The 65-million-year copyright infringement.

LOST IN DINOSAUR WORLD – the movie from the man who sued JURASSIC PARK!

Children’s author Geoffrey T. Williams published a series of four books from 1985 to 1988 under the Dinosaur World banner. When Michael Crichton published Jurassic Park in 1990, and Steven Spielberg subsequently made the 1993 movie based on that book, Williams saw so many similarities between JURASSIC PARK and his series (especially the second book, Lost In Dinosaur World) that he sued both Crichton and Spielberg, and anything else that got within roaring distance, from Universal Studios and Amblin Entertainment, probably all the way down to the mosquito minding its own business in the amber.

Suffice to say, Williams lost. Up against a big Hollywood writer and the BIGGEST Hollywood filmmaker, what did he expect? Still, I feel for the underdog here, as Williams’ work is published and easily observable as beating Crichton’s story to the punch of a dinosaur “zoo,” featuring a boy and girl wandering the grounds avoiding a T-rex, a family encountering a Compsognathus, a T-rex chasing a herd of dinosaurs, a dinosaur nursery, a dinosaur expert, electrified carnivore fences, down to the boy’s name being Tim. Sounding way familiar, right? Yet the Court Of The Rich ruled against Williams, citing Crichton’s book and Spielberg’s film as being different enough due to exploring deeper themes like corporate greed and genetic engineering ethics, with the similar elements not protected under copyright, such as the concept of a dinosaur zoo, and the similarities of the main characters.

Usually, one would start this next segment with, “Unperturbed by his legal loss…” and then go on to describe how Williams put together a film to rival JURASSIC PARK… alas, no. Unfortunately, the movie LOST IN DINOSAUR WORLD is not a comeback win for this underdog.

[At this point, I have to mention the confusing fact that Spielberg’s omnipresent composer John Williams scores JURASSIC PARK, and Geoffrey T. Williams is no relation. (Just another coincidence – as the Court Of The Rich might say…) With all the mentions of the Williams name, we could easily confuse which Williams I am referring to, so to be clear, anytime I mention Williams in this article – it’s GEOFFREY T.]

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I don’t know which producer thought to release LOST IN DINOSAUR WORLD as a direct-to-video 27-minute short in the same year that JURASSIC PARK changed the face of filmmaking, but it’s safe to say he had more audacity than John Hammond. Shot entirely on location at “Marine World/Africa USA” theme park in Vallejo California, in an exhibit called “Dinosaurs! A Prehistoric Adventure,” the animatronic dinos (created by a company called “Dinamation”) send discordant messages to our neocortexes. Y’see, many zoos create statues, murals or animatronic models of some of the animals that are featured within, kinda like a tease at the entrance… so when we see each dinosaur here as an animatronic model, there’s a disconnect: Are they MEANT to be models, or are these things meant to be REAL?

Industrial Light & Magic this ain’t!

Yup, they’re all meant to be real, and with each dino encounter, the family (made up of father, with yuppie sweater tied around yacht club neck; mother, who will never be an actor; daughter, young and precocious; and Tim, dinosaur obsessionist) dutifully gape in astonishment while Tim runs down factoids like a robot, accompanied by bland computerized music faker than the dinos. Remembering that it’s geared toward children’s education doesn’t make the spitting of dry information and soul-dead synths any less cringeworthy.

There’s no explanation on how this Dinosaur World came to be – the fact that dinosaurs exist is a given. No origin story of DNA-from-mosquitos, or how that baby dinosaur is being hatched, etc. Despite JURASSIC PARK resembling this dino-dung in more ways than you can count a stegosaur’s plates, that significant DNA foundation sets it way apart.

After viewing a Dimetrodon, a Stegosaurus and Apatosaurus (all with feet fastidiously rooted to the spot, yet supposedly imbued with… uh, Life?) the family stops at the park restaurant, and we are treated to a punning poetry slam from the wait-staff. I’ve committed many sins in my life, but none so big to deserve this level of torture.

A Pteranodon snatches Tim’s hat and he gives chase, thus precipitating the title of the film – LOST IN, etc. Tim and sister come upon a Deinonychus feeding (and still feel the need to shout-whisper factoids), and I can’t help but think of yet another connection to JURASSIC PARK. (By now it’s well known that Spielberg’s Velociraptors are over-sized, to the point that he actually should have used the Deinonychus species name for them. Here, Geoff Williams makes no such rookie mistake!)

Tim and sis are penned in by the indomitable Tyrannosaurus rex, and after a helicopter distracts it, they escape between its immovable legs. The tension is bearable.

DINOSAUR WORLD is a morbid curiosity. Just like Williams’s lawsuit it has sunk into the tarpit of obscurity. It was made at the exact wrong time in history; it will never fly, considering that audiences had just gotten the taste of “real” dinosaurs in JURASSIC PARK. The poor Dinamation company held on for a time, until they too went out of business. No one would accept anything less after JURASSIC. (Back in Australia in the late 70s, there was a theme park called Paradise Gardens, which featured life-size dinosaur models, designed much like the 18^th century notion of fat, upright, standing-on-tails-like-kangaroos, and they were simply the color of the plaster from which they were formed. And I remember that as an insane family day out… but what kid would stand for that static, scientifically inaccurate, bland-dimensional world NOW?).

No one knows what became of Geoffrey T. Williams. Or these actors. Now they know what it’s like to feel extinct.

END

That Rare Occasion a Remake is Better Than The Original!

A group of low-rent thieves heist a bank truck with the unwitting aid of a little old lady, whose rooming house they use as a makeshift headquarters. When the old lady discovers their ruse, they decide to dispose of her – but who amongst them has the stones to actually do it?

I saw the 2004 remake of the heist comedy THE LADYKILLERS long before I saw this 1955 original. Marveling over Tom Hanks’s deliciously loquacious Southern Gentleman gang leader in the remake, I thought the original would feature an even better version of the character, played by no less than the great Alec Guinness.

Alas, I was wrong!

Guinness is Professor Marcus, sporting prosthetic buck teeth that lend an impish, ghoulish air to his scheming demeanor. But again, though he IS a thief, alas that whole makeup job was for nothing, as it is purely a visual shortcut to denote untrustworthiness. There is not much more to his character (except for being the “brains” of the heist troupe). It is unfortunate that the remake is so good, because it showed us how well this character could have been fleshed out. 50 years after this original, a similarly buck-toothed Tom Hanks (with writers-directors The Coen Brothers) would explode out of the box with the faux Professor’s verbosity and eccentric charm, which would be of a piece with his buck-toothed duplicity.

Professor Marcus rents a room with Mrs. Wilberforce (Katie Johnson), welcoming in his heist buddies under the guise of classical musicians, who all plot the heist in Marcus’s room, while pretending to “practice” via the cunning use of the best technology available – a record player.

One of Marcus’s co-conspirators is Peter Sellers as Harry, in one of his first movie roles, so enamored with his idol, Alec Guinness, that he was constantly insecure about whether he was doing a good job. And let’s face facts: this is not the Peter Sellers we know – the confident, versatile, domineering comedic talent; this is a young upstart trying to make his way in the filmic world and not doing anything remotely challenging or exciting to disturb his patrons.

Alongside Sellers, as the most obvious “hitman” character is Herbert Lom as Louis (who would go on to star opposite Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau, as his nemesis in THE PINK PANTHER films, starting with 1964’s A SHOT IN THE DARK). The other two crooks are not worth mentioning – a big lug and a big sap.

The heist goes off smoothly, but it is when Mrs. Wilberforce discovers the stolen money and her part in it that the movie enters into quickstep broad farce, with each of the thieves trying to find ways to: a) kill Mrs. Wilberforce, while b) stealing all the money for themselves, while c) not getting killed doing either.

Premiere voted THE LADYKILLERS one of “The 50 Greatest Comedies of All Time” in 2006. It was uproarious in its day, but it has dated considerably (just the low-tech elements of the heist itself might confuse modern viewers – police having to use public phones to communicate crimes in progress, picking up parcels without any identification, newspaper headlines taken as fact, etc.), and the thing most responsible for this movie being shown up as mediocre – ITS OWN REMAKE!

END

Goes from Very Real to Somewhat Hollywood.

A movie where the lead character does everything that YOU would do in a dire situation – at least in the first two acts, before he must bow to Action Movie Protocol and shoot the bad guys, rescue the girl and take down a redneck meth lab all by himself…

LAST SEEN ALIVE starts off very compelling, as Will (Gerard Butler) loses his wife Lisa (Jaimie Alexander) at a roadside gas station in a small town. Will enlists the aid of a reluctant police department to find her, also taking matters into his own hands to track down her abductors.

It’s nothing we haven’t seen before (abducted wife, distraught husband, hillbilly antagonists – very much reminding us of Kurt Russell’s 1997 BREAKDOWN), but in this movie, writer Marc Frydman and director Brian Goodman employ a different approach with their lead character – though they’ve stacked the deck in casting Man’s Man Gerard Butler, he doesn’t suddenly go Action Man when the plot is ignited. Rather, Butler’s Will reacts in a very Real World manner; he does all those things that we would do in his situation – because in the Real World, there is never a sudden tip into detective/spy/vigilante mode, as your first reaction is believing that a person gone missing will simply turn up, with some mundane reason on why they “disappeared.” And so Will does, trying to keep his voice steady as he speaks to the store clerk (Michael Irby – Cristobal from BARRY!); as he circles the parking lot, as he leaves messages on her voicemail… a slow burn… as he calls the police, who reluctantly get involved; he drives to his in-laws’ home, in the hopes that Lisa has hitched or walked there (their stunned/worried reactions are right on the money as well – great performances by Cindy Hogan and Bruce Altman), and finally giving in to despair and anxiety, that would force his hand to Action Man…

That’s the key to every movie lead role: putting the viewer in the place of the protagonist and ultimately asking not what HE would do in a situation, but what YOU would do. And if the protagonist actually does what you might do, he becomes all the more relatable. It is especially satisfying when Will confronts the man who snatched Lisa, and punches down at his face, incessantly, while the man pleads to “Stop! Stop! Stop!” and with each “Stop!” another punch lands – unremitting, unforgiving. I was laughing at the fact that that is exactly how I would handle that situation; and how YOU would handle it as well.

Unfortunately, this realism cannot be sustained, as Will’s situation gets infinitely grimmer when he himself commits “crimes” to try to counter the crime of his wife’s kidnapping. The Man doesn’t see this as justifiable eye-for-eye resolution. In the Real World, Will would have faced numerous charges himself for becoming a vigilante, no matter it was in the quest to reclaim his wife.

The detective is played very naturally and calmingly by Russell Hornsby. And though they could have upped the stakes with Cop Accusing Protagonist Of The Crime, the movie steers away from this trope. Again, to its credit. Although by the Hollywood Happy Ending, the Detective has become non-real as he ignores all Will’s crimes for the sake of Will retrieving his wife from meth dealers. In any Real World situation, the detective’s “duty” would have overridden his sense of justice and he would have arrested Will for kidnapping himself (man found in trunk of his car), assault and battery (see: above scene), destruction of property (blowing up the meth compound) and murder (shooting dead the drug kingpin), amongst a trove of smaller crimes that they would have pinned on him. (Have the filmmakers been around real police at ALL?)

The antagonists are also played for realism. Usually, baddies are portrayed as unremittingly eeevil, laughing at their crimes and confident in their wrongdoing (that they regard as right), but here, many of the evildoers involved in Will’s wife’s kidnapping are as unsure of themselves as Will is as an Action Man. Because “kidnapping” is far above their pay-grade – the local drug kingpin wants nothing to do with it – and in essence, the kidnapping plot goes nowhere. Meaning, there IS no grand design – there was just an impetuous grab at potential ransom money with no plan behind it at all. The B-actor doing the grabbing? Ethan Embrey (that non-personality who is not even at the level of That Guy From That Thing – unless you mean THAT THING YOU DO, where he played a guy so faceless, he didn’t even have a name, even though he was in the starring band!). Here, he plays Knuckles, a guy so swamped in white-trash double-wide squalor he would resort to anything to make a quick buck. Just like Ethan Embrey.

So the movie’s own realistic plot is its downfall, in a way. We have been conditioned to believe that any event that drives a plot should have much more machination behind it. Instead, we get the plot equivalent of Ethan Embrey.

END

White Lion.

Separated from his mother in India at 5 years old, adopted by an Australian couple and raised in Tasmania, Saroo Brierley, 25 years later, tracks down his biological mother in India through the magic of Google Earth. And a privileged white lifestyle.

Taking nothing away from the inspiring effort of Saroo and the overwhelming poignancy of his quest, there is yet an awful irony underpinning LION, which the filmmakers don’t focus on for fear of diluting its river of tears.

But we’re getting ahead of the story:

Dev Patel is Saroo – and just like Jeff Bridges can tell his grandkids he once did a whole movie in his pajamas, Dev can say he did a whole movie with tears in his eyes. And never once combing his hair.

Garth Davis directs LION non-intrusively, as screenwriter Luke Davies adapts Brierley’s memoir, A Long Way Home (Penguin Publishing, 2015), introducing us to Saroo as a 5-year-old (played by astonishing 8-year-old Sunny Pawar), living with his single mother (Priyanka Bose), younger sister and older brother Guddu, in a small hut in Ganesh Talai, an underprivileged suburb of Khandwa.

One night, Saroo accompanies Guddu (Abhishek Bharate, also magnificently naturalistic), to a train station to scrounge for odd jobs. Instructed by Guddu to wait on a platform for him, Saroo falls asleep on a bench, wakes hours later, searches for Guddu, and accidentally boards a train bound for Calcutta, 1,500 kilometers from his home.

Lost. With no way, or knowledge of how, to get home.

After sad scenes of Saroo trying to communicate with commuters and other abandoned street children, he is taken in by a woman who, overnight, turns from benefactor to malefactor, as we realize she scoops up homeless kids for men with disturbing intentions. Not fully understanding the oddly sexual scenario, Saroo hi-tails it out of her place after a man stops by to smilingly prod and grope him.

Saroo ends up in an orphanage, where he is adopted by Australian couple John and Sue Brierley (David Wenham and Nicole Kidman in very gauche hairstyles), who fly him to their home in Tasmania (that little triangular island under the mainland, kinda like Australia’s Hawaii).

Grown, a powerhouse Dev Patel assumes the role of Saroo. (Patel looks rugged; matured as an actor, and come into his own since his breakout role in SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE.) Around 29 years of age, about 2010, Saroo starts searching for his Indian home.

I’m sure this irony must have crossed Saroo’s mind many times: that he was only able to find his mother in that Third World country halfway across the globe, due to being adopted by a couple from a First World country. If Saroo had spent his life in the Indian orphanage, he would have died there none the wiser about his mother’s fate. I’m sure he must have often slammed up against conflicting emotions as he Google-searched for a ghetto, from a room overlooking a beach, downing beers, while beautiful crimson sunsets glistened over a city where he could acquire whatever his heart desired – including a computer, the internet, an apartment, a job, beer, and a ticket to India.

Thus it seems screwy for Saroo to accuse his longtime girlfriend (Rooney Mara) of being “privileged” and to turn away from her, when she doesn’t share his obsession – an obsession only able to be fed due to being adopted by a couple from a First World country. So there’s a pragmatism that underpins this story – it’s only because Saroo possessed a privileged lifestyle himself that he could afford to be so cavalier about looking for his underprivileged past.

Nonetheless, you will watch LION with tears edging your eyes.

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1987. When young Saroo boards the plane for Australia, we hear a snatch of Mondo Rock’s State Of The Heart, which, for an Australian, places us directly in that ‘80’s era (and gives us a musical cue on Saroo’s changed psychological state). Though Saroo approaches every beat of his new life with trepidation – arriving at Hobart, stepping into his foster parents’ home – there is an undeniable change in tone for the better; a pervasive feeling of hope, quietude, cleanliness, clamor annulled, and relief mixed with doubt that this could be real. Yet deep down, would crossing that Australian threshold mean that Saroo’s real family were lost to him forever?

That loss must have germinated in his psyche, for him to have embarked on his journey of retracing his heritage all those years later!

John and Sue Brierley also adopt Mantosh, another young Indian boy, healthy in body, but with psychological problems. Played by Divian Ladwa as an adult, Mantosh would retain the habit of hitting his head reflexively when anxious, and did not pursue any noteworthy career path, which the film plays out unflinchingly.

As Saroo tells his adopted mum after he starts his quest, “You also adopted our pasts.”

And that is the other tragedy of this tale: How does Saroo tell his adopted mother Sue, who lavished all her love on him, that he is looking for his biological mother? Would it not tear her apart, and make her feel like she did not sacrifice enough? Can any movie truly portray how wrenching the moment when Saroo finally showed Sue his research, after months of plotting rail routes and search areas on a giant wall map?

As with all “true stories,” LION takes its dramatic liberties, and real life Saroo relates how the real life Sue supported him from the very beginning of his quest. It was not a secret to her. There is another filmic moment for which Saroo commends the filmmakers: Nicole Kidman gives her all in a staggering emotional moment when she confesses to Saroo (Patel) that she and her husband opted not to have children of their own, even though they were able to, because they wanted to help children less fortunate. “That was why I loved your father – we both had the same vision.” Stunned Saroo had taken it for granted his adoptive parents were barren!

Real life Saroo has remained silent though, on exactly what the filmmakers were going for with Nicole Kidman’s hair.

When Saroo attends a hotel management course in Melbourne in 2008, he discovers Google Earth, through a group of cosmopolitan friends. In the movie, his wanderlust is awoken when he spies a dish of jalebis (Indian sweets) during a dinner with these friends, and almost breaks down as he “confesses” to the empathetic group that he is “lost.” Who knows how this desire would have gradually piqued in real life Saroo? The end result is: the search was afoot, calculating train speeds from 25 years ago, scouring his memory for landmarks; growing apart from his girlfriend…

I find it amusing that the film uses Rooney Mara’s character to represent both girlfriends Saroo had at the time of his quest; the first, he lost to his obsession, the second, he apparently spent lots of time with due to her fast internet connection (that’s not a metaphor! – for all you under-30s, there was a time when online information didn’t just “pop up” onscreen the moment you clicked on it!). Thus, even as Saroo grows distant from Mara (as per gf #1), we see her waking in an empty bed, to find him out in the loungeroom slaving over the computer (as per gf #2). This factoid is not apparent in the movie – just an amusing footnote when researching Saroo.

Dev’s Aussie accent is very good, and it’s funny hearing him do it so well. He’s also got the “interior bearing” of an Indian raised in Australia, meaning, he denounces his heritage when questioned if he is Indian – “I’m not really Indian, just born there, raised in Australia.” It’s not a mean denunciation or racist slur; having been raised by white Australians, Saroo merely identifies with them, more than the people of his ancestral heritage, of which he only shares distant genes, not cultural upbringing.

Filmed in the actual locations where Saroo lived his life – from the hovels of Ganesh Talai to breathtaking vistas of his Australian bush locale in Tasmania – LION is truly what so many movies advertise themselves as – an emotional journey! When Saroo identifies that specific train track that bore him, and then the landmarks along the way, we are in his head, in his racing heart, and scampering around in his unruly hair. But I do question: How were all these locales unchanged after more than two decades? Old structures like water towers and bridges appearing on Google Earth – we marvel at the poverty and/or laziness/corruptness of the government bodies that did not refurbish these edifices over 25 years!

By February 2012 Saroo had found enough evidence to make the journey to India, and actually walks the tiny alleyways, in a daze, to his stone hut… Patel is now in Oscar territory with these final scenes, emotions warring within him, wonder, fear, sorrow, nostalgia, determination… and now the other grim reality must be faced: if his mum was actually still living in that hellhole – what a horrifying existence!

As it happens, she had moved out of that hovel to a nearby residence. A passing man who could speak English (as it happens, this actually transpired) leads Saroo to his mother.

Having forgotten his Hindi language, Saroo and his mum embrace tearfully in two different languages. He discovers Guddu died that night – hit by a train – and his mum, hoping against hope that Saroo would one day return, never moved away from the area. Movie depicts Saroo always having fanciful visions/dreams of his brother crossing the train tracks – of course, his brother will always be that age in his memory, and tragically, there would never be any other age for him; real life Saroo relates there are not even any pictures of Guddu. A river of tears for these final scenes.

2013. We see coda footage of real life Saroo introducing his two mothers to each other, in the village of his Indian mum. Oh God! The tears, the tears…

The final title card tells us that all his life, Saroo had been mispronouncing his own name. His given name, Sheru, when properly pronounced, meant… LION.

So THAT’S why his hair was like that…

END

Lost In Act Three.

LOST IN SPACE blasts off as a well-produced science fiction adventure, then gets lost loster than its lostest characters.

Brought to the big screen from the 1965 TV series, LOST IN SPACE captures much of the dynamics between all the characters originally created by Irwin Allen; it updates the tech, the spaceship, the production value; it gives nods and winks to the original’s aged and ageless fans; it adds dimensions to the interaction between the characters we’ve known and loved for decades – and then it goes and puts them in a story so dull and effects-laden, we want to do to the movie what Don wants to do to Judy while she’s in cryo-sleep.

Movie opens quite abruptly at an orbiting construction site (the “hypergate”), in the year 2058, accompanied by useless and silly narration, as William Hurt tells us “warring nations had forgotten their differences and The United Global Space Force was constructing this hypergate to colonize space.” Firstly, the phrase “forgotten their differences” should really bug anyone even mildly aware of the nuances behind geopolitical alliances and hostilities; but in the very next breath, Hurt tells us terrorists are preparing to strike— So there goes all that dumb talk about peace! And we see that narration itself as a geopolitical tactic: the filmmakers want international screenings and no boycotts by naming any hostile nations. (It’s what the ’65 original did in its own way, by claiming, “other countries sabotaging the mission.”)

Then we open on a space dogfight around the hypergate, featuring rugged, principled fighter pilot Don West (Matt LeBlanc) – movie already gambling with its credibility by introducing this mannequin-faced non-actor on loan from FRIENDS in its first scenes – repelling some of those aforementioned terrorists. Movie also gambles that the thoughtful, intriguing concept of interstellar colonization should come with an appetizer of Pretty Orange Explosions and pew-pew lasers. And Joey Tribbiani.

At last we arrive at the meat: a press conference for the mission to Alpha Prime (We presume, from prior knowledge, it’s the name of a planet in the Alpha Centauri triple-star system, although this is never mentioned. Matter of fact, LOST IN SPACE 1965 was where I first heard of the concept and name of Alpha Centauri being the closest star to Earth – I’m sure I was not the first ten-year-old to learn this!)

William Hurt is Professor John Robinson, the staid, preoccupied patriarch of the first family in space, the Robinsons (Hurt is brilliant, his underplaying just beautiful; he’s a walking, talking Actor’s Guide to Acting!).

Mimi Rogers (AUSTIN POWERS) is John’s biochemist wife, an understanding mother and loving partner; unafraid to take a strong hand to keep him in check when he and Don are “hosing down the deck with testosterone” (i.e. arguing over who’s in command of the mission).

Heather Graham (who would appear in AUSTIN POWERS 2) is mouthwatering Judy – no wonder Don wants her so bad! – eldest daughter and ship’s doctor; she tamps down Don’s libido at their first meeting, “Those who can’t think, fight.” That doesn’t stop him from thinking – about her deep space.

Lacey Chaubert is Penny, with the type of annoying squeezetoy voice that will only attract pedophiles and wife-beaters. She’s the teen demo: hooker mascara, rad clothes, doesn’t want to leave her friends on Earth, makes video diaries, is brought home frequently by cops for misbehavin’ – what-EVeeeer! It’s amusing that even in the 2018 LOST IN SPACE Netflix reboot, Penny’s character is crafted for the same teen demo (which has morphed to Angsty Millennial), yet Original Penny was just an innocent pre-teen (although she did get froozy in that episode where they went to that teen planet – hey! Maybe Penny was a Bad Girl after all!).

Expressionless Jack Johnson is Will, youngest child, smartest geek. Not a great actor, but then, surround him with tech and hope for the best. Thus it is Will who becomes closest to the Robot, only because he has the technical knowledge on how to control him. And the Robot—

He-hey! That voice! We’d recognize it from the sands of Saudi Arabia to the deserts of Alpha Prime – it’s Dick Tufeld, original voice of the 1965 Robot! And yes, he gets in a coupla solid “Danger, Will Robinson”s to make us tumescent. Designed to look like he has an evil twin growing out of his lower body, only later would he be redesigned by Will to minimally resemble our beloved bubble-headed booby!

The absent father, the strong mother, the too-busy daughter, the vogue daughter, the brilliant son, the egotistic pilot, the Robot helper, and – the saboteur, Dr. Zachary Smith!

Acting megalith Gary Oldman (AIR FORCE ONE) plays Dr. Smith as a hybrid of Saboteur Jonathan Harris (from the first few episodes of Season 1, 1965) and Effete Jonathan Harris (Seasons 2 and 3). Only Oldman could pull off such a subtle, dangerous, funny, lethal role, from his aversion to facing danger, to his epithets for the Robot (“You mechanical moron!”); at times we can’t tell where Jonathan Harris ends and Oldman begins.

Five original cast members cameo: June Lockhart (aka Maureen), Marta Kristen (aka Judy), Angela Cartwright (aka Penny), Mark Goddard (aka Don West), with quite a meaty role as the General who introduces Professor Robinson to this movie’s Don West. And Dick Tufeld, still stuck inside the Robot. (Bill Mumy wanted to appear as the Older Will, which would have made for a great meta twist, but obviously his agent wasn’t shark enough.)

In retrospect, this is probably Matt LeBlanc’s best acting role of his career. Not kidding or being sarcastic. In between taping FRIENDS episodes, he flies back and forth to this film set to play it straighter than any straight man, as a hotshot pilot who’s loyal to Robinson, hot for Judy, got a hardon for Smith and pilots the Jupiter 2 like a Harley in space. Unfortunately, he’s completely overshadowed like a planet being eclipsed by a thousand suns, by appearing alongside two of the greatest actors of any generation: when he’s not interacting with Hurt, he’s facing down Oldman! Poor, poor boy! It’s ludicrous seeing LeBlanc’s le blank expressions up against either of these thespian giants.

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The opening plot is homage to 1965’s Season 1 Episode 1 “The Reluctant Stowaway,” where Dr. Smith programs the Robot to destroy the ship in flight, and is then stuck onboard. There is a better-written dilemma here, where Smith is double-crossed by his bosses (Edward Fox) and left to die in the Jupiter 2 to eradicate evidence of their sabotage.

There is an outer covering on the Jupiter 2, called – appropriately – Jupiter 1. These space agency scenes are pretty legit during launch, although I don’t know why they would launch a vehicle into space in that flat saucer position, causing maximum drag. Anyway, Jupiter 1 cracks open in orbit and Jupiter 2 emerges, shaped like three bubbles squashed together.

It is when the Robinsons reach deep space that the bad decisions really start to pile up – not from the crew on the ship, but the crew on the film. Akiva Goldsman screenplays, trying to make up for his abortion BATMAN & ROBIN (1997) from the year before, and Stephen Hopkins (THE GHOST AND THE DARKNESS) directs, and together they turn a grand adventure into so much trope and cliché and stupidity.

The process by which the Robinsons reach deep space is good writing: the Robot starts destroying the ship, and Smith desperately wakes the hibernating family, who discover the Jupiter is caught in the Sun’s gravitational pull (a nod to one of the plots in the original series). They use the new “hyperdrive” to shoot through the Sun – and without a hypergate on the other end, they know it will shoot them into unchartered space. Which happens.

The Robinsons encounter a ghost ship, whose records show it is from Earth’s future, on a rescue mission of the Jupiter and its crew! The filmmakers then turn this cerebral plot development into – CGI spiders chasing the family, and stupid CGI helmets and war masks. So they escape and can circle back to exploring that time-warp plot—nope, it’s Pretty Orange Explosion time as Don blows up the ghost ship for no reason other than to excite ten-year-olds who were falling asleep with the wormhole-to-the-future plot.

I HATE CGI INSECTOIDS! This film was probably one of the first to use them, but they’ve become a staple in many futuristic films; I guess they’re easy to render. The only role they fulfill is creating more runtime for the movie, and are NEVER necessary to move the plot forward. A spider bites Smith, who will turn into an insectoid in the final act – but we don’t need a swarm of spiders for that plot point – it only takes one, if at all.

The Jupiter immediately crash-lands on a planet (with breathable air, mind you! – the original series taught us well!), and the adventure seems to stall.

The last act is a dichotomy of good ideas coupled with bad execution, as the filmmakers explore the wormhole plot to a poignant conclusion.

the big mistakes:

• LOST IN SPACE boasts some of the worst CGI you will ever see in a tentpole movie. It seems like Irwin Allen Productions went forward with the movie even though they knew the technology couldn’t handle the filmmakers’ vision. Though there are reportedly over 900 CGI shots (the most in any film at the time), the first time we notice the lackluster computer graphics is during the cryo-sleep sequence, where fully-CGI restraints and eye-shades magically appear over each Robinson.
• The execrable CGI baby-ape-thing called “Blarp” that Penny befriends (a nod to the chimp called Bloop in the original series, which was just as idiotic a character). This special effects animal is utterly separate from its real life environment; a precursor to Jar Jar Binks, it’s not fooling anyone that it’s really in the scene with the actors. And when it is in the background of so many scenes, it ruins the suspension of disbelief, even if the scene is important. No one is wondering “How did they do that?” as with Gollum in THE TWO TOWERS. It literally looks like a Warner Bros. Bugs Bunny cartoon. They bring that terrible special effect onboard the Jupiter without any thought of quarantine. Or rendering apparently.
• The CGI spiders that look so artificial I thought they were robots, but they were meant to be organic. I think. I still can’t tell.
• Penny’s voice, Penny’s vogue, Penny’s hooker mascara, Penny’s acting, Penny calling Will “kiddo.”
• The Robot redesign: Don’t fix what ain’t broke!
• The family doing a “Goodnight, John Boy” homage, which should have had the funders running for the hills.
• The “LS” logo: As if Alpha Control had printed caps with “LS” on it, as in “We’re gonna get this family LOST like a mo’fo.”
  
• Ending titles trying to be too hip: They incorporate John Williams’s soaring theme into a rap beat. Wrong!
• Matt LeBlanc: Though he does a good job… he’s Matt LeBlanc.

the biggest mistakes:

• Dr. Smith becoming an insectoid: a full-CGI joke of a cartoon. Not only that, he’s got an eggsac hanging off his butt— Euuw, gross! Does this mean he’s a hermaphrodite? They had the greatest actor in the world, who could do poignant, funny, menacing, ominous, evil – any emotion you want, or a combination thereof – and they plop his rendered face on a cartoon scorpion-thing. The wasteful idiocy of the filmmakers in throwing away Oldman’s expertise for a goony cartoony, is almost as high as their audacity in thinking their scheme worked.
• Time-Travel Mumy: In the third act, Older Will appears, played by Jared Harris. This movie might have been saved – on a psychological level at least – if they had cast Bill Mumy as Older Will. At the time, he was a perfect 44 years old (and they could have used makeup to render him any age required), and he would have slammed home the poignant nostalgia for all existing classic LOST IN SPACE fans. The ruining of Oldman’s performance and the miscasting of Older Will are the movie’s two biggest mistakes, and its ultimate downfall.

The potential for LOST IN SPACE was always high. It’s obvious Irwin Allen Productions and New Line Cinema wanted this movie to be the “pilot” for a trail of sequels ad infinitum. Writer Goldsman even started with a sincere idea – to reboot the camp ’65 series with ‘90’s grit, which was enough of a pitch to get Oldman onboard as the first powerful cast member, which induced other stars to join. Where did it all go wrong? I’m blaming the ambition of the filmmakers, which outpaced the technology of the day, and a little blame to casting for even putting forward LeBlanc’s name as the action hero stereotype played against Hurt’s intellectual. LOST IN SPACE came at us like it knew what needed fixing from the original series. And ends up fixing many elements and then breaking them again worse than before.

Blarp!

END

Secret Service Superman.

LONDON HAS FALLEN follows in the same vein as its predecessor, OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN – a gritty actioner that puts the American president in peril, so his bromantic bodyguard can save him.

The terrorists are winning again.

Movie opens on a Middle Eastern wedding party near Pakistan, which is blown sky-high by an American missile, taking the lives of over 200 people, 2 of whom are sinister-looking guys planning revenge killings. Scorecard: 2 potential criminals, 198 innocent civilians. Told you the terrorists were winning—oh, you took it for granted I meant Middle Eastern olive-skinned people when I said “terrorists,” and not the American military with drones, attacking from a base in Nevada and murdering in cold blood from afar like cowards? The mission officer even tells the guy flying the drone, “You’re clear to execute.” He uses the word “execute.” And gets away with it because – America…

The explosion cross-fades into an American flag – as if to rub our noses in it. (‘Watch us murder with impunity and then wrap ourselves in the stars and stripes to justify it!’) Title card tells us it is Two Years Later…

We meet American President Ben Asher (Aaron Eckhart) and his bodyguard Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) jogging; the youthful, sexy Pres once again amazed at the iron constitution of his chief protector running rings around him. Little does he know his taut-buttocked guardian is writing a Resignation Letter, expecting his first child (with wife Radha Mitchell).

But then – the British Prime Minister dies and every world leader must attend the funeral in London. Not knowing Banning intends to resign, Pres calls on him to make the trip. Banning accepts, telling his understanding wife, ‘One last time.’

With every world leader in London, the city is blown to hell, in a massive coordinated strike that leaves few leaders alive. One of my favorite newsmen, Lawrence O’Donnell, represents Generic American Newsguy: “the attack decimated most of the British landmarks. Five world leaders confirmed dead.” (I’m presuming Londoners would be a tad more impressed with this film than the rest of the world, seeing their landmarks blowing up in such realistic detail, as we Angelenos appreciated the novelty of L.A. landmarks torched by special effects in VOLCANO).

A Pakistani named Barkawi (Alon Aboutboul) takes the blame, the same guy whose daughter was blown up at the wedding earlier. So this is blowback for the American attack. Barkawi was one of the 2 sinister-looking guys – and he didn’t even die, which means the Americans blew up all those innocent people for nothing! (The innocent victims are later referred to as “collateral.” Who are the terrorists again?) And now the Americans seem surprised when arms dealer Barkawi comes after them righteously for blowing up his whole family! These “terrorists” and their vendettas! Why can’t they just let America blow them up without retaliating?!

In the midst of the Pretty Orange Explosions and gun battles, President Asher and his boy Mike Banning, fight their way to the chah-pah! It’s all blam-fest from there on in, superguy Banning providing protection level services that only a man-of-steel could likely get away with.

All the main characters reprise their roles from OLYMPUS: Morgan Freeman is VP, Angela Bassett is Secret Service director; Robert Forster and Melissa Leo in the president’s cabinet, drawing on their reserves of Concerned Face No.7 around the White House conference table; Jackie Earle Haley joining them with Concerned Face No.9.  Colin Salmon is head of British security (the man who should be the black James Bond); and there’s cute and sexy Charlotte Riley as Jacquelin (Banning warns, “Don’t fuck with her!”), dealing with a mole in the British Secret Service, who helped coordinate the London strikes.

Co-written by the writers of OLYMPUS (Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedickt, and directed by Babak Najafi (hey! He sounds like one o’ dem terrorists), LONDON HAS FALLEN is a brutal R-rated bullet-fest with premium swearing and savage, violent deaths. There is a scene where Banning shoves a knife slowly into Barkawi’s son, just so that man’s brother (listening on the walkie-talkie) can hear him scream and die. The president asks Banning, “Was that necessary?” Banning’s curt reply, “No.” It’s comedy gold—but wait! Shouldn’t the Pres be horrified, thinking, “Whoa my God! My bodyguard is a SADIST!”? But no. Funny. Because – American.

The Pres and Banning make it to the chah-pah, called Marine-1. In an amazing sequence (for more than one reason), the convoy of three helicopters runs out of flares to deflect the missiles coming at them from the ground. We hear on the com, “Marine-2, prepare to sacrifice.” Marine-2 says, “Copy”– wait—what?!— Marine-2 simply has to take it in the ass for Marine-1?! And we see Marine-2, without hesitation, fly into the path of the oncoming missile, without any lube.

Cliché Alert: The Pres and Banning drive through a hail of bullets and get clear, then start laughing, “We fucken made it!” Isn’t this ALWAYS the moment that the attack comes ‘pon the side? The Pres is nabbed by the villains, who plan to execute him live on the internet (which should trend for about 3 hours, and then be replaced by news of the Kardashians).

It’s amusing that Gerard Butler’s character name (Banning) is so close to the actual name of the white supremacist Hutt in the 2017 Dumbo Donald administration (Bannon). This movie makes us wish someone would kidnap Dumbo Donald and beat the shit out of him, as they do President Asher, although one might wonder what principles the villains would make Dumbo Donald renege on (as the pathological liar is devoid of principles or loyalty to any country or creed), or what national secrets they could beat out of him that he hasn’t divulged himself without any prompting? This is why Dumbo Donald – the president who has insulted every other world leader with his ignorance – has not been kidnapped yet. Firstly because everyone knows that no one would try to get him back, and secondly, because there is no ethos there, no system of belief that can be denigrated on the world stage. And really, how far would Dumbo’s Bannon go to rescue his senile, retarded Nazi boss? And we could bet no helicopter would throw itself in the path of an oncoming missile for that obese mongrel swine.

Cliché Alert: Humanizing the Americans – Pres cares for his son, Banning cares for his wife, Morgan Freeman wants to catch a big fish… How come we never hear how much Barkawi cared for his daughter? His emotion for her is relegated to revenge on London. They say he deals weapons to America’s enemies. But didn’t America sell arms to the Afghans, Iranians, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Palestinians, the Mujahideen, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah, and ISIS? Oh, that must have been some other country named The United States of America.

Cliché Alert: Jacquelin discovers the mole betraying British Secret Service. Instead of alerting a whole squad to go pick him up, she confronts him alone in a parking garage. (Just because you’re sexy doesn’t make you smart.) With gun in hand, she then proceeds to tell him how she figured he was the mole. How about saving it for the trial, honey? Then she tells him softly to “Get on the floor.” We know he’s going to back away towards his car, where there is a gun waiting for him. We know she’s going to say it louder, “Get on the floor!” while he continues to back away with his hands up. And we know she’s going to scream “GET ON THE FUCKING FLOOR!” before he lunges for the gun and she is forced to shoot him dead. She could have wounded him, but no. So  when reporting the incident, how will anyone know she is in the right? Maybe she shot this man in cold blood and PLANTED all that evidence making him look like the mole? This scene is so stupid, it made Jacquelin even hotter.

Cliché Alert: Banning deletes his Letter of Resignation. Because he loves his job? Because he loves his country? Because he loves his president? No, because he loves a sequel.

Movie ends by blowing up Barkawi. And to pander to Social Justice Warriors, we clearly hear, “Ground asset confirms: clear of civilian presences.” Yeh, royt. So this makes up for murdering those innocent 195? Because you CHECKED this time for “collateral”? I guess we owe America an apology.

If you love action movies, LONDON HAS FALLEN is a good proponent. It’s well-acted, and may squeeze a poignant tear in small sequences. The set-up scenes in the first act are very compelling for their detail, editing and direction. And production values are exceptional: there is a firefight where our heroes are running towards their objective at the end of a street, while being fired upon from that point, and we can see fiery streaks of heavy duty rounds coming at us from a vanishing point. We see the flares of the firing, hot bullet trails in the air, impact points, meticulous sound design; the blocking and cinematography in this scene alone is stunning. It separates LONDON from its copycats.

It’s a highly predictable film of course, because no American president is killed in an American movie (unless it’s Lincoln or Kennedy). Especially by so-called “terrorists.” Terrorists have to lose in this current fearful political climate. It’s not so much fantasy as wish-fulfillment.

But the funniest thing is, even though movies portray terrorists as being from Anywhere But America, America has proven itself the greatest terrorist threat to the world, especially with a madman at the helm (Dumbo Donald): not even counting the innumerable American gunmen who terrorize schools and malls, America “boasts” the largest nuclear armory in the world, disallows other countries to amass nuclear weapons, uses the threat of WMDs to keep other countries cowed; has military bases around the world holding the boot on other countries’ necks, owes debt to other countries with no intent to pay it back, with the threat of sanctions, embargoes and loss of support, should those countries pipsqueak their dissatisfaction.

And though all other countries still try to outwit America the old-fashioned way – with bombs and guns and man-agents dressed as women – Russia eventually got it right, installing a dimwit sociopath wannabe dictator in the White House in 2016 to do their bidding (much like America installed the Shah of Iran in 1953), and this Dumbo Donald is systematically dismantling the tenets of democracy one freedom fry at a time.

The terrorists have won.

Olympus has fallen.

END

In the beginning, God said, Let there be Willis…

Eight years before Willis O’Brien brought KING KONG (1933) to life with his brilliant stop-motion animation, he used that innovative technique on his very first feature, THE LOST WORLD (1925), a silent movie based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s book (released 1912), in which scientists discover prehistoric animals on an Amazonian plateau.

THE LOST WORLD is the Big Bang of dinosaur/monster movies. We trace a direct line from this seminal film all the way through every iteration and pale imitator of KING KONG, GODZILLA (1954), and JURASSIC PARK(1993). We would have none of these if it weren’t for Willis O’Brien’s pioneering and imaginative forays into bringing dinosaurs to life on the silver screen.

Yes, the models were hopelessly anatomically incorrect, and the stop-motion was rudimentary at best (the triceratops is especially stiff, and looks like it is just being moved around without moving its limbs!), but when Doyle showed footage of the dinosaurs to the Society of American Magicians (with Harry Houdini in attendance!), the New York Times declared the dinosaurs “masterpieces” and “extraordinarily lifelike.” Let’s face it, no one had seen dinos in action before, and the earliest ham-fisted drawings in textbooks represented dinosaurs as sluggish plodding dumbbells. Long before John Ostrom and Robert Bakker debunked those theories, here was O’Brien bringing them to roaring life as action killers.

Just so happens a Professor Challenger (Wallace Beery, with the worst pasted-on beard in prehistory) is making claims to the scientific community that he’s about to embark on an expedition where dinosaurs run free, challenging anyone who doesn’t believe him to tag along. Well, that would be EVERYONE, wouldn’t it? Shouldn’t his “invitation” be to those who believe him?

Based on writings in a lost scientist’s journal (named Maple White), brought to him by that scientist’s daughter, Paula (Bessie Love), Challenger, with his small party of overactors, including Malone, does indeed find passage to the Lost World. Ostensibly to find the missing scientist, but truly just to blow their – and the audience’s – minds.

Once on the plateau, the audience gets its money’s worth, as the effects shots pile on dinosaur after dinosaur, feeding, battling, running, plus pterodactyls and ape-men. This movie must have been INSANE in its day. Director Harry O. Hoyt uses process shots to put the stop-motion animals onscreen with the human actors, and though there is no direct interaction between them, through the cunning use of cutaways, inserts and resourceful editing, we can see how a 1925 audience might be riveted on their seat-edges, marveling at the Allosaurus attacking our heroes and being driven away by gunshot wounds.

The action never stops, as a Brontosaurus destroys their tree-bridge back to civilization, a Triceratops family is attacked by the Allosaurus, and an ape-man hounds their trail, then a volcano explodes and all the dinosaurs run screaming, while the roaring orchestra score tries to club us over the head and drag us to its cave to take us roughly from behind.

There’s even enough human drama for the film to claim, “Mighty prehistoric monsters clashing with modern lovers!” The hunter Roxton (Lewis Stone) finds evidence of Maple’s skeleton AND an escape route; meanwhile, thinking they are stranded forever, Malone puts the hard word on Paula (even though his fiancé waits back in London) – and she accepts his advances (meaning they kiss without passion). She also thinks they will find her father here… but then Roxton returns to find the young lovers giggling coquettishly – and tells them of the escape route and her dead father…

Awk-ward!

It is refreshing to see that this oldest of all dinosaur movies actually represents herbivores authentically (as not chasing humans to eat or harm them, as they do in other films of this era), and it’s quite progressive how Challenger wishes to simply “observe the brontosaurus’ habits” rather than shoot it blindly (like that idiot Carl Denham does to a stegosaur in KING KONG 1933 and then laments on how hard it is to bring one back alive).

The volcano erupts and it’s a cavalcade of dinosaurs running and battling. Quite amazing to see the level of effort that went into this movie’s effects, remembering that nothing was simply “rendered” but hand-crafted frame-by-frame.

A brontosaurus stuck in mud is brought back to London – and decimates the city! Here is the actual creation of the trope of Beast Brought Back to Society and Running Amok (a la KING KONG, VALLEY OF GWANGI, GORGO, JURASSIC PARK: THE LOST WORLD, et al)! There’s even the drunk staggering out of a bar and gazing on the beast like it was a product of his liquor!

The jungle backdrops are all clearly paintings, the theatrical acting will bust a blood vessel, the climax is rushed to a close, and the human drama ends on a decidedly silly note, but THE LOST WORLD is quite good viewing, and not just as an artifact. It’s a grand story after all, told by a master – Arthur Conan Doyle (who appears in the film’s prelude as himself, sitting in his garden attended by his dog). When we were kids, seeing dinosaurs in this rudimentary manner was enough to satisfy our dinosaur jones. Because we didn’t have the foresight to visualize how good dinosaur special effects could become. Without knowing how “real” Spielberg’s saurians could look, we accepted the low bar, rather than not see them “brought to life” at all.

The king of disaster movies, Irwin Allen, could have taken some pointers from this film, as his 1960 remake was one of his biggest disasters.

END

Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter…

It’s not really a swansong for Logan. It’s not exactly an elegy for The Wolverine. No, LOGAN is actually the final curtain for Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. Because Jackman, so perfectly cast 17 years ago in X-MEN, became so adamantium-grooved into the character, that he is inextricably identified with the Canadian mutant known as James Howlett/Logan/Wolverine. So in order for the 48-year-old Jackman to hang up his claws righteously and go have a donut, he also had to bring the character to an end. Thus, we must ask ourselves, who then are we crying for when the final cross is turned sideways to mark an X over the grave?

There will be spoilers. If you haven’t guessed by now.

Sad, somber and ultra-violent, LOGAN is truly – as Hugh Jackman hoped – the UNFORGIVEN of superhero movies, where we meet the anti-hero well past his prime, forced to go on one last quest, and inadvertently finding a bittersweet redemption.

Year 2029. All the mutants with the form-fitting costumes and metrosexual hairstyles are dead, and no more mutants are being born. Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), now in his doddering nineties, is in hiding with Logan (Jackman) and another mutant named Caliban (Stephen Merchant – yes, the man behind THE OFFICE, in an excellent dramatic turn as the albino tasked to care for Xavier and hurl insults at Logan. We never quite figure Caliban’s mutant power, except maybe making his whining bearable due to his British accent.). Logan has adopted his birth name, Howlett, and drives limos for seedy clients along the Mexico/U.S. border, planning to save enough money to buy a boat and sail off into the sunset with Xavier, who is slowly losing his mind. It’s a pipe dream, fluttering around the edges of sanity, as their existence also seems to be.

The adamantium in Logan’s skeleton that makes him invulnerable is poisoning him, faster than his mutant healing factor can regenerate his cells. As he painfully pushes bullets out of his chest wounds, it dawns on us that he is becoming mortal. Whether it’s a blessing or a curse, Logan is finding out the hard way.

I will say, it’s a shock to the system seeing Jackman/Wolverine in this pathetic physical state: though he’s still built like a freight train, he limps, he’s shoddy, unwashed, unshaven – his infamous half-beard has grown into an unambiguous full beard (is there nothing sacred?) – and he’s keeping himself drunk and irritable. Logan is sad, exhausted, distrustful, and when he goes berserk in this R-rated movie (a trait that could never be fully realized in previous PG-13 outings), the violence is brutal and blood-drenched. Charles Xavier is also worn out, feared and discarded by society, his telekinetic powers not entirely under his control. No matter how much we might pine for the simple cartoon characteristics of old, LOGAN is not for the weak-hearted.

And the language! I do declare, Beauregard! Well, I never! It is easy to digest Logan swearing like a street scrapper, but to hear Xavier swearing is jarring; I mean, he’s a learned professor – even if he put up with Logan’s potty mouth, one would think he would not stoop to that street vernacular himself. Is this what the world has come to? Xavier saying, “I’m fucking 90!”

When Logan is tasked to transport a scrappy little girl, Laura (Dafne Keen), to an apocryphal destination, the movie comes into focus. Government spooks led by a steel-armed merc named Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) are after Laura, and stumble upon a bonus: “As I live and breathe – the Wolverine!” (When Pierce says the name, a thrill flirts up our spines – just the mention of that name makes it all snikt powerfully into place!) Xavier is another prize quarry for Pierce, who explains that the government wants to register Xavier’s brain as a Weapon of Mass Destruction; and we kinda see the sense as Pierce explains how “dangerous a degenerative brain disease would be in the world’s most dangerous brain.”

Richard E. Grant is another government scientist. Unlike other X-Men movies, the government is no longer scared of muties and don’t want to kill ‘em all, or cure ’em for that matter – they want to weaponize them, which is why they pursue.

Exposition is a little clunky as Xavier and Logan watch hidden camera footage (edited as cogently as a ROCKY montage) and discover Laura is called X23, a mutant engineered with Logan’s own genes in a secret gubmint lab. Hence, retractable double-claws in her forearms – and foot claws for added sass. Other mutant children are seen escaping the lab. X23’s quest: to rendezvous with them at a mutant haven called Eden, described… in an X-Men comic! Worlds collide as Logan denounces X23’s X-Men comics, “Maybe a quarter of it happened – and not this way…”

Both Xavier and X23 consider Logan her “father,” but Logan is not so quick to agree: “Look, kid. I’m not who you think I am!”

The gore is exceptional. A scene where Logan struggles against Xavier’s mental concussion waves, to kill a bunch of assailants in seeming “slow-motion.” His arm-katanas creamily injected through skulls and chests and bellies, flesh parting, blood gouting, illustrating how lethal those claws are. We have to imagine this is what was happening throughout Logan’s killing sprees – but off-camera. When he jumped off the balcony in X-MEN 2 and sliced into four assailants, they all died off-camera. Now we see the graphic consequences of having adamantium claws “that can slice through vanadium steel like butter” (whatever that means – Wolverine comics used to love that phrase).

And there is the inspirational fury of X23, that gives us a spark of hope that the legacy will live on. After all, in comics, X23 has already gone on to bear the code name Wolverine. And though Dafne Keen is only the age of Hit-Girl in KICK-ASS, her ferociousness stirs something feral in our loins [and is there any way I can say that WITHOUT sounding like a perve? I guess not…], with an acting maturity far beyond her pre-teen years. One can only speculate what the future holds for the Wolverine brand…

Road movie maximus, Xavier, Logan and X23 on the run, through car chases, bladed slaughter scenes and one very portentous interlude.

When a farmer’s horses escape a trailer on the highway, Xavier tells Logan to stop and help. Logan snarls, “Someone will come along.” Xavier: “Someone has come along.” He closes his eyes and psychically corrals the horses. Not only is this a poignant scene illustrating Xavier is not totally gone (he is kept medicated – in his words, “pharmaceutically castrated”), it is a lesson in behavior for this fractured, polarized society. Yes, you can walk past someone in need, knowing “someone else” will come to their aid – but you are here RIGHT NOW. Why not you? If not now, when?

Stopping for the night at the farmer’s home (Eriq La Salle, Elise Neal and Quincy Fouse as the family), we experience a quiet respite from the bloodsport. Soothing. The polar opposite of adamantium murder and frenzied decapitation. And Xavier tells Logan, “This is what Life looks like. A family, people who love you. You should take a moment, feel it.” Logan brushes it off with a grunt.

Thus, Logan’s dying breath can be taken two ways: “This is what it feels like…”

Some think Logan is referring to dying, a condition he has been deprived of over centuries, yet if we hearken back to Xavier’s words, and add the final whimper of X23 as she holds him close, “Daddy…” we see the movie has come a long way to rend our hearts. We realize that the brusque Logan, guarded, lonely, selfish and wary (“Bad shit happens to people I care about”), in his last flickering moments, experienced Life as Xavier described – the elation of caring for someone else and having them care for you.

Probably only one moment of levity in this almost depressing saga: After delivering Laura to Eden, Logan lies unconscious… while the kids of Eden, to his chagrin, trim his beard into the half-beard/sideburns we know so well. It’s a laugh for them because they only know him from the comics – a legend, a wraith in yellow panties and Astro Boy hairstyle; and it’s a laugh for us – to at last recognize our berserker hero, wolfen ‘do and pumped in fury as he locomotives headlong into his final battle.

---

Wolverine, the Marvel superhero character created in 1974, will surely be back on the silver screen, in another incarnation in an alternate future, although I doubt anyone will inhabit the role as legitimately as Jackman. Seeing him bid goodbye to the character is as saddening as if the character is dying for good. For no matter the younger actors that will don the sideburns henceforth, no matter the swankier production values, the poutier muscles, the funkier hairdo, the grander adventures – this iteration of Wolverine is lost to us forever.

LOGAN is like a ménage a trois between SHANE, TRUE GRIT and UNFORGIVEN, but mostly TRUE GRIT (a hardened gunslinger protecting his young charge, no matter the cost), not SHANE (a hired gun helping landowners, with a young boy on the periphery of the story), even though Laura and Xavier watch the latter in a hotel room, Shane’s dialogue neatly summing up Logan’s regrets, “There’s no living with a killing. There’s no going back from one.” (In the final scene, Laura repeats Shane’s words verbatim, that he utters to the strange mannequin boy, about “running home to mother.”)

The theme of every killing taking its toll is presupposing you have a conscience. Though Logan has a conscience, Laura does not. She has been raised as a sociopath, so Shane’s words do not hold any resonance for her, even though the filmmakers (writers Scott Frank, Michael Green and James Mangold, also director) would like to believe they are emulating an old time classic.

Many were disappointed in Wolverine’s first solo outing, 2009’s overwrought X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE (directed by Gavin Hood), but the film was not bad – it just lacked the gravitas we expected from a character so damaged and dark; then James Mangold’s THE WOLVERINE (2013) was praised for “getting it right,” even though in retrospect, we realize that film only retained the character names from Wolverine’s first intensely psychological solo adventure and none of the gravitas. Now, Mangold sharpens his claws and actually does snikt it out of the park with LOGAN. Gravitas an’ all.

X-eunt in X-cellence.

END

 A stranger Ranger.

The Lone Ranger (in radio, television and film) has made Gioachino Rossini’s galloping theme so famous that the term “intellectual” has been defined as “a man who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.”
— Wikipedia.

No one’s a stranger to the Ranger. Popular in entertainment media since the 1930s, if you are alive right now, you were exposed to The Lone Ranger at some point in your life.

The story of the masked Texas Ranger who seeks Justice with his Native American sidekick has always been a pretty simplistic endeavor, which probably explains the Lone Ranger’s popularity. I remember the cartoon best. Straightforward. Baddies were one-dimensionally bad, and good guys were just as one-dimensionally good. As far as I can remember, The Lone Ranger was never shadowed by the darkness of vigilantism or moral ambiguity. Even the irony of him operating outside the Law to bring Justice is lost on his demo.

THE LONE RANGER 2013 retains this same simplistic notion of bad and good, with a little origin story thrown in, cartoonish action pieces, and a lot of people holding a gun on someone else and talking instead of shooting.

The team that brought us the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN create this kids’ adventure tale (writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, and director Gore Verbinski); thus, a kid is the voice of the audience. The tale is told in flashback, after a young boy (Mason Cook) at a 1939 San Francisco fair, dressed in Lone Ranger duds, visits the Wild West exhibit and encounters an ancient Tonto (Johnny Depp) as one of the exhibits. Tonto spins a tale of what really happened 60 years ago, deconstructing the Lone Ranger legend. So the movie proper (set in 1869) is interrupted jarringly at intervals by these scenes of the boy and old Tonto, the boy voicing some plot hiccup or mythology we’d all like to point out at that juncture.

It’s like the movie is being too self-effacing; playing devil’s advocate with itself too harshly; like it’s attributing outlandish plot elements to the ravings of a senile Injun. And that old adage “If you don’t like yourself, how can anyone else like you?” works against the filmmakers, because these segments prove they do not have faith in their own product; that it needs some kind of self-conscious apologia. They seem to scoff at the childishness of the Western format and the unblemished integrity of the lead character.

Armie Hammer is the new chiseled face of the Ranger aka John Reid, a lawyer who returns from the big city to bring law to the frontier via the gavel, not the gun. Riding with his Sheriff brother (James Badge Dale), their posse is ambushed by the Butch Cavendish gang (William Fichtner). The whole posse is killed, with Reid left for dead. Tonto, also on the trail of Cavendish (believing he is a Wendigo spirit, throwing nature out of balance), finds the wounded Reid and, at the prompting of a mythic white horse, nurses Reid back to health.

Tonto urges Reid to wear a mask whilst seeking his “killers,” the rationale being: they think him dead, “better to stay that way.” Which spurs the running gag, “What’s with the mask?” A very modern phrasing that rankles on the “legend” aspect.

Tom Wilkinson is the railroad baron, laying track through hostile Comanche territory. (Wasn’t he the railroad baron laying track through hostile territory in THE GHOST AND THE DARKNESS?) Ruth Wilson is the Michelle Monaghan lookalike whom Wilkinson threatens with rape and whom Reid crushes on – it’s Disney, so any chance that we’ll see rape or sex is dashed before it ever progresses to hand-holding. Helena Bonham Carter (veteran of starring alongside Depp) is a whore. And here, she plays a whore. Barry Pepper is a cavalryman with a mungabush to rival Custer’s. And Stephen Root is a councilman with a mungabush that puts Pepper’s to shame.

Saginaw Grant, legendary Native American elder, states the most profound truth, when told that attacking the white man will cause war and ultimately the death of his people: “We are already ghosts to them…”

THE LONE RANGER is best appreciated by younger folk not picky about the cartoonish nature of its bombastic action, where people escape explosions right next to them, and walk away without a bruise from massive falls that would kill a lesser Wile E. Coyote. Some of the stunts and gags are original, and the soundtrack will eventually cascade into the majestic gallop of the William Tell Overture during the final audacious chase scene. But this finale, atop two trains on two different tracks, rolling alongside each other along cliff faces, is especially made for that young audience, as I lost count of how many times I wanted to punch the movie, with its coupling and decoupling of carriages, crashes and explosions and splinterings, shooting across moving carriages, jumping on and off train roofs and generally doing all those things that only Bugs Bunny and the Roadrunner can get away with.

This Western can’t quite figure if it wants to be a comedy with high action or a statement about villainy told comically. While it’s trying to decide, it keeps losing favor in many ways:

• The constant regression to the museum display with old Tonto and the young kid.
• A WHITE MAN playing a RED MAN. (Is it 1956 up in this biznatch?) Well, unlike Burt Lancaster’s APACHE, the producers don’t pretend the movie is high art, and Depp is having fun creating another eccentric role. YET… there are numerous sad nods to the Native Americans’ cruel treatment at the hands of white “pioneers” – a message that would be infinitely more impactful if a WHITE MAN were not playing a RED MAN!
• Saginaw dies – at the hands of Pepper’s mungabush. A tragic moment that led nowhere and was not teachable or plot-dependent. Maybe Pepper’s character might see how cruel it was to kill old folk in the name of the railway, but no. The moment is simply cruel.
• There are many contraventions of canon, such as “kemo sabe.” Upon researching this phrase that Tonto has used on the Lone Ranger for nearly a century, its meaning is still in contention, taken to mean anything from “trusted friend” to “soggy bush.” Tonto tells Reid it means “wrong brother” – because he wanted to save Reid’s brother, who was a better frontiersman than Reid, a book-learnin’ fella.

No one’s a stranger to the Ranger. But this Ranger is a stranger to us. THE LONE RANGER deconstructs the legend so thoroughly that the Ranger comes off looking like an “unwitting” hero, not the instigator of justice. Tonto is clearly the brains behind the outfit, while the Ranger is led by the aquiline nose like a righteous, vapid blonde. (Hammer played this role once before (in MIRROR MIRROR); if he’s not careful, he’s going to end up Brendan Fraser.) This rejiggering of the partnership’s power structure was not to deconstruct legend, but because it just looks screwy in this age of pc tolerance – for a red man to devote himself so unquestioningly to a white man like a – ahem – slave… In the early 1900’s, there was no question that the “noble savage” would aid the righteous white man as he trampled the beloved frontier into “civilization,” but now, that inherent subservience doesn’t wash. Hence, Tonto is boss, and on his own mission.

And even THIS doesn’t quite wash. Because the underlying reason Depp is cast as Tonto is because they couldn’t realistically cast a Native American who would be lording over an actual white man. No audience would stand for it! That’s how deep the racism river runs! They HAD to cast a white man in the role of red man because he was written to be the leader of the duo. And we can’t have an ACTUAL red man as boss now, can we, racist America?

The one time the Ranger rears up on his horse with that famous cry, “Hi-Yo, Silver!” a startled Tonto berates him, “Don’t ever do that again!” With the film’s rancid critical reception, it’s a safe bet he won’t…

END