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Posts Tagged ‘movies’

Measuring a drop in a bucket

It’s International Blog Against Racism Week again, and boy do we have things to choose from — at levels of fame ranging all the way from Sonia Sotomayor and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. down to things like the U.S. cover of Justine Larbalestier’s Liar. (And quieter things than that, no doubt, from one corner of the world to the other, in every city and town.)

Riffling through my brain to see what I might have something to say about, I landed on, of all things, movies. Specifically, the live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Most of my Avatar news has come via anima_mecanique, who has been posting off and on about the head-desk moves of the filmmakers in whitewashing their source. Avatar, if you don’t know, is an animated series set in a fantasy world that I tend to think of as western Pacific Rim in inspiration: the various elementally-themed societies are mostly different varieties of Asian in basis, with the Water Tribes blurring over into northern Pacific natives/Inuit. In other words, not Eurofantasy. But along come the filmmakers with their live-action movie, and suddenly not only is the whole cast white, they’re committing cultural blunders right left and center, like telling people to show up for casting calls in their “traditional cultural ethnic attire. If you’re Korean, wear a kimono.” <headsplode> Well, they backpedaled a little to cast some brown people, like that nice boy from Slumdog Millionaire since everybody likes him, right . . . only last I heard, that nice boy and all the other non-white actors are playing members of the Fire Nation. Who are, y’know, the enemy.

Oh yeah. That fixes everything.

The problem is, I’m not sure what I can do to protest this problem other than make a blog post. Boycotting the movie? Not effective. My one lost ticket sale won’t make anybody take notice, and if a lot of people boycotted it, enough that they did notice, Hollywood wouldn’t say “oh, I guess we should cast Asian actors next time.” They’d say, “oh, I guess we should go back to Eurofantasy.” I can buy the animated series, and I’m going to (I’ve seen the first season and loved it), but after that, it seems like all I can do is talk.

Which isn’t totally ineffective. After all, it was fan outcry that got them to cast Dev Patel (even though he would be way better as Sokka than Zuko). And now that I look on the IMDb, it seems they’ve got a Korean actor for one of the Earthbenders, so hey, there’s one who isn’t on the wrong side of the war. At least some of that has happened because people talked about the problem.

I just wish I knew how to do more. I’ll probably end up going to see the movie, because I suspect that I’ll achieve more by supporting baby steps toward non-Eurofantasy than holding out for perfection, but it’ll annoy me. Especially since it’s pretty obvious that the filmmakers don’t even really get where they went wrong.

linkage gets a follow-up

Back in April, I made an annoyed post about how Wall Street types were wringing their hands over Up — not because they thought it would be a flop, but because they didn’t think it wouldn’t be an even bigger hit than everything else Pixar has ever done, and therefore investors should abandon that obviously sinking ship. Or something.

Well, it’s slightly gratifying to see a follow-up in the New York Times, featuring this line: “Dead wrong” is how Richard Greenfield of Pali Research put his related analysis in a research note. In other words, Up has done just fine, thank you, where “just fine” is defined as “raking in profits your average studio would be breaking out the champagne for.” (He’s still recommending people sell Disney stock — but that’s based on issues with broadcast TV and the theme parks.)

It doesn’t address my underlying issue, which was the idea that every movie Pixar makes has to reap a bigger harvest than the one before it, or it’s time for investors to bail. From my perspective, Greenfield wasn’t wrong because Up turned out to be a bigger earner than he forecasted; he was wrong because he acted as if the sky was going to fall if it only made a good profit rather than a spectacular one. I still find the insistence on nothing but constant growth to be unsustainable. But at least the guy has issued something of a mea culpa.

Star Trek thoughts, round two

Since I was going to a Yoshida Brothers concert up in the city this evening, and kniedzw was going to the city for an IMAX showing of Star Trek with his co-workers in the late afternoon, I decided I might as well tag along and see what the space dive looks like when projected on a ginormous screen.

(Pretty good. Makes me wanna take up skydiving.)

Anyway, this is the post where I spoil like a spoilery thing, so I’ll cut-tag again.

More like a review than the last post . . .

Wolverine verdict, no spoilers

I wish I remembered whose comment it was I read earlier today, re: the Wolverine movie, but I agree with it. Basically, unlike The Dark Knight or the earlier X-Men films or a bunch of the other superhero movies we’ve gotten these past years, this movie? Is not trying to talk about any Issues. Not civil rights, or vigilante justice, or anything like that.

It’s just an action movie.

With superheroes.

And it’s a perfectly competent action movie, as such things go. It has its good moments and its plot holes and some lines of dialogue I would have changed, and what I found the most interesting was the way its entire science-fictional component is just one piece of the whole, rather than the central focus. I mean, how far into the movie are you the first time anybody uses the word “mutant”? And then it’s just a line of dialogue like any other, not an occasion to stop and exposit. Mutants. Moving on. The script just kind of assumes you’re on board with the basic concept, and proceeds with its action-movie business without any further ado.

Which strikes me as an efficient statement on the mainstreaming of genre tropes. I mean, hell — they spend more time explaining the gadgets in a Bond movie than they did on the mutant powers here. And y’know, I think I like that.

two things that make me angry

I’ll put the important one first: a lengthy article on Dubai that frankly just turns my stomach, presenting both the dark underside and the artificially bright topside of that city. I presume not everybody in Dubai is like the Emiratis and expats quoted there, but that’s the image of Dubai I’ve seen marketed: a sunny playground for shopping and leisure, to be enjoyed by the wealthy — just don’t ask what’s propping it up.

The second one’s smaller, but closer to home: apprehension about Pixar’s latest, Up. Why the apprehension? Are they worried it will be a flop? No; in fact, everybody’s pretty much assuming it will be a critical and commercial success. But probably it won’t be as big of a hit as (say) Toy Story, and (perhaps more to the point) it doesn’t have all the merchandising opportunities of that film, and so nevermind that Pixar has yet to release a single film that could be termed a critical or commercial flop; some corners of the industry are worried that Pixar’s films aren’t as lucrative as they used to be, and this is a problem. Not that they aren’t profitable; they are. But that they aren’t always increasing in profits.

I find that outlook diseased. Here we have a rock-solid company that has, since its inception, turned out quality entertainment that also brings in a nice, healthy return on the investment of making it. But hits, it seems, aren’t enough; they must be mega-hits, and ever-growing in size, or Wall Street will flip out.

Can you say “unsustainable model”? I can.

Anyway. I’ve had those tabs open in my browser for a couple of days, but I decided not to rain on Easter Sunday with them, so you get them today. Enjoy. So to speak.

Whoa.

It’s been ten years since The Matrix came out?

This is one of those moments when I wonder where the time went. My memory of childhood is extremely spotty, so you pretty much have to get into the stuff I encountered in late high school or college before I have a “dude, I feel old” moment. But yeah — I feel old. I remember seeing that movie in theatres. (And I went having no idea what it was; thanks to a variety of factors, I’d managed to miss pretty much every bit of advertising that film had.)

Ten years. It was, in certain respects, such a landmark film, and now all of a sudden I’m looking at it as a historical artifact.

Weird.

Oscar thought

Imagine being Anne Hathaway, twenty-six years old, sitting there twenty feet from Shirley MacLaine while she tells you how awesome she thinks you are.

I actually really liked that aspect of the Oscar ceremony — having the acting awards presented by groups of previous winners, each of whom addressed one of the nominees personally, instead of speaking impersonally about them in the third person. And it fit the whole aesthetic of the ceremony, which was, as one of our party said, “glam on a budget.” How do you do Hollywood glitz in a recession, without seeming grotesque in your conspicuous consumption? Well, inasmuch as that’s even possible, you do it by hearkening back to classic Hollywood style, and also by leaning on the star power of your people, rather than big-budget displays. (lowellboyslash, I know you hated the song-and-dance numbers, but Hugh Jackman actually does a fair bit of musical theatre, and both he and (later on) Beyonce actually carried off the style of it decently well.)

Kate Winslet wins the Best Acceptance Speech award for the night, by being all sweet and touching and then telling Meryl Streep she can suck it. *^_^*

Not the most memorable ceremony ever, but we enjoyed it. The key to the Oscars, as always, is to watch them with a big ol’ group of friends and as much snark as you can bring. They’re dead boring on their own.

I guess I’ll have to entertain *myself*.

Dang it, Internets, you are suppose to entertain me, and you are failing. One thing I preferred about being on East Coast time: in the wee hours of my morning, the West Coast folks might still be updating their LJs. But alas, I’m sitting here on a Friday night with hardly anybody giving me anything to read.

Well, tonight was supposed to be a night of productivity anyway. And it has been: so far, I’ve gotten 1,007 words on the ongoing story. But I think we’ll need to have another work session tonight, because this story, y’see, it has already passed short story territory and is charging merrily through novelette on its way to a possible novella. (Which is part of last night’s whininess: I keep working on this damn thing and it isn’t done yet. Novellas: the worst of both worlds.) Anyway, while it isn’t absolutely critical that I finish it before the calendar page turns, I would like to, and that means it’s advisable to get through this damn scene tonight.

But first I need to figure out who the characters are going to talk to, and what he knows.

In my non-writing time, I’ve been entertaining myself while doing other downstairsy things by re-watching the first half of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. Quibble all you like with his interpretation; I will always love it for being full-length. And this re-watch has made me realize my favorite stretch is from the conclusion of the interior play to the moment Claudius sends Hamlet off to England. Why? Because that’s probably the densest stretch of Hamlet being a smart-ass in the entire play, and I do love him when he’s a smart-ass. I’ve thought for quite a while now that he’s probably one of the literary ancestors of Francis Crawford of Lymond.

Meh. I think it’s time to practice that time-honored writerly technique known as “flopping on the bed and staring at the ceiling until I can bludgeon my brain into working.” I have to get these characters to Coldharbour somehow.

thoughts on Match Point

I seem to be constitutionally incapable of trusting Jonathan Rhys Meyers in any role he plays. I just keep seeing Steerpike. (This is especially ironic when you consider that JRM is my casting for one of the protagonists in an unpublished novel. Apparently I don’t trust Julian?)

Anyway, I want to talk about Match Point (which has him in it), but There Will Be Spoilers, so don’t read past the cut if you don’t want to know.

For the record, my opinion is that you shouldn’t worry about being spoiled, as the movie is not that great.

Here’s why.

It annoys me when a movie promises me (speculative) genre elements and then fails to deliver them.

It’s raining right now.

Like, actual water falling from the sky.

. . . I now live in a place where this is an event worthy of comment.

In other words, winter is coming — but not George R. R. Martin oh my god the Others are going to come over the Wall and kill everybody winter; just Bay Area “okay, time for the year’s precipitation” winter. I’m living in wet season/dry season territory now, and this is the first rain I’ve seen since moving here.

In totally unrelated news, Monster House is kind of an awesome movie.

three kinds of fanfic

So I’m trying to feed my brain for a story I want to write, that requires me to be jazzed up for gritty pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon goodness. Ergo, one thing I’m doing is watching lots of adaptations of Beowulf. And it occurs to me: thanks, perhaps, to the nature of the poem (which cannot be ported into cinema without changes; it would make a terrible film as written), the films I’ve seen have all taken distinct liberties with the text. As a result, I find that I can, without much hesitation, classify all three* of them as different varieties of Beowulf fanfic.

In order of release:

1. The 13th Warrior — Crossover fic. It’s Beowulf meets ibn Fadlan! Crichton apparently read the journal of an Arab traveler who met some Norsemen on the Volga river, and decided to use that as his connection point for splicing the Arab into the Beowulf story. Which probably looked utterly nonsensical to the many people out there who have no idea who ibn Fadlan was, and thought they were chucking an Arab in just for laughs. (Incidentally, the alteration of Grendel came about from Crichton imagining a relic population of Neandertals living into more modern times. I think Eaters of the Dead may be my favorite book of his, actually.)

2. Beowulf and Grendel — Sympathy for the devil, or whatever formal name it may have among fanfic writers. Grendel attacks Heorot because Hrothgar killed Grendel-Dad back when Grendel was a kid. Grendel-Dad was killed because, well, he took Hrothgar’s fish — I think that’s what Hrothgar said near the end of the film — and anyway, he’s a troll, a big hairy lug who can’t really speak, so that’s all the justification anybody needs. This story also sticks in an utterly non-canonical character, the prophetess Selma, for the purposes of illuminating its chosen theme. (Which would be annoying as hell if she didn’t get such good dialogue.)

3. Beowulf (the Zemeckis/Avary/Gaiman one) — Textual interrogation. This is the kind of story where the fanficcers screenwriters looked at the original and started asking questions. Why does Grendel attack Heorot, but not hurt Hrothgar? Why does Beowulf bring back no evidence of having killed Grendel’s mother? Why does the narrative then leapfrog over decades and end with some random dragon? Then they invented their own reasons to plug what, from the viewpoint of modern fiction, look like narrative holes.

For the record, I think The 13th Warrior still stands as my favorite, but oddly — and in direct contravention of general opinion, I think — Beowulf and Grendel comes second. They filmed in Iceland, which I think claims the Oscar for Best Supporting Landmass**, and they do a good job with the muddy, shabby nature of even kingly life back then. More importantly, it’s got the kind of smart-ass lines I like in my Norse/Anglo-Saxon/whatever epics — delivered in a veritable Babel of accents, I might add, ranging from Selma’s American to Beowulf’s Scottish and on from there. The Zemeckis Beowulf, sadly, just didn’t engage me, despite the surge of glee I felt when Gaiman described their desired aesthetic as being “a kind of Dark Ages Trainspotting, full of mead and blood and madness.” I never warmed to the motion-capture CGI or felt it justified its usage, and the rampant*** phallic imagery got to be a bit much.

Time to go read the poem, I think, and try to poke this story idea into becoming an actual story. I need to figure out who dies at the beginning; without that, I don’t have much to go on.

* “Three” because I’m not including the science-fictional Beowulf movie with Christopher Lambert. I saw it years ago, and all I remember is that it was terrible enough that I don’t want to see it again.

** First awarded to New Zealand for The Lord of the Rings.

*** Yes, I chose that word on purpose.

random movie query

I need recommendations for a movie with a really epic fight scene in it. But the fight has to be of a specific variety: something in the “two-handed broadsword” or “double-headed axe” family. Y’know, the sort of fight where a guy plants his feet and starts whaling away at something at least twice his size with a weapon that’s at least half his size. As much as I loves me some rapier duels, or dexterous hand-to-hand throwdowns, I’m not after that kind of thing right now (and I’ve got plenty of it on my shelves anyway). We’re looking for mighty-thewed, stamina-of-an-aurochs kind of combat here, or at least as close as I can get to it.

Suggestions?

(N.B. — I would like suggestions of such scenes done well. Bonus points if the movie containing said fight doesn’t suck. I’d rather not watch crap, thanks.)

T3

We’re going into the last week of “pack to move halfway across the country while also going full-steam ahead through the novel,” and I’m trying to be as good as I can about policing my sanity. I can, you see, be very bad about figuring out when I need to take breaks, and when those breaks need to involve human beings not inside the Magic Picture Box.

To that end, I wandered down to moonartemis76‘s place this evening, and we finished our tour through the Terminator movies by watching T3: Rise of the Machines. I wanted to see it mostly to bridge between T2 and the upcoming Salvation, but I have to say: surprisingly, it was not nearly as bad as I was expecting. In fact, I don’t think I would call it bad. Not as good as the first two, and overly self-indulgent when it comes to the special effects — but they did a nice job of finding ways to rotate their ideas* and develop motifs from the previous movies. The call-backs were pretty thick on the ground, but that’s kind of a feature on the franchise. (“She’ll be back.” Etc.)

I’m interested to see the fourth movie, and I do want to give The Sarah Connor Chronicles a shot at some point, since apparently that isn’t half-bad, either. As far as franchise survival goes, this one is maintaining a better average of quality than most — which is to say, not phenomenal, but not a steady downhill slide, either.

*By “rotate their ideas,” I mean things like how Schwarzenegger was the bad guy in the first film but the good guy in the second — and if you watch T2, they do an excellent job of faking you out on that front. The series works very conscientiously to set up your expectations and then do something new. The “something new” isn’t always brilliant, but I give them points for trying.

insights from a conversation with Khet

MOLOKOV: The man is utterly mad! You’re playing a lunatic.

THE RUSSIAN: That’s the problem: he’s a brilliant lunatic. You can’t tell which way he’ll jump. Like his game, he’s impossible to analyze. You can’t dissect him, predict him — which of course means he’s not a lunatic at all.

–from the musical Chess

The Joker is a lunatic, of course, but that quote came to mind while khet_tcheba and I were discussing why Heath Ledger’s take on the character was so disturbing. And it made me realize that you can’t triumph over his Joker: you can capture him, or you can thwart his plan, but you will never get the satisfaction of a psychological victory. There is absolutely nothing you can do that will make him react with real chagrin and acknowledge that you have bested him, not because he’s too egotistical to admit his own defeat, but because he’s too chaotic; defeat can only happen if he’s invested in a particular outcome. And he isn’t. Anything you do, or don’t do, is equally amusing to him, equally a demonstration of the chaos and meaninglessness he sees.

. . . and that’s creepy.

Non-spoilery review of The Dark Knight:

I didn’t think it was possible to make Batman Begins look flimsy and slight, but they may just have managed it.

Jeebus. My head hurts. In a good way.

Temple of Suck

To hell with completeness’ sake; I should just institute a rule that I’m never watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ever again, for any reason. Every time I watch the thing, it gets worse — and it’s not like it was good to start with.

curiosity

Did anybody actually go see The Movie Formerly Known As The Dark Is Rising?

I’m noticing all these posts about The Golden Compass, various people and blogs discussing what they thought of the movie, and I don’t recall seeing one about The Seeker. Which rather suggests to me that nobody I know went to see it.

This probably isn’t so, but at the very least it doesn’t seem to have gotten much attention. Can anybody who saw it tell me what they thought? How bad was it, really?