Word: planeteers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...houses sprout like tropical flowers; office buildings magically morph in a technique that might be called Virtual Realty. You have to watch carefully, for this is not an ingratiating film. It drops you into a foreign landscape without guidebook or translator. It is as cool and distant as the planet the Strangers come from. But, Lord, is Dark City a wonder...
...Boogie Nights auteur Paul Thomas Anderson says, Reynolds was more than "the coolest guy on the planet"; in Deliverance and Starting Over, "Burt also had great chops as an actor." The athletic grace, caged intensity and wounded dignity are on display in Boogie Nights, but so is Reynolds' status as '70s icon--once tarnished, now burnished...
...question of the sphere's origin is left unanswered at the end of the film--along with a lot of other loose ends--but it's really no mystery. It probably came from the Forbidden Planet, a realm first explored in the classic 1956 sci-fi adventure movie. Its inhabitants had mastered the technique of invading people's minds, prying their darkest passions out of them and turning them back on their victims. Obviously Hoffman's character isn't the only figure involved with Sphere who has a good memory for the classic tropes of dystopian...
...that's all right. We're in the realm of homage here, not plagiarism. What's not so good is the failure to make something arresting out of the way the dark side and the bright side of our minds interact. Movies like Forbidden Planet, which had neither the technical sophistication nor the skilled actors available to Levinson, worked their metaphors with a sort of leisurely literateness. Here, all meaning is simply lost in the hubbub, drowned out by the modern imperative to deliver a rush of action, however incomprehensible, every few minutes...
...camp classic: Charlton Heston is The Omega Man(1971). The part must have a dream for Chuck: as the last man on Earth after a biological weapon decimates the human race, he gets to chew a whole lot of scenery all by himself. Then he gets to save the planet. Sure, it wears a little thin when you see make-up streaks on the pale-faced night mutants. And the race-relations moral is ham-fisted. But if you're a Heston fan (and CP knows you are), this post-apocalyptic nightmare offers a decent thrill -- and a few chuckles...