This is Your Hobbit on Steroids

or, An Over-long Expected Movie

[Yes, there will be some spoilers.]

All joking aside, I enjoyed the first part of Peter Jackson's three movie Hobbit adaptation. Yes, it's a deeply flawed movie, and I'll get to some of those flaws in a moment, but Martin Freeman is brilliant as Biblo and there are some truly brilliant visuals at times. The riddle game scene in particular was very, very good. I've probably read The Hobbit a dozen times over the years, and as a child I watched the terrible 1970's Hobbit movie numerous times, so I both love the story and am tremendously glad to see it done better than the old version. Further, my beefs with Jackson as in some sense enabled by his own work. While there are parts of the Lord of the Rings movies that make me cringe these days, the fact remains that they significantly raised the (previously shockingly low) bar for Fantasy on the big screen.

The biggest problem, I think, with the Hobbit movie is that it is too long. Having given himself three three hour movies in which to tell a story whose original is far shorter than even one volume of The Lord of the Rings, Jackson finds himself more able to insert his own content (loosely based on the appendices of The Lord of the Rings) and most of this is pretty inferior. The sheer quantity of story in The Lord of the Rings kept Jackson's instincts more in check. I think the movie would have been significantly stronger is much of the "extra" material had simply been cut: The execrable (literally) sections with Radagast, the White Orc (it's a bad sign when the story slows down whenever the extra antagonist who's been added to increase tension appears), the White Council.

Other over-long portions resulted from Jackson's need to expand anything resembling an action scene to the Nth degree. The scene of Smaug's arrival is okay as a prequel if one wants to start that way, but shoehorning in a battle at the gates of Moria did nothing for the story. The stone giant battle added nothing to the story and simply added an extra scene of action so unbelievable as to pull one out of the story. And the gimmicky escape-from-the-goblin-kingdom scene seemed like a scene from the video game that somehow made its way into the movie.

What's good in the movie is, in the main, quite good. But I felt that by simply cutting it down to about two hours it would have been a much stronger film.

The main thematic change which concerns me, especially as it gives me pause as to what will occur in the later movies, is a subtle shift in the character of Bilbo and his relationship with the dwarves. In the book, Biblo has an adventurous streak which is offended when he's describes as being "more like a grocer than a burglar", but he remains very much a hobbit, if an adventurous one. As such, he is never a warrior. He is courageous and loyal, yes, and the dwarves come to respect him deeply for these qualities, but he remains inherently peaceful.

The movie can't quite stand to leave this alone. Thus, in one of the last scenes of this movie we see Thorin wade into battle against a band of orcs while the rest of the dwarves seek shelter in a tree. Thorin looks like he's about to be killed when Bilbo, who till now has been scorned by Thorin as so much baggage, draws his little sword and rushes into battle. Bilbo's fierce defense of the wounded Thorin against a crowd of wargs and orcs inspires the other dwarves who then raise their battle cry and charge into battle after him.

Bilbo having saved Thorin's life in battle, and the whole company having been rescued by eagles, Thorin sheds man-tears and embraces Bilbo, declaring that he had never been more wrong than when he had questioned Bilbo.

In other words, rather than the dwarves coming to respect Bilbo for being a courageous yet non-warlike hobbit, in the movie Bilbo wins respect by becoming a warrior, by becoming more like the dwarves. (Actually, I think Jackson way overemphasizes the warrior element of the dwarves. But they are, at least, capable of being warriors in the book, even if that isn't their primary character.) In addition to not being like the book, it seems to me that this is a weaker and less interestingly character choice, and a concession to the unstated but frequent trope that worth in adventure stories is wholly synonymous with martial prowess.

The Road Goes On, And On

Anthony Lane reviews The Hobbit in The New Yorker:

In “The Lord of the Rings,” the errand of Frodo, though epic in execution, was plain enough: to destroy what would, in the wrong hands, cause irreversible harm. It was like stopping the Nazis from building an atomic bomb. But what the dwarves want, in the pages of “The Hobbit,” is gold, and their lust for it corrodes the quest and tarnishes its valor. That is what lusts do. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, who deplored the vanishing of the Latin Mass, believed in the existence of evil and in the struggle to be delivered from its claws. It is there in every shimmering scale of Smaug, the dragon; deprived by a mouse-quiet Bilbo of a single precious cup, he falls, Tolkien writes, into “the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but never used or wanted.” Ouch. The dwarves, in their small way, are no less possessed, and the joke is that a hobbit, who wishes nobody ill, should help to lead them into temptation. So many twists of the spirit, in such little space. In my old paperback, Tolkien gets the whole thing done in two hundred and eighty pages, nineteen chapters in all. And how far has Jackson travelled, after almost three hours of cinema? The end of Chapter 6. The corrosion has yet to bite.

***

For pathos, though, we still have Gollum, the damned and slimy soul (voiced again by Andy Serkis), who lurks in the dark and loses what he loves. Bilbo finds it: “His hand met what felt like a tiny ring of cold metal lying on the floor of the tunnel.” That is the account given by Tolkien, who knew that turning points were all the more momentous for being unadorned, but Jackson, with so much room to spare, cannot dare to underplay the crux. Instead, before Bilbo stumbles upon the ring, we see it slip from Gollum’s safekeeping, tumble in refulgent slow motion, and, on impact, give a resounding clang. (If Jackson ever films “Othello,” wait for Desdemona’s handkerchief to hit the ground like a sheet of tin.) “All good stories deserve embellishment,” Gandalf says to Bilbo before they set off, and one has to ask whether the weight of embellishment, on this occasion, makes the journey drag, and why it leaves us more astounded than moved. And yet, on balance, honor has been done to Tolkien, not least in the famous riddle game between Bilbo and Gollum, and some of the exploits to come—dwarf-wrapping spiders, a battle of five armies, and the man who turns into a bear—will surely lighten the load. As Bilbo says, nearing the end of the book, “Roads go ever ever on.” Tell me about it. 

Surfing with Mel

Oh, Lickona. Only you would be awesome enough to write a meta-screenplay about a meta-screenplay about Mel Gibson dealing with his angst against the Catholic Church (and everything else).

Open on a long shot of Mel’s Malibu estate. We hear sounds of sobbing, screaming, stuff getting broken, a marked contrast to the serene, Mediterranean splendor of the vista. 

MEL (Voice Over): The Catholic Church is not a big fancy church in Rome paid for by people trying to buy their way into heaven. It’s not a guy in a funny hat telling people who they’re allowed to screw and how they’re allowed to screw them. It’s not even weeping, bloody Jesus on the cross – I should know, I made a movie about him. 

As the voiceover progresses, we cut to a mid-range shot of a private chapel on the estate. It’s a gorgeous little building. Suddenly, one of the stained-glass windows shatters from the inside, and we hear, clearly, Gibson bellowing from within. 

MEL (Voice Over): No, the Catholic Church is rehab. It’s a halfway house for people who are just smart enough to know they’re f-cked up, and just dumb enough to hope there’s something that can be done about it short of getting their own sh-t together or blowing their brains out. They know they can’t make it out in the world on their own, so they come here for support. Meetings on Sunday. There’s rules posted by the door, but nobody really checks to make sure you’re in compliance. 

As voiceover progresses, cut to interior of chapel. Gibson is inside, and he’s tearing the place apart. Pews are upended. Light fixtures shattered. The crucifix has been torn off the wall behind the altar. Now Gibson is wielding a huge monstrance like a bat, breaking windows and smashing statues. We come on the scene just as he winds up on a statue depicting Mary – one that looks just like the Mary from The Passion of the Christ. With a guttural cry of anguish, he swings and smashes her head.

MEL (Voice Over): You meet a lot of people inside. Some are on their way up, some on their way down. Some are lifers, and some walk in one day with their eyes shining like they’ve just found Jesus or something. Others have tried to move out and go it alone, only to wind up back inside. That’s how it was for Joe and me. Maybe that’s why I thought we could work together.  

Panting, heaving, Gibson stops his rampage and surveys the damage, simultaneously thrilled and horrified at what he’s done. He pauses to look at the monstrance, which still amazingly, contains the Host. 

Then go read the comments at Korrectiv on the same.

The Quintessential Pie Fight

Years ago, before the advent of the internet and search engines and Youtube, one might see a movie once and never stumble upon it again, which meant that certain scenes, remembered as they were viewed in the first flush of hysteria, achieved a crystalline status as the funniest thing ever.

Do such memories live up to the harsh reality of re-viewing? Not often. And yet, just last night I found a cinematic moment that has haunted me for two decades, and it was everything I remembered, and more:



"You simply must try my pies!"

It also struck me that there was a passing rememblance here to the past weeks of blog conversation at DarwinCatholic.

In Which I Consider Engaging with The Hunger Games

I have a slight reactionary streak that protests against paying too much attention to big Pop Culture deals. Often this saves me the unnecessary loss of brain cells (no one was ever hurt by ignoring Jersey Shore), but occasionally I come late to the party everyone else has already discovered, and I feel silly for sitting so long outside with my back to the door. (Ex.: Downton Abbey.)

I've paid scant notice to the phenomenon of The Hunger Games ever since it's been a phenomenon, but now I'm trying to figure out whether I'm on the wrong side of the fence here. Really, I blame Brandon for this, because he posted this video.



At first I didn't pay much attention to it, because, I mean, Taylor Swift! But the next day, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal (my source for What's Happening Now) about "soundtrack compilation albums", those pieces of "inspired-by" marketing designed to trap crazed movie fans who hunger for just one more piece of arcana. The article was about the success of the soundtrack compilation album for The Hunger Games.

One cut from the album, Ms. Swift's "Safe and Sound," went on sale online in late December and has sold 735,000 copies, according to SoundScan... 

Mr. Lipman says that the theme of soundtrack meetings was "What does music from the Appalachian mountains sound like 300 years from now?" 

To that end, director Gary Ross enlisted music producer T Bone Burnett, whose "O Brother Where Art Thou?" soundtrack was a smash hit in 2000—an unlikely feat for a collection of old-time favorites like "Keep on the Sunny Side" and "In the Jailhouse Now."

Now I had to confront my prejudices, because I like T Bone Burnett's work on "O Brother Where Art Thou?", and I was curious what his concept of futuristic Appalachian music might be. So I had to go back and watch Taylor Swift. And then watch it again, and then hum the song for the rest of the day. And then go to iTunes and listen to clips from the rest of the album. And the long and short of it is, now I'm considering buying an album (which I never do) based on a movie I haven't seen, based on a book I've never read.

We probably will read The Hunger Games, but seeing as the wait list at the Columbus library is almost 1000 deep, it might be a while.

My Beef With The Bechtel Test

Kyle had a post up a little while back linking to a video from Feminist Frequency about how the 2011 Oscar contenders measure up on the "Bechdel Test". I forget where I ran into the test before, but I definitely remember it rubbing me the wrong way. As summarized in the video (if, like me, you hate videoblogging, you can read the transcript here):

The Bechdel Test is a very basic gauge to measure women’s relevance to a film’s plot and generally to assess female presence in Hollywood movies. It was popularized by Allison Bechdel in her comic Dykes to Watch Out For back in 1985. In order to pass the test a film just needs to fulfill these three, very simple, criteria: A movie has to have at least two women in it who have names, who talk to each other, about something besides a man. Pretty simple right? I mean this is really the absolute lowest that we could possibly set the bar for women’s meaningful presence in movies.

Now, I gotta say, this just makes me climb the walls. I have a strong dislike for simplistic litmus tests that allegedly determine the quality (or even more generally the qualities) of fiction, and I also dislike "gotcha" tests that are supposed to determine hidden bias. These seems at the confluence of these two, and as a result it takes a certain amount of effort to separate my annoyance from the topic enough to try to come up with some less gut-level reaction to it. Given this aim, I'll start with working through the things I can't accuse the test (in this particular use) of, than then work back to why I have an issue with it as a means of evaluating fiction.

First off, the way that the test is being discussed here is not necessarily that advocated by the comic strip characters who originated it -- where "the rule" was to not watch any movie that didn't fit the criteria. Feminist Frequency (and Kyle) on the other hand, admit that a movie might be quite good while not passing the test. Here's Feminist Frequency again:

Again, to be clear this test does not gauge the quality of a film, it doesn’t determine whether a film is feminist or not, and it doesn’t even determine whether a film is woman centered. Some pretty awful movies including ones that have stereotypical and/or sexist representations of women might pass the test with flying colours. Where really well made films that I would highly recommend might not.

Obviously, there's some level of tension here, because while she insists that some really good and recommendable films might not pass the test, she also seems to see it as a problem when individual films (such as 7 out of 9 Best Picture nominees) do not clearly pass. But still, at least formally the concession is clearly made that passing the test is not necessary to a movie's being good or indeed to having strong and essential female characters.

Also, I feel I should concede that passing the test will correlate fairly decently with films that have more female representation in them. Yes, you can have a woman-centered story with a female main character but structured in such a way that the film doesn't pass, or a story which is evenly balanced between one male and one female character, but in general movies in which a woman or women have a lot of screen time will pass.

This leads to the beginning of my criticisms, however, because although most stores that have a lot of screen time for women will pass, they will often do so rather incidentally. So, for instance, I'm finishing up reading Jane Eyre -- certainly generally considered a "girl book", and one that has such a strong female main character, who repeatedly stands up against the expectations of a male dominated world, that it is considered by some critics to be an example of proto-feminist fiction. Thinking of the recent movie of Jane Eyre, it does indeed pass, but even so probably 90% of the screen time involves either Jane interacting with men or Jane talking with other women about men. Even with the more spacious book, if you cut it down to only the scenes which involve Jane talking to another woman about something that does not involve any men, you get some fairly pedestrian scenes in which she talks to her female cousins (and listens to them argue), talks to Helen Burns about books and life, talks to her teachers and to the kitchen maid and her aunt's house, and talks to her pupil Adèle. You miss virtually all of what's interesting in the plot: the conflict.

Now, someone will be pointing out to me that the claim isn't that the scenes that meet the Bechtel Test are the most interesting in the story, just that if the story has a substantial part for women that it is likely to pass the test. And I get that. But it frustrates me that someone would try to analyze fiction based on a criteria that is clearly and admittedly incidental to what it is they're trying to measure. Measuring something like the percentage of the time a named woman character is on screen, or the percentage of lines spoken by a woman, would, however, but a lot less fun than the gimmicky three criteria Test. And something like "are female characters realistic and important to the plot" is hard to quantify, and thus wouldn't produce a fun site full of people rating movies according to one's criteria.

Aside from the fact that the Bechtel Test is clearly measuring something incidental to what it's actually looking to find, it seems to me that by design it isn't really set up "to measure women’s relevance to a film’s plot" as to determine the extent to which women are a separate and self sufficient group within the plot. So, for instance, despite it's female protagonist the movie True Grit fails the Bechtel Test as applied by Feminist Frequency:

Interestingly, even though True Grit is a female centered story, following the adventures of Mattie Ross struggling to get by in a man’s world, when we apply the 60 second rule the film doesn’t pass. In fact the only exchange she has with any other woman is with Mrs. Floyd the innkeeper and those incidental interactions total less than a minute. This style of film where the female lead inhabits an almost entirely male world, brings to mind the Smurfette Principle which I’ve discussed in my Tropes vs Women video series.

So clearly, what's being tested for (and what Feminist Frequency desires to see in a movie) is not simply that women in the movie be well rounded character or that they be essential to the plot, but rather that they be in a world which is at least moderately separate from men. This seemed particularly driven home to me by her complaint against a movie I haven't actually seen (and thus can't provide my own evaluation of the characterization) but the analysis itself is telling:

Tree of Life is a more experimental film about a boy and his family. It fails the test because the only brief scene where two women talk, the conversation is about the death of the family’s son. While it’s true there’s very little dialogue in the film as a whole, the father and the son do speak to each other on multiple occasions.

So, a conversation between to women isn't real if it's about how they feel about a male who has died. If it was a woman, that would be fine, since they're talking about the death of a male, it fails. (Heck, if they'd talked about designer shoes instead of about the death of a family member, it would have passed.)

Similarly, any film which is tightly focused on a relationship (between a man and a woman) is going to at least flirt with failing.

Now, given that this test originates on a comic stripe entitled "Dykes to Watch Out For" perhaps that's reasonable enough. But if one's interest really is in characters and stories well told, I don't see why one would allow oneself to get caught up in this particular analysis gimmick. I don't think that woman characters are less real when they talk to men than when they talk to women, or when they talk about male characters than when they talk about female characters. Yes, perhaps that fact that many Hollywood films don't pass it says something about the extent to which women are represented as independent characters in mainstream films, but if so only in a very incidental fashion. And given that the majority of films lack any well rounded characters of either sex, I find this hard to get particularly excited about.

The Weekend in Books and Movies

The three youngest were at Grandma's this weekend, and the house was quiet. Too quiet. In the silence I had to face the disturbing fact that if I only had two children who were 9 and 8, there would be little to goad my natural laziness into action. Secure in the knowledge that the big girls could take care of themselves and weren't likely to fall off the piano bench or write on the walls (I wouldn't put it past them to drag chairs into the pantry to get on the high shelves, but at least they can do it safely), I took the opportunity to read three biographies of the Marx Brothers, simultaneously. They mostly bore each other out. Sometimes they bore each other aloft. Aloft to ask you to leave if the dialogue doesn't improve.

'Atsa no good.

And because we didn't have to spend vast swaths of the evening settling small fry, we watched movies. The girls had been clamoring for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban -- not a bad outing, if you have to watch a Harry Potter movie. They finally kicked out the director of the first two soppy movies, and found someone who understood tone, and pacing, and how to let young actors act and not mug.

You know what's lousy? When you re-watch a movie that you thought was kinda okay, and it turns out to be a real dog. I hadn't seen You've Got Mail for about 12 years, and I had remembered as being sweet and fluffy. I remembered wrongly. Underneath its fantasy veneer of life on the North Upper West Lower East Side ("I'll lose my job and have to move to Brooklyn!" one character wails) there's an undercurrent of sleaze so palpable that I couldn't wade through it without a drink to brace me up. The spectacle of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan cheating on their live-ins as glibly as possible was appalling. I turned to my Manhattan as a corrective measure after the jokes about cybersex at the five-minute mark.

Apparently, nothing in romantic comedies has any consequences except being a big-business capitalist who delights in screwing small operations out of a living by opening big box stores in liberal enclaves. I found it difficult to suspend disbelief so much as to buy Tom Hanks' nice guy act when his character was schtupping the most self-absorbed, shallow, high-powered publishing exec. (In the words of Groucho, "What do you think of in bed at night, you beast?") Never do we see Meg Ryan all hormonal from her birth-control pills, even though she's sleeping with a luddite newspaper columnist but declares she doesn't have children because she's not married. Or maybe they use condoms, because the columnist is all righteous about the detrimental effects of new-fangled technology. Tom Hanks and his father make familial banter about how many times Dad ran off with the nanny, with no undercurrent of bitterness or accusation. Both Tom and Meg are able to cozily roll up their old significant others, even though we see no hint of the sniping, weariness, and jabbing that usually accompanies the death throes of a relationship. You never saw a more bloodless breakup than Meg Ryan and Greg Kinnear being chipper about the other's new prospects. Oh, my aching teeth.

As a corrective, the next evening we watched The Best Years of Our Lives, the 1946 best-picture winner about the very current topic of WWII vets readjusting to their previous lives and relationships. The raw honesty of the movie was heart-wrenching, especially in the thread that focused on Homer Parrish (Harold Russell). Russell was a real-life veteran who'd lost both his hands in a training accident, and he received two Oscars for his role as a maimed sailor trying to prove his family or the girl next door that he can manage just fine with his prosthetic hooks.. Fredric March plays a banker who's been away for so long that he has to become reacquainted with his wife (the wonderful Myrna Loy) and grown children, and Dana Andrews is a skilled pilot who returns to find his brief marriage disintegrating and his former job as a soda jerk demeaning. I am no softy, but I found myself crying through the entire movie.

Now we're back to the grind. The house is full of noise, and we'll probably find time this week to re-watch Horsefeathers and Animal Crackers before we ship 'em back to Netflix. That's quality entertainment.

Here's each of the Marx Brothers singing "Everyone Says I Love You", from Horsefeathers.



Think it's too late for me to strike up an anonymous correspondence with Groucho and his cigar?

From the Vaults: Giant Man-Eating Bugs Bore Me!

I wish I could remember who it was that told me recently that Peter Jackson's King Kong was a great movie. Whoever you are: You Were Wrong, and here's my review from 2008 to prove it. I also think that 2008 may be the last time we sat down and watched a movie (I don't count Thor as "sitting down and watching a movie", though the critiques of King Kong are also surprisingly relevant to that cinematic spectacle.)

***

So we felt like watching a movie last night. This is an increasingly rare occurrence, as we're usually too tired or preoccupied these days to tie up two hours of our precious free time post-girl-bedtime. But last night we tied up three hours watching King Kong, and all I can say is that Peter Jackson owes me back the extra hour with which he padded his bloated movie.

Peter Jackson does lavish spectacle well -- we've all seen Lord of the Rings. Perhaps he does better work when he's presented with a plot-heavy saga to whittle down into nine 0r so hours of screen time. But his King Kong is thirty minutes of plot jam-packed into three hours of increasingly distancing special effects extravaganza. A bit of action in a movie gets one's adrenaline pumping. Strata after strata of over-the-top dinosaur stampedes and ape chases and Kong fighting men and Kong fighting three dinosaurs at the same time with a girl in his hand! so ossified our suspension of disbelief that by the time giant insects and spiders and tapeworms were devouring our heroes and one guy was using a machine gun to shoot hordes of scorpions off another guy, we were yawning and checking the time. And this from the people who spent a tense half-hour in a stand-off with a single cockroach just hours earlier. (Now that was a situation with real dramatic potential.)

Oh Peter Jackson. What happened? I wanted to like your movie. But why the character development for the ship's crew who suddenly fall off the screen in the last hour? Where did all the natives of the island come from and disappear to? Why the massive and unneccesary plot holes in what should have been such a compact story? Why couldn't we see more of Colin Hanks' production assistant, who was the only character I cared about? How on earth can anyone make a movie that winds up with me skipping past a scene of a guy being eaten by multiple huge tapeworms not because I'm horrified but because I'm numbed by the preceding interminable action sequences? The mind boggles.

Perhaps in my old age I'm getting jaded, but when I chose to spend an evening of my valuable spare time with a movie, I like to be entertained or challenged or at least somewhat involved. Is that too much to ask of the exact same production team that made Lord of the Rings?

Today in Cinema

Over at Korrectiv, Matthew Lickona and his brother Mark have been bringing the drama. Literally. The guys have been restaging a few scenes from the movies, putting their own touches on characterization and motivation, and they've done an impressive job on a shoestring. And who knew Matthew had such a dreamy baritone?

Check out their Untouchables, 1984, and a classic monologue from Pulp Fiction.

Next Narnia Movie: Magician's Nephew

[ht: Siris]
Despite the lackluster performance of the movie adaptation of Voyage of the Dawn Treader at the domestic box office (abroad, it apparently did better than Prince Caspian) Walden Media has decided to move forward with another Narnia movie: The Magician's Nephew

Why do The Magician's Nephew next?

It's a creative decision in terms of what story we felt has the best opportunity to draw the largest audience. The box office has pretty closely followed the sales pattern of the books. Prince Caspian sells about half of the books of Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe, and it did about half of the box office. Caspian sells about a third more books than Dawn Treader, and it did about a third more box office. That pattern continues to decline with Silver Chair being the weakest book in the series in terms of consumer demand.

We just think the origin tale of The Magician's Nephew is a great one, and it brings back the characters that have proven to be the most popular—a lot of Aslan and the White Witch. It explains the origin of the lamppost and the wardrobe. The order of these books is something that few people agree on anyway. While Silver Chair certainly continues Eustace's adventure, we never knew when Magician's Nephew would come in the sequence of films. We never assumed it would be last, and we never assumed it would be first.

Now personally, it seems to me that you could do a bang-up movie of Silver Chair, which is one of my favorites out of the series (I think I'd rank favorites as Last Battle, Horse and His Boy and Silver Chair in that order) but it'll certainly be interesting to see Walden take a shot at Magician's Nephew next. I wonder if they'll go for Horse and His Boy after that. It seems fraught with peril for a movie studio given modern racial sensitivities and the situation in the Middle East (Lewis does, after all, fairly explicitly set the Calormenes up as a pagan version of the Turks) but if done deftly it seems like it could be a very cinematic story. My advice: cast a hot young Bollywood actress and Aravis and push the cultural influences in your Calormen design further East.

Total Rewrite

I opted out of the theatrical world when I was four months pregnant with my oldest. I was a stage manager then, falling asleep on the 101 while driving home at midnight from gigs, which just didn't seem compatible with raising a child or being pregnant or staying alive. I keep my hand in now and then by doing the stuff that pays so little that no one else wants to take it on: directing a Christmas pageant or teaching acting to teens or writing scripts for short adaptations of the classics. The thrill of the production is lots of fun; I'll never forget the time last summer when my lead actress hurt her foot in the last rehearsal the day of the show and I thought I was going to have to go on, seven months pregnant, and play Peter Pan.

I miss it, and so it's fun to live vicariously through other members of my family. My sister and my cousin are opera singers. Several of my cousins have gone into theater-related careers. And then there's Cousin Jeff.

You remember Cousin Jeff. Greg Belmont, Emo Vampire Hunter? Yeah. He's got a new indie short out called Total Rewrite, about an actor who goes crazy and finds that his romantic comedy role has turned into an action fest. Jeff, as always, is the one with the hair.



Warning: got some language.

Iron Man 2: A Review In Three Bullets

My brain was in a condition such that opening any of my current reads seemed too challenging, and my internet connection too was showing signs of fatigue, declaring itself too sluggish to deliver Netflix, so I betook myself to a nearby RedBox and picked up a copy of Iron Man 2.

• The first Iron Man was, to me at least, unexpectedly and rawly fun. One felt as exuberant watching it as the irrepressible Tony Stark. In this installment, Stark is in a nearly endless hangover as a result of side effects of his magic chest power source thingy. And the movie too lacks the boyish enthusiasm which made the original so delightful.
• I don't know why it's so hard for the writers of these comic book action franchises to grasp the idea that one need not square the number of plot threads the side characters in each additional installment of a series.
• That Scarlett Johansson of all people reported she needed to lose a lot of weight in order to log her cat-suited-female-superhero-side-character role underscores how far off the normal curve of female biology that archetype resides -- however grateful the world's men may be for her taking one for the team in this respect. And yet it's actually more interesting to watch Pepper Potts struggle with her unwanted CEO job than it is to watch Johansson give significant-yet-never-fulfilled glances to Stark, and occasionally take time out to bounce off walls and kill people in gymnastically unlikely ways. There must be something wrong with that...

Jane Eyre!

I first read Jane Eyre when I was thirteen. I remember staying up all night, in my aunt's guest room, reading voraciously and sobbing a bit when Jane declared to Mr. Rochester, "I am not an automaton!"

Enbrethiliel posts the trailer for the new adaptation of Jane Eyre, over which I'm drooling. It looks extremely gothic, as it should. I loved the version PBS aired a few years ago, with Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens, but if there's one thing the world can use it's more Jane. Bring it!

(Also, it looks like the new one gets it right that Blanche Ingram had black hair, not blonde.)

My Favorite Movies and How They've Changed

I enjoyed reading Kyle Cupp's series of posts on his favorite movies made during his life time.

One of the things that struck me as making Kyle's list particularly interesting is that it's not simply a list of what he thinks are the best movies, but rather the movies which he enjoys watching most. However, thinking about this, it occurred to me that my list of favorite movies, in this sense, has changed a lot over the last 5-8 years. This is not generally because I've changed my mind about whether or not movies are good, but rather that what movies I feel like watching (and certainly which movies I feel like watching again) has undergone a shift.

Aristotle, who was a bloke who knew a thing or two, argued that the purpose of tragedy is to make us feel pity and fear, and that through experiencing these emotions intensely while watching (and participating as an audience member in) a drama we purge ourselves of our pent up feelings and thus arrive at the end of the play refreshed and calmed.

The thing is, I find myself a lot less eager put myself through excess pity and fear these days. Perhaps because, these days, on reaching the end, I'm more likely to feel tired than refreshed or calmed. 8-10 years ago, when I was a serious movie watcher, I truly enjoyed a well made movie that thoroughly put me through the wringer. These days, while I continue to recognize some of those movies as very good, I have much less desire to ever actually sit down and watch them again. Many of the movies I bought back then now sit quietly on my shelf, unlikely to be watched again any time soon.

This is not to say that I only want to watch pop-corn movies, but looking over some of my old favorites that I no longer want to watch, I recognize a certain sort of artistic brutality -- not necessarily movie violence, though some of them were indeed very violent movies, but rather some sense in which they were movies that treated their audience to the more extreme ends of the human experience. While these days, I seldom feel so venturesome.

Also, I find it simply impossible to stick to only movies made during my lifetime, as some of my very favorite movies are more than thirty-one years old.

In an effort to give some sense of what I'm talking about, while also imitating much of what I found fascinating about Kyle's list of movies, I will list off "favorite" movies (in the sense of movies that I not only think are good, but enjoy watching -- desert island movies, if you will) of which one list will be movies made during my lifetime, and the other before. I'll also list some movies that I would once have listed among my favorites, but would no longer, even though I continue to consider them very good and well made movies. (I was going to do ten of each, but precision and discipline failed.)

Favorites From My Lifetime
Gosford Park
Princess Bride
Spirited Away
Henry V
Brazil
Babette's Feast
Gattica
Wag the Dog
My Neighbor Totoro
Gladiator
A Christmas Carol (George C. Scott)
O Brother Where Art Thou
Bladerunner
Apocalypse Now
Persuasion
Ran

Favorites From Before My Lifetime
The Third Man
Lion in Winter
Patton
Big Country
Vertigo
The Thin Man
The Godfather
All About Eve
Chinatown
Palm Beach Story
Barry Lyndon
Yojimbo

Former Favorites (Again, I mostly continue to think these are very good movies -- I just don't plan to see them again any time soon.)
Pulp Fiction
The Funeral
The Addiction
The Passion
Fargo
Being John Malcovitch
Magnolia
Thin Red Line
The Mission
Rob Roy

Bonus Round: A few guilty pleasures These are movies that for one reason or another I do not think are actually great movies, but which I could (and often do) watch again and again with pleasure:
This Is Spinal Tap
Office Space
Tropic Thunder
Master and Commander
Independence Day
Men in Black
Mission Impossible

Raising Consciousness through Easy Virtue

I've been watching more than my usual share of movies lately -- a function both of feeling brain dead after a particularly busy and stressful couple weeks at work, and the fact that MrsDarwin (rounding the corner from first to second trimester) often crashes right after the kids do, leaving me with nearly bachelor levels of free time late at night. Last night I made an attempt at The Constant Gardener, though in the end I dropped it after a bit over half an hour. I was in the mood for something much more noir like, not the earnestly quiet improbability of recent John le Carre. (Now if someone would start making movies of Alan Furst novels, I'd be all over it.) I could take a story about Big Pharma running illegal human testing rings in the third world and killing beautiful young activists who see through their plans in a silly action movie sufficiently punctuated by explosions and chases , but it's rather uninvolving in a movie that takes itself deadly seriously.

But what struck me in particular was that Constant Gardener had the same inciting incident as a more entertaining movie I watched earlier this week, Iron Man. In both movies, the hero is a front man (either the quietly earnest Ralph Fiennes or the wildly amusing Robert Downey Jr.) for evil organizations without really knowing it, and his path towards eventual heroism begins when an attractive and earnestly progressive female reporter confronts him, asks uncomfortable questions, accuses him of apologizing for an evil organization, and then is next seen taking her clothes off with him in bed.

Tony Stark in Iron Man is protected by his loyal personal assistant Pepper Potts the next morning when she (in her own words) "takes out the trash" and so the Christine Everhart character is restricted to showing up at key intervals to ask Stark probing questions and move the plot forward.

Justin Quayle, on the other hand, has no such protector, and the quiet and polite Englishman soon finds himself in a sudden marriage-of-convenience with Tessa, the young activist who (after landing in bed with him after confronting him about the Iraq war in a press conference he was giving for another diplomat) demands that he take her with him to Africa where his next assignment is.

Two instances, of course, do not make a trend. I'm trying to think of other examples in which movie writers decided the best way to raise the consciousness of their male hero was to throw an idealistic female reporter at him, leading to salvation through one night stand. Thank You For Smoking would count, except that the anti-hero never turns around, he just gets out of his current difficulties and carries on.

Do we have a trend here? Perhaps this is the inverse of my long standing assumption that more traditional mores are likely to win out in the end because they perpetuate and are perpetuated by stable families: Progressive ideas are destined to win out because hot female proponents will sleep with anyone who doesn't agree with them. Then, after we spend the next two hours of screen time fighting big corporations, the world will be a better place. (This does seem rather rough on the men who already agree with progressive ideals, though. Do they get any time?)

Azur and Asmar: The Princes' Quest

We've been delighted here at Chez Darwin by Azur and Asmar: The Princes' Quest. It's the story of two boys, brown and white, raised as brothers on tales of the captive Djinn Fairy, then cruelly separated by Azur's coldly aristocratic father. When they grow up, each vows to rescue and marry the fairy himself. There are voyages, scoundrels, magic keys, and the most enchanting princess I've seen on screen in ages. You can watch it in the original French and Arabic, but we chose English (the Arabic is subtitled, not dubbed, which the non-reading three-year-old didn't seems to mind).

The animation style is almost completely unrelated to the Disney and Pixar stuff we've become accustomed to. It's flat and bright and highly textured and gorgeous. There are intricately patterned Arabic backgrounds that are so hypnotic and dazzling that it takes a moment to adjust the eyes. And there are NO SASSY TALKING ANIMALS. Need I say more?

Note to parents: you might balk, but here we were quite pleased that the first shot of the movie was the Arabic servant quite obviously breast-feeding first one, and then the other boy.

Bollywood Bleg

Here's a Friday entertainment post to see how diverse in movie taste our readership is.

MrsDarwin and I recently attempted a foray into Hindi film. I have a certain interest in Indian culture, working with so many Indians at work, and we'd seen several Indian-made or themed movies made with a mainstream, English-speaking audience in mind. (Monsoon Wedding, Bride and Prejudice, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsmbObwStSQ) We'd seen the epic Lagaan -- nearly four hours about love, colonialism, and cricket.

However, the other night we mis-stepped badly while sitting up late with NetFlix instant play -- striking out with both the crossover Bollywood/Hollywood:

Which was simply flat, and a bit too much like an Indian-Canadian remake of Pretty Woman as a musical.

And then with the Hindi movie Race:

Which featured eye candy, music video style songs with even less relation to the plot than usual, and a plot whose swerves went far beyond hair-pin. It had a certain rogue-ish charm, but we remain mildly flummoxed by why we watched the whole thing.

So, clearly looking at the capsule summaries on NetFlix (and the number of stars from user reviews, which all seem to range from 3-4 anyway) is not the way to select quality movies. Do we have anyone out there who is familiar with Bollywood cinema and can recommend a top five or ten favorites? (I think we're looking more for the romantic comedy musical genre, than the seemingly endless number of hopeless epic historical love-story musicals -- a surprising number between Indians and Pakistanis. One can only be hopeless and epic so much of the time.)

Movie Review: District 9

MrsDarwin and I grabbed a rare chance to take an evening out last night and went to see District 9, a science fiction movie that came out a couple weeks ago. Contrary to stereotype, it was actually MrsDarwin who had latched onto this as the movie to see, and I'm glad she did as it was one of the more enjoyable SciFi flicks that I've seen in a while. (Movie Trailer here.)

The premise of District 9 takes a standard SciFi movie plot and turns it sideways. A giant alien ship arrives at Earth and settles over the city of Johannesburg, South Africa. And it just hangs there. No aliens appear, nothing happens. After several months, people cut their way into the ship and find hundreds of thousands of aliens in filthy conditions, apparently starving. The aliens are brought down to Johannesburg for humanitarian reasons, but once they're settled friction results. This is learned in flashback; the movie opens twenty years after the aliens first arrival, by which point the aliens (derisively called "prawns" by most people because of their physical appearance) have for some time been confined to a squalid shanty-town called District 9. Because of mounting crime and distrust, the South African government is seeking to relocate the now 1-2 million aliens to a newly constructed tent city well away from the Johannesburg, District 10. To accomplish this, they've hired shadowy multi-national MNU, and the MNU bureaucrat assigned to oversee the eviction is Wikus Van De Merwe, a man clearly in over his head in an operation which will obviously end badly.

What opens as a documentary in which Wikus shows a film crew around District 9 and displays his alien management abilities (as with any culture clash, when people don't understand you, talk louder) gradually turns into a SciFi action movie, as Wikus accidentally sprays himself with a mysterious fluid which an alien who goes by the name Chris Johnson has been distilling for the last twenty years in an attempt to re-activate an aging command module and get the alien ship working again.

A couple things make this film stand out from your standard big budget aliens-arrive-and-actions-ensue movie. One I was particularly struck by is the realism of the characters and dialogue. Wikus Van De Merwe is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but as you get to know him during the course of the movie he becomes a basically endearing character -- and ordinary guy thrust into a strange situation who overcomes some of his prejudices as a result, but becomes neither hero nor martyr. Director Neill Blomkamp had his actors improvise much of the dialogue, and the result in a nice change from the carefully scripted zingers, comebacks and stock characters that inhabit many SciFi action movies. (This especially stood out having seen a preview for 2012 right before the feature.)

Also interesting is that the aliens really are alien -- indeed, sufficiently so that it's never entirely clear what is going on from their perspective. There are clearly several different castes of alien with different abilities (as with ants or bees) and nearly all of those stuck on earth are of a worker caste and not very good at self direction. They're not attractive to human eyes, and their cultural habits are unclear, their food habits at times disgusting, at other amusing. (They usually eat raw meat, but have an intense attraction to canned cat food.) A sequel (the ending clearly leaves room for one) which did an interesting job of fleshing out the aliens and how they got there would be interesting.

In a moment which will stand out to pro-life viewers, at one point the MNU agents moving through the shanty-town serving eviction notices comes upon a shack full of prawn eggs and larvae. Wikus "unplugs" several eggs and radios for a "population control unit" which proves to be consist of a flamethrower. "Here," he says, tossing a piece to one of the MNU security men. "Souvenir of your first abortion." Wikus explains to the camera that the popping sound they hear from the burning shack is of eggs exploding. (We later learn that prawns are supposed to obtain a license to have children.) A few minutes later, as they're proceeding through the camp, Wikus points to prawn children running by and observes that they're breeding too fast, too many children. One of the security men points his rifle at the children, "Should I get rid of them?" he asks. "No, no, no," Wikus responds, putting his hand in front of the muzzle. "You can't kill them at this age. It's illegal."

Note: spoilers in comments.

Pity and Fear

Aristotle taught that the purpose of tragedy is to inspire pity and fear in the audience, thence causing catharsis, a purging of emotion. I've always found his explanation of tragedy compelling, but as I get older (queue laughter at the thirty-year-old getting "older") I find that I want to achieve catharsis much less than I used to. Not that my life is layered in tragedy or anything, indeed, far from it. But somehow, one just doesn't feel as much like seeking out pity and fear at thirty as at twenty.

This has been running through my head as I've been reading about The Stoning of Soraya M.



It looks like a really incredible movie, and especially with the developments in Iran of late, I would like to have seen it. I would like to have seen it, yet I confess, I don't really feel like seeing it.

Perhaps as one gains the capacity to understand that tragedy is real in life, one is less willing to seek it out. At twenty, I had a great appreciation for tragedy, but one perhaps facilitated by the fact I didn't really understand it in a concrete sense. At least, not as much as I fancied I did. Or maybe I'm just tired, or a wuss.

Ummmmm...

I liked his acting in Three Kings.

I liked his directing in Being John Malkovich and Adaptation.

But watching the trailer for Spike Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are, I can only think of the need for a whole new award category: Most over-psychologized full-length movie adaptation of a very short children's picture book ever.