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| Rorschach |
HBO's WATCHMEN series (which should really be called AFTER WATCHMEN) gives us a White Supremacist Group calling itself The Seventh Kavalry. That's a reference to Custer's doomed Cavalry. The change from 'C' to 'K' in 'Cavalry' is a reference to the Ku Klux Klan.
The Seventh Kavalry wears masks based on deceased original WATCHMEN hero Rorschach.
WATCHMEN creators Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons based Rorschach on a character created by Steve Ditko (himself creator of Spider-man, Dr. Strange, and many others). That character was The Question.
Rorschach's real name was Walter Joseph Kovacs. That 'K' was a nod to Ditko's love of K's.
A fairly astonishing number of Ditko creations had either a 'K' or the K sound created by a hard 'C' in their names.
These characters include but are not limited to the following characters: Vic Sage (The Question, whom Rorschach parodies), Ted Kord (Silver Age Blue Beetle, whom Nite Owl parodies), Peter ParKer, Rac Shade, Mocker, Doctor Strange, Doctor Octopus, Mac Gargan (Scorpion), Electro, Doctor Spectro, Jack Ryder (Creeper), Chameleon, Clea, Clown, Curt Connors (Lizard), Hank Hall (Hawk), Tinkerer, Karcilius... OK, you get the idea. You'll note that the 'K' sound even lurks in The Question and Rorschach.
So the Seventh Kavalry is also a nod to the Ditko 'K.'
Hey, there's a 'K' in Ditko!
Imagine that!
Pearl Harbor: The Accused (2016) This HBO documentary does an awfully good job of absolving disgraced four-star admiral and Commander in Chief US Pacific Fleet Pearl Husband Edward Kimmel of responsibility for that Day of Infamy. Indeed, it does such a good job of doing so that the only explanation for the actions and inactions of US Naval Chief of Operations from 1939-1942 Harold Rainsford Stark is that Stark was a member of the time-altering lunatics of Rittenhouse on TV's Timeless.
Kimmel's grand-children continue to fight for his official absolution, but while a Senate Resolution absolving him of responsibility was passed in 1999, Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama have refused to sign that Resolution, thus leaving Kimmel's honour in official limbo. It's really an astonishing story. Recommended.
Elvis Presley: The Searcher (2018): written by Alan Light; directed by Thom Zimny:
This two-part, three-hour-plus HBO documentary is hagiographic to the point of occasional absurdity throughout.
However, it also offers an overview of Presley's life through photos and footage and commentary from those who knew him (Priscilla Presley, assorted producers and friends) and those who admired him (most notably, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty).
It's worth your time if you love Elvis or if you simply don't know that much about the arc of his career. By the end, it plays like a tragedy, one that F. Scott Fitzgerald might have penned had he been around for the Elvis Era (1953-1977). Recommended.
Spielberg (2017): directed by Susan Lacy: Earnest HBO hagiography of Steven Spielberg dishes almost no dirt, almost no critiques of his work, and almost no mentions of the writers who wrote many of his finest movies. Welcome to Hollywood Auteurism 101.
It's nonetheless an often engaging film, especially as it lays out Spielberg's childhood and the increasingly strained and then broken relationship of his mother and father that led to Spielberg being estranged from his father for more than a decade. Don't look for a discussion of Always, though. Lightly recommended.
Virus: adapted from the Dark Horse comic-book series created by Chuck Pfarrer by Chuck Pfarrer and Dennis Feldman; directed by John Bruno; starring Jamie Lee Curtis (Kit Foster), William Baldwin (Steve Baker), Donald Sutherland (Captain Everton), Joanna Pacula (Nadia), Cliff Curtis (Hiko), Sherman Augustus (Richie), and Marshall Bell (Woods) (1999): On the bright side, this first directorial effort from visual effects maestro didn't destroy John Bruno's career... as a visual effects maestro.
The problems with the movie aren't his fault, however -- comic-book adaptation or not, Virus is an insanely derivative piece of work. It is, however, relatively competent in its direction. It's also produced by Gale Ann Hurd, and derivative of many of the other films she produced.
The crew of a salvage ship caught in a hurricane comes across an abandoned Russian science ship. Or is it abandoned? After all, there's blood and destruction everywhere. But kooky Captain Donald Sutherland -- who appears to be acting in another, funnier movie -- wants the giant vessel for the $30 million salvage fee it will bring from the Russians if they want it back. However, there's SOMETHING ON THE SHIP.
Virus might be at least a slightly better movie if the prologue were moved into the centre of the film as a flashback. It's as if Aliens (another Hurd-produced film, and one Virus cribs from shamelessly) showed us what happened to the colonists in the first five minutes of the movie. It's a dumb storytelling decision that suggests that the studio may have thought a prologue-less Virus was too hard for an audience to follow. Given what a colossal bomb Virus turned out to be ($15 million domestic gross on a 'Where did they spend it?' budget of $75 million), maybe they'd like to travel back in time and fix some of the movie's narrative decisions.
Other than trite dialogue and some dodgy visual effects (most of the storm shots of the Russian vessel in the hurricane clearly involve either miniatures or terrible CGI work), Virus also gives the viewer a mostly underwhelming nemesis. Or nemeses. Sometimes the crew has to fight evil versions of the cute robot from Short Circuit, sometimes they have to fight mechanical spiders from about a dozen SF films and TV shows, and sometimes Donald Sutherland gets assimilated by the Borg... and the Borg are nice enough to leave his captain's hat on him. That at least is some funny stuff, and surely a great leap forward in human-cyborg relations.
The actors do what they can with what they've got. Well, except for the aforementioned Sutherland, who clearly said 'To Hell with a naturalistic performance!' on Day One of shooting. He's sort of a hoot, as is Marshall Bell chewing the scenery as an untrustworthy helmsman. William Baldwin and the rest of the male cast members have almost nothing interesting to say.
The Sigourney Weaver 'action woman' part gets split between Joanna Pacula and Jamie Lee Curtis in an almost schematically on/off way -- which is to say, when one is kicking ass, the other is cowering in a corner, and vice versa. Curtis really hated this movie. It's not hard to see why. It's vaguely watchable, and some scenes in the robot abattoir have a sort of cyberpunk-meets-Grand-Guignol thing going on. But it's also relentlessly derivative when it's not just being dumb. Not recommended.
Westworld: written and directed by Michael Crichton; starring Yul Brynner (Robot Gunslinger), Richard Benjamin (Peter Martin), James Brolin (John Blane), Dick Van Patten (Banker), and Majel Barrett (Miss Carrie) (1973): Before Michael Crichton gave us a murderously malfunctioning dinosaur them park in Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton gave us a murderously malfunctioning robot theme park in Westworld.
Yes, this is the Delos Corporation's adult theme park of the near-future in a desert area of the American Southwest. It's divided into three independent sections that intentionally remind one of similar divisions in Disney theme parks: West(ern)world. Medievalworld, and Romanworld. Except for the guests, everyone you meet in a park is a robot.
The fact that you can bang the human-form robots of these three worlds is clearly part of the appeal of these expensive vacations for adults. You can also shoot them, stab them, punch them, and insult them with impunity. They're just robots, albeit incredibly sophisticated sex-doll robots. Nothing can go wrong. Or is that worng?
James Brolin as a beefy American blowhard and Richard Benjamin as his sheepish, emasculated, divorced pal play our two protagonists. Or maybe increasingly cranky robotic gunslinger Yul Brynner is the protagonist. It really depends on where your sympathies lie. The film-makers dress Brynner like his heroic gunslinger in The Magnificent Seven. But in Westworld, he's something of a dink even before his programming goes astray. Then Brynner becomes the unstoppable forerunner of the Terminator, complete with the occasional bit of pounding background music as he pursues his prey through the three worlds and down into the warren of maintenance tunnels and work rooms and labs below the Delos parks.
The movie works pretty well as a recurringly dumb bit of SciFi action with just a tinge of obvious satire. Unable to solve two narrative problems with anything involving cleverness, Crichton just stupids his way through. How do you tell robots from humans? Um, Delos couldn't get the hands quite right. On robots that are indistinguishable otherwise from human and which you can boink away to your heart's content, it's the hands that are the design flaw.
Secondly, how can the bullets be real? Oh, all guns have a sensor that shuts down the gun if it's pointed at a human being. That wouldn't seem to help if one got clipped by a ricochet or a bullet coming from a few hundred yards away, something that seems pretty likely given the giant shoot-outs we hear in the background throughout the first half of the movie. Maybe they're magic bullets.
These are the dumb solutions to problems created by Crichton himself. Surely one could put a small tattoo or mark somewhere prominent and always visible on a robot to distinguish it from a person. And surely you couldn't have real, lethal bullets flying around and maintain a perfect safety record. But Yul Brynner's gunslinger needs real bullets for Crazy Time!
Oh, well. Westworld is still an enjoyable slice of pre-Star Wars Sci Fi movie-making. The suspense in the second half is engaging and competently directed by Crichton. And now HBO will turn Westworld into a series with tons of graphic sex and nudity because that's what HBO does. So look forward to more human/robot sexual shenanigans in 2016. Surely nothing can go worng. Recommended.
The New Rules by Bill Maher (2005): Man, it's like a time machine, this collection of Maher's TV rants from 2005. Bush the Younger had just won re-election, the Democrats were in total disarray, America was fighting two wars and mumbling about a third with Iran, and Dick Cheney was still the power behind the throne. Good times!!!
The sell-by date on some of the rants included here may have already expired by the time the book came out -- celebrity stuff often wanes with great rapidity. We know that Britney Spears and Kevin Federline were still a topic of conversation in 2005. Lindsay Lohan had already become a joke. Pope Benedict has just become Pope among revelations he'd been a member of the Hitler Youth. How time flies!
There are still a lot of laughs here from Maher and his stable of TV writers, many of them now bitter, long-after-the-fact laughs at the dark days of Bush and Cheney. And it's a short book, obviously, and one you'll probably only find in used bookstores. So it'll be cheap! I got mine for 50 cents!!! Lightly recommended.
