Fun with NASA

SENTRY

ALTAR

Just mucking about with some NASA photos, taking full advantage of the public domain status of most of their images.

Bolling for Armageddon

I love movies that question reality. American Psycho seems just an ordinary slasher film on the surface, but it's actually a richly complex character study with the most unreliable of unreliable narrators, a sociopath who views himself as an abstraction of his own perceived image. In the end, though, Patrick Bateman may well be the only sane man in a crazy world despite his rather unorthodox coping mechanism. The way in which the film brings about this shift in perspective and the relative ambiguity in which it leaves the relationship between the conflicting views makes it a cinematic masterpiece.

The Final Storm, by contrast, can't seem to make up its mind about what its reality is and what its ultimate goal is in telling the audience whether or not its suspicions are right or wrong. The marketing describes the film as a biblical Armageddon piece, a story of survival in the final days of man. It centers around a young family on a small rural farm amidst a two-pronged assault on their sense of security in the form of pessimistic news reports on television and strange weather patterns out their own windows.

Into the fold walks (or rather stumbles) a stranger named Silas, played by Luke Perry, who is unable to recall his past at first, but slowly reveals a rather ominous connection to the farm's history, one unknown to its current residents until the third act. Said residents are a husband and wife with a teenage son, the wife a former bar hostess, the son a typical rebellious teen, and the husband a struggling farmhand with a drinking problem. What plays out prior to Silas acting out his hidden agenda is typical survivor fare, with trust at a premium, suspicions getting thrown about wildly, and a foreboding sense of dread as events begin to mirror those described in the Book of Revelation, quoted frequently through and out the film. Apart from the strange weather patterns such as snow in June and mass hysteria including looting and savagery, other telltale signs of the end times are less obvious until pointed out by Silas, namely the disappearance of all animals including crickets and birds as well as a blood moon in the night sky. All this would seem to be building up to a grand finale, with the stars being extinguished from the sky one by one like candles pinched by a pair of wet fingers.

The problem is, while this ending ultimately arrives as prophesied, it practically comes out of nowhere when the film shifts gears and turns the enigmatic Silas from a kindly and knowing stranger to a straight-up pious nutcase with a perverse sense of justice. This shift in character feels forced and clashes harshly with the film's more grandiose backdrop of the end of all existence. Imagine if the eponymous shark from Jaws disappeared toward the third act and was replaced by Billy Zane's character from Dead Calm, only for the shark to reappear at the end to sink the ship and kill everyone in one fell swoop. That's the problem with The Final Storm; it's really two movies in one, but one film is insubstantial on its own and the other can't quite cope with the cramped quarters it shares with its traveling companion. In the end, we're left with half of one movie and a fifth of another presented as a whole that starts things off well enough, but falls apart in the third act, attempting to make up for its bait-and-switch structure by harkening back to the impending doom mentioned at the start.

Normally, in films this pessimistic, the ultimate end is a kind of incentive for characters to complete their respective arcs, reconcile any differences, bury any hatchets, and free any otherwise closeted skeletons, with the deus ex machina of the apocalypse serving as a kind of final release that everyone (characters and audience alike) can feel humbled but strangely relieved by when the time comes. Here, it's a rush job, tacked on as if to distract the audience from the wayward pacing and uneven characterization. Needless to say, it doesn't quite work, and the end result is notably unsatisfying.

All But One Avenger... In A Way.

Just saw Captain America: The First Avenger, technically the fourth feature-length outing for the captain, if you're keeping score and are up to date on your obscure/forgotten film trivia. I was never a big fan of the character; I only had one issue of the comic as a kid, and it ended on a cliffhanger with him being prepared for a gender-swap. I kind of always meant to pick back up on that, but eventually I stop and just ask myself, "Why?" I think he's just kind of uninteresting, the same way Superman can be. He's too powerful and just doesn't have that many flaws or inner conflicts.
However, I was willing to give the movie a chance for two reasons, first being that Joe Johnston has never made a bad movie and I just knew in my heart he would respect the source material. Second, it kind of reminded me of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but done just a little better (or so the trailers made it seem).
When all was said and done, I really wanted to like this movie, and while I don't hate it, I just found myself almost completely underwhelmed. at first, I thought it was just from being in something of a bad mood, but after letting it all sink in for a bit, I figured out the problem. It has the same overall fundamental flaw that Iron Man 2 had, that it was so busy setting up the next story that it took almost no time to tell its own. In Iron Man 2, this was just annoying because the story that we were left with once the setup was removed wasn't really any good. It was full of holes and gaps in logic bookended by a few semi-interesting action sequences. With Captain America, the story it told wasn't bad, but it was very straightforward and simple, but told at such a breakneck pace there was no time to really take anything in. Normally, I don't think a movie feeling too short is a bad thing; if anything, it means the movie has done its job by making me want to stay immersed in that world long after the credits roll. Here, though, it just felt rushed. This movie clocks in at about 2 solid hours, but there was more than enough content here for at least 2 and a half, and I would never have gotten bored or tired of what I was looking at. In short, I felt like I got shortchanged in favor of a franchise.
Thor, meanwhile, is my favorite of the lot. Everyone seemed to compare it right away to the Flash Gordon film, but I kept thinking of Masters of the Universe, especially with the way that much of the story is set on earth. There's a lot to dislike about the film, namely the fact that the small New Mexico town looked far too much like a set (and I'm from there, so I can tell you no small town looks like that nice), but that's hardly a dealbreaker and it's almost ironic that we're more willing to forgive and accept the fantastic settings than the "real" ones. It was also cool to see Colm Feore as Laufey, king of the frost giants, who were surprisingly scary. Most people may know Mr. Feore as the leader of the Necromongers of Riddick infamy, but, to me, he'll always be Glenn Gould.
I have not seen the newest Hulk, and frankly, nothing really makes me want to. I'm one of those weirdos who actually really likes the Ang Lee Hulk film, and not just because of my present-since-childhood crush on Jennifer Connelly. I was really disappointed that one wasn't better received. Sure, the ending was a bit weak, and Nick Nolte's anti-military speech seemed way more out of place than it should have, but it had a lot of good points. It embraced its comic book origins and did justice to the pathos of the main character. The new one, however, is a dull retread starring Edward Norton, possibly my least favorite actor in cinema, certainly in my bottom 5, alongside John Malkovich. I just don't get his appeal; nearly all of his movies have him playing a dual-natured character, which he only just about manages to pull off. There's also his off-screen antics, like constantly re-writing and ad-libbing his own lines as well as inviting himself into the editing suite to give himself more scenes, leading Tony Kaye to attempt replacing his director credit with "Humpty Dumpty" on American History X. Ego is a word that gets thrown about haphazardly when it comes to actors, but Norton seems to be one of the few actors to whom the term "egotist" actually applies.
So, am I excited about The Avengers in 2012? Honestly, not really. I think it's being built up too much and Marvel Studios is obsessing far too much with making a franchise that it's selling its setup films short.