sci fi

Men in Black 3: just as delightful in 1969

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Our favorite alien-zapping secret agents return in the delightful Men in Black 3.   We still have the yapping Will Smith paired with the Titan of Terseness, Tommy Lee Jones.  In this edition of the  sci fi comedy franchise, Smith must travel back to 1969 to save his partner and the world from a new odious and scary alien villain, Boris The Animal.  We get a Mad Men size dose of 1969, including Andy Warhol’s Factory, the Miracle Mets, the Moon Launch, some hippies and lots of skinny neckties.

The cast is all good, but the most inspired casting has to be Josh Brolin as the young Tommy Lee Jones.  Michael Stuhlbarg, last seen as the uptight depressive in A Serious Man, here almost steals the movie as a blissed out but hyper-perceptive alien.  Michael Chernus, so good in a serious role in Vera Farmiga’s Higher Ground, is excellent as a shady geek. Bill Hader is very funny as Warhol.

I’m usually not one for franchise movies, but MIB3 is gloriously entertaining.  I saw it in 2D – you should, too.  As with most movies, the 3D premium isn’t worth it.

In the trailer (but not the movie) we briefly glimpse the torch-wielding Columbia Picture lady wearing MIB shades – very cool.

Least Convincing Movie Monsters

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The Killer Shrews: This is a dog in a fright mask.

Given the Cowboys & Aliens hubbub and my post on 1994’s Oblivion, I’ve been thinking about phony looking movie monsters.  So here’s my list of the Least Convincing Movie Monsters.  These monsters are so bad that Godzilla doesn’t even make this list.  And the dogs wearing fright masks in The Killer Shrews (above) are only #3.  Enjoy.

The first cowboys & aliens movie

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I really enjoyed the first cowboys and & aliens movie, the sci fi spoof 1994 Oblivion, now available on DVD.    It is set in the year 3030 on the planet Oblivion, which strongly resembles a frontier town from a spaghetti Western, peppered with the occasional cyborg, ray gun and ATM machine.

Oblivion is intentionally campy, has a silly plot and lots of tongue-in-cheek dialogue.  The scene where the funeral is interrupted by the weekly bingo game upstairs is especially funny.  The cast seems to be having lots of fun with the material. Musetta Vander as the  rawhide whip-wielding dominatrix Lash and Carel Struycken as the death-forboding undertaker Gaunt are especially over-the-top good.  In addition, Julie Newmar plays a cougarish saloon proprietor, and Star Trek’s George Takei is the Jim Beam-swilling town doc.  Amazingly, Oblivion rated a 1996 sequel, Oblivion 2:  Backlash, in which most of the cast returned.

I haven’t yet seen the $100 million summer blockbuster Cowboys & Aliens, which opens this weekend.  Cowboys & Aliens is set on the planet Earth, where Daniel Craig, playing a Clint Eastwoodesque Man With No Name, awakes with his memory erased by aliens and a futuristic bracelet.  Harrison Ford’s torch-bearing mounted lynch mob is interrupted by laser attack from an alien spaceship.  Saloon gal Olivia Wilde (House, The OC) is pulled into the sky by alien forces.  It takes itself much more seriously than does Oblivion, and I only hope that it’s half as entertaining as Oblivion.