I think I’ll make tonight a streaming double feature:
1- From Netflix, Transcendent Man, a documentary about the speculative ideas of Ray Kurzweil.
2- From PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery series, episode two of the second season of Sherlock, “The Hounds of Baskerville.”
Double feature, tonight: 2011 version of The Three Musketeers, with Milla Jovovich playing the Tom Cruise part in Mission Impossible.
Tonight’s movie: Sketches of Frank Gehry.
[Added after watching the documentary.] I now like some of his buildings more than I did. I already liked the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, of course; and I still don’t like the MIT Stata Center (form should bend a little to function, I think, and people who work there tell me it’s the best argument for telecommuting).
Evening movie: Jeremy Clarkson’s Supercars.
Yes, that’s a Gee-Whiz crash testing into a kitchen table. The table was ok.
Huh. Last time I saw the guy, he was the head MBS trader in an investment bank. And what is Nikita (the lesser version) doing fighting vampires?
Nope, not watching Resident Evil. Instead I’ll watch a documentary about the design and operation of the specialized salvage ship Glomar Explorer and Operation Azorian, when the CIA tried to recover a sunk Soviet submarine.
Huh. There’s probably an entry in the DSM-V about people who’d rather watch documentaries about Cold-War era secret naval missions than dumb movies with fast-moving supermodels.
I think it’s called “being an engineer.”
I think I’ll watch the first Resident Evil movie tonight. Perhaps make a marathon of it and watch all four. I can’t quite explain my attraction to these movies, though… I generally find zombie movies stupid, modern action movies overdone with CGI, and movies based on computer games too derivative.
![A tale of two remakes: Nikita and Conan, The Barbarian
The remake of La Femme Nikita wins on production values over the original. That’s good, because it loses on almost everything else.
Story: both use unthinking action scripts. The running backstory for the original was that of an internally crypto-fascist organization that was working towards the common good (mostly); the remake suffers from the 2000s TV show problem of trying to make political points.
Guns: Much better guns in the remake and much more poorly used. In the original, characters used handguns, MP5s, and the occasional sniper rifle, usually when appropriate. In the remake, the weapons are so overdone that Nikita shoots a HS50 .50 BMG into a hotel to take down a bad guy from across the street. That slug would take down the bad guy and pass through all the internal walls of the hotel, then continue across a few more buildings. It’s an anti-materiel weapon designed to be shot from a mile away! But looks good with her outfit.
Michael: Good God Almighty, could the remake Michael be more of a whiner? Ron Dupuis’s wooden acting was precisely what a cold-blooded killer requires. Michael Samuelle never complained or argued, even when sent on a suicide mission. The new Michael is “modern man” and, in the current parlance, needs to man up. And shut up.
[Added 3/5/12.] Lyndsy Fonseca. Whenever she’s on screen, I root for Zetrov. The original had likable sidekicks, at least.
Nikita: Fashion model vs. martial arts movie star. No contest, Peta Wilson wins by miles: she’s gorgeously charming, her Nikita has been unjustly dragooned into service unlike Maggie Q’s, and her australian accent softens everything she says. Neither is credible as a commando, obviously. Maggie Q may know martial arts, but that doesn’t mean that she could knock out a OMON-trained 250Lbs-of-muscle Zetrov bodyguard with a punch. Peta’s Nikita uses her smile more than her fists, which plays to the actress’s strengths.
— • —
The remake of Conan, the Barbarian also has much better production values than the original. It shares a few names and minimal context with the original. Otherwise it’s a completely different movie.
Story: Are you kidding me? Story? Ok: fight; fight; more fight; fight; damsel in distress; fight; fight; fight in extremis with the bad guy; Conan wins. Oh, should I have put SPOILER there?
Gore: Not for the squeamish. Think John Woo-level detail of blade-vs-flesh encounters and some really disgusting expulsion of assorted body parts and bodily fluids.
Bad Guy: Stephen Lang plays to his strengths as a bad guy (as in Avatar) and exhibits stereotypical bad guy leadership (unlike his good guy leadership in Terra Nova). His makeup is so good that I didn’t recognize him; the voice sounded familiar so I paid attention in the credits. But James Earl Jones plays a better bad guy: he was calmly evil, while Lang’s is too involved and comes across as insecure and immature in his evil-ness.
Young Conan: Great scene of young Conan doing the Cimmerian version of a SEAL Evolution which turns into a real fight. Nothing like this in the original. Definitely a plus for the remake.
Conan: Jason Momoa, who provided comic relief and hand-to-hand combat scenes in Stargate Atlantis, acts much better than the original Conan, Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Not that hard, really: he’s basically playing his Stargate Atlantis Ronon Dex character with minimal changes.) But he doesn’t really look like comic book Conan. Ahnuld might be a terrible actor, but he had the muscles for the part. As with the original we are subjected to a gratuitous and unnecessary shot of Conan’s naked buttocks.
Verdict
Nikita is worth watching — if there’s no Masterpiece Mystery — for Maggie Q, for laughing at bad tactics and gun use, and for Xander Berkeley’s great acting (playing “Operations”).
Conan, the barbarian is a good action movie, not for the squeamish. It would be better if it had a different title character and didn’t try to link itself to the original or the comic book character.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0cdvxWOsN1qaiztzo1_1280.jpg)
A tale of two remakes: Nikita and Conan, The Barbarian
The remake of La Femme Nikita wins on production values over the original. That’s good, because it loses on almost everything else.
Story: both use unthinking action scripts. The running backstory for the original was that of an internally crypto-fascist organization that was working towards the common good (mostly); the remake suffers from the 2000s TV show problem of trying to make political points.
Guns: Much better guns in the remake and much more poorly used. In the original, characters used handguns, MP5s, and the occasional sniper rifle, usually when appropriate. In the remake, the weapons are so overdone that Nikita shoots a HS50 .50 BMG into a hotel to take down a bad guy from across the street. That slug would take down the bad guy and pass through all the internal walls of the hotel, then continue across a few more buildings. It’s an anti-materiel weapon designed to be shot from a mile away! But looks good with her outfit.
Michael: Good God Almighty, could the remake Michael be more of a whiner? Ron Dupuis’s wooden acting was precisely what a cold-blooded killer requires. Michael Samuelle never complained or argued, even when sent on a suicide mission. The new Michael is “modern man” and, in the current parlance, needs to man up. And shut up.
[Added 3/5/12.] Lyndsy Fonseca. Whenever she’s on screen, I root for Zetrov. The original had likable sidekicks, at least.
Nikita: Fashion model vs. martial arts movie star. No contest, Peta Wilson wins by miles: she’s gorgeously charming, her Nikita has been unjustly dragooned into service unlike Maggie Q’s, and her australian accent softens everything she says. Neither is credible as a commando, obviously. Maggie Q may know martial arts, but that doesn’t mean that she could knock out a OMON-trained 250Lbs-of-muscle Zetrov bodyguard with a punch. Peta’s Nikita uses her smile more than her fists, which plays to the actress’s strengths.
— • —
The remake of Conan, the Barbarian also has much better production values than the original. It shares a few names and minimal context with the original. Otherwise it’s a completely different movie.
Story: Are you kidding me? Story? Ok: fight; fight; more fight; fight; damsel in distress; fight; fight; fight in extremis with the bad guy; Conan wins. Oh, should I have put SPOILER there?
Gore: Not for the squeamish. Think John Woo-level detail of blade-vs-flesh encounters and some really disgusting expulsion of assorted body parts and bodily fluids.
Bad Guy: Stephen Lang plays to his strengths as a bad guy (as in Avatar) and exhibits stereotypical bad guy leadership (unlike his good guy leadership in Terra Nova). His makeup is so good that I didn’t recognize him; the voice sounded familiar so I paid attention in the credits. But James Earl Jones plays a better bad guy: he was calmly evil, while Lang’s is too involved and comes across as insecure and immature in his evil-ness.
Young Conan: Great scene of young Conan doing the Cimmerian version of a SEAL Evolution which turns into a real fight. Nothing like this in the original. Definitely a plus for the remake.
Conan: Jason Momoa, who provided comic relief and hand-to-hand combat scenes in Stargate Atlantis, acts much better than the original Conan, Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Not that hard, really: he’s basically playing his Stargate Atlantis Ronon Dex character with minimal changes.) But he doesn’t really look like comic book Conan. Ahnuld might be a terrible actor, but he had the muscles for the part. As with the original we are subjected to a gratuitous and unnecessary shot of Conan’s naked buttocks.
Verdict
Nikita is worth watching — if there’s no Masterpiece Mystery — for Maggie Q, for laughing at bad tactics and gun use, and for Xander Berkeley’s great acting (playing “Operations”).
Conan, the barbarian is a good action movie, not for the squeamish. It would be better if it had a different title character and didn’t try to link itself to the original or the comic book character.
And this is one of the times when I go ballistic! I understand, rationally, that the monetization decisions of the content owners are theirs to make; I understand that Netflix depends on content owners’ decisions; I even understand that it might make sense to pulse the availability of niche products.
But I still go ballistic with this destruction of customer value for revenue model purposes. It’s almost down to the level of airlines and telcos.
And people wonder why music lovers prefer owning the music to subscribing to services. Well, here’s one reason (among many): if it’s mine you can’t take it away. (That’s also why people hate DRM that “calls home.”)
