The View From The Mountain

Forty years ago, I saw DUNE in the theater with my father, who was a huge fan of the Frank Herbert book that the film was based on. The 1984 version of DUNE was directed by David Lynch, a surrealist filmmaker who was a true cinematic visionary, and I--a nineteen year old science fiction fanatic--was really looking forward to seeing what would be a new universe for me. My father, who had read all of the Frank Herbert Dune novels up to that point, was simply looking forward to seeing his all-time favorite SF novel brought to life on the big screen. And then we saw the damned movie. To say that the David Lynch version of DUNE was a disappointment was putting it mildly. The movie was a cringe-worthy affair with plenty of over the top performances, shoddy special effects, and plot holes so large you could ride a sand worm through them. I remember my father telling me, after we came out of the theater, to just read the book. “The book is so goo...

It’s always a joy to watch someone who’s a master at their work, whether it’s a musician, an artist, or an actor. Most great actors make it look easy--which is not to say that I think acting is an easy job. I know from personal experience that acting is very hard. It’s a skill that the talented make look very easy, and one of the most talented actors working today is Paul Giamatti. If you’ve watched some movies over the past few years, chances are very good that you’ve already seen Paul Giamatti. He was the jittery earthquake expert in San Andreas , the sympathetic police chief in The Illusionist , and as the titular John Adams (a part that got him the Emmy and a Golden Globe) in the 2008 HBO series of the same name. Recently, I saw Paul Giamatti in the superb The Holdovers , a movie that I wasn’t planning on writing up, but I kept thinking about it--and all of its characters--long after I saw it. In The Holdovers , Giamatti plays Paul H...

3 Body Problem , Netflix’s latest TV series, is loosely based on the first novel in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, by Chinese author Liu Cixin (who also wrote the book The Wandering Earth ). Simply put, it’s an alien invasion story, but one that’s a lot more sophisticated than your average ‘pew-pew-pew’ cliché-fest. For one thing, this series begins in the 1960s, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, which was the nationwide purge instigated within China by then-Chairman Mao to keep himself in power. A young woman named Ye Wenjie arises from the chaos to become a central figure in the overall story. The 3 Body Problem of this series’ name refers to a far-flung solar system that has three suns. Any planet within this tri-sun system would have a hard time of it, taking turns orbiting one belligerent sun after another, and it just so happens that the aliens who set their eyes on invading Earth--known as the San-Ti--come from this embattled world. ...

The Last Voyage of the Demeter literally takes a chapter from Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula . This chapter in the legendary novel that details Dracula’s arrival in England via a sailing ship named the Demeter is pretty scarily effective. It shows the ship beaching itself on the shores of England, with its crew all dead--and, with Dracula apparently on the loose ashore. It creates a dreadful, ominous tone that informs the rest of the story. And I haven’t given anything away by revealing the ending, because the film itself opens on that very same scene: the Demeter beached on the rocks, with the police and locals gathering around the stricken ship and discovering its horrors. This opening serves as a framing device for the rest of the film, which is told in flashback. But while that chapter shows what happened after the voyage, The Last Voyage of the Demeter attempts to fill in the gaps of the voyage itself. Or, at least it tries to. Horror fans--both fa...

The Creator was directed by Gareth Edwards, who also directed the superb Monsters ; the somewhat annoying 2014 Godzilla (which was pretty good--when you could actually SEE the Big G), and the excellent Star Wars film Rogue One . The Creator takes place midway through the 21st century, when the United States suffers a devastating blow when Los Angeles is destroyed by a nuclear weapon that was set off by an Artificial Intelligence. This prompts the US and its western allies to ban all AI worldwide. When New Asia, a newly formed state in Southeast Asia, refuses to cease using AI, along with its robotic constructs, this creates a war between them and the United States. In 2070, Sergeant Joshua Taylor (John David Washington) of the US Army, goes into New Asia with a commando force to destroy a special weapon that had been created by the enemy forces. He’s also looking to see if he can find his wife, whom he thought had died five years before, but is now seen to be alive a...

Director Zack Snyder has made enough of my favorite films ( Man of Steel , Zack Snyder’s Justice League , the Dawn of the Dead remake) that I genuinely look forward to his latest project. Of course, he’s also made some real stinkers ( Sucker Punch , Batman Vs Superman ), but everybody has a bad day at the office, right? And I was brightened up considerably when I saw that his latest film, the star-spanning space saga Rebel Moon: Part One: A Child of Fire , would be premiering on my birthday on Netflix. And then I saw the frigging movie. Seriously, WTF did I do to deserve this on my birthday? Rebel Moon first started out life as a pitch for an R-rated Star Wars film that Lucasfilm, the producers of SW, had turned down. Undaunted, Snyder then brought the project to Netflix, and traces of its Star Wars inspiration still remain: the space Nazis, a scene in a cantina, the laser swords that one of the characters uses. But even if a film is...

I was watching a video on YouTube about the "wacky" animated fantasy films of the 80s, and it made me realize that this year marks the fortieth anniversary of Fire And Ice . Unlike the other fantasy films (both animated and live-action) that were released in the 1980s, Fire And Ice was notable because it was a collaboration between animated film director Ralph Bakshi ( Fritz the Cat , Wizards ) and noted fantasy illustrator Frank Frazetta. Fire And Ice takes its inspiration more from the Conan the Barbarian stories (which Frazetta became first known for, having drawn the covers for them) rather than the Lord of the Rings . Bakshi was no stranger to J.R.R. Tolken’s works, having produced his own animated version of LOTR a few years prior. Bakshi re-used his favorite form of animation, called rotoscoping, where actors are filmed onstage, and their actions on film are then hand-drawn, frame by frame, by an animator onto cells. This provides a far more reali...