Total Recall, Total Dud

Dudley Done Wrong

Total Recall 2070. Directed by Art Monterastelli, performances by Michael Easton, Karl Pruner, and      Cynthia Preston, Alliance Atlantis, 1999

Stylized and cribbed from Blade Runner down to the Asian style among the denizens of an unnamed city, a synth-pop knock-off of Vangelis and a purposeless "Gaff" (James Edward Olmos) clone, Total Recall 2070 also steals the basic plot of a most excellent movie. This is not that movie.

In this movie, self-aware androids want more time to -- have memories -- and thus snatch a Rekall Corp. scientist but are thwarted by our hero, David "I Kid You Not" Hume (Michael Easton) who must have been a stunt double for David Duchovny at some point in his career. The androids are sneaky and end up grabbing the Mars-bound scientist in order to hold onto their precious yet fake memories and feelings.

Meanwhile a youngster who is a mind-reader (this is the future and radiation does great things in the future) and most excellent video game player is kidnapped from two distraught foreigners with the surname of Bimboo or Sordoo or Sodoor or somesuch. This sad couple mistakenly thought they went for a nice trip to the Galapagos Islands but really had a mind-job done on them by Rekall (or someone pretending to be a Rekall rep) and had their kid snatched along with any memory of even ever having a kid. What a nasty corporation!

No new ground is covered in the pilot but there are no less than three zingers that will give viewers a chuckle and/or a deep sigh:

1. After our protagonist, good cop, Officer Hume loses his partner in a gun-battle with androids, he gets a new partner with the personality of Lieutenant Commander Data from Star Trek the Next Generation but has no clue that this cop is - gasp! - an android. I'm a complete space cadet and it was clear to me from the first scene with Mr. Roboto and his "Caesar" haircut that this was a tin man. Remember, Hume's whole professional life revolves around paying attention to what's going on.

2. Much ado is made of the lethality of a 12mm pistol that Officer Hume has snatched from the scene of his partner's murder, but when he deploys the weapon he is (a) unable to hit the back side of a barn with it, and (b) when he randomly does hit his target, the victim dies no more surely or not than the bodies that seem to fall everywhere from ray guns in the hands of most everyone. 

3. Hume's highly principled and loyal wife, Olivia, is often on the verge of getting really, really mad with David but she always falls back and melts in his arms, and supports all of his crazy antics in the end such as going to Mars with his robotic Lurch-like partner.

This one was bad. Unfortunately is was not bad enough to be bad like Sharknado. I give it two out of five velotaxis. 

Care and Feeding of ... Substitute Teachers!

It's not every day that I come across something uproariously funny subbing, but this is by far the best. In the sub notes, the teacher left this essay assignment for potentially miscreant students (there were none, they were just great).

It starts with these words: A substitute teacher is an ordinary person, just like you or me.

I immediately thought of the instructions you might get for your first puppy!

Movie as Metaphor...for What Ails Education?

The Pentagon Wars is clearly a "B" movie, 

and a nearly humorless comedy at that, but that does not prevent it from having some explanatory power.

The movie is allegedly based on the book by a retired Air Force Colonel who wrote what looks like a serious and detailed study of bureaucratic malfeasance in the Pentagon's procurement process (James Burton, The Pentagon Wars: Reformers Challenge the Old Guard).

Stacked up against such notable classics as Catch-22 or Doctor Strangelove, it surely fails as a "military-lunacy-film," but it does score points in showing how idealists can get co-opted by the system or simply eliminated. The film does seem to leave open the possibility of a "third way" within the system in the character of one Colonel (later Brigadier General) Smith who feeds tidbits of truth to the press and Congress. Yet his timidity suggests this third way to be a compromise that one ought to not consider to remain morally coherent.

The Connection with Education...  

As he was near leaving office, President Eisenhower famously warned of the "military-industrial complex" which could lead to a consumeristic approach to the planning, production and acquisition of war materiel. The film demonstrates how some of the dynamics can work on a small scale. In this case, with the long drawn-out design and testing of what would (finally) become the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

The education establishment does not consist of generals, but principals, superintendents, professors at schools of education, textbook publishers, lobbyists and politicians. The latter are in abundance and, while they cannot rival the Pentagon's annual budget, education policy and practice far outstrips any cultural contribution the military makes.

And rather than inflated weapons systems that get pushed into the pipeline and have a way of being refined one way or another, the educational schemes that emerge from the "educational-bureaucratic complex" seem to have less "quality assurance" than say, the M16 (one of the best moments of the film is when "Colonel Burton" tells the tale of Vietnam veteran he met who used on the early M16s with the cheap ammo that cost hundreds of lives in the early days of its fielding). When soldiers die, people begin the notice. When educational schemes fail, does anyone notice?

DEATH SENTENCE - Almost as good as Sharknado!

Good Heavens!  Rating: 3 out of 5 amputations below the knee


Where does one even begin? This is perhaps the funniest movie I've seen since Sharknado!  Granted, with the shark film, I had already braced myself for absurdity but with Death Sentence, I had no idea what kind of film I was getting myself into.

The premise is intriguing: a father witnesses his son getting killed in a random act of gang violence, and decides to take the law into his own hands. This could go in multiple directions, all of them interesting. Moral complexity? Well, the raw material is there but you won't find it here.

What you will find is Kevin Bacon as a kind of Clark Kent miraculously transformed into The Terminator. Professionally, he works for a corporation and seems to be responsible for -- risk management! The film is politely incoherent and all the bad guys get wiped-out (this was not a surprise once I realized the film was not serious).

Special effects are from the George Romero School of Film: a dead cop in the car who has a fountain of blood streaming from his neck; one gang member flies in the air 30' when a car hits him and he's doing just fine in the next scene; another gang guy loses the lower 2/3 of his leg below the knee after a blast from Bacon's 12 gauge shotgun in a moment that is reminiscent of the knight fighting scene from Monty Python's Holy Grail. Rich stuff.

The award for best contrived scene surely goes to the rooftop garage scene where Bacon wraps a seat-belt around a bad guy's neck and the car -- defying gravity as it propels itself up a slope! -- flies off the 3rd level and onto the ground. Sheesh, sometimes seat-belts don't save lives! 

There's also a great chase around the house almost as funny as Inspector Clouseau versus Cato in The Pink Panther Strikes Again. The highlight is when Bacon literally pulls the rug from under a bad guy right before he blasts him.

Best unfathomable moment is after Bacon has shot up the town and returns with his rat-scalped self to his now empty house (he has succeeding in getting his wife killed). The lady detective shows up with a convoy of cop cars to his house to ... tell him his remaining son is going to be okay! No arrest, no lecture about going on a killing spree, just good news. Holy Implausibility, Batman! 



Not to be missed: the scene where Bacon shaves his head badly and at the same time plays with various guns and ammo. It lasts about ten minutes but the haircut is worth every second.

Look, I know Kevin Bacon, John Goodman, and, yes, Renee Russo all need to make a living, but is this sort of thing really necessary.