Category: Film

Tales From Earthsea

“It’s all right; they have wings.”

Going into a movie expecting the worst can sometimes turn out in one’s favour: when a movie is not, in fact, terrible and can perhaps even be termed “entertaining”, this is a victory. Tales From Earthsea is one such movie.

The problem with being made by Ghibli is that a certain standard of excellence is expected. The problem with being made by Miyazaki Goro is that the film is forced to live in his father’s shadow. For my money, I enjoyed this movie infinitely more than I did Howl’s Moving Castle.

Tales from Earthsea probably sucks as an Earthsea movie – consultation with my mother reveals that an enormous amount of this movie makes no sense from an adaptation perspective, and Ursula K. Le Guin agrees with this – but otherwise it’s a perfectly engaging, albeit generic, Ghibli fantasy film.

Science fiction: the victim of apathy that trickles down into hatred

Now, on underdeveloped scattershot argument theatre …

While I’ll be the first one to call Heroes silly, I’m not a professional TV critic. Alan Mascarenhas of the Sydney Morning Herald had this to write of episode 14, showing this week in Australia:

However, the show seems caught between different audiences. There are special effects but probably not enough to keep the science nuts happy. Any emotional drama is nobbled by the artificiality of the premise: it’s hard to feel much empathy for a mutant.

For one, Magneto would be furious.
For another, Mascarenhas probably doesn’t understand how any of these genres work, confessing that he’s “not science-fiction minded” and that he had not seen an episode of Heroes before episode 14.

I said of that episode:

I really enjoyed the first half of Heroes. Since then we've suffered at the hands of an invisible Haggard-esque degaying of Zach (I don't know: he still seems pretty gay to me), a general anti-climactic nature, boredom at the hands of Niki/Jessica, and the distinct impression that the writers are just throwing revelations at us for the sake of it.

Yeah; but I knew what I was talking about. On that note, Bryan Fuller
totally confirmed the Zach thing again. Now we’ll never see Odessa again anyway, so it doesn’t matter, but oh, what could have been.

Anyway, this sort of closed-mindedness in this day and age makes me sad. I wouldn’t mind if he were specifically criticising Heroes, but he’s laying waste to an entire genre. Many SF fans don’t watch SF solely for whizz bangery. Even something as frequently smug and annoying as Firefly (or, indeed, any of Joss Whedon’s work [I’ll save my rant against his ruination of Angel for when I feel like tearing someone to pieces]) features characters that one can care for, even if they haven’t first hand experienced hijacking a train of its medicine and then being attacked by conscience and then kicking a guy into a jet engine and then having a statue erected in their honour and then having an ill fated but well conceived film made out of respect for what could have been and becoming a leaf on the wind.

The use of fanciful settings for stories allows authors and directors to bring into sharper relief the humanity of their characters. Many stories are analogous to real life situations, and there’s a reason that comics have a strong following in the gay community: it’s not because of the tights; it’s because of double identities, not fitting in, and general difference.

A lot of good SF (if you can really call superhero stories SF when they’re kind of their own genre anyway) just drips with metaphor, and a lot of the time this works well. I wasn’t much of a fan of the X-Men movies, but their relevance to the gay community was … uncanny (“Have you ever thought of … not being a mutant?”). Then it took a turn for the worse with X-Men 3, which was Brett Rattner’s personal journey into “I have no idea what message I’m trying to get across here … I appear to have made the franchise a front runner advocate of pro-life? Okay.”

These frequently subtle, sometimes not, metaphors and subtexts are effective ways of teaching people about issues in roundabout fashions. I suppose that this common subversion is probably one of the reasons that comic books and SF are seen as negative influences, but there's no shame in learning. Unless that shame is the addiction to magic that made me hate Willow on Buffy for a long time (although that show did teach girls that it's okay to make out with other girls in the event that your boyfriend cheats on you with a werewolf – which in itself is okay because he’s also a werewolf).
This subtext is also important because sometimes things cannot be said, like the gay episode of Star Trek that wasn’t made 20 years ago (I’d give you more sources, but After Elton is a good resource and frankly, a google search for “gay Star Trek” yields Kirk/Spock. On a side note, could the gay Trek characters be any twinkier? I think not).

Genre is a flexible idea; one can’t discount an entire genre because one does not like a single entry in that genre (also, if anyone mentions Sturgeon’s Law, which is the refuge of cynics who hate freedom, I will be forced to … well, don’t push me). Genre can also make something that is absolute tripe, such as X-Men 3, into something marvellous. I loved X-Men 3 because it was completely by the numbers, designed for maximum emotional manipulation with the added bonus of pissing fans right off.

It’s true that fans can be among the most annoying people on the planet, but every field has people who bring it down for the rest of them. This illustrates to us all that not everyone is the same and, while some might like flash bang magic, others appreciate the genuine character that can be breathed into SF, fantasy and the like. Not every appreciator of the genre is a mouth breather; most people want to be accepted like everyone else, even without the desire for the escape that such flights of fancy so readily offer, and good SF can offer real and likable characters into the mix.

I claim to people who want to know the vague direction that my life will take once I leave university that I would like to become a journalist. Yet mainstream journalism hates the fringe, and it fears the internet, couching everything in terms of condescension that sneer at people who use computers or like video games. It happens, even in the more intellectual presses, and it’s not good. Unfortunately, the apathy that has become the zeitgeist for internet users means that the well meaning but ill informed will rule for a while yet. If SF is going to be as routinely awesome as Eric Cartman 2546, then the ignorami are the ones suffering.

The image of Flash Gordon with Ming the Merciless was one of the first page results for “science fiction sucks” on Google Image Search.

Shooter

Bang-b-bang-bang! Kaboom! Ra-ta-ta-ta! Whompf-whompf-whompf-whompf! Screeeeeeeeeeeee!

This was precisely the movie I needed. I can’t be serious all the time, I need some levity in my writing. What better source of levity could there possibly be than Mark Wahlberg shooting stuff until it explodes? The only real problem with Shooter is that I had to wait almost two hours before Mark Wahlberg started swearing at people. That’s easily what he does best.

300

Good people don’t wear clothes.

I was prepared to dislike 300, and feel bad about feeding its insatiable money machine. I had read about the film’s “Assault on the Gay Past” and expected the worst.

There are indeed some misgivings on that front, but 300 is in my eyes a film that is so ultimately inconsequential that it should have no lasting effect. Unfortunately, the meme hungry internet has latched onto 300, making it a huge beast. It is a beast made of nought but air, but a beast nonetheless. We shall see where this movie, which didn’t really need to be made beyond the trailer, finds itself in several years’ time.

Garden State

Unlike the stuff I see at the cinema, the DVDs I write about are picked totally arbitrarily.

I don't understand my peers' attraction to Garden State. Don't get me wrong, I like it; it's just that I had always assumed I held the monopoly on depressed, directionless people with emotional numbness that they are desperate to be rid of regardless of the pain that it inflicts upon them.

The Good Shepherd

“I’ll tie your shoe.”

Robert De Niro has, in The Good Shepherd, made a movie that fails to engage with its audience for the entirety of its near three hour run time. I don't have exacting standards, but my standards are slightly greater than this.

The fault does not lie at the feet of Matt Damon, but rather at those of his character: here he has been written into a corner as a man with no emotions. It's easy to portray no emotions on the silver screen, but it's infinitely more difficult to make someone care about these lack of emotions … even if the film itself explores the cause of this lack.

The Good German

“We’ll always have Berlin.”

Steven Soderbergh is one of those directors who believes in doing new and exciting things in film, like releasing the same film simultaneously on DVD, the internet and in cinemas and seeing which one no one will see the least.

The exciting thing he had in mind for The Good German was to make it exactly the same way that a movie would be made in the forties: cinematography, sound and set design like the greats. Apparently his contract stipulated that in order to make The Good German he had to append the end of Casablanca to it.

Clearly he had mixed success.

Set buckles to “swash”

The first Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End trailer surfaced today or thereabouts (actually, a few days ago; I’m not exactly topical at the moment).

I’m fairly excited about this movie, because I love swash, I love buckle, and I say nay to all of the Pirates naysayers who couldn’t believe that Dead Man’s Chest was a cliffhanger in excess of two hours. It was a half movie, like one that had drank of the unicorn. Having killed Harry Potter and regained its power, Pirates returns with At World’s End!

From what I can tell, the pirates of the world unite for a conference so that they can complain about global enterprise robbing them of their fun. This is the part where we suggest that Disney making a movie that criticises big business and crushing fine traditions is ironic to the max.

The promo materials on the walls emphasise the Chow Yun Fattitude of it all, and we’re assured by this trailer that Verbinski has taken every opportunity to use traditional cinematic “exotic shorthand”. Look at those vaguely Turkish pirates! Hooray for the pirates of Asia! Because the Pirates franchise is largely about fun, I can let them get away with these antics.
In these movies I will accept Geoffrey Rush cackling away like a madman just because … I don’t know. These films undersand the value of adventure and big set pieces. I think that part of this is because the franchise was born with absolutely no hope of a big return, and it ballooned into hugeness. While it’s got the cynical machinations of marketing bubbling deep beneath the surface now, the fun continues to float to the top.

On a completely unrelated note: why the hell are the Wachowski Brothers making a Speed Racer movie? I’ll only see it if I’m guaranteed that it will involve orgasm cake.

I couldn’t figure out how to use the “Pirate Viral Player”, so I didn’t bother.
I remember that “viral” things on computers used to be bad, but now companies just throw things on the internet and expect them to propagate. I suppose it’s a better situation.

Shaun of the Dead

“Kill the Queen.”

Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg are clearly big fans of movies and, with two under their sleeves and also a TV series that I’ve never seen, they’ve demonstrated themselves capable of working across several genres.

In my efforts to become less lazy about watching my DVDs, I finally cracked out Shaun of the Dead in honour of Hot Fuzz turning out so well. Shaun of the Dead is truly the ultimate in rom zom coms!

Hot Fuzz

“Swan!”

I’ll keep this brief, because Hot Fuzz is like a gift: it’s not as fun if you don’t open it yourself. This is a film that straddles genres, as Shaun of the Dead did before it, and the result is something by turns contemplative and hilarious.