Blue Men Group, Ripley-is-not-Amused, and The Subjugation of the Natives: The Game: The Movie

Ended up seeing Avatar (due to familial obligations, I swear!).

I can see why some people liked it, though I was far too annoyed by the middle to be able to stomach the guns-and-dragons-for-forty-five-minutes climax. This is what white people do, they eradicate populations then overidealize them afterwards in order to make themselves feel better. This movie, like some reviewer said, is entirely Ferngully meets Dances With Wolves — and Dances With Wolves is probably the most demeaning two-and-a-half hours ever set to cinema. District 9, though not a great movie (it couldn't decide where allegory ended and action movie began) at least treated culture clash more realistically than Avatar, which ends up being your basic white male fantasy.

In terms of biology the movie was fascinating and detailed, though they don't even make an effort to make Pandora seem like an actual alien world. The template is an oversized, primordial earth. Notice how the dragon-things all have four wings — just like the first flying lizards on earth.

Anthropologically it was less than interesting. The Na'vi both facially and phonetically resemble indigenous post-slave-trade Caribbean Indians, so Pandora is basically Hispanola with flying mountains. Like in all white-man-goes-native movies, the male tribesmen are stubborn, strong and ugly (though easily bested by the hero in combat) and the women are fierce, oversexualized and all for a little miscegenation.

Movies like this tend to forget that native americans didn't have horses until Europeans brought them over, and the supposed natural connection between man and beast that Native Americans exemplify depended entirely on beasts being previously domesticated. People forget that a successfully culture must reshape the landscape around it, must subjugate the beasts of the field and the plants of the earth, this is how a species escapes extinction. It's the whole reason we have things like language and culture and bad movies. Humans are the dominant species in their ecosystem, the fantasy would be a humanoid society that is not the dominant species, in a society that exists symbiotically with other large creatures. Which sounds almost romantic if it weren't so unrealistic. In nature, you're on the top or you're food. And if you're food you're not going to be concerned with luxuries like love or morality. But human society, or at least the human society that makes movies like this, has been on the top so long I bet it just longs to be submissive to something. This is part of the reason why man is never the master of his own fate, we long to be controlled by something, be it god or nature or in this case some weird tree-based melding of the two.

Sigourney Weaver seemed like she was having a good time but became less and less interesting as the story got more and more predictable (though she was still given the best lines). The temple scenes were laughable reminders of the hilarious Zion rave party. And the climactic fight, for all its ecological ballyhoo, was all machismo and patriotism, designed to inspire way more recruitments for the marines corps than for Green Peace.

The 3d was fantastic though.

Depp, Mann, and Boys



Public Enemies. I will say, Mann is becoming a master of shooting in near-total darkness, you really felt the muzzle flare in all the night shots and it was deafeningly loud at times, which is all good. But it's true, his Dillinger is a complete blank. And I wonder about this, most of Mann's early movies were all fronted by big personalities: James Caan, deNiro, Tom Cruise, Will Smith, which sort of hid or ameliorated the fact that those characters were essentially the same blank. But the last few movies have been almost a deconstruction of that hero (the hero boiled down to mere competence, as grashupfer had been talking about). Has Colin Farrel ever been less interesting than in Miami Vice? His hair did most of his acting. And Johnny Depp, a master of mannerisms, here plays someone with no discernible personality. But Depp's been deconstructing himself as well, look at how deeply he inhabited the character of Ed Wood versus what he's been playing the last few years: he's consistently creating characters who are hollow shells. Shells of mannerisms.

I hope they come together to make Action Movie: where our hero Troubled Hero faces Cool Bad Guy to save Idealized Woman and succeeds or doesn't.

(or did I just describe Sin City and all its future iterations)

(actually the movie should be titled Adolescent Confusions About Masculinity)

Train Robbers, Brad Pitt, and Reticence in the American West



Finally saw The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Not a great movie but parts are worth it. I especially like the portrayal of James himself, a man alternately coarse and troubled -- the coarse parts being more convincing than the troubled parts since Brad Pitt's default expression seems to be one of troubled blankness. But when he's coarse and rude and jovial we get a real glimpse of the anger and sadness there, more deeply than when Pitt goes all puppy-eyes on us. I also liked how very little was spoken that meant what was said, speaking one's mind being a faux pas in this sort of manly universe. But almost nothing was said in the whole movie that was not an outright lie, an elision, a change of the subject, chit-chatty bullshit, etc. (An almost sole exception being Jesse's line about how when the soul peeks over the mountain it will be as loath to reenter the body as you would be to suck up your own puke.) I enjoy when movies show how little meaning corresponds to text, maybe because it seems so difficult from a screenwriter's perspective (I can only imagine how many notes the script must have contained.) Our culture is built on words, always has been, even our visual art needs to have paragraphs of explanation attached to it. It's nice to be reminded how small a part words play in the dance of meaning.

The character of James gradually morphed into your basic american movie tragic-hero: paranoid, moody, self-destructive. But there was something in the character (and in the story itself) that didn't quite lend itself to this pigeonholing, which made that section a little difficult to stomach. And once he's offscreen the movie sort of peters out. But it makes its point, which is the same question of imaginary fathers that McCarthy deals with. (Also notice how Jesse only starts to go south when his older brother, his authority figure, takes off.)

The narration was sub-par and seemed tacked on but what it was trying to do was frame the movie into the right genre: this is a historical essay, told in retrospect, with all the phrases and cadences of a documentary. A short story of a movie.

The visuals are more surreal than documentary though, and I kept noticing how in the framing of the outdoor shots the land seems to dominate the sky, grain and weeds and browns and dull greens pushing out the blue and clouds. It made me realize how much the camera cuts a hole out of reality, a hole where we are. I wouldn't be noticing these things in a movie that demanded I believe in it (cf: Kubrick's "not shooting reality but the photograph of reality"), another reason why this is more of an essay.

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The Desperate Ones

OSCARS ROUND-UP '08

Wherein I try to watch as many Oscar-nominated movies in as short a time as possible.



#1 is The Wrestler, which is hard to like or dislike, though thankfully Aronofsky has (at least temporarily) shed most of the the annoying tendencies of his last two movies. You could take the movie as the failure of the american dream (not the rags-to-riches one, the find-what-you-love-and-do-it-and-everyone-will-love-you-and-youll-make-oodles-of-cash one), but really it's more about its success -- this is what you actually want when wanting stuff. For ambition to be more important than family, health, etc. In characteristic movie fashion, professional ambition is put against family and love and stuff: movie-success, since movies all want to tell us that family and love and stuff are more important than anything. The scenes with his daughter feel phoned-in, the scenes with the stripper would have felt it too if not for the natural vivacity of the characters, old but still frisky. What is hard to stomach is his speech at the end, about the audience being his family -- we know it's a lie, he knows it's a lie, and yet there's supposed to be something triumphant about the ensuing battle. Up to that point he'd been at least trying, but then he gives up — and giving-up is essential to the American Dream, the stubborn, stupid, self-destructive American Dream. Aronofsky understands this, re: Requiem, but here it seems that he has to sell the dream back to us.

#2 was Frost/Nixon which does a lot to be obviously about what most plays are about anyway. Language as competition. As such it's the most thrilling movie about a conversation I can remember to have seen. Where it fails for me is in the character of Frost, who is portrayed far more weak/lucky than you think he should be -- I didn't feel at all the scenes where we're supposed to feel the mirrored connection between the two combatants, in fact Frost seemed to be everything that Nixon railed sympathetically against, which tips the scales way too far toward Nixon in the identification department. This seems to be more a failing of the directing than the portrayal, since Howard seems to be trying to squeeze every bit of capital-e Entertainment out of this script as possible. Hence Frost is weaker and less charming than we know he should be so it becomes more of a struggle for him to succeed. Which leaves you feeling at the end that Frost is simply lucky.

#3: In Bruges — very entertaining while not extremely good. The writing was fresh and jumpy (another playwright) but most of the scenes had pacing problems, abnormal pauses, the signs of a young/shaky director. And yet, very much worth watching, if only for the Colin Farel's character. You can't keep your eyes of him, he's so twitchy and excitable and juvenile and fun, one of those characters bigger than the story he's in. Also, best eyebrow acting since David Tennant. He picked up a Golden Globe for it too, but no Oscar nods. And as good as Heath Ledger's performance was, his Joker was still very much contained in his story. Curiously though, if the Best Supporting goes to Ledger this will be two years in a row of villains. But Chigurh will always be much more frightening.

#4: Milk, the best of the lot so far. It's a biopic, doesn't pretend to be more than a biopic, but hits everything evenly and well. Very balanced — entertaining without being sensational. And it avoids the big pitfalls of biopic: First it skips right over the rise/fall that makes most of them get weighty and predictable in the third act, since its main character dies right at the top (nothing to be thankful for but hey, makes for good cinema). Second, it skips the backstory, the inner life, the secret woes etc. Milk is portrayed as a public figure, there's nothing to him that isn't right there up front, which is part if not all of his charm. And the performances were all pitch-perfect, down to the smallest roles, each with his/her own fascination about them. Another benefit of biopics, even the bit parts are real people.

#5: Happy Go Lucky plays like a love letter to the social, so strange in a medium full of rugged individualists and tortured loners. I got bored by the middle of the movie while it started to be About Things; thankfully it didn't end up being about much. Poppy is unconcerned with the things the neurotic people around her are: ambition, career, procreation, pensions, adulthood, etc, which the movie portrays as things we use to stave off loneliness. Poppy staves off loneliness by being social, and so tries to help people. And thankfully the movie doesn't gloss over the fact that this is the result of number of neuroses of her own, but at the same time doesn't dwell on them. Some people like to help people. And we all can't be social (if we were we wouldn't be on the internet) but it's nice finally give a bit of thanks to those who are, 'cause where would we be without them really. This doesn't mean that we're gonna make eye contact on the street or anything.


#6: doubt was. alright? It was too long for its content and too short for its subject. Meryl Streep was better than I expected but worse and worse as it went on. Hoffman was capable. Viola Davis was the standout of course. Her scene kinda reminded me of the scene with William Holden's wife in Network — both small, almost throwaway scenes that do little to further the plot but add so much, taking you outside the little squabbles we're concerned with on screen and reminding us that maybe there are real people out there being affected.

Matt Smith, Dreams, and My Bid for Sci-Fi Immortality

Odd dream - I went to audition for a community theater-esque production of Tartuffe. Had to take a schoolbus to get there. I think it's been all this hemming and hawing about the new Doctor Who, which makes me think, hey, I'm older than that guy. I should play Doctor Who.


NOT MY DOCTOR




THE DOCTOR IS IN

Covers Mash-up vol3

Sprout & the Bean