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!?
Friday, December 18, 2015
Thursday, December 3, 2015
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, November 26, 2015
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.
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.
Sunday, November 22, 2015
now i want a sandwich...
New movie, so, spoilers.
Before we begin, a confession: I only read the first 'Hunger Games.' Right now I'm picturing you, dear reader, with a shocked -- shocked! -- look on your face and in your best Martin-Lawrence-as-Shanaynay voice going, "Say whaaaaaaat!?" But honestly, I feel I can better judge the movies having not read the source material and therefore knowing them on their own merit. At least that keeps me from shelling out for them.
Despite being an enjoyable series as a whole, there's two big complaints. First, and regarding the movie itself, it didn't need to be split into two movies. I'd forgotten large chunks of the first and struggled to remember who half the people were while processing the action. It also gives the beginning a disconcerting start in the middle feeling -- probably because it does -- and at about hour two it passes from expanding on a detailed fictional world to just wasting everyone's damn time.
Secondly, I never felt that much about The Hunger Games had much to do with anything that happens in the real world. It's not a stretch, given that Collins is American and that the book is aimed at an American audience, that Panem is a dystopian America far in the future. For example, a government that purposefully forces its subjects into starvation is kind of asking for the rebellion that concludes the series, and my guess is real life people would've put up with it for a hell of a lot less time than at least the 75 years Districts 12 thru five did. I always thought it would've been much more interesting if the government provided a super unhealthy but cheap to produce food for its subjects, keeping them fed but rendering them weak with obesity and its many related health problems, and that Katniss stayed fit and fed her family meat and grain not out of death-defying need but simply choice.
Plus, the messages about conformity and following orders would never fly with an actual population, especially if the contemporary era is the basis of that future. The reason so many angsty teenagers buy into the mantra that they are different, just like everyone else is different, is that everyone is a maverick in the modern age. Part of the hilarity of presidential elections is watching people like Hillary Clinton or George W. Bush try to convince everyday Americans that somehow they are different, and not a bland emissary of the ruling class; that sending their children to the most exclusive prep schools in the world puts them on par with confused middle-income moms hopelessly confused over a high school grading system. In my estimation it would be impossible to keep a people down by convincing them of their place in society and just hammering the point. Americans are ceaselessly optimistic, after all, which is why I guess President Snow had it coming all along.
So The Hunger Games: Mocking Jay: Too Many Colons: Part 2 sums up Panem's revolt against power with a bang and a stern warning never to trust anyone over 40. Katniss herself is and isn't part of the climatic battle, but hangs back to film propaganda shots for the rebellion and carry out a super-secret mission that somehow everyone knows about. She feels almost ancillary at this point. Even the scene where she's filmed turning a captured worker to the cause ends with a gunfight that was going to happen whether she was there or not, and the incident quickly spirals out of her control and into rebellion leader Alma Coin's endless stream of Girl on Fire inspirational posters. The tango between Coin and Snow is perhaps the best written part, and its to Donald Sutherland's credit that he comes across as an evil leader, perfectly aware of his evil, who knows that his time is over and doesn't care one bit. It's to Julianne Moore's credit to play a younger version of exactly that during a moment of unfettered victory and rise to power -- you could say it's two sides of the same yeah I'm not even going to dignify that with a complete sentence.
In fact, the "beginning" to about the hour-thirty mark is sort of a blur since nothing very interesting happens, and the pivotal moments come crammed together at the end. Peeta slowly recovers from his government brainwashing and turns human again, while Gale leads what amounts to a rebellion-sponsored death squad. Haymitch, Effie, and the other tributes and side-characters are barely around before they're swiftly killed off or forgotten, and then there's zombies in a sewer for some reason?
The climatic battle is fantastically filmed and genuinely hard to watch, but leaves out what would otherwise be gallons and gallons of blood for that sweet PG-13 rating, and from then on the movie is solely about Katniss's plan to stop the original evil government from transitioning to a new evil government. I counted 3 plot twists heavy with mom-style hometown wisdom about power and double-edged swords and something-something violence begets violence before a very long end sequence that doesn't so much close the story but just kind of Peetas out.
Yep, that happened. I'm not funny. And did I mention the zombies?
Maybe it's mechanically-delivered end speech to a baby that doesn't yet have object permanence let alone speech centers or J-Law's seemingly unchanging youthful looks, or maybe it is the stupid yellow dress, but I don't buy Jennifer Lawrence as a mom. She's an immensely talented actress and a delight to watch, but the five minute appendix of her with babies being motherly and reassuring while Peeta does his best fun dad impression in the blurry distance felt forced. Perhaps after the intense breakdown scene where Katniss finally learns to love the mangy cat introduced in the opening paragraphs of the first book, the writers decided everyone needed a break and a cute baby. Here's a hint: if you want to end on a cheap positive note, just play this video of Tumbles the two-legged puppy getting wheels.
The thing I like the most about Hunger Games is just how cynical it all is. I said before that the best part of the final movie is watching Coin and Snow send respective legions of wide-eyed loyalists to their not-at-all-bloody deaths, literally playing chess with living pieces. It is an entirely unromantic image of political rebellion.
People have complained that Hunger Games ripped off Battle Royale but having seen the entire thing through I believe the author when she said she didn't know anything about it beforehand. If it does rip anything, Katniss Everdeen has a distinctly Paul Atreides quality to her. If Dune was the story of a young, charismatic warrior leading a downtrodden people to a destiny of freedom, but unleashing a shit storm of unending slaughter as a by-product, I'd say Collins took far more inspiration from that than Japanese high schools students killing each other with Uzis and cleverly hidden razor blades. The comparison to Battle Royale is one of complete surface analysis that only makes sense as long as you don't think about it too much; Battle Royale is far more optimistic in its world view and opinion of people as heroes than Hunger Games. Which is what makes Hunger Games so good.
Before we begin, a confession: I only read the first 'Hunger Games.' Right now I'm picturing you, dear reader, with a shocked -- shocked! -- look on your face and in your best Martin-Lawrence-as-Shanaynay voice going, "Say whaaaaaaat!?" But honestly, I feel I can better judge the movies having not read the source material and therefore knowing them on their own merit. At least that keeps me from shelling out for them.
Despite being an enjoyable series as a whole, there's two big complaints. First, and regarding the movie itself, it didn't need to be split into two movies. I'd forgotten large chunks of the first and struggled to remember who half the people were while processing the action. It also gives the beginning a disconcerting start in the middle feeling -- probably because it does -- and at about hour two it passes from expanding on a detailed fictional world to just wasting everyone's damn time.
Secondly, I never felt that much about The Hunger Games had much to do with anything that happens in the real world. It's not a stretch, given that Collins is American and that the book is aimed at an American audience, that Panem is a dystopian America far in the future. For example, a government that purposefully forces its subjects into starvation is kind of asking for the rebellion that concludes the series, and my guess is real life people would've put up with it for a hell of a lot less time than at least the 75 years Districts 12 thru five did. I always thought it would've been much more interesting if the government provided a super unhealthy but cheap to produce food for its subjects, keeping them fed but rendering them weak with obesity and its many related health problems, and that Katniss stayed fit and fed her family meat and grain not out of death-defying need but simply choice.
Plus, the messages about conformity and following orders would never fly with an actual population, especially if the contemporary era is the basis of that future. The reason so many angsty teenagers buy into the mantra that they are different, just like everyone else is different, is that everyone is a maverick in the modern age. Part of the hilarity of presidential elections is watching people like Hillary Clinton or George W. Bush try to convince everyday Americans that somehow they are different, and not a bland emissary of the ruling class; that sending their children to the most exclusive prep schools in the world puts them on par with confused middle-income moms hopelessly confused over a high school grading system. In my estimation it would be impossible to keep a people down by convincing them of their place in society and just hammering the point. Americans are ceaselessly optimistic, after all, which is why I guess President Snow had it coming all along.
So The Hunger Games: Mocking Jay: Too Many Colons: Part 2 sums up Panem's revolt against power with a bang and a stern warning never to trust anyone over 40. Katniss herself is and isn't part of the climatic battle, but hangs back to film propaganda shots for the rebellion and carry out a super-secret mission that somehow everyone knows about. She feels almost ancillary at this point. Even the scene where she's filmed turning a captured worker to the cause ends with a gunfight that was going to happen whether she was there or not, and the incident quickly spirals out of her control and into rebellion leader Alma Coin's endless stream of Girl on Fire inspirational posters. The tango between Coin and Snow is perhaps the best written part, and its to Donald Sutherland's credit that he comes across as an evil leader, perfectly aware of his evil, who knows that his time is over and doesn't care one bit. It's to Julianne Moore's credit to play a younger version of exactly that during a moment of unfettered victory and rise to power -- you could say it's two sides of the same yeah I'm not even going to dignify that with a complete sentence.
In fact, the "beginning" to about the hour-thirty mark is sort of a blur since nothing very interesting happens, and the pivotal moments come crammed together at the end. Peeta slowly recovers from his government brainwashing and turns human again, while Gale leads what amounts to a rebellion-sponsored death squad. Haymitch, Effie, and the other tributes and side-characters are barely around before they're swiftly killed off or forgotten, and then there's zombies in a sewer for some reason?
The climatic battle is fantastically filmed and genuinely hard to watch, but leaves out what would otherwise be gallons and gallons of blood for that sweet PG-13 rating, and from then on the movie is solely about Katniss's plan to stop the original evil government from transitioning to a new evil government. I counted 3 plot twists heavy with mom-style hometown wisdom about power and double-edged swords and something-something violence begets violence before a very long end sequence that doesn't so much close the story but just kind of Peetas out.
Yep, that happened. I'm not funny. And did I mention the zombies?
Maybe it's mechanically-delivered end speech to a baby that doesn't yet have object permanence let alone speech centers or J-Law's seemingly unchanging youthful looks, or maybe it is the stupid yellow dress, but I don't buy Jennifer Lawrence as a mom. She's an immensely talented actress and a delight to watch, but the five minute appendix of her with babies being motherly and reassuring while Peeta does his best fun dad impression in the blurry distance felt forced. Perhaps after the intense breakdown scene where Katniss finally learns to love the mangy cat introduced in the opening paragraphs of the first book, the writers decided everyone needed a break and a cute baby. Here's a hint: if you want to end on a cheap positive note, just play this video of Tumbles the two-legged puppy getting wheels.
The thing I like the most about Hunger Games is just how cynical it all is. I said before that the best part of the final movie is watching Coin and Snow send respective legions of wide-eyed loyalists to their not-at-all-bloody deaths, literally playing chess with living pieces. It is an entirely unromantic image of political rebellion.
People have complained that Hunger Games ripped off Battle Royale but having seen the entire thing through I believe the author when she said she didn't know anything about it beforehand. If it does rip anything, Katniss Everdeen has a distinctly Paul Atreides quality to her. If Dune was the story of a young, charismatic warrior leading a downtrodden people to a destiny of freedom, but unleashing a shit storm of unending slaughter as a by-product, I'd say Collins took far more inspiration from that than Japanese high schools students killing each other with Uzis and cleverly hidden razor blades. The comparison to Battle Royale is one of complete surface analysis that only makes sense as long as you don't think about it too much; Battle Royale is far more optimistic in its world view and opinion of people as heroes than Hunger Games. Which is what makes Hunger Games so good.
Monday, November 9, 2015
a spectre draws near!
New movie, so, spoilers.
If Skyfall set the new tone for James Bond by catapulting him from the 1970s -- where he's been stuck since the end of the decade like your uncle Luke who can't let go of his polyester wide-collared button-down -- into the modern age, then Spectre is a return to bad habits by washing Skyfall in an entire tub of OxyClean until the barbecue sauce stains come out. It is by no means a bad movie, just going from zero to more-of-the-same in about 3.1 seconds.
Let's set up a little comparison: Skyfall is to James Bond as Die Hard is to 80s action movies. No doubt many of the unkillable ain't-got-time-to-bleed heroes of the hair metal era took a thing or two from the master himself. But Die Hard made Commando look like the G.I. Joe doll he was: a plastic, two-dimensional and otherwise flawless robot -- it's difficult to understate what John McClane, a hero who bled, cried, got tired and screwed up his marriage, did in the face of action heroes who were otherwise a bulletproof hybrid of man and backhoe. Likewise, Bond as a franchise was basically unchanged since the Sean Connery era, and Skyfall put a bullet right between that one's eyes.
Now that I think about it, Skyfall probably should have been the second movie and Spectre the prequel. We've known about unlimited/unquestioned government surveillance for some time now, but the more recent development is the dangers of hacking en masse, which was more Skyfall's techno-anarchist baddie's thing, are perhaps the larger concern when it comes to privacy. One thing I really hate that movies do is assume that everyone computer, phone, camera and garage door opener is on some kind of Wi-Fi network and can be hacked into and taken over by a few nerds and rapid typing. Speaking of Die Hard, #4 mangled this worse than almost any other movie I've seen. Good job.
Anyway, hacking on a "Tarje" or Office of Personnel Management scale is only possible because of how data is stored and if you think of hacks as a natural by-product of the Internet existing, logical. Likewise, the tech industry is not only complicit in government snooping, but its obsession with mass storage, cloud computing and data backup lends itself toward mass collection. The best prisoner, after all, is the one who locks himself up. Large, centralized databases make big targets to unsavory folks. But probably the best argument I've come across against such bulk dredging is that it provides too much useless information through which to sift and not only doesn't work, can't work. The volume is so huge that the government pays wads of taxpayer dollars to millions of private contractors, and to me it's sort of amazing that there has only been one Ed Snowden thus far. And since we've seen the kind of damage one singular person can do the structure as a whole, casting a wide net for (comparatively) cheap private labor doesn't exactly give me much comfort. Plus, I don't exactly want some 23-year-old Reddit addict knowing that I bought baguette pans on Amazon.
Alright, back to Spectre. Government spying bad. Like the way Silva in Skyfall modernized the individual Bond villain, Spectre tries to drag the rest of the component parts that make up a Bond movie into the future as well. Problem being that such things were silly in the Fleming novels and remain silly to this day. Spectre itself is a massive criminal network pushing the world to adopt its spying measures by committing acts of terrorism to scare governments into it for... reasons? Good megalomaniacs are hard to come by and as creepy as Christolf Waltz gets, he doesn't come close to John Huston in Chinatown. He could've just as easily become a bank or insurance company CEO and had a similar amount of government influence and lived a life of needless violence away from the prying eyes of law enforcement, so the entire Stonecutters thing has a cartoony feel.
There are further attempts to humanize Bond -- give him the full McClane so to speak -- but they fall sort of flat. Monica Bellucci had the potential to be a great Bond Girl (or Bond Woman has Daniel Craig himself pointed out), but all we get is a PG-13 sex scene and a quick PG shot of her in some sexy lingerie that she somehow had time to put on between assassination attempts. She's never in the movie again. Lea Seydoux does a nice turn as the actual Bond Girl, but as Ash pointed out, why does she have a French accent if her dad is Austrian, and why does that accent start to go away at about the three-quarters mark? Another way Spectre fails to live up to its predecessor is trying to have a tough Bond Girl, and Seydeoux is at turns tough and icy, but then all hot and bothered for some Bond action and really doesn't do much else. Skyfall did this better to by making the ultimate Bond Girl "M," which works as a far better humanizing force: Bond only knows the job, so having his boss as his lady tugs at whatever heartstings he has left even more, and there's no possibility of humping, which forces Bond to understand her as human and not an ambulatory penis receptacle. It hurt when she ate it.
Finally, Waltz himself does a turn as Bond's long-lost sort of adopted brother and man does this go nowhere. I don't know if it was intentional or not, but the entire thing made me want to see the movie from Waltz's point of view: a kid who had his childhood stolen away by an adopted stranger and used the drive as a rise to prominence and vehicle to exact symbolic revenge.
Oh wait, that's Old Boy.
Waltz is a good actor and all, but I got a sort of Gary Oldman in Book of Eli feel from it, where some studio head said to another, "Hey, Terry, who does creepy really really well?" and Terry responded "You know, this movie sounds suspiciously like some Korean flick I saw a while back and, hey, where'd you get a hockey sti--" *WHACK*
But the biggest sin of Spectre is also its largest departure from Skyfall. See, Skyfall worked because it spent a lot of time distancing itself from other James Bond movies and really pulled new fans into the fold. When we saw it, Ash went into the theater feeling like I was dragging her to some stupid dude movie and left singing the theme song. Spectre (which means, by the way, Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, but you wouldn't know that from seeing the goddamned film named after it) references not only the Daniel Craig movies but goes back to the Connery era -- the entire torture scene is pretty much lifted from Goldfinger with crappier dialog. Even for people in their 30s like my, James Bond is kind of old, and the references were so many and so frequent it's like the Spectre was just a cut-n-paste job of other, arguably better movies.
That, or they just ripped off freaking Old Boy.
The rumor is that Craig is done with James Bond, and I suppose the future is a little brighter given the fact that World War 3 might just start if they don't cast Idirs Elba.
The rumor is that Craig is done with James Bond, and I suppose the future is a little brighter given the fact that World War 3 might just start if they don't cast Idirs Elba.
Saturday, October 31, 2015
putting the hallow in halloween: a wes craven theory
To say that I'm a Wes Craven "fan" is a bit disingenuous. I grew up in the 90s and Freddy Kruger had already taken the road of Frankenstein, Dracula, the wolf-man and Godzilla before him -- that is to be rather domesticated and seen as more of an unruly pet than a force of pure evil. A lot like my cat actually: he might scratch up the molding but he's so damn entertaining. I'll get to this in a bit, but I missed the splash damage caused by the original Nightmare on Elm Street. The only pre-Nightmare Craven I've seen is Last House on the Left, and I didn't sit down to watch Scream with my thinking cap on until a few years ago -- even though I saw not long after it was in theaters and was just transferring into high school, slowly resembling its awkward and patch-bearded heroes and psychos more and more. I don't own any Craven on DVD (Ash is veritable Craven, particularly Scream, fanatic and I am the better for it).
In fact, I didn't spend much time thinking about Craven at all until the news of his apparently sudden death in August, and then, more so now, I realize that particular knife he wedged in pop culture's spinal column will be twisted no more.
As reviewers have noted before, Craven upped the ante for horror between two and four times, depending on how you score it. Formerly a humanities professor from extremely religious parentage, he fell in love with movies in college and, if Wikipedia is to believed, broke into the scene writing and editing porn. This comes across strongest in Last House on the Left, and his penchant for pushing actors to their physical and mental limits reverberated through all of Craven's films.
Last House was Craven's first horror and depending on how you see it, is either the reinvention of the grindhouse genre or the simply the best example of it. In it, two teenage girls head off to a rock concert. Their parents disagree but do little to stop them, and the girls are promptly raped and murdered by a gang of escaped convicts whose leader is called Krug. The gang moves on, but after their car breaks down, seek refuge with some kind older folks who just happen to be the girl's parents. After learning what the gang has done, the parents exact a bloody, and highly symbolic, revenge. Craven's second grindhouse film, The Hills Have Eyes, tracks hapless vacationers as they head off into the desert, guided to an inbred and highly deformed family of cannibals. And like Last House, the one survivor on the "good guys" team ends the film by tacking the hill people back to their lair and mercilessly slaughtering the lot of them: men, women, children and all.
Like Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper, Craven was introduced to real-world horror through Vietnam footage, and both Massacre and Craven's films were logical responses. While Hooper went out of his way to make political statements in interviews, Craven the professor carefully hid the message that our suburban moms and dads and our happy good-willed Winnebago drivers turn into monsters when they've been in the jungle too long.
Deadly Blessing and a foray into camp with Swamp Thing, for which Craven was never too successful, followed, but when Nightmare on Elm Street hit the big screen in 1984 it hit hard.
So here's my theory about Wes Craven and why the guy was so damn smart: he just made the same movie over and over, carefully updating it to to dig the right fear-nerve of the time.
In '84, the U.S. was in the midst of a massive counter-counter-culture swing. Reagan was president and he promised a return to good 'ol 'Merican values and more importantly, a shrug-off of Jimmy Carter: the presidential analog to Debbie Downer. One of Carter's most controversial moves as chief was pardoning the 'Nam draft dodgers, all but saying aloud the entire thing was a mistake and nobody should've been expected to go. A few short years later, and suddenly Vietnam was a noble effort -- a good college try, if you will -- and the nation let out a collective sigh of relief, realizing that the citizen him or herself was no longer expected to live it down.
Enter Freddie Kruger. The combined ideas that a thing you can't see or affect while waking, dreams, can kill you, and that despite your fearful begging and week-long caffeine binges, your parents tell you to take a sleeping pill and stop acting so nuts was a serious indictment of Reagan's "innocent America" ideal. Audiences knew it. Combine that with the relatively low budget, studio disagreements and the sheer amount of violence and its a wonder Nightmare got made at all.
Kruger, originally, was a child molester (this unsavory tidbit was sanitized from later sequels). The parents burned him alive in the school's boiler room and hid evidence of their crime, though it drives protagonist Nancy's mother to insanity and her father into a bottle. Looking backwards, Nightmare could almost be the direct sequel to Last House: the vengeful ghost of the conveniently named Krug come back to kill the next generation, finding a way to attack children who are now locked away in suburban fortresses of sheet rock, vinyl siding and denial.
Freddie himself got the double-whammy of being a wholly owned creature of New Line and shooting to mega-stardom -- flames the studio only sought to fan. Craven had little to do with Kruger afterward and was probably glad about it, content to let his creation run free and observe the damage from afar. He directed Nightmare 3: Dream Warriors, where the children turn Kruger's malleable dream world against him, and a criminally-underrated gem called Wes Craven's New Nightmare.
New Nightmare deserves all the attention it gets simply because it's a movie clearly written 100% by Craven the former teacher, starring Nightmare heroine Heather Langenkamp, Freddy actor Robert Englund, longtime producer Bob Shaye and even Craven himself as themselves. In New Nightmare's world, when a story has been told enough, it comes to life. In this case, the subject is the actual Nightmare on Elm Street movies. So to recap, it's a Wes Craven movie where the bad guy is a Wes Craven movie. Nightmare made lots of people rich, but Craven appears content to almost give a lesson on the dangers of fame and the detachment from one's own creation that the Hollywood remake machine can cause.
All this before they made 4 Transformers movies!
New Nightmare also serves as the jumping-off point for Scream, arguably the most successful of Craven's movies and either the second, third or fourth time he set a new standard for low-budget terror, featuring the second enduring Craven character Ghostface. The ending line, "Horror movies don't create psychos: they make the psychos more creative!" is just story-come-to-life with the supernatural distilled out. Now in the 90s and in the full-swing of Clinton's neo-liberalism and wholly a generation into the self-esteem movement, there was no need for monsters to frighten kids because the kids were empowered to be monsters, parents and adults in general be damned. It's no mistake that protagonist Sidney saves her father from two insane classmates who've watched Halloween one too many times. Scream is not so much a genre movie as it is a movie about genre, breaking down horror movie rules and then reminding the victims that it doesn't matter if you know you're in a horror movie or not.
I haven't seen any of Scream sequels but I hear it is the almost expected downhill slide into repetition and eventual self-parody.
The late 90s was also the last time the cinema landscape would prove fertile ground for Craven. Not that he didn't have continued personal success -- taking Meryl Streep to an Oscar nomination with Music of the Heart and attempting to tackle post 9/11 flight anxiety with Red Eye are no small things. But that evolving idea birthed with Krug, nurtured with Kruger and brought to its logical conclusion with Scream never seemed to come up again. Craven produced Scream: The Series with original screenwriter Kevin Williamson, and while the show's inaugural season was not exactly bad, it lacked a certain intelligence and fell into too many modern TV show pits (because a show isn't a show without a creepy high school student-teacher relationship, apparently).
In interviews, when Craven described the feeling that pushed him into writing and directing horror, he used the word "anger." It's an interesting choice of diction, and if one looks at his movies as both stories and scholarly examinations of present times, Craven certainly had a lot of anger at the world. I mentioned before that he grew up in a strict, religious family, and parents figure strongly as either foils or outright villains: parents who send their children off to die (there's a particularly nasty scene in Last House that more than adequately illustrates this); parents who don't believe their children; parents so inept the children need to save them.
Ironically, the only time we see a "good" parent in a Craven movie is New Nightmare, where fictional Heather battles fictional-but-real Freddy for the soul of her child. Whether this is intentional or not, or whether he dialed down the effect so as not to hurt real Heather's reputation as a parent is unknown, but such nuance and brainy-ness and self-confrontation is now lost to the world.
I guess we're all going to have to pay attention to our scariest dreams a little more now.
Happy Halloween.
In fact, I didn't spend much time thinking about Craven at all until the news of his apparently sudden death in August, and then, more so now, I realize that particular knife he wedged in pop culture's spinal column will be twisted no more.
As reviewers have noted before, Craven upped the ante for horror between two and four times, depending on how you score it. Formerly a humanities professor from extremely religious parentage, he fell in love with movies in college and, if Wikipedia is to believed, broke into the scene writing and editing porn. This comes across strongest in Last House on the Left, and his penchant for pushing actors to their physical and mental limits reverberated through all of Craven's films.
Last House was Craven's first horror and depending on how you see it, is either the reinvention of the grindhouse genre or the simply the best example of it. In it, two teenage girls head off to a rock concert. Their parents disagree but do little to stop them, and the girls are promptly raped and murdered by a gang of escaped convicts whose leader is called Krug. The gang moves on, but after their car breaks down, seek refuge with some kind older folks who just happen to be the girl's parents. After learning what the gang has done, the parents exact a bloody, and highly symbolic, revenge. Craven's second grindhouse film, The Hills Have Eyes, tracks hapless vacationers as they head off into the desert, guided to an inbred and highly deformed family of cannibals. And like Last House, the one survivor on the "good guys" team ends the film by tacking the hill people back to their lair and mercilessly slaughtering the lot of them: men, women, children and all.
Like Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper, Craven was introduced to real-world horror through Vietnam footage, and both Massacre and Craven's films were logical responses. While Hooper went out of his way to make political statements in interviews, Craven the professor carefully hid the message that our suburban moms and dads and our happy good-willed Winnebago drivers turn into monsters when they've been in the jungle too long.
Deadly Blessing and a foray into camp with Swamp Thing, for which Craven was never too successful, followed, but when Nightmare on Elm Street hit the big screen in 1984 it hit hard.
So here's my theory about Wes Craven and why the guy was so damn smart: he just made the same movie over and over, carefully updating it to to dig the right fear-nerve of the time.
In '84, the U.S. was in the midst of a massive counter-counter-culture swing. Reagan was president and he promised a return to good 'ol 'Merican values and more importantly, a shrug-off of Jimmy Carter: the presidential analog to Debbie Downer. One of Carter's most controversial moves as chief was pardoning the 'Nam draft dodgers, all but saying aloud the entire thing was a mistake and nobody should've been expected to go. A few short years later, and suddenly Vietnam was a noble effort -- a good college try, if you will -- and the nation let out a collective sigh of relief, realizing that the citizen him or herself was no longer expected to live it down.
Enter Freddie Kruger. The combined ideas that a thing you can't see or affect while waking, dreams, can kill you, and that despite your fearful begging and week-long caffeine binges, your parents tell you to take a sleeping pill and stop acting so nuts was a serious indictment of Reagan's "innocent America" ideal. Audiences knew it. Combine that with the relatively low budget, studio disagreements and the sheer amount of violence and its a wonder Nightmare got made at all.
Kruger, originally, was a child molester (this unsavory tidbit was sanitized from later sequels). The parents burned him alive in the school's boiler room and hid evidence of their crime, though it drives protagonist Nancy's mother to insanity and her father into a bottle. Looking backwards, Nightmare could almost be the direct sequel to Last House: the vengeful ghost of the conveniently named Krug come back to kill the next generation, finding a way to attack children who are now locked away in suburban fortresses of sheet rock, vinyl siding and denial.
Freddie himself got the double-whammy of being a wholly owned creature of New Line and shooting to mega-stardom -- flames the studio only sought to fan. Craven had little to do with Kruger afterward and was probably glad about it, content to let his creation run free and observe the damage from afar. He directed Nightmare 3: Dream Warriors, where the children turn Kruger's malleable dream world against him, and a criminally-underrated gem called Wes Craven's New Nightmare.
New Nightmare deserves all the attention it gets simply because it's a movie clearly written 100% by Craven the former teacher, starring Nightmare heroine Heather Langenkamp, Freddy actor Robert Englund, longtime producer Bob Shaye and even Craven himself as themselves. In New Nightmare's world, when a story has been told enough, it comes to life. In this case, the subject is the actual Nightmare on Elm Street movies. So to recap, it's a Wes Craven movie where the bad guy is a Wes Craven movie. Nightmare made lots of people rich, but Craven appears content to almost give a lesson on the dangers of fame and the detachment from one's own creation that the Hollywood remake machine can cause.
All this before they made 4 Transformers movies!
New Nightmare also serves as the jumping-off point for Scream, arguably the most successful of Craven's movies and either the second, third or fourth time he set a new standard for low-budget terror, featuring the second enduring Craven character Ghostface. The ending line, "Horror movies don't create psychos: they make the psychos more creative!" is just story-come-to-life with the supernatural distilled out. Now in the 90s and in the full-swing of Clinton's neo-liberalism and wholly a generation into the self-esteem movement, there was no need for monsters to frighten kids because the kids were empowered to be monsters, parents and adults in general be damned. It's no mistake that protagonist Sidney saves her father from two insane classmates who've watched Halloween one too many times. Scream is not so much a genre movie as it is a movie about genre, breaking down horror movie rules and then reminding the victims that it doesn't matter if you know you're in a horror movie or not.
I haven't seen any of Scream sequels but I hear it is the almost expected downhill slide into repetition and eventual self-parody.
The late 90s was also the last time the cinema landscape would prove fertile ground for Craven. Not that he didn't have continued personal success -- taking Meryl Streep to an Oscar nomination with Music of the Heart and attempting to tackle post 9/11 flight anxiety with Red Eye are no small things. But that evolving idea birthed with Krug, nurtured with Kruger and brought to its logical conclusion with Scream never seemed to come up again. Craven produced Scream: The Series with original screenwriter Kevin Williamson, and while the show's inaugural season was not exactly bad, it lacked a certain intelligence and fell into too many modern TV show pits (because a show isn't a show without a creepy high school student-teacher relationship, apparently).
* * * *
In interviews, when Craven described the feeling that pushed him into writing and directing horror, he used the word "anger." It's an interesting choice of diction, and if one looks at his movies as both stories and scholarly examinations of present times, Craven certainly had a lot of anger at the world. I mentioned before that he grew up in a strict, religious family, and parents figure strongly as either foils or outright villains: parents who send their children off to die (there's a particularly nasty scene in Last House that more than adequately illustrates this); parents who don't believe their children; parents so inept the children need to save them.
Ironically, the only time we see a "good" parent in a Craven movie is New Nightmare, where fictional Heather battles fictional-but-real Freddy for the soul of her child. Whether this is intentional or not, or whether he dialed down the effect so as not to hurt real Heather's reputation as a parent is unknown, but such nuance and brainy-ness and self-confrontation is now lost to the world.
I guess we're all going to have to pay attention to our scariest dreams a little more now.
Happy Halloween.
Thursday, October 29, 2015
downton abbey has a baby with castlevania
New movie, so, spoilers.
Short version: Crimson Peak kinda sucked. What was supposed to be an afternoon at the moo-vees turned into getting mugged by a ghost in the parking lot and then waking up two-and-a-half hours later in a dumpster with $12 missing and a giant hole in the memory.
This is disappointing because del Toro is usually much better than this. Exhibit A is The Orphanage, a very sad tale that features very creative ghosts that tell an otherwise uncomplicated, humanistic story. Crimson Peak is also sad, simple and humanistic, but covered so much mud the big reveal at the end turns into a colossal letdown.
I've since forgotten all of the character's names so we're going to call our protagonist Flopsy. Flopsy is the daughter of an American steel tycoon in the vein of Andrew Carnegie, and a dreamer, writer, and while the movie alludes to her supposed feminism, the writers clearly didn't research it or wait for The Suffragette to come out and just watch that. Flopsy sees her mom's ghost from a young age that cryptically warns her to "beware of Crimson Peak."
Okay, let's stop here a second. How cryptic is "beware of Crimson Peak" anyway? I know geography wasn't the best in nineteen-oh-whatever but a clearly educated daughter of wealth like Flopsy would've at least figured there can't be too many red goddamned mountains in the world. We'll get back to this in a minute, but, right? Seriously.
Flopsy's heart goes aflutter when a handsome stranger of English old money blows into town and solicits old dad for some startup cash. This goes on for far too long before dad dies under mysterious circumstances and Flopsy marries, uh, well, now his name is Gonad.
And we'll stop here again just to say that I have no problem with a long introduction or extended periods of quiet punctuated with crash-bang action. The original silent Phantom of the Opera is probably the best example of this. But the shift in gears from Downton Abbey turn o' the century baron's drama to full-blown supernatural horror is so jarring that Crimson Peak actually feels like two different movies smashed into one.
Gonad, of course, takes his new bride to his home of Crimson Peak -- the audience doesn't find out about the name until later, but for Christ's sake it's a mountain peak with special blood-red clay oozing out of every one of it's earthy pores. For an aspiring writer Flopsy lets that little bit of foreshadowing whiz right on by. And that isn't the end of what amounts to a long string of increasingly poor decisions on her part.
Gonad lives with is creepy-ass sister, a turn of bat shit loco brought to the screen wonderfully by Jessica Chastain, and since I've forgotten her character's name as well she is now called Nutso. Gonad and Nutso live alone in an isolated mansion with large swaths of caved in roof with no cleaning staff and did I mention it's sinking? Flopsy is seen at turns taking these revelations with something between bemusement and tacit acceptance as Nutso follows her around the house pushing nasty tea and Gonad seemingly refuses to sleep with her. Flopsy sees ghosts of course, but the siblings sans sanity tell her she's crazy and to drink more tea.
Another really disappointing aspect of Crimson Peak are the ghosts themselves, somewhere between Sadako of Ring-fame and animated to look like video game monsters ripe for the chopping. And despite del Toro's penchant for design and insane detailed (Exhibits B and C: Pacific Rim and the Hellboy movies), the ghosts are just people sans skin. For crap's sake, even the Crimson in the movie's title is a gimmick. The remake of Poltergeist did this too: subbing some genuinely terrifying monsters for a bunch of blurry human shapes, betraying that mix of laziness, budget constraints and not wanting to animate anything that's going to look like absolute crap in six months.
Anyway, the totally-not-scary-at-all ghosts point Flopsy to some unsavory tips about her new hubby (as if the fact that he comes from wealth and can't afford keep the goddamned snow out of the living room isn't enough). And one night she follows the spirit's lead to the movie's dramatic denumont and...
Nope, can't even finish that sentence with any degree of seriousness because it's just Flowers in the Attic. What the fuck guys?
Flopsy walks into Nutso going all nutso over Gonad's gonads and it all falls together in declarative exposition: Nutso murdered Dad so her brosband could sap her inheritance while wifey dies slowly of poisoning. Talk about jumping on a bandwagon five years after it left the station. Damn.
The throwdown between Flopsy and Nutso as the house sinks and the coveted clay stains the snow rouge is full-on fun, but does something I very much dislike in that it makes Gonad the ultimate hero. He predictably has a change of heart and sides with Flopsy over his wifester, prompting her stab-laden freak-out in the first place. In the end, it's Gonad's ghost (a ghostnad!?) that distracts Nutso long enough for Flopsy to land the killing blow, complete with cheeky one-liner.
I said before that Flopsy gets introduced as a sort of proto-feminist but the writers clearly had no idea what that was supposed to mean. Having her take out Nutso with her own feminine fists of fury would've been a nice return to form after her adventures in incestuous polygamy. But because, or at least as I infer, she cannot kill Nutso alone and needs Gonad's help, the message is that his redemption is complete because he orchestrates his evil sister's death.
Before I forget, Charlie Hunnmann is also in the movie, is the only other person who can see or is interested in ghosts and shows up for the final showdown and holy crap does that character arc go nowhere fast.
As a Primus album once said, they can't all be zingers, and this one doesn't so much zing as it slowly buzzes on a descending scale, as though one was blowing a kazoo at his bosses birthday party the day he got fired. If a studio is going to toss money away incorrectly using a talent and vision like del Toro's on overused and insensitive incest shockers, they might as well just freaking fund At the Mountains of Madness already.
Short version: Crimson Peak kinda sucked. What was supposed to be an afternoon at the moo-vees turned into getting mugged by a ghost in the parking lot and then waking up two-and-a-half hours later in a dumpster with $12 missing and a giant hole in the memory.
This is disappointing because del Toro is usually much better than this. Exhibit A is The Orphanage, a very sad tale that features very creative ghosts that tell an otherwise uncomplicated, humanistic story. Crimson Peak is also sad, simple and humanistic, but covered so much mud the big reveal at the end turns into a colossal letdown.
I've since forgotten all of the character's names so we're going to call our protagonist Flopsy. Flopsy is the daughter of an American steel tycoon in the vein of Andrew Carnegie, and a dreamer, writer, and while the movie alludes to her supposed feminism, the writers clearly didn't research it or wait for The Suffragette to come out and just watch that. Flopsy sees her mom's ghost from a young age that cryptically warns her to "beware of Crimson Peak."
Okay, let's stop here a second. How cryptic is "beware of Crimson Peak" anyway? I know geography wasn't the best in nineteen-oh-whatever but a clearly educated daughter of wealth like Flopsy would've at least figured there can't be too many red goddamned mountains in the world. We'll get back to this in a minute, but, right? Seriously.
Flopsy's heart goes aflutter when a handsome stranger of English old money blows into town and solicits old dad for some startup cash. This goes on for far too long before dad dies under mysterious circumstances and Flopsy marries, uh, well, now his name is Gonad.
And we'll stop here again just to say that I have no problem with a long introduction or extended periods of quiet punctuated with crash-bang action. The original silent Phantom of the Opera is probably the best example of this. But the shift in gears from Downton Abbey turn o' the century baron's drama to full-blown supernatural horror is so jarring that Crimson Peak actually feels like two different movies smashed into one.
Gonad, of course, takes his new bride to his home of Crimson Peak -- the audience doesn't find out about the name until later, but for Christ's sake it's a mountain peak with special blood-red clay oozing out of every one of it's earthy pores. For an aspiring writer Flopsy lets that little bit of foreshadowing whiz right on by. And that isn't the end of what amounts to a long string of increasingly poor decisions on her part.
Gonad lives with is creepy-ass sister, a turn of bat shit loco brought to the screen wonderfully by Jessica Chastain, and since I've forgotten her character's name as well she is now called Nutso. Gonad and Nutso live alone in an isolated mansion with large swaths of caved in roof with no cleaning staff and did I mention it's sinking? Flopsy is seen at turns taking these revelations with something between bemusement and tacit acceptance as Nutso follows her around the house pushing nasty tea and Gonad seemingly refuses to sleep with her. Flopsy sees ghosts of course, but the siblings sans sanity tell her she's crazy and to drink more tea.
Another really disappointing aspect of Crimson Peak are the ghosts themselves, somewhere between Sadako of Ring-fame and animated to look like video game monsters ripe for the chopping. And despite del Toro's penchant for design and insane detailed (Exhibits B and C: Pacific Rim and the Hellboy movies), the ghosts are just people sans skin. For crap's sake, even the Crimson in the movie's title is a gimmick. The remake of Poltergeist did this too: subbing some genuinely terrifying monsters for a bunch of blurry human shapes, betraying that mix of laziness, budget constraints and not wanting to animate anything that's going to look like absolute crap in six months.
Anyway, the totally-not-scary-at-all ghosts point Flopsy to some unsavory tips about her new hubby (as if the fact that he comes from wealth and can't afford keep the goddamned snow out of the living room isn't enough). And one night she follows the spirit's lead to the movie's dramatic denumont and...
Nope, can't even finish that sentence with any degree of seriousness because it's just Flowers in the Attic. What the fuck guys?
Flopsy walks into Nutso going all nutso over Gonad's gonads and it all falls together in declarative exposition: Nutso murdered Dad so her brosband could sap her inheritance while wifey dies slowly of poisoning. Talk about jumping on a bandwagon five years after it left the station. Damn.
The throwdown between Flopsy and Nutso as the house sinks and the coveted clay stains the snow rouge is full-on fun, but does something I very much dislike in that it makes Gonad the ultimate hero. He predictably has a change of heart and sides with Flopsy over his wifester, prompting her stab-laden freak-out in the first place. In the end, it's Gonad's ghost (a ghostnad!?) that distracts Nutso long enough for Flopsy to land the killing blow, complete with cheeky one-liner.
I said before that Flopsy gets introduced as a sort of proto-feminist but the writers clearly had no idea what that was supposed to mean. Having her take out Nutso with her own feminine fists of fury would've been a nice return to form after her adventures in incestuous polygamy. But because, or at least as I infer, she cannot kill Nutso alone and needs Gonad's help, the message is that his redemption is complete because he orchestrates his evil sister's death.
Before I forget, Charlie Hunnmann is also in the movie, is the only other person who can see or is interested in ghosts and shows up for the final showdown and holy crap does that character arc go nowhere fast.
As a Primus album once said, they can't all be zingers, and this one doesn't so much zing as it slowly buzzes on a descending scale, as though one was blowing a kazoo at his bosses birthday party the day he got fired. If a studio is going to toss money away incorrectly using a talent and vision like del Toro's on overused and insensitive incest shockers, they might as well just freaking fund At the Mountains of Madness already.
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
was child's play ever scary?
Before getting into this, I am beginning this post on Oct. 21, 2015 a.k.a Back to the Future Part 2 day. By time of posting that day will have passed and the following observation will be late (or is it early? Maybe it's on time in ways we can't possibly comprehend!) Pretty much everything that you could want to read about the BTTF movies is out there already, but I figure I'd mention, briefly, why it is one of the few franchises where the sequels are so goddamned good. Simple really: the writers realized the most interesting thing about the fictional world they created was time travel, and they used it to great effect in the first as a way of understanding how Marty & Co. got to where they were in the future by showing off the past. They essentially made the same movie with the same kind of meta-commentary in Part 2, but instead had them go forward to, well, today. It's literally the mirror image of its predecessor. If Marty and Doc had gone back to another point in history -- say to change Marty's destiny as a child or something -- it would've been A) exactly the same movie as its predecessor and B) utter crap. In the age of sequels, that's how you do one right. It would help if many of the movie franchises out there now used some interesting material to begin with...
(It's 11:22 p.m. at time of posting. Made it.)
And to answer the question in the headline: no. Child's Play is not scary, and I'm not really sure it ever was.
I was 6 in 1988 when the movie hit theaters, so I'm not sure about the initial reception, but was a little more than surprised to see that Roger Ebert gave it a good review. But I digress: it is a greatly enjoyable movie and the effects, particularly Chucky's face, have held up reasonably well (as practical effects do -- nothing ages faster than animation).
Plot-wise, with a little explanation of the cursed "Good Guy" doll in the opening, Child's Play is the Talky Tina episode of Twilight Zone fed growth-hormone beef and shot up with PCP. In the classic horror fable, we the audience never get an explanation as to why Talky Tina doesn't like Dad very much, and that adds to the intertwined senses of mystery and dread. Chucky comes about from a mix of serial killer/toy store/voodoo ritual right from the get-go, and it is more than a little telling that the only non-white character (briefly) in the movie is the voodoo priest who equips the Lakeshore Strangler with the power to reanimate himself.
It was filmed in Chicago but never identifies the city, and the cast of white victims suffering the albeit unintended wrath of Creole magic brings to mind such racially-loaded terms as "urban decay." This is a theme that runs through the core of a few 80s movies and skirts the edges of many more, from the Chinatown vision of LA critical to Blade Runner to the punks in the opening of Terminator or perhaps most egregiously, the Hispanic heroin-addicted homeless rapists in that shining banner of American cinematic achievement that is Jason Takes Manhattan. There's also a splash of the late-decade recession that reared it's ugly head towards the end of the Reagan presidency: the economy tanked, cities were a mess and many experts agree the sitting president was in the throws of Alzheimer's. Shit sucked, is what I'm getting at. Catherine Hicks's (who won a Saturn for best actress in a horror, believe it or not) character must work double-shifts at a department store to scrape by as a single mom in 80s-land, and still only manages to get a coveted Good Guy doll from a homeless shill.
At the heart of the plot is little Andy, Karen's son and seeker of the Good Guy doll, and at the heart of the movie is a comment on commercialism as it relates to kids. Good Guy himself was based on Hasbro's mega-popular My Buddy toy. I can still remember the commercials and that lurid, unblinking and deadened thousand-yard stare. Before My Buddy was Chatty Cathy -- the subject of the aforementioned Twilight Zone. And after, Cabbage Patch, Furby, Tickle-Me Elmo, each with their associated yarns of Christmas Eve Wal-Mart brawls.
Karen, of course, doesn't believe Andy when he tries to tell her Chucky offed the babysitter with a claw hammer. It's not until she learns that Chucky foregoes alkaloids for his juice and goes straight for the hard stuff -- pure evil serial killer soul -- that Karen moms the hell out and drafts a detective investigating the babysitter's demise to her cause. Not that she'd need to: Chucky's on a mission to whack his former partner who left his corpus to die in a toy store at the hands of the very same detective, at which point the horror movie shifts into crime-revenge as told by Jim Henson with a gut full of Wild Irish Rose. Chucky proves more resilient than Rasputin in the final battle over Andy's soul, and the toothy melted face is really the stuff of nightmares. He's slain in the end, but given the sheer amount of sequels, we know that the killer is never really dead.
The original question was whether the movie was scary or not, and I think that depends on how you define scary. It's got some good jump-scare moments that I'm sure were more terrifying in a dark theater at 130 decibels, and the bit where little Andy is locked in a hospital room as Chucky's pitter-patter of untimely doom inches closer is quite tense. But the entire thing is so out there, particularly Chucky's off-the-cuff "Stupid bitch!" and "I'll fucking gut you!" lines, it doesn't lend itself toward fear the way, say, Night of the Living Dead or even that Twilight Zone do.
Though it is a fantastic time capsule into the average person's anxiety over what the holiday rush for crappy toys does to kids and, ultimately, what it does to parents. I am not looking forward to the day two fully-formed adults hospitalize each other over four-year-old-friendly drones, but the revisit was certainly worth it.
At the heart of the plot is little Andy, Karen's son and seeker of the Good Guy doll, and at the heart of the movie is a comment on commercialism as it relates to kids. Good Guy himself was based on Hasbro's mega-popular My Buddy toy. I can still remember the commercials and that lurid, unblinking and deadened thousand-yard stare. Before My Buddy was Chatty Cathy -- the subject of the aforementioned Twilight Zone. And after, Cabbage Patch, Furby, Tickle-Me Elmo, each with their associated yarns of Christmas Eve Wal-Mart brawls.
Karen, of course, doesn't believe Andy when he tries to tell her Chucky offed the babysitter with a claw hammer. It's not until she learns that Chucky foregoes alkaloids for his juice and goes straight for the hard stuff -- pure evil serial killer soul -- that Karen moms the hell out and drafts a detective investigating the babysitter's demise to her cause. Not that she'd need to: Chucky's on a mission to whack his former partner who left his corpus to die in a toy store at the hands of the very same detective, at which point the horror movie shifts into crime-revenge as told by Jim Henson with a gut full of Wild Irish Rose. Chucky proves more resilient than Rasputin in the final battle over Andy's soul, and the toothy melted face is really the stuff of nightmares. He's slain in the end, but given the sheer amount of sequels, we know that the killer is never really dead.
The original question was whether the movie was scary or not, and I think that depends on how you define scary. It's got some good jump-scare moments that I'm sure were more terrifying in a dark theater at 130 decibels, and the bit where little Andy is locked in a hospital room as Chucky's pitter-patter of untimely doom inches closer is quite tense. But the entire thing is so out there, particularly Chucky's off-the-cuff "Stupid bitch!" and "I'll fucking gut you!" lines, it doesn't lend itself toward fear the way, say, Night of the Living Dead or even that Twilight Zone do.
Though it is a fantastic time capsule into the average person's anxiety over what the holiday rush for crappy toys does to kids and, ultimately, what it does to parents. I am not looking forward to the day two fully-formed adults hospitalize each other over four-year-old-friendly drones, but the revisit was certainly worth it.
(It's 11:22 p.m. at time of posting. Made it.)
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
excited for star wars (but not that star wars)
For a long time now I've felt kind of sorry for Thanksgiving. I was in Target with Ash the other day and saw a sad half-shelf full of felt turkeys -- and owls for some reason -- next to overflowing piles of Halloween decor three rows deep. And even though Thanksgiving is after Halloween, those turkeys will be off to slaughter on November 1st, which might as well begin the two month pregame binge leading up to Christmas.. And along with it comes the deep saturation carpet bombing of holiday movies.
There's not a whole lot I can say about Star Wars: The Force Awakens that hasn't already been said, much of which amounts to "We know what we're in for." Unless there is some serious effort on J.J. Abrams's part to switch things up, it is safe to say with a certain degree of confidence that Star Wars Seven will be an incomprehensible mess of a plot set against the backdrop of great special effects, lens flare and space ships that go "Weeeeeee-wee we-we-we-we-we" for absolutely no freaking reason. And while I've never outright disliked anything Abrams has done, I wonder if it is more unfortunate that he was chosen to reboot both that and Star Trek.
Abrams claims that he never got into Star Trek because it was "too philosophical" and heaven forbid any length of entertainment media ask you to think about something. The original Trek had some action-y bits but was never the exercise in bombast that Star Wars was. Instead, Trek came from a future where everything was pretty chill: Earth was relatively safe and all. And if anything resembled an evil empire, it was the Federation itself, being an overly bureaucratic scientific/military exploration outfit with orders never to interfere with a developing species path and to shoot to kill. It made for a pretty interesting dichotomy that would be taken to the logical extreme in England's Blake's 7 (you're cool if you get it, and there may be more on that later).
Probably the biggest problem with Abrams's Star Trek is that he spent considerable effort turning it into Star Wars. Trek was never exactly known for its special effects and those were about all the new ones had going for them (lens flare obscures the graphics and allows them to age more gently, if you thought Abrams's crusade against epileptics everywhere was purely artistic) . They're enjoyable in that tasty-but-mostly-air chocolate wafer sort of way, but don't offer much the way of substance or originality, and feel like they've been written not as homage to the original or as a way to expand the source material, but to smear a fresh coat of plaster over the charming but weather-worn original. Family revenge story, check. Thinly veiled allusions to 9/11 and ripped-from-the-headlines global terrorism, got it. Snidely claiming to be clever by reversing Spock and Kirk's roles whilst keeping the story intact, why the hell not? But perhaps the worst part of Trek 2.0 is Zoe Saldana as Uhura, doing Nichelle Nichols's legacy no favors by turning the legendary character into a thermonuclear blast of hotness whose personality can be summed up with the phrase, "Bitches, right?" I haven't seen her in enough roles to judge the performance but there is a total lack of chemistry between her and Zachary Quinto, and more importantly the script fails the character - Guardians of the Galaxy did the same thing. And in the case of classic Star Wars, it only took six hours of movie and a fan base to get Princess Leia chained to the floor in a metal bikini.
In this light, Abrams makes a sort of worthy successor to Lucas, who plastered over his own movies with the "enhanced" DVD reissues. Everyone who cares the slightest bit about Star Wars remembers "Han Shot First!" but among other added scenes are some cute animated desert critters because apparently Ewoks screen tested so well all the movies needed to pander to the 8-12 demographic, a needless expository bit with Han and Jabba that's so badly made one wonders if it an animator threw it together two hours before cleaning out his desk, and replacing the physical models in the Death Star battle with animated ones. Writing dialog that explains the over complicated plot to the audience the way a second grade teacher explains the rain cycle is pretty much mandatory for any movie costing over a million bucks, and Abrams follows suit. The original Star Trek, being all think-y and stuff, never talked down to its audience the way even classic Star Wars does. Nor did it greatly over-simplify several thousand years of Eastern religious philosophy and grind it down into bullshit pop-psychology peppered with Bible references.
The closest Abrams has come to breaking out of his mold was Super 8, but he fails on the front of originality. As much as I liked that one, it really is just E.T. cranked up to 11. And while it seems like Abrams is trying to get Star Wars out of the massive dent its left in the couch from too many years of laziness and microwaved mac-and-cheese dinners (casting a black guy and a woman in leading roles is a start for the what may amount to the whitest cinema institution this side of Birth of a Nation), his work with Super 8 reveals a fundamental inability to think for himself and willingness to jack someone else's movie up on steroids.
I am looking forward to Rogue One, the first of two planned spin-offs much more than any of the core series. The story is said to take place just before A New Hope and chronicle how the Death Star plans get into the hands of the rebellion and has been handed to Gareth Edwards. I'm not going to say that Edwards is a better director than Abrams, but his two movies have shown he can work within the constraints of self-produced indie film and big budget Hollywood with little loss of quality.
Edwards first movie, 2010's Monsters, is a goddamned masterpiece that blends an interesting take on alien invasion with a serious-if-unintentional discussion of immigration, mashed together with a love story that never feels forced or that it doesn't belong. 2014's Godzilla reboot ups the Hollywood dumb factor a little, but as I said that is practically a requirement. Even still, Godzilla is about the closest thing to a proper homage to the full breadth of the King of Monsters' tenure - from city-stomping wrath of nature to unwitting protector of mankind. It isn't the only attempt to make a direct sequel to the 1954 original, but it is the best, and that it took sixty years to get it right says a lot.
Edwards has a number of advantages over Abrams. In terms of graphics, he is better with scale (making things appear a correct, consistent or believable size with animation is extremely difficult; just pay close attention to the new Star Treks). And my hope is that he will remain unconstrained from filling the human roles with relateable cardboard cutouts with who the audience is supposed to identify. The heroes of Monsters, for example, and not particularly likable people but you root for them anyway, and it makes their internal journey as important as the external. Plus, critically, he knows how to hold back: Godzilla takes an hour to show up and the tell-tale roar is that much louder for it.
And maybe that is the entire problem with the Abrams brand of movie: nothing is held back. Chris Taylor's book "How Star Wars Conquered the Universe" reveals that, even toward the final draft, A New Hope was a very different movie. Some of the effects had to be improvised or scrapped altogether to fit within the budget and deadline - not to mention Lucas's multiple rewrites after getting called on lifting entire scenes from Lord of the Rings, and I get the feeling Lucas never quite got over those slights and has been working to rebuild the initial vision ever since. Nowadays, almost anything with the ubiquitous bubble-letter logo with sell out overnight, and graphics have come to the point that whatever can't be filmed can be animated. A director's head can almost literally be opened and put up on the screen, and there's no reason for anyone aboard to say, as someone probably said to George, "Hey boss, we can't afford that."
In fact, many of the tricks of low-budget became standard practice before the age of animated everything. Think Halloween's spraypainted William Shatner mask, Alien's slow build and relative lack of aliens, or running a camera backwards for intense chase scenes in Evil Dead.
Abrams might be a veteran of the special effects field, but that's precisely the thing that can get one in trouble next to a director like Edwards, who made Monsters on a scant (by Hollywood standards) $500,000. Throwing a black guy and a woman into the spotlight for the new main movie is nice and all, but comes across as a little heavy-handed from Abrams. Remember that bit in Star Trek: Into Darkness when Alice Eve took her clothes off for no reason? Not exactly utilizing female cast members in really creative ways to get the most out of the dramatic potential there, bro.
The final problem, and this extends to both movies, is that you pretty much like or dislike Star Wars as much as you're going to already. Franchise movies have that problem and this is no exception. At least Rogue One has a little more wiggle room out of the gate, until it's inevitably overshadowed by the second spin-off by Jurassic World's Colin Trevorrow, and if the latter is any indicator there will be a written test following the feature to make sure you got the plot. At least we'll get to find out who those Bothans were...
There's not a whole lot I can say about Star Wars: The Force Awakens that hasn't already been said, much of which amounts to "We know what we're in for." Unless there is some serious effort on J.J. Abrams's part to switch things up, it is safe to say with a certain degree of confidence that Star Wars Seven will be an incomprehensible mess of a plot set against the backdrop of great special effects, lens flare and space ships that go "Weeeeeee-wee we-we-we-we-we" for absolutely no freaking reason. And while I've never outright disliked anything Abrams has done, I wonder if it is more unfortunate that he was chosen to reboot both that and Star Trek.
Abrams claims that he never got into Star Trek because it was "too philosophical" and heaven forbid any length of entertainment media ask you to think about something. The original Trek had some action-y bits but was never the exercise in bombast that Star Wars was. Instead, Trek came from a future where everything was pretty chill: Earth was relatively safe and all. And if anything resembled an evil empire, it was the Federation itself, being an overly bureaucratic scientific/military exploration outfit with orders never to interfere with a developing species path and to shoot to kill. It made for a pretty interesting dichotomy that would be taken to the logical extreme in England's Blake's 7 (you're cool if you get it, and there may be more on that later).
Probably the biggest problem with Abrams's Star Trek is that he spent considerable effort turning it into Star Wars. Trek was never exactly known for its special effects and those were about all the new ones had going for them (lens flare obscures the graphics and allows them to age more gently, if you thought Abrams's crusade against epileptics everywhere was purely artistic) . They're enjoyable in that tasty-but-mostly-air chocolate wafer sort of way, but don't offer much the way of substance or originality, and feel like they've been written not as homage to the original or as a way to expand the source material, but to smear a fresh coat of plaster over the charming but weather-worn original. Family revenge story, check. Thinly veiled allusions to 9/11 and ripped-from-the-headlines global terrorism, got it. Snidely claiming to be clever by reversing Spock and Kirk's roles whilst keeping the story intact, why the hell not? But perhaps the worst part of Trek 2.0 is Zoe Saldana as Uhura, doing Nichelle Nichols's legacy no favors by turning the legendary character into a thermonuclear blast of hotness whose personality can be summed up with the phrase, "Bitches, right?" I haven't seen her in enough roles to judge the performance but there is a total lack of chemistry between her and Zachary Quinto, and more importantly the script fails the character - Guardians of the Galaxy did the same thing. And in the case of classic Star Wars, it only took six hours of movie and a fan base to get Princess Leia chained to the floor in a metal bikini.
In this light, Abrams makes a sort of worthy successor to Lucas, who plastered over his own movies with the "enhanced" DVD reissues. Everyone who cares the slightest bit about Star Wars remembers "Han Shot First!" but among other added scenes are some cute animated desert critters because apparently Ewoks screen tested so well all the movies needed to pander to the 8-12 demographic, a needless expository bit with Han and Jabba that's so badly made one wonders if it an animator threw it together two hours before cleaning out his desk, and replacing the physical models in the Death Star battle with animated ones. Writing dialog that explains the over complicated plot to the audience the way a second grade teacher explains the rain cycle is pretty much mandatory for any movie costing over a million bucks, and Abrams follows suit. The original Star Trek, being all think-y and stuff, never talked down to its audience the way even classic Star Wars does. Nor did it greatly over-simplify several thousand years of Eastern religious philosophy and grind it down into bullshit pop-psychology peppered with Bible references.
The closest Abrams has come to breaking out of his mold was Super 8, but he fails on the front of originality. As much as I liked that one, it really is just E.T. cranked up to 11. And while it seems like Abrams is trying to get Star Wars out of the massive dent its left in the couch from too many years of laziness and microwaved mac-and-cheese dinners (casting a black guy and a woman in leading roles is a start for the what may amount to the whitest cinema institution this side of Birth of a Nation), his work with Super 8 reveals a fundamental inability to think for himself and willingness to jack someone else's movie up on steroids.
* * *
I am looking forward to Rogue One, the first of two planned spin-offs much more than any of the core series. The story is said to take place just before A New Hope and chronicle how the Death Star plans get into the hands of the rebellion and has been handed to Gareth Edwards. I'm not going to say that Edwards is a better director than Abrams, but his two movies have shown he can work within the constraints of self-produced indie film and big budget Hollywood with little loss of quality.
Edwards first movie, 2010's Monsters, is a goddamned masterpiece that blends an interesting take on alien invasion with a serious-if-unintentional discussion of immigration, mashed together with a love story that never feels forced or that it doesn't belong. 2014's Godzilla reboot ups the Hollywood dumb factor a little, but as I said that is practically a requirement. Even still, Godzilla is about the closest thing to a proper homage to the full breadth of the King of Monsters' tenure - from city-stomping wrath of nature to unwitting protector of mankind. It isn't the only attempt to make a direct sequel to the 1954 original, but it is the best, and that it took sixty years to get it right says a lot.
Edwards has a number of advantages over Abrams. In terms of graphics, he is better with scale (making things appear a correct, consistent or believable size with animation is extremely difficult; just pay close attention to the new Star Treks). And my hope is that he will remain unconstrained from filling the human roles with relateable cardboard cutouts with who the audience is supposed to identify. The heroes of Monsters, for example, and not particularly likable people but you root for them anyway, and it makes their internal journey as important as the external. Plus, critically, he knows how to hold back: Godzilla takes an hour to show up and the tell-tale roar is that much louder for it.
And maybe that is the entire problem with the Abrams brand of movie: nothing is held back. Chris Taylor's book "How Star Wars Conquered the Universe" reveals that, even toward the final draft, A New Hope was a very different movie. Some of the effects had to be improvised or scrapped altogether to fit within the budget and deadline - not to mention Lucas's multiple rewrites after getting called on lifting entire scenes from Lord of the Rings, and I get the feeling Lucas never quite got over those slights and has been working to rebuild the initial vision ever since. Nowadays, almost anything with the ubiquitous bubble-letter logo with sell out overnight, and graphics have come to the point that whatever can't be filmed can be animated. A director's head can almost literally be opened and put up on the screen, and there's no reason for anyone aboard to say, as someone probably said to George, "Hey boss, we can't afford that."
In fact, many of the tricks of low-budget became standard practice before the age of animated everything. Think Halloween's spraypainted William Shatner mask, Alien's slow build and relative lack of aliens, or running a camera backwards for intense chase scenes in Evil Dead.
Abrams might be a veteran of the special effects field, but that's precisely the thing that can get one in trouble next to a director like Edwards, who made Monsters on a scant (by Hollywood standards) $500,000. Throwing a black guy and a woman into the spotlight for the new main movie is nice and all, but comes across as a little heavy-handed from Abrams. Remember that bit in Star Trek: Into Darkness when Alice Eve took her clothes off for no reason? Not exactly utilizing female cast members in really creative ways to get the most out of the dramatic potential there, bro.
The final problem, and this extends to both movies, is that you pretty much like or dislike Star Wars as much as you're going to already. Franchise movies have that problem and this is no exception. At least Rogue One has a little more wiggle room out of the gate, until it's inevitably overshadowed by the second spin-off by Jurassic World's Colin Trevorrow, and if the latter is any indicator there will be a written test following the feature to make sure you got the plot. At least we'll get to find out who those Bothans were...
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