TV And Films

The shows and movies I like (or don’t).

International Talk Like William Shatner Day

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In honor of William Shatner’s 78th birthday tomorrow today, 3/22/09, I am declaring March 22nd to be “International Talk Like William Shatner Day!” Hey, we have “International Talk Like a Pirate Day”, and Shatner inspired a helluva lot more kids to be like Captain James T. Kirk than any who wanted to be some smelly, toothless, “arrr”-spouting frickin’ pirate.

Now, since talking like our hero is a bit more challenging than walking around going, “Arrr”, I’ve included the following video tutorial for your edification, filmed by producer Bill Biggar, on a loooong drive to the airport on L.A.’s fabulous 405 freeway. Enjoy, and remember, it’s pronounced “sabotaaj”, not, “sabotahj”.

Watchmen Credits

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While “Watchmen” didn’t end up as my favorite movie ever, I do want to join a number of people in recognizing the excellence of the opening credit sequence. In fact, this was probably my favorite part of the movie itself (seeing the newest “Star Trek” trailer was my favorite part of the entire movie-going experience).

The credits are a five-minute montage over Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A Changin'” that brings the audience up to date with the alternate history of the world in the film, through the heyday of costumed adventurers fighting crime in the 40s, their fall from grace in the 50’s, and several key moments where the Comedian and Dr. Manhattan influence the course of history to far different results than those that we are familiar with.

UPDATE: At the request of Noah Kaufman of yU+Co, the video file has been removed.

There are an incredible number of tiny little details and moments buried in this sequence, some that readers of the Watchmen comics will note, others being nice little nods to history. Sci-Fi blog io9 has a great rundown of some of the many (not-so) hidden moments in the credit sequence, and I was happy to note that I’d noticed most of what they’d mentioned. The two on their list that I didn’t catch on to are the Batman references in the first shot, and that Mick Jagger is standing next to David Bowie outside of Studio 54 (though I did see both Bowie and the Village People).

A little sad, perhaps, that the opening credits are my favorite part of the film, but they were very nicely done. All credit here (no pun intended) goes to director Zack Snyder and the crew at yU+Co[4]. Nice job, guys.

Watching the Watchmen

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Since I can only spend so many hours a day tossing resumes out across the ‘net before I start to go buggy, I decided to take a few hours out of the day and head out to catch the matinee of “Watchmen“. I got home a bit ago, and I’m going to see what I can do as far as getting my thoughts down. Perhaps a little jumbled, but so it goes.

First off, a few thoughts on what came before the movie. Remember when you would go to a movie, find your seat in a relatively hushed theater, and have a nice few quiet moments before the movie? Heck, at this point, I’m nostalgic for the stupid advertising slideshow we got for a few years, rather than the constant, loud bombardment of noise and flashing lights we get from the moment we step in the theater these days. Of the many reasons why I don’t go see movies in the theater these days, the advertising barrage is a big one.

This time, I scribbled little notes on my iTouch as the drivel went by…

“Last House on the Left“: Ugh. So not interested.
Worst thing about going to the movies these days: the stupid Kid Rock/National Guard music video.
E*Trade’s freaky talking babies don’t benefit at all from the big-screen treatment. Oh, and I get _two_ of those ads. Yay.
“Knowing” still looks interesting.
The Kia Soul hamster wheel commercial was cute, but will probably get old fast if it goes into wide release on TV.
Hmm…the “no calls during the movie” blurb has been updated to “no calls or texts.”
Previews:

  • “Wolverine“: Okay, so this one could be fun. Still likely a rental for me.
  • “Angels and Demons“: Another rental.
  • “Star Trek“: So, so, so nice on the big screen! This one, I’m there on opening weekend, if not opening night.
  • “Public Enemies“: Looks intriguing. Good cast, good director, could be worth seeing. Again, though, I put it on the rental pile.
  • “Terminator Salvation“: I just can’t get excited about this. Much like how (in my universe) nothing exists of Highlander beyond the first film, nothing exists of Terminator beyond T2.
  • “Observe and Report“: Oh, dear god, another mind-numbingly stupid mall cop movie? And to make it worse, it’s the last trailer we get, so after a lot of geektastic goodness, we’re left with a bad taste in our mouth (almost literally, any movie that features vomiting in the trailer is guaranteed not to get my money) before the main event. Nice job of programming, dolts.

And now, Watchmen.

First off, the good: it’s an incredibly faithful screen translation of the comic book, even with the changes made to the ending (no big spoiler there — that changes were made has been well-known, it’s what those changes are that have been kept more-or-less secret). From an artistic and technical standpoint, the film is astounding. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see someone make an attempt at a mashup between the comic book’s boxes and text and the movie’s images once the DVD comes out and they can get good screengrabs. You’d be able to stay incredibly close to the original work, save for the last issue. Very, very nicely done.

The casting was also incredible. Most of the cast were actors I didn’t know very well, if at all, but who fit their characters beautifully. I also got a kick out of seeing some old favorites pop up, including Max Headroom himself, Matt Frewer, as Moloch. Spot-on perfect.

That said, the movie ended up leaving me cold. It’s not at all that it’s a bad movie — as I just said, on a technical and artistic level, it’s amazing — it’s just that it completely failed to engage me, and in quite a few scenes actively repulsed me. I’ve been trying to work out why, and I think it boils down to two main points: first, that while I enjoy the original graphic novel and recognize it’s importance to the geek world, it was never the “event” for me that it was for many other geeks my age; second, I find that as I get older, I’m getting less and less desensitized to overly realistic depictions of violence.

To the first point: I’ve never been a huge comic geek. I don’t have anything against comics at all, I’ve enjoyed reading many, have a few collections and graphic novels in my library (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The Dark Knight Returns, Marvel 1602, and the entire Sandman series being the standouts), but I was never hugely into either reading or collecting them (with the sole exception of The Tick, of which I still have the first ten issues — first prints of 2-10, and the second printing of issue one — carefully preserved). While I’d heard about Watchmen many times, I didn’t ever read it until I picked it up a few years ago, and even now, I’ve only read it twice: once when I first bought it, and once again last week. Because of that, while I find it a good read, and have read enough about it over the years to recognize it’s importance to the comic world, it doesn’t hold any particular personal importance for me. Good book, worth reading, that’s it.

To the second point: Yes, Watchmen is a violent book. I know this, and I wasn’t expecting there to be a strange lack of violence in the movie. However, I was more than a little put off by just how much, and how graphic, violent imagery there was. In some instances, it was simply the director being faithful to his source material. In other instances, though, the movie actually ended up being quite a bit more graphic than the original work did, and not simply because of the transition from drawn artwork to live action.

The rest is going beyond a cut, as I’m quite likely going to be more than a little spoileriffic here. If you’re reading via RSS or on Facebook, stop now or don’t whine. ;)

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Dollhouse

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As evidenced by my recent tweet, I’ve now given Joss two chances to win me over to Dollhouse, and he’s 0 for 2. It just doesn’t work for me, and there’s a number of smaller reasons that add up to one big fail.

There’s a lot of elements to why it’s not working — from the creepy premise (normally I’m all about creepy, but when the basic idea for a show is essentially repeated, technologically-enabled date rape, that’s a kind of creepy that doesn’t do it for me) to the predictable “twists” (there wasn’t a single situation in episode two that was a real surprise) — but I think one of the biggest reasons that I can’t get into it is simply that I don’t care about the characters…and, more importantly, I can’t see why I ever would.

Echo is, by definition, a “tabula rasa,” or blank slate, even to the point of being described as such by the head of the Dollhouse. How can I even begin to care about who she is when the whole point of the show is that she isn’t? She has no personality of her own. The only time she exists as a person is when she’s been imprinted for an assignment, but that person disappears as soon as she returns to the Dollhouse. I can’t invest myself emotionally in a character that’s nothing but an empty shell.

When we look back at early episodes of long-running shows, it’s often funny to see how “unformed” the characters were at that point. The actors were still discovering their roles, taking the rough character sketches given to them and beginning to flesh them out into fully developed people that we can care about. With Dollhouse, that doesn’t seem to be an option — perhaps for some of the secondary and tertiary cast — but certainly not for the lead.

At least, not if they play by the rules that they’ve set up. And this is where the Whedon acolytes cry out, telling me to wait! Hold on! Because — as was widely reported before Dollhouse first aired — part of the compromise Whedon had to make with FOX was to set up the first seven episodes as primarily standalone episodes, without major ties into the planned arc of the show. So, you see, these first seven are like “seven pilots,” and if we just keep watching, we’ll get to the really good stuff! Where Echo starts breaking through her programming, and the mysteries start to unravel, and then, and then, and then….

Sorry, no. That doesn’t work for me — no show should need seven pilots just to get people interested. No, I don’t expect every TV show to have some huge story arc to follow — some of my favorite shows (Star Trek TOS and TNG) were entirely or almost entirely standalone episodes, and I enjoyed the “monster of the week” X-Files episodes as much as I did the “conspiracy” episodes. Guilty pleasure shows like CSI and NCIS do a great job of being entertaining and interesting, allowing you to get to know the characters as they grow over time, while still generally staying within the bounds of standalone shows. There does need to be some amount of advancement possible, however, otherwise you might as well just be “rebooting” every week.

On top of all that, though, the characters and situations need to be interesting, and that’s a major failure of Dollhouse. To date, the most interesting characters I’ve seen have been the FBI agent and the doctor (and I’m not even sure if that’s because the character is that interesting or because I loved Amy Acker’s character “Fred” on Angel). Echo, her handler, the geeky guy who does the programming, the boss? None of them interest me as much as one secondary and one tertiary character do, and that’s a bad sign. The situations have only been slightly better — the first week’s hostage situation and negotiation was a little interesting, but was only the latter half of the episode, and last week’s “hunting the human” schtick has been done so many times that it completely failed to grab my interest. Really, how much suspense could there be when the main character is in mortal peril in the second episode of the series? Spoiler alert, folks…she ain’t gonna die.

So no, no Dollhouse for me. Maybe Joss still has some good stuff rattling around in his brain, and maybe all he needs to do is to get away from FOX to do it. However, I have my doubts.

On the Neverending Story

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As I’m sure most people have noticed, there’s a huge trend right now for movie studios to forego the troublesome process of actually having to come up with new ideas, and just dig back into the past to resurrect formerly successful properties. That way, nobody actually has to think too terribly hard, and they can hope to gain a few ticket sales by cashing in on misplaced nostalgia. The success of these ventures has been uneven (to say the least), and every time word leaks out of another ill-conceived attempt to recreate something from our childhood, my question is always, “Why can’t they try to remake the bad films into something good, instead of ruining films that were good in the first place?”

This morning, I woke up (early, for some reason), and saw this tweet:

seattlegeekly: RT @GeekTyrant: NEVERENDING STORY: Another Childhood Film Classic Gets Jacked http://bit.ly/19nlmr – WHY do they feel they have to do this?

I expected my usual reaction of, “oh, geez, why?”…and didn’t get it. You see, yes, there’s a chance that they’re taking a film that’s loved by many who were kids when it came out and “updating” it to be bigger, louder, and — as is typical for today’s reimaginings — stupider (see trailers for the upcoming recreation of Disney’s “Witch Mountain” franchise for a prime example of what I’m talking about). However — and this is where I risk lynching by those only familiar with the film — if we’re lucky, this could turn out to be one of those cases where they just might improve on the original.

Some background: I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska. Now, Alaska in the 1980’s was still far enough removed from the Lower 48 that more often than not, we tended to run a few weeks behind the rest of the U.S. I must have been around nine or ten years old when I saw a trailer for the original “Neverending Story” on TV, and I was immediately entranced. A kid not much older than me getting literally sucked into a fantasy book, with fantastic creatures, flying dragons, and beautiful princesses? Awesome! And so I eagerly waited for the movie to come out.

And waited.

And waited. I have no idea how long I actually waited, but it was long enough in kid years that it turned into “forever.” This was before the modern technique of releasing trailers six months to a year in advance of a film to build excitement, so I’ve always assumed that Alaska just got the movie a month or two after it opened in the rest of the U.S. Whatever the reason, I was annoyed and anxious…I wanted to see that movie! And then, while wandering through a bookstore, I saw it: the book of the movie! It had pictures on the front cover of the kids from the trailer, the dragon…that was it! Now it didn’t matter that we hadn’t gotten the movie…I had the book! I got it, went home, and dove in.

I dove in much like Bastian did. Here was a kid much like me, for whom books weren’t merely printed words on paper, but entire worlds that would flow out of the pages, wrap around us and envelop us, drawing us in to the story as if we were really there. I was with Bastian on his adventures just as he was with Atreyu, Artax, Falcor, and all the rest. I fell in love with that book.

Not too long after I finished reading, word came out that the movie was finally opening in Anchorage! Finally! All the adventures I’d just lived, I’d get to see — the creatures, the battles, everything! I’m not sure I’ve ever been quite so excited to see a movie…this was it. This was exactly what I’d been waiting for since that first trailer.

And then, over that next hour and a half, my ten-year-old self became suddenly, bitterly, painfully schooled in the realities of translating a novel to the screen. Roger Ebert’s review of “North” had nothing on the vitriol that spewed out of my young mouth when I “reviewed” the film to my family and friends. It was horrid! A tragedy! A disaster!

For years now, I’ve described the major differences between the book and the movie thusly: “Take your favorite childhood novel. Now, tear it in half, and throw the latter half away. Now, start randomly tearing pages out of the first half, until it’s about half the size it was when you started. Now, take what’s left, and shuffle it around until it loses nearly all resemblance to the original story. There’s your script!”

There were so many moments in the book that I’d played over and over in my head, that I’d been dying to see on the screen, that simply didn’t exist. One of the key scenes that I felt cheated on was when Atreyu and Falcor meet. In the book, Atreyu has lost Artax, spoken to Morla, and left the Swamps of Sadness on his own. Travelling through a canyon, he witnesses a battle between two great monsters: a luckdragon, and a shape-changer named Ygramul the Many…

The battle between the two giants was fearsome. The luckdragon was still defending himself, spewing blue fire that singed the cloud-monster’s bristles. Smoke came whirling through the crevices in the rock, so foul-smelling that Atreyu could hardly breathe. Once the luckdragon managed to bite off one of the monster’s long legs. but instead of falling into the chasm, the severed leg hovered for a time in mid-air, then returned to its old place in the black cloud-body. And several times the dragon seemed to seize one of the monster’s limbs between its teeth, but bit into the void.

Only then did Atreyu noticed that the monster was not a single, solid body, but was made up of innumerable small steel-blue insects which buzzed like angry hornets. It was their compact swarm that kept taking different shapes.

This was Ygramul, and now Atreyu knew why she was called ‘the Many’.

To have this scene played over and over in my head for weeks, seen from every angle, imagined from every possible vantage point, and then to watch in disbelief in the film as Falcor simply appears for no particular reason — a deus ex machina that bothered me at ten, even if I didn’t know the term — to pull Atreyu out of the swamp? Oh, this was just not right!

I didn’t watch that movie for years afterwards.

Eventually, as I got older, I started to wonder if it was really as bad as I remembered, and rented it. Of course, no, it wasn’t that bad. A little older, a little wiser, and a little more cognizant of the sacrifices that must be made when adapting a 377-page fantasy novel to a 90-minute movie, I came to realize that it’s really not that bad of a movie at all, and even had a lot of fun on one trip to Germany when I got to see some of the sets. However, it’s definitely one of those films where I need to keep it in a compartment entirely separate from that of the book. Two creations that share a name and many characters, but in most respects, are two entirely separate things.

So now comes word that there may be a new take on the film. Admittedly, it’s still in the very early stages of planning, but one key quote stood out to me: “The new pic…will examine the more nuanced details of the book that were glossed over in the first pic.” Now, who knows just what details they’re looking at (though they certainly have a lot to choose from), and this could be nothing but marketingspeak aimed directly at people like me who are more attached to the book than the movie, but I’d like to hold out at least a little hope that we may get something closer to what Michael Ende originally created.

Pixar and Gender

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Long-time readers will recognize this particular soapbox, but it’s good to know I’m not the only one standing on it: Pixar’s Gender Problem:

Whenever a new Pixar movie comes out, I wrestle with the same frustration: Pixar’s gender problem. While Disney’s long history of antipathy toward mothers and the problematic popularity of the Disney Princess line are well-traveled territory for feminist critiques, Pixar’s gender problem often slips under the radar.

The Pixar M.O. is (somewhat) subtler than the old your-stepmom-is-a-witch tropes of Disney past. Instead, Pixar’s continued failure to posit female characters as the central protagonists in their stories contributes to the idea that male is neutral and female is particular. This is not to say that Pixar does not write female characters. What I am taking issue with is the ad-nauseam repetition of female characters as helpers, love interests, and moral compasses to the male characters whose problems, feelings, and desires drive the narratives.

Much of the post covers much the same ground that I have in the past (first asking if Pixar is a ‘boys only’ club, then investigating Wall•E’s Misogyn•E, and then in response to an interviewer’s question). There is some word of an upcoming film that I hadn’t heard about yet that does appear to have a female lead. All may not be rosy just yet, though…

The Bear and the Bow: OOOOOH! Somebody told Pixar that they needed to make a movie with a girl as the main character! So, duh, it’s going to be “Pixar’s first fairy tale”!!! The main character will be, get this, a PRINCESS! But, since the Pixar people are probably good Bay Area liberals, I’m sure the princess will want to defy her parents’/society’s expectations. Where have we seen that before, I wonder? No cookies for rehashing the same old shit. If we’re super lucky, she won’t marry the prince, which will allow us to cover the same ground that Robert Munsch and Free to Be You and Me covered in the goddamn ’70s. Maybe it will be good, but no matter how good it is, it still PISSES ME OFF that girls get to be main characters only when they are princess (or marrying up the social ladder a la Belle and Mulan) in fairy tale worlds. Boys can be main characters anywhere, but if a girl is the main character, you can bet your ass it’s a fantasy world.

So it may be a step forward. If we’re lucky, it’ll be a big step forward, and it may even be enough to get Prairie and I back in the theater for a Pixar film. Noone can really argue that Pixar is bad at storytelling (well, aside from Cars, that is), but in the end…

…It’s not just the stories they choose to tell, it’s how they choose to tell them: in a way that always relegates female characters to the periphery, where they can serve and encourage male characters, but are never, ever important enough to carry a whole movie on their own shoulders. Unless they’re, you know, princesses.

(via Kottke)

My Movie Rating System

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For no particular reason that I can come up with, I was thinking over how I rate movies, and attempting to quantify the basic reasoning for each star of a five-star rating system. I think I’ve pretty much nailed it down.

* (one star): Two hours of my life that I won’t get back.
* * (two stars): Not a total waste of time, if the viewing cost is low enough (free coupon, someone else is renting it and I happen to be around to see it, a good Netflix plan with relatively high turnover).
* * * (three stars): Worth a rent.
* * * * (four stars): Worth seeing in the theater (at a matinee, or at an evening show if I’m either excited enough by the particular movie or feeling rich enough to afford it), possibly worth purchasing (preferably secondhand or after a while so the price has dropped, but perhaps at full price if I think it’s on the high side of four stars).
* * * * * (five stars): A keeper. Worth seeing in the theater if possible, worth owning at whatever price I think is reasonable.

Of course, as with any rating system, there’s some amount of variability, and my movie collection certainly isn’t entirely comprised of 4- and 5-star movies (Star Trek V? Honestly, it’s about a 2-star movie. But it’s Star Trek, and I’m a nerd and a completist). But on the whole, I think that’s a pretty good overview of my thought process.