My Recent Accumulation Of Writings

Wow, I haven’t updated this for a while. Temporary internet exposure must’ve gone to my head. Anyway, this is a compendium of the last 8 or so articles I’ve published at Blogcritics.org, my new home on the internet.

Earliest to most recent:

Article first published as Movie Review: The Importance Of Being Earnest (2002) on Blogcritics.

Article first published as Movie Review: Journey To The Center Of The Earth (2008) on Blogcritics.

Article first published as Experiment In Autobiography (Title Stolen Wholesale From H.G. Wells) on Blogcritics.

Article first published as DVD Review: Centurion on Blogcritics.

Article first published as Movie Review: The Expendables on Blogcritics.

Article first published as Twilight – What The Hell? on Blogcritics.

Article first published as DVD Review: Sherlock Holmes (2009) on Blogcritics.

Article first published as DVD Review: The Ghost (2010, aka The Ghost Writer) on Blogcritics.

You can find my new writer profile on Blogcritics.org here.

The Day The Earth Stood Still Review

Article first published as Movie Review: The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) at  http://blogcritics.org/video/article/movie-review-the-day-the-earth5/

The plot of the film The Day The Earth Stood Still revolves around an alien who comes to earth with a message to an untrusting and fearful humanity. The message is ‘don’t go out to the stars and bring your violence and death with you’, which is a good message to preach, and humanity really needed it back then when the Cold War threatened to kill us all in a big fireball.

The film, directed by Robert Wise, stars Michael Rennie as the alien, Klaatu, who comes down to make the world a better place and Billy Gray as the Standard ’50s Child (all “gee, mister” and “no foolin’?”) that he befriends while he’s there. Michael Rennie (who is the standard human alien of the piece) has one of those faces in that he looks like someone you may have seen in that thing a while back, or it could be somebody else entirely.

The very similar Plan 9 From Outer Space tried to use the same basic plot but didn’t succeed due to a great many problems, such as the narrator seemingly being confused about when the film takes place (“Future events such as these will affect you in the future…”) — and of course, being directed by the notorious Ed Wood.

Much like the kid’s use of the words ‘gee mister’ which are now thought of as a cliché of the time, the language standards of the time made themselves known in other ways too. For instance, some of the first words of the film are ‘holy mackerel’ and ‘holy Christmas’. Even in 1951 (when the movie was made), nobody would actually exclaim ‘holy Christmas’, at least not when they weren’t being censored fiercely. (Mind you, I wasn’t there. I could be wrong.) Speaking of gibberish, the movie is also, incidentally, the origin of the phrase ‘Klaatu Barada Nikto’, which was appropriated by the Star Wars expanded universe and the Tron film, among others.

Normally movies from the ’50s and early ’60s don’t tend to age too well when compared with the films of today, due to our superior film quality, sound quality, and the fact that most of them are in black and white. However, if the film is good enough, as with The Day The Earth Stood Still, it doesn’t really matter how good the cosmetic stuff is. The same message that this movie preached is still relevant today (in fact, especially so, as our weaponry and methods of delivering said weaponry have vastly increased since the ’50s). It’s one of the classics because it really makes you think about how things could’ve gone differently back then, and how we could’ve done with a real Klaatu to help us along the way.

This film was remade in 2008 starring Keanu Reeves, with the central message of the film changed to encourage people to be green to make it more relevant to the people of today. They didn’t have to do that though, as while we’ve cooled down a bit since the Cold War (nice pun), we are still a primitive and warlike people as Star Trek would put it, and part of me suspects it will always be so.