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Scoop:
I do not know if you've read Kathleen Turner's new autobiography, which I
just finished and didn't find very interesting, but one thing did stand out
in this book. She explained that she has always done her own nudity in
movies, with the exception of having used a stunt butt in "The Man With Two
Brains" because she didn't think the scene was funny. I doubt that was the
reason since her ass is not her best feature and I think she didn't want it
photographed up close. It always looked like an insert butt in the scene,
but I wondered if she had that much clout in only her second movie to demand
they use a stunt butt and after having just come off Body Heat. BTW, she was
paid $30,000 for Body Heat. Anyway, the next time someone posts a photo
showing that as her butt, you can point out what it actually is.
C
The Gene Generation
The Gene Generation is a cyberpunk/steampunk offering which consists
mostly of actors performing in front of green screens, with the superimposed backgrounds supplied by comic book art. The result is similar to a rotoscope
film, except that the humans are portrayed by three-dimensional actors
rather than two-dimensional posterized images of the same actors.
That is
if you are willing to accept Bai Ling as a three-dimensional actor.
Debatable, I admit.
Unlike speculative future fiction, which takes place
in a future human society in which some dangerous modern trend has not been
properly regulated, steampunk and cyberpunk adventures take place in some
alternate universe in which a human-like society has developed with
different styles and technologies. The most common conceit involves the
extension of the 19th century's obsession with enormous machines, as used in
a post-industrial society that could never quite get the "post" right
because it never figured out how to miniaturize
or transistorize the machines.
If you think about it, you'll realize that
we had some periods in human history which played out sort of like steampunk
adventures. For the first thirty years of the 20th century, we had recorded
voices and silent films, but nobody seemed to be able to put the two
together, even though it would have been almost as simple as playing a
record while the movie was being projected. Steampunk and cyberpunk writers
love to imagine exaggerated versions of these sorts of crazy gaps in
technology. The people in their imaginary dystopias have advanced computers,
but they operate them with rusty metal keyboards, and their monitor outputs
are eternally stuck in the era of green text on black backgrounds. They can
alter a human's DNA with a bracelet, but they don't have cell phones, and
all of their gargoyle-festooned buildings look like places where the Phantom
of the Opera would feel snuggly. They have the advanced technology required
to fill the skies with traffic, but the airborne vehicles look like the
Chinese junks one might have seen in the Hong Kong harbor in 1890. Their
inventions have brought them all the drawbacks of technology, with none of
the conveniences. Part of their world is derived from Blade Runner and
another part of it from Conan the Barbarian, and the fun of it all derives
from the mixing of technologies which should be centuries or even millennia
apart.
The Gene Generation has all of those elements I just described, and
they create a fairly interesting backdrop for the action, but one cannot
build an interesting film solely on backdrop. Like this film, Sin City basically put an
alternate comic book universe on screen with live actors, but Sin City would
not have been worth the watch except for some interesting story lines, a lot of heart, and an authentic film noir
sensibility. In contrast, The Gene Generation is basically just a routine B movie about
mobsters and assassins, except with an odd alternate universe in the
background. The original premise about DNA re-programming is virtually
abandoned, and the little of it that remains is about as scientific as an
episode of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Mostly the DNA reordering just
involves turning humans into things that look like skeletons occupied by
some writhing snakes, and even that bizarre conceit never really becomes central to the
action, other than that the assassins will occasionally overpower somebody
with magical snake bracelets instead of bullets.
Strangely enough for a
movie with plenty of imagination in the animated portions, the costuming is
completely unimaginative. The good people of their world, as well as the
evil, all wear leather Fonzie jackets pretty much all of the time. I guess that
1950s bad boy style is supposed to look "punk," but as I surveyed the bleak and
sunless landscape of their world, I had a hard time imagining the areas
where they raised all the necessary cattle. (Fonzie grew up in Wisconsin,
where there is no shortage of cows.) Of course the logic never
matters in cyberpunk, but the imagination does, and one thinks the director
might have benefited from employing some costume specialists who could have
made the people in his foregrounds as outré as the cartoons in his
backgrounds.
The bottom line on The Gene Generation is that some good
concepts remain undeveloped, and some imaginative background details go
unsupported by what the humans are doing in the foreground. The director
(who also write the comic book, ala Frank Miller) showed some impressive
talent in some areas of film creation, but desperately needed a better story.
Bai Ling did do some impressive
nudity. Here are the film
clips. The samples are below.