First up, a bit of fun in Spaceman, a 1997 Indy SF film about a 4 year old kid who is kidnapped by aliens. They raised him to be a soldier and trained him to kill. Twenty-five years later he's accidentally left on Earth in Chicago. He survives the best he can. He tries to get jobs in the army and the FBI, because of his fighting and killing skills, but they won't hire him. When we meet him he's working in a supermarket where he doesn't quite fit in though he's a good worker. Angered one day he beats up a shoplifter. After he gets fired he winds up in the psych ward where he learns about hit men from another patient. His attempt to get a job as an assassin with the local mafia boss pits that man against him. Toss in some dissection crazy FBI agents, a pretty girl next door, some fighting, a few jokes, and you've got a fairly decent movie. It even has a happy ending.
The movie is written and directed by Scott Dikkers. I hadn't heard of him before, this is his first film. He directed a second film called Bad Meat in 2004 and in 2007 to 2008 he was an senior exec producer on The Onion TV show. I never watch that series but I know about it and the newspaper.
I liked the whole premise and the script is pretty good. There were some good jokes, a got a few laughs, and the dialog was better than the production values. Production values are non-existent on a movie that's said to cost about $50K but they do OK moving the camera around and setting up their shots. You can see the fuzziness of the DVD image in the screen caps here. The acting isn't always so hot either, some of them are much better than others, but it isn't so awful I had to turn it off. I've seen plenty of these Indy films that have worse acting. It gets a 5.8 on the IMDb and that's not a bad score for a movie like this. Of the 235 votes., fifty people gave it a 10 and 49 people gave it a 6. I gave it a 6 because it isn't a 7 and it's better than a five. It's not the little gem I'm always piping on about but I'd still recommend it to the SF fan that likes a bit of comedy.
I hadn't seen the two Ewok Adventures before. It's not unusual, I don't follow much of anything in the Star Wars universe really. I don't actively seek out the new movies. Someone lent me a DVD set with both films in it. I'm watching that today.
Caravan Of Courage - An Ewok Adventure 1984 The first TV movie was originally call The Ewok Adventure but later it had the title changed. The story came from George Lucas and the screenplay was written by Bob Carrau. It was directed by John Korty. I wasn't familiar with John but I see in 1972 he directed The People, a TV movie based on the Zenna Henderson People novels. I read those books and I remember seeing the TV movie. I haven't seen it in years so I just downloaded it off of YouTube. It stars Kim Darby and William Shattner. A couple of years later John would win an Emmy for directing The Autobiography Of Miss Jane Pittman. I did see that but I'm not that interested in seeing it again. Joe Johnston was the Production Designer on both TV movies.
In Caravan Of Courage a couple of kids get separated from their parents after their ship crashes on Endor. They get befriended by the Ewoks and stay with them. They find out their parents are prisoners in the castle of a giant so they get a gang of Ewoks together to go rescue them.
In the 1985 sequel, The Battle For Endor - An Ewok Adventure, the family are still living with the Ewoks when the village is attacked in a bloody battle that leaves the little blond girl alone with Wicket. Her whole family gets slaughtered along with plenty of Ewoks. Blondie and Wicket run away and are befriended by a critter with hairy ears called Wilfred Brimley. First he's a gruff old poop but he's a softie inside. They all bond together and work out a plan to fix is spaceship and take off from Endor. It's a good plan, that place really sucks. There's plenty of killing in this one.
Both movies have some of the last stop motion animation produced by ILM before they switched to Go-Motion animation. It's not anything outstanding but most of the critters were OK. They also use a good bit of latent image matte painting which is where they block off sections of the film as the shot and then rewind the film to shoot the matte painting. Those bits are fairly well done. Too bad the stories were kind of weak. I did read that Lucas wasn't too happy with the productions. Not unhappy enough to ban them from DVD. There was a 2004 edition and that's what I watched. That DVD is now out of print, I see they are going for good money, 40 bucks on up, on eBay and Amazon. It's not good enough to get me to spend that sort of money, if I need one, I'll buy a bootleg, there are plenty out there for $10-15. Still both TV movies are much better than that Star Wars Christmas Special. Maybe the cash strapped Disney will put them out on Blu-ray in the future.
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