PACIFIC RIM (Rated PG-13)

Directing a sci-fi action adventure where giant robots clash with monstrous creatures from the center of the earth is a natural wish fulfillment for Guillermo del Toro.

A self-described “fanboy,” del Toro is within his element for directing “Pacific Rim,” which seems pitched to the sensibilities of Japanese cinema that celebrated such monsters as Godzilla and Mothra.

With the annual Comic-Con geek fest taking place in San Diego, the Mexican-born filmmaker could arrive at the event as a conquering hero. Maybe he did in the past, and I am just not aware of it.

Set in the near future, “Pacific Rim” finds that the human race is at a critical crossroads, following apocalyptic attacks on coastal cities around the world, including San Francisco, Manila and Hong Kong.

Creatures emerging from the depths of the sea look like a mixture of dinosaurs, sea serpents, and horribly deformed alien creatures. These legions of monstrous creatures are known as Kaiju, the Japanese word for giant beast.

The monsters destroy bridges and tall buildings as if they were rambunctious kids knocking over building blocks or Legos. Goodbye, Golden Gate Bridge. Too bad they didn’t attack London because I would love to see a monster tangle with the London Eye.

To combat the Kaiju, a special type of weapon was devised: massive robots, called Jaegers (German for “hunters”), controlled by two pilots whose minds are synched via a neural bridge, called “The Drift.”

Unfortunately for mankind, the sea monsters keep mutating into every more powerful creatures, bent on nothing short of complete annihilation of the planet.

On the verge of defeat, the forces defending humanity have no choice but to turn to two unlikely heroes – a washed up former pilot (Charlie Hunnam) and an untested trainee (Rinko Kikuchi).

Hunnam’s Raleigh Beckett was a Jaeger pilot in the initial Kaiju wars when co-piloted a giant robot with his older brother on a mission that went badly.

After the death of his sibling, Raleigh had dropped out of the monster bounty hunting, doing odd jobs along the Alaska coast while others tried to figure out ways to fortify the coastal areas from the monster invasion.

As the world hangs in the balance, Raleigh is dredged out of retirement by his former commander, Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba, a suitably no-nonsense tough guy), for a desperate play showdown with the Kaiju.

The problem, of course, is that it takes two to pilot the 25-story tall robots, and a pilot’s partner has to be someone with whom sharing your brain requires the utmost bond of trust and confidence.

Full of bravado and swagger, Raleigh may be willing to put his life on the line despite any risks, but he’ll only do so on his own terms.

Meanwhile, Kikuchi’s Mako Mori is a beautiful Japanese martial-arts expert who’s a candidate for a robot pilot position, though she must first prove herself capable of enduring the intense training.

Known only to commander Pentecost, Mako’s past includes a dark secret about a childhood encounter with the Kaiju that still brings nightmares that must be purged from her memory. Interestingly, a red slipper is a symbol of the mental torment.

Not surprisingly, there is a severe competitive streak in the international cast of robot pilots, and after Raleigh and Mako tangle in a martial arts contest, they become partners in the robot called Gipsy Danger.

Del Toro has an affinity for Ron Perlman, having used him in his “Hellboy” films. Fittingly, Perlman’s Hannibal Chau is a sleazy black market operator in Hong Kong, selling the salvageable body parts of dead Kaiju.

More comic relief comes from a pair of wacky scientists, Charlie Day’s high-pitched voiced Dr. Newton Geiszler thinks he create a neural bridge with a Kaiju, while his partner (Burn Gorman) is just plain eccentric.

The success of the Jaeger program requires Raleigh and Mako to become a well-connected team. For his part, Raleigh is a loner who grapples with trust issues, and so it is no easy task.

Fans of this genre are anxious to move on from the obvious plot contrivances and get to the essence of what is expected from an action film with roots in the anarchic Godzilla genre.

“Pacific Rim” does not disappoint those who want to enjoy the spectacular clash of the titans, as robots and monsters bang away at each other with ferocious intensity.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.

LAKEPORT, Calif. – Local artist Diana Liebe will demonstrate how to create and use a silk screen in an August class at the Lake County Arts Council's Main Street Gallery.

The class will be held from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 24, at the gallery, 325 N. Main St.

Demystify this wonderful art form and learn how to incorporate silk screen images into your art.

The cost is $20 and includes a T-shirt.

To sign up, contact Liebe at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or 707-245-7512.

Here’s an observant and thoughtful poem by Lisel Mueller about the way we’ve assigned human characteristics to the inanimate things about us. Mueller lives in Illinois and is one of our most distinguished poets.

Things

What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation ( www.poetryfoundation.org ), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press from <em>Alive Together</em> by Lisel Mueller. Copyright 1996 by Lisel Mueller. Introduction copyright 2013 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. They do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

THE LONE RANGER (Rated PG-13)

Sometimes you put your money on the wrong horse. It has happened to me, on more than one occasion, at the Santa Anita race track. It can also happen in making other choices in life.

That occurred most recently in picking to review “The Lone Ranger” instead of “Despicable Me 2.” A revisionist Western tale, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Gore Verbinski, seemed like a sure bet.

The best thing about “The Lone Ranger,” produced at a cost to rival the GDP of a Third World country, is in fact the Lone Ranger’s beautiful white horse, Silver, an equine hero and great scene-stealer.

Possessing a distinct personality, Silver holds a beguiling combination of mystery, humor, majesty, eccentricity and heroism. This is a horse that suddenly appears in treetops and on the roof of a burning barn.

Now we don’t want to slight the human actors in “The Lone Ranger,” especially since the filmmakers put a lot on the line by casting Johnny Depp as the Native American warrior Tonto.

It is also apparent that the Bruckheimer-Verbinski team, which produced the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, put a lot of stock in getting mileage out of Depp’s essential quirkiness.

With heavy face paint and a dead crow sitting on his head, Depp’s Tonto, a proud Comanche with a quiet sense of humor, often looks and sounds like he’s channeling the spirit of Captain Jack Sparrow.

Armie Hammer’s upright, newly-minted federal prosecutor John Reid, soon to become the Lone Ranger, is returning from the east by train to Colby, Texas to start his legal career.

Meeting him in Texas is his older brother Dan (James Badge Dale), a hardened Texas Ranger whose rough frontier nature is a striking contrast to that of his refined and highly educated younger sibling.

At first, John Reid holds the naïve view that playing by the book will trump the extremely violent nature of the Wild West. His worldview is put to the test by a vicious outlaw in custody on the train.

Soon to be the arch enemy of the Lone Ranger, the fiendish Butch Cavendish (a horribly disfigured William Fichtner) is freed by Butch’s gang in a daring railway hijacking.

As a result, Reid finds himself chained to another prisoner onboard, which turns out to be Tonto, taken prisoner for a transgression that already I do not recall.

Setting up the inevitable pairing of Tonto and Reid as crime fighters takes considerable time. It happens most dramatically when Tonto comes to the rescue of Reid after a brutal ambush by Cavendish’s gang.

Once in Texas, Reid teams up with his brother and other lawmen to hunt down Cavendish, but unfortunately they are all gunned down in a desolate canyon.

Tonto stumbles upon the massacre scene and proceeds to bury everyone, including a presumed dead John Reid, who rises from his makeshift grave just in the nick of time.

At this point, Reid dons the famous black eye mask and wide-brimmed white hat, transforming himself into the fabled Lone Ranger, seeker of justice on the dusty plains.

Motivated as much by desire to avenge his brother’s cold-blooded murder, the Lone Ranger also has an odd longing for his brother’s widow (Ruth Wilson), who had once been his girlfriend before he moved east for law school.

While Butch Cavendish is the ultimate badass outlaw and the obvious target for a manhunt by the Lone Ranger and Tonto, other dubious characters populate the landscape.

Helena Bonham Carter has an impressive turn as the peg-legged Southern madam running a house of ill-repute that follows the railroad as it is being built. She’s flamboyant and has a shotgun concealed in her fake leg.

A superb actor, Tom Wilkinson appears as railroad tycoon Latham Cole, hell-bent on his vision of finishing the Transcontinental Railroad in great haste.

Whenever Wilkinson is in a film, he’s almost invariably a person of dubious moral character, if not an outright villain. For “The Lone Ranger,” his railroad builder is kind of what you would expect.

“The Lone Ranger” is a distended exercise in long, drawn-out action, though the climax on a runaway train offers the dramatic heroics that are most worthy of the Lone Ranger’s mythological history.

A lot of money was spent to give “The Lone Ranger” a spectacular look in its setting in Monument Valley and other locations that recall the cinematic brilliance of John Ford Westerns.

My guess is that “The Lone Ranger,” which is oddly uneven and not very satisfying in the end, won’t have the success necessary to launch a new franchise.

DVD RELEASE UPDATE

In perfect timing for this week’s movie review, another story of the Old West is being released on DVD, the television series “How the West Was Won.”

Based on the 1962 film of the same name, this TV show was a rousing action saga and moving family chronicle about the post-Civil War era (the same time period for “The Lone Ranger”).

The TV show starred “Gunsmoke” legend James Arness as a mountain man accustomed to the harsh realities of frontier life, while his widowed sister-in-law, Kate (Eva Marie Saint), struggled to maintain a home for the family.

Kate’s eldest son, Luke (Bruce Boxleitner), is pursued by the law for deserting the Union Army.

“How the West Was Won,” a beloved TV series of the American West, plays out during a hard-hitting period when laws were frequently broken and progress was charted by individual suffering and survival.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Auditions for “Rocky Horror Show” are coming soon, and Lake County Theatre Co. wants to see you there.

The show brought the theater company fresh new faces onstage, new members and an expanding audience, and they are hoping it will again.  

All roles are open, so get to practicing those rock-n-roll numbers and come show your stuff.

Auditions will be from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesday, July 17, and Friday, July 19, at Konocti Vista Casino in Lakeport, and 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, July 20, at Gard Street School in Kelseyville.

Callbacks, if necessary, will take place from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Monday, July 22.

There will be no accompanist, so singers need their own accompaniment, either live or on CD.  

Be ready to move, there will be group movement/dance auditions, and individual auditions as well.  

For more information, call John Tomlinson, 707-355-2211.

CLEARLAKE, Calif. – Second Sunday Cinema and Move to Amend will host a showing of the documentary “Heist” on Sunday, July 14.

The film will be shown at Clearlake United Methodist Church at 14521 Pearl Ave. in Clearlake.

Doors open at 5:30 p.m., with a locally written play to be featured at 6 p.m. followed by the film at 6:15 p.m.

The cost is free.

The shuttling of wealth from the have-nots to the haves continues to go very smoothly over many decades. This dramatic, well-researched documentary exposes the reason and the start of this process, which debilitates our nation as a whole.  

In 1971 then-Justice Lewis Powell wrote a lengthy secret memo detailing what should happen and how: Corporations should, he said, take wealth and power from the people by taking control of all major institutions in the United States, including the military and the judiciary – even religious organizations.

The most recent blow was the SCOTUS decision of January 2010, Citizens United, declaring that corporations are persons, just like you and me.  

Move to Amend disagrees, and is working hard nationwide and locally to amend the US Constitution to clearly state that only people are people.

For more information call Shannon Tolson at 707-889-7355.