For my part, I’ll try to keep the study on a basic level.  For your part, you may go as deep as you like in the comments. 

Why not amble on over now and read the first two posts, and join us?

8.  God’s Word: Food for the Soul

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It isn’t just bad acting, though there’s plenty of that.  Bela Lugosi emotes well, but his part is, shall we say, cut short.  John "Bunny" Breckinridge exudes a compelling creepiness as the alien high commander - and he wasn’t even an actor.  Mona McKinnon (Paula) is okay too at 50s-style TV acting.  Everyone else is dreadful.  Ex-wrestler Tor Johnson makes Roddy Piper look like Lawrence Oliver.  Dudley Manlove (yeah, that’s right) as Eros (yeah, that’s right too) seems to be announcing a newsreel.  But what can we expect?  Wood didn’t have the money to be choosy. 

It isn’t just the cheap sets and special effects either.  Sure, the gravestones flap in the wind, the flying saucer exterior has a 90 degree corner, and the saucers in flight bounce around like yo-yos.  But I could overlook that too, just like I would at a stage play.  Realism costs money.

So what makes Plan 9 so bad?  First, the writing (and Ed Wood was the writer as well as director).  The plot is ludicrous and the dialogue is often laughable.  See for yourself:

Then there are the production choices.  Cars and characters move from nighttime to daylight and back to night.  Extended chase scenes show characters running repeatedly across the same sets. 

But the worst choice of all (and the most laugh/cringe-inducing) is Wood’s choice to build the movie around Bela Lugosi, who died a year or two before filming began.  Shortly before Lugosi died in 1956, he and Wood had shot a few scenes for another film.  Then in 1958, Wood put together Plan 9 and decided to bill it as Lugosi’s last film.  But how do you make a movie featuring a character who is no longer with us?  You splice in the 2-3 minutes of footage you have (even though it doesn’t match) and then you hire this guy:

This is Tom Mason, Ed Wood’s wife’s chiropractor.  He’s obviously younger and has better hair than Lugosi, but as long as he does all his scenes with a cape pulled over his mouth, who will know the difference?  Even if you cut from Mason at night to Lugosi in the daylight, back to Mason at night!

Due to the miracle of the Internet, you can watch Plan 9 From Outer Space in its entirety here.  Which is as it should be.  If Wood had lived today, he and YouTube would be a match made from above.

7.  Confession

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The Parallax View

The Parallax View begins with the assassination of a Senator. Director Alan J. Pakula shows us the conspiracy involved, but no one else sees it.  When a Warren Commission stand-in hands down its report, the conclusion is predictable:  This was the work of a lone gunman who, conveniently, died shortly after the assassination.  Familiar, huh?

Three years later, reporter Joseph Frady (Warren Beatty) isn’t interested in the assassination even though he knows that several witnesses have died.  Frady gets drawn in when a friend is added to the casualties, and soon he’s nearly drowning (literally) in the evidence of a conspiracy, which leads him to discover the Parallax Corporation, a company that seems to recruit assassins.  Frady decides to try to get himself recruited in order to infiltrate Parallax and the shadow government behind it.

"Parallax" is a word photographers and astronomers use to describe how what we see changes when we change our point of view.  As Frady moves ahead with his investigation, our perception changes - about the nature of this conspiracy, about the difference in politics between reality and show business, and especially about what kind of danger Frady is in.  At the end of the film, when another Warren-like Commission delivers another report, we know that we can never again see things like they do.  Or like they tell us to.

The Parallax View is an entertaining and artistically satisfying film that features three especially creative moments.  One is a scene in a morgue that powerfully and without any wasted motion shows us Frady being pulled into this drama.  The second is a well-known and unsettling montage that the Parallax Corporation shows to Frady as a training-testing-brainwashing exercise, designed to mix up his ideas about basic values like God, faith, parents and patriotism.  The third - and this is certainly one of the ten most memorable shots I’ve ever seen on film - involves a golf cart and a room full of tables.

As I mentioned before, people have been telling me that tomorrow’s election is among the most important in recent history.  The Parallax View suggests that the real issues are decided by people we’ve never heard of, against whom we cannot possibly win.  I’m not quite that paranoid.  But assuming that democracy is still a reality and not yet an illusion, the devil waiting to take it from us probably looks a lot like the Parallax Corporation. 

 
IMDb trailer

I actually feel a bit guilty about watching They Live (1988).  Having seen at least part of it many years ago, I should have known better.  But it begins promisingly.  Professional wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper plays a homeless construction worker who is anxious to get a job, play by the rules and claim his piece of the American dream.  But he soon stumbles upon a Matrix-like truth:  The world we see is an illusion pulled over our eyes.  We are ruled by alien overlords who push us to consume, reproduce and never ask questions.  Our planet is their third-world and they intend to use up our resources, reward the collaborators among us, and eventually abandon us when there is nothing left.  One character points out a truth that is highly relevant in our day:  There are no countries left.  It’s all business now, and the political system is just a sham (which is similar to John Perkins’ message in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man). 

All of this could be a setup to an interesting and thoughtful movie.  But of course it isn’t.  After the intriguing setup comes an hour of us-versus-them violence that doesn’t play so well post 9/11.  Once Piper’s character can see the aliens among us, he feels justified in killing them on sight.  And why not?  He’s part of the vastly outnumbered resistance, after all.  This may have seemed simple enough in 1988, but I hope that five years of fighting an insurgency in Iraq has given us a more thoughtful perspective.

But I’m taking this movie way too seriously.  Director John Carpenter set out to make a self-satirizing, B-movie, zombie flick and that’s what They Live is.  This is a movie, after all, where…

1. Piper’s character discovers the aliens among us by, of all things, looking through a special pair of sunglasses.  (This works better when he gets a pair of special contact lenses later in the movie!)
2. Approximately ten minutes is devoted to a brutal fist fight between Piper and his best friend about whether or not to put on the sunglasses.
3. Piper occasionally gets to erupt into his WWF (not WWE!) persona and spout some funny lines:  "I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ‘butt’, and I’m all out of bubblegum!"

I don’t recommend They Live, even if you have the 93 minutes to kill and you like the theme of a shadow government as much as I do.  They Live is too silly and too profane.   Besides, you could watch instead The Parallax View…

Speaking of voting, early voting is so easy here, I can’t understand why everyone doesn’t do it.  There are still a few more days to cast your vote, and in Kingston you can do it at the Roane County Courthouse or the Kingston Community Center. 

And get this:  After I voted last week, I almost quit thinking about the election.  It’s like when you celebrate Christmas a few days early – you’re almost surprised to see Christmas lights still up.  So early voting is a good way to (partially) put it behind you!  Unfortunately, the political junk mail still keeps coming.

6.  Prayer

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How can these folks be so narrow-minded as to limit marriage to two people?  Or to people?