I went and watched Star Trek the other day. The movie is just flat-out great; provided you go in expecting a Star Trekian plot (now with more Red Matter to fill in the plot holes!). This is Star Trek with the budget and acting it was always meant to have, with a real commitment to the spirit of the original.
Spoilers Below the Fold
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I went and saw Watchmen the night before last. It was OK. I will give them credit for this much up front: it did not feel like a near-three-hour movie. It was not physically painful in the way, say, Titanic was. So, kudos on that, at least.
And I won’t get more into the Antigone/Marcotte topics, other than to give my two cents here rather then have my shining wisdom buried in long threads, which I have not read to their completion so if I ignore something you commented on, you know, forgive me.
And I will spoil the living fuck out of this thing, because my main gripe is with the ending. For your convenience, after my list of non-spoiling complaints, I provide a cut.
1) Dear Zack Snyder: Could you put more schlong in your movies? There’s really no such thing as too gratuitous.
I don’t know how to feel about the films of Snyder’s that I have seen. On the one hand, it’s nice to see male bodies treated like we’re used to seeing female bodies treated. I saw Watchmen with two guys, one who had seen 300 and one who hadn’t, and the one who had said “Well, you kind of feel bad about yourself after watching all those perfect-looking men run around basically naked the whole movie.” “Welcome to the world of women,” I said. Because it’s true. And I generally like his sex scenes, because he directs some of the only sex scenes I’ve seen in a movie theatre that even come close to looking like people actually having sex. Good sex, not romantic comedy sex, but actual sex where both parties get to enjoy themselves. Sure, the people having sex are generally far more attractive than people are in real life, but I’m ok with that because if I ever want to see normal people having sex, well, I have the internet. For movie ticket prices, give me sexy. But not too sexy, because I have to believe it, ya’ know.
On the other hand, sometimes it’s ok for sexy things to hit the cutting room floor. Watching a Zack Snyder movies always leaves me with a creepy feeling that I know too much about Zack Snyder’s fantasy life. And Dr Manhattan’s giant blue god-dick was creepy in its inert ginormousness, like a stuffed blue gym sock taped to his nether regions. I mean, if you’re going to put cock out there where everyone can see it, make it move a little so it doesn’t seem like it’s just kind of floating in the air in front of Dr Manhattan, untroubled and unconnected to the motion of his body.
2) A little updating might not have killed the story line. When the movie first ended, I was quite critical, until my roommate, who had read the comic, explained to me that it was written in 1985, and exactly how closely they had kept to the source material. Knowing that made it a little better. But what seemed gut-wrenchingly scary to people in 1985 (namely, the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction and the fact that there was now enough firepower on the planet to vaporize everyone and everything multiple times) is background noise to people my age and younger, and I am way closer to 30 than I’d like to admit. For us, it’s always been that way, and so the sense of urgency and fright the beginning of the movie was trying to convey seems almost as quaint as those 1950′s videos of children being trained to hide under their desks in the event of nuclear explosion. Oh! For those innocent times when only two superpowers had access to nukes, which were large and obvious and prohibitively expensive! Before the internet, there were no instructions to make your own nuclear bomb on the internet.
I’m old enough to remember the falling of the Berlin wall and the end of the cold war, and while I knew it was a big deal, I remember not being quite clear as to why. The fear of the Soviets and the complexities of the cold war did not make it down to elementary school children in a clear and convincing matter, which is probably part of the reason people who would never joke about the Nazis find Soviet kitsch to be hilarious. By the time we were old enough to understand, it was over, and it was recent enough in history to always be cut short by the end of the year – it was never treated with the same depth or repetition as say, the Civil War or WWII.
The result was I found a lot of that movie to be hokey until I really sat and thought about it. And I’m a thinking, reading person who loves Russian novels and has read quite a bit about Soviet history in the last year or two. Hell, I just returned a library book about fucking chess’ role in the Cold War, OK? I’m saying, I’ve done my independent study on this topic. If the point was lost on me until I had some context for when and why the story was written, imagine how little of it is getting to your average 18-35 year old movie goer? Yeah, that’s right. Your point just got lost in well-choreographed gore and gratuitous blue wang.
3) Could you have made Silk Spectre II look less like Xena? The whole time she was kicking ass I kept on thinking of that Simpson’s episode: “I didn’t know Xena could fly!” “I keep telling you, I’m Lucy Lawless!” She can keep the cute little wiggle dresses though. Those were awesome.
And finally, spoiler, and probably the only place Antigone might agree with me.
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I went and saw Watchmen yesterday. It was a pretty good film, if you like iron age comics (which I’m not a huge fan of). I haven’t read the comic books, but the gentleman I went with has and he claimed it was a mostly faithful representation of the comic book.
Technically, the film was very strong. There were scenes that were very comic-book-esque, without actually being comic shots like in 300 or Sin City, and to boot, they were some awesome shots. The casting was about perfect for the characters, although I think the characters weren’t terribly well-rounded (though that might be intentional). My only real quibble was the music; pick any over-done cliche war song from the 60′s that they like to stick in Vietnam movies and it was there. That, in and of itself wasn’t so terrible bad (again, it might have been intentional) but the fact that they engineered it so it was the loudest fucking thing ever was really annoying to me (particularily since I think that the movie theatres have the sound too loud in the first place).
Spoilers below the fold (and trigger warning for a rape scene)
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Last night, I watched “What Would Jesus Buy“, a documentary by Morgan Spurlock that is generally about over-consumption and more specifically about Rev. Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. Rev. Billy is an activist/ preacher* who, with his choir, go and delivers a very simple message to people at malls across the country: Stop shopping. Frequently, this message gets him arrested (well, that or all the trespassing).
As to the general point, I think it’s a very good one. People spend WAY to much money on Christmas, have long confused “expensive” with “affection” when it comes to gifts, and companies exploit this confusion to sell lots of stuff that people don’t really need. Now, I’m not to terribly sure about the strategy of going to the Mall of America, or Disneyland, or any other major shopping hub and telling people to not shop is terribly effective, nor is going door to door caroling with anti-consumerism songs; but damned if it isn’t HILARIOUS. But, I think I think my group** is kind of a “choir” audience (as in, preaching to the choir): for the longest time, I’ve been trying to make gifts instead of buy them, and I don’t have the cash (nor the desire to go further into debt) to be shopping junkies; PE and Silky HATE shopping, and Hubby has requested that no one buy him anything this year, but to donate to March of Dimes.***
There were a lot of really poignant moments in this movie, as well. There is a scene, when Rev. Billy is lying on a hotel bed with his wife wondering if he was doing any good at all that I’m sure every activist must of felt from time to time. Spurlock really knows his stuff: his cut pictures were hilarious, but not distracting, and it had the right combination of facts, entertainment, and intimacy. Spurlock is like the anti-Moore: he knows to stay the heck out of the movie. The only criticism I have is that it jumps all over the place a lot: sometimes it’s showing Minnesota, then what looked like New Mexico, and then back to the MOA, and it also meandered around without having a true direction.
*I think the preaching part is sincere, but I’m not actually sure.
**PE, Silky, Hubby and I
***If anyone really wants to get me something for Christmas this year, March of Dimes, Amnesty International, and Planned Parenthood, are my favorite organizations.
I really don’t remember this scene from Fantasia.
You may have already seen this, but if you haven’t, do take a moment and check out Cracked.com’s rundown of Disney’s most shameful moments. I mean, not that it’s surprising that a massive corporation run by a right-wing snitch has some skanky race issues, but wow.
Most parents show their kids these cartoons. Mine did, and no, I didn’t get the cultural and historical context that makes a character like Uncle Remus so very, very disturbing. This is the sort of thing that makes explaining systemic racism to white people so terribly frustrating. (On a related note, don’t read the comments unless you have a stronger stomach than I do.)
I’m surprised that this didn’t get a mention. Though I guess nameless slaves don’t really count as “characters.”
Third Reich to Fortune 500 is also funny/disturbing.
Hat tip: rantipole6
What is this?
I don’t know about you, but it took me several long minutes of staring at this to realize it was supposed to be a penguin. A Gentoo Penguin, actually, from the movie’s official site. Which is, you’ll note, a rather plump, pear-shaped bird.
But we all know that we can’t have plump, pear-shaped female characters of any species on a large screen—it might give women and girls the undesirable idea that they can take up physical space. So we have the strangely deformed result: a sexy animated penguin with boobs. Small boobs—it’s a children’s film after all—but still boobs on something that isn’t a mammal. (Note that the, er, male penguin characters in the movie actually do look like penguins.)
The mind, she boggles.
Kyso has a point about the Dutch sinking to new lows on the reality TV front, but at least the French stepped up to the plate — the Cannes Film Festival rewarded a political film with the Palme d’Or:
A harrowing film about illegal abortion in Communist-era Romania beat 21 movies by well-known directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Ethan and Joel Coen, and Wong Kar-wai to win the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize Sunday.
Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s low-budget film, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” depicts the horrors a student goes through to ensure her friend can have a secret abortion.
I was too busy coating myself in Axe Body Spray and watching UFC to hop across the pond and catch this year’s festival, so I can’t tell you if the film is deeply feminist or even any good, but I’m happy to see the international film community rewarding works of art that address the issues of the body.
Hopefully, members of the blogosphere can encourage as many “regular” Americans as possible to see the film when it arrives on our shores. Harrowing secret abortions may not only be a thing of the past over here; they may also be a thing of the near future.
This is too delightful: the asshole frat boys from “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” are suing basically every production company involved in the making of the film.
Legal papers said the two men “engaged in behaviour that they otherwise would not have engaged in”….
According to legal documents, a production crew took the pair to a bar to drink and “loosen up” before taking part in a documentary they were told would be shown outside the US.
Bwa-haaa-haa-haaaaaa!
I hope to hell the case gets thrown out. Looking at those guys, I hardly think that drinking themselves stupid and then saying racist and sexist shit is “behaviour that they otherwise would not have engaged in.”
A quick google search finds a statement from the not-sueing fratboy and indicated, yep, these guys were dumb as all hell:
“I got a call from one of my buddies asking me if I wanted to get paid $200 to get drunk, and I said, ‘Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.’ So I went down and I went though an interview process and I was one of the lucky, I guess — or the unlucky — that I got chosen,” he said.
They interviewed for the chance to make $200 to get drunk? And this did not strike them at all suspicious? Borat was supposed to have one hell of a release form, which I guess they didn’t read.
Let’s set up a hypothetical scenario here. Say one of these guys had met a girl at a bar and bought her round after round until he was finally able to fuck her without too much of a fight. And the next day she sobered up and decided she’d been raped and wanted an investigation and prosecution. How much do you want to bet these frat boys would be among the first to join the “doesn’t matter that the bitch was drunk, she didn’t fight back so obviously she consented” choir? But when the tables are turned and suddenly it’s them being sweet-talked and boozed up until they miss the obvious warning signs and end up hurt and humiliated, oh, now it’s different.
With the dust-up over CleanFlicks no longer being allowed to remove the offending elements of a film for fundie consumption, TBogg now reports that some wingnuts are demanding conservo-drones make more movies themselves.
I couldn’t agree more. For too long, conservatives have had to suffer the blight of filmic oppression.
Why, just imagine if someone were free to make a movie about Jesus, and tell it like it really was, with all the blood and gore and cinematic lighting and anti-Semitism. That movie needs to be made, but the radleft establishment won’t let it happen.
Even if it did get made, the film would be crucified by all those mean old Hollywood Jewish folks.
But forget Jesus for a second (you can leave him in your heart, though).
Can’t we get a good war movie in the theaters, something that shows soldiers fighting nobly instead of all those flicks about civilian rapes and massacres spilling out of the multiplexes? Just once I’d like to see something uplifting, maybe about a lost solider who’s brought home to his mom against all odds because his brothers are dead. We need more gee-whiz fightin’ flicks like that. But those LA snobs would rather shoot up the heroin with hookers than produce uplifting war movies, so good luck making one.
It doesn’t have to be aw-shucks all the time, though. Conservatives have a dark side, too. Oh, sure, we libs like to worship our Satan and use contraception all willy-nilly, but the wingnuts can go even darker. Someday, if they can ever throw off the shackles of artistic discrimination, just maybe they’ll get the chance to show us their secret fantasies, something about Armageddon, or how 2 days from now the world will end. That’d keep your kids up nights, and maybe teach them to straighten up and be ready for salvation.
Eh, that’s a pipe dream, unfortunately. Even if the wingnuts tricked the studios into making those movies, they’d flop. The American public is too brainwashed to want to see anything other than anti-war speeches and tits.
The only way it’s going to work is to take the CleanFlicks route: make a movie about the kinds of things liberal Hollywood loves but clean them up the Republican way. I know making a movie seems an impossible task, because the list of things you need includes all of the following:
1) money
And where can the right in America find any of that?
Assuming we someday solve the conservative financial crisis, though, I’d like to pitch 3 movies under the CleanFlicks production banner:
The Godfather’s Father
Vito Calzone is an evil mob boss. He’s so vicious he adopts good Irish boys and twists them into monsters that decapitate horses for fun. Fortunately, his war-hero son arrives home and becomes Godfather to his sister’s baby. The son uses his character-building experience in the military and his renewed interest in Catholicism to show his father the error of his ways. Maybe in the sequel they could open a soup kitchen in Vegas.
Trading Places 2006
Dan Ackroyd and Eddie Murphy star in a swap of hilarious proportions. Rich off affirmative action, Eddie Murphy lives the life of privilege. Working WASP Ackroyd can’t catch a break in this life… until Eddie’s malt-liquor-loving uncles get bored and decide to play the old switcheroo with them. Of course, once they meet a nice, upstanding white fellow, the drunk uncles realize the money and power’s been going to all the wrong places. They decide to keep Ackroyd as their wealthy heir and let Murphy rot in hell where he belongs. Fun for the whole family!
Election… For Real
Pff. Girls can’t win elections. And if you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying. The dumb jock wins and the teacher who f***ed the system becomes principal.
I look forward to receiving my preproduction checks at your earliest convenience.
Like most noir thrillers, The Third Man rewards multiple viewings. My first time through, solving the mystery of Harry Lime and his supposed demise primarily occupied my attention. During my second viewing, I was drawn to Carol Reed’s manipulations of the shellshocked Viennese streets and tunnels, (Alida) Valli’s nuanced performance, the film’s patient revelation of Major Calloway as a savvy force for good, etcetera. My third experience hit me over the head with what should’ve been an obvious fact: Holly Martins isn’t just flawed — he sucks. Holly’s the ultimate nice guy, perhaps the best example captured on celluloid.
After Holly arrives in Vienna desperate to find work with school chum Harry Lime, he learns Harry was hit by a truck and killed. After attending Lime’s funeral, Holly is offered a ride by Major Calloway. They stop for a drink, and Holly reveals details about his schoolboy friendship with Lime, including the confession that Holly was “never so lonesome in my life till [Harry] showed up.” Those wary of the nice guys will recognize this quality of needing someone else to define his life. Left to his own devices, Holly couldn’t make his own fun. He needed Harry to do it for him.
Calloway reveals to Holly that Lime was mixed up in racketeering and possibly murder. This deeply offends Holly, who defiantly promises to right this injustice and blusters to Calloway, “when I’ve finished with you, you’ll leave Vienna, you’ll look so silly.”
Holly meets with Baron Kurtz, one of Lime’s closest friends, who does his best to discourage Holly from his pursuit of justice, and suggests to him that “it won’t do Harry any good. You’d do better to think of yourself.” In truth, this is exactly what Holly’s doing. He considers his desire to clear Lime’s name a noble gesture of friendship, but Holly clearly derives much of his self-esteem from having earned the friendship of such a larger-than-life chap. Lime’s perch on the pedestal is essential to Holly’s own pride, and he will do anything to defend it.
Obviously, the use of the pedestal is a classic nice guy maneuver. Like the guys who obsess over a girl/woman they’ve artificially idealized as the perfect girlfriend, Holly subconsciously needs to bask in the reflective glow of the company he keeps. He wants a perfect best friend on his arm as badly as a nice guy desires his One True.
In fact, Holly’s so caught up in restoring the myth of his trophy friend he doesn’t even think of the possibility of murder until Lime’s former girlfriend, Anna, confronts him with the details and wonders aloud about it. Anna’s entrance presents Holly with a new object of obsession, one he doggedly pursues in nice guy fashion.
Fired up over an even bigger noble cause (the possibility of murrrderrr), Holly returns to Lime’s residence with Anna to question the porter who initially informed Holly of Lime’s death. Naturally, in the uncertain post-war climate, native Viennese were better off getting mixed up in as little trouble as possible. After the porter says he saw 3 men carry Lime’s body across the street, Holly flips his lid. Baron Kurtz claimed only 2 men did this, and Holly chastises the porter for not coming forward with this information. The porter tries to explain that these are dangerous times, but Holly retorts, “suppose I take your evidence to the police?” Holly threatens and bullies for his own narrow righteous cause, completely oblivious to the needs of others. This “me me me” attitude in the guise of justice is all part of Holly’s nice guy nature.
Later, Holly’s noble blustering causes him to reveal the porter as the source of his evidence to the very people he suspects of Harry’s murder. Unsurprisingly, the porter ends up dead. How nice of Holly.
Like any nice guy who finds a damsel in distress, Holly is helpless against his attraction to Anna. First, though, his chat with her reveals the depths of Holly’s delusions regarding his friend. After Anna asks him to tell her about Lime, Holly confesses all of the following:
“Oh, we didn’t make much sense. Drank too much. Once he tried to steal my girl.”
“I suppose so – he could fix anything. [...] Oh, little things. How to put your temperature up before an exam…the best cribs. How to avoid this and that.”
“When he was fourteen, he taught me the three card trick. That’s growing up fast.”
If you had a friend who tried to steal your girl, knew every cheat in the book, and mastered deceit via cards by age fourteen, would you really find the notion that he fell into a life of crime that impossible? Nice guy pedestals don’t crack easily, apparently.
Holly doesn’t notice that, though, because he’s busy building one for Anna. Despite her boyfriend dying only the other day, and despite her obvious love for the man, Holly begins with the passive aggressive nice guy mating ritual, weighting the air with hints like “you’ll fall in love again.” Already, you can sense his quest to clear Harry’s name is becoming a way to impress this female prize, a former companion of Holly’s alpha male now opportunistically available for him.
Despite her protestation that she doesn’t ever want to fall in love again, Holly ups the ante:
Holly: “Come on out and have a drink.”
Anna: “Why did you say that?”
Holly: “Seemed like a good idea.”
Anna: “It’s just what he used to say.”
Holly: “Well, I didn’t learn that from him.”
I call BS. Holly wouldn’t accidentally stumble across exactly the same date-request phrase as his male idol. He has no idea just how much he has cribbed his style from his friend. Further, what makes this request seem like a “good idea?” Anna clearly mourns Lime, makes no bones about it, and has no interest in men right now. But the typical nice guy sees only the chance to be someone’s awesome boyfriend.
When she tries to deflect Holly by reminding him that they should go to the porter before its too late (unaware he is already dead), his full nice guy regalia is revealed: “What’s the hurry? Can’t we talk quietly for a couple of minutes?” A few minutes ago, Holly was obsessed with finding Lime’s murderers and clearing his name. Now all he wants to do is hit on his dead friend’s girl.
It must be exhausting to be an evangelical Christian. There’s so much real stuff to battle — gays, baby-hating feminists, Muslims, Janet Jackson, and an inability to cope with one’s own sexual desires — that piling on debates about what really happened between semi-fictional characters in their fun and friendly book of worship seems excessive. And yet it’s what they do so well, isn’t it?
Lately, the fundies are up in arms over the idea popularized by the Da Vinci Code that Jesus bumped uglies before becoming wall art. They’re even more worked up over the idea that the writings of Martin Luther are being used to justify this accusation.
Owen Gleiberman’s scathing review of the film in Entertainment Weekly has drawn much of the ire:
Yes, a soupçon of research reveals that the Priory of Sion is a hoax invented in 1956, and surely it can’t be proved that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were ever intimate (though Martin Luther believed so). But what we want from a film of The Da Vinci Code is the fervor of belief.
Missouri Pastor Walter Snyder takes the magazine to task:
Old lies never die — they just become fodder for the entertainment industry. That’s the case, anyhow, with the fable that Martin Luther believed that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had gotten married. Now CNN has picked up an Entertainment Weekly review of The Da Vinci Code that perpetuates the fraud. Meanwhile, Code author Dan Brown keeps an archived Time magazine article about the novel which bears the same false testimony on his own web site.Since Brother Martin’s good name is being dragged through the thick Brown mud, I encourage you to read what Luther actually said and study the accompanying commentary in Luther, Jesus, and Mary Magdalene at Aardvark Alley.
Gleiberman never said they were married, just that they did the dirty deed, but I guess it never hurts to put words in someone’s mouth before calling them a liar.
Still, I’m guessing ol’ Walt doesn’t relish the idea of Jesus the Fornicator (the one true son of St. Amanda of Fornicatus?), but isn’t like the OG from EW to get his facts wrong. I figured I would check out the Aardvark Valley link helpfully provided by ye olde pastor.
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