Unsettling Bruce Willis bot.

Thanks to Netflix and my laziness, I had time to sit down and watch Surrogates starring Bruce Willis. Surrogates is about a future world where most people stay inside, opting to live their lives through a robotic avatar (not the blue kitty kind mind you) that goes out into the world while the user pilots them remotely. Naturally, the surrogate bots tend to be everything their operator is not, and since they are robots, if they are destroyed, their owner remains safely at home…or do they?

To add some spice, someone starts killing surrogates with a device that also kills their operators. It’s the job of Willis’ character to find out the “who”, “what” and “why”. Of course, creepy youthful Willis-bot ends up biting it which forces real life, not so pretty Willis to venture out into the world as a vulnerable meatbag.

While the story was nothing all that unexpected (human protesters against surrogates, surrogate operators who want things to stay the way they are), it was fairly well executed. The twist as to who the real killer was caught me a little off guard, and I was enjoying the movie…then they blew it with the ending.

There’s not much more upsetting in a movie to me than when everything falls apart at the end. The finish for the movie felt forced and disingenuous. It was as if some studio exec said they needed to scrap whatever ending was there before in favour of something cheerier. The problem is that it went against character motivations and ends up lacking the bite they could have had with something a bit more dismal. The movie could have really driven home the social commentary it was trying to bring and still have been satisfying to the viewers. (See the spoiler section for more on the ending.)

The effects in the movie are adequate, the script was decent and the acting was enjoyable. It could have been so much more though, and after reaching the ending, all I can see is wasted potential.

Final Score: 2 out of 5.

BEYOND THIS POINT ARE SPOILERS…TURN BACK IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE FILM OR CARE ABOUT CHARACTER AND PLOT POINTS BEING REVEALED…

Here is my big problem with the ending. Willis’ character decides at the very last moment, after he’s confirmed that no operators will die, to wipe out the entire surrogate population. All at once, every surrogate in the U.S. shuts off and crumples to the ground. The cleanup of the bots would be horrendous, let alone the crashed cars and any collateral damage caused by said crashing vehicles. (I wonder if airplanes would have crashed too.) However, that’s not the biggest problem. According to the movie, you have a society that has lived for several years through their surrogates. They have adjusted to doing next to nothing for themselves. To take all of that away at once would cause widespread panic. People wouldn’t know what to do with themselves anymore, and having to face their own unperfected face in the mirror day after day would likely drive some people mad. Suicide rates would probably skyrocket and the work force would be all kinds of screwy. Jobs that could once be completed by robots might be completely unmanageable for a human. You are talking about a complete infrastructure change because one guy decided to pull the plug.

The more poignant ending would have been the character protecting the life he knew. To choose to continue this distant existence through a robot. It may not have been the sappy “he and his wife are truly reunited” ending that they had, but it would have made more sense and had far more impact.

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Best part of the movie.

If I had to review Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland in one word, I would chose the word: boring. With a few more words in the review I could say that it was boring, with a side of boring for dipping. (I saw it in 2D, but I don’t think all of the 3D in the world would have made it any better.)

I consider myself a Tim Burton fan, and I think I was one of the few to actually enjoy Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There have been very few misses when it comes to my enjoyment of his films. Alice was a definite miss.

I wasn’t sure what to expect by way of the plot, but it was not really a reinterpretation of the classic story as I had hoped it would be. It was more like some sort of strange sequel or alternate reality.

I found myself unable to care about any of the characters. Every performance was lackluster. Depp definitely captured the “mad” in Mad Hatter, but there were times when I couldn’t understand a damn thing he was saying. There is a line between nonsense words and mumbling unintelligibly.

The White Queen (Hathaway) was supposed to be very light and ethereal, but she just came across as trying too hard. Carter’s performance as The Red Queen didn’t feel like anything new or fresh. Alice (Wasikowska) didn’t really strike me one way or another. The performance of Crispin Glover as Stayne was surprisingly better than most of the cast. At least he was effectively creepy.

The effects in the film were okay, but I found them more distracting than anything. The one stand out piece was the Cheshire Cat. He was beautifully rendered, and the character interpretation was overall marvelous. (Stephen Fry was the perfect voice actor for it.) I could have done with a lot more of him in the movie.

The ending of the film felt flat and uninspired. I think we were supposed to feel as if the character of Alice had grown because of her experiences, but the character development was so weak that there was never that sense of real life-changing accomplishment.

Even though the plot was not very true to the books, some of the elements and pacing felt very close. However, where the books draw you into the nonsense the movie pushes away.

I really don’t have much else to say. There was a point somewhere during the movie where I started spacing out from boredom in favour of visiting my own Wonderland. It was sadly more interesting than the one flickering across the screen.

Final Score: 2 out of 5.

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Photo/Makeup by Spatola Designer Images

I like to scare people.

That statement is the main reason that I’ve tried my hand at being a scare actor. (For those unfamiliar, a scare actor generally works at a haunted attraction with the intent of terrifying the patrons.) I don’t know why I get such a kick out of it. Maybe I find a perverse and possibly sadistic thrill in scaring the piss out of another person. Maybe it’s some sensation of delight at being able to effectively entertain and disturb at the same time. Maybe it’s all of the above. Whatever it is, I like it.

At this time I have worked at three separate haunts. Two of them were only for a few nights as a volunteer, and one was as a paid employee at an autumn carnival. So far I’ve gotten to be an eyeless dolly, a bruised lobotomy patient, a demon, a deranged nurse, a vampire and the classic generic haunt monster. I’ve got my favourites out of that group (eyeless dolly and nurse) but they’ve all been fun roles to fill.

Many scare actors seem to have a type of character they play in general. Noisy and sarcastic, screamers, wild lunatics and so forth and so on. My forte is the silent, creepy type. I revel in being able to terrify people without having to say a single word. I’ll throw in a growl now and again or a gnashing of teeth, but a silent stare and a crazed walk are immensely effective on their own. I remember scaring one guest at a haunt so badly that they tried to run away from me. I gave chase and they tripped and landed face first. They started to get up, took one look at me looming over them and took off running again.

I also use my size to my advantage whenever possible. I’m fairly tall, but slender, so I can fit into places some other scare actors can’t. At one haunt there was a tunnel filled with fog for guests to go through, and generally the actors would bang on the outside walls and scream. I was just slim enough to slip inside with the victims guests and pretend to crawl sideways along the wall, appearing out of the mist. The space was so narrow that walking by me was unavoidable and I actually had to make sure people would leave the tunnel in the correct direction.

Scare acting also has a lot to do with timing. Sometimes you’re in a place where folks can see you from far away and visa versa. That can be easier sometimes since you can start to gauge who’s going to be the best target to torment. (Haunt monsters tend to pick out the weakest of the herd.) When you’re in hiding though, it’s a lot more difficult to time your scares. You have to listen to the group to try and figure out how large it is and try to aim for the middle. (The general rule of thumb is not to go after the first or last of a group. The middle is best for collateral damage.)

Unfortunately, working haunts isn’t all fun and games though. It’s hours of repetition. If you’re the type that screams and hollers at people you have to be careful to not lose your voice. There’s always the chance you could get maimed by a guest (especially if you’re like me and like to get in as close as possible). And, of course, there are the jackasses.

I can’t fathom why some people spend good money to go to haunts only to be rude to all the actors. Maybe they feel that they can get away with being nasty since they’ve paid to be there. Some of these people are nearly unbearable. They come in to heckle you, tell you your makeup is lousy, tell you that you aren’t scary, all the while you’re trying to keep in character and scare the other people coming through.

Sometimes the guests aren’t the problem at a haunt; sometimes it’s the other monsters. You get the ones that don’t take it seriously or roam into your area and ruin your scares. Effective scaring often results from teamwork, but not everyone wants to play nice. So many of the actors at the last haunt I worked were so horrible that I actually had to quit before scare acting lost all its appeal. The folks in charge had hired mainly high school kids that could never bothered to follow the rules or simply didn’t care. The experience we were trying to create really suffered because of a few individuals. There’s plenty of room for fun and jokes, but you have to remember that you still have a show to put on.

Sadly, I didn’t have the opportunity to work at a haunt last year. The timing was bad, and I’d already worked and quit the biggest local haunt the year before. I’m hoping that this year I can pick up a few days somewhere as a volunteer. I almost feel like a junkie that’s going to need her fix.

Gentlemen, start your chainsaws.

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This guy was the Phantom?

Sometimes it’s refreshing to visit our childhoods. Last night I feel like I got to travel back in time a little bit with the help of my old friend Condorman.

Condorman is a movie about an awkward comic book artist (Michael Crawford) who gets a chance to live out a comic book fantasy. It turns out his friend in the CIA needs a civilian to deliver some papers to the Russians, and wouldn’t you know who he picks to help out. Naturally things go awry and our unlikely artist-hero is sent on the adventure of a lifetime.

This movie had everything I could want as a kid. Espionage, comic-book action, explosions, a villain with one silver eye, crazy gadgets, “exotic” locations, and a guy dressed up like a condor. It doesn’t get much more awesome than that.

Watching the movie now, I don’t know if I would have had the same love for it if I hadn’t grown up with it. It would still be fun and entertaining, but in a different way. The plot is admittedly predictable, many of things in it don’t really make a lot of sense, and the scripting is very cheesy in places. Yet, upon re-watching it, I think that some of the cheesiness and predictability was intentional. Our hero is living out the Condorman story, so it only makes sense that it follow some of the same conventions of a comic book. Or maybe I’m trying to justify the silliness.

Regardless of any imperfections this movie may have, it left a big impact on me as a child. So much so that I was actively seeking a copy. I finally found a “decently” priced new copy from a seller on Amazon. I paid the lowest available price which was around $30, and sounded a lot better than the $50+ I was used to seeing. (Of course, knowing my luck, Disney will suddenly decide to re-release this and I’ll see it at Target for $15.)

As a final note, this was the movie that made it hard for me to believe that Michael Crawford could ever be the Phantom of the Opera. I’d listened to the soundtrack several times before anyone told me who was singing. When my mum finally broke the news to me I could only look at her slack-jawed and say “That’s Condorman singing?!”.

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