Month: March 2020

2000 in Film

MISSION TO MARS: a sedate, mournful, yet optimistic journey to the stars (2000 in Film #10)

A J. Black

This year, 20 years on from the year 2000, I’m going to celebrate the first year of cinema in the 21st century by looking back at some of the films across the year at the turn of the millennium which took No #1 at the box office for their opening weekends.

This week, released on the weekend of March 10th, Brian de Palma’s Mission to Mars…

At the tail end of the 90’s, and before the rise of the dominant multi-picture franchise, every year was marked by films which covered similar blockbuster ground. 

1996 had aliens with Independence Day and soon after through a comedy lens in 1997’s Men in Black or Mars Attacks! That same year brought us the ‘volcano’ movies – Volcano and Dante’s Peak, both front-lined by rugged men of action. 1998 was the ‘asteroid’ year, marked by Michael Bay’s excess in Armageddon and the more philosophical (and far superior) Deep Impact. 2000’s variant on this trend was the Mars mission, with critical misfire Red Planet dropping at the tail end of the year, and before it Brian de Palma’s Mission to Mars, arguably the superior of two films which projected humanity forward deeper into the 21st century and toward the next frontier. We remained hopeful, back then, that humanity might reach for the stars. Twenty years on, the best we can hope for is that Donald Trump’s vaunted ‘Space Force’ ends up with eggs on its vacuumed face.

Mission to Mars, in a quirk of fate, actually takes place in the year 2020. The Mars mission, in an even stranger quirk, launches in the film on my birthday. With significant confidence, I am pretty sure that my 38th birthday this year will not be marked by another giant leap for mankind, which places Mission to Mars even more firmly into the science-fiction territory it already covers. Mars missions are promised or hoped for perhaps in the 2030’s, and now Red Planet’s 2056 looks far more likely (if we even have a habitable planet to launch from by then).

Mission to Mars, as a result, is hopeful and optimistic about our chances as a species, in a similar vein to its tonal bedfellow, 1997’s Contact, from Robert Zemeckis. They are films with different journeys but similar destinations. Both are riding the crest of Western hopes in the 1990’s that we may be about to embark, in the 21st century, on a great new adventure. That makes it all the more disappointing that Mission to Mars, the first significant high-concept blockbuster movie released in 2000–it’s only real challenger on opening weekend being Roman Polanski’s Johnny Depp-starring slow burn horror The Ninth Gate–is an underwhelming, strangely mournful and frequently corny experience. Continue reading “MISSION TO MARS: a sedate, mournful, yet optimistic journey to the stars (2000 in Film #10)” →

Alias, Episode Reviews, TV

ALIAS 2×09: ‘Passage – Pt 2’ (TV Review)

A J. Black

In 2018, I began my first deep-dive TV review series looking at JJ Abrams’ Alias, which ran from 2001-2006. This year, I’ll be looking at Season Two’s 22-episode run in detail…

The second half of Passage is proof positive that Alias might have benefited more often by indulging in the traditional two-part episode structure of old, given how well it makes use of the breathing space afforded to it by part one.

The Box, as we previously discussed last season, played structurally with the classic two-part event episode by seeding a high-concept idea within the ongoing, serialised fabric of Alias, in a different manner to Alias’ penchant for ending stories week by week in a truly serialised fashion with a cliffhanger, frequently Sydney-in-peril. This lessened over time, with many Season Two episodes having the confidence to end on an emotional beat, but connected narrative structures remain – take how Salvation flows into The Counteragent, for example.

Passage, like The Box, has a condensed conceptual idea—Syd, Jack & Irina work together on a mission—that only exists within the construct of these two episodes, while helping the forward the broader arcs of the season.

Passage therefore has the space to establish the global stakes—in this case stolen suitcase nuclear weapons inside contested Kashmiri territory—and establish the emotional stakes—here surrounding whether Syd, Jack and the broader CIA can trust Irina enough to let her out of her cell—which gives this entire story a greater depth than some Alias episodes are afforded. It is a sign that Alias can break from the traditional Season One template of a mission Sydney goes on with a specific objective, broken up into two or three set-pieces per episode. The mission in Passage is the episode, and it works entirely to service the Bristow family drama. Not until Season 4 premiere Authorised Personnel Only will Alias again give itself the two-part framework to tell a story in quite this manner.

That is part of the reason Passage works so well, indeed rarely for the second part of a story, it works better than part one and the establishment. Passage also works because the payoff is as satisfying, if not more so, than what the episode sets up.

Continue reading “ALIAS 2×09: ‘Passage – Pt 2’ (TV Review)” →

2000 in Film

THE NEXT BEST THING: A glossy, ham-fisted, non-romance (2000 in Film #9)

A J. Black

This year, 20 years on from the year 2000, I’m going to celebrate the first year of cinema in the 21st century by looking back at some of the films across the year at the turn of the millennium which took No #1 at the box office for their opening weekends.

This week, released on the weekend of March 3rd, John Schlesinger’s The Next Best Thing…

It is fair to say that the first weekend in March of 2000 was a slim one in terms of new releases, which accounts for why John Schlesinger’s The Next Best Thing was both the most profitable movie and at the same time failed to ultimately make a profit, just falling shy of recouping its modest budget.

Everyone involved almost certainly imagined it would do better. Madonna was headlining as Abby, a New Age yoga instructor in sunny California who falls in love with her gay best friend Robert, played by Rupert Everett—basking in the glow of success in My Best Friend’s Wedding, where he essentially played the same kind of character. It must have seemed like box office alchemy, indeed Madonna’s previous film Evita probably remains her most successful. Throw in one of the most celebrated transatlantic directors of the 60’s & 70’s in Schlesinger and what we should have ended up with was a charming, star-led romantic comedy. What we ended up with was a bizarre, mawkish, messy comedy that veers wildly into a dramatic final act lifted from an entirely different movie.

The Next Best Thing is, to put it mildly, bad filmmaking. The script, written by Tom Ropelewski as an original screenplay called The Red Curtain originally meant to star Richard Dreyfuss & Helen Hunt—proof positive there was a better film lurking underneath somewhere—that eventually was mangled through the Hollywood threshing machine, plonked into the lap of Madonna, and presumably transformed into the strange, worthy beast we ended up getting. Quite what possessed Schlesinger to get on board we will never know – it’s even more tragic that this was the final film he directed before his death in 2003. It’s about as flaccid and ignominious an end the director of Midnight Cowboy or Billy Liar could have had to his career. Nothing, genuinely *nothing*, about this film works in any respect. It is really quite remarkable from that perspective.

The Next Best Thing is also evidence that while Hollywood had an eye on the progressive, liberal structures that are coming to define it twenty years on, its tin ear for how to achieve them was still strong.

Continue reading “THE NEXT BEST THING: A glossy, ham-fisted, non-romance (2000 in Film #9)” →

Alias, Episode Reviews, TV

ALIAS 2×08: ‘Passage – Pt 1’ (TV Review)

A J. Black

In 2018, I began my first deep-dive TV review series looking at JJ Abrams’ Alias, which ran from 2001-2006. This year, I’ll be looking at Season Two’s 22-episode run in detail…

If the first seven episodes of Alias Season Two deal with the fallout from Season One and establish the narrative and character arcs of the second season, Passage is arguably the two-part episode which kickstarts the beginning of the end of the series we have come to know up to this point.

The change is evident right away with the lack of a pre-credits sequence explaining the concept of the show, as every episode up to this point has in some manner included. This could have been a decision designed to afford the show greater running time, having to worry about those concerns as a network series, or equally it could simply show the confidence Alias now has that the audience will be keeping up enough with a standard ‘previously on…’ segment. The stabilisers are now off. Even the slippery Mr Sark, who we see in a brief car dual alongside Sydney Bristow which recalls a much cheaper version of the car chase in Mission Impossible II, is blasting out Creedence Clearwater Revival’s classic ‘Bad Moon Rising’ on the stereo. “I see a pale moon rising… I see trouble on the way…”.

Everything about Passage, immediately, is foreshadowing significant change on the horizon. Syd is now working with one of her key antagonists in Sark, though she very quickly establishes a Mutually Assured Destruction quid pro quo with him as regards the truth about her role as a double agent. “If you burn me, I burn you”. His presence, nevertheless, moves a bad guy into her orbit in a way the series has not previously attempted. As Sark arrives, the stakes also massively raise as Passage introduces a big gun: nuclear weapons. Sure, Syd may have casually defused a nuke early on in Season One’s So It Begins…, but here it matters. Passage considers stolen nuclear weapons big enough, Thunderball-style, to warrant a broader, two-part canvas.

Passage, in that sense, mirrors the key Season One two-part story The Box, even if they go about their business very different. They both change the game in several ways. They are both points of no return. Continue reading “ALIAS 2×08: ‘Passage – Pt 1’ (TV Review)” →