Peter Hoflich

Cool, we had guests come over!

This is the view from my new office desk!

Flash Gordon – I watched this movie when I was 11 years old, haven’t seen it since, although I know it’s become a cult classic (how many times have I heard the Queen song since?!?!). It was great fun to watch it now, in 2012, with my 10-year-old kid, and is just as exciting/campy as I remember it, with the whole wood-beast game of trust/hand grab, the battle on the spiked floating platform with the bullwhips (!!!), the gruesome deaths of Klytus and Kala, not to mention the impalement of Ming by the battleship’s spikey prow. I had forgotten, though, how Flash was nearly eaten by a gruesome swamp beast, only to be saved by Timothy Dalton, who then wants to kill him himself, but is stopped by the Hawkmen, who want to see both of them dead. Nutty. But it all makes sense in an innocent way – at least there’s nothing wrong with the screenplay and plot (unlike some Batman movies I’ve seen).

The Earth’s weather has gone amuck, it’s even being tormented by… hot hail? Mad Dr Zarkov takes Flash and Dale into space for no good reason other than one of them needs to keep his/her foot on the red button so that the g-force doesn’t destroy all of them. They pass out and drift into a Barbarella alien world of lava lamp skies (nice). Great dialogue from Dale: “I was trying to get my head together. By myself. Y’know? This isn’t my scene, Flash.” The scene of Flash football in Ming’s throne chamber is pretty funny. Lots of fighting, torture, near-death experiences. “Lying bitch”, Timothy Dalton says to Princess Aura. “Don’t you love me?” “I don’t trust you.” And she is a bitch, a spoiled hussy who has her own pleasure moon – there’s even a nice catfight between Aura and Dale, some time after Dale is given some sort of space quaaludes to help her stomach Ming’s love thrusts (“Many brave men died bringing this from the Galaxy of Pleasure”). Good fun from beginning to end, even if it is a bit long (funny that it seems long – many of the scenes already look like they were chopped too close to the skin by an over-zealous editor).

Basically, it’s the fun movie that Barbarella should have been, down to the evil queen and everything, but with a traditional macho hero defending his damsel in distress, etc.

Takeshis’ – A brief, skittish, semi-retarded movie, designed to be nonsensical and get viewers to form their own alternate versions of the “reality” of the film in order to be entertaining at parties. “Oh, did you see Takeshis? What do you think it’s about?”

The film is a random series of scenes, most of which have nothing to do with each other, of Takeshi throught the ages, re-enacting scenes from his films, wandering through the film in a selection of characters, but mostly he is either a humble convenience store worker or the famous film director himself. Great audition for a small part – totally crap throughout, he hardly has an opportunity to try. The gangster and his moll mock and tease him at the old apartment where he lives (which looks like a set – ah ha!!!). Flowers are delivered to director Takeshi’s apartment, a caterpillar crawls up the leaves, gamblers rumble in a mahjjong parlor. The bit players get their own scene of tap dancing and percussion, perhaps a deleted track from the Zatoichi soundtrack enacted in Takeshis’ (so as not to waste anything good).

Ultimately, I don’t know what to make of Takeshis’. Maybe I need to see more Takeshi movies.

Throw Momma From The Train – I remember loving this movie the first time I saw it. Watching it with my 10-year-old son wasn’t all that great – the laughs were dark, and few and far between otherwise. But Danny DeVito is somehow charming in this film about a slithery, rodent-like pest of a man who writes bad prose and befriends a downtrodden writer who’s trying hard to make a comeback (romantically and professionally) after his bitchy ex-wife makes a fortune from stealing his book. Wow!

Somehow, Billy Crystal comes off as a geek, a nerd, a creep, with the creepy Owen shining as a shattered mama’s boy. Anne Ramsay is stunning as a rotten harridan of a mother, and she’s fully of real nut bar lines.

Somehow the movie takes its inspiration from Hitchcock’s Strangers On A Train, and off they go. Fortunately, the film has enough heart to spare the depressing ending, and everything ends… darkly… happily ever after. Always nice to expectations reverse.

The DVD comes with a few extras, which are good fun – more scenes of Owen stalking Larry, some intellectual conversations (in passing), and other great fun. Love it.

Recently we saw our old bean stalk wither and die – it had reached the end of its life, that is all.

We planted three of the beans we had harvested from it, and all three have sprouted! We’re so excited, we’ll have a second generation of beans covering the grill outside of our window! Here are some initial pics:

The Neverending Story – I had never seen this innocent child’s tale, probably because it came out in 1984 when I was 15 and a little too old for this sort of thing. Fine. But I was always curious, since it has become such a huge cultural institution, especially in Europe. Now that I have a 10-year-old, it was really the right time to see it and I’m glad that I did when I did – Zen loved it!

The story follows that strange CD Lewis trope of meshing the fantasy world with the real world (The Princess Bride did it again a few years later), with an intro of a young boy on the run from bullies who comes across a mystical book shop with a mystical book that draws him into a faraway land of adventure. Nice.

The weird thing about the book is that there is no enemy, as a vast nothingness is appearing across the land. It is not a hole. “A hole would be something. No, it was nothing. And it got bigger and bigger.” Funny scene as the giant bat sleeps while flying. The rock biter and the weird elves, and also the fairy court of four-faced creatures (they re-appear in the Spy Kids story, somehow), only appear at the first part of the story, when Atreyu takes over. There is reference to all sorts of atavistic, esoteric creatures – Artax, Gmork, Auryn. “It’s getting more interesting by the minute.” Cryptic wise-folk answering questions with deep answers like “not that it matters, but… yes!” We meet Falkor, the luck dragon, who seems more like a dog (or more like an oriental dragon) than a dragon we’d know of. And then:

Why is it so dark?
In the beginning it is always dark.

Nice little tale, looking forward to learning more about the never-ending story (haven’t heard much about it recently – is it really “never-ending”?).

The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter – Another chapter with a different Bastian, a different Atreyu, but more interaction between Bastian and his dad. Bastian enters Fantasia, sees more mystic creatures than last time – Tri-face, the evil attaacker No Face. Falkor is slightly less fake-looking in this version. Wicked over-acting by Bastian and Atreyu both. Weird betrayer bird called Nimbly (highly annoying, highly similar to Hoggle in Labyrinth). The emptiness is coming, and the evil witch Xayide tricks Bastian into frittering away his magic wishes on frivolous things, causing him to lose one memory with each wish (Bastian isn’t aware of the terms and conditions of his magic potion, it seems).

Bastian goes power mad and battles Atreyu, accidentally killing him (?!?!?!). But it all works out well in the end when Bastian learns to use his wishes wisely, and causes the destruction of the evil Xayide. Yay!

Gimme five!
Five what?

Whatever, by Michel Houellebecq – The first novel of Michel Houellebecq follows the Murakami Haruki vein of releasing a promising first novel about nothing that yet (still) hints at the promise to come, before launching a massive national bestseller. In Houellebecq’s case, Whatever (the original French title is Extension du domaine de la lutte, the literal English translation being “broadening the field of struggle”) is a very short novel of only 155 pages discussing the life of a certain drone bee in an IT company who is engaged in the training of his firm’s new software. Vaguely Kafka-esque in terms of its infrastructure, the story meanders around various corporate developments – he’s engaged in a new training programme at the Ministry of Agriculture of France, he ventures forth in this with a bizarre co-worker (the hideously ugly dandy wanna-be playboy virgin Raphael Tisserand) who’s inexplicably killed off, before ultimately going insane and drifting through life from institution to institution. Now sex-less, our narrator regularly becomes delusional, masturbates, and ultimately sets the structure to the more scientific (and more atomised) sequel, called Atomised.

While I am a habitual dog-eared of books, marking the various passages of interest in books I am too lazy to actually take notes about (in my defense, I mainly read books on galumphing buses and trains, where note-taking is near-impossible, even if I can get a seat), I had only done so twice in this book. Let’s see what I took note of:

I spotted a strange graffito in the Sèvres-Babylon Métro station: “God wanted there to be inequality, not injustice” the inscription said. I mused on who the person so well-informed about God’s designs might be.

She didn’t reply at first, thought for a few seconds then asked me:
“When did you last have sexual relations?”
“Just over two years ago”
“Ah!” she exclaimed, almost in triumph. “There you are then! Given that, how can you possibly feel good about life…?”
“Would you be willing to make love to me?”
She was flustered, I think she even blushed a bit. she was forty, thin and very much the worse for wear; but that morning she appeared really charming to me. I have a very tender memory of that moment. She was smiling, somewhat despite herself; I even thought she was going to say yes. But finally she collected herself:
“That’s not my role. As a psychologist my role is to equip you to undertake the process of seduction so that you might again have normal relations with young women.”
For the remaining sessions she had herself replaced by a male colleague.

How clever. How so very clever…

The Dark Knight Rises – The latest Batman movie, which is touted as the end of the series (which is silly – what insane/suicidal Hollywood executive would allow a cash cow like this to end) is not a good movie, connected in spirit and continuity to the inferior first film; sadly, nothing about this one harkens to the quality of the second film, aka Heath Ledger’s last film.

Once again Bruce Wayne is in retreat and brooding in his mansion. He gets drawn out by the treat of someone called Bane, and encouraged by “Miranda Tate” (an all-new character in the Batman universe) to come out. So many people in this film seem to know that Bruce Wayne is Batman that it hardly seems like he has a secret identity any more. There’s goofy stuff about Commissioner Gordon’s moral lapse in living the Harvey Dent lie, which cleans up Gotham City, the Catwoman’s life dilemma (she has to steal to get her life back from the thugs she is in hock to), and then some grand scheme to bring anarchy to Gotham (turning it into a sort of reverse Escape From New York universe, combined with Robespierre’s Reign of Terror). Yes, Bane wins, until we find out that he isn’t the real ringleader; great, just like Batman Begins with that phony Ra’s Al Ghul thing.

So many things are wrong with this movie, such as the way that the movie deviates from the root characters (Bane’s origin has no connection to Thalia Al Ghul, who is treated very lightly here – she is, after all, a longstanding Batman character and is just as close to him as to her own father, and also fathererd his child), how heavily armed thugs tend to fight with their fists than their guns against unarmed opponents like Batman and Robin, and there are many other problems. For instance, there’s a scene when Bane is choking Batman with a thin rope despite Batman’s thick neck armor. Then later, Batman’s thrown into a pit in India (how did he get there) after being bankrupted after a phony attack on the New York Stock Exchange. Gahhh…!!! His broken back heals over several months in captivity in a prison pit, and he manages to climb a wall of death to freedom.

While I didn’t enjoy the first and third of the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, the series’ casting is truly impeccable, with the exception, I suppose, of Katie Holmes at Rachel Dawes and maybe also Marion Cotillard as “Marion Tate”, both of whom are truly inexplicable love interests for Bruce Wayne (especially Tate, in that there’s no indication of mutual attraction or respect, with their too-close-for-comfort fling more like a one night stand than anything).

The movie we watched this 2.5 hour film in had the air conditioning on full blast, I really suffered. Watch this on DVD.

Batman & Robin – I thought it would be cool to watch both “final” Batman films in the same day, so after watching The Dark Knight Rises in the theater on a Saturday afternoon with my wife, I went home and watched Batman & Robin with my wife and my ten-year-old son Zen (an Arnold Schwarzenegger fan). The differences between the Schumacher films and the Nolan films are glaring, most notably the casting – only Poison Ivy is well-cast, and she even gets some horrible, clunky dialogue, eventually learning to vamp it up like Mae West, and also a little bit of Anita Pallenberg (using her Black Queen’s sinister “Hello my pretty pretty” line from Barbarella). There’s also the use of bad jokes in the series, the smug handsomeness of George Clooney (without a trace of brooding) in this film in particular, the peckerish brattiness of Chris O’Donnell’s Robin (true to the character of the historical Robin, but who wants to see that in a modern update?), the chunky uselessness of Alicia Silverstone’s Batgirl, and the thick make-up applied to Arnold (not to mention the useless glittering plastic items that are strapped to his body, and his flimsy ice gun, etc). The art direction, with its mammoth set pieces, is also a strong negative in this movie (and parts of the series) as well as its heavy use of black-neon contrast and the oafishness of the action scenes. The film of this film finally also bears more similarity to the Adam West series than even to the earlier Tim Burton Batman, with cartoonish violence and silly plot twists.

The movie’s intro is totally bombastic, with over-the-top graphics and close-ups of Batman and Robin’s rubbery battle suits, including their rubber butts and crotches, not to mention fake six-pack abs and nipples stamped onto their fronts. There’s Bat/Robin bickering, “I want the car – chicks dig the car,” says Robin. “This is why Superman works alone,” Batman retorts (we chortle). The hockey team from hell plays with a diamond the size of your fist (Freeze needs a bunch of these, it seems, to complete his evil plan to freeze the world). Pamela Isley, working with mad scientist Jonathan Woodrue, has an attack of conscience when she overhears Woodrue creating superthug Bane out of a chemical called Venom to auction him off to global terrorist organizations, “Fellow maniacs – bidding begins!” Poison Ivy is created a la the Swamp Thing, and the flaky, oatmeal-ish tree hugger Isley becomes a seductress/eco-terrorist. “Come, Bane darling, we’ve got a plane to catch.” There’s a great clumsy vampy scene as an Afro-American bunny tries to seduce Mr Freeze (“C’mon, Freeze baby, let’s warm things up”). Fail. Interesting note – the song “Poison Ivy” is played big band style when Poison Ivy enters the charity auction. Nice. She does a slutty come-on to everyone in the room that has to be heard to be believed. Batman flashes his Batman AmEx card, “Never leave the cave without it.” Nice Standard Chartered Bank colours around the room. Lots of bad ice/cool puns, such as “cool party, ha ha ha…”, etc etc etc. Neon pink squatter punks try to beat up Mr Freeze. Poison Ivy: “It took God seven days to create paradise; I can do better.” Oooohhh… a little full of ourselves here, aren’t we?

And who is Bruce’s phony girlfriend, Julie Madison, played here by Elle Macpherson? Seems like they dug through the files for this one – Madison had been Batman’s first girlfriend from 1939-1941, appearing four issues after he did.

Interestingly, when the character of Mr Freeze was introduced in 1959 (then named Mr Zero) he was actually Batman’s first supervillain, as he’d previously just fought thugs and gangsters.

Kindergarten Cop – I thought of this as a wimpy movie, with Arnold mugging badly with the kids, but I forgot that there are two murders, one quite brutal, and the bad guy gets shot dead at the end (with his mother finding his dead body – brrrrrr!!! What mother, no matter how creepy and evil, deserves that…).

The story follows Detective John Kimble, a big city detective whose marriage has fallen apart because of his singular dedication to arresting scumbags. His sole quarry now is Cullen Crisp, a vain scumbag with his long hair in a ponytail who makes sure that he has a manicure before he kills someone, or steals candy from a baby, etc. Kimble goes undercover as a kindergarten teacher when he finds out that Cullen’s ex-wife (who could testify against him) has moved out to a small town, Astoria, in Oregon, “the divorcee capital of the world.” The highlights of the movie are probably Pamela Reed, who poses as Kimble’s sister and does a great German accent posing as Schwarzenegger’s sister (she also brings along a hilarious fiancee/chef, the bumbling Bob Nelson), and the magnificent Linda Hunt, who plays a school principal. Schwarzenegger’s interaction with the kids is not too bad as he often gets to play up to his background in athletics for some of the teaching scenes, although I still think he’s still too goofy to be playing a non-Terminator. But there are some good lines:

Is your wife okay?
Compared to What?

I hate feeling like this. [barfs]
I hate it too.

When the kids are introducing their parents: “My dad’s divorced, my mom’s divorced…” “My dad’s a gynecologist, he looks at vaginas all day long.” The twins inform Kimble “our mom says that our dad is a real sex machine.” When Kimble is smitten with his colleague, Reed says “relax butch, the love doctor’s here.” Not a bad little film, but a little underwhelming from the director of Ghostbusters and other blockbuster films (they’d surely have hoped Kindergarten Cop would be just as big, right?). Maybe he blew his budget securing Schwarzenegger.

Spy Kids, Spy Kids 2 – Great film, great opening of a camera moving along a beach and into the window of a house on the shore and into the bedroom of two young kids, Carmen and Gerti. Nice. Cool flashback scene as their mom, Ingrid, tells the story of two spies who are on enemy camps initially but eventually fall in love. Nice scene of their wedding being blasted to bits, then the two escaping in a speedboat, attack helicopters in pursuit, as they go off on their honeymoon. Of course it’s no fairy tale, but it’s “How I Met Your Mother”, only the kids don’t know that it’s not a fairy tale… yet. Wonderful setup for the film, flawless. Eventually things come crashing down, real life enters the kids’ world, and off they go to save their parents, bumbling all the way. Actor Daryl Sabara, who plays Juni, was only nine years old at the time. He’s charming and innocent, but believable somehow; interesting gag about one of them still being in diapers… until we find out that it isn’t Juni. The two kids have nice sibling rivalry, they have real emotional issues (Juni is bullied, has no friends, Carmen plays hooky all the time and goes off to… Belize?).

Robert Patrick is great in the movie as Mr Lisp, an evil billionaire funding a secret project to create android decoys (he’s a tough guy, but otherwise doesn’t give in to the temptation to reprise his role as T-1000 from Terminator 2), Tony Shaloub is good as Minion (he is a minion), George Clooney suave as a secret service director, and Teri Hatcher plays a certain treacherous Ms Gradenko (remember the Police song from Synchronicity?). And yes, Danny Trejo is in the movie as Isador “Machete” Cortez, their real uncle (Cheech Marin plays their fake uncle – a joke that gets recycled a bit in the sequel).

Very nice little film – too bad the sequel lacks its smarts, character development and charm (and interesting cameos).

Spy Kids 2: The Island Of Lost Dreams – Hardly as good as the original, nor with any of the interesting cameos of the original, this film has a half-hearted Steve Buscemi playing an evil scientist, a role nearly as irritatingly underwhelming as his appearance in another big budget sequel, Escape From LA (at least fellow Coen Brothers alumni John Torturro put some oomph into his role as Simmons in the otherwise-awful Transformers films). There’s also Latin screen legend Ricardo Montalbalm as Jini and Carmen’s grandfather.

The plot revolves around Juni and Carmen going on their own first mission, to locate a hidden island that’s full of strange mutated creatures. Their parents and grandparents, bickering the whole time like children themselves, go out to rescue them. It’s all very silly, including rival Spy Kids Garry and Gerty Giggles, children of traitorous OSS chief Donnagon Giggles (wasn’t he in the first movie? He was, and he’s played by… Mike Judge, creator of Beavis and Butthead, and King Of The Hill). Danny Trujo and Cheech Marin have small roles, it’s good to see them indeed. It really feels like a Robert Rodriguez movie. The movie is packed with really cheap-looking CG, almost unbearable. Apparently, Rodriguez turned down the studio’s offer for more money to get more expensive effects, going for wacky and creative, not smooth-looking. So that’s why the film looks so cheap. The only thing that looks good is the skeleton battle… an homage to the 1963 film Jason And The Argonauts (and in a sincere/opportunistic tribute to the innovative film, Rodriguez’ jerky and fake-looking battling skeletons make it look like technology hasn’t advanced a step since 1963).

But some of the lines are good, like when Donnagan talks to the President: “Thank you, Mr President, that will be all.” Or when Gerti says “I’m looking forward to retirement” (he’s ten years old). “Skeletons… dead skeletons.”

We’re kids, not monsters.
What’s the difference?