Movie Review — Cars

Quick Reaction

Cars was useless.

More Details

For starters, I don’t like NASCAR (or other car racing).  And mind you, this isn’t in isolation: I went with a date to a car race one time; I don’t think we went out again after that.  90-minute drive to get there, and another hour to get into the racegrounds and park (and an hour to get out again later).  Then lots of cars going by a few at a time, and expensive concessions.  What was the point?  Not even any crashes.

(There’s a theory that says there are two types of sports.  In one, you go to see someone doing something impressive — track & field, for example.  In the other, you go to see someone get hurt — football.  Car racing: in person, you often can’t see the whole picture of the race, just a couple hundred yards of the track, so frankly, you’re there in hopes of seeing a nasty crash.)

(Baseball doesn’t seem to fit into either category.  Maybe it’s not really a sport?  And Ice Dancing falls in both categories.  <grin>)

Beyond that, with Cars in particular, I found the character designs to be ugly.  And while I expect a simplified story in animated films, since they are largely aimed at kids, I typically expect enough non-kid content in a Pixar film to make adults not feel the film was a waste of their time.  I didn’t get that in Cars: shallow characterization, predictable plot, and a “message” throughline so worn that it could get a blowout on any curve.

Say Something Nice

Beautiful work on the landscapes.  Can I get a short film just of them?
 

Movie Review — Clerks

Quick Reaction

Clerks was crap.

More Details

After disliking Mallrats so much, what did I expect, watching an even earlier Kevin Smith film?  Glutton for punishment, I guess.

Neither Dante nor Randal present as well-formed characters.  Randal’s dialogue, in particular, never comes across as realistic; not just being delivered like a swiftly memorized, passionless monologue but apparently written in the same way.

I still have Chasing Amy and Dogma in my Netflix queue.  They are newer films, so Smith’s skills should be better, right?  They can't get worse, can they?  Can they?

Say Something Nice

I watched this in 5-10 minute chunks over the course of a month.  (That it took me a month to finish it says something.)  I have no problem doing that with most any movie; I have read comic books for thirty years, and they present a 22-page chunk of story once a month, unfolding over 4, 6, 12 months, so doing a movie that way over days or weeks is not much different.  Clerks itself is very “chunked”, even with segment titles throughout, so it works even that much better viewed in pieces than most films will.
 

TV & Movie Review — Firefly and Serenity

A couple years ago, on a trip to Canada, my boyfriend picked up a copy of the Firefly boxed set at a thrift store, telling me how good it was.  We proceeded to watch the first disk’s worth of episodes the next few times I was at his place, but then he had a break-in where his big screen TV and most of his DVDs were stolen.  The TV and some DVDs were later recovered, but not this set.

I added the set to my Netflix queue, and eventually finished them a month or so ago, plus the follow-on movie, Serenity.  (Particularly of note in the boxed set is that it includes a handful of episodes which did not get aired during the half-season run of the TV show.  A must for anyone who enjoyed the show.)

In no way am I about to become a Browncoat (fan of the show) and rave about how it is the best television show ever.  (Sorry.  That would be Twin Peaks.  Or maybe Lost.  Or I’ll accept The Dick Van Dyke Show, if someone insists.)  And I won’t ever quote lines of dialogue or do Firefly cosplay.  (I will drool over Jayne a bit, though.)

Actually, it took several episodes for me to warm up to the show.  The first disk’s worth, it was simply okay: solidly a “Western in space”, with an intriguing mix of conflicted characters and unrevealed pasts.  Good enough for what it was, but not necessarily anything I would have pursued weekly if I randomly tripped over an episode.  By the end of the second disk, though, I was solidly interested in the show, because it was interesting, different, and engaging.  By the end of the boxed set, I was invested enough to be bummed by the doomed nature of the show.

The Serenity movie, though, is a must for fans of the show.  (Hard to say if it hangs together adequately by itself without the background of the television show.  I rather suspect that the Inara and Shepherd subplots would be pretty obscure.  But this definitely didn’t come across as just a double-length episode of the show, like some Star Trek films did.)  There were two big unanswered questions left over from the show — what are the Reavers, and what the fuck is up with River — and those both get answered in the movie.  (Or at least resolved.  I still have no idea why they did what they did to River — it felt rather like they came up with a solution and then stitched it backwards into her character to pretend it was the cause — but the subplot gets resolved, which is sufficient.)

The scenes with Serenity passing through the Reavers were very well done, a space battle/ballet which brought to mind the attack on the second Death Star from Return of the Jedi, but doubled.  And although I mourn (NON-SPECIFIC SPOILER) for the characters who died in the film, I also appreciate that Whedon did kill some of his precious children, making the story that much more heart-felt.

And a nagging non-question from the show — where does this actually take place, how big of a “universe” is it set in — also gets answered.  We’re so used to Star Trek and Star Wars, where the ships blithely skip all the way across the galaxy, that it was a bit of a shock to realize that the entire show occurs in a single solar system (albeit one with a couple dozen planets).  This information changed the perspective I had on the show a little bit, making things a lot more plausible for the characters to periodically run into people they knew.

(One thing that did annoy me with the extras on Serenity were the repeated comments that the movie was very special in that it was a movie based on cancelled television show, and that never happens.  Well, never since Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, thirteen years before.  And double never since Star Trek: The Motion Picture, thirteen years before that.  So yes, it’s rare, but hardly unknown.  Or “thirteen years” is the definition of “never” in movie land.)

Now Dark Horse Comics is releasing collections of their Serenity comics.  Amazon, I’m coming for you.  (But still, no brown coat.  I promise.)
 

Movie Review — Zoolander

The only thing redeeming about Zoolander was that the previous movie I watched was The Devil Wears Prada, a far more realistic, funny, and enjoyable movie about the fashion industry.  Many people over the years have told me how good this was, but I think they need their heads examined.

(Then again, many people like sitcoms, but almost every time I watch one, I can’t fathom most of the appeal.  They usually just aren’t funny.  Like with the movie A.I., I pull out of the show and listen to the music or the laugh track and see how those things lead the audience to what is intended to be funny, even when it isn’t.  It reminds me of the final episode of Ellen, which had no laugh track, and which was made that much funnier/deeper by people who told me they didn’t get it because of that, that they didn’t know what was supposed to be funny.  Boy that’s sad.)

Back to Zoolander, though…

• Fashion models are goofy, inept, and vapid.  Yup, got it.
• Fashion designers are goofy, inept, and warped.  Check.
• Anything else?  Nope.

(Okay, I did like the scene at the gas station, replayed with the statue at the end.  That was twisted.)
 

Movie Review — The Devil Wears Prada

I bought The Devil Wears Prada on DVD when the local Hollywood Video closed.  I had seen it when it was in the theaters and damn, I forgot how much fun it was.

One of the things I like about this film is that it isn’t a romantic comedy (it’s a “coming of age” film).  She doesn’t meet a guy from the opposite side of the financial/political/upbringing spectrum, find herself attracted to him, decide she hates him instead, grow to love him, and then end up happily ever after with him.  (They tease at a subplot with that, with the editor she meets, but it is only a sideline and it doesn’t end up ending pleasantly.)

Then again, maybe it is a romantic comedy, but instead of a hunky guy, the opposite lead is Meryl Streep’s “Miranda Priestly”.  Their relationship, although it technically is a mentor/student type of thing, does follow the standard tropes of the romantic comedy genre, without sex and marriage being the end goal (but with “become part of my life and lifestyle” replacing it).

On top of all the glamour and publishing/fashion insight and the love her/hate her relationship the characters end up having with the Priestly character, the final quote from Priestly (“Everyone wants to be like us”) and Sachs’s reaction to it (and the mixed reaction that viewers have — some would agree with Priestly and some would not, adding an extra layer to things) are a fantastic kicker that tie the movie up with a dandy little bow.  (A cerulean bow, of course.)
 

Movie Review — The Wild

When The Wild came out, I was right there at the head of the pack, saying that their tagline should be “Hey, we can do Madagascar, too!”  (That is, "Madagascar 2”, as though it were a sequel to a much more successful computer-animated “New York zoo animals escape to a wild jungle island” movie from about a year before this.)  In reality, I realize that it was probably in development well before Madagascar came out, perhaps even with completely separate influences.  (See the comics industry releasing X-Men and Doom Patrol or Swamp Thing and Man-Thing at basically the same time.  It’s a form of “convergent evolution”.)

I finally saw it (via Netflix), and my quip was both wrong and very right.

First, the character designs for the animals are some of the most realistic we’ve seen when it comes to a fully computer-animated film.  In comparison, the animals in Madagascar are roughed-out cartoons.

Second, the thrust of the plot is a bit more organic and adult-friendly, with the kid being upset at his father, running away and getting in over his head, and the father and friends setting out to rescue him.

But then we have the turtle curling match, and the animals steering the ship (sorry, but the penguin cell in Madagascar, while not any more believable, was at least funnier), and the breakdancing, and the dance choreography of the wildebeests.  Once you get into these facets, then the cartoony nature of the Madagascar animals becomes more warranted… or if you prefer, then the realistic character designs break hard against the non-realistic actions.  And since this occurs repeatedly throughout the film — it could be somewhat excusable only at the front and back as a framing sequence — the viewer is constantly shoved back and forth.

In the end, if you have to choose between realistic (ugly) choreographed wildebeests and cartoony (cute) choreographed lemurs, chose the cute ones.

(It’s also interesting to examine that movie poster, because it’s not very representative of the film.  It implies everything occurs in New York City, it paints the characters are more cartoony, it is missing two of the main characters, and it positions the dogs and alligator as much more significant than the three minutes of the film they actually appeared in.  Almost as if they were trying to paint the characters as more like those in Madagascar, but to distance the plot from being seen as similar.  The Wild only brought in about 15% of what Madagascar did; in fact, it only brought in half as much total as Madagascar did on its opening weekend.)
 

Movie Review — Fight Club

Halfway through Fight Club, when they were just beating the snot out of each other, I thought to myself “Okay, this movie is fucked up.  I have no idea why I’m watching this and I don’t think I would recommend it to anyone else.”

At the end of Fight Club — which I can’t say anything about, since “The first rule of Fight Club is: ‘You do not talk about Fight Club.’” — I thought to myself “Okay, this movie is fucked up.  I have no idea why I’m watching this and I don’t think I would recommend it to anyone else.”  Just for completely different reasons.

I neither enjoyed it nor didn’t enjoy it.  It was twisted, but while twisted is an okay reason to see a film, it isn’t a reason to recommend a film.  But at least I get the references now; that’s something.
 

Movie Review — Doogal

Doogal is, um, a computer-animated kids movie about a dog and a singing cow and slacker rocker rabbit and a snail who take on a quest from a good wizard spring to stop a bad wizard spring from freezing the world solid, and who do a lousy job of it but eventually win anyway (for not much reason other than because the good guys always have to win).

If that sounds both stupid and not especially enjoyable — probably including for the kids it is aimed at — you’re right.  As bad as Barnyard was, this is the computer-animated film that will make you swear off of watching anything in that mode that comes down the Netflix queue.  (Then again, I haven't dared to watch Hoodwinked yet.)

• Unattractive character designs.
• A melange of characters apparently based on the toys left ignored in some kid’s toy chest, given how poorly they mesh as a group/team.
• The classic quest concept of recover the magic objects, and in the process lead the bad guy to each of them so he can get them instead, never mind that he would have apparently never found them otherwise.
• Loads of pop culture references and anachronisms (a laser grid in an ancient Aztec temple?), the sort which break you out of the thin story over and over again rather than enhancing it.
• Subplots which go nowhere (like the snail’s unrequited love for the cow).
• Atrocious matching of the voice work to the character mouths.  (Apparently all the characters but the cow and good wizard spring were redone for the American release, and they either did a lot of ad lib or the script work was really shoddy in terms of retaining the timing.)

The only reason I would recommend this is to put something in front of a 4-year old that he or she hasn’t already seen twelve times.  If the kid has seen something else only ten or eleven times before, put that on again instead of this.
 

Movie Review — Barnyard

Remember those foam “stress relief” toys from the 1990s, the ones you could squish into a malformed ball and they would slowly restore to the original shape?  That is the apparent basis for the design of the cows in the animated film Barnyard.  It’s also the only redeeming feature of the film.

• The male cows all have udders.  According to IMDB, the director says this was an intentional joke.  That may be true, but that doesn’t make it funny.
   
• Other than the cows and a couple other barnyard animals, the bulk of the character designs are simply ugly.
   
• While this is positioned as a movie leading into a Nickelodeon television series, it’s obvious that the reverse is true: they took several episodes of the proposed TV series and strung them together  The entire film is structured in roughly 20-minute chunks, and several of the pieces have characters who do not appear in other chunks.  If you’ve going to give us a movie, give us an actual movie, not a re-edited batch of TV shows.

Movie Review — Basic Instinct

I finally saw Basic Instinct (1992) this week, thanks to the wonders of Netflix.  This film had been on my “Don’t Watch” list for the last 20 years.  Due to the gay protests over it when it was being filmed and released, it was a big no-no to support this horrible anti-gay film about an ice pick-wielding bisexual murderess.

I’m glad I finally saw it, because that was a load of horse crap.  Or rather, twenty years down the road, it now looks like a load of horse crap.  At the time, maybe making an example of the film was the right thing to do.

I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area (to San Jose, an hour south of San Francisco) in August 1990, at age 23.  I had come out over the previous year in Eugene, Oregon.  I think my first trip to San Francisco proper didn’t occur until November or December of that year, for a Silicon Valley gay techies dim sum brunch.

(I still remember walking up the stairs into the cavernous dim sum restaurant, not knowing what anyone who would be there looked like.  I scanned the entire place and figured that the table of white people must be those there for the brunch.  And then saw many other people in the next half hour come up the stairs and do the exact same thing.  This was back in the days where we knew people online pretty much only by their name and e-mail address; there were no social networking or cruise sites where we could see a photo.)

Soon after that, I was regularly coming up to San Francisco at least once per weekend, to country dance at the Rawhide II.  After I joined the San Francisco Saddletramps a year later and eventually moved to San Mateo, halfway up the peninsula, my trips to The City would be three or four per week.  San Mateo was a great place to sleep, but a lousy place to have a gay life.

One of the first pieces of gay political activism that I remember was the stuff surrounding Basic Instinct, although as one of the first, it’s also something that I only have hazy memories of.  The biggest memories I have of the time are the involvement of the activist group Queer Nation, and that the gay country bar Rawhide II was used as one of the sets in the movie, and gay activists did drive-by paint bombing of the front door because of the “sell out” nature of the owner and the business.

Ray Chalker, the owner of the Rawhide II and the Sentinel gay paper, eventually earned himself a worldwide reputation as a jerk — I was once in Florida at a gay country-western dance event and met a couple guys from London who said “You’re from San Francisco?  Do you know the owner of the Rawhide?  We hear he’s a complete asshole” — but now I wonder what portion of this might stem from the Basic Instinct stuff?  That is, while running both a newspaper and a bar already put you at odds with some people in the community, when you get publicly branded as a sort of a traitor to the community and members of the community conduct repeated vandalism against your business, I can see how that changes your view of the community; you start to mistrust motives and you become a degree less pleasant to work with, and that can certainly spiral in intensity over time.  Add in the gay community’s institutionalized memory, where we hold grudges and refuse to take actions for years after the reason to do so has evaporated — like the Coors Boycott [see here] [and here], or dare I say it, avoiding seeing the movie Basic Instinct — and it’s easy to see an unfocused perpetual animosity toward Chalker and the Rawhide II festering in the community for years, continually being reinforced by Chalker himself in the way he reacted to things.

(On the flip side, Chalker’s anger and behavior eventually resulted in the creation of the Sundance Association for Country-Western Dancing, a strong non-profit which “owns” and directs the Bay Area gay country community now long after the Rawhide II ceased to be a gay country bar.  And Sundance has been an inspiration and model for Seattle’s Rain Country Dance Association, which formed after we lost the Timberline as a dance location up here.  Mmm, there’s a lot of stuff thet we can tag as possibly having some roots in this movie!)

Part of the fun with this movie, as with any one taking place in a familiar-to-you city was in identifying where things occur and what has changed since then, such as:

• Nick’s apartment is in North Beach.  Although I don’t know that neighborhood much from driving, that is also where some of Tales of the City takes place (Russian Hill is right next door; the TV mini-series was released the next year), so I recognized some of the street locations used in both.  (Alas, I don’t know that area of the city well enough to tell where they turn down a one-way street, or turn on one street and end up clear across town.)
   
• The construction pit where Roxy’s car crashes?  That is what would become Moscone Center.  You can tell by some of the other buildings seen on the other side.
   
• As noted before, the country bar is the Rawhide II.  The real one’s 7th-near-Harrison location isn’t what is shown in the movie, nor did it have a neon cactus.  It never had room inside for a live band where one is in the movie; the room was only 20–25 feet across, narrow and long.
   
• The looming freeways threw me for a loop at first, since I couldn’t place the locations as near the 101 in SOMA.  But when Nick is walking on the pier with the city behind him, I remembered that there used to be a freeway along the Embarcadero, damaged in the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 and torn down in 1991, after the movie was filmed.

Also fun was freeze-framing the scene in the country bar (scene 18), which according to the DVD notes featured as many as 100 of the bar’s regulars:

• Right as the scene opens, a guy with a bushy moustache and a white cowboy hat is seen dancing as the camera zooms through the ceiling fan.  That is Jeff Hines (d. 1998), longtime instructor at the Rawhide and prominent member of the San Francisco Saddletramps dance troupe.
   
• As Nick pays Gus’s tab, a curly haired woman is at the bar.  I think that was Jackie, whom I knew from the 931 Cloggers.
   
• As Gus and Nick leave the bar, they pass by the pool table.  Behind the black woman is a blond man in a black shirt, with a pool cue.  That is Tim, another of the San Francisco Saddletramps.  (Tim and I joined at the same time, in late 1991.)

20 years down the line, and with early 90s AIDS in the mix, a few other people looked familiar, but I couldn’t identify any of them by name.
 

Gasp! Mutants!

Here’s a poster for X-Men: First Class.

Don’t tell anyone, but I think the guy second from the left is a mutant!  No, not because his head is the wrong size for his body, or because he emits fog from his armpits, but because his left hand is a vampire — it doesn't cast a reflection in the highly polished floor!

Yes, this has been submitted to Photoshop Disasters.
 

Movie Review — Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Out of all the things I could say about Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, one sums them all up:

After watching this movie, I wanted to put the disc back in and watch it again.  Immediately.

That’s a pretty rare thing for me.  The only other movie that I can think of that gave me that urge was Memento, but that was because I wanted to see all the clues again know that I knew the outcome.  Mmm, and Mulholland Drive as well, again one of those films where all the threads change right at the end.  Scott Pilgrim isn’t one of those.

I’m still in the process of reading the comic book series that Scott Pilgrim is based on — I need to go pick up a reorder of vol. 5 that came in last week — but up through vol. 3, the movie is one of those ultra-close transfers from comic to film that only Watchmen and Sin City have managed thus far.  But with the comic itself a mash-up of slacker, music, and video game content, the movie version takes that a level further, mashing comics, music, and games into a whole which works amazingly.

Another of the great things I can say is that the last few minutes of the movie kept me guessing about what would happen.  That so seldom happens for me (unless there’s an intentional mystery in the film) that I was enthralled.  Of course, it’s also a plus that I haven’t read the end of the comics series yet, so it couldn’t be spoiled for me that way.

(Hmm, that’s an interesting thought for how to approach movies based on books and comics.  If you know too much of the original, you can’t enjoy the movie as a movie — you’re always picking at the inadequacies — but if you know too little, you can sometimes be lost or be aware that you are missing backstory [which is my complaint about all the Harry Potter movies after the first couple, that you could increasingly recognize the places where subplots and entire chapters were chopped out to make the content short enough to film].  For Scott Pilgrim, I knew a lot but not too much, so I could enjoy the first half due to the match ups to the source and I could enjoy the last half due to knowing enough to really be settled into the movie’s world.)

In some ways, the movie works better than the comics.  Smart screenwriters know when to avoid some of the diversions that a comic book indulges in, and when to play up things which are subtle in the original source material.  They succeed in both of these with Scott Pilgrim, for example amping up Wallace’s gay angle, while completely cutting the Stephen Stills “recording an album” plotline (with its own gay angle).

I heartily recommend this movie for anyone who has at least a passing interest in upcoming indie music, slacker culture, video games, and non-superhero comics.

Now someone explain to me: how does a film about a rock band and loaded with cool and way different special effects (unless you want to just call them updates of the 60’s Batman show) not even get one Oscar nomination in the pertinent categories?
 

Movie Review — Blazing Saddles

I recently watched the classic Mel Brooks’ Western comedy Blazing Saddles, as part of my quest to refresh on all the Mel Brooks movies.  (I also watched The Producers — the original one — soon after.)  I’m not sure I had ever seen this one before.

It was interesting seeing (hearing) the word “nigger” being used abundantly during the film.  Admittedly, it was done to make a point rather than as casual dialogue.  According to the bonus features, this was controversial even at the time, with some actors declining to take a role where they would have to say the word.  Today, I don’t think you could get the movie into the theaters; in a drama or a documentary, said by someone clearly depicted as “bad”, yes, but not in a comedy with the word being used by general populace characters.

The most interesting part of this DVD was extras, which include a number of alternate versions or extended scenes done for the television version.  Yes, extended versions: some scenes edited for the movie were actually restored for TV.  When does that ever happen any more?

No idea if “nigger” made it onto the TV; I expect not, given the other bits which did not.  Particularly noted in the behind the scenes stuff was the campfire bean-eating scene, where they had to remove all the fart sounds, leaving the cowboys mysteriously standing up and sitting down repeatedly, in a weird slow motion dance.  Also of note was Madeline Kahn’s character, whose last name (“Shtupp”, meaning “stuff” in Yiddish, a double entendre) couldn’t be said on TV, so she gets introduced as “Lili von…”.

(Side angle: while the use of “nigger” throughout the film was shocking and bizarre based on what we are used to today, stuff like the campfire farting scene slides by as trite and common juvenalia.  But it isn’t, or at least it wasn’t: apparently this is the first movie fart joke of the sort.  This is the prototype.  Mel Brooks is to blame for all those fart jokes we endure in inane comedies today.  Sigh.)

(Per IMDB trivia on the film, the fart sounds are from the old “soaped up armpit” method.)

In the end, Blazing Saddles is more of a curiosity today than a landmark, but Brooks is apparently working to recraft it for Broadway.  Then again, I saw the original version of The Producers a couple weeks after seeing this, and compared to the stage version (I haven’t yet seen the movie version of the stage version), it also feels quite remote.  Brooks did a fantastic job reconfiguring that film for the stage, so I have some hopes for Blazing Saddles on Broadway.  (Then again, I didn’t think Young Frankenstein did all that great on stage.)

But God knows how he’s going to manage to get “Nobody move or the nigger gets it!” in there.
 

Movie Review — Mallrats

Mallrats had been sitting in my Netflix queue for a year or more.  No idea why I put it in there, really — recommendations from others about Chasing Amy and Dogma, I guess, since they are both in the queue as well — but whatever.

I’ve started using the Watch Instantly feature some, watching movies 10 minutes or so at a shot when I’m sitting at the computer.  There really isn’t a lot of stuff available for watching this way: right now, I have 122 movies in my Queue, with only 23 available for this feature (including oddities like half the Star Trek films available for play but the other half not).  The real quirk has been that stuff ceases to be available from time to time; I’ve had more films go away half-watched than I’ve been able to complete.  (Which explains why Mallrats ended up at the top of my queue: when it was no longer available to watch online, I popped it to the top of the queue so I could watch the last 15 minutes.  Grr.)

(As for watching a film 10 minutes at a shot: I understand why some people feel unable to do this.  But me, I’ve been trained to do this via 30 years of comic book reading.  I am used to reading 20 pages of a story which will takes 4–10 months to complete (if ever), and waiting a month for the next piece.  And doing this with 30 different series at once.  And a novel or two.  And for several years, a daily soap opera.  So watching 10 minutes of a film each day for a couple weeks is really no problem, although I avoid doing it with more than a couple films at a time.)

Back to Mallrats…

What a waste of a movie.  Nothing redeeming in the characters, nothing illuminating in the story, and not even anything fun or funny.  (And I wanted to hit Brodie in the face several times.  A character who screams about things every time he opens his mouth and overreacts to everything may reflect some real people, but it doesn’t make for a good primary character.)

(Okay, Stan Lee’s small bit was reasonably good.)

So why am I covering the film if it’s not even worth Netflixing it?

Because of the recurring joke about the autostereogram in the film being a picture of a sailboat.  You can see the trailer here.  The stereogram appears almost full screen at 0:57.  Freeze frame and view it for yourself.



It ain’t a sailboat.  (Not that I’m the only person to ever notice that, of course.)  But that sort of a continuity flub really takes the enjoyment wind out of my s…

No, I won’t even write that.
 

Stuff I Read: “Bleeding Cool”

For years, UK-based Rich Johnston’s “Lying in the Gutters&rdquos; column was the place to go to for advance news and rumors about the comic book industry.  He had an incredible hit rate for getting stuff right — which probably implies that lots of people were willing to feed stuff to him, that they trusted him.

About a year ago, “Lying in the Gutters” was transformed from a weekly column into the comics and comics-related film news (and rumor) site Bleeding Cool.

While other comics fan sites run lots of previews of soon-to-be-on-sale comics, interviews with creators, press release lightly rewritten as news stories, and fan musings on various subjects, Bleeding Cool remains the go-to place for all the latest stuff.  As an example, the current front page has bits on:

• Sponge Bob comics
• A new Transformer named "Spastic"
• Ads for The Walking Dead
• A Roy Lichtenstein painting auction
• J. Michael Straczinski
• A new Winnie the Pooh movie
• Torchwood and Dr. Who
• The Little Fockers movie
• Casting for the new Spider-Man movie
• Ghost Rider 2
• …and a lot more

Lots of rumors.  Lots of barely-there, bleeding-edge news.  Lots of trailers and such that don’t show up on other comics sites.

Not just cool.  Bleeding Cool.
 

Rocky Horror G(l)eek

I’m such a Rocky Horror geek.  I both loved and disliked the recent Glee episode.  (More on that later.)

During the 80s and early 90s, I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show roughly 50 times.  (Only twice in the last decade, though, and probably only a half dozen times after mid-1990, when I moved to California.  I guess I decided drinking and getting laid was a better use of my post-midnight time.)  I’ve been in several theater casts and even in an actual stage production.  Here are some memories…

Seattle / In College (1987–1988)

• My second time seeing it was at the Neptune Theatre in Seattle, on what turned out to be their 10th anniversary showing, during my junior year of college (1987, I guess).  Lots of people in costume, and the “opening act” was the Bugs Bunny cartoon “Rhapsody Rabbit”.  While we were waiting in line to get in, some Jesus Freaks were across the street with signs and a megaphone, telling us we were going to Hell for seeing the movie.  (Really.  For seeing a movie.)
   
• Our crew made a few more trips from Tacoma to the Neptune over the next year or so.  One time, one of the kids we approached to come with us said “You don’t want to see that movie!  That’s where they rip up the chairs in the theater and throw them at each other!”  (Makes Sue Sylvester’s interpretation of throwing toast seem benign, huh?)  Another time, my father came with us (drove us up); a youth pastor, he knew of the movie but had never seen it and afterward, he said he was glad he had seen it (in that “I didn’t really enjoy it, but now at least I know what it is” sense).
   
• The Neptune cast used to “sacrifice” (Rocky Horror) virgins before the show.  One time, we took a college friend up name Carol.  Carol Carroll, actually.  They had fun with that.  (“Ask her her name!  Ask her her last name!”  “No, what’s your last name?  No, your last name!”)
   
• My first theater cast part was at the Neptune, where they put me in a wedding dress and I played Betty Monroe.  My Ralph was wearing a Nixon mask.

Eugene and Portland / In Grad School (1988–1990)

• During grad school in Eugene, the local art theater started doing Rocky Horror, and after several of us showed up in costume, they asked us to create a theater cast.  We did that every Friday and Saturday for about a year.
   
• At one point, they even played it as a Saturday afternoon matinee.  (Lasted about 3 weeks, I think.)  There’s something truly wrong about exiting a showing of Rocky Horror into bright sunlight.
   
• Actors Cabaret of Eugene put on a live version of The Rocky Horror Show (note that the stage show name differs from the movie), and I was cast as one of the Tranyslvanian chorus.  (I had nothing prepared for my audition piece, so I sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”.)  To this day, I struggle to sing the melody (rather than the harmony) for “The Time Warp”, and I still recall bits of the show choreography.  The show only ran for three performances, but it was lots of fun.
   
• A few times, several of us drove to Portland for their showing (must have been after the Eugene theater stopped showing it), and once we drove to somewhere near Seattle and provided a cast for a theater there.  Ah, the long drives in my old Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.  The Portland theater had a live band at the time which would play before the show; a cover of “Tainted Love” was their best/most memorable piece.
   
• At some point, a few of us from the Eugene cast were interviewed for a master’s thesis someone was doing on Rocky Horror and similar mass participation movie viewings (of which there were very few at the time).  I think I’ve got a copy of the thesis somewhere (God knows where).
   
• Over the years, I’ve played several roles in theater casts: Betty Monroe, Columbia, Dr. Frank N. Furter, Riff Raff, Magenta, Dr. Scott, Brad Majors, and Rocky.  I still have most of my costume bits (except the wheelchair), including the gold lame booties for Rocky and the laboriously hand-sequinned blue tap shoes for Columbia.  (Mmm, need pics!)

California and Seattle / The Last 20 Years (1990–2010)

• After moving to California, I went to showings in Palo Alto a few times.  In about November 1990 (I think), they had a costume contest.  At the time, I had let my hair grow long, aiming for a ponytail but my hair has so much body that it was more of a puffball.  For Halloween that year, I had done a French Maid drag costume (you can see where this is going), and I re-used that as Magenta.  With my own hair teased out big, and with a beard.  I won the costume contest and got a copy of the Rocky Horror Picture Show Book.
   
• One of the women in the square dance club was a big Barbie collector, and for Halloween that year, she dressed up as Janet from the Floor Show sequence, and brought a Barbie dressed to match.
   
• Since moving to Seattle in 2000, I’ve only seen Rocky Horror twice: I took my then-boyfriend Aaron to see it at a theater in West Seattle, and later then-boyfriend Rusty to the Cuff Complex for their annual showing.  In both cases, the guys were a bit scared of me for how well I knew the film and how much I threw myself into the songs, dances, and antics.

Which brings us back to the Glee episode.

While I was pleased that they did a Rocky Horror episode (and I’m glad that they didn’t echo back to the piece of Fame involving the movie), I still found this to be one of the weaker episodes thus far.

The Good

• I was tickled from the very start by the realization that Quinn in the show would play Magenta, the role played in the movie by… Patricia Quinn.  (In-joke or coincidence?)  Fox has stated that the lips in the intro are Santana’s (which means they are still Magenta’s lips, since Santana did some of the Magenta stuff, especially during "Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me"), but the voice sounds like Quinn to me; if they were mirroring the movie, then it should be one person’s lips and another’s voice, so it could be Quinn mashed-up with Santana (although technically, it should be Kurt’s voice over Santana’s lips).  (The comments thread in that article say that a producer tweet and that the soundtrack album indicates that it was indeed Santana’s voice as well as her lips.)
   
• The actress playing Mercedes was superb as Dr. Frank N. Furter (as she always is, of course!).
   
• The lyric changes in the songs to make them teen-appropriate (or really “TV appropriate”, I guess) caused me to snicker at times. (Although I give them props for changing “transsexual” to “sensational”; that one worked fairly well.)  Ultimately, the word switches didn’t really bother me, since they were addressed in the story as part of rewrites to make the show acceptable for a high school musical.
   
• “Whatever Happened to Saturday Night?” has now been added to my country DJ set (East Coast Swing, 162 bpm).  I also have “Physical” from Season One in there, as a West Coast Swing.
   
• I completely missed that the TV network guys were Barry Bostwick and Meatloaf.

The Bad

• Since when are Mr. Schuester and the Glee Club responsible for the school musical?  That came out of left field and wasn’t fleshed out very much.
   
• The episode didn’t serve to really move any of the subplots forward.  At best, it nodded to Sam and Quinn’s relationship and Sue’s TV career.
   
• The episode didn’t have as strong a “structure of a musical” structure.  “Will uses the show to get close to Emma” as the emotional crux didn’t really carry the right weight.  “Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me“ as an Eleven O’Clock Number?
   
• The whole thing about casting Carl as Eddie and Will as Rocky seemed totally left field (it’s a high school musical!) and gave a really major “Eeewww” factor to things.)
   
• There has apparently been some outcry reaction to Kurt’s use of “tranny” in the episode.  I noticed it at the time but was more intrigued by the issue the character raised — it’s hard enough being out and gay without everyone thinking you want to be a drag queen or get a sex change as well — than I was at the potential perjorative.  But I’m not trans, either.

The Future

• Seeing a leather-clad motorcycle riding dentist made me wonder about whether there’s a Little Shop of Horrors episode in the works for next year.  (Similarly, Kurt’s references to the Sing-a-Long Sound of Music — an event which stems directly from the Rocky Horror phenomenon, as does the “Rocky Horror Lion King” from furry circles — needs a payoff at some point.  These kids are 16 going on 17, after all.)

 

Movie Review — Shanghai Surprise

I recently bought the DVD of the 1986 Madonna/Sean Penn film Shanghai Surprise for $4 from a bin at a local drug store.  (I also bought Shut Up & Sing, Kinsey, the 2007 musical version of Hairspray, Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector, and maybe a couple others.  They were cheap, how bad could they be, right?)

I had to ask.  Oh, this one was painful to watch.  It involves a missionary hiring a ne’er-do-well to help her find a million dollars worth of missing opium to be used as medicine, dealing with corrupt police, gangsters, and high class prostitutes along the way.

(It was made worse by the George Harrison soundtrack.  Not much good music in the film.  I had thougth this was the movie that Madonna’s “Live to Tell” song came from — that was really why I bought it — but that was the other 1986 Sean Penn film, At Close Range.  Damn, what was Madonna thinking here?  At least get a hit song on the soundtrack, woman!)

The settings — filmed in Hong Kong and Macau — aren’t bad, but the story is full of holes and oddities like why they needed to hire someone in the first place and how Madonna’s missionary character had all the money she was throwing around (and why she wasn’t just buying opium with it instead).

Beyond that, there are two major problems with the film itself:

• It can’t decide if it wants to be serious and maybe even noir, or if it wants to be a wacky caper film.  There are a number of characters which work in one or the other, but not both.  Every time it seems to be going serious, a WTF? scene or campy character shows up (I never did figure out what Kronk’s role was, other than to kick the plot down the alley when it stalled), but all the scenes which seem aimed at wacky hijinks pull up short and end up as weird/goofy rather than actually funny.  (Most likely, the producers wanted something in the vein of Romancing the Stone, but the story didn’t have the chops for that.)
   
• The dialogue delivery is atrocious.  Of course, you can’t do a lot when the words themselves are poorly put together, but the flat, badly inflected stuff coming out of Madonna’s mouth (no, not her music!) is just embarrassing.  But you can’t just blame Madonna, since Sean Penn’s lines come off just as bad.  You’ve got to blame the director, I guess.

What salvages this DVD, though, are the extras, which were put together some 15 or 20 years after the fact.  In addition to a “Madonna in 1986” piece with a couple media mavens discussing her career up to and after that point, there is one with the writer and one of the actors discussing the film and the problems it had (including the crew nearly rebelling due to [pri]Madonna), and another with several comedians talking about their favorite and least favorite parts of the film.  If you felt embarrassed for the actors or felt guilty about mentally savaging parts of the film, you’ll find these people agreeing with you just about point for point.

Any fan of campy, terrible movies will tell you that viewing the movie as a shared experience can help salvage (rather than “savage”) it — you have others to discuss, commiserate, and moan with — and sometimes can even elevate a piece of shlock into a form of art.  (Hello, Rocky Horror Picture Show!)  This one will never make “art”, but it maybe can be enjoyable pain when shared with others.
 

Movie Review — Hamlet 2

I recently tripped across the big song from Hamlet 2 recently (working on this post), so I added it to my Netflix queue.

The movie is about a lousy high school drama teacher who is told that the drama department is being cut, so he decides to go out with a bang, producing a whacked-out controversial musical sequel to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, which results in rejection and near rioting.

In the post-Glee world, it is probably impossible to avoid comparisons between the TV show and this film.  So why fight it: Hamlet 2 is at least a thematic predecessor of Glee, if not an outright inspiration.  Recommended viewing for fans of Glee.

What I found most interesting about the film, though, was how my view of it changed slightly after watching the DVD extras.  On first glance, the movie appears to be in the “inspirational teacher” genre (Mr. Holland’s Opus, Dead Poet’s Society, etc.), but the filmmakers say that they hate those films; Hamlet 2 is really an “anti-inspirational teacher" film.

And when you think about it, that’s true.  Foremost, of course, is that the teacher is totally incompetent; although he has a lot of heart and passion, he has no idea what he is doing, and any success comes despite him rather than because of him.  Beyond that, most of the tropes of the “inspirational teacher” genre are all but missing: we never see the kids practice; we never see the kids fail and then improve; we never see the show going up against deadlines or almost failing to come off; they play with the teacher inspiring the low-life ethnic kid, but he turns out to the school’s best student; etc.  As you watch the film, you don’t quite realize that they are doing a drive-by on these tropes, flipping the bird as they go by rather than stopping to pick the trope up.  Kind of cool, in retrospect.

The other note of interest I found in the DVD extras is that the movie was filmed in Albuquerque rather than its setting of Tucson.  (Tucson told them no, based on how much they badmouth the city.  Go figure!)  And thus the “Tucson Gay Men’s Chorus” used in the film is apparently actually a gay men’s chorus from Albuquerque.  But I had that figured out (well, strongly suspected it) ahead of time, because I recognized one of the singers, a square dance caller I know from Albuquerque.  (Nice shirt, Bill.)  (Private joke.)  Alas, the singers are not credited in the film or on IMDB, neither as a group nor individually; Bill confirmed it for me via Facebook.
 

Movie Review — Iron Man 2

Iron Man 2 wasn’t quite as good as Iron Man (to me; read what I wrote on that one), but neither will I say it was worse.  It’s like getting a 97 on a test rather than a 98: it’s still an “A”, and that’s all that really matters.  (And the first film gets a special bump because it so outperformed expectations.  This one gave us pretty much what we wanted and expected, so it doesn’t come away with as much of a glow, as a result.)

There are two things to say with certainty:

• Robert Downey Jr. does a great job of playing Tony Stark, imbuing the character with more life than he had in the ’80s comics where I’m most familiar with him.
• At no time during the movie did I feel that the movie was thumbing its nose at the comic book connection, trying to void or avoid that connection.  That’s a very good thing.  There’s a certain trust that comic book-based movies have to live up to for the comic book fans, to find their own path but not seem to be kicking the comic book puppy in the process.  X-Men: The Last Stand\, Spider-Man 3, and Superman Returns all failed in this, being more intent on being a movie than something part-and-parcel of the comics; they “kicked the puppy”, but Iron Man 2 did not.  (Never forget that the reverse exists, too: call it “letting the puppy eat your steak” where a movie doesn't try to transcend the comic book — perhaps even embrcaes the worst stereotypes of the comics book — and becomes less as a result.  See Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.  No, on second thought, don't see it.)

Some other thoughts:

• The Nick Fury/SHIELD stuff was too strongly geared toward setting up for future Marvel movies (or I’m just too aware that it’s doing that), too self-aware of their purpose in the film.  Nick and Natasha’s characters would have been better in the film if they we presented more strongly as keeping an eye on/reining in Tony Stark, with the future connections being much more under the surface.
• Don Cheadle never looked really comfortable in the role of Rhodey, doubly so when in the armor.  Maybe it chafed?
• It took me a long time to accept the Justin Hammer character.  Once I was able to interpret him as being a Tony Stark wanna-be — everything he does is in imitation of Tony Stark, aping what Stark does without an understanding of why and how — then I was able to grasp the character better.
• Referencing the 1970s Stark Expo as “Expo ’74” threw me a bit, since “Expo ’74” was the name for the Spokane World’s Fair, which I fondly recall attending as a kid.

 

Movie Review — Armageddon

I watched Armageddon last week, the 1999 sci-fi flick about an asteroid the size of Texas bent on crashing into Earth (and killing us all), with the solution being to recruit and quick-train deep core oil drillers as astronauts to drill a hole in the asteroid and drop a nuke in to blow it up.

Okay, admittedly seeing the the names Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay on a movie’s credits list should trigger the brain into saying “This is going to be lots of stuff exploding and levels of ridiculousness three times what anyone should be expected to endure, so just shut yourself off now.”

But I can’t do that!

Thoughts (and spoilers for every bit of the film!):

• I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie where the high concept was quite so easy to distill: “Roughnecks in space.”
• If you send up two shuttles, one will crash.  That’s a given.
• The music (and some of the visuals) in this around the astronaut departure and return was some of the most patriotically manipulative I’ve encountered, to the point that it was almost a parody of itself.  (And let me note that by “encountered”, I mean “noticed” — so over the top that it broke me out of the film to analyze what they were trying to do.  The first film I noticed this with, and still my marker for egregiousness in that department, was A.I.)
• Why did they even bother having a woman astronaut in the crew if they were going to leave her in the shuttle the entire time?  The only thing she really got to do was to get tossed against the wall when the Russian cosmonaut wanted to hit the equipment with a pipe to make it work.
• After the (surviving) shuttle overshot its landing by 20-plus miles, it still basically crash landed, since the terrain wasn’t what they had planned on.  So how did it manage to take off again without any issues at all before the bomb blew up?
• Why do they have to put stupid countdown deadlines into these things?  All that does is tell us “Don’t get your hopes up.  The bomb won’t and can’t go off until the last few seconds.”  Here they had 18 days, and they still set it off in the last half second.
• What was so special about the drilling depth of 800 feet?  The asteroid was a million miles away when they detected it, and they could only barely analyze details on it anyway.  So why did the hole have to be 800 feet and not 775 (in which case they could have set the bomb off a good 30 seconds earlier)?  And why was 800 feet still the right depth when they were drilling in a completely different location than planned, in totally different material?  (I suppose this can be rationalized as the roughnecks and the shuttle crew didn’t have enough knowledge of the situation to ask the question, and even if the crew in Houston could have revised their estimates in time, would it have made a difference?  At that point, it was “Drill the hole, dump the bomb, and just pray like crazy.”)
• With radio and video transmission cutting in and out, it was amazingly clear for a good minute or more for Harry to say his goodbyes.  (There should also be a several second delay in transmission times due to the distances.  For dramatic purposes, we can excuse that some and they actually left things hazy enough to not make me complain about it too much.  It would have been a wasted plot point to make a big deal of it.)
• On the other hand, an extended period of clear video signal sure wipes out the tension from earlier regarding their absolute last chance to remotely detonate the bomb.
• The repeated scenes of small town America with people costumed right out of a 1950s farm really bothered me.  No one dressed like that in 1998.  See my earlier comment about the music being manipulatively patriotic.
• The surface of the asteroid was covered by razor sharp spikes of rock.  People were flying all over the place, crashing into the terrain.  Rocks were exploding, creating showers of even smaller razor sharp rock fragments.  And not a single spacesuit got even a tiny puncture.  (One guy did from his helmet being smashed to bits, but that’s not quite the same thing.)
• Given that the shuttle that didn’t crash overshot by 20-plus miles, how didn’t the second armadillo even find them?

And wasn’t that ending amazing?  At the very last second, the bomb that was dropped in the hole drilled in the wrong place on the asteroid tumbling end over end in all three dimensions (which had ruined their earlier calculations) blew the asteroid in exactly two pieces, sending both of them to pass Earth on opposite sides of the planet (“Missed it by that much!”), and the explosion also vaporized all the other rubble, including the basketball, Volkswagen, and presumably Chrysler Building-sized chunks which were in the rubble cloud stretching hundreds of thousands of miles ahead of and behind the asteroid (which had already destroyed much of New York and Shanghai, and all of Paris), so nothing more hit Earth at all.  What are the odds?

Let me tell you, as a math/comp sci major in college who started as a physics major, the odds are… (calculate) um… (check again) er… (grimace) zero.

Even if we close our eyes to the largest chunk (ahem) of this, that the asteroid itself was exploded enough for the major pieces to miss Earth and avoid the“global killer” nature, the fact remains that huge chunks of stuff were hitting the planet for three weeks before the big one arrived, and had already killed millions.  We saw massive amounts of smaller stuff preceding and following and all around the asteroid; if the shuttle didn’t blow up from the nuclear blast, then neither did anything further away than it, nor did many things closer than the shuttle that were larger.  There would be far more volume of that rubble than the leading bits that had already hit, given a reasonable normal distribution.  Even with the Texas-sized chunk missing, you’re still going to have one the size of Dallas (about 1/1000th the size of Texas) going boom into the mid-Pacific and creating a tsunami that wipes Tokyo, Sydney, and Los Angeles off the map.  You’re still going to have one the size of Crawford, Texas (1/1000th the size of Dallas) leaving a crater where Switzerland used to be.  You’re still going to have Lake Michigan vaporized by something the size of a semi.  You’re still going to have stuff the size of golfballs destroying the Hagia Sophia and the Taj Mahal (since they were both seen in the film).  And what’s more, you’ll have had this happening increasingly for a couple days before the bomb went off (the destruction of Paris was a good demonstration of this, but there would have been several more impacts of that size in the day or two before the bomb exploded) and you would have them coming for 3 weeks afterward, asteroid strike or not.

Global killer, with nothing more than bacteria surviving?  Averted.  Massive climate change that still lasts for a few hundred years?  Right on schedule.  Human population drops from 6 billion to 600 million (and that may be generous), with technology infrastructure and everything we know of as industrial-level civilization destroyed?  Check check check.

But I guess that sort of a slightly upbeat but ultimately depressing ending wouldn’t go over well, huh?