Mini-cap: Harsh Realm E1 "Pilot"

I don't think I remembered that Harsh Realm ever existed.  It certainly wasn't around for long: nine episodes were made (based on a comic book by James D. Hudnall and Andrew Paquette (thanks, Wikipedia); developed by Chris Carter of The X-Files fame) but only three aired before FOX yanked it.  And I can't remember what prompted me to move it up my Blockbuster.com queue.  Be that as it may, I've got a DVD of it and might as well run through it for you.  The pilot was a little confusing and hard to hear - I'm particularly fuzzy on names - but it's got several ringers cast-wise and by the end of the episode, I was ready to watch another one.

E1 begins in war-torn Sarajevo, 1994.  A solider, name of Waters, tries to help a little girl and gets pinned down inside a derelict building that U.S. forces are going to bomb the bejeezus out of to clean out the rabble.  Waters's buddy, Tom Hobbes, goes in after him and saves his life, Waters's gut shot notwithstanding.

Fast-forward to Fort Dix, New Jersey, "present day," which would be 1999.  Tom Hobbes, now a lieutenant, is just a couple weeks away from his discharge and eagerly looking forward to moving to California with his fiancee, Sophie, and dog Dexter (a fairly charismatic Jack Russell terrier), when the military sucks him into one last mission.  They've got this virtual reality (hereinafter referred to as "VR") training program that they want him to test.  More to the point, they want him to try to defeat the current high scorer, Omar Santiago.  Tom puts on the headphones and watches the introductory video - narrated by the extremely recognizable dulcet tones of Gillian Anderson herself!

The video cuts off halfway through.  We the viewers know that Tom is now in the VR program but he hasn't figured it out yet.  He figures it out pretty quickly when people start shooting at him and blowing buildings up and when he tries to help a wounded guy, the wounded guy fades away in a blur of pixels.  He gets himself shot but a mysterious and mute woman finds him and heals him by laying on of hands.  Next, Tom finds his home at Fort Dix, but it's destroyed and empty, except for his dog, Dexter.  Then Tom hooks up with the cynical and cranky Mike Pinnochio (D.B. Sweeney!) who promises to take him to where Santiago is in exchange for Dexter, whom Pinnochio says he's going to eat. 

Pinocchio shows Tom a highly fortified fence around a bustling, well-lit city - Santiago City, because Santiago has hijacked the program and become the defacto despot, controlling all the power and money, and leaving rebels like Pinnochio and others to live in darkness outside the fence - and shows him where to get through.  Tom goes in (taking both Dexter and Pinnochio's car keys) and finds his old army buddy, Waters.  Waters is now working for Santiago: he too was given the same mission Tom was - to defeat/kill Santiago - but it's no use and now he's working for the guy just to stay alive since there's no way out of Harsh Realm.  And also, Waters is married to Tom's girl Sophie, or at least a virtual character (hereinafter "VC") version of her.  Tom has a tough time getting it through his head that VC Sophie isn't his actual girl, even when she doesn't know who he is, and runs off with her.

Soon enough Tom and Sophie get arrested by Santiago's men and comes face-to-face with Santiago himself, played by Terry O'Quinn, a/k/a John Locke from Lost.  Meanwhile, Pinnochio and the mute mystery woman are at a scruffy bar outside the fence, Pinnochio drinking steadily.  She writes on the dusty bar, "It's him," and Pinnochio grunts that he knew it from the moment he saw Tom - and they head into the city to rescue him.  As they're all escaping, Waters shoots and kills VC Sophie.  Tom is Very Angry about this, but Pinnochio drags him away.  Santiago shakes his head and tells Waters that he just made a big mistake as now Tom will never stop coming after them.

The last shot is of Tom in the real world, lying comatose on a gurney, sensors stuck to his head.  The camera pulls back and we see that he is not alone hooked up to Harsh Realm: he is in a warehouse-sized building and there are thousands of unconscious Harsh Realmers around him, stretching as far as the eye can see.

Mini book review: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

I love Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice is my favorite of her books.  I love zombies.  It would stand to reason that these would be two great tastes that taste great together (now I want a peanut butter cup - rats) ... did I love Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?  Not so much.

I think the problem is that Austen's original is just so sharp and clever and funny and on the nose, and Grahame-Smith not only didn't add to that, but he subtracted some of it as well when he inserted his zombies.  It wasn't funny anymore.  Plus, when he added in the zombie bits, he tried to stylize it to Austen's era, so the zombies weren't scary.  Before I started reading this book, I never would have imagined that Jane Austen + zombies would = tedious.  But that's what it was: tedious.  I had to make myself slog through the novel to the end.

Do yourselves a favor: read the original Pride and Prejudice and then watch George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (or Shaun of the Dead if you want to stick with the British theme).  That'll be a much more satisfactory way to get your Austen/zombie fix.

Movie review: Moon

It's some time in the future.  Our planet, after decades of famine, war and dependence on fossil fuels, is now fed, cared for and using HE3, a clean fuel source that is found in abundance on the dark side of the moon.  It's even easily mined: one man is all it takes to keep the mining equipment running and the fuel heading back to Earth at regular intervals.  Now, it's not all tea and cookies for this one man - Sam Bell - since he is all alone in the mining company's depot.  Sure, he's got reruns of classic television shows to watch and is whittling a scale model of his hometown; he's got a treadmill and free weights; he can talk to his houseplants and GERTY, the mining company's computer, who is actually a pretty good conversationalist.  But the communications antenna array is broken and Sam can't talk live to anyone on Earth, relying on recorded messages from his wife, infant daughter and the mining company bosses. 

It's lonely.  It's extremely lonely and, shortly before his three-year contract is up, Sam starts hallucinating, which causes him to crash his rover into one of the mining machines.  The accident is a bad one and when Sam wakes up back at the base, GERTY hovering solicitously over him, he has no memory of it.  GERTY tells him that a rescue crew will come to clean up the wreck but Sam sneaks out, going back to the crashed rover.  What he finds there is confusing and disturbing and calls first his sanity, and then reality, into question.

Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell and is a tour de force in this tight little (97 minute) science fiction flick.  Rockwell is practically the only live actor ever on the screen - GERTY is voiced by a smugly sympathetic Kevin Spacey (who makes an excellent robot) and Sam's wife is shown only as a recording or a flashback.  Rockwell is awesome as Sam's mind and body start to deteriorate, carrying the whole movie.  Although there is very little that can be called "action," Moon catches and keeps your attention easily.  A very nice genre piece - definitely worth your time.

Mini-book review: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith

We all know that Abraham Lincoln was one of the greatest presidents this country has ever had: strong, hard-working, self-made from nothing, superlatively articulate and a visionary for the ages.  What we didn't know, until this book, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, was that he was one of the greatest killers of vampires this country has ever had as well.

After his mother was killed by a vampire when Abe was a young boy, due to his layabout father's owing money to said vampire, Abe embarked on a mission to rid his country of vampires.  As he grew older and was guided on the path to political leadership by powerful allies, Lincoln learned that the scourge of the South - slavery - was closely intertwined with the undead scourge.  Driven out of Europe by vampire hunters, the creatures found America to be a place of freedom, where they could have access to nearly limitless slave blood if they supported the Southern slaveowners.  What the human slaveholders didn't know was that the vampires intended to enslave them as well, enslave all Americans and live fat and happy off their blood.  When Abe learned of this plot, he realized that by abolishing slavery he could abolish the vampires too, and thus began his crusade.

Written as a biography based on the now-found lost journals of our sixteenth president, Seth Grahame-Smith does a good job of sounding factual, using "excerpts" from the journals and incorporating Photoshopped "historical" photographs and drawings.  There is a nice balance of real Lincoln history interspersed with the chopping off of heads - plenty of fact and fiction to satisfy both the biography fan and the vampire fan in me.

P.S.  The book is being made into a movie - should be fun!

Movie review: The Town

Normally I am not a fan of Ben Affleck the Actor.  I find him stiff and unnuanced, boorish.  But in The Town, which Affleck also directed and cowrote, I liked him just fine.  Pluswhich, there's very few actors who can do a more authentic Boston accent than he can.

The Town is about a group of Charlestown (a Boston neighborhood) thugs who are very good at robbing banks.  Led by Doug McCray (Affleck), they've caused a lot of grief to the local cops and FBI guys (Jon Hamm and Titus Welliver - and the latter's accent is pretty good, no doubt because he's from Maine).  When the boys pull a bank job in Cambridge, Doug's childhood buddy, Jem (a very menacing Jeremy Renner), takes a hostage, Claire (Rebecca Hall), the bank manager.  They let her go but Doug later approaches her in an attempt to determine if she can identify any of the bank robbers.  She can't, and the two of them hit it off, and it goes from there.  In fact, Doug likes her so well that he wants to get out of the 'Town and try a new life.  But before he can, his crew has to pull one more job, a big one: robbing the "Cathedral of Boston," a/k/a Fenway Park after a NYY-BOS series.

The cast in The Town is loaded.  Along with those already mentioned are Pete Postlethwaite (R.I.P.) as the local heavy; Chris Cooper as Doug's incarcerated dad; and Blake Lively as Jem's gorgeous drug-mule white-trash sister who has a thing for Doug.  (Note: her Boston accent is not so good.)  Shot on location all over Boston, the city is almost another character and it was fun for me to see places I'm familiar with from my three years living in Beantown: the Charlestown bridge, Fenway Park, Harvard Square, the T, the North End (they did a car chase in the narrow streets of the North End! that's some ballsy filmmaking!).

I quite liked The Town with its solid, well-paced story, strong acting and ring of authenticity.  I'm still not willing to entirely approve of Ben Affleck's acting, but the nice job he did in this movie has redeemed him somewhat in my eyes.

Movie review: Session 9

Session 9 is a 2001, small budget horror film where, to quote one of the movie's cast and crew, the horror is about "dread, not shock."  This haunted house story is nicely done, slowly ratcheting up the tension to the inevitable reveal at the end, never devolving into (too much) carnage.

The story unfolds over the period of a week in which an asbestos abatement crew is hired to clean up the Danvers State Hospital, an old lunatic asylum in Danvers, Massachusetts, before construction crews come in for a massive remodel.  The five-man crew consists of: Gordon, the owner of the asbestos abatement company who is suffering from sleep deprivation in the wake of his new baby's birth; his second-in-command Phil, intense, pragmatic, and bitter as all get out; Hank, the cocky young buck, always looking for his golden ticket and currently shacked up with Phil's ex-girlfriend (hence the bitterness); Mike, the law school dropout, too smart for the job but not sure what to do with his life; and Jeff, Gordon's acne-scarred, mullet-headed nephew.

There is a sixth major character in Session 9: the building itself.  The movie was filmed on location and the old hospital is grander and more scary than any CGI construct could ever be.  Built in 1874, the Danvers State Hospital was enormous, holding 2,000 [severely overcrowded] patients at one point.  It was said to be the birthplace of the pre-frontal lobotomy - essentially an icepick through the eye socket - and home to some abusive treatments of its inmates.  The hospital was emptied of patients in the late 1980s and finally shut down in 1992.  In the movie, the building radiates fallen grandeur and decay, the red brick towers looming over the landscape while inside, the treatment rooms, corridors and subterranean tunnels echo with their former denizens' madness.

As the asbestos crew works away, the hospital manages to split them up and worm its menace into each of them.  Mike finds a series of reel-to-reel recordings in an old office, and steals away as often as he can to listen to the nine sessions of one Mary, afflicted with multiple personalities.  The voiceover of these sessions weaves in and around the other guys, as Phil buys drugs to deal with the job's stress, Jeff's fear of the dark threatens to overcome him in the tunnels, Gordon slaps his wife in an exhausted rage and Hank uncovers a hidden cache of old coins in the basement morgue.  Things get tenser and creepier, the guys lashing out at one another, until you just know one of them is going to succumb to the building's insanity.  The fun is figuring out who will crack first.  I guessed wrong.

The coda to Session 9 is that the amazing old hospital was finally torn down in 2006, despite the protests of preservation groups and the building's listing on the National Register of Historic Places.  The plan was to build apartment buildings on the grounds but the initial attempt was destroyed in a mysterious fire that gutted the place.  All that is left now are some cemetaries, blocked off tunnels, the brick administration facade and a couple of wards.  Despite its troubled lifespan and ultimate demise, the Danvers State Hospital lives on in Session 9, and this film is as much a monument to the building as it is an effectively creepy little horror flick.

Mini movie review: Run, Fat Boy, Run

Run, Fat Boy, Run is a silly, inconsequential comedy starring Simon Pegg, Thandie Newton and Hank Azaria, and directed by David Schwimmer.  About five years ago, Dennis (Pegg) suffered a major case of cold feet and left his pregnant bride Libby (Newton) at the altar.  Now, his relationship with her is strained, although he does love his exceedingly adorable son; he's out of shape; and his security guard job at the ladies' wear section of a department store scarcely pays enough for him to make the rent.

Libby is doing just fine, however, with her popular bakery shop and very nice flat.  Even better, she's dating the smooth, successful American Whit (Azaria) who runs marathons for fun.  When Dennis - who still carries a torch for the woman he abandoned - meets Whit and learns of an upcoming charity run ... well, you can see where this is headed.

This is not the Simon Pegg of Shaun of the Dead, Spaced or Hot Fuzz.  This is Simon Pegg in a generic, slightly funny comedy, playing an Everyman schlub who overcomes the odds with a supporting cast of vaguely eccentric characters, and ends up learning something in the process.  It's a harmless enough movie, not terrible but not particularly good, and while it's always good to see Pegg onscreen, I prefer him to be unshackled in less conventional fare.

Mini book review: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

I'd been waiting for ages to read The Hunger Games - very popular at the library - and took it with me on vacation last week. I tore through it, loving it, this suspenseful, fast-paced, violent blockbuster of a post-apocalyptic YA novel, and when I finished, thought, "I'm so going to love writing a review of this book."  But now I find I don't have much to say about it, other than I'm looking forward to the other two books in the series and am also looking forward to the movie adaptation.

Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen is a great character: tough as nails because she has to be, yet vulnerable because she's yet only a girl; smart and adaptive to her world but often oblivious to the feelings of the people in it.  Brave and loyal, broken and battered, she's a wonderfully flawed heroine, fighting for survival in a vicious world, the ultimate reality t.v. show, The Running Man for the modern age.  Other characters are less fully developed, but that may be because the story is told from Katniss's point of view and her focus is on killing/not getting killed.

So that's all I've got.  I fear there is more murder and mayhem ahead for Katniss and Peeta, and heartbreak as well.  I'm on the waiting list for Catching Fire - hopefully I'll have more to say about the second book.  And hopefully I'll like it as much as I did The Hunger Games.

I haven't forgotten

This may be the longest gap between posts since I started ol' FMS.  I'm so sorry.  But our houseguests just left, and I just finished reading The Hunger Games, and I've got The Town and Session 9 waiting to fire up the DVR ... a book review will be up in the next day or so, promise.

Summertime Television

Summertime television used to be el sucko.  Of course, after this year's lackluster season, once the only bright spot - Justified - ran its course, there wasn't much I wanted to watch now anyway.  To be sure, I've got all the episodes of AMC's The Killing sitting in my DVR, and I've recorded a bunch of Invasions too (although I can't remember why - is it supposed to be any good?).  Burn Notice returns sometime soon too and that's nice and light and fluffy.

But what of the new cable shows, released in the summer when there's nothing on the networks?  This time around I've got a list of them that I'm willing to try, based on some geeky blog post I read somewhere:

• Teen Wolf - 6/5 on MTV.  This remake is not surprising in the wake of Twilight.  I read something somewhere that this version is "more Incredible Hulk than Teen Wolf," but I'll give it a shot.
• The Nine Lives of Chloe King - 6/14 on ABC Family.  From the show's site: "Chloe King is looking forward to celebrating her birthday with her friends and single mother, just like every other year…that is until she starts developing heightened abilities [FMS note: cat-like] and discovers she's being pursued by a mysterious figure. Chloe soon learns she's part of an ancient race which has been hunted by human assassins for millennia —and that she may be their only hope for ultimate survival."  Hey, I liked GREEK a lot so I'm interested to see what they do with an urban fantasy-ish series.
• Falling Skies - 6/19 on TNT.  A post-apocalyptic humans vs. alien invaders show executive-produced by Steven Spielberg?  I have high hopes for this one.
• Wilfred - 6/23 on FX.  You've seen the ads, right?  Frodo's got a dog.  Everyone else in the world sees an actual dog but to Frodo, it's a guy in a dog suit with an English or Aussie accent.  Could be twisted (she said hopefully).
• Alphas - 7/11 on Syfy.  Kind of like Heroes (but only in a good way, hopefully) with a team of folks with heightened abilities.  Only this time they have government funding AND David Strathairn.

What about you guys?  What will you be watching when it's too hot to do anything else?