I made the wrong choice of watching a dull, ponderous sci-fi-ish movie called One Day Like Rain. Instead of watching this film school exercise (C-), read the Rumi quote the title is drawn from. I shall spoil this 90 minute waste of time for you: moody adolescent girl uses "physics and chemistry" to grow crystals in her parents’ garage and concocts a liquid from said crystals that causes hallucinations, catatonia, and, in the case of her best friend, death. I don’t follow the leap from there to the end/beginning of the world and rain on troglodytes on Mars (owing something to the rock monster in the original StarTrek). A troupe of surprisingly eclectic bibliophilic homeless people figures in, somehow.

In the end the moody girl has sex by the lake with her boyfriend, beginning or ending the world; "this is what the garden was for." Only a horny teenaged boy (redundant) could ignore her coital soliloquy (the third recitation of Rumi). All I could think about is how her boyfriend, twice as tall as she, must be humping her knees for their face-to-face missionary lovemaking. That tells you something about how riveting this movie is. Even the cameo by Jesse Eisenberg (Social Network) as the 20-year-old virgin brother was disappointing. At least, he didn’t confuse screaming with acting, favoring perplexed silence (as in, “how will this help my career?” — he may be the only one whose career didn’t sink after this). Five minutes of rain yesterday exceeded the best 5 minutes of this movie, if you can find that many. It is fitting that the stars all wink out near the end — the perfect metaphor for a zero star movie. Please don’t watch it.

I was with Fringe from the beginning. I thought the principal characters were well-conceived and well-acted — I will miss them. I stopped watching Fringe when they made the Observers evil. I’m tired of boogeymen. I’m tired of emotionless ruthless robotic humanoids — we always fear the evil within ourselves. (And Fox will supply a legion of serial killers starting next week. Set your barf-bag now!)

I grew up with Kolchak: the Night Stalker, Night Gallery, the original Outer Limits, and the Twilight Zone. I watched The X-Files from the beginning (Fox Maulder was Kolchak’s grandson) until, after 40 years, I grew tired of the monster of the week. I thought Lost was breathtakingly original, but devolved into mythical babble after they made the Others evil (more xenophobic evil-within boogeymen in our mirror — worse than monsters-of-the-week).

Ritualistically, I watched the Fringe series finale. It took me a while to catch up with some characters (September, in particular). I was especially glad to visit Over There (the alternate Universe), which really was my favorite part of the whole series. There were such fascinating differences Over There (coffee is rare, if I remember correctly, and I think we should call an ID a Show-me). Indeed, it’s a little sad that the alternate characters were all more interesting than the one’s on our side. (The same was true of evil Spock in StarTrek.) I wonder, though, why didn’t the Observers conquer Over There? Just our luck.

There was one aspect of Fringe that troubled me more than the gross viscera it wallowed in, even more than the standard video game storylines (pick this up, then go get this, then overcome this setback, repeat every week). Fringe pretended to put Science at its core, but it was really Magic. I don’t mind magic. I hate Magic disguised as Science for an uncritical audience.

Of course, nerds are nothing, if not critical. There are few things nerdier than arguing about the plausibility of sci-fi. It wasn’t just the absurd and gross wet-tech embodied by the awful shape-shifters. It wasn’t the steampunk psychic typewriter. I was irked by Walter and Peter Bishop, both brilliant, quick thinking scientists. Both jargon-spouting conjurers, in truth. Mind you, I love those characters. I just think Walter was really bent over a cauldron calling for Astrid to fetch more eye of newt. Stop invoking Science like a god.

Of course, the epitome of my disappointment was Bell. It was great to see Nimoy again, but by the end of his story he was on an ark seriously intending to ride out the destruction of one universe and the birth of another, which was to be peopled by his Dr Moreau hybrids. (The original Island of Dr Moreau remains the movie that horrified me the most.) That was the end of my interest in the series, which might have stopped there, were it not for the clout of its fans.

The credit the fans get for keeping Fringe alive galls me. Surely, Firefly has more fans, who are more passionate. And we got shit from the same network.

In the end, Fringe lived down to its baser instincts. Long scenes dependent on gunplay attest to bankrupt storytelling. For the good of the cause, countless people can be butchered gorily with a biohazard. Talk about blood-lust. Entire worlds are undone with the wave of a magic wand because heroes don’t take polls.

If I haven’t spoil Fringe for you yet, I won’t spoil the very last scene except to say it was almost worth two hours of irritating nonsense and it harkened to my favorite episode in the series. Of course, moments later, I was scratching my head over time paradoxes and how a message from a time undone ends up in the past. Such a nerd.

PS: Won’t Peter and Olivia be disappointed when Etta grows up to be a completely different person because of her completely different environment. Oh, wait, they have no knowledge of the other Etta. They live in an ideal world where we can rewind and forget the bad times.

PPS: I can’t wait to see Walter Bishop show up in the sequel in an atomic-powered Deloren. But, he’s more of an atomic-powered station-wagon-type. See what happens when writers don’t know when to stop?

I’ve been waiting for this movie to be available for streaming. The martial arts film is ostensibly historical and about events surrounding the one and only female Emperor of China, which brings to mind two of my favorite Xena episodes about Lao Ma – watch those sometime.

Unfortunately, this movie is at least 30 minutes too long. However, there are several interesting characters and many great visuals throughout the movie. In fact, I fast-forwarded through the movie a second time just to watch a few fights and was amazed I spent another 90 minutes watching a movie that I’m ambivalently recommending to fans of the genre (after you see Iron Monkey and Jade Warrior).

The movie gets really weird after Detective Dee asks a friend, “Do you remember Donkey Wang?” Later: “Doctor Donkey Wang with the scabies?” I don’t know if that picks something up in the translation.

Note, the movie is in Chinese with subtitles, which did not work for me in Roku but were available in the vastly superior Windows 8 app. 

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010) – IMDb

An exiled detective is recruited to solve a series of mysterious deaths that threaten to delay the inauguration of Empress Wu.

Director:

Hark Tsui

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010) – IMDb

See my 5 start favorites.

This sci fi movie has the look and feel of an older movie, particularly a Spielberg movie. ET plus Iron Giant with a touch of creature feature (and two touches of Harrison Ford’s version of The Fugitive). The cast is pretty good (a nod to Stand By Me). The effects are at times over the top but effective. I liked the pop music soundtrack, but, as is often the case, I found the non-pop mood music excessive and loud.

I’ve enjoyed much of J.J. Abrams’ work beginning with Alias and including much (not all) of Lost. Abrams has a recognizable style. He knows how to move people through an apparent disaster (see Episode 1 of Lost). He makes frequent use of an effect I HATED in his StarTrek – and here – in which a blue light crosses the screen as a kind of flare, masquerading as the effect of lights within the scene. Perhaps he considers that realistic, but I consider it annoying. My first thought is there is a problem with the “film” or transmission/projection; my second thought is fire the camera crew, except it’s really the director who goes out of his way to add this in post production. Ugh.

Abrams also has a signature many of my friends will notice. However, I don’t really like his affectation because it marks him a disciple of that professor – and I am not. Contrived instances of our shared … fetish muddy the waters; I delight in the random, not the staged. (OK, I can’t help but think, “oh, look!” no matter the context and I’ve staged more than one instance.) [If this paragraph means nothing to you but you want to know, follow this link, then this one. It’s innocent fun – or deeply profound – despite my use of the word fetish, which will probably cause the wrong people to follow search results to this entry]