movie: inkheart

I haven't read the book, but if the parts of the movie that work are any indication, I think I want to. If the parts of the movie that don't work are any indication... Well, I hope the book hangs together better.

I liked the movie for it's promise and it's premise: a few people in the world can read things out of stories and make them real in our world, and they retain the characters and abilities they had in their own worlds. One of these people lost his wife when he read something out of a book and she was traded for it, because there always has to be a trade, and for the last nine years, he's been looking for a new copy of the book so he can try reading her out of it. This is awesome.

And then there's Paul Bettany, who is always great, playing a character that should be perfect for him, but because of the screen adaptation? The editing? Something, he motivations are shaky at best and contradictory at worst, and this fun character is all over the damn place and never really changes. His arc is more of a wobbly loop? I want to reedit his part. Badly.

The daughter (Meggie? Maggy?) should have been better, too. A feisty girl who never knew her mother and grew up roaming Europe, who wants to be a writer and is supposed to be good at it? So little of that comes through, because she's mostly crying and being captured. She's so integral to the end, but she never really gets any volition of her own. Even when she's righting hte wrongs, even when she's editing the world for herself, it's because someone else told her to. And that disappoints me. And why is there so little trading / magical recoil when she reads? Does she just do it better, and they forgot to mention the fact, or is that another plot hole?

I do like Alladin the Flying Squirrel, but it's more because he's the only one aware of how cool all this is who isn't a greasy badguy. And where did 'you like her, don't you?' come from? The two minutes they sat next to each other in the car?

Rhyssa is dull. The Aunt is lovely and cranky and colorful, and then has nothing to do, though it looks like they wanted her to like the stuttering reader. Capricorn is not really all that threatening, and overacts. The henchmen are interchangable and disposable. The Shadow looks awesome, probably the best thing in the movie (except maybe the gorgeous settings), but doesn't do much and doesn't manage to convey what, exactly, lets it 'flay the skin off your bones' as was threatened. And if these are the characters the author created, I have trouble believing that it's all that great a book-- and I do so want to believe. Because there's something beautiful about the idea that our favorite worlds could be real, that we could meet our literary children and go on adventures with them, that they can develop lives and opinions of their own, and, best of all, that the sad endings might be different this time around (which is an eternal hope of mine). It makes me sad that it falls short of these good ideas, and then the DVD, at least this one, doesn't even have deleted scenes that might make the plot work better. Or even a scene that shows Dustfinger using his ever-present bag that we decided was holding all the plot-plugs to fill all the plot-holes.

So yeah. The movie has plenty of space for me to rewrite it, which is a plus. But the plot holes that require me to write them are too numerous, which is a minus. The ideas are great, which is a plus. But the character development is either not there, or reduced to one-liners that come from nowhere and don't replace lettin gus experience people changing, which is bad. So I'm going to find the book. And here's hoping there's a director's cut somewhere that makes more sense.

Also, Brendan Frazer obviously sold his soul for eternal youth, and it's getting a little disturbing now that he's started playing adult characters with kids who look roughly the same age. And if he's a great reader, why can't he read more naturally?

movie: ponyo

What a sweet movie. I was unaware that goodfish looked like weird little girls in dresses, but from beginning to end, it was sweet, non-threatening, quirky, and beautiful-- entirely gorgeous. If you're going into this expecting Princess Mononoke, though, be warned-- it's much closer to My Neighbor Totoro in theme and complexity. Which is fine; it's a kid's story, and I'm glad it'll be around when I have kids.

It's (very) loosely based on The Little Mermaid, but when I say 'loosely', I mean it's like they took the extreme basic ideas and ran with them. A girl of the sea who wants to be a human? Check. A dad who doesn't want her to? Check. A supernatural sea-woman with magical powers? Check. Seafoam if she fails? Check. Everything else is new. And sweet. And there's alot going on, but the primary POV characters are five years old, and most of it doesn't really affect them so much as it affects the world around them.

Ponyo is a little goldfish who gets lost and washes up on shore, where she's rescued by a little boy named Sasuke. While with him, he cuts his finger, which she heals with a lick, but tasting human blood starts a transformation-- it unlocks all the primal power inside her, knocks nature out of balance, and lets her have capricious five-year-old control over the magics. It means she can will herself into having arms and legs and being a girl (although whenever she uses magic, she looks more like a frog muppet with chicken legs), and then she and her hundreds of sisters can cause a horrible tsunami that almost wipes out the town while she goes in search of Sasuke. Because she's fallen in love with him, in that entirely pure way that only kids can love. Most of the rest of the movie is them being kids while they look for Sasuke's mom and have adventures in cuteness; Ponyo's dad flips out a little at the imbalance in nature, but her mom, a huge magical sea goddess, finds it sweet and amusing, and convinces him to let it play out. They save Sasuke's mom and all the old ladies she's in charge of, and give the kids a choice: If Sasuke will love her as a girl or a fish, she'll be allowed to make the choice between the two, but she can't be both like she is now. She, of course, chooses him, and everything's fine.

Favorite parts:

- on the radio to Sasuke's dad on the ship: "HAM!"

- during her transformation: "TEETH!"

- when she finds him and wraps herself around his head and stays there.

- when teh tide is up to his door, and while they're figuring out what to do, an octopus is sidling into the house.

- "For milk!" and the Angry Baby.

- the theme song, which I want to sing to my kids. When I have them.

movie: harry potter and the half-blood prince

See, here's the thing: I liked this moviw, and I'm not particularly appologetic about that. It was fun, exciting, sweet, a little scary, and it had all the important parts that move the plot along and develop the characters. So what if it doesn't follow the book exactly? The book is freakishly long, and a seven hour movie just isn't worth the time. The first movie was practically a read-along, and that was dull, dragging and opressive. I think the movies have been saved by the fact that the books were so long by the end; it means the directors and scriptwriters could cut the things that work in a book but are unnecessary in a movie, that they can pare the story down to it's basic components and show us what's needed to make a movie-- because movies and books are different things, even if they're telling the same story, and there's really nothing but agravation in trying to make them the same.

Half-Blood Prince had everything I wanted it to have: It had Draco being tortured by his own divided loyalties, lurking and brooding and crying alot, and I swear the kid got skinnier and paler as the movie progressed, as he should if he's really dealing with this horrible crap. It had Ginny getting to do stuff and have lines, and she's really good at the shining, compassionate better-person schtick. It had Ron totally missing the point with Hermione and Hermione realizing what all these weird feelings meant. It had Snape being subtle and divided and obviously unhappy and murky and snarky and wonderful. It had Dumbledor at a loss, damaged, and ready to finish the plan. Slughorn was wonderfully twitchy, Lavendar was exactly as clingy and weird as was necessary for us not to feel bad when she gets jilted. I hated seeing the Weasley house burn, I loved Bellatrix, the few moments we got of Fred and George were awesome as always, Luna was fantastic, and that scene where the whole school bands together to stop the cloud-skull-creepiness totally got me.

And best of all, it reminded me why I loved all these characters, and set up how horrible it's going to be in the next movies when they start offing people left and right.

Best parts:

- Hopped-up-Harry talking about the spider's pinchers

- "He likes my sister for her skin??" "Well, I'm just saying it could be a contributing factor."

- "I supposed you're wondering what we're doing here?" "Honestly, sir, after all these years I just sort of go along for the ride."

- "Why does it always seem that when there's trouble, the three of you are involved?" "I've been asking myself that for six years."

- The set design. Hogwarts looks more like a real place every time, and this time it was gorgeous, all stairs and vaulted halls and weird little details like the birdcage inside the birdcage and so on. I want my office to look like Dumbledor's...

- Ron and Harry hitting eachother as they fight over the book. Just like real boys.

There were a few weird things:

- They almost entirely cut Harry's obsession with the book and who wrote it, and then Snape is all 'I'm the Half Blood Prince' and I went 'Oh, right, that was the title of the movie...'

- Did we see Ginny break up with Dean? Because all of a sudden she was all over Harry, and it was very sweet and exactly what was supposed to happen, but I don't remember her stopping dating... And most of that relationship got cut, too.

- Where was Hagrid as his house was being burned down? And what happened to the Weasleys after the same? We just sort of skipped those parts, and I don't remember what happened in the book.

- Wasn't there more with Lupin and Tonks?

Over all, though, it was great fun and I really enjoyed it. Each movie holds together as a movie better than the last, the world gets more detailed and real, and the characters act and dress and speak more like real people. I loved it.

movie: land of the lost

When I was sick recently, I stayed up all night watching a marathon on SciFi of the original Land of the Lost. I'd always thought it was silly and cheezy-- which it was-- but I didn't expect it to be fairly well-written. I was surprised at names I recognized (like Ben Bova) on the author list, and at how consistent the storylines were. Before I watched that, I wanted to see the movie; afterward, I was actually excited, since I had a little background on it and knew enough that I could now catch any in-jokes.

The movie's been doing really poorly by the reviews. Like, dismally poor, last time I checked. In my opinion, they're missing the point. I found the movie silly and more than a little rediculous, but that's what I was expecting: that's what the show was like, and it never once claimed to be a serious interpretation, anyway. It's fun, cheerful, silly, a little crude but never really terribly insulting, and has more plot than I expected it to have. It's full of really great references to the actual show and how this isn't the same thing, and it's quotable enough that it's already made its way into our personal lexicon. Sure, there are plot holes, but they generally don't matter much to the story as a whole; it won't be winning any awards, but it's not the trainwreck it's been made out to be. I mean, Holly gets to take on Sleestaks with only a belt and some feistiness! Marshall gets to ride and dinosaur! Watch it with an open mind, and love it for the silly little bit of brainfluff it really is.

If I had been given the choice, I wouldn't have made Enik's story arc the way it was, and I would have had everyone stay, but then we wouldn't have gotten the triumphant return to the Today show at the end. Ah well. 

I'll probably buy it and watch it when I don't want to have to think too much, like when I'm doing housework or I can't sleep or something-- it's not at all challanging, but it makes a rip in time and space look awfully fun.

Plus, there are these neat-ass Sleestaks.

movie: up SPOILERY SPOILERS

You know how we've all been fine tuned by a lifetime of watching Disney movies to react with desperately strong emotions about every big eye and lonely wide shot? I went to the MGM Studios once when they still had the actual animators there, and there was that little 'fifty years of Disney' montage thing where they splice together all the parts that we know so well-- and are overwhelmed with the force of our hardwired emotions: all the sad parts all together, and the audience all sobs, all the happy parts all together and the audience laughs, all the scary parts, all the angry parts, all the cute parts. It was... distressing. I didn't particularly like knowing how I'd been manipulated, and I've been somewhat suspicious and resentful of Disney movies since then (not that I've stopped watching and loving them, only that I can see what they're doing now and I resent it a little).

Pixar does that, like, seven million times stronger, does it with a more delicate touch, and best of all, does it without any resentment from me. It's impressive. I go into Pixar movies knowing I'm going to sob like I'm made of tears, knowing that it's going to be a breakneck rollercoaster of emotions-- and I don't care. And it gets worse every time. I thought Monsters Inc was the most I could cry in a sweet movie aimed at kids. And then I saw Finding Nemo. I managed to hold off through most of Ratatooi, mostly because I was working at a restaurant at the time and there were kitchens full of rats, and then there's that part where the critic is transported back to his childhood, and I was undone for the whole rest of the movie. And now there's UP.

I loved it. The first fifteen minutes manage to show a man's whole life, his love, his dreams and how they're put off, his pain, his loss-- a whole life and all it's backstory and motivation in that first fifteen minutes with hardly any talking. And before the story even started, I was sobbing. Sobbing so I could hardly breathe, when the short beforehand (which I think is my new favorite one) had me choked up and teary-eyed already. And then I was immediately laughing when Carl is being so crochety and Russel being so hopelessly awkward-- and right back to crying when Carl tries to keep his home and has to go to court. Then back to laughing when he lets the baloons go and floats off, smug and crochety now, and Russel's on the porch... And it's like that throughout, with the chacaters dragging me along and the plot moving so swiftly that I don't have a chance to recover from one before I'm back on the other. It's amazing how they make us care about these weird little characters so quickly.

Favorite parts:

- Dug-- all of him. I want collars that make dog-talk into people-talk so I can have a dog like Dug. I especially like "I have only just met you but I LOVE you" and "Will you be my prisoner now?" and "I am warning you, bird, I am jumping on you"

- Russel and the bird. Every time we cut back, there's something silly going on-- the bird is cuddling him or tossing him around, or, the best part, where he's standing on the bird's feet and using it's legs like stilts. 

- Young Ellie and her crazy hair and sudden decisions.

- Carl when he's crochety but not unreasonable; there are a few places where he gets unreasonable, and though we understand why he is, they aren't the places I liked the best.

- The Cone of Shame!

- Alpha's old voice!

- Russel's winderness badges: you only get glimpses of them through the movie, but at the credits, they show the best ones, and they're awesome. I also loved how he can have all the badges, and know so little about the training; it's both funny and really sad that someone's been letting him pass without doing anything for real, especially since he takes it so seriously.

The villain gets the Standard Disney Villain End, which is nice, because I didn't want him being so easily redeemed when he'd been loony for, what, sixty years? And he's really loony, both brilliant and animalistic all at once. And the secondary villain, Carl's inability to break his promises to Ellie so much that he can't ever let go, that's done away with too-- and I'll admit that more than a little of my sobbing at the end was because I know how hard it is to let go of things that remind you of better times, and I wanted so badly for him to be able to keep it all AND win the day, and I knew that that's now how plots work.

And it's a new top for Pixar-- I'm glad merging with Disney didn't ruin it. I never know how they're going to beat the last movie, but they did again, and I can't wait for next time.

star trek (the new one—DON’T READ THIS IF YOU DON’T WANT SPOILERS BECAUSE I”M TOTALLY TALKING ABOUT EVERYTHING)

Oh, man. I didn’t want to like this movie. The old one holds such a special place in my heart* and mind, and I didn’t want to see it ruined, which seems to be how all but a few modern remakes seem to go. And the posters didn’t really do much for me—I mean, really, a blur that might be the Enterprise? Kirk looking like his hairline and his eyebrows are fifty miles apart while Spock looks like he’s got no forehead at all? I was expecting something along the lines of Episode I, all flash and resentment, no story or emotion at all.

Man, I’m glad I was disappointed. This is the best sort of disappointment, where everything comes out much better than you expected. JJ, you’ve reached Whedon-levels of devotion in my pantheon of fan-saints (as if Lost hadn’t already won you that).

I loved it. I loved it so much, I went to see it again four hours later with one of the same people I saw it with the first time.

The ship looked delicious, retro enough to sate the fan in me, but new and bright and futuristic and wonderful enough to surprise me and make me want to be part of it all over again, like when I was a kid and had that same fresh feeling of wonder. It felt right, like this is what they’d intended it to look like before, but they just didn’t have the budget or the techniques to get it right. The loving and sexy first shot of the Enterprise at spacedock (why it gotta be spacedock? you don’t call a regular dock a waterdock.) was beautiful—I wanted to reach out and touch her hull with my bare hands. She looked real. She looked like the flagship should look, shining and beautiful and fresh and unchallenged. And the effects, whether battle or just cruising were great, flashy and brilliant and yet still somehow real enough to feel like something that could actually happen, something people could make and could live in. The first space battle, with Kirk’s dad and mom’s entirely human conversation as this massive monstrosity ends their marriage in fire and heroics set the tone for a movie that’s very tech, but also has the emotional connection that was desperately missing from all the Star Wars prequels. It’s what SciFi should be.

On to the characters. Like I said, I was most resistant to these new upstarts playing my beloved crew, but they won me over. Kirk wasn’t nearly as weird-looking as the posted led me to believe, and he had exactly the right amount of offhand charm and deep-seated anger mixed with problems with authority and a willingness to get severely beaten to get the job done. Which he did. Alot. He’s like the Harry Dresden of space over here, beaten up every three minutes by someone faster and stronger than him, and yet coming out on top every time. “I’ve got your gun” indeed! And he wasn’t as smarmy as Shatner!Kirk could sometimes come across, though he kept the cheerful disregard for protocol that always made him interesting (and, really, made this branch of the franchise more interesting than the story overall—I agree with Pike: the Federation had lost something in the perfect regimentation of the human race).

Spock was fun. I didn’t like Zack’s Syler until recently when he got something to debate over, and Spock always had that: something to battle out in his own head. I like that Spock’s whole emotional issue comes from the fact that he can’t reconcile the fact of loving his mother with the logic of not allowing emotions to rule him. And I love that he can love Uhura and still be remote, logical, radical, rebellious Spock. his eyebrows bothered me, but his real eyebrows bother me, too. I’m just happy that there wasn’t any of the idea that Vulcans are tantamount to androids that so many non-Spock actors seem to think is the case. I love that he’s devoted to being the best Vulcan he can be, but is just human enough to rebel when he needs to, to be the much-needed radical faction within the solid, ancient, entirely controlled Vulcan culture.

And I loved the deserty-cave imagery of the Vulcan homeworld. Amazing. And alien in that way where it’s obviously not here, but is recognizable enough that it’s not off-putting.

Sarek was pretty great, and Amanda was perfect—a bright human woman willingly living within an alien society, but daring to keep her sense of self and to be openly proud of her alien son. I didn’t even realize it was Winona Ryder until I saw the credits. She didn’t seem Winona-like.

Uhura was a little skipped on the character development, but we got enough in her acting to know that she’s strong and brilliant and has an actual talent—she’s naturally adept at what she does, not just a space-receptionist. She really cares for Spock, but doesn’t let it get in the way of her job, she wants to be an upstanding officer, but she speaks out when things are unfair, and she follows orders, but makes it known that she doesn't necessarily agree with them. That’s a lot of complexity to get into a pretty narrow role that she was given; i hope there are Uhura out takes in the special features. I hope there are dozens of deleted scenes, not because there are parts where I think something was missing, but because I want to see more of this lovely shiny world.

Chekov is adorable, a bright little baby dropped in the middle of this crazy, much older crew on a lunatic mission that doesn’t make a lot of sense in the context of usual fleet missions, but he has enough confidence to keep up, to do what he knows he can do and to do it well. I love that he’s still got his speech impediment. And I love that he’s excited about it all. And I love that he never once gets punched in the jaw and knocked out.

Sulu was also great fun, sardonic and a little sarcastic, unhappy with how things are going but loyal and skilled enough to trust and act accordingly. And fearless enough to volunteer for a skydive from space with combat training that includes not much more than fencing—and apparently some hack-and-slash.

McCoy was cranky and fussy and angry as I would have expected, but I missed the taunting that they hadn’t reached yet between him and Spock—trying to get a rise out of a Vulcan was always his most entertaining work. He makes more sense this way, a man who’s already been through medschool before joining Starfleet, who knows exactly what can go wrong when you leave the surface of a planet. Of the crew, though, I would have liked to have seen more of him, to get to know him a little more. Maybe to have seen just a moment when he was more at ease and less exasperated with the world.

And Scotty! He had the smallest part yet, but Simon Pegg just shone! Cranky, a little bit cracked, perfectly willing to go through a transport he hadn’t tested, to get almost drowned, to be taken hostage by security, to defy the captain, to be dropped into a role he hadn’t been assigned to, and to do it well. He was entertaining, to say the least, and sort of stole the scenes he was in—I’m glad they let him do most of the talking in his three scenes.

Old!Spock was exactly what I always loved about Spock in the movies: he knows who he is, and he knows exactly when logic doesn’t apply and how to rationalize so that irrationality seems rational. He willy-nillys all through the timeline, manipulating in that way where you could be mad at him, but you know he’s doing it for the best, so you aren’t. He delivers his best line as if it were new, and he fits flawlessly into a movie full of new people playing his old friends.

They’re all a little crazy. I love that this fact was played up. To work so well as a nontraditional crew, they’d all have to be on the adventure-seeking side, the lunatic fringe, and that’s exactly where they are. It makes sense. It’s not just loyalty to the captain, because he wasn’t the captain yet: it’s the fact that they’re all of a mind to find the best way to do something, even when it’s the crazy thing to do.

And the villains. Nero is a weird choice of a villain, really familiar and matter-of-fact, and I think that makes him scarier: he matter-of-factly destroys a whole ancient world and goes on to destroy another with the intention of wiping out something like 150 more. He falls through time and deals with it by spending 25 years obsessing over a plan to ruin the lives of everyone instead of going home to a world that hasn’t yet been destroyed (or even realizing that if he takes out Starfleet, there’s NO chance that it won’t be destroyed). He’s another rogue, someone not only separated from his home, his empire and his government, but also from his time and his previous life: a madman who thinks nothing of changing history.

And that’s what this movie does. half-way through, I realize that JJ wasn’t going to fix it. That this is how it is now. And I was just floored. It’s so bold. There was a moment of sadness that everything that came after won’t happen now, but there’s this immense feeling of freedom and excitement: anything can happen now. Anything. Maybe we’ll meet all the people we loved from after this point in the original timeline, but maybe we won’t**. Maybe we’ll meet all new wonderful people, have all new amazing adventures, fall in love with this world all over again.

I’m so ready to find out.

 

Other notes:

- JJ, that’s not how black holes work. You could have solved this easily by saying wormhole instead. Also, if one drop of red matter makes a time-traveling black hole, how come a whole ship full makes one the same size and strength? And why was so much needed anyway?

- I miss Nurse Chapel. And if Uhura is Spock’s love interest, then maybe in movie 2, Bones can meet Chapel and she can be his? He needs a good girl.

- I wonder what this more industrial-factory sort of a ship’s crew quarters would look like? We didn’t see a single private space in this movie (understandably, since all of it happened in, like, three and a half minutes), and I’m curious how the people all lived. individual quarters or barracks-type? Is there a lounge? Are there offices? Do they have toilets?

- Yay for understanding the three-dimensionality of space and the relativity of up-down orientation! That’s how space should be! And yay also for the perfect use of silence in the scenes that happened in space. There’d be no noise, and that makes them creepier and more stunning.

- * My personal memory of the OS comes from being very young in Japan and being locked un during typhoons: the USO channel would halt normal broadcasting and show OS marathons so they could break at any time for weather updates, and we’d sit on the floor all day and watch one of my dad’s favorite shows with him—which was quite amazing since we hardly saw him because of the hours he worked.

- Was Kirk’s mom in Starfleet? She seems to have been the only family-member on board, and he was just a Lieutenant, not important enough to have a live-in wife aboard. They say later that she was off-world…

- Did we really need the scene with kid!Kirk and the car? We needed the one with kid!Spock so we’d know what his weakness was, but I think Kirk’s was just to offer symmetry. We got that he was a roughneck from the bar scene.

- Uhura’s room-mate and maybe best friend was killed on the Farragut on that first mission, and she never got a chance to realize it. The only reason she wasn’t killed also was because Sulu left the braking dampeners on.

- ** I’m hoping we still get to meet Savik, Picard, Worf, Dax, Odo, and the afore mentioned Nurse Chapel. Doesn’t Kirk have a brother in the OS? I guess that got changed. I hope we don’t have to meet the Borg. I’m so over them, and it’s Voyager’s fault. I also hope we get to see the villains of the OS, all those tacky weird low-budget necessities turned into something cool and flashy and worthy of this movie.

- I’m pretty sure the entire purpose of the second crew was to wrangle lens-flares. Which I loved. I hope the future really is bright and shiny and flarey, and not dull and beige and monochrome and so well adjusted that people are flat and boring.

mvoie: futurama - into the wild green yonder

The last of the four contracted futurama moviesodes, and that makes me sadface. But a fun one, back to the way futurama always was, and that makes me happy face. I liked Bender's Big Score ("Scarab Forearm Bird Bird Bird!"), which felt like Futurama and had all the scifi weirdness that we all know and love about it. The Beast With A Billion backs? Not so much. Icky, mostly, though I do like the idea that Leela has elbow spikes that she hides... Bender's Game was fun, but the advertized parts took forever to happen, and the rest is a totally different story. But this one was back to the truth of the show-- scifi spoofing itself with characters we like and storylines we care about. 

In typical Futurama fashion, it gets around to the main point about half-way through, but the randomness is less random than it could be-- it all comes together perfectly in the end, and it's a good send off if it should happen that no one wants to pay for more of them (though I hope they do). It's like this: Green waves make new life around a little violet star. Amy's parents are blowing stuff up in order to build more stuff where it was-- namely, a bigger better Vagas to replace the already improved one they just blew up-- and one of those things is the universe's biggest minature golf. Which means the violet star has to be turned into the ball return at the end. Feminist environmentalists try to stop them and wind up killing Agnew, and Leela winds up as their leader, on the run. Meanwhile, Fry has been brain-stabbed and now can read minds and is recruited by a whole secret society of mind readers who are working for the green wave and against the Dark One that will try to stop it-- they want him to infiltrate Wong's business and stop him from blowing up the star. Along the way, there's Zap Brannigan and Kiff, there's Bender robbing and plundering and having an affair with Don Bot's wife Fanny. There's Hermes and Zoidberg and Amy and the Professor not getting enough screen time, but being funny when they do. There's Morvo and Lurr. There's a cameo by Mom. There's even Scruffy. It's everyone all at once.

I like.

movie: steamboy

This should have been right up my alley. I mean, really. Anime? Check. Steampunk? Check. Science saves us all? Check. And yet... I'm used to anime being back loaded and havign to watch through alot of character development before we get to the point of the plot in the last twenty minutes or so-- that's just standard procedure-- but this just seemed to take forever to get anywhere, even though there was action all over the place, and then when we got there, it was all full of crazy people all being crazy at eachother and no real moral compass at all. I'm okay with movies that have a different morality than I would follow-- I don't go to movies to be agreed with-- but this was all over the place. Science is good. Science is bad. Science id good but your dad is bad. No, it's HIS dad who's bad, and you need to listen to me. No, wait, it's Robert Louis Sevenson who's a jerk, so be sure you stay away from him, but we're all totally trustworthy... Yeah. No. Just no.

I mean, the movie was entertaining, but I wasn't able to figure out what point it was making. And there were other annoyances: The father is half steampunk cyborg, and that's hardly touched on at all. No implications what so ever. Millions of inhabitants of London are frozen / burned up / crushed by falling debris / exploded, etc, and none of that matters. What the hell is the little selfish and unrepentent little American girl about? Editing was weird, too-- things happened without us seeing them, even though they act as if we did.

I'll stay with my Miazaki, thanks.

movie: repo - the genetic opera

Oh my god, the badness. It makes no sense. They sing for no reason-- even given that they're in a musical, there's huge swaths-- like the whole first twenty minutes-- where they don't need to be singing what they say. They repo organs, okay, sure, but there's only one guy in charge of all the reposessions, he's got a sick daughter, and he tears things out and throws them around. It has Anthony Stewart Head wasting himself in something that was probably abour half-baked as far as his plot went. It had Joan Jett for absolutely no reason. It has Paris Hilton in probably the best movie she's ever done.

It's utter crap.

But it's also really pretty, and I want Sarah Brightman's holographic eyes and all the eyeliner in the world. And I'll probably go around the whole rest of my life saying 'reeeeeeeppppoooooooooommmmaaaaaaaannnnnnnn' and 'epilogue!' for no other reason than because it's catchy and rediculous. 

Fun, but i think it rotted my brain.

EDIT: Also, there's Paris Hilton's face falling off in totally the least useful way, visually. And there's various incesty-flavored interactions. It would have been better with choreographed dance numbers. And the potential romance bits totally didn't happen, replaced by the afore-mentioned incesty bits.

movei: penelope

Yay for modern fairytales!

This one has Christina Ricci as an hieress who's been cursed in the sort of situation that is apparently unslightly but not unheard-of: she's got a pig nose. The curse can only be lifted by unconditional acceptance by one of her own, so this is interpreted to mean that she needs to get married. She's been meeting eligible upper-class boys through a one-way mirror, and so far, even the ones who liked her as a disembodied voice run off screaming in fear when they see her not-that-terrible piggynose. And she's getting a little fed up.

Meanwhile, there's this dwarf with one eye from where he was attacked trying to get pictures of baby Penelope years and years ago, and they've faked her death to keep the tabloids off, so all these rich boys have to sign paperwork saying they won't talk, and the tabloids are getting fed up with not having any real solid info. Enter Blondy McAwfulpants who teams up with him to find a down-and-out blueblood to pay off for pictures. And then enter pretty pretty James McAvoy as said chump / Max in something similar to the agreement of Heath Ledger in Ten Things I Hate About You, though this is less with the bitchiness and more with the exaggerated 'deformity'. They hit it off when he's distracted and doesn't see her showing everyone what she looks like, so he doesn't run away. He tries to steal her favorite book out of all the books available, all of which are expensive first editions. And he comes back. Even after he's seen her nose. And keeps coming back until he deels bad about selling pictures of her, calls off the deal, and ditches.

She's crushed and rejected, but doesn't want to do this again, so she runs away, and even knowing very little about the world, manages to do pretty well for herself by being sweet and lovely and friendly. She makes friends with a grouchy bartender and a sassy delivery girl / Reece Witherspoon. And she exposes herself. Pretty quickly, too, though the movie says it's been weeks. Either way, people like her already, so it's less of a big deal than it could be, and she's suddenly very popular. 

While she's having adventures, Max is trying to get himself back together and gives up gambling, gives up drinking, and gets a real job before turning back to music, which he'd given up at some point in the past. He left telling her he couldn't marry her, which she takes to mean he can't deal with her nose, when he really meant that he didn't have the power to help her. 

She eventually comes home and agrees to marry Blondy McAwfulpants, who's basically been told he has no choice and tells her he's had a change of heart, but when they get to the actual wedding, she says 'no' and runs back to her room. Her mother's trying to get her to break the curse, and she says she's fine with who she is-- and the curse is broken. She's  one of her kind. So then her mom feels bad that she didn't love her unconditionally, which would have broken the curse right away (and still tries to tell her how to improve herself), and she finds herself in posession of a normal life. She starts teaching kindergarteners. And after a while, there's a Halloween party and Annie drags her up to where Max lives, and since she's wearing a mask, he doesn't know it's her. He's packing up to move, and as she's asking him questions and commenting on things, he figures it out and there's a really great grab-and-kiss before he knows that her curse is broken. 

And then they live happily ever after.

It's really adorable, without being at all sappy or insipid-- she's a strong, interesting character, and everyone else is clearly-defined and very much their own, even if the world goes a little more smoothly than the real world goes and there's never really any danger to it. I love that here's this classic cursed-princess, and she takes control of her own fate, selling her own pictures to the tabloid when her family-funds wear thin, and finding her own life in the world. And I love that the prince is broken and sad, and not really a prince at all, but still turns out to be the exact right one for her. And I love the way she's pert and smart and sharp in a way fairytale princesses rarely get to be, and he's tense and sexy and conflicted the way princes rarely get to be. It's great, and fun and sweet, and just enough different that it's worth watching again and again, and I think it could grow up with you. 

I do not love lovely Burn Gorman putting on the worst American Accent I've heard in years, though the very fact that he's in here makes me happy.

Plus, it's fun getting James McAvoy-induced whiplash when you think he went from Mr Tumnus to Wanted to Penelope in just a few years, and with other, more serious and more fluffy things in between.

x-files: i want to believe

Way after the fact, yet again, but man. What a rough movie. Literally rough, like even after six years it couldn't get finished right. 

I really love the X-Files. I watched it from it's second episode (I was away for the premier) to it's last, and I was really excited about finally getting the closure we all wanted... and it wasn't there. No wonder no one liked it. I came into this knowing that no one liked it and knowing that it was basically a character study and had nothing to do with the series' main points, but still-- it came across as cold, heartless, isolated. Maybe that's what he was going for, our Chris Carter who hates us, but still-- if so, he undid himself, because there was none of the sparkle and the tingle that we love between these two characters, despite the fact that DD and GA knew what they were doing and were fully in character and were trying really hard to make it work. All that snow just sort of repressed the emotional contact that a character study needs, and without it, there's little for us to care about. And it was full of weird darknesses that were not syched with the rest: a pedophile priest? I love Billy Connolly, but even he couldn't really make it work with the scraps of muguffinness he was given. Russian frankenstiens? Why? Because that dude was in love with another dude? Then why did they keep steaking female body parts to rebuild him with? Mulder and Scully breaking up? He didn't fight for her and she gave up on him too easily, adn then they were just back together and all was forgiven? And that poor sick kid, waht was his purpose? Scully kept on with his treatments, which, given the deal she made, would seem like she wasn't giving up and she wasn't running away any more, and then... she does?

I don't know. It's unfocused. It's lacking the humor that kept the show light enough to bear and the humanity that kept us invovled in their lives. I could have handled Mulder and Scully having problems, being as how this is, like, almost a decade after he went into hiding and they aren't married and she's in an opressive job and he's kinda going stir-crazy. I can handle that he'd want to get back in the field and do something, and that she might not. I can even handle the lack of mythology in favor of a new idea. But I can't handle that they'd ever be so blase about eachother's emotional involvements, and this thing that should have brought them back togther, back to where they started so they could find eachother and themselves again, it just pushed them further apart, and that fact was never dealt with, just... pushed aside. And I can't handle the tiny scraps being thown at us-- remember the other psychics you worked with? remember that kid we had? now that that's out of the way, let's never mention them again-- or the poor writing that dealt with the entanglements we were left with by not dealing with them at all-- al mean, seriously, you've been in hiding all this time close enough that a helicopter can bring you back and now you're totally forgiven on this basically small-scale case that doesn't even affect the FBI much at all? Come on.

It feels like Chris Carter doesn't like us. Or that he's grown bitter and jaded to the detiment of this idea that was so great when it started. I can see where this could have been great, but the parts aren't tied together well enough and the characters are manhandled through this loose and messy plot, and it basically just left me not caring. It's like a third season meh-episode blown up into something that can't support it's own length. And there were only three deleted scenes, so I'm not convinced that it's a failure of the editing. If it turns out that people are upset enough to want another one to make up for it, and the next one is good, I'll be greatful for it, but I don't particularly like it. Don't hate it, but I'm sad it wasn't good.

movies: iron man

Sunday, October 5, 2008 -- accidentally posted in the wrong blog!

I know, I know, I'm the last person on the planet to see Iron Man, buy you know what? It doesn't matter, because even on the TV, it's a pretty sweet flick. Glowing heart-sustainers! Explosions! Emergency Engineering! Socio-political Commentary! More Explosions! It's bright, shiny, snarky to the point where I almost actually forget that I never much liked Iron Man in the comics, and it's got layers that were unexpected from this genre: he manages to change without sacrificing who he is, he decides to do right in his own way, war = bad is proved without being too blunt or indelicate, big business = bad (when you aren't in control of your own interests) is proved, too... And the computer's voice is Paul Bettany, who I love, and who manages to be snarktastic even in a flat synthesized way. Additionally, there's Pepper Pots, who entirely understands her boss, her job and herself, who cares enough about him to get in the middle of a massive-robot battle, and cares enough about herself to keep the love-interest angle where it should be-- at least until he becomes capable of not wandering from model to model. Although, a loving, open, polyamorous super hero might be really nice...

And there's plenty of squee. Hints of War Machine, that whole section at the end of the credits, the classic Iron Man things like hand-weapons and crazy flying... Over all, a pretty solid and really fun sort of movie, with way more joy in it's existence than the last X-Men movie, which seemed to entirely forget that all this super hero stuff is just really really cool.

movies: cloverfield

Yeah, I know, an old one, and if you're tired of hearing about it, I won't hold it against you if you don't read this review. Much. No, really. Go ahead and ignore me.

I've managed to stay fairly clean of spoilers, so other than the previews and trailers during commercial breaks, I didn't really know what to expect other than shaky camera and a lot of running. I liked it. The party scene went on almost longer than it needed to, and I was starting to get bored with it to the point where when they finally got out on the fire-escape and I recognized the setting from the trailer, I was relived, but I liked it. I don't think it was the best movie in the world, and I don't think it's even the best thing that JJA has had his hands on, but I liked the idea and it was a fresh voice in the glut of monster / apocalypse movies that I do so love and have probably seen far too many of. The frame story that this was found after the fact and is classified government info added a neat edge of conspiracy.

The monster was not like anything I've ever seen, and that meant that even when they were showing it-- earlier and with more clarity then I'd thought to get-- none of it made any sense to me, and that was great. If it's an alien, there's no reason it would make sense. And the parasites were almost scarier than the monster-- they were on a human scale, able to attack directly, and made it almost impossible to hide. I think the scenes in the subway tunnels were some of the best, and that that's what similar scenes in 28 Weeks Later should have been like. And that bleeding-eye body-asplody that happened from the bites? Unexpected and really gross. The characters were nicely human, scared, jabbering stupidly and latching on to random parts of what was happening, like you do in traumatic situations, blindly heroic because that's really all you can be like that-- better to die doing something then alone and hiding, right? And the random flashes of that one perfect day before everything went to hell pretty much accomplised the whole juxtaposition thing. It was real enough to get my brain going along those 'what would I do in this situation?' pathways, and that's really harder to accomplish than a plain gutteral fight or flight reaction. Adrenaline is mindless, but this managed to get inside my head and creep me out, though in the end it was more suspenseful then scary.

Don't read the Wikipedia page before hand, and really, don't read it after, either. The backstory somehow manages to make it less cool and more stupid.

There's talk of a sequel, and that makes me nervous. The only way I think it would be interesting would be if it was the same story from a radically different angle-- there were thousands of people in the City, and someone else must have recorded it (or several someones-- it'd be cool to see the thing from, say, five different angles, all different, all with differing goals, spliced together to give us a clearer look at the event). Other then that, something post-apocalyptic, the clean-up and dealing with the parasites might be neat, but I think it would be a different movie, a different subgenre. There was talk that this was a juvenile, and if it's not dead, as the credits seem to hint, a full adult might bring down the whole world-- and the concept art looks interestingly cthulu-esque, but if there's no way to stop it, it'll be harder to make the story anything but hopeless and depressing. A second Cloverfield will have to be more interesting to get out of the shadows of the first and to justify it's own existence, or it might as well not even happen.