The Road To Gangsterland

Eight classic films from eight decades, all about gangsters, gunmen, and mobsters.

White light, white heat: Cagney

Our preview of Michael Mann’s upcoming Public Enemies, about the pursuit of notorious folk hero/bank robber John Dillinger, got us thinking about other gangster movies worth recommending to those unfamiliar with the genre. Since the crime movie has been a staple of American cinema since its advent almost eight decades ago, there’s actually a lot of films to suggest.

The gangster film has changed with the times, too, remaining vibrant by adapting to the public’s shifting perception of crime and criminals. Originally debuting in the hard times of the 1930s, the genre waned as prosperity grew after World War II, giving way to the murkier and more complicated story structures of film noir. Reaching something of a nadir in the law-and-order 1950s, the gangster film rebounded amid the social turbulence of the 60s thanks to films like Bonnie and Clyde and Point Blank.

Their names Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow: Dunaway, Beatty

The trend of championing the gangster character, a kind of urban re-expression of the American outlaw figure – continued through the 70s and 80s. The 90s, the era of Taranantino, saw an explosion of new attempts to capture its spirit, but the genre has contracted in the current decade towards films of a more realistic tone and scope. The following eight works represent one gangster film from each decade, and each one is available on DVD. Trust us when we say there are plenty more.

 The Public Enemy (1931): William A. Wellman’s steel-nerved tale of a bootlegger (James Cagney) on a ruthless ascent and eventual demise through the Prohibition-era underworld included several characters based on real-life organized crime figures. Cagney and co-star Jean Harlow shot to stardom after the film’s release, and its success helped cement Warner Brothers’ position as the studio that catered to working-class Americans.

The scene in which Cagney goes to exact bloody retribution on a rival gang, appearing at 1:08 in the clip below, has inspired legions of imitators and become synonymous with Hollywood’s Golden Age.

High Sierra (1941): Humphrey Bogart got the part of world-weary gangster “Mad Dog” Roy Earle after Paul Muni and George Raft, both bigger stars at the time, turned it down. Bogart’s friend John Huston wrote the script, and under the direction of gangster film auteur Raoul Walsh (White Heat, The Roaring Twenties) the cross-country adventure helped steer Bogart’s career towards the roles for which he’s now most famous.

The story, and Bogart’s portrayal of Earle, gave a melancholy spin to the typical gangster caper drama, including elements of doomed romance and encroaching fate while revealing the psychological scars of its characters. The action sequences were gripping and inventive as well, as this car chase sequence demonstrates:

On The Waterfront(1954): The gangster film shifted in the 1950s, as a prosperous country’s interests reversed towards championing cops over criminals and conformists over outlaws. Not explicitly a gangster picture, Elia Kazan’s based-on-actual-events depiction of life on a New Jersey dockyards portrayed organized criminals as ruthless destroyers of dreams, turning its sympathies instead to the ruined lives left in crime’s wake. And it starred Marlon Brando, the actor of his generation, as simpleminded ex-boxer turned dock worker Terry Malloy. In the clip below, Terry’s mobbed-up brother (Rod Steiger) offers him a plum job if he refuses to testify about mob influence on the dockyards. You’ve heard the famous quote, but here’s the entire scene:

Bonnie and Clyde (1967): The pendulum of public sympathy swung back again in the anti-establishment 1960s, with a new generation of filmmakers willfully pushing the envelopes of violence and sexuality as a response. Director Arthur Penn and several screenwriters, including Robert Towne (Chinatown), reached back to the gangster heydey of the 30s to revisit the story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, two bank robbers in love with breaking the law as well as each other.

Stars Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, backed by supporting players including Gene Hackman, Michael J. Pollard and Gene Wilder, recreate the Great Depression era as an allegory for the restless modern day, complete with treacherous authority figures and crumbling social institutions. (Read our full review here.) The ending, scandalous upon the film’s release for its bloodshed and seeming cruelty, actually sums up the entire film in violent, unforgettable veracity.

Black Caesar (1973): Though 70s crime cinema is perhaps best known for Francis Ford Coppola’s first two Godfather epics as well as William Friedkin’s The French Connection and its derivatives, the urban-focused blaxploitation subgenre was meanwhile adapting many classic gangster tropes to fit the spirit of the era’s black culture. Black Caesar took the homage a step further, remaking the 1931 Edward G. Robinson-led Little Caesar as a ghetto tour de force, complete with soundtrack by James Brown.

For whatever moral ambivalence conventional American cinema possessed through the decade, the low-budget blaxploitation films took it a step further, and Black Caesar is no exception. Directed by horror maven Larry Cohen (Captivity), it’s a tawdry and bloodthirsty assault on the audience that only just redeems itself, as the early gangster films did, by its self-possessed swaggering cool. In the trailer below the gangsters have apparently even stolen Jim Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” riff.

 Goodfellas (1990): Arriving at the close of the Reagan Era, Scorsese’s audacious mobland saga remains the director’s definitive masterpiece and a bona fide American classic. Depicting both the mob’s everything-up-for-grabs heydey in the 1950s and 60s but also its slow rot from within through the 70s, the film follows based-on-real-life mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta, never better) and his two robbery and hijacking confederates (Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci) through twenty-five years of heists, betrayals, and retribution. 

Scorsese structured the film around movement, including a number of set pieces that dazzle in their bravado and montages that remain in the memory forever. In the scene below DeNiro’s paranoid gangster Jimmy Conway has decided to close ranks, elminiating the crew that helped him carry out the infamous 1978 robbery of Lufthansa Airlines.

Donnie Brasco (1997): Like Goodfellas, Mike Newell’s (Four Weddings And A Funeral) heavy drama is set in New York and depicts a true story about the mob in the 1970s. And that’s about where the similarities end. The titular character (Johnny Depp) is an undercover FBI agent cozying up to Lefty Ruggiero (Al Pacino, keeping a lid on the hooa-ah), a mid-level gangster with little to show for his lifetime of loyalty. The two work for Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano (Michael Madsen) a thug with the brutality of the classic gangster antihero but little of the ameliorating brains or ambition.

There’s no elegia for the mob lifestyle that was, no nostalgia about vanished eras. The gangsters are a backbiting and bullying wolf pack more than an organized outfit, driven at one point to ransacking parking meters for money to buy booze. The New York they inhabit, full of greasy cigarette smoke and ugly cars,  is a shithole evocative of The French Connection rather than the grandeur of Scorsese’s romantic vision. If the film fails to arrive at any real point about the mob or its setting, it’s nonetheless eminently watchable for Pacino’s exquisite performance as a man who’s wasted his life and lives with the weight of that on a day to day basis.

Eastern Promises (2007): Romantic criminals were a tough sell in Post-9/11 America, and the majority of the current decade’s crime films have borrowed from Tarantino’s increasingly impressionistic rendering of criminal life or, like Donnie Brasco, centered on undercover operatives working to destroy the corrupt system from within. Among the best of these was 2007′s underrated Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg’s (Dead Ringers) gritty look into Russian mob operations in London. Viggo Mortensen (Appaloosa) plays the undercover cop, Naomi Watts (The International) is the doctor investigating the death of a Russian white slavery victim, and the great Armin Mueller-Stahl (Avalon) co-stars as the charming head of the local crime family.

Cronenberg’s reputation rests on his sizeable body of overtly weird films like Videodrome and eXistenZ, but a late-career turn into crime cinema begun with 2005′s A History of Violence (also with Mortensen) shows him eminently capable of working within gangster film structures. Eastern Promises is the kind of film where you grip your seat’s armrest for 100 minutes, horrified at what your eyes witness, but then recommend it to friends starting the minute you leave the theatre.

- Michael Kabel
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Preview: Public Enemies

Michael Mann, Johnny Depp and Christian Bale team for the true story of America’s gangster mastermind.

Pairing a director who’s perfect for its true story and a theme that’s dead-on resonant for our troubled times, July’s Public Enemies tells the true story of the hunt for John Dillinger, possibly the smartest and almost certainly the most daring of the criminals who fascinated the American public during the 1930s. It’s also got Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard, and rising star Channing Tatum, making it a can’t-miss summer epic for just about everybody.  That’s appropriate, since its subject matter helped shape the very form and style of the crime movie itself, in important ways that continue to this day.

During the early 30s, as America suffered through the worst of The Great Depression, a nationwide outbreak of well-executed but often astonishingly violent crime swept the nation, particularly the Midwest. Far from reacting with shock and revulsion at the audacity of the crimes, most often involving bank and payroll robberies, the public came to see the men and women responsible as something akin to modern day outlaws. Much of the public, primarily the poor and middle class, received the criminals like modern day Jesse James or Robin Hoods, outlaws who (regardless of whether their beliefs were accurate or not) struck blows for the common man against the financial and government systems responsible for the nation’s collapsing economy. The government, slow to react, bolstered its fledgling Federal Bureau of Investigation to reign in the crimewave, with decidedly mixed results.

Meanwhile Hollywood, eager for ways to utilize their relatively-new sound technology and to stimulate audiences without running afoul of the sanitizing Production Code, took to the “gangsters” as a means of attracting male audiences. In short order a number of classic films, including The Public Enemy, Little Caesar (both 1931) and Scarface (1932)  introduced audiences to the criminal “underworld.” Long on screeching tires and machine gunfire but demure on racy language or sexual content, the films provided escapist entertainment for millions of unemployed Americans and shaped the forms of the crime movie genre.

Has much changed in seventy five years? Audiences this summer, unemployed or otherwise, will see Depp portray Dillinger, the brazen criminal who, among other adventures, once robbed a bank by posing as a Hollywood location scout and simply walking out with its money. Bale plays Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent who drove Dillinger into hiding for months, eventually gunning him down outside a movie theatre.  Cotillard (La Vie En Rose) appears  as Dillinger’s love interest, while Tatum (Fighting) plays explosive Oklahoma “Robin Hood” bank robber Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd. Rounding out the supporting cast are Billy Crudup (Watchmen) as FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover as well as Rory Cochrane, David Wenham, Leelee Sobieski, Giovanni Ribisi, and Emilie de Ravin.

Director Michael Mann (Heat, Manhunter) has established himself as the auteur of modern American crime movies,  so his tackling the impetus of America’s fascination with criminals seems both natural and long overdue. Yet the trailer below promises, despite the action and suspense, something of a more accessible tone, a divergence from the polished but brooding atmosphere that’s largely defined his style since his debut feature Thief (1981). Mann co-wrote the script with TV screenwriter Ronan Bennett and Southland creator Ann Bidermanm, based on the 2005 book by Bryan Burrough.

The real Dillinger

As for the stars, Depp’s an unusual choice to play the methodical Dillinger, a man who in real life often resembled Humphrey Bogart. Depp is the sixth actor to portray the gangster, including most famously Lawrence Tierney (Reservoir Dogs) in 1945′s overheated Dillinger. Having conquered the Joker, the Terminator, and his own body weight in his last several roles, Bale is a more logical choice to play the relentless agent Purvis, and it’s his first time as a straightforward antagonist since John Singleton’s Shaft remake nine years ago. They’re well-supported by the expansive cast: Mann has a habit of overstuffing his rosters (Heat and The Insider especially), and the multinational ensemble he’s built this time is no different.

Public Enemies opens nationwide July 1.

- Michael Kabel
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DVD Review: The Wrestler

Mickey Rourke’s comeback triumph arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray this week.

Believe the hype about Mickey Rourke. Offering a very good performance in a truly bad film, his heroic work in last year’s The Wrestler is still not enough to salvage the film from the sadistic, simplistic vision of director Darren Aronofsky and screenwriter Robert D. Siegel. If the film is worth seeing at all, it’s only to witness this once-supernova leading man blaze a trail back to the acclaim he deserved early in his troubled career.

Rourke plays Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a broken-down wrestling superstar fallen into obscurity twenty years after a history-making match. Reduced to performing in school gymnasiums, Randy nevertheless continues to be revered by small children, his fans from the old days, and especially his fellow athletes – until he suffers a steroid-induced heart attack.  No longer able to wrestle, he diverts his energies to strengthening his relationships with the women in his life: Pam (Marisa Tomei), a middle aged, single mom/stripper; and Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood), the daughter he abandoned years earlier. Through a series of misfortunes – partly of his own making -  Randy finds himself alone again, compelled to reenter the ring for the archetypal last chance at glory.

Two scenes in particular give Rourke the chance to shine in his vulnerability and ruined strength: as he pleads with his doctor to call him “Randy” even as he receives a potentially fatal diagnosis, and later when he tries to shower in an undersized bathroom stall without getting his bandages wet. That one shot, to the film and Rourke’s credit, is a truly heartbreaking depiction of a basically decent guy in desperate need of a little self-control.

But ironically the nuance of Rourke’s performance stands in stark contrast to the merciless heavy-handedness of Siegel and Aronofsky. Like the rabid fans roaring and chanting with Randy’s every move, the film’s creators seem to take perverse pleasure in watching the Randy endure pain – not from the barbed wire and staple guns strewn about the wrestling ring, but rather from a gauntlet of rejection and disappointment relentlessly pummeled upon him. This string of pathos-inducing defeats provides fertile ground for Rourke the actor to prove that he’s still got it, but for the audience such an exhibition of brutality isn’t revelatory so much as it grows tedious and repulsive. 

To Siegel’s credit, the film couldn’t provoke such an intense reaction if the character of Randy the Ram weren’t so endearing and so sympathetic. Still, the disjointed progression of the film’s narrative makes the story’s weaknesses difficult to overlook. Randy’s centerpiece monologue to his daughter, a genuinely touching piece of screenwriting, ultimately suffers from a complete lack of escalating tension: Randy and Stephanie are casually walking the Jersey Boardwalk one moment, then he’s suddenly baring his soul to her the next with no set-up in between. Other such structural flaws undermine the integrity of the film as a whole, particularly in the third act when Pam has a change of heart that’s too easy and too neat to come across with any credibility. The end result feels rushed, as if Siegel is so anxious to hit the big showcase moments that he steamrolls over the details. He wants the payoff without putting in the hard work.

It’s therefore no surprise that any attempts at symbolism or metaphor are patronizing and paper-thin, perhaps best evidenced by an early scene in which Pam compares Randy the Ram to Jesus Christ. Similarly, Randy can’t build relationships with the two women in his life, so he returns to the glory and camaraderie of the wrestling ring where he (presumably) dies of a heart attack. He dies of a broken heart, you see? Ugh. Making matters worse, Aronofsky’s choppy editing and awkward transitions only heighten the narrative disconnect.  Subtlety has never been his strong suit, and unfortunately here he returns to the tawdry heavy-handedness that permeated 2000′s epically overrated Requiem For A Dream. Aronofsky’s fixation with employing shock value for its own sake is most apparent in a graphic tryst between Randy and a fetishist barfly, a scene that’s so clumsily handled it plays as film school amateurish.

For that matter, the exceedingly violent wrestling sequences are a paradox: while considerable screen time is devoted to depicting the physical and psychological toll that the sport inflicts upon its participants, Aronofsky still can’t stop himself from staging the actual matches as an adrenaline-heavy joyride. Far from making some kind of an artistic statement, the director plays it as safe as he can – disingenuously deriding the savagery of the sport for the film’s art-house target audience but without alienating any potential cross-over appeal that might lure actual wrestling fans ( the parents who brought their ten year old to the screening I attended) to the ticket booth.

As for the supporting cast, Wood perhaps best exemplifies the inelegance of Aronofsky’s approach to his cast: her eyes, face and voice all convey the intensity of her character’s heartache even as her hands slash the air in a series of awkward gesticulations. The actress obviously possesses the talent and the chops for her difficult role, but she’s sorely in need of, well, direction. That makes Aronofsky’s obvious disinterest in developing her character all the more disappointing.

A sloppily staged production of a lazy script, it’s hard not to think of The Wrestler without reminding oneself of Monster or The Last King of Scotland­ -films that are all but forgotten after the Academy Awards save for the charisma and craftsmanship of their stars. With Rourke the current Hollywood darling du jour, let’s hope his future projects will utilize his resurrected talent with more grace and restraint.

- Stephen Kabel
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(Note: This review originally appeared for the film’s theatrical release.)

Coming Down To Earth

Seven films to help you appreciate the world in which we live.

It's where you live.

Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.”  While he wasn’t referring to the physical world itself, his words are certainly true in the modern context of environmentalism. That quote comes, by the way, from For Whom The Bell Tolls, which was also a very good film. One of movies’ great gifts is their ability to help us understand the world, and in that understanding we gain insight into why it’s important to keep the planet safe.

The following films suggest something important to remember about the Earth and/or the importance of acting now to preserve it. Some are noteworthy for their scenery and lush depictions of one or more regions of the planet. A couple are potent cautionary tales about the consequences we face if the problems confronting us now aren’t met with our best energies. We’ll reuse the usual caveats here and mention that they’re in no particular order, and the list is in no way conclusive. Feel free to post your “what abouts” in the comments section.

1. Days of Heaven: Terrence Malick’s 1978 melodrama is legendary for its lush photography of the Canadian prairie, which stands in for pre-World War I Texas. Cinematographers Nestor Almendros (Sophie’s Choice) and Haskell Wexler (Medium Cool) invest the movie with a glowing, almost ethereal light, so that even a grainfield at dusk becomes a gorgeous snapshot of a lost era. The story in fact sometimes takes second place to the setting, exactly as Malick intended. His two films since, 1998′s The Thin Red Line and 2005′s The New World, have almost but not quite equaled the visual excellence constantly on display here.

2. Dreams: Akira Kurosawa based this 1990 collection of eight vignettes on dreams he himself experienced at various points in his lifetime. The focus throughout is on imagery more than conventional storytelling, as the master director’s artistic eye covers terrain including blizzards, forests, the landscapes of Vincent Van Gogh, and even the speculative wastelands left after a nuclear war. The following clip, from the vignette “Village of the Watermills,” only hints at the almost-tangible depth of Kurosawa’s (along with cinematographers and frequent collaborators Takao Saito and Masaharu Ueda) vision of the world around him.

 

3. Jeremiah Johnson: Director Sydney Pollack is known chiefly for his character-driven work including Tootsie and Absence of Malice, but his 1972 collaboration with Robert Redford (one of seven films the two made together over 23 years) remains a minor classic of understatement. With a melancholy story based on a true-life mountain man in Frontier-era Utah, cinematographer Duke Callaghan’s attention to scenery is a brilliant example of the decade’s fascination with Western vistas. Warner Brothers’ straightforward DVD edition has been on shelves for years. It’s time for a new transfer re-release. (Note: clip contains low audio.)

 

4. Out of Africa: Among the first true epics to emerge from Hollywood after the Heaven’s Gate-led collapse of the artistic freedom that had led America through the 70s, Pollack’s 1985 adaptation of the Isak Dinesen memoir featured a vast story and starred Redford and Meryl Streep, arguably the era’s most respected movie stars. The script is long and rambling, with subplots and travails abounding, but David Watkin’s Academy Award-winning cinematography articulates Africa’s often-daunting beauty in much the same way Jeremiah Johnson captured the American West thirteen years before. Having said that, Out of Africa is the kind of movie you either see once or watch a hundred times, depending on your tastes in film.

5. At Play In The Fields of the Lord: Directed by Hector Babenco (Kiss of the Spider Woman), this complicated 1991 epic offers a multi-faceted series of character studies radiating through and around the Niaruna tribe of the Amazon River Basin. Two hard-luck cargo pilots (Tom Berenger and Tom Waits) are hired by a local police commander to bomb the tribe, while freshly-arrived American missionaries (Aiden Quinn and Kathy Bates) want to save the villagers’ souls instead. The Amazon rain forest appears both inviting and destructive, with heavy loss of life and hope devastating the characters. Based on Peter Matthiessen’s novel, the film met with a mixed reception thanks to its dense plotting and sometimes overreaching script. It’s nonetheless built a steady following in recent years, and a DVD release is long overdue. (Note the following clip is from the soundtracking of the film)

6. Wall*E: There’s not much to say about Pixar’s 2008 film that hasn’t been said before, including here on this blog: it deserved a Best Picture nomination, the bold approach to storytelling makes it a classic of animation, while the intelligent storyline can satisfy grown-up tastes while entertaining children at the same time. Really, it’s just a modern classic.

There’s a lot of corporate lip service about Earth Day this month, including the usual blizzard of PR from TV networks and others looking to profit from the observance. For educational value alone, show the kids this instead.

7. Soylent Green: The opposite of Wall*E in probably every significant way, Richard Fleischer’s (The Narrow Margin) 1973 adaptation of Harry Harrison’s dystopian novel remains chillingly prescient, thanks to an abundance of convincing flourishes and pitch-perfect turns by Charlton Heston, Chuck Connors, and Edward G. Robinson (in his last screen appearance). Set in a 2022 New York where runaway population growth and global warming have stripped the world of practically all its resources, Heston’s police officer investigates the murder of an executive at the Soylent Corporation, the agricultural megalith with the new product ready to feed the world. The titular foodstuff’s actual ingredients are the stuff of movie legend.

IMDB lists a remake in production for a 2012 release, so at least the movie industry is definitely recycling something.

- Michael Kabel
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DVD Review: The Lost Collection

Lionsgate releases eight films from the 80s that “you totally forgot about.”

The Duckman cometh again.

Most film fans have at least one sentimental, half-remembered personal cult classic they wish would just come out on DVD already. We complain about it, we sign petitions, we blog about it, and maybe eventually we get a no-frills DVD that, if we’re lucky, also includes the trailer as reward for our years of anticipation.

No doubt some devotees of lesser-known 80s cinema, especially fans of just-this-close-to-A-List leading man Jon Cryer (Pretty In Pink, Two and A Half Men), will take delight in Lionsgate Home Entertainment’s release of eight little-known and, honestly, little-celebrated films from the Me Decade. Each film comes with a pop-up trivia feature as well as English and Spanish subtitles, though  most lack widescreen presentation or in some cases even a new digital transfer. Six of the films are making their DVD debut, however, so if you’ve got to have them here’s your best chance yet. They’re budget-priced at $14.98 SRP.

Hiding Out (1987): One of the four movies featuring Cryer that saw release in the year following Pretty In Pink‘s breakout success, this uneven thriller/comedy cast him as a Wall Street stockbroker forced to testify against a mob boss accused of insider trading. Fearing for his life, he seeks refuge by enrolling  in an inner-city high school, lying low until the bad guys come to get him. We saw this movie on cable back in 1987 and thought how ridiculous Cryer looked trying to seem more grownup by wearing a beard (which was, by the way, completely passe throughout the decade.)  Widescreen.

Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home (1987): We’re tempted to write this one off as a low-grade knockoff of the vastly more successful Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but given how atrociously that latter film has aged (Matthew Broderick’s Ferris comes off today as an insufferable hipster prick) we’ll give this one the benefit of a doubt. This time Cryer plays the titular Stewart, a semi-New Romantic rebel and son of a U.S. Senator (Nicholas Pryor) who’s returned home after seven years in various boarding schools. His father and mother (Lynn Redgrave) are getting set up for scandal by their duplicitous campaign manager (Paul Gleason, the evil Mr. Vernon in The Breakfast Club), so it’s up to Stewart and his oddball new girlfriend (Viveka Davis) to bail them out. The film includes one of those notorious Alan Smithee directing credits you always hear about, after two real directors walked. Fullscreen.

Repossessed (1990): Remember how, after the riotous success of the first The Naked Gun, Leslie Nielsen thoroughly wore out his popularity by starring in an endless parade of similarly-toned “spoofs” that were nowhere near as funny? That all kind of started with this film, in which he plays an exorcist named Father Mayii (Say it out loud. You’ll get it) trying to cast the devil out of a suburban housewife (Linda Blair, presumably getting some kind of closure for her Exorcist notoriety) he’d saved years before. Except for one brilliant sight gag at Senator Ted Kennedy’s expense, the jokes are completely hit or miss; honestly, most of them miss. Director Bob Logan went on to make Meatballs 4 two years later. Fullscreen.

My Best Friend Is A Vampire (1988): High school student Jerry Capello (Robert Sean Leonard, House) makes love to a beautiful woman (Cecilia Peck) who bites him on the neck; shortly thereafter men armed with stakes burst into the bedroom, killing her and setting fire to the house. Later, Jerry realizes he’s become a vampire and with the help of a 300-year old companion (Boston Legal’s Rene Auberjonois) tries to abstain from human blood by drinking pig’s blood while avoiding the hunters. Reviews call the film kind of cheesy, kind of fun, but in any event we can’t help but imagine Joss Whedon seeing it and thinking, “Yes…. but what if…” Fullscreen.

Slaughter High (1986): Lowbrow dreck like this was a cornerstone of video store shelves throughout the decade, especially the mom and pop kind of places that perpetually struggled for inventory. Combining Friday The 13th with a generic high school revenge fantasy, Slaughter High details the bloody retribution given ten returning alumni by the outcast they disfigured in a prank gone wrong a decade before. We imagine the film fueled more than one sleepless sleepover when it aired on Cinemax back in the day, and anyway you have to love that pun-filled cover image, looking as it does like a cross between a yearbook promotional photo and an Iron Maiden album cover. Fullscreen.

The Night Before (1988): A tuxedo-clad young man (Keanu Reeves) awakens in an alleyway with no memory of how he got there. As the story unfolds he realizes through a series of flashbacks that he’s lost his father’s car and accidentally sold his date (Lori Loughlin) to a pimp while lost in East Los Angeles, the 80s cinema badlands of choice. With an emphasis on situational comedy over detail and a guest appearance by George Clinton’s P-Funk All-Stars (part of an all-funk soundtrack), the After Hours-meets-Dude, Where’s My Car? setup at least has potential for a light diversion. Fullscreen.

Homer and Eddie (1989): James Belushi and Whoopi Goldberg weren’t in every single American film made between 1985 and 1990 – it just seems like it. Here they team for a road movie about a terminally ill sociopathth (Goldberg) taking a mentally-deficient baseball fanatic (Belushi) to see the father who abandoned him. A weird mix of violence and comedy ensues, and while the two don’t fall in love they nevertheless apparently learn the kind of life lessons that are probably useful only to people in movies. Goldberg reportedly plays crazy really, really well, and the film represents a rare example of Belushi broadening his range. Director Andrei Konchalovsky also helmed the Sylvester Stallone-Kurt Russell anti-classic Tango & Cash that same year. Widescreen.

Irreconcilable Differences (1984): Arguably both the best and most well-remembered of the collection’s films, this endearing tearjerker details the demise of a young couple’s (Ryan O’Neal and Shelley Long) marriage after his film directing career takes off. Drew Barrymore plays their 10-year old daughter suing for divorce, while Sharon Stone has a great (and revealing) early turn as a bedhopping starlet. The film is almost worth viewing simply for the epic turkey O’Neal’s hubris-struck cineaste attempts to direct: Atlanta, an all-musical sequel to Gone With The Wind.  Real-life writing-directing couple Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyer (Private Benjamin, Father of the Bride) later called their marriage quits, too. Fullscreen.

Finally, here’s eight more films from the decade we think deserve a release or re-release to the DVD format. They’re all at least as good as the material presented in this first batch: Tuff Turf, starring James Spader as a rich kid sent to the wrong side of the tracks; the grim Peter Coyote-led neo-noir Slayground; the Judd Nelson-Ally Sheedy crime saga Blue City, based on a novel by Ross McDonald; the punk rock Blackboard Jungle riff Class of 1984, starring Michael J. Fox; Penelope Spheeris’ The Boys Next Door, starring Charlie Sheen and Maxwell Caulfield as teens on a crime spree in L.A.; The Terminator-meets-Greenhouse Effect sci-fi actioner Hardware, starring Dylan McDermott and Stacey Travis; Made In Heaven, a romance starring Timothy Hutton and Kelly McGillis and set amid probably the most inviting afterlife ever put on film; and finally and maybe most importantly Sweet Dreams, the Patsy Cline biopic starring Jessica Lange and Ed Harris.

- Michael Kabel
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TV Review: The Unusuals

Smart, intriguing ABC cop series is a treat for viewers with offbeat tastes.

One cop is suicidal while his partner lives in fear of a deadly family curse. A New York Yankee-turned-cop with a dark past builds trust with his new partner, a Park Avenue scion who’s turned her back on wealth.  Their sergeant is a retired astronaut with a full-sized space suit in the corner of his office. They chase serial killers who prey on cats, the oldest and dumbest family of crooks in New York history, and the killer of one of their own. Circling around them all are more strange police and even stranger criminals, with a corruption conspiracy in the background that’s only hinted at in murky but clever revelations.

ABC’s new cop comedy-drama The Unusuals is a smart whirlwind of offbeat comedy and slow-simmering paranoia that manages to stay above the too-pervasive trend towards preciousness, thanks to its gritty texture and the perfectly-pitched acting of its talented ensemble cast.  Early ratings results have not proved promising, which is a shame. Like Life On Mars, its predecessor in the post-Lost death slot, it’s a vigorous effort to make original television.

partners: Tamblyn, Renner

The two episodes so far have kept the action moving confidently forward while gradually shading in character detail without seeming overly expository. Casey Shraeger (Amber Tamblyn), a journeyman vice detective working undercover prostitution stings, transfers to the Homicide unit of the NYPD’s Second Precinct, a station house where seemingly every detective and officer has something to hide or something off about their personality. She’s partnered with charismatic detective Jason Walsh (Jeremy Renner) to solve – as her first case – the murder of Walsh’s partner. Charges of corruption and illicit behavior swarm the fallen officer, providing the viewer with a gateway into a larger tangle of allegations and deeper meanings that likely involve their fellow officers.

From left: Perrineau, Goldberg, Curnen

It seems the precinct’s Sergeant Kowalski (Terry Kinney) has brought Shraeger in as a means of cleaning house, whether she wants to help or not. Shraeger, meanwhile, goes to lengths hiding her silver-spoon past. Circling this central story are long-time partners Eric Delahoy (Adam Goldberg) and Leo Banks (Harold Perrineau), two detectives at a crossroads: Delahoy is suicidal thanks to a recently-diagnosed brain tumor, while Banks has become convinced he’ll die sometime in the next year. He’s just turned 42, the same age his father, grandfather, and uncle reached before dying in terrible accidents. That Delahoy miraculously survives a shotgun blast in the first episode only makes them more agitated with themselves and each other.

All of this was just the first two episodes, the beginning of ten that ABC has ordered. Hopefully every one will get the chance to air, because show creator Noah Hawley (Bones) has stuffed the show with characters and situations that must represent a career’s Rolodex of ideas. What’s probably most surprising is how accessible the show actually is, and how well it works. There are no clumsy wads of backstory filled in at odd places, no scenes of a guest-star getting brought to speed about details for the sake of audience clarity. Instead almost everything is rooted in character development, coming out of each their interactions with each other and the strange world around them.

Though it’s still too early to predict standout performances, Renner (The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford) shows a relaxed confidence as the mysterious Walsh. Tamblyn, a long way from Joan of Arcadia, mixes her character’s confusion and resolve into a controlled performance that shows strength without resulting to TV-woman-detective superficiality. Goldberg and Perrineau, playing different kinds of panic bouncing off one another, are all manic aggression and self-loathing. Goldberg’s made a career of playing shifty oddballs, and he’s well used here. Perrineau, having jumped the Lost ship at the right time, seems at greater ease as the more clearly-defined Banks. Only one character, detective Allison Beaumont (Monique Gabriela Curnen) has yet to define herself in relation to the others, though a revelation at the second episode’s conclusion is likely a step in the right decision.

Where’s it all leading? Can the show realize its potential? It’s hard to say after two episodes, and it’s been a while since ABC could build a hit drama out of a midseason replacement. (We’re tempted to say since Grey’s Anatomy, though there’s possibly a more recent example than that.) Ultimately there’s a Cable feeling permeating the show, as if its character-driven nuances might be better served by the USA Network or possibly FX. If all else fails – and the show deserves to succeed – we hope it finds a berth where it can flourish. Television this promising deserves room to grow.

- Michael Kabel
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Review: Observe and Report

Seth Rogen’s diversion through the dark side of comedy can’t get out of its own way.

In the past we’ve criticized Seth Rogen for repeatedly giving the same performance of the same character with little variation. But in his new film Observe and Report, he finally takes a big risk by playing Ronnie Barnhardt, a bipolar and dangerously unstable shopping mall security guard. Clearly intended to be a hilariously uncomfortable misfit in the vein of Robert DeNiro’s Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, Rogen never quite manages to create a complete character, largely due to the fractured script and direction of writer/director Jody Hill.

The intensely dark comedy follows Ronnie the would-be alpha dog as he tries to apprehend two criminals terrorizing the local mall: a compulsive flasher (referred to merely as “the Pervert”), and a seemingly invisible thief. His efforts are frustrated, though, when police Detective Harris (Ray Liotta) arrives and promptly puts the moves on Brandi (Anna Faris), the cosmetics saleswoman whom Ronnie obsesses over. Ronnie earnestly tries to prove his mettle, but a series of disappointments and betrayals makes him a threat to everyone around him. 

Oddly, the humor shines brightest in the film’s darkest moments, such as a squirm-inducing psychological evaluation and anything involving Ronnie’s degenerate mother (Celia Weston). But the gags miss more often than not, and Hill relies too heavily on gratuitous shock value. (He seems particularly intent on breaking records for the most droppings of the f-bomb and for the longest unedited tracking shot of male genitalia.) For that matter, whole sequences feel uninspired and derivative, especially from Office Space and Borat! 

Most distracting of all is Hill’s over-reliance on musical montages: it’s a crutch he can’t seem to shake when the story – his own story, at that - calls for character development. The end result is a barrage of repetitive, tedious vignettes that provide the cheapest of laughs in the spaces between the more unsettling moments.

So it’s possibly no surprise that his treatment of violence borders on schizophrenic. Though not as irresponsible as the gunplay of Pineapple Express (also starring Rogen and frequent Hill collaborator Danny McBride), the violence here is alternately grotesque and laughably absurd. In a film that seems at least intrigued by the ugliness of human aggression, it’s disconcerting that Hill glosses over the consequences of violence. It’s as if he wants to throw the issue into the spotlight without disturbing anyone too badly – in other words, to play it safe. That might be excusable for a brainless comedy, but such timidity diminishes the toll that Ronnie’s aggression takes on his psyche and undercuts the integrity of the film as a whole.

It’s also surprising how the female characters leave the most lasting impressions. Weston in particular steals her scenes: her character’s halfhearted desire to play caretaker is constantly thwarted by her own brutal and ambivalent honesty. Faris, as the object of Ronnie’s obsession, has perfected the grating, toxic airhead that she’s previously dabbled with in Lost in Translation and Just Friends. Collette Wilson ably conveys some much needed purity as Brandi’s good-girl rival for Ronnie’s affection.

By way of contrast, Michael Peña is both disappointing and misused as Ronnie’s best friend and “partner in crime” Dennis. Sporting a horrible jheri curl wig and speaking with a cartoonishly effeminate lisp, Peña’s character amounts to little more than a walking sight gag. Considering Peña’s previous gut-wrenching turns in Crash and The Lucky Ones, I  expected more than an indefinable caricature that unnerves without managing to amuse. 

Ultimately, however, the film is a Seth Rogen vehicle, and his perennially affable presence limits the degree of menace that the script demands.  To his credit, anyone would be endearing – even noble – when compared to the reprobates surrounding him. Yet Rogen’s innate likeability translates into vulnerability in his scenes with Weston and Wilson, and the tenderness of these scenes help make the pat, “all is forgiven” Hollywood ending bearable. And to be completely fair, even veteran actors have failed to find the proper balance between humor and danger – just look at Robin Williams’ dreadful Toys or Death to Smoochy, or Jim Carrey’s little-loved The Cable Guy.

Its many flaws aside, Observe and Report manages to be an entertaining ninety minutes, and it proves that there’s more to Rogen than just his slacker stoner shtick. His next feature, Judd Apatow’s Adam Sandler vehicle Funny People,  promises a return to form. That’s a shame, because Rogen could probably create a truly compelling walk on the dark side – if he could find a director willing to take him all the way.

- Stephen Kabel
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Preview: Moon

Sam Rockwell in an old-school science fiction thriller.  

Evocative of the more subdued and character-driven science fiction classics of the 1970s such as Silent Running and Solaris as well as 2001: A Space Odyssey, the new film Moon offers another entry into the present decade’s slow resurgence of intelligent sci-fi, seen in films including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Primer, and 2046. It’s also got Sam Rockwell, one of our favorite actors, and includes Kevin Spacey in possibly the part he was born to play.

Co-written and directed by first-time feature filmmaker Duncan Jones, the story joins lunar prospector Sam Bell (Rockwell) at the end of his three-year hitch as the sole human occupant of Sarang, a remote mining station on the dark side of the moon’s surface. The largely automated station refines the lunar soil looking for Helium 3, an isotope used to end the world’s desperate energy crisis. Kept company by GERTY, the on-station artificial intelligence (voiced by Spacey), Bell has used the time wisely, working on his violent temper and getting his mind and spirit in shape for the early retirement with his family that awaits him on Earth.

With two weeks left on his tour, an accident sends Bell on an excursion to one of the camp’s roving processing stations. There he discovers a fully-grown copy of himself lying unconscious in a hatchway. Alone and feeling more isolated than ever, he must ask then himself if the being is real, calling into question his own sanity but also his very existence. 

Would you believe, they put Sam on the moon?

At first glance Jones’s film has done everything right to make a retro-cool science fiction thriller, most notably using a plastic-sleek design aesthetic both reminiscent of 2001 and about a thousand artist’s depictions of life in space from the last 50 years. Even the poster pays homage to the 70s era, its layout bringing to mind 1971′s The Andromeda Strain. The use of Helium 3 as a major plot point is also a timely and intelligent decision. That rare gas has been named by many futurists as the key to effective fusion power, and Russian and Chinese space experts have already called for exploring the moon for its presence. So for fans looking for something besides Transformers exploding  or something brainier than 2012,  Roland Emmerich’s latest apocalyptic hoo-ha, the film’s probably a can’t-miss.

Our skepticism comes from a couple of times we’ve been let down by such intriguing sci-fi spectacles before – and those from more accomplished directors. Brian De Palma’s 2000 clunker Mission To Mars shared Moon‘s attention to near-future space exploration realism but was crippled by a conclusion that made no damn sense given its setup. More recently, Danny Boyle’s Sunshine looked both realistic but imaginative at the same time. It too fell apart in the third act, once some kind of climax-focused tension became necessary. 

But performance counts, too. Rockwell is an intriguing choice to play an isolated astronaut, with his blank slate face that easily disappears into emotional complexity at a moment’s notice. And the idea of Spacey’s dry ice-on-tile voice animating a complex robot is a natural. (If 2001 were made today, who better to voice HAL?) The two of them together could probably wage a snark-off battle for the ages, but they’re also quite capable of subdued work that puts character first. Acting isn’t always the difference between good science fiction and bad, but it also never hurts.

Finally, there’s also something to be said for timing. Moon opens in limited American release June 12, just a little less than six weeks before the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing.

- Michael Kabel
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Miscellaneous Debris, April 2009 Edition

Our semi-regular compendium of movie, TV and DVD news of general interest.

The summer movie season is just around the corner

Something we didn’t realize when this blog started up a year ago: it takes more time to research and keep up with what’s forthcoming than it does just watching and reviewing films. That makes us think sometimes that we should narrow our focus. But where’ s the fun in that? Trailers, after all, are the only good reason (besides good seats) to get into the theatre early.

Every month or so we make a list of items and news stories that maybe don’t warrant a full blog post of their own. Some excite us, some bore us, one or two irritate or even piss us off a bit. But they’re all worth mentioning at least for their conversational value.

1. Though there’s not much going on by way of new releases lately, the good news is that the summer movie season starts three weeks early this year, with the release of X-Men Origins: Wolverine on May 1, followed by Star Trek just a week later and Terminator: Salvation only two weeks after that. That’s three blockbusters before Memorial Day, traditionally the kickoff of the summer blockbuster avalance.

He also once played Orson Welles

2. Speaking of the Wolverine movie, we can see both sides of the flap about its illicit appearance online this week, but on the other hand it’s not that hard to predict some things about it. Based on what we know, we can assure viewers that 1. Hugh Jackman will give a very good (but not great) performance, 2. Ryan Reynolds will have all the best lines and 3. Liev Shreiber will act circles around everyone else. And the ending will remain open for a sequel.

3. Rescue Me, FX’s series about a New York City Fire Department crew and the families that love but often fall victim to their angst, premiered this week after an eighteen-month hiatus. The episode was entertaining but not quite exceptional, about as good as the show ever was during its uneven first season. Still, it had the fesity energy that later seasons lacked, abetted in no small part by charismatic performances from Robert John Burke as an alcoholic ex-priest falling off the wagon and a show-stopping turn by Michael J. Fox as a new boyfriend for Janet Gavin (Andrea Roth), the oft-separated wife of main character Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary).

4. Recent news stories show that movie theatre attendance has risen significantly since last October, when the worldwide economy more or less went to Hell in a bucket. To quote the Propellerheads and Shirley Bassey, it’s all just a little bit of history repeating: the movie business has traditionally thrived during hard times, and no wonder. People looking for diversions from their circumstances have lots of time to kill, and movies are nothing if not an escape. With a summer loaded with science fiction and action franchises just around the corner, Hollywood could be in for a banner year.

5. Some of the most vivid examples of films that both reflected and capitalized on the nation’s Depression-era restlessness got a DVD release this week with Universal’s Pre-Code Hollywood Collection box set. Turner Classic Movies has already released several similar box sets celebrating Hollywood before the sanitizing Hays Code, though we’re tempted to get this newer package just for its films’ lurid titles: The Cheat, Torch Singer, Hot Saturday, Murder At The Vanities, Search For Beauty, and (our favorite), Merrily We Go To Hell. The various films include performances by Fredric March, Tallulah Bankhead and Cary Grant.

6. From the “lurching into self-parody” desk comes news of Sam Raimi’s latest, which if nothing else boasts a title that would right in with the aforementioned set: Drag Me To Hell dusts off the “gypsy curse” conceit for a thriller about a loan officer (Matchstick Men‘s Alison Lohman) stalked by bad juju after foreclosing on an old woman’s mortgage. The stunningly cheesy trailer below seems to include its entire first act. Now, wait and see if somebody doesn’t trot out the old “zeitgeist” and “cultural barometer” arguments to validate the film’s existence. It opens nationwide May 29.

Really, Life On Mars creators? Really?

7.  Two shows that fought continuous battles for survival came to a conclusion over the last couple of weeks, with at least one serving its definite coda. Life, a hypnotically offbeat cop drama starring the singular Damian Lewis, aired its second season finale (and likely series conclusion) that efficiently wrapped up (almost) all its open plots and subplots while bringing closure to Lewis’ tortured Detective Charlie Crews. By total contrast, a week before ABC’s Life On Mars aired a series finale that packed an explanation for its time-lost Detective Sam Tyler (Jason O’Mara) so out-of-left-field, so contrived, that the show’s creators might just as well have walked on camera and given their audience the finger. Look for details in articles with names like “Worst Show Finales” in the years to come.

8.  There’s a logic that goes you can remake a film only if the original wasn’t very good. But what about films we love for their weaknesses? A remake of 1981′s Bullfinch’s Mythology-via-Star Wars cult classic Clash of the Titans is up for remaking, this one reportedly co-starring no less than Liam Neeson as Greek god patriarch Zeus and Ralph Fiennes as his villainous brother Hades. Sam Worthington (Terminator: Salvation) will star as the heroic Perseus, and Alexa Davalos (Defiance) plays his true love Andromeda. The film is slated for release next March.

9. If you’re not already familiar with DC Comics’ long-running hero Green Lantern, get ready to hear a lot more about him over the next twenty months. The comics company plans a massive summer crossover, ominously titled The Blackest Night, about Green Lantern Hal Jordan and the far-ranging Green Lantern Corps (a kind of interstellar police force) waging a “war of light” against the reanimated dead heroes of the DC Universe (And that body count is a lot higher than you’d think). July sees the release of Green Lantern: First Flight, a straight-to DVD animated feature film about Jordan’s recruitment into the Corps, with voice talent by Law & Order: SVU‘s Christopher Meloni and Battlestar Galactica‘s Tricia Helfer. Finally, a live-action feature directed by Martin Campbell (Casino Royale) is slated for a December 2010 release.

10. Finally, something that actually rates at least one blog posting of its own. A couple of weeks ago we ran a long article hoping for, among other actors, a career rebirth for Michael Keaton. May 1 sees the limited release of The Merry Gentleman, a moody neo-noir with religious overtones that marks the errant leading man’s directorial debut. Keaton also stars as Frank Logan, a contract hitman who moonlights as a tailor while contemplating suicide. He becomes involved in a low-heat romance with Kate Frazier (No Country For Old Men‘s Kelly MacDonald), a woman fleeing her abusive husband (Bobby Cannavale, The Ten) and pursued by a cop with bad intentions. The trailer’s evocative atmosphere and deliberate tempo look promising for fans of such films (like us), as well as its premise, which reminds us an odd bit – in a good way – of John Dahl’s dark comedy You Kill Me. 

We’ll be back next week with previews of some of those summer blockbusters. Have a good weekend.

- Michael Kabel
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Star Trek: Great Trekspectations

Seven cool things about the Star Trek universe we hope to see in the new movie.

The long-awaited new “reboot” of the Star Trek franchise opens in just 30 days (Update: Read our review of the new film here) and the previews growing ever more pervasive on television and online have just begun to reveal the new film’s rollicking story. We expect that’ll continue up until its opening, but in the meantime – being somewhat neophyte Trekkers ourselves – we’ve come up with a list of people, places, and things we’d like to see shown or at least visually referenced. Each one, we think, could ramp up the cool factor even further.

The following list isn’t in any particular order, and we apologize in advance for any gaps in our knowledge. These are ideas and concepts we’ve come across over the years, and we’ve taken what we could from Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki, to fill in the blanks. Also, what’s below doesn’t necessarily include everything from the semi- and non-canonical expanded universe of Trek novels, video games, comic books, cartoons, and role playing games. We’ve barely dipped a toe into that ocean.

Romulan birds-of-prey in formation

The Battle of Cheron and the defeat of the Romulan Star Empire: The Romulans (like Mr. Spock’s Vulcans, but craftier and far more malicious) are the bad guys of the new film, but in Star Trek continuity Earth and its allies fought a long and mutually devastating war with their vast Star Empire a century before. Little is known about this conflict’s climactic battle except that the defeat was a humiliating loss for the Romulans and directly led to the formation of the Unied Federation of Planets.

If other franchises like Star Wars and Battlestar: Galactica have anything on Star Trek, it’s a well-known space battle. Showing such an event as a Midway-in-space-style slugfest would fix that once and for all.

Robert April, the Enterprise‘s “first” captain: When Gene Roddenberry wrote the first Star Trek treatment for MGM in 1964, the ship was called the Yorktown and was captained by Robert April, a part reportedly meant for Jack Lord or Lloyd Bridges, among others. Over the years a number of canonical and non-canonical sources have incorporated and fleshed out April’s character, establishing his British heritage and giving him a more militaristic bearing than his successors Christopher Pike (played in the new movie by Bruce Greenwood) and James T. Kirk (Chris Pine). Seeing this earliest of Star Trek creations, possibly in his later career as an ambassador, would make a great tribute to the mid-20th Century bravado of the original series.

The legacy of Star Trek: Enterprise: Probably the least-loved of the six series, Enterprise was nevertheless exciting and remarkably well-acted TV sci-fi. Especially in its second two seasons, when its storylines and tone took smarter but markedly darker turns, the prequel series offered multi-episode arcs that settled a lot of long-running fan debates while also fixing inconsistencies in the overarching Trek timeline and universe. And it managed all that while still remaining the most action-oriented Trek yet.

Honestly, we expect this black sheep of the Trek franchises to get short shrift in the movie, but it deserves some kind of acknowledgement for its efforts to explain the backstory of every series set after it.

Gary Mitchell, Captain Kirk’s best friend: The pilot to the original series featured helmsman (and possible First Officer) Lieutenant Commander Gary Mitchell, Kirk’s buddy from their days at Starfleet Academy and as wily an officer as Kirk himself. Driven mad from psychic powers gained on a world at the edge of known space, he attempted to kill Kirk and the Enterprise’s crew before meeting his own death at Kirk’s hands. Mitchell was played by Gary Lockwood, who two years later starred as the astronaut murdered by the HAL-9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

There’s no mention of  a Lockwood character in IMDB’s listing of the new film’s cast, which is kind of a shame. Introducing a character that died in the series’ first episode would have lent a grim in-joke to the crew’s “first” adventure, if indeed the new film works as a prequel to the 1960′s series.

Andorians, the warlike anti-Vulcans: Blue-skinned inhabitants of a frozen moon that orbits a ringed gas giant, Andorians are fiery-tempered warriors who pride themselves on letting emotions guide their decisions. The historical enemies of the dispassionate Vulcans (who live on a world of deserts and volcanoes), they were among Earth’s strongest allies in the war with the Romulans and then later a founding member of the Federation.

They’re also among the most prominent aliens in the Trek galaxy, appearing in all its three time periods. It almost wouldn’t be the same without one or two of them manning a station aboard the Enterprise or filling in the ranks at Starfleet Command. And speaking of cool alien races…

Caitians, the Federation’s cat-people: One of two feline-derived species in the expanded, non-canon universe, Caitians were also briefly glimpsed in the gallery shown at the end of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Various stories and sourcebooks published over the last two decades describe them, somewhat ironically, as a peaceful, vegetarian, and spiritual people who value loyalty above all else.

An interplanetary civilization like the Federation can’t have too many aliens interacting with humans. And cat-people are cool by definition.

A map of the Neutral Zone from the original series

The Neutral Zone, the no-man’s land between Federation and Romulan space: Part of the bitter peace created at the end of the Earth-Romulan War, the Neutral Zone was established as a no-fly zone between the two warring powers. That didn’t stop both sides from heavily fortifying their boundaries, with the new Federation building massive stellar fortresses out of hollowed-out asteroids towed into formation for that purpose.

Actually, of everything on this list we give the Neutral Zone the best odds of making an appearance. Not for nothing, but the Zone and the Romulan Star Empire were introduced in the episode ”Balance of Terror,” considered by many (including series creator Gene Roddenberry) to be among the best of the original series.

Star Trek opens nationwide May 7, with international release dates varying through that week.

- Michael Kabel

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