Yesterday I watched a movie! Here are my Movie Thoughts about Timer.

Full disclosure, I didn’t mean to watch Timer. When I started watching it, I thought I was going to be watching In Time. I was aiming for a sci-fi story about people with clocks in their arms that tells how long they have left to live and uses that gimmick to comment on wealth disparity, but what I got was a movie about people with clocks in their arms that tells them when they will find their one true love. But hey, I liked Timer fine, so it’s all good.

The Movie Thoughts that came to me during Timer is this: I think there may be a whole genre of movies that I recognize but which hasn’t quite been codified yet. Timer is a movie in which a company has a fancy new sci-fi device (which is more magic than science, really) and we aren’t exploring what the device means for humanity or anything, we are focused on a emotional arc of the characters. The sci-fi magic, presented via some company’s gizmo, is just a plot device to allow us to play through the character study and apart from that one element, the world resembles our own. It isn’t a future timeline or a fantasy world. We might get some offhand commentary about how the world is changing because of the device, but that isn’t the focus, and it hasn’t progressed enough to make society unrecognizable. (For example, I disqualify the movie the Lobster because the society in there has different laws and mores than our own. It’s too different.)

Other examples of this sort of thing would be Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where there’s a company that can erase memories. There’s also Cold Souls, where there’s a company that can remove souls and put them in different bodies and such. Both are stories not about the science, but about the characters who just happen to access the science via the miracles of capitalism.

I may not be big on capitalism, but I like this gimmick for a genre. The idea that one could wander down to the strip mall and go into a shop and have some magic device that can power an emotional story arc. I can’t pin down a name for this genre, but it’s definitely related to Magic Realism or Fabulism, but with a corporate component. Capitalist Fabulism? Eh, someone will find a better name, so long as we get more movies of this ilk. And I hope we do.

Hey, I forgot that “Movie Thoughts” was even a thing I had started doing on this site. I think I did two and then forgot about them. Well, I want to break up the flow of Phone Guys being the only thing going up, so let’s talk about a movie I watched the other day.

Today’s Movie Thoughts are about Knightriders.

I don’t actually want to get too into the details of the film itself, but I should give a little bit of a summary: This is a movie about a group of travelling performers whose medium of performance is motorcycle jousting. There’s a bunch of drama about who gets to be in charge of this motorcycle troupe, and there’s a lot of allusions to the tales of King Arthur. That’s the basic deal. But the Movie Thoughts that occurred to me while watching were about how much I wish the movie had been dumber.

I’m not going to say Knightriders is a bad movie, but it isn’t a good enough movie that I enjoyed sitting through it when I wanted a dumb action movie.

What I mean is that it turns out that Knightriders exists in some sort of valley of quality that actually makes me find it less enjoyable. It’s in the Mid-Quality Zone. I thought that the motorcycle knight movie was going to be stupid. Instead, it turned out to be a movie delivered a drama film plot that just happened to have motorcycle jousting amid actual character work and attempts to take the plot seriously. These things would be good in a good drama, but Knightriders doesn’t break through the barrier to be a good drama. It’s just middling. And the fact the film’s length seemed better suited for a compelling drama than for a dumb action movie meant that I was getting more of what I didn’t want.

The lesson is this: We need more movies about motorcycle fighting. There needs to be enough variety in that concept that there are motorcycle fight movies for whatever mood the viewer happens to be in.

Today I am thinking about a 1988 horror film, called Pulse.

Pulse is about some sort of technological entity, maybe living electricity or something, that seems to enjoy nothing more than taking over the electronics in suburban homes so as to slaughter those inside. We’re never given any kind of motivation or explanation or anything, but bad horror movies love to do bad storytelling and use the “whatever is in your imagination is scarier” excuse, so I’ll just allow it. Anyway, the protagonal victims here are this one kid* and his father and step-mother. Basically, their house tries to kill them. That’s the movie.

It isn’t a terrible movie, of course. As a fan of horror films, I have watched much worse. But it wasn’t great either I have enough trouble connecting with horror movies given that I’m not in the least afraid of the dark or of night-time. Anyone who knows me can attest, PDR thrives at night. But you know what else I am also not afraid of? Technology. Therefore, I am definitely not the target audience for a movie, the point of which is apparently “Remember, all this technology in our lives? It could kill us.” I’m a lot more off-put by the people using the tech than the tech itself.

And anyway, this movie is probably two decades too soon for a real Killer Technology House plot. Sure, lamps can overheat and start a fire and such, but the Killer Technology House in here is way too low-tech for anyone living in the 21st century. Okay, a lamp can overheat and start a fire or a hot water heater can… also overheat and cause scalding water to hurt people. Those are potentially deadly things, sure, but our houses these days are literally connected to the Internet. The Pulse Entity of 2018 could audio of it killing the kid onto the father’s phone so that the father is distracted and gets into a car accident. In 1988, the monster has to basically malfunction at the people. In 2018, it could use the technology as it is intended and still kill people. And all that without having it inexplicably lock doors that are in no way electric. Was it doing that with magnets, movie? What did I miss movie?

Also, we have electric locks now too, so we could do that too.

Anyway, in spite of my gripes, there will always be something about movies made in the 80s that I will appreciate. I don’t think it is just the time period (Though I do love the time period. I love that there was a time when calling someone a “turkey” was considered a serious insult), but there is something a quality to film of that time that I’d love to see brought into the modern era, and not just via works set in the 80s (Stranger Things).

In conclusion, I am willing to write and direct a sequel to this movie if Hollywood calls. Thank you, goodnight.

*It was not until I checked the IMDB page that I learned that the main kid was played by Joey from Blossom. Whoa. (Good reference, PDR)

I watch a lot of dumb movies. To get something out of it, I am going to start occasionally writing thoughts about them on my website. These are not reviews, because almost always these will be terrible films, just things I think of while watching.

Today’s Movie Thoughts are about Fatal Justice.

The plot is pretty basic. A CIA Assassin code-named Diana is sent to kill a more senior CIA assassin code-named Mars. Early plot twist: Mars is her long-lost father. Later plot twist: The CIA is actually trying to wipe out its entire current generation of assassins to get new ones who are more loyal to newer administration (some of whom are compromised to the Russian mob).

It’s definitely a movie that uses violence and action as a spectacle, but it actually has a pretty anti-killing stance within the text. As he nears death, Mars says: “You know, it’s funny. You start killing for Uncle Sam, you’re young, you believe in the system. You want to do the best you can do… but when you find out that it’s a lie, it’s too late. You don’t have nothing left. You don’t have nothing left. It’s just you and your conscience. I’m so tired of killing. I just want to rest.” Of this, PDR, your local Pacifist Who Likes Action Movies, wholly approves (while admitting the hypocrisy).

When Diana is introduced, she is posing as a pizza deliverer to gun down an old man in front of his family. It’s implied the guy “deserved” it, but she feels bad for his family. Mars, meanwhile, is introduced as training the next generation of assassins. There’s a scene I actually like where Mars is doing a drill sergeant thing with the new volunteers. He asks one of them why he joined and the guy is like “To serve my country” and Mars is like “You are not! You’re here because you want to kill people” and he goes on about how this job lets them act out their sick fantasies and the government will sanction it and “pat you on the back”. Mars’s training technique is very much like the Marvel character Taskmaster’s, in that the students aren’t guaranteed to make it through alive. I suspect this is not how he’s always trained them, but that he’s only doing it this time he knows what’s coming.

As Diana and Mars team up to go into what seems like it’ll be a suicide mission: “You go East, I’ll go West.” “We’ll meet in Hell.” Someone thought that was deep.

Naturally, for all the movie laments what killing does to the protagonists, Diana still achieves her victory by slaughtering everyone who wronged her. (I mean, her ultimate victory is actually seeing through the CIA’s last ditch attempt to get her and escaping, but mostly the violence thing.)

What else? There’s some surprisingly expensive-seeming stuff going on: helicopter scenes, cars flipping, stunts where people fall from windows. Speaking of the helicopter(s)* There is a bit where a cop, over a speaker from a helicopter, was saying “This is the police, come out with your hands up” and then Diana shoots at him and he says, still over the speaker “Oh Shit” in a pretty bad delivery but it made me laugh. Diana actually does manage to bring down the helicopter with the pistol.

But those few scenes with a budget can’t cover up the fact that the movie is pure B-Grade trash. The bad camera quality, some terrible ADR work, crappy lighting. It’s all stuff I myself could probably exceed in these days of 2018 with my phone. Granted a lot of the acting is bad, but they do have actors. That’s one thing that even 2018 PDR can’t rival. Amusing to me: at one point Mars assigns four trainees orders to head North, South, East, and West respectively, but the actors don’t move in directions that can correspond with their orders.

Finally, for a movie that has nudity and swearing and such, Diana keeps using these exclamations that are endearingly mild. She’s all “You better believe it. And how!” and “Oh, man!” even in times of danger. Unfortunately, “You picked the wrong day to mess with me, buster” is not going to rank among the top action one liners of all time.

*While multiple helicopters appear in the narrative, I suspect they were all played by the same helicopter.