The Stop Button
blogging by Andrew Wickliffe
Category: Sci-Fi
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Jurassic Park III is about a third of a movie. Even though it runs ninety minutes (minus however many minutes in end credits), there aren’t any characters and the running time is mostly spent on the action beats of a better movie. Instead of being a movie about genetically engineered dinosaurs left to their own…
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Total Recall opens with some of the best music Jerry Goldsmith has ever scored. It then moves on to a sci-fi sequence, set on Mars, and Verhoeven soon gets in his first animatronic head. There are a lot of animatronic heads, which get exposed to atmosphere and explode or get turned into grenades and so…
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Even though The Lost World: Jurassic Park is pretty bad, it features some of Steven Spielberg’s more interesting work as a director. It’s a b genre picture, with a huge budget and Spielberg directing it. It even has a cute King Kong reference. It’s a singular film in Spielberg’s filmography—even when he does a terrible…
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Two big things I noticed about Jurassic Park. First, it’s still a superior use of CG. It really shows how digital effects do not get better with technology or budget or whatever; being used by a good filmmaker makes all the difference. And Spielberg does a fine job with Jurassic Park. It’s an incredibly impersonal…
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Tron: Legacy is a little better than the first one (though the first one is so bad, it would be hard not to be). It does, however, share a very common trait–it’s best when the music is blaring. The Daft Punk score is wondrous and when the music’s going, Tron: Legacy works. Another asset is…
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How’s this one for a double standard? When director Robert Rodriguez made Desperado, he demanded a Mexican actress (Salma Hayek) play a Mexican character (against studio wishes). When producer Robert Rodriguez made Predators, he cast a Brazilian actress (Alice Braga) as an Israeli character… Braga’s fantastic in Predators, but really… why isn’t anyone crying foul?…
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Wow, I’ve never written about an Albert Pyun movie for the Stop Button? I hadn’t realized how lucky I’ve been over the last five years not to see one. Actually, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a Pyun movie as an adult. Dollman went straight to video. Some of it looks like it might…
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Buckaroo Banzai‘s greatest contribution to cinema–well, if it didn’t get Peter Weller the Robocop role at least–is as a warning against trying to adapt authors like Thomas Pynchon to motion pictures. Banzai goes out of its way–the Pynchon references are well-known, to the point Pynchon even referenced Banzai in a novel (Vineland)–and it’s not hard…
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When subjecting myself to Highlander II, I wanted to find the worst version possible. Over the years, the director and then the producers have returned to the film and tried to edit the footage into something more palatable. Of course, these attempts are not just hampered by the use of existing footage (it’s not like…
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Roughly a third of Superman IV is missing, so it’s a little difficult to really form an opinion of the filmmakers’ intentions. I mean, it was an anti-nuclear proliferation movie… which suggests they were well-intentioned, but it’s impossible to know what they were trying to do with it as a film. For instance, it doesn’t…
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Superman III–deservedly–gets a lot of flak, but it’s actually the most faithful to the comics in a lot of ways. It plays out like a late sixties, early seventies Superman comic–“The Man Who Killed Superman,” turning out to be a bumbling, generally well-meaning guy like Richard Pryor, or “Superman Versus the Ultimate Computer.” Superman III…
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First SUPERMAN sequel (much of it filmed back-to-back with the original) has Terence Stamp leading a trio of supervillains on a worldwide takeover (aided by Lex Luthor Gene Hackman) while Superman and Lois Lane are busy having an ill-advised and ill-plotted (if singular) romance. Great performances from Margot Kidder and Christopher Reeve. Sometimes excellent, sometimes…
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If watching Richard Donner’s director’s cuts have taught me one thing, it’s Donner probably shouldn’t have final cut. His director’s cut of Lethal Weapon, for example, is atrocious. He adds about nine minutes to Superman and, much like Coppola’s revision of Apocalypse Now, it’s a testament to the original film it can weather the additions.…
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Virtuosity, being from the 1990s, is from the era when both Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington didn’t only appear in films directed by the Brothers Scott and Kelly Lynch was still in movies getting theatrical releases. It’s an early CG movie, with lots of computer references and set in the “near future.” It’s incredibly solid,…
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I love this movie. Seriously. Not just because it features the most idiotically jingoistic song since Grease 2‘s “Do It For Our Country.” There’s a fair amount of political commentary (instead of going for the easy Bush jugular, Neumeier’s a lot more complicated, particularly when it comes to how religion is sellable as war propaganda)…
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It’s easier to stomach Tron if you think about it as a video track to Wendy Carlos’s score. While there’s some technical innovation (shooting actors on green screen, now a norm, got some of its starts with Tron, not to mention the endless CG–except in Tron, at least it was for effect and not some…
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The last time I tried watching Starship Troopers 2, I turned it off. I have no idea how I made it past that point this time, but I’m almost glad I did. The big problem with the first act is Brenda Strong, who it centers around. Strong’s acting “style” fit in the first film, but…
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A lot of Pandorum is the best thing producers Jeremy Bolt and Paul W.S. Anderson have ever had their names on. It falls apart, after a weak open no less, at the end. The very end. It reminded me of Outland, the exit is so stupid. It totally invalidates the trials the protagonists went through…
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So they take Bruce Willis and de-age him, but then they put Rosamund Pike in old age make-up? That one doesn’t make much sense. Surrogates is another modern future concept movie–like iRobot or Minority Report–the future comes crashing down because of the movie star hero, there’s some kind of conspiracy involving the new technology, on…
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If you were to tell me I was going to react the way I did to The Fountain, Aronofsky’s dream project, I wouldn’t have believed you. While The Wrestler succeeded, Aronofsky didn’t write it. All my experience with his screenplays is negative. In terms of how the film works, The Fountain is somewhat singular. It’s…
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Watching Freddie Prinze Jr. court Saffron Burrows feels like some kind of archaic punishment. It’s the filmic equivalent of the rack. Thankfully, not all of Wing Commander concentrates on the courtship, which might very well be the anti-Christ of screen romances–trying to decide if it’s Prinze or Burrows who gives a worse performance (Prinze through…
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Sometimes competency is a bad thing. Screamers is a fairly well-made–Duguay’s composition isn’t spectacular, mostly because the sets were all CG embellished so there was only so much he was actually shooting–but there are some excellent effects sequences. There’s some nice stop motion and then a great shuttlecraft liftoff. Duguay knows how to spend his…
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The only “real” pro-war movie I can think of is The Green Berets. But Starship Troopers is also pro-war, even if it’s, well, startlingly so. I mean, the scene where Casper Van Dien grins after getting his battlefield promotion, following a colleague’s horrific death, is a fine example. What Verhoeven does here, in Starship Troopers,…
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If it weren’t for the painfully Canadian cast–I’m thinking mostly of Greg Byrk and Gina Holden, Holden because a recognizable, down on her luck American actress would be playing her character and Byrk because he’s so bland he’s got to be Canadian–Screamers: The Hunting would probably be a little better. There are some decent actors…
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I’ve never seen a movie before where the vanity producer (Peter Jackson) came before the studio who put up the money for said vanity producer. Wait, this movie is supposed to be about apartheid? Director and co-writer Neill Blomkamp is from South Africa and adoring critics can’t stop making the comparison. It starts in 1982.…
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I know The Island bombed but I can’t believe anyone thought it wouldn’t. It’s incredible such a large budget was given essentially to a future movie–it takes place in 2015 or something, it’s never clear, but there’s a lot of future stuff–and I had no idea it was a future movie. Bay’s got future cars…
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Didn’t John Woo used to have a style? I mean, I know he had birds and he had the guns pointed at each other, but didn’t he have some style? He’s got no style in Paycheck, which ends up being one of the best movies John Badham never made. It’s a complete time waster, the…
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It’s a Christian movie? Really? Okay…. I guess the dinosaurs confused that point. And I think there’s some gravity in there. Being a fan of the seventies adaptation, I thought I’d see this one too. It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever sat through. It’s relatively harmless, with far better acting than I was expecting.…
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There really isn’t anything to dislike about Star Trek. Well, maybe the music, which isn’t bad, just isn’t as good the rest of the music in the series. There’s a lot to like–Chris Pine (though the wife disagrees), J.J. Abrams’s direction is outstanding, there’s some nice little stuff (Zoe Saldana’s Uhura and her romance, Leonard…
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This movie got good reviews, right? I mean, I know Episode I got good reviews, but this one did too, right? I suppose the CG is better than before–except for Yoda, who’s desperate for a good puppeteer–and the action sequences are a tad more engaging. The space battles, mostly. The actual lightsaber fight scenes are…
The Stop Button 