jump, they say
Wheee! My shuffle just hit the Manic Street Preachers cover of "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head," which is deeply appropriate. Cape Town has been solidly rained on for several days now, great fat rain with, last night, a small and slightly diffident thunderstorm which cleared its throat a few times and then shuffled off, embarrassed. There are huge puddles everywhere, including one entire lane in the middle of the shopping centre this morning, and a young lake outside our front gate. I am a happy, happy rain-worshipper, as stv can testify, having laughed at me as I headed out to work this morning with a silly grin on my face. Also, I'm having to restrain a more or less continuous impulse to jump in puddles, or drive the car through them in a dashing arc of spray.
Atmospheric pressure is doing the right things, but this is not going to stop me from a rant, possibly a necessary counter-balance to yesterday's unashamed Doctor Who fangirling. In a moment of mild interest, or possibly complete mental aberration, the houseguests and I watched Jumper on Saturday. We were ... stunned. Stunned and unable to parry.
Hollywood traditionally does awful things to science fiction movies - I think it's a tragic disease, or possibly a christening curse. Ideas and narrative cliché are badly mismatched bedfellows, leading to strangely twisted and uncomfortable sex. The premise of Jumper - young man discovers he can teleport, leads life of indolent bank robbery and sightseeing until hunted down by mad anti-jumper organisation - is rife with promise and implication, absolutely none of which the movie fulfils. It operates, instead, as an exercise in surface, a sort of going-through-the-motions gesture at narrative, plot and psychology, but with each of its elements completely unconnected to any of the others and devoid of any actual value or significance. It exemplifies more than any other recent film I can call to mind the script malaise currently at the heart of the blockbuster. It's as if the writers thought, okay, we need a main character, an antagonist, an antihero, a love interest, family angst, some jumping around and some conflict, and proceeded to put all of the above into a blender and give them a whirl. The result isn't actually fractured, it's just bland, featureless and perfectly lacking in flavour or meaning.
Apparently the huge drawback of teleportation as a superhero power is that it turns you into a drivelling idiot, or, in extreme cases, into Hayden Christensen. As an actor Christensen is characterised mostly by petulant woodenness1, but here you can't even blame him: even an actual actor wouldn't be able to do much with the complete absence of motivation, consistency or logical response which the script presents. He more or less bumbles around achieving a string of actions variously characterised under "no apparent reason", "seemed like a good idea at the time", "vaguely stupid" and "too stupid to live", while Samuel L. Jackson is Baaaaaaad! (in both morality and acting technique) in his immediate vicinity and various parents are absent and illogical. His girlfriend sticks confusedly around with him despite an absolute lack of reason to do so. The whole shambling mess totters to a halt without resolution, and expires in a morass of badly-motivated loose ends. In a snowdrift.
We watched in a sort of stunned silence for the first twenty minutes or so, as it was gradually made apparent that in indulging in normal expectations - that this DVD contains an actual film - we had been royally swizzed. Then we watched the rest in a steadily-increasing abusive rage, shouting imprecations at the screen - "Noooo!", "Why???", "Now is not the moment!" and "Just tell her!" When the film did occasionally allow interesting ideas to briefly manifest - fun games with momentum on teleported objects, for example - they were still-born, strangled within seconds of their presentation by stupidity, disinterest or wanton disregard for cause and effect. The obvious limitations of the lead actor's wooden consciousness aside, the film itself failed for even a microsecond to examine the implications of its premise, the moral issues attached to the freedom and flexibility of the teleporter.
Absolutely the best thing one can say about Jumper, apart from its provision of a quality opportunity for ranting, is that some of the scenery was rather pretty2. As jo said, the cinematography wasn't bad. It's a wholly appropriate epitaph. Travel great distances to avoid this film.
1 I draw your attention to the Bowie lyrics with which I head this post: "They say / he has no brain / They say / he has no mood / ...They say 'Jump'..."
2 Including, at the moments when he took his shirt off, the lead actor.
Atmospheric pressure is doing the right things, but this is not going to stop me from a rant, possibly a necessary counter-balance to yesterday's unashamed Doctor Who fangirling. In a moment of mild interest, or possibly complete mental aberration, the houseguests and I watched Jumper on Saturday. We were ... stunned. Stunned and unable to parry.
Hollywood traditionally does awful things to science fiction movies - I think it's a tragic disease, or possibly a christening curse. Ideas and narrative cliché are badly mismatched bedfellows, leading to strangely twisted and uncomfortable sex. The premise of Jumper - young man discovers he can teleport, leads life of indolent bank robbery and sightseeing until hunted down by mad anti-jumper organisation - is rife with promise and implication, absolutely none of which the movie fulfils. It operates, instead, as an exercise in surface, a sort of going-through-the-motions gesture at narrative, plot and psychology, but with each of its elements completely unconnected to any of the others and devoid of any actual value or significance. It exemplifies more than any other recent film I can call to mind the script malaise currently at the heart of the blockbuster. It's as if the writers thought, okay, we need a main character, an antagonist, an antihero, a love interest, family angst, some jumping around and some conflict, and proceeded to put all of the above into a blender and give them a whirl. The result isn't actually fractured, it's just bland, featureless and perfectly lacking in flavour or meaning.
Apparently the huge drawback of teleportation as a superhero power is that it turns you into a drivelling idiot, or, in extreme cases, into Hayden Christensen. As an actor Christensen is characterised mostly by petulant woodenness1, but here you can't even blame him: even an actual actor wouldn't be able to do much with the complete absence of motivation, consistency or logical response which the script presents. He more or less bumbles around achieving a string of actions variously characterised under "no apparent reason", "seemed like a good idea at the time", "vaguely stupid" and "too stupid to live", while Samuel L. Jackson is Baaaaaaad! (in both morality and acting technique) in his immediate vicinity and various parents are absent and illogical. His girlfriend sticks confusedly around with him despite an absolute lack of reason to do so. The whole shambling mess totters to a halt without resolution, and expires in a morass of badly-motivated loose ends. In a snowdrift.
We watched in a sort of stunned silence for the first twenty minutes or so, as it was gradually made apparent that in indulging in normal expectations - that this DVD contains an actual film - we had been royally swizzed. Then we watched the rest in a steadily-increasing abusive rage, shouting imprecations at the screen - "Noooo!", "Why???", "Now is not the moment!" and "Just tell her!" When the film did occasionally allow interesting ideas to briefly manifest - fun games with momentum on teleported objects, for example - they were still-born, strangled within seconds of their presentation by stupidity, disinterest or wanton disregard for cause and effect. The obvious limitations of the lead actor's wooden consciousness aside, the film itself failed for even a microsecond to examine the implications of its premise, the moral issues attached to the freedom and flexibility of the teleporter.
Absolutely the best thing one can say about Jumper, apart from its provision of a quality opportunity for ranting, is that some of the scenery was rather pretty2. As jo said, the cinematography wasn't bad. It's a wholly appropriate epitaph. Travel great distances to avoid this film.
1 I draw your attention to the Bowie lyrics with which I head this post: "They say / he has no brain / They say / he has no mood / ...They say 'Jump'..."
2 Including, at the moments when he took his shirt off, the lead actor.