Movie Review — The Road to El Dorado

Via Netflix, I finally watched this animated film from the year 2000.  Some semi-spoilers below.

• Completely forgettable songs by Elton John.
• Every see a movie trailer which you feel like has shown you every good scene?  (Witchboard is the one that I first remember giving me that feeling.)  This one’s trailer goes a step beyond and shows the villain’s defeat!
• Were these folks Aztecs or Mayas?  Imagery was mostly Mayan, I think, but the Spanish villain being Cortes (Cortez) points to the Aztecs.
• Slightly puzzled by the inclusion of the Cortes plot at all.  The only menace added came from the knowledge that Cortez wiped out the Aztecs.  And after the big fight with the High Priest, the boat crash and such is denouement.  I suspect they just needed another 10 minutes of story to get things to the 70 minute mark needed for a theatrical release.
• Curious to watch the credits and see that other than the character animation, lots of other parts of the film appeared to have been farmed out to a bunch of other animation studios (probably doing various computer work, I guess).
• Can we draw thematic connections between this and the Hope/Crosby “Road” movies?   (Apparently so.  IMDB trivia says Miguel and Tulio’s reflections twist into Hope and Crosby at one point.)
• No one died.  Not even the guy who was stomped on by the giant stone jaguar.  Sigh.  Kid’s film in the end.

All this said, the movie itself was pretty enjoyable.  (RottenTomatoes rates it a 49%, which gives it a Splat value there but really means that it’s probably okay but not stellar.)  The themes were reasonably adult, the backstory interaction between the Chief and the High Priest had more subtlely than you expect in what is usually kid’s fare, and there was only one obligatory humorous animal sidekick and it actually supplied an important plot point.

And the Mayan imagery was way fucking cool to have running in my head during that hot sex scene we had the next night.  Jaguar gods, rivers of gold, feathered headdresses, pyramids erupting out of overgrown jungle, stone altars… wow!
 

Dream Journal: December 4, 2009

On December 4, I was scheduled to start the Landmark Forum, an event I didn’t really want to do.  (More on that in a later post.)  I had a brief dream the night before:

I was in a building with a high arched ceiling with glass skylights.  Sort of haphazardly placed around the large room were false walls, the sort that went halfway to the roof but not all the way.  Each wall had landscaping — ferns, moss, flowers, trickling fountains — and barely audible New Age music was playing.

It felt like a 1970s/1980s sci-fi show set, something from Logan’s Run or Buck Rogers.

I was talking to two guys who were also there for the Forum.  We all had on name tags and one had a black bar on his, an indicator of someone having taken the Forum before.  His name was “Belief”.  The other guy was named “Don”.  (I’m not sure if we were all wearing form-fitting jumpsuits or not.)

Some chimes rang, signalling that we to go in to the start of the Forum.  As we filed into some other room, Don and I noticed that Belief had vanished.  When we sat down, Don had also vanished.

Then I woke up.

Jeez, talk about your blatant and ugly symbology: that Landmark was New Agey and sci-fi, that any “Belief” would vanish from me, and that anyone (anything) else I knew would also vanish and I would be left alone.

The next night, my dream was Mary Chapin Carpenter’s song “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her” repeated over and over and over.
 

Crap crap crap

My old blog went bonkers.  Started giving errors every time I tried to post.  Tried unpublishing everything, no luck.  So I pulled off all the content (exported it) and deleted the old blog, and then created a new one.  But I can’t point it to the old location; something has changed with Blogger to only allow blogs at full domains, not leaf nodes.  (Suspicion: that change may be what broke the blog.)  So now I have to have it hanging from their free service until I can rig up a subdomain off my site, and I have to republish all the old posts (with the original dates).  Hours and hours of work, but at least I’m up and going again.
 

Dream Journal: November 15, 2009

Moved this post to the Sounds Kinky-er blog:
http://soundskinkyer.blogspot.com/2009/11/dream-journal-november-15-2009.html
 

Movie Review — 2012

Oh my God, what a steaming heap of…

Well, if you turn you brain off…

No, I mean really turn it off.  Don’t think about any of the stuff in the movie.

SPOILERS — SPOILERS — SPOILERS

• Don’t think about the odds of surviving
  close call after close call after close call.
• Don’t think about jumping a limo from the street into a sinking building, through the collapsing floors, and jumping it out the other side (just in time) and down a story or two with one door missing and neither losing any passengers nor setting off the air bags.
• Don’t think about managing to get the plane to take off and then staying just 50 feet off the ground while buildings throw themselves at you.  Instead of going up!  Away from the destruction!
• Don’t think about whether a super-heated volcanic ash plume only a few miles from a just-erupted supervolcano would foul the engines of a small prop plane, maybe melt things, or invade the interior air supply.
• Don’t think about how an ash plume from Yellowstone can reach DC in 7 hours (averaging nearly 300 mph), and only reach Las Vegas (about 1/3 as far away and on the same side of the Rockies) in the same time.
• Don’t think how a plane can take off from the Las Vegas airport, at the south end of the strip, and then cruise over/through the Wynn, the Venetian, and Paris casinos in that order, since those run north to south!
• Don’t think about how they got two fat teens, two little kids, a fat adult man, two normal sized adult men, two adult women, and a small dog into a single Bentley.
• Don’t think about how long it would take for hypothermia to set in atop a Himalayan glacier, for people wearing the same clothes they did in Southern California, Yellowstone, and Las Vegas.
• Don’t think about how a 1500 meter tidal wave manages to make it far into inland India.  And really don’t think how it then increases to be more than 5000 meters high in order to crest the Himalayas.  (And definitely don’t think “Why didn’t any of the brilliant scientists question how a tidal wave would increase in height while travelling over a thousand miles of dry land?”, even if the in-movie answer would have be “We don't know, but there it is!”)
• Don’t think about where the fuel is stored in a plane which falls off a cliff, impacts nose firsts, and explodes as a result.  And don’t think that there should be consistency when another plane runs nose first into the side of a ship.
• Don’t think about how overtaxed the food stores would be on the ships after taking on twice the planned load.  Don’t think “Donner, party of five.  Donner, party of four.”
• Don’t wonder about what devastation hit Africa, the only populated continent never mentioned during the destruction part of the movie.  (Because they actually sideswipe pretend to address that one.)
• Don’t think about why there was no mention of the other half of the surviving rich people of the world at the end.

Once you stop thinking about science and the odds and geography and fuel lines and food… if there’s any of your brain left, you’ll probably enjoy the outright goofiness of this movie.

You’ll definitely be talking about this movie after it’s done.  You’ll be saying:

“What the…
how the…
fuck, that made no sense!”

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Updated on January 2, 2010
 

Dream Journal: November 1, 2009

I rarely have any dreams, or at least only rarely have any that I remember past waking up.  (I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream about flying, although they say such are one the most common kinds.)  So when I do have a memorable one, I try to preserve it.

It was early evening and we were standing on the deck.  (There was a definite sense of “us”, but whether the other person was my real-world boyfriend or not, I can’t say.)  Down below, our cats (not my current cats, though) were leaping off the ground, landing in the top branches of trees, and then jumping down again — and not just jumping up and down, but 10 foot leaps into the air, into delicate twig-like branches, and doing backflips on the way down.  I soon realized that the trees were loaded with twittering birds, so the cats were jumping and catching them.

Looking closer at the branches nearest me, some of which extended onto the deck at foot level, I could see that the branches were laden with big plump berries or small plums, and the birds were feasting on them.  The berries were so ripe that they must have fermented and the birds were passing out after eating them.  There was even a stack of birds three deep in front of me.

Our dog (not my current dog, because I don’t have one) came over to the stack of birds, sniffed at them, and took the top one in its mouth, then dropped it over the edge of the deck.  The dog took the second one, and dropped it over the edge.  The dog then took the third one — a small, pure white bird which had been under the other two — took it in its mouth, and crunch crunch ate it.

And then I woke up.

I have no idea what the dream means.  (Do dreams always have to mean something?)  I can make up something sexual about watching other people doing fancy “tricks” and not settling for the first “bird” when a better one may be hidden behind it.  But the whole eating metaphor with the cats and dog gives that one a hard twist to the right.

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Updated on February 3, 2010
 

The Truth Behind the Politics

Mark Evanier writes:

Sometimes, I don’t think most Republican leaders hate Obama so much as they just hate not being in power… and don’t see any other weapon at their disposal than to keep on fanning the rages of the Rush/Glenn Beck/birther mob.

Amen!