Political theory and practice

Star Wreck in the Pirkinning (2005) 

IMDB meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 43m, rated 6.5 by 6,000 cinemtizens.  

DNA: Finland.

Genre: Sy Fy.

Verdict: A parody with laughs.

Tagline: ‘Deploy Windows 95!’  

Travelling by accident from the far future back to the 21st Century Earth, no one believes Captain when says he is from the distant future.  He’ll show them!  He sets about conquering Earth so he can save it from destruction.  Yes, he is a megalomaniac.  

When the going gets tough, the tough use the ultimate weapon: Windows 95!  It will destroy anything! 

***

This is a fan mash up of Star Trek, and it worked well enough to keep me watching.  There are others segments of different lengths. Click on.

Any Questions for Ben (2012)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1hr and 54m, rated 5.6 by 1,800 cinematizens.  

DNA: Strine.

Genre: Neither Rom nor Com.

Verdict: Oh hum. 

Tagline: Is that all there was?

The tale of a poor little rich boy who has everything (money, cars, women, booze – who could ask for more?) and, yet, wants more.  

The best scene comes with the end-credits when our now reformed hero is leaving the country.  If you can endure the preceding drivel, stay tuned long enough to the see that.  

***

Overall it views like a Melbourne Tourist Board production of bright and beautiful young people basking in the hedonistic sun and fun (alcohol and sex) day in and night out in bleak city.  

It is accompanied by a deafening soundtrack that combines demolition work with peak hour traffic. 

In all it was about 1h and 54m too long.  

Witch Hunt (1994)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 40m (it felt longer), rated at 5.5 by 1,800 (drug-addled) cinematizens. 

Genre: Noir fantasy.  

DNA: Hollywood. 

Verdict: Skip it.

Tagline:  The tortoise outpaced it.

Intended as a sequel to Cast a Deadly Spell it suffices to demonstrate the superiority of that film to this one. Yikes.

This was watching cement dry, and wishing a dog would run through it to break up the monotony.  

The original pitch idea would have been interesting but the execution was execrable.  What idea?  Set in early 1950s Hollywood the unscrupulous Senator Joseph McCarthy campaigns against, not communism in La La Land, but magic. (See Cast a Deadly Spell.) He is so unscrupulous that he plans to burn witches alive at his campaign rallies.  (That might have seemed far fetched in 1994, but it is now all too easy to imagine this will appeal to the planners of the next Republican convention.)

I won’t labour the threadbare production values.  The non-sequiturs. The dead ends.  I will mention that a dead bored Dennis Hopper mouths his lines in a monotone, with frequent glances at his watch.  

There were some good moments, but too few for redemption.  The late Julian Sand as the Irish villain was a delight, perfectly polite and never threatening, yet menacing all the same.  Hypolyta Kropokin was a dignified witch who seemed to forget her hexography at the crucial moment.  And the female lead had a poignant backstory that emerged at the end, without any fit to the plot, such as it was, in which she got to act.  There was also a corker of a special effect at the Drive-In Theatre. In short, it has moments, but these dots did not connect up into a whole.

Out There (1995)

IMDB meta-data is runtime of 1h and 38m, rated 5.3 by 537 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: USA.

Verdict: Trailer trash prevails.

Tagline: The truth is out there. 

One-hit wonder photographer collects old cameras and occasionally they have film in them, which he develops, invariably family snaps.  After a particularly bad day, for diversion he buys a Box Brownie from a yard sale, a camera of no interest but a salve to his bruised ego on the day, and, yes, it has film in it, and, yes, he develops it, and…..these are not family snaps.  

The Brownie film, conveniently dated to August 1969, shows, yep, an alien abduction of two good ole boys who were out deer hunting in the primeval forest dark and deep. Conscientiously, the snapper tries to interest the Air Force in investigating, but Project Blue Book, which was never a book and not blue, has been closed.  No budget for checking every cockeyed hysterical claim. Then he tries selling them to a news agency executive who laughs them off as fakes.  

Fakes they may be but strange things start happening around him, and off he goes with the now grown-up daughter of one of the supposed abductees who never did return home.  The plot is a Möbius strip that keeps returning to the point of origin, until…!  

There are many smiles and few laughs along the way, and some star turns by some stars, including a caricature of Jean-Paul Sartre, and Tiffany Case. (See the full cast list.)  

Unpretentious, unassuming, diverting, and sharp with an appealing cast and some complicated plotting.  Moreover, it has a nice story about — believe it or not, Ripley! — Richard Nixon. 

Pedants corner: yes, I know why it was called blue.  Do you?

Cast a Deadly Spell (1991).

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 36m, rated 6.4 by 4,900 cinematizens.

Genre: Noir plus.

DNA: Hollywood and Vine.

Verdict: I ate it with a spoon!

Tagline: It’s magic!

LA 1948 where the latest trend, everyone is doing it, is magic.  That is MAGIC. It’s the newest technology of the day activated by a snap of the fingers or an incantation. Most of it, most of the time is white magic, little conveniences, but where there is white…there is also black. Very.

Gumshoe Gus Grissom is on the case, using the nom de noir Phil Lovecraft.  And what a case it is, the recovery of an overdue book purloined from Croesus.  Phil may not be sharpest number in the phone book, but he is clean and honest.  

Clean? He doesn’t use magic! That puts him in the same minority today that eschews mobile phones and scanners: as they are technophobes so he is a magicophobe.  That makes him the right man to recover this book of the dark arts, because he won’t be tempted to use it.

Off he goes with his $40 a day and gas money, encountering a unicorn and, even more rare in Hollywood, a virgin.  Everyone is up to no good apart from his landlady Hippolyte Kropotkin.  That name, like many others draws on the Mythos of H P Lovecraft for the cognoscenti.  

The screenplay has gaps but the direction is confident and brisk to keep things moving, and move they do.  Part tribute like Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and part pastiche like Chinatown, and wholly original.  Recommended to all Noiristas. 

Pedant’s corner: yes, yes I know about Prince Kropotkin. I read his book Mutual Aid. Bet you haven’t.