tron and narnia: tumty-tumty-tumty-tum i slew him! tumty-tum

tron: movie starring jeff bridges as tom hanks from the polar express (cuz he was cgi'd...you're welcome)
voyage of the dawn treader: new-breed narnia movie starring someone as someone else (it's called acting)

the subtitle to this post is sexism: not just for sexist stuff anymore.

it was a product of seeing the tempest, tron, and narnia within the space of a week that really did the damage: i first became conscious that sexism isn't just for people who are concerned with the size of a lady's paycheck anymore.  it's out there in the movies, and it's ANNOYING THE CRAP out of me.

now, narnia couldn't help it, even if it had wanted to.  as i tried to explain in coked-out detail to my friends*, c.s. lewis was a sexist barstard.  i haven't read everything he wrote, but i did get through his theolo-sci-fi trilogy.  i enjoyed the third one (i can't remember the names) in part because i thought he painted a realistic and interesting character for the woman in the overly-modern marriage. i found his solution to the marital issues of the couple to be quite modern, if by modern one is referring to the philoso-critical stylings of dr. laura schlessinger (so, about 15 years out of date).  what i'm trying to say is, he was sexist.  like dr. laura.  lewis's lady-characters are sympathetic in themselves (i mean, excepting the white queen, who's just sexy), but the solutions he derives for the problem of their femininity are recockulous.  he really takes the idea of separate spheres to a new plane of fairness.  aslan, in narnia, rebukes everyone with the same unpredictability and gentleness, male, female, and reepicheep alike.  but it's still separate spheres; susan still gets kicked out of narnia for liking make-up and nylons, because apparently you can't like boys and god at the same time (which sounds, frankly, like a bit of over-identification on c.s.'s part [actually, i don't get a gay vibe from lewis, but i should probably wikipedia him for solid evidence as to his sexual preferences.  that's a joke.  i'm not going to do that]).  and lucy still has to wander around a bit like an idiot, because a lady's sexual awakening is much less acceptable in the scheme of things than a man's.  after all, did adam pluck the apple?  no sir!  i mean, it's not even an illogical sort of sexism, considering the intellectual power lewis was bringing to bear on the conundrae (probably not a word) of christianity.  but it is annoying.  the spice girls would have something to say to it, if he were writing in modern (or my current particular frame of modern, apparently) times.

so disney can't help but make lucy a bit ineffectual and wander-around-y.  she is a sweetheart, and legitimately so.  but as a role model she's not going to make a ceo out of your daughter.

the same, unfortunately, can be said for the chick in tron.  props to disney if they were making a kora in hell-frame kind of reference--according to online, they weren't; it's spelled quorra, and i can't figure out what it's supposed to refer to, but i'd like to know.  anyway, she's useless.  as usual, no shame to olivia wilde, who i thought was as good as possible under the circumstances, not to mention super cute.  but that meme of the strong pretty girl is just ballooning into something ridiculously impossible.  it's like "hey, this female character has fight scenes, so she must be an individual.  you're welcome, feminists everywhere!"  yeah.  shove it, disney.  i understand that quorra had to be female, not only to provide young flynn with a love interest, but also so that the final third of the movie could literally turn into star wars (for which operation one clearly needs a princess leia surrogate, not to mention a moody bishounen [sp?] with an improbable haircut for luke).  but did she have to be so "teach me, you man-god!  for i am your creation!" about it?  why was she always crouching subordinately whenever one of the flynns was around?  according to her account, old flynn earned her self-erasing, accolyte-like devotion by standing over her when she woke up.  i mean, a rescue was implied, but literally, that's how she said it in the film.  the whole character is just ridiculous.  her whole race was destroyed and she's a super-human manifestation of god in the machine, but don't worry about any messy emotional reactions to either of these things, unless if you count her outburst about liking jules verne, certainly the emotional center of the film.  i could be cautious and go with "underwritten," but i'm choosing to go with "ridiculously misogynist skipping the point in favor of the haircut bastard filmmakers."

moral of the story: standing over a woman when she wakes will make her all kinds of haircut.

or possibly, sexism annoys me.  which is what i opened with.  disregard all the in-between.  it's like a newman-o but with filling from chernobyl.


*coked-out due both to the quality and quantity of the detail, and the fact that i had imbibed a great deal of diet coke during the movie (i'm not actually familiar with the type of detail that people on coke [the drug] tend to produce.  i am a nice girl from a suburb, which would actually argue for the non-veracity of that statement but for the fact that i am, and always have been, a nerd [see every post on this blog]).

the tempest: it's taymor-riffic

The Tempest: movie starring the conceptual stylings of Julie Taymor mostly

first off, the acting was FUCKING BRILLIANT.  miranda was amazing, caliban was amazing, and of course doc ock (name? alfred molina, apparently) and alan cummings were fantabulous--i thought chris cooper gave a good interpretation to a difficult part, as did the ariel dude, who we didn't really get to see due to the taymoring of the film, and, yeah, in my eyes, tom conti for the win.  felicity jones was brilliant in a part that one doesn't really need brilliance in, but in which brilliance is possible--djimon hounsou (hopefully spelling that right) was brilliant in a part that may be difficult to do justice to--and he did do it justice, freaking fabulous--but always has a certain amount of cachet around it.  i thought tom conti took a very possibly onerous part and turned it into something really really good.  i was a little conflicted about helen mirren.  i thought she did an excellent job of creating a character, but i wasn't sure that the character she created was being helped by the shakespeare.  the lines made sense--made painstaking sense--and were deeply felt, but it was like she was acting despite shakespeare instead of through him, and that bothered me, but it shouldn't too deeply, because she was very good.  reeve carney as what's-his-face was not good, but really funny, which made up for it.  apparently he was too cool to enunciate.  he had the immaculately kept iggy pop hair of edgy love, and nothing more was necessary than a few shirtless moments and an entirely inappropriate rendition of "o mistress mine" (yeah, why was that there?  so taymor could taymor around with more gender-political "exploration"?  if so, stop it, taymor! stop it now! the line "that can sing both high and low" was not written for you to dithyramb around with [or if it was, we truly do inhabit a creepy-ass universe]).

if taymor had to do with the choices of her actors, even if she fostered an environment in which they could make their choices, then she deserves a lot of credit for having done so.  but i thought the movie was a mess.  it was very entertaining--very entertaining.  i should give it some sort of pass for making the shakespeare so eminently filmable (a friend of mine says that the tempest really isn't filmable, and i felt like taymor turned it into an opulent feast of filmability, so i'm sure she deserves credit for that too).  but BOO!!!  BOO!!!

BOO!!!  it's like back in the day when i read an interview with the fool who directed that wildly awful version of mansfield park with frances o'connor, the one that in the end featured fanny writing sanditon or something for susan's amusement, in which above-mentioned fool of a director said something like, "i know there will be laura ashley bitches out there who will object to this movie because we show boob."  no, director fool, no.  we laura ashley bitches (i'm not actually one, but would much rather be ranged on their side than her's) are not objecting to your dumbass movie because it shows boob.  we are objecting to it because it neglected to capture even the tiniest particle of jane austen's intention or spirit, as well as a good third of the plot.

taymor did not go nearly to these lengths--we did see boob, but it was hermaphrodite man-boob (and, yes, it was tempting)--but she did make a mess, what with her desire to shove a special effect into every insecurity of signification.  i can't really go into specifics as deeply as i'd like without driving the blood pressure up dangerously high, but, as an example, the sandcastle miranda holds at the beginning: it crumbles.  in the rain.  when i pointed out how STUPID this conception of...whatever the hell it's supposed to mean...was, my friend said, basically, "but prospera starts out with everything and nothing and ends up with nothing and everything," and for a minute he made it sound good.  but then i thought back, and, no.  i mean, yes, my friend's interpretation of the significance of the sandcastle is awesome, but the sandcastle itself?  no.  no.  that shit could mean pretty much anything.  its meaning was entirely overridden by its desire to look cool.  yes, the most obvious interpretation is...uh, that prospera, by calling in a thunderstorm, has unleashed the destruction of her own castle of sand, or whatever*, but it's just such an unnecessary interpretive move.  it doesn't get us any nearer to the heart of matter (as niska would say)--sure, it's a visual metaphor, but it tells rather than showing.

what would i have her put in its place?  NOTHING.  INTERPRETIVE SILENCE.  just STOP DOING STUFF.  stop tim burtoning around.  shakespeare didn't make it this far because his work could be twisted into meaning--it meant in the first place.  it meant so much, taymor, (i'm a shakespeare-phile, i admit it completely) that even within your self-indulgent rigmarole it still surfaced at points.  but it had to struggle.  why make it struggle?  that's just rude, taymor.  be nice to sextacentarians (??).

i'm not saying that there's some ur-interpretation of shakespeare out there that can be latched onto and drug home like a theseus by the minotaur.  i'm saying that some attention to the text is required when making a movie of a play--either that, or you peter brooks it, and make sure that the fish you're boning is known to be your own fish (rrow), a move that is a bit like throwing on a flak jacket in a nuclear blast, but can at least protect you to some extent from a reasonably fair mind (which mine, on this subject, may totally not be).  shakespeare is not the instrument.  you are the instrument.  your own interpretation is entirely correct, but only if it's coming from the work--only if you're being plucked, like a fortepiano, from the inside.  don't tell me taymor isn't doing the plucking.  don't tell me she's not looking for opportunities to have harpies spit oil as a metaphor for...again, something (bp spill?  peace in the middle east?  bunnies?) and stupid, stupid gender-bending whatnottery for ariel, prospera, and the fools in their gowns.

it's like communist russia: the tempest pluck you.  taymor is clearly no candidate for an un-american activities investigation.  YEOUCH, sra.  what a burn!

i should apologize for a lot of this, because much of the movie was very watchable.  it just lit my fire, is all.  i can forgive ridiculousness, i can forgive incompetence, i can forgive idiotishness.  i CANNOT forgive all the jibber-jabber that films try to put us through, and the tempest's taymoring is a really prime example of it.  i am not turning the tempest into an example (my example of terrible filmic incompetence is and always will be the hours)--i am just holding it responsible for itself, which maybe nobody thought to do.  what the hell, guys?  come on!  stop plucking around!


*one of the bizarrities of my life is that, though a dedicated musician and quasi-dedicated writer, i'm not at all good at pinning meanings to metaphors.  i cling to theorists like derrida and de man for that reason--the inaccuracies of metaphoric assumption as propounded by said thinkers are like manna to my brain (but not literally), not just because they're interesting, but because they give me a leg to stand on.  but i should be completely clear that it's inability, not choice, that turns me away from the assumption that metaphors mean things (though thank god i have been turned away).

for colored girls: is it me, or...

For Colored Girls: tyler perry film starring whoopi and some other perhaps distractingly attractive ladies

...are my tastes changing?

normally, a movie taking itself this seriously with this much intensity would have made me want to curl up and die.  and don't get me wrong, i did want to curl up and die.  but in the good way.  dear god it was so good.

my friend, though he liked it, said that if the camera had focused one more time on a woman's face, getting blair witch up-close-and-personal with her expelling facial fluids, he would have abdicated the theater, like edward VII for wallis simpson*.  and though, again, i normally would agree with him, in this case, no.  no.  that particular camera move, i thought, was something like a strophe in a poem, a rhyme scheme: a symbol of movement in vision.  besides, that camera shot provided the actresses with the correct frame in which to get their acting done.  no other frame was either possible or necessary.  it was beautiful, what all of them did within that painfully intimate space.  i couldn't take my eyes off it.  i see on imdb (never read others' reviews, sra) that people felt like the poems' readings slowed the movie down, juxtaposed too strangely with the other dialogue.  but i kind of feel like expectations might be getting in the way of a really thrilling reality: those poems are beautiful.  and they are said beautifully.  some of them are more seamlessly interwoven than others, but even if they hadn't been acted so well, the poems would have been worth hearing, period, and i thought that all of them were acted just wonderfully.

i can't say how affective the film was--i've run into this problem before.  with anything that i don't like, it's often just sheer catharsis (as well as one hell of a good time) to rip and tear and maim, and call down my petty thunderings like isabella's jove.  and with stuff i do like but am not "supposed to" like, defending my opinion becomes matter for discussion.  but with something that moved me so much--that i think was felt so truly by its actors and its director--there's kind of nothing to say.

aside from, uh, "see it," i guess.  SEE IT, YOU GLORIOUS BASTARDS!!!  it's magnificent.  hey, here's a thing: if kimberly elise actually gets nominated and/or wins best actress for this, my faith in the academy awards (absolutely destroyed like post-Gojiro box-tokyo by the multiple wins of Titanic) will be either partially or completely restored.  she is so good.  so many of the actresses are magnificent, but her part is...unbelievable, and she takes it and goes where it goes--she takes on the body of her part, which is so horrifying and amazing.  of all the moments she has, i think i got first wrapped up in the way she says "i've loved you since i was fourteen" to her abusive alcoholic husband, and you see the resistance in her to what's in front of her, and some of its cause... i can't.  i have no words.

of course, if she doesn't get nominated, then good bye academy forever and ever.  yeah!  i'm threatening the academy!  i'll believe in you jagweeds even less if kimberly elise doesn't get nominated for best actress!  grumble grumble...("i'll never let go, jack"--let go, kate!  just let go!  what the hell are you doing getting back on that boat???  another 125 minutes of my life, james cameron, really?  spent on watching some people who we all know are going to die get wetter but not in a fun way?  why of course i'll let you have those precious hours!  what would i have spent them on, anyway?  fighting cancer?  writing my novel?  washing the dishes?  window shopping?  microwaving a hot pocket and then eating only half of it?  really anything else in the entire universe?  why would i want to do that?  curse you, academy!  and your eleven wasted statuettes too!!!  lord knows i am not as much of a fan of the sweet heareafter as some i could mention [really, sarah polley?  you're just going to take that dude's dead wife's clothes?], but atom egoyan certainly deserved that statuette more than cameron, or whatever hung-over flunky directed kate and leo through those love scenes [love kate; love leo.  hate titanic]).

oh, there was one thing.  i thought the part just before the...uh, no spoilers?  main event of the plot, should i say?--was overdone.  i totally acknowledge that it was pretty dang difficult moment to do, but it didn't capture much of a feeling.  though in a way, that kind of worked to the film's advantage, because the story even more clearly wasn't about the events of these womens' lives--it was about what they did with them, how they thought of them, and how, in the end, they turned them into poetry.  it made me want to read the book.  that, in this case, was the mark of a good film.


*it took a significant amount of wikipedia-ing to get that reference correct.  i thought it was archduke franz ferdinand who abdicated, which had always confused me because i was like, well, what's even the point of assassinating him then?  symbolic protest?  don't like the hit single "take me out?"  (really really dumb joke, sra.)  but i was wrong.  franz married a lady he shouldn't have, but he still got to be archduke.  which did him a world of good.  it was edward VII who abdicated.  that wallis must have been something something.

neowolf: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Neowolf: movie to-be-starring the next generation's equivalent of tom servo, crow, and mike/joel

HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAHAHHAHAHA.

whyyy? why the enormous but malodorous bouquet of film editorial techniques? why did the entire movie take place with a fog machine working its little heart out? obviously the characters were smokin'--their looks were pretty much all they had going for them--but did they also give off such an intense bodily heat due to their werewolfiness that they literally generated whiffs of steam in all situations?

it was ba-ha-had. the only thing it had going for it was kevin, and he died.

oh, spoiler, sorry.

also the girl band was cute, but their music was te-he-he-herrible. not as a-ha-hawful as neowolf's music, but...not...great.

and oh my god, the sheer amount of slow-mo kissing that should have been sexy but COMPLETELY WAS NOT. here's a tip, guys: kissing is awesome; bare flesh is awesome; but neither kissing nor flesh can carry your movie when they are completely in a vacuum. sort of in the same manner that amplification alone cannot make a heavy metal song much better than it already wasn't. the movie was the antithesis of awesome, to the point that even its medium-copious amounts of slow makeout and nonspecific nudity could not make it awesome. neowolf was the black hole of awesomeness, and even the awesomeness of naked people and kissing was annihilated in its suckage.

the best-worst part was definitely the relationships, which made no sense. the directions the characters gave each other came in at a very close best-worst second, however: "that hotel on the edge of town" (a direction that gay boy gives to main girl) does not appear to me to be uber-specific. it may just be me. maybe there IS only one edge to the town, and one hotel ON said edge--i don't live in santa wherever-the-heck-ica, i can't judge. i mean, this direction apparently conveyed something pretty exact to main girl, because not only did she find the hotel, but she found main guy's steam-filled hotel room without any appreciable effort. or maybe the NAME of the hotel she was directed to was "That Hotel on the Edge of Town hotel." catering to all edge-of-town stayers, The Hotel at the Edge of Town hotel is ironically situated in the main shopping area--get the comforts of center-of-town-ness without sacrificing your raucous living-town-on-the-edge vibe!

the other good-bad direction (from alpha wolf to gay guy) was something like, "turn off at the exit near to where our next show will be--you can't miss it."

yeah. bet i can.

i'll just type that one into mapquest.

mapquest is asking for a city or a zipcode.

what the hell, i'll give it one.

the first five results of looking up "the exit near to where our next show will be, san francisco, california" on mapquest are as follows:
1. New Leaf Service for Our Community
2. Church-The Nativity-Our Lord
3. EXIT 434A/DUBOCE/N
4. Our City (it's apparently located on howard)
6. Lance Shows Photographer

ok, lance shows photographer was 7th on the mapquest list, but 5 and 6 were just more freeway exits.

i know what the problem is here! i should have used googlemaps!

looking up "the exit near to where our next show will be" on googlemaps resulted in locations in oregon and tennessee. i guess the band neowolf owns a really fast tour bus. or perhaps their "next gig" was a temporal anomaly, and they were in two disparate places at the same space-time. a temporal anomaly that has had unspeakable ramifications. those ramifications being the unleashing of the movie neowolf. it is upon us, america! noooooo!! the gods of the threshold are angry!!! the spiky laughing idiot gods are released!!!!! QUICK, SOMEONE GET THE PORCUPONICON*!!!

anyway, don't watch neowolf unless you're interested in seeing a how's how of film editing--from slo-mo to oh hell no. or you're interested in a very cursory and somewhat (according to my friend) fictitious history of wolfsbane. or you want to watch action silver bullet forging! now with 47% less action for your ease of delugtition!

or you want to see actors who look, respectively, like rebecca gayheart, johnny depp, zac efron, brendan fehr, and james callis. but aren't.


*the porcuponicon is, i think, pete abrams' intellectual property, and is entirely awesome. sluggy freelance 4-eva.

i have a fever. blame the previous version of this blog post (much less lucid even than this one--which is saying something) on illness.

hannah montana: goooo, pop cultural capital! gooooo!

Hannah Montana: the Movie: movie starring miley cyrus AS hannah montana!! or hannah montana as miley cyrus...whoah.

i've never seen the show (i SWEAR! no, i really haven't! don't you trust me?), and perhaps snobbishly, i was surprised by how much i liked this movie. or maybe it's not snobbish, because of the embarrassing amount of experience i've had with disney channel-style joints, from life-size to bratz.... the point is, having had some experience with the TERRIBLE AWESOMENESS that can result from bad bad bad marketed-to-children films, hannah montana: the movie was pretty much legitimately awesome. surprising? possibly. i don't know, because i haven't seen the show (really, i haven't. i really haven't).

first of all, miley cyrus is pretty fantastic. not sure i like her voice, but i really like the way she uses it. or used it in this movie. that's not a damning with faint praise, by the way. as a singer myself (you know, sort of), i think it's much more important how you sing that what you're working with--and that's been proved time and again. callas, for example. or johnny rotten. i like both of those singers better than miley cyrus, but that's a matter of personal taste. don't like most of the songs, but the way she sang "climb" was...good. really good. and i was completely into her acting. i thought all her choices were full of character, personal and original--i felt like she was really present in what she was doing.

not having seen the show (really, i totally haven't), i don't know if that was a product of the product of hannah montana: the franchise, or a product of some combination of the script and direction. again, i'm ABSOLUTELY NOT saying that some uber-talented director managed to draw a performance from miley cyrus that she never would have been able to accomplish without him--i felt like she was totally steering her own boat on the acting end of things. but the performances were pretty universally good, which, again, because i have experience with such things, i am qualified to say, is not always the case with disney-style movies.

allow me to stretch my imagination for a minute and say that what i feel like happened was:
a., the director came upon a quasi-ready-made cast, because of the show being a longstanding sort of thing.
b., the director was like, okay, let's get into these roles!
c., the director was maybe somewhat surprised by what the cast was capable of bringing to their parts.
d., the director was like, "let's go with this. you guys are totally awesome."
does that sound condescending? i don't have as much experience with tween t.v. as i do with tween movies, so it's so very possible i'm totally wrong about the way hannah montana: the t.v. show carries itself. but, like, even the friends of the skateboard girl who blew up the cake had, like, a lot of depth to them--more depth than you'd necessarily find in the beta-female sidekick of the lead girl in a romantic comedy (oh, you know exactly what i'm talking about)--and they only got, like, five minutes of screen time, and i wasn't wild about the stuff they had to do.

maybe it's a t.v.-to-movie thing, when t.v.-to-movie is done right. like serenity. not all of the NINE main characters got as much time as one would have liked (kaylee and simon spring to mind), but there was a certain vibrancy about all of them, perhaps caused by their having had lives previous to the movie.

this also might explain why melora hardin character fell a little flat. usually i freaking ADORE melora hardin (17 again??? totally amazing performance! and that one episode of the office where she and michael go to the party together and she's kind of drunk and talking to the camera and you can see her coming apart at the seams because of the sharp-edged way she laughs--just so good), but in hannah montana: the movie, she didn't seem to be as grounded of a character as the rest of them (even billy ray cyrus, who i liked, but thought was pretty bad as an actor--again, liked what he did, just didn't think it was good acting), and it fell kind of flat. which was too bad. because she's so good.

anyway, i may not go straight to target and buy hannah montana: the sheet set or hannah montana: the waffle iron, but i really liked this movie. it was neat. it gives me faith in this miley cyrus-obsessed next generation. in my day we had britney spears, who was always pretty much a disaster (sorry if this seems harsh; i do root for her personally, and feel like fame has given her a REALLY tough time. but there are two pretty much irrefutable arguments as to her not-so-greatness: "email my heart," and crossroads. though i like her work on how i met your mother. i suppose, like everything, it's a delicate balance). whether or not you think miley cyrus has talent, she has heart, and a spark, which is more than can be said of a whole lot of cultural icons, pop or otherwise (i am talking to you, elvis costello. i am always talking to you. "i don't want to go to chelsea!" bah! get off the train!).

and if she doesn't actually have the heart or the spark, she at least knows the value of faking such things, which, again, is more than can be said for some.

but just to clarify, i personally think that she is talented and she does have heart and spark.

which is surprising in one whose face can be bought on bright pink bathroom towels.

and i think i might go rent the show now.

oh, god, the embarrassing confessions made possible by the interweb.

not sure who might find it ironic that i like hannah montana the movie but not billy eliot, and who might find it typical...and who would agree with me. thank you, by the way, one person in the universe who would agree with me. maybe we'll meet someday.

the last exorcism, or, how ELSE to give that "the creeping terror" monster indigestion

The Last Exorcism: movie starring the hand cam of a palsied man

before i go into a lot of material (which i'm going to enjoy doing, b-t-dub, so much) about the documentary style of filming a horror movie, i'm going to say what i thought of the movie. this is quite simple: i liked it. very much. i thought it was quite sympathetic, and the acting was great. NOT a "set 'em up, knock 'em down," this was more of a "when you are a linen-suited preacher looking into the void, the void is looking into your linen suited self as well" kind of thing. it was real good.

i think. i did have to skip about half of it, either through bodily absence or else by closing my eyes, because the camera WOULD NOT STAY STILL. in normal circumstances, even when i haven't eaten a whole passel of mall food and topped it off with reese's pieces, this style of cinematography isn't the kindest to my intestines. but in this case, it was just such an extra-special experience.

"bon" mots related to this second aspect of the movie are as follows (and there's nothing after these, so if you want to stop reading, go ahead):
-pumas. highly endangered. don't endanger them further by renting them from the zoo and strapping cameras to their backs and then having them film your movie for you. in fact, while you're at it, don't rent those monkeys that swing from tree to tree either. and if you're going to use elephants, don't attach the camera to the trunk.
-i am familiar with the term "jazz hands" from bring it on--it may be a legitimate dance thing, but why are you applying it to cinematography, camera guy? too busy fosse-ing to mockumentarize the horror as it deserves? are you actually IN chicago? is the director using your footage to check up on how well you've learned the dances? are you going over it now? "keep that camera hand circling nice and tight," he or she is telling you. and you did. congratulations.
-it's called a tripod. paranormal activity had one. spoiler: granted, having one got that dude killed, but spoiler: not having one doesn't do you much good either.

no, it was good. but you got to treat it like that hotbox yoga.

fighting, or, how not to enunciate ever and still get your point across

Fighting: movie starring channing tatum as a tough guy with a sensitive side and a past, and terrence howard as a man in two pairs of pants

again, probably not selling the whole "i'm NOT an octegenarian!" aspect of my internet persona, but my main problem with this movie was that i couldn't understand about two-thirds of it. i'm not talking about the plot. there were at least flashes of insight when it came to what was going on with the plot. i'm talking about the actual lines, which for the most part i couldn't make out. the subtitles helped, but my friend and i commented almost as much on how we couldn't figure out what the heck was being said as we did on how gay everything seemed.

which, considering that it was a fighting movie, and considering the way we tend to joke in the first place, is SAYING SOMETHING.

now, i'd just like to take a step back, and point out that my reaction to fighting is just as formulaic as fighting itself. guess. go on and guess what i did and didn't like.

i'll give you a hint: the plot. its existence. do you think i found it original, or otherwise? and who do you think i'm going to blame for this? the actors, the writers, or the director?

actually, in this one instance i'd fool you. i thought the direction was pretty awesome. let's all just keep in mind that i don't know the first thing about moviemaking, but i found the camera work detailed and sympathetic, kind of like how the director to youth in revolt took an otherwise fairly revolting film and made more of it than he or she had to, except i liked fighting better than youth in revolt.

i mean, in a formula film, which i'm pretty sure fighting inarguably is, there's, you know, opportunity for good stuff to happen, and because that good stuff kind of exists in a vacuum, you do notice it pretty acutely.

terrence howard, for instance. OH MY GOD. either he IS that guy, or that was one FRACKING AMAZING performance. i can put it best like this: if a formula film about dance or street fighting or whatever is kind of like an opera seria, in which the plot takes place so that we can watch the featured subject happen (fights, dancing) as if it were arias surrounded by recit, than terrence howard's performance was a sonata in the middle of the opera. it's not like he stole the show; stealing a show is pretty unprofessional, in my opinion. it's just that his performance was so good, so detailed and eerie, sad and whole*, that it drew itself together throughout its disparate time-space in the movie. he wasn't the only one who acted beautifully. channing tatum was really really good. and brian j. white was just awesome: he would come onscreen and shower this brilliance that wasn't solely an effect of how cute he is. not solely. which, considering how cute he is, is, as usual, saying something--his acting was...yeah. awesome.

i'm kind of blathering.

i mean, the plot was pretty much nonsense--but there were layers; the idea of fighting was a metaphor, not just a descriptive thingee, so that though the sequence of events only kind of made sense, the underlying idea hanged together. it had heart, or something.

i'm glad i saw it.

no, thank YOU, america.


*ha ha, talk about your doctrine of the affections.
seriously, sra? seriously?