I always get the jitters when a main actor/actress (in this case, Mark Harmon of N.C.I.S. fame as “Certain Prey’s” protagonist, Lucas Davenport) is also one of the movie’s “Executive Producers”. Executive Producers are usually money-people, financial backers, because they have a lot of it, and more often than not — if they happen to be actors or actresses — land big parts in the movie. Sometimes, that can be a good thing. But don’t count on it. Right from the opening scenes, it is terribly obvious “Certain Prey” Minneapolis Deputy Police Chief, Lucas Davenport was not going to be the author, John Sanford’s in-depth Lucas Davenport characterization we are all familiar with at all. Nope. Instead, this movie’s Lucas Davenport/Executive Producer is, uh — Mark Harmon, famous N.C.I.S. team leader turned character-actor in the flesh, fresh off the N.C.I.S. set. I swear, I kept waiting for the rest of the goofy N.C.I.S. cast to burst onto the screen.
“Certain Prey” is one of the most poorly-cast movies I’ve ever seen*. Period. The only character with even a smidgeon of the novel series’ authentic flavor is actress Athena Karkanis, who played the novels’ sultry sidekick cop, “Marcy Sherrill” character.
“Certain Prey” is a stinker. A real letdown. Here’s an online movie comment I fully agree with: “It sucked and then some…” Yep. It did that.
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Tim says: *Perhaps only to be eclipsed by an upcoming (author Lee Child) “Jack Reacher” novel movie, wherein the super bad-ass 6′ 5″ Jack Reacher charcter/protaganist is portrayed — amid a flurry of negative moviegoer criticism — by a wimpy 5′ 7″ Tom Cruise. More than likely, it will suck “and then some”, too.
I like author John Sanford’s “Prey” novels. You know, the ones that have the word “prey” in all the titles. The ones that are so difficult to remember if you’ve read or not. I like Sanford’s protagonist, Lucas Davenport. A lot. I like actor Mark Harmon, wizened team leader of N.C.I.S. fame. And I like movies.
Guess what I’m going to be recording tonight (May 2, 1012) at 2 AM, EST on the USA Channel? John Sanford’s “Certain Prey“. That’s what.
Tim says: it’s time once again to flush out wacky preview guide snippets. Based purely on these plot lines, it’d be fun to have been a fly on the wall during the hype and subsequent pitch to whichever movie producers finally decided these screenplays were destined for box office greatness. Or not.
VALERIE FLAKE 1999
“A nice guy with an ill-tempered mother pursues an embittered widow who drinks, bed-hops, and demeans sympathizers.”
I particularly like the “demeans sympathizers” phrase. Not sure, though, what it means.
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RETURN OF THE SWAMP THING 1989
“A mad scientist’s vegetarian stepdaughter falls in love with one of his leafy failures.”
I watched this movie for about twenty minutes just because I wanted to see Heather Locklear eating salad.
“A woman from Indiana uses a magic ring to turn two rats into dates for her teen friends.”
Why pick on Indiana? Why not a woman from Iowa, or Kansas, or – - just “A woman uses a magic ring to turn two rats into dates for her teen friends.” Never mind. I still wouldn’t have watched it.
“Stuck in an all night doughnut shop, a vampire hunts a rat, saves a cab driver from things, and deals with an ex-girlfriend.”
I used to dive a cab. My things were never saved. Not even by vampires. Of course, maybe the rat was in the cab while the vampire was being driven to the doughnut shop. Naw. More importantly — how come “donuts” can also be spelled “doughnuts”?
It didn’t matter where you were in the Florida Centennial State Fairgrounds: the “SLINGSHOT” ride was always visible, towering — Godzilla-like — above the carnival skyline, daring you to rearrange your roving in order to take a closer look. I’d wager to say NO ONE passed by the other-worldly SLINGSHOT without standing silently for several minutes, head askew, looking straight up and wondering what kind of fool would pay $20 to be launched into space like that.
“90 MILES PER HOUR IN UNDER THREE SECONDS! 5 G-FORCES!”
. . .is what a simple black, red and white sign nestled just beneath a $20 ticket price and a hoard of screeching seagulls boasted.
What other kind of fool is there?
“Hey, Pat,” I exclaimed. “Let’s do it!”
Coney Island's CYCLONE
I recalled a similar carny moment forty years prior when we both had stood in front of Coney Island’s infamous wooden-tracked “CYCLONE” roller-coaster ride. Only that time it was Pat who asked ME the same question. “Uh, uh,” I had stammered back then. “Not me.” But to no avail. Literally dragged onto the rickety ride, I remember screaming nonstop and nearly peeing my pants. “Wow, let’s do it again!” Pat had gushed back then, long before those intervening years caught up with her depthless curiosity, or — perhaps – wisdom had merely won out.
“No way, Tim,” said Pat emphatically in the here and now, watching the SLINGSHOT fling two screaming passengers hundreds of feet into the air in a matter of nanoseconds. “Some rides are best taken from a distance.”
“Aw, come-on, Pat,” I pleaded. “Remember when we went last year on that Bush Gardens ride — the one that flipped us upside down in cork-screwy loop-de-loops? That was FUN!”
“Not the same thing,” she said. “No, YOU go on. I’ll wait over by the corn dog stand.”
Left brain: NO! Right brain: NO!
Now, undecided about taking the Florida Stare Fair SLINGSHOT ride sitting next to a total stranger, I began checking out the structural integrity and underlying engineering principles of the SLINGSHOT ride; my brain started clicking. (I do exactly the same thing while sitting in the window seat of a Delta airliner just before takeoff: Flaps down? Engine connected firmly to the wing? Any sounds of screeching metal against metal? Brownish fluid dripping from the wingtips? Ground crew appears alert and on top of things?)
The SLINGSHOT consisted of a two-passenger seat suspended dubiously on two metal guy wires that hung down from either side of twin erector-set towers (sturdy masts of super-cranes that once worked on mile-high skyscrapers or perhaps in a shipyard?). A 20×20-foot spring assembly, made up of literally HUNDREDS of individual and tightly-coiled steel springs, was hydraulically winched down immediately before every launch sequence using a classic Rube Goldberg pulley system. The cocking process took a couple of minutes, during which time I was able to clearly note the whites of the passengers’ eyes flashing like disturbed stars just before going supernova.
And then, without warning of any kind, WOOOOSHHHH!
Here is a YOU Tube video of the SLINGSHOT ride. In this version I notice a cage surrounding the two riders has been added. The one my sister and I watched was an open air two-seater. You get the idea…
Just like a ball bearing hurled from a gigantic slingshot, the terrified passengers TWANG! into deep space, clamped firmly to their seat by restraining devices similar to vice grips. At the apogee of the flight, the chair seat turns briefly upside down in near zero gravity before plummeting back to the earth in true bungee-cord freefall fashion. Major screaming going on here. Up and down. Springs creaking. Up and down again. Way MORE screaming, passengers gyrating like yo-yos amid a sudden cloudburst of corn-dog-colored confetti.
The seagulls go wild.
Mercifully, the passengers are lowered to the ground, where a zillion springy coils are once again compressed, waiting for the next forty-dollar twosome. . .
What could possibly be more terrifying than THAT?
A nighttime SLING... That's what!
No thanks. Pat was right: “Some rides are best taken from a distance.”
I just watched an outstanding Smithsonian Channel television show, (“Goshawk: Soul of the Wind“) about the amazing goshawk, an incredible bird of prey that can fly silently through tree branches while hunting by folding up its wings to get through the smallest tangle of branches in the swift and deadly pursuit. The determined goshawk also uses its talons to push off tree trunks like a banking billiard ball during flight while chasing down its prey. Very impressive and spooky stuff.
I’d really hate to have THISraptor chasing me down for dinner.
Look for the Smithsonian Channel’s “Goshawk: Soul of the Wind” in your TV program listings. Direct TV’s listings indicate “Goshawk: Soul of the Wind” will air again on the Smithsonian Channel on Tuesday, 9/27 at 7AM, and again on Wednesday, 9/28 at 3AM. Set your recorders and be amazed.
Tim says: if you’d like to submit one of your own You Tube “Video Curiosity” discoveries for consideration, use the “Contact” form at the top of the blog. Include the link and a descriptive sentence or two and your first name only. (Email addresses (if any) will not be published.)
As a kid I loved “kick the can” and “capture the flag“, and for a while I tried the indoor “LASERTAG” craze, where I acquired a taste for hurdling obstacles while trying to annihilate real living players with a little red dot that was registered as a “hit” and tallied during the game. I was pretty good. Then, years later while living in Baton Rouge, I became heavily involved with “paintball“. Yes, I was one of those good ol’ boys who ran amok in the Louisiana bayous sweating like crazy, swatting mosquitoes and running like hell and ducking through the cypress swamps with eye goggles and my CO2 paintball rifle wanting nothing more than to nail a green-paint-filled paintball smack dab in the middle of someone’s chest. Paint balls hurt!
Now — in an attempt to reinvent the thrill of the hunt all over again — I’ve become enamored with “UberStrike“: a high-tech HD paintball-like computer game played in a virtual world against other UberStrike members of all ages on servers scattered all over the world. Obviously, shoot-em-up games are not for everyone.
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UberStrike cost $9.99 on the Apple App store, but it is also available for the PC and directly online. Games can either be played (like capture the flag) in a RED-team vs. BLUE-team mode, or in an all-out free-for-all mode where anything that moves is fair game. The UberStrike online forum is very helpful to newcomers seeking tips and tricks to help them progress from level to level: your mentor can be an incredibly talented teenager or a retired ex-SEAL. You’ll never know. Credits that can be used to upgrade (rent) equipment are gained during battle. Or, some folks choose to pay for them at the UberStrike store using real money. Cash credit players are sometimes frowned upon by the game purists, who prefer to earn their outfitting upgrades during play. To me, both viewpoints are acceptable: the biggest and baddest weaponry in the world won’t help you one bit from getting massacred by experienced players using the simplest of weapons.
One aspect I like about UberStrike — unlike paintball and many other shoot-em-up video games available in the marketplace – is there is absolutely not one single drop of blood spilled during UberStrike game play. Ever. However, the first-person point of view of yourself being blasted off a roof and falling to the ground and twitching for several seconds is truly ghastly.
Modern technology has brought 3D HD games to our desktops like never before, a far cry from the pioneering text-only games like “Zork“, created way back in the early 80s.
I really like UberStrike. But — again — UberStrike might not be your cup of tea.
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Tim says: I got a kick revisiting the “Zork” link. When I bought that game for my Radio Shack Model 4 TRSDOS computer back in the early 80s, it was my first computer game ever. I became so addicted to it I called in sick from work for 3 entire days. “You have made the TROLL very, very angry. He is running at you with his rusty sword. Thick red saliva is drooling from his lips. This is not a happy TROLL! What do you want to do? Never mind. You’re dead.”
Doesn’t get any better than that.
Tim says: I accidentally trashed the dozen or so comments for this post. My bad.
Preview writers and the folks who create newspaper headlines have always fascinated me. So much to say and so few characters in which to say it. With this in mind, one of my pastimes is reading on-screen television movie guide synopses on the preview channel. Here’s a recent one for the 1965 movie, “Wild, Wild Planet”, starring Tony Russel, Lisa Gastoni, and Massimo Serato that really cracked me up:
“A space cowboy saves planetary leaders from an alien shrinker’s army of inflatable females.”
Most special effects in many of today’s movies have become so commonplace that they have ceased to be special at all. I mean, seriously—how many explosions with flailing bodies launched into the foreground, how many cars overturning from half-concealed ramps, how many running folks catching fire, how many helicopters crashing into mountain sides, how many gush-popping bullet wounds and bullet holes whose ricochets throw sparks even while striking trees (or other organic matter) can an audience possibly digest?
I suspect that contemporary movie producers, screen writers, directors, and stunt people are so familiar with every canned special effect that they refer to them universally by numbers.
Director: “Okay, listen up. First off we’ll pan down from effect #33 into effect #12. Makeup: go light on the blood until effect #27 has had time to register.”
Producer: “Hang on there for a minute. If we substitute effect #88 and effect #50 for effect #33 instead, we can throw in an extra effect #41 or possibly two back-to-back effect # 6s and save investors a little money.”
Writer: “Yeah, but I was saving those two number 6s for the scene where the jealous boyfriend, having just survived effect #73 (minus his ear, or course) was falling over the cliff right after effect #9 catapulted him right off the edge.”
Sigh. If the Movie Guild would simply publish this Official Special Effects List shorthand and distribute it at the theater, think of the money they could save in production by just plugging the effect number text right into the blank movie scene.
Last week I re-watched the Alfred Hitchcock movie, “Psycho”. It was chillingly refreshing not to have witnessed the famous shower scene the way it most certainly would have been graphically depicted today. More and more I find myself turning to the older cinemas of yesteryear. You remember them — the movies where special effect #1 was a bold pioneering force called CREATIVITY.
I watched “The Day the Earth Stood Still” 2008 movie remake on pay-for-view the other night and was so disappointed I almost deleted it halfway through the viewing. The movie was filled with (spectacular) special effects and little else, not the least of which was any semblance whatsoever to the original movie’s storyline plot, to which I attribute a true “Classic” rating. I gotta tell you I have a real problem when arrogant Hollywood producers, directors, and money managers decide to remake any movie classic: Hell, let them earn their own movie classic status the old fashioned way!
Having said that, a lot of folks I know didn’t care for the original movie, either. What I liked about the original 1951 movie was its simplicity, a straight forwardness ultimately delivered to an uneasy, Cold-War-era nuclear-paranoid audience in the closing scene: “It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet, but if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder. Your choice is simple: join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We shall be waiting for your answer. The decision rests with you.”
The original 1951 “The Day the Earth Stood Still” movie was based on a short story, “Farewell to the Master“, by mostly unknown writer Harry Bates, published in the October 1940 issue of Astounding Magazine.
I must point out that although the storylines in both of the two movie versions of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” are different than the “Farewell to the Master” short story, I did not like the recent 2008 “The Day the Earth Stood Still”remake one iota. It was a pompous and arrogant production from the get go, crammed with special effects designed to be overbearing in an attempt to make up for an otherwise terrible movie plot. I usually enjoy watching lead actor, Keanu Reeves, but his lackluster performance in this classic 1951 movie remake did little to enhance the movie.
It was not worth the $4.99 Pay-for-View fee, popcorn or not.
“Take off on a thrilling flight across America, a journey that allows you to leave yourself, and your travel organizer, at home. Shot entirely in high definition, this series offers rare glimpses of some of our nation’s most treasured landmarks, all seen from breathtaking heights.”
That’s what the Smithsonian Channelweb site has to say about their captivating series, “Aerial America”. I began watching it a couple months ago, and I have to admit: I’m hooked.
“Aerial America” is a series of hour-long, mini-documentaries, enriched from beginning to end with exquisite nonstop aerial views which spotlight — state by state — America’s incredible geographic diversity and beauty from an aerial perspective; taken from a slow-moving, rock-steady helicopter, the production value is everything you’d expect from the Smithsonian Channel — and more. Several episodes have already been produced, and many more are in the works.
Packed with interesting — and often little-known — state histories and trivia, “Aerial America” is an incredible snapshot of America at it’s best. Watch it if you can, but look out: it’s addicting.
Preview writers and the folks who create newspaper headlines have always fascinated me. So much to say and so few characters in which to say it. With this in mind, one of my pastimes is reading on-screen television movie guide synopses on the preview channel. Here’s a recent one for the 1965 movie, 
Effect # 1
Posted in Commentary, Movies, tagged Movie Review on 07/23/2011 | 5 Comments »
Most special effects in many of today’s movies have become so commonplace that they have ceased to be special at all. I mean, seriously—how many explosions with flailing bodies launched into the foreground, how many cars overturning from half-concealed ramps, how many running folks catching fire, how many helicopters crashing into mountain sides, how many gush-popping bullet wounds and bullet holes whose ricochets throw sparks even while striking trees (or other organic matter) can an audience possibly digest?
I suspect that contemporary movie producers, screen writers, directors, and stunt people are so familiar with every canned special effect that they refer to them universally by numbers.
Director: “Okay, listen up. First off we’ll pan down from effect #33 into effect #12. Makeup: go light on the blood until effect #27 has had time to register.”
Producer: “Hang on there for a minute. If we substitute effect #88 and effect #50 for effect #33 instead, we can throw in an extra effect #41 or possibly two back-to-back effect # 6s and save investors a little money.”
Writer: “Yeah, but I was saving those two number 6s for the scene where the jealous boyfriend, having just survived effect #73 (minus his ear, or course) was falling over the cliff right after effect #9 catapulted him right off the edge.”
Sigh. If the Movie Guild would simply publish this Official Special Effects List shorthand and distribute it at the theater, think of the money they could save in production by just plugging the effect number text right into the blank movie scene.
Last week I re-watched the Alfred Hitchcock movie, “Psycho”. It was chillingly refreshing not to have witnessed the famous shower scene the way it most certainly would have been graphically depicted today. More and more I find myself turning to the older cinemas of yesteryear. You remember them — the movies where special effect #1 was a bold pioneering force called CREATIVITY.
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