FANGIRL 3

Say Hello to 'Pan Am' I hope you're ready to fly the friendly skies, because on September 25, ABC is taking wing withPan Am. The latest entry in the rapidly growing category of televised 1960s revisionism — which includes AMC's Mad Men and NBC's The Playboy Club — Pan Am takes us back to a golden time when air travel blessed us with dashing pilots, sexy stewardesses and no baggage fees. Pan Am stars Christina Ricci, Kelli Garner, Mike Vogel and Michael Mosley in what executive producer Jack Orman (ER) describes as a tale of "wish fulfillment" that is "sweeping and epic." All executive producer Thomas Schlamme (The West Wing) really wants the public to know is that "[Pan Am] has nothing to do with Mad Men." Set in 1963, Pan Am follows the soapy exploits of those men and women of the skies as they enjoy a life of excitement and possibilities — especially the ladies, who in this era were often fated to housework or dictation. Both Mad Men and The Playboy Club have dealt with complaints about the way women are portrayed, but Christina Ricci thinks that Pan Am actually is empowering. "Sexism on Pan Am is a misconception and unraveling that is actually what drew me to the role," says Ricci, who plays head stew Maggie. "[Air travel] is something that's exciting for these women. We're as excited as the passengers are. As soon as anyone sees 10 minutes of this show, the misconception [of sexism] will be gone. It's really a great message for young girls and women." I suppose we'll have to see for ourselves whether this is true. But there was definitely an innate chauvinism at play in this era and to deny it existed would be false. One thing the producers seem to have nailed is the '60s aesthetic. Pan Am looks true to the time, though ABC did make one demand that chips away ever so slightly at the show's verisimilitude: There is absolutely no smoking allowed. That's one restriction the producers of Mad Men don't have to deal with. For the record, Schlamme is tired of the constant comparisons with that other series. "We just hope [Pan Am] is executed in a wonderful way," Schlamme says. "One [show] has nothing to do with the other — it just happens to be that they're both set in the '60s." Uh huh. While it's possible Pan Am shares nothing with Mad Men but an early '60s setting, it's doubtful ABC's new series would've taken off if AMC's most popular show wasn't so, well, popular.

Apollo 18 (2011) Directed by: Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego Written by: Brian Miller Cast: Lloyd Owen, Warren Christie, Ryan Robbins The United States' Apollo 11 first touched down upon the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969. Several other journeys followed, with the last being Apollo 17 in December of 1972. What isn't common knowledge is that there was one last top secret mission to the lunar surface - at least according to the quite fictional world of Apollo 18. The premise of Apollo 18 is that the US government fired off (at least) one more trip to the moon for a very secret mission. This mission was long covered up and denied; however, some 80 minutes of footage were purportedly uploaded to WikiLeaks inspired 'LunarTruth.com', a website dedicated to shining the truth on this secret mission. Just to be clear in case anyone is confused - it's all a bunch of malarkey, of course. Apollo 18 is a new installment in the ever growing 'found footage' subgenre in which video is "somehow" found showing a horrible (e.g., paranormal, monstrous, Bieber) event occurring to an unwitting collection of individuals. The tone of the setup within Apollo 18 is about right. The film doesn't try to be overly showy with the early interviews with the astronauts or with any of the first act film of the trip to the moon. It's actually a bit dry, which is just as it would be. The astronauts are presented as well trained professionals out to do a job. They have a sense of humor, to be sure - but their focus is always determinedly and doggedly on getting their job done. This straight forward technique may be a bit off-putting to viewers expecting well timed comedy relief, but it really was the right approach. Things get rough as the story opens up. It's soon revealed that the astronauts may not be completely alone on the barren lunar rock. They soon find evidence that someone - or something - is tampering with equipment outside the ship. Whatever it is doesn't stay outside for long; the tampering continues with rock samples and other equipment within the ship, and these invasions seem to be occurring while the two astronauts sleep. If you know anything about the found footage subgenre (or have even seen the trailer), you already know the astronauts certainly are not all that alone, and you probably realize that things are not going to go very well for the two men. What follows is a lot of space drama, screaming, jump scares, shaky camera (1974 style, at that), and dark revelations of the truth. It is within these revelations that the film shows its weakest points; Apollo 18 suffers from implausibility issues from multiple fronts. The very nature of the life-forms involved and the fascist and cruel behavior of the US Department of Defense both leap well beyond a reasonable suspension of disbelief. The first is just a head scratcher as it doesn't make any sense that such a thing would even evolve on the barren landscape of the moon - I'll leave it to you to see the details of the critters and decide for yourselves. As the two astronauts really get into it, the US Department of Defense becomes less than sympathetic. This is also a stretch. I realize the US government has done horrible, horrible things to people in decades past (I'll bite my tongue as to whether we would now). A pretty easy example is the rather brutal experiments with syphilis that went on for many decades in the United States, in which individuals of lower classes were intentionally infected with the disease for the purposes of testing. So, I do understand the US government of 1974 could easily do some pretty awful things. However, such actions were always against those the government saw as belonging to the lower classes. Frankly - and this is a horrible thing to say, though it is true - it abused those individuals it saw as "expendable". This is where the implausibility comes in with the unsympathetic abuse of the DoD to the two astronauts of Apollo 18. The last people the US government would treat as expendable would be two extremely highly trained professionals with tens of millions of dollars of training invested in them. The amount of money and effort invested in these two men would have been enormous. I'm not saying the ethics of the 1974 US government would have restrained them from abusing the astronauts; no, I'm saying the money and resources involved in abusing the astronauts would have stopped them. While implausible, I do admit I like the lunar critters. They're never really clearly shown and you never really understand what they are dealing with, but I think this works in favor for the film. Sometimes (or even, often), it's what you don't show in a film that makes it work. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark recently made that error in that it attempted a technological extravaganza with its little beasties and ended up making it less than scary. In contrast, Apollo 18 keeps things rather vague, even unanswered, and therefore manages to make its skittering monsters a little creepy. Apollo 18 is a flawed film, and the great bulk of those flaws come from its rather blatant plot holes. Some people may also have a problem with the bouncy camera work and intentionally flawed film quality that riddles the footage of Apollo 18. Even with these flaws, I do like what they were shooting for - a high tension, claustrophobic trip to the moon, restricted with yesterday's science, and facing an invasion of scurrying little monsters as well as the evils of the United States Department of Defense. I also like that they kept the behavior of the astronauts themselves as so very professional instead of casting them as guffawing surfer dude douchebags like so many other Hollywood films would have done. If I were going to restructure this film, I might just write the little monsters out of the script entirely. It could be a sort of Brad Anderson's Session 9 - in space. An astronaut grows increasingly disturbed by strange things he sees on the moon until he's driven completely insane, and then bad things happen. It's never really revealed whether something is really messing with his mind, or if he's just plain nuts. Better? Go see Apollo 18 first and then let me know. This is a Day Two Review. Our rating (3 out of 5):

Zombies! An Illustrated History of the Undead (2011) Author: Jovanka Vuckovic St. Martin’s Press And by “illustrated” they mean, “Lots of film stills and posters!” Jovanka Vuckovic’s first book-length filmic writing has taken the form of a thoughtful exercise on the zombie phenomenon in modern film and literary culture. While she delves into the history of the American zombie experience and Poe’s romantic playfulness with the creatures in some of his stories and poems, An Illustrated History is really about twentieth century zombie film phenomenon and how it has influenced these early years of the twenty-first. Opening with a light history of the Haitian zombie mythos in American folklore and its African origins, the book quickly moves on to literary appearances of the creatures prior to film technology. These two historical influences on the modern zombie movie become apparent in discussions of White Zombie, which Vuckovic cites as the first real zombie film, and other silent and talking horror movies of the 1920s and 1930s that explore the racially-infused mythos. The book traverses the sensationalized zombie movies of the 1940s and 1950s, stopping at the 60s to devote an entire chapter to what is described as the seminal modern horror movie of all time in Western film history: Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead. Due to her close friendship with Romero (he even writes the forward to the book), Vuckovic has insights into the filming of Night of the Living Dead that other authors don’t necessarily; for instance, the fact that the deep political subtext is merely “serendipity,” as she calls it, rather than Romero’s calculated purpose, and that the choice of a black lead actor (at a time when that was a controversial choice) was a result of his great acting ability, not the color of his skin. Night of the Living Dead marks the midpoint of Vuckovic’s account of zombies. The rest of the chapter is about the 1970s and Romero’s sequel, Dawn of the Dead. Pages are devoted to the Euro zombie movies of the 1980s as well as American classics like Return of the Living Dead. The detail regarding Italian films is impressive, spanning names I can’t pronounce and awesome stills from gory, low-budget movies. A list of zombie movies from the 1980s, along with discussions of The Evil Dead, Day of the Dead, and Reanimatormarks these sections real sources of horror lore and fact for film and horror movie crack-heads. It’s the discussion of the 1990s and the years beyond that Vuckovic injects with opinion, winding down from the excitement of the previous chapters. Vuckovic does not like Resident Evil, the 2002 big-budget horror zombie film directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, citing that his reasons for making the film were “financial” rather than artistic (p. 114), and expressing a personal opinion that the film, well, stank a bit. Vuckovic’s close relationship to Romero, however, gives her an interesting outlook on (and perhaps a prejudice against?) the film, seeing as Romero was kicked off of the movie as director in the early days of its pre-production. She expresses that horror fans across the Internet agreed:Resident Evil was already a failure before it have even been made (p. 112). Vuckovic also articulates dislike of the Dawn of the Dead remake from 2004 written by James Gunn. Mostly, she objects to the idea of a remake of one of Romero’s good zombie film. She calls all of the horror film remakes of the 2000s a “trend of the uninspired” (p. 122), but she pats Gunn on the back by praising his original and (and I agree) awesome creepy/zombie flick Slither from 2006. I don’t want to make it sound like the author is totally up Romero’s ass because he wrote the introduction to the book; sorry to be crass, but I want to make sure it’s clear that while she clearly adores his early movies, she doesn’t have positive things to say about Diary of the Dead (2007) orSurvival of the Dead (2010). That’s one thing that’s striking about this particular section of the book: Vuckovic knows, and has written about, a lot of the filmmakers she discusses through her time as editor of Canadian horror magazine Rue Morgue. She’s not afraid to say what she really thinks of their movies, not even Romero’s, in order to give a realistic version of how zombie films evolved. That’s important in a book like this one; if her legitimacy was compromised by her professional relationships, none of the opinions in the book would be worth taking into consideration when planning your next Romero-thon. Fortunately, integrity wins out and Romero ended up writing the introduction despite her lack of love for his last two films (presumably out of respect and friendship). I wish the book had stopped there. Vuckovic is an encyclopedia of movie plots, titles, and trivia and it’s intriguing to see how her deeply personal experiences with some of the films have framed her perception of zombie cinema as a whole. However, the last chapter deals with comic books and video games and feels rushed and less impressive than the film analysis. The list of literature titles is exciting, but the inclusion of comics and video games takes away from the non-fiction film discussion and pushes it towards a shallow overview of zombies as pop culture. That isn’t how I felt about the previous sections of the book at all, so it’s a conflict I wish had been resolved. With a little co-writing from filmmaker and literary editor Jennifer Eiss, the book’s latter chapters express far more opinion than the earlier chapters. Likely because Vuckovic has opinions about the things she knows more about: movies that were made in the 80s, 90s, and now – her own lifetime. I enjoy the frank assessments of those decades and the almost academic insight into Night of the Living Dead and the zombie films of the 1970s and 80s (though I would have loved a bibliography for some of the facts from the initial historical chapters) and I can also get on board with her statement thatHouse of the Dead 2: Dead Aim, as a film, was “unforgiveable” (p. 122). I think that’s actually a factand not an opinion, in this case.