as we may blog

Maggie was at the opera rubbing elbows with the city’s giltterati last night which gave me a rare night to myself. After relieving the refrigerator of the last of the hard boiled eggs and chicken sausages, I took to the couch to check out a couple movies that I knew Maggie had no interest in seeing. As luck would have it, both movies featured the capable thespianism of one Donald Pleasance!

Pleasance may be best known as supervillian Ernst Stavro Blofeld in You Only Live Twice. His portrayal of the one-eyed, cat petting supervillian is now iconic.

THX 1138 (1971, 88 minutes)

I had high hopes for George Lucas’s futurist dystopia, but I found the movie kind of flat. Robert Duvall’s performance as a medication-shirking escapee wasn’t strong enough to balance the stark, clinical whiteness of the entire film. Instead, the environment dominated the movie in a heavier way than I think Lucas intended, leaving me thinking “OK, I get it” at several points.

I did enjoy two aspects of the film quite a bit: the cinematography was excellent, many shots were framed in really striking and unusual ways; the frequent references to cost-benefit analyses of chasing an escaped inmate made me smile.

Pleasance played SEN 5241 and shaved his head for the role, like everyone else in the movie.

Escape from New York (1981, 99 minutes)

There are so many good reasons to see this movie. Manhattan as prison. The hair. Kurt Russell’s hair. Kurt Russell’s hair while wearing an eyepatch. Kurt Russell’s hair while wearing an eyepatch and riding in Ernest Borgnine’s cab.

I think this movie rises above the level of purely ironic or camp enjoyment, too. The movie takes the crime ridden urban decay of the late 70s/early 80s to its logical conclusion (or at least the logical conclusion as it seemed at the time). There is real suspense as Russell battles his way through a violent, abandoned Manhattan full of desperate criminals. The film was an obvious influence on modern fright/horror favorites, too. 28 Days Later owes a huge debt to the scene in Escape where cannibalistic criminals rise out of the sewers and chase Kurt Russell.

Pleasence plays the portly US President whose plane crashes inside Manhattan mere hours before an important global summit with the leaders of the Soviet Union and China. He spends the majority of the movie handcuffed to a briefcase, looking scared. His final scene with Isaac Hayes is notable both for its extreme violence and its extreme comedy.

The review may be more inspired than the movie:

The screams and the images of smoke billowing through the canyons of Lower Manhattan may make you think of the attack, and you may curse the filmmakers for their vulgarity, insensitivity or lack of imagination. (The director, Matt Reeves, lives in Los Angeles, as does the writer, Drew Goddard, and the movie’s star producer, J. J. Abrams.) But the film is too dumb to offend anything except your intelligence, and the monster does cut a satisfying swath through the cast, so your only complaint may be, What took it so long?

Cloverfield (2008)

It’s been awhile since I had a good ol’ You Should See This post, so here goes: Brokeback to the Future (safe for work, you need speakers).

Props to siverson for the find.

Post title shamelessly stolen from the blog formerly known as Nice Pants, Jerk.

[warning: spoilers ahead]

28 Days Later is on its way back to Netflix HQ as I type. I’m a bit of a sucker for these types of near-apocolyptic movies. I don’t really know what to say about this one (which means writing a blog entry about it is required) but I’d be interested to hear others’ impressions. I guess I would say that were it not for a few pretty significant plot questions, this would’ve been a really good horror/science fiction type movie. A few things I noticed:

• Why didn’t the soldiers in the Manchester compound resort to buggery? It worked for pirates. Why such a discriminating taste for survivor females?
• The idea of humans as virii is interesting enough, but if the infected retain almost all of their human characteristics (such as running maniacally, yelling, and biting), then why didn’t they work to sustain themselves by, you know, eating? It seemed a convenient plot twist that the infected simply starved to death. 28 days later.
• Why were the infected basically vampires? If the virus is rage, then does it stand to reason that people are only enraged in the dark? I don’t get it.
• I liked how the film was shot, especially the beginning scenes of an empty London. I’m surprised the jerky, grainy, high-contrast stylings didn’t annoy me, actually, now that I think about it.
• How did these people NOT get infected with all the blood that was flying around?! (If I were truly tasteless, this would be the spot where I force a joke about "catching AIDS" from a drinking fountain. But I’m not.)
• This was the first movie I’d seen in a long time where I immediately checked out the DVD special features when I was done watching the movie. So that’s gotta mean something. It’s good the alternate theatrical ending remained alternate, though I’m not sure I was too satisfied with the standard one, either.

I dunno, I guess there was just too much about the film that required me to suspend my disbelief. Unlike other movies of this ilk. Like Signs. *cough*