you'll shoot your (other) eye out! a christmas story in context

The most prescient and important line in Robert Graves's sweeping psudeo-historical fiction I, Claudius occurs at beginning. Claudius, who unexpectedly became Emperor of Rome, is an aged man crippled with congenital birth defects and paranoia who decides, as the empire tears itself apart from under him, to pen a memoir. One of his earliest recollections is of Thallus saying to Aristarchus, "The theater isn't what it was," to which Aristarchus wryly replies, "No. And I'll tell you something else: it never was what it was."

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Seeing 1983's cultural icon A Christmas Story is something between a tradition and a force of  nature. Despite it's beloved status, I doubt many people decide to watch it -- it's just on. Two stations in the basic cable lineup spin the reel for 24 hours straight leading up to and through Christmas Day, and it worms its way into the standard cannon of network holiday movies, endless mid-90s Charlie Brown updates and Viagra commercials.

My fiancee had never seen it before, and I had only vague memories -- kind of like the Greatest Hits version of the movie rather than the whole deal -- so when we had a break cooking for the next day's family gathering, we sat down and decided to watch A Christmas Story. About two-thirds through, she turns to me and asks, "Is this when America was great?"

We'll get to that.

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My memory was better than I thought it would be, particularly remembering that it is, as an objectively judged film, awful. It looks -- and sounds -- bad, even for '83 standards. It's set in an apparently alternate-universe 1940 where a mid-western family wasn't crippled by the tail end of the Great Depression, wracked with anxiety over a second war in Europe, and where Indiana desegregated its schools nine years early. If the setting feels artificial, that's because the story actually comes from radio humorist Jean Shepherd's In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, which wasn't written until 1966 (Shepherd also lent his radio talents and narrates the movie as adult Ralph). The book was billed as a novel, but is actually a collection of Shepherd's broadcasts rendered into short stories, and those unrelated stories are cobbled together into the final movie. The stories themselves are fictional accounts of Shepherd's childhood, all taking place in Hohman, Indiana (itself a fictional Hammond, Indiana, Shepherd's hometown). While there isn't anything inherently malicious about presenting your own rose-tinted view of your childhood, plunking a black kid in the background of a public school c. 1940 is galling kick in the junk. It is also inappropriate but thematically consistent to say that history has junk since the movie is oppressively male.

Straddling the line between a genuine comedy and a marshmallow-fluff Hallmark movie, it doesn't fit neatly into either and can be best be labeled a children's movie of the classic "boy's adventure" variety. To be clear, there is a major difference between a story that is about children and a story that is for children, and A Christmas Story is the latter. Good stories about children frame the adult world through a child's eyes, but it is still very much the adult world -- think It, E.T. or more recently Stranger Things. Ralphie's parents on the other hand, behave in a way that a child would expect an adult to behave. In real life, this is a developmental disorder, and in filmmaking, it is how one chooses an audience.

We all know the plot: little pudge-faced Ralphie Parker wants to get his pudgy fingers on a Red Ryder BB gun, and spends the movie conning his parents, teacher and the creepiest mall Santa this side of an unwashed Billy Bob Thornton amid cries that he'll shoot his eye out.

Given the tone along the way to the goal, I can't help but think that A Christmas Story is perhaps the most misplaced cinematic gem in the American heart. Shepherd refused to write down his comedy broadcasts, and before being published as In God We Trust..., they appeared serialized in "Playboy" -- yes, that "Playboy," which begins to explain some things. Ralphie's vignettes and the resulting lessons have an air of cynicism to them, and we both found it difficult to find anything endearing about them. The lamp, based on the short story "My Old Man and the Lascivious Special Award That Heralded the Birth of Pop Art," is a pretty clear shout-out to Shepherd's syndication in a nudie mag and a glimpse into the horror show that is Ralphie's unnamed parent's marriage. One particular detail I never noticed until now is the singular square inch of ass at the top of the lamp. Not sure why, but it made the entire B-story feel somewhat wrong, maybe a little too real. That Mr. Parker throws the lamp up in the window to show off to the neighbors compounds it, and makes the scene where Mrs. Parker smashes the thing uncomfortable. The notion that older, married men must are slaves to their lust and must be corralled by jealous wives has been used to justify all manner of sexual crime since crime existed, and this holiday gem doesn't even do us the service that A Charlie Brown Christmas does with subtext.

Ash, being a teacher, was doubly horrified at the scene where Flick sticks his tongue on a frozen pole and his friends abandon him. Grade school teacher Mrs. Shields is perhaps the only adult in the story who doesn't act like a pod person sent from Planet Lunchables, promptly getting help and later both giving Ralphie stinkeye at his bribes and asking some serious questions about his desire to cap a sucka.

Another thing: none of the adults get first names or even call each other by first names, which I find a little disconcerting. It has the same air of quaint good-'ole-days politeness that St. Hartman's homophobic rantings in Full Metal Jacket have in relation to anything that's supposed to be inspiring.

A Christmas Story is sometimes effective. Ralphie works his pudge off to get the Little Orphan Annie decoder ring only to find out the secret message is an ad for Ovaltine -- the overpriced chocolate milk mix he'd been guzzling for weeks on end to get the ring in the first place. The entire bit has an air of Voltaire's intense cynicism. Which leads me to the conclusion that perhaps the legion of fans who gather 'round the sectional when it gets cold out to relive the Misadventures of Ralphie Six-Shooter and the Adults that Were Replaced by Cylons have A Christmas Story pegged wrong. It's a cliche to say that Christmas is a holiday that has been co-opted by retailers since the turn of the century, but the early holiday classics such as Charlie Brown and It's a Wonderful Life at least take the pains to give their protagonists some sense of magic at the end. Ralphie, like Shakespeare's eponymous King Lear, digs a hole into the earth to find some kind of refuge. But sometimes the effort is rewarded with crazy Tom O'Bedlam. Or a crappy marketing scheme.

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"[The girl] is the spirit of want, and this is the spirit of ignorance. Beware the boy."
- A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Story's popularity endures -- I think -- because of its bottomless paper bucket of optimism. Ralphie spends the whole of the story acting like a two-timing little shit, beating up the town bully and dropping an F-bomb in front of the fam, but is rewarded with his precious pellet blaster regardless. There's a heartwarming scene where Mr. and Mrs. Parker take a pause in hectic, marathon Christmasing to listen to some carolers. Even the fact that Ralphie shoots himself right in his stupid pudgy face the second he takes the gun out for a whirl ends up alright in the end.

Of course it has already been established that the world of A Christmas Story doesn't exist, and its visage of America was one cooked up by aliens or Doc Brown or the T-1000. It was a world where there were no consequences: Mr. Parker could ogle a hunk of plastic and his wife could destroy it, and it was just another cah-razy day in the heartland and not cause to rethink one's life choices. Ralphie could shoot himself in the face with a fake gun and come away unharmed - hell, today he'd be lucky if he came away from that alive. It was a world where parents could safely stick soap in their kids' mouths or smack them around and they didn't have to grow up into a generation of serial killers in the 1970s. It was an America teetering on the brink of war and Mr. Parker blithely complains about all of that "politics slop" taking up space in his newspaper.

All of these things together stitch together a story that is more parody than nostalgia, like Lovecraft's fictional town of Innsmouth, which appears all normal to the outside observer, but for the murderous fish-men that lurk below the waves. Lovecraft, of course, was a racist, and his monsters were a stand-in for the various social minorities and immigrants he saw dotting the pristine New England of his childhood. A Christmas Story might not feature any tentacle monsters, space radiation or Satanic rituals, but if you remove the stack of dusty commemorative plates, it is an empty table indeed. It's a place where a kid begs for a gun and shoots himself and where the stigma of divorce is worse than a marriage that has long outgrown its own uselessness. A Christmas Story is a sad, desperate painting of a great America that never was, and from the outside, looks pretty much shoestring-budget holiday movie, where the actors aren't paid enough and the crew, shooting outside on a cold winter morning, doesn't even get a cup of hot Ovaltine.

remove. thy. shift. ... wait, what?

Guess there's nothing to get one writing again like finally seeing a super-shitty Halloween movie that everyone somehow loved.

One of the giveaways that 2015s The Va-Vitch wasn't as good as everyone thought was the wide diversity in ratings: 91% from Rotten Tomatoes but only 3.5 stars from Ebert. Not that ratings count for much, but Very Serious Professional Movie People love nothing else if not consensus, and the question of what makes a film good is about as boilerplate as one can get.

Anyway, The Va-Vitch is a beautifully shot, surprisingly historical farce that tries to straddle between a slice-of-life period piece about early American puritans in the new world and full-blown supernatural horror. Things open with a family patriarch getting kicked out of an unnamed settlement -- Anytown, USA c. 1680 I guess -- for being too puritanical for the puritans. What led to this point is unclear and never explained, which serves as the first of many, many plot letdowns to come. Not that the audience would get it anyway: dad's mix of gravelly voice and period dialog make just about everything he says a series of unintelligible grunts anyway.

The Va-Vitch was billed as some kind of feminist landmark for it's portrayal of young Tomasin, but the camera spends so much time on mom, dad, Black Philip the goat and dad's abs it's difficult to see her as the protagonist, let alone the movie being told from her point of view. Let's get this out of the way now, since the movie wastes no time either: yes, there's a witch in the woods. So even though we get some chilling scenes of the family discussing whether to marry Tomasin off for extra money and supplies and treating her and her budding feminine wiles as the cause of their woes (instead of, you know, getting fricking exiled), it's all rendered moot by the literal existence of the literal, baby-eatin', boy-screwin', plague-bearin', shape-shiftin' witch.

In this light, I saw the movie from the father's point of view: trying to comprehend supernatural things that don't fit within his narrow, Biblical frame of reference. Faced with an enemy he can't defeat with either shouting or flexing his stomach muscles, he goes slowly insane. Aside: I doubt that's what the filmmakers were going for, but I wonder how much of the hype, reviews, and cover shot of Tomasin stick in the audience's head beforehand -- perhaps she is the protagonist because viewers are told she's the protagonist, but in watching what's actually in the movie, I saw it differently.

Historically, the Salem Witch Trials happened because a kind of grass mold native to the New World, of which Europeans had no knowledge, caused hallucinations in the populace, and their behavior was only explained away as demon possession. This gets hinted at in the Va-Vitch but never developed or explained, and that's what I thought they were going for, until the male heir of the family, Caleb, stumbles across a hut in the woods and the super-sexy witch therein.

At that point, and after the sexy lady has a hot body but an off-camera messed-up arm that snags Caleb and by extension the audience from the far side of Planet Jumpscare, I was completely kicked out of the narrative and couldn't take it seriously anymore, and I also managed to guess the ending. Black Philip is the literal Devil, and invites Tomasin to "live deliciously," (whatever the hell that means, like, open a food truck?) he gores dad to death and Tomasin hacks up her mom. Like other slow-burn horror movies, particularly anything from James Wan, it fulfills the plodding psychological terror erupts into an orgy of blood and violence just before credit roll. In the end, Toamsin gets naked and runs though the woods, finds a whole group of witches doing witchy stuff around a ridiculous bonfire and flies away.

The Va-Vitch (or I suppose to it should've been called The Va-Vitches) has the same problem The Last Exorcism did. Both movies set up as humanistic dramas about ordinary people pulling demons from the pages of the Bible to replace the demons in their own heads, and Last Exorcism was actually quite effective. That is, until you get to the last 60 seconds and a monster-demon lizard baby is born in front of another bonfire and eats a camera crew. I suppose it's a way to reassure an audience of the vast untruth that the monsters on the outside are scarier than the monsters on the inside by always making the monsters on the outside real, tangible and literal.

The thing is, The Va-Vitch is not a bad movie, and I get why people liked it. It's visually arresting and visually immersive, and does use the setting to tell the story to great effect (because I don't know about you but I couldn't understand a thing those mofos said). But by the time Tomasin was flying through woods in her birthday suit, I felt like the end of a 100 minute joke.

* * * * *

A far better movie with demons far more terrifying is 2016s Under the Shadow. Set in Iran in the last year of the Iran-Iraq war (what simpler times: I was 5, my parents were still together and the USA loved Saddam), a missile impacts a middle-class apartment complex in Tehran and bring with it the djinn. In the spirit of getting things out of the way, yes, the djinn are real and literal, but there's more going on here.

Young mom Shideh and her daughter Dorsa wait at home while husband-daddy Iraj is on the front lines as a field medic. Shideh is a med student herself, but because of her involvement in the Iranian revolution, is blacklisted from finishing her studies, becoming a doctor and going back to work. The movie opens, in fact, to a disinterested university admissions director brushing her off while an airstrike takes place in the distance. It's a heartbreaking scene that gives clear context for the rest of the movie -- something the Va-Vitch turns it's crooked nose up at from minute one.

Under the Shadow is, at it's core, an homage to 80s haunted house movies, most notably Poltergeist. The audience spends most of the time in Shideh's apartment and gets to know her daily routines. The scenes of her playing or doing lessons with Dorsa, repeated breakfasts and escape into Jane Fonda workout tapes before the scares build tension for the audience but also build Shideh and Dorsa as human beings. And because the audience is aware of Shideh's political past and why she's stuck in the apartment all day, every day, it allows for a good deal of sympathy -- something The Va-Vitch and its va-vagueness never address.

While it's not as stunning as its naked-in-the-woods counterpart, Under the Shadow pulls off an even more amazing feat in that it's relevant. Shideh and Iraj's brief discussions about the Iran-Iraq war, at the time the largest war that had ever been fought, illustrates the conflict in their marriage but also imparts a good deal of history not well known outside the Middle East. Shideh's clashes with Iranian culture do this as well: her coveted VCR is illegal. And in a twist on Poltergiest et. al., Shideh makes a run out of the haunted house only to be arrested by cultural enforcement police who catch her outside without her head covered. Actress Narges Rashidi manages a good long scene doing her best kicked-puppy face in the movie's most oppressively tense moment at the police station. This kind of period piece is one that is pertinent because parts of the world still function this way.

And that gets back to the final reason I was disappointed in the Va-Vitch: too much is left up to the audience. The hallmark of lazy writing is when names or keywords are used in place of showing. The audience doesn't know why Puritan dad and fam are exiled, but hell, they're Puritans and they're all nuts, am I right? The audience never knows if their life in the settlement is better because it is never shown.  It is serviceable enough to feel bad for Tomasin as her kin start to turn against her, but there's no base for their life before, and if history is any lens, it probably sucked just as bad, and having more people around an adolescent woman really just equated to more work to do and a better chance at getting assaulted and then blamed for it. Well to be fair they blamed the devil for most things but she'd have gotten her ass burned at the stake anyway. Puritans riding dirty, that's for damn sure. The audience only ever sees the va-victims of the va-vitch as victims, so it's difficult not to feel bad. But because they aren't people, the audience feels sympathy because it's told to, not because they deserve it.

Alright that's harsh, the baby does. He didn't do nothing. But nobody else. You get one. Damn Puritans.

the oscars music criticism hour

Another awards show dead and buried.

Honestly, what are we even supposed to say about it, besides the fact that everyone seems to have forgotten their history: Straight Outta Compton's only nomination was for its two white screenwriters, which happened to the (vastly superior) Spike Lee film Do The Right Thing in 1989. Of the entire movie, only Danny Aiello was nominated for best supporting, and Public Enemy's seminal track Fight The Power, which was played at the 2016 show, lost to -- of all god-forsaken things -- Under the Sea from The Little Mermaid.

Quickly: I am glad that Spotlight won best picture. It was an underdog production from start to finish. The state of investigative journalism in the U.S. and, hell, around the world, is patently pathetic. Even the much-lauded war journalist is labeled by the official Defense Department as an "unprivileged belligerent" -- basically a thin notch above "enemy combatant." Even former actor and "Great Communicator" Ronnie Reagan hot-mic'd himself back in 1986 by calling the media "sons of bitches." Much like the troops themselves and to a similar extend police, journalists are the heroic risk-takers of American legend ... just as long as we don't have to see them, know them, deal with them or think about any of the things they say.

Additionally, while I was rooting for Mad Max: Fury Road all the way through (which cleaned up with six creepy gold statues of Klaatu), I'm glad all of the recognition was for crew, design and stunts -- the non-glamours parts of film making we slobbering media-whore consumers rarely see. The fire coming out of that guitar was real and Sunday it got it's due.

You've seen this before but I reiterate that it's a goddamned guitar that shoots fire and you will see it again and enjoy it!

And there's not a whole lot one can say about Chris Rock's admirable but supremely awkward attempts at addressing the everyday racism of Hollywood, except that somehow Asians ended up as the ass of the joke? I guess there's a valid criticism there but some more focus would've helped, particularly that there were no Asians* up for anything this year, with the exception The Look of Silence, a second-half of the documentary The Act of Killing that approximately nobody saw (but really you should see both). This comes soon after word that Scarlett Johansson will take the lead in an American live-action reboot of the seminal cyber-punk anime Ghost in the Shell. I'm not trying to put people in boxes or anything, but I don't know many Jewish women native to NYC who go by Motoko Kusangi.

[UPDATE: I started this post several days ago and it seems her entry for the movie has been removed from IMDB. This is what listening to the internet gets you.]

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If there was a high point -- or low point? -- of the night, it was Lady Gaga losing the best song award to Sam Smith. Let's be clear: Gaga is effectively the most overrated** musician working today. Depending on what side of spectrum you come from, she's either Amy Winehouse without the deeply tragic personal demons and far better adapted to fame, or Tori Amos on bath salts. Her performance was great comparatively, but without her patented Gaga-ness -- the ever present need to charge her fans a few hundred a ticket so she can light a baby grand on fire or something -- it didn't exactly stand out.

But this was the "issues" Oscars and issues it brought. Until It Happens To You was written for the documentary film The Hunting Ground. It tracks the many, many failures many different social and legal systems as they pertain to the epidemic of college campus rape, and her performance brought dozens of rape and sexual assault survivors out on stage. That Brie Larson won for Room, a movie that heavily features the dis-empowerment of women, doesn't exactly seem like an accident (like Spotlight, it was an underdog movie that came out of nowhere, adapted from a best-selling novel that came out of nowhere).

The other two songs paled in comparison. The Weekend's Earned It is a forgettable little bit of pop/soul/R&B crud that somehow posits that women "earn" their domineering and abusive partners by, being better victims I guess? It was written for 50 Shades of Gray, after all. And given what astute readers who don't forget or block out that the mega-successful PG-13 semi-smut is elaborate Twilight fanfiction, twin Mary-Sue heroines Bella Swan and Ana Steele "earned" something between jack and shit.

But it really sticks in my craw (and I'm a dude so, ya know, use your imagination) that Sam Smith's James Bond crooning of The Writing's on the Wall won. The thing that made Skyfall stand out was that it was also a good movie on top of being a James Bond movie, and the titular Adele theme actually had something to do with the movie itself. Smith's Bond song hammers home the idea that Bond is old and soft and just wants to settle down. Spectre the movie takes absolutely zero of such advice into consideration. And that the risk of crossing into dudebro territory: when one has even an inkling of a shot with Monica Belluci and you aim for a skinny blonde French chick, that is basically worthy of psychotherapy.

The Writing's on the Wall is just a bad song, squeaked out by an equally forgettable singer who I can't tell apart from all of the other equally-forgettable singers blasted out with strobe-light frequency on Q102. And I'd like to imagine, since part of our theme here is forgetting history, that after Sam Smith's acceptance speech, his agent backstage told him with much fluster, "Mr, Smith, Elton's on the phone and he sounds pissed."

* Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, whose film A Girl in the River, won best short-subject documentary, is Pakistani. Chris Rock and Sacha Baron Cohen's jokes were clearly aimed at East Asians. Incidentally, Leo was allowed to go way over his time talking about climate change -- a subject that (as Chris Rock noted early in his routine) that people who don't have to worry about ritual killings get to think about -- way over his time, but Obaid-Chinoy was played off halfway through explaining that her movie actually caused Pakistan to outlaw honor killings.

** You'd think this label would go to Taylor Swift or Beeb but I don't think it applies as nobody actually expects anything of them. Swift's entire persona and music are based around being a really dumb, white chick. Gaga, you know, tries.

THE TRUTH IS OUT -- just shut up

Guess I should get off my lazy ass and write something, yeah? It's been a kind of long dry spell thanks to not taking any time off work for the string of winter holidays ancient man invented to keep Western civilization from committing mass suicide from lack of endorphin and vitamin D deficiency (Merry Christmas friends; I just got you some insight.)

So the X-Files wrapped up Season Ten last night and mercifully it was shorter than the basically unwatchable Season Nine -- the one were Gillian Anderson reads her lines as great as ever, but her face makes all the words come out as, "Holy shitballs I am so done!" I can't tell of the flash of THIS IS THE END after the credits was a signal that the rebooted series' six episode pseudopod lurched out of its hardened bunker where it's been holed up eating baked beans for the passed 14 years into warm and familiar waters where an adoring viewership and gentle caress of renewal awaited, or the entire thing got cracked open with shucking knife and slurped down with butter to a guttural sucking noise, or it was just trying to be clever.

It wasn't clever, in any case. The intro tries to make sense of the fabled X-Files core mythology and while my memory of the original series is only partly intact, I get the feeling it skipped about half. Mind you, this wasn't for time constraints: the seasons of writing ignored to make the finale work were the bits that make the entirety of the show make not a solid but of fucking sense. The truth is indeed out there. And it's really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really dumb.

The sendoff felt more like an X-Files medley than an actual episode, but then again, that was the general feeling and indeed the likely purpose of the reboot in the first place: the next station stop of the Reboot Train. The first and last episode are the weakest of the six, and not just because they try to take root in a fictional narrative that has long since duct-taped itself to the wall for fear of self-harm. More time is spent showcasing Soup host Joel McHale's character -- a kind-of Glenn Beck spoof who serves as a jumping-off point for Mulder and Scully's eventual reunion and also as a one-man Greek chorus to remind the viewers were we left off. Much of the dialog follows suit. Mulder's final confrontation with The Smoking Man is laughable, and aside from a quick fight scene that's somehow never resolved, he's barely in the episode. Most of Scully's lines are wasted explaining things to the viewer as they're happening on the screen, and then after commercial, we get McHale's Tad O'Malley repeating them. I won't spoil the end but suffice to say it wraps up kind of awkwardly with Scully explaining the plot of more episodes to come before credits roll. Look, I get that people felt the original show didn't explain itself that well but this isn't really the best way to -- where the friggin' crap that UFO come from, come on guys!

The thing that feels so un-X-Files this go around is that it's all just so fast. X-Files didn't invent the slow burning story but honed to almost perfection, doling out breadcrumbs of both the FBI's most unwanteds' burgeoning love plot and the fate of the human race through 24-episode seasons. Like the way it tapped into the everyman's distrust of his government in the 90s and American's fascination with and indeed willingness to believe urban legends, it was really a show of its time. Syndicated shows gave you something to look forward to every week -- a kind of way to mark the time passing -- and allowed for a real dedicated fanbase to grow, not unlike that layer of orange slime you wipe out of the vegetable crisper every few months. Nowadays, you can binge Orange is the New Black in a coffee and pizza-fueled day, and then its over. The discussion lights up like a supernova for a few weeks, and then eventually it all fades to black and silence until the next season drops. The irony is that the delivery of more content instantly leads to less of an impact. Back in X-Files time, you got a big moment every week for months on end. Now you get one a show, maybe once a year.

The only episode that came close to good was the third, a kind of obligatory joke episode with a reverse-werewolf plot. It takes a while to get there, and most of it is Mulder discussing life's harsh realities with monster, whose turned into a man, and whose brush with humanity is turning into a monster, while Scully slowly and methodically discovers the real monster is only too human. It's almost like watching Scooby Doo on acid and thinking the entire experience is, like, transcendent, only to come to your senses amid urinating on your own couch.

But it hit that sweet spot of being funny but meaningful, and outlandish but allowing the viewer to hang disbelief on the coat rack for the evening. None of the other episodes quite did that, and worse, every time I felt like getting on board with the finale, a line of terrible dialog or the fact that the next generation of Mulder and Scully are named Miller and Einstein (sweet Jesus!) would curb-stomp me down back on the pavement. And can someone please explain how an 80-year-old intubated burn victim took down Mulder during a commercial break, after Mulder totally kicked some much younger dude's ass?

My hope is that this puts the final nail in X-Files coffin and we can bury that shit for good. Fiction is the world's magic mirror: it doesn't always show us exactly what we want to see -- when the Queen asked who was fairest she was left shouting at her glass, "You had one job!" -- but it shows us something about ourselves we perhaps don't realize or accept. We still need myths to explain the things we can't quite comprehend or reconcile, and those are what become handy placeholders for facts. The X-Files was not so much about the gap between myth and fact, but the journey from one to the other. From belief to evidence. Feeling to truth. Will it ever get there?

Not in six episodes.

star wars is now the legend of zelda

So, three-ish months of blogging down and here we are reviewing Star Wars. Here goes...

Let's get the positives out of the way now. Star Wars: Episode 7: The Force Awakens: Again With the Colons is full stop the best Star Wars movie made. It is superior to A New Hope in every conceivable way. and for clarification on that, here's a list:

Inclusion! This Star Wars features an elfin heroine named Rey and a black defecting Stormtrooper named Finn. Already both of them pull the story away from the almost entirely white cast of the original and, Samuel L's novel badassery aside, the entirely white cast of the 2000s prequels. Casting a black Stormtrooper (John Boyega of the British sci-fi/comedy Attack the Block) with the back story of being taken as a child and raised in a military academy to serve the First Order has some obvious allusions to slavery, but it also reminds the audience that the white clad menaces are just people. Not droids or mindless clones, just average people, and when people who are just like you and me are the ones massacring entire villages seemingly at will, well, that's scarier than the most cloned of clone armies or the droidiest of droids.

Rey, played by an absolutely wonderful Daisy Ridley, makes it known pretty quickly that she doesn't need anyone to take her hand and lead her away from danger, and more than once rushes, overwhelmed, under-prepared and outgunned, straight into it. There's a great dynamic between Rey and Finn, each prisoners of a very small world in their own regard. Finn may be physically strong, a crack shot and a determined fighter, but that's all he is, whereas Rey has had to learn survival on her own, selling scrap to a slum lord on a desert world. She is clearly the more capable of the two, and I don't know if Abrams or writer Lawrence Kasdan (of Raiders of the Lost Arc script-fame) intended, but it's a pretty damning implication of militarized society. Finn existing in civilian society, to the extent that there is one in the Star Wars universe (it's called Star Wars, not Star Town-Hall Discussion or Star Disciplinary Committee Action Plan for Christs' sake) comes across as wooden, awkward, even a little scared when simply interacting with other people. Rey also speaks a ton of alien languages and often gets stuck interpreting for Finn. She's has seen that the outside world requires a little more finesse when one looks at straight on and not down the barrel of a blaster. And speaking of Rey...

Acting? Star Wars is the last place one looks for good acting, but hope against hope, Ridley and Boyega pull it off. Ridley's best scene is her confrontation with bad guy Kylo Ren (played also wonderfully by Adam Driver), when she begins to understand her connection to the plot-- er, Force. She manages to convey with facial expressions alone the act of discovery: first confusion, then fear, and finally understanding that Ren's mind probe is not only useless to him, but a tool for her. This comes across again in her lightsaber battle with Ren later. It's a nice and badly needed injection of both subtlety and humanism into the otherwise flat landscape of cardboard cutouts with people in black leotards carrying then around that serves as typical Star Wars characters.

Han Solo -- arguably the real protagonist of the first three movies -- makes a prominent appearance playing the role of Darth Your Dad, and while the performance is good, Harrison Ford is, at the end of all things, Harrison Ford. It is the reason for his nearly half-century of incredible personal success and also his single greatest limitation. The inclusion of the Raiders script writer plants on Han the onus of cheeky one-liners (like, "Escape now, hug later!"), and Han's short-fused but admiring relationship with Chewbacca is as endearing as ever. He was far too likable in the first three movies for this, but now that Han is old, guilt ridden and back to smuggling like the the Jabba the Hutt days, it is evident that Chewie is not only his oldest, but his only friend.

I was disappointed that Carrie Fisher's reprisal of now-General Leia was so short and insubstantial, considering the degree to which Fisher's honesty about being a woman in her 50s navigating the chew-em-up-n-spit-em-out gauntlet that is a Hollywood career has blown up TV-land. No metal bikinis this time around. Fisher's admission that she has never "not been in Star Wars," and her personal history of feminist activism in a landscape that hasn't changed syncs up nicely with Leia, taking an active part in another rebellion against yet another macho space-fascist regime.

And it isn't really worth mentioning Mark Hamill reprising his role as Darth Red Herring but I will leave you to judge if those few precious seconds were worth it.

A kind of pathetic villain. For all the time and massive, phallic towers of money spent hyping evildoer Kylo Ren, I feel bad for the guy If the film were flipped to his point of view, it would be titled Kylo's Really Crap Week at Work or something. Ren worships Darth Vader's rotting skull and doesn't need the mask or voice modulator but wears them anyway. They straight up gave him a World War 1 German helmet too; slap a spike on it and you have Darth Picklehaube. But under the mask, Ren is just a kid, markedly younger than the military commanders with whom he serves and it shows, and has a propensity to temper tantrums involving his lightsaber. He is less omnipotent sovereign of pain and hate and more spoiled brat whose dad gave him a middle-management job he totally didn't earn. It is a welcome departure from the menacing calm of Vader or the scheming evil of Emperor Palpatine.

No mention of those goddamned Midichlorians. Back in 1977, people were legitimately worried about computers taking over the world (hint: they were right). Part of why Star Wars hit such a cultural note was that it played off this fear. In a galaxy where there was space travel and laser guns, there was still The Force -- that unexplained connection that a living thing has to life, the universe and everything. Audiences reportedly gave standing ovations when Luke Skywalker famously switched off his targeting computer and eyeballed his shot on the Death Star.

Fast forward to the cynical 2000s and The Force was explained away with breeding: Force-capable kids were born with a high count of bacteria called Midichlorians that allowed them to tap into cool junk-throwy mind-controly lightning-shooty powers. This was actually closer to the original script Lucas envisioned, where Starkiller (bet you didn't get that reference, nerds!) passes use of the force on only through his children and the Jedi order is essentially a carbon-copy of the Bene Gesserit messiah-generation program from Dune (Lucas had an early problem with lifting plot points and entire scenes of dialog from other works, including an almost word-for-word rip of Gandalf's "Good morning!" speech from The Hobbit).

Episode 7, smartly, thankfully, does away with this Nazi bullshit and never brings it up. The Force still does whatever the plot needs it to, but now at least does it more mysteriously and maybe a little more zen, like someone bought it a feng shui book or something.

Now the other stuff. Comparing The Force Awakens to A New Hope directly in the beginning was deliberate, because it is A New Hope. Almost every plot point, twist, and archetype show up again in almost the same order (unlikely and/or unwilling heroes find destiny; surprising parentage, mentors meet their fate; a planet-destroying weapon and long-ass space battle). The new Star Wars treads so much old ground that it likely died of thirst wandering the Dune Sea or tripped into a Sarlacc pit. This isn't to say that it's a bad movie, of course; just mind-numbingly unoriginal.

It's the same issue long-running video game franchises have as well. The Legend of Zelda is damn near 30 with half as many iterations, and while they are very good at exploiting the technology of the time (moving from 2D to 3D or using physics engines for example), jumping from the 1986 debut to the most recent brings nothing new to the table. I feel confident enough saying that The Force Awakens had what was effectively an unlimited budget, so it could fully realize the potential for animation, but how much of it is new is up for serious debate. (Aside: this is ironic considering Lucas created the cowboys-in-space classic he did almost directly because he kept running out of money.)

The biggest problem with Star Wars as a whole is that you don't get much wiggle room as a writer when everything comes down to a cosmic battle between two extremely rigid ideas of good and evil. The fabled Sith might sound imposing on paper, but they make no goddamned sense: if each individual Sith is supposed to kill any other fellow Sith in order to seize power, why do people join in the first place and how does the organization last long enough to build the biggest space army in all of space?

Likewise, many writers have pointed out the Jedi are essentially the secret Gestapo-like police of the galaxy: they claim children born into certain conditions whether the family agrees or not and otherwise undermine the politics of even the most backwater worlds to suit a notion of order that may or may not work for that world.

When you slap all of these limitations on to the fact that it's freaking Star Wars, the kinds of movies one is allowed to write that will have the requisite box-office success required of Hollywood and franchise-owner Disney dwindles. For example, I imagine someone at a meeting about the concept of the film brought up the fact that it isn't Star Wars without R2D2, so a tiny portion of the script has to justify the world's favorite ambulatory trash can reentry into the series. The same goes for C3PO (played by original actor Anthony Daniels), though at least "I've been helping out Leia for the past 30 years" is way more plausible than "A bunch of bacteria made a child in the Alabama trailer park of the galaxy mega-smart and he built C3PO to be his friend before handing the droid over the rebellion and then turning evil." Think of it as the creative version of death by a thousand cuts: banality by a thousand self-references.

It is also plagued by action sequences that, I am sorry to say, just aren't very good. I said in my first post for this site that the elements of a J.J. Abrams Star Wars were largely known by virtue of what he did with Star Trek and I was right. Lots of Tie Fighters explode and crash into things and the entirely-animated dogfight scenes drag on for way too long. I don't know if I am getting older or what, but extended battle scenes just bore me. I can't stay awake for Return of the King.

At the end of the day, I don't have any real feelings of substance towards J.J. Abrams. He directs movies that go on for a length of time and are generally entertaining. But, as I said, when everything is boiled down to such base elements and all of the subtlety and nutrition float off like so much vapor, it is difficult to feel a strong anything.

But I digress. See Episode 7, even if you're not a Star Wars person. Like Skyfall did for James Bond, it straddles both worlds of being a Star Wars movie and also being a good movie at the same time. A couple of times I caught myself with a big dipshit grin on my face, and you can ask Ash: that doesn't happen very often.

Wait a minute: where hell are Han's dice!?

the law of unintended consequences

New movie (that nobody cares about) so basically everything that can be spoiled is spoiled. It's like the vikings were up in there or something.

Before I go ahead and say that any movie -- any movie -- is a shitty movie, I have to stop and recognize that making movies is really, really hard. I have a particular respect for B-movies since lacking an army of bodies and effectively unlimited resources to pull the best talent in the world exacerbates this process. It doesn't feel good to dump all over the effort of the actors, staff, writers and technical crews when so much of their time, effort, and more of than not honest-to-god love went into 85 minutes of screen time me and maybe other six other dorks will watch. Sooooooo... with all that being said, 2015s Stung is a really shitty movie.

Listed as a comedy for some reason, Stung is funny only if you enjoy a particular kind of bro-tastic humor where a pathetic and somewhat hopeless bro tries (and fails, and fails, but ultimately prevails!) to mack a weapons-grade hottie. It's also supposed to be a horror, although aside from some cookie-cutter ominous-music Attacks from Planet Jump Scare, it isn't exactly frightening. It was also hailed for months as my favorite kind of B-movie, the practical effect sci-fi, but it's staple giant wasps are animated on screen for just as long, if not longer, than the puppet counterparts. Don't even have plot yet and we're in "Three strikes, yer out!" territory. Yikes.

No, the other kind of wasp.

I, and I imagine others, came away from Stung with a strong, "I don't get it" feeling. For all of the empty promises, the framework is largely there. Human beings impregnated with giant wasp eggs that literally explode the hapless ambulatory wombs on the way out doesn't exactly breed chuckles, but there was opportunity in the victims being a gaggle of insufferable rich couples. The unlikely heroes, two small-time caterers running a failing family shop, trying to keep a straight face as they sneak booze and tokes to get through the night and make wage had some potential. Neither Jessica Cook or Matt O'Leary come across as bad actors, but I got the feeling they did scenes written with jokes and nobody told them they were supposed to be acting funny. When O'Leary's character Paul sneaks off to share a joint with the hired musician, Paul, who we've established something of a rebel and a layabout, just comes off as sad, out of his depth, basically pitiable. And Cook's young on-the-ground business owner Julia jumps between right bitch and intensely protective mom figure but doesn't quite live up to either (because there can't possibly be a woman with any modicum of power who isn't a total queen-b, amirite?), and of course takes her clothes off more than once. The script is sort of dumb, but the party guests, particularly Lance Henricksen's grouchy, alcoholic town mayor, are developed a bit. And even though the animated wasps are horrendous, there are some nice touches, like chunks of former human clinging to the newborn abominations virgin carapace as it is first gently caressed by the air. The failing here, as I see it, is a lack of focus, and taking the usual Hollywood path of cramming in far too many elements into one movie and ultimately watering all of them down.

Stung is an unintended consequences movie, sometimes better knows as chaos theory or The Butterfly Effect, as made famous by that film about seemingly predictable events spiraling wildly out of control. You know, Serendipity. The ill-fated party is thrown for Sydney, a disabled son of a wealthy chemist, and it is later explained that Sid doesn't have much love for dear ol' dad. Sydney, played quite well by Clifton Collins Jr., has a hunch and a limp, and his father tried to improve upon the original but giving him growth hormones, fueling the next generations descent into drinking and generally being an asshole. Sid, however, finds dad's hormones (of which there are several 55-gallon drums up lying around the house for some reason) might not work on birth defects but does wonders for plants, so he sews it into mom's garden to grow some impressive foliage and ease the widow's grief.

Gallons of growth hormones also work well on wasps. Who knew!? Bet you'll think twice before throwing that pan of anti-freeze out in the back, yes?

Fast forward through a bunch of exploding guests and Sid gets stung (haha, get it?), but the wasp only grows out of his hunch, takes over his mind and makes him a kind of human-wasp emissary and the movie, once again, has the chance to be funny but the actors make the critical error of taking it seriously.

Basically this. But with wasps.

It's around this point he kidnaps Paul and tries to impregnate him with a queen wasp using a giant grub, and Julia comes to the rescue. And it's also around this time that the entire end sequence shamelessly rips off Aliens. Lt. Ellen Ripley is not amused.

Stung ends with the wisdom that nothing gets a girl in heat like nearly being burned to death by a eight-foot airborne arthropod that's on fire almost taking you out, so sad bro Paul and Julia get jiggy 'wit it in the back of an ambulance in full view of first-responders and still covered in wasp-goo. I hope there's no such thing as wasp herpes. Yick. And to add a whiz-bang factor to the end, Paul, Julia and whole lot of very confused EMTs are beset upon by more giant wasps, burst forth from cows and dragging the carcasses behind them. Certain death for all descends from the sky the clanking of cowbells and roll credits.

* * * * *

A far better example of this genre of unintended consequences movie is 2013s magically titled Blood Glacier. I have to start by warning that the English dub is terrible, so if you catch it, make sure it is in its native German (the title in that is Blutgletscher... not exactly scoring points there Germany*).

If Stung's Paul is presented as a I-do-my-own-thing tough guy but comes across as a pathetic loser with serious self-esteem issues, then Blood Glacier's hero Janek (pronounced yann-eck) is an actual pathetic loser with serious self-esteem issues, in a sort of self-imposed exile working with a geology team as a kind of handyman in literally The Middle of Nowhere, Austria. Janek is a supreme screw-up, barely able to stay sober enough to keep his job doing patrols and menial repairs around the base, and is the subject of relentless abuse at the hands of his snooty scientist co-workers. Why is our hero in such a state? A woman, of course. The same woman who is now visiting the base with some government dignitaries to visit the operation and take some landscape photos.

Janek and Tanja, played by Gerhard Leibmann and Edita Malovcic respectively, are not exactly the breakout starts of tomorrow, but Blutgletscher has a segmented leg up on Stung in that the two actors know they are in a campy, extremely obvious homage to John Carpenter's The Thing and while the humor isn't overt, it is obvious the two are just having fun with it.

Tanja shows up with an obvious stand-in for current German president Angela Merkel. She's there to assess climate data the mountain-bound team is gathering, and while there they discover that the nearby glacier they are monitoring for shinkage has started bleeding. Another plus this latter film shows off is that it actually is a practical effects sci-fi. The "blood" from the glacier is actually an ancient, possibly alien bacteria that combines the DNA of an animal with whatever other animal is touching it (and also sends these chimera-like abominations into a murderous frenzy, though presumably if you woke up and had become half groundhog overnight you'd probably be a little pissed off about it).

The prospect of certain death or mutation pulls Janek out of his stupor and he becomes the de-factor leader of the survivors, although the award for pure badassery goes to Herr Chancellor, because who doesn't want a scene with a woman in her sixties murdering a mutant deer with goddamned rock drill? Tanja tries to explain the events as they unfold and Janek strains his mind to get it, but it's his survival skills that win the day.

Blood Glacier has a lot of the elements of Stung: disgusting, gooey monsters, an awkward love story, finding creative uses for power tools, and a final bang! at the end to tie things up. But instead of the cow/wasp airdrop, Blood Glacier ends with Janek and Tanja finding that a pregnant dog on the base has given birth to a mixed-up, half-human puppy. It is a quiet and somewhat somber ending, considering the revelation that the pair's former fling crumbled when Tanja got an abortion and neglected to inform Janek. It's a far more mature, and darker, setup, resulting in a bigger impact when the two are brought closer together by the dog-faced boy. Ellen Ripley approves.

Or at least won't melt your face off.

* * * * *

Oddly enough. Stung's plot resonates somewhat with this week's climate conference in Paris, where the industrial world will decide how much it can pollute the planet while still making things comfortable for the people they don't exploit as much as everyone else, with uninvited U.S. representatives trying to prove that the basic pillars of the scientific method are a Herbalife-style scam. Blood Glacier might be about the more existential and arguably dire threat of global warming, but pollution is just as large an issue, and in many ways is much easier to understand and do something about. Both movies work off of our basic fear that each new convenience mankind invents, the side-effects are going to be wide reaching and ultimately unreversible. Will there be giant wasps and recombinat virus monsters? Probably not. But something made that bloop and if the oceans get much warmer, I bet it's gonna be pissed.

* Despite how funny Mark Twain's essay "The Awful German Language" gets, German is actually quite pleasant when spoken in a normal tone; literally the only exposure Americans get to German is old broadcasts of Hitler, so it does come with quite a lot of bias. But just imagine for a moment that a person mutters to you in a reassuring tone, "Warum Insekten haben so viele Beine ? Es ist einfacher, um durch Ihre Albträume zu kriechen."
Beautiful.

dog is (hit)man's best friend

To clarify, John Wick is a movie that Ash and I bought on a whim for a dollar because, aside from movie-obsessed nerds like us, who buys DVDs anymore?

It is a very, very stupid movie dressed up very well, similar to Keanu Reeves's titular character donning a four-figure suit in which to go a-killing. It's almost a shame that this is clearly a contract movie, featuring Willem Dafoe, Michael Nyqvist, a Swede portraying a Russian gangster* whose accent gets lost somewhere in the middle, and Alfie Allen of Game of Thrones fame. It builds a fictional world where assassins have a secret underground economy complete with a no-kill upscale hotel and trade favors in gold coins. Either that, or it's a grim alternate reality where Ron Paul is Lord Sovereign Commander of God's Green Earth.

*Aside: Since when are all gangsters Russian? I guess the Very Serious People who write movies have decided that it's a good idea to make us afraid of stereotypical Ruskis because AK-brandishing brown people with funny accents was played out when True Lies did it and would somehow be less tasteful given world affairs? Give it time, VSPs, give it time.

Anyway, John Wick the character is a hitman with a heart, out of the business but reeling from the death of his wife to a fatal but unspecified illness. The day after her funeral, an adorable beagle puppy arrives on his doorstep and oh holy shit the dog is going to eat it, isn't s/he!? Of course! Look, he even gave it a friggin' bowl of cereal -- that dog does not have long for the world.

Yes, the dog dies. At the hand of Allen's character Iosef no less: a spoiled snot-nosed daddy's boy who gives spoiled snot-nosed daddy's boys a bad name. The seemingly random carjacking and dog murder connects all the way back to gang boss dad Viggo, Wick's ex-employer, and thus begins the highly symbolic and blood-soaked punishment for the two men's collective sins.

John Wick the movie falls into a lot of the obvious traps of dumb action movies: it's essentially a series of completely unrealistic bloody gunfights broken up by dialog that is supposed to be deep, with the usual pretention to maturity that makes every third word "Fuck!" or "Shit!" We get it, writers: these are bad men who trade in bad things, but at this point they all sound like a pack of 12-year-old boys who accidentally turned the dictionary to the FT-FU page.

Giving credit where it's due, the movie is stylized and consistent. Professional killers for hire hang out at clubs and hotel bars like high school teachers in the Atlantic City Tropicana for the NJEA convention. There's a "code" that gets mentioned but never fully explained, save that there's no killing in the hotel and "dinner reservation" is hit-speak for "I just murdered the ever-loving shit out of a lot of people and would like a new sofa." And a small personal enjoyment: the camera pulls back from the action and lets you see the stunts, unlike the now-popular Batman Begins formula, in which some film editor wanted closeups of Christian Bale's teeth instead of action. Another much better hitman movie Haywire did this as well to great effect. (Like JJ Abrams use of lens flare to cover up crappy graphics, close up fight scenes mock intensity but are really just pulling the camera in to show less detail because the stunts aren't particularly inventive.)

But the real high point amid reliably silly and overtly expository speech is one simple exchange between John Wick the character and Viggo during their eventual showdown. Viggo laments for simpler days when murder was business and business was good, and the better killer answers with, "Do I look civilized to you?" Maybe it's unintentional, but the first thing one learns about screenwriting is that in an insane world, insane things are normal. John Wick the movie takes this to its logical conclusion and then tears the rule book up with Wick's character. He's been out of the job for a few years living perhaps better than the everyman, but not shooting people in the face for a paycheck and presumably paying for groceries with normal, everyday dollars. And upon going back in, he's seen the outside and that it is better, and the world of paid killers he left behind looks as nuts to him as it does to us. For as dumb as the movie was, there was a real attempt at connection between the audience and the character that was not entirely unsuccessful.

So, props, I guess? If I had to make an analogy, John Wick is worth seeing for the spectacle: it's a kid whose clearly fallen asleep in class but tiny glints of brilliance reflect off the drool pooling around his face.