Doctor Who: Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks (2007)

"That motherfucker had, like, 30 goddamn dicks."

Doctor Who is this great show about a dude named the Doctor who is an alien and is awesome and zips around space and time in his space-and-time machine, which looks like a blue box and is called the TARDIS and is also awesome. One caveat to the show's awesomeness, though: sometimes it sucks.

In this two-part episode, the Doctor (David Tennant, at this point) and his companion Martha (Freema Agyeman) visit New York during the Great Depression, because, you know, they figured that would be fun. Alas! Their quaint excursion to the breadlines is foiled by--who else?--the genocidal Daleks. The Doctor's mortal enemies are kidnapping people and dragging them to the Empire State Building in service of some evil plan.

Okay. Pretty straightforward. Also pretty boring. Neither the Doctor nor Martha does or says anything particularly interesting, and most of the guest characters are similarly flat. I do like the relationship between stagehand Laszlo and Adelaide-clone Tallulah. It's sweet and sad. Everything else about this two-parter, though--the tedious plot, the awful American accents, the idea of Human Daleks--is best forgotten.

For some reason, in new Who*, the presence of Daleks (or Cybermen, another classic enemy of the Doctor) tends to indicate crappy episodes. The big exception is the Ninth Doctor episode "Dalek," which is heart-wrenching and pretty dope. But while "Dalek" pulsed with an emotional core, most Dalek-centric episodes have been heavy on the "EXTERMINATE!" catch phrase (which--don't get me wrong--I love) and light on real feeling. The most recent season of Doctor Who was superb; to my mind, its only truly lackluster episode was the third one: "Victory of the Daleks." I'm going to idly speculate that Dalek episodes disappoint because 1) they're probably commissioned in an unimaginative way ("Give us Daleks in the thirties!" "Give us Daleks in WWII!") and 2) Daleks bring down the whimsy level, which means that the episode must compensate by being really dark or really scary. Otherwise, it's just really dull.

Looking back on season 3 of new Who, I'm sad for Martha Jones. She was a one-season-only companion, and she got shortchanged. First, her pining after the Doctor was not a particularly meaty arc. Second, she was in a lot of mediocre-to-bad episodes. In spite of those substantial handicaps, I find Freema Agyeman's performance completely winning. I love Martha and want only the best for her. But she did not usually get the best. She usually got "Daleks in Manhattan."

*There is "old Who," which ran from 1963-1989, and "new Who," which began in 2005. New Who is not a true reboot; it continued from where the old series left off. (More or less.)

- Didn't Like It (but if I were rating new Who as a whole, I'd give it 4 stars, and if I was rating the newest season of new Who, I'd give it 6 or 7)

Moon (2009)

This is a great week for everyone but me being right. For years, my friends, colleagues, and frenemies have been telling me I should watch The Wire, and I have said, "I will watch The Wire when I watch The Wire." Now I am watching The Wire, and you all were right, and I was stupid. Similarly, last year, while everyone I knew flipped out about Moon, I said, "Yeah, I'll get around to it." WELL, I HAVE GOTTEN AROUND TO IT, AND IT IS GREAT.

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) works for a company called Lunar Industries, mining helium-3, which humanity has adopted as its primary energy source. Sam is the only human part of the operation, there to inspect and maintain the automated harvesters. He's been alone on the moon for almost three years. When the movie opens, he's two weeks away from returning home, which is good, because the isolation is driving him crazy. He's started hallucinating, and one vision distracts him as he's driving out to a harvester, leading to a nasty collision. In the aftermath of the accident, he starts uncovering his employer's sinister secrets. (Ooh! Sinister! [Very sinister.])

Here are some things that Moon has:
-Sam Rockwell
-A robot
-Outer space
-Feelings
-Great production design/art direction


Moon looks better and is better (smarter, more interesting, more emotionally compelling, etc.) than almost everything that was nominated for an Oscar last year, blah blah, arts awards are bunk. And it is more original than everything else I saw last year, with the possible exception of Logorama. People who know how fond I am of In the Loop and A Serious Man will understand how much it pains me to say that any movie exceeded them at anything, but it's true.

Watching movies like Moon is wonderful, of course, but it's also a little bit awful: it makes average movies look really bad. For a few weeks after I saw Hunger, other movies and TV shows felt mechanical and unchallenging. I'm sure that Moon will also make me bridle at the next movie I try to watch.

Moon is energetic. That's what it is. It has the scrappy intensity of a very ambitious movie made on a small budget, a fuck-you-itiveness. It says, We will show you humanity and corruption and sadness and hope. We will do it on the moon. For $5 million. And it will look goddamned fantastic.

- Loved It

The Brother From Another Planet (1984)

How fun was this. The Brother From Another Planet is about an alien refugee (Joe Morton) who crashes in the harbor off of Ellis Island. He makes his way (by chance, I guess, though the geography's a little suspect) to Harlem, where he has Problems because he doesn't understand Human Ways (like money) and also he's mute. But then he wanders into a bar populated with quirky regulars, and they adopt him!

We follow the Brother through his mundane travails (finding somewhere to live, a job), his weirdo quests (some stuff with drug dealers, some other stuff with a lady), and his pursuit by two bounty hunters, the Men in Black (John Sayles and the perennially foxy David Strathairn).

Fish-out-of-water scenes are, of course, obligatory for this kind of movie, and they often feel hackneyed. Not so here. In the hands of Sayles, Morton, and Strathairn, everything is fresh. I giggled the maximum amount when the Brother saw a crucifix for the first time. (Morton's reaction shots are always dynamite, actually.) There's also a very funny exchange between the Men in Black and the bartender, Odell:

Man 1: Beer.
Odell: What kind?
Man 2: Draft.
Man 1: On the rocks.

Now, this may just seem okay amusing, but Sayles and Strathairn's delivery really sells it: they're totally deadpan, but they still convey a confused panic at the bartender's question--and then Sayles' alien recovers with misplaced confidence: "On the rocks." ON THE ROCKS YOU GUYS. FOR BEER. OH THE HUMOR. No, really, it's a very funny scene.

A very funny scene.

The beer scene is a great way of introducing these two creepy villains. They are the vague menace hovering over the story, and while they're intimidating, no one is so frightened as to cooperate with them. This is one of my favorite running not-quite-gags in the movie, and it reaches its peak when they try to question a public servant about the Brother. She looks nervous for a second, and then she dispatches them with piles of paperwork and requests for verification of identity and employment.

The movie is admittedly uneven: its low-budget-ness, which really shines in the simple approach to alien tech (e.g. the Brother's eyeball surveillance, the Men in Black's imaginative alien fishing reel), makes for a pretty fucking boring climactic chase sequence. Also, I did not so much enjoy the drug subplot, which includes an atmospheric (by which I mean "tedious") tour of nighttime Harlem and culminates in the Brother doing something that made me very uncomfortable.

BUT: those few things aside, this movie has a lot of heart. It's filled with fun characters, and Morton holds everything together expertly. I don't think I can praise his performance enough: he's expressive, charismatic, sympathetic--and silent.

Finally, I have to end with some cool trivia: Joe Morton has the distinction of being the first actor to appear in two movies reviewed on this blog. (He played Keanu Reeves' commanding officer in Speed.) Also, John Sayles is clearly campaigning to be my new favorite director. Item 1: I liked this movie a lot. Item 2: he self-finances his movies by doctoring scripts. Item 3: IMDb informs me that in a poll two years ago, Mr. Sayles said that The Spirit of the Beehive is one of his 10 favorite movies. BOOM. Great job, John Sayles.