The Best and Worst Movies of 1997

I took some time out to explore the whole evolution/creation debate, and though there will be definitely more of that to come, I thought it was high time I continue my lists of favorite movies from the 90's.  The last time I did one of these was for 1996, so this one will cover the year 1997:

The Best Movies of 1997

Air Force One, Face/Off, Mimic, MouseHunt, Con Air, George of the Jungle, As Good as It Gets, Scream 2, The Shining, and Titanic

Air Force One

Back when we had Clinton as the Chief Executive of the country, even the year before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, Harrison Ford as President James Marshall in this movie was at least three times the courageous, moral President than Clinton could ever hope to be!  When his plane, Air Force One, is hijacked by Gary Oldman and his soldiers, he does whatever it takes to save his family, and refuses to deal with terrorists.

   

As  Good As It Gets

One of my all-time favorite romances because it is also the most real.  This is no storybook romance!  He's a cantankerous writer suffering from severe OCD, and she's a feisty, outspoken waitress with an ill child, and the one who brings them together is a gay man who's just been beaten and needs a dog sitter for his little lapdog.  Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, and Greg Kinnear all do some of their best work.

Con Air

"Put the bunny down!"  Nicholas Cage hit his stride as an action movie hero here, following up The Rock with this tale of a retired army ranger on an airplane full of vicious convicts who suddenly take over the plane. He must play along until he can turn the tables, aided on the ground by a US Marshall played by John Cusack.  With delicious roles for John Malkovich, Ving Rhames, Danny Trejo, and Steve Buscemi as some of the more memorable convicts and Colm Meany as a constant thorn in Cusack's side, not to mention a great crash landing on the Las Vegas strip, there's lots of stuff here action fans will just love.

  

Face/Off

Another great Nicolas Cage action flick, this one defies logic, but who cares?  John Woo directs this exciting action flick in which an FBI agent Sean Archer, played by John Travolta, manages to catch criminal mastermind Castor Troy, played by Cage, and then undergoes a procedure to have Castor's face grafted onto him so that the man's surviving brother will reveal the location of a bomb.  Things become much more difficult, however, when Castor wakes up, contacts his goons, and forces the doctor to give him Archer's face and identity.  When Archer manages to break out of prison, it's a cat and mouse game between them, with Archer's wife and daughter, and Castor's girlfriend and son, caught in the middle!  Convoluted and totally unbelievable, this is still an action movie not to be missed! John Woo knows his stuff!

George of the Jungle

Brendan Fraser has had his share of stinkers, both in the action and the comedy genres.  This isn't one of them.  The film manages to capture the flavor of the old cartoons in ways sorely missing from other cartoon updates such as Yogi Bear and Underdog.  A delightful, funny treat!

Mimic

The plot makes it sound ludicrous!  Giant cockroaches have evolved the ability to disguise themselves as human, and they're dangerous and hungry!  This silly description betrays a chilling little horror film, and the cockroaches are anything but a silly contrivance.  Yes, they've grown to be about the size of a man when standing up, but their "human camaflauge" is merely the mirage of a human face on their appendages, giving them the appearance of a vagrant in an overcoat from a distance, until they open their wings to reveal they are, in fact, nothing more than gigantic, vicious, killer insects!  If you're looking for a good creature feature, this is one of the scarier ones to come along.

MouseHunt

A wonderful family comedy, this one takes the concept of Home Alone, about a boy outwitting two thugs, and gives the role of the boy to a mischievous mouse.  Nathan Lane and Lee Evans, as brothers who own the house with the mouse, make for a wonderful comic pairing, and don't miss the hilarious cameo by Christopher Walken.  This is slapstick at its best!

Scream 2

So Scream was a hit, playing fast and loose with slasher film conventions while paying homage to the classics of the genre.  The question was, could the sequel be a hit too, especially in a world where sequels are, almost by definition, inferior?  The characters here even discuss the inferiority of sequels!  Yet, as with the first Scream, the level of the writing here is clever and still quite refreshing, giving horror movie geeks yet another film they could really love!  You may guess the main killer way before the end, but that doesn't mean there aren't some delicious scares to be had.  I loved the way it started, with Jada Pinkett Smith and Omar Epps getting hacked at the premiere of the movie Stab (based on the events of the first movie), and there's lots more playing with horror movie conventions mixed with great suspense. 

The Shining

Fans haven't been kind to this TV movie version of Stephen King's famous haunted hotel novel, and over the years, after the Stanley Kubrick original slowly became a bonafide horror classic (though truthfully, more Kubrick than King), this TV movie, mostly shot at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, King's inspiration for the novel, captured most of the themes from the novel missing from the Kubrick version, and truthfully, Steven Weber, Rebecca De Mornay, and Courtland Mead are much closer to the characters from the book too.  Sure, the hedge maze in the original turned out to be scarier than the hedge animals from the book that show up in this TV remake, but many other elements were just as scary, or more scary, than the Kubrick film, such as the chilling "woman in the tub".  

  

Titanic

What list of the top ten movies of 1997 would be complete without including James Cameron's classic take on this historical tragedy, turning Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in the bona-fide movie stars!  Their characters, Jack and Rose, may not have been on the original boat, but fans forgave Cameron his dramatic license, and when the ship goes down, it is quite the cinematic experience!  Very few films become instant classics.  Even fewer actually deserve that title.   This one does.

The Best of the Rest

Alien: Resurrection

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery

Contact

The Devil’s Advocate

The Edge            

Hercules

Liar Liar

The Lost World: Jurassic Park

Men in Black

Tomorrow Never Dies

This list features films that just missed making it into the top ten, for various reasons.  The sequels Alien: Resurrection and The Lost World: Jurassic Park had a few interesting ideas, yet were still inferior sequels (see Scream 2 above), and Tomorrow Never Dies was a good James Bond movie in a long, inexhaustible line of "good" James Bond movies.  Many people probably thought Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Liar Liar, and Men in Black were funnier and more inventive than George of the Jungle or MouseHunt, yet even so, it's debatable.  Hercules was cute, but doesn't quite compare to other recent Disney hits, and though Contact, The Devil's Advocate, and The Edge are more original, and are entertaining movies, they're not really the best of the year, now are they?

The Worst

An American Werewolf in Paris

Anaconda

The Fifth Element

Life is Beautiful

The Relic

A Simple Wish

Spawn

Starship Troopers

Vegas Vacation

Wishmaster

Turbulence didn't make this list because it's one of those serious films that's so bad, it actually works as a hilarious comedy.  At any rate, it was funnier than Vegas Vacation, the worst of the Vacation movies, or A Simple Wish, which was even worse!  The Fifth Element had some inspired Sci Fi concepts, but Chris Tucker's annoying character ruins it!  (Drew, if you're reading this, I'm sorry.  I just didn't like it.)  Anything inspirational in the Roberto Benigni film Life is Beautiful is strictly coincidental, a fluke, as proven by anything else Benigni has ever been in (including his irritating "performances" at the various award shows to pick up his awards for this uneven and unbelievable film).  The rest of this list, more than half, are horror movies.  None of them were scary, or particularly memorable.    

Oscars and Box Office

Here's the big hits at the Oscars and at the Box Office for 1997.  These are the ones that didn't make my lists above:  Despite wanting to possibly see them some day, I never did see Amistad or The Wings of the Dove, have no real desire to see The Full Monty or Boogie Nights, and had never even heard of Kundun.  Meanwhile, I did see Good Will Hunting and L.A. Confidential and just didn't find them all that great.

Notable Oscar Films:

Titanic

As Good As It Gets

The Full Monty

Good Will Hunting

L.A Confidential

Men in Black

Amistad

The Wings of the Dove

Kundun

Boogie Nights

Biggest Box Office Hits:

Titanic

The Lost World: Jurassic Park

Men in Black

Tomorrow Never Dies

Air Force One

As Good As It Gets

Liar Liar

Good Will Hunting

The Fifth Element

The Full Monty

"Despicable Me 2" is Anything But Despicable!

Some people I know stay away from animated films, treating them all like it’s just kid’s stuff.  My question to them is:  What’s wrong with you?

     Why can’t an animated film be just as worthy, viable, and entertaining as live action?  It’s not all Phineas & Ferb or Ben 10 on the big screen, ya know, and if you’re gonna have the attitude that it just cannot be as good as live action, you’re gonna end up missing some of the good stuff!

     Okay, I DO understand that some computer animated films aren’t all that great, such as G-Force and Yogi Bear that I reviewed recently, but if you have a problem with computer animation, then you’d have to miss films like Life of Pi or Oz the Great and Powerful.

     Despicable Me 2 (trailer linked here!) is some of the good stuff!  We found it to be utterly entertaining and unbearably cute, at least as much as the first one was.  Even the trailer makes me chuckle!  Loved the voice cast, the character animation, and even though at times it seemed like it was starting to become more reminiscent of something like the two cable channel cartoons I mentioned above, or most others, it quickly veered off into other wholly entertaining directions.

     As a bonus, it wasn’t cloying like some of these animated films can be (the Madagascar movies come to mind), and wasn’t filthy either, and I’m finding that these charming Despicable Me movies have a lot of endearing qualities, and not just in the animation, but in the writing as well.  This is a family movie the entire family can thoroughly enjoy together!  A winner!

Evolutionists and Mass Mind Control?

Mine is just one voice in the debate.  Which debate?  Well, pick your choice!  Religious, political, scientific, philosophical...  When I venture forth with ANY truth, what I’m finding is thousands upon thousands of people who would be willing to debate it.  Belief in the Bible?  People will come out of the woodwork to tell you all the fallacies: How many of our Christian rituals these days are based on pagan ideas – Christmas, Easter, what Jesus looked like, the reliability of the Bible as a whole and the problems with the many translations – and they actually have a leg to stand on in such accusations!  Faith in the conservative movement?  People will produce reams of evidence to support crackpot theories that some of the people I admire were involved in alien conspiracies and some sort of hedonistic Satanism, and even though this is usually going way too far, the idea of government conspiracies and mass mind control (what is called NLP or Neuro-Linguistic Programming) isn’t, in itself, too hard to fathom in today’s day and age of Oprah and Obama!  The Evolution/Creation debate?  It’s always and forever ongoing, with cheap shots and underhanded practices.    

Matt Walsh

My blogs recently, when I haven’t been doing movie reviews, have been about this very thing:  Creationism vs. Evolution, particularly Darwinism.   Nobody really makes comments on my blog to refute me.  Unlike radio personality Matt Walsh and his wonderful, informative, thought-provoking, very enlightening, entertaining, and popular blog (linked here), mine actually has a very teensy readership by comparison.   For one thing, I’m not quite as informed or as gung-ho as my sister, or the conservative pundits you might see on TV or read on Townhall.com like Michelle Malkin, Todd Starnes, or Doug Giles.  

Malkin, Starnes, and Giles

For this, I’m actually kind of glad.  I’ve seen them rake these other people over the coals (unfairly, and without addressing the real issues they bring up) and I don’t invite their poisonous hatred.  The internet Evolution police task some of these other creationists for their “misconceptions” and “wrong thinking”, and bringing to the table a plethora of other terms and concepts I’ve heard before but that I haven’t mentioned in my blog posts that are already too long by most people's definition, and an obsession and “hot button topic” based on the amount I’ve already written about it (and truthfully, I’ve only really scratched the surface in this debate).

     And yet, what I see in the refutations of these other creationists I find to be personally disturbing and exasperating.  Here’s a sampling of 10 such arguments against creationism and creationists I see quite often:

1. The tone of the evolutionists is always one of superiority, mental or otherwise, as if to say, “You’re an idiot, and not really worth my time.”  They smirk, and belittle creation science, but, of course, don’t feel any sort of embarrassment over the mistakes and outright lies and hoaxes that Darwinian science has fostered on the public again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again!  I can’t even begin to tell you how many times they have done this!  Should they really be taking such a condescending, intellectual high ground here, especially when even their top scientists and philosophers have had to turn to such concepts as punctuated mutations, multi-verses, and alien seeding in order to explain how this theory could possibly work given the evidence?
2. Instead of presenting evidence for Darwinian evolution or against creationism, they end up giving the creationist homework assignments, as if to say (or actually saying), “We can’t continue the debate until you educate yourself properly.  Read this article or that book, and then we can continue the debate, once you have researched this topic sufficiently.”  This is basically the same argument you get from people of other religions.  From my point of view, I’ve already read and written a lot about this topic over the last 20 years, but apparently, it’s never enough, or I just haven't read the right books.  Creationists are always portrayed as mentally inferior no matter what – even think tank intellectuals like Dinesh D’Souza (whose main problems with Darwinian evolution deal with atheists trying to remove God from the equation).  Is this “homework assignment” really going to make any difference, say anything new I didn’t already know, or will it just be a waste of my time?  Is it going to clarify it all for me, spell it all out, or will it be simply another evolutionary dead end?  How about rephrasing it for me instead of giving me another homework assignment, or is that too difficult for you?  Besides, if I read this other person’s book or article, they’re telling me what THEY think.  What do YOU think, Mr. Evolutionist?
3. When not giving homework assignments to creationists they are debating, their arguments are rather general in nature, bringing up concepts that sound intelligent, but are not supported by any evidence – such as an infinite number of small changes producing a new species over time – but of course cannot back it up with scientific proof – such as that these small changes produced, or began to produce, a new species.
4. They make it sound like we don’t believe in evolution of any kind when, in fact, we do!  We just don’t see the evidence for their claim that these changes produced any new species over time, or that it ever produced life from non-life, particularly by accident.
5. Their “proofs” of evolution always seem to be rather obscure philosophies, mathematical formulas, and theoretical physics – far from the simple and obvious proofs they are always talking about – and not actual hard, indisputable evidence in the fossil record or with the life currently existing on this planet, nor are they able to create life from non-life in the lab, even though they are really trying!
6. They have the attitude that their theory has already been proven as fact.  They claim that there are no scientists – or at least, no legitimate scientists – who dispute speciation and big changes over time, and they claim the evidence has been documented hundreds and hundreds of times.  So where is it?  I go to their sources, and their leading biologists, philosophers, and scientists – Carl Sagan, Stephen J. Gould, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, etc. – and discover nothing substantial there.  I discover that even they say the universe “appears” to be intricately designed in the same breath they tell you that there is obviously no designer, and then we’re back to square one.
7. They say that if you’re not a scientist and don’t have a Ph.D., then you have no right to even engage in this debate.  Never mind that most of the people saying this don’t have Ph. D’s themselves, or that they also rake over the coals people who disagree with them and DO have Ph. D’s, like Jonathan Sarfati, and then they tend to dismiss them out of hand as someone who should know better or “dropped too much acid in the 70’s” or something.  Google “Creationists with Ph.D.’s” and see what negative stuff pops up!
8. They treat creationists with contempt, no matter who they are, portraying them as ignorant idiots asking ignorant questions, Neanderthals who don’t know what they’re talking about.  No creationist or creation debate is even worth their time.  This is a fallacy, for even the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, Ehrman, and Harris have found formidable debates from the likes of Wallace, D’Souza, Lennox, and Craig.
9. They are usually forceful, aggressive, condescending, belligerent, and often invoke profanity, especially from the internet masses who can’t spell or write a coherent, grammatically correct sentence, and then have the gall to take creationists to task for being stupid!
10. It’s not just that they don’t believe in God.  They can’t ever admit that He exists.  They hate God with such a passion that they hate the very idea of His existence.  “It can’t possibly be true, end of discussion!”  They also see Christians as unenlightened fools since they put their faith in an obvious “myth”.

Well, you can make all the excuses in the world for why you shouldn’t believe in God.  But if you choose not to believe on intellectual grounds, then you should also know that many admirable and learned men – like C.S. Lewis and those on the list linked here don’t have a problem with it.  Many of these people really are intelligent, often difficult to debate, and DO believe in God.  It still all comes down to choice, and science and intellect are not such deciding factors to automatically wind up coming down on the side of atheism as you might think!  In fact, I started this little essay/commentary mentioning the concept of mind control and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP.  It seems to me the attitude of the Darwinian atheists to belittle the creationists and treat them as intellectually inferior might, in fact, be utilizing some NLP tricks of the trade to keep their simple minded followers in line.

Zombies! In Which I Take a Brief Moment to Share a Little Bit of Time with the Living Dead

Well of course it's movie reviews!  Like I'm really gonna spend time with zombies, ha!  How would we even communicate?  Zombies can't talk!

     (Not to mention the fact that THEY AREN'T REAL)

All the titles link to trailers

Warm Bodies

Grade: B

I suppose it was only a matter of time!

Question:  How do you make the dead look sexy?  Answer:  Nicholas Hoult, who probably has played the sexiest corpse this side of Goldie Hawn in Death Becomes Her and Kim Basinger from the Tom Petty video for “Mary Jane’s Last Dance”!  I prefer my zombie movies with a wink and a smile.  The TV show The Walking Dead notwithstanding, my favorite zombie movies are all comedies, and this follows suit.  And I did like it!  It’s just not in my top three, which are Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, and Death Becomes Her.  It probably makes it into my top five, however, right alongside The Return ofthe Living Dead.  And it’s actually pretty darn mild for a zombie movie!  This may be the first bona-fide zombie movie rated PG-13!

The romance is cute, but if you accept the fact that zombies can actually exist (and let’s face it, that’s actually asking a lot right off the bat, being that they aren’t actually pumping blood through their bodies to make their muscles work), this film then asks you to accept the fact that zombies can become human again, and can start talking and thinking.  I realize one of the first zombies in all of literature, Frankenstein’s creature, was able to communicate verbally, but whereas that was a serious examination of the concepts of life and death, and not a silly rom zom com, in this movie the fact the zombies start talking is just a childish contrivance for a cute romantic movie.  What’s more romantic than a love that causes a zombie to rejoin the living, and not just him, but other zombies too, whose hearts start beating again at the mere idea of love?  It’s an interesting twist on the classic romance movie.  I’m just not sure it qualifies as the best of zombie films.

The Dead

Grade: C+

I had never seen it before, and so I was kind of looking forward to seeing what all the critical hype was about 25 years ago, while I was too busy watching Fatal Attraction, Moonstruck, and The Witches of Eastwick.  That’s what I thought it was going to be anyway!  I thought this was going to be John Huston’s last film from 1987, a lyrical labor of love starring his daughter Angelica Huston, an adaptation of a classical piece of literature by favored Irish author James Joyce (clip linked here).  That’s what the description said, though I found it odd that SyFy would be running this kind of movie.  Maybe there was a fantasy angle or something that I wasn’t aware of.

     Then I discovered that what I actually recorded onto my DVR, despite what the description said right there on the guide, was a 2010 B-grade horror film that was kind of like Night of the Living Dead in Africa.  

I was still game, though it did mean I needed to switch gears.  Instead of an understated, poetic drama about an upper-class Christmas party in turn-of-the-century Ireland, I was now going to watch a nightmarish vision about two survivors attempting to make their way across the unforgiving landscape of Africa in the middle of a zombie plague.  

The film was an attempt by the Ford brothers, Howard and Jonathan, to make a name for themselves in the crowded marketplace of independent horror films.  As such, it’s not so bad.  The African zombies are actually quite chilling in their slow moving, creepy-eyed dead slumber, some of them with bones protruding from their wobbly, broken legs.

White actor Rob Freeman as an American military engineer Brian Murphy, and Prince David Osei as Sgt. Daniel Dembele, roaming across the desert looking for his son, make for an interesting duo.  I am still a horror movie fan, and the movie is watchable, and there are some good scares here.  But if truth be told, it was not what I was expecting AT ALL, since I was in the mood for the graceful Angelica Huston drama, and it’s really not the sort of movie to shoot to the top of my favorite horror movie list anyway.  I’m quite content with my box set seasons of The Walking Dead at the moment, thank you, (ComicCon Season 4 trailer linked here!) and though true zombie movie fans may want to check this out, I guess the rest of us need not know it even exists.  It’s just another zombie movie in a market now flooded with zombie movies.  Why, I just reveiwed one of them (above), not to mention the fact that one of the recent, big, over-hyped summer blockbuster was the Brad Pitt zombie-thon, WorldWar Z!

     I guess I’ll have to catch that final film of John Huston’s some other time.

So How Did I Become Such a Closed-Minded, Bible-Thumping Creationist Anyway?

Political Cartoon from Dana Summers from Townhall.com

To answer the question in the title of this blog, all one has to do is look around!  Do you really like what you see?  If you do, are you the person in the above cartoon who is disgusted and offended by the nativity scene?

The small section, after the quote below, is from my Journal, March 29, 1996, and it describes how my brothers were the ones to bring me to Christ to begin with.  I don't discount my mom's influence, however.  I don't know if any of us would have ended up going regularly to church if it had not been for Mom's Christian faith while we were growing up, though we were not a "church family" (As kids, we did go to a church for a couple of summers, but it was without Mom and Dad, and I also remember a few Catholic services here and there with Mom's family through the years).  After a rough childhood among Nazarenes, Dad seemed skeptical of several Christian doctrines, particularly why God would allow good people to go to hell (something many people struggle with, and a main reason many people choose for themselves not to believe), and yet it was from Dad that we kids all got our rather far-right, conservative view of the world, though it took several years for this unpopular ideology to bloom.  All these years later, we are still devout church-goers, still right-winged conservative Christians, and my sister seems to be the most outspoken, passionate, and yes, even confrontational of all of us with the forces of this world and nation that seek to silence and belittle Christians, and further their very un-Christian agendas.  You go get 'em, Kim!    

"Maybe God is trying to tell you something."

          - Margaret Avery as Shug, The Color Purple (1986)

See the video linked here

My older brother Scott was trying to get me to go to that church, but I wouldn’t go.  He tried to convince me that the belief I had in evolution was wrong, but he couldn’t remember all the facts he had which invalidated the theory of evolution, and he wasn’t very good at arguing in favor of creationism.  Like me, he’s better at writing.

     But then my twin brother Terry convinced me to go to a few services and immediately a pastor named Walt Brown gave a series of lectures on creationism vs. evolution.  Scott was excited and so was I, and I went with him to these lectures.  I bought Brown’s book In the Beginning and, despite the reservations my Uncle Herb has on this theory and this book, I became a true believer in creationism.  That was the turning point for me, and ever since, I’ve been studying the Word of the Lord.

     And so Uncle Herb has been trying to share his pantheism with me, and then all of the sudden my church gives an entire series on cults, the New Age movement, Eastern religions, and how to defend my faith (apologetics).  All the tools I need!  Like some of the characters in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple, maybe God is trying to tell me something!  First the creation lecture and now this!

Gary's Action Movie Reviews: "Premium Rush", "The Hurt Locker", and "RED"

I get behind in my movie reviews when I post other things.  Here's three recent action films I saw, and the only one of the three I really liked much was RED.  The movie titles link to trailers.

Premium Rush

The hope with any movie is that it is going to be a treat, especially if the trailer really sells it.  It’s why we pick ‘em!  Yet the trailer here oversold it a bit.  This looked like a Hitchcockian tale of a bike messenger caught up in some sort of espionage or super-spy plot and using all his bicycle skills to stay one step ahead of them all.  There was a bit of this feeling here, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt was agreeable in this role, as usual, but in the end, it was revealed to be something quite a bit less than espionage or secret agent shenanigans, and some of the bike stunts by then came off as B-movie stunt work, like we were watching a sequel to that really old Nicole Kidman Australian bike flick.  We could call it BMX Bandits, Part 2: Trouble in New York.

The Hurt Locker

Winner of the 2008 Oscar for Best Picture, director Kathryn Bigelow became the first female winner of the Best Director award.  What’s more, I really like the actor Jeremy Renner, a pug-ish actor on the short side who is all muscle and attitude, reminiscent of the new James Bond Daniel Craig.  It’s no coincidence they’ve been using him to add some macho spice to the latest Bourne movie, Bourne Legacy, the Mission: Impossible sequels, The Avengers (as Hawkeye), and Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters.

     Yet I don’t quite understand all the accolades.  I didn’t hate The Hurt Locker, of course.  It was quite good actually.  But Best Picture and Best Director?  Is it really that good?  Does it even really compare with other acclaimed war films such as Platoon and Saving Private Ryan?  Personally, I don't see it.  This one didn’t reach me emotionally like some of these other war pictures did.  I just don’t understand why it was such a hit at the Oscars, especially when its competition was Avatar, the groundbreaking sci-fi film from Bigelow’s ex-hubby James Cameron, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, and my favorite among them, The Blind Side.  I even liked Pixar’s Up more, which was also nominated for Best Picture.  After having seen it, it still leaves me scratching my head, questioning, “Just what is up with this film?”  Maybe the critics can appreciate its searing look at life and death, but other films struggle with this theme as well -- like Brothers -- and especially war films.  Just what does this film have that these other films don't.  I still don't see why it garnered such award buzz.

RED

I had resisted watching this one, for I thought “Helen Mirren with a machine gun?  What will they think of next?”  But several friends told me it was good, and had some humor, so I tried it.  In this case, I’m glad I did.  I wasn’t disappointed.  It’s not the best action movie I’ve ever seen, but it wasn’t the worst either, and Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, Brian Cox, and Mary Louise-Parker were all quite good, though Richard Dreyfuss didn’t bring a whole lot as the main villain, and neither did Julian McMahon as the deceitful Vice President who gets what’s coming to him.  However, the big surprise here was Karl Urban as William Cooper, a devout agent and loving family man who pursues this RED team (which stands for “Retired: Extremely Dangerous”) with a dogged determinism, until he uncovers exactly why the CIA wants them eliminated, and then he turns out to be one of the good guys.  After seeing him in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and then as Dr. Leonard McCoy in the two latest Star Trek movies, and now this, I’m certainly a fan! 

"Star Trek" and the Movie "Face/Off" Are Fascinating, Ultimately Impossible Science Fiction Stories: Darwinian Evolution is the Same!

     One of the reasons why I love Star Trek so much is that it excites my imagination with creative yet outlandish and implausible ideas.  To be able to go faster than the speed of light, or move backwards in time, or through other dimensions of reality, or to tele-transport from one location to another, or to create "life" by using a computer program projected as a solid, interactive hologram – these are all ideas to set the imagination on FIRE, yet none has been scientifically proven.  That’s not to say they are necessarily impossible.  They are definitely impossible by today's standards, but who knows what science may be found in the future that makes them possible.  But at the very least, they are definitely implausible.  The impossibility appears when you begin multiplying all the implausibilities.  

     For instance, everything we scientifically know right now says that we cannot go faster than the speed of light, because only things without mass, such as light, can go that fast.  The minute you add mass, the possibility for light travel falters, so that even a tiny spec of dust, which has at least a teensy bit of mass, would become infinitely heavy if it ever achieved the speed of light, and would require an infinite amount of energy to attain and then sustain that speed.

     So the writers of Star Trek, in their infinite wisdom, expanded upon real science, coming up with wildly inventive ideas that sound like logical extensions of modern day knowledge.  In short, they’ve created things that don’t exist yet, but sound like they possibly could.  For example, to solve the problem of sending objects with mass (such as the Starship Enterprise) into space faster than the speed of light, they came up with the concept of the warp engine, which is supposed to render the Enterprise mass-less by surrounding and concealing the ship with mass-less energy, in effect warping the space around the ship.  They achieve this by coming up with yet another inventive concept, mixing a very volatile fusion of matter and anti-matter in a warp core.

     Likewise, the “impossible” concepts of such things as the transporter and interactive, sentient holograms have been made possible in the world of Trek by “twisting” what we know to be scientific fact and mixing it up with scientific fiction (hence, the popular term “science fiction” which is rooted in scientific fact and expanded through imagination into the realm of science that sounds logical, and even cool, but doesn’t really exist – at least, not yet).

     Of course, Star Trek, and other science fiction, isn’t created just to develop current scientific concepts.  These ingenious stories were and are, first and foremost, entertainment, and their entertainment value is only enhanced by these plausible sounding growths of contemporary scientific data.  For example, the Next Generation episode “Rascals” (trailer linked here) is not possible, yet still enjoyable.  

Aside from the general impossibility of a device like the transporter, we have a story about four grown adults who are turned into pre-teens during a transporter accident.  The explanation and solution to their plight is basically just technological and medical “gobble-de-gook,” but that’s not the point of this story.  The point of this particular yarn, and most of science fiction in general, is to excite our imaginations with an intriguing idea (“What if a transporter malfunction changed some of the crew into children?”) and to explore that idea in an interesting, thought-provoking, and entertaining way.  Granted, the writers of this specific episode only partially succeeded in the task, for although the main plot about the plights of Picard, Guinan, Ro Laren, and Keiko is interesting, the subplot involving the Ferengi take over of the Enterprise, and the crew being saved by the newly shrunken crewmen, is fairly weak, and probably added because the main plot just wasn’t enough to fill out an entire episode.  Yet despite this weak subplot, this was still a very intriguing episode, in part due to the inventive sci-fi creativity, and allowing for some quality character insights, particularly with Picard.

     This is just one example, as Star Trek is littered with virtually hundreds and thousands of resourceful, engaging, and stimulating ideas, all while staying within the realm of the “scientifically impossible” by today’s scientific standards.

     The reason I bring all of this up is to once again argue for that famous, age-old debate I love to write about: creationism versus evolution.  You see, I do not deny that evolution is an intriguing concept, just like Star Trek’s universal translator and those magical replicators, or that, like these fictional models, it is rooted in scientific fact.  Yet, just like these examples from Star Trek, the scientific facts surrounding the theory of evolution have been merged with some scientific fictions in order to make it seem more plausible, when, in fact, it is actually impossible.

     But let me put Star Trek on the backburner for now, and cite another example to make my point.  The movie Face/Off starring Nicolas Cage and John Travolta is an action-packed, captivating, and well made movie (The trailer is linked here).  Travolta plays Sean Archer, an FBI agent on the trail of murderous terrorist Castor Troy, played by Nicolas Cage.  Castor Troy was the man responsible for the death of Archer’s son six years before during an assassination attempt, and Archer has been doggedly pursuing Troy with a personal score to settle.  At the beginning of the movie, Archer finally succeeds in catching Troy and putting him into a coma.  Also captured is Troy’s younger brother Pollux, yet Archer and the city are still sitting on a time-bomb since Pollux and Castor designed and planted explosives that could kill thousands of innocent people unless the FBI can find it and diffuse it in time.  Only the Troy brothers know its location, with Castor in a coma, and Pollux refusing to talk.

     The story then becomes quite implausible when Archer agrees to undergo a surgical procedure to have his face removed, and to have Castor’s face surgically grafted on so he can assume Castor’s identity, and fool Pollux into thinking that he, Archer, is big-bro Castor, so that Pollux will unwittingly give him the location of the bomb.  To fool Pollux, Archer’s body is also altered to look like Castor’s, and a micro-receiver is implanted in his voice box to give him Castor’s voice as well.  With the surgery a success, Archer is effectively able to enter a prison facility disguised as Castor, and after only a few hours, fools Pollux into revealing the location of the bomb.

     Now the plot turns from implausible to impossible by merely multiplying the implausibilities into the realm of the ridiculous.  The real Castor Troy wakes from his coma to discover his face has been sliced off.  He quickly contacts some of his goons by phone, who successfully kidnap the surgical specialist who preformed the operation to transform Archer into Troy, and force him to perform a second surgery.  As with Archer, Castor is now given Archer’s face, body, voice, and identity, and he and his goons promptly set fire to the lab, and kill the doctor and the only two FBI agents who knew of Archer’s covert mission.  Wow!  How did they manage that without getting caught?  Any number of things could go wrong with a plan like that!  With the real Sean Archer now stuck in prison as Castor Troy, the real Castor Troy now pretends to be FBI hero Sean Archer, and sleeps with Sean’s wife.  Add on top of this Archer’s prison break from a prison no one has ever escaped from before, or how Archer’s wife and daughter don't suspect a thing!  The outcomes of some later action scenes are unbelievable, to say the least.

     I actually liked this fun but silly action film, but my point here is that many of the occurrences in the plot may be implausible, but when taken as a whole, it becomes utterly unbelievable, and quite impossible, yet we suspend our disbelief because it is still intriguing and holds our interest due to the creativity of the story, and everything from the acting and cinematography and the use of slow-motion and music keeps us interested.  It becomes an entertaining impossibility.

     And evolution is the same; an interesting and intriguing idea with a lot going for it and flawless on the surface, but if one were to really stop to analyze it, it is completely impossible.  If you think the events of the movie Face/Off are just too coincidental and far-out to be believable, just remember that evolutionary scientists ask us to accept their theories that are at least a hundred times more implausible than the plot of Face/Off, and demand that we accept this as fact.    What the evolutionary scientists present as scientific fact is actually more difficult to believe in than the fantastical, futuristic, technological wonders of Star Trek.

Sentient holograms, good guys and bad guys changing faces, and wild, evolutionary intermediate species:  Interesting and fun, of course, but not believable for a second!