inception: one hell of a movie

Inception: written and directed by christopher nolan

anyone who reads my opinion of this movie is going to think i'm deliberately perverse. and i guess that would be one way to explain it. i like the wolfman. i hate avatar. i like zombie strippers. i hate love actually. anything good and/or popular, i hate; anything bad and/or unpopular, i love. i don't intend it to be thus, but that does seem to be how it works.

so is it any surprise that i didn't like inception, and felt like the entire movie was one long experience of being kicked in the senses?

the sensation that comes closest is that of being forced to watch anne of a thousand days in ninth grade history. no escape. just you, the entire class, and a bunch of greasy, fake fur-wearing '70's actors yelling at each other from the depths of their method training, and then an interlude, in which someone watches someone else from a window and the soundtrack features a lute. and then the screaming. and then the headache-inducing plot happening. and some messenger in tights brings a scroll of parchment and the plotting nobleman speaks lowly to himself in a wonderfully sonorous voice. more lute, and then a lifelike party scene in which more greasy '70's actors carouse by yelling, and then the king fondles some strawberry blonde while listening to another message delivered by another messenger in tights. and meanwhile, on the beach, some people yell at each other. and then more lute. and then someone recounts a memory from childhood. and then there is sexual tension with a less greasy '70's man with slightly better hair than the rest of them. and by the time the third class period-worth of watching this rolls around, you actually jump out of your seat and yell "CHOP OFF HER GODDAMN HEAD ALREADY!!!" and THAT's why you don't get a date for winter formal. or so you tell yourself.*

but i digress. like, a lot.

okay, here's the thing. dark knight? worked--so worked. why? because the emotional center was there there there. it went beyond words. it affected us. it affected us, because emotion is always a little bit like a secret, one of those secrets left in plain sight, like a scar from a wound. there is a reason behind it, and the reason is simple. now, as the audience, we don't have to know the reason behind the secret--what makes the scar a memento of a secret, as opposed to just a bodily mark. heath as the joker, with his nineteeen thousand origin stories, worked because there was one thing that tied him together. we didn't know what it was--it wasn't put into words, or not words that we could trust. but it didn't have to be, because it was fully present in every aspect of the performance. the scar evinced by his face was firmly tied to a reason for its existence, and that reason was powerful enough to make its evasion of words possible.

in inception, i would argue, this is not the case. there is a secret involving his wife and kids and possibly his father (ah, spoilers, ought i to employ you? i guess not)--a secret that drives the plot, one that may or may not be revealed at the end. but it's not a good secret--it doesn't provide enough motivation for the film itself. maybe there's something i haven't guessed about inception--some clue that i didn't catch. but it doesn't matter, as i've said, whether or not one knows the secret. what matters is whether or not the secret provides a powerful enough reason to make a plot worth sitting through.

i'm going to call it the blade runner phenomenon. it's not that there was no rhyme or reason to blade runner, it's just that a person (well, i) didn't care enough to try and figure out what said rhyme and reason were. and this might be my fault, but i think it had a lot to do with the fact that the film didn't give me much to work with. lots and lots of cool ideas, interesting visuals and hommages, but the connecting secret wasn't there--wasn't where it was supposed to be.

now, outside of this critique i could rave about inception. i'm not going to, because as awesome as the plots were, and as beautiful as the filmic world was, it all became a lot of bombastic nonsense due to the fact that there was no center. the center was supposed to be the romance between leonardo and his wife, but it didn't play. it had a lot going for it, but it didn't tie together, because it had nothing to tie around. and this unravelling, to use an inception-like metaphor, spread, and turned the really cool plot into something like a magic eye picture without the hidden picture.

the performances were brilliant. seriously, the acting was incredible. the look of the movie was amazing. the plot, as i've said, was nearly there. but when something comes that close, it only ends up being worse when it fails. at the 15 minute mark, we all were pretty damn sure we knew what the underlying plot twist of the movie was. we then spent 2 hours and 45 minutes waiting to find out if we were right. whatever we found out or not is unimportant. what's important is that those 2 hours and 45 minutes didn't contribute enough satisfaction to the end reveal to make the stomach-twisting suspense, confusing (though wildly interesting) plot, or delicately and sympathetically conveyed characterization worth the involvement of energy that they demanded. and that is a sin.

because it was a really good movie. i just couldn't stand it. it was really really well done. i just couldn't believe that it had betrayed me--not with its twist, but with its lack of meaning. nolan knows how to mean, we've seen that in the dark knight. next on the list is to figure out what it means to mean. i know i sound crazy, but meaning isn't something that you can choose. it is other than manipulatable. the meaning of his movie was there--i know that, because of how good it was--but nolan missed it, because he was too busy creating to listen.

sorry. this is pretty out there. god knows i don't hear meaning the way i want to most of the time. but that's my proscription for nolan's next movie, anyway: listen. figure it out. make it happen. you can do it.

i don't know crap.

*having a liz lemon moment here.

predators: whole planet of terror!!

Predators: in theaters; starring adrian brody as not arnold schwarzenegger

what a whimsical soundtrack. seriously. for the most part the background music was pretty standard fare, that is, but every once in a while there'd be, like, a flutey/bassoony kind of moment and i'd think, "leonard bernstein? how did they get leonard bernstein? isn't he dead?" and this music didn't take place at lighter moments, either. it took place right in the middle of all the angsty "music for them being among us" (you know, lurking orchestra plus drums). it was very confusing, this interspersal of west side story. but kind of awesome.

overall impression: i thought this movie was good. but that requires some explanation. see below.

re: the fact that i can't think of one actually good thing about it. the ideas were derivative--which makes sense, because it was a sequel, but, you know, within the sequel, the plot was pretty standard. the topher grace twist at the end was downright poorly done, characterization-wise; the characterizations were pretty much anything but special. the special effects were kind of cool, or well-integrated is maybe what i mean, but i'm not a special effects person really--i appreciate them when they're well done but it doesn't bother me when they aren't (dead alive, for example: still good!). the idea that both the predators and the prey were predators is...done. it has been done. in many other films. with much stronger metaphorical platforms. from the others to mannequin*. and, oh my god, two of the five non-caucasian characters? out, within the first, say, 20 minutes. and one of the remaining three is out within 20 minutes of his introduction. i guess being a woman, or a man wielding the blade of your ancestors**, gives you a certain amount of immunity. but thus far in an extensive mainstream movie-watching career, the man of color has survived ONCE that i remember. house on haunted hill, the 1999 version. of course maybe i'm not watching the right movies.

but. i liked it. i'm not sure why. maybe it was seeing adrian brody character try to out-hunt the hunters (that phrase sounds like it should be the name of some sort of quasi-alternative '80's album)...but that doesn't account for the whole of its appeal, though it was really fun.

it wasn't suspense that carried my involvement, for once, but enjoyment. i didn't want the movie to end--i didn't get impatient. the story was really well told, and maybe that's why it appealed to me. it was interesting in itself, not for reasons that can be added on or adduced within, such as metaphory, wild-nights identification with characters, or overly flavored cinematography (oh you know what i mean. like magnolia. magnolia was the pepper vodka of overly flavored cinematography***). you wanted to see how what was going to happen would happen, and that's pretty cool. maybe robert rodriguez is known as a good storyteller. i don't read other people's reviews, so if this discovery on my part is well understood by everyone else everywhere, i apologize, but...yeah.

yeah! if i were caught in a supervillain's lair, bound to a chair, with my eyes glued open (eew, sra), i would totally rather be forced to watch predators than manos: hands of fate. which isn't saying much. but i'd also rather be forced to watch predators than the ring two, 28 days, scent of a woman, becket, the 1966 casino royale even for kitsch value, pan's labyrinth, or runaway bride. which is, i'd say, saying something: i liked it.

and again, you're welcome america.

*mannequin does not actually have a stronger metaphorical platform than predators. gotta stop bringing up mannequin, sra.

**who apparently has the power not only to swordfight the alien to death, but to invoke oliver stone's heaven and earth, just for the length of his final scene. impressive, really.

***not sure this is true, but i really wanted to say it.

twilight: eclipse, or in the words of bruce mcculloch, "iiii liked it"

Twilight: Eclipse: new release starring dakota fanning

well, as far as burger king scratch-off purposes go, i am on team jacob. hey, it got me chicken fries.

i really liked this. i was, of course, piss drunk. but i've noticed that drunkenness does not improve a terrible movie--rather, it ups the impatience quotient. i think my standards are slightly more stringent when i'm drunk at a movie, and eclipse totally passed--i enjoyed the heck out of it.

the thing is, i've never read the books, which in the case of the twilight series pretty much ups my personal enjoyment quotient (what's with all the quotients, me?). so i don't really have an opinion on how well the characters are represented. but i like the direction the movies seem to be going in ("you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition at"). the first movie, twilight, we saw in a theater full of screaming teens in homemade shirts, which was just awesome, period. i wasn't wild about the movie, but i did think that it filled its purpose--that is, if it's a vehicle for something its whole audience is extremely excited about, then it did a really good job at being such a vehicle--it was, you know, sincere. i had certain issues with the fact that edward, having been alive for like 200 years, had only managed to come up with that one idiotic piano piece, but those are problems with the overall premise as opposed to the movie specifically, if you see what i'm getting at. plus i thought kristen stewart was really excellent as bella. the second movie, twilight 2: revenge of the twilightians was--yeah, i liked it more. the plot made no sense, but there were a lot of, like, shared moments between the director and the actors and the audience in which the film seemed to be saying, "we all know this is a little stupid, so let's give these characters some personality despite source material and genre." there was a lot of soundtrack going on. especially when bella's room was spinning. which is neither here nor there.

in eclipse, i liked that that same sort of tongue-in-cheek "personality despite characterization" thing was kind of stronger, maybe--and the plot actually seemed to be taking place at the same time as itself. it wasn't, like, playing all eleven strings of the string theory (hendecahedral dutch?? and i'm not sure there are eleven strings--and i don't know much about string theory [typical sra-ian metaphor])--instead, the plot seemed pretty linear. i liked it when edward and jacob had that conversation when jacob was warming bella with his body and edward said, "if i wasn't in love with her i could really go for you," and jacob said, "yeah, i'm not gay"*. and i feel like stewart and pattinson give the bella/edward relationship some believability. which, considering that the entire series was very obviously written as a means of gratifying the romantic desires of an author who didn't have a very fulfilling high school experience (YEOWCH, sra)**, is pretty impressive. also, i don't remember soundtrack specifics, but i do remember enjoying the music.

as always, the main draw was the audience. it wasn't opening weekend, so there were no homemade t-shirts or displays of fisticuffs between opposing team members, but there was a hard-core cadre of prepubers who must, at that point, have seen the movie like twelve times and knew exactly when to clap (the next generation is apparently very pro-vampire marriage). though nobody wolf-whistled charlie when he came onscreen, an audience reaction of which i've never had enough.

um, the end.

oh, i also really liked the tinkling noises that the vampires made when they broke (does that piece of foley info count as a spoiler?).

*this may not be a verbatim record of the verbal transaction being referenced.

**bear in mind that i haven't read the books. and that i understand--only too well--writing idiotic stories to get rid of high school hangups.

the last airbender, or, aang: lady in the water

The Last Airbender: directed by m. night shamananana-is-my-favorite-group

mr. shyamalan had an impossible job with this film. unlike harry potter, to me it doesn't seem that anyone who hadn't seen the source cartoon would be interested in watching the movie (and if you haven't seen the cartoon, don't waste the time you might be spending watching it on this movie); like harry potter, the source material kicks ass; so even were the film decent, monsieur syhamalan would have a lot of dissatisfied viewers on his hands (see previous remarks re: harry potter on the fact that every fan of something awesome which gets made into a movie is going to have mostly the same complaints as every other devoted fanperson, plus their own special area of complaint that nobody else could have thought of because nobody else would be insane enough to care). he's got to storytell 20 24-minute anime episodes in the space of one to one-and-an-eighth hours--i'm not great at math, but i think that's a ratio of 480 to 70, or 48 to 7, or 6.86 to 1. in order to make the last airbender a good movie, senor shyamalan has got to make time for enough cgi to stun an ox; he's got to develop characters that are richly complex; he's got to establish an entire world; he's got to honor the tone of the show; and he's got to make a coherent movie.

does any of this get done by this movie? oh dear god no. the plot is nonsensical--indicative detail being the fact that at a certain point, establishing place-names written out at the bottom of the screen change about once every two minutes. the characterizations are absurd--mostly because lines just don't seem to be what the writers are interested in giving the characters. "pshaw," one writer may have spoken to another. "aang doesn't need to say anything. dialogue is so 2009. katara's voice-over already explained everything the audience needs to know. you know, the spirit world with the lanterns, and the...um, bending...tattoos...what's this movie about again?" the cgi is nothing special, but more importantly it's inaccurate. people make bending movements, but nothing happens when they do. and aang's avatarian rampage at the end of season 1 does not take place. he just gets in touch with his emotions because a dragon told him to--oh, b-t-dub, this review contains spoilers--and then holds a wave over the fire nation's technology until they decide to go away. i guess it's the beach boys' answer to nonviolence: create a wave and you're sittin' on top of the world, doo doo dee dum dum, dum-dum-dum-dum, dee dum. the tone of the show is completely misrepresented--firelord ozai's entire face shows up right off the bat, sans either leaping flame-throne or impressive ponytail; the character's names are all mispronounced, not, as my friend pointed out, the original words they represent, but the way they're said in the show. and nobody can seem to agree on how to say "avatar"--it ranges from "aavatar" to "ahvatar" to my personal favorite, aang's garbled-possibly-with-embarrassment-but-i-may-be-giving-the-creators-too-much-credit "ovumtur." and the content is wiped clean from humor, wiped cleaner than that dude in flowers for algernon's mind.

but still. the show is a damn tough act to follow. it's just that (oh, here goes a metaphor i'm going to attempt), if the show avatar: the last airbender was the star that the wise men followed to baby jesus (with me so far?), then the movie avatar: the last airbender was the party of dudes that showed up fourteen months too late because they got lost because one of them forgot which star they were following but didn't want to tell the others that he had so that by the time they got to bethlehem the baby was long gone but they decided to stay and make a movie. and that movie was avatar: the last airbender. and, lo, it was quite quite bad.

not since the other avatar have i had this much fun reviewing a movie.

bart got a room: thank you, instant netflix, for making me laugh at love...for once

Bart Got a Room: teen comedrama starring steven j. kaplan and alia shawkat

...and a kick-ass soundtrack.

yeah. it's 4:15 in the morning, and i really liked bart got a room. you may perhaps notice that anything with any of the cast of arrested development in it appears to go on my personal yes list, but it's not just alia shawkat that made me like this so much. i actually laughed out loud, a lot, because the main character was such a straight man, and the comedy sort of behaved like a series of concentric circles: the people a ring outside him were a little nutty, and then you got these pretty darn nutty people a ring away from those people, and then on the fringes were the cameos, which had more to do with perspective than actual nuttiness, but, like, the bride with the broken arm who is walking by? come on, that's funny! the fact that the dad's favorite restaurant is filled with nothing but old people, and him and his son and his series of dates? i don't know. i just liked it. the incidental comedy kind of reminds me of those sort of brief visual, random, ironic jokes that gilmore girls used to make so well. and as the situational humor gets broader the cameos get broader, until finally bart shows up with his date and his suite, and then bart and his date start dancing, so it's like somewhere outside of the main characters' world, napoleon dynamite is going on, if they only knew where to look and how to channel it, but they don't, because they're occupied with their own world. it's really good. i liked it very much.

it actually seems like that's part of the thing that the movie is doing: the miami (?) the movie is showing us isn't the "bienvenidos a miami" side of the locale. rather, it's the retirement, lizard-in-the-house side. there's a cool miami somewhere out there, but it's not the characters' miami. the characters' miami has a lot of retirees buying a single fish at 4 in the afternoon and golf balls in the pool. the main character--danny, that's his name--tries to make his reality match up with some cooler, less virginal, less family-oriented one, but it can't be done. so he accepts it, and, kind of like the kid whose bar mitzvah he crashes, becomes a man...or re-becomes a kid...or acknowledges that he's neither.

yeah. it's really good. the acting is great, the script is great. and the SOUNDTRACK!!! dixieland and klezmer, i think those are what those genres are called, and a bit of some other stuff--yeah. yess. thank you, bart got a room, for promoting such a positive auditory experience.

just one of the guys:...and back to stuff that's not in theaters

Just One of the Guys: '85 movie starring joyce hyser pretending to be a guy

there are three reasons i want to go back to high school. they are, in order, least to greatest: 1., i want to walk down the hall, for once, secure in myself and my body. i don't have to talk to anyone, and no one has to talk to me. i just want to walk down the hall. 2., i want to hit on mr. thompson--is that so wrong? and 3., i want to wear a tux to prom. like joyce hyser. in just one of the guys. ah yes, it was a lead-in all along.

the main reason to watch just one of the guys, aside from the stereotypical-yet-hilarious brother, is that joyce hyser is hot hot hot in her man's clothes. she's faaaacking smoking. she's hot in the girl's clothes, too--she's just plain hot--but, yeah, get her in drag, and she's grrr-rah. she turns the words of red-blooded bi women to jelly in their mouths and on their blogs. joyce hyser crosses the divide with aplomb. it's not every actress that looks as good as a guy as she does as a girl--joyce does do so. she is blllablllahyum.

nothing, mom, nothing! just blogging on the interweb!

there are other reasons to watch just one of the guys, too. the beginning kind of sucks--it's too slow, and all the characters start out annoying, especially hyser as the unsympathetically good-looking girl whose real-world problem with not being taken seriously by misogynists doesn't read big enough for a movie. her acting seems stale and her eyes seem mean, and the sex-obsessed brother, douchebag boyfriend, and self-pitying best friend don't make the film more watchable. but when she starts being a boy, things heat up, and not just because she looks so good...and not just because i have a thing for cesarios (not just). her reactions get more human, and though her boy-acting remains pretty painful to watch, you can see her also starting to become a different version of herself in the character of the guy she's pretending to be, so that while her swaggering and stuff is annoying, her actual character starts to become really engaging--and at the end, which i think is the hallmark of a successful crossdressing movie, she doesn't seem as much like a guy or a girl as like a person--and she and love-interest-man actually seem to have chemistry when she's a girl, which is kind of rare. which makes the film fun to watch, even if certain aspects of it are irritating. and the brother and best friend, as well as the love interest, also all get progressively more interesting as the film goes on. one couldn't exactly say how they do, but they do.

i mean, i really like stupid crossdressing movies. she's the man, for instance, because of amanda bynes, and channing tatum, especially his speech at the end: "it's just like what coach says before every game: be not afraid of greatness, some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them," which is staggering genius because it's so damn wrong and amazing. just one of the guys is definitely a stupid crossdressing movie, but it's fun. after the first fifteen minutes.

as a sidebar, joyce hyser's character appears to live in the same house as geena davis did in earth girls are easy. i'm assuming it's because there was one house in the '80's, but i might be wrong.