Standing Mode
raininva and I watched Robot Jox this weekend – I hadn’t seen it since the early nineties. I liked the mech designs better than I did when I first saw it, and Gary Graham’s an old genre friend now (once considered for Captain Sisko, according to the IMDB). But the script is still ungood. My favorite bit is still the one where the bad guy uses a prohibited ranged weapon during a match, causing the death of hundreds of spectators, and the referees just shrug and say “do-over!”
Contrast this to Gunhed, which has a cooler mech and more interesting characters, but is confusingly edited and is willing to let the audience make up their own explanations for a bunch of plot points. There was enough left unanswered in that flick that I was easily able to steal the whole plot for a Shadowrun game without giving too much away to the players. Still, I prefer it.
I’m trying to make a mental list of live-action “giant robot” movies that are worth spending 90 minutes or so on. Iron Man #28 looks good, but I don’t know if it will ever be dubbed or subbed. And though I love it for camp, I’m not sure I can bring myself to include the first Power Rangers Movie.
Speaking of such, I’ve procured the Cutey Honey live-action flick, which will go into the “to be watched” queue after the latest Orion Slave Girl episode of “Enterprise” and this week’s “Doctor Who”. The movie’s looking very cheesy, which of course is just what I’d be looking for.
The other serious Whovian at my office wants me to bring in the Whoman DVD that I still owe rubinpdf money for. I will do so. He has been warned 🙂
Booklist: I re-read Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil, and am trying to finish his Beyond This Horizon, but the latter’s just not grabbing me. OTOH, the local library had a hardcover of Larry Niven’s Ringworld’s Children, which I’m enjoying much much more than The Ringworld Throne. It’s feeling more like SF than the “fallen-civilization fantasy” that Niven admittedly loves, but I think is a bit mined out. I’ve got another nonfiction library book on the OSS to read after that.
Wow. This got long.
Big robot movies: have you seen Casshern? The trailer I’ve found looks quite nifty, but a friend whose taste I trust says “To like this movie you must have liked at least one of three things: Dragon Ball Z or other overwrought anime that canonical anime fans dislike, live-action Ultraman or Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers type shows, and/or Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow for its use of blue/greenscreen sets.”