Dance Flick

I've got a ton of errands to do for my upcoming trip, and yesterday I was up in Nashua to cross a few items off my list. I took the opportunity to duck into the AMC in Tyngsboro for a pre-noon four buck showing of Dance Flick, the new Wayans Brothers comedy that came out over the weekend.

One of my favorite things about the AMC are the goofy promos before the movie featuring the AMC mascot, which is basically a small man made out of film. My favorite is the intro to the trailers, in which the film dude waves his film hands over a crystal ball (to see what's coming in the future, get it?). The soundtrack of this clip is a little scratchy, as if they have been playing it for about twenty years. Like decrepit drive-ins, there is something soothing about the continuity of these types of experiences.

I mention this because in a couple days I should be overseas. I've noticed that there is actually an AMC in this first place I'm visiting. I'm eager to see if they have the same mascot in their promos.

Note: I just went and looked on-line and found out that the mascot's name is "Clip." Here's a photo of him (from this page), and there are several video on this page.

As far as the movie, after a string of disappointments and disgruntlements lately, I was really in the mood for something that wasn't going to offend me. I suppose that was a dangerous position to put myself in, walking into a movie like Dance Flick, but I still held out hope.

As I've mentioned, comedy get plays by different rules than drama. This goes double for parody movies like this one. The story in this case needs to be only enough to hold ones interest as a platform for a string of stupid jokes.

Beyond this, the most I usually hope for is that the movie is not disgustingly gross. In that respect, I was really worried in the first two minutes, when we got an over-the-top urination joke, followed by a view of a guy who literally puts his head up his own ass. Cripes, this was going to be a long movie.

But it was as if the Wayans Brothers, conscious of the fact that a certain segment of today's audiences expect a dose of scatalogy in order to laugh, provided the obligatory helping right up front, in to get it out of the most. The nadir of taste in the movie was right at the beginning. From that point forward, the disgust-o-meter registered at much milder levels.

So was the movie funny? Yes. I found myself laughing out loud at least a dozen times.

Was that enough to make me happy that I had spent the time to see this movie? Indeed it was. It was exactly what I expected and hoped it would be, nothing more and nothing less. But it was enough to break a losing streak and set my mood right again.

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smthsonian

If I hadn't known better, I would have thought that the Tri-Town Drive-in was one of those long abandoned relics of yesterday. The screen was not at all visible from the road, and the dilapidated sign was embedded in an overgrowth of trees. Only the fact that the skewed letters on the marquee spelled out current releases was there any hint that this was active outdoor cinema venue.

The website had advertised 17 bucks a carload, but when I handed the woman at the booth a twenty dollar bill, she gave me back a five spot with a generic roll ticket. There were already well over a hundred cars in the plaza, a good crowd for a Saturday night. Over half the cars were minivans, and in many cases, the families had pulled out the interior seats and placed them outside.

Most of the time at the movies, I don't buy concessions, simply because I'm on such a tight budget. But in the case of drive-in theaters, I consider it mandatory to kick in a few bucks for munchies, given that drive-ins are such an endangered species.

The concessions stand was a definite throw-back. It had a full grill that looked at if it hadn't changed at all in twenty-five years, right down to the Centipede video game. Eight bucks got me a cheeseburger, small fries, and a small Pepsi---a lot more than you'd get an one of the chain multiplexes.

I ate my meal while sitting in my front seat during the trailers, until I realized that I had still had the folding chair from my camping trip. I took it out from the back seat and sat in front of my car as the sky grew dark. It occurred to me later that one of the reasons that the drive-in had the feeling of an outdoor music festival was that so many of the cars and minivans had full stereo systems, which they had turned up while keeping the doors open. This meant you could sit outside and still hear the movie soundtrack quite easily in the open air.

As for the movie, what can I say? It was pretty much as dumb as I expected it would be, so it didn't really let me down.

I've grown very tired of magically driven plot lines, and this would seem to qualify, but like I said, I'd already accounted for it. Besides, comedies always get to play by a looser set of rules. A quick look at Shakespeare should be evidence enough of that.

But I would remiss if I didn't restate the Law of the Destruction of Museums in contemporary cinema: if a museum appears as part of the story, it must be partially or completely desecrated or destroyed. In some sense, this movie and its predecessor are the canonical examples, not because the exhibits come to life, but because plenty of the interior gets smashed and wrecked along the way. These movies seem to cater to the some phillistine aspect of our culture in which certain people go to museums and fantasize about cool it would be just to wreck everything inside.

But there is something more deeply offensive that the destruction law. It had to do with how the exhibits behaved when they came to life. Simply put, it was almost as if they were intended to be insulting to anyone with any knowledge of history.

It's not because the brought-to-life characters spoke in anachronistic dialect. It more to do with the fact they were as dumbed down as they possible could get.

I'm not just being a curmudgeon here. In the old days of Hollywood, the people who ran studios had a consciousness of the lowered status their industry held among the "high culture" types, including in academia. Partly out of a desire to be taken seriously, they made movies that often could be appreciated by anyone of any educational level, even as they completely made up history out of whole cloth.

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian reflects how far we have fallen from this idyllic state. Let me give you an example. Over the last couple months, I've been reading Will Durant's The Age of Napoleon. As it happens, Napoleon is one of the characters who comes to life in this movie.

But did I recognize the Napoleon in the movie? Not at all. Napoleon himself is one of the most written-about people in history, but like the other characters in the movie, the Napoleon here was seemingly not based on any actual historical description, but rather on other stereotypes of Napoleon. Because of this, it was possible to appreciate the humor only if you had never read anything about the real Napoleon, or if you were willing to switch off your brain completely.

This reflects a fundamental breakdown in the distinction between knowledge and ignorance in our culture. It's as if in making this movie, it never occurred to writer and director that historical personnages brought to life in the museum needed to be anything other than the crudest depictions possible.

It's not suprising therefore that when Rodin's Thinker came to life, he was not at all erudite, but rather spoke in a stupefied Brooklyn accent. Likewise the bobble-headed Einstein could assert that pi is "3.141592...to be exact." As any mathematics student knows, pi is irrational, and thus cannot be expressed exactly by an finite sequence of digits.

But what about the story? Was it possible to appreciate the narrative despite the fact that you had to turn off your brain to appreciate it? Unfortunately not, at least after the mid point of the movie, when the narrative degenerated into a mish-mash retread of the Mummy series.

The clumsiness of the story was reflected in the mistimed use of the giant Lincoln from the nearby memorial, who show up at what appears to be the climax, only to disappear before the real climax arrived. By that time, I was barely interested in what was going on.

Nevertheless I was still following it, for one simple reason: Amy Adams, the pride of Boulder dinner theater. Last year I'd come to be a huge Adams fan, but I had noticed in her last few movies that she had tended towards the mousier, soft-spoken roles. Here we get to Adams in all her glory, as potent as in Enchanted. She pretty much carries this movie on her back, and everytime she was on screen (as Amelia Earheart) , my attention was rivetted.

Years from now, when they do a retrospective of her career, they can trot out this movie as example of how a superb actor can make even an inferior movie watchable. Did it save the movie? No, because you still need a good story, which this didn't have. But like I said, it was still enjoyable.

Finally I should mention that a couple weeks ago, I bought my nephew the Wii game of this movie. Since then I've been watching him as he makes his way through the levels. What surprised me after seeing this movie is that the story within the Wii game was far superior to the movie itself.

Liveblogging at the Tri-Town Drive-in

Today marks the one year anniversary of the start of this crazy quest of mine to see all the new movies released in theaters in the United States---or at least to see as many of them as possible.

Actually at the time I had no idea that it would turn into this. What actually happened is that because I was moving out of my apartment, a year ago today I let my cable get cut off, and for the first time in two years I not only was without Turner Classic Movies, but without any television at all.

In the previous eight years before that, I had seen perhaps twenty new movies in theaters. It had ceased to become an activity that interested me. But suddenly it seemed like the thing to do, so I got in my car, drove over to the discount cinema on Drake in Fort Collins, and bought a ticket to Vantage Point. Not really an auspicious beginning, you might say, because the movie was crap, but it certainly got me in the right mood.

It was only two or three weeks later that I came up with the idea of seeing all the movies that came out. At first I decided that I would see all the movies in 2008, as I've mentioned. But when the new year came around last January, I decided to keep it going. I was having too much month.

Today also marks the approximately the six month anniversary of starting this blog. I'm not sure what finally possessed me to start writing about the movies I was seeing, but after seeing Synechdoche, New York, I sat down and signed up for this Blogger account. Now that was an auspicious beginning.

It now seems like it is time for another upgrade to this adventure, which is exactly what is about to happen. In two days I'm flying overseas, to a non-English-speaking country. Am I going to see movies there? You betcha. Am I going to write about them? Well, what do you think I bought this new Asus Eee PC for?

To celebrate this milestone, last night I ventured over to nearby Lunenberg, to the Tri-Town Drive-in, the only such establishment in the Bay State. I hadn't been to a drive-in in almost a year, when I saw The Incredible Hulk in Fort Collins right before hitting the road to Jackson Hole. It seemed like the right thing to do.

I brought along my Eee and started typing up this blog entry right in the car while the previews played. They had wireless, and I could have uploaded it, but I didn't finish it quite in time. Still it was a nice dry run for this adventure, and a fun way to mark a year of seeing every damn movie that Hollywood throws my direction.

Oh, and I bought a new digital camera too. By the time I got there, it was a little too dark to get good shots. The Eee has no DVD drive, but it does have a built-in card reader. This is going to be fun...

Star Trek

I've had it. Officially as of now I am promoting time travel to the level of Class A narrative felony. If I had my druthers, I would impose a five year ban on any form of time travel in motion pictures.

The new Star Trek could have been, and should have been, a masterpiece of a motion picture, one that should have satisfied new and old fans, and filled in critical gaps in the canonical storyline of the Star Trek series.

I really, really, really wanted to like this. I'd been putting it off as a reward after completing some to-do list tasks for my upcoming trip, so I could finally enjoy it in relaxed fashion. An hour before the show today I'd bought my new camera in Nashua, and for the very first snapshot, I took a commemorate shot of the exterior of the AMC in Tyngsboro that has become my second home.

But in the movie, Star Trek fans did not get the fulfillment of the missing parts of the canon. Instead we got what amounts to the negation of the entire Star Trek storyline as we known it, performed ironically under the guise of resurrecting and honoring it. In that sense, it was the perfect Postmodern movie of 2009---destruction of the past, present, and future masquerading as creation.

This is also the last straw for me as any sort of J.J.Abrams fan. I will finish out following the last season of Lost next year, but that's it. From this movie I finally learned the essential truth of Abrams---the guy just likes to destroy things. Nearly every season of Lost has ended with something blowing up. In Cloverfield we got to see the beheading of the most potent symbol of American freedom followed by the nuking of Manhattan.

Now we get...the annihilation of the entire planet Vulcan and the near extinction of Vulcan race. That would be bad enough, but the destruction was such as to shit upon the entire original series, all in the name of, ahem, "rebooting."

If I were a studio head, I'd like to "reboot" Abrams' ass right off the studio lot, L.B. Mayer style.

It's a damn shame because in many respects this was a magnificent effort, especially in terms of art direction and acting. Karl Urban as McCoy blew me away. The Academy doesn't usually give supporting actor nominations for these kind of performances, but in this case they ought to.

I could forgive Abrams for stripping Kirk of his Iowa nativity, having him be born in space instead. I'd already discerned that from the trailers, and in some ways it makes more sense for the Kirk character.

But fuck---time travel. My mouth is hanging open at how wretched it was. Not just little old innocent go back in time for a little glimpse, but full on plot-completely-relies-on-it type crap that I just gone done ranting about in my previous entry on Terminator Salvation. But at least in the latter instance, the makers of the fourth Terminator film were constrained by the necessity of using it according to the canon of the series. They had to use it, which is why the movie felt so clumsy when it otherwise didn't need to be.

Not so for Star Trek. Time travel wasn't necessary all, except for maybe the fact that the writers weren't clever enough to come up with anything else. It should never have been used as the main plot element that drives the characters actions. Never.

Yes, we have had time travel before in Star Trek ("Edith Keeler must die"), but never quite like this.

But Abrams is a destroyer, a Postmodern plunderer par supreme. The Vulcans were nothing if not refined Classicism, so what more appropriate way of celebrating the revival of the series than annihilating their entire history?

This movie also craps on and cheapens the entire future interactions between Kirk and Spock, since they know they are supposed to be lifelong friends. Who gives a shit now, if it's all destiny?

I suppose in time I will get used to this new Vulcanless timeline, but right now I don't want to think about that. I just feel sick to my stomach when I think about this entire movie.

And I'm likely to walk right out of the next goddamn time travel movie I see. I'm sick of directors like Abrams getting all cute and clever trying to figure all the logic of it out (or not trying to figure it out, I suppose). There is no such thing as time travel. What once was fresh and interesting is now simply a device for telling lazy, inferior stories. It's a cheat, and from now on, in my book it is a crime against narrative.

UPDATE: Oh, and fuck Abrams for depriving Scottie's character of the joy of making his big discovery. They obviously do not understand scientists at all. How would Abrams like it if someone made his movies for him? Cute.

But at least I was spared of having to watch the Golden Gate Bridge be destroyed twice in one month on the screen. I was definitely holding my breath on that one.

Terminator Salvation

So why did this movie suck so much?

That's what I'm thinking to myself Thursday afternoon as I'm driving home from Leominster. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon---and quite hot. The memories of the cold unheated auditoriums there, and the parking lots full of mountains of snow, were a distant memory.

The question was sort of a mystery, because in fact, I hadn't thought that Terminator Salvation actually did suck. In fact, I sort of enjoyed it for the most part. But everyone else seemed to think it sucked, including Roger Ebert who stated, at least in the title of a blog post that I didn't read, that he wished he could be transported in time from the start of the movie two hours until after it had finished. That's harsh.

First things first: the time travel logic in it doesn't make sense, but that really applies to the entire Terminator series. I think this Cracked article pretty much sums it all up. (also check out this hilarious comparison of T2 and T3)

To me, time travel is always a crutch, because it is not really part of the human condition. Lately it seems time travel in movies, and on television, is getting out of hand. It makes me wonder if it is a sign of weakness in story telling. Basically in time travel stories, one is allowed gaping plot holes that would otherwise doom a normal non-time-travel movie.

Did the story here give us characters we cared about? Yes. Did this characters have urgent motivations which were clearly spelled out? For the most part, yes. Well, maybe.

Come to think about it, I suppose the point is that the time travel logic in this case was not only full of holes, but almost illogical. Here's where I understand the criticism, one that can be expressed by a general principle: it's ok to have plot holes in a time travel story but not if those plot holes actually supply the principal motivations for the characters. In other words, it's acceptable somewhat to paper over the inevitable holes in a time-travel story with magic dust, but it is not acceptable to build the foundation of the story around such holes, and that's exactly what this movie was trying to do. But like I said, I suppose one could say as much about the entire series.

Whew, at least I've got a new rule out of this.

That being said, I was very sympathetic to this movie and was able to enjoy it because it expressed something very emotive about the struggle against tyranny in the world today, something that is being ignored in the current narrative of our culture. That is, the movie is really about now, not about the future.

But it's not the machines we're fighting against. The force would that wipe out humanity, or at least reduce the world population to a fraction of its size, is other humans. They only seem like soul-less machines. One could thus argue that the movie tell the truth and a lie at the same time.

The truth is that humanity is under attack. The lie is that the attack is not happening now, but in some alterate reality future. Personally I think the truth-telling part of art always is stronger than the part that tries to tell us lies, no matter what the intention of the film makers.

See this is what happens when I look at the damn reviews before I see a movie. I wind up apologizing for liking it. Damn it, I'm not gonna. The theme of the story involving the decisions made the characters based on their hearts (literally, as it turns out) seemed well conceived, despite the flimsy time travel part. It could have been a lot better movie, to be sure, but I wasn't expecting much.

So yeah, I guess the movie did sort of suck, but it was enjoyable enough that I had to think the question over, and it was worth it all to feel for two hours like I wasn't the only member of the Resistance.

Angels & Demons

Believe it or not, I was actually looking forward to seeing this movie when I walked into the Tyngsboro AMC early Saturday afternoon. I knew it would be absolutely mindless, but I thought maybe in its mindlessness, it might be fun. Somehow the idea of pure escape appealed to me.

It was tempting to start writing my review in my head in advance, before the trailers even started playing. In many respects, I knew what was coming.

For someone like me who makes a point of investigating and exploring conspiracy theories, Dan Brown is the kind of guy who just makes a mockery of the whole thing. I'd actually read the book upon which Angels & Demons was based, and like The Da Vinci Code, I'd found it to be not only banal, but deleterious to the efforts of those who would attempt to explore the hidden aspects of contemporary politics and history.

In Brown's world, the conspiracies always involve centuries-old organizations that nevertheless still retain their power through some kind of mystical inertia. This belies the essential truth about conspiracies: the organizations themselves are pointless. It is only the individuals that count. Brown, however, always fixates on the organizations. In the world of conspiracy theories, that's a dead give away that you are dealing with the realm of camp, rather than truth.

For example, in The Da Vinci Code, who really gives a crap about what happened two thousand years ago? What does that have to do with today? It is the conspiracies that are alive at this very moment matter, not the ancient ones. Mystical philosophies and pedigrees are pointless. It is raw power that matters.

The second prejudice I held against this movie is that I knew from the book that the physics in it, which plays a major role, is just downright stupid as well, pathetically so.

But like I said, I'd already accounted for much of this before I walked in the theater. I was just hoping for an interesting story. I was willing to grant an indulgence on every other count, if it didn't offend me on the level of narrative.

As a thriller, it mostly worked, and for the first act, I was hooked. It kept up the constantly forward-linked action of its predecessor, and thus it didn't disappoint me.

But after the midpoint, something started to go horribly wrong in a way that began to offend me on a deep level, beyond the complaints I've already mentioned. It happened during a scene in one of the churches in Rome in which there is a wild gun battle during a fire. People get shot right and left, including one of the major sympathetic characters, who winds up dying on the spot.

I thought to myself: wait, that character's not supposed to get killed. I'm not talking about the book, the details of which I've forgotten, but rather the laws of story telling. There was no reason for that character to be killed, and the essential rule of motion picture story telling, drawing upon Aristotle himself, is that what happens is always what needs to happen.

It occurred to me that the reason the character was killed was to eliminate him as a suspect in the mystery part of the story. What an absolutely crummy reason. It is a hallmark of lazy story-telling.

This actually turns out to be the preferred way in which the story eliminates its suspects. It kills them all, until only a few are left.

But worse than this is that the movie rather unexpectedly descended into full-fledged orgiastic illustration of what I calls the Laws of Destruction in Postmodern cinema. Briefly stated, they are:

1. The Law of Book Destruction. If a book appears as a major element in the story, it must partially or completely destroyed during the course of the story.

2. The Law of Library Destruction. If a library appears as a major element in the story, it must be partially or completely destroyed or desecrated during the course of the story.

3. The Law of Museum Destruction. If a museum (including a historic church) appears as a major element of the story, it must be partially or completely destroyed or desecrated as part of the story.

There are actually a few more, but these are the ones that are appropriate here. In the second half of the movie, Angels & Demons not only upholds these laws, but seems to go hogwild with them in a way I haven't seen on film in quite some time.

Let's see...the protagonist is a scholar who desires to gain access to the Vatican archives to study rare manuscripts. The story allows him to do so, and he gets to examine an extremely rare Galileo pamphlet, of which only one example exists.

What do the characters do? Of course theyliterally rip a page right out of the book, because who has time for niceties like the preservation of rare manuscripts. The protagonist scholar then carries the rare page around like a train ticket. All the while I'm obsessed, thinking, "Is he at least going to put that damn thing in a safe place?"

The story makes it clear that if the page is exposed to water, it will instantly dissolve. Later when the hero puts the folded and ripped page in his pocket, all I can think about is the scene I know is coming from the trailer, when he is going to dive into a fountain. I grow agitated. Is Ron Fucking Howard (the director) actually going to have the character destroy that page!?

Not until Hanks' character changed his clothes could I finally relax. But then he returns to that same Vatican Archives, and this time, he winds up ransacking an entire shelf of rare manuscripts, crushing them with a metal bookshelf to save himself.

Fuck you Ron Howard!! What is the fucking point of this? The story could have been told without all this destruction, so why do it?

Because that's what we do now in our culture: we dsstroy, dismantle, and pillage.

Later in the story we get treated to close-ups of melting artwork in a church, and, as a piece-de-resistance, crumbling ceiling artwork inside St. Peter's.

As in every such contemporary instance, the most disturbing aspect of this is how casually this all happens, as if it the most normal thing in the world, to destroy and ransack our cultural heritage in order to resolve whatever plot issue is at hand. The movie excuses this all by the premise that Rome itself will be destroyed if the mystery isn't solved in time, but this feels like a crutch. Don't complain about the Vatican Library, bub. It could have been a lot worse.

Yes, it's only a movie, but why must these things happen in every movie? The near constancy of the Laws of Destruction (sometime I'll write about them in detail) speaks volumes about our societal attitudes towards art and culture. The key is that kind of pointless destruction without remorse has become mandatory in Postmodern cinema.

I'm fucking sick and tired of it. I'm sick and tired of spending twenty minutes distracted by pointless worries over whether or not a character will bother to put a page from a rare manuscript in the glove compartment instead of waving it in the wind. I'm sick and tired of seeing libraries destroyed every time they appear, and having it transpire with some kind of repressed pleasure by the director.

The destruction happened for no reason at all, in story terms, and was simply gratuitous. It didn't have to be that way. A few changes in the script of this story could have made all the difference. But that's not how Hollywood rolls these days.

The key, in my mind, is that even the "good" characters never seem to care, or to make any real effort to avoid such destruction, or to express any remorse at the loss. It always what "must be done." For me, nothing speaks more to the essential barbarism of our time than the way Hollywood movies methodically resort to smashing every artifact and ripping apart every book that appears on screen. It is the most offensive set of cliches in the current Postmodern canon.

Did I mention the stupid conspiracy aspect, which of course turns out to be a conspiracy of only a handful (as all Hollywood conspiracies must turn out to be), or that the physics is over-the-top ridiculous? Oh yes, I guess I did. But I hardly even cared about those things by the end.

I wanted this to be a decent mindless thriller, but this movie felt like a kick in the crotch to all my Classical sensibilities. I couldn't wait for it to be over.

Obsessed

Are we in post-racial America?

That was the question that was most on my mind as I sat down in a deserted theater last week in Leominster to see an early matinee of Obsessed. In case you haven't seen the trailer, the premise is basically this:

A charming and handsome African-American executive, Derek (Idris Elba), is married to a beautiful African-American woman (Beyonce Knowles) and has a young son. They live in a nice house in Los Angeles. One day a pretty young white temp worker (Ali Larter) arrives at the office and takes a liking to him. Eventually she stalks him, and makes life hell for him and his family.

The trailers mentioned nothing about race, and I correctly anticipated that race would not be an overt issue in the movie as well. In fact, race is never mentioned outloud in the entire story.

The question I asked myself right from the beginning was: do the characters' races actually matter to the story? That is, could one have made the same movie with a different racial mix among the characters?

By the end of Act One, I had my answer. Race definitely did matter to the story. It was impossible for me to imagine the same movie being made with an all-white cast, or with the racial roles reversed, or in some other perturbation. But actually this is overally broad. Really it is more correct to say that Derek, the male protagonist, definitely had to be African-American for this story to work.

Why? It actually had a lot to do with our current norms of sexuality. The executive protagonist is a strong character, with a definite moral compass that he attempts to follow. He resists temptation at every turn. He does not sleep with his beautiful stalker. He pushes her away when she tries to give him a blow job in a toilet stall.

Simply put, Americans would never believe that a white man would be able to resist such temptation. There isn't a single white actor alive that I could think of, who could pull off this role, at least not in the age group depicted here.

In the Classical era, there were dozens, nay, hundreds of actors who could have done this, because that's what honorable men were expected to do. But American men are no longer considered to be honorable by default. They are considered to be dogs who are unable to resist blow job offers, even at the cost of their marriage and family. No (white) man, we believe, can resist such temptations, but he is still a scumbag when he succumbs.

But a black man is perhaps believable is this regard because we know that black men have to play by a stricter set of rules. We all know that black men must try harder in the work place, and must take special precautions to guard their public images. It is believable to American audiences that Derek could muster up the courage to push the vixen away.

Once I made this realization about the looming subtext of race within this story, I began to appreciate the movie, which turned out be not so bad.

In most respects, it is a simple standard plot line:

1. Attractive woman falls for her married boss and tries to seduce him.
2. He resists her
3. She tries even harder, becoming desperate.
4. He continues to resist her
5. She becomes unstable and takes extreme measures, overtly endangering his position.
6. The man's wife finds out about the stalker.
7. There is a breach between the man and his wife over the issue.
8. The breach is repaired.
9. The stalker is defeated.

The arc of the plot went pretty much as I expected. Like I said, without the subtext of race, this wouldn't have been a very interesting movie. But it was indeed interesting, because of the part of the story between the first attempts of Lisa, the white woman, to seduce her boss, and the eventual moment when the wife finds out about it.

In this type of plot, the critical element of this story, the one that drives the narrative, is always the choice by the husband to conceal what is happening from his wife. Instead of telling her about the attempts at seduction, he keeps everything to himself. The concealment is the "poison" that escalates into the near-destruction of his family. In this respect the movie was very Classical: secrets within a marriage are bad.

During this critical part of the story, the movie utterly transcended race. The blackness and whiteness of the characters didn't matter at all, and the movie felt post-racial because it posited that the black protagonist actually had the same kind of Postmodern weaknesses as contemporary white men.

Although the executive fended off the advances, he actually did encourage her by openly flirting with her. He crossed the line in this respect, in that he wanted to feel erotic energy in his office interactions with her without having any consequence to it.

More critical, however, is his weakness once his wife finds out about the non-affair. She does not believe him. She throws him out of "her house." He complies like a whipped dog (imagine a Classical hero leaving his own house!) and holes up in an apartment, unable to understand what he has done wrong.

"Just tell me what to do, and I'll do it," he pleads to his angry wife, all the while proclaiming his total innocence. It is exactly the disease of weakness one sees in nearly every white husband on screen. One could inscribe those quoted words as the motto of the Postmodern husband.

One thing I learned from this movie is that Beyonce Knowles is a very good actress. There is a scene near the beginning of Act Three, after the couple has been estranged for several months and are finally having dinner together. The husband has begged for dinner together on his birthday. In the restaurant, he finally admits that he should have told his wife after the very first incident with the stalker.

At that moment, one sees a shift in Knowles' eyes, and the tiniest flash of a smile. It's the kind of subtle gesture you would have seen from, say, Barbara Stanwyck back in the Forties, an action that might slip past any man but would be inescapable to any woman watching the movie. The hero has finally taken responsibility for his actions, and realized what he did wrong. It is the magic moment, and her heart melts. The breach is repaired, and the story can move forward.

From that moment on, the couple's energies are aligned, and thus when the crisis of the climax arrives, when the stalker makes her last stand, they are able to defeat her.

By that time, I had mostly forgotten who was black and who was white.

On narrative

If there is anything I have discovered in writing this blog, it is that I am fascinated by the power of narrative. It is the issue that I come back to, over and over, when analyzing my reactions to movies.

A motion picture, Syd Field tells us, is a story told in pictures. To write even a passable screenplay, it is necessary to comprehend and digest this definition. The story may not be everything about a movie, but it stands alongside photography itself as the two necessary foundations that make up a movie as we know it.

Part of the reason I've enjoyed writing this blog is that it feels like a break from the other side of my personality, which is consumed with current events, politics, and economics---the side that started to leak into here after I saw Watchmen, and which appeared again in the previous entry.

Lately it feels as if these two parts of my soul have been converging, and the issue of narrative strikes me as the unifying theme.

Narrative, I have learned, is powerful---very powerful. I used to hear people say this when I was in college literature classes, and at the time, I accepted it in a romantic sense, which was my nature back then. But now I have come to understand that this statement is true in a sense that is much deeper and more concrete than I could have comprehended in my early twenties.

Narrative has the power to define who we are in the most direct sense. It has the power to the delimit the contours of thoughts and feelings, not only on an individual level, but on a societal level as well.

Stories are vehicles for revelation and transformation. This is not only because they rehash archetypes deep within us. That speaks to the past. They have this power because they reach out to the new as well. This is the essence of creativity, and what drives the human spirit forward.

The canon of motion pictures, and in particular Hollywood motion pictures, is for all its deficiencies, the greatest body of art ever created and preserved by mankind. It stores the collective spirit of the American nation in the Twentieth Century. I personally believe that the preservation and furtherance of this art is the greatest source of hope for us---for all the world right now---because it is an unassailable fortress of a character of liberty and humanity that seems to have ebbed away in our current culture. Above all, this is why I am so passionate about understanding Classical cinema, and how cinema has changed in the Postmodern era.

History is a narrative as well. It is the story we tell ourselves as a nation, as a people, of how we got to where we are now.

Like any narrative, it is selective, a partial assembling of something resembling truth that may at times converge to a meaningful whole, at least fleetingly, to allow us glimpses of understanding of the great riparian flow of time in civilization.

Postmodernity asserts that this wholeness is an illusion, and that seeking it is a waste of time. Those who advocate this point-of-view assert that is arises out of greater wisdom, that it is an escape from the false paradigm of the Classical era in which truth was, falsely they claim, assumed to assemble into a comprehensible whole.

But I believe that this Postmodern view is itself a delusion. The reason is that for much of the Twentieth Century, especially over the last fifty years, the story of history we have been telling ourselves, that has been told to us, is flat out full of outrageous lies and distortions. The Postmodern era cannot converge because the pieces were never meant to fit into a whole. They were meant to confuse, to distract, and to obfuscate.

All that remains in the end is irony, which allows us temporary escape from the prison of the unconverging parade of lies.

Which brings me to where we are now. I believe that we are witnessing the collapse of the Postmodern False Narrative. The False Narrative can no longer be sustained. It has accumulated too many self-contradictions.

The characterization of 9/11 Truthers in the media is that we are all tin foil hat wearers. We are all rabidly insane, living in a swarm of delusions.

Yet almost everyone who seriously bothers to look at the hard evidence about what happened that day, and examines it with the spirit of an open mind, comes away with the same conclusion, namely that it is likely that the entire story we have been told is a fraud, and that it was probably an inside job, carried out with help from high level officials in the Bush Administration, and with domestic and foreign intelligence services.

Those of us who have made this journey know that it is not easy, because by itself, it forces one into a complete overhaul of one's interpretation of the United States, its government, and the American people. Simply put, this is not a place where most people are ready to go. It is very disturbing in many ways, and thus I have sympathy with those who are not yet ready to open their minds to the truth.

We know, however, that those who call us tin foil hat wearers are themselves the ones who have shut their minds to the truth. They are living that very same frenzied madness of falsehood. It has taken more and more effort to keep our collective hands over our ears, singing "la la la la" to keep out any bits of information that may start the process of erosion.

But it is happening. What has happened on Daily Kos over the last few days is a sign that the process is starting to accelerate. It is now stipulated that "everything we know about 9/11 is a probably a complete lie."

Yet it is still taboo to discuss what this statement might mean. To open the Pandora's box of that day, we must still agree in advance to come to the same conclusion as before. We can tinker with the edges of the picture, the essential features of the narrative must be preserved.

This is an untenable position, and it cannot last. The cracks are starting to widen. Many are going to lose their minds in the days ahead, and the entire apparatus of lies goes down in flames.

This is one reason why those of us who have made the leap are trying to reach out to those we know. It is a lot easier if you make the leap sooner, rather than later.

In the meantime, I'll keep writing about movies. I personally would not have been able to make this transition without the power of motion pictures. Art, I assert, always subverts power, even if it is created in chains. This is the nature of art.

Even as Postmodern movies had strived to elaborate the false narrative, they have exposed it and undermined it at every turn. This is the beauty of the process, the transformational magic of the Spirit that leaves me in awe, utterly humbled, and thankful that I could become aware of all this.

Rorschach speaks again

Old black Joe's still pickin' cotton for your ribbons and bows...

According to the FAQ of Daily Kos (where I used to have a diary), you can say just about anything, but the one opinion that will get you immediately banned from the site is to suggest that 9/11 was an inside job (think about that a moment).

To my surprise, there is a full-fledged front page war right now on dKos over...9/11 conspiracies.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that everybody knows that the most powerful leaders in the world, including our Treasury and Defense secretaries, are meeting at a hotel in Greece this weekend for their annual secret pow-wow, and the domestic press media (except for Brother Alex) is saying absolutely nothing about it.

The front is giving way. This is what victory feels like.

Back to our regularly scheduled program.

UPDATE: The dKos diarist who wrote the entry I linked to was personally banned by Kos himself. Amazing.

Could have predicted this---in fact I did

Not to toot my own horn too much, but this is exactly what I predicted:

What has been great for the exhibition industry has been a drag for Blockbuster this year.

Jim Keyes, the video rental chain's CEO, said Thursday that a 14% surge in theater attendance in 2009 means consumers are forgoing rentals in favor of going to the movies.

As the economy tanks, movie attendance in theaters will go up, not down. It seems counterintuitive, going against the folk wisdom that people will cut back by forgoing theater attendance in favor of DVD rentals.

Rather, as people downsize, they will go to movies instead of going out to more expensive venues. This is what I did when I downsized my own life. That's how I knew.

Movies to see: for future reference

The indies are ripping through the Boston theaters these days, but I've had little gumption to go into the city (or even into Waltham). I screwed up and missed out on seeing Gomorroah, leaving me very bitter, since I'd read the book last month in anticipation. But that's what I get for procrastination. Maybe I'll catch it in the theaters as it makes the rounds elsewhere before it shows up on DVD.

Here are some other movies that are leaving this week I may not get to see until the DVD release

Every Little Step
American Violet
Sugar
Tyson
Is Anybody There?
The Merry Gentleman
Moscow, Belgium

Monsters vs. Aliens

"What you doing, Uncle Matt?"

It was my three-year-old niece Sarah. She'd climbed onto the desk beside me and was looming over me, looking at the computer screen while I was typing away my reactions to Wolverine.

"I'm writing an entry for my blog," I said.

"That sounds yucchy."

"Well, it's not actually," I said. "It's about a movie."

"The movie that we just saw?"

"No it's about a different one, one that I saw a couple days ago. But I'm going to write about the one we saw today too."

"Oh."

So here I am.

I had let Monsters vs. Aliens fester in the theaters for a couple weeks, knowing I had plenty of time to get around to seeing it. Also I've learned that if I want to see movies in any of the small one-screen downtown cinemas in this area, I have to wait a couple weeks for current releases to clear out of the multiplexes. Monsters vs. Aliens was a sure bet to eventually make the rounds of these out-of-the-way venues.

But last Friday my sister had announced she wanted to get out of the house with the children, possibly for a movie. I helped her look over the listings. What was suitable for children? I said Earth was probably too predator-oriented for the little girls. Hannah Montana: the Movie? My sister vetoed that idea. The only choice was Monsters vs. Aliens, for which I was more than happy to accompany them to Entertainment Cinemas in Leominster for the early matinee. My homeschooled ten-year-old nephew came along as well.

When I think of Dreamworks animation, the first thing that comes to my mind is that there will be plenty of jokes about bodily functions. This one didn't disappoint, and there was a steady drip-drip of humorous bits about peeing, farting and belching. I tend to regard these as crutches, as ways of distracting from the essential task of cinematic story-telling, although they always make the kids laugh.

Given that, I thought the movie succeeded fairly well during the first two acts. Although it's not apparent from the trailers (except for the ones that were shown during chick flicks), the main plot is the one that follows the "ginormous" woman Susan (voiced by Reese Witherspoon), who is converted to a mutant on her wedding day by a glowing meteorite.

The most interesting part of the story to me was how, in the wake of Susan's sudden transformation, the U.S. military swoops in and arrests her in the most destructive manner, without ever announcing what they are doing, or under what law they have the authority to detain her. They simply take her away rudely and imprison her. There is no discussion of criminal charges, or her rights as a citizen. She is simply to be imprisoned forever.

This is balanced in a lovely way in a scene a few minutes later when a larger alien robot crash lands with the intention of retrieving the meteorite on behalf on an evil alien overlord.

Whereas the benevolent but hapless citizen is carted away without even so much as an arrest warrant, the malevolent alien robot is greeted with courteous pomp and circumstance by the President (voiced by Stephen Colbert, who all but steals the show here).

All in all, it was one of the best satirical portraits of America in 2009 that I have seen on film.

What follows is a battle between the imprisoned (good) mutant monsters (Susan included) against the rampaging robot. The showdown, which occurs at the midpoint of the movie and involves the destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge, actually comes across as the climax to the story, and probably should have been so. Nearly everything in the second half of the movie felt like a letdown compared to the first half.

Why? The entire Third Act felt like a letdown because it gave way too much screentime to the four-eyed mutant alien overlord (voiced by Rainn Wilson), who is a very boring character. My attention during this part of the movie was not helped by the fact that my nephew and one of my nieces (presumably out of lack of interest) had taken to running up and down the center aisle of the otherwise empty auditorium.

Why is the alien overlord boring? Because strange mutant alien characters are always boring in animation. The only exceptions are Kang and Kodos from The Simpsons, who are kept fresh by the fact that they are used so sparingly.

On the other hand Monsters vs. Aliens way, way overdoes it, not only giving lots of screen time to the four-eyed alien, but creating literally thousands of clones of this character that fill the screen and reduce the (more interesting) monster characters to supporting players.

I've come to conclusion that strange alien creatures are a hallmark of lazy animation. My proof is that this is the fourth animated feature in the last year alone to fall back on bizarre aliens as a plot crutch. The previous three features---Space Chimps, Delgo, and Battle for Terra were all freaking disasters. All three were independently produced, and I can imagine the producers thought that using aliens was a handy shortcut, making for interesting fantasy characters to cover-up otherwise deficient stories.

Notice on the other hand that Disney-Pixar almost never uses these types of characters, and as a consequence their animated features are the cream of the crop. It simply takes far more work and creativity to bring to life Woody from Toy Story or even a robot like Wall-E, than it does to go hog wild creating floating fantasy creatures.

Dreamworks only half sucks, so only the last part of Monsters vs. Aliens fell into the lazy crapola category.

There were a few other themes in the movie that stuck out. The Postmodern examination of the enfeebled American male was in full force, as all the men in the movie follow the dichotomy of either being weakened egotistical jerks or hyper-masculinized egotistical war mongers (literally the name of one of the characters). As in many recent films, it is the task of the (sane and ego-balanced) women to cope with these reduced creatures.

The scene of the teenage couple in the car, in which it is the young woman who is aggressively trying to get her pathetic boyfriend to kiss her, is perhaps the most interesting such example. Ironically such scenes were commonplace not out of the question in the classical era, in which it was assumed that women had to chase men, but largely vanished after 1970, which is the approximate date of the sexual courtship inversion in cinema (subject for another time).

On another note, perhaps the most disturbing moment in the movie was the scene involving the destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge mentioned above. I couldn't help but feel that the formula for a disaster movie has become "let's think of famous landmark that hasn't been destroyed yet." There is something willfully barbaric about this trend, one that speaks to the dismantling and destructive impulse in Postmodern culture.

Even though it was only an animated movie, it greatly saddened me to see the magnificent structure reduced to ruins without a single note of consolation or regret from any of the characters in the movie. What a strange time we live in.

POSTSCRIPT:

"What you doing?"

"I'm listening to the radio. I wrote another blog entry---about you."

"About me riding a horsie?"

"No, about when we went to the movies."

"Oh. Can you write about me and horsie?"

"O.K., I will."

"And can you write about Maura and a horsie?" Had to get the sister in there.

"You can be sure I will."

X Men Origins: Wolverine

In most cases I try to eschew movie reviews of current Hollywood releases until after I've seen a film. This is mostly because for purposes of this blog, I like to form my own fresh opinions. Sometimes if I read an interesting thought about a movie in a review, I will go out of my way to think of something even fresher and more clever, and the contortions are not always pretty.

But when a movie like X-Men Origins: Wolverine makes ninety million bucks in its opening weekend, and I don't get around to seeing it for a whole week, word starts leaking out in the blogs. I can't help but notice when there is a trend hinting that a movie, well, sucks.

So I knew going into this movie not to expect too much. But I'd just seen Terra (see previous review), and had built up a cast iron stomach for sucky fantasy. Why not cross off two of them on one trip to the Tyngsboro AMC, while matinee prices were still in effect?

At least I'd get to see some thrilling action scenes, and certainly the story had to be better than the movie I'd just seen.

To make a long story short, I spent the first third of this movie thinking, "Well this ain't so bad, maybe." It didn't knock me over, but it wasn't turning my stomach either.

But then things just went south. The story just started to rot, like day old garbage, and the end of the movie, as I would later tell a friend of mine on Facebook, I felt like I'd eaten "a merde sandwich."

What went wrong? It certainly wasn't the acting. Hugh Jackman was fine enough for me, given what he was supposed to do. Yet I was scratching my head in wonderment that this is how he follows up his Academy Awards hosting gig, that catapulted him to the A-list of current stars. Well, of course, he couldn't have known the timing would work out this way. But cripes, what a waste.

And Liev Schreiber, whom I liked very much in Defiance, was wasted as well, in a movie which will nevertheless make him much more of a household word, and even give him his own 7-11 action figure.

Nope it was the story, plain and simple, as it always is when a movie really sucks. And unlike the case with Terra, where digging into the corpse felt like a wasteful exercise, somehow dissecting this turkey feels like a fruitful exercise.

The main deficiency that really stuck out to me is one that I constantly harp on as being the general weakness of Postmodern cinema, which is that the character motivations are so often kept swirling in the morass of the sewer. Everyone in this movie seems driven by the basest of instincts. You'd think this would work, given that the movie is about beast-men mutants, but actually it just makes it worse, and proves that beast-men characters probably need higher motivations than usual, if the story is going to work at all.

Instead, the motivation of the title character (Jackman) never really rises above the level of revenge. The tone is set in an opening scene, the significance of which is never really explained. We just learn that the characters are dangerous, and prone to outbursts like hypermedicated children.

The title character actually seems happy until he balks at massacring civilians for the government. He doesn't put up too much of a protest, however, but just walks away. Afterward he seems perfectly content until his own mate is killed, and then he goes ballistic to shed the blood of those who wronged him. That's it---the whole shebang, the reason why every else happens in the movie. Even when, at the end of the story, we finally get the glimmer of any sort of higher motivation (mutant liberation), it doesn't really contribute much to the story.

The title character's nemesis, his brother and a fellow mutant (Schreiber), has even more mysterious motivations. He's a mad dog, er, cat, I guess. Period. End of story. Somehow in fighting many wars for America, he, like the Comedian in Watchmen, acquires a taste for rape and murder and thus becomes bad. It's all we're given as far as why he does what he does, and why he hates his brother. Oh, I guess, we learn he has an ulterior motive to help the bad guys, but like the mutant liberation part, it almost comes as an afterthought, long after the character has been established.

I think the worse part about this is that in 2009, we're just supposed to buy all of this without question. We're all beasts, after all, right? None of us really has any higher motivations than nihilistic plunder or possibly revenge. Wolverine is realism, ya see? That's the Postmodern voice of lies talking again.

But oh yes, there is indeed goodness as well. At the end, the nihilistic brother, instead of killing the good title character when he has the chance, comes to his rescue because, get this, no one is allowed to kill his brother but him, and, more importantly brothers have each other's back.

Is your head spinning yet? Nihilism reigns supreme in our souls, so much that we will kill our family members, but if someone else tries to kill them, bloodline connections become all important, and the tribe instinct kicks in. Grrrrrr!

My god, we are not only in the gutter, but swirling down into the treatment plant.

Please don't think I'm just moralizing here. The more important point here is that wallowing in base character motivations makes for inferior stories, ones that are disatisfying to watch, and leave you feeling like you ate, well, you get the picture.

There are other things wrong with the story as well. For one thing, too many characters get killed. Every time you get to like some one, they get offed. After the scene in the barn with the old couple and the motorcycle jacket, I pretty much had my verdict for this film in mind.

There was no reason for what happened in that scene to happen. We already had outrage. We didn't need more at that point. All it did was alert me to be on the watch for any character sympathy to build up, because I knew that character would be killed.

There were a few things here and there about the movie that I liked. The dark portrayal of high-level corruption in the United States military is always welcome in my book. Too bad the public still thinks of it as a fantasy.

The effects involving Schreiber jumping around like a cat are sometimes fun to watch. Moreover the CGI effects at the end involving the nuclear power plant were original and enjoyable to watch, even though they had been partly spoiled by the trailers.

Spoiled, yes. That's the right word for the stench left in my nostrils, the dead carcass of a rotting animal of unspecified species.

The Battle for Terra

What a gip!

A couple months ago when I first saw the trailer to Battle for Terra (originally called just Terra), I swear to god it was a completely different movie then the animated feature I just saw at the AMC in Tyngsboro.

In the trailer I saw, a bunch of animated alien kids are playing in a neighborhood that looks a lot like American suburbia. A mysterious spaceship lands. Everyone is terrified. It turns out the invaders are from, gasp, Earth! It turns out that the humans, for various reasons, need to find a new planet. The story is from the point of view of the benign aliens who are being invaded.

Something weird happened to this movie between the making of that trailer and the release last week. No faux suburbia in sight. Instead the chinless aliens float listless in cloud cities that very reminiscent of Horton Hears a Who (the first of many "borrowings" I noticed in this movie). For fun, the young aliens ride light aircraft in the clouds for fun, skimming past "sky whales".

This feature is the first (I think) entry of Lionsgate into feature-length animation. Lionsgate, as I learned from Sly Stallone on one of his DVDs, really isn't a studio per se, but a distribution umbrella for independent production companies, sort of like United Artists was back in the old days.

That being said, this movie might be taken as evidence of just how hard it is to break into feature animation. It wasn't a very good start.

From the get go, Terra reminded me a lot of last winter's Delgo, a truly independent animated feature production that set the inglorious all-time low mark for a wide release opening, one that may never be eclipsed.

In fact, Terra reminded me a lot of Delgo. Both are about weak-chinned lizardesque alien races who can float or fly, and who are forced into an unwanted war to defend their homeland. What the hell is it with this particular plot premise?

The animation in this movie was certainly far superior to Delgo, but that really didn't matter, because, well, the story just sucked. If I could nominate one recent film to illustrate the point that story matters above everything else, this would be it.

I didn't care about the characters. I didn't care about the young girl alien protagonist. I didn't care about the human fighter pilot who crash lands, and whom she rescues. I didn't care about any of them, which is somewhat odd, considering the story revolves around the possible extinction of the entire human race.

We don't really learn that this is the issue until half way through the film, and you'd think it would make me care about what happened, but it didn't.

The screenplay was just junk, a mish-mash of cliches and recycled pieces of other movies, including Battlestar Gallactica, City of Ember, and Wall-E (almost too obvious a theft given the design of the robot). The climactic fight scene seemed to be cribbed almost word-for-word from the Death Star scene in the first Star Wars movie. To make matters worse, not only did the aliens all look alike, but so did the humans. I couldn't keep anyone straight.

I was the only one in the theater for this last-day matinee, and I was so bored during the climax that I wandered around changing seats, just to amuse myself.

Just like Delgo, the producers of this movie went out and hired a bunch of talented well-known actors for the voices (including Evan Rachel Wood, of whom I am a fan). But it just goes to prove, like I said, that all that doesn't matter if the story sucks.

I could go into detail about what was wrong with the story---the introduction was too accelerated, for example, and the story never bothered to establish what the core motivations of the individual characters were (as opposed to the aliens and humans as a group). I didn't know what made them different from the other characters around them (except for the very tired cliche of having the young alien girl be a fantastic whiz-kid inventor).

But if I spend too much time thinking about why this movie sucked, it will make my head start to spin.

There was moreover some serious weirdness in the subtext, which asserted that humans are predators and probably deserve to die out. That really creeped me out, actually. The alternative is to be like the aliens, I guess, who live a controlled society in harmony with nature but also one of enforced blissful ignorance ruled by "elders" who float around telling the citizens to "move along" and to "stay calm."

And they lived dreadfully ever after. Yucch.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

I just love those four-dollar early weekend matinees at the AMC in Tyngsboro. On Sunday morning I was back for another one. Even though I had a backlog of releases from previous weeks, I was in the mood for a comedy, so I decided to see Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, which had just come out two days before.

In my write-up of 17 Again, I mentioned that "naturalistic cover" was one of the hallmarks of Classical cinema. The Scrooge story (that is, adaptations of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol") is prime example of this. Such adaptations were popular in the Classical era, but the stories were always such that everything that happened to Scrooge, although psychologically powerful as a transformative experience, could be explained as a hallucination or a dream.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past takes the Scrooge story to new ground. Instead of a Christmas-themed story about a greedy miser who discovers the nature of charity and generosity, it is a wedding-themed story about a serial seducer, Conor Mead (Matthew McConaughey), who discovers the true nature of romantic love.

It was written by Scott Moore and John Lucas, who wrote last year's abysmal Four Christmases, but the result in this case was quite different. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past works very well, and in my book comes in as the strongest romantic comedy so far this year.

Naturalistic cover is completely upheld, as it should be for a Scrooge adaptation. Everything that happens to Conor (his visitations by ghosts) can be counted as a drunken hallucination, yet one that is powerful enough to change him over the course of one night.

One reason this movie works so well is impeccable casting. McConaughey is absolutely the perfect choice for Mead. Likewise Michael Douglas is delightful in a supporting role as the ghost of Conor's deceased uncle upon whose life Conor has based his own. Jennifer Connolly Garner is also the perfect choice for Conor's long-time long interest, whom he must win back in the course of the story, after discovering the true nature of love.

The mapping of money-to-love in the theme is handled very well. In Conor's past, we learn why he went from being a sweet-hearted young man to a closed-hearted seducer. There is more than a little reference to the contemporary seduction community (itself a trend in current Hollywood movies), in which many of the most diligent students are men who were previously completely inept at talking to women and had their hearts broken repeatedly.

Watching this movie was a rare experience for me, in that it was so fun to watch that I completely lost track of the time, never once checking my watch during the showing. I probably could have sat through it again, right afterwards. But it was past noon. It would have cost me six-fifty by then.

Earth

I was in such a good mood after 17 Again that I decided to make it a double feature, something I hadn't done in months, possibly since coming back from New York. Right after the movie ended, I went out into the outer lobby and perused the listings. Earth was beginning in just a few minutes. A nature film seemed like the perfect follow-up, so I bought a ticket and went back inside the theater.

As I just now learned from IMDb, this movie, which was co-produced by the BBC and the Discovery Channel, was actually released two years ago in Europe, but is now showing as a feature in the United States, having been released on Earth Day a few weeks ago.

Its current distribution is under the Disneynature imprimatur. The distribution tag on the beginning of the movie starts with what looks like the familiar dark outline of Sleeping Beauty's Castle, but when it lights up, it turns out to be an jagged mountain---cool!

It reminded me of when I was ten years old and went to see a double feature at the Mall Theaters in my hometown in Iowa. The two movies then were The Living Desert and the The Vanishing Prairie. At the time I thought it was just one movie, but they are actually two different Disney films.

As it happens, they had been made over twenty years before I saw them, and won Walt Disney back-to-back Oscars for Best Documentary Feature in 1953 and 1954 respectively. Gee, and I thought they were just cool nature films with a conservationist slant. One of the things about going to movies as a kid is that the ones that stick in your memory vividly are sometimes the ones that adults wouldn't even go so see.

Even though Earth was not a Disney production per se, it fit right in line with those spectacular features that Walt produced over fifty years ago. For one thing, the movie is all nature. Until the closing credits, there are no human beings at all in the entire movie, just wilderness landscapes and animals, lots of animals.

Moreover, the cinematography is incredible. Did I say incredible? That's not strong enough a word. Mind-blowing is perhaps more fitting a description. Some of the most striking shots are of massive groupings of animals, for example, birds in flight filling the screen. There are also the first-ever aerial shots of Mt. Everest to appear in a feature, having been photographed from a Nepalese spy plane.

The Disney trailers for this movie emphasized that the movie follows the "stories" of three animal "families" throughout the year. That's probably stretching it a bit---most of the movie isn't about these families, and it really only checks in on them every now and again. But it's enough to live up to the promotion, which is a good thing, since following the families too closely would have cheated us out of so many other great sequences.

One thing that struck me about this movie was that the producers pulled no punches at all when it came to showing the circle of life, a fact that was underscored by having James Earl Jones as narrator, and having him actually mention "the circle of life."

But this is not The Lion King. Animals get eaten. They don't show blood and gore, but you get to see predators actually catching their prey on multiple occasions. In fact, the predators seem to win almost every show down. Is that spoiling things too much? Perhaps so. In any case, although I was willing to recommend this for my ten-year-old nephew, I would be more hesitant to recommend it for my three-year-old nieces, who watched The Lion King, say, about fifty times during my stay with them.

Perhaps the greatest irony about this movie is that I now see films with no human beings in them in a completely different light. As marvelous and praiseworthy as this movie was, the complete absence of human beings in it inevitably made me think of how the world environmental movement has been, at the internationalist level, hijacked by elite neo-eugenicists (like this sociopath) who openly desire to reduce the world's human population drastically, and to turn much of the planet back over to the wild, like a giant nature preserve.

At one time in my life, this would have seemed like a good thing. Now I see this as the epitome of evil. I certainly don't want to slander the producers of this marvelous film without evidence, but it is always worth remembering that the Nazis were great environmentalists (just read this).

Walt would have never stood for such things. He was on the side of good, of humanity, and yes, of the Earth. I assume this movie is too.

17 Again

About three weeks ago, I remembered that my old college roommate from my freshman year lived in the Boston area. At least he did live here the last time I talked to him, which was over ten years ago. Having decided to try to find him, I identified a person on LinkedIn that I was sure was him. I wound up joining LinkedIn just to find him.

Alas, the email bounced, but one thing led to another, and before I knew it, some old high school friends of mine ganged up on me and got me to break down and finally join Facebook, a step I was sure I would never take.

It turns out I was pretty much the last person I knew to join Facebook. Every one of my old friends, save a few here and there (including my freshman roommate), had accounts already. For the first couple days, I pivoted from delight to shock and horror. It felt like I'd gone to a high school reunion and now would be locked inside forever.

More strange was the mixture of being in simultaneous contact with persons from various epochs of my life. It was dreamlike, to say the least.

One result of all this madness is that for nearly a week or more, the Google Movies page had ceased to become the first web page I visited, after email, in the morning.

But the equilibrium re-established itself shortly. New releases were filling up the multiplexes, and having decided to go overseas, as I mentioned, I wanted to keep abreast of American movies until the last possible moment.

I had mixed feelings about 17 Again when I walked into the Tyngsboro AMC early on Saturday morning for the four buck pre-noon showing. Certainly a romantic comedy was what I was in the mood for, but the premise---the old "age switch" gag, in this case with Matthew Perry being granted a wish to knock twenty years off his age, and thus becoming Zach Efron---is the kind of story that, in my mind, starts with one strike against it.

Why is this so? It starts with a negative in my book simply because, well, duh, this kind of thing never really happens to any living human being. Is that too obvious? I suppose it makes me a spoil sport of some sort, but I like stories that actually attempt to address the human condition, and not the "paranormal" condition, of which I really have no direct experience (and neither does anyone else).

Another way of saying this is that such premises are cheats. It doesn't mean you can't use them, in my book, but that if you do, you have to go the extra mile to make the story reflect some truths about human relationships that do not explicitly depend on the fantasy premise. If the characters' motivations and struggles are really all driven by the fantasy, then the story is just junk. Good storytellers (writers and directors) find ways of overcoming this.

Classical cinema was very light in its use of these kinds of premises, for a variety of reasons, which I am still working out. One is tempted, for example, to compare 17 Again to It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Michael O'Donnell (Matthew Perry) is granted his wish by a "spirit guide" (the lovable Brian Doyle-Murray), who is presumably the New Age version of George Bailey's guardian angel, Clarence. The comparison is explicitly elevated to an homage when the spirit guide jumps off a bridge into a river.

But there is a crucial difference in the stories, one that is enlightening in regard to the trends of Postmodern cinema.

Specifically, in Capra's classic, the "alternate reality" in which George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) finds himself (i.e., Pottersville) is one that is completely orthogonal to the "real" Bedford Falls, in that there is no connection between the two worlds. Because of this, everything that happens in the Pottersville fantasy has no effect on the Bedford Falls world.

Because of this, the fantasy premise of It's a Wonderful Life has what I call "naturalistic cover," which is a hallmark of Classical cinema. Briefly stated, it means that everything about the fantasy story can be explained through naturalistic terms, in this case by the assertion that George Bailey hallucinated the entire Pottersville experience.

That the movie doesn't suggest this explicitly is beside the point. Such an explanation is nevertheless compatible with the Bedford Falls timeline of "real" reality.

On the other hand, 17 Again, like many Postmodern films, discards the entire notion of naturalistic cover. The fantasy timeline is not orthogonal to the normal timeline, but is part of it, integrated into it. What happens within the fantasy story has direct and concrete cause-and-effect bearing upon the real timeline.

Postmodern audiences simply no longer expect naturalistic cover in the way Classical audiences did. It is arguably part of deeper cultural transformation over the last three decades. Even as late as Star Wars (1977), movie makers were reluctant to assert true fantasy without naturalistic cover. In Lucas' movie, the "magical" events are explained as technological advances, and when Luke hears Obi Wan's voice telling him to turn off his flight computer, the naturalistic cover is that Luke is simply hearing what Obi Wan might have said to him, as if remembering his wisdom.

But times have changed. The transformation is one that I find fascinating and have made a private study of.

As for 17 Again, I found that within the constraints of its fantasy premise, it worked fairly well. One major reason is that the story asserted the fantasy without trying to explain it very much, almost winking directly at the audience, as if to say, "we know this is ridiculous, but give us break and go with it for ninety minutes." So I did, and I was happy that I did.

As for the story itself, it was told well. Michael O'Donnell feels his missed out on his life because of a crucial decision he made during a basketball game when he was seventeen years old. We know what must happen, when he gets the chance to be a teenager again (in the present day---this is not a time travel movie). Of course he will find himself in almost exactly the same situation, and, having made a character transformation because of the events in the fantasy story, he must decide to do exactly the same thing as he did before, and be at peace with his entire life.

By the way, the writer of this movie, Jason Filardi, also co-wrote the screenplay for next year's Topper, which I presume is a remake of the 1937 movie starring Constance Bennett and Cary Grant as a pair of ghosts who communicate with living people. It's one of the Classical movies that came as close as you can get to the Postmodern paradigm of discarding naturalistic cover.

Should be interesting to see how they handle it.

O.K., I gotta go check my Facebook page again. Thank God I'm heading off an extended trip, or else I might get addicted.

Dragonball Evolution

"...the first rule is...that there are no rules..."

Oy, I thought to myself, after hearing the first line of Dragonall Evolution last Tuesday. This is going to be a real winner.

I was sitting in the third row of one of the theater auditoriums at the Flagship Cinemas in Derry, New Hampshire. Actually at the Flagship Cinemas, as I discovered, the auditoriums are, following the nautical theme of the chain, marked as "piers." Thus I was in "Pier Number Five." Cursive letters on the door requested that patrons remain "Quiet on deck."

I had found myself up in southeastern New Hampshire because on Thursday, after perusing the listings on Google Movies, it had suddenly struck me: where the hell was Dragonall Evolution? It had completely disappeared from all the cineplexes in eastern Massachusetts after only two weeks. Thankfully it was still playing in Derry.

I didn't mind the trip, since it was to a new location, a chance to explore a new cinema chain, and to take a road trip on such a nice spring day, with all the daffodils in bloom. A harbor theme for a theater chain struck me as a little incongruous. But it was innocuous enough and completely forgotten once one was in the auditorium itself.

But the movie, I could tell from the opening line, was going to suck.

The "only-rule-is-no-rules" thing has struck me for some time now as perhaps the greatest hallmark of Postmodern cinema, and its greatest weakness and source of artistic delusion.

In the breakdown of the Classical era, heroes became antiheroes, and thus being a renegade became prized overall. Rules and structure became associated with the classical era, which was dead, and thus freedom meant doing your own thing, without regard to any restriction.

The problem with this is that it is bullshit. Postmodernity claims to have "no rules," but in fact it has plenty of rules---making Postmodern cinema arguably more formulaic than Classical cinema. By asserting that it follows no rules, it follows what I call "the rules of the gutter," of the lowest common denominator of infantile ego-driven character actions.

Eventually you wind up with a movie like this one: a magical hero battles a magical villain using magical powers. There are "no rules" on what the characters can do (since magic is limited only by special effects), but everything becomes a stupid retread of cliches. Every bit of hokum from eastern mystical religions is flouted as valid and true, to which I say blecch!

The movie lived up to my expectations. It started with the "white-boy kung-fu prodigy" cliche and went straight into the crapper from there. The young hero, like the worst of Postmodern heroes, is really a boy who hasn't grown up yet, and remains utterly immature at the end of the movie.

Probably the best example of the downward spiral was a scene in which the white-boy hero, at the direction of his master trainer, is trying to use his magical powers to telekinetically light lanterns in a courtyard.

His love interest, a young woman who is a martial arts expert, enters the courtyard. She is not magical, and her powers are not greater than his, but she insists on temporarily taking over his training, and testing him.

She tells them that for every lantern he lights with his magic, he can take one step towards her (with the implied promise of a kiss at the end).

Right here you have the entire difference between the Classical and Postmodern romantic heroes in a nutshell. In Classical cinema, (putting aside the use of magic for now) the rules dictate what must happen next, for the hero to remain a true hero. He must deny the authority of the woman to test him in this way. Instead of agreeing to her test, he must walk boldly up to her, grab her, and kiss her. Then and only then, he can turn around a light the lanterns, as if an afterthought.

But the Postmodern hero of this movie does what Postmodern heroes are supposed to do: he agrees to the authority of the woman to place tests upon him like this. He plays her game. This is the credo of our time: the way to win a woman's heart is to play along with her games, to follow her rules, to give her what she says she wants in order to please her and win her approval. I'll show her, says the boy-man-who-follows-no-rules. I'll do exactly what she says she wants and that will amaze her and make her love me.

In the Classical era, movie makers knew this was bullshit. Let me emphasize this point. The difference here is not one of cultural difference, it is one that speaks to the natures of men and women, and how they interact. Women today are probably no more attracted to milquetoast wishy-washy boy-men who rush to please them than they were fifty years ago. Human nature hasn't changed in this regard.

This is one of the reasons that Classical cinema remains so powerful---it speaks truths that we in our current era are denying. It teaches rules that have been forgotten, instead of spouting bullshit such as "there are no rules."

As a final piece de resistance, after the climax of the story, the hero is given a chance between using his one "magical wish" to send the Earth-destroying villain back to hell, or instead to raise his master from the dead, and let the archvillain go on his way to terrorize and possibly destroy humanity. Guess which one he chooses? He does exactly what a Postmodern boy-man would do. Why sacrifice one's ego for the benefit of all of humanity? That's just a stupid rule, you see, and I do my own thing, dammit.

The one thing positive I can say about this movie is that for about three minutes in the climactic fight scene, it had some cool special effects. If you're a dedicated fan of such things, you might find this movie watchable, perhaps by fastforwarding through most of the dreadful plot on a Netflix DVD.

Secret of the Grain (La graine et le mulet)

I'm going to miss Dunkin' Donuts when I leave New England. There seems to be one on every street corner in this part of the country, and I've found they are perfect places to hang out before movies, for an hour and even more. The coffee is good, and they are very well-lit with large windows---perfect for comfortable reading.

Best of all, they make a great little egg and cheese sandwich that costs just over two bucks, and that you can get any time, day or night. I could practically live off of them.

Usually I like to get the croissant version of the sandwich. Last Tuesday evening when I was in West Newton, I ordered one. The clerk, of Indian extraction, told me that they were out of croissants. This sometimes happens late in the day.

"O.K., I'll have it on a bagel---plain." There are always plenty of those.

It was the second time I'd been in that particular Dunkin' Donuts, the first time having been when I was in West Newton last December to see Frozen River. I'm a creature of habit.

This time, however, the sunlight was still lingering in the sky, and the weather was much warmer. It was a beautiful spring evening. With a little time to spare, I took my bagel sandwich out into the evening and ate it while sitting on the steps of a bank.

One of the disappointments when I went to Frozen River was that I was not given a ticket, since the machine was broken. This time the mechanical apparatus correctly spit out the little piece of paper for me. My collection had grown by one.

Like last time, the showing was in one of the upstairs auditoriums in this fifty-year-old multiplex. But unlike last time, the auditorium had modern comfortable seats, instead of the stiff, traditional kind. It was a lot easier on my back.

I had gotten there about fifteen minutes early to see Secret of the Grain. It had been showing for several weeks at various theaters around Boston, and I had been playing chicken with the listings, knowing I wanted to see it. But I kept putting it off. Finally I decided that I wasn't going to wait anymore. Another week and it might be gone.

I was the only one in the auditorium. A lonely mylar birthday balloon hugged the ceiling by the screen. The movie had gotten rave reviews. Although it had been playing for over a month, I still thought it was poignant that in all the Boston metropolitan area, with all its millions of souls, I was the only person who wanted to see this movie this evening, for its sole showing in the only theater where it was playing.

Often I'm by myself at theaters, but that is usually at matinees at multiplexes, for movies in wide release. In this case, it truly was a showing just for me.

What to say about this movie? It is just freakin' awesome, one of the best pieces of cinematic storytelling I have seen in the past year, to be sure.

It was the first French film I had seen in several months, as I had gotten slightly less adventurous lately, and it was good to escape the Hollywood formulae for the evening. It always amazes me the differences in the Poetics of American and French films.

Or not. Sometimes they only seem different on the surface.

The story takes place on the Mediterranean coast of France, in a port town near the city of Montpelier. In the opening scene, we are aboard a tourist boat. A young man, a tour guide, is distracted from his work and goes off to have sex with a female passenger.

Immediately we switch to an older North African immigrant, Slimane (Habib Boufare) who is being told that his long-time services at a shipyard are no longer needed. The story then follows this man. We meet his ex-wife, and get to see his dingy apartment.

The opening scene, of the two characters having sex on the tourist boat, of grows mysterious as it seems to have been forgotten in the story. Who were those characters?

At the half-hour mark, at which time all Hollywood movies must have presented the essential premise of the story, I still had no idea what the hell this story was really about. It was a slow languid introduction, so different, and so pleasurable. Everything was unwinding at a much different pace.

Then bang, a few seconds later, right as the thirty minute mark passed, the young man from the opening scene reappears in a crowed apartment scene. It turns out that he is the son of the shipyard worker.

So it illustrates the point that some canons of the storytelling actually cross borders, whereas others do not. That is, although I still had no idea where the story was going, there was still something about that half-hour mark that an essential character needed to reappear.

There is so much about this movie---I could write several essays. One of the techniques of writer/director Abdel Kechiche that really stuck out was the use of long, drawn-out scenes inside the cramped apartments of the characters, using many close-ups and extreme close-ups.

I thought I had gotten use to this pacing, but then a scene arrived that really seemed to stick out even more than the others, in which Slimane is in his apartment talking to Rym (Hafsia Herzi), the young daughter of the woman with whom he is having an affair, and who owns the hotel in which he lives.

There was something about the way the camera lingered on Rym's face that felt strangely erotic, even though on the surface there was little different about the style. Her jangling earring seemed almost hypnotic and dripping with sexuality.

Rym, who considered Slimane to be like a father to her, is complaining to Slimane about Slimane's sons, that they are ungrateful because they think that he should return to North Africa. "They think that France is just a bordelle," she cries out, using a term that means both brothel and "mess" (the subtitles chose the former meaning).

Next to her the stoic Slimane seems impassive and fixed. Smoke from his cigarette curls around him in arabasque swirls in the sunlight. At the time of this scene, I made a mental note to write about how awesome it was.

And here's the thing about this movie that makes it so incredibly good---it turns out that everything I just said about this scene---the hypnotic earring, the smoke, the conversation, the words she uses---turn out to have a huge significance later in the story. This is what masterpieces are made of.

One of the differences between French and American movies in terms of pacing is that French movies often do not present the essential struggle of the character until the beginning of Act Three, whereas American films almost must present them by the beginning of Act Two. This movie was an example. It wasn't until an hour and half that we learn of Slimane's plan to convert an old rusting boat into a restaurant.

He is not a restauranteur. It seems like a quixotic mission. But his family will help him. Even his ex-wife will cook her famous couscous for the grand opening, when he will invite all his friends, and the bankers and town officials as well, in order to get the necessary finances and permit approvals.

For a movie that starts out so languidly, it more than makes up for it in the last half an hour, during the fateful dinner aboard the boat. It is at this time that the importance of opening sex scene (involving Slimane's son) suddenly comes thundering down like the judgment of the gods.

I've never seen a non-action film that builds its tension more steeply than this one does towards the end. I could barely sit in my seat. In fact, I didn't, having to get up and pace around, which was OK, since I was the only one there.

The theme of the story, as I could tell, was the generational disconnect between the older North African immigrants and there children, who are more westernized. This is hardly stated overtly in the movie, but it emerges when one examines the cause-and-effect relationships in the story.

Specifically, the end result, in the very last scene, is the consequence of many small actions of the characters along the way (as it should be). Perhaps the most fateful one is the refusal by one of Slimane's daughters to fulfill the custom of taking a plate of couscous to a poor person in the streets. This refusal will turn out to have enormous repercussions, as it should.

Slimane's children will let him down, but one character will step up, and attempt to save the day. It's exactly who you expect. But will it work? Like I said, I couldn't keep in my seats.

A masterpiece indeed, and a perfect break from so many Hollywood movies lately.

As I walked out into the night out, the dark sky was still perfect and peaceful. The air was warm.

It occurred to me right then and there that it was time to go back to France.