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Look! It Moves!: The Grab-Bag Edition by Adi Tantimedh

Published Mon, 28 May 2012 11:00:41 -0500

No topic to devote a whole column to this week, as I've been looking at all sorts of things and thinking about stuff, so I'll just talk about what caught my attention.

So there's a new DOCTOR WHO videogame out for the Playstation 3. People in the UK can buy a disc version while people in the US can only download it from the Playstation Network. DOCTOR WHO: THE ETERNITY CLOCK is a Metroidvania-style side-scrolling with puzzles and, finally, some actual back-and-forth time travel in a Doctor Who game! It's also buggy as hell. This is the first time I've seen a game crash on the PS3. The first time I've seen a game freeze the PS3. I saw River Song fall through the game world and into eternal darkness and thought it was part of the story until I realized it was really a bug and had to restart the whole game. Beyond that, I haven't gotten far enough to form an opinion of the game. If you like METROID and DOCTOR WHO, I suppose you'd want to give it a go.

So the general buzz about David Cronenberg's new movie COSMOPOLIS is that it's disappointing. Yet no review has actually pointed out that it's actually an adaptation of the Don Delillo novel and that maybe it's rubbish because the novel is rubbish. I read it years ago. It's the most unsubtle and hamfisted novel that Delillo ever wrote in a career lasted over 30 years. This from the writer who's the closest America has to their own J.G. Ballard. Cronenberg was just being faithful to the book.

This news came just as I was thinking about movies in the 90s. That was the decade when a new generation of filmmakers like Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, David O'Russell and Wes Anderson came about who were touted as auteurs the way Scorsese, Spielberg and Coppola were in the 1970s. It was also the decade when the notable older filmmakers made some bad films that made me wonder if they were going off the boil. The two filmmakers that came to my mind last week were Cronenberg and Paul Schrader. Both of them made two terrible films each. Cronenberg made the static SPIDER, adapted from Patrick McGrath's gothic novel and the miscast M. BUTTERFLY from David Henry Hwang's play. Schrader made two even worse films: the horrible and worthless THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS from Ian McEwan's equally pointless novel and the utterly miscast and wrongheaded modern-day retelling of "The Count of Monte Cristo", FOREVER MINE. THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS was staggeringly awful. How could you make a movie about sexual obsession with Christopher Walken and end up with one of the most boring movies?! FOREVER MINE is a movie that I sat through wondering why it needed to exist at all. This is a movie that cast Joseph Fiennes as a Latino cabana boy and has Ray Liotta doing the usual Ray Liotta blustery gangster thing with no real point at all.

Both Cronenberg and Schrader did manage to make one good movie each in the 1990s, Cronenberg with eXistenZ and Schrader with LIGHT SLEEPER, two key movies of that decade, so it's not all bad. Now Schrader has teamed up with Brett Easton Ellis to raise financing for their new movie through Kickstarter. THE CANYONS has an original screenplay by Ellis and Schrader will be directing it this summer. They've already raised the $100,000 they need to get cracking and the drive still has more than a week to go. From what I've heard, it's a thriller about the decadence and spiritual emptiness of Hollywood (with sex and nudity, of course), themes both Ellis and Schrader have always been drawn to. I just hope it's not going to be another THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS.

Came across an intriguing little show online called THE BOOTH AT THE END. Set in a diner in Los Angeles, it's about a mysterious man who sits in the last booth with a notebook who will give people what they want if for a price: to accomplish a task he sets them. A man hoping to save his young son from leukemia is tasked with finding a killing another child. A girl who wants to be prettier is tasked with robbing a bank. An elderly woman who wants her Alzheimer's-ridden husband restored to her is tasked with planting a bomb in a public space. A teenage girl who wants her father's financial worries to go away is tasked with finding a recluse and taking him out of his house. And so on. And the man does not force them to any their tasks, only that they come back and tell him about their progress and the decisions they make as they wrestle with the tasks. I've always been a fan of TWILIGHT ZONE, TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED-type anthologies, and this is one of those. The mysterious man in the booth is played by Xander Berkeley, who has spent his career playing baddies in everything from Michael Mann shows to LA FEMME NIKITA, here plays a mercurial, manipulative ringmaster with all the mannerisms of a psychiatrist subtly prodding his patients to reveal sides of themselves they never knew existed and, in some cases, wish they hadn't discovered. There were five half-hour episodes produced and they should be watched all in one go to see how everything spins out, and it's never how you expect.

THE BOOTH AT THE END can be watched in the US on Hulu..com.

POSTHUMAN, a short Science Fiction animated movie I did script consultant work on is currently doing the festival rounds and showing at The New York Short Film Festival this Tuesday evening at 7:30pm. By "script consultant", I did story notes and helped with the dialogue. Everyone else did the hard work, particularly Cole Drumb and Jen Luk, the co-writers and creators, and Jesse Norton and his team of animators. Tricia Helfer voices the heroine in it.

I'm thinking about launching the LOOK! IT MOVES! Podcast. I'll be interviewing games designers, comics creators, the occasional filmmaker and whichever interesting people I'd like to talk to. First one up soon.

Easily distracted at lookitmoves@gmail.com

Follow the official LOOK! IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture, stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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