Somewhere the sun is shining

I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the end of the world. I don't mean a 2012/DEEP IMPACT/ARMAGEDDON style Big Woosh but more specifically the fall of civilization, the descent to barbarism, the necessary evil of banditry, the sovereignty of our darker angels and the requisite recalibration of the line between acting as a hero for your loved ones and being some stranger's worst nightmare. If I were alone in the world, I'd probably sit out the end of days parked in front of my widescreen, watching old movies as long as the power held or reading or catching up on some sleep. Having children changes you. The things you might do to protect them. Or feed them. Sometimes my daughter climbs out of her bath and says "Daddy, I'm cold" and I flash on a worst case scenario exploiting this momentary discomfort and dwell on the waking nightmare of not being able to do a goddamn thing about it. All this to say, I think about the end of the world a lot.

End of the world movies don't really have to be very good to pack some kind of wallop. Àlex and David Pastor's CARRIERS (2009) was kept in quarantine by Paramount Vantage for a couple of years before being given a platform release last fall and dumped onto DVD. It's not hard to see why Paramount didn't go for this grim tale of biological plague or why it might have wanted to distance itself from a less than heroic turn by Chris Pine, star of J. J. Abrams' rebooted STAR TREK (2009), cast here as the leader of a quartet of twentysomethings trying to make it to the Texas coast without catching the airborn bug that has decimated the world's population.

In various reviews and movie message boards, CARRIERS has been taken to task for not being 28 DAYS LATER (or 28 WEEKS LATER, for that matter) but I appreciated its quieter, smaller scale approach to the broad canvas of its subject matter. The movie isn't about big setpieces or grandstanding moments of ultraviolence and shock but about the minuteness of cruelty. Early in the film, we understand that the young survivors (who also include FAST FOOD NATION's Loy Taylor Pucci, THE CAVE's Piper Perabo and Emily Van Camp from THE RING TWO) have agreed on a set of rules by which they reckon they will avoid contamination and survive. Almost immediately, these hard and fast rules are put to the test. Resolves weaken, barriers come down, and tragedy thrives.

The worst thing about CARRIERS is the patness of its brother against brother scenario, which fails to tease anything new from the stereotype. Pine is the working stiff who resents the younger Pucci's Ivy League education (albeit one he never got to enjoy) and endeavors to steer him clear of potentially fatal displays of empathy and kindness. This tack might have worked if Pine were etched as a levelheaded autocrat but for some reason the filmmakers pitch him as one of those lightly bearded Ident-a-Kit rebels that one finds only at the movies and his beer-swilling bellicosity cloys and annoys. The best thing about CARRIERS is the cameo by LAW & ORDER; SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT's Christopher Meloni, as a father desperately trying to get his infected daughter (MAD MEN's Kiernan Shipka) to a help station in time to save her life. The scene in which these characters are abandoned by the protagonists is an exquisitely rendered moment of perfect tragedy and the film's emotional tentpole. No other scene carries nearly the same payload, however Pastor y Pastor trowel on the home movie flashbacks to goose the gravitas.

Well-intentioned, CARRIERS too often shoots itself in the foot with misguided sidebars and lost opportunities. The softly devastating scene mentioned above is followed by one in which the four protagonists frolic on a country club golf course, with the filmmakers piping in incidental rock music as if the whole thing were a screw-the-establishment style 80s comedy. There is another well-played scene set at a desert gas station (in which a member of the gang who has been concealing her infection is remanded to the inevitable) and the film's final speech has a pleasantly lyrical quality but all-told CARRIERS feels strangely at odds with itself - occasionally haunting but hardly getting the greatest yield from its allotted time.

The principal of the thing

Arbogast on Film has been remiss in recognizing yet another contribution to our floating blog-a-thon, The One You Might Have Saved. Over at Temple of Schlock back in July, Chris Poggiali picked Victoria Principal from George Armitage's classic brother-on-brother mano-a-mano VIGILANTE FORCE (1976), which stuck the bosomy, Japan-born starlet (who turned 60 on January 3rd) between warring sibs Kris Kristofferson and Jan-Michael Vincent. The movie is a personal favorite and Chris makes a persuasive case for Principal's ill-starred schoolmarm Linda Christopher, the film's "tragic simpleton," as being rescue-worthy. (In a perfect world, I mean.) I remember watching the movie on TV in the late 1970s and being shocked to see Principal, who I knew from THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JUDGE ROY BEAN (1972) and EARTHQUAKE (1974) and Playboy, gunned down like a bitch. But here I am, getting ahead of myself. It's Chris' story. Let him tell it.

Death Notice: Curtis Allina

The man who put the heads on Pez dispensers has died. Curtis Allina succumbed to heart failure on December 15, 2009, at the age of 87. Born in Prague on August 15, 1922, Allina's family were Sephardic Jews who suffered greatly at the hands of the Third Reich. Emigrating to the States after the war, Allina worked for a New York meat packer before landing a gig in 1953 with Pez-Haas, the American arm of the Viennese confectioner. (The brand "Pez" is a shortening of Pfefferminz, German for peppermint, the candy's first flavor.) The original Pez dispensers were designed to look like cigarette lighters and marketed to adults. Allina thought the candy could appeal to children (and sales might boom) if the packaging were more fun. He tirelessly lobbied the Vienna office for change until the suits gave in. The first headed Pez dispenser was Santa Claus. Based in Orange, Connecticut, Pez continues to do booming business, selling tens of thousands of units each year. Allina left Pez in 1979 to head Au'Some Candy. La dolce vita indeed.

Nupondi spoken here

The neverending blogathon, The One You Might Have Saved, lives on over at The United Provinces of Ivanlandia, where Ivan himself sheds a tear for ONE MILLION YEARS B.C.'s dark horse hottie, Nupondi... and doesn't care if you see it.

If I were king...

... or if I ran a tee shirt company, this anonymous film review cadged from the Netflix website would definitely merit its own unit:

"This movie sucks no offense i couldnt watch the hole thing i got so bored and tired of it that i finally quit i would give not even a whole start plus in some parts the picture is horrid just saying"

I think that's my product line right there: Just Saying Tees!

Happy New Year!

Start this one off right!

... 5... 4... 3... 2...

As Barry Manilow would likely say, it's another New Year's Eve. Here's to brighter skies and better days in 2010, the year we make... a living. God willin' and the ship don't flip.