Entertainment
Bill Murray's Epic, Steampunk Sci-Fi Is Already Being Forgotten By A Generation
By Britta DeVore
| Published
We’re so incredibly used to having every piece of media at our fingertips, with streamers like Netflix offering copious amounts of TV shows and movies for the price of a subscription. Still, some titles haven’t made it to streaming platforms. In an era where fewer than fifty percent of households have access to a DVD or Blu-Ray player, that means they can’t be watched. And if a movie can’t be watched, it will be forgotten.
That’s exactly what’s happening to City of Ember, the 2008 steampunk fantasy movie. Despite a star-studded cast led by Bill Murray, the movie isn’t available to stream anywhere except as an extremely pricey rental on Apple TV. It’s worth paying that price to see.
The film, which is based on Jeanne DuPrau’s 2003 novel, The City of Ember, is a fantasy lover’s dream as it takes audiences underground to the titular city. Running on a generator that has served its purpose for more than a century, time is running out, and with it, the lights within the deep cave start to dim and flicker.
Taking matters into their own hands and seeing themselves as the city’s only hope at restoring light to even its darkest corners, two teenagers, Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan) and Doon Harrow (Harry Treadaway) go on a dangerous yet exciting journey to turn the lights back on for good.
After having earned an Oscar nod for her work in Atonement, City of Ember was another pivotal stepping stone in Saoirse Ronan’s career, which would ultimately lead her to earn three more Academy Award nominations and heaps of accolades for her work in such projects as Brooklyn, Lady Bird, and Little Women. The casting team behind the fantastical tale’s on-screen adaptation was on their A-game for this one, as they also nabbed names including Bill Murray (Lost in Translation) and Tim Robbins (The Shawshank Redemption).
Just as it was a pivotal career moment for its star Saoirse Ronan, City of Ember was a similarly huge moment for director Gil Kenan. Two years earlier, Kenan had paired up with Columbia Pictures for the animated horror flick, Monster House, giving him the preparation and connections needed to jump into live-action filmmaking with City of Ember.
From there, Kenan’s hold on Hollywood continued to expand with the helmer attaching himself to the 2015 remake of the horror classic Poltergeist, the holiday fantasy flick, A Boy Called Christmas, and, most recently, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.
City Of Ember’s Box Office Disaster
Unfortunately for Kenan’s first live-action film, all the big names around (which included Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman as producers) couldn’t save the production from being a financial disaster. Despite making a concerted effort to time the movie’s release shortly after the final book of DuPrau’s series hit shelves, City of Ember couldn’t keep the lights on at the box office. After spending $55 million on the feature’s production, the movie would only rake in $17.0 million, marking it as a gargantuan box office bust.
City of Ember didn’t bomb because it was terrible; it bombed because no one knew what it was supposed to be. Released in 2008 with a modest budget and almost no marketing push, the film suffered from a complete identity crisis. It looked like a kids’ movie, played like a dystopian thriller, and was based on a book that didn’t have the built-in audience studios were hoping for.
Saoirse Ronan wasn’t a box office draw, and the rest of the cast, while solid, didn’t give audiences a reason to show up opening weekend. Add in a dark, grim visual tone that undercut its family appeal and a release window crowded with bigger, louder competition, and City of Ember simply got buried,one of those cases where a decent movie disappears because the studio never figured out how to sell it.
Why The Critics Got It Wrong
Critically, City of Ember landed in that frustrating middle ground; reviewers generally agreed it was well-made, but not compelling enough to matter. But those critics judged it for what it wasn’t instead of recognizing what it actually was.
Reviews knocked it for being “low-stakes” and too simple, but that restraint is the point; the film isn’t trying to be a bombastic dystopian spectacle, it’s a slow-burn mystery about decay, curiosity, and survival. What critics labeled as thin plotting is really deliberate minimalism, allowing the world itself to carry the tension.
The production design wasn’t just impressive; it was the movie, creating a lived-in, dying civilization that most bigger-budget films fail to achieve. And Saoirse Ronan anchors it with a grounded, human performance that fits the story’s scale perfectly. City of Ember was sincere, patient, and visually rich, qualities critics mistook for weakness when they were actually the film’s biggest strengths.
Why You Can’t Watch City Of Ember
Unfortunately, with weak box office and middling reviews, making City of Ember available on streaming hasn’t been a priority for anyone. It’s not available on any major streaming service.
Currently, the only way to stream City of Ember is via Apple TV, where you have to pay an exorbitant on-demand fee. If you haven’t seen it yet, pay up and watch before it’s gone.
Entertainment
Star Trek’s Most Ambitious Villain Helped Create The Franchise’s Most Complex Hero
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
When Star Trek: Voyager first came out, the most fascinating character was the Doctor. While Robert Picardo’s performance was superb, it’s fair to say this character was mostly fascinating on a conceptual level. We had seen things like hypercompetent Starfleet captains and exotic aliens before, but what we hadn’t seen was a fully holographic chief medical officer. Voyager’s Emergency Medical Hologram seemed like the perfect embodiment of the Star Trek ethos. He’s a technological strange new world and new life, all rolled into one.
However, what casual audiences didn’t realize is that the Doctor wasn’t completely unique. Long before Picardo’s character ever sawed bones in the Delta Quadrant, Captain Picard dealt with another extraordinary hologram: Moriarty, the brilliant foe of the famous investigator Sherlock Holmes. Over on The Next Generation, Geordi LaForge accidentally created this villain as a sentient hologram when he asked the holodeck to create a challenge worthy of the android Data. Later, Star Trek: Voyager executive producer Jeri Taylor revealed that, in-universe, the holographic Doctor was created because Starfleet took advantage of the same accidental breakthrough that created Moriarty!
It all started in “Elementary, My Dear Data,” the Next Generation episode in which the titular android and Geordi LaForge recreated Sherlock Holmes’ adventures on the holodeck. Thanks to his positronic brain and his encyclopedic knowledge of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes novels, Data is able to easily solve every mystery that is thrown at him. That’s when Geordi makes a seemingly simple request. He asks the Enterprise computer to develop a holodeck foe that could actually defeat Data, one of the smartest beings in the entire galaxy.
The computer obliges and creates a sentient version of Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’ greatest foe. Following Geordi’s instructions, the Enterprise computer included much of Data’s vast programming, which resulted in the holographic character becoming self-aware. Moriarty ended up threatening the Enterprise on two different occasions, and Picard eventually got rid of him by trapping the unknowing villain in a simulation where he thought he had left the holodeck and could explore the stars. This was meant to be a happy ending for Moriarty, but in the show’s typically bleak fashion, Star Trek: Picard later showed us a different, more hostile version of this character created by a malevolent Section 31 AI.
How A Villain Created A Hero
What does all of this have to do with Robert Picardo’s holographic Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager? Elementary, my dear reader! Very early in Voyager’s development (the show didn’t even have a name yet), executive producer Jeri Taylor was inspired by Moriarty to create a new character. As reported in A Vision of the Future-Star Trek: Voyager, Taylor wrote down notes for a holographic doctor “who, like Moriarty, has ‘awareness’ of himself as a holodeck fiction. He longs for the time when he can walk free of the Holodeck.”
A few days later, she wrote down additional notes that contain a startling bit of Star Trek lore. “The Holo-Doctor represents a new, state-of-the-art technology which has capitalized on the serendipitous incident which created Moriarty, and has programmed a holographic character which has self-awareness of his situation and limitations.” While Moriarty is name-dropped on Voyager a couple of times, the show never mentioned what Taylor’s notes seem to confirm: that Lewis Zimmerman could never have created the Emergency Medical Hologram program if not for Geordi LaForge accidentally creating Moriarty on the holodeck.
From Villain To Leading Man?
If that’s not strange enough, there was a period of time when Voyager’s producers were considering making Moriarty a mainstay character on the show. As reported in Star Trek–Where No One Has Gone Before, Taylor’s notes mentioned that “everyone agreed that was a little too broad, and we couldn’t figure out why anyone would take him along.” After dismissing the idea, they decided “that having a holographic doctor with the full consciousness of being a hologram might be fun, and we’d never done anything like that before, except for Moriarty.”
There you have it, gentle reader. Without the character of Moriarty on Star Trek: The Next Generation, we’d never have the Doctor on Voyager. In this way, Trek’s most ambitious villain helped create the franchise’s most complex hero. Thanks to Jeri Taylor’s notes, we also know that, in-universe, Lewis Zimmerman would never have been able to create the Doctor if not for Geordi accidentally creating a sentient Moriarty so Data could have fun. In retrospect, this does make Zimmerman’s arrogance that much weirder. After all, he has a lot of attitude for someone who owes his entire career to the two biggest book nerds in the galaxy!
Entertainment
Moon phase today: What the Moon will look like on April 19
After days of almost (and complete) darkness, the Moon is finally starting to reappear. We’re currently in the Waxing Crescent phase of the lunar cycle, which means each night until the Full Moon we’ll see it get more illuminated from the right side.
What is today’s Moon phase?
As of Sunday, April 19, the Moon phase is Waxing Crescent. Tonight, 5% of the moon will be lit up, according to NASA’s Daily Moon Guide.
Despite more of it now being illuminated, the percentage of surface is still too little to be able to spot any surface details. Check again tomorrow.
When is the next Full Moon?
The next Full Moon is predicted to take place on May 1, the first of two in May.
What are Moon phases?
NASA states that the Moon takes about 29.5 days to orbit Earth, during which it passes through eight distinct phases. We always see the same side of the Moon, but the amount of sunlight reflecting off it changes as it moves along its orbit, creating the familiar pattern of full, partial, and crescent shapes. We call these the lunar phases, and there are eight in total:
New Moon – The Moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it’s invisible to the eye).
Mashable Light Speed
Waxing Crescent – A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).
First Quarter – Half of the Moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-Moon.
Waxing Gibbous – More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.
Full Moon – The whole face of the Moon is illuminated and fully visible.
Waning Gibbous – The Moon starts losing light on the right side. (Northern Hemisphere)
Third Quarter (or Last Quarter) – Another half-Moon, but now the left side is lit.
Waning Crescent – A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.
Entertainment
Ryan Gosling’s R-Rated Netflix Thriller With An MCU Budget Is Worth Its Weight In Shootouts
By Robert Scucci
| Published
After watching 2021’s Kate, the almighty algorithm threw 2022’s The Gray Man onto my radar, and I can’t say Ryan Gosling has ever disappointed me, so I figured I may as well give it a shot. He has a built-in level of charisma that lets him do his thing, and most of the time it lands. Going into the Russo brothers’ film expecting to see $200 million well spent on action sequences, with the added bonus of Gosling in the mix, I didn’t quite know how things would play out, but I had a hunch I wouldn’t feel let down.
But here’s the problem with straight-to-streaming action thrillers. Films like The Gray Man never get much time on the big screen, and they kind of need it if you want to enjoy them at the highest level. Across roughly 400 theaters, the film only brought in $454,023, which isn’t really its fault. It had a very short run across a disproportionately small number of screens, meaning it was never meant to recoup its budget this way. It’s a Netflix Original, designed to pull huge numbers on streaming.
The reason I see this as a bad thing is because this is an expensive movie. MCU expensive. Waterworld expensive. When that much money goes into blowing stuff up in spectacular fashion, I want to see it on a giant screen. Living in an apartment, I don’t have a fancy audio setup because my neighbors would murder me if I did, and my 44-inch TV is fine for most things, but less than stellar when entire city squares are getting leveled with all guns blazing.
Long story short, The Gray Man is a lot of fun, but it would be even more fun if you could watch it the way it was meant to be seen.
Let’s Not Get Bogged Down By The Details
The Gray Man also has an extremely convoluted plot. Not in a “too many twists” kind of way, but it’s a “load up the guns, spray and pray” kind of movie that would have been better served by simplicity. It’s executed well, but as side characters keep getting introduced in the second and third acts, part of me gets annoyed that I can’t fully shut my brain off because there’s always a new name or face to keep track of after the blasting has already started.
Ryan Gosling is a black ops agent known as Sierra Six, formerly Courtland Gentry. He was locked up as a minor after murdering his abusive father, and CIA officer Donald Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton) decides he’s the perfect candidate for a second chance. The deal is simple: Courtland works for him in exchange for his freedom, knowing he’ll be dealing with some very dangerous people.
Once things get rolling, Sierra Six teams up with Agent Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas), and the first mission we see involves assassinating a target named Dining Car (Callan Mulvey). Complications arise when the job goes sideways and Dining Car reveals he’s also part of the Sierra program before succumbing to his wounds. A flash drive gets passed off with vague instructions, and the wild goose chase begins, centering on CIA officer Denny Carmichael (Regé-Jean Page), who sends a swarm of operatives after Six and Dani to retrieve it.
Along the way, we get more backstory on Six’s relationship with Donald and his niece Claire (Julia Butters), who Six previously worked security detail for. This obviously becomes important later because more collateral has entered the equation. The scenes between Six and Claire offer a surprisingly wholesome break from the chaos in Prague, and they’re a welcome addition.
From here on out, you pretty much know the deal. Double crosses stack on top of double crosses, things explode, and there’s so much inter-agency confusion over who’s good and who’s pulling the strings that you almost wish they’d ease up on the exposition and just keep blowing stuff up.
Solid, Pulse Pounding Action Thriller
The Gray Man’s budget absolutely shows on screen from start to finish. The action sequences are gorgeously shot (something that’s not always consistent across Netflix Originals), and at one point Sierra Six is standing on top of a moving tram, firing through the roof while tracking targets through reflections in nearby windows as the city flies past. This comes after he’s handcuffed to a railing in a town square, picking off attackers before they even get a chance to take him out.
Ana de Armas wielding a shotgun after throwing hands is also worth your time because she fully commits when the moment calls for it.
The only real issue I have is the film’s tendency to overload its premise with complexity for the sake of it. Most people don’t turn on action thrillers to do mental gymnastics. At least I don’t. I love psychological thrillers when I want things to get murky, but with action movies, I just want to sit back and watch things explode.
The convoluted plot isn’t a dealbreaker, just a nitpick. Some people enjoy sprawling shadow government conspiracies. It’s just not really my thing, so take that with a grain of salt. It’s still a great watch, just not one you can fully sink into the couch for and completely turn your brain off.
The Gray Man is a Netflix Original, and you can stream it with an active subscription.
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