MOTM: "The American Astronaut" (2001)

Try to dissect the following phrase:

“He's a birthday boy. He kills without reason. If he has no reason to kill you, then he can kill you. But if he has a reason to kill you, then he's got a problem. Because if he kills you without resolving that problem, then you'd be dead, and the problem would live on forever, unresolved.”

It sounds odd but that’s the kind of person who is hunting Samuel Curtis, the so-called “American Astronaut”. And that is the world in which he lives. He’s an interplanetary trader carousing the dives and blue-collar corrals of deep space. And his most recent job? Deliver the “Boy Who Saw a Woman’s Breast” at the behest of his smuggler buddy, the Blueberry Pirate, to a planet of women in exchange for the body of the former monarch of Venus.

Thus is a descriptor of the only science-fiction western musical you will probably ever see. Sounds kind of like a deadpan version of “Spaceballs”, right?

Movie of the Month: "Lifeforce"

“Lifeforce” could not be considered a good movie in even the loosest version of the classical sense. Its troubled past would at least suggest as much.

Klaus Kinski, Sir Anthony Hopkins and Terence Stamp either refused to participate in the project or simply fell through the cracks altogether. James Horner was approached for the soundtrack but passed. The roughly $25 million budget recouped only about half of that during its box office run. Over 1,000 actresses (pardon my anachronism?) were screened before the role of “Space Girl” was filled, which is odd considering she only has about four lines of dialogue and spends the great majority of the film in her birthday suit. Oh, and did I mention that the alien ship was modeled after an artichoke? 

Review: "Inception"---7/20/10

I doubt science fiction has ever looked this chic.

Over the course of the weekend, as I’d been tinkering over a few other projects, walking the dog, humoring my dad’s fractured ankle, and ruminating over a second viewing of this summer’s best (not to mention brightest) blockbuster, I came to realize that I was not suffering nearly the same degree of confusion that I had come to expect from Christopher Nolan. And I was a bit sad because of it. At one point during the film,  two women sitting behind me, who seemed to by tripping over the mechanics of “Inception” rather than the story, exclaimed “What’s going on?”

Review: "Predators" 7/14/10

You...one....ugly...mothaf*cka...

The law of averages gives us a cheap, mathematical kind of hope. But it’s hope nonetheless. After two films of such stunningly bad quality as "AVP" and "AVPR", I was starting to wonder if 20th Century Fox had forever squandered one of the most beloved creature-feature franchises this planet has ever known. But just as I was about to rig up another Paul W.S. Anderson dummy in effigy, I happened to stumble upon Nimrod Antal’s “Predators”, a surprisingly faithful reboot of John McTiernan’s singular action classic (let’s face it, the 80’s was only man enough to only handle one Predator).