The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

Year 2, Day 107 - 4/17/10 - Movie #472

BEFORE: Same story as last night, only with (hopefully) better effects.

THE PLOT: A remake of the 1951 classic sci-fi film about an alien visitor and his giant robot counterpart who visit Earth.

AFTER: Definite upgrade. Keanu Reeves seemed (to me) the perfect choice to play Klaatu, the alien in human form who would probably not really understand human emotions, or be able to express them. He hasn't really shown much expression since his "Bill & Ted" days.

Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) gets an upgrade too - in the first film she was a secretary in the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, but here she's a top biologist, called in a part of an elite team to investigate the strange sphere that's shown up in Central Park (flying saucers are so old-fashioned...). She's on hand when the spaceman emerges, and (once again) gets shot by the military, and taken to a hospital.

What happens in the hospital is unique, and a great explanation for why this alien appears in human form. No explanation was given in the 1951 film, it was just taken as something of a coincidence that a man from another world looked human...

And Gort gets a major upgrade - in the original film, he was quite obviously played by a man in a tinfoil suit - but here he's a 50-foot tall CGI masterpiece, capable of taking on military helicopters and anything else the military decides to throw at him.

Aliens are tricky when it comes to their motives - remember the ones from "The Twilight Zone" that carried a book titled "To Serve Man"? And it turned out to be a book of recipes? Those bastards... Well, Klaatu has come to save the Earth - note that he didn't say "to save mankind", because in the opinion of the alien council, it's the humans that are the problem, and it's time to correct the situation.

In the 1951 film, Klaatu seemed like a peacenik socialist, but in this one, he's something of a hippie liberal with an environmental agenda. Man is a threat not because of his warlike nature, but because he's been polluting the planet and causing other species to become extinct - and it's their earth too!

Also starring Kathy Bates (as the Secretary of Defense!), Jaden Smith, John Cleese (as a Nobel-winning scientist!) and Jon Hamm.

RATING: 7 out of 10 action figures

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

Year 2, Day 106 - 4/16/10 - Movie #471

BEFORE: A sci-fi classic that I've never seen - with a very famous robot, which allows me to link from "Futureworld" and kick off my "alien invasion" chain.

THE PLOT: An alien lands and tells the people of Earth that they must live peacefully or be destroyed as a danger to other planets.

AFTER: How about "The Day the Earth was Bored Silly"? This film was boring with a capital "B"!

A flying saucer lands (which pretty much eats up the special effects budget for the whole film) and a spaceman exits, along with his giant robot, Gort. Naturally the army's first response is to shoot first and ask questions later, so the spaceman, Klaatu, is brought to the hospital. Once he recovers he disappears (it helps that he looks exactly like a human...) and lives among the hu-mans in a boarding house.

He contacts one of the world's top scientists, Dr. Barnhardt (Einstein must have been busy) to gather the world's leaders together to hear his message. See, he just wants to talk to us - or perhaps his evil plan is to bore us all to death. In the meantime he enjoys engaging people in social debates - causing people to suspect that he's secretly either a Communist or a civics teacher.

You know a film was made in the 1950's when a woman sees no potential problem with leaving her young boy with a complete stranger, so she can go on a picnic with her boyfriend. "Gee, honey, do you think I should leave my son with that man from the boarding house, the one who seems a little odd, mostly keeps to himself, and knows an awful lot about interstellar physics?" Why, sure, I don't see a problem with that at all - he just wants to buy your son some ice cream, take him to the movies and talk politics. What could go wrong?

Klaatu demonstrates his alien power by causing the entire world to lose electricity for 30 minutes (except for hospitals and planes in flight - he's not heartless...) but if his goal was to get people to listen to him, he probably didn't realize that inconveniencing humans by taking away their cars and TVs, even for a short time, is just going to piss everyone off.

Finally, after being chased by the army and shot - again - Klaatu is ready to deliver his message to the people of Earth. Let me see if I get this straight - Point 1: We, the Federation of Planets, are peaceful people. Point 2: We believe that you, people of Earth, are petty and warlike. Point 3: If you threaten any other planets, we will come back and blow you up. Ummm, can we go back to point #1, where you said you were peaceful? Doesn't point #3 sort of contradict point #1?

Basically, Klaatu wants to warn humans against taking our nuclear weapons and attaching them to rockets, and launching them toward other planets. Fine, except that humanity never would have even thought to do that until you suggested it - since we didn't know that there was life on other planets for us to blow up! Couldn't you just have avoided this situation by NOT landing on Earth to tell us that we had potential enemies in space?

I swear, sometimes people just don't think these things through - even aliens.

As stated, the special effects on this movie were laughably cheap - jeez, even "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" had better effects. Tomorrow I'll watch the 2009 remake to see how well it improves on the original.

RATING: 3 out of 10 flashlights

Futureworld

Year 2, Day 105 - 4/15/10 - Movie #470

BEFORE: Sequel to "Westworld", and Yul Brynner's final film appearance...

THE PLOT: Two reporters, Tracy and Chuck, get a message from a third one who discovered something about "Futureworld" and becomes killed before he could tell anyone about it.

AFTER: A fairly unnecessary film. We KNOW there's something hinky going on at Delos Park, so any suspense or mystery is pretty much dispelled before the film begins. Plus, why re-open a park that got so much negative publicity, when a few hundred people died there? Is sex with robots such an attractive proposition that people are willing to return to the site of the Great Robot Massacre? Better to just bulldoze the park, and start over with another robo-entertainment concept in another location...

The new addition to the park is "Futureworld", where you can ride a space-shuttle up to Mars and go skiing on red dust...and in the future, they've invented the concept of the robot three-way. The problem is, the place doesn't look all that futuristic - especially when viewed in 2010, when the space-shuttle program is about to be scrapped. Heck, I can get a more "futuristic" experience over at Mars 2112, a Manhattan theme restaurant where you ride on a phony rocket (a motion simulator) to a dining area that resembles the surface of Mars.

We had a fine time at the Star Trek Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton a few years ago, where there weren't any robots trying to kill us, the food was great (Ham-BORG-ers) and the special effects were certainly better than those seen in this film...I'd rather go back there than go to Futureworld.

Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner keep sneaking behind the scenes to get a glimpse at what's really going on at Futureworld...but I love how Fonda's character finds some hi-tech computer and starts just pushing buttons randomly. Not to worry, he's a whiz at this sort of thing - huh? Would you sneak into the control room at Disneyworld and just start pushing buttons like a chimp with a typewriter? Next thing you know, there'd be an accident on the Space Mountain Coaster, and it's your fault...Disney lawyers would be on your ass like white on rice!

Blythe Danner's Tracy (called "Socks" by Fonda's character, worst nickname ever...) is given the chance to experience a machine that video-records her dreams (to VHS or Beta?) and apparently her dream is to run through a mansion from a Stevie Nicks music video, pursued by Yul Brynner's gunslinger robot. What? Her character never even met the gunslinger, so how could she fantasize about him? Westworld was shut down by the time she got there...so was this fantasy put in her head by the Delos staff, is this some lingering aspect of the computer virus? I guess we'll never know, because the movie doesn't see fit to explain.

This movie came out 1 year before the first "Star Wars" film, oddly both feature a holographic chess-game sequence - however the one in "Futureworld" looks like a complete cheat - it's just live-action footage of chessmen, either matted into a framing shot, or shot on a giant stage from a distance, in order to look small. Then Lucas came along with much better holographic effects and totally schooled this film...
see what happens when you spend a few more dollars on special FX?

RATING: 3 out of 10 microchips

Westworld

Year 2, Day 104 - 4/14/10 - Movie #469

BEFORE: A different type of disaster film - one that takes place at a theme-park where people interact with life-like robots, in environments designed to replicate the Old West, the Roman Empire, and medieval times. This was written and directed by Michael Crichton, who later explored a similar idea in the novel "Jurassic Park" - also known as "let's clone some dinosaurs, what could possibly go wrong?"

THE PLOT: A robot malfunction creates havoc and terror for unsuspecting vacationers at a futuristic, adult-themed amusement park.

AFTER: Continuing my theories about the differences between men and women - according to this film, the ideal vacation for a man would be in an Old West town, where he can drink whiskey, get into bar fights, shoot a man (robot) just to watch him die, and then go have sex with a (robot) prostitute. Sounds about right... By contrast, the women would tend to visit the medieval section of the park, where they can dance, attend banquets, and have chivalrous men (robots) compete in jousting competitions to win their favor.

Presumably, the more ribald of both genders would be most interested in Roman World, where the debauchery of the Roman orgies are re-created...but conveniently this is left out of the film, to maintain some modicum of decency, and a PG rating.

But let's be clear, we're talking about indulging the basest of male + female fantasies - so that would be everything up to and including simulated rape and murder, which is justified only by the presence of robot victims, rather than human ones. Does that make it OK to indulge? Where do we draw the line on robot rights?

And supposedly there are multiple safeties to ensure that people can't be harmed while on their fantasy vacation - the visitors to Westworld can't be shot by a robot, but that barfight still had the potential for injury. Getting thrown off a balcony or getting a bottle broken over your head could still be dangerous. And what about a guest punching out another guest, since theoretically you can't tell the guests from the robots. Then you've got the sword fights in the medieval section, or the possibility of contracting an STD at the Roman orgy...

Yul Brynner is perfect as the deadpan gunslinger - who takes a licking and keeps on ticking. He gets shot up by the guests, but after a few minor repairs, he's back for revenge - there's no question he was the inspiration for Arnold's Terminator robot, who was just as hard to destroy.

It's fun to see the 1973 depiction of the future, with a bunch of lab technicians in white coats, sitting in a room full of giant computers with those big old spinning magnetic tape reels, saying things like, "You mean it's something like a human virus...but one that affects computers?" Yeah, genius, now that we live in the future we just call that a computer virus.

So, whatever happened to the Westworld concept? Did the idea of sex with robots go the way of flying cars and personal jetpacks? We've got electric cars and the interwebs, but the best we can do for entertainment seems to be 3-D movies and Playstation 3 games, even virtual-reality turned out to be a big disappointment. There are rumors of a remake of "Westworld" to be released in 2012 - maybe this will remind people how far we still have to go.

Also starring Richard Benjamin, James Brolin, Dick Van Patten, and Majel Barrett (from "Star Trek") as the local madam.

RATING: 5 out of 10 breakaway chairs

The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)

Year 2, Day 103 - 4/13/10 - Movie #468

BEFORE: Wrapping up "air disasters" week - I saw most or maybe all of this movie when I was a kid - but after watching that last stinker I need a winner as mental floss, or a palate cleanser. This film deals with a plane crash in the Sahara desert, and stars Jimmy Stewart, from "Airport '77", and George "Patroni" Kennedy as well - so it should fit in rather well right here.

THE PLOT: After a plane crash in the Sahara, one of the survivors says he's an airplane designer and they can make a flyable plane from the wreckage.

AFTER: I'm glad I included this film - because though I remembered the gist of the film, I had forgotten all the neat little twists and turns along the way.

One of my favorite films is "The Great Escape" - and this has something of the same feel, it's a bunch of manly men doing manly man-things, and we see different personality types working together to accomplish a common, unlikely goal. Richard Attenborough happens to appear in both films, and that helps with the tone.

There are also similarities to the film "Alive", the biggest difference being that one film takes place in the desert, and the other in the snowy Andes mountains - but there are enough common themes about survival and rescue that I'm glad I book-ended my airplane chain with these two films.

Conflicts between the men arise, not just over disagreements about how to survive and how to attempt a rescue, but also due to the different nationalities of the men. British men, American men and 1 German have to work together - and this is not too long after World War II. Quite stereotypically, the sole German is an organized, exacting prick of an airplane engineer. There's more to him than that of course, but I can't reveal it without giving away a juicy bit of the plot...

The conflicts between the men also highlight a point I made after watching "The Perfect Storm" - you can put a bunch of men together in a completely estrogen-free situation, and even though they may hate each other, there's a great chance that the job at hand will still get done. Sure, they devolve a little bit, and several times in this film a solid punch to the jaw is considered an appropriate form of communication, but once they slug it out, it's back to the business of saving each other's bacon. Girls hold grudges, and I stand by that little factoid.

My one quibble about the film is that we only learn the personalities of a small number of the men - the crusty pilot, the exacting engineer, the defiant soldier...but there are over a dozen characters, and not all of them are given a chance to shine, or develop in any significant way.

I didn't fully understand the mechanics behind the re-building of the plane when I was a kid - this was before the days of DVRs or DVDs or even VHS tapes, I think - and you couldn't rewind when watching a film on TV. Somehow in my head I mis-remembered and thought they combined pieces of their crashed plane with another crashed plane they found - but now that I can go back and look at the opening shots of the cargo plane, I finally understand which pieces of the cargo plane came together to form the Phoenix. Fascinating stuff.

Also starring Ernest Borgnine (last seen in "Poseidon Adventure"), and Peter Finch (of "Network" fame).

RATING 7 out of 10 spanners (that's wrenches to you, Yank...)

The Concorde: Airport '79

Year 2, Day 102 - 4/12/10 - Movie #467

BEFORE: I deserve some kind of medal for sitting through all of these "Airport" films - and I've been warned by friends that this one is the worst of the bunch. Since the Concorde stopped flying a few years ago, this is outdated to boot.

THE PLOT: George Kennedy again in his aviation-disaster role as Joe Patroni has to contend with nuclear missiles, the French Air Force and the threat of the plane splitting in two over the Alps!

AFTER: Continuity errors abound, along with an unlikely plot and laughable effects - where do I start?

Let's start with George Kennedy's character - he was a mechanic/airport manager in the first "Airport" film, then he became the V.P. of Operations for another airline in the 2nd film, then he had some secret job for a millionaire in the third film - now he's a pilot flying the Concorde! So he's had 4 completely different jobs for 4 different fictional airlines in 9 years! Plus in the first film, he talked about his wife and 5 sons, and in this one he mentions his late wife and ONE son, who's entering college - presumably this is the son seen on the plane in "Airport 1975", but he must have aged 10 years in just 4 years somehow...did the other sons die in a plane crash?

Then we've got an industrialist, Kevin Harrison (played by Robert Wagner), who's secretly an arms dealer - when a reporter gets secret papers handed to her, just before boarding the Concorde, Harrison uses a test of a drone missile to try and blow up the jet. Despite the fact that the Concorde can travel at twice the speed of sound, and the missile can't, the missile seems to catch up with the plane and fly circles around it - huh?

Kennedy's Patroni doesn't seem at all fazed by the fact that someone shot a missile at his plane - he treats it like this sort of thing happens to him every day. Who knows, maybe it does, the guy always seems to be in the middle of these disasters... His answer to defeating the missile involves doing a loop-de-loop with the supersonic jet, opening up the window (!) and firing a flare-gun to distract the heat-seeking missile - as casually as you or I would roll down our car window to order at the drive-thru...

So the plane makes it to France, but is forced to land on a very short runway - it's stopped by a series of flimsy plastic nets (!!) and has damaged equipment from the missile - yet still manages to take off again for Russia the next day. Excuse me? They delayed my plane once because the pilot didn't have the right seat cushion, and you're going to take off again in a plane damaged by a missile? That you flew upside-down in a barrel roll and almost crashed?

Comic relief (as if more were needed) is provided by Jimmie "Dyn-o-Mite" Walker as a jazz musician who smokes pot in the restroom, and Martha Raye, as the token aging actress who has a bladder-control problem and needs to use the restroom every 5 minutes. Raye later did real TV ads for incontinence products - so either she felt very strongly about this personal subject, or was trying to capitalize on her fame from being in "Airport '79" - either way, it's sad.

Also starring (if that word can be used in this context) Eddie Albert, Cicely Tyson, Charo, John Davidson, David Warner, Avery Schreiber, Sylvia Kristel (who was apparently forced into making nudie films like "Private Lessons" after this...) and Sybil Danning (ditto for the nudie flicks, so that's one positive thing) Oh, and Harry Shearer as the (uncredited) voice of the nightly news - I bet this film isn't on anyone's resume...

This is a definite contender for the worst FILM ever made. It's one of those films that makes you wonder if the director (plus writer, plus editor) had ever even SEEN a real film before.

RATING: 1 out of 10 barf bags

Airport '77

Year 2, Day 101 - 4/11/10 - Movie #466

BEFORE: Seems like this disaster film will neatly combine my fear of flying with my fear of drowning...

THE PLOT: Art thieves hijack a 747, hit fog and crash into the ocean, trapping them and the passengers under 100 feet of water.

AFTER: OK, that does it - I'm calling for a nationwide boycott of all airplane travel until the airlines can guarantee my safety. True to form, there was an actual plane crash this weekend, and now the government of Poland has been thrown into chaos. If we all band together, and stop flying in unsafe planes, we can bankrupt the airlines, and everyone can go back to safer modes of travel, like trains and horse-drawn carriages.

Jack Lemmon stars as the pilot of the troubled airplane this time, and for once the pilot doesn't bite the big one in the first act of the film - he just gets knocked unconscious by some art thieves, who then proceed to crash the plane into the ocean. Can the navy locate the plane and rescue the passengers before the fuselage breaks and the plane floods? Hey, it's like "Poseidon Adventure", but with a plane!

The movie depicts the plane sinking in a matter of minutes, but as we saw last year when that pilot performed an emergency landing on the Hudson River, a plane full of air, assuming it's intact after a water landing, would actually float for a while.

The special effects in this series didn't improve all that much - the plane seen hitting the ocean is quite obviously a small model plane, probably with the film slowed down to give it the illusion of being of greater size.

George Kennedy reprises his role as Joe Patroni, but only in a brief cameo, providing valuable information on the stress points of a 747.

Also starring Jimmy Stewart, Darren McGavin, Christopher Lee, Brenda Vaccaro, Olivia de Havilland (as the token Golden-Years actress...), veteran character actor M. Emmet Walsh, and 70's TV icons Gil Gerard and Pamela Bellwood.

RATING: 4 out of 10 scuba tanks

Airport 1975

Year 2, Day 100 - 4/10/10 - Movie #465

BEFORE: This sequel is shorter than the original by a considerable margin - hopefully it's a bit more exciting, as well.

THE PLOT: A 747 in flight collides with a small plane, and somehow the control tower must get a pilot aboard so the jet can land.

AFTER: Now THIS is more like it - actual action actually taking place! The special effects are markedly better, but there's still a lot of that cheezy rear-projection going on...

Though this is the film that "Airplane" was mostly ripping off - you've got the stewardess forced to try and fly the plane, the injured pilot, the substitute pilot, the sick girl being transported to her kidney transplant, and a bunch of people on the ground yelling at each other and overacting while trying to fix the disaster in the air.

It's interesting to see so many staples of the 1970's - Charlton Heston rocking a turtleneck sweater, passengers smoking and drinking boilermakers on the plane, and the use of the term "stewardess" instead of "flight attendant". And what's with the girl being transported to her transplant operation - was this before doctors figured out that it was easier to ship the kidney than the recipient? It just seems ill-advised...

And see, now I've got my proof - it's possible for a little plane to hit a bigger plane and cripple it! Now I've got that worry to look forward to on my next trip... But fortunately, the plane should be full of Comic-Con geeks who grew up playing the Flight Simulator game, so they should be at least better at flying the plane than an untrained stewardess.

George Kennedy's Joe Patroni carries over from the first film, I think he's the only constant in the series - but this time his wife and son are aboard the plane, so he's personally involved in getting a pilot aboard to fly and land the plane. It's a longshot move - but it's the only one he's got!

Also starring Karen Black, Susan Clark, Linda Blair, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Gloria Swanson (as Gloria Swanson!), Sid Caesar, Myrna Loy, Helen Reddy and the classic sitcom triumvirate of Jerry Stiller ("Seinfeld"), Norman Fell ("Three's Company") and Conrad Janis ("Mork & Mindy") Oh, wait, I almost forgot Erik Estrada and Larry Storch (what is this, the Love Boat?)

RATING: 5 out of 10 oxygen masks

Airport

Year 2, Day 99 - 4/9/10 - Movie #464

BEFORE: Of course I've seen "Airplane" a dozen or so times - one of the best parody films ever. But, I've never watched the films that it was made to spoof - so let's correct that.

THE PLOT: Melodrama about a bomber on board an airplane, an airport almost closed by snow, and various personal problems of the people involved.

AFTER: I'm going to have to take something of a mulligan on this one. I tried to watch it, I really did - but I kept falling asleep. Then I'd wake up, rewind the DVD back to where I left off, and try again - this scenario repeated until about 6 am, at which point I was forced to call off the attempt.

To be fair, I was up early on Friday morning for a 9 am doctor's appointment, then I worked a full day, came home and watched Tuesday's "American Idol", plus the results show, then had to get started on clearing my DVR before the weekend hit. So I guess I was pretty exhausted...

However, I place much of the blame on the movie itself - there were too many people TALKING about the action taking place, which is certainly not as exciting as the actions themselves. Guys, the general filmmaking rule is "Show, don't tell." I promise to review the plot summary online and fill in the gaps of what I missed, but this film is going to be like "Casablanca", another talky-talky film I've never been able to make it through without napping.

Burt Lancaster plays the manager of a Midwestern airport, and Dean Martin plays his no-good pilot brother-in-law - there's a terrible snowstorm, a madman with a bomb on a plane, a little old lady who sneaks aboard planes without paying (Helen Hayes) and George Kennedy plays Joe Patroni, the get-it-done guy who has to find a way to save the day.

Special effects? Virtually non-existent - again, it's all talk and very little action, at least the parts that I was able to watch.

Also starring Jacqueline Bisset, Maureen Stapleton, Van Heflin and Gary Collins

RATING: 3 out of 10 snowplows (I freely admit the low rating may be my fault)