Poor Peter – the schmuck hasn’t slept well in forever, plagued by nightmares about losing his family in some sort of attack. Michael Pena stars in Netflix’s new sci-fi offering Extinction, and the guy who’s known as the one good thing to come out of Crash is a perfect fit for family man Peter. It possibly doesn’t hurt that his character appears to work on a set that looks like an exact copy of the Van Dyne lab.
Anyway. Both his boss (Mike Colter) and his wife (Lizzy Caplan) urge him to see a sleep specialist and get his shit in order. But Peter starts to wonder if maybe there’s a reason he’s been chosen for these visions. And, for the first time in the history of marriage, it turns out he’s right. An alien invasion interrupts their dinner party and things get to explodey, apocalypty, emergency level so quickly that he doesn’t even get to say I told you so.
It occurs to me that Extinction’s invaders remind me a lot of something that invaded Ottawa this time last summer. We called it La Machine. Basically they’re storeys-tall robot-puppets that stalked the city’s busiest streets.
It looks relatively benign behind Sean at the moment, but you have to see it in action to really get the gist. The spider, which is what I was reminded of in the movie, was joined by a dragon AND THEY WERE NOT FRIENDS. When they met up in the city, they invariably fought.
Sorry for the crummy video, but you can kind of see the people under neath the spider’s body who are controlling its various legs.
Anyway, sorry guys, this was a pretty big sidebar, even for me. Back to the movie.
Extinction isn’t bad, you just have to be willing to hang in during the first half, which is pretty standard, perhaps even subpar fare. At any rate: nothing you haven’t seen before. But there’s some clever foreshadowing that makes the second half much more interesting. It’s probably not a great move to inject the film’s personality into only the back end because lots of viewers won’t stick around long enough to find it. But for those that do, it’s an engaging and curious interpretation that a true sci-fi fan has likely encountered before in some form or another, but this kind of backward and forward thinking is always welcome. Extinction, by Hounds of Love director Ben Young, looks like a thriller, but this is a trick. You’ll have to survive the invasion to find out what’s really going on.
Anyway, I watched a bad movie called Pompeii. He of the sublime 6-pack plays a horse-whispering slave, used for gladiator-style fighting, and perhaps sex. But because of his goodness with animals, he curries the favour of a fair maiden, lady Cassia (Emily Browning) who is being hotly pursued\blackmailed into marriage by Senator Corvius (Kiefer Sutherland). And if that wasn’t bad enough, a volcano erupts and kills them all. Haha, classic.
drive them further apart? Oh who am I kidding – there’s isn’t a single inch of this movie you don’t see coming, but somehow I don’t mind the cornball cutesie comedy of it all because Grammer and Bell have such a sweet chemistry between them. There’s pretty much nothing of Bell’s that I won’t give a go, she’s so luminous and honest and I just find her enjoyable and I’m pretty sure that would be true even if she was changing a tire, or the laundry, or her mind for the 15th time as we stand outside the movie theatre in the rain.
to all of her daughters in the womb. While I’m not petrified of them as she is, I do not trust them, I think they’re probably evil, and we’re firmly and avowedly a dog family. This is obviously the worst kind of generalization, allowing one rogue cat to colour our opinions of an entire species even though no cat has harmed me personally. Still, no cat has won me over, either, and they seem to actively or passively do the opposite of that 9 times out of 10.
So the truth of a film like BPM (aka Beats Per Minute aka 120 battements par minute) hurts. It hurts to see such a strong group of people fighting to save their own lives, but watching the group, watching their friends and colleagues, go missing one by one. They send postcards with the faces of their dead comrades to the Prime Minister knowing one day that face might be theirs. They act as guinea pigs for drug companies that withhold information, and go to jail for demanding it. And they continue to fight even after it proves not to “just” be a “gay disease” but one that would spread to lots of vulnerable populations. Their hard work is what saved us all.
some script writer would have made even a half-assed attempt at circumventing the obvious pitfalls, but no, Kasane runs into them face first, and the camera caresses her smudged lipstick. I mean, you can understand what Kasane (Kyoko Yoshine) gets out of the equation – but Nina (Tao Tsuchiya)? What can she possible stand to benefit?
unappreciated cook, also a widower, named Vernon (Andrew Scott), and c) Billy (Jeremy Irvine), a head-in-the-clouds inventor who haunts the library looking for inspiration.
person. In my life, and probably in yours, addictions are the exception and not the rule. But for people who are in different circumstances, life is hard as fuck, and living sober can feel impossible. And that’s not even factoring in genetics. I felt so sad for this client of mine who has never known anything else.
with an elite crowd, the higher ups are cautioning Detective Woo to back off – but he’s much too much a loose canon to respect authority, isn’t he? You know he is. Meanwhile, if Park is looking inadequately grief stricken, he’s overly concerned about his wife’s missing body. And pretty soon he’s frantically claiming that she’s responsible for her own disappearance, and is somehow still alive.
