This Week’s Movie: TOUCHING THE VOID

At the start of the British mountain-climbing documentary Touching the Void, we meet Simon Yates and Joe Simpson, clearly much older than they would have been during the events depicted in the movie, narrating how they felt in the past tense. The implication is clear: whatever happened to them, they survived. One might think that knowledge would ruin the movie – you often hear it leveled at fictional movie prequels – but it doesn’t. Touching the Void is so tense and riveting that you never even think about it.

This Week’s Movie: SHOWGIRLS

So, Showgirls. That just happened.

This Week’s Movie: STARSHIP TROOPERS

At one point in Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, a soldier played by Seth Gilliam (who would go on to greater fame in The Wire) tells our hero Johnny Rico (Casper van Dien), “You kill bugs good.” Between the words themselves and Gilliam’s grunting delivery, it’s a line that has never failed to get a huge laugh from every audience that I’ve ever seen the film with. And here’s the most important thing: Verhoeven wants to get that laugh. He is in fact depending upon that laugh. Starship Troopers is perhaps the most subversive film ever released by a major studio, where the suits thought they were getting a special-effects summer blockbuster that would fill the theaters up with 17-year-olds, and Verhoeven delivered a powerful statement that the sort of film those suits wanted is in fact a fascist construction.

This Week’s Movie: GALAXY QUEST

Out of all the possibly false stories about the Star Trek television and movie series, this one is my favorite: George Takei was the final member of the original cast to sign on to do the movie Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and he occupied a unique position. Takei’s character Hikaru Sulu had never received a single promotion during the TV series or previous movies, but he was the captain of his own ship in STVI. The reason for this? That film was to be the send-off for the original Star Trek cast, and fans would demand that everyone had to be on board, but Takei demanded that he would never be on set at the same time as William Shatner. There was only one set to serve as the bridges for all of the good guys’ ships, so with Takei and Shatner as separate captains, their scenes together could be filmed on separate days! Behind-the-scenes drama that intense would make a great movie in and of itself, and in 1999 it did: the superb comedy Galaxy Quest.

Of course no movie studio would allow a franchise as successful as Star Trek to be deconstructed so savagely for laughs, so the comparisons are all indirect. Tim Allen plays the hammy captain of a TV starship crew who are at least fifteen years off the air, victims of Hollywood typecasting, and don’t have a movie series to return to. Between the show itself, and their long journey around the sci-fi convention circuit, their personal vendettas have been allowed to fester to the point that the rest of the crew is basically united in their hatred of Allen. They’re forced to work together when a group of actual aliens, having watched the show and believing it to be a documentary, recruit them for battle against a brutal intergalactic warlord.

If you’ve ever watched an episode or two of the original Star Trek TV series, then every word of the previous paragraph and every second of Galaxy Quest clearly becomes pointed commentary on everything that was both good and bad about that series. Gene Roddenberry’s optimistic (some might say naive) vision of the future, the way that impossible science was covered up by hand-wavey writing, the constant struggle between Shatner and Leonard Nimoy for the best scenes … it’s all on the screen here, and it ain’t subtle. It’s certainly a planned irony that Sigourney Weaver, who as Ellen Ripley in the Alien films was one of sci-fi’s all-time great tough gals, is on hand here as the mostly useless female member of Allen’s crew.

And let’s be clear: none of that nerdy commentary stuff would work if this movie didn’t also work on its own merits as a sci-fi action-comedy. This movie is exciting when it needs to be and funny in every other moment, spraying good jokes at the screen at a pace even the South Park guys would envy. Special credit should go toward the design of the villain, Sarris (voiced by Robin Sachs): he’s a strong commentary on how much times had changed since the original Star Trek, and how Cold War idealism might not work in a world which brought us Rwandan and the Yugoslavian genocide, but he’s also just plain ruthless and bloodthirsty in the way that a good action movie villain ought to be.

This is Tim Allen’s best acting work in a walk. He surely has an understanding of what it means when an actor gets associated with one role on one TV show for the rest of his life, which is part of being in this movie. But an equally big part requires him to be a really good, really believable spaceship captain. Just ask Scott Bakula:* it’s not easy to be as tough as Captain Kirk without doing a Shatner impression. This is a movie which calls for Allen to do the “action hero rolls into action” move exactly right, but also to have the exactly right reaction to the resulting mocking from Weaver, and he pulls both of those challenges off wonderfully.

A big part of the reason that I hated Grandma’s Boy last week is that I found it to be a fundamentally mean-spirited picture, with a message that seemed to be “you would never want to hang out with these characters if they didn’t get high all the time.” Galaxy Quest is the flip side: even though these characters don’t like each other particularly much, they’re a joy to be around. The whole movie is basically a love letter to Star Trek and shows like it; although “the show was cheesy and its fans are nerds” might seem to be the point of some of the jokes, it’s never done cruelly or in any way other than a good-natured one. Most movies about the Trekkie phenomenon don’t make it seem so cool to be a fan of Star Trek, but Galaxy Quest makes it seem downright heroic.

Reviewed by Mark Young

*The captain of the short-lived, little-watched, most recent Star Trek spin-off series, Enterprise.

Edited with BlogPad Pro

This Week’s Movie: GRANDMA’S BOY

Many Movie Klubbers liked the 2006 comedy Grandma’s Boy. The movie even got a round of applause afterward. My reaction was much different, but I want to respect my friends’ opinions. So here’s the most respectful review I can write about Grandma’s Boy:

I thought it was bad. I laughed at exactly one joke*, and it left me feeling angry and depressed.

The End.

Reviewed by Mark Young

*If you’re curious: it was the joke about Charlie Chaplin during sex: “Was he silent?!”

This Week’s Movie: THE FALL

One of the reasons that six-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis was so good in Beasts of the Southern Wild is that most child actors can only do so much. They can play pretend, sure, and that lets them act to a degree, but Wallis went well beyond that degree. If you want to get a better idea of the average six-year-old actor, you might watch The Fall, a film released in 2008 and directed by Tarsem Singh (who is usually billed as simply, “Tarsem”). The Fall is sharply limited by the abilities of one of its leads, six-year-old Catinca Untaru, but in some ways it’s even better because of her limitations.

This Week’s Movie: THE BOYS NEXT DOOR

Maybe people remember comedies like Wayne’s World and Clueless better, but Penelope Spheeris came to prominence with a pair of bracingly dark movies: 1981′s landmark punk-rock documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, and 1985′s The Boys Next Door. Both take place mostly on the west side of Los Angeles, amongst the burgeoning punk and mod counterculture there. But the documentary is actually about the counterculture, and the fiction film is merely among it. The Boys Next Door is trying to be about people who are even more nihilistic and hopeless, and suffers a bit for it.