…and who’s that there behind the penultimate calendar door? Why, it’s only our old pal ‘Dinners’, with a special surprise…

I caught some movies this week that I have never seen and I would like to share with you my thoughts on them.

Dogtown and Z-Boys : Brilliant to say the least or better yet – Radical. This movie brought so many memories back and touched me on some deep levels. I skated the same streets and surfed the same waves as those guys and grew up hearing stories from others and my dad.One of my first boards was an Alva, a friend of my dads gave me cause his son never rode it anymore.These guys really birthed a whole new culture and lifestyle and all they wanted to do is surf and skate – To feel the freedom it gives you. Nothing like it in the world. This movie has also inspired me now – at the ripe old age of 30 ( I haven’t picked up a board in 15 yrs ) to start skating again. I highly recommend this to anyone that is interested in history – real history.

Sin City : Sucked. Mickey Rourke with the only bright star in this dark mass of shit – well that and all the super hot chicks. I am officially in love with Rosario Dawson.

War of the worlds: I have to admit that even though I cant stand Spielberg or Cruise, this was pretty decent. I believe this is Toms best performance since Born on the 4th of July. The CGI was realistic and tasteful and even though it seemed a bit rushed I think they pulled it off.

oh…BTW – MR.Wizard kicks ass!

Part 1 (#46-50)

Part 2 (#41-45)

And…

As promised, here’s our next 5 selections.  Visit tomorrow to see picks 31-35.

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(trailer)

Taos: Oh man, I love everything Mamet does. Not even Tim Allen could bring this movie down.

David: A quiet David Mamet. There’s a lot in Redbelt that could be criticized. But the protagonist’s arc–by movie’s end–just the stuff of greatness. Solidified Chiwetel Ejiofor as one of my favorite actors.

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(trailer)

David: [note: the flip of a coin, and 2046 may as well be here instead] The ever-wistful In the Mood for Love is the first of a more refined Wong Kar Wai. I prefer his early-mid summer period (maybe that’s because I myself am still young), but I still adore his late summer now autumn flags. A great piece of cinema in its own right, once seen in the context of its loose trilogy (Days of Being Wild, Mood, 2046), another dimension of allure–something mysterious–amplifies in the mind.  Aaaaand… another Chris Doyle photographed pic makes the list.

Taos: Cinematography looks amazing, but I haven’t seen it yet.

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(trailer)

Taos: Finally a sci-fi film that doesn’t forget the science. Duncan Jones might be the next big thing. Especially if he gets to make the movies he wants. Not much can be said without ruining it. In the case of this movie: more is less. (Duncan Jones is David Bowie’s freakin son!)

David: Supposed to be better than it looks. I’ll find out come its dvd release next month.  A score by Clint Mansell can’t hurt its chances.

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(trailer)

David: One of the most visceral movie experiences I’ve had.  Apart from the spotty prehistoric stampede, I was there for the ride the full three hours topside.  A supreme beauty of an epic.

Taos: Hard to like at first, but grows with reflection. If I were to pick a movie I hated at first but grew to love, I probably would have went with War of the Worlds instead.

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(trailer)

David: Letting Matt Damon kick ass for six hours was one of the best decisions of the decade. Simply enough, what really pushes this one past its bookends (and by a sturdy margin) is its emotional primacy, succeeding, too, at what Quantum of Solace later failed to make happen for 007.

Taos: The Bourne films run together in my mind. I know the action was great and the story was outstanding, but I cannot tell you the individual storylines. Influenced half a decade of action films: nuff said.

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Until tomorrow!

THE RUNAWAYS

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Me and Orson Welles – This story, based on the novel by Robert Kaplow, is from one of my favorite “hip” directors, Richard Linklatter (Waking Life). It is set in 1937, when Welles was a known radio actor and before he took the world by storm both on the radio and in movies.  “Me and Orson Welles” features a teenager (Zac Ephron; High School Musical) who is in love with the theater, acting, and writing, everything about it. He manages to get hired for no pay by Orson Welles’ company that intends to produce Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” in a week’s time.  The film is a kind of sideways examination of the real Orson Welles, played here by a relative newcomer from the UK, Christopher Mackay. He really nails the voice and “the look” of Welles. Orson Welles is depicted as a brilliant life force that uses people, misuses them, and discards them with a flourish and without a backwards glance. If I hadn’t been familiar with “Citizen Kane” (1941), “The Magnificent Ambersons” (1942), and “The War of the Worlds” (broadcast October 30, 1938), I would have missed many of the inter-textual references.  In fact, you may find some that eluded me. As a friend said, this is Zac Ephron’s transitional picture from pop to serious drama but he barely makes it. He sings a song with his “High School Musical” voice during one of the rehearsals; someone should have caught that.  Still, I found the film interesting, classy, and am glad I saw it.

An Education – Nick Hornby is a very entertaining novelist who can turn his books into enjoyable screenplays. Recall “About a Boy” (2002) and “Fever Pitch” (2005). But here the mostly male perspective changes as Hornby adapts a coming-of-age memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber into a script that understands the character with empathy. The film is smart with a touch of pathos.  Jenny (Carey Mulligan; Bleak House) is about to turn sixteen in the mid-1960’s. She is as bright as her parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) are dull and boring. Her tedious father has her on track for Oxford so she can get a job after and support herself. One rainy day, she accepts a ride home from an older man, David (Peter Saarsgaard.) They meet again and he asks her out. Jenny’s father is reluctant, but ever so carefully David seduces Jenny and her parents. David makes them trust him. When Jenny discovers that the sophisticated David and his high class friend Danny are running business scams, she is shocked and threatens to walk away. But she likes the excitement and hates the boredom of her life at home and school. She gives her virginity to David on a weekend trip her parents allow her to take because David’s “aunt” (Danny’s girlfriend) will be the chaperone.  David proposes to her when he thinks Danny is about to make a move on her. Then when Jenny discovers the real truth about David, she must humbly ask for mercy from her parents, teachers whom she had confronted and humiliated when she quit school to be married. I imagine there are many Jenny’s out there who learn life’s lessons the hard way; the thing is, Jenny is a fast learner and amazingly has not burned all her bridges.  She has one lifeline left, a teacher. This film is as much about youth, and growing up as it is about the educational establishment, and both sides score points. This is a well-acted story with warmth, hope and insight. You can feel the cold English rain falling, falling.

People love to be scared – safely – or to consider the end of everything – as long as it happens to someone else, or only sort of maybe could happen to us all, but not really.

Out here in Hollywood that’s one way you make money. On the occasion of the recent death of Gene Barry one of the cable channels put his most successful film into rotation for a few days – from 1953, War of the Worlds. Barry was dashing and suave and quietly heroic, and Los Angeles was destroyed (and City Hall blowing up was particularly impressive). It was most satisfying. It won an Oscar for Special Effects.

But H. G. Wells started it with his 1898 novel of the same name – London got it good. And the Orson Welles famous 1938 radio version was maybe too good – people thought New Jersey actually did get it good. You don’t want real panic. Steven Spielberg’s rather awful 2005 adaptation was the exception – many of us wanted to see Tom Cruise get it real good, no matter what the collateral damage. That man is extraordinarily irritating.

But you can sell the end of the world as we know it. People will pay to see that. The current version is the Roland Emmerich end-of-everything extravaganza 2012. It made big money in spite of the justifiable ridicule of most critics, and the bewildered amusement of scientists. And Los Angeles really gets it in this one.

But why do people like this sort of thing? One has to discount universal existential self-loathing – the whole of the public can’t be that clinically depressed. They don’t want the world to end. They don’t want to die right here and now.

But they do like to contemplate everything going wrong, and to tell each other it could happen, or might be happening right now. No one likes to hear anyone say that we ought to just back up and put things in perspective and consider the reality of the situation – yes, bad and dangerous things are happening, as they always do, but they’re not all THAT bad, or so bad we cannot find a way to deal with them. That’s no fun, even if rational.

Perhaps people are just bored – you know, leading lives of quiet desperation, mulling over all their personal dreams that never even got far enough along to be broken. One way to deal with that is to say, damn, there’s no hope for anyone. That makes the hour in the checkout line at Wal-Mart a bit more bearable. And in the evening you can go to the movies and watch the world end.

And on Tuesday, December 15, it was the progressive advocates of healthcare reform who were saying that this was the end of everything. As Mike Madden reviews in an item at salon.com, this was President Lieberman’s bitter pill – one man had ruined everything. The Medicare buy-in and the “public option” were now dead – he didn’t want them, and he was the last one Senate vote the Democrats needed to break a filibuster by the Republican minority. And he said he’d join the Republican effort to stop everything if he didn’t get his way, the exact bill he wanted. And the progressive advocates of healthcare reform watched as he effectively gave the finger to his former party, and his constituents, and grin in glee as he was now more powerful than the president, and the Democrats, and the Republicans. It all came down to him. And he was making sounds that even with the bill now being shaped exactly as he alone wanted it, he might oppose it anyway, and vote it down – presumably just for the fun of it, and because he could.

So now, with the Democrats hoping he won’t go that far, and will support the bill that they stripped down to nothing much at his request, to get his vote, Madden points out that “the end stages of the debate over healthcare reform will essentially be a mad scramble by progressives to mitigate the damage Lieberman and conservative Democrats can do to the legislation before it passes – and to try to convince their wavering allies that the bill is still worth supporting.”

Yes, what started out as “a sweeping effort to change the entire healthcare system looks likely to wind up as a moderately ambitious attempt to regulate the insurance market” – while giving them tens of millions of new customers of course, and guaranteeing any losses, or even a slight drop in their massive profits.

But it wasn’t the end of the world:

“We’re not going to get all that we want,” said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., a leading advocate for the now-defunct public option. “But we’re going to get so much more than we have.” Rockefeller and most of his colleagues were singing from the same rueful hymnal. “Look at 31 million Americans who will have health insurance as a result of this bill,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the second-ranking Senate Democrat. “How do you say to them, ‘Sorry, you can’t have health insurance, we think this bill could be better’? … I’m not happy with it, I don’t like the way this has happened. But at this point in time, look at where we are.”

That was President Obama’s tune too, but Madden isn’t buying it:

They managed to kill not just the notion of a public health insurance option, but also the compromise Democrats had hatched just a week ago, which would have expanded Medicare a bit instead of launching a government-run insurance plan. That’s not the end of the damage. To get the bill through the Senate, Democrats will probably have to fund its $900 billion price tag by taxing expensive health benefits packages, instead of with a new tax on the rich, as the House prefers. Some sort of language restricting access to abortion under the new, government-supervised insurance exchanges will be thrown in, as a sop to win Nelson’s anti-choice favor. Access to Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor, won’t be expanded as much as many progressives want. And yes, the bill would dole out $50 million to groups teaching abstinence-only sex education plans, which helped buy the support of Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark.

Nor is Howard Dean – “Honestly, the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill.” Why spend a ton of money to make the insurance cartel even richer, and allow them to charge anything they want, and make people pay a fine if they don’t buy their crap. Sure, the insurance companies will now have to cover folks with preexisting conditions, but the Senate bill allows them to charge triple premiums for any such people. And Madden covers the range of people saying this is nonsense and the bill isn’t even worth supporting. It’s the end of everything, a dream that didn’t even get far enough along to be broken, you see.

And there was the president trying to be all rational:

President Obama and Senate Democrats tried, even in the face of all that outrage, to remind their erstwhile allies of what else the bill does. “The final bill won’t include everything that everybody wants,” Obama said after meeting with Senate Democrats – including Lieberman – at the White House. “No bill can do that. But what I told my former colleagues today is that we simply cannot allow differences over individual elements of this plan to prevent us from meeting our responsibility to solve a long-standing and urgent problem for the American people. They are waiting for us to act.”

Well, most everyone would get coverage, really, even if at extreme high cost, funded by the taxpayers. And Madden says that’s not all bad:

The legislation would, after all, bar insurance companies from refusing coverage to people who are already sick. It would give federal subsidies to people who can’t afford insurance coverage on their own. It would set up a regulated marketplace to shop for policies. It would set up some experiments in changing the way medical care is paid for, to reward outcomes instead of procedures, which could save the country billions of dollars down the line. It would at least alleviate, if not completely fix, the status quo, which left untouched would lead to continuing, rapid increases in premium costs for the middle class – and continue the insurance industry’s capricious practice of denying care just when it’s most needed. Yes, the insurance companies would get millions of new customers, thanks to a new federal requirement that all individuals buy insurance. But is the point of reform to punish the insurers, or is it to expand access to what every other industrialized nation considers a basic human right?

It’s half-a-loaf, but that’s not the same as nothing at all:

“These aren’t small changes,” Obama said. “These are big changes. They represent the most significant reform of our healthcare system since the passage of Medicare. They will save money. They will save families money; they will save businesses money; and they will save government money. And they’re going to save lives.”

Joe Lieberman may find a wall to kill the half that’s left, or he might not. In any event, it’s not the end of the world.

And Matthew Yglesias points out that this is not a Hollywood movie, as real lives are at stake in policy debates:

I think it’s absolutely vital to point out that lives are at stake in important policy debates. A bill that will provide health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans will save lives. If its opponents succeed, those lives will not be saved. That’s one of the reasons the debate is important. There’s a tendency among both cynical Beltway journalists and battle-hardened political activists to look at these things in terms of who wins and who loses in the political fight. But the political fights are actually about things. They’re about who gets access to a decent standard of health care. They’re about whose homes will be destroyed by floods. They’re about which workers will lose their jobs because their employer needs to lay people off in the wake of a financial bubble they had nothing to do with.

The effort to transform politics into a bloodless, technical dispute or a kind of amusing masquerade are both efforts to obscure the stakes from people and ensure that elites and insiders don’t have their interests challenged.

How these things work out is not a game, and not a movie – and all the end-of-the-world grandstanding is kids’ stuff.

And on the other side of the political spectrum there’s this video clip – Sean Hannity getting a studio audience to agree things have gone so far that Obama should immediately be arrested and tried for treason.

Chris Bodenner explains:

Above is an appalling act of exploitation. Sean Hannity assembles a group of 9/11 victims – understandably roiled by grief and frustration – and frames the segment around the “betrayal” of Obama putting terrorist suspects on trial in New York. The exploitation is not so much of the family members themselves, who would harbor the same feelings and opinions regardless of Hannity’s forum. Rather, Hannity is exploiting the empathy that millions of viewers hold for those victims. By stoking their sadness, and providing no counterbalance from grieving victims with alternate views, Hannity creates pure propaganda. And he channels that raw, seething emotion not just toward a particular policy decision, but a personalized individual – Barack Obama – who also happens to be the nation’s leader in a time of war.

Bodenner offers this discussion of the clip if you don’t click on the link:

“It may be pushing the envelope a little bit,” Gadiel added, “but I, I wonder, you know, The Constitution has provisions for people who provide aid and comfort for the enemy and I just – there’s no exemption for high officials, including the president and the attorney general. I just wonder when, when it will be that people would, will decide or will there be people around who will be willing to point fingers if he crosses the line and when does he cross the line?”

So how did “patriotic” Hannity react to his guest calling, essentially, for our president to be arrested for treason? By encouraging the rest of his audience to agree. “Let me ask for a show of hands once again. How many of you – show of hands (Hannity raised his own hand as a blatant cue for others to do so, too) – high, if you can. How many of you agree with what Peter just said?”

Almost the entire studio audience raised their hands.

Yep, it’s the end of the world as we know it, and we have to stop that! So let Fox News and Rupert Murdoch lead the effort to overthrow the government. What else do you think is going on here? Even Orson Welles didn’t go that far.

And that wasn’t helped by this:

US President Barack Obama is to transfer dozens of Guantanamo Bay detainees to a jail in rural Illinois as he battles to close the notorious facility on Cuba’s southern tip, officials said.

“The president has directed, with our unanimous support, that the federal government proceed with the acquisition of the facility in Thomson,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in a letter.

And see Chris Bodenner on the Politics Of Tough – all about the Republicans being up in arms about this, telling everyone to be scared to death, that this will be the end of America, and the world, as we know it – and the locals, mostly redneck-and-proud-of-it Republicans, happy with the Obama plan, and actually hoping some of these guys do escape, so they can grab their guns and hunt them down and kill them. They’re not scared. They’re eager. The end-of-the-world thing seems to have backfired, at least in that area of rural Illinois. It’s hard to know what to make of that. The amazing aliens from outer space are coming! Cool. I’ll get my shotgun. That’s not how this was supposed to play out.

But in the Telegraph (UK), Toby Young says we’ve had a decade of this nonsense, starting with the Y2K bug:

When I discovered that absolutely nothing had happened I felt vaguely disappointed. On the face of it, that makes me sound like a depraved nihilist – I was upset that a global disaster hadn’t occurred – but it was a sickness shared by many and, though I didn’t know it at the time, symptomatic of the decade to come.

He says that the problem with the decade now ending is “that when terrible things did happen – when planes really did start falling out of the sky – we greeted them with barely concealed excitement.”

Of course we did:

We watched them being replayed over and over again on CNN, drinking in the wild overestimates of casualty numbers and nodding along enthusiastically as experts confidently predicted all the cataclysmic consequences to follow. It was a form of mass hysteria – something akin to Freud’s death wish, but writ large.

If the past 10 years had one defining characteristic it was that they allowed human beings to give full expression to their yearning for chaos, one of their darkest unconscious desires. It was the decade in which people’s appetite for destruction became almost insatiable.

Sure, bad things always happen, but something fundamental bothered him:

…it was the way these phenomena were latched on to, the apocalyptic fantasies they gave rise to. It was as if people wanted the world to be consumed in an orgiastic frenzy of ultra-violence, whether at the hand of Mother Nature or an Islamist cell in possession of a ‘dirty bomb’.

He is not pleased with the “sheer enthusiasm with which people embraced this scaremongering.” And Roland Emmerich and his movies are part of that:

In two movies – The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 – he gave powerful voice to the public’s deep-rooted craving for obliteration.

Audiences sat there, spellbound, as the world’s landmarks were demolished one by one. Emmerich managed to come up with the weapons of mass destruction that the UN inspectors had failed to discover.

And on it goes – Climate Change will kill us all, or Facebook, or cell phones, or reality television, or something.

And all this puzzles him:

Why, then, so much pessimism? Why the desire for calamity? My theory is that it was a hangover from the previous decade. 1999 wasn’t simply the end of the 20th century, but of the second millennium.

As such, people were expecting huge upheaval. All kinds of strange cults sprang up, eagerly looking forward to an earth-shattering event.

Among the technocratic elite this took the form of conjuring up the specter of the Millennium Bug, but there were thousands of other examples. The world’s population was waiting, with ill-disguised glee, for the 20th-century equivalent of the meteorite that triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs.

When nothing happened, people felt cheated. But instead of concluding that their prognostications of doom were irrational, they looked elsewhere to affirm them. They began searching for the slate-cleaning catharsis that had been denied them on December 31 1999.

And they found it, one way or the other.

But he’s probably wrong to confine this to the last ten years. End of the world stuff has been around forever. People have been reading War of the Worlds since 1898, and doing their own riffs on it – New Jersey, Los Angeles, maybe Milwaukee next time around (not that anyone would notice). Apocalyptic fantasy is the natural response to a boring life where nothing quite worked out the way it should – just a form of anger at the world as it is. You need some relief from that. And Hollywood is here for you.

The curious thing is that America elected the let’s-slow-down-and-think-about this Obama fellow, not that the-sky-is-falling-bomb-the-bastards-now John McCain. So slightly more than half the country, for a moment, was able to consider what was real and what was silly.

But the tug back to the silly is always there, and will be coming to a theater near you soon. But it’s only a movie, folks.

It seems like every day there’s just a bit more steampunk in the world. The latest addition to the steampunk genre is “War of the Worlds: Goliath”. It’s an animated movie, but it seems to be rated R for language, violence, and possibly sex and nudity. It’s, after all, produced by the “Heavy Metal” people, so anything goes I guess. Of course, that also means the film won’t pull any punches so it could be pretty cool. In fact, based on the trailer, it will be pretty cool.

The basic synopses from “Heavy Metal Magazine” is as follows (no real spoilers, so don’t worry):

In 1900, the Earth was attacked by ruthless invaders from the planet Mars. The Martian’s 80 ft tall, heat-ray spewing, Tripod battle machines laid waste to the planet, but the invaders ultimately fell prey to Earth’s tiny bacteria.

Fourteen years later, Man has rebuilt his shattered world, in large part by utilizing captured Martian technology. Equipped with giant, steam-powered Tripod battle machines, the international rapid reaction force, A.R.E.S., is Mankind’s first line of defense against the return of the rapacious Martian invaders. Based in a massive fortress complex at the south end of Manhattan Island, the young warriors of A.R.E.S. train under the leadership of Secretary of War, Theodore Roosevelt, and the grim General Kushnirov.

And return the Martians do. The rematch finds the multinational squad of the A.R.E.S. battle Tripod “Goliath” on the front-lines of a vicious interplanetary offensive when the Martian invaders launch their second invasion using even more advanced alien technology. In the crucible of combat, this young team helming the mighty Goliath will be tested to the limits of their endurance and courage as they fight for Mankind’s very survival under the onslaught of an implacable enemy.

This is the saga of “War of the Worlds: Goliath”, a 90-minute, animated, steampunk epic of war, comradeship and courage under fire.

Gene Barry died Dec. 9 at the age of 90.

He came to prominence first in the 1953 film, “War of the Worlds” and then moved on to household name status when he played in the “Bat Masterson” series in the late 1950s. He twice played the lead role of an independently wealthy police detective in “Burke’s Law” — in the mid ’60s and again in the mid-1990s for one season. In between, he co-starred with Robert Stack and Tony Franciosa as a magazine publisher in “The Name of the Game.”

Less has been written of his singing and dancing talents, but longtime Arkansas observers say Barry once appeared at the Vapors Club in Hot Springs during the heyday of his fame between “Masterson” and “Burke.” Some contend that Barry may have been scheduled in the Vapors once when the notorious club was bombed and had to be rescheduled in a nearby club. (Barry made several appearances in Broadway musicals.)

Ironically, William Barclay “Bat” Masterson, the longtime lawman-gunslinger-gambler-promoter-sports writer on which Barry’s “Masterson” character was based, was reportedly a big fan of Hot Springs in its prime as the nation’s favorite resort and gambling center.

Spend Day 10 in the company of John, ‘Dinners’, George, Ringo and Darrell as they run through a festive medley of some of their greatest hits, but with a special Christmassy twist…

Still From 'SLINGERS'

Keep up with the latest at Sizemore’s official site HERE.

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I’m sure everyone has heard that there is going to be a remake of the classic 1950’s movie  Forbidden Planet, arguably the best Sci-Fi of that decade and one of my top 5 pre-Star Wars science fiction movies. Made in a time when the cold war was a very real theat and nuclear power was a big mystery to the average person, the popular Sci-Fi of the day filled the screens with giant ants and clouds of radiation, Special effects of the day were rockets hanging from wires with smoke curling upward. Forbidden Planet was a stark departure from all that and worked as all great science fiction works by looking at the Human equation, quit literally the monsters were our own base fears which never changed no matter how far our or the aliens  technology had advanced.  The FX still stand up today, who can forget the monster form the id attacking the ship the shields straining to hold it back and our first look at the unseen foe, I once heard that Gene Roddenberry got the idea for Star Trek from this movie, a galant crew traveling the cosmos in their ship from planet to planet on missions to explore and confront the unknown, did I see something that looked a lot like a Transporter on that ship too. J. Michael Straczynski creator of one of the best Sci-Fi’s  to ever appear on the small screen Babylon 5, will write the script. Straczynski is focusing more of the plot on telling the story of the first expedition, and that Warner is hoping it turns into a franchise so they’re throwing a decent amount of money at the project, he recently got cornered by SciFiWire and had to give up some details about his proposed Forbidden Planet remake…

“ There’s a little more action, but it’s still a strong character piece, because it’s based on The Tempest and the idea of a father whose daughter is being courted by, in the original play, sailors that are washed up on shore. You need to have that dynamic still in place to respect the original and the source material. So there’s a fair amount of talking, but there’s some really cool action pieces in it as well.”

“ We’ve actually decided to show more of the first ship when it first arrived 20 years earlier to sort of counterpoint what’s happening in the present story. If you’re a fan of the original, as I am, and have always been, I think it’s very faithful to that.”

So why am I concerned here,

• War of the Worlds

• The Day the Earth Stood Still
  

Were these good remakes of 2 other classic’s in the case of  War of the Worlds NO and The Day the Earth Stood Still YES, I actually liked that one Keanu Reeves surprised me and the story showed imagination but kept true to the original, but I really really what’d to see much more GORT on the rampage  War of the Worlds showed no imagination and I never did like Tom Cruise. What will Forbidden Planet be like, I’ll let you know

Still from the 'PANIC ATTACK' short by FEDE ALVAREZ

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I hate it when I’m fooled by the media. And I’ll admit, it does happen…

Have you ever heard of the War of the Worlds controversy? I heard it first in my Radio Prod class and looking through the internet about it, it was HUGE!

The War of the Worlds was supposed to be a radio drama but listeners mistook it for actual news bulletin and believed that there is an alien invasion for real! (if that isn’t kuh-ray-zee!)

I found an audio clip of the drama from youtube, and according to the uploader of the clip, “it is the specific section of the 60 minute radio play that prompted most of the listening audience to believe it was an actual attack.”

But that is way way ancient. And if it was me, here and now, hearing that crap, I wouldn’t believe it… probably because I know that alien invasion only happens in sci-fi movies and personally, I’m not yet ready for that kind of information. haha!

What I would believe (and it really irritates me because I’m always fooled by it) is when I’m watching my favorite Filipino drama on TV and then suddenly it breaks into an advertisement without saying that’s it’s already commercial break.

Like in the Maging Sino Ka Man drama wherein John Lloyd Cruz was about to propose to Bea Alonzo (if I remember correctly) and then it turns out it was an ad for I-can’t-remember-what-product-anymore, I was like WHAT THE HELL?! I almost believed it was part of the drama?!

But it seems that that was a new advertising strategy as I witnessed it more in some other drama and shows.

What’s wrong in that way of advertising is it does not separate itself anymore with other forms of productions.

One thing that I was really pissed about was when The Buzz had John Lloyd interviewed by Boy Abunda about JLC’s “new love”. I was even anxious to know who’s this “new love” of JLC. At the start of the interview they were having a serious almost heart-to-heart talk then it turns out that JLC’s new love is none other than his new endoresment, CHOCOLAVA! WTF?!

I curse that kind of advertising strategy since then.

And theoretically speaking, MEDIA has the POWER, that is why it is capable to give a direct effect on its audience like in my experience I just shared (oh yess, I’m talking about the Magic Bullet Theory)

Jeg var inde og se den fantastiske effektfulde film: 2012. Wow.

Så fik jeg ideen lige at lave en liste over fede katastrofe film. Der er naturligvis film som jeg har vurderet ikke hører til katastrofe film eller hvor katastrofen ikke er stor nok til at kvalificere sig til listen. Film beskrivelsen er hentet fra bloggen: Om livet i al almindelighed – the jules rules og fra Scope.

2012.

2012

Forskere opdager at jorden snart vil gå under, og klodens ledere lægger i al hemmelighed planer for at redde sig selv og så mange andre som muligt. Jackson er på ferie med sine to børn, da han tilfældigvis opdager sandheden om den forestående undergang, og inden han får set sig om, er den hyggelige ferie ændret til en kamp mod elementerne og egoistiske samfundsspidser.

Titanic

Titanic

James Camerons romantiske storfilm – der vandt 11 Oscars – om det unge par Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) og Rose (Kate Winslet), der trods forskellige baggrunde forelsker sig få dage inden Titanic synker.

Outbreak

Outbreak

Indbyggerne i den lille californske by, Ceder Creek, bliver syge unden varsel. Ramt af en virus, som er mere smitsom og dødelig end pest. I et hæsblæsende kapløb med tiden – og hans overordnede i militæret – kæmper Dr. Sam Daniels for at finde smittebæren – og modgiften. Med bl.a. Morgan Freeman, Dustin Hoffman og Rene Russo.

Armageddon

Armageddon

En tidlig morgen forsvinder rumfartøjet Atlantis fra NASA´s skærme, og nogle få timer senere falder en meteorregn over jorden. Men det er desværre kun begyndelsen. Med en hastighed på 35.000 km/t er en gigantisk asteroide på størrelse med Texas på vej mod jorden. Rammer den, vil det betyde jordens undergang. Med bl.a. Bruce Willis, Liv Tyler, ben Affleck og Billy Bob Thornton.

Deep Impact

Deep Impact

Hvad vil du gøre, hvis du vidste, at en gigantisk komet om få dage vil ramme jorden og hele menneskeheden blive udslettet?? Nedtællingen til dommedag er i gang i dette altødelæggende overraskende brag af en filmoplevelse. Mimi Leder intruerer en række stjerneskuespillere som Robert Duvall, Tea Leoni, Elijah Wood, Vanessa Redgrave, Maximilian Schell og Morgan Freeman.

Kina Syndromet

The China Syndrome (1979) – (Kinasyndromet)

Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda og Michael Douglas medvirkerii Kina Syndromet en uforglemmelig advarende thrilleriom faren ved atom spaltning og TV nyhedernes enorme magtfaktor.

The Day After Tomorrow

The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

Klimatologen Jack Hall´s research peger på, at den globale opvarmning kan udløse en pludselig og katastrofal ændring af Jordens klima. De iskerner, som han har boret ud af Antarktis beviser, at det er sket før, for ti tusinde år siden. Og nu advarer han myndighederne om, at det kan ske igen, hvis de ikke griber hurtigt ind. Men hans advarsel kommer for sent. (naturligvis, ellers var der jo ikke nogen film…) Dernæst følger en række stadigt alvorligere vejrkatastrofer rundt omkring på kloden: hagl på størrelse med grapefrugter hamrer ned over Tokyo; orkaner af hidtil usete vindstyrker hærger Hawaii; der falder sne i New Delhi, og så pisker en række alt ødelæggende tornadoer igennem Los Angeles. Snefri fra skole? Det tror jeg nok!

Independence Day

Independence Day

Den engelske forfatter H.G. Wells har ikke levet forgæves. Hans over 100 år gamle sci-fi roman Klodernes Kamp har tydeligvis dannet forbillede for denne opdaterede filmudgave, instrueret af Roland Emmerich. Verden står over for en trussel fra det ydre rum i form af en hær af gigantiske rumskibe fyldt med væmmelige, gopleagtige aliens, der bestemt ikke har gode hensigter. Will Smith og Jeff Goldblum er to barske gutter, der står klar til at tage den ulige kamp op. Og det gør de godt, hvis du spørger mig.

Dante's Peak

Dante’s Peak

I den fredsomlige by Dante´s Peak frygter ingen af indbyggerne at den store vulkan, som ligger tæt på byen, skal gå i udbrud. Videnskabsmanden Harry Dalton, som er på besøg i den smukke by, kan dog mærke, at noget er galt. Helt galt. Kommunekontoret nægter at hjælpe – en redningsaktion er for omkostningsfuld, siger de. Ingen lytter dog mere til Harry Dalton end den kvindelige borgmester, men snart får de dog meget andet at lytte efter – lyden af eksploderende lava! I rollen som manden der kæmper mod naturen og de forstokkede kommunalpolitikere, ses Pierce Brosnan. Den kvindelige borgmester, Rachel Wando, spilles af Linda Hamilton.

Twister

Twister

Huse bliver flået i tusinde stykker. En brølende ko kommer flyvende gennem luften. Traktorer falder som regndråber. En 8 tons tankvogn bliver en flyvende bombe. En kilometer bred og 300 km i timen hurtigløbende naturkraft af total og fuldstændig ødelæggelse kommer imod dig.Twister er på vej til dit hjem. Helen Hunt og Bill Paxton spiller to videnskabsfolk, der forfølger den mest destruktive naturkraft, der har hærget gennem Amerikas Midvesten i 50 år. Ved at udsætte en beholder fuld af små sensorer umiddelbart foran skypumperne, håber tonadojægerne at de bliver suget op, så man kan kortlægge skypumpernes anatomi. Men for at få placeret beholderen rigtigt, bliver de to tornadojægere nødt til at komme helt tæt på, så tæt at de næsten kan røre ved deres gigantiske og lumske modstandere.

Volcano

Volcano

Los Angeles. Hjemsted for de rige og berømte. Hele verdens underholdnings-hovedstad. Englenes by. Men underneden rumler et skoldhedt helvede – nu er det klar til at bryde ud. En sprække i jordens skorpe åbner for en altødelæggende kraft. En endeløs strøm af hvidglødende lava bliver til en flod af uundgåelig død, der nu begynder at strømme gennem verdens tættest trafikerede gader mens ildkuglerne regner ned fra oven. For byens katastrofechef er det hans værste mareridt, der er blevet til virkelighed. Han har ikke set det værste endnu! Med bl.a. Anne Heche, Tommy Lee Jones og John Corbett.

Poseidon

Poseidon

Nytårsaften bliver den gigantiske luksusliner Poseidon ramt af en flodbølge af de store og vender bunden i vejret. En lille gruppe overlevende bliver fanger dybt inde i skibet og må arbejde sammen for at slippe ud af skibsvraget, der langsomt fyldes med vand. Opgaven gøres ikke lettere af, at alt er smadret og vendt på hovedet.

war of the worlds

War of the Worlds

Filmen er endnu en moderne fortolkning af H.G. Wells’ klassiske science fiction-roman, der omhandler en fantastisk kamp for selve menneskehedens overlevelse, set gennem en ganske almindelig families optik. Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) må flygte for at redde sig selv og sin familie fra en skræmmende hær af trebenede rumvæsener, der udsletter alt på deres vej. War of the Worlds er et actionspækket eventyr, der nærmest eksploderer med spektakulære specialeffekter! Men for mig bliver filmen noget ødelagt af ret dårligt skuespil og en meget irriterende hysterisk pige, der skriger hele filmen igennem. Ja, du er nok kun 10 år, men hold dog kæft, så de der rumvæsener ikke kan finde dig!!

The Towering Inferno

The Towering Inferno (1974) (Det tårnhøje helvede)

For at fejre opførelsen af verdens højeste skyskraper, holder holdet bag en fest på øverste etage. Desværre har elektrikeren brugt dårlige materialer for at spare penge. En kortslutning sætter ild til 85. etage og pludselig er festdeltagerne på 135. etage fanget. Brandmajor O’Hallorhan og arkitekt Roberts forsøger sammen at redde gæster fra ilden.

World Trade Center.

World Trade Center

Politimændene John McLoughlin og William Jimeno er på arbejde en stille dag i New York i september, da terrorister flyver to fly ind i Word Trade Center. Sammen med andre redningsfolk kommer betjentene de indespærrede til undsætning, men ender med selv at blive fanget under murbrokkerne. Chancerne for at overleve er ikke store, men John og William nægter at give op.

The Core.

The Core

Golden Gate broen styrter sammen. Pacemakeripatienter falder døde om, ingen ved hvorfor. Fuglene mister deres stedsans. Årsagen skal findes i jordens indre – kernen er holdt op med at rotere! Det har den skræmmende konsekvens, at det magnetiske felt, som jorden er omgivet af, er ved at gå i opløsning. Et hemmeligt sted i Utah arbejder en gruppe videnskabsfolk med tiden som deres værste fjende. De får kun 3 måneder til at bygge et fartøj, der skal kunne rejse ind til jordens kerne med en atombombe, som skal genstarte kernens rotation. Som astronauter- nu terranauter- er det den kvindelige Major Beck Childs (Hilary Swank), der skal styre besætningen sikkert ind til jordens kerne og tilbage igen.

Hard Rain

Hard Rain

Byen Huntingburg trues af en oversvømmelse. Sheriffen evakuerer befolkningen samtidig med at en havareret pengetransport bliver overfaldet af en røverbande. Men transportens chauffør, Tom, stikker af med pengene, forfulgt af banden og politiet, der ikke er så retskafne som de burde være. Undervejs får Tom uventet hjælp af Karen, der prøver at holde vandmasserne ude fra den kirke, hun er ved at restaurere. Men langsomt strammes nettet om de to unge…

Daylight.

Daylight

Den underjordiske tunnel mellem Manhattan og New Jersey styrter sammen. Nogle få overlevende finder sammen i tunnelens midtersektion, der endnu holdes oppe. Men hvordan skal de komme ud? Heldigvis er der en modig taxa-chauffør (Sylvester Stallone), der ved lidt om tunnelkatastrofer og ikke står tilbage for at tage på en redningsekspedition under jorden!

Cloverfield

Cloverfield

En hyggelig fest for at fejre Robs afrejse til et fedt job i Japan afbrydes pludseligt, da jorden i New York begynder at ryste. Forvirrede og bange styrter folk op på taget af bygningen, hvor de ser en ildkugle fare gennem luften. Så rystes bygningen igen, strømmen går, panikken bryder ud. Hud har fået til opgave at lave en videooptagelse som en farvelgave til Rob, og han lægger ikke kameraet. På den måde får vi et øjebliksbillede af, hvordan panikken breder sig, når husene rystes og gaderne fyldes af støvskyer, når skyskrabere synker i grus. Hud følger en lille gruppe på flugten, men da Rob over mobilen får fat i sin elskede Beth og hører, at hun ligger fastklemt i et af de sammenstyrtede huse, ændrer han retning. Mod bedre vidende går han mod centrum af Manhattan, hvor noget stort og dødbringende er på spil. Og mod al sund fornuft går Hud og et par af vennerne samme vej. Uhh!

Supernova

Supanova

En astrofysiker har opdaget, at verdens undergang er nært forestående. Solen vil snart eksplodere og Jorden vil gå under. Mens et hold af forskere kæmper mod tiden for at forhindre, at hans dommedagsprofeti skal gå i opfyldelse, forvandles verden til et sandt inferno. Med bl.a. Luke Perry og Tia Carrere.

Sunshine.

Sunshine

Solen er ved at dø og sker det, vil det selvsagt få katastrofale konsekvenser for jorden og menneskeheden. Det største rumskib der nogensinde er blevet bygget, ICARUS II, bliver derfor sendt ud i rummet med en enorm atom nyttelast ombord, hvis formål er at gendanne de dele af solen, der allerede er gået ud. Ombord på rumskibet er en besætning bestående af otte astronauter. De kommer alle til at stå ansigt til ansigt med deres værste frygt.Sandsynligheden for at missionen lykkes synes mere og mere usandsynlig som de langsomt nærmer sig den frygtindgydende og overvældende kraft fra universets største og mest imponerende enkelte objekt – solen!