Expelled Grey Matter

I honestly don't know why I originally saw Dark City , other than maybe my wife and I agreed it looked interesting.  I think I had seen Rufus Sewell in a television program and, talented as she is, Jennifer Connelly was never the biggest reason I would go out and see a film.  I didn't even know Richard O'Brien was in it until I recognized him as one of the main bad guys.  Also, this was Alex Proyas's second feature film - his first being The Crow , which was not exactly a selling point for me. Still, when I saw it in the theater in 1998, I found it one of the more interesting movies I had seen in a long time.  Where The Crow was all atmosphere with little payoff, Dark City endeavored to give us a good story.  It's not without its inconsistencies and flaws, and I don't really think it's meant to make us question reality or go beyond the actual story it is telling, but it definitely succeeds in doing what it sets out to do.  John Murdoch (Sewell) wakes up in ...

Stuart Gordon is one of those horror directors that unfortunately didn't break out into the mainstream like John Carpenter or Sam Raimi.  I think the only movie he made that had a major theatrical release besides The Re-Animator  was Fortress , and the former is largely known from when the uncensored version was released on video and the latter should be more well-known but isn't.  I think part of the reason Gordon didn't break into the mainstream, however, was because he and frequent collaborator Brian Yuzna spent a good amount of time adapting the works of H. P. Lovecraft.  By adapting, I honestly mean taking a story that was a few pages long, incorporating the general elements of said story (and using the names of characters in it), but putting it in modern times and, with their cowriter Dennis Paoli, making it something much different.  Despite this they still maintained the spirit of Lovecraft, and after the success of The Re-Animator Gordon decided to foll...

Wonder Woman was a surprise when it came out in 2017.  It wasn't that a superhero movie with a strong female lead could become such a hit, but more so that Warner Bros. and DC had it in them to make a movie that had a sensible plot and was indeed watchable.  Marvel has made its mistakes, especially when trying to force female leads to be heroes of third-wave feminism rather than just simply showing them as equals with the male heroes.  Diana Prince was always a character that was building up to being great.  As times changed, Wonder Woman changed, from making tea for Superman and Batman to being one of the strongest heroes around.  I still had a couple problems with the first film.  One is that it went the usual path of the DC movies of looking like it was filmed on an extremely bad day in Los Angeles, with everything a monochrome brownish-orange.  The other is that Ares was a terrible, forgettable villain.  I understand that there has to be some...

I really didn't know much about Ad Astra going into this.  I knew it was in space, I knew that it sounded like a 2001: A Space Odyssey wannabe, and, to make things worse, I knew that star Brad Pitt had talked about it being about toxic masculinity.  I guess it's a subject one can explore in a movie that warrants it, but slipping it into a science fiction movie seemed like one of the usual "get woke, go broke" actions we have seen over the last few years, where it seems that everything in a movie takes a back seat to a political agenda.  The confusing thing is that Ad Astra , if it is about toxic masculinity and any other type of leftist agenda, hides it to the point where one would think that maybe its star missed the whole point of the film.  It is at heart about a man coming to grips with issues concerning his father, and in many ways plays out like a Hallmark special.  While the movie cost just shy of $100 million - quite a bit less than a lot of preach-to-t...

If there was one thing that Disney was for the longest time it was dependable.  Their releases, whether animated or live-action, were going to be light, family-oriented affairs.  This was perfect for the 1950s and a good portion of the 1960s.  Problem is, as the 1970s wore on, it was obvious that a good portion of the nation had outgrown the entertainment that the studio had to offer.  Tellingly, The Cat from Outer Space would be one of its last G-rated live action films. Not only had society and the world changed, but so had audiences and movies themselves.  By 1978 Star Wars was the biggest science fiction adventure movie, and a year hadn't tempered that.  On the other side, for those who took their sci-fi a bit more seriously, there was Close Encounters of the Third Kind .  People like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were winning the hearts and minds of children and adults alike.  Though generally non-offensive, they weren't afraid of appeal...

The name William Gibson used to mean a lot in the realm of science fiction.  The author of the popular novel Neuromancer , he took the idea of a future like what was presented in Blade Runner to an extreme and invented a sub-genre of sci-fi called cyberpunk - a term that I am sure many will recognize from a recent game release.  Cyberpunk deals with dystopian societies where humans are frequently modified in different ways, often to help them interface directly with computers.  While Neuromancer  was published in 1984, it had resounding effects, especially after the World Wide Web became available in the early 1990s.  It seemed like some of what had been predicted was coming true, and a number of novels and movies based on the idea of augmented humans fighting against corporate overlords began appearing.  The internet was a brand new thing and, for many Boomers, who made up the majority of writers tackling the subject, computers might as well still have be...

When I first heard of Terry Pratchett and Discworld I didn't immediately run out and start buying the books.  I was reluctant to even start.  At the time I learned about the series there were already 25 or more and, not being a lover of fantasy, I was in no hurry to deviate from my regular reading habits.  This changed when I read a compilation that had a novella featuring Granny Weatherwax, the lead character in most of the side stories dealing with a number of rural witches and the adventures they get into.  It was well-written, hilarious, and convinced me that Pratchett was worth checking out. It was  Wyrd Sisters , the first of the witch books, that I began my journey with, largely because it was the first one featuring Granny Weatherwax.  Soon, however, I was reading them all and, until Terry Pratchett's death in 2015, Discworld books were something I looked forward to every year, along with whatever new stuff Stephen King and Jack McDevitt might have...

There are certain movies that, when watched, I hear the voice of Johnny Rotten in my head: "Ever get the feeling that you've been cheated?"  I know that voice should not go off in my head for a movie like 2099: The Soldier Protocol, whose blurb reads like an Asylum ripoff of Avatar , but it did.   I went into this knowing full well I was not going to be watching anything close to a good movie.  However, we have David Arquette in a thick coat, strange faceless soldiers in the background and a frozen, apocalyptic city.  I was at least hoping for goofy monsters and SyFy level silliness as Deputy Dewey fought his way through the new ice age that had engulfed the end of the 21st century.  Instead, this has nothing to do with dead cities, the year 2099, or really even David Arquette.  Instead it's an Australian film - inexplicably taking place in the United States - that was originally called The Wheel .  The lead, in fact, is Jackson Gallagher, a forme...

What I remember about the debut of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial  was the lines to get into see it.  I was 10,  I hadn't really seen much advertising, and I really didn't pay attention to who directed things.  I certainly had no idea who was in it.  In all honesty, I don't think I ever asked to see it, or even knew it existed until my parents asked me if I wanted to go.  However, I knew what an extra-terrestrial was, so there was no argument from me.  Luckily, since I grew up in Phoenix, we saw it at the United Artists in Christown Mall - which means we waited inside the mall instead of out in the heat.  It was June, after all. The movie stayed in theaters for a little over a year.  The only other film I can remember from around the same time that did so was The Gods Must Be Crazy , but it generally only played at one or two theaters.  E.T. stuck around in the first-run cinemas, crushing movies like The Thing and Blade Runner  which a...

Another teal and orange movie poster.  A series of scenes that are assembled to make nostalgic fans aware that, yes, the cantankerous star of the original will return.  However, nothing in the poster, the trailers or the promotion provided any information on what this movie would be about - much less how a sequel could be made to a movie that depicted a world that was now just two years in the future and far from on its way to what was shown 35 years prior.  Blade Runner showed us the world of 2019.  Flying cars patrolled the urban canyons of a Los Angeles where the penthouses of the elite and the giant corporations that controlled the world, and the other worlds humans were retreating to in order to escape their dying planet, loomed above the city and caught what little sunlight made it through the thick, yellowish, barely breathable air.  We had developed synthetic humans, known as Replicants, for slave labor and cannon fodder, and it was up to special police...

I never thought I would find myself so alone in appreciating Star Wars: The Last Jedi .  I know that in reality people who like movies got it.  Rian Johnson was trying to breathe new life into a franchise that was quickly beginning to repeat itself and live off the nostalgia of when it was better.  The problem was that there had been an entire prequel trilogy by George Lucas that had, in many ways, ruined the faith of fans, and it had gone beyond nostalgia to just trying to get the feeling of the original universe to return.  In some ways The Force Awakens did that, but it did rely heavily on bringing back old characters and themes. The Last Jedi instead gave us a number of things to consider: the weight that Luke Skywalker carried on his conscience due to his failures, the idea that lineage didn't necessarily determine destiny and the fact that heroes could be fallible.  We got more of a sense of how big the Galaxy was, something that Rogue One and Solo succ...

When I review movies I tend to stick with the theatrical versions.  Sometimes extended, director's or re-edited cuts may be a bit better, but often it is the theatrical version that most are familiar with.  There is also the problem with over-indulgence, particularly on the revamped versions of the original trilogy of  Star Wars movies and the extended version of The Exorcist .  While the latter may have been closer to what William Peter Blatty wanted it to be, the original theatrical release was the one that satisfied director William Friedkin, thus muddying the question of which is the "real" version. With Blade Runner there is no question.  Ridley Scott has declared that his favorite version, and the one that best represents what he was trying to do, is the "Final Cut" version released in 2007.  Inconsistencies were cleared up, the backgrounds were clearer and some work was done to digitally replace the original matte paintings or at least make them blen...