I know that present nerd consensus is that the Hobbit trilogy is fundamentally flawed, but dammit I liked the first movie in the new trilogy – probably because I didn’t see it in Super More Frames Per Second Version, which everybody said was absolutely awful – and this looks to have lots of awesome stuff in it: swords, lotsa giant spiders, elves doing Peter Jackson Martial Arts, more swords, Benedict Cumberbatch doing Evil Voice, and basically everything else I want out of Tolkien movies. So I’m stoked.

Twitter buddies were, last week, angsting a bit about how the cultural touchstones we had growing up are gradually disappearing and losing their relevance. Ghostbusters and Back To The Future lasted much, much longer in terms of cultural relevance than most movies do, partially because of the rise of cosplay and conventions, partially because each of the two franchises stayed fresh and new for longer than average (Ghostbusters from the first film’s debut 1984 to 1991 when The Real Ghostbusters ended its run, Back to the Future from 1985 to 1993 (again, from first film to end of animated spinoff series). And partially it’s because both of these movies were in the right place at the right time with respect to cable stations adopting the “let’s buy a given number of movies and air them endlessly” strategy that lasted for most of the Nineties and Aughts; you could catch Ghostbusters and Back to the Future and a select number of other films practically once a week on the likes of TBS or AMC or whatever other movie channels were available to you on basic cable, and even non-movie channels ended up having movie nights because it was and is a cheap way to fill up airtime.

But now with the rise of digital delivery, that era is basically coming to its end. People are losing the habit of watching movies on TV or indeed on any schedule other than their own. Which: this is great in many ways, of course, because you get freedom and a la carte selection and all that sort of thing, and you watch movies on your own time and etc etc etc. But the cost of that is that cultural touchstones have their power diminished and their period of relevance shortened. Which means that we are witnessing the rise of the first generation of people since Back to the Future‘s inception that don’t understand references made to it; it is passing out, finally, of the cultural jargon. As most things do, of course. Ghostbuster as well. Hell, Willow is practically an antique. The Princess Bride is the one that seems to be sticking and I think that’s largely to do with it having had wide distribution on kid-focused cable networks over the last decade, but who knows how long that lasts?

All of which is to say: those kids today, and in fact people in their twenties even, are much less connected to the movies I loved growing up when I was younger. On the one hand this is sad, because those movies are awesome. On the other hand, it means that this particular series of columns has way more breadth, because movies I have never considered to be particularly obscure are now, in fact, becoming obscure! Hooray! Or not.

The Freshman was never really a cultural touchstone in the first place, and as time goes on it becomes less and less well-known. This is not because it is a bad movie: it isn’t. It’s a very good one. But it is a movie that relies greatly on a previous cultural touchstone itself, namely The Godfather and Marlon Brando’s performance in it, and while some might argue that The Godfather is timeless – no, it isn’t, because nothing is timeless, and most people today are more familiar with second- and third-degree references to The Godfather than the film itself. So increasingly I see people even my own age are completely unfamiliar with The Freshman, and that is a shame.

The basic plot is simple. Matthew Broderick is Clark, your titular freshman going to NYU, who arrives in New York and is immediately ripped off by Victor Ray (the late, great Bruno Kirby). Penniless and stuck, and with his horrible stepfather unwilling to help him out, Clark manages to track Victor down and Vic promises to make it up to him, despite having sold his stuff, by “getting him a job.” The job is working for Carmine Sabatini (AKA “Jimmy the Toucan”), who of course looks amazingly like Vito Corleone, although everyone explains to Clark not to mention this because Carmine is very sensitive about it. Carmine takes a liking to Clark, and offers to pay him to do some work for him…

…and then Clark has to pick up and deliver a Komodo dragon to an odd, out-of-the-way farm run by a crazed German (Maximillan Schnell).

…and then he’s introduced to Carmine’s beautiful daughter Tina (Penelope Ann Miller, having a ball with her character).

…and then he finds out Carmine has already told Tina that she and Clark are to be married, about which she is greatly enthusiastic.

…and then federal agents show up and tell Clark that the whole Komodo dragon delivery was the tip of a much larger thing.

…and this is about when he starts freaking out.

Those are your plot beats, but the sign that The Freshman is interested in being more than a simple caper comedy lies in the details. Indeed, many people upon hearing the plot are expecting a zany romp, but the movie isn’t really that interested in being zany the excellent bit with the Komodo dragon notwithstanding). It’s much more contemplative than that; still a comedy, to be certain, but a gentle one. Admittedly, it is gentle like the way Carmine is gently re-arranging Clark’s life without talking to him about it first. It doesn’t meander; everything is done with purpose and in its own time.

The Carmine/Clark relationship is the heart of this movie and what gives it dramatic heft. Carmine may be a mob boss or may not be (they hedge about this quite a bit), and he definitely has an iron will, but Carmine is clearly generous and loving as well. Late in the film, he goes to visit Clark and the two talk about children’s books, and Clark’s late father, and Carmine asks Clark to tell him one of his father’s poems, and it’s a wonderful, intimate little scene about a father with no son and a son who lost his father, both of whom clearly respect and like the other greatly, but who are also divided, at the moment, by little things like “being a mob boss” and “federal agents breathing down Clark’s neck” and even though these things are never mentioned they are addressed.

A lesser film would have simply indulged in Godfather references until the audience was mumbling “leave the guns take the cannoli” in their sleep, but this movie doesn’t go that route. Marlon Brando’s callback to Vito Corleone is only skin-deep; Carmine is a different character, a different person, and in this, Brando’s last great role, he manages to convey that difference while using all of Vito’s visual and audible tics. That Carmine looks like Vito is only the movie’s best running gag, and not its interior life. And this means you don’t have to see The Godfather first to appreciate The Freshman, because this movie isn’t about another movie. Honestly, so long as you know Vito Corleone exists, you will know enough to enjoy this flick.

(A NOTE: For the purposes of this list, the “Renaissance” begins with Little Mermaid in 1989 and ends with Home on the Range in 2004, when Disney first shut down their 2D animation unit. This means that the “proto-Renaissance” films (The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective and Oliver and Company) are not included. Also not included is Dinosaur, the first non-Pixar 3D film, since that is not properly part of the Renaissance era’s hand-drawn animation line. Also not included are Pixar films, because they obviously don’t count.)

17. Pocahontas. I actually watched Pocahontas all the way through for the first time this past Saturday and good lord is it awful. On Twitter it was pointed out that Pocahontas was put into development following the Best Picture nomination for Beauty and the Beast and that Jeff Katzenberg decided to turn Disney animated films into Prestige Events, but this isn’t just a bad Disney animated movie, it’s a terrible prestige event as well. The film’s visual style is reminscent of Don Bluth’s preferred animation style, but without any of Bluth’s signature energy; the visual staging is boring as sin (a total lack of immediacy or visual excitement in most shots). The pacing is terrible, the wacky cartoon animals are hatefully bad, the songs are range from average (“Just Around The Riverbend”) to amusingly bad failures (“Savages”) to “fuck this song forever it is the worst” (“Colours of the Wind,” the preachiest, most insipid song to ever be obviously written to win a Best Song award and still do it, because the Oscars are often bullshit in this way). The dialogue goes beyond trite to being redundant. Mel Gibson keeps forgetting to speak with an English accent. And having David Ogden Stiers voice the villain only two years after he voiced Cogsworth in Beauty was perhaps not the best choice even if Stiers is great, because all that happens is you’re reminded of a better movie. A much, much better movie. Pocahontas killed Disney’s animated momentum almost all by itself and the Disney Renaissance never really recovered. It is also the only movie on this list that is simply bad, plain and simple.

16. Atlantis: The Lost Empire. An attempt to turn the Disney animated powerhouse into a very pulpy boys’ adventure movie and it doesn’t really work. The Mike Mignola-influenced visual design is gorgeous to look at, certainly, and the action is spectacular, but the plot is basically paper-thin in the “you’ve seen a Star Wars, right, okay you can follow this” way and the voice acting talent is mostly wasted: Michael J. Fox’s Milo is the standout, but he gets most of the lines so that is to be expected, while the likes of Leonard Nimoy, James Garner and Claudia Christian are just sorta there. Atlantis is slight in so many ways that the spectacle it provides in mass amounts are nothing more than empty calories, an explosion of bombast and sound and fury signifying nothing.

15. Home on the Range. Fun fact: you probably don’t remember this exists. There’s a reason for that: the last Disney animated feature until the hand-drawn animated department was shut down is very forgettable. It’s competent, certainly, a perfectly adequate funny animal story (Judi Dench is in particular a treat), but it is somehow appropriate that the final “traditional” cartoon feature from Disney would be such a meaningless bit of fluff that it is barely remembered.

14. Fantasia 2000. Here’s the thing: F2K is certainly lushly animated and has a few good comedy bits (my favorite is when Donald does a double-take at the pair of normal ducks walking past during the Donald’s Ark sequence). But the problem with F2K is the music selection. Here are the songs selected for F2K:

Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, first movement
Pines of Rome by Respighi
Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin
Piano Concerto no. 2, first movement, by Shostakovich
The Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saens
Pomp and Circumstance by Elgar
Firebird Suite by Stravinsky

That’s a lot of very familiar classical music, isn’t it? With the exception of Pines it’s all very My First Classical Album. A not-too-challenging bit from a Beethoven symphony, George Gershwin, Igor “probably most important composer of the 20th century” Stravinsky and Pomp and fucking Circumstance, which gets played at every single high school graduation ever? I mean, the original Fantasia had Night on Bald Mountain as its closer – that’s out of left field. And “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” was definitely a daring choice in 1940. And the animation matchups are predictable too: an animal march for Pomp, scenes from New York for Rhapsody, dancing animals for Carnival, an actual firebird for Firebird. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not bad, it’s Fantasia, and the core concept is always going to be strong (come on, don’t you want a new Fantasia?) but F2K definitely undershoots the mark.

13. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. This one gets a lot of flak because it was next in the pipeline after Pocahontas and people don’t remember it fondly. It’s honestly not that bad. Overly serious in tone, perhaps, as compared to most Disney flicks – the comedy bits with the gargoyles are definitely a little tacked-on as compared to Disney’s more organic efforts to integrate funny-animal comedy into a larger narrative, and the Esmerelda/Phoebus romance is predictable and bland. But the movie doesn’t shy away from its darker-than-average tone and Judge Frollo is a terrific villain. The songs are mostly bad, though (or at least mediocre as all get out) and at this point a Disney film with bad songs was in trouble from the get go, even though the score is comparatively pretty good. Hunchback suffers a lot from guilt-by-association with Pocahontas; if it had come between, say, Lion King and Hercules I think it would be better remembered. But it didn’t.

12. The Rescuers Down Under. This gets included in the Renaissance almost by default, as the film in between Mermaid and Beauty. It is perfectly acceptable franchise entertainment with some gorgeous visuals – Disney was definitely using the film as a testing ground for the CGI/hand-drawn art combination they would master in their later films, and the visual direction and staging of scenes is very skilled – but it’s nothing more than that, unfortunately.

11. Brother Bear. Disney’s last major 2D animated effort until The Princess and the Frog (I don’t count Home on the Range as “major”) has a nice story and good voice acting, but the animation is, let us be honest, second-tier: Disney cut back on the CGI elements it had been using with hand-drawn animation successfully in its previous features to cut costs, and the result is evident on the screen (and the choice of colour palette for the film veers sharply between drab and garish). Which is not to say the animation is bad, by any means, but it’s definitely simpler than many modern Disney features. And Phil Collins’ score is simply not as good as his excellent work on Tarzan. Brother Bear is fine, a decent little movie that transcends its limitations to an extent, but only an extent.

10. Treasure Planet. It flopped at the box office, but Planet is the delivery of what Atlantis promised: a great adventure story, told with amazing visuals. Planet has a more full plot, better realized characters (and better voice acting: I mean, Emma Thompson and David Hyde Pierce in the same movie?), more heart (the Jim/Long John Silver relationship really works beautifully) and the visuals go beyond the impressive stuff in Atlantis to some truly next-level stuff. The 3D backgrounds and 2D characters do clash at times (okay, more than a few times, probably about a third of the movie), but when they work it is seamless. It’s kind of a shame it bombed, because Treasure Planet was essentially a prototype for a new model of 2D animated film, something that shows like Justice League would later use as a template in many ways.

9. Hercules. It’s entertaining as all get out, one of the funnier “traditional-style” Disney flicks (James Woods in particular enjoys the hell out of himself), and wiser than me have pointed out previously that, when you get right down to it, Hercules is basically a Superman story in Greek drag. Which is great! So why isn’t it higher up? Mostly because Hercules tries too hard and aims to do too much. The R&B/gospel score is an interesting and exciting musical choice, but it is almost always cranked up to eleven – “Zero to Hero” in particular is so fast that you either miss half the lyrics or half the visual gags – and the rest of the movie is so, so fast that rewatches reveal literally hundreds of details, and I know we’re all supposed to say rewatches are great but there’s a difference between “going back and catching new layers” and “going back and rewatching because you were not physically capable of watching the entire thing in the first go.” And the whole movie is like this! (Also, let’s be honest, the Greek Gods are basically all pricks and that kind of detracts from Hercules’ quest.) But at this point we’re in the “differing levels of excellent,” anyway, so…

8. Aladdin. Aladdin has not aged as well as some Disney flicks, and the reason it is this far down is simple: the movie in large part lives and dies by Robin Williams’ Genie, and the Genie gets more and more dated with every year as Williams’ references get older and older. Of course, Aladdin still has much to recommend it: the last few songs of the Alan Menken/Howard Ashman team (and Menken never hit the musical heights he did with Ashman with his other collaborators), Jonathan Freeman reminding everybody why dedicated voice actors are important with his Jafar, Gilbert Gottfried’s great performance as Iago, the great animation work on the Carpet and Abu, and the “do ya trust me?” line that honestly just makes the flick. But yeah, it’s not what it was in 1993.

7. Lilo and Stitch. I’ll admit that this movie is one that I never liked quite as much as other people did. I mean, I like it, don’t get me wrong, but Lilo and Stitch fans are, well, awfully fanatical about their fandom and I’m not at that level. It’s obviously a well-made movie, brilliant in many ways, and Stitch is funny, and the film manages to be sentimental without being maudlin (I defy anybody to hear Lilo explain how her parents died without getting at least a little catch, just because she does it so plainly and without drama, and that’s how kids talk about dead loved ones), and it manages to be sentimental while providing a ridiculous amount of slapstick. Out of all the movies in this list, this is the only one I really had trouble placing. I can see the argument for moving it up a notch or moving it down one. It, like Emperor’s New Groove, is very atypical in how it is a Disney movie, and that makes it harder to analyze.

6. The Little Mermaid. Another surprisingly low ranking to some people since Mermaid is what began the whole Renaissance in the first place, but I never thought Mermaid had the strongest story or the most engaging characters. It also doesn’t quite have what later Disney films mastered, which is the art of describing sexual tension between two animated characters, and that matters a great deal given the premise of the film. It does, however, have the best overall musical set-pieces in Disney history: “Under the Sea” is a deserved classic, of course, as is “Part of Your World,” but I actually think “Kiss the Girl” is the best (and most understated, underrated) song from the movie. And it has a good villain in Ursula, and an exciting ending. But I can’t get past Ariel’s overall lack of agency throughout the flick.

5. Tarzan. It still amazes me that Phil Collins – Phil “Do We Have A Horns Section In This Song? Maybe We Should Add A Horns Section” Collins – could put together a score and soundtrack as strong as the one he did for Tarzan. But he did, and that is far from the movie’s only wondrous surprise. Tarzan works astonishingly well, with two excellent villains, a willingness to engage in non-Disney-levels of violence (but sparsely, to maximize their effectiveness), near-perfect integration of wacky sidekick moments into the main plot, real emotional heft throughout the story and probably one of the loveliest endings of any Disney film ever, combined with absolutely gorgeous integration of CGI into a 2D world. Superb work.

4. The Emperor’s New Groove. This one is wildly atypical for Disney; a tailor-made Disney Epic called Kingdom of the Sun which was converted halfway through into a zany comedy, and normally that formula would spell disaster but Groove is a magnificent triumph, so good that I am quite certain Kingdom of the Sun would have been an immense Pocahontas-level disaster. Groove works because it doesn’t work the romance angle like practically every other Disney flick (this is the first non-sequel of the Renaissance era to have no princess in it!), it doesn’t have any big musical set-pieces at all, it basically jumps up and down on the Disney Formula until said formula is dead and bleeding, and that is what makes it truly great: it commits to laughs right from the beginning and never lets up, even during the moments of pathos that the story demands. And Patrick Warburton’s performance as Kronk is one of the all-time great voice acting triumphs.

3. The Lion King. This is generally the point where somebody snarky says “you mean Kimba the White Lion” but that line has always been mostly crap, based on a similarity between names and a couple of shots that look sort of the same. The Lion King draws its power not from those minor similarities, but from its riffing-on-Hamlet plot, probably one of the best voice casts in Disney history, certainly Disney’s single best villain in Jeremy Irons’ Scar, and songs that are… okay, “Circle of Life” and “Hakuna Matata” are probably top-10 Disney songs of all time, at least, and “Be Prepared” is top 20, and the rest are… not that. (Seriously, “I Just Can’t Wait To Be King” is so goddamn annoying. SO ANNOYING.) To sum up: Kimba was also kind of bad and Lion King is not.

2. Beauty and the Beast. The purest fairytale of any of the Disney films by far. Easily the best overall soundtrack – the Ashman/Menken team hit their peak with this and has never been surpassed, and frankly Beauty‘s soundtrack is so strong it deserves ranking among top musicals of all time, not just Disney cartoons. The setpiece for “Be Our Guest” is an all-time classic in film history. Remarkable vocal performances throughout. The gags are perfectly written into the script, but more important the romance that is the core of the story is completely real and believable on every level, which ultimately leads to what can only be described as the sexiest kiss Disney ever animated, as part of the best ending they ever wrote. There’s a reason this one got the Best Picture nod. (Even if the fairy that cursed the Beast was really a total dick.)

1. Mulan. Mulan is unique in that she is the only Disney “princess” whose agency is her own throughout the story. Belle is a prisoner, Ariel a pawn, Jasmine and Megara and Esmerelda are all tokens to be won for the most part, but not Mulan. Hell, Mulan has more agency than most of the male Disney protagonists, who mostly react heroically. Mulan, though, goes out and proactively self-sacrifices, first for her family and then for her country. The fact that Mulan the film has a strong soundtrack, excellent voice acting, a solid and entertaining plot and good visuals are almost besides the point, because the reason Mulan is the best Disney Renaissance film is simple: Mulan isn’t a Disney Princess, no matter how much they want to make her one. She’s a Disney hero, and that makes all the difference.

I’m really hesitant to recommend ‘Super’ to anyone. Don’t get me wrong, I really liked the movie a lot; the performances are all great, from Rainn Wilson’s painfully awkward, possibly mentally ill superhero to Ellen Page’s fantastically creepy amoral turn as a sidekick who’s just fine with crushing bad guys’ legs with a car to Kevin Bacon, who plays wonderfully against type as a drug dealer who’s really more interested in doing drugs and making money than in being any kind of “criminal mastermind”. The plot unfolds with a strange, horrifyingly logical progression that never stops being believable even as it turns into a big action-packed shootout between superheroes and drug lords. The jokes are…ahh. Well. Yes. That’s where I hesitate to recommend it.

Because if you have a really sick, twisted, perverse and disturbed sense of humor, ‘Super’ is really, really funny. If you think that someone getting beaten with a pipe wrench for cutting in line is comedy gold, or that you can have a funny scene of someone getting shot in the leg, or that brutal, entirely realistic violence can somehow be presented in such a way that makes you laugh as much out of surprise that someone would actually put this on film as any other reason, well…then you will love ‘Super’. If you’re um, sane, well-adjusted and a generally decent human being, then maybe not so much. It’s not that you won’t find anything to like, here. James Gunn does a really good job of portraying Liv Tyler as a realistic, interesting, complex drug addict who isn’t just a prize for Rainn Wilson and Kevin Bacon to fight over, and there’s a lot of material in there about the ethics of using violence to solve complex societal problems. But there’s also a scene where a woman slices up a guy with fake Wolverine claws and cackles madly as she murders him, and some of you might not be up for that.

So, um, ‘Super’. If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like. If you don’t, consider this fair warning now. Because if you watch it based on my recommendation, and you wind up absolutely hating the movie and everyone involved in its creation and me by extension, well…I’d rather not have it get around that I inspired the protests, okay?

Torontoist asked me to provide captions to all their photos this year at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, and this may have not been wise. That Jake Gyllenhaal, he sure does love his ethnic gorilla jokes!

So I was sorting through my movie collection the other day – I do this about every three months, whittling down those movies I don’t really need to keep – why did I buy The Dish, anyway? It’s a nice little movie and I know I must have paid maybe four dollars for the used DVD, but did I need to own it? – and taking stock of what’s been released on Blu-Ray that I can upgrade from my DVD collection. (Yes, I duplicate on Blu-Ray. What’s more, I buy blank multidisc cases from blankmedia.ca and turn everything that isn’t already a Blu/DVD combo pack into one, because I want format redundancy wherever possible. I probably have something of a condition that demands exotic pills of some kind.)

Although Blu-Ray selection is growing steadily, it isn’t growing explosively like DVD did. It’s slow and steady, and so many major titles just aren’t available on Blu-Ray at all. Lots of classics are just missing – there’s no Touch of Evil on Blu, no The Big Sleep, no Ikiru, not a single Marx Brothers movie, not a single Astaire/Rogers joint (and the only Fred Astaire you can get on Blu-Ray at all is Easter Parade, which isn’t bad but isn’t even a top five Astaire flick). There’s no UHF, no Monty Python and the Meaning of Life, no Real Genius, no Erik The Viking, certainly no Brain Donors. No Eight Men Out, no Searching For Bobby Fischer – no Abyss, for crissake, and it’s only the single best movie James Cameron ever made! If you want a Blu-Ray copy of Sneakers you have to import it (since its initial North American release was in HD-DVD and, I dunno, someone’s still pissed about that, I guess?). If you want to watch Shall We Dance? on Blu you have to settle for the mediocre American remake instead of the Japanese original – and don’t get me started on foreign films generally, if it’s not top 200 IMDB it’s kind of a wasteland.

Now this is the point where someone says “but we’re all going digital instead” and I get irritated by this because digital is hardly an answer. First off, renting films – and when you “buy” digital movies, that’s what you’re doing almost every single time – is not the same as buying them. Second, digital delivery is getting more and more sporadic as rights get more and more expensive for distributors to purchase.

As an example, take Wimbledon, a charming little 2004 sports film/romcom starring Paul Bettany and Kirsten Dunst. I am not saying Wimbledon is an unsung treasure or anything; it’s a lesser offering from the Working Title factory that cranks out chipper British romcoms, a solid B-grade movie: well-written with a few flashes of inspiration, good performances all around (including a younger Nikolai Coster-Waldau before he became the Kingslayer) and mostly funny, although Jon Favreau’s character is just annoying. But it’s fun, and it’s less than a decade old. It should be relatively easy to catch digitally, right? But no. It’s not anywhere. And there are tons of Wimbledons out there. (I asked on Twitter a while back what the word should be for when you want to watch something you would expect to see on Netflix – an unambitious mid-level dramedy that only really wanted to make its modest budget back and maybe a little more – and it is not there. My friend Tara suggested “Netflunx” which is just perfect.)

And then there’s international rights issues. Of the digital solutions, Amazon Instant Video is the best for selection (although at ten bucks a flick I would not say it is especially a winner on price considering you’re just paying for a license) – but that assumes you live in the United States. Outside of the United States digital selection is crap or nonexistent. Digital is not really a great option for non-Americans period, which is why we furners all spoof our DNSes and watch American Netflix instead of the local brand: there’s just so much more on it.

And worst, remember the DVD selection explosion? All that stuff is out of print now. Want a copy of Without A Clue (another great movie not available on digital anywhere)? Get ready to pay upwards of forty bucks for a new DVD of it.

It’s nuts when you think about it. We very briefly had a neverending rainbow of home cinema, the largest film selection available to any generation ever, period, end of story, and we’re regressing from that. How depressing is that?

So I went to see Jobs yesterday, because I was in the mood to see a movie in theatres (I like going to see movies in theatres; some people whine incessantly about other people making noise and disturbing their precious experience, but I like the communal aspect of moviegoing) and it was either Jobs or The Wolverine and I think Marvel has found my limit because I simply do not want to see that movie even a little. At this point if you want me to watch another film in the X-franchise, you’d better be promising to bring back Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler, and then maybe we can talk.

So, it was Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs, and I freely admit I went mostly because I wanted to be ready for the inevitable Rifftrax release, because the trailer for Jobs is cheesy and awful – every line is predictable and it features both “Can’t Hold Us” by Macklemore and “Baba O’Reilly” by the Who, which is a one-two punch of “trailer cliche songs” (and yes, the Macklemore song is already a trailer cliche after less than four months, that is how fast it became one; it basically arrived pre-cliched). And it’s got blurbs, most of which are pointless (oh, Gizmodo said not to miss it, well then).

Now that I have seen it, I can say that Ashton Kutcher is going to get most of the blame for this thing flopping, because he is front and center and it is the predictable and easy narrative to say “ha ha Kelso from That 70s Show as Steve Jobs” but really, it’s not his fault. Kutcher does a good job with what he’s given: he does his best to inhabit the Jobs character in this, doesn’t shy away from giving an unsympathetic performance (because, let’s be honest, Steve Jobs was a dickhead) and delivers a performance that is overall quite solid. Really, there’s a number of great character actors in this – JK Simmons, Dermot Mulroney, Matthew Modine, Josh Gad – and they all deliver rock-solid work with what they’re given.

Here is the problem: they are given mostly crap. To its credit, Jobs doesn’t shy away from Steve Jobs being a dickhead: many of the deplorable and awful things he did during his life (blackballing fellow Apple founders because he could, refusing to acknowledge his daughter because he wanted to pretend he wasn’t the father, cheating on his girlfriend – hell, literally the first appearance of Steve Wozniak in the film is when Jobs fucks over Wozniak for a couple thousand bucks without Woz’s knowledge). But the film has no greater narrative arc than “Steve Jobs was a shithead and also a genius” and doesn’t back it up: Wozniak rather than Jobs is the brains behind the Apple II, Jobs royally screws up the Macintosh by making it too costly to sell cheap, and then BAM iPod and iMac and all that sort of thing. In this movie, Steve Jobs isn’t a tempestuous genius; he’s a child who keeps repeating a mantra and getting other people to do the work for him, which ironically comes off unfair to him. We’re talking about his supposedly hagiographic biopic here! (I mean, I am hardly an Apple fanboy, but come on, credit where credit is due.)

Worse, because Jobs’ bad behaviour is not given proper context (any number of personal traumas in his life, remember), the movie is aimless. It drifts about from incident to incident rather than having a narrative heft. This is intensified when you consider how much the movie leaves out: after a brief prelude where he’s bragging about the iPod to Apple employees, it begins with Jobs in 1974, bumming around in college, goes through the founding of Apple through to Jobs’ ouster from the company in 1985, and then eleven years pass. No discussion of Jobs’ early life (which is interesting) other than a token mention of his adoption during an unintentionally-hilarious LSD trip early on. The time away from Apple, where he founded NeXT and co-founded Pixar, is literally covered in fifteen seconds, and then we spend the last fifteen percent of the movie covering Jobs being put back in charge at Apple and that’s the ballgame.

Aaron Sorkin is writing a Jobs movie right now, and he’s going minimalist – apparently his movie is three half-hour setpieces, each one taking place immediately before a major Apple product launch. That’s a really interesting way of approaching Jobs, because the product launches were his greatest moments of influence (at a guess, they’ll be Apple II, Macintosh and iPhone) and it plays to Sorkin’s strengths, because if you’re gonna write three bottle episodes and call it a movie, you can do much worse than to hire Sorkin. The other way you could go for Jobs is to do an HBO-style miniseries, a technocratic version of John Adams. But Jobs tries to cover everything and fails miserably. It simply leaves out too much, and tries to cover that with brief asides and single sentences, and the cheats don’t work.

Oh, and did I mention the dialogue yet? Because it’s so bad, guys. Putting aside the numerous standing ovations Jobs gets during this movie (which are just an opportunity to repackage Jobs-speak and Apple marketing talk as dialogue), if you listen to the dialogue in that trailer, you have to understand it gets worse than that. No cliche is spared, no predictable line avoided. You will be able to quote this movie in advance of seeing it. Which makes it so deliciously awful that really, I have to recommend the experience. Although you may wish to get stoned first. I am sure Steve Jobs would approve of that.

Dear Mr. Card,

I wanted you to know that I recently read your statement regarding the proposed boycott of ‘Ender’s Game’, and I can understand where you’re coming from in your plea for tolerance. Believe me, I can understand what it’s like to worry that your livelihood will be affected by the intolerance of others. Many of my LGBT friends have had to face open discrimination in the workplace due to the kind of open hatred you personally fostered with your time and money…and in fact, continue to foster today, despite your belief that the whole issue is now “moot”. So I can deeply sympathize with your hope that “the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.”

To that end, I pledge that I will in fact show just as much tolerance of you as I expect to see you and others show towards people of different sexual preferences and identities (by the way, I assume that since the issue is now “moot”, you’ll be disbanding NOM? After all, no sense throwing good money after bad, right?) In that spirit, I pledge the following:

I will not seek to deprive you of your legal and constitutional rights.

I will not seek to have you declared mentally ill and institutionalized.

I will not seek to have normal, healthy sexual activities that you perform in private with consenting adults declared illegal, in order to “send a message” to you about their morality.

I will not seek to have you declared an unfit parent based on your sexual preference/inclination, nor will I suggest you act in a sexually predatory fashion towards prepubescent children who match your sexual preference.

I will not refuse to serve you at my place of business.

I will not advocate the overthrow of the United States government in order to install a puppet regime that discriminates against your sexual preference/inclination.

Because I agree with your request for tolerance, I freely and happily pledge to all these things. I think you’d no doubt agree that I am meeting you more than halfway, given your previous verbal and financial advocation on LGBT issues. Nonetheless, as you pointed out, your backwards and hateful rhetoric is rapidly receding into history’s rear view mirror, and you are rapidly becoming seen as nothing more than a bigoted old crank who nobody listens to anymore. In that light, I agree that it’s easy to be tolerant in victory. So let’s stand on this agreement and let bygones be bygones.

…oh, you may note that “paying good money to see your shitty-ass movie” isn’t included in the definition of ‘tolerance’. That wasn’t what you were asking me to do, was it? Drop me a line back and let me know!

Sincerely,

John Seavey

Channing Tatum deserves better than a movie that is so bad it deserves to be ranked next to Showgirls in the list of movies that their creators will eventually pretend were meant to be parodies.

Much like John Carter, it is a perfectly average piece of genre fiction with some genuinely good bits that was pre-determined to be horrible by people who have not seen it; unlike John Carter, its sins are the result of caution rather than ambition.

The Matrix: Given that we perceive the world entirely through our senses, the ultimate nature of reality will always be subject to irreconcilable doubt.

The Matrix Reloaded: Why yes, the Wachowski Brothers would like large sums of money, thank you very much.

The Matrix Revolutions: If your agent is good enough, you can get a $110 million dollar sequel greenlit before anyone even sees the movie it’s following.

The Terminator: Even though it might feel like you’re an ordinary person powerless to affect the vast sweep of history, you can do more than you might think.

Apocalypse Now: It’s easy to lose your perspective on “sanity” when you get too far away from other people.

Cast Away: It’s easy to lost your perspective on “sanity” when you get too far away from other people.

Road to Perdition: You will never truly understand your father, and you will always miss him.

The Lion King: In a world with limited resources, it’s just better that a privileged class of rulers takes the majority of the food and leaves everyone else struggling over scraps, and trying to change this is evil.

Grave of the Fireflies: No matter how just your cause, when you go to war you will turn people into victims.

I, Robot: Racial prejudice is entirely justified, and all those people who think we can get along are just dupes blinded to the secret cabal who rules the world and plans to murder us all when the time is right!

The Dark Knight: Being a hero sometimes means sacrificing your own personal happiness.

Jurassic Park: Treat the “little people” nice, because they can make your life a living hell if you screw them over.

Resident Evil: Biological warfare is an ultimately suicidal pursuit.

Twilight: Dysfunctional, sociopathic stalkers are sexy because they’re really into you!

King Kong: Wild animals don’t make good pets, and are best appreciated in their natural habitat from a safe distance.

The Shining: It sucks when you’re a kid and parents get a new job that uproots you from your familiar environment.

Room 237: Postmodern film critique can lead you down some pretty fucking crazy rabbit holes, dude.

Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth 2150 AD: It would really have sucked if the Nazis had won World War II.

Stargate: No matter how hard it seems, you have to let go of the past or you might as well be dead.

The Wishmaster: A clear head and the ability to think on your feet are immensely valuable.

The Omen: As much as you love your children, they’re always going to be a living reminder of your mortality and that’s always going to be faintly unnerving.

Friday the 13th: Sometimes people will blame you for shit you didn’t even do, and they can’t be reasoned with.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Hedonism isn’t as bad as some people proclaim it to be, and only uptight prudes get upset about casual sex and transvestitism…and, um, murder…and…er…cannibalism.

Quarantine: Authority figures prefer to operate in secret primarily because they don’t like to be held accountable to the general public for their actions.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey: Risks are worth taking, because ultimately they (sentence to be continued next year)

Jim already covered a lot of ground yesterday, a lot of which I concurred with and sort of pre-empted chunks of my post, but I’ve got a few things to say (spoilers after the cut).

continue reading "Man of Steel"

WHAT I LIKED:

Henry Cavill – I buy this guy as Superman, whereas Christopher Reeve, Dean Cain, and Brandon Routh were more like “it’s impossible to cast Superman perfectly, but these guys are tall and seem earnest.” Cavill can be nice without seeming unaggressive, as in his “I’m not asking to help you, I’m telling you” tone towards General Swanwick. This is a Superman that isn’t removed from danger because he’s immune to it; he’s just pretty confident he can handle any shit that comes his way.

Krypton – Man of Steel presents a much more interesting Krypton than any of the movies so far–not as interesting as the comics, but the comics have had 900 months to explore the concept. I definitely got a John Byrne vibe from it, which surprised me because that was like three or four reboots ago, but it fit with the premise. Byrne’s Krypton is not just a doomed world, but a civilization in decline. Granted, a fantastic Curt Swan kind of Krypton would be even more enjoyable, but after decades of glaciers and crystals I’ll take what I can get on the big screen.

Kevin Costner – I’ve never sat down and compared all the different versions of Jonathan Kent, so I can’t say for sure that Costner is the best one. But I am certain that this is the first time I bought Pa as a midwestern farmer, and not the idea of a midwestern farmer as conceived by some big city writer or movie director. In playing the role Costner comes across like some guy my dad would know, at an age where he’s not ready to admit he’s no longer the alpha male in his family. The father-son quarrel especially rang true.

Urban Legend Superman – I’m a sucker for the period after Clark is grown up and leaves home but before he decides to act publicly as Superman. It’s a fertile ground for doing stories you can’t do after Superman’s debut, and this movie takes advantage. It’s a blast watching that mysterious unkempt stranger showing up in random places helping people and sneaking in his powers. And it provided a novel way to introduce Lois Lane to the story, by acknowledging that sooner or later an investigative journalist would notice Clark’s trail and trace it back to the Kents’ farm.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE:

The plot – Basically Krypton is dying, so Jor-El’s solution is to start fresh by sending his son to Earth, and General Zod’s solution is to turn Earth into a new Krypton and make all the same mistakes again. This conflict reminds me of nothing so much as the “World of New Krypton” storyline a few years back that sucked so hard that I dropped the Superman comics and DC rebooted them. You can’t get into “Earth vs. Krypton” because Krypton is dead–that’s the one thing everybody knows about it–so you can’t shake the feeling that you’re watching the last desperate twitches of a spent force. Superman II avoided this dilemma by depicting Zod as a self-interested (not nationalist) megalomaniac who is freed by (rather than in denial of) Krypton’s demise. In contrast, Man of Steel feels like a pointless (albeit well choreographed) brawl over a moot point.

The pacing – It felt like every time the movie started to build momentum, we had to grind things to a halt to show another flashback to Superman’s childhood or a Jor-El speech. It sucks to have to say that, because this movie deserves points for letting Superman be active and alive rather than floating around being thoughtful. But somewhere along the line someone still thinks that pensive reflection is what makes it a Superman movie, which is especially frustrating in light of the Nolan Batman movies and the Avengers franchise raising the bar for superhero blockbusters.

Superman didn’t save many people – OK, you know that scene in the 1978 movie, where Superman saves Lois in the falling helicopter? Of course you do. What makes it so iconic is that it’s the perfect example of what makes Superman such an appealing fantasy–Lois’s danger becomes increasingly apparent, and as tension mounts all you can do is wish that some guy with all the power to fix it would swoop in and fix it. (Similarly satisfying: Captain America saving that old man in Avengers; any time Batman says “I’m Batman.”) Trouble is, Man of Steel has several scenes like that in which Superman frankly can’t fix it, either because he’s fixing something else or Zod’s thugs are all as powerful as he is. I don’t want to be too hard on the big guy, because he did save the world and that’s where I keep all my stuff. But throughout the third act there are places where I wished someone would magically prop up the falling buildings or rescue the frightened minor characters. And when Superman is literally in your movie, it’s kind of frustrating when he can’t be there every time it looks like a job for Superman.

Jor-El – Let’s be clear: the whole point of Jor-El is that he’s gone. He cannot raise his son, he cannot know what will happen to his son, and he cannot help his son. That’s what he has to come to grips with when they launch the rocket, and that’s why he doesn’t need to be all over the movie after that. As soon as any Superman story has to rely on a premise of “Luckily, Jor-El thought of that so he packed this into the rocket with Kal,” it’s time for a rewrite. Man of Steel has Jor-El pack a handy fully interactive Jor-El hologram that can literally do everything for Clark except punch General Zod. Imagine if Batman’s dad built the Batcave and left him extensive notes on how to be Batman, as well as a prerecorded plea for the villain to abandon his mad scheme so innocent lives are not lost. It’s kind of like that.

Again with the Jesus references – Look, I get it, Superman came from the heavens to save the earth in his early 30s, but regular people sometimes regard him with suspicion. But that’s also right where the similarities with Jesus end, so can we get over this already? You’d think somewhere around the part where Clark is flying around the Indian Ocean trying to zap a giant world engine with his heat vision, the writers would start to notice that this isn’t very much like the New Testament after all.

The Daily Planet is almost irrelevant – It’s not that I object to a Superman story that doesn’t involve the Daily Planet and its staff. It’s that time is wasted on these characters when they are irrelevant to the plot. I strongly suspect that the folks who made this movie would have preferred to dispense with the journalism stuff altogether, but they didn’t think they could get away with reinventing Lois Lane as one of the military guys. As it is, the scene where Perry White and Steve Lombard have to save that girl loses its impact, because the only reason we have to care about them is that they’re going to be Superman’s coworkers in the future.

Racebending missing the point – If the goal is to increase visibility of non-white performers in predominantly white movies, I would have rather seen Christopher Meloni play Perry White’s irrelevant part, and Lawrence Fishburne play the badass colonel guy that is in all the important scenes and helps Superman save the world. I’m just sayin’.

That other thing that’s a SPOILER – It will probably be the most controversial thing in the movie, and I could probably do a whole post on it. So let’s just pretend I’m talking about Batman filming a porno with a goat. Basically, if you’re going to have Batman fuck a goat, and you want to make it clear Batman absolutely doesn’t want to fuck a goat, it might be a good idea to establish beforehand Batman’s strong feelings about goat-fucking, and not have Batman appear to be totally fine in the scene immediately following the goat-fucking. I think I’ve made myself clear.

The logic in my head went thusly:

1. Edward Norton was utterly wasted in ‘The Incredible Hulk’, a movie about a man with a split personality who was destructive and at odds with his ‘primary’ self.

2. Prior to that, Norton was probably best known for ‘Fight Club’, a movie about a man with a split personality who was destructive and who (came to be) at odds with his primary self.

3. Previous Hulk stories have featured the Hulk at varying levels of intelligence. You could, without betraying the source material, write a Hulk who was as eloquent and charismatic as Tyler Durden. And the potential for stunt-casting with Brad Pitt would be too hard to pass up. In some alternate universe, we got a version of ‘The Incredible Hulk’ written as a superhero homage to ‘Fight Club’.

4. When writing dialogue from this alternate Hulk movie, it’s worth remembering that Hulk dialogue is always funnier when written in Roy Thomas’ green Hulk argot.

As such…

“First Rule of Hulk Club: Hulk not talk about Hulk Club.”

“Second Rule of Hulk Club: HULK NOT TALK ABOUT HULK CLUB! RRRAAAARRRRGGGGH!”

“Third Rule of Hulk Club: When puny human say ‘stop’, go limp, tap out, Hulk stop smashing them.”

“Fourth Rule of Hulk Club: It not fair to gang up on Hulk.”

“Fifth Rule of Hulk Club: Hulk will smash you when Hulk finished smashing other puny human.”

“Sixth Rule of Hulk Club: No shirts. No shoes. Only purple pants.”

“Seventh Rule of Hulk Club: Hulk will smash as long as Hulk has to smash.”

“And Eighth Rule of Hulk Club: If this your first night at Hulk Club…you must SMASH!”