Tag: movie

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filmmaking movie rants this shit is fucked up

Ridley Scott explains nothing, actually

Okay, someone hold my hat, I am about to come unglued here.

So yeah, by now you might have heard that Ridley Scott is making a movie called Exodus: Gods and Kings, which is based off the Bible story. Which takes place in Egypt.  Allow me to illustrate, briefly, where Eqypt is located:

Egypt: It's a place in Northern Africa.
Egypt: It’s a place in Northern Africa.

Okay? Now. Some people, including me, are kind of pissed off about some of the choices he’s made. Allow me to summarize why with a picture:

Notice anything, here?
Notice anything, here?

And here, have a bonus:

Even Christian Bale looks unimpressed.
Aw, they’re building a statue.

Just for reference, in reality land:

Here, some actual Egyptian statues. (Per source, Ramesses II, even.)
Here, some actual Egyptian statues. (Per source, Ramesses II, even.)

Now, if those don’t explain why a lot of us on the internet are breathing fire, just… tell you what. Go read this.

All right. We all caught up now?

So then Ridley Scott “explained” his casting decisions. Which he described as careful. (Hoo boy.) Like, to a certain extent I get, hey I like this actor and want to work with them and they are perfect for this role. Trust me, I now totally get that urge. And as many people have pointed out, if the casting seemed truly colorblind (Ken Watanabe as Nun! Benicio Del Toro as Rameses II! Viola Davis as Tuya!) I could go for it. I really could. But let’s look at the first ten actors listed on IMDB:

  • Aaron Paul – white (American)
  • Christian Bale – white (British)
  • Joel Edgerton – white (Australian)
  • Sigourney Weaver – white (American)
  • Ben Kingsley – non-white (British)
  • Indira Varma – non-white (British)
  • John Turturro – white (American)
  • Ben Mendelsohn – white (Australian)
  • Maria Valverde – white [spanish (literally from Spain)]
  • Emun Elliott – white (Scottish)

I would like to say, first, I feel gross and horrible after writing that list out, and awkward, and ugh. But I also feel it serves an important point, which is basically, out of the first ten people on the case list, there are two actors who could really be considered non-white (both Ben Kingsley and Indira Varma have an Indian parent) and Maria Valverde, who as an actual spanish person from Spain to my understanding should be considered white for the purposes of what we’re talking about. The point here is that the top listed actors are 80% white. If you go with the actors that are really being used to advertise the film, which would pretty much be the top five, you’re still at 80%.

In a movie. That takes place in Egypt.

Scott was not asked about the racial component of his casting decision, but he did answer a question about how he formed the international cast — which has been criticized for only featuring colored performers in small roles, such as servants, thieves and assassins.

“Egypt was – as it is now – a confluence of cultures, as a result of being a crossroads geographically between Africa, the Middle East and Europe,” Scott said. “We cast major actors from different ethnicities to reflect this diversity of culture, from Iranians to Spaniards to Arabs. There are many different theories about the ethnicity of the Egyptian people, and we had a lot of discussions about how to best represent the culture.”

Yeah, all different ethnicities. You know. American, British, and Australian.

If you want to actually see most of the different ethnicities Scott’s talking about, when you go to the IMDB page, click “see full cast list.” Most of them are hidden in there. Which indicates much, much smaller parts. But we kind of already knew that from the pictures, right?

Oh and?

There are many different theories about the ethnicity of the Egyptian people, and we had a lot of discussions about how to best represent the culture.

I did a little googling around because I was curious. And yeah, there’s controversy, most of it seeming to stem from much more openly racist times when people couldn’t handle the idea that someone who wasn’t snowy white made something white people think is awesome, like the pyramids. While at this point the science apparently boils down to:

There is no scientific reason to believe that the primary ancestors of the Egyptian population emerged and evolved outside of northeast Africa.

While that’s no doubt an oversimplification considering yes, the area is a major crossroads, using that as an excuse to justify the vast majority of your principle actors looking like they didn’t mind the gap on the Tube and fell through a rip in space and time to land in ancient Egypt is pretty fucking disingenuous.

(Actually, that’s a bad joke on my part, since apparently London is ~60% white and thus would not be well-represented by Ridley Scott’s casting.)

I imagine when you’re a director of Ridley Scott’s caliber, you can end up getting a lot of your principle actors by just calling them up on the phone and telling them you have a script you want them to read. So it’s really on him to take a step back and ask himself why most of the people he thinks are the best man or woman for the job are white rather than doing elaborate mental gymnastics to justify it later.

Because I really, really am not down with the implication that somehow, the best actor for the job is almost always white. Because there are amazing actors out there who aren’t white, and I’d bet you anything even more amazing actors who are just waiting for a chance to shine, if people would just fucking give them that chance.

And it’s not hard to do, by the way. All you do is write a casting notice like this:

[Gender], 20s to 40s, non-white…

Or if you don’t want to close the door all the way, fine:

[Gender], 20s to 40s, preferably non-white…

And trust me. You will get a response, from amazing actors, and I bet you anything one of them will be the right person for the job.

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charity movie suffering for charity

[Movie] Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: could have been worse

Well, you did it, so I did it, so here we are. Charity gets $300 and you get to make me suffer for a little over an hour and a half. There was unfortunately no drinking accomplished during this movie, but that was because I had two tablets of vicodin on board to help defeat the rawness of the healing incision in my foot. This may be why Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made not one iota of goddamn sense to me, though my housemate assures me it made no sense to her, either, and she was completely sober at the time.

But I’m going to try to be positive about this.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Lips for the lipless

Remember how, back in the heady days when Transformers didn’t have lips and no one had even conceived of the idea of making a movie out of a fucking board game, the teenage mutant ninja turtles were either animated or played by dudes in costumes obviously made out of rubber, the way god and nature intended?

Top-10-Interesting-Facts-About-Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Turtles
Remember when practical effects were a thing? I miss those days.

Now you get this endless protean horror that’s the result of a weird and highly illegal genetic experiment that involved Shrek, college frat boys who just desperately needed some beer money, and something unidentifiable, perhaps the last shreds of Michael Bay’s conscience which had until now been kept preserved in a jar of pickled eggs in the recess of some broom closet. It looks something like this.

Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Turtles-Donatello-Yell-700x396
I LIIIIIIIIIIVE

Which is a fucking cruel thing to do to someone who is one prescription pain medication, let me tell you. There is shot after shot of all four of these horrors grouped around and staring down on an unconscious or confused character, and every time it felt like I’d been caught in the kind of bad trip I could expect if the drugs I was on weren’t legal and had potentially been cut with some kind of weed killer. I’d experience this full body twitch of terrified revulsion while I waited for a set of those rubbery CGI-lips to press against the screen and begin to siphon my soul from my body while another chanted Y’ai’ng’ngah / Yog-Sothoth / H’ee-L’geb / F’ai Throdog / Uaaah.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: A significantly shorter movie than Transformers 4

Pretty much all of the fighting takes place between rendered characters. And while there’s more visual coherence than you get in the average Transformers movie, where it looks like bundles of scrap recycling getting battered together over and over, this made up for being able to tell what was happening by bring incredibly fucking boring.

What I can’t blame on the vicodin is the bit where they felt the need to make Shredder’s suit sort of… transformer-ish? Partially mechanized? Come on, guys, Shredder was badass enough on his own, making him half swiss-army-knife is really not the way to impress. I think at one point he might have wielded a corkscrew or the wine bottle opener.

Apparently the hellturtles learned their techniques from Splinter, who literally taught it to himself from a book that he found discarded in the sewer, which thankfully was a pictorial instruction manual in the way of ninjutsu. I wish I was making that up. I wish I was making any of this up. I wish this had just been some sort of anesthesia-induced fever dream, and I’d soon wake up to find it was still actually Thursday and I’ve just fallen asleep with a copy of The Mountains of Madness over my face, then I’d think about the horrifying turtle-lips and vomit a lot.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: If you like exposition, then have I got a movie for you

Because there’s a lot of it. Exposition, I mean. Really meaningless exposition. I never thought I’d accuse old-school TMNT of being sort of intellectual, but in comparison, yes? Because at least the old ninja turtle writers seemed to realize that certain things could be left unsaid, and that certain bits of exposition didn’t need to be repeated over and over again. It strikes me that in a movie that barely made it to 100 minutes, maybe the director could have gone out on a limb and, I don’t know, shown us a few things instead of telling.

When Sacks gets mentioned to Splinter, he takes the opportunity to explain why Sacks is evil and in league with Shredder (which he knows because…reasons?) instead of the movie having a couple of scenes to say develop Sacks as a character, have him betray April and the turtles, and show he’s evil. Why make this decision? It wasn’t in the interest of running time.

And if you like background info dumps, this is a wonderful movie. Want to hear several times about April and her dad and her connection to the turtles? Got you covered. What about the foot clan? There is like a foot clan forecast in every scene in which they tell you what activity level to expect! Useful! (They are also apparently the only evil ninja clan in the history of ever to be so terrible at ninjutsu that they use guns, but then have worse aim than the average Stormtrooper.)

I don’t know, maybe the turtle lip budget was running severely over at that point. If there had been less exposition, there would have been more scenes with the turtles, and more souls would have needed to be harvested for Shub-Niggurath the Black Goat of the Woods With A Thousand Young.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: One third the female characters, slightly less sexism.

So the movie is about April, a lady reporter who, as far as I can tell, suffers from severe, untreated exercise-induced asthma, because she’s always short of breath in every scene no matter what she’s been doing. And Vernon, her camera guy, with whom she has a pretty awesome kind of bro-ish friendship except at incredibly random and awkward intervals the script has this hiccup and decides that oh yeah April is a girl so Vernon should hit on her. Because that’s what boys do. Like the time Vernon drops April off at Sacks’s house and literally says, “Nothing better than dropping off a pretty girl at a rich guy’s house.” He was randomly neckbeard fedora-y, except he has no neckbeard, but at one point he literally does wear a fedora. A fedora that he immediately disavows in apparent confusion when called on it.

It’s almost like there was this script for a boring but fairly normal movie, and then someone realized Michael Bay was involved and thus ran it through a random creepy sexist comment generator. Or maybe there was a whole subplot with Vernon that got left on the cutting room floor, in which Vernon has at times been replaced by a terrifying clone made from mutated white bread, and the only way you can tell them apart is that the real Vernon is just sort of doofy and doesn’t creep on his coworker.

But anyway, Vernon and April team up with the four ninja turtles who are, if I recall correctly, named Nerdy Turtle, Manpain Turtle, Generic Turtle, and Creepy Turtle. Or if you believe the script, Donatello, Raphael, Leonardo, and Michaelangelo, but I think my names are much more accurate. There are sad attempts at witty banter. The only turtle who is even slightly likable any more is Nerdy Turtle, but he still looks like he’s going to eat your soul from within the film so that doesn’t help at all.

Yeah, that? That's Donnie.
Yeah, that? That’s Donnie.

I found Creepy Turtle personally upsetting, because Mikey was actually my favorite from when I was a kid. And yet the moment he shows up on screen he starts hitting on April, including uttering the immortal line: “She’s hot. I can feel my shell tightening.”

Hello ladies, you can call me Dr. Reptilove
Hello ladies, you can call me Dr. Reptilove

Back in the day, Mikey was a kind of free-spirited party turtle. Apparently in the year 2014 that translates to “let’s party like it’s Steubenville.” It’s gross. And every time Creepy Turtle said something fucking creepy, you know who I heard laugh? Not the kids in the theater. The dads. And that made it approximately a million times creepier.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: It could always be worse

There were actually two scenes in the entire movie that I really liked… because they were the ones that reminded me most of the turtles I grew up watching. Early on, there’s a scene where Splinter is trying to get the boys to admit where they went, and he finally breaks their silence by tempting them with the mystical “99 cheese pizza.” That was cute. And then toward the end, all four of the turtles are in an elevator going up a long way, and then they start beat boxing using the beeps from the elevator. That, too, was cute.

The rest?

Maybe all you need to know is that the word Cowabunga is uttered only twice in the entire movie, right at the end. First, with appropriate enthusiasm. Then again with the sort of “gritty grimdark I’m about to walk away from an explosion while putting on my sunglasses” tone that made me want to weep in despair.

But fear not. The turtles have a new catchphrase: Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!

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movie

[Movie] 4 movies I saw on the plane

I’m back from the UK. This means I’m unfortunately in Houston again. The less said in regards to how I feel about that situation, the better. (It’s been nice to see my friends at work, though! And do some geology! So that’s positive.)

Anyway, quick comments on the four movies I saw on the flights to and from the UK.

Cuban Fury

I’d been wanting to see this one for a while, because it involves Nick Frost, and I love him to pieces. It was cute, and funny, and there was a lot of very enthusiastic salsa dancing in it, which just made me look forward to when I can start dancing again. It had some pretty formulaic rom-com boy gets the girl at the end tropes that I really could have lived without, including Julia (Rashida Jones) being incredibly dense about both a mix tape and the fact that Drew (Chris O’Dowd) was intensely gross and creepy. I think the only thing that really bothered me about the movie was Chris O’Dowd playing a note perfect gross, creepy, sexist dude and everyone just sort of… turning a blind eye to everything he did and taking it. Probably because it was so uncomfortably reminiscent of real life.

Divergent

This movie wants to be The Hunger Games so desperately that it gets kind of embarrassing to watch, really. It runs into the same dystopia problem as The Maze Runner, in that there’s a kind of fun concept that completely falls apart when you have to even superficially explore why in the hell anyone would have thought it was a good idea to run a society like that in the first place. At least The Hunger Games manages to get past that superficial level of thought on the politics and sociology, which is necessary because the story is all about political machinations. Unfortunately for Divergent, the fun concept runs aground on Kate Winslet trying desperately to deliver a believable villain speech that boils down to “we have to kill you because reasons, okay?” When it’s not trying to clumsily justify why the super special “divergents” are dangerous to the poorly constructed society, it’s a fun enough movie.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

Starring Chris Pine’s intense blue eyes and Kenneth Branagh’s embarrassing attempt at a Russian accent. There’s a kind of exciting scene wherein Chris Pine kills someone in a bathroom. But it probably says a lot about where this movie fell on my personal spy-fy foodchain that I lost interest completely after the bathroom murder and decided I’d rather just write porn on my airbook instead.

A Long Way Down

I decided to watch this movie just because I recalled it being mentioned in Empire. Glad that I did. For a movie that’s ultimately about suicide, it’s incredibly funny, and with the awkward sort of humor that I tend to love. Brosnan’s character gets a little hammy at times, I thought, but the others were complex and interesting and incredibly well played. I cried twice as well, and not for the reasons the summary would make you expect. I think the biggest winner of the cast was Toni Collette, who played Maureen. She’s the least outwardly neurotic of all of the characters, but I think her story had the most emotional meat to it, which was well-served by the quiet way she played the character. Boy, when Maureen smiles, you can really feel it, because of that quiet reserve she has most of the time. I definitely recommend this movie.

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movie

[Movie] Guardians of the Galaxy

tumblr_n8kmz2Zmen1r426i4o1_500Guardians of the Galaxy is wonderful fun because it has no pretensions about being anything other than goofy, pulpy space opera. It’s unabashedly weird, colorful, and cheeky. And it’s one of those rarest of all animals, a movie where the trailer tells you exactly what you’re going to get:

So yes, if you looked at that and thought hell yeah I want to watch a bunch of sarcastic aliens and a sassy white dude save the galaxy from a guy whose body paint can’t manage to hide his major pout, then you will be very, very satisfied with your movie ticket purchase.

I’ll say there are light spoilers below. Very light. Links mostly go to animated gifsets, FYI.

After one viewing, I think what makes GotG work so well is it has managed to find a good balance between making fun of its tropes and embracing them. (With the leavening mockery most often voiced by Rocket Raccoon.) It would be way too easy for this movie to fall into schmaltzy losers becoming winners by teaming up territory (backed up, no doubt, by a montage featuring Smashmouth’s All Star) if it weren’t for the fact that Peter Quill’s ‘we’re all losers’ speech is punctuated by Drax’s inability to pay attention and Rocket being 100% done with the entire process.

While many of the characters have the requisite angst-riddled background we see in comic book movies, when the manpain starts to get particularly thick Rocket makes the point that everyone has lost someone, and so what? The pain doesn’t make anyone special and you still have to just keep going. (This after having a drunken rampage in which he speaks about his own unpleasant origins.) There’s actually a lot of dark and grit in the setting of the movie—it starts with a young Peter Quill watching his mother die of cancer and then immediately being abducted by aliens whom we later find out were planning to eat him! The galaxy that the team of misfits wants to save is an inarguably scary and dangerous place. But what sets GotG apart from, say, the recent DC movies is that the characters do just what Rocket talks about. They keep living in the most technicolor way possible, and obviously have managed to find joy, hope, friendship, and family.

While I found all of the heroes likable, my favorites were the aliens: Groot, Rocket, and Drax. I know that early on, Groot and Rocket were considered potential tough sells just because they’re very weird when you compare them to the general “conventionally attractive white person” that fills out most of the primary and secondary parts in the MCU movies. Heck, I wouldn’t call Drax conventionally attractive either, even if he looks pretty human. While Rocket’s bottomless well of snark is undeniable, I liked the fact that all of them were very much not human. (Hell, I loved Drax’s inability to understand metaphors way more than I should have.)

And it’s a good thing that the heroes are likable and their coming together as a team has such good chemistry, because it’s those characters that have to drive the movie. The plot is standard “there is a bad guy that wants to kill a lot of people!” comic book fare, and Ronan (the pouty villain) is a particularly unexciting villain from a universe that’s previously given us Loki and Alexander Pierce. Ronan’s best moment is right at the end when he’s being utterly confused by the antics of Star Lord, and trust me, it’s still not much of a moment for him. Nebula felt very underutilized as a villain (though presumably we’ll be seeing a lot more from her in the future), but I appreciated her and Gamora providing the requisite Marvel movie daddy issues.

I swear to god, the entire MCU runs on sass and daddy issues.

GotG has apparently done very well in its opening weekend, and I think it’s well deserved. Marvel’s earned its reputation for putting out fun popcorn movies that don’t actively insult your intelligence while you’re watching them, and this continues the trend. I see in the linked article, there’s even been an uptick in the female audience numbers.

Well, GotG has a female hero, and a female villain, and I’ll say I loved the fact that Nebula was a stone-cold murder machine and not the general evil sex kitten trope. And Gamora was also pretty anti-use your sexy wiles. I could have done with less Star Lord hitting on Gamora (and the bit where Drax called her a whore flat pissed me off) but in the grand scheme of action tentpoles, GotG did pretty well. Hell, the leader of the Nova Corps, Nova Prime, is played by Glenn Close. Marvel’s been giving us better and better female characters of all sorts (though occasionally still fridging them) and the spin-off television show Agents of SHIELD has gone leaps and bounds beyond, with 50% of the main characters being women.

But they can do better. What Marvel has already done only serves to highlight the fact that they are still making a very conscious decision to not do a female superhero-headed movie, and that Janet Van Dyne seems to have been just wiped from the MCU, and that makes it all the more frustrating.

Marvel, we trust you enough that we made a movie featuring a fucking talking tree and a cyborg raccoon explode August box office opening weekend numbers. How about you trust us enough to give us a movie where the center of the poster isn’t a totally ripped white dude?

See also: Chuck Wendig’s totally academic review of GotG, which sums up my feelings completely before I took twelve hours to become coherent again.

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liveblog movie suffering for charity

Vurping my way through the 50 Shades of Grey trailer

0014: Creepy piano music starts. We see frumpy lady in the elevator, startling as the elevator goes ding. Wanna bet that by the end of the trailer she will look supersexyhotinatotallyconventionalway because creepy dude semen has magical wardrobe-improving powers?

0014: “At least everyone’s white. I know that sounds kind of weird, but no one should have to put up with this abuse but white people.” <– my Latina housemate, y’all.

0018: Everything in Mr. Grey’s office is white. Just like the cast.

0020: Sleek blond personal assistant lady in grey power suit reminds me of Portia in Better of Ted a bit, except that was funny and not fucking creepy.

0024: IMPOSING DOORS.

0036: I think this is supposed to be sexy? Apparently he’s intimidating? I guess that’s an intimidating giant hand, rendered in HD on my TV screen.

0036: By the way? Pepper Potts did a much better CEO office.

0045: Worst interviewer ever.

0047: Oh teehee Mr. Creepy Dude! I’m the empty vessel frumpy female character who is here just for you to mold into a thing you like! Teehee!

0051: “Look at me.” “I am.” Presumably not for the first time, I vomit slightly into my mouth.

0051: Also, the big reveal on what Mr. Creepy Dude looks like? He looks like a random creepy dude you might meet in college. You know. The kind you wouldn’t leave you drink unattended around. Presumably he is what is known as “hot” by… someone. I’m guessing.

0051: Also, I disapprove of his tie. With a charcoal gray suit, if he wants to make some kind of dominance statement he really should have gone for the pop of color.

0104: “I exercise control in all things, Miss Steel.” LOL (then wouldn’t you think he’d probably need to loosen the fuck up in the bedroom a bit?)

0111: This has got to be the least sexy supposed-to-be-read-as-dominant-kissing-in-an-elevator scene I have ever witnessed.

0113: OH LOOK HE GRABBED HER WRIST AND PULLED HER ARM UP OVER HER HEAD. SO DOMINANT. MUCH SEXY. VERY STILTED. WOW.

0113: BEYONCE, WHY

0114: Please note that the word “Phenomenon” quite literally only means “a thing that happened.” So yeah. This is sure a thing that happened. Sure is happening. Right now.

0115: Oh god send me help please. Or whiskey. Or pepto.

0118: He has a helicopter. Whee?

0119: As predicted, her clothing is becoming progressively more fashionable and her hair less messy.

0123: “I had a rough start on life. You should steer clear of me.” SOMEONE TURN ON THE MANPAIN SIGNAL.

0124: He’s jogging! In a grey hoodie! SUCH MANPAIN. YOU MUST RESCUE HIM, WOMAN WITH NO PERSONALITY! FIX HIM!

0127: GRRRRR HE IS TERRITORIAL ISN’T HE SO SEXYBARRRRRRF

0137: So like, the thing where he’s touching her leg under the table at dinner. This would be cute or even sexy but this entire trailer is shot like at any instant the officers from Law and Order: SVU are going to come busting through the door.

0139: Oh boy. Lip biting.

0144: He also owns a glider apparently. Double whee? HE IS A RICH, EXCEPTIONALLY CREEPY WHITE GUY. IN CASE YOU HAD NOT NOTICED. SO RICH. RICH AND FULL OF MANPAIN.

0153: “Enlighten me, then.” Could this line have been delivered with less emotion?

0202: The red room. Montage of BDSM stuff one would find doing a google search. Wants to be sexy. Fails.

0222: Bonus for the soft sighs played in the background, which would do nicely if this was a movie about serial killers, I think. Third acidic vurp.

I have no idea who the target audience was for this trailer, but I’m not it. There was nothing romantic or remotely sexy about it. Rather, it read like a tragic cautionary tale about a woman who is stalked, emotionally manipulated, and used by a rich guy who thinks he has it rough.

So fairly accurate to the source material, from what I can tell.

This nauseating creepfest might well destroy my liver next Valentine’s day if my readers hate me enough. Hahaha well considering how I generally feel about that holiday and the way abusive behavior is often depicted as romantic, the release date does seem appropriate, doesn’t it?

(PS: This one isn’t coming up for six months. Wanna make me suffer through something terrible much sooner?)

Categories
movie science fiction

[Movie] Snowpiercer

There is a basic level of surreality you have to accept when you approach this movie, similar to when you watch a Terry Gilliam or Jean-Pierre Jeunet film. (I can’t believe it’s coincidence that one of the characters is named Gilliam.) There are things that happen that don’t necessarily make sense outside of a sort of dream logic. But if you can accept that, the experience is intense and rewarding.

Snowpiercer is gorgeous and disturbing and a bit heartbreaking. Just the way it was filmed was beautiful. Every car of the massive train has its own distinctive color palette and environment, which I loved. It goes from claustrophobic filth in the rear of the train to strangely 50s-esque, to technicolor futuristic to heartlessly gearpunk. And while there’s quite a bit of violence in the film, it’s brutal rather than titillating. People who get hit once with an ax go down and stay down. (Well, mostly.) Characters come out of the mid-film meat grinder utterly shell-shocked.

(And considering the movie I saw before this was Transformers 4, I appreciated the visual coherence among the complexity all the more.)

The plot for the movie sounds deceptively simple when summed up: Geoengineering that attempts to counter the undeniable threat of global climate change goes horribly wrong, throwing the world into a life-killing ice age. Humans take refuge on a massive train that is effectively a closed ecosystem that never ceases moving, making an entire circuit of all the continents once a year. There is a strict class system enforced with religious fervor, based on the original ticket bought by the passengers. The tail of the train is basically steerage, controlled brutally and fed on “protein cubes” with the cars becoming increasingly high class toward the engine. Curtis (Chris Evans) working with Gilliam (John Hurt) foments a rebellion and attempts to take control of the engine so they can demand equal treatment for those who live in the tail.

As you can imagine, this movie is very specifically about class, and about the way the poor are controlled, abused, and used by the wealthy. It’s also very much about the structures put in place by the wealthy in order to maintain that control—in this case to a Machiavellian, mind-bending degree. But the most pointed and brutal scenes of the movie are really the ones that involve children, both the way children are indoctrinated from an early age, and the way the children of the poor are ultimately meat for the gears of society.

The next time someone says that science fiction—nay, good science fiction—can’t or shouldn’t be political, I invite them to sit down and watch Snowpiercer. Then take a big swig from their swimming-pool-sized movie theater cup of shut-the-fuck-up.

I can’t begin to say how grateful I am that Bong Joon-ho dug in his heels and fought to keep his cut of the movie intact. If you’re one of those lucky people who live in a city where Snowpiercer is showing on its limited release, drop what you’re doing and go.

(For an excellent analysis of Snowpiercer as a movie about capitalism, see here.)

And a few SPOILERS now: 

Continue reading “[Movie] Snowpiercer”
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charity movie suffering for charity

[Movie] Transformers 4: Fuck This Movie

I’ve been trying all day to come up with a funny way to write about how transcendently angry this movie made me. Something hopefully a bit more highbrow than the entire concept of “rage pee.” And then I realized I can’t do it, and it was going to stop me from meeting my obligation to you lovely people, who gave $400 to charity to make me watch this insult to common decency on film. So I’ll just lay it out for you.

I had this one moment, midway through my second beer (bless you, Alamo Drafthouse, without your alcohol I would not have survived) where I almost, almost convinced myself that no actually, Michael Bay is totally a genius, and this is his never-ending art project to hold a mirror up to movie-goers across the globe and prove that no matter how low you think the lowest common denominator is, actually you need to pick your shovel back up and keep digging. It was like he was laughing, Bella Lugosi-style, deep and evil and amused, at the incontrovertible proof that we are a culture in only the most bacterial of senses, unquestioningly throwing money at anything rancid so long as it came coated with the appropriate amount of bright orange glitter. And I almost laughed with him for a moment as my sanity cracked and bent.

None of us deserve the smirking comfort of thinking there’s some kind of meta-point to all of this.

There is no plot. There is no character. If I was feeling charitable I would say that Michael Bay and his screen writer, Ehren Kruger, have transcended the concept of plot, but that would imply some kind of higher purpose beyond stuffing in a little more creepy ogling and another unsubtle product placement. This movie is effectively a well-shot, two hour and forty fucking minute long, ugly, ravenous kaiju baby of a music video for the Imagine Dragons song Battle Cry, Hasbro’s newest line of merchandise, and centuries of ingrained misogyny and racism.

This is Michael Bay, with the executives of Hasbro and Paramount arrayed around him and applauding, taking a giant shit on a platter and offering it to the world. Except instead of a regular silver platter, this one’s shaped like a woman has been painted down with a spray tan. This is a two hour and forty fucking minute long movie in which the only actual plot thread is a man deciding if he will retain ownership of his daughter, peppered with slow motion explosions, incoherent car chase scenes, and battle after battle of CGI robots fighting other CGI robots in such a way that it really just kind of looks like a trash compactor fucking a junked car in the tailpipe, but less visually discernible.

And I never thought I’d say this, but considering the length of the movie it could have used more explosions, and giant robots rolling around in indecipherable masses of computer-generated metal. There is proportionally less Transformer action in this movie than in those previous in order to make room for men being super creepy at a seventeen-year-old girl.

The constant misogyny throughout the very fabric of this film is inescapably vile and toxic. Every major male character, when introduced, within his first few lines of dialog explicitly objectifies the nearest female character. At the very beginning of the movie, in one scene we quite literally go from Lucas (TJ Miller) creepily eyeing a couple of women walking by and calling them ‘junebugs’ to in the next scene, the theater landlord talking effusively about ‘dancin’ girls with big chachas.’ The only male character who doesn’t get a major moment of creepy objectification is Cade (Mark Wahlberg) but that’s apparently because he’s too busy obsessing about the state of his daughter’s purity. Which doesn’t get creepy at all.

If you’ve read anything about this movie, you’ve probably heard about the rightfully infamous “Romeo and Juliet law” scene. Nothing I have read as of yet does actual justice to how absolutely fucking creepy this scene is. Cade and Shane (Tessa’s boyfriend, played by Jack Reynor) have been pissing on each other’s legs since the moment they met about, frankly, just to whom Tessa belongs. Then Cade finds out that Shane is 20; well, Tessa is a minor. Without so much as blinking, Shane launches into a lecture about the Romeo and Juliet law of Texas, and has the text of the law on a laminated card in his wallet. He is carrying it the way one might expect a young man to carry a freaking condom. And it’s honestly impossible to state which is creepier in this scene; the constant emphasis on how young Tessa is when she is consistently objectified throughout the film, the fact that her creepy-ass boyfriend has memorized a legal defense of his right to fuck a minor, the complete and disturbing possessiveness of her father, or the fact that Michael Bay purposefully made the creative choice to include all of this and then made a point of it.

Double bonus ick points for this all occurring just a few scenes after one of the movie’s many incoherent car chases, during which time Shane tells Tessa to ‘grab his stick’ to do a driving maneuver, then informs Cade she ‘has the best hands in the business’ in the most innuendo-laden way possible.

I’m not a prude. The thought of teenagers having sex does not make me clutch at my pearls, have the vapors, or despair about the morality of America. But the way Tessa is basically treated as a non-person throughout the movie who has no say in her own life, and is explicitly objectified as underage by basically every male non-robot, and it’s the central human conflict of the movie? Yeah, you bet your ass that grosses me out.

Honestly, if it weren’t for the way Tessa had less agency than a toaster, I could have even found some of this funny. Cade and Shane spend every scene they have bickering about Tessa, no matter how the conversation starts. If there were some sort of reverse Bechdel test, where they had to have a conversation that wasn’t about a woman, they would fail it miserably. But considering Tessa spends her entire time on screen screaming, being rescued, and biting her perfectly made-up lower lip in a way that’s presumably supposed to convey the sexiest possible kind of terror? No. No, no, no.

There are other female characters in this movie. The geologist, Darcy (Sophia Myles) basically spends all of her time wearing white, making her unlike every female geologist I’ve ever met. I’m still puzzled about her presence in the movie, since she seems to almost have a reason to be around (something something Transformium something) but then that is subsumed with the need for her to be manchild inventor Joshua Joyce’s (Stanley Tucci) emotional validation and tell him for no apparent reason that she is proud of him (HOW? WHY? FOR WHAT?) before vanishing without a trace for the rest of the movie. Su Yueming (Bingbing Li) has the makings of a very interesting character, actually, obviously high-powered and career driven, who saves Joyce’s ass several times. Which then plays into him going on and on about how he has the hots for her. He calls her a “my delicate flower” at one point. The only thing that saved me from flipping the goddamn table was that she looked just as done with it as I felt, and then later when he asked if she missed him she flatly said, “No.”

Between the way Su Yueming is treated and the offensively stereotyped samurai transformer (voiced by Ken Watanabe), there is rich evidence that few lessons have been learned after the complaints of racism that followed the previous movies. (Bonus: the only black characters were either effectively non-speaking parts of the evil CIA team/KSI scientists or the real estate agent at the beginning of the movie, who is run off the property by a baseball-bat-wielding Cade yelling insults about how fat she and her brother are. So that’s awesome.)

After over 1000 words, there is probably something I should say about the actual plot. But after mulling it over for nearly 24 hours, I am still unconvinced that the movie even had one. This thing was so badly paced that time dilated, as if I was falling across the event horizon of a black hole; when I went out of the theater for my first bathroom break, I checked my phone and discovered there was still an hour and fifteen minutes left, which left me longing for the simple pain of eternal spaghettification. It was an incoherent mass of purposefully knotted loose ends to set up two more movies because, as proof that we live in a godless universe of pain, this one is the start of a new trilogy. Characters fall in and out of the narrative without rhyme or reason, apparently tucked away in a closet unless needed to blow things up, leer, or be leered at.

Megatron is brought back to life because of a MacGuffin, and new Decepticons have kind of(?) been made by the humans but that’s not important right now apparently. What characterization once existed for Optimus Prime has now been completely thrown at the window after he spent most of the movie threatening to kill humans (and did kill one but he was the CIA bad guy so I suppose that’s then all right?) and saying humans weren’t worth protecting until Cade tells him to calm his shit down and soothes him with an incredibly awkward unintended pregnancy metaphor. No, really. Optimus Prime and his random collection of conflicting and incoherent motivations made me long for the nuanced and well-handled manpain of Man of Steel. Another alien race is introduced so that Optimus can rocket away at the end of the film after telling Cade, “When you look at the stars, think of one of them as my soul.”

Literally the only plot thread that did tie up was the conflict between Cade and Shane, when Cade symbolically transferred ownership of Tessa to her super creepy, twenty-year-old boyfriend.

And the dinobots? In less than 6% of the movie by my recollection. Grimlock at no point speaks, let alone declares that he is Grimlock, no bozo, or king. The existence of the dinobots is weak at best and not even visually that arresting unless you have a giant boner for seeing a Transformer on a T-rex wielding a sword. In which case, buy the movie poster and save nearly three hours of your life you can use for masturbating to your bizarre fetish instead.

Perhaps the worst, most personal insult of this movie is the fact that the soundtrack is literally only twenty minutes long. For a two hour and forty fucking minute movie. I haven’t liked any of the Transformers movies since the first one, which I thought was…okayish. But I have always loved the soundtracks. All of which have clocked in around an hour long, like most theatrical scores. They’re good writing music. So this? It’s an outrage. That sure explains why about a third of the way into the film, I felt like I was stuck in an endless loop of the background track from Tron: Legacy and couldn’t escape. I get that these movies aren’t even trying any more, but goddammit.

Seriously. Fuck this movie. It’s not even good enough for my rage pee.

(If you would like to read my progressively more badly written and incoherent notes, taken during the film, find them here. Be warned, it was dark in the theater, and I was pretty drunk by the end.)

(Also, the FAQ at io9 for this movie is quite funny. Much funnier than my enraged ranting.)

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charity movie suffering for charity

Transformers 4: I am drunk and I must rage pee

So this is kind of a giant excuse and an explanation. You see my first pee break in this movie, which is approximately 17 hours long and composed of jackahammers and CGI, I had to pee. And realized there was still an hour and fifteen fucking minutes fucking left in the fucking movie. Came back to my seat. Put in another order because I was not nearly drunk enough for this shit. Order card said:

refill Pibb

refill lemonade

refill iced tea

another Rocket milk shake and mexican chocolate

because f____ man how the f_____ is this movie another hour long I need more alcohol pray for me

Yes I literally wrote that (including the line instead of the full f-bomb) on my order card. The waitress grabbed it, looked it over, and whispered, “Yeah this movie is really long, isn’t it?”

So I’m kind of too drunk right now after consuming two beers and two very alcoholic (I think it was extra alcoholic because they took pity on me) shakes in a bit over two hours. Too drunk to write something to coherently express how this movie made me feel. It’s really just one giant rage pee. So I will write you your thing tomorrow, you bastards. I earned this one for charity, that’s for sure. And while I’m trying to hammer my anger into actual words rather than a primal, Nicolas-Cage-esque scream, I will scan in the ten and a half pages of hand-written notes I took which become increasingly difficult to read the drunker I get, but you’ll get the idea.

Tomorrow.

But I will leave you with a few subtitle ideas that would have been much more appropriate than Age of Extinction.

Transformers 4:

  • Longing for the Radically Feminist Days of Megan Fox
  • This Is What an Aneurysm Feels Like
  • An Overly Long and Creepy Virginity Metaphor
  • Magnets: How the Fuck do They Work?
  • A Bud Light Movie in Every Sense
  • Who the Fuck Is Grimlock?
  • Not Even Texas Deserves This
  • Fuck This Movie
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movie

[Movie] So I was right about Maleficent

Warning: talking about rape again.

Or rather, the way I interpreted the wing-removal scene in the movie. Angelina Jolie has confirmed that it was very deliberately indicative of rape.

Now Jolie has confirmed that the scene deliberately echoes the too-familiar beats of the date-rape narrative. “We were very conscious, the writer [Linda Woolverton] and I, that it was a metaphor for rape,” Jolie said during an interview with BBC Woman’s Hour.

There’s another quote right after this one in the article that’s worth emphasizing, I think.

Jolie had spoken forcefully at the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, on Tuesday, demanding an end to rape as a tool of war. “It is a myth that rape is an inevitable part of conflict,” she said at the Summit. “There is nothing inevitable about it.”

I think the way the movie staged the scene is very in line with what Jolie said there. It’s very clear that Stephen’s decision to cut off Maleficent’s wings is a very, very deliberate one. He went out to meet her already prepared to do something terrible. He made a conscious decision to drug her. He made a conscious decision, when he couldn’t bring himself to kill her, to still do something that hurt her in a very fundamental way. Stephen chooses to do this because he wants power, and the crown. It in no way something that was destined to happen from the beginning of their relationship, or even because he threw in his lot with the humans.

And it’s sad that it feels very unusual for a movie to depict rape as something that isn’t just about the “heat of the moment” but rather a choice on the part of the attacker (either pre-meditated or a snap decision) to hurt someone. We’re still getting fed the bullshit rape fantasy where it somehow turns consensual partway through more often than I care to think about.

I have to take extreme exception to one thing the article says, as a throw-away:

Maleficent may have muddled messages—the fact that Maleficent’s entire motivation as a villain is rejection by a man is not a great feminist message—

Are you fucking serious? Did we not watch the same movie? Did you just forget the part where the entire previous paragraph of the article is about how Stephen cutting off Maleficent’s wings is a fucking rape scene? Now, if we want to gripe about her entire motivation for villainy being about what a man has done to her, okay then. That’s definitely a legitimate complaint. But raped by a man and rejected by a man are not even on the same plane of existence.

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movie

[Movie] Riddick

So, I’m really glad I didn’t bother seeing this movie in the theater. I’m now regretting even paying for it on pay-per-view. Because it actively pissed me off as I watched it. Let’s just do this bullet point style:

  • It was obvious from moment one that the only reason Riddick found the alien puppy was so that, eventually, the now-grown alien dog could join the large crowd of people in Riddick’s fridge. Painfully telegraphed. I’m also not sure what it says about these movies that they’ve gone from fridging women to fridging dogs. Hopefully they saved the puppy a spot in the fruit drawer.
  • Dahl. Fucking Dahl. I just couldn’t even with this character. The at times painfully wooden mercenary woman started off showing how strong she was as a female character by punching the crap out of the dirtbag mercenary. That’s fine, I can get behind that, since it does kind of make sense with the mercenary thing. But then Santana the dirtbag spends the rest of the movie until his death being increasingly rapey at her until Riddick kills him. And bonus for the fact that Dahl clearly states she “doesn’t fuck men.” Maybe this means she’s a lesbian. Maybe she’s just asexual. Maybe she just wants them all to back the fuck off. But then Riddick says that he’s going to go “balls deep” in her because she asks him to. The only thing that kept me from punching holes in my TV in anger was that this did not actually happen, thank goodness, though I was sorely tempted when she basically straddled Riddick in the course of rescuing him at the end and he slid his hand over her butt. (Sure, maybe it was a joke between equals where she was basically going Nope, still not for you. I could have gone with that, up until the butt-touching.) With each movie, the female characters have become progressively less fully realized just to make more room for Riddick being a power fantasy. It’s incredibly disappointing, particularly when you think about how freaking awesome Fry was in Pitch Black.
  • If I cared less about Papa Johns’s desire to get revenge for his son (killed in the first movie) I might stop breathing. It was incredibly unconvincing. (And then he comes back for Riddick…why?) Also, this left me with the strong desire to order a pizza. Damn you.
  • I guess the weird alien monsters were trying to move us back to the good ol’ days of Pitch Black, but these were even more ridiculous, and not in a good way.
  • Incredibly ridiculous scene with motorcycle-ish things. Very motocross. Much silly. Such adolescent fantasy. Wow.
  • In this movie I learned that a Brazilian wax is apparently the way of the Necromonger woman. I did not need to know this, and yet now I do.
  • The cheese factor of the action and dialog has gone from cool and fun to cringe-worthy. I left Chronicles of Riddick in spasms of roleplaying nerd glee over the whole “I’ll kill you with my tea cup” line. And I rewatch this movie often. It’s still good stuff. This movie lacked the minimum level of cleverness. It felt more like it was trying to be a cheap knock off of its own greatest hits. We’ve been here before, and it was a lot more enjoyable the first and even second time around.

It’s difficult for me to define the difference (aside from the ever worsening treatment of female characters) between Chronicles of Riddick and Riddick, that makes the first delicious cheeseball fun and the second an exercise in frustration. With each movie the writing has become less focused, and the characters have become progressively less fleshed out. And then by the time you get to Riddick, it’s not even really a movie any more, it’s just basically the uncomfortable experience of watching someone’s wanky, adolescent, misogynistic power fantasy put on film, where Riddick is the paper cut-out stand-in with biceps to die for.

All I can think is that if I’d ever written fanfiction with this level of flat wish fulfillment, fans around the internet would have ripped off my head and shit down my neck all the while endlessly screaming the words “Mary Sue.”

It’s not fun any more, Riddick. Go home.