The Retouchables: RoboCop

Peter Weller in RoboCop '87: I will call you "Murphy," and Murphy when you call me you can call me "Al."

Today! Right now! Right here! The first installment of The Retouchables, an irregular but recurring feature I'll be writing for NPR Monkey See about reboots and remakes and re-remakes and, just maybe, bootmakers. IN THIS EPISODE: RoboCop!

 José Padilha's remake opened at number four with a bullet last weekend, so the time just felt right. This'll be all on RoboCop for a while, I promise.

Documentaries Documented

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Jessica Oreck's Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys is beautifully photographed and almost wordless.

In this week's Village Voice, I review the documentaries Mercedes Sosa: The Voice of Latin America, Life Is Strange, and Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys. That last one, which is about reindeer herders in Finnish Lapland, probably sounds like the hardest sell subject-wise but it's the best of the trio by a good margin.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: More Hobbits, and Christmas Music

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1973's Magnum Force inverted the premise of its prequel, Dirty Harry.

Thanks to Pop Culture Happy Hour full-timers Stephen Thompson, Glen Weldon, and host Linda Holmes for inviting me back on the podcast this week to talk about The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, and a subject closer to my heart than that one, Christmas music. Have I mentioned that I'm very interested in Christmas music?

Our dissection of that enervating Hobbit movie feeds into a discussion of second installments, and some of the ones that really work. If you haven't seen Magnum Force in a while, there's no time like the present, Christmas T-minus five.

You can listen here or download the podcast from iTunes here. 

One element of our Hobbit talk that got cut for time was when I mentioned that I'd sought out a "High Frame Rate" presentation of this movie, because I'm interested in where action pictures might be headed. I remember James Cameron mentioning HFR as a potential new frontier in interviews from more than ten years ago, well before Avatar. (He has announced that Avatar's four sequels, coming in 2016, 2017, and 2018, will be released in HFR.)

I've read that director Peter Jackson messed with the color grading of the HFR version of Smaug in response to complaints that the prior Hobbit movie had a cheap, daytime-soap look. I love the irony that the newest, priciest filmmaking technology has the effect of making this megafranchise look like a shot-on-video-for-peanuts Dr. Who episode.

Anyway, whatever Jackson did seemed to my eyes to be for naught. Smaug has a distracting, video-gamey look that conspired with its pointlessly roaming camerawork to make everything in the frame feel weightless. I had a tougher time suspending my disbelief watching The Desolation of Smaug than I do watching the original 1933 King Kong, or a Ray Harryhausen joint. The illusion of weight, not size, is what makes impossible visions seem real.

Rosebud the Sled: Spoilers, considered.

1968: Humanity learns the location of the Planet of the Apes.

Last year, a brilliant new play premiered at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company called Mr. Burns, a Post-Apocalyptic Play. Everyone who reviewed it told their readers far too much about it. Everyone but me... he said modestly.

The cycle repeated itself when Mr. Burns opened last month at Playwrights Horizons in New York City. So I wrote this for the Village Voice.

Pros and Khans, or Star Trek into Dorkness: How the new movie reflects a 32-year-old battle for a 47-year-old franchise's soul.

I once attended a midnight screening of the Cadillac of Star Trek films -- that would be numero dos, The Wrath of Khan -- wherein the projector bulb burnt out right in the middle of Mr. Spock's heroic death scene. If the theater hadn't given us four free movie passes to compensate for this effrontery against all that is good and decent, I would have suspected an especially cruel prank, perhaps orchestrated by a partisan of the bloodless, squeaky-clean Next Generation-flavored Star Trek, which I suppose is okay if vanilla is what you like.

Naturally, I had to dig up my Khan DVD at home and watch the final 10 minutes before I could go to sleep that night. Spock's grand and tragic expiration would soon be reversed in a not-so-good movie with the surprise-negating subtitle The Search for Spock, but whatever.​

All of which is to say that my love for The Wrath of Khan is mean and true. And it fascinates me that that film, more than any other of the hundreds and hundreds of subsequent Star Trek items (a great number of which -- like the entire Deep Space Nine and Voyager and Enterprise series, for instance -- I've never seen or read), remains the primary source document that continues to guide the cinematic Star Trek universe, especially in the heavily Khan-indebted new movie Star Trek into Darkness.

J.J. Abrams' second Trek film  takes a generation-old, backstage fight over the meaning and purpose of Star Trek and drags it right to the center of the camera-flare-buffered frame. I make my case today on NPR's Monkey See blog.

​On further reflection, I guess The Wrath of Khan is really more like the Toyota Corolla of Trek than the Cadillac. It was the lowest-budgeted of the theatrical films by a good margin, and yet it's proven, three decades on, to be the most reliable one.

Oh, and I really wanted to quote John C. McGinley's unforgettable, rhymed description of Keanu Reeves' character in Point Break to describe Chris Pine's portrayal of the young horndog Kirk in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek pictures. Unsurprisingly, that didn't make it past Standards & Practices at NPR. But I tried, you guys. I tried.​

Another Tango in Paris After That Supposedly Last One: Simon Killer, reviewed.

Brady Corbet & Mati Diop in Simon KIller.​

My review of Simon Killer, writer/director Antonio Campos's second feature film, is in the Village Voice today. Total Recall joke deleted, but the Blow-Up and Taxi Driver and Rushmore allusions (and the Rush Hour 3 joke!) remain. Film critics are terrible people. Read it here.

That said, I'm about to see one of my favorite specimens of that loathsome breed, Mr. Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune and Filmspotting. Tomorrow I'm off to Louisville, Kentucky, where Phillips and I will both be covering the final weekend of the Humana Festival of New American Plays as part of Engine 31 -- theater journalism's equivalent of The Avengers, basically. More on that a little later.