The Screengrab : jurassic park

Unwatchable #51: “Simon Sez”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:30:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

A few years ago I was on a bus from Paris to Frankfurt, following a whirlwind 36-hour tour of the City of Lights. Gazing out the window at the French countryside should have been entertainment enough for our tour group, but no: we had an in-ride movie. It was an action movie called Double Team, and it starred Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dennis Rodman and Mickey Rourke. Appropriate, no? Van Damme is almost French after all, and they still loved Rourke in France for many years before his recent comeback.

Anyway, I don’t remember much about Double Team, but Wikipedia reminds me that Dennis Rodman played “a flamboyant arms dealer.” One thing I don’t recall thinking is that Rodman would have a long and successful film career. In fact, I very specifically remember not thinking that, and I think history has proved me right. The ex-basketball star’s sleepy-eyed brand of charisma may be an asset to the likes of Celebrity Apprentice, but his acting chops only served to make Van Damme look Brandoesque by comparison.

Nonetheless, Rodman did get a second chance at becoming the next Van Damme with Simon Sez, which I would charitably describe as an action comedy. Rodman plays the titular Simon, an ex-CIA operative now working for Interpol in France. (Apparently the European agency has a more lax dress code, allowing their agents to sport platinum blonde hair and multiple facial piercings and tattoos. I would think such an appearance might be a drawback on undercover missions, but I never went to spy school.) For reasons that eluded me, Simon is assisted by two monks, a wisecracking fat guy and a wisecracking black dude; they’re like the worst Abbot and Costello tribute show on earth.

That makes them a good match for the sorriest Jim Carrey substitute a SAG minimum salary could buy in 1999, Dane Cook. As Nick Miranda, Simon’s old classmate from Langley, Cook has clearly been given free reign to unleash his comic genius at will. He makes Wookie noises and Jurassic Park noises! He snaps off the one-liners in the midst of a high-speed car chase. (“These guys are like my college loan officers – they just keep comin’!” “Maybe he just wants some Grey Poupon!”) There is a satisfying moment when he falls off a fire escape into a garbage can and rolls down an alley, but it’s not enough to make up for his gruesome mistaken faith in his own talent and likeability.

Anyway, the plot has something to do with Rodman and Cook teaming up to rescue a rich man’s kidnapped daughter who is being held ransom for the disk full of CIA secrets Brad Pitt thought he’d found in Burn After Reading. Rodman’s vortex of bad acting takes over the rest of the cast, none of whom can make the typed-by-chimpanzee dialogue sound like words actual humans would say. The action sequences offer an array of gaffes and utter disregard for the laws of physics (I think I saw Rodman stopping for a sandwich as he fell from a 30-story window), but there is a quicksand sequence, which always cheers me up. (Unfortunately, Rodman rescues Cook before he completely disappears beneath the surface.)

The good news is that Simon Sez was rewarded with one of the worst opening weekends in history, debuting on 504 screens and taking in a miserable $185,472 total. The movie got what it deserved, and I don’t need to pile on any further. I will mention something you may have noticed: this is Unwatchable #51, which means we’ve made it halfway through the list and have 50 more to go. They bet against me! They said I’d never make it past #78! But I proved ‘em wrong! Tune in next week for a special first-half celebration of…Unwatchable!

Previously on Unwatchable:
52. In the Mix
53. Baby Geniuses
54. Meatballs 4
55. A*P*E
56. Araf

MIchael Crichton, 1942-2008

Phil Nugent — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Michael Crichton, who died of throat cancer Tuesday at the age of 66, started out as a prodigy and developed into something like a smoothly functioning assembly line of marketable concepts. Crichton, who graduated from Harvard in 1964 and obtained an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1969, published his first novels under the name "John Lange", starting with Odds On in 1966; he also published the thriller A Case of Need (which would be filmed, in 1972, by Blake Edwards under the title The Carey Treatment) in 1968 under the psuedonym "Jeffrey Hudson" and co-wrote the countercultural action comedy Dealing (1970) with his brother Douglas, which they published under the name "Michael Douglas." (It too was made into a movie in 1972.) Under his own name, Crichton published Five Patients (1970), a nonfiction account of his medical experiences, as well as the sci-fi thrillers The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man, both of which were also quickly snapped up by Hollywood. Not surprisingly, Crichton, by all reports a bit of a control freak and no shrinking violet, soon decided to get more involved, in a hands on way, with what the movies were doing to his books, and he launched his own directing career with Pursuit, a 1972 TV-movie based on a John Lange novel. A year later, he made his feature directing debut with Westworld, an ingenious sci-fi movie about a futuristic amusement park where average joes can pay to inhabit robot-infested, pasteboard versions of the wild west, medieval times, and ancient Rome and live out their sleaziest, movie-inspired daydreams. The movie, which featured Yul Brynner as a sinister robot version of his own character from The Magnificent Seven, demonstrated just how far Crichton could go in powering a movie with his own cleverness. It also dropped an early hint that he might not have the most flattering opinion of the mass audience he'd decided to pitch his work at.

Crichton would also direct the medical thriller Coma with Genevieve Bujold in 1978 and, in 1979, adapt an elegantly staged version of his 1975 novel The Great Train Robbery, starring Sean Connery as a Victorian super-thief. In the 1980s, his pace slowed considerably. He Between 1980 and 1989 he published only two novels, Congo and Sphere, that were not well received, as well as a couple of non-fiction books, including a follow-up to Five Patients and an introductory guide to computers. He also wrote and directed a couple more sci-fi movies, Looker (1981) and Runaway (1984), and directed a forgotten-on-impact Burt Reynolds movie, Physical Evidence (1989), which would remain his last credit as a director. (He reportedly came out of retirement to do some uncredited reshoots on John McTiernan's 1999 The Thirteenth Warrior, which was based on his 1976 novel Eaters of the Dead.) But his 1990 novel Jurassic Park relaunched Crichton as an idea man, a master of high concept with a knack for latching onto hot-button issues and molding them into audience-friendly gimmicks ranging from rampaging, resurrected dinosaurs to his illustrating the issue of sexual harassment by having, in the movie made from his novel Disclosure, Demi Moore terrifying Michael Douglas (the real one this time) with her mechanical-career-woman sexual avidity. (To some degree, Crichton never really stopped writing for robots.) Crichton's genius reputation in Hollywood was solidified by his work as creator-writer on the TV series ER, which made George Clooney a star and provided work for every other English-speaking actor within reach of a SAG card, proving to be a lot harder to kill than dinosaurs. Out of deference to the newsmagazine-cover-worthy success of his second act, Hollywood once again fast-tracked everything by Crichton they could get their hands on, including not only his Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World, Timeline and Rising Sun (which enlivened his chilly technocrat image by lending it an arresting undercurrent of deranged, crackpot xenophobia) but earlier, dodgier novels that had been lying dormant for years. (He also produced and co-wrote the 1996 Twister.) His last work to appear in his lifetime was his 2006 novel Next. It generated headlines when it appeared that Crichton had avenged himself on a journalist who had attacked a previous Crichton novel, State of Fear, for its dismissive attitude towards global warming by giving the man's name to a fictional character who was a child molester.

Yesterday's Hits: Independence Day (1996, Roland Emmerich)

Paul Clark — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The more research I do into potential Yesterday’s Hits titles, the more I begin to think that true classics that were hugely popular in their time are an anomaly. This seems especially true of big, effects-driven summer blockbusters. When throwing tens- or even hundreds- of millions of dollars behind a movie, the studio is reluctant to take any unnecessary risks. Of course, there are still films that try to be unique and special, but they’re a risky proposition, since for every Back to the Future there’s a Hulk. More often than not, studios leave little to chance in order to make a splashy, inoffensive movie that appeals to as many people as possible. And while movies like this sometimes make a lot of money, they rarely linger in the public consciousness for very long. By way of example, and just in time for Independence Day, I offer up… well, Independence Day.

What made Independence Day a hit?: A few months ago, I spotlighted one of the biggest hits of the 1970s Irwin Allen disaster movie cycle, The Towering Inferno. The key to that movie’s success was the combination of big stars, state-of-the-art effects, and plenty of destruction to keep audiences entertained. When making Independence Day, the major inspiration of director/producer team Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin was to fuse the Irwin Allen formula with an alien-invasion plot a la War of the Worlds. And while Independence Day lacked the megastars of its 70s-era predecessors- its top-liners were Will Smith, then best-known to many from TV’s The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, a post-Jurassic Park Jeff Goldblum, and Bill “Not Paxton” Pullman- the relatively low-wattage cast only served to direct more attention to the effects-driven mayhem.

Realizing this, Emmerich, Devlin, and 20th Century Fox mounted a highly effective advertising campaign that played up the movie’s effects. Even today, the movie’s most iconic image contains no actors whatsoever, but simply shows an alien craft blowing up the White House. And despite the lack of box-office draws, the ads paid off magnificently, with the movie earning over $300 million in the United States alone, making it the highest-grossing movie of 1996. In addition, Independence Day propelled Smith to movie superstardom and launched his self-promoted reign as the king of July 4th releases.

What happened?: For a movie that enjoyed such popularity on its initial release, Independence Day enjoyed very little long-term love. The major reason for this was because there was very little about that movie that hadn’t been cribbed from earlier, better-loved blockbusters. The plot was formulaic, the characters were one-dimensional, and the aliens bore a strange resemblance to the extraterrestrial baddies from the Alien franchise. Even the movie’s major selling point- the effects- suffered in the long run. Independence Day was made to enjoyed in theatres, so inevitably the movie’s effects would suffer on the small screen, and as the years passed they became less impressive in light of more groundbreaking effects like those in Titanic and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And really, without plot, characters, aliens and special effects, what’s left to Independence Day?

Does Independence Day still work?: Surprisingly, yes. Of course, for the movie to work it requires some willful suspension of disbelief. And by “some,” I mean “a whole truckload.” To put it bluntly, Independence Day is pretty kind of stupid, and the more one thinks about the plot the dumber it gets. Even more than most alien-centric thrillers, the logic behind the invasion just doesn’t hold water. Similarly, the human race’s eventual solution to the threat is so harebrained that one could hardly be blamed for rolling one’s eyes.

Likewise, most of the characters are pretty standard-issue. Each is assigned a quirk and a conflict and set loose within the story, and their separate character trajectories all proceed more or less as we expect them to. Some of the actors do a better job than others at making them work- Smith has an easy charm and Goldblum’s nebbish routine is almost always fun, but Pullman is clearly keeping his more eccentric impulses in check to play the President. In addition, the film’s most entertaining supporting character (Brent Spiner’s endearingly daffy alien expert Dr. Okun) isn’t around nearly long enough, while the most irritating (Judd Hirsch as Goldblum’s perpetually kvetching dad) has far too much screen time. Of all the characters in the movie, he survives?

Yet the movie does more or less what it sets out to do- that is, to entertain the audience by blowing stuff up real good. Emmerich and Devlin’s hearts might not be in Independence Day’s story or characters, but they’re certainly in the explosions, and they definitely deliver in this area. I think it’s telling that many of the effects in the movie were accomplished at least in part by using detailed models, as the filmmakers were so excited to set the world ablaze onscreen that they actually constructed the models to be blown up rather than simply using all-CGI effects like many other movies of the period. As a fan of old-school analog effects, I appreciated the extra effort that went into doing this.

Listen, by any rational standards Independence Day is not a very good movie. It’s formulaic, and I’m pretty sure I killed some brain cells just by watching it again. But deep within the heart of many a moviegoer there’s a part that can’t resist movies that are loud and dumb and willfully cheesy with plenty of explosions, to say nothing of Will Smith talking about “whupping E.T.’s ass.” To ask for intelligence from Independence Day is like reading Strindberg for the jokes- that’s not the point, so why bother looking? As Pope John Paul II once said of another potential Yesterday’s Hits entry, “it is what it is,” and for what it is, it gets the job done. Sometimes, that’s enough.

Stan Winston, 1946--2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Stan Winston, one of Hollywood's reigning special makeup and visual effects virtuosos and, as anyone who ever saw him on TV or crossed paths with him at a convention can testify, one of the most likable fellows in his field, died Sunday at his Malibu home at age 62, ending a long struggle with multiple myeloma. Born in 1946, Winston graduated from the University of Virginia, where he studied sculpture and painting, before heading to California in 1968 with ambitions to make it as an actor. Instead, he landed at Disney as a makeup apprentice. In 1972, he founded Stan Winston Studio, the first of a string of companies that would eventually include Stan Winston Digital and Digital Domain (co-founded with Scott Ross). He proceeded to immediately attract attention for his work in television, including his memorable work on the TV movies Gargoyles, where he encased Bernie Casey in Satanic makeup, and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, where he aged Cicely Tyson a hundred years. (He won Emmys for both programs.) In the mid-1970s he began developing special makeup and effects for movies, gradually working his way up from such films as Mansion of the Doomed and the blaxsploitation non-classic Dr. Black and Mr. White to John Carpenter's The Thing (where he stepped in to assist an overworked and exhausted Rob Bottin), Aliens, Terminator 2, and Jurassic Park, all of which won him Academy Awards. Other notable credits included Predator, Batman Returns, Congo, A. I., Edward Scissorhands, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Galaxy Quest,, and most recently Iron Man. He also directed the 1988 horror picture Pumpkinhead and the Michael Jackson music video slash psychodrama Ghosts.

All-Night Mockbuster Marathon

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:30:00 GMT

It’s time for another all-night marathon, so put on a pot of coffee, find the sweet spot on the couch and join me for a nocturnal journey into the shadowy world of the mockbuster. (If you’re not sure what a mockbuster is, here’s a handy primer.)

12 midnight. We begin with the latest mockbuster from the good people at the Asylum, Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Lost Skulls. I’ll bet you can guess which blockbuster-in-waiting occasioned the release of this one. Although the character of Allan Quatermain actually predates the creation of Indiana Jones by nearly a century, his reappearance now is a case of history repeating itself. Temple of Skulls is based on H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 novel King Solomon’s Mines, as was the 1985 film starring Richard Chamberlain, a mockbuster before they had a word for it. (Back then, we charitably called it a Raiders of the Lost Ark ripoff.) This doesn’t stop the producers from claiming that Allan Quatermain inspired Indiana Jones, which is partially true but certainly misleading in this context. In any case, there is no temple of skulls in the movie, so you can bet it was retitled once Lucasfilm announced the name of the latest Indiana Jones flick. Anyway, as Temple of Skulls begins, two rugged prospector types in South Africa find the map to King Solomon’s mines. Not trusting each other, they split it in half to ensure they’ll stick together. Shortly thereafter they are attacked by Zulus and the map pieces blow away. Some time later, rugged great white hunter Quatermain (Sean Michael) gets his hands on one half.

12:20 am. I’m trying to figure out when this movie is set. We’ve got coal-burning trains, ladies in frilly frocks, black dudes in hip-hop hats and Nazi references. So I guess…some time in the last 70 years or so? Anyway, Quatermain has teamed up with Sir Henry and Lady Anna, a wealthy couple with the other half of the map. They are being pursued by Quatermain’s arch-nemesis, a scenery chewer straight out of an old Hammer horror movie.

12:30 am. Here we have a five-mile-an-hour chase between a truck and a locomotive engine. It’s like someone stuck a Monty Python sketch in the middle of the movie.

12:45 am. Our heroes dodge CGI bugs, then encounter a (real) rhino. This scene is edited Survivor-style; we have no idea if the rhino is even in the same hemisphere as Quatermain and the gang.

1:00 am. In fine National Geographic tradition, Quatermain and company are captured by bare-breasted natives. There is a bizarre CGI Zulu head-removal ritual.

1:15 am. I was expecting pretty much constant action and zero plot from Temple of Skulls, but that’s not actually the case. For all I know, it’s a reasonably faithful adaptation. I must give the Asylum credit for scenery at least; the movie is purty to look at.

1:40 am. Let us move on to King of the Lost World, another literary adaptation posing as a recent blockbuster. It’s loosely based on A. Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, with the addition of “King” to the title and a picture of a big scary ape on the cover to fool drunk people at Blockbuster into renting it. The box also trumpets an appearance by Bruce Boxleitner – star of Scarecrow and Mrs. King! Well, that’ll bring the kids into the tent. Anyway, King opens with a plane crashing onto an island, announcing its intentions to rip off not only King Kong and Jurassic Park but also Lost. This is confirmed when we see a stewardess trapped up in a tree. Three minutes into the movie, a giant gorilla snatches her. We won’t be seeing him again for a while.

2:00 am. Giant bug attack!

2:10 am. There’s a glitch in the DVD and I have to jump ahead five minutes, at which point maggots are being used to heal a woman’s wound. So glad I didn’t miss that.

2:25 am. Our heroes find a fighter jet with an active nuke. The mysterious Bruce Boxleitner knows how to hot-wire it.

2:40 am. Things are happening now! One dude gets impaled by a giant scorpion. The others are taken hostage by skull-face painted natives. There are boobies! And lesbian natives!

2:50 am. A flurry of terrible CGI: we’ve got pterodactyls, plus the giant ape finally returns, though he looks blurry and pixilated. (Another reason CGI must die: think about how much progress in giant robot ape technology could have been made by now.) Boxleitner reveals he was sent to disarm the nuke, which really makes no sense, especially once he explains that the bomb has a limited range of 300 yards. Anyway, they blow up the ape real good. Okay, I’m lying. It’s not real good.

3:00 am. It’s time for The Da Vinci Treasure. Here’s how you know these folks at the Asylum aren’t completely shameless: the film concerns a forensic archeologist and his search for the Da Vinci codex. See – they could have called this The Da Vinci Codex! Maybe they didn’t quite have the grapes for that (though they did make The Transmorphers, unreviewed here – I’ve got my limits too, junior.)

3:15 am. Anyway, the main players here are a haggard C. Thomas Howell as our hero Michael Archer, an earring-sporting Lance Henriksen as the villainous Dr. John Coven, and Nicole Sherwin as your typically hot linguist/theologian. Throughout the movie, director Peter Mervis (Snakes on a Train) employs an annoying effect that kept making me think there was something wrong with my DVD player. It’s a sort of freeze-frame/flash/jumpcut deal – like someone mentions Jesus, and suddenly there’s a flash of light, a whoosh, quick shots of a crucifix and the Last Supper, and then back to the scene. I guess this pumps up the excitement level, as if looking for hidden clues on the Shroud of Turin weren’t exciting enough!

3:20 am. We have our first mention of the Knights Templar! Also, the Shroud of Turin is apparently kept in the basement of the Alamo.

3:30 am. And Da Vinci invented 3-D glasses, in case you were wondering.

3:45 am. In what must be the most expensive scene in any of these Asylum movies, there is a smash-em-up car chase through the streets of London (or San Diego, whatever) involving a tour bus. Fortunately they didn’t have to pay the guy playing the Casio on the soundtrack too much.

4:15 am. Apparently I nodded off during the big revelation scene in The Da Vinci Treasure. I’m sure it changed the face of Christianity forever, but there’s no time to go back! Let’s wrap this up with an old school mockbuster to cleanse the palate, shall we? Of course I’m talking about 1988’s timeless E.T. ripoff, Mac and Me. We begin on another planet, where a family of aliens is accidentally sucked into the vacuum hose of a rover from Earth. The aliens, I guess, are meant to be cute, but to me they look like giant sea monkeys or very confused burn victims.

4:30 am. After the alien family is brought to Earth, the smallest alien, or Mysterious Alien Creature, or MAC (you see?), hitches a ride with a single mother and her two sons moving to California. They don’t notice him, but he keeps getting into mischief, and the youngest, wheelchair-bound brother Eric keeps getting blamed for it.

4:45 am. Eric plummets off a cliff in his wheelchair and is rescued by Mac. When he tells the doctor what happened, the doc diagnoses him with “schizofreakia” and decides to dope him up. Ah, the 80s.

5:00 am. Breakdancing! At McDonald’s! With Ronald McDonald and football players and – don’t take my word for it, see for yourself:

5:15 am. By now everyone believes Mac exists, and they help reunite him with his family members, who are trapped in a mineshaft out by those windmills from Rain Man. The kids nurse the aliens back to life with nourishing sips of Coca-Cola. I tell ya, this movie is Morgan Spurlock’s worst nightmare.

5:30 am. Of course, government agents are in hot pursuit of Mac, and in their attempts to capture him they manage to blow up an entire mall and kill Eric in the process. Fortunately, Mac and his family are able to suck the death right out of him. Apparently the aliens don’t hold their ill treatment by the agents against their government, as the movie concludes with the whole family becoming U.S. citizens. A final ominous title card claims “We’ll Be Back.” We’re still waiting. And by “we,” I mean “not me.” Good night.

Previously: All-Night Bigfoot Movie Marathon