The Clare Champion Clare news, sport, entertainment and local notes
WHY is the future always so clean?
Back in the good ol’ days, the coming decades and centuries were, at best, skanky, with tiny pockets of ultra-luxury for a priviliged few, like in Blade Runner, or, at worst, apocalyptic vistas of smouldering cities, cannibals and land-locked pirates with mullets. Like in Mad Max. Or Titanic (at least in my version, anyway…)
A recent phenomenon, played out in the likes of Minority Report, Gattaca and, most notably, I, Robot, shows the future as a sterile place, a weird, Stepford Wives sort of hangout, just one dumb jumbsuit shy of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Even Marty McFly had his share of future shock when confronted with his elder, corrupt corporate self and family of ugly children in the second Back to the Future. Even back in the ’80s, the future was all clean livin’ and pastel colours. And flying cars.
Like Stepford, the clean futures are always the ones that look perfect but are, deep down (or in some cases – Demolition Man – not so deep down) rotten to the core.
Surrogates is one of those “clean” futures. Clean like I, Robot. In fact so like I, Robot that director Johnathan Mostow may well have just nicked all the sets and general look from that Will Smith sci-fi romp along with a whole bunch of ideas and even camera shots.
Set in 2017, the world as we know it has retired to its bedroom. The majority of the population has taken to living their lives through advanced robots that offer them control from the comfort of their homes. Everyone is now beautiful and ageless and crime has been almost eradicated.
But it’s all a saccharine facade and it takes a shocking murder perpetrated with a weapon that can kill people through their surrogates to shake matters up and set Bruce Willis on the case and blah blah, uncover the conspiracy, blah, face up to difficult truths, blah, teach humanity how to live again.
There is nothing in this film that will either surprise or shock you. Except maybe Brucie’s hair at the start and discovering what Ving Rhames would look like if he replaced 95% of his head with hair.
If you’ve seen I, Robot, you’ve seen this film. Only with a more interesting, better executed story. Even Robert Cromwell shows up to do pretty much the same job – embittered science genius whose influence is pivotal to the plot.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a film-watching drone to view this in my place and had to sit through it all – just so you don’t have to!
Which living death/near life experience brings us to Sex and Death 101.
An odd sort of a flick starring Simon Baker, that bloke off Neighbours (or was it Home and Away) now starring in TV detective show, The Mentalist, and Winona Ryder, making her first, faltering steps back into the Tinseltown fold, Sex and Death is kind of a dark sex comedy with a half-baked sci-fi twist.
Written and directed by Heathers scribe, Daniel Waters, it tells the story of a year in the life of annoying perfect blond uber-mensh, Roderick Blank (Baker) who, just days before his wedding, receives an email listing the names of all 101 women he is going to, ahem, know, biblically, before he dies.
He gets the list from a poorly explained plot gimmick called “The Machine” (possibly an oh-so-clever reference to the dramatic device “deus ex machina”) and soon finds himself embroiled in an existensial sex farce – to shag or not to shag?
It’s a little like the philosophical crux of TV series Flash Forward if the show were made by a 14-year-old boy and comes across ultimately a slightly classier, but substantially less funny, than a Carry On… movie.
The only character that you won’t want to punch is, strangely, Mr Blank, the one character that probably deserves it most. Chalk it down to Baker’s considerable, almost cartoonish on-screen charm – a characteristic a clever director should see fit to use or exploit to far greater and more imaginative effect in the near future.
Oh, there’s a serial killer sub-plot starring the winsome and wide-eyed Ms Ryder doing her usual doe-eyed/crazy chick schtick. The story is utter guff but the light-fingered leading lady also manages to emerge from the smouldering wreck of the movie with her reputation more or less in tact.
Shame the same can’t be said for the author of one of the funniest and smartest films of the ’80s though.
