Keanen's Film Blog

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by James Cameron, Strange Days is a mashup of Christopher Walken’s Brainstorm (1983) and the LA riots. It’s not The Matrix (1999), it’s not Escape from New York (1981), it’s a mix of different things that starts strong but fizzles out in the end.

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Riddick is (so far) David Twohy’s last film, and a great note to go out on. This was the film that introduced me to his body of work. I remember talking about it with some pals online when it came out, and for some reason I had just read a review of Escape from Butcher Bay.

“Would you recommend Riddick?” I asked. “Does he stab anybody with a screwdriver?”

“He stabs people with a lot of things,” said my friend.

I was sold.

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Mail is a real pain in the ass. Either the local numbnuts deliver your parcel three blocks off the mark, or you try to send electronically, only to find that you need to set up a trusted SMTP relay. In the case of either problem, you likely won’t figure it out until months after the fact. There’s a reason a rampage is called “going postal”.

Poor Kevin Costner. He is tasked with delivering the entire nation’s mail on the old shoeleather express. If any package is misdelivered, he gets the blame. No vehicles, no electricity, no help of any kind. With certain non-trivial problems, all you can give it is your best effort.

As a connoisseur of video games and the artistic goods of Japan, I heard about Kojima Hideo-san’s extravagant foray into the world of Postman, the majestic and not-at-all-pretentious Death Stranding, wherein you play as Kevin Costner’s vision of a parcel carrier. There is also a video game called Postal, wherein you don’t have to deliver a thing (see end of first paragraph).

But this is no game, this is a serious examination of what it means to be an American, through the lens of our mailman and savior.

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I have a background in film, and was assisting with a streaming pilot before quarantine regulations put it on hold. We joked about Coronavirus on set, but nobody thought it would be treated as a pandemic. As a result, I have more time to put much-needed work into my indie game.

What I’m trying to say is that pandemics aren’t all that bad. I know it’s a different story for someone pissing blood in the hospital (no offense to those who get off on the insertion of foreign objects; just making a point), but I’m a naturally healthy and socially isolated individual, so pandemics don’t affect me as much. But in the movies, it’s always the end of the world for everyone.

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This is not an indictment of a franchise but of a particular film. Before Jonathan Nolan, before Beyond Westworld, there was Westworld, a campy little sci-fi western. That’s how these things start. In a case of life imitating art, Westworld (the setting, the film, or the franchise) gets more interesting and dangerous over time until its flimsy foundation collapses under the weight of its own ambition.

The cheese factor is at a critical level. Imagine Tron (1982) on horseback. Double down on the AI-taking-over-the-world trope and you’ve got Westworld. This may have been one of the first films to go so completely overboard with sci-fi cliches. The basic ideas themselves are not absurd, but the story is in the telling.

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