing Modesty is just too thin; she need to stand up to men not just mentally, but physically as well.

As for what works, well, it feels very much like an episode of a 60s action/adventure where Napoleon Solo, or one of Roger Moore's characters has to keep a villain talking ll night. Interestingly, Modesty doesn't show off her skills at the start of the film. usually in an action film, we see our hero in action near the start (with the promise that they will be even more spectacular in the climax). Although it's revealed that modesty has been taught martial arts, we don't see that until the end. And it's that end scene - with Modesty ripping slits in her long tight skirt for some high kicking action - where she's most the Modesty Blaise I'm looking for.

Is Modesty Blaise Sci-Fi? The author, Peter O'Donnell says no, despite a variety of psychic powers cropping up in the stories (I, Lucifer being the most obvious example). Modesty is very popular in SF circles - I spotted a reference in S M Stirling's Dies The Fire recently.

Airwolf

2008-09-09T02:57:00.000-07:00

There was no movie night last week. However I've not blogged about movie night the week before, or Xbox games night the week before that. Why? Because I'm a useless lump. Heckler and Kochk - not reviewing anything as we're too busy and uninspired.

The good news is that we did watch something on Xbox games night to warm us up - the feature length pilot episode of Airwolf - the choice of V___. Here I will attempt to capture our experience using questions and answers and maybe stuff off the whiteboard.

Q. Is Airwolf Science Fiction?
A. It's a helicopter than can fly faster than the speed of sound. It carries weaponry useful for anything from blowing down a door, stopping a car right up to sinking a Knox-class destroyer. All this on the chassis of a Bell 222 helicopter. It doesn't get any more sci-fi than that?

Q. Isn't that just bad technical details in an action/thriller series?
A. What about the way the weapons disappear into the space the wheels take up? And the fact that it has far too much equipment and weaponry to take off, let alone do all the stunts? There must be some kind of folded space storage compartment on board. Plus it has a buttock activated cockpit[1].

Q. Hmm. Very well. What is the background of Airwolf?
A. I'm glad you asked. As the pilot episode explains, Airwolf has been built by "The FIRM"[2] in order to ~~do all kinds of illegal stuff~~ fight the Russians (as the Cold War is still on). However it's designer, Doctor Charles Henry Moffat steals it, blows up the research centre and wipes all the files on it and takes it to Libya where he does all kinds of evil stuff with it. Archangel, the FIRM's deputy director convinces Stringfellow Hawke, the test pilot, to steal it back in return for trying to find his brother, Saint John Hawke, who is MIA in Vietnam[3]. String and his helicopter business partner Dominic Santini[4] steal it back after some unconvincing covert operations and several exciting helicopter stunt scenes. Then they hide Airwolf and booby trap it, so the FIRM have to keep looking for Saint John. Archangel convinces String to fly missions for the FIRM and the first season is all set up.

Q. Is Stringfellow Hawke his real name?
A. Not only that, but he lives in a log cabin by a lake with his cello and a hounddog. From the board:

Catch me a trout - I'll be back for breakfast.
Who would train a dog to look up women's skirts?

Q. For some reason this question appears in my notes: Does Stringfellow Hawke wear underwear?
A. In the pilot, String clearly states that he does not wear underwear. Also from the whiteboard:

Strip out of your fightsuit please, we only have 16 minutes.

Q. Does Stringfellow Hawke have any tics or characteristics?
A. At moments when he wishes to impress people with his seriousness, he takes off his shades.

Q. Can Airwolf really sink a Knox-class destroyer?
A. It seems unlikely. However I note that, although originally classified as destroyer escorts by the time of Airwolf they had been reclassified as frigates; as small a US warship you're likely to find in the Mediterranean. In addition, they're mainly Anti-Submarine ships which suggests Dr Moffat has chosen the softest target the US Navy had. On the other hand, most Anti-ship missiles seem to be in the 4-5m long range - about a third the length of Airwolf (not half as Heckler's diagram on the whiteboard suggests).

Q. What is the best part of the show?
A. The theme tune. It's not that the helicopter stunts aren't good, but they only have one mid-air explosion, and far too many shots of Airwolf are recycled or sped-up. The ground-based acting is neither better nor worse than one might expect for a 80s action/thriller.

Q. Was there anything else on the whiteboard that you want to point out?
A. Why not?

"The odds you brother is alive are 10,000 to 1"
"[That Maneuver] doesn't have a name - you don't normally See that unless you've lost the tail rotor!"
Your cream cheese senator - it's pink! Only in California.[5]
"Use Extreme Prejudice"
Wings of Awahu!
"In the Desert a body like that would wither and die in a few hours." "After a few hours with such a body what would it matter?"

Q. In the real world, how would the US have responded to such delibrate provocation by Libya?
A. In the real world, in 1986, after disputes over Libyan territorial claims to the Gulf of Sidra, and Libyan supported terrorist attacks, a bombing raid, Operation El Dorado Canyon was launched. This caused somewhat more damage than Airwolf (no, really).

Q. Are there any youtube videos that could illustrate this post?
A. Yes there are. Sadly I don't have time to dig through them, so here's a link to the youtube Airwolf search page. I have a feeling Heckler had found a couple of amusing ones, so I'll ask him.

Q. thank you, you have been most informative.
A. Yes I have. And thank you for asking such enlightening questions.

[1] According to the whiteboard anyway. The first time Ernest Borgnine gets in, the cockpit lights up when he sits down. When he gets up it goes dark. What are we supposed to think?
[2] A thinly disguised CIA.
[3] Actually, they steal all his artwork, but let's not get too bogged down.
[4] From the whiteboard: And Ernest Borgnine as Dominic
[5] No, I'm not sure what this is about either.

The Day Planet Terror Stood Still

2008-08-28T09:45:00.000-07:00

So for movie night on 14 August we had a classic tale of alien contact, The Day The Earth Stood Still, and a modern take on horror/action/zombie badness in Planet Terror.

I don't know that I can add anything to the immense amount of analysis that has been levelled at Day over the last 50 years, so I'll just say that you should see it. You should especially see it if:
1. You're thinking of watching Mars Attacks, Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Independence Day (to pick three heavily influenced films);
2. You're in a world that, 18 years after the end of the Cold War, still has enough nuclear weapons to kill everyone twice over and you don't know what to do about it[1];
3. You're thinking of seeing the Re-make;
4. It's the 10th of December (2 days before the release of the re-make which The Crotchety Old Fan has declared THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL TO WATCH THE ORIGINAL MOVIE DAY (TDTESSTWTOMD for short))

Planet Terror is as pure a piece of bad zombie action as you could hope to see. It's all about putting zombies, go-go dancers, rogue military officers and a woman with a machine gun for a leg onto our screen and getting on with it. At the end of the day it adds very little to the zombie movie genre, but it's a pleasure to watch, and the little touches and in jokes (the "missing reel" and the jar of testicles spring to mind) make it a lot of fun. Also, Bruce Willis appears to be sporting Sten's beard. This film has been rated "Gruesome" by the V___ film preview board.

[1] I really need to get together a list of Nuclear Anxiety and/or Cold War films, and see which are relevant today; TDTESS alone won't answer that question, but it's certainly on the list.

Denial

2008-08-28T09:43:00.000-07:00

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a smart, interesting comic, written by Alan Moore and drawn by Kevin O'Neill, featuring a team up of various Victorian era adventure fiction heroes. Volume's 1 and 2 of League features Bram Stoker's Wilhelmina Murray, H Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain, Robert Louis Stevenson's Henry Jeckyll[1], Jules Verne's Captain Nemo, and Hawley Griffin, an inevitable spin off of H G Well's The Invisible Man confronting a variety of unusual threats to the British Empire. There's a follow-up story, Black Dossier, which I haven't read yet.

Heckler claims to have got a DVD of the film. He is, however, wrong, as there is no film. There is no film. There is no film.

Don't believe me? Ask Alan Moore.

[1] And Edward Hyde

The Tag Shields Are Failing Cap'n!

2008-08-13T03:16:00.000-07:00

We've tried to avoid becoming part of any meme or tag by ensuring that we have no friends on the internet[1]. As this post shows, our strategy has failed. Clearly we haven't worked hard enough at this, so our next move will be to create some internet enemies[2]! But before that, here's the 48 top sci-fi adaptions meme:

SF Signal started it.
The Crotchety Old Fan was caught in a crossfire and hit twice with it.
He passed it on to us.
There's probably a moral here somewhere.

The rules are:

Copy the list below.
Mark in bold the movie titles for which you read the book. [Edit: bold isn't showing up, so I've changed to Pink and Bold]
Italicize the movie titles for which you started the book but didn't finish it.
Tag 5 people to perpetuate the meme. (You may of course play along anyway.)

The list:

Jurassic Park
War of the Worlds
The Lost World: Jurassic Park
I, Robot
Contact
Congo
Cocoon
The Stepford Wives
The Time Machine
Starship Troopers
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
K-PAX
2010
The Running Man
Sphere
The Mothman Prophecies
Dreamcatcher
Blade Runner(Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
Dune
The Island of Dr. Moreau
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
The Iron Giant(The Iron Man)
Battlefield Earth
The Incredible Shrinking Woman
Fire in the Sky
Altered States
Timeline
The Postman
Freejack(Immortality, Inc.)
Solaris
Memoirs of an Invisible Man
The Thing(Who Goes There?)
The Thirteenth Floor
Lifeforce(Space Vampires)
Deadly Friend
The Puppet Masters
1984
A Scanner Darkly
Creator
Monkey Shines
Solo(Weapon)
The Handmaid's Tale
Communion
Carnosaur
From Beyond
Nightflyers
Watchers
Body Snatchers

A little embarrassing I know. One or two thoughts:

Jurassic Park - I would happily, or at least stoically, finished this, if I hadn't picked it up to look at in a friend's house while said friend got ready to go out. 40 minutes later they were and I left it behind.
War of the Worlds, Island of Dr Moreau, Time Machine, Invisible Man - H G Wells studied at the Normal School of Science, which later became the Royal College of Science and is now a constituent college of Imperial College London. By a staggering coincidence, along with my degree from IC, I became an Associate of the Royal College of Science. Apart from allowing me to put ARCS after my name, this link with H G Wells has lead me to read far too many of his books. If there were four I'd recommend reading, it's these four. If I was going to film one it wouldn't be any of these (or even the others that have been filmed - The First Men in the Moon. The Shape of Things to Come, The Sleep Wakes) but The War in the Air.
Starship Troopers - The book's good (even when I disagree with it), and the film is good as a Robocop-in-space. But where do they connect?[3]
Hitchhikers - grew up with the TV series, later read the books and heard the radio version. The film hadn't quite gutted it as Hollywood was expected to do as you could still see bits of the original in it. One thing that worked in the film - Ford Prefect claims to be from Guildford, but is clearly an American, which would have fit in perfectly with the original(s).
The Running Man - If there's anything of the Stephen King novel left in the film, you could have fooled me. Hmm, must add The Running Man onto our list of Arnie films.
The Iron Man - the film came out too late for me as I'd outgrown the book ("Where did he come from? Nobody knows") but it's still haunting.
The Postman - probably the only David Brin book I've not read.
Nightflyers - never seen the film. Read the novella recently when I got hold of the George R R Martin retrospective story collection. Good, but it feels a little old fashioned, probably because the whole crossing horror with space travel has reused these ideas endlessly since then.

As I said we don't have internet friends so I'm not tagging anyone. Breaking the chain will add karma to my soul and mean I never find true love and all my finances will fail, damn it, but that's the price you pay for blogging. Heckler and Kochk - breaking internet chains so you don't have to.

[1] This isn't quite true, but most of our internet friends know us under different names, and don't blog about sci-fi. Who would have thought!
[2] Maybe we'll start with The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. I read them anyway, so it would make any feud much less hard work.
[3] By a staggering coincidence, our notes from Starship Troopers 3 seem to have fallen through a time-rift from when we're going to be able to see it in the UK in September. They seem to have been distorted by their passage, or maybe that's just Heckler's handwriting (spoilers):

His Chief of Staff used to polish my brass, if you know what I mean!
It only took me 8 years to make colonel.
What I do out of uniform is off the clock General.[4]
Asking the Sky Marshall for an autograph.
Johnny Rico - Hero of Planet P.
They'd use heavier firepower, but it would damage the set.
We lost the Sky Marshall. Good we'll all hang together.
It's only 100 klicks away. - We ain't got rations for that. - You're
fat, you won't need them!
They should clone Dix so there's an army of Dix.
Controversy with a Q
He thinks God is a bug!
Sure he's gone - but he left us with a song!

[4] Heckler as capitalised General, but left colonel lower-case. Due to the different usages here, I'm not entirely sure that's wrong.

Archery Comics!

2008-08-12T02:12:00.000-07:00

Comics writer Warren Ellis released 4 one-shot comics in 2004 asking the question what would comics look like if they hadn't been overtaken by superheros so completely? Comics grew out of the old pulp magazines, so he used old pulp genres. There was a detective story, a science fiction story, an aviation story[1] and an old-school pulp-mystery hero along the lines of The Shadow or Doc Savage story, all released under the fictional Apparat comics line.

Now he's releasing a number of one-shot comics under the Apparat line. Crécy is the first. As might be imagined it's a story of the battle of Crécy, from the viewpoint of one of the archers, William of Stoneham. There's less chivalry and "let the boy win his spurs" and more rain, sausages made from horse's arseholes and swearing, and, especially, more longbows.

Now as every good English schoolboy knows, the crossbow is not even in the same league as the long bow. A trained archer fires 10 arrows a minute, while some Italian with a bodged together machine will be lucky to get off 2 in that time. Like so many things all good English schoolboys know, and as Crécy details, this isn't true. The Genoese were professionals with well-maintained weapons, and hooks on their belts to cock the crossbow in one smooth standing-up motion. Seven and a half bolts a minute, and man-sized pavise shields to reload behind, so they are invulnerable to arrows. Longbowmen aren't invincible when their opponents are invulnerable.

After a history lesson as obscene as it's fascinating the English win the battle. I expect Ellis intended this to be part of an imaginary history or medieval war comic genre. But I can't help thinking of an imaginary archery-comic genre. Robin Hood and William Tell fill in for Superman and Batman; Wonder Woman is an amazon, so give her a bow and she's good to go. Legolas has a spin-off comic from Lord of the Rings (which has more archery in it). Archery-heroes with the names like Apollo and Artemis are obvious, and maybe Cupid too. Rambo becomes an Archery-hero, and there's a whole Trojan War cycle with Achilles and Penthlisea doing the whole love and death thing. Historical stories come in as well - Genghis Khan, Domitian (who apparently could fire 4 arrows at once) and the archers of Henry II[2].

There's maybe even room for Green Arrow in this imaginary comics genre. Maybe.

[1] No really! It first appeared as a subset of (proto) science fiction in the 19th century, was prominent amongst adventure fiction between the wars, had a few final moments in the 50s (Biggles springs to mind) and finally became indistinguishable from thrillers and adventure stories as the tropes and scenery became mainstream or were discarded.
[2] Tepus, Bowman of the Guards; Gilbert of the White Hind; Hubert of Suffolk; Clifton of Hampshire; Egbert of Kent; William of Southampton. It's like a medieval JLA but with bows!

Recycled Review: Labyrinth

2008-08-10T11:55:00.000-07:00

Heckler and I were at the Great British Beer Festival on Thursday[1] and sadly Starship Troopers 3: Marauder isn't out in the UK or we would definitely have watched it when we crawled back to Sten's flat [2]. But that's no reason not to put up some content. I previously said I would put up my thoughts on Labyrinth (1986, Dir:Jim Henson, trailer). Here's what is in my note book:

She's wearing jeans under that medieval frock
Don't say "David Bowie" 3 times
Sten is a rubbish Goblin King (He doesn't wear enough makeup)
Not the Bog of Eternal Stench!
Is that all it does? Smell?
There's a horrible bitey thing on a stick! And it's biting another goblin's arse!
Heckler sleeps with Antonio Banderas[3]
Babies: not evil, just incontinent.

The film's been out for 20 years, so I won't recap here. I'm just going to touch on why I think this film is an improvement on Jim Henson's previous puppet fantasy The Dark Crystal (reviewed at Heckler and Kochk!). 2 main performances (Sarah the heroine[4] and Jared the Goblin King[5]) are played by live actors. Most of the rest of the cast are puppets. This emphasizes the difference between the real world and the goblin world, and between the run of the mill goblins and Jared, the tall, good-looking, androgynous rock-god-king.

There's songs (many of them written and performed by Bowie). Sarah grows up and learns something. There's some real scary bits. And, with all due respect the Sten, Bowie nails the whole goblin king thing - the combination of attractive, scary and unpredictable all at once is just right. The labyrinth itself sometimes looks a bit like an illustration in a book, but that's mainly because, as it turns out, it is.

Jim Henson obviously learnt from The Dark Crystal and built on that, with good results. As we know, it didn't do too well at the box office, but it's had a long tail with video and DVD. And I can see why - I now feel like watching it again...

[1] It sounds like we're inseparable and live in each other's pockets; I assure you that is not the case.
[2] Good Point (for fans of the book): Armoured suits make an appearance
Good Point (for me): Some theology makes an appearance
Good Point (faint praise): It's better than Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation
Bad Points: The rest of the film
[3] This was byplay, not related to the film
[4] Jennifer Connelly, who went on to win an Oscar in 2002
[5] David Bowie, in one of the two non-human roles that he absolutely nails.

Admiral Ackbar

2008-08-01T16:22:00.000-07:00

While I'm putting a few posts up there's just time to mention good old Admiral Ackbar (a)who popped up in movie night before the one where we went on the road and ended up watching South Pacific.

Here is his official website;

http://www.itsatrap.net/

...and here is a clip of him at his finest;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNLuq0lW50k

Heckler

(a) he is somewhere high up in the hierarchy of the rebel alliance in the Star Wars universe. He is remembered for but one line!

The Animatrix

2008-08-01T15:37:00.000-07:00

At the most recent movie night Kochk and I finished watching the 9 short films which made up the Animatrix. Lemat had gone home, or possibly to Casualty to get some anti-depressants after we had watched "Alien Apocalypse".

This means that in the last few weeks we have managed to finish off not only this DVD but the complete series of "Crime Traveller" and "Galactica 1980"

Anyway - back to the Animatrix - this was a straight to DVD spin off from the Matrix trilogy (a) and was meant to tell us more about the world of the Matrix itself.

All 9 of the mini films has names and - so far as I could tell - were unrelated to each other save for the theme of the Matrix.

The Matrix, we know from the original film, is a virtual reality that all of humanity (b) is trapped in letting them believe that the are living in a normal world whereas in fact they are all in pods in a post apocalyptic machine world where human bodies are supposed to be used by the machines as a power source. People don't struggle because they don't realise they are trapped. A sort of docile "battery farm" (d) if you will.

Like anything Windows based the Matrix appears to be vulnerable to various breakdowns and problems. One of the films featured a haunted house within the matrix which was in fact a manifestation of the representation of the world breaking down because the surroundings appeared to pixellate and gravity was behaving incorrectly. Another featured an athlete who was able to walk again after his muscles apparently exploded whilst he was running in some sort of international sprinting race. The Matrix is not perfect in other words - just like real life.

If you liked the Matrix you MIGHT like this but it is by no means guaranteed - indeed you probably need to understand most of the Matrix back story to have any chance of following what these films are all about.

Of course the films pose several questions for us but the most haunting question of all is whether we can know the true nature of reality or whether in fact what we see is only a shadow of some other reality. Maybe life is but a dream!

Heckler

(a) Just as with the original Star Wars (ANH) the original Matrix film is a stand alone movie although it left the path open for sequels (or even prequels). Many hold the first Matrix film as the best even though in may ways the sequels are superior in most respects (eg depth of plot, action and effects). Maybe it is the heart in the original Matrix or just the fact that it was unique at the time which made it such a success. "Bullet time" filming techniques were invented for the making of this film.
(b) Well bar the likes of Laurence Fishburne's character who live in the last human city of Zion(c), and possibly Free France which as we all know is in the South Pacific. Zion by the way is way way down underground, it looks a fair bit like the wierd subterranean world inhabited by old Heckler & Kochk Cleopatra 2525.
(c) Which we remembered when we sat down - (copyright) Boney-M "By the Rivers of Babylon"
(d) Boom! Boom!

Movie Night - 31st July 2008

2008-08-01T13:56:00.000-07:00

I have a number of comments to make in respect of last night's movie night and cannot help but agree with the majority of sentiments that have tumbled from Kochk's keyboard.

I would like mainly to talk about the film "Alien Apocalypse" which starred an "actor" called Bruce Campbell. Here he is advertising Old Spice as worn by our esteemed colleague Lemat;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af1OxkFOK18

SPOILER (although you are presumably reading this as we have watched bad sci fi so you don't have to) The plot of this film features 4 astronauts returning from some very non specific "Probe Mission" that has seen them come back after 40 years away. I can't remember for certain but I think they mention having been cryogenically frozen - the crew don't look all that old (a). This is inconsistent with a line later in the film in which the President of the US (b) (c) thanks Bruce Campbell's character for having sent a message back to Earth warning of the approaching alien attack fleet(d).

In a plot stolen directly from Planet of the Apes the returning astronauts find that the Earth has been taken over by giant termites (f) who have enslaved humanity to work in saw mills to feed them wood (really!? who made this stuff up). The aliens also, at least twice in film, bite off people's heads and swallow them (cue for hilarious headless body spurting blood effects). One of the aliens says "next to wood it (people's heads) is our favourite delicacy". One wonders how they decided upon thi if they normally only eat wood - I guess it must be an acquired taste!

The aliens appear to have pretty much subjugated all of humanity notwithstanding the lack of any apparent military capability on the planet bar infantry and one single armoured personnel carrier. Human slaves wear gags and forfeit a finger for each failed escape attempt. There is no obvious organised human resistance and they seem to have lost a lot of civilisation such as the concept of shaking hands and what doctors do. Also the only good looking human on new Earth has misinterpreted chamois leather as something to be worn as a bikini.

On the subject of doctors I would like to return to the subject of the "probe mission". As I mentioned we did not see the ship and we aren't told much if anything about what the mission was. The mission had a crew of four and when we first see them one crewmember has a broken leg. Let us assume that one, if not two, of the crew is a pilot what then would be the specialities of the other three crew? Well, in short, we are not told except that Bruce Campbell's character is......an osteopath! An osteopath? I mean what sort of mission were they on? As someone who gets the occasional back twinge I know that a good osteopath is good to have on hand but equally so is a mechanic, a barber or chef! On a space mission I'm thinking that a pilot, an engineer, a navigator and probably a medic (rather than an osteopath) are probably my the highest mission priorites.

Anyway luckily Bruce Campbell's character is able to use his osteopathy skills to heal the people on Earth so that they will trust in him and follow his uprising against the alien termites. No really, that's what the film did!

I won't go into much more detail about this. For me the scene I remember most - from when I was curled up in the foetal position rocking gently back and forth to cope with this film - was Bruce Campbells screaming face in slow motion being covered suddenly in green alien goo. Like some horrific alien fetish porn film (although it is meant to be the character killing aliens with a sword). I felt ill after this and the only cure was that the film was over. Sadly this was only teh first film on a Bruce Campbell double bill - I may need some time before I can possibly cope with the second film "The Man with the Screaming Brain"

I give this film 9 Bela Lugosis on my bad sci-fi scale!

Heckler

(a) Well in the sense that they obviously haven't been living in space for 40 years unless they left as children.
(b) or "USA", a collection of independent states that used to be part of the colonies
(c) The President is an old man who seems to be sitting in a very low rent looking bunker somewhere near Portland. When he later goes on the offensive against the aliens the President also wears an anorak.
(d) This film is so low budget that we never see anything of the alien attack fleet. In fact all we see of the alien technology at all are the energy weapons they carry and some sort of armoured infantry carrier about the size of a transit van. Said vehicle also seems to be larger on the inside based on the number of alien troops who are disgorged from it (e)
(e) Come to think of it we don't see Bruce Campbell's space ship either - except as a shooting star coming down from he sky. I feel cheated.
(f) Albeit these are invading alien giant termites rather than intelligent apes who have evolved and overtaken humanity (g)
(g) Disappointingly - especially given how cheesy this film is - no character says "get your hands off me you damn dirty termite!"

Movie Night 31/07/08

2008-08-01T00:30:00.000-07:00

The Watchlist:

Batman and Robin "No matter how bad The Dark Knight is, if we've just watched Batman and Robin it will be an instant classic."
Alien Apocalypse "We've been flirting with Bad Sci-Fi for a while - it's time we took our relationship to the next level."
Lost in Space episode "That Rocket may be small, but it has enough wonder fuel to make a real blast."
The Last Three Films in The Animatrix "Wow, that is some trip."
Random Futurama episode "Sweet Gorilla of Manila!"

Other business:
Our friend S___ has been given the nom de blog Sten.
Movie night regular LeMatt asked "If I were loaded with blanks, would I be Matt LeBlanc?"

From Kochk's whiteboard:

K: "Serious objective professional and analytical reviewing this evening"
H: "Shall I draw the cock and balls now?"

Batman and Robin:

Bat Nipples!

Alien Apocolypse:

Muzzle Fetish
Evil Dead.
It's a bunch of apes on horseback. Morning Stan!
Welcome to PlankWorld™ the world of wood™!
When Conga lines go bad!
The aliens want to get wood.
If the aliens can't get wood, they get head.
Why did they take an osteopath into space?
SPARTACUS
LeMatt: I sense some headbiting going on. The aliens are a bit headstrong.
We've been flirting with Bad Sci-Fi for a while - it's time we took our relationship to the next level.
PROPHECY!

From Heckler's Whiteboard:

Morning Sten! [Picture of Sten Waving]

Batman and Robin:

That's no control lever
The Ice Man cometh
I'm afraid my condition leaves me cold to your plea.
You're not sending me to the cooler
Stay cool bird boy
If the doctor says so then it must be true
Oxbridge Academy
Hi Freeze! I'm Batman.
Your emotions make you weak, that's why the day is mine
Freeze's Rocket [Picture of Rocket] I see nothing phallic about that!
Gilgamesh Wing
You corrupt my research into some diabolical scheme of world domination
Who wouldn't want their hands on Bruce Wayne's family jewels?
I programmed my brain waves into the bat computer to create a virtual simulation
Your stupidity is terminal, now you're cured
Poison Ivy:{ Why not send junior home early. I've got some wild oats to sow
{ My garden needs tending
I respect your opinion but sadly I'm not good at rejection so sadly you'll have to die
The Bat Signal comes out of a sac on Sten's arse[1]
I hate to disappoint you but rubber lips are immune to your charms!

General:

[Picture of Y-fronts]
Goering!

Alien Apocolypse:

The aliens should have just landed at PlankWorld!
(Alien swallows space pilot's head) "That is our favourite delicacy next to wood"
The President lives, with all his men.
Osteopath in space.
Space probe mission.
The time is now [2], this is the place.

Lost in Space:

That Rocket may be small, but it has enough wonder fuel to make a real blast.
Some commander! You don't know a giro from a flux gate

Futurama:

Sweet Gorilla of Manila! A Letter from the Central Bureaucracy

For no apparent reason:

D___ J. P____

So, the good news is that Alien Apocalypse is what this whole thing is about: Us watching Bad Sci-Fi so You don't have to. The bad news: there's a Bruce Campbell commentary track. In theory I might review the film without listening to it. But that's for less foolhardy critics. I will take one for the team by watching Alien Apocalypse with the commentary track and THEN review it. But in case V___ is reading this from Egypt, I warn potential viewers that, in the words of LeMatt, the film contains a lot of headbiting; the V___ preview board officially rates the it as "gruesome".

[1] This would be like the planetary defence plasma bugs from Starship Troopers. That's another Earth Defence system involving Sten. Is there any way of protecting the Earth without this man?
[2] Alien Apocalypse has a line that is the title of a Moloko song; Batman and Robin features a Moloko song. At last a unifying feature to the evening![3]
[3] Red Heat and Three Kings both made the long list for second feature.

Heckler and Kochk: Two Views of WWII

2008-07-27T03:40:00.000-07:00

Movie Night is sometimes referred to as "Hairy Belching Men Night" which is somewhat unfair to the swearing, drinking and physical comedy aspects of the evening. Last Thursday we packed up and went on the road, projector, big screen, whiteboards and all to Beretta's house for "Civilised Mixed Company Supper Party Night". Everyone was on their best behaviour, except possibly me who made slightly more mess than everyone else there combined (hardly any wine got on the ceiling). Watched: Wonder Woman: Judgement From Outer Space Part 2, and South Pacific.

So, two different views on World War 2. In Judgement From Outer Space, aliens, concerned at the development of rockets and atomics, take a look at 1942 Earth to see if we have the potential to grow into civilised, peaceful beings, or if we're violent barbarians who need to be wiped from the galaxy. Initially Andros, the alien can't see any difference from his point of view between the Allies and the Nazis. "Americans don't torture people or make arbitrary arrests" Wonder Woman points out[1]. Well, it's good to see America's moral superiority to the Nazis so clearly stated.

If I have a real problem with this two-parter it's that the US authorities are perfectly happy taking Wonder Woman and Andros' words on being a 3,000 year old superhero and an alien sent to sit in judgement on us respectively, while the Nazis insist that they can't be, and must be products of US Atom research. In the WWII I studied, it was the Nazis who liked ideas such as the Hollow Earth, and proposed the Star Aldebaran as the origin of the Aryan race; wouldn't they be more likely to accept such ideas? (Anyway, here's the theme tune: Stop a Bullet Cold, Make the Axis Fold)

South Pacific is a classic musical, and was chosen despite a stack of bad to moderate Sci-Fi a foot high being available. Sadly I didn't take notes from the Whiteboards, but here's the four most famous songs based on a non-representative sample:

Happy Talk
I'm Going to Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair
There Is Nothing Like A Dame
Some Enchanted Evening (disputed, until I pointed out that Mr S___, our RE teacher at school and something of a musical buff would sing this one, after which Heckler bowed down and worshiped the song)

And boy are there some unusual versions of some of those songs on Youtube.

Heckler noted that Nelly didn't actually do a lot of nursing (and in general, the various members of the US military in the cast had a lot of time to hang around singing). Of course, that is explained in the film; the male chorus are Seabees (Naval construction units), the female nurses. The base has been built, but they don't have the intelligence on the Japanese to commit to an offensive, so the hospital isn't full, and the Seabees can hang around doing laundry and running scams. See also the expression Hurry Up And Wait.

Anyway, it looks like we'll be back to being hairy, belching and watching some genuine bad Sci-Fi this week. Until then, all the youtube videos in one player can be found here:

[1] I suspect that Steve Trevor's USAAF Counter-Intelligence unit would be pretty happy making arbitrary arrests, and even torturing people if Wonder Woman wasn't there to act as their conscience

Linkage and Administrivia

2008-07-22T01:50:00.001-07:00

Heckler got a new, double size whiteboard (it's, what, A2? so it can still sit on someone's lap) and revealed it at last Thursday's movie night. In fact he took a picture of me looking at it [1]. And we still have the old one. There's good news and bad news - more movie night notes, but I didn't copy them off so won't be reporting them here.

Time to actually start a links section or two; I'll be expanding this later. Part one Kochk's Blog-U-Tron ("They Write Good Sci-Fi Commentary And You Should Read It"): The AMC SciFi Scanner talks some sense and includes John Scalzi's provocative weekly Sci-Fi movie columns. Talking of Scalzi, his own Blog, the Whatever talks about Sci-Fi a fair bit, although since AMC pay him for talking about movies, he talks more about literature. And of course The Crotchety Old Fan who apart from his deep knowledge of the history of Science Fiction is behind all kinds of interesting stuff I haven't quite had time to explore in detail, most notably the Classic Science Fiction Channel, as featured previously here, and now in the non-blog Links To The Fifth Dimension ("They do Sci-Fi Stuff So You Don't Have To"?). Of interest (as background) Planetocopia - a climatologist creates several planets (including alternative Earths). And Finally Strange Horizons, an online Speculative Fiction magazine; the reviews focus on SF and Fantasy literature, but that's all good too.

Heckler tells me that too much theology is boring. It's probably just as well I haven't seen Prince Caspian then. While I'm linking, if you want more theology, Slacktivist tells us what C S Lewis was actually writing about in Prince Caspian (the answer: beer). One final thing - in the pub G___ pointed out the Duffy Video to Warwick Avenue I reviewed looked very cheap to make. For a more expensive Duffy video I suggest Mercy

[1] "It's a picture of me staring at some crudely drawn breasts!"
"They're not that crudely drawn"

Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog: Act III

2008-07-19T04:10:00.000-07:00

So: Tragedy.

Also pilot and origin story.

And finally, lots of extras! A real finale.

It's not the meditation on supervillainy I was hoping for, but I doubt there ever will be unless I write it myself.

I will be pleased to receive this (hopefully on the extra packed DVD) for my birthday.

We will now return to our usual programming (assuming Heckler doesn't write anything).

Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog: Act II

2008-07-17T03:12:00.000-07:00

Well, I was wrong.

Here's the episode in jokes, which inevitably will be spoilerish:

"Billy, you're driving a spork[1] into your leg."
"So I am. Hilarious."

"... at my famously successful heist last week; I say successful in that I achieved my objective; it was less successful in that I inadvertently introduced my arch-nemesis to the girl of my dreams and now he's taking her out on dates..."

"I need to be a little more careful on what I say on my blog. Apparently the LAPD and Captain Hammer are among our viewers."

"I wanna be an achiever. Like Bad Horse."
"The thoroughbred of sin?"
"I meant Gandhi."

"Apparently the only signature he needed was my fist. But with a pen in it. That I was signing with."

"See Penny's giving it up. She's giving it up hard. 'Cos she's with Captain Hammer. And these [brandishes fists] are not the hammer. [walks away. pause. returns.] The hammer is my penis"

I note of course that the duet at the beginning, where Horrible is in utmost despair and Penny is deliriously happy from the same events, and they're singing the same song with slightly different words and emphasis, is, despite not being funny at all, really good.

Am I foolish enough to predict what happens in Act III? Well the only thing I can see for certain is that Horrible tries to kill Hammer and fails. What happens then is up for grabs. Probably Bad Horse turns up and maybe Hammer and Horrible have to combine to defeat him, or maybe Hammer is revealed to be in partnership with him, or maybe he doesn't turn up and it's just singing cowboys. As for Penny, I'd like her to clear off away from these lunatics at the end, or a second best would be her falling for Bad Horse. Girls love horses, and they love a bad 'un. What could be more natural than that?

[1] The spellchecker doesn't have spork, but does offer "Spock" for it. Crazy.

Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog: Act I - more thoughts

2008-07-16T11:15:00.000-07:00

I had a few thoughts while, um, dealing with some laundry, and the last post was a bit full of OMG!-ness so here they are:

Dr Horrible seems to be young, hungry for power and success, net-savvy but not yet very successful - his blog has something of a cult status, but isn't read and analysed all over the planet as, for example Lex Luthor's blog would be. Evidence: applying to join the Evil League of Evil and that he doesn't have his own washing machine (has he used the parts for one of his devices?).

Supervillain plans tend towards one of two paradigms; EITHER they ignore the existence of Superheroes entirely (this being a kind of genre blindness) and so they tend to fall apart when a walking muscle jumps on top of the van and destroys the device controlling it; OR they aim their plots directly at their superhero rival, often at the expense of their other goals. Having gone for the first option in Act I I would anticipate Dr Horrible trying to attack Captain Hammer in Act II. From the plot so far, I would expect the classic plan - make the superhero look to be not a hero at all.

SuperHERO stories always come down to punching[1]. But this is a SuperVILLAIN story. And it's only Act I.

UPDATE: That's a very long shot at the beginining - Neil Patrick Harris talking to camera for 3 minutes

[1] As Joss Whedon is aware; the three volumes of Astonishing X-Men I've read illustrate this clearly.

Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog: Act I

2008-07-16T09:49:00.000-07:00

Joss Whedon's Supervillain Musical is online for a limited period. Here's what happens - Dr Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris best known as Dougie Houser, or possibly that psychic Colonel from Starship Troopers) has a video blog. This introduces the character, who intends to rule the world using his freeze gun (which freezes time) and then offer it at the feet of Penny, a girl he admires at the laundry. He also reads an email from Johnny Snow who claims to be his nemesis, but his nemesis is actually Captain Hammer[1] (Captain Hammer comic here).

He gets a letter from Bad Horse, leader of the Evil League of Evil, who is willing to let Horrible join if he proves himself with an especially spectacular crime. As it happens Horrible is going to steal the Wonderflonium he needs for his freeze gun. He runs into Penny who is collecting signatures for a homeless shelter and finally talks to her. As he attempts to steal the Wonderflonium by remote controlling the van it's on, Captain Hammer arrives and destroys the device controlling the van. The van careers out of control and nearly hits Penny; Hammer throws her out of the way into a pile of garbage just as Horrible manages to stop the van. "You nearly killed her," says Horrible. "I remember it differently," says Hammer. Penny and Hammer's eyes meet and to Horrible's dismay they "connect" and sing. The episode ends with Horrible running away with the Wonderflonium while they are distracted.

Well, it's all set up - comedy, songs that actually drive the story, a superhero[2] who causes at least as much damage as the villain he opposes, a love triangle, and of course Bad Horse lurking in the background. All in under 14 minutes. I for one will be watching this again and again (until Monday, obviously).

[1] I contend that one can have but one nemesis, and it is pleasing to see Dr Horrible agree.
[2] This covers some of the same ground as Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman, in a more comic fashion; Dr Impossible notes that although he's smarter than the heroes and his plans involve robots, high technology and out thinking people, somehow it always comes down to hitting each other.

Movie Night 11/07/08

2008-07-12T01:42:00.000-07:00

Movie night was a day late, as Heckler was celebrating being out of warranty. Be careful Heckler, if you break yourself now, you'll have to pay for repairs! Anyway we finally finished Crime Traveller with the last two episodes The Lottery Experiment and The Broken Crystal[1], another Wonder Woman episode (Last of the Two Dollar Bills), an early episode of Lost in Space that I failed to record anything about as that came last, and Beach Blanket Bingo (1965, Dir: William Asher). Even by our generous standards this doesn't count as Sci-Fi, even if there's a mermaid[2] swimming in and out of the plot, but the DVD was a present from, erm, Beretta[3]? who was attending, and anyway we've been admiring the opening sequence on Youtube for quite some time. Anyway, to the whiteboard:

General Comments:

If you don't review bad Sci-Fi, we won't make guns

Crime Traveller, The Lottery Experiment:

Slade: I think I can help you!
Turner: Why, have you taken a course in Laser Optics?
"98 number memory and message capacity. The Rolls Royce of Mobile Phones."
Perhaps he'll get a new ja[cket][4]

Beach Blanket Bingo:

"If I put my arm around someone, I like it to be my idea."
"I'm saving that one for my wallet."
"Come along now, let's get out of these loose clothes and into something tight."
"It's just good clean fun that keeps him out of pool halls."
"It was my bad side - I was facing front."
"The best way to learn is to watch."
This film is generating quotes faster than I can write, and I'm running out of space.
"I, Eric Von Zipper, am putting the snatch on you."
"It's a people bite!"
"Frankie's small, but he's wiry."
"I'm taking you to my boobie[5] house"
Frankie's wearing Jeff Slade's Jacket!

From Crime Traveller: The Broken Crystal

Synchotron (sic)
"Lengthen the photon rod."

And Generally:

I'm bored of the board
Boobies make me smile
Goebbels! [6]

Anyway, before I emulate Jeff Slade and make my 7:30 bedcheck, here's all those videos in one special movie night player:

[1] K: Didn't we watch that last week?
H: No, that was The Dark Crystal
K: Yes, but it was broken
H&K: Mmmmmm...
[2] Played by Marta Kristen who also played Judy Robinson, the blonde daughter in Lost in Space. In fact if we believe IMDB she seems to have gone straight from Beach Blanket Bingo to Lost in Space. Coincidence? You tell us!
[3] Heckler, I know Krupp is funnier, but she expressed a preference. Still, you can call her Krupp if you like.
[4] Slade has worn the same mustard yellow jacket in every episode of Crime Traveller - The episode when he wore a dark blue one, he got locked in the boot of a car and set on fire which ruined it.
[5] It's taken some googling to find out what was going on here; it seems that South Dakota Slim calls everyone "boobie".
[6] This probably deserves a footnote: In the episode of Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman destroys a padlock with her bare hands, then one of the Nazi agents shoots one out, then Major Steve Trevor opens another one by forcing the lock. I then imagined Adolf Hitler reviewing the budget of Nazi Sabotage operations in the US and exclaiming "They're claiming expenses for 2000 padlocks? That doesn't sound right. [shouts] Goebbels!" Following which we shouted "Goebbels" at each other until it ceased to be funny.

Dark Crystal

2008-07-10T03:11:00.000-07:00

I didn't take notes off the whiteboard at the last movie night, which is probably just as well as there were some unusual illustrations. For the record we watched 2 more episodes of Crime Traveller (which I will review when we've finished, and this time I won't show Heckler my notes before hand), The Dark Crystal and an episode of Wonder Woman[1].

So The Dark Crystal (Trailer) - a fantasy movie where all the actors are puppets from Jim Henson. It looks like if you search youtube you can find the whole film up there if you've not seen it or forgotten about it some time in the last 25 years. The first question is, does it show it's age? Visually, no, because although there has been puppetry in films since then, the state of the art doesn't seem to have advanced greatly. Storywise, it's a little simple - it's definitely a kids film[4], and other than looking good (Aughra's Orrery has stuck with me since) doesn't make much attempt to hold the attention of adults.

That simple story - The Last Gelfling™ has been brought up by the Gentle Mystics™ to find a Shard of The Crystal and use it to Repair the Crystal in Accordance With The Prophecy, or The Evil Skeksis™ will destroy the world. Not that there aren't some good bits - (Jen - Wings? I don't have wings! Kira - Of course not. You're a boy. And: Jen - The prophecy didn't say anything about this! Kira - Prophets don't know everything!)

On balance not as good as the next time Jim Henson went for fantasy with puppets - Labyrinth. Which not coincidentally came as part of the three pack of Henson Fantasies (with MirrorMask). We watched Labyrinth before Heckler and Kochk started up, but I have the notes, so I'll briefly cover that real soon now.

[1] Notes made during Wonder Woman:

Wonder Woman is a Super Secretary
The Falcon really doesn't like Aubergines[2]
Are you going to change in front of the window Diana Prince?
Wonder Woman has flat stunt boots and heeled posing boots[3]
Good thing they use the same notation on Paradise Island. What, Greek letters?

[2] I have not the faintest clue what this was about
[3] So that's how she does it!
[4] LeMat was saying how it scared him when he first saw it

Dieselpunk vs Steampunk

2008-07-03T07:01:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago two different TV channels happened to synchronise their schedules to create a virtual double bill: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow followed by Wild Wild West. Sky Captain has the Sky Captain, Joe Sullivan, (played by Jude Law) tracking down both the mysterious kidnappings of eminent scientists and the source of mysterious giant robots which are attacking all over an alternate 1939 world and stealing resources and equipment. Wild Wild West has US Army Captain Jim West tracking down Confederate hold-outs who are kidnapping the most eminent scientists in 1869 America, while preparing for a new Confederate rebellion. Both are saddled with sidekicks they don't want (Sky Captain gets Polly Perkins, intrepid girl reporter for the New York Chronicle played by Gwyneth Paltrow; Jim West gets US Marshal Artemus Gordon played by Kevin Kline who builds gadgets and intrepidly dresses up as a red-head (leading inevitably to Will Smith's line: "Never drum on a white ladies boobies at a big redneck dance"))

I could go on about similarities and differences to try and build a coherent article or even track down links between the films (Bai Ling plays a beautiful and evil sidekick to the villain in both!) to try and impress you. But in all honesty I've put off writing this for so long it's movie night tonight and I'll have a backlog. So here's some of my notes:

The Sky Captain is an extraordinary pilot[1], and a fine pulp adventurer, but a rubbish general. His "Army for Hire" doesn't seem to have been on alert despite the attacks on New York, which appears to be just up the road. On the other hand, there's not (yet?) been any attack on Pearl Harbour, so maybe the "If you think you're under attack, get those damn planes off the ground" idea isn't in his doctrine.

Polly Perkins ("Could we just for once die without bickering?") sees to be fine as an investigator, and has a good turn of words. But she's rubbish at holding on to her camera, or in fact sending her copy in to the editor.

Angelina Jolie turns up as a British Air Captain[2] in a leather flightsuit and an eyepatch. Sky Captain has a machete[3] which comes in useful on the mysterious island. This is a full on alternate history; not just the technology but the world situation is different to our 1939.

It's the technology - a ramped up 30s - that makes it dieselpunk. It looks fantastic. It uses many old 20s and 30s pulp ideas.

Maybe that's the flaw; it uses them but doesn't examine (or better yet re-examine them) in the light of the 21st century. There's lots of ideas that sound better than they turn out to be[4]. It seems to have been the director's first and to-date only film. As I said, it's flawed, but it's interesting and it looks great.

So on the Wild Wild West side, we have a couple of one liners from Will Smith: "Hold on a minute Belle, you can't just go ramming a man's personal things into a hole like that."
"This is not the way you transport nitro."

I don't remember ever seeing a whole episode of the original 60's TV series (there's an idea Heckler), but on the idea of a black lawman in a comedy western, didn't Blazing Saddles do that better?

The technology is one part super-powered Victorian Steampunk (note Loveless's steam-powered wheelchair) to three parts fantasy. Wild Wild West is more secret history than Alternate History (most of the things that are a matter of historical record actually happened around about 1869, although the secret service was actually set up to combat counterfeiters and that in 1865). And this film passes the time easily enough, it's amusing enough and the action and effects are good enough, but it never seems to me to be trying for more than good enough. To me, Sky Captain seems to try for more, and partially succeeds, while Wild Wild West aims to pass the time pleasantly and just about manages it.

Some videos (link):

[1] Although not as extraordinary as his plane, from the imdb trivia page (oh, spoilers):

Sky Captain flies a late-model P-40, the six gun version of the P-40N. However, his has a few "Hollywoodifications":
- The rear decking behind the pilot's seat, and the fuselage fuel tank under it, were removed in order to add a second seat (for Polly). This was actually done to some real P-40s for flight instruction.
- The pop-open bays for the cable launcher and magnet bombs are right in the middle of the centerline fuel tank (which fills the interior of the wing between the main wheel wells).
- The small underwater engines under the horizontal stabilizers would retract right into the tail wheel gear well, and into each other.
- When going into underwater mode, the ostensibly solid-metal propeller blades collapse down into the prop spinner, and into a different section of space-time. The real plane's prop spinner is a shell that goes around the collars and gearing of the prop hub assembly.
- Roughly 5000 horsepower appears to have been added to the 1200hp Allison engine.

[2] This being an alternate 1939, it's not quite the RAF and it's not really the Navy either.
[3] There are several scenes in the Jurassic Park films that I can't help wondering why no-one ever packs a machete with them. It turns facing a velociraptor from "certain death" to "deadly fight".
[4] SPOILER: having archive footage of the dead Laurence Olivier stand in for what turns out to be archive footage of the dead Dr Totenkopf sounds fantastic, but you know, on screen, so what?

No Movie Night

2008-07-01T16:34:00.000-07:00

There was no movie night last week, as Heckler was off to Glastonbury. But does that mean there was no Heckler and Kochk? As it happens, yes. But that doesn't have to be the case.

I'm going to start a no-movie-night tradition[1] of reviewing something that's completely unrelated to this blog's stated purpose. In this case, the video to the song Warwick Avenue by Duffy. Youtube link here.

So the first thing I notice is that from 0:18 to 3:35 is one continuous shot of Aimee Duffy singing and crying in the back of a taxi. That's a pretty long take for a music video. It also gives me my first comparison: a close up of a face for a long time and crying suggests to me Sinéad O'Connor's Nothing Compares 2 U (this video dates back to 1990 when O'Connor was 24, the same age as Duffy is now). Was this an influence?

Next thing to notice: from 2:10 to 2:24 she stops singing in the video, although the playback keeps going. I don't know if this is deliberate, but the way it appears, that she can't go on singing her prepared song, is almost heart breaking. (Michael Stipe stops singing and walks away from the microphone in a couple of REM videos, but it has a different effect. I can't seem to find the video I'm thinking of; still, you might get the idea from the video to What's the Frequency Kenneth).

Thirdly, the song is mostly about what Duffy is going to say when she meets her ex-lover at Warwick Avenue (lyrics here), but the video begins with her taxi pulling away from Warwick Avenue tube station. So she's going over what she meant to say, but, I think it's clear, it didn't go as well as the plan laid out in the lyrics. And what's going on in the lyrics is not a happy scene.

Which leads me to my final point: that despite what popular media might suggest, grief is not pretty. It's not about beautiful young women weeping photogenic tears in front of the camera. If everyone grieving looked like Sinéad in Paris or Duffy in a Taxi in west London, we'd all be there to offer sympathy. In real life grief is ugly and unpleasant, and that's why people avoid it.

Playlist here as Warwick Avenue doesn't embed.

Anyway enough of this. Next time some actual Sci-Fi; Dieselpunk vs Steampunk!

[1] Which may last as long as one no-movie-night

Galactica 1980: The Return of Starbuck

2008-06-27T16:13:00.000-07:00

I have almost nothing to add to what Heckler says about Galactica 1980[1]. What I'm going to talk about is the last episode of Galactica 1980, which, apart from it's framing, is actually more of an original Battlestar Galactica episode.

It begins with Doctor Zee, the Galactica's child genius, having a dream which closely ties in with his mysterious origin. It seems there was once a great warrior known as Starbuck who was lost when his ship was damaged in a fight with the Cylons. He crash landed on an uninhabited planet, which he named "Starbuck" and appointed himself President of. Bored, he finds a crashed Cylon ship and repairs one of the Cylons, who he names Cy. He convinces Cy not to kill him and teaches him to play cards.

Then it gets a bit weirder - a mysterious pregnant woman appears from nowhere, is silent for a week, then asks Starbuck if he would die for her. She reveals that she came from a "dimension beyond", and that the child is Starbuck's spiritual child. The kid is born and Starbuck and Cy stand as his godfathers, the woman (Angela, in a fairly unsubtle hint at her origins) says they need a spacecraft so Cy and Starbuck build one by sticking bits of the Viper and Raider together, then, as predicted by Angela, Cylons turn up. Starbuck sends Angela and the kid off, Cy shoots two of the Cylons, is shot himself and Starbuck gets the last one, leaving him alone with the dying Cy who describes Starbuck as his friend. Back in the framing story, it's revealed that Zee was found on his own in the lifepod of the Viper/Raider.

A swift look at Mormon beliefs leads me to note that Starbuck's drinking, smoking, gambling and womanising[3] aren't merely quirky flaws, but are actual sins. Here on the planet Starbuck he redeems himself by saving Zee and Angela. I note also that in Mormon theology, dead Mormons actively help God; we might say that they become angels. If I have a real complaint it's that this isn't The Return of Starbuck, other than within the scope of the story, it's actually a Farewell to Starbuck (Battlestar Wiki notes that it was originally titled "Starbuck's Greatest Journey", although a rubbish title, one closer to the actual events in the show)

There's one final thing to note - Zee, Starbuck's son, born of an angel, is clearly going to be the saviour of the human race (Zee, of course, is the last letter of the alphabet, indicating an ending - "I am the Alpha and the Omega"). He also has a Cylon for a godfather. What does this mean? Well to me, it suggests the ending is not victory, but peace. Sadly (or, considering the way Galactica 1980 was going, perhaps fortunately) we will never know.

Unless there's a spinoff from the new BSG, involving superpowered kids, flying motorbikes and time travel hijinks. Galactica 2010 anyone?

[1] I say almost nothing, but I'll point out that while those of us raised more or less as Catholics or Anglicans read Adama as Moses and the journey of Galactica's fleet as the flight from Egypt[2], Glenn Larson was a Mormon so it's more directly the journey of the Mormons from New York to Deseret (Utah). On the other hand, the Mormon leadership explicitly drew parallels between the flight out of Egypt and their own exodus to Salt Lake City. I'll be coming back to Mormon theology later in my review, although I'll note I've only read the most entertaining excerpts from the Book of Mormon so the odds are good that I will be very wrong. I should know better than to mix theology with ~~liverwurst and buttermilk~~ movie reviews.
[2] If only there were Ten Plagues, I could tie this into my reading of The Reaping.
[3] Do I need to note that Starbuck ends up with the traditional consequence of womanising - a child - by untraditional means?

Backdated Posts

2008-06-21T17:27:00.001-07:00

Wew have plenty of other painful sci-fi to review here. The two series we finished before stratuing up this blog were;

Star Maidens - a 1970s social commentary on sexism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Trrsh8X0G8

and

The Secret Service - a half live action, half puppet based sci-fi spy thriller with the best theme tune in living memory!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOnWzmlRdfs (bear with it - it's worth it)

Reviews to follow!

Heckler

Crime Traveller

2008-06-21T16:42:00.000-07:00

It is almost inconceivable why this show did not get picked up for a second series. Crime traveller features police using time travel to solve murder mysteries (see what they did there?)

With episode titles like "Jeff Slade and the Loop of Infinity" and of course the unforgettable "Revenge of the Chronology Protection Hypothesis" this was surely a winner.

In fact - sadly - this show is actually complete and total rubbish.

Holly Turner, played by the classy and even modestly attractive Chloe Annett, has the use of a time machine invented by her father. I cannot even begin to describe this machine other than to say it is a conflagration of bizarre and cheap components and is built into the living room at Holly's flat. I don't know how an estate agent might describe the flat - maybe "bijou with surprising extra dimension to it"?!

The time machine can send you back in time by a seemingly random period - but in the episodes we have seen so far it doesn't seem to be much more than about 24 hours. Also - as the time machine is Holly's living room - you are presumably only supposed to leave and arrive points in time when you know you are not already going to be there.

This particularly so as in episode 4 Holly tells us that making eye contact with yourself from a different "time zone" could quite literally bugger up the entire universe! I don't see how you can really plan for this if you don't know how far back you are going to go and also as Holly and the male protagonist (of whom more below) MUST return to the time machine to be there at the exact moment they left. How then to avoid their own departing selves?

Anyway Holly works for the police as a "science officer" and seems to have whatever scientific looking miscellany the BBC had lying around when they filmed this. I've heard of forensic, ballistic and even scene of crime officers but never a police science officer. Nonetheless this introduces Holly to suave, smooth talking detective Jeff Slade played by Michael French. An actor whose acting has slightly less dimensions than Holly's flat.

Slade is a hard hitting unorthodox cop with a side line in terrible jokes. Here is another hard hitting unorthodox detective;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnNrwmk2RIk

It's perfectly obvious that Holly and "Slade", as he is referred to throughout the series, fancy the pants off each other.

On the subject of pants and less specifically clothes in general Slade's wardrobe appears to consist of one pair of jeans, one yellow short and one suede look mustard yellow jacket which he wears in every episode. We're up to episode 4 and the only other outfit Slade wore was destroyed when he got caught in a fire (presumably they wanted to keep the yellow jacket et al*)

Anyway whenever a crime (this has always turned out to be a murder) occurs Slade immediately asks Holly to take them back in time to see who did it. In episode 4 Slade himself (having come back in time) nearly lands up caught and charged as the murderer.

The dimwit.

In episode 2 Holly is actually arrested for the murder of her aunt whose death she is investigating by coming back in time - she nearly doesn't get back to the time machine in time and thus allegedly trapped in the "loop of infinity" identified in the title to episode 1. I assume this is what happened to Bill Murray in Groundhog Day! Or anyone who visits Scunthorpe**

Anyway I don't know why they bother - it was made plain from episode 1 that they cannot actually change events in their own subjective past so , at one end of the scale, Slade's attempt to gamble using future knowledge leads to naught and at the other Slade only survives to travel in time to start with because Holly rescues him - unbeknownst to him - when she comes back herself. It seems then that the time machine only allows Slade and Holly Turner to see whodunnit and give you a headache about cause and effect! Importantly no murders are averted! It all seems an excuse to not do any proper detective work.

We have 4 more episodes of this to watch. I'm not sure I can stand it....

It would be a crime to travel to see this...

Heckler

* - presumably in a time travel series, with an inherent risk of such things, it is easier to avoid continuity errors if your principal cast always wear the same clobber!
** - which I did a few months ago

My Take on Galactica 1980

2008-06-21T15:59:00.000-07:00

Battlestar Galactica was a brilliant show!

It had all the classic elements of
proper sci-fi; i.e. strong characters with defining characteristics*, plots driven hard by the back story** and of course the sci-fi element of it being set in space with the bad guys being robots (cylons)!

Battlestar Galactica 1980 had none of this. In an ill conceived and budget driven attempt to maintain the success of the original series (which can still hold its own against many more recent series) BSG1980 showed us the Galactica and its rag tag fleet of refugees arriving at Earth only to have to send only two members of the crew and a bunch of aggravating children to Earth whilst the rest of the fleet arses about in space allegedly trying to draw the Cylons off.

The cylons - being the driving force behind the plot - actually only appear in three episodes, one being a two parter wher they appear to have advanced to the point where they can look human. By sheer chance in that episode, where the Cylons actually land on Hallowe'en, they are mistaken by some americans as people in fancy dress. In the other episode it is a flashback to a much earlier time and features Starbuck. That episode redeems the entire series only in as much as that none of its core cast is in it!

Worse still BSG1980 introduces us to Barry Van Dyke (son of Dick) and his hair.

Here's old Barry messing up another brilliant classic show (Airwolf) in the little known and unreleased on DVD final season where all the original cast have been replaced!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AscaDJ40tBU

It seems to me that Barry's version of a colonial warrior (BSG's military elite) is as convincing as his father's cockney accent in Mary Poppins!

Oh and let's not forget the flying motorbikes (cue a cameo appearance by some people who look like they were in CHiPs). Sadly I can't find a clip of this.

All of the "best" of Galactica 1980 can be seen here - and even then it is too long;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbweBDnViyA

In short - if you enjoyed the orginal BSG then you almost certainly won't like this. It sucks.

Heckler

* - for example Starbuck is driven by passions for gambling, women, fine cigars and flying by the seat of his pants, Apollo is trying to be the galaxy's most boring fighter pilot and Adama is basically Moses leading his people from tyranny to a promised land - a shining planet called Earth
** - the last surviving humans from numerous colony worlds being driven hard across the galaxy dfrom a race of machines bent on destroying them

Movie Night: 20/06/08

2008-06-20T00:59:00.000-07:00

Movie Night at Heckler's last night. Anything in quotes is from the show in question. Some parts got partially wiped out so I've reconstructed them [like this]. Here's what's on the Whiteboard:

From Galactica 1980: The Return of Starbuck

This will be the highlight of the series![1] What, the end of it?
"That was an unexpected move, he is a very good pilot"
"That is a small consolation, we are going to crash!"
[He's not] gone nuts, he's just amusing himself.
["We were] taking a vote and the ground come up and hit us."[2]
What did S___ look like in 1980.

An aside:

(Snake killing stick)

From Crime Traveller: Fashion Shoot

What? Me and Jack (sic) Slade having a cook off?
I don't care how [bad] the Dark Knight is, if we've just watched Batman and Robin, it will be fine.
OH NO -HE'S SET FIRE TO JEFF SLADE

From Batman Returns:

I was their number one son but they treated me as No 2.
"You can't have too much power, if my life has any meaning, that's the meaning"
"I'd like to fill her void"

Then we were distracted by a youtube video of Green Arrow and Black Canary which lead via an unexpected route to this comment:

Superglue chicken fillets to S___'s chest.

Back to Batman Returns:

Erogenous zones blown sky high.
That's the biggest parasol I've ever seen.

Crime Traveller: Revenge of the Chronology Protection Hypothesis

"There was nothing in the Guardian (laugh)".
"You're l[uck]y yo[u] don't take the [Gu]ardian."
"Malfunction in the gravity simulator booster circuits."
The Revenge of Chronology Protection Hypothesis.

In addition Heckler drew S___'s eyes and glasses, but then labelled them with a slang word for breasts, I described a spacecraft in terms not really suitable for this blog and for some reason the phrase "Heather Locklear in her bra and pants" all appear on the board.

[1] I thought I said "should", but Heckler had the board, so that's what was written. I'll go into why it should be better in a mini-review later.
[2] All quotes are from Cy the Cylon.

Galactica 1980: Space Croppers

2008-06-18T11:26:00.000-07:00

The great blog Heckler and Kochk, our home for these many weeks. We have endured the wilderness of space. And now we are nearing the end of our journey. We have at last a review of some genuinely bad sci-fi.

Galactica 1980, originally a spin-off, later rolled into the main Battlestar Galactica syndication package follows the exploits of Troy (Apollo's son played by Kent McCord) and Dillon (Troy's sidekick played by Barry van Dyke) 30 years after the original series. The Galactica has found Earth, but the earthlings are too primitive to defend themselves against the Cylons, so the Galactica and it's fleet draw off the Cylons in another direction while various teams of agents try to help earth advance. Their methods of doing this involve hassling nuclear scientists, flirting with TV News reporters, travelling back in time to fight the Nazis[1], getting stranded on Earth with a bunch of kids from the fleet and using their flying motorbikes.

As well as flying motorbikes they turn out to be stronger than earth humans (due to a difference in gravity), and have invisibility bracelets and a lang-u-tron which translates English to whatever-they-speak in such a way as to create comic effect. Most of the jokes involve cultural misunderstandings between Dillon and Troy and the various Americans they meet.

Do I need to note that the main title sequence is from the original series with no footage from the 1980 series?

So much for the background, as Sun Tzu might say. Last week we watched the penultimate episode Space Croppers. Some of the plot and some of the footage is recycled from the original BSG episode The Magnificent Warriors. The Cylons, who it seems have been following the fleet to discover the whereabouts of Earth - and I'll come back to that point - get bored waiting and attack the one remaining agro ship. Troy and Dillon go to California, or possibly Texas, or conceivably New Mexico or Arizona, take a half share in a farm that's failing due to drought and unfair water allocation (due to prejudice against the farm's Hispanic inhabitants), grow a crop and seedlings to save the fleet from starvation and defeat the greedy, racist villains. The leader of the villains sees the ship that comes to water and supergrow the crops, as well as plant a colony on Earth and presumably recognises it from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Knowing that accusing them of being aliens would make him look nuts, he accuses them of being illegal aliens. He ignores the fact that the superscouts who've turned up to get the harvest in in time are almost certainly working in violation of child labour laws as well as being illegal aliens; since he's blatantly abusing water use law and regulations[2] maybe he's willing to spot them one labour law violation. Anyway everything turns out for the best.

Back on the movie night whiteboard notes post[3] there's a couple of quotes that illustrate some of the flaws. To repeat:

If I wanted crude artistic expression I'd watch your acting [Barry] Van Dyke

Troy and Dillon come across a scarecrow and attempt to work out it's use. The scene is not very funny, or well acted, and is over long. Dillon's final suggestion is that it's a form of crude artistic expression. Hence our-associate-who-I'm-calling-LeMat's outburst.

Are you suggesting some sort of Michael Bolton - Barry Van Dyke hair off?!
Adama is trapped in a 70s disco and can't get out!

By setting it on Earth, it looks very dated, which means when they create a funky control room lit by red strip lights it looks like a disco.

But this is all a natural consequence of what this series is: an attempt to continue the success of Battlestar Galactica on a smaller budget. What makes this episode really bad is the throw away line of the Imperious Leader which I'll quote here:

I'm growing impatient waiting for the Galactican fleet to lead us to the last outpost of humanity. Launch a full-scale attack on their agricultural ships. We must destroy their food supply, thereby forcing them to lead us to Earth.

What this does is convert the original BSG, all of it, all 24 episodes, into the Escape from the Death Star sequence. All of the struggles and sacrifices of the characters which we've been following are meaningless. They've not survived due to their own skill, daring and luck; the Cyclons let them escape to follow them to Earth, pressing them hard so they don't try and stop along the way, but not so hard as to make them turn and fight a final apocalyptic battle rather than be picked off one by one.

I'm really unhappy with that reinterpretation, but I can't see what other conclusion I can come to given what the Imperious Leader says. Still, at least it explains how they managed to fight off the Cylons by the skin of their teeth every episode.

Final thought goes to LeMat, who recorded this on the Whiteboard:

We nearly came a cropper with that one

My rating: Zero Rounds (for destroying my childhood memories of Apollo and Starbuck's heroism, it's a knife fight)

[1] If we believe Wikipedia, Donald Bellisario, then working with Glen A Larson, took the time-travel-of-the-week idea and turned it into Quantum Leap.
[2] Unless this is Texas, and water law hasn't moved on since it was used to drive conflict in one of many Westerns.
[3] Need a snappier name for that.

Bad Sci-Fi, Classic Sci-Fi

2008-06-18T03:06:00.000-07:00

Last week John Scalzi's SciFi Movie column for AMC talked about why so many classic Sci-Fi films are actually bad films. Being limited to 800 words he barely scratches the surface (he expands some thoughts in the comments, and doesn't answer one question with the response "What? Tell you now and waste a whole potential column? Madness!", so hopefully he will come back to this theme). Which begs the question, is our focus on bad sci-fi in this blog and our viewing a reaction to the high levels of badness in the classics of the genre, or are we just so-bad-it's-good weirdos?

The crotchetyoldfan, who, not entirely coincidentally, is behind the Classic Science Fiction Channel my last post was about[1], talks about this column and SF films he's watched three times on his blog. If nothing else, there's several films I'd like to see and several more I'd like to see again I got from this.

Additionally, there's a point he touches on in passing, which is that the movie business marketing label "Sci-Fi" doesn't make a film SF. Related is the question that came up last week, namely is Hellboy a Superhero movie? An associate, who we may or may not be referring to as LeMat in these posts, said yes. The question is, if it wasn't from a comic book would it still be? (Of course if it wasn't from a comic book, the film would almost certainly have been very different).

Anyway, enough talking about talking about bad sci-fi - this afternoon I hope to get back to just talking about bad sci-fi.

[1] I'm clearing out my things to blog about list, so I can review the first two episodes of Crime Traveller before tomorrow's movie night.

The Classic Science Fiction Channel

2008-06-18T02:35:00.000-07:00

So via Wil Wheaton and Boing Boing, John Scalzi's pimping thread[1] and our own comments I'm pointing out The Classic Science Fiction Channel website. Down the linked page is the creator's screed. Here's an excerpt:

I've been very disappointed by the so-called SciFi Channel since its inception. Like many others, I believed that I'd be able to tune in and regularly catch repeats of classic shows, great classic movies, some SF oriented 'made-for' content (coverage of conventions, literature, authors, etc) and maybe some original movies or series, carefully chosen to insure the preservation of the genre and treat it in a positive, perhaps even marginally experimental, way.

You can probably guess that's not what I got.

In the UK it's not as bad as the US where this guy is based. Indeed one of our associates[2], not a big SF fan, was introduced to Heroes by the SciFi Channel and leaped to it's defence. I have every intention of watching, reviewing, and, to a limited extent, enjoying SciFi's monster-of-the-week movies.

Here's the idea behind The Classic Science Fiction Channel - don't like what regular TV is giving you? Create your own virtual internet channel. Some of the stuff is on Hulu which doesn't let you look at it if you're outside the US (boo, hiss). Some of it is stuff that Heckler has already spent his hard earned pennies[3] on (a quick glance suggests that this very nearly corresponds with the Hulu stuff. Hooray!). Worse still, we have a pile of DVD's as tall as Heckler[4] to watch already, so getting on to this will take a while, not to mention that we'll have to ramp up our technical skills to make things on the computer appear on the big screen.

Nevertheless I heartily endorse The Classic Science Fiction Channel, which will get the Heckler & Kochk Seal of Approval™ and appear on our blogroll once I get around to setting it up.

[1] It's not as smutty as it sounds.
[2] Heckler, we should come up with a system for nicknaming other people. I note that this Wikipedia page may be of assistance.
[3] No, literally.
[4] 37 inches from muzzle to butt plate, since you ask.

Movie Night: 13/06/08

2008-06-13T02:27:00.000-07:00

Last night it was movie night on Heckler's big screen. Here's the notes from the Whiteboard as it happened[1]:

From before we started

Drink all of S___ & V___'s booze.

From Battlestar Galactica 1980: Sharecroppers

If I wanted crude artistic expression I'd watch your acting [Barry] Van Dyke
Your frustration, hurt and disappointment are shared by J___ and I
Are you suggesting some sort of Michael Bolton - Barry Van Dyke hair off?!
Adama is trapped in a 70s disco and can't get out!
We nearly came a cropper with that one

From our main feature Ghost Rider

See those Blackhawks? They're down!

From Crime Traveller: Death in the Family (actual lines from the show)

Power surge in the photon generator![2]
Don't worry - it was just a light testicular blow.

Down at the bottom of the white board

Hector Alonzo
Misplaced apostrophe's

Proper reviews on these later.

[1] I've anonymized some names of real people
[2] Which I translated as "we need to change the lightbulb".

Iron Man

2008-06-08T07:16:00.000-07:00

So: Iron Man[1]. Being in that part of the Venn diagram where movies, comic books and Sci-Fi meet, this film has been much discussed in those parts of the internet I frequent. At Sci-Fi Weekly Wil McCarthy used his regular the-science-in-science-fiction column to discuss Iron Man back in April. (He gives the science a C-). More problematically, on another board someone noted that the film uses a trope known in the link as "What these people need is a honky"[2]. I note in addition that the invaluable Jim Henley has discovered some other concerns about having a rich white capitalist as a hero (his own excellent review is here).

So with all this informed commentary, what do Heckler and Kochk have to offer? What is our raison d'etre? Where is our unique selling point? Very well:

1. Theme Song. Iron Man doesn't have a theme song, which is why I came up with this one:

Iron Ma-an
He's the man,
the man with the Midas touch
An iron touch
Such a cold finger
Beckons you
Into his den of gin
But don't go in!

Sung to the tune of Goldfinger, preferably by Dame Shirley Bassey.[3]

Tim Walters responded to this with:

Iron Man, Iron Man
Does whatever an iron can
Presses shirts, any size
Sends them back Martinized
Yeah, yeah, there goes the Iron Man

To this tune, I'm assuming.

Of course the 60s Iron Man cartoon had a theme song - why didn't they try and incorporate it into the the film?

2. A Bad Joke whispered during the film:

"Is Tony Stark being ironic?"
"No, I think he gets Pepper to do his shirts for him"

3. I can confidently state that the terrorist group Ten Rings is familiar with neither Norse myth nor the A-Team. Anyone who was would know better than to lock an engineering genius ~~in a warehouse with all the equipment needed to convert agricultural machinary into a cabbage firing bazooka~~ in a cave and tell him to build weapons.

As for Norse myth, I'm pretty familiar with the Lay of Volund[4], and have even been known to tell a stripped down version around campfires, and the only way the references could be more obvious is if one of the terrorists had wandered in and said "~~Weyland Smith~~ ~~Hannibal Smith~~ Tony Stark, this cunning weapon you're building for us isn't your revenge is it? It won't allow you to fly away on Swan's wings afterwards will it? Okay carry on."

Final Score: 8 rounds (I can't think of anyway to link the number 8 back to the film. Sorry.)

[1] Or as we refer to him "Gold-Titanium Alloy Man"

[2] Stark goes out to Afghanistan, has a moment of personal growth, escapes, and then comes back to defend the people. I note in mitigation that this is only part of Stark's story, rather than being the entire narrative.
[3] Potential Iron Man/ James Bond crossover - Gold-Titaniumalloyfinger with the sequel The Man with the Gold-Titanium Alloy Gun
[4] It's been out for at least 1100 years, so you've only yourself to blame if this is a spoiler for you. Here's Auden's translation.

Tin Man

2008-06-06T05:57:00.000-07:00

Tin Man is a Sci-Fi Channel mini-series based on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. What it isn't is a straightforward adaption of the book[1], or the film[2], or even the other film[3]. DG, a feisty 21st century waitress, finds herself in the Outer Zone or O.Z. She meets a variety of companions including Glitch, who has had half his brain removed; Cain, a cop (known as tin men for the tin star they carry), who has been trapped in a metal coffin for years watching a hologram of his wife and son being killed and is consequently fairly heartless; and Raw, a hairy psychic who is generally afraid of stuff, as you might be if you'd been stuck in a dungeon and had your psychic essence sucked out of your head with a tube.

Oz, which was a bit clockpunk, has moved on into the 21st century and become the O.Z. and seems to have gone through steampunk and out the other side into a post-steampunk apocalypse (see this trailer). This, as you might expect, is due to DG's evil sister Azkadellia usurping the throne. She's planning to destroy the O.Z. during the double eclipse, but there's just one thing in her way; she need the emerald.

So anyway, the problems; the O.Z. looks a bit too much like every other Sci-Fi planet or fantasy land, for the obvious reason; it's shot in British Columbia like every Sci-Fi planet or fantasy land. Raw doesn't seem to have character arc to get back his courage (I may have missed this; it's over 5 hours of film). DG's father's name is Ahamo (Omaha backwards), but Zooey Deschanel pronounces this amusingly (as shown in this video).

Things that may or may not be problems: All the knowing nods to the book and the film ("Have a heart Cain", "Lions?" "Tigers?" "Bears!" "Oh my!" etc.) The full on love of Cain (he may be the title character, but does he have to be a hero at everything?). DG always happening to turn up in the right place at the right time (This is based on a kid's fantasy, but still).

Good stuff: When it looks good, it looks really good. The technology looks like it has the clockwork stuff from the books in it's DNA. DG has been prepared for the O.Z. by her father's stories so doesn't spend the entire time trying to go home, and is smart and sassy. Cain's gun, which solves several early problems lets them down. Cain is a real Gunslinger[4]. DG's relationship with Azkadellia gets more and more complicated as it goes on. It's three parts, so we aren't over cliffhangered; it's not crammed into 2 hours which would have been tragic, or stretched into 13 or 22 hours, which would probably have turned it into setting and problem of the week rather than having all the parts moving at once. And the flying monkeys are tattooed on Azkadellia's chest.

Final Score: Seven rounds (2 for each part, and 1 for the finale)

All the videos in one Oztastic player here:

[1] The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L Frank Baum, 1900. Being out of copyright it is available from Project Gutenberg for free.
[2] The Wizard of Oz (1939, Dir:Victor Fleming) This is the famous musical with Judy Garland as Dorothy. Here's the trailer, which, I note, has several blatant lies in the voiceover. (Not the claim to Widescreen - that's true)
[3] Or other films as it turns out. Here's a couple you may or may not know of:

The Wiz (1978, Dir: Sidney Lumet) This is also a musical but has all different songs to the Wizard of Oz, and an all black cast including Diana Ross as Dorothy, Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow and Richard Pryor as the Wiz. No really and truely. It looks like someone has put the whole thing on Youtube, but I'm just going to link to this song Ease on Down the Road.

Return to Oz (1985, Dir: Walter Murch) Some suggest that this production was something to do with the preventing the expiration of the film rights, others suggest it was just the whole thing of Disney losing it's way in the mid-80s. Either way, here's the trailer. Note that there is a Scissor Sisters song of the same name, based on the Oz books, while at the same time being a remembrance of friends lost to drug abuse; it's an album track and doesn't have an official video, so here's a Doctor Who/Rose fan video with it as a soundtrack.

There's a list of other adaptions on the Wikipedia The Wizard of Oz (adaptions) page which does not half give the lie to the claim in the trailer to the 1939 film that "...no one has dared the towering task of giving life and reality to the land of Oz and it's people"; I count 5 attempts to put it on film, one of which failed. Also first published 1900, film in 1939; that's 4 generations of children?

[4] Inspired a little by Stephen King's Dark Tower series?

Sunshine

2008-06-03T03:48:00.001-07:00

Heckler has missed his first deadline, and, if we'd actually discussed the blogging schedule of Heckler and Kochk before he'd gone on his emergency holiday to Turkey, he'd be on course to miss the second (in case you were wondering it's my intention to propose one update per blogger per week). So let's talk about things the two of us haven't seen together, and he probably hasn't seen at all.

Like much big screen serious Sci-Fi, Sunshine[1] (2007, Dir:Danny Boyle, Trailer[2]) is very silly, but looks fantastic. That's the gist of this Strange Horizons review by Adam Roberts, which I agree with almost entirely, so you might as well ignore me and read that instead. To take an example that isn't in that review, when there's a fire in the oxygen garden on their spacecraft, they flush it with oxygen to burn it out! I don't know, do they think they're the Human Torch, to whom every problem is a barbecue? Nevertheless the full sequence looks amazing.

Event Horizon takes the metaphor that Faster Than Light (FTL) travel leads to madness and chaos and takes it literally. There are scenes in Sunshine that hark back to Event Horizon (a deserted ship, people going mad), but a clearer influence is 2001: a Space Odyssey[3], in this case suggesting that the closer we get to the Unconquered Sun, the closer we get to God, which will inevitably drive some people mad.

Well blimey. Three films reviewed, two of them with religious themes. Still there's a difference in the way characters are brought to belief in Sunshine and The Reaping. In The Reaping God smites and creates flashy miracles, the sort of thing that the most hardened unbeliever wouldn't be able to ignore[4]. In Sunshine, it's the mystery and the luminous numinousity[5] of the Sun that brings people to the conclusion that we aren't just fall out from an uncaring supernova ("are we just spacedust?" I think is how they refer to it).

But I've probably talked about God in films enough. Next, let's see what the Sci Fi channel have done to a children's classic. There can't be any religion in a children's classic, can there? Can there?

Final score: 7 rounds (One for each of the crew, but lets Cillian Murphy survive to safeguard the future of the human race)

All 3 of the videos linked to in one handy playlist player below.

[1] Not to be confused with Little Miss Sunshine (a fine comedy) or The Sunshine Boys (which I haven't seen), both films that were on Sky the night I saw Sunshine.
[2] There's currently six different trailers in the first seven on this page (the number 6 spot has been taken by a Little Miss Sunshine Trailer) so if you're feeling up for a bit of trailer action go there and watch.
[3] With an homage to the famous airlock scene; I'll note that this film subscribes to the theory that the only good decrompession is an explosive decompression.
[4] A true sceptic (and I'm looking at one of you in particular here) might still entertain the alien or psychic powers theory, but the biblical god theory would be my leading candidate.
[5] Yes the entire point of this review is to get this phrase onto your screen (or "numinous luminosity"). That and the Human Torch joke.

The Reaping

2008-05-30T06:35:00.001-07:00

The origins of Heckler and I's love affair with Hilary Swank, which I hasten to note is entirely unrequited, is lost in the mists of time (although misplacing the space and adding an apostrophe to her name has given us some amusement). What I can reveal is that one night we watched a film called Max Q about a shuttle mission that goes wrong and ends in a crash. It was bad. Afterwards I noted that The Core did it better in seven minutes, so Heckler brought out the DVD and not only was it much better but Hilary Swank and Bruce Greenwood showed more acting ability and characterisation than the entire cast of Max Q in 97 minutes. Take a look for yourself.

Anyway, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences agrees with Heckler and I to the extent that they've awarded Swank two Oscars for Best Actress in a Leading Role, so I feel that's enough justification for our ~~obsession~~ interest.

The Reaping, (2007, Dir: Stephen Hopkins, Trailer) as befits a two-time Oscar winning actress, is a Serious Horror film, based loosely on the biblical plagues of Egypt. In this case, serious means there aren't many jokes; the plot itself is very silly as most Horror plots are.

Although I anticipate a mostly secular audience for this review, I consider anything that happens in the Bible is not a spoiler. You have been warned.

Let's get the list of plagues out the way. They are:

River turns to blood
Frogs
Lice
Flies
Disease of livestock
Boils
Hail mixed with Fire
Locusts
Darkness
Death of the First Born

Hilary Swank plays Katherine Winter, a former ordained minster who is now Professor of Debunking Miracles (here she is in action) at a Louisiana University. Somewhere in the Bayou, near a town called Haven[1] the river has turned red. They're blaming a young girl, who, not entirely coincidentally, is about the same age Winter's daughter was when she was killed in the Sudan, leading to her loss of faith. Winter arrives in town and fails to find a non-supernatural explanation as the plagues progress. However it seems the town is hiding a dark secret[2].

So let's get to the meat of the issue. What are the theological problems with this? The original 10 plagues were sent by God to convince the Pharaoh to let the Israelites go. Notably, God sent two representatives to Pharaoh to explain what was going on. We seem very short on prophets telling people what's going on. On the other hand, we see the film mostly from Winter's viewpoint[3], so it could be that God has made the situation clear, but also hardened their hearts to not the girl go, and this all happens off camera where Winter can't see it.

I note in passing that when God unleashes a series of disasters on his peoples, they tend to have a big old-time religious revival which convinces him to stop the smiting. Now there's sufficient reasons in the film to understand why this doesn't happen; you can even understand why God might harden the hearts of the Havenites to not let his chosen go (they deserve everything they get[4]). But here's the thing. He's using the ten plagues to destroy a particular group. Why did he use those exact same ten plagues on Egypt? Was that because it was the same situation?

Is The Reaping suggesting that the story in Exodus is a cover story? In this reading, the release of the Israelites from their bondage was a side effect of the God's main intention - to smite the Egyptians. Exodus is the spin-doctor's version of what actually happened.

My, what a blasphemous film The Reaping is.

Anyway favourite plague? I'm going to pick the most spectacular - Locusts. And it being Horror, I'll also pick out the moment of revelation when you find out what the River of Blood actually is.

Final Score: 6 rounds (One for each plague that's good - Blood, Hail, Darkness, Hail and Death of the Firstborn - and one bonus for Hilary Swank)

Videos linked to in one handy player below.

[1] With a name like that, something disastrous is bound to happen
[2] With a name like Haven, what did you expect?
[3] Additional viewpoints provided by her assistant Ben (Idris Elba), Father Costigan (Stephen Rea) who tries to warn Winter by telephone and comes to a bad end, and some flashbacks from Loren, the girl at the heart of the mystery (AnnaSophia Robb).
[4] True justice is one of the themes of Horror as a genre - if people got what they deserved that would truly be horrific

Schwarzenegger Corpus 1: Raw Deal

2008-05-29T05:41:00.000-07:00

Some years ago Heckler and I came back from the pub with some friends and discovered that a Schwarzenegger film we'd not heard of was coming on: Raw Deal (1986, Director: John Irvin. Trailer.). This, we thought, would be perfect after-pub fare - mindless violence and a quotable one-liner or two. We got the one-liner out of the way fairly quickly:

"You should not drink and bake" (Not Safe For Work) (Afterwards quoted by us as "Don't drink and bake" to anyone who cooked in the style of Keith Floyd)

The film continued with Arnie driving into an oil refinery in his police car, rigging it to blow up and driving out on a motorbike. He then reappears in a smart suit with slicked back hair and begins a one man war against the mob.

("Why did he blow up that oil refinery again?"asked Heckler. "To get enough crude oil to slick back his hair," I replied.)

After Arnie drove a lorry cab into a gambling den, the film got a bit talky for five minutes and we got distracted, stopped paying attention and never did figure out what was going on.

Anyway, the 21st Century rolls around and Raw Deal becomes available on DVD at a highly discounted price. Heckler, determined to find out what the hell that film was about, purchases it. And, earlier this month, we wander back from the pub after a friend's birthday and set it going.

As you might imagine, the evening ended about forty five minutes into the film with Heckler lying on the lounge floor snoring loudly.

If you want to know our impression of the film at that point, this video will probably show you.

Finally last weekend, after watching the Eurovision song contest, we put it on and finally make it through to the end. In brief: Arnie shoots, punches, blows up and generally destroys the Chicago mob, is never in a situation he can't handle, very little collateral damage happens etc. etc. in classic 80s action film style. Good Guys win, Bad Guys lose. High point? The final battle sequence including buildup). Low point? The film in general. Most disappointing is that this exchange (NSFW) is actually in Commando, not Raw Deal as I thought.

So a film from our shared history is out of the way. Still, the DVD has a use: if Heckler is having trouble sleeping, I'll just slip it in the player.

Final Score: 2 rounds (one for the film, and one for you if you miss)

All the Youtube videos from this post arranged in one playlist below.

Introduction

2008-05-26T08:05:00.000-07:00

Heckler and Kochk - we watch bad Sci-Fi so you don't have to.

We're a couple of guys who watch films and TV and then review them in the character of two internet-linked sentient firearms.

I'll note that not every blog description subtitle is 100% accurate. Not everything we watch is bad, nor is it all Sci-Fi[1], but, you know, that's kind of the way to bet. Bad things are generally easier and funnier to review, and our knowledge of Sci-Fi is probably our greatest asset[2] so that will be the meat and potatoes of this blog. And if you want to watch what we have, even though you don't have to, feel free. To a certain extent that's what the comment thread is for.

Anyway, that's the plan. As this is the first post, we haven't actually started yet.

[1] Indeed not everything that gets reviewed here may even be things we've watched - they might be things we've read or heard or smelt, tasted or felt, or even just experienced.
[2] Which would be kind of embarassing, if I weren't an anonymous guy pretending to be a gun. Oh wait...