Screenhead

It’s extraordinarily difficult to write a review of a movie like The Fourth Kind because it’s not really a movie so much as it is an agenda.

Clearly, someone desperately wants us to believe that what we’re seeing is actually really really REALLY REAL, and won’t be satisfied until, my guess is, we start pestering our Congress critters for answers.  I’m not sure.  Because I’ve never left a movie so utterly confused, and I’ve seen David Croenenburg movies.

This one follows Dr. Abigail Emily Tyler, who is played by Milla Jovovich, who actually TELLS us that’s what she’ll be doing in the beginning of the movie.  And we’ll be following her around as she conducts a sleep disorder study on the people of Nome, Alaska.  Now, Nome is downright infamous for being hard to reach, but apparently it’s also got a serious missing persons problem, and it’s somehow become the FBI travel destination of choice, garnering over two thousand official visits when neighbor Anchorage, who has something like seventy times the population, rates only about three hundred visits in that same time frame.

Now, it’s hard to tell at first glance just how much of this is real and how much of it so utterly fake as to be a complete pantload, because the movie is trying so very desperately hard to convince us that EVERYTHING WE SEE IS HAPPENING FOR REALS, YO, by virtue of running split screen so often I thought I was watching 24.  They’ll do two splits and three splits and four splits and four splits with rotating frames.  It got to the point where I wondered, is this a movie or a Final Cut Pro demo?  And they’ll run, almost ad nauseum, “real footage” alongside footage of the actors, to try and cement that belief.

I’ll freely admit that this is some creepy stuff–when that guy started levitating I got a little freaked out, and Abigail Tyler “herself” under hypnosis was a cold chill up my spine but do I believe this actually went down?  No.

See, one great line from the movie that manages to describe the movie in its entirety is where one of the “patients” is muttering that he’s okay, and “Dr. Tyler” swings in with “Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”  And that’s exactly what I thought of this movie.  Yes, okay, you’re going to RELENTLESSLY show me this “real footage” and insist, as loudly and vociferously as possible that it’s real, and frankly, I kind of doubt it.

Folks, this has allegedly been going on since the year 2000.  But somehow it took almost TEN YEARS for someone to exploit it?  Come ON.  We’re talking about a Hollywood scene so desperate that TWO GARFIELD MOVIES looked like a good idea but we’ve got allegedly actual footage of a woman shrieking that she’s god in SUMERIAN and NO ONE’S ran with that ball yet?

The Screenhead Ten Scale joins me in a dismissive back of hand “bah” to this creepy but horrendously disjointed fright fest and acknowledges that the idea is pretty scary but forces my suspension of disbelief engines to glow white hot and give off an ominous whining noise.  Thus, it hands this incredulous horror romp a five out of ten for being creepy yet not even vaguely credible.

You can join Daniel Radcliffe, the Harry Potter, and director David Yates and watch Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The experience  is being called the first-ever worldwide Live Community Screening (LCS) exclusive to owners of the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Blu-ray Disc and hear star Daniel Radcliffe and director David Yates answer your questions during this live LCS on December 12, 2009. 

Not only do you get to see and hear Radcliffe you also will be the first to see footage from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Wait a minute…Radcliffe and Yates are in London. But the worldwide LCS, which showcases the expansive capabilities and interactivity offered with Blu-ray and Warner Bros. BD-Live, will take place on December 12^that 12:00PM PST (3:00PM EST) live from London.  The LCS will allow BD-Live capable Blu-ray users to simultaneously watch the movie together with Daniel Radcliffe and director David Yates and hear an interactive Q&A where fans can ask questions about the blockbuster film directly to Daniel and David, directly from their home.  

This is cool and all you have to do is own the Blu-ray version of Half-Blood Prince. Warner Bros. BD-Live is an interactive feature exclusive to the Blu-ray format that allows users to experience a variety of exclusive interactive features.  In addition to access to the multi-territory LCS, other exciting BD-Live content available to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood PrinceBlu-ray owners include: 

·        An exclusive introduction to the upcoming Harry Potter Ultimate Editions by Daniel Radcliffe

·        My Commentary – fans are able to post user-generated Picture-in-Picture commentary over the film and share it with their friends and other BD-Live community members

·        Live Community Screenings – Allows users to send invitations and have a virtual screening with friends and family while chatting together through the BD-Live platform

·        Facebook Connect – allows users to interact with their Facebook friends, update their Facebook status while in BD-Live and invite their Facebook friends to Live Community screenings. 

Warner Bros. BD-Live community members who have registered and signed up for the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince LCS will receive an emailed invitation to participate in the event. The first 100,000 members who RSVP will secure a spot for the screening. WB BD-Live registered users from the participating territories who own the Blu-ray Disc and have signed up for the BD-Live LCS event will be able to insert the disc, connect to WB BD-Live and logon to the LCS at this designated time to participate in this ground breaking exclusive event.  

It will take some techno know how, but you have plenty of time to figure it out until December 12, 2009. BD-Live is only accessible through a BD-Live enabled Blu-ray Disc played on an Internet-connected Blu-ray player (including PlayStation 3) with BD-Live capabilities and sufficient data storage.  Please consult your Player Manual or Player Support Website for more information.

While great sci-fi movies have made their presence and influenced movies of all genres to this day, a lot of science fiction films over the years have gone quite unnoticed, even by today’s standards, with the Internet making it possible to spread word about independent “thinking man’s sci-fi” like Moon, Primer and, to some extent, Sunshine. Here are ten movies that are virtually not present in any “top 10 sci-fi ________ list” (fill in the blank).

Note: we intentionally did not include sequels, remakes nor animated features. And by “forgotten” and “underrated”, we mean amongst the general audience. Not necessarily movie buffs like us and the ones who frequently roam the Internets.

10: Code 46 (2004, IMDB link)
Code 46, the British sci-fi film set in the not too distant future where the population is divided between the wealthy ones staying in the cities, and the not so fortunate ones who have been delegated and separated outside. An insurance fraud investigator, played by Tim Robbins, is visiting Shanghai, where his investigation leads him to meeting a woman and… you’ll have to see the rest for yourself. There’s not much action or drama in the film — it’s rather slow and the pacing and story carefully unfold during the movie. It’s by no means a perfect film, but definitely worth seeing, if only for it’s beautiful photography.

9: Enemy Mine (1985, IMDB link)
In the distant future, mankind is fiercely fighting an alien civilization, and when a pilot from each side of the battling worlds crash land on a planet, they’re forced to work together in order to survive. It’s the sci-fi version of the buddy movie, yet very intelligent and, at times, emotional, offering an excellent comment on society, where “working together usually benefits both parties”. It was Wolfgang Petersen’s first success in North America after “Das Boot”, but sadly, one of his most forgotten ones.

8: Equilibrium (2002, IMDB link)
Christian Bale’s first real action movie, as a law enforcer in a dystopian future where human emotions and art are strictly forbidden in order to eradicate violence and war. So they are told. People are controlled with a daily intake of “equilibrium”. Bale’s character forgets to take the “medication”, and subsequently begins to “feel”, giving him a new perspective on the situation. While the movie wasn’t a commercial nor artistic hit, it offered an original view of a dystopian world, interesting action set pieces, and the introduction of the “gun kata”, a martial arts style which includes gun-fighting.
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I wanted to hate this movie.  Believe me, I did.  Going into this thing burned like acid on my soul.  After the colossal cash-grab wreck that Michael Bay and company made out of the first one (Character  development?  Who cares?  More explosions!  Plot coherence?  Who cares? Bigger explosions!  Actually respecting the canon?  Who cares?  More AND bigger  explosions!) I longed to tear this nightmare into quivering bloody stumps.

So why, oh why, did I enjoy the sequel?

Somehow, Michael Bay and company have defied the longest possible odds and made a sequel better than the original.  Okay, it’s not like Bay had a tough act to follow–when you’re throwing more crap than a stadium men’s room on Chili Dog Friday, it’s not exactly hard to do better on your second go-round.  But here it is, and it’s clear–this one is significantly better.

This time, things are looking up for the Witwickys–Sam’s off to college, his dad’s poised to turn his room into a home theatre, his mom is…well…she’s freaking out, badly, but that’s every mom’s right when the baby leaves the nest.    Meanwhile, another scrap of the original Allspark cube has reared its ugly head, and this catapults the college-bound Sam back into the thick of an alien civil war.  The U.S. military’s been working with the Autobots to root out and blast the Decepticons into their component bits and pieces.  But the Decepticons aren’t alone this time around–they’ve got some support in the form of the Fallen, an enigmatic figure that will represent a whole lot of trouble for the Autobot forces.

The first thing you’ll notice is that there are a LOT more Autobots hanging around than there used to be.  And a lot more Decepticons, too–Earth is becoming something of a tourist trap for giant shapeshifting robots.  But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing–it just gives us more room to blow stuff up and knock stuff down.

This is where Bay’s production really shines; they’ll blow stuff up and knock stuff down in really entertaining fashions, and they’ll do it with a kind of insane blind fury that’ll just make your jaw drop.  This is like that episode of Mythbusters where Jamie got a hold of a Vulcan cannon and used it to shoot fish in a barrel.  Only a lot more so.  It’ll be all sorts of fun to watch this, and it’s very engaging even if it’s all really kind of simplistic.  Further, there will be plenty of laughs here– Sam’s mother, played by Julie White, is a particular scene-stealer, and was easily responsible for some of the biggest laughs in the theatre.  She got more than a few guffaws out of me too, and for a Michael Bay movie, that’s no small feat.

That’s not to say that this gets off scot-free.  There’s still plenty of standard Michael Bay problems.  Devastator is not some kind of giant turtle.  He is a giant bipedal humanoid robot.  I don’t even want to know what he was thinking bringing in Mudflap and Skids.  These two are USELESS.

And in the biggest kick in the teeth EVER, he brought in the original voice of Soundwave, Frank Welker, to voice Soundwave.   Frank Welker, for the kids at home, was the original voice of Megatron also, who for reasons that STILL escape me is being voiced by Hugo Weaving.  There’s no reason Weaving should be involved.  You have the ORIGINAL MEGATRON!  USE HIM!

Who am I kidding?  Michael Bay can’t understand human thoughts unless they’re written in letters thirty feet high and set on a fire that was started by a car exploding.

But the fact remains.  This movie will do exactly what it sets out to do.  It will knock stuff down and blow stuff up and Megan Fox will still be hot and there’s lots of things to laugh at and plenty of things to make your jaw drop.  For two and a half hours, you will be entertained.  And at the end of the day, isn’t that what we come to the movies for?

I admit that I was not aware going in to see Russell Crowe’s latest, State of Play, that it was based on a British TV show.  Being that I enjoy British TV, it sort of makes sense now that I really, almost unaccountably, enjoyed the movie version.

State of Play is a political thriller to match them all, with Russell Crowe playing hard-bitten print journalist Cal McAffrey, your classic “white knight” sort of journalist dedicated to the truth…at all costs.  Kind of the Spider Jerusalem of his era, he’s joined by Rachel McAdams as Della Frye, a blogger handling part of the electronic side of things for the Washington D.C. newspaper both work for.  McAffrey and Frye tracking down the circumstances following the recent death of a Congressman’s mistress about to start a series of hearings into a paramilitary government contractor called PointCorp. As McAffrey and Frye continue to follow the various disparate threads, they begin to see a much greater plot forming almost before their very eyes–the sort of plot that could very well destroy several careers and do inestimable damage to the United States government itself.

For those of you who study the current political landscape, you’ll likely notice at least some “ripped from the headlines” sort of incidents, including a very easy connection between fictional PointCorp and current bugaboo Blackwater (who, ironically enough, recently underwent rebranding possibly due to the fact that everyone associated the name Blackwater with undisciplined, unaccountable mercenaries who shot at American citizens in New Orleans and did who knows how much damage in Iraq.), you’re more than welcome to pat yourselves on the back at this point.  Good catch.

But this is part of what makes State of Play such an interesting film.  Yes, it’s your class-X political thriller, but there are so many elements of plausibility included in the narrative that it takes on a life of its own.  Change a few names around and we might well be looking at something that will happen tomorrow, or next week, or next month.  It’s absolutely plausible.  And, given the prevalence of blogging that’s sprung up worldwide—nobody’s laughing at the idea of “citizen-journalists” any more—and in a time when newspapers are going under whilst blogs are flourishing due to the massive disparities in production costs, it’s kind of ennobling to see a blogger like Delia Frye suddenly in a position to make a serious difference, even IF it’s only with the help of a hard-bitten mentor of the print journalism game.

Even better, we’ll also be exposed to intradepartmental bickering at the newspapers, as they struggle to keep up the old ways of print—slow, careful, precise and well supported by fact—when cost containment virtually DEMANDS the new ways of electronic media—fast, dirty, loaded with opinion and commentary, and able to churn out copy in a rapid fashion to keep the short attention span engaged.

Truly, there are several great conflicts going on in State of Play, and we’ll be able to follow almost all of them to at least reasonably satisfying ends. In fact, State of Play itself is a highly satisfying thriller, carefully paced, well put together, and ready to take on the big leagues.  Quite a jump from the old days of TV serials, and I’m glad they made the effort.  State of Play is easily worth your time and your movie dollars.

What goes on the web stays on the web? Well technically true unless you are fully aware of the things that go around the Internet and its impact on the mankind.

Josh Harris, once considered the godfather of the downtown Internet scene in NYC in the 90s and known far and wide for his outrageous parties, innovations in chat, streaming audio and the creation of the first online television network, is but a footnote in history at this point all because he took his experiments with the Internet and media consumption too far.

Award-winning filmmaker, Ondi Timoner, has been documenting his incredible experiments, and his ups and downs, for over a decade from puppeteer to puppet, from millionaire to exiled and broke. Timoner sets out with We Live in Public to tell the story of yet another walking cautionary tale in Josh Harris who, as Anton Newcombe did for artists everywhere in DIG!, will inevitably shake us all to the core about what the future brings for all of us as we increasingly live, work and love through media and technology.

(Source) Comingsoon.net

For those of you who aren’t already familiar, “tinfoil hats” are about what they sound like: hats made from aluminum foil.  While they’re fairly interesting as a fashion choice, they have a much more benevolent purpose in the conspiracy theorist circles–namely, to block harmful mind control rays transmitted by the government from reaching your brain and messing with it in any of a hundred possible ways.

Wait!  Don’t stop reading!  I SWEAR this is a movie review!

Okay, now that you’re back, I know I’m on thin ice, so I’ll make this quick.  Unholy is a movie that’s going to leave you wanting a tinfoil hat, whether or not they actually work.  Basically, Unholy places Adrienne Barbeau, horror movie legend, in the unenviable position of watching her daughter commit suicide in the first ten minutes of the film.  From there, she will piece together the shocking events that led to her daughter shoving a shotgun muzzle under her chin and opening fire.  What she’s going to find, however, will involve Nazi superscience, malfeasance on the part of the United States government, the Unholy (that’s the point of that title!) trinity of scientific endeavor (invisibility, time travel and mind control) and what role she, her daughter and her son will play in the development of same.

I know–by now, you’re a little freaked out. You’ve seen JFK.  You’ve maybe seen Fire In The Sky.  You know the government isn’t always on the up-and-up with its citizenry.   So it’s definitely a possibility (a pretty weak one, but still, a total possibility) that your government could right now be developing some kind of random whatsit that’ll lead to families at each other’s throats and mothers having to watch their own children forcibly inject buckshot into their own heads.

Scary? Absolutely.

And Unholy will take full advantage of this scariness and ratchet it clear through the roof, by showing us in an almost loving detail how bad things can get.  I confess that even I was freaked out by this, and following the succession of one strange event to the other only managed to leave me steadily more freaked out with each passing event.  By the time we saw the ending, which manages to make the film into a perfect circle (it’s that whole time travel thing–don’t ask too many questions or I’ll wind up spoilering), I was reaching for the Reynolds Wrap and looking for a place under the bed to hide.

The sheer plausibility of the events before you, coupled with an incredible detail backed up by a serious cast (say what you will, folks, Adrienne Barbeau was, is, and always will be an AMAZING actress) makes Unholy a screaming nightmare of terror from which you will not easily awaken, even with the rolling of the final credits.

If you have even the slightest inclination toward paranoia, I really recommend you stay away from this sucker. It’s EXTREMELY potent stuff, and might have you putting everything you’ve got into canned food and shotguns.  But if you’re okay with tales of government chicanery and sheer science lunacy, then you will love this terrifying and tautly-paced romp.

I have to admit, when I saw the new version of My Bloody Valentine, shot for a 3-D process that I had hoped was long dead, I was surprised.

When I first heard about the resurgence of 3-D as a medium I shook my head and sorrowed for the industry.  I really did–this was an idea that made me cringe to the bottom of my very soul.  I knew Hollywood was desperate–explains Marley and Me; a movie that’s basically an hour and a half of cute dog is a sure sign of capitulation to sheer desperate hope–but I hadn’t thought that things were so bad that they had to resort to the bad old days of cheesy glasses to get the proverbial butts in the equally proverbial seats?  Scuse me for my skepticism.

And how did it turn out, you ask?  Well, better than you think.  But first, a word on the plot.  A young man has returned to his small, close-knit mining community to settle some long-dormant business on the tenth anniversary of the Valentine’s Day killings in said small town.  Of course, sudden homecomings like this never come without controversy, and in this case, don’t come without a whole slew of murders.  But who’s killing the people of this small town?  Is it the miner who ran amok in the first place?

Or is it someone ELSE?

You can tell almost immediately from just reading this portion that this movie will be packed to the gills with red herrings.  Indeed, the way the movie is set up it will be pretty much impossible to tell EXACTLY who the killer is until said killer is revealed at the end.  I’m not even going to spoiler by using a GENDER term, it’s that clouded.

This leads me into a discussion of the 3-D concept.  I had not thought, before seeing this, that 3-D could be anything short of a gimmick, a last-ditch effort to boost sagging sales in the face of an economic firestorm the likes of which those of us under the age of sixty have never seen.  I had sorrowed to the thought of having to borrow–or worse, rent or BUY–a pair of ridiculous glasses that would not fit over my own.  I had cringed at the thought of seeing the movie in a theatre not outfitted for 3-D and having to suffer through a moulange of red and blue images.

But no.  What I saw that day was a surprising improvement over regular filmmaking.  Even without 3-D augmentations, without 3-D glasses, the scenes that were clearly designed to be viewed in 3-D (things flying directly at the audience, tree branches, pickaxes like you saw in the commercial) still managed to fly at me in a forced-perspective sort of affair.  I was amazed–I was actually watching a movie with 3-D sequences WITHOUT the benefit of cheesy glasses.  There was no red / blue whatnot, nothing that was even out of the ordinary–just 3-D sequences…without glasses.

I approved, wholeheartedly.  By itself, My Bloody Valentine 3-D was a mundane, mediocre slasher title the like of which we’ve seen hundreds of times before.  But with that 3-D, it took on an added note of realism that improved the overall body of work with surprising effect.  What I had feared would be a simple gimmick had instead turned out to be spice enough to elevate the mundane into something at least slightly more interesting.

Considering that Hollywood’s order of the day is “more of the same and plenty of it”, it was a surprise to find a note of innovation in the theatre.  And that makes it worth a look.

Sam Worthington in a Harley t-shirt watching the monitor with James Cameron, nothing could be finer. 

What is Avatar all about any way, right?

Well, here is something I found on the Internet that might clear your thoughts on this picture coming out in IMAX 3-D December 18, 2009.

An Avatar is a human mind in an alien body, finds himself torn between two worlds, in a desperate fight for his own survival and that of the indigenous people. The film stars Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez and Sigourney Weaver. Written and directed by James Cameron.

EMBED:

This past Wednesday, a stunt demo was held at the Sunset Gower Studios out in LA, which featured a revealing action-filled presentation of the high-energy physical effects performed in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor!

The demonstration was performed by a team of stunt professionals, which was followed by a Q&A with actor/physical effects performer Scott Armstrong, who stunt doubled for actor Luke Ford in the film.

In addition, the intimate, behind-the-scenes look at the stunt performer’s experience included a sword fighting demonstration, airborne battle acrobats and the fire effects handling that appeared in the film! The Q&A was moderated by veteran stunt choreographer Joe Box.