Thoughts on MoviesBlade RunnerThere is considerable evidence that Deckard is not a replicant. Deckard is thrown about like a rag doll by every replicant he scuffles with (with the possible exception of Rachael, who doesn't try very hard, also see footnote). His ass is kicked even by Pris who was described as a "basic pleasure model." If you were assigning a replicant to blade runner duty, you would probably pick one whose physical capacities were at least equal to those of a basic pleasure model. Deckard believes that he has quit the police force. He doesn't like his bosses or coworkers, he has to be threatened into returning to work, and he is insubordinate to the point of allowing Rachael to escape. If you were programming a replicant for blade runner duty, you would probably make him more enthusiastic about his work. The memory-implant technology is new, but Bryant refers to Deckard as the "old blade runner" and acts as if they have worked together for a long time. Granted, this could be an elaborate lie (although why concoct a rocky relationship, see above) but at least it shows that if Deckard is a replicant, then the police know about it and are lying about it. The same police are sufficiently paranoid about replicants that they want to whack even the inoffensive Rachael as soon as Tyrell reports her missing. This does not jibe too well with them letting a new and experimental replicant roam Los Angeles with a badge and a gun. The coincidence of the unicorn dream and the origami unicorn is not exactly the same as Deckard showing off his knowledge of Rachael's childhood memories. A recent dream is not the same as a childhood memory, and a unicorn is a single ambiguous symbol, not a detailed story like the two that Deckard tells Rachael. In other words, it could just be a coincidence, or show that Deckard and Gaff have similar taste in symbols. Gaff's origami chicken meant, "You're acting like a chicken," not, "You dreamed about a chicken last night." The unicorn could mean something like, "You're chasing an impossible goal," not, "You dreamed about a unicorn and I know about it." Gaff does not say to Deckard, "It's too bad neither you nor she will live, but then again who does?" In short, it's amazing how easily people are taken in when a lying Ridley Scott replicant gives a few interviews. Come to think of it, have those interviewers passed a V-K test lately?
[Footnote: If Rachael has no built-in expiration date, as
stated in the original cut, that's consistent with her
apparent lack of superhuman strength. After all, the light
which burns half as bright burns twice as long.]
Clearly there should be some sort of weight classes for the title of Worst Movie Ever. But in the lightweight class, I'm putting all my money down on Born American (1986), starring Mike Norris, son of Chuck Norris. This was Renny Harlin's first film. Someone liked this film enough that Renny Harlin got to move to Hollywood and make more films such as Nightmare on Elm Street 4, Die Hard 2, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, Cutthroat Island, et cetera. Just think, if you could make a movie as good as Born American, it would be your passport to a bigtime Hollywood directing career. Born American was the first movie since World War II to be banned in Finland, on the grounds that it might offend the Russians. Of how many movies can this be said, its villainous Russians were such atrocious caricatures that we feared reprisals by the Soviet war machine. I only saw this movie once about twelve years ago and I don't really want to try and reconstruct the rambling stupid plot but, ah, just to give you a flavor there's this secondary character called the Admiral. As I recall he's some kind of ex-CIA guy who's hiding from the CIA because they'd kill him to stop him from publishing his tell-all memoirs or something, and what better way to hide-- get this-- than as an inmate in a nightmarish Russian prison? Anyway, the point is he's called the Admiral. Just "the Admiral". He doesn't have another name, is the point I'm making. So at the end of the movie the Admiral and Mike Norris and the Girl have escaped from the prison (omigod I gave away the ending) with the aid of the bazookas they found in the prison bazooka closet, and we have the following exchange. Mike Norris: "Well, so long, Admiral." The Admiral: "There's no need for titles between us, son." That kills me.
Shortly afterward the movie ends with a roll-up block of
text that wraps up the plot, probably tells you how Mike
Norris and the Girl got back to America or whatever, I don't
remember that too clearly but I do remember that the roll-up
had typographical errors in it. Apparently even Renny Harlin
feels bad about that but he blames it on his producers
thusly: "They didn't think their audience knew how to read."
An annoying thing about Goldeneye was that there was the tremendous media brouhaha about how James Bond was going to drive a BMW-- and then the damn BMW Z3 hardly features in the film. Q gives a spiel about it but it hardly figures in the plot. I'm not opposed to product placement in James Bond movies, because in a sense James Bond is all about brand names-- Aston Martin, Bacardi, Walther PPK. I understand Fleming made a point of littering his stories with brand names to add verisimilitude. However, I would suggest to the sponsors, if your product is going to be made the center of attention as a "gadget", try to make sure it actually does something cool in the course of the movie. Conversely if your product is only going to make an incidental background appearance, then don't pay so much for the slot and don't blow the whole thing out of proportion.
Also, I think less is more when it comes to advertising your product's movie appearance. You want people to think that James Bond selected your brand of underwear naturally, for a man who prefers to live life to the full, knowing that each day might be his last and that Her Majesty's Government is picking up the tab, would never settle for any but the finest and most high-quality underwear. Don't make everyone suffer through incessant TV ads about how "we are the sponsors of the upcoming James Bond movie, please please notice our underwear in scene six and also in scene twenty-three, because we sure paid a heck of a lot of money for it."
In the movie Gone with the Wind, there is a scene where Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) tends a wounded Confederate soldier, who tells her about his experience at the battle of Bull Run. Why does Scarlett, normally a quick-thinking and sharply observant person, not summon aid and arrange for this obvious Yankee spy to be shot?
Can I possibly be the first person to worry about this? It
is not listed as a goof in the Internet Movie Database.
Cameron Diaz does a two-week swap of her L.A. mansion for Kate Winslet's cottage outside London. Each woman is fleeing a broken relationship. Cameron hooks up with Kate's brother, Jude Law, while Kate is visited by Cameron's ex-boyfriend's music partner, Jack Black. My wife and I, who currently live in Los Angeles, went to see this with my brother and his girlfriend, who currently live in a village outside London, so we had the benefit of some art-imitates-life moments. Driving around a truck on the wrong side of the road! Ho ho, we've been there. Kate Winslet does a good, energetic job and is the high point of the film. Jude Law is fine, Cameron Diaz is okay. Jack Black is a disappointment, maybe because he doesn't have much material. He's slightly funny like you're funny at dinner, but I don't recall him having a single real laugh line. In general, this romantic comedy isn't heavy on comedy. It might be okay if you're mainly interested in the romance. This is also one of those movies that gives you a good sense of what it would be like to be a psychic and able to predict the future. I don't think there is a single surprising moment from beginning to end.
Every character in this movie just happens to be either a writer, an
editor, or a musician. If they're American, then they're
writer/editor/musicians for the movie industry. There's a lot of
schtick about movies, and then a lot more tedious schtick about
movies. It tended to confirm my theory about the general mediocrity of
movies about the movie industry. The theory is that tiresome crap
about movies gets a thumbs-up from moviemakers where equally tedious
stuff about shoemaking or cattle breeding would be pared back.
Will Smith plays a robo-phobic detective investigating the death of an eminent roboticist, whose apparent suicide jump was witnessed only by a robot. Since robots are programmed never to allow humans to come to harm, no one else thinks that the robot could have murdered the roboticist, but they are curious as to why the robot did not prevent the man's suicide. The robot runs away and hides in a factory with 1000 other identical-looking robots. Will Smith and robopsychologist Susan Calvin solve the problem by issuing orders to the 1000 robots and logically identifying the 1001st robot that doesn't belong. Susan Calvin discovers that the runaway robot had some special alterations. U.S. Robotics wants to hush up the investigation to prevent any mass fear or distrust of robots. Then some other robots start trying to kill Will Smith, in apparent contravention of their First Law programming, but he escapes by his wits. It transpires that a legalistic loophole in the definition of "harm a human" is allowing the robots to harm humans. Having solved the mystery, Will Smith and Susan Calvin repair the problem. This is the movie as it was suggested by Isaac Asimov's famous robot stories. There are basically only two problems with the movie as it is showing in theaters.
IdiocracyI wanted to see this movie partly because of the Kornbluthian premise, and partly because I like King of the Hill, but also I have to admit my interest was increased by the fact that Twentieth Century Fox doesn't particularly want anyone to see the movie in theaters, and is presumably doing the contractually-obliged minimum in that direction. There has been zero advertising of the movie. In the Los Angeles area, it is only showing at a single hole-in-the-wall theater in Pasadena; and Los Angeles is apparently one of the few metropolitan areas where it is showing at all. Having gone to some slight effort to see it, I really wanted to like the movie, but it was just okay. My wife opined that the movie was "a world of suck," but I think that might be a little harsh. Even she conceded that the movie had "some good ideas" but the execution was just so-so. I think even a bad movie can be rewarding if it makes you think about how it could have been better. In the case of Idiocracy, the main thing it's made me think is that a Marching Morons scenario is really unlikely. For one thing, I think the reproductive advantage of stupidity is probably overrated. Even among the characters of Idiocracy, we see that the more successful idiots have harems of multiple wives, while other idiots, who on balance are presumably even stupider, are incarcerated in prison. For another thing, if Earth is in a race between Idiocracy and Gattaca, I think Gattaca is likely to win out.
There is a final surprise scene in Idiocracy after the credits. In our theater, almost everyone had left before the end of the credits and thus missed the final twist.
I enjoyed The Incredibles but I think one of its themes, "If everyone is special, then nobody is," sends a muddled moral message. The phrase is first used in reference to Dash's desire to go out for sports. It's wrong, the movie appears to say, for the super-speedy Dash to hide his light under a bushel. Rather, Dash should celebrate his specialness by entering track meets. Umm. Exactly what is the point of Dash collecting trophies by competing against non-superpowered individuals, while actually running far below his real limits in order to avoid suspicion? Should he continue to add to the trophy case by running against younger kids as well? Disabled kids maybe?
Then the villainous Syndrome threatens that when he's ready
to retire, he will sell his super-technology to the masses,
so that anyone can have superpowers and superheroes will no
longer be special. Umm again. Cut the ominous music for a
second. This is a bad thing? Supposing it were possible for
say, Orville and Wilbur Wright to keep the secret of the
airplane to themselves, and just use it on a personal level
to fight crime as the Amazing Flying Duo, does anyone really
think that would have been desirable? For anyone?
So you and your team go into a bank and you take a bunch of hostages. Pretty soon the police have surrounded the building. You knew this was going to happen, right? So what's your exit strategy? "These guys know what happened in Munich, right?" the policemen ask. "Haven't these guys seen Dog Day Afternoon?" The question they should really be asking is, "Have these guys seen Die Hard?" But maybe that would hit a little too close to home. Inside Man isn't Die Hard, but I think it is a more worthy successor to Die Hard than either of the official sequels. (Die Hard 2 was too unimaginative, and Die Hard With a Vengeance was too gimmicky.)
Clive Owen takes the Alan Rickman part of the well-spoken criminal
who's thought his robbery through and through. Denzel Washington is
the black sheep detective. And Jodie Foster, loosely speaking, plays
the role that the FBI played in Die Hard: a higher power that
takes over from the cops... just as the criminals anticipated.
The dialogue is mostly weak. There is one funny bit and a couple of okay lines. The writers have a tendency to use the okay lines again, and again and again until they're dead like a Saturday Night Live sketch. The movie wastes some time with the characters being angstful and philosophical. "What does the future hold? Why do we steal— to enrich our lives or to define our lives? Did my father really know how much I loved him?" Oh brother, this is supposed to be a heist movie. If I wanted to hear characters talk about their feelings or have deep philosophical insights, I would have gone to see Star Wars Episode Two. The obligatory romantic relationship between Mark Wahlberg and Charlise Theron feels very obligatory.
Some things are not well thought out. The good guys don't use guns,
but the bad guys do. The fact that the good guys won't even use guns
as a defensive measure means that their plans are extremely vulnerable
to unraveling. But it's not clear why the good guys don't use
guns. It's not because they don't want to endanger innocent lives&151;
they're perfectly happy to engineer accidents that could easily kill
someone. It's not because they don't want the bad guy's death on their
conscience— they're happy to indirectly bring about his grisly
murder.
The most abused characters in Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings are Gimli, treated as a buffoon, and Gandalf, transformed into an inconsistently psychokinetic X-Man. It's almost astonishing how little love and respect the filmmakers have for the Gimli character. Book-Gimli remarks wryly that dwarves are no horsemen and that he wishes he could walk rather than be bumped about like a sack of grain in the saddle. Movie-Gimli does a pratfall off his horse and claims it was on purpose. Book-Gimli ultimately wins his orc-killing contest with Legolas, by a score of 43 to 42. Movie-Gimli gets no such moment of triumph, and opens the contest by churlishly claiming one of Legolas's kills for himself. Book-Gimli is constantly decapitating orcs taller than himself. This might have been translated to film with Gimli bounding through the air, whirling like a dervish and bouncing off walls like a muscular Yoda. Instead, movie-Gimli's signature attack is hitting people in the crotch, much like the kid from the Home Alone movies. Another favored movie-Gimli tactic: get pinned under something and wait for Legolas or Aragorn to save you. I think it's a shame that Jackson did not make a movie version of The Hobbit before doing The Lord of the Rings. Most of the things I don't like about Jackson's Lord of the Rings might have been fixed if he had to make The Hobbit first. As it is, Jackson must have read The Hobbit, surely, but I don't think it influenced him enough. In The Hobbit, Dwarves occupy a central position and are sympathetic characters (in contrast with say, the Elves, who appear in a more mixed light). Then the Dwarves move off-stage in LOTR, leaving Gimli as their sole representative with a reservoir of associated goodwill. If Jackson had gone through The Hobbit as a filmmaker like a reader going through the books, I think Gimli would be treated better and we would be spared the dwarf-tossing jokes in LOTR.
Similarly, there are two striking chapters in The Hobbit,
the encounters with the Trolls and with Beorn, where Gandalf
saves the day basically through clever wordplay. That should
have established the proper precedent that Wizards in
Middle-Earth get ahead mainly by having a way with words
(Oxfordian Linguist as Hero?), not by having psychic battles
or engaging in telekinetic chop-socky.
The movie Minority Report is supposedly based on the short story, "The Minority Report," by Philip K. Dick, but the short story is rather different from the movie. How different is it, you ask? Here is the first line of the short story. Anderton is the character played by Tom Cruise. "THE FIRST THOUGHT Anderton had when he saw the young man was: I'm getting bald. Bald and fat and old." More thoughts on the movie:
Monty Python and the Holy GrailI noticed that when King Arthur first meets the Knights Who Say Ni, he asks them, "What is it that you want?" And later, the Head Knight Who Until Recently Said Ni says, "It is a good shrubbery," and, "You must place it here by this shrubbery." Only a few lines later do we discover that the Knights Who Said Ni are allergic to the word it and they start making a fuss about hearing it.
Remarkably, this is not yet listed as "trivia" or a "goof"
in the Internet Movie Database. Although, unremarkably, some
people have mentioned it on the great wide Internet before
me.
This movie differs from any one of the 430 episodes of Bonanza in the following ways:
Early on, Open Range hints at being a gritty-realism Western in the mold of Unforgiven. "The reality of the Wild West was that it rained a lot and you were lucky to huddle under a tent. And it was cold and hard and boring. And it took a long, long time for anything to happen." But any sense of realism built up by the rain and lack of things happening is later cast aside in favor of every ridiculous cinematic convention. Cardboard villains. Cardboard villagers. Inexplicable love at first sight between the dirty cowpuncher and the only woman in town. Miraculous inability of villains to shoot heroes at point blank range. Cheap pet tricks: You killed my dog! You saved my dog!
There's a kind of weird coffee thing early on. "Let's go into town for some sugar and coffee." "Here ya go Mose, some coffee... made fresh for once!" "Since you saved my dog, I'd be honored if you'd join me in this saloon, for a cup of coffee." Was this movie paid for by Nescafe? (There's also a plug for Swiss chocolate.) Or is it just that the screenplay was written in a Starbucks?
Shane Carruth, the writer, director, co-star, producer, composer, co-cinematographer, editor, and probably best boy and key grip, made Primer for $7000. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Shane Carruth is living the filmmaker's dream! Synopsis: The movie is about some engineers who are trying to escape their Dilbertesque jobs by developing some profitable invention in their garage. Two of them discover that whatever it was they were trying to build, what they have accidentally created is a small time machine. They hide this news from the others, scale the device up to a person-sized time machine, and naturally, start day-trading stocks. Once they begin tampering with history, the movie becomes somewhat confusing. Carruth claims that he hasn't read any classic time travel stories, but if he had, the evident literary antecedents would be David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself and Robert Heinlein's By His Bootstraps. The Good: Carruth's engineers have a lot of verisimilitude and in many ways his time machine makes more sense than other movie time machines. The fact that he put a lot of thought into the time machine makes it quite plausible that the plot forms an intricate and logical whole when understood completely. The Bad: It's pretty hard to grasp that intricate and logical whole. When I stepped out of this movie I thought that I understood 80% of it but there was 20% I didn't get. From conversations and web-surfing since then, I realize that I understood less than I thought I did, maybe 60% at the time and 85% now. (In contrast, I followed all of, say, Memento in one viewing.) If there is anyone other than Shane Carruth who completely understands the plot of this movie, I have not seen their explanation posted to the Internet yet. I don't think most people understand the bleeding ear. (I have a theory about that.) I don't think most people understand the party. (My wife has a theory about that.) I don't think most people understand the degraded handwriting. (I'm baffled about that.) There is at least one scene in Primer in which the characters appear suffused with a funny color, and this could be some kind of effect of the time travel or it could be some cinematographic statement about the characters' inner sickness or something, but most likely it's an accidental side-effect of $7000 filmmaking. The plot is like that too. It's hard to know whether everything would come clear if you watched the movie again, or if there are parts that are just plain ungettable and this movie is a kind of hoax perpetrated on the Sundance Grand Jury.
Carruth claimed in a Village Voice interview that the movie contains all the information you need to understand everything, except for how and why Thomas Granger traveled back in time, which must remain a subject for speculation. After reading that I'm willing to take him at his word and watch the movie again. But I've missed my chance for now, it's not playing in Santa Monica any more.
1. Mal disguises Serenity with skeletons and red paint to look like a Reaver ship. But such a visual disguise would be of little use in the immensity of space. Even supposing that every ship carries a ten-meter telescope as standard equipment, a ship would have to come exceedingly close, say within ten thousand kilometers or about the diameter of a planet, before it could see details the size of a skeleton (limited by the Rayleigh criterion). Resolution: Mal must have expected that Serenity would indeed be flying exceedingly close to Reaver ships (see below). Also, spaceships could have super-telescopic imaging power through some technological trick, such as dispersing an array of sensors in a cloud around the ship. 1(b). In the Outer Rim, in the endless nothingness of space, why does Serenity fly within what appears to be a few hundred meters of a fleet of Reaver ships? Resolution: We can only conclude that the close approach was deliberate, and Mal believed it was better to seek out the Reaver fleet and fly within kissing distance of it, rather than give any appearance of avoiding it. It is slightly odd that Serenity was able to slip away from the Alliance ships, but Mal had no confidence in her ability to avoid detection by the Reaver fleet. Perhaps Mal knew from experience that the Reavers actually had better detectors than the Alliance. 2. Why does the Serenity crew physically carry the Miranda "black box" recording to Mr. Universe? Why not send it to him as an email attachment? Note that although the Alliance is not particularly backward in data storage technology (they can store and display video in a 4x8 glossy photograph), the "black box" recording is quite large, somewhere in size between a drink coaster and a paperback book. This suggests that it either contains a great deal of data, or some kind of authentication technology, or both. If the "black box" contained some kind of physical apparatus to confirm the authenticity of the record, Mr. Universe's equipment might need physical access to the recording medium in order to confirm authenticity and satisfy others that the record was genuine. Perhaps Serenity did not have the level of communications gear required to guarantee authenticity. This would help explain why the Serenity crew needed Mr. Universe's help at all (instead of just sending the video themselves to everyone they could think of), and also why anyone would believe a video circulating on the Internet.
I guess I'll put a spoiler warning on this review, but I'm not sure it's doing anybody a favor. I scrupulously avoided reading any spoiler information. A friend of mine who had heard spoilers from his co-workers surprised me by refusing to see the movie with me. But I wanted to believe it would be good, so I went to see it. My friend was the lucky one. Signs is crap. Oh, it has some of the elements of a good movie, maybe, but if you have the makings of a great cheeseburger and add brake fluid, you're not left with an okay cheeseburger. We now bring you a synopsis of the hit movie Signs. - - - - Graham: I was an Episcopalian priest, but then my wife got run over by a truck, so I quit. What's even the point of being a priest if you don't get special protection from that kind of thing? "Ray" crosses. The others look at him. Morgan: Is that... him? Merrill: Yes. Bo: Who is that? Graham: That's M. Night Shyamalan, the writer/director. - - - - The Aliens: Next up on the list of planets to invade: "the Earth." As you can see from the blue globe filling the viewport, a better name would be "the Water." Most of the surface is submerged in water, and most of the rest of the surface is soaked in atmospheric water at irregular intervals. The lifeforms cluster around the water, because they are in fact mostly made of water. Anyway, we're going to attack. Hopefully they won't guess our one weakness. "Ray": Water? The Aliens: DAMN it. How did you guess that? "Ray": Well, water was the secret weakness in my last... I mean, in the last M. Night Shyamalan movie. The Aliens: Yeah, what's with that? Issues stemming from a childhood sprinkler accident? "Ray": I'd rather not talk about it. - - - - The Alien: Okay, I'm going down. Can I have an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator? The Other Aliens: No. The Alien: Can I have a spacesuit to protect me from all the water? The Other Aliens: No. The Alien: Can I have a flintlock pistol? The Other Aliens: No. The Alien: Can I have a crowbar? You mentioned I might have to break into some houses... The Other Aliens: No. The Alien: Can I have a pointed stick? What if the natives are armed with baseball bats or kitchen knives? The Other Aliens: No. Listen, what you do is catch them when they're asleep or unconscious, and use your poison gas tube to squirt poison gas up their nostrils. - - - - "Ray": I trapped an alien in my pantry! The Alien: I was looking for SOMETHING to eat that wasn't MADE of #*(%ing WATER. The Alien wiggles his fingers under the door. The Alien: Help! I'm in here! Let me out! Graham cuts off two of the Alien's fingers. The Alien: Ow! - - - - The Other Aliens: We're leaving. We never expected the natives to have knives, and water. We're leaving so fast that we're abandoning our wounded to die on this watery hell-world. The Alien: Guys! Guys! It's a flesh wound! Two lousy fingertips! Look, I can still pick stuff up! The Other Aliens: Sorry, Harry. You're wounded, not a whole alien any more. What would Cheryl think if she saw you like this? Bye now. The Alien: This is a #*(%ing travesty. This is just #*(%ing embarrassing. The aliens in #*(%ing Independence Day were smarter and tougher than this. - - - - The Radio: The aliens have fled after some people in villages in the Middle East figured out a means to defeat them. We have no more details at this time. It is not known if the successful stratagem involved cutting the aliens with knives, hitting them with sticks, or spraying them with water. - - - - The Alien: At last, an unconscious asthmatic boy. Someone sufficiently weak and defenseless that I can squirt poison gas up his nostrils. Merrill: It seems like if you have to get in close like that, you're missing the whole point of having poison gas. Graham: Something my dying wife said makes me think we should hit the alien with a baseball bat. The Alien: Ow! Graham: I feel now that my wife didn't die in vain. How else would we have thought of hitting the alien with a baseball bat? Morgan: I'm alive! My asthma saved my life. Bo: And by leaving glasses of water lying around the house, I've saved us the trouble of fetching the hose! Graham: My family's charming idiosyncrasies have saved us from tragedy (except for my wife) while millions of others have perished. I guess God did intend for us to get special protection after all. I'm going to become a priest again. The Alien: Yeah, that's deep. About as deep as Independence Day, which also featured a lapsed rabbi who regained his trust in God after the alien invasion. Got anything else? Graham: Uh, everything happens for a reason? The Alien: If everything happens for a reason,
then what was the reason that we even came to this #*(%ing
planet? Answer me that one question and maybe I won't
squirt poison gas up M. Night Shyamalan's nostrils.
Stan Lee's one complaint about the 2002 movie, in an NPR interview, was that the Green Goblin's mask was immobile. He thought the Goblin should somehow have been given animated features. Roger Ebert said the same thing. They're certainly right, and furthermore this is also a problem for the masked Spider-Man. The live-action Spider-Man is actually less emotive than the comic-book version, because in the comic books Spider-Man can express a bit of emotion by changing the size and shape of his big white eyes. The live-action Spider-Man has fixed lenses, and it's just plain hard to act and have dialogue when you have no moving facial features. An hour after the movie was over, I realized the problem was exacerbated because Spider-Man never sounded as if he were wearing a mask. Darth Vader and the Stormtroopers had a similar facial-expressiveness problem, but at least they sounded as if they were talking from inside a metal suit. Spider-Man doesn't sound as if he's talking through a ski mask. (Obviously, the problem of how to make a voice appear to emanate from a mask, while keeping the words intelligible, is no problem at all for printed speech balloons, but more difficult in a movie.) In consequence, when Spider-Man and the Green Goblin are speaking to each other, there are no visual or audio cues to anchor the voices in the figures on screen. They might as well be delivering voice-overs, or communicating telepathically. Their conversations are sometimes powerfully reminiscent of scenes from the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. It's a hard problem, and I'm not sure what the right solution is. But some things they could experiment with before the next movie:
I liked Kirsten Dunst. She does "happy" and "flirty/playful" very well. She also does "upset" reasonably well. I don't care for her "misty-eyed/emotional" though. She takes on a sort of drugged expression then, and one of her eyelids droops a little bit, like Willem Dafoe having a Goblin flashback in the elevator. [Update: She looks the same way in the billboards for Spider-Man 2.]
Kirk sells a pair of glasses to a pawn shop to get 20th century money. Spock pulls him aside and says "Weren't those a gift from Dr. McCoy?" Kirk says, "Yes, and they will be again, that's the beauty of it." This was a dopey thing for Kirk to say. First of all, even if the glasses were destined to get from the pawn shop to McCoy, Kirk already remembers the experience of getting the glasses from McCoy and he's not going to have that experience again. So from his, Kirk's, point of view, he's selling the glasses and he's not going to see them again. If McCoy asks in Star Trek V, "Where are those glasses I gave you," Kirk's not going to be able to produce them.
And second, the glasses almost certainly aren't destined to
get from the pawn shop back to Kirk. If the glasses are in a
closed loop, then the glasses in the pawnshop have to be in
just the same state as the glasses in the 23rd century,
which means the glasses have to survive for 300 years
without the slightest wear or physical alteration, even on
an atomic level. So the glasses aren't in a closed loop,
they were manufactured like regular glasses, and McCoy
didn't get the glasses from the pawn shop at all.
Superman ReturnsOn the positive side: Nice visual effects, everything in the movie looks very pretty. Superman catchphrases and references and homages to the earlier movies are included in a natural way. Negative: Unimaginative script, in many ways a retread of the 1978 movie. When a novel plot element is introduced, it's generally abandoned and left unexplored or unexplained. Just about everything else is resolved in the least imaginative way possible. Unnecessarily slow, with far too many long shots of Clark doing nothing but moon over Lois or vice versa. * Early on, the movie hints at a more sympathetic portrayal of Lex Luthor. He says he wants to be Prometheus bringing technology to mankind, not a selfish godling like Superman. (Cf. Syndrome in The Incredibles.) However this intriguing idea is completely cast aside and it turns out Lex wants to kill billions of people. What? Why? What does it gain him to kill billions of people? He couldn't think of any more productive plan or more popular approach to being the savior of mankind? * Lois: "If this rocket launch is so important, why is it only being covered by one news network?" Good question, and here's another: why does Lois Lane bring up this issue as if it's going to be important, when in fact the question will never be answered and will never come up in the movie again? * Lois doesn't really seem like a two-timing gal, so how does she not know who the kid's father is? How does the father not know, by the calendar, who the kid's father is? My wife suggested that the gestation period for a Kryptonian baby might be different than for a human baby. That's just the kind of creative plot twist that is utterly absent from this movie. * It's stated that Kryptonian crystals form themselves out
of water, like ice. Are Kryptonian crystals less dense than water? No,
because they sink in water, they don't float. It would appear then
that a Megafortress of Solitude forming in the ocean would not cause
sea levels to rise and inundate the coasts; on the contrary, it would
suck up water and cause sea levels to recede, sort of like a
Kryptonian Greenland Ice Sheet.
Morgan Spurlock, a man in excellent health, decides to eat nothing but McDonald's food for 30 days and see what happens to him. The rules are: he has to have three square meals a day; he can't eat or drink anything except purchases from the McDonald's menu; he has to sample everything on the menu at least once; and he only Super-Sizes the meal if the order-taker suggests it. Also, while his normal lifestyle involves a lot of walking, he tries to walk less to be more representative of a sedentary person. Meanwhile, he travels around the country talking to people-- food industry executives, nutrition activists, school cafeteria workers, people on the street-- about fast food. I saw the movie at the Santa Monica Laemmle and was sort of interested to realize that several of the people-on-the-street interviews had taken place one block to the east. It's clear that Spurlock has an anti-fast-food agenda and a preconceived idea that the McDonald's food will be bad for him, and as a double-blind medical study, his experiment leaves a lot to be desired. (I wonder what would have happened if he suffered no ill effects from the diet? Would the film still have been made? Still have been distributed? What if by some miracle he had lost weight? Would Morgan Spurlock then have become McDonald's answer to Jared Fogle?) Nevertheless, Spurlock manages to avoid seeming like a fanatic, even seems relatively fair-minded, partly because he is cast as a moderate when compared to his girlfriend, a vegan chef. We don't see Spurlock being mean, sarcastic, or confrontational with anyone, so the documentary seems more informative than argumentative. Spurlock even gives some screen time to a Big Mac superfan who has eaten over 19,000 Big Macs without any apparent ill effects. It's not clear just what Spurlock's regular diet is. He's not a full-time vegetarian although his girlfriend is a vegan chef. At the end of his first day of eating McDonald's food, he throws up, which seems like a pretty violent reaction to me. Over the following weeks he gets sick, sick enough to surprise and alarm his doctors, but perhaps this is a short-term "system shock" effect as much as anything else? He seems to be stabilizing at the end of the 30 days.
Spurlock was asked if he wanted to super-size his meal 9 times. That's 9 out of 90 (or maybe 9 out of 60 since I'm not sure you could super-size a breakfast). I would have expected the percentage to be higher.
This is a very quiet movie. I can hardly think of a theatrical movie with less plot and less drama. Practically nothing happens. It's Seinfeldian: a show about nothing. I sat gaping in amazement, just marvelling at how little was going on. The dramatic climax of the movie is a decision to cut or not to cut a song from The Mikado. That's about the most heart-pounding moment. And the movie is two hours and forty minutes long! But although it's very unexciting, it's not boring. There's something compelling about this mundane slice of life, these nineteenth-century people and their little relationships and struggles and addictions, which are just glimpsed and then dropped and not developed or explained at all. It's a lot like a Frontline documentary without the voiceover. "Next time, on Frontline: Frontline's cameras spent 14 months behind the scenes at the Savoy Theater in London. You'll see the librettist, the composer, the producer, the musicians, and the actors, as they struggle through the process of creating a popular entertainment. That's: OPERETTA... next time on Frontline." If Mike Leigh intended to make a conventional sort of theatrical movie and he produced this, then he's the worst movie maker in the world. But it's not possible that he could make a movie this slow by accident, so it's really sort of interesting. |