Tag Archives: New Mexico

Cowboys and Aliens

In Cowboys and Aliens, it’s 1873 and a skinny, craggy Daniel Craig awakes in the Arizona desert with no recollection of who he is nor how he got there, and with a strange, beeping, modern metal bangle strapped to his wrist. When he arrives at the nearest town, it’s attacked by aliens with vastly superior fire power, and Daniel joins a posse alongside a surly rancher (Harrison Ford) to track them down and rescue the girl.

That’s it in a nutshell. It’s not a deep plot, all things considered. The Western part of the mash-up is very well done though – everything from the horses to the dust to the costumes feels stylish and authentic. (It also filmed in Plaza Bianca just outside Santa Fe in New Mexico, where we hosted Cineposium a few years back). The aliens bit of the mash-up is less well done however, which is a bit disappointing really. The best thing about Cowboys and Aliens – apart from Daniel Craig in chaps, of course – is that the movie is played completely straight. Not a witty quip from a mouthy African-American side-kick in sight.

True Grit

The Cohen Brothers’ remake of True Grit, starring Matt Damon and an incomprehensible Jeff Bridges, filmed in New Mexico – I’m guessing because of the incentives as much as for the pristine Old West landscapes. You all know the story of the prissy teenage girl who hires a bounty hunter to track her father’s killer and then goes along for the ride.

To be honest, I don’t have much to report from the film. I preferred the original? Matt Damon’s good? It’s not the best Cohen Brothers work I’ve ever seen? I liked it, just not massively, and it failed to move me in any way, positively or negatively. Sad but true.

Paul

Oh I so so so nearly loved Paul. Nearly, but not quite. It’s about two harmless British sci-fi geeks who’re attending Comic Con in San Diego (actually Albuquerque Convention Center) and then heading off on a road trip to some of the American South-West’s most iconic sci-fi sights and sites. Heading towards Roswell, New Mexico in a camper van, they inadvertently rescue a lippy alien called Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen) from some bad guys and set in motion a ridiculous, silly but smile-worthy cross country.

So Paul’s got Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who are sweet and nerdy and sympathetic and likeable. Current it-girl Kirsten Wiig is in it too, as an odd-ball Creationist who kind of has to have a re-think, faced with the short, green body of evidence before her. Jason Bateman, Bill Hader, David Koechner, Jane Lynch are in it too and of course Seth Rogen; all it needed was Paul Rudd, Will Ferrell and Catherine Tate and it’d be a real self-congratulatory Who’s Who of trans-atlantic funny folk.

New Mexico obviously features strongly as a location; the scene where Paul goes shopping in disguise was shot on Bridge Street in Las Vegas, NM – not Las Vegas NV. I’m guessing in Las Vegas NV, Paul would’ve fit right in.

Thor

Thor was a nice film. Entertaining enough. I liked Kat Dennings channelling Justin Bartha as the dry Riley Poole sidekick. I like Chris Hemsworth better without the hair. I love (of course) Natalie Portman. But it felt like watching a tv show. Nothing wrong with that per se, but I don’t see it being a thunderingly auspicious start to an Iron Man-esque franchise. It felt kind of shallow. I bet it’ll sell a ton of toys though. The town where the exiled Thor inadvertently crashlands for the very briefest of times, was purpose built in the scrubland outside of Galisteo, New Mexico. Strangely, I can’t summon the enthusiasm to write more than that.

Let Me In

Oh, I really, really wanted to enjoy Let Me In. As you know, I loved the originals: the book – Let The Right One In - and the Swedish movie of the same name. And I even relished the idea of the story reinvented the Mountain States (though I wish Colorado’s incentives had won it for Fort Collins, rather than Los Alamos, New Mexico.)

But I’m really sorry to report that I found Let Me In really disappointing. It’s well cast, (the kids are great, Richard Jenkins is creepy), beautifully lit, and well-enough paced , but it’s just feels like it’s entirely lacking the social commentary – the poverty, the alcoholism, the child abuse, the broken homes, the bullying and casual violence – that made the originals so chilling and so immediate. They even chickened out of the icky sex change business. So I was disappointed. Disappointed.

Los Alamos does well out of the movie though, it’s front and centre of the action – a smart PR move by the town, proving that even bad publicity is good publicity. Details of filming on location via the link.

Did You Hear About The Morgans?

Clearly I have developed Tourettes: since last night’s movie Did You Hear About The Morgans?, I’ve been blurting out all kinds of ill-advised and off-colour swear words at inopportune moments.

The Morgans starts on tricky ground for a comedy – an estranged NooYoyk couple, her wounded, him pleading – witness a murder and are whisked off, together, into the Federal Witness Protection Program in rural Wyoming. (Wyoming’s all rural, actually, but it just sounded better written that way). There they have to learn to trust each other and learn to laugh together again and learn about just how nice and homely the folk are in the state that beat Matthew Sheppard unconscious and left him strapped to a post – all the while unaware that the incompetent assassin is tracking them down.

Listen, Did You Hear About The Morgans? is not, on paper, a bad film. The plot is obvious, sweet, fish-out-of-water, town-and-country vignettes kind of stuff, Sarah Jessica Parker is (gasp) really quite touching as the emotionally injured wife, and there’s a nice enough cast of supporting players. However, what you’ve probably already heard about The Morgans is that it’s basically unwatchable, and that is all down to Hugh Grant. OMG – here comes the tourettes again, fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck – what the fuck was that performance? A role so completely at odds with the tone of the movie, so grating, so stilted, so shallow, so totally self-referential (Hugh as himself, basically) that every time he’s on screen the movie dies a thousand small deaths. Awful.

As for Wyoming, the movie of course filmed in New Mexico – allegedly because Wyoming Republicans (led by that charmer Dick Cheney) objected to jokes about Sarah Palin and the state’s venomous attitude towards liberals. As a result, the ranch that appears in the film is actually to be found in Pecos NM, the rodeo grounds in Galisteo, and there really is a town of Ray. It’s just not in Wyoming. As a result of Cheney’s political interference, 75 NM crew and 1000 NM extras scored the jobs that could potentially have gone to Wyomingans (is that a word?) Apparently the DVD’s extras include “an interesting look at how a small New Mexico town cheated for Wyoming.”

The Book of Eli

In The Book of Eli, Denzel Washington plays a mysterious stranger moving through a shattered post-apocalyptic landscape of dessicated ghost towns and cannibalistic marauders carrying the only surviving copy of the King James Bible. This magical book possesses the power to save mankind and must be protected at all costs. Think Pale Rider meets The Passion of The Christ meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

So The Book of Eli entertaining enough “in it’s own little mud-brown way” (as per Stephanie Zacharek’s scathing review in Salon.com) It tries hard, mostly using CGI on a studio set, to evocate of a particular nightmarish time and place, and its not without its dramatic tensions. Why quite so many hammy English character actors are out in the New Mexico desert, though, is not explained.

It’s also not explained what caused the war in the first place. My bet it would be blind, prescripitive, thoughtless adherence to – or rather wilful, selfish misinterpretation of – the good words written in that precious book. As Stephanie says: “The Book of Eli. Read it and weep.”

Carriers

A couple of random things. 1.) A couple of years back, I took a road trip through New Mexico. I thought it looked like the Klein Karoo. 2.) I read a short story book about Zombies while in LA. And 3.) I also just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s bleak (and a little pointless?) book The Road about a road trip from hell. (I probably won’t watch the film now, thanks.)

So, aside from now planning to create a food and medicines stash in my basement, I was reminded of all of the above when I caught another little road movie called Carriers on the looonnng plane journey from LA to Dubai.

Carriers stars the rockin’ Chris Pine and the even more lovely Piper Perabo as a part of a mismatched foursome travelling through New Mexico in the aftermath of a vicious and extensive plague. Most folks have died nastily, and the increasingly desperate survivors battle to retain their humanity in the face of unspeakable choices. Christopher Meloni’s in it too, a Dad struggling to save his infected little girl.

It’s a small film really – it was apparently filmed back in 2006 and never released – but it’s creepy and disturbing and pretty convincing. Well filmed, well lit, well acted, it proved an uncomfortably enjoyably way to fill some of a 16 hour flight.

Terminator Salvation

Three movies and a tv series later – all of which, remember, were about actually stopping Skynet and the nuclear war – and the Robots of Terminator Salvation have indeed taken over the world. The grown-up John Connor, method-acted into snarly oblivion by the increasingly unpleasant Christian Bale, is now some sort of post-apocalyptic messiah, coordinating the surviving humans against the all-knowing, and unstoppable robotic onslaught. Well, sort of.

SciFi is, I think, meant to include Science as well as Fiction – things have to be at least vaguely sensible. And this isn’t. For instance, whilst the robots are apparently able to pick up enemy movement at will, they miss the rebel base entirely and they completely fail to react to the torching of a whole forest by Connor and his crowd. Can anyone say “heat seeking missile”?

And whilst Sam Worthington looks pretty (and he certainly picks up a lot of the slack for the odiously one-dimensional Bale) what exactly is he there for? To raise questions about the blurring distinctions between man and machine? Perhaps. Because while the movie raises those questions, it doesn’t get around to answering them. All Very Perplexing.

For what it’s worth, Terminator Salvation filmed in New Mexico.  New Mexico Magazine offers advice on day trips to the locations in the film. And in case there was any doubt about how filming can involve the whole community, here’s a story about how two dogs from the local doggie day care won featured extras roles…..

Taos, Summer of Love

GQ magazine is running a feature on road trip essentials that directs you to Taos, New Mexico (a remarkable arts colony in the middle of nowhere that I was lucky enough to visit en route back from the Santa Fe Cineposium last year.)

Legendary scary-person Dennis Hopper lived in Taos—physically, anyway—in the sixties and seventies, and Taos is shrewdly using the 40th anniversary of the Hopper-directed Easy Rider movie, (which partly filmed in the State) as an excuse for a series of events known as The Summer of Love.

There’ll be art exhibitions (including one curated by Hopper), throwback concerts (Country Joe re-creating his set at Woodstock), and (naturally) motorcycle rallies. Another local, Dean Stockwell is the Grand Marshal of the town’s hippie parade on June 6. (if you only know him from Blue Velvet—or worse, Quantum Leap—do yourself a favor and rent the 1968 film Psych-Out, which also features a healthy dose of early Nicholson…..)

And for another take on dysfunctional film-inspired road trips, here’s an article at the Sydney Morning Herald.