I see at AICN that a sequel or two to Independence Day may be in the works. Such a project has long been rumored; this has been on-again, off-again ever since the original movie came out in 1996 and did lots of business. I actually loved ID4 and I still think it’s just amazingly fun to watch (note to self: show ID4 to the kid), even though its plot doesn’t make one bit of sense, even before Jeff Goldblum defeats the aliens with his Macintosh Powerbook.
Of course, that makes you wonder how the sequel would go:
Jeff pulls out his iPhone and dances his fingers across its touchscreen for all of five seconds. Almost immediately the alien ships start dropping out of the sky like flies.
ALIENS: SSSHHHIIITTT….
But I digress. While reading the news item quoted on AICN, something stood out for me:
IESB has received a tip that Will Smith is now locked for not only Independence Day 2, but also a third installment. The plan would be to shoot both films back-to-back. Whether the studio opts to go the Matrix route and release the two films six months apart or do like the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels and split them by a year remains to be seen. According to our sources, if all goes according to plan, the sequel(s) could shoot as early as 2011.
This would be Emmerich’s next directorial endeavor after his William Shakespeare thriller Anonymous. This would also come after Will Smith’s next (which will be either The City That Sailed or Men in Black 3). So this wouldn’t interfere with those projects.
Did you catch that?
This would be Emmerich’s next directorial endeavor after his William Shakespeare thriller Anonymous. This would also come after Will Smith’s next (which will be either The City That Sailed or Men in Black 3). So this wouldn’t interfere with those projects.
Wait…what? A William Shakespeare thriller? As in, the Bard as some kind of action hero?
Thank you for joining me today. Many of you have come to know me through the years. You have supported me in good columns and bad. Now, you have good reason to be critical of me. All I can say is I’m sorry for my irresponsible and foolish behavior.
I’m addicted to Sporcle.
Perhaps you’ve never heard of Sporcle.com. If so, it’s only a matter of time. Sporcle is an on-line trivia site which is infiltrating the minds of tens of thousands of innocent, well-meaning people. Log on to it at your peril.
Do it. You know you want to. I’ll even make it easy by giving you a link: Sporcle.
Click it and you’ll be one of us!!!
(Sporcle’s lots of fun. Really. If you have any love of trivia at all, you’ll enjoy it.)
Remember my post a short while ago about the goofy 1980 B-movie space western Battle Beyond the Stars? I just figured that post represented a pleasant trip down geek memory lane for me and maybe a few others who recalled that obscure film. I certainly never figured that Battle was any kind of going concern.
Well, guess what: Battle actually is a going concern. It’s being revisited, in the form of a prequel comic book!
I am so going to read this.
Details here. The world needs more space opera comic books!
I’ve belatedly decided that the visual theme for Byzantium’s Shores this year will be things exploding. This will manifest itself in my periodically replacing the masthead image with a new screengrab from some movie or other in which something explodes. Sometimes it’ll be an exploding spaceship, or maybe an exploding planet, or maybe something here on Earth getting blowed up real good. We’ll see how it goes.
(Ten quatloos, by the way, to the first reader who can identify the explosion in the new masthead!)
Battle Beyond the Stars is a movie that seems to confound expectations. If you watch it expecting a good movie, you’ll be disappointed. But on the other hand, if you watch it expecting a bad movie, you may be disappointed in the other direction.
Battle came out in 1980, one of a string of flicks to come out in the years after something happened in 1977 to suddenly make the entertainment industry think that there was a market out there for science fiction, especially in the form of explodey-spaceshippy-goodness. Battle was produced by Roger Corman, the king of the low-budget movie who nevertheless also served as a talent scout for later Hollywood geniuses, the most notable being a special effects artist who designed the spaceships for this movie and who later went on to bigger things. His name? James Cameron.
I saw Battle when I was in fourth grade. It was part of a double feature at the local movie house, the first film being a flick called Starcrash. I’ve never seen Starcrash since, although I do have a downloaded copy on one of my hard drives. Starcrash is legendary for being a bad movie, although I recall liking it when I saw it. Battle was the main event of the feature, though, and I was really looking forward to it, mainly because the nine-year-old me had thought that this trailer just looked awesome:
That trailer had run on a bunch of movies leading up to the release of Battle so I was really stoked when it came out. And when I saw it? Well, I was nine. I loved it. It had aliens and spaceships and lasers and things exploding and a cute girl. I got the soundtrack album, featuring music by a composer named James Horner, and I played that album a lot over the years, wearing it out and grooving to what I thought was the best explodey-spaceshippy movie music I’d heard outside of a Star Wars film. (Of course, my sample size was very small, I didn’t know film music enough to hear Horner’s huge debt to Jerry Goldsmith in the score, and I didn’t know enough about orchestration or performance to recognize a score that was recorded on a shoestring budget and which featured some really bad orchestrations, such as the track “Cowboy and the Jackers” which does things to the trumpet section that may be in violation of several international treaties.)
I saw Battle once more when it showed up on network teevee a few years later, and still liked it, and then I didn’t see it again for many years. I may have caught it in a cable broadcast sometime in the 1990s, but I’m not sure. I didn’t see it again in its entirety until just last week. How does it hold up? Well, movies like this don’t really “hold up” – that’s the wrong way to look at them. I had no illusions that it was some unheralded gem of SF moviemaking, but I was pleasantly surprised that it’s not that bad, either.
So, what about Battle Beyond the Stars, anyway? What’s it about? It’s very simple: The Magnificent Seven in space. That’s it. Literally.
We open with a giant enemy ship traveling through space (at a very slow pace, even though it has six enormous thrusters that are constantly firing).
The ship is ruled by our villain, Sador of the Malmori. Who are the Malmori? Are they a race of aliens? An empire? A family? We’re never told. Anyway, his ship approaches a planet called Akyyr (that’s how I’m spelling it, anyway), which, seeing that it is inhabited by peaceloving folk who only own one spaceship (which is a weather station), decides that he’s going to conquer it. So he hovers his enormous ship over them, projects his enormous face over their heads, and says, “I have come to conquer you.” (This he does after destroying the weather ship, just because he’s evil. The weather ship had been occupied by two guys who display the Akyyrian attitude by greeting an enormous and malevolent-looking spaceship by grinning, saying “Look! Visitors!”, and then contacting it by asking, “Could you identify yourself, please?”)
Anyway, Sador gives the Akyyrians seven days (“risings of your red giant”) before he’ll come back and finish conquering them. Why the delay? Who knows, but it gives the Akyyrians time to send one of their local young men, a boy named Shad (played by Richard Thomas as John-Boy Walton in space), off in the other ship they own, the secret one once piloted by the old blind guy who used to be an adventurer, to round up some help in the form of mercenaries.
The ship Shad flies is probably the single most famous thing from Battle Beyond the Stars. The ship is simply named “Nell”, and sure enough, it’s run by a computer by that name who speaks with the voice of a cranky lady. What’s most memorable about the ship, though, isn’t her personality; it’s her shape:
This ship is one of the more famed B-movie spaceships in movie history. You know you’re talking to a knowledgeable geek when the mention of the movie Battle Beyond the Stars draws the rejoinder, “Oh yeah, the movie with the ship that’s shaped like a pair of breasts!” The ship is more than that, though – it looks like a feline body with female breasts and then a couple of wings where the ship’s guns are, which sweep up and out, spread out to look like…well, it’s a very feminine ship. (And it was designed by a young filmmaker who was cutting his chops with Corman’s production crew, the afore-mentioned James Cameron.)
Anyway, Shad goes off in search of mercenaries he can hire to fight off Sador. On the way he meets a taciturn fellow named Gelt (Robert Vaughn), who only wants a meal and a place to hide from the apparent galaxy’s worth of folks who are after him:
He meets a ship commanded by a group of aliens who have third eyes on their foreheads and who use telepathy to do stuff:
He meets a “Warrior Valkyrie” named “St. Exmin”, played by Sybil Danning:
Given that her screentime involves her looking like this, it’s almost a crime that Danning doesn’t get more of it. She does, however, have one of the goofiest lines in movie history, and boy, does she deliver the hell out of it:
The other girl there is Nanelia (Darlanne Fluegel), who is every bit as naïve about people as Shad is, which makes her a perfect fit for him. She, too, gets far too little screentime, because she’s really cute. I remember her being one of the first females onscreen to impress me with her cuteness. I mean, look how cute she is in that clip, when she giggles at the prospect of learning how to “tingle, tangle, prangle” her new love interest from this warrior in the goofy headdress! Yeah, Nanelia is really, really cute:
Most memorable, probably, is the Space Cowboy Shad recruits who goes by the name “Space Cowboy”, played by George Peppard:
Cowboy is an arms runner who ends up leading the Akyyrian planet defense with the weapons he’d been running to a planet that Sador has just wiped out. Cowboy is extremely cool, although it’s hard not to expect him to grin and say, “I love it when a plan comes together!” But he does have one of the niftiest gadgets I’ve ever seen in a skiffy movie: he has a gizmo on his belt that dispenses Scotch and ice. (Why a Space Cowboy is drinking Scotch and not bourbon is never explained.)
And there are some aliens who are basically actors in rubber suits. You know how it is. Anyway, a big battle ensues (the Battle beyond the stars!), in which quite a few of the recruited mercenaries die heroically before Shad and Nanelia finally figure out how to do Sador in. I know, I just spoiled the movie, but what of it? Who would watch a movie like this and even consider the possibility of a bummer ending?
The clip above aside, there’s some witty stuff in the course of the flick, and one nicely done moment after Gelt (Robert Vaughn) dies, involving Shad’s bargain with him (a meal and a place to hide). There are also some exceedingly goofy moments, and like all B-movies, some of the stuff that happens isn’t explained very well at all (such as a scene in which the telepathic-collective aliens make their own stealth attack on Sador that involves sacrificing one of their own and a transplant of arms, believe it or not).
Of course, we have to have a romance between Shad and Nanelia, and it’s your typical awkward stuff (“Do they have kissing on your planet?”), but at the end, when victory has been won and all that are left are our hero and heroine returning to Akyyr, instead of ending with some neat dialog and some delightful snogging, we get Shad quoting at length from the “Varda”, the sacred text that the denizens of Akyyr are constantly quoting throughout the film. Weird stuff – the kid should be finally taking his big step into manhood, and instead he wants to recite from the holy book of a pacifist planet that sounds like The Art of War.
Battle Beyond the Stars is not a good movie. Nor is it a bad one. If you’re attuned to it and willing to go where it wants to go, it’s a fun little flick, if you’re into movies where the villain who is trying to conquer the planet Akyyr gets to shout in triumph at the end, shortly before his unimagined demise, “Akyyr is mine!”, followed by leading his entire bridge crew in sinister bad-guy-who’s-just-won-the-lottery laughter.
In other words, it’s the kind of movie that can only appeal to your inner nine-year-old. And that’s not a bad thing to be, is it?
According to AICN, Sony Pictures has failed to come to an agreement with the creative team behind the first three Spiderman movies on the making of a fourth, so the whole team is out and now they’re planning to reboot the franchise.
Yup, another reboot.
Look, some “reboots” are fine — Batman Begins and Casino Royale both brought fresh direction to their respective franchises. I suppose Star Trek did as well, although I’m less sold on that film than most. But geez, do we need to keep rebooting things? Rebooting seems to be less about creative direction now and more about marketing and money and so on. I know they don’t call it “show business” for nothing, but I’m tired of the whole “Keeping franchises alive by rebooting” craze.
For this flick, will we have to watch Peter Parker get bitten by the spider again? Watch him learn about his new powers again? Lose Uncle Ben again? From the look of things, Sony really really really wants a Spiderman flick in 2011 and will do whatever it takes to get one. Oh well.
On New Year’s Eve, we decided to do something we’d never done before: we went to downtown Buffalo for the annual Ball Drop and the ringing in of the New Year. Now, we’ve watched the Ball Drop on teevee a lot over the years; here in Buffalo, Channel 7 (our ABC affiliate) airs split-screen coverage of Buffalo’s Ball Drop with the big one at Times Square, as part of New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.
Now, I can’t lie — judging by what we’ve seen on teevee, I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about being downtown for our Ball Drop. For one thing, it involves being pack in with lots of people. For another, we’d been out very late the night before (for our TSO concert) and I’d then had to get up very early the next morning for a project at The Store, with the Ball Drop obviously keeping us up past midnight. But the biggest factor in my ambivalence was the fact that the teevee coverage always makes the Ball Drop look, well, lame. As in, “serving platter covered with Christmas lights being lowered out an office building window on a string and an extension cord” lame. So I figured I’d be freakishly tired while I froze my arse off standing around a huge crush of people waiting to watch a chintzy ball of lights come down a building before shoving my way through the crowds to get home. Luckily I was off the next day, but still.
Well, wouldn’t you know it — the Ball Drop was a terrific time.
Our parking strategy was a good starting point. Instead of trying to park close to the event, we decided to park in a lot down at the foot of Main Street, right outside the vacant-for-the-night HSBC Arena, and then ride the Metro Rail to the Ball Drop location. The Ball drops down the front face of the Electric Tower, a beautiful old building in downtown whose top tiers are always illuminated white except for the holiday season when they’re lit green, red, gold. This is what we saw as soon as we got off the Metro Rail train:
Swirling spotlights kept arcing over the building and into the air, sending those wonderful blue shafts of light into the winter sky. The snow was falling, but the flakes were big and fluffy, there was no breeze to speak of, and the temperature was just cold enough that we could stand there for a little over an hour without wanting to kill ourselves. (Still, a roving hot chocolate vendor or two wouldn’t have been a bad idea.)
Here’s the view from the vantage point we set up for ourselves:
The Ball itself was a lot nicer looking than what we see on teevee: a glittering globe, completely covered with lights that were swirling and spiraling and generally looking all, well, glittery. We got there at about 11:00, so we had to stand in one place for the remaining hour. But that hour went pretty quickly, because there was a lot of entertainment on the stage there, at the foot of the building: trivia contests, appearances by Buffalo Sabres, the Mayor receiving what I couldn’t discern to be either a cheer or a lusty boo, more trivia, lots of fun music, and then the final song of 2009. It was “Don’t Stop Believin'” by Journey, which is, frankly, a song I could live without hearing again for a good long time.
But anyway, the final minute of 2009 came at last, and during the last fifteen seconds of the year, the Ball began to descend:
And at last, we were into 2010!
More music, lots of cheering and kissing. The third song of 2010 the deejays of the night chose was “ABC” by the Jackson Five (at which every single black person around us started dancing). Then we followed some of the dispersing crowd out of the area, walking down Main Street until we got to the next Metro Rail station, where we caught the next train and rode it back down to our parking spot. It took us half as much time to get home from the Ball Drop as it had the night before from the TSO concert.
One final postscript. The Daughter loves stuff that either glows or lights up, so whenever we’re at a function that takes place at night, we’ll almost always have to go to one of the inevitable street vendors who are selling such wares — glow necklaces, glow sticks, light-up hats, et cetera — and get something. She chose this thing that was clearly a knock-off of a lightsaber, even though it’s incredibly chintzy and cheaply made, so much so that the guy could have hawked them for two bucks and made a profit. (Which is no doubt why he was hawking them for eight bucks each. I’m so easy.)
So The Kid came from from New Year’s with a toy lightsaber, whose siren call I managed to disregard for over a week. Yup, I made it a week.
Until last night, when I finally gave into the temptation.
