Tag Archives: movie

Tammy and the T-Rex (1994)

This was recommended to me as one of the best of the bad dinosaur movies. Unfortunately, I don’t think it was quite bad enough to be good. A young man’s brain is transferred into a mechanical T-Rex, and he then struggles to be understood and to get back into a human body.

The T-Rex itself is often unconvincing, as the animatronic model can’t walk, so you mostly get shots of its upper body and head (where it either doesn’t move, or seems to be moving on rollers with preternatural smoothness) plus shots of rubber T-Rex feet walking. Denise Richards should get a B-movie Oscar, though, for her convincing scenes of being in love with the robotic beast; some moments are nearly as good as Fred Astaire dancing with a coat rack. I also liked the multi-talented Ellen Dubin as Helga, but it was a small part that should have been given more room to develop.

The movie toyed with crossing the sexual line, but wimped out except for a bizarrely out-of-place strip-tease just before the credits that felt like too much too late. [I am told there is a new “uncut R-rated” version, but I don’t think that’s what I watched.] This is probably a failing, as there could have been a comedy gold mine there if handled well (think Young Frankenstein, or even Toxic Avenger). So, I’m going to give this one a B-.

Ad Astra

Watched Ad Astra (2019). OMG the science was so awful, so many times. Probably the worst moment was where Brad Pitt was climbing up into a rocket, from below, WHILE IT WAS BLASTING OFF (and he was experiencing maybe 3 Gs and effectively weighed 600-800 pounds!). And immediately after that, the crew unstraps and attacks him. But there were LOTS of others. Making antimatter without making an equal amount of matter. A tiny antenna sending a focused beam of energy from Neptune to Earth (ever heard of the diffraction limit?). Showing space elevators on Earth early in the film, and then using massive rockets to get into orbit; and NOT having space elevators on Mars or the Moon, where they would be cheaper and easier to build due to the lower gravity. Anyway, DO NOT WATCH THIS TURKEY. Even if you can stomach the crap science, the plot is mindless and peppered with gratuitous religious overtones that were as out-of-place, and rang as false, as the ones in The War Of The Worlds (1953) or Contact (1997). The director wanted to make 2001 A Space Odyssey and ended up making 2 hours and 1 minute of space idiocy.

2.0

A while back, I recommended the Tamil-language sci-fi blockbuster Enthiran (English version: Robot) especially for its mind-boggling robot-swarm chase scene near the end. For those of you who watched and enjoyed it, I am happy to report that the sequel 2.0 is now available free on Amazon Prime (so far, only in Tamil with English subtitles). I don’t think it’s quite as good or surprising as the original, but still worth a watch.

Bacon Number 2

My Bacon Number is down to 2. Apparently has been since 1995, but I didn’t see it until today. Kevin Bacon – Murder in the First (1995) – Erick Vinther – Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970) – me. My Erdős number is probably still 5, so my combined Bacon-Erdős number would be 7 (the same as Mayim Bialik and Natalie Portman, who both also have 2+5).

Alien Covenant

Didn’t like Alien Covenant much. Figured out the final reveal a good 10 minutes before it happened (around the time they’re all running for the escape ship), so the end of the movie was boring. But the rest of the movie was mainly gorily killing off characters you haven’t even had time to learn the names of, let alone care about. I think Ridley’s lost his touch; the great thing about the original Alien was the ensemble acting, with well-developed characters that you actually knew and cared about, so that their deaths mattered. Even Prometheus had that to an extent, but in Covenant it’s pretty much just absent.

The Martian

Finally saw The Martian yesterday. I only liked it about 80% as much as I was hoping to. The special effects were seamless and gorgeous, but the human side of the story seemed a bit weak. Lots of characters, not much development. Despite lasting 2h22m, it cut out a lot of the book plot, and the meticulously-constructed chain-of-dominos feeling (each problem arising from the previous solution) got lost in the process. I also felt some of the math and science was over-explained, while some was not explained well enough Maybe they thought they had to dumb everything down for a mass audience, and maybe they were right, but even a 10-year-old kid who’s played Kerbal Space Program for a few hours is going to find parts of the movie mildly insulting to their intelligence. Nevertheless, I’m happy it was such a big hit, and I hope we see more books and movies like this in the future.