Short takes: ‘The Expanse’ season 3, ‘Megamind’ and ‘The Haunting of Hill House’

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
July 31, 2020

If you like space opera and you haven’t seen the TV series The Expanse, you’re doing it wrong. I could also have written, “If you like intelligent science fiction and you haven’t seen the TV series The Expanse, you’re doing it wrong.”

The show debuted in 2015 on Syfy and has compiled 46 episodes over four seasons. All the episodes are available through Amazon Prime Video, the exclusive home for the series’ fourth season, which debuted in December. I saw the first two seasons a couple of years back and recently watched season three; I hope to catch up on the new season in the near future. Filming has evidently finished on the show’s fifth season, which could be released later this year.

The Expanse is based on a series of novels by James S.A. Corey, the pen name of a pair of Albuquerque writers. Set in the 24th century, when humans have colonized Mars and a number of other locations, the show focuses on a quartet of blue-collar astronauts who stumble upon a series of secret experiments. The research involves a mysterious self-replicating substance called the protomolecule, which originated outside the solar system and has a nasty habit of destroying everything in its path.

Robert Zemeckis’s thrilling ‘Allied’ tells the story of two married World War II spies who may not have managed to come in from the cold

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 27, 2018

Robert Zemeckis’s 2016 World War II movie, Allied, is a terrific thriller starring Brad Pitt as a Royal Air Force spy who learns that his wife may be a Nazi mole.

The film begins in 1942 in an isolated stretch of desert outside Casablanca as Max Vatan (Pitt) parachutes in to rendezvous with Marianne Beauséjour (Marion Cotillard), a Frenchwoman who’s laid the groundwork for a plot to assassinate Germany’s ambassador to Morocco. (Why would doing so offer the Allies any advantage whatsoever in the war? Unclear, I confess.)

When the pair both manage to survive the dangerous mission, Max’s bosses in the British intelligence bureaucracy give him permission to bring Marianne to England and marry her. Within months, if not weeks, of Marianne’s arrival, the duo are joined in matrimony, and she is pregnant with their daughter.

Adam McKay explains how the end of the world got monetized in ‘The Big Short,’ his surprisingly entertaining tale of real-life financial shenanigans

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Jan. 2, 2015

The Big Short is a strangely entertaining and extremely timely movie about a wholly unlikely subject: A handful of investors who anticipated, and got rich because of, the collapse of the American housing market.

Director Adam McKay’s feature is based on Michael Lewis’s 2010 nonfiction book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. Lewis also wrote Liar’s Poker, Moneyball and The Blind Side, among other books; the first of these drew on Lewis’s experiences on Wall Street, while the latter two became enormously successful sports movies. The latest Lewis-inspired outing was translated to screen by thriller screenwriter Charles Randolph and McKay, the director of such excellent comedies as Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

The Big Short tracks three sets of characters in their quest to make a bundle of money while betting against conventional wisdom. One of the men at the heart of the story is Michael Burry, a one-eyed possibly autistic medical doctor who runs a Silicon Valley investment firm. As played by Christian Bale, Burry is an oddball who loves to play heavy metal rock music at eardrum-piercing volumes and who regularly shows up at the office dressed as if he were about to spend a day cleaning his garage. Burry wears the shirt throughout the film, which takes place over the course of about three years.

Burry, who’s capable of prolonged bouts of concentration, finds that an alarming percentage of housing mortgage bonds are based on poorly secured subprime loans. A single bond consists of thousands of individual mortgages, each of which represents the debt owed by a home buyer to a lender; investors buy the bonds in order to receive a share of the monthly mortgage payments.

For decades, such bonds were a rock-solid investment. What Burry discovers — contrary to the assertions of virtually every economist in the known universe — is that many of home loans being made were incredibly risky. As a result, the mortgage bond market is highly overvalued and therefore due for a correction, otherwise be known as a crash.

Apocalypse now and again: 20 years later, Terry Gilliam’s ‘12 Monkeys’ is just as frightening and brilliant as ever

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 10, 2015

12 Monkeys, Terry Gilliam’s 1995 science fiction movie, is the story of a frequently injured and befuddled time traveler who is attempting to investigate a devastating plague. I saw it when it was first released; I did not much like it then, although I thought it was undeniably clever and impressive.

Recently, I re-watched the movie. It is a brilliant and harrowing film.

In 1997, when James Cole was a child, a disease wiped out the vast majority of the human population, forcing the survivors to flee to a nightmarish subterranean complex. The adult Cole, a violent convict played by Bruce Willis, is sent back in time by a group of somewhat buffoonish scientists. The experts believe they can render the plague harmless by studying samples of the original disease, before it began to mutate.

It’s never explained why examining the earliest iteration of the disease would be more helpful in finding a cure than studying its current varieties. Then again, as the mysterious Louis sardonically tells Cole, “Science ain’t an exact science with these clowns.”