We are about to enter the realm of great danger. My personal safety is at risk by writing this. The world over there are legions of Star Wars fans that would gladly suit up in their faux Stormtrooper Armor and pretend blast me into smithereens for suggesting that any Star Wars product, be it film, book, comic, game, or action figure is sub-par. One of the most vehement and earnest believers in the Force, my wife, will likely swat me with a plastic lightsaber. (She has two) But I must press on for the good of the viewing public and make my case for why Return of the Jedi is stupid.
First some background. I grew up with this movie. I remember seeing it in the cinema when it was released way back in 1983. I remember the run up to the release date being a maddening experience as we, the little children of the 80's, debated furiously about the origins of that half-built Death Star that was on all the posters. Was it the original Death Star still in disrepair after the events of the first movie? Was it a new Death Star? Would Luke save the day? Why was his lightsaber green? Is Darth Vader is father? If so, who's his mother? To say the least, we were all jazzed for this movie. And when it finally came out, it made me feel as though I had achieved something just by living to see the saga told in its entirety...or so we thought. My uncle, who passed recently, had all three of the original movies on VHS back in the day when nobody had VHS. When we would visit, my brother and I would watch and rewatch those movies with Jedi in heaviest rotation. It, in our pre-pubescent opinions, was the best one of the three Star Wars films. It had the Sarlaac pit, speeder bikes, a mighty duel with Darth Vader, the evil Emperor shooting lightning from his fingertips and a massive space battle between the rag-tag forces of the Rebellion and the indomitable Star Destroyers of the Galactic Empire. Plus, and bear in mind we were children, it had Ewoks. When you are nine years old Ewoks are cool. So what happened? Simply put: I grew up, saw better movies, and grew to appreciate plot and character development. I guess that wasn't as simply put as it might have been, but it is the truth.
I hope to break down my dislike of this movie into four sections and, if I can keep my head on straight, I'll hold myself to that formula. You may disagree with my findings, but I feel that the problems with the film are so obvious and silly that most adults would have a hard time sitting through it. The four sections are these: 1) Luke's Plan 2) The plot 3) The production values 4) The Rebel Victory. Let's begin.
Luke's plan makes no sense whatsoever. None. Let us deal with the established information we the audience have regarding Jedi Knights. In this case we are dealing with a young man who didn't know he was a Jedi until some crazy dude in the desert told him he was one and then a little green Muppet fed him some sort of stew on a world that looks like the bayou, had him float some rocks around with his mind, berated him for not fully believing in something he had just learned about and then sent him off to kill a half-robot/half-human that might be his own father. Setting all that aside we have the following abilities: Super speed, super reflexes that border on precognition, ability to see possible futures, ability to see across the entire galaxy, swordsmanship, telekinesis, hand to hand combat training, super endurance, and sewing. Luke can, if prompted, fight like a demon with supernatural powers (which would be completely natural for a demon, one would guess) construct his own weapons without instruction, and create a snappy new ensemble to wear into battle. He's got it all. Add to all that the fact that he is also an ace pilot, cool under pressure and, much like his sister, plucky. This is a guy who is going to deliver a master plan the likes of which even Eisenhower has never seen. Not only that, he's going to back it up with Jedi powers and marital arts acumen. But that doesn't happen.
Here is Luke's Plan (as near as I can tell): Step one, send the droids to Jabba the Hutt's palace and have them play a message that explains how the droids are a swap for Han Solo. Essentially he is asking Jabba to take two decades-old, beat-up, robots in exchange for Jabba's most hated enemy. Why wouldn't that work? Moving on. The whole thing is ruse of course. Inside R2D2 is Luke's lightsaber. There it will stay hidden until Luke springs his trap. Here are the things that must happen for Luke's trap to be sprung. Jabba must keep the droids without searching them for weapons, bombs or bugs. He must then take C3PO as his new interpreter droid and send R2D2 to serve on his sail barge. Next, Leia must fail in her attempt to rescue Han and end up as a slave girl. With all this in place, Luke enters the palace by using the force to open the main doors and subdue the guards. Then he "mind-tricks" the majordomo into bringing him before Jabba even though he is literally a few steps away from the gangster's throne room and doesn't really require an introduction since we just saw his hologram only moments before. (In movie time I'm sure several days have passed, but my assumption is that Jabba does not have the memory of a goldfish) Luke does not gain access to his lightsaber at this time. Instead he tries to shoot Jabba in the face with a stolen pistol, ends up fighting a monster without using the force at all and then is taken captive by a group of people that we have established that he can "mind-trick" at will. Now the plan comes into full swing. Jabba must at this point decide to take everyone for a ride on his Sail Barge across the Dune Sea. Once he has the captives in place on separate vehicles in preparation for their untimely demise in the belly of the Sarlaac, he must ask if they want to beg for their lives at which time Luke gives the signal for R2 to launch his hidden lightsaber into the air. Luke must catch the sword on the fly and then start chopping people up. He must then defeat all of Jabba's henchmen single-handedly while his friends save themselves. Then they can all leave together.
Why didn't he just walk into Jabba's palace, gank all the guards, take Han out of there and never look back? He probably could have avoided bloodshed by mind-tricking everybody into not fighting him. Jabba wasn't susceptible to the mind-trick, but that wouldn't matter as Jabba can't really move and isn't a threat by himself. He could shout commands at a room full of befuddled lackeys until he was green in the face only to see Luke stroll out with Han. Barring that, once he popped out a glowing blade made of pure energy, blocked every blaster bolt that came his way and chopped couple of n'ere-do-wells in two; the rest of the rabble would have left him alone. There is no reason at all for Luke, Han, Leia, Chewy, Lando, C3PO or R2D2 to have done any of this. Add to the mix the fact that Luke and Leia are two highly valued members of the Rebellion which is a several-thousand-man-strong organization with its own commando teams. Why send the key players of your army into a stronghold of evil without backup? Isn't there a group of Rebel Alliance Rangers that could infiltrate the palace of the vile Hutt and escape without notice? If you've got Jedi, Sith and Space Slugs you've got to have Space Ninjas. It just stands to reason.
Overall Plot: According to Gary Kurtz, the producer of the first two films in the series, the plot for the third film was radically different than the product that arrived on screens in 1983. It was his opposition to the story changes suggested by George Lucas that precipitated his departure from Lucasfilm. Instead of a bold new entry into the overall Luke Skywalker saga, Lucas wanted to play it safe. And it is no wonder that fans were a little bit jarred by the return to formula that Jedi represented. A New Hope introduced us to the galaxy far far away and took us into the heart of one of the mightiest battles of an epic war. The Empire Strikes Back continued the story with a different style, showed us new worlds and characters, and broke our hearts at the end. In both films the action is driven, in part, by the threat of Jabba the Hutt and his band of inter-galactic bounty hunters who want Han Solo to either pay up or become payment himself. We never see the gangster himself, at least not in the early versions of the films, but his name casts a shadow over the fates of all of our heroes. The threat is far removed from the on screen action, but his presence is felt in the form of Boba Fett: A Bounty Hunter completely without Ruth. If the first two films are any indication, Jabba the Hutt is as frightening a character as The Emperor or Darth Vader and as cunning. Yeah, that guy doesn't show up.
Instead of a formidable opponent and master tactician whose importance to the story line has been foreshadowed by two movies we are given a fat, immobile slug-thing. Not only is he sort of a let down from a design perspective, this entire plot line is tied up and over with after only 20 minutes of movie. After four hours of storytelling that preceded his appearance Jabba only gets to play into the hands of the most ludicrous plan of a half-trained Jedi and then die. He should have been a match for just about anyone we've met so far. He should have been a puppet master manipulating a rouge's gallery of henchmen and foiling our hero at every turn only to be defeated by some masterstroke that no one could have foreseen. The Jabba of Jedi looks like the master of Play-doh and not much else. His henchmen are stupid. His defenses are non-existent and the one cool guy that hangs out with him, Boba Fett, is killed seconds after engaging a blind man in combat.
No, the Jabba angle is abandoned in short order and instead of myriad new worlds to explore and new enemies to face we are given Tattooine (again), Dagobah (again) and The Death Star (again). Oh, and our enemy is still Darth Vader. We do get to meet the Emperor in the form of a heavily made-up Ian McDarmid and that's pretty cool. But he doesn't really do much besides taunt Luke and deliver some juicy lines. We also get to visit the forest moon of Endor which looks a lot like southern California if it were populated entirely by fuzzy-baby-cutie-bears.
Much of the action follows no particular flow. People do things because the writers want them to, not because it makes sense. For example: Chewbacca, a two hundred year old Wookiee, electrician, machinist and pilot suddenly decides that he needs to eat the rotting corpse of a creature he finds in the forest. This justifies a trap that the writers want the heroes to fall into. One of the those heroes is a Jedi Knight, but that doesn't seem to matter as he and the others are undone by a rope net and some stone spears. Also, when our heroes are flying into the Endor system to execute their not-so-secret infiltration of the moon, they fail to notice the massed Imperial fleet that stands between them and the target. Had they noticed, they might have radioed back to their friends that it was all a trap. That or run the hell away themselves. In addition, Luke seems to have forgotten that he and Vader can sense each other over a considerable distance. He only seems to give it some thought as they fly by the command ship containing his murderous father and the thousands of soldiers he controls. Vader, no smarter than anyone else, allows them to land rather than capture them right there. This allows the rebels to hook up with the Ewoks, destroy the shield that protects the Death Star and sell some extra toys.
A word on character development: I'm shoehorning this in with plot so that I don't abandon my format choice. Luke is not a very curious individual in this film. He's keen to leave home and have new adventures in the first film. He's ready to learn all he can about being a Jedi in the second film. But this time around, he just doesn't care anymore. Yoda confirms that Vader is his father and Obi Wan seconds that. Super-good. However, beyond the fact that Anakin Skywalker went all evil and became Darth Vader (I picture him stepping into a phone booth ala Clark Kent becoming Superman), that's all the explanation Luke is given. Does Luke ask how Vader came to be encased in a space suit? No. Does he ask how Vader fell to the Dark Side lest he fall himself? No. Does he ask who his mother is? No, he does not. At this point Luke just wants the movie franchise to be over because he is the stand in for George Lucas. By this time it is clear that the series creator wants nothing more to do with his creation and as such nobody asks any embarrassing questions in the same way that no one ever has to pee. "Go kill Vader," says Obi Wan. "Alright," replies Luke. And so it is that he flies into danger. We as an audience raise our hands to ask those pertinent questions ourselves, but we sit in the dark like a sea of over-eager students who will never be called on.
Production Values: Dude, what happened? The original film set a standard for detail that everyone has been aping ever since. The special effects were groundbreaking and still hold up today, for the most part. The second film was the realization of a dream as a larger budget and more refined effects gave us new vistas and vibrant landscapes on alien worlds. Colors popped, eyes bugged out, and we all learned to love a little puppet named Yoda. Enter Return of the Jedi. The special effects are ok, but everything looks kind of washed out. Nothing has any depth. Jabba's palace is shot from about two angles and it populated almost entirely by people in jumpsuits and Halloween masks. It is exactly what Lucas was trying to avoid with the Cantina scene from A New Hope. Jabba looks fake and rubbery and the original Sy Snoodles (lead singer of the band) hardly moves. Instead she just sort of shuffles sullenly in place while her tiny mouth spasms in time to the music. Something else that struck me is how little of the Death Star we see. Vader lands dramatically at the beginning and the Emperor joins him later in the same hanger. Later we see the Emperor's thrown room which looks like part of an old warehouse. This is the seat of ultimate power in the universe but nothing seems very well built. Kind of a flimsy battle station, if you ask me.
The worst part of the visual style of Jedi is the over-use of backdrops. Big paintings that stand in for actual sets or models. Most egregious is a painting of the Millenium Falcon that hangs in the background during what should be a dramatic scene between Han Solo and Lando. Instead of paying attention to their lines I'm watching a 2D replacement for a special effect. Earlier we watch as Luke and crew retrieve the droids from the sands of Tattooine. The painting that represents the sand dunes of the deep desert looks like it was done by a high school art class for the local production of Aladdin.
Space ships fly at odd angles because the matting process looks hurried, action figures ride speeder bikes, and everything takes on a dull gray tone as though everything happens in the late evening. Not only are the effects and lighting questionable, but the hairdresser even recycled Aunt Beru's haircut and gave it to Luke. That's not my observation, mind you. It's been tossed around a lot, but once you notice it you can't help but smirk whenever Mark Hamill is on screen.
I know that many people worked thousands of man hours making this movie and there are bright spots like the final space battle that really show off the effort. But overall this movie is sloppy compared to its predecessors. Watching this one back to back with Empire leaves one with the feeling that Jedi is the older, grainier movie and Empire is the bold new vision.
Finally, how do the Rebels win? The fact that an entire legion of the Emperor's best men are destroyed by the Ewoks boggles the mind. It boggles it, delivers and flying axe kick the mind's delicate face and the punches the mind in the back of its sensitive mind-knee crumpling the mind like a thing that crumples in an analogy. Why are the Stormtroopers so weak and foolish? In the last film they invaded a heavily armed Rebel base and did so easily. Now they can't fight back against the cutie-wootie bears and their super-advanced armor can't defend them against little twig-like arrows. After the legion is defeated by Care Bears, Han has the great idea of using the Imperial comm-system to announce that the Rebels have been defeated. This results in the bunker lowering all defenses so the Rebels can walk in and blow them up. You see, that's what happens when a heavily fortified military position in hostile territory is returned to Status Quo, they open all the doors and windows. I'm sure something similar happens in the Green Zone of Bagdad every day.
Alright, the shield that protects the Death Star from attack (something they should have had two movies ago) is down for the count. The desperate and badly outnumbered Rebels can now begin their assault on the Death Star and win the day. So, what do we have to work with? The Imperials are represented by many many Star Destroyers and thousands of fighters, plus the Death Star is now operational and able to destroy any target in its path. The Rebels, in a sort of "Knife to a Gunfight" move, show up with about four capital ships and a handful of fighters. One of the capital ships is a Medical Frigate. Yes, they brought their Medical ship into battle. Oh, and the Death Star immediately destroys two of their larger ships. Somehow, with the shield down, Lando and his wing men are able to out-fly every fighter in the sky, descend into the Death Star and detonate its main reactor. The Emperor is dead, the Death Star is destroyed and the all rejoice. Kaloo Kalay, oh fraptious day! The only problem is the Imperial Fleet is still right there.
Why are the Rebels not wiped out by the overwhelming forces of the Empire? Where do all the ships go? If I were commanding even one of those Star Destroyers, I'd just hammer what was left of the Rebel fleet (approximately three medium size ships) and then blast the surface of Endor into ash. Then it would be Miller Time. Instead, the ships all vanish in a puff of forgetfulness. The audience is dazzled by the explosion of the Death Star and the Rebels are all so happy to have killed the Emperor that nobody mentions the fleet again. My theory is that when the Death Star exploded the Star Destroyers got spooked like jumpy horses and lit out for the safety of the Galactic Barn. That or maybe everybody in the Empire was just really sleepy. I don't know how they keep time in space, but I'm sure that it was past their bedtime. They all returned home to sack out and fight again at a more reasonable hour.
So, that's it. It's a train wreck on the order of The Phantom Menace. Nothing makes sense, it doesn't look all that great and the characters are morons. As a child I loved this movie dearly. Now I can't sit through it without exclaiming "Oh, come on!" Okay, I'm ready for my nerdy beat-down.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Movies are Stupid Round Four: Computers are Also Stupid
Once upon a time I used to be fairly ignorant about computers. In many areas of computing I would still be considered a novice, but I do have a good grounding in the basics and that has served me well lo these many years. Back when I was less knowledgeable about the inner workings of the silicon mind I was understandably impressed by Hollywood's presentation of computer science. Computers, I thought at the time, can do anything that a hero needs them to unless they are evil computers in which case they can still do anything, but only the things that evil computers want to do...like kill all humanity using an army of vat-grown Arnold Schwarzeneggers.
As I grew in my technological knowledge, or tech-understandery, it seemed that many of the abilities of movie computers were vastly overstated. You can't actually launch nukes against Russia using a TRS-80 and a dial-up modem connecting at 2600 baud. Sure, some kid in the 80's hacked the Pentagon using one, but he didn't even know what he was looking at and he certainly couldn't have killed us all with a key stroke. I'm pretty sure that guy works at Wendy's these days replacing the light bulbs on the drive-thru menu board. Nor can you upload a virus from a Mac Power Book to an entirely unknown Extraterrestrial data system. Systems are not as interconnected as we are led to believe on television and in the movies. A program that adversely effects my workstation won't hurt my server. A virus that might destroy the email system wouldn't harm even one byte of internet pornography that I in no way have backup up on three hard drives...at work. The password is not "Tallywacker".
Technology is a wonderful plot device and I'm not disputing that. Without incomprehensible science stuff we wouldn't have more than a handful of episodes of Star Trek or any episode of CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, NCIS, or Bones, Crossing Jordan, Law and Order SVU, Law and Order Criminal Intent, Law and Order Orignal Recipe or House. None of these fine shows could withstand even one script read-through without the complicated and bewildering array of printed-circuit B.S. that allows a detective\hero\doctor\part-time samurai to solve a mystery in 44 minutes. Sometimes you need to be across the galaxy in less than 12 parsecs (wink) so you can fight a guy in a mobile iron lung using an ancient martial art based on your feelings. In that rarefied situation I'll spot you the faster-than-light travel because the whole thing is absurd anyway. Plus, it lets me use extra hyphens. And I'll grant you ray guns, artificial gravity and everybody wearing their pajamas all the time. The future is a sleepy place and we, the sci-fi viewers, accept this as part of the genre that we love so well. But when it comes to computers, the interactive aspect of sci-fi, I call shenanigans on the whole of Hollywood's offerings.
What it boils down to, the consomme of the situation, is this: You must play by your own rules and those rules must make some sort of sense to begin with. In my office I have a telephone and a stapler and a workstation. There are programs that I could run on my desktop to eliminate the phone. The phone could use some software that might eliminate the need for certain aspects of the computer. The stapler is irreplaceable. The point is, I can't just take pieces of one and make the other. If I have a broken monitor, two AAA batteries and some hand lotion I cannot make a spreadsheet in Excel out of it. In the past certain learned men were shown to make radios out of coconuts when the need arose, but that was just a television show and a perfect example of crazy Hollywood technology. My physics professor used to say that "Parts is Parts" and while that makes sense at the subatomic level, it won't help you build a transport out of your old blender and a pair of heinouslly smelly tennis shoes. You just can't. So, when our friends on Star Trek crash land on a planet and must find a way to contact their compatriots or make a laser beam or a whole new ship, it makes no sense that they could just take a piece of this and a reactor from that and snap it all together like some sort of glowing space-lego set. But what is worse is the completly inconsistent way that the computers work in the first place. Sometimes they can just ask the computer what the likelyhood of some crazy plan working might be and she sings it right out. Other times she gets confused by simple requests for rare foods or music selections. If she's a super-smart AI with unlimited, or seemingly unlimited, processing power such that she can calculate the odds of surviving a trip through an asteroid field despite the protestations of the pilot, why can't she find Styx II in the ships archives? Count the pop-culture references there. Yeah, I know. Sad.
Picking on Star Trek or Wars or Man is easy. They're all based not on good science but on story telling and adventure. Bully for them. Droids are AI that think and feel and say wacky things during combat. They can fix complex systems on the fly. They always have the needed tool handy tucked away in their little metallic bodies, but they communicate with beeps and whistles or just say "ROGER ROGER" to everything. Really? I guess what put me on this tangent of computational criticism was a conversation my wife and I had about "The Fly". Dig this, in "The Fly" with Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, a scientist is working on teleportation. Now that falls soundly into my "silly technology forgiveness" safety zone. It's crazytalk to begin with so I have no beef with it. However, in order for his teleportation system to work he has had to create a complex computer mind that can break down the human form, interpret that being as data and then put it all back together again in another place. Having done some limited programming myself I can tell you that the logic required to make a computer program that intuitive would be worth much more than the teleportation system. Just having the tools necessary to create the OS needed to run the whole thing would be a veritable goldmine of computer science. But in true Hollywood form this is all cast aside. We've got to get Goldblum in that pod with a fly and scramble his DNA, stat! To that end, the computer is suddenly a special needs computer. It got confused when it saw, GASP!, two different patterns in the chamber. What to do? What to do? My assumption would be that the program would break, like when I try to query a database using the wrong syntax or I ask the system for data that doesn't exist. In the really-real world a computer can only do what it is told. Tell it anything new or unexpected and it just stops doing anything until you tell it different. Such is not the case with "The Fly". Now we have a system that can't make a simple decision, a logical decision, so it forumates a much more complicated plan. When faced with a new situation, one that I can't believe that any programmer in his right mind would not have thought of waaaay in advance, the computer does not choose option A: Shut down. Nor does it choose option B: Just teleport both beings seperately. No, it chooses option C: Meld the two beings together at the molecular level creating a whole new being that will be horrible. Too dumb to know what to do with some extra DNA, smart enough to reprogram itself to do something it had never done before or been told to do by anybody...ever. That's some movie stupidity if ever I saw it. An analog "I'm having trouble cutting down this tree with my chainsaw. Hmmm, I know! I'll create interstellar travel so that I can fly to a planet that doesn't have trees. Problem solved."
In "2001" the computer HAL is fully self aware and has something of a nervous breakdown. I buy that. He's not a thing, he's a he. People get upset and conflicted and unhappy. If I was a big metal ship floating through space having to look after a couple of shedding, stinking, eating, pooping bossy humans for months on end, I might get a little cranky. If a couple of guys, who could not exist without my constant intervention on their behalf, started talking smack about me inside a space-pod...somebody might have to die. Accidents happen, so watch your step during your spacewalk Dr. Poole. It makes sense, plays by its own rules and is exactly what you would expect from Arthur C. Clarke. It also makes sense that nobody in Hollywood got this movie when it came out and it was a commercial flop during its initial release. Now, had the computer made unbelievable leaps of logic, produced completely unfounded results from the flimsiest of hypothesis and talked in a kooky Jamaican patois the film would have been hyped from coast to coast and sold out every seat in every movie house from New York to other parts of New York. There were fewer cinemas in the sixties.
It was Mr. Clarke who once opined that any level of technology, sufficiently advanced, was indistinguishable from magic. Our movie making friends have taken this to mean that computers can be used in place of magic when mages, alchemists and such just don't fit the story. You need a hero to learn something he couldn't possibly know? The internet tells him. Do you have an unknown killer on the loose hacking up prostitutes and cab drivers? Just ask your semi-sentient PC who did it. We accept these absurdities because we largely don't know any better. But I submit that the reverse substitution would not be so easily accepted. Imagine a sword and sorcery movie where the loin-cloth-clad warrior must employ FORTRAN to stop the mad King Humassivious. "You must travel through the Misted Plains of Aronak, beyond the Foothills of Perpetual Sundays until you come to the...I T Department. There you will find Mark, the savvy PERL programmer who instructed me." Sort of loses something, doesn't it?
If we wouldn't stand for sloppy plot contrivances in the former, we shouldn't allow them in the latter. I know that a realistic depiction of programming or research would be tedious and uninteresting to almost everyone. But there must be some middle ground. Maybe a training montage ala Rocky IV. Just shots inter-cut of typing, back-spacing, drinking Mountain Dew, eating Doritos and more typing while a suitable rock anthem blares in the background. Until such time as the movie studios see fit to give us a real computer movie or a movie that at least portrays computing in a sensible way, I'll just have to cringe when I see a computer used supernaturally in a movie. I'll just close my eyes and pretend that it's not happening. That or get over myself and drink my $3.00 cherry coke.
As I grew in my technological knowledge, or tech-understandery, it seemed that many of the abilities of movie computers were vastly overstated. You can't actually launch nukes against Russia using a TRS-80 and a dial-up modem connecting at 2600 baud. Sure, some kid in the 80's hacked the Pentagon using one, but he didn't even know what he was looking at and he certainly couldn't have killed us all with a key stroke. I'm pretty sure that guy works at Wendy's these days replacing the light bulbs on the drive-thru menu board. Nor can you upload a virus from a Mac Power Book to an entirely unknown Extraterrestrial data system. Systems are not as interconnected as we are led to believe on television and in the movies. A program that adversely effects my workstation won't hurt my server. A virus that might destroy the email system wouldn't harm even one byte of internet pornography that I in no way have backup up on three hard drives...at work. The password is not "Tallywacker".
Technology is a wonderful plot device and I'm not disputing that. Without incomprehensible science stuff we wouldn't have more than a handful of episodes of Star Trek or any episode of CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, NCIS, or Bones, Crossing Jordan, Law and Order SVU, Law and Order Criminal Intent, Law and Order Orignal Recipe or House. None of these fine shows could withstand even one script read-through without the complicated and bewildering array of printed-circuit B.S. that allows a detective\hero\doctor\part-time samurai to solve a mystery in 44 minutes. Sometimes you need to be across the galaxy in less than 12 parsecs (wink) so you can fight a guy in a mobile iron lung using an ancient martial art based on your feelings. In that rarefied situation I'll spot you the faster-than-light travel because the whole thing is absurd anyway. Plus, it lets me use extra hyphens. And I'll grant you ray guns, artificial gravity and everybody wearing their pajamas all the time. The future is a sleepy place and we, the sci-fi viewers, accept this as part of the genre that we love so well. But when it comes to computers, the interactive aspect of sci-fi, I call shenanigans on the whole of Hollywood's offerings.
What it boils down to, the consomme of the situation, is this: You must play by your own rules and those rules must make some sort of sense to begin with. In my office I have a telephone and a stapler and a workstation. There are programs that I could run on my desktop to eliminate the phone. The phone could use some software that might eliminate the need for certain aspects of the computer. The stapler is irreplaceable. The point is, I can't just take pieces of one and make the other. If I have a broken monitor, two AAA batteries and some hand lotion I cannot make a spreadsheet in Excel out of it. In the past certain learned men were shown to make radios out of coconuts when the need arose, but that was just a television show and a perfect example of crazy Hollywood technology. My physics professor used to say that "Parts is Parts" and while that makes sense at the subatomic level, it won't help you build a transport out of your old blender and a pair of heinouslly smelly tennis shoes. You just can't. So, when our friends on Star Trek crash land on a planet and must find a way to contact their compatriots or make a laser beam or a whole new ship, it makes no sense that they could just take a piece of this and a reactor from that and snap it all together like some sort of glowing space-lego set. But what is worse is the completly inconsistent way that the computers work in the first place. Sometimes they can just ask the computer what the likelyhood of some crazy plan working might be and she sings it right out. Other times she gets confused by simple requests for rare foods or music selections. If she's a super-smart AI with unlimited, or seemingly unlimited, processing power such that she can calculate the odds of surviving a trip through an asteroid field despite the protestations of the pilot, why can't she find Styx II in the ships archives? Count the pop-culture references there. Yeah, I know. Sad.
Picking on Star Trek or Wars or Man is easy. They're all based not on good science but on story telling and adventure. Bully for them. Droids are AI that think and feel and say wacky things during combat. They can fix complex systems on the fly. They always have the needed tool handy tucked away in their little metallic bodies, but they communicate with beeps and whistles or just say "ROGER ROGER" to everything. Really? I guess what put me on this tangent of computational criticism was a conversation my wife and I had about "The Fly". Dig this, in "The Fly" with Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, a scientist is working on teleportation. Now that falls soundly into my "silly technology forgiveness" safety zone. It's crazytalk to begin with so I have no beef with it. However, in order for his teleportation system to work he has had to create a complex computer mind that can break down the human form, interpret that being as data and then put it all back together again in another place. Having done some limited programming myself I can tell you that the logic required to make a computer program that intuitive would be worth much more than the teleportation system. Just having the tools necessary to create the OS needed to run the whole thing would be a veritable goldmine of computer science. But in true Hollywood form this is all cast aside. We've got to get Goldblum in that pod with a fly and scramble his DNA, stat! To that end, the computer is suddenly a special needs computer. It got confused when it saw, GASP!, two different patterns in the chamber. What to do? What to do? My assumption would be that the program would break, like when I try to query a database using the wrong syntax or I ask the system for data that doesn't exist. In the really-real world a computer can only do what it is told. Tell it anything new or unexpected and it just stops doing anything until you tell it different. Such is not the case with "The Fly". Now we have a system that can't make a simple decision, a logical decision, so it forumates a much more complicated plan. When faced with a new situation, one that I can't believe that any programmer in his right mind would not have thought of waaaay in advance, the computer does not choose option A: Shut down. Nor does it choose option B: Just teleport both beings seperately. No, it chooses option C: Meld the two beings together at the molecular level creating a whole new being that will be horrible. Too dumb to know what to do with some extra DNA, smart enough to reprogram itself to do something it had never done before or been told to do by anybody...ever. That's some movie stupidity if ever I saw it. An analog "I'm having trouble cutting down this tree with my chainsaw. Hmmm, I know! I'll create interstellar travel so that I can fly to a planet that doesn't have trees. Problem solved."
In "2001" the computer HAL is fully self aware and has something of a nervous breakdown. I buy that. He's not a thing, he's a he. People get upset and conflicted and unhappy. If I was a big metal ship floating through space having to look after a couple of shedding, stinking, eating, pooping bossy humans for months on end, I might get a little cranky. If a couple of guys, who could not exist without my constant intervention on their behalf, started talking smack about me inside a space-pod...somebody might have to die. Accidents happen, so watch your step during your spacewalk Dr. Poole. It makes sense, plays by its own rules and is exactly what you would expect from Arthur C. Clarke. It also makes sense that nobody in Hollywood got this movie when it came out and it was a commercial flop during its initial release. Now, had the computer made unbelievable leaps of logic, produced completely unfounded results from the flimsiest of hypothesis and talked in a kooky Jamaican patois the film would have been hyped from coast to coast and sold out every seat in every movie house from New York to other parts of New York. There were fewer cinemas in the sixties.
It was Mr. Clarke who once opined that any level of technology, sufficiently advanced, was indistinguishable from magic. Our movie making friends have taken this to mean that computers can be used in place of magic when mages, alchemists and such just don't fit the story. You need a hero to learn something he couldn't possibly know? The internet tells him. Do you have an unknown killer on the loose hacking up prostitutes and cab drivers? Just ask your semi-sentient PC who did it. We accept these absurdities because we largely don't know any better. But I submit that the reverse substitution would not be so easily accepted. Imagine a sword and sorcery movie where the loin-cloth-clad warrior must employ FORTRAN to stop the mad King Humassivious. "You must travel through the Misted Plains of Aronak, beyond the Foothills of Perpetual Sundays until you come to the...I T Department. There you will find Mark, the savvy PERL programmer who instructed me." Sort of loses something, doesn't it?
If we wouldn't stand for sloppy plot contrivances in the former, we shouldn't allow them in the latter. I know that a realistic depiction of programming or research would be tedious and uninteresting to almost everyone. But there must be some middle ground. Maybe a training montage ala Rocky IV. Just shots inter-cut of typing, back-spacing, drinking Mountain Dew, eating Doritos and more typing while a suitable rock anthem blares in the background. Until such time as the movie studios see fit to give us a real computer movie or a movie that at least portrays computing in a sensible way, I'll just have to cringe when I see a computer used supernaturally in a movie. I'll just close my eyes and pretend that it's not happening. That or get over myself and drink my $3.00 cherry coke.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Movies are Stupid Round Three: Mother Nature Hates You
If I learned anything at all about the weather from having watched The Day After Tomorrow it is this: Everything is the Vice President's fault. As near as I can tell the whole Global Warming crisis, which only seems to feel like a crisis in August for some reason, can be tracked back to the hateful and pig-headed actions of the Vice President of the United States. That bastard! While I find it hard to believe that the entire world could be cast into the seventh level of hell because of one crotchety old movie stereotype, I'll have to admit that it is good to know who is responsible for this mess. Now that we know who did it all let us discuss what he did and the consequences of his heinous actions.
The concept of The Day After Tomorrow is a familiar one...we are all doomed. The planet has been altered by our greenhouse gas emissions or "Civilization Farts" in such a way that the North Atlantic current has destabilized due to the saline content of the oceans having been reduced by the melting of the polar ice caps as a result of global warming caused by the aforementioned farts. It seems that while humanity has enjoyed the societal advances of technology over the last hundred years or so we have been, unbeknownst to the common folks, cutting the global cheese. Now the world is all smellified and is ready to take revenge on all of us wee little bald apes with our microwave ovens and Cadillacs and Styx 8-tracks. Mr. Roboto rules!
Basically the science in this movie only sounds like science. Rationality is thrown under the bus to make room for an expedient story and some cool special effects. With that in mind one must ignore everything said by Dennis Quaid's character having to do with climate change. You'd wear out your clicking finger trying to navigate through all the Wikipedia articles that deal with climate change while trying to vet anything that he says. We need disasters now, damn it! Science can sit this one out.
In place of a reasonable explanation for things we are given an arrogant villain onto whom we can focus our ire. He's a slave to those "Corporations" and uses words like "people" and "economy" so we know for certain that he's evil through and through. When confronted with the possibility that a century of industrial progress has crippled the Earth's natural heating processes he scoffs and suggests that we can't just undo all of humanity for the sake of avoiding an ice age that may or may not happen. The smug bastard even refuses to take these facts to his boss. Yes sir, the Vice President is not only to blame for what is to come, but clearly he is the only person in the government with any sway at all and if he refuses to take your findings to the President personally, then you'll just have to take your ball of research and go home...to your lab...of sulking.
Okay, so we've got our psuedo-scientific goobledygook, we've got our villain (oh how my rage burns against him and his button-down world!) now we just need a plausible story full of effects that are special. Well, we don't get one. Instead we get to watch this scientist, who is convinced that the world is coming to an end, send his son off to New York because he's on the debate team and as we all know the debate team finals trump any global emergency. I'm pretty sure that World War II was delayed for just such a reason.
The son, played by Jake Gyllenhall, looks in no way like a man in his late twenties playing a teenager. Not at all. And that's a good thing because he needs to play an idealistic and naive kid who must weather the storm to come and serve as that sole voice of reason in this crazy mixed-up world with its hills of beans that sometimes amount to things and other times do not. It is his plight, being stuck in New York when the special effects finally happen, that spurs the story on. By the time the world does start coming to an end the movie could use some spurs. I don't know about you, but when I pay to see intercontinental destruction I don't like being made to wait while people explore their feelings.
Anyway, the mid-atlantic water thingy is desalinated and so on which causes massive cooling in the form of super-gigantic ice hurricanes that form over land. Seriously. The result is a tidal wave, for some reason, that floods the eastern seaboard and then a massive cold snap that instantly freezes everything into a sheet of ice. Anyone caught outside will be killed. Jake Gyllenhall knows all this because he called his dad on an underwater telephone and got the 411 on global disaster. Strangely, none of the refugees huddled together in the library believe him. They all set out for warmer climes and maybe a latte from one of the many Starbucks in NYC. Oh, and they all die from the giant ice hurricane that they all literally watched happen before their eyes and yet didn't seem to think was dangerous.
On the note of giant ice hurricanes...the special effects are great in this movie. When NYC freezes over in a matter of seconds it looks real. The tidal wave, the super storms, the running an screaming; all good. But there seems to be a disconnect between the filmmakers and any type of logic. I know that science is out the window with this film, but there are some things you just can't do and all the CGI in the world is not going to help you. The best example of this is when Jake Gyllenhall and friends outrun cold. The temperature is dropping all over the northern hemisphere, but Jake is just too fast for it. Oh, it chases him down a hallway, but he escapes. Also he cures Septicemia with a single injection of Russian penicillin found on board a derelict oil tanker that somehow sailed down the streets of a major American city. And he outsmarts a pack of wolves. Later on he is saved from certain doom by his dad who walked from Washington D.C. to New York during the onset of a new Ice Age. That actually happens.
I own a copy of this movie on Blu-Ray. It looks awesome and overall I enjoy it, but this movie is way dumb. If you are willing to suspend reason and disbelief in the extreme, you too will enjoy this stupid movie. Otherwise you might bleed from your eyes as your brain tries to make sense of it all.
The concept of The Day After Tomorrow is a familiar one...we are all doomed. The planet has been altered by our greenhouse gas emissions or "Civilization Farts" in such a way that the North Atlantic current has destabilized due to the saline content of the oceans having been reduced by the melting of the polar ice caps as a result of global warming caused by the aforementioned farts. It seems that while humanity has enjoyed the societal advances of technology over the last hundred years or so we have been, unbeknownst to the common folks, cutting the global cheese. Now the world is all smellified and is ready to take revenge on all of us wee little bald apes with our microwave ovens and Cadillacs and Styx 8-tracks. Mr. Roboto rules!
Basically the science in this movie only sounds like science. Rationality is thrown under the bus to make room for an expedient story and some cool special effects. With that in mind one must ignore everything said by Dennis Quaid's character having to do with climate change. You'd wear out your clicking finger trying to navigate through all the Wikipedia articles that deal with climate change while trying to vet anything that he says. We need disasters now, damn it! Science can sit this one out.
In place of a reasonable explanation for things we are given an arrogant villain onto whom we can focus our ire. He's a slave to those "Corporations" and uses words like "people" and "economy" so we know for certain that he's evil through and through. When confronted with the possibility that a century of industrial progress has crippled the Earth's natural heating processes he scoffs and suggests that we can't just undo all of humanity for the sake of avoiding an ice age that may or may not happen. The smug bastard even refuses to take these facts to his boss. Yes sir, the Vice President is not only to blame for what is to come, but clearly he is the only person in the government with any sway at all and if he refuses to take your findings to the President personally, then you'll just have to take your ball of research and go home...to your lab...of sulking.
Okay, so we've got our psuedo-scientific goobledygook, we've got our villain (oh how my rage burns against him and his button-down world!) now we just need a plausible story full of effects that are special. Well, we don't get one. Instead we get to watch this scientist, who is convinced that the world is coming to an end, send his son off to New York because he's on the debate team and as we all know the debate team finals trump any global emergency. I'm pretty sure that World War II was delayed for just such a reason.
The son, played by Jake Gyllenhall, looks in no way like a man in his late twenties playing a teenager. Not at all. And that's a good thing because he needs to play an idealistic and naive kid who must weather the storm to come and serve as that sole voice of reason in this crazy mixed-up world with its hills of beans that sometimes amount to things and other times do not. It is his plight, being stuck in New York when the special effects finally happen, that spurs the story on. By the time the world does start coming to an end the movie could use some spurs. I don't know about you, but when I pay to see intercontinental destruction I don't like being made to wait while people explore their feelings.
Anyway, the mid-atlantic water thingy is desalinated and so on which causes massive cooling in the form of super-gigantic ice hurricanes that form over land. Seriously. The result is a tidal wave, for some reason, that floods the eastern seaboard and then a massive cold snap that instantly freezes everything into a sheet of ice. Anyone caught outside will be killed. Jake Gyllenhall knows all this because he called his dad on an underwater telephone and got the 411 on global disaster. Strangely, none of the refugees huddled together in the library believe him. They all set out for warmer climes and maybe a latte from one of the many Starbucks in NYC. Oh, and they all die from the giant ice hurricane that they all literally watched happen before their eyes and yet didn't seem to think was dangerous.
On the note of giant ice hurricanes...the special effects are great in this movie. When NYC freezes over in a matter of seconds it looks real. The tidal wave, the super storms, the running an screaming; all good. But there seems to be a disconnect between the filmmakers and any type of logic. I know that science is out the window with this film, but there are some things you just can't do and all the CGI in the world is not going to help you. The best example of this is when Jake Gyllenhall and friends outrun cold. The temperature is dropping all over the northern hemisphere, but Jake is just too fast for it. Oh, it chases him down a hallway, but he escapes. Also he cures Septicemia with a single injection of Russian penicillin found on board a derelict oil tanker that somehow sailed down the streets of a major American city. And he outsmarts a pack of wolves. Later on he is saved from certain doom by his dad who walked from Washington D.C. to New York during the onset of a new Ice Age. That actually happens.
I own a copy of this movie on Blu-Ray. It looks awesome and overall I enjoy it, but this movie is way dumb. If you are willing to suspend reason and disbelief in the extreme, you too will enjoy this stupid movie. Otherwise you might bleed from your eyes as your brain tries to make sense of it all.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Movies are Stupid: Round Two...Electric Bigelow
You've likely never heard of Kathryn Bigelow. At one time she was married to James Cameron of Terminator fame. Aside from that brief brush with greatness she directed a little known film called Point Break starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze. That was, and has been, the high point of her directing career. She followed up Point Break with a poorly received film called Strange Days. I think I'm one of the seven people who paid to see it in the cinema. It's overly long and takes itself way too seriously, but it doesn't suck. Ralph Fiennes is in it doing a passable American accent and Angela (should have played Storm) Bassett plays his love interest/bad-ass driver. It's a decent yarn about the end of the millennium set in a near-future that looks nothing like the actual future that came to pass. Most near-future movies are that way. Instead of "near-future" they should call them "silly special effects budget expenditure". All of which is beside the point. In 1987 Kathryn Bigelow, you can tell she's serious because she spells her name with a "y", co-wrote and directed a largely unseen film called "Near Dark" and it rocked. However, as with most movies, it was also stupid.
The concept of Near Dark is fairly simple. Boy meets girl, girl bites boy and turns him into a vampire, boy is abducted by girl's vampire family consisting of weird urban shit-kickers and, for some reason, a young boy who is really an old man. Freaky. That would pretty much be the end of it were this an episode of the Twilight Zone, but our hero cannot bring himself to kill anyone in order to eat and this means trouble as the vampire gang has gotten used to the idea of killing and eating humans. Those members who are not on board with this dynamic must leave and by "leave" I mean "get ripped apart by angry vampires". Thus a young country boy from Texas is on the run from a who's who of supporting character actors who frequently appear in James Cameron films.
Sounds great, right? How could this movie, which I so obviously like, be stupid? Allow me to illustrate. Apparently this gang of supernatural killers has been roving around the US since some time in the mid 1800's killing folks left and right without being noticed. That's some trick. I'm sure a whole raft of serial killers would love to know how to pull that one off. A little known fact about law enforcement: They take murder very seriously. Most murder cases are solved and many are solved in short order. These days they just run any DNA they find through a database and start building a profile of their killer within hours of the crime. But even in the archaic 1980's the police were not, contrary to popular belief, incompetent. Generally speaking, if you killed somebody in 1987, the police would track you down and arrest you. Whether alive or undead, everyone was subject to the law. And as such one has to wonder how a group of bloodthirsty killers can leave bodies strewn all over the countryside year after year for over a hundred years and never get caught. One could argue that they use their otherworldly powers to subdue their prey and that they further use their supernatural strength, speed and cunning to hide away their crimes that they might work in secret for all time. One could argue that, but one would be contradicted by the movie at every turn.
Here we have a group of scruffy-looking people riding around in an RV or van or SUV or other large vehicle with the windows blacked out. That alone would raise suspicions among even the most disinterested of observers. Add to that the fact that they stalk their prey by walking up to them, making small talk, and then ripping their faces off. In one scene from the film the band of merry murderers kill all but one patron in a bar and then burn the place to the ground. This is one of the few times when the film makes some kind of sense because the lone survivor calls the police who then promptly hunt down the killers. Unfortunately for both the cops and the viewers the vampires are able to escape by...wait for it...driving away. Indeed, after a harrowing shootout with the state police the vamps make good their escape by getting in their van and driving away. The cops do not give chase or even call in backup via their radios. I guess they just hang around in the desert for a while until they figure out that the bad guys aren't coming back. After that they go to Waffle House for some coffee and pie. The Waffle House bit doesn't happen in the movie, but I imagined it happening and that made me smile.
There is more idiocy to be had as the story unfolds. First a minor gripe among the many other, better fed, gripes: why don't they black out the windows of their vehicle when they steal it? Twice they are shown to be rapidly deploying their half-assed efforts to block the sunlight as dawn approaches. You'd think that after a century of hunting and hiding they would have this all down to a science. However, these are clearly the slacker vampires who never get a book published about them. Without a doubt any group of nocturnal death merchants who periodically forget that the sun will kill them are not long for this world. How they made it all the way to 1987 without bursting into flames is beyond me. In any event, my plan would go like this were I the cranky leader of a bunch of dusty cowboy vampires: Step 1) Steal a car. Step 2) Black out all the windows thoroughly. Step 3) Cautiously hunt my prey and then dispatch them where they will never be found. Step 4) Arrive at predetermined sunlight-free location to sleep. That's it. How hard could that possibly be?
More gripes; A common problem with modern movies is that directors seem to think we are morons. This is especially true when it comes to firearms. In the movie world anyone one not on camera cannot hear the report of a hand gun or a rifle. This movie has shotgun blasts in the middle of the night that arouse no suspicion and a large caliber hand gun is fired in a hotel room with no intervention by the police or other authority figures. You see, if you're not on screen you must be deaf. In addition to the soundless gun play there are buckets of blood after every attack, but everybody stays relatively clean. One scene involves a vamp using his sharpened spurs to cut a man's throat. At the end of the scene the floor, walls and even the ceiling drip with blood, but later that same vamp is plasma-free. Speaking of blood, that brings me to my final gripe.
Modern vampire stories have become morose and dour. Anne Rice made it her goal in life to douche-fy the vampire and make him a sad and lonely creature living on the edge of society wishing he could join his human brethren and no longer be on the outside looking in. Boo Hoo. One thing she got right was the idea that you can't just stop being a vampire because you don't like it anymore. Not so in Near Dark. After our hero escapes the vampires with the help of his family who just happened to be staying at the same hotel, the father gives him a blood transfusion that de-vamperizes him. Seems to me that anybody reporting to an Emergency Room with a strange blood disorder would be treated in a similar manner. A quick trip to any Doc-in-the-Box would be enough to undo the horrible fate that had befallen you. Within the confines of this vampiric paradigm the unearthly kiss of the Nosferatu is not unlike a case of syphilis. Sure, vampirisim would have been a terrible plague upon the world striking terror into the hearts of men and causing mothers to hold their children tightly to them at night for fear of the ancient evil that walked like men. This would have been true right up until the mid-1800's when blood transfusions started to become more common. By the 1900's it was a well tested technique with proven results. If all it takes to cure vampirism is a well-known and widely available medical procedure, then the vampire was defanged as far back as 1825. So, to sum up, one can stop being a vampire by taking in large quantities of human blood. That makes no sense whatsoever and begs the question: Has Kathryn Bigelow ever heard of vampires before?
The concept of Near Dark is fairly simple. Boy meets girl, girl bites boy and turns him into a vampire, boy is abducted by girl's vampire family consisting of weird urban shit-kickers and, for some reason, a young boy who is really an old man. Freaky. That would pretty much be the end of it were this an episode of the Twilight Zone, but our hero cannot bring himself to kill anyone in order to eat and this means trouble as the vampire gang has gotten used to the idea of killing and eating humans. Those members who are not on board with this dynamic must leave and by "leave" I mean "get ripped apart by angry vampires". Thus a young country boy from Texas is on the run from a who's who of supporting character actors who frequently appear in James Cameron films.
Sounds great, right? How could this movie, which I so obviously like, be stupid? Allow me to illustrate. Apparently this gang of supernatural killers has been roving around the US since some time in the mid 1800's killing folks left and right without being noticed. That's some trick. I'm sure a whole raft of serial killers would love to know how to pull that one off. A little known fact about law enforcement: They take murder very seriously. Most murder cases are solved and many are solved in short order. These days they just run any DNA they find through a database and start building a profile of their killer within hours of the crime. But even in the archaic 1980's the police were not, contrary to popular belief, incompetent. Generally speaking, if you killed somebody in 1987, the police would track you down and arrest you. Whether alive or undead, everyone was subject to the law. And as such one has to wonder how a group of bloodthirsty killers can leave bodies strewn all over the countryside year after year for over a hundred years and never get caught. One could argue that they use their otherworldly powers to subdue their prey and that they further use their supernatural strength, speed and cunning to hide away their crimes that they might work in secret for all time. One could argue that, but one would be contradicted by the movie at every turn.
Here we have a group of scruffy-looking people riding around in an RV or van or SUV or other large vehicle with the windows blacked out. That alone would raise suspicions among even the most disinterested of observers. Add to that the fact that they stalk their prey by walking up to them, making small talk, and then ripping their faces off. In one scene from the film the band of merry murderers kill all but one patron in a bar and then burn the place to the ground. This is one of the few times when the film makes some kind of sense because the lone survivor calls the police who then promptly hunt down the killers. Unfortunately for both the cops and the viewers the vampires are able to escape by...wait for it...driving away. Indeed, after a harrowing shootout with the state police the vamps make good their escape by getting in their van and driving away. The cops do not give chase or even call in backup via their radios. I guess they just hang around in the desert for a while until they figure out that the bad guys aren't coming back. After that they go to Waffle House for some coffee and pie. The Waffle House bit doesn't happen in the movie, but I imagined it happening and that made me smile.
There is more idiocy to be had as the story unfolds. First a minor gripe among the many other, better fed, gripes: why don't they black out the windows of their vehicle when they steal it? Twice they are shown to be rapidly deploying their half-assed efforts to block the sunlight as dawn approaches. You'd think that after a century of hunting and hiding they would have this all down to a science. However, these are clearly the slacker vampires who never get a book published about them. Without a doubt any group of nocturnal death merchants who periodically forget that the sun will kill them are not long for this world. How they made it all the way to 1987 without bursting into flames is beyond me. In any event, my plan would go like this were I the cranky leader of a bunch of dusty cowboy vampires: Step 1) Steal a car. Step 2) Black out all the windows thoroughly. Step 3) Cautiously hunt my prey and then dispatch them where they will never be found. Step 4) Arrive at predetermined sunlight-free location to sleep. That's it. How hard could that possibly be?
More gripes; A common problem with modern movies is that directors seem to think we are morons. This is especially true when it comes to firearms. In the movie world anyone one not on camera cannot hear the report of a hand gun or a rifle. This movie has shotgun blasts in the middle of the night that arouse no suspicion and a large caliber hand gun is fired in a hotel room with no intervention by the police or other authority figures. You see, if you're not on screen you must be deaf. In addition to the soundless gun play there are buckets of blood after every attack, but everybody stays relatively clean. One scene involves a vamp using his sharpened spurs to cut a man's throat. At the end of the scene the floor, walls and even the ceiling drip with blood, but later that same vamp is plasma-free. Speaking of blood, that brings me to my final gripe.
Modern vampire stories have become morose and dour. Anne Rice made it her goal in life to douche-fy the vampire and make him a sad and lonely creature living on the edge of society wishing he could join his human brethren and no longer be on the outside looking in. Boo Hoo. One thing she got right was the idea that you can't just stop being a vampire because you don't like it anymore. Not so in Near Dark. After our hero escapes the vampires with the help of his family who just happened to be staying at the same hotel, the father gives him a blood transfusion that de-vamperizes him. Seems to me that anybody reporting to an Emergency Room with a strange blood disorder would be treated in a similar manner. A quick trip to any Doc-in-the-Box would be enough to undo the horrible fate that had befallen you. Within the confines of this vampiric paradigm the unearthly kiss of the Nosferatu is not unlike a case of syphilis. Sure, vampirisim would have been a terrible plague upon the world striking terror into the hearts of men and causing mothers to hold their children tightly to them at night for fear of the ancient evil that walked like men. This would have been true right up until the mid-1800's when blood transfusions started to become more common. By the 1900's it was a well tested technique with proven results. If all it takes to cure vampirism is a well-known and widely available medical procedure, then the vampire was defanged as far back as 1825. So, to sum up, one can stop being a vampire by taking in large quantities of human blood. That makes no sense whatsoever and begs the question: Has Kathryn Bigelow ever heard of vampires before?
Monday, August 18, 2008
Movies are Stupid: Round One...Ricky Bobby
The people who make films don't like them very much and the people that write films are way too connected to their projects. In the middle, us. We the movie viewing public are forced to endure films that are, at the same time, the anemic step-children of some disinterested studio head and the over-fed, bloated pet project of some under-appreciated and reality-detached writer. As a result, there are far too many hyphens floating around this review. As an example of both studio malaise and artistic overindulgence I will be using Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.
Studio executives are convinced of one thing that guides their every cinematic decision: Star Power equals dollars. Now, we all know that this is patently untrue. Look at Catwoman or Batman and Robin or any Arnold Schwarzenegger film not directed by James Cameron. Just because you put a known quantity on the poster does not mean we the viewing public will turn up in droves to give you our money. However, year after year we are served up the same actors (of varying degrees of skill or charm) in a spate of unwatchable films. Will Farrell is one such actor.
I am a Will Ferrell fan. Let's just get that out of the way. He was the one bright spot of Old School and often the only truly funny character on SNL during his tenure there. Imagine the Spartan Cheerleaders with any other male performer from those years. And that bit was just barely funny. The point is: He's got talent and he's willing to do just about anything to entertain. Certainly such a man should be high on any filmmaker's list of leading comedic men. And as such he appears time and again as largely the same character in a host of mediocre comedies that waste both his natural charisma and our time.
In Talladega Nights Ferrell portrays Ricky Bobby an idiot redneck NASCAR driver who wins despite all logic. His secret skill to winning so many NASCAR races? Drive Fast. Yep, all these years the other NASCAR drivers have been ignoring those upper gears that allow for great speed. But not Ricky Bobby. He looked down at the diagram on the gear shift and determined that there were other selections beyond 1st and 2nd. Genius! I know, I know, it's a stupid comedy. But couldn't they at least have come up with a better conceit as to how he wins so many races without having a brain in his head? Guess not.
The foil for Ricky Bobby is none other than Borat. Sacha Baren Cohen plays a gay, French, formula one racer who has come to destroy Ricky Bobby. Oh noes! How does this upstart Frenchy intend to win against such a racing virtuoso as Ricky Bobby? He's gonna drive even faster. Oh yeah, he's going all the way to 5th gear while Ricky languishes in 4th. The Fool!
Rounding out the cast for this humorous tour de force is Ricky's wife, whose name escapes me (such is her contribution to the movie), his two sons Walker and Texas Ranger (actually a funny joke) and Ricky's best friend, that guy from Boogie Nights that isn't Marky Mark. With such a stellar cast how could one go wrong? Let me explain. The wife is a moron like Ricky and that's fine. The charm of these movies is there wacky characters who defy all reason because reason is stupid and should be destroyed...as we all know. Unfortunately they cast an attractive, but not spectacular looking, actress in the role of Mrs. Bobby. A running gag throughout the film references her amazing breasts but even a cursory inspection of the goods reveals small, pert breasts to be sure, but not awe-inspiring. How much would it have cost to get an actress with a huge rack? Hell, even if they like the actress they had, why not use some of the Jar Jar Binks technology for a good purpose and increase her bust to epic proportions? I'm a stickler for such things. By "things" I mean "boobies" and by "stickler" I mean "I like to look at boobies".
Ricky's best friend and fellow racer is dumber than Ricky. He too uses the secret upper gears to gain better standing in the races, but he never wins. Why he doesn't just drive on past the lead car and become a winner himself is never explained. He just can't seem to do that and we accept it.
The two boys, Walker and Texas Ranger, are foul mouthed heathens. They actually made me laugh several times. Good for them.
Also, Ricky's father appears several times as part of a subplot involving Ricky driving fast because his daddy told him to...or something. There's a live cougar involved. Anyway, Gary Cole is in the movie and I like to see him working.
So, why does this movie fail so powerfully on every level? People went to see it in the theater. It is considered a financial success. Doesn't that prove that people are exactly as dumb as the studio execs think they are? To a degree they are right. But that doesn't make this movie funnier. It doesn't justify the seven dollars you paid to see it or the two hours it took to tell a weak story. And that brings me to my gripe with the screenwriters.
These guys toil in obscurity. They write scripts that no one will ever read. Scripts that get read but not produced and occasionally they get to write a script that will get produced but the studio gets final say on just how funny it can be. You see, it's not that the screenwriters can't write funny, it's that they are told to rewrite so many times that they lose sight of just what funny is. The result is a bloated script full of every gimmick, schtick, or half-baked joke they can dream up. It's the scattershot version of writing. Just give them everything and hope something sticks.
What the screenwriters don't seem to know is that the studio bosses don't really care that much about a NASCAR comedy. They only really want to put their mark on the film by pissing on the script a few times just to let everybody know they are still in charge. Once finished with their excretory actions, they move on to pee on other scripts. That leaves a urine soaked screenplay that is far too long. Ricky Bobby only really has to race a little bit, be wacky, beat the Frenchman and drink a Bud. Maybe he could push a little brown person down the stairs or something.
There were several times, early in the film, when I laughed out loud. Oh that nutty Ricky Bobby with his two first names. He's a hoot with his ignorant hillbillydom. This is, after all, a Judd Apatow produced film and that is almost always a good thing. But before long both my wife and I were checking the clock and making trips to the bathroom without pausing the film. Because the storyline follows no descernable arc there is nothing to keep up with. The characters don't change and neither do the jokes. Finally you are reduced to watching non-descript idiots wander around in front of the camera. Sure, there are pretty colors, but that only gets you so far with a viewer such as myself. What made the other well-known Apatow comedies so good was an investment in the characters. Knocked Up, Superbad, 40 Year-old Virgin all had good storytelling on top of silliness that draws a viewer in and makes you care in some small way about the idiots. If Ricky Bobby had died in a horrible flaming crash at the one hour mark of this film with no explanation as to what happened next, I would have been much happier with the product. The point is, too many gags strung together in the guise of a plot.
There we have it. A perfect example of a movie studio with no idea how to make a movie and screenwriters who don't know when to stop making a movie. The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is in no way alone in this strange vortex of suckitude. Semi-pro, Blades of Glory, anything starring Jimmy Fallon...all of these are terrible and pointless. "Wave your arms and scream like a banshee" isn't direction enough to make a performace worth watching. Movies can be insane, I like insane, they just need to come to a point and then shut up. I'm going to do that now.
Studio executives are convinced of one thing that guides their every cinematic decision: Star Power equals dollars. Now, we all know that this is patently untrue. Look at Catwoman or Batman and Robin or any Arnold Schwarzenegger film not directed by James Cameron. Just because you put a known quantity on the poster does not mean we the viewing public will turn up in droves to give you our money. However, year after year we are served up the same actors (of varying degrees of skill or charm) in a spate of unwatchable films. Will Farrell is one such actor.
I am a Will Ferrell fan. Let's just get that out of the way. He was the one bright spot of Old School and often the only truly funny character on SNL during his tenure there. Imagine the Spartan Cheerleaders with any other male performer from those years. And that bit was just barely funny. The point is: He's got talent and he's willing to do just about anything to entertain. Certainly such a man should be high on any filmmaker's list of leading comedic men. And as such he appears time and again as largely the same character in a host of mediocre comedies that waste both his natural charisma and our time.
In Talladega Nights Ferrell portrays Ricky Bobby an idiot redneck NASCAR driver who wins despite all logic. His secret skill to winning so many NASCAR races? Drive Fast. Yep, all these years the other NASCAR drivers have been ignoring those upper gears that allow for great speed. But not Ricky Bobby. He looked down at the diagram on the gear shift and determined that there were other selections beyond 1st and 2nd. Genius! I know, I know, it's a stupid comedy. But couldn't they at least have come up with a better conceit as to how he wins so many races without having a brain in his head? Guess not.
The foil for Ricky Bobby is none other than Borat. Sacha Baren Cohen plays a gay, French, formula one racer who has come to destroy Ricky Bobby. Oh noes! How does this upstart Frenchy intend to win against such a racing virtuoso as Ricky Bobby? He's gonna drive even faster. Oh yeah, he's going all the way to 5th gear while Ricky languishes in 4th. The Fool!
Rounding out the cast for this humorous tour de force is Ricky's wife, whose name escapes me (such is her contribution to the movie), his two sons Walker and Texas Ranger (actually a funny joke) and Ricky's best friend, that guy from Boogie Nights that isn't Marky Mark. With such a stellar cast how could one go wrong? Let me explain. The wife is a moron like Ricky and that's fine. The charm of these movies is there wacky characters who defy all reason because reason is stupid and should be destroyed...as we all know. Unfortunately they cast an attractive, but not spectacular looking, actress in the role of Mrs. Bobby. A running gag throughout the film references her amazing breasts but even a cursory inspection of the goods reveals small, pert breasts to be sure, but not awe-inspiring. How much would it have cost to get an actress with a huge rack? Hell, even if they like the actress they had, why not use some of the Jar Jar Binks technology for a good purpose and increase her bust to epic proportions? I'm a stickler for such things. By "things" I mean "boobies" and by "stickler" I mean "I like to look at boobies".
Ricky's best friend and fellow racer is dumber than Ricky. He too uses the secret upper gears to gain better standing in the races, but he never wins. Why he doesn't just drive on past the lead car and become a winner himself is never explained. He just can't seem to do that and we accept it.
The two boys, Walker and Texas Ranger, are foul mouthed heathens. They actually made me laugh several times. Good for them.
Also, Ricky's father appears several times as part of a subplot involving Ricky driving fast because his daddy told him to...or something. There's a live cougar involved. Anyway, Gary Cole is in the movie and I like to see him working.
So, why does this movie fail so powerfully on every level? People went to see it in the theater. It is considered a financial success. Doesn't that prove that people are exactly as dumb as the studio execs think they are? To a degree they are right. But that doesn't make this movie funnier. It doesn't justify the seven dollars you paid to see it or the two hours it took to tell a weak story. And that brings me to my gripe with the screenwriters.
These guys toil in obscurity. They write scripts that no one will ever read. Scripts that get read but not produced and occasionally they get to write a script that will get produced but the studio gets final say on just how funny it can be. You see, it's not that the screenwriters can't write funny, it's that they are told to rewrite so many times that they lose sight of just what funny is. The result is a bloated script full of every gimmick, schtick, or half-baked joke they can dream up. It's the scattershot version of writing. Just give them everything and hope something sticks.
What the screenwriters don't seem to know is that the studio bosses don't really care that much about a NASCAR comedy. They only really want to put their mark on the film by pissing on the script a few times just to let everybody know they are still in charge. Once finished with their excretory actions, they move on to pee on other scripts. That leaves a urine soaked screenplay that is far too long. Ricky Bobby only really has to race a little bit, be wacky, beat the Frenchman and drink a Bud. Maybe he could push a little brown person down the stairs or something.
There were several times, early in the film, when I laughed out loud. Oh that nutty Ricky Bobby with his two first names. He's a hoot with his ignorant hillbillydom. This is, after all, a Judd Apatow produced film and that is almost always a good thing. But before long both my wife and I were checking the clock and making trips to the bathroom without pausing the film. Because the storyline follows no descernable arc there is nothing to keep up with. The characters don't change and neither do the jokes. Finally you are reduced to watching non-descript idiots wander around in front of the camera. Sure, there are pretty colors, but that only gets you so far with a viewer such as myself. What made the other well-known Apatow comedies so good was an investment in the characters. Knocked Up, Superbad, 40 Year-old Virgin all had good storytelling on top of silliness that draws a viewer in and makes you care in some small way about the idiots. If Ricky Bobby had died in a horrible flaming crash at the one hour mark of this film with no explanation as to what happened next, I would have been much happier with the product. The point is, too many gags strung together in the guise of a plot.
There we have it. A perfect example of a movie studio with no idea how to make a movie and screenwriters who don't know when to stop making a movie. The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is in no way alone in this strange vortex of suckitude. Semi-pro, Blades of Glory, anything starring Jimmy Fallon...all of these are terrible and pointless. "Wave your arms and scream like a banshee" isn't direction enough to make a performace worth watching. Movies can be insane, I like insane, they just need to come to a point and then shut up. I'm going to do that now.
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