Capitalism - Feudalism without the Kings
Tax the Rich

Movie Monday

Fast post today since my time is pretty limited now as I'm discovering I have to triage any discretionary time I may have. The Greeks talked about a "good death" meaning death with honor in battle but I guess a good death is something we can all wish: fast and without much pain. I don't know how this one is going to play out but, in a week, I'm seeing fast deterioration. And surprisingly, I'm learning that unless the caretaker paces himself, he/she deteriorates also.

Stlll no review of Prometheus though I watched parts of it again yesterday. I think I'm having trouble with how the director/writer/actor want Captain Shaw portrayed (Her science is so flawed that she's reminding me a modern day, cleaned up version of the villain scientists of the 1950s sci-fi cheesy pot boilers.) I'm thinking that I have to move beyond Shaw's character and take a look at this movie again, and again and again it seems.

But I do have two sci-fi flicks to reviews; two small sci-fi flicks which, if you blinked, you missed.

The first is Perfect Sense (2011) which is really only sci-fi in its premise: humans start to lose their senses one at a time. Take that away and you're dealing with a typical love story: they met, they love, they quarrel, they reunite. However, set in the backdrop of a world losing its five senses, starting with the sense of smell, makes Perfect Sense one of those great films for a double-dating movie nights where you can stop at Starbucks after and talk into the wee hours about what this movie means. (That is, if you have a very, very inexpensive babysitter home with the kids.)

Ewan MacGregor plays a chef and Eva Green is the scientist trying to understand and stop this world-wide sense-depriving virus epidemic. It's an interesting twist on the typical world-wide epidemic flicks where things get bloody and violent fast. You don't get your oozily, ugly plague victims here. Instead, you get perfectly normal looking humans who are slowly losing all their human senses: smell, taste, hearing, sight, and touch and the questions we're left with are: Without human senses are we still human? and Without human senses, is life worth living? Nothing is resolved here. No last scene of everybody going into church to give thanks as in that 1953 The War of the Worlds. You are left on your own "darkling plain" to decide the future.

Monsters (2010), though your sci-fi flick with scary aliens, is also a perfect gem of a movie. Seldom has any movie, let alone sci-fi, put together the blonde female lead, monsters with very long tentacles, and dark jungle nights and not produced a cheesy, screaming bodice-ripper. Monsters breaks that mold. Whitney Able plays Sam, the daughter of a rich newspaper publisher who gets stranded in Mexico at the US border; a place where aliens (from space) landed some time ago and are kept contained by US patrols (see the metaphor?) Scoot McNairy is the photojournalist, Andy, who, by escorting Sam back to US safety, hopes to get her dad to publish his photos. Get the picture? We have hero-guy bravely helping rich blonde to safety. Well, no, that's not it at all. First, Sam is the only one who can speak Spanish so she must translate for Andy. Second, it's Andy who foolishly leaves their passports with his one-night stand as he runs after Sam and then returns to discover she stole them. Without passports and money, Sam and Andy lose their places on the last ship to safety and have to make the journey on foot. So it's he, not the aliens, who puts the "damsel in distress."

I talk a lot about the strident PC feminism which pours through so many movies today (Snow White and the Huntsman) and yearn for intelligent writing/acting/directing which can get a feminist POV across without turning up the volume to "not fit for human ears" and cramming it down our throats. Monsters is that movie I'm wishing for. Although Sam is in an emotional turmoil (does she really want to marry her fiance?), she is a competent, resourceful woman. (This movie even admits that people have to pee when Sam gets Andy to stop for that reason.) Sam's got an emotional life which involves a man but you never look at her as the ditsy blonde whose only purpose in life is to choose between two men. (Which is really the premise of a similar plot, It Happened One Night, where Clark Gable is escorting Claudette Colbert back to her rich dad.)

Monsters is sweetly realistic on many levels. Also, it's a monster movie without the screaming violence and it's a metaphor movie minus the bat-to-the-head approach. Be sure to watch it and then decide: do Sam and Andy get a happy ending? A lot of mulling-over thoughts in both these small gems, Perfect Sense and Monsters.

That's it for today. See you next week.