We've put a team together...

Having connived and blackmailed my way into become his “fount of all comic book knowledge and information” I sat down with Jon X of the After Movie Diner to discuss all six of the films that currently compose Earth 199,999 (otherwise known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe). Listen here

or you can visit the After Movie Diner’s website and download this or any of Jon’s other wonderful podcasts to your mobile device of choice on Stitcher, iTunes or Talkshoe. (And while you’re there, you could do worse than give Jon the highest rating possible and – who knows – maybe even a review.)

Those six films are, of course, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger and The Avengers, which long-time readers (both of you) watched me suffer through in real time. New readers: now’s your chance to blow some dust off these old reviews and discover all the wonderful ways I’ve contradicted myself over the years. More to come this Friday.

by Chad Denton

The Two Minutes of Hate get more casual every year...

Dodo frustrates Stephen by being clueless to an almost surreal degree, hopping out of the TARDIS without hesitation into a jungle and thinking she can just hop on a bus back to London. The Doctor actually agrees with Dodo – at least insofar as he thinks they actually are still on Earth somewhere. Dodo, who is at least knowledgeable about animals, notes that the jungle is filled with different species from across the world while the Doctor discovers that there is no sky but a metal roof. The mystery unravels when the Doctor and the others are taken to a group of humans by alien beings, the Monoids. They are told that the ship is a futuristic Ark, taking the human race and samples of all its species away from an Earth that’s slowly being destroyed by an expanding sun to a new world much like Earth, a journey that will take 700 years. The Monoids are an alien race that migrated to Earth long ago from their own dying world and “offered” to become servants in exchange for their new home. Most of the human population has been reduced to a microscopic state and placed in stasis until the ship finally arrives at the new planet, while the humans left active are Guardians, who, along with their descendants, are expected to protect the ship. After figuring out the Guardians’ understanding of time, the Doctor deduces that they’ve wound up 10,000,000 years past the twentieth century.

While most of the Guardians are willing to trust the Doctor and the others, things quickly become tense when a cold Dodo has spreads to the Guardians and the Monoids, who have no resistance because the common cold had been wiped out for millennia. When the chief Guardian is struck down by the illness, the deputy chief, Zentos, has the Doctor and the others arrested and puts them on trial. Zentos accuses them of being sent from the planet they are traveling toward, Rathusis, to sabotage the mission. His paranoid arguments win the day and the Doctor and the others are sentenced to be ejected into space. However, the chief Guardian intervenes and, seeing that Steven is also sick, orders that the Doctor be given a chance to cure the illness but only if he uses Steven as his test subject. The Doctor essentially reinvents the flu vaccine, which stops the plague and of course allows the TARDIS crew to leave as heroes.

Click here to read the full article…

"You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe...whatever you want to believe...you take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland...and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes..."

If you were alive on planet Earth in 1993, you probably found yourself face-to-face with the work of Michael Crichton. He was fifty-one by that point, and a multiple New York Times bestselling author with a shelf’s worth of fiction and non-fiction to his name. Most didn’t bother looking at them, but some of us did, and through them we learned Jurassic Park was the end point of a thought-line that runs through Crichton’s whole career, possibly his entire life.

To tease that thought-line out, it’s best we step back into the shoes of a thirty-one-year-old Crichton as he attempted to become a full-time filmmaker. It’s 1973, and Crichton’s last two books are doing well, though nowhere near as well as his first real success, The Andromeda Strain. Published in ’69 and made into a movie two years later, Strain contains the seeds of Crichton’s literary obsessions…though neither book nor film are as thrilling as they think are.

Which is probably why his next book, Binary, reads more like an episode of CSI than as an actual Michael Crichton novel (and since it was the last one he published under a pseudonym, that kinda fits). Police procedurals always sell, especially when they can wow the audience with all that fun, new forensic technology modern cops (supposedly) get to play with these days. So Binary became a made-for-TV movie, re-titled Pursuit, with Circhton himself directing.

"Whether you enjoy it or not is your own affair. But I think you will... "

Having proven his chops, Crichton began shopping scripts around Hollywood, including an idea inspired by Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride and its “impressive” anamatronic characters. Combining his love for the technological underpinnings of modern life with his love for kick ass movies, Crichton came up with Westworld and – through some no doubt-arcane magic – convinced MGM to let him direct it with what certainly looks like minimal supervision. Name another SF author who can say the same thing?

The result is a strange movie – simultaneously innovative and retrograde – that you can appreciate on a lot of levels. At base, it’s a straight-up Western. Above that, it’s a low-key buddy comedy. And above that, it’s a sci-fi scare-fest. And above all that, it’s keystone of Crichton’s literary work. Not just because it deals with his primary storytelling obsession – the pathological failure of modern society’s complex systems – but because it explicitly depicts the consequences of those failures in a way The Andromeda Strain couldn’t, since its antagonist was a space virus. Here, the fundamental entropic principals of the universe have a name and a face. Luckily, for you The King and I fans out there, both belong to Yul Brynner.

Before we get there, we start off with another Crichton-trope: false documentation. The novel Jurassic Park (for example) starts off with a long-winded-but-still-abridged history of genetic engineering and the biotech companies that grew around it. In this case, we get an informercial for the Delos corporation, introducing us to Delos’ futuristic theme parks: Medievalworld, Romanworld, and Westworld. Decked out in (the then-popular culture’s prevailing notions of) period-specific décor and peopled by highly advanced robots, these parks promise all who enter “the vacation of tomorrow, today.” Visitors are free to indulge their every whim, secure in the notion that “nothing can go wrong.”

"With the font choices of yesteryear."

Two such visitors give us our in-road to this world: apparent best friends Peter Martin (Richard Benjamin) and John Blane (James Brolin). John’s been here before, and so assumes an easy, know-it-all air that can become insufferable after awhile. This is Peter’s first time, so he gets to be insufferable right from the off, peppering John with the kinds of questions hapless schlubs would ask on the hover-craft ride over. Thanks to way Crichton lingers on these two, the scene perfectly recreates the feeling of being trapped on a flight next to some asshole who just won’t shut the fuck up.

Landing, John and Peter change into appropriate attire and integrate themselves into Westworld, with John being more successful than his friend, who feels “silly – like a joke.” John’s response is priceless:

“It’s not a joke! It’s an amusement park! All you have to do is have fun.”

“Fun,” in this case being defined as “drinking unlabled rot-gut whiskey, getting into random fights, and sleeping with robot whores in too-small, nineteenth century beds.” Because whenever a new technology comes along the first question anyone asks is, “Can I fuck it?” Or you can out-draw the Yul Brynner-bot in a slow motion-assisted gun battle. Don’t worry: the robots are programed to make sure you always win. After night falls on this day of Peter-mollifying merriment, the Delos Corp. elves come out of their control tunnels to clean up the robot bodies and ship them downstairs for repair.

Face the horror of...a world without iPods!

If you want to see a sci-fi movie with a real “documentary feel,” look no further than this almost forty year-old Michael Crichton flick. These little asides in the control room will punctuate the main action from here on, and the camera becomes one of those roving eye-ball things Darth Maul had in the middle of The Phantom Menace: floating over technicians with handfuls of android guts; lingering on the eery sight of Yul Brynner-bot’s unhinged faceplate; tracking the head technician as he pokes and prods his subordinates. “You get a confirmation before you open her up.” “Yes, sir.”

This is the reason Crichton became a novelist instead of a doctor. At some point during his rounds at Boston City Hospital, a younger version of Crichton looked up from whatever he was doing and saw this:

Welcome to the sterile corridors of The Real.

And in that moment something simple, basic and human in his mind recoiled, stunned by the horrifying banality of it all. He decided to share this vision with the world, almost always casting it as a vision of our future. The present is (usually) far more marketable when you dress it up in future-garb. But for all the random SF elements casually tossed into the background, for all his technical lectures (the long moments of silence in this film are perfectly designed for a scientific/historical aside) and one-note characters, there’s a humanist core to Crichton’s work that’s so subtle most people don’t bother noticing it. He spent his whole career trying to warn us this future has already come to pass. And we’re living in it. Or at least trying to. It could very well gun us down in the street at any moment without thinking twice and that’s so scary a thought, most of us turn away from it…giving this present-future the perfectly opportunity to bite us in the ass.

So it is with Our Heroes, Peter and John, who survive the Obligatory Bar Fight and spend the night on the floor. By now, both are fully into the spirit of Westworld. What better time for the androids to rise up against their human “guests”?

We never really know how or why the robots of Delos suddenly go mad. The programers and scientists behind the scenes talk of a virus spreading through the robot population, but its structure and origins are never explored. There’s no Dennis Nedry in this movie. Most of the people in Crichton’s early novels were well-meaning but useful idiots instead of active antagonists. The turning point (when Crichton took his first half-hearted stabs at creating “villains”) probably came with either Congo or Sphere…though in Sphere, everyone’s driven mad with power, so you could call all of them “antagonists” if you really wanted to get technical. (Spoiler alert for a twenty-five year-old book and fifteen-year-old film, neither of which are the strongest entries in their creator’s catalogs.)

"So we've tabled the resolution to create the commission to decide whether or not we need to decide if we have a problem. Good. Meeting adjourned."

You could say the same thing happens here, only with less reality warping and more accidental suffocation. Before that, though, Crichton’s careful to show us a scene where the technicians down below talk themselves out of recognizing the problem…or even out of the fact that a problem’s occurring. After all, robots can’t catch viruses…not like, real ones. After all, the use of the term “virus” to describe malicious, self-replicating computer programs had just entered the popular SF consciousness in 1969 and wouldn’t escape its genre ghetto for another eleven years.

In the meantime, we see brief shots of the robot apocalypse going on in Romanworld, but Crichton’s never really been interested in the nitty-gritty of robot-on-human (or anything-on-human, for that matter) violence. He had a clinical view of the human body and it’s various bi-products, which tells you why his characters are all so forgettable…apart from the occasional Author Avatar. (Here’s looking at you, Dr. Malcolm…and your damned gymnast children.) Peter and John come off as dudes playing cowboys, which is exactly what they are and exactly what they need to be…but that’s pretty much all they do for the whole movie, one hesitantly (at first) and the other enthusiastically. This evil robot, on the other hand, is one cold bastard, and you can tell Crichton loved exploiting this concept to its fullest. I wouldn’t call Brynner-bot a “character” per se, but Crichton’s greater interest in filming “him” at the expense of the home-grown humans is more than evident. Inexplicably (if you’re working off an Asimovian background, like yours truly), Brynner-bot seems to like toying with his prey, showing off and wasting ammo as only a Western badass can. Whoever programed him obviously loved The Magnificent Seven as much, if not more than, my parents.

Thanks to its SF trappings, Westworld‘s not often given credit for being both a functional Western and a send-up of Westerns in general. As with other writer/director luminaries of the 70s, Crichton grew up watching Western movies, serials, and now-classic TV shows. This is his cinematic love note to his own childhood, and it’s telling he made this as soon as he got the opportunity (re: cash) to make it right. Every genre touchstone is here, from the whores to the gunfights to the Sheriff-killings to the jail breaks. And what to our wondering eyes should appear at the very end? A showdown between the Big Badass and the Kind-Hearted Tenderfoot, of course. John Ford would nod in stoic approval…at least until our Tenderfoot reaches the underground lab.

It's the grin that tips you off. Here's a robot that really loves his job. Probably too much.

Even then it works because, clinician though he was, Crichton could also be a ruthless sum’bitch when the need arose. Exhibit A: the poor White Shirt Yul Brynner-bot catches in the desert and perforates from half a county away…because that’s what he does. As human as he may look, he and all the robots of Delos lack the basic human ability to countermand his own programing. That’s why they have remote control off-buttons…and those might’ve worked too, if it weren’t for that meddling virus.

That virus represents any random element intruding upon humanity’s best laid plans. The cautionary air to these tales is sometimes mistaken for technophobia, but I’ve grown to see it as a more straight-faced, if no-less-strident, warning. “Please,” Crichton’s stories beg us, “take a look around yourselves. Peep the vast, complicated, technological systems that underpin your life and lives of every human being on the planet. Check ‘em and respect ‘em, because learning shit is cool…and because those systems have no respect for you. Unless you pay attention, one of these days, you’re going to wake up and find they’re out for your blood.”

That’s the real message of his fiction and thanks to this, Crichton stories have a nasty habit of fading into each other. Being the oldest of his “mature” work, Westworld‘s suffered from a lack of attention. It deserves to be seen by all Crichton’s fans and by SF fans in general. It’s early 70s pacing will try the patience of nincompoops and its disinterest in human beings has left the actors high and dry. Thankfully, we’re in the hands of a great cast, with some of the best leading men of the late-60s. None of them ever became the Marlon Brando they wanted to be,  and I’m sure certain people thought Yul Brynner’s best years were behind him…but they were wrong. Everyone ran with it, had fun, and created a creepy-fun thrill ride through an under-appreciated classic from everyone involved…especially its writer/director.

"Doesn't anything work around here?"

by Chad Denton

The Doctor and Steven arrive in a place the Doctor quickly figures out is sixteenth century Paris. Right away the Doctor wants to try to meet Charles Preslin, a famous apothecary (sort of the early modern equivalent of a pharmacist). Unknown to them they’ve arrived at one of the worst possible times to be in Paris this side of 1792; Huguenot noblemen are staying in the city to celebrate the wedding between the Protestant leader Henri of Navarre and the French princess Marguerite de Valois, and tensions are running high between the Huguenots and Catholics. Not knowing this, the Doctor reluctantly agrees to let Steven go sightseeing while he tries to find Preslin, but makes Steven promise not to talk to anyone unless he must. However, once the Doctor leaves Steven accidentally disobeys by getting into an argument with a bartender, which leads to him befriending a Huguenot named Nicholas. Meanwhile the Doctor finds Preslin, who is in hiding and is terrified of being persecuted by agents of the Abbot of Amboise, and encourages his research in science.

Nicholas offers shelter to a frightened servant girl, Anne Chaplet, who fled the service of her master, the Abbot, who had heard a rumor that there was going to be a massacre of Huguenots in Paris. To protect her, she is sent to work for the prominent Huguenot Admiral de Coligny; Nicholas also brings Steven to stay the night at Coligny’s quarters, in order to save him from being arrested for breaking the curfew. The next day Steven arouses Nicholas’ suspicious when he mistakes the Abbot for the Doctor, who are both dead ringers for each other. At least Nicholas agrees to help Steven find the Doctor, but has suspicions that Steven is a Catholic spy, which are exasperated when it turns out that Preslin has been missing for years. Steven escapes and tries to make his way to the Abbot, whom he’s convinced is the Doctor in disguise, and winds up embroiled in politics when he overhears members of the royal council discussing an order from the queen mother Catherine de’ Medicis to assassinate someone codenamed the “Sea Beggar,” who turns out to be Coligny…

Click here to read the full article…

"So...am I 'legend' yet, or do I have to kill a brace of vampires? Is it three or more? Is there a minimum to beat? A Buffy quotient?"

Alejandro Amenabar was another one of those film school drop outs who said “screw it” and began writing, producing, directing and staring in his own films in the mid-90s. There’s a good chance you haven’t heard of him because he went to school at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid instead of UCLA or whatever the hot New York film school is this season. (Really should ask my New York friends about that at some point when I start caring.)

Amenabar’s first movie, Thesis, was about a Universidad Complutense student Nancy Drewing her way towards a snuff film ring. Open Your Eyes (Abre los ojos) is his sophomore movie, the kind that proves you can avoid the stereotypical sophomore slump if you’re smart and/or talented enough. Not only is Open Your Eyes better than Thesis, it’s more interesting and seems a bit more personal. As you’d expect from any movie born out of a flu-based fever dream.

Open Your Eyes opens with our protagonist, Cesar (Eduardo Noriega) awakening to a deserted city. Except this turns is all dream. In the “real” world, Cesar’s the comfortably-well off son of a dead restaurant chain owner, with plenty of spendin’ money to throw around. Along with the three cars and the swanky Madrid apartment, this affords him the chance to sleep with his choice of beautiful women, much to the envy of his best friend, Pelayo (Fele Martínez):

Cesar: You’re handsome.

Pelayo: I’m acceptable, when you’re not beside me.

Cesar: You’re like anorexics. They insist they’re fat and end up crazy.

Pelayo: When some girl ties you down, the rest of us will get a chance.

Because it symbolizes the gulf between them. That's why.

Except this is all a flashback. In the really “real” world, Cesar’s a criminal in a psychiatric hospital, charged but awaiting trial and telling his story to court appointed-shrink Antonio (Chete Lera). Maybe Cesar can get off on an insanity plea if he’ll just tell the damn story all the way to the end. In a linear fashion, please. Antonio needs to hear it all before he can hand down the diagnosis. Apparently Cesar killed someone and now chooses to hide his face with a prosthetic mask, believing himself horribly disfigured no matter who insists otherwise.

After some belligerence, we and Cesar flash back to his last birthday party, where Our Hero tries (and fails) to avoid Nuria (Najwa Nimri), the girl he’s been sleeping with until now (“now” being the first fifteen minutes of the movie). In typical Young, Rich Asshole fashion, Cesar avoids her by cozying up to Sofia (Penelope Cruz), the girl Pelayo brought to his birthday party, causing some inevitable friction between the friends. After hitting the booze to drown out the fact he’ll always play second-fiddle to his friend, Pelayo storms out, leaving Cesar to talk his way back to Sofia’s place.

Just a memo to all you guys out there: if you want to convince your friends they could be just as successful with the ladies as you are, it’s best not to steal their dates. The only thing keeping Cesar from engaging the Cruz Control is Sofia’s concern for Cesar and Pelayo’s friendship. You see why I can’t call him Our Hero? He’s a  jerk-off who can’t appreciate what he has. If this movie didn’t spent its entire two hour length fucking with him, I might not have enjoyed our time together nearly as much.

"Maybe so, but I can also be a complete idiot whenever the script requires it. Because you never know: shit happens, and all this might just be a dream. Or not."

The next day, Cesar makes the inexplicable choice to get into a car with Nuria when he finds her parked outside his apartment (nope – nothing creepy going on here). Nuria promptly rams the car into a wall, killing herself and destroying Cesar’s face (and only his face – that’s some precision car crashing, there) beyond the scope of modern reconstructive surgery.

Except our director cuts straight from the car crash to a scene where a normal looking Cesar meets a still-hot-as-ever Sofia in the park. By now, we’re thirty minutes in, and I’m already starting to question the line between reality and the “dream” world, with a growing suspicion in my gut that the two are not as distinct as (say) Cesar might believe. Open Your Eyes is that kind of movie, playing in the same sandbox as several Philip K. Dick stories I could think of, particularly from his middle period when he started letting speed write novels for him. There’s this one novel – Ubik, from 1969 -  about a bunch of people who end up trapped in a dream state after their terminally injured bodies are shoved into cryostasis to keep their hearts and minds functioning. It includes a supporting character who can warp reality by retroactively undoing past events with her psychic powers…just because that’s how Philip K. Dick rolled.

Open Your Eyes is like that. Either you roll with it, or get out of its way, because it’s not gonna stop to explain things to the halt. This makes it abysmally hard to talk about, because I don’t really want to talk about it. But I want you to go out and see this flick, so I have to tell you why, which means I have to talk about it, if only in the most oblique terms. Open Your Eyes is a film that puts you on guard, since nothing screams “unreliable narrator” quite as loudly as a flashback, especially when they’re told to cops or psychologists. Combine that with Cesar’s repeated false-awakenings – which grow to have more of an effect on reality than he’d like, with tragic consequences – and you’ve got a story with more twists than a bent straw, hauling you through its every twist thanks to all the time spent strapped to this one masked man’s back.

Insert Massive Attack song here. (No, really.)

What the hell, right? Fifteen years of reviewers have already spoiled the hell out of this thing, so why am I being coy about it? Because I don’t have to contribute to all that. I’d rather interpret this dream Alejandro Amenabar made for us. It’s full of symbols, but I’ll spoil the film if I start describing them and become exactly the kind of Idea Lepidopterist I despise. And since I want you to run out and find this movie as soon as humanly possibly, it’s better to risk boring you by talking about the themes of Open Your Eyes rather than risk spoil the film by talking about its specifics.

Themes like vanity. Before Nuria’s attempted murder, we see Cesar, all suave and self-effacing, taking his good looks and their attendant privileges for granted, like any privileged sod. Afterward, he’s so desperate for Sofia’s attention he starts stalking her during her day job as a park-based mime. (Even stoops to put money in her mime-hat, and you should never give money to mimes. They can’t all be Penelope Cruz, and the non-Penelope Cruz mimes don’t need the encouragement.) After loosing his face, go figure, Cesar turns into a embittered, mood-ruining douche, jealous of the very best friend whom he so casually cockblocked, since Pelayo’s kept Sofia company through all this madness…and ain’t irony a bitch? Drunk and alone, Cesar passes out in the street…

And that’s all I’m going to say. There’s over half a movie to go, and it’s the interesting half.

Some dates end better than others...especially if you went to the Kennedy School.

I was surprised by the discipline in this, its director’s second feature. Not many people go straight to the reality warping, but Amenabar pulls it off leaves it hanging casually by his side until you’re lulled into a false sense of security…and then he smacks you in the face with it. He’s not trying to be flashy, he’s not trying to be cute, and he’s not trying to give anything away until he’s good and ready. This isn’t about stylistic technique: it’s about the damn story, and it’s about telling that damn story so well, I didn’t figure out the twist until we were twenty minutes from the ending. That’s something, right? (Around here, buddy, it’s a lot.)

And more than anything, Amenabar chose some great actors to carry this story through all its twists, up to and including the end. Noriega’s Cesar may be a hypocritical rich asshole, but he’s a believably hypocritical rich asshole, and I wound up feeling sorry for him in spite of the constant urge to punch him in his new scars. He’s petty, casually cruel, and ends up a broken, self-pitying monstrosity…but damnit, it’s not like he was actively evil. A Lothario, sure…but did he deserve a partial face-amputation? (Actually, he might have if Sofia hadn’t successfully fought him off during their One Night Together. Never rub another man’s rhubarb.)

Cruz infuses Sofia with a feisty life that almost makes her side project as a mime interesting, and the makes the rest of her even more so. Despite being the Object of Affection, Sofia’s a better love interest than the thousands of cardboard standies dotting Hollywood’s productions, with a clear sense of what she wants and how much shit she’ll put up with, no matter how much of a face you have. Martínez’s Pelayo is every rich douchebag’s dejected wingman throughout time, either getting his sweet revenge or tossed unceremoniously by the wayside of his best friend’s great love story (depending on which dream-reality we’re in at the moment). No matter who’s dream we’re in, the chemistry between everyone and the strong script at their disposal keep the characterization consistent and movie enjoyable.  I love watching Cesar suffer. I love watching Pelayo bitch him out for not appreciating what he has. I love watching Sofia bitch Cesar out for letting his dick hamstring his conscience. And her occasional habit of miming in the nude.  I love that all these things are contained within the same film: a sci-fi/murder mystery/love drama…with dream sequences. And reality warping. And I Am Legend riffs.

You assume we want you to move, Penelope.

That scattershot nature might scare off those who insist their films be one thing  and one thing only, remaining safe within the confines of audience expectations. Abre los ojos doesn’t give a fuck about your expectations. This film isn’t a straight line, it’s a puzzle that demands active audience members. The fun of a first viewing comes from figuring out how all these weird little pieces fit together. The fun of a second viewing comes from seeing them all fall into alignment like the components of a Transformer.

If I had a complaint it would be that, after all the build up we’ve been through, any conclusion could potentially come off as an unsatisfying cop-out. This conclusion, in particular, smacks of the worst cop-outs in late-90s sci-fi. But instead of pretentiously insisting that my films arise ex nihilo I’m going to praise Open Your Eyes for setting the ending up in under thirty minutes before hiding it in plain sight for the rest of the film. I swear, I didn’t guess it until the end, and when’s the last time that honestly happened…? I can’t remember, myself…and that’s terrifying.

So if you have the time, patience, or taste for some existential terror, track Abre los ojos down and see what a sci-fi movie can be when spectacle doesn’t crowd out the idea that gave it shape. I love how what little spectacle there is here only comes forward to serve those ideas, distracting you from them with sly, slight-of-hand storytelling even as it waves them right under your nose. The soundtrack up and tells you…well, I don’t want to tell you what the soundtrack tells you, except to say, “Good things.” You know I don’t mention soundtracks unless they stand out.

Dream on...

Because this is a good movie that deserves more than a spot on the always-getting-longer list of Sundance award winners no one really remembers anymore. Or the not-as-long-but-even-more-depressing list of foreign-language films inexplicably remade into English by a Hollywood so desperate for “new” ideas it’s started strip-mining them out of other countries like a fucking aluminum manufacturer. Open Your Eyes deserves to be seen, taken in, and remembered on its own terms, as a piece of 90s sci-fi that tries to ask questions and explore characters. In other words, a piece of 90s sci-fi that doesn’t outright suck.

By Chad Denton

Hell, who doesn't remember this?

So it came to my attention that, around the time I started doing my “Simpsons” write-ups, Onion AV Club writer Nathan Rabin has been doing his own reviews. This was kind of discouraging, since one of the reasons I do pop culture write-ups is to make a desperate shot in the dark toward getting a paid writing gig. And while I’m just some random person on the Internet, he gets paid for writing for a major website, which in the light of the Internet’s hierarchy means that I’m a groveling peasant and he’s a bejeweled archbishop.

I honestly did think about giving up this series before I even really began it, but it occurred to me that I’m not writing these as strictly reviews but as a reflection on a show that I literally grew up with. Also I said that I would try to generate more substantial content in this space to try to get you all to throw some change my way, and so here we are.

At least most of the first two seasons of “The Simpsons” are built around Bart’s perspective, so it’s no surprise that the earliest big target of Simpsonian satire is the American public school system, if not the entire modern concept of education. If the entire city of Springfield is an American dystopia, then Springfield Elementary is a greater dystopia within dystopia. The teachers have been broken down and drained bone-dry of any idealism they started off with, the administrators are more concerned with appeasing the almighty budget or enforcing arbitrary rules than with pedagogy, a budding genius like Lisa is at best left perpetually underengaged or at worst is encouraged to become a careerist and view her education as little more than a series of hurdles, and a problem student like Bart is just treated like a nuisance who has to be ignored for the sake of the “smart” kids. Now, in what is the first post-pilot episode to hit the air, little of this is evident just yet, but the grim and all too real portrait of Springfield Elementary does start to surface here.

Click here to read the full article…

Could be worse...could be an Aundrey II...or a Triffid...I'm just sayin'...

John W. Campbell Jr. published the novella Who Goes There in 1938 and went on to inspire the next generation of alien invasion stories, usually involving duplication, replacement, and the resulting paranoia. Who Goes There escaped the printed page and became The Thing from Another World in 1951, the same year Robert Heinlein published The Puppet Masters, which non-Heinlein fans might facetiously describe as “Who Goes There 2.0.” (If we want to be dicks about it.) Two years later, our “friends” at 20th Century Fox chose to distribute a little independent horror movie called Invaders from Mars. The year after that, Collier’s Magazine began serializing a novel from 5 Against the House author Jack Finney called The Body Snatchers.

With all these other Alien Invasion films making such a big splash, Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures had to snatch up the film rights. It had no choice, having been around since 1931 and gained a well-deserved reputation for low budget Westerns (which weren’t all that bad), Bowery Boys comedies (which weren’t all that funny) and Bomba, the Jungle Boy adventures (which really were all that racist and then some). Like any small timer, Monogram hoped for some respect, and so transmuted itself into Allied Artists Pictures. It began fielding “B-plus” films with at-the-time-insane production costs, sometimes climbing north of one million dollars.

"Yes...yes...here you can see where they cut the budget: those cheap props? Shooting in Bronson Canyon? Yes, those are definitely the scars you'd expect..."

This helps explain why the film we now know as Invasion of the Body Snatchers – which was never destined to be a “B-plus” picture – suffered a hundred million dollar budget cut right out of the gate. The studio chopped a week off its shooting schedule and nixed the producer’s efforts to film in a real-life small, Northern California town, like the one Finny described in his novel. Suddenly, the  cavalcade of A-list (or at least B-plus list) stars proved too expensive. Everyone who did make the cut put in six-day workweeks and the production still managed to go three days over-schedule. The test audiences laughed in all the wrong places. The studio execs demanded a framing sequence to (a) spoil the ending and (b) leave the audience on an optimistic high note. (Wouldn’t want our “thriller” to “thrill” them too much now, would we?) And to top it all off, critics turned the film into a political football for their own pet causes. And yet…

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a personal favorite of mine, a movie where vision overcame budget restrictions by integrating them into its story. I never knew the (fictional) town of Santa Mira, CA, was a patchwork of three other cities (and two canyons – though I recognized Bronson, since it’s been filmed more times than most sex acts). I never knew this production cost a grand total of $382,000. And much as I’d like to live in a universe where Kim Hunter starred in this and Planet of the Apes, the use of (largely) TV actors means there aren’t any famous faces around to destroy the illusion that these are (exceptionally pretty, but still) everyday residents of Small Town America. There’s very little obvious evidence of the rushed production or low budget, and plenty of evidence that test audiences of the ’50s were as idiotic as they are today.

Honestly, I’m always surprised the film turned out to be this good, but the fact is it stands far out from its competitors and predecessors. At a time when Hollywood grappled with competition from upstart new media (when hasn’t it?) by trying to be BIGGER and LOUDER, Invasion stands out by trying to be a horror movie. They didn’t have the money to put on a grand spectacle, like Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, which brought the aliens down out of the skies and into our cities. Invasion, like Invaders from Mars, brought the aliens out of our cities and into one of the few environments Americans were supposed to hold sacrosanct: the small town. Might as well call it “our” town since it only exists in the fictions of our collective culture.

...the kind of town where the natives are never far from their pitchforks.

Santa Mira’s that kind of town, a place of farmers with roadside stands, aunts, uncles and fat traffic cops, where everyone knows everyone else. Here’s Dr. Miles Burnell (Kevin McCarthy), returning from an out-of-town conference to find everyone clamoring for him. Here he is ignoring most of them in order to focus on old college flame Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), whose cousin Wilma (Virginia Christine)’s come believe her Uncle Ira (Tom Fadden)’s been replaced by an imposter. “Someone who only looks like Uncle Ira.”

Dr. Miles recommends Cousin Wilma see his psychologist friend, Dr. Dan Kaufman (Larry Gates), who rationalizes her paranoia away as a good ol’ garden variety delusion. Becky’s worried, despite being “in the capable hands of [her] personal physician,” but nevertheless accompanies Miles on a house call to the Belicec residence. There Jack (King Donovan) and his wife Teddy (Carolyn Jones) reveal the half-formed-but-otherwise-recognizable Jack-duplicate they left on their own pool table. Our dear doctor’s surprised, but not enough to recommend Jack call the police right the hell then. Oh no. Better wait until morning. Sure, Miles. Whatever.

That’s more than enough time for the creepy duplicate-Jack to open its eyes and send both Belicecs fleeing their house in terror. The better for Jack’s duplicate to sneak away while no one’s looking. And of course, no one bothered taking a picture of the damn thing while it was on the pool table. If they did, Dr. Kaufman and the authorities might actually believe them. Assuming, of course, that Dr. Kaufman and the authorities haven’t already been replaced.

Get up, stand up...stand up for your right...to use up planets like tissue paper and then move on to new ones... Yeah, it doesn't fit the rhyme scheme; sue me, I just woke up."

Deciding there’s safety in numbers, Miles, Becky and the Belicecs hold up at the doctor’s house…and eventually discover four more pods growing out in the greenhouse. Deciding the creatures grow from space-born spores drifting into our atmosphere, Miles sends the Belicecs out of town in the hope of escaping their influence. After destroying the embryonic mass of foaming horror that would’ve eventually become his duplicate (but finding himself incapable of destroying the one meant to be be Becky) Miles and Becky attempt to separate the real humans from the pod people…only to end up the last two human beings in town, huddled in terror as they watch the duplicates get organized and begin to spread themselves across the state of California…and after Kal-ee-four-nee-ahh, the world!

These scenes easily lend themselves to political interpretation, though these days I tend to look at it from a socio-cultural angle. These Body Snatchers predate Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man by almost a decade, yet they create as perfect a state of “unfreedom” as you’re likely to find outside the Borg Collective: systematic, unemotional, and entirely detached from their project of replacing all human life with themselves. It’s just what they do. The already-classic-when-this-came-out SF trope of the alien conqueror who wants to end human suffering by stripping away human emotion allows them to rationalize their activities to our protagonists in a way the Martians couldn’t. They have no malice aforehand and they don’t want to decimate our cities or control our minds. All they want is to become us and they’re incapable of understanding why we might resist such a thing since, after all, we’ll still be…in them. They can’t feel, so they can’t know how creepy that is, and that’s awesome.

This makes them one of the most interesting alien invaders of the pre-Alien era. In their cold precision, they resemble a certain breed of killer robot that wouldn’t be invented for another thirty years, but with better personalities. They’re predators posing as domesticated Everyday Folks, as we see in the creepy scene where five of them sit around a living room with one holding a pod in his arms. “Should I put it in the baby’s crib?” The “mom” stands up and volunteers to do the job it instead, like that would help. It’s the kind of thing a paranoid schizophrenic would dream up – some down on his luck used car salesman in a dead-end, California suburb, watching life pass him by.

"Is he talking about...our literary antecedents? That bastard!"

Would it surprise you to know Philip K. Dick wrote a short story called The Father Thing in 1954? The Obligatory Kid in this movie, Jimmiy Grimaldi (Bobby Clark), seems to be a version of its protagonist. There seemed to be a lot of fake people wandering around in the early 50s, especially after they hanged the Rosenbergs and the mind control stories coming out of the Korean War filtered into the popular imagination. Makes sense, really: we all walk around knowing what we keep from other people. No telling what they keep from us…who they might turn out to be…what they might turn out to be…or when they might turn on us and try to siphon out our personalities while we sleep.

The movie’s not very clear on the mechanics of body snatching, and that’s its most obvious flaw, obviously blamed on its sudden budget cut. It looks like all you have to do to become one of them is fall asleep, and that’s ultimately unsatisfying after all the build up lavished on this process. The budget also shows in Santa Mira’s widely variable population. Sometimes a simple jump cut can thin a crowd out by fifty, sixty…a hundred…how many people were in this town again?

Honestly though, I don’t care.  They saved all their money for the greenhouse sequence and it’s goddamn creepy for 1956, if not exactly viscous enough for modern gorehounds. And I don’t care about that either. Invasion‘s real strength lies in its ability to put you in the head of Dr. Miles Burnell. If this aspect of the movie failed, they could throw all the money in the world at it and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. Thank God it works, and it works because director Don Siegel sticks with Burnell like flypaper, even before the studio insisted on that framing sequence. (Incidentally, Miles tells his story to actor Whit Bissell, late of Dr. David Reed’s ill-fated expedition to the Black Lagoon).

Town meetings were never this cool in the MIdwest...

I’ve heard some people, who happen to be professors, and therefore very smart and very worth listening to, describe this movie as a “Sci-fi Noir” picture, and they’re very right about that. As in any good noir, you nominally don’t know who’s working for or against Our Heroes and betrayals are always sudden, no matter how inevitable they might seem in retrospect. Kevin McCarthy gets to embody this. In the story-proper, he starts off a clean cut, smiling town doctor. The movie’s his journey from that guy to the raving, disheveled madman we and not-Dr. Thompson meet in the framing sequence. This tight focus on a strong, central character perfectly complements the atmosphere and by the end, if the movie’s done its job, its forced us to snatch Dr. Burnell’s bod without our even noticing. Like him, we’re left strung out from the constant threat of duplication and desperately hoping he’ll convince the outside world “They’re here already!” And “You’re next!”

Don Siegel, for anyone who doesn’t know, would go on direct Coogan’s Bluff, Two Mules for Sister Sara, The Shootist, Dirty Harry, and Escape from Alcatraz, which just goes to show you never know who’s toiling away in some Poverty Row studio. The guy making the black and white, $380 grand alien invasion movie could go on to direct some of the best Action/Westerns of the 70s. You can see Siegel’s eye for empty streets and stark landscapes in the way Santa Mira changes (or doesn’t change) under the pod people’s management, and in Miles’ eventual flight across the parched, Serengeti landscape of So-Cal. You can also his his preference for psychologically-affecting camera angles and strong, ultimately isolated protagonists.

This last has the unfortunate side-effect of making all the other characters less than memorable, as they’re all basically pod people fodder. Except Dana Wynter’s character, since Dana Wynter’s stunningly unforgettable. And just as an aside: it’s interesting to see the Obligatory Love Story bloom between two divorcees…even though they have to use code words.

An old flame walks into your office with a hot new case? How much more noir could you get? I suppose you could set all this in San Francisco...

(So when did “I hear you’ve been to Reno?” stop being code for “I hear you dropped that sad bastard/dumb broad you stupidly tied yourself down to when you were still young and spry”?)

Too bad Becky’s not what you’d call dynamic. Hot though she may be, she responds to the Unknown the same way as most of her contemporary damsels: with lots ‘a screamin’. I almost expected Dr. Burnell to hook up with his hot nurse, Sally (Jean Willes), before I saw Dana Wynter walk in wearing that strapless dress. Can’t fault your decision there, Dr. Miles. I would’ve done exactly the same thing. Still, more nurse for the rest of us…

And so now I recommend this original Invasion of the Body Snatchers to you. Could it have been a little tighter? Yeah. Could it have used some more money? Hell, couldn’t we all? Despite that, it’s one of my favorite alien invasion movies of all time. It’s creepy, unnerving and effective as all hell. See it, show it to your kids, and spend their whole lives making “pod people” jokes with them behind other people’s backs. It’s done wonders for me and it might just do the same for you and yours. Besides, we all know they’re here already…and you’re next…don’t fight it…it’s as simple as going to sleep…

"His ideas are garbage!"

Having fled my Evil Self from the Republic Serial Dimension, I take refuge inside the After Movie Diner and discuss two prime examples of 1970s SF goodness: Michael Crichton’s Westworld and Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (That one with Donald Sutherland’s mustache.) Download, share, and enjoy.

As always, big thanks to Diner host, friend of the show, and theme-song writer Jon X for putting up with my rambling once again. This’ll be the third time I’ve slipped into the diner’s chipped Formica embrace, the previous two being Episode 21: The DIY Superhero Special and Episode 12: Censorship! An Ass-to-Mouth-Palooza. All of which are available for download at The After Movie Diner’s website (hint-hint, nudge-nudge), along with loads of branded T-shirts, coffee mugs, mouse pads and condoms for your wearing, drinking, dust-gathering or freak-getting-on pleasure.