Omega Man!

As alert readers of the Twitter Update feed on the right will have noticed, Netflix streaming let me accidentally watch Omega Man the other night.

(Sidebar: Netflix streaming makes having a newborn possible. Up at 3am for another feeding? Why not just order up Omega Man and chillax?)

Somehow, I'd managed to never actually see this all the way through. The first 30 minutes is excellent, and then it starts a steady downhill slide straight into one of the least subtle alegories of an ending I've seen since Neo went from being a Jesus-eque character to actually BEING Jesus.

Final Score: 2 points, but an honorable mention for this:



Seriously, any movie that can provide THAT image is a winner. (Why yes, those are ruffles, and yes that IS velvet!)

I also bring this up so I can link to Mick LaSalle's Appreciation of Charlton Heston. This was in the SF Chronicle after Chuck died a while back, and it's not an obituary so much as just that - an appreciation. I'm sort of an accidental Chuck fan, and I keep trying to paraphrase this when people ask me why. Omega Man finally gave me an excuse to dig the link out of the web and post it here.

(And, for the record, if you haven't seen it, go rent Touch of Evil. Trust me.)

"You've got to come back with me, Marty!"

So, the first scene in Back to the Future 2 is also the last scene in Back to the Future 1. But, since Michael J Fox was visibly older and Marty's girlfriend had been recast, they had to reshoot the scene for the opening of 2. (This should not be an exciting trivia fact to anyone.)

However, proving once again that no matter what, someone has more free time than you do, The Internet has made a side-by-side comparison of the two versions of the same scene.

Funny stuff to note: while Michael J Fox delivers his lines in a very different way, Christopher Lloyd is almost perfectly synced with himself. Also, the number of reused shots surprised me - for example, the close-up of Doc Brown pulling stuff out of the trash is recycled from the first version, but the shot of Doc dumping it all into Mr. Fusion is new - which means that some poor sod had to carefully watch the first version and figure out what pile of trash props they needed for the reshoot. (Why do that? How is that easier than just using new trash?)

Star Trek: Capsule Review

Liked it. A lot.

Stealing a line from Wil Wheaton, if all reboots were done this well, geeks wouldn't respond to reboots with the venom that they do.

For an old-school "lapsed catholic" Trekkie like myself, it was really a kick to see Trek given an actual A-List treatment (and budget).

My only real complaint about the movie was that it has, possibly, the worst astrophysics of any science fiction movie I've ever seen.

Also, it needed a Wil Wheaton cameo.

MOON

I want to see this movie really, really badly, and I didn't even know it existed 20 minutes ago.

Why didn't anyone tell me Sam Rockwell was starring in a mashup of Alien, Silent Running, and Outland?

ALSO: directed by David Bowie's son, which is basically the only way to make this movie more awesome. And yeah, that's Kevin Spacey as the robot's voice.

Sam's back in the saddle

Sam Raimi has a new movie coming out.  A horror movie where a bank employee is cursed for not giving a gypsy woman an extension on her mortage?  Yes, please.  Really, the only thing this trailer is missing is Bruce Campbell.  (And, let's be honest, that's a pretty big deficit.)

Made available here for Reference

The Five Point Movie Scoring System is an infallible system developed over years of painstaking research. The System boils the total value of a Movie down to a totally accurate score between Zero and Five, the higher the better.

A Single Point is scored for the presence of each of the following:

1) Robots (also valid: Cyborgs or Replicants.)
2) Explosions (Any kind)
3) Ninjas
4) Nudity
5) Space Ships (or any other sufficiently advance mode of travel)

The Value of this system can be observed by the following ratings:

Star Wars: 4 points
Starship Troopers: 4 points
MORTAL COMBAT! 3 points (added by Heidi)
Raiders of the Lost Ark: 1 Point
Blade Runner: 1 Point
Citizen Kane: 0 points


No one has ever found a 5-Point movie. This is believed to be an entirely mythical concept.