LORD OF THE RINGS TRILOGY: 

The trilogy includes The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. A lot of guys like it because it shows a band of men (including hobbits, elfs and dwarfs...) working together. Even when they are split up following assorted catastrophes, the characters each follow their paths to achieve their objectives. This is especially true of some of the minor characters:

 

King Theoden (Bernard Hill) who banishes his own self-doubts to lead his people in their defense of Helm’s Deep, and who later at the siege of Minas Tirath makes a truly stirring speech. Meanwhile, Faramir (David Wenham) overcomes his inner conflicts over possession of the Ring and gives up its power for the higher truth. I really liked the scene in The Two Towers where, at the moment of extreme crisis, Faramir shoots the Nazgul's flying beast and saves Frodo from himself. It's men working together and all that sort of thing.

 

Director Peter Jackson took an interesting approach in filming the trilogy, using actual New Zealand locales for the landscape of Middle Earth. This makes the films feel all the more real. CGI is in there, but only where needed. The actors react realistically to events which are too bizarre even for them. When Frodo, Sam and Gollum reach the Black Gate of Mordor, you can see both the fear and pride in their faces from boldly going where no hobbit has gone before.

 

The complete trilogy is long, especially if you get the “director’s cut” version on DVD or videotape. What is amazing about The Lord of the Rings is not so much that it is good film, but that they could make it at all!

 

 

EXCALIBUR:

John Boorman’s take on the Arthurian legend. It’s an odd mix of late Medieval armor with early Dark Ages characters, but the reason I recommend it is for the subplot involving Sir Perceval in the second half of the film. It’s the Parsifal legend, of course, and it gets to the root of the legend, which goes back millenia.

 

In order to find the Grail, Perceval must go on a quest whose goal, he finally realizes, is not a physical object. He encounters sorceress Morgana La Fey and resists her blandishments, being hanged from a tree where, at the verge of death, he glimpses the Secret of the Grail. Later, after a symbolic purification he comes to the realization that the True Grail is inner enlightenment and so he can finally relay the truth to Arthur about the oneness of the King and the Land. It has meaning to anyone who has conducted a warrior quest, or who wants to conduct one.

 

 

THE THIRTEENTH WARRIOR:

A film adaptation of Michael Crichton’s book, “Eaters of the Dead”, which was a retelling of the Beowulf story. Antonio Bandaras is a Saracen who hooks up with some Vikings to fight the Big Evil. And who else is behind the Big Evil other than a matriarchical earth goddess! It’s all kind of hokey but sharpen your broadsword and pass the popcorn.

 

 

THE LAST MAN ON EARTH

 

You are the only living human being in a world which has been depopulated by a bizarre epidemic. At night, you fight off the hordes of zombie-like creatures which besiege your fortress-like home. During the day, you struggle to maintain life as unusual and kill as many slumbering foe as you can. Then do it again the next day, and the next, and the next...

 

You are The Last Man on Earth.

 

Last Man on Earth stars Vincent Price as the titular hero. It’s an interesting role for Price. He plays it straight, without his usual irony. He makes his character of Robert Morgan work as a man of intelligence dealing with an impossible situation and maintaining his sanity in the bargain. It’s not an action movie. There’s killing in it, unpleasant and necessary, but it's not the point of the film. Morgan takes no joy in it, nor are there any heroics. Price comes off as a Randian “man of the mind”, literally standing alone against a hostile world. Regardless of the external circumstances, he stays true to his principles, trying to find a cure.

 

Last Man on Earth can be seen as a tale of alienation. One man’s struggle against a world which has lost its humanity. The empty city, the living-dead antagonists, the quest for a cure—fill in the blanks with whatever symbols you care. Significantly, Price’s character has lost his wife and daughter to the epidemic, as too many men have lost their families to a system which has been rigged against them.

 

A considerable part of the movie is in the form of flashbacks. There’s the usual scenes of the Army trying to deal with the plague, but the best they can do is burn bodies in gigantic pits. This is not the standard 1950s science fiction movie in which the Pentagon saves the day by the last reel. The end of the movie gives some hope, but not by resetting things to the way they were before the plague. There’s no going home again. A new breed of humans arise. Humanity moves forward, somehow. Despite his intent, Morgan becomes the new world’s legend.

 

Last Man on Earth was the first attempt to film Richard Matheson’s book, “I Am Legend” (the hero’s original name was Neville in it, for some reason the movie makers changed it). It was later filmed as The Omega Man (with Charlton Heston) and more recently as I Am Legend (Will Smith). Both of the later two films seemed to miss the point of the original, perhaps spending too much money on sets and special effects, and turning things into a conventional action flik.

 

Last Man on Earth’s low budget, oddly enough, works in its favor, giving the film a stark simplicity reflecting the character’s plight. It gives a degree of documentary realism which makes it all the more disturbing. Also, the “romance” element which is in the later two films is not present in Last Man on Earth. Price does not allow himself to be seduced by the female who appears, instead maintaining his scientific detachment. And from that we can learn a lot.

 

(I’d also comment that Omega Man is a bit dated, with its hippies and Afro hairstyles; on the other hand, you get to see Charlton Heston do his thing and there is that incredible scene where he screams “there are no phones ringing!”)

 

 

BATMAN FOREVER:

This third entry in the Batman series got kind of panned, but there is good stuff in here. Batman Forever is something about Batman (Val Kilmer) fighting an alliance of evil between Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) and the Riddler (Jim Carrey). Along the way, Batman picks up a new partner, Robin (Chris O’Donnell). There’s some good mentoring between the veteran Bruce Wayne (Kilmer) and newcomer Dick Grayson (O’Donnell’s alter ego), especially where the veteran tells the incipient super-hero of the consequences of violence. Kilmer’s not preachy, he just lays it out as it is and lets O’Donnell make his own choices. Grayson takes off, but later returns, proclaiming himself to be not just Wayne’s friend but also a partner.

 

Nichole Kidman plays a police psychiatrist, but she is not the femme fatale of the other Batman movies. Most of the time she is made up in pasty white makeup and black clothing such that she looks like a walking ghost.  She's the yin to Batman's yang.

 

One significant scene has Bruce Wayne (aka Batman) and Edward Nigma (aka the Riddler) at a party that puts the “d” in decadence. Each is dancing with one of the hottest women in Hollywood (Drew Barrymore, Kidman) but the men ignore the babe in their arms for the battle of wills between the two of them. Kilmer then finds himself in a mind control machine that draws from him his inner fears, and which will later be used against him. (Kilmer seems to have played this scene in the way he wanted to play Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s The Doors.)

 

In the end, Batman/Bruce Wayne has to confront and overcome his inner demons, while the bad guys are unable to do the same (and thus they self-destruct). The movie closes out with Batman leaving Nichole Kidman behind to fight evil along with his new partner, Robin.

 

 

THE TRUMAN SHOW:

The situation is the stuff of paranoid delusion and nightmare alienation—your family, your friends, your home town, your entire life, are all one big conspiracy being perpetuated against you by omniscient and unseen forces. Robert Heinlein used a similar theme in his short story, “They”, where an insane asylum inmate is convinced that the world is a series of false fronts created by god-like being to keep him from knowing his true identity—and in the end, he turns out to be right.

 

The Truman Show turns this nightmare into a gentle satire. Jim Carrey is the Truman Burbank of the title. Truman has lived his entire life in the perfect town with the perfect wife and perfect job. But he suspects that something is not quite right. It’s the day he glimpses his long lost father on a crowded street before the latter is "disappeared". This encounter propels Truman on his quest for the truth.

 

The movie becomes Truman’s journey to break free. But it’s not simply to escape the city-sized sound stage in which he is trapped. It’s also to overcome the smothering of his wife and mother, who are really actresses playing their roles. The former exploits sex and the latter uses guilt to keep him in check.

 

It’s interesting that the triggering event for Truman’s quest is his search for his father. And it is that rare film which emphasizes the importance of men in their children’s lives. But there is more to recommend The Truman Show than that. It’s really about a man who goes his own way. Truman resists all the blandishments that society has to offer and, like a modern Magellan, strikes out for parts unknown until he literally comes to the end of his world. And in his final challenge, he literally breaks on through to the other side.

 

The movie has some very interesting scenes. In one, Truman asks his “wife” (really, an actress playing his wife) a very important question: why does she want to have children with him when she obviously can not stand him? It’s a question a lot of men might ask today, why do so many women want to get married when they show nothing but contempt for men.

 

The Truman Show is also a good family film. Jim Carrey plays Truman with restraint, humor, insight and a touch of weariness, as if the strain of the perfect life is slowly causing him to unravel. There's a couple of nice bits where he invents characters in his bathroom mirror, literally reflecting on his life. Mercifully, there is a minimum of four letter words (I’ve always contended that the use of four letter words is poor writing since it shows the author can not get his ideas across in any other way.)

 

If the film has a flaw, it is that Truman’s final decision to escape happens without any explanation as to how he figured out that his supposedly long lost “father” was just another actor. (In an early draft of the screenplay, the triggering event is when he opens a dictionary and finds the word "Trumanesque" in it, referring to him.)

 

By the way, circa 1999 several movies came out in which a hero questions his view of reality and/or society: The Truman Show, Fight Club, The Matrix, eXistenZ, Thirteenth Floor, Dark City. It’s all reminiscent of the 1960s Situationalist International concept of the Society of the Spectacle: that modern technology was creating a world in which people were reduced to the role of spectators in their own lives. 

 

 

DARK CITY: 

This is sort of an “iffy” entry into the recommendations because there is a (yuck!) romance element in the movie (though it’s part of the façade). Dark City starts as classic film noire: a man wakes up in a sleazy hotel room with a murdered woman’s corpse and a bad case of amnesia—but then it turns into a science fiction fable about a man discovering his inner powers.

 

What makes this such a movie for men is that the three male leads, Rufus Sewell (the amnesiac turned hero), Kiefer Sutherland (the mad scientist with a bad case of guilty conscience), and William Hurt (the cynical cop who’s willing to give a guy a break) all work together as a team, each using their unique powers to win through.

 

Yeah, there’s some yucky romance stuff in there, but it’s the price you pay for saving the world. In one scene a detective comes to the realization that his wife is not really his wife, and that everyone in the city is literally running around in circles like rats in a maze, perhaps a metaphor for how too many people live their lives.

 

One thing that is annoying is that a narrator explains the back story in the first five minutes of the film, as if the studio thought that the audience could not figure it out for themselves. Oh well. If you can imagine Alfred Hitchcock directing an Original Twilight Zone episode with special effects by George Lucas, you’d get the picture about Dark City.

 

I watched Dark City again the other night. One other thing that puts it into the realm of "iffy" movies is that the Rufus Sewell character is assigned what amount to godlike powers via fiat...a literal deus ex machina, given that the alien "visitors" use a gargantuan machine to assist them in changing the scenes. I think a hero ought to earn his powers, and what makes this all the more ominous is that by the end of the movie, Sewell has in effect made himself the god of this world, not only purging the garden of the alien snakes or chtuloids or whatever, but literally letting there be light. I dunno, this seems to be a little too much power to entrust to one man. We can perhaps see him as a Prometheus-like character, bringing fire to a humanity that has been kept in the dark, but in the end, Prometheus paid for his defiance of the gods, restoring balance to the cosmos.

 

 

EQUILIBRIUM:

Equilibrium has Christian Bale reclaiming his own humanity in the face of a numbed-out society. The movie is set in a future derivative of Fahrenheit 451, The Matrix, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Metropolis, and the characters are somewhat on the detached side, though this is perhaps intentional. Significantly, male rebels are shown to be the bearers of art, culture and liberty. There are a couple of women in the film, but they do not usurp men's roles, nor do they act as weak and helpless heroines to be rescued—instead, they complement the male characters with their own strengths.

 

The central control mechanism of Equibrium's dystopian future is a daily dose of mood suppressing drugs. One thinks of Ritalin in these circumstances. I especially liked the scene where Bale’s aesthetic senses awaken when he inadvertently plays a record of Beethoven’s Ninth while searching a museum of banned artwork. You literally see his eyes opening.

 

There is also some nice father-son interaction, especially the scene at the end where Bale’s son saves him from the secret police, and afterwards junior tells him, “You taught me well”. Amen, brother.

 

ROLLERBALL:

James Caan is Jonathan E, the Number One player of Rollerball, the murderous game of utopia. He has privilege, fame and women, but risks it all when the rulers tell him he must retire.

 

Rollerball was part of that wave of "thinking person's" science fiction films which were released in the decade prior to Star Wars, and included 2001: a Space Odyssey and Soylent Green. Producer Norman Jewison made Rollerball  as a cautionary tale about violence, the media, and people trading their freedom for security. And it has a lot to say about these things today three decades after it was released.

 

Jewison gives a well realized future where all is well, sort of. The buildings are monuments of glass and chrome, the people trim and fashionable. No paramilitary police are kicking in doors and hauling away people to the local gulag. In fact, there's only one weapon shown in the entire movie, a supercharged pistol which partygoers use to incinerate a woodline. Beneath the surface things are not quite so hot. Like there are no more libraries, shades of Farenheit 451. One odd sequence has Caan trying to get information out of what is apparently the world's one and only computer, called "Zero", but Zero just quite isn't cooperating today. Well, the movie was made long before Bill Gates became a household name.

 

Anyway, Caan has to make some hard decisions. In order to get him out of the game, the corporate rulers (who are now also the government) keep changing the rules.  Like no penalties. And no substitutions. And no time limits. So by the final game in the playoffs, Rollerball has become a deathmatch. You see, what they are afraid of is that Jonathan E is subverting the game's propaganda message, that individual action is futile. Of course, he proves that it isn't.

 

Along the way, he has to give up a lot of stuff. His one close friend among the other players is rendered braindead in a skirmish with the Tokyo team. His mistress, with whom he has a reasonably friendly (if business-like) relationship, is replaced by another female, this time a corporate spy (whom he dispatches with ease). Towards the end, he rejects a reconciliation with his once beloved wife (not so easy) in order to stay true to himself.

 

One of the more powerful scenes of the movie is in the locker room just before he goes into the final game. Everyone is suited up for combat. Caan looks over his teammates, but by now they are all strangers, faceless behind their helmets. He rolls on into the arena, ready to do battle, one man alone.

 

 

ALIENS:

This may seem and odd entry, given that it stars Sigourney Weaver, but Aliens has a vision of what a lot of men thought women’s liberation was going to be about: women actually living up to the standards of men and everybody getting down together.

 

Aliens has Weaver and a sexually integrated squad of spaceborne marines going up against the eponymous aliens on a cyberpunk-biomech décor planet. The female marines are neither the weak and helpless heroines of yore, nor the anti-male harridans of present films. They pick up their assault rifles and do their jobs without any hysterics, flirting or feminist cliché spewing. Oh yeah, the aliens are equal opportunity slashers of both male and female flesh.

 

Yes, a subtle romantic relationship develops between Weaver and one of the marines, but it is rightly understated in the film. The movie is also useful for its realistic  portrayal of the cohesion and disintegration of the troopers. The women are neither victims nor heroes, they’re grunts, just like the men. Too bad it never worked out this way in reality.

 

 

STAR WARS: ATTACK OF THE CLONES:

This is another odd entry. I included Clones mainly because it has some portrayals of female-male dynamics that ring true. Apprentice-Jedi Anakin Skywalker tries to get the attention of all-around galactic babe Padme Amadalla (Natalie Portman) by being the nice guy. In return, she publicly humiliates him by treating him as a child (calling him “Annie” in front of his peers). It’s only later in the movie, after Anakin has slaughtered a village full of civilians, that she decides she is in love with this bad boy.

 

The turning point comes when, following the massacre, Padme approaches Anakin with a serving tray, a symbol of her deciding to submit to him. After all, he has “proven” himself a “real” man by killing the innocent as well as the guilty. Now freed from responsibility for her actions, she galavants around the galaxy with the young Sith lord in training and joins in the general bloodbath (OK, it’s mainly robots and insect-like aliens who are getting chopped up, Lucas wants to keep the movie suitable for young ‘uns, so “lubricant bath”?).

 

By the end of the movie Anakin has begun his descent into the Dark Side of the Force, so Padme just has to marry him. It’s all an abject lesson for NiceGuys on what it takes to win some women…and why they may find it is not worth the effort, in a galaxy not too long ago nor too far away.

 

 

DUNE (David Lynch director):

 

“Father, the sleeper has awakened!”

 

Great line from David Lynch’s film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel, "Dune". It's about a young man who realizes his messianic powers on a desert planet, sole source of the "spice", the drug without which the Galaxy can not live. The book became a sci-fi classic, but it was not until the success of Star Wars that the studios would risk filming it.

 

The first act of the movie has some good interaction between the doomed Duke Leto Atreides (Jurgen Prochnow) and his son and heir, Paul (Kyle MacLachlan). Paul’s desire to avenge his father’s demise at the hands of the Galactic Empire’s minions motivates much of the action, though this isn’t simply a revenge movie—Paul seeks to fulfill the destiny he promised to his father, to awaken the “sleeping” powers within him.

 

Herbert’s future is not PC (after all, the book was written before the “1960s”). Both men and women develop the powers unique to their own sexes. One premise is that a revolt against “thinking machines” (what we’d today call computers) forced people to develop their mental abilities. So there are male quasi-religious orders of thinkers (Mentats) and warriors (Sardaukar, Fedaykin), and female orders of genetic manipulators (Bene Gesserit). Each is strong in their own sphere and no one goes into the other sex's bailiwick. Men and women are "worlds" apart.

 

Paul's mother, Jessica, is a noble character. She drops out of the sisterhood (in this case, the Bene Gesserit) in order to support both her husband and son. And there are some good scenes of her and Paul working together to cross a desert while pursued by giant sand worms. They then hook up with the Fremen, holy warriors waiting for a messiah to lead them and Paul fits the bill.

 

Paul finally realizes his powers by going into the desert and doing that which is forbidden, taking the "water of life", though why it is so important is never adequately explained. He then has the mystic revelation and can fulfill his destiny. Like Prometheus, he breaks the bounds of convention.

 

Dune can be a confusing movie to watch if you have not read the book (and if you have read the book, you might read too much into the film). The last half seems rushed, and many of the character relationships are never quite fulfilled. It’s perhaps best to just sit back and let it flow through your consciousness. A lot of the movie is in mantra-like one-liners (“The worm is the spice, the spice is the worm”; "Soon they'll be folding space, far off in the control rooms of spice gas"). The movie’s flaw isn’t so much that it cut out too much of the book, but that it maintained too many pointless subplots while neglecting Herbert’s intent, that the rise of a hero is not necessarily a good thing.

 

There are several different cuts of the film floating about. The original theatrical release was 2 hours and 17 minutes, while various television and video releases have added another 40 minutes' worth of (poorly edited) footage. The DVD has several more cut scenes.

 

The Science Fiction Channel did a Dune mini-series a few years back which was a much more literal adaptation of the book. It also got into the book’s political nuances, though at times it can be a bit uneven: you can see where the special effects budget ran out!