Goldeneye meets Thunderball.

If VOLCANO was the fun fun fun volcano movie of 1997, DANTE’S PEAK was its serious big brother. That doesn’t stop it being unintentionally funny.

Geological mystery abounds on whether the mountain shadowing bucolic tourist town Dante’s Peak will erupt or not. Yuh think? Yet Pierce Brosnan wastes his overqualified suaveté as geologist Harry Dalton, sniffing for sulphur and prospective explosions, whilst himself trying to sniff and explode in the man-pants of ugly town mayor Linda Hamilton. (Is it just me or did her muscles in TERMINATOR 2 alleviate the weird face?)

Pre-empting VOLCANO by a mere two months, there is more science, more drama, more romance here than in Tommy Lee Jones’s bombastic vehicle. And in place of the leathered shoe-face of Jones, more Pierce – yes please!

Bathing with lava

Of COURSE the mountain explodes (did I ruin it for anyone?), and all boredom breaks loose. Running and Screaming with the usual tropes: the grandmother who won’t leave her mountain home, then ends up sacrificing herself for her grandkids (when she hops out of a boat into supposedly boiling water to help steer it to shore, yet looks like she’s just stepped into a pool that’s not heated quite right at the old folks home); Harry’s geologist boss (Charles Hallahan) who disagrees with him, who is proved wrong and dies, his crew watching his van being swept away like they’re watching a physics lecture; there’s even a dog leaping to safety. I hate that. I hate that so much.

And don’t forget the spindly, delicate robot surveyor that can’t even walk steadily on flat ground, sent down the 60-degree slope of the caldera, which it descends at a rate of We’ll-Be-Here-Till-Christmas. Of COURSE it malfunctions halfway down, precipitating a decidedly reckless doughy geologist going ill-advisedly off-rope to fix the useless piece of crap. Of COURSE he breaks his leg during a tremor that rattles everyone’s eruption nerves except their boss’s, who promptly doesn’t put the town on alert.

His death in the van is pretty humorous, but Grandma wins the Funniest Death award here.

END

Immovable Force meets Unstoppable Accent.

For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.
— John F. Kennedy, address to the nation, June 1963 after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The people were real, the crisis was deadly, the decisions were world-shaking. And the accents were abominable.

THIRTEEN DAYS is the taut story behind the maddening politics of the John F. Kennedy administration during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when the world held its breath as Russia moved nukes into Cuba and America played chicken with them.

From the book by Philip D. Zelikow and Ernest R. May, The Kennedy Tapes – Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis, director Roger Donaldson and screenwriter David Self capture every sweat-soaked moment of the Machiavellian politics yet keep it understandable, airtight and kinetic, with the filmstock often reverting to black and white to emulate the iconic period look.

Kevin Costner is presidential advisor Kenny O’Donnell, whose Kennedy-clique accent at first seems over the top, but when everyone is vocalizing at that level of absurdity we’re soon inured to it.

Bruce Greenwood is John Fitzgerald Kennedy, uncanny when the light hits him the right way, but then, I never “knew” Kennedy like older pundits knew him; I’m basing my visual knowledge on those iconic news clips (“ask not what your country can do for you”) and photos (White House portrait, arms crossed; at the podium, inauguration; in the limousine before the assassination…)

In a time when all women wore beehives and men folded their arms across their chests more than they had to for maximum iconic photo effect, the thirteen day standoff finds President Kennedy battling against his own military who want to invade invade invade (the only solution those lunkheads know or understand), and against the Russian diplomats stonewalling him on the reason for the missiles.

The inoperative missiles – when operative – would have the capacity to level American cities in minutes. How dare they?! Don’t the Russians know that only America is allowed to point missiles at other countries?

With the aid of brother Bobby (Steven Culp) and back room deals with the Russians (that were not revealed until nearly three decades after the crisis), John F. reached a non-military resolution, saved face and became an American Hero.

And all with that abominable accent.

END

Darwin never looked so good.

It’s ALIEN with a spectacular pair of natural knockers.

Designed by H.R. Giger – the alien species, not the knockers – a half-human, half-alien life form called Sil (Natasha Henstridge in her human form) escapes from a SETI facility and goes on a rampage fucking everyone. In the Biblical sense. And then fucking them in the Hollywood sense.

Spreading her alien seed, doing what every species on Earth has been designed to do by genetic engineering since life began, somehow she is regarded as doing something wrong. Only because she is not of the human species.

And it only confuses the issue when non-humans have such great knockers.

Specialists are called in to hunt down the alien: Michael Madsen as the Tough Guy, Alfred Molina as The Dork, Marg Helgenberger as The Hot Scientist and Forest Whitaker as The Empath, all led by Ben Kingsley The Brain.

SPECIES hangs our credibility by a thread by initially mating human DNA with alien material to spawn Sil, but we can live with that in a haze of scientific jargon and mungus ta-tas; that thread is cut when The Empath is introduced, tracking mud all over the science and jerking all over the jargon. Whitaker is only here so that the alien hunters can glean clues to Sil’s movements without hard evidence and stay hot on her hot tail. That spoils an otherwise good story centered around the most basic tenet of natural selection.

Sex.

The message at the core of SPECIES is that every living thing’s purpose is to mate; continuance for the genetic code. It’s what Marg Helgenberger aches to do with Michael Madsen all movie.

We’ve grown so inured to that mating message with all our displacement and duplicity and political correctness that when Sil asks a captive woman why she is here on Earth, the woman tearfully laments, “I don’t know!” And people don’t! They think they are here to make money, to worship false gods, to get married, work a job, buy a house, blah blah…

Writer Dennis Feldman got it right – the purpose of life is to propagate more life. And the organism in this story trying to copulate copiously is designed correctly as well – she is the most alluring thing on two gams. Genetic engineering at its best. Henstridge is so strikingly beautiful, there is nothing else onscreen when she glides past. Helgenberger is a tasty specimen herself, but in this movie, Henstridge is in a league of her own.

The message gets a little lost when the person on the team who eventually has mind-blowing, unprotected sex with Sil is The Dork. Who promptly explodes with alien bodybursting.

There’s the other message: the more beautiful the chick, the more painful the disease.

END

Like A Bat Out Of Invercargill…

To Go Faster: that was the single-minded purpose of Herbert J. “Burt” Munro (1899 – 1978), whose life story was an “inspirational movie” just waiting to happen.

World’s Fastest Cucumber

The tagline boasts, “based on one hell of a true story,” justifiably it would seem, as Munro – a fearless, free-spirited New Zealand rider who broke land speed records in his 60s – was one hell of a character.

THE WORLD’S FASTEST INDIAN is the quixotic tale of Munro’s first trek from his provincial home town of Invercargill, New Zealand, to Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats, to tilt at the land speed record in what he hopes will become The World’s Fastest Indian – his modified 1920 Indian Scout motorcycle. Reading like the archetypal Hollywood tearjerker, it is fortunate that archives of Munro interviews and riding footage still exists, to corroborate that his tall tale was indeed a real life template for underdog movies.

Anthony Hopkins gives a startling performance as Munro (for his utter divergence from all things Hannibal or Uptight Butler), paying supreme tribute to Munro by burying himself in a role which is part absent-minded professor, part master mechanic, all nutjob – the type of guy who, when told to mow his thigh-high lawn, torches it with gasoline, not through any malice, but with an ingenuousness that would somehow endear him to all he came in contact with.

As with any “true” story, director-writer Roger Donaldson (whose resumé is a laundry list of recognizable films: THE BOUNTY, NO WAY OUT, COCKTAIL, SPECIES, DANTE’S PEAK) composites events and characters to squeeze Munro’s storied life into 127 minutes of fish out of water hell on wheels. Lifting many of the anecdotes and dialogue from Munro himself (from a documentary Donaldson directed in 1973, which appears on the DVD: OFFERINGS TO THE GOD OF SPEED), Donaldson admits to Munro’s legend blurring over the years, “There were many stories that I’d heard that just could not have been true and then there were stories that I knew to be true that were hard to believe.”

The numerous cameos ably support Munro’s need for speed : Chris Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Paul Rodriguez, Christopher Lawford, with notable appearances by Annie Whittle and Diane Ladd, to further the fact that “dirty old men need love too.”

Accompanied by the Indian he worked on for decades like a lover, Munro’s quest would see him paying his way across the Pacific as cook onboard a tramp steamer, using a log as a wheel when the desert highway claims his makeshift trailer, choking down a Native American’s gift of powdered dog’s balls for his prostate, stealing petrol from the official race supply, letting his tailpipe char his calf during a record attempt rather than stopping, battling his own ailing heart, butting heads with regulation-raunchy officials and – the most horrible trial of all – spending a night in Hollywood.

Was Munro such a yokel that, instead of finding a hotel in Long Beach (where he would pick up his bike from Customs the next day), he would rather trek all the way north into Hollywood for the night just to “see film stars”? Apparently so. With scenes that read like a clunky CROCODILE DUNDEE, Munro winds up at the Flamingo Sunset hotel, promptly getting ripped off by a fake flower-girl, propositioned by an old hooker and meeting a transvestite within the space of two minutes. (When I first moved to Hollywood, it took me a whole week to get taken by a small-time hustler, propositioned by a skanky hooker and befriend a she-male.)

Cutting down on the weight of his bike – and against all regulations – Munro saw no need even for brakes (“I’m planning on going, not stopping”) or a parachute (“I’m not planning on bailing out”). From the poverty-stricken, ascetic life he led, it was no wonder he was eternally ready to die with his boots on. If Munro had nothing else, he had balls. And plenty of ’em. Which accounts for his simple philosophy, “You live more in five minutes on a bike like this going flat out than some people live in a lifetime.” And also accounts for the trail of bodacious, wrinkled squeeze he left in his wake.

For those who believe in planetary alignments and other such nonsense, the whole solar system must have conspired to aid Burt Munro in those days leading to the 1962 Bonneville Speed Week, as fortuitous event after fortuitous event nudges him towards his goal, everyone’s heart melting over Burt’s cause (from competitors to race officials alike), creating a syrupy Disney contagion that seems non-believable at times, but which must have some basis in reality, as the shattered records are testament to this broke, obsessive, neighborhood nuisance becoming a living legend.

Some of Munro’s land speed records still stand to this day.

It’s a sobering thought that there must be thousands of fanatical old tinkerers out there who obsess over seemingly ridiculous, esoteric pastimes, any of which, with the right set of circumstances, could land them in history books.

Burt Munro just happened to be the wrong man in the right place at the fastest time.

END