The Age of Commercialism

A Masterpiece!

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

My favourite thing about this movie is that despite the control tower guys insisting it is night for the entirety of this movie, we have entire scenes in daylight, followed by a quick flick to total darkness, and back to daytime ... then the control tower with the blinds drawn (and sunlight trying to break through!) because it's nighttime, yo! Daylight! Nighttime! Daylight! No really, is IS nighttime! Yes, they didn't employ anyone to do continuity.I also enjoyed the 'every character gets their own moment' moments. The best one is the redneck racist, who goes below into the cargo hold and freezes. "It's so dark!" he stage whispers, with a light shining in his face. No one appears to listen, so he says it again. Crazed dog-trainer woman, crawling around the floor near a wall light says, 'So it's dark, what's the big deal?' Evidently, all this light is just for the audience, not the characters, because we then focus on his face, his traumatised, blank/stupid face as he begins his story ... his childhood abuse story, (which was probably the MOST RELATABLE PART of the whole movie). Crazed dog-trainer woman listens to him for like, ten seconds max, then pushes past him like 'Whatever, dude! I gotta find my dog.' Unbelievably selfish and totally negating his childhood trauma. I also enjoyed the Grandma Polly scene ... an old-fashioned kettle is on the gas hob. Grandma falls off a ladder and hits her head ... the lit gas goes out (HOW?) but the gas stays on (screw you, physics) but oh no! A candle is lit! Got to say, this was super fun, ideal to be used in a drinking game for foolish lines, continuity errors and plain head-desk moments. I am not to be blamed for the alcoholism that might result from such a game though!

COLLISION COURSE is another cookie cutter disaster/thriller movie from Fred Olen Ray. I noticed that Jason Bourque, the man responsible for directing such movies as ASTEROID: FINAL IMPACT and DOOMSDAY PROPHECY, helped to write the script. Unsurprisingly, this is the sort of film shown on the SyFy Channel, a safe, bland, and extremely derivative type of movie that copies pretty much every plane thriller in existence.The story is about solar flares and the havoc they're wreaking here on Earth. Some people are trapped on an out-of-control passenger plane when the pilot is killed by a flare and the co-pilot is knocked out cold. The only person with the power to save the passengers and crew is a writer who knows a thing or two about flying planes.It's amazing that a film with a potentially exciting premise like COLLISION COURSE can be so dull. Fred Olen Ray is up to his old tricks here, incorporating stock footage of expensive stuff (i.e. explosions) from other movies and generally fumbling the non-existent suspense. An ageing Tia Carrera is the best actor they can come up with and her acting is very poor.

This may be the single worst movie I have ever seen. Crippled by a deadly solar flare, an airplane continues to fly on autopilot after the captain is electrocuted and the co-pilot is incapacitated. Far-fetched but at least plausible. However, the writing, acting and visual look and effects are on the level of the sophomore class play. It's all so bad that it borders on the classic level of "Plan 9 From Outer Space". Clichés are elevated to an art form, the characters are stunningly one- dimensional and the story is fully disconnected from facts and reality. How this movie was ever funded is beyond me. How people get paid to create drivel like this is astounding. I feel especially bad for Dee Wallace, a good actress who gamely gave it her all in a secondary role. The best thing about this movie is that eventually it ended.

Collision Course may not quite be bad enough to be on a personal worst movies ever list or the very worst movie to air on the SyFy Channel(any contenders for that title make for a very large number). That is saying next to nothing though, because it still has everything bad about melodrama/disaster movies at their worst. To search for a redeeming quality you'd have to look very hard, but for anything that came across as least bad about Collision Course it was Dee Wallace who does try to give some compassion to material that was beneath her. Generally in regard to the acting Collision Course is a very poorly-acted film, with the actors ranging from overwrought emotion(Tia Carrere applies here) to no emotion or acting skills at all. The acting is not the only bad thing, everything about Collision Course is bad. The drab look of the movie is very unappealing, and further disadvantaged by about 20 years out of date special effects that show no signs texture, shading or proportion and simplistic camera work. The dialogue gives meaning to the term banal and practically insults it too and gets increasingly turgid and predictable. The story shows no tension, fear of characters' predicaments or heart, and instead consists of very questionable science/maths, pedestrian pacing and ham-fisted melodrama. The characters are also the sort that we never care for or know anything about, that they're written in such a cardboard fashion and acted lazily doesn't help. Overall, there's worse out there- you'll agree or disagree here- but Collision Course at the end of the day was very difficult to endure. 1/10 Bethany Cox