The Wizard of Speed and Time (1988)

All the big things I should have done by now, but I was so busy doing little things. I wonder how many other people are out there? Writing stories and scripts that nobody else may ever read, making movies that nobody may ever see... discovering secrets, important things that could help everybody. Maybe I shouldn't make movies for a living... I could deliver Steve's pizzas...

If we could live on hopes and wishes, make movies at the speed of thought, all the movies that could have been, all the dreams that I could spin...

One of the things about being a movie lover is that you get a interest in the art of movie making. It's always interesting to learn how certain scenes were filmed, what kind of camera techniques were used, and how certain visual effects are pulled off.

I think Jurassic Park was the last presently-released film where I was genuinely interested in its special effects. It seems nowadays that questions like these are mainly answered with three simple letters: C-G-I. Lower-tech movies made before the era of green screens and naming 3D computer animators in the end credits are much more fascinating to me. Movies like The Black Hole, Tron, Flash Gordon, Terry Gilliam's "Trilogy of Imagination", even The Thief and the Cobbler with its complex animation sequences. I've seen more breath-taking shots in those movies than I ever have in a million films that use superimposed backgrounds to save themselves buying a shooting permit.

Mike Jittlov could tell you a thing or two about the buisness of show. A math-language graduate out of UCLA who took animation as an art requirement, Jittlov made many films involving stop motion animation, rotoscoping and pixilation throughout the 70s, which won him many accolades and got him a job as an animator at the Disney studio. One of his most famous creations was the Mickey Mouse satellite that was first seen when the Disney Channel launched in 1983. He later went on to do special effects on several fan films as well as the 1990 Patrick Swayze film Ghost.

To understand his only feature-length directorial effort The Wizard of Speed and Time, you must first get to know another film--a three-minute film Jittlov made in 1979 with the same title:

This film was shown on a Hollywood special effects episode of "The Wonderful World of Disney" that was made to coincide with their release of The Black Hole. Science fiction conventions across the country screened the film for years afterward, and its popularity convinced Jittlov to write, produce, direct and star in this feature, a faux behind-the-scenes account of the making of this short with bits and pieces slightly exaggerated for comedic and satirical effect.

BEST. BEDROOM. EVER.

It all began in Hollywood in the far off year of 1977 ("and maybe another dimension") where big-shot producer Harvey Bookman of Nameless Dreamcrusher Studios (played by Richard Kaye--the producer of this film, ironically enough) and director Lucky Straeker (The Giant Spider Invasion's Steve Brodie in his final film appearance) are putting together a show about special effects filmmakers. Lucky seems interested in this one as-yet unknown independent filmmaker named Mike Jittlov, and contacts him at his mother's house where he works in the company of robots, wind-up toys and other menagerie to ask him to bring in a demo reel, but Bookman throughout remains convinced that Mike can't make movies since he's just an effects guy whom nobody's ever heard of. The two of them eventually decide to hire him, but with a catch--Lucky has placed a bet of $25,000 that Mike CAN make a film that they can use in their show.

The film contains a great deal of satire regarding the Hollywood movie machine. A second job offer at a rival TV production doesn't pan out as they refuse to hire Mike when they find out he's freelance and insists that he join a union. What follows is a brief montage where Mike is sent from one union office to another, dealing with union representatives all played by the same guy (Disney voice actor Will Ryan) and getting swamped with regulations, paperwork and fees.

"Nobody gets into the Union! Not nobody, not no how!"

And of course, Bookman is the evil Hollywood executive who's made a bet that he hopes will enable him to use the phrase "you'll never work in this town again", so naturally he attempts to sabotage Mike's production any way he can--not giving him the use of his soundstages or lighting or even paying him until the film is finished. Thus Mike has to rely on his friends to help him shoot, sell most of his possessions to raise his own film budget, scrounge empty film cans from studio dumpsters and shoot an entire full-size stop motion sequence in his garage in the middle of a rainstorm.

Bookman, at a screening of his film, in which he is singing and surrounded by film cans, walking camera tripods and a carnivorous clapper board, asks Mike and company the next day to do a second special effects sequence with location shots and plenty of girls by Friday, and then hires two thugs who talk like Cheech Marin and either Doug or Bob Mackenzie to dress as policemen (or Keystone Kops, to be precise) and hassle them, knowing that Mike's crew don't have the time to get shooting permits. Along the way they steal a police car belonging to Tubbs from Miami Vice, unaware that there's a police dog in the back seat.

Jeez, does this guy hate independent productions so much that he'd actually go to such lengths to sink a guy's homemade film before it's even in the can? I mean, I know they have torpedoed ideas in the past with focus groups, target demographics and time slots opposite the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards, but actual production sabotage? I've heard of Screwed by the Network, but WOW.

"Cheech and Canuck" did not test well early on.

Location shooting proves difficult in a humorous scene involving a police helicopter chase at Griffiths Park that turns into a citywide manhunt, while the actress problem kinda takes care of itself--Mike meets an actress named Cindy (Paige Moore) while meeting with Bookman on another of his more calamitous productions for the upcoming special, with fog machines blaring at random and crew members walking off the set in frustration. Lucky for Mike, Bookman finds out about her work on his film and fires her for breach of contract, and she's brought some friends along as well.

Oh yeah, and it's around this time in the movie that the two of them fall in love.

"Joke's on you, Hollywood! I got ALL your film cans! Good luck storing your film reels NOW!"

Finally the film is complete, and Mike must get it down to the studio, but without a car or an electrified bicycle or any other means of transportation, he is forced to ride his camera dolly all the way to Bookman's office, and thus another chase scene ensues with the fake police officers, the REAL police officers whose car they stole, a Woody Allen impersonator (or maybe that IS Woody Allen, I dunno) and the set of a prison escape movie.

And after all of this, Bookman takes the film and exits without even giving him the check. This makes Mike so angry that he crashes a party at Bookman's house demanding to be paid and then gets thrown in a swimming pool, actually holding his breath at the bottom for an entire two minutes until he gets his money.

So he does his own stunts as well.

In the end, Mike eventually gets his money, Bookman loses the bet and also his job, and the big night arrives. The gang put up flyers and advertise on the moon, but on the night of the premiere:

 

So what effect is this? Does the presidential seal explode or what?

A preemptive speech from the President slowly clears the room as the commander-in-chief drones on and on and on. A discouraged Mike starts burning boxes of film until Cindy takes him for a drive to clear his head. Luckily for Mike, the President finally stops talking just in time to show his film--a recreation of his original 1979 short to accommodate for casting changes and such. Fast motion, stop motion, visual effects and men in green jackets galore, plus a few inspiring subliminal messages inserted for those of you watching the film on a QuickTime file or any media player that lets you advance one frame at a time.

Not much to the rest of the film after that. Mike and Cindy kiss, they're greeted by a crowd in a movie theater who must have just watched the film and sing their congratulations to him, and then the credits roll.

The only way to travel.

The Wizard of Speed and Time is a rare insight into the mind of a director/producer/actor/special effects man. (To give you some idea of how rare it is, the movie was finished in 1983, spent several years in distribution hell and is nowhere to be found on DVD). Not unlike Thief and the Cobbler or Terry Gilliam's films, it's clearly a labor of love that shows dedication to the filmmaker's craft. It's satirical, it's whimsical, and its extensive use of Jittlov's famous visual effects inject a bit of comic energy into the whole affair.

Some films where the stars write AND direct can turn into an ego trip for the filmmaker--he always gets the best parts, everybody kisses up to his character, and the whole plot revolves around him. This film doesn't do that. This isn't a movie about Jittlov making movies, it's a movie about making movies--that anyone with a camera and an idea can go out there and tell the story s/he wants to tell. Especially true now that we all have video cameras built into our phones. Film buffs and filmmakers from professional to amateur status should seek this film out on YouTube and give it a look at.

Though he does get the girl in the end...

Casino Royale (1967)

CASINO ROYALE is too much...for one James Bond!

James Bond turned fifty last year. Though he hasn't even aged a day.

After twenty-three movies, six actors and so many women I'm surprised he hasn't picked up at least one sexual disease, people still love him.

Can't blame him, really. Good, bad or indifferent, there are so many awesome and memorable things to list from this long-running franchise. The fight scenes, the fancy cars, the innuendos, the elaborate gadgetry, the volcano hideout in You Only Live Twice, the amphibious car in The Spy Who Loved Me, John Cleese playing Q in that one movie, the bizarre henchmen like Jaws, Oddjob and Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, the women characters with suggestive names like Pussy Galore, Plenty O'Toole, and Holly Goodhead...

This week, however, we'll be looking at a James Bond film that nobody remembers--Casino Royale.

Actually, there are TWO James Bond movies that aren't part of the official canon--there's this one, and there's also the 1983 film Never Say Never Again, in which Sean Connery (at the age of 53) returned to play 007 in what is essentially a remake of Thunderball.

When Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli won the film rights to Ian Fleming's James Bond novels and stories, there was one title they didn't get--the very first novel from 1953, Casino Royale, which had already gone to CBS for a 1954 episode of their Climax Mystery Theater series. When those rights wound up in the hands of Columbia Pictures, producer Charles Feldman originally wanted to make the movie WITH Saltzman and Broccoli, but ended up producing it by himself when they couldn't come to terms, and neither could he cast Connery himself to play Bond...so he decided to make the film into a comedy. Too bad he didn't tell most of the actors who genuinely thought it was a straight-up Bond flick. David Niven, Fleming's original choice to play his super-spy character, was given the lead.

This was not the only problem this film had.

Guess how many people directed it.

Normally one is enough, unless it's a Coen or Wachowski flick.

This movie had SIX DIRECTORS--SIX--each helming different parts of the film. One of them (who went uncredited) was the stunt coordinator in charge of the final sequence. Another one, Val Guest, was put in charge of piecing this whole thing into as close of a coherent story as it gets.

Now, any movie that goes through six directors would surely have some wondrous tales of production hell. And this film does not disappoint - Orson Welles and Peter Sellers never got along, and Welles' good friend Princess Margaret, the Queen's sister, did nothing to douse the animosity; the original budget was $6 million but eventually ballooned to twice that amount; Sellers and co-star Woody Allen made frequent contributions to the screenplay, as did others including film director Billy Wilder and Dr. Strangelove's Terry Southern, whom Sellers brought in to try and outdo Welles. The end result was a mish-mash of a film that led to reviews ranging from lukewarm to negative from critics who called it indulgent, lacking discipline, and hard to follow. Despite this, and unlike many of the films I've done, it did manage to make its money back in theaters.

Many people in this film have also appeared in official Bond movies, the most obvious guess being co-star Ursula Andress, the Bond girl from Dr. No. The list also includes Vladek Shaybal (From Russia with Love), Caroline Munro and Milton Reid (The Spy Who Loved Me), Angela Scoular (On Her Majesty's Secret Service), and Burt Kwouk (Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice), who also appeared alongside Peter Sellers as Cato in the Pink Panther movies.

Look for a guy in a Frankenstein's monster costume at the film's climax. That's David Prowse in his first film role. You know, the guy who would later appear on camera as DARTH VADER. (Yes, you read that correctly. Frankenstein's monster.)

And incidentally, who should design the opening titles of this film than our old friend Richard Williams.

The first scene in the movie shows Peter Sellers standing in a French pissoir meeting a police inspector who shows him his...err...credentials.

This really won't make sense without a picture, so here is one:

Nothing comes of this scene.

David Niven plays James Bond 007, the ORIGINAL James Bond as it turns out, who retired from the British Secret Service 50 years ago (didn't know the Cold War was running that long) and has been living in resentment of the gadget-obsessed, sex-crazed buffoon that MI6 gave his name and number to after he left. His old boss, M (played by John Huston, father of the Grand High Witch herself) visit him with representatives of the CIA, the KGB and French intelligence in hopes of coaxing him out of retirement to stop the evil organization SMERSH from eliminating their secret operatives.

(Before you think SMERSH is a silly made-up word, it was actually an umbrella name for the Soviet Union's counterespionage agencies. The name comes from the Russian phrase smiert spionam, meaning "death to spies", which many Bond fans may recall was a plot device in 1987's The Living Daylights. Here they've given the name to a SPECTRE-like global terrorist group, while I'm left wondering why the KGB guy is there.)

Anyway, when Bond turns them all down, M has his mansion blown up for some reason...and then apparently dies in the explosion. Even though it looks like it only just blew off his toupee.

Old guy, young lady...I think this was how Never Say Never Again went, come to think of it.

Bond travels to Scotland to console the widow M, who has been replaced by a SMERSH agent named Mimi (Deborah Kerr) who has also replaced everyone in M's castle home with SMERSH ladies in hopes of seducing Bond and destroying his abstinent image. All their attempts fail, and even agent Mimi falls in love with him and saves his life when the other girls try to kill him during an exploding grouse hunt.

Now the new head of MI6, Sir James (we'll call him Sir James for clarity's sake) returns to London, acquaints himself with Moneypenny...'s daughter (Barbara Bouchet), and is briefed that British spies all over the world are being killed in bordellos and geisha houses by lady SMERSH agents who are preying on their inability to refuse sexual favors. As a countermeasure, he orders that all remaining MI6 agents will change their names to "007 James Bond" to throw SMERSH off his--I mean, their trail, and establishes a program to train spies to resist sexual attraction. Moneypenny Jr. brings in a new trainee, a karate expert named Coop (Terence Cooper) who doesn't really do much of anything if I recall.

Meanwhile, retired agent/millionaire Vesper Lynd (Andress) finds an expert baccarat player named Evelyn Tremble (Sellers) to become another James Bond, go to Casino Royale and play some cards against a SMERSH agent known as Le Chiffre - in the more recent movie a terrorist mastermind, but in this movie Orson Welles playing a guy who embezzled SMERSH assets to feed his compulsive gambling habit.

Right now at least one part of him is violating the Official Secrets Act.

Meanwhile, in another plot point that goes nowhere, Bond looks up his estranged daughter Mata Bond (Joanna Bettet), his long-lost daughter whom he sired with Mata Hari (yes, THE Mata Hari), to infiltrate a spy school in East Berlin that is really a SMERSH cover operation. She finds that Le Chiffre is also selling embarrassing photos of world leaders at an "art auction" to raise the money to pay SMERSH back, steals the photos, flushes them down a toilet and escapes in a cab driven by Wilfred Mott from Doctor Who.

Back at the casino, after Evelyn/Bond must fight off a lady SMERSH agent by the name of Miss Goodthighs, he goes off to play baccarat, but not before learning that Le Chiffre wears a special kind of infrared sunglasses to help him cheat. The baccarat game is a clear metaphor for the feud between Sellers and Welles on set - Le Chiffre and Evelyn/Bond trade off magic tricks and comedic foreign accents almost like schoolchildren on a playground. When Vesper steals Le Chiffre's infrared sunglasses, Evelyn/Bond easily cleans him out, but his victory is short-lived when Vesper is kidnapped outside the casino and Evelyn/Bond chases after her.

Or at least I think he chases after them, because there is a bit of a jump cut after he gets in his car and is about to give chase. Suddenly he's strapped in a chair about to be tortured by a sore loser Le Chiffre.

And he is. Psychologically.

As he is hallucinating being attacked by bagpipers and more women in bathing suits, Vesper appears to rescue him...and then shoots him.

So...does that mean he's dead or something? I mean, we don't see him for the rest of the film, and I know Sellers walked off the set at one point, but is he killed for real if he's killed in his freak-out? That needed to be explained a bit.

"Excuse me, which one is directing this scene? ...erm...am I in the right movie?"

Equally inexplicable is what happens immediately afterward, when some SMERSH agents suddenly appear out of nowhere and shoot Le Chiffre in the forehead.

Meanwhile, in London, Mata Bond is abducted by a SMERSH agent posing as a Royal Guardsman on a horse and taken onboard a...flying...saucer?

Okay, this movie's not making any sense now.

Sir James and Moneypenny track her back to the casino, where some friendly SMERSH agents with guns take them to their basement headquarters and present them to their leader Dr. Noah (no relation) face to face--Jimmy Bond. Yes, it turns out Sir James' lesser-known, ill-regarded nephew, played by Woody Allen, is so jealous of the size of his uncle's metaphorical penis that he started up a supervillain club to kill off all the sexually attractive secret agents. He's also devised a biological weapon to make women more beautiful and to kill every man taller than 4'6", to make him the most desirable man in the world.

He's also got this second plan to have all the world's leaders assassinated and replaced with robotic clones that obey his every command, but, again, nothing comes of this.

I didn't know he first auditioned as a Bond girl.

He's captured this other lady James Bond we saw training Coop (Dahlia Lavi) and offers to make her his new queen, and she complies only to trick him into swallowing a pill he's developed that turns him into a walking atomic bomb.

The climax of the film...uggh...I have no idea what's going on. Sir James reveals Lynd as a double agent, suddenly some cowboys bust in and then a free-for-all breaks out. Every character who's still alive at this point as far as I know are there beating people up, and people are running around screaming and I think they're ALL supposed to be James Bond, a couple of seals are there for some reason, and then we get some Indians parachuting out of a plane and they start shooting everyone with arrows and dancing around and...there's also a chimp...and all the while Jimmy's walking around counting down the number of small atomic explosions yet to go off inside his stomach before he finally hits zero and blows up the entire casino and all the James Bonds die and go to heaven except for Jimmy.

They all die at the end. Yeah, THAT'S how much sense this film makes.

The 1967 Casino Royale starts out as a straightforward satire of the Bond films, genuinely playing on Bond's natural attractiveness and reliance on gimmicky cars and watches and things. Unfortunately, at some point into its running time, the movie sort of forgets all of that. Actually I'd go as far as to say that the movie loses all sense of coherence and descends into psychedelic, madcap nonsense. As an early entry in the spy spoof genre, it is well-intentioned, and the talent of its all-star cast is accounted for, but as you can expect from a film with six directors and too many cooks in the screenwriter's broth, the execution is rife with dropped subplots and useless characters and just falls apart. By the end of the film, the filmmakers just throw their hands up in the air and say "screw it, may as well end on SOMETHING."

Of course, little did anyone involved in this film know that at some time in the future, there would be a moment where people would be tired of the old formulaic structure of a Bond film--the sexy girls, the gadgets, the double entendres, and the witty postmortem one-liners--and decide that the franchise was overdue for a reboot. (I think it was probably around Die Another Day, which was so by-the-book it really stung.) And so, in 2006, one movie in the official series would start the story of Bond all over again. This time, with a more serious Bond, a more action-oriented Bond, a Bond who doesn't just shoot guys in a tux with a girl hanging off his leg while drinking a martini (shaken, not stirred).

And that movie would be called...Casino Royale.

And incidentally, THAT movie WAS just the right size for ONE James Bond.

What, another--oh, this movie can go to HELL.

Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979)

Life's a piece of s**t
When you look at it
Life's a laugh and death's a joke, it's true
You'll see it's all a show
People laughing as you go
Just remember that the last laugh is on you.

If there is anything I will admit to being a die-hard fan of, other than Peanuts, it is Monty Python. I fell in love with the original Flying Circus TV series instantly when my parents rented some episodes of it at Blockbuster back when I was nine. I loved watching it as a kid. It was silly, it was irreverent, plus the fact that I was watching something mature and sophisticated for my age while everyone else at school was still watching cartoons and MTV made me feel kinda special. I have since collected the entire series on DVD, as well as most of the movies and many of the books. My older sister has given me a plethora of Python toys as Christmas and birthday gifts. I am that devoted.

And no, I'm not the kind of fan who annoys his friends by constantly quoting it in public. I'm not THAT devoted.

And since you've been such good little boys and girls during my "Trilogy of Imagination" ...trilogy, I have a little treat for you: this week, we're going to look at a Python movie.

No, not that one.

Yeah, I'm sure Google REALLY loves it when Blogger users put pics of topless women in crash helmets on their sites.

THAT'S the one, Life of Brian. The most controversial of their cinematic efforts.

While promoting Holy Grail in theaters, the Pythons were often asked what their next movie project would be, to which Eric Idle jokingly answered "Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory". He had even written a sketch with Terry Gilliam where Jesus is angry with some carpenters because they hadn't built his cross properly. They didn't do anything with the sketch, but the idea of a Python Bible story intrigued them, so they did a crapton of Biblical research and spent two weeks in Barbados hammering out a movie script.

After examining the Dead Sea Scrolls and life in Biblical times, however, the Pythons couldn't really find anything all that funny about Jesus. So they decided instead to satirize Jesus' followers, more specifically mainstream religion and its holier-than-thou figureheads. The original script featured Brian as Jesus' thirteenth disciple, the one who couldn't attend the Last Supper because his wife was having friends over for dinner, but eventually Brian became just a regular guy in 33 A.D. Judea.

This sadly didn't stop the film from being at the center of many religious protests, led by a lot of church bigwigs who claimed that Brian was intended to be a mockery of Christ himself without even having seen the movie. It was actually banned in several countries and geographic regions for decades--Sweden marketed it as "the film so funny it was banned in Norway". They may have received a sign of times to come when the EMI studio thought the script was too blasphemous and pulled their money out just two days before they were supposed to fly out to Tunisia to start filming.

Fortunately, the Pythons managed to get by...with a little help from their friends.

Former Beatle George Harrison was a good friend of Eric's and wanted to see the movie made, so when he learned about their financial problems he and his business manager founded the Handmade Films production company to provide the movie's £2 million budget.

I saw this film on TV when I was eleven and didn't think too much of the film's message. I'm older now, and having been born and raised in a moderate Southern Baptist family and attending a Unitarian church in a progressive college town in the most sanctimonious state in the Union, it does kinda hit close to home for me.

(DISCLAIMER: One of the problems of analyzing movies in such a format as this is that you don't want to give too much away to those who haven't seen it. Comedies in particular are a minefield; a bad comedy is easy because you can complain about how the jokes aren't funny and how it insults the audience's intelligence, but GOOD comedies...well, there's always the risk that one or two people who haven't seen it will stumble across it and risk me spoiling the jokes for them. For the benefit of those one or two people, we'll be focusing on the plot of this film instead of its humor, while mentioning where the jokes are in this film so that those who HAVE seen it will know what I'm talking about.)

At least he's not a bureaucrat.

Nowhere is this blasphemy allegation proven more wrong than in the very first scene, which sets up an all-too-familiar setting...

The Three Wise Men have followed a star to a manger in Bethlehem, where a Mrs. Cohen (played by director Terry Jones) nearly throws them out before seeing the gold, frankincense and myrrh they want to give her son for Christmas. Despite some confusion over what myrrh is, they bless the child and bestow their offerings to him, but no sooner are they out the door do they realize they've made a mistake, take their gifts back and head to the heavenly-glowing stable next door.

(In a famous debate on British television where Michael Palin and John Cleese defended the film against two Anglican religious authorities, it turned out they'd had a long lunch and were late to the movie, so they missed this first scene. Remember, kids, always finish your homework.)

About thirty years and a bizarre but nicely animated opening title sequence later, we cut to the Sermon on the Mount as given by Admiral Piett.

The boy whose name was Brian has grown up to be this man called Brian (Graham Chapman), who still lives with his mother and resents the oppression his people are suffering at the hands of the occupying Roman Empire. It is a fact proved early on when it is revealed that his father was a centurion and he wasn't quite immaculately conceived, if you get my meaning. This motivates him to sign up with the People's Front of Judea (not to be confused with the Judean People's Front), an anti-Roman resistance movement lead by one of John's, Michael's and Eric Idle's characters each, and also that he's fallen for another member of theirs, a young lady named Judith (played by Sue Jones-Davies, who lifted the ban of this film in a small Welsh town in 2009 by becoming mayor of it).

The People's Front of Judea can be best described as a faction that doesn't really do a lot of resisting. They just sit around and talk a lot of power-to-the-people stuff and about how much better they are than those other resistance groups, especially the Judean People's Front (splitters!). One of them is also fighting for his right to be a woman. Yes, HIS.

"Item four on the agenda, how all the other left-wing organization's mothers wear army boots..."

He meets the PFJ again at his day job selling food to patrons at the local coliseum. His first assignment is to paint an anti-Roman slogan on the front of Pilate's palace. This is one of the best gags in the movie, so I won't spoil it for you, but it ends with "Romans Go Home" written in Latin one hundred times on the palace walls in various font sizes. Suffice to say, he's as good as in.

Soon after, our little revolutionary is going on his first gubernatorial raid, in which the PFJ sneak into the imperial palace and attempt to kidnap Pilate's wife and hold her hostage until Pilate agrees to withdraw all Roman soldiers from Judea. (Well, except for those who contribute to roads, housing, education, public security, health...crap, did I just give away a good joke then? You one or two people forget you read this!) Things don't go exactly according to plan, thanks to the sudden appearance of a rival anti-government faction, and an argument over which of them came up with kidnapping Pilate's wife first has a hockey game breaking out between them leaving Brian the only one still standing when the centurions arrive.

Brian is brought before Pontius Pilate (think Michael Palin in a toga with an Elmer Fudd/Homestar Runner-type speech impediment) while he decide what to do with him. Or he would if he could, err...stop them laughing about...something that comes up when Brian mentions that his father was in the Roman garrisons...err...

REALLY hard to describe this without giving away a lot of the jokes in them. I'm not even sure I should have mentioned the "what have the Romans ever done for us" scene, even if it is crucial to the film's message.

Anyway, Brian manages to escape and runs up the stairs of a very high, unfinished tower to escape the guards chasing after him, but inadvertently runs off the top of it.

And then...this happens:

I am aware that this movie came out not long after the first Star Wars film was released, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Any landing you can walk away from. And never mention again.

After...that, the chase resumes as Brian retreats back to PFJ HQ with a legion of centurions right behind him.

Incidentally, the PFJ are headquartered at the residence of one Matthias, son of Deuteronomy of Gath (played by John Young, who in an earlier scene was about to be stoned to death for blasphemy, but that went wrong, they just...let him go?). The balcony he is hiding in gives way to drop him right in a line of prophets and seers preaching to the masses, one of whom looks like Terry Gilliam in a potential Keith Moon role. In order to keep his cover, he pretends he is one of them, spouting off philosophical nonsense to a crowd of skeptical listeners who keep picking holes in his parables, and only when some centurions pass by is he suddenly struck with inspiration, and only then does this ruse work.

A little too well, actually.

In fact, his listeners are now convinced that he's their new Messiah, and he is forced to get away from them.

While fleeing from the multitudes, Brian loses one of his shoes (sandals?), which his new-found devotees interpret as a sign, thus kicking off a scene which the Pythons themselves have described as "the entire history of religion in two minutes." The only thing I can mention about it without spoilers is that British comic legend Spike Milligan cameos as the only man left behind when the Brianites run off in the same yet now separate directions.

Maybe it's Matthias' identical twin brother, Dingo.

Brian repeatedly tries to tell his new followers that he's not their new Messiah, but his many attempts to talk sense into them are interpreted as blessings or miracles or words of guidance. He finally tells them to, in a less polite choice of words, "copulate off", only for them to ask him how they should do so. They eventually leave him alone, carrying off a heretical naked hermit whose vow of silence was recently broken to be stoned or something, leaving Judith behind.

One passionate night later, Brian awakens stark naked to an even larger crowd of devotees outside his bedroom window.

Insert funny yet satirically relevant scene I can't tell you about here.

Things are no different at PFJ headquarters, where the sick and possessed have lined up to be healed by their new Savior. Reg has even struck a deal with a Mr. Papadopoulus (executive producer Harrison in an uncredited cameo) to let Brian speak at the Mount. Even Judith has caught Brian fever.

This never happened to the other guy.

Right about now, the Romans finally catch up with Brian (took them that long to chase him down?) and take him back to Pilate, who calmly sends him off to be "cwucified".

Pilate, in a festive Passover spirit, addresses the crowd with his friend from Rome whose name I can't mention for fear of giving away another joke, announcing that he will release one prisoner from his crucifixion party, which the crowd takes as an excuse to name as many 'R' names as they can to poke fun at his accent. After failing to get her comrades in the PFJ to get off their lazy asses and do something about it, Judith joins this crowd to call for Brian's release.

Meanwhile, the PFJ finally decide on a unanimous vote to get off their lazy asses and do something about it.

Mean-meanwhile, Brian has just been sent off with the rest of the crucifers...crucifixioners...crucifees...he's going to be crucified.

Not a lot of major jokes to give away in that lot.

"I will cwucify that wascawwy wabbit!"

Brian is eventually strung up on his cross along with 139 other criminals. The PFJ finally arrive...to wish him well on his martyrdom for the cause, and then sing and applaud for him.

The Roman rescue party show up to release him, but when everyone insists that their name is Brian ("I'm Brian and so's my wife!") they take the wrong man down instead.

A sudden appearance by the Judean People's Front's crack suicide squad (introduced in a deleted scene) goes about as well as you'd expect. Wish I could tell you about it.

Judith appears to say farewell after Reg tells her "what he was doing".

Even his own mother shows up to disown him.

So to summarize: Brian is now hanging on a cross, a long, torturous, horrible death awaits him and all avenues of rescue have pretty much left him to rot.

What more perfect time for a merry sing-along?

So that's Life of Brian. And how does it hold up?

Well, in this so-called enlightened age of Fox News pundits, holier-than-thou politicians, and religious types who spend more time in picket lines than in church...pretty well.

The extensive research the Pythons did for this film shows. The biblical look of the film is quite authentic, and the cinematography and Terry Gilliam's production design makes it all the more realistic. Man, it had ALIENS in it and it looked real. In fact, just about the only thing it gets wrong is that everybody in Judea is Caucasian.

Also...blasphemous? HOW?? Jesus appears in this movie twice, just before AND immediately after the opening credits, and he's the only person in the film who is actually played straight. The Pythons casually tiptoe around all references to him; the worst he gets is when Michael Palin's ex-leper calls him a "bloody do-gooder". The film doesn't outright tell you to abandon Christianity and become an agnostic, it's just saying think for yourselves and have some common sense, a message I'd imagine some mainstream religious leaders would have trouble wrapping their heads around. Message aside, it also has some of their funniest material. Those one or two of you who haven't seen this movie will love it.

Since its release, Brian has become a cult classic--not as popular as Holy Grail or as censor-baiting as Meaning of Life, even though you do get a brief glimpse of Chapman's naughty bits at the start of the "we're all individuals" bit, but it has a nice tinge of satire that the other two films lack. The controversy that surrounds it even now only adds to why people like it so much (look up "Not the Nine O'clock News" on YouTube sometime). It's basic Monty Python--humor that's silly, absurdist and at times sophomoric, but at the same time so sophisticated only the stupid amongst the stupid couldn't understand it. I'm quite proud to list this movie as one of my all-time favorites.

And I didn't even mention the best jokes in it, either.

Praise be to Brian, patron saint of satire, who died so that we all shall laugh.

Brazil (1985)

Welcome to part two of our look at Terry Gilliam's



All you latecomers can check my discussion of Time Bandits for a proper intro.
Then come straight back here, and head on over to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen afterward.
Everyone else...<hr> tag.

---

Dear Sid Sheinberg,

When are you going to release my film, 'BRAZIL'?

Terry Gilliam

This was from a full-page ad that Gilliam took out in a 1985 issue of Variety. It was addressed to Universal Pictures head Sid Sheinberg, whose company had obtained the U.S. distribution rights to Gilliam's newest movie Brazil, but were holding off on its release. The studio didn't think that the original ending of Gilliam's cut would test well with audiences and were toying with the idea of re-editing the film to give it a "happily-ever-after" ending to make it more marketable.

Gilliam disagreed with this idea, and for a while Brazil was left in cinematic limbo while the director fought with the studio. In the meantime, Gilliam held several unapproved private screenings of the film to Hollywood critics and to students at a lecture at USC. It managed to impress the Los Angeles Film Critics Association enough to be named Best Film of the Year, and with such praise Universal had no choice but to give in to Gilliam's demands and release it unedited.

The movie finally came out stateside in December of 1985, ten months after it premiered in Europe. Of course it wound up making more money there than it did here, but it's a cult classic now, so who cares.

And it didn't stop Sheinberg from releasing a 94-minute "Love Conquers All" version which actually made it to television.

We'll be looking at the original two-and-a-half-hour cut because a) I don't like watching re-edited movies, and b) I don't care much for Hollywood endings.

The film takes place, as the opening captions dictate, "somewhere in the 20th century", which would probably suggest an alternate timeline in world history, in a city not unlike that in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, where everyone has either a British or American accent. The Ministry of Information, the all-knowing, all-seeing body that rules over wherever this movie takes place, rules with an Orwellian fist thanks to its system of charging suspects for their incarceration and the information they interrogate them for.

It's a system which values efficiency, and little else...especially not building safety codes. You see many many ducts and pipes coming out of the walls and the ceilings of everywhere. It's very claustrophobic and I'm not even sure most of them are even for heating and AC. But they don't care. The movie even starts with a commercial advertising new designer ducts at your local Central Services showroom.

Oh yeah, and there's the classic 1984 tactic of setting off random explosions in public places from time to time so as to make you think there are terrorists about.

"Happy Christmas, everyone! ...oh, and OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA."

Jonathan Pryce stars as Sam Lowry, a white-collar employee working for the Ministry. Sam is a low-level government worker, no wife, no girlfriend, he's henpecked by his mother (Katherine Helmond), an overbearing woman who along with her friends is seriously addicted to plastic surgery. At his job, he is also prone to daydreaming that he is a winged knight sailing through the skies after a beautiful maiden in the clouds.

Truly a prime candidate for the Anti-Sex League.

And that he is also David Bowie.

On this particular day, Sam is assigned by his boss, whom Gilliam has reverently named Mr. Kurtzmann (Ian Holm) to look into a clerical error where a dead fly jammed in the printer has caused a typo on a government document regarding a Mr. Harry Tuttle, a rogue element, and the subsequent wrongful arrest of a Mr. Archibald Buttle, loving husband and father of two. Apparently they'd overcharged Mr. Buttle for what little info they got out of him, and Sam is told to rectify it as well as deliver a refund check to his grieving widow (apparently Buttle's heart condition never turned up on Tuttle's papers).

Meanwhile, the Buttles' upstairs neighbor Jill (Kim Griest) is trying to get to the bottom of this whole mix-up in hopes of discovering what happened to Mr. Buttle, but the higher-ups at the Ministry refuse to cooperate and have even branded her as an enemy of the state for trying to bring their administrative error to light. And, as it happens, she looks just like the girl in Sam's recurring daydreams.

"You have the right to remain silent. Anything you sign can and will be deducted from your bank account in a court of law."

Also, on one night where the heating system in his apartment breaks down, Sam is unexpectedly visited by the REAL Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro), a renegade central heating repair guy who left the government payroll a while back because he couldn't stand the paperwork. Unfortunately, his presence makes enemies of two Central Services maintenance guys (played by Bob Hoskins and Derrick O'Connor) who rip out all of Sam's ductwork and then kick him out of his flat so they can "fix it."

Throughout, Sam's recurring dreams start turning Freudian as he now has to save his dream-Jill from baby-faced ghouls, monsters who look very much like Mr. Kurtzmann and Mrs. Buttle and her children, and a ferocious samurai warrior sitting atop a pile of rubble all lit up in neon.

And that's about the first two-thirds of the film right there.

Also, former Time Bandit Jack Purvis appears as a rival plastic surgeon to Jim Broadbent at one of Sam's mother's fancy parties. Thought I'd mention that for continuity's sake.

Holy crap. ...is that a shoe on her head?

Using his new-found government connections--his best friend Jack (recurring Python alumnus Michael Palin) and his mother's ties to Deputy Minister Jeremiah Helpmann (Peter Vaughan), a leader who talks a lot of nonsense, most of it in cricket metaphors--Sam finally gets to meet the appropriately freaked out Jill just as she is staring down several gun barrels hoisted by many heavily-armed policemen. What follows is a chase scene where Sam tries to confess to Jill and Jill tries to lose him while driving a truck through a construction site and finally escapes through a fancy department store during a conveniently-timed "terrorist attack."

He sneaks back into the Ministry to tamper with some records to have Jill declared legally dead and call off the storm troopers, and after that he finds her again and the two of them enjoy a passionate night of romance with Jill strangely wearing a wig making her look like the damsel in distress of his fantasies.

The next morning Sam and Jill are just about to make plans for Hate Week when they are rudely awakened by the sound of policemen barging in and surrounding them with machine guns.

At least Winston and Julia both got to live.

Read the book.

"I never wanted to be a bureaucrat anyway. I wanted to be a lumberjack..."

Sam is charged with treason for abusing his position and is strapped to a chair inside of a nuclear cooling tower where his old (as in, ex-) friend Jack wears a baby doll mask from his dreams and is about to perform a very surgical interrogation. (Jill is revealed to have been shot while resisting arrest.) Suddenly a gaping hole appears in Jack's brain as Tuttle reappears with some similarly-dressed gentlemen to rescue Sam and blow up the Ministry. Guns blaze, more things explode, and we even get a nice Battleship Potemkin reference.

From this point on, things get very stream-of-consciousness. Tuttle disappears in a stream of papers, Sam arrives at a funeral for one of his mother's friends (who had died of complications from complications from complications from her latest facelift) and finds that his mom looks eerily like Jill and has become a cougar, he falls into the casket and runs through a world lifted from his daydreams with monsters and soldiers and things chasing after him, next thing he knows he's in a trailer truck with the very-much-alive-and-kicking Jill in the driver's seat. And so the two of them drive out of the city and off into the countryside, where they settle down together and live happily ever--

Hey! You! Get offa my cloud!

Oh. Err, okay. So it turns out that last bit was all in Sam's head the whole time. He's dreaming again. Jack and Mr. Helpmann observe, fear they've lost him as they exit the room and leave him alone with his thoughts, humming the title song/recurring motif.

Damn. So Big Brother wins. Again.

Or...maybe Sam does. Somehow.

Well, the audience wins, anyway, because Brazil is a freaking EXTRAVAGANZA. Screw its two-and-a-half hour running time, I loved it.

I don't see why Universal felt cutting the ending would make it a better film. It's about a guy who daydreams a lot. So what, the daydreams suddenly become real? His bosses and his mom and everything else made his life such a living hell that the fates decide to cut him a break? I haven't seen the "Love Conquers All" version, but I'd hardly think a boy-gets-the-girl conclusion would mesh well with the whole escapism theme. Besides, George Orwell's novel didn't have a happy ending either, and IT worked.

Also, typical of Gilliam's efforts, it is SPECTACULAR to look at, probably even more so than Time Bandits. A lot is made of the use of perspective in the camera work which makes for eye-popping cinematography, whereas the art design is a very unique blend of futuristic technology and retro film noir elements--I particularly liked the Ministry of Information interiors that resemble a 1940s newspaper office and the use of giant magnifying lenses and typewriter keyboards as a makeshift desktop computer.

AND its vision of modern society is frighteningly prophetic. Think about it--a consumerist people that's fanatically obsessed with money, credit ratings, and appearances, buried up to their eyebrows in red tape, plagued by invisible "terrorists" who may or may not exist, concerned with efficiency to the exclusion of most everything else including conscience or craftsmanship, and they'd never in a million years admit that they're wrong.

Not bad for a guy who admits he's never even READ 1984.

A pictoral metaphor two reviews in a row. You know I spoil you people.

Demolition Man (1993)

I've SEEN the future. Do you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing "I'm an Oscar Meyer Wiener"!
--Edgar Friendly

The year is 1993, and Sly Stallone's career had fallen on hard times. His reputation as an actor had been tainted with such cinematic disasters as Rocky V, Oscar, and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot!, and the Iron Curtain had fallen two years ago which meant there were no more Commies for John Rambo to perforate. He needed a movie to drag his star out from where others had fallen, a movie which would spark his comeback as an action star, a movie which would place him in the limelight once more.

That movie was Cliffhanger, which was a critical and commercial success and picked up four (technical) Oscar nominations.

Then, five months later, this came out:

We begin at Los Angeles in the future year 1996, which is a criminal-infested wasteland which is constantly on fire. Quite a bleak three-year outlook for the city, huh?

LAPD officer John Spartan (Stallone), a.k.a. the "Demolition Man", is called in to deal with a hostage situation in one of the apparently many crime-infested parts of the city, where criminal madman Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes, in a case of one man with a cool name playing another man with a cool name) is holding a busload of passengers hostage. Spartan storms a derelict building where Phoenix is hiding out, and they both get into a fight during which some explosives are set off and the building is brought tumbling down. Spartan eventually wins, and Phoenix is arrested and carted off to be frozen in a cryogenic prison.

...Well, that was a short movie. Very simple story, too. Looks like this will be a short review for a change. Hope you enjoyed reading it.







Oh wait. Spartan is arrested as well on charges of involuntary manslaughter when all the hostages are found dead in the rubble, and he gets frozen too.

You'd think they'd have put out that volcano by now.

Fast forward a few decades to the year 2032, where Los Angeles has merged with San Diego and San Bernadino to become the megalopolis of "San Angeles". Yes, you guessed it--it's another dystopian future movie. We seem to get a lot of those nowadays. The only difference here is unlike the other two I've covered, there isn't some ultra-violent national sport to keep the proletariat from revolting.

Here we meet our third major character, Lenina Huxley (a pre-Speed Sandra Bullock), a lieutenant in the San Angeles Police Department, which isn't seeing much action these days since the society they live in is a peaceful, puritan one organized by the city's pacifist leader Dr. Raymond Cocteau (Nigel Hawthorne). Huxley is one of those "retro nuts" you see a lot of now and then, people who are infatuated with the pop culture from a previous era; in her case, the late 20th century. Her office and apartment are decked out with all sorts of paraphernalia from this period in time, and she's seen so many action movies from way back when that her day job seems kind of boring. If only something interesting were to happen...

There's one in every workplace.

Well, careful what you wish for, because today's the day of Simon Phoenix's parole hearing. This goes south quickly when shortly after he's thawed out he manages to free himself of his restraints, dispatch the guards with some martial arts moves, and poke out the warden's eye to trigger the retinal scan security system to excuse himself from the building.

He does not know how he managed this.

He's just broken out of jail and already he's racked up six homicides and stolen a car--

Oh, wait a minute. This is too rich. They don't use the word "homicide" to describe a code 187 in 2032 San Angeles. You know what they call it now?

You really wanna know?

Okay, here it is:

I will give you a moment to process this and laugh appropriately.

Yes. It seems that there hasn't been a homicide in San Angeles for so long that they forgot what it was called and just made something up. Most of the dialogue in this film is along these same lines. What do they call a burglary, a "RobberyTheftSteal"?

Well, anyway, the SAPD's *ahem* finest are unable to restrain Phoenix--when they first approach him at a phone booth-like computer terminal, the arresting officer has to read from a small prompter becuase he doesn't know what to do--that they eventually come to realize the only way to catch an old-fashioned criminal is with an old-fashioned cop. So they dig up Spartan's ice cube in the cryoprison, thaw him out and reinstate him as a fully-deputized law enforcer. Huxley is assigned to be his partner since she speaks late 20th Century...or tries to numerous times, anyway.

Phoenix's trail leads to the San Angeles history museum, where he has found the Armory exhibit...or rather, many particularly deadly weapons stored in a glass display case which any maniac, not just Phoenix, could smash through if he used his head...or in Phoenix's case, someone else's. Spartan eventually catches up to him, and they have a tearful reunion throughout the rest of the museum, Phoenix greeting Spartan using a highly-advanced magnetic accelerator gun and Spartan using his fists.

Spartan escapes the museum only to run into Dr. Cocteau himself, but strangely he cannot find it in himself to blow his head off. The good doctor suggests that he has "someone to kill", a man who through some sort of hypnotic suggestion Phoenix knows to be named "Edgar Friendly", and Phoenix casually wanders off, not knowing why he can't shoot him.

"Oh, please, just call me 'Your Holiness'."

After this, they spend a bit of time fleshing out this non-threatening, peaceful world we've entered. Spartan has an understandably hard time adjusting to San Angeles in a future where:

• Everyone has a bio-engineered sensor chip implanted into their skin so they can be monitored wherever they go.
• Thanks to the 61st Amendment which apparently repealed the part in the Constitution that said the President had to be a natural born citizen, Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected to the White House at some point. 
• A war between fast food franchises has left Taco Bell the last remaining restaurant chain.
• The most popular radio station in town plays nothing but old commercial jingles.
• The modern convenience of toilet paper has been replaced by "three seashells." They don't really explain how that works, so you'll just have to use your imagination.
• Everything that has been deemed not good for you is bad, and is henceforth illegal - smoking, alcohol, contact sports, meat, chocolate, gasoline, toys that aren't educational, salt, even SWEARING is against the law. Matter of fact, there's a running gag throughout the film where anyone who cusses is ticketed for "violating the verbal morality statute."
• Much to the delight of Republicans, religious wackos and the state government of Kansas, abortion is illegal as well. But then, so is impregnating your wife without a license.
• Speaking of sex, it is now done without any physical contact or fluid transference with the use of neurological "thought helmets." If you want to make a baby, you have to go to a lab.

"Can't we just cuddle? ...oh, right, we can't."

We also learn that there is an underground resistance movement in the sewers of San Angeles who are reportedly organizing and plotting to overturn Cocteau's nanny state, led by this Edgar Friendly whom Cocteau wants Phoenix to kill. Spartan notices this when during a dinner date at a fancy, err...Taco Bell he chases away some subterranean ruffians who it turns out were just foraging a delivery truck for food. Spartan, Huxley, and a third cop played by Benjamin Bratt investigate further by checking out the sewers, where they discover an underground civilization of shabby-looking people who have rejected Cocteau's law and have made a crude version of old Los Angeles where they live their lives in poverty and minding their own business. This "Edgar Friendly" turns out to be Denis Leary in a trench coat, just a regular guy who likes to annoy Cocteau from a distance and just has a few friends along for no reason. Though he does sound flattered that Cocteau sent someone to kill him.

Then Phoenix arrives to shoot up the place and we get another fight scene complete with a car chase, Phoenix in a modern police car with futuristic control screens he somehow knows how to read, and Spartan in Edgar's 1970 Oldsmobile. During this tussle, Phoenix takes the time to casually mention that the bus passengers he was holding hostage at the start of the film were already dead when Spartan arrived, so he went to freezer jail for nothing. Oh, you little rascal.

By now Spartan and Huxley have put all the pieces together: Cocteau wants to kill Edgar and crush the resistance he is supposedly leading, but since ape can't be seen killing ape in the world he created and with a police department too dumb for words, his only option was to brainwash the imprisoned Phoenix into doing it for him, feeding him the knowledge,  access codes and physical capabilities he would need to do the job, and then busting him out of jail when the time was ripe. Phoenix even asks Cocteau to thaw out some of his old friends to help him out.

Here we have to wonder if Cocteau was really thinking straight. Here he is, letting one of the 20th century's most kill-crazy felons loose on the streets after years of implanting the skills of a Navy SEAL and an expert computer hacker and his only job is to kill ONE GUY? What about the harm he could do to this peaceful society, one that is actually stupid enough to keep all of their weapons FULLY LOADED behind a glass case in a museum? Did he not consider the amount of collateral damage this man might cause, as measured in destruction of property and loss of life? And what will he do when his job is finished? How is he going to rein him in? If the police can't stop him, who can? And talking of killing machines, who's to say that he won't pull a Terminator scenario out of his hat and become self-aware, rise up against his master, kill him, and then unite his fellow machines against the humans and take over the world?

Well, unfortunately for Cocteau, that last thing I mentioned is exactly what happens. Phoenix turns the tables, has one of his cronies shoot Cocteau (since he's programmed not to do it himself) and is now planning to thaw out every thug in the cryoprison to raise infinite amounts of hell on San Angeles, just like in the good old days.

And all Spartan learned in cryoprison was how to knit.

With support from Edgar Friendly and his...friends, and no help whatsoever from the increasingly boorish SAPD police chief (Bob Gunton), Spartan and Huxley infiltrate the cryoprison where Phoenix is awaiting for the final showdown. Huxley manages to take out one of Phoenix's cronies before Spartan renders her unconscious with his taser...truncheon...thing to face the big boss alone. Another fight breaks out between the two of them and Phoenix has the upper hand throughout most of it, but thanks to a smashed cryogenic fluid container, Phoenix's body is finally frozen solid and finally shattered like liquid nitrogen. Spartan escapes just as the cryoprison is destroyed by several massive explsions.

Finally, with the police chief mourning the loss of their city's leader and Edgar Friendly eager to have the party he's fought for his right to have, Spartan suggests that the two of them work together to form a law-abiding but more permissive society, and then leaves with Huxley, asking her how the "three seashells" thing works.

Demolition Man is a silly movie, a VERY silly movie. It doesn't completely subscribe to the idea that everyone in the future will wear jumpsuits and eat food pills for three square meals a day, but its depiction of a dystopian, overly sanitized society isn't taken as seriously as in other films. I'm not sure whether it was trying to criticize ultra-liberal political correctness or uber-conservative sheltering--perhaps it was more focused on the balance between order and chaos, but the extra bits like Taco Bell, President Schwarzenegger and the "three seashells" clearly have nothing to do with the plot and were merely written in for a laugh.

Also, there was also a proposed subplot about Spartan seeing his daughter after being frozen for thirty years which never gets off the ground.

Credit where it's due, however--Wesley Snipes is enjoyable as Simon Phoenix. Just look at him gallivanting around 2032 San Angeles, running rings around its incompetent police force, MurderDeathKilling people all over the place. He's like a kid at Christmas who doesn't know which present to open first. Bonus points should also go to Denis Leary, who plays Edgar Friendly as...Denis Leary in a trench coat.

Take from this movie what you will, but it's MOST DEFINITELY a silly movie.

"Now, John, about that 'fluid transference' thing..."