hrlaser

Fifty years ago, Klaatu landed his saucer on a baseball diamond in Washington DC, was surrounded by Army tanks and soldiers. The saucer opens, a ramp extends, out he walks holding a device in his hand and what happens? A soldier fires at him, shooting the device out of his hand and destroying it.

Have we come any farther than this in the treatment of superior race, highly advanced aliens after fifty years of film making? Not really.. not at all. Technologically, we have CGI spaceships instead of painted plywood.

"Taken" had its moments of brilliance, but this 20 hours of over-padded nonsense, loaded down with so many commercials by the SciFi Network as it was (If I NEVER see one of those IBM commercials again, it'll be too soon).. seemed to be leading up to something, to some final conclusion of utter joy and brilliance, and it just simply didn't get there. The ending, which I will not spoil, was an enormous letdown..

I won't try to detail the plot, which spans fifty years, if you're reading this you've probably read a bajillion other comments and know what it's all about anyway, but I will hit two things that really stuck out in my mind..

a) Little Dakota Fanning, as Ally, is an absolutely AMAZING actress, showing a depth of range and ability that is nothing short of astounding. I can't imagine how good she will be, or at least potentially could be, as she gets older.. I wish her the best of luck. She was easily the best actor in this marathon..

b) Matt Frewer, as a brilliant, wise-cracking alien scientist and researcher caused his own demise in on of the shows final hours, with one of the most absurd, unconvincing, hackneyed bits of contrived stupidity imaginable.. in this age of cell phones, he turns his back on "Mary Crawford" within earshot of her while she's taking a shower, just feet away from him in a hotel room, and picks up the room phone to make a call to expose her evil intent. For crying out loud, he saw her have her own father killed, showing absolutely no remorse.. why in the world wouldn't he have gone outside the room, outside the hotel, and made that call with a cell phone? Dooming himself the way he did was incredibly cheap writing, and while it was unexpected, it was also totally illogical for his character to have sacrificed himself so easily..

This twenty hour snooze-a-thon could've been distilled down to two or three two hour segments, and not lost anything at all, and been better for the shortening in every way. As it was, I got the feeling the producers made it 20 hours long (minus endless commercials) just to prove they could do it.

It didn't give us anything new at all. The ending was a gross letdown.

While they're not science fiction, if you ever want to see two absolutely brilliantly written and acted television mini-series, watch "Shogun" and "Roots." Those are commercial television at its finest.

Harv

You've probably read a lot of other comments, so I'll spare you the details of what "RKO 281" is about.. rather, my comments pertain to made-for-HBO films, particularly this one..

HBO's movies always strike me as a cut above the usual made for the small screen fare, but just a notch below being theatrical quality. There's a strange feeling of being manipulated, that I get from almost all their films, especially biopics like this one, "Truman", and their latest "Path To War" which they're running this month. HBO likes to take on monumental, historical characters, like Orson Welles, Harry S Truman, and LBJ, but seems to always surround them with characters who are portrayed as being slightly dumb, and made to look like fools, on purpose. It's as though HBO is telling us to look back into history and laugh at how naive and silly people were in decades past.. look at the dumb clothes they wore, the silly hairstyles, their mannerisms, while at the same time idealizing them..

In these kinds of films, cars are never dirty or dented. People never flub their words when speaking to each other. Homes and offices are always a paragon of cleanliness. Everything looks brand new. Staged. Too perfect.. Okay, perhaps realism is not what we want in our movies.. we live in homes that have dirty dishes in the sink and rumbled towels in the bathroom, and stacks of magazines on the tables.. but there ARE period films in which the "lived in" look IS quite well done.. witness Bob Raefelson's "The Postman Always Rings Twice."

While the set and art direction of "RKO 281" is stunning, everything is beautiful to look at: all the vast, wood-panelled offices of the Hollywood moguls, somehow, everything has an artificial look to it.

And then, there's Liev Schreiber's portrayal of a young Orson Wells.. Again, sometimes HBO can create a convincing lookalike - Gary Sinese as Harry S Truman was right on the money, Michael Gambon as LBJ comes sort of close, but doesn't quite ring true, but Schreiber simply doesn't look or sound anything like Orson Welles did. Welles had a booming baritone voice, an in-your-face style of projecting his words, and a simply riveting screen presence. Schreiber's lack of a jaw, and his delivery simply never convinced me that this man was Orson Welles.. This is not to take away from Schreiber's acting abilities at all.. he was simply the wrong actor for the part. And since he is the centerpiece of the film, the entire film suffers because of his weak Welles clone..

However, "RKO 281" _is_ worth watching, if just for the lush sets and atmospherics, and the far too few glimpses we get of the making of "Citizen Kane." But again, HBO made this film as a drama, not a documentary, and a drama relies on conflict.. and thus the film concentrates on the clash of personalities, not the creation of the best film ever made..