When my friend and I arrived to see "Pandorum" at the Century 24 last week, the parking lot was empty.  This is the place where bad movies open to die an unwatched death.  For a science fiction movie, good or bad, this wasn't a bad situation.  We were horrified to find a bevy of pre-teen girls moving through the concession stand, wondering if "Pandorum" appealed to the teeny-bopper set of "Twilight" and we should return our tickets.  We were relieved see them go into the theater playing "Fame," a re-make of the classic 1980's TV/movie/play/whatever since Hollywood can't think of anything more original.  Unlike "Jennifer's Body" the week before, no one was talking behind us since there were fewer people watching.   We had one question that was left unanswered by the trailer that we first saw at WonderCon 2009.

Was "Pandorum" more like "Alien" (an alien creature) or "Event Horizon" (a demon-possessed spaceship)?

The bridge crew of the Elsym receives the final transmission from a dying Earth that they are now the last survivors of humanity.  Later on, two crew officers, Bower (Ben Foster) and Payton (Dennis Quaid), are awaken from hyper-sleep.  They have functional memories for operating the various subsystems of the ship that comes back to them sooner than their personal memories of who they are as individuals.  They discover that they're locked inside their compartment, unable to raise the bridge crew on the radio, and a periodic power surge is slowly destroying the ship.  Bower goes into the ventilation system to bypass the locked door to find out what is going on with the ship and reset the nuclear reactor before it shuts down forever.  Payton monitors Bower's progress via radio and tries to find a way to unlock the door to the bridge.

Bower comes across the pale-skinned creatures that are roaming around the ship, hunting down and eating any survivors they can find.   Are these space vampire or space zombies?  Neither.  They appear to be space cannibals who violently eat humans—or each other—into shreds.  Bower discovers two other crew members, Nadia (Antje Traue) and Manh (Cung Le), who had eked out a marginal existence of staying alive while avoiding the creatures.  Together they travel towards the nuclear reactor.  When they come across another survivor in a bolt hole, he recites how one member of the bridge crew reacted violently to Earth's last transmission, taking on a Messiah complex, and exiling the other crew members into the ship, referring to the elaborately carved images into the metal panels like cave paintings that resembles the exile of humanity from Eden.  Of course, the survivor telling them the story posioned their water so he could have them stay for dinner as his dinner.  They convinced him that they would be his last dinner if the nuclear reactor shuts down to kill everyone aboard the ship.

Payton, meanwhile, discovers a crew member crawling in the ventilation shaft, Gallo (Cam Gigandet of "Twilight"), who was on the bridge when the last transmission from Earth came in.  Pandorum, as Payton explained to Bower earlier, is a psychological condition that sometimes effect crew members in deep space, introducing paranoia and homicidal rages.   The first ship sent to the Earth-like planet failed because a sick crew member took over the ship and jettisoned the hyper-sleep pods of 60,000 people into deep space.  When Payton confronts Gallo about what really happened to the ship, the Pandorum madness spirals out of control in a fight to the death.   Meanwhile, Bower resets the nuclear reactor with minutes to spare and comes under the influence of Pandorum when reaching the bridge.

The ending has several twists, some obvious and some obscure.  The most significant can easily be missed when the camera crosses over the mission time clock—924 years from launch—that explains the evolution of the cannibals from the exiled crew.  When the doors over the bridge windows are opened to reveal a dark void, the distinctive lifeforms swimming outside explains where the ship had landed.  Although Pandorum the disease nearly killed the mission again, the ship itself had completed the mission to bring humanity to a new planet.  Only 1,200 some odd survivors are left to restart humanity.

Cannibals in space is a subject rarely touched in science fiction. The closest example I can think of are the Reavers from the TV series, "Firefly," who haunt the space ways looking for flesh to consume and decorate the outside of their ships with skeletons.  The only other science fiction series where the crew evolved was the TV series, "Red Dwarf," where Cat is the humanoid descendent of a pregnant domesticated cat during the three million years sealed in the ship cargo hold.  This makes "Pandorum" a rather curious blend for a science fiction movie, less like "Alien" and "Event Horizon" in many ways.

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When I saw "Extract" this past weekend, I expected a movie about seemingly normal people caught up in situations that leads to morally compromising choices that no one in their right mind would entertain and someone dropping dead for no good reason.   I wasn't disappointed.  This is a Hollywood genre that I like to call dysfunctional reality.

Small businessman Joel (Jason Bateman) finds himself stuck at work and an overly talkative neighbor, Nathan (David Koechner), that prevents him from getting home before 8:00PM, and, once his wife, Suzie (Kristen Wiig), puts on her sweatpants, he is so out of luck in getting laid for that night.  If that wasn't bad enough, a larger company is offering to buy out his extract flavor factory, and his workforce is more interested in bickering with each other that accidents routinely happen.  After one of his employee, Step (Clifton Collins Jr.), loses a testicle in an extended accident that involves everyone on the line, a dysfunctional reality settles on Joel.

The movie starts with Cindy (Mila Kunis) at a guitar shop looking to buy a $3,000 USD guitar for her Dad's birthday, and, once the two sales clerks are falling over each other to get something from the back room, she walks out the door with the guitar.  At a nearby pawn shop, the clerk is throwing $20 USD bills at her when she tells him about how her poor Dad had just died.  After glancing through her collection of Midwestern driver licenses, and reading an article about the factory accident with the realization that millions of dollars could be gain in a personal injury lawsuit, she gets a job at the factory to learn of Step's home address to cozy up him and starts stealing personal items from everyone else.

Meanwhile, Joel confesses his martial problems to his bartender, Dean (Ben Affleck), who loads him with booze and a horse tranquilizer pill that's supposed to be something else, and offers him devious advice about setting his wife up with a teenaged gigolo to pretend to be the pool cleaner to cancel out any the moral qualms about having an affair with Cindy.   (Recycling the 1970's answer to any problem with sex, booze and pills.)  After sobering up with a killer hang over, Joel changes his mind only to discover that the gigolo had started early after recovering from his hang over and proven himself to be too effective.  Now anger and guilt replaced the long suffering frustration to animate the conversations between husband and wife.

Gene Simmons of KISS fame plays a personal injury attorney, Joe Adler, who seems to be the only sane person in the movie when he explains vulgarly how the monetary value of a man with only one testicle is the holy grail of personal injury lawsuits.  After Joel refuses to pay the holy grail number, the attorney offers to drop the suit in return for slamming Joel's testicles in a door as adequate compensation for his Step's loss.  But even the attorney is not immune from this dysfunctional reality when Cindy sets him up to steal his fancy sports car and drives off into the sunset.  I think Simmons performance rivals Meatballs' performance as a strict fundamentalist father in "Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny."

Joel eventually figures out Cindy's game, sleeps with her, goes about righting the wrongs of this dysfunctional reality, and reconciles with Suzie at the funeral of their talkative neighbor who keels over after she tells him off.  You can't have a dysfunctional reality movie without one person bumbling into his own death.  Which is why "Extract" reminds me of "Burn After Reading" (which I hated) with the gym instructor accidentally shot dead by the Treasury officer who never fired his gun before, or "The Lady Killers" when a fallen criminal is tossed on top of a garbage barge passing underneath a bridge.  When everything returns to normal, you have to wonder why these people put themselves through this in the first place.

This is the kind of movie that makes me glad that I have a normal, boring life with few moral complications. Then again, I'm a writer.  All my characters suffer whatever stupidity that I can think of.   Except I don't think my imagination will ever be as twisted as what Hollywood is putting out with these dysfunctional realities.

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I read the reviews from the The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle describing the new "Ice Age: Dawn of The Dinosaurs" movie as being scientifically inaccurate because the last great ice age occurred after the dinosaurs been wiped out by a meteor.  Funny.  I thought this was entertainment rather than a documentary.  Or maybe the reviewers are scientifically stupid?

I'm at a lost to understand why this movie is considered to be scientifically inaccurate because a pocket of dinosaurs continued to exist into the ice age.  Such a situation is unlikely but not that far fetch.  A possible new species of humanity, homo floresiensis,  was discovered on an island in the Far East.  The ancestors of these small people settled there during the ice age when the ocean levels were low, and, isolated from the rest of humanity after the ice age, evolved into a new species.  They lived until about 12,000 years ago when a possible volcanic eruption wiped them out, which is fairly recent in geological time.

I enjoy the Ice Age movies only to see the squirrel in his pursuit of the acorn that is always out of his reach.  This time he has new female competitor/lover for the acorn with the opening scene set to "You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine" by Lou Rawls (there's an instrumental tango version of this song later on).  During the course of the movie, we see them going through all stages of love until they forget all about the acorn.  When domestic bliss becomes too much of a burden, chasing the acorn becomes more appealing.  I once took a date to a hole in the wall jazz club when I was in college.  The woman jazz singer was describing all the different stages of love, and we left at midnight when she was describing how love sucks.  The way the movie ends with the squirrel losing both the acorn and the love interest reminded me of that moment.

As for the rest of the movie, I really didn't care.  All the fat jokes got replaced by penis jokes.  (Not that I can complain too much about that since I wrote a novella about a chain-smoking vampire hunter with a wooden stake in his pocket that's a phallic fantasy when looking up a dream dictionary.)  The only bright spot was the swashbuckling Buck the weasel voiced by Simon Pegg, with the best lines, characterization, and action scenes.  The 3D work was handled exceptionally well in comparison to other 3D movies that came out this year.

As for scientifically accuracy, I would care only if this movie was a documentary.

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A new graphic novel by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, "A Drifting Life," is a semi-fictional autobiography of the post-World War 2 manga scene, and perhaps the thickest (856 pages) I have ever read.  Bracketed between the end of World War II in 1945 and the Peace Treaty in 1960, this story is about Hiroshi Katsumi learning to become a manga artist, his early work in magazine contests, working for a single publisher with shady business practices, working with other artists and multiple publishers, misadventures with women, and a political awakening that redefines a young man.  At times brutally honest, startling and revealing about the human condition, this book is a masterpiece.

Most artists internalized their fears regarding their work.  Although Hiroshi has his doubts from time to time, all his fears are externalized by his older brother, Okimasa.  Both aspire to be manga artists but the younger brother is more prolific and constantly refining his work more than the older brother, creating a tension between the two that range from mild verbal sparing to outright abuse.  Hiroshi is constantly escaping to get away from his older brother by being a substitute basketball player at high school, working on his manga at his aunt's place under the roar of American bombers flying out of the airport, or watching what would later become classic movies from America (Shane, Snow White, and Dumbo) and Japan (Seven Samurai and Godzilla) that would influence his work.  He later moves to Tokyo to live with other manga artists and find better business opportunities.

What I admired the most about Hiroshi is his willingness to keep working from project to project to create a critical body of work to enable him to advance to the next level of his career.  We see a steady progression from shorter lengths (four-panel on postcards) to telling longer stories (32-pages) to creating full-length books (128-pages), struggling and mastering each level along the way.  Experimenting with new and different techniques for story telling and visual presentations from classic literature, hard-boiled detective mysteries, and movies to keep the stories fresh and interesting.  Learning how to manage the business side with different artists, projects, and publishers.  Being an artist is hard work and this book that took ten years to make clearly demonstrates that.

If you're an aspiring manga artist or writer, and want to know how to successfully manage your career, this book is a must read.

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