SCENE: A STUDIO BIGWIG and his three JUNIOR EXECUTIVES sit at a table.

BIGWIG: We have had an excellent run this year, gentlemen. One, I was certain we had drained the Adam Sandler well dry, but your bottomless pit of imagination showed us that there is still much more for Adam Sandler to do.
FIRST JUNIOR EXECUTIVE: He can be a man and a lady! I have plans for him to show up in a romantic comedy next as the girl!
THIRD JUNIOR EXECUTIVE: That is a terrible idea.
BIGWIG: But potentially profitable, and therefore not entirely terrible. Two, you too have used Adam Sandler to best advantage with the success of Just Go With It.
SECOND JUNIOR EXECUTIVE: I liked it better with my original title, Let’s Both Lie So I Can Get Sex.
THIRD: Two fun facts: firstly, you bastardized a movie called Cactus Flower that actually won Oscars in order to make that movie, and second, you are a terrible person.
SECOND: Hey! I did not steal the plot from that cactus movie! I never even saw whatever it is you’re talking about!
BIGWIG: But it made a lot of money. And Three – I have to admit, even I wasn’t expecting a lot out of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and now we’re going to be able to sequelize it. And you even managed to do it without Adam Sandler.
FIRST: I think it would have made double the money if Adam Sandler had been the chimpanzee leader and thrown poop at James Franco. People love it when monkeys throw poop! Especially at James Franco.
BIGWIG: In any case, we must look ahead to 2012. Gentlemen, I want us to consider the public domain. I am tired of paying six dollars and ninety-five cents for the rights to a toy marketed in the 1980s that has kitsch collector value. That is six dollars and ninety-five cents that could be going in my pocket instead. What ideas do you have, crack junior executives?
SECOND: Where?
THIRD: He used “crack” as an adjective.
SECOND: I knew that! We all knew that! Nobody can prove anything!
FIRST: I vote we do The Three Bears, starring Kevin James as Papa Bear, Melissa McCarthy as Mama Bear, and that weird guy who is thirty-two but looks like he is fifteen and has a TV show as Baby Bear.
BIGWIG: Fairy tales? Do go on.
FIRST: Or we could do a movie where the hero is Aspirin and he’s fighting the evil Gingivitis.
THIRD: I don’t think that quite works.
FIRST: Maybe they’re heroic dragons in human form! Except for Gingivitis, who is an evil dragon sorcerer.
BIGWIG: This interests me.
THIRD: Think of the CGI budget.
BIGWIG: You have a point, Three. I am less interested now. Let’s talk about the bears one again.
SECOND: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Look: fairy tales are bloody and dirty and about unpleasant human urges put into story form to make them slightly more palatable to children. The bears thing is destined to flop because it is about none of those things. There need to be tits and murder.
BIGWIG: That is an uncannily astute observation coming from you, Two.
THIRD: He said the same thing about the Teletubbies last week.
BIGWIG: Stopped clocks, Three. So, what fairy tale can we make both sexy and violent?
THIRD: Well, the obvious choice is “Snow White,” which has generational mother-daughter competitive jealousy, a huntsman who does some violent things, and a handsome prince. There’s probably a solid “adult” version to be made there – a little more fantastic than Ever After, the Cinderella retelling, and a little more grounded than Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.
FIRST: No, no, you’re going about it all wrong! The Queen should be grumpy and funny! And the charming prince should be all dorky so he is lovable! Like Adam Sandler! Except maybe better looking, because Adam Sandler is kinda ugly. And the dwarves should be all wacky! And they should have catchphrases and talk like rappers do!
THIRD: Well, I think –
SECOND: No, no, no. First off, the Queen should be played by a total bombshell, like Charlize Theron. And then we get Kristen Stewart to play Snow White because teenagers love Kristen Stewart, and we get the guy who was Thor to be, like, Thor. Except we can’t call him Thor.
THIRD: But the entire point of “Snow White” is that it’s about maternal jealousy of the daughter. Charlize Theron is beautiful. How are we supposed to believe that she envies Kristen Stewart? I mean, Kristen Stewart is good looking, but she’s not your classic supermodel type and Charlize Theron, well, is.
FIRST: This is exactly why we need to have the Queen be played by Julia Roberts with a fake nose so she is ugly.
THIRD: And we’re back going too far in the other direction again.
SECOND: Look, if we do it my way we can have awesome swordfights.
FIRST: Well, I say we can have awesome swordfights too! With puns and fencing and so on!
SECOND: No, this needs to be less Princess Bride and more Braveheart. Snow White can lead an army of soldiers against the evil Queen, who… I dunno, is a vampire or something? And then Thor can help kill her.
THIRD: Why do we need Thor in this movie again, which is supposed to be about a female protagonist?
SECOND: I’m sorry, I thought we were in the business of making hit movies, which are predominantly watched by teenaged boys.
BIGWIG: Well said, Two.
SECOND: Besides, we’ll need him for the eventual threeway sex scene with Snow White and the Queen.
BIGWIG: Less well said, Two, and this comes from someone only slightly concerned with traditional narrative.
SECOND: Does this mean my all-dwarf gangbang is out?
BIGWIG: Need I remind you that we do not make pornography at this studio?
SECOND: No.
BIGWIG: And why don’t we make pornography at this studio?
SECOND: “Because the internet has killed off pornography’s profitability for the foreseeable future.”
BIGWIG: Thank you.
FIRST: It doesn’t matter because my idea is much, much better. I think we need love potions. And a dance sequence. And pop culture references! And Nathan Lane turning into a cockroach!
THIRD: But none of that makes any sense –
FIRST: It doesn’t have to make sense because it’s magic!
BIGWIG: He has a point there. Therefore, we will make One’s Snow White movie. We will get Julia Roberts and Nathan Lane and one of those actors we’re currently trying to convince America is the next Tom Cruise. I don’t know which one and it doesn’t matter. Pick somebody off last year’s GQ covers and tell him to be charming.
THIRD: Armie Hammer?
BIGWIG: He’ll do. And we’ll use actual little people for the dwarves. We will use every famous dwarf and midget in Hollywood.
THIRD: Peter Dinklage?
BIGWIG: No, he would cost actual money. I meant the famous dwarves that nobody really cares about.
SECOND: I think this is a mistake. We’ve already done kiddie, family-friendly versions of fairy tales before. We’ve done them over and over again. We even did meta already. Remember Enchanted? That sucked.
THIRD: It was critically acclaimed and made over three hundred million dollars worldwide.
SECOND: But we didn’t see Amy Adams’ tits even once. I consider that a failure for all humanity.
BIGWIG: Two also has a point – about the film, not Amy Adams. Therefore, I have decided that we will also make Two’s Snow White movie. It will have battle scenes and be sort of Gothy in the way that teen films sometimes try to pretend that they are rebellious and experimental, but will ultimately have a safe core to it. And, to make the critics happy, we’ll cast good actors to be the seven dwarves. Probably British ones.
THIRD: I assume we’re not making three Snow White movies.
BIGWIG: Don’t be ridiculous.

NOTE: This was the third of these, written back for my Livejournal back when I was still on Livejournal. However, it does not appear to have been web-archived, and besides, I might as well rewrite it now. So this is a revamped version of the original article.

Have you ever jacked in? Have you ever wire tripped? No? A virgin brain. Well, we’re gonna start you off right. This isn’t like “TV, only better.” this is life. Yeah, this is a piece of somebody’s life. Pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex. You’re there! You’re doing it, seeing it, hearing it! You’re feeling it! It’s about the stuff you can’t have, right? Like running into a liquor store with a .357 magnum in your hand, feeling the adrenaline pumping through your veins.

Strange Days foresaw a lot about the future when it first came out.

Not the “jacking in” thing, where people get addicted to reliving copies of brainscanned memories on laserdisc – although in 1993, people didn’t really have an idea of what net.addiction was just yet, and in some ways Strange Days‘s conceit of becoming addicted to living somebody else’s life presages, in many ways, World of Warcraft, Second Life and similar online pursuits, and heck let’s just toss Youtube on there as well while we’re at it because you know there are people using it to relive old memories they probably shouldn’t. So hell, let’s count that as a prediction for Strange Days. But let’s also count its prediction of the rise of a Tupac Shakur-like rapper with similar cult following after his violent death, its depiction of a society with the killer mix of ever-growing social stratification combined with ideological and cultural divisions in the underclass, its recognition that the growing fusion of hip-hop, pop and metal would only continue, and its understanding that Tom Sizemore looks really freaky and awesome in a wig. Okay, that last one isn’t really a prediction, but come on. He looks freaky and awesome in a wig.

You know how I know it’s the end of the world? -Everything already been done, every kind of music’s been tried, every kind of government’s been tried, every fucking hairstyle, bubble gum flavors, you know, breakfast cereal… What are we going to do? How are we going to make another thousand years? I’m telling you, man, it’s over. We used it all up.

But Strange Days is great for reasons other than its often impressive precognitive abilities. It’s got Angela Bassett in what I would argue is her definitive movie role and one of the baddest-ass female action hero roles ever, which by itself makes the entire catalogue of Angelina Jolie look wussy. It teaches us the secret of making Juliette Lewis tolerable, which is to have her sing rather than speak (seriously: the movie’s major flaw is that Lewis’ appeal to Ralph Fiennes is only evident when she’s singing). It has a killer supporting cast: Sizemore, Michael Wincott, Vincent D’onofrio, William Fichtner, Glenn Plummer. It has an absolutely fantastic soundtrack that sounded in 1993 like what the future of music would sound like, and to an extent still does. It has one of the most beautiful and heartfelt endings I’ve ever seen in a movie, and begins with what I still hold up to be one of the greatest cold opens in film history (which, lest we forget, was filmed long before lightweight digital cameras were available, and thus had to be filmed entirely on full-sized Steadicams):

You’re just calmly backstroking along in the big toilet bowl and somehow you never let it touch you. I mean, between working vice and your current so-called occupation, you must have seen every kind of perversion. But you’re just like… some teflon man, you still come out this goofball romantic.

And it has Ralph Fiennes as Lenny Nero, the protagonist, and this is great because Ralph Fiennes rarely gets to be the hero of a story that isn’t staggeringly tragic – seriously, almost all of his major roles have been either villains (Voldemort, Amon Goth, Hades, Harry Waters in In Bruges) or heroes who have to suffer unimaginably (see The English Patient, Sunshine, The Constant Gardner, The End of the Affair – one could go on). Lenny, on the other hand, is a straight-up hero. Maybe a flawed one (after all, he is an ex-cop who’s also the future-equivalent of a drug dealer who is obviously obsessed with his ex-girlfriend), and certainly not your traditional action lead (Lenny openly admits he’s a talker rather than a fighter – he oozes good-natured smarm in a way that just makes you root for him), but he’s the hero here, and it’s just so great to see Fiennes for once straight-up play the good guy and do it so well. (Of course, shortly after Strange Days Fiennes unfortunately signed on to play John Steed in The Avengers, and although he was the best thing about that movie, it basically killed him as a heroic lead. So in Strange Days we are essentially seeing Fiennes in a position he would never be in again.)

This tie cost more than your entire wardrobe. It’s the one thing that stands between me and the jungle.

I am shying away from discussing the plot, and this is not because the various plot twists (and yes, of course there are plot twists) are so crucial to enjoying the film that being spoiled of them would ruin the film. (At least one of them most viewers, I expect, will see coming their first time out.) I’m refraining from discussing it because, although the plot is perfectly good, Strange Days relies on character and performance to see it through to the end, and does so with skill and grace. Kathryn Bigelow was decades away from her long-deserved Oscar at this point, but she’s always been a muscular presence behind the camera and this film is no exception: there’s nothing wasted in this, not for a second, and the direction never bores nor grows incoherent. She’s too good to let that happen.

One man’s mundane and desperate existence is another man’s Technicolor.

Strange Days is a wonderful mix of pessimism and optimism, of action and drama and mystery and sci-fi (and some truly funny bits, although it is by no means a comedy). It is also an extended analogy about the Rodney King riots and the sometimes tenuous bond between police and society as a whole. And while it does very few things perfectly, it does many things very well.

And did I mention that soundtrack?

MGK: So it turns out that the people who are putting out Anonymous are also encouraging teachers to run lessons about how Shakespeare did not, in fact, write Shakespeare.
FLAPJACKS: I have no idea what that sentence is about.
MGK: Okay. So, you know Roland Emmerich?
FLAPJACKS: Yes.
MGK: He has directed a movie called Anonymous, which theorizes that the works of William Shakespeare were in fact written by the Earl of Oxford.
FLAPJACKS: …and?
MGK: What do you mean, “and”?
FLAPJACKS: And what blows up?
MGK: Nothing blows up.
FLAPJACKS: That doesn’t sound right. Are you sure the Globe Theatre doesn’t blow up?
MGK: I’m pretty sure, yes.
FLAPJACKS: Oh. So Shakespeare is an alien, then.
MGK: No.
FLAPJACKS: Look, you said this was a Roland Emmerich film, so either something blows up or there is aliens. There are rules about this.
MGK: Nothing blows up and there are no aliens.
FLAPJACKS: The Earl of Oxford is an alien, maybe.
MGK: There are no aliens.
FLAPJACKS: Queen Elizabeth?
MGK: No aliens.
FLAPJACKS: Maybe the Tower of London is a spaceship.
MGK: No aliens.
FLAPJACKS: Well, if there’s no aliens and no explosions, why did Emmerich even make this movie?
MGK: Well, he says “I like big ideas. That’s probably what combines Anonymous with my other films. You know, “What if Shakespeare was a fraud?” Or, “What would happen if finally, in one big storm, we get the bill for all the bad things we’ve done to the environment?” Or, “Godzilla comes to New York.” All big ideas, in a way, and you can say them in one sentence.”
FLAPJACKS: How is “Godzilla comes to New York” a big idea? Godzilla goes to cities and smashes them up. It’s basically the whole point of Godzilla. Godzilla movies are not about him having a nice dinner at a restaurant with Mothra and discussing their midlife crises.
MGK: I think, given the other examples in the sentence, you have to understand that a big idea for Roland Emmerich is not quite what we would call “a big idea” for other people.
FLAPJACKS: “Hey, guys, I just had this big idea! What if an asteroid hit the Earth? No, wait, I got a hundred of these! What if the Titanic sank? I can’t believe nobody’s thought of this yet!”
MGK: Yes. This is the sort of finely tuned mind that decides that a conspiracy about William Shakespeare is a big idea.
FLAPJACKS: Still, is it not worth considering whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare?
MGK: No.
FLAPJACKS: Well, maybe we should look at the pros and cons. For a start: his name is William Shakespeare. That seems like a “pro” to me right there.
MGK: That is indeed an excellent point.
FLAPJACKS: But perhaps we should consider the fact that he was, after all, only some lowly schlub and not an educated nobleman of class and leisure. I mean, how could a mere actor know of the existence of far-off countries like Italy and Denmark? It’s not like they had Wikipedia back then.
MGK: I believe they did, however, have books. Also, on occasion, they had foreigners.
FLAPJACKS: Mere trifles. Also, he wrote about aristocrats a lot, so therefore one could credibly argue that William Shakespeare’s plays were therefore written by a noble, because who knows more about nobles than other nobles?
MGK: The problem with this argument is that it therefore logically follows that Snooki from Jersey Shore wrote her own book, rather than having it ghostwritten.
FLAPJACKS: An excellent counter-argument, particularly given Snooki’s emergent status as “next Shakespeare.” Or, should we say, next Earl of Oxford.
MGK: I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.
FLAPJACKS: Me as well! But that’s not important: what’s important is the undeniable fact that Shakespeare was just a common-as-dirt plebe, and that five hundred years after his death, we can no longer find his original manuscripts proving that he was the writer, so therefore clearly it was a nobleman.
MGK: Yes, you have summed up the “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare” argument quite neatly. By which, of course, I mean you have demonstrated that it’s really just a bunch of classist garbage spun forth by people who don’t want to admit, for whatever reason, that the greatest writer in the English language was basically just some nobody.
FLAPJACKS: Well, we do have to have standards. I mean, we can’t all be Snooki.
MGK: Throwing up in my mouth again.
FLAPJACKS: Yeah, me too.

So apparently Joss Whedon directed an adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing while nobody was looking, and stuffed it, unsurprisingly, with Whedon alumni. Could be good, could be not; with Whedon I always reserve judgement until I see it, because Whedon’s stuff swings wildly along the quality arc for me. I also tend to reserve judgement on performances until I’ve seen them – that having been said, judging by this poster it looks like Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof are playing Beatrice and Benedick, and although you never know until you see the actual performance, my gut tells me these are two spectacular miscastings. I like both actors, but neither seems right for the part.

If I was going to describe Amy Acker’s specialty, it is in portraying characters who have at their core a sense of fragility to them: her characters always feel brittle and she’s very good at bringing that out of them, even if they are really quite tough when you get down to it (like, for example, Fred). But Beatrice isn’t a fragile character: she’s arguably the toughest of all of Shakespeare’s female protagonists, able to blast Benedick or outsnark Don Pedro with not an ounce of fear or worry in her.

As for Denisof: he plays characters that are, at their essence, clean-cut straight-man sorts, men who are creatures of society first and foremost, people who fit in. (Even when he plays later-years Wesley as a burnout, the influence is still there.) But Benedick isn’t that guy: Benedick is the direct forerunner of Han Solo. Benedick is a guy who actively spurns his best interests in society (marriage, being a proper gentleman as the rules of society dictate, going against his own boss if need be, etc.) and plays by his own conscience – and yes I know someone’s going to say something about Wesley here but the point is that there’s doing this sort of thing out of a sense of duty and doing it just because you want to. Nathan Fillion’s in this movie too, and he’s much more a Benedick than Denisof is.

But then again, Shakespeare wouldn’t be Shakespeare if people didn’t think they could take chances with it. So I’m curious to see how it goes. Presumably Claudio is impaled on something sharp in the final act.

Maybe twenty minutes too long, but otherwise manages to make a story that is, at its heart, about statistics filmic in a way that is a deeply impressive piece of writing.

When ‘The Dark Knight’ came out, I confess that I did not have tremendously high hopes. Not because of Heath Ledger as the Joker or anything I’d heard about the production, but simply because I had yet to see a live-action Batman movie I actually liked after six tries (I liked the ’89 Batman when it came out, but it hasn’t aged well for me.) Even ‘Batman Begins’ holds the distinction of being the one Christopher Nolan movie I haven’t been able to really get behind (its messages about violence strike me as extremely confused. “I won’t kill this man because Killing Is Wrong! And to save him, I’m going to blow up the building with the entire League of Shadows still inside it!”)

But ‘The Dark Knight’ worked. It was, finally, the Batman movie I had been looking for. A brilliant Joker story that made the character convincing, terrifying, and absolutely riveting to watch. A deep, heartfelt exploration of human morality as the Joker works on Gotham City in an effort to prove that given the right circumstances, with the proper motivation, anyone and everyone will become a killer…and fails. Or does he? Seeing Harvey Dent finally snap and prove that at least for him, the Joker was right is a cruel, twisted, but ultimately honest exploration of both characters. It’s a great movie from beginning to almost-end.

Because that’s the one problem with ‘The Dark Knight’. The ending makes no goddamn sense. (I’ll explain why after the cut. Spoilers, sweetie!)

continue reading "The One Problem With ‘The Dark Knight’"

For those of you who don’t read my own personal blog (and you’re certainly not obligated to), I recently posted an angry, possibly coherent rant about some people’s belief that Leia appears as a more empowered, feminist character in ‘Empire Strikes Back’ than she does in ‘Star Wars’, despite large amounts of extremely blatant textual evidence to the contrary. (Suffice to say when your reaction to being in a strange, unfamiliar, possibly dangerous situation is, “I’m going to go find a pretty dress and get my hair done, then sit in my room and wait for the menfolk to come back and tell me what’s going on!” …you fail at empowerment.)

And I was discussing the idea with my wife, who is a very smart woman and a feminist, and we were bouncing around the idea of what ‘Empire’ might look like if Leia was actually treated like the strong, fearless, intelligent woman she was in the original ‘Star Wars’, rather than the Ice Princess Who Just Needs A Big Strong Man To Tell Her What To Do in ‘Empire’. And she suggested I blog about it. The rules: Change the actual plot as little as possible, while having Leia do things that an actual well-written, well-developed female character would do as opposed to a whiny damsel in distress.

First off, the sexual banter between Han and Leia would change. Less of the Slap Slap Kiss bullshit that fans have been conditioned to believe is an actual romantic relationship by decades of seeing women suddenly go gooey in films over guys who have been total assholes to them, and more actual, um…banter. Instead of telling Han she doesn’t like him because A Woman Doesn’t Know Her Own Mind and Needs a Man To Show Her Who She’s Interested In By Forcibly Sexing Her Up…(the classic “AWDKHOMANAMTSHWSIIBFSHU” trope…) Leia knows perfectly well that she’s attracted to Han, but she’s also a little annoyed that he knows that she knows and that he’s acting more than a little smug about it. So she flirts with him in a way that puts him just a little off-balance, because Han’s the kind of cocky guy who needs to be put off-balance in at least one area of his life because it tempers his exuberant confidence. Han, for his part, is playing along because he knows Leia is worth it and he’s pretty sure it’s just an act. (Pretty sure.)

From there, we cruise through to the first major “Leia gets to hold the Idiot Ball because she’s a woman” moment, the escape from Hoth. In the film, Han realizes that Leia has stayed too long and is in danger, he informs the Rebel command that he’ll be taking her off planet, and he practically carries her off over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Leia is portrayed as passive, whiny, and naive, while Han gets to demonstrate his superior judgment and discusses with a MAN what to do about this whole “woman” situation while Leia gets no input at all.

In the revised version, Leia stays longer deliberately. She risks her own life to make sure that the Ion Cannon stays operational until the last transport has left, then heads for the Falcon’s hangar. Han is shocked to find her still on-planet, but she explains that she had a plan all along: hitch a ride on the Falcon. “But I told you I was leaving five hours ago!” he said. “You also said you had one last minor repair to the Falcon,” she responds. “I figured you’d still be here when it was time for me to leave.”

At that point, things go roughly the way they do in the film for a while, with one key difference: Leia operates the gun turrets while Han and Chewie fly/fix the ship. Because as we saw in the first movie, there is a turret that can be operated independently of the cockpit, and Leia isn’t the kind of person to sit passively by and watch other people do the rescuing when she can pick up a gun and start shooting. She might not be as good of a shot as Han or Luke, but she can at least make the Imperial pilots nervous. (Oh, and that also means Leia’s primary role during this section of the movie isn’t to sit there whining about each decision Han makes, only to be proved wrong by his manly manliness that manfully mans up at every turn.)

Jump ahead past the kiss (which would still happen, although again, without the “Oh, I don’t like scoundrels like you,” “Sure you do, you just don’t know it yet. Once I commit sexual assault against you, you’ll realize you love me!” “Oh, hey! I guess I do!” bullshit) to Bespin and Lando. Here, instead of spending all her time changing outfits and getting her hair done, Leia decides to ingratiate herself to Lando using her diplomatic skills, and see if she can’t get a few strings pulled to get a message out to the Rebel Alliance (an actual sensible, active thing for a major character to do in that situation.) Instead, she comes back to Han and tells him that Lando is being evasive. There are areas of the city he won’t show them, he avoids letting them use the communications systems, and he won’t give a straight answer as to what’s wrong with the Falcon. She suggests that Han and Chewie keep an eye on the repairs at all times, while she goes looking for Threepio. (Again, note the active decision making, instead of just letting other people do things while she whines.)

Of course, they get captured anyway, they get tortured (and the suggestion Timothy Zahn made would be more explicit here, which is that Leia is actually tougher under torture than Han…after all, she wouldn’t give up the location of the Yavin base despite torture and drugs)…and Han gets frozen in carbonite. From there, things would progress pretty much as normal, because Leia becomes a more active character once Han is out of the picture. (Still not fond of the “Leia gets a flash of woman’s intuition Jedi insight” sequence, but that’s something that could be handled better if it was foreshadowing for Leia actually using Jedi powers in ‘Return of the Jedi’.)

The point of all this? Only that it is possible to handle Leia as an active, decisive, intelligent, emotionally-mature female character without losing the essential plot of ‘Empire’. The fact that they didn’t do this isn’t a reflection of some insoluble plot conundrum, it’s a reflection of laziness and a reliance on stereotypes of female behavior on the part of the writers. And this is the “best” Star Wars flick?

On Twitter, regarding the Animalympics posts, Tobias Carroll writes

I am absurdly happy that you did this. Said cartoon had nearly passed into the realm of “things I thought I’d hallucinated.”

Everybody has things like this, don’t they? Even in the age of Google.

One of mine, for example, is an educational cartoon from the late 70s/early 80s, that if I had to characterize it in a single sentence I would say was basically “Civilization, the cartoon series” – it was a series of vignettes about human advancement, with a trippy proggy synth-based theme. I’m not sure if it actually existed and I watched it, or if it’s the remnants of dreams as a kid. Does this ring a bell to anybody else?

Post your own “did I hallucinate that or what?” in comments, or answers to other people’s hallucination-or-did-it-happen TV shows.movies.

…is very, very good. I am not sure if it is the best of the “Avengers Generation” of Marvel movies, but I am quite sure that it is my favourite, because Joe Johnston did exactly what I wanted him to do in making a Captain America movie, which was basically take the tone of the old Republic serials, pump up the action and drama, and update it into a modern, adult film which kids can still enjoy. The fact that it ends on a melancholy note (and if you know Captain America at all, you know that his origin story has to end that way) gives it a tone that no other superhero movie really has had over the last decade.

Of note: Chris Evans is a magnificent Captain America, and I think that is high praise because we generally recognize that of all the Marvel characters, Cap is probably the hardest to play: it’s very easy to turn his idealism into self-righteousness or priggishness and make him unlikeable (I’m looking at you, Mark Millar), but Evans simply emphasizes Cap’s basic decency, which is the core of the character, and the overriding theme of Cap in the movie is “a weak but noble man becomes strong,” which is what Cap’s theme should be. The supporting cast is likewise excellent: Hugo Weaving is a predictably fantastic Red Skull, Tommy Lee Jones’ colonel gets all the good lines, the Howling Commandos don’t get much screen time but are all good (special bonuses: Neal McDonough as Dum Dum Dugan and Kenneth Choi playing Jim Morita, which was unexpected but appreciated), Dominic Cooper’s Howard Stark is a clever 40s-influenced riff on RDJ’s Tony Stark, and Stanley Tucci’s Erskine gives the film heart and purpose. The only weak link is Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter, who is not bad but not on par with everybody else.

My only other note is to avoid seeing it in 3D – unlike Thor, where the 3D was unnecessary but not really an issue, Captain America is less enjoyable in 3D – not because of the 3D itself, which is again unnecessary but not bad or anything, but because wearing the glasses dims the movie. In Thor, which was loaded with bright colours and lots of light, this wasn’t so much an issue, but in Captain America, where Joe Johnston is again working with the lush, dark colour palette he’s used so often for his period work, it makes the film look drab when it is not that thing. So go 2D for this one.

The trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man has once again rung the bell and the internet is debating whether or not we truly, truly need another Spider-Man movie:

Now, ASM will come out a mere five years after Spider-Man 3came out. This has been deemed a short stretch of time, but it’s only four years shorter than the stretch between Batman and Robin and Batman Begins, and nobody seemed to mind then. Is the timeframe really the difference? Is it the fact that Spider-Man 3 only sort of sucked, while Batman and Robin is really, really terrible (despite Chris Sims and David Uzimeri’s noble efforts to reclaim it as the spiritual heir of the Adam West Batman)? Is it the stark difference in tone between the Nolan Batman and the Schumacher Batman, whereas Andrew Garfield seems to be working the same Peter Parker mold that Tobey Maguire did, right down to being somebody trying to play a teenager while actually being in their late twenties?

I actually think that last one has some merit to it, because the Raimi Spider-Man trilogy has its strong points, but its overriding failure is that Spider-Man doesn’t wisecrack, mostly because Tobey Maguire is not the sort of person you imagine quipping in battle. Like, at all. He’s so achingly sincere. If Spider-Man spent the trailer making fun of baddies while beating them up, I’m sure comic fans would be jizzing in their pants over the new Spider-franchise. That having been said, I’m not entirely convinced that what works on the page for Spider-Man will work in a film: in a comic you can see Spidey’s thoughts and in a movie you have to rely on the actor portraying him to give you a sense of Peter’s inner self behind the lines. Also see Brian Michael Bendis’ probably correct assertion that Spider-Man’s constant running commentary drives everybody else around him insane and I can see where it might actually turn off audiences. But who knows?

But I digress, because what I really wanted to say is that a filmic reboot isn’t the same thing as a comic book reboot. James Bond was effectively rebooted every time a new actor played Bond, regardless of Desmond Llewellyn always being present as Q (or, nowadays, Judi Dench always being M) because there is no greater continuity to Bond films beyond “Bond is a badass, repeat” when it comes time for a new Bond. And this is sensible, because Connery’s Bond isn’t Moore’s Bond isn’t Brosnan’s Bond isn’t Craig’s Bond – they each have their own distinct style of playing the character and each man’s Bond has his own quirks and works in his own filmic universe. Moore is Bond in a wackier world than Connery is Bond, who is Bond in a far more romantic world than the one where Craig is Bond.

Indeed, if we go back to Batman again, one of the failures of the first franchise was the belief that Batman, like Bond, could be played by different actors while maintaining essentially the same narrative strands for the character, which is one of the reasons Batman Forever is so achingly bad: Kilmer isn’t Keaton. (But only one of them.) For the same reason I think that the current Batman producers made the right call by not finding a new actor to play the Joker in the Batman films but are staying away from it. An actor in a role is not unlike a new writer on a comic book: he uses his tools to tell the story of the character in the way he sees fit, with the help of his artistic collaborators (other actors/director/writer vs. artist/editor/letterer). Just as Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol isn’t anything like Arnold Drake’s Doom Patrol (or, if you like, Dan Slott and Roger Stern’s respective runs on Amazing Spider-Man, which have tonal similarities but are often wildly different), so, even with the obvious similarities, will Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man be nothing like Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man. And that’s why the reboot is a good idea.

EDIT TO ADD: In comments, Entertained Organizer writes:

It’s safe to assume that most actor/director pairings aren’t making it past three movies, so does that mean until the end of time every fourth movie in a superhero franchise needs to be the origin again?

Not necessarily, but complaining that the same story gets told over and over again doesn’t seem to be a criticism of, say, productions of Hamlet. Why, then, should it apply to the origin story of Spider-Man?

YES I JUST COMPARED STAN LEE TO SHAKESPEARE! AND DID SO NON-IRONICALLY!

NOTE: This was the second of these, written back for my Livejournal back when I was still on Livejournal. However, it does not appear to have been web-archived, and besides, I might as well rewrite it now. So this is a revamped version of the original article.

Loser was just further evidence that Jason Biggs’ career was over before it even started, which is kind of a shame because Jason Biggs has always been one of those actors who deserved better than he got: what he got, sadly, was “hey, it’s that guy who had sex with the pie in American Pie.” It didn’t help that beyond the Pie franchise he made some truly wretched choices: Boys and Girls and Saving Silverman is a one-two punch of horrible that could kayo most careers, but then Biggs made the poor decision to go ahead and appear in Jay and Silent Bob as himself and let Kevin Smith mock his only real achievement. And American Pie was an achievement for Biggs, because he played a dorky character without a shred of self-consciousness and thus made said dork a hero. It’s not something to be ashamed of, or run away from – it is something to be owned.

Loser follows suit as Biggs plays to his strength: he is the title character, a giant dork from the sticks named Paul who’s going to NYU and who just doesn’t fit in with mean big city life. Of course, in his native environment, he is widely admired by friends and family who think he’s just the greatest guy ever (Dan Aykroyd makes a brief cameo as his dad, giving him advice: “remember, son, interested is interesting“). But in New York City, he is just another schmoe, and unfortunately for him, he truly is a massive dork. Of course, the film goes in a farcical direction by having his roommates be wholly awful human beings: roofie-using date-rapist trust-fund babies who, while amusing, might as well be wearing HATE ME signs around their necks. Similarly terrible as a person is his professor, played by Greg Kinnear in full-on smarm mode, and who is dating the girl he likes, Dora, played by Mena Suvari. (Who is another “whatever happened to…” actor, having last appeared that I can remember in the not-very-good Day of the Dead remake, which was only notable for having Ving Rhames star in a second Romero-remake after Dawn of the Dead but as a totally different character.)

What makes Loser work, for me at least, is that it is honest about New York, which means being honest about great cities generally. It acknowledges that New York is an exciting place, filled with culture and vitality and unpredictability in a way that Paul’s hometown will never qute have. But it does this at the same time as it acknowledges that part and parcel of that vibrancy that cities have is a nasty streak, and by that I don’t mean to refer to Paul’s horrible roommates or teacher, who are stock villains; instead I refer to the fact that, when Paul and Dora go about town on their date, they are flat broke and have to figure out how to do things for free – sneaking into theatres at intermission, tooling around art galleries without paying, snagging a loaf of bread without paying (how very Les Miserables). The city might let them abide, but it is not greatly sympathetic to them, and this is an honest thing to say about any city, let alone one as romanticized as New York.

Loser doesn’t play up Paul’s decency to mirror off of his foils’ worthlessness; it doesn’t have to do that. All Loser does is present two reasonably nice people in a not-nice world, and have at it with them without pandering, and treat them generally with respect while surrounding them with a cynical, cruel world. They survive, of course – this is a comedy. But it has grit to it which I like.

Is it still entertaining to mock Harry Knowles, or have we moved on to the point where we view him as just sort of faintly sad? I mean, at this point we all know exactly what Knowles’ flaws are as a film journalist, but is he still relevant enough that we can take deep pleasure in seeing him suffer?

I ask because I found his review of Toy Story 3 while wandering through the site a few weeks back, and it has to be one of the sweetest pieces of schadenfreude I’ve seen in a long time. If you really feel like it’s not worth it to make fun of him, though, just let me know and I’ll give you written permission to skip the rest of the entry. (Please allow 4-6 weeks for processing of your request.) Oh, this would also be where those of you who don’t want spoilers for Toy Story 3 should skip out.

continue reading "I Forget…"

So over the July 4 weekend I finally got around to seeing X-Men: First Class, and…ugh.  I know that movie’s a critical hit and all, but it just left me…angry, I guess, that I’d wasted my time.  And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I hated the movie for the same reason I don’t really like the X-Men in the first place.

I’ve never been able to get into the X-Men.  I can dig just about all the other classic Marvel guys–The Fantastic Four, Captain America, Spider-Man, you name it–but by and large my impression of the X-Men is a lot like my impression of First Class–too many characters running around in an overwrought, self-important morality play.  (I liked the original 2000 movie, and I remember thinking this was because it avoided the usual X-Men bullshit.)  The theme that mutant/human relations serves as a metaphor for real-world civil rights issues is a good one, but it’s trotted out all too often to justify stories where mutants just worry about their personal problems, or sit around being douchebags.

X-Men: First Class suffers from an abundance of douchebags.  The movie presents three choices for the mutants–they can follow Professor X and seek peaceful coexistence with humans, they can follow Sebastian Shaw and use their abilities to live like kings, or they can follow Magneto and attack the humans before the humans hit them first.  This is a great start for a story, but the movie fell apart for me when I realized I don’t really want any of these three guys to win because they’re all racists.  I mean, setting aside the various obnoxious things they do to their fellow mutants, each of them clearly sees normal humans as an inferior race–Shaw treats them like lackeys and beasts of burden; Magneto treats them like irrational savages hellbent on a race war; and Xavier treats them like children who won’t understand tolerance until he talks down to them about it.  This is especially problematic when the movie hinges upon Xavier and Magneto as the heroes.  The end result is a three-way conflict of equally unappealing ideologies, the likes of which have not been seen since the WCW vs. NWO-Hollywood vs. NWO-Wolfpac feud of 1998.

There are advantages to making Xavier more irritating and Magneto more sympathetic.  It certainly makes both of them deeper, more realistic characters.  But there’s a reason fiction tends to prefer stark Manichaeism over shades of gray–people don’t want to hold their nose and back the lesser evil, they want to find a clear favorite to root for.  Admittedly, in the real world, we’re always supporting one dickhead to better oppose some bigger dickhead, but in the real world we have to.  If I don’t like the state of immigration politics in the US, my only choices are to live with it or try to do something about it.  If I don’t like the state of mutant civil rights in the Marvel Universe, I have a third option–I can stop buying X-Men crap and it all goes away.  So you can see where I think Marvel has a clear incentive to give me a mutant activist I can truly get behind.

What would help such a character win people over is if he would actually accomplish a goal.  Pop quiz, when was the last time the X-Men unequivocally won anything? My first thought was the time they beat Norman Osborn in that Dark Avengers crossover, but when I say “beat” I actually mean they fled American soil rather than fight a lost cause.  That’s usually how it goes–they blunder into a storyline and consider it a success if they escape with their lives.  Restoring the status quo is a typical and acceptable goal for most superheroes, but that’s because most superheroes prefer the status quo.  The X-Men are opposed to the status quo (“world that hates and fears them,” remember?) so every story where they don’t make the world better is sort of a failure for them.  What are the X-Men comics doing these days?  I guess Wolverine and Cyclops are fighting over who gets to lead the X-Men.  What difference does it make?  I’m sure it’ll be appealing if you’re into the personal relationship between Scott and Logan, but that’s the selling point of a soap opera, not a superhero story.  A superhero story is about getting stuff done; the X-Men tend to just mope about how stuff is hard.

Sorry about the lateness of this post; I just got done with a weekend at CONvergence, a Twin Cities sci-fi con that fits nicely into that category of “not so tiny that it’s just a dealers’ room and a movie room, but not so huge that you have to stand in line for two hours for everything.” I got to see a clever little indie movie called ‘My Sucky Teen Romance’ that people should keep their eyes out for, got to chat canon with Lars Pearson of Mad Norwegian Press, and generally had fun. But now, it’s back to work!

“Work”, in this case, elegantly describes the task of thinking about the ‘Matrix’ sequels. Because while I do recall bumping into a few defenders that hectic summer, I think that with the benefit of almost a decade of hindsight, nobody really wants to say that ‘The Matrix Reloaded’ and ‘The Matrix Revolutions’ were any good at all. But I’m not here to discuss the bad things about them. I think we were all aware pretty quickly of the mistakes they made…the fight scenes that were there simply because they thought they had to top the first movie’s fight scenes, the dull speechifying, the inexplicable downgrade in power that Neo got offscreen, the “what the fuck happened” final conclusion…today, though, I’m more interested in discussing the good ideas that were buried in under all the dreck, the stuff that could have been the bones of a good sequel before they began slapping the bloated, corpulent flesh onto it. So let’s talk about the good in the ‘Matrix’ sequels, shall we?

1) The Oracle is a liar. That would actually have been really brilliant, if they’d only followed through on it properly. The whole first movie, we’re set up to believe that the Oracle is a wise, mysterious, shamanic figure who is guiding Neo to his ultimate destiny. The second movie, we find out that all that’s true…but his destiny is to cull the “free humans” down to a manageable number, and she’s actually a computer program whose job is to convince him to betray mankind. Hell of a second act twist, sets up a brilliant third act…shame that they found the least interesting way possible of executing it. (I had one friend who explained to me that he didn’t even realize that’s what the twist was, because “after about the Architect’s third sentence, it all just started to sound like the grown-ups from Peanuts talking.”)

2) The Merovingian. Not anything about his actual execution, mind you: He’s dull, smug, pretentious, snotty, and his endless blather kills every scene he’s in. Oh, and his plot function is terrible too. But the idea of the villain of the second movie being a powerful renegade computer program who prefers the Matrix to his “natural habitat”, who is the opposite of Smith in the first film because he adores the pleasures of experiencing life through sensory input, and who is running a secret “underground railroad” for programs who want to live in the Matrix…that’s quite clever. And it makes sense that such a person would be against the One, because he’s enjoying things the way they are and doesn’t want the boat rocked by the One, v6.0. It needed a lot more drafts, but it’s a solid idea.

3) Smith returning as a computer virus. The idea that Neo somehow accidentally made him is stupid, and the less said about it the better, but again, there’s the germ of a good idea under this. At the end of the first movie, Neo is all-powerful. If you want to get at him, you need to get at him outside of the Matrix. For the artificial intellegnces, recreating Smith as a living computer virus, one who can infect human brains and wear human beings like suits, would be the way to go. (Although it’d have to be for the third movie, once Neo has realized his destiny and rejected it.) But one of the key elements that they almost utterly neglected is that Smith hated even being in a simulation of flesh…being in an actual flesh body should have been a source of major character conflict for him. Perhaps he becomes a nihilist, hoping to bring down the Matrix and bring about the extinction of both humans and computers rather than continue as he is.

Which would lead, in the end, to a roughly similar finale. The AIs realize that Smith, their creation, is a bigger threat than Neo, and form a truce with Zion to stop him. Neo dies saving everyone, the AIs make the Matrix voluntary (one of the things they should have played up is that the average human being is driven insane by Neo’s attempts to “snap them out of it”.) And eventually, they all live sort of kind of happily ever after until everyone realizes that the whole “using human beings as a power source now that solar power is inaccessible to us” thing actually violates the laws of thermodynamics in a big way and they’d all have perished in a frozen grave ages ago.

Okay, so the original had its problems too.

Via Pajiba:

One thing I feel needs mentioning: this is not Martin Campbell’s cut of the film, but the studio’s. I live in New Orleans where it was shot, I read the shooting script, all of which was painstakingly filmed with intense research, and all of that was left on the cutting room floor — a sort of combination of what happened to Daredevil and Watchmen, respectively — character development sacrificed for CG, scenes made irrelevant by removing their setup. The movie in the theater starts with an explanation of mythos that is made redundant by the more natural, scripted questions from Hal when he gets the ring. Ten minutes of childhood Hal, Carol, and Hector that sets up Hal’s first ring construct is reduced to an awkwardly placed flashback in the middle of another scene. The training with the ring is almost completely excised except for one minor scene. Most appallingly, the ending completely deletes the fact that Kilowog, Sinestro, and Toma-Re arrive at the end and help Hal defeat Parallax. Not to mention Parallax was supposed to be a 3rd act reveal after we spend the film worried about Hammond going evil, not the main villain for the entire film. I sincerely hope we get a director’s cut or at least all the deleted scenes on the video release.

Is it just me, or do those studio changes seem responsible for a lot of what wasn’t good about the movie? This sort of makes it sound like Green Lantern got the Kingdom of Heaven treatment: reasonably decent film cut down by studio into crap-burger.