Total Recall 2070: Machine Dreams Total Recall 2070: Machine ...
I was so excited at first. I thought I was dealing with an 80s-style Italian fake sequel. All the signs were there: The cover art is just a tad too close to that of the Paul Verhoeven original, and the box copy on the back makes reference to The X-Files and The Matrix, while studiously avoiding any mention of the films actually ripped off here.
Turns out this is just a made-for-cable movie that spawned a short-lived, officially licensed Showtime series, something which isn't noted anywhere on the package that I could find. That's not nearly as much fun, and it doesn't change the fact that it's still just a cheap simulacrum of a sci-fi action film, comprised of scenes and ideas lifted from a dozen other movies.
The year, as the title implies, is 2070, and the world is run by major corporations. The police force (now called the Citizen's Protection Bureau) deals with an average of two murders a year. When a cop is killed by a group of rogue androids, his partner (Keanu Reeves lookalike Michael Easton) tries to find out why. Everything seems to point to Total Rekall?the powerful corporation that offers people virtual vacations anywhere in the universe. Except here the "vacations" are a bit more low-tech than they were in the original?more like a VR set-up you'd buy at Radio Shack. The head of Total Rekall is a wicked and corrupt character (Nick Mancuso) that isn't telling the cops all he knows.
Apart from that, and a quick trip to Mars at the end (which employs clips from the original) it becomes a wholesale rip-off of Blade Runner?without the style or philosophy, even though the cop's name here is "David Hume." There are rogue androids who've been programmed to be more human but only for a short period of time. There's a renegade programmer from the Rekall corp. There's a human character who turns out to be?surprise!?an android. And for some reason they throw in a psychic Ukrainian kid.
It's a delightfully shameless mess. The special effects and set designs are decent, if not mind-blowing (they even steal Blade Runner's Chinatown and giant animated talking Asian billboards). What I found particularly interesting is the fact that the filmmakers, knowingly or not, lifted everything here from Philip K. Dick and then dumbed it down considerably. But I guess that's to be expected, it being made for television and all. But because it's for cable television, there's some boobs and lots of cursing.
The package contains no delightful extras. I'm afraid you're on your own.
?Jim Knipfel
The Apu Trilogy Directed by Satyajit Ray (Sony Pictures)
At this year's National Society of Film Critics meeting, the group spared itself embarrassment by voting down a Boston-based member's proposal that went something like this: "To Peter Jackson for creating the greatest trilogy in the history of motion pictures." Not only was the wording gaseous, but the sentiment was all wrong.
Why no such enthusiasm for Bergman's Silence-of-God trilogy? Antonioni's L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse? The complete corruption-damnation-repentance cycle of Coppola's Godfather trilogy? Or a recent fickle-critics favorite, Kieslowski's Tricoleur trilogy? Peter Jackson himself might admire the Revenge of the Nerds trilogy.
Surely the most ambitious and penetrating film troika is Satyajit Ray's The Apu Trilogy, now available in three glowingly restored DVDs (courtesy of the Merchant/Ivory Foundation's noble, tasteful sponsorship). During the late 50s and early 60s, Ray embarked on the filmmaking inspiration he received working on Jean Renoir's The River and adapted a favored book by Indian novelist Rabindranath Tagore. The first film, Pather Panchali, is certainly a magnificent debut as well as one of the most emotionally affecting movies ever made. Its story of a boy, Apu, growing up in the Indian countryside, examines the workings of family and community with a naturalism and grace still unsurpassed. Ray made the people of an obscure part of the world matter to even the most refined international cineastes.
In the second film, Aparajito, Apu leaves his rural background to be educated. Ray creates a drama around the very meaning of the word education, taking Apu out of his limited existence and introducing the boy to the troubled life of the modernized world and the vanity and pain of the intellect.
By the third film, The World of Apu, Apu comes to adulthood, marriage and fatherhood. So far, each part of the trilogy has been great?stories with moments of real-time, arduous veracity and humbling compassion?but part three shows Ray going from genius to mastery. The World of Apu is an exquisite balance of life's most serene and tragic occurrences. The grown-up Apu is played elegantly by Soumitra Chatterjee, who would become Ray's frequent alter-ego, and the young bride is embodied by Sharmila Tagore in one of the most disarming female characterizations on film. Hobbits cannot match the wonder of these folk.
?Armond White
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes Directed by Sandor Stern (Sterling)
While the rest of us weren't paying attention, someone out there has continued churning out Amityville Horror sequels. I'm not sure why this is, but they keep popping up everywhere?straight to video, on cable?and a remake of the original is in the works right now.
At last count, there were something like eight or nine sequels out there. And to their credit, instead of simply rehashing the same story over and over the way you find in most franchises, the Amityville sequels have grown increasingly ridiculous. There's one about a possessed mirror, another about a possessed clock, one about a possessed dollhouse.
And this one?
There's a gag in an old episode of Family Guy in which Stephen King's editor asks him what his next book is going to be about. King looks around the office, snatches up a desk lamp and says, "It's about?a lamp!?An evil lamp that torments a suburban couple!"
Let's just say the makers of Amityville 4 took that idea and ran with it. It's about a floor lamp possessed by Satan.
After a group of priests perform an exorcism on the Amityville house, the owners decide to have a big yard sale. An old woman picks up a particularly ugly lamp and sends it to her sister in California (Jane Wyatt) as a joke. The lamp arrives the same day her newly widowed daughter (Patty Duke) and three grandchildren move in with her.
Soon enough, the appliances start acting weird and ugly goop comes out of the pipes, chainsaws start by themselves and beloved pets end up in toaster ovens. Plus, the youngest child starts talking to her father's ghost?who appears to her in the lamp. You know how you can tell that something bad is going to happen? The lamp begins to glow. Even after they put it in the attic, and whether or not it's plugged in, once that thing starts glowing?whoa, look out. Meanwhile, a priest who took part in the house exorcism, convinced that Satan is living in that lamp, tries to track it down.
About 20 minutes into the film, I said to myself, aloud, "I'm watching a movie about a haunted lamp."
Interesting thing about the package, though?among the extras is a short "True Story of the Amityville Horror" essay. After pointing out that, yes, there was a brutal murder in the home, it makes no bones about saying that the Lutz family fabricated all those "haunted house" stories in the hopes of making some money. Which leaves me wondering whether or not they're making anything off these sequels.
?Jim Knipfel
Superfly Directed by Gordon H. Parks Jr. (Warner Bros.)
From the comfort of our gentrified, homogenized New York City, circa 2004, it is a fabulous treat to be transported back to the bad old 1970s, to the days of "Ford to City: Drop Dead." And what a treasure trove it is. Gordon Parks Jr.'s film may be short on believable plot, but like a time capsule, Superfly is a wealth of moments, purposeful and accidental, that are richer than the purported narrative.
Archeologists of the recent past will have a field day with the throwaway details: the zooms and pans that, above all, place the film's provenance in the early 1970s of Altman and Coppola; the repeated use of a telephoto lens to lend star Ron O'Neal some iconicity; the "Teddy 71" graffiti visible during a water-side scene; the gritty vibrancy of nighttime Harlem's streets and clubs; the cocaine being cut on a vinyl copy of Sly & the Family Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On, with its iconic American-flag cover.
Ron O'Neal, looking like a slightly less porcine Ron Jeremy, stars as Priest, the suave drug dealer looking to make one last score, etc., etc., etc. Again: The narrative isn't exactly groundbreaking. Priest snorts a lot of coke off the crucifix hanging around his neck, lolls around with his two girlfriends and, when those two leisure-time options are unavailable, looks pensive, purportedly contemplating his future Good Life. To reinforce the notion that Priest is a Real Man, we get multiple close-ups of his bulging crotch, but even these cannot erase the nagging feeling that O'Neal is too soft to be playing such a hard character.
This only reinforces the fact that today Superfly should be enjoyed for its stolen moments. Playing off the success of the previous year's surprise smash, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Superfly presented a world almost solely populated by African-Americans, a fantasy of self-sufficiency born out of the flickering embers of the civil rights movement. Like Stagger Lee, Priest was a bad-ass out to protect his own, but like Malcolm X, he was all heart on the inside. Superfly aims for a moment of pulp poetry in its closing image of Priest driving away scot-free, the glimpsed Empire State Building a symbol of the unlimited possibilities available. Looking back on the film from the distance of 30-plus years, we all know that the icons with legs are Curtis Mayfield's odes to the vigor and tragedy of the drug game, "Pusherman" and "Freddie's Dead."
?Saul Austerlitz