Category: Media

Weblogging is replete with Carnivals of this, Bonfires of that — most of which fall on a Friday before all of this gets put into sleep mode. One such I thought is missing is something along the lines of a Carnival of Matinee Movies. These are the movies you saw Saturday afternoons, either in a theater or at home on television.

Saturday matinee movies aren’t just film or cinema–they’re culture. How we are as people is greatly defined by what Saturday afternoon movies we saw with our friends, family, or by ourselves. They didn’t even have to be Saturday afternoons, because the Saturday matinee movie is a state of mind as much as a state of time.

I am not particularly good at starting a meme, so I won’t. Rather than attempting to start a “Matinee Madness”, I’m just going to write about Saturday matinee movies on Saturdays and if folks want to join, they can. If not, no big deal. At a minimum, it’s a change of pace from discussions about Wikipedia, Google, and big-haired bloggers.

Matinee movies differ for each of us. My roommate is partial to westerns, but my Dad favored war movies. Old dancing and singing movies ring other people’s bells, but my Saturday matinees invariably focused on science-fiction movies; usually featuring what I called the Playtex Living monsters.

I’m not alone in being brought up in the tradition of creature features on Saturdays. The SciFi channel seems to have tapped into this with its CGI movie of the week, but with, to me, much less class. Bizarrely enough, I fit the demographics for these types of movies: being a woman over 50 (and therefore to some conservative writers, equivalent to dog food).

I didn’t believe the demographics until I visited my Mom. She loves the SciFi creature features. More, she loves disaster flicks. While there, we watched shows on killer bees, killer locusts, and little nanobots that can eat a human in 3 seconds flat. Humanity dies a thousand deaths, weekly, at my Mom’s.

Mom went to The Day After Tomorrow at the movies twice, and while I was visiting, got into a conversation with her 82 year old neighbor next door about the merits of some kind of disaster flick on NBC. Listening to them, I was reminded of two wine lovers discussing the relative merits of a new wine. Yes, it had a good tension, but it spent too much time getting into the action. Oh my yes, that building falling down was especially good. It became flat, though, in the middle: not enough people squished.

If they do a remake of the Poseidon Adventure, as the rumors go, she’ll be in alt.

(Now, I like disaster flicks, too, but I didn’t like the Poseidon Adventure. The premise was good even if the clothes were awful. But I could have lived with the clothes, and the hair, and even Ernest Borgnine in yet another disaster flick. No, it was the song, you know what song. I still hate that song.)

I, on the other hand, grew up with monsters: from the sea, from space, and particularly from Japan. Yes, this means Godzilla. I loved Godzilla. It didn’t matter that the monsters were fake and the Tokyo looked like it was made of cardboard, or that the tiny little human being stepped on looked like Ken of Barbie doll fame. I loved it when the thing screeched; I loved when it would smash through power lines; and when it fought the bad monsters and would jump up and down with glee, I would join it.

As a consequence, I love Japanese movies that feature Playtex living monsters, no matter how improbable.

Recently PZ Meyers wrote a review of The Calamari Wrestler, a new Japanese flick where the hero, a famous wrestler, reincarnates as a giant squid. PZ, who most likely picked this up because of its giant squid associations (he, like me, is all things Archituethis Dux), started his review with:

I have seen The Calamari Wrestler. It was…indescribable. I won’t even try.

Variety had a few more words:

Funny pic about a brooding wrestler reincarnated as a giant squid is a kind of “Waiting for Godzilla” aimed at the midnight circuit. F/x, amounting to men in rubber suits, is proudly of the Ed Wood school, but tasty tale is served up with a redeeming wink. Quick sketch of Japanese pro wrestling history, couched in terms of island’s postwar identity problems, give extra context to the tentacle-in-cheek sports spoof. Cult suction should ensue, but it won’t see much theatrical ink.

A Japanese giant squid that wrestles–impossible to resist. It is now first in my Netflix queue. I’ll have a review of it for next Saturday’s Matinee Movie of the Week.

Yule points to three short movies utilizing stop motion created by a family run production company, Painful Productions in Vancouver Island. These short-shorts are more than worth a view, as is Yule’s writeup of the company.

(Note, you can download a Mac-based player for Windows Media files.)

I did go see Serenity tonight. The movie theater is about 1/2 mile from us, and no one was out. We had the stadium seating theater; shared with approximately 20 other people. The seats were excellent and so was the sound, but the film developed a flaw in it for the last ten minutes. Didn’t impact on the overall movie, but was unfortunate.

I won’t talk about the movie–anything one can say is a spoiler. I think it was an excellent movie, but somewhat unexpected. It was a true Firefly show, though — no disappointments for fans. I didn’t see any hull number, but I’ll take a swing and guess at the hull number and ship soon to enter Serenity trivia as noted by Commander Rogers: the NC 1701, USS Enterprise.

Spoiler alert: This post discusses the last episode of Battlestar Galactica, aired Friday night, in detail.

Battlestar Galactica features several characters that are Cylons, though they look human. Most of the Cylon characters in re-occurring roles are women, specifically Boomer and Number Six. There are many duplications of each character, which can lead to some interesting story lines.

Boomer, in different incarnations, has fallen in love with two human males. She is now known to be Cylon and imprisoned. The crew refers to her as ‘toaster’ and ‘it’, but they also have become more sympathetic toward her, as she has joined forces with the humans because of her love for one of the men.

Number Six appears mainly as some form of mental image in the mind of the scientific genius, Dr. Baltar–though whether this is madness or mechanics, we’re never quite sure. It was his relationship with Number Six eventually led to the destruction of the human planets. In the show, dialogs occur between the two, though only he can see the woman. This can lead to some humourous scenes (sex plays a big role between the couple); but some tedius ones as well.

I was ambivalent about the casting of humans as Cylons in this new show, but the last four or five episodes have been absolutely riveting because of this decision. None more so than the show last Friday night when another battle ship, the Pegasus, found the Battlestar Galatica, and the actions of the military in the two ships can be compared side by side.

The Battlestar Galactica is led by Adama, a man who for all of his strict reliance on all things military, is able to adapt to situations. He’s a stubborn man, but an honorable one. He’s appealing because he makes mistakes, and even more so because he doesn’t always see them as mistakes. This has kept the show from being cheap and overly heroic.

The Battlestar Pegasus is led by a woman, Admiral Cain, following on a strong female presence in the show. Unlike Adama, though, Admiral Cain is a by the book military commander, with little interest in much other than a need to win, to triumph, to take the fight to the Cylons.

The meeting between the two started out smoothly, but it’s not long before problems started arising. Admiral Cain has little regard for Adama’s personal interactions with his crew, considering them a weakness. She demands a break up and mixing of crew members. More, we find out that she had killed her first XO in cold blood because he wouldn’t follow her orders. We also find out that the Pegasus also has a Cylon prisoner of its own–none other than one of the Number Six characters who haunt Baltar’s mind.

Number Six is beautiful, blonde, and devious. She is the ‘evil’ member of the Cylons, the one who helped bring about destruction of the planets. In the opening shows, she kills a baby in his crib and then walks away without once looking back. She is tough, strong, and not particularly likable–using sex to manipulate men such as Balthar. I’ve seen her referred to in sci-fi circles as ‘the Cylon Slut’.

When we see her on the Pegasus though, she is collapsed on the ground and chained about her neck, arms, and legs. She has been badly beaten and starved, and lays there staring vacantly ahead of her. From joking that male Pegasus crewmembers do with those on the Galactica, we find that the crew used that oldest expedient to break women: rape.

Cut away and the Pegasus officer that has beaten and raped Number Six is now on his way to do the same to Boomer.

From there we have a constant cut away between scenes where a selfish, self-centered Baltar is trying to help Number Six, crying, as she lies broken on the deck; while the Pegasus officer has his men straddle Boomer over a bed and prepares to rape her.

The two scenes, juxtaposed, are powerful, and made more so because Number Six is clearly ‘evil’, while Boomer is just as clearly ‘good’. And it is this that made all the difference.

I was curious and searched in Technorati for mention of Battlestar Galactica and rape. It was interesting to read the reactions; especially to see young men deal with something they’ve never faced in all their Lara Croft games; to hear science fiction fans talking about war and rape and genocide, and explore whether rape would be allowed on a ship commanded by a woman. One person wrote that he knew rape existed, but it wasn’t something he wanted to necessarily see on television, in such graphic detail. Disturbing, he called it.

Yes, it is.

An excellent review of this episode of Battlestar Galactica.