Whistler: “I want peace on earth and goodwill toward men.”

Abbot: “We are the United States government! We don’t do that sort of thing!”

Along with L.A. Confidential, which I wrote about here, one of my favorite all-time movies is Sneakers, made in 1992 and directed by Phil Alden Robinson. It’s a light, funny caper film, with a lot of ridiculous but enjoyable hacker nonsense and a great ensemble cast. I first saw it when I was working in a theater pub in Florida, and during its run there I saw twice a night for about two weeks. And that still wasn’t enough: I owned it on VHS and I’ve probably watched it another dozen times in my life. It’s still one of those films that, if it’s on TV, I’ll sit and watch it every single time. Major spoilers to follow.

Robert Redford is Martin Bishop, the head of a security firm who, as a teenager, got caught hacking into bank accounts and computer networks and fled to Canada, leaving his friend Cosmo to take the rap and the jail time. Sydney Poitier is the tightly wound ex-CIA agent Donald Crease, Bishop’s partner at the firm. The rest of the team is comprised of Darryl “Mother” Roskow (Dan Aykroyd), a technician with a head full of conspiracy theories, Erwin Emory, known as “Whistler” (David Strathairn), a blind computer whiz whose sharp ears make up for his lack of sight, and Carl Arbogast (River Phoenix), a young, earnest, yet somewhat awkward prodigy.

Together they work as “white hat” hackers: businesses interested in testing their own security systems pay Bishop and his team to break in and find flaws or weaknesses. Their first job in the film shows them breaking into a bank by commandeering the phone system, conning the security guard, disabling the alarm, and hacking the computerized accounts to withdraw a briefcase full of money (a bit ironic because Bishop’s firm is just barely scraping by).

Soon after, two agents from the National Security Agency visit Bishop’s firm with a proposal: they are looking to steal a “little black box” from a mathematician named Gunter Janek who has developed an algorithm that can crack encrypted codes. Bishop is told that Janek is being funded by “SeTec Astronomy”, a company that may be a front for the Russian government. Though the job has potential risks, Bishop is coerced by the agents who threaten to send him to jail for the crimes he committed as a young man. The rest of the team is on board, not particularly to help Bishop clear his record but because there’s a sizable paycheck in it.

The caper is successful: they locate the box through surveillance and con their way into Janek’s office to steal it. An interruption from Janek’s girlfriend, Elena Rhyzkov, results in the funniest scene of the movie, where Bishop has to invent a reason for being in the office with the help of Whistler and Crease, who speak to him from the surveillance van over an earpiece. It’s a convoluted, ridiculous story they come up with, and they’re constantly having to alter it on the fly while Bishop amusingly stalls for time.

Whistler (over mic): “You’re a private investigator.”

Bishop: “I’m a private investigator.”

Rhyzkov: “But why? Who hired you?”

Bishop: “Hm?”

Rhyzkov: “Who hired you?”

Bishop (eventually): “Mrs. Janek.”

Rhyzkov: “There is not Mrs. Janek!”

Bishop (eventually): “Yeah?”

Whistler (over mic): “Well, you got us stumped.”

Eventually, Bishop convinces Rhyzkov (whose name he pronounces incorrectly and differently each time he says it) that Janek does have a wife, and there’s a perfectly good reason that she hired Bishop, and that Rhyzkov shouldn’t tell Janek anything about it, but should “just keep on loving him.” He continues to recite the nonsense that Whistler is feeding him over the earpiece.

Bishop (listening and reciting): “And never let him know… that you know… what he thinks you don’t know… that you know. You know?”

Whistler (over the mic, quickly): “And give him head whenever he wants.”

Bishop: “And give him he– help. Be a… beacon… in his sad and lonely life.”

That night, they celebrate the successful sneak with a party at Bishop’s office and chat about what they’ll all do with the money they’ve earned. Whistler and Mother eventually get curious about the black box and try it out, discovering, to their growing horror, that it can be used to break into any computer system in the U.S., including the national power grid and the FAA. Meanwhile, Bishop realizes that the name of the company funding the black box, “SeTec Astronomy”, doesn’t mean anything, and starts rearranging the letters with scrabble tiles to see what else they might spell.

After discarding “Montereys Coast”, My Socrates Note” and “Cootys Rat Semen”, he settles on an unnerving possibility:

Too Many Secrets.

As it turns out, the NSA agents that hired Bishop were really thugs working for Cosmo, Bishop’s former friend (played by Ben Kingsley). Bishop is kidnapped, thrown in a trunk, and brought to see Cosmo, who has made a fortune in organized crime. (“Don’t kid yourself, they’re not that organized.”) Cosmo supposedly plans to use the black box to destabilize the world economy. “No more rich people, no more poor people. Everybody’s the same. Isn’t that what we said we always wanted?” Cosmo asks. Still enraged at Bishop’s betrayal, Cosmo has him dumped in the street after framing him for the murder of a member of the Russian consulate.

Without the box, and on the run, the team hides out at the home of Liz (Mary McDonnell), Bishop’s former flame, while they engage in a mini-caper, calling the real NSA while masking their location by bouncing the call off several satellites and using a voice stress analyzer to determine if the NSA agent they’re talking to is being truthful with them (okay, sure). The team realizes their only option is to steal the box back from Cosmo, so yet another caper is born.

This is part of what makes Sneakers so much fun: there’s new cons and capers seemingly every fifteen minutes. Most movies like this have a con at the start to establish the skill of the team, and one big, complicated one at the end, but the film is constantly coming up with new challenges for the team, and while far-fetched and ludicrous, they’re still always clever, inventive and enjoyable.

Redford glides through the movie with his rumpled charm, and the interplay between the paranoid Mother and the skeptical Crease is great, but the best material comes from David Strathairn as Whistler. Because he’s blind, he picks up on a lot that the others don’t, simply by listening. Since he was locked in a trunk, Bishop feels there is no way to determine where Cosmo’s thugs drove him, but Whistler urges him to describe what he heard: the sound of tires driving over seams in the concrete leads them over a specific bridge, the car going over a series of bumps takes them across railroad tracks, and Bishop thinking he heard a cocktail party leads them to the reservoir, where a collection of cackling geese does indeed sound for all the world like people chatting at a raucous party.

“That was very good, Bish,” says Whistler. “Remind me to make you an honorary blind person.”

Staking out Cosmo’s building (a toy company front), they discover a nebbish named Werner Brandes (Stephen Tobolowsky at his Tobolowsky-est) has the office next to Cosmo’s, and the next caper is born: capture Brandes’ voice on tape saying the exact words the security system needs to hear to allow them access: “Hi. My name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my passport. Verify me.” Liz is dispatched on an awkward date with Brandes to coax those words out of him, one by one, and eventually just has to resort to telling Brandes that the word “passport” turns her on to get him to say it (one wonders how she got him to say “verify”). Bishop then enters Cosmo’s office and steals the box, walking at a snail’s pace as to not set off the motion detectors.

Before Bishop can escape, Cosmo gets wind of their plan, takes back the box, and holds them at gunpoint, though despite everything it appears he still is fond of Bishop.

“I cannot kill my friend,” Cosmo says. Then he turns to one of his henchmen. “Kill my friend.”

So much for fondness. Naturally, the team still manages to escape with the box as everyone pitches in to help (including the blind Whistler doing the driving). Back at the office, they’re ambushed by the real NSA (the agent they spoke to on the phone, Bernard Abbott, is played by James Earl Jones). Bishop realizes the NSA wants to use the box to spy on Americans, and leverages this information into getting his team everything they hoped to get by accomplishing the original sneak: Bishop gets his criminal record cleared, Mother gets a Winnebago (burgundy interior), Carl gets a date with an attractive NSA agent (“The young lady with the uzi, is she single?”), and Whistler asks for peace on earth, with Abbot eventually relenting: “All right. I’ll see what I can do.” Amusingly, Liz doesn’t want anything. “Oh, I’m fine,” she says with a dismissive wave, drawing the last of many perfect Redford double-takes in the film.

There are plenty of problems with Sneakers, especially with the computer nonsense, and there are plot holes big enough for Whistler to drive a truck though. The security systems of Cosmo’s office are intricate: keycards, voice verification, heat sensors, motion detectors, but (as in Mission: Impossible‘s CIA break-in) apparently no one thought to install video cameras in the most important places. And it’s a little weird of Cosmo, with all of his precautions, to simply leave the black box sitting on his desk and not in a safe. Also, when Bishop is discovered in Cosmo’s office, there are shots of what appear to be dozens of guards racing around the building, but later, when the team escapes, there are literally none to be seen.

I can forgive it, though: when a movie has enough charm, a collection of strong performances by great actors, clever writing and likable characters, I can pretty much forgive anything.

I’ve been playing L.A. Noire, and what with all the fedoras, old-timey cars, and talk of “bracing” witnesses, it’s put me in quite the mood for one of my favorite movies, L.A. Confidential. I stayed up late watching it again the other night.

There’s a shorthand in a lot of movies, especially cop dramas, when it comes to character flaws. Want to quickly build an anti-hero? Give him a drinking or drug problem. Give him an ex-wife (or a dead wife) or an estranged child. Give him a couple days of beard growth and a crummy, messy apartment. This signifies to the audience that your hero is struggling with demons without having to do all that pesky work of, you know, writing a good, believable character.

L.A. Confidential takes the harder, longer route, and it pays off in spades: the three main characters are all horribly and realistically flawed and thus incredibly compelling. Exley is a overly ambitious weasel, a political rung-climber obsessed with outdoing his father, and happy to wear the disdain of other cops as a badge. Vincennes is a charming sleaze, willing to sell out for fame and headlines and not interested in solving crimes as much as starring in them.

With Exley and Vincennes both showing themselves to be glory hounds (“Between the two of you guys, you should bring along a photographer” one cop says as they leave the office together), we’re left with Bud White. At first, he appears to be heroic enough, viciously punishing women-beaters, but his loyalty to his scumbag partner and sudden bouts of violence show him to be less than a white knight.

And then we see his true colors: while rescuing a rape victim, White summarily executes a rapist, then plants a gun on him. It’s like the last of the air being let out of our sails. Not because we feel for the rapist (as White says, “That’s what the man got. Justice.”) but because our last hope for a hero has shown himself to be horribly flawed as well, willing to kill suspects and plant evidence. Shit, we think. Everyone in this movie is a complete disaster. Who am I supposed to be rooting for again?

Redemption is coming, however. After Exley receives his commendation, he discovers he’s been set up: the Nite Owl suspects were innocent (of the murders, at least), and their deaths were engineered by the corrupt Captain Dudley Smith (along with prison wardens, police captains are almost always evil in movies). Vincennes is paid to set up a hapless male prostitute to seduce the district attorney for blackmail purposes, but after the kid winds up dead, Vincennes realizes he’s lost his way. And White gets involved with Lynn Bracken (see: heart of gold, prostitute with), who helps him realize he’s got more to offer than just acting as “the guy they bring in the scare the other guy shitless.”

As the three cops struggle to right their wayward paths, we’re treated to the best scene of the movie. I haven’t seen Kevin Spacey act in anything recently, but watching this scene makes me remember just how brilliant he can be with just a few spoken words.  Exley comes to Vincennes after realizing that the Nite Owl case is bullshit. “Do you make the three Negroes for the Nite Owl killings?” he asks Vincennes.

Vincennes (pause): “What.”

Exlsey: “It’s a simple question.”

Vincennes: “You should be the last person who wants to dig any deeper into the Nite Owl… lieutenant.”

The last word is wonderfully delivered and dripping with meaning. Lieu-ten-ant. The Nite Owl case earned Exley the Medal of Valor, it officially “made” him, and now he’s about to go pulling at its loose threads. Finally, Exley tells Vincennes why he became a cop: because he wanted to catch the criminals who thought they could get away with it. “Why did you become a cop?” he asks Vincennes.

Vincennes, after a long pause: “I don’t remember.”

Again, Spacey imparts a ton of meaning with just a few words: we can see this revelation is heartbreaking to Vincennes, and yet he can almost find the humor in it.

After Captain Smith kills Vincennes (you could see it coming, since Smith mentions, for no apparent reason, that his family is out of town before letting Vincennes into his kitchen), Exley seeks help from White, but Smith has tricked White into wanting to kill Exley. Another great scene, where White goes on a rampage, flinging Exley around the room like a ragdoll, as Exley implores White to use his brain and realize that Smith is playing him. “Think!” he yells as White is whomping on him.

White eventually realizes he’s been set up by Smith, and he and Exley begin working together to stop the corrupt captain. Is there anything more satisfying than when Exley and White team up? I still feel so damn happy when they walk into the office to brace the district attorney. Exley, sitting, looking smug, and White looming against the bookcase, a ticking clock of brutality, ready to be unleashed by a simple look from Exley. The D.A. isn’t scared shitless… until White uses his head to open the window and then dangles him out of it. The first time I watched that scene I didn’t hear a single word of dialogue, I was so concerned the D.A. was going to slip out of White’s hands and plummet to his death.

The film also has its finer, subtler moments, like Exley talking to Lynn in the police station. Seeing her bruised face, Exley asks if she’s okay. “Are you?” she responds, seeing his own bruises, also caused by White. It’s a sort of sad moment, as they both acknowledge that they’re entwined with a violent psychopath, but by now they also both realize White adds up to more than the sum of his muscles.

Another one of my favorite little moments is when White is questioning the medical examiner about the Nite Owl case. He notices blood on the wall in one of the crime scene photos, the blood of his partner, Dick Stensland, and wonders why it’s there, when everyone was supposedly killed in the other room.

“Well, he was a cop,” the M.E. says. “He probably tried to do something.” He does a great little dismissive eye-roll, implying he doesn’t think much of the heroic antics of cops. White, on the other hand, knows Stensland was anything but a hero, and that’s all he needs to confirm that the Nite Owl case isn’t as neat as it seems. Like Lynn told him, he’s smart enough.

And, of course, this scene:

Exley: “Shut up. A hooker cut to look like Lana Turner is still a hooker.”

Vincennes: “She is Lana Turner.”

Exley: “What?”

Vincennes: “She is Lana Turner.”

Fantastic.

The only issues I have with the film arrive in two scenes. First, the scene of Exley getting seduced by Lynn Bracken has always felt a bit forced to me, as it happens too quickly. Exley is obviously jealous of White and attracted to Lynn, but the speed in which he is seduced is a little ridiculous. There was really nothing up to that point to suggest that he was such a horndog, and it felt a little rushed just to give Smith the tools to set White after Exley.

And, of course, the final scene of the movie, or what should have been the final scene.

We’ve got the shoot-out at the Victory Motel (still exciting, even after repeated viewings). White and Exley holed up in the same room White has done so much of his strong-arm stuff in (the hole in the floor he crawls through during the firefight is the same hole he made while ripping up the torture chair during the interrogation of Sid Hutchens). As the armed thugs move in, Exley and White share a bit of jet-black humor, with Exley saying that all he ever wanted was to measure up to his father.

“Now’s your chance. Wasn’t he killed in the line of duty?” White asks. (God, what a great fucking movie this is.)

In the aftermath, White lies on the floor and Exley gets the drop on Smith. Smith says to Exlsey as the sirens approach: “Hold up your badge, so they know you’re a policeman.” (A beautiful line, considering how everyone involved has crossed the line between cop and crook in one way or another). Exley shoots Smith in the back (a nice callback to the three questions Smith asked Exley at the start of the film.) Then, Exley holds up his badge as the squad cars pull up.

Boom. Roll credits. Perfect ending. We assume White is dead (come on, he was shot three times at close range), and we’re left to guess at the fate of Exley. He could come out okay, he could be finished, we don’t know, we don’t need to know.

Instead, unfortunately, we get what feels like a tacked-on wrap-up. Exley sits in an interrogation room, giving a summary of all the plot lines for anyone who has fallen behind, and then smartly maneuvers himself into getting another medal. Captain Smith is labeled a fallen hero (for the good of the department) and White, somehow still alive, drives off into the sunset with Lynn.

Bleah! It’s like eating through a bag of cherries and discovering the last one is rotten: it doesn’t spoil the meal but leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

But still. Great movie.

I was going to write a review of the film Never Let Me Go, but the first half-hour of the film featured a scene that distracted me so badly that I’m going to mainly talk about that instead. There are some premise spoilers ahead, though nothing I hadn’t already heard before watching the film.

Never Let Me Go is science-fiction, but it’s “light” science-fiction, which means the science-fiction is really just the backdrop, rather than the center, of the film. The film wants to tell a story about people, and doesn’t try to or need to explain the sci-fi stuff. Unfortunately, I’m the type of person who really does need that stuff explained, as I’ll detail below.

In the film, we’re shown a boarding school filled with small children, and it’s pretty clear there’s something weird going on from the start. The kids believe that they can’t leave the school grounds or they’ll be murdered or starve to death. A truck arrives full of presents for them, presents that appear to be old, donated, broken toys. They use buttons for money, and they’re not taught useful skills but are mostly encouraged to paint. Some of the teachers appear to be creeped out by the kids, and one teacher has a breakdown and tells the kids they have no future. The deal is, these kids are clones, being raised so their organs can be harvested (see also The Island, and Clonus: The Horror).

(Actually, don’t see them, they’re terrible.)

A school for clones is a cool concept, and for a while, I’m happy with the movie. But then things start bothering me. In the film, when the clones reach a certain age, they’re allowed to go out into the world and have actual lives (at least until they are required to start donating their organs). There’s a scene where all the teenage clones are driving together in a car down a country road on their way to a restaurant . This scene takes place maybe thirty minutes into the movie, but the film may as well have ended there, because that’s when I hit a logic wall I couldn’t break through.

Seeing these clones drive along, a question popped up, and that question was: Wait, are you kidding me? This cloning company just let their clones wander off?

Look at it like this: I’ve paid a company millions of dollars to raise a clone-me so I can cut out his lungs for my own use when I get old, and this company (let’s call them CloneEx) just turns him loose? CloneEx lets my teenage clone drive around unsupervised in a car where he could have an accident and let my precious clone-organs get destroyed?

Other things happen in the film from that point, but I’m still stuck on the clones driving that car around, and how that could ever be allowed to happen. I can suspend disbelief for the main concept: that there are a bunch of clones being raised, but I can’t past the simple fact that these clones would be allowed to do whatever they want. Does CloneEx not know how terrible at driving teenage drivers are? Especially a teenage me? I was a terrible, reckless driver. What if clone-me crashes into a tree? Those eyes that get shredded when my clone goes flying through the windshield — those are my eyes. I am going to need them when I’m 95 and want to look at holographic space-pornography in my moon-condo.

Beyond the hazard of letting clone-me drive around, there’s the danger of letting clone-me do other things. What if my clone decides he doesn’t want to wait around for me to decide I need a new liver? What if he escapes, and commits crimes and leaves my fingerprints for the cops to find? What if he seduces my wife — after all, he’s younger and (comparatively) better looking than I am. What if he finds me and kills me and takes my place and inherits all of my millions of dollars I’m imagining myself to have?

And there’s no protestors at the school? No campaigns to release the clones, no liberal outrage at the poor clones being used as organ banks? None of this is addressed anywhere in the film. Like I said, NLMG doesn’t need to answer any of these questions, because the film isn’t meant to be a hard look at the science and politics and logic of cloning. It’s about, I don’t know, love or mortality or relationships or some shit.

But just I couldn’t enjoy the rest of it, because I couldn’t stop thinking about how CloneEx is the most irresponsible cloning company out there. I should have gone with InterClone Solutions, Ltd. Dammit. They really know how to protect my clone investment.

Quickie review: It was okay.

Longer review: Natalie Portman is a ballet dancer who is preparing for Swan Lake, and this one time she sees her face on someone else’s body and then when she looks again she doesn’t see it anymore, and then pretty much that same thing happens like five hundred more times and each time she’s like “Did I just see something weird?” and then she looks again and decides she probably didn’t. And I guess the audience is supposed to be spooked out about it and we are until maybe the 40th time it happens and then it just gets boring. And maybe we’re supposed to wonder if it’s something supernatural or if she’s just nuts, but it’s pretty clear she’s just nuts, as far as I could tell.

Also, a bunch of ballet happens. There’s a scene where her lecherous jerk ballet boss (or whatever the guy in charge of a ballet is called) tells her she’s a perfect performer but needs to loosen up and and she gets stressed out and cries and this scene happens roughly four hundred times as well.

There’s also some pretty shocking gore, which is cool, and Natalie Portman has a sex scene with Mila Kunis, which was pretty much all I was hanging around for because I’m a base, disgusting pervert. Still, Natalie Portman is very good at acting and dancing,  Mila Kunis is very good at being pretty, and Barbara Hershey is great at being one of those brittle overbearing moms who smile in such a strained, stressful way that it makes you want to dive out a window.

I watched TRON: Legacy on DVD this weekend. I don’t think there are any serious spoilers below. This isn’t really a review, just some notes I made while watching it.

• Computer generated Fake Young Jeff Bridges is fake.
• Like, really fake. As someone on my Twitter feed said, Fake Jeff Bridges is president for life of the Uncanny Valley.
• Didn’t they test this before putting him in the movie? It’s off-putting and fake and embarrassing. I bet Robert Zemeckis is watching thinking, “Wow, this looks great!” I bet he’s touching himself, he’s so excited.
• Okay, onto the rest of the film. Sam, Jeff Bridges’ son, is clunkily established as a hacker and reckless rebel. He rides motorcycles and jumps off tall buildings. I wonder if those talents will come in handy later.
• Okay, Sam is in The Grid world now. He seems to take this in stride.
• Women in The Grid world are fetish dolls, apparently. When you’re done with them, they obediently go back into their little boxes on the wall. That’s a nice message.
• Disc-fighting in the arena. It looks really cool.
• Sam’s opponent does a bunch of pointless backflips and sideflips.
• Remember in the first movie, when Jeff Bridges was horrified that he had to kill his opponent? Sam doesn’t give a shit. Because why would the movie want to endear him to us?
• New opponent does even more pointless flipping around. New opponent never shows his face. I wonder if that’s important?!??!??!???!?!1!
• New opponent does four flips to get in the way of Sam’s disc, than another to get out of the way. If he’d just have stood still he’d have been fine.
• The disc fighting stuff looks great and is fun. It’s also over very quickly. I watch it again.
• Fake Young Jeff Bridges is back. Apparently he’s going to be in a lot of this movie. He looks stupid and fake, especially when he’s standing next to real actors, which he always is.
• Light cycles! Yay. Except for FYJB, this movie is flippin’ beautiful. Like, jaw-droppingly beautiful.
• The light cycle sequence is fantastic. It’s also over quickly. I watch it two more times.
• Sam, after killing an opponent: “That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” Ugh. On the other hand, I’d probably say something just as generic if I were there.
• Daft Punk’s score is fantastic. Pausing the movie to download it, so when I’m driving around in my car tomorrow I can pretend I’m on a light cycle.
• They’re really cannibalizing the first film, including a lot of lines. I guess that’s to make people who know the first film well say “Hey, that line was in the first film!”
• Olivia Wilde sometimes looks beautiful, sometimes looks like some kind of weird upsetting ninja elf clown.
• Real Older Jeff Bridges is here. He sort of looks fake, too.
• ROJB and Sam and Ninja Clown have dinner and talk. It’s boring.
• There seems to be some attempt to give this film a Lord of the Rings epic seriousness and gravity. It’s sort of failing.
• A couple of jokes are inserted and they seem weird among all the seriousness.
• FYJB’s motivations for being a dick are revealed. They’re not terribly satisfying.
• There’s a disco for computer programs. Okay. Sure, why not.
• Everybody is Kung-Fu fighting. I know Sam is a motorcycle guy, so his talents on the light cycles are explained, but I don’t know where he learned how to fight.
• Remember how in the first movie, Jeff Bridges sort of sucked at flying the warship? Sam doesn’t suck at anything. He is super-great! And therefore boring.
• More talking. It’s boring.
• Bring back the light cycles or something. You’re losing me, movie.
• A couple more weird jokes about ROJB being a hippie. They feel out of place.
• ROJB is Gandalf, FYJB is Saruman.
• Sam is fearless and bold and great at everything and always does the right thing and always makes the right choice. What a dull, lifeless character.
• Sam kicks ass behind closed doors. Because why would we want to see a cool fight?
• Airplane fight stuff. It’s okay, I guess. I kind of just want the movie to be over. I’ve got laundry to do.
• Everyone could have easily escaped the movie by now if only they’d stop talking.
• The ending of this movie is brought to you by Deus Ex Machina, Inc. Bleah.
• Sequel is shamelessly set up.
• The movie is over. I have a bunch of questions that are not going to be answered.
• Now I’m listening to the Daft Punk soundtrack while doing laundry. It makes matching socks seem a lot more exciting.

His solution was to never, ever stop swinging the camera around and around and around. It was almost funny if not for the fact that I was almost getting motion sick. No matter how mundane the topic, the camera was always swooshing all over the place. Anyway, the movie was not enjoyable awful, nor awfully enjoyable. It was just sort of there.

To the menu!

Extreme Couponing: I wrote about this recently, and I don’t have much else to say other than that it’s a new episode, coupons will be clipped, dollars will be saved, pantries will be stocked with peanut butter and shampoo, and while I have no interest in ever watching any movies in 3-D, I would like to see this show in 3-D, so the extreme grocery savings come right AT MY FACE. (TLC)

Modern Family: Guest starring Jonathan Banks as Jay’s visiting brother. Banks spent most of his career playing a series of slimy, evil, extremely unlikable bad guys (look at his GIS and you’ll recognize him), but had a fantastic turn on Breaking Bad last season playing an aging, spectacularly dangerous, yet almost impossibly likable hitman. I’m interested to see him do a little comedy. (ABC)

American Greed: I’m almost tempted to enact some kind of scheme to defraud people of millions of dollars and go to federal prison just so Bill Curtis will narrate my story. He’s my favorite narrator ever. (CNBC)

Justified: I lost a bet on last week’s episode: I was certain Coover was going to kill Loretta. We’re getting so close to the end of the season, I figured something would have to happen to ruffle Raylan’s feathers just a little bit. He’s been cool as a cucumber for far too long. Alas, I lost the bet and Loretta seems safely out of harm’s way. Darn. I mean, good! Good for the little girl not getting killed. But, also darn. (FX)

Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files: A haunted swing is investigated, as well as a family in Florida who claims to have been in contact with aliens for a decade. I’m gonna guess these are both facts. (SyFy)

Quick recap of Sunday night’s entertainment:

We watched episode 2 of The Killing. With an entire season devoted to one case, the information is coming in at a leisurely trickle, which is good, though I admit I’m already impatient for more. I sort of wish we’d missed the season, waited until it was out on DVD, and rented it so we could consume it big, multi-episode gulps (The Wire was much more satisfying that way). Still, it’s very good, and it’s devoting a lot of time to the family of the deceased and how they’re trying to cope, which is both painful to watch and extremely rare for television to show. Generally, the only time you see the reaction of the family of a murder victim is when they’re informed of the murder, and they cry a little, and they mention “She used to hang out with this kid down the street” and then the investigation shifts away from them, until maybe you see them in the courtroom at the end.

Yesterday, I mentioned a TV movie called My Future Boyfriend, a bit of family-friendly dreck on ABC Family about a man who finds an old romance novel a thousand years IN THE FUTURE comes to the past to learn about love from the author, and I started watching it just to make my wife watch it, because I like making my wife watch terrible movies just to torture her. I blinked first, though; in fact, I started chanting “Kill me, just kill me” when she refused to change the channel. It was all incredibly trite, including a bit later where the guy from THE FUTURE gets sad and cries and doesn’t understand why his eyes are leaking water. Groan.

On to the menu for Monday night’s TV and Tuesday’s DVD & Video Game releases:

Television

Intervention, followed by Relapse: Watch some people struggle to overcome drug addiction, then watch some other people succumb once again to drug addiction. I’m not sure if that’s Arts or Entertainment. (A&E)

Paranormal State: The sixth season kicks off with Penn State’s ghost-busting crew (who have apparently been in college for six years now?) visiting a home that is haunted by the show’s editor the ghost of a murdered girl. (A&E)

Being Human: A vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost walk into a bar share an apartment. Is anyone watching this? I caught a few episodes of the original British series, and it was very good but not really to my tastes. Wondering if SyFy is running with it or mucking it up. (SyFy)

The Colbert Report: Mythbusters fans might want to tune in as Jamie and Adam are Stephen’s guests. If you miss it, it’ll only be on 19 more times tomorrow. (Comedy Central)

DVD/Blu-ray

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1: It’s coming out tomorrow on DVD, but there’s actually a box set of the Harry Potter movies for sale on Friday, containing the first film to the seventh, even though the eighth and final one will be out this year. I can’t think of a reason for anyone to buy this set unless they’re unfamiliar with the series but have a friend or family member who’s a fan, so they buy it for them as a gift not realizing there’s still one more movie on the way. Which is probably exactly why this set is for sale, actually. For shame! (April 12)

Video Games

World of Tanks: A new MMO featuring, as you might surmise, a shitload of tanks. It’s free to play, with the option to earn or buy various upgrades. This was an extremely popular game during its nine month beta, with over 90,000 people logged into the same server at the same time, so it’ll be fun to see how it does in full release. (April 12, PC)

Aliens! They be invadin’ all the time. Am I right? Ladies, back me up on this.

I’ve seen three alien invasion movies in the past month or so: Skyline, Battle: Los Angeles, and Monsters, but before we get to them I want to highlight a few things about alien invasion movies in general.

There are three main rules that make up most alien invasion films:

1) The aliens have a poorly conceived attack plan
2) The aliens go door-to-door looking for humans (there are billions of us and we have a bunch of doors: this is gonna take a while)
3) The aliens have a glaring weakness that humans can exploit

Take War of the Worlds (Tom Cruise edition): It’s got all three elements. 1) The alien’s attack plan is to bury their attack machines under the ground thousands of years before humans are even around, then wait for us to evolve tanks and fighter jets before trying to take over the planet. Extreme procrastination. 2) They get out of their invulnerable tripods and spend twenty minutes looking for Tom Cruise hiding in a basement. 3) They die because they’re allergic to Earth-cooties.

Signs has all three in spades; in fact, the aliens in this movie are the dumbest ever created. 1) They announce their plans to attack by creating crop circles and waiting for everyone on Earth to realize the attack is about to begin. 2) They then skulk around some strategic locations like Mel Gibson’s farmhouse and a Brazilian child’s birthday party so everyone can see them. Also, they’re naked, which comes into play in: 3) They’re allergic to water. So, everyone knows they’re attacking, they’re allergic to 75% of the planet, and they walk around naked attacking us individually.  They are finally defeated by a little girl’s glass of water and a pantry door.

Now, to the more recent alien invasion movies. Spoilers, naturally, if you haven’t seen them.

Battle: Los Angeles

Summary: Aaron Eckhart is an aging military veteran who is about to retire and is haunted by a past failed mission, which is subtly indicated by a character in the movie basically blurting out “Hey, Aaron Eckhart, you’re an aging military veteran who is about the retire and you are haunted by a past failed mission!” It’s really about that blunt. Aliens start plunking down into the ocean off the coast of Los Angeles, then wade into shore and start killing everyone. Aaron Eckhart redeems himself for his past failed mission where he got a bunch of soldiers killed by leading his new platoon of soldiers on the alien attack mission and getting a bunch of them killed, then figures out everything about the aliens, like how to kill them (shoot them in their bodies). This movie is awful.

Stupid Attack Plan:  Yes! Slowly walking around the streets shooting us one at a time with guns? I’m not saying it doesn’t work, but surely you aliens have some sort of giant bombs or poison gas or something. Luckily for them, our Army is dumber: they think it’s a ground invasion only, somehow forgetting that the aliens had to fly through a bunch of outer space to get to earth and may have a couple spaceships with them.

Door-to-Door Search: Yes! They try to break into a police station to get the people inside it, and can’t even manage that: they’re foiled by a couple soldiers and a veterinarian.

Exploitable Weakness: Yes! The spaceships are all controlled by a single main spaceship thing that if you explode it, none of the other spaceships will work. Remember, if you’re traveling thousands of light-years to attack a planet, bring some spare main spaceship things with you.

Skyline

Summary: Giant alien lens flares land in LA and start sucking people up. Meanwhile, some rich young attractive  people go to the roof of their apartment building where they are almost killed by aliens and then decide to go to the parking garage where they are almost killed by aliens so they go back to the roof about six more times and are almost killed by aliens each time so they mainly sit in the apartment arguing about whether or not they should go to the roof again, which they do fourteen more times. The Army shows up and nukes an alien spacecraft but the aliens fix it, and then the Army figures maybe they should put three soldiers on a roof with a bazooka, because if the nukes don’t work then that clearly will.

Eventually, two of the attractive people go to the roof yet again and the aliens get them, finally. Also, one of them is pregnant, and she tells her boyfriend, and at first he’s all “Gross!” but then he’s all “I love you so much that even if my brain is sucked out and put into an alien robot I will fight to defend our baby,” and that happens and he does. This movie is awful.

Stupid Attack Plan: Yes and no! Sucking humans up with light works great, but they give up on it almost immediately and start stomping around in the streets and moving on to:

Door-To-Door Search: Yes, for what feels like hours. Including one alien robot spending five solid minutes slowly creeping around one apartment just to abduct an old man and his yappy dog. I hope he got chewed out by the boss alien robot. “You were gone for a half-hour and all you have is this old guy and his Jack Russell?”

Exploitable Weakness: Sort of! The aliens did not count on that one guy’s love for his preggo girlfriend, which inspires him to punch alien robots to death with his fists. Luckily, he appears to be the only human in love with someone, because no one else puts up much of a fight.

Monsters

A NASA space probe is bringing back alien germs from one of Jupiter’s moons and breaks up in the atmosphere, scattering alien goo all over Mexico. The alien microbes find Mexico perfectly to their liking, and grow to enormous proportions and stomp all over the place, and most of Mexico is quarantined. A scuzzy photojournalist is down in Mexico trying to take pictures of dead people to sell to the newspapers, and a media magnate’s privileged daughter is also in Mexico (for some reason), and her dad orders the dirt-bag photographer to see that she safely makes it back to America. The jerk photographer eventually grows less jerky, the pretty girl… well, she doesn’t change much, but she stays pretty and starts to like the less-jerky-growing guy, so that’s nice. We eventually see the giant weird aliens and learn what they’re all about.

This movie is actually not bad, more of an low-budget indie road movie set against the backdrop of a giant alien invasion. It’s on Netflix Instant, and you might want to check it out. It’s a little dull in parts but has some effective scenes and is a pretty refreshing, low-key sci-fi flick.

Stupid Attack Plan: Nope! The aliens were shanghaied by NASA, and they’re just wandering around doing their alien thing. It’s the earthlings that have all the hang-ups, man.

Door-To-Door Search: Not really! There is a scene where a giant alien sticks his tentacle into a gas station food mart, but he might just be looking for stale Ring-Dings and lottery scratch-off tickets.

Exploitable Weakness: No! It’s not clear how effective air strikes are on the aliens, but the giant wall built along the border doesn’t keep them out of the United States. If you’re as clever as I am you may detect some incredibly subtle social commentary here.

As I’m typing this week’s menu, I’m sitting in a cafe across from two young people clearly on a first date. Man, I’m so glad I’m not single anymore. The mid-day coffee date is the worst date ever. Even if things totally work out, both people have horrible coffee breath and it’s the middle of the afternoon (on a Sunday, in this case). Luckily for these two, it is clearly not working out, though they’re both trying to pretend it is. I feel like I should pull a gun and rob the cafe, if only to give them an excuse to cut the date short.

This cafe also appears to be a prime spot for divorced couples to swap out their shared children. So, this whole place is incredibly depressing.

Anyway, here’s what’s coming to screens this week!

Movies

Arthur:  Russel Brand is so astoundingly ugly it’s sort of fascinating, but not enough to get me to a theater for this remake of the 1981 Dudley Moore/Liza Minelli romantic comedy. I hope they at least blast some Christopher Cross. (April 8)

Hanna: A little girl is raised in Finland to be a super-assassin by her ex-CIA dad. Then she kicks everyone’s ass, Bourne-style. Think I’ll wait for the rental. (April 8)

Your Highness: I guess this is Robin Hood for stoners or something? Count me among the seemingly few who don’t think Danny McBride is all that hilarious. Yes, he says inappropriate things in a loud voice, but so does this guy I work with and I wouldn’t pay ten bucks to watch him for ninety straight minutes. Expect lots of pot jokes and sack-taps. (April 8)

DVD/Blu-ray

Tron Legacy: I missed this in theaters because I never really was that into Tron but I will definitely rent it because I was sort of into Tron. (April 5)

I Love You Phillip Morris: This will be added to the bottom of my Netflix DVD queue and will remain there for ages as I constantly add new items in front of it. Then, some day, perhaps years from now, it will actually be mailed to me and it will sit on my counter for a few weeks until I send it back unwatched. Some films are just like that. (April 5)

Television

Lights Out: Season and series finale (it’s been cancelled). Like Terriers, this wasn’t a fantastic show but probably deserved a second season, based on quality if not viewership. The problem I was having with it was that the show was only fun if Leary was fighting, but he would only fight if he needed money, so to keep him fighting he’d always need to be broke, which resulted in the show having to constantly think up reasons for him to keep losing the money he’d make from fighting. Anyway, in the final episode he climbs into the ring with Death Row Reynolds, the fight we’ve been waiting for the entire season. With no season two, it doesn’t really matter if he wins or loses, but I’ll still check it out. (Tuesday, 10pm, FX)

Justified: The thing I’m finding most interesting about Justified this season is that Raylan isn’t an anti-hero: he’s not really fighting personal demons or being haunted by anything in his past. Pretty rare for good TV, and especially for FX, to just let their hero be a hero. In this week’s episode, the big dumb violent guy gets violent again. (Wednesday, 10pm, FX)

Community, Parks & Rec, 30-Rock: All reruns this week (boooo). Perfect Couples is new, though, because it got cancelled due to it sucking, and they need to run all the remaining episodes to make room for — choke — Paul Reiser’s new show. (Thursday, NBC)

The Killing: Sunday’s two-hour premiere of the season-long murder mystery was a little heavy-handed but otherwise excellent, and will be re-aired a number of times this week if you missed it (it’s also streaming commercial free on AMC’s site). AMC’s choices of what makes an American Movie Classic are dubious at best (The Chronicles of Riddick?) but they really know how to make good TV. (Sunday, 10pm, AMC)

Video Games

Dino D-Day: Imagine it’s World War II, and the Nazis have dinosaurs and you get to fight them. Do I even need to continue? Nazis dinosaurs = sale. (April 8, PC, Steam)

Shadow Harvest: Phantom Ops: I have no idea what this game is, but it seems to have been titled by some sort of random cool word generator. Other possibilities: Phoenix Operation: Dark Assassins, Legion Delta: Shadow Slayer, and Rising Phantom: Operation Shadow. See, it’s easy. (April 5, PC)

e-Books

Bossypants by Tina Fey: I’ll probably wait for the price to drop in the Kindle Store before picking this up, but her writing in The New Yorker has been great, so it’s definitely a sale.

Netflix Instant Pick of the Week

Cheers: I don’t know how long Cheers has been on Netflix Instant, but I swear I searched for it recently and it wasn’t there. It is now, though, all 270 episodes. I watched a few this weekend and it’s still as funny as I remember, though the pacing is glacially slow compared to current sitcoms.