Jamie Alexandre Hall's Blog, page 7
March 16, 2017
Off My Shelf: Kong - Skull Island (2017)
The previews of Kong: Skull Island made it look like the sort of movie we would want to see for escapism -- something light and amusing, full of dumb action and special effects. A "popcorn movie."
Surprisingly, even with that low standard, it basically failed for me. Here's the trailer, so you know what we thought we were getting into:
It looked kind of fun, right? Well, here's the things that the movie got right: the CGI ape, the climax battle, and one visual of the "hero" running through a cloud of green smoke with a samurai sword. Now let's talk about everything else. (There are a lot of spoilers in here, so... you might want to watch the movie first, and then come back and see if you agree with me.)
THE CHARACTERS: For a start, a big problem with this movie was that there were just way too many characters. We had the male lead (Tom Hiddleston), the female lead (Brie Larson), the Samuel L. Jackson, the six to ten military guys he worked with, a random scientist, another random scientist, John Goodman, the two additional scientists, John C. Reilly, an entire village of natives...
This is only like half the people we're supposed to keep track of. Now, I understand that when you have a movie that means to feature people being killed in gruesome ways, you pad your film a bit with disposable people that you can easily kill off so that you don't run out of characters.
"Please beam down some more guys in
red shirts."But most of those "disposable" characters should be either, a) morally-suspect people...
Such as Kevin Bacon's "naughty teenager" in Friday the 13th......or b) people that you're never given enough info to care about. They don't have a name, they don't have a background. They just serve to alert us, the audience, that this is a dangerous situation. People who actually do have names and backgrounds might still die, but they need a more meaningful, substantive death. Not everybody has to have a monologue -- but if we know who you are, and feel for you in some way, there should be some significance to your death. It needs to make us feel something that has significance to the story.
It doesn't have to be an ornament-worthy moment, but, you know....Which is why it really surprised me (not in a good way) when they randomly kill off John Goodman's character halfway through the film. John Goodman's character is responsible for the story -- he personally instituted this mission to Skull Island, and it seemed like things ought to really revolve around him. Maybe, by the end, he's learned a lesson about the value of human life or the nature of nature or whatever? However, it's like the scriptwriters had no idea what else to do with him after a certain point... so he has barely any dialogue after they reach the island, then he's unexpectedly eaten by a dinosaur, and never spoken of again. (Not unlike the despicable treatment of Bryan Cranston in a certain other giant monster movie, that was supposed to star Bryan Cranston -- only to have him randomly die about fifteen minutes in from having stuff fall on him?)
I am still upset about that one. I should have asked for
my money back.Meanwhile, we have Samuel L. Jackson's character -- hamfisted "crazy military man", who becomes obsessed with the idea of killing Kong. My question for you is this: WHY ARE THE SAMUEL L. JACKSON CHARACTER AND THE JOHN GOODMAN CHARACTER SEPARATE CHARACTERS? John Goodman's character is shown as a bit loony to begin with, so why not just combine the two characters into one character who a) leads the mission to Skull Island for his own purposes, and b) those purposes turn out to be a goal of killing Kong, because he's CRAZY? Samuel L. Jackson had nothing to do until the end of the movie, and John Goodman had nothing to do after the beginning of the movie... so why not combine them?
I searched for a picture of John Goodman and Samuel L. Jackson
together, and all the internet could give me was a picture of
sexy John Goodman. C'est la vie.Outside Samuel L. Jackson and John Goodman... there were so many ridiculous ancillary characters that we had no time to get to know the people who were ostensibly our main characters, Tom Hiddleston and Cheese Larson. Tom Hiddleston is a "tracker", and Cheese is a war photographer who doesn't like the war. AND THAT'S IT. They have just the barest, merest, smattering of dialogue, and we don't ever get the chance to slightly care about them.
This is everything these characters do. You now have
no reason to see this movie.You know what? It's okay to have main characters who are ultimately not the main focus of the story, especially in this specific type of movie. That's fine! If you're like, "this is a special-effects movie and the real star is the giant monkey" -- that's fine!
But don't build up your human characters, then, as if you had something substantial to do with them later. Hiddleston is introduced like he's some kind of cross between James Bond and Indiana Jones... and his entire contribution to the movie is running fast and advising against adventuresome courses of action. Larson is introduced as if she's this hard-as-nails reporter who has strong moral convictions... and her main contribution to the movie is minor snark and not getting crushed when King Kong picks her up.
Not to beat this into the ground... but another thing this movie really missed was the "concerned scientist" character from all giant monster movies past -- "You can't blow him up! We need to study him... for science!"
This guy.There were like seven scientist characters in this movie, and not one of them was concerned about seeing an amazing specimen of undiscovered zoology get shot to death with machine guns within the first five seconds after he's discovered. All I needed was a single one of them saying, "No!! Don't!!" when the military starts firing -- you know, a couple lines to justify the presence of so many scientists. But no -- the scientists are either eaten by monsters, or they do absolutely nothing.
Really, that's my main problem with all the ancillary characters -- the majority of them either served no purpose whatsoever, or had unexpected, abrupt, meaningless deaths, which just mainly made me angry at the nihilistic laziness of the scriptwriter.
TIME PERIOD: For some reason, probably because every movie has a stupid soundtrack full of catchy oldies these days (I call this the Guardians of the Galaxy-effect) -- it totally escaped me when we were watching the trailer that this was a period film. So, at the beginning of this movie, I was somewhat taken by surprise when we suddenly found ourselves in the 1970's. Why? Because that's how they get around the fact that nowadays you could use Google Earth to zoom in on Skull Island and everybody would know that there was a giant monkey there. So I'm pretty sure they made it a period piece to limit the technology, and for no other reason.
SOUNDTRACK: Speaking of the soundtrack... the soundtrack was overwhelmingly obnoxious in this movie. They shoehorned in every "Vietnam era" pop song they possibly could -- it seemed like very five seconds we were being treated to another Creedence Clearwater Revival . It was very cliche, and got downright annoying after a certain point. (And outside the pop songs... I can't remember any other music. Which isn't a good sign.)
Just listen to "I See a Bad Moon A-Rising" twenty times while looking at this
picture and it'll have the same general effect as watching this movie.MORE PROBLEMS: They blew the reveal of King Kong. In the first five minutes of this movie, two people see King Kong. Granted, he's partly shrouded in shadow... but not enough to consider him hidden. What a waste of a reveal! Kong is the major selling-point of this movie... You need to tease the heck out of that, keeping him hidden as long as possible -- keeping the audience waiting and interested, wondering when King Kong is going to show up. It really made the ultimate reveal of Kong later in the movie shrug-worthy.
*shrug*ALSO....
One of the first things we see after we reach the island is the fleet of helicopters dropping firebombs -- and then we cut to a close up of a reflection of fire in one soldier's sunglasses, while an evil grin spreads across his face.
Wait, what? What point are they trying to make here? This movie seems to be under the impression that it's a war flick -- and it seems to have something to say about Vietnam, but it doesn't, really. They seem to be making some kind of point about Samuel L. Jackson's commander character being obsessed with war... and yet, half his motivation in the latter part of the film is not leaving one of his men behind, which is an honorable sentiment (and the other half his motivation is wanting to blow up King Kong because King Kong blew up his men, which at least stems from caring deeply for his men).
"I'm the main villain... but I'm basically a good person!"So, why is he such a bad guy? Better still to ask, "Why is this movie so deathly afraid of actually having a real bad guy?" Every character's basic raison d'etre is terribly muddled and vague.
Except for one... THIS GUY.
The reviews are in, folks, and the critics agree that John C. Reilly stole the show. Why? Firstly because he was some badly-needed comic relief. (His dialogue had personality, so I'm guessing he improvised most of it.) Second, it was a relief to stumble across one fully likeable character whose motivation was clear and made sense. There were no questions about whether he was a good guy or a bad guy, and whether or not we wanted him to succeed. If he had been the main character of this movie... it would have succeeded as a movie. The end.
THE THINGS THAT WERE GOOD: The CGI ape was good -- I can't fault it that. One of the few other good things I have to say about this movie is that it kept moving -- and that the story was substantially more entertaining to watch than Peter Jackson's 2005 King Kong (although I would like to point out that most things, including doing your taxes and sitting in a dentist's waiting room, are more entertaining than Peter Jackson's 2005 King Kong.) And I essentially liked that they stayed on Skull Island, because there are two things that you remember about the original King Kong (and two things which the remakes tend to have problems getting right) are: 1) the scene where King Kong fights the dinosaur, and 2), the scene where King Kong climbs the Empire State building. Because in this film Kong never leaves Skull Island, they were able to use the dinosaur fight as the climax of the film -- and it basically worked. I enjoyed the climax of the film.
I can't find a picture of that fight, so accept this Toho substitute.I also enjoyed one visual in this movie: when our pseudo-hero, Tom Hiddleston, runs into a cloud of green smoke, wearing a gas mask and cutting up monsters with a samurai sword. It was a really neat looking visual. It made me wish that I was watching a movie just about that, and that it didn't have the big muddled story of Kong: Skull Island wrapped around it.
OVERALL THOUGHTS: It's not "fun" bad like Twister -- and yet not quite as bad-bad as Godzilla (2014). I'm not going to compare it to the original King Kong, because that movie is iconic and it wouldn't be quite fair... but I'm also not going to talk about its relationship to the Toho version of King Kong, because, ultimately, it's not its relationship to either of those versions of Kong that makes it good or bad. Really, I'm not going to recommend that you see this movie mainly because it was just lazily written, and I don't think lazy movies should be rewarded anymore. If you desperately want some giant-monster in your life, I guess you could watch it -- but I can't give you any other reasons. Ultimately, it's just mediocre.
(Does that make it a good "popcorn movie"? Please see my post on "Popcorn movies.")
NOT RECOMMENDED.
Surprisingly, even with that low standard, it basically failed for me. Here's the trailer, so you know what we thought we were getting into:
It looked kind of fun, right? Well, here's the things that the movie got right: the CGI ape, the climax battle, and one visual of the "hero" running through a cloud of green smoke with a samurai sword. Now let's talk about everything else. (There are a lot of spoilers in here, so... you might want to watch the movie first, and then come back and see if you agree with me.)
THE CHARACTERS: For a start, a big problem with this movie was that there were just way too many characters. We had the male lead (Tom Hiddleston), the female lead (Brie Larson), the Samuel L. Jackson, the six to ten military guys he worked with, a random scientist, another random scientist, John Goodman, the two additional scientists, John C. Reilly, an entire village of natives...
This is only like half the people we're supposed to keep track of. Now, I understand that when you have a movie that means to feature people being killed in gruesome ways, you pad your film a bit with disposable people that you can easily kill off so that you don't run out of characters.
"Please beam down some more guys inred shirts."But most of those "disposable" characters should be either, a) morally-suspect people...
Such as Kevin Bacon's "naughty teenager" in Friday the 13th......or b) people that you're never given enough info to care about. They don't have a name, they don't have a background. They just serve to alert us, the audience, that this is a dangerous situation. People who actually do have names and backgrounds might still die, but they need a more meaningful, substantive death. Not everybody has to have a monologue -- but if we know who you are, and feel for you in some way, there should be some significance to your death. It needs to make us feel something that has significance to the story.
It doesn't have to be an ornament-worthy moment, but, you know....Which is why it really surprised me (not in a good way) when they randomly kill off John Goodman's character halfway through the film. John Goodman's character is responsible for the story -- he personally instituted this mission to Skull Island, and it seemed like things ought to really revolve around him. Maybe, by the end, he's learned a lesson about the value of human life or the nature of nature or whatever? However, it's like the scriptwriters had no idea what else to do with him after a certain point... so he has barely any dialogue after they reach the island, then he's unexpectedly eaten by a dinosaur, and never spoken of again. (Not unlike the despicable treatment of Bryan Cranston in a certain other giant monster movie, that was supposed to star Bryan Cranston -- only to have him randomly die about fifteen minutes in from having stuff fall on him?)
I am still upset about that one. I should have asked formy money back.Meanwhile, we have Samuel L. Jackson's character -- hamfisted "crazy military man", who becomes obsessed with the idea of killing Kong. My question for you is this: WHY ARE THE SAMUEL L. JACKSON CHARACTER AND THE JOHN GOODMAN CHARACTER SEPARATE CHARACTERS? John Goodman's character is shown as a bit loony to begin with, so why not just combine the two characters into one character who a) leads the mission to Skull Island for his own purposes, and b) those purposes turn out to be a goal of killing Kong, because he's CRAZY? Samuel L. Jackson had nothing to do until the end of the movie, and John Goodman had nothing to do after the beginning of the movie... so why not combine them?
I searched for a picture of John Goodman and Samuel L. Jacksontogether, and all the internet could give me was a picture of
sexy John Goodman. C'est la vie.Outside Samuel L. Jackson and John Goodman... there were so many ridiculous ancillary characters that we had no time to get to know the people who were ostensibly our main characters, Tom Hiddleston and Cheese Larson. Tom Hiddleston is a "tracker", and Cheese is a war photographer who doesn't like the war. AND THAT'S IT. They have just the barest, merest, smattering of dialogue, and we don't ever get the chance to slightly care about them.
This is everything these characters do. You now haveno reason to see this movie.You know what? It's okay to have main characters who are ultimately not the main focus of the story, especially in this specific type of movie. That's fine! If you're like, "this is a special-effects movie and the real star is the giant monkey" -- that's fine!
But don't build up your human characters, then, as if you had something substantial to do with them later. Hiddleston is introduced like he's some kind of cross between James Bond and Indiana Jones... and his entire contribution to the movie is running fast and advising against adventuresome courses of action. Larson is introduced as if she's this hard-as-nails reporter who has strong moral convictions... and her main contribution to the movie is minor snark and not getting crushed when King Kong picks her up.
Not to beat this into the ground... but another thing this movie really missed was the "concerned scientist" character from all giant monster movies past -- "You can't blow him up! We need to study him... for science!"
This guy.There were like seven scientist characters in this movie, and not one of them was concerned about seeing an amazing specimen of undiscovered zoology get shot to death with machine guns within the first five seconds after he's discovered. All I needed was a single one of them saying, "No!! Don't!!" when the military starts firing -- you know, a couple lines to justify the presence of so many scientists. But no -- the scientists are either eaten by monsters, or they do absolutely nothing.Really, that's my main problem with all the ancillary characters -- the majority of them either served no purpose whatsoever, or had unexpected, abrupt, meaningless deaths, which just mainly made me angry at the nihilistic laziness of the scriptwriter.
TIME PERIOD: For some reason, probably because every movie has a stupid soundtrack full of catchy oldies these days (I call this the Guardians of the Galaxy-effect) -- it totally escaped me when we were watching the trailer that this was a period film. So, at the beginning of this movie, I was somewhat taken by surprise when we suddenly found ourselves in the 1970's. Why? Because that's how they get around the fact that nowadays you could use Google Earth to zoom in on Skull Island and everybody would know that there was a giant monkey there. So I'm pretty sure they made it a period piece to limit the technology, and for no other reason.
SOUNDTRACK: Speaking of the soundtrack... the soundtrack was overwhelmingly obnoxious in this movie. They shoehorned in every "Vietnam era" pop song they possibly could -- it seemed like very five seconds we were being treated to another Creedence Clearwater Revival . It was very cliche, and got downright annoying after a certain point. (And outside the pop songs... I can't remember any other music. Which isn't a good sign.)
Just listen to "I See a Bad Moon A-Rising" twenty times while looking at thispicture and it'll have the same general effect as watching this movie.MORE PROBLEMS: They blew the reveal of King Kong. In the first five minutes of this movie, two people see King Kong. Granted, he's partly shrouded in shadow... but not enough to consider him hidden. What a waste of a reveal! Kong is the major selling-point of this movie... You need to tease the heck out of that, keeping him hidden as long as possible -- keeping the audience waiting and interested, wondering when King Kong is going to show up. It really made the ultimate reveal of Kong later in the movie shrug-worthy.
*shrug*ALSO....One of the first things we see after we reach the island is the fleet of helicopters dropping firebombs -- and then we cut to a close up of a reflection of fire in one soldier's sunglasses, while an evil grin spreads across his face.
Wait, what? What point are they trying to make here? This movie seems to be under the impression that it's a war flick -- and it seems to have something to say about Vietnam, but it doesn't, really. They seem to be making some kind of point about Samuel L. Jackson's commander character being obsessed with war... and yet, half his motivation in the latter part of the film is not leaving one of his men behind, which is an honorable sentiment (and the other half his motivation is wanting to blow up King Kong because King Kong blew up his men, which at least stems from caring deeply for his men).
"I'm the main villain... but I'm basically a good person!"So, why is he such a bad guy? Better still to ask, "Why is this movie so deathly afraid of actually having a real bad guy?" Every character's basic raison d'etre is terribly muddled and vague. Except for one... THIS GUY.
The reviews are in, folks, and the critics agree that John C. Reilly stole the show. Why? Firstly because he was some badly-needed comic relief. (His dialogue had personality, so I'm guessing he improvised most of it.) Second, it was a relief to stumble across one fully likeable character whose motivation was clear and made sense. There were no questions about whether he was a good guy or a bad guy, and whether or not we wanted him to succeed. If he had been the main character of this movie... it would have succeeded as a movie. The end.
THE THINGS THAT WERE GOOD: The CGI ape was good -- I can't fault it that. One of the few other good things I have to say about this movie is that it kept moving -- and that the story was substantially more entertaining to watch than Peter Jackson's 2005 King Kong (although I would like to point out that most things, including doing your taxes and sitting in a dentist's waiting room, are more entertaining than Peter Jackson's 2005 King Kong.) And I essentially liked that they stayed on Skull Island, because there are two things that you remember about the original King Kong (and two things which the remakes tend to have problems getting right) are: 1) the scene where King Kong fights the dinosaur, and 2), the scene where King Kong climbs the Empire State building. Because in this film Kong never leaves Skull Island, they were able to use the dinosaur fight as the climax of the film -- and it basically worked. I enjoyed the climax of the film.
I can't find a picture of that fight, so accept this Toho substitute.I also enjoyed one visual in this movie: when our pseudo-hero, Tom Hiddleston, runs into a cloud of green smoke, wearing a gas mask and cutting up monsters with a samurai sword. It was a really neat looking visual. It made me wish that I was watching a movie just about that, and that it didn't have the big muddled story of Kong: Skull Island wrapped around it.OVERALL THOUGHTS: It's not "fun" bad like Twister -- and yet not quite as bad-bad as Godzilla (2014). I'm not going to compare it to the original King Kong, because that movie is iconic and it wouldn't be quite fair... but I'm also not going to talk about its relationship to the Toho version of King Kong, because, ultimately, it's not its relationship to either of those versions of Kong that makes it good or bad. Really, I'm not going to recommend that you see this movie mainly because it was just lazily written, and I don't think lazy movies should be rewarded anymore. If you desperately want some giant-monster in your life, I guess you could watch it -- but I can't give you any other reasons. Ultimately, it's just mediocre.
(Does that make it a good "popcorn movie"? Please see my post on "Popcorn movies.")
NOT RECOMMENDED.
March 14, 2017
On My Shelf: So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993)
After watching all those Wayne's World movies, I thought I should probably watch the copy of So I Married an Axe Murderer that I bought last Halloween.
Not that there were going to be a lot of surprises for me: I've seen this movie a billion times, but not one of those billion has been in the last fifteen years. So I guess I was due for a viewing.
Plot: Mike Myers is a... guy... who enjoys beat poetry and is deathly afraid of commitment (apparently because of the bad example his parents set). He always comes up with feeble excuses not to get involved with the ladies. But then he meets a very lovely lady butcher and begins to consider the notion that she might be "the one" -- until clues are dropped that she might be an axe-murderer.
If you like the 1990's, and Mike Myers, you'll probably enjoy this film, because there's plenty of both in it. This movie also features all the things that Mike Myers likes best: Scottish accents and showing his butt to people.
It's a thing.I can't confirm that an enthusiastic appearance of Mike Myers' posterior happens in every Mike Myers movie (because I haven't seen either The Love Guru or The Cat in the Hat) but I think there is at least a moderate level of butt exposure in every Mike Myers film I've seen. Mike Myers, if you're out there reading this -- could you confirm or deny this pattern?
STORY: Overall, despite involving axe-murder, the plot is light and harmless, and the film is substantially less obnoxious than you would think. In its time, I thought it was a fairly average movie with a few good jokes -- and, now, I think it stands out because it's an original story. It's nothing ground-breaking, but it's just nice to watch something that isn't a re-boot or pre-boot or fe-boot (you take a successful film franchise and re-cast it with the basically the same story but women in the lead roles) -- or a "soft reboot" or an outright ripoff. It's not any of those things. It's its own story (a mystery/romantic comedy -- a genre-mix which really saw its heyday in the 1940's and is more or less ignored today) with its own unique plot, its own unique beats and its own unique characters. And it deserves some credit for that.
I mean, how many rom-coms can you think of where the lead male
makes the lead female fall in love with him by doing comedy bits
with raw meat?VERY MINOR POINTS: This is a petty, niggly question, but I must ask it: Do they ever say what Mike Myers' character's profession is in this movie? Surely he doesn't make a living doing beat poetry on open-mic night at coffeehouses? I kept waiting for them to clarify at some point that he's a writer and the beat-poetry thing is just a hobby... but they never really do. They simply never show him working.
Speaking of niggly points, I find it very odd that this movie features not one, but three "jokes" about a person getting hit in the crotch in very quick succession. (Mike Myers gets hit in the crotch. Then he gets hit in the crotch. Then someone else gets hit in the crotch). I guess he was obeying the "rule of 3"... but, I mean, getting hit in the crotch isn't really a "joke" joke of the type you would repeat. I'm having trouble explaining what I mean, because when I try to put it in words, it sounds like I'm saying it's too low-brow a chuckle to repeat three times.... That isn't quite what I mean, because (if I was really worried about how low-brow something was) would I watch half the movies that I do watch? But I guess it's as close as I can come. Something just feels off about putting those three crotch injuries right next to each other.
I don't know why this happens in this movie. Apparently
Mike Myers just thought ThighMasters were funny.
(And, of course, it was another opportunity not to wear pants.)Final niggly point: I'm a little unclear about why Mike Myers' character is so deathly afraid of commitment. I guess it's implied that his parents' relationship has turned him off the idea -- but, in spite of being weirdos, his parents are basically treated as harmless eccentrics who essentially love each other... So... why the intense "terror" of commitment? (I guess the answer is, "because he has to be scared of it to advance the plot.")
OVERALL: The plot is fine and the performances are fine; special nods to Phil Hartman as "Scary Alcatraz Guard" and Michael Richards as "Offended Newspaper Man". Mike Myers in dual roles as Mike Myers and Scottish Mike Myers are... pretty typical Mike Myers.
Let me put it this way. The deciding factor on whether or not you will like this movie is if you like other Mike Myers movies. If you like Austin Powers and Wayne's World, I can tell you to watch this movie in good conscience for a harmless story with some pleasant laughs. If you don't like those films... Well, I don't know why you would consider watching this, the most Mike Myers-ie of all Mike Myers movies, but it's still pretty harmless. My main complaint about this movie? It's just... not... really... quite as funny as I remembered it being. Not BAD, not UNFUNNY, just... kind of average. But it does make a nice break from endless reboots.
RECOMMENDED... WITH (mild) RESERVATIONS
Not that there were going to be a lot of surprises for me: I've seen this movie a billion times, but not one of those billion has been in the last fifteen years. So I guess I was due for a viewing.
Plot: Mike Myers is a... guy... who enjoys beat poetry and is deathly afraid of commitment (apparently because of the bad example his parents set). He always comes up with feeble excuses not to get involved with the ladies. But then he meets a very lovely lady butcher and begins to consider the notion that she might be "the one" -- until clues are dropped that she might be an axe-murderer.
If you like the 1990's, and Mike Myers, you'll probably enjoy this film, because there's plenty of both in it. This movie also features all the things that Mike Myers likes best: Scottish accents and showing his butt to people.
It's a thing.I can't confirm that an enthusiastic appearance of Mike Myers' posterior happens in every Mike Myers movie (because I haven't seen either The Love Guru or The Cat in the Hat) but I think there is at least a moderate level of butt exposure in every Mike Myers film I've seen. Mike Myers, if you're out there reading this -- could you confirm or deny this pattern?
STORY: Overall, despite involving axe-murder, the plot is light and harmless, and the film is substantially less obnoxious than you would think. In its time, I thought it was a fairly average movie with a few good jokes -- and, now, I think it stands out because it's an original story. It's nothing ground-breaking, but it's just nice to watch something that isn't a re-boot or pre-boot or fe-boot (you take a successful film franchise and re-cast it with the basically the same story but women in the lead roles) -- or a "soft reboot" or an outright ripoff. It's not any of those things. It's its own story (a mystery/romantic comedy -- a genre-mix which really saw its heyday in the 1940's and is more or less ignored today) with its own unique plot, its own unique beats and its own unique characters. And it deserves some credit for that.
I mean, how many rom-coms can you think of where the lead malemakes the lead female fall in love with him by doing comedy bits
with raw meat?VERY MINOR POINTS: This is a petty, niggly question, but I must ask it: Do they ever say what Mike Myers' character's profession is in this movie? Surely he doesn't make a living doing beat poetry on open-mic night at coffeehouses? I kept waiting for them to clarify at some point that he's a writer and the beat-poetry thing is just a hobby... but they never really do. They simply never show him working.
Speaking of niggly points, I find it very odd that this movie features not one, but three "jokes" about a person getting hit in the crotch in very quick succession. (Mike Myers gets hit in the crotch. Then he gets hit in the crotch. Then someone else gets hit in the crotch). I guess he was obeying the "rule of 3"... but, I mean, getting hit in the crotch isn't really a "joke" joke of the type you would repeat. I'm having trouble explaining what I mean, because when I try to put it in words, it sounds like I'm saying it's too low-brow a chuckle to repeat three times.... That isn't quite what I mean, because (if I was really worried about how low-brow something was) would I watch half the movies that I do watch? But I guess it's as close as I can come. Something just feels off about putting those three crotch injuries right next to each other.
I don't know why this happens in this movie. ApparentlyMike Myers just thought ThighMasters were funny.
(And, of course, it was another opportunity not to wear pants.)Final niggly point: I'm a little unclear about why Mike Myers' character is so deathly afraid of commitment. I guess it's implied that his parents' relationship has turned him off the idea -- but, in spite of being weirdos, his parents are basically treated as harmless eccentrics who essentially love each other... So... why the intense "terror" of commitment? (I guess the answer is, "because he has to be scared of it to advance the plot.")
OVERALL: The plot is fine and the performances are fine; special nods to Phil Hartman as "Scary Alcatraz Guard" and Michael Richards as "Offended Newspaper Man". Mike Myers in dual roles as Mike Myers and Scottish Mike Myers are... pretty typical Mike Myers.
Let me put it this way. The deciding factor on whether or not you will like this movie is if you like other Mike Myers movies. If you like Austin Powers and Wayne's World, I can tell you to watch this movie in good conscience for a harmless story with some pleasant laughs. If you don't like those films... Well, I don't know why you would consider watching this, the most Mike Myers-ie of all Mike Myers movies, but it's still pretty harmless. My main complaint about this movie? It's just... not... really... quite as funny as I remembered it being. Not BAD, not UNFUNNY, just... kind of average. But it does make a nice break from endless reboots.
RECOMMENDED... WITH (mild) RESERVATIONS
March 7, 2017
On My Shelf: The Hobbit - An Unexpected Journey (2012)
I really liked the Lord of the Rings films -- so, of course I saw this movie when it came out. And I supposedly watched it again with a couple friends after that. That would mean that, at this point in my life, I have watched this film exactly two times too many. I was looking forward to never seeing this movie ever again....And then, a friend of ours, for reasons best known to himself, gave us the extended editions of all three Hobbit movies. So, now, to my tremendous embarrassment, we own all three of the Hobbit movies on my shelf. And that means I have to review them...
Just on the off-chance that you've never seen Lord of the Rings and never read The Hobbit, here is the story of the book in a nutshell:
The Hobbit is a story about a little man named Bilbo Baggins who lives in a cozy hole in the ground. He loves to drink tea and sit by a warm fire and be comfortable. A wizard comes along with some dwarves and bamboozles him (via manners) into going on a rather uncomfortable adventure where his skill at walking quietly will help him steal a particular magic stone back from a dragon that invaded the dwarf cave. Lots of fun, whimsical adventures are had along the way. (If you you'd like this story in greater depth, here's Leonard Nimoy singing The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins...)
"The Hobbit" shouldn't be quite as stupid as this, but it shouldbe equally as whimsical.
The movie more or less follows the same general plot as the book... while doing its best to remove any fun or whimsy one might experience during said adventure. It's hard to know where to start with the things that are wrong with this movie.... because, basically, the only parts I don't have a problem with are the scenery that was borrowed from Lord of the Rings and the casting (because I don't think anybody really did a bad job with what they were given).
Other than that, THIS MOVIE IS TERRIBLE. It's main problems?
PACING AND TONE!!!!! (With some additional points subtracted for wholly unnecessary double-and-single entendre jokes).
Let's start at the very beginning...
It begins with elderly Bilbo, at the beginning of the Lord of the Rings story, recounting his young life adventures -- except, we immediately have a problem, because Bilbo doesn't begin by recounting his adventures, he begins by recounting events he never saw -- namely, the ravaging of the dwarf kingdom by the dragon, Smaug, and the displacement of the dwarves.
This moment is highly out-of-place, and, if anything, should have waited for a point later on -- where the leader of the dwarves, Thorin Oakensheild, starts singing a song about that exact occurrence. Would have made sense to have some flashbacks at that point, wouldn't it! But noooooo...) We then slip back in time to when Bilbo looked less like Ian Holm and more like Martin Freeman.
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So, Bilbo is minding his own business, and Gandalf hassles him for a bit. All fine and dandy and close to the book... except for the pacing, which is as slow as molasses. Gandalf departs, Bilbo goes about his business -- then the dwarves arrive, more or less one-by-one, at Bilbo's place -- gradually raising his discomfort level. This section would have been fine, but, sadly, nobody told the editor that this scene was supposed to be amusing and quick-paced... so there are exceptionally long, quiet, awkward scenes of the dwarves slowly arriving and disturbing Bilbo by eating all his food. It's all upsettingly slowly paced, and the score isn't helping.
This dreary scene is followed by an unexpectedly jouncy little song where the dwarves defy the laws of physics and sing about how they acknowledge that Bilbo doesn't like them messing around -- which seems really out of place given the slow, plodding, non-whimsical tone that has just been set. You could have edited this entire section of the film down to just a couple minutes and had all you needed out of it -- just buzz through their arrivals, cut to them singing their song and upsetting him and telling Gandalf how he's upset by it all -- and it would have flowed so much better.
How I look while I'm watching this movie.Then they have the somber scene of Thorin singing the song about how they had to leave their mountain home and they were sad (which would have been a good place for the dragon flashbacks... providing Bilbo a reason to change his mind about going -- you know, because he's moved by the images of the dragon decimation that have flashed through his mind. AS IT IS, there are no flashbacks, and we don't see Bilbo affected by the song, and Bilbo wakes up the next morning and then just inexplicably has decided that he wants to go on the adventure with them. (Was he moved by their song? Did he kind of enjoy their company? It's really unclear. I mean, yesterday, he was like, "I just want to be left alone by you weirdos!" and now he's racing after them?)It just gets worse from there. They stop for the night, and one of the dwarves recounts the story of some dwarf battle that happened after they were ejected from the mountain, when they establish why Thorin Oakensheild is such a cranky dillweed about everything (his grandpa died in that battle -- although it also appears everyone's grandpa also died in that battle, so his rights to be exclusively cranky on this account are limited). They also establish who the main villain is going to be for this series of films... [image error] ...This CGI jackass who was not in the book.What is the main purpose for this story at this point in the film? I guess to inject some excitement, since battle scenes are exciting, right? Well, they are if you care about the characters in them, but at this point I don't really care about Thorin Oakensheild because he's a crusty butthole -- and I'm not worried he's going to die in the battle because this is a flashback -- so, again, what is the point and purpose of this scene, here? JUST to establish the stupid, lame, CGI villain ("Azog, The Defiler, also known as The Pale Orc" according to The One Wiki to Rule Them All).
[image error] Seen here: Practical effects Orc from The Lord of the Rings.
100% more believable to the inner recesses of your brain
and therefore 100% more enjoyable to watch.Around here, we also inject the further adventures of Radagast the Brown. For the uninitiated, Radagast the Brown is a wizard who is mentioned in a throwaway line in the book -- but is actually shown and given some stuff to do in this version of the story. Again, I have no problem with the casting -- as he was cutely and expertly performed by Sylvester McCoy, also known as Doctor Who #7 from the 1980's iteration of that show...
He was good, but Doctor Who was terribly preachy and dull at that time.(But isn't he cute?)He kept the character at a tone that would have been correct... if the rest of this movie had been played at the level it was supposed to be played. As it was, against all the muted and dull scenes, Radagast seems cartoonish and weird, with a couple goofy jokes and eye-crossing thrown in. But mainly, the problems I have with Radagast in this film are that a) he was included in the first place, because his presence is literally just killing time, and b) that somebody thought it would be funny if he had bird poop all over the side of his head. (Spoiler: It's not.)
I wish I was kidding about this.And the further problem with bringing in new characters and characters who didn't really play a part in the original story is that (besides killing time) they all do one main thing: distract from our main character. You know, THE HOBBIT?! The one this whole saga is named after? 
Oh, yeah! THAT guy! What's his name again?I seriously don't know what Bilbo was doing during most of this movie. Looking at things and running, I suppose. Oh, he was whining about forgetting his handkerchief at one point.Okay, so, next they arrive at Rivendell, home of the elves. It's essentially the same as in Lord of the Rings except that Bret MacKenzie is given a bit more to do this time.
Namely, he gets to stand around with thisexpression on his face.The extended edition of the movie gives us a little more time at Rivendell, with the dwarves purposefully being rude to the elves and dancing on tables, and a scene where one of the sexy dwarves is commenting on the attractiveness of the elf ladies and realizes the one he was eyeing is a dude. I don't mind those scenes, because they are harmless and whimsical (which is what the tone of the story The Hobbit is SUPPOSED TO BE).
I will say, there was some unnecessary nudity.When we first watched this movie in the theater, one of the (many) complaints I had was that it was far too long (not unlike this review, since I had so much to gripe about). The whole story should have been no more than one film in its entirety. So I sincerely doubted that seeing it in an "extended edition" form would help matters. Oddly, though, I feel the extra scenes in the extended edition didn't hurt. There were like three extra scenes we spotted -- one, baby Bilbo hitting Gandalf in the butt with a wooden sword (I guess to demonstrate the "adventurous spirit" that Gandalf saw in Bilbo as a child?); two, a little more dialogue when the dwarves first come to visit Bilbo; three, some extra dialogue and singing once they reach Rivendell. In truth, the extra dialogue is pretty harmless... in fact, these scenes that were excised from the theatrical release felt more like the book "The Hobbit" than the rest of the movie did, because they were mostly cute, harmless dialogue that developed the individual characters.
Overall, then -- how did I feel about this movie on second viewing, and first viewing of the extended editions?
This film, due to length, was divided up into two discs. Disc One was HORRIBLE. It was just as bad as it was the first time I saw it, but now there was even more of it. I HATED IT. Disc Two was actually slightly less horrible... Almost watchable, which is quite an improvement on part one. Ultimately, then, should you put this on your shelf if you are anything except an uber-Tolkien fan?
NOT RECOMMENDED.
March 6, 2017
Off My Shelf: Logan (2017)... An Extremely Long, Spoilerific Review
In a nutshell: Logan was basically entertaining and, if you love Hugh Jackman's Wolverine character, you should probably go to see it. But you might have a few issues if you also happen to love the X-Men franchise in general.
Everything from here on out is a spoiler, so be warned... **DON'T READ THIS IF YOU DON'T WANT BIG SECTIONS OF THE MOVIE SPOILED FOR YOU!**
Okay. Although this movie kept my interest pretty much throughout, I was left feeling overall a faint disatisfaction, and it took me days to finally formulate all of my vague feelings into a specific set of issues. The problem was, of course, that overall, the movie moves pretty well and is pretty sound -- but there was still a nagging sense of something not quite right.
PERFORMANCES: The performances were great. Even the worst movie I've seen that featured Wolverine (which would pretty much be a toss-up between X-3: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine)... was not bad because it featured Wolverine, and no part of Hugh Jackman's performance has ever been found lacking. I think his sincerity is what makes him -- that, and his convincing ability to portray physical pain (see The Wolverine [2013]. If there was ever a man who could convincingly take an atomic bomb blast, it would be Hugh Jackman.)
Just walk it off, buddy.I have never seen such convincing "exhausted, sick, old person" staggering as we are treated to in this movie. That doesn't really sound like a compliment, but there were certain points (like when he was exhaustedly running up the hill at the end of the film) that I just wanted to laugh at how convincingly horrible he looked. And, of course, Patrick Stewart was great. The kid wasn't bad -- which is to stay, she did a good job of hopping around and stabbing things, and not talking for the majority of the film. I don't know, I feel like I never connected with the kid -- I never disliked her, nor particularly liked her. I guess I was just neutral to the kid. She was a bit Wednesday-Addams-ish for my tastes.
Don't know why I got that vibe.SPECIAL EFFECTS: The special effects were fine... but, in my opinion, CGI blood continues to behave unlike real blood ought to behave. And I don't care how sharp Wolverine's claws are -- anytime somebody gets stabbed in the head, it looks fake to me.
TONE: The tone of this movie was dead serious, realistic. It seems very difficult to believe that it takes place in the same universe as all the other X-Men movies. (If you want to get real technical -- it's not really clear that it does take place in the same universe as all the other X-Men movies, considering that Professor Xavier has previously died once already and that Wolverine has previously gone back in time and changed the past. Not to mention that X-Men Origins: Wolverine flat-out ignored the chronology of the other films. ...I think I'm just going to assume that it's in a different timeline).
This gets to my overall main issue -- which is that I think the problem is in the story.
STORY: The main thing is that -- although it's a generally respectful treatment of the character Wolverine -- it's an overall unsatisfactory treatment of the X-Men franchise. And that's because the comic book this is based on was never meant to be the official end of the X-Men -- the comic book was written as a one-off, "What if?" story with no real connection to the overall universe. Remember all those other characters you got to know and love in the X-Men films -- Rogue, Cyclops, Storm, Jean Grey, Nightcrawler?
You know, all those people who generally stand behind
Wolverine in pictures?In this version of the story, THEY'RE ALL DEAD. Killed off-screen by one of Professor X's brain farts. Professor X? Drooling incoherent vegetable kept in an oil drum out back. UNTIL, that is, the story needs him to be more coherent -- and then he Grandpa-Joes-it right out of there.
In a figurative sense, of course. I'll just come right out and say it -- I don't like the treatment of the Professor's character in this story. For one thing, why is he in this movie? What purpose does he serve? It seems in the beginning like he kind of gives Logan a
raison d'etre
-- except that he doesn't. Did we really need him? Couldn't Wolverine have just been living on his own, and then encountered the kid, and then gone on his adventure? I do think Patrick Stewart did a great job with what he was given (he was impressively feeble) -- but I also think it was a sad end to a character we all knew and loved (although maybe not a more ignominious than his former death in X-3: The Last Stand. You know, the death he inexplicably recuperated from in later films.) In other words... I don't feel like the character has had a good death in this franchise. He deserved better.
Ultimately, though, I know this movie wasn't really about Professor X -- or even Wolverine. They just wanted to put the nail in the coffin of this particular franchise. (You know. So they can re-boot it two minutes from now).
Not that this franchise hasn't had its ups and downs. X-3: The Last Stand was a bad movie -- and even more disappointing coming off the high of X-2. And everybody knows that X-Men Origins: Wolverine was one big fat mistake -- even Hugh Jackman makes fun of it. It's a terrible story with shockingly bad special effects.
What's weird, though, is that this movie (Logan) features some of the exact same beats as X-Men Origins. Story element about the government collecting mutant kiddos in order to weaponize their powers? CHECK. Scene where Wolverine is taken in by kindly farm folks (who are then violently murdered)? CHECK. Adamantium bullet to the brain featured strongly in the resolution? CHECK. Wolverine fights an evil version of himself? CHECK. (From X-men Origins: Wolverine I'm counting his brother, Sabertooth, as an evil version of himself. There were too many, "We're the same!" "You can't walk away from who you are!" -type moments in that movie to not draw this parallel).
They even had the same mutton-chops!So, yes, the filmmakers just lifted these elements from one of the crappiest films of the Wolverine saga. (Maybe to show they could do it better? I won't deny that they did do it better... But it was just very strange to feel like I was watching scenes I had already seen in a much crappier film.)
Whether or not that was purposeful -- I think that there are some big things that were under-explained in this movie. There's a very fine line in script-writing between artfully under-explaining something in such a manner that it's an interesting and thought-provoking mystery... and just plain failing to explain something because you're a kind of lazy script-writer. I'm very much inclined to say that these things fall towards the latter end of the spectrum, because...
1.Why the hell is Wolverine dying? This is important. He suggests it has something to do with the Adamantium in his body... but that's never clarified. Since when is Adamantium poisonous? Is Adamantium just poisonous after eighty or so years of exposure? Is the little girl going to die because of this? Or is it actually something else killing him? All this needed was a single line clarifying the situation... and it was never offered.
"I'm dying... because the script said so."2. So, it's explained that the government has been running this secret program to breed and weaponize mutants using stolen mutant DNA (including Wolverine's). They more or less do some cloning (I say "more or less" because these kids aren't straight-up clones. If they were straight-up clones, they would be identical to the originals, and they're not) to make little kids with mutant powers who are then trained to murder people. But that's kind of hard, so the government decides they have a better idea ("We need something without a soul,") and decide to shred the evidence of their experiment (including the kids) -- proceeding to their next plan. Well, at this point, I began to wonder if they were going to re-introduce Sentinels...
...Giant robot police, essentially, which were featured heavily in the comics and yet have never really (in my opinion) had a solid outing in the movies. They don't have souls, right? That's the only thing they could be talking about, right?
No, their big idea that's better than sorta-clones is just a straight-up identical adult clone of Wolverine (wait, what?!) who dresses in black. So... why or how does he have "no soul"? (The film's words, not mine.) Please explain. Also explain how or why he's an adult, when your first clone project, that came before him, is still composed of seven-year-old kids. (It's my understanding that the comic this is based on featured some time-travel stuff. That would have solved the logistical problems of this film -- but, oooooh, this movie is too realistic for that sort of thing. So, they just don't explain it. Again, this is not a clever mystery -- this is loose and/or sloppy screenwriting.)
So, evil clone Wolverine kind of looks like this. Just without
the suit and the Jason Bateman haircut.Now, I fully admit that their introduction of the identical Wolverine clone to the story was a surprise -- for a few moments, a really big surprise -- but, in the end, kind of disappointing, because it was so easy a device. Red Letter Media thought it was symbolic of Wolverine vs. his own darker side -- but, frankly, I think they were giving the film too much credit, because -- although this the evil clone is defeated -- he's defeated with all the stuff that goes into the symbolic darker side of Wolverine (i.e. rage and killing). There's no moral to this story. He tells the girl a few times that she can't just keep killing people and stealing stuff -- and then he steals some stuff and kills a bunch of people. His last actions on earth? Killing people. (Since he's dying, he technically can't steal stuff at that point.)
So what was the overall moral again? OH YEAH, the overall moral was putting a cap on this franchise. I have no doubt Marvel already has a re-boot plan ready to go, and the only thing stopping them was Hugh Jackman's unending popularity as this character. WHO DOESN'T LOVE HUGH JACKMAN'S WOLVERINE?
Well, a handful of uber-nerds who complain he's too tall, but they don't count.And let me just say this: they're going to have trouble going on with Wolverine without Hugh Jackman. His success as Wolverine is going to be every bit as unrepeatable as Christopher Reeve's Superman. There's a reason "people cling to" Christopher Reeve's Superman, and it's not just to spite big-fat-sour-patch-kid Zack Snyder -- it's because his performance as this character was perfect. He was everything we needed and wanted Superman to be. Even in laughably awful movies, like Superman 4: Quest for Peace, there was nothing lacking about his performance or interpretation of the character.
This photo generously blurs out the very-visible black
curtains in the background of the moon's surface.MISSED OPPORTUNITIES: First of all... I've never read the comic series that this is based on, Old Man Logan.
[image error]
... But I went to see this movie with three people who had, and those people assured me that the plot of this movie has practically nothing to do with the plot of the comic book. For instance, do you see on this cover how we've got a creepy old version of The Hulk, what appears to be a Red Skull version of Captain America, Spider-Woman with a gun, some kind of lizard-dog, monsters, and a child wearing Ant-Man's helmet? Not to mention, this scene happens in the book...
That's Hulk eating Wolverine. And then Wolverine
exploding out of the Hulk's stomach.... Yeah, none of that stuff is in the movie, because they couldn't use any characters who are owned by Disney's half of Marvel, which includes Captain America, Hulk, Spider-Man, Ant-Man, and so on. Therefore, use of this comic alone classifies itself as one big missed-opportunity for a crossover extravaganza. In fact, I'm not even sure why you would do this comic if you couldn't include all those other characters -- especially when all you're taking from it is the very basic premise (Wolverine is old now, and he goes on a road trip) and you just fill in the gaps with plot elements from X-Men Origins: Wolverine... (you know. The worst movie in the franchise. Are they just assuming people didn't see it?)
Second missed opportunity : Okay, this may be a small point, but at one point the characters are watching the movie Shane . Particular emphasis is made on one scene (it's a bittersweet scene where the Shane tells the kid that he's a fighting man, and that he can't settle down and live a normal family life, and has to go away). I can see the parallel they're drawing. It's pretty obvious -- especially when they directly quote those lines later in this film.
... However, a better and far cleverer parallel to draw would have been to this line from Shane:
Don't you think you would be able to do some deeper philosophical stuff by examining this line, and what it therefore means to people like Wolverine and the girl, who have basically been raised to be tools? (There's even a line to the effect that, "They're not children, they're tools." Not those exact words, but something close.) This line could have spawned an examination of the fact that neither of them is inherently all bad -- that they have a choice about how they use their murder-skills, and can use them for bad OR good purposes. It becomes an interesting examination of the nature of free will -- and not just a rather heavy-handed attempt to make this more like a Western by referencing one of the world's most famous classic Western films.
OVERALL: The film kept my interest throughout... Mainly because it was extremely difficult for me to detect the story structure. My general sensation while watching the movie was "interested, but not engrossed"... I was kept interested because I couldn't figure out what was going to happen next --not because I was so wrapped up in the story. So, I feel like this movie will suffer on a second viewing, because I'll know exactly what's going to happen, and there won't be that level of superficial interest to keep me watching.
I felt that the relationship between Wolverine and little-girl-clone wasn't all that strong (due to the lack of personality on her part) -- which meant that the central thrust of the movie, the father/daughter dynamic, was lacking. (And, frankly, was done better in a little movie called X-Men that you might have heard of).
They seemed like they were going for some kind of western-flavored experience... but failed to truly achieve that by failing to have a decent moral to their story.
In the end -- I think it's an entertaining Wolverine movie, and if you like Hugh Jackman's Wolverine you should see it -- but it's a not a great X-Men movie, and a bit of a letdown as an end to the franchise.
RECOMMENDED(...with reservations.)
Everything from here on out is a spoiler, so be warned... **DON'T READ THIS IF YOU DON'T WANT BIG SECTIONS OF THE MOVIE SPOILED FOR YOU!**
Okay. Although this movie kept my interest pretty much throughout, I was left feeling overall a faint disatisfaction, and it took me days to finally formulate all of my vague feelings into a specific set of issues. The problem was, of course, that overall, the movie moves pretty well and is pretty sound -- but there was still a nagging sense of something not quite right.
PERFORMANCES: The performances were great. Even the worst movie I've seen that featured Wolverine (which would pretty much be a toss-up between X-3: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine)... was not bad because it featured Wolverine, and no part of Hugh Jackman's performance has ever been found lacking. I think his sincerity is what makes him -- that, and his convincing ability to portray physical pain (see The Wolverine [2013]. If there was ever a man who could convincingly take an atomic bomb blast, it would be Hugh Jackman.)
Just walk it off, buddy.I have never seen such convincing "exhausted, sick, old person" staggering as we are treated to in this movie. That doesn't really sound like a compliment, but there were certain points (like when he was exhaustedly running up the hill at the end of the film) that I just wanted to laugh at how convincingly horrible he looked. And, of course, Patrick Stewart was great. The kid wasn't bad -- which is to stay, she did a good job of hopping around and stabbing things, and not talking for the majority of the film. I don't know, I feel like I never connected with the kid -- I never disliked her, nor particularly liked her. I guess I was just neutral to the kid. She was a bit Wednesday-Addams-ish for my tastes.
Don't know why I got that vibe.SPECIAL EFFECTS: The special effects were fine... but, in my opinion, CGI blood continues to behave unlike real blood ought to behave. And I don't care how sharp Wolverine's claws are -- anytime somebody gets stabbed in the head, it looks fake to me.
TONE: The tone of this movie was dead serious, realistic. It seems very difficult to believe that it takes place in the same universe as all the other X-Men movies. (If you want to get real technical -- it's not really clear that it does take place in the same universe as all the other X-Men movies, considering that Professor Xavier has previously died once already and that Wolverine has previously gone back in time and changed the past. Not to mention that X-Men Origins: Wolverine flat-out ignored the chronology of the other films. ...I think I'm just going to assume that it's in a different timeline).
This gets to my overall main issue -- which is that I think the problem is in the story.
STORY: The main thing is that -- although it's a generally respectful treatment of the character Wolverine -- it's an overall unsatisfactory treatment of the X-Men franchise. And that's because the comic book this is based on was never meant to be the official end of the X-Men -- the comic book was written as a one-off, "What if?" story with no real connection to the overall universe. Remember all those other characters you got to know and love in the X-Men films -- Rogue, Cyclops, Storm, Jean Grey, Nightcrawler?
You know, all those people who generally stand behindWolverine in pictures?In this version of the story, THEY'RE ALL DEAD. Killed off-screen by one of Professor X's brain farts. Professor X? Drooling incoherent vegetable kept in an oil drum out back. UNTIL, that is, the story needs him to be more coherent -- and then he Grandpa-Joes-it right out of there.
In a figurative sense, of course. I'll just come right out and say it -- I don't like the treatment of the Professor's character in this story. For one thing, why is he in this movie? What purpose does he serve? It seems in the beginning like he kind of gives Logan a
raison d'etre
-- except that he doesn't. Did we really need him? Couldn't Wolverine have just been living on his own, and then encountered the kid, and then gone on his adventure? I do think Patrick Stewart did a great job with what he was given (he was impressively feeble) -- but I also think it was a sad end to a character we all knew and loved (although maybe not a more ignominious than his former death in X-3: The Last Stand. You know, the death he inexplicably recuperated from in later films.) In other words... I don't feel like the character has had a good death in this franchise. He deserved better.Ultimately, though, I know this movie wasn't really about Professor X -- or even Wolverine. They just wanted to put the nail in the coffin of this particular franchise. (You know. So they can re-boot it two minutes from now).
Not that this franchise hasn't had its ups and downs. X-3: The Last Stand was a bad movie -- and even more disappointing coming off the high of X-2. And everybody knows that X-Men Origins: Wolverine was one big fat mistake -- even Hugh Jackman makes fun of it. It's a terrible story with shockingly bad special effects.
What's weird, though, is that this movie (Logan) features some of the exact same beats as X-Men Origins. Story element about the government collecting mutant kiddos in order to weaponize their powers? CHECK. Scene where Wolverine is taken in by kindly farm folks (who are then violently murdered)? CHECK. Adamantium bullet to the brain featured strongly in the resolution? CHECK. Wolverine fights an evil version of himself? CHECK. (From X-men Origins: Wolverine I'm counting his brother, Sabertooth, as an evil version of himself. There were too many, "We're the same!" "You can't walk away from who you are!" -type moments in that movie to not draw this parallel).
They even had the same mutton-chops!So, yes, the filmmakers just lifted these elements from one of the crappiest films of the Wolverine saga. (Maybe to show they could do it better? I won't deny that they did do it better... But it was just very strange to feel like I was watching scenes I had already seen in a much crappier film.)Whether or not that was purposeful -- I think that there are some big things that were under-explained in this movie. There's a very fine line in script-writing between artfully under-explaining something in such a manner that it's an interesting and thought-provoking mystery... and just plain failing to explain something because you're a kind of lazy script-writer. I'm very much inclined to say that these things fall towards the latter end of the spectrum, because...
1.Why the hell is Wolverine dying? This is important. He suggests it has something to do with the Adamantium in his body... but that's never clarified. Since when is Adamantium poisonous? Is Adamantium just poisonous after eighty or so years of exposure? Is the little girl going to die because of this? Or is it actually something else killing him? All this needed was a single line clarifying the situation... and it was never offered.
"I'm dying... because the script said so."2. So, it's explained that the government has been running this secret program to breed and weaponize mutants using stolen mutant DNA (including Wolverine's). They more or less do some cloning (I say "more or less" because these kids aren't straight-up clones. If they were straight-up clones, they would be identical to the originals, and they're not) to make little kids with mutant powers who are then trained to murder people. But that's kind of hard, so the government decides they have a better idea ("We need something without a soul,") and decide to shred the evidence of their experiment (including the kids) -- proceeding to their next plan. Well, at this point, I began to wonder if they were going to re-introduce Sentinels...
...Giant robot police, essentially, which were featured heavily in the comics and yet have never really (in my opinion) had a solid outing in the movies. They don't have souls, right? That's the only thing they could be talking about, right?
No, their big idea that's better than sorta-clones is just a straight-up identical adult clone of Wolverine (wait, what?!) who dresses in black. So... why or how does he have "no soul"? (The film's words, not mine.) Please explain. Also explain how or why he's an adult, when your first clone project, that came before him, is still composed of seven-year-old kids. (It's my understanding that the comic this is based on featured some time-travel stuff. That would have solved the logistical problems of this film -- but, oooooh, this movie is too realistic for that sort of thing. So, they just don't explain it. Again, this is not a clever mystery -- this is loose and/or sloppy screenwriting.)
So, evil clone Wolverine kind of looks like this. Just withoutthe suit and the Jason Bateman haircut.Now, I fully admit that their introduction of the identical Wolverine clone to the story was a surprise -- for a few moments, a really big surprise -- but, in the end, kind of disappointing, because it was so easy a device. Red Letter Media thought it was symbolic of Wolverine vs. his own darker side -- but, frankly, I think they were giving the film too much credit, because -- although this the evil clone is defeated -- he's defeated with all the stuff that goes into the symbolic darker side of Wolverine (i.e. rage and killing). There's no moral to this story. He tells the girl a few times that she can't just keep killing people and stealing stuff -- and then he steals some stuff and kills a bunch of people. His last actions on earth? Killing people. (Since he's dying, he technically can't steal stuff at that point.)
So what was the overall moral again? OH YEAH, the overall moral was putting a cap on this franchise. I have no doubt Marvel already has a re-boot plan ready to go, and the only thing stopping them was Hugh Jackman's unending popularity as this character. WHO DOESN'T LOVE HUGH JACKMAN'S WOLVERINE?
Well, a handful of uber-nerds who complain he's too tall, but they don't count.And let me just say this: they're going to have trouble going on with Wolverine without Hugh Jackman. His success as Wolverine is going to be every bit as unrepeatable as Christopher Reeve's Superman. There's a reason "people cling to" Christopher Reeve's Superman, and it's not just to spite big-fat-sour-patch-kid Zack Snyder -- it's because his performance as this character was perfect. He was everything we needed and wanted Superman to be. Even in laughably awful movies, like Superman 4: Quest for Peace, there was nothing lacking about his performance or interpretation of the character.
This photo generously blurs out the very-visible blackcurtains in the background of the moon's surface.MISSED OPPORTUNITIES: First of all... I've never read the comic series that this is based on, Old Man Logan.
[image error]
... But I went to see this movie with three people who had, and those people assured me that the plot of this movie has practically nothing to do with the plot of the comic book. For instance, do you see on this cover how we've got a creepy old version of The Hulk, what appears to be a Red Skull version of Captain America, Spider-Woman with a gun, some kind of lizard-dog, monsters, and a child wearing Ant-Man's helmet? Not to mention, this scene happens in the book...
That's Hulk eating Wolverine. And then Wolverineexploding out of the Hulk's stomach.... Yeah, none of that stuff is in the movie, because they couldn't use any characters who are owned by Disney's half of Marvel, which includes Captain America, Hulk, Spider-Man, Ant-Man, and so on. Therefore, use of this comic alone classifies itself as one big missed-opportunity for a crossover extravaganza. In fact, I'm not even sure why you would do this comic if you couldn't include all those other characters -- especially when all you're taking from it is the very basic premise (Wolverine is old now, and he goes on a road trip) and you just fill in the gaps with plot elements from X-Men Origins: Wolverine... (you know. The worst movie in the franchise. Are they just assuming people didn't see it?)
Second missed opportunity : Okay, this may be a small point, but at one point the characters are watching the movie Shane . Particular emphasis is made on one scene (it's a bittersweet scene where the Shane tells the kid that he's a fighting man, and that he can't settle down and live a normal family life, and has to go away). I can see the parallel they're drawing. It's pretty obvious -- especially when they directly quote those lines later in this film.
... However, a better and far cleverer parallel to draw would have been to this line from Shane:
Don't you think you would be able to do some deeper philosophical stuff by examining this line, and what it therefore means to people like Wolverine and the girl, who have basically been raised to be tools? (There's even a line to the effect that, "They're not children, they're tools." Not those exact words, but something close.) This line could have spawned an examination of the fact that neither of them is inherently all bad -- that they have a choice about how they use their murder-skills, and can use them for bad OR good purposes. It becomes an interesting examination of the nature of free will -- and not just a rather heavy-handed attempt to make this more like a Western by referencing one of the world's most famous classic Western films.
OVERALL: The film kept my interest throughout... Mainly because it was extremely difficult for me to detect the story structure. My general sensation while watching the movie was "interested, but not engrossed"... I was kept interested because I couldn't figure out what was going to happen next --not because I was so wrapped up in the story. So, I feel like this movie will suffer on a second viewing, because I'll know exactly what's going to happen, and there won't be that level of superficial interest to keep me watching.
I felt that the relationship between Wolverine and little-girl-clone wasn't all that strong (due to the lack of personality on her part) -- which meant that the central thrust of the movie, the father/daughter dynamic, was lacking. (And, frankly, was done better in a little movie called X-Men that you might have heard of).
They seemed like they were going for some kind of western-flavored experience... but failed to truly achieve that by failing to have a decent moral to their story.
In the end -- I think it's an entertaining Wolverine movie, and if you like Hugh Jackman's Wolverine you should see it -- but it's a not a great X-Men movie, and a bit of a letdown as an end to the franchise.
RECOMMENDED(...with reservations.)
February 28, 2017
On My Shelf: Aladdin (1986)... No, Not the One You're Thinking Of.
So, last year my husband told me about a movie he'd seen as a child, called Aladdin. No, not that Aladdin. The movie he remembered was an foreign movie that a childhood friend of his had on BetaMax (taped off HBO, I'm told). My husband half-thought that he'd dreamed the whole thing because no part of his memory of the experience made sense -- but then he recently discovered the film's opening music online. We tried to find the movie on YouTube, but alas, the only copies on there are dubbed into other languages (it's apparently quite popular overseas).
Then, just when we thought all was lost, and we would never find a copy of Aladdin to watch -- Mr. Hall received a VHS copy of it for Christmas.
Which is how we came to have a copy of this movie on our shelf.
It's about a young man named Al Haddon (GET IT?!) who comes across a genie's lamp at junk shop he works for. He rubs the lamp, encounters the genie, steals the lamp, and uses the unlimited number of wishes from the genie to improve his life in a disorganized, slapdash fashion. (Prior to finding the lamp, Al's problems are that his Dad is dead, his Mom works for a mobster, his Grandpa drinks too much, gambles away all the family's money and is in debt to the mob. Oh, also Al is boring, untalented, and girls don't like him. So, Al's first wish, logically, is for a vintage automobile.)
Green-screen flying cars!The situation gradually spirals out of control as the mob sends people after Grandpa; Grandpa steals and attempts to sell Al's lamp back to the shop that Al stole it from; the police chief is suspicious of Al being driven around in a vintage vehicle with no license plates; and the Genie doesn't quite get modern society, and keeps getting picked up by the police as well. Throw in an insane bureaucrat, a completely random child abduction ring story, and our hero using magic to be a ringer in sports events, and you've got Golan-Globus' Aladdin.
Bud Spencer! You can apparently see him in many films not made
by native english speakers.My Opinion: Watching this movie is hypnotic -- because no part of it makes sense. You're literally watching it the whole time going, "Why is that happening? Wait, why is that happening?" This is the type of movie that the crew of Red Letter Media described as feeling as though it was made by an space alien; you know, someone who had observed us from another planet, and thought they understood how earthlings spoke and reacted to things... but just didn't quite have a handle on it.
On the one hand, we have the Genie, as performed by the enigmatic Bud Spencer. I call him "enigmatic" because he's pretty expressionless, and it's kind of hard to tell what he's going for at times. But he was also avuncularly charming (in a vague kind of way). He just kind of goes along with the plot, has a couple lines that are delivered in funny ways, and seems amused by the way things turn out. And we have our hero "Al Haddon" -- an 80's teen boy of the Billy Peltzer variety (with the main distinction being that the kid who played Billy Peltzer was charming and a decent actor, and this kid was... well... a kid. And only questionably titled "an actor"). His character learns zero lessons in the course of this film and only winds up in a slightly better position in life at the end by pure, dumb luck.
Nothing makes a better sub-plot in your light-hearted children's movie
than children being abducted and sold into sex slavery. (This really happens in this movie).This type of plot is generally used to tell a morality tale whereby the hero learns that it's not fun to be a sports star if you cheated to win, or to get the girl if she doesn't like you of her own free will. (Such as in the film Bedazzled . Same basic premise -- poor schlub is granted wishes to fix his life, and finally learns the lesson that life before the wishes, with all its flaws, was better).
But not in this movie!
Bud Spencer was a big deal overseas.Does Al learn it's wrong to cheat to be the best at sports, and that he was really doing a disservice to all his friends who had put in the hours and practiced to be the best at basketball and waterskiing? Nope. Does Al learn stealing is wrong? Nope. Does Al wish for logical fixes on any of the things wrong with his life (you know, like, wishing his Dad alive again?) No -- he wishes to beat up his enemies, wishes for a car, wishes for the girl he likes to kiss his cheek, etc. etc. (You would think that this would be a good spot for learning a lesson about selfishness... but, no, not so much). Al is so self-centered that he even randomly forgets about the Genie and just leaves him in the city by himself.
Now, all of that is not to say that I hated this movie. Far from it -- I thought it was pretty entertaining "bad movie" viewing.
Watch this trailer! Even though it's in German --tell me with all that crazy stuff happening that youaren't just a BIT curious to watch it.
In fact, I would go as far to say that this movie is on par with a film like Troll 2 -- which enjoys cult status. Troll 2 is actually a very similar kind of film; a film written and produced by Italian filmmakers in America with a mostly American cast; and a film that also feels as though it was written by aliens. The big difference between Troll 2 and this film is that Troll 2 was a technically well-made film which looked like it had been made using actual film-making equipment. Aladdin looked like they blew the entire budget on procuring high-dollar actor Bud Spencer.
So, ultimately, I do recommend this in the same way that I'd recommend Troll 2 -- if you've got a bunch of friends who love to sit around and make fun of bad movies, this is a perfect movie for you. If you like good special effects, good acting and plots that make sense... ah, not so much. (But if you do want to see it... I have to warn you, it's going to be hard to track down a copy!)
RECOMMENDED GOOD BAD MOVIE
Then, just when we thought all was lost, and we would never find a copy of Aladdin to watch -- Mr. Hall received a VHS copy of it for Christmas.
Which is how we came to have a copy of this movie on our shelf.
It's about a young man named Al Haddon (GET IT?!) who comes across a genie's lamp at junk shop he works for. He rubs the lamp, encounters the genie, steals the lamp, and uses the unlimited number of wishes from the genie to improve his life in a disorganized, slapdash fashion. (Prior to finding the lamp, Al's problems are that his Dad is dead, his Mom works for a mobster, his Grandpa drinks too much, gambles away all the family's money and is in debt to the mob. Oh, also Al is boring, untalented, and girls don't like him. So, Al's first wish, logically, is for a vintage automobile.)
Green-screen flying cars!The situation gradually spirals out of control as the mob sends people after Grandpa; Grandpa steals and attempts to sell Al's lamp back to the shop that Al stole it from; the police chief is suspicious of Al being driven around in a vintage vehicle with no license plates; and the Genie doesn't quite get modern society, and keeps getting picked up by the police as well. Throw in an insane bureaucrat, a completely random child abduction ring story, and our hero using magic to be a ringer in sports events, and you've got Golan-Globus' Aladdin.
Bud Spencer! You can apparently see him in many films not madeby native english speakers.My Opinion: Watching this movie is hypnotic -- because no part of it makes sense. You're literally watching it the whole time going, "Why is that happening? Wait, why is that happening?" This is the type of movie that the crew of Red Letter Media described as feeling as though it was made by an space alien; you know, someone who had observed us from another planet, and thought they understood how earthlings spoke and reacted to things... but just didn't quite have a handle on it.
On the one hand, we have the Genie, as performed by the enigmatic Bud Spencer. I call him "enigmatic" because he's pretty expressionless, and it's kind of hard to tell what he's going for at times. But he was also avuncularly charming (in a vague kind of way). He just kind of goes along with the plot, has a couple lines that are delivered in funny ways, and seems amused by the way things turn out. And we have our hero "Al Haddon" -- an 80's teen boy of the Billy Peltzer variety (with the main distinction being that the kid who played Billy Peltzer was charming and a decent actor, and this kid was... well... a kid. And only questionably titled "an actor"). His character learns zero lessons in the course of this film and only winds up in a slightly better position in life at the end by pure, dumb luck.
Nothing makes a better sub-plot in your light-hearted children's moviethan children being abducted and sold into sex slavery. (This really happens in this movie).This type of plot is generally used to tell a morality tale whereby the hero learns that it's not fun to be a sports star if you cheated to win, or to get the girl if she doesn't like you of her own free will. (Such as in the film Bedazzled . Same basic premise -- poor schlub is granted wishes to fix his life, and finally learns the lesson that life before the wishes, with all its flaws, was better).
But not in this movie!
Bud Spencer was a big deal overseas.Does Al learn it's wrong to cheat to be the best at sports, and that he was really doing a disservice to all his friends who had put in the hours and practiced to be the best at basketball and waterskiing? Nope. Does Al learn stealing is wrong? Nope. Does Al wish for logical fixes on any of the things wrong with his life (you know, like, wishing his Dad alive again?) No -- he wishes to beat up his enemies, wishes for a car, wishes for the girl he likes to kiss his cheek, etc. etc. (You would think that this would be a good spot for learning a lesson about selfishness... but, no, not so much). Al is so self-centered that he even randomly forgets about the Genie and just leaves him in the city by himself. Now, all of that is not to say that I hated this movie. Far from it -- I thought it was pretty entertaining "bad movie" viewing.
Watch this trailer! Even though it's in German --tell me with all that crazy stuff happening that youaren't just a BIT curious to watch it.
In fact, I would go as far to say that this movie is on par with a film like Troll 2 -- which enjoys cult status. Troll 2 is actually a very similar kind of film; a film written and produced by Italian filmmakers in America with a mostly American cast; and a film that also feels as though it was written by aliens. The big difference between Troll 2 and this film is that Troll 2 was a technically well-made film which looked like it had been made using actual film-making equipment. Aladdin looked like they blew the entire budget on procuring high-dollar actor Bud Spencer.
So, ultimately, I do recommend this in the same way that I'd recommend Troll 2 -- if you've got a bunch of friends who love to sit around and make fun of bad movies, this is a perfect movie for you. If you like good special effects, good acting and plots that make sense... ah, not so much. (But if you do want to see it... I have to warn you, it's going to be hard to track down a copy!)
RECOMMENDED GOOD BAD MOVIE
February 21, 2017
Off the Shelf: Lego Batman (2017)
First new movie of 2017 -- Mr. Hall and I went to see Lego Batman!
The trailers had looked whimsical -- and we like both Legos and Batman, and we've played through all the Lego Batman video games, so how could we lose?
Plot: Batman is cool! He's winning at everything -- stopping criminals, and cheering up citizens! But he also has kind of a sad homelife because after he gets back from saving Gotham city, he just sits around by himself. Also complicating matters, Commissioner Gordon has just retired and been replaced with... Barbara Gordon, who wants to shake things up in Gotham. Batman offends the Joker by telling him he's not his greatest villain, so the Joker comes up with a plan to prove that he is Batman's greatest villain.
Here's the thing. I thought the animation (which for the most part looked like stop-animation) was really fun. I liked the tone -- it was an extremely heightened version of exactly what you want out of Batman -- it was like the best parody of Batman ever. I really enjoyed it... for the first THIRD of the movie.
Then, it reaches a certain point (Batman is jailed due to a tactical misstep).... and... the film... screeches... to... a halt. From then on out, the best it got out of me was a half-hearted chuckle, because all the latter two thirds of the movie are mainly concerned with are being woefully heavy-handed about the film's rather vague philosophical message.
Let's spend just a minute looking at the treatment of the characters. Robin was fine -- actually found him more bearable than most iterations of Robin (probably the most sympathetic Robin since Burt Ward). Alfred was fine. Villains -- fine. Was especially pleased that Billy Dee Williams got to make an appearance as Two-Face. And I was perfectly okay with the replacement of Commissioner Gordon with daughter Barbara Gordon -- I thought it was an interesting twist and was interested to see where it was going. Batman/Bruce Wayne is smitten by Barbara, but put off by the way that she thinks things should be run...
[image error] I heard a child in the audience ask, "Where's Batgirl?"...And by the end he is referring to her as something like "my platonic friend", has made her an honorary member of his family ("Friends are family!")... not a wife, not a girlfriend, not a Mom, not a sister... just a weird, sexless, honorary family member. I find that... a very odd treatment of the female lead. I have no problem with there not being romance in the film, but if you're not going that route -- why introduce a female lead at all? Why not keep the original Commissioner Gordon? (And you can't tell me it was necessary to the plot, because she ultimately didn't do anything that Jim Gordon couldn't have done.) Why ignore the essential (and interesting, and plot-development-spawning) nature of the male/female dynamic? To introduce the dynamic early in the film and then ignore it in the end is, a) strange, and b) sloppy scriptwriting.
Now let's talk about that philosophical message of the movie: Batman has to accept having relationships with people in order to save Gotham. Then he has to learn this lesson again. AND AGAIN. People in this movie literally say, "It takes a village," multiple times....
...Which, behooves the question, "It takes a village... to WHAT? What the hell are you talking about?" The implication of the quote in the film is that "It takes a village" to do anything at all, which is rather debatable. I mean, Batman definitely saves the entire city entirely by himself in the first five minutes of the film. He only needed other people in a particular set of circumstance to resolve a set of particular conflicts in this film -- which means the first five minutes of this film undermines the entire end of the film. Again, regardless of one's philosophical opinions about whether anything actually "takes a village" (outside of winning a "Best Village" competition), this is just plain sloppy scriptwriting.
Gordon, Barbara, and an oddly-Hillary-Clinton-looking
lady mayor. COINCIDENCE?Perhaps, you say, I'm just plain reading too much into this. "You're talking gender dynamics and philosophy! This is a kids' cartoon! For kids! You're a thirty-something year old adult! You weren't the intended audience! No WONDER you didn't enjoy it!"
Guess what? I was in a theater full of kids. The kids laughed... at the first third of the movie, at most of the same parts I was laughing at. After that, they got just as quiet and unenthusiastic as I was. They got impatient. They got bored. They might not have been able to articulate that the film got too heavy-handed in the latter half, or that the moral got repeated too many times -- and I doubt any of those small children had anything to say about the weird lack of payoff for the gender dynamics. All they could tell you is that the second half wasn't as fun as the first half.
Perhaps, ultimately, what it comes down to is this: this movie failed at its philosophy, and failed at its gender dynamics, and it failed at its plot -- because this movie simply never should have been more than thirty minutes long.
And that's all I have to say about that.
NOT RECOMMENDED.
The trailers had looked whimsical -- and we like both Legos and Batman, and we've played through all the Lego Batman video games, so how could we lose?
Plot: Batman is cool! He's winning at everything -- stopping criminals, and cheering up citizens! But he also has kind of a sad homelife because after he gets back from saving Gotham city, he just sits around by himself. Also complicating matters, Commissioner Gordon has just retired and been replaced with... Barbara Gordon, who wants to shake things up in Gotham. Batman offends the Joker by telling him he's not his greatest villain, so the Joker comes up with a plan to prove that he is Batman's greatest villain.
Here's the thing. I thought the animation (which for the most part looked like stop-animation) was really fun. I liked the tone -- it was an extremely heightened version of exactly what you want out of Batman -- it was like the best parody of Batman ever. I really enjoyed it... for the first THIRD of the movie.
Then, it reaches a certain point (Batman is jailed due to a tactical misstep).... and... the film... screeches... to... a halt. From then on out, the best it got out of me was a half-hearted chuckle, because all the latter two thirds of the movie are mainly concerned with are being woefully heavy-handed about the film's rather vague philosophical message.
Let's spend just a minute looking at the treatment of the characters. Robin was fine -- actually found him more bearable than most iterations of Robin (probably the most sympathetic Robin since Burt Ward). Alfred was fine. Villains -- fine. Was especially pleased that Billy Dee Williams got to make an appearance as Two-Face. And I was perfectly okay with the replacement of Commissioner Gordon with daughter Barbara Gordon -- I thought it was an interesting twist and was interested to see where it was going. Batman/Bruce Wayne is smitten by Barbara, but put off by the way that she thinks things should be run...
[image error] I heard a child in the audience ask, "Where's Batgirl?"...And by the end he is referring to her as something like "my platonic friend", has made her an honorary member of his family ("Friends are family!")... not a wife, not a girlfriend, not a Mom, not a sister... just a weird, sexless, honorary family member. I find that... a very odd treatment of the female lead. I have no problem with there not being romance in the film, but if you're not going that route -- why introduce a female lead at all? Why not keep the original Commissioner Gordon? (And you can't tell me it was necessary to the plot, because she ultimately didn't do anything that Jim Gordon couldn't have done.) Why ignore the essential (and interesting, and plot-development-spawning) nature of the male/female dynamic? To introduce the dynamic early in the film and then ignore it in the end is, a) strange, and b) sloppy scriptwriting.
Now let's talk about that philosophical message of the movie: Batman has to accept having relationships with people in order to save Gotham. Then he has to learn this lesson again. AND AGAIN. People in this movie literally say, "It takes a village," multiple times....
...Which, behooves the question, "It takes a village... to WHAT? What the hell are you talking about?" The implication of the quote in the film is that "It takes a village" to do anything at all, which is rather debatable. I mean, Batman definitely saves the entire city entirely by himself in the first five minutes of the film. He only needed other people in a particular set of circumstance to resolve a set of particular conflicts in this film -- which means the first five minutes of this film undermines the entire end of the film. Again, regardless of one's philosophical opinions about whether anything actually "takes a village" (outside of winning a "Best Village" competition), this is just plain sloppy scriptwriting.
Gordon, Barbara, and an oddly-Hillary-Clinton-looking lady mayor. COINCIDENCE?Perhaps, you say, I'm just plain reading too much into this. "You're talking gender dynamics and philosophy! This is a kids' cartoon! For kids! You're a thirty-something year old adult! You weren't the intended audience! No WONDER you didn't enjoy it!"
Guess what? I was in a theater full of kids. The kids laughed... at the first third of the movie, at most of the same parts I was laughing at. After that, they got just as quiet and unenthusiastic as I was. They got impatient. They got bored. They might not have been able to articulate that the film got too heavy-handed in the latter half, or that the moral got repeated too many times -- and I doubt any of those small children had anything to say about the weird lack of payoff for the gender dynamics. All they could tell you is that the second half wasn't as fun as the first half.
Perhaps, ultimately, what it comes down to is this: this movie failed at its philosophy, and failed at its gender dynamics, and it failed at its plot -- because this movie simply never should have been more than thirty minutes long.
And that's all I have to say about that.
NOT RECOMMENDED.
February 14, 2017
On My Shelf: Snow White (1937) - Context is Important!
Just in time for Valentine's Day -- a lovely, romantic little cartoon. Do you know the story of Snow White? (I'm guessing you do.)
You know, it's the story of the young princess who is hated by her evil queen stepmother -- who sends Snow White out to be killed by a woodsman, who has a change of heart and lets her live? Seven dwarves, witch, apple, handsome prince, etc. etc.?
If you're familiar with that story -- you know the plot of Disney's Snow White. All Disney does is flesh it out with songs.
A LOT of songs.That might sound like a criticism... but I'm very conflicted about criticising this cartoon, because it really was a seminal work. It needs to be viewed through a context: namely, as Wikipedia points out, "it is the first full-length cel animated feature film and the earliest Disney animated feature film," (emphasis mine). No one had ever done anything like this before. It was a wholly new thing. It needs to get some respect for that alone.
Even more context: The movie industry itself was only 31 years old when this film came out -- and the "Talkie" was only ten years old -- and the first full-color film was somewhere in the range of just five years old. Just seeing color images on screen, singing and dancing, was a pretty big thrill for people -- and Disney delivered!
This knocked people out of their seats!
I love the animation, the songs are charming, and the story is simplicity in itself -- because they basically just tell the story I described to you above, and (as I said) flesh it out with songs. And, in a way, it actually is kind of nice that doesn't take a lot of weird liberties with the original story. (I don't need a lengthy backstory explaining that the evil Queen had a hard childhood and her father didn't respect women who weren't attractive so she overcompensated by trying to become the most beautiful lady of all and the woodsman was actually her boyfriend and they just had a bad breakup and blah blah blah... That's the sort of thing that makes modern movies morally confusing and painfully, excruciatingly long.)
If this movie had come out more recently and wasn't the first of its kind, I would mention that no time is wasted on things like... oh... character development. Specifically for Snow White; she is kind, and pretty, and likes to sing... and that's about it. (Mind you, the people who like to rag on about there not being enough character development for the Disney Princesses should check out how much development Prince Charming has in this movie. His character is: he is a guy with a good singing voice who literally just happens to be passing by).
Right: Snow White. Left: Some Guy.I'll admit it... I begin to get a little impatient during the second or third non-plot-advancing dwarf song, too. But I think small children watching this film would be perfectly satisfied with the content -- and I think anybody older than that should be watching it through the window of CONTEXT and not hassling it for any perceived flaws.
It's a marvelous achievement, a harmlessly cute story, and that's that. When you start holding it up and saying things like, "Well, by TODAY'S standards, it's [fill in the blank]..." you're missing the whole point.
RECOMMENDED.
You know, it's the story of the young princess who is hated by her evil queen stepmother -- who sends Snow White out to be killed by a woodsman, who has a change of heart and lets her live? Seven dwarves, witch, apple, handsome prince, etc. etc.?
If you're familiar with that story -- you know the plot of Disney's Snow White. All Disney does is flesh it out with songs.
A LOT of songs.That might sound like a criticism... but I'm very conflicted about criticising this cartoon, because it really was a seminal work. It needs to be viewed through a context: namely, as Wikipedia points out, "it is the first full-length cel animated feature film and the earliest Disney animated feature film," (emphasis mine). No one had ever done anything like this before. It was a wholly new thing. It needs to get some respect for that alone.
Even more context: The movie industry itself was only 31 years old when this film came out -- and the "Talkie" was only ten years old -- and the first full-color film was somewhere in the range of just five years old. Just seeing color images on screen, singing and dancing, was a pretty big thrill for people -- and Disney delivered!
This knocked people out of their seats!
I love the animation, the songs are charming, and the story is simplicity in itself -- because they basically just tell the story I described to you above, and (as I said) flesh it out with songs. And, in a way, it actually is kind of nice that doesn't take a lot of weird liberties with the original story. (I don't need a lengthy backstory explaining that the evil Queen had a hard childhood and her father didn't respect women who weren't attractive so she overcompensated by trying to become the most beautiful lady of all and the woodsman was actually her boyfriend and they just had a bad breakup and blah blah blah... That's the sort of thing that makes modern movies morally confusing and painfully, excruciatingly long.)
If this movie had come out more recently and wasn't the first of its kind, I would mention that no time is wasted on things like... oh... character development. Specifically for Snow White; she is kind, and pretty, and likes to sing... and that's about it. (Mind you, the people who like to rag on about there not being enough character development for the Disney Princesses should check out how much development Prince Charming has in this movie. His character is: he is a guy with a good singing voice who literally just happens to be passing by).
Right: Snow White. Left: Some Guy.I'll admit it... I begin to get a little impatient during the second or third non-plot-advancing dwarf song, too. But I think small children watching this film would be perfectly satisfied with the content -- and I think anybody older than that should be watching it through the window of CONTEXT and not hassling it for any perceived flaws.It's a marvelous achievement, a harmlessly cute story, and that's that. When you start holding it up and saying things like, "Well, by TODAY'S standards, it's [fill in the blank]..." you're missing the whole point.
RECOMMENDED.
February 7, 2017
On My Shelf: Beauty and the Beast (1991)
I got Beauty and the Beast on Blu-Ray for Christmas! It's a beautifully animated, beautifully scored movie... with some minor issues. I like this movie. I do! But -- thanks to the fact that I already considered myself "too old" for cartoons when it came out, and so I didn't wind up seeing it until I was in college -- I can view it critically. And I do.
First of all, I'd like to address a minor technical issue. At the beginning of the cartoon... and maybe this is just in the Blu-Ray version, all hyper-clean and HD'd... there is a distinct, white edge around all the black outlines in the cartoon. I find it really distracting. But I haven't seen a VHS copy of this to know if this is just fall-out from the age of high-definition, or if this is what the original cartoon looked like. So I guess I'll wait until I can have some verification of that issue.
Second... from a story structure viewpoint, I'd like to complain about the fact that the first time we see the Beast's face is in a very minor shot in the prologue. This is just plain a waste of a reveal. The ideal first place to have scene the Beast should have been when Belle's Dad sees him for the first time...
RIGHT HERE!...Otherwise, the surprise of this scene is lessened by the fact that we've already seen him in the prologue. Frankly, it's odd that in a movie that clearly had a lot of care put into it, that they would spoil the first appearance of their male lead this way. It just kind of feels... uncharacteristically sloppy.
Third... let's get into some plot and character issues. I probably don't need to explain the plot of Beauty and the Beast. The only parts you're probably unfamiliar with from the basic fairy story are that they've added a villain (an alpha male named Gaston) and some minor character development for our female lead (the aforementioned Belle).
Left: Belle. Right: Gaston.
Middle: Boots covered in oddly slimy,
easily-wiped away, non-staining mud.And, honestly, those two things are the things I like least about this film.
We open the movie on Belle. Here's the character development for Belle: Belle likes to read!
... That's it!
Oh, also, she's fed up with living in provincial France. Everybody in her town thinks she's peculiar because she likes to read (which is an odd reaction on their part, considering this town is able to maintain a large, well-stocked bookstore in an age of societal illiteracy. Surely Belle isn't the only customer -- especially considering she's never seen actually paying for a book?)
And I'm not altogether sure what Belle finds so unpleasant about provincial France, considering she sings her song about wanting something more than "this provincial life" while standing in locations like this:
How intolerable!... with tons of time to sit around and read, and evidently not worry about money or food, while the most eligible bachelor in town pursues her. WHAT IS SHE COMPLAINING ABOUT? At least Snow White was being kept in rank servitude, and Aurora was forced to live in hiding as a peasant and kept away from all human contact. Those are legitimate complaints. "People in this town are nice to me... but they don't get me!" is hardly a life-threatening situation. Frankly, she kind of comes across as an intelligence snob.
He doesn't care about books! He's sub-human!Now, let's look at the film's villain -- Gaston. I find it a little odd that he's even in this movie. The qualities he has -- being a bit of a jock, being inconsiderate, and being totally willing to imprison Belle's father to get at her -- are qualities that the Beast has as well. In fact, couldn't you just have cut Gaston out of the movie entirely and focused more on these same qualities in Beast? Or at least given Gaston different bad qualities? It's even presented (as one of his many bad qualities) that Gaston is "covered in hair"...
Significantly less hairy than somebody
else in this movie.So, why do they have a secondary character in this movie who embodies all of the traits that the Beast has (to a lesser degree than the Beast has), and yet is presented as horrible, disgusting and irredeemable? One might suggest it's because because they just needed somebody to lead the pitchfork-wielding mob at the end and that's the best they could come up with (because they're not very creative)... but couldn't Belle's Dad, who has only seen the bad side of the Beast, led the charge? Wouldn't that have been a complicated and interesting development? For that matter, couldn't anybody have led the mob?
In fact, why would you make someone who is extremely like the hero into the villain? Either because, a) you're not an extremely good writer, b) you actually did have a great sub-plot discussing the natures of good and evil, drawing parallels and tying it all neatly together -- which ultimately got cut from the final draft by the producer, or c) YOU ACTUALLY HATE THE HERO OF THIS STORY, SO YOU DO TO THE VILLAIN WHAT YOU COULDN'T DO (but wanted to do) TO THE HERO. (The screenplay for Beauty and the Beast was written by Linda Woolverton... who also wrote Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. You remember that movie? A movie featuring the moral that the best possible fate for a young woman is staying single and going into business? What a coincidence that someone who wrote a story like that should have metaphorically killed off the male lead of Beauty and the Beast... Just sayin'.)
"...Unless you're Beast, in which case, bend over backwards
to become whatever any random woman wants you to be."A lot has been written about whether or not Gaston even actually qualifies as a villain, so I'll recommend you read this article ("Over-Analyzing Disney: Why Gaston Isn't Such a Bad Guy After All") and leave off discussing that topic right here.
But getting back to my main point, in a nutshell... I don't dislike this movie. But you know what? I think it bears stating (especially to any children that might be watching this with you) that there's nothing ultimately wrong with being athletic, or being a hunter (or, for that matter, being a masculine male). And there's also nothing wrong with being -- or not being -- a "booky" type of person. Some people just don't get any enjoyment or enlightenment out of reading, and are better off with athletic pursuits...
So, for the record, Belle, you're not better than other people just because you like to go off by yourself and curl up with a good book (and this is coming from someone whose idea of a good time is going off by myself and curling up with a good book). Both types of people are necessary to the survival of the species. (The Belles of the world maintain our inner life and spirituality -- and the Gastons of the world make sure we don't starve to death).
So, ultimately, this movie is...
RECOMMENDED... but with Philosophical Reservations.
First of all, I'd like to address a minor technical issue. At the beginning of the cartoon... and maybe this is just in the Blu-Ray version, all hyper-clean and HD'd... there is a distinct, white edge around all the black outlines in the cartoon. I find it really distracting. But I haven't seen a VHS copy of this to know if this is just fall-out from the age of high-definition, or if this is what the original cartoon looked like. So I guess I'll wait until I can have some verification of that issue.
Second... from a story structure viewpoint, I'd like to complain about the fact that the first time we see the Beast's face is in a very minor shot in the prologue. This is just plain a waste of a reveal. The ideal first place to have scene the Beast should have been when Belle's Dad sees him for the first time...
RIGHT HERE!...Otherwise, the surprise of this scene is lessened by the fact that we've already seen him in the prologue. Frankly, it's odd that in a movie that clearly had a lot of care put into it, that they would spoil the first appearance of their male lead this way. It just kind of feels... uncharacteristically sloppy.Third... let's get into some plot and character issues. I probably don't need to explain the plot of Beauty and the Beast. The only parts you're probably unfamiliar with from the basic fairy story are that they've added a villain (an alpha male named Gaston) and some minor character development for our female lead (the aforementioned Belle).
Left: Belle. Right: Gaston. Middle: Boots covered in oddly slimy,
easily-wiped away, non-staining mud.And, honestly, those two things are the things I like least about this film.
We open the movie on Belle. Here's the character development for Belle: Belle likes to read!
... That's it!
Oh, also, she's fed up with living in provincial France. Everybody in her town thinks she's peculiar because she likes to read (which is an odd reaction on their part, considering this town is able to maintain a large, well-stocked bookstore in an age of societal illiteracy. Surely Belle isn't the only customer -- especially considering she's never seen actually paying for a book?)
And I'm not altogether sure what Belle finds so unpleasant about provincial France, considering she sings her song about wanting something more than "this provincial life" while standing in locations like this:
How intolerable!... with tons of time to sit around and read, and evidently not worry about money or food, while the most eligible bachelor in town pursues her. WHAT IS SHE COMPLAINING ABOUT? At least Snow White was being kept in rank servitude, and Aurora was forced to live in hiding as a peasant and kept away from all human contact. Those are legitimate complaints. "People in this town are nice to me... but they don't get me!" is hardly a life-threatening situation. Frankly, she kind of comes across as an intelligence snob.
He doesn't care about books! He's sub-human!Now, let's look at the film's villain -- Gaston. I find it a little odd that he's even in this movie. The qualities he has -- being a bit of a jock, being inconsiderate, and being totally willing to imprison Belle's father to get at her -- are qualities that the Beast has as well. In fact, couldn't you just have cut Gaston out of the movie entirely and focused more on these same qualities in Beast? Or at least given Gaston different bad qualities? It's even presented (as one of his many bad qualities) that Gaston is "covered in hair"...
Significantly less hairy than somebodyelse in this movie.So, why do they have a secondary character in this movie who embodies all of the traits that the Beast has (to a lesser degree than the Beast has), and yet is presented as horrible, disgusting and irredeemable? One might suggest it's because because they just needed somebody to lead the pitchfork-wielding mob at the end and that's the best they could come up with (because they're not very creative)... but couldn't Belle's Dad, who has only seen the bad side of the Beast, led the charge? Wouldn't that have been a complicated and interesting development? For that matter, couldn't anybody have led the mob?
In fact, why would you make someone who is extremely like the hero into the villain? Either because, a) you're not an extremely good writer, b) you actually did have a great sub-plot discussing the natures of good and evil, drawing parallels and tying it all neatly together -- which ultimately got cut from the final draft by the producer, or c) YOU ACTUALLY HATE THE HERO OF THIS STORY, SO YOU DO TO THE VILLAIN WHAT YOU COULDN'T DO (but wanted to do) TO THE HERO. (The screenplay for Beauty and the Beast was written by Linda Woolverton... who also wrote Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. You remember that movie? A movie featuring the moral that the best possible fate for a young woman is staying single and going into business? What a coincidence that someone who wrote a story like that should have metaphorically killed off the male lead of Beauty and the Beast... Just sayin'.)
"...Unless you're Beast, in which case, bend over backwardsto become whatever any random woman wants you to be."A lot has been written about whether or not Gaston even actually qualifies as a villain, so I'll recommend you read this article ("Over-Analyzing Disney: Why Gaston Isn't Such a Bad Guy After All") and leave off discussing that topic right here.
But getting back to my main point, in a nutshell... I don't dislike this movie. But you know what? I think it bears stating (especially to any children that might be watching this with you) that there's nothing ultimately wrong with being athletic, or being a hunter (or, for that matter, being a masculine male). And there's also nothing wrong with being -- or not being -- a "booky" type of person. Some people just don't get any enjoyment or enlightenment out of reading, and are better off with athletic pursuits...
So, for the record, Belle, you're not better than other people just because you like to go off by yourself and curl up with a good book (and this is coming from someone whose idea of a good time is going off by myself and curling up with a good book). Both types of people are necessary to the survival of the species. (The Belles of the world maintain our inner life and spirituality -- and the Gastons of the world make sure we don't starve to death).
So, ultimately, this movie is...
RECOMMENDED... but with Philosophical Reservations.
January 31, 2017
On My Shelf: Wayne's World 2 (1993)... Second Verse - Same as the First.
Apparently, the people behind Wayne's World either went, "WE CAN DO BETTER THAN THAT!" or, "Oh, that made money? Heck, we can do that again..." and hastily rushed out another movie twelve months later. Oddly enough, though, I think that this is the better film.
Don't get me wrong. I think Wayne's World might be a little more creative in some respects. It spent more time developing a convincing villain and had funnier ending(s). But it has so much air. So many bits and pieces that don't turn out funny. And Dana Carvey's skill as an entertainer was absent in Wayne's World. (I'm not sure where it was hiding, but it sure wasn't in front of the camera. I've heard something about him and Mike Myers going through a rough patch during the first movie -- so maybe that's it. Regardless, though, it's kind of painful to watch).
While, on the contrary, Wayne's World 2 has:
* Better pacing!
* No time wasting!
* Comedy that works!
* An "alive" version of Dana Carvey!
* Christopher Walken!
Storywise... it kind of feels like you're watching the same movie. The plot this time involves Wayne having a spirit guide who tells him that if he puts on a concert ("Waynestock") it will turn his life around. And there are lots of bits and pieces of comedy that feel like they wound up more fully explored in Austin Powers and its sequels. And, like I said, they spent more time developing the villain in the first movie (probably because they didn't have enough good comedy from the leads to fill up the film)... so I feel like Christopher Walken, in this movie, gets a bit wasted.
He does dance at one point, which is a good thing
(C.W. was a musical theater actor/dancer before he became
the Christopher Walken we all know and love). Not that that makes up
for underuse of Walken.I don't have a whole lot to say about this movie, because it's pretty much just harmless light entertainment that works well and gets the job done (and plants a lot of seeds that later blossomed into Austin Powers) -- but, that in itself is a good thing. There's definitely not enough harmless light entertainment in the world.
So, if you want a light, amusing movie with lots of movie references and sight gags, I recommend Wayne's World 2!
You can totally watch it without watching Wayne's World first. In fact, that's
RECOMMENDED
Don't get me wrong. I think Wayne's World might be a little more creative in some respects. It spent more time developing a convincing villain and had funnier ending(s). But it has so much air. So many bits and pieces that don't turn out funny. And Dana Carvey's skill as an entertainer was absent in Wayne's World. (I'm not sure where it was hiding, but it sure wasn't in front of the camera. I've heard something about him and Mike Myers going through a rough patch during the first movie -- so maybe that's it. Regardless, though, it's kind of painful to watch).
While, on the contrary, Wayne's World 2 has:
* Better pacing!
* No time wasting!
* Comedy that works!
* An "alive" version of Dana Carvey!
* Christopher Walken!
Storywise... it kind of feels like you're watching the same movie. The plot this time involves Wayne having a spirit guide who tells him that if he puts on a concert ("Waynestock") it will turn his life around. And there are lots of bits and pieces of comedy that feel like they wound up more fully explored in Austin Powers and its sequels. And, like I said, they spent more time developing the villain in the first movie (probably because they didn't have enough good comedy from the leads to fill up the film)... so I feel like Christopher Walken, in this movie, gets a bit wasted.
He does dance at one point, which is a good thing(C.W. was a musical theater actor/dancer before he became
the Christopher Walken we all know and love). Not that that makes up
for underuse of Walken.I don't have a whole lot to say about this movie, because it's pretty much just harmless light entertainment that works well and gets the job done (and plants a lot of seeds that later blossomed into Austin Powers) -- but, that in itself is a good thing. There's definitely not enough harmless light entertainment in the world.
So, if you want a light, amusing movie with lots of movie references and sight gags, I recommend Wayne's World 2!
You can totally watch it without watching Wayne's World first. In fact, that's
RECOMMENDED
January 24, 2017
On My Shelf: Coneheads (1993)...I Don't Entirely Understand Why People Hate This Movie.
I'm not entirely certain why people seem to dislike this movie so much.
It has better pacing, performances and jokes than Waynes World and Clue put together -- and yet, Clue has (an incredibly unfair) 65% "fresh" and Wayne's World has a whopping (and wholly undeserved) 85%.
The Plot: The Coneheads crashland on Earth and are forced to live there for the next sixteen or so years while trying to "blend in" with the natives.
That's it, in a nutshell. The Coneheads are weirdos and clearly aliens, and yet the people around them are oblivious or put their own spin on things to make them make sense.
I'm not saying this is a great movie -- but I'm really confused as to why people seem to hate it so much. What exactly were they hoping for from the SNL sketches that they failed to achieve in this film? I mean, let's look at a summary of your average Conehead sketch:
The Coneheads are aliens living on Earth and trying to "blend in" with the natives. They show themselves to be weirdos and clearly aliens, but people are oblivious or put their own spin on things to make them make sense.
Look! And I bet the game show host doesn't
even realize they're aliens.... How is that different from what we were presented in this movie? I mean, they had to flesh out the plot a bit by throwing in a sub-plot about some over-enthusiastic INS agents (since the Coneheads are "illegal aliens")... but the film needed a villain, and that seems as logical a villain as any. (Immigration in the 90's wasn't quite the furiously-stabbing-finger-in-someone's-chest hot-button topic that it is nowadays. You could joke about those things in those days).
Once again, I'm going to say that people give a film like Wayne's World a pass because they can't remember what happens in it. (And I can't tell you why people give Clue a pass, because I genuinely don't understand that phenomenon).
I just thought this poster was funny.
Especially the tagline, "I can't take my head off you."You know, my title for this post was totally a lie, because I think I do know why people hate this movie: I'm going to say that people think they dislike Coneheads because when it was released it didn't appeal to its target audience. It thought its target audience was people my age -- young people who would have gone to see Chris Farley movies and Adam Sandler movies. However, the people who actually got excited about this movie and went to see it are people my parents' age (people who watched the Conehead sketches when they were first on -- people who, by the time this film came out, were in their 40's or 50's). Those same people either weren't into gross-out humor and cheap jokes like this:
GET IT? HE'S GOT NO BUTT!...Or just plain didn't like the new 90's-flavored comedy. So, people my parents' age watched or rented this movie, and were sorely disappointed in it ("That's not what the old Coneheads were like," is a comment I think I actually recall hearing), while people my age didn't watch it because it was something their parents were excited about.
Ultimately, then, the main problem is that this movie didn't understand who its target audience was -- nor did the general public.
Watching it nowadays, I found the supposed "gross-out humor" to be junior level (South Park wasn't a thing yet when this movie came out), and the overall plot and story were harmless. So, yes, I would actually recommend this movie if you're in the mood for some light entertainment (and can get past the light treatment of a hot-button topic, and don't mind mild gross-out humor.)
RECOMMENDED (Harmless)
It has better pacing, performances and jokes than Waynes World and Clue put together -- and yet, Clue has (an incredibly unfair) 65% "fresh" and Wayne's World has a whopping (and wholly undeserved) 85%.
The Plot: The Coneheads crashland on Earth and are forced to live there for the next sixteen or so years while trying to "blend in" with the natives.
That's it, in a nutshell. The Coneheads are weirdos and clearly aliens, and yet the people around them are oblivious or put their own spin on things to make them make sense.
I'm not saying this is a great movie -- but I'm really confused as to why people seem to hate it so much. What exactly were they hoping for from the SNL sketches that they failed to achieve in this film? I mean, let's look at a summary of your average Conehead sketch:
The Coneheads are aliens living on Earth and trying to "blend in" with the natives. They show themselves to be weirdos and clearly aliens, but people are oblivious or put their own spin on things to make them make sense.
Look! And I bet the game show host doesn't even realize they're aliens.... How is that different from what we were presented in this movie? I mean, they had to flesh out the plot a bit by throwing in a sub-plot about some over-enthusiastic INS agents (since the Coneheads are "illegal aliens")... but the film needed a villain, and that seems as logical a villain as any. (Immigration in the 90's wasn't quite the furiously-stabbing-finger-in-someone's-chest hot-button topic that it is nowadays. You could joke about those things in those days).
Once again, I'm going to say that people give a film like Wayne's World a pass because they can't remember what happens in it. (And I can't tell you why people give Clue a pass, because I genuinely don't understand that phenomenon).
I just thought this poster was funny.Especially the tagline, "I can't take my head off you."You know, my title for this post was totally a lie, because I think I do know why people hate this movie: I'm going to say that people think they dislike Coneheads because when it was released it didn't appeal to its target audience. It thought its target audience was people my age -- young people who would have gone to see Chris Farley movies and Adam Sandler movies. However, the people who actually got excited about this movie and went to see it are people my parents' age (people who watched the Conehead sketches when they were first on -- people who, by the time this film came out, were in their 40's or 50's). Those same people either weren't into gross-out humor and cheap jokes like this:
GET IT? HE'S GOT NO BUTT!...Or just plain didn't like the new 90's-flavored comedy. So, people my parents' age watched or rented this movie, and were sorely disappointed in it ("That's not what the old Coneheads were like," is a comment I think I actually recall hearing), while people my age didn't watch it because it was something their parents were excited about.Ultimately, then, the main problem is that this movie didn't understand who its target audience was -- nor did the general public.
Watching it nowadays, I found the supposed "gross-out humor" to be junior level (South Park wasn't a thing yet when this movie came out), and the overall plot and story were harmless. So, yes, I would actually recommend this movie if you're in the mood for some light entertainment (and can get past the light treatment of a hot-button topic, and don't mind mild gross-out humor.)
RECOMMENDED (Harmless)
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