Just ’cause it’s a theme song, don’t mean it’s not true

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When I first heard about Tropic Thunder, I thought it was going to be just another two hours of Ben Stiller and Jack Black hamming it up, or at best one of Stiller’s MTV Movie Awards parodies stretched out to feature length. Turns out it’s got plenty of both, but it manages to be surprisingly good. Those movie parodies were always funny, after all — apparently all you have to do to get a whole movie out of them is to add a few hundred million to the budget, throw in a few more celebrities, and most importantly: get Robert Downey, Jr. involved.

He’s kind of awesome in this movie. There’s one line — I can’t remember the gag, it was pretty forgettable — but his delivery is so perfect it’s almost scary funny. After the scene ended, a few people in the audience actually clapped. I’d never seen that in a movie before, people applauding the delivery of a line.

Everybody else manages to do the kind of thing they do best, they rein in the goofy camera-hogging but still manage to make it over the top, and the gags are all over the place. Most of the scenes have slapstick, puns, fart jokes, and satire all going on at the same time. Whenever Hollywood types make a satire about Hollywood, it generally makes me uncomfortable — I wonder if they’re in on the irony of making a movie to make fun of yourself for being self-absorbed. Here, they got the balance just about right.

And, probably not all that surprising, the parody trailers are perfect. I can’t remember a movie where the opening worked so well. It set the perfect tone for a movie that’s going to go balls-out goofy for the next two hours. The movie does kind of run out of power towards the end, but it’s got so much momentum from the beginning, the coasting speed is still pretty damn funny.

Maybe I Didn’t Want to Believe As Much as I’d Originally Thought

journeysteveperry.jpgSomehow I’d gotten the idea that the new X-Files movie was about werewolves. I think maybe I mis-heard “Wendigo” when someone was saying, “When did it go horribly wrong?” So if you go see the movie expecting werewolves or yeti, you’re going to be disappointed.

Of course, if you go see the movie at all, you’re going to be disappointed. It’s really not very good. But at least it’s educational. I learned:

  • Much of West Virginia is covered by icy tundra and snowdrifts several feet high.
  • Except for the skyscraper-filled cities.
  • You don’t have to be any kind of specialist to perform neurosurgery, you just have to know how to google for “stem cell research.”
  • Experimental stem cell procedures are surprisingly easy to get green-lit in a Catholic hospital.
  • And the stem cell samples are so easy to get, you can be on the operating table the same day you come up with the idea.
  • Same-sex marriage inevitably leads to mad science.
  • When performing transplant surgery, it’s important to get the correct blood type, so the patient doesn’t reject the donor head.
  • People with rare blood types wear MedicAlert bracelets to advertise that fact, even when their blood type is the universal receiver.
  • In West Virginia, public pools are segregated by blood type.
  • You can shave off a thick beard without trimming it first, as long as you avoid the spirit gum.
  • People’s arms can give off psychic vibrations even after their head has been severed.
  • Dana Scully is steamin’ mad at pedophiles, and she’s also amazingly good at reading mailbox addresses at night during one of West Virginia’s frequent blizzards.
  • “Reaper” must be filmed in Canada, since one of the guys from that show has a small part in the movie. I already knew Leoben as our gay Russian villain was Canadian, and I was expecting the Kids in the Hall and Alanis Morisette to show up any minute.
  • “The X-Files” only worked when it didn’t take itself seriously.

Considering how the movie completely falls apart if you think about it for even a second, it’s surprising that the biggest complaint isn’t that it’s ludicrous, but that it’s so dull. But that’s really how “The X-Files” always worked — the production values and performances were always high enough to make you believe it was smarter than it really was. And Mark Snow’s ever-present keyboard would lull you into a false sense of significance.

That, combined with the brilliance of the occasional Darin Morgan episode, would distract you from the fact that an awful lot of the series was just Mulder and Scully standing around having exasperatingly pointless conversations that are meant to sound meaningful. But at least back then, there was genuine appeal to the characters; in I Want to Believe, they’ve had all the charisma drained out of them as if they’d been exsanguinated.

As an added bonus, here’s what I learned from the trailers:

Why So Serious?, or, I Miss the Giant Penny

250px-Batman-Outsiders-1.pngAccording to the box office numbers, there’s a good chance that everyone reading this has already seen The Dark Knight. But just in case, I’ll include a spoiler warning: it’s pretty damn good.

The movie mentions several times how the Joker and Batman are both “freaks” and outsiders, and how lonely it is to be different from everyone else. Now this, I can relate to somewhat, based on my lukewarm-at-best reaction to Batman Begins, and being in packed rooms at conventions where everyone else is practically wetting himself at the notion of a sequel. I’d have to smile nervously and clap and give a half-hearted “whoo!” and then go home wondering if maybe the problem is with me, and then cry myself to sleep under my X-Men 2 poster. I just didn’t get the attraction.

But The Dark Knight is an excellent movie. When you consider the performances — not a bad one in the entire cast, and Heath Ledger really is as outstanding as people have been saying; the production values; the dialogue; the unabashedly and unapologetically mature tone; the music and phenomenal sound design, it’s probably the best comic book movie ever made. But it’s still not my favorite, and I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what it is that doesn’t work for me.

I can’t accuse it of being too dry, because there are loads of genuinely clever moments. Or of being self-important Oscar-bait, because there’s an action scene involving a truck, a motorcycle, and some cable that may be the first objectively bad-ass scene in action movie history. (Which is to say: it’s not a matter of opinion; it would be impossible for a human being to watch that scene and not say, “Now that was bad-ass.”)

I can’t really even fault the two-and-a-half-hour length, since it did a remarkable job of keeping up the pacing. Even late into the movie, when you hear that weird “Joker noise” come up on the soundtrack, you can’t help but get every bit as tense as you were during the first scenes. It was only in the last half hour when I started to get “adaptation fatigue,” when I thought, “Wait, you’re going to try and squeeze The Killing Joke in here too? Really?” It felt like they were afraid they weren’t going to be allowed to make another Batman movie, so they had to squeeze every “serious” Batman story they could into one movie.

What it comes down to is that these movies are for the people who’ve been wanting a real Batman movie ever since the 70s. Back when people were desperate to “take back” the character from the campy 60s version and get back to his sinister and tragic roots. When I first got into comics, I was already in college, so I felt like I had to make up for lost time by getting big stacks of them and reading through several issues of Batman at a time. And I always ended up with the same feeling as I did watching Batman Begins: sure the story is competently told, but it’s going to end up ridiculous if you put any amount of thought into it, so why bother? Comics continue to swing back and forth between “joyless” and “ridiculous,” and Batman is the poster child for that.

Several times during The Dark Knight, I was struck by how it’s so much better, by several orders of magnitude, than any interpretation of Batman done so far. The Tim Burton movies seem even more embarrassingly silly now than they did when they were released, and it’s unsettling to think that at the time, they were supposed to be a counter to the “silly” version of Batman. When you consider all the indignities the character’s been made to suffer over the past 50 years, it’s perfectly understandable that people would want to see a version that does the character justice.

Especially when the movie is as good as this one. But still…

The Dark Knight is a much better movie than Hellboy 2, but the latter had earth elementals and fairies and giant clockwork monsters and the Angel of Death and ectoplasm in a diving suit, all memorable images that stand out in my mind and make me want to see it again. The Dark Knight is more realistic and less corny than X-Men 2, but there wasn’t really any moment I was inclined to stand up and cheer as when Nightcrawler bamfs out of a plane to save Rogue.

As good as The Dark Knight is, it still feels like it’s targeted at the people who want to be able to pinpoint Gotham City on a map. The people who insist that comics can too tell meaningful stories. Personally, I don’t feel that defensive about the term “comic book movie,” and don’t think they have anything to prove. I’ll take a Miyazaki-inspired 40’s art deco nightmare over Chicago any day, and a dark cave with a giant penny over a big Matrix-y room with concrete floors and fluorescent lights.

To Be in the Venture Compound in the Summertime

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I’ve got 2 Venture Brothers-related confessions to make: first is that before he showed up in the series, I’d never heard of Klaus Nomi. Second is that until last week’s episode (“What Goes Down Must Come Up”), I’ve thought this season was clever but not hilariously funny.

This episode had me dying, though. (Yeah, I’m watching it Wednesday night. I’ve been busy). The story was the best this season, Jefferson Twilight makes everything funny, and it was nice to get a little break from the Monarch and the Guild of Calamitous Intent stuff.

Plus, I just like it when I get a reference. And I love it when people just go balls-out on a joke, and have it end up working perfectly. When they first showed the sewer tunnel and played the little snippets of music, I thought, “Wait a second. They’re not actually doing what I think they’re doing.” And then they topped it with pretty much the best reference ever. I had to pause the recording I was laughing so hard.

I didn’t catch a single one of the references in the later scenes, but for a minute there, I felt hip.

My favorite line (paraphrased): “They’re members of the Rusty Venture fan club, which explains the survival skills they needed to live down there for 40 years.”

The Right Hand of Doom

hellboypancakes.jpgI really wanted to love Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and for the first 15 or 20 minutes, it looked like that was exactly what was going to happen. There’s a really clever flashback to Hellboy’s time growing up on an army base (previously only seen in a two-page gag story called “Pancakes”), and a fantastic sequence where the movie’s back-story is delivered via CG puppets. It’s just beautifully done, imaginative, with a distinctive style that still felt very much influenced by Mike Mignola’s style.

It’s followed by a neat title sequence, a cool scene introducing us to the story’s villain, and a creepy sequence at an auction house. It’s all great stuff, and with the monsters, sigils, antiquities scattered about, and sense of impending doom, it nails the tone of a live action version of a Hellboy story.

But then everything kind of starts to unravel as soon as Hellboy shows up. It never really falls apart, but it just kind of deflates. There’s a ton of brilliant stuff throughout, most of it so impressive that I’d recommend the movie to anybody who’s a fan of effects-heavy action movies. And it was much better than the first Hellboy movie. But it still felt uncomfortably “off.”

There’s so much that the movie gets exactly right. The story has the feel of an ancient legend pushed into the modern day, an apocalyptic cataclysm that can only be averted by lots of punching and shooting. There are self-important kings and lords, and untrustworthy guides who work according to rules that we just barely understand. And the sinister versions of elves, fairies, and other creatures, that I think only the team Guillermo del Toro has put together can do justice to. (Ideas and character designs that were hinted at in Pan’s Labyrinth are splayed out all over the screen here).

But the tone was just wrong. After seeing The Devil’s Backbone, I wondered if del Toro’s work kept getting violated by Hollywood. But he has screenwriting credit on Hellboy 2, and I kept feeling like the screenwriting was the weak link. The script understands that Hellboy is ultimately a comedy series, but doesn’t seem to get that it’s supposed to be dry humor. Long stretches of mood and foreboding, followed by a punchline about as un-subtle as you can get. (“Is that… a monkey?” “HE’S GOT A GUN!!!”)

But pretty much every time the movie attempted comedy, it just felt stretched too thin, dragged on too long, or just fell flat. And it kept falling back on the “get a load of this guy!” stuff, reminding us how wacky it is to be watching a movie where a huge tough-talking demon is the good guy. But anybody going into a movie called “Hellboy” has already heard that joke and gotten it; the movie needs to top that. And all the lame story points from the first movie are still shoe-horned into this one: there’s still the unnecessary romance between Hellboy and Liz Sherman, and the Tim Burton-esque theme of freaks who just want to fit in. Plus, there’s way too much Jimmy Kimmel, which is to say, there’s some.

Then again, the tone of Hellboy adaptations varies so much that I’m starting to wonder if maybe I’m the one who doesn’t “get” it. The novelizations and short stories seem to think he’s the demon form of Indiana Jones; the videogames seem to think he’s a Mortal Kombat character; and the movies seem to think he’s Lobo crossed with Edward Scissorhands. Maybe that’s the genius of the comics — there’s so little dialogue and so many silent side shots of watching statues or ravens murmuring portents of doom, you’re free to impose whatever character you want on Hellboy.

So as not to end on a down note, I want to point out a few of the things I like: The character of Johann Krauss — a German medium who was trapped in his ectoplasmic form during a seance and now has to live inside a containment suit — is kind of underused in the comics, a cool idea that kind of went nowhere. In the movie, he’s great, a cool suit that’s continually outgassing, and a memorable voice (by Seth McFarlane, surprisingly). The fight scenes were big, dumb, and hard to follow, exactly like they are in the comics. There’s a whole scene with Liz and a character I won’t name but he’s near the end and is like the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth — that whole scene is exactly like a Hellboy comic. And I really loved the brief image of Hellboy’s “true form.”

An Inconvenient Contaminant

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I saw Wall-E last week for my birthday (thanks, Rain!), but have been too busy distracted buying stuff and staring blankly at computer screens to be able to write anything about it.

It’s so good I can’t think of a better word to describe it than “wonderful.”

At this point, it’s a given that any Pixar movie is going to have moments that are astonishing visually and artistically. And it’s pretty much inevitable that they’re going to have at least one moment that makes me cry. But I could tell I was in for a hard time with this one, because I started tearing up during the short film, “Presto.” Not because it was sad, but because it’s filled with these little jolts of brilliance, thrown at you in rapid succession. It’s a series of rabbit punches directly to the part of your brain that appreciates good stuff.

And in the first fifteen minutes of Wall-E, there are all these little moments that had me marveling at the animation and the pacing and whoa I squeezed out another tear how did that happen? Wall-E watches a scene from Hello Dolly and starts to practice the dance routine with a garbage can lid as a straw hat, and it’s so perfectly timed and under-played and evocative, you can’t help but be moved by the conspicuous subtlety.

Reading the reviews, you’ll find heaps of praise with the same superlatives repeated: “a jewel,” “a masterpiece,” “stunning,” “breathtaking,” “heartbreaking,” “enthralling,” “beautiful,” and my favorite so far, “dangerously close to the sublime.”

But you’ll also see plenty of complaints about the shift in tone from the first part of the movie to the second, and about the “preachy” message. I don’t think either are valid, but to explain why means spoilers.

Continue reading “An Inconvenient Contaminant”

All up in her griddle

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A couple weeks ago, my satellite went out, and I seriously considered just canceling the service altogether. Even if I were home long enough to watch TV, all the shows I’m most interested in are available on the internet. And if I ever do get free time, wouldn’t I be better off going outdoors, or at least reading?

Luckily, the DVR helped dispel all that nonsense by recording the Fuji TV programming block that runs in the bay area on weekends. One of the shows I caught was “Teppan Shoujo Akane!!”, which is about a teenage girl who uses a magic griddle named Ittetsu to battle rival teppanyaki chefs while searching for her missing father.

I know, right? But it’s even better than that: even though it was made in 2006, it looks and feels like it’s coming straight out of 1988. Her arch-enemy is a scenery-chewing rich girl of the Animal House/Meatballs school of villainy, and there are scenes where Akane takes long walks on the beach with her griddle as romantic music plays.

This is something that I never would’ve heard about had it not been for the sweet, sweet rays of entertainment broadcast to my TV. How could I ever have doubted it?

At one point in the episode I watched, Akane grows despondent over a betrayal, and she actually throws Ittetsu into the trash! After some soul-searching, she realizes her mistake and begins a chase through the streets of Tokyo, pursuing the garbage truck taking away her magic griddle. She jumps onto the back of the truck and bows to Ittetsu in abject apology. And I understood exactly how she felt when she caressed the griddle and said:

I’m not all alone! I have Ittetsu! I still have iron-griddle dishes!

Iz not so great, aktually

lolkara.jpgThis “half-season” of “Battlestar Galactica” ended last Friday with an episode called “Revelations.” I don’t really have much to say worth a spoiler warning, but if you want to know nothing about the episode, you might want to skip this post.

Maybe the series has always been like this, and I just couldn’t tell because I was watching the episodes out of order, but it seems like the show has been wildly uneven in quality. Two episodes ago was a muddled, directionless mess of an hour, immediately followed by one of the best episodes of the entire series (“Hub”). The finale was more of the same: there were story moments and individual scenes that were just fantastic, but I just wasn’t that impressed with the episode as a whole.

I liked pretty much everything they did, plot-wise, but I wish they had stretched it all out over the last 8 or 9 episodes instead of trying to cram everything significant that will happen to the human race into 45 minutes. Everything was rushed and muddled. Lately my biggest gripe about TV shows is that the characters’ motivations get lost; it doesn’t seem like they do stuff because the characters want to, but just because the writers need them to get from here to there. In this episode, it seemed like characters did stuff just because they were afraid they wouldn’t have time to before the scene ended and we cut to somewhere else.

But a few of the moments were great. It got so tense that I actually had to pause it and get up to pace around the apartment, which I’m guessing is the kind of reaction they were hoping for. But I was anxious only partly because of the tension the episode had built up, and mostly because I kept saying, “Don’t screw up the whole series, don’t screw up the whole series…”

I don’t know, maybe that’s an intentional dramatic device — they’ll show you an episode so bad, or a plot development so ridiculous, that you have to be a little scared of them. They’ve got a gun to the series’ head and are holding it hostage, “Keep watching, or we’ll blow it to hell! We’re crazy enough to do it!”

The ending was fine, but it was more “oh, so that’s the option they picked” than “holy cow, I didn’t see that coming!” I guess the last 10 or so episodes are going to be all about the Final Fifth and what happens next. I’m not so upset anymore that it’s going to be 2009 before any new episodes air. I’m curious to see how it all ends, but I think BSG and I could use some time apart.

Spoilers

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Last month, news came over the wireless that Steven Moffat is taking over “Doctor Who” when its fifth season starts in 2010. I didn’t think much about the announcement, since I haven’t been paying much attention to the series. It’s turned into kind of a shrill, nonsensical mess with increasingly overwrought finales. Even though it has the occasional brilliant, best-thing-on-television episode, that hasn’t been enough to keep me interested.

Of course, what the brillaint, best-thing-on-television episodes have in common (with a couple of exceptions) is that they were written by Steven Moffat. I just finished watching his two-parter for season four, “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead”, and it looks like this hasn’t been just a coincidence. The guy is just crazy good. And he seems to understand the series on a gut level, and he knows how to turn it from goofy kids’ sci-fi programming into astoundingly good television.

What impresses me the most is how he manages to nail the formula of the series, without its feeling formulaic. The two-parter is a straight-up “Doctor Who” formula story: time travel, aliens, a little bit of horror, with new characters getting picked off one by one and a thrilling conclusion where the Doctor suddenly figures out a deus ex machina to fix everything. Not only that, but this episode is something of a mash-up of Moffat’s other episodes, with time paradoxes, a love story, a little bit of self-referential storytelling, and scary monsters from unlikely sources (in “Blink” it was statues, here it’s shadows) shambling around repeatedly saying creepy catch-phrases (in “The Empty Child” it was, “Are you my mummy?” here it’s “Hey, who turned out the lights?”)

So it’s amazing that it all mixes together to make something that works so well. I think the last time I’ve been genuinely creeped out by a TV show was when I saw “Blink,” and the last time I’ve been so genuinely happy at a happy ending was when I saw “The Doctor Dances.” Lesser writers are afraid to save a character because they think it’ll look like a cop-out, but Moffat really earns his happy endings. And earns his scares, as well — the monster in these episodes is basically the haunted spaceman from “Scooby Doo.”

If we can expect a whole season of episodes as good as these two, then the next full season of “Doctor Who” could be amazing. Of course, it’s over a year away, but it’ll be worth the wait.

MST3K at Comic Con

Via Andrew P Mayer’s blog, there’s an announcement that almost everybody who ever appeared on Mystery Science Theater are going to be speaking at a panel at the San Diego Comic-Con:

We now have full confirmation of the upcoming panel at Comic-Con in San Diego, Friday, July 25, 7:15 p.m.

On the panel will be: Trace Beaulieu, Paul Chaplin, Frank Conniff, Bill Corbett, Joel Hodgson, Jim Mallon, Kevin Murphy, Bridget Nelson, Mike Nelson, Mary Jo Pehl and J. Elvis Weinstein. Wow.

Holy monkey! Could that get any cooler at all?

The moderator will be Patton Oswalt.

In unrelated news, I’m going back to the San Diego Comic-Con this year.

After last time, I swore I never would, but right as I was wondering if maybe it wouldn’t be so bad this year, I got asked if I wanted to go for work. (I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’ve got a cool job.) Now I’ve got another reason to look forward to it.

Espinazo

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It’s an old cliche that Hollywood takes the hard work of creative people and squeezes all of the originality and innovation and intelligence out of it, to dumb it down for the mass market. I never really believed it, though: instead of this big, faceless, creativity-sucking entity, isn’t it easier just to assume that some people just aren’t as talented as others? If a movie like National Treasure is all Hollywood’s fault, then how do movies like The Life Aquatic and Adaptation and Miller’s Crossing get made?

But I’m starting to think that cliche might have something to it, the more movies I see from Guillermo del Toro. This weekend I watched The Devil’s Backbone. Like Pan’s Labyrinth, it was made in Spain. And unlike Mimic, Blade II, and Hellboy, it was very good. Original, innovative, intelligent, and above all, uncompromising. So either del Toro’s talent has been wasted by Hollywood, or he only knows how to make movies set around the Spanish Civil War.

The movie’s weird, not even so much for what it shows but for how it kept turning into something other than what I’d expected. Before it started, I’d thought it was going to be like The Orphanage, another Spanish movie set in a haunted orphanage. But it’s much more interesting than The Orphanage, and it’s a period piece, and it’s not really a ghost story. Except it kind of is, except for when it veers off into melodrama, or character study, or coming-of-age tale. Plus, there’s an explosion.

You can tell that del Toro’s a fan of Mike Mignola, or at least why he’s a fan if he weren’t already before making this movie, because there’s that same feeling of simple stories interwoven with the gothic and gruesome and just plain strange. If I were to describe just the plot, it wouldn’t sound all that compelling, but then you watch the movie and there’s something interesting going on in just about every scene.

The new kid at the orphanage meets the principal — who’s got a half-wooden, half-metal prosthetic leg. He finds a father figure in the kindly old science teacher — who keeps fetuses in glass jars and drinks the liquid when no one’s looking. And he runs into the orphanage’s spooky ghost — who’s called “the one who sighs” by the other kids, and who has a constantly-bleeding wound from the crack in his skull, and is always surrounded by particulate matter as if he were still underwater.

The Devil’s Backbone turned me into a bona fide fan of Guillermo del Toro, and I wish I’d seen it sooner, and now I’m really, really looking forward to Hellboy II this summer. The best I can say about the first Hellboy movie is that it was clear del Toro was a big fan, and while the movie didn’t add much to the character or even really capture the spirit of the comics, it had some good ideas and didn’t do anything awful. But the trailers for the sequel seem to have a better feel for what it is that makes Hellboy cool.

Plus, del Toro’s riding on the success of Pan’s Labyrinth, so I’m thinking he’s got enough clout that he can stand up to the nefarious Hollywood talent-suppression field, and make an American Big Summer Blockbuster that’s as cool as the ones he’s made in Spanish.

Sine intellectus non

Speaking of TV shows: did anybody else understand what the hell was going on with this week’s “Battlestar Galactica?” (Called “Sine Qua Non.”) It felt to me like what would happen if you took all the components of a BSG episode, fed them into a computer:

  • Stand-off at gun-point
  • Apollo makes speech about making tough choices to survive
  • People see things that aren’t there
  • Character thrown in brig
  • Fist fight
  • Idyllic near-death experience
  • Character in brig paces
  • Political discussions
  • Spaceship does faster-than-light jump
  • Mention Raptors and Vipers
  • Return of bit character from past episode
  • Include Starbuck: yes/no

and then hit the “Randomize” button. Okay, we’re good to go! — wait, we didn’t click the “Lucid” checkbox? Damn, too late. Maybe no one will notice.

I was glad to see (spoiler?) Adama admit he totally loves Roslyn 4-ever, but they could’ve done that in a future episode, just by having the Basestar return and find him there in a raptor, reading her book. That’s all they needed. Apart from that and the little revelation that Cylons can indeed get other Cylons pregnant, this seems like a filler episode that could (and should) be easily forgotten.

But Lucy Lawless is back next week, so that’s promising.