what jane espenson said

This was just one of the great things on the HodgePodgeman podcast this week.
I recently said that Star Wars is fantasy and got a very mean look in response, so it was nice to hear someone with at least a shred of authority voice the same opinion. (I imagine JH will get/has gotten lots of mean looks over it too.)

all the movies of 2013

I think I saw 28 movies in the theater this year. I wrote on the blog about three of them: Elysium, Upstream Color, and Frozen. I feel like I'm handing in my homework late, and it's still incomplete. Can I have partial credit? 

Enough Said - If it's true that Nicole Holofcener is "the new woody allen" or "the female woody allen," it makes sense  that this is my favorite of her movies, because I think it's the funniest one, and the one where the most irritating characters live in the margins instead of in the center. Quick question: is there actually such a thing as a professional poet? And do they get recognized by fans in public parks? This seems like a weird science fiction world to me.

The Spectacular Now - Maybe 2013 was the year of Bob Odenkirk. His scenes were the best part of this movie for me. I had somehow gotten the impression that The Spectacular Now was a comedy, and it is not. Comparisons to Say Anything are wildly off base. This  movie is a painfully truthful portrayal of alcoholism and depression. 

Star Trek into Darkness - I'm not sure what to make of these movies that are not exactly remakes, but so deeply linked with the movies that came before them. I guess I could just say it makes me feel old, even though I was a very tiny person when Wrath of Khan came out the first time.

The Hobbit 2: Desolation of Smaug - Oh wait, I guess this was the year of Benedict Cumberbatch. Almost everything was wrong with this movie, and yet. It's just so magical, all those things up on the screen that only existed in my head for my whole childhood. Also Richard Armitage is dreamy. But then,  Thorin Oakenshield probably shouldn't be dreamy--come to think of it,  I'd say that "dwarves shouldn't be hot" covers a big fraction of what's wrong with The Hobbit 2. 

Warm Bodies - I'm glad I didn't realize that was the kid from About A Boy until it was over. I think it would have been distracting. 

Identity Thief - I could probably be convinced to see almost any movie Melissa McCarthy is in for a while even if it is pretty terrible. This one was pretty terrible.

Gravity - I have not been so emotionally involved in a movie in ages.  At the same time, the great weakness of the movie is the way it tries to get the audience emotionally involved, by explaining for instance that when people die it is very sad. Still one of my favorite movies of this year. 

Oblivion - I barely remember this movie. I might have fallen asleep during it. Have you read this book? It's pretty good.

World War Z - I don't have any inside knowledge of this, but it seems like this script must have been lying around, not called World War Z, and then someone got the rights to World War Z, and someone was like, "Well, we have this zombie script lying around, can we call it World War Z?" And the answer was no, but they did it anyway. After seeing this movie, I was thinking about whether it should have been more like the book, whether it would have been possible to make a movie of the book, something big and sprawling and loosely connected.  Something more documentary-like, almost academically interested in the nuts and bolts of world-wide zombie infection.  My conclusion: Contagion was a better adaptation of World War Z than World War Z. (p.s. my favorite thing about watching World War Z was seeing Peter Capaldi in a small role.)

In a World… This movie is a romantic comedy that gets right a bunch of things that romantic comedies almost invariably get wrong. No, that's not quite it. It's like, it traffics in all the dumb cliches of the genre, but it manages to make them work. e.g. you know that thing where the female lead is So Awkward even though she is obviously Cameron Diaz or whatever?  Lake Bell manages to come across as genuinely dorky and odd and obsessive (even though she's model-gorgeous).    

The Heat - see above re Identity Thief. This movie was much funnier than Identity Thief. 

Much Ado About Nothing - I really did not plan to like this movie, because while it seems very awesome and fun to read or perform a Shakespeare comedy in your  big gorgeous house for funsies, it also seems pretty self-indulgent to then release that thing in movie theaters, even if you are very good at what you do. In black and white no less! But I was totally charmed by it. I'll also second Thad F's opinion (I think it was Thad?) that Nathan Fillian should win some sort of prestigious award for his portrayal of Dogberry. 

The rest, with my Netflix stars ratings:

Monsters University ***

The Way Way Back ***

Philomena ****
Iron Man 3 ***
The Croods ***
Pacific Rim **
Side Effects ***
Red 2 **
The World’s End *****
This is the End ***
Ender’s Game **
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire ***

from now on maybe I'll just write about previews instead of actually watching the movies

I have written here before about how I didn't get Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, even though I really REALLY tried to like it. I think I have a reasonable imagination. I read books and watch movies and I relate to the characters in them. I don't generally have a sociopath-style lack of empathy, and I rarely have trouble understanding and getting emotionally involved the story of a fictional character, even a character whose life is very different from my own. And yet I can't get my head around Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And I suspect the same thing is going to happen with Spike Jonze's new movie, which people are raving about, and which also seems to portray a relationship between a flesh-and-blood human man, and a woman who is not a person. In the case of Eternal Sunshine, the relationship was between a) a man and b) his internal reconstruction of a woman who actually exists. In Her, the female lead is an AI, an operating system. 

I don't know why but I feel compelled to clarify: I'm not saying that my feminist ideals stop me liking Eternal Sunshine out of some political or moral commitment. I promise I am quite capable of enjoying a movie that is at odds with my personal and political beliefs. I'm saying that when I watch that movie, I just plain don't get it. 

And also, I'm not saying Her can't be a very good movie. It might even explore ideas of gender and romance in ways that are interesting. I'm just scared that it will be one of those forehead-crinkling experiences where I question my basic humanity/cognitive function/sanity, because everyone else gets it and even though I am pretty sure I'm not stupid, I do not get it. I might just not see it, because this experience is so genuinely alienating when it happens. 

Maybe also, we could work on a list of movies where women play a central role, and have relationships with male characters who are not really experiencing the story. I can't think of any, but of course I haven't seen every movie ever made (yet). It's true that a lot of romantic comedies are populated by implausible weird ideal men who probably don't exist in life, and the women are (slightly) more realistic, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm looking for stories about heterosexual romance in which the story is told from the perspective of the woman, and the man has a questionable if any lived experience of the story. My sad little list is very unsatisfying: Bicentennial Man, Edward Scissorhands, Making Mister Right, The Purple Rose of Cairo, the relationship between Data and Tasha Yar. Mostly, that's just a list of movies in which ladies made it with robots. Which might be a useful list, but which is not totally relevant here, especially since most of those stories are pretty focused on the experience of being a whatever-non-human-thing. 

Frozen

It's hard to say what's great about Frozen without giving away parts of the ending, and while the ending is pretty well telegraphed from the first, um, ten minutes?...it's probably the polite thing to avoid giving it away while the film is still in theaters. What is great about Frozen, to put it in the vaguest terms possible, is that it questions/subverts a bunch of fairy tale traditions that Disney has mostly promoted over the years. Also pretty great: Idina Menzel singing, Kristin Bell being funny, the song "In Summer."

What is weird about Frozen is easier to talk about, and that is the Disney traditions it fails to subvert, in particular a few very boring ideas about what is pretty and what people (or girls, or princesses) look like. Princesses are pale pink and very tiny in the waist and very big in the eyes. Yawn. I'm not mad about it, but it is a little boring. I've been defending Disney (mostly in imaginary conversations with people I don't actually know) against the charge that their recent movies about marginalized (non-white, non-European, etc.) characters were a kind of PC box-checking. Native American? Check. African? Check. African American? Check. My theory is that maybe there's a more generous interpretation, in which someone noticed that there are vast stores of characters and narratives to be mined outside the Grimm/Anderson cannon they had explored (but not nearly exhausted) in the first 50 years of the Disney Princess franchise. (It's probably not exactly fair to retrospectively label it a franchise, but I think it was Disney Marketing that did that, not me.) So they made a movie about a little Black girl in Louisiana in the twenties not because of idealism about diversity, and not because little African American girls are an untapped (or, um, undertapped) market for Princess merchandise,* but because they noticed that it would be a fresher, newer kind of character, and because 1920s New Orleans (jazz! voodoo! parades!) is a cool setting for a story.

But it seems we're back to Grimm and Anderson now.

Linda Holmes on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour pointed out that if you look closely at the two princesses in Frozen, you'll quickly see that their eyes are the same width as their waists. Here is a quick illustration:

One more bit of cut-and-pasting further illustrates the weirdness of gender portrayals in this movie:

Doesn't Princess Anna look pretty cute with the eyes of Hans? 

*Obviously this is the real reason for diverse characters. I remember standing at the fabric cutting counter at Joann's the year The Princess and the Frog came out, and talking to the clerks about how ALL their Tiana fabric had sold out before the movie even started playing in theaters.

it's not that Elysium is too political but that its politics is dumb

Part One: Elysium's Politics

Elysium looks cool, with its pervasive filth, massive disorienting cityscapes, and exoskeleton-related gore. I enjoyed watching it. I was never bored watching it either. And I guess I should say, I am a sucker for a simple (simplistic even) sci fi premise with a heavy-handed political message. And boy is Elysium that. But there's something deeply and fundamentally wrong with the politics of the movie, and it's not that it's too far left. 

There's a scene near the beginning of the movie where Matt Damon's character goes into a room and he is exposed to a bunch of radiation, and then an alarm goes off, to let everyone know that "organic material" was detected in the blast room. Think about this for a second. Someone built a machine for irradiating materials. They then added an Organic Matter Detector, which detects organic matter in the chamber, but only after the radiation burns through the room. Why? Why would you design your machine to detect organic material in the chamber after the blast of radiation? The only answer I can think of is one that Elysium seems really comfortable with: Because you are evil. 

I expected to feel a little awful after seeing this movie, because I thought it would make me think about privilege and wealth disparities and the very real lack of affordable healthcare for lots of people in the world. I thought it was going to force us to confront the fact that in this real world where we actually live, there are people who starve even though there is enough food for everyone. Those real life problems result from complicated, flawed economic systems. They are hard problems to solve, and worth solving. 

But Elysium actually makes it easier to ignore these problems, because it allows its audience to utterly fail to identify with the bad guys. I'm not like her, I think. And as long as I'm not just plain evil, motivated solely by evil, I guess I'm one of the good guys. Or at least, I am not part of the problem. If the problem is "people who actively want to keep poor people from getting healthcare and good food out of pure malice" then I am definitely not the problem. 

Part Two: A short list of cliches and confusions that bugged me about Elysium, apart from the politics problem. 

1. Jodie Foster's character has this evil plan where she is going to install a program that will rewrite the government of Elysium. For a minute, I thought this meant that all of Elysium was some sort of Matrix-style virtual reality. But it's not. I think we're just supposed to believe that if a computer says President Patel is no longer president, then he will actually no longer be president. Why? How? (Note: someone said that maybe it's the law enforcement robots that get reprogrammed, so those robot guys will recognize Jodie Foster as president and do what she says.)

2. The threat of sexual violence as a motivator for the protagonist, because he cares about the victim. Because you see, the thing about sexual violence against women is that it's so hard on the men who love those women. Eye roll. 

3. It is a little weird to me that in a movie that's all about class and poverty and inequality, the main character is Yet Another White Dude Who Saves Everyone. Read this 

4. The replacement program, the one that the good guy hackers install instead of the evil one Jodie Foster was planning to install, declares all residents of Earth to be citizens of Elysium. That's cool. Even the part where the hacker changes a line of code, something like "earth residents status: illegal" to "earth residents status: legal." That's okay--I like heavy-handed. But it then displays the following error: "Cannot arrest citizen of Elysium." Seriously? They can't arrest any citizen of Elysium? For any crime? I guess? I don't think I want to live there. 

So it goes.

Charlie Kaufman Writing ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ Movie for Guillermo del Toro

(How they gonna do four-dimensional aliens? I hope not like that Donnie Darko hooey.)

Room 237 (with Upstream Color spoilers)

Room 237 is a documentary about people who are a little obsessed with The Shining--and with their interpretations of it. When you hear the synopsis, you think it's going to be about lunatics--e.g. one of the subjects of the film believes The Shining represents Kubrick's confession to his role in faking the footage of the moon landing. What makes the movie interesting is that these people are decidedly not lunatics. They come across as surprisingly sane and ordinary. Each of them just happens to be a little obsessed with one idea.

I saw Room 237 a few weeks ago, not long after seeing Shane Carruth's new movie Upstream Color. It was not until I saw Upstream Color for the second time (after Room 237) that I thought of Rosemary's Baby when Amy Steinmetz's character cut her hair short. Haircuts are not so uncommon in movies (in fact, I once spent a very long time digging around a website someone had made that was just a catalog of haircuts in movies), so I didn't think too much about the similarity. But then at the end of Upstream Color, there's a scene where Steinmetz cuddles a pig, as if it were her child (which it sort of is).

My point is, a person wouldn't have to be very obsessive or nutty to get...preoccupied with finding evidence of the validity of an offbeat interpretation of a film. It only took me about an hour to find these parallels:

John Cassavettes and Shane Carruth look good in button-downs under pullovers. 

beds outdoors 

haircuts

board games as important props

Not pictured: long period of fasting followed by eating frenzy, cuddling and lullabying the hideous monster that is sort of her baby.

Some of these pictures are from:
http://metallicimagery.blogspot.com/2013/04/upstream-color-review.html 
http://veryaware.com/
http://www.zontikgames.com