9/14/09
9/13/09
9/12/09
9/10/09
9/9/09
9/8/09
9/7/09
9/1/09
Two More
Firstly, a heads-up that I'm going to make some major changes around here. Slowly contemplating things, as I am wont to do, and I'll get around to it.
Secondly (and thirdly), things that defy contemplation- the last of the summer movies.
I've got to say that District 9 was the second in two refreshing, heartening trips to the cinema (see previous post). Characters I cared about (none of them human, mind you- protagonist Wikus Van De Merwe has to be the biggest fuckup in a hero's shoes since John Locke of Lost), and therefore spent the film at the edge of my seat as their long-shot plans for escape went realistically awry again and again. I'm half-praying they don't sequalize this, but who am I kidding. We need more original concepts like this- look how they take hold of audiences, Hollywood, and stop banking on "known properties"...
...Or worse yet, continually fucking them up. I mean, what is there to fuck up about G.I. Joe? And before you roll out your "what did you expect?", let me explain.
G.I. Joe, in its odd way, is the reason I write, and the reason I went into acting. For years (maybe ages 9-12?) I concocted an elaborate, continuing storyline for my vast collection of toys and vehicles, a storyline for which I kept notes and taught myself things about plotting that I still use today (I didn't once see the cartoon, so the characterizations also became my own). Whenever I'm working on a script, there isn't a mental moment that goes by that I don't recall how I mentally bookmarked some action taken by Duke, or Flint, or Destro, as I played with those toys, and stored it away until the consequences of that action were to be dealt with in the storyline. And some serious stuff went down in my 11-year-old battlefield/bedroom: love, hate, betrayal, death, resurrection- so surely Hollywood could do better than an 11-year-old, right? I just had to go and find out.
Aaannnd, the answer was no. Sort of. The goofy nonsense that passed for plot in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra incorporated some stuff that, if you can believe this, overthought the concept: Cobra Commander and Duke being brothers, or whatever the fuck they were, and however that relationship worked. And the opposite: the playing down/simplification of Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow's backstory, which was brilliantly done in the Marvel Comic of the 1980's (and I do mean brilliantly; that's not just emptyheaded trash culture fanboy flare; it was a magnificent and monumental series). Otherwise, boom-boom-pow, it was just like chucking plastic around the sand pit back in the glory days.
But this might stand as the utlimate example of a baffling line of thinking when it comes to making films about these pre-existing properties: why take iconic, memorable designs and slap black leather on them?????? Jesus, Murphy, I mean, it's even a good business decision to stick with some known elements; Transformers pulled a masterstroke by keeping some of the cartoon voices on the payroll, yet G.I. Joe took distinct design like this:
and 're-imagined' it as this:
Is this meant to be playing to world markets that didn't have the action figures/cartoon in their lives? Becuase that still doesn't make sense. I'm convinced they could have added $30-50 million to their box office if they'd reproduced some of the remarkable designs Hasbro came up with 25 years ago. I mean, Snake-Eyes, who is famously mute, had a mouth on his costume. How does this stuff get by 30 pre-production approvals and as many test audiences to be ridiculed by people like me?
Secondly (and thirdly), things that defy contemplation- the last of the summer movies.
I've got to say that District 9 was the second in two refreshing, heartening trips to the cinema (see previous post). Characters I cared about (none of them human, mind you- protagonist Wikus Van De Merwe has to be the biggest fuckup in a hero's shoes since John Locke of Lost), and therefore spent the film at the edge of my seat as their long-shot plans for escape went realistically awry again and again. I'm half-praying they don't sequalize this, but who am I kidding. We need more original concepts like this- look how they take hold of audiences, Hollywood, and stop banking on "known properties"...
...Or worse yet, continually fucking them up. I mean, what is there to fuck up about G.I. Joe? And before you roll out your "what did you expect?", let me explain.
G.I. Joe, in its odd way, is the reason I write, and the reason I went into acting. For years (maybe ages 9-12?) I concocted an elaborate, continuing storyline for my vast collection of toys and vehicles, a storyline for which I kept notes and taught myself things about plotting that I still use today (I didn't once see the cartoon, so the characterizations also became my own). Whenever I'm working on a script, there isn't a mental moment that goes by that I don't recall how I mentally bookmarked some action taken by Duke, or Flint, or Destro, as I played with those toys, and stored it away until the consequences of that action were to be dealt with in the storyline. And some serious stuff went down in my 11-year-old battlefield/bedroom: love, hate, betrayal, death, resurrection- so surely Hollywood could do better than an 11-year-old, right? I just had to go and find out.
Aaannnd, the answer was no. Sort of. The goofy nonsense that passed for plot in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra incorporated some stuff that, if you can believe this, overthought the concept: Cobra Commander and Duke being brothers, or whatever the fuck they were, and however that relationship worked. And the opposite: the playing down/simplification of Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow's backstory, which was brilliantly done in the Marvel Comic of the 1980's (and I do mean brilliantly; that's not just emptyheaded trash culture fanboy flare; it was a magnificent and monumental series). Otherwise, boom-boom-pow, it was just like chucking plastic around the sand pit back in the glory days.
But this might stand as the utlimate example of a baffling line of thinking when it comes to making films about these pre-existing properties: why take iconic, memorable designs and slap black leather on them?????? Jesus, Murphy, I mean, it's even a good business decision to stick with some known elements; Transformers pulled a masterstroke by keeping some of the cartoon voices on the payroll, yet G.I. Joe took distinct design like this:
and 're-imagined' it as this:
Is this meant to be playing to world markets that didn't have the action figures/cartoon in their lives? Becuase that still doesn't make sense. I'm convinced they could have added $30-50 million to their box office if they'd reproduced some of the remarkable designs Hasbro came up with 25 years ago. I mean, Snake-Eyes, who is famously mute, had a mouth on his costume. How does this stuff get by 30 pre-production approvals and as many test audiences to be ridiculed by people like me?
8/23/09
Finally, A Film Worth Writing About
Just take a look at the previous post's date. It's been a wasteland of a summer, no? Star Trek- two hours of technicolor glee, but that was May. Up- a winner, and should be somewhere on the 1000 best films ever made. And since I'm full-time in Halifax now, I've blinked and missed anything critically notable like The Hurt Locker, and... um... The Hurt Locker. Instead it's been a parade of disappointment. When did movies stop making sense? Transformers, Harry Potter, Wolverine, Terminator- name your franchise; every one of them was like picking up issue #340 of a comic book I've never read. Maybe if you sit around thinking about Dumbledore's Army (but wasn't that what the last HP was about? And why not even a mention of said army in this new one?) or the internal workings of Jazz the police car Transformer (Is he the police car Transformer? Is he a he? Or an it? And was he even in Revenge of the Fallen?), you might be of another opinion, but you'd also be a child, and no one makes movies for grown-ups any more.
But- one that rides the line (meaning there's grown-up pleasures to be had, but if you just want to "Aw, Dude! That was fuckin this! That was fuckin' that!" all your way through it, fill your emotionally stunted boots) is the one I saw last night, Inglourius Basterds.
I've never been one to worship Tarantino to the exclusion of all else, but I've been a fan. I saw Reservior Dogs a year before it became an obsession at my and everyone else's university, and that's triggered an auto-reaction to every one of his films since (even Pulp Fiction): that there's never going to be that pure experience of being surprised by this filmmaker again. Or so I thought.
I think it's the classically evocative WWII setting that made so much of this movie pop for me. Every one of Tarantino's tricks that I'd grown so aware of worked for me here. As a writer I'm a huge fan of knowing the rules and promptly breaking them. This movie introduces characters, then shoots their nuts off before they've had a chance to do shit-all for the story or for themselves. There are extended scenes (or, in recent QT style, 'Chapters", such as the "Rendezvous in Nadine" sequence, that are as good as any stage script I've read in ages, that meander down entirely irrelevant roads (the 'King Kong' conversation b/t the undercover Basterds and the German officer), and pull themselves together just in time for the denoument, which is as abrupt as a gunshot to the face. Literally.
And there's just enough silence and breathing room in this film to set one's mind going. I found myself thinking, early on, 'Is this a film about good and evil? Or just about evil? Or just about war?' These are guys who don't beat them (well, in one sense of the word, they do), but join them. They're not glorious, and they're bastards. They, like their foul German opposers, don't think a lick about what horrid shit they're inflicting on hundreds of people. And that makes the nihilistic bent that Tarantino works with jive the best it has in any of his work.
There's a moment in the polar opposite of this film, the aforementioned Star Trek, where Kirk and Spock are trying to talk their way through an encounter with Nero, the planet-destroying villain, who of course doesn't want anything to do with diplomacy. And just when you think you might get one of those orations on humanity that Patrick Stewart did so well and Scott Bakula did so badly, Kirk just says "Fuck it. All we can do is shoot at him"
And Spock agrees. And they do.
That's what Inglourious Basterds is from start to finish. We all know why Shoshonna works with a steadfast resolve to burn every Nazi alive in her movie theatre- because that's what you do when the world's that way. And if you think these thoughts are far too lofty to have come out of this particular moviegoing experience, well.
I can't immediately bring to mind a war film that didn't have the protagonists coming to grips with the moral lapses they've expereinced in battle, which is something I suspect one doesn't do much of in The Fight. And before going to this movie I found my mind drifting over the PC implications of having Jews do this in a movie, but that's kind of all out the window now.
One of several scenes as good as a one-act play
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