Blow me the money.

Mel Gibson is billionaire airline owner Tom Mullen, whose son gets kidnapped in RANSOM. Rather than play to the kidnappers’ ransom demands, Mullen’s status allows him to go on national TV to offer the 2-million dollars ransom money as reward for any info on his son’s kidnappers – the ransom money becomes bounty money!

Serpentine Gary Sinise is Jimmy Shaker, heading the kidnapping ring, which also features Liev Schreiber, Lili Taylor and Donnie Wahlberg, all doing a vapid job of being hardened kidnappers.

Crazy-eyed Delroy Lindo is the FBI agent helping Tom and his wife (Rene Russo) find their boy, while trying not to act too much like Laurence Fishburne.

Mel and Rene do some fine traumatized acting – we really feel they’ve lost a son – but there’s nothing like Mel’s “tragic face”; you know that look he gets like he’s one feather-push away from going total Riggs.

Ron Howard directs this well-made thriller. First two acts are compelling, especially the twist of turning the ransom into bounty – which sets all the kidnappers against each other and twists Jimmy Shaker’s panties no end. But the last scene ruins any impact of True Vengeance; even robs us of that satisfying feeling of Justice – and I mean True Justice, not The Law’s milky version of it.

It may not be politically correct to “wish” vengeance on someone, even if they’re bad guys – but the Hollywood/MPAA staple that makes it imperative that bad guys should draw first and ONLY THEN be shot down by the good guys is becoming tiresome. (In the original cut – Han fired first!) End result is always the same – bad guy gets killed – but the methods of execution are so painfully pc transparent.

In the film’s climax, Shaker is fist-beaten by Mullen – justifiably – then the cops show up and force Mullen to drop a gun he has trained on Shaker. Even though Mullen has every right to shoot this scum who kidnapped his boy, The Law and our supposed Moral Compass tells us he shouldn’t, tells us the criminal should be wrung through the judicial system for punishment. All that becomes moot when the beaten and bloodied Shaker suddenly draws a hidden gun on Our Hero and Crazy-Eyed Lindo pumps the perp full of lead. Case Closed.

The resolution is the same as if Mullen had killed him, but now we all “feel better” about ourselves because the criminal drew on Our Hero behind his back. Y’know, if you play out this willowy movie rationalization in real life, someone’s gonna get themselves killed for all the wrong reasons.

Where’s Riggs when we need him?

END

Ground Control to Major Tom
Take your protein pills and put your mascara on…

Mission To Farce.

MISSION TO MARS stands every bit as tall as CAPRICORN ONE in the Ignorant Space Movie category, exhibiting so many misdemeanors, misrepresentations, misapplied physics laws, mistaken facts, missteps, mysterious logic, and misapprehension of spacefaring dialect that one wonders which second-grader took three months off school to helm it.

Brian de Palma – the dark force behind 1983’s SCARFACE – appends his name as director. But I think he’s lying.

Starring Don Cheadle as the Crazy Black Guy, Gary Sinise (wearing more makeup than David Bowie on the Ziggy Stardust tour), Tim Robbins as The Tragic Apple-Pie Hero, Connie Nielsen as The Chick and Jerry O’Connell as The Fat Kid from STAND BY ME.

Poffy roving redundantly.

From its first space scenes, the film trumpets its ignorance, showing a remote rover aiding a manned mission on Mars. Audiences are so conditioned to robot helpers in space cinema (since Will Robinson and Dr. Smith leaned so heavily on theirs for comedic side-kickery in LOST IN SPACE of the 60s) that they do not realize this particular rover’s superfluity. Rovers are reconnoiter craft for unmanned missions – consequently, this 26-million-dollar redundancy would not exist in a space agency whose motto became “faster, cheaper, better” to appease the ignorant, impatient public and the even more ignorant, penny-pinching government. (That only two of these three aspects can exist simultaneously is another issue altogether. That is, you can have faster and cheaper, but it won’t be better; cheaper and better, but it won’t be delivered faster, etc.)

And from there, it’s downhill fast.

MISSION TO MARS is so machine-gun riddled with one discrepancy and fallacy after the next, that absolutely zero enjoyment can be gleaned from the storyline, performances or the space or planet backdrop effects.

Crazy Black Guy gets stranded on Mars. Blatantly throwing logic, budget, orbital mechanics and NASA protocol to the pigs, Apple-Pie, The Chick, Fat Kid and Ziggy are sent to rescue him. Another “launch window” to Mars is years hence, yet these American Pie Heroes – working on the fact that everyone in the film and the audience regard the launch window as a McGuffin – go anyway. Launching outside a “launch window” is not a “dramatic element that illustrates dedication and Team Spirit” – it is an impossibility. Without gravity assists (by flybys of Venus and Earth), a spacecraft already constructed for such a journey would have to be retrofitted to house inordinate amounts of additional propellant, construction exigencies alone putting the mission outside budget and payload constraints… No one can just declare their heroic intentions and have everything ready to go by Sunday – which is basically how Ziggy achieves his launch; to save someone openly considered dispensable by the space agency (who train scores of astronauts for the same missions, for just such eventualities), who may be a corpse anyway, considering all radio contact with him was lost.

You lost me at Houston, We Have a Problem.

NASA would more likely launch a mission to retrieve its ROVER, which has more intelligence in its antenna than all the astronauts combined.

Our rescuers discover a giant Face on Mars – that old 70’s superstition from the Viking 1 probe photo. In a space age where we have already disproved its existence, the film-makers opt to pander to conspiracy theorists, pseudo-scientists, astrologers and imbeciles who shun scientific evidence like the mystical “evil” they have been inculcated to believe is tangible. In a technological era that possesses extraterrestrial soft-landing spacecraft (Mars Pathfinder, launched 1996) and high-altitude surveillance (Mars Global Surveyor, launched 1996), given the fictional year of this movie (supposedly 2020), even if we need to regard The Face as “real” for the movie’s dramatic purposes, it should have been discovered decades before these astro-nots landed.

Instead, the movie ramps further into idiocy.

Near Mars orbit, the rescuers abandon their exploding ship (more obscene fallacies accompany the ship explosion than can be catalogued here); though, leaving in a dead fall, they still achieve enough orbital velocity to capture a supply module already in orbit. (Again, absolutely no respect is afforded physics laws, as Apple Pie fires up his jets and points directly at the module to catch it – but with the module in a lower orbit, he needs to fire his jets against the direction of his higher orbit to attain that lower orbit.)

Upon impossibly reaching the module, Pie goes flying past it as if he was in an atmosphere, setting up the most heinous crime this movie could commit on the unquestioning minds of its ape-like audience:

With Pie’s MMU (Manned Maneuvering Unit) out of fuel, Chick, supposedly a trained astronaut, uses the same incorrect directional jet burns and massive overacting to try to save him. Pie tells her, “You can’t catch me with your MMU, honey. Their jets are designed for attitude control, not travel.” Information which probably should have been learned at the Astronaut Academy, dontcha think? After the mathematical impossibility of saving Pie is explained to her like an idiot-child, she stops and – shoots a tether cable at him! Remember that silly thing we learned in grade school called Newton’s Third Law of Motion: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”? Taking for granted that Chick has miraculously attained orbital velocity of 28,000 kph, after shooting the tether, she retains her relative position, steady as a rock, in the vacuum of space – breaking one of the most fundamental physics laws, while everything else around her continues to adhere to those same laws! No one told Newton that enough overacting piled on the Third Law would negate its physics.

Speciously landing on Mars, Crazy Black Guy is found (spearing fish and talking to a volleyball named Wilson), whereupon ensue conversations about DNA that only a screenwriter with absolutely no biology knowledge could appreciate. Their super-redundant rover leads them into the Face on Mars, where they encounter a tall alien being wearing a flowing number that would look fabulous on Barbra Streisand.

Of course, helmets – as in all space movies – are completely arbitrary. Who knows why NASA spends so much useless time engineering environment suits when every planet in the universe – as LOST IN SPACE taught us – already has a breathable atmosphere? Before we can even ingest the next twenty stupidities that the movie flings at us like ape-poo, helmets on Mars are eschewed for the purpose of contractually appeasing the pretty movie stars and their agents who insist on verifiable screen time. (How else to prove it if there’s that unfashionable helmet obscuring the star’s $500 hairstyle?)

Barbra shows them a solar system hologram – with all the planets orbiting in the wrong direction (proving that there are idiot screenwriters even on Mars) – and a nifty morphing computer program which she bought from Michael Jackson, showing that Life on Earth was seeded from Life on Mars. Well, that accounts for all those Jerry Springer guests.

Every aspect of the DNA scenes, zero-gee scenes and orbital mechanics scenes is completely blundered from the dialogue to the action to the fallacious physics laws which go in and out of play as the plot requires; spacecraft do not emit vapor trails; sound does not propagate in a vacuum; galaxies don’t look that way in visible light; the atmosphere analyzer on Ziggy’s forearm shows “Nitrogen 56% Oxygen 20% Trace Gasses 1%” – the film-makers are so lazy that they do not even bother to make the numbers add up to 100 percent!

Movie writers always hide behind the pretext that movies are “only entertainment” and should be taken less seriously. Yet what kind of entertainment can be gleaned from a movie with this much blatant disregard for the most basic tenets of reality (such as: Humans Can’t Breath On Mars)? Why should society extol education and learning when this demeaning and insidious disrespect for learning is lauded with heathen funding and absolutely criminal promulgation? If they say they are appealing to “the masses,” how much of an insult is it to regard The Masses as this imbecilic? Unfortunately, there will be many who, being too young or underprivileged to have afforded an opportunity for education in basic physics, will enjoy this film – and thus the dumbing down of a generation acquires its target long before that generation even knows what hit it.

Every scientific fact that mankind has strove so hard to identify is treated like so much dross by the ignoramuses who forged this worthless and useless, deformed, retarded thing they call a movie, that their greatest punishment will be having to see their names attached to it for millennia to come.

END

The Greatest Successful Failure of all Time.

O, swear not by the moon, the fickle moon, the inconstant moon…
— Shakespeare, “Romeo and Juliet.”

As I watch Ron Howard‘s APOLLO 13, I smell that familiar kerosene funk in the air: solid rocket boosters firing, RP-1 propellant and liquid hydrogen surging, flux capacitor giga-watting – yes, it’s the Tom Hanks Oscar-Machine chugging rugged in red-carpet mode.

Apoffo 13

Hanks is Jim Lovell, captain of APOLLO 13, launched by NASA in April 1970; the planned third manned mission to the Moon, aborted when an oxygen tank exploded mid-journey (precipitating the portentous line, “Houston, we have a problem!”), turning their Moon mission into a rescue mission and their landing module into a squeezy freezy lifeboat.

Thank goodness Tom Hanks was onboard!

Howard, we have a problem.

Trying to film a story with so many integral characters is impossible with a camera-magnet like Hanks tooling around on set. Our media-driven lifestyle denotes that “star-power” dictates character importance in a movie, so though Hanks may play a prominent role as one of three astronauts imperiled by the spacecraft malfunction, Every – Single – Member – of NASA is equally worthy of the limelight blindingly focused on Mr. Fantastic.

I’m not a Hanks Hater, but I do feel that “rescue credit” is unduly focused on Statuette Boy. In the real world, credit for the rescue of the seemingly-doomed Apollo 13 craft is dispersed throughout hundreds of personnel, each of them a Hero: not least, the Flight Directors, Gene Kranz, Glynn Lunney and John Aaron (Kranz played by Ed Harris, the most notable actor of the FD’s, thereby implying he was the most “important” – once again, sigh). Lunney, Kranz’s relief FD, is stoic Marc McClure, and Aaron – the FD who identified “power” as key factor in the life-saving stakes, thereby engineering the decision to “turn off everything but the essentials” – is fleshed out by the clinical-tastic Loren Dean. Astronaut Ken Mattingly (dropped from the original Apollo 13 crew for medical reasons) is Gary Sinise, all suave intensity.

Lovell’s crew are Fred Haise (Bill Paxton, in his patented “Game over, man!” swoon) and John Swigert (ever-dependable Kevin Bacon, whose presence in this movie with so many other A-Listers puts him at least “two degrees” closer to about 436 other actors…).

Unlike the DeLorean DMC-12, or the LZ 129 Hindenburg, or the RMS Titanic – all failures on a grand scale, all seemingly trespassing on virgin technology and future advancement, with each failure marking the end of an era for their respective milieux – the “failure” of the 1970 Apollo 13 lunar mission aided in advancing space-faring dialect and paved the future with skyward momentum for the International Space Station, the Space Transportation System (Shuttles), Mars Soft Landers and beyond…

There will be other space projects and who knows, I might be part of them… We learn through failure.
— Jim Lovell, from his diary, after rejection by NASA for the 1959 Mercury program.

Disabled by a wiring malfunction that led to an explosion that leaked their oxygen into space, Apollo 13’s prime directive shifted from “frolic on moon at taxpayers’ expense” to “stay alive, no matter what occurs.” Technical problems compound, each adversity overlapping the previous one, with the spacecraft crew and Mission Control united against the exigencies of the failing mission itself.

Director Howard intelligently chose to have nothing more than true-to-life events provide the drama of APOLLO 13; as obvious as this may sound, very few “true” or “inspired by” films refrain from inserting Hollywood subplot and cliché to ramp up the stakes – with this tale, Howard did not need to. The phrase, “You can’t make this shit up!” springs to mind, as all the “dramatic movie formulae” were present without even trying: ticking clocks, family stakes, technological adversity as villain, all encapsulated in the real life tale of three astronauts who missed the moon but unwittingly hit a jackpot…

Had the Apollo 13 crewmen died during their rescue attempt, American fortitude would have suffered a blow infinitely worse than the beating it took when either of the lightning-quick Shuttle disasters stunned the nation. With the Shuttles, it was over before anyone had time to realize problems had even arisen. With Apollo 13, manifest effort was expended over the course of four days; a public vigil during an avalanche of adversity that would have broken the back of America if the crew had not survived.

And in the surviving, gradually attaining a success (read as fame) far greater than any of the men who actually trod the Moon’s surface (barring Armstrong and Aldrin). Proof? Tell me: who were the three astronauts of 1971’s Apollo 14? (Not even Apollo 11 (1969) had the honor of having a pinball machine created after them.) Responding to the notion that this could be “the worst disaster NASA’s ever experienced,” Kranz retorts, “I believe this is going to be our finest hour.” He was right.

An exemplary aspect of this film is the unobtrusiveness of its computer-generated visuals. Though Georgie Lucas believes he has the monopoly on CGI-filmmaking (simply because he owns the company that icings a large percentage of A-List blockbuster), Ron Howard illustrates – via Digital Domain’s finesse – how to incorporate CGI into one’s movie with class and taste. Quite simply – this is as good as it gets! Every star-field, exterior shot and moon view is seamless subtlety; without even realizing it, we see new footage of Apollo 13 rising on the Saturn V pillar of fire; Lovell’s fantasy of descending to the Moon’s surface (made ever more poignant by the fact that he has lost the opportunity) captures the sheer, crazy joy of raking one’s fingers through regolith and gazing skywards at a gibbous Earth-rise… No need for dandy villains, exotic beasts or killer droids, Howard’s judicious use of CGI captures everything that Lucas’s imprudent abuse lost – true magnificence and awe.

Lucas directed Howard in 1973’s AMERICAN GRAFFITI. In sooth, the Padawan has become the Master.

It is a testament to the talent of this Master that he could fashion such an involving movie from three guys stranded in a refrigerator for a week and a pack of Reservoir Dogs jargoning at outdated computers.

If not for those Apollo 13 “failures” (Lovell, Haise and Swigert), Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa and Edgar Mitchell of Apollo 14 might have had a more glorious day in the sun – or the Moon, as it were…

END

My Favorite Martian versus Garth Brooks.

This story should have stayed in our heads. Reading Stephen King‘s daunting 1000+ page The Stand (restored version, of course), nothing “visual” could intercept our imagination driving onto the wastelands of a dead earth, seeing an unseeable being (Flagg) in our mind’s eye, envisioning the disturbing horrors of the Lincoln Tunnel gridlock, the appendix operation, the suicides and rapes and mean killings.

The Green Miles

To the chagrin of a billion readers, director Mick Garris and the tome’s author himself, King (as executive producer, screenwriter, and actor), offer us a vapid TV visualization of the book, diminishing all its epic impact.

A super-flu has decimated the bulk of humanity and two camps (one Good, led by Mother Abigail in Colorado, one Eeevil, led by Randall Flagg in – where else? – Vegas) amass devotees to stage a Final Battle.

This six-hour mini-series, a direly obvious television production, gives us an intelligent A-Lister as Stu Redman, the tacit leader of the group (Gary Sinise, working his Mini-Eastwood Method), Ray Walston (who still can’t shake that MY FAVORITE MARTIAN Method), Miguel Ferrer (great in anything, here Flagg’s right-hand man), two Brat Packers right at home in TV Land (Rob Lowe and Molly Ringwald’s Lips), and Stephen King himself (playing against type, as a character with an IQ greater than his shoe size, doing a very passable imitation of an actor). Though Ed Harris and Kathy Bates phone in cameos, the production is hobbled by a clutch of talent-challenged aspirin ad veterans that round out the cast.

And the bad guy? The incarnation of hell-on-earth whose visage people could not cast their gaze upon? – a country singer with a mullet! Maybe King made a mistake in naming his menace “Randall Flagg.” Who could tremble before a villain who answers to “Randy”? If Jeff Goldblum (as rumored) had accepted the role of Flagg, we might have had a respectable screen-demon on our hands – instead, the movie miscasts Jamey Sheridan as the Dark Man of our nightmares: a toe-tappin’ redneck with a Def-Leppard-roadie hairdo. The only thing more sinful than Sheridan’s Huey Lewis mullet-palooza was his 80s fashion sense.

Leaning heavily on the delusional proselytizing of their matriarch, Mother Abigail (Ruby Dee), no one seemed to notice that the “epic quest” she entreats four characters to undertake “to make a Stand!” against Flagg’s evil achieves nothing that wasn’t going to transpire anyway. Flagg’s downfall was precipitated by inefficient management, insubordination and bad judgment in recruiting a loose cannon like Trashcan Man (a compulsive arsonist, played with lunatic scene-chewing by Matt Frewer), who delivers a nuclear weapon into the heart of Flagg’s congregation, only to have it set off by none other than the Hand Of God (whadaya know – a deus ex machina as a deus ex machina!). All these events had nothing to do with our rose-mouthed do-gooders and their half-assed jibes at Flagg, ultimately getting crucified for their troubles… Well, trusting to the wigged-out soothsaying of a raving old woman hallucinating from her mixture of Demerol, Cyclizine and down-home moonshine and traveling to The Dark Man’s lair with no plan, no resources, nothing but “the shirts on their backs” was bound to lead to the business end of a crucifix.

Even in the book, simply laughing in the face of the Bad Guy in order to cause empire-crumbling dissension was an obtuse disconnect; a tale so wonderfully kinetic and operatic – brick-walled when one realizes that the author himself had no clear notion on how to wrap that beargarden with any serious impact.

Ultimately, the actual “Stand” spoken of so reverently comprised of interminable walking scenes which amounted to padding, with Stu breaking his leg and sitting out the key plot scenes in a ditch. No one was allowed to drive, with no rational reasons given, other than “Mother Abigail said so.” And after all that meaningless walking – once the Old Testament God of Wrath goes Gomorrah on Vegas with His old-fashioned tabula rasa idealism – Stu boosts a car and drives back to Colorado!

Mother Abigail’s wholly erroneous precognition is surprisingly not even questioned by now and we surmise the townsfolk just want to cut their losses and move on, whilst retiring the old bat to a sanitarium. With her amorphous auguring and everyone else in the cast displaying bursts of psychic linkage whenever required to enhance the plot, the actual “boundaries” of these psychic powers is never delineated.

For example, Stu can “sense” when a character fatally crashes his bike, yet he couldn’t sense that same character building a bomb, premeditating destroying their community. In another case, after two of Flagg’s henchmen kill a Judge whom Flagg wanted alive, Flagg himself suddenly appears and flogs them to death – why didn’t he simply appear two minutes earlier and acquire the Judge himself?

King is justifiably proud of this work; what were once simply motes of his imagination, transferred to typewriter keys, now walking, breathing townsfolk. In a late scene, his joy at seeing “Stu!” and “Tom Cullen!” was heartfelt as their Creator, as well as his character happy for their safe return.

The book is more forgiving in its plot holes and inconsistencies, but that is more telling on the genius of the writer than the content of the tale itself.

END