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Syriana a Review

Rarely does Hollywood come up with some serious commentary on US Foreign Policy and the forces that seek to influence and exploit it. Although a disjointed affair, the implication of the Oil Industry and how the Department of State viewed things in the Middle East as opposed to the Intelligence Agents in the countries themselves. Idealists seeking to promote democracy make choices that put them on the opposite side to State and the "National interest, and how that follows closely to the OIL Industries interests. We are learning that a fully liberal democracy in other countries (Think South America) does not follow that the resulting government will be interested in supporting the US when it considers it's own position in the World. China figured prominently in the background as a looming threat to this teleplay. How much it tracks real life will be upto individual assesment, in my opinion, I think it tracked well. It has always been about the OIL, and the US is determined to meet it's needs first, and being the US it can.

Alien Hunter

A movie now in DVD starring James Spader as a scholarly linguist found at the start of the movie teaching in college basic linguistics. Although the movie itself is rather basic and simple, and certainly less than a box-office success.

Set in Antarctica at a mythological US NASA Research station at the South Pole, they find a mysterious device buried in the ice wich is transmitting a powerful signal into space. They of course move the object from its buried location to the South Pole facility where the ice it is encased in melts slowly.

I won't go into details except to say that the alien is infectious, fatally so, to a certain number of the expedition, the others turn out to be carriers, all of them. The fatal nature of this infection, and the fact it is fatal to all life (demonstrated in a scene set in the artificial conditions of an acres sized green house with genetically engineered corn, where the passing of some of the infected protagonists causes the corn to wilt, turn black and die as they pass, well done by the SFX guys), they can't leave the facility. To top this of, the government controllers in the Whitehouse decide to nuke the site with a Russian submerged SSBN.

Despite questions in my mind about whether Moscow would in reality take orders for such a task from Washington, or whether they would have such an expensive piece of equipment in the Southern Ocean anyway. That is how the problem is to be solved.

The surviving people make their own arrangements to escape certain death in an interesting way, but I will leave that to you to find out.

The main part of this movie was the infection. The aliens (who ever they are) are aware they are lethal to life on Earth. Spader discovers a message encripted in the signal whic says "Do not open!", which, of course, they did.

The writers gave the aliens more intelligence than the humans, and they maybe right. Colonial occupation of the New World and the Pacific/Australasia has resulted in devastating infections which helped wipe out 80 per cent or more of the native populations, without counting the brutality of the occupiers. In our history, we have failed to teach and work successfully with the natives many times. Now it is too late, we can only opologise and respect what is left of these peoples. Maybe, at first contact, we will fare better, I hope so.

I sat and watched the DVD version of "Hannibal" yesterday and just today a Discovery Channel documentary on the beginning of the "criminal profiler" in the FBI by one man, "Robert Ressler - The Man Who Lives With Monsters Feb 13, 2003. Although this was a coincidence, it certainly added a factor to the efforts of Clarrise Starling and the evil methodical intelligence of Hannibal Lecter yet again. I am now waiting for the start of it all "Red Dragon", which won't be out until April on DVD.

Circles in the Corn

Here we are in the pleasant green countryside of rural Pennsylvannia, a corn farm, somplete with pre-harvest tall corn. Mel Gibson is the hero of this story, a disillusioned local priest (anglican or more correctly episcopalian) having given up his priesthood after his wife was killed in a road accident. He spends the whole length of the movie coming to terms with his loss and adjusting to realise that his depression is having an effect on his young family and his younger brother. For that I was greatful, a relatively normal family suffering loss, not the usual super achievers that Hollywood like to enforce as normal.

Then the dogs go crazy in the middle of the night, and that morning they discover a geometrical crop circle in their cornfield. With out explanation the corn has been flattened without being broken, which is, apparently, impossible for us simple farmers to do. It is consistent with some obscure book that the character played by Rory Culkin the son of Gibsons Graham Hess, finds in a bookshop in town. A book that the bookshop owner thought would never sell in such a conservative town, who then kept it against her better judgement to give it to the Hess Boy.

Full of unsubstantiated stories by unpublished professors, the book reinforces the myths already known in the community or at least the boy and his uncle. The tall aliens, the dogs barking and unexplained events in the middle of the night. I can't be sure, but the dark alien figure seems to be conflated familiar aliens with the men in black. I one act, the alien is found moving around the outside of the house and when almost cornered, it makes a spectacular jump to the roof. All the time the creature is dark and undefined.

The idea that the aliens might be communicating by radio lead the boy to find the baby alarm device that allows the parents to hear what the baby is doing. Now, for some reason only known to the authors, the aliens are found to be communicating on the frequency this device uses. All the time, the language is undecipherable by any except the children. When they finally meet up with one of them, close a personal, it spoke in the same way, the same mysterious language.

The whole idea of Crop Circles is, of course, not restricted to Hollywood. It has become so a part of our culture as to be worth exploring in fiction bythe movie industry. The real thing is a mystery to some and a practicle joke for others. Living, as I do in Australia, I haven't seen such things in my Melbourne suburban life. The alien origins hypothesis, I should think, is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence. Nothing in the real world has happened on the scale, local or internationally as postulated in Signs. The mystery is how these geometric indentations in the cereal crops came about. This was answered some years ago by two brothers in England called McWhireta or something close to that.

"It's only flattened corn..." Doug Bower, 1991

Doug Bower, assisted by his pal Dave, made his first circle in a Hampshire wheat field sometime during the summer of 1978. They made it on their hands and knees with a four-foot metal bar normally used to secure the back-door of Doug's Southampton studio.

"I'd always been interested in UFOs and flying saucers", he remebers, "...so I thought I'd make it look like one had landed." Whatever initially inspired him - divine guidance, the 1966 circle in a Queensland reed-bed, close to where Doug lived at the time, or simple ale-induced prankishness - the leap from provincial trampler to extraterrestrial super-force was swift.

Doug's daytime work-bench doodles transmogrified by night into gleaming sun-blessed articles of faith. This genius - fast-possessing others - couldn't be re-bottled.

Thousands of circles have since appeared world-wide in wheat, barley, oil-seed rape... grass, oats, linseed, peas, maize, mustard and rye... Gradually, inevitably, the circles grew appendages; curled scrolls unravelled into straw-perfect aisles; simple circles' sets became cathedral-like floor-plans - vast temporary sacred sites morphogenised the Gaiaic cry of nautili, whales, serpents, snails, scorpions, and spider's webs........

from the website http://www.circlemakers.org/

This all indicates to me that the only evidence is the man made rop circles. The belief in alien created crop circles or even some as yet not understood natural phenomenon all lack credibal evidence. More certainly, the more incredible the theory would require extremely creditable evidence, none of which has come forward.

As a story based on modern mythology, this certainly is entertaining and would give it 3 stars.

H.G.Wells, Today, Yesterday and Tomorrow.

Having recently seen the Time Machine with my son at the decadent establisment called Crown Casino Complex in Melborne, I thought I might give a review of the movie. Guy Pearce is Alexander Hartegen a nutty professor type. Very much into theoretical physics, constantly preoccupied, finds the courage to propose to the love of his life only to lose her in an accidental shooting. This event spurs him on to develop his "time machine" to prevent the tradegy that befell his love. He finds he can't change history as easy as he thought possible and is unable to prevent her death by intervening before the event.

Then he moves into the future to find the answer to that question, why he can't change the past.

It is good to see H.G.Wells' classic still firing the imagination of Hollywood in the 21st Century. The basic premise still holds today even with our advanced science and modern views.

I think Guy Pearce did an admiral job as the key character who knocks himself out after a disaster on the moon creates earthquakes and the end of civilisation on Earth. Hartdegen moves through the eons finally awakening in the distant future. Note that the cataclysmic disaster is now of a nuclear bomb nature on the moon (runnaway commercialism in the future perhaps) rather than the US and Russia lobbing those evil monsters in their silos at each other, like the earlier version of "Time Machine", you know the one, with that other Australian Actor, yes, Rod Taylor.

The Eloi appear more believable this time and of course Alexander falls for a charming young lady (played by Samatha Mumbo) who gets taken by the terriball secret that is the Morlocks. Well done special effects created a creature larger, meaner and more athletic than us poor humans.

The Moorlocks live underground and are slaves to a monster, half man, half morlock who claims the superiority of the vast time that his tampering with nature has produce the Eloi as a food source for his Moorlocks and the occasional female to assist his wicked perversion of science.

Like everything else these days from Hollywood this is an anti-science view of the future, admittedly a longtime in the future, but neverthless allowing the primitive Eloi to defeat the Moorlocks with Alexanders help.