The Cult TV Faces of: Statues



Identified by David Colohan: The Twilight zone: "The Little People."




Identified by Hugh: Lost in Space: "All That Glitters."




Identified by Dr. Howard Margolin: The Starlost: "The Goddess Calabra."

 

Identified by jdigriz: Kolchak: The Night Stalker: "The Youth Killer."





Identified by Will: Star Trek TAS: "The Lorelei Signal."

 


Identified by Hugh: Land of the Lost: "Medusa."




Identified by David Colohan: Space:1999: "The Taybor."




Identified by Hugh: Dr. Who: "The Keeper of Traken."




Identified by David Colohan: Twin Peaks.




Identified by Jake Lockley: The X-Files: "Grotesque."




Identified by Chris G: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: "Becoming" (Part 2).




Identified by Woodchuckgod: Farscape: "Look at the Princess."




Identified by David Colohon: Firefly: "Jaynestown."




Identified by Hugh: Lost.



CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)

"Wasn't that just magnificent? I was worried it was getting a little dodgy in the middle part, but then that finale...wow!

- Willy Wonka in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)

Since it was published in America in 1964, Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) has become a classic of children's literature.  The book is still assigned reading in many middle school and high school curricula and has spawned two film adaptations, 1971's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Tim Burton's 2005 fantasy, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. 

Although Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory has become a generational touchstone for kids raised in the 1970s (myself included), the recent Tim Burton adaptation is, surprisingly, far more faithful to the Roald Dahl novel in terms of mood, manner, and visualization.  As is the case in the Dahl book, the 2005 film deftly critiques both capitalist society -- which creates a vast gulf between the economic well-being of Willy Wonka and Charlie Bucket -- and the mores of contemporary child-rearing. 

On the second conceptual front, the Tim Burton movie has updated many of Dahl's satirical flourishes for 21st century consumption, turning Mike Teavee into a video game-a-holic and Violet Beauregard into a pre-adolescent over-achiever.  But despite such minor updates, the intent of both works remains to hold up a mirror to society at large and address something seemingly flawed in the prevailing social structure.  Naturally, both book and movie accomplish this task in entertaining fashion, as a seemingly "harmless" fairy tale meant for kids. 

Like Dahl, Burton is an expert in the creation of fantastic and grotesque worlds, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory provides him ample opportunity to showcase his stellar, off-beat imagination.  Dahl's slapstick humor, and exaggerated settings -- namely an impossibly bizarre factory interior -- thus find new life in Burton's audacious visualizations, which critic Peter Bradshaw accurately described as conveying  "a retro Day-Glo 1960s" vibe.

Furthermore, Burton's fascinating addition of a Willy Wonka back-story represents the director's stylistic personalization or interpretation of the source material, and functions in some sense, even, as an improvement over the novel's story.  In particular,  Burton gives Willy "father" issues, and this aspect of the movie plays perfectly into the social criticism of modern-day parenting underlining the entire affair.

It's easy to gaze at Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and see only a colorful kiddie flick, a silly, inconsequential fantasy, but in this entertaining film, Burton has retained so much of what made Dahl's work unique, and, in fact, added something to the experience.  He's done so by co-opting the literary imagery of Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and even the choreographic style of Busby Berkeley (1895-1976).   In toto, the film is another remarkable triumph for the director, and I must admit, I wasn't expecting the film to be so damned good.

As critic Stephanie Zacharek wrote in Salon: "“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” couldn’t have emerged from anywhere but the dark, chambered nautilus of Burton’s imagination — in its best sections, it’s magically deranged in a way no other filmmaker could even come close to pulling off." 

Magically deranged.  That about says it all.

"You can't run a chocolate factory with a family hanging over you like an old, dead goose."

In Charlie The Chocolate Factory, eccentric candy-maker Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp) has distributed five golden tickets to visit his factory in the unusual and delicious Wonka candy bars.   This act sets off a world-wide search for the five elusive tickets.

The first ticket is found by an obese glutton, Augustus Gloop (Philip Weigratz).  The second is "procured" by a millionaire-industrialist for his indulged daughter, Veruca Salt (Julia Winter).  The third ticket is found by a gum-chewing over-achiever, Violet Beauregard (Annasophia Robb) and the fourth by a smart-aleck video-game aficionado, Mike Teavee (Adam Godley).

Rather unexpectedly, the final ticket falls into the hands of the modest and kind Charlie Bucket (Freddy Highmore), a boy who lives in poverty in a ramshackle house on the outskirts of town with his parents and grandparents.  At first, Charlie decides to sell the ticket to pay for food because his father has recently lost his job, but Charlie's grandpa, Joe (David Kelly) convinces him he should keep it.

Together, Grandpa Joe and Charlie meet Willy Wonka at the factory, and tour the various rooms of his amazing candy factory.  These include The Chocolate Room, the Inventing Room, the Nut Room, and the TV Room. 

In each room, one of the young visitors falls prey to a strange industrial accident. Augustus Gloop is sucked up into a giant chocolate pipe (or straw?).  Violet is turned into a giant blueberry after sampling Wonka's experimental three-course-meal-chewing gum, Veruca is tossed down a garbage chute in the Nut Room, and Mike Teavee is sucked into a television...then shrunken down to size by the experience.  In all instances, Wonka's bizarre workers, the Oompa-Loompas (Deep Roy) sing songs about the fallen children.

In the end, Charlie is the only child to remain standing on the entire tour, and Wonka reveals he would like him to be his heir.  The only catch: Charlie must do it alone; without the family who helped get him here...

"Candy doesn't have to have a point. That's why it's candy."

Candy doesn't need to have a point, but Charlie and the Chocolate Factory certainly makes a few.

In his artistic selections, Burton enhances the novel's social critique of runaway, out-of-control capitalism. 

In particular, Burton opens the film with a truly Dickension flourish by showcasing a wintry, industrial city where a vast gulf exists between the wealthy and the poor.  Charlie lives in little more than a hovel, and watches as his father loses his job in the local toothpaste factory.  The Wonka factory dominates the landscape, both a foreboding and mysterious place.

A proponent of social reform himself, Charles Dickens' satires often showcased the hardships of the working class in London, and pointed out the anti-human and inhumane nature of big industry during his time.  Like Dahl, Dickens is well-known for his black humor and colorfully-named characters, as well. What Burton achieves here so brilliantly is the fanciful merging of the two artists.  He enhances Dahl's words with imagery of poverty, industry and inequality right out of Oliver Twist.  Of course, there's also a modern spin on the idea of runaway industry since automation at the factory is the thing that puts both Mr. Bucket and Grandpa Joe out of work.  This aspect of the film certainly speaks to our national context today, in the era of the one percenters and the 99ers.

Meanwhile, Willy Wonka leads the indulged life of, well, Michael Jackson in Neverland.  The idea that both the late King of Pop and Wonka seem to share in common is that neither one was afforded a happy childhood.  But in adulthood, they possess the will and the wealth to rectify that mistake; to recreate the childhood they wished they had. To indulge themselves, in other words.  Such wealth puts Wonka in a different social class from Charlie, who has no time to focus on his childhood, only the vicissitudes of day-to-day survival: a hole in the roof, and cabbage soup again for dinner.  Wonka is a lonely figure -- a Burton outsider and misfit -- but he is rich enough to build a world around him; one that answers only to his demands and desires.  Charlie can't do that. 

Additionally, Wonka has surrounded himself with the Oompa Loompas, small "men" who all look identical to one another, and toil for cocoa beans, rather than for a living wage.  Wonka brought them back from the "wild," and this facet of the story is certainly an allegory for the First World's colonial exploitation of the Third.  It's also notable that the Oompa Loompas all "look alike" and aren't exactly treated as individual people. 

Significantly, they dance in the geometric, kaleidoscopic, uniform fashion favored by Busby Berkeley in his Depression-Era films, and that's important too.  The Oompa Loompas act (and dance) as "one" and don't concern themselves with personal wealth: they are a collective. 

Again, it's important to recall that Berkeley made his splash in Depression Age films such as 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, and that his choreography was said to eschew failed American "individualism" (capitalism?) in favor of the concerns of "the collective."  In other words, the Chorus Girls dancing in a Berkeley musical number were all part of a larger pattern or ideal, unimportant alone but powerful as a network or "whole."  The Oompa Loompas are presented in that very fashion here, and hence as an antidote or remedy to the overt, out-of-control capitalism we see described in the film, embodied by acts of corporate espionage and sabotage. 

If you couple the Dickensian landscapes (incessant snowfall, extreme poverty, smoke-spewing factories) with the Busby Berkeley musical flouishes (championing the collective nature of collaboration in Wonka's factory), with Dahl's tale of a "good" boy who inherits the Factory -- the means of production -- what you start to see emerge on-screen is a tale depicting the failure of capitalism and the importance of "community."  For what does Charlie, in the end bring to Willy Wonka -- the iconoclastic loner -- but an acceptance and understanding of family; the root "community" of human society and civilization?

Even the film's narration describes Charlie in terms which  heighten the social critique against out-of-control capitalism.  The narrator suggests:

"This is a story of an ordinary little boy named Charlie Bucket. He was not faster, or stronger, or more clever than other children. His family was not rich or powerful or well-connected; in fact, they barely had enough to eat." 

What are Charlie's prized characteristics?  Well, he's loyal to his family, he shares with them his resources (his candy bar and his love...), and he believes that when he succeeds, they all succeed.  Given this description, in conjunction with the trenchant visuals, it's not a stretch to view the film as a rebuke of western culture's long-standing ideals and myths surrounding rugged individualism and boot-strap-ism (or "entrepreneurship.")  

Indeed, this boy succeeds not by being the smartest, fastest or strongest, or by being the son of a rich man, but by simply being decent and responsible to those around him; by having a sense of himself in relation to others. 

Powerfully, Burton's film also notes the extreme unfairness of  out-of-control capitalism, namey that it does not reward those who do good, but rather those who already possess resources.  "The kids who are going to find the golden tickets are the ones who can afford to buy candy bars every day," says Grandpa Joe. "Our Charlie gets only one a year. He doesn't have a chance."   That's the problem: the deck is stacked against those without by power by those who already possess it.

Outside the withering critique of capitalism, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a cautionary tale for parents.  Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregarde and Mike Teavee are negative examples to learn from.  They reveal to audiences what happens when parents fail in their sacred duty to raise decent human beings.  Gloop is a glutton, Salt an indulged brat, Violet an empty-headed "winner" who has to be the best at everything she does, and Teavee an emotionally disconnected know-it-all.   And although the film punishes the children for their offenses, it does not view them as the real bad guys, as the Oompa Loompa song for Veruca clearly points out:

"Who went and spoiled her / Who indeed? Who pandered to her every need? / Who turned her into such a brat? / Who are the culprits, who did that? / The guilty ones - now this is sad / Are dear old mum and loving dad."

What we see here is a kind of "sins of the father" dynamic.  The parents are the ones at fault for raising monsters, and yet it is the children who ultimately suffer for actually being monsters.  This is a dynamic that, as the father of an only child, I grapple with just about every day.  How much indulgence is too much indulgence, in terms of child rearing?  Where's the line between a happy child and a spoiled one?  Cross that line, and the child...and the world suffer. 

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -- both the source novel and the film -- deal with the very real idea that parents can all too easily transform their children into brats.  They can do it by obsessing on winning (a variation of competing, which goes back to the capitalism angle); by turning them over to the tender lessons of commercial television, or by indulging their every appetite, no holds barred.   I confess, this is the very reason why the Dahl book has always appealed to me on such a gut level: the idea that kids, if we aren't careful, are little Frankenstein Monsters that we make and then set loose into the world.

The film adaptation by Burton goes the extra and perhaps even genius step, of suggesting that Willy Wonka is one of these Frankenstein Monsters all gorwn up.  His father, a cruel dentist played by Christopher Lee, turned him into what he is: a snide, family-hating Michael Jackson/Howard Hughes-like recluse; someone who can't meaningfully connect to other human beings.  Optimistically, the film's conclusion suggests that Wonka will be "adopted" by (and thus re-parented) by Charlie's humble and nurturing family, and that this particular monster can be un-made.

Some critics have suggested there's something a bit sadistic about both the book and the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  I don't disagree, but sometimes a little so-called "sadism" is good for the soul.  It's good to know that the wicked and the corrupt and the gluttonous and the entitled eventually get punished for their misdeeds, and that occasionally -- just occasionally -- someone of stout heart and gentle tendencies can win out over the wealthy, the connected, the loud, and the powerful.

As I wrote above, Burton's 2005 film -- filling in the gap in Wonka's backstory -- actually improves the nature of Dahl's story.  It reveals to us that Wonka is human and flawed, and even a bit monstrous too.  He's not a perfect creature standing in judgment of "bad" children here, but rather an imperfect, flawed being himself.  I like that interpretation, because it suggests that a child wounded will, as an adult, wound others.  And it also suggests that it's never too late to care about someone, and help them be better.    

Wonka doesn't get away with being a monster in this version of the classic Dahl tale, and I like that. It defuses the "sadistic" label the book has acquired over the years.

People who live in glass elevators, after all, shouldn't throw stones...

Next Weekend: Alice in Wonderland (2010)

Sci-Fi Wisdom of the Week

"There's plenty of money out there. They print more every day. But this ticket, there's only five of them in the whole world, and that's all there's ever going to be. Only a dummy would give this up for something as common as money. Are you a dummy?"

- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)

(to be reviewed here tomorrow) 

Collectible of the Week: Star Trek Game (Hasbro; 1974)

Some five years after the original TV series ended and five years before The Motion Picture (1979) premiered, Hasbro released this memorable and unique Star Trek board game (for ages 4 - 10). 

Decorated with art reminiscent of both the Gold Key comic book series and the CBS animated series of the 1970s, this Star Trek "action and adventure in outer space" game comes with a large fold-out  playing board, four colored pieces (representing the Enterprise crew), and a "double" spinner that permits your starship to travel under either impulse or warp drives.  The spinner is probably the coolest aspect of the game.

On the large, colorful board, there are four separate adventures to experience, one for Kirk, one for Spock one for "Bones" and one for Lt. Uhura.  And the individual adventures are rather strange, too.  In one adventure, Mr. Sulu is called Mr. "Sula" and the word "asteroids" is repeatedly spelled as "asternoids." 

I don't know about you, but I'd hate to have a bad case of asternoids...

Anyway, in one adventure, you land on a spot where "the crew becomes sleepy" (!) and the player must go back three spaces.  Turns out the sleepiness is being caused not by MSG, but by "moonbeams."

Another adventure on the board involves an oddball mystery: "who has been fishing on Earth?"   Turns out its aliens; apparently without a fishing license...

The whole thing, story-wise, is incredibly odd and not very Star Trekkian in detail.  Obviously, it's designed for the very young, but still, kids are smart; they know when details are wrong.

On the plus side, the original series-styled art work remains very intriguing and if nothing else, the game is abundantly colorful.  I'd say the Hasbro Star Trek game is worth having just for the warp and impulse spinner.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Super 8 (2011)

"You can't go home again" wrote Thomas Wolfe. 

And if nothing else, J.J. Abrams' expensively-mounted Steven Spielberg pastiche, Super 8 (2011) proves his point.  

This is a science fiction film I wanted to love, and more than that, wanted to love deeply.  My ardent desire to love Super 8 stems from my admiration for Spielberg the filmmaker and also from my feelings of affection for the long-lost days of my own childhood; the days of model-building, amateur movie-making, and middle school friends.

But as much as Super 8 implores modern audiences to "relive the memories" in the spirit of a Kodak advertisement featured in the film, it ultimately lacks the humanity of Spielberg's impressive cinematic oeuvre.  Despite his rampant sentimentalism, Spielberg's films are almost universally constructed  upon solid stories, on tales that hang together and, more than that, touch the heart.   

By contrast,  Super 8 feels more like a collection of ingredients that, finally, don't gel into something coherent or meaningful.  The movie simply doesn't stay with you after you've screened it because, finally, it has nothing new or interesting to say.  If nostalgia is the most useless of emotions then Super 8 -- a non-Spielberg Spielberg movie -- is the most useless of movies.

In terms of specifics, Super 8 dramatizes two interconnected tales. One is about a group of friends who throw everything (including the kitchen sink...) into the making of their own backyard horror film.  The other, far less interesting story concerns an alien who escapes from military custody and nearly destroys the friends' town. 

In the latter story, Super 8's creature or "monster" conveniently represents whatever the screenplay happens to need at any given moment -- either horror or wonder, by the roll of the dice --  and never becomes a consistent-seeming presence, or  a character as memorable or colorful as the beasties depicted in Jaws (1975), E.T. (1982), Close Encounters (1978) or Jurassic Park (1993).

I harbor no enmity for J.J. Abrams as a filmmaker -- not even for his widely ridiculed overuse of "lens flare -- but Super 8 by-and-large confirms my suspicion about him as a popular filmmaker.  He understands form and style quite well, but doesn't quite "get" substance.  

In other words,  the director knows very precisely how to make a product that on a superficial level resembles something else you already know and like: a Star Trek movie that feels like Star Trek, for example. But in some cases, Abrams doesn't quite capture the heart of the thing he so colorfully simulates.  Consequently, something deep and human is sacrificed in his vision.  Occasionally you don't notice this facet of Abrams' work because the execution of his mimicry is so dynamic and accomplished.You get distracted by the bells and whistles.

Super 8 has a lot of bells and whistles. But what it needed was heart.


"Bad things happen... but you can still live."

Super 8 tells the story of young Joe Lamb (Joe Courtney), a boy who lives in small town Ohio and is fourteen years old in the summer of 1979.

As the movie commences (with a great first shot), Joe's mother has died in an industrial accident, and a mourning Joe lives with his in-denial father, Jackson (Kyle Chandler), the local police deputy. 

While working on an amateur zombie movie with his friends, Joe -- the project's make-up artist -- begins to fall for lovely Alice (Elle Fanning), a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, and daughter to the man who indirectly caused his mother's death.

While shooting their Super-8 movie at a local train station, Alice, Joe and their friends witness a horrifying train wreck.  Something monstrous escapes from the wreckage, and begins to wreak havoc upon the small town...

"I know that's your camera, sir, but technically, that's my film."

Super 8 is constructed primarily upon two pillars: Spielberg nostalgia and late 70s/early 80s nostalgia.  Both facets of the film give the enterprise a considerable lift, even if they can't, in the final analysis, cloak the superficiality of the film's emotional canvas. 

In particular, the production design milieu of Super 8 is truly splendid, a careful evocation of the Carter/Reagan era that brings back many fond memories for me. 

I was a kid of about ten-years old at this time in our nation's history, and so for me the film's setting sparked some powerful memories.  The model kits, the movie posters, and the toys in young Joe Lamb's bedroom are items that I remember well and that speak to my personal sense of nostalgia.  I also enjoyed seeing characters return home to modest split level ranches rather than outrageously designed, glitzy McMansions.  America has changed a lot in three decades.

Refreshingly, Abrams' film boasts a sense of humor about this era too. One droll moment involving the Sony Walkman captures almost perfectly the differences between 1979 and 2011. I appreciated all these period touches and references, and the movie made me feel wistful for the freedom of youth.  Super 8 depicts a world without e-mail, cell phones, and video game platforms (save for Atari), in which, as a kid, you really and truly felt free to explore your own imagination.  No officially arranged "play dates" were necessary.  The afternoons, following school, seemed to last forever, and you didn't have to worry about updating your Facebook profile. 

We didn't realize it at the time, but today this bygone age seems like one of pure innocence.

Super 8 also captures well that delicate period of adolescence when boys start to outgrow their toys but are too young, really, to understand girls or the reasons why girls make them feel a certain way.  For many adolescents, the focus on movies-- on movie making explicitly -- proves a perfect bridge between childhood and adulthood.   With movies, you can still "play" as you would with toys and -- if you're lucky -- get girls in on the act too.  My later teen years were spent in this endeavor, as I made home movies with my friends; home movies with titles like The Great Can Opener Massacre and Rock'n'Roll Vampires from Hell.

So I really do get what Super 8 aims to recreate.  I love the period touches, and I admire the excavation of a special time in "this boy's life."

The film's second creative pillar, Spielberg's aesthetic, is also impressively rendered.  In Super 8, we see all the ingredients that made Spielberg's work (especially circa 1975 - 1985) so powerful to a generation of film lovers. 

For instance, there are scenes in Super 8 of a disconcerting military presence in suburban America, as also depicted in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.  There are kids on bikes, pedaling from adventure to adventure as seen in E.T. and the Spielberg produced Poltergeist (1982).  There's also the Spielberg convention I call "This boy's bedroom," in which items decorating the bedroom reveal much about a boy's interest in magic, movies, monsters and pop-culture.  We saw "this boy's bedroom" featured in everything from Close Encounters to E.T., to Spielberg productions like Poltergeist and Gremlins.  Spielberg-inspired efforts such as The Monster Squad (1986) and Invaders from Mars (1986) featured the convention too.  

Super 8 also gains a lot of mileage from "broken" families, a Spielberg tradition in The Sugarland Express (1971) E.T. and even Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989).  Abrams also knowingly evokes Spielberg-ian film compositions, namely the commonly-seen "Jurassic Park"-styled shot in which characters gaze upward, mouths agape, at something wondrous, off-camera.

Most importantly, however, Super 8 involves the idea of something alien or foreign invading normal suburban America, whether that something be a shark, an alien, ghosts, Nazis, or monsters.  It's not a coincidence that Super 8 takes place in 1979, the year of the Three Mile Island disaster.   Something was roiling under "normal" life in America of this span...and it seemed mysterious and possibly frightening.

I enjoyed all of Abrams' Spielberg-ian homages here, I must admit.  And yet I kept feeling, as I wrote above, that in Super 8 I was screening the work of a man who understood surface detail, but not deeper meaning.  And that, furthermore, the story (by Abrams) had been crafted exclusively to make room for all the homage, without sufficient regard for internal logic and consistency.

Considered rationally, the narrative makes precious little sense.  For instance, the audience is asked to believe that a tormented alien who can read humans minds has never, before interfacing with Joe, encountered an individual who has experienced and understood loss and personal pain.  You see, contact with the boy and the boy's advice that "bad things happen, but you can keep living" prove the very impetus that redirects the angry alien towards escape rather than vengeance.  The alien puts down his pastime of eating human body parts, and decides to phone...er...go home.

This resolution feels like a creative cop-out, especially since the creature already boasts access to Elle Fanning's Alice, and certainly she -- having lost a mother too -- understands the nature of pain.  Why is it that after reading so many human minds, the monster only achieves closure through rapport with Joe?  This whole idea -- upon which the plot resolution hinges -- is undeveloped at best and contrived at worst.

Another poorly-constructed moment in the film's third act finds Joe's father -- without explanation or apparent precipitating cause -- deciding to forgive the man who, through negligence, is responsible for his wife's death.  This change of heart is supposed to be a heartwarming moment, but there's no lead-up to it, and no character growth that reaches a particular crescendo.  Spielberg movies may be relentlessly sentimental, but this quality of his work is usually earned.  The character "growth" in Super 8 feels capricious and mechanical by comparison.

Super 8's emotional climax seems off in some significant way too.  Joseph must choose to let go of the locket that belonged to his dead mother.  This piece of jewelry is all that he's got left of her now, but the movie's point -- as seen in the monster's epiphany -- is "letting go."  The monster lets go of his pain at Joe's urging, and ascends to the stars.   In this same spirit, Joe releases his mother's locket and lets go of his pain and loss too. 

Again, I get the idea: don't hold onto the past.  Live in the present.  And yet this message is utterly incongruous and somewhat insincere in a movie that lingers -- nay wallows -- in the notion of  the past.  The whole movie lives in so-called "better" days.  It  holds on tightly to the fairy tale of a "simpler past," so tell me again why Joe should willingly let go of the only tangible memory of his lost mother?  

This valedictory moment, like so many others in the films, does not ring true on an emotional level.  When he's twenty, Joe will really wish he held onto that locket...

The few original touches that Abrams brings to Super 8 also tend, in some way, to work against the film's spirit.  The big special effects set piece of the film is a spectacular train crash.  This crash doesn't feel Spielbergian in any sense of the word.  Spielberg's style is best described as grounded reality plus a touch of magic.  A simple American town encounters a voracious great white shark that is almost supernatural, for example.  A boy meets an alien who is lost, and needs a friend...just like him, for another.  Spielberg's films are grounded in our reality, and there's usually only one magical quality involved, so that believability is maintained. 

Here, by contrast, the train crash brazenly defies the laws of physics and is so over-the-top catastrophic you can't believe for a moment that anyone would survive it, let alone children bystanders nearby, at the scene.  Train cars blow apart, launch through the air like missiles, explode into towers of flame...and the movie loses every bit of grounded reality it has painstakingly crafted up until that point.  A train crash of this cartoon nature belongs in another movie, but not in a Spielberg homage.

The other "new" touch in Super 8 involves the depiction of the alien.  He has been tortured by America for years, and is angry about his treatment.  This disposition seems to reflect the post-Bush II, War on Terror mindset, not Ronald Reagan's more noble mindset of the 1980s. In May of 1988, President Reagan declared his desire to "bring an end to the abhorrent practice of torture" worldwide by supporting the Convention Against Torture and Inhuman Treatment or Punishment, for instance.   The point of this rumination is that back in the "simpler" 1980s, we believed we were the good guys, and Spielberg films reflected this steadfast belief.  Nobody in the American military tortured the aliens in Close Encounters.  We feared E.T. would be captured and studied in the 1982 film, but I don't know that we feared our government would actively and sadistically torture the guy.   I mean...we didn't think he was going to be water boarded.  The torture angle  is a new touch that reflects our times, but alas also seems out of synch with the Spielberg-ian painting kit in Super 8.

I would hate to give the impression that I think Super 8 is a terrible or worthless film.  It isn't.  The parts of the film I enjoyed and admired the most involved the children working hard to make their zombie movie.  Over the end credits, their final cut gets played, and it is a funny, affectionate, imaginative delight.  All the performances in the film, particularly by the children, are very strong as well.

But the movie's story doesn't really make much sense, no emotional connection is ever forged with the badly-designed, ugly monster, and the score by Michael Giacchino falls well short of the standard set by John Williams for Spielberg.  Most damningly, the film resolutely lacks a sense of wonder.  I remember very well the days of Spielberg's magic; the days when he made one seemingly perfect blockbuster movie after another.  He went from strength to strength, from Jaws to Close Encounters to Raiders of the Lost Ark (let's forget 1941 for the moment...) to E.T., and made movie fans for life out of children of my generation.   The man can do wonder, and do it well.

Super 8 feels more like second tier, quasi-Spielberg fare, like Lady in White (1988) or The Monster Squad.  It knows what it wants to be and what it should be, but it just doesn't quite have the chops -- or the emotional honesty -- to play on the master's level.  I held high expectations for Super 8, it's true, but that's part of the Spielberg magic.  He rarely disappoints.  You can't make a movie based on his work, and expect not to be held to his standard of excellence.

The child director in Super 8 keeps trumpeting the idea that "production values" will make or break his film, but of course, that's not the case.  Production values do not a masterpiece make. 

Someone needed to tell J.J. Abrams to stop obsessing about production values and turn on his heart light instead.

The Whispering Sea rises...

My new Space:1999 novel (after 2003's The Forsaken) is in the hands of editors and nearing production for publication (likely in 2012).

In the meantime, Powys Media has posted an interview with me regarding the new book -- The Whispering Sea -- which is set in the series Year Two timeline.

Here's a section from the interview.

Q: How did The Whispering Sea come about?

A: The Forsaken (2003) was well-received by readers and reviewers, and because of my long-standing affection for Space: 1999, I very much wanted to write another series novel for Powys. So the discussion quickly came around to what kind of story to tell for a second novel. This was also after I had written “Futility” and “A Touch of Venus” for Shepherd Moon. At some point, I developed a lengthy outline for a follow-up novel to Forsaken – a kind of indirect sequel – called Ordination, but then we shifted gears to go with The Whispering Sea…which, if I remember correctly, is a title that Mateo gave me. Ordination was more in line with Alpha and Omega, this kind of epic, galaxy-spanning tale about Maya being inducted into the “priesthood” of the Space Brains, and it just got too big. Mateo pointed me in another direction, and we did something more contained, more stand-alone with The Whispering Sea.

Q: The Forsaken is a “bridge” novel spanning the differences between Space: 1999 Years One and Years Two. Is that distinction also true of The Whispering Sea?

A: Actually The Whispering Sea is a bridge novel too. If you think about it, there’s a pretty wide gap between the end of “The Metamorph” and the beginning of “The Exiles.” Maya is already Alpha’s science officer in “The Exiles,” and she seems to already have an established relationship with Tony Verdeschi. So in The Whispering Sea, I’m bridging the gulf between those two episodes and dramatizing the story of Maya’s arrival on Moonbase Alpha. How did she get there? How did she come to fit in? How and why was it decided that she would become Alpha’s science officer? Those are the questions the novel covers.

I'll write additional updates about the book's release schedule as further details become available, and also post images of the book's cover art when it is complete.

The Cult-TV Faces of: Ghosts



Identified by Jose: One Step Beyond: "The Dark Room."




Identified by Chadzilla: Inger Martin in The Twilight Zone: "The Hitch-hiker."




Identified by Chadzilla: Edward Mulhare as Captian Gregg in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1968)




Identified by Jose: Rod Serling's Night Gallery: "The Ghost of Sorworth Place."




Identified by SGB: Dan Mateo (Giancarlo Prete) in Space:1999 "The Troubled Spirit."



6



Identified by SGB: Star Trek: The Next Generation: "Sub Rosa."




Identified by Randal Graves: Ed Asner and Lily Tomlin in The X -Files: "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas."




Identified by Randal Graves: Mr. Crocell (Dean Winters) in Millennium: "The Curse of Frank Black."




Identified by Randal Graves: Jenny Calendar (Robia La Morte) in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: "Amends."



11



Identified by Nate Yapp: Supernatural: "Pilot."





Identified by SGB: Ghostfreak on Ben 10.



CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Big Fish (2003)

"A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him, and in that way he becomes immortal."

- Big Fish (2003)

Tell me, which alternative  fosters a better understanding of your life experience: the bare bones truth, or an embellished, "flavored" version of the truth that contextualizes you life as a great story, one with heroes and villains, winners and losers, and a beginning...and inevitable end? 

Tim Burton's 2003 fantasy masterpiece, Big Fish beautifully and emotionally makes the case for the latter option. 

In real life, we're each of us but a little fish (only 1 out of 7 billion...) swimming about in a global sea.

But in our imaginations -- and in our private family circles -- we're all big fish: colorful personalities who loom large in the stories of our sons and daughters, and our Moms and Dads. In our private worlds, we're important, nay the most important figures.

The first shots and compositions of Big Fish take the viewer down into the sun-drenched water of a fresh-water river as a big fish swims alone there, and this inaugural visual perfectly captures the movie's most important conceit: the idea that we all make ourselves and our lives out to be "big."

Sometimes we even do so at the expense of those we love, who risk becoming mere "context" in another person's epic poem. 

The big fish swims alone, after all...

Of all Tim Burton's films, I readily confess that I find Big Fish the most emotional.  Maybe because it's a story of fathers and sons learning to understand one another.Perhaps because it concerns the inevitability of death, and the passing of the generations (as well as the storyteller torch). 

Regardless, I do know that this film hits me on a very personal, very intimate  level every time I see it.  I had an important person in my life until about a year ago (2010) who was, like the movie's Ed Bloom, a masterful and ridiculous storyteller. 

He was a man who had (so he claimed...) met and conversed with Colin Powell and Albert Einstein, and who was biologically related both to General Robert E. Lee and Katie Couric.  He absolutely never met a fish story he didn't like. The man could put you on with the straightest of straight faces, and in some moments, could even devise for you what your life story should be.

This larger-than-life figure spoke in the most idiosyncratic and singular manner I've ever known,  replete with lots of extremely colorful metaphors, and he passed away following the sudden onset of a terminal illness. 

And yet -- in large part because of his incomparable manner of expressing himself and telling his stories -- he remains an everyday voice in my head. Today, he's an indelible fixture there, and sometimes, almost against my will, I still hear his unique voice, and his flamboyant way of communicating.  His vocabulary alone -- his bizarre lexicon -- seems often to be on the tip of my tongue. 

I don't always know why.

Now, I don't want to romanticize this man and turn him into a saint, because that description does no one any good.   e're all but human beings, with flaws and foibles. But there was an element in this man -- as there is in Big Fish's Ed Bloom -- that raises questions; that fascinates.  He turned his stories into great adventures, all while leaving the real man, the truth itself, opaque. His crazy stories and jokes cloaked...what precisely? 

So, in one sense, I knew this man and his unique mode of expression deeply for over twenty years, and yet in another very basic sense, I didn't know the real man at all. 

At least not until I understood the seemingly impossible: that the stories, jokes, and tall tales were the real man.  They were part and parcel of his individual and mental gestalt, and you couldn't separate him from those tall tales.

I don't usually write here about how films affect me personally.  I generally don't like that approach in film criticism, preferring to rely instead on examinations of compositions and leitmotifs, and so on. 

And yet I can't honestly deny that Big Fish hits me in a close place.  It seems so true to my own personal experience that I suppose I have a hard time separating Will Bloom's story from my own experience.  What I can declare with conviction is that Big Fish is the most heartfelt and touching of Burton's works.  erhaps not the best (a title I reserve for Ed Wood or perhaps Edward Scissorhands), but certainly the most emotional.

As Clint Morris wrote of the film in Film Threat: "It takes those oddities and twists that many don’t usually go for if they’re not a big fan of the director and interweaves them into a tale that’s so enriching, so heartwarming, so funny, so touching and so breathtaking, you’ll wonder why the king of wackiness didn’t branch out sooner." 

And Peter Travers, writing for Rolling Stone, insightfully noted that Burton had finally hooked the one that got away, in the process deepening his "visionary talent." 

I agree with both those conclusions.  If I had to select one Tim Burton film for people who generally don't like Tim Burton films, it would be Big Fish.

"It doesn't always make sense and most it never happened..."

Big Fish is the story of Ed and Will Bloom, estranged father and son.  Ever since he was a little boy, Will has heard his father tell crazy stories about witches, giants, werewolves, Siamese twins, and mysterious ghost towns. 

At first, Will believed the stories were wondrous and magical, but over the years he began to wish that his father would drop the fairy tales and just start relating to him as a real person.

Now, as an adult, Will learns that his father is on his death bed.  He asks his father to tell him one true thing before he dies, but his father insists that his stories are the "truth" about his life.  "I've been nothin' but myself since the day I was born, and if you can't see that it's your failin', not mine," he tells his son.   Will finds this hard to accept, especially as he prepares to become a father himself for the first time. 

After Ed relates his life story to Will's wife, his health declines further.  On the verge of dying, Ed asks Will --- his only son - to tell him how his story ends.  Will complies, and in doing so, gains a new insight into the man who raised him, as well as the importance of storytelling in all our lives.

"Dying is the worst thing that's ever happened to me."

In some senses, Big Fish is very much about a blowhard, as Roger Ebert suggested in his review of the film.  It's uncharitable, but true. Ed may have led a big life, but he also has a big mouth.

In fact, Ed Bloom (Ewan McGregor/Albert Finney) has so transformed his life into a series of weird and wonderful stories that his grown son, Will (Billy Crudup) isn't sure he even knows his father.  That's a terrible thing.

And yet the movie ultimately sides with old Ed.  He isn't viewed with harshness by Burton.  Instead -- in the passing of the generations -- the movie reminds us that each storyteller will have his day. 

Ed has had his day, and now Will's day looms.  At the movie's end, it is Will who tells the "end" of Ed's story, and who recounts for his son a lifetime of adventures. It's important too, that Ed is never portrayed as a liar. Instead, as his funeral reveals, he is just a serial exaggerator: one with a foot in fact, and another in colorful fiction.  By Ed's reckoning, Will tells stories with "all the facts, none of the flavor," and that's just not his way.

Some reviewers have been hard on Big Fish, noting that it never really considers the son's point of view or feelings.

There may be some truth to this perspective, but in the final analysis, Big Fish does right by both characters.

We follow Ed from birth to childhood illness, from his first love to, ultimately, his death. In Ed's life story, we readily detect his spring and summer (his youth), and even his autumn and winter (his old age and demise). 

Notably, Burton makes certain that the natural landscape echoes each one of these spans. As a young man, for instance, Ed sees Spectre as a beautiful, idyllic town, well-painted and carpeted in lush green grass. As a middle-aged man, however, Ed returns to the town and finds it paved over, browning, and in a state of decay.  You can't go home again.

Similarly, when Ed courts the love of his life, their romantic love is expressed in the vibrant yellow of endless daffodils. As death approaches, such blooming (and remember his name is Ed Bloom...) has ended, and all the trees are stark and naked, bereft of leaves.  Winter has come for Ed at last.

Will certainly represents an important chapter in Ed's life, but in a sense, his "part" of the story only really becomes important in the closing chapters.  Ed can't write his final sentences himself.  That's why he needs his boy. Ironically, it is to contextualize his life, not vice-versa as Will initially feared. 

And really, that's always the job of those left to carry on after losing a parent: to put the actions and span of the dead into some kind of meaningful order.

As it turns out, Ed's strange stories become important to Will. They represent the old man's legacy and gift, a colorful way of looking at the world and remembering Dad.  Ed wanted Will to listen to his stories for a reason, and not merely to entertain him. Someday, the boy would need to know the details so he could take ownership of Ed's story and continue it for the next generation.  Again, this is as much about Will as it is about Ed.

In life, we are all part of this cycle.  We all heirs to a story, caretakers of that story, and then givers of the story -- after we've had it and protected it for a lifetime. Big Fish gets at this idea in a more beautiful and imaginative fashion than just about any movie I've seen.  The imagery is enormously affecting, particularly as the strong, healthy Will picks up his infirm, dying father and lifts him into the air -- as if carrying him like a baby -- for one last adventure, one final tall tale.

There's something so innocent and beautiful about this image.  The boy who was once held by his father's strong arms now lifts up his sick dad -- negating the realities of gravity -- and cares for him as he was once cared for.  This image gets me every time: the son becomes the father; the father the son.  The roles reverse, and time marches on.

Big Fish offers other narrative and visual glories as well.  I love the use to which director Burton puts Helena Bonham Carter here, essentially making her every "other" woman figure in Bloom's life.  She is both a terrifying (if friendly...) witch and a young, innocent girl, all grown up. 

And I also appreciate another powerful image: one of a fork in the road that seems to literalize the Robert Frost poem about the road taken and the road not taken. Again, this fits in well with the story's meditation on the seasons of life, and the choices we make. Our destiny is sometimes as simple as deciding which path to follow.

Big Fish is filled with incredibly whimsy and magic, and yet, at the same time, the film seems to truly capture something essential about our mortality, and the mortality of those we love.  We can view tall tales as merely "amusing lies" from someone we love, or as the seeds of immortality itself, a renewable source of energy that we can share with our children and our grandchildren. 

I wrote above about the man in my life who was a lot like Ed Bloom, right down to his southern heritage  He saw Big Fish back in 2004 and loved it.  He especially loved that Bloom's stories were ultimately validated...that there was a degree of truth in his musings about giants and witches and werewolves, and so on.  I get that now.  In understanding our own lives, the stories we tell do become true to us, at least after a fashion.

It may be "impossible to separate fact from fiction, the man from the myth," but when you meet a storyteller of such caliber, you never forget his words...or his life.  It doesn't always make sense and "most of it never happened... but that's what kind of story this is." 

I'm glad that Burton decided to tell it. But damn...it makes me weep. It makes me want to hold my son.