Originally posted at Cinevox. Spoliers, of course.
******************************************
Spoilers abound, of course.
So Peter, Beth, Cindy and I saw it.
My goodness, my transformation to effete film snob is nearly complete. I know intellectually this movie isn't half as bad as it felt (or maybe it was) and that I'm responding as much to the adulation it is getting (confirming my growing suspicion that most of the people in the world who aren't me--or at least agree with me 95% of the time--are idiots) as its mediocrity.
Peter and Beth want a full-on ATK rant. Not sure I'm up to that--but I guess I'll give it the old James T. Kirk try. The abbreviated version, in rising order of what I found irritating:
--the prolonged and ever increasing chase factor, turning the franchise from a science-fiction film into an action film. Mission: Impossible in space, if you will.
--either be a reboot (and ignore the continuity issues/problems) or a prequel (and spend time explaining how to get Nimoy, etc into the movie), but don't do a half-assed job at both and thus a satisfactory job at neither.
--The explicit coda delivered in dialogue for those too stupid to understand what a movie they have just seen is about.
--(I realize I may be the only one who cares about this one, but...) I find it to be the wrong cultural moment for the political self-congratulatory tone of our humanistic, Western federation valuing of life and even mercy towards our enemies. Spock is supposed to be the moral hero because he recognizes he has been "emotionally compromised" and thus relieves himself of command. Kirk offers mercy to the terrorist slayer of 6 billion life forms b/c that may be the only way to build a diplomatic bridge to the terrorists? Sure, he's happy when they say they'd rather die than submit, allowing us to simultaneously exercise genocidal vengeance yet still feel morally superior in, you know, a Christian sort of way. It's the sort of fantasy wish fulfillment of the sort (pandering to our basest instincts masquerading as moral superiority) I haven't seen since, well, Left Behind. Rather than deal with or even acknowledge our most problematic (Kaplan uses the word "shameful," I think, in Female Perversions) urges, let's construct fantasy scenarios in which giving in to them is actually required of us and therefore morally noble rather than compromised or even base. It's the philosophical/moral equivalent of the Kobyashi Maru scneario--let's rewrite the program to that some problem isn't a problem at all and congratulate ourselves at our cleverness in being able to have our cake and eat it too. I've never been a great follower/fan of the television incarnations, but I've respected what I've seen, in part because there seemed to be an actual ideological idea or world-view that was being expressed. This film reminded me of the first Harry Potter film--working feverishly to get in all the superficial surface paraphernalia (as though those were the things that made it great rather than just nostalgic buttons to push) but totally whiffing on the spirit that animated them and made people love it in the first place.
Should make a couple gazillion billion dollars and serve marvelously as a tent pole reboot. And it's my fault, because like the last two Star Wars movies, I know I'll probably go see them all.
On the upside, I had a great afternoon with friends and family, so that was well worth eight bucks. I guess if I had to choose between that and loving the film but finding the people I see it with really annoying, I'll take the company every time.
Showing posts with label Rants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rants. Show all posts
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Sunday, March 15, 2009
The House Bunny Quasi-Rant
I can't quite bring myself to full rant mode for The House Bunny, because, let's be honest, pretty much any complaint I could raise about the film would be rebutted by at least two of the five primal questions:
Now, I could point to the ending with a speech about the importance of inner beauty, friendship, etc. followed by the post-coda dance to the song, "I Know What Boys Want." But I prefer this exchange of dialogue:
Oh boy, we laugh because it's funny, and we laugh because it's so true. Because, really, aren't gays the only guys that like to talk with girls they hook up with?
I would point out that this film is more demeaning towards men than women, as it shows women at least capable of friendship and being motivated by things other than sex, while it makes clear that a guy is and can only be motivated by one thing.
I would point that out, except that to point out that the only reason a guy might watch the film is to ogle girls requires admitting you watched the film. This reminds me of the famous Dilbert cartoon where the point haired boss says that one of his worker's flaws is that she tends to argue with people who are much smarter than her prompting her to think, "I can't argue with his stupid misconception without proving it is true!" Checkmate.
Okay, I watched this film, so I guess I deserve whatever scorn I get. Please berate me in the comments below as you see fit.
P.S. Anna Farris was actually kind of cute in Entourage. Oh well.
P.P.S. Was that Katherine Macphee as in American Idol Katherine MacPhee? You know, if I had to put her performance up against Kelly Clarkson's in From Justin 2 Kelly, I think she might actually beat Kelly Clarkson, which feels out to even type.
P.P.P.S. Last fall in Toronto I saw Kat Dennings in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. I am hard pressed to think of an actress who has been in two consecutive films this bad and yet towards whom I developed no ill will. She seems like a pleasant enough actress, but Kat...fire your agent.
- What did you think was going to happen?
- How long have you known about the assignment?
Now, I could point to the ending with a speech about the importance of inner beauty, friendship, etc. followed by the post-coda dance to the song, "I Know What Boys Want." But I prefer this exchange of dialogue:
Maybe Oliver is one of those guys who likes to have a conversation with a girl before he hooks up with her.
He's gay?
Oh boy, we laugh because it's funny, and we laugh because it's so true. Because, really, aren't gays the only guys that like to talk with girls they hook up with?
I would point out that this film is more demeaning towards men than women, as it shows women at least capable of friendship and being motivated by things other than sex, while it makes clear that a guy is and can only be motivated by one thing.
I would point that out, except that to point out that the only reason a guy might watch the film is to ogle girls requires admitting you watched the film. This reminds me of the famous Dilbert cartoon where the point haired boss says that one of his worker's flaws is that she tends to argue with people who are much smarter than her prompting her to think, "I can't argue with his stupid misconception without proving it is true!" Checkmate.
Okay, I watched this film, so I guess I deserve whatever scorn I get. Please berate me in the comments below as you see fit.
P.S. Anna Farris was actually kind of cute in Entourage. Oh well.
P.P.S. Was that Katherine Macphee as in American Idol Katherine MacPhee? You know, if I had to put her performance up against Kelly Clarkson's in From Justin 2 Kelly, I think she might actually beat Kelly Clarkson, which feels out to even type.
P.P.P.S. Last fall in Toronto I saw Kat Dennings in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. I am hard pressed to think of an actress who has been in two consecutive films this bad and yet towards whom I developed no ill will. She seems like a pleasant enough actress, but Kat...fire your agent.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Pineapple Express Rant
Since I had Knocked Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall on top ten lists the last two years, I guess I should summon up the energy to rant Pineapple Express, but I just can't think of any clever or creative way of saying, boring, pointless and unfunny.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Entertainment Weekly Rant
Our friends over at Entertainment Weekly love to make lists. They are fun to make and (sometimes) fun to read, but they do have the drawback of often making those who create them look like, well, idiots.
Case in point. I learned that a lack of a nomination in the category of Best Actress for Renee Falconetti's portrayal of the eponymous heroine in Carl Thedor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc constituted the 69th worst Oscar snub in history.
There are, I suppose, a variety of ways one can evaluate Falconetti's performance and not look like a fool. One might reasonably argue that some of the credit goes to Dreyer for the recognition of talent and for coercing the role out of her. (One of my current objections to so many critics awards is that absent some witnessing of the process, it is very difficult from the final product alone to discern the contributions of, say, actor from director from screenwriter.)
One could just as easily, without looking like a fool, insist that Falconetti's turn as Joan is one of the most iconic film performances of all time, belonging on a plane above awards, entering into the cultural and artistic collective memory as a sort of touchstone moment around which histories are written.
Here's what one can't do without looking like an idiot. One can't look at The Passion of Joan of Arc and say, "You know, in the annals of great performances, I gotta say Falconnetti's Joan ranks six ahead of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day and four behind Alan Rickman's turn as Hans Gruber in the first Die Hard movie."
Case in point. I learned that a lack of a nomination in the category of Best Actress for Renee Falconetti's portrayal of the eponymous heroine in Carl Thedor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc constituted the 69th worst Oscar snub in history.
There are, I suppose, a variety of ways one can evaluate Falconetti's performance and not look like a fool. One might reasonably argue that some of the credit goes to Dreyer for the recognition of talent and for coercing the role out of her. (One of my current objections to so many critics awards is that absent some witnessing of the process, it is very difficult from the final product alone to discern the contributions of, say, actor from director from screenwriter.)
One could just as easily, without looking like a fool, insist that Falconetti's turn as Joan is one of the most iconic film performances of all time, belonging on a plane above awards, entering into the cultural and artistic collective memory as a sort of touchstone moment around which histories are written.
Here's what one can't do without looking like an idiot. One can't look at The Passion of Joan of Arc and say, "You know, in the annals of great performances, I gotta say Falconnetti's Joan ranks six ahead of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day and four behind Alan Rickman's turn as Hans Gruber in the first Die Hard movie."
Friday, January 16, 2009
Eagle Eye Rant
There are movies I like.
There are movies I dislike.
And then there are movies that just positively bewilder me.
Eagle Eye is one of the latter. I can't even begin to figure out my response to it because I'm honestly baffled by what I am looking at. I haven't been this lost at the movies since I'm Not There.
Granted the Dylan biopic created a different kind of confusion. In Eagle Eye, I could follow the "plot" (such as it was) and identify the characters (such as they were), but I just had no idea what was going on.
I mean, I knew what was going on in the film--some group or person was using the electronic devices that surround us to create Rube Goldbergesque (both in their complexity and silly pointlessness) escapes for our characters.
What I didn't know is what was going on with the film. Was it just stupidly over the top in not caring about plausibility? Or was the ever increasing ridiculousness supposed to be part of the point that signaled to the audience...what? That there was no point? That it was a fable?
Watching this film is a bit like watching White House Press Secretary Dana Perino on The Daily Show. There's no there there. There's no message or point. The point is that she is there and the thing she is there to say is that she is there. You sort of know she doesn't believe half of what she says because...well because she can't possibly believe half of what she says. She's not drooling on herself or otherwise acting mentally retarded. Yet she has the professionally practiced poker-faced earnestness that never actually makes the wink literal. And then when all is said and done, you are still left to wonder what's the point of winking, anyway, as interpreting it as a wink means you have to either be oblivious to or careless about the fact that words and ideas (some of which are defended some of which are advocated) have real meaning and real consequences whether one always leaves oneself a trail of breadcrumbs to the "I was just being ironic" out or not.
Honestly, I don't feel dumber for having seen this movie...I feel...more...
Hopeless.
Because as much as I like a good mindless action flick...when the chases and explosions and threats of child murder are wrapped around a shell of nothing, I start thinking maybe the theater ought to just bypass the exercise altogether and just hand patrons a ball of crack for their twenty dollars.
There are movies I dislike.
And then there are movies that just positively bewilder me.
Eagle Eye is one of the latter. I can't even begin to figure out my response to it because I'm honestly baffled by what I am looking at. I haven't been this lost at the movies since I'm Not There.
Granted the Dylan biopic created a different kind of confusion. In Eagle Eye, I could follow the "plot" (such as it was) and identify the characters (such as they were), but I just had no idea what was going on.
I mean, I knew what was going on in the film--some group or person was using the electronic devices that surround us to create Rube Goldbergesque (both in their complexity and silly pointlessness) escapes for our characters.
What I didn't know is what was going on with the film. Was it just stupidly over the top in not caring about plausibility? Or was the ever increasing ridiculousness supposed to be part of the point that signaled to the audience...what? That there was no point? That it was a fable?
Watching this film is a bit like watching White House Press Secretary Dana Perino on The Daily Show. There's no there there. There's no message or point. The point is that she is there and the thing she is there to say is that she is there. You sort of know she doesn't believe half of what she says because...well because she can't possibly believe half of what she says. She's not drooling on herself or otherwise acting mentally retarded. Yet she has the professionally practiced poker-faced earnestness that never actually makes the wink literal. And then when all is said and done, you are still left to wonder what's the point of winking, anyway, as interpreting it as a wink means you have to either be oblivious to or careless about the fact that words and ideas (some of which are defended some of which are advocated) have real meaning and real consequences whether one always leaves oneself a trail of breadcrumbs to the "I was just being ironic" out or not.
Honestly, I don't feel dumber for having seen this movie...I feel...more...
Hopeless.
Because as much as I like a good mindless action flick...when the chases and explosions and threats of child murder are wrapped around a shell of nothing, I start thinking maybe the theater ought to just bypass the exercise altogether and just hand patrons a ball of crack for their twenty dollars.
Friday, January 09, 2009
Gran Torino Rant
Gran Torino is a bad film, yes, but at least it has the decency to be an exquisitely bad film of the type you can enjoy if you can get your head in the right place, see it with a few buddies, and one-up one another in deriding plot holes and predicting developments. (Give your self one point if you correctly predicted Clint would say confession in the second half of the film, two if you correctly predicted it would be in the penultimate scene, and three if at the appropriate time you turned to the person you were sitting next to and said, "This would be a really good place for a montage.")
I said to my friend Peter (a.k.a. Smokey Burner) after the film--and it's imperative that you understand that I am absolutely, positively in earnest--that as bad as the film was, it would have been perfect with two small changes:
a) The addition of a Predator.
b) If the dog could talk (or at the minimum do a voice-over narration).
Before I explain, let me just say that I think it is Eastwood's presence that ultimately causes the film to implode. This is a shame, really, because if the film had starred Steven Seagal, Mark Wahlberg, or Vin Diesel, it could have gone straight to video as a Death Wish reboot without having to add all the Jesus imagery the only point of which seems to be to make you wonder if Gus Van Sant somehow decided to do a shot by shot remake of Unforgiven only to have a sly intern slip in pages of The Karate Kid to see if he would notice:
"What's it like to kill a man?"
"It's horrible; you take everything he ever has or will have. Now show me wax the car..."
(I got all three points for the quiz above, but I had one deducted for incorrectly guessing that when Eastwood gives the car to his Hmong mentee that the keys would be on his dog tags.)
But I digress.
The fixes.
Well, first the Predator, because if you are going to take the position that society has gone to hell and some sort of hunter needs to instinctively know who deserves to live and who deserves to get his face kicked in, he ought to at least have cool infra-red vision. Plus a Predator is relatively quick short hand for a film to just go ahead and announce that it is renouncing any claims to reality and just pandering to most basic instincts that attract us to genre pieces to begin with.
The dog takes a little more (but not much more) explaining. One of the things that hampers Eastwood is that the script calls on him to verbalize every response he has because it doesn't trust the audience to get even the most heavy-handed underlining. The opening scene is of his wife's funeral and he scowls at the grandkids and then (in case you didn't get it) their two parents (his kids) explain to each other why he is scowling at their kids. ("Did you see him scowling at your kid for wearing a Lion's jersey?" "Yeah, well your daughter is showing her belly button...") My personal favorite example of this ongoing expository dialogue is when Eastwood gets a phone call that begins, "Hi Dad, this is your number one son, Mitch..."
Unfortunately there are several scenes in which there is nobody around to serve as author (or interpreter) surrogate and tell us what his glowers mean, so Eastwood has to do it himself, either by looking in the mirror and/or talking to himself--"What the hell are you doing here?" or muttering under his breath to nobody in particular. In what I guess is the pivotal scene of the film, Eastwood watches a neighbor woman get out of her car and spill her groceries as a group of teenagers laugh and walk by her on the sidewalk. "Will you look at that!" he grumbles and starts to get up from his chair. Before he can, though, he notices his young, Hmong neighbor walk across the street and say, "Here let me help you." Eastwood then looks at the dog and says, "Well whaddaya know?"
Smokey Burner turned to me at that point and said, "The film couldn't just show us him watching that exchange and trust us to figure it out?" But my response was, heck, in for a penny, in for a pound. It would have been much more satisfying if either Eastwood (or the dog) added, "Hmmm, after witnessing this, I begin to wonder if perhaps I've/you've misjudged my Hmong neighbor. Maybe with the gruff but ultimately loving mentoring of the sort of cantankerous old person who is drainingly bitter and racist in real life but irascibly charming and just non-PC in the movies, he might actually bloom into a noble enough character that he's potentially worth saving from becoming the sort of misogynist punk that I'm/you're berating him for not being in the first place."
At the very least, such an exchange would indicate that the film was fully embracing self-parody rather than just flirting with it in a way that Eastwood's character would only call "weak-assed." Granted, people who haven't seen a lot of magical realism might not know what to make of a talking dog, but if they had just made the dog's bits voice-overs a la Look Who's Talking, Homeward Bound, or To Kill a Mockingbird (if, you know, Scout had been a dog), I think Gran Torino would have worked perfectly as a living fable rather than a drama. It may even have been guaranteed one Oscar.
Assuming, of course, that they could have gotten Morgan Freeman to play the dog.
***SPOILERS***
P.S. The film ends with Toad driving the Gran Torino by the lake. If there remains any doubt about how many plot holes the film has or just how cynical a bastard I really am, I confess the one thing I most desperately wanted to see at that moment was the car full of black guys that harassed him earlier in film drive up along side and one of the passengers pull a gun and say, "Give me the keys, wuss--you're Hmongy buddies can't save you anymore!"
I said to my friend Peter (a.k.a. Smokey Burner) after the film--and it's imperative that you understand that I am absolutely, positively in earnest--that as bad as the film was, it would have been perfect with two small changes:
a) The addition of a Predator.
b) If the dog could talk (or at the minimum do a voice-over narration).
Before I explain, let me just say that I think it is Eastwood's presence that ultimately causes the film to implode. This is a shame, really, because if the film had starred Steven Seagal, Mark Wahlberg, or Vin Diesel, it could have gone straight to video as a Death Wish reboot without having to add all the Jesus imagery the only point of which seems to be to make you wonder if Gus Van Sant somehow decided to do a shot by shot remake of Unforgiven only to have a sly intern slip in pages of The Karate Kid to see if he would notice:
"What's it like to kill a man?"
"It's horrible; you take everything he ever has or will have. Now show me wax the car..."
(I got all three points for the quiz above, but I had one deducted for incorrectly guessing that when Eastwood gives the car to his Hmong mentee that the keys would be on his dog tags.)
But I digress.
The fixes.
Well, first the Predator, because if you are going to take the position that society has gone to hell and some sort of hunter needs to instinctively know who deserves to live and who deserves to get his face kicked in, he ought to at least have cool infra-red vision. Plus a Predator is relatively quick short hand for a film to just go ahead and announce that it is renouncing any claims to reality and just pandering to most basic instincts that attract us to genre pieces to begin with.
The dog takes a little more (but not much more) explaining. One of the things that hampers Eastwood is that the script calls on him to verbalize every response he has because it doesn't trust the audience to get even the most heavy-handed underlining. The opening scene is of his wife's funeral and he scowls at the grandkids and then (in case you didn't get it) their two parents (his kids) explain to each other why he is scowling at their kids. ("Did you see him scowling at your kid for wearing a Lion's jersey?" "Yeah, well your daughter is showing her belly button...") My personal favorite example of this ongoing expository dialogue is when Eastwood gets a phone call that begins, "Hi Dad, this is your number one son, Mitch..."
Unfortunately there are several scenes in which there is nobody around to serve as author (or interpreter) surrogate and tell us what his glowers mean, so Eastwood has to do it himself, either by looking in the mirror and/or talking to himself--"What the hell are you doing here?" or muttering under his breath to nobody in particular. In what I guess is the pivotal scene of the film, Eastwood watches a neighbor woman get out of her car and spill her groceries as a group of teenagers laugh and walk by her on the sidewalk. "Will you look at that!" he grumbles and starts to get up from his chair. Before he can, though, he notices his young, Hmong neighbor walk across the street and say, "Here let me help you." Eastwood then looks at the dog and says, "Well whaddaya know?"
Smokey Burner turned to me at that point and said, "The film couldn't just show us him watching that exchange and trust us to figure it out?" But my response was, heck, in for a penny, in for a pound. It would have been much more satisfying if either Eastwood (or the dog) added, "Hmmm, after witnessing this, I begin to wonder if perhaps I've/you've misjudged my Hmong neighbor. Maybe with the gruff but ultimately loving mentoring of the sort of cantankerous old person who is drainingly bitter and racist in real life but irascibly charming and just non-PC in the movies, he might actually bloom into a noble enough character that he's potentially worth saving from becoming the sort of misogynist punk that I'm/you're berating him for not being in the first place."
At the very least, such an exchange would indicate that the film was fully embracing self-parody rather than just flirting with it in a way that Eastwood's character would only call "weak-assed." Granted, people who haven't seen a lot of magical realism might not know what to make of a talking dog, but if they had just made the dog's bits voice-overs a la Look Who's Talking, Homeward Bound, or To Kill a Mockingbird (if, you know, Scout had been a dog), I think Gran Torino would have worked perfectly as a living fable rather than a drama. It may even have been guaranteed one Oscar.
Assuming, of course, that they could have gotten Morgan Freeman to play the dog.
***SPOILERS***
P.S. The film ends with Toad driving the Gran Torino by the lake. If there remains any doubt about how many plot holes the film has or just how cynical a bastard I really am, I confess the one thing I most desperately wanted to see at that moment was the car full of black guys that harassed him earlier in film drive up along side and one of the passengers pull a gun and say, "Give me the keys, wuss--you're Hmongy buddies can't save you anymore!"
Friday, December 05, 2008
Wanted Rant
Here are the opening intertitles for Wanted:
Now I forget if it was Siskel or Ebert who said one key test of a film is whether or not its plot sounded more or less interesting than a documentary of its actors having lunch. I would certianly say another is whether or not the plot was formed by MadLibs (TM).
Try picking a friend at random and asking them to play MadLibs and then see if your movie premise sounds more or less the same or even better than Wanted's:
A THOUSAND YEARS AGO...
A CLAN OF WEAVERS FORMED A SECRET SOCIETY OF ASSASSINS.
THEY SILENTLY CARRIED OUT EXECUTIONS TO RESTORE ORDER TO A WORLD ON THE BRINK OF CHAOS.
THEY CALLED THEMSELVES THE FRATERNITY.
SIX WEEKS AGO...
Now I forget if it was Siskel or Ebert who said one key test of a film is whether or not its plot sounded more or less interesting than a documentary of its actors having lunch. I would certianly say another is whether or not the plot was formed by MadLibs (TM).
Try picking a friend at random and asking them to play MadLibs and then see if your movie premise sounds more or less the same or even better than Wanted's:
A __Number__ OF YEARS AGO...
A CLAN OF ___Profession (Plural)__ FORMED A SECRET SOCIETY OF __Dungeon's and Dragons Character Type__.
THEY __Adverb__ CARRIED OUT __Nominal__ (Verb in Noun form) TO RESTORE ORDER TO A WORLD ON THE BRINK OF CHAOS.
THEY CALLED THEMSELVES THE __Type of Group or Organization___.
__Number___ WEEKS AGO...
Sunday, June 29, 2008
The Other Boleyn Girl Rant
The Other Boleyn Girl begins with a scene of two young girls (pre-teen, it looks like) running through a field playing while their father discusses having accepted a proposal of marriage for one. I was dutifully shocked (shocked, I say!) at the juxtaposition of childhood innocence with worldly scheming. It seems that once upon a time--a time not so very long ago that the women didn't have shampoo and modern dental work to grow up to look like Natalie Portman--women were subject to the rule of men and even men in their family, even, shockingly, their own fathers, used that rule not for the good of those women but in callous disregard to the feelings and desires of those women. I wonder...is it possible...that living in such an unhealthy and oppressive environment would cause a woman to be inwardly and outwardly warped, to devalue herself, and to pursue sexual power as the only power available to her?
The film then moves to a scene of a woman, near death, exhausted from childbirth. Stunningly, yet more shockingly, she appears more distressed at her inability to produce a male offspring for her mate than at her own brush with death. I believe the words "I'm sorry" may have crossed her lips (though this was evidently not a Disney film, since the "it's all my fault" line required of all Disney heroines remains unspoken here). I was saddened to learn that once upon a time, in a time and land so very far away that even childbirth was dangerous, some women even internalized the expectations of a patriarchal society, treating them as right (or at least normal) and accepted with good graces the fact that their very lives were of less import than the concerns of the men who surrounded them.
From there we move to a scene where a male messenger informs the king that his child has died during the birthing process. The messenger's nervous looks and the king's icy glare lend an air of sudden, unexpected (so very, very unexpected!) menace to what one had assumed was going to be a grief filled scene. I was flabbergasted to learn that not only do some men care more about their offspring than the women that bear them but they may be so monstrous as to vent their wrath, anger, or disappointment on innocent bystanders simply because they can.
And so we veer from scene to scene, each illustrating some frightening and inconceivable truth--sisters both love one another and see one another as rivals. Sex existed before 1960s and sometimes people (even women!) spoke frankly about it with one another. Words like "other" in movie and book titles are sometimes used ironically or ambiguously in order to surprise the reader.
The Other Boleyn Girl seeks with all its might, pushes, strains, strives, positively labors, to be incomprehensible, and it succeeds, finally, but not in the way it wants. Years and years of Law & Order: SVU have beaten the message home to even the most culturally obtuse that it's tough to be a woman in a man's world, and, unfortunately, adding to that fact the observation the fact that women who lived long ago (but not so very long ago, if you know what I mean) had it even worse doesn't exactly create the ground-breaking expose that it was supposed to.
I don't know, perhaps I'm getting this all wrong. Perhaps the point is not supposed to be that some idealized historical romance setting can contain all the ugly truths of living in a world bent to power but rather to show that our progressive, egalitarian views of ourselves aren't really that much farther evolved than the dark ages we congratulate ourselves for surpassing. (Yeah, yeah, I know, the label "Dark Ages" doesn't exactly apply to this time period, but it isn't like they are all speaking Elizabethan English, so sue me.)
It's not that this is a horrid movie. Heck, it's always a pleasure to watch Scarlett with two "t"s for 110 minutes, even if she isn't running around in a white Puma jump suit or whispering in Bill Murray's ear. It's just that the last time I was expected to be this impressed at an elaborate announcement of truths already known, my cat was crying for a treat for doing good-boy peeing in his litter box.
P.S. (Later edit) I spoke too soon. Portman does, in fact, give a derivation of the "it's all my fault" line in the last third of the movie.
The film then moves to a scene of a woman, near death, exhausted from childbirth. Stunningly, yet more shockingly, she appears more distressed at her inability to produce a male offspring for her mate than at her own brush with death. I believe the words "I'm sorry" may have crossed her lips (though this was evidently not a Disney film, since the "it's all my fault" line required of all Disney heroines remains unspoken here). I was saddened to learn that once upon a time, in a time and land so very far away that even childbirth was dangerous, some women even internalized the expectations of a patriarchal society, treating them as right (or at least normal) and accepted with good graces the fact that their very lives were of less import than the concerns of the men who surrounded them.
From there we move to a scene where a male messenger informs the king that his child has died during the birthing process. The messenger's nervous looks and the king's icy glare lend an air of sudden, unexpected (so very, very unexpected!) menace to what one had assumed was going to be a grief filled scene. I was flabbergasted to learn that not only do some men care more about their offspring than the women that bear them but they may be so monstrous as to vent their wrath, anger, or disappointment on innocent bystanders simply because they can.
And so we veer from scene to scene, each illustrating some frightening and inconceivable truth--sisters both love one another and see one another as rivals. Sex existed before 1960s and sometimes people (even women!) spoke frankly about it with one another. Words like "other" in movie and book titles are sometimes used ironically or ambiguously in order to surprise the reader.
The Other Boleyn Girl seeks with all its might, pushes, strains, strives, positively labors, to be incomprehensible, and it succeeds, finally, but not in the way it wants. Years and years of Law & Order: SVU have beaten the message home to even the most culturally obtuse that it's tough to be a woman in a man's world, and, unfortunately, adding to that fact the observation the fact that women who lived long ago (but not so very long ago, if you know what I mean) had it even worse doesn't exactly create the ground-breaking expose that it was supposed to.
I don't know, perhaps I'm getting this all wrong. Perhaps the point is not supposed to be that some idealized historical romance setting can contain all the ugly truths of living in a world bent to power but rather to show that our progressive, egalitarian views of ourselves aren't really that much farther evolved than the dark ages we congratulate ourselves for surpassing. (Yeah, yeah, I know, the label "Dark Ages" doesn't exactly apply to this time period, but it isn't like they are all speaking Elizabethan English, so sue me.)
It's not that this is a horrid movie. Heck, it's always a pleasure to watch Scarlett with two "t"s for 110 minutes, even if she isn't running around in a white Puma jump suit or whispering in Bill Murray's ear. It's just that the last time I was expected to be this impressed at an elaborate announcement of truths already known, my cat was crying for a treat for doing good-boy peeing in his litter box.
P.S. (Later edit) I spoke too soon. Portman does, in fact, give a derivation of the "it's all my fault" line in the last third of the movie.
Monday, May 26, 2008
National Treasure--Book of Secrets Rant
I am chagrined to report--but honesty compels me--that at the 1:40 mark of National Treasure: Book of Secrets I turned to my wife and said, "You know what would make this the best movie ever?"
And I mean this sincerely...
If they had gotten to the bottom of the balancing stone table and found and Alien and a Predator battling it out.
No, really, I'm serious.
REALLY.
Think about it.
Best...
Movie...
Ever.
Why the heck Hollywood doesn't hire me to fix its scripts is inexplicable.
Alas, there were no aliens nor predators, wasting a perfectly good set up and leaving the film with some serious continuity and plausibility problems.
And I mean this sincerely...
If they had gotten to the bottom of the balancing stone table and found and Alien and a Predator battling it out.
No, really, I'm serious.
REALLY.
Think about it.
Best...
Movie...
Ever.
Why the heck Hollywood doesn't hire me to fix its scripts is inexplicable.
Alas, there were no aliens nor predators, wasting a perfectly good set up and leaving the film with some serious continuity and plausibility problems.
Friday, April 04, 2008
August Rush
I won't say that August Rush is the worst movie I've seen in the last year (at least), not because it isn't but only because I'm too tired having torn apart Dan in Real Life to have the energy to expound on all the bad choices made by the film's makers. (Excepting, perhaps Robin Williams's sideburns; I'm hard pressed to decide if his costuming was meant to overtly reference Brokeback Mountain and Midnight Cowboy and thus make implicit the character's gay-menace subtext or whether, given the film is essentially a reinvention of Oliver Twist, it is only supposed to get us as far away as possible from Fagin's Jewish identity and the implicit Jew-menace subtext.)
I will say that I can't think of a film since A Thin Red Line that drags on longer after you know what is going to happen. (I actually caught myself straining for glimpses of George Clooney in the Central Park crowd until I realized I, not August, was having a flashback.) I'm not sure whether or not to blame that on the writing, directing, or editing. I want to say the latter, as the film is perpetually building to montage moments over song-track serenades only to abruptly come to a screeching halt in order to start another. I guess this is meant to build tension (as opposed to merely make the film longer), but instead it just builds sluggishness. We're told repeatedly that these characters are desperately searching for each other, but they sort of slog through the film with a slothful confidence that if they wait long enough the movie they know they are in will end and they have no responsibility (beyond turning to the next page of the script) for moving their story along.
Freddie Highmore has a quiet intelligence and (miraculously for this film) the sense to avoid mugging (mostly) for the camera that allows him to escape from a sentimental shlockfest with his dignity intact. (Stack him up against Haley Joel Osment in Pay It Forward, and you'll see the difference between being in a bad movie versus being of one.) Terence Howard glides around the periphery of the action, and I'm uncertain whether he is supposed to be invoking his cop character in The Brave One or one of the angels in Wings of Desire. Certainly the sadness that Howard conveys (primarily through his low voice) plays against our cultural stereotypes of the big, angry black male and hence makes his characters memorable and seem a lot more varied than they really are. That's not a knock on him as an actor, though. The truth is that his performance, like Highmore's (and, really, I would even argue Williams's, though I don't like it) evidence an actor who knows (either deep down or straight up) that there's just nothing to his character in the script and it's up to him to make him real through performance choice and character mannerisms. While I always appreciate a professional giving it a go rather than phoning it in, in this case (ironically, since the subject is music) the independent choices the actors make for the characters clash, and so each seems to be inhabiting a different movie. (I started to say a "different world," but, again, these characters don't live in a world, they are characters who know they are characters in a movie rather than characters who think they are people in a world.)
For reasons I cannot fathom (perhaps because the film made me think of a parent searching for a child) the last paragraph and the distinction between characters who are people versus who know they are in a film made me think of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's 1996 masterpiece La Promesse. In it, Jeremie Renier as Igor spends a considerable amount of time trying to find a child. The contrast between these two films is a master illustration in the difference between plot as a bunch of stuff that happens and plot as the framework through which character is revealed and developed.
I will say that I can't think of a film since A Thin Red Line that drags on longer after you know what is going to happen. (I actually caught myself straining for glimpses of George Clooney in the Central Park crowd until I realized I, not August, was having a flashback.) I'm not sure whether or not to blame that on the writing, directing, or editing. I want to say the latter, as the film is perpetually building to montage moments over song-track serenades only to abruptly come to a screeching halt in order to start another. I guess this is meant to build tension (as opposed to merely make the film longer), but instead it just builds sluggishness. We're told repeatedly that these characters are desperately searching for each other, but they sort of slog through the film with a slothful confidence that if they wait long enough the movie they know they are in will end and they have no responsibility (beyond turning to the next page of the script) for moving their story along.
Freddie Highmore has a quiet intelligence and (miraculously for this film) the sense to avoid mugging (mostly) for the camera that allows him to escape from a sentimental shlockfest with his dignity intact. (Stack him up against Haley Joel Osment in Pay It Forward, and you'll see the difference between being in a bad movie versus being of one.) Terence Howard glides around the periphery of the action, and I'm uncertain whether he is supposed to be invoking his cop character in The Brave One or one of the angels in Wings of Desire. Certainly the sadness that Howard conveys (primarily through his low voice) plays against our cultural stereotypes of the big, angry black male and hence makes his characters memorable and seem a lot more varied than they really are. That's not a knock on him as an actor, though. The truth is that his performance, like Highmore's (and, really, I would even argue Williams's, though I don't like it) evidence an actor who knows (either deep down or straight up) that there's just nothing to his character in the script and it's up to him to make him real through performance choice and character mannerisms. While I always appreciate a professional giving it a go rather than phoning it in, in this case (ironically, since the subject is music) the independent choices the actors make for the characters clash, and so each seems to be inhabiting a different movie. (I started to say a "different world," but, again, these characters don't live in a world, they are characters who know they are characters in a movie rather than characters who think they are people in a world.)
For reasons I cannot fathom (perhaps because the film made me think of a parent searching for a child) the last paragraph and the distinction between characters who are people versus who know they are in a film made me think of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's 1996 masterpiece La Promesse. In it, Jeremie Renier as Igor spends a considerable amount of time trying to find a child. The contrast between these two films is a master illustration in the difference between plot as a bunch of stuff that happens and plot as the framework through which character is revealed and developed.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Dan in Real Life: I'm not done yet....
Hey, I achieved another life goal this weekend by finally getting a shout out in Jason Morehead's Opuszine!
I very much like and respect Jason's take on film (we together sat through Geoffrey Wright's MacBeth at the Toronto Film Festival one year and he helped articulate some of the reasons I didn't care for it despite Lady MacBeth giving her "out damn spot" speech in the nude), so I was pleased that he had the same exasperated response to Dan in Real Life that I did.
Now, I made the (possible) mistake of posting a comment at Jason's blog, and the next thing I know all the rant juices are flowing again, and I kept thinking of more and more things about the film I didn't like.
I already mentioned in a footnote the (I can only assume meant to be taken as) playful "teasing" of Mitch early in the film in which a family member says that if he messes up the relationship with Marie they will dump him and keep her.
Since Marie, with Dan's help, is the one who messes up the relationship and the family doesn't dump her (or Dan), I can only assume that this earlier scene was less a call for applying an expected standard of decency in all relationships as a condition of family acceptance and more just an expression of personal preference--they actually just like her more than Mitch.
This, in turn, got me thinking about Marie's character. I've mostly just been ranting about Dan and the film's inability to reconcile what he does with what it wants you to feel about him. I thought, too, as the final credits rolled over the wedding and we see the family beaming at the now happy couple, of Ann Landers's old rubes that when a man marries his mistress he creates a vacancy for that position and that if she cheats with you she'll cheat on you. Mitch and Marie aren't married, of course, but there is a corollary here somewhere--Dan and Marie's relationship is (half-)baked in the cauldron of lies and deception, and we are supposed to take it on spec that the resulting pastry that is the ensuing marriage will be one of love, trust, and mutual respect? Forget "love," she doesn't even respect Mitch enough as a person to tell him the truth when she dumps him...one more example of the film's curious motif that lying to people is the highest form of love because the truth sometimes hurts and therefore trying to prevent hurt is the same as loving.
Just as the film changes the foundation of Dan's dilemma from attraction to love as a means of glossing over and trying to justify what the audience might otherwise recognize as some pretty shabby behavior, so too it must try to figure out a way to make Marie a character who can string Mitch along, dump him with no explanation, immediately start dating his brother, and yet not come across as a completely heartless bitch.
The first step in doing so, is, of course, casting the radiant and lovely Juliette Binoche, who is so lovely and has so much good will wrapped up in her actor's persona, that we are just inclined to think of anyone she is playing as a good person. You, know, it's Dan in Real Life's equivalent of the U.S. Government hiring Tom Hanks in The Simpsons Movie to cash in on some of his credibility. There is a weird sort of twisted irony of Binoche in this role. She may be best known for her role in Krzystof Kieslowski's masterpiece, Blue, about a woman trying to emerge from the deadening weight of grief after the death of her husband (and daughter). If I thought the maker's of Dan in Real Life were cleverer, I might almost take this as a tip of the hat to their influences, much like the cameo roles for veteran actors in remakes or Branagh's inclusion of Judi Dench and John Geilgud as Hecuba and Priam in Hamlet.
There's a fine line between honoring and exploiting, though. (The Simpsons Movie is making that very point with the Hanks example.) If this film is thinking about Binoche's association with Blue at all, its invocation of it is more base, akin to the rising tendency of writers and directors to point to shared cultural reference points as shorthand for communicating what they are going for rather than actually trying to invoke a message, idea, or theme in their own work. One can do this through casting (part of what makes Bob Saget so darn funny in Entourage is our immediate association of him with Full House; part of what makes Keith Carradine so right for Kill Bill is the immediate association with Kung Fu), as well as musical cues, or visual "homages" that invoke previous cinematic reference points. When done well, or decently, this can be a way of fleshing out an otherwise minor character and enriching a film. When it becomes a substitute for character development, it becomes a lazy crutch for bad writing.1
The closest thing Marie is given to an explanation of her feelings (other than, hey, I just like this other guy better) comes in an exchange with Dan in which she talks about reading his book. Mitch has apparently stolen some lines or approaches from Dan's advice column--nuggets like "I'll forgive you your past if you forgive me mine"--and in a foolish act of unforgivable deception has tried to apply advice from a relationship advice column to his relationship. Marie complains that all Mitch's "best lines" are, in fact, Dan's and that she didn't realize in falling in love with Mitch (who applied the advice) she was actually falling in love with Dan (who gave the advice).
This exchange, like the aforementioned shower scene screams out for a deconstructive reading, in part because (like many scenes or works that cry out for deconstruction) it makes no sense if taken at face value. Here is a woman who, we are supposed to believe, is too embarrassed to be found talking to a guy in a bathroom while she washes her face and so she will subject herself to the greater embarrassment of stripping and getting in the shower with him. Here is a woman who apparently detests lies and dishonesty so much that she is outraged that a boyfriend will apply advice from a relationship column without providing a verbal, in-text MLA citation about where it came from. Yet the same woman who is outraged not at being lied to but not being told the whole truth will turn around and refuse to be honest with him about her own actions. This makes about as much sense to me as a teacher failing a student for plagiarism on the grounds that he argued in an essay that people ought to love their neighbors as themselves without thinking to mention that someone else said it first but then turns around and plagiarizes large parts of the student's essay for her own dissertation.
Marie's rationalization here (it has to be a rationalization, she can't be serious) would seem to imply, if taken seriously, that words are a greater sign of love than actions. Perhaps if the film had cast Gwyneth Paltrow instead of Binoche, we might instinctively think of Shakespeare in Love and suspect that Marie is a poetic, Romantic sort of the type who has a highly idealized view of love and falls in love with the man because he is the source of the words, but then that would work better if Dan were a poet rather than an advice columnist and if it were the words themselves, rather than the sentiment behind them, that were beautiful. As it is now, I kept flashing forward to a moment thirty years in the future after Marie has enjoyed a few decades of Dan's sincere love and devotion, where she is wandering through another, different book store and stumbles across a Bible that has fallen open to Ephesians 5:25: "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her."
In my mind, I see Marie immediately and tearfully filing for divorce. "All those years," she sobs, "I thought I was falling in love with you...only to find out that I'm really in love with St. Paul."
***************************************
1One could argue, I suppose, that Binoche's presences is meant to evoke not Blue but The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and were I to find out that the original choice to play Dan was not Steve Carrel but Daniel Day-Lewis, I would have to rethink my contention that we are meant to take the Dan-Marie relationship as true love and not merely the desperate attempts of two lonely and co-dependent people feeding their addiction to love and lust as a narcotic used to dull their existential pain.
I very much like and respect Jason's take on film (we together sat through Geoffrey Wright's MacBeth at the Toronto Film Festival one year and he helped articulate some of the reasons I didn't care for it despite Lady MacBeth giving her "out damn spot" speech in the nude), so I was pleased that he had the same exasperated response to Dan in Real Life that I did.
Now, I made the (possible) mistake of posting a comment at Jason's blog, and the next thing I know all the rant juices are flowing again, and I kept thinking of more and more things about the film I didn't like.
I already mentioned in a footnote the (I can only assume meant to be taken as) playful "teasing" of Mitch early in the film in which a family member says that if he messes up the relationship with Marie they will dump him and keep her.
Since Marie, with Dan's help, is the one who messes up the relationship and the family doesn't dump her (or Dan), I can only assume that this earlier scene was less a call for applying an expected standard of decency in all relationships as a condition of family acceptance and more just an expression of personal preference--they actually just like her more than Mitch.
This, in turn, got me thinking about Marie's character. I've mostly just been ranting about Dan and the film's inability to reconcile what he does with what it wants you to feel about him. I thought, too, as the final credits rolled over the wedding and we see the family beaming at the now happy couple, of Ann Landers's old rubes that when a man marries his mistress he creates a vacancy for that position and that if she cheats with you she'll cheat on you. Mitch and Marie aren't married, of course, but there is a corollary here somewhere--Dan and Marie's relationship is (half-)baked in the cauldron of lies and deception, and we are supposed to take it on spec that the resulting pastry that is the ensuing marriage will be one of love, trust, and mutual respect? Forget "love," she doesn't even respect Mitch enough as a person to tell him the truth when she dumps him...one more example of the film's curious motif that lying to people is the highest form of love because the truth sometimes hurts and therefore trying to prevent hurt is the same as loving.
Just as the film changes the foundation of Dan's dilemma from attraction to love as a means of glossing over and trying to justify what the audience might otherwise recognize as some pretty shabby behavior, so too it must try to figure out a way to make Marie a character who can string Mitch along, dump him with no explanation, immediately start dating his brother, and yet not come across as a completely heartless bitch.
The first step in doing so, is, of course, casting the radiant and lovely Juliette Binoche, who is so lovely and has so much good will wrapped up in her actor's persona, that we are just inclined to think of anyone she is playing as a good person. You, know, it's Dan in Real Life's equivalent of the U.S. Government hiring Tom Hanks in The Simpsons Movie to cash in on some of his credibility. There is a weird sort of twisted irony of Binoche in this role. She may be best known for her role in Krzystof Kieslowski's masterpiece, Blue, about a woman trying to emerge from the deadening weight of grief after the death of her husband (and daughter). If I thought the maker's of Dan in Real Life were cleverer, I might almost take this as a tip of the hat to their influences, much like the cameo roles for veteran actors in remakes or Branagh's inclusion of Judi Dench and John Geilgud as Hecuba and Priam in Hamlet.
There's a fine line between honoring and exploiting, though. (The Simpsons Movie is making that very point with the Hanks example.) If this film is thinking about Binoche's association with Blue at all, its invocation of it is more base, akin to the rising tendency of writers and directors to point to shared cultural reference points as shorthand for communicating what they are going for rather than actually trying to invoke a message, idea, or theme in their own work. One can do this through casting (part of what makes Bob Saget so darn funny in Entourage is our immediate association of him with Full House; part of what makes Keith Carradine so right for Kill Bill is the immediate association with Kung Fu), as well as musical cues, or visual "homages" that invoke previous cinematic reference points. When done well, or decently, this can be a way of fleshing out an otherwise minor character and enriching a film. When it becomes a substitute for character development, it becomes a lazy crutch for bad writing.1
The closest thing Marie is given to an explanation of her feelings (other than, hey, I just like this other guy better) comes in an exchange with Dan in which she talks about reading his book. Mitch has apparently stolen some lines or approaches from Dan's advice column--nuggets like "I'll forgive you your past if you forgive me mine"--and in a foolish act of unforgivable deception has tried to apply advice from a relationship advice column to his relationship. Marie complains that all Mitch's "best lines" are, in fact, Dan's and that she didn't realize in falling in love with Mitch (who applied the advice) she was actually falling in love with Dan (who gave the advice).
This exchange, like the aforementioned shower scene screams out for a deconstructive reading, in part because (like many scenes or works that cry out for deconstruction) it makes no sense if taken at face value. Here is a woman who, we are supposed to believe, is too embarrassed to be found talking to a guy in a bathroom while she washes her face and so she will subject herself to the greater embarrassment of stripping and getting in the shower with him. Here is a woman who apparently detests lies and dishonesty so much that she is outraged that a boyfriend will apply advice from a relationship column without providing a verbal, in-text MLA citation about where it came from. Yet the same woman who is outraged not at being lied to but not being told the whole truth will turn around and refuse to be honest with him about her own actions. This makes about as much sense to me as a teacher failing a student for plagiarism on the grounds that he argued in an essay that people ought to love their neighbors as themselves without thinking to mention that someone else said it first but then turns around and plagiarizes large parts of the student's essay for her own dissertation.
Marie's rationalization here (it has to be a rationalization, she can't be serious) would seem to imply, if taken seriously, that words are a greater sign of love than actions. Perhaps if the film had cast Gwyneth Paltrow instead of Binoche, we might instinctively think of Shakespeare in Love and suspect that Marie is a poetic, Romantic sort of the type who has a highly idealized view of love and falls in love with the man because he is the source of the words, but then that would work better if Dan were a poet rather than an advice columnist and if it were the words themselves, rather than the sentiment behind them, that were beautiful. As it is now, I kept flashing forward to a moment thirty years in the future after Marie has enjoyed a few decades of Dan's sincere love and devotion, where she is wandering through another, different book store and stumbles across a Bible that has fallen open to Ephesians 5:25: "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her."
In my mind, I see Marie immediately and tearfully filing for divorce. "All those years," she sobs, "I thought I was falling in love with you...only to find out that I'm really in love with St. Paul."
***************************************
1One could argue, I suppose, that Binoche's presences is meant to evoke not Blue but The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and were I to find out that the original choice to play Dan was not Steve Carrel but Daniel Day-Lewis, I would have to rethink my contention that we are meant to take the Dan-Marie relationship as true love and not merely the desperate attempts of two lonely and co-dependent people feeding their addiction to love and lust as a narcotic used to dull their existential pain.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Dan in Real Life Rant
Dan in Real Life is one of those Three's Company/sitcom style comedies in which people get themselves into bigger and bigger complications trying to cover up something that wouldn't be half the problem their secrecy was if they simply were honest and rational for any thirty second segment of the film.
It is the type of film in which a woman will strip and get into a shower where she knows a guy is hiding because she is too embarrassed to admit he was in the bathroom talking to her while she was washing her face and too stupid to tell the person who asks to talk to her to wait for her in the other room and she'll be out in a few minutes.
It is the type of film in which characters spend days of screen time (what seems like years of our life time) lying to or avoiding honest conversations with people they love so much because they love them so much and are afraid the truth might hurt them a little bit. One of my pet peeves is movies that tell us something about characters but can't back it up by showing us what we are supposed to take the movie's word about. You know, how, say, Finding Forrester will tell us over and over that Forrester is a great writer but never show us anything he's written, or how The Saint will tell us Elizabeth Shue is a supergenenius but never show the character doing an intelligent thing.
Dan in Real Life tells us over and over again that Dan's extended family is loving and has a great relationship, but it seems to think that means they have competitive crosswords on family game night and not that they ever make particular efforts to treat others as they would be treated themselves or to try to provide for them a supporting and loving environment.
It is the type of movie where kids who are bratty the whole movie (and brattiest when dad is actually acting the most responsible as a parent) suddenly act supportive when their dad actually does something irresponsible and mean. Why do they do this? Because these characters exist in a world in which they know they are not real but are in fact characters in a movie...a movie which is 95% over and the plot needs for them to undergo a change of heart (and character) in order to have a happy ending that the writers don't know how to logically get to.
I think the part of Dan in Real Life I liked the least was Dan's resolution with his brother who first hits Dan and then interrupts Dan's attempts at apology to rush out the door and get in a car with a hotter, younger chick who was trying to pick up Dan at a bar earlier in the film. What, exactly, is the point of the scene? Turnabout is fair play? The brother landed on his feet or wasn't really that into the girl to begin with? No reading of this scene is consistent with what the character and the film has told us is true to that point about the brother's feelings for his girlfriend,1 but, I'm hard pressed to see how any scene that tried to honestly deal with the fallout of the discovery could be resolved in 30 seconds or less so that we can get on with the happy ending.
Towards the end of the film Dan and Marie meet furtively in a bowling alley. The woman working there smiles knowingly as she watches them interact and, without being asked, turns on the romantic strobe lights. The function of this scene appears to be to have the stranger validate what the movie wants us to believe but has been unable to credibly show us--these two are obviously in love. It is so obvious anyone, even a complete stranger, could see it. The only ones who can't see it are, apparently, any adult who is living in the same house with them. The woman's recognition is a prefiguring of Dan's own recognition ("I love her"), and it is irksome how problems and conflicts are not resolved in light of that fact but dissolve in the face of it.
Like many rant-worthy things, there may be a seed of truth here, a seed that hints at a better movie that might have been. If the film were about two people gradually realizing (or even trying to hide the fact) that they are in love only to come to admit it and sadly (or defiantly, who know?) admit that love is selfish sometimes and this fact trumps whatever reasons they might give to or wrongs they might perpetrate on other people, it might have been a mature, intelligent, "real" movie.
The problem, though, is that Dan in Real Life is not about two people who spend several days trying to hide the fact that they are in love. It is a film about two people who spend several days trying to hide the fact that they just met. Furtiveness, as any good Medievalist reader might tell you, is a wonderful aphrodisiac. So you either buy the fact that Dan and Marie instantly fall in love at the book store and spend days valiantly trying to fight against that realization only to realize its no use, or you are confronted with the interpretation that they somehow fall in love through the glimpses they get of one another while pretending to not know each other. In the film's most honest moment, Dan (after watching Marie lead family jazzercise) pretty much admits that what is painful to be around her is that he finds her attractive and knows he can't pursue that attraction not that he "loves" her and knows she is dating someone else. Yet to follow that line of thought when she does become available can't be construed as something other than selfish (or at least indifferent to his brother's feelings) so his feelings have to be recast as love because claiming (him to himself and the movie to us) that his actions are motivated by love is the only way to make them justifiable (much less noble).
Heck, even that sort of self-deception might be interesting if the film was honest about it being (or at least mixed with) self-deception. If it admitted or invited you to consider the fact that these characters might be unhealthy (or have unhealthy habits) that have led to periods of regular or prolonged self- (and other-) delusion, then the "heart wants what the heart wants" conclusion might even be poignant as at least it would come on the heels of some self-knowledge or surrender of a constructed but artificial self-conception. (Yeah, can you tell I've been watching Rohmer's Six Moral Tales all last month?)
Dan in Real Life has no such pretensions. Dan gets the girl and gets to keep his conception of himself as a sacrificially giving father (he's willing, at the end, to give up the love that justifies all if that's what they want and they have to practically shove him out the door) and a supporting, loving brother. Bonhoeffer once famously railed against "cheap grace"--pale imitations of a holy and beautiful thing masquerading as the real deal--by pointing out that grace costs something. Dan in Real Life is kind of about "cheap love"--love not proven through putting others first or coming with a cost, but love used as the vaguest of all possible words, love as a label not to be earned but invoked, love not as a reason but as an excuse.
Bah.
1Nor, really, is the family's response to Dan's revelation consistent with the family dynamics hinted at when the family tells the brother, earlier in the film, that if he messes up the relationship with Marie they will keep her and dump him. Or maybe it is...here, again, the film could be hinting at a truer, realer, film that wants to come out, one in which responses are based not on what people actually do but on assigned roles in the family mythology. Dan is the good brother and Mitch is the f--- up, because, well, because it's always been that way and to let the facts get in the way of a good stereotyping is to question the truthfulness and reality of the family mythology on which the priviliged positions of respect and deference of its members rest.
It is the type of film in which a woman will strip and get into a shower where she knows a guy is hiding because she is too embarrassed to admit he was in the bathroom talking to her while she was washing her face and too stupid to tell the person who asks to talk to her to wait for her in the other room and she'll be out in a few minutes.
It is the type of film in which characters spend days of screen time (what seems like years of our life time) lying to or avoiding honest conversations with people they love so much because they love them so much and are afraid the truth might hurt them a little bit. One of my pet peeves is movies that tell us something about characters but can't back it up by showing us what we are supposed to take the movie's word about. You know, how, say, Finding Forrester will tell us over and over that Forrester is a great writer but never show us anything he's written, or how The Saint will tell us Elizabeth Shue is a supergenenius but never show the character doing an intelligent thing.
Dan in Real Life tells us over and over again that Dan's extended family is loving and has a great relationship, but it seems to think that means they have competitive crosswords on family game night and not that they ever make particular efforts to treat others as they would be treated themselves or to try to provide for them a supporting and loving environment.
It is the type of movie where kids who are bratty the whole movie (and brattiest when dad is actually acting the most responsible as a parent) suddenly act supportive when their dad actually does something irresponsible and mean. Why do they do this? Because these characters exist in a world in which they know they are not real but are in fact characters in a movie...a movie which is 95% over and the plot needs for them to undergo a change of heart (and character) in order to have a happy ending that the writers don't know how to logically get to.
I think the part of Dan in Real Life I liked the least was Dan's resolution with his brother who first hits Dan and then interrupts Dan's attempts at apology to rush out the door and get in a car with a hotter, younger chick who was trying to pick up Dan at a bar earlier in the film. What, exactly, is the point of the scene? Turnabout is fair play? The brother landed on his feet or wasn't really that into the girl to begin with? No reading of this scene is consistent with what the character and the film has told us is true to that point about the brother's feelings for his girlfriend,1 but, I'm hard pressed to see how any scene that tried to honestly deal with the fallout of the discovery could be resolved in 30 seconds or less so that we can get on with the happy ending.
Towards the end of the film Dan and Marie meet furtively in a bowling alley. The woman working there smiles knowingly as she watches them interact and, without being asked, turns on the romantic strobe lights. The function of this scene appears to be to have the stranger validate what the movie wants us to believe but has been unable to credibly show us--these two are obviously in love. It is so obvious anyone, even a complete stranger, could see it. The only ones who can't see it are, apparently, any adult who is living in the same house with them. The woman's recognition is a prefiguring of Dan's own recognition ("I love her"), and it is irksome how problems and conflicts are not resolved in light of that fact but dissolve in the face of it.
Like many rant-worthy things, there may be a seed of truth here, a seed that hints at a better movie that might have been. If the film were about two people gradually realizing (or even trying to hide the fact) that they are in love only to come to admit it and sadly (or defiantly, who know?) admit that love is selfish sometimes and this fact trumps whatever reasons they might give to or wrongs they might perpetrate on other people, it might have been a mature, intelligent, "real" movie.
The problem, though, is that Dan in Real Life is not about two people who spend several days trying to hide the fact that they are in love. It is a film about two people who spend several days trying to hide the fact that they just met. Furtiveness, as any good Medievalist reader might tell you, is a wonderful aphrodisiac. So you either buy the fact that Dan and Marie instantly fall in love at the book store and spend days valiantly trying to fight against that realization only to realize its no use, or you are confronted with the interpretation that they somehow fall in love through the glimpses they get of one another while pretending to not know each other. In the film's most honest moment, Dan (after watching Marie lead family jazzercise) pretty much admits that what is painful to be around her is that he finds her attractive and knows he can't pursue that attraction not that he "loves" her and knows she is dating someone else. Yet to follow that line of thought when she does become available can't be construed as something other than selfish (or at least indifferent to his brother's feelings) so his feelings have to be recast as love because claiming (him to himself and the movie to us) that his actions are motivated by love is the only way to make them justifiable (much less noble).
Heck, even that sort of self-deception might be interesting if the film was honest about it being (or at least mixed with) self-deception. If it admitted or invited you to consider the fact that these characters might be unhealthy (or have unhealthy habits) that have led to periods of regular or prolonged self- (and other-) delusion, then the "heart wants what the heart wants" conclusion might even be poignant as at least it would come on the heels of some self-knowledge or surrender of a constructed but artificial self-conception. (Yeah, can you tell I've been watching Rohmer's Six Moral Tales all last month?)
Dan in Real Life has no such pretensions. Dan gets the girl and gets to keep his conception of himself as a sacrificially giving father (he's willing, at the end, to give up the love that justifies all if that's what they want and they have to practically shove him out the door) and a supporting, loving brother. Bonhoeffer once famously railed against "cheap grace"--pale imitations of a holy and beautiful thing masquerading as the real deal--by pointing out that grace costs something. Dan in Real Life is kind of about "cheap love"--love not proven through putting others first or coming with a cost, but love used as the vaguest of all possible words, love as a label not to be earned but invoked, love not as a reason but as an excuse.
Bah.
1Nor, really, is the family's response to Dan's revelation consistent with the family dynamics hinted at when the family tells the brother, earlier in the film, that if he messes up the relationship with Marie they will keep her and dump him. Or maybe it is...here, again, the film could be hinting at a truer, realer, film that wants to come out, one in which responses are based not on what people actually do but on assigned roles in the family mythology. Dan is the good brother and Mitch is the f--- up, because, well, because it's always been that way and to let the facts get in the way of a good stereotyping is to question the truthfulness and reality of the family mythology on which the priviliged positions of respect and deference of its members rest.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Elizabeth: The Golden Age Rant
Ah, remember the good old days when comedies could be openly homophobic and historical (I use the term very, very broadly) dramas could be openly Catholicphobic without...
Well, without what, that's the question.
I mean, these days, complaints of hackneyed or negative portrayals of some group are so common that they may have lost their ability to rouse our censure much less our indignation.
I suspect on some level that the opening of Elizabeth: The Golden Age is meant to make me associate Spain with Al-Qaeda, what with the whole Holy War angle and them trying to loose a war on Christian civilization that only Americ...er, protestant England stands in the way of. It reminded me of all the previews for The Alamo that said that the Mexican army under Santa Anna was "one of the most powerful armies ever assembled." I think they, too, were Roman Catholic, weren't they? Hmmm. The plot thickens.
I don't know, maybe this was exactly how it played out, but I suspect, as with the scene of Elizabeth in the bathtub with some female adviser and followed by the awkwardest of love triangles between the Virgin Queen, Sir Walter Raleigh, and said maiden, that the film was trying a bit too hard to be topical rather than insightful. The first film, I thought, tended to focus on the political manueverings of Elizabeth, presenting the queen's love life as secondary to her political pragmatism; this film seems to read like an undergraduate psychoanalytic reading of history crossed with a bad episode of Zalman King's Red Shoes Diaries. Is the Virgin Queen sublimating her unfulfilled (and unfulfillable) sexual desire by vicariously forcing the two people she wants to love her to love each other? Or is she some symbol of neoconservative tyrants who use a veneer of public morality to hide or deny their baser instincts (such as getting a sexual charge out of power over people in all forms)? The whole pancake make-up takes on a whited sepulcher symbolism that I'm not altogether convinced is consistent or intended.
Then again, I'm not altogether convinced anything in this film is intentional other than the message that Catholics are lying, plotting, untrustworthy assassins (whoda thunk it) and that Protestants, like Americans who inherited the tradition of Elizabeth are morally superior protectors of freedom of speech and religion, even while those they are protecting are plotting to take away those very freedoms as soon as they can kill all the leaders.
But if the Spanish (and English) Catholics are the Holy War Jihandists, what are we to make of Elizabeth, the protector of all civil liberties who insists that she will move against her own people only when they break the law and won't have half the population hung or hounded merely because they have ideological differences with her? Is this pandering to American audiences? Is it meant to be a sarcastic comment about how power really sees itself? Is it supposed to be an arch contrast to the "fight them there so we don't end up fighting them here" mindset of the George W. Bush aministration? Is it just supposed to be a historical curiosity without any reference or connection (or comment on) current events?
The film is a mess, ideologically as well as structurally, which is a shame because...well, because there is a certain nostalgia to seeing Cate Blanchett return to the scene of the triumph. Still, it's a real head scratcher. One can only assume that they hoped to fill it with enough pretty set design that nobody would look to hard at what was happening on screen or try to make heads or tails of it.
Well, without what, that's the question.
I mean, these days, complaints of hackneyed or negative portrayals of some group are so common that they may have lost their ability to rouse our censure much less our indignation.
I suspect on some level that the opening of Elizabeth: The Golden Age is meant to make me associate Spain with Al-Qaeda, what with the whole Holy War angle and them trying to loose a war on Christian civilization that only Americ...er, protestant England stands in the way of. It reminded me of all the previews for The Alamo that said that the Mexican army under Santa Anna was "one of the most powerful armies ever assembled." I think they, too, were Roman Catholic, weren't they? Hmmm. The plot thickens.
I don't know, maybe this was exactly how it played out, but I suspect, as with the scene of Elizabeth in the bathtub with some female adviser and followed by the awkwardest of love triangles between the Virgin Queen, Sir Walter Raleigh, and said maiden, that the film was trying a bit too hard to be topical rather than insightful. The first film, I thought, tended to focus on the political manueverings of Elizabeth, presenting the queen's love life as secondary to her political pragmatism; this film seems to read like an undergraduate psychoanalytic reading of history crossed with a bad episode of Zalman King's Red Shoes Diaries. Is the Virgin Queen sublimating her unfulfilled (and unfulfillable) sexual desire by vicariously forcing the two people she wants to love her to love each other? Or is she some symbol of neoconservative tyrants who use a veneer of public morality to hide or deny their baser instincts (such as getting a sexual charge out of power over people in all forms)? The whole pancake make-up takes on a whited sepulcher symbolism that I'm not altogether convinced is consistent or intended.
Then again, I'm not altogether convinced anything in this film is intentional other than the message that Catholics are lying, plotting, untrustworthy assassins (whoda thunk it) and that Protestants, like Americans who inherited the tradition of Elizabeth are morally superior protectors of freedom of speech and religion, even while those they are protecting are plotting to take away those very freedoms as soon as they can kill all the leaders.
But if the Spanish (and English) Catholics are the Holy War Jihandists, what are we to make of Elizabeth, the protector of all civil liberties who insists that she will move against her own people only when they break the law and won't have half the population hung or hounded merely because they have ideological differences with her? Is this pandering to American audiences? Is it meant to be a sarcastic comment about how power really sees itself? Is it supposed to be an arch contrast to the "fight them there so we don't end up fighting them here" mindset of the George W. Bush aministration? Is it just supposed to be a historical curiosity without any reference or connection (or comment on) current events?
The film is a mess, ideologically as well as structurally, which is a shame because...well, because there is a certain nostalgia to seeing Cate Blanchett return to the scene of the triumph. Still, it's a real head scratcher. One can only assume that they hoped to fill it with enough pretty set design that nobody would look to hard at what was happening on screen or try to make heads or tails of it.
Monday, February 25, 2008
American Gangster (Mini-) Rant
There is a scene early in Ridley Scott's film in which Detective Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe) and his partner uncover a cool million dollars in unmarked cash. Roberts' partner argues that to turn in this money is to become pariahs in the department, that crooked cops don't trust cops that would voucher that much money.
It is a scene of the "tell don't show" variety, and it annoyed me, at least a little.
The scene immediately cuts to the two detectives with the pile of money on the precinct table, counting it out. A window separates them from the rest of the squad, and we can see from the sullen expressions that the reaction of the squad is pretty much what Roberts' partner said it would be.
This seemed a little heavy handed to me, but the tradition of setting up a scene so that we know exactly how we are supposed to interpret the behavior is a staple of Hollywood. So, I'm still at this point only feeling mildly as though I'm being condescended to by the film.
In walks the detectives' lieutenant. Why, he wants to know, are they counting the money out in the open where everyone can see it? Let's just underline the point of this whole scene for those who were out for popcorn in the car scene or are oblivious to the body language of his colleagues. Now I'm starting to feel like the film just doesn't trust its viewers to pay attention.
Roberts and his partner voucher the money and walk through the squad room. Over the hostile rumblings of the other officers present, we hear one observer say (in what sounds like a dub), "Fucking boy scout."
Oh, I get it now. They are mad at him for vouchering the money. I was getting this vibe that something was being communicated about his working relationships through this scene, but it wasn't until the end that I truly understood the point. [Unlike the film, I'm trusting my audience to know how to read my tone.]
My friend and former colleague once told a class we were team teaching to treat exclamation points in writing as if one inherited 100 of them at birth and after one had used them all, they were gone forever. I think implicit in this instruction is the understanding that if one exclamation point isn't going to carry the day, two certainly won't. The second actually weakens the first, making us wonder if the writer doth protest too much.
When the exclamation points or underlining are narrative rather than literal, I call it being led around by the nose by the director or screenwriter. Don't think, such films argue, only assimilate and process the film's thematic sound bites.
Scott is a talented filmmaker with a visual eye and a restrained touch, at least early in his career. Films like The Duellists and Blade Runner have pointed and particular ideological and thematic ponts of view that the films--in their totality--are designed to underscore. But they also have contemplative space, room to breathe and think. American Gangster reads more like a police procedural, more interested in the plot mechanics than the insight into the human condition that the plot might reveal. Characters like D'Hubert and Deckard are fascinating precisely because they are not just "boy scouts" and thus the conflicts between them and their respective antagonists are once which interest us because of what they reveal to us and not just because of a marginal rooting interest in the outcome. Can we really say the same about the characters in G.I. Jane, Gladiator, or American Gangster? Is there anything we learn about the main characters in these films that cannot be encapsulated and underscored in any three minutes of film?
It is a scene of the "tell don't show" variety, and it annoyed me, at least a little.
The scene immediately cuts to the two detectives with the pile of money on the precinct table, counting it out. A window separates them from the rest of the squad, and we can see from the sullen expressions that the reaction of the squad is pretty much what Roberts' partner said it would be.
This seemed a little heavy handed to me, but the tradition of setting up a scene so that we know exactly how we are supposed to interpret the behavior is a staple of Hollywood. So, I'm still at this point only feeling mildly as though I'm being condescended to by the film.
In walks the detectives' lieutenant. Why, he wants to know, are they counting the money out in the open where everyone can see it? Let's just underline the point of this whole scene for those who were out for popcorn in the car scene or are oblivious to the body language of his colleagues. Now I'm starting to feel like the film just doesn't trust its viewers to pay attention.
Roberts and his partner voucher the money and walk through the squad room. Over the hostile rumblings of the other officers present, we hear one observer say (in what sounds like a dub), "Fucking boy scout."
Oh, I get it now. They are mad at him for vouchering the money. I was getting this vibe that something was being communicated about his working relationships through this scene, but it wasn't until the end that I truly understood the point. [Unlike the film, I'm trusting my audience to know how to read my tone.]
My friend and former colleague once told a class we were team teaching to treat exclamation points in writing as if one inherited 100 of them at birth and after one had used them all, they were gone forever. I think implicit in this instruction is the understanding that if one exclamation point isn't going to carry the day, two certainly won't. The second actually weakens the first, making us wonder if the writer doth protest too much.
When the exclamation points or underlining are narrative rather than literal, I call it being led around by the nose by the director or screenwriter. Don't think, such films argue, only assimilate and process the film's thematic sound bites.
Scott is a talented filmmaker with a visual eye and a restrained touch, at least early in his career. Films like The Duellists and Blade Runner have pointed and particular ideological and thematic ponts of view that the films--in their totality--are designed to underscore. But they also have contemplative space, room to breathe and think. American Gangster reads more like a police procedural, more interested in the plot mechanics than the insight into the human condition that the plot might reveal. Characters like D'Hubert and Deckard are fascinating precisely because they are not just "boy scouts" and thus the conflicts between them and their respective antagonists are once which interest us because of what they reveal to us and not just because of a marginal rooting interest in the outcome. Can we really say the same about the characters in G.I. Jane, Gladiator, or American Gangster? Is there anything we learn about the main characters in these films that cannot be encapsulated and underscored in any three minutes of film?
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Is Hollywood Prejudiced Against Christians or are Christians Prejudiced Against Hollywood?
Okay, I don't normally do this, but I'm going to link here to a conversation or thread on another blog. Over at Looking Closer, my friend Jeffrey Overstreet asked for "Hollywood movies made since the turn of the millennium that present Christianity in a positive light" to supplement a list made by another critic/friend of his.
Normally, I would just post a comment at his blog, but since I have a few choice words about the question and since my response could be qualified as a "rant," I'd rather not stir things up needlessly on someone else's turf when he or she is trying to sincerely address or answer a question that I think is both loaded and stupid.
Anyway, here are some of my thoughts about biases and who really has them:
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Normally, I would just post a comment at his blog, but since I have a few choice words about the question and since my response could be qualified as a "rant," I'd rather not stir things up needlessly on someone else's turf when he or she is trying to sincerely address or answer a question that I think is both loaded and stupid.
Anyway, here are some of my thoughts about biases and who really has them:
***********************************************************************************
One problem with the request (not the list) is that few good movies portray *anything* in an unequivocally, unambiguously, consistently good light.
Laying aside momentarily the qualification of since 2000 and just focusing on the criteria for inclusion on the list…
By Christianity do we mean Christians (or those who profess to be) or the religion of Christianity? To what extent is the religion of Christianity conflated with the institutions that include its adherents? Do films such as "Honeydripper," "A Man For All Seasons," or "Becket" that depict individuals of faith and contrasts them with other, negative characters of faith qualify as positive portrayals? How do we treat or think of films that show people in the process of faith development--characters who may not be entirely positive or negative in their
behavior but are growing (or seeking to grow) in their understanding of what it means to be Christian? (I'm thinking of characters such as Sarah Miles in "The End of the Affair" or Frankie Dunn in "Million Dollar Baby.")
Do the characters that are portrayed favorably in "Amazing Grace" and are Christian offset or trump the characters in the same film that are portrayed negatively and are Christian? (Does "The Sopranos" portray Italian-Americans in a positive or negative light? It might depend on if you look at Melfi or Tony.)
Are characters such as Clarice Starling in "Silence of the Lambs" or John Anderton in "Minority Report" ever or sufficiently associated with Christianity to the extent that the moral choices they make cast their* faith* in a good light, or must a film make an explicit, overt (and heavy-handed) connection between a character's faith and his/her moral choices in order to qualify as a positive portrayal of religion? Must the character announce before every good deed, "I am doing this because I am a Christian; were I not, I would make a different, more evil and selfish choice instead"?
In other words, the phrases "portray," "Christianity," and "in a positive light," are all hopelessly subjective and (I would argue) hopelessly ambiguous. (Not to mention people at Jeff's blog are already parsing what "Hollywood" means...studio funded? studio distributed? made independently by people who live in or are from Hollywood area?)
Try substituting just about any abstract or group noun for "Christianity" and ask for the same list. Please name me 20 Hollywood films that portray "Hispanics" or "women" or "Authority figures" or "democracy" or "capitalism" or "liberals" or "conservatives" or "muslims," or "atheists" or “librarians” or “salesmen” or “people who practice any form of birth control” in a "positive light”...remembering examples seems to me to be about equally difficult, which suggests to me that the difficulty in deriving such a lists says more about the poor way the question is framed than about some ideological hegemony in Hollywood.
The request also depends on the fact that we tend to remember anecdotal examples that confirm our hypotheses more readily and easily than those that don't. Compare the following three requests...
1) Off the top of your head, without running off to Google or IMDB, name 20 Hollywood films since 2000 that have a car chase.
2) Off the top of your head, without running off to Google or IMDB, name 20 Hollywood films that depict successful and meaningful inter-racial friendships.
3) Off the top of your head, without running off to Google or IMDB, name 20 Hollywood films since 2000.
My point here is that the ease or difficulty in formulating any of these lists has as much to do with what makes something memorable as it does with how frequent the thing is. If I immediately provided you with 20 examples of #1 and #2, would that really convince you that #1 and #2 were equally prevalent in the movies, or would you walk away still convinced of your opinion that Hollywood is “pro car chase” and “anti inter-racial friendship”?
I refuse to play this game (defend Hollywood from claims of anti-Christian bias by pointing to anecdotal examples), not because the odds are stacked against me but because the rules and Pharisaical judges are. The way the question is formulated and presented makes it appear to me that it is not a serious request for a reasoned argument but a statement of opinion in the rhetorical form of a question--an opinion (that Hollywood is biased against Christians) that is fraught with its own assumptions and prejudices, and those of the type that are seldom, in my experience, assuaged or deterred by reasoning or contrary data.
None of this means, of course, that this particular stereotype (that Hollywood has, on the whole, a negative attitude towards Christianity) isn’t, in fact true.
Stereotypes sometimes have a seed of truth in them or an origin in fact (before they become distorted or exaggerated). But the same could be said of anti-Christian stereotypes.
Are we so confident, I wonder, in how virtuous we are and how virtuously we act in and towards the rest of the world, that the only possible explanation for a negative reputation is an irrational and unfair prejudice? Could it be—I’m just asking—that one reason so many Christians are portrayed as jerks in contemporary media is that a lot of Christians act like jerks in contemporary society?
Just a thought.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
The Original Rant
I have a label for posts I've designated as "rants," and it occurred to me that the original rant (which was posted at an external site) is no longer available. I'm re-posting it here. Obviously the rant was in reference to a particular thread dedicated to rants, and Blogger doesn't separate posts by threads, so this blog contains more than just rants...but this still conveys the spirit in which those posts that are rants are made:
Are you tired of having the men in the white suits sent for you just because you see the prentitiousness and pomposity of someone else's cherished drivel?
Are you tired of ducking from rotten tomatoes just because you are brave enough to call Kevin Spacey a wooden kewpie doll who got out-acted in his biggest film--by a plastic bag!
Are you tired of people mumbling phrases like "critical consensus" and "mise-en-scene" when you gag at the newest Criterion collection re-release but who turn like jackals when you try to defend Titanic?
Do you think your opinion should count as much as anyone else's, even if you didn't go to film school at Florida State for two semesters and hear Dustin Hoffman lecture on campus about how he prepared for Death of a Salesman by using a walker before dropping out to design Angelina Jolie wallpapers for Microsoft XP?
Well, step right in, because I have a safe haven for you...the Rant Zone...a thread designed for NEGATIVE COMMENTS ONLY!
This is not the place where you defend the film (go do that in its thread); this is not the place where you engage others in persuasive arguments designed to win them to your way of thinking....
No, no, no, no, no.
This is the place for you to vent your frustration at the mass hypnosis that has thrust Renee Zellweger to prominence. (I mean any American with an accent mark in her name, puh-leeze).
Consider this a safe zone for the disaffected and disillusioned. Here you may say, if you wish, that you didn't think Monty Python and the Holy Grail was very (or even a little) funny. Here you can say that you've always found Alfred Hitchcock's films to be slow and laborious. You can even diss multiple Oscar winner Hillary Swank for her performances in Beverly Hills 90210 and The Next Karate Kid . If you think Mulholland Drive made even less sense than the last season of Felicity, well that's okay, because we're a support group and we are here to do what all support groups do...bite our tongues, nod our heads, and listen sympathetically to you explain how you laughed even less at I Heart Huckabees than you did at The Life Aquatic.
If you DON'T CARE what Bill Murray said to Scarlett Johansson at the end of Lost in Translation because you were already bored silly, come right in.
If you think Sean Connery was the worst of the five James Bonds that you've seen, pull up a chair.
If you thought Sideways could only be entertaining to someone who had just drank a bottle of Pinot Grigot, get in line for a group hug, because Uncle Ken is here to tell you everything is going to be okay.
We give compassionate listening to all who would vent and ask only two things in return.
1) Only rants, please. If you liked a movie, frankly my dear fanboy, we don't give a damn.
2) Absolutely, positively, no defending a movie someone else has trashed. We don't pass judgment on another's pain in the Rant Zone; the road to healing is through empathy.
Are you tired of having the men in the white suits sent for you just because you see the prentitiousness and pomposity of someone else's cherished drivel?
Are you tired of ducking from rotten tomatoes just because you are brave enough to call Kevin Spacey a wooden kewpie doll who got out-acted in his biggest film--by a plastic bag!
Are you tired of people mumbling phrases like "critical consensus" and "mise-en-scene" when you gag at the newest Criterion collection re-release but who turn like jackals when you try to defend Titanic?
Do you think your opinion should count as much as anyone else's, even if you didn't go to film school at Florida State for two semesters and hear Dustin Hoffman lecture on campus about how he prepared for Death of a Salesman by using a walker before dropping out to design Angelina Jolie wallpapers for Microsoft XP?
Well, step right in, because I have a safe haven for you...the Rant Zone...a thread designed for NEGATIVE COMMENTS ONLY!
This is not the place where you defend the film (go do that in its thread); this is not the place where you engage others in persuasive arguments designed to win them to your way of thinking....
No, no, no, no, no.
This is the place for you to vent your frustration at the mass hypnosis that has thrust Renee Zellweger to prominence. (I mean any American with an accent mark in her name, puh-leeze).
Consider this a safe zone for the disaffected and disillusioned. Here you may say, if you wish, that you didn't think Monty Python and the Holy Grail was very (or even a little) funny. Here you can say that you've always found Alfred Hitchcock's films to be slow and laborious. You can even diss multiple Oscar winner Hillary Swank for her performances in Beverly Hills 90210 and The Next Karate Kid . If you think Mulholland Drive made even less sense than the last season of Felicity, well that's okay, because we're a support group and we are here to do what all support groups do...bite our tongues, nod our heads, and listen sympathetically to you explain how you laughed even less at I Heart Huckabees than you did at The Life Aquatic.
If you DON'T CARE what Bill Murray said to Scarlett Johansson at the end of Lost in Translation because you were already bored silly, come right in.
If you think Sean Connery was the worst of the five James Bonds that you've seen, pull up a chair.
If you thought Sideways could only be entertaining to someone who had just drank a bottle of Pinot Grigot, get in line for a group hug, because Uncle Ken is here to tell you everything is going to be okay.
We give compassionate listening to all who would vent and ask only two things in return.
1) Only rants, please. If you liked a movie, frankly my dear fanboy, we don't give a damn.
2) Absolutely, positively, no defending a movie someone else has trashed. We don't pass judgment on another's pain in the Rant Zone; the road to healing is through empathy.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Beowulf Rant
Okay, today was the last day of class, so I decided to reward myself before the torrent of papers comes in on Monday by giving myself a night out. First stop Borders, to pick up a copy of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Tower. Reading for pleasure, I have a vague recollection of what that was like. Then, on to Beowulf.
As I had indicated to some friends, I was mildly curious and went expecting to like it for two reasons. One, I'm a non-reformed contrarian. If the majority of the evangelical press and subculture hate it, I'm bound to like it just to tweak their noses. Second, unlike, say, LOTR, I have no real emotional attachment to the source material, so I'm not likely to be offended by changes.
It took me, sadly, about five minutes to realize that this film was a colossal series of blunders, the last of which was my blundering into the theater to see it.
Oh...
my...
gosh...
I'm stunned speechless. Pardon me while I try to think of how to express the inexpressible badness of this film...
Okay, I'm back.
I thought (honestly) of two analogies while I was watching Beowulf. The first was, to be perfectly honest, Left Behind. Beowulf shares with Left Behind a sort of zenith of badness. It is, what Slacktivist calls "instructionally bad"--that is bad in such a way that it is actually an object lesson in how to be bad, an almost perfect Platonic example of badness. The other analogy that I had was that my response was something akin to what English teachers sometimes feel when they receive one of those rare train wreck papers. You know the ones I'm talking about...the ones where "F" just isn't quite sufficient to express their failure...the ones with total system failure....where the grammar is bad, the documentation is haphazard, where you can't find the hint of the whiff of the scent of an idea, where it's not just disorganized but incoherent, and where the smiling student asks you to read it over (the day before the paper is due) to make sure she hasn't missed any tiny points that might keep her from getting the "A" on which she is counting...
In poker lingo...they call this going on "tilt"...a Mike Matusow meltdown. This is 2oo7 New York Mets territory here...a once in a lifetime perfect storm of bad decisions, bad luck, and bad execution punctuated almost exclusively by brain farts.
Better, more educated men than me have documented some of the content problems...some of the ways that the film not only misunderstands and misrepresents its source material, but does so needlessly and (bigger sin here) pointlessly. It is not as though they are subverting some Christian or humanistic or epic message to replace it with something else, because there is just no real consistent view of what makes Beowulf heroic or different from anyone else other than he happens to share his name with the title of the movie.
No, let me focus on a point that I haven't yet heard mentioned in the jeers and catcalls about content....
The movie looks like crap.
I really, really, really, cannot overemphasize this point. I might be willing to forgive the ideological or literary rape of the source material if it were in the service of an alternative idea or philosophy or even in the service of an entertaining spectacle, but, alas....
The movie, really, really, looks like crap.
The animation here, mostly rendered in a style to make it accessible to 3D is totally and completely wrong. Was I the only person in America who kept looking at the seat next to him to see if the other guy in the audience was holding a joystick? Because, I swear, it felt like I was watching someone play a video game, not watching a movie...and, even in comparison to contemporary video game standards, the graphics looked like crap...closer to Grand Theft Auto than Halo3, if you know what I mean. (With the exception, of course, of Angelina Jolie's breasts which were lovingly and carefully rendered to have depth, curve and musculature rather than just lines to suggest the same. How the hell this movie got a PG-13 is beyond me, and I like to think of myself as the least prudish evangelical in America.) Anyway, there is a rotoscoped feel to the herky-jerky movements that make the exchanges plastic, wooden and two dimensional but is supplemented with computer enhanced detail in all the wrong places. Thus you can count the hairs on Wulfgar's beard but Beowulf never changes expression. Really, a half-hour spent with the Simpsons animators would have gone a long way for Zemeckis and company in learning how minimal changes in simple animation in conjunction with vocal performance can convey a broad range of emotion. Stack the set design up against 300 (another anachronistic and lurid retelling of source material that is sick in both senses of the word [as an insult and as a compliment]) and you see how bare is the vision of the world here. Zemeckis and Gaiman are clearly infatuated with some of the ideas expressed in Beowulf and expressed through Beowulf, but (I really can't emphasize this enough) film is primarily a visual medium and abstractions don't film well..and the narrative through which the ideas are supposed to be conveyed LOOKS LIKE CRAP!
I will admit, that I have friends who are much more tolerant of expressionism in film than I am. Amongst my cinematic friends, I refer to myself unapologetically as the narrative whore. So I will cop to the fact that seldom is being visually interesting sufficient to engage me in a film. Oh, the last five minutes of 2001 looks trippy and all (even if you're not stoned), and In Memory of Myself looks gothic and operatic and is cool even if you don't know what the hell is going on most of the time...but truth to be told I get a little bored by Fantasia or Mary Poppins or even (it pains me to say it) parts of A Clockwork Orange...where the visuals so overpower the narrative that the medium becomes the message itself. It's not that I need realism...it's that I want a sensible meshing of style with content. The Man Who Planted Trees is both minimal and expressionistic, but the simple, pencil drawings are perfect for conveying the starkness and emptiness of the landscape that is gradually and subtly transformed by Eleazar Bouffier's faithfulness. Pan's Labyrinth and Blade Runner both have power enhanced by expressionistic set design that creates a real world in which real people (and replicants) can interact rather than just being sets to look at without a story (e.g. Jeneut's Alien Ressurection or Lucas's Phantom Menace). The last time I saw such a poor marriage of style and content was Michael Wigglesworth's "The Day of Doom" (trying to do the last judgment in nursery rhyme form, really...argh).
I could go on and on...the naked battle was ironically and unintentionally reminiscent of Austin Powers in all the wrong ways. Mike Myers has made it impossible to cleverly hide the male sex organ and that device has already passed the genre cycle of parody (in The Simpsons Movie) to the point where it is experienced, instinctively as cliche or parody, not as serious...it can't be taken seriously by this audience at this time. The dialogue is just wincingly bad...I actually got some dirty looks from a few people in the theater for inappropriate laughter...
"You honor me."
"No it is you who honor me; it is I who am honored...by you...who am honoring me...because I am Beowulf!...and I have come to kill your monster! Your monster will be killed by me, Beowulf. After which we will drink mead...or maybe before...in any regards, there will be mead drinking and monster killing at some point because I am...umm...who am I again...oh yeah, Beowulf...and you are Unferth and you are hot chick that I'd like to sleep with after I kill the monster and drink the mead and am honored by you for doing the same...."
Oh, the scene where Jolie grabs Beowulf's erect Hrunting...and it...ummm...splurbs onto the floor into a pool of liquid was, quite possibly the biggest belly laugh I've had at the movies since Derek Zoolander said "You can read minds?"
The latter, at least, was intentionally stupid.
As I had indicated to some friends, I was mildly curious and went expecting to like it for two reasons. One, I'm a non-reformed contrarian. If the majority of the evangelical press and subculture hate it, I'm bound to like it just to tweak their noses. Second, unlike, say, LOTR, I have no real emotional attachment to the source material, so I'm not likely to be offended by changes.
It took me, sadly, about five minutes to realize that this film was a colossal series of blunders, the last of which was my blundering into the theater to see it.
Oh...
my...
gosh...
I'm stunned speechless. Pardon me while I try to think of how to express the inexpressible badness of this film...
Okay, I'm back.
I thought (honestly) of two analogies while I was watching Beowulf. The first was, to be perfectly honest, Left Behind. Beowulf shares with Left Behind a sort of zenith of badness. It is, what Slacktivist calls "instructionally bad"--that is bad in such a way that it is actually an object lesson in how to be bad, an almost perfect Platonic example of badness. The other analogy that I had was that my response was something akin to what English teachers sometimes feel when they receive one of those rare train wreck papers. You know the ones I'm talking about...the ones where "F" just isn't quite sufficient to express their failure...the ones with total system failure....where the grammar is bad, the documentation is haphazard, where you can't find the hint of the whiff of the scent of an idea, where it's not just disorganized but incoherent, and where the smiling student asks you to read it over (the day before the paper is due) to make sure she hasn't missed any tiny points that might keep her from getting the "A" on which she is counting...
In poker lingo...they call this going on "tilt"...a Mike Matusow meltdown. This is 2oo7 New York Mets territory here...a once in a lifetime perfect storm of bad decisions, bad luck, and bad execution punctuated almost exclusively by brain farts.
Better, more educated men than me have documented some of the content problems...some of the ways that the film not only misunderstands and misrepresents its source material, but does so needlessly and (bigger sin here) pointlessly. It is not as though they are subverting some Christian or humanistic or epic message to replace it with something else, because there is just no real consistent view of what makes Beowulf heroic or different from anyone else other than he happens to share his name with the title of the movie.
No, let me focus on a point that I haven't yet heard mentioned in the jeers and catcalls about content....
The movie looks like crap.
I really, really, really, cannot overemphasize this point. I might be willing to forgive the ideological or literary rape of the source material if it were in the service of an alternative idea or philosophy or even in the service of an entertaining spectacle, but, alas....
The movie, really, really, looks like crap.
The animation here, mostly rendered in a style to make it accessible to 3D is totally and completely wrong. Was I the only person in America who kept looking at the seat next to him to see if the other guy in the audience was holding a joystick? Because, I swear, it felt like I was watching someone play a video game, not watching a movie...and, even in comparison to contemporary video game standards, the graphics looked like crap...closer to Grand Theft Auto than Halo3, if you know what I mean. (With the exception, of course, of Angelina Jolie's breasts which were lovingly and carefully rendered to have depth, curve and musculature rather than just lines to suggest the same. How the hell this movie got a PG-13 is beyond me, and I like to think of myself as the least prudish evangelical in America.) Anyway, there is a rotoscoped feel to the herky-jerky movements that make the exchanges plastic, wooden and two dimensional but is supplemented with computer enhanced detail in all the wrong places. Thus you can count the hairs on Wulfgar's beard but Beowulf never changes expression. Really, a half-hour spent with the Simpsons animators would have gone a long way for Zemeckis and company in learning how minimal changes in simple animation in conjunction with vocal performance can convey a broad range of emotion. Stack the set design up against 300 (another anachronistic and lurid retelling of source material that is sick in both senses of the word [as an insult and as a compliment]) and you see how bare is the vision of the world here. Zemeckis and Gaiman are clearly infatuated with some of the ideas expressed in Beowulf and expressed through Beowulf, but (I really can't emphasize this enough) film is primarily a visual medium and abstractions don't film well..and the narrative through which the ideas are supposed to be conveyed LOOKS LIKE CRAP!
I will admit, that I have friends who are much more tolerant of expressionism in film than I am. Amongst my cinematic friends, I refer to myself unapologetically as the narrative whore. So I will cop to the fact that seldom is being visually interesting sufficient to engage me in a film. Oh, the last five minutes of 2001 looks trippy and all (even if you're not stoned), and In Memory of Myself looks gothic and operatic and is cool even if you don't know what the hell is going on most of the time...but truth to be told I get a little bored by Fantasia or Mary Poppins or even (it pains me to say it) parts of A Clockwork Orange...where the visuals so overpower the narrative that the medium becomes the message itself. It's not that I need realism...it's that I want a sensible meshing of style with content. The Man Who Planted Trees is both minimal and expressionistic, but the simple, pencil drawings are perfect for conveying the starkness and emptiness of the landscape that is gradually and subtly transformed by Eleazar Bouffier's faithfulness. Pan's Labyrinth and Blade Runner both have power enhanced by expressionistic set design that creates a real world in which real people (and replicants) can interact rather than just being sets to look at without a story (e.g. Jeneut's Alien Ressurection or Lucas's Phantom Menace). The last time I saw such a poor marriage of style and content was Michael Wigglesworth's "The Day of Doom" (trying to do the last judgment in nursery rhyme form, really...argh).
I could go on and on...the naked battle was ironically and unintentionally reminiscent of Austin Powers in all the wrong ways. Mike Myers has made it impossible to cleverly hide the male sex organ and that device has already passed the genre cycle of parody (in The Simpsons Movie) to the point where it is experienced, instinctively as cliche or parody, not as serious...it can't be taken seriously by this audience at this time. The dialogue is just wincingly bad...I actually got some dirty looks from a few people in the theater for inappropriate laughter...
"You honor me."
"No it is you who honor me; it is I who am honored...by you...who am honoring me...because I am Beowulf!...and I have come to kill your monster! Your monster will be killed by me, Beowulf. After which we will drink mead...or maybe before...in any regards, there will be mead drinking and monster killing at some point because I am...umm...who am I again...oh yeah, Beowulf...and you are Unferth and you are hot chick that I'd like to sleep with after I kill the monster and drink the mead and am honored by you for doing the same...."
Oh, the scene where Jolie grabs Beowulf's erect Hrunting...and it...ummm...splurbs onto the floor into a pool of liquid was, quite possibly the biggest belly laugh I've had at the movies since Derek Zoolander said "You can read minds?"
The latter, at least, was intentionally stupid.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Rant
First off, I'll say *SPOILERS* ahead because a friend posted some general comments on his blog a few weeks ago that I claimed constituted a major spoiler and he said did not. Well, having finished the novel, I'll just say, yes, it was a spoiler. You didn't give away the precise details of the end of the novel, but the substance of the ending was as I anticipated from your comments both in terms of the nature of the action you mentioned and the character who made it.
Okay, on with my comments, which have nothing to do with Dumbledore's newly revealed sexual orientation.
Unlike the object of some of my recent rants, I didn't hate this book or the series. I did think it was overdone. I'll also qualify this by saying my wife and I read this book aloud, an experience of which is always different from speed reading.
3) Deux-ex-machidobbyscar. The Dobby thing just turned into a too convenient Deux-ex-Machina. How many times did Rowling write the heroes into a corner only to use the house elves to get them out? At least twice in this book. The scar (which is forever throbbing, screaming, burning, leaving him in pain, agony, and sweats) also became an overused device to bring in offstage action and tie a plot together.
2) Magic and monologues. When Harry and You-Know-Who-Riddle are circling, circling, circling, circling, circling, I kept waiting for the jet from the Incredibles to come and suck him up by his invisibility cloak into the Island of Lost Batman Villains. Yeah, we get it, he was a Horcrux. The idea was on the Internet before the book became out and we had the entire idea set out in the dream sequence. Yet we have to have Harry go over and over to Riddle with a "There's one thing you don't know" speech. Which raises another point...this whole magic thing doesn't make sense to me. If the Death Eaters can put a curse on a particular word that alerts them to whenever anyone speaks it why limit it just to "Voldemort"? Going all the way back to the last book...if you've got time to freeze Harry under a cloak, you've got time to freeze Draco coming after you. Why is nobody watching these guys circling, circling, circling, throwing in a spell. Oh, I konw, there are shield charms over them or whatever. It's all just sort of convoluted to avoid the question of why Harry can't just use the invisibility cloak to get the drop on Voldemort and why whoever gets first spell doesn't always win.
1) Stylistics. Not since Stephen King wrote his valentine to Hannibal has he given a more preposterous review than when he said Rowling had turned herself into one of the preeminent stylists of her generation. The books are imaginative and characters memorable. As a plotter, she is first rate. As a stylist? Repeated phrases and whole sections. The books are increasingly bloated and the last one with all Dumbledore's "You are the better man" move from the over-ripe to the mushy. I've had more than one person suggest to me that the overwrought quality of the prose is an echo of the overwrought emotional quality of teens who are the protagonists. Maybe. Though the ending seems to portray Harry as having arrived at manhood and doesn't leave me suggesting that she is writing for teens about teens.
I suppose I should follow up on the last and the post in general by saying there is a difference between being horrible and being average and being exceptional. The books are mostly satisfying and I'm glad I read them and all, but...
Okay, on with my comments, which have nothing to do with Dumbledore's newly revealed sexual orientation.
Unlike the object of some of my recent rants, I didn't hate this book or the series. I did think it was overdone. I'll also qualify this by saying my wife and I read this book aloud, an experience of which is always different from speed reading.
3) Deux-ex-machidobbyscar. The Dobby thing just turned into a too convenient Deux-ex-Machina. How many times did Rowling write the heroes into a corner only to use the house elves to get them out? At least twice in this book. The scar (which is forever throbbing, screaming, burning, leaving him in pain, agony, and sweats) also became an overused device to bring in offstage action and tie a plot together.
2) Magic and monologues. When Harry and You-Know-Who-Riddle are circling, circling, circling, circling, circling, I kept waiting for the jet from the Incredibles to come and suck him up by his invisibility cloak into the Island of Lost Batman Villains. Yeah, we get it, he was a Horcrux. The idea was on the Internet before the book became out and we had the entire idea set out in the dream sequence. Yet we have to have Harry go over and over to Riddle with a "There's one thing you don't know" speech. Which raises another point...this whole magic thing doesn't make sense to me. If the Death Eaters can put a curse on a particular word that alerts them to whenever anyone speaks it why limit it just to "Voldemort"? Going all the way back to the last book...if you've got time to freeze Harry under a cloak, you've got time to freeze Draco coming after you. Why is nobody watching these guys circling, circling, circling, throwing in a spell. Oh, I konw, there are shield charms over them or whatever. It's all just sort of convoluted to avoid the question of why Harry can't just use the invisibility cloak to get the drop on Voldemort and why whoever gets first spell doesn't always win.
1) Stylistics. Not since Stephen King wrote his valentine to Hannibal has he given a more preposterous review than when he said Rowling had turned herself into one of the preeminent stylists of her generation. The books are imaginative and characters memorable. As a plotter, she is first rate. As a stylist? Repeated phrases and whole sections. The books are increasingly bloated and the last one with all Dumbledore's "You are the better man" move from the over-ripe to the mushy. I've had more than one person suggest to me that the overwrought quality of the prose is an echo of the overwrought emotional quality of teens who are the protagonists. Maybe. Though the ending seems to portray Harry as having arrived at manhood and doesn't leave me suggesting that she is writing for teens about teens.
I suppose I should follow up on the last and the post in general by saying there is a difference between being horrible and being average and being exceptional. The books are mostly satisfying and I'm glad I read them and all, but...
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Spiderman 3 Rant
Okay, I know this is hopelessly late because I'm the only person in the universe who didn't see Spiderman 3 in the theater, but wow, how cheap and exploitative was that beam scene? First we have a large metal object crashing into a skyscraper (with a POV shot from people in the building no less), followed by innocents on the ground getting debris scattered over them, followed by people in the building falling from death inducing hight (to be saved by a swooping Spiderman).
I'm not sure if we've yet answered (honestly) the question of whether or not America is ready for a film about 9/11, but we've at least answered the question of how long it will take for the latest watershed Event That Changed The Universe to get subsumed in the pop-culture machine and become a shorthand allusion through which lazy writers and reckless auteurs can graft a sense of (unearned) significance onto their empty eye candy or jolt the numbed senses (and sensibilities) of a weary audience with a sense of danger and dread that can no longer be imparted through the use of stunts, special effects, or narrative.
P.S. [Later Edit]--I've never been a big fan of the conceit of having superheroes refer to each other by their civilian names...it was and is a sort of causualness with one's most precious commodity, the secret identity, that seemed at odds with the seriousness with which they took their jobs. This conceit (which I've noticed in Justice League Unlimited) is growing increasingly irritating. In the last thirty minutes of the film Spdierman fights without his mask and they all yell "Peter" and "Harry" at each other. Apparently nobody in the year 2007 has invented a telephoto lens (this in a film about competing photos of Spiderman) or advanced listening technology to eavesdrop on distant conversations.
I'm not sure if we've yet answered (honestly) the question of whether or not America is ready for a film about 9/11, but we've at least answered the question of how long it will take for the latest watershed Event That Changed The Universe to get subsumed in the pop-culture machine and become a shorthand allusion through which lazy writers and reckless auteurs can graft a sense of (unearned) significance onto their empty eye candy or jolt the numbed senses (and sensibilities) of a weary audience with a sense of danger and dread that can no longer be imparted through the use of stunts, special effects, or narrative.
P.S. [Later Edit]--I've never been a big fan of the conceit of having superheroes refer to each other by their civilian names...it was and is a sort of causualness with one's most precious commodity, the secret identity, that seemed at odds with the seriousness with which they took their jobs. This conceit (which I've noticed in Justice League Unlimited) is growing increasingly irritating. In the last thirty minutes of the film Spdierman fights without his mask and they all yell "Peter" and "Harry" at each other. Apparently nobody in the year 2007 has invented a telephoto lens (this in a film about competing photos of Spiderman) or advanced listening technology to eavesdrop on distant conversations.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Pirates of the Caribbean III Rant
Not a review, here, just a slightly edited discussion board post that I felt sharing beyond the few contributors to that board.
**********************************************************************************
I spent a decent part of the last day or so meditating on what made this film so wretchedly bad. I even contemplated (and believe I could) setting up a Slactivist-type project whereby I would write an essay a week on some micro portion of the film, dissecting how it is “instructively bad” at each individual point.
The plot is bloated and migraine inducing, while the photography and editing is shockingly bad. A stellar example is a scene between Knightley and Chow Yun Fat that can’t decide whether to use dolly shots or jump cuts and so intersperses both with little rhyme or reason—managing to confuse spatial relations and break rhythm at the same time. Look, I’m not asking for mise en scene here—this is an adventure movie, not Citizen Kane--but I think if this were a film school project it would get thrashed.
I think what ultimately grinds my gears about the latter two installments is the pointlessness of the whole thing and the way it tends to use reversals and new information as deux ex machinas rather than mythological layering. Oh it was fun to see the shifting allegiances in the first film, but by the second (and certainly the third) you would think the characters would know what they stood for and wanted even if others were mistaken about them. The pirate code seems binding at times, at others, it is merely, you know, “suggestions.” The problem with that is that the film wants to have it both ways…chastising government and institutions for being capricious and hypocritical yet championing the pirate life not as some embodiment of a Thoreau-like adherence to a personal integrity but only as a rebellion against that which it isn’t all that different from.
Look, I hate the RNC as much as the next namby-pamby liberal who laments the erosion of our civil rights under the Bush regime—but must EVERY adventure film portray ANY form of institutional power as totalitarian? I wrote an op-ed piece a couple of years ago about how Hollywood films were doing the cultural work of paving the way for war with film after film that lionized a small group of noble brethren who withstood robotic and totalitarian armies (historical and fantastic) by holding fast to principles in the face of great odds. No more…
Here we get Elizabeth Swann doing her best impersonation of Winona Ryder doing a postmodern interpretation of Henry V…”we few, we happy few, we band of loosely affiliated mercenaries with momentarily aligned mutual interests…for whoever fights with me is my brother, from now until the end of the scene!”
These characters are so devoid of deep commitments (or even passions) that it just feels like nothing is at stake…a feeling that is only exacerbated by the decision to treat death as one more plot hurdle to be written around rather than a consequential possible result of a wrong (or, God forbid, a right) decision.
But hey…I’m a red blooded, American male, so who wouldn’t want to watch Keira Knightley prancing around in a tighty-nighty that can barely cover her (as Forrest Gump would say) “butt-tocks”? At least her attributes are more consistently present than Sparrow’s “now you see them—now we are too busy to think of how to get rid of them so they’ll disappear for no reason” surrealistic hallucinations. Maybe the film wouldn't have been nearly three hours if someone hadn't accidentally inserted Un Chien Andalu in the second reel.
Somewhere out there, I’m willing to bet there is some fundamentalist who is protesting The Simpsons and Harry Potter but who wouldn’t blink at Jack’s (or Barbosa’s) assertion that “there is more than one way to gain eternal life” or find its phrasing anything other than coincidental.
(1 rum bottle out of 5)
**********************************************************************************
I spent a decent part of the last day or so meditating on what made this film so wretchedly bad. I even contemplated (and believe I could) setting up a Slactivist-type project whereby I would write an essay a week on some micro portion of the film, dissecting how it is “instructively bad” at each individual point.
The plot is bloated and migraine inducing, while the photography and editing is shockingly bad. A stellar example is a scene between Knightley and Chow Yun Fat that can’t decide whether to use dolly shots or jump cuts and so intersperses both with little rhyme or reason—managing to confuse spatial relations and break rhythm at the same time. Look, I’m not asking for mise en scene here—this is an adventure movie, not Citizen Kane--but I think if this were a film school project it would get thrashed.
I think what ultimately grinds my gears about the latter two installments is the pointlessness of the whole thing and the way it tends to use reversals and new information as deux ex machinas rather than mythological layering. Oh it was fun to see the shifting allegiances in the first film, but by the second (and certainly the third) you would think the characters would know what they stood for and wanted even if others were mistaken about them. The pirate code seems binding at times, at others, it is merely, you know, “suggestions.” The problem with that is that the film wants to have it both ways…chastising government and institutions for being capricious and hypocritical yet championing the pirate life not as some embodiment of a Thoreau-like adherence to a personal integrity but only as a rebellion against that which it isn’t all that different from.
Look, I hate the RNC as much as the next namby-pamby liberal who laments the erosion of our civil rights under the Bush regime—but must EVERY adventure film portray ANY form of institutional power as totalitarian? I wrote an op-ed piece a couple of years ago about how Hollywood films were doing the cultural work of paving the way for war with film after film that lionized a small group of noble brethren who withstood robotic and totalitarian armies (historical and fantastic) by holding fast to principles in the face of great odds. No more…
Here we get Elizabeth Swann doing her best impersonation of Winona Ryder doing a postmodern interpretation of Henry V…”we few, we happy few, we band of loosely affiliated mercenaries with momentarily aligned mutual interests…for whoever fights with me is my brother, from now until the end of the scene!”
These characters are so devoid of deep commitments (or even passions) that it just feels like nothing is at stake…a feeling that is only exacerbated by the decision to treat death as one more plot hurdle to be written around rather than a consequential possible result of a wrong (or, God forbid, a right) decision.
But hey…I’m a red blooded, American male, so who wouldn’t want to watch Keira Knightley prancing around in a tighty-nighty that can barely cover her (as Forrest Gump would say) “butt-tocks”? At least her attributes are more consistently present than Sparrow’s “now you see them—now we are too busy to think of how to get rid of them so they’ll disappear for no reason” surrealistic hallucinations. Maybe the film wouldn't have been nearly three hours if someone hadn't accidentally inserted Un Chien Andalu in the second reel.
Somewhere out there, I’m willing to bet there is some fundamentalist who is protesting The Simpsons and Harry Potter but who wouldn’t blink at Jack’s (or Barbosa’s) assertion that “there is more than one way to gain eternal life” or find its phrasing anything other than coincidental.
(1 rum bottle out of 5)
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