mcgrew

I was hoping this would be a version of the excellent "undone" series of BBC radio shows, and boy was I disappointed. Rotoscoping is always a terrible idea, I don't care how clever a director thinks she/he is.

In interviews, producers, writers and actors have gleefully declared they consider st:pee a mere vehicle. Thus, they could use any show at all to carry their trendy message. So they watched clips of Star Trek on YouTube as 'research', and wrote a lazy, preachy drama about an apology-tour by an old man. To try and hoodwink the rubes (that's us), they sprinkle in old faces - despite swearing before the show premiered they would not do that. (Lying? No, foolish peon, this is 'reprioritizing the narrative,'). Remember when it was going to be a character-driven show? No space battles, no gratuitous murders? That lasted what, 15 minutes into the first episode? The Hand of Kutzman has woven straw into... excremental. Again. Forget it. In five years, this will have sunk without a trace. As it deserves.

It's not clear to me that the makers of this movie ever read a Harley Quinn comic -- or indeed, a Birds of Prey comic. The best I can figure is they looked at some covers, ,and that's it. The story of Harley and the Joker is plenty of story. It's a battered-woman finding herself. It's a criminal coming to find a new role for herself in society. It's a woman who is an enemy to the Batman, discovering that he is a far more valuable human being than her ex. It's bittersweet. It'd make a great movie.

But this? It's a movie that seems to have been rewritten and reshot so many times that nobody could remember what or who the movie was about. There were a bunch of terrible decisions. #1 - that Birds of Prey was a candidate for spinoff, and must therefore be given enough screen time to build potential audience. (This is based on the mistaken belief that Harley is merely a spinoff character from Suicide Squad.) #2 - That the story couldn't tell itself, and therefore had to be narrated (the "Deadpool did it" fallacy.) #3 - That Harley could not be an action hero, but had (for all of the character-introduction and much of the movie) to be a merely lucky buffoon. (Even when she blows up Joker's chemical plan, she's fall-down drunk.) #4 assumed that because the guy who played the joker for 2 minutes in SS wasn't available, they couldn't use "the Joker" as a character at all. Harley exists because of the Joker. He is the siren song of evil to her. Most of her struggle is to not be under his spell again. Read the flippin' comics. #5 assumed that you-go-girl was by far the most important 'message' that it should be shoehorned into the story in a manner rather like Harley's favorite weapon, a giant hammer. (The "Ghostbuster did it" fallacy.)

Some say this is a remake of Deadpool. It is certainly intended to be as much like it in tone as it could be. But Harley herself? Not as well written, not as well plotted, and frankly, not as well acted. I've read that "Black Mask" was supposed to be a closeted gay, but the studio ordered that be dropped, because otherwise the movie would have been declared homophobic. It would have been an interesting inclusion, actually -- it would have made him afraid of his own organization as well as the good gals, and set him in a far more (and to many gay men, resonant) complex light.

But Joker is the evil angel in any Harley story. Having her dispose of him entirely with a remake of the "When he cheats" music video is to miss out on, well, the story of Harley Quinn.

Skip this movie. It's just plain not worth an hour-and-a-half of your life.

Don Meredith's son (the director) uses the famous "Ice Bowl" as a central theme to talk to players on both sides (and some civilians as well) about the game. Michael, as narrator, talks about his father, unsurprisingly, but is still a well-told story that keeps you watching. The game is (literally) legendary, with both teams having ups and downs, leading up to the agonizing (for us Cowboy fans) final score. One of the most touching moments is when Roger Staubach, looking back on the first Cowboy Super Bowl win, says "this was Don's team." But Don had moved on, eventually to join the great triumvirate that gave new life to the NFL.

Micheal said something interesting early on in the documentary, that he was racing the undertaker to get participants memories (Don himself had died 7 years before this was done.) Anyway, worth watching.

Wow, were the white guys incapable or what? Without the influence of oppressed everybody-but-white-guys, it would appear the US would be incapable of flight, much less flying to the moon.

And it get worse. Much worse. Nixon is a psychopath, because he wants a landing on the moon. Mission rules are to be torn up when its inconvenient, the Eagle is (apparently) blown off course in landing by lunar winds (although one NASA drone announces its possible the spacecraft somehow exploded), and then handicapped by a lack of basic physics on takeoff. Mike Collins is gifted with telescopic sight, and the personality of a kamikaze pilot. Landing approach video is the exact same as that of Ranger 7. The astronaut practice area includes not only pointless canyons but a glowing Earth hanging from the wall. Russian N1's do not blow up due to absurd engineering. Astronauts don't know not to talk to long-haired weirdos who identify themselves as reporters, who ask pointed questions that call into question the entire program. Werner von Braun is a closet nazi.

And that's just the first episode. We haven't even gotten to the advertised part where oppressed, but strong confident women arrive to save us all from the influence of white men. You know, like that other historical drama, "Hidden Figures." And this works, because... white men are incapable. If the Russians beat us to the moon, we will just want to give up. Oh yeah, and the same Congress who wrote NASA a blank check suddenly are venial morons.

This written by people who insist on imprinting modern politics on a time 50 years past. They cannot remember the moon landing, and so believe they can just make stuff up. And it's pathetic. And a blight on the men and women who really did perform engineering miracles for a nation that had pretty much no appreciation for those efforts.

Let's see, we have a 'fish out of water' character, two damsels, and Woody playing... Woody. The movie itself can't decide if it's a parody of a zombie movie or a zombie movie or just a three-stooges homage (that could only afford one stooge... Woody.) In the end, I just couldn't care about any of the characters, and so what happened to them didn't matter. All I could think of as the running time ran out was "thank god this will end." And... Bill Murray? Really? He has one (bad) joke, and insists on being so annoying we all wish somebody would shoot him, so they do. All his appearance does is show that the makers were able to find a character more annoying than "Tallahassee." Oh yeah, who decided everybody's name was a city? Did somebody have a serious Quentin Tarantino fetish?

When this show started, it was a cut above other procedurals, in large part because it was different procedures. The characters were interesting, the puzzles fun. But they ran into the same problem all episodics have - they run short of puzzles. So they move on to soap opera. Everybody gets kidnapped at least once, for no reason a character becomes traitorous, stunt-casting, and of course romance. And if you like a soap opera with worms (literally), you'll keep watching.

But the thing that brought us in receded into the background, and fairly quickly. Are they in love? Will minor characters get married? Hey, isn't that a guy from that band? Who cares? I didn't.

I usually applaud anybody who tries to present historical information on, well, any media at all. But these guys are so lame, so boring, and so wildly inaccurate - specifically whenever presented with an opportunity to make up something ridiculous, and weave it in with the factual stuff, they do precisely that. You'd be better off with the History Channel -- that is, if they ever start presenting actual history again. Of course, "Comedy Central" (where this 'comical' show runs) doesn't present actual comedy any more, so maybe it evens up.

Its not satire, and it's not funny, unless you've preloaded some chemical assistance of your own (in which case "Liberty Insurance" commercials are funny too, so that's not a good metric.)

Give this dumpster-fire a wide berth. It's not worth your time.

A fine actor like Mr. Malkovich is entirely wasted. 'ABC' (the novel) is a good "smokescreen" mystery, but it's a little hard to find the actual story in endless scenes of... nothing happening. Poirot here is a metaphorical african immigrant, hated by pretty much everybody, insulted and demeaned at every turn. He seethes at... something... endlessly. His supporting characters - put there by one of the greatest detective writers ever - are whisked away as unnecessary (I guess) by a writer from "Eastenders" who seems to think she knows better. The police spend far more time insulting Poirot than policing. Poirot - having solved 9 previous baffling cases (via the list of novels) - is dismissed as being bad for public relations (I guess) and told to bugger off repeatedly. The writer is far more interesting in presenting sledgehammer social-justice metaphors for today ("being relevant" is the phrase used - by people who are general incapable of actual creativity) than telling the story she claims to be telling.

Having made one of the best interpretations (the Suchet one), the BBC has 'advanced' to the level of the 1965 Tony Randall "the alphabet murders". Pass this one by.

Raymond Chandler was one of the best writers of popular fiction of the 20th century. He could draw you in, and keep you in, a claustrophobic world of danger and weirdness. Unfortunately, this movie does very nearly no justice at all to his work. The director, Robert Altman, didn't even bother to read the novel, preferring to work from a script that completely changed the ending (and lots of everything else), and made no sense whatsoever. He seems to me to be completely uninterested in telling Chandler's story; he seems mostly interested in giving his friends a job.

Major dialogue (notably every line by a useless Sterling Hayden) was "improvised" -- that is, just mumbled in front of the camera. The other actors generally look confused and slightly alarmed whenever Hayden stumbles into view, and now we know why. But Altman, despite knowing that Hayden was drunk and stoned all the time on set, decided this was wondrous "satire", and inflicted it on us.

Scenes take too long; dialog is clearly a surprise to most everybody (having little to do with the plot), important plot elements are inserted at random times (making Marlowe instead of an investigator, a wandering man, handed clues by passersby right before they're needed) and variations from the original novel all fall utterly flat. The movie is at least 20 minutes too long, and probably more like 40. This is *not* a "good" Marlowe movie. But 3 stars for the stunt casting of Henry Gibson.

The novel kind of tired me out; even though I am of an age where I get *every* pop-culture reference, and played *every* video game, I got bored with the never-ending gushiness of it all. But I read it, and generally enjoyed it.

But the movie uses pretty much all of the dazzle of the book, and leaves behind pretty much all of the "meat" of it. Yes, the oasis is cool; it's a crossover between "second life" and your average PS4 game -- but for all its supposed sophistication, the oasis looks like a game of "World of Warcraft". An old one.

But what happened to the characters? Parzival is your average Spielberg hero -- pretty, but empty. He's pretty empty. But he must, no matter what, stop whatever he's doing to... save the girl. (In the book, it is Z who is captured.) And the heroine can thereafter wander around the evil guys lair without let or hinderance because even though they know *exactly* who she is, and exactly what she looks like, she can go anywhere -- even the head naughty-man's sanctum, and nobody notices. There were people who were not me what were saying (out loud), "oh, c'mon!" at this.

And the others 'gunters'? They are supposed to be the best of the best -- heck, Artemus is supposed to be *the* best. But she knows practically nothing that matters. Another supposedly 'elite' character announces that he can't help with a puzzle (the endlessly dull "Shining" one), because he is scared of the movie. What, he couldn't read the script? But anyway, since this is a Spielberg movie, there must be a 'fish out of water' that the hero explains things to -- to pass on information to the audience. In this case, this involves Z telling Artie things she *must* already know, to be the gunter she supposedly is. In the book, the quest is a matter of figuring out puzzles. In this movie, it's basically Z already knowing all there is to know, slogging his way through it, and dragging the rest of the "high 5" along; apparently because he likes to talk to them.

The movie nevertheless has a real problem with the contests for the keys, which are the driving force of the quest. For the book, the puzzles were tough, and led you to a tough contest to 'win' the key. (Also, it left out entirely that each character had to win the key personally. In the movie, once the key was used, everybody could just rush in. It cheapened things.) In the movie, the contest was an afterthought; once a character arrived at the contest arena, the key was essentially handed to them.

So, no, didn't like it. It did what Hollywood often does to complex stories, it dumbs them down ("simplifies them for the audience"), it uses stereotypes shamelessly ("uses archetypes"), and whenever things slow down, throws in explosions ("action sequence.") The only really surprising thing is that the original author at least put himself in as a script-by. They took a cute niche story and turned it into "Indiana Jones and the Temple of 80's Videogames", and he, apparently, helped. I'm sure the money was... excellent. The movie was... not.

A very workmanlike effort, with the usual big-face interviews, and slow-pan-and-zoom-of-stills video, and tragic music. However, there is a giant hole in the narrative that centers around Sandy Pittman, the rich-girl 'adventurer' whose presence on the mountain was pivotal in the disaster. (Ms. Pittman consumed the entire attention of the Sherpa who was supposed to fix ropes on the final day, and of chief guide Scott Fischer, who stayed with her and said Sherpa all the way up the mountain, thus arriving over 2 hours at the summit after 'turn around time'. Fisher died on the return trip - his body is still there - as did seven others.) Ms. Pittman, who has loudly proclaimed that she is just a swell person and that accounts describing her actions as biased, was nevertheless the most important person on the mountain on that awful day, because of the chaos she caused to occur (allegedly. There, she can't sue me.) It is a curious ommission on the part of "Frontline", however. In their telling, she pretty much magically appears after the storm breaks, and is saved by Boukreev, whose own curious behavior (racing up the mountain sans oxygen and then back down to camp 4, leaving clients behind) is papered over. Then she vanishes again. Try and find "Mountain without Mercy", from ABC (Ms. Pittman was employed by NBC on her jaunt, another unmentioned item in "Storm"), produced six months before any of the various competing books on the matter, with better interviews, and with less recast-the-narrative bias (in my opinion. There, PBS can't sue me.)

There's one amazing shot in this movie - it's the five Elvii walking toward the casino to the tune of Crystal Method's "Vapor Trail." Everything before that is trying to come up with a reason for that shot. Everything after is to have something after, because, well, they needed something after.

In the end, it simply isn't interesting who lives, who dies (which is practically everybody), and who gets money. Characters who aren't played by Kurt Russel and Kevin Cosner are all forgettable, and for the most part unbelievable. Did anybody tell Howie Long or Ice-T how bewildering their appearance at the end as talking (and shooting) puppets would be?

Nothing before 'the walk' matters, nothing after 'the walk' matters. And I'd argue that all that money, blank ammunition and blood squibs was not worth the 17 seconds of 'the walk'. Certainly not two hours of sitting in the theater.

This was a movie that had one too many bad-things.

We start with a group of strangers (reminding one of TZ's "five characters in search of an exit," in all the right ways) tossed into a it's-the-end-of-the-world survival pod. Add in one maintenance man (the always reliable Richard Jaekel), and one... well, traitor (Bradford Dillman in strangely fitting glasses, for some reason). And pretty much everybody falls to pieces with the knowledge of what's happened to everyone they know.

That's a great story. Add in the possibility that this is some sort of macabre psychological experiment, but that no matter what, nobody can leave.

That's a greater story. Add in... vampire bats?!? Suddenly a human story is converted into a piranhas-are-out-to-get-me scream-fest. And suddenly ridiculous. Now we're just waiting for someone to be killed, screaming, by swarms of vampire bats, while some try to find a way out, and are killed, screaming.

This could have been a fantastic movie (along the lines of another 'survivor' tv-movie, the superb "Sole Survivor" (1970), or the equally superb "Groundstar Conspiracy" (1972)), but somebody decided "there needs to be an immediate danger", and that it should be vampire bats. Too bad.

Very tightly written; lots of in-jokes, a parody in each episode of something Mr. Van Damme has ever been in (made all the better by he joining in with gusto.)

Each episode is very nearly its own action-movie, with shootouts, kicks, punches, and kung-fu-theater cliches, lovingly rendered and expertly done. Van Damme's acting is extremely good -- from slapstick, to tragedy, to simple world-weariness, to hopeless romantic, to tough-guy, and occasionally to characters (notably 'Filipe' in episode 4) that should be simply awful, but nevertheless, somehow, work.

Give it a try; you might be pleasantly surprised.

The writer of "Freaks and Geeks" and the writer of "Parks and Recreation" no doubt struggled mightily to come up with a good script. The "Freak" guy also directed, and he strove mightily to make Boston (and Australia) be NYC and breath life into his words.

They both failed. This remake (it is entirely a remake of GB-1) has no energy, no wit, and cannot bring itself to do anything new at all. The actresses struggle mightily (the actors might as well have all been made of cardboard -- including the bizarrely-Australian Chris Hemsworth), but cannot escape the flaccid story and lines they have been presented with.

Its just all so lazy. They expect us to giggle like children for the cameos of the originals (and so they are carefully sprinkled through the movie -- including the firestation, and the sta- puft man), and love the story because of it. Sorry, no. They expect us to be enchanted with anti-ghost hand grenades and such. Sorry, no. They expect us to love the characters because they are just like the originals. Sorry, no. They expected us to laugh when characters screamed and shouted, in simulation of emoting. Sorry, no.

Nobody wanted to take a risk "with the brand", so nobody did. The movie is dedicated to Harold Ramis, who I suspect would be disgusted with the lack of originality and humor.

Save your money.

You'll notice that SW7 only has a "based on characters" credit for George Lucas. That's because Disney decided to make it "for the fans" -- that is, a movie pieced together out of a sort of "greatest hits" of the other 6 movies, with nothing new whatsoever. We are, they suppose, not smart enough to absorb new plot devices, and will be perfectly happy to give them money to show us the old stuff over again. And based on box-office revenues they appear to be right.

So we get a search for 'the last jedi' (like when we were looking for Obi-Wan all those years ago) to return to the fight against tyranny, but along the way, an orphan on a desert world (like Luke Skywalker) will come into possession of a robot with information crucial to the rebellion (like R2D2), leading to an attack on a powerful planet-killer (like the Death Star), to be supported by an attack on a nearby world (like the moon of Endor, mercifully without ewoks). Then an all-in-black villain (like Darth) will be faced down by a new jedi (like Luke - - except this one can defeat a jedi master after beginning the fight not even able to activate her lightsaber), and a father and son will face off on a long bridge and one of them will fall off it (like, well, you know.) Harrison Ford appears, and doesn't even seem to even be enjoying himself -- just saying what's on the page and trying to put the whole experience behind him. (And given the awful stuff on the page, its understandable.)

Meanwhile, storm troopers are appearing and disappearing as necessary, still can't shoot, their armor still doesn't to a bit of good. Just like... you get the idea. Oh yeah, and there's a bar with an alien band. Gosh, that's new.

So, what do we have instead of new ideas? Lots and lots of explosions. And I mean a LOT of explosions. And x-wing fighters and tie fighters swooshing by in entirely incomprehensible combat. And more explosions. And shouting, and talking about... something -- mostly, I think, to give the effects guys time to reload their explosives. Did I mention the explosions?

You don't need to see this movie. You can watch "the middle three" again, and you'll have the exact same plot. Don't see it -- it's a waste of your time (it certainly was a waste of mine.)

This movie could have been great, and it certainly shows flashes of brilliance. But they are flashes only (and generally in the use of language -- probably written by Peter Cook), and are separated by tiresome pirate-based skits that (kind of) hang together. My rating of 6 is for the flashes, and not the tiresome-ness.

Cheech Marin and Peter Boyle dig into their parts and play with gusto, but everybody else seems to be sort of standing around a lot and saying things to get us to the next scene of people standing around. James Mason plays Charles Laughton gamely, but Marty Feldman is mostly wasted. John Cleese seems to be acting in an entirely different movie all together. The best line (by Spike Milligan) is spoken by a character not even given a name. A shame, really.

Mr. Morrison has done a very fine thing in rescuing what can be saved of these old films from themselves (nitrate stock film destroys itself over time, but at the time there was nothing better for the price.) But his presentation of them is maddeningly sterile.

Not once is there a narration or description of what we are seeing (except for the title). Not once is there context for whose army we're looking at, what they're doing, whether this is thought to be 'combat footage' (though most is, obviously, not), even what year it might be. Were there no historians standing nearby to ask? Even I, an amateur, can see some things (what helmets are worn, type of cannon or tank) that might help a novice viewer get some context.

As it stands, the film is mere a curiosity, a set of pictures books lying open to show random pictures with no captions. Mr. Morrison has obviously done a hugely difficult task, and done it well. But the payoff is missing. The viewer has nothing to latch onto, no way to learn anything about what is being shown to him or her.

And the music? You're better off turning the sound off. The music, often simply a group of string musicians literally sawing away at their instruments, is only distracting. It doesn't do anything (but presumably get some grant money to keep the saw-ers all in spritzers) to help the movie. Couldn't Mr. Morrison have used music, and recorded words of the period, having spent so much time and effort to show us film of the period? What could be better than gramophone recordings, tinny and imprecise, to go with the grainy, discolored, warped- image film? Why is it a nimrod like me can think of that, but not Mr. Morrison?

To better appreciate the work here, take the video, wash out all the color (so its all in the grey it originally was - the nitrate-deterioration-affected other colors are just jarring, to no use), and put on some scott joplin or something instead of the soundtrack.

This movie is pretty terrible, but I gave it an 8 out of 10 because hidden away inside it is a great little (shorter) movie.

If you:

* take out all the scenes with Maury Chayken and Saul Rubinek (who are fine actors, but most certainly not here)

* take out all the speed-up-the-movie-for-humor scenes (most notably the chase through Quebec - indeed, drop most of that chase entirely)

* take out everything before the opening credits (that is, the tedious 'backstory', which is explained just fine later in the movie -- indeed better.)

* leave in everything with Richard Harris and Christopher Plummer (who appear to have someone else writing their dialog from the pretty awful stuff written for everybody else.)

... then there's a cracking good fish-out-of-water story joined with a swashbuckler trying one game too many.

So, be ready with the fast-forward button, and you might just have a good hour or so.

"Syfy" has an execrable record in either "sci" or "fi", since it was taken over by TV lifers who are chiefly interested in moving up the NBC ladder (and thus could care less about content.) The last show they did that was good? Babylon 5. They took over B5 from "PTen" and... oh wait, no they didn't. OK, MST3000. OK, Eureka -- seasons 1 and 2, and then they squeezed all the life out of that as soon as they could. Otherwise we've seen endless "Mansquito"-like movies shot in eastern europe; miniseries like "The Prisoner" that crapped all over the original and the unbelievably awful "Andromeda Strain", and on and on.

I believe that story pitches at SyFY headquarters are bathed in gin, and the magic phrase for actually creative people is "sure, why not? But cut your budget by 80 percent." In such a maddeningly dull group of people, the "it's A and B, but with C!" pitch is liked above all - mostly because it requires no thought on the part of the decision-makers.

So the makers of Ascension made the following pitch: "It's CSI and Starlost, and the "fake Eureka subplot" -- you liked that, right? -- and with breasts!". Let us put to one side that CSI is deadly dull, that the "fake Eureka" subplot was mishandled (and stretched out too long), and Starlost was disowned even by its creator ("Cordwainer Bird") before it aired. No wait, let's not. Since it's SyFy, we'll make it absurdly disjointed technologically ("launched" in 1963, but with HDTV's everywhere, modern idioms of language, and endless references to modern events), this is held up a social commentary too. And, you know, breasts (and occasionally, butts, but only women's.)

In case you don't know, the original "inspiration" for this story is Zimbardo's laughable prison psychology "experiments" at Stanford in 1971. His "experiment" violated pretty much every possible restriction on psychological experiments -- non-random subjects, inserting *himself* in the experiment to guide it to the conclusion he wanted beforehand. That his experiment was worse than useless didn't faze him in the least, and he's dined out on it ever since (to this very day), generally with the theme that there are no evil people, only people made evil by circumstance and treatment. (That Zimbardo stole his conclusion from the earlier Milgram experiment, but had added grinning sadism of his own, is just waved away.)

Anyway, Ascension is not worth your time. It's not "SciFi." It's hardly "Fi". But, yes, breasts.

I get the impression that "Director Douglas" told himself and all the other actors, "give me all you got!" for every scene. That, and every time his stunt coordinator said, "hey, we could do a fall from that rock, or tree, or that hillock, or that bridge, or that wall or that flat patch of ground there", they'd shoot it.

That, and the way these pirate gauchos, or whatever they are keep killing each other off for no obvious reason -- I know, the gold, but they didn't just fall from the sky; they must have had fat times to go with the lean times they had right before the movie started. That, and that a major character (Mark Lester's hero-worshiping "Jamie") shows up 20 minutes in. That, and the pointless "twin" story. That, and the movie takes 25 minutes to 'sync up' with the story they're using.

Now, there are a couple of nice scenes, don't get me wrong -- Peg and Jaime when they first meet, and the whole scene that follows, through the funeral. And then Peg starts throwing knives near people and shouting, and things go to weirdness again.

That, and "indians" who seize Peg, "torture" him in a fairly dumb way, and who look a lot like Yugoslavians. That, and wooden legs that are made (and decorated) in the middle of a treasure hunt with evil "indians" and heavily armed "allies" who just turn up and are accepted into the hunt with no wonderings about who will kill who (and try to rape the woman at the first opportunity), and when told to "git", just do. But before and after, we sing!

That, and we'll know the treasure location right away, because... gimme a minute... nope, got nothing. That, and a character actually *saying* as characters keep changing their minds about who gets the gold and who gets killed and where Jamie went, "Hey, it's getting complicated."

That, and who exactly killed who for why at the end? And they did what with the which for huh?

... anyway, an exuberant, but inexpert movie. But don't cry for Mr. Douglas, he may have been a bad director (and a very uneven actor) here, but "Final Countdown", "Draw!", "Tough Guys", a great performance in the lousy "The Fury", and an underrated version of "Inherit the Wind" are in his future. Nobody makes everything great, but as a low point, not such a terrible one.

(Note: this review is of the movie, not the novel. The novel is pretty good; you can add it to your to-read list. The movie… well, its not something I'd put on your to-watch list.)

In the (original) Andromeda Strain, a group of scientists, lead by Jeremy Stone (Arthur Hill), a wise, brilliant bacteriologist -- who thought up and oversaw the "Wildfire" facility and the recruitment of the other members -- try to puzzle out an alien threat.

Now imagine that Jeremy Stone was a moron. He might write a plan like "Wildfire" for the government that was absurd in its premises, procedures, and selection of people. For mankind's first contact with aliens, he selects an astrophysicist, a biologist, mathematician, and a psychologist. Let's never mind that those are pretty terrible selections (a human psychologist to deal with an alien intelligence? An astrophysicist *and* a mathematician? How about, I don't know, a materials specialist? Or maybe more than just four people?), let's move on to the idea that the government would, in the midst of greatest event of the millennium, dust off this lame brained plan and follow it to the letter (including his example personnel), because they didn't have any better ideas.

Beyond that, we have very similar items - disparate people brought together in secret, working cut off from the outside world, mysterious deaths, alien menace, explosive ending danger to all the survivors, slam-bang discovery of the threat from an unexpected quarter. Its Andromeda Strain, but with Larry, Moe, Curly and Shemp.

In the DVD commentary, Hoffman and Jackson make a lot of reference to how the director and actors improvised a lot of what was going on (for instance the whole Beth/Norman thing being made up on the spot.) Pretty much every deviation from the novel is awful, and builds to a horrendous, shouting, incomprehensible mess where characters pretty much literally just thrash around screaming to crashing music -- to make sure the audience knows to start collecting their stuff, because the credits are coming soon.

… and by the way, if they were gonna forget everything and the power, so nobody would ever know what was down there (the whole "unknown event" thing) -- what about them tapes in the mini sub?

In the 1970s, the TV networks put a lot of money into creating their own collection of original films. The rationale was that they were about as cheap as a series pilot (indeed some, like "Marcus Nelson Murders" did become exactly that -- for "Kojak"; "The Night Stalker/Strangler" for the Kolchak series), and did not entail open-ended commitments like a series would.

This flick is certainly at the high-end of these (the low-end was things like "The Hard Ride" - - motorcycle-gang members with machine guns in Vietnam, in a low budget, low brow version of "Missing in Action"; the immortal "Killdozer"). Frank Sinatra shows his acting chops again (nearly for the last time, from here on there was only one episode of Magnum PI to be proud of), surrounded by the usual suspects of series TV and made-for-TV-movies (notably Harry Guardino, good as always.) The soundtrack is certainly movie-quality (as were most of this era's TV-movies.)

The movie suffers from having an enforced length -- 145 minutes to fill a 3-hour timeslot -- and thus there is painfully unnecessary padding of scenes and dialog, and long traveling shots with the obligatory shoe-leather-sound-effects. But there's a cracking good 90-100 minute movie in here.

Social democrats never forgave Richard Nixon for being alive. He dared to be an anti- communist. He dared to run against their great hero, and nearly beat him. He dared not to go away and die after that. He dared to build a coalition that could beat the Johnson/Humphrey machine. He dared to crush their dream candidate in 1972 and rub in their noses in the inconvenient truth that they were not the vanguard of the new era they fancied themselves to be. He dared to not go away and die after they managed to depose him.

Them people will positively love this movie. Everything they have done though their lives to define themselves -- mostly hating Nixon, and thus feel good about themselves -- is brought out again (with an occasional "just like the Republicans now" to be 'relevant'.)

To others, this might seem like just the tiniest pathetic -- whipping on a dead Nixon (repeatedly calling him "tricky Dick" in the narration, for instance) -- is just the lost generation of social democrats of the 1960s (mostly lost because they ran away and hid from responsibility for 30 years and couldn't find their way back) trying to convince themselves that they still hold the moral high ground. Because they still hate Nixon.

So if you hate Richard Nixon, even if you don't know why, you'll love this movie. If you secretly wish you had lived in the 1960's (I did, you shouldn't), you will love this movie. If you have any actual understanding (or indeed remembrance) of history, or do not wish just hear a pleasant fable to make you wonder where that old American flag headband you bought in 1971 is -- don't bother.