After watching Diamond Head, I decided to check out Blue Hawaii, which provides a similar enjoyable look at retro fifties Hawaii. It’s an Elvis-in-Paraside flick, of which The King made several (Girls, Girls, Girls!, Paradise Hawaiian Style, and I suppose the TV special Aloha From Hawaii also counts).

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A particular subset of action movies embody a specific modern fantasy - Mr. Hero, suburban male, successful in every way (McMansion, loving wife, kids, upper middle class job) suddenly finds himself in a situation where everything is not as it seems. Mr. Hero’s home life is threatened by some grand conspiracy involving politics, evil corporations, and mean, ugly people. Eventually, the complicated plot is reduced to situations where the solutions are thankfully simplistic and caveman-primal: guns, driving cars really fast, and punching people. Mr. Hero rises to the occasion and kicks some serious ass.

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I saw Dune upon its debut in the early eighties, after having read the Frank Herbert book. The biggest complaint at that time was the film made little sense if one hadn’t read the novel; a sentiment I totally agree with. Dune is an epic, complex world, featuring several factions from different planets fighting over a mysterious spice on the desert planet Arrakis. Mix in prophetic religion, mysticism, truly warped imagery, and gigantic alien worms, and it’s confusing to the initiated. Watching the film version with no previous familiarity almost certainly leads to a gigantic “WTF?”

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This film concerns a spelling bee, a quietly dysfunctional family, but more so the mystical Kabbalah. Your knowledge of the last item should probably determine whether or not you rent this film. I know next to nothing about the Kabbalah and therefore the deeper meaning of much that transpired was lost on me.

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What’s good about A Scanner Darkly? Love for the Philip K Dick source material. Some surprisingly appropriate acting from Robert Downey Junior, Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder, and even Keanu Reeves. And certain key moments where the animation evokes the confusion and unreal moments of drugs.

But I see a failing that is sometimes attributable to recreational narcotics: an unfortunate tendency for the imaginer to apply too much profundity to their personal hallucinations. More simply put, an enlarged sense of self worth = ego.

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Yet another entry in the seventies sci-fi genre, this one is better than others, but not by much. The plot is based on a compelling premise - a manned mission to Mars is scrapped due to faulty engineering, so the powers that be decide to hoax the Mars landing on a sound stage. Yes, this sounds partly inspired by the conspiracy theories that the moon landing was hoaxed. And yeah, one of the astronauts is played by OJ Simpson, the one and the same - who some would say lives in a conspiracy theory of his own.

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For completeness’ sake, I watched the 1967 spy spoof Casino Royale, which features several James Bond type characters and more than one director. It’s stuffed with familiar actors: Orson Welles, David Niven, Peter Sellars, and Woody Allen. To call this film bizarre is an understatement (it’s a “psychedelic comedy”). I found it particularly surreal to watch after the recent, way serious, Casino Royale starring Daniel Craig as Bond.

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This is odd Bond, not unlike Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Many feel it shouldn’t even be included in the canon, as it wasn’t produced by EON Productions. But it has one aspect making it somewhat worth seeing: Sean Connery.

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Note: There a slight discrepancy of the spelling between of the word License and Licence - I guess from the American and British useage of the word.

This Bond movie is more than a bit off; I don’t know how else to put it. While I appreciate the attempt at a more realistic, serious Bond, there’s a fair amount slightly too unique about it, the result being that I didn’t really “get” it, or enjoy it all that much. Gosh, I’m hard to please, but I suppose it’s understandable after watching about twelve James Bond movies in succession.

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I still found the decidedly eighties entry in the James Bond Franchise, A View To A Kill enjoyable, despite its cheesy, made for television vibe. I also must plead guilty to some personal bias - the setting is Silicon Valley, with some scenes occurring in San Francisco proper (Fisherman’s Wharf, the Civic Center, and a hatchet-battle atop the Golden Gate Bridge). I work right across the street from Pier 39, so seeing some parts of The City I’ve walked through, held my interest during some admittedly lame plot turns. The Duran Duran theme song is also cool.

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