Zebraman (2004) – Odd Japanese comedy about a third-grade teacher with a lousy home life and an obsession with “Zebraman,” a short-lived tokusatsu TV series (think “Kamen Rider”) from the ’70s. But it’s more than the story of a middle-aged closet cosplayer, as amusing as that would be; he discovers, when he runs across an actual crime being committed, that he somehow has Zebraman’s powers. What’s more, the strange crimes in his city are mimicking the plots of Zebraman‘s seven televised episodes; and then, when he discovers a cache of the rest of the season’s unproduced scripts and discovers that all of the crimes are the handiwork of aliens who were scheduled to win at the end of the season… well!
It would probably leave cold any American viewer whose knowledge of tokusatsu TV extended no further back than the American importation of the Power Rangers. But for those with a winking appreciation for silly ’70s Japanese TV, it’s an amusing ride.
Building Star Trek (2016) – The core of this Smithsonian Channel documentary is two parallel endeavors: One of the curator of a pop-culture museum to collect enough original Star Trek props to put together a bridge display for a 50th anniversary celebration, the other of a team of Smithsonian restorers to refurbish and preserve the original 11-foot model of the Enterprise to hang in their lobby celebrating the same occasion. Interspersed with them are little “Star Trek made our future!” featurettes, talking about research into warp drives, tractor beams, diagnostic tricorders, cloaking devices, etc. Those mini-stories get a little tiresome with their concerted ignorance of the fact that all of those ideas originated in print SF (and let’s not talk about the narrator’s forced “witty” Trek references), but the meaty dual stories are intriguing for fans of both Star Trek and prop-making.
Dune (1984) – Lord, what a botch job. Say what you will about Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, but he figured out a workable balance between staying faithful to the source material and making the movie version cohesive in its own right. But Dune… endless exposition so that barely-alluded-to subplots will supposedly “make sense,” voiceovers from multiple characters in the same scenes trying to fill in gaps, mystic pretensions presented with all of the visual artistry of a contemporary MTV video… And I watched the extended version, which tried to “repair” the flaws in the David Lynch theatrical version and instead threw so many MORE fragmentary plot threads at the screen that by the end, the long-suffering narrator was just telling us entire narratives that happened offscreen.
I hear that someone’s scheduled to get a THIRD adaptation of Dune off the ground in the next couple of years, which I somehow think is going to feel like an unwanted sequel to John Carter Of The Planet That Dare Not Speak Its Name.
Abandoned movies: The Sword and the Claw, Terrorvision