Thoughts on movies, comic books, life, and other nonsense, by someone who should know better
It happens to everyone – we get old and our appeal fades. We see the power we once had exercised by a new generation, and our movies start grossing less and less at the box office. It’s inevitable … but sometimes the natural decline is pushed harder down the slope by our own choices. Case in point, Tom Cruise’s newest movie Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.
I will admit that I’m burnt out on zombies – I have been for a while, long before they transitioned into pop culture with (arguably) the success of Shaun of the Dead – but likely I’m not alone. It’s the go-to monster for low budget crap on Netflix, and hundreds of badly written “post apocalyptic” novels on Amazon. Gone are the days – long gone – when the zombie was used as a metaphor for the mindless hordes of us, where the shuffling, brain dead hordes said, or tried to say, something about our propensity for herd mentality and mass consumerism. Nope, all gone, swept away under a tidal wave of pop culture of, ironically, brain dead depictions of zombies. Now you’re more or less likely to see them used either as backdrops (The Walking Dead) or rampaging groups of chase/eat machines (28 Days Later, World War Z).
Chances are, if you went to see Passengers based on the previews alone, you’d have gone in expecting a sci-fi thriller with a solvable mystery at its core. The movie, which stars fan favourites Jennifer Lawrence (The Hunger Games trilogy) and Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic World) certainly looks that way from the minute or so of carefully edited clips that you get. The giant, somewhat dark looking spaceship in deep space, the two leads running around while things go to hell – and why are they the only two to wake up?! So, yeah, if that was what you were expecting, I bet like me, you came out of the theater disappointed.
The Nice Guys, writer/director Shane Black’s first movie since Iron Man 3, is a throwback to his 2005 movie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which featured a pre-career resurgence Robert Downey Jr, and Val Kilmer’s arguably last “big” role as a thief and a private eye respectively, thrown together by circumstances to ultimately investigate a criminal case. Flash forward 10 years and now it’s Russell Crowe, enforcer-with-a-heart (kind of like Wade Wilson before he became Deadpool), teaming up with the private eye, played by Ryan Gosling. Black is a sharp writer, but the biggest hits of his career, Iron Man notwithstanding, are buddy movies – he also created Lethal Weapon, and Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans had the same dynamic in 1991’s The Last Boy Scout.
To qualify everything that comes next: while I’m a Star Trek fan, there’s a lot about Trek I cannot stand. I’m talking about the various TV incarnations and the current reboot, just to be clear. It’s the earliest memory of TV I can recall, and according to the dedicated Star Trek wiki, Memory Alpha, I likely caught it in the final season of its first run on the BBC (September – December 1971). I loved this show, and a big part of me still does.
AT THE FOOTHILLS OF MADNESS 