Film

While I’m not nearly as much of a movie buff as many, I do like ’em and watch ’em when I can.

Queueing Up…

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For the past few months, Prairie and I have been the kind of customers that Netflix must pray for. We’ve been busy, and we were getting movies from a queue I put together a long time ago, when I was living on my own and therefore choosing films that I was interested in, not films that we were interested in (and while there’s some overlap, there’s also a lot of disconnect between the two). So, we’d ended up getting movies that we just weren’t interested in, and they’d just sit here in the hopes that some night, they’d sound right.

Of course, the longer they sit, the less of a good deal that $20 a month is.

So, on the verge of just canceling the Netflix account, we decided we’d take a little time to brainstorm a bit and put together a queue that we’d be more likely to enjoy going through. I completely nuked the queue I had built up, we found three basic ideas to start from, and got a new queue set up. We’re pretty sure that the result will carry us through for the next few months rather easily.

Of course, the final result might provoke a few laughs, or at least raised eyebrows. But it’s one that works for us.

iTunes “Opening Night” by Bryn Dowling, Meg Gillentine, Ensemble from the album The Producers (Movie) (2005, 1:46).

Retkhan

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Khan Noonien Singh, long one of the most famous and most loved villains in the Star Trek universe, has over time presented some (extraordinarily geeky) issues to fans who know his story.

Namely, the Eugenics Wars of the 1990’s. According to Star Trek canon as established in the original series episode ‘Space Seed‘…

From 1992 to 1996, Khan was absolute ruler of more than one-quarter of Earth’s population, including regions of Asia the Middle East.

In the mid 1990s, [Khan and other genetically engineered] Augment tyrants began warring amongst themselves. Other nations joined to force them from power in a series of struggles that became known as the Eugenics Wars. Eventually, most of the tyrants were defeated and their territory re-captured, but up to 90 “supermen” were never accounted for.

Khan escaped the wars and their consequences along with 84 followers who swore to live and die at his command. He saw his best option in a risky, self-imposed exile. In 1996, he took control of a DY-100-class interplanetary sleeper ship he christened SS Botany Bay, named for the site of the Australian penal colony. Set on a course outbound from the solar system, but with no apparent destination in mind, Khan and his people remained in suspended animation for Botany Bay’s (nearly) 300-year sublight journey.

Of course, when this was all dreamed up in the 1960’s, no-one knew that Trek would survive until the mid-’90’s, let alone grow into the phenomenon that it did. Once the ’90’s rolled around, though…well, yes, as fans, we are perfectly aware that Trek is fiction. It’s just more fun when we can find ways to make the Trek universe and our universe overlap. When Trek takes place tens or hundreds of years in the future, that’s easy. Once we get to a point where we’ve moved solidly into the decades referenced in Trek with no sign of genetically engineered supermen or Eugenics Wars…well, that’s when things start to get creative.

A couple of years ago, I picked up two Trek novels by Greg Cox: The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume I and Volume II. Cox does an incredible job of retconning (that is, ‘retroactive continuity‘: “…the adding of new information to ‘historical’ material, or deliberately changing previously established facts in a work of serial fiction. The change itself is referred to as a ‘retcon’, and the act of writing and publishing a retcon is called ‘retconning’.”) as he merges the established Trek universe with the known recent history of the real world.

In Cox’s version of history, many of the perceived minor skirmishes and events around the world during the ’90’s, from middle-eastern conflicts to terrorist incidents were actually the public result of conflicts between the supermen as they battled with each other behind the scenes. It’s done quite well, and nicely filled in the details of Khan’s life on Earth up to his exile on the Botany Bay.

Hundreds of years later, of course, the Enterprise discovers the Botany Bay drifting in space and has their first encounter with Khan, culminating with Khan and his crew being marooned on Ceti Alpha V. Then, eighteen years later, Khan is rediscovered and eventually killed during the events of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

While long recognized as one of the best (if not the single best) Trek film, Khan left a number of unanswered questions regarding Trek continuity:

  1. Why did the Reliant not recognize that Ceti Alpha VI had exploded and that they were actually orbiting Ceti Alpha V?
  2. Why did nobody realize they were in the same system that Khan had been marooned in?
  3. Why had Khan never been checked up on, as Kirk had promised to do at the end of ‘Space Seed’?
  4. How could Khan recognize Chekov (and vice versa) when Koenig wasn’t on the show until the season after ‘Space Seed’ was filmed?
  5. What happened during Khan’s years on Ceti Alpha V?

Yesterday while on lunch and browsing the bookstore shelves, I noticed that Cox had a new Khan book out, To Reign in Hell: The Exile of Khan Noonien Singh, in which he explores the eighteen years between ‘Space Seed’ and The Wrath of Khan. I’ve only read the first chapter so far, but Cox is continuing to display his ability to construct believable retcons. The majority of the book is concerned with the last of the above posed questions, telling the story of Khan’s years in exile. The first chapter, though, in addition to setting up the framing story of Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Sulu returning to Ceti Alpha V to investigate and assuage Kirk’s guilt over the deaths of his crewmen, family, and ship during the events of the second, third, and fourth Trek films, also quickly and concisely answers the first three questions.

Cox even comes up with an explanation for the fourth — though he did fail to use Koenig’s “Chekov kept Khan waiting in the restroom” idea.

Khan’s long been Trek’s best villain, and Greg Cox is doing a bang-up job of filling in the holes outside of established canon. It’s well worth picking up his books if you’re in the mood for a little Trek-based fun.

(Incidentally, consider ‘retkahn’ or ‘retkahnning’ to be my proposal for Greg Cox’s ability to flesh out Khan’s story. The word amuses me, and neither seems to show up in Google yet [retkhan, retkhanning], which actually surprised me a bit.)

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

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Prairie and I went out to see the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie last night — one of the few movies coming out this summer that we were both excited about enough to head out on opening night. The reviews (which I avoided looking at until this morning) aren’t being terribly kind, but we had a lot of fun.

I’ll agree that it’s longer than it really needed to be (though Prairie doesn’t seem to think so), and there were a few moments when I found myself wishing that things would just slow down a little bit (particularly during the peak moments of the Kraken’s attacks). However, those small fumbles aside, the movie’s a perfect bit of popcorn summer fun: raucous, silly, over-the-top swashbuckling entertainment.

And I love, love, love Davy Jones and his crew! The effects work was incredible; even more so when, rather than pulling the standard effects-heavy movie trick of leaving the most complicated bad guy effects half-obscured in rain and night shots, they actually let Davy Jones and his crew go cavorting about in the light of day. What a treat — rainy nights are such an easy way to (attempt to) hide shoddy effects (Godzilla, anyone?), that it’s fun to see a movie with enough confidence in its work to let it be seen in all its glory.

So, iffy reviews aside, it was a winner in our book, and we’re looking forward to the next one.

iTunes “ToriMix v2” by Amos, Tori from the album Difficult Listening Hour (2001, 46:37).

Bachelor Week So Far…

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  • Saturday:

    Got up at 3am to take Prairie to the airport. Came home, crashed, slept for a couple hours, then went to work. Insanely busy work day as all the procrastinators came through to find a suitably techy toy for the men in their life for Father’s Day. Came home, called Prairie and chatted, changed, went off to The Vogue for bouncing. Much fun bouncing around and flirting outrageously with friends. Closed out the club, came home, crashed.

  • Sunday:

    Work. Insanely busy again, as people brought the men in their life in to choose their own suitably techy toy. Came home, called Prairie and chatted, changed, went off to The Vogue for bouncing. Again. More fun bouncing around and flirting outrageously with friends. Closed out the club, came home, crashed (I haven’t closed out the club two nights in a row in a really long time…and wow, was I feeling it…).

  • Monday:

    No work! Puttered around the house in the morning. Postponed a photoshoot with Danielle (xementio) due to outfits still being in the laundry. Instead, we went wandering around Carkeek Park. Came home, called Prairie and chatted. Watched The Chronicles of Riddick. Not bad, though somewhat odd. While Pitch Black was a fun sci-fi/horror romp (essentially an Alien clone with Vin Diesel instead of Sigourney Weaver, TCoR — technically a sequel — feels very much like it was originally written as a 80’s-style fantasy flick (I found parts of it reminiscent of Krull) and retrofitted to include the character of Riddick. Entertaining enough, though, and while I’m not sure why Dame Judi Dench was slumming it in this film, it was fun to see her.

  • Tuesday:

    Work. Slower day, not terribly notable. Came home, dinked around on the ‘puter ’til Prairie called (as she and her dad are now working their way from Palm Springs, CA back to Seattle, I don’t have a number to call them at), then dinked around on the ‘puter more until…well, until now. Will be crashing soon.

Coming up over the next few days (in theory, at least)…

  • Wednesday:

    Work.

  • Thursday:

    No work! House cleaning and puttering in the morning. I need to see if I can find a way to rig up some form of backdrop to use for the photoshoot with Danielle, which should be happening Thursday afternoon. This will be an interesting experiment, as I’ve never done any sort of posed, modeling style work, and she’s never done any posing. We’ll both be improvising as we go. First improvisation is the aforementioned backdrop — since I’ve never done anything like this, I don’t have any sort of pseudo-studio, and the only backdrops are whatever happens to be in my apartment. We’ll see how this goes.

  • Friday:

    No work! Probably more housecleaning and puttering in the morning, since I’m a procrastinator. My brother will be in town in the afternoon on his way up to a party with a friend, as he’s in bachelor mode for a few days while Emily heads back East to visit family. Loose plans to hang out for the afternoon/evening. Possibly head out to The Vogue after hanging out with Kevin, as this will be my last day of bachelorhood.

  • Saturday:

    Work. Prairie and her father should appear at some point during the day. Evening will be spent here at home, doing cute couple-y things like cuddling.

  • Sunday:

    No work! Xebeth arrives in the morning to visit for a few days. Current tentative plans include the Pride Parade in the late morning/afternoon…all else is pretty much up in the air, to be improvised as we go.

  • Monday:

    No work! Entertaining Xebeth.

  • Tuesday:

    Xebeth leaves early in the morning, then I go to work. From here on out, life should be returning to some semblance of normality.

Whew! Thank goodness summer is here so we can spend some time kicking back and relaxing! ;)

X-Men: The Last Stand

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We went out to see X-Men III today. Overall not bad, but not nearly as good as the first two were. I really think that the switch of directors from Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, Apt Pupil, X-Men, X2) to Brett Ratner (Rush Hour, Rush Hour 2) was a big factor in this. A pity, because of how good the first two were, and the possibilities presented by the “cure” for the mutant gene (which ended up feeling more like a Macguffin only of use to set up the big battle scenes at the end, rather than the issue at the core of the film).

Had Singer been given the same script to work with, I think he’d have come up with a much more watchable movie — Ratner just tried to pack far too much into 90 minutes. Too many new characters to keep track of, and too much reliance on action over plot. While the big set pieces were quite well done and fun to watch, they also were too big, hard to track, and went on so long that “nifty!” soon gave way to “okay, can we go to something else now?” Occasional editing goofs went a long way to pulling you out of the film, too — apparently the sun goes down in seconds in San Francisco (or Magneto and his bunch stood on the end of the bridge admiring Alcatraz for a couple hours), as the bridge moving took place at sunset, and immediately afterwards it was dark night.

Still, it was fun, not bad for a summer action flick, and probably wouldn’t seem nearly as shoddy if the first two hadn’t set such a high bar for the series.

One last thing, though: while apparently I’m greatly in the minority here, “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” wasn’t funny when it first appeared on the ‘net (I’ve never been able to get through more than about ten or fifteen seconds of the video before getting bored and turning it off), and it wasn’t funny in the movie. Rather, it was out of place, didn’t seem to fit, pulled me out of the movie (since I knew of the source), and suffers from the same problem that the Shrek movies suffer from (as good as they are): most pop-culture humor is only funny at a particular moment in time, and only if you ‘get’ or are a fan of the reference. A few years down the road, that line will just be another forgettable one-liner.

iTunes “Snake and the Moon” by Dead Can Dance from the album Dr. Martens: Shoe Pie (1996, 4:12).

Is Pixar a ‘boys only’ club?

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Honestly, I’d never even thought about this until Prairie brought it up after we watched one of the trailers for Cars, when its predominantly male-centric theme got her started thinking about the rest of Pixar‘s oevure. We got started talking about it again this morning, after I noticed this quote from Bonnie Hunt excerpted on the Luxo weblog:

One night John [Lasseter] said to me, “The next movie I’m writing, you’ll be the girl in it.”

See that? The girl. Really, that sounds about right. Just where are the girls in Pixar films? Let’s take a quick look…

  1. Toy Story: Bo Peep, Andy’s Mom, and Hannah (the infant sister). All definite supporting characters. Andy’s Mom and Hannah are barely there, and Bo Peep is little more than a cute flirtation gag.

  2. A Bug’s Life: More women, but more characters overall, also: Princess Atta, Princess Dot, The Queen, Gypsy Moth, and Rosie the Black Widow. It’s still a male-dominated cast — even the ladybug is a boy (it’s a great gag, but when looked at from this context, suddenly it’s not as funny).

  3. Toy Story 2: Jesse, Mrs. Potato Head, Tour Guide Barbie, Bo Peep, Andy’s Mom, and Hannah. Jesse, admittedly, is a wonderful character, but still definitely a supporting character — this is still Woody and Buzz’s story. The other additions are an overbearing housewife and a dim blonde. As Prairie said, “Hooray for womankind!”

  4. Monsters, Inc.: Boo, Celia (Mike’s Medusa-like girlfriend), and Roz (the supervisor/secretary). An infant, a neglected love interest, and a stereotypical crone of a secretary (voiced by a man, no less).

  5. Finding Nemo: Dory, Peach (the starfish), Deb/Flo (the fish whose ‘sister’ is her reflection in the tank), and Coral (Nemo’s mom). Dory’s certainly a major character in the film, but still essentially a supporting character (this is, after all, Marlin and Nemo’s story)…and she’s addled to boot. Sweet, lovable, and funny…but addled.

  6. The Incredibles: Helen Parr (Elastigirl), Mrs. Hogenson (who?), Violet, Mirage, Edna Mode, Kari (the babysitter), and Honey (Frozone’s wife). To date, Helen is Pixar’s strongest female character, and the closest they’ve come to a female lead, but again, the movie is about how Bob (Mr. Incredible) adjusts to the changing circumstances in his world. We certainly can’t ignore Honey, who is only present as a voice haranguing Frozone as he tries to find his costume.

  7. Cars: Sally’s the only female character in any of the previews. According to the IMDB, there’s also a Lizzie and a Flo. Until the movie appears, we won’t really know just how strong of a character Sally is, but the trailers make it obvious that this is, once again, a boy’s movie (to the point that Prairie isn’t looking forward to Cars as much as she has other Pixar films, due to the automotive theme).

  8. Ratatouille: This one’s so early in development that the only definite information to date is that it’s about “a rat named Ratatouille who lives in a upmarket Parisian restaurant run by an eccentric chef.”

To date, there’s not a single Pixar film that has a female main character: The Incredibles comes the closest, but even there, both Helen Parr/Elastigirl and Violet are supporting characters, and it’s Bob Parr/Mr. Incredible that’s the hero. Look at the ‘poster wall’ on Pixar’s website. None of the poster designs feature a female character…even the rollover effects exclude every female character save Dory.

As Prairie pointed out to me, where there are plenty of Disney films that girls can spend hours playing and pretending to be the Disney Princesses in (most of them, at least), there isn’t a single Pixar film that she would have wanted to play as a child.

While some might argue that Disney as a whole is sexist, I don’t quite see that. Disney’s older works are often based on traditional fairy tales, where the missing mother/evil step-mother is an integral part of the tale (as is the handsome prince coming to the rescue); newer films have been much better. Tarzan, for instance: while Jane’s mom is conspicuously missing (presumably permanently, and not just left behind in England, as Jane’s father cheerfully joins her in remaining in Africa) and Tarzan’s parents (mother and father) are killed, Kala is a very strong and loving mother figure, and Jane — like Megara, Mulan and Kida before her — is a deliciously strong woman in her own right.

It’s a pity that, as one commenter posited on the Feministing weblog, movie studios in general are both constrained by and unwilling to challenge what appears to be a very male-dominated movie audience, even for children’s movies.

The two big reasons for the dearth of females in G-rated films are that a lot of the source material (childrens’ books, fairly tales) feature male protagonists, and more importantly, a number of very well-made childrens’ films featuring female protagonists underperformed at the box office (A Little Princess, Matilda, Because of Winn-Dixie…), leading a lot of executives to believe that boys won’t watch films with female protagonists. So while studio executives bear a large measure of responsibility for not pushing harder, they’re also reacting to the market in this case.

So how about it, Pixar? You’ve shown the world that not only does Disney not have a lockdown on animated films, but that “children’s” films can be made that are good family films as well, rather than aiming the films so low that the unfortunate parents have to grit their teeth for an hour and a half whenever they take their kids to the movies. For over a decade now (since Toy Story‘s debut in 1995), you’ve consistently produced some of the best films — not just animated films, or children’s films, but best films — around.

How about letting the girls in to play as well?

iTunes “Another World” by Beborn Beton from the album Tales From Another World (1997, 4:25).

Who is John Galt?

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I’m not entirely sure about this one — Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie will be starring in a film version of Atlas Shrugged.

According to Hollywood trade paper Variety, the Mr. And Mrs. Smith co-stars, who are both fans of the Russian novelist, would play the lead roles of Dagny Taggart and John Gault [sic].

Brad Pitt I can see as Galt — while Pitt isn’t one of my all-time favorite actors, I know he can act (and occasionally actually impress me), and from what’s bouncing around inside my head from the last time I read Atlas Shrugged, he has the right look. And for people who aren’t huge fans, he’s not a huge character until towards the end of the story, though he does pop up from time to time throughout.

I’m not sure about Angelina as Dagny, though. Here are two descriptions of Dagny from early in the book:

Her leg, sculpted by the tight sheen of the stocking, its long line running straight, over an arched instep, to the top of a foot in a high-heeled pump, had a feminine elegance that seemed out of place in the dusty train car and oddly incongruous with the rest of her. She wore a battered camel’s hair coat that had been expensive, wrapped shapelessly around her slender, nervous body. The coat collar was raised almost to the slanting brim of her hat. A sweep of brown hair fell back, almost touching the line of her shoulder. Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her posture taut, as if she resented immobility, and unfeminine, as if she were unconscious of her own body and that it was a woman’s body.

[…] She looked like a young girl; only her mouth and eyes showed that she was a woman in her thirties. The dark gray eyes were direct and disturbing, as if they cut through things, throwing the inconsequential out of the way.

To my mind, Angelina seems too overtly sexual and womanly, too consciously sensual to be Dagny, but Prairie thinks that she can pull it off.

It may be time for me to re-read Atlas Shrugged, too. I first picked it up without knowing anything about it, simply because it had the single best titled I’d ever seen for a novel (and I still think it holds that position for me). Now I tend to re-read it every few years — I don’t agree with everything Ayn Rand proposes, but there are certain central themes that I do like (working for what you receive rather than expecting handouts). I just don’t tend to carry them quite as far as she does (to the point of decrying all forms of social welfare).

iTunes “ToriMix v1” by Amos, Tori from the album Difficult Listening Hour (2000, 45:31).

Meme: Watch These Movies

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Again with the Kottke-derived movie memes. Watch these movies…

Film critic Jim Emerson recently compiled a list of 102 movies that you should see before you can consider yourself movie literate:

…they [are] the movies you just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They’re the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat “movie-literate.”

The list is after the jump…

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50 Best Book-to-Film Adaptations

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Another “X greatest Y” list has appeared. This, of course, means it’s meme-time!

Working from the Guardian’s list of the 50 best book-to-film adaptations (discussion as to what films should or should not be on this list is in progress over at kottke.org), I’m tagging each line with a B if I’ve read the book, and an M if I’ve seen the movie.

And with that, we’re off…

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Back in 1973…

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This is fun: THE movie timeline.

So here’s the pitch: The Movie Timeline is the history of everything, taken from one simple premise: that everything you see in the movies is true – the real mixes with the fictitious, so long as it’s reported in a movie somewhere…

In 1973, the year I was born:

  • January 1: 12:01am – The Poseidon, a luxury liner on its last voyage from Athens to New York, is struck by a 90ft tidal wave and capsizes (The Poseidon Adventure, 1972)
  • Bobby Darin dies (Beyond The Sea)
  • New York – William Miller and Penny Lane go on tour with Stillwater (Almost Famous)
  • Las Vegas – Sam “Ace” Rothstein begins running a casino (Casino)
  • The Ice Storm
  • The Long Goodbye
  • Astronauts travel 3000 years into the future and bring back talking apes, who are killed by the police and the investigation files sealed (Planet of the Apes)
  • March 15: George McFly wins a writing award, or is killed, depending on the timeline (Back To The Future Part II)
  • June: Mossad debriefs a killer it may or may not have hired (Munich)

And in 1976, the year both Prairie and my brother Kevin were born:

  • January 4: Rocky Balboa shocks the boxing world by lasting 15 rounds with heavyweight champ Apollo Creed – though Creed wins (Rocky)
  • King Kong is again discovered on Skull Island and let loose – again – on New York City (King Kong, 1976)
  • Atlanta, Georgia – Bo “Bandit” Darvill and Cledus “Snowman” Snow bring 400 cases of Coors beer 1800 miles from Texarkana to Atlanta in less than 28 hours, winning $80,000 (Smokey and the Bandit)
  • Israeli officer Avner is debriefed by Mossad (Munich)
  • Rocky Balboa marries Adrian and they have s son, Robert “Rocky” Jr (Rocky II)
  • Summer – Dazed and Confused
  • July 4: Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation, Idaho – Arnold Joseph saves infant Thomas Builds-The-Fire from a burning house (Smoke Signals)
  • July 8: Hannibal Lecter savages a nurse during a medical examination (Red Dragon)
  • September 8: Howard The Duck arrives on Earth (Howard The Duck)
  • November 25: Philadelphia – Rocky Balboa knocks out Apollo Creed in the 15th round in their rematch (Rocky II)
  • November 26: The Band perform their last concert together (The Last Waltz)

Who knew things were so eventful back then?

iTunes “Stay” by Shakespear’s Sister from the album Hormonally Yours (1991, 3:48).