Nick Chinlund is John Reilly (a ‘Reilly, Ace of Spies‘ reference?) involved in some double-agentry that the audience hasn’t been informed of, and the character goes through several changes about what he knows and what he may or may not know. Malheuresement, I feel that Amir Mann hasn’t done enough to win my sympathy for Reilly and his predicament.

Why has Mann chosen Africa as the site of Reilly’s imprisonment? The Middle East would have been a more timely place for the story to occur,  with the subtext of extraordinary rendition. Mann gave away currency and revelence when he chose to site his drama in Africa.

The Fifth Patient is stylish, timely and relevant film punctuated by an occasional subliminal message/dream-state/flash-back editing style. For all of it’s good looks, director Mann willfully resists competing the protein that would make his film stand out. Perhaps Mann and the studio were trying not to be too on-the-nose with his anti-war statement, but he film loses a lot of potential by opting out of current events.

One other thing that mars this film is over-explanation. They mention that Reilly has been programmed, re-programmed and programmed again. In the plot-holes where Reilly and his alleged wife, Helen (Marley Shelton) are talking about the family life he can’t remember. But a wife and 2.5 kids are the American dream, something that Reilly shouldn’t necessarily question laying claim to. At another point in the script, one of Reilly’s African wardens makes a point about Western arrogance, “Americans are just naïve — I’m a reralist. I realize that sometimes bad things have to happen for the greater good.” The African Prison Warden literally lectures Reilly, the American, on the Realpolitik of the Bush II years. Wow, just wow. Nice swing, but…

During interviews with his wife-apparent (Shelton), Reilly asks Helen whether they have any children and how they met, since he has no memory of them, only her word that she is his wife. Just like John Byrne’s, “Once In a Lifetime”, this scene begged the question, “You may ask yourself, this is not my beautiful house/You may ask yourself this is not my beautiful wife”. This scene comes and goes without apparent significance, but a better director would have forced this scene to hang a bit more significantly because it’s here that writer-director Mann touches down on one of his central themes — identity — and fails to make it a structural component of his drama. Perhaps it’s just this reviewer, but for reasons such as this, it sometimes felt as though it was shot by a director who had overlooked the writer’s intentions.

How did Helen even get to Ngobo in the first place? Did the government of Ngobo just take her identity at face-value when she turned up? Did Ngobo pay for her passage or did the Americans? And the revolving-door of suited white men who were able to gain access to Reilly seemed to defy common sense.

Yet, this film has the courage to investigate the tortuous perils and paranooia of a war we’ve been involved with for the better part of a decade. While the script could suffer a touch-up and some performances be sharpened (a slow-clap towards the end fails me), the cinematography and art direction were solid. I give it a 4/5.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

1. ‘Children of Men’
2. ‘Moon’
3. ‘District 9′
4. ‘A Scanner Darkly’
5. ‘Avatar’
6. ‘Donnie Darko’
7. ‘Star Trek’
8. ‘Minority Report’
9. ‘Cloverfield’
10. ‘Serenity’

CoM, check; Moon, looked good, but it didn’t keep me awake; District 9, not — why South Africa? — and on and on. I am just incapable of becoming excited by most of these titles. Minority Report was interesting because of it’s Philip K. Dick cachet (and the fact that it was made during Bush II) , but very few of those movies had the **umph** of the movies I grew up on. As a child of the ’70s and ’80s, I feel as though I’ve lived a charmed life, given that the following came out during the period that sanned 1979-1989:

‘Alien’ (1979)
‘Altered States’ (1980) ‘The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
‘Blade Runner’ (1982)
‘The Thing’ (1982)
‘Return of the Jedi’ (1983)
‘Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai’ (1984)
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1984)
‘Dune’ (1980) ‘Back to the Future’ (1985) ‘Brazil’ (1985)
‘Re-Animator’ (1985)
‘Aliens’ (1986)
‘The Fly’ (1986)
‘Robocop’ (1987)
‘Near Dark (1987)
‘They Live’ (1988)

And I’m still unable to think of a good sf movie for 1989.

Since some of the best sci-fi of the passing decade has occurred on the small screen, I couldn’t resist listing a few television shows, if only because their effect on our pop-culture was indelible. In no particular order:

‘The Man from Earth’ (2007)
‘Children of Men’ (2006)
‘Minority Report’ (2002)
“Firefly”
“Battlestar Galactica”
‘Night Watch’ (2004) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Watch_%282004_film%29
‘Day Watch’ (2007) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_Watch_%28film%29
‘Iron Man’ (2008) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man_%28film%29
‘X-Men 2′ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men_2_%28movie%29
“Farscape” (1999-2003) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farscape

Many of these moives and shows, I’ve already written about on this site.
Now, none of these entertainments as groundbreaking as any of those eighties movies, but I just needed a place to start this thing.

During the week, I’ll make an attempt to justify my choices, but in the meantime, I’ll ask readers in the audience to recommend their own science-fiction favorites or offer their own recommendations from a faded

Operation Paperclip Nazis working in criminal sanitariums off the coast of Washington State? Mind control? A WWII veteran and widower with PTSD? Visuals by David Lynch.

It’s 1951 in this film and the most unfortunate thing about Shutter Island is that Scorcese and writers Stephen Knight and Laeta Kalogridis decided that it’s okay not to make sense. They decide to just let go. Film is a visual experience and flourishes are flourishes, so why the fuck not? If your local cinemat can affor to spend $750k on a new 3D projection kit, you can sit and watch Martin Scorcese orchestrate some crazy in 2D. On Shutter Island, the Eater Eggs and Red Herrings run thick, wild and free. So wild, that you may want to pause and consider throwing a few back, before deciding which ones you want to take home to eat.

Emily Mortimer is both Rachel Saldano whom Marshals DiCaprio and Ruffalo have been sent  to find, but also a Concentration Camp victim that DiCaprio liberated Dachau back in ’44. Saldano was committed 8 years ago, after she stabbed and drowned her 3 children, but disappeared out of her cell 3 nights ago. DiCaprio and Ruffalo wake up one morning to discover that Saldano has returned.

And then Scorcese lets it all fall away, revealing that DiCaprio is, in fact a Nº 6 and he’s been lured to the island for treatment,  and that he’s apparently murdered his dead wife. It’s a brain teaser.

In the last scenes there’s an uncomfortable acceptance of roles, where DiCaprio and Ruffalo briefly acknowlege the role-playing game they’ve been involved in, before DiCaprio joins the men with the pitforks and shovels (literally!) to take his long walk off a proverbial short pier. Scorcese spares us the pier, but leaves us wondering what kind of mannerist, noir, magic realism thing we’ve just given 137 minutes of our lives to. It’s beautiful and occaisionally sublime to behold, but I somehow suspect Dennis Lahane’s novel makes more sense in print.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Terry Gilliam attempted to bring ‘Watchmen’ to life twice, once in 1989 and a decade later, in 1999. He gave up because he felt that the story couldn’t be adequately covered in 2 hours’ time and that the material might be better dealt with as a miniseries, Though there is no Gilliam ‘Watchmen’, I credit ‘Watchmen’ and it’s alternate-apocalyptic 1985 for the rich visual landscape of thr film that Gilliam went on to produce in the mid-’90′s, ’12 Monkeys’ (1995).

Moore’s ambivalent heroes were a sea-change for comic book industry back in 1985, but Zack Snyder’s 2009 film stops far, far short of of Moore’s moral revisionism and even further from the Watchmen send-up that was Brad Bird’s ‘The Incredibles‘ (2004).

Anyone attempting to translate Moore’s 12-issue, 264 page graphic novel — a would-be 4-1/2 hours in screenplay-time — into filmed entertainment had a daunting enterprise ahead of them.

Snyder’s ‘Watchmen’ fails as an adaptation because the writers failed to adequately adapt the prosaic storyline to suit the 2-hour commercial format. The David Hayter/Alex Tse screenplay, hews too close to the dramatic beats of the original novel. At full length, those beats have their place because they furnish Moore’s 8 protagonists with engaging backstories, however, even at 166 minutes, the 264 page version of the thing fails to be fully satisfied.My other problem with the movie — besides the length — was the writers’ decision to comp so closely to the comic books’ dialogue and Snyder’s tolerance for some very average performances. I often felt as though the actors were reading their lines off of a teleprompter rather than inhabiting their characters. That and 2009 is not 1986 — people like Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca have neither standing or relevance, 23 years later after Chrysler has been bought, sold and is in the ditch once again. I’m certain that 90% of the cherished 16-24 viewing audience drew a complete blank the movie’s reference to Iacoccoca.

As a fanboy, I generally like to see my favorite stories faithfully reproduced for the screen. However, as an audience member, I saw too many rich characters crowding the screen, only to see their potential wasted. Each and every one of Moore’s Minutemen team were not only superheroes, but also tragic figures, trapped in their own peculiar hells. Silk Spctre (Sally Jupiter) is a 2nd-generation hero, having inherited her title from her mother, Sally Juspeczyk. Similarly, Nite Owl aka Daniel Dreiberg wears the costume of a legendary Silver Age hero. But the most formidable dysfunctions are to be found in the older heroes — Dr. Manhattan, the original Silk Spectre, Ozymandias and the Comedian because their idealism and nostallgia poison their daily lives.

Like Oliver North, The Comedian sees himself as a formidable patriot, despite the fact that his marching orders came from questionable quarters. When the one super-powered being, Jon Osterman, transmigrates into Doctor Manhattan, he leaves his humanity behind.

From my writerly perspective, Watchmen ought to have been Rohrshach’s picture — as with ‘Taxi Driver’, we ought to have had a good long taste of Rohrshach’s daily, hard-luck P.O.V., down to stealing Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl’s beans. The rising action of the Comedian’s death should have allowed Rohrshach to recount his troubled relationship with the man, but deciding to investigate the matter nonetheless.

There was no reason for this movie to run almost 3 hours. If you’ve got 246 pages of comic book script to turn into a movie and only 120 minutes to tell the story, then you’re going to have to cut some pages. Sometimes this happened, but we lost lots of important character development along the way. This is especially tragic because Watchmen is a character-driven piece. Like ‘Rosebud’ in ‘Citizen Kane’ we had an opportunity to see Jon Osterman’s childhood obsession with watches, but that didn’t play out in this film, even though it showed up on ‘Heroes’ (and then, was wasted).

I’m sure that the Snyder’s choices will justify themselves upon the 2nd and 3rd viewing, but the name of the game in moving works of literature into film is adaptation. Though I’m a huge fan of Carla Gugino, they ought to have diminished her role more and given Malin Akerman more space to explore being a 2nd-generation hero and Dr. Manhattan’s forgotten love interest, precisely because the Osterman/Janey Slater subplot doesn’t pay off as well as it does in the book.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Imagine a couple million dollars of filmmaking equipment, and empty studio and several tens of state-of-the-art technicians waiting on some Seattle lawyers, and you get the idea. though the film is a little more substantive than  that.

As someone who’s hasn’t played many video games in the past 20 years and been disappointed by just about every game-to-movie adaptation I’ve seen. ‘District 9′ exceeds all of the expectations I never had for ‘Halo’.

Plot-wise, ‘District’ is sort of novel because it starts with an unlikely premise — technologically advanced extraterrestrials end up marooned here on Earth, living in dire, 3rd world conditions. Strangely enough, these aliens don’t exert their prowess and take-over the planet. Somehow, they end up as an underclass here on Earth, whiling away their time in an aimless barrio in Johannesburg, as poor as any of the former bantustans living off of cat food

Why Joburg? To quote the characters on ABC’s current space-opera, Defying Gravity, “H2IK” — hell if I know. Any other storyteller would use the Joburg location to make a point — about South Africa’s apartheid history, it’s role as a former British colony or Nelson Mandela’s heroism. Unfortunately, that’s just where ‘District 9′ seems to fail. You shouldn’t pull an ornate prop or set-piece out of storage unless it’s going to serve your play in a constructive manner. Here, Johannesburg is just a city, like any other.

With all of the potential that D9‘s dystopia had to offer, it really doesn’t go anywhere. Had D9 been set in Asia somepalce, the film might have played as an metaphor for the money that the West pours into Asia year after year, only to see human rights violations  and hungry children persist.

My understanding is that director Blokamp hails from Joburg and had done a 6-minute science-fiction film, ‘Alive in Joburg‘ (film) back in 2005. ‘District 9′ is an expansion of the AiJ premise.Though the visuals are fairly impressive, I didn’t get the impression that D9 was ever intended to be a game-changer the way that ‘Close Encounters’ and ‘Star Wars’ were. 30 years ago.

Shot for only $30M, the film is a marvel of low-budget, high-end effects, but it’s still too expensive for the SyFy channel. I only wish they’d given the script another 2 weeks, to drive home an enduring story.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

While the franchise’s demons, the Cenobytes, appear within the film’s first 5 minutes, we only get a glimpse — they are by no means central to the story. Rather, Pinhead and the Cenobytes are simply the vehicles of hubris:The cenobytes both identify and punish those who are willing to overreach. Though the SciFi Channel insists that all genre movies reveal their creatures within the first 15 minutes, that formula — dictated by commercial requirements — is really irrelevant because ‘Hellraiser’ is an epic drama that circulates around Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence) and her evil stepmother, Julia (Clare Higgins).

Indeed, writer-director Clive Barker waits over an hour to give the audience a good look at the franchise’s signature demons, the Cenobytes, specifically Pinhead. The key antagonists in the first film are really Julia and the posthumous Uncle Frank. Julia wears little makeup, and Frank little skin.

What makes ‘Hellraiser’ an effective and entertaining movie is its emphasis on character and story, rather than makeup.

Uncle Frank rises from the dead at approximately the 20-minute mark, whereupon he marches around for the next 45 minutes fully flayed and in search of skin that can only be acquired vampirically, via the victims that Julia supplies him.

Looking back, ‘Hellraiser’ really was one of the precursors to the big genre franchises that the studios are wont to get ahold of these days — you know, the one-picture spec that turns into the 3 picture franchise-project after box-office receipts cross the $120M mark. Even Mr. Barker is probably surprised that his little million dollar picture spawned seven sequels and warranted a remake.

The remake — due in either 2009 or 2010, depending on where you look — one hopes that Seraphim Films and the Weinstein Company will work toward a 3 picture story-arc and take into into account the many continuity errors of the first two movies, like the Julia-spawning mattress that somehow survived the Dresden-like house fire at the conclusion of the first movie. Though substantial time is spent on a retcon-recap at the beginning of ‘Hellraiser:Hellbound’ (1988) that one would hope that the Weinsteins would choose a capable director and take the LoTR approach.

But the real value of ‘Hellraiser’ lays not so much in its latex prosthetics and stage-blood, but the slow burn of it’s domestic taboo themes: incest, infidelity and lust. It’s not selling her soul to the Devil that’s Julia’s error, it’s her transgressive relationship to brother-in-law Frank that drives her to participate in a Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka-like serial-killing spree, to restore skin to Uncle Frank’s undead sinews. Certainly, the soap operatic Bonnie and Clyde prepending of Hellraiser that makes the first movie so effective, especially when one considers similar movies — Bernard Rose’s ‘Candyman‘ (1992) and Paul W.S. Anderson’s ‘Event Horizon‘ (1997) — and their reasons for relative mediocrity.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

*Actually, the Cenobytes do make an appearance at the 3 minute mark, but it’s dark and ambiguous — the only real concluusions viewers can draw is that they wear leather and are comfortable around medical waste.

I can’t believe that I sat on the 13 episodes of the first season as long as I did. Actually, I can — my estimation of AMC as a broadcast network is so low, that yes, I’d second-guess anything that they’d broadcast after 20 years of PG-edited, non-Turner ‘American Movie Classics’ — (‘Quigley Down Under‘, anyone?) — that we’ve enjoyed with commercial interruption for the past 5 years.

Somehow, AMC come into the epic bildungsroman that is ‘Mad Men’.

‘Mad Men’ is the story of Dan Draper (Jon Hamm), the creative director at Sterling-Cooper, a mid-level advertising firm on Madison Avenue, c. 1960. Draper is a successful man, keeping an office full of young turks from staking out his corner office, even while he holds down a picture-perfect family in Ossining and alternate in-town mistresses. He is also veteran of the Korean War and a man with a past, apparently risen from his dust-bowl roots by luck and willpower alone. As the show goes on, it peels away at Draper’s history even as it reveals the dynamic of his workplace, his co-workers, clients and other firms that would like to lure him over from Sterling-Cooper.

Now, I haven’t read any other reviews of this show — haven’t been curious until just now — but ‘Mad Men’ is the quintissential American story that The Sopranos was marketed as for so many years. But not all Americans are Italian, nor are all Italians involved with organized crime. David Chase’s 6 season, 8 year show was ultimately an homage to Francis Ford Coppola’s twisted metaphor for American manifest destiny, but again, most American are neither Italian, nor mafiosi.

Given the scope of both shows, it should be of no surprise that Weiner worked on The Sopranos for 3 years as both a writer and producer. What sets Weiner’s show apart from Chase’s is that ‘Mad Men’ takes place at the beginning of our modern era, when America’s white-collar professionals were still coming into their own.

As head writer and show-runner for ‘Mad Men’, Weiner uses the tropes of one genre as the set-piece of another. On one hand, the sunny rooms of suburban households were the setting for light comedies — “I Love Lucy”, “The Donna Reed Show”, and “Leave It to Beaver” – while the workplace portions of the show play like the filmization of some dog-eat-dog Ayn Rand novel. In general, the show feels like a serialized Douglas Sirk film — ‘Written on the Wind’(1956) or ‘Imitation of Life’ (1959) — brightly-lit set-pieces, full of crisp technicolor, an extraordinary accomplishment in terms of art direction, musical choices and period costume design.

But ‘Mad Men’ isn’t a racial melodrama as much as it speaks to the nascent sexism, racism, classism and antisemitism of the period.

As a show, Mad Men‘s 1960 is a strange rear-view mirror to look upon a now-alternate Rat-Pack reality where America is once again in ascendancy, three-martini lunches are common, cigarettes mandatory, marital infidelity a contagion and John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism was a scandal compared to Nixon’s apparent corn-fed integrity.

“Mad Men” is especially interest in in 2008, given the forces that would like to see America return to a simpler, more ‘conservative’ time. It may be on AMC, but it sure as hell looks like HBO, especially if you’re watching it on DVD.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

“Mad Men” airs on Sunday nights at 10 p.m. EST/9p.m. Central. Season 2 started on July 27, 2008. Episodes are available on numerous OnDemand cable services and via iTunes.

An amazing scene from the Season 1 finale, just to whet your appetite:

‘Shutter’ plays like ‘Ring 2′ ought to have. Back in 2005, I had hoped that the production team at DreamWorks would have done the smart thing and either followed the Japanese sequel or done the metatextual thing and paid homage to their source material by sending Rachel Keller East for a close-encounter with kwaidon — Japanese ghost stories. Unfortunately that didn’t happen.

Shutter ’08 is good at explaining the mechanics of Asian horror, but little better than other American remakes. It may even be too late to resurrect American interest in the import subgenre.

The 2004 Thai original and American remake are almost identical, save for the fact that in the American version protagonists Ben and Jane are visiting Japan from the United States, whereas the original’s Tun and Jane are Bangkok locals. Ben-Tun is, in both cases, a photographer with a past. Thai-Jane is a student, while American-Jane is a schoolteacher. American-Jane and Ben are newlyweds, while Jane and Tun are presumably just dating.

It’s fairly clear that the original Thai Shutter of ’04 was inspired by the Japanese Ringu franchise — the Hideo Nakata film that gained popularity in Japan, then spun off into 2 sequels and a South Korean television series. Aside from the stringy-haired ghost, there’s a moment when an iconic, Sadako-like figure starts to rise from a darkroom sink.

Interestingly, it’s the original version of this viral ghost-story that raises the ante for Western audiences by tipping its hat to Chris Marker’s ‘La Jettée‘. Though it’s just a little didactic, there’s a good moment in the original film where student-Jane’s instructor explains that “photography does not reproduce reality. It depends on how the image is framed. What is revealed, [and] what is concealed. Your perspective is critical.”

The original film features more inventive camera work and better production design despite the re$ource$ the American version had going for it. Because their Shutter entered the field at the end of a wave of Asian tech-virus horror movies, Directors Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom really are able to improve upon everybody else’s stories of haunted cell phones and watering holes: Spirit Photography has been a cult fascination throughout the world since the 19th c. What better ay to populate an Asian horror film than with a technology or phenomenon that Westerners might already be familiar with?

Moreover, Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom borrow numerous Western ideas ideas about photography and it’s aesthetics as plot-points — specifically, the heretofore mentioned matters of framing and perspective. But this effort at staging and blocking doesn’t make it into Luke Dawson’s screenplay adaptation . Curiously, there’s a Larry Craig moment in the original that might have entertained American audiences but for some reason it didn’t make the American cut of the film.

One thing I have noticed about these movies, especially in the Thai original is the attention to shot composition. Here, more than most American movies, the original emphasizes shot composition because you’re constantly surveying the background for ghostly apparitions. Directors Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom go one further than any of the directors that preceded them by paying homage to both Nakata and Stanley Kubrick in closing pursuit scene absent from Dawson’s adaptation.

Another nice invention by Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom is a sequence where Jane assembles her snapshots only to discover that they’re haunted by a zoetroped ghost in an image sequence. This is repeated in the American remake, but of course the pictures here are in color.

For all of the ‘Ringu’, ‘Grudge’, ‘Pulse’ and ‘One Missed Call’ rip-offs that have been projected onto American screens these past few years, the original ‘Shutter’ has the best ending, something that surprising and thoughtful, but aped in the American version. See it, but see the original.

Original Thai version Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Japanese-directed U.S. remake Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

But The Middleman isn’t just some dime-store comic book property, it’s a fun, literate and self-conscious treatment of semi-secret agents, superheroes and villains, a pop-culture confiture that rivals anything Joss Whedon and the Gilmore Girls ever offered up in zither’s fast-paced talk-fests. While I’ve not read the comic book, it is said to be ingenious.

Grillo-Marxuach is also the creator and veteran producer of such shows as “Medium” (2005), “Lost” (2004), and the short-lived “Boomtown” (2002). Middleman is probably best characterized as a reprise of the original Patrick McNee iteration of The Avengers, but updated and self-deconstructing as Grillo-Marxuach and his team name drop cult memes as varied as Stuart Gordon and The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency without skipping a beat. Middleman is admirably tongue-in-cheek fare for an audience that can appreciate the absurdity of modern ‘reality’ television as well as the buddy-dramedy Secret Agent shows of yesteryear, from ‘Wild, Wild West’ to , yes, ‘Get Smart’.

Though the parent network, ABC has picked-up a few similarly quirk-filled shows during the past several years (‘Dirty Sexy Money‘, ‘Lost’ and ‘Pushing Daisies‘ come to mind) it has chosen to bury Middleman on ABC Family along with the provocative ‘Kyle XY’. One would think that clones, robots and The 700 Club wouldn’t mix well, yet ABC Family has chosen to program all of these shows on the same network.

Why ABC Family would relegate an ambitious new genre show to a para-religous network is anyone’s guess, but the results of moving an engaging, family-friendly show from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. on in the gulag of para-religious basic cable can only be interpreted as willful sabotage.

Fact of the matter is that the real audience for this show would be the comic-book savvy Buffistas, Browncoats and former Farscape fans, if not the fans of SciFi Channel’s ‘Eureka‘.

Middleman stars Matt Keeslar in the titular role as a gadget-wielding superhero of sorts who is out to defend the world from mad scientists, criminal organizations and rogue daytime television hosts with the assistance of his able lieutenant, Wendy Watson (Natalie Morales).

In the first episode, Wendy and the Middleman go up against a PG-rated tentacled Hentai monster and cybernetically enhanced apes, in that order. Subsequent episodes feature Lucha Libre Wresters, Prada-wearing Succubi, Jewelery-eating aliens and evil daytime talk-show hosts. The dialogue is fast and pithy.