film: January 2006 Archives

One of the panels I sat on -- moderated, actually -- at Arisia a couple weeks ago was “The Three-Minute Movie.” A quick-fire comedy panel, it went like this: audience members threw out the name of a beloved (or not so beloved) SF/F movie, and my fellow panelists -- Kristin Burger, Solomon Davidoff, Michael David McAfee, Robert Balder -- and I tried to sum up the film as quickly as possible. Some of the summaries went on for just about three minutes and were too much to capture as I sat there with my laptop: I’m not that good a typist, and they wouldn’t have translated to text, anyway. But here’s a few that survived the transition well:

The Matrix: What do you call a million robots at the bottom of the zeitgeist? Whoa.

Blade Runner: Robots are bad. Am I a robot? Robots are good.

Blade: Who’s the half-breed vampire who’s a sex machine? Blade!

Mad Max: Hello, my name is Mad Max. You killed my doggie. Prepare to die.

Fantastic Four: Not so much.

The 1986 The Fly: “Your arm’s off!” “No it isn’t.”

Sometimes one summary would inspire others, and we wouldn’t wait for audience suggestions but just let the stream-of-consciousness flow:

Friday the 13th: They’re killing us all! Let me take off my shirt! Let’s split up!

Night of the Living Dead: Zombies are after us! Let’s not run!

Tomb Raider: *run run run* Oh look, she’s wearing tiny shorts! *run run run*

The Dukes of Hazzard: *vroom vroom vroom* Oh look, she’s wearing tiny shorts! *vroom vroom vroom*

The Fast and the Furious: *vroom vroom vroom* Oh look, they’re all wearing tiny shorts! *vroom vroom vroom*

The best moment, however, may have been when someone in the crowd shouted out “Dune!” and all my other fellow panelists spontaneously broke out into an apparrently famous filk song. It’s sung to the tune of “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,” and it starts out like this:

The spice melange, it's so cinnamon sweet,
I put it on most everything I eat.
It's addictive, too,
And don't it make my brown eyes blue.

The whole thing is here. It made me reconsider my aversion to filk -- clearly, I’ve been missing some good stuff.

We get stalked by the likes of Robert Patrick and William Shatner.

Speaking of Monty Python...

“I like Monty Python.” That’s what director Lasse Halström said at a press event last month -- and then it clicked, and I was like, Okay, so that’s where his new film, Casanova, is springing from. Cuz “Halström” and “farce” aren’t two words that generally go together, and neither are “Halström” and “geek touchstone” (though as I listened to him speak, I was suddenly reminded of the profound affect his My Life as a Dog had on me as a geeky kid, the likening of adolescent angst to the tragedy of a doomed dog circling the Earth in a space capsule). But Casanova is sharply, satirically funny, less like the work of the Pythons itself -- though it does feature an Inquisition that nobody expects -- than like something else that was inspired by them: The Princess Bride.

Weeks before The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opened, I had the chance to chat with some of the cast and crew, and they were all understandably anxious about how the film was going to be received. “’I love those books -- don’t screw it up,’” producer Mark Johnson said was the typical reaction to the news he was making a film adaptation of the beloved book.

I think it’s safe to say now that not too many folks think he screwed it up. The film topped the holiday box office -- movies don’t do this kind of business unless audiences are returning to see a movie twice or three times or more, and it goes without saying that people don’t see movies they don’t like more than once. And more: Geeks, in my anecdotal experience and observation, go to the movies a lot, much more often than the average nongeeky moviegoer, who might see only four or five movies in the theater each year. But any movie that achieves Narnia’s box-office success has to be one of the four or five movies the nongeeks are seeing, too -- the numbers demand it, I think, because it’s the rare geek who will see a movie a dozen times, or not, at least, this particular film. Narnia is wonderful, but it ain’t Star Wars or The Matrix. (Then again, part of the hilarilous appeal of the Narnia white-boy rap “Lazy Sunday” that appeared on the mostly irrelevant Saturday Night Live recently may be that it does touch on how deeply we geeks are moved by the film.)