Guest Post: The Bukharin Alternative, Part Two

It is a common belief in some circles that Stalinist policies were necessary for the Soviet Union to industrialize sufficiently in order to defeat the inevitable genocidal Nazi invasion. In particular is the Holodomor, in which grain was exported to the West to purchase industrial equipment and the like while millions starved to death. Ukraine was hit particularly hard, but Central Asia, the North Caucasus, and other places suffered as well.

However, my Internet cohort Scott Blair doesn't agree with this theory and wrote this essay--which I broke into two parts--to elaborate. Part One can be see here.

The Bukharin Alternative Part Two: Stalinist Complicity in the Rise of Hitler

By Scott Blair

It is also worth considering whether or not Hitler would have risen to power without Stalin’s support. In 1928, the Comintern leadership in Moscow took a much harsher stance against collaboration with Social Democrat parties in Europe, on the belief that the collapse of capitalism was imminent. In Germany, the results were disastrous. From 1928 onward, the German Communist Party (KPD) “party directed its venom principally against the Social Democrats”, while the Red Front-Fighters League became a paramilitary force. The KPD were particularly vocal in attacking the Social Democrats, who they denounced as “social fascists”, and by the end of 1932 Germany’s military was worried that a crackdown on the Nazis or Communists would result in civil war. Initially, Josef Stalin and the KPD welcomed the rise of Nazism, believing that he was a crazy fool whose rise to power was a sign that the German revolution was at hand. History has proven how wrong this belief was.

In these circumstances, one may well wonder if Nikolai Bukharin would have made a difference, and the answer is an emphatic yes. In contrast to Stalin, by 1928 Bukharin had become notable for advocating collaboration with the Socialist parties of Europe, and as the KPD followed the line set down in Moscow, it would have followed Bukharin’s policy as well. While it is unlikely that the Social Democrats and KPD would have collaborated in any meaningful way, if the KPD had emphasize on stabilizing the Republic the German military may have been more willing to crack down on the Nazis. This would not have resulted in a shiny, happy German democracy, and the possibilities range from an authoritarian state run by the military, to an unstable democracy, to a German civil war.

All three alternatives would have been preferable to the Third Reich. Even a militarist dictatorship would have been unstable, possibly annexing Austria and warring with Poland, but it is unlikely to have been as aggressive or uniquely successful as the Third Reich was. It must also be remembered that before the rise of Hitler Germany and the USSR had been close, with joint military exercises and discussions about a partition of Poland. Thus, in the Bukharin alternative the Great Patriotic War may never occur.

Even if one assumes Hitler still rose to power, and that things are the same until the beginning of Barbarossa, then it is possible Bukharin’s policies would have still let the Soviet Union win. On the one hand, the Soviet Union would have a smaller industrial base. First, it is unlikely that Bukharin would have been caught by the surprise the way that Stalin was, which may have resulted in a different outcome in the opening stages of the Great Patriotic War. It is also unlikely that the purges would have taken place, with their well known effects on the Soviet officer corps. Finally, peasant disenchantment with the regime, so obvious in the summer of 1941, may have been much less significant in a USSR that followed Bukharin’s policies. All told, even if we assume a somewhat smaller Soviet industrial base, there is good reason to think that the USSR would ultimately prevail in the war, as it did historically.

Thus, Bukharin would have emerged from the Great Patriotic War as the head of a USSR with a much more vigorous agricultural sector, and one with millions of more citizens than had died in the famine. Perhaps Bukharin’s Soviet Union would not have turned the former breadbasket of Europe into an importer of American grain. Perhaps calls for increased autonomy in the economy would have been more successful in the 1960s, and the USSR’s economy would not have stagnated and ultimately crumbled.


At the risk of being speculative, in such a scenario it is possible that the Soviet Union would still exist today. If so, Stalin, far from being necessary, may have ensured the USSR’s ultimate demise.

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Guest Post: The Bukharin Alternative Part One

It is a common belief in some circles that Stalinist policies were necessary for the Soviet Union to industrialize sufficiently in order to defeat the inevitable genocidal Nazi invasion. In particular is the Holodomor, in which grain was exported to the West to purchase industrial equipment and the like while millions starved to death. Ukraine was hit particularly hard, but Central Asia, the North Caucasus, and other places suffered as well.

However, my Internet cohort Scott Blair doesn't agree with this theory and wrote this essay--which I broke into two parts--to elaborate...

The Bukharin Alternative Part One: Collectivization and the Great Terror

By Scott Blair

In order to answer whether or Stalin was necessary, it is necessary to consider who could have replaced him. In order to do so, let us posit that in 1927, at the height of the debate between Josef Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin, Stalin dies from a bad batch of borscht. Thus, Bukharin, considered to be a more moderate leader, assumes control of the Soviet Union. What would the USSR, under the command of a man who said, “we have to tell the whole peasantry, all its strata: get rich, accumulate, develop your economy,” look like? Bukharin’s policies would have entailed a modification of the NEP, and its continuation. It is therefore worth asking how the USSR would have industrialized under him. Stalin’s industrialization is often held up as an example of his success, and so it is worth asking if Bukharin could have done the same.

To begin with, it is clear that collectivization, the cornerstone of Stalin’s policy, was a disaster. Gross farm output declined 20% between 1928 and 1933, and this is allowing for a recovery after the initial great famine. It has been estimated that “not until the mid 1950s did agriculture regain the level of output achieved in the last years before the Great War”. The number of livestock in the Soviet Union also fell dramatically, and it is estimated that half of the nation’s cows, pigs, and horses were killed between 1928 and 1932. This is especially tragic as the last years of the NEP witnessed increased crop diversification and access to new equipment such as horse drawn plows. 

Admittedly, the NEP had problems. The Revolution, by breaking up the large estates and farms of prosperous kulaks who had produced for the market, ended up producing millions of subsistence farms which were simply less efficient. This meant that while agriculture production recovered and surpassed the 1913 Russian levels, grain sales actually declined during this period. Thus, collectivization did have some benefits, by forcing peasants to provide grain for the Soviet Union’s burgeoning cities. It has also been suggested that the famine caused approximately twelve million Soviet citizens to flee the countryside for work in the USSR’s new cities between 1928 and 1933. 

In addition, the NEP years saw marked instability in pricing. 1922 witnessed high prices for grain and low prices for manufactured goods, while 1923 witnessed the “scissors crisis”, in which peasants refrained from buying industrial goods because the price of grain was low while the price of grain was high. Grain prices offered by the state in 1927 were low, while industrial consumer goods were in short supply. As a result, peasants simply withheld their grain from the market. As the state needed grain to industrialize, these problems have led to the belief that the NEP was essentially a dead end, and it is therefore worth asking how Bukharin could have come to terms with them. 

First, by by December of 1927, even Bukharin wanted “to speed up the tempo of industrialization and put pressure on the kulaks, though [he] believed the free market had to be maintained”. Secondly, by 1927 Soviet investment in industry had already surpassed investment by Russian and foreign capital in Russian industry in 1913, and industrial output slightly exceeded prewar levels. Thus, even without any modifications, industrialization and development would have continued, albeit not at the pace of Stalin’s Soviet Union. However, a variety of mechanisms to stimulate agricultural production, and thus industrialization, present themselves. For instance, the Soviet government forced peasants to sell a certain amount of grain to state procurement agencies or to machine tractor stations for their services. The state also imposed a high sales tax on goods but not on food, ensuring that what money peasants received by selling crops would go to the government. 

Thus, Soviet policy ultimately consisted of taking grain from Soviet peasants at artificially low prices, and selling them industrial goods at extremely high ones. There is no reason to assume such policies could not have been followed sans collectivization. This would have resulted in a system that squeezed the peasants, but allowed them to maintain a profit on what was left of their crop, but need not have entailed collectivization. Such a system would probably have squeezed less grain out of the peasants, meaning that industrialization would go less rapidly than historically. However, it would have provided better long term prospects for Soviet agriculture once industrialization had been achieved. 

It is also worth considering Bukharin’s historical plan provide more grain for the cities. Bukharin historically proposed selling manufactured goods at low prices and buying grain at high prices to encourage peasants to market more grain, but it is unclear if this policy would have worked. However, when the People’s Republic of China began paying peasants more for agricultural products in the late 1970s and early 1980s, agricultural production and the sale of agricultural products boomed as peasants responded to the new demand. China’s economic success is well known, and this suggests that Bukharin’s policy may have let the state have its cake and eat it too. The Soviet Union may have been able to build an industrial base which, if not as large as the one it possessed historically by 941, was not significantly smaller. 

Two additional points suggest that Stalinist policies harmed industrialization. Collectivization and the ensuing slaughter of livestock also harmed the Soviet textile industry as well as exports of wool and leather. As money from exports was used to finance purchases of machinery necessary for industrialization, a more benign policy may have helped the Soviet Union purchase more foreign technology. It is also worth asking what the effect of the famines the ensued from collectivization was. Estimates put the number of deaths from famine between four and nine million, and the birth rate declined in the mid 1930s, ultimately rebounding by the end of the decade. It is therefore worth asking what the net economic effect of the loss of six million Soviet citizens was. One of the purported benefits of the famine and collectivization was that it drove peasants to the cities, where they worked in the USSR’s new factories. 

Would the number of migrants from the countryside have been significantly less in a Bukharin led USSR if we assume that at least some of those peasants would have immigrated to the city? Furthermore, many of those purged were among the USSR’s intelligentsia, and it is evident that the Soviet economy would have done better if engineers, instead of chopping wood in Siberia, had been able to use their skills productively. It is unclear how much of difference fewer purges would have made, but it may have been significant. 

Part Two will cover the role of Stalin in Hitler's rise to power in the first place...

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"The Strain" Review and Recap: Episode Three "Gone Smooth"

The most recent episode of "The Strain" was on Sunday. I had a lot going on Monday, so this review and recap is a little bit late...

The episode begins with a mysterious figure getting dressed. We see a being that looks remarkably like Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter movies applying makeup, fake ears, etc. until we have the Eichhorst we all know and loathe. He says the time for charades is over soon and victory is near.

Meanwhile, while Eph and Nora's CDC boss is being less than helpful as usual, survivor Ansel (the nerdy-looking one who I thought was a bit creepy) is at home with the wife and kids and getting sicker. Bloodshot eyes, ringing in the ears. He won't go to the doctor. And Jim Kent disappears from the CDC to get answers at the Stoneheart Group HQ. There he encounters Eichhorst and is brought back into line when the Nazi vampire offers to ensure his cancer-stricken wife Sylvia is admitted to a drug trial. "You have two bosses now," he warns. Uh oh.

And Sertrakian goes before a judge who cannot pronounce his name properly. Nora, who earlier told Eph Sertrakian knew things, comes in to watch the proceeding. Sertrakian plays the Holocaust-survivor card and the bereaved-widower card. The judge calls him out on the silver sword-cane, which he claims is an illegal concealed weapon. Sertrakian BSes him by promising to have it melted down and replaced with a normal cane. The judge lets him off. Nora tries to speak to him afterward, but when she balks at the idea of killing anyone who has been in contact with the dead passengers and survivors of the plane, he blows her off. Tsk, tsk.

Meanwhile, Eph is at a family court hearing. The judge asks Zach what sort of custodial arrangement he'd like. After himming and hawwing about how he knows his parents want what's best for him, he said he'd rather Eph visit him a few weekends a month. This way, he's not stressed out on top of his stressful job like joint custody would supposedly do. Eph is upset and tries to say that Zach really meant "joint custody" and the judge shoots him down. After the hearing, Eph is really upset. Kelly (his wife) tells him that regardless of what the judge rules, he can visit Zach any time he wants if he just gives her the heads-up first. When Eph insists Zach is the most important thing in his world, Kelly says he should show that with "little things" rather than just saying it. Although there's this stereotype of vindictive ex-wives trying to excise fathers from their children's lives, Kelly is coming off as far more sympathetic and reasonable than the grouchy Eph. Many bloggers have complained about this bit of family drama, but it was actually helpful in humanizing Kelly and painting Eph with some major shades of gray.

Cut to Gabriel Bolivar (who I kept referring to in my notes as "Marilyn Manson"). He's sick. Meanwhile, Eph visits the Frenchman's house and finds a tub full of blood and hair. Something is stalking him. Nora calls him away and we see a vampiric form (probably the daughter) watching him.

Meanwhile, Vasily Fet is making a house call on some influential yuppie whose daughter was bitten by a rat. He catches the rat and exhorts the daughter not to eat in bed (since rats are attracted by the smell of food). While smoking outside the yuppie's building, he sees many rats on the streets. He follows to find them swarming out of a pipe. Something's down there...

Next we see Jim coming home and meeting his wife Sylvia, who's bald from chemotherapy and wearing a head-scarf. She got into the trial. The devil is holding up his end of the bargain so far. Back at the nerdy survivor's house, he's still sick and now his dog is barking at him. He goes into the kitchen and sees a thawing steak--and drinks the blood from it. In front of his horrified wife. Uh oh. And I'm not the only one who noticed something unusual about his tongue...

Bolivar is having a house call from a doctor. He describes ringing in his ears and a voice calling his name. The doctor offers him various prescriptions. Then Bolivar gets up and opens his robe. We don't see what the doctor sees, but said doctor immediately advises him to go to the hospital. Bolivar doesn't want the paparazzi troubles, so the doctor instead offers to get him in touch with a "discreet" urologist who makes house calls.

Back at the pawn shop, Sertrakian hangs up the cane he'd promised to destroy and gets the passenger manifest for the airplane from this hacker girl. He's going to "visit their families" and "pay his respects." Uh oh.

And back at the hospital, Captain Redfern really isn't doing well. Under UV light, his body is alive with the worms. He announces, "He is here."

Back at Eph's former home, Zach is reading about his father's CDC exploits on an iPad. He hears a noise downstairs. It's Kelly, reading through a photo album from happier times. Much sadness and cuddling.

Late at night at Regis Air's headquarters, Eichhorst pays the CEO a visit and kills him, making it look like a suicide. It looks like the "it was carbon monoxide poisoning" charade is going to go on for a little while longer.

And Bolivar isn't looking too good. His eyes are bleeding and even without his Goth makeup, he's looking pale and veiny. Then he goes to urinate and his member falls off. He flushes it down the toilet without a care and then does that creepy eye-blink thing the fully-infected do. And then he turns around and we see full frontal no-genitalia vampire. According to an interview from Del Toro, under that robe he's developed a full-blown cloaca to excrete as he feeds like a tick, so certain parts are rather superfluous now.

The episode ends with Redfern disappearing from the hospital just before they're going to open him up to see what's going on with him. Jim finds him in the basement feeding on blood samples. Redfern attacks him, but the Voice of Evil recognizes him as "Jim" and Redfern backs down. Nora and Eph arrive and Redfern attacks them, revealing the mouth stinger for the first time. Eph beats him down with a fire extinguisher but he gets up to try again--until Eph proceeds to totally destroy his head with the fire extinguisher in the same way the Master did with the man he killed at the airport.

The Verdict: Good episode. Awaiting the next one.

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Blast from the Past Movie Review: Lost In Space (1998)

Last night I went over to my friend Nick's for another movie screening for the podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood. That night's entree was Lost in Space,the 1998 television adaptation of the classic TV show in which the Robinson family, thanks to the treacherous saboteur Dr. Smith, ends up, well...look at the title. The link will be in this post when it's ready.

So how did it hold up?

The Good

*As I said on the podcast, they tried to make a much more coherent space-opera universe. I remember the original series featured the Robinson family going on a "five year vacation," although some fact-checking online indicates that they actually were part of a serious colonization mission. Instead we have a dying, resource-depleted Earth and different political factions (the Western-dominated United Global Space Force and the Global Sedition, which comes off as some kind of Third World group) trying to take control of the Earth-like world intended as humanity's second home.

*There are some good callbacks to the original series, including the robot being voiced by the same actor and Dr. Smith getting Will Robinson's attention by tapping out "Danger Will Robinson" in Morse code. Several actors from the original show play different roles in the movie--mother June Lockhart plays the young Will Robinson's school principal, for example, while the original Major West plays the commanding officer of the new one.

*Although it took awhile to actually get into space, once the mission actually begins things are entertaining for awhile. The robot, sabotaged by Dr. Smith, goes on a rampage and wrecks the ship, and in order to avoid being pulled into the gravity of the sun, Professor Robinson and West have to trigger the hyperdrive even though, without the hypergate, they could end up anywhere. Well, alive in the middle of nowhere with a slim chance of getting home is better than being incinerated by the sun, so off we go...

*The Robinsons seem a lot more Genre Savvy than they were in the TV show. Professor Robinson can't bring himself to shoot the man who'd tried to kill them in front of his children, so they keep him locked up and only let him out when they explore a derelict ship (more on that later) because leaving him aboard the ship without supervision is more dangerous.

*I liked the depiction of middle daughter Penny as a rebellious semi-Goth who resents having to abandon her life on Earth to go on a decades-long space mission. Will apparently acts out in school (albeit in nerdy ways like hacking school computers for his own projects, not by being violent or obnoxious) due to his father never being around. This does deconstruct the whole "family gives their all for the species" angle because, let's be blunt, most people aren't that noble and self-sacrificing. Mother Maureen, although being more mature about, makes her dislike of the situation clear in two scenes with her husband.

The Bad

*The movie is, simply put, incredibly boring. It's not as aggravatingly dull as Spawn was the other night, but it's still pretty darn slow. Nick said it's a "chamber drama" and given the amount of family issues they all have to work through, that is somewhat appropriate. However, the way it's done is booooring...

*The CGI has not held up very well for the most part. The opening space battle between the United Global Space Force and Global Sedition looks like a video game. Things get better when the lost Jupiter 2 encounters a derelict human ship with more advanced technology that's got a cute obvious toy tie-in monkey-like creature and a swarm of space-dwelling spiders (that presumably came off an alien ship found alongside the derelict that nobody really comments on), but they still don't look that good.

*The science doesn't make a lot of sense. The Jupiter 2 has a faster-than-light drive of some kind, but apparently without a completed hypergate the drive transports the ship to a random location. It seems rather hard to swallow that humanity at this point has figured out how breach the light-speed barrier but can't actually guide the ship anywhere. The end of the film implies that with the star-maps retrieved from the Proteus the Jupiter 2 will get to Alpha Prime well ahead of schedule, but that doesn't really make a lot of sense. We already have star-maps! Figuring out how to travel faster than light is the hard part!

It would've been better if the Jupiter 2 had an FTL drive that works as advertised and the robot's rampage caused them to jump to a random location before crapping out completely (if it uses space-folding, which the time-travel story later in the movie implies) or drop out of hyperspace someplace random (if it moves them in and out of some kind of parallel dimension).

*The acting is, as a general rule, not very good. The most egregious offender is Jared Harris, who plays the future adult Will Robinson. I liked him as Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, so I'm guessing he got better. Matt LeBlanc--yes, Joey from Friends plays West--also has some issues with his delivery as well.

*Dr. Smith has a lot of wasted potential. He starts out as a mole who programs the robot to destroy the Jupiter 2 for Global Sedition for money and then is nearly killed by a rigged communicator now that he's served his purpose. He's knocked unconscious long enough for the ship to blast off and when the robot goes on its rampage, he's forced to awaken the Robinson family to save his own skin. He talks about how it's in his self-interest in help Our Heroes because he wants to survive to return home, but he's pointlessly treacherous in two different scenes (trying to persuade West to help him take control of the ship, playing on their shared military backgrounds, and later taking several characters hostage). He's also a massive downer claiming they're doomed all the time, which in a situation like this is outright dangerous, not just annoying. He'd have been better as a Token Evil Teammate who's useful (and actually does useful things rather than being The Load) because it's in his interest but definitely not trustworthy.

*The story is too complicated. I'd have dumped the time-travel issue and had them simply forced to fight the aliens to salvage the derelict human ship to repair their own. Of course, the only reason said human ship is there is because of the time-travel plot, so maybe they come across the wreckage of a previous expedition or some Global Sedition explorers in the same boat. The latter could be really interesting--they either have to fight them for the parts to repair their ship or they have to team up like how the Federation and Maquis did in Star Trek Voyager to make it back home or fight off aliens. Given how Global Sedition tried to kill Dr. Smith after he wasn't useful to them anymore, there could be hostility from that quarter, which given how in the show Smith's various shenanigans made life more difficult that makes sense. Plus, if one of the Sedition men gets older daughter Judy's Bad Boy Syndrome going (she apparently sacrificed a lot of her personal life to the project and might resent that, even if she's not as vocal as her siblings), we could have some kind of love triangle involving him, her, and the flirtatious West. A Global Sedition true believer might also give some back-story as to what the group actually believes--the only time their ideology is discussed is that they apparently are planning to build their own hypergate and leave the "Western devils" on Earth to die.

*The friendship between Will Robinson and the ship's robot that plays a critical role later is really, really sappy.

The Verdict

Not as abysmal as Spawn, but still pretty darn bad. So much potential wasted by a mediocre script that, as was pointed out in the podcast, needed some major rewrites. 5 out of 10.

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Blast from the Past Movie Review: Spawn (1997)

Last night I went over to my friend Nick's to watch Spawn for his podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood. It's likely to go live sometime in October as part of the Halloween-themed month and when it does, you'll be the first to know.

So let me tell you about how I movie I saw when I was in middle school (it came out the month I turned 13) about secret agent Al Simmons who returns from Hell as a demonic uber-warrior to see his wife again after making a deal with the Satan stand-in Malbolgia held up...

The Good

*John Leguizamo plays the demonic Violator, who's the "evil angel" on Spawn's shoulder to speak. And he's clearly having a lot of fun playing this character in all his perverted scatological glory. Among other things he eats a rotten pizza writhing with maggots out of a dumpster (something the actor actually did, according to TVTropes), passes prodigious quantities of gas, and even performs a cheerleading number dressed in drag. Yes, watch it. It's hilarious. But he's not just a purveyor of lowbrow humor and bad advice to our hero--watch out when he gets really mad (it's around 2 minutes into this clip). He's probably one of the best things about this movie.

*The character of Cogliostro, implied in this version to be a Hellspawn from an earlier generation who had successfully rebelled against Malbolgia and now serves Heaven, had a lot of potential to be an interesting character. They didn't touch on it as much as they could have, but then again, it's not his movie.

*I liked how they introduced the evil Jason Wynn (played by Martin Sheen) and his henchwoman Jessica Priest. Jason is smoking prodigiously and putting out his cigarettes in an ashtray crawling with live scorpions, while Priest is getting really friendly with a tarantula.

*The fight scenes--with the exception of the battle between Spawn and Cogliostro and the Violator in Hell--are pretty entertaining. Michael Jai White, who plays Spawn, is a martial artist in real life, so that certainly helps.

*Spawn's widow Wanda and his best friend Terry are in an interracial marriage with a biracial daughter and nobody cares. Not even the villains. It's a non-issue.

The Bad

*How on Earth a superhero movie could be this dull is beyond me. The opening credits (which consist of a lot of stylized fire effects and the names of pretty much everybody involved in the film) take about ten minutes. During the movie and the podcast I joked that this is where a lot of the special effects budget went, considering how poorly the rest of the special effects held up. The movie drags in multiple places, so this isn't just a one-time problem. It is probably one of the most excruciatingly dull films I've seen this year.

*The special effects are abysmal, especially in scenes taking place in Hell. The computer animation sequences in which the characters go to Hell (Al when he's damned as a murderer and Al and Cogliostro when Violator drags them into Hell to fight him there) is really fake. And when we actually get to Hell, it looks like (as TVTropes put it), a bad Playstation One game. Malbolgia is even worse--when he talks his mouth doesn't move with his words. And by that, I mean it doesn't move very much at all. This isn't some 1960s Godzilla movie with poor dubbing, but much, much worse.

Yes, I know the movie was made in 1997, but guess what else came out in 1997? Men In Black.The Lost World: Jurassic Park. And this is after the glories of Jurassic Park (1993) and The Abyss
(1989). This movie cost $40 million to make, so it's not like there wasn't money available.. I've seen much cheaper movies with much better special effects than this. If they made Hell a physical set in the vein of What Dreams May Come and made the Malbolgia a physical puppet monster rather than CGI, that would have been a massive improvement. Sometimes a big puppet really IS better than CGI.

*Here's a really ballsy alternative course they could have taken that would have dealt with the above issue--make the movie animated. There was an an HBO animated series that premiered a few months before the movie did and lasted a few years. The movie could have been a tie-in with the animated series in the vein of Ducktales The Movie or even replaced it completely. The former course makes more sense business-wise even if it means the movie would be released a year later, since a TV show is a cheaper way to build a fan-base. Animation would save money on actors (since it wouldn't take up as much of their time to record lines as opposed to physical acting) and avoid the special effects fails of the live-action movie.

And even though animation for adults is pretty risky in the USA, this would have been a great time for it. This is years before Batman Begins,during which the Batman saga consisted of the much goofier Schumacher films. Hell, this is the year of Batman and Robin, which from what little I know of it was just absurd.

(Seriously, a Bat Credit Card? And here are some really bad Mr. Freeze puns too.)

This is also the age of the dark 1990s antiheroes. Spawn is the epitome of that trend, being an undead assassin transformed into some kind of hell-monster who does really awful things to really awful people. There simply were no films reflecting this trend, so even a riskier violent animated movie would fill a gap.

The Verdict

So much wasted potential. Don't bother with it. 4 out of 10.

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Blast from the Past Movie Review: Super Mario Brothers (1993)

Over the weekend, I watched the 1993 film Super Mario Brothers with my friend Nick for his new podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood. The episode isn't available yet, but once it is I'll plug in the link in place of this sentence. :)

So how exactly did a video game series with only minimal plot (the plumber has got to rescue the princess from the lecherous turtle-dragon thingie) get made into a film with a plot? Well, the movie starts out with a woman fleeing through New York to deliver a metal case locked with an exotic stone to a convent in the way one generally associates with foundlings being abandoned. She then goes down a subway tunnel, where she encounters Dennis Hopper in a military uniform with reptilian ridges on his head. Meanwhile, the nuns open the box and the egg inside hatches, revealing an infant girl. Twenty-some years later, the struggling Mario Brothers plumbers encounter a young blonde woman who wears the stone from the prologue as a necklace...

The Good

*I'll give them points for trying to create an expanded world/plot based on the game, even if what ultimately emerged was, well...we'll get to that. We have back-stories for the Mario Brothers themselves, both of them clearly have lives outside of being plumbers (the elder brother Mario has a girlfriend of his own, while younger brother Luigi is into sci-fi, unexplained phenomena, etc). The plot also involves people from our own world ending up in the parallel dimension even before the plumbers themselves get involved, which is pretty innovative.

*Dennis Hopper is having a lot of fun as the nefarious Koopa and it shows. He's the best actor in the bunch and the most entertaining with his distinctive voice.

*There's one scene that comes off as a parody of Thelma and Louise. I guess that's a Parental Bonus.

*The ending--a pretty blatant Sequel Hook--did pique my interest. Apparently it piqued enough interest that a comic-book sequel was written, much like what happened with the film Serenity.

*I did like Yoshi, even though he was too small for anybody to ride on. He's a pretty good example of pre-Jurassic Park special effects--a dinosaur puppet that moves by itself.

*There's an inside joke for gamers that I didn't notice at first--Mario, whose girlfriend was abducted by dull-witted minions who mistook her for Daisy, must dance with a very large woman based on the Big Bertha character from the games in order to retrieve Princess Daisy's necklace. Said dancing includes burying his head in her cleavage to try to snatch the necklace with his mouth. The outfit he's wearing in that scene is orange--much like that of Wario, the evil Mario counterpart who first appeared a year or so before the movie came out. Pretty clever.

The Bad

*The wider world they tried to create is ridiculous even by the low standards of children's movies. The gist of it is that the meteor that killed the dinosaurs instead created some kind of parallel world where dinosaurs evolved into a mostly human-like species dwelling in an isolated analogue to New York City in the midst of a vast desert. I'm guessing having "humans" who are descended from dinosaurs was cheaper than having casts of thousands of reptilian-looking creatures--and would allow for a love story between Luigi and Princess Daisy that's not icky. However, given how the The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! that featured live-action sequences in our world and animated sequences in fantasyland had come out years before the movie, it would have been better if they'd done a similar live-action/animation split. The world and characters would be much more faithful to the game, which would help prevent the problem I'll get to next...

*Animation would allow for the Goombahs and Koopas to resemble their video-game counterparts better instead of being huge deformed quasi-dinosaurs. Given the science fiction plot, the Koopas could be human-sized reptilian creatures and the Goombahs could perhaps be humans (or human-like creatures) wearing some kind of armor? The Goombahs and Koopas instead are these ugly semi-retarded things that look ridiculous.

*They made Mario the plumbers' last name, so it's Mario Mario and Luigi Mario. It's so inane. It'd be better if the "Mario Brothers" thing resulted from a misunderstanding, perhaps by the inhabitants of fantasyland when they meet the plumbers.

*Bob Hoskins is Mario and John Leguizamo is Luigi. Bob Hoskins is 22 years older than John Leguizamo. They do explain this with Luigi claiming Mario pretty much raised him--I had the notion they might be from a large Catholic family where the parents married young and didn't use contraception, so the older siblings might be married and have families of their own when the youngest siblings are born and if the parents died, the older siblings would look after the younger ones. However, it'd be simpler if they were closer in age. Luigi makes a joke about how Mario was like a mother to him, so if they made casting decisions in order to justify a joke that really wasn't that funny, well...I really hope they didn't.

The Verdict

Very poorly made and often inane, but it has its entertaining moments. Four out of 10.

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Blast from the Past Movie Review: The Mighty Ducks

Last Saturday night, I watched The Mighty Ducks with my friend Nick for his podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood that should premiere soon. I saw the movie in theaters when it came out, so here're my thoughts on this tale of an arrogant attorney who rediscovers his love of hockey due to being forced to coach an impoverished youth hockey team after driving under the influence.

The Good

*Emilio Estevez does a good job playing Gordon Bombay, the arrogant attorney in question. He's quite obnoxious and karma bites him in the behind pretty darn quick. He also has a fairly strong character arc--he learns some lessons in humility and comes to love the children he'd once disdained as "barely human."

*The film has some pretty funny jokes, including a scene where ineffective goalie Goldberg (who is afraid of the puck) is tied up (in heavy pads) and the other kids shoot pucks at him to break him of his fear.

*A climactic scene where a character is deliberately injured by players on the rival team is downright painful to watch. The kid is strapped down on a backboard--as a former lifeguard, I've participated in backboard drills and when those get involved, you know some bad things are up.

*Some issues of social class get explored--the rival Hawks team is as good as it is because it's from a wealthier part of town and its parents can afford to provide good uniforms, rink time, etc. for their kids. Bombay has to get his boss at the law firm to provide a very large sum of money so the kids can buy equipment, practice, etc. Even if kids won't understand this, adults certainly will.

The Bad

*The film is really cliched. Bombay is haunted by his failure as a child to score at a hockey shootout and displeasing his overbearing coach, something that wrecked what could have developed into a promising hockey career. The film begins with a flashback to this and we see it at least one more time. We also see a quite literally sepia-toned flashback to Bombay practicing hockey as a kid with his late father (who died just before the hockey shootout) and an old Scandinavian mentor figure. And the Hawks team is straight out of the Cobra Kai school of bad juvenile athletes warped by their malevolent coach--the same coach who berated Gordon as a child for letting them all down for not scoring that critical goal.

*Per the above, there's a whole lot of Narm going on here. But it's not even funny Narm--it's just groan-inducing. Bombay's challenge to his boss--including QUACKING at him in the office--is just annoying.

*It's not 100% clear how old the kids Bombay is coaching actually are. They're part of a "peewee" hockey league and the team includes two girls, which means they're probably elementary or early middle school aged (before puberty would put the girls at a disadvantage in physical strength vis-a-vis the boys). Goldberg in particular says he hasn't had his bar mitzvah yet, which means he's younger than 13. A big plot point hinges on some of the kids misunderstanding something they overheard Gordon say to his former coach, a misunderstanding that only younger kids would make. However, the kids' dialogue sounds like something older kids would say, with the derogatory nickname "Cake Eater" (I'm guessing an allusion to the supposed quote from Marie Antoinette) for a wealthier character being something I wouldn't expect from young kids from the wrong side of the tracks. And one of the girl hockey players seems to be dating one of the boys--although this isn't really touched on much, they seem more like teens than sixth graders.

*Per the above point, many of the kids are really annoying and bratty, in particularly Jesse Hall who really needs a spanking (or, given how it'd be really improper for a non-parent to do that, perhaps a lot of wind sprints).

The Verdict

A good movie to take kids to see, but adults will likely be bored. 5.5 out of 10.

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