WAS1 Productions

Originally Written 04/23/03

When I first saw the trailer for Holes, it looked like a really interesting film. It held up to its promise and was thoroughly enjoyable. The story had one of the more complex plots I’ve seen in a family movie, weaving together the destinies of the the three central charcters’ family lines. While it was a little predictable how things were utlimately going to work out, the story was still quite intelligent, and entertaining.

The narrative of the film flowed nicely, using flashbacks to flesh out the backstory. It combined comedy and drama with mythos and the friendship of a buddy story. It was a delight to watch and a nice change from the standard fare. The book it’s based on has gotten great reviews too.

Originally Written 04/13/03

Tuck Everlasting is an interesting family-friendly fantasy/drama story. It centers around a girl who discovers a family living in the huge woods on her family’s estate. They have a secret and are hiding from the outside world. It turns out they found (by accident) a spring, the water of which will give anyone who drinks it eternal life.

The downside of immortality of course is that they’re frozen in time at the age they drank the water and have been living like that for near a century. Themes of watching the world change around you and losing ones you love to old age and disease are shown, much like in Highlander.

The girl falls in love with the youngest son, whose frozen at the age of 17, and at the end must decide to drink from the water and live eternally with him, or go off and find her own life. The movie was not only a nice period piece (set in the early 1900s) but also a really nice bittersweet story.

Originally Written 04/13/03

I’ve been trying to catch up on Vincent Price’s old movies as they come out on DVD and The Abomidible Dr. Phibes sounded fun. The plot of a madman exacting revenge on the nine doctors he blamed for the death of his wife, all with deaths planned after the curses of the Egyptians from Exodus in the Bible, had great promise. Unfortunately the pacing of the film was very tedious and distracted from its enjoyment.

The film was very showy and gimmicky and had a bit of flair to it which was amusing though, so it wasn’t all bad. I also got a chuckle from the death of rats, where a guy was freaking out from having what were obviously just tame pet rats crawling over him, and how they tried to edit it to make it seem like they were attacking him.

Unfortunately, the character who Price played had been injurred in an accident, and could only talk through a mechanical device. He spent most of the film mute, so his usual pressence was dilluted. I’ve heard Theater of Blood is a movie that uses a similar idea of thematic murders, so I may check that out sometime.

Update 04/20/10

I’ve watched Theater of Blood and it was a better movie. It was pretty goofy like Phibes, but it had more of a devilish sense of glee in dispatching the reviewers who spurned a mad Shakespearean hack actor. Vincent Price had more of a presence in that film as well.

Originally Written 04/13/03

Watched  Comic Book Villians, which sounded interesting. It was a black comedy about rival comic-book shop owners trying to talk an elderly woman from selling her deceased son’s comic book collection. He’d died in his 50’s and had been an avid collector, so when they got to take a glimpse at his collection, it was like finding the holy grail, with all of the vintage comics stashed away there.

Of course the woman doesn’t want to sell her son’s things, and the two store owners start turning up the pressure. The movie started out good and was entertaining seeing all of the machinations the two guys were going through. However, the third act of the film became unnecessarily dark and gritty and that left a bad taste in my mouth.

On the plus side, it was neat seeing the geeky kid from Road Trip, whose been in typecast roles for several bad movies (including a kind of pointless role in The Core), it was neat seeing him get a chance to have a bit more of a character. Yeah he still played a geek, but at least his character evolves through the movie.

Originally Written 2007.

Fans of the new Doctor Who BBC series will have likely seen these episodes already, but for anyone who hasn’t seen them, if you like good drama and entertaining science fiction, you should check them out. The episodes are from seasons two and three, and star David Tennant as The Doctor.

The Girl in the Fireplace is probably my favorite episode of the new series. It has a few plot holes (it is Dr. Who afterall). Reinette falls in love with The Doctor too quickly, but I also really loved the romance and melodrama of it. The things I mentioned liking about the pathos of time travel were touched upon even better here.

The story was a lot of fun. The Doctor and companions find a deserted 51st-century space ship, which they discover has various time portals back to 18th-century France. The Doctor ends up jumping in and out of Madame de Pompadour’s life, discovering a monster under her bed when she’s just a child, and then saving her from nefarious droids when she’s a grown woman. The connection between the two of them was really sweet, and the actress playing the Madame really added a lot to the story. A Review of the episode mentioned “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” which is a book that’s on my ever-growing reading list.

The set designs between the two time periods was quite nice. I loved the styling of the ship, and the Victorian-era disguises of the nefarious droids after the Madame was delightfully creepy. The fact that they’re shown to be clockwork, instead of electornic is a nice touch too, and the creature design was superb. I’ve always liked artificial life forms, and the mechanized thinking of these machines made them interesting characters.

All in all, the plot was delightfully absurd, and worked at handling the goofy premise wonderfully. The whole story had a nice dreamy quality to it too, especially the coda at the ending.

Blink is another episode I really liked, it was right up there with “The Girl in the Fireplace.”  It didn’t have the same emotional impact of that episode, but it did have a couple of nice bits of character drama, and the use of different time streams was very well done. It was something very different and creative, plus having scary moving statues is always interesting. I also liked how The Doctor was mostly in the background for this episode, and they had some clever ways of having him interact with the other characters, which was a lot of fun.

Other episodes in the series which have both wonderful horror atmosphere and good character drama are The Silence in the Library and the two-parter set in a WW2 war-torn England The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances.