Tag: Movies

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100 Characters

Roger points out that Entertainment Weekly did another of their “list” things, this time the “100 Greatest Characters of the last 20 years”. I don’t much like EW, but their lists are usually good for a blog post or two, so I’ll just reproduce their list with comment on the entries. (Now, I’m not reading the actual EW article, so I’m not sure of their criteria.)

1. Homer Simpson. While I can’t quibble with the placement, I call foul in that Homer Simpson first showed up more than 20 years ago, and therefore should not be eligible.

2. Harry Potter. On the basis of Homer’s ineligibility, Harry should be Number One. Not just a cultural phenomenon, but Harry’s also a great character, and one of the pleasures of the books is watching him grow.

3. Buffy Summers. I really need to watch Buffy one of these years, in its entirety. I always liked what I saw when I caught sporadic episodes here and there.

4. Tony Soprano. Meh. I know lots of folks liked this, but it wasn’t my cup of tea.

5. The Joker (The Dark Knight). Not sure about the eligibility here, either. This was a new take on a very old character, not a new character. Great performance, but this also seems a bit high to me.

6. Rachel Green (Friends). This high? I dearly loved Friends and it was huge in its day, but for whatever reason it hasn’t had much staying power. But then, maybe we’re a little too soon yet for 1990s nostalgia. It’s taken this long for overalls to start coming back into style, after all.

7. Edward Scissorhands. This high on the list? Really? (This movie was my first date with The At-the-time Future Wife. Love the movie, but I’m not sure I’d put Edward this high up.)

8. Hannibal Lecter. Again, shouldn’t be eligible. Silence of the Lambs, which came out in 1991, was an adaptation of a book that was several years old. Yes, Anthony Hopkins cemented Lecter in our cultural mind, but that’s not the same thing.

9. Carrie Bradshaw (Sex and the City). I never watched this show. She wore overalls a lot, though, from what I’ve seen.

10. Spongebob Squarepants. Sure, why not?

11. Cosmo Kramer. Absolutely!

12. Fox Mulder & Dana Scully (The X-Files). Two characters as one? Huh? A great duo isn’t a great character. Both are great characters.

13. Jack Sparrow (Pirates of the Caribbean). Come on, EW! It’s Captain Jack Sparrow.

14. Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski (The Big Lebowski). I need to see this.

15. Shrek. Sure, why not?

16. Bridget Jones. Maybe. I know nothing about her.

17. Lara Croft. OK, maybe.

18. Sue Sylvester (Glee). I don’t know why, but I cannot get into Glee. I’ve watched it a bunch of times, and every single time, I bounce off it. So no from me.

19. Morpheus (The Matrix). Ummmm…I’m on the fence, here. Laurence Fishburne’s performance was terrific, but the character’s really your basic Mentor character in a Campbellian hero journey tale.

20. Ally McBeal. I hated that show. Hated it, and mostly because I tend to hate the people in David Kelley’s shows. So no.

21. Rosanne Conner (Roseanne). Hated the character. Hated the show. And she debuted in 1988, so not eligible, anyway.

22. Eric Cartman (South Park). OK, I guess. I can’t believe the show’s still on, but “Respect mah authoritah!” and “Screw you guys, I’m going home” are always good lines to have at one’s disposal.

23. Austin Powers. Sure.

24. Felicity Porter. Huh? Seriously? The show wasn’t that great…but then, EW is pretty firmly in the camp of worshipping everything JJ Abrams touches. I’m surprised they haven’t put a LOST character on the list yet.

25. Woody (Toy Story). Absolutely! But I wonder how many Pixar characters I’ll find on this list. Pixar does character better than anybody. I’m hard-pressed to think of a badly done character in any of their films.

26. Kavalier & Clay (from Michael Chabon’s novel). Again, a duo is not a character. A great book, though.

27. Frasier Crane. Not eligible! He first appeared on Cheers in the 1980s!

28. Madea. I have no idea who she is. Pardon me whilst I Wiki-search…hmmmm…wow. I’ve never heard of any of this. It’s always amazing how certain cultural items can slide by you so completely and utterly. This feels like something I should at least know about, and yet, nothing at all.

29. Vincent Vega & Jules Winnfield (Pulp Fiction). All right, EW, grab your chalk and write “Duos are not characters” 50 times on the blackboard. Both are great characters.

30. Stephen Colbert (in the persona he portrays on his show). Huh. Wouldn’t have thought of him as a character, but yup!

31. Forrest Gump. He’s a great character, but the 1994 movie is based on a 1988 book. Not eligible.

32. Beavis and Butt-Head. OK, here’s a legitimate exception to the “Duos are not characters” rule, simply because they are never shown in any light other than interacting with one another and they are cut from the same cloth.

33. Sarah Connor (Terminator 2). No, because it’s a sequel to a 1984 movie! Not eligible!

34. Cher (Clueless). No idea; never saw it.

35. Dexter Morgan (Dexter). No idea; never saw it.

36. Gollum (Lord of the Rings). So obviously not eligible that it boggles the mind. Yes, he’s an amazing film-making creation in the movies, but the movies do not create the character.

37. Kyser Söze (The Usual Suspects). He’s a Macguffin and a plot-trick all in one. I wouldn’t even consider him a character. (And besides, the movie is crap.)

38. Elmo (Sesame Street). Not eligible. He’s been around forever. Sure, he’s become huge more recently, but that’s not the same thing.

39. GOB Bluth (Arrested Development). I never really watched this show, so I don’t know.

40. Ron Burgundy (Anchorman). OK, I guess. I loved the movie.

41. Harold and Kumar. Never saw the movie, so I can’t comment on whether they’re enough of a single entity to qualify under the “Beavis-and-Butthead Exception”.

42. Sydney Bristow (Alias). I was never really impressed with the show, so no.

43. Cal Stephanides (the novel Middlesex). No idea; never read it.

44. Jack Bauer – 24. Absolutely. In fact, he should probably be higher; Bauer was really a great pop cultural summation of the entire decade of the 2000s.

45. Stewie Griffin (Family Guy). OK, yes. The parts of that show that actually make me laugh always seem to involve either Stewie or Brian, the talking dog.

46. Jerry Maguire. Sure.

47. Corky St. Clair (Waiting for Guffman). Not a clue.

48. Red (The Shawshank Redemption). Not eligible…Stephen King’s original story was published in 1982.

49. Vivian Ward (Pretty Woman). Meh. The hooker with a heart of gold?

50. Pearl the Landlord. I have zero idea who this is.

51. Omar Little (The Wire). I’ve never watched The Wire. It doesn’t look like my cup of tea.

52. Annie Wilkes (Misery). Novel published in 1987. Ineligible.

53. Edward Cullen. No. No no no a thousand times no. Great popularity does not equal great character. Edward Cullen is a creepy and abusive stalker.

54. Juno (Juno). Sure.

55. Tracy Jordan (30 Rock). Sure, OK.

56. Barney Stinson (How I Met Your Mother). Sure, OK. I’d probably love the show if I could get beyond my irrational loathing of Bob Saget.

57. Clayton Bigsby. No idea who he is.

58. Thelma & Louise. DUOS ARE NOT CHARACTERS!

59. Master Chief (Halo). Not a clue.

60. Mary Jones (Precious). Never saw it.

61. Vic Mackey (The Shield). Never saw it.

62. Jimmy Corrigan (Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth). I’ve had this on my shelf for years. I suppose I should actually read it some day….

63. John Locke (Lost). I’m surprised that they didn’t put him higher than this. Never gave the tiniest crap about the character (one reason I never much liked LOST is that I didn’t like the characters), but it was great seeing Terry O’Quinn get a chance to show what a great actor he’s been for years.

64. Maximus (Gladiator). Huh. OK, I guess.

65. Lorelai & Rory Gilmore (Gilmore Girls). I’ve only seen a few episodes and enjoyed them. But DUOS ARE NOT CHARACTERS.

66. Allie & Noah (The Notebook). DUOS ARE NOT CHARACTERS.

67. Borat. Yes!

68. Effie White (Dreamgirls). Never saw it Probably should.

69. Miranda Priestly (The Devil Wears Prada).

70. Mary Katherine Gallagher (SNL). Erm…meh.

71. Det. Alonzo Harris (Training Day). Never saw it.

72. Kara “Starbuck” Thrace (Battlestar Galactica). OK, we’re testing my standards of eligibility here. I’m going to allow it, even though BSG is based on a show from 1978. Why? Because the re-imagining was so extensive that the newer Starbuck can really only be said to be based on the original character in name only.

73. Catherine Tramell (Basic Instinct). No. One iconic film moment — we know the one — does not a great character make. She’s pretty much a cipher in the movie, a character on which to hang plot stuff. She’s a female Keyser Soze, and he’s not a character, either.

74. Don Draper (Mad Men). Never saw it, but sure.

75. David Brent (The Office – original from the UK). You bet!

76. Tyler Durden (Fight Club). I didn’t like the movie, but that was more of a “cup of tea” thing than any obvious flaws I could point out — I found it very well-made and interesting, but ultimately unpleasant.

77. Mimi Marquez (Rent). Never saw it.

78. Patty Hewes (Damages). Never saw it, either.

79. Elphaba (Wicked). Never saw the musical or read the book. We’re hoping to see the show when it comes to Buffalo again next May, though.

80. Gorillaz, the world’s greatest virtual band. No idea what they are.

81. Amanda Woodward (Melrose Place). Meh. Didn’t like the show much.

82. Tracy Flick (Election). Didn’t see it.

83. Jen Yu (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). I’ve seen parts of this movie. I should rectify that.

84. House (House). Yes!

85. Daniel Plainview (There Will Be Blood). Never saw it.

86. Karen Walker & Jack McFarland (Will & Grace). DUOS ARE NOT CHARACTERS!

87. Tony Stark (Iron Man). Not eligible. I’m not even going to bother Googling when Iron Man first showed up in comics, since I read him as a kid.

88. Napoleon Dynamite. I should probably see this.

89. Wilkus van de Merwe (District 9). This too.

90. Marge Gunderson (Fargo). Absolutely! Strange thing — she’s too good a character to be contained in just one movie, and yet, a sequel would just seem kinda dorky, you know?

91. Hancock (Hancock). Never saw it, but I have a hard time seeing this on the list.

92. Christopher Boone (The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-Time). I know nothing about this.

93. “Game Boys”: Nathan Drake – Uncharted, Kratos – God of War, Niko Bellic – Grand Theft Auto IV. I have no idea what this is talking about.

94. Truman (The Truman Show). Sure. This movie seems underrated to me these days.

95. Wilhelmina Slater (Ugly Betty). Not sure; I only saw one or two episodes of this show and wasn’t all that thrilled by it.

96. Bernie Mac (The Bernie Mac Show). Meh. Wasn’t really my cup of tea.

97. Violet Weston (August: Osage County). Not a clue.

98. Lisbeth Salander (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Not a clue.

99. The Bride (Kill Bill). I haven’t seen the whole thing. I’m not sure how good a character she is. How many dimensions of character are there in this blood-soaked violence fantasy?

100. Tim Riggins (Friday Night Lights). Meh…the few episodes I saw didn’t knock me over.

OK, so there’s the list. Again, I didn’t read any of EW‘s commentary, but it seems pretty clear that they’re judging things on the basis of when characters became Big Cultural Things as opposed to when they originated, but that seems to be splitting hairs to me. Sure, Frasier Crane became a lot bigger when he had his own hit show, but he wasn’t exactly a bit part on Cheers — it’s not like they made a juggernaut hit out of Harry the Hat, for example. This is how they’re able to choose Tony Stark (not the most famous of Marvel superheroes) and not Spiderman or Wolverine (who were hugely famous long before they showed up in movies).

Better, in my view, to select characters only created since 1990. Sure, way more people know who Gollum is by virtue of the LOTR movies, but it’s not as if the books were obscurities known only to a small number of cultists and fanboys. It may be fun to view fantasy and science fiction fandom as something of a small ghetto, but consider: the LOTR books have been in print for more than half a century. I see no logical argument to be made that Gollum is a character of the “last 20 years”. If we’re restricting ourselves to movie characters, then maybe, but EW didn’t do that.

And of course, there are some other quibbles as well, as I note throughout. EW‘s list is wildly skewed toward what’s popular as opposed to what’s good, which leads to stuff like Edward Cullen being on there. And the whole thing of counting couples or duos as single characters really bugged the crap out of me; there’s really only one duo on there, Beavis and Butthead, that can be considered, for me, a single character entity (although Harold and Kumar might well qualify as well).

And then there are the simple omissions from the list: characters who most absolutely certainly ought to have been there. Here are just a few, tossed off the top of my head:

President Josiah Bartlet. An intelligent character, smart as a whip, and depicted as being governed by very strong moral principles that he nevertheless ignores at times. He’s a very human character.

Captain Malcolm Reynolds. I’ll take him over any character in any teevee series ever helmed by JJ Abrams.

Severus Snape. The way JK Rowling handled Snape over the years was nothing short of brilliant — we never knew, until there were mere pages left in the last book, whether he was a villain or not. And even when that question was finally answered, his motivations turned out to have been deeply complex. He’s a terribly underrated character, in my view.

Pixar characters: Mr. Incredible. Wall-E. The old guy in Up. And since they liked duos so much, I’m surprised they didn’t pair Woody with Buzz Lightyear, or include Marlin and Dory.

Captain Barbossa. They have Captain Jack Sparrow up there, but a good adventure movie can only become a great adventure movie by virtue of its villain, and Barbossa’s one of the best.

Jack Dawson. I know, we’ve culturally agreed that we can only sneer at Titanic these days, but I don’t.

Lieutenant John J. Dunbar. Same thing with Dances With Wolves.

Hayao Miyazaki characters: Ashitaka, San, Chihiro. And more.

Gil Grissom. He was so cool back when CSI was new.

If they’re including duos and some very recent characters, where are Castle and Beckett? (Not that I’m including duos, but I’d have Castle and Beckett on there separately.)

I wasn’t a huge Law and Order fan, but when the show’s cancellation was recently announced, just about every blog post or article online I saw about it mentioned Jerry Orbach’s long-running character, Detective Lennie Briscoe. That seems a good addition, to me.

Dr. Perry Cox from Scrubs; Dr. John Carter from ER. Also from The West Wing, Donnatella Moss and CJ Cregg. And from my beloved Once and Again, Rick Sammler and Lily Manning.

OK, that’s it.

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“Now that’s what I call a close encounter.”

The Daughter and I watched Independence Day last week. It’s the first time I’ve watched the entire movie in ages, and my impressions haven’t changed one bit. I’ve never been one for the idea of “guilty pleasures”, which I take to mean “Things you like even though you know you shouldn’t”; why should I ever think I shouldn’t like something that I already like? Makes no sense to me…but Independence Day (or, famously and quite oddly, ID4 for short) is about as close as I come to having a real guilty pleasure. I like the movie a lot, and yet, there’s so much that’s wrong with it!

(Hmmm, in that sense, it’s not unlike Star Trek 2009 in that regard.)

ID4 is a movie that piles plot hole after plot hole on top of implausibility after implausibility. It’s a movie that posits the horrible deaths of tens of millions of human beings on Earth, and yet is lots of fun to watch. It’s a movie that has the President of the United States personally leading the fighter plane attack on the alien ship at the end of the film, hours after he’s watched his wife die. There is so much stuff in ID4 that doesn’t make sense in any way, and yet the movie is so well-made that it almost never matters. It’s the Teflon movie. I can sit here and rattle off a long list of things that are wrong with it, and yet, when I watch it I get excited at President Whitmore’s cheesy “St. Crispin’s Day” speech; I laugh when the Defense Secretary has to speak up and tell the President that yes, there is an Area 51; I choke up with cropduster pilot Russell Case sacrifices himself to destroy the aliens; et cetera.

I assume anyone reading this far into this post remembers the plot of ID4: aliens attack earth, blowing up city after city while humanity reels. A plucky group of survivors, including the President of the United States, gathers at Area 51, where they figure out how to strike back against an enemy whose ships all have impenetrable shields. Finally the resident computer genius (Jeff Goldblum, of course) figures out how he can use his 1995 Apple Powerbook to infect the entire alien fleet with a computer virus that will lower the shields, and the humans attack. Lots of explodey-spaceshippy-goodness ensues.

I got the DVD out of the library, not realizing that it was one of those “Revised Director’s Cuts” that put about ten minutes or so of stuff back into the cut, so while watching the movie, I kept realizing I was seeing scenes I hadn’t seen before. In some cases, those scenes actually helped smooth over some of the plot holes.

Some random thoughts from the recent viewing of ID4, then:

:: It’s interesting that the film goes out of its way to avoid establishing whether President Thomas Whitmore is a Democrat or a Republican. I have no idea, and based on the evidence in the movie, I couldn’t even hazard a guess.

:: Implausibility watch: Of all the geniuses who are surely working on analyzing the aliens’ signals and transmissions, only the cable teevee genius in New York (Goldblum) is able to figure out that they’re running a countdown?

:: Early on, as the Mother Ship is entering orbit, an Earth satellite is destroyed when the mother ship moves into its orbital path. I never noticed before, but the satellite has “CCCP” painted on its outside. Is that actually supposed to be the Mir space station?

:: Implausibility watch #2: In the event of massive public panic in the largest cities in the world, it’s still possible to drive from NYC to Washington, DC in less than seven hours. (The “Director’s Cut” adds back a bit of footage that shows the drive being less easy than it appeared in the original cut, but it’s still hard to buy.)

:: Implausibility watch #3: One of the closest advisors to the President of the United States would really keep her cell phone number listed “for emergencies”? What kind of emergency would that be? In the original cut, when David (Goldblum) calls Connie (Margaret Colin) on her cell, her first words are, “How did you get this number?” I’ve always thought that odd, since she keeps it listed! But the Director’s Cut fleshes this out a bit, with David having to look up the number, but realizing that she hasn’t listed it under her current real name. (She used his last name, as she is his ex-wife, but she didn’t take his name when they were married.) This still doesn’t explain how it would be useful to her to be listed in the phone book under a different name, but the movie was written and made in 1995 when cell phones were only starting to really take off, so I’ll give them a pseudo-pass on this. It always stands out, though.

:: A couple of additional scenes with Russell Case (Randy Quaid), the drunken cropduster, establish that he didn’t actually father those kids but married their mother. (At least one of them, anyway.) This explains the somewhat troubled relationship between Russell and Miguel, the oldest kid. The scenes also establish that the younger boy is sickly and needs constant “medicine”.

:: Implausibility watch #4: So, Capt. Steven Hiller (Will Smith) can apparently deliver a punch so hard that it knocks the alien unconscious even through the protection of his “biomechanical suit”, and it knocks him out for hours. Although, we do see Hiller later on kicking the crap out of the alien when he gets frustrated, so maybe he’s been periodically beating on the alien in the interim. Plus, the alien is no doubt injured from his crash landing. And besides, it’s a cool moment on screen anyway — Hiller has about half-a-second of “Yeesh, what the hell is that?!” reaction when he first sees the alien, and then he punches it out. Yee haw!

:: Implausibility watch #5: Area 51 has been kept secret for decades, but Capt. Hiller knows it’s there because he saw it while he was flying over it at top speed trying to evade fire from an alien spaceship. Sure!

:: Implausibility watch #6: Backing up a bit, the fire-wave in the tunnel should have killed Jasmine (Vivica Fox). Why would it sweep past an open closet without filling it with flamey-goodness?

:: Added scenes: We get to see a bit of where Dr. Okun (Brent Spiner) is showing David what they’ve learned about the alien technology. There’s even a line in there about computer compatibility, which I suppose is intended to make the stuff about the computer virus later on feel a bit less hand-wavey. Does it work? Maybe.

:: Implausibility watch #7: Capt. Hiller suddenly decides to grab a helicopter and fly off to his old air base so he can…what? Why does he do this? Sure, it enables him to reunite with girlfriend Jasmine, who has also coincidentally found the injured First Lady, but seriously, why does Hiller fly there? This makes zero sense.

:: Unnecessary developments: I can’t imagine how the death of the First Lady is in any way necessary, except to end the film’s second act on as down a note as possible so the third act can be all about redemption and whatnot. It still feels to me like a narrative cheat: the First Lady is injured badly, she barely gets to the company of doctors in time…to die anyway? This is the part of the movie I like least, actually.

:: Implausibility watch #8: Yeah, the computer virus. Sure, fine, whatever. I’ve made my peace with it. Still, like I said a couple months back, it makes me wonder how a sequel might work.

:: OK, have the aliens made zero modifications to their ships in fifty years since that scout ship crashed at Roswell, NM? Hiller and Levenson (the Goldblum character) fly that ship up to the mothership, which allows it to dock and then ignores it until it’s trying to fly away again, and only then do the aliens investigate that ship? The alien control-room guy doesn’t think, “Hmmmm, according to records, that ship’s been gone for fifty years. Should look into that.”

:: Implausibility watch #9: Not so much an implausibility, but I always wondered why, instead of a massive fighter attack, they didn’t wait until the shields were down and then nuke the alien ships. Fifty ships worldwide means fifty nukes.

:: The fighters sure waste their missiles by firing them at enemy fighters instead of concentrating them on the big ships, don’t they? Especially later on, when it turns out that the fighters’ machine guns can also blow up the enemy fighters. Why didn’t they use the machine guns on the fighters in the first place? Then maybe they’re not down to exactly one missile when it comes time to take out the big ship’s “primary weapon”.

:: Had Bill Pullman played his cards right, he really could have become the heir apparent to William Shatner as King of Geek Cool. Instead, fourteen years after ID4, Nathan Fillion is Crown Prince to The Shat. Kind of sad…but Pullman’s performance as the President is all kinds of geek-masculine cool, especially with lines like “Hang on, General. I want another shot at it!” and “We need to give Mr. Case some cover, Gentlemen, let’s plow the road!” Great stuff, there.

:: I remember noticing Devon Gummersall’s name in the credits when I saw the movie the first time, and I didn’t remember him in the movie. He’d been cut, it turns out. He shows up in the Director’s Cut in two fairly forgettable scenes. (Gummersall was the kid with the stringy blond curly hair, Brian Krakow, who had the unrequited crush on Claire Danes’s Angela Chase in My So-Called Life, which was made two years before ID4.)

:: I’ve always wondered why a single nuclear missile would destroy the entire alien mother ship, which we’ve been told is “one fourth the size of Earth’s moon”. There’s no shot of that missile hitting the mother ship’s reactor or anything, just the missile, sitting stuck in the wreckage of the last wall it punched through. I assume the writers did this because otherwise you’d still have millions of aliens ready to invade Earth, but still….

:: Why, with widespread panic about an alien invasion taking place, would The McLaughlin Group still be on teevee?

:: Hey! Assuming that the aliens have been blowing up major cities in order of population, I have to think there’d be a good sporting chance that Buffalo would still be intact after the aliens have been destroyed at the end. And heck, if being one of the only cities still standing after the defeat of an alien invasion can’t help the Buffalo economy rebound, then nothing can!

:: And yet, after all that, what a fun movie!

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“Think they’ll have THAT on the tour?!”

After some debating as to whether or not she was ready for it, The Wife and I decided to take a plunge as regards The Daughter.

We watched Jurassic Park with her.

Which she promptly pronounced “very unscary” at the end.

Oh well. She got a kick out of the dinosaurs, at any rate.

I had to see Jurassic Park twice before I really appreciated it. The first time I saw it, I was living in Allegany, NY. At the time, there were only four movie screens in the town: three at the local mall (which were the nicer theaters), and one at a theater on the grounds of a local hotel called The Castle (which has long since been demolished).

The Castle Theater was…well, there’s no other way to describe it. It was an awful place to see a movie. In fact, several years later, I would decide to simply stop seeing movies there at all, and if something came to town that I wanted to see and that’s where it played, I’d go to Buffalo to see it instead. What was wrong with the Castle Theater? Well, so many things. First, it was run by a single employee. This fellow would sell some tickets until the concession line got too long, at which point he would slide over and sell some stuff over there. Then he’d go back to tickets when that line started piling up. And so on.

And he’d sell tickets or popcorn for so long that the movie would invariably start late. Sometimes it would start very late. I remember one movie starting thirty minutes late, because the single employee was still selling tickets and Cokes. He couldn’t get away from the counter to perform his third duty: running the damned projector. Ugh.

That was bad enough, but the Castle committed other awful Crimes Against Cinema. If you’ve read Roger Ebert for any length of time, you’ve seen one of his rants against theater operators who try to pinch pennies by turning down the brightness on the bulbs in their projectors. This results in daytime scenes that look like they’re taking place at sunset, and night-time scenes that are very hard to follow. In addition to that, they would keep the volume way down in that place, so movies tended to be very hard to hear during quieter segments. This tended to really hurt Jurassic Park because (a) the entire middle act takes place at night, (b) the film’s dialog mix is quite soft to begin with and occasionally characters are talking at the same time, and (c) because the projector could be heard whirring away during all but the loudest scenes.

So the theatrical presentation made Jurassic Park a very hard film to enjoy, so much so that my second viewing took place in a Buffalo theater. And it was almost revelatory: entire plot points suddenly made sense, and instead of a murky scene involving a giant blob, the T-Rex sequence became sharp and visible and, as a result, pretty harrowing.

At this point, I don’t have anything terribly new to say about Jurassic Park. Jeff Goldblum has all the best lines, and for some weird reason, I always thought that Laura Dern gets prettier and prettier throughout the film, as she gets dirtier and sweatier. (I don’t know what that says about me.) Sam Neill is always fun, as is Wayne Knight. Its effects hold up extremely well, and are enhanced by the fact that the film was made when CGI was only just becoming very powerful, so not every effects shot actually used it. For some reason, it struck me that no one in the film carries a cell phone. The kids in the movie are OK — not Spielberg’s best urchins, but not awful, either. Jurassic Park was an event movie when it came out, but now, nearly twenty years on, it’s what it always was: a very competent monster movie.

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Blofeld should have run a movie studio

It appears that the troubled times at MGM have claimed a victim: James Bond. MGM has been on the selling block for a while, and yet no one has stepped up to buy the studio, so their ability to develop projects is pretty much toast right now.

Here’s hoping this situation is resolved sooner rather than later, what with the Bond franchise having received an enormous creative rejuvenation in the last couple of films (and having found a terrific actor in Daniel Craig as Bond to boot).

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De-rez!

SamuraiFrog points this out: a very well-made trailer for the movie TRON, the original 1982 classic, using only footage from the movie but edited in the style of trailers these days:

Compare with the actual original trailer from 1982:

Trailers have sure come a long way, haven’t they?

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Welcome to Earth!

I see at AICN that a sequel or two to Independence Day may be in the works. Such a project has long been rumored; this has been on-again, off-again ever since the original movie came out in 1996 and did lots of business. I actually loved ID4 and I still think it’s just amazingly fun to watch (note to self: show ID4 to the kid), even though its plot doesn’t make one bit of sense, even before Jeff Goldblum defeats the aliens with his Macintosh Powerbook.

Of course, that makes you wonder how the sequel would go:

ALIENS: We’re back, Earthlings! Bwaaa-haa-hahahaha!

JEFF GOLDBLUM: Oh, you guys again. Take this!

Jeff pulls out his iPhone and dances his fingers across its touchscreen for all of five seconds. Almost immediately the alien ships start dropping out of the sky like flies.

ALIENS: SSSHHHIIITTT….

But I digress. While reading the news item quoted on AICN, something stood out for me:

IESB has received a tip that Will Smith is now locked for not only Independence Day 2, but also a third installment. The plan would be to shoot both films back-to-back. Whether the studio opts to go the Matrix route and release the two films six months apart or do like the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels and split them by a year remains to be seen. According to our sources, if all goes according to plan, the sequel(s) could shoot as early as 2011.

This would be Emmerich’s next directorial endeavor after his William Shakespeare thriller Anonymous. This would also come after Will Smith’s next (which will be either The City That Sailed or Men in Black 3). So this wouldn’t interfere with those projects.

Did you catch that?

This would be Emmerich’s next directorial endeavor after his William Shakespeare thriller Anonymous. This would also come after Will Smith’s next (which will be either The City That Sailed or Men in Black 3). So this wouldn’t interfere with those projects.

Wait…what? A William Shakespeare thriller? As in, the Bard as some kind of action hero?

Huh-whuh?!

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Why so serious?

A while back, The Wife and I watched The Dark Knight. What did we think of it?

Well, The Dark Knight is certainly a good movie, but wow, it’s dark. Really dark. It’s a grim, grim, grim movie. It’s so grim that when The Wife and I finally watched it recently, we each liked it but we each also felt the need to decompress after with a couple of episodes of Mad About You. There is almost no humor in The Dark Knight, which may seem kind of ironic, considering that the villain this time out is the Joker, but then, the film also understands that there’s nothing funny at all about the Joker. That’s something the first Tim Burton batfilm didn’t really understand, to that film’s detriment. Who, watching that movie, didn’t find the Joker just a bit awesome and fun? The Dark Knight gives us a Joker whose jokes just aren’t funny in the slightest, because they almost invariably involve someone dying horribly.

I don’t have a lot to say about the movie that hasn’t been written before. I’m actually not the biggest fan of Batman around, and I’ve never found Batman to be the eternal source of Awesome that many do. I like the character’s somewhat grim background, but lots of characters have grim backgrounds, and it always seems to me that Bruce Wayne’s background is pretty contradictory — he’s able to build this enormous business empire despite a near total lack of ability to sustain any kind of human relationship. I don’t know, but there’s always something about Bruce Wayne that makes me want to slap him and say, “Jeez, man, you’ve got it made! Quit brooding over everything!”

Basically it seems that the current notion of Batman is to take, say, the brooding qualities of Peter Parker and crank them up to 11. Spiderman defeats the villain but can’t reap the rewards? Well, Batman defeats the villain and becomes a total pariah from society! Batman is haunted by the deaths of just about every single person he’s ever allowed to become close! Batman doesn’t even seem to enjoy the gizmos he gets to play with; at least Peter Parker gets to enjoy web-slinging his way around New York.

I admired The Dark Knight‘s production quality (even though some of the action sequences are a bit hard to follow). One thing I liked is that a surprising amount of the film takes place in bright daylight, including the bank heist that opens the movie. All of the promotional materials, trailers, everything for the movie — including the ending of the previous movie — paint a picture of Gotham City as being a place of constant darkness and rain, not unlike the Los Angeles of Blade Runner. Thus it came as a bit surprising that when the movie opens, it’s mid-afternoon on a bright sunny day. You don’t need physical dark to have a dark movie, after all.

That’s about all I have to say about The Dark Knight. I liked it, thought it was really good, et cetera. But wow, I wish Batman was even a little fun to be around.

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Screws fall out all the time, the world’s an imperfect place

Thumbing through the new nonfiction books at the Library two weeks ago, I happened upon an interesting looking volume called You Couldn’t Ignore Me if You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation, by Susannah Gora. The cover art features caricatures of characters from the iconic teen movies of the 1980s: John Bender, Lloyd Dobler, Ferris Bueller, and others from Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo’s Fire, Sixteen Candles, and Some Kind of Wonderful.

The “Brat Pack” movies are often said to have “defined a generation”, whatever that means. I’ve never entirely understood that. I wasn’t terribly interested in those kinds of films when I was a teen; I saw The Breakfast Club via a video rental after a teacher, of all people, waxed poetic about it in class one day. (With good reason, I came to see.) Of the films discussed at length in the book, the only one I saw in its first run in a theater was Say Anything, which truly did rock my world — I thought it was a brilliant movie from the first five minutes, and I’ve never stopped loving it. But I didn’t see St. Elmo’s Fire until I watched an edited version on TBS while in college, and I don’t recall ever seeing Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, or Some Kind of Wonderful. I never had a crush on Molly Ringwald. Ally Sheedy, sure. But Molly? Not so much.

(In fact, one of the earliest actual rants I remember posting on this blog came when the American Film Institute did one of their 100 Years, 100 Movies specials, focusing on movie romances…and omitted Say Anything, which I hold to be not just one of the great movie romances, but the greatest teen romance ever. Funny thing about Say Anything, though: when it came out in 1989, I was feeling a bit of teen angst because I was about to graduate high school, my future felt uncertain, and I had just failed in my first real attempt to date a girl. I felt like seeing a movie, so I saw Say Anything. Which is about a guy graduating high school, feels uncertain about his future, and is in love for the first time in his life. Oy!)

Part of this is probably fairly obvious to regular readers; my filmgoing interests back then tended to be a lot more geeky in nature.

The book fills several roles: a chronicle of a certain period and group of people in Hollywood, a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the making of their films, and an examination of their cultural impact. It’s a very entertaining and informative read, especially in its overall profile of writer-director John Hughes, who comes off as a very complex man, often fiercely loyal but also extremely difficult to please. One thing I always look for in a book about movies is that it makes me want to see the movies discussed, especially the ones I’ve never seen before.

I found the inside stories of the movies the most interesting, as I usually do with things like this. I kind of skimmed through the chapter about the New York Magazine article that coined the term “Brat Pack” and, in many ways, doomed the careers of the actors within it; what interested me was the making of the films themselves. The way the set decorators had to literally paint trees green because Ferris Bueller’s Day Off takes place in spring and yet was filmed in fall; the fact that Cameron Crowe came this close to not getting to use “In Your Eyes” in Say Anything; the way the entire ending of Pretty in Pink was reshot, to Jon Cryer’s chagrin, after the original ending tested horribly.

My favorite of these stories involves what is actually my least favorite scene in The Breakfast Club, the bit toward the end when Claire decides that Allison needs a new look:

When it came time for the cast to film a now infamous scene in which Claire gives Allison a makeover, Sheedy wasn’t too thrilled. In the first version of the scene, Claire puts a lot of makeup on Allison, “like putting a lot of stuff on her is making it all better,” says Sheedy. Uncomfortable with this hypocrisy, Sheedy took the matter in hand. She suggested a small change that made a big difference, at least to her, and to any viewers paying close attention. “I asked John [Hughes], ‘Can we make it more that they are taking this shell off of her?’ ” says Sheedy. Hughes saw the logic in her suggestion, and so the resulting scene features Ringwald actually removing makeup from Sheedy’s face, in particular the dark eyeliners her character has been hiding behind. When removing the makeup, says Sheedy, Ringwald’s character “uncovers the beautiful purity that is in Allison that isn’t so scary and dark — and she got my hair out of my face, took my sweater off of me.”

But even with the idea of removing makeup as opposed to adding it, the scene wouldn’t exactly have Betty Friedan jumping for joy. “It is very much like Grease at the end there,” says Sheedy. “Like suddenly the jock sees her [as if she’s] come out singing ‘You’re the One That I Want.’ The thing I love about it,” says Sheedy frankly, “is that she doesn’t quite pull it off.” Sporting a frilly headband with an awful bow on it, Allison looks a bit like an unhappy poodle. “It doesn’t work. It’s just so stupid-looking. That bow completely came off of Madonna.” As part of Allison’s make-under, she removes many layers of her dark, goth/bag lady attire, to reveal a girly blouse. But if Allison’s true nature had been represented in the clothes, says Sheedy, “that should’ve been a boy tank top, a muscle tee. It should’ve been. But they wanted feminine. I don’t know — I always felt like John was on the fence about the transformation. But it was part of the ending written into the script. Everybody shifted positions into something else, and there was nowhere to go with Allison except into something like that.”

“How could that have been allowed to happen?” Juno star Ellen Page lamented to New York magazine. Page argued that the scene leads women to “start judging ourselves, just because…you’d rather climb trees than give blow jobs.” Indeed, says sociologist Robert Bulman, “the movie would have been so much stronger had it stuck to its original theme, which was, these are important characters who have something to bring to the experience of these friendships. To have her character go through a transformation to be accepted — that goes against the theme. That scene always kind of breaks my heart.”

I tend to agree, and have never understood the impulse behind the scene. The whole film, to that point, seems to be leading to the conclusion that the character in the least need of change is Allison, and yet, she’s forced through the most overt change of all of them. (Sheedy’s a bit wrong about Grease, though; what a lot of people miss about that movie is that at the end, yes, Sandy changes, but so has Danny — he’s not the outsider rebel anymore, and has instead earned a varsity letter. Both characters change for each other.)

The chapter on Say Anything, as good and welcome as it is, feels a bit at odds with the rest of the book, as the film had nothing to do with either John Hughes or the Brat Pack actors. I’m glad the film is discussed, but its presence here feels a bit out of place, and if it was there, then surely some other teen films from the 1980s could have warranted mention as well. Fast Times at Ridgmont High is mentioned in passing (with the explanation that the film’s feel makes it more of a 1970s holdover than a film from the 80s); I’d personally hold that The Karate Kid is as vibrant a teen film, and as culturally relevant, as any of Hughes’s movies.

Still, You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried is an engaging and entertaining examination of an odd series of films that seem to be both classics and fluff at the same time, as well as an elegiac tribute to John Hughes.

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I see you!

I loved Avatar.

I really did. I loved the thing. It hit so many of my sweet spots that I found myself utterly involved in it barely fifteen minutes in. Even with its dialogue that often barely manages to rise above the level of “serviceable”; even with its Cameron-style foreshadowing delivered with all the subtlety of a ball-peen hammer to the forehead; even with its cardboard cut-out villains who have almost no depth, no characterization, and no complexity to their motivations other than money-making and gratuitous warmongering.

I loved it despite those flaws, because Cameron is just such a damned good storyteller that he can usually make big flaws disappear into the background and yes, because the visuals amazed me.

I was going to write a long piece about the movie, but then I decided to just go the “randomly unconnected thought” route. So here are random thoughts about Avatar:

:: Yes, I lost myself in the visuals. The movie was just beautiful to look at. I was awestruck by one shot after another. Especially the tree that has the spores that bob in the air like jellyfish, and the way the ground lights up when the Na’vi walk on it.

:: No, I wasn’t bothered by the word “Unobtanium”. Sure, maybe they should have come up with a name of their own, but really — if they’d done that, no one would remember it as soon as the lights came back on at the end of the movie. And besides, if you look at the names of some of the lab-created elements on the periodic table, some of them are just as goofy: “Californium”, anyone?

:: The movie seems to paint the military with a pretty broad brush, but I think Cameron was trying not to do this, although not terribly successfully. He does make clear that these aren’t actual US military (a point Gregg Easterbrook missed completely when he bitched about the movie on his Tuesday Morning Quarterback column, but I’m not looking for the link right now), by pointing out that they’re hired by whatever corporation hired them and by showing them, in a briefing scene toward the end, as being not all guys in fatigues but also fat guys in crappy T-shirts. But Cameron didn’t do enough to draw this distinction, so his depiction of military, seems kind of damning. (Of course, I’m not sure how fair this perception is, since in the course of the film we only really get to know two military people other than our hero, Jake Sully: the helicopter pilot with a conscience, and the lunatic “Roger Ramjet” who is the main baddie anyway.)

:: The movie is not original in the least degree, except for one idea that never really gets any kind of great SFnal treatment: the notion of the movie’s biosphere as being an enormous information transfer thing. Cameron flirted with a really nifty idea there, in positing that the spiritual “We’re all connected!” thing common to “savages” is an actual physical reality on this planet, but he didn’t take it far enough. That should have been the starting point for an amazing movie, not the ending point. It really is “Dances With Wolves In Space”, but I was fine with that.

:: In talking about the movie in his football columns, Easterbrook (again no links, because I’m lazy) kept referring to the movie as a “cartoon”, thus displaying the commonly held belief that animated movies are inherently lesser works than live-action movies. Easterbrook can suck it.

:: James Horner’s score is OK. There are a couple of big moments when the score takes flight, but for the most part, if you’ve heard Horner a few times, you know what to expect here.

:: Sometimes I really wish James Cameron would hand his script to someone and say, “Can you make this a little more subtle, please?” The movie was awash in the occasional foray into dialogue so clunky it made me laugh (a lot of the warmongering military talk fell in this vein), and as usual, Cameron sure likes to beat us over the head with foreshadowing. “Wow, that body-suit weapon thing looks cool! I sure hope someone goes mano a mano with that guy in that suit!” “So, you say that there’s this one flying beastie whom nobody’s ever been able to ride? Interesting….” “You can theoretically transfer everything from one brain to another? That may come in useful….”

:: SamuraiFrog hated the movie. I understand most of his criticisms, even if I don’t share them.

:: For the most part, Avatar is…well, it’s a movie. I liked it a lot. I had a great time watching it. It entertained me. I don’t see it as some kind of magnificent game-changer, though. Visually it raises the bar. Story-wise, it’s just good.

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Random Oscar Thoughts before I go to Bed

Just some stuff before I decide that I can’t watch anymore (which should be in a few minutes):

:: If they awarded the Best Picture Oscar based on the first half of a movie, Up would be a shoo-in. Its second half was a major let-down, though.

:: Michael Giacchino has deserved an Oscar for several years, and Up is a fine score. I liked what he did with Star Trek better, though. That score has grown on me hugely since it came out last year.

:: I’m reading a new book about John Hughes and the Brat Pack right now, so it freaked me out a little when they did a special memorial for Hughes and brought out some of the Brat Pack. Wow.

:: Speaking of which, the degree to which Matthew Broderick’s voice hasn’t changed at all since Ferris Bueller is a bit unnatural.

:: The applause for the Hughes memorial seemed a tad unenthusiastic, didn’t it? And they showed some young people in the audience looking bored or confused, as if they wondered why they were honoring a guy who made noted movies in the 1980s and then dropped out of sight.

:: So far my favorite acceptance speeches are the guy who wrote Precious and the costume designer who opened with “Yeah, I’ve already got two of these” and proceeded to point out that costumers who do films set in real life today deserve recognition as much as those who do the Elizabethan epics do.

:: I liked the “Best Original Score” ballet they did. And if James Horner’s score to Avatar had been as good as the sixty seconds or so they played of it, that score would have won. But it wasn’t.

:: I’m liking Alec Baldwin. But then, what do I know? I’m the one person who liked Jon Stewart and David Letterman as hosts.

:: I don’t care if it lengthens the ceremony, Lifetime Achievement Awards should happen on Award Night. Roger Corman deserved to stand up there on stage.

:: I think that Queen Latifah is a beautiful, beautiful woman. No real point here, just that she’s beautiful.

:: Back to Alec Baldwin: he really seems to tone Steve Martin down a bit, nicely.

:: We’re in the greatest era of visual effects ever, and only three movies get nominations in that category? Hey, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: WTF?!

:: I think I must be the only person in the world who doesn’t think that James Cameron was being a dick when he did his “I’m the King of the World!” thing in 1998 when Titanic won. I just thought it was a funny mimicking of a famous moment from his movie. Didn’t bother me at all.

:: 11:10 pm and the show’s still going strong. I, on the other hand, am not. So I’m off to bed.

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