p e n g u i n d e v i l

I do not have a lot of chances to go “out”. I have limited time during the week, limited baby sitter options, and limited wherewithal to arrange anything. That said, last month I did the arranging and actually went out to see a movie. A movie that I didn’t know much about, but had seen the preview and it looked rather entertaining… The Dead Don’t Die.



Heading into it was a bit of a mixed bag. Of course, Zombie comedies are a mixed bag on their own… Most are bad, but Shaun of the Dead and Return of the Living Dead are timeless classics, so there is certainly potential.

And I don’t really like Jarmusch’s movies. The ones that I’ve seen (Down By Law, Mystery Train, Night On Earth, Coffee and Cigarettes) have basically felt like boring movies that have a few interesting scenes (most notable was the unexpected thrill of seeing Screaming Jay Hawkins show up in Mystery Train). Coffee and Cigarettes would be the only one that I would have an interest in re-watching. So I wasn’t exactly excited about it being a Jarmusch movie, but I figured that might make for an interesting zombie movie.

Anyway, so this movie… It stars Bill Murray (who I love but who has been known to do some questionable things), Adam Driver (who I only know as Kylo Ren and was interested in seeing him do something else), Chloe Sevigny (who I generally like and respect her typical take no crap attitude), and a number of other people of merit who I assume are doing this just for kicks (Danny Glover, Steve Buscemi, Tilda Swinton, Iggy Pop, RZA, etc etc). I enjoyed Adam Driver’s dry frankness, Bill Murray was fine as Bill Murray, and I liked RZA’s Wu-dropping appearance as a delivery driver.

But, beyond that, it was rather annoying. Way way too much breaking the forth wall (in ways that felt dull, trite, and totally unneeded), Chloe’s girlie girl role was too girlie girl for Chloe to play (it just came off as insulting or a weird joke), Tilda Swinton seemed as if she was just here passing time between takes in some other movie (through she was pretty refreshing at times compared to many of the others), Iggy Pop’s parts were silly, Tom Waits part is, sadly, forgettable. A lot of the “angle” was overly contrived and got a bit hard to bear at times. Obviously it is intended as a political and social satire, but that is made way too obvious. Yes, Jim… We get it… Over and over again. People are robots, society is stupid and trite, politics is a ridiculous scam. Yes, thanks. Anyway, just not my cup of tea… I think I would have preferred it as a 20 minute short.

Well, well, well… Six years and here I am again. Okay, and then some. I actually started this post eight months ago and got one paragraph into it…

Anyway, back then, I went to a movie gathering with some friends and it got me to thinking about movies in a more social sense again…

Originally, I wanted to do a little blurb about Science Fiction movies. I ended up doing something and put it on my current blog, but, hey, may as well start this up again as, for the umpillionth time, thinking about it made me want to reopen this blog and see if I can keep it going. I always had fun with it. So let’s see if I can figure it out…

The movie that I saw socially was Gravity. Now, I’d seen it before, but all I could remember about it was that it was non-stop and rather stressful. The second time around? The same… Non-stop and stressful. It was nicely shot and quite exciting, but there were two things that I found super distracting… First, George Clooney’s attitude. So unbelievably casual and unprofessional. It was a bit hard to take him seriously as an astronaut when he kept carrying on like he was just in the midst of being a jerk in the playground. Secondly, the nearness of everything. Space is huge, orbits are set off from each other, different things are at much different altitudes, and those things that they hopped between (Hubble, ISS, and Chinese station), are no where near each other. Maybe just little things done in the name of making the movie work, but those kind of things gnaw at me and distract me from getting into it. However, it’s still pretty fun to watch, if you can stand the stress.

But, on to other movies. Since I can’t really sum up seven years of missed movies, I’ll mention what is probably the movie I’ve watched the most in those years… Interstellar.



This has turned out to be one of my all-time favorite movies. A dystopian future in which food is running out, things are wearing out, and people are just trying to survive on what’s left. Things like the space program and anything else considered frivolous have been tossed aside. However, a farmer, who happens to be a former test pilot from the old days when people wasted their time with stuff like that, is informed by his daughter that a ghost is talking to her. In this new era of dying crops and everything running out, everything is very dusty, which is unpleasant and unhealthy but very helpful for her ghost. It turns out that is becomes obvious that some kind of communication is coming to her…. And once they try to decipher it, everything changes…

The story of sending a ship through a wormhole to a different galaxy in the hopes of finding some place for humanity to survive. It is a great romp. A fun, yet very serious, realistic-feeling space adventure. With some romance, and betrayal and murder and really unique looking robots. But what really takes off is the science. The planets on the other side of the wormhole orbit a black hole, and the science and gravity and time effects of the black hole are covered in many fascinating ways, as it the black hole itself and the singularity and the meaning of time and space and, hold on, Gravity!