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Ray Bradbury Theater – The Man Upstairs (S2E5)

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If you were thinking the only way this series could get worse was to set an episode in France —  sacré bleu!

rbnotredame07aWe open with the standard shots of the Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame Cathedral accompanied by the usual God-awful electronic score.  Normally, this would indicate stock footage and be a sure sign that the episode was not filmed in Paris.  Shockingly, the camera pans from the cathedral to one of the actors throwing rocks in the river.  Was this actually filmed in Paris?

Grandma calls her American grandson Dougie into the small hotel she runs so he can watch her plunge a Michael Myers sized kitchen knife into a turkey, which apparently he always takes great pleasure in.  As Grandma stitches up the bird, Dougie plays with with the guts she removed.  This strikes Grandma as charming rather than, say, a sign of tendencies toward serial killing.

A man, Mr. Koberman, rings the door of the hotel.  He is French, carrying a parasol and wearing a turtleneck, so Dougie wisely tells him they are full, beat it.  Grandma has a business to run, however, and invites the man in.  Dougie shows the man to his room.  When he opens the curtains, the man reels back from the sunlight.

rbtreadwell01That night at dinner, we meet the other tenants: Mr. Dumas, an artist, and the very hot and criminally underused Miss Treadwell, a student.  Dougie notices that Mr. Koberman hides his silverware and produces his own wooden utensils.  He says the sound of silverware clanking gives him lé willies.

So naturally Dougie tweaks him by doing a trick with his fork.  Somehow he plucks the tines, producing a sound that no real fork could ever make, not even a tuning fork.  In fact, it sounds suspiciously like the awful electronic score of the episode.  This drives Bokerman from the table.  I feel his pain.

That night, Miss Treadwell goes to the library, and Koberman goes out for the evening.  Dougie plays with his heat-sensing camera —  wait, what?  As Koberman returns to the hotel, Dougie notices a strange hot hourglass-shaped organ in his chest.  The next morning, Miss Treadwell does not come down to breakfast.  And they are having croissants!

rbeiffel01Dougie checks out her room to see if she is OK.  Or naked.

No sign of her, so he goes to Bokerman’s room.  There he sees pictures of many girls, including Miss Treadwell.  There is also a picture of Bokerman at the construction of the Eiffel Tower.

Dougie connects a lot of dots and determines that Bokerman is a vampire.  He sneaks into his room, pulls out the turkey knife and plunges it into Bokerman.  He proudly brings the strange organ downstairs to show Grandma.

Strangely, Mr. Dumas and the police seem to have no particular concern that this boy has murdered a tenant at the hotel.  With a lack of skepticism worthy of the Obama press corp, they accept that this must have been a monster and deserving of his fate.  Seeing that he was stitched up just like the turkey, they cut him open and find the murder weapon — not the knife but Dougie’s silver coin collection.    Says one: “Seems like the boy made a good investment.”  Cue haughty French laugh.

I rate this a cinq.

Post-Post Leftovers:

  • Sacré bleu is never actually used in French speaking countries.
  • Dumas says the Eiffel Tower was built for the 1900 Paris Exhibition, but it was actually built for the 1889 World’s Fair.
  • The director’s other credits are French productions, further suggesting this was filmed in France.  There’s got to be a story behind that.
  • Dougie is one of the worst child actors in history.  He is at the level of Worf’s son on Star Trek TNG or . . . [I got nothing].  Appropriately, this is his only credit on IMDb.
  • Féodor Atkine (Koberman) has had quite the career, however.  Mostly in France, but he was also in Woody Allen’s Love and Death, and in World War Z where he was oddly uncredited.
  • Miss Treadwell is still in the biz, but is credited only sporadically on IMDb.

Steven Millhauser – Thirteen Wives

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I sent this to my Kindle some time ago and forgot about it, but this morning, I accidentally tapped the icon.  Since I had just written about Millhauser’s Eisenheim the Illusionist, I decided to see what this one was about.

It starts out simply enough with a narrator saying, “I have 13 wives.”  OK, simple in sentence structure, but not so much in implications.  Anyone who has read Millhauser knows this is not going to be a story about Mormons.   You know to expect a detailed description of life with each, and to not expect much of an arc to the characters or story.  And that is fine — nobody expects show-tunes out of Dylan.

He continues on to very briefly describe their collective living and dining arrangements in a one-paragraph introduction.  There are a few sentences that leave the story open to interpretation.

Even though I married my wives one after the other, over a period of nine years, I never did so with the thought that I was replacing one wife with a better one, or abolishing my former wives by starting over. Never have I considered myself to be a man with thirteen marriages but, rather, a man with a single marriage, composed of thirteen wives.

Millhauser then begins a numbered list.  I don’t remember him ever doing that even though his style certainly lends itself to that format.

Rather than recap the 13 essays of his wives — and there is no wrap-up following #13 — I will just say that each wife is lovingly and fully rendered; much more than some deserve.  But this is not a schmaltzy, romantic ode to Big Love or the individual women.  There are eccentricities and quirks to be found, preternatural empathy, and some defying of the laws of physics.  But the latter instances are grounded by being mixed in with more traditional relationships.

There seems to be a lot of speculation online as to whether he is describing one woman over a period of time, the multiple facets of one woman at one point in time, or actually 13 distinct wives as advertised.

There seems to be more evidence to support the 13 wives theory, but ultimately I don’t think it matters.  As usual, Millhauser puts his universe on the table and you can dig in or not.  There is enough to go around.

I rate this 11 wives.

At least as of today, it is available online here.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

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Conedgeoftomcover01s: Got to the Theater 8 minutes late, anticipating the usual 17 minutes of previews. Miraculously, the movie had already started.  OK, I can’t blame the film for that, but I’m grasping for straws because the movie itself was very good.

Tom Cruise is caught in a time loop similar to Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, except some chick is shooting him in the head in most of the iterations.

Also, he is waking to each reset day with a sergeant screaming “On your feet maggot!” rather than hearing “I Got You Babe” on the radio.  Although around the 20th time, I’m not sure which would be worse.

It gets off to an interesting start — at least at the point where I where I strolled in — as Tom Cruise is not playing his usual confident, infallible, smirking superman. Here he is Don Draper, or more accurately Pete Campbell, a weaselly military ad man who finds himself on the front lines of a war with aliens.  He does his best to talk, spin, and blackmail his way out of being sent into the real war, but to no avail

He is busted to private and assigned to a combat unit commanded by Bill Paxton, who is great in this role despite being possibly the worst actor to ever make a fine living working full-time in movies; he is frequently a great character, but that is not the same.  The irony is that among the grunts he commands there is not a single character as interesting as Hudson in Aliens.  OK, I guess the indistinguishable soldiers are the real “con” of the movie.

Once in combat, he is pretty quickly killed.  But not before killing one of the aliens. Not just a regular alien, but a 1 in 6 million alien that possesses time-travel capabilities.  You’d think the aliens would protect such a rare, valuable resource, but no.  After blasting the alien, Cruise gets a blood, guts & goo facial. This is enough to transfer the time-travel abilities to him.  When he is killed, he resets / awakens the previous morning.

Eventually, Cruise becomes the superhuman killing machine that we expect him to be.  The difference here is that it is earned.  We see him repeatedly fail, die, and learn from his mistakes.  For him, Nietzsche was wrong — What DOES kill him makes him stronger.  There are no participation trophies.  Cruise gets a rare chance to develop a character — from smug ad man, to scared toy-soldier, to born-again hard — and completely pulls it off.

Emily Blunt plays a war hero aka The Angel of Verdun aka Full Metal Bitch who had earlier been stuck in a time-loop.  Understanding Cruise’s potential as a weapon, she becomes his trainer and partner.  If there was one thing I didn’t care for in the movie, it was her.  The character is OK, but the actress just brought nothing special to the role.  OK, forget the indistinguishable soldiers, they were just bit players and ultimately cannon-fodder — the miscasting of Emily Blunt would be the only “con” I could come up with.

Toward the end, there were several things I didn’t understand.  For example:

  1. Cruise seemed to indicate he was teaching himself to fly the helicopter at the farmhouse, but then told Blunt that an alien would hear the noise and attack it if were even started (which she proved to be true).
  2. Before attacking the Louvre, Cruise says not to kill any of the Alpha aliens because that would alert the Omega alien who would would then reset the day.  But they do go in guns a-blazing, killing scores of aliens.
  3. And, of course, the whole ending.

Mostly likely all of these are explainable by a) dialogue I missed, or b) the fact that the theater now serves beer.

Except the ending.

So, maybe the real “con” is the ending; in more ways than one.  Certainly that seems to be creating a lot of online chatter.  But then most chatterers are praising Emily Blunt, too.  I can construct a scenario in which it makes sense to me, even if it is not airtight.  This ain’t Algebra; both sides of the equation don’t have to balance to be entertaining.

Rating: I’d rather sit through a time-loop viewing this movie than have to sit through Godzilla one more time.

Post-Post Leftovers:

  • Great movie, but terrible title — sounds like a soap opera.
  • Why the European setting?  Callback to D-Day?  Tired of destroying Washington and New York?  Got news for you, people love seeing Washington destroyed. Maybe it is not PC during this administration.
  • I can’t figure out what the giant paddle is that she is carrying.
  • The shadow of Aliens looms large, and not just for Paxton and the cargo-loaders.  When told they could not shoot the aliens at the Louvre, I really wanted to hear, “What the hell are we supposed to use, man?  Harsh language?“
  • As usual, I regret going 3D.  It was fine, but pointless, in the static shots; but many of the action scenes were a mess.  Also, it darkens the screen so much that I never was able to make out the last word of Full Metal Bitch on the poster, and didn’t recognize Emily Blunt as being the woman pictured.  Possibly due to sitting at a sharp angle to the screen.
  • Seventeen minutes does seem to be the average for previews.  However, the new X-Men ran longer, and the Evil Dead reboot last year had a record-breaking 25 minutes.  I wouldn’t care if they lasted an hour — if we knew they would last an hour.  Here’s a way to start — no advertising for movies that won’t be in the theater for 2 years.
  • There really is a Science Hill, KY but I can’t figure out why they would have made it Paxton’s character’s hometown.  Bill Paxton was born in Fort Worth, TX.  He was photographed waving to JFK leaving his hotel the morning he was killed, and later attended Lee Harvey Oswald’s old high school.  John Denver also attended the same high school, but there is no photographic evidence linking Paxton to his death.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Mink (S1E36)

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More komedy from Alfred Hitchcock, this time explaining that he has given up on his diet and is trying sports.

ahmink03a

Actual Closed Caption

That hilarity comes at the end of the episode, but it is kind of a slog to get there.  Woman buys fur on the cheap.  She is later busted as it had been stolen.  She pleads her innocence, but the conspirators deny ever having met her.  As always on AHP, justice prevails.  For a complicated episode, it is pretty easy to summarize.

Normally I like these kinds of mysteries where someone just seems to have disappeared and only one person remembers them.  Hitchcock did this earlier and better in his film, The Lady Vanishes; and in an earlier AHP episode, Into Thin Air.

ahminkdawn01But on to more important matters.  The women in this episode were annoying and er, not attractive to men.  With the exception of Eugenia Paul.

Holy crap, this woman must be a time traveler.  She does not look like anyone else I’ve seen in this series so far.

She has a few credits every year in the mid to late 1950’s then nothing.  According to IMDb, she married the heir to the Pep Boys Auto Shops fortune.  I find that hilarious, but I’m not sure why.

She is also in an episode in Season 2, so I have that to look forward to.

Aside from Eugenia, I rate this episode wet dog fur.

ahminkdawn05

Post-Post Leftovers:

  • Watching this episode, something made me think, “every one of these people is dead.”  I checked IMDb and sure enough every actor, actress, the writers, the director — all dead.
  • And that wasn’t necessarily the case.  Gone With the Wind is almost 20 years older and the last performer just died this year.
  • Sadly, that includes Eugenia Paul who was only 20 in this episode.

 

Devil’s Due (2014)

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devilsduecover01There sure is a lot of hate for a pretty good movie.  Maybe I am just too forgiving.  Of course, it has its flaws, but it also has some great scenes, things I had never seen before, and even it gave me a legitimate chill at one point.  What more can you ask from a movie?

The biggest gripe seems to be with the found-footage format, and it is sometimes pretty goofy.  Mostly it is being shot by husband Zach McCall, but there are also inserts from a police station camera, a supermarket security camera, rogue cameras installed by Satan worshipers, and the craziest — a trio of teenagers who also just happen to film everything.  There is no pretense that this footage was ever actually found and edited into what we are watching.  This is not found-footage, this is unfound-footage.  You can bitch about the presentation, or you can roll with it.  Ich bin ein roller.

In brief scenes of the wedding and the night before we meet Zach and the very cute Samantha McCall (Allison Miller).  If there is anything important here, I missed it.  We do briefly see a preacher — Bernard from Lost — who shows up later, and get the couple’s names, but otherwise, not much.  Minutes later, they are winging it to the Dominican Republic for the honeymoon.

devilsduesam02Sam has her palm read, and it goes about as well as it goes in every movie.  The reader tells her she’s had hard times, but now is happy — oh, that’s sweet; that she has no family, no past — that’s, er, harsh but factual; and, oh yeah, she is born from death!  This last bit is literally true as her pregnant mother was killed in a car crash, and Sam was cut out of her belly.  The palm reader flips out, repeating, “They’ve been waiting”, prompting the McCalls to run from the shop.

They immediately become lost after dark in the Dominican Republic which is basis enough for a horror movie.  They flag down a taxi and the driver offers to take them to a club for a drink.  Despite flying out the next morning, being tired, lost, nervous about their surroundings and freaked out by the palm reader — sure, let’s have a drink!  He takes them to a place is pretty sketchy, down dark corridors decorated in the Hostel / Saw motif.  Shockingly, they actually do emerge from this filthy trek a) alive and b) into a swingin’ club.

devilsduesam03

Just another gratuitous shot

We get footage of them drinking, dancing,having a good time there before the picture becomes choppy and we get just brief glimpses of them being carried out of the club.  then a satanic ritual is performed on a flaming Quake II logo (because what other kind of ritual is there?).  Nixonian gap in the tape / they are back in the hotel with no memory of how they got there.  Seconds later they are back home in the US.

Either 5 minutes or 7 weeks later, Sam announces that she is pregnant.  Not sure what this guy Zach does for a living, but at about 25 he’s got a McMansion, unlimited free time, a hot wife, and no financial worries about an unplanned child.  Guy Woodhouse had to sell his soul for this kind of life.

After Sam’s first ultrasound, we start getting indications that all might not be well with her pregnancy.  In a bit reminiscent of Paranormal Activity we get a night vision shot of Sam violently grabbing Zach’s wrist as she continues to sleep.  Things get progressively weirder from here.

Part of the weirdness is in the POV.  For the first time, except briefly in the film’s opening shot, we are viewing the action from a non-McCall POV.  Now, we get several shots from security cameras of Sam shopping in the market before pausing in front of the meat case.  She pauses, takes a package and begins eating the raw meat.  Say, that is crazy — she’s is a vegetarian!

There is more weirdness, best left unspoiled.

Thank God, the cult installs hidden cameras in the McCall house to eliminate the need for Zach to be filming everything.  Coincidentally, this happens at just the moment Zach stops filming everything.  My favorite, and least practical, is the Arbogast-cam that mimics the POV when Martin Balsam gets stabbed n Psycho.

devilsduecam01

Arbogast-Cam

When Sam and Zach attend a communion service, ya just knows there is going to be a problem.  Sure enough, Pastor Bernard starts sputtering, and bleeding from the nose onto his nice clean frock or tunic or vestment or whatever it is that they wear.  He is staring at Sam, knowing that she is somehow responsible for this and will damn well pay the cleaning bill.  There is a nice blink-and-you-miss-it moment as the camera pans past Sam’s profile and she is sporting some cool red devil eyes.

devilsduesam01Later, Zach is reviewing tapes and spots the taxi driver from the Dominican Republic in the church during the pastor’s seizure.  He was not detected as being a communion-crasher at the service, which is shocking because 1) he is not the sort of Dominican they are used to seeing in the pews, and 2) not the kind of Republican either, for that matter.

He also finally sees the few frames that show him and Sam being hauled out of the club, and the flaming Quake II satanic ritual.

Zach goes to see Pastor Bernard, and shows him the symbols that appeared on the tape.  Whoops, it turns out they are not the logo for Quake II, but religious symbols heralding the return of the anti-Christs — plural.   That seems a little unfair — it should be one anti per Christ.  He tells Zach to get the hell out of his room.

Now we come to the scene that is worth the price of admission.  We cut to 3 teenagers who also have a fetish for filming.  What happens next is exhilarating.  And that’s all I have to say about that.

Actually, probably best not to even document the rest.  From this point on, the pace and chills really accelerate.

The last scene is another honeymooning American couple, this time in Paris.  They are approached by the same taxi driver.  Being another dopey camera-wielding couple, at this point, I feel they deserve whatever they get.

I rate it a 600 out of 666.

Post-Post Leftovers:

  • From the directors of the “10/31/98” episode of V/H/S, which was also pretty good.  Strangely, I don’t remember much about it except that it was good.  Maybe it just seemed good right next to the God-awful wraparound.
  • According to IMDb, there is an uncredited actor in this named Spencer Tracey.  Why would you even attempt a movie career with that name?  Can it possibly help you?  Edward Norton had the good sense not to go by “Ed“.  Might I suggest “Spence”, at the very least?
  • Just discovered that on The Honeymooners, Ed Norton’s middle name was Lillywhite.  Hate to think what it might have been in the 2005 version with Cedric the Entertainer.
  • Why does the anti-Christ have to be American?  Oh yeah — Hollywood.
  • Pregnant women are smug.