The View From The Mountain

I was pleasantly surprised when I saw Rampage , the latest popcorn flick starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. I initially didn’t have high hopes for it because…well, because it starred Dwayne Johnson, a Hollywood star whose films are usually big on the spectacle but short on brains. Rampage begins in familiar territory for those who have seen the recent Life , starring Ryan Reynolds: aboard a rapidly deteriorating space station, with Marley Shelton doing a superb job playing a member of the crew who is forced to rescue several of the research specimens before she’s even allowed to get on the life pod by her callous unseen bosses. Unfortunately Shelton’s character doesn’t survive, but the specimens that she got aboard the life pod wind up being scattered all over North America when her life pod explodes upon reentry into earth’s atmosphere. One of the specimen containers lands in the gorilla pen of the San Diego Zoo, where George, an albino gorilla that’s been raised by Davis Okoye (J...

I took an old Godzilla model kit (the Playing Mantis re-release of the old Aurora kit), cut him in half, and placed him in this ocean diorama. The ship is a WW II transport vessel that I tweaked slightly to make it look more like a generic cargo ship. The ship was a cheap kit, the kind you can slap together in an afternoon. The "water" was a paste from Woodland Scenics called Flex Paste. After it dried, I painted it in the bluish colors of the ocean, and then covered this (after the paint dried, of course) with Water Effects, also from WS. This was a fun diorama for me to do, one that got started when I saw the trailer for the upcoming Godzilla: King of the Monsters film. You can buy this right here.

Just how badly does Pacific Rim: Uprising suck? Pretty badly. Let’s put it this way, I was already checking the time, wondering when this piece of shit would be over, a mere ten minutes into the movie. A sequel to the charming and fun Pacific Rim , released back in 2013, Uprising never would have existed had the original not drawn huge box office numbers in China. The original Pacific Rim didn’t exactly set the American box office on fire, despite being an enjoyable pastiche of Japanese monster movies--the kind that have giant monsters stomping cities. Pacific Rim posited that there was a special force of giant robots, crewed by human pilots, that were sent out to stop these monsters, called Kaiju. The robots are called Jaegers. The sequel takes place ten years after the first film, in which the Kaiju were finally stopped. John Boyega, better known as Finn from Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Star Wars: The Last Jedi , stars here as the son of the Jaeger leader (would that make...

Last month marked the tenth anniversary of The Dark Knight , a superhero movie featuring the Batman that had become a seminal film in many ways. It’s influences can be felt far and wide throughout Hollywood and beyond, and its ‘darkness’ has been blamed for the dire, funereal tone of such latter superhero movies like Man of Steel and Batman Vs Superman: Dawn of Justice . I’ve come across many comments online where the poster wondered why people liked The Dark Knight because it was…you know, so ‘dark’ and ‘gloomy‘. Do the fans of TDK like depressing stories? Speaking as a fan of the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy, I can honestly say that, no, I’m not a fan of depressing stories. But then, I don’t consider The Dark Knight to be a depressing tale, anyway. When director Christopher Nolan set out to reinvent the Batman with Batman Returns (which is a great film in its own right) back in 2005, he wanted to set the Caped Crusader’s exploits in a far more gritty, low-to-the-ground ve...

I didn’t care for Ready Player One , the novel written by Ernest Cline. It was a vapid, empty-headed excuse for an adventure story with a main character that was so thinly written he could have been a cardboard cutout. Taking place in 2045, in an economically depressed United States where most people live in trailer parks that have the trailers stacked one on top of each other, the only reason for living for most is the Oasis, an online “world” that’s created by a deceased Steve Jobs-like genius named Haliday. Before he died, Haliday created a game within the Oasis where players had to collect “keys” by solving riddles and surviving endurance tests. The player who received all of the keys would then become the ruler of the Oasis (as well as becoming set for life, financially). As can be expected, many people have been on the hunt for these keys, including a multi-billion dollar corporation that wants to further commercialize the Oasis once they seize control of it. The problem that ...

William Cameron Menzies was an art director on seventy films going back from 1917 to 1956, but he’s probably best known for just one of the twenty four films that he directed, Invaders From Mars . Released sixty five years ago in 1953, Invaders From Mars remains a classic thanks to Menzies’ tight direction and imaginative use of settings and costumes. A young boy named David (well-played by Jimmy Hunt) sees what looks like an alien spacecraft land in the sandy field behind his house at night during a violent thunderstorm. Of course his parents don’t believe him—yet when his father (Leif Erickson) goes out to investigate, he comes back the following morning acting very weird. In addition to being cold and distant, this normally loving and gentle man now resorts to hitting David when the boy doesn’t immediately obey his orders. David notices that his father has a strange wound on the back of his neck, and this becomes a telltale mark of those who have been “taken” by the aliens that ...

Katee Sackhoff is a goddess. There, I’ve said it. I freely admit to being a huge fan of this actress, whom I first came across in the Battlestar Galactica reboot that aired on the Sy-Fy Channel (back when it was more appropriately known as the Sci-Fi Channel). Her performance as a gender-changed Starbuck was superb; she brought such humanity and depth to a character that could very easily have been very one-note. After Battlestar Galactica ended, I followed Sackhoff’s career, watching her go on to play deputy sheriff Victoria ‘Vic’ Moretti on the enjoyable Longmire , and as the rascally Amunet Black on the most recent season of The Flash . And that was why I happily settled down to watch Katee in the recently released 2036: Origin Unknown . A science fiction opus, 2036: Origin Unknown deals with a manned mission to Mars that goes horribly wrong. But this isn’t the mission that Katee’s character is on; instead, her father was aboard the doomed ship that crashed without warning, wit...