The Flying Deuces

It’s amazing how some personalities from older movies and short films are still so recognizable today. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are still easy to identify even for younger generations, even if many of those same people have never watched an actual Laurel and Hardy film. The thin man and the fat man have become almost an archetype of comedy pairings, and it’s largely due to the characters that these two actors portrayed themselves as (with Abbott and Costello also contributing to the image, in a less exaggerated form.)

I saw Babes in Toyland a few years ago, and while I enjoyed it, I could tell it wasn’t quite the archetypal Laurel and Hardy film. The Flying Deuces may come after their best-known run under producer Hal Roach — it’s directed by A. Edward Sutherland and produced by Boris Morros — but this 1939 film feels a lot more like what my generation has been told to expect from Stan and Ollie. It’s a silly, light-hearted film with a simple plot and a lot of funny gags.

WarGames: The Dead Code

WarGames is often regarded as, if not an all-time classic, at least an 80s classic, and with good reason. It has an interesting plot, fun and well-acted characters, and while there is a small element of fantasy involved (most particularly a computer capable of learning built on early 1980s hardware) it’s mostly pretty believable. It has a plot that is both fun and serious, using the Cold War as a backdrop for a story in which a young hacker nearly starts global thermonuclear war by starting a game with precisely the wrong computer. Even the government agents in the film are largely intelligent, rational, caring human beings whose main flaw is an excess of faith in their systems, which were designed to be able to go off without human intervention, and to be nearly impossible to recall (the film Dr. Strangelove apparently did not exist in the WarGames universe, or the government just didn’t take it to heart.) It’s a great film, one I would rank as among my favorites.

WarGames: The Dead Code is pretty much what you’d expect from a direct-to-video sequel made 25 years later, in 2008, involving none of the original cast, writers, producers, or director, and no name actors. It could probably have been worse, but it’s far from the quality of WarGames, and far from necessary. I would be concerned about some of the things that bother me about the film constituting spoilers, but in this case, a large part of the problem is that if you’ve seen WarGames, then WarGames: The Dead Code has already been spoiled for you (and if you haven’t seen WarGames, just watch WarGames instead.) Although WarGames: The Dead Code is a true sequel, not a remake, and follows on the events of before, it is also very much a retread of the earlier film. All of the important parts are essentially recycled. So, yes, this review contains spoilers, but they won’t really spoil anything that wasn’t already going to be spoiled.

In Time

Andrew Niccol wrote and directed this 2011 film, which stars Justin Timberlake as a man living in the ghetto of Dayton in the future. Exactly how far in the future is unclear, though in most respects the time closely resembles the present day. In this future, people no longer age post-maturity; at age 25, they simply stop growing older and continue to look 25 no matter how many more years they live. But, ostensibly to avoid overpopulation, everybody has an internal timer, visible through the skin of their arm, which reads out how much time they have — and everyone is given one year on their 25th birthday. When that time runs out, they simply die. Surviving past one’s 26th birthday means that one has to earn additional time, and time has become the main currency in the world. People spend time on goods and services, earn time for their work, and steal time from each other on the streets. The rich have eons and live in luxury; the poor quite literally live from day to day.

It’s a concept with a lot of ramifications, with many different aspects that could be explored. I have no qualms in saying that it’s perhaps one of the best and most creative science-fiction concepts to hit the cinema in years. But my praise for this film largely ends with the concept; the rest of the film just doesn’t live up it.

Memento

I’ve seen a handful of the films that Christopher Nolan has directed over the years: Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Prestige (which has nothing to do with Batman). What they all have in common, besides Christian Bale (OK, it has a little bit to do with Batman), is that they are very good, and a bit more cerebral than the standard films of their genres. Memento, released in 2000, is one of his more critically acclaimed films, and a large part of that acclaim is that it is perhaps the most cerebral of his films. I didn’t catch the film when it first came out, and it somehow managed to elude me in the 12 years since as well; fortunately, though, I managed to elude spoilers of the film until I was finally able to see it for myself.

Memento stars Guy Pearce as Leonard Shelby, a former insurance investigator with a couple of problems. The first, which provides the plot of the film, is that his wife was murdered and he was assaulted, and one of the killers is still on the loose. The second problem, which provides the gimmick of the film, is that the attack left him with a brain injury, resulting in a case of anterograde amnesia. He can remember events up to the incident as perfectly as he could before his injury, but he is left unable to form new memories. He can hold things in his memory as long as he focuses on it, but if he goes too long without writing it down, it’s forgotten forever. Every encounter is a new one to him, every event has him feeling as if he’s just woke up in media res, and every morning he wakes up to find it is, once again, Groundhog Day he has no recollection of his recent past. He relies on Polaroids, notes to himself, and — for permanent clues and warnings — tattoos (some self-administered) to keep himself in the loop of his progress.

Live Free or Die Hard

The fourth Die Hard film, released as Live Free or Die Hard in the United States and simply Die Hard 4.0 elsewhere, came out in 2007, twelve years after the release of Die Hard with a Vengeance. There had been gaps in the series before (there was a five year gap between the second and third films), but nothing quite like that. So there was some question as to whether it would be a good entry in the franchise… especially as the 2000s and onward have been full of very-belated sequels that don’t live up to the originals.

Len Wiseman, director of the first two Underworld films, takes the helm here. Bruce Willis returns, of course, as John McClane, and of course John’s life outside of fighting crime and terrorism hasn’t gotten any easier. His daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is estranged from him, refusing to even use the same last name, but has a lot of the same belligerent attitude John himself has. But he soon has little time to worry about that, as FBI deputy director Bowman (Cliff Curtis) calls in a favor to NYPD to bring in a hacker that the FBI is interested in after a cyber attack. McClane arrives just as assassins try to kill the hacker, and we’re off to the usual assortment of shootouts and explosions. Hey, we all know why we’re here. Trying McClane’s patience is the hacker himself; Matt Farrell (Justin Long) is hyperactive, needy, and prone to rant on anti-corporate conspiracy theories, and quickly gets on McClane’s nerves.

M

Fritz Lang’s 1931 film M is considered by many to be a classic example of film noir. It’s made it into a few top 100 lists (including being #50 on IMDb), and is cited as being a major influence on both the genre and films in general. It was filmed in German, but the Criterion Collection has released a version with deftly-translated subtitles; when I had the opportunity to see that version, I decided to do so.

The film is inspired by various serial killers around Germany at the time that Lang was writing it. It stars Peter Lorre as a disturbed man who has become a serial child killer in a German city, and Lorre’s performance is exceptionally creepy, especially with Lang adding in one of the first leitmotifs in film history, with the killer (actually Lang dubbed in) whistling “In the Hall of the Mountain King” whenever he is taken by his compulsion to stalk, kidnap, and murder children.

News: G.I. Joe: Retaliation Delayed Until March 2013

The second live-action G.I. Joe film, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, has been delayed until March 29, 2013, according to SlashFilm and various sources. This is particularly surprising since its previous release date was June 29, 2012 — only five weeks from today. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that was so close to its release date get delayed, let alone by so much. The major marketing push has already been underway for this film for some time; teasers have given way to trailers, and movie posters with the June 29 release date have been displayed in theatres for weeks now.

The reason Paramount is giving is that they want to use the time to do a post-process conversion of the film into 3D, but it seems like a big gamble to me. They’re going to have to work doubly hard to sell people on the film now; quite literally, as they’ll have to essentially duplicate the entirety of their marketing campaign.

The Wheel of Time: Books 0-2

When I started my re-read of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, I initially planned to read all 15 novels (including the forthcoming A Memory of Light), and do a single, if lengthy, review at the series at the end of it all. Since then, a few things have happened to change my mind about my approach.

First, Bubbawheat of Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights suggested I give updates a few times during the course of the reading. Which got me thinking on whether it was really valuable, blogging-wise, to write a post announcing the start of the reading project and then not say anything else on it until it was finished several months later. I’m thinking no. Secondly, a few books down, I realized that if I were to review each novel individually, even if I gave only a paragraph to each, in addition to the quite-necessary overview of the series and how the novels interconnect that my final post will have to have… that’s going to be a staggeringly long blog post. Besides being difficult to write, a long post can sometimes be hard for people to read, even if well-formatted (and I’m pretty long-winded as it is) — and I did just have one of my longest posts ever essentially “air ball” in terms of garnering comments. But most importantly, I realized I had forgotten to account for just how quickly I can actually read. I’d allotted myself about three weeks per book. Three weeks into it, I’ve read two beyond the one I had just finished when I started the post. When I first read these, it was at a rate of about one a week. I had thought other activities — such as the more frequent movie watching I do as an adult — would slow me down, but it doesn’t seem to have had as much of an impact as I had thought. I may need to space things out and deliberately slow myself down some to keep from having a situation where I’m waiting months between the penultimate book and the ultimate one. And in that situation, even though I’m taking a lot of notes, it’s possible I’d forget what I meant to say about each individual book.

So, slight amendment to the plan. I’ll still have the big overview post at the end of it all, but before then, I’ll be making a post every three books. Starting today, with the prequel New Spring: The Novel, and the first two books, The Eye of the World, and The Great Hunt.

Hostage (2005)

It’s hard to pass up an action film starring Bruce Willis. Even when it’s one I haven’t heard of before, I assume there’s a certain minimum level of enjoyment because Bruce Willis is always going to turn in a solid performance. Hostage is no exception to that rule; Willis is as good as ever here.

In Hostage Willis’s character, Jeff Talley, starts off as the hostage negotiator for L.A.P.D. After a negotiation goes awry, he loses confidence in himself, and takes a job as the police chief of a nearby suburb. He finds the job less stressful, as it’s a quiet town, and most days are essentially crime-free. Most days. Of course, we know there wouldn’t be a movie if that were always the case.

Comment Emails Back to Proper Behavior

Last post on this, thankfully. I already mentioned this on Twitter, but it was o-dark-thirty so it’s possible even the people who follow me on there missed it, let alone those of my readers who don’t follow my Twitter account. As you might expect, WordPress received no small number of complaints from people who were upset that the “Follow comments by email” checkbox was now on by default. They’ve posted an update on their blog article about it, and have reversed their decision. The checkbox is now off by default once more, as it should be. So now you’ll only be subscribed to receive emails for every comment on a thread if you check the box yourself — which is to say, if you say you want to, instead of someone else deciding for you.