Reviews of Many Things

Sorry I haven't been blogging much lately. Here's a pile of mini-reviews of things I've watched or read recently.

AWESOME THINGS

Wicked -- I saw the musical at the Orpheum Theater. If you're not familiar with it, it's the story of The Wizard of Oz retold from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West. It was absolutely wonderful. I have read the book by Gregory Maguire, and the book was good, but not amazing. The musical was a heck of a lot of fun, though. They changed the plot quite a bit, especially toward the end. Because, you know, musicals need happy endings. But it worked. It was a hoot!

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay -- This book by Michael Chabon is one of the most engrossing novels I've read in a long time. Young Czech Joe Kavalier escaped from Nazi-occupied Prague and made his way to New York City. There, he and his cousin Sam Clay, created a Nazi-bashing comic book, which lead to fame and fortune . . . and tragedy. The story is so well written, its descriptive passages so rich, that the pictures that formed in my mind were as vivid and clear as if I were looking at the pages of a graphic novel. The book walks the fine line between real life and fantasy. The characters and their relationships feel real, but some of the situations they find themselves in are as wild as the tales they spin in their comics. It's beautifully absurd, and absurdly beautiful. I would recommend this book to . . . well, pretty much anyone.

Star Trek -- Some people don't like the new film because it completely erases the original continuity. But after five or six TV series and ten movies, it was getting hard for Star Trek writers to come up with new plots that didn't contradict something that had already been established. The movie gets around that with time travel, an incident that changes the lives of young Kirk and Spock so that their paths unfold differently. (No ambiguity is left on this count. Uhura even refers directly to "an alternate universe.") So this is a whole new Star Trek, a clean slate. And some of the changes to the universe were HUGE. Certain characters die. A certain planet is destroyed. And certain characters are in a romantic relationship that made me double-take. (Let's just say Uhura kisses someone--not someone I expected--and there was no alien mind control involved.) And it was tremendous fun. It wasn't deep and meaningful, but not everything has to be. It was a thrilling adventure, and I loved every second of it.

Avenue Q -- Another Broadway musical, which I saw at the Orpheum over a month ago. It was a rather raunchy, adult homage to Sesame Street. It was hilarious, but decidedly not for all audiences. I loved the Bad Idea Bears, who always showed up whenever the characters had to a big decision to make, and helped the characters make the worst possible choices. ("I'm broke and unemployed. I don't know how I'm going to pay my rent." "I know what to do! Let's buy beer! Yay!")

LESS-THAN-AWESOME THINGS

The Underneath -- This children's chapter book by Kathi Appelt was a National Book Award finalist, but I wasn't really fond of it. It was an enjoyable melodrama, but the writing style was really irritating, and often rather overblown. Good, but not great.

The Escapist -- This graphic novel is meant to be a representation of the comic written by the characters in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. However, it really didn't do justice to the source material. At all. It was very disappointing, perhaps because the prose descriptions in the novel gave me such vivid images, and this comic didn't measure up to the pictures in my mind.

Strawberry Panic -- I'm familiar with the lesbian-romance-at-an-all-girls-school sub-genre of anime. I enjoyed Maria-sama ga miteru, and I expected Strawberry Panic to be similar. And on the surface it is. However, it is boring--horribly, excruciatingly boring. It ran for five DVDs, with barely enough plot for one, spread very thinly. It had far too many characters; I kept losing track of who was who. And the plot was stupid. Seriously, how does winning what amounts to a popularity contest for best lesbian couple qualify you for student government? Don't bother.

THE JURY IS STILL OUT

The Historian -- I'm about two-thirds of the way through this book by Elizabeth Kostova, but I'm really enjoying it. There are parallel plots in different time periods, as a girl searches for her missing father, and many years ago, her father searches for his missing professor, and many years before that, the professor searches for the real Vlad Tepes, also known as Dracula. Actual vampires stalk the father and the daughter. (It's nice to see sinister Old World vampires as serious villains again.) I can't tell yet how it will end, but it is a very interesting journey, rich and vivid and suspenseful. I'm leaning toward proclaiming it to be awesome, even though I haven't even finished it yet. *

The L Word -- I've been watching the DVDs with my favorite ex-girlfriend. It's a soap opera, to be sure. At times it borders on porn. Are all those sex scenes really necessary? I don't think so, but it's not bad enough to make me stop watching, because I actually care about some of the characters and want to see what happens to them. But these ladies make some really, really bad life choices at time, and I end up screaming at the TV rather often. I'm at about the middle of season two (out of six). At present, I'm planning to continue buying the DVDs and watching them. Not sure what the final verdict will be. It's witty and interesting, but often very frustrating.

* Addendum 6-4-2009: I finished reading The Historian. It is thoroughly awesome in every respect. It is suspenseful, vivid, and has a nice little twist at the end.

Three Movie Reviews

I'll say Happy Valentine's Day, although this post has nothing to do with Valentine's Day or romance.

Turns out Khuntami was right after all. We had quite a snow yesterday. I took the day as vacation, which was just as well; the university closed early because of the storm, so I would have only been able to work a half-day even if I had gone in. To occupy me during the snow day, I checked out a pile of movies from the library. (Why yes, I am avoiding working on my novel.)

First, I watched Bonnie and Clyde, the 1967 film with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. This tells the more-or-less true story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, notorious Depression Era bank robbers. One of my coworkers warned me that it was violent and bloody. And it was, but only when necessary. I never felt the violence was gratuitous or inappropriate. Given the subject matter, it was spot on--not too little, not too much, but just right. The movie was as true to history as any Hollywood film is, which is to say it took a lot of liberties. But that's okay--it was an excellent story. The blurb on the back of the case says the film "balances itself on a knife-edge of laughter and terror," but I found it neither comedic nor horrifying, just realistic. Like real life, it was a peculiar mixture of light and dark. It was suspenseful and thrilling, and at times sweet. Bonnie and Clyde were in love, and in the spaces between the robberies and murders, there was palpable tenderness between them. It was a masterful film.

The second DVD I watched was O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), another tale of Depression Era miscreants, this one minus all the violence. Three prisoners escape from a chain gang and go in search of buried treasure, the loot from a bank robbery. The movie was professed to be based on Homer's The Odyssey, and while many key elements were present, such as the blind prophet, the sirens, and the cyclops (who took the form of a one-eyed Bible salesman), it could really only be said to be based on The Odyssey in the same way that The Lion King was based on Hamlet. The humor ranged from wickedly clever to plain stupid, but overall, it was a very enjoyable comedy. And it had a happy ending, which was a plus after Bonnie and Clyde.

The third DVD I watched was something completely different, a film I'd never heard of before, Billy Elliot (2000). The youngest son of a coal mining family goes to boxing lessons, with gloves that had been his father's and grandfather's before him. Unfortunately, he's absolutely terrible at boxing. He is left alone to practice with the punching bag until he gets it right. When he goes to drop off the building keys with the ballet instructor in the other room, she dares him to try ballet. He does, and he likes it. While pretending to attend boxing lessons, he secretly goes to ballet class instead. Eventually, his father finds out, and is not pleased. Then Billy has to make a hard choice, but his father also has to make a hard choice. This film is both funny and beautiful. And music is used very effectively throughout the film--both classical and rock music, for the different parts of Billy's life. Every song choice was perfectly suited to the scene. I can find nothing negative to say about this movie; it was superb.

Sword of the Stranger

I saw the anime movie Sword of the Stranger this week. I had never heard of it before. I went with a friend, because we always like to support any anime that comes to theaters in our area, even if it's something we've never heard of. And for whatever reason, not only had we never heard of this film, we also couldn't remember its title to save our lives. Even when we got to the theater, we were asking for tickets to "Sword of the . . . Samurai? Uh, Sword of the Something, anyway." The fact that the theater abbreviated it to Sword of S on the signage and ticket stubs didn't help much.

Despite the unmemorable title, Sword of the Stranger turned out to be a very good movie. The animation was superb, an absolute masterwork of hand-drawn animation in an era when almost everyone is making their movies with cheaper, faster computer animation. A fishing net hanging in the wind was animated so beautifully it looked real, and the blowing snow effects were amazing. And, of course, being a samurai film, there was no shortage of incredible fight scenes with few survivors.

Set in feudal Japan, the story featured a young boy and his dog, fleeing from a group of Chinese warriors and one giant, blond-haired, blue-eyed barbarian. The boy was chosen by prophecy, and his blood would grant immortality if he were sacrificed at exactly the right time in exactly the right way. The rather obnoxious kid and his very clever dog escape, and they end up sheltering in the same abandoned house as a quiet ronin with no name and a dark past. The villains attack; the ronin saves the kid's life, and the dog saves the ronin's life. It's really the dog that holds the man and boy together, and when the enemies manage to capture the boy, the ronin and the dog go to heroic lengths to save him. Meanwhile, the political pressure builds between the Japanese lord, his ambitious shogun, and their Chinese guests, culminating in an epic, bloody battle.

The plot seemed like kind of standard samurai genre fare, but even if the story wasn't groundbreaking and the characters were rather stereotypical, it was nice to see a standalone anime movie that wasn't connected to a TV series or manga. It was thoroughly enjoyable.

YouTubing

Now that I have DSL, I've been wasting a lot of time watching YouTube videos. And a lot of it truly has been wasted time, but here are a couple of shining gems that are worth sharing.

Cat lovers should not miss An Engineer's Guide to Cats. Also worthwhile, even though the election is long past, is the sequel, An Engineer's Guide to Voting (Ginger Cat for President). Trust me, the aerial cat fight is worth it.

Movie lovers should enjoy 100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 numbers. Someone put in a heck of a lot of work on this cinematic countdown. Can you identify all of the movies shown? I know quite a few of them, but not even close to all.

Enjoy!

The Lost World

Last night I watched The Lost World, the silent movie masterpiece. (2001 DVD by Image Entertainment, from the Blackhawk Films Collection.) This particular edition was assembled from pieces of eight different surviving prints of the movie, and it was about half an hour longer than any version I'd seen before. It's still not the complete film as it appeared in theaters in 1925, but it's probably the closest restoration possible. They did a fine job of repairing the film, minimizing scratches, shakes, and other damage; it does not seem cobbled together at all. The picture quality is much, much nicer than I'm accustomed to seeing in a 1920s vintage film.

For being 83 years old, the movie stands up surprisingly well. I was really struck by the high quality of the stop-motion animation used for the dinosaurs. I've seen many films from the 1950s and '60s that fall far short of these effects. They even went to the trouble of animating the dinosaurs' breathing, a touch of detail I've rarely seen with stop-motion effects. The dinosaurs' bellies swell and shrink with each breath in a way that makes them seem almost real. Clear your mind of all the fancy CGI effects you've seen and imagine sitting in a dark theater in the Roaring Twenties. The experience must have been absolutely chilling.

The movie was groundbreaking. There are echoes of this film in almost every monster movie and adventure flick that came after, from King Kong to Indiana Jones. (When I saw the little graphic of the boat sliding across the ocean, all I could think of was Indy's airplane trailing a line on the map.)

One of the neat effects was the use of color. Yes, it's a black and white film, but some scenes were tinted for effect. So scenes inside well-lit buildings were in sepia, while night scenes were in blue, jungle scenes in green, and a sunrise in red. This was very effective in setting the mood.

The human story is kind of bland, but let's be real--we're watching the movie for the dinosaurs. The beasts represent the best paleontological knowledge of the time. Sadly, much of it is quite antiquated. The dinos are taildraggers, with the bipedal ones standing upright like meerkats. And there's the brontosaurus. Egads! Well, sure, we know now that the so-called brontosaurus was really the skeleton of an apatosaurus with the skull of a camarasaurus slapped on, but back then, brontos were in! And these were no slow, lumbering beasts. No! These fast and agile dinos could hold their own in Jurassic Park.

As for the humans, we've got the nerd boy who proves himself and becomes a manly man; the big game hunter, a decent guy who gets kind of shafted in the end; the crazy scientist with wild hair, wild beard, and wild eyes; the forgettable, bespectacled entomologist; and an incredibly annoying waif-like heroine. She obviously has some courage, because she goes on this expedition, wears pants, climbs mountains, and so on, but she looks clinically depressed all the time, pursing those tiny rosebud lips and looking up sadly with those enormous doe-like eyes. I'm not sure why the hero (nerd boy) falls in love with her, unless he is some kind of vampire that feeds off sorrow and misery. And back at base camp, we've got a generic white guy and his bumbling companion, a painful racial stereotype character in blackface. This offensive caricature is my main complaint against the movie.

Still, from a historical perspective, this is an incredible film. Well worth an hour and a half of your time.

Invasion of Astro-Monster

Nope. Invasion of Astro-Monster (aka Godzilla Vs. Monster Zero) was plain awful, even in its original Japanese.

The 1954 film Gojira was suspenseful, powerful, and even rather moving. In that first movie, Godzilla was actually a scary monster. He was a dinosaur, acting with animal motives. There was nothing human about him. He moved like a beast, not a man. He was a force of nature, an ancient animal awakened, then transformed and twisted by the actions of humanity. When that first Godzilla destroyed Tokyo, it was truly a magnificent moment in cinematic history. It was terrifying and heart-rending. You really felt for the woman clutching her children and telling them, "We'll be with your father soon." Or the radio announcer reporting on the destruction, knowingly facing his own doom with dignity as he signed off, "This is our final broadcast. Goodbye," just as Godzilla moved in for the kill. Yes, that first Godzilla killed people. Death was shown on screen, as were the wounded, maimed survivors. The despair and sorrow were palpable. That first movie was one of the greatest disaster movies ever made, to say nothing of one of the greatest monster movies. Heck, delete "disaster" and "monster"--Gojira, in its unedited form, is a truly great movie. No qualifiers needed.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

By the 1960s, the vintage of Invasion of Astro-Monster, Godzilla had been fully personified. He had become a fancy-dancin', high-kickin', goofy superhero. He no longer acted like an animal, instead making blatantly human arm gestures and other movements. He was no longer frightening, nor even slightly intimidating. Oh, sure, he stomped a city flat, but he looked so ridiculous doing it, with those high steps and swinging arms, that it was merely laughable. They never showed any people actually dying in all that destruction, just running away to safety. The real sense of fear and threat is all gone.

And the aliens and their dorky-looking flying saucers and ridiculously primitive uber-computer were outright dreadful. (Not that the computer was supposed to be primitive, mind you. Pretty much every 1960s-era movie depiction of a futuristic, super-powerful computer seems primitive and clunky compared to even the outdated junky computers that can be found in virtually any apartment complex dumpster today.)

Of course, I do love cheesy B-flicks. I absolutely did enjoy Invasion of Astro-Monster on that level. I just find the sharp contrast between 1950s Godzilla and 1960s Godzilla fascinating.

Stack o' DVDs

I bought a bunch of DVDs on sale today. Which one of these is not like the others?

Sweeny Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street -- blood and gore and unspeakable violence.

Kill Bill -- two volumes of blood and gore and unspeakable violence.

Nancy Drew -- kindness and cupcakes conquer all!

Yeah . . . Nancy is probably creeped out by who she has to share the DVD shelf with.

And despite these new movies, what am I watching tonight? Invasion of Astro-Monster! (Otherwise known as Godzilla Vs. Monster Zero.) I've been enjoying the original Japanese versions of the Godzilla movies. Gojira and Godzilla Raids Again were certainly much better than their U.S. versions, Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Gigantis: the Fire Monster respectively. (Gigantis, in its U.S. release, is borderline unwatchable. I couldn't finish it!) Here's hoping the Invasion of Astro-Monster is also secretly a good movie in disguise.

Earthsea, again

Well, my opinion of Studio Ghibli's Tales from Earthsea has improved. On the second viewing, I liked it much better, perhaps because I was no longer comparing it to its source material but rather viewing it for its own sake.

Why the change of heart? I just finished watching Earthsea, the 2004 live-action movie. I think it's strongly indicative of quality that I can enjoy watching Ghibli's Tales from Earthsea twice and still be willing to watch it a third and possibly fourth time in order to share it with more friends, but I had to break my viewing of the 2004 Earthsea into six separate sessions because I couldn't take the whole thing in one sitting. And it's not just because it was nearly three hours long; I watched the extended versions of all three Lord of the Rings movies back to back in the same day once (treating them as a single twelve-hour film), so I know I can handle long movies.

Whereas Tales from Earthsea drew the majority of its source material from the third and fourth novels of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series, the 2004 Earthsea movie covered the first and second books--A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan--overlapping them to form a single blended story, rather than two separate stories set several years apart.

Earthsea used more names, places, and events from Le Guin's books than Tales from Earthsea did, so it bore more superficial resemblance to the books. However, it played so fast and loose with the themes and details that I would not consider it at all faithful to the original. In fact, it's approach to the source material is roughly on par with the Xena: Warrior Princess approach to Greek history.

My first couple sittings with Earthsea, I just cringed. The acting was bad. In fact, the only actor with any talent seemed to be Danny Glover as Ogion. I'm guessing he just needed a paycheck. Desperately. Everyone else laid on the ham and cheese pretty thick. Names were pronounced inconsistently, depending on who was speaking. The special effects were substandard. The dragon looked ungainly, and his voice was almost painful to hear. I'm sure their intent was to make it seem like he was hissing as he spoke, but his lisp was more evocative of a duck with a sore throat.

They also did the same thing Tales from Earthsea did with regards to race. That is, pretty much everyone was white except for Ogion. The actress who played Tenar was kind of sort of Asian looking, yet somehow still kind of sort of white looking. Why the heck can't anyone make a version of Earthsea where Ged and his countrymen are all dark skinned like they're supposed to be?

On later viewing sessions, I started enjoying it more. At first, I thought that perhaps it was getting better in the second half. Then I realized that I had simply lowered my expectations to the point that I was no longer feeling disappointed. Once I decided to watch it with the B-movie mentality, I was fine. The problem is, the packaging bills it, "In the tradition of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter . . ." That just sets the viewer up for an epic letdown. In no way is it even close to the same caliber as either of those movie series. It can not be judged on the same scale. Perhaps it should have said, "In the tradition of Clash of the Titans and Xena: Warrior Princess . . ." Then I would have had the proper mindset from the get-go. I mean, even the soundtrack was highly evocative of Xena, which made me think they might have had the same composer. But no, Earthsea's score was composed by people I've never heard of.

(For the record, I like Xena and Clash of the Titans. But I won't pretend they're "good" in the same sense as Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.)

Anyway, watch the 2004 Earthsea with B-movie expectations, and you might enjoy it. Watch the Studio Ghibli Tales from Earthsea with higher expectations, but with the knowledge and acceptance that it is not faithful to the source material. The Ghibli version is a far better film in my estimation, worthy of being judged by normal standards.

Then read the books and understand why Le Guin was unhappy with both adaptations.

This made me think about how I would feel if one of my books (pretending I might someday get published) suffered a bad movie adaptation. I'd probably be upset, too. However, I came to the conclusion that even a bad movie would generate increased book sales. As they say, any publicity is good publicity. I know I rushed to read The Golden Compass after seeing the exciting preview for the movie. The movie turned out to suck irredeemably, but Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy was well written, interesting, and engaging (although I found some of the themes to be quite disturbing). And at the library, every time a movie adaptation of any book comes out, that book, no matter how many years its been collecting dust in the stacks, circulates nonstop for a while. So hopefully Earthsea and Tales from Earthsea will lead people to Le Guin's books.

Gedo Senki: Tales from Earthsea

Well, I got to see the anime film Gedo Senki: Tales from Earthsea. It's not a bad movie, but it's not up to Studio Ghibli's usual quality. The pacing seemed off, and the script seemed awkward and incomplete in parts. Ideas were introduced, then left to wither and crumble with no followup. Parts of the story just seemed muddled and confusing. I couldn't help wondering, "Okay, now what the heck just happened?" at the end.

The animation quality--while still above average--seemed poor when compared to Ghibli masterworks like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. While most of the animals, like the llama-like creature and the bovine mounts, were beautifully done, there seemed to be something off about the dragons. I'm having a hard time putting my finger on it, but something about the way they moved didn't seem natural. On the other hand, they looked cool, and the hail of sparks falling from their mouths was magnificent.

Gedo Senki is Goro Miyazaki's first movie, so I suppose it would be harsh to measure it with his father's yardstick. But I can't help thinking that if Hayao Miyazaki would have been the one to make it, it would have been a much different--and much better--film. But that's neither here nor there.

Despite bearing the English subtitle of Tales from Earthsea, I have to admit that I didn't see much resemblance to Ursula K. Le Guin's story. (Neither did Le Guin. Visit her website to read her response to this film.) It's like they took elements from her books, most particularly The Farthest Shore and Tehanu, stripped them out of their context, and sprinkled them throughout an unrelated story.

This radical remixing of Earthsea struck me as very familiar in some ways. As I watched, certain scenes made me think, "I know this. I've seen this somewhere before." And I knew that I wasn't seeing echoes of Le Guin's Earthsea, because those elements that felt so familiar to me seemed so very foreign to Earthsea as I had envisioned it from reading the books.

During the end credits, right after "Based on the 'Earthsea' series by Ursula K. Le Guin," it said "Inspired by 'Shuna's Journey' by Hayao Miyazaki." And the lights went on. I was picking up on the elements from Shuna's Journey (Shuna no Tabi), a rare manga that Hayao Miyazaki published in 1983. I am lucky enough to own a copy of this small, beautiful book. It is one of my most cherished possessions.

Unlike most manga, which are black and white and printed on cheap paper, Shuna's Journey is full color, 147 pages of exquisite watercolor artwork on glossy paper. Despite being 25 years old, the binding is still strong and the pages are still brilliant. High quality stuff. Of course, it's in Japanese. The book was never officially translated into English, although I have seen fan translations floating around on the web. But even without understanding the text (which is substantial), the story fairly well tells itself through its pictures. If you can get a copy on the used market, I recommend it highly.

I immediately ran to my bookshelf and plucked off Shuna's Journey. Yes, yes, it was all there. The slave caravans. The oxen mounts. The beautiful, tender scenes of farm life. The cities and the sweeping landscapes in the film are very evocative of the backgrounds in Shuna's Journey. Arren in Tales from Earthsea is perhaps even more like Shuna than he is like Arren from The Farthest Shore. Therru likewise is more like the slave girl Shuna liberates than like Therru from Tehanu. Even the scuzzy drug-pusher in the movie, who tries to give Arren hazia, looks just like the old man Shuna encounters on his travels.

Of course, Arren in the film rides a cool llama and not an antelope. Oh, wait, Shuna's antelope was already used in a Ghibli film--Yakul, Ashitaka's steed in Princess Mononoke, is an exact copy of Shuna's mount. Princess Mononoke draws quite a lot from Shuna's Journey, too. Of course, both of those works were by Hayao Miyazaki, so it's excusable.

Okay, before this turns completely into a tribute to Shuna's Journey, I need to get back to Tales from Earthsea.

One of Le Guin's complaints, which I agree with, is that the characters are all light-skinned in the movie. In her books, Ged and the others of his country are all dark-skinned. Only Tenar, a foreigner, is light-skinned. But in the movie, all of the characters look white.

Now, I have read articles that talk about the way Japanese audiences perceive anime characters. When shown a generic smiley face, it "looks white" to white people, but "looks Japanese" to Japanese people. That is, a cartoon face, in the absence of distinctive racial markers, will be perceived to be the same race as the viewer. Since I've heard this over many years from multiple sources, from Japanese people to scholarly journals, I think it's probably true. So Ged, Arren, and Therru probably look Japanese to Japanese audiences. With her blond hair and blue eyes, Tenar surely looks white. So Japanese audiences probably do pick up on a racial difference there.

However, even so, this is somewhat contrary to Le Guin's point. That is, knowing the majority of her readers were white, she made her characters black on purpose. I can't see into her mind, of course, but I expect her intent may have been to make white readers view a world where blacks were the majority, where they were powerful in the same way whites are in the U.S., in other words, where black is the cultural default, and white is the "other." But in the movie, the main characters (except Tenar) were changed to the same race as the primary viewers (Japanese), which was the opposite of what Le Guin did. So I was sad to see the Tales of Earthsea populated entirely by light-skinned people.

Another thing that bugged me about the movie was the villain. The subtitles read Cob, but the characters were clearly saying Kumo. And since the character bore little or no resemblance to Cob from the books, I'm inclined to think Kumo is essentially an original character.

Unfortunately, Kumo is also a boring, one-dimensional villain. When you watch other Studio Ghibli films, you get complex characters. Princess Mononoke doesn't even have a clear villain. There are three sides opposed in a war, and there are merits and ills on all sides. In the Ghibli version of Howl's Moving Castle (which similarly bore only minimal resemblance to Diana Wynne Jones' book), the Witch of the Waste ended up as a companion of the heroes after she lost her power. Even in Spirited Away, Yubaba was not without merit.

Kumo, however, was just a monster. Nothing more, nothing less. Ho hum. No layers. No complexity. No interest.

By the way, Kumo really seemed womanly. Cob was male, and the subtitles consistently referred to Kumo as "he" (note that Japanese doesn't have pronouns differentiating male and female, so listening to the dialogue is no help here), but the body shape, face, voice, and attire were all very feminine.

If Kumo is a woman, that's fine. Hopefully the official translation (which will hit the U.S. no earlier than 2009) will clarify that. But if Kumo is a man, then I'm disturbed. Of course, I'm not bothered by feminine men, drag queens, or intersex people. What I'm objecting to is the only such character in the film being the main villain. That reinforces the stereotype that queerfolk are somehow inherently malignant. I mean, it's bad enough when we're used for comedy relief. Do we have to be represented as evil, too? (Mind you, I'm okay with queer villains so long as there are queer heroes, too. I'm only offended when the lone queer character is bad, as if the queerness is part and parcel with the badness.) But if Kumo is, in fact, a woman, it's fine because heroic women are present in Tenar and Therru, so there is balance.

Another thing that bugged me was Therru's scar. In the book, Therru was horribly disfigured by her burns, with emotional scars equal to her physical ones. But in the movie, she just has a faint red blotch on her face. Despite covering the area around her eye, it doesn't seem to have affected that eye at all. Don't tell me it's difficult to animate a disfiguring burn scar--look at Prince Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender or Gouda from Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG. Goro Miyazaki just wanted Therru to be pretty. But Therru isn't supposed to be pretty. She's supposed to be ugly, which is why she was so feared. She provided an example of how a person who was deeply damaged on every level could still be a hero.

Now despite this long litany of complaints, I did like the movie. I will certainly buy the DVD when it is released in the U.S. But Goro Miyazaki still has to grow quite a bit to fill his father's shoes.

The Feral Martians of Venus

Last night at my friend's monthly movie, we saw a 1962 science fiction film from the Soviet Union. The title on the screen was in Russian, which I don't read, subtitled as Planet of Storms. The box had the title Planeta Burg. I don't know which one is a more accurate translation, but you've got to admit that Planet of Storms sounds a whole lot better than Planeta Burg.

I'll say right from the top . . . this was a bad movie. It was interesting from a cultural perspective. How often do Americans get the opportunity to see Communist era Russian flicks? As with the couple of Communist era Czech movies I've seen, the characters all have a sort of glum fatalism. As one of my friends said, "They're all emo!" Apparently, life under Communist rule just plain sucked, even if you were a cosmonaut.

Three ships, with three crew members apiece, went to Venus. Right at the beginning of the movie, an asteroid came from nowhere and destroyed one of the ships. In the aftermath of the disaster, the survivors were supposed to stay in orbit over Venus and wait for another ship to come from Earth, so they could do their mission with a full crew as planned.

Thing is, they got bored. So the five men took their crappy robot and headed down planetside, leaving the only female crew member alone in orbit, where she would struggle with space madness, which looked a whole lot like bipolar disorder.

The guys got separated. One group of three had a nifty hover car that looked right out of The Jetsons. They cruised around and had a grand old time while searching for their companions. They found a crude sculpture of a dragon, which proved the presence of intelligent life on Venus. They did not even consider the possibility that it may have evolved there. No, they came to the conclusion that Martians must have colonized Venus, and the reason the artwork was so primitive was that the civilization fell and the people reverted to savages. Yes, that's right, Venus is populated by feral Martians. Oh, and dinosaurs. Did I mention the dinosaurs? Yep. Venus, home to feral Martians and cheap rubber dinosaurs.

Keep in mind that they never explicitly stated that they had encountered Martians at any point in the history of space exploration, nor even that they had found any form of life whatsoever on Mars. It's just an unstated assumption that Mars was obviously the site of the first great civilization in the solar system. They even hinted at the idea that Earth was also a Martian colony. So we, too, are feral Martians.

Meanwhile, the other two guys, with their clunky, junky robot, had a big bag of suck. A carnivorous tentacle plant tried to eat them, they caught malaria, and then they got stranded in the middle of a surging river of lava. First of all . . . malaria? The guys started feeling a little sick, so they jumped to the conclusion that it's malaria?

As they lost consciousness, the robot made contact with the group in the hover car. The hover car group asked the robot where his masters were, and the robot spouted off that he had no masters; he was a free machine. Unimpressed, the guys told the robot to give medicine to the ill crew members. So the robot got the pills from the pack, spilled them all over the ground, rubbed them in the Venusian dirt, then with no small effort managed to pick one up with its clumsy, stumpy, poorly engineered club of a hand. Then the robot flipped open the guy's space helmet, dropped the pill in his mouth, and poured water all over his face, managing to splash some few drops in his mouth. I'm not sure if the robot was trying to kill him them or just incompetent, but the scene was unintentionally hilarious.

Presumably, the robot repeated this procedure with the other guy, although the audience was spared the spectacle. The amazing thing was, the guys actually recovered from their "malaria." Yes, a few healthy gasps of Venusian air and a pill covered in dirt and alien microbes was just what the doctor ordered.

So why did they put their helmets back on? Seriously? The credibility was ruined at this point.

And the robot . . . it just got worse and worse. With technology advanced enough to build a bipedal robot that would play music like a walking mp3 player and occasionally wax eloquent on philosophy, they couldn't even waterproof it? A little rain, and it had to run off and hide in a cave? Oh, but while a weak drizzle would destroy the robot, it was perfectly capable of strolling through knee-deep flowing lava.

What happened to the robot in the end? Did the cosmonauts meet any Venusians? Or did they get eaten by dinosaurs? Did the lonely woman in orbit die of boredom, or did she succumb to space madness and send her ship--the crew's only hope of returning to earth--careening down to the planet's surface? If you actually care enough to want the answers to these questions, you'll have to watch the movie for yourself. If you love B-movies, especially if you enjoy mocking them MST3K-style as you watch, put it on your must-see list.

Dinosaurs Alive 3D

I took a half-day of vacation today, to escape the chemical fumes in my workplace. (They're applying some kind of top-coat to the floor in the basement, but the smell got pretty strong on every floor.) I went to the zoo for a walk. I wish I'd taken my camera, because there was a monkey in the sloth's tree, hanging upside down like a sloth. Also, they have new reedy sea dragons in the aquarium, and they're exquisitely beautiful. Plus the black-footed cat and Mai the three-legged tiger both have babies.

After my walk, I decided to see the Dinosaurs Alive 3D film at the zoo's IMAX theater. Alas, that turned out to be a big disappointment. The computer animated dinosaurs were rather disappointing. I've seen better animation in low-budget kids' movies. Plus they went to all the trouble of making it 3D, but they ruined any potential sense of realism that may have provided by skimping on the interaction between the dinosaurs and their environments. Dinosaurs would walk across desert sand and leave no footprints. The perfect wind-ripples upon the sand were completely undisturbed by the ferocious to-the-death battle happening upon them. Sometimes the animation overlaid on the filmed background was not lined up quite right, so the dinosaurs seemed to be sliding or drifting a little with each step. I'm not even sure they consistently remembered to have the dinosaurs actually cast shadows.

Then the 3D effects themselves were bad. This wasn't the old-style red lens/blue lens style of 3D, but you still needed glasses. The technology wasn't explained and I'm too lazy to look it up, but I assume it has to do with polarization of the light or something along those lines. Anyway, for objects in the middle depth, it worked fine. For distant things, there was no sense of depth at all. For close-up things, the effect broke down. Items had ghost images around them where the two components of the film didn't come back together. So the ghosty double-vision close-ups actually ended up giving me a headache. At times I ended up closing one eye so I could just watch it 2D.

Then the content of the film itself was somewhat lacking. It was only 45 minutes long, and I'd have to guess that the actual animated dinosaur sequences totaled somewhere in the 5-10 minute range, including the several repeated scenes. Most of it was spent on the paleontology grad students, and it came off as really, really staged. I'm sure all documentaries are staged to some degree, but this just seemed extra bad. It seems more like a poorly scripted paleontology recruitment film than anything.

Plus I don't trust their facts. Near the end, they said something to the effect of "only two percent" of all dinosaur species have been discovered. How do they know that? You can't give a percentage known for a predominantly unknown body of knowledge. There is no whole to calculate it against. Maybe we've only found one percent. Maybe we've actually found 20, 30, 50, or 90 percent. The thing is, it is impossible to know. It's one thing to say, "we think that we may have discovered as little as two percent of what's out there to be found," but quite another to assert as a fact, "we've only found two percent." The first is speculation. The second is a lie.

All in all, I'd say skip Dinosaurs Alive 3D. Not worth the time or money, or the headache.

"My Bike Ignites!"

Woo! I got my DVD of Kamikaze Girls today. I ordered it the night I finished reading the novel, because the book was so great. The movie follows the book for the most part, but the plot does diverge a bit, especially towards the end. But that's okay, because the movie is grand fun in its own right. Actually, in many ways, it's even more quirky and bizarre. The screenplay didn't just change the story; it successfully augmented it. The additions they made suited the spirit of the story marvelously. The alterations, including a significant change in the order of certain key scenes, worked well enough. They took full advantage of the medium to create a spectacular, lush, vivid visual feast. In short, it was as beautiful as it was strange. And of course, it was supremely high in cheese. Not bad cheese like Cutey Honey, but good cheese like Moulin Rouge. My only problem with it involved a bit of scatological humor, because I really don't like that sort of thing. However it wasn't worse than various scenes in Shrek.

I also picked up the Kamikaze Girls manga, as long as I was at it. However, I found it to be rather disappointing. The adaptation of the novel's story was lackluster and didn't do it justice at all, and the additional stories included in the book were just not that good. ("Ichigo's Case" was decent, if not great. But if "The Pinky-Ring Princess" and "The Middle-Finger Princess" were not bound together with the other stories, I would actually throw them away. I feel like they are contaminating my bookshelf.) I recommend skipping the manga altogether, but read the novel and watch the movie.

I'd have to say I still like the novel best. There is such a richness to the story, so many subtleties that weren't conveyed in the movie. But the movie was a hilarious blast, definitely worthy fare.

(Oh, and if you were wondering about the title of this post, "My bike ignites!" is the opening line of the movie. That pretty well sets the tone, don't you think?)

Cutey Honey

At my friend's monthly DVD-and-dinner party, we watched Cutey Honey, the live action movie based on a 1970s anime. Now, I've been avoiding Cutey Honey in any form for years, on account of the giggle and jiggle factor. However, the movie actually turned out to be fun. I won't lie and say it was a good movie, because it wasn't. But it was very entertaining.

The movie opened with what my friends and I dubbed "leg cam." Basically, the camera was positioned in the actress's lap, looking down her legs as she took a bubble bath. It would not be the last time we saw leg cam. During fight scenes or swinging in the park, the director apparently thought we occasionally needed to see the view from her crotch.

Underwear scenes and scanty costumes littered the movie at every turn, but it never crossed the line. Thus we were spared any actual nudity. Likewise, no sex.

The villains, costumes, and fight scenes were right on par with, say, Power Rangers. Occasionally, they splurged on low-quality CG special effects. At other times, typically during fights, they cut to choppy animation because apparently they couldn't budget for actual stunt performers. But for the opening credits and during flashbacks, they actually tried for a better quality of traditional animation.

Ah, the opening credits. The Cutey Honey theme is a J-pop classic. I've had a Euro-dance mix of it in my playlist for years.

But, oh dear, seeing the lyrics of that song subtitled was, shall we say, a bit traumatic. Ahem, "She's the popular girl with the big, bouncing boobs."

Oh. My. God.

I've been listening to WHAT for all these years? I can only hope that this song never came up on my random shuffle when I had Japanese friends over at my home. If it did, they were too polite to mention it . . .

Jinkies.

Anyway, back to the movie. Opening theme, leg cam, and all that aside, it was a cute story about a superhero, a policewoman, and a plucky reporter against a bunch of really ugly, really over-the-top bad guys. At some point, I found myself thinking, "This kind of reminds me of Iczer One. Or maybe it's more like Iczer Three, what with the four lackeys serving the main villain and all. Anyway, it would definitely fit in the Iczer-verse." A few minutes later, one of my friends said, "Hey, this is just like Iczer One!" So perhaps the similarity was more than passing.

One of the lackey villains seemed, well, not exactly cool, but at least less uncool than the others. Until his personal string quartet showed up to provide music as he whipped out his microphone and guitar-shaped pitchfork/axe/spear/whatever to do battle. Goodbye, mote of cool.

At another point, we were "treated" to a long montage of Honey wandering the city, changing into a diverse array of ludicrous costumes. "Oh my Lord, she's having a music video," groaned one friend. Her husband described it as "follow the moping fashion victim."

There was a nice bit o' lesbian subtext, which I wasn't the only one to notice. That was a definite plus. No kisses, though, so that adds a minus. But neither woman ends up with a man, so there's another plus. So on the gay-o-meter, it tips slightly (but only slightly) to the queer.

Anyway, I should stop now. I can't quite say, "It was so bad it was good." But I'll say, "It was so bad it was hilarious," and leave it at that.

Double Feature

I saw Happy Feet twice this weekend--Saturday with friends, Sunday with my mother. Had I realized Mom wanted to see it, I wouldn’t have returned it to the video store. As it was, I rented it twice.

Happy Feet is a very cute, but very strange movie. It’s like they put March of the Penguins, Moulin Rouge, and Footloose in a blender, then added a cup of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the obligatory dash of preachy social commentary. (No recent American children's movie seems to be complete without the latter.) I obviously liked it, or else I wouldn’t have watched it twice. The penguins are so incredibly cute!

Mom and I also watched Pelišky, a Czech movie I first saw two years ago on a rainy day in Moravia, when we rented videos and stayed inside. It’s set during the Prague Spring, a brief period of about eight months in 1968 when a kinder, gentler form of Socialism (“with a human face”) took root in Czechoslovakia. The movie focuses on the love triangle between a group of teenagers and the (in my opinion) infinitely more interesting relationships among their parents. It’s a comedy right up until the end, when the truth of history puts a tragic cap on the story. The hardline Communists of the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968, to force their particularly nasty form of Communism onto the Czechs. The movie ends with a dedication to the effect of, “To all those whose friends, lovers, and families disappeared overnight, while they remained behind.” The first time I saw it, I was with several Czech people, and watching it now, I can still remember one of them nodding during the invasion scene and saying, “I remember that.” I cried during this viewing just as I did then.

Although I really enjoyed both movies, I have to admit that Happy Feet and Pelišky make for a really bizarre double feature.

A Barrel of Monkey King

My friend’s movie-of-the-month was the 1967 Hong Kong flick Cave of the Silken Web, a tale of the Monkey King. I’m arachnophobic, so when I first read his invitation, the “silken web” part sent me into a panic. But I googled it and saw that the “spiders” were just scantily clad women, and then I started looking forward to it.

And I was not disappointed. If you like cheesy, goofy B-movies, add this to your must-watch list. The costuming was great in the sense that it was bright, colorful, and eye-catching, and terrible in the sense that it was . . . well, terrible. For example, no attempt was made to use makeup to hide the transition between Pig’s plastic snout and the actor’s face, and you could see his real ears nestled inside his big floppy ones. Honestly, I’ve seen grade-school trick-or-treaters with better costumes.

But the movie was hilarious, loaded with more cases of mistaken identity than all the Shakespearian comedies put together, lots of slapstick, kung fu, bad singing, and a wide array of special effects that might have been good in 1967 but which look painfully lame now. Most of the characters were incurably stupid, although Monkey sometimes did some very clever things. All in all, I have to give it a thumbs up for sheer cheese.

Dreamgirls

I finally saw Dreamgirls tonight. I was not familiar with the Broadway play on which the movie was based, so I didn’t know much going into it except that it was about a group of singers and, well, that it would have lots of music.

And the music was excellent. I anticipate a soundtrack purchase in my near future. Many of the songs had my foot a-tapping. The songs, like the plot, increased in power as the show went on. What started lighthearted and almost fluffy grew into a very strong story. The acting was good all around, and the singing was wonderful.

The story spanned a decade from the late sixties through the early seventies, and the passage of time was shown through the marvelously detailed and meticulously accurate changing costumes, sets, hairstyles, and even the fonts on printed text. Historical events, such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream speech and the Detroit riots, further anchored the story in its period. (And bonus for me, who likes to see how stuff works, there was a close-up of a vinyl record being pressed. Neat!)

Beyond the trappings of set and costume, the show was filled with subtle touches. The facial expressions of the nameless, voiceless background characters spoke volumes about the shifting moods and lines of tension. Many plot points were never explicitly stated--a look or a gesture was enough.

Definitely worth your time. I recommend it to just about anyone, unless you hate music or something.

Snakes on a Plane

Last night, a friend and I had dinner and rented Snakes on a Plane. We both expected the movie to be bad, but it turned out to be far worse than I had ever imagined. Gratuitous violence, gratuitous sex, gratuitous stupidity--you name it. The acting wasn’t bad, really--it’s just that the characters were horrible. The actors did quite well for the script they had. The plot was atrocious and riddled with holes. (I suppose the holes were necessary for the snakes to slither in through.) And the snakes were the cheesiest computer generated animals I’ve seen since those awful wolves in The Day After Tomorrow.

But it was good for a few laughs, especially in scenes that should not have been funny.