On High Horses

A healthy chunk of the criticism levelled at the movie "Kick-Ass" zeroes in on what most writers describe as its morality, or lack thereof, with the specific focus of that ire being the foul-mouthed, murderous 11-year-old named Hit Girl, played by Chloe Moretz. I will not contest that there is something off about the concept, and in fact I was initially put off from watching the movie precisely because of it. I mean, I have a four-year-old girl and the thought of casting a little girl in that role seemed revolting to me.

The thing about art, whether in literature, music or film, is that sometimes, in my opinion, it has to challenge our perception of what is good and proper, whether the end result is an affirmation of one's belief or a reexamination of them. I was genuinely curious about the film and ultimately decided that if I wanted to knock it, I would have to try it first. So basically, I walked in half-expecting to hate it, despite my efforts to suppress all expectations or preconceived notions.

Ultimately, however, I couldn't. I enjoyed myself too much, even though the movie definitely had its flaws. It be self-indulgent and it often engages in one too many nudge-nudge, wink-wink moments to fans of superheroes, but director Matthew Vaughn, whose "Stardust" adaptation I enjoyed three years ago, really seems to know how to tell a story. Sure, Hit Girl is a big part of that story and yes the violence is pretty disturbing, but to judge the film solely on the "morality" of the film while overlooking breakthrough performances by Aaron Johnson and Chloe Moretz and a fantastic return to form for Nicolas Cage is to allow one's own preconceived notions to curtail one's ability to appreciate an attempt at art on its own complete terms.

I think morality and art appreciation can be compatible, but I think it's important not to mix the two. The craft of a movie boils down to how it tells its story; the effectiveness of the script, actors, directors, visual effects, lighting, sound design, etc. (and in the case of a film like "Kick-Ass," its comic timing). It's why films like "The Birth of a Nation," and "Lolita" have remained in the public consciousness despite the former promoting one of the worst possible evils and the latter touching upon a relationship that, even today, would be not only taboo but grounds for imprisonment. It's morals are something else, and can be varying degrees of good or bad. The important thing, I think, is not to appreciate a film solely based on its morals or perceived lack thereof; for better or worse, these films are kind of like cultural touchstones, like clothes or music; they can tell future generations what past society is like. I'm not saying "Kick-Ass" does that, but by writing it off solely on moral grounds, one risks missing the bigger picture.

Not only that, but by insisting on moralizing about a film, like the Catholic Church did with "The Da Vinci Code" one ends up generating a whole lot of attention the film may or may not have received without all the pontificating. For example, the fact that the DVC sequel, "Angels and Demons" was, relative to its predecessor, a box office failure, offers some testimony to the mileage the original film got out of all its negative publicity. It could well go down in history as one of the films that really spooked the Catholic Church. Without all the hoopla, given the bad reviews and people who didn't come back for the apparent sequel (which did not contain any Catholic Church-bashing), it may have just gone down as yet another murder-mystery-suspense film, end of story. I suppose the reasonable conclusion here is: the higher up one gets on a horse, the farther the fall.

Some outdoor shots

With this new digital camera, I now have increased confidence in my ability to create some pretty spectacular automotive illusions. Allow me to demonstrate...








Maybe writer's block isn't so bad...it's allowed me to discover a whole new side to myself...

On Writer's Block and Chinese Spam (And I'm Not Talking About the Canned Food)

I've been writing a little something for myself since last year; it's a book I hope to be able to have published when it's done, or failing that, which I am able to self-publish. It's a fiction book; writing law textbooks, despite my profession, somehow holds very little allure for me.

Lately, though, I've hit a bit of an impasse. I've always known it was hard to write when one has a lot on one's mind, but when I finally got back to work on my little novel over the Holy Week what took me aback was exactly how much time I'd been away from it. According to the time stamp I had last written there on the 28th of January, or over two months before I got going again.

I thought to myself; I couldn't possibly have been working that whole time, so what exactly have I been up to?

I got my answer when I went over my various blog posts, film reviews, and discussion threads over at my toy car collector forum. Long story short, not very much and a whole lot at the same time.

I guess it's easier to work around writer's block or write without any real inspiration when one is basically writing off the top of one's head, as one tends to do for stuff like blogs and online fora (though I recognize that there are much more serious bloggers out there who put a great deal of thought into their online musings); sometimes it feels easier for me to sustain quick bursts of creative energy than to go through the agonizing process of structuring a narrative. This was clear to me when I read the book I've written so far and saw that some of it was pretty engaging and some of it kind of just blundered along. My up and down days affect my ability to write a longer piece of work, unlike a quickie blog post, which is either great or awful reading all by itself.

One downside of blogs like this one and multiply is that people I don't know from Adam sometimes post all kinds of garbage. The latest batch I'm getting is a bunch of Chinese spam which, thanks to the google translator, I have determined is an advert for some porn. Good grief.

My Generation's Turn to Be Remade

One of the touchstones of my youth was listening to remakes of twenty-year-old songs, hearing my mother say "the original sounded better," and refusing to believe her. That was the eighties, and the songs being remade were either sixties' era songs or older.

As early as 1998, I should have seen that it would soon be the eighties' turn to get the remake treatment, when a mullet-wigged Adam Sandler starting poking fun at the era (in which he had clearly grown up) in his film, The Wedding Singer, which was set in 1985.

Twelve years after the Sandler movie, when everything from even the last year of the eighties is officially over twenty years old (and where the people born in 1980 are now turning 30), apparently people sitting up in Hollywood feel that the era is now officially ripe for the remaking. It's been in the works for some years, with such popular 80's properties as Transformers getting the big screen treatment and making a mint, but in 2010 the floodgates seem to have burst open, with everything from toys, TV shows and old B-movies getting either an adaptation, remake or sequel. Heck, even the Disney movie Tron, which bombed when it was first released in 1982 but which has generated a cult following since, will be followed up by Tron: Legacy, a sequel literally 27 years in the making.

To make a brief rundown of the films and properties getting the remake treatment, here are a few I've seen advertised over the last few months in no particular order: Clash of the Titans (based on the 1981 film), The A-Team (based on the popular TV series), The Karate Kid (based on the 1980s film series) and Poltergeist (based on the 1980 film). I remember watching the original Clash of the Titans.

Now, I have no intention of decrying the remake in general and bewailing the creative bankruptcy of Hollywood. That's just as tired and old as the people claim the remakes to be. Some of the films I truly liked have been remakes, including the Lord of the Rings films (there was a prior attempt to adapt J.R.R. Tolkien's saga back in the 1980s by adult-animation meister Ralph Bakshi)and Andrew Davis' 1993 film The Fugitive, starring Harrison Ford. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. I'm not complaining, nor am I particularly happy to see it happening.

I just find it, well, in a word, funny to think that this day has come. So many of the things I enjoyed as a kid are so old they're getting made over with rock music and CGI. Boy this feels weird...

On Coming Out and Career Revival Attempts

The other day I wrote about some out-of-work screenwriter trying to grab (or re-grab) his 15 minutes of fame by writing a non-apology for his role in bringing the cinematic debacle Battlefield Earth to the big screen (basically saying "it's not the movie I wrote!"). It was such an oddity I had to give my two cents on it, and it was in many parts an entertaining read.

Now, official has-been pop star Ricky Martin has just come out of the closet. To the uninitiated, that means he's announced that he's gay. The funny thing about it is, the general public kind of saw the writing on the wall a few years ago when Martin sired twins by a surrogate mom (i.e. "you're marketed the world over as a Latin sexpot, and yet you have to get a SURROGATE to carry your kids instead of placing them in a woman the old-fashioned way, which is what arguably millions upon millions of women would absolutely love for you to do? WTF?"), and several people who were even keener (e.g. Barbara Walters) saw it a lot earlier than that. So, frankly it's about as "newsy" as George Michael's coming out. Or Elton John's.

So why do it at all? Well, I haven't really been following the music scene a whole lot for the last several years, but it strikes me that this guy hasn't had a whole lot of hits since his first English language album was released over ten years ago. Maybe in the post-Adam-Lambert-coming-out climate Martin felt that the market would be more receptive to gay singers than they would to aging Latin pop stars. Apart from the fact that I'm pretty sure Lambert is a better singer than Martin is, the thing about Lambert is that he has work that is currently on the radar. Martin, outside of his usual Latin audience, has apparently fallen well below it. Had he outed himself at the zenith of his career or even after selling a moderately successful album I believe the applause at his candor would have been a lot louder, but now he's only a few notches, if at all, above the aforementioned Battlefield Earth screenwriter. Maybe he'll come up with a follow-up revelation that he isn't really gay once it emerges that no noticeable bump in the sales of his albums has occurred.

Scriptwriters deserve to get work based on their skill and musicians deserve to sell albums that provide a great listening experience; this promotion-by-controversy/ shocking revelation business is quite honestly depressing. I couldn't give two shits if Freddy Mercury slept with men ; he was a rock god. Neither do I care if Adam Lambert is gay; the man has a great voice and he isn't shy to use it. But as much controversy as they courted, at least they let their music do the talking the loudest.

Well, Martin doesn't appear to be getting a whole lot of Yahoo! hits so maybe people aren't quite the suckers I'd figured them to be.

An Open Letter to Google Ads

Dear Google,

I confess I don't really understand how your ad placement system works, but it strikes me that right now, it's not working very wqell.

After Manny Villar started polluting my blogspace (and just about every other space on the internet) I went to AdSense and clicked my preferences; I made it clear that I DON'T want political ads on my blog. It strikes me that I was ignored; the ads continued, and it strikes me that the only reason they even stopped is that Villar must have used up his "Net" time the same way he has come close to using up his TV air time. One reason I'm sure that this is the case is that Villar has since been replaced by another senatorial candidate, this time one of those mass-murderers from the era of martial law who has managed to perpetuate himself in the political system by jumping allegiance time and time again just like every other worm in elected office and who would now seek to do so with your help.

How archaic is your filtration system that you can't even detect a simple political campaign ad for what it is? What kind of money have the candidates dropped into your bank accounts that you can summarily ignore your subscribers' emphatic pleas to be free of politics in their blogs, which for people like me are often a haven from the trials and tribulations of daily life?

Please, if my recalibrating my preferences didn't say it clearly enough, please TAKE ALL THESE POLITICAL CAMPAIGN ADS OFF MY BLOG!

Sincerely,

This Irate Blogger

If You're Going to Own Up, then Own Up, for God's Sake...

A curious bit of entertainment-related news popped up today: there's a story in the New York Post which is described as an apology by J. D. Shapiro, one of the screenwriters of the 2000 film Battlefield Earth for...well, the movie itself, though one presumes he only referred to his role in getting it made. It must have been a major role, as he received an "award" in the form of a Golden Raspberry, also known as a "Razzie" for his work on what has been voted as the worst movie of the decade (the 2000s). Shapiro received the award personally, and while in the case of people like Sandra Bullock and Halle Berry one can say they're simply being good sports, in Shapiro's case it would appear that he showed up because at the time he had nothing better to do.

His apparent unemployment aside, the piece is an entertaining read at first, in which Shapiro starts out by confessing that he only ever got involved with Battlefield Earth author L. Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology, and subsequently with the production of the film, because he wanted to get laid. There are a good number of chuckle-inducing passages on the way, and in some instances I even found myself laughing out loud.

Then, maybe about midway through the piece, the tone changes as Shapiro goes from blaming his dick for his participation in the production to blaming John Travolta and his people for overhauling his script. Now, I have no interest in defending this film but I have to say that if Shapiro had truly wanted to apologize for this movie he could not have picked a less sincere way to do it. Had he really wanted to tell everyone how sorry he was for even turning in a draft for what turned out to be a critically-reviled and commercially-shunned film he could easily have done so without resorting to the old "I wrote a different movie" chestnut. Instead, he seems to make the rather feeble suggestion that his draft would have made a better movie. The most he seems to apologize for from this point onwards is the fact that he even bothered to collect a paycheck for this film. As for writing it, however, Shapiro seems much more convinced that he had written a better movie than that which saw theatrical release.

Now, though I will take the trouble to point out that apart from Battlefield Earth this man seems to have no other screenwriting credits (or at least, none that a quick Google search could turn up), which would seem to suggest a desperate grab for attention here, but whatever his motives I think the real issue here is why Shapiro even bothered to preface his piece with the declaration that he had written the "suckiest" movie ever, considering that according to him, he didn't write the version everyone saw.

In this day and age of zero accountability (witness the execs of the Big Three who went to Washington with their begging bowls sometime last year and basically disavowed all responsibility for running their companies into the ground with their insistence on making, marketing and selling gas-guzzling pieces of junk) it would have actually been kind of refreshing to see a mea culpa, even if came kind of out of left field and was for a movie that everyone except the folks that award the Razzies has already chosen to forget (by no doubt suppressing their memories). It certainly got my attention, and if Google is to be believed, quite a number of other people's, too. Too bad it wasn't much of a mea culpa at all.

So really, if one wants to apologize, then one should APOLOGIZE, for the love of Pete, rather than make a ham-handed attempt to shift the blame to someone else mid-diatribe. Shapiro should just own up for his part in the disaster and then maybe the healing can begin. Assuming, of course there's even a ghost of a hope left for his screenwriting career...

Recycling Superheroes Part II (and Manny Villar is...Gone??? Thank God!)

I don't think it was even a year ago that I blogged about how Hollywood seems to be falling into the habit of recycling actors for roles in comic book movies. I guess the most dramatic possible illustration of how utterly insignificant my blog is to the folks over in Tinseltown is the fact that they have just done it again. Chris Evans, the actor who played Johnny Storm, aka the Human Torch of the Fantastic Four in the two rather unloved film adaptations of the comic-book, has just been cast to play Steve Rogers, aka Captain America in the upcoming feature film.

The sad thing about it is that I actually like Evans. I was willing to defend the second Fantastic Four movie and to a lesser extent the first one because of how perfectly cast he was as Johnny Storm (and how perfectly cast Michael Chiklis was as Ben Grimm, aka the Thing). When Twentieth Century Fox recently announced that they'd be rebooting the Fantastic Four film franchise I was genuinely hoping that he and Chiklis would be retained (though I also hoped that the Thing would be replaced with CG rather than his rubber makeup, which made him look like a pile of orange shit). I find his portrayal of Johnny Storm to be incredibly true to the character's comic book origin; he's cocky, he's a loud mouth, and he loves fast cars and hot women. Now, I don't know whether or not he has the acting chops to pull off a completely different comic book character in Captain America, and maybe he does, but as far as I'm concerned that's not even the point.

The point is that there are sooooo many actors out there, known and unknown, who could play any given role, including that of Captain America, that confining the choice to so very few as to include people previously cast as comic-book characters just feels like yet another symptom of Hollywood's collective lack of imagination. Evans, in particular, has starred in, apart from the Fantastic Four films, Push, a superpower-themed film, and is going to star in TWO comic-book based films this year alone.

Go ahead and make your comic-book movies with the same actor over and over again, Hollywood. Ask yourselves this, though; what would Iron Man have been like if Tobey Maguire had been given the role of Tony Stark, or what would Batman have been like if Christopher Reeve had been given the role of Bruce Wayne?

A little imagination can go a long way, please start showing some.

Aging Matinee Idols (and Manny Villar can eat my dog's day old shit)

It was weird watching the John Hughes tribute on the Oscars last night; though I hadn't seen all of the movies featured there I knew just about every one of the movie stars who appeared onstage to say some kind words about him, and even most of the actors who appeared in the clips that formed the montage of his body of work. And in those clips they were all so...very...young.

I was between ten and thirteen when most of the movies featured came out but I remember seeing those actors and basically figuring they'd never grow old.

Having seen so many of my actual friends die young, it's a bit of a paradigm shift to suddenly see people who seem to have abruptly grown old. I'm not talking about the people I see regularly, in person or on the big or small screen; watching them age before my eyes just as surely as they see me doing so before theirs is a markedly different experience from running into someone one hasn't seen for so many years and being hit in the face with the reality of age. I need no reminders of my own mortality, and in fact I find what I saw somehow oddly reaffirming; so much can happen between now and the day we die, and as long as we're alive it's largely up to us if what happens is good or bad.

In short, the tribute to John Hughes, to me anyway, had the desired effect; rather than mourn a death, the once-young icons who stepped up on the stage there on Oscar night ended up celebrating life. And as near as I could tell, they all looked their age, not all botoxed-up like Manny Villar.

Thank You Academy! (And DON'T vote for Manny Villar)

Having watched the 82nd Academy Awards earlier today, I wasn't treated to a whole lot of surprises as the people widely expected to win, well...did. It wasn't unlike seeing "Titanic" or "The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" romp all over their rivals many years ago, though in this case the awards were slightly more evenly distributed over more films.

I won't spoil the winners for anyone who may blunder onto this blog post without having seen the show or read about the winners, but on a personal note I will say I was rather happy with the way the awards turned out.

Suffice it to say that just because the Academy had to cave in to pressure to make room among the Best Picture nominees for more...popular movies, they certainly haven't sacrificed their judgment when it comes to recognizing the movies they truly love. No, they stuck to their guns, and made a little bit of history in the bargain.

I'll say no more, but suffice it to say that this marks the dawn of a new day!

The Advertisement of the That Motherfucker Manny Villar

Several months ago I noticed a "monetize" option on my blog and recalled all of the wonderful stories I'd heard about people making money off their blogs. So I signed up for the program.

The thing of it is, this blog isn't particularly popular and I don't even have a whole lot of time to write it in it anymore, so I basically haven't been paid yet because it only gets remitted to me after the income reaches a specific critical mass. Well, next to nobody clicks on this thing, and the few people who do usually don't even comment (one of them insists on texting me instead), but I take some comfort knowing that I've earned x amount of cents at the very least.

But boy, the ad of Manny Villar that has been showing up regularly on my blog now for months really just pisses me off. It's the proverbial salt in the wound. I know and accept that people who write about useless, irrelevant shit make bucketloads of money through their blogs, and that some other somehow manage to get 15 minutes of fame because yahoo basically picks up their blogs for opinions on everything from fashion to events. I am okay with that; I'm okay that they're making money off their blogs and I'm not...but to see this asshole's mug smack in the middle of my blog actually discourages ME from posting on my own blog.

I can't stand Manny Villar. I think, based on what I've read and heard, that he's a liar and a thief and that there's a fair chance, if he's elected, that he will rape this country like no one ever has or ever will.

I've tried to call up the "monetize" option and take it off, but I really don't know how, so it's really frustrating.

If you guys at Google are reading this, please take this asshole's mug off my blog, even if it means losing ads. I'm not making any money off them anyway.

Yesterday I thought I'd found the solution; I clicked onto google ads and adjusted my preferences to exclude politics and current events. The next time I logged on I was pleased to see something else. Apparently, however, Villar's crew have found a way around this and have once again had Google reinsert his irritating face onto my blog. PLEASE, Google, recognize this bullshit as a political ad and BAR it from my blog!

And Then There Were Ten...

Fans of The Dark Knight who gnashed their teeth over its exclusion from the race for the Academy Award for Best Picture of 2008 can take some solace knowing that, apparently as a result of the outrage, the Academy of Motion Picture of Arts and Sciences has expanded the field of Best Picture nominees from five to ten. As a result, this year, whereas those of us who follow the annual Oscar nominations would usually see a slew of art films with the token mass-appeal movie thrown in for good measure, now there are ten nominations which seem to be split evenly among the "blockbusters," or movies which have grossed over $100 million, and those which haven't. A lot of other bloggers who chose to voice their opinions around the time the nominations are released basically divided the ten among those the Academy among those who the Academy wanted to nominate and those they felt they had to nominate.

What do I think? Well, not that it really matters in the great scheme of things, but people take the Oscars a tad too seriously, more than they deserve, and this little episode is proof of that.

The expanded field is both a blessing and a curse; on the one hand they allow the Academy members to include deserving films that would otherwise be on their "almost" lists, but on the other hand, it creates a tendency towards "tokenism."

That doesn't strike me as much of an issue with films like District 9, which nabbed a slew of technical nods and even one for best adapted screenplay, or Up, hails from regular Oscar-bait-house Pixar, but considering that The Blind Side, a film I haven't seen, has as its ONLY other nomination one for Sandra Bullock's acting in a lead role, I smell an attempt to fill a quota. That just feels wrong on several levels, because either now the Academy is trying too hard to please the all-important TV audiences that keep their program relevant, or are showing absolute contempt for those very audiences by choosing films that, without the expanded system, basically wouldn't get the time of day from the Academy. So they're either pandering excessively to or showing their disdain for the general public. Either way, I don't see this ten Best Picture nominee system catching on too well in the long run.

Of course, that's just me.

But hey, if it means Iron Man 2 will be able to snag a Best Picture nod next year, maybe it'll be worth keeping around for just one more awards season...

Why the Environment-Friendly Blockbuster Film is an Oxymoron

Back when WALL-E was in theaters, apart from enjoying the film itself, I took additional pleasure from readings its mostly glowing reviews. One review, though, which seemed contrary just for the sake of it, made a scathing commentary on the hypocrisy of Pixar for pushing some anti-capitalist, tree-hugging agenda despite the fact that at the time the film was released Disney's partners and licensees were busy hawking tie-in products that were unabashedly profit-oriented like toys and t-shirts (my kids each have one of the latter). The toys, as I understand it, didn't sell real well and are now presumably gathering dust in bargain bins or warehouses. In short, they'll probably turn out to be a lot like the junk WALL-E had to compact and stack for 700 years. Now, the fact that such tie-in products exist is arguably not attributable to Andrew Stanton, who created the story and characters, but to the studio's marketing arm. While it's unfair to criticize the film based on the actions of the suits responsible for selling it, that doesn't mean Pixar or Disney deserve a free pass. The fact remains that on some level they greenlit the attempt to sell useless junk based on a film that precisely decried the effect that the long-term accumulation of useless junk could have on our planet. After the merchandising phenomenon that Cars turned out to be (with new lines still selling almost four years after the film was first released), it's not hard to see why the suits at Disney would try to sell products based on their film, but there does seem be something highly contradictory or paradoxical about hawking consumer products based on a film that seemed to condemn excessive commercialism.

This, I believe, is a genuine problem facing well-intentioned films that nonetheless require the capitalist system to get off the ground. I think it's also a problem that the studio that financed the openly environmentalist blockbuster Avatar had to deal with; to hedge its bets on the gargantuan budget, Twentieth Century Fox probably sold off as much of the film as they could to sponsors and licensees. I've seen the McDonald's tie-in toys and have read about the existence of Mattel-manufactured toy line (though mercifully I haven't seen any of it). I'm fairly certain that there are (or at least will be) such other products as t-shirts, video games, and novelizations (or comic-book adaptations) to boot. While the film decries the abuse of forests, the suits marketing it chop down trees to print books about the film.

Of course, this has no real bearing on the story or James Cameron's vision but as in the case of WALL-E there's something distinctly off about a movie saying "save the planet" while it is accompanied by dozens of tie-in consumer products, that will, upon their disposal, undoubtedly add to the already near-catastrophic pollution problem we are currently facing.

I still remember the absurdity of the attempts to cash in on the unique financial juggernaut that Titanic turned out to be; there were talks about a planned TV series or miniseries that would be set before the sinking. A sort of "prequel TV tie-in." By its very nature, Titanic was not the kind of film that would lend itself to any kind of sequel so people tried (and failed) to find other ways to make money off its mammoth success.

Avatar, with its fantastical worlds, colorful characters and creatures and cool-looking mechanized villains, is ripe for "toyhood," with one of the most exploitative capitalists in the business, Mattel, taking on the license (though high-end collectible manufacturer Sideshow Collectibles reportedly has some really cool stuff in the pipeline). Fox could have gone straight to artisans like Sideshow and maintained some kind of integrity by shying away from mass-market products as opposed to limited production but again, to guard their gargantuan investment they went for the cash in Mattel's pockets.

Thus, to get its message across, Avatar or any other hyper-expensive film with an environmentally-oriented message must use the very system it condemns. Though this is an understandable and necessary evil, I still can't quite wash the bad taste out of my mouth.

Maybe down the line such films can be funded the same way Barack Obama's presidential campaign was; through grassroots fund raising of some sort, then maybe we could get some solid message-oriented work from creators who didn't have to sell a little bit of their souls to get their films made.

The Future of Film?

Anyone who's ever seen a movie where the characters watch three-dimensional holograms pop in front of them like a couple of the Star Wars movies must have, at least at one point, wondered what it would be like to watch something like that instead of the normal flat images one sees on TV or on our movie screens.

While we aren't exactly there, 3-D films, as I understand it, are supposed to bridge the gap between this world and that. Hollywood currently has at least three major proponents of the new 3-D movement that started earlier this millenium. George Lucas, whether or not the 3-D images in his Star Wars films were his not-so-subtle endorsement of the format, has often talked about re-releasing all six films in the format. Forrest Gump director Robert Zemeckis, since abandoning live-action film making for motion capture films, has released all three of his movies in 3-D or IMAX 3-D format. James Cameron has been quoted as having said something to the effect that we experience life in 3-D, and that it makes perfect sense that we should experience the movies in such a way as well. While I certainly don't begrudge them their passion, especially considering that between them they have over a hundred years of filmmaking experience, I'm not yet a hundred percent sure I share it.

I've only seen two 3-D movies, after all. I suppose I'm glad I missed the 3-D movies of the 1980s (and of the 1950s) because from what I've heard they wouldn't have given me a whole lot of enthusiasm for the format, especially the horror movies. The closest I ever got to old-fashioned 3-D was a comic book, and apart from the novelty of it, it was not the least bit impressive. The red and blue glasses basically robbed the comic book of most of its color.

My first experience with the format, A Christmas Carol, was, to be honest, not an entirely pleasant experience. I liked the movie and some of the 3-D effects, but walked out of the theater with a headache. Also, it cost significantly more than it would have in 2-D and in truth, as entertaining as the 3-D effects were, they did nothing to propel the story. Based on that experience and on my sister's feedback from Up, where she basically said it didn't add anything to the overall story, I wondered if some of the internet haters were right all along and that 3-D really is nothing more than a fad.

That changed with my second 3-D movie experience: Avatar. I've written about this film here and elsewhere (apeltala.multiply.com) so there's no need to belabor the point that I had a great time.

The point, though, is that suddenly 3-D made sense to me. I have yet to see the film in any other format (or more than once, for that matter) but when I walked out of the theater, apart from not having a headache, I was convinced that had I not seen the film in 3-D IMAX, the experience would have been somehow diminished. I certainly won't attempt to pass this off as any kind of gospel truth but if nothing else, I've been convinced that I've just seen a glimpse of how the future of film should look.

Of course, I can't ignore the fact that IMAX 3-D is just too expensive to watch on a regular basis, but it is a cold hard fact that the experience is not one which can be replicated by any mainstream home entertainment system and therefore, barring the financial concern, gives a compelling argument for steering clear of the bootleg DVDs and catching movies in the theaters.

Maybe not every film will look quite as good as Avatar did in IMAX 3-D, but every medium and every format needs a benchmark. Also, there's a lot of room for improvement on Avatar's storytelling angle, so maybe we'll soon have a filmmaker dazzle us with both a scintillating story and dazzling effects. Peter Jackson pulled it off not too long ago, after all. I find myself eagerly awaiting Tintin, and would gladly save up for the 3-D version if there will be one. Such is my faith in both the filmmaker and the format in its current incarnation.

The future of movies looks pretty bright to me.

When Pocahontas Turned Blue and John Dunbar Became a Paraplegic

I'm gonna say this right up front: I absolutely loved James Cameron's Avatar. I still remember walking into Titanic eleven years ago expecting the most moving, profoundly romantic experience I could have had at the time and walking out thinking "ehh." I experienced no such disappointment with Avatar, and it wasn't even necessarily because my expectations were lowered.

I think the comparisons between Avatar and works like Dances With Wolves, John Carter of Mars and even Pocahontas began the moment the story was disclosed to the general public. I suppose it didn't help that not everyone was sold on the way the fantastical aliens populating Cameron's new world, Pandora, looked. "Thundersmurf" became a popular internet slur for them. In true fanboy fashion, the bashing commenced though thanks to the fact that I actually had things to do this time around I didn't bother to indulge my usual masochistic urges of reading message board after message board full of venom.

Like I posted some months ago, this was probably Cameron's first ever brush with internet fanboys, and I wondered how he, or the studio backing him, would take it, even though Fox is no stranger to internet brickbats. They didn't really seem to give a shit what the usual "basement dwellers" had to say.

Still, upon watching the film I understood why none of the story or "Thundersmurf" revelations even mattered. I think it was genius, in fact, of Cameron and the film's marketing team to get that stuff out of the way as early as possible because none of it really give the audience any idea of what the movie is all about, and that is the realization of a world beyond imagining.

Cameron's Pandora, the new world he created, is the star of Avatar. Its hills, mountains, trees, birds and bees, all of which is both familiar and new at the same time. In terms of environments, I've only ever seen such visual innovation in a Hayao Miyazaki movie, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, but that was hand-drawn animation and was, by comparison, not nearly as challenging to render. That world did not face the challenge of making the viewers believe that what they were seeing was real. Cameron basically took the massive proceeds and virtually unlimited street-cred he'd picked up from Titanic, and cashed it ALL in making this unbelievable feast for the senses.

The consensus on this film is that the story is weak but the visuals make up for it. That, I feel, is an oversimplification. While I will readily concede that the story is not the most original ever to be written, it could have been done a lot worse. Titanic, for all its Oscars and accolades, had its fair share of truly rancid dialogue (and in fact its screenplay was conspicuously snubbed by the Academy back then) but down the line nobody seems to be complaining. Somehow, what Cameron had achieved back then with the digital sinking ship and the massive production, managed to overshadow what he had not, and in my humble opinion, that happens to be the case here.

Avatar comes across as a largely visceral experience when, like its main character Jake Sully, we are introduced to Pandora in all of its untamed glory. It's enough, for me, that he establishes the reason why human beings would want to despoil such splendor, and the science behind the titular avatars. As caricatured as the evil corporate types and their redneck henchmen may seem, we as a race would be sadly delusional if we refused to acknowledge that such people actually exist in real life. Life is not as simple as "humans are bad, while nature is good" but the themes in Avatar definitely remain relevant, no matter how heavy-handed their application may be. Seeing what corporations and the need for profit has driven people to do on this planet makes their actions in Avatar completely believable and as they ravaged Pandora I, for one, felt genuinely saddened because like I said, Pandora is the real star of the movie.

I remember feeling lousy during the first hour or so of Titanic with all of its uplifting music, bright lighting and the digitally-rendered version of that magnificent ship plowing through the Atlantic because I knew well beforehand that it would all end in tragedy. In Avatar In contrast, I could not be quite so sure what Pandora's fate would be even after it was all over (yes, there is the possibility of a sequel). Pandora is a world I wanted to survive, and I think that was what made the movie for me.

The debate on the merits of this film, I'm sure, will go on and on, which I think will be a hallmark of this film's greatness, i.e. that it is and will continue to be talked about for years to come, but to my mind, at least, the debate is settled: for all its flaws, and there are several of them, this was easily one of my more memorable moviegoing experiences. Sure it unpretentiously borrows from Dances with Wolves and other works of fiction besides, but what it adds is something which must be seen to be believed.

The Cathartic Appeal of Wolverine

I was never much of a Wolverine fan. I always connected more with Spider-Man's teenage angst or Batman's tortured soul. I even liked Iron Man's constant conflict with his inner demons better. Wolverine, to be fair, has his own share of inner demons, it seems that more often than not, they triumph as he slaughters people on pretty much a regular basis. I have an entire trade paperback (which my wife bought) consisting of stand-alone issues, every one of which features him killing someone or leaving him to his death. I also have the first half of the Mark-Millar-penned "Enemy of the State" in which Wolverine also kills a hell of a lot of people (to be fair, at first it's while he's under the influence of Hydra, but he also does plenty of killing on his own). I appreciate some stories told starring him, but he's never held that much appeal for me.

Till now.

The Maguindanao massacre has, by now courtesy of cable news and the internet, shocked pretty much the world. The fact that it happened at all is bad enough but that no one seems to be able to do anything about it feels ten times worse. Though the adult in me is appalled by what happened and hopes for the best but not expecting much, the eternal adolescent in me still fantasizes about what I could have done had I been a superhero on the scene.

I have no interest in being a Superman or a Spider-Man and basically stopping all the bad guys in their tracks and saving all the victims, or in being a Batman and basically roughing up the bad guys but only up to a certain point.

No, I conceived of a Wolverine fantasy, this time, which involved me being in the thick of things, taking all of the bullets those bastards have to offer while opening up their intestines, cutting off their limbs and severing their arteries. Killing them simply wouldn't do; if I had the power to take as much abuse as Wolverine does in his most tenacious incarnations I would not content myself with stopping those animals. No, I would inflict the maximum amount of pain imaginable.

I would let them shoot me, riddle me with their bullets and gain the impression of superiority in arms and force and when I'd lulled them into that sense of security I would attack and watch their bravado melt into horror as they'd realize they were completely helpless to stop me, even with all their guns. I'd destroy their weapons with my adamantium claws, in some cases with their limbs attached, to remind them of how useless they are against me. I would cut them in places where they would bleed out severely enough to die but slowly enough so that they could take in just how conclusively they've been routed.

Once the last of the gunmen had breathed his last I would then behead them, gather up their heads, drive over to the mansion or nightclub or office of the person who sent them and drop each and every one of them at that person's doorstep. And after taking another hail of bullets from the personal security and after maiming and killing the entire cadre of personal security I would stand right in front of the people responsible for masterminding the would-be murders, have them look around at the carnage, tell them I'd be watching them, and then walk away, leaving them in a sea of their goons' blood and entrails. I would leave them with fear of God in their hearts and a pair of soiled pants.

And then, when they'd thought I'd gone, I'd sneak up behind them and kill them anyway.

I'm not Wolverine, so I obviously would never get to do any of those things but after the brutality in Maguindanao it was the first time I had ever wanted to do them, even in my mind.

Back When Marvel Wooed Hollywood...

I don't know if anyone remembers this but many years before his death last July, Michael Jackson already met the Grim Reaper, albeit in the pages of Marvel Comics' Longshot miniseries, where he got blasted to smithereens while filming a television show on Mojoworld. I'm sure a lot of people do remember how preoccupied Marvel was with being fashionable back in the '80s (among other time periods), as perhaps best exemplified by the jeri-curled Beyonder who faced off against the Marvel Universe in Secret Wars II, and the perpetually mullet-haired Longshot himself.

But way before Blade, the first successful movie based on a Marvel Comics character came out in 1998, Hollywood was Marvel's wet dream. It was all over their comic books; whether it was fans or writers coming up with their own personal lists of who they'd like to see playing Spider-Man (with names like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt getting mentioned more than a couple of times).

It's a different world now, one where Disney has bought Marvel (for a steal, in my opinion) precisely because of the power its properties wields at the box-office, where Hugh Jackman was made a star precisely because of his appearance in the X-Men movies, which remain his highest-grossing films to date, where people like Nicolas Cage, Ryan Reynolds and even Robert Downey Jr. campaign avidly to play Marvel characters, in some instances not even for very much money, and where studios holding the rights to Marvel films prior to the Disney acquisition scramble to make more because they don't want to lose them. Yep, it's a different world, one that more than makes up for the snubs of Marvel roles by the likes of Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, for the several aborted attempts to realize Marvel projects, one of the most notable of which was Tom Cruise's failed Iron Man endeavor at the beginning of the millenium, and even some of the creative misfires that did make it to the screen like Daredevil and Ghost Rider.

The buzz for Iron Man 2 is at a fever pitch right now and it still makes me feel all warm and tingly inside that the first one is widely regarded as the film that re-launched the career of Downey Jr., an actor whose work I have always admired.

The best part of all this is that even for this tantrum thrower, the best is yet to come.

Hip to be Square.

I love the recent film 500 Days of Summer. With the exception of the cornball narrator I love just about everything about it from the writing to the acting to the music.

As strange as it may sound, one other thing I love about this film is that apart from an e-mail message which the main character, Tom Hanson (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) receives from Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel), there is no mention of any technology anywhere in the film that could possibly date it. Nobody texts, nobody tweets, nobody has a myspace or facebook page.

Tom dresses like a prep-school kid from some eighties movie, shops for Ringo Starr albums, is a huge fan of the 1980s TV series Knight Rider (not its tepid 21st century revival), and dances to one of my favorite Hall and Oates songs. He is, apart from being my kind of guy, the anti-hipster, a character who, to borrow a phrase used by renowned film critic Richard Corliss, is joyfully, defiantly anachronistic in his pop-culture preferences.

In Tom's delightful dance number to the 29-year-old Hall & Oates song "You Make My Dreams," he basically flips the bird at putrid, trying-hard movies like He's Just Not That Into You which love to scream out at the audience how up-to-date their script is with trends and technology. "Look, our characters have myspace pages! They text! They tweet! Aren't they the shizz?" Probably, but the minute these little technological quirks have gone the way of the dinosaur like the pager did, thereby ceasing to have any contemporary cultural relevance, so will those little references. It irks me that Iron Man makes reference to myspace, which has already been supplanted by facebook, as I understand it.

To my mind it's pure foolishness for filmmakers, unless they're working with a story that deals directly with technology like 1992's Sneakers or 1998's You've Got Mail, to make references in their films to extant tech, especially if the story can be told without it.

It's like the difference between Pixar movies and many Dreamworks films; with all of their pop-culture references, the Shrek films will one day be dated back to things like The Matrix or the first Spider-Man film, while most Pixar films, with the possible exception of Cars (which is dated by the models of the newer cars involved like a Porsche 996 Carrera S and a Ferrari F430) will truly achieve timelessness, especially films that feel neither here nor there like The Incredibles or Finding Nemo.

It's a given these days that audiences have woefully short attention spans, as products perhaps of the MTV generation. It's been over a decade since a movie has spent more than five weeks as the number one film in America (James Cameron's Titanic) and so the quest is on to find something that people watching movies will latch on to.

Well, I will say this; the answer to that remains to be compelling, relatable characters and a great story.

The trashy He's Just Not That Into You, with its "look at me" references to myspace and texting may have made more money than the infinitely superior 500 Days of Summer this year, but I wouldn't be surprised if, years from now, when people start making lists of truly great romantic comedies of the new millenium, that little movie with the guy who didn't text or tweet were to appear on all of them, with the other film basically being consigned to oblivion.

WHY Aren't Anime-Based Movies Selling?

The first movie I ever watched that was based on a Japanese anime or manga series was Christophe Gans 1995 film Crying Freeman, starring Mark Dacascos, which I genuinely enjoyed even though I had not watched the original series or read the original comic books. The last one I watched, just last Saturday, was an adaptation of the seminal anime/manga classic, Astro Boy, who was created by the so-called godfather of animation, Osamu Tezuka. In the case of Astro Boy I had watched one of the TV series starring him (there have been three, one in the 1960s, one in the 1980s, and one that ran about three or four years ago), and I still enjoyed the film, shortcomings notwithstanding.

I've noticed, though, that the reception of Joe Public all around the world (with the exception of Japan) has not quite been as warm as mine was of these two movies, or of anything based on anime or manga in general. Three of Hayao Miyazaki's films, Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle and now Ponyo, have all made very decent box-office, the vast bulk of it in Japan and Korea, but have otherwise made very little impression on the global box-office.

Films like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and Speed Racer were the kind of flops that could lose studio executives their jobs (and quite possibly did) and the aforementioned Crying Freeman never even made it to theatrical release in the United States. Considering how badly the current Astro Boy film is doing in theaters, it may as well have been sent straight to the DVD shelf. And the less said about 20th Century Fox's Dragonball, the better.

This is strange because judging from things like comic book conventions and amateur comic book drawings of fans all over the world, one would think anime is one of the most popular media out there, a global phenomenon. Heck, the word anime isn't even Japanese; it's French for "alive."

Why, therefore, do so many people outside of the Land of the Rising Sun ignore anime feature films, or feature films based on anime? Is it some residual resentment left from World War II? Is it a general global inability to digest Japanese pop-culture (a thesis which the success of movies like The Ring would debunk, I'm sure)? I'm curious.

It's really quite a shame as there are quite a number of good works of anime that, with the advances in today's technology, could be adapted pretty well with the right people behind them. We're talking about an industry that is capable of bringing books, plays, comic books, toy lines, video games, television shows and even blasted theme park rides to the big screen with resounding success. The successful and profitable translation of anime to the big screen shouldn't be as big a challenge as it has been for the last several years (though I'm really not crazy about the upcoming Akira adaptation, as I feel it is a classic that should be left alone).

Come on, Hollywood! Bring me my Robotech!

A Nice Little Dream

For the last month or so I've been quite stressed about one thing or another, and today I was able to get at least one source of stress of my chest by finally conducting a direct examination I'd been dreading for several months; I was prepared and I articulated my questions well and in an objection-proof manner.

I had something, though, that helped me get through that direct examination, as nerve-wracked as I was, besides the usual preparation.

Last night, I dreamed about my best friend and the godfather of my firstborn, Jay Tan. Here's the thing; it wasn't even one of those dreams where he was alive and walking and talking. No, he was pretty much as dead in the dream as he is in real life. But there was something special about this dream.

In this dream, I and several other people were gathered to watch several performances based on work Jay had done. I caught a stage play and an animated short film (though of course I cannot remember the story of either) based on stories he had written.

Now, as far as I know Jay did not write fiction as a hobby. He wrote ad copy for a living, and was quite the songwriter and occasional blogger, but he didn't do a whole lot of fiction, so I'm pretty sure that the notion that he would be honored for his works of fiction was basically a product of my own mind.

But I loved the idea of Jay being cherished after his death even by people who didn't know him in life. I loved the idea of celebrating his creations even after the funerals and weeping and the regret. I loved the idea that he had achieved immortality in the eyes of not only the people who loved him but the people who loved his work.

I once decried a line from the Ridley Scott film Gladiator uttered by Maximus, the Roman general played by Russell Crowe: What we do in life echoes in eternity. I found it an expression of utmost hubris and a failure to acknowledge that we are all part of a bigger plan. In view of this dream, though, it's not quite so bad as I thought; being immortalized through one's work is something that's nice, as is the thought that the things one does could even survive the demise of an entire species.

I love the thought of Jay living on in things like his work, and I certainly hope he does. Maybe the guys who have hold of his songs could publish them somewhere...