Masterpiece of Horror Theatre- Halloween II

      Forgot to mention this earlier. When I was trying to find Halloween on Netflix, I found two of its sequels instead. Yeah, they show the panned sequels, but not the critically acclaimed original. Netflix is weird. So, after the success of Halloween. a sequel was comissioned. While Carpenter and Hill considered making a sequel where Michael Myers stalks Laurie in a new high-rise apartment, they ultimately decided to simply set the film immediately after the events of the first one.  Akkad and Yablans endowed the film with 2.5 million dollars, larger than the original. However, Carpenter refused to return directing, claiming he didn't want to do a sequel (Should've thought of that when he made Escape from LA), and newcomer Rick Rosenthal was chosen as his replacement. The cast, with the exception of Nick Castle (who played Michael Myers, and I just realized I forgot to mention that in my review of the last one) returned in their original roles. The film was released in 1981 to financial success, bur negative reviews. And it's not hard to see why.
       Set immediately after the events of the first film (on October 31st, 1978), Michael Myers (Dick Warlock) disappeared after Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) shot him several times. Loomis immediately goes to hunt him down, becoming more hysterical because of Myers near superhuman healing factor. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is sent to a nearby hospital. Myers steals a knife, and kills another teenager (because....). Anyway, Laurie is kept in the hospital, sedated by drugs. She learns that her pursuer was Michael Myers, who was a local legend because of the murders. Myers eventually learns of her location. Laurie begins to have visions of her as a little girl with her adopted parents, and visiting a young boy (interesting). Meanwhile, Dr. Loomis and Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cypher) try to hunt Myers down. They seemingly kill him by crashing a car into him, but it turns out to be a pedestrian with a similar mask. However, when Brackett learns of Anne's (Nancy Loomis) death, he leaves the film, and is replaced by Deputy Gary Hunt (Hunter von Leer), and they investigate the former Myers residency, and find nothing. Meanwhile,(God, I watched this last night, and I don't even remember the sequence of events!) Myers makes it to the Hospital, where he cuts the phone lines, and kills the staff. Eventually Laurie is left to flee him while still sedated and weakened. Loomis and Hunt go to a local school where Myers was spotted, where the term "Samhain" is found in blood. Samhain was a pagan holiday celebrated on October 31st, so Loomis begins to suspect an occult connection. However, he is confronted by his assistant Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens), who was forced by the Illinois governor to take him back to the hospital. Meanwhile, paramedic Jimmy (Lance Guest), who was developing a romantic interest in Laurie, is rendered unconscious, when he sees a dead nurse, and slips in her blood. (No, really). Having offed most of the staff, Myers continues to pursue Laurie. Laurie eventually finds peace in the boiler room. After killing another nurse, Myers chases Laurie through the room. Meanwhile,(yeah, this movie jumps around a lot), Dr. Loomis learns that Laurie was, in fact, Michael Myers' younger sister, who was adopted by the Strodes after Myers incarceration. Realizing that Myers was targeting Laurie, Loomis forces the Marshal (John Zenda) to the hospital. Laurie barely escapes Myers in the boiler room, but is unable to start a getaway car. Jimmy walks in, but becomes unconscious again on the wheel, alerting Myers to her presence, just as Loomis, Chambers and the Marshal arrive. Laurie is able to alert them, and Loomis shots Myers again. However, Myers once again rises, and kills the Marshal. Finally, he mortally injures Loomis, and is about to kill Laurie, when Laurie shots him in the eye, confusing him long enough for Loomis and Laurie to fill the room with gas, and for Loomis to lit it on fire, killing himself in the process. Laurie looks on as Myers steadily burns to death. As an ambulance takes her back home, Laurie sees the body of Myers burning....
          I'll say this. It still had some legitimately creepy moments. Like a scene where Myers sneaks into a home and steals a knife. Or when he is slowly approaching Laurie in the Boiler Room. The twist that Laurie was Myers' younger sister, whilst not making sense, at least is somewhat interesting, and actually provides motivation for Myers seemingly random rampage. It also had its fair share of good kills, and the final scene is fairly well done. The cinematography is still good, with many of the same tricks that made the original such a classic, and the cast still does very well. The new guy playing Michael Myers does well with the role.
      The main problem with the film is its tedium. It gets really repetitive seeing Myers kill these random people. Seriously, I didn't really care about the kills in this. They get old really fast, and that loses the horror of these scenes. Further, it goes so slowly,. The pacing gets really slow in the middle, and it pads it out more than a car built for skydiving. Like I said, I could barely remember what sequence the scenes went in, because I stopped caring somewhere in the middle of the film. Dr. Loomis is even worse in this film, than in the original, having murdered an innocent teenager.
     Out of all the films I've seen for this, this is probably one of the worst. Not because it's bad, because there is some elements that save it, but it just pales in comparison of the original. It started scary, but it gradually just becomes slow and boring. And not scary. This would have worked better as the ending to the original. Urgh. If you wanted to see the cliffhanger of the original resolved, I suppose you could watch it, but otherwise, skip it.
   Next time, we take a look at another John Carpenter film: Prince of Darkness.

Masterpieces of Horror Theatre- Halloween

     Welcome back to Masterpiece of Horror Theatre, and today we take a look at the very influential slasher film Halloween. So, yeah, in 1976, action thriller Assault on Precinct 13 debuted, directed by relative newcomer John Carpenter, whose only previous credit was a dark satirical science fiction film called Dark Star. Among those who saw Assault were producer Irwin Yablans and financier Moustapha Akkad, who wanted Carpenter to make a film about a killer stalking babysitters. With the help of his then-girlfriend Debra Hill, Carpenter was able to churn out a script The Babysitter Killer, but was renamed Halloween by Yablans. Filmed for 20 days in 1978, and with a low budget of 300,000 dollars, it was a finacially successful, with 70 million in gross, but critically mixed. And we're looking at it today.
     On Halloween day, 1963, 6 year old Michael Myers (Will Saldin) murders his older sister Judith (Sandy Johnson), and is forced to spend his life in an insane asylum. Years later, on Halloween Night, 1978, his psychaitrist Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) witnesses his escape, and is able to determine that he will head to his hometown of  Haddonfield, Illinois. There, a young girl Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) made plans to babysit her neighbor Tommy Doyle (Brian Andrews). In the background, Myers is stalking her using a car he stole from a farmer, after he spies Laurie in front of his old residence. Eventually, as night falls, Laurie is babysitting Tommy, while her friend Annie Brackett babysits a girl across the street, all while Myers watches. Meanwhile, Loomis and Anne's father Leigh (Charles Cyphers) try to locate Myers in the community.  After Annie dumps her child, Lindsay Wallace (Kyle Richards) with Laurie, Myers makes his first move, strangling Annie in her car as she is going out to see her boyfriend. After Laurie's other friend Lynda van der Klook (P. J. Soles) and her boyfriend Bob arrive at the Wallace residence to.. ahem "frolick" around as it were, Myers offs them as well. Eventually, Laurie tucks the children in, and goes across the street, where she finally encounters Myers, who dumps her down the stairs. She survives and after failing to get help from a neighbor, goes back to the Doyle house, and instructs Tommy to lock their door. However, Myers infiltrates that house, and the two struggle, before Laurie is able to seemingly kill him. However, just as Laurie is calming down the kids, he climbs up the stairs, and engages her again. After she seemingly kills him again, he rises again, and almost kills her. However, she shakes him off, briefly reveals his face (which is very normal, despite the letters)and Dr. Loomis (tipped off by Tommy and Lindsay after Laurie instructs them to go find help) shots Myers over a window. However, when he looks down from said window, he has vanished....
     Okay, first off, this was terrifying. It had a number of effective scares, which stems from its excellent use of tension. Every scene builds its tension, slowly building up the kill, and then catching you by surprise when it does happen. You know it's going to happen, but you are biting your nails waiting for it to happen. That is how you create an intense jumpscare. Not making fakeout scares, which will create mild surprise by causing a spike in the score, which subsides very quickly, like most of modern horror does. Speaking of the score, it is also very well done, fitting the mood many times, and never distracts from the killings. In fact, sometimes the killing or scare happens while the music is still playing, which makes it scarier. Also, all the actors do their very best. Michael Myers is a very effective villain. He is a silent, but deadly killer, clearly able to bid his time, and plan to ensure that he could psychotically kill this random assortment of teenagers. The low budget actually serves the films suburban setting quite well, with  authentic looking houses, which never feel cheap.
     I do have a few problems with the movie. It does get very slow towards the middle and the first half of the end, when Myers simply stalks his victims. While this has its share of creepy moments, it largely drags on for a little bit. Also, Dr. Loomis doesn't seem to have much consequence until the very end. Hell, you could cut him out of the movie, and reshot it, so that Myers escapes undetected, and Laurie herself shots Myers, and you basically lose nothing in the main plot.
   Overall, a very chilling and intense film, one which solidifies John Carpenter as one of the most influential directors, and stands head and shoulders over its imitators. If you want a chilling and intense film, give this a watch. Next week, I take a look at the sequel.

Masterpieces of Horror Theatre- Quatermass and the Pit (aka Five Million Years to Earth)

         For those of you who have been following my Facebook for the past two years, you probably already know every year, during the week of Halloween, I do several horror movie reviews. These were rather short (simply because I don't like doing particularly long Facebook posts, that's why I started this thing in the first place), and last year, I adopted the guise of a horror host called the Storyteller, and reviewed them in costume. This year, my University does not have a fall break at the end of October, and I don't really want to do the Storyteller schtick again this year, so I'll just do them here, every weekend of October. This is "Masterpiece of Horror Theatre," where I take a look at the obscure and the classics the horror genre has to offer. I cheated a little bit with this first film. I watched this a few months ago. However, I never said this had to be a first impressions, and it is a good film, so I might as well review it. First, a little background. The Quatermass Experiment was a BBC science fiction serial that aired in the summer of 1953, created Nigel Kneale. It revolved around Professor Bernard Quatermass, a scientist in charge of the "British Rocket Group", who coordinated the first manned spaceflight (remember, Sputnik hasn't happened yet). When said mission returns with two astronauts dead, and one infected, it is apparent that aliens interrupted the mission, and now Quatermass must stop them from destroying the Earth. This serial was so successful that it spawned off two sequel serials, Quatermass II(Electric Boogaloo), and Quatermass and the Pit, and became very influential in British television and culture at the time. Most notably, it was one of the main inspirations for Doctor Who. Around the time the second serial was being aired in autumn of 1955, Hammer Films (later notable for a series of Dracula films starring the late Christopher Lee in the titular role) released a film adaptation of the first serial, called the Quatermass Xperiment (Because "e"s are uncool), which starred American actor Brian Donlevy in the main role, and directed by Val Guest. Kneale, who had little involvement with the film, wasn't very fond of the casting, but when they adapted Quatermass 2 in 1957, he wrote the screenplay, though Donlevy still returned in the role. However, while Quatermass and the Pit was released in between December 1958 and January 1959, and the film rights were purchased by Hammer shortly after, distribution issues prevented the film from being produced until 1966, with a new script by Kneale and Anthony Hinds. In the role now was Scottish actor Andrew Weir, and the director was Roy Ward Baker, who made the Titanic film A Night to Remember. Quatermass and the Pit was released in the United Kingdom on November 9th, 1967, and in the US on February 16th, 1968, as Five Million Years to Earth. After this film, Kneale would write one final Quatermass serial, simply named Quatermass in 1978, and the character was retired, until a remake of the Quatermass Experiment was made and released in 2005, starring future Doctor David Tennant, But, we're primarily focusing on the 1967 film, so here we go...
      The film opens with in the London Underground, where several diggers find a number of fossilized human remains while digging a new extension. Paleontologist Dr. Rooney (James Donald) and his assistant Barbara Judd (Barbara... Shelly) are on the scene, excavating the remains, when another surprise arises. A mysterious metal. A bomb disposal unit is sent to examine the object, but needing further consultation, they call in Colonel Breen (Julian Glover, or as you may know him, General Veers from The Empire Strikes Back, or Walter Donovan from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade). Breen is in a meeting with Professor Quatermass (Andrew Keir), who is irate that the military plans to hijack his Moon colonization, and that Breen is assigned to the British Rocket Group. Quatermass accompanies Breen to the dig site, where he witnesses the full uncovering of the object. Breen suspects  that the object is V-weapon left over from the war.  Underneath the object, however, is another fossilized human, which Dr. Rooney calculates to be 5 million years old. Quatermass and Barbara then go to around the area, called Hob's Lane, and learn of a number of local legends about devils and goblins haunting the region. Meanwhile, continued examinations of the object reveal it to be harder than any known Earth substance. It also appears to damage anybody who touches it. After a Borazon drills fails to open a door within the object, the door is destroyed, and it is revealed to have various insectoid residents. When Quatermass and Rooney examine them, they find them to be Martian in origin, and they bear a striking resemblance to the Devil. Quatermass uses this to hypothesize that they had come to Earth from a dying Mars to establish a colony. They increased the intelligence of the native humans to serve as the colonizers, and those eventually became modern homo saipiens. However, Breen gives an alternative hypothesis, that it was a Nazi propaganda weapon meant to scare Britons by giving the start of an alien invasion ( A theory that has a number of holes in it. Like: why would the Nazis develop such a hard material, and then waste it all on this one trick, when they could have made tanks or planes with the stuff? Why is it buried under the city, where no one could find it? Finally, why place all these fossils next to it? Was it just a nice touch?) The minister of defense decides not to think, and not only accepts Breen's theory, but plans to unveil the craft. Meanwhile, Sladden, the Borazon drill operator, is going to get his equipment out of the cave, and is haunted by the images of Martian hordes.Quatermass hypothesizes that it was a "survival of the fittest." style event, and fear that a similar event will occur. At the unveiling, disaster strikes, as the ship begins to use the television equipment to cause the population to riot. Further, some are drawn to the ship, and are killed, including Colonel Breen. Quatermass almost suffers the same fate, only for Rooney to snap him out of it. The two realize that the ship intends to destroy London, and remake it as a Martian colony. A large virtual image of a Martian insect looms over the city. Eventually, drawing on a legend that the "devils" could be repealed by metal, Rooney climbs a crane, and smashes it into the Martian. The film ends with Quatermass and Barbara tired from the experience.
      First, all the actors do very well, particularly Andrew Weir as Quatermass (a person of strong intellectual conviction and scientific mind; a character someone like me is inclined to like), and Colonel Breen (who is thoroughly unlikable, but at least you understand his positions). The effects, for the 1960's, are well done. It is very B-Movie, but not too distracting. I admit, I do find the idea expressed in this work fascinating. I don't subscribe to the ancient alien theory at all, but I do find the idea that aliens came in the distant past, and altered humanity to make them intelligent fascinating, if unrealistic. Granted, this is not the first work to show such a view (The Star-Begotten by H G Wells did this in 1937, with Martians no less.). However, the way it is portrayed was the most interesting part of the story. The mystery also does progress very well, and you do wonder why an alien ship is inside a London tunnel.
    I'll admit, the climax and ending were somewhat confusing. It was hard to follow exactly what was happening due to the chaos. They also don't explain why the ship looked like an organism towards the end. Hell, they don't explain why the Martians decided to use proxy humans to colonize the Earth, instead of doing it themselves. Once again, the Colonel had a very flimsy theory, which thinking about it ten seconds makes it fall apart easily, given what we were shown earlier. Finally, it is very slow and prodding, and it does take a while to go through.
     An incredibly entertaining, if slow film. I'll admit, the image of the Martian insects and the chaos of London are horrifying enough to justify this as a horror film. If you prefer more bloody and grotesque horror, you'll not find it here. However, if you enjoy watching a compelling mystery, with horrifying implications, and intense moments, I would give this a watch. Thanks for reading. Next time: I take a look at the seminal slasher horror film Halloween, and its sequel, Halloween II

Mr. Lowell and his Amazing Canals

        So, here is the more appropriate update for the recent Mars discovery. The discovery of perochloridate salts in the seasonal flows on Mars, hence indicating the presence of ( briny) liquid water on the planet, is a tremendous discovery. However, it confirms previous observations that water was present on Mars, in one form or another. Not on the surface, obviously. It is too cold on the surface for liquid water to exist as a liquid. However, it likely existed billions of years ago, and it might exist subsurface, where the seasonal flows likely come from. And if water, however salty, exists, the chances of life of some form existing on Mars does increase. Of course, this mode of thinking is only around 50 years old. From the time of William Herschel (who was the first to demonstrate that the white parts of Mars were ice sheets), it was believed that water, and presumably life, was abundant on Mars. Especially with the presence of the icy poles. In fact, a dark shadow that would go from the pole to the Equator was considered to be a seasonal plant growth in the late 19th and early 20th century (Astronomer Gerard Kuiper would say that the dark spot was windblown dust, and this hypothesis was later confirmed by Carl Sagan, and his student James Pollock). And the idea of life on Mars was ingrained, actually still ingrained, in our fiction. The aliens that invaded late Victorian England in H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds were Martian in origin.  In Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoom series (which you may know from that overall descent, but disappointing film John Carter a few years ago), was full of various races and creatures roaming the planet Mars. And there are many other examples, from Tweel in the 1934 short story Martian Odyssey (it's in public domain, so you might be able to find it) to Looney Tunes' Marvin the Martian.  The biggest influence on all of these ideas was a man named Percival Lowell, and his ideas about Martians using canals to transport water.

          Well, I call them in the title "his canals", but Lowell didn't actually discover them. They were first described by an Italian astronomer named Giovanni Schiaparelli, during the Opposition of 1877. Basically, when Mars is on the opposite side of the sky from Earth. He had drawn several extensive straight lines on Mars, which he described as canali. Before I go any further, I would like to put that particular term into context. Apparently, while it is spelled like canal, the word "canali" actually roughly translates to channel, as in a natural channel. Schiaparelli also never hypothesized that they were artificial in origin, though he didn't oppose the notion. However, in the Anglosphere, the term canali became canal, and soon, it became a very popular idea that canals existed on Mars. Then came Percival Lowell, whose name would come to be associated with the canals. Lowell was not a professional astronomer. He was a business man and diplomat by training, and Harvard educated to boot. After hearing about Schiaparelli's discovery in 1893, he set out to discover see them himself. He built his own observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and looked at Mars, and drew the canals that he found.  Using these, he concocted an entire story, (based in part on William Pickering's speculation on the canals) about a civilization which was dying due to a lack of water. They needed to transport the water via canals to keep them alive. He popularized this particular story in a large variety of books and articles on the topic, where the idea of Martian canals was disseminated into the general culture. He would promote these ideas until his 1916 death. Note that this was the time that technological progress of all kinds, particularly transportation, were being celebrated, so the public was ripe for this idea, much as ancient aliens appeal to modern audiences.
       Despite the popularity of the canal hypothesis, professional astronomers were skeptical. Why? They couldn't see them! No professional astronomer could actually see or describe the canals. Astronomers like Asaph Hall (who discovered the Martian moons), and Edward Bernard (who discovered Amalthea, one of Jupiter's moons.) viewed the Planet and couldn't find any of the canals Lowell described.  Other, non-astronomers also criticized Lowell. In particular, was biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, who was notable in formulating the theory of evolution independently of Charles Darwin, and influencing him to some extent. In 1907, Wallace wrote a rebuttal against Lowell, and his theories, noting that the so-called “canals” are likely just cracks in the Martian crust, where volcanic carbon dioxide rises from the mantle of the planet, and into the plants on the surface. Even if this explanation wasn’t true (its validity based on the idea that Mars had non-contracting core inside a contracting crust),  Mars  also had a mean temperature of -35 F, far too cold for any life to exist.  And in In 1909, during  an observation in a thirty-three telescope in Meudon, France, astronomer Eugene Antoniadi proposed that the canals were optical illusion, based off the fact that the surface of the planet were naturalistic. Despite the rejection of the mainstream astronomy community, the canals of Mars persisted into the 1950's. Werhner von Braun mentioned them in his Mars work, and Ray Bradbury was influenced to some extent by Lowell, when he was writing the Martian Chronicles. However, it was the arrival of Mariner 4 to the Red Planet in 1964 that finally killed off the idea of Martian canals. It not only showed that Mars was virtually dead, but there were no canals at all, confirming the observations of the astronomers of Lowell's time.
     So, what were some good things to come out of this? Well, towards the end of his life, Lowell would turn his attention towards a ninth planet, which he called "Planet X", which he and the observatory at Flagstaff would try to find. Eventually, in 1930, an astronomer working at the Flagstaff observatory (at this point named the Lowell Observatory) named Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto, and the initials PL (as in Percival Lowell) was chosen as its sign. Also, it did popularize the idea of water on Mars. Further, Schiaparelli's initial idea of "canalis" as natural features have been shown in the form of various channels and canyons, which were more than likely formed from the erosion of liquid water in the distant past. While there were no dying civilizations or large artificial canals, this weeks discovery does demonstrate that water does exist on Mars, and with water, there is the possibility of life on Mars...

Sources:

The Scientific Exploration of Mars / Fredric W. Taylor.

Cambridge, UK; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2010.

The Exploration of Mars/ Wernher Von Braun, Willey Ley, with illustrations by Chesley Bonestall

New York; Viking Press, 1960

Canals of Mars- The Worlds of David Darling:

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/M/Marscanals.html 

The Canals of Mars- ScienceBlogs

http://scienceblogs.com/universe/2012/09/28/the-canals-of-mars/ 

Tracing the Canals of Mars: An Astronomer's Obsession by Richard Milner, Astrobiology Magazine- Space.org: 

http://www.space.com/13197-mars-canals-water-history-lowell.html 

Is Mars Habitable? by Alfred Russel Wallace:

http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S730.htm 

Moon Mission in the 30's

    Howdy everybody. Though I was gone? Nope! It's been a somewhat hectic two months for me. I enter college at CU Boulder, so I've been focusing on adjusting to this new climate. Now that I'm more or less adjusted, I can now resume with writing these entries. I'm back, and  in honor of the recent Mars discovery, I am going to talk about... the Moon. What? I begin this entry months ago, it's not like I could change the subject to Mars, given I had already done the research for this. Anyway, remember my Daedalus overlook? Well, in that, you probably remember me talking a little bit about the British Interplanetary Society's proposal about a moon mission in the 1930's. Well, I'm going to write about it. Enjoy
       In 1938, the BIS commissioned a study about a vehicle that would carry a crew of three onto the Moon, as well as a ton of payload, and safely bring them back to the Earth, with only half a ton of final payload. It was meant to show that a mission to the Moon was both physically and economically viable at the time. The moon rocket would have been using powder as a fuel, as was common in model rockets at the time. However, there was a major problem. The velocity required to actually reach the Moon would be in excess of 16 km/s. If it would be built in a single rocket, 90 % of the mass of the rocket would be propellant. To solve this, they decided to create a step rocket, with multiple boosters. Basically, since the booster would have a very low yield, there would be approximately  2,490 mini honeycomb based boosters, which would be immediately discarded. (Such an idea can be traced back to the multiple stage rockets proposed by Kostatin Tsiolkovsky in the late 19th Century.) It would be launched from a high altitude lake near the Equator (possibly Lake Titicaca). It would be about one metric ton, and could send a crew of three to the Moon. There was shielding for the descent to the Moon, though no shield for the descent back to Earth. Also strange was the use of solid fuel, since liquid fuel was considered impractical, due to the power of pumps needed to actually produce the force to push each booster. (Of course, this problem was eventually solved, by a German rocketeer named Werhner von Braun).  The lunar lander itself looked like a gun shell, about 11 ft tall, and 13.5 ft in diameter. The landing would bear some resemblence to the eventual landing of Apollo 11 in 1969.  The hull would be a glass like aluminum oxide, but the cabin would be plastic, with a ceramic covering. The cabin is also attached to boosters, which would create a spin for artificial gravity. The rocket, despite being the center piece of the mission, was actually not the only part of the mission studied. They also studied how the Astronauts could survive the mission. Along with the aforementioned heat shielding, the food was supposed to be high in calories (such as bread, butter, cheese, honey, etc.). The crew would carry an assortment of scientific equipment and protection, to study the Moon, including sunburn lotion (apparently, spacesuits weren't conceived of yet), a telescope and microscope, and geological hammers. Air and water for the mission would be extracted from a single tank of  To communicate, they would use "flashes of light." (Presumably using it for morse code), which would be broadcast by the BBC (ironic, given their coverage of Apollo 11 30 years later.)
    The design, led by J. Happian Edwards, and including Arthur C. Clarke as the astronomy consultant, was published in January of 1939 in the Society's journal. Even then, they noted that they didn't actually have the resources to actually go through with this mission at the moment (given that even experimenting with rockets was illegal in Britain at the time.) However, they hoped to send out a survey to gather public support, to actually begin with this mission. This attracted a lot of attention to the Society, both positive and negative. It had gotten attention in Time Magazine, and publications as far away as India. Despite this, most modern analyses of the mission do deem it ultimately implausible, due to the large number of boosters, and the lack of heat and radiation shielding. After World War II, the Society turned to lesser targets, such as organizing the first conference on planning the first orbiting artificial satellite. However, it is still held as a seminial study, as the first serious attempt to plan a mission to the Moon, using (then) modern technology, and some of it would later recall the later Apollo missions.
  So, thanks for reading. A shame I couldn't do something Mars related. Maybe the BIS did something with Mars...

Sources:

The Union Jack on the Moon, by Ron Miller- io9.com
http://io9.com/the-union-jack-on-the-moon-1262867212

The BIS Lunar Spaceship- The British Interplanetary Society official website:
http://www.bis-space.com/what-we-do/projects/bis-lunar-spaceship

HMS Moon Rocket, by Tony Reichhardt- The Air and Space Magazine, March 1997:
http://www.airspacemag.com/space/hms-moon-rocket-3143/?all

BIS Lunar Lander- Encyclopedia Aeronautica
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/bisander.htm

Film Review- Paper Towns

 (By the way, I'm sorry there was no Inside Out review. There was some complications that prevented me from writing it. You'll hear my thoughts on it at the end of the year)    
  I was browsing through some of the reviews for this film, when I came across a comment, which literally said that John Green was the next Nicholas Sparks. I don't necessarily agree. I think most people expressing this sentiment are primarily referring to his most famous work as of late,The Fault in Our Stars. They likely weren't referring to today's subject, but I'll get there later. Superficially, yes, Fault does have some resemblance to Mr. Sparks works. However, there is several distinguishing features, at least in term of story.  I haven't read any Nick Sparks works, and I have seen only one of his films (and it made so little impression on me, I sometimes forget I even watched it), so I'm just going off what I've read. In a Nick Sparks book, cancer or insert-disease-here is used merely as a cheap ploy meant to score some tragedy in an otherwise mundane romance. Fault uses cancer (better)  as the center focus, showing how it affects the characters and their outlooks. I'm going to make a wild guess, and say that Sparks never examines terminal diseases in that manner. He certainly didn't in the one movie of his I saw. (Maybe he does in other books. I'll never know; I refuse to pick up any of his books). Another difference. Nick Sparks, as you may know, tends to write the same story over and over ad infinitum. I've read only Fault and today's subject Paper Towns, but that rather small sampling did provide me enough credence to say that they aren't the same story. They have different themes, different romances, different settings, different outlooks for different characters. My point is that Paper Towns is not just another Fault in Our Stars. They are fairly distinct. I certainly could tell the movies apart. Now, I am not a big fan of this genre (Regular readers of this blog might know that already), but I appreciated Fault. It wasn't groundbreaking, or innovative, or overly philosophical. It was just a fairly entertaining little romance film. When I finished Paper Towns, I had the same reaction. Not exactly a book I would think much about, but a good small romance book. The biggest strength of both these works was the fact that, despite their pretensions, they have a sort of charm to them. A sweetness to the romance, the repretoire, something like that. The film Paper Towns somewhat has that charm, but I have more... reserved praise for it...

       Based on the novel by John Green, the film centers around Quentin "Q" Jacobsen (Nat Wolff) who has been infatuated with his free-spirited neighbor Margo Roth Spiegelman (Cara Delevingne) since she moved to his Orlando suburb when they were 8. They bonded over an instance where they discover a deceased man whilst traveling together. (This incident was more important in the book; it is never brought up again in the film) However, by their Senior year in high school, they had grown apart. However, it is clear that Quentin still has feelings for Margo. This is brought to the open when Margo enters into his room one night. Her boyfriend Jase (Griffin Freeman) had been cheating on her, and so she seeks vengeance on Jase, her other friend Becca (Caitlin Carver), with whom Jase was cheating on, and her best friend Lacey Pemberton (Halston Sage), who Margo assumed had knowledge of the affair, but didn't tell her (Lacey actually didn't know about the affair.) Margo wants Q to be an accomplice to her revenge plot against those who have wronged her. Quentin reluctantly agrees, and together, they pull a succession of various embarrassing pranks, including against Chuck Parson (RJ Shearer), an old bully of Quentin's. They then break into the "SunTrust" building, where they share a romantic moment. Q believes this to be the beginning of a renewed romantic relationship with Margo. However, the next day, after detailing the events to his friends Ben Starling (Austin Abrams) and Marcus "Radar" Lincoln (Justice Smith), Q learns that Margo hasn't come to school. He later finds out that she had ran away (thankfully, that bizarre scene in the book, with the detective is left out). While Q, Ben, and Radar are hanging out in Q's room, when they observe a "Woody Guthrie" poster in Margo's room. Curious, they bribe Margo's sister Ruthie (Meg Crosbie), and they dig through her stuff, and find a Guthrie album, which leads them to a collection of Walt Whitman poems. Q finds a particular passage about doors, which leads him to a small paper, with an address on it. The three friend skip school, and head to the location, which shows various atlas, and a messages "You go to the Paper Towns, and You never come back." This begins a journey that will take Q, Radar, Ben, Lacey (who joins them to help rectify the mistake Margo made), and Angela (Jaz Sinclair), Radar's girlfriend (a minor character in the book), that brings them to unexpected places. This journey may not lead to the mysterious, eclectic Margo Q thinks he's searching for.

      The cinematography is relatively good in this film. Not anything special, but good. So was the soundtrack. It was the same heavily indie based soundtrack as Fault, but works a little better here, since it never intrudes on emotional moments. Nat Wolff, and most of the cast do fine. At first, I felt that he sounded too subdued, but I realized that was meant to be his personality. Wolff does well in the role, being able to display the normality of his character. While they make significant changes to the book, it still holds the same theme. However, the movie deals with it in a slightly different way. In the book, (spoiler), she doesn't come up much in the book. She is often discussed as an idea, rather than an actual character, and when Q actually sees her again, he realizes that she is not an idea, but a real, living, breathing person. In the movie, she is also essentially an idea for some of the film, but she is shown more in the film, and her true character is more explicitly shown. Both are used correctly in the context of their respective mediums to deconstruct the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl." While Margo may be portrayed as such a character, in the end, she is still a person with her flaws and her own personality, and Q realizes that their paths are diverging, and that he should let her go. Hell, the movie actually portrays this better, with scenes of where his path was leading, and where Margo's might lead. In the end, Q is able to let go of his image of Margo, and moves on with his life. This is a nice examination into the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and how it isn't as clean cut in real life.  There is a lot of tension in the movie over whether they will actually find Margo, and there is dramatic tension over whether Q will find the real Margo. It also had very humorous moments, which stem from rather nice setups.

       Okay, Cara Delevingne: Wooden. She expresses all of her sentiments in the exact same tone of voice when she is supposed to be active, surprised, casual. Her performance does not make me interested in her character, who is supposed to the driving force behind the characters and the story itself. When she rarely expresses any sort of emotion well, I really have no interest in her as an idea, which, as I just described, is the point of the story. I won't spoil the book, but, needless to say, they make major changes to the second and third acts. I'm not going to complain because they changed the events. I'm going to complain about how those changes affect the narrative. The changes make the narrative seem more haphazard, and more rushed. It also makes it more apparently rushed. For instance, they elevate Radar's girlfriend Angela into a main character, simply so that her and Radar's plotline could be acted out, even though it could have been earlier in the film. This is because that plotline was resolved earlier in the book. I also feel that they left some threads from the book they carried over unfinished. For example, the dead man, who was mentioned more, and actually served a narrative purposes. Again, I'd like emphasize that I'm not complaining that they simply changed it. I'm complaining how they handled these changes. Some other things. I loathed the Ben character (I loathed him in the book too, so it may have been a carry over, and he is more likeable in the movie. At least, his "Honeybunny" schtick is not as prevelent in the film) It also has some of the more corny lines in the novel, which could have easily been cut. The dialogue is also a little stilted at times, but there is enough good dialogue to save the film.

          I'll say this: it deserves the 58% it got on Rotten Tomatoes. Not to say that it was a terrible film. It was a fairly decent film. It just wasn't as good as I thought it would be. But it is still fairly good. I did enjoy watching it, and I'm glad I watched it. If you read the book, whilst they make major changes, it is still in the spirit of the book, and true to its themes and characters, so you'll probably enjoy it. Just don't think it will be faithful like Fault was. If you haven't, it might be a nice offering to take a date to, or just see for the hell of it. It isn't that long, so if you're interested, go ahead and watch it. Overall, good, not great. 

Review: Jurassic World

           Again!? Why did they think this was still a good idea? I mean, first, before the park even opens, the whole apparatus of the park was deactivated, and the dinosaurs went berserk. Then, they tried to build one in San Diego, on the  mainland, and a T. Rex ended up rampaging through a major metropolitan area. Then, some people landed on the island, and a spinosaurus almost killed them. (Yeah, I'm really into this franchise.) Anyway, why did they think that building another park was a good idea? You know that something is going to go wrong, based off that track record, and I'm going to let you guess what happens in this film. Yep, everything goes wrong. And they had the audacity to genetically create a new dinosaur, an ultimate predator sort, and they didn't have any contingency plans for it. You know what, it probably doesn't matter. Because this is actually fairly decent a film.
      Fourth in the film franchise based off the 1990 novel by the late Michael Crichton, the film follows "Jurassic World," a fulfillment of John Hammond's original vision for Jurassic Park. It is a major success, with visitors coming to see the varieties of genetically created prehistoric creatures on a daily basis. However, to increase visitors, the manager (I presume so, at least) of the park, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) was told by InGen, now under the management of Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), to create an all new Dinosaur. One which would combine all the ultimate predators (Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor, Carnotaurus, Giganotosaurus, Majungasaurus, and Rugops), which also has other traits from DNA placed in it. They called it Indominus Rex (roughly translating to "Untameable king"). However, after Ms. Dearing gives Mr. Masrani a laydown of the creature, he asks that someone be able to control it. Specifically, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), a former Navy seal, assigned to train the (featherless, because that isn't scary enough, supposedly) velociraptors, who is rightfully suspicious of the prospect. Meanwhile, Zach and Gray Mitchell (Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins), the nephews of Dearing, come to visit the park, and their aunt. However, given that Dearing is a little too busy at the moment, so they are stuck with her assistant. They promptly ditch the assistant to explore the park a little more. After an establishment scene, showing Grady as the alpha of a pack of Velociraptors, and head of security Vic Hopkins (Vincent D'Onofrio) wanting to use them as weapons (Spoilers: that goes no where, and doesn't matter in the slightest to the precedings), he is brought to the Rex exhibit, where it disappears from its captivity, supposedly by climbing. However, when Grady and two other employees investigate, they find it is very much in its cage. Apparently, the frog DNA caused it to change its temperature enough that the thermal sensors couldn't detect it. It escapes from its confines, kills the two employees, and begins a rampage. All the while, the park is evacuated, but the two nephews, in gyroscope tour, decide to go off trail, and encounter the Rex. They barely escape it. Now, Grady and Dearing must now both find and defeat the Rex, and find the two boys, before more havoc is wrecked.
    First, the dinosaurs were pretty good to look at. Yeah, they weren't scientifically accurate (I'd go back to Alan Grant's statement that the Dinosaurs were more theme park attractions in the third film), but it was fun to see them. Also, the acting is okay. Chris Pratt did pretty well in his role. Some may find him bland, but his serious demeanor was pretty well done, and proves that he could do more than be a snarky badass. He has, at this point, completely excised Andy Dwer from his system.  Bryce Dallas Howard did well. Sure, their characters weren't complex, but the characters were never great in these films, so that gets a pass. The effects were good. One thing I really appreciated was the use of practical effects in some scenes. CGI has become so prevalent, that everything seems false. The use of practical effects is not only a good homage to the original, but makes the reactions of the people around the dinosaurs more believable. There was also the fact that there was a lot of suspense in the plot. The climax, I won't spoil, was very exciting to watch, and has a homage to the original that works. It is easily the best scene in the whole film.
    Are you familiar with the concept of a "Mary Sue"? If not, it basically refers to a character that is very perfect in their abilities and actions. Indominus Rex is a Villain Sue. It literally is a predator so perfect that it has camoflage, ultra-intelligence, and it can even tame other creatures. That really pushed my suspension of disbelief. It really seemed implausible, even with all the genetic talk, that this creature is so perfect at being a villainous creature. I didn't much care for the two kids, and their story. The reason that I cared about the two kids in the original was that they had distinct personalities, and we got to know them well enough that we wanted to see them succeed. In this, yes, we follow the kids from the beginning, but the whole summation of their personalities are 'Gary is pedantic, and Zack is somewhat girl-crazy." I really didn't care about their stories, when they had such bland characterization.  I was worried going in that this would rely heavily on nostalgia for the original. That wasn't greatly true, but the homages that were in the film were irritating. Granted, one or two of them were okay, but it just came off as overbearing. Like the director kept wanting to say "Look, I made a sequel to this influential film, and trying to recapture its glory." You know, Abrams did that with Super 8, and that was less than satisfying. The things I like about the Jurassic Park sequels was that they never tried that. They never pretended that they could easily remaster what the originals had. This one is definitely trying. But, in fairness, it doesn't come up a lot.
       It was okay. To some extend, it meet my expectations. It was never going to be as good as the first and second, but it's good on its own. If you want to see a Jurassic Park sequel, or just interested, I say watch this (I definitely prefered this to the Third Jurassic park.) If you dislike the films, this one isn't going to convince you otherwise. Next week, Pixar!