Doctor Who: Midnight (2008)

Some mood music, while you read.

We at the PPCC are huge sci-fi nerds, and yet it has taken us a long (loooong) time to get into that one mighty pillar of sci-fi-ness, Britain's Doctor Who of Britain, starring Britain, co-starring Britishness. Okay, we tease, but, damn, that shit is nationalistic! Which is fine. Most spec fic is notoriously US-centric, after all. Anyway, we're glad we finally initiated ourself. In addition to being nationalistic like crazy sauce, it is also addictive and silly and fun and full of everything.

It's difficult to review a PILLAR, so instead we'll focus on a few things:

• The episode, Midnight, and how it's awesome and a good intro. (Review)
  
• Some Doctor Who themes, and how they run the gamut from awesome to stupid to huh-ness. (Thoughts)

Allons-y, then!  

Episode review: Midnight

Doctor Who episodes seem to come in three varieties:

• Really trashy, ridiculous, and occasionally awful one-off episodes, featuring a Monster of the Week. As some of our friends assured us, "You do know it's a kid's show, right?" (No, we didn't! But now we do. Oh, how we do.)
  
• Really spectacular, mind-bending one-offs.
  
• Mediocre-to-good episodes that are usually redeemed by giving us one more crumb along the Great Path of Understanding the Doctor, usually accompanied by a Great Emotional Moment for the Doctor as well. These are exciting.

Midnight falls into the secondary category. It's the perfect gateway episode; you can watch it while knowing nothing of the Doctor and his Interminable Journey. But, of course, the experience is much richer if you do know a bit, since Midnight takes several Doctory themes, and then subverts them in refreshing ways.

Midnight begins on a fancy, diamondy planet called, uh, Midnight. Which is ironic, since it is brilliant and sparkling and very, very sunny. It is also totally hostile to any form of life; the sun being "x-tonic", which is technobabble for "zapping killer laser beam-like". The Doctor (David Tennant) and his Companion, the wonderful Donna Noble (the wonderful Catherine Tate), are taking a (much-deserved) break on Midnight, which markets itself as a party planet. The Doctor decides to go on a nature tour, while Donna lounges by the pool.

On the nature tour, we're introduced to a variety of Typical Human People: there's the suburban couple (Daniel Ryan, Lyndsay Coulsen) and their sullen teen son (Colin Morgan), the bumbling professor (David Troughton) and his geeky assistant (Ayesha Antoine), the flight attendant (Rakie Ayola; called a "hostess" in the episode, since apparently it's also 1950), and a middle-aged divorcee (Lesley Sharp). After lampooning modern commercial flight (endless, chattering entertainment options, tiny peanut packets, and so on), the journey is underway. The Doctor makes a few friends, people joke, and obviously something horrible is looming on the horizon.

We won't give away the horribleness, because much of the episode's genius is the smart and inventive (and cheaply-produced!) monster that we meet. If it's a monster at all. But it's something straight out of The Twilight Zone or Hitchcock: the fear and tension is slow, subtle, and gripping. One subversion of the Doctor Who routine is that the Doctor is as ignorant as everyone else on the ship (and in the audience) as to what the It thing is. Nothing is supposed to live on Midnight, and yet it seems something has? (Note that we can't even conclusively say that something has. One lovely interpretation of the episode is that there was nothing there at all, and everyone just freaked themselves out.)

A second subversion of Doctor Who's usual stuff is that, for once, humanity isn't celebrated, but instead retreats immediately into the banality of evil. When confronted with something difficult to understand and potentially violent, the passengers become scary and bestial themselves. It's reminiscent of J.G. Ballard's comments on seeing the "ragged scaffolding" of suburban civilization strip away, and how rattling that can be. For Doctor Who fans and the Doctor himself, it's especially rattling: usually, humanity has a big ol' crush on the Doctor, and is always happy to be helped. Here, they're skeptical, paranoid, hostile.

Anyway, the craft in this episode is just brilliant. The dialogue: building up tension, revealing aspects of the It thing's otherness slowly, taking sudden turns. Argh, as a writer, the PPCC burned with jealousy at someone having had such a good idea! The music. The acting: Tennant is always pretty damn good, but his role-reversal during the climax was so well-done. As with Lesley Sharp, especially in the earlier moments of being possessed, when she's/it's "learning". Ah! So good. Bravi, bravi.  

Big thoughts  

First big thought: Doctor Who is Buddhism

In fact, it might be as Buddhist as Groundhog Day, and that's pretty damn Buddhist. Except, whereas Groundhog Day is uplifting because it shows us nirvana (the ultimate happy ending), Doctor Who just grounds the PPCC down with its nihilistic woe. Seriously, how can this be a kid's show? HOW?! It is misery by design.

The most obvious Buddhist links are, first, the regeneration, and, second, the eternal woe. Oh, the woe.

One of the central tenets of Buddhism is that life is suffering, and it tends to repeat again and again, until we can break out of it by building mindfulness and compassion and non-attachment. Once you break out of that cycle of life and rebirth, you turn into Bill Murray - i.e. a Buddha, an enlightened being. In Mahayana Buddhism, there's an intermediate stage, called a bodhisattva - that's someone who delays nirvana, staying amongst the merely-stuck to teach about loving-kindness and being all nice and stuff.

You could argue that the Doctor's a bodhisattva. But we wouldn't. Because while he is pretty helpful and sorta nice and all that, he's also fighting the same battles over and over again: those Daleks never seem to die, do they? Nor does the (wonderful) Master (nor should he!).

Similarly, you'd think the Doctor would have learned, by now, that attachment leads to suffering (second Noble Truth in the ol' Buddhism). But he doesn't - constantly seeking out Companions, and constantly, ahem, effing them over. They never seem to emerge unscathed from their adventures. Seriously, after you've lost various Companions to death, dismemberment and being locked in a parallel universe, JUST STOP, DUDE.

So, it's Buddhism, but it's Buddhism at its saddest: the moment after the First and Second Noble Truths (life sucks, and the sucking will go on forever), and before the Third and Fourth (wait, maybe I should stop all this). To use a Christian analogy, it's like modeling a story on the moment after Jesus dies, but before he's resurrected. It's just miserable, dude.

 IS THIS WHAT YOU TEACH YOUR CHILDREN, BRITAIN?!

Which brings us to the second big thought.  

Second big thought: Doctor Who is Nationalism

 "Oh no," someone gasps. "They're headed towards Earth!"

Cut to outline of the UK.

The ostensible backstory is that the Doctor loves Earth like peanut butter loves jam. And that's fine. But Earth is basically Britain. And not only that - it's England. Scottish David Tennant wasn't allowed to keep his Scottish accent because, of all the regenerations a rogue Time Lord could make, of all the species, the genders, the heights and the everythings, the dude's gotta be a white English male every. single. time. Rumor has it the newest Doc, Peter Capaldi, will be retaining his Scottish accent, but this was - apparently - a major BBC decision.

Sometimes, the nationalism stuff is grating. But we know that we have no leg to stand on; most sci-fi is heavily skewed towards the US, and few people even seem to notice. At other times, the nationalism stuff is hilarious and wonderful, such as when an ailing Doctor - remember, this guy's a magical, super-smart, self-healing, time-traveling alien - is on the brink of death and then healed by the power of a CUP OF TEA. (Seriously, that was brilliant.)

Another wonderful byproduct of the Who's nationalism, is its portrayal of workaday Normal British Folk in all the supporting characters: Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), the London shopkeeper. Donna Noble, who's "just a temp from Chiswick!" And their funny families! Everyone is pretty modest, even mediocre. What's nice about the show is that it celebrates this normality for the inherent brilliance it can conceal.

Third big thought: Doctor Who is fandom

Fandom is nice. Fandom is fun. And Doctor Who has a huge, gigantic, long-lived fandom that seems to go on and on in every direction, and rival the Trekkies in terms of historicity and population density. Many of our good friends are Whovians. Some of the latest Doctors themselves - Tennant and Capaldi - are Whovians. And then you've got things like Adventure Time fans and fun, smart YouTube channel fans, and references all over the place. And the fanfiction! Oh, the fanfiction. We don't even want to go there.

For whatever reason (we still haven't pinpointed it), this miserable, lonely Time Lord has captured everyone and their mom's attention - including ours. The PPCC has basically put everything on hold while we finished off the Tennant years. And now we've still got all of Matt Smith to go - oh God.

There's still so much to say - how Doctor Who compares to Star Trek, especially The Next Generation, since we do think they are two sides of the same (weird) coin. Or the weird moments of transcendental, pulpy space opera in Who - especially when they talk about the Time War (and it sounds like the line-up for a heavy metal festival, "the Could-Have-Been King and his army of Meanwhiles and Never-Weres!"). But we'll leave that to another day, as it's 1AM here and a Time Lord has just regenerated in our laptop!

Star Trek: The Next Generation, episode "Genesis" (1994)

Image source. Yeah, FYTNG!

Oh man. Sometimes we expect the Enterprise crewmembers to look up at the camera, break the fourth wall and just scream, "OMG AM I IN THE BEST EPISODE EVER?!"

Star Trek: The Next Generation's season seven episode, Genesis, is one of those Best Episodes Ever that made us squeal and squawk with pure delight. And it just goes to show you that, for every awesome and hilarious sci-fi idea that you can possibly think of, there's probably already a Star Trek episode for it.

One day, one of the Enterprise's torpedoes went shooting off into an asteroid field, irritating Lieutenant Worf (Michael Dorn) and Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes) immensely. While Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Data (Brent Spiner) took a shuttle to go retrieve it, everyone back on the Enterprise starting acting very, very bizarrely. Worf suddenly feels hot all the time, while Counsellor Troi (Marina Sirtis) starts to feel cold and parched. Riker can't focus on anything, and hypochondriac Lieutenant Barclay (Dwight Schulz) becomes manic. What could possibly be going on?! Is it the flu or something?

Well, sort of! They're all DE-EVOLVING! Because it's the best episode of a TV show ever!


Amphibian Troi. Most hilarious ever?! POSSIBLY. Pic courtesy Wikipedia.

When Picard and Data return to the ship, they find it a steamy, Amazonian mess of jungle shrieks and predatory roars (that would be Worf, who de-evolves into the Shrike - shout out to Dan Simmons!). Picard immediately contracts the virus, and it's only another twelve hours before - according to Data - he will de-evolve "into either a lemur or a pygmy marmoset."

Let's take a moment to let that sink in. This man, Picard,

= A

LEMUR.

OR A


PYGMY MARMOSET.

.....

!!

Of course, leave it to Picard to become the most squirrelly and adorable of primates - while beefy, seven-foot Riker turns into a Neanderthal (okay, australopithecine). While he goes all anxious and twitchy (and kudos to Patrick Stewart's Royal Shakespearean training - who else could so fully encapsulate Terrified Lemur Man? With such pathos?), Data saves the ship. Again.

Ahh, this was the best of a very strange show. We've been overdosing on Next Generation for the past few days, ever since discovering WatchTrek.com, and we've often found episodes so overstuffed with insane ideas that the audience (or characters, for that matter) has no time to fully digest what the hell just happened. Soul-sucking aliens from another dimension… your accidentally-created double wooing your ex using tai chi-inspired interpretative dance… finding out someone amputated your arm and reattached it while you were sleeping?!! It's all in a couple episodes' work for Commander Riker, for example. And that's just one character! The show is packed with this sort of stuff. We love it.


A gratuitous shot of a typical TNG episode, wherein everyone is jumping around and falling over. Pic courtesy FYTNG.

We loved this episode because it captured that atmosphere of bizarreness, hilarity and horror - an intoxicating cocktail, and not something that's easy to do. When Picard and Data run into their former crewmates who are, one by one, presented as a gaping amphibian, a roaring australopithecine, and, well, the Shrike - it's hilarious, weird, and scary. It's like Slither, or The Fly, or the Evil Dead series. That is, sort of disgusting - but in a really awesome way. And the cat-lizard! THE CAT-LIZARD!?

Buy this now. Buy it.

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

Ghost in the Shell blasts onto the screen with haunting, Melanesian-esque choral music, post-human spinal tubing and lots and lots of arching breasts. We were kind of terrified in the first few minutes, but eventually settled down to really enjoy this innovative, brilliant, bizarre cyberpunk anime.

They say there are no new stories to tell, but surely all that 1980s early Internet sci-fi and Singularity stuff was new! Designing our own evolution for a transhuman future, etc. Because while Ghost in the Shell is talking about ancient Descartesian problems of defining consciousness in a world of epistemological doubt, it's also approaching those 17th-century questions with very 21st-century post-human answers. In particular, in a world of networked computers and biological augmentations, the division between meatspace and cyberspace is blurred. And this redefines everything - as Battlestar Galactica's philosophizing Cylon, Caprica Six, put it: "Are you alive? Prove it." Because, for all you know, you're a machine brain living in a virtual reality. Everyone thinks they're human.

Major Motoko Kusanagi (voiced by Atsuko Tanaka), she of the arching breasts which we will be seeing a lot of throughout the film, is a fully cyborg, detective-type badass killing machine (literally). She works for the Japanese government's Section 9, a sort of cyberpunk police squad. Their current target is the criminal hacker, the Puppet Master, who hacks into people's "ghosts" - that is, their consciousnesses, which these days are often embedded in brains permanently connected to the Internet. The Puppet Master's motives are nebulous, and some havoc is wreaked on the garrish, dilapidated, rainy downtown streets. That is, until a rogue cyborg claiming to be housing its own ghost appears. And then everything - especially the definition of life - is thrown into question.

But not before we squeeze in some evocative, meditative sequences. Even in moments of crisis, such as during a high-tech/high-speed car chase across nighttime Tokyo, director Mamoru Oshii slows the emotional pace down with somber, spacey music and lingering shots on the details of this very strange, brave new world. Though there are some grisly moments of violence (is this rated R? it should be!), the tone of the film is more cerebral than action-oriented. Characters often spend their time expositing the themes and ideas. This is excusable as they are running an investigation, and so explaining things to each other makes sense. It's also excusable because those ideas - do you grant human rights to a thinking machine? how did that ghost appear? - are so clever.

We really enjoyed it. We liked that, while there is the token human male character (sporting some very 1980s hair and shoulder pads indeed!), the film is brave enough to keep our focus on the non-human female protagonist, Motoko. Motoko's existential angst is resonant. It feels real (point of the movie, maybe?). When she talks about how being some biomachine superlady with access to infinite bits of data only makes her realize her limitations, we were moved. Oh, Pinocchio! Or as Rudyard Kipling once said, in a quote which has already been pilfered by sci-fi people for post-human themes, "Let them fall, Mowgli. They are only tears."

Is this THE cyberpunk movie of all time? Can it be topped?! We don't think so. It's more cyberpunky and smart than the oft-cited Father of the genre, Blade Runner! Highly recommended.

The American Astronaut (2001)

Guest blogger Brianosaurus (rhymes with "rhinoceros") is a sci-fi geek jet pilot who recently laid the smackdown in the House of PPCC by knowing waaay more about dystopias than we did. Today he brings his encyclopedic sci-fi knowledge with a review of a movie we've never heard of, let alone seen. Though clearly it's the best ever! Also, a note: Brian mentions Primer, a brain-pretzeling indie sci-fi cult classic, and we'll have the review for that one up soon (we promise). In the meantime, hold onto your ten-gallon hats and enjoy!

The American Astronaut in a nutshell: If Hugh Jackman from Oklahoma played Han Solo in a musical Flash Gordon set in the 1920s.

Meet Cory McAbee.



He’s that guy you know; the one that can do everything. McAbee is the writer, director, and star of American Astronaut. He also wrote all the music for the movie with his band, The Billy Nayer Show (yeah, he’s in a band too). So without a doubt, The American Astronaut is McAbee’s baby. I’m just telling you so you know who to thank later!

The American Astronaut, shot in black and white on 35mm film, falls into one of our favorite genres: the Space Western (think Star Wars and Firefly). Set in an alternate past, the story follows Samuel Curtis (Cory McAbee) as he travels across the solar system trading goods on various planets and asteroids, always trying to stay one step ahead of his nemesis, Professor Hess (Rocco Sisto).

McAbee’s universe is at once very old and, by the nature of space-travel, very futuristic. Everything looks like it was cobbled together from scraps at a salvage yard (it actually was), but it works. We see grimy, dirty worlds filled with rough and dirty men. Rednecks and criminals. And when I say men, I mean only men. There are no women out and about in McAbee’s rough universe. They all moved to Venus after they figured out how to asexually reproduce. The rest of the solar system is filled with men who can’t even imagine what women are like. Sex is so far out of their realm of possibility that they don’t even know how to talk dirty. Because of this, men have developed an interesting culture on their own, where music and dancing are not only part of their way of life, but also a means of communication.


Awesome bathroom music attack scene!!

**Spoilers** We see this immediately in the movie as Sam Curtis makes his first delivery (a cat named Monkeypus) to a bar on the asteroid Ceres. On his way to the bathroom, Sam is ‘musically’ attacked by a pair of dancers clad in overalls (one of my favorite scenes!).


The Boy Who Actually Saw a Women’s Breast. McAbee uses shadow to give his sets greater depth.

Sam trades Monkeypus for a Real Live Girl (we assume an embryo in a box), which, after talking to his friend, the Blueberry Pirate (Joshua Taylor), he decides to take to Jupiter for more trading. Jupiter, by the way, is now a mining colony run by Lee Vilensky (Peter McRobbie channeling Robert McNamera), who rewards his workers with shows from The Boy Who Actually Saw a Women’s Breast (Gregory Russell Cook, who “gets to” wear a great costume: “It was round and soft”). Sam convinces Vilensky to trade him The Boy for the Real Live Girl. He succeeds and jets off, intending to trade The Boy on Venus for the recently deceased King. Since only women inhabit Venus, they keep a stud male around to keep the gene pool from stagnating. The former stud has died and his wealthy family on Earth is willing to pay handsomely for the return of his body. Sam and The Boy get held up along the way to Venus, however, when they run into a flying barn in space. After a quick discussion with the barn’s inhabitants (silver miners from Nevada who accidentally gained super intelligence), Sam agrees to take a boy (who wears a bodysuit and is ignorant) back to Earth with him in exchange for chocolate and cigarettes.


Samuel Curtis’ spaceship, an example of McAbee’s painted exterior space scenes.

When they finally reach Venus, they find Professor Hess is waiting for them. Fearing for the safety of The Boy Who Actually Saw a Women’s Breast, Sam decides to give the women Bodysuit instead. The story more or less ends here. We find out Sam takes The Boy back to Earth and raises him as his son while Professor Hess stays on Venus to help Bodysuit. **End Spoilers**

Cory McAbee’s universe is wonderfully portrayed in the film. McAbee’s use of lighting and shadows gives the otherwise simple sets a sense of depth. He makes us feel as if we are in the 1920s (or watching something from that era) with effective use of makeup on characters like The Boy Who Actually Saw a Women’s Breast, who is shot like a silent film star.

Another striking element to the story is the music. The Billy Nayer Show really comes through here and adds something rich to a story that would have otherwise been a bit thin. Another interesting element is the fact that due to the low budget of the film, all space travel shots are actually just painted pictures mixed with the live action inside Sam’s spaceship (a sparsely decorated one-room apartment with fantastic wallpaper). This actually worked for us. It gave us that feel of very old Saturday morning serials and didn’t distract like intrusive CG does.


The Boy’s makeup is like that of a silent film star’s.

McAbee’s storytelling isn’t quite on par with his design though. The story is continually off-kilter and overly weird. Weird for the sake of weird is fine to a point, but here it interrupts the story at times. I also question the use of the villain, Professor Hess, as the narrator. I would much rather have heard Sam telling the story so we could get closer to him as our hero and main character. Listening to Hess move the story along doesn’t feel right, especially at the end where the story falls short and the narration kicks in. Our last moments are with the villain Hess, not our hero, Samuel Curtis, the American Astronaut.

But Cory McAbee’s vision is fantastic. He proves to us that imagination and the art of storytelling are more alive in common people than Hollywood would have us believe. McAbee is part a small group of artists (like Shane Carruth from Primer fame) that are not held back by the mainstream production system and are able to deliver their story and vision to a willful and eager audience. Imperfections will be there, but it doesn’t matter: we need more Cory McAbees.



Don't buy it from the man, buy it from Cory McAbee himself!

Evita (1996)

One of the most curious things about the film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita is that nearly all the scenes featuring Political Power, such as the famous "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" moment, are filmed off-balance.


The Old Guard, off-balance.


The rise of the Peróns; the tilt worsens.


Vertiginous heights!

It's a clever visual reminder of both the delirious heights Eva and Juan Perón find themselves in by the halfway mark of this movie, as well as the unsteady base they've founded their power on. It's a castle built on quicksand, and - amid the eerie, minor-chord chanting of "Perón! Perón!"/"Eviiiita!" - the spotlight reels drunkenly and the framing is permanently off-kilter. This famous sequence is then gloriously bookended by "And the Money Kept Rolling In (And Out)", which is a montage of the Perón government hemhorraging funds - into hospitals, into infrastructure, into bread and circuses and their own pockets.

A confession: we watch Evita with the same regularity that some people go on holiday. We kinda like it. (Kinda big time.)


Our favorite "oligarch". We look out for him in all the snobby, rich people numbers!


Though when the chorus sings as a big crowd, or line of military drones, it's scary.

For economists, Argentina is a strange beast. One hundred years ago, it was poised to be one of the next great powers, growing fast and making money. By the 2010s, it had fallen far below that potential. And in between? The Peróns. (Okay, and a lot of other stuff - like the crisis in 1999 - but saying "The Peróns." sounds a lot more dramatic and exciting.)

Yet this musical acknowledges the magnetic charisma of Juan and Eva. Following Eva Duarte (Madonna), who later became known by the loving diminutive "Evita", as an ambitious social climber, we begin in the poor town of Los Toldos, quickly move to the heady nights of Buenos Aires as Eva sleeps her way onwards and upwards, eventually landing in the bed of Juan Perón (Jonathan Pryce, in a big fake... nose). Perón, an influential military man, is slowly making his way up the ladder as well. They agree - in the jazzy number "I'd Be Surprisingly Good For You" - to team up, and, well, Jonathan Pryce and Madonna are an unlikely and unexpectedly hot duo.


Love!

Or so think the screaming crowds (and the PPCC), who - as governments topple, riots break out and buildings burn down - catapult the Peróns and their new, labor-friendly rhetoric into the Casa Rosada.

This film is all about glory, legends, cynical politics, big promises that kind of ambiguously follow through, and, of course, crowd control. So it's a lot like Webber's other PPCC favorite, Jesus Christ Superstar. As in JCS, the mob - amorphous, impatient, demanding and, above all, LOUD - is more than spectator. It is the important third character, getting in the way between the Father and Son, between Juan and Eva. If we were Žižek, we'd say it was the id to Juan's/God's superego and Eva's/Jesus' ego - the mob is unmanageable, impulsive, dangerous and hypnotic. It is the ugly, scary, Dionysian part of being human.


Juan and Eva as the superego and ego, respectively, trying to manage...


Their fickle id.


(Note: these two moments are separated by practically the entire film. Such is the genius of the editing.)

In Evita, that crowd is also represented by none other than Ché (Antonio Banderas, not a cat here), ultra-popular populist icon. Ché is forever pushing and shoving his way between people, getting beaten up by policemen, standing in factory lines, gazing cynically at the lather everyone is frothing around in. Literally, he stays grounded. And so often voices Jiminy Cricket-like asides, meets Eva in dreamscapes where they discuss what the hell she thinks she's doing, and sometimes - for the help of those ignorant of Argentine (Argentinian?) history - summarizes things.

Ever since reading about Pablo Escobar building hospitals in the marvelous Cocaine: A Definitive History by Dominic Streatfield, we've been interested in the politics and economics of Latin America. However, since we spend most of our spare time these days updating this blog, it keeps getting pushed down the list of General Things To Do. Can anyone suggest a good primer on, er, modern Latin American history?


This guy getting torn down in Parliament reminded us of Italian parliament, circa 2008!

About the impact of the film. Well: as we said above, we watch it a lot. It's one of our favorite things (apart from packages wrapped in brown paper tied up with string). When Madonna tells us not to cry for her, we do - oh, how we do. It's a spectacle. When Jonathan Pryce's vibrato voice bellows into the microphone - "Arrrrgentinos! Arrrrgentinos!" - we get goosebumps. "Descamisados! Mis companeros!" Webber's music is as easy and Puccini-fied as it's always been. Transferring the musical from Broadway to film naturally lost some of the excellent original cast - Patti LuPone as Eva and poor, beautiful Mandy Pantinkin (!) as Che - in favor of bigger names. Madonna is fine, as is Jonathan Pryce - duh, they're professional singers. Antonio Banderas strains a bit, but he makes up for it by playing an obese cat 14 years later (so funny! so cute! oh, fat cats lolz!). We try to dress up our long-simmering, low-fi crush on Jonathan Pryce by saying that we like him because of Brazil, Terry Gilliam's 1980s dystopian classic. We reckon that sounds cooler than admitting that we just think he's sexy in an arched eyebrow, vibrato, Welsh way. In a big fake nose way.

Now someone Christian Dior me! Lauren Bacall me! Machiavell-me!

Under the Mountain (2009)

The low-budget fantasy, Under the Mountain, is an endearingly imperfect and low-key production. Based on a popular Kiwi YA book by Maurice Gee, it clocks in at a rushed 90 minutes - though we reckon something like five hours would have been enough to do the story justice. Instead, this film feels slipshod, with some very dodgy acting, a hasty narrative and a weak conclusion. Despite all this, we kinda liked it. Like, liked it a lot. It was cuddly. It featured Sam Neill. And New Zealand. And blue lakes. And volcanoes. Anyone up for a hug?

Twins Theo (Tom Cameron, awful but sweet) and Rachel (Sophie McBridge, a bit better) share that special twinly connection of telepathy and feeling what the other feels. One day, they come home to find that their mother has been killed in an accident. As Rachel reaches out in her grief, Theo shuts down - he cuts himself off from the twinliness, leaving Rachel alone in silence. Giving their father time to mourn, they are shipped off to live with their Uncle Cliff (Matthew Chamberlain) and Aunt Kay (Michaela Rooney) in Auckland. Guided by their cousin Ricky (Leon Wadham), they explore the mighty volcanoes surrounding Auckland city, marvel at the dilapidated house across the lake owned by the mysterious Wilberforces, and meet a crusty old man who yells at them. This old geezer is none other than Mr. Jones (SAM NEILL) - and, when Theo finds a 19th century picture featuring a not-much-younger Mr. Jones in his Volcanoes textbook, he realizes that Mr. Jones isn't just a crazy curmudgeon. What is up?


Not Weasleys.


The Uglies from the Planet Crap and their ill-tended yard.

Something is up! Like beyond orbit up! It's a (hilarious, unintentionally) doozy of interstellar warfare and colonizing alien species and "twinness". Mr. Jones is the last surviving extraterrestrial expat of a race of Fire Raisers (think Avatar: The Last Airbender, but they only come in pairs). Back in the day (like, waaaaay back in the day), the Fire Raisers warred with the squiggly race of crappy aliens, now embodied in the Wilberforces (think The Matrix's Agent Smith mated with Predator). Then a third alien race came in - okay, we got hazy here - called the Gargantuans, or maybe just Gargantua, and they were trapped by - the Fire Raisers? the Wilberforces? Sam Neill's Sam Neilliness? well, something - under Auckland's seven volcanoes. The mother Gargantua, a kind of Grendel thing with rhinestones for eyes, currently slumbers under the mightiest of the peaks: Rangitoto Island (Māori for "bloody sky").


By our powers combined!

And only twins can defeat the Wilberforces and the Gargantua(n)s! After giving Theo and Rachel some very handsome oversized pebbles - Fire Raiser weaponry - Mr. Jones stresses, in that particularly grumpy way of his, that the only thing that's special about Theo and Rachel is their twinness, and they have to channel this twinness if they ever hope to survive. Theo's like, "Yeah, whatever," and Rachel's like, "What happened to your twin, Mr. Jones? And all the other twins before us who attempted this feat?" and Mr. Jones is like, "THEY DIED."

The acting, especially coming from the younger actors, is terrible. Just dreadful. The pacing is also slow. The cuts are awkward, and the background score seems to have its own ideas about how the story should go. Sam Neill channels his most ultra-serious avatar, often bordering on the camp (especially when he hobbles around and growls about dead alien races). The Wilberforces, while unnerving with their Predator-like jaws and slimy exoskeletons, were also quite funny as an ancient alien race that never quite got the hang of grammar ("Make them dead!" being a good one, though we also enjoyed "Then I will observe you to die, ho ho ho!").


"They? Oh, they died horrible, drawn-out deaths," he wheezed. Yay!

Yet DESPITE ALL THIS, we cannot stress this enough, we deeply enjoyed this film. We are, of course, completely biased by our wild fondness for New Zealand and Sam Neill and young adult fantasy. But it was like Madeleine L'Engle cookies marinated in Sam Neill sauce (which sounds gross, but he even does the thing where he arches his eyebrows and glares crazily and intones some pronouncement on our DOOM). It was like a fuzzy blanket of Kiwi comfort. We just know that if we were 11-year-old Kiwi schoolgirls (as we are, on the inside), we would love the idea of sleeping alien beasts lying beneath Auckland's craters.

"But what if I don't feel any particular fondness for Sam Neill or New Zealand or aliens, PPCC?" you may ask. "What then?"

Well, since we cannot fathom such a bizarre, unnatural perspective, you're on your own. But for the rest of you: beautiful, beautiful trash. (Oh yeah, and since it's a kid's film, we think this is okay for 9-year-olds and up. Or maybe particularly badass 6-year-olds.)

(the soundtrack! the best we could do in American Amazon)

Slither (2006)

There's a great moment in Slither, the B-grade horror/comedy, when the hero, Officer Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion), is being choked in his office by a rampaging zombie deer. It sounds very funny (and it is!), but it's also a nail-biting moment of suspense. Such is the genius of this film.

As we've noted before, we've recently been inundated with the horror genre here at the PPCC - from the drawling bore of Underworld: Rise of the Lycans to the camp classic that is Ghostbusters. Simon Pegg's endearing Shaun of the Dead was our favorite-so-far, but it's been ousted today by the far funnier, far grosser Slither. Whereas Shaun of the Dead relied much on the charm of Simon Pegg as our favorite nerd-with-a-heart-of-gold (and he is, yes, so cute!), Slither is much more concerned with being the most disgusting, most absurd and hilariously presented B-film we've seen in a long time. And it succeeds.


Very poor insulation.

Somewhere from the deepest, darkest reaches of outer space, a meteor crashes into a poor, forgotten, Confederate flag-waving town in the American South. This town doesn't have that false sense of mummified 1950s Americana as in Waitress, rather it resembles the poor white realities of trailers, chain fast food and trucker hats (so, more like The Wrestler). Anyway, the meteor. So Grant Grant (Michael Rooker) and his wife, Starla Grant (Elizabeth Banks), have a minor disagreement one evening - while the hunky policeman, Bill, looks on (he's been pining for Starla since forever). During Grant's walk in the woods to cool off and get some air, he discovers the meteor - and is promptly attacked by a small worm-like parasite that squirms out of the smoldering space ash and into his diaphragm before clamping onto his brainstem.

Now possessed by the alien slug, Grant begins to sprout slimy tentacles, weird rashes and an insatiable hunger for MEEEAT. MEEEEEEEAAAT. After kidnapping and sucking the life force out of a local girl, as well as being spotted by Bill and his police posse, he is dubbed the "squid" and tracked by the terrified, bumbling townspeople. Lots of really inventive gross stuff then happens.


Beautiful boy!


Like a demented episode of House.

Has anyone in the PPCC readership seen David Cronenberg's The Fly? There's an iconic scene in it when the twitching, crusty, fly-man anti-hero, played by Jeff Goldblum, vomits on his food before eating it. It's all part of fly digestion! he says, while his girlfriend (and the PPCC, and the whole audience) looks on in gaping horror. Well, if you found that scene disgusting, but sort of... hilarious, and you kinda wanted to watch it again just so you could laugh at it, then Slither is for you. DO NOT watch it with any beverages around (as you will spit them) nor any food (as you will probably throw it back up) - the film is a strong mixture of the nauseating coupled with the very funny.

In fact, we spent so much of the film laughing and swallowing back our lunch, that we didn't realize how insidiously scary it also is - indeed, it's a testament to the quality of the filmmaking, which juggles moods deftly. There's the scene where we first see the alien slugs in all their squirming, multitudinous horror - the characters are screaming, the violins are shrieking, and something touched our thigh. PPCC readership, we tell you now that we jumped so high we nearly slammed against the ceiling. So, yes, it is also a fairly scary film.

But it is also a lot of fun, if watched responsibly. Where by "responsibly", we mean: with company, in full sunlight, without any food or beverages or children around. Enjoy!

Ghost Busters (1984)

Ghostbusters, which may as well be titled Whitebusters, is, apart from its white-washing which we'll discuss below, a near-perfect film. Deeply ingrained into our 1980s childhood, some lines - such as, There is no PPCC, there is only Zool! - are eminently quotable and appropriate for all occasions. Or, even better, Choose the form of the destructor!

Set in the same bouncy, cynical, synthesizer-soaked 1980s urban landscape that the Enterprise crew found itself stumbling into once, a trio of paranormal aficionados are kicked out of Columbia University and their research grant terminated. While good ol' boy Ray (Dan Aykroyd) and nerdy Egon (Harold Ramis) are genuine in their interest in the paranormal, charlatan Pete Venckman (Bill Murray) is more interested in getting the girls and schmoozing with the crowds. His skepticism quickly evaporates, however, when the trio are called in by the New York Public Library to rid it of a spectral Victorian lady hovering through the stacks (and really messing up the Dewey index cards!).


This crazy town.


The three!

Without income, but with a renewed belief in the otherworldly apparitions which haunt Manhattan, they put a new mortgage on Ray's childhood home and decide to go in business as the Ghost Busters, paranormal exterminators. Business is slow at first, but when a posh apartment lady, Dana (Sigourney Weaver), starts getting harassed by her refrigerator - which, incidentally, opens onto another dimensions where ancient Sumerian demi-gods chant, ZOOOL!, into the steamy flames - business positively booms! And if demonic possession, floating grubby green things and 8000-year-old pissed off deities wasn't enough, the Ghostbusters eventually get harassed by the Environmental Protection Agency, as represented by the snide skeptic, Walter Peck (William Atherton).


One of the funniest ghosts: we love when he starts idly making loops around the chandelier and going, "Vroooom. Vroooom."

The reason we noticed this film's uncomfortable white-washing/colorblind racism/callitwhatyouwill, is because, when business really gets going, the Busters hire an additional member of the team: Jesus-loving, down-to-Earth guy, Winston (Ernie Hudson). And then we spend the rest of the move watching him get ignored - sometimes even, literally pushed aside! There were shots where the original three would have their conferences about what to do about Gozer the Gozerian, and Winston would just kinda be off to the side - we think Bill Murray was probably even blocking his line of sight! Then little, insidious things, like when the Busters have to cross their beams, and they each get a close-up shot of their face as they fire up - except, of course, for Winston, who is just shown in the end as being in the crossed beam group. So much for individuating him - out of a group of four, he becomes the only member who is truly amorphous, without distinction. It's really lame.


WTF? Why is Ernie Hudson stuffed behind Bill Murray's power pack?


WTF?

We don't think it's real racism, but we do think it's colorblind prejudices which are playing out in the details. And it brings an otherwise perfect, awesome movie down a notch. Blah.

Battlestar Galactica: Season 2, Episode 12 (2006)

In an effort to stop binging on Battlestar Galactica and try to break up this weekend with something fresh and new, we've decided to review some... Battlestar Galactica.


Based on Da Vinci's Last Supper, we love it! Commander Adama as Simon the Zealot, Gaius Baltar as Judas and the heart-warming Cylon, Caprica Six, as Jesus?! CAN THIS SHOW BE MORE AMAZING?!

Disclaimer: Because it's really hard to review individual episodes of a TV show with a long-scope narrative arc, we'll just put a big fat spoiler warning on this review. In case you are, like us, one of the last people on this planet who hasn't seen this show. Nonetheless we'll try to be as vague as possible.

As our review of the miniseries noted, one of the main themes in BSG (yes, we're on acronym-only basis now) is the difference or non-difference between humans and their Cylon "descendants", and how pure survivalism can sometimes unveil the disturbing similarities between the two groups. All this is textured with classical myth in the form of a conflict between Greco-Roman gods (whom the humans worship) and Abrahamic monotheism (which the Cylons promote). In plainer terms, the humans are constantly faced with tough moral choices, and their behavior becomes increasingly relativist - kind of like the way Zeus et al. were so morally ambiguous. As Commander Adama (Edward James Olmos) notes, "Context matters." The Cylons, on the other hand, resemble any hard-line moral absolutist in their unambiguous belief that they are right and the humans are wrong. The ultimate absolutist and judge, God, they believe, will eventually punish the humans for their various sins - and, to help Him along, the Cylons will put an end to their race. Interestingly, there are only twelve models - matching the twelve apostles? Hmmm.

By season two, episode Resurrection Ship, a new character has been introduced - Admiral Helen Cain (Michelle Forbes). Now, considering we're steeped in a story full of Old Testament allusions, Commander Adama and his ark of survivors flying to a promised land aboard the Battlestar Galactica don't take well to this new person named Cain and her militant commando-style Battlestar Pegasus. After a near-civil war between the two battlestars over the manslaughter of a Pegasus man (long story, other episode), the two agree to unite forces to destroy a Cylon spaceship dedicated to "resurrecting" Cylon consciousnesses into new bodies. In a secondary plotline, the ever-unstable Dr. Gaius Baltar (James Callis) has been assigned the task to interrogate the Pegasus' Cylon prisoner - an unnamed woman (Tricia Helfer) who is (1) a visible victim of torture, and (2) an identical copy to Baltar's ex-girlfriend and hallucination-companion, Cylon model number six (Tricia Helfer, duh). He, understandably, empathizes, as does the audience.


Jesus and Judas - err, I mean Caprica Six and Gaius Baltar the Traitor. Love it!

Now, a lot is going on here. An intimidating amount, in fact. So we'll start with what we know:

My brain! MY BRAIN!

There's no spoiler in acknowledging that one of the Galactica's former pilots, Sharon (Grace Park), is a sleeper Cylon agent. (This is revealed in the pilot episode.) As the show progresses, her character becomes increasingly complex - she is, right now, our absolute favorite. Without giving too much away, Sharon is now a prisoner aboard the Galactica, and the rest of the humans have very mixed feelings about her. Adama, in particular, has a tendency to get a little upset. (PPCC aside, but their interactions are the best!) In one scene, an exasperated and brooding Adama calls Sharon to his room to sit her down and ask, "Why do the Cylons hate us so much?"

Her response captures the entire issue: Adama himself once noted that humanity is a "flawed creation", and that humans can still be petty, hateful, even murderous, thus provoking the question, Do they deserve to survive?

"Maybe you don't," Sharon says bluntly.

This, of course, prompts Adama to prove that damned Sharon wrong by being the best human he can be, and hence deserving of survival. He shares his insights with the crew, too. But we can't help thinking Adama (Adam?) is a very flawed creature himself - his occasional tough decisions to cut the fleet's fat are pretty traumatic. Furthermore, we can't help wondering where, exactly, he is regarding the knowledge of good and evil? His relationship with the wonderful President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) - apart from being sweetly romantic - often takes the hint of the seemingly pure and maternal Laura showing the gruff Adama just how much more hardcore she is than him. (No apples to appear, yet.)


Can we love these two even more? The answer is no. They are our peanut butter and jelly. They are our Saturday morning and Super Mario Bros. Can we just have an episode about how much they love each other? Please?!

The pageantry of science fiction

This show has made us cry a number of times now, often because of the beauty with which it presents the dystopian crises and interstellar battles. The lovely aesthetics are aided by atmospheric and interesting music by Bear McCreary, the show's composer. Often McCreary's music feels like a mix of minimalist Philip Glass (in one episode, one of Glass's piano pieces is heard) and the evocative Tan Dun (composer for films like Hero and House of Flying Daggers). In the episodes surrounding the Resurrection Ship, the Cylon warships are sometimes introduced with music resembling the chanting of Tibetan Buddhist monks. In some ways, it's reminiscent of the Tibetan long horns heard in War of the Worlds.

One scene, in particular, captures the grand-scale myth-making imagery found in the series. Ace pilot Lee Adama (Jamie Bamber) has ejected from his fighter, and he floats peacefully through space - the battle before him is spread silent and distant, and we take a moment to watch it with him, and to marvel at the tragedy. It's a lovely piece of filmmaking!


Captain Apollo watches the destruction as he floats through space.

And the moral of the story is...

...no idea!

This is what we consider to be the genius of Battlestar Galactica: it is so ambiguous. Because we empathize and follow the storylines of a large ensemble of flawed characters, we can only watch the terrible things happen and lament at the iron-clad rules of cause and effect. Ideas such as free will feel deeply unstable when characters are often at the mercy of their own ignorance and heated emotions (ah, how Buddhist). And often we're faced with the "most pure" characters - Laura Roslin, Lee Adama - making decisions which force us to redefine purity so we can keep shoe-horning them in.

Similarly, the Cylons are progressively more and more humanized - such that, by this episode, it is unclear just how "morally correct" the humans really are in the war. Is it wrong that we love the Cylons too?!

So maybe the moral of the story is just that: Shit is complicated.

Battlestar Galactica (2003)

There's a series of books out there called Something... And Philosophy, where the Something will be something unexpected and pop culture-y, such as Star Trek, or Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings. We always thought it was just marketing tripe to get people into philosophy via their favorite low art setting. Surely Star Trek is the only TV pop which merits a book on philosophy?

Apparently not, for there is the movie-length pilot of Battlestar Galactica.

Everyone who knows us offline knows that we have a bit of a dystopia fetish. We have a worrying appetite for disaster stories, especially when they are set in the future and/or space, and we prefer all our characters in such stories to be dark, brooding and preferably doomed.

"Then you'll LOVE Battlestar Galactica!" our friends chorused.

And, yes, we have started the brainwashing, and, yes, we are loving it. But while it presses our usual buttons in a usual way (99% humans killed by angry robots! lone human ark sailing through space to an unknown destination! ensemble bonding! be still, my heart), it also amazes us by being so gosh darned philosophical. We could... well, gosh, we could write a book about it!

In the past or future or somewhere, but definitely in media res, it's been forty years since the human-Cylon war, and relations between the two groups are icy at best. One of the last warships of the human fleet, the Battlestar Galactica, is preparing for its decommissioning ceremony, and its crew is all abuzz with its quotidian soap opera motley human drama. There's Kara "Starbuck" Thrace (Katee Sackhoff), the stogie-chomping ace pilot with a big ego and big, cocky smile, there's the grim (and glorious!) Commander Adama (Edward James Olmos, of Blade Runner), his alcoholic XO, Tigh (Michael Hogan), and his son, Captain Lee "Apollo" Adama (Jamie Bamber). There are also a bunch of other people doing a bunch of other things. The point: no one has any idea of the dystopian doom which awaits them, nor will the dystopian doom necessarily drive much of the drama (though it drives a lot of it, admittedly).

Meanwhile, on the Earth-like human colony planet of Caprica, the terribly clever, terribly cheeky genius Dr. Gaius Baltar (James Callis) is discovered to be (1) cheating on his girlfriend, Six (Tricia Helfer), (2) who is also, incidentally, a Cylon in disguise (new model!) (3) who has used him for his defense systems knowledge, thus dooming the human race to near-extinction. Moments after Gaius learns this, a bunch of Cylon spaceships appear and the atomic bombs begin to drop. Gaius flees, but not before acquiring Six as a permanent companion via flickering hallucination; also, the decommissioning ceremony is interrupted, all twelve planets of the human colonies are destroyed, and the Secretary of Education, Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell), becomes the new colonial President.

Not since Pasqualino Settebellezze has a film made us muse on the right to survive. But this movie-length pilot sets up a number of fruitful (and fairly typical) sci-fi themes: What makes us humans, when Cylons look, feel and act like us? What is free will and consciousness, in an age of artificial intelligence? As the first scene shows, a Cylon asks a human, "Are you alive? Prove it." Or, as a character from the new spin-off series says, "A difference that makes no difference is no difference." This is all par for the course - we've seen it before in movies like Blade Runner or books like Neuromancer - but BSG seems to be looking at it from an interesting angle: if the point of the human-Cylon conflict is that there is some fundamental difference between being human and being Cylon, and if humanity's uniqueness comes from its loftier ambitions (justice, mercy, compassion, blah), then what do we make of humans who must continuously do awful things in order to save themselves? That is, when the biological imperative of surviving drives out all the loftier concerns, the lines between human and Cylon are not just blurred - they're erased.

Pasqualino Settebellezze and BSG's pilot both demonstrate how surviving for surviving's sake can lead to some very nasty moments indeed. Or, let the PPCC rephrase: while Pasqualino unambiguously portrays the moments as nasty, BSG leaves the questions hanging. Two examples. First: there are a number of scenes in the pilot where the remaining humans (now numbering 50,000), have to choose to either let some X number of humans die (where X<<50,000) in order to save the majority. The characters agonize over this, but the conclusion is always the same: the majority wins. It has to. But the lingering doubts remain: Does it really? We can't be sure that the decision to survive, at the expense of an unlucky minority, was right or wrong. BSG impressed us by presenting these difficult questions for what they are: pretty unanswerable! Incidentally, there's a great game about this on the PhilosophersNet: Morality Play.

Second example: there are two notable scenes in which a major character admits that, even in the face of our species' worst crisis imaginable, they are still more concerned with their individual fate. These two characters are Gaius Baltar, who is concerned that the other 49,999 people will soon learn that the genocide was partly his fault, and Laura Roslin, who learns early in the pilot that she has cancer. Here, too, BSG emphasizes the ambiguity: Baltar is mocked by his hallucination-Cylon (who begins to sound increasingly like a sort of Jiminy Cricket-style disembodied conscience) for his selfishness, and Roslin is reassured that her feelings are normal, nay, characteristically human. So who's right? Does the victimless nature of Laura's doom erase her selfishness, redefining it as humanity?

With such a large cast of characters, it's easy to find your personal favorites. Our favorites are Commander Adama and Gaius Baltar, who are brilliant in radically different, clashing ways - like ice cream and cheese. But the performances by all the actors - particularly Mary McDonnell as Laura Roslin, Paul Campbell as her assistant Billy, and Katee Sackhoff as the swaggering Starbuck - are very good. We look forward to seeing how the characters and the themes (especially free will, given all those creepy sleeper Cylon agents!) develop over the next four seasons.