Month: July 2009

The idea that Han Solo didn't shoot first is poorly implemented in the Star War Special Edition. It seems that, in 1997, George Lucas got Han Solo confused with Indiana Jones: Han is a man primarily interested in personal gain who eventually gets his heart softened by the triplet allures of love, justice and deus ex machina; Indy is an adventurer who firmly believes that things belong in museums. Surely Han couldn't do something so dirty as to shoot a dude unprovoked, Lucas must have thought. No, that's not Han at all; the Han I know chills with moon teddy bears and claps around campfires with Billy Dee Williams[1].

This theory doesn't entirely stand up in light of Indy simply shooting the guy who came at him with a scimitar in Raiders, but Lucas has never been known for his consistency, not even in the days when he had credibility as a film maker and story teller.

In light of Lucas' waning, never before have the words "Greedo shot first” been so true, so weird, or so paradoxical: this insane piece from Charlie Jane Anders examines what would have happened in a bizarro world where movies are rendered pointless but also somehow …gooder? (That word is as real as this theory!)

This hypothetical draws so heavily on knowledge of the Star Wars universe and its characters that one wonders how it would have made any sense if it were the original version of events. The best part is that it heavily references the prequel trilogy, which is great for two reasons: it assumes that Lucas had actually thought of any of this stuff at the time he made A New Hope; and, having prepared three movies before A New Hope, Lucas decided to neglect all of that in favour of Greedo killing everyone who got in his way, thereby conquering the galaxy.

Actually, that does kind of make sense. Also worthy of note is the fact that Greedo somehow manages to get directly from being pulled aboard the Death Star to rescuing Leia, which I recall having been at least slightly difficult for a team of two seat-of-the-pants professionals, a farm boy and a pair of droids. But hey, he's Greedo. He makes the trains run on time, he managed to wear a suit that was probably actually integrated into Vader's biometric systems, and he restores peace to a galaxy which apparently has a murderous law of succession.

The real question is "why not?” I have no satisfactory answer. Greedo shot first.

It’s dangerous to refer to a situation in a play as “awkward and artificial”, because there is a very real possibility that the audience will conflate the comment with the play itself. Martin Crimp's The City is one such play, a sort of Synecdoche, New York Jr that doesn’t make you question reality so much as it makes you question whether you could be bothered to take anything at more than face value.
I’m inclined to believe that it’s a collection of interesting parts in search of a whole to be the sum of. A stage consisting of nothing but uncomfortably steep steps that is occasionally bathed in complete darkness asks the audience to accept contextual clues as to where we are: it scarcely matters, because we’re always somewhere around the house of two people whose names are irrelevant. It looks like they’re uncomfortable, and this is likely the case.

The City amounts to a collection of monologues masquerading as conversations between a married couple, their eight year old daughter and their neighbour over the course of a year, presumably in this time of Global Financial Crisis (man, I can hardly wait for the GFC to be over).

The monologues are interesting, covering as they do the wife’s trip to a book festival, the husband’s encounter with a boy he had bullied in his school days and, most interestingly and inexplicably, the involvement of the neighbour’s husband in a secret army carrying out a secret war in a secret city, killing everyone inside so that they can then go in and kill the remainder of citizens “clinging to life”. Sometimes the monologues are even related to each other, if we’re lucky – but they are essentially selfish pieces of work.
The thing is that The City is puzzle theatre, and puzzle theatre doesn’t work so well when you couldn’t be bothered to solve the puzzle. The actors acquit themselves well, although I continue to feel awkward whenever actors shout in a play and go red in the face. The "awkward and artificial” line can definitely be applied here, particularly as the dialogue is written in a self conscious mode of constant clarification of meaning and motivation. It’s plainly supposed to be how people “really” talk, but part of the point of movies, plays and books is that they represent the real rather than actually being real. Fictive performance is replication; more real than real.

In trying to both appear real and to make the audience question reality, The City divorces itself from both the audience and the play's "duty” to maintaining the illusion of reality. It’s interesting but nothing else. It’s hard to know how we’re supposed to take characters who we can’t gauge the meta-levels of.
This was an instance where it really felt there was, more than a fourth wall, a glass screen between the audience and the performer. Reading the program, it seems that this was Crimp's intent, so I suppose that, on some level, The City was a success.

A while back, I got interested in MGMT. They programmed an episode of Rage, and included their own video for “Electric Feel” – both tribal and beautiful. So now they’ve come out with “Kids”, featuring a one minute prologue followed by five nightmarish minutes of a child tormented by monsters.
It’s interesting, if you like their sort of music (which, according to Wikipedia, can be classed as “Indie Rock”, “Synthpop” “Dance-punk” and “Psychedelic Pop”, suggesting they’ve got no idea what it is either). The director is also apparently part of the team who made Where The Wild Things Are:

I take Joanna Newsom’s appearance as the inattentive mother of this child to be a tacit endorsement of MGMT’s efforts. It also goes to show that a lot of the time I have to wonder what “the deal” is with music videos. The ones that grab my attention probably don’t actually “mean” anything, but they engage the eyes and, if I enjoy the music, I look into it further. My way of life isn’t exactly conducive to stumbling across videos, but they can strike in the most unexpected of places and ways.

What I’m trying to say here is that when I heard Soulja Boy’s “Crank Dat” at a law firm’s reception, my life was changed. No, really. (Not really). It would perhaps be more accurate to say that I still remember the first time I consciously came upon Scissor Sisters, and that was one of many pebbles that started an avalanche that irrevocably changed the way I live today.

The works of Lady Gaga could possibly justify a PhD thesis by this point, and I might get to them later. For now I should make it clear that the child in the video is crying, but he was totally cool with the monsters. Apparently they’re tears of fatigue or something, so I guess baby labour camps are tough work.

How great is GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra going to be? With my barely concealed distaste in this "summer” season (bearing in mind that Australians won't see Up until September), I'm going to take GI Joe's tagline to heart: "When all else fails, they don't”.

Look at it this way: it’s bright and crisp. It looks like the special effects had enough of a budget to appear both special and effective. It doesn’t look like it takes itself too seriously, as evidenced by the villain being Christopher Eccleston (the Ninth Doctor!) eating scenery, combined with Joseph Gordon Levitt in fetish gear (although I don’t think that’s shown in this trailer).

I think that one of the many problems with Transformers is that it takes itself so damned seriously, and Michael Bay is convinced that he has made “art”. Shia LeBoeuf sees his character as so identifiable it’s scary.
Megan Fox, on the other hand, has been the only person publicly out of the machine, admitting that it’s not art, and that she needs hard liquor to fill the void in her soul created by watching the movie.

Imagine, if you will, that GI Joe was produced by a team of Megan Foxes. People who knew they weren’t making art, but were instead focused on having as much fun as they possibly could on the ultimate in ridiculously over-budgeted ($170 million!) bubblegum cinema.
It might not be the case here, but come on. We can only take so many terrible self important movies before we want to chew on a movie that is aware of what it is, of its limitations, and has decided to make us laugh, intentionally or not.
To be entirely honest, when I was at the cinema and I saw the submarines approaching the base at the trailer’s beginning, I was intrigued. Then I found out that it was GI Joe and my natural cynicism kicked in, but the trailer editor had done his job. I could no longer totally discount the piece.

GI Joe might not be good by any objective measure except one: it will be better than Revenge of the Fallen. Don’t let me down, Dennis Quaid. When all else fails, you don’t.

Synecdoche, New York is my favourite sort of movie: it exists on the edge of reality, its existence only confirmed by the fact that I saw it with a friend. It's also got another thing going for it that makes it harder to write about: the less that you know of Synecdoche, New York, the more liable you are to be surprised.

Either that or pissed off and feeling like Charlie Kaufman has wasted more than twenty years of your life. That's the beauty of the movies: you can feel strongly one way or the other. Hatred is still a response, and it's far better than apathy.

Are you familiar with Jane Austen? She's a promising young female writer with a strong following, perhaps best known for her seminal work Bridget Jones's Diary.

Turns out that she's taking the idea of olde timey romance and turning it on its head! Her first gambit is the zeitgeist shattering book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which effortlessly shoehorns a zombie infestation and battle into a perfectly serviceable story about a group of women who must be married off at all costs to rich landowners in order to save their silly mother's face. It must be successful, because I've seen at least three women reading it in public.

That's what they're all over these days: Edward Cullen and Mister Darcy. The latter, of course, is a master in the art of zombie killing and all around uptight jerkface with a heart of gold. So popular was this young upstart Austen's genre bending that she managed to claw her way to number three on the New York Times' best seller list before they realised that, as a woman, she didn't have the agency to warrant such a spot.[1]

Austen has decided to follow her surprise success with the release of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, which will apparently be about two recently impoverished sisters who seek love and heartbreak … and something else that I think the title hints at but I've yet to get an actual idea of. Austen is moving up in the world, though: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is an infinitely catchier title that doesn't even rely on the crutch of memes as a cynical grab for readers.

…

Okay, I just considered Jane Austen as an actual meme hound, even … gasp! … a channer, and my brain exploded. I was surprised to see so many copies of Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in real life. In my estimation it's the sort of book that you hear tell of online and then never again. Serious, unironic reading of a romantic classic spliced with zombie combat. I was surprised when I found out that this book is more than just a cash-in, because further reviews have revealed "(w)hat begins as a gimmick ends with renewed appreciation of the indomitable appeal of Austen's language, characters, and situations…”[2]

It's a relief, really. I've got nothing against messing about in the public domain: my mother and I enjoy a good bonnet drama, and this year the ABC televised Lost in Austen, a BBC miniseries about a woman who accidentally trades places with Elizabeth Bennet, "ruins” the story of Pride and Prejudice as it was supposed to happen, and falls in love with Mister Darcy herself after they both over what an arrogant prig he is.

It's a knee jerk reaction to automatically think that zombies are a bad idea in this day and age, but one can't really blame me. All of the cool things – pirates, monkeys, zombies, vampires, and ninja … have been spoiled by an internet hungry for something that I'm not entirely sure of. That this seems to be done with a sort of love and respect warms the cockles of my heart, and other such disposition changing cliché.

I didn't have that instant reaction to Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. It may be that I'm getting less uptight in my old age, or it may be the fact that the open and gleeful stupidity of the title caught me entirely off guard. I'm not an Austen fanatic; in fact, I've never read one of her books, but I'm now comfortable in the knowledge that she's in safe hands. Sometimes the appearance of stupidity can mask a deep and abiding love, and  one that the world is just a tiny bit better for.

[2]Donna Bowman, AV Club, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”, April 15 2009

"Isn't this movie just Leonidas with a shirt on?”

-Tony Lin, 14/07/2009

Have you got any idea of how sick of seeing trailers for The Ugly Truth I am? They're pairing it with everything, from Revolutionary Road way back in the day to Transformers and Brüno now! It's had a huge lead in promotion, so it's probably going to explode at the Australian box office.
This time I won't go into a lengthy tirade against Katherine Heigl, because she's got some sort of defence machine that will spring into action if a word … and there have been many … is said against her. That doesn't stop the fact that this movie is going to suck (although last time I defamed The Ugly Truth I also defamed The Proposal, and that turned out better than my cynical heart could ever have hoped).

I don't understand why some movies take so long to come out. I've been seeing trailers for this for about five months; it comes out on August 6^th here.  From the (Australian!) director of Legally Blonde, the Jane Fonda comeback vehicle Monster-in-Law (which I saw the trailer for roughly seventy billion times in 2005), and criminally boring card counting flick 21, The Ugly Truth is another bad romantic comedy about two unlovable creatures finding love in each other.
That's actually pretty surprising: that both of them are as bad as each other, albeit in different ways.  How many times am I going to have to see Heigl fellate a hot dog before I die? It's getting so much play that I fear I may have a coronary at the cinema and that will be the last thing that I see.

The Ugly Truth amounts to a frat comedy on Gerard Butler's side combined with a "successful woman want to know what love is, and wants you to show her” romance on the other side. Can misogyny and blatant career sexism meet in the middle and create a successful film? Does Gerard Butler actually work in a "real” movie, or will he forever be kicking people into holes and telling them where they are in the hearts and minds of the people?

It's also R rated in America, so that means you'll get extra raunch! Substitute "raunch” for "boobs”, which in Hollywood means the same thing most of the time.

Maybe, if I could drag myself to it, it could surprise me. The Proposal worked because it didn't resort to gender stereotyping, even if the same movie could never have been made had Sandra Bullock's character been a man and Reynolds' a woman. These were just two people who had their own family and intimacy issues and the movie worked based on that.

The Ugly Truth, from the poster on, tells you "this is what a man is. This is what a woman is.” It's lazy writing, in reality, but time and again that seems to be what audiences want. You can't go to such a movie and uncritically accept what it is trying to feed you. I want people to be able to rise up and say: "not everyone is like this! Certainly, Katherine Heigl, men like your breasts, but that is not all there is to you! And Gerard Butler, stop making men seem so shallow! Sure you like Katherine Heigl's breasts, but that's not all you like about her!”
It's a war I'm never liable to win, but I'll repeat myself until the day I die: stop making crap movies that are little more than thinly veiled sexism. As I intend to die during a preview for The Ugly Truth next week, you won't hear it repeated much longer, but keep it in mind.