Set Phasers to Awesome

I know I have written here before about movies that I liked, and some about Story in general and my particular way of thinking about Story. One thing I have never felt able to define is any specific type of story that I prefer; I can't even decide on a "favorite" movie. The reason for this was pointed out to me recently when another friend commented to me — after I summarily dismissed a pair of recent movies as "just plain ordinary" — that because I have seen so many movies, I only like the ones that are in some significant way unique or "out of the ordinary." He's right.

I have seen a lot of movies; as soon as I had the means to do so, I devoured them. I could estimate a number, but I think it would be embarrassing. What I have discovered is this: good isn't good enough. In a large sampling of movies, there are a lot of good movies. Speaking of a simple binary state, good vs. bad, where I regret the time I wasted watching the movies that are "bad" and don't regret the time I spent watching the movies that are "good," there are a lot of "good" movies. So many in fact that a movie's potential to be "good" is no longer a compelling reason to ever watch it, and thus over the past couple of years I have found myself seeing fewer movies and liking fewer of them.

So my friend is right and as he realized, perhaps before I did, I do have a preferred genre after all: I believe the common term for it is "Awesome". I prefer "Awesome" movies. Its sibling genres, "Really Great", "Great" and to a lesser extent "Very Good" definitely have their place, but "Awesome" is really what does it for me. The good news is, I find that those four genres combined total perhaps 50 to 100 movies. The bad news is, I find that there are perhaps two or three people in the world who would agree with me on what those 100 movies are. The other good news is, these genres are completely made up and entirely subjective, so I am guaranteed to be right.

What is it then that identifies a movie as falling into one of these genres? As my friend said, the distinguishing characteristic is uniqueness. Whether it is a familiar story told in an unexpected way, or a type of story I usually disdain told in such a skillful and compelling way that I am powerless to resist, or a story that purposefully breaks a cinematic "rule" with spectacular results, or just a simple story that achieves such genuineness that all other similar movies fail by comparison, each of the movies in these genres has some particular aspect of its storytelling that is unlike anything I have seen before.

That being said, I can now make a stab at answering my other friend's question: what is my favorite movie? Since I now know that to date only seven "Awesome" movies have been made, I can tell you without a doubt that my favorite movie is one of these:

• The Bourne Ultimatum
• Empire of the Sun
• The Iron Giant
• Meet Joe Black
• Pride & Prejudice
• Primer
• Strings

The candidates for "Really Great", "Great" and "Very Good" are harder to define, but I feel sure they include this list.

• August Rush
• The Bourne Identity
• The Bourne Supremacy
• Contact
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Dancer, Texas, Population 81
• Dead Poets Society
• The Four Feathers
• Frequency
• Gattaca
• Henry Poole is Here
• Hero
• In Good Company
• The Incredibles
• Kingdom of Heaven: Director's Cut
• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
• The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
• The Matrix
• Miracle
• Proof
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
• Speed Racer
• Star Trek
• Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope
• Star Wars, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
• Star Wars, Episode VI: The Return of the Jedi
• Superman Returns
• Unbreakable
• Up
• X2: X-Men United

Two recent movies have exhibited this quality of uniqueness. In fact, if it were possible for a movie less than one month old to earn such a distinction, I might almost say they were "Awesome"; certainly they are "Great" and perhaps even "Really Great." These two movies are Star Trek and Up.

Star Trek — finally someone managed to make Star Trek into a movie and not just a two hour television episode. (I'm not exaggerating: I saw the two hour premiere of Enterprise in an actual movie theater, and the experience wasn't that much different from the movies.) Ironically, many of the people responsible came from television; particularly gratifying is the fact that the director, composer and several of the producers and editors also brought us Lost. Watching the end credits of Star Trek I couldn't help thinking that it's no wonder Lost is so great: the people making it are capable of producing work like Star Trek. I watched Star Trek on TV for years; I have seen all of the movies. Though some were entertaining, they all shared these qualities: they never surprised me, they never went anywhere new, and they never surpassed my expectations. This Star Trek is something new, something surprising, and just flat out fun to watch. I can't remember the last time I had that much fun in a movie theater. The action is exciting, it's visually stunning, the special effects are top notch, the actors have chemistry and talent, and — wonder of wonders — the humor is genuinely funny (and not just to people who show up to the theater in Starfleet uniform). My one aching regret is that it was not produced in RealD 3D, but then again I don't suppose the biggest movie of the year really has to be.

Pixar as well has risen to new heights with Up — and no, I do not apologize for the pun. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but Pixar succeeded in producing a story that moves from genuinely touching to laugh-out-loud funny with seamless ease, all centered around characters so natural that by the time you think the words "suspension of disbelief," it already happened five minutes ago. It was a joy to watch. I should also mention that Partly Cloudy, the short film that preceded the movie, continues to display Pixar's genius with dialoge-free storytelling and lives up to its long line of great predecessors (Geri's Game, For the Birds, One Man Band, Lifted, Presto). I did see the movie in 3D, which was nice. I don't think the 3D played quite as large a part in the whole experience as it did when I saw Monsters vs. Aliens, but it didn't really have to.

3-D Follow-up

A couple posts ago I said I was going to take the first opportunity I had to see a movie presented using RealD Cinema 3D. Tonight I went with a couple of friends to see Monsters vs. Aliens in 3D.

RealD's take on 3D technology uses, instead of differently colored lenses, circular polarized lenses, one polarized clockwise and the other polarized counter-clockwise. Alternating differently-polarized frames are then projected onto a reflective screen specially designed to preserve the polarization. The point of using circular polarization instead of linear polarization is so that the 3D illusion is preserved when the viewer's head is tilted.

Based on this first impression, I have to say the 3D presentation worked surprisingly well; it's certainly a great improvement over other 3D technologies I have seen. First and foremost is the lack of eye strain. I watched the 3D episode of Chuck this past January, which used Intel's ColorCode technology (brown and blue glasses), and at the end of the hour-long episode I was glad to take the glasses off. One of the two people I went with tonight experienced a little bit of eye fatigue, but I myself experienced none. The second major improvement is in the representation of finer detail. ColorCode's use of layered colors in a single image to make the 3D effect has the limitation of being unable to effectively display differences in depth of small objects and texture — the result being that the larger objects in the scene (buildings, people, furniture) are rendered much like cardboard cutouts in a diorama, even on an HDTV. RealD Cinema's use of two completely separate images was much more effective in presenting finer details like facial features, surface contours, and even clouds of individual dust particles or grass clippings as naturally 3-dimensional, with the surprising result that surfaces one would expect to have texture but didn't (for instance, the Missing Link's scaly skin) stood out like a sore thumb. As a display technology, RealD Cinema lives up to its promise very well.

As with any new technology in the film industry, good implementation is key. There are still some quirks to the 3D effect that cinematographers are going to have to learn to work with. Objects that intersect the left and right sides of the screen still exhibit a flickering effect, and fast horizontal movement produces an unintelligible image much like looking in a vibrating mirror. Extreme variations in depth or objects placed very "close" to the viewer also lose the 3D effect, and objects flatly perpendicular to the camera's line of sight still exhibit the cardboard-cutout effect. I have a feeling that further refinements to how scenes are laid out (and perhaps further refinements in the technology itself) will overcome these issues.

Overall, the movie itself was a surprisingly natural-seeming 3D experience, with few exceptions. The experience was so natural, in fact, that I find myself struggling to imagine what the movie would be like had I seen it in 2D. I found it easy to forget that I was wearing 3D glasses, and I thought the movie made fairly good use of the technology as an experience rather than a gimmick (although there was a somewhat amusing incident with a paddle ball that, I admit, made me blink). On the other hand, I think the movie probably would not have been as entertaining without the additional fascination of 3D, and probably wouldn't hold up under multiple viewings — certainly not multiple 2D viewings.

So, overall it was a very positive experience. The RealD Cinema technology gets a 9 out of 10, the implementation of it in this movie gets a 7.5 out of 10, and the movie itself gets a 7 out of 10. I'm looking forward to seeing how the technology progresses, and especially interested in seeing it used on live action. There are currently 34 more movies scheduled to be released in RealD Cinema between now and 2013, but as best I can tell, all but two are either computer animation or stop-motion animation; the other two are horror movies I won't be seeing under any circumstances.

A Survey of Film History, Parts XX-XL

I realized today that I haven't done one of these in over four months. This time the movies range from 1936 to 1956, and include everything from film noir to romantic comedies to musicals. There are far to many for me to do a thorough review of each and every one, but I'll add comments where I can, and hopefully will keep up with this better in the future. I am pretty much officially out of the 1940's now; after Adam's Rib, which I have not yet watched, there are seven movies still in my queue from prior to 1955, but they are all listed as "unavailable" or "very long wait".

The Very Good:

• Midnight (1939) - I found this movie thoroughly entertaining; great characters and very funny.


• Suspicion (1941) - My queue (in addition to today's post) features a disproportionate number of Hitchcock movies, because I haven't seen very many before. This movie should probably be in the next category down, and would be except for what I learned from the DVD special features about the plot of the original novel. Consider this movie to be in the "Very Good" category for what might have been, rather than for what is.


• To Catch a Thief (1955) - This Hitchcock film is an example of a mystery done right. It features interesting characters, sufficiently surprising twists, and is overall very satisfying.

The Good:

• Sabotage (1936) - This Hitchcock film had some pretty tense scenes, but very little in the way of compelling characters.


• All About Eve (1950) - well acted and, consequently, a captivating story; however, not the kind of story I'd like to watch over and over again.


• Pat and Mike (1952) - a charming romantic comedy, entertaining as most of Kathryn Hepburn's movies are. It simply lacks the spark that made Midnight such a standout.


• Dial M for Murder (1954) - another Hitchcock film; great tension, but with a somewhat anticlimactic ending, and told with a sense of detachment that made it hard to relate to the characters. (See below for further, semi-related discussion.)


• Rebel Without a Cause (1955) - James Dean knew melodrama. It's a fairly unremarkable storyline made compelling by the storytelling.

The Merely Bland:

• The Awful Truth (1937)


• Road to Morocco (1942)


• Lifeboat (1944) - yet another Hitchcock film. Too homogeneous in its pessimism to be interesting.


• Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948)


• State of the Union (1948)


• The Third Man (1949)


• Stage Fright (1950) - Hitchcock again; a compelling story brought down by a disappointing ending.


• Singin' in the Rain (1952) - I prefer the kind of musical where the music is organic to the story. This movie is an approximation of that kind of musical, being that it is about Hollywood stars making a musical movie, but the songs are trite and the storyline is weak. One extremely bright spot is Jean Hagen's hilarious portrayal of Lina Lamont.


• Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) - Here's an example of the wrong kind of musical: the kind where people pause and burst into song and dance for no apparent reason (except perhaps to cover up a weak plot). Howard Keel's vocal performance is a pain point for me too.


• Moby Dick (1956)

The Bad:

• Spellbound (1945) - one last Hitchcock movie. As much as I like Gregory Peck, I couldn't stand his performance in this movie. An overdone performance in a movie that offered little else of interest.


• Harvey (1950) - I can't figure out if this movie is portraying a serious psychological condition as a heartwarming farce, or doing a very poor job of telling the story of a magical creature mistaken for insanity. Whatever the case, I could not wait for this movie to end, mostly because of Jimmy Stewart's clumsily earnest performance.
  
  The most interesting thing about this movie is that Jimmy Stewart's invisible friend Harvey was the inspiration for the naming of the neural clone of Scorpius that existed in John Crichton's head in Farscape, a name that was first used by fans in online message boards and later adopted by the show's producer's and written into the script.


• Sunset Boulevard (1950) - The worst kind of story reveals its awful ending at the beginning, and then forces you to sit through two hours of unredeeming story. This is a prime example.

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An interesting fact about Dial M for Murder (1954) is that it was originally filmed in 3D. What makes that notable is that the film is in no way a "spectacle" or gimmick film, as were most movies that were being filmed in color, widescreen or 3D. I only saw the 2D version of the movie; I'd be interested to see the 3D version to see how it came out. This was the time of the rise of in-home television, and color, widescreen formats and 3D were the features that still made the movie theater distinctive from free television. Color and widescreen eventually became commonplace and are now artistic decisions rather than economic ones, but 3D all but disappeared due to the limitations of the technology. A format couldn't be produced at the time that was comfortable for extended viewing without headaches and eye strain.

A 3D image requires some technique of delivering different input to each eye. The most common technique is the well-known red and blue glasses, or the more recent brown and blue variation (Intel's in-home ColorCode variation of their InTru 3D technology; go to the link and click the "3D HP Showroom" link on the right). This technique, used recently in a Superbowl commercial as well as an episode of Chuck (reported to be the first ever full-length TV series presentation in 3D), is basically unchanged since the 1950's and is the only method of 3D presentation that can be used on standard in-home equipment. Other new techniques involve using electronic glasses with lenses that flicker in sync with a high-speed projector that displays a frame first to one eye and then the corresponding frame for the other eye, or RealD Cinema, the similar but reportedly more natural-seeming technique of using glasses with differently polarized lenses to view two differently polarized images projected by a high-speed projector (this display technology is utilized by InTru 3D and claims to eliminate the eye strain caused by previous techniques). Neither of these techniques can be implemented in the standard household, which means that movie theaters once again have the advantage of being able to present an experience that cannot be found for free at home. This advantage, combined with the relative ease of converting computer animated films to any available 3D format and the widespread availability of in-home high definition large screen content, may explain the recent increase of 3D movie theater presentations. According to the InTru 3D web site, "DreamWorks Animation has committed to producing all of its feature films using InTru 3D technology beginning in 2009."

At this point however, 3D is still little more than a gimmick. It provides to the viewer a unique viewing experience, but that in itself is not enough to give the technology from eye-candy to valuable tool. This has been seen before with film technology innovations like the bullet-time effect created for The Matrix, and computer-animated movies in general. Much like the flurry of 3D movies in the 50's, both of these technologies had an innovator, followed by innumerable followers who used the technology simply because it was the next cool thing. However, if the movies that used these technologies were memorable, it was not because they used those technologies — it was because there was something distinctive about the story, the characters, the filmmaking or, for the best, all three. If the popularity of 3D continues to grow, as it looks like it will thanks to easily implemented comfortable technology, masses of filmmakers will jump on the money-making bandwagon (there are currently 37 movies scheduled to be released using the RealD technology in 2009-2013). What the technology is truly waiting for, however, is for a filmmaker to use the technology to do something other than throw objects at the audience.

I'm going to take the first opportunity I get to see an InTru 3D movie to see if the technology is as groundbreaking as they claim. However, the first truly great 3D movie will be the movie where the filmmaker uses 3D technology as a medium and as a true component of the cinematography rather than as a gimmick; the movie where the audience forgets that they are watching a 3D movie, and is simply captivated by a story told in a way that was never possible before. That movie is the one I am truly looking forward to.

Surveys, a History of Film, a Survey of Film History (Parts XII-XIX), and Oh Yeah, People Can't Seem to Stop Stealing My Cable.

So I went and voted yesterday. On the way in, I was given a survey to keep me entertained while I waited in line; the survey was supposed to tell me what my political leanings are. That's the opposite of what I would have expected, but if you're curious you can take the same quiz online. There was also a guy there who was running for Congress by standing one foot outside the line beyond which no campaigning is allowed (X feet from the polling location) and handing out fliers that said essentially nothing about him. It was a moot point, because as it turns out he is a Democrat and I live two blocks outside his district.

Also this week I had the joy once again of being robbed of services legally mine by right of purchase. There is something about the apartment upstairs that drives people to patch into my cable. The first of my neighbors did it twice, necessitating two visits from a cable technician to restore my service (both times he removed a splitter from my line, which was later replaced with a new one "accidentally"). The new residents also found it more convenient to put a splitter on my line than to pay for service of their own. A technician once again removed a splitter from the line four weeks ago. Most recently, I removed another splitter from the line myself earlier this week, hoping to avoid the three day wait for a technician to come out. No such luck, because as it turns out, this was no ordinary piracy. This time, the thieves upstairs moved out (it's interesting to note that with less than four weeks remaining in the apartment, they still felt the need to resume stealing my cable) and, having decided they were done stealing from me, somehow managed to have a cable technician come out and disconnect my service altogether. That, at least, is what the technician found when he came out three days later to check out the problem. So the irony is that at the exact moment I noticed my service go out, there was a technician 100 feet away actively disconnecting it.

Finally, over the past couple of months I have managed to make further progress in my survey of film history (via my Blockbuster queue), but that same progress will likely be soon undone. I say that because on the second to last day of my vacation, it rained for 12 hours. Coincidentally, that same day the owner of the B&B I was staying at, knowing I am interested in film, had brought me a book she had run across at the local library. It was a 300-and-something page coffee table book, American Cinema: One Hundred Years of Filmmaking, by Jeanine Basinger; I read the entire book. It began with an analysis of the aspect of filmed storytelling that fascinates me most, the use of the "invisible" technical aspects of filming to manipulate the audience and further the story, but pulled a bait-and-switch and became a detailed history of the development of the film industry and the Hollywood studio system. Still very interesting, but not quite as interesting as listening to someone agree with me for 12 hours. The author said many things in the first two chapters that I agree with, and I'm still wishing I could have read the book that should have followed them. In any case, thanks to that book I may now be adding as many as 16 new movies to my queue. Movies seen since the last update:

Two very similar movies in Gentleman's Agreement (1947), starring Gregory Peck, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), starring Jimmy Stewart. Taken on face value, these two movies may not seem that similar; Gentleman's Agreement is about a reporter who goes "undercover" as a Jew to write a story about anti-semitism, while Mr. Smith is the much-loved classic about a Boy Scout leader appointed to congress; however, both tell the story of a passionate individual encountering corruption and fighting to stop it. Where the two films diverge the most is in my opinion of them: Gentleman's Agreement was spectacular; Mr. Smith was barely mediocre. The reason, I think, is that Mr. Smith is a wide-eyed, golly-gee love poem to a hyper-idealized version of the founding fathers and American democracy; it's more of an over-dramatized PSA than a story. Gentleman's Agreement on the other hand takes a (comparatively) realistic and very human perspective on a very human problem; it very much deserved its three Oscar wins (including Best Picture) and its five additional nominations.

I also surprised myself by very much liking Casablanca (1942); I honestly didn't expect to.

The Philadelphia Story (1940), starring Kathryn Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart. Entertaining and well-made; recommended.

Also viewed: The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), Brief Encounter (1945), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), and Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941). These movies were all good, but not particularly outstanding.

A Survey of Film History, Parts V-XI; Also, Enthusiasm for Points and Points for Enthusiasm

The ghosts of cinema past haven't finished making their point yet:

Stage Door (1937) - has charm, a good performance by Kathryn Hepburn and the unexpected (by me) bonus of Lucille Ball in a supporting role.

The Thief of Baghdad (1924) - the earliest film on my list, and the second of only two silent films. It made number 9 on AFI's list of the Top 10 Fantasy movies. Overall, a good movie, and the special effects are impressive for the time. However, it lacks the skill of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights.

The Maltese Falcon (1941) - a thriller starring Humphrey Bogart. It made #31 on AFI's top 100 films of all time, and #6 on their Top 10 Mysteries. It didn't turn out to be exactly what I was expecting, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a good movie.

Woman of the Year (1942), Holiday (1938) - two more Kathryn Hepburn movies; it's not a coincidence, she's the one actor I looked up by name when building this list. Woman of the Year was fairly good (with an extremely funny kitchen scene) but the ending lacked; of the two, I enjoyed Holiday much more. There are two categories of stage-to-screen adaptations: those directed like stage plays, and those directed like movies; Holiday falls into the former category, but doesn't really suffer for it.

It Happened One Night (1934) - starring Clark Gable, it made AFI's Top 10 Romantic Comedies (#3), Top 100 romances (#38) and Top 100 Movies (#46), and was also the first movie to win all of the five major Oscars: Best Movie, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Screenplay. I divide romances into three categories, in descending order: Films, Chick Flicks and Girl Movies. To list examples would be to admit that I have seen movies that fall into the Girl Movie category; I'll simply say that It Happened One Night is a Film. Recommended. Clark Gable also starred in the next movie on my list:

Gone With the Wind (1939) - although nearly four hours long, I found this movie surprisingly short. The historical aspects were interesting, some of the plot points less so. Of the ending, I will simply say: weak, very weak. On a scale from "Girl Movie" to "Recommended", this movie gets a "Worth Watching Once".

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I surprised myself this week by getting very interested in the Olympics. The first hour of the opening ceremony was supreme artistry (watch the entire hour here), and on a couple of occasions I found myself involuntarily talking to the TV: first, during Alexander Artemev's pommel horse routine in the men's Gymnastics prelims (view the same routine from a different night here, at about 4:17) when he kept the US team in the running for a team medal — not once, but twice — and second, during the last few seconds of Michael Phelps' seventh gold medal race — the one he won by 0.01 seconds (view coverage here; watch the whole first four minutes of the video, including his mother's reaction). Sadly, NBC's obsession with Michael Phelps was also one of the low points of their Olympic coverage, as they insisted on asking every US gold medal swimmer how they felt about Phelps' performance, and even characterized the relay team's gold medal performace as being "for Michael" — to their faces.

Not quite so Olympian were the feats of advertising that went on in between the interesting stuff, the most outstanding example of which was a commercial for a certain electric company. The commercial featured a spokesperson who "loves to read" — an admirable trait to be sure, but she listed her three favorite genres as follows: "fiction, non-fiction, and autobiographies about people."

That reminds me: I'd like to point out that my favorite things to eat are food, beverages, and pineapples that are fruit. And if I can contrive to eat them while reading an autobiography about a pineapple, all the better.

A Survey of Film History, Parts II - IV; Also, The Preponderance of S

Here begins my demonstration of the "approximately chronological" nature of my Blockbuster queue. In viewing order, I present:

The Lady Eve (1941), starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. This was apparently one of the top ten films in the box office that year. It is described as a "screwball comedy," but I just didn't see it ("it" being the comedy, not the film). All in all, the film is a rather pedestrian affair; ironic, considering it's about an affair that begins on a cruise ship and ends on a train.

City Lights (1931), written and directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin, is notable for being one of only a few silent films released after "talkies" had become the norm; it was Chaplin's last silent film. It is also widely considered to be his best film, and it topped AFI's list of the top ten romantic comedies of all time. I can readily believe it; it's a work of art. Highly recommended.

Alice Adams (1935) is a simple and bittersweet but not outstanding romance, starring Katharine Hepburn and Fred MacMurray. One line is a particular standout, and may in my mind justify Hepburn's Oscar nomination, but in all other respects this film gets a shrug and a "meh."

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I have noticed this before in record and movie stores, and I noticed it again this weekend as I was going through my CDs trying to get rid of the ones I no longer listen to; it's a disturbing trend that appears to have been going on in the entertainment industry for quite some time now: there's a distinct bias toward artists and movies whose name begins with "S". Yes, that's right, the entertainment industry is letterist. Once I noticed it I had to find out for sure, and it turns out that of the artists whose albums I own, over 20% have names beginning with "S", and the same is true of the movies. Not only that, but movies with titles that begin with "S" are apparently also more likely to get sequels. Need proof? Spider-man, Superman, Star Wars and Star Trek are just four examples.

I smell a conspiracy, and it's people with speech impediments who are going to suffer for it.

A Survey of Film History, Part I of LXXX-something; Also, Public Display of Hostility

The recommendations feature of the Blockbuster online rental service is very nearly useless — at least in my case. A significant portion of the movies they recommend to me are movies I have already rated (i.e., already seen). Another useless feature is the "Don't show me this movie again" level in the rating system; it apparently has no bearing on whether you will actually avoid seeing on the site again, as a number of these show up in my recommendations as well (which makes the "We think you'll like..." heading on the recommendations page more than a little ironic). The saving grace of the Blockbuster online rental service is their vast library.

Last week, after having received no useful recommendations in recent months and seeing that my queue had 7 movies remaining, I went through a number of AFI "Top 100" lists and "Top 10" lists (which inexplicably had different contents than the top ten of the "Top 100" lists), as well as the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die" list and added anything I hadn't seen that was major or sounded interesting to my queue. The end result: my queue now contains an additional 80+ movies (yes, 80 out of over 1000) ranging from 1924 to 1989 which I will be watching in a sequence that will approximate chronological order, some or most of which I may have something to say about.

Somehow, first up was a light comedy produced in 1938 called Bringing Up Baby. Starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, it was a rather spectacular box office failure at the time, and came near the end of a string of unsuccessful movies that actually succeeded in putting Katharine Hepburn out of work for a short time. However, it is now considered a classic and has made a number of "Top X Movies of All Time" lists, including #14 on AFI's Top 100 Comedies. Well, they were right. I think I laughed more at this movie than I have at the past five recent comedies that I have seen combined. Katharine Hepburn was fantastic and, well, I never knew Cary Grant was funny. Very entertaining and definitely recommended.

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The following glimpse into the seedy underworld of grocery store clerking was being (unintentionally?) broadcast over the loudspeakers to the entire parking lot as I exited Tom Thumb tonight:

Female Voice: "— called you five minutes ago and you haven't answered my question yet. All I wanted to know is whether there are any plastic bags back there so, are there any plastic bags back there?"
Male Voice (thirty seconds later): "Tiffany, 10 minutes is all I ask.

Ah, such angst. A series of bleeps followed, but I think it was a phone being dialed, not anything actually being censored.

Not everyone at Walden Media thinks you're stupid.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian works too.

Walden Media think you're stupid; the Wachowskis are just inconsistent.

I'll start with the good news: the Wachowskis are inconsistent. I am of course referring to Larry and Andy Wachowski, the writer/director/producers of The Matrix, a thoroughly entertaining movie and groundbreaking at the time (nine years ago?!). However, they are also the writer/director/producers of its unfortunate (for us) sequels and, to the great indifference of nearly everyone, the writer/producers of V for Vendetta. The inconsistency is this: I just saw their latest movie, and I was thoroughly entertained. Is it ridiculous? Yes. A little cheesy? Sure. Gaudy? Yeah. Really, really over-the-top? Oh yes. But it works in a way that no other movie has so far this year. Don't know what movie I'm talking about?

Speed Racer.

I'll wait while you recover. Done? Sure, it's a movie based on a cartoon, and it looks like an LSD-trip, but it has a genuine, beating heart that had me smiling involuntarily within the first three minutes. Here's the clip that first made me wonder if this movie could actually be good:

Incidentally, it also uses contextually relevant flashbacks to an extent that is ironic only because the movie co-stars Matthew Fox.

Now for the bad news: Walden Media really do think you're stupid. Last year they released a movie called "The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising", based on the book "The Dark is Rising" by Susan Cooper. I first read the book seventeen years ago, and it is, along with the other books in the series (it's actually the second in the series), one of the few books I read as a kid that I still enjoy now. It is set in England sometime in the 60's or 70's, and is about Will Stanton, a British boy who on his eleventh birthday discovers that he is the last of the Old Ones, and will play a key role in the final battle against the Dark. Judging by the movie that was actually produced, however, Walden Media thinks you're too stupid to get that story. Here's a partial list of improvements made:

• Will Stanton is an American living in England. (Americans won't pay to see fantasy movies about British kids.)
• It's set in the modern day, and includes an extended scene in a mall. (To make American kids feel more at home.)
• There's a ~16-year-old love interest for Will.
• Will is 14. (Presumably so that they can make his attraction for his love interest sexual without it being too icky.)
• A deep, dark family secret.
• A long-lost twin. (No, I'm not kidding.)
• Lots of action sequences.
• And on...
• And on...

I'm going to stop before it sounds like I'm ranting. I'm not against book-to-movie adaptations; I'm not even against book-to-movie adaptations that make significant foundational changes to the storyline (remember the Bourne trilogy?). I'm simply against changes that try to cater to an imaginary audience that is dumber than the audience that actually exists, and against changes that result in a movie that is just plain bad.

Reading Rainbow

Tonight I finally finished reading The Four Loves, by C. S. Lewis. I think I probably started it sometime around the beginning of December. I can offer no reason why it took me so long to read 141 pages, other than that is simply my habit. Sometime last fall I went around my apartment and gathered up all of the books that were laying around, individually and in piles, on shelves, desks, chairs, various parts of the floor and even in my bed into three piles: fiction books I had already started reading, fiction books I had not started reading yet, and non-fiction books. The piles were actually of nearly equal height, which could be measured in feet (or perhaps only foot). Now at the end of April I have whittled the two fiction piles down to five books, all of which I have already started — though when I will finish them, I cannot begin to guess. The dynamic nature of my piles is such that even though I returned six or so partially-read books to the shelf (a reluctant gesture of defeat) and returned half a dozen never-to-be-started books to Half Price Books, I made up for them by reading the seven most recent Jack McDevitt books and the Fire of Heaven trilogy by Russel Kirkpatrick (and of course not finishing four of the remaining books which have been in the stack from the very beginning).

I think Jack McDevitt has by now earned the position of my favorite currently writing (and living) Sci-Fi author. I have read eleven of his books now, and while they are all easily digestible (in the literary sense, not the literal), they are also unfailingly entertaining. He also has a gift for describing scenes, painting vivid mental pictures with scant few words whose result is somehow greater than the sum of their parts.

Russel Kirkpatrick has earned the same post on the Fantasy side; his Fire of Heaven trilogy is a 1900-page epic (is that a redundancy?) that on the continuum of Fantasy sits about halfway between The Lord of the Rings and the reality of the Middle Ages. It's one of the more original works I have read in the Fantasy genre, in part because it is perhaps the only Fantasy work written in the last 50 years that doesn't include the words "elf" or "dwarf". It is also unusual in that its major theme draws parallels to Christian theology that are so strong as to be nearly allegorical. I emphasize the word nearly because the "Most High" in his novels differs from the Christian God in some subtle but important ways; however, his very thorough and matter-of-fact handling of a very Christian-like faith makes me curious as to what his beliefs actually are.

In any case, now that I have finally finished The Four Loves, next in the stack is another epic: John Calvin's two volume 1500-page Institutes of the Christian Religion, which has been waiting to be started for a few months. Perhaps I will have some (most likely confused) thoughts on it to post sometime.

Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). ... The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend. ... Hence we picture lovers face to face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead. ... One knows nobody so well as one's "fellow." Every step of the common journey tests his metal; and the tests are tests we fully understand because we are undergoing them ourselves.

....

The mark of perfect Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all. It was a distraction, an anomaly. It was a horrible waste of the time, always too short, that we had together. Perhaps we had only a couple of hours in which to talk and, God bless us, twenty minutes of it has had to be devoted to affairs!

....

God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing — or should we say "seeing"? there are no tenses in God — the buzzing cloud of flies around the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. ... Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.

— C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Three-peat

Yes, I admit it, I was that guy this weekend, the guy who walks around in public with a fever and a cough. In my defense though, I was only out looking for Motrin and a thermometer (successfully and repeatedly unsuccessfully, respectively), and I spent the rest of the three and a half day weekend on the couch wrapped in a blanket.

However, as you may be surprised to discover, my diseased excursions were not the highlight of my weekend. What was, you ask? Well, as soon as I failed to roll out of bed on Saturday, I decided that Sunday would be the perfect day for my long-awaited Bourne triple-header: by then I would likely be well enough to stay awake for the whole thing, and yet still sick enough to justify not doing anything else.

My worry going into this undertaking was that watching all three of the Bourne movies together would reveal them to be a mishmash of varying creative styles and disjointed plots, but in fact the opposite turned out to be true. For three movies filmed separately at three year intervals (with two different directors, even), they make a surprisingly coherent and consistent whole, a true trilogy. Each leads smoothly into the next, and each adds further color and depth to the story without feeling contrived (even in the case of the end credits, where the extra dimensions are literal). The common musical themes help to tie the movies together as well — again, even in the end credits, where the same song is used for all three movies.

The third movie, The Bourne Ultimatum, did an especially good job of finishing off the trilogy. It tied in well to The Bourne Supremacy, touching on two of its major plot points and reframing one of them in a different context that was a genuine (and much enjoyed) surprise to me when I first saw it in the theaters. It also bookended Supremacy well, having several scenes that were the reflection (and the opposite) of earlier scenes in The Bourne Identity. It says a lot that the action highlight of Ultimatum is a masterfully paced and imaginatively staged eighteen minute long search-chase-boom-chase-pause-chase-pause-chase-pause-chase-fight sequence.

So am I an action movie fan? Only when they're done like this...

[The more detail-oriented among you are now thinking, "That only accounts for about 6 hours of the weekend, what did you do on that couch the rest of the time?" Well, I also watched Lost, Season Two. Turns out Michael was always a psycho, I just couldn't see it at the time.]

Fire, Ice and Rhapsody

Today was my day off. More than that, it was the middle of my four-day weekend, and I had nowhere to be, which is why I purposely did not set my alarm. And yet still I was woken up this morning a little after 8 a.m. by the loud, insistent, piercing beep...of my smoke detector. Don't worry, I'm O.K. It was just the battery dying, but is it insensitive of me to wonder why after three years of my living in this apartment, if it's going to die, can't it do so at a decent hour on a day when I hadn't gotten up my hopes of sleeping in? Because after I got out of the warmth of my thrice-blanketed bed into the cold of my forgot-to-turn-the-heat-on-last-night apartment, pulled the thing off the wall and turned on the light to figure out how to open the secret compartment on the back to remove the criminally self-centered attention-seeking battery in question...well, by that time I'm already up, so I might as well go check my email. And get the temperature above 50.

Not that cold is a bad thing. Brace yourselves: I went to a hockey game this week. Free tickets, good company, never been to one before — none of these were reasons to say no, so I said yes. Turns out I actually enjoyed it. The seats were high enough that I could see what was going on and close enough that I didn't need binoculars, and the game moved at a pace that wouldn't cause a snail named Ennui to die (very slowly, of course) of boredom. There was also air-conditioning. Any sport that comes with air conditioning has at least one thing going for it. (See? Football, no air-conditioning — definitely evil.)

This week was Thanksgiving, for those of you who didn't know, and so I spent some time thinking about the things I am thankful for. My church — never before have I met, let alone had the opportunity to be a part of, such a loving and giving group of people. My job — it's fun...what more can I say? But the one that takes the takes the marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes at the moment I didn't even think of until tonight: I thank God for giving me the ability to be moved by music. Tonight, I went to see August Rush. The movie is about a boy gifted beyond words with musical ability, trying to write the music that will help him find his parents. It plays out like a modern day fable about the power of music. It is deft in its simplicity, and absolutely gorgeous in its portrayal and use of music. August Rush is easily the best movie I have seen this year (yes, even better than The Bourne Ultimatum and Ratatouille); I highly recommend it.

CGI vs. CGI (Or, Dueling Directors)

I confess: I may have a problem. Twice this week I have driven twenty miles to see a movie on one of the only five digital screens in the metroplex area. In my defense, however, these two movies are by their very nature the epitomy of digital cinema. The first, Transformers, the huge special effects action movie directed by Michael Bay; and the second, Ratatouille, the latest Pixar CGI animated movie, directed by Brad Bird.

Of course, it wasn't a fair match from the start. Michael Bay's pedigree includes such great filmic triumphs as Armageddon, The Rock, Bad Boys (I and II), Pearl Harbor, and The Island. On the other hand, Brad Bird is one of my favorite directors (in animation, there is no one better), who has created actual classics, in The Iron Giant and The Incredibles.

It says a lot that a word has been coined specifically to describe Michael Bay's directiorial style: Bayhem. He creates fantastic, hard-hitting action sequences; as far as pure adrenaline-rushes, there are few better than Bay. One of the things I have actually liked about his style (this may sound like a back-handed compliment; perhaps it is) is his use of sound effects. He very effectively uses sound to convey a convincing sense of mass in his digital creations (for instance, the big steel barbell that goes bouncing down the highway in The Island, or the giant robots in Transformers), something that other filmmakers lack. Unfortunately he almost universally lacks the same convincing realism in his character and story development, and that's where his movies fall apart for me. The CGI in Transformers is among the best I have seen, virtually flawless in both the characters themselves and their integration into the scenes, and the action scenes are intense and exciting. What is strange about the movie though is that his simple drama scenes also feel rapid-fire, fast-paced and intense; it has the odd effect of diminishing the impact of the action sequences. It's a very exciting movie; on the other hand, the story doesn't so much flow as tumble to its unfortunately inevitable conclusion and that, to me, is a flaw. Another flaw of note: for what most will perceive as a movie directed at children, there is a surprising amount of blatant crudeness and intense violence.

Brad Bird, on the other hand: The Iron Giant succeeded where virtually all other children's movies (though granted, I wouldn't recommend the movie for young children) have failed, by creating an honestly and realistically characterized little boy in an equally emotionally resonant story; The Incredibles, likewise, was flashy and exciting without sacrificing engaging characters. To call Ratatouille a visual feast would be to make an egregious pun; unfortunately, there is no other way to describe it: the animation is exquisite. Fortunately, the story and the storytelling hold up their end as well. Bird manages to make the animation serve his story rather than overpower it, and (surprisingly, but rightly) glosses over some plot points that might have distracted, in order to remain focused on the relationships in his story. I am only mildly surprised to say that Ratatouille is the best movie I have seen this year.

The Darling Duds of May

Spider-Man. Shrek. Pirates of the Caribbean. They are three of the top six biggest movie trilogies of all time. The "thirds" of these trilogies cost a combined $718 million to make, not including hundreds of millions spent on marketing campaigns, and they all came out this month. These were record-breaking, record-founding franchises to begin with, and now it is hard to find a record sheet of any kind in the industry whose top ten places contain less than five movies from these franchises. Biggest Friday Gross, Biggest Saturday Gross, Biggest Single Day Gross, Biggest Opening Day, Biggest Opening Weekend, Biggest 4-Day Total, Biggest 5-Day total, Fastest to $100 million, Fastest to $200 million, Fastest to $300 Million — three of the only five movies to ever make more than $400 million dollars in the US come from these three franchises. Not only is 2007 the first year in the history of cinema to have three $100+ million opening weekends, it had them all in the same month, a total of $365 million dollars for these three movies alone. All these numbers add up to only one thing: more Spider-Man, Shrek, and Pirates of the Caribbean.

I'm not impressed.

Sure, Spider-Man 3 and Pirates 3 were enjoyable movies, even entertaining, but great movies they were not. They had funny parts, exciting parts, sad parts, tense parts — far too many parts that never came together to make a coherent whole. It's disappointing, really. [For the sake of full disclosure, I have to tell you that I haven't seen Shrek 3, and I most likely won't so I will offer no opinion of it here other than my total avoidance of it.]

Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 were well-made movies that told compelling stories about relatable, believable (within the context and style of the movies) characters; in the genre of superhero movies they rank as high on my list as any movie can that was not made by Bryan Singer. Spider-Man 3 is a mish-mash of under-developed characters, hazy motivations, overly convenient plot twists, missed opportunities, and incoherent action sequences — it makes me wonder what happened to the people who made the first two. When I see a great movie, I think about it all the way home from the theater; sadly, I wasn't even thinking about this movie by the time I got in my car.

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl introduced one of the most unique and inherently entertaining characters in film history: Captain Jack Sparrow. How can two sequels with this character fail to be hugely entertaining? The answer: if they fail to establish a unifying storyline and stick with it. Two hours into the second movie, I was still wondering where the story was supposed to be heading. My major complaint with the second movie ended up also applying to the third movie: they played like a succession of "cool scenes" with too little tying them together. I am starting to agree with most filmmakers' resistance to making more than one sequel at a time. Pirates of the Caribbean, The Matrix, even to a much lesser extent The Lord of the Rings — all these trilogies had excellent beginnings, and were followed up by lesser movies simply because the filmmakers couldn't stop saying, "wouldn't it be cool if we _____" and lost the overall story. For the Pirates trilogy, at the end of five and a half hours of sequels, I am left with only two memorable scenes: the scene in the second movie where the woman (How sad is that? Two movies and they can't even get me to remember her name.) gleefully accepts the undead monkey as payment for information, and the scene after the end credits of the third. Dishonorable mention goes to "The Attack of the 50 Foot Tall Woman" and the end of the third movie, where you-know-who stabs the you-know-what and takes you-know-whose place. Call me picky, but that's a dumb ending.

It's not all bad news from May though. Surprisingly, the two biggest blockbuster movies of the summer were completely and utterly outdone by two hours of television. Lost capped off a spectacular third season with a two hour finale that ranks among the most excellent hours of TV I have seen. The twist ending managed to answer the most basic of all of this show's mysteries while at the same time posing about a hundred new questions to be answered next season (or maybe just forty eight, that being the number of episodes remaining in the series), and left me checking my calendar to find out how many months until the next episode (eight). Compelling characters, moving sacrifices, exciting action, intriguing storylines, mysteries galore — storytelling at its best. Take a lesson, Captain Jack.

(If you object, ironically, that Lost had an advantage over these two huge franchises in its 70+ hours of character and story development, I will point you to the pilot episode of the series and dare you not to be intrigued by the end of it.)

Here's hoping Hollywood can manage to stand on its own the next couple of months; the rest of the summer won't have Lost to redeem it.

For everything there is a season box set, A time to love, and a time to...

...be inexplicably bored out of my mind.

I love a good story. Even better, I love a good long story. I am also not a stranger to the DVD marathon, having been known in the past to devour an entire season of a television show in a single weekend. I once watched the first five seasons of The West Wing in less than a month. That is why it is no small thing I am announcing now: I have been beaten by Space: Above and Beyond.

In December I bought Space: Above and Beyond: The Complete Series (all of 23 episodes) and now, four months and only 11 episodes later, I am giving up. It's not that I haven't had time. No, in the past four months I have also watched the sixth season of The West Wing, the first season of 24 (not a keeper), seasons two and three of The Pretender and the first season of Numb3rs, not to mention a number of movies and even a second viewing for certain movies. Actually, all that makes it sound like I couldn't have had time, but the truth is, if Space...forget it, I'm abbreviating it SAAB from now on...if SAAB had been as dramatic as its box cover, I would have finished it before New Year's. At least I bought it used.

Is everything bad about it? Surprisingly, no. In fact, given that it was a show that got canceled during the time that even Babylon 5 wasn't getting canceled, I was surprised by how much wasn't bad about it. The special effects were nothing, well, special but were better than other shows of 1995 and worked around the CGI and budgetary limitations of the time quite well, and the same goes for set design. The music was fair to middling, but that was also common for the time. The premise wasn't bad either. It was a sci-fi show about a collection of flawed characters on the frontlines of a massive human-alien outer-space conflict; if that's not a premise practically bursting with exciting dramatic possibilities, I don't know what is. Even the specific episode plots weren't necessarily bad. No, what caused this series' downfall for me (and possibly everybody else in America who didn't watch it in 1995) was the wooden dialogue and the desolate, parched, and positively dreary wasteland where its characterization should have been. Again, it's not as if the characters were bad, or even lacking in potential; they simply starved starved to death out of neglect, leaving behind boring first-draft cardboard-cutout skeletons where their well fleshed out and three-dimensional bodies should have been. After 11 episodes of me switching the counter on my DVD player from "Time Elapsed" to a much more comforting "Time Remaining," I have decided that I want slots 1, 2 and 5 in my DVD player back much more than I want to finish the rest of this series. My biggest pet peeve when it comes to Story: squandered potential. I'm not saying any of this to criticize the series (What would be the point? It's been dead for 12 years.) but to illustrate some of the things I look for in film.

In contrast, Numb3rs is a series which by all rights should be boring. I mean, it's a crime procedural about math. However, what it has that SAAB utterly failed to produce are vibrant, likeable, complex, believable characters with interesting and entertaining inter-relationships that provide the show with humor and, surprisingly, warmth. The series is filled with gemstone-quality character moments that make it almost more of a procedural drama than just a straight procedural, and the show is all the better for them. I know I have talked about this show before, but I got the season one set in the mail on Thursday afternoon and I had watched my way through the entire (albeit shortened) season by Friday evening, about 4 minutes before the lightning knocked the power out.

"Larry, I didn't know you wanted kids."
"Well, children are wormholes."
"Wormholes?"
"Yeah, they're portals, to the unreachable future and unattainable past. Well, as things stand now they exist only in the theoretical realm, so..."
"Yeah, I can see how you would have a problem selling a woman on the idea of carrying your wormhole."

- Drs. Larry Fleinhardt, Charlie Eppes and Amita Ramanujan, Numb3rs

Yeah, they're geeks, but at least they know it.

One Score and Four Years Ago...

...my mother brought forth on this continent — OK, I'll stop there.

So what did I get myself for my birthday? The new Relient K album, Five Score and Seven Years Ago, of course (and no, my birthday wasn't today). My first thought as it began to play on the CD player in my car: "Man, these speakers sound good." Second thought (about four score and seven seconds later): "These speakers sound really good, but the music is great." Happily, I was stuck in traffic for nearly an hour so I got to listen to the whole thing. That's what I get for venturing out for food.

Over the years my opinion of these guys has steadily grown from thorough-but-mildly-guilty enjoyment to open admiration. Finding this CD in my mailbox tonight almost made up for being sick the five days surrounding my birthday.


[Here's how much I like Relient K: for about five seconds I considered buying the "Bluegrass tribute to Relient K" album, Pickin' on Relient K (see link for samples). Out of respect for my recent illness, I decided against it.]

I am such a geek...

I don't think I'm ever going to tire of being compared to the M 57 nebula.

- Megan Reeves

Numb3rs is a great little TV show. That opinion of mine is surprising because it's a crime procedural, which generally bore me to no end. This one, however, is a crime procedural in which they use math to help solve the crimes (thus the conclusion that I am a geek). It also has the advantage of generally wholesome content (with the exception of the crimes of course) and likeable characters who produce moments like the one above which, in context, are actually rather charming...

(I'm not alone in this, however: for two seasons it has been the most watched program on Friday nights.)

That means he's really big, right? And made of metal?

For anybody who is wondering, The Iron Giant is a great movie. How great, you ask? So great, I reply, that it officially surpasses The Incredibles as the best animated movie I have ever seen.

Coincidentally (or is it?), they were both directed by the Academy Award-winning Brad Bird.

Sweet! Superman, Singer-style!

I remember enough English from high-school to know that that is called alliteration.

I went to see Superman Returns tonight with a couple of friends. One of those friends reviewed the movie much better than I will here. His take:

"I never read comic books or watched the movies when I was a kid, so I never knew how, like, totally sweet Superman is."

Before I go any further, I have to say that I am not a fan of Superman. The cartoons were fun, but the comic books were included in my general bias against the medium and the four movies ranged from cheesy to exceptionally awful (with the exception of the first hour or so of the first one). The character has always been just a primary-colored myth to me, and beyond the disposably fun aspects there was nothing in his story or struggle that captured my interest.

The thing I have always liked about Bryan Singer is that he (and the writers of course) has an uncanny ability to make all of his characters (even the blue-tighted crimson-becaped nigh-invincible alien ones) undeniably, viscerally human. He is also demonstrating an increasingly subtle skill for rhythm, pacing and structure in action and non-action scenes alike. In this movie, Singer has finally capitalized on the potential that was contained in those goose-bump inspiring chords John Williams wrote to start off the first movie in 1978. Superman Returns picks up where the second movie left off (deservedly pretending the third and fourth never happened), even including some of the same music and the same style of title sequence. The visual effects are amazing, to the point that the first audible "wow" occurred about 90 seconds into the movie. The action scenes are impressive and beautiful and realistically staged all at once. Superman remains a mythical figure in this movie, but instead of a live-action cartoon version, he is the what-if-it-were-real version. Special effects are finally able to make Superman fly and move and lift and land the way an immensely powerful superhero should, and the current trend of actually taking stories seriously (yes, even the comic book variety) results here in a character who is believable and relatable.

There are some things in this movie that are a bit ridiculous (you won't find any spoilers here), realistically speaking, but this is a myth brought to life, not reality. I've gotten over it.

On a scale from 1 to 10, this movie gets a "Yeah, I'd pay to see it again, and yeah, I'll probably buy the DVD too." That falls somewhere between 9 and 10. Once again, I am left waiting to see a Singer superhero sequel (alliteration). Come on, you know there's going to be one...

Science Fiction and the X-Men

The fascinating thing about the X-Men story is that it's a perfect example of what good science-fiction can be. Science fiction is more than just stories about aliens, space ships, ray guns, and time travel. Science fiction takes us outside the world (or time) we live in so that we can look back at our own world with a new and changed perspective. How quickly we can rise to anger when topics like racism, religion, politics, and ethics come up! Science fiction has the unique ability to address those topics directly, veiled in a context that is "not really real," thus making an end-run around the minefields we have set up in our minds. Sure, X-Men is about human beings born with genetic mutations that give them extraordinary characteristics and abilities living in a world where most normal humans hate and fear them. Not "really real," right? But what is it really about? It's about two groups of people who are different, and the people on both sides (with varying degrees of ability to hurt each other) who have to decide how they are going to live with and treat the people around them. Now that sounds familiar. People on both sides who hate and fear (and are willing to wipe out) everyone on the other side because some people on the other side hate and fear them in return, and people on both sides who are willing to give up everything to defend everyone, even those who are different. Sounds relevant to me.

Now that you are starting to suspect that I am a geek, allow me to definitively confirm your suspicion: I saw the new X-Men movie twice this weekend, in the same 24-hour period. (Here's where you should skip to the next post if you don't care about the X-Men movies.) That fact is probably as bad as it sounds, but allow me to defend myself with some mitigating circumstances. My impression of a movie changes based on who I see it with. Unless I am completely alone, I have a tendency to see the movie I think the people around me are seeing, rather than the movie I would see. It's a pretty much unstoppable phenomenon and, being the Story enthusiast that I am, I enjoy that it gives me the opportunity to see multiple aspects of a story. So I saw X-Men 3 the first time at a midnight showing the day before it opened with a theater full of X-Men geeks (as opposed to my more generalized condition of geekness) and all of their yelling and cheering, and the second time the next day with two friends in a theater full of parents who shouldn't have brought their 5-year-olds but did.

I am a fan of the first two X-Men movies. Actually, I have enjoyed many of Bryan Singer's filmic creations, and X-Men 2 is among the best action movies of the past 7 years (this coming from a guy who normally uses "action-movie" as a derogatory adjective). I started looking forward to Singer's X-Men 3 about .5 seconds after the credits began rolling on X-Men 2. Imagine my dismay when he took his writers and moved on to Superman, relegating the third X-Men to the direction of Brett Ratner, a man who has never created anything I truly enjoyed.

I wanted to like this movie, so the usual thing that happens in that case happened: the story and the craftsmanship got separated in my mind. The story in this movie is epic and meaningful. Someone has developed a "cure" that manipulates the genes of mutants, making them normal humans. Suddenly the whole world, including millions of mutants, are forced to ask hard ethical questions like should people change the essence of who they are just to be more accepted by society? Should society be allowed to require them to change out of fear? Should they be allowed to change if they want to? How should they react if society decides to force them to change? Should the "cure" ever be used as a punishment for a mutant gone bad? With villains on both sides of the line, these questions lead to epic and tragic events, and to some incredibly powerful and effective (my highest compliment) scenes. The story and events (and the highly reactive audience) made my first viewing a very enjoyable experience.

The second time I saw the movie, as usually happens, I noticed the flaws in the craftsmanship a lot more. The problem in the movie comes from the run time and the production time, both being too short. The lack of production time led to some unfortunate choices regarding special effects, and a limitation on how much time could actually be spent filming. The shortness of the running time (40 minutes shorter than the second movie) led to the excision of all of the plot- and character-development that made the second movie so strong. This movie became to a certain extent "Brett Ratner's A Series of Epic Events," to its own detriment. The change in writers also, for whatever reason, resulted in some very unfortunate dialogue (and language) in several places.

This movie gets a 9 for story (and what Bryan Singer could have done with it) and a 5 for craftsmanship (and what Brett Ratner did with it).