Three Cheers for Darkened Years!

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

Film review by: Witney Seibold

            O.k. O.k. Yeah, I saw it. What of it? You didn’t give me any grief when I saw “D.O.A.: Dead or Alive.”

            One of my friends once said that he like the Fantastic Four because they were the only superhero team in the entire annals of comic books that had TV sitcom potential. You have a married couple, the wife’s brother, and a best friend, all living under the same roof, and they all have to work together. Oh, and the brother and the best friend hate each other. Can they get along? Well, they’ll fight a lot, but not before learning some valuable lessons about friendship and marriage and family. Oh, and occasionally they have to do battle with some large mutant space beastie.

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The Number 23

Film review by: Witney Seibold

            Yeah, I’m afraid this is another one in which I’m going to give away the ending. Trust me, I’m not usually the type of critic who delights in always spoiling things for my readers out of some Olympian sense of superiority to an inferior art. That’s my excuse some of the time, though. No, I simply have issue with the way things turned out in “The Number 23,” so I have to discuss it openly, rather than being maddeningly vague.

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The Lookout

Film review by: Witney Seibold

            Warning: I might give away some plot details…

            “The Lookout” writer/director Scott Frank is responsible for the screenplays to very good Hollywood thrillers like “Dead Again” and “Get Shorty.” As is the case with longtime screenwriters who begin to direct, his film “The Lookout” takes more glee from its quiet moments of interpersonal dialogue and characters’ internal struggles than it does with chases and climaxes. This is no bad thing, as “The Lookout’s” interpersonal dialogue makes for some very intimate close-ups of damaged people, and the characters’ internal struggles are actually unusual and daring for a thriller.

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Waitress

Film review by: Witney Seibold

            “Waitress” kind of sneaks up on you. When we are first introduced to the characters, they are too droll and folky and protracted; they are mere stereotypes of the typical, downhome-cookin’ Southern ladies and gents. The opening dialogue is too stagy. The entire tone of the piece seems like a corny sitcom. Land sakes, It’s about a pie-makin’ expert.

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Paprika

Film review by: Witney Seibold

            Like in “Dreamscape,” there is a machine in “Paprika” which allows the user to walk about in the dreams of others. The problem with this dream machine is that it alters the brain of the user, breaking down their own distinctions between dreams and reality. A kind of delirious insanity breaks out among the testers. The machine is also somehow affecting the dream world in general, causing all dreams to merge into one wacky parade.

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Ocean’s Thirteen

Film review by: Witney Seibold

            “Ocean’s Thirteen” is going to be the last of the “Ocean’s” movies. I’m not saying this because it’s suffering from classic sequel fatigue (and in a summer to see the release the third or fourth chapters in numerous franchises, this seems to occur often); in fact, it’s heads and shoulders above the scatterbrained and sloppy “Ocean’s Twelve.” I say this because it has sort of an elegiac feel to it. Like it longs for a Las Vegas that has been torn down – a Las Vegas populated by the Rat Pack, martinis, and cosmopolitan sophistication – in favor of a slicker and bloated fast-buck franchise. So it goes.

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There’s No Place Like…

An essay by: Witney Seibold

Some trivia about “The Wizard of Oz:”

   - There is an urban myth floating around about the actor who hung himself not only on set, but on-camera. And not only on-camera, but in the final print of the film. At the end of the “If I only had a heart” number, as the Tin Man, Scarecrow and Dorothy are skipping off into the distance, the suicide ca be seen in the background. It is, in fact, a bird, I think a condor, stretching its wing (animals were called in from the L.A. zoo to wander freely about the set in many shots). The rumor started that it was a stagehand accidentally falling into frame, and, with the advent of video, became an actor, a Munchkin, hanging himself.

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Brand Upon the Brain!

Film review by: Witney Seibold

            I will try to write this review without using the words “weird,” “strange,” “odd,” or any other such synonym, but I make no guarantees.

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Fido

Film review by: Witney Seibold

            Imagine that instead of Nazis causing all that trouble in the 1940s, it was actually zombies. WWII was actually the Great Zombie War, and the humans won. Well, we didn’t quite wipe out all the zombies, and the dead still spring back up unless they are buried decapitated, but the survivors have set up camp in fenced off 1950s suburban utopias, and a corporate superentity called Zomcon has developed a collar that tames certain zombies so they may be used as free slave labor for affluent families. The zombies don’t really care because, well, they’re zombies.

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Klaatu Verata Nikto

An essay by: Witney Seibold

            There was a time when science fiction was taken seriously. When, as a genre, it was used as a serious forum for discussion of important philosophical or social issues. Books like Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 used their future worlds to comment on where human societies were headed. Isaac Asimov raised important questions about technology. “The Twilight Zone” regularly explored the human mind. “Star Trek,” while prone to occasional bouts of silliness (“His brain is gone!”), and to a greater degree “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” actually tackled hot-button items like civil rights, sexuality, immigration, and equality through intelligent discourse involving alien species (that there are no “Star Trek” films on my list is just an indicator that none of the films can match the insight and quality of the TV shows).

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