My Two Brothers

Today I’m talking with my friend and colleague, Kim Wells. In addition to being an assistant professor of Digital Media here at Delta and being the discipline coordinator for the Electronic Media Broadcasting program, Kim is also an Emmy-award winning film producer. This next week on Wednesday, February 13^th, Delta College’s Humanities Learning Center will host a screening of Kim’s latest film collaboration, My 2 Brothers: From Disability to Despair.  

2019: The Future is Now

Well, here we are in the future, and I must say, in a lot of ways, it’s not what we were told to expect. Sure, we have self-driving cars, but where are the flying cars? Yes, we have reality tv shows with contestants who at one another’s throats but what about the ones where people are literally out to stab each other in the back? And last of all, where are the monstrously powerful telepaths who threaten to destroy all of Neo Tokyo? Hmm. Come to think of it, the future that was predicted for 2019 wasn’t all that great, so maybe it’s for the best that most of what was foretold still seems at least a little ways off. 

2019 is an auspicious year because, for whatever reason, several science fiction films made decades ago were set in this year. There were some utterly forgettable B-pictures like the 1983 production called 2019: After the Fall of New York as well as a pair from 1995, one called Steel Frontier and another called Heat Seeker. But there were also some very influential, very good sci fi movies set in this year too. 

 The oldest is 1983’s immensely influential and still amazing Blade Runner directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford. Set in an ecologically-devastated 2019 where actual live animals are a thing of the past and the ultra-rich live in posh, off-world colonies, Blade Runner’s main conflict comes from a very futuristic concern – intelligent, powerful androids called replicants are loose and need to be stopped by cops trained specifically to do exactly that, cops called, you guessed it, Blade Runners. While in our own 2019, we are not strangers to urban sprawl or climate change, thankfully Scott’s vision of our time is still just a masterfully rendered nightmare. 

 Next up came a film that, at the time, was just a chunk of 1980s testosterone but now seems weirdly prescient. 1987’s The Running Man starring none other than Arnold Schwartzenegger is a very loose adaptation of a Stephen King story in which a police officer framed for murder ends up participating in a Hunger Games-like tv game show called The Running Man. Convicts run and are stalked by a series of hunters with pro-wrestler-ish names like Sub-Zero and Buzzsaw. Schwartzenegger as the framed cop, of course, manages to kill and maim his way through the game, working his way toward clearing his name and bringing down the corrupt totalitarian government. Actual game show host Richard Dawson is perfectly cast as the Mephistophelean villain. It’s not a great film, but the way it predicted our tv-addicted voyeurism and lust for unscripted drama is a little eerie. 

 The very next year in 1988 came the great and unsettling Akira, the animated adaptation of Katsuhiro Otomo’s sprawling eight-years-in-the-making graphic novel of the same name.  Set in a post-apocalyptic Neo-Tokyo, the story centers on Kaneda and Tetsuo, two friends who belong to the same biker gang. After a freak encounter with an escaped psychic, Tetsuo discovers he has powerful latent psychic abilities himself, and the power slowly begins to drive him mad. Meanwhile, Kaneda simultaneously tries to save his friend, battle rival biker gangs, and escape the various government and police forces after him. The two-hour long film barely scratches the surface of Otomo’s gigantic six volume book, but on its own, the film is a monument of beautiful, elaborate hand-drawn animation and complex if violent and disturbing storytelling. Not much in Akira resembles our present day, but believe me, except for the super-cool motorcycles, that’s a good thing.

So according to the movies, we are officially in the future even if we don’t have flying cars in every driveway. Our present-day is far from being without problems, for sure, but thankfully we do still have animals around and no murderous robots yet that I am aware of unless you count Siri.

Holiday Wrap-Up

As usual, over Christmas break, I watched as many movies as I could squeeze in between shopping, wrapping presents, eating, sleeping, visiting family, and walking the dog. It was the usual combination of new films in the theater, catching up with movies on disc that I missed during the year, and streaming a few mystery films just to see what they were all about. I will discuss a couple of the movies I watched at greater length in the next couple of weeks, but for now, here is my annual post-holiday round up, eight movie reviews in four minutes:

Life of the Party: If you like Melissa McCarthy’s usual brand of ridiculousness, this absurd but familiar fish-out-of-water tale of a newly divorced mom following her daughter to college is more of what you already enjoy. It is a dumb, clumsy movie, but at the same time, there are at least a couple of brilliant comedic moments that made me laugh in spite of myself. Feel free to turn your brain off and laugh at this one.

Please Stand By: A quirky indie movie starring Dakota Fanning, Alice Eve, and Toni Collette. Fanning plays a mildly autistic woman who leaves her group home in San Francisco to hand deliver her 450 page script for a Star Trek movie to Hollywood. Its slow pace, high B-list stars, and muddy tone all scream indie project, and your enjoyment will vary depending on your tolerance for slow moving quirkfests. 

Mission Impossible: Fallout: Tom Cruise has been playing Ethan Hunt for 22 years and while Fallout is an enjoyable action outing, it’s mostly because of Henry Cavill turning up as an unexpected, brutish, mustachioed opponent. At 56, it will be interesting to see how much longer Cruise thinks he can play the hero. 

Pacific Rim: Uprising is not as good as Guillermo Del Toro’s original film. It lacks the epic-sized, rococo craziness, but hey, it’s still about giant robots beating up giant monsters, so really how bad can it be? It’s an excellent Saturday afternoon, folding the laundry film.

The Dressmaker is an Australian film featuring Kate Winslet as a skilled dressmaker who returns from Europe to her tiny, gossipy, scandal-ridden outback hometown to settle scores and find resolution. The whole thing looks like it was filmed through a deep-fried Instagram filter and Kate Winslet never even really tries to approximate an Australian accent, but there are some enjoyable light moments and the dresses Winslet’s character constructs for her various friends and enemies really are something to behold.  

Sierra Burgess is a Loser is a Netflix original movie that, like most Netflix projects, is a nice effort but generally misguided. It’s trying desperately to be a gender-flipped John Hughes teen movie brought into the 21^st century, but basically, it’s just the story of a lonely girl catfishing an unsuspecting guy but it’s okay because…I don’t know?

Bird Box: It’s an Internet sensation, it’s Netflix’s biggest success, it’s the film that launched a thousand memes – it’s also a joyless, grimy dishrag of a movie. The more I think about it, the more I wish I had those 124 minutes back. It’s A Quiet Place with blindfolds but without the heart, script, or performances that made a Quiet Place worth seeing.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. I sat through this entire film saying, “That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.” Admittedly, it is about cloned dinosaurs running amok, so it’s not exactly a documentary, but even the human characters act like poorly CGI’ed creations. The plot, dialogue, character motivation, and last minute “surprises” all seem to be written by a team of 14 year olds locked in a room with a week’s supply of Monster and Axe body spray. If you have been fortunate enough to avoid Fallen Kingdom so far, keep that going in 2019

Happy New Year everyone!