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You know, I really hate TV.  I hate it about the same way I hate, say, Hitler, but more often.  But even I’ve got to admit that there are some good shows on every so often, and when they show up I should talk about them.  So today, you get a TV recap–huzzah!  And today, I’m going to talk about a little show on Discovery Channel (where most of the good shows on TV seem to be migrating these days) called The Colony.

It’s about to have its season finale within the next couple days, so if you get an opportunity to reacquaint yourself (or possibly acquaint for the first time) this really awesome show, take the chance.  See, it’s a really nifty idea for a reality show (and I know reality TV is about eighty percent crap but this qualifies as non-crap) in which about a dozen people from all walks of life are brought together to live in a dilapidated warehouse somewhere in L.A.  Why are they living in a warehouse?  Because it’s the end of the world.

The Colony assumes that the civilized world has finally gone the way of the dodo, whether by nuclear devastation or superflu or whatever (they really don’t say nor do they need to; dystopia comes in many flavors even if they all taste vaguely similar), and left only a handful of people alive.  From there, a group of survivors band together and try to recreate civilization, if only in pocket fashion.  But after some tense encounters with marauders and other hazards, the survivors start to look outside L.A. for places to go.

The great thing about The Colony isn’t so much that it’s accurate (I mean, come on–they’re living in a warehouse and some of these marauders have guns.  But no one ever uses them.) but that it’s a possibility.  There are some really novel ideas in here; I had no idea that wood gave off flammable vapor when heated–I just knew that wood burned.  You will learn a lot while watching this, make no mistake, and even if you don’t learn everything you could, there’ll still be something new and interesting here.  The fact that I can use the words “new and interesting” in connection with a TV show is as unsettling as it is exciting, and that’s a good way to describe The Colony.  Get in touch with this one while you still can–season finale is next week.

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I’m not really one of those people who’s ever really trusted the government. They’ve made entirely too many major mistakes for me to put a whole lot of trust in them. After all, these are the guys who brought you “ketchup is a vegetable”.

But then again, I don’t much trust people much either, and if you ever wanted a good look at a slow descent into barbarism of the kind that’ll make you want to go out and buy a shotgun, just take a good long look at Disney’s Blindness. Yeah, this is all coming to us from Disney, by way of Miramax.

Basically, there’s a strange disease roaming the countryside, and possibly the entire planet, steadily turning the populace blind. In a bid to keep the disease from spreading, the government sets up a quarantine zone in what looks like a hospital. But the government’s efforts at containment aren’t going very well–the population of that quarantine zone gets bigger with every passing day and even figures in the government are starting to come down with it. As the quarantine zone grows more and more populated, it doesn’t take long for the criminal element to slip in, and soon, the quarantine zone is run by vicious criminals who take over the food supply. Will everyone else make it through alive? And what will happen after that?

This is an extraordinarily important movie–not because we’re all likely to be struck blind soon but rather because this is an excellent look at what life is like without a very precious little thing called the rule of law. Without the rule of law, people who would normally be criminals can run amok without anything but regular people to stand in their way, and regular people aren’t normally given to vigilante justice, the only kind of justice there is in a society without the rule of law. You’re going to see that point in almost heartbreaking detail in this one.

But by like token, you’re also going to see some real human decency here. You’re going to see just about every kind of behavior human beings can exhibit in a crisis–you’re going to see love and compassion and generosity and incompetence and horror and misery and greed and everything else.

You’re going to see everything…whether you like it or not.

It doesn’t surprise me that this was a translation from a book, and that the guy who wrote it won a Nobel prize. Because for what faults this movie has, like a cookie-cutter happy ending and some bizarre choices made by the “good” guys of the quarantine zone, it’s still an amazing look at humanity in crisis.

This could easily be one of the most literary and engaging of all the dystopian movies out there, and there have been plenty of dystopian titles. I count myself something of an expert in dystopian fare, having seen the world threatened by alien invasion and by demon horde and by disease, zombie, bad weather and everything in between, but without doubt, the biggest threat is inevitably man.

So basically, Blindness is an incredibly hard-hitting look at man without law, and if you can’t get enough of the dystopian, take a hold of this one. And just to complete the punchline offered by the headline:

…and he is us.

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So only recently, the folks out at Lions Gate released a set of old Schwartzenegger films in a big box set called the Arnold Schwartzenegger collection.  The California governor was in a LOT of movies, so I guess it was really only a matter of figuring out exactly which ones to put in the set.  This is the first of a series of four we’ll be discussing, The Running Man.

Set in a futuristic, heavily dystopian 2019 Los Angeles where the government has pretty much thrown the Constitution clean out the window and no one really cares about things like “rights” or “civil liberties”, TV is king.  And no king is higher than Damon Killian, the host of America’s number one television show, The Running Man.  Set in a massive underground arena created from the big earthquake of 1997, anyone the government doesn’t much like (including hackers, schoolteachers and cops gone rogue) are turned into Runners and dropped therein where they are pursued by agents called Stalkers.  Heavily armed and permitted to kill whoever they find in the maze of tunnels and set pieces, the Runners almost never survive.  Those who do are given incredible prizes, including but not limited to exotic trips and their own freedom.  But as you might well expect, the game isn’t exactly on the level.  Thus, when a group of Runners who have the side goal of taking down the entire goverment are plunged neck-deep into the frenzy that is The Running Man, they discover that it may not be just a fight for their lives…but rather the chance they’ve been waiting for.

First off, this was a Stephen King book.

I say “was” of course, because the resemblance between that and the movie is pretty much purely coincidental.  This is not what Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman) had in mind, so any attempt to judge this movie on the book’s standard will meet with catastrophic failure.

Thankfully, though, despite the fact that they’ve made a butchery out of the translation, what’s left behind is a compelling dystopian sci-fi / action hybrid that doesn’t strain the suspense of disbelief very hard and definitely entertains, albeit in a very much over-the-top fashion.  There’s also some extra relevance here, in a post 9/11 society, not to mention a society that’s increasingly obsessed with reality television, asking some really deep questions like how valuable are our rights and freedoms, and how much of “reality TV” is actually all that real to  begin with?

Philosophical issues aside, there’s really no doubt that The Running Man provides plenty of thrills and action to spare, and despite the fact that it’s well over twenty years old now (twenty TWO, as a matter of fact–ABC used to LOVE this thing for Sunday night movies in a deeply edited form), it still doesn’t even really look that dated.  That may be the biggest surprise of the whole thing, in all honesty–even after twenty-two years, The Running Man still manages to deliver the goods.  If it’s still good after twenty-two years, I can’t help but think it’ll be good for ANOTHER twenty.

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