fine whine

In the past month I've watched several DVDs from decades past, including The Love bug and Point blank. Those two films aren't necessarily unconnected as they may seem. While Love bug is a jaunty comedy about racing an intelligent Volkswagen and Point blank is about a single-minded thug out for revenge against the organization that took his money (and his wife), they have one sort-of link: Keenan Wynn.

I call it a 'sort-of' connection as he only appears in one of those aforementioned films. He is, however, the villain of the Love bug sequel Herbie rides again*.

Too bad the movie isn't up to par with his abilities, honed though they may be playing the bad guy in other Disney outings. It's a typical sequel, in that everything that was successful or amusing about the first was kicked up several notches and other variations thrown in to really show up the predecessor.

The problem with such an approach (does anybody remember, oh, The Matrix reloaded? Poor souls) is that it often isn't necessary. If the first movie is so good, why then the need for more, bigger, better? I can understand the desire to correct mistakes and improve missteps, but nothing in The Love bug necessitated the jump from one intelligent vehicle to many, from a cable-car to a veritable flock of Beetles.

It is that ragtag bunch of VWs that set the stage for the film's final act that are the tipping point for me. While it is an impressive technical feat to have all of those driverless Bugs, it cheapens the magic of Herbie being this almost-human car. It is one thing for one car to be able to drive itself; it is wholly another for said car to be able to recruit its seemingly ordinary brethren. It's so ridiculous it's not even funny.

Jessica made an interesting point about Stephen King movies with their sentient cars, and it made me recall last week when I watched Maximum overdrive for the nth time. There's a movie that does the self-driving vehicles thing right: any driverless car or truck is fair game (as well as pinball machines, an electric knife, a lawn mower, and vending machines). There's no whimsy, of course, but frankly I'd've rather watched that DVD again than seeing this. Watching Herbie rides again did a disservice to my childhood, as I'm pretty sure I enjoyed it back then. I can but wonder if the subsequent two installments in the Herbie canon were as bad; I hope not.

I'm not in any hurry to rent them, though.

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* Once again I submitted a correction to the AMG synopsis. Isn't it a bit odd to find two mistakes in under a week, without trying at all?

In your synopsis you state, "this, of course, is after Powers angrily pushes Berry off the balcony of a seaside restaurant and into the drink". This, of course, is incorrect. Powers is angry with Berry, yes, but it is not a shove that puts him into the drink but a slap across the face with a boiled lobster. That 'boiled' part is important, or must be, since the characters mention it three times.

Moreover, Nicole is not in fact Mrs. Steinmetz's (Helen Hayes) niece. She calls Steinmetz 'Grandma' but tells Berry she just lived across the street from her. For that matter Berry calls her 'Grandma' later on in the film. Never 'Aunt'.

Also, you never refer to the characters by name, just the actors. In other synopses you do the opposite. Why the inconsistency?

Once again, only time will tell if they are interested in being accurate, or, as I am beginning to suspect, more interested in minimal coverage of every movie in their database, whether it be by rewording the back of the DVD cover or trying hard to remember.

I heard this while I was standing outside a store, munching on a bagel:
"Mom, this isn't a Canadian quarter; it's a Texas quarter!"

No comment.

Doubtless science fiction fans have both eagerly awaited and dreaded an adaptation* of Isaac Asimov's robot stories. From what little looking I did into this film, more hoopla surrounded the trailers than the final product, er, film.

'Product' does a good job of describing this 'film' as so much of its creation seems to be assembled from off the shelf parts more than organically and artfully combined. Most of this centers around our protagonist, Will Smith playing every action movie character he's done before. His street-smart cop is the only guy who doesn't trust the seemingly harmless androids, and naturally sets him at odds with everybody else. In the world of easy filmmaking, that means he's due to have a protracted foot chase with a seemingly purse-snatching robot (which is obviously a misunderstanding, made annoyingly so by the length of the chase), to get chewed out by the weary chief of police, and so on and so forth. It's as predictable as a Meg Ryan movie, I tell you.

It's as though the filmmakers were faced with but one question: what excuse do we have to make Will Smith run? Not, how do we shoehorn action into a thinking person's movie; nor, how do we make the robots and other effect look convincingly real and not distractingly CGI-slick?

Overtly CGI films as a technique are still in their infancy, and this will not be heralded as one of the early triumphs. Everything looks too fake, too slick, and the robots in particular don't quite seem to be inhabiting the space the actors who were motion-captured actually did. It all looked, well, too fake, even before we got to the sideways semi/robot onslaught at high speed scene, which was far too long.

Oh, and while we're talking about the vehicles, I'd like to add one thing: Spherical wheels are not a neat, futuristic idea. Think about why the lucky ones of us have upgraded to optical mice instead of their ball-laden forebears. Nice try on the futurism bent, but don't think that the car will be that much reinvented in a mere three decades, let alone so impractically.

But back to the sheer obviousness of it all. When first we meet Bridget Moynihan (the obligatory initially reluctant partner/eventual soul mate) she's wearing smart, shiny synthetic clothes with her hair up and speaks with a clipped, precise manner that comes off as too intellectual and stilted. By the end of the ordeal she's clad in natural fibers and leather (not head to ankle like our Converse wearing protagonist, but close) with her hair down and tousled, and she speaks like an average action hero's girlfriend. This may be some sort of character arc, I suppose. Either I'm a genius at spotting things or we're getting beaten across the head with a theme stick.

The lack of subtlety and depth sink this movie far more than anything else. All in all, it's too, well, robotic.

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* 'Adaptation' is not exactly the correct word. The titles noted that this was "Suggested by" Asimov's works, so the writers could pick and choose as little or as much as they needed to plunder and pillage. Their philosophical conceit, at the very core of the movie, is more or less sound, at least as far as I have found in the whole Asimov-discussion-circle demographic. Isaac himself addressed much of the same idea in 1985 by creating the lesser known 'zeroth law' of robotics, dealing with the injury of humanity as a whole, not piecemeal. This addition would have seriously compromised the film's plot, far more than the usual burdens of credibility and the laws of physics.

Today is so-called casual Friday and as such I donned a t-shirt instead of the polos I wear the rest of the week. This is nothing new, really, as this is how I dress pretty much every week.

Today's t-shirt was my bright green one with the flocked yellow Atari logo. Jessica bought it and another one with the logo, but on a blue tee, and gave them to me as gifts. I like them both, but rarely wear them. The blue one has 3/4 length sleeves, and I have difficulty with that sort of thing. The green one, though, has totally normal sleeves. The only downside of it is that everybody notices it.

I get more compliments (or at least comments) on this shirt than any of my other ones, save perhaps for the Darth Vader/cK shirt. Atari is just cool, you know.

A lot of people have bought this shirt, mostly for significant others. While that is an interesting tidbit, it also means that this is by far not a unique shirt. I like having unique shirts.

Oddly enough, despite buying it at JC Penny so many years ago, I've never seen anyone else wearing another dV shirt. Not a one.

It would seem that t-shirts are my hobboy of sorts as of late. When making my wish list I scoured the web for e-tailers with cool shirts, and I watch threadless for its new shirts and the submissions for the ongoing contest.

I'm working on doodling up some designs of my own to send them, but probably won't have anything I'm completely happy with let alone capable of winning. Still, it's worth a shot.

I've also fed many a slogan to their sister site OMG, which operates on the same principle except that anybody can submit ideas in the form of a slogan, not a finished design. They're much slower to print new shirts, and so far none of my submissions, clever though I may think them, have been made into a shirt.

Of course I'm not new to the t-shirt making business. As a kid I painted many of them with fabric paint (some of which are cool, others are merely neat copyright infringement) and even once recently, and I even once screen printed a tee in high school, which was later lost. I spent a lot of time working on that shirt, too.

I'd like to print some more. If I recall correctly it was messy but rather fun.

I really liked The Omega man.

That said, in the first couple minutes I found a (slightly) glaring mistake. In the scene where we look through the windshield at Robert Neville (played by Charlton Heston wearing an outfit from Soylent green) there is visible, in the far background, a moving vehicle. As he is ostensibly the only driver alive in the entire city, and moreover has been for the last two years, this must be a mistake. This is so far the only goof of that kind that I saw. IMDB has a list of many others. I submitted mine to them but worded it badly, so we cannot be sure if it will make it into the pantheon or not (when I reminded them that Ice Age was a "cgi-film" that update took a while) but I can be happy at least to have noticed something that nobody else wrote down. Or something like that.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the movie. I began watching it today in a motor coach (well, that's what they called it; I'd call it a bus) on the return trip from Manhattan to Teterboro, New Jersey. The company sent me to The City today for, well, half an hour to fit four pairs of jeans. Unofficially I helped some of my counterparts in Design with how we work together, and stuff like that, but officially I was only there for that half hour. I wouldn't have minded wandering around the city, but alas, I had work that needed to be done. Perhaps for the next trip. They're sending me up just about every other month anymore, so I'm due for another before too long.

Speaking then of "too long", back to Omega man. It's not too long for the movie, just too long for the drive as I ended up watching some of it in the airport lobby, more on the plane and eventually just finished out the last half at home. The first couple minutes (up until we meet the Family) are the best but it was enjoyable all the way through.

Fortunately I had only the vaguest idea what this movie was about. The DVD back cover, the AMG synopsis*, and even the film's original trailer are misleading or outright wrong (the trailer likely deliberately, the others merely from ignorance or laziness), so it was probably good that I hadn't seen them.

Unlike some of his other SF movies, Omega puts Charlton pretty much in the present (well, the present as it was in the 70s, give or take a year or two) which no doubt saved a bit on production costs (take that, Logan's run). It seems considerably less dated than Soylent green and, being less pretentious, is much more fun. Brighter too, as much more of it takes place outside.

It's just a fun movie to watch.

Near the end of it Jessica asked me, incredulously, "You're really concerned about him, aren't you?" and yes, I guess I was. The movie may be dated, the science inaccurate, the acting too over-the-top, the scenery chewed, and the technical mistakes may be legion, but this is quite an enjoyable movie (and Robert Neville an interesting character), particularly for me, a fan of the 'Heston vs. the world' genre. It's fun enough to toss in a good "Damn, dirty" here and there for laughs.

I want the soundtrack. Too bad the only time it's been cut to disc it was a 3000 piece limited edition. The score definitely adds to the rollicking good time, even if it is very, very reminiscent of the music from The Prisoner at times.

All in all, it's definitely the most enjoyable movie I've watched while riding in an uncomfortable bus seat through New Jersey. Damn dirty bus seat.

It's also among the few movies set in L.A. that I didn't hate.

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* I sent AMG my comments as below:

Your synopsis is incorrect. Neville is not guarding the serum; the Family isn't interested in being cured at all. They want to kill him. If he's trying to preserve anything it's his own life and sanity. His grasp on the latter is tenuous at best, but clearly having survived the Family's attacks for two years he's done well so far with the former.

Earlier in the synopsis, calling him the "sole normal survivor" is also somewhat inaccurate, as later mentioned he has lost his "last man on earth status". Perhaps a better way to describe him as the only man vaccinated against the germs? "Sole recipient of the life-saving vaccine", maybe?

Only time will tell if they are interested in being accurate.

So today we go to the dentist, right? Jessica packs me a lunch with brownies and a sandwich with sesame seeds. It's a conspiracy, I tell you.