Jan 16 2012
The 69th Golden Globe Awards were held last night in Los Angeles, hosted again by Ricky Gervais, despite the silly upheaval over his performance last year . Although they have become increasingly shabby as a form of predicting the Oscars, the ceremony is still noted as one of the landmarks of the awards season. More
Jun 30 2011
Remake and sequel hysteria has hit an all-time high these past few years and it isn’t showing any signs of stopping. With Raja Gosnell’s The Smurfs set to destroy more of our collective childhood in a few weeks, and the third installment of Transformers smashing its way into theaters, exploiting children’s television shows from yesteryear is in vogue.
So, given the fact that Hollywood has designs on completely renovating our childhood memories, I’m going to take the ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ approach. You want some stuff to remake, how about a list of titles from the past that could actually be the jumping off point for something interest? Counting down from the least likely to the most, I give you the top ten retro children’s televsion shows ripe for remake. Studio execs, get out your pens and takes some notes…
10. Denver the Last Dinosaur (1988-1990)/ Dinosaucers(1987)
Denver the Last Dinosaur plumbed the latch-key kid culture of 1980s Los Angeles in a daring and imaginative way; it paired a group of diverse school kids with a dinosaur….wearing a mohawk and sunglasses. It’s a big, green prehistoric critter that warbles when it speaks and yet it’s the only real friend these kids have until it teaches them they have each other. Brilliant. Truly brilliant. How to remake it? Only one way really. Keep the time period. Keep every single one of those costumes and get ILM to do Denver; afterall, they know dinosaurs. And, please, you can use CGI for Denver but don’t even try an animated mo-hawk. It would be a disaster. We know how these things are supposed to look, and practical fx are the only way you are going to get an even half-way realistic hairpiece on a dinosaur.
Dinosaucers on the other hand, is far easier. It didn’t air for very long in the 80s, and although there are a few out there, like my wife, who somehow have the theme song still running in their databanks, most people would be new to this. They are aliens from space who look like humanoid sentient dinosaurs and they are embroiled in a war. It worked for Transformers so why can’t it work here? Not enough to go on? Pish! If you throw in some amazing fx work for the dino-people and the space ships you might have one of the craziest and entertaining popcorn B-movies in some time. Just don’t go looking for a plot. It’s dinos from space, people! It’s a gold mine!
9. Zoobilee Zoo (1986-1988)
One of the weirdest bits of PBS programming, Zoobilee Zoo imagined a world full of anthropomorphic animals living in an entire civilization of their own..and they sing all the time. The theme song promised ‘magic and wonder are waiting for you!’ More like flamboyance and creepiness. And yet, despite the fact it resembled a more educational and gaudy version of Cats , Zoo was perfectly suited for a young child’s mindset. Whereas Sesame Street focused on practical educational knowledge, Zoo was more interested in how people interact and with finding your inner diva. I’m running images of Baz Luhrman’s Zoobilee Zoo through my mind and it looks like a rave crossed with community theater–it just might work. Or how bout Terry Gilliam’s Zoobilee Zoo? Yes, I think it has a nice ring to it. Just stay away from realism. I don’t want to see a flick with a young kid wandering into the mutant quarantine zone and encountering the disfigured Zoobles, who just want to find a life beyond Thunderdome.
8. Read All About It! (1981)
Please tell me someone remembers this. Its pretty much the reason I included it at all. That and it would be great to have a movie in theaters that reminds kids that once upon a time we had things called newspapers and print media. It aired on TVOntario and right here on MPT as well. I used to watch it as a kid, and remember seeing the entire initial series in school. The storyline was rather interesting as science-fiction; it followed a couple of intrepid kid journalists who learn that history is being changed by an cosmic, time-traveling entity called Duneedon(he’s the thing in the pic above; admit it,you thought it was the genie from Pee-Wee’sPlayhouse). Incorporating lots of library know-how with sleuthing and actual reporting skill, Read All About It! was sort of the perfect thematic mix for a PBS program. Of course the production values, the acting and the direction sucked. So what about a remake that stays true to the source story and the details of the old-fashioned journalism? That alone would give the pic a unique bent. These kids don’t just hit the net? They have to go to the library?
7. Small Wonder (1985-89)
Ok, its uncomfortable confession time. One of the first acknowledged little boy crushes I had was on Small Wonder’s V.I.C.K.I, the robot Ted Lawson creates as a sibling for his biological son Jamie. If that sounds wierd or creepy now, Tiffany Brissette was older than I was at the time and at 6 it never dawned on me that it was wrong to have the hots for a dead-eyed girl that you could conveniently program any whim into. Yea, it was creepy. Even then, when it was just intended to be a cute little sitcom about a kid and his robotic sister, it was creepy. These days, the robotic family member bit has been beaten to death. Look at A.I. or Bicentennial Man. Possibly the best approach to Small Wonder is marrying that sense of family drama to a real sci-fi story that explores the unanswered questions a kid might not ask: if Vicki never grows, what happens to her once everyone else is gone? Does she head out to meet the blue fairy or would a more realistic movie handle that differently? When Jamie is 65 is his 8year old sister still watching his back? Someone call Tim Burton. I bet he could give us a ‘Small’ to really wonder at.
6. Are You Afraid of the Dark? (1991-1996)
Ok, this is the first show on the list that doesn’t belong as much to my childhood as my siblings. The stories were just a bit tame for my taste and because it was Nickelodeon it was also pretty cheesy on the production end. I remember some specific eps like Bobcat Goldthwait as the Sandman and Aron Tager as the kooky bum-like wizard Dr. Vink–later stories also featured Firefly’s Jewel Staite and Roc’s Charles S. Dutton. What I appreciated about it then was the close-quarters, home-fried campfire story bookends the tales all had. Friends formed a group called The Midnight Society and met in the woods to tell ghost stories. Many of the stories borrowed tropes from tried and true stories like The Monkey’s Paw or the legend of the Golden Arm. One episode even featured an old theater showing Nosferatu and had the vampire escaping from the film. Unlike the grime and grimace of today’s teen horror, this pre-teen approach was mindful of what came before. Perhaps bridging the age gap and bringing AYAOTD to a wider audience as a family chiller is a good place to begin in jump-starting the dying film form of the horror anthology.
5. David the Gnome (The Secret World of the Gnomes) (1985/1987)
This one gets to be here at the behest of my wife. The ultimate cultural cross-over, the show that found its ways to Nickelodeon in the late 80s was a Spanish cartoon dubbed into english with the help of Christopher Plummer(Sound of Music, Dracula 2000) as narrator and Tom Bosley (Happy Days, Father Dowling Mysteries) as David. The original spanish version was based off a Dutch children’s book series that included The Gnomes and The Secret World of Gnomes. The animation had a real illustrated quality to it, and David and his wife were caretakers of the forest, helping and healing the animals that lived in their domain with a combination of medicinal herbs and good old fashioned gnome know-how. Looking like a lawn ornament come to life, David was a tantalizing combo of Marty Stauffer, Martha Stewart and Jerry Garcia all rolled up into a endearing ball of blue and red. So, why re-do it? Well, it would have great potential as a computer animated or even hand-drawn feature if it were to land a good writer/writers. And you could bring Tom and Christopher back for voice parts I’m sure. Plummer has been doing voice-work for Up and 9 recently and I’m sure he’d jump at the chance to hear himself talk, and let’s face it, his voice is perfect for it.
4. Tranzor Z (Mazinger Z in Japan), 1972
In 1984, when my fellow kindergarteners were reeling over He-Man, Transformers and Voltron I was the dopey kid who was head-over-heels for Tranzor Z. Only problem was while toy store shelves were chocked to the brim with the others there was no Tranzor Z to be found at all. Hey! How was I to know that the real issue was that I wasn’t Japanese and living ten years earlier? See, the show that ended up airing on weekday afternoons was a U.S. import of Mazinger Z, a Japanese anime released in 1972. had giant robots with detachable fists fighting the legions of Dr. Hell (Dr. Demon in the U.S. release) and his henchman, who included Lord Ashura (Devileen in the U.S.) who happened to be a hermaphrodite right down the middle; each side of his/her personalities would bicker and fight endlessly with the other. Several elements were cut from the U.S. release including the fact the female robot, Aphrodite A, had breast missles she would fire at enemies.A live-action film could involve hot-shot pilots going off to battle in the robots–big shiny special fx set pieces– without worrying about a convoluted or needlessly complex mythology that might be shredded in the adaptation, ala Evangelion. Just think, it could be like Robot Jox, but actually good and with a budget of more than 3,000 U.S. dollars.
3. Eerie Indiana (1991)
Perfectly weird and terrifically witty, with a plot hook that felt like Stephen King meets The Wonder Years, Eerie Indiana was one of my all-time fave series as a kid. And as is usually true of the televison I end up loving(*cough* Pushing Daises, American Gothic, Brisco County Jr.*cough*), it was canceled after a too-short run. Marshall Teller (Omri Katz) is a young boy who moves with his family to Eerie, Indiana and learns that the town lives up to its name. There were ATM machines with a mind of their own, a set of braces that could pick up the hidden thoughts of dogs and in one of the best storylines, a Tupperware sales lady was actually keeping her two sons in a state of suspended animation by sealing them away in bed-sized tupperware. Katz and Just Shankarow, who played Marshall’s sidekick, Simon were a nice fit as the adolescent leads. It was even remade a few years later with more comedy but even less success. A fresh new cast and crew would do well for the show, but let me suggest one of the series’ original headliners for director; Joe Dante, of Gremlins and Matinee. This is definitely his bread and butter.
2. Gargoyles (1994-1997)
It’s frustrating to watch all of these current cartoon movies parade across the big screen when one of the best is still out there gathering dust. By the time Gargoyleslanded, I was well into high school, and not paying much attention to the weekday afternoon toon line-up, but my siblings adored it and I found myself catching bits and pieces when I would come home, and slowly, I was hooked. What began as a riff on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, with a band of varied gargoyles hanging out in New York City with their human female friend became a complex fantasy incorporating Scottish history and mythology, Arthurian legend, and amazingly, entire aspects of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was a comic book come to life and had the same sort of attention to detail and superb voicework(over half the primary cast for Star Trek: The Next Generation was on board for this one) that defined Batman: The Animated Series. Creating a live-action version of this would be a no-brainer, though it might take a little bit of refreshing the audience what Gargoyles is exactly. Either way, it has plenty of opportunity for great creatures and special effects and it has the one thing that Transformers, G.I. Joe and their ilk failed to possess; characters and a story we could care about.
1. H.R. Pufnstuff (1969)
Wow, where to begin with H.R. Pufnstuf? Created by Sid and Marty Kroft, who were also responsible for the equally odd Sigmund and the Sea Monsters and previous remake victim, Land of the Lost, Pufnstuf is clearly a product of its’ time period, the late 60s. There’s a plot there right? Sure, somewhere, and if you are a child with a thing for mescaline or LSD, it all may make perfect sense. There’s a magic talking flute named Freddy, a six foot dragon that is the titular character and a witch named Witchie-Poo. All of this is so surreally designed that it feels just like a fever dream brought on by a bad roast-beef sandwich eaten too close to bedtime. If there’s to be a remake, we need someone who can just cut loose and make all of that weirdness come alive up on screen. Forget the usual suspects, go scour the world of tv commercials, music videos and homeless street art and get us a Pufnstuf director. All of this trippiness will no doubt look super-wicked in 3D.
May 13 2011
PCN RATING: 
A curious nostalgia came over me during Scott Stewart’s new comic adaptation Priest. Whether watching Paul Bettany’s warrior-monk dispatch goopy eyeless monsters or race across a barren wasteland on a retro-future motorcycle, my mind kept returning to the B-movie cheapies of my youth. Filled with slick special effects, over-produced mega sets and a story hammered out of nothing but genre recyclables, Priest would have been right at home in that period of time between the late 1980’s and early to mid 90’s.
The real trouble is that while Stewart’s movie is visually stronger and less inherently silly than low-rent gems like Mega Force, Split Second, or Trancers, it lacks the most important things they all shared; a sense of humor and lack of grim seriousness. When your film is about a Catholic Empire fighting a vampire infestation in an apocalyptic future and your main character has a fearsome cross tattoo covering his entire face, it’s important to remember that dour solemnity isn’t your friend.
The potential for epic silliness or worthwhile speculative fiction exists within Priest’s compelling premise. Humanity has been warring with a race of vampires for hundreds of years and when that struggle finally ended it saw the inhuman beasties pushed into reservations sequestered in the burned-out wastelands while the humans huddle together in fortifications like Cathedral City, a giant enclave that resembles the nocturnal metropolises of Blade Runner, Dark City or Franklyn. The humans created an order of gifted soldiers called Priests to destroy the creatures and now that the war is over they mostly exist to ensure that the Church rules all. When one of these Priests (Bettany) learns that the vampires are back and have abducted his niece (Lily Collins), he betrays his Order and heads out into the wasteland to get her back.
A warrior haunted by his deeds, a homestead obliterated by attackers, a young girl stolen, and a diminished culture hated by society. You don’t necessarily have to have even seen John Ford’s The Searchers to recognize that plot or to know that Bettany’s character is the stand-in for Wayne’s Ethan Edwards. Both men have committed atrocities against the ‘savages’ and both are ready and willing to kil their niece if she’s been tainted or turned by their enemies. While it’s not uncommon for a second-tier pic like this to adapt a popular story for shorthand, Priest never really does anything audacious enough to explain why it chose The Searchers in the first place. The vampires, at least at first, aren’t even remotely tied to humanity and they don’t prove a good correlation to the Comanche people in Ford’s film. There’s no subtext or human thread; the resulting action climax of Priest isn’t analogous to the scene where Wayne chases down Natalie Wood and then ushers her into his arms.
Still, Priest should and could work as a fun Friday night monster movie if it were only a little more willing to lighten up or add some definition to its characters. The spiritual faith angle that sees a religious conglomerate leading the world against perceived evil could be very interesting if it really committed to the ideas it raises. Ultimately, when Bettany rebels it has less to do with a crisis of faith and more a worldly belief (the vampires are still out there, while the Church says no). When he draws the similarly bent Priestess (Maggie Q) to his cause, along with his niece’s fiancée Cam Gigadet, their union comes out of a need to fight monsters, not to explore spiritual fidelity.
Once the film moves from the city to the austere and foreboding landscapes of the wasteland, it changes gears and genres and becomes a kind of horror western filled with big, hair-raising set pieces and comic-book weaponry. These elements go down easier and I was having a great time with the growing camaraderie between Maggie Q’s sleek and severe battle babe and Bettany’s more reserved, single-minded assassin. There’s something stirring beneath the surface of these two but the script keeps pushing it aside.
When Karl Urban shows up looking like Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, and reveals himself to be the villainous ‘Black Hat’—the first human vampire—the movie gets terrifyingly erratic and stiff at the same time. The pacing is off, the thrills are minimized and the dialogue is so wooden and obvious that one longs for the eloquence of Dwayne Johnson in Fast Five. What’s missing is that flavor of spirit and invention that inhabited even the tackiest bargain basement schlock title. Sure Bettany can weild those cross-shaped throwing stars, but he never gets a line as good as Rutger Hauer’s partner in Split Second, who when faced with the possibility of an alien rat-devil, stammered ‘ We need bigger guns—BIG, BIG guns…REALLY F—ING BIG GUNS!’ Cyborg 2 might have been trash, but Jack Palance still got to sneer and croon ‘If you’re gonna dine with the devil, you neeed a loooooonng spoon!’
After this film and Legion, I’m starting to wonder if Scott Stewart doesn’t have incriminating photos of Paul Bettany hidden somewhere. With his gaunt, haunted features and penchant for emotionally disarming performances, Bettany is a precious acting commodity that’s all but wasted in Stewart’s poor-man horror opuses. There’s something about the way he carries himself that meshes with Stewarts vision of individuals staging a rebellion against a spiritual tyranny, but then the films squander his war-weary renegades. The problem is that he, as well as co-stars Maggie Q, Christopher Plummer and Karl Urban are left to the wilderness in Priest—they are embodying types not characters, and there’s little room for nuance and variation amidst all the sound and fury and speeding action scenes.
Stewart demonstrates here in a way he did not with Legion that he has the technical sensibilities and attention-to-detail necessary to master genre fiction. However, his instincts as a director and storyteller are terribly lacking. He tries to cover up the fractured narrative with stone-faced sincerity and that ruptures on him too. Mixing and matching the action scenes to create a fresh rhythm backfires because the film’s dramatic DNA doesn’t support it. We shouldn’t be attacking the monster’s main nest in the middle of the film and ending on a wire-fu fight atop a barreling train. There’s a lot here for genre fans to savor, but it’s more like sampling the food at one of those wholesale clubs; tasty, yes, a worthwhile meal, no.
May 16 2010
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (PG-13) Directed by: Terry Gilliam. Written by: Terry Gilliam & Charles McKeown Starring: Christopher Plummer, Lily Cole, Heath Ledger, Tom Waits, Verne Troyer, Jude Law, Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell
Ninja Rating:
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a Terry Gilliam film that has stirred in me any sense of wonder or joy.
At last then, here is a new picture from the director that does both of those things. For that reason alone The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is a work to treasure. Filled with elaborate, mind-boggling visuals and moments of madcap fantasy, Parnassus is also one of the more thoughtful Gilliam concoctions; taking the concept of the storyteller trapped within a world of the mundane and tweaking it to create a film that feels like his most personal yet.
If Time Bandits, Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen are portraits of the dreamer in the aging process, then Imaginarium is a look at the struggle of the artist when no one wants to buy his particular brand of enchantment. Those films were all three unbridled flights of fancy, works brimming with restless imagination and wild invention. Dr. Parnassus comes at the end of a long drought for Gilliam —his last few pictures died at the hands of freak accidents, studio interference or his own inability to reign in his fevered vision. As a result, it has a sense of weariness and earth-bound wanderlust, scrabbling across grimy London streets to drink at the oasis of fleeting dream worlds that sparkle and fade back into the smoky night.
The story, as hammered together by Gilliam and his long-time collaborator Charles McKeown, tells the tale of the immortal Dr. Parnassus, a monk who made a deal with the devil and earned for his troubles everlasting life, lost love, and a daughter who will become the property of Satan on her 16th birthday. Centuries later, Parnassus is tooling around London, moving his imaginarium from town to town in hopes of luring in marks and engaging them in a phantasmagoric showdown wherein he and the devil will battle for their souls. If Parnassus can snag 5 souls in 3 days, then he wins, and Lily will be saved. The imaginarium, a medieval rolling theater decorated in carnival paintings, is the enchantment by which the good doctor will achieve this. Patrons enter and once they have passed through the mirror, they are catapulted into a dream world that reflects their own sublime desires, values and beliefs, with Parnassus and the Devil hiding in the corners, offering up their respective wares.
In the past, Gilliam has often conjured his surrealist fantasies from practical materials and effects; designing massive sets and hand-crafted components to bring to life worlds that felt like real spaces. In Parnassus, he has traded up for computer-generated visuals and everything we see amounts to actors standing in front of a green screen. This, to be sure, flattens some of the images and instead of the old-school theatricality of Brazil or Time Bandits, we have to settle for the frantic zip and zoom of a high-tech pinball game crossed with interactive digital matte paintings.
In the hands of a lesser talent, these sequences would be devoid of personality and surprise, but Gilliam imbues the same sense of passion and odd-ball whimsy that he applied to his older works. Remember the man who wore the ship upon his head like a hat in Time Bandits, or those images of Sam Lowry blissfully soaring cotton-candy clouds on his mechanical wings? This time around, we have the singular experience of watching Tom Waits in a black bowler hat, grinning from behind the controls of a gigantic, bosomy Russian bubushka as it crushes and tromps across a blasted, burned-out landscape.
The fantasies of the imaginarium have been designed in direct contrast to the way Gilliam imagines the real-world sequences of London. Everything in the streets is lit in a dank yellow, or washed-out blue, and the alleys and tenements have never look so decrepit and worn down. Characters dress in rags or soiled suits, and later when they move the imaginarium to a modern shopping center, it is filled with glittering, hollow people and vast, lonely interiors. The fantasy worlds are of course the bread and butter, featuring forests of giant jellyfish using their tendrils to push through clouds full of sizzling electricity. There are ladders that extend miles and miles into the sky, and colossal airships sporting leering faces drift across hills of glittering hard candy. There is much to see and experience, but alas, these scenes are not the bulk of the film. Instead, Gilliam is relying upon his plot and his actors far more here than I’ve seen him do since Twelve Monkeys or The Fisher King.
To be sure, he assembles a wonderful lot of performers; the excellent and grumpy Christopher Plummer, stunning newcomer Lily Cole, Tom Waits as an particularly oily Lucifer, and of course the late and still great Heath Ledger, who plays Tony, an errant amnesiac who joins Parnassus’ performing troupe when all seems lost. Lily Cole, as Parnassus’ daughter Valentina, is particularly good in her role and shares a chemistry with Ledger that works well for the film’s midsection where Gilliam gets briefly bogged down with the particulars of his plot. Cole’s childlike features and curvy body seem at odds with each other, and she has an almost otherworldly aura that Gilliam no doubt enhances through film technique. He likes oddballs, and Plummer’s Parnassus, sage though he may be, is one of them. The doctor is old, tired and bitter and the remaining bits of hope he finds he hordes away from his makeshift family.
It is surprising then, to discover that Ledger’s character Tony is not only a secondary character, but also a particularly unsympathetic one. Tony is an extremely flawed man whose dark past is literally stalking him through the real world and the dreamland. A third act revelation all but makes him the film’s villain. And yet, as portrayed by Ledger, and then later his three stand-ins, he comes to life and bolsters the movie in the same way that the character expands Parnassus’ failing business; through pure showmanship.
As displayed in The Dark Knight, Ledger had no shortage of ability and quite possibly some hidden storerooms of quirkiness. He only gets to hint at that quirkiness here, but he’s among the handful of performers who feel right at home within Gilliam’s artificial fantasies. From the moment he comes into the movie, hanging by his neck underneath a bridge, to that last moment we see him as Tony, charging into the Imaginarium to unlock its treasures, he has our attention. If Gilliam is the broken-down old wizard looking for one more bit of spellbinding, the Ledger has become his erstwhile barker, calling back the disenchanted masses who are looking for nothing more than a little bit of magic.
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is actually quite a bit magical; also heartfelt, frustrating and sometimes so erratic that it threatens to lose us. But what it holds at its heart is a worthwhile idea that there is still wonder and value to be had in dreaming, and that those things not easily seen or briefly glimpsed, may in the end, be worth much more than the endless tons of the tangible, rusting away here at our fingertips. It is not a perfect movie, or one that will appeal to everyone, but there is an Old Hollywood sort of splendor to it. Gilliam weaves betweens the mountains of melodrama, through the valley of absurdity and finally evades the fiery darts of pretension, to deliver an honest to goodness fairy tale for the modern age. The Devil be damned, Gilliam has triumphed in the face of adversity, and made a movie that both he and ‘Heath and his friends’
