Indignant Desert Birds

[[Warning: The only important part of a Transformers movie is that giant robots will be fighting one another. You know that going in. Spoilers are thus impossible. To the extent that a spoiler might be possible for this film, I will spoil it. If that keeps you from seeing this movie, say "thank you".]]

This movie is bad. All it really needs to do is give a half-decent excuse for robots to beat one another up, and it fails. It does, however, do one extraordinarily thing right: It calls Michael Bay- the movie’s director/producer!- a giant douchebag. I’m not sure he noticed.

Hollywood formulates dictates that there is a girl (Carly Spencer) in this sort of movie. She isn’t there to be an independent actor, but rather to be a Princess Peach– a motivating force for someone else to act on behalf of. Some of the minor characters in the movie actually seem to balk at putting themselves in danger so that the hero (Sam Witwicky) can rescue his girl, but they go along with the plan once they figure out that the world is also at stake.

I’m not kidding about that.

In a triumph for the say-don’t-show school of storytelling, Carly’s is presented as a intelligent, capable individual. We see her working for the White House, running logistics for a global corporation, and are told that she’s worked for the British Embassy in Washington DC. She is in every way more fit to be the story’s lead than the actual dude performing that role.

Perhaps Sam is meant to be an audience stand in. A sort of everyperson hero that we can empathize with. That would help explain his constant inability to quite nail the suave behavior that he seems to be aiming for. After all: who among us hasn’t done some really dumb things that we’d rather everyone forget about? This doesn’t seem quite right, however. Sam’s buffoonery is rewarded. It is as if Director Michael Bay doesn’t know the difference between actually awesome behavior and a parody of such. Could it be that he has mistaken Duke Nukem for something other than a cautionary tale?

In a classic display of the male gaze, through the first half of the movie, the camera reduces Carly to a sex object. When she’s in a shot, her secondary sex characteristics are on full display.

Michael Bay has had this problem with women before. Indeed, in the words of one Bay defender “Mike films women in a way that appeals to a 16-year-old sexuality.” Presumably he means “16-year-old [boy]“.

So for the first half or so of the movie, the camera is perving on the female lead. And at one point one of the characters- Bruce Brazos- actually does a double take at her. And everyone in the room reacts badly. Like he’d ruined their fun game by calling attention to it. From that moment on, the camera treats Carly as a human being. I think we can thank the editorial staff for that beautiful and wicked commentary on Transformers and sexism.

Now, if only the writers had come up with something interesting for her to say.

Tags: Feminism, human rights, movies and television by Punning Pundit
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You will be assimilated-- in a sexy dance number

From the first moment I saw 1776, I have been in love with musicals. It was as if reality could involve people spontaneously break out into choreographed song and dance routines. As if our world were too big to be as mundane as we live it. Naturally, I had to see a film adaptation of Nine. And naturally I began to compare it to the stage version.

It was irksome to discover favorite songs truncated or left out entirely. It was bizarre to find only eight women, and I believe it was mentioned* that the child was eight and a half.** With all this in mind, I think it’s obvious: this movie is not an adaptation of the stage performance at all. Rather, it’s the best film adaptation yet of the book Tristram Shandy.

To start with, they’re both gratuitously about sex while straight-facedly claiming to be about anything else.*** Shandy claims that the story is about his own life, but can’t seem to advance the plot all the way to the moment of his birth. Nine is supposed to be about a Great Artist’s struggles to make a movie, but instead gets stuck talking about his childhood. The life and struggles for both protagonists are set when they are too young to exert much– if any– influence over that path.

Those are pretty surface level events, however. Structurally, they both do things with the format that are simply not done. For Shandy, this means creating space within the book to jump between time periods– often these jumps happen within a page. The phrase “winding the clock” came to be very dirty over the decade in which it Shandy was published. The book itself, however, wound revolved around a certain set of events, which didn’t quite climax with the birth of the author. See how I said that again, but slightly dirtier? That’s how the book goes. Rather than being a book about a subject, in many ways it’s a book about the act of… being a book.

Nine plays with the structure of film. Remember what I said yesterday about film not being capable of showing the interior life of a subject? Well, that was a thumping lie. What Nine does brilliantly is use music to illustrate the thoughts of the subjects. Contini is not literally sitting with his mother, he is imagining what that conversation might be like. His thoughts are not life-like, but rather larger than life. Musical.

Contini states that it is his ambition to get ideas out of his head and onto the screen with as little “talking about it” as possible. This is a musical based on a play based on a movie about making a musical. It is about the very structure of ideas itself. In that, it is a very worth adaptation of Stern’s masterwork.

*I could be wrong about this, my date noted it and I did not.
**This would, of course, be a reference to the original film 8 1/2 on which the stage production of Nine is based.
*** Wait a minute, you’re asking, is Nine any good? I’ll cover that in a footnote****
****Nine was a musical involving half-naked ladies singing how much they want to get laid. That’s going to be enjoyable pretty much no matter what.

Tags: Books, humor, media, movies and television, music by Punning Pundit
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Oh gods. It’s been a while. The pipes are rusty, the fingers need limbering, and if I don’t write soon, I’m going to… stop being able to find a good metaphor.

Just watched V for Vendetta. Fun movie in the “Action packed never stops moving” sort of way. The thing I really don’t get is the veneration of Guy Fawkes. Let’s look at the record: man tried to blow up parliament as part of a pro-catholic movement. Alright, that doesn’t mean so much in America in 2009. After all, here and now it’s mostly the Baptists who are crazed terrorists and the “seculars” who try and put their heads down to ignore whatever it is they’re doing.

But in 1605 “Catholics” (Latin for “universal”) and Protestants (Latin for “nu-uh, you are so wrong about _something_”) were in a state of war. Not in the technical sense of “conflict between 2 or more state powers having more than 1000 causalities”, but in the more brutal sense that most of the European nations would be engaged in a bloody civil war that would set brother against sister until long after the Treaty of Westphalia sought to end cross border religious raids.

Except England. While it was technically a “protestant” nation, there was a great deal of informal toleration– roughly a Catholic equivalent for “don’t ask, don’t tell” in modern America. By century’s end England would replace this informal policy with a formal one. In the mean time there were known Catholics serving in the Parliament along side their Protestant brethren.

That’s the Parliament that Guy Fawkes wanted to destroy. That’s the _reason_ he wanted to destroy it. Guy Fawkes plotted to bring back the fire, bring back the bloody reign inter-sectional warfare that plagued England in the rule of “Bloody” Mary. The Gunpowder Treason and Plot that ought never be forgot? There’s a reason for this warning. Fawkes had a vision of the world on fire, and only accident prevented him from destroying the guarantor of English Liberty.

So, in 2008, when I see the Church of Scientology– a small and powerless cult– harassed and protested by people wearing Guy Fawkes masks, I being to wonder if this “anonymous” group that has forgotten it’s history, or is enacting a parody of it’s most shameful bits, hoping that we all will remember what life was before 1649 and Maryland’s act of Toleration. If it’s the later: well done internet people. Maybe it will be enough to push back against modern religious in-Tolerance.

If the former– if they really are donning the mask of a religious zealot to harass the world’s least-powerful religion– it’s a sad message that we’ve lost the lesson of the 5th of November…

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Very broadly speaking, a horror movie is one in which the audience identifies with the victims. As they struggle to get away from the supernatural (or otherwise) awful occurrence, the audience sees itself reflected in the eyes of would-be slain, and is rooting for them to get away.

In a slasher movie, we’re rooting for the killer.

In order to make this plausible, we have to hate victims. Maybe they did something last summer, or are general douchebags, or had bullied the killer all his life. The slasher is a modern embodiment of the Greek Erinyes, and we’re along for the ride. The most recent Friday the 13th movie is quite a ride.

A basic outline of the plot: A bunch of teenagers go into the woods to party, screw, smoke, and have a good time are picked off one at a time by a guy named “Jason”. A few weeks later, another group of teens goes off into the same woods to do the same thing. Also: the brother of one of the girls from the original group is trying to find his sister. Also: there are tits. Lots of them.

Amazingly*, the tits are attached to women with actual and distinct personalities. Also, the guys fondling the tits have actual and distinct personalities. And the guys who only wish they could do said fondling? Yup. What about the girls who don’t get naked? Them too. This is actually a problem.

Remember what I said about needing to hate the victims? I didn’t. I can’t hate teens for the crime of being up in the woods to party, smoke, and screw. Unless you’re Pat Roberson (or Osama bin Laden), you can’t either. The result is that we’re left identifying with the bare breasted woman who just took a machete through the top of her skull. The guy who left the (relative) safety of the house to fetch his (stoned) friend? That’s the heroic guy I want to be. Well, the hale and hearty version of him, anyway. Not the version of him with an ax in his back screaming for help.

And so the movie is horrific. Over and over again we see normal American Teenagers killed for the crime of being normal American Teens. 97 minutes of pain. The only conclusion I can draw is that we’re so decadent that just living here is worthy of death. Or the writers didn’t think about what they were doing.

The movie isn’t awful, though. It’s has some very sharp camera work and film editing. This isn’t faint praise– despite the fact that I knew exactly what was coming and what to expect, the tension was maintained and I was consistently shocked to find Jason somewhere he shouldn’t be. Very well done, folks.

Rating: 3 machetes out of 5 Hockey masks. Mechanically great, but the writing is a mess. Scary, scary, scary…

*for a slasher movie

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Bond was a bonding moment between my father and me.  As a younger girl, I was captivated by the grown-up themes of sexuality and violence encompassed into thrilling stories easily identifying the good and the bad side.  Growing up I did not like violent movies, but these were an exception.  I found the stories captivating, and I enjoyed a foray into the naughty themes that I associated with “grown ups”.

My Tante (aunt) asked me if I would like to join her to watch the new James Bond movie with her.  I expected story, violence, sex, and gadgets – in that order.  Watching the movie previews I began sinking lower and lower into my seat.  I am not a huge fan of violence without consequences, manufactured frame-by-frame digitally altered sequences where showing blood is optional.  I figured that Bond movies appeal to an audience much different from the romantic comedies I generally go to see.

The many-gunned car chase did not begin the movie well.  There was no explanation before, during, or after, just a camera focus that made me a bit queasy.  The movie only went downhill from there.  The chemistry among the different actors’ roles, lacked.  Even the sex seemed an after-thought, as if after writing the entire script, that Bond must have sex in every movie.  So they added in a bimbo, with whom he had no chemistry with, and meshed it into the movie.  The plot was similar.  If you hadn’t seen the previous movies – or hadn’t seen them recently (as was my case) – following the plot was very difficult.  It was fueled by revenge, which I suppose was supposed to show a human element to an otherwise suave Bond, but the battle between good and evil was a little muddled.

I am first to admit that the notion of good and evil is silly.  Definitions are murky at best.  This, of course, does not mean the concepts are myth or untrue, but there is often lots of grey area to play in.  Quantum of Solace tried to play in the grey area – or maybe they were just trying to outdate M – but they didn’t do a very good job of it.  Maybe it was due to the fact that following the plot was difficult, but the reason M doesn’t trust Bond, or – as a matter of fact – not much of anyone trusts Bond, is unclear.   Not much is clear, except there was tons of violence.  Yet, even that was not clear.  The camera angles were constantly changing, so it was impossible to see if the punch you saw two seconds ago caused the blood spurting from his face, or maybe it was that knife you see in the next frame. 

I was sad to see this movie series deteriorate.  As a casual observer of the films, it means little more to me than a wasted afternoon and a nostalgic look back on my times with my father.  I am always the last one to see the “it” movie, mostly because I don’t enjoy films without plot, and the next Bond film will not be an exception to this rule.  

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Antitrust laws* are, well, dull. Even Antitrust lawyers have to be paid to keep their eyes open while discussing the craft. And yet, they’re pretty important.

With different laws Sony wouldn’t be in a position to screw over Microsoft like this, and the marketplace would have one fewer distortion.

Of course, capitalists don’t like free markets, the playing field is too level…

*you’re snoring already, aren’t you?

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