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Spaceman
List Price: Unknown [Buy now and save at Amazon]
The Movie:
I supposed I expected a bit more from the man who was the "creative mind" behind popular newspaper "The Onion", which also published its first book last year. "Spaceman" feels like director Scott Dikkers and friends simply got together and decided to make a little movie on the weekends. Whenever a situation like this happens, you either get a course in low-budget hilarity ("Clerks"), or you get a mess. "Spaceman", for the most part, is a mess.
"Spaceman" opens with a young child getting kidnapped by aliens. Flash forward to years later, when his ship crash-lands, but he's nowhere to be found. The child, now a Spaceman(David Ghilardi) tries to find employment in a supermarket. But, as he's now seemingly been re-programmed to be not such a nice space guy, he tends to beat people up who are either following him or after him or what not, so after getting fired from his supermarket job he becomes a hitman - and he fails at that, too. But, apparently he means well - he's just seeking out his mother, who he was taken from years ago.
The main problem is that Ghilardi plays "Spaceman" as if he's a space robot. It's a dull performance, and it's not helped that very few of the lines or situations are actually amusing. Although "Third Rock From The Sun" has begun to finally run out of "fish out of water" bits for the aliens on that television show (it's going off the air soon), John Lithgow's performance as the leader of the alien group living as humans has been nothing less than a masterpiece of comedic timing during various episodes.
"Rock", and to a lesser extent the "Coneheads" movie of a couple years ago proved that there is still a bit more to be mined out of the aliens learning about Earth genre - but "Spaceman"'s attempt at pulling anything new out of the idea comes up with nothing. It's a dull film that's too dark to be considered a comedy and too poorly acted to be unintentionally funny. A real dissapointment.
In the current issue of Premiere magazine, there's an article discussing how Miramax films has signed a deal with the writers of the Onion. "What we want is to make movies that don't suck", says the current editor-in-chief. Hopefully that means that we won't be seeing a sequel to "Spaceman" anytime soon.
The DVD
VIDEO: "Spaceman" is presented in what looks to be about 1.66:1 widescreen, and it is not anamorphic. It's also a not a particularly great looking transfer, although that complaint would probably be more due to the filmmakers than to the effort to bring it to DVD. Sharpness and detail are all over the map - a few scenes looked passably sharp, but others looked soft - some even looked slightly out of focus. The film's few night scenes looked murky and lacked detail - a couple shots seemed almost completely undefined.
Colors usually looked natural, but not bright or vibrant in any way. At times, they started to appear murky and showed some slight signs of color bleeding. That's not all, though. Although I was suprised that the feature wasn't in worse condition, there were some noticable scratches and marks throughout the movie. An instance or two of pixelation appears, but no edge enhancement. It's a decent effort to present very low-budget material.
SOUND: "Spaceman" is presented in Dolby Digital 5.1. The Chace Digital Stereo logo on the back of the box would seem to indicate that processing has been used to make this 5.1 presentation - that, and I doubt a film this low budget would be 5.1 in the first place. The results are very strange at times, indeed. There's little surround use, that I was already texpecting.
What I wasn't expecting though, was an oddity with the dialogue. For the most part, dialogue came through the center speaker, although at a rather low volume. I'd turn up the volume, and during some of the scenes the dialogue also starts to come out of the right front speaker. It's a strange and somewhat distracting effect, which forced me to turn the volume down. Audio quality remained decent, although rather thin at times. I found the dialogue situation to be a rather annoying and overall, this wasn't a particularly good re-working of the sound.
MENUS:: The menus are quite well-done, with animated backgrounds for both main and sub-menus, along with the score playing.
EXTRAS:
Commentary: If the movie wasn't the least bit interesting, at least the commentary is entertaining. director Scott Dikkers discusses the challenges of making a film at absolutely no money at the same time as he was doing major re-working of "The Onion". There were quite a few problems during the shoot, including accidentially making some trouble at the grocery store they were shooting in and having the managers disrupt their filming as a result. During the filming, the director also ran out of money and couldn't complete the film, having to have to think about where to live instead of where to edit. At one point in the discussion, Dikkers wonders if he should have played the film for laughs - he should have went with that. Still, it's a very interesting commentary that's more entertaining to listen to than the movie.
Also: 5 deleted scenes, trailer, quiz game, previews for other Palm Pictures titles, weblink.
Final Thoughts: "Spaceman" was a major dissapointment, coming from someone who came up with "The Onion". The performances are not particularly good and the film doesn't know whether it wants to be a comedy or...something else which I'm still not sure. Neither the audio or video quality is very good, and the discs few extras are interesting. Not recommended.
I supposed I expected a bit more from the man who was the "creative mind" behind popular newspaper "The Onion", which also published its first book last year. "Spaceman" feels like director Scott Dikkers and friends simply got together and decided to make a little movie on the weekends. Whenever a situation like this happens, you either get a course in low-budget hilarity ("Clerks"), or you get a mess. "Spaceman", for the most part, is a mess.
"Spaceman" opens with a young child getting kidnapped by aliens. Flash forward to years later, when his ship crash-lands, but he's nowhere to be found. The child, now a Spaceman(David Ghilardi) tries to find employment in a supermarket. But, as he's now seemingly been re-programmed to be not such a nice space guy, he tends to beat people up who are either following him or after him or what not, so after getting fired from his supermarket job he becomes a hitman - and he fails at that, too. But, apparently he means well - he's just seeking out his mother, who he was taken from years ago.
The main problem is that Ghilardi plays "Spaceman" as if he's a space robot. It's a dull performance, and it's not helped that very few of the lines or situations are actually amusing. Although "Third Rock From The Sun" has begun to finally run out of "fish out of water" bits for the aliens on that television show (it's going off the air soon), John Lithgow's performance as the leader of the alien group living as humans has been nothing less than a masterpiece of comedic timing during various episodes.
"Rock", and to a lesser extent the "Coneheads" movie of a couple years ago proved that there is still a bit more to be mined out of the aliens learning about Earth genre - but "Spaceman"'s attempt at pulling anything new out of the idea comes up with nothing. It's a dull film that's too dark to be considered a comedy and too poorly acted to be unintentionally funny. A real dissapointment.
In the current issue of Premiere magazine, there's an article discussing how Miramax films has signed a deal with the writers of the Onion. "What we want is to make movies that don't suck", says the current editor-in-chief. Hopefully that means that we won't be seeing a sequel to "Spaceman" anytime soon.
The DVD
VIDEO: "Spaceman" is presented in what looks to be about 1.66:1 widescreen, and it is not anamorphic. It's also a not a particularly great looking transfer, although that complaint would probably be more due to the filmmakers than to the effort to bring it to DVD. Sharpness and detail are all over the map - a few scenes looked passably sharp, but others looked soft - some even looked slightly out of focus. The film's few night scenes looked murky and lacked detail - a couple shots seemed almost completely undefined.
Colors usually looked natural, but not bright or vibrant in any way. At times, they started to appear murky and showed some slight signs of color bleeding. That's not all, though. Although I was suprised that the feature wasn't in worse condition, there were some noticable scratches and marks throughout the movie. An instance or two of pixelation appears, but no edge enhancement. It's a decent effort to present very low-budget material.
SOUND: "Spaceman" is presented in Dolby Digital 5.1. The Chace Digital Stereo logo on the back of the box would seem to indicate that processing has been used to make this 5.1 presentation - that, and I doubt a film this low budget would be 5.1 in the first place. The results are very strange at times, indeed. There's little surround use, that I was already texpecting.
What I wasn't expecting though, was an oddity with the dialogue. For the most part, dialogue came through the center speaker, although at a rather low volume. I'd turn up the volume, and during some of the scenes the dialogue also starts to come out of the right front speaker. It's a strange and somewhat distracting effect, which forced me to turn the volume down. Audio quality remained decent, although rather thin at times. I found the dialogue situation to be a rather annoying and overall, this wasn't a particularly good re-working of the sound.
MENUS:: The menus are quite well-done, with animated backgrounds for both main and sub-menus, along with the score playing.
EXTRAS:
Commentary: If the movie wasn't the least bit interesting, at least the commentary is entertaining. director Scott Dikkers discusses the challenges of making a film at absolutely no money at the same time as he was doing major re-working of "The Onion". There were quite a few problems during the shoot, including accidentially making some trouble at the grocery store they were shooting in and having the managers disrupt their filming as a result. During the filming, the director also ran out of money and couldn't complete the film, having to have to think about where to live instead of where to edit. At one point in the discussion, Dikkers wonders if he should have played the film for laughs - he should have went with that. Still, it's a very interesting commentary that's more entertaining to listen to than the movie.
Also: 5 deleted scenes, trailer, quiz game, previews for other Palm Pictures titles, weblink.
Final Thoughts: "Spaceman" was a major dissapointment, coming from someone who came up with "The Onion". The performances are not particularly good and the film doesn't know whether it wants to be a comedy or...something else which I'm still not sure. Neither the audio or video quality is very good, and the discs few extras are interesting. Not recommended.
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