Popeye Doyle bought the house on Archer Avenue in the winter of his 35th year. Over the next decade, he and his wife, Morticia Addams, had three children: Derek Zoolander, Emma Woodhouse, and Anthony Adams. And then they separated. Morticia falls in love with Roger Murtaugh. Meanwhile, Anthony is in love with Emma, who’s married to Peter Venkman but having an affair with Derek’s rival Hansel.
Back when the Dude had a radio show, he was inadvertently responsible for a massacre at a restaurant. One of the victims was Mindy, which caused Mork to lose his mind and think he was a medieval knight. Fortunately, with the help of Mr. Noodle’s brother Mr. Noodle, Mork finds love with Ellen James, and the Dude finds the Holy Grail.
All Philip Marlowe wants to do is run a nightclub, but things start going awry after the infamous child murderer Hans Beckert is arrested there. Jerry Durrance shows up with Marlowe’s old flame, Joan of Arc. Meanwhile, the Invisible Man and Cesare the Somnambulist team up to give him trouble, and Kasper Gutman wants to buy the place out from under him.
My favorite film of 2009 was about a kid who travels to an island on which the components of his psyche are represented by Tony Soprano, Claire Fisher, Eli Sunday, Idi Amin, Sally Ragdoll, and Colonel Frank Fitts.
The truth of the matter is that Donnie Darko and the Joker have been in love all along, much to the chagrin of Mia Thermopolis and Jen Lindley.
But the important question is, who really shot Major Reisman? Everyone thinks it was Scottie Ferguson, but George Washington McLintock seems to know something he’s not telling.
Okay, so here we are in late January. The Golden Globes have happened already, and the Oscar nominees are announced in a week. We’re heading into the heart of awards season. Therefore, I’ve decided I should go ahead and warn you: I have no intention of blogging about any of it.
(and no, I don’t just say that because for the past couple of weeks I’ve had trouble finding time to blog at all)
Now don’t get me wrong- I’ll probably watch the Oscars. I might even, if I feel like it, post an entry afterward, but it will be about who wore the best clothes and how the hosts did and where the dead people montage fell on the touching/cheesy spectrum (and does Vic Chesnutt get a spot? Because he was really memorable in Sling Blade), because these are the reasons why one watches the Oscars. What I’m not going to do is pretend that the Oscars is an experience that has anything to do with film.
If the Academy chose the most popular films every year, there wouldn’t be much of a point to watching, but at least there would be a discernible purpose (even if it was a questionable one, like legitimizing lowest-common-denominator entertainment with a meaningless statue). On the other hand, if the films that won tended to be those that are widely regarded as the best by critics, the Oscars would gain a lot more respect amongst people like me, but we’d have to tune in to the Sundance Channel or wherever to watch the damn show, because it sure wouldn’t be on network TV.
But the Oscar dinosaur doesn’t do either of those things. Instead, it becomes more predictable each year, giving the big prizes to films that contain enough elements from some sort of Master Best Picture Checklist:
Is it the epic story of an underdog?
Is it a reasonably good effort by someone we should have honored years ago when they were doing their best work?
Does it involve disability or perhaps disease?
Does it make big cultural problems like racism or poverty seem solvable through individual goodwill and effort?
Is it about the holocaust?
If you can answer yes to at least three of these questions, and you also have Weinstein or Warners throwing cash around in your name, you’re on the way to a Best Picture Oscar.
And while I’m ranting, let’s talk about institutional homophobia. I don’t know what the age breakdown of the Academy voters is like, but I hope they’re kind of old, because that’s the best possible explanation I can come up with. In the past 20 years, there hasn’t been a single Best Picture winner which featured a sympathetic queer character in a major role, despite nominations for The Crying Game, Four Weddings and a Funeral, As Good As It Gets, The Hours, Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Little Miss Sunshine, and Milk. I’m not saying all of those films should have won (or that they’re all fantastic portrayals of LGTBQ characters), but certainly one of them ought to have won at some point.* Furthermore, in that same span of time there have been two Best Picture winners that feature self-loathing queer murderers, and one that used unsympathetic gay characters to represent the growing decadence of 13th-Century British royalty.**
Within this unfortunate context, one wonders if the Academy voter sees the many actors awarded for playing queer (Tom Hanks, Hilary Swank, Sean Penn, etc.) as categorically similar to those awarded for portraying the psychologically unbalanced or mentally disabled (thus accounting for Hanks’ early ’90’s twofer). Of course, the Academy also loves it when beautiful women are deglamorized to show their “dedication” to a part, so the very best thing you can do to win, as Nicole Kidman and Charlize Theron will tell you, is to play a mentally unstable queer woman who’s uglier than you (and playing a real person always helps too).
Anyway, I apologize if this entry is particularly long and disjointed, but I’ll get back to my point: I refuse to blog about the Oscars (or the Golden Globes, which are so much more pointless that I haven’t bothered addressing them here). I will, however, try to blog more in general.
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*Specifically, Brokeback Mountain should have beat Crash, at the very least. I mean, I thought Milk was far superior to Slumdog Millionaire, but at least Slumdog has fans. I don’t know anyone, critic or layperson, who got anything out of Crash. Seriously, Crash? That one single shot in Brokeback Mountain where Heath Ledger stands up angrily in front of a sky full of fireworks has more cinematic interest in it than the entirety of Crash.
**A special prize to the first reader who names all three of these films.
Amanda Bowers is a psychotherapist and aspiring writer of young adult fiction. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and dog-child, Ruby. When not writing, she enjoys flash-mobbing, dream interpretation, and coloring on her walls.
As if watching Dexter isn’t enough with its colorful setting in bright, multi-cultural Miami and its dark musical motifs and darker characters. As if it isn’t enough to find yourself instantly intrigued by the idea of rooting for a serial killer, and as the series unfolds, to find yourself consistently rooting for this character and enjoying the intricate way that the writers and actor Michael C. Hall bring the many layers of Dexter’s past and present to light. As if it isn’t enough to have original plot lines and award-winning guest stars such as John Lithgow, the writers of Dexter still find time to create and firmly support the development of character Debra Morgan, Dexter’s police detective little sister as played by Jennifer Carpenter.
Hardly anyone could introduce Deb’s character better than Dexter himself. After listening to a voicemail she left him in the first episode, he tells us, “That’s my foul-mouthed foster sister, Debra. She has a big heart but won’t let anyone see it. She’s the only person in the world who loves me. I think that’s nice. I don’t have feelings about anything. But if I could have feelings at all, I’d have them for Deb.” This dialogue says as much about Dexter as it does Deb and the ever-important role she plays in his life and on the show.
When you first meet Debra Morgan, or Deb as she’s most often called, she’s scantily clad while working an undercover prostitution sting and desperately wanting to get in on the action of being a homicide police detective. It would be easy enough to dismiss her character as someone who has mismatched her true talents and her career aspirations given her hooker attire, modelesque beauty, and her constant need to check out her hunches with Dexter rather than trust her gut. And then when she proves herself more than competent as an officer and rises to the rank of homicide detective for the Miami Metro Police Department, it would have been easy enough for the writers to pigeon-hole Deb as “one of the guys,” a hard-nosed, explicative-dropping ball-breaker. But instead, they have consistently chosen to write Deb as a multi-faceted character – so much so, that by the fourth season she is easily one of the strongest characters (and actors!) on the show.
In a throwback to what Joss Whedon got right about his female-empowering character Buffy Summers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, what I most appreciate about Deb is that she is physically strong while also being emotionally vulnerable. Yet just like in real life, the reverse is also sometimes true – Deb is capable of portraying great psychological strength while struggling with her lack of physical prowess in comparison to other characters trying to [fill in the blank with malicious details here] . . . yes, she’s a favorite target for suspense and drama on the show.
When her colleagues are exhausted and out of ideas, Deb’s intellect and determination help the department find their next lead on a difficult case. When everyone else realizes she might be making a big mistake, Deb plunges ahead, more willing to be wrong than to be invisible or pretend she doesn’t feel something when she does. When faced with complicated ethical choices, Deb carefully weighs her loyalty and her integrity, usually unwilling to sacrifice either while figuring out a compromise that still let’s her sleep at night. And when Dexter is out of line, Deb doesn’t hesitate to reel him in: “I love you, bro, but sometimes you’re a fucking ‘tard.”
Deb is intense and unwavering, yet as highlighted above, she still knows how to take and make a joke. Although at first her foul mouth seems like a bit of a caricature, Jennifer Carpenter owns that aspect of Deb’s character so much that it’s not only one of those familiar things you can count on when you cozy up to your TV on Sunday night, but Deb also serves out happy helpings of much-needed comic relief! In one of her quintessential Deb moments, she delivers the following line after Dex anxiously confides to her that his girlfriend Rita is pregnant: “A baby? A mother-fucking, rolly-poly, chubby-cheeked shit machine? Are you kidding me?” And she delivers this line with a joyous, big-toothed grin. As an audience, we all have permission now to be happy for Dexter. Deb has that kind of power.
Deb’s fiercely loyal to her family, but not at the expense of being devoted to her job. She’s an incredibly intuitive detective, yet still vulnerable to letting her personal feelings get in the way of solving a case. She weeps her heart out in one scene and kicks ass in the next and it doesn’t feel at all unrealistic. It’s no short order to portray all of the seemingly contradictory facets of Debra Morgan’s character. But award-winning actress Jennifer Carpenter more than rises to the occasion, turning Deb into a fleshed out person loved by her fictional character companions and TV-viewing audience alike. The writers and Jennifer obviously understand that real people are always walking contradictions. As such, she has become one of the most vital female characters brought to the TV screen in recent years (and there’s been tough competition from ground-breaking shows such as Battlestar Gallactica and Mad Men). Debra Morgan refuses to fit nicely in any of the oft-prescribed stereotypes written for women, and in doing so she inspires her viewing audience with her bold, crass, intelligent maneuvers while also being relatable as someone who gets her heart broken, makes mistakes, and (falsely) feels as if she’s “fucked up” beyond redemption.
Perhaps most importantly, Deb serves as Dexter’s foil and someone he consistently leans on to keep him planted in humanity. Where Dexter is calculated, Deb is impulsive. Where Dex is logical and seemingly incapable of expressing human emotion, Deb is spewing emotion all over the place in tears, f-bombs, and lusty encounters. Where Dex doesn’t trust anyone other than Deb, Deb lets people into her life and her heart over and over again, even when that decision is unwise. However, as a crackerjack, brother-sister, blood spatter analyst and homicide detective team, Dex and Deb do have one thing in common: they are both cunningly good at nabbing the bad guy by the end of the season.
You might be having a bad day today. Maybe work has been rough lately, or maybe you don’t have a job at the moment and you’re trying to find one. Maybe you’re worried about healthcare, or war, or social justice. Whatever you’re afraid of, there’s one thing you don’t have to fear: dinosaurs. Despite all the problems we face in 2010, dinosaur attacks are not one of them. Why is that, you ask? Because we have Superman, and Superman’s got the dinosaur problem covered.
Lois is in full-on His Girl Friday mood in this one, cute little hat and all. The fact that Perry White sends her to the museum when he hears the dinosaur might be alive strikes me as a little shady. There’s frequently this sense in Superman stories that everyone knows what kind of narrative this is, and what steps have to be taken for the story to move along. Along the same lines, but even shadier, is the engineer who “accidentally” drops an oil can into the refrigeration machinery. My personal theory is that this is the first animated appearance of Lex Luthor, who disguised himself as a refrigeration engineer to purposely unleash the dinosaur on Metropolis. My favorite thing about this whole sequence is the thermometer which just says “Freezing/Melting/Danger” in lieu of actual numbers.
Also, that shot of the dinosaur’s eyes opening? I love that. Possibly the single best moment in a Fleischer Superman cartoon. Certainly the creepiest.
This creature perfectly embodies the way dinosaurs were always portrayed in the first half of the 20th Century. He’s not recognizable as any particular species. He’s huge, flabby, lumbering, and seems deliberately destructive. He also has a particular interest in eating people, as demonstrated when he gobbles up Lois, who then has to be fished out of his mouth! Talk about cutting it a little close, Superman.
As wet and gross as Lois probably feels after that, she’s still presumably better off than the people whose houses are directly in front of the dam. That just seems terribly ill-advised, even if dinosaur attacks weren’t a foreseeable risk.
On the obligatory Daily Planet front page at the dénouement, you can see that the monster has been put on display in the zoo. Do you suppose that’s regarded as a permanent solution? As frequently as supervillains attack Metropolis, is it really wise to keep a giant dinosaur around, just waiting to be let loose as a distraction while you go out and rob some banks? In this pre-Endangered Species Act era, you’d think they’d just kill it. But maybe Superman persuaded them not to- after all, he and the dinosaur are both the last of their kind.
I can’t really call myself an animation blogger, but I’m certainly a film blogger who has a vocal love of animation (particularly classic American animation). As such, I felt obligated to see The Princess and the Frog, Disney’s return to hand drawn musical fairy tales, but I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic. The trailer was a jumble of too many disparate elements, and to be honest I was a little annoyed they didn’t hire someone more daring than Randy Newman to do the music. I love Newman’s work, and I know he knows his way around the music of New Orleans (and everywhere else), but it would’ve been nice to see the job go to someone younger, hipper, and maybe, you know, black.
Newman does, of course, pull through just fine. The music isn’t knock-your-socks-off spectacular, but it’s fun while it’s happening and it moves the story along. In addition to the swinging jazz that plays in the New Orleans sequences, there’s also some zydeco (performed by fireflies) when the story moves out into the bayou, and a great (spiritually nonspecific) gospel number by the wise woman character, Mama Odie. I was disappointed that the Shadow Man’s big number wasn’t a little stronger, because villain songs are often my favorite. “Friends on the Other Side” starts out great, but it peters out for too long when the tarot readings start, and the climax seems to come from nowhere.
The story follows a pretty simple romance/quest/overcoming adversity formula, but it stays pretty engaging throughout. Disney also does their best to make amends for some of the damaging messages they’ve injected into the culture in the past. The explicitly stated moral of this story is that you have to work to build the life you want- you can’t just wish on a star or wait for your prince to come. I loved how they deal with Prince Naveen’s acknowledgment that his pampered upbringing has left him with almost no useful skills. I also thought it was a nice touch that the spoiled rich girl, Charlotte, turns out to be a decent person and a good friend, just a problematic one. Making her a villain in the end would have been both easier and far less interesting.
As far as the race thing which many people (myself included) were just waiting for Disney to screw up, I think they did okay. The movie feels a little focus-grouped at times, but I’d call that an improvement over egregious racism. If the protagonist were white, the portrayals of the villain and helpful wise woman as black would be unfortunate, but with a majority-black cast everything seems pretty balanced out. The ambiguity of Prince Naveen’s race is a little strange, particularly in the way he seems to be regarded by the film’s version of 1920’s society as an acceptable partner for either black or white women. Regardless of where he’s from (my guess was somewhere in French-colonized North Africa), it’s hard to believe that the Americans he meets wouldn’t want to immediately box him into a racial identity they understand and keep him there. Perhaps this is meant to be his aristocratic privilege mixed with the unique cultural dynamic of New Orleans?
The look of the film was beautiful, taking the old school Disney aesthetic and bringing it adeptly into the 21st Century. I loved the character designs, except for the Cajun firefly, who was a little too overtly silly-looking for me. Mama Odie was especially great, particularly the way her skin hangs off her face in the manner of the very old. Charlotte’s design was also a standout. You can see how she’d be regarded as a pretty girl, but her pug face has none of the classic Disney beauty about it. Tiana, in contrast, is immediately recognizable (for better or worse) as a “Disney Princess,” despite any efforts to give her recognizably black facial features. The frogs that she and Naveen transform into capture their human personalities to an impressive degree, while still maintaining their frogness (frogocity?).
Marketing aside, will The Princess and the Frog stand the test of time and be regarded as a Disney classic? Eh. Who knows what that even means anymore. It will certainly stand up better than anything they’ve made since The Lion King (all respect to the dedicated fans of The Emperor’s New Groove and Lilo and Stitch), which is no small feat. I hope that it leads to more big-scale animated musicals, and particularly more that are set in the last hundred years, and more protagonists of color. For all the problems people have with the stuff Disney produces (many of which I agree with), I’d love to see them go back to being a force to be reckoned with in the animation world, instead of continuing to focus their energy in the realms of television and pop music.
Kati Corlew is pursuing a PhD in Cultural Community Psychology at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa. Her research interests include social and environmental justice, poverty, and discrimination. Prophetic aliens from the planet Narn are of natural interest to her.
When Dustin put the call out for guest writers to do character portraits, I didn’t even have to think two seconds before deciding mine would be on G’Kar from Babylon 5. If you’re unfamiliar with the show, Babylon 5 is both the best and the worst scifi serial there ever was. The show takes off to a bumpy start with a feature length pilot that falls victim to some of the worst dialogue of all time. The acting isn’t much better. In fact, some of it is much worse. But for those who are contemplating watching the series for the first time (Dustin, I’m looking at you), I would highly encourage you to suffer through this first episode (and hell, the first season) (and hell, probably even the season after that) with good graces and possibly alcohol. Because…
The series as a whole is like a series of really engaging novels! The series as a whole is witty and thought-provoking with enthralling storylines, amazing arcs of character development, and provocative satires and commentary on our human experience, particularly our raging political battles, rebellions, revolutions and subversions. The series as a whole builds upon itself, including upon that rough beginning, to create an epic journey for the characters and viewers alike.
And plus… there’s G’Kar. G’Kar is a shining spot of awesome during the early WTF phase of the show—and then he just keeps getting better.
Two things you must know about the show in order to appreciate G’Kar:
1) Babylon 5 is the UN in space. Interplanetary wars have reached their critical mass, and so humans (America), along with a small number of other advanced civilizations (Europe) band together to create a diplomatic space station to figure out a way to peace. They had to do this a few times because Babylons 1-4 blew up or got disappeared.
2) G’Kar is the ambassador for the planet Narn (Africa), which prior to the show had been subjugated and devastated by the Centauri Republic (the British Empire). Narn has been freed now that their homeworld is bleak and barren and mined of all resources; and the Centauri Republic is in decline. The Narn blame the Centauri for ruining their planet, and the Centauri blame the Narn for their declining empire because the whole Narn fiasco was so expensive and didn’t further their glory at all. Got it? Narn + Centauri = No Love.
Narn ambassador G’Kar and Centauri ambassador Londo Milari are mirror characters. Of course they hate each other, given their planets’ history, and they strike off on two very different paths, but they’re basically the same person on two different journeys. They both mourn for the past glory or beauty of their homeworld; both their jobs on B5 are to scheme the other planets into helping them back to the former glory or beauty; and neither of them believes this is possible. Both G’Kar and Londo believe that their whole purpose on Babylon 5 is a fool’s errand which they must nonetheless strive to fulfill, and so they pay lip service to their ambassadorial duties, they drink and carouse and generally live the lives of ne’er-do-wells, and they take great joy in their highly amusing mutual hatred. (These two make the early episodes entertaining even without alcohol.)
G’Kar begins the show as a disillusioned, apathetic caricature of who he thinks he should be. He rails against the injustice done his world in a close approximation of sincerity, knowing that all his screaming will never be truly heard and all his efforts will never amount to anything. In a bit of extraordinarily impressive acting for someone who is covered with foam alien-face make-up, G’Kar’s resignation and despair bleed through the exaggerated outrage that he has become too numb to actually feel.
The turning point for his character takes place with heartbreakingly poor timing. G’Kar and Londo come to terms, of sorts, and G’Kar, for the first time since Narn’s subjugation, has hope. He believes that his efforts at B5 just might do something after all. This turning point is short lived, because Londo has also just experienced a turning point. Londo has learned the hard way that the road to hell is paved with slightly shady, questionable and self-serving intentions. A series of minor choices, all made in one grouchy fit or another, have culminated in Londo (kinda accidentally) spearheading the re-conquering of Narn. Genocide and internment camps ensue. Londo has no choice but to continue down this terrible path.
His mirror G’Kar continues down another. With his people enslaved and his hope smashed to pieces, G’Kar does the only thing a reasonable person would do: he takes a bunch of alien PCP and goes to kill Londo. Lucky for him, he is stopped and thrown in jail. As with other people traveling down G’Kar’s path (Mandela), jail transforms G’Kar. In the solitude of his rage and betrayal and despair, G’Kar in a way rediscovers, but in a way truly discovers for the first time, the source of his spiritual belief and the way in which he can free his people even in the midst of their slavery. He comes to understand the true nature of human – alien interactions, even the darkest elements. He transcends the scheming politics of his position, and seeks instead a much higher purpose.
He begins writing and speaking so as to free the minds and the spirits of his people. He campaigns endlessly, puts his life in danger, and trades his pride for the freedom of his planet. From his beginnings as an ambassador of uncertain repute he becomes the moral compass, the grounded extremist, the spiritual guide, and the truth-speaker of the series, all the while remaining the same G’Kar in wit and personality that we knew from the start.
G’Kar also says my favorite line of the whole series. I made a t-shirt out of it, even. At one point, he confronts Londo about his role in the genocide. Londo tells him there was nothing he could have done because at that point, no Centauri would have paid attention if he had tried to stop it. G’Kar screams, “It doesn’t matter if they don’t even listen. You have an obligation to speak.”
And he is heard.
Londo, his greatest enemy and his mirror opposite has heard him. All of the Narn have heard him. Other, unaffected, civilizations have heard him. And I heard him. Because his is a language that speaks to the heart.
So, yes, it’s true, I have a bit of an inter-species crush on G’Kar. I maintain that this is not creepy, although I don’t exactly have any good arguments to back up that assertion. G’Kar’s plotline in B5 weaves throughout much greater (and other minor) plotlines, many of which are equally compelling—some perhaps more so for their intricacy and scope. But G’Kar’s story is the one that engaged me from the beginning, carried my interest through the early quagmire of rough dialogue and bad acting, and finally captured my heart with the tragic beauty of his journey to true freedom.
And other stuff on the show is good too, so check it out. Possibly with alcohol.
When I was a kid, I loved the classic Star Trek, and this movie reminded me why. It’s big, colorful, fast-paced and reasonably smart—although I wish the movie was just a little bit smarter. Zachary Quinto is a fantastic Spock, and Chris Pine is a reasonably okay Kirk (there’s really no fair way to judge anyone who’s not Shatner in that role). Karl Urban is absolutely phenomenal as Bones (always my favorite character), and if he’d had more to do, the film would probably be higher on this list.
9. The Princess and the Frog
There’s a full review coming, so I won’t say too much here. In short, I was pleasantly surprised by how good this is. The animation is gorgeous, the music is occasionally very good, and the politics are as good as could reasonably be expected. I’ll definitely watch this again sometime, which is more than I can say for Avatar.
I’ve always loved scifi/fantasy stories that background the adventure in favor of believable characterization and drama. Largely for that reason, this is my favorite by far of the Harry Potter series. It’s a movie about good wizards battling bad wizards, sure, but more than that it’s a movie about being a teenager, and it captures the joy and confusion of that age perfectly. All that, plus a fantastic turn by Jim Broadbent.
7. Up
Ed Asner is the gift that keeps on giving. He’s been the go-to crusty old man for about 30 years, and he’s still alive and continuing to perfect the role. In Up, he’s holds his own, voice-wise, with a cute little fat kid and probably the funniest canine character ever put on screen. Of course, this being Pixar, there are also mindblowing visuals and an outside-the-box story. There’s also a real emotional core to the film, particularly in that opening montage that makes everyone (everyone!) cry.
6. Drag Me to Hell
After the disaster that was Spider-Man 3, Sam Raimi returned to his horror/comedy roots and proved he’s still got it in him. This might be my favorite horror film of the past decade (the only other contender is 2008’s Let the Right One In, a film so different it’s hard to compare). Drag Me to Hell is scary, suspenseful, occasionally disgusting, and frequently hilarious. In other words, it’s everything a horror movie ought to be. A moment of Satanic sunlight in a dark decade of reprehensible Torture Porn.
Wedged into this year of big, noisy, frequently dumb scifi movies comes this weird little cerebral piece, like a lost film from 1974, to show us what the genre is capable of. The writing is unapologetically complex, the effects are excellent but never distracting, and Sam Rockwell blows it out of the water in an insanely demanding role.
Lynn Shelton’s film deals with some heavy issues without ever feeling even slightly bogged down: gender, sexuality, friendship, art, the social divide between bohemian and bourgeoisie. Josh Leonard, Mark Duplass, and Alicia Delmore all do a great job building their characters and their relationships with each other through extraordinarily believable (apparently improvised) dialogue. This is also one of the best portrayals of awkwardness I’ve ever seen outside of any version of The Office, but unlike that show, it never makes you wince and turn away.
3. Fantastic Mr. Fox
Every inch a Wes Anderson movie, despite its cast of woodland creatures. George Clooney does that thing he’s so good at, his cleverness and charm perfectly embodied in fox form. Anderson regulars like Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray find their dapper inner animals as well. Meryl Streep’s vocal performance is strangely lackluster (which is particularly disappointing after she totally nailed the Julia Child role) but passable. The puppets and sets are beautiful, the animation is lovingly old school, and the plot has some depth to it while still appealing to children (or at least the ones I saw it with).
Big, sprawling, occasionally messy, but beautiful to behold. A hell of a lot of talking, punctuated with people getting killed with guns and knives, baseball bats and bare hands. A love letter to war movies, but also a film with something to say about war. I get annoyed with film nerds who write negative reviews of Tarantino films that can be summed up as, “I get every one of your obscure cinematic references (behold as I list them) and therefore I hate you and your films.” If Tarantino’s esoteric allusions were a problem, it would be the people who don’t get them that hate the films, which doesn’t seem to be the case. I get maybe about half of them myself, but I just like watching what he builds out of such disparate pieces.
I’m extremely impatient to see this film again. It’s so unlike anything else I’m used to that I have a hard time trusting my opinion of it based on one viewing. These are the things I do know: It captures the spirit of the book perfectly. The creatures are wonderfully constructed and beautifully acted. It’s unlike anything else I’ve ever seen (including Spike Jonze’s other films, which I always found overrated). Parts of it almost made me cry, but it left me feeling genuinely uplifted. This was a movie I never would have thought (prior to seeing the trailers) could possibly be good, and yet it was basically perfect. This movie makes me want to have kids, just so I can one day show it to them.
What is there left that hasn’t been said about Avatar? First of all, yes, it’s gorgeous to look at. James Cameron really puts the emphasis on immersing you in a weirdly beautiful world of fluorescent trees, glowing dandelion pods, and flying dragons. The big blue people are beautiful (and yes, sexy) as well, moving through the jungle with preternatural grace. The fight scenes are big, but they’re not poorly edited and impossible to follow as in the style of so many action movies these days.
Second, to agree with the second point everyone else has raised, the story is mindnumbingly predictable post-colonial white guilt claptrap. The dialogue is almost George Lucas bad, and everything that’s going to happen is telegraphed ages in advance (sure, let’s spend a whole scene describing some great heroic act that only happens every few generations- you don’t suppose the hero will do that very thing before the end of the movie, do you?). I agree with the comparisons to Ferngully and Dune and Dances with Wolves (although I admit I’ve never watched Dances with Wolves, I’ve pretty much got the idea). The one comparison that sprang to mind which I haven’t heard anyone else make is to The Dark Crystal, in which the creators got so wrapped up in building a beautiful and internally consistent world from scratch that they didn’t leave any time for building an equally interesting and unique story.
I think Annalee Newitz is right that this film has a serious problem in its (metaphorical but inarguable) depiction of race, and I further think that SEK is right that we should go ahead and call that problem what it is: racism. Cameron sets out with clear intentions of respecting indigenous people, but you can’t just fall into the same old “noble naked savages with feathers in their braided hair communing with horses and being one with the Earth Mother” trope and act like that’s okay. It’s not okay, and we need to move past it.
I did think it was kind of interesting how Cameron finds a reasonably believable pseudo-scientific justification for the whole “connection to all living things” idea by giving the aliens a cluster of tendrils (like a biological USB port) that they can connect to plants and animals to communicate psychically with them. Usually, when science fiction features psychic powers, there’s a big suspension-of-disbelief pill to swallow in the idea of dualism (that our minds exist outside our brains), since real science has repeatedly found that it just doesn’t hold up, as much as we might like it to. By creating a physical, nervous connection between two discrete beings, Cameron gets around that problem. Of course, when it’s all in the service of creating an imaginary race that’s even more like we want American Indians to be than American Indians actually are, it’s hard to really appreciate this innovation.
I also have to say that I’m really, really sick of the “military asshole” archetype embodied here by Colonel Miles Quaritch. Wasn’t this exact same guy in District 9 too? The problem with a character like this (aside from the fact that he’s obnoxious for every moment he’s on screen) is that it embodies everything that’s wrong with militarism in one cartoonishly villainous character, and then the audience waits in great anticipation for the scene where he gets his, and then he does, and everyone cheers “Hooray, we’ve defeated militarism!” I’m sorry, Hollywood screenwriters and action movie fans, but you can’t kill a noxious ideology by putting arrows through some asshole’s chest. For that matter, you can’t rid the world of greed by packing Giovanni Ribisi into a spaceship and sending him away, but whatever.
In closing, I’ll say this: If you have any interest at all, even a little bit, in ever seeing Avatar, SEE IT IN THE THEATRE. The spectacle is all it has going for it, and it will be totally pointless on a TV (no matter how big, flat, and HD).
There are no Betty Boop Christmas cartoons because she’s Jewish. There are no Superman Christmas cartoons because that would just be weird. There’s a Grampy Christmas cartoon, but I really detest Grampy, and have no intention of ever featuring him on a Fleischer Friday if I can help it. However, Popeye the Sailor also celebrates Christmas in his fifth short, although of course he celebrates it in his own special way.
I’m keeping it short this week, since we all have holidays to get back to, so here’s a few quick observations:
In Popeye’s World: Earmuffs are essential. Scarfs are optional. Coats and jackets are unheard of.
On a related note, you can’t really tell if a Fleischer character is shivering, because they constantly shake in time with the music.
Olive Oyl fares much better without Mae Questel than Betty Boop does. In this instance, Bonnie Poe does her voice.
“It’s a day for peace on Earth!” is the very best thing you can say before punching someone.
Popeye and Bluto are shockingly graceful on ice skates.
I’m completely baffled that Bluto avoids cutting Olive’s head off at 03:35.
The bit where Olive crawls across her own legs (or however you define that move) is pretty unsettling.
Can’t afford tree trimmings? Just punch a guy really hard.
If you’ve learned only one thing from reading this blog, I hope it’s the name of the primary (and best) voice of Betty Boop, Mae Questel. What you may not know is that the final screen appearance of “the Betty Boop Girl” also happens to be a Christmas classic (for those of us who came of age in the 80’s and 90’s, anyway). Yes, Mae Questel, mere months before her death, played the hilariously out-of-it Aunt Bethany in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. She’s only on screen for a few minutes, but she’s hands down the funniest character in the film. Despite her age, you can still see and hear Betty Boop lurking within her, and her singing voice is surprisingly strong. If you haven’t watched the movie yet this year I realize it may be too late to get your hands on it, so I’ve done you a favor and assembled all of Aunt Bethany’s scenes into one action-packed highlights reel. So enjoy, Merry Christmas, and… Play Ball!
Popeye Doyle bought the house on Archer Avenue in the winter of his 35th year. Over the next decade, he and his wife, Morticia Addams, had three children: Derek Zoolander, Emma Woodhouse, and Anthony Adams. And then they separated. Morticia falls in love with Roger Murtaugh. Meanwhile, Anthony is in love with Emma, who’s married to Peter Venkman but having an affair with Derek’s rival Hansel.
