The Invisible Library

So, the new trailer for Star Trek is online. It looks like JJ Abrams usual mix of splodey nonsense with a nice thin layer of WTF on top. Why is a 12 year old Captain Kirk driving a sports car off a cliff? And what 12 year old uses his middle name when identifying himself? To a robocop? On a hoverbike? Then there’s angry Spock. And angsty Kirk on his own motorbike driving over to watch the Enterprise being built. On stilts. But hey! Uhura takes her top off and shit blows up all science fiction-like (at the speed of special effects!)

Yeah I know, it’s a trailer, so there’s no real sense of story but just trying to fit all those images and what we know of the plot (time traveling Old Spock and something to do with Grungtastic Romulans) just makes my head hurt in a way that only an amorphous black cloud monster thingy can.

I would have much preferred to ditch the childhood back stories, the angst and the time travel and just told a good old fashioned Star Trek yarn. Reboot the franchise BSG/Casino Royal style, by slicing out the 40 years of crap and giving us a lean, cool future with slick space ships, dazzling battles and a story that questions the frontiers of human knowledge. Oh well, we’ll see if any of this makes sense in May.

When The Dark Knight came out, there were a few bloggers who saw an authoritarian/Conservative bent to the character. Similar things were said about Iron Man being a shill for the Military Industrial Complex and Superman as a tool of Jingoism. Pretty much any super hero movie gets parsed for liberal/conservative bias. And while there are any number of valid ways to interprit a story, looking at super heros throught he lens of poitics always irked me, but I couldn’t quite explain why.* Luckily, John August has given it some thought as well and explains the issue far better than I could:

Efforts to place TDK’s Batman on a real-world political spectrum are doomed. Sure, he’s tough on crime, but he’s also anti-gun. He holds himself outside the law, but destroys his own phone-tapping technology. Is he a Conservative? A Liberal?² A Libertarian?

Nope, he’s just Batman. And as a comic book character, he’s allowed to hold simultaneous incompatible philosophies.

Exactly. Batman can be all these things because he is hyper-real. He’s not a citizen or a politician running for office, he’s a psychologically complex avatar, a stand in we can use to explore larger, slightly abstract concepts about Freedom, Free Will and Justice. If you saw The Dark Knight and all you saw was a Billionaire exercising his authoritarian impulses without restraint, then you were sitting way too close to the screen.

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* Also, Bruce Wayne, Billionaire Playboy would never vote. It’s out of character for the disinterested playboy persona. He can buy whatever freedom he needs, which is a decidedly Republican attitude, but one that would go completely unacted upon, outside of large donations to the popular DA who doesn’t relaly need the gesture. And Batman, while concerned about the plight of the pooor and the disenfranchized, wouldn’t bother pulling the Democrat lever, as he knows all polititians are crooked and fallible.So there.

We’re off to Comic Con tomorrow. Pictures and a full report will be forthcoming!

Elvira and I saw The Dark Knight on Friday and we’re both really impressed. If Batman Begins was the film that Batman’s Mythology deserved, a crystalline compilation of everything great about the character with the excess fat of seventy years of history trimmed off, then The Dark Knight continues the story, as if it was simply Act 2. In several ways, I’m not entirely sure how Christopher Nolan convinced DC/Warner to let him make such a dark series of films but good on him for pulling it off. Both films work seamlessly as a whole but his film especially takes a long hard look at where the boundaries of civilization and civilized behavior lie. Not exactly the stuff of a Summer popcorn superhero movie. And that’s a good thing. You want that, go see Iron Man. But if your looking for a really, really dark view into what makes humans want to fight and define right and wrong, this is the film for you.

As usual, some spoilers may leak out.

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The Incredible Hulk was better than I thought it would be and much better than Ang Lee’s Hulk. It ties into the mythology of the Marvel Universe well, setting up ideas like the Super Soldier program, eluding to Captain America and tying in nicely with a cameo by Tony Stark. The story was pretty well done and the big ‘ol fistfight between Hulk and Abomination was fun. And really, in a Hulk film, that’s all anyone is looking for. The film works better as a link in a larger story, building towards The Avengers, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

To my surprise, Kung Fu Panda is a really good movie. It looked kinda dumb form the posters and the trailer made it look like a decent kid film but it has a lot of heart, a very solid story and some first-rate animation. Really beautiful. The writers walked fearlessly into a story about following your dreams, loving who you are, and appreciating your family, whatever shape it comes in, and turning these into real character moments without being too sentimental. It’s hard to do this in any film and next to impossible in an animated family movie. But they did it, making the best movie about talking animals who do Kung Fu you’ll see all year.

I’m not going to see The Happening, as I’ve given up on Shyamalan. He has a certain craftsmanship behind the camera and can come up with interesting if ill thought-out concepts but the man can’t tell a story to save his life. From what I’ve read so far, this one isn’t any better than Signs, which I discussed at length earlier. Pass.

John Scalzi wants to know why so many classic sci-fi films suck so bad:

It’s strange that such legitimately bad films are considered classic, but there are reasons. The first, I regret to say, is that for a very long time — from just after 1927’s Metropolis through 1968’s 2001 – the number of truly good science fiction films could be counted on one’s fingers. So the entire genre is graded on a curve. But the other thing is that science fiction films — like science fiction literature — value the idea over the idea’s delivery system. So if you deliver a 150-foot reptile who is the embodiment of the mid-20th Century fear of nuclear annihilation (like Gojira), or tap into the Baby Boomer terror of the death of its own beautiful youth (a la Logan’s Run), you can get away with letting a lot of other stuff slide, like plot, acting and production design.

Science fiction is a genre of ideas, but that’s still no excuse for shoddy production levels. And while I disagree about Gojira,* he does have a point: an awful lot of sci-fi films coast by on cool factor with hardly an effort at all given towards making it a good film. Sadly, this hasn’t really changed. Just because A list actors like to take a workman’s holiday and slick CG is now affordable, it doesn’t mean the widespread use of either as plot caulk makes the new crop of sci-fi films better than their rubber monster and stiff B actor progenitors.

We could just tally it up to Sturgeon’s Law, that 90% of everything is crap. But there’s more to it than that.

For many years, sci-fi was ostracized as kiddie fare. These were films to occupy the youngsters and if they taught a ham fisted moral along the way, all the better. It would keep the RIAA off their back and let the studio have the wiggle room to get that new starlet’s top off. For dramatic reasons, of course. Hollywood didn’t want to spend money or time investing in science fiction when their was adult drama to be made. And if a few weirdos back in the early days of cinema made some art out of sci-fi, well that was an accident. Let’s not let it happen again. It took the likes of Kubrick and the success of Star Wars to let Hollywood execs know that there was money to be made in science fiction. But they have yet to grasp that their can also be artistic gain from making good science fiction rather than just summertime cash cow action movies with vaguely science fictiony elements. And they won’t until some weirdo director’s sci-fi pet project wins an Oscar for something other than costumes or make-up.

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* The Godzilla films have their own unique aesthetic. The amateur effects and implausible biology are part of that, not a detractor form it. Godzilla is a pop art fever dream. It’s what goes on in your subconscious after coming down from a sugar and caffeine high and falling asleep in the clothes you wore to the amusement park. It jangles and unnerves and works under its own weird logic, like a Warhol painting or a Dada exhibition. It’s mythology and so doesn’t have to play by George Lucus’ or Stanly Kubrick’s rules.

We saw Indiana Jones and the [place] of the [spooky noun] Friday night and were amused enough not to get up and leave so I guess it was alright. I had medium expectations going in and they were met. I stopped expecting artistry from Lucus and Spielberg ages ago and now settle for passable craft form them and their plug and play lackeys. All was in order. The Koepp Scriptwriting software turned out a by-the-numbers story with no surprises that weren’t on the “so dumb I can’t believe they did that” end of the spectrum. The characters were slightly more than two dimensional (ranging between 2.2 and 2.8) and the egregious CG effects were kept to the animal kingdom, so no real foul can be called.

Spielberg has mastered the skill of keeping you engaged in a movie just long enough to make it to the credits. Maybe this has always been his gift. Not genius or even exceptional craftsmanship, but just good enough cinema-making skills to make an entertaining way to waste a few hours. There are worse skill sets to have. Though it is kind of sad that the trailer for The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor looks more like an Indiana Jones movie than the actual Indiana Jones movie we saw.

But there’s no way for Spielberg to deliver on that sort of expectation. He, Lucus and Ford spent the last 18 years twiddling their thumbs and in the meantime, the movies changed. The audience changed. Some of that was Spielberg and Lucus’ doing but how sad is it that they were beaten at the game they invented?

I would have liked a better Indiana Jones movie but got the Crystal Skull instead. It wasn’t socks for Christmas but neither was it the BB gun I wanted. “That’s OK,” says Steven Spielberg. “A better movie would have just put your eye out anyway.”

Kate Blanchett clearly had fun with her Lulu wig and Russian accent. And hay, swords! Shia The Beef got to be in a movie with Harrison Ford. His Erdos-Bacon number just went up. Seeing Karen Allen again was great. Wish there had been more for her to do than drive a truck off a cliff but hay, I’m sure John Hurt wanted to be more than just a walking, babbling treasure map. No Joy, John. This is a Koepp script and there simply is no room for that much characterization.

There’s much to be said about the plot holes, the silly aliens and magic of magnetic crystal skulls, CG ants that look like killer M&Ms and those silly, silly monkeys. But why bother? See the movie. Enjoy your two hours and then try not to be bitter as you leave the theater. It is after all, only a movie.

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* He could be a world class pianist and Soviet History specialist put in charge of managing the foreign policy of the world’s only empire, fighting a pitched battle against an asymmetrical foe that is neither Soviet (or even Russian!) and wouldn’t know an F from a G sharp. Steven Spielberg is no Condi Rice, that’s for sure. George Lucus may be the cinematic equivalent of Donald Rumsfeld though. The case is still pending.

Via Jezebel, in their regular parade of Hollywood Hookers, Victims and Doormats, we have this observation from Randall Munroe of XKCD:

There were about 110 movies with a male lead and 5 with a female lead. Of the second-billed females, nearly all are written as love interests of the first-billed man. There were over sixty movies in the sample with two male stars top-billed. The only movies with two top-billed female roles, on the other hand, were The Devil Wears Prada and Scary Movie 4.

My cousin has been working on tallying (by hand!) all movies with two top-billed female stars. She reports that there are staggeringly few of them, and the roles fall mainly in two genres: mother-daughter bonding movies and horror films.  Hollywood is not creating female heroes.

This is seriously fucked up. But you know who’s to blame? Marketing.

Once you accept the Golden Demographic* as axiomatic, all your rationalizing is done for you with statistics. Which of course is the way to make art and entertain people. Who doesn’t long for the sweet freedom form the tyranny of story telling and compelling drama? More explosions! That’s what males, age 18 to 34 want! and who are we to say no to the demands of the Market? OK, we’ll throw a chic in there but only if we can see her boobs and let the camera linger on her ass.

Randal, being the super genius that he is, has the solution: Summer Glau kicking Dick Chenney in the face. Not only would I pay full price to see that, I’d buy it on DVD. Twice.

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* Ever wonder who came up with the stupid Baby Boomer/Gen X idea? Demographers. It’s so they can use our memories and tribal affiliations to better sell us crap we don’t need.

Over at io9, theres an interesting discussion as to why most movies about going to Mars turn out to be either boring as all get out, or a tedious rehashing of pulp sci-fi tropes from eons past. I made the observation in comments there that boiled down the answer to two basic concepts: 1) doing Mars realistically is boring. and 2) this leads to ancient alien artifacts and time travel, which dumps us into pulp hell. The caveat being that, unless your source material was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and you just go for it, naked sword fights and all, it’s going to blow.

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Fidel Castro has resigned as Supreme Grand Poobah or whatever of Cuba. Yippee. His hip younger brother, Raul Castro Ruz, 77, will take over and maybe Fidel will start blogging or something.

Not to belittle the plight of the Cuban people under that horrible dictator Fidel, but, really the man wasn’t a complete monster. Swap out a Castro here and there, so long as the US maintains its embargo, not much is going to change there. Crippling poverty and a complete and total lack of freedom. Or The US under President McCain.

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