TV And Films

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

Mad Max

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Prairie and I spent three nights last week watching the entire Mad Max trilogy: Mad Max, The Road Warrior, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

The first two, I have to admit, we kept alternating between laughing at and being fairly horrified by. Sure, they’re considered classics of sci-fi/action/post-apocalyptic movies…but wow. Two things kept striking us over and over:

  1. No woman goes unpunished. Almost without fail, every woman who appears on screen is either raped, dead, or abused into catatonia by the end of the films. In Mad Max, the only female character who escapes such a fate is the 60-something lady who owns the house that Max and his wife stay at…so apparently the only way to survive as a woman in this world is to be too old to be concerned with.

    Women fare a little bit better in The Road Warrior, though that may only be because there are more women in the film as background characters in the refinery compound. There’s really only three women that are given any memorable screen time: one who is raped and killed in the distance as Max watches through a telescope; one older woman in the compound who rants, raves, and is generally little more than a Voice of Doom; and one younger woman who serves as little more than a vapid but pretty face for the minicopter pilot to hit on — though at least those two do survive the movie.

  2. The homoerotic imagery, especially when coupled with the fate of the various characters. From the butch leather man costuming of the police force in Mad Max (especially Chief ‘Fifi’, who parades around in naught but tight leather pants and scarf while watering plants) to the range of stereotypes represented by the various bad guys (pastels, prancing, eyeshadow, androgynous appearances, BDSM gear, etc.)…all we could think was that the movies had been made by someone who was extremely unhappy with their homosexuality.

    Max himself as the hero (or, more accurately, anti-hero) is the sole obviously heterosexual “man’s man”, out on a mission to wipe clean the light-in-the-loafers renegade bikers (even when the bikers attack a young couple, when found later by Max and his partner, it’s only the guy that has lost his pants — the girl, while catatonic, is still dressed). The “homosexuality is bad and evil and should get you killed” subtext is so blatant that it hardly even counts as subtext anymore. I kept remarking that I’d be surprised if entire treatises hadn’t been written exploring this, and from the looks of a quick Google search for ‘“Mad Max” homoerotic‘, it looks like I was right.

Thankfully, Beyond Thunderdome was a far better movie than either of the first two. The costuming was an obvious evolution of the post-apocalyptic fashions of the first two (managing to carry the visual theme while decreasing, if not quite completely removing, the homoerotic overtones), the world was no longer divided into “straight = good, gay = bad” camps, and there were not just one, but two decent female characters — and they even managed to find a plot that was more engrossing than simply “drive around and kill things.”

By the time we’d sat through the first two films, both Prairie and I were approaching the third with no small degree of trepidation…but as the credits rolled, we were both rather pleasantly surprised to find that we’d both actually liked the last film. Not only was the story far more interesting (actually two separate but overlapping stories: the battle between Auntie and Master Blaster for control of Bartertown; and the lost tribe of children waiting for Captain Walker), but the characters were developed beyond the one-dimensional portraits they’d been in the first two films (Max himself gains some humanity, and Master goes from bad guy in the first half of the film to good guy and fellow escapee in the latter half).

I found the second half of Thunderdome to be more interesting than the first — the battle for control of Bartertown was fun and all, but the lost tribe of children were far more interesting to me, especially linguistically. The writers had come up with a very believable pigdin English for the children to use, and the two storytelling sequences that bookend the last half of the film were beautifully done.

So when all’s said and done, I’m not a big fan of Mad Max as a trilogy — but you can definitely count me as a fan of Beyond Thunderdome.

iTunes “Professional Widow (Armand’s Star Trunk Funkin’)” by Amos, Tori from the album Professional Widow (1996, 8:06).

Best TV of 2005

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Of Time’s list of the best TV shows of 2005, I’ve only seen one — but I’m not going to argue at all with their assessment. Number one on the list…

Battlestar Galactica (Sci Fi)

Most of you probably think this entry has got to be a joke. The rest of you have actually watched the show. Adapted from a cheesy ’70s Star Wars clone of the same name, Galactica (returning in January) is a ripping sci-fi allegory of the war on terror, complete with religious fundamentalists (here, genocidal robots called Cylons), sleeper cells, civil-liberties crackdowns and even a prisoner-torture scandal. The basic-cable budget sometimes shows in the production, but the writing and performances are first-class, especially Edward James Olmos as the noble but authoritarian commander in charge of saving the last remnants of humanity. Laugh if you want, but this story of enemies within is dead serious, and seriously good.

(via /.)

iTunes “Panzermensch” by And One from the album Virgin Superstar (2000, 5:04).

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

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Prairie and I just got home from seeing The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. We were a little nervous going in: not only was this a movie adaptation of a favorite childhood book (something which all to often suffers when translated to the screen), but Prairie’s sister Hope had seen it last week and hadn’t been terribly impressed. Once all’s said and done, though…

So. Very. Good.

The Lion, the Witch and the WardrobeStory-wise, the movie is very nearly — and quite successfully — a direct adaptation of the book, with only a very few changes made along the way. The most major change is the addition of a few minutes of prologue to the film, expanding a single sentence from the book (“This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.”) in order to help modern audiences get a feel for the time period and the reasoning behind the children’s visit to the country. A later addition — a confrontation at the base of a frozen waterfall — doesn’t insert itself quite as smoothly, but still doesn’t come across as too jarring.

Effects-wise, the film does wonderfully. Aslan, while not perfect, is quite acceptably realized, but the real standouts are the creatures created by Lord of the Rings veterans Weta. From Mr. Tumnus and his fellow fauns to the centaurs, from the Minotaur to the harpy, from the gryphons to the phoenix…across the board, absolutely stunning creature effects. Both the centaurs and the phoenix were deemed “better than in the Harry Potter movies” by Prairie and me, and the harpy in the White Witch’s army was, for me, a true jaw-dropper. So much stuff, so beautifully realized.

Last — but, of course, far from least — the characters themselves. The children were wonderful (especially Georgie Henley as Lucy), James McAvoy was suitably charming as Mr. Tumnus, and Tilda Swinton as the White Witch…oh, I got such a kick out of her, especially during the ending battle as she drives her polar bear-drawn chariot across the battlefield with Aslan’s shorn mane fashioned into a battle headdress. Simply gorgeous.

And as for the “Christian element”…eeeh. Sure, the allegory’s in the movie as in the book, but without it being pointed out, I don’t think most people would care one way or the other. Those who look for it will find it, but it’s certainly not like there’s a big neon “Christ Figure” sign pointing at Aslan every time he comes on screen. If anything, there’s a bit less overt references to Christian mythology in the movie than in the book — while both refer to the children as Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve, the movie never mentions the White Witch’s origins as the daughter of Adam’s first wife Lilith and a giant.

All in all, both Prairie and I came out quite satisfied. Some small quibbles here and there, to be sure (neither of us particularly cared for the stylized approach to the moments after Jadis is defeated), but on the whole a marvelously successful job of translating the book to the screen. Hurrah!

And now I’m off to find some turkish delight…

Poseidon

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Apparently, there’s a big-budget remake of the 70’s disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure being made, and the first trailer just hit the ‘net.

As I was watching the trailer, a shot of the huge wave bearing down on the ocean liner made me wonder about just how likely such an event really was. To my (admittedly limited) knowledge, waves such as that are generally associated with tsunamis, where waves that might be unnoticeable on the ocean grow to incredible height as they progress into shallower water near shore. Large waves away from shore are generally associated with storms or hurricanes. So, to see a wave large enough to capsize a modern ocean liner in the open sea on an otherwise clear night seemed to be straining, if not outright breaking credibility.

In my head, then, I decided that part of the remake should be the question of where such a wave would come from and what could generate it. In my version of the movie, the survivors of the capsized cruise ship would make it to the surface, find a life raft or some other craft, and make it in to shore…only to discover that the wave had been generated by a huge meteor or asteroid crashing into the ocean not far from their ship, and by the time they’d escaped the ship and made it to land, huge tsunamis had wiped out entire coastlines across the world, practically destroying the world as they’d known it. Kind of a modern-day Planet of the Apes ending, only without the sci-fi time travel element.

What really surprised me when starting to write this post, then, was noting these two passages on the IMDB’s trivia page for The Poseidon Adventure:

Paul Gallico was inspired to write his novel by a voyage he made on the Queen Mary. When he was having breakfast in the dining room, the liner was hit by a large wave, sending people and furniture crashing to the other side of the vessel. He was further inspired by a true incident which occurred aboard the Queen Mary during World War II. Packed with American troops bound for Europe, the ship was struck by a gargantuan freak wave in the North Atlantic. It was calculated that if the ship had rolled another five inches, she would have capsized like the Poseidon.

Such mid-ocean “rogue waves” were previously thought to occur only once every ten thousand years. A 2004 study of satellite radar images showed they can happen as often as hundreds of times every decade.

Whoa. Such waves are real? Apparently so!

Rogue waves are freakishly large waves, much bigger than the surrounding swell. They seem to rear up out of nowhere, sometimes out of a fairly calm sea, and disappear just as quickly. Mariners have recounted tales of such waves for centuries, but until recently oceanographers discounted them, along with sightings of sea monsters and mermaids. Naval architects, however, have analyzed the wrecks of ships sunk in recent decades, and have found that a large proportion of them have damage consistent with an encounter with a rogue wave, which can reach heights of a hundred feet. Even supertankers have been sunk by these monster waves. Now the evidence is too great to ignore, and physicists are trying to understand how rogue waves are generated. The issue is important not only for our understanding of the ocean, but also because rogue waves seem to be responsible for the loss of many lives at sea.

Hot damn that’s cool. Freaky and scary, but really cool. Guess I should be giving the scriptwriters a tad more credit than I had been!

Marie Antoinette

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How very odd this is — odd, though, in a way that gives me a grin. The first trailer for Marie Antoinette, a new film by Sofia Coppola (from whom Lost in Translation came to the screen). It’s a period piece starting Kirsten Dunst (yum!) as the ill-fated queen…and the trailer is all set to New Order‘s “Age of Consent“.

Odd…but I think I like it.

(via Pop Astronaut)

Update: I keep seeing places linking to this (interruptorjones, kottke, and others) describing the soundtrack as ‘indie rock’. Since when is New Order — especially New Order circa 1983, when ‘Power, Corruption and Lies‘ was released — ‘indie rock’ instead of ‘new wave’ or ‘new romantic’? Bad enough that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with all the various genres, sub-genres, and sub-sub-genres that have been concocted for today’s music world, but retrofitting today’s labels to music that’s 23 years old just makes it even more confusing.

Narnia followup

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A selection of quotes from reviews of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe…

The book’s well-discussed Christian allegorical content, by contrast, is rendered precisely as Lewis wrote it; no more and no less overt than on the page.

— The Seattle Times

Los Angeles Times reviewer Carina Chocano described the film as “real by the logic of childhood” and noted that the book’s much-discussed Christian themes do not overwhelm the simple tale of four children’s adventures in Narnia.

“As a Christian primer, it’s terrible. As a story, it’s timeless,” Chocano wrote in a review on Wednesday.

— Reuters

The Christianity may be too New Age to make good 700 Club fodder. On the other hand, The Lion et al. could serve as a powerful teaching story: the gospel according to Tumnus. Certainly, the Boschian “crucifixion” that Aslan suffers has to be friendlier than Mel Gibson’s Jew-baiting sadomasochist extravaganza. Anyway, for all the Lion‘s blatant allegory, the tale’s engagingly child-centered family dynamics will most likely be understood as a cosmic divorce settlement pitting Aslan’s cuddly dad against the White Witch’s castrating mommy.

— The Village Voice

Some evangelical groups have been promoting the movie as ” ‘The Passion’ for kids,” which makes it sound potentially like a greater source of lifelong trauma than “Bambi.” But the Christian allegory embedded at its chewy center serves less as evangelical cudgel than a primer on morality and the myths we create to explain it. The magical land of Narnia is a place where Western myths and religions (classical, Christian, Celtic, Norse, you name it) are jumbled together so that we may consider their similarities and uses. If it weren’t for Lewis’ stated intention to write a fantastical story to make the dogma go down, it might even come across as a liberal humanist parable about myth and its function in society, especially during times of trouble.

[…] If a scene featuring the torment and grisly execution of Aslan is meant to recall the crucifixion (the lion is eventually resurrected, thanks to the rules of the “deep magic” that governs Narnia), the other stuff cancels it out. That is, unless Christianity has lately been amended to allow for the Christ figure in pitched battle against a witch, a Minotaur and evil dwarfs (the centaur, the faun and flying wildcats are on his side), which, these days, you never know.

[…] No wonder that some might take it as religious instruction: It’s a medieval vision of Christianity for another dark age, with the Christ figure as soldier and war as the way to make the world safe for Santa Claus. As a Christian primer, it’s terrible. As a story, it’s timeless.

— Los Angeles Times

If you’re not a fan, perhaps you’re among those who know of the book mainly thanks to the bleating of certain evangelicals who claim that Lewis’ tales–unlike those featuring that satanic Harry Potter–bring viewers to Christ. (“Go spend money on Narnia stuff to show that you love the Lord!”)

It’s true that there are elements of biblical allegory in here; it’s also true that this is a fantasy. And frankly, it’s the story that matters; even if you must categorize Narnia as a Christian movie, it’s many times better than any overtly Christian movie in recent memory. Faith-based films like Left Behind tend to pile on the sentimentality; Narnia does not.

— The Dallas Observer

While pundits and the press witter on about whether C.S. Lewis’ ageless tales of Narnia are too Christian, or not Christian enough, or the wrong kind of Christian, children the world over will yawn politely and read on. I must have devoured The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at least 10 times while growing up in an aggressively Anglican culture, and it never once occurred to me that Aslan the super-lion died the death of Christ and was similarly resurrected. Nor would it have bothered my little Jewish soul had someone set me straight.

…if Narnia according to Adamson is more a democratic war on crypto-fascist totalitarianism than a holy war against the non-Christian barbarian, I for one won’t be filing a complaint.

— LA Weekly

…generations of readers have found The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe to be a gripping adventure that reaches well beyond its religious underpinnings, and this robust version respects both aspects and finds the same winning balance of excitement and meaning.

— The Onion AV Club

The lion’s eventual resurrection is crucial to the Christian overlay in Lewis’ work, and while this element may help “Lion” lure Gibson’s passionate audience to untold upward B.O. effect, the film does not stress its religious parallels.

— Variety

Time to put my money where my mouth is?

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Ten months ago, when I was trying to figure out BitTorrent so I could keep up with Battlestar Galactica, I wrote this in a comment:

As it is, I’d gladly pay a few dollars per episode to download high-quality versions of this show (and, theoretically, other shows that I might be interested in in the future), much like I currently do with music from the iTMS (with the caveat that I’d expect any DRM to be no more restrictive than what the iTMS uses).

And wouldn’t you know it — Battlestar Galactica is now available through the iTunes Music Store at $1.99 per episode! Very nice.

Of course, over the past ten months I’ve become accustomed to the quality afforded through captures of HD broadcasts: the episodes I download through BitTorrent are ~350Mb each and widescreen at 624×352 pixels; the episodes Apple offers are ~200Mb and shown at the ‘standard’ (pan-and-scan? cropped?) 4:3 ratio at a much smaller 320×240 pixels. Of course, there is the risk of getting a bad quality rip from BitTorrent that wouldn’t hold up to the norm, while it’s probably safe to assume that the officially sanctioned videos from Apple will be consistently good quality.

As an experiment, I purchased the most recent episode of BSG (‘Pegasus’) and compared Apple’s version to the version I downloaded via BitTorrent.

Battlestar Galactica’s ‘Pegasus’
iTMS BitTorrent1
Filetype: .m4v .avi
Length: 45:27.04 44:19.03
Filesize: 207.26 MB 345.80 MB
Time to download: I didn’t immediately think to time this, roughly 20-30 minutes on my connection. Varies depending upon the number of active BT clients: at best speed should match the iTMS time; at worst speed could take anywhere from hours to days.
Dimensions: 320 x 240 624 x 352
FPS: 24.00 23.98
Video encoding2: -NA- Generic MPEG-4
Audio encoding3: AVC0 Media MPEG Layer 3
Data rate: 636.72 kbits/sec 1106.58 kbits/sec
DRM: Apple FairPlay v2 None
Comparitive: At native sizes, the iTMS video is sharper but noticeably darker. The BitTorrent copy isn’t as crisp, but being a few notches brighter makes it easier to see (a situation exacerbated by my using an old 17″ monitor that already has its brightness and contrast at maximum and really needs to be replaced when I can afford to do so). Even so, the iTMS video is gorgeous: darker and smaller (2/3 the height and 1/2 the width), but better quality — at native size.

At full screen, the smaller size, greater compression and lesser data rate of the iTMS track is very obvious. Compression artifacts not noticeable at 320 x 240 are very visible when blown up to my monitor’s standard setting of 1152 x 870. The BitTorrent video, while softer, doesn’t show nearly as much artifacting (but then, given the larger native size and widescreen ratio of the video, it’s also only being enlarged 247% as opposed to the iTMS version’s 360%).

All in all, while the iTMS video is better quality at native size, the BitTorrent copy is far more watchable when blown up to full-screen.
Notes: 1: Due to the distributed and decentralized nature of BitTorrent, the reported statistics, while representative of the quality of most BT downloads I’ve received, are only definite for this particular copy of this episode.
2: As reported by QuickTime Player’s ‘Window > Show Movie Properties” window under ‘Sound Track’.
3: As reported by QuickTime Player’s ‘Window > Show Movie Properties” window under ‘Video Track’.

So, now what? I did say in the original quote that I’d happily pay for “high quality” copies. At the moment, with Apple’s focus on optimizing the video for the iPod, I’m not sure that the video offerings are quite enough to tempt me away from BitTorrent on a regular basis. It’s close…but not quite there.

Unless someone gives me an iPod video for Christmas, of course. Then I may need to re-evaluate. ;)

Narnia and Christianity — does it matter?

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After reading Terrence’s ‘Saying No to Narnia‘ and Pharyngula’s ‘Narnia as an inoculation‘, both of which pointed to a Guardian UK article titled ‘Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion‘, I was somewhat annoyed. As an open-minded, pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, anti-Bush liberal who was brought up in a Christian household and counts Christianity as a major part of who I am and why I’m an open-minded, pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, anti-Bush liberal, it occasionally gets under my skin when I’m reminded yet again that ‘Christian’ has become a dirty word synonymous with the worst of the bigoted bible-thumping set, tainting anything that it touches.

It was quite nice to see Arcterex’s take on the same article, then:

I read the Narnia books as a child, and absolutely loved them. They had a similar draw as modern day Harry Potter. The downtrodden who think they aren’t anybody in the world finding out that they are a heros in a magical world.

Of course, then I found out later on in live about the religious overtones in the books…

And couldn’t care less. A good story is a good story, and personally I find this sort of ignorant reporting as bad as the Christian groups who go around saying how Harry Potter is promoting kids to become satanists and how it’s an evil book. It’s a friggin’ book and a good story. Geez.

Damn skippy. Sure, there are Christian overtones to the Narnia stories. There are Christian overtones to the Matrix stories, the Lord of the Rings stories, the Star Wars stories, and countless other stories (both printed and filmed), too. Why all the rancor? Just because the religious right (who all too often seem to embody the antithesis to the Christianity I grew up with) has jumped all over The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, is it suddenly impossible to go out and enjoy a fun fantasy movie?

Sure, you can read all sorts of meaning into the stories and why they’re being brought to the screen now — religious indoctrination, right-wing propelled mass media conspiracy theories, whatever. You can also tell your inner Fox Mulder that every so often it doesn’t matter and go watch a movie.

That’s what I’m planning on doing.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

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Prairie and I just got back from (finally) seeing the latest Harry Potter movie. In brief, I think this is my favorite of the series so far. Rather fast-paced (though it would have to be to pack everything in that it needed to) but still quite coherent and hitting all the key points, and absolutely spot-on performances from Brendan Gleeson as Mad-Eye Moody and Ralph Fiennes as Lord Voldemort.

Plus, I think I’ve got a crush on Cho Chang. ;)