A Day off and Martians

Well I’m off today –which is a nice break from the underlying tension and morgue like atmosphere at work. It gets on your nerves waiting for shoes to drop. I don’t think I’m gong to be let go in the next round of lay offs but you never damn know. It’s all part of day to day living in the brave new world of everything’s going to shit faster than you can imagine.

Still, it’s a bright sunny fall day, I’m getting paid for sitting at home, I have surf guitar on the stereo (guilty pleasure number 35) and when I finish writing this I’m going out for pizza.

Some days life doesn’t completely suck.

While big news I don’t expect the North Korean bomb to take much away from the page gate frenzy, one – it was far away and two - we have no pictures – we have become a such a sub-literate people that unless we have pictures we don’t understand. Also – as far as I can tell, there was no sex involved. Now if it turns out that the dictator had sex with an underage page to set off the bomb well, then it’ll be news.

I don’t see how this is going to help W and the GOP, this is just something else they screwed up but I’ve been wrong before. I’m sure the noise machine will start yelling fear fear fear but I think we kind of jaded about that.

Meantime, it looks like the GOP House Hierarchy knew in 2000 that there was something wrong with Foley and the pages. No matter what they try to do it gets worse for them. If there weren’t such pigs I’d feel sorry.

Enough politics – I have to take showers and it’s hurting my skin.

Watched The Angry Red Planet last night and I’m not really sure why. It’s not as bad as some but it is a long long from being ‘good’.

It starts off with a lot of talking among military types – the talking is merely to tell the audience what the filmmaker couldn’t show – that there is ship coming back from Mars and it has been out of contract for six months.

A note, there is no way in the world to make a meeting dramatic unless there is a conflict or people are going to get into a fist fight or screw on the table. So many of the 50’s sci fi films feature endless talking heads yapping at each other to tell the viewers things they can’t figure out anyway to do otherwise, it’s lazy and it’s cheap and boredom sets in real fast here kids.

The ship is brought in (using the old old standby of showing a rocket take off in reverse – this is not a big budget film) and of the ships initial complement of 4 only two are left, one is doctor Iris something or other (the red haired female lead) and the Captain of the ship, the other two are dead.

The captain has something wrong with him (well get into what later) and is hustled off to the hospital and Iris is in a state of shock about the events on Mars.

The captain has something on his arm and they can’t figure out what. In trying to find out about the incidents on Mars, they get Iris to talk about the voyage. So beings the flashback.

And I start to really hate this movie.

First off, in the ship, they talk about their 1 g acceleration, it’s so they don’t float around the entire voyage, because it would have cost too much for special effects. I have to think that in the 50’s Hollywood writers took an especial pride in knowing as little about science as possible before trying to write a science fiction script. For their ship to keep accelerating at 1 g for the entire trip, they would have to have a fuel tank the size of the damn moon, which they would also have to accelerate. And then when got to Mars the amount of fuel required to slow them down would take another moon sized fuel tank. Okay not a big point but still.

Meantime the Captain shows us there is a fine line between cocky and utterly obnoxious by crossing over it in a bulldoxer. I presume he’s supposed to heroic and brave but he comes off as a condescending sexist jerk, yeah I know the world has changed but not that much. Let me put it this way, Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart, or Errol Flynn didn’t act like jerks when playing officers. Iris or Irish, which he keeps calling her because of her red hair, is obviously smitten with the jerk. When she says that she’s not sure if he’s calling her Irish or Iris he said “when I say your name, you’ll know it”. The camera cuts over to Iris who has some kind of open mouthed expression, I suspect it was supposed to romantic eagerness but it’s totally unreadable.

By the by having known Irish women all my life, I can tell you that Captain Jerk’s ham handed way would have gotten him a) the coldest shoulder on the planet and b) the nastiest most abusive tongue lashing the instant the voyage was over and they didn’t have to depend on the jerk to get them home. Iris you’re no Maureen O’Sulivan.

Some 20 minutes of daily life on the ship to mars is shown. We get to know the characters; we start to really hate them. There is the other scientist he’s a quiet fellow with very little to do so I don’t really hate him that much I just resent spending time with him. Then there is the other guy, he’s the comic relief on the ship, the guy from Brooklyn. He’s a jerk and dumb. He makes painfully unfunny jokes, he makes mistakes, and I’d have shot him out an airlock about a week into the voyage.

Well they land on Mars – there are far too many shots of them looking out the window – however we’re not allowed to look out the window at first – when we do well, it’s kind of weird.

The movies gimmick was that when they were on the Martian landscape everything is tinted a bright red, it was supposed to make the backround drawings look like 3-d what it does is make them red. It makes it look like you’re on drugs watching the movie.

So our valiant 4 go out and the first thing they find is what led to badmoives.org (which you should go look at if you like bad films at all) to post one of the rules of sci fi films “if it looks like a carnivorous plant, it probably is a carnivorous plant) the other thing that is a more than a little weird here is that it also looks a like a close up of a vagina (I’m not going into details just trust me on this). It’s strange in a disturbed Freudian way.

So of course Iris (or as I shall call her from now on “stupid”) is the one that gets attacked by the plant. Captain Jerk rescues her from the Lesbian killer plant and the Obnoxious Comic Relief from Brooklyn kills said plant with a “sonic gun” that emits a high pitched sound that gives you a head ache just listening to it. Again the budget was too low for a ray gun.

Later they run into the iconic monster of the film – the Rat Bat Spider Crab. It doesn’t make any sense as a real animal but it’s got the touch of nightmare about it. Still the way they encounter is another cheat. The 4 are out and about and they see what looks like trees to us, stupid, in her job being head of the biological part of this expedition, cuts a spine off the tree, it turns out it’s the leg of the Rat Bat Spider Crab. Now I have to think if they have looked up they would have noticed that these ‘trees’ all were connected to the big ass monster right over their heads. But they didn’t cause it wasn’t in the frame they didn’t see it. Only people in movies act like that.

Later they catch a glimpse of Martian cites and are then driven away from the Martian City by a giant Amoeba – this is the scene that sacred me as a kid – the whole getting absorbed stuff in the blob scared me but good. (and isn’t’ one of the other treats of global warming that the blob could be released? I smell Sequel here guys- and it’s topical, the global warming thing). But nowadays fake amoebas with rotating eyes don’t do much for me except provoke laughter. I was rooting for the Amoeba “come on get em” I was thinking (Yes I’ve seen the movie a lot but still you hope) Still the Amoeba gets the Comic Relief. One down, three to go.

After some “well we could do this or that” stuff, with the Amoeba around the ship trying to eat its way in, they drive it off with electric shocks, Stupid catches a glimpse of a 3-eyed Martian and faints, and the ship takes off. This is when the quiet scientist dies from the acceleration. Right like NASA is going toss someone with a heart condition into space, and Mars being much smaller than the earth, it takes a lot less to take off from it, so if he was going to have a problem with would have been the initial take off, not now.

And it turns out Captain Jerk has been touched by the amoeba and it’s eating his arm or just hanging out I can’t tell. He’s in bed helpless.

I guess the voyage home consisted of Stupid emptying the Captain’s bed pan and shooting the Quiet Scientist’s body out the air lock and making coffee. We aren’t shown any of it and I am grateful.

There is more toing and frowing as Stupid comes up with a way to cure Captain Jerk, it’s not that interesting, more meetings really.

There is final scene where the recovering Captain Jerk calls Stupid by her name, she gives us the same unreadable expression, then a tape is played which is a message from Mars and the message is to stay the hell off of my lawn in a cosmic sense. It’s pointless really, like this film.

Counting down to the gig in Florida, and waiting to hear from Otto’s – need to follow up with them on this.

Well I’ve gone on too damn long about a stupid film (again).

Later Droogs.