When [It] Strikes Me

Does Extract stand a chance at getting a laugh out of you?

On a recommendation from my boss, I checked out Mike Judge’s Extract.  I actually was quite jazzed to watch it, as I am a big fan of Jason Bateman and his work on Arrested Development, as well as Judge’s prior workplace comedy.  Office Space was one of the funniest movies of the 1990s and perfectly encapsulated the tedium of cubicle life.  Its cast was very well chosen, featuring an oft-overlooked, likable guy (Ron Livingston) and a beautiful female lead trying to break out of TV (Jennifer Aniston).

Extract has a similar formula, with Bateman and Mila Kunis headlining the cast.  Judge managed to surround Bateman and Kunis with a stellar supporting cast including SNL standout Kristen Wiig, headliner Ben Affleck and top notch character actors JK Simmons and Clifton Collins Jr.  With a great supply of human capital to work with, Judge tried to tap back into the winning formula he struck with Office Space.

Bateman plays Joel, the owner and operator of a flavor extract manufacturing and packaging company.  Although he’s hardly the cog in the wheel that Livingston’s Peter Gibbons was at Inetech, Joel suffers from a sort of middle age malaise.  He’s ready to sell and get out of the extract business, hoping to retire and be able to spend time filling his life with something to enjoy.  Unfortunately, his home life is stale and his friendships consist solely of a relationship with local bartender Dean (Affleck).  When Kunis’ Cindy, a serious bid on the business and various other pratfalls enter his world, Joel’s life gets turned upside down.

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Rubicon premieres this Sunday night, August 1st.

From One Pawn To Another.

In television, a viewer might often feel a pawn, not being handed anything by a fellow pawn, but rather shifted from one board to the next. Never long to last in the fight, as the milieu of a series loses its shine and the successive attempts at new shows turn into just another run of short-lived games. Rarely does a pawn cross the board and become the queen, engrossed with and empowered by the board itself.

With a few shows I have felt myself as substantively more than a pawn in the game of television programming; in those handful of shows I have lastingly and fully been engrossed. I can really check them off with the fingers of one hand:

• “The West Wing” for its political acumen. A show that reminded us both of what we most wanted in our leaders and the forces which prevent that ideal from being manifested.
• “Battlestar Galactica” for its social commentary. In an era when America was redefining itself both at home and on the world stage, no television program so boldly captured our internalized national struggles.
• “LOST” for its Joycean depth. Bad Robot’s ambitious efforts to challenge viewers made expecting more of one’s viewers a reality and opened the door to the difficult-to-navigate world of what might aptly be termed televised literature.
• “The Wire” for its simple poetry. It is, after all, this epic, five-part poem about the decline of the American empire that gave us the inspired scene in which D’Angelo explains chess to Bodie and Wallace.

There have been other great shows. “Mad Men” gave us attention to detail and historical fiction as a commercial winner. “The Shield” offers a level of grittiness that is hard to turn from. But with most television, it’s as D’Angelo explained to Bodie, “The pawns, man, in the game, they get capped quick. They be out of the game early.” In most television, it’s easy to just sit back and play dumb. Only in the best shows are the pawns challenged to be “some smart ass pawns.” It’s those shows that challenge the viewer that interest me most. In “Rubicon”, I hope we have one such show.

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Released this past June, The Passage was a very well deserved "break in" fiction for the Kindle.

So what happens when you turn over to a “legitimate author” the dystopian, post-apocalyptic genre with a mix of vampires and the “fast-zombies” of 28 Days Later?  Well, the long and the short of it (and this will be the last reference to “short”) is 784 pages of frackin’ awesome.

The author is Justin Cronin, whose prior works, “The Summer Guest” and “Mary and O’Neil”, were less mass-marketable titles.  They were, however, popular and well received, with each earning pretty solid reviews and critical acclaim.  In “The Passage”, he breaks out into the world of big, Hollywood-tie-in fiction.  And he does so by journeying into a realm that, to be honest, few “legitimate” modern authors have ventured into.

Yes, Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker became legends with the monster book story, and each did so with sophistication. But the modern face of monster fiction is the drivel that Stephenie Meyer has made a fortune off of.  I’ve not read and have no intention to read Twilight books.  One only needs to understand that they are written for an ADD, tween audience with film in mind.  I imagine her books must be like Dan Brown vomited up a trilogy with no religious underpinnings and a lot more self-cutting.

I’m probably not being fair, as this isn’t really a genre I seek out in books.  I generally read more non-fiction than fiction and I tend to stick with the classics or some Michael Chrichton (who, to be honest, probably actually would qualify as something not far off this genre).  Nevertheless, I imagine most horror fiction is somewhat like a harlequin novel or the Star Wars spin-off books.  Not a lot of thought, but mindless enjoyment.

“The Passage” is so very much more than that.  Click on through for why. Read more…

Daybreakers is really nothing close to The Matrix or 28 Days Later, even though it too rests on an interesting an unique idea.

Some movies just have not a whole lot going for them when I’m about to watch them.  Daybreakers is one such movie. I watched it earlier in the week while (i) suffering from a crummy stomach virus which both left me miserable and unable to really appreciate popcorn and (ii) reading “The Passage” by Justin Cronin, which is a book that, quite simply, puts most vampire stories to shame. But this isn’t a review of that brilliant book (which ranks as Amazon’s top book of the first half of 2010), that review will follow shortly when I finish it (it’s “War and Peace” long… well, not really, but darn close).

Anyway, Daybreakers is a movie I should have really liked.  It actually does meld a few different themes to create an interesting back story and milieu.  The basic premise is that a viral outbreak of vampirism (not the neutered “Twilight” kind, but the more Stokerish Blade variety) has led to a shift such that vampires have simply slid into and displaced humans in modern society.  Humans have become farmed for their blood and those that run free are hunted, but never killed.  The story somewhat expands on the idea from Blade of vampires as a back room clan with Catholic Church style resources, but no public face.  This has expanded to vampires fully running the show.  It’s actually a pretty interesting departure from the standard tale of viral apocalypse.  Pretty much every interesting fiction about viral apocalypse (be it “The Passage”, “World War Z“, I Am Legend, 28 Days Later, or even Zombieland) involves a mindless destruction of the world as we know it.  In Daybreakers, humans are really just displaced.

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I kind of wish there had been a bigger media push for this film. It really could have taken off in theaters.

Quite simply, there are a handful of movies that manage to just make one laugh out loud uncontrollably.  It’s more common that you run across those comedies in a theater when mob mentality has you rolling in the rows.  I last experienced this with The Hangover and, before that, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.  It is that more rare comedy that can have you rolling with laughter when watching at home.  I present to you one extraordinary example of that in In the Loop.

Based on the British TV show “The Thick Of It,” the political drama is one-third The Office (UK version), one-third Curb Your Enthusiasm and one-third The West Wing.  In other words, it’s freaking brilliant, even though its not for the faint of heart when it comes to language.

The BBC program it was based on focused solely on the antics of Downing Street enforcer Malcolm Turner (Peter Capaldi, a veteran of Brit TV shows such as Torchwood: Children of the Earth, which I reviewed yesterday).  Turner is the Machiavellian, potty mouthed king of communications and the show follows his interactions with the team at the Ministry of Social Affairs.  There he deals with MP Hugh Abbot and his right hands Glenn Cullen, Terri Coverley (Joanna Scanlan)  and Oliver Reeder (Chris Addison).

In the film, director and producer Armando Iannucci keeps Capaldi’s Malcom Turner in place and reshuffles a few actors like Addison into new characters who retain some of the characteristics, despite different roles.  As impish aide Oliver Reeder, Addison plays Mr. Fix-It as a transfer into a dysfunctional foreign development ministry and its incompetent MP Simon Foster (Tom Hollander).  The story follows Foster’s role in the run-up to a UN resolution to declare war in a situation that is a thinly veiled stand-in for Iraq.  No Qumar here, either.  They just don’t overtly reference the country.

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The third Series of Torchwood is clearly the cream of the crop, but the entire run is enjoyable.

BBC America fans might be familiar with Torchwood, but it’s not terribly likely. It’s a bit of a shame, as this was one of the better serialized shows on TV in the sci-fi genre. For a country that really embraced The X-Files for nine seasons and two full length features, you’d think there could be a place for Torchwood.

I start with the X-Files reference because, for comparison purposes, it really is the most spot on. Torchwood is a serialized mystery show spun off from the BBC’s thirty-plus season Doctor Who phenomenon. It follows Doctor Who crossover Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) and the Cardiff-based branch of a secret agency referred to as the Torchwood Institute.

It’s hard to decide to what degree of depth I should go into on the series mythology on this. I’m gonna go on the light side, but give just some of the basics. Cardiff is the Welsh city in which a space/time tear has opened a dimensional gateway of sorts. As a result, there’s a tremendous amount of alien activity in and around the city. The British Government commissioned the Torchwood Institute a long time ago to monitor and keep alien activity in check.

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The movie is in German with English subtitles.

Not every movie is made to be great.  In fact, I’d say it’s not hard to argue that most zombie genre movies are not meant for greatness.  Dead Snow, or Død Snø if you want to be German about it, is just that type of movie.

It’s weird to see this kind of flick come to America from the foreign ranks.  Although you do see camp show up occasionally — think the awesome Shaolin Soccer or last year’s Bollywood kung fu comedy Chandni Chowk to China — it’s rare to really see a campy horror in subtitles.

The plot here is surprisingly easy to follow and having to watch the subtitles wasn’t actually that tough, even for a horror movie.  Basically, you have seven medical student friends who arrive in a remote, Norwegian (or at least I think it’s Norway) locale, where they expect to meet one’s girlfriend, who owns a cabin in the mountains.  They hike nearly an hour from the road to reach the rustic cabin.

When the girlfriend doesn’t arrive, they start to worry; tension is added by the visit of a local camper who warns of evil in the mountains which is descended from a Nazi crew that raped the land and eventually froze in the mountain cold.  When the boyfriend heads off to find his girl, the zombie fun kicks off in full.

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Primer is a complex and, at times, very confusing film that earns a hearty recommendation from me.

The best way to watch a movie is almost always when you have no idea what to expect.  Going in with little more than a two line plot mini-summary leaves you open to surprise and, occasionally, that surprise is pleasant.

It was so with Primer, a 2004 independent film that was a darling of the Indie Film Circuit.  It won the Grand Jury Prize and Alfred P. Sloan Prize at Sundance, the Best Writer/Director at Nantucket and the Best Feature at the London/Sci Fi.  It was also nominated in all the major categories for which it was eligible at the 2005 Independent Spirit Awards.  For a film made on a budget of about $7,000… well, let’s just say that newcomer writer, director, producer and lead actor Shane Carruth has got some game.

I do feel that going into the movie with very little background was important in my enjoyment, so I’m certainly not going to play too much of a spoiler herein.  I’ll keep this review pretty high level and light on detail.  And with a film that was as dense on the scientific jargon, keeping it high level is sometimes a necessity and not simply a luxury.

Primer is a mix between a sci fi feature and a thinking-man’s thriller.  As a bit of a science nerd, I think the thing I appreciated the most was Carruth’s dedication to maintaining at least a modicum of scientific integrity in his draftsmanship.  The film definitely has a gritty and perhaps even realistic feel.

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Seeing the ice geysers of Enceladus are one of those moments where you look around and realize this program has you smiling and wanting more.

For shame… for shame HBO and THC and Discovery.  BBC2 is currently airing a brilliant series of hour-long documentaries starring Brian Cox called Wonders of the Solar System.  Although produced jointly by the BBC and Discovery Communications’ Science Channel, it is currently airing only in Britain… presumably to air later on Science.

Fortunately, there’s this little thing called the interwebs which makes surreptitious viewing of cross continental programming possible.  I’m not going to tell you where you can obtain parts one, two and three… but hyperlinking isn’t necessarily telling, now is it?

I complain, because this really is, at times, magical science.  Brian Cox — who’s known as the Rock Star Physicist both for his past history as a rocker and his playful magnetism and genuine wonder when presented with that which is cool — sums it up best when describing how amazing it is that he’d been able to calculate the wattage output of the Sun using household items:

[The sun is radiating out] 400 million million million million watts. That is a million times the power consumption of the United States every year radiated in one second. And we worked that out by using some water, thermometer, tin and umbrella. And that’s why I love physics.

Wonders of the Solar System, “Empire of the Sun.”  It’s really just brilliant and inspiring stuff and filmed and scored with a real passion for the joys of scientific discovery.

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Modern Warfare 2 is at its best when the war comes to US soil.

I have a bad habit of buying a video game, playing it a few times and then just letting it sit idle… to be played on those rare occasions where my brother and I feel an intense desire to snipe.  Our games of choice have tended to be the military based shooters, though the initial renditions of the Call of Duty family of games really lacked in on-site co-op gaming (AKA, I don’t have XBox Live).

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 differed from its predecessors in that it was engineered with the co-op gamer in mind.  While I initially played this in full-on brother snipe mode, I just finished the single player campaign version and felt I ought to give it a simple review.

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