True and Fake and On the Take

For All Mankind (1989): directed by Al Reinert: Extraordinary documentary selects from 7 million feet of footage from the Apollo missions to create a composite journey to and from the Moon. Beautiful, haunting, and often very funny. Really a must-see for anyone who's interested in space exploration. Kudos to Al Reinert for discovering this footage and putting it together -- it was just sitting around in a NASA storage compartment for two decades! Highly recommended.

Doom (2005): based on the game from iD software; written by David Callaham and Wesley Strick; directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak; starring Karl Urban (John Grimm), Rosamund Pike (Sam Grimm), and Dwayne Johnson (Sarge): Joyless slog hamstrung by the fact that it adapts the joyless slog of a videogame that was the Doom reboot of the early oughts rather than the awesome original Doom with its colourful demons. 

This is basically a dumb, boring zombie movie that lifts large sections of its plot and backstory from John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars. Karl Urban, Dwayne Johnson, and Rosamund Pike are utterly wasted. Visual effects thrills are few and far between, as much of the movie takes place in the dark and the monsters aren't very interesting. Mancubus, come back! Not recommended.

The Wedding Singer (1998): written by Tim Herlihy; directed by Frank Coraci; starring Adam Sandler (Robbie Hart), Drew Barrymore (Julia Sullivan), Christine Taylor (Holly Sullivan), and Matthew Glave (Glenn Guglia): Adam Sandler at the height of his erratic powers, Drew Barrymore at the height of her pert cuteness. In terms of enjoyable movies, this was the moment of Peak Sandler: what came after would be increasingly dire and regrettable. Recommended.

Eddie the Eagle (2016): vaguely based on a true story; written by Simon Kelton and Sean Macaulay; starring Taron Egerton (Eddie Edwards), Hugh Jackman (Bronson Peary), and Christopher Walken (Warren Sharp): Feel-good movie very loosely based on English ski-jumper Eddie Edwards' improbable time at the Calgary Winter Games of 1988, when he jumped terribly while becoming a media sensation. Taron Egerton is charming as Edwards, while Hugh Jackman plays Edwards' (fictional) mentor as a slightly loopier Wolverine. Certainly an adequate time-filler when you need to turn your brain off for a couple of hours. Recommended.

Hail, Caesar! (2016): written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen; starring Josh Brolin (Eddie Mannix), George Clooney (Baird Whitlock), Alden Ehrenreich (Hobie Doyle), Ralph Fiennes (Laurence Laurentz), Scarlett Johansson (DeeAnna Moran), Tilda Swinton (Thora and Thessaly Thacker), Channing Tatum (Burt Gurney), and Jonah Hill (Joe Silverman): The Coens create something that's an odd combination of black comedy and nostalgic fun-fest, complete with big, Old Hollywood show-stopping dance and swim numbers. 

The movie makes a lot of sense if you view it as the warped Hollywood dream of protagonist Josh Brolin, who plays a 'fixer' for a fictional Hollywood studio during the 1950's. Part of the cue to seeing the movie as its own type of warped Hollywood version of reality is that the film takes its title from the film within the film, a big-budget slice of ham that looks an awful lot like Ben Hur. 

All the actors bring their A-games for the Coens. Brolin is terrific, Clooney is hilariously dumb and baffled, Channing Tatum dances, and Scarlett Johansson swims. Soon-to-be young Han Solo Alden Ehrenreich charms as a B-list cowboy star elevated to A-list, 'prestige picture' status. Look close for Christopher Lambert as a director and Frances McDormand as a chain-smoking film editor. One of a handful of 2016's cleverest, bleakest, most joyful movies. Highly recommended.

Moon Trap

Moon by James Herbert (1985): James Herbert has often been called England's version of Stephen King. This isn't a bad comparison, though King doesn't usually have at least one vaguely soft-core, five-page-long sex scene in almost every novel. The comparison is made more interesting by King's analysis of Herbert's early novels in King's non-fiction horror survey, Danse Macabre.

I've certainly enjoyed the half-dozen or so Herbert novels I've read, and I enjoyed Moon. Herbert's good characters are sympathetic, if occasionally a bit too aesthetically pleasing when they're women (the protagonist's girlfriend is stunningly beautiful...why is this necessary?). Come to think of it, there's a thematic reason it's necessary, one that constitutes a spoiler alert if I explain it further.

Herbert is generally more ruthless than King, or at least more arbitrary when it comes to the question of who dies, and when -- there are a couple of wrenching sequences here that derive a lot of their power from that surprising arbitrariness, and Herbert's decision to not tie certain plot and character threads up neatly.

The plot recalls King's The Dead Zone: protagonist Jonathan Childes has psychic flashes. They once helped him stop a serial killer. But they also made him a media flashpoint when people found out that he was the only useful psychic to ever work on a police investigation. So he moves from England to one of the Southern coastal islands to try to lay low, and to hope that the psychic flashes are a thing of the past. But then horrifying visions start again.

Childes' skepticism about his own powers generates a fair amount of drama as we go along, as do the apparent limits of those powers: he can see what the killer is doing in his mind, but he doesn't know where, and he can't glean the killer's identity from these psychic links. This last becomes quite a problem when the killer suddenly realizes that Childes is psychically observing the killer's actions, and manages to start pulling information out of Childes' head that immediately puts his ex-wife, his daughter, and eventually everyone around Childes in mortal danger. It all makes for a quick, enjoyable read with some moments of visceral and existential horror. Recommended.

Bruce Willis vs. The Moon

Movies:


Moon, starring Sam Rockwell and Kevin Spacey, written by Duncan Jones and Nathan Parker, directed by Duncan Jones (2009): While it's no 2001, Moon is an intelligent and enjoyable science-fiction movie, an increasingly rare thing in these heady days of overwrought CGI and underwrought writing.

Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, the only worker on a Lunar Industries moonbase on the far side of the moon tasked with mining Helium3 and shipping it back to Earth to power Earth's fusion reactors. Sam is only weeks away from the end of his three-year contract -- and a return to his wife and child on Earth -- when an accident leaves him wondering just what is really going on. The result is a tightly plotted science-fiction thriller with several surprises and a refreshing air of scientific verisimilitude.

Rockwell is fast becoming one of my favourite, slightly offbeat actors -- his Sam Bell is sympathetic and a bit wiggy, the latter perfectly understandable given his three-year isolation. Kevin Spacey lends his voice to GERTY, the base computer which knows...something. Spacey pitches his voice in HAL territory, leaving one wondering until the final scenes whether or not we have another homicidal computer on our hands. If you enjoyed the old Twilight Zone or the 1960's Outer Limits, you'll enjoy Moon's combination of existential dread, hope, and the joys of plot twists. David Bowie's son, Duncan Jones, does a nice job of directing. Here's hoping he continues to make movies as enjoyable as this, and doesn't get sucked up into the Hollywood crap-making machine. Highly recommended.



Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis, Radha Mitchell, Ving Rhames and James Cromwell, written by Michael Ferris and John D. Brancato from the graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele, directed by Jonathan Mostow (2009): I'm not sure I'd call this a good movie, but it is fun. In a future world, cybernetics has advanced to the point that a person never has to leave his or her home -- a robotic surrogate, usually better looking than the original person, can do everything for you while you lie in a control chair, directing the surrogate's movements and experiencing whatever it experiences safely away from any possible harm. But then someone manages to murder a person by destroying his surrogate, and FBI agents Bruce Willis and Radha Mitchell are called in to investigate. Ving Rhames shows up in a ridiculous dreadlock wig.

Bruce Willis's surrogate makes for some droll moments -- CGI de-ages Willis's face and gives him a full-head of somewhat ridiculous-looking blonde hair. The future society isn't drawn with enough care to be fully believeable (obviously, not everyone would be able to afford these things as they apparently do in the movie), but the metaphoric commentary on people and their avatars, whether those avatars are computerized or simply the fake faces we put on when we go out the door, is interesting and sometimes somewhat poignant. If you could live through a nigh-indestructible, better-looking version of yourself, would you? And would it be fair to criticize people who do so because of mental or physical problems? Recommended.