Wolfwalkers

 Wolfwalkers is an animated film from the same director as The Secret of Kells. It has a similar sort of art and line style, with movements easily flowing across the screen in a way I found very aesthetically pleasing. You can read the plot summary on Wikipedia, so I'll just give some viewing notes:

If possible, you should view this on a bedsheet in a neighbor's backyard.

Cover your delicious blood with skin, and cover that with clothing, then bugspray. (You will still be bitten on the face, and hands, and through your socks. This is the destiny of the delicious. Your itchy discomfort will be offset by the bug-free experience of neighbor kids.)

At the appropriate time --- and trust me, you will know the appropriate time --- you should absolutely howl along with the onscreen wolves. Everyone else, on their lawn chairs and picnic blankets, will absolutely do this, especially if < 7 years old.

Five stars, highly recommended. Not entirely historically-accurate.

This post's theme word is eidolon (n), "an idealized form" or "a phantom". The animation smoothly showed transition between physical humans, eidolon scents and spirits, and wolves.

Gianni Schicchi

I enjoyed the all-video chat performance of Gianni Schicchi by Opera Ithaca. It's a quick, cute comedic opera, so having it set as a family video chat call worked for the story and setting.

The audio recording was surprisingly clear (my ears kept expecting laptop-microphone quality and being impressed at the actual recording of voices and orchestra), and the video editing included some unexpected surprises, like when... everyone's singing faces were live-photoshopped onto a flock of chickens running around? The lines of libretto that explicitly describe taking actions (like hiding the body, or putting on hats, or passing around the will) were all handled cleverly as a video call, and while it wasn't clear if everyone was supposed to be in different rooms of the same house, it overall worked and was adorable.

This post's theme word is equipollent (adj), "equal in power, force, or effect." The potential heirs found the profits from forgery to be equipollent with the dangers of exile.

The Favorite

The Favorite is a movie that tells the (fictionalized, edited) story of a snippet of the life of Queen Anne (of England) and two ladies who are vying for her attention and the political and social power it confers. This move was advertised at me with what was surely targeted ads online... and they were right, it's in my wheelhouse: a British Period Piece Featuring a Strong Female Lead.

And which of these tremendous actors is the "lead"? The plot allows all three of them space and time onscreen to develop an inner world, and they have the breadth of real people. No one is single-minded, no one is consistent, no one's inner monologue is transparently interpretable by the audience. I really enjoyed that the audience was left space to feel sympathetic, or outraged, or critical, of the characters at different moments. I did not emerge from the movie with a clear hero in mind, or a clear villain, or even a clear moral. There was no overarching lesson, as far as I could tell.

This movie passed the Bechdel test in a ferocious way. Most scenes featured only women, talking about whatever topics they want. Occasionally men were allowed to be furniture, or backdrops; when men were permitted lines in scenes, they discussed women. The single two-man scene consisted of them desperately discussing how to change their behavior to get women to notice them. It was fascinating to watch this happen, so naturally, and to notice when I noticed that men were being so sidelined.

The Favorite featured what I am sure will be my favorite sex scene of 2019. Possibly of the decade. (I am confident I can say this because popular culture's take on sex scenes is so skewed. I don't want to spoil this one for you, but it really stands out as unusual and memorable.)

We left the theater and immediately read the Wikipedia articles for Queen Anne and Sarah Churchill. Then I requested Churchill's book --- an after-the-queen's-death smear job, reportedly --- on interlibrary loan (full text here with OCR errors, scan of the physical book here).

In summary: of course I recommend this movie. I left it and assigned myself reading homework! Some days I truly am living my best life.


This post's theme word is desacralize (v tr), "to deprive of hallowed status." A falling-out between friends can result in desacralization and loss of peerage, if the friends are royal.

Incredibles 2

Any fool attempting to see the Incredibles 2 movie this weekend quickly found that it was sold out, hours in advance, at all internet-ticket-selling theaters. Unfortunately, all us fools discovered this when we tried to walk into the theater and buy a ticket for an imminent showing. (One wiser fool in my party knew of a not-internet-ticket-selling theater, which is where we ended up seeing the movie.)

I went dressed in costume, and I watched family after family be turned away at the door. Truly, a heartwarming scene for supervillains. (My costume was noncommittal on the good/bad axis.)

This high demand was probably predictable. Other things that were predictable:

• major plot points hinged around Bob (Mr. Incredible) keeping secrets from his wife Helen (Elastigirl) AGAIN
• poop/farts played for jokes (it worked: the theater was full of kids who laughed at that)
• the supervillain is a completely non-magical normal person AGAIN
• the supervillain's goal is to destroy the credibility of superheroes AGAIN
• the supervillain is a super-smart technology inventor AGAIN
• plot repeatedly discusses super-suits, and super-seamstress Edna gets several quippy scenes AGAIN
• a character was motivated by the murder of their parents AGAIN, DISNEY? WHYYYY?
• public opinion fully reversed several times during the movie
• plot twists fully predictable to anyone above the age of 10

I liked that there was a subtle moment where a responsible person changed baby Jackjack's diaper mid-action-sequence. Blink and you'll miss it, but it happened.

I also liked that the message of the movie, which will maybe sneak in to the heads of children who repeatedly watch it, is that technology is easy to use to manipulate people, and we should all be aware of that when we use it. The movie explicitly says this, a few different times (mostly supervillain monologues, but still... true).

The movie tried to wink at adults by having plot points and jokes revolve around reversal of stereotypes, but there were just as many setups that relied on tired stereotypes, so for me this was a wash.

Also, a quibble of reality: this is a world with lawyers and class-action lawsuits against superheroes. How is it not also a world of insurance against superhero-level property damage? The characters explicitly discuss getting insurance for the damage their rescues incur. This problem is not very interesting, should be fully solved, and ... for the sake of authorial integrity... why is insurance being used as a motivator in this movie? Insurance and murdered parents are the new Disney tropes.

Overall it was cute and fun, of course, because the style is still adorable, cartoon physics permits anything, and at several points, people wield a laser-eyed baby and say "pew pew" to make him shoot lasers out of his eyes.

This post's theme word is zetetic (adj), "proceeding by inquiry, search, or investigation" or (n) "a skeptic or inquirer." I am a delighted but zetetic movie-viewer.

Video consumption

I know what you're thinking. You're wondering, "what can I watch and listen to to better imitate Lila in thought, action, and deed?" This blog is for you, oh my sycophants, and of course also for my parents, who are approximately 2/3 of my readership. (That's a lower bound.)

Since reading a heap of Hugo 2017 nominees, I've swung far to the other side (while still voraciously reading) and watched... some... movies. (Gasp!) Don't worry, I retain my innate personhood, and independently-verified snarkiness readings have been off the charts this summer, so I'm not losing my precious "edge."

In this blog post:

• Wonderwoman
• Star Trek: III (*reboot timeline)
• Pitch Perfect
• Vikings
• The Rise of Catherine the Great

Wonderwoman was reportedly a male-gaze-free movie (see this and this), but it seemed plenty gaze-y to me, with lots and lots of glamour shots, power posing, and wind-blowing-directly-through-hair. Her appearance was its own subplot! Also, years of weightlifting have left me perpetually dissatisfied with the insufficiently-muscled arms of women playing physically strong characters. If she is actually going to overhead press an entire tank, then could she please have visibly-defined triceps? I suspect that even by examining her physical appearance this closely, I am somehow contributing to a cultural problem.

The coolest part of the movie was that, during a climactic fight, an explosion temporarily deafened Wonderwoman and the audience. This meant that even the dramatic music cut out, which was a fantastic way to show that the fight was still tense, visceral, and compelling, even without the swelling music and loud explosions. Without even being able to tell what characters were shouting at each other! Unfortunately, the movie retconned this cool moment several minutes later by having a flashback in which all audio was restored. Boo.

As for plot: no comment from me; I don't understand how the marketing-fandom-executive trifecta synergy works; superhero movies make no sense. I once saw a kabuki play in Japanese in Tokyo, and I got a last-minute ticket for the second act only. There were no surtitles, so I had no idea what the plot was, I could not understand the speaking, and every single gesture and facet of the performance and set seemed imbued with a mystical relevance that I could only hypothesize. This was basically the same, except much less interesting.

I tried watching Star Trek: a third thing, as endless scifi sequels are probably easier to comprehend, but I found it was replete with the same sort of overhashed writing. As if the script was an amalgam of several scripts, and even that script was lost about halfway through shooting. I think there were several plot points that could have been solved by characters just talking with each other, or occasionally sending a text message. This is in keeping with (apparent) modern movie-writing style. Honestly I tried to forget this as soon as it ended, because it didn't include any cool effects and there was no unreliable narrator. Why bother?

Pitch Perfect was a much better palate-cleanser, for being fairly bland with little bits of cute music and several lines that seemed both realistic and funny. It left unexplained how a singing group that spends most of its time practicing a dance routine can manage to perform musically-complex arrangements flawlessly, but ... it also didn't explain how so many 25-30 year-olds were in college.

Vikings is basically Toxic Masculinity: The Historical Drama. I watched it because I am waiting for the next season of Versailles to be released, and I wanted to see more George Blagden performances. It's weird to see Louis XIV dressed up as a grime-covered heathen. I couldn't stomach very much of this show, as it relied too much on close-up shots of men brooding over their own hurt egos and deciding to murder each other (and ancillary women and children). That's not plot development, IMHO.

The Rise of Catherine the Great was terrific!

... which, I mean, of course I liked this. It was a dramatized history, with very slow plot progress, in German and Russian (and some French), with subtitles. All "place settings" were untranslated onscreen, and also untranslated were the numerous times that the camera looked over someone's shoulder as they wrote a politically-significant letter in Russian. I suppose it might be intellectual snobbery, but I actually enjoyed it a lot more because of the linguistic authenticity, even though that made it less directly accessible to me. Aside from the language, the slow plot, the lovely costumes, ... how to explain my delight? Oh, that's right: a historical digression.

Once, when I had roommates with Netflix, my influence on the group Netflix profile became clear when the mysterious, opaque genre-generating algorithm suggested an entire collection of videos under the heading "British Period Pieces Featuring a Strong Female Lead". This series -- though not British -- fits squarely into that concept-space. I found it by only lightly-algorithmically-influenced browsing, but I'm confident that I would have found it faster Netflixily.

I recommend it.

I also recommend, you know, reading books. Lots of them (I've now added several histories of Russia to my queue). If that's not your style, then the other summer 2017 Lila fashion is singing to yourself in the car: try it today!


This post's theme word is quiff (n), "a tuft of hair brushed up above the forehead," or "a woman considered as promiscuous." The production featured several historically-accurate quiffs!

Carol

Carol tells the story of a woman (the titular Carol) who meets another woman (Therese); they strike up a friendship and go on a car trip. This is the most boring possible plot summary, because I'm not sure how to convey the content of a film which was so deeply visual. Almost the entire plot was carried on in nonverbal facial cues. Carol and Therese chat, and converse, and sometimes just look at each other, and flirt; but the boundary between these things is extremely fluid. At times the camera itself felt like it was flirting, the particular way it framed part of someone's face to shape the way the audience was allowed to read their expression.

The film is a visual and emotional feast, leaving me sated and digesting (mentally).

The setting (1950s New York City) provides a delectable selection of high fashion: heels, crisp and luscious makeup, fur coats, gloves, strict and uniform social rules and roles which everyone ought to aspire to. And the story unfolds slowly, just as the protagonist is revealed slowly: Therese is quiet and reticent. The audience is shown how she moves through her day, but no voiceover frames our understanding. We must read her feelings and thoughts in how she moves, in how she dresses, in how she acts, in her expressions; we must squeeze every drop of substance from her infrequent utterances. This forced me enticed me to pay attention, and probably caused me to be more emotionally invested.

Which is the point of the film (IMHO).

The entire plot is carried on tiny glances, offhand gestures, the way one person walks or tilts her shoulders or touches her hair. It is a film which studies how people assemble themselves from a collection of tiny decisions, and responses, and unconscious tics. How and why are people attracted to each other? Why do they get along (when they do), and why do they clash (when they do)? How do personalities and attitudes change over time? It was fascinating to see characters behave differently in different settings. Carol makes a big impression as a decisive, in-charge, dominant figure, but later we get to see the range of her personality; she is sometimes emotionally weak, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes gives support and sometimes desperately needs it. Therese, when choosing to summarize herself, characterizes herself as "never able to say 'no'" and "I don't even know what I want to order for lunch", but elsewhere we see her repeatedly say no in the face of aggressive and relentless social pressure, and she definitely makes her own choices throughout the film, even if she chooses to hide them or frame them as part of someone else's story.

Inevitably, a story with so much framing involves a photographer. I think this sort of low-hanging metaphorical fruit is unavoidable to directors and writers. The metaphor was applied with a very light touch.

I really appreciated a chance to see women characters who are fully realized, who get to have many dimensions, strengths and weaknesses, who are not predictable, who make their own choices and live with their consequences and don't have to be wrapped up neatly at the end of the film. And I appreciated that for once --- for once! --- the male characters, even those with immense influence (as any realistic 1950s plot cannot avoid the fact that social structures give men power over women), are not allowed to elbow their way to the center of focus. The men were okay; some were despicable, some were sad, and as a nice boondoggle, all of them also got to be fully-dimensional characters.

Easily my  favorite summary came from Q., who said, "Some male reviewers described the movie as 'Two women stare at each other for two hours.' But I realized: it's a movie for people who can read faces."


This post's theme word is polylemma, "a choice involving multiple undesirable options." The specter of divorce is a polylemma hanging ominously over Carol.

Deadpool

I went to see Deadpool with no background knowledge of the comic books on which it was based. The trailers and billboards playing around Paris suggested that it would break the 4th wall.

They were accurate.

Spoilers below the break.

Dark Vador

Some translations are inexplicable. I thought, foolishly I now see, that Darth Vader was a fictional character whose two-word referent was... entirely invented. Apparently not, since it was translated in the French version of all Star Wars stuff as "Dark Vador."

The venerable Louvre is graced with this poster... and exhibit!
"Mythes fondateurs: D'Hercule à Dark Vador"

Darth --> Dark? "Dark" is a word in English, so the fact that this is the French translation of "Darth" is especially backwards. Also, I thought "Darth" was a sort of honorific or title; "Dark" is neither of those things.

Vader --> Vador? I guess the vowel swap makes it easier to pronounce in French. This is now my preferred pronunciation, heavy on the final rolled 'r'.

This post's theme word is ullage, "the amount of liquor by which a cask or bottle falls short of being quite full." There's a certain intangible ullage in that translation.

Star Wars: n+1 (again)

I laughed aloud at Caity Weaver's summary of the movie:

You might be thinking, “Surely the weapon has shields, to protect it from such an attack?” Yes, Shirley, the weapon does have shields to protect it from such an attack. Here’s the gang’s plan for disabling them: “We’ll disable the shields!” It works.

This post's theme word is nestor, "a wise old man." The movie suffered a curious paucity of nestors.

Star Wars: n+1

No spoilers: It was cute, with the expected (large) amount of fan-service, call-backs, and foreshadowing of predictable events. The villain was actually villainous, with depth of character and a psychological edge that was scary.

As always, the evil side made a series of logistical, engineering, and personnel choices that resulted in catastrophic failure of a[n ill-conceived] plan. I would be really surprised if this did not happen in a Star Wars movie. Also, explosions in space made noise.

I predict that rolling robots will be a popular toy in the upcoming months.

I shared the audience with several storm troopers and one wookie. They did not fight where I could see. No jedi, at least not that I could tell, but I guess they could be disguised as normal people.


This post's theme word is anserine, "of or relating to a goose; silly, stupid." Yet another anserine evil plan thwarted!

Le Tout Nouveau Testament

Le Tout Nouveau Testament (The Brand New Testament) is a film nicely established by its first line: "God is real, and he lives in Brussels." The premise is extended by the stipulation that God lives in a top-floor apartment, which he has never left since the beginning of time, with his wife and 10-year-old daughter (his son having snuck out in a well-documented episode and Gotten Into A Bit of Trouble With The Romans). He runs everything through an outdated computer in his bigger-on-the-inside home office. And "runs everything" really means everything: we see him devising weather disasters, the rule that "the other line always moves faster", and managing individuals' lives, all through this computer.

God is also kind of horrible, true to the Old Testament version of things. Corporal punishment, strict rules, no empathy with suffering. His daughter sneaks into his office, SMSes everyone on the planet with their exact date of death, changes the root password, and then escapes the apartment (Jesus told her that the washing machine has a secret tunnel down to the Earth!). When God (of course) follows her, to try to retrieve (1) his daughter, and (2) access to his omnipotent computer, he is confronted with the unpleasantnesses of the world that he devised. To great comedic effect. The directors, editors, and writers clearly want God to be an unsympathetic character, and they are successful. His sympathetic daughter, of course, seeks apostles while on Earth and has a scribe (homeless man) following her, writing a new testament. She does some miracles, just light ones --- doubling a sandwich, walking across a canal. Nothing showy, but played for laughs in contrast with God's clear lack of powers (he plunges into the canal, and is hungry, dirty, and eventually deported).

It was a neat movie, although it didn't contain as many laughs as I expected from the premise. Many of the apostles' stories (interwoven, of course, throughout the film) were lonely and bleak, and invited serious reflection in the audience. (The color palette, dominated by greys and rain, echoed this.) These were intercut with cute "news" segments showing ridiculous things, but the overall tone was more somber than expected. (I think I expected something more silly, like the tone of Amélie.)

I recommend.


This post's theme word is naches, "emotional gratification or pride, especially taken vicariously at the achievement of one's children." Not much naches is on display here.

Inside Out

The latest in Pixar's endless emotion-tugging animated films "for kids" (but with lots of material for grown-ups) is Inside Out, which tells the tale of a young girl whose family moves to San Francisco. The star of the film is "Joy", a personified emotion who lives in the girl's head, drives her via a space-shuttle-like control panel, and rallies the other emotions (Sadness, Disgust, Anger, and Fear) to create what somehow, inexplicably, emerges as a coherent personality.

The movie swaps between inside and outside shots, and if you'd like to see what the movie looks like without all the interior explanation, someone made that edit already. It's as jagged and uneven as you expect in a movie where most of the motivation and explanation is interior.

Inside Out seems to be doing parents a service. It provides a convenient metaphor for talking with children about emotions, and managing them. It makes emotions a personification separate from the child, and of course --- because it's a standard Pixar heartstring-puller --- the moral of the story is: it's okay to be sad sometimes. A useful message.

It's unfortunate that only five emotions got to be incarnate: joy, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust. What about love, pity, hope, wonder, patience, envy, courage? Why is joy the only positive emotion that made the cut? This is understandable from a plot-simplification direction, but unfortunate as a service-metaphor, since it mushes humor and delight and affection and every other positive feeling into one lump. (On the other hand, Amy Poehler is the personification of joy in real life, so the casting is perfect.)

Another quibble: the movie posits that one emotion is the captain, making executive decisions, and that this emotion is fixed and unchanging. This is fine for our main character, driven by joy, but is rather depressing when we skip into the mother's head and see that she is driven by sadness, or the father's head, driven by anger, and realize that this will always be the case. On the other hand, they present as normal-to-happy, functioning adults, so maybe the takeaway message is that, however your emotions are inside your head, you are still okay?


This post's theme word is cack-handed, "clumsy." The child's attempt to comfort came off as cack-handedly sweet.

Mad Max

Mad Max: nonsensical subtitle was exactly as advertised. The ads show: a handful of characters, sand, guns, cars/trucks/explosions, grit, dirt, and more guns. This is what you get, in a there-and-back two-hour-long car chase with very few scenes devoted to anything but chase action.

It approaches the platonic ideal of a summer action movie. Almost all dialog is removed; almost all characters are nameless; the plot (and the cars) move in one direction only, and that is towards destruction. Everything gets exploded, cut, shot, burnt, squashed, and destroyed. Well, nearly everything. Obviously there are some desert rocks which go essentially unchanged. And somehow quite a few people avoid sunburn.

Apparently it's causing a ruckus amongst people concerned with the dangers posed by having a prominent female character with agency, but these concerns are ridiculous. The movie did not seem to grind any particular axe, unlike, say, The  Dark Knight Rises (overtly anti-Occupy-Wall-Street) or District 9 (anti-apartheid). It was mostly pro-explosions and car chases. Pro-guns. Maybe anti-deserts? At least, pro-water. But that's an undisputed stance. Everyone is pro-water; we are water-based lifeforms.


This post's theme word is augean, "extremely difficult, unpleasant, or filthy." The augean desert wastland holds no appeal as a vacation destination.

Shaun le mouton

Shaun le mouton is a clever little lamb,the clear bellwether of his flock and a clever manipulator of human and canine mental states. He mostly uses his powers for harmless pranks and playful indulgences, like television and (human) snacks for the sheep. His mortal enemies, the pigs, are individually clever and mean-spirited as a group, but somehow content (or incompetent enough) to stay in their human-designated pen and simply provide sniping laughter from the peanut gallery when his schemes go awry.

One day, his usually mild antics take a sinister turn when they cause the semi-abduction of the farmer, accompanied by a memory-obliterating concussion. The synergy of the displacement of mind and body results in the birth of a new person: the owner, sure, with his shearing skills intact, but with a zen-like lack of mental clutter, no memories of his past and no (apparent) desire to seek the mystery of his presence. The humans in this perverse, inverted world, all present a similar awareness of the present and lack of curiosity of the past, while the sheep (and, to a lesser extent, the other farm animals) have a more familiar human-like long-term memory and perpetual, low-level anxiety about plans to restore the farm, infiltrate the city, escape the dogcatcher, etc. As always, dogs are the go-between, exhibiting characteristics both partly-animal and partly-human.

The forbidding impossibilities of the outside world alternately form apparently-insurmountable barriers to Shaun et al.'s quest (passing as human, finding the farmer in a city of people) and are glossed as trivial (physics, probability, credulity, fashion). Yet somehow, this dissociative horror film wraps up all existential questions with a simple return to the status quo, all within a deceptively short 85 minutes, packed with basic questions of existence and purpose, as well as some pretty funny sight gags.

This reviewer also enjoyed the French localization. Sheep, of course, even in ominously-sentient-scheming form, do not speak (save "baaaaaaaaaa!", Shaun's spine-tingling catchphrase), but the human signs and written materials appeared in French, despite cultural indications that this was meant to be English countryside. Consider it another point chalked up for the weird, skew, not-quite-real universe of the film, contributing to the playful yet disquieting tone of the piece overall.

The movie was cute, and I am in a pompous mood. This is the result.



This post's theme word is barmecidal, "unreal," or "giving only an illusion of something." The animated clay figures present an allegory for the trials of real life, a barmecidal universe plagued by only a few of the true daily onslaught of existential challenges.

Don't watch "Only God Forgives"

I saw "Only God Forgives." It was a wretched non-movie. The blurb describing it as an "ultra-violent revenge saga" is too generous. It is ultra-violent, to be sure.  But this is one instance where specialized film-buff jargon gets in the way of actually describing the series of images and sounds that you will be forced to watch. The descriptor "controversial" should be interpreted as "terrible, unless you are so film-pretentious that you have wrapped around MAXINT."

There is no plot; it's not even that some things happen, then other things happen. NOTHING happens. Is part of the movie a dream sequence? Possibly. Is the entire thing a cruel, nightmare-inducing practical joke played upon viewing audiences? That is the only explanation that makes sense to me.

Ryan Gosling has no lines and does his best not to move his body or face while on-camera. I cannot explain why. It's a movie.

Perhaps the entire operation is a response to the evidence that modern movies are entirely formulaic and predictable. Formulaic movies make it easy for the audience to understand what is happening with only a brief sketch on-screen: a moment of a man's eyes meeting a woman's during a musical cue, and we understand they are destined to overcome odds and love each other. Only God Forgives is the other end of the spectrum: no matter how much we see on-screen, the audience never understands what is happening, has happened, or will happen. The violence was unexpected and sociopathic, except when swapped for just-as-unexpected-and-sociopathic "mercy." The soundtrack provided no context or cues, and seemed completely divorced from the images, even during karaoke scenes.

Robbie Collins deserves a gold star for penning the phrase "spits in the face of coherence" in his review, another highlight of which is the apt summary: "The film’s characters are non-people; the things they say to each other are non-conversations, the events they enact are non-drama. Meanwhile the camera is forever rolling off down corridors, as if someone forgot to apply the handbrake on the rig. "

My viewing companion A. described his experience thusly:

The good part about this movie was that the main police guy [Vithaya Pansringarm] looked like an Asian Geoffrey Rush. And man, Geoffrey Rush is great. I really like him.

Geoffrey Rush was not in this movie. That's right: the best part of this movie is that it might remind you of Geoffrey Rush, famous and excellent actor, who exists and was not in this movie.


This post's theme word is exscind, "to cut out or off." I wish I could exscind the memory of this movie from my mind.

Now You See Me

Now You See Me was slick, shiny, sparkly... produced within an inch of its life. It had no plot to speak of, except in tones of aggravation, e.g.:

• why is the camera continuously spinning?
• why were there 5 main characters? It would have worked with 2. (It would have been better with 1, who wakes up at the end and dreamed the entire movie! There, I improved it.)
• why were there so many attempted plot twists? Unnecessary.
• why does each magic show last 90 seconds? wouldn't a real-life audience riot after such a short show?
• does Morgan Freeman simply walk onto the set of a movie and declare, "I am in this movie now"?

If you want a film with a clever caper, watch Ocean's Eleven instead. If you want a film where Morgan Freeman is a shadowy authority figure, watch Wanted instead.
If you want a film about magic which will make you think, watch The Prestige instead. (Thinking during Now You See Me may result in sprained neurons, and should be attempted only by professional movie critics receiving hazard pay.) If you want to turn off your brain for a 120-minute experience, go take a nap under a tree.

Honestly, you should nap under a tree anyway. It's beautiful outside.


This post's theme word is charivari, "a confused, noisy spectacle." Avoid the charivari of this movie; I have endured it to forewarn you.

Guilt about racism

Racism is bad. We all agree on that. I want to mention two leisure activities --- the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and the movie District 9 --- which made me feel personally guilty about racism.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks describes Rebecca Skloot's journalistic and emotion-heavy research into the immortal cell line derived from Henrietta Lacks' unknowingly-donated-to-science cervical cancer cells. The book has two tones: the first, a factual historical narrative describing scientific research, blends via description of Henrietta Lacks' health and life into the second, a first-person account of Skloot's research efforts over many years, which extended to a very personal relationship with Lacks' descendents.

The science part was interesting. All the emotional parts --- and this includes parts with scientists being manipulative, deceitful, and exploitative --- made me feel guilty. As a child of privilege, as an educated person, as a scientist, as a human being, the story made me feel guilt. About my own luck, by chance of birth, to have avoided those circumstances. This contrition is reinforced by Skloot's own similar feelings, which she explores at length.

By the end of the book I was having flashbacks of District 9 every paragraph or so. That kernel of an interesting idea, that intriguing nugget of science (or science fiction) was the bait to lure me, yet again, into this abstract feeling of shame and iniquity. Yes, I see that thing you're showing me! It's bad! I want to change it! Yes, 30 seconds later I still feel bad about it!

What purpose does all this remorse-mongering serve? Highlighting awareness? We get it, we're aware of racism. I just wanted to read about cancer research, I just wanted to see alien technology; is there some need to crush me with guilt? Skloot seems to derive some catharsis from writing every twinge of contrition, every individual malfeasance; perhaps bringing unpleasant history to light can shape future history for the better.  District 9 is the bigger culprit here, because I guess the producers weren't sure the audience would pick up on the analogy that confining aliens to a ghetto was like apartheid confining people to a ghetto. So they drew the analogy in every. single. scene. Is this a movie about historical atrocities or about futuristic atrocities? I can only effect one of those. Sure, you're winning the battle for hearts and minds, but there's no opposition and you haven't told us what to do to win the battle for... you know, the actual battle.

In the end I'm forced to blame myself (touché) for enduring. I read the entire book, I sat through the entire movie, I caused myself to have the experience which gave rise to these feelings which I do not enjoy. I'd much rather live the life of the mind, where all recreational (and employment-driven) media consumption is stripped down to its essential ideas, without the dross of attendant emotions.

Of course this "dross" is a main purpose of recreational media. (Thank you, Prof. Lynn M. Festa's "Sex and Sensibility in the Enlightenment", for teaching me all about experiencing emotions as a cultural pastime.)

My recommendations: read some interviews with Skloot, you'll get the main points. And watch District 9 at home, with the fast-forward button handy.


This post's theme word is comminate, "to threaten with divine punishment" or "to curse." Those who have not watched District 9 are roundly comminated.

Looper

One postdoc deadline is past and so I took a break and got around to watching Looper.

I thought it was nice. The recursive nature of time-travel was neatly introduced and explored (including a nod to nerds: "I don't want to talk about time travel because if we start talking about it then we're going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams"). There was enough action to draw a wide audience and the concomitant funding to make a good movie. Pierce Gagnon gave a great performance as a creepily verbose and thoughtful child.

Looper was pleasant and exciting, and mildly thoughtful. But it certainly wasn't second only to 2001: A Space Odyssey! It was decent.

It had some problems. There were the usual plot issues, e.g., if I were an evil mastermind and wanted to send all minions back in time to be killed by their younger selves, I would not stagger the murders. Because some young minion will catch on, and then not kill himself, and then we have all these time-travel paradoxes plus some very angry guy from the future who's had 30 years to plan his revenge. The entire notion of telekinesis was an unnecessary, shiny dongle added for the special effects sequences. The movie seemed to have many clever bits that were edited out for the final cut -- we kept expecting certain people to be revealed as each other's older selves, and this never happened. Certain paradoxes were ignored. (More rants on plot problems available here.)  Memory was sometimes a push informational channel and other times a pull, as convenient to the level of tension.

Also, you would have thought that by now, all movie villains everywhere at every point in history know one thing: do not mess with Bruce Willis. Just leave the man alone. Because almost every movie I've seen him in --- including this one --- has one scene where Bruce Willis brutally destroys all the baddies, and their hideout, and their technology, and their MacGuffins.

But Looper's main failing in my mind was that it answered all the questions it raised. (Except the gaping plot holes.) The audience had nothing left to ponder as we left the theater: no "why did that happen?" or "how did X cause Y?" These are the interesting questions about stories with loops of time travel! Looper tied up all the loose ends into --- forgive me --- loops, leaving us no dangling threads to play with. (Except the gaping plot holes, which we mercilessly lampooned on the way home.)

If you want a looping time travel movie, watch Primer instead. Then watch it a few more times while you theorize and test your theories. It's much more interesting and difficult to figure out and fun, which is quite revealing about my movie preferences.

xkcd's take on Primer

If you'd prefer a looping, causality-warping book, I highly recommend Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which has oodles of clever time-travel ideas in it, plus some play with meta-fictional content, plus is a book.


This post's theme word is aceldama, "a place of bloodshed." The aceldama's creation invalidated the causal chain which led to its creation. Spoiler alert.

Brave

I saw Brave, the latest Disney-Pixar animated movie. It was delightful. Just take a look at this trailer:


Do you see it? Can you guess what was so entrancing, fascinating, uplifting, mesmerizing, and fantastic, about Brave?

That's right!

It's the hair.

Just look at it. It's bouncing here and there; it has weight; it has volume; it has drag in the air. It's compressible, like real hair. Later in the movie, when Pixar wanted to show off more, they put the hair partially under a hood and then had it lightly rain! Rain! Bedraggled hair, slowly drying over the course of time. Incredible.

If the hair isn't enough for you, this movie also has a lot of fabric, fluttering and draping and sliding; it has excellent water; and finally, it has a bear fight between two full-sized bears, covered (as bears are) with fur!

The plot was so-so, not great. Typical Disney fare. A princess, spirited and full of heart, is put into a bad situation because of her gender. Then, with some small amount of character growth and a large amount of wandering in the woods, witches, dramatic horseback riding to showcase the soundtrack, and slapstick comedy, the princess manages to slightly amend her original situation, while still not disrupting any Disney gender norms. Plus there were some jokes at the expense of the Scottish, and some jolly bagpiping.

But the hair. It's incredible. I could not take my eyes off it. Go watch it!


This post's dual theme words are lissotrichous, "having straight or smooth hair," and scotophobia, "fear of the dark," OR "fear or hatred of the Scottish people or culture." Disney's latest animated offering discourages both the lissotrichous and scotophobic.

Alas! Edward Norton

Apparently, at some point in the past, Marvel figured out that they could get more mileage (money) from their fan base by recombining existing superheroes into a superhero gang. Thus did Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, and some other incidental characters included for franchise convenience, combine forces to become The Avengers in 1963. I am not a comic book aficionado, so now I willfully elide and ignore the vast, rich intervening history of Marvel fandom and the Avengers. And now, nearly fifty years later, this sad and wrung-out merchandising ploy is being resurrected as a live-action film by the unimaginative executives of today.

Thus do we arrive at The Avengers movie.

A universe in which the extremely scientific and engineering-centric Tony Stark coincides with the Norse god Thor who has magical hammer powers makes no meaningful, consistent sense. (Mjöllnir!) I continuously wondered throughout this trailer whether the super-science field would cancel the super-mythological field and render them both as pitifully over-muscled, emotionally immature men. Shouting at each other in a giant crater of their own inability to come to terms with life.

All this absurdity could be overlooked, but for one fact: Edward Norton is no longer the Hulk. I am appalled and disappointed; I enjoyed [mocking] Edward Norton-as-the-Hulk's origin movie, and Edward Norton is a favorite of mine. Now there's some other guy playing the Hulk, and he is frankly much less Edward-Norton-ish than I'd prefer.


This post's theme word is snite, "to blow your nose." I snite at you, you so-called Arthur King, you and all your silly reboots of franchise movies!