Walking Tall

If the audience at last night's sneak preview of Walking Tall was any indication, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's fan base is still intact, and the film's marketing people must have run a lot of commercials about the preview screening during this week's wrestling programs. The row in front of us was filled with grunting, hooting, joking lunkheads who did all of these things throughout the film. Far from detracting from the experience, however, it added an atmosphere of authenticity -- because that's exactly what was happening on screen as well.

The remake updates the story pretty closely (from what I can recall in my hazy memories of the original), introducing Johnson as Chris Vaughn, a former Special Forces soldier who returns home after eight years. To his surprise, the town mill has closed and his former girlfriend is working as a stripper in the community's new source of income, a garish casino run by a former classmate. The classmate (Neil McDonough) is more stereotype than character, but no one seemed to mind.

After a run-in with the casino security goons that nearly kills him, Vaughn decides that the casino is a Bad Thing. After breaking the law for most of the movie's first half, he does the only sensible thing: he runs for sheriff and wins. The movie takes off into pure fantasy as Vaughn fires the entire staff of deputies (including, apparently, the people who answer the phones) and relies on his buddy Johnny Knoxville to help out. I'm sure Knoxville's character had a name, but who cares? It's Johnny Knoxville. I know that at this point I should have been enjoying The Rock's one-man (OK, two-man) crusade to clean up the town, but I couldn't help marveling at how crime-free it was already, that a newly-elected sheriff could keep his job while ignoring all of the everyday business that had previously kept about a dozen people busy during the previous sheriff's tenure. Didn't anyone have anything else for which they needed a lawman?

Of course this isn't the point; I was supposed to be watching The Rock kick ass, and naturally the Rock kicks ass. The film goes to great lengths to even things up between the towering muscle mass that earned this man his wrestling moniker and his adversaries, but there can be no doubt of the outcome. That is just the way the lunkheads in the previous row liked it, and I couldn't help enjoying their enthusiasm. Knoxville adds an awful lot of entertainment value to scenes that need levity, particularly a scene involving a suspect and his beloved truck.

Scott and I were struck by the incredible lack of nudity in what is nominally an exploitation film, especially since the casino is supposed to be part strip-club. There are wet t-shirt contests that miss the point so entirely that Scott speculated there might have been some crafty editing or even the post-production "re-whitening" of the t-shirts. Janet Jackson, is this your doing?

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Love it or hate it, you can't deny that this movie asks some really interesting questions. If we could erase hurtful memories, would we? And if someone somehow managed to erase all of the pain in his past, what would be left of him as a person?

Without getting too bogged down in logistics, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman introduces the technique of memory erasure as a mundane procedure. Not only is it possible and practical in this story, but also honed to the point that it can be done overnight in one's own home. Technicians sneak in at night and zap portions of your brain with the offending memories, and then steal away before you wake up, presumably to preserve the illusion. (I wondered how the company explains the charges for memory erasure in this case, but those are the logistics I mentioned.)

Joel (Jim Carrey), a nebbishy loner, discovers that his extroverted girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) has had him erased from her memories, and so he exacts a sort of revenge by having her expunged from his brain. Their friends are all mailed little cards asking them not to mention the relationship ever again. The doctor and the technicians he employs become involved in the story in a number of tangled ways, but the real complications set in when Joel decides, mid-procedure, that he would like to keep his memories of Clementine after all.

The chronology of the film is as maze-like as the corners of Joel's psyche in which he tries to hide Clementine from the lasers (?) that hunt her, but that is part of the appeal. By the time we really understand what's going on, it is in part because we've been yanked around as much as Joel has. It's not always a pleasant process; I walked out of the movie not much liking any of the characters, including Joel, but after some time I have decided that I do like the film's message, and the way that message was presented.

Still I come back to lingering questions of the logistics of the procedure. One particularly disturbing aspect of the treatment is a ripple effect -- some older memories must be wiped out because they become connected to the newer ones. Not just the memories that Joel uses to hide Clementine, but also his entire memory of the song "Oh My Darling Clementine" and the fact of a beloved childhood Huckleberry Hound doll. Without key pieces of his past like these, is Joel the same person? And what about those memories that we don't retain in the natural course of our lives? What kinds of people would we be if we still had them?

Spectreman

When I was in middle-school (or maybe early high school? -- the mid- to late-'80s at any rate), there was an afternoon block of kids' programming on the local independent TV station, Channel 69. (No, I'm not making this up. In fact, they're still there, although now they are the local UPN affiliate.) Hosting the afternoon was Captain 69 who, along with a robot buddy whose name I can't remember, cracked wise from his show desk aboard whatever spaceship set they'd constructed for him. The programming rotated, showing obscure Japanese cartoons like Tranzor Z, but the mainstay of the afternoon, for me at least, was always Spectreman.

Spectreman was a third-rate Ultraman created by Fuji Television and P-Productions in 1971, presumably to cash in on the rubber-suit craze. I don't know whether they succeeded or not on the "cash in" part, but the resulting 50+ -episode run certainly kept a lot of kids entertained. Even at that point I knew Spectreman was pretty bad but back then with no cable TV (my parents just started subscribing within the last few years) and no internet, it was the best thing going.

At a recent sci-fi convention (see the entries on MegaCon below) I was able to pick up a bootleg DVD with the first four half-hour episodes of Spectreman, and it was every bit as bad as I remember. Actually, it was somewhat better than I remember. The initial episodes feature Spectreman's alter-ego, George, trying to fit in with us Earthlings. Since the evil ape-scientist Dr. Gori has come to Earth and plans to conquer the world with giant monsters born of the pollution we humans so foolishly create, George allies himself with a pollution-fighting task force. Budgets for the series must have been hideously low, as the show must constantly create excuses for George not to change into Spectreman, even when it would make sense to do so. The main limiting factor is that the transformation process is controlled by "Overlord," a disembodied voice who watches over George from the roving planet "Nebula 71." Overlord is a control freak who spends a lot of time telling George to solve his problems in his human form before finally relenting, which is when Spectreman appears and may kick some ass.

I think we're probably going to do a review of some part of the series over at Stomp Tokyo so I won't say a whole lot more, but I gotta say it's a kick seeing an old favorite like this and to discover that it's still enjoyable.

Survivor All-Snores

Last week's Survivor was, frankly, a waste of time. At the risk of being insensitive, Sue's pity party over Richard's admittedly thoughtless and tasteless act in the previous episode did not make for engaging television, and the producers handled the situation poorly, at least from the vantage point of my couch. The only drama they could manage to eke out of the episode was to let Sue shoot off her mouth and depart grumpily. After all that, she gives up her shot at a million bucks because she's pissed off? Hardly the stuff that makes one think of her as a "survivor."

What amazed me even further was that, after being robbed of an immunity challenge by Sue's walkout, host Jeff Probst then offered the tribes a chance to share the reward without competing for it. Wow, Jeff, you want to eliminate everything that makes this show worth watching? Fortunately the competitors realized what the show was all about and voted to hold the challenge anyway. All in all, though, a pretty lame episode.

Hopefully things will be back on track tonight.

Thoughts on MegaCon 2004

What really struck me about Orlando's Megacon is that it's much more of a trade show for sci-fi fans than other conventions. Held at the Orange County Convention Center, the con focuses on vendor booths and autograph sessions, adding discussion panels and other programming events as an afterthought. If you've been to other conventions like Dragon*Con, imagine the gaming rooms, dealers' room, artist's alley, and walk of fame combined and spread out across one large showroom floor (though, considering the congestion in the aisles, perhaps not large enough). A convention center is of course more conducive to this sort of raucous expo atmosphere, but it is distinctly different from a convention hotel, where the attendees settle in for a few days and have rooms to which they may escape (or use to change costumes).

There were a few events taking place in seminar rooms, like the standard Arne Starr trailer show. (More on this in a bit.) Some of the higher-profile guests were also in themed panels, but the rest of the programming tracks seemed too generic or technical. In any case, there was little to interest us and we spent most of our time on the showroom floor. This was a good thing, as we needed most of that time to see all of the booths and make decisions on what we were going to go back and purchase.

When we approached the MegaCon programming folks about attending the convention as speakers, we were informed that panels were staffed by the people who had paid for showroom floor booths. This may account for the scattershot nature of the programming -- there were panels on CGI animation next to talks by comic book creators -- but I think the convention could benefit from the wealth of creative talent in the area who would be only too happy to offer their expertise in exchange for the exposure and admission to the convention. Naturally, I say this as one of those people looking for exposure, but if there had been a better variety of panels I might have stayed as a paying attendee for an extra day.

The one programming event I did attend was Arne Starr's traveling show of movie trailers, which is a mainstay of sci-fi conventions. For years Starr, a comics illustrator with some friends in Hollywood, has set up his projection equipment in ballrooms and showed movie fans the upcoming slate of movies for the next year, commenting on projects in development as he goes. Unfortunately Starr's gig has been supplanted by the wealth of trailers on the Internet -- indeed, most of his stock seemed to come from Apple's Quicktime trailers site and there were few trailers which Scott or I hadn't seen. (A notable exception: American Scary.) In this particular instance there was a lot of fiddling with the projector and sound equipment, which was a major distraction until he got it fixed. (Perhaps he should have been given more prep time?) Still, the house was packed and there were enough people who apparently don't troll the movie rumors sites to keep the appreciative (and surprised) murmurs coming.

I would probably return to MegaCon given the opportunity and the time, but it's not high on my list of "must-attend" events.

MegaCon 2004

Just got back from MegaCon, Orlando's big sci-fi / comic convention. We gave away a bunch of copies of B-Movies Quarterly, mostly to people standing in line for tickets. It's a captive audience of folks who become desperate for something to do while they wait. My wife, who did most of the distribution (we find both men and women are more receptive to offers of free goods made by a woman), reports that those folks who had been waiting longer were more likely to take a copy. Either they were really ready for a distraction, or maybe just needed something with which to fan themselves.

More on the convention later.

The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra

Our review of The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is now up at Stomp Tokyo. Enjoy.