Some Reviews
It's been more than a month since I've posted, mainly because I'd misplaced my password, and trying to recover it was a kafkaesque runaround in frustration. Having my server crash at work didn't help. I'm hoping that this will finally take care of things.
A few comments on movies Penny and I saw recently.
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There's a peculiarity in Amerikan movies dating back to the early to mid 1990s, and it's one I don't particularly appreciate. It has to do with sex. People in movies still have sex in Amerikan movies, to be sure, but they almost always leave their underwear on when they do it.
I think I know what's going on here, or at least how it started, and it has a lot to do with a certain cowardice that has developed in Hollywood since the vold revolutionary days of the cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.
About the time this trend started coincides pretty closely with the emergence of the unholy alliance between the radical feminist left and the fundamentalist Christian right in an effort to outlaw porn. Specifically, female nudity in movies was A.) an objectification of women for the gratification of horny men; B.) a means by which men got horny watching movies, thus contributing to rape, and C.) all of the above.
Now, I've never bought into this bullshit, and in fact, there is some evidence that in fact, the rise of Internet pornography has contributed to a decrease in the incidence of rape in recent years.
All of that aside, Hollywood still seems to insist that people fuck with their underwear on.
The latest example of this is the latest teenage horndog sex comedy, Superbad. It's from the same team of producers and actors that brought us The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. All three of these movies are wildly funny at times, but in the end, I've been bothered by all of them -- it's as if they want things both ways. The producers want to titillate you with sex (though more talking about it than seeing it), and at the same time, they want to deliver this ultra-consevative message about morality. Knocked Up was the worst of these -- it played out as if Dr. Phil wrote the script, as in "all women are goddesses and their every want and need is sacred; all men are scum, and they will remain so unless they go through the effort of changing every single detail about themselves, and maybe even if they do it anyway."
Fortunately, the subtext of Superbad wasn't nearly so obnoxious, mostly innocent stuff about the importance of sticking by your true friends.
But they still kept their underwear on to fuck.
*************************************************************************************
I really wanted to like Stardust. I really, really did. In fact, I tried like hell to like that movie. But in the end...
Stardust is a fantasy flick based on a story by Neil Gaiman. That alone gives it a lot of points in my book. Gaiman is one of the most brilliant writers to appear on the fantasy scene in decades -- never mind that his appearance came via graphic novels, particularly the long-running Sandman series.
The film was beautifully done in almost every way. The story and script were extremely engaging and emotionally affecting. The cinematography was breathtaking. The acting was uniformly excellent.
The premise in a nutshell -- Dude in a small English village during what appears to be the 18th or early 19th century is smitten with this haughty bitch and wants to do anything to get her to marry him. One night, they see a falling star land beyond a forbidden wall that separates England from the fantasy kingdom of Stormhold. She says she wants the fallen star, and he promises to fetch it for her.
It turns out, the star is actually a gorgeous woman, and a whole lot of people in Stormhold want her powers for themselves. Among them, a bunch of evil witches...
And therein is the problem. There are four separate witch characters in the film, and they are all depicted as supremely and thoroughly evil, without one shred of redeeming qualities among any of them.
Well, I'm a witch. And I object.
OK, I can understand an evil witch -- fairy tale archetype and all that. But four of them? All of them completely devoid of any good qualities whatsoever?
Sorry folks, but to this day, people still lose their jobs over the Wiccan religion. People still have their children taken away in custody battles -- in fact, divorce lawyers are still considered to be not doing their jobs if they don't bring it up as an issue. There are still fundamentalist assholes out there who do violence against witches or their property -- like the Wiccan priestess who came home in South Carolina not too long ago to find all of her pets beheaded.
I can kind of understand the depiction of the White Witch in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. After all, C.S. Lewis was an evangelical Christian, and you wouldn't expect him to have any fondness toward witches. And he started writing his Narnia series in the 1930s -- no one had ever heard of Gerald Gardner back then, and he probably hadn't heard much about the Comasonry movement that helped give rise to Wicca. You could say he had an excuse.
Neil Gaiman has no such excuse. A fantasy writer living today, especially one so literate and well-educated as he is, has certainly heard about Wicca and what it is. Hell, he probably personally knows some Wiccans. And none of his work gives any evidence that he is some kind of raving fundamentalist. He just knows better than to do what he did.
So I ultimately can't say I liked Stardust or can recommend it to anybody.
But to be fair, Penny loved the movie and recommends it to everyone. And she's also a witch. Not at all like the witches you see in Stardust either.
************************************************************************************
On to something I did like. I found the science-fiction movie Sunshine to be very refreshing. What was particularly refreshing about it was a science-fiction script that wasn't written by someone who flunked science in high school and therefore has hated science ever since.
The premise -- the earth's sun is dying at some unspecified date in the future, though not real far into the future. As the sun fades, the earth has been experiencing non-stop winter. In an attempt to "reboot" the sun, an expedition was sent seven years earlier to the sun to drop a huge atomic bomb into it and see if the flames can be rekindled, as it were. It disappeared without a trace. Now the spaceship Icarus Two is carrying "all of the earth's remaining fissile materials" in one last attempt to restart the sun before it dies completely.
Now this is not a perfect film. There are some cliches. If you're a moderately well-read science-fiction fan, you just know that they're going to find Icarus One, and some disaster will befall because of it. And I heard some complaints that the ending was ambiguous and hard to understand -- personally, I didn't have much trouble figuring it out, and it was certainly a lot less difficult than, say, a classic like 2001: A Space Oddysey. Some of the images could be attributed to psychological fantasy on the part of the characters that are still alive at this point, but you're set up for it pretty well through the course of the film. Also, viewers should be forewarned -- the tone of this film is very dark, and a lot of disturbing things happen during the course of the story.
There were a lot of things I liked about the film. The writer obviously did some homework and researched how a spaceship might be designed to make an expedition to the sun and how it might operate. The film incorporated a lot of what scientists know about the nature of space near the sun. The argument is made that the mission must be derailed -- that if God intended for mankind to become extinct, then it is blasphemous to resist that fate -- but the characters who make this argument are not portrayed sympathetically, and they are definitely not the good guys. And in the end, the solution to the problem is definitely a technological one, not an anti-technological one.
And that may be the most refreshing thing of all about Sunshine.
A few comments on movies Penny and I saw recently.
*************************************************************************************
There's a peculiarity in Amerikan movies dating back to the early to mid 1990s, and it's one I don't particularly appreciate. It has to do with sex. People in movies still have sex in Amerikan movies, to be sure, but they almost always leave their underwear on when they do it.
I think I know what's going on here, or at least how it started, and it has a lot to do with a certain cowardice that has developed in Hollywood since the vold revolutionary days of the cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.
About the time this trend started coincides pretty closely with the emergence of the unholy alliance between the radical feminist left and the fundamentalist Christian right in an effort to outlaw porn. Specifically, female nudity in movies was A.) an objectification of women for the gratification of horny men; B.) a means by which men got horny watching movies, thus contributing to rape, and C.) all of the above.
Now, I've never bought into this bullshit, and in fact, there is some evidence that in fact, the rise of Internet pornography has contributed to a decrease in the incidence of rape in recent years.
All of that aside, Hollywood still seems to insist that people fuck with their underwear on.
The latest example of this is the latest teenage horndog sex comedy, Superbad. It's from the same team of producers and actors that brought us The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. All three of these movies are wildly funny at times, but in the end, I've been bothered by all of them -- it's as if they want things both ways. The producers want to titillate you with sex (though more talking about it than seeing it), and at the same time, they want to deliver this ultra-consevative message about morality. Knocked Up was the worst of these -- it played out as if Dr. Phil wrote the script, as in "all women are goddesses and their every want and need is sacred; all men are scum, and they will remain so unless they go through the effort of changing every single detail about themselves, and maybe even if they do it anyway."
Fortunately, the subtext of Superbad wasn't nearly so obnoxious, mostly innocent stuff about the importance of sticking by your true friends.
But they still kept their underwear on to fuck.
*************************************************************************************
I really wanted to like Stardust. I really, really did. In fact, I tried like hell to like that movie. But in the end...
Stardust is a fantasy flick based on a story by Neil Gaiman. That alone gives it a lot of points in my book. Gaiman is one of the most brilliant writers to appear on the fantasy scene in decades -- never mind that his appearance came via graphic novels, particularly the long-running Sandman series.
The film was beautifully done in almost every way. The story and script were extremely engaging and emotionally affecting. The cinematography was breathtaking. The acting was uniformly excellent.
The premise in a nutshell -- Dude in a small English village during what appears to be the 18th or early 19th century is smitten with this haughty bitch and wants to do anything to get her to marry him. One night, they see a falling star land beyond a forbidden wall that separates England from the fantasy kingdom of Stormhold. She says she wants the fallen star, and he promises to fetch it for her.
It turns out, the star is actually a gorgeous woman, and a whole lot of people in Stormhold want her powers for themselves. Among them, a bunch of evil witches...
And therein is the problem. There are four separate witch characters in the film, and they are all depicted as supremely and thoroughly evil, without one shred of redeeming qualities among any of them.
Well, I'm a witch. And I object.
OK, I can understand an evil witch -- fairy tale archetype and all that. But four of them? All of them completely devoid of any good qualities whatsoever?
Sorry folks, but to this day, people still lose their jobs over the Wiccan religion. People still have their children taken away in custody battles -- in fact, divorce lawyers are still considered to be not doing their jobs if they don't bring it up as an issue. There are still fundamentalist assholes out there who do violence against witches or their property -- like the Wiccan priestess who came home in South Carolina not too long ago to find all of her pets beheaded.
I can kind of understand the depiction of the White Witch in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. After all, C.S. Lewis was an evangelical Christian, and you wouldn't expect him to have any fondness toward witches. And he started writing his Narnia series in the 1930s -- no one had ever heard of Gerald Gardner back then, and he probably hadn't heard much about the Comasonry movement that helped give rise to Wicca. You could say he had an excuse.
Neil Gaiman has no such excuse. A fantasy writer living today, especially one so literate and well-educated as he is, has certainly heard about Wicca and what it is. Hell, he probably personally knows some Wiccans. And none of his work gives any evidence that he is some kind of raving fundamentalist. He just knows better than to do what he did.
So I ultimately can't say I liked Stardust or can recommend it to anybody.
But to be fair, Penny loved the movie and recommends it to everyone. And she's also a witch. Not at all like the witches you see in Stardust either.
************************************************************************************
On to something I did like. I found the science-fiction movie Sunshine to be very refreshing. What was particularly refreshing about it was a science-fiction script that wasn't written by someone who flunked science in high school and therefore has hated science ever since.
The premise -- the earth's sun is dying at some unspecified date in the future, though not real far into the future. As the sun fades, the earth has been experiencing non-stop winter. In an attempt to "reboot" the sun, an expedition was sent seven years earlier to the sun to drop a huge atomic bomb into it and see if the flames can be rekindled, as it were. It disappeared without a trace. Now the spaceship Icarus Two is carrying "all of the earth's remaining fissile materials" in one last attempt to restart the sun before it dies completely.
Now this is not a perfect film. There are some cliches. If you're a moderately well-read science-fiction fan, you just know that they're going to find Icarus One, and some disaster will befall because of it. And I heard some complaints that the ending was ambiguous and hard to understand -- personally, I didn't have much trouble figuring it out, and it was certainly a lot less difficult than, say, a classic like 2001: A Space Oddysey. Some of the images could be attributed to psychological fantasy on the part of the characters that are still alive at this point, but you're set up for it pretty well through the course of the film. Also, viewers should be forewarned -- the tone of this film is very dark, and a lot of disturbing things happen during the course of the story.
There were a lot of things I liked about the film. The writer obviously did some homework and researched how a spaceship might be designed to make an expedition to the sun and how it might operate. The film incorporated a lot of what scientists know about the nature of space near the sun. The argument is made that the mission must be derailed -- that if God intended for mankind to become extinct, then it is blasphemous to resist that fate -- but the characters who make this argument are not portrayed sympathetically, and they are definitely not the good guys. And in the end, the solution to the problem is definitely a technological one, not an anti-technological one.
And that may be the most refreshing thing of all about Sunshine.
posted by Da Zedman at 9:16 PM
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