Closet Sci-Fi Geek

Stephen Hawking’s New Theory

Could the universe-as-we-know-it just be one of a zillion possibilities that ended up manifesting? Quantum strangeness abounds in Stephen Hawking’s new theory of how the universe began.

Neil Gaiman’s Mirrormask

I’m a fan of Neil Gaiman, and the Jim Henson Company is also on my “good” list for creating Farscape. When I recently found out that they had gotten together to create a fantasy movie, Mirrormask, I was somewhat excited.

Mirrormask has won tons of awards, and yet has languished in obscurity - so what gives? Now that I’ve seen the film, the answer is quite simple: The film itself is kind of boring.

We’ve seen this story in many guises before: A young girl is whisked away to a new and strange land where she goes upon a quest to find something…or is it herself? In Mirrormask, we meet Helena, a 15-year-old girl who works in her family circus and longs to run away to the “real world.”

Helena, strangely enough, looks like a very young Helena Bonham Carter, and I was somewhat distracted during the film, trying to figure out if they’d actually named her that on purpose. And that just goes to show you how completely unengaging the story itself is. I can’t explain what exactly is missing. It’s not that the archetypal “Alice in Wonderland” story itself is overdone, since anything can be made fresh with interesting characters and good dialogue. Mirrormask just somehow falls flat.

The visuals, on the other hand, are quite amazing. This has to be one of the strangest worlds ever displayed on film. It’s dark, it’s dreamy, it’s bizarre. Books become animals that fly back to the library if they believe you really dislike them. A cat lady’s home is filled with felines with eerie human-like faces, sitting in toilets.

With all of this imagination going on, it’s hard to identify exactly what makes the film so dull. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that, somehow, in spite of all the weirdness, there’s a lack of wonder here. In a magical world, the director needs to express that feeling of magic and wonder to the audience. This never happens.

This is all compounded by one of the worst, most annoying soundtracks ever, consisting of bad 1980s soft jazz, replete with a constant and irritating soprano saxophone solo.

What could be a great film, then, is simply kind of blah, and only interesting for some of the strange visuals. This is such a shame, considering that Gaiman is capable of much better.

Chick Flick Sci-Fi: The Lake House

I’m visiting my mom right now in Florida; what better movie to go with ma see than The Lake House, a romantic tale of two loves lost in time. The Lake House stars Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves (reuniting onscreen for the first time since Speed) playing two time-crossed lovers, Kate and Alex. The two somehow figure out they are connected by a magical mailbox (and a psychic doggie) even though they are separated by years.

Each time a letter is put into the mailbox, it either travels forwards or backwards in time (approximately two years). He is in the past, she is in the future, and even though they both live in the Chicago area, somehow finding a way to meet and connect in real time and space is difficult for both.

While it’s hard to believe that any two people could fall in love so deeply and fast over some letter-writing, we do see this happening on the Internet all the time. At times, the mailbox was seeing so many letters shoot back and forth so quickly, that the gal sitting next to me giggled and called it “instant messaging.”

As science fiction films go, The Lake House is obviously more chick flick than hardcore sci-fi, and it fiddles around with time paradoxes that we’ve already seen done to death on the various Star Trek installments. The Lake House, however, brings it into more realistic, if mystical turns, since it affects “real” people living “real” lives, and Spock’s not involved attempting to calculate a slingshot around the sun. In this sense, it’s refreshing.

I’m actually not a huge fan of time paradoxes in general; I feel they are way overused in science fiction as cheap plot devices, and they don’t make sense to my logical, linear mind. The Lake House, to its credit, manages to focus on the emotions involved and not whether any of this makes logical sense (since it does not).

Both Bullock and Reeves do a great job, and I would love to see them paired again onscreen. (Fortyish Sandra Bullock looks spectacular, by the way, though Keanu was looking a bit out of shape and weathered.) I think their film chemistry is great, despite some critics who thought it fell flat. (I actually like Keanu’s understated acting.)

By the end of the film, it seems somewhat obvious how things will turn out, but that still doesn’t downplay the emotional impact of the ending. As the film wrapped up, the woman sitting next to me was bawling hysterically. I have to admit, I was a bit choked up myself.

The Lake House won’t be everyone’s thing, and is hardly going to please most sci-fi fans, but I enjoyed it. So even if you don’t think it’s your cup of tea, it might still be worth the rental.

A Boy and His Dog - Only for Die-Hard Misogynists

Don Johnson had quite a film career in the 1970s prior to starring in Miami Vice. First, he was The Harrad Experiment, which was a film about a college where the students were shacked up with one another to explore concepts of sex and group marriage. (That film, by the way, is worth renting, because it’s so dated and silly on many levels.)

He continues his career as a walking sex fiend in 1975’s A Boy and His Dog. There, in a post-apocalyptic America, Johnson runs around a Mad Max world as a serial rapist, with a telepathic dog as his only companion.

Some have called this the greatest science fiction film ever made. I can only guess that such folks either haven’t watched a lot of good sci-fi films or they’re just off their rocker. Besides the awful politics, which I’ll get into in a second, A Boy and His Dog has this main problem with it:

An absolutely annoying “talking” dog. He talks in his mind the way the kids from Look Who’s Talking do. There’s no explanation as to how he got these mysterious powers. It’s completely unbelievable, never mind that the actor has a voice who sounds a lot like KITT from Night Rider. I’m not sure what the heck a real dog might sound like if he spoke telepathically, but this sure wasn’t it.

The dog is also surprisingly mean and sarcastic. I might have even bought this rotten personality, if the dog had been some sort of mean-looking hound, like a pit bull with a scar over his eye. But no, he’s one of those shaggy dogs, the same type of dog found in the Shaggy Dog movies. Ridiculous.

If you can get past the fact that the dog talks, then you must then accept the fact that he’s somehow lost his ability to sniff out food, and yet he can find any woman in the vicinity through his psychic powers.

This is hardly “hard” science fiction.

From there, we find that the dog finds these women so that Vic (Don Johnson’s character) can rape them. Really pleasant.

It is with this astonishing premise that the film sets off on its journey. Vic gets conned by Quilla June, a woman from the underworld whom he initially tried to rape. The underworld is community that lives under the ground, protected from the effects of the nuclear holocaust. Only, the men there are sterile, so they want Vic for his sperm.

Vic is lured underground and captured. They tie him up on a bed with a tube attached to his nether-regions to suck out his sperm, which is, in my mind, some small payback for the rapes that he perpetrated on women.

The only good part of the film is the bizarre depiction of this underground community, called, appropriately, Topeka. Here, people are living in a surreal uber-patriotic Christian dictatorship, flying the last remants of the American flag in an obscene recreation of small town America.

Some of the scenes here are reminiscent of the best of The Prisoner, with mindless citizens wandering around a world where marching bands play incessantly for no good reason and constant commands are given over a loudspeaker system.

I felt that part of the film, at least, was a political satire. The representation of Topeka was pointed and pertinent, especially today with the rise in Christian fundamentalism.

But I could not figure out, until the end, whether the misogyny in the film was making some sort of statement against it, or was the film just reveling in it. What was the whole point of the film? Did it even have a point?

A Boy and His Dog has one of the most controversial, shocking film endings of all time. Because of the nature of the ending, I will need to discuss it in order to complete my political analysis…so be forewarned…

SPOILERS AHEAD: Do not read further if you don’t want the ending to be spoiled!

Quilla June rescues Vic from being a walking sperm bank. So they escape to the surface, only to find the dog bleeding and starving to death. Quilla June, expressing the most bizarre, unbelievable personality switch, had already gone from yelling at Vic about what a horrible guy he was to telling him that she loved him and wanted to spend her life with him. This, after he had attempted to rape her at gunpoint. (Whaaaat?)

She is portrayed as this inane, manipulative woman, who just sucks up to Vic the rapist for no good reason except that she wants stuff from him. I suppose she would be the post-apocalyptic version of a gold digger.

So at the end, given the choice to run off with Quilla June, or save the dog, Vic choose to kill Quilla June and feed her to the dog. It’s also implied that Vic had a bite of Quilla June as well.

Pretty darn sick, if you ask me.

What amazes me about this is that I’ve read other reviews on the Internet by regular guys, who think somehow A Boy and His Dog is a love story about a man and his dog.

I’m not even sure if I can begin to touch that particular sentiment.

But apparently a lot of guys find this film to be funny. Hilarious. Sick and twisted, and “kinky.”

Honestly, even before the shocking ending, I didn’t find the film to be funny at all, in any way. Not because I was railing against it the whole time, but because it just wasn’t. Lengthy scenes with Vic and the dog arguing over getting food, with Don Johnson’s somewhat painful acting? Ummm, no, not funny.

So I can only guess that the reason guys find this film funny is that it taps into some sort of primal anger and resentment they have towards women. It’s a release for them.

My concern with this, however, is that without there being any greater social commentary on the misogyny, this film is in effect encouraging the rape and killing of women.

It does this very explicitly. At the end, we see Vic walking off into the sunset with his canine companion, having learned nothing whatsoever, but victorious against the horrible woman who plotted against him.

I’d be open to this whole setup if there was a bigger point to be made. But I’m afraid, there really isn’t. If anything, the film makes a sad statement about what some men think the true nature of the male gender really is - selfish, violent rapists who don’t care about anyone but themselves. (Themselves, and their dogs.)

I don’t think that’s the real truth, thankfully.

Battlestar Galactica vs. Farscape

I’m a member of the WELL, and there’s been a discussion going on about the best shows put out by the Sci Fi Channel. In response to quite a few people putting Farscape down, saying Battlestar Galactica is the best sci-fi show ever, I wrote the following reponse, included here, unedited:

Honestly, I don’t get comments at all where people are saying Farscape isn’t high quality or wasn’t well-written.

BSG is higher quality? HOW? It’s a heck of a lot easier to look “real” when you are stealing standard military uniforms for costumes than trying to come up with aliens that actually look *alien.*

I just don’t get it. I don’t find BSG to be bad, but it’s not CREATIVE in the way something like Farscape was creative.

Farscape was a classic fish out of water story. It took an average human and propelled him into the farthest reaches of the galaxy. It was weird. It was *supposed* to be weird. I thought it was brilliantly weird.

And after more than a decade of Star Trek shows going downhill, where aliens started to look like nothing more than human beings with a funny nose ridge or other simple facial prosthetic, Farscape was exceptionally refreshing.

(Yes, we did have human-looking peacekeepers, but that was a necessary device for a number of reasons in my book.)

When Star Trek Voyager was started, the Star Trek writers would say they’d need to move out of the universe to make things more interesting…somehow, in their existing universe they couldn’t come up with anything more creative. Yet, in Voyager, they just showed that it was *their* failing, not the universe they were in. Voyager just ended up being the same Star Trek cliches, just in quandrant D instad of quandrant A.

Farscape somehow took sci-fi and made it fresh and fun again. They also did this with PUPPETS, which is a dying craft, if you ask me. Don’t tell me that Farscape’s “Pilot” wasn’t a real character, or that it looked cheesy. Pilot was ten times better than any CGI alien I’ve ever seen. Rigel managed to work too. Rigel was well done too. I suppose, with being so brainwashed by CGI these days, it might be initially jolting to see a puppet character that is actually 3D, but the quality of his facial expressions was terrific. He seemed real to me.

Let me also remind that Farscape came out four-some years prior to BSG, and was using CGI from that time…things change fast in the computer world nowadays.

As for gripping story arcs or melodrama, Farscape had that in spades, particularly at the end of season 2. It was also not “all is good or all is bad.” We had bad characters that maybe were good guys and sometimes vice versa. People were constantly switching sides. Crighton ended up working with Scorpius at the end. This wasn’t just some mindlessly cliched story going on here.

Beyond that, the writing was so funny, so fresh, and so witty. The observations Crighton made, constantly, were a joy in and of itself. His pop culture references, in relation to the alien world around him, were not only hysterical but intelligent and pointed commentary, both on what was going on around him and the real world.

Now, some people who are more into “serious drama” may think that BSG is somehow “better written” or “higher quality” because of its realism or dark quality, but that’s just pretention, in my opinion. I watch sci-fi for a lot of reasons, but one of them is its ability to entertain me.

BSG hits me over the head with a hammer. That’s not brilliant nor entertaining. It’s just overblown drama - which is sometimes good, but not in any way creative genius.

End of rant. Thanks for watching!

Billie Piper to Leave Doctor Who

SciFi Ranter Girl recently reported that Billie Piper is leaving Doctor Who at the end of season two. Piper has been playing Doctor Who’s sidekick and companion in the new series; it seems a replacement has not yet been announced.

I’m fairly neutral on Piper’s exit. I found her to be fine as a character, but not someone I was bowled over by. And while I understand the need to play to the teen audience, I would love to see Doctor Who’s next companion be someone slightly more mature. The continual allusions to a guy “who appears to be in his forties” and a 19-year-old are just…ick…in my book, though I suppose some guys might disagree with me.

Someday, if Doctor Who were to get really radical, we’ll have a female Doctor and a young male companion. Now imagine what that might be like…I’d watch it.

Welcome to the New Site

I’ve just moved everything over from Blogspot. It’s nice to finally have categories to organize everything. I’m still in the process of putting all old posts into their proper categories and making little tweaks to the site, so bear with me.

I’ve also added some new discussion forums…they are very empty now, so if you have a moment, pop in and say hi!

Some fresh posts will be added very soon now.