Celluloid Heroes

Laugh while you-a can, Monkey Boy!

Mix theoretical physics, rock’n’roll, neurosurgery, Orson Welles and Rastafarian aliens from another dimension and you get this goofily eccentric genre-bending science-fiction action comedy. This is definitely one of those “love-it-or-hate-it” movies that you recommend to friends with caution. After watching this, they will either thank you profusely or recommend you for civil commitment.

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Wolverines!

Ah, the Eighties. They were a time, weren’t they? We had MTV, big hair, narrow ties, Ronald Reagan and a commie behind every rock. John Milius’ tale of teenage insurgents fighting a communist invasion of the United States is violent, at times goofily operatic and it’s probably a better movie than you’ve heard. That violence earned it the distinction of being the first PG-13-rated ever released.

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Well, I’m sure I’d feel much worse if I weren’t under such heavy sedation.

After doing for heavy metal what Blazing Saddles did for westerns, This Is Spinal Tap also managed to spark a minor cottage industry known as the Christopher Guest mockumentary. Now, Tap was hardly the first fake rock documentary, since The Rutles had been around for several years. Eric Idle’s spoof of Beatlemania, however, never got near the National Film Registry as did Rob Reiner’s affectionate yet lacerating take on head-bangers.

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I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

Dune is an absolute triumph of art direction over coherency. That’s not to say that it’s completely imcomprehensible, but in its theatrical length, the average moviegoer will probably be lost in this heavily compressed version of Frank Herbert’s mythos.

The Dune series of novels, especially the first, has been compared to the Lord of the Rings stories, due largely to density of detail in the universe. Another parallel is that both were considered virtually unfilmable. Unfortunately, David Lynch was not given the degree of control and freedom that Peter Jackson had and the film suffers for it. Forced by the De Laurentiis family to condense his movie into just over two hours, Lynch’s theatrical cut feels more like a highlight reel than a cohesive story.

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I do seem to remember a process where you people ask me questions and I give you answers, and then I ask you questions and you give me answers, and that’s the way we find out things. I think I read that in a manual somewhere.

2010 is the sequel to the film that needed no sequel, the cinematic equivalent to painting legs for the Mona Lisa. It seeks to explain things best left to the individual viewer’s imagination. For these reasons, I hate it.

But is it a good movie? Judging by the standards set by 2001: A Space Odyssey, the answer is no. By the standards set by what tends to call itself science fiction these days, it’s ok, but not great.

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