Secret Headquarters

A streaming review from The Movie Snob.

Secret Headquarters  (C).  This perfectly mediocre little movie has been aptly described by another critic as a mix of Home Alone and Spy Kids, to which I would add that it is better than either of those duds.  Owen Wilson (Midnight in Paris) plays a divorced dad who is trying to reconnect with his middle-schoolish son Charlie (Walker Scobell, The Adam Project). The thing is, Wilson is secretly a superhero named The Guardian or something like that. When superdad leaves Charlie home alone and Charlie invites some friends over, the kids discover that, deep beneath dad’s cabin is . . . a secret headquarters. The kids accidentally reveal the secret headquarters’ location to some villains led by Michael Pena (Ant-man), and then it’s nonstop hijinks. I was a little disappointed that Charlie’s friend Maya (Momona Tamada, A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting) was introduced as being a cool, capable girl, but then she virtually disappeared about halfway through the movie. As a disposable piece of family entertainment, it’s perfectly fine.

Rifftrax: Yor, the Hunter From the Future

A new DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Rifftrax: Yor, the Hunter from the Future  (B-).  Rifftrax released this one to DVD in 2021. Apparently it started out as some sort of Italian TV miniseries and then got chopped down into an 88-minute theatrical release in 1983?  Anyway, it stars Reb Brown, the beefy hero of Space Mutiny, as Yor, a beefy hero who wanders around some sort of post-apocalyptic planet that is now inhabited by primitive tribes and dinosaurs. He’s handy with his giant stone axe, and he has a talent for finding the most attractive ladies the post-apocalypse has to offer, most especially Kalaa (Corinne Cléry, Moonraker). It’s quite goofy, as you might expect, but I didn’t think the riffing was as funny as it could have been. Nevertheless, I did get some laughs out of it, so it wasn’t a bad way to spend an hour and a half.

Rifftrax: Planet of Dinosaurs

A DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Rifftrax: Planet of Dinosaurs  (B).  I don’t know when I picked this DVD up, but I’m surprised to see on the internets that the Rifftrax boys issued it way back in 2009.  Anyhoo, the movie itself is a dull 1977 release featuring a bunch of hirsute yet hapless space travelers that get marooned on a prehistoric planet full of stop-motion dinosaurs.  The movie is padded out with endless scenes of the polyester-clad astronauts hiking through some rocky, arid wilderness, punctuated with the occasional dinosaur or large-spider attack.  The riffing is good, with lots of fun being poked at the facial hair, costumes, and general 1970s aesthetic of the film. The disc also features the original version of the movie without the comedic commentary, but I cannot imagine why anyone would watch it.  I certainly didn’t!

Despicable Me 2

A new review from The Movie Snob.

Despicable Me 2  (C).  I saw the first film in this franchise a long time ago and then recently rewatched it with the family. It was, just as I recalled, pretty good, with some scenes at the end that really tugged at the heartstrings. (Click here for my review.)  Then we watched this sequel from 2013.  I would say it’s mildly entertaining.  Former supervillain Gru (voice of Steve Carell, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World) has gone straight, trying to raise the three orphaned girls he adopted in the first movie and working on a new business making jams and jellies.  But a new supervillain is on the loose, and the Anti Villain League taps Gru to help sleuth out who the new criminal mastermind is.  This requires Gru to go undercover as the proprietor of a cupcake shop at the local mall where the new supervillain is supposed to be hiding out.  And perky AVL agent Lucy Wilde (voice of Kristen Wiig, Paul) is assigned to be his partner in anti-crime.  Lots of stuff is going on in the background—oldest daughter Margo (voice of Miranda Cosgrove, School of Rock) has her first crush on a boy, minions are getting kidnaped, and Gru submits to going on a date with a pushy neighbor’s friend.  A few amusing moments here and there, but pretty mediocre overall.

Rifftrax: Missile to the Moon

A DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Rifftrax: Missile to the Moon  (B-).  This is a DVD from early in the history of Rifftrax, the main successor to Mystery Science Theater: 3000.  It’s not a bad way to spend 77 minutes.  The film being riffed is a cheapie from 1958 in which five Earthlings travel to the Moon (in a missile). There we learn that weird rock monsters stalk the surface and a small society composed entirely of women inhabits some air-filled caves.  It’s a lame film, but the riffing is pretty good. Tommy Cook, who played a young crook in Teen-age Crime Wave, plays a young crook in this film too.  No bonus features, which is a real time-saver!

Klara and the Sun (book review)

Another book review from the ol’ Movie Snob.

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro (2021).  This is the third of Ishiguro’s novels that I have read, and his Never Let Me Go is one of my all-time favorite books. (The Buried Giant is not in the same league but still worth a read.)  This, his most recent novel, is excellent and thought-provoking. The setting is the near future, and our first-person narrator is Klara, an artificial friend or “AF” as they are generally called. In other words, she’s a life-like robot, and she is programmed to be an appropriate friend for a teenager. The first chapter is about Klara’s “life” in a store where AFs are sold. Then she is bought to be the companion of a sickly teenaged girl named Josie by Josie’s divorced mother, a slightly intimidating figure whom Klara always refers to as “the Mother.” Gradually we learn some other disquieting facts about this alternate reality, always through Klara’s intelligent but naïve point of view. I found myself thinking a lot about the movie A.I. as I read the book, but this take on artificial intelligence struck me as more believable and engrossing. Highly recommended!

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island

The Movie Snob suffers through a sequel.

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (D). Apparently I liked Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008) decently well, but this 2012 sequel was terrible. This time, angsty teen Sean (Josh Hutcherson, The Hunger Games) is trying to find his eccentric grandfather (Michael Caine, Flawless), who has disappeared while trying to find some mysterious island out in the Pacific Ocean. So, after solving some weird clues that are easier than a Monday crossword puzzle, Sean teams up with his mom’s enormous boyfriend Hank (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, San Andreas), a goofy helicopter pilot (Luis Guzman, Welcome to Collinwood), and the pilot’s lovely daughter (Vanessa Hudgens, High School Musical 3: Senior Year), to find granddad. The “adventure” through the island’s CGI landscape is as dull as dishwater, and absurd coincidences abound.  Mainly I felt bad for Hudgens, who not only has to wear a tiny, tight outfit the whole time (much like Karen Gillan in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle) but also has to feign attraction to the not-terribly-charismatic Hutcherson.

Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves

A new review from The Movie Snob.

Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves (C).  I gather that this is the third installment in this series of movies, and it was released straight to video in 1997.  I have seen only the first one in the series, so be warned that I may have missed some important details relating to the second movie.  Just kidding!  I’m sure there were no important details in this lame movie.  Rick Moranis (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids) returns as the suburban dad and wacky inventor Wayne Szalinski, and this time he, his wife, his brother, and his sister-in-law get shrunk by his shrinking machine and must somehow get their kids’ attention before they end up as cockroach food.  It’s not very entertaining, but I give it credit for showing a teenaged gal (Allison Mack, TV’s Smallville) stand up to a caddish boy who plants an unwelcome kiss on her.  Although Moranis hasn’t done much acting in recent years, Wikipedia reported that he has signed on for another sequel in this series to be called Shrunk.

The Complete Critical Assembly (book review)

A book review from the pen of The Movie Snob.

The Complete Critical Assembly, by David Langford (2002).  This one is really off the beaten path.  Langford is a writer of both fiction and nonfiction.  From 1983 to 1991, he wrote short columns reviewing science fiction and fantasy books for magazines including White Dwarf, a British magazine about role-playing games.  I read about him somewhere, and then I read a glowing recommendation of this collection of all of his columns.  Because 1983-1991 roughly matched my period of interest in sci-fi and fantasy novels, I searched the book out.  And, lo, I really enjoyed it.  Langford is an amusing writer, and sure enough he commented on some books and authors I remember from my youth.  For example, he has some unkind but funny words for the Thomas Covenant series of books by Stephen R. Donaldson and likewise the Well World books by Jack Chalker.  Other books he reminded me that I read back in the day: Harry Harrison’s East of Eden, in which dinosaurs evolved into intelligent lizard-people, Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality series, the alien-invasion novel Footfall, and Code of the Lifemaker, in which humans discover alien robots “living” on Saturn’s moon Titan, in an oddly medieval society.

Blade Runner

The Movie Snob finally sees a classic.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut  (B+).  I had seen bits and pieces of Blade Runner over the years, but I only recently watched it from beginning to end.  This is “The Final Cut,” which Wikipedia says is a digitally remastered version released in 2007 for the film’s 25th anniversary.  The disc has a clip of director Ridley Scott saying this is his preferred version of the film.  It does look very good for a film from 1982, and it omits the unpopular voiceover by Harrison Ford’s character, Deckard, from the theatrical version.  Anyhoo, you must already know the story: in the near future (2019!), Earth has colonized the solar system, and a big corporation has invented almost-human androids to do much of that dirty and dangerous colonizing work.  But sometimes these androids, or replicants as they are called, develop minds of their own, and when they go rogue, special cops called blade runners (like Deckard) “retire” them with extreme prejudice.  Here, the action starts with the unwelcome news that four very dangerous replicants have made it back to Earth and are roaming the streets of a crowded and rainy Los Angeles.  Deckard is pressed into service to hunt them down: the brute Leon (Brion James, The Fifth Element), the lithe Zhora (Joanna Cassidy, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead), the deceptive Pris (Daryl Hannah, Splash), and the extremely dangerous Roy (Rutger Hauer, The Hitcher).  He also visits corporate HQ and meets the very latest model replicant, the beautiful Rachael (Sean Young, Dune), who can almost fool the psychological tests designed to catch replicants.  Other recognizable faces pop up—M. Emmet Walsh, who I just saw for the first time as the slimy P.I. in Blood Simple, Edward James Olmos (Stand and Deliver) as a weird cop who’s into origami, and William Sanderson, who was so memorable as the bumpkin Larry (with two brothers Darryl) on TV’s Newhart.  Anyway, Blade Runner is a classic of dystopian film, and it works pretty well as a sci-fi/cop movie.  Harrison Ford (Star Wars) kind of sleepwalks through his role as a world-weary cop, but Sean Young was pretty good as the replicant who doesn’t know she’s a replicant.  I thought her career kind of stalled after this, but I see on the internets that she has worked pretty steadily—she even had a recurring role on The Young and the Restless for a while!

P.S. I can’t believe I forgot to include a cross-reference for the Philip K. Dick story on which Blade Runner is based, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And while I’m at it, a cross-reference to my review of the recent sequel Blade Runner 2049.

Star Trek: Voyager (season 7)

The Movie Snob finishes the job.

Voyager: Season 7.  This season achieved a 2.58 grade-point average on 15 B’s and 11 C’s.  It was a solid season for the show to go out on, with a decently satisfying season finale (even though it involved a time-travel story, which is inherently lame).  Although I didn’t spot any A-quality episodes, I handed out lots of B’s.  Some worthy episodes include “Imperfection,” in which Seven’s Borg implants start breaking down; “Body and Soul,” in which The Doctor (Robert Picardo, TV’s China Beach) has to hide out in Seven’s implants and gets to take over her body when he does so; and the two-parter “Workforce,” in which almost the whole crew is brainwashed into happily joining an alien world’s workforce.   On the downside, there’s a story arc about The Doctor’s developing a sense of indignation about how holographic beings are perceived and treated that I didn’t find convincing, and another short arc about romance blooming between Seven (Jeri Ryan, TV’s Boston Public) and Chakotay (Robert Beltran, Repo Chick) that wasn’t remotely believable

Star Trek: Voyager (season 6)

New from The Movie Snob.

Voyager: Season 6.  Oops! I finished watching Voyager long ago but somehow never got around to reviewing the last two seasons. Anyway, there’s no doubt that season six is the best season of Voyager yet.  Garnering three A’s, a whopping sixteen B’s, and seven C’s, this season crosses the finish line with a very respectable 2.85 grade point average.  Of course I must insist you watch the A-listers.  First there’s “Survival Instinct,” about the plight of three former Borg drones—they’ve been psychically linked to each other and cannot tune out each other’s thoughts.  Then there’s “Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy,” a very funny episode in which some spying aliens detect the Doctor’s outlandish daydreams and mistake them for reality.  Finally there’s “One Small Step,” a touching story in which the Voyager crew discovers an ancient NASA spacecraft inside a space anomaly.  I won’t list out all the B-grade episodes, but I’ll note that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle) guest stars in the solid episode “Tsunkatse.”  A nice continuing story is set in motion in “Collective” when Voyager encounters some Borg children who have been cut off from The Collective.  “Ashes to Ashes” is a weird, thought-provoking episode about an alien who claims to be the reincarnation of a deceased member of Voyager’s crew.  “Good Shepherd” is a fun episode focusing on three lowly crew members that we’ve never seen before.  And “The Haunting of Deck Twelve” is a ghost story that would make great Halloween watching.  But the whole season is worthwhile, so get to it!

The Blob

A new DVD review from The Movie Snob.

The Blob  (C).  I watched the Criterion edition of this 1958 “classic,” and it wasn’t terrible, even though it shares a lot of B-horror-movie DNA with the notoriously bad Giant Spider Invasion.  In both movies, a meteorite crashes in some remote area, witnessed by only a few folks.  The meteorite turns out to be a gateway for a grotesque and implacable alien invasion of Earth.  The aliens kill a few unfortunates in the small town nearest the crash site, but the local police are slow to recognize that something weird is going on.  Finally, the loathsome menace reveals itself and causes riotous panic in the streets!  Steve McQueen (The Getaway) stars in The Blob as the teenager who’s the first to figure out that something sinister is going on, and he rallies his teenaged buddies to help him sound the alarm in their small town.  In an interesting twist, the police chief is NOT totally dismissive of these darned kids’ crazy story, even though he’s hamstrung by the lack of anything resembling proof.  There are a couple of commentary tracks on the DVD, but I must admit that haven’t listened to them.

Star Wars

The Movie Snob goes back to the beginning. The real beginning….

Star Wars (A-).  I recently re-watched this old classic, probably for the first time since I started this blog.  Of course it’s awesome.  I still wonder how our little band of heroes was able to navigate the anonymous halls and corridors of the Death Star so easily on their very first visit, but never mind.  I also ding the filmmakers for not trimming the film a tiny bit to make it a G-rated movie.  There are a few mild but unnecessary expletives, and a couple of scenes that are unnecessarily gruesome.  (The scene of Luke Skywalker’s home after the storm troopers have murdered his aunt and uncle; the bloody severed arm in the Cantina scene.)  But who knows; maybe the filmmakers reasonably feared a G rating would hurt box office.  In recent years I managed to get my picture taken with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill, Corvette Summer) and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher, When Harry Met Sally) at comic-book conventions. I doubt I’ll ever score the trifecta by getting Han Solo (Harrison Ford, American Graffiti), though.

Star Trek: Voyager (season 5)

More Star Trek from The Movie Snob.

Voyager: Season 5.  This season achieved a 2.5 grade-point average, which is slightly lower than the 2.58 grade I gave season four.  However, season five was the first in which I gave any episode a grade of “A,” and I actually handed it out to three different episodes: “Drone,” “Course: Oblivion,” and “Someone to Watch Over Me.”  Not surprisingly, Seven of Nine figures prominently in two of those three excellent episodes.  In “Drone,” she becomes a maternal figure to another Borg drone who develops an individual personality, and in “Someone to Watch Over Me,” she takes the Doctor’s advice and experiments with dating.  “Course: Oblivion” is an affecting episode in which we find out that the aliens from season four episode “Demon” have somehow built their own duplicate starship Voyager and now believe that they are the real Voyager crew.  Otherwise, I handed out nine B’s, thirteen C’s, and one F for the bizarre episode “The Fight.”  Stay away from that one, but definitely check out the A-listers and the many killer B’s:  “In the Flesh,” “Infinite Regress,” “Counterpoint,” “Bride of Chaotica!,” “Gravity,” “Bliss,” “Dark Frontier Part I” (Part II got only a C), “Warhead,” and season ender “Equinox Part I.”

Star Trek: Voyager (season 4)

The Movie Snob goes where no man has gone before.

Voyager: Season Four.  This show continues to improve, in my estimation.  Using letter grades, I gave this season’s 26 episodes 16 Bs, 9 Cs, and only a single D, for a 2.58 grade-point average.  A large part of the reason for the season’s high marks has to be the appearance of a new crew member—a svelte former Borg drone known as Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan, Down with Love).  Her long years as a Borg have left her super-smart and super-unemotional, and her struggle to get in touch with her long-suppressed humanity becomes a running motif.  (Her joining Voyager also means the end for Kes, a character I kind of liked.  Kes bows out in the second episode.)  The crew continues to find the Delta Quadrant a dangerous and even savage place, repeatedly crossing paths mid-season with an extremely belligerent and cruel race called the Hirogen.  And around that same time, the crew manages to communicate with Starfleet, though only briefly and incompletely, which is kind of exciting and generates some repercussions in future episodes.  The only episode you must avoid is number 21, about some weird molecule called Omega, which Star Fleet has a top secret directive to all starship captains to destroy.  There are lots of good episodes, but I’ll single out episode 14, in which the Doctor gets to interact with another snippy emergency medical hologram played by Andy Dick (TV’s NewsRadio), and episode 23, an unusual episode set 700 years after Voyager’s unfortunate detour to the Delta Quadrant.

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids

New movie review from The Movie Snob

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids  (C).  This was my first time to see this 1989 “classic,” so my grade is a little generous to factor in the era in which it was made and the fact that a geezer in his 50s is not the target audience.  That said, it’s really not very good.  Rick Moranis (Little Shop of Horrors) plays an absent-minded scientist type who’s also a suburban father of two.  He’s trying to invent a shrinking machine, which he unwisely keeps in his house’s attic.  Through a mishap, his kids and the two boys who live next door get shrunk down to a size smaller than an ant.  When the tiny kids accidentally get thrown out with the garbage, they have to cross the now-immense back yard to return to the house and then somehow draw their parents’ attention to their plight.  The kids’ adventure part of the story is okay, but throughout the movie the humor is generally terrible.  Extra demerits for the next-door dad character (Matt Frewer, Dawn of the Dead (2004)), a stereotypical boor who hounds his sensitive older son to be a football player and is otherwise generally unpleasant.  The lovely Marcia Strassman (TV’s Welcome Back, Kotter) plays Moranis’s wife.  I didn’t recognize any of the child actors, but The Borg Queen informed me that Jared Rushton was in Big.

Star Trek: Voyager (season 3)

The mission continues….

Voyager: Season Three.  Season Three serves up another 26 episodes of the trials and travails of the starship Voyager on its 70-year journey back to the Alpha Quadrant.  I think the show’s batting average was a little higher this season than last; for season three, I dished out 10 B’s, 14 C’s, 1 D, and 1 F for a grade-point average of 2.27.  The F goes to episode 7, “Sacred Ground,” which is, in my view, a poor handling of religion and faith that is unfortunately characteristic of Voyager and maybe all of Star Trek.  The D grade goes to episode 20, “Favorite Son,” in which a planet of alien vampire women set their sights on Ensign Kim (Garrett Wang, Survival Island), of all people.  But there are plenty of good episodes, such as episode 11, in which Q returns for some more hijinks, episode 17, in which Chakotay (Robert Beltran, Bugsy) finds a planet full of emancipated Borg drones, some of whom are trying to build a new, peaceful society, and the cliffhanger season-ender in which the Borg itself makes its first real appearance.  I’m looking forward to season 4.

Big Hero 6

A new DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Big Hero 6  (B).  I finally saw this Disney film the other night, and I thought it was good.  The Borg Queen took me to task for not giving it an A grade of some kind, but there’s no way it compares with Disney’s greatest films.  (A few examples: The Lion King, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Zootopia, and even Moana, which has risen considerably in my estimation since I reviewed it in these pages.)  Also, I suspect Big Hero 6 would play better on the big screen; its futuristic setting was pretty but not immersive on the TV.  Anyhoo, this is basically a superhero origin story.  Teenaged Hiro is a genius at robots but really comes into his own only after his older brother dies in a mysterious fire and a shadowy villain starts stalking the streets of San Fransokyo.  Hiro teams up with his brother’s nerdy science friends and with Baymax, a big balloony robot that Hiro’s brother had been working on when he died.  With a few modifications, Baymax goes from cuddly nurse robot to high-flying action hero, and eventually it’s time for a showdown with the big bad.  I was entertained.  If you like superhero movies, Big Hero 6 is worth your time.

Star Trek: Voyager (season 2)

A TV review from The Movie Snob.

Voyager: Season Two  (C).  The Borg Queen and I watched every episode of season two in order.  (I joined her in her quest to watch the whole series partway through season one, so I didn’t review it.)  By way of background, I was big Star Trek fan in my younger days—saw every episode of the original series (most of them many times) and pretty much every episode of The Next Generation, but aside from the movies I pretty much dropped out after TNG.  So far, Voyager is a decent enough entertainment.  The premise is that some advanced alien technology has catapulted an advanced Starfleet ship named Voyager clear across the galaxy into the “Delta Quadrant,” and at normal speeds it will take Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew, TVs Orange Is the New Black) and her intrepid crew 70 years to get back home to Federation space.  Moreover, the Delta Quadrant is a fairly lawless place, full of villains like the cliquish, Klingonish Kazon and the ruthless but plague-ridden Vidiians, so it’s tough sledding.  Anyhoo, I dished out Bs, Cs, and Ds to season two’s 26 episodes in roughly equal measure, so there were plenty of average and subpar episodes.  If you just wanted to try the highlights, I’d recommend “Cold Fire” (episode 10), “Prototype” (episode 13), “Death Wish” (episode 18), “Deadlock” (episode 21), “Innocence” (episode 22), “Tuvix” (episode 24), and “Resolutions” (episode 25).  The season ends with a cliffhanger that I found pretty meh.  But if you like Star Trek, you should find season two reasonably tolerable.  The Borg Queen tells me it improves in later seasons, so we’ll see . . . .

Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker

The Movie Snob fulfills an obligation.

Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker  (C-).  And so we come at last to the end of the nine-movie Skywalker saga, and not a moment too soon for this reviewer.

Spoilers follow!

As at least one critic has observed, in Episode IX director J.J. Abrams does his level best to ignore or undo everything that happened in Episode VIII.  Although the Resistance seemed to be whittled down to about 5 or 6 people by the end of Episode VIII, Episode IX kicks off with General Leia (Carrie Fisher, When Harry Met Sally…) back in charge of a typical, seemingly well-manned rebel base.  Villain Kylo Ren (Adam Driver, Frances Ha) destroyed his Vaderesque mask in the last movie, but he solders it back together for this one.  The painful love story between Finn (John Boyega, Pacific Rim: Uprising) and Rose (Kelly Marie Tran, XOXO) is mercifully dropped.  That stuff about Rey (Daisy Ridley, Murder on the Orient Express) being the orphaned child of a couple of nobodies? Mm, not exactly.  And so on.

But there is some continuity:  Episode IX continues the recent tradition of strip-mining the original trilogy for material.  Remember how Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid, The Return of the Jedi) got killed when Darth Vader hurled him down a bottomless air shaft?  Well, you can’t keep a good Sith Lord down, and fifty years on he is rested up and ready for action.  But before we get to the inevitable showdown with Palpatine, our heroes have to go on a tedious quest looking for the Magic Crystal of BlizzBlazz that will reveal Palpatine’s secret hiding place.  None of the main characters is very interesting.  I think Adam Driver is a terrible villain.  Poe (Oscar Isaac, Ex Machina) and Finn are just dull.  Rey is cute and kind of fun to watch if only because her Force powers far outstrip anything we ever thought even a trained Jedi could do, but she spends pretty much the whole movie scowling.  C-3PO is actually kind of entertaining in this outing, and I loved the little muppet guy who has to crack 3PO’s droid head open to get at some secret Sith data.  Billy Dee Williams (The Empire Strikes Back) pops up for a couple scenes, looking genuinely amused at being in the film.  None of it makes much sense, but I thought the climactic battle between Rey and Palpatine was kind of cool.  And the final scene, when Rey goes to Luke Skywalker’s boyhood home on Tatooine, warmed the heart of this old original-trilogy-loving geezer.

Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone

DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (B).  I saw this 1983 sci-fi B-movie in its theatrical release, and it left such a big impression on my teenaged self that I could still vividly remember certain scenes and lines today.  So you can imagine my glee when I was killing some time at a Fry’s Electronics and found the Blu-ray for around $9.  I watched it last night, and it was just as cheesy as I expected it would be—but I still enjoyed it.  A spaceship blows up out in deep space (an accident caused by something it really seems like they should have anticipated), and three passengers (attractive women all) escape in a lifeboat and crash on a desolate world where a plague decimated a human colony and turned the whole place into a Mad-Max-ish sort of environment.  (I think they filmed the crash scene in Utah’s Goblin Valley State Park, if I’m not mistaken.)  A scuzzy Han-Solo-ish space jockey named Wolff (Peter Strauss, XXX: State of the Union) is in the neighborhood and could use the reward money, so he lands his ship and starts rolling across the desert in his Mad-Max-ish SUV.  He picks up an orphaned scavenger named Niki (Molly Ringwald, one year before Sixteen Candles came out and two years before The Breakfast Club) and discovers that an old acquaintance named Washington (Ernie Hudson, Ghostbusters) is also on the planet searching for the lost ladies.  After some encounters with hostile but not especially competent local mutants, Wolff, Niki, and Washington end up at the Thunderdome-like enclave of the villainous cyborg Overdog (Michael Ironside, Starship Troopers), who has captured the lost ladies, and a climactic showdown ensues.  Strauss and Hudson don’t seem to be taking the movie all that seriously, but Ringwald really commits to her role, spewing amusing space slang a mile a minute and generally acting like a petulant American teenager the whole time.   And did I mention it’s only 90 minutes long?

So that’s what you’re in for if you can find this lost gem!  You’ve been warned!

The Sparrow (book review)

Book review from The Movie Snob.

The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell (1996).  How about a science-fiction novel about first contact with an alien species that is chock full of religious talk?  That’s what The Sparrow is.  In the near future, a radio telescope discovers unmistakable signs of intelligent alien life on a planet in the (relatively) nearby Alpha Centauri solar system.  Remarkably, the Jesuits (a Catholic religious order) are the first to mobilize after this discovery, putting together a team of priests and lay people to pilot an asteroid-turned-starship to this alien world.  The author’s style didn’t really grab me, especially the many scenes that I guess were supposed to be humorous.  Also, the story takes a long time to get going because Russell starts out telling it on two tracks: the story of the discovery and mission preparation, and, some 50 years later, the story of the Jesuits’ attempt to figure out what went wrong by interviewing the mission’s sole survivor and returnee.  But after bouncing between these two narratives for a while we eventually get to the first-contact adventure, and I must admit that part of the story held my attention.  Although I can’t say I loved the book–there’s some fairly gruesome/lurid stuff in the first-contact-adventure part of the story–I sort of want to read the sequel to find out what happened next….

Ad Astra

The Movie Snob sees a current release!

Ad Astra  (C).  This movie has done very well with other critics—currently scoring 80 out of 100 on metacritic.com—but I was underwhelmed.  It’s a sci-fi flick set in the near future.  Brad Pitt (Burn After Reading) stars as Roy McBride, an astronaut so unflappably cool he makes Neil Armstrong look like a bowl of quivering jello.  Strange, deadly energy pulses from Neptune start threatening life on Earth (and on the moon and Mars, which have been colonized), and it seems that Roy’s father Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones, The Homesman), who disappeared on a scientific mission to Neptune years before, may have something to do with it.  Before you can say “2001,” Roy is blasting off from Earth on a mission to contact dear, old dad and, with luck, save the world(s).  Lots of critics have compared Ad Astra to Apocalypse Now, which is fair, but to me the more obvious comparison is the 2007 space thriller Sunshine.  Anyhoo, I found the movie visually appealing but much lacking in the story and character departments.  Roy is so locked down he is hard to empathize with.  Donald Sutherland (Forsaken) pops up in a small role, and Liv Tyler (That Thing You Do!) has the tiny and thankless task of flashing on the screen a few times as Roy’s estranged wife.

Brave New World (book review)

A book review from the desk of The Movie Snob.

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (1932).  I read this classic dystopian novel a long time ago and was inspired to re-read it by an episode of the National Review podcast called “The Great Books.”  It is a weird story, much weirder than I remembered it.  Huxley set his tale in the distant future and predicted a caste-bound society in which people are created in laboratories and subjected to extensive physical and psychological conditioning so that they will be perfectly adjusted to their eventual caste and status in life, whether the lowly, semi-intelligent worker class or the higher classes who do the finer work in the bio-factories and conditioning centers.  (The caste descriptions are, unfortunately, pretty racist.)  Everyone, save only the tiny group of world-governing Controllers, is kept mindlessly content with a feel-good drug called soma, constant entertainments, and endless recreational sex.  But off in the wilds of New Mexico is a reservation of people who still live the old way, and the action of the tale is sparked when a reservation dweller called the Savage makes his way into modern society and questions everything he sees.  Definitely worth a read.  The volume I got also featured a subsequent Huxley essay called “Brave New World Revisited,” but I found it very tiresome and couldn’t finish it.