Tintin and Action Fatigue

Tintin is great, Steven Spielberg really is a master of his craft. They managed to make a modern movie that's still true to the comic, except they cut out all the racism. Probably a good thing.

My one problem with the movie is action fatigue. I felt like we should have already come to the end of the climax, only to find that what I thought was the climax was only an entertaining diversion, and there's an entirely separate climax that's even longer. By the end, I'm just tired of all the crazy stuff that's happened.

I think this happens more nowadays because of the huge budgets that movies get. If Peter Jackson wants to have a fully CGI chase scene in King Kong that goes on for 40 minutes, he can do that without going over budget. By the end, I'm not going to care what happens to them, I'm just waiting to take a break from all the craziness.

Pirates 4

I saw Pirates of the Caribbean 4. It's just about what you would expect. It's clearly the work of people who just didn't care. It's one of the many modern movies where you have no idea where you are or what's going on most of the time. They made the shot very pretty, but it's clear they didn't do the work to flesh out the world.

Al Swearingon didn't get as much to do as I would have liked, but he had an entire HBO series, and that didn't satisfy me.

Apparently some idiot in marketing thought the movie didn't skew young enough or something, so they added in a pointless romance between a young couple of "actors" with all of the "acting ability" (generic good looks) and none of the name recognition of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightly. I thought cutting the boring romantic pairing was the best improvement to the series, only to see my hopes dashed. At least it didn't take up much screen time.

Speaking of, I hate that Hollywood seems to think "romance" is the same as, "the woman is attractive, and the man is attractive/funny", so they fall into each other arms, often having spoken for less than ten minutes. I'm not saying you have to show ten minutes of dialogue, although Tarantino shows it's possible. A movie can indicate that a romantic pair has had time to talk off-screen before they decide they'd die for each other. Pirates 4 was particularly bad, considering one of the pair was a monster, and the other was a priest.

700th Post - Coen Brothers

It's my 700th post! Woo!

When it comes to the Coen Brothers, I think we can all agree that their movies are good. They're entertaining, and they have such confidence in their skills, they can do things with much more subtlety than most directors.

My issue about Coen Brothers movies is that I don't know how to think about them. Are they smarter than me, hopelessly pretentious, or both? It often seems there's an underlying metaphor, but I never can put them together. Example: What's the ending of No Country For Old Men about? Or the ending of True Grit? (Which I just saw and enjoyed. Jeff Bridges is great.)

I've read a few analyses of their movies, but they're generally a sort of crazy-person interpretation, where everything is a metaphor, every name is a weird code, and there's always someone that is standing in for God. While I know there are symbolic movies, I'm reluctant to accept such an elaborate metaphor based only on people's names, for example. I generally don't buy people's "elaborate metaphor" interpretation of stories.

Some Movie Thoughts

First of all, Inception may not be a bad movie. The real measure of a movie is whether people like it, whether they feel like their 10$ is well spent. With that measure, it wasn't a good movie to me. I do maintain, however, that Inception is a bad story. Stories are about character, and the characters in Inception suck.

To be fair, Inception is nowhere near the worst movie of the year. One of the largest injustices of all time is that the turd of Alice In Wonderland is one of the 7 movies to make a billion dollars. Hereafter is so tedious, I only stayed in the theater because I assumed that it was building up to something.

Spoiler: Hereafter is like a Ayn Rand book. Reality doesn't support Objectivism or Hereafter's belief in the afterlife, so the author simply creates their own reality, where it's obvious that their belief is correct. This fictional "proof" takes precedence over character, plot, etc. Hence, the "climax" of Hereafter isn't an event of narrative importance, it's an event that shows that the afterlife is real.

Speaking of the afterlife, the reason people see a light when they have a near death experience is just because there's no oxygen going to their brain. It's a repeatable medical condition, not some magical connection to another world. All of these "glimpses of the afterlife" imply that god created a pretty crappy way of separating the alive from the dead.

Nicolas Cage Mystery

I have a profound question about Nicolas Cage. Why do I like him, even though all his movies are, at best, schlock? The best you can say about Con Air and The Rock, unarguably his best movies, is that you can have fun while watching them sometimes. He has been in so many terrible movies, he's essentially a B movie actor with a bigger paycheck.

Inception #5 on IMDB

I know this happens every time a new pretentious movie comes out, but this is particularly revolting. Inception is #5 on the IMDB list of the best movies ever made.I'm sure in a year it'll be much lower, but this is absurd.

Toy Story 3 is a much better film, and it's only at #20. LA Confidential is better than either of those, and it's only 65. I think we can all agree that the IMDB list is flawed, at best.

Megamind Review

Megamind is a surprisingly thoughtful film. Much more slowly paced than I would have expected. It reminds me of The Nightmare Before Christmas, in the sense that the driving force of the protagonist is ennui, something rare for a movie theoretically aimed at children.

I give it heaps of extra credit for the way they've controlled the trailers. They did a great job not spoiling anything. Everything you've seen in the trailers only covers the first twenty minutes or so.

I saw the AV Club gave a B+ to Tangled, so maybe it's not terrible? Rapunzel has a spunky animal friend, so it seems like it has to be bad, I dunno.

Megamind:
.8 Ron Perlmans out of a possible 5.

The Most Beautiful Thing

I assume you've seen American Beauty. It's a good movie. One question: when that guy shows the video of the plastic bag, describing it as the most beautiful thing he's ever seen, are we supposed to think that it's actually beautiful? I always thought it was just another example of how completely devoid of beauty their world is.

Random Rankings

I thought I'd rank a few things, in order of best to worst:

Star Wars: 4, 5, 6, 3, 2, 1
Star Trek Series: Next Generation, DS9, Enterprise, Original Series, Voyager, Animated
Noble Gases: Helium, Krypton, Neon, Argon, Xenon, Radon
Kubrick Films: Dr Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket, Clockwork Orange, 2001, The Shining, Barry Lyndon, and the rest.
TF2 Classes: Demoman, Medic, Scout, Soldier, Heavy, Sniper, Pyro, Engineer, Spy
British Colonies: USA, Australia, India, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand
Queens of England: Elizabeth 1, Victoria, Anne, Mary 1, Elizabeth 2
Whig Presidents of the USA: John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, William Henry Harrison

Lists are often not comprehensive, too much work.

Story Is About Character

Todd Alcott is a writer of screenplays. He also maintains a blog where he analyzes other peoples' films. His central rule of analysis is simple: "What does the Protagonist want?". I'm not sure that I agree 100% with the implications of that, but it is a good way to approach a story.

Kurt Vonnegut has a simple rule for writing: everything that you write must either,

1. Advance the plot, or
2. reveal character

If, at the end of the story, we haven't learned anything about the characters, then it's not really a story, it's more like a list of events. This is the weakness of a lot of movies, including Inception. At the end of Inception, what do we know about the characters?

Dom Cobb:

1. Wife died, (sad)
2. Children are inaccessible (sad)
3. Used to be really good at dreamweaving, but issues with wife have made that impossible.

Ariadne:

1. Is a student
2. Has a hopelessly pretentious name (This reveals more about the screenwriter than the character)
3. Becomes relatively proficient at dreamweaving

And so on. If you want to know if a character is well fleshed out, imagine them in a different context. What would Dom talk about with a stranger at a bar? How would Ariadne act at a fancy wedding? Compare those "characters" to your favorite characters. Think of listing everything you know about Han Solo, or Andy Dufresne.

If you want to make a good story, create a character that we care about. Everything else comes second.

PS. Inception could have been shortcut entirely if Michael Caine had just brought Dom's children out of America.

Superman

Is it just me, or is every Superman story "Oh man, it looks like Superman's on the ropes! No, wait! He's summoned the energy to win, even though he couldn't do it a second ago!"? It's particularly egregious when he's on the ropes because of Kryptonite. It was my understanding that Kryptonite didn't just make him a little nauseated, it's supposed to make his powers not work.

The worst offender of all time is the latest Superman movie, where Superman is stabbed near fatally on an island of Kryptonite, and only needs to fly off to get some sunlight before he carries the entire island of Kryptonite into space.

Good heroes do things even though it seems impossible. Superman manages this by having his power levels fluctuate wildly for no apparent reason. Maybe there's a rich vein of Superman stories where this doesn't happen, but I don't know of them.

Why Inception Is A Bad Movie

Inception is a bad movie. I'm going to skip over some complaints that aren't a big deal, then I'll address the main problem.

Dreams are completely different in real life and in Inception in basically every way. Someone pointed out that the movie would work much better if they said "subconscious" instead of "dreams", so let's just pretend that's what they did.

The rules throughout the movie are completely inconsistent, and often ludicrous. Falling in your sleeping body is supposed to pull you out of your dream, but later in the movie, they pull a switcheroo and have the dream person fall to wake up the sleeping body. The entire Limbo thing was particularly dumb, if you can just kill yourself in Limbo to wake up, then Limbo isn't a real threat, or it wouldn't be if they were being consistent. The increasing speed at lower levels is an interesting idea, but completely unjustified by the (incorrect) idea that the brain can work hundreds of time faster than it normally does*.

The naming of the characters is particularly silly. Ariadne? Are you serious?

In defense of Inception, it's not actually that confusing or hard to keep track of or understand: Some guys use a magic dream penetrating thingy to insert the idea of breaking up a company into a businessman's psyche.

The idea that there's so much "meaning" and "interpretation" to be analyzed is just piffle. There's no subtext whatsoever, and the only interpretation anyone makes is "was scene X a dream or reality?" A popular interpretation is that the entire film was a dream, which could be said of any movie whatsoever, and is therefore completely inane. There's no logic to think that the "real world" of the movie is real or dream, there's no system to determine what's real or not. The most popular dream question is the final scene, which must be a dream, unless Christopher Nolan would have us forget that children age in the real world. The time that the apartment across the street was the same apartment that Dicaprio was in was an interesting, almost subliminal, visual trick, but it doesn't mean anything.

Now the big stuff, starting with the second largest problem: The "antagonists". Inception is interesting in that it has no character serving the rolê of antagonist, the obstacles they have to work against are psychological. At some point, the people making the movie thought this would be boring, so someone decided that dreams defend themselves with gun wielding characters who attempt to eject foreign dreamers. This makes for a constant video-game-esque gunfight against faceless goons for absolutely no reason. This provides no real narrative pressure or threat, since it's a dream, and we don't care about the protagonists.

That's the largest problem with Inception, we don't care about the protagonists**. There are only two people in the movie who actually have character, and they're both rather obnoxious. The businessman is just a stuck up clichè. Leonardo Dicaprio's character, oddly named Dom Cobb(?), is the person that we're supposed to sympathize with, but he's totally uninteresting. Without an antagonist, and without a sympathetic protagonist, and with action that's almost entirely in someone's subconscious, we're left with a plot about no one in a conflict with no one over nothing in a place that isn't real. No wonder I didn't care about what happened. For such a long movie, I'd like more payoff than "unsympathetic Dom Cobb gets over the guilt of his wife's death".***

I've heard people say that they were hit hard when Cobb actually got to see his children's faces. Maybe I'm just cynical in my old age, but they didn't see that coming from a million miles away? It's so shamelessly manipulative and predictable, I can't believe people accepted that as resolution.

PS. I don't care whether the end was in a dream or not, but the way the top wobbled just a little, then ending with a cut to black, that was genius. It's very rare you hear everyone in a theater groan. Even I had a visceral reaction to that trick.

* We do not use only 10% of our brains, a myth the movie alludes to without actually quoting. There's no way we would evolve the ability to think hundreds of times faster without the potential to do it. Evolution doesn't work that way. Interesting side note: they should hook up geniuses to the dream stuff to have them do centuries of theoretical mathematics over the course of a few months.

** We also don't care about the mission. "Stop an enormous energy company from getting larger!" That's our rallying cry? Really? 

*** Why didn't Dom just tell his wife that he had Incepted the idea that they were in a dream? "Honey, I stuck that idea in your head, that's why you can't get over the idea," is better than your wife killing herself.**** And why are there so many rules about Inception if no one else had ever gotten it to work before?

****Maybe we're just not supposed to notice, but every time it cuts to Dom and his wife waking up from their Limbo dream, they don't have any of the dream sharing equipment.

Inception In A Word

Masturbatory

Sexism

There's a test to show how sexist media is:

"Does the media have a conversation between two women that is not about a man?"

This doesn't seem like a very demanding test, but it actually demands a lot of things that many TV shows and movies aren't interested in. There has to be more than one woman in a show. They have to be together in one scene.* The women have to be characters, in the sense of having their own interests, and they have to be interests outside of romance. Many shows have no interest in women as characters, the (male) writers seem to think that women can only be a source of sex, and their role is entirely one that denies or accepts that role. Sex denying women are robotic and unpleasant, sex allowing women are emotional and incapable intellectually.

Before you think that this test is unfair, (After all, what is the chance that Uhura and Nurse Chapel are going to talk about something other than another member of the crew?) just try this test the other way around. How many TV shows and movies pass this test with the very first line of dialogue, when applied to men?

I think this demonstrates pretty clearly that the people who design media think that the default "person" is a male, and when they're casting their show with "minorities", they include one woman in the central cast, and one in the secondary cast. It's pretty funny that people consider women to be a minority, after all they're treated like one, but they're actually more than 50% of the population.

*Star Wars famously has only ONE SCENE in Episodes 4,5, and 6 that has two women on the camera at the same time.

How To Train Your Dragon is Good

How To Train Your Dragon is a good movie. Better than I expected it to be by a long shot. There were several parts that really impressed me artistically. Yes, the CGI is excellent, but the mastery of the physical acting of CGI characters (especially the *Spoiler Alert* dragon he trains *End Spoiler Alert* ) is really great. Not one person left that theater not in love with the *Spoiler Alert* dragon he trains *End Spoiler Alert*.

The movie also took a few chances with plot and events that I didn't expect from something marketed to children, and it avoided most of the idiotic things people tend to add to movies to make them "Kid Friendly". (Why do people think vomiting, farting, and getting hit in the groin is hilarious to kids? For children, humour comes from character. Adults love the nut shots.)

I like to mock Dreamworks as a second-rate Pixar, but I'd definitely put Dragon against Pixar. It's certainly not as good as Pixar's best, but I'd say it's certainly on the same level.

Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

I have a good joke.

Person 1 "How did you like Alice In Wonderland?"

Person 2 "What do you call a movie that has nice CGI but is terrible in every other way?"

Person 1 "Avatar?"

Anyway, Tim Burton is rapidly becoming the most unnecessary film-maker of all time. If ever there was a film that didn't need to be made, it's a sequel to Alice In Wonderland. It doesn't even have much for the macro/micro-philia crowd.

2009 In Film

If you want to refresh your memory of 2009, check out Wikipedia here. Of the top ten grossing films of 2009, only Up was worth watching, although I heard The Hangover was funny.

Good movies of 2009 that I saw:
Star Trek
Up
District 9
Inglorious Basterds

OK movies that I saw
Coraline
Watchmen
Monsters Vs Aliens
Ponyo
The Informant!
The Invention Of Lying
Sherlock Holmes
Men Who Stare At Goats

I hope you understand this isn't a comprehensive list of movies, I missed many movies from 2009. The order is simply in the order of release, I'm not ranking them in any particular way.

Anyway, 12 movies in a year isn't too bad, that's a decent movie every month.

The Invention of Lying

Ricky Gervais' The Invention of Lying begins as a single-premise comedy: wouldn't it be funny if everyone was brutally honest, all the time? (Answer: sorta) But it becomes The Invention of Religion about halfway through. By boldly asserting that Religion doesn't exist without lies, Gervais isn't being particularly subtle about his thesis.

There is one point that I think bears more examination: when the film's characters are exposed to religion for the first time ever, they take it much differently than someone in our world; they take it deadly serious. The reasoning is obvious; if you have a chance to enjoy eternal happiness in the future, all other parts of life become trivial in comparison. So when the film's characters are told they are allowed two sins (Like baseball, three strikes and you're out) some characters wisely decide to drink themselves into a stupor, since it helps keep you out of trouble sin-wise, and it accelerates their deaths, after which, their "life" will be better.

Why don't we see people "gaming" the system in our world? Why don't people spend their formative years figuring out how to get into heaven, then spending every bit of labour for the remainder of their lives trying to secure that place in heaven?

They Don't Believe.

Inglorious Bastards

I saw Inglorious Bastards. It's good. Brad Pitt is always good, and Samuel Jackson and Harvey Keitel are included, for no particular reason.

EDIT:

I remembered, with not prompting whatsoever, to do a Ron Perlman score.

.95/5 Ron Perlmen

Public Enemies

I saw Public Enemies, it was all right.