I made one of my biannual pilgrimmages to the movie theater
If most wide-release films didn't suck so bad, I'd go more often. This theater is very upscale, which means that not only is the population of poorly-behaved teenagers and loud idiots low, it has a bar in the lobby. Fuck yes, I WILL be taking my double espresso vodka into the theater with me.
The previews were a largely mediocre lot, sadly (see my previous point about wide-release films sucking). The only thing I'm really interested in is After Earth, which is Will & Jaden Smith's new thing. The preview looks great. I'm disappointed to see it's directed by M. Night Shyamalan, but hopefully he won't suck it up too much. I'll have to see what the RT rating looks like when it comes out.
World War Z looks like a big basket of crap. This should shock no one, as anyone who's read the book can see that its strength is not in its originality of plot (zombie plague topples the human race, human race triumphs over adversity) but in the structure and presentation: the story is told through a series of retrospective interviews with survivors. Anyone can see that kind of thing's going to be hard to capture on film, but judging by the trailer they decided to not even bother and just filmed "Independence Day With Zombies" instead. Also if you believe the production history referenced by wikipedia, it sounds like the whole thing has been a real shitshow and there's been serious studio interference with the film to keep it as non-threatening as possible. Awesome.
Speaking of Independence Day (I forget if the AP style guide calls for italics for films but I'm too lazy to check), one trick pony Roland Emmerich is once again going back to the widescale-disaster well with White House Down. The problem I'm having with this movie is that one of the main characters is the US president, who is black, and that he seems to be set up as both the sidekick and the comedic foil for the main character, who is of course a white guy. I'm not exactly an expert on race and the media, but there seems to me to be some very troubling takeaways from a scenario in which the (black) president is reduced to the level of a comedic sidekick for a (white) action hero. Of course, maybe the movie itself will not carry the same overtones as the promotional material- it wouldn't be the first time.
Another film that will get NO favorable judgments from me, however, is The Lone Ranger. I picture this conversation, although I'm not a film industry expert either:
Studio guy 1: Okay, great news, we've signed Johnny Depp to play Tonto in The Lone Ranger. Up high!
Studio guy 2: Yeahhhhh, aren't we at all concerned that we're hiring a high-profile white actor to play a high-profile Native American character? I mean, given the reputation the film industry has for whitewashing characters, particular in the context of the western genre, doesn't this have the potential to piss people off? Sure, Tonto was voiced by an Irish guy back in the day, but it's not the 1930s any more. People are going to notice that Johnny Depp is white.
Studio guy 1: They noticed that M. Night Shyamalan turned all the Asians in Avatar into white people, but The Last Airbender made a shitpot of money even with all the whiners.
Studio guy 2: Yeah, but Avatar was based on a cartoon, so they could get away with claiming the characters were "ethnically ambiguous." Tonto isn't ambiguous. I mean, the 50s was hardly a hotbed of racial sensitivity but even back then they cast a Native guy as Tonto. Well technically he was a Native Canadian, but still.
Studio guy 1: Wow, really?
Studio guy 2: Yes.
Studio guy 1: Well there aren't any fucking Native American actors that are going to get us as many asses in seats as Johnny Depp, I'll tell you that.
Studio guy 2: Just please tell me we're not going to paint brown makeup on him and hope no one notices.
Studio guy 1: Omigod THAT'S IT. Indians wear war paint, right? So we just put Depp in war paint through the whole thing. Problem solved!
Studio guy 2: Um. People are still going to know Johnny Depp is a fucking white guy under the paint.
Studio guy 1: And we'll make the paint WHITE. So it's like we put a white guy, in whiteface! Edgy!
Studio guy 2: ....Is 9:15 am too early to start drinking?
Iron Man 3 gets an A from me. Definitely better than the 2nd one, and I think as good as the first. It was a very busy film, as these tend to be, but I didn't feel like the action was overcrowded. There was a good character arc for Tony, and I thought the way they handled The Mandarin was very clever. The two major problems I have with the film are: 1, it didn't do an adequate job of explaining why none of the other supers got involved. I consider this a major narrative failure because it's something I kept thinking throughout the film, which means the script wasn't doing a good enough job of keeping the plot hole closed. Yes, this is an Iron Man film and you need Iron Man to be the star, you don't want to turn every Marvel film into The Avengers from here on out. But once you've crossed the streams, you can't just ignore it and hope no one notices.
They tried to explain why Shield wasn't involved by claiming that stuff was happening at a very deep level etc. And while exploding super-soldiers is definitely within Shield's remit, this film is taking place in the space where the threat isn't fully conceptualized and it just looks like a series of regular old bombs. Avengers ended with the team scattered and temporarily decommissioned. But they spent a lot of that movie building up relationships between those characters, and there's no indication in this movie that the other Avengers were aware of what was up with Tony or really gave a shit. Wouldn't one of those assholes at least call and say "Hey, way to taunt terrorists into targeting you, douchebag" or "Pepper, I'm so sorry, is there anything I can do to help?" Even from a purely pragmatic viewpoint (and the man is nothing if not pragmatic) I would think Nick Fury would at least TAKE AN INTEREST when a paramilitary attack of terrorist origin murders one of the Avengers in his own home on American soil? Isn't Shield part of Homeland Security? What the eff?
The other issue is one I thought of afterward. I really liked that a lot of Tony's character arc was about him dealing with the aftermath of his experiences in The Avengers, and learning to rely on himself and separate his self-image from the suit. I really liked that they gave him a lot of symptoms of PTSD and made dealing with that a part of his journey in the story. It interfered with his life and relationships and hampered him at key moments, which was realistic and made his character more relatable and his problems more immediate. (I know Tony explicitly denies that he has PTSD, but it's in character for him to do so, particularly at that moment, so I don't consider that denial dispositive.)
So what's the problem I'm complaining about? Basically I think that the ending made it a little too easy. I understand the significance of Tony destroying the various armors at the end, and that's an important step and statement about his growth. It's not that the ending is...tacked on...exactly, and I don't necessarily have a problem with the way the narrative is framed. But the way it ties up all the loose ends with a few lines seems a little too neat. Like when you play a video game and at the end they sum it all up in a couple paragraphs accompanied by black and white sketches. It feels like a bit of a cockslap. And while we'd have to see the next film with Iron Man (Avengers 2, I think) to know for sure if they've completely resolved the PTSD-or-PTSD-like-thing he's been dealing with, the way they wrap it up implies that he's completely closed the book on that problem, which is...not right. Regardless of whether it's PTSD or a PTSD-like-thing, you can't overcome it in a couple days by sheer force of will. Conscious steps taken towards resolution are important but not the whole story. And I feel that by wrapping it up this way, they've prematurely ended a character arc for Tony that started extremely promisingly and a lot of effort was put into.
Christ, I'm tired and I haven't even started on Star Trek yet.
It's hard to speak about these films from equal footing. While I have no experience with the source material for either, I have more grounding with the movieverse Iron Man (due to the prior 2 movies) than to the Star Trek reboot (I didn't see the first Abrams film). Plus I've made no secret of the fact that the only reason I was interested in the movie was Benedict Cumberbatch. So I'll keep my comments brief. This film was fun to watch, and the pacing and structure were good. I adored Cumberbatch, not least because his voice is like some sort of subsonic orgasm machine, and the emotional arc dealing with Kirk and Spock's friendship was well-executed throughout. The acting was really superb across the board, and I must say that I enjoyed rampage!Spock.
HOWEVER, I would say that as a whole this film is not as successful (as a film) as IM3 and gives me more serious pause. The whitewashing thing is a problem. Even as someone who is not a Trek fan, I felt betrayed when it became clear that Cumberbatch was in fact Khan. Don't get me wrong- Cumberbatch is a great villain, his voice and his presence are incredible, and I'd like to see him in more "evil" roles in the future. But Khan isn't white. Do we really have to take the few solid, historically non-white characters in film history and turn them into white people too? There are two weirdly contradictory claims about how this happened. Bob Orci claims that there was a concern about portraying non-white people as villainous, but the writers also claim that the villain wasn't originally Khan, they just sort of shoehorned him in. Both these explanations sound suspect to me, particularly Orci's.
See, the problem of portraying non-white people as villainous comes about in two ways- in the aggregate (when the only roles non-white people are cast in across a large range of movies are villains) or when your non-white villain is portrayed as villainous BECAUSE of his race or if he becomes such a caricature of villainy that he has no personal characteristics outside his race. With the aggregate issue, there's not much you can do in the specific context of a Star Trek film project, because all the characters are well-established as being of particular backgrounds, unless you want to change it up and make everyone black or something, but this franchise has already established a pattern of maintaining the ethnicities of the characters from the original work. When you've established that pattern, you can't fix anything by suddenly making the non-white characters white- you just fuck things up worse. What fixing the aggregate problem really requires is more original works making the decisions that place non-white characters in key roles, both heroic and villainous. That's not to disclaim the responsibility of individual films, but a legacy project like Star Trek is a different situation than an all-original project. (And of course we have to remember that the original tv series was well ahead of its time in terms of promoting non-white leading roles.)
The second problem is easily, easily solved by competent writing. Villains should be a product of their backgrounds to the extent that their ethnicity may help shape their life experiences, but they should in no sense be cardboard cutouts. If your villain turns into a stock character like "the terrorist Arab" or "the opium-smuggling Chinese" or whatever, it doesn't necessarily make you racist, but it DOES make you a lazyass motherfucker. A proper villain is human, and should be at least partially sympathetic. His motives should be a reflection of the kind of person he is- if you're stuck on him, think about his minions and how he recruited them and why they're there. If the answer is "because they like to kill people" then stop and start over. This isn't a WW2 propaganda film and your villain is not Hitler. "Because he's evil" is not a motivation.
The reason I think Orci's explanation about not wanting to characterize non-whites as villainous or other is horseshit is because the writers actually did a fantastic job with Khan. They downplayed his "otherness" successfully to the extent that even once you learn that Khan ISN'T part of Starfleet and never really was, you sort of forget that. He's alien in the sense that he's distant and cold and ruthless, but he's completely humanized by his backstory. I can't seriously believe that having his skin be a different color would have undone that work. Furthermore, Khan was far from a caricature of a villain and he was utterly sympathetic. His explanation for why he went after Starfleet's commanders made total sense and even made his action seem fair under the circumstances. You feel kind of glad when he kills Admiral Marcus because really, fuck that guy. When the torpedoes detonate on the ship he's commandeered and he screams in anguish as (he believes) his entire crew is destroyed you can't help but feel sympathy for him. Sure, he's a genocidal maniac, but all he wanted was to save his friends! It's obvious that the writers deliberately elicited this sympathy in part by developing a parallel between Khan's actions and Kirk's, and they did it very well. My point is that all this excellent character work would more than compensate for any othering inherent in casting a non-white person as the villain.
Finally, everyone swore up, down and sideways that Cumberbatch was NOT KHAN, omg, where did you people even get that. I understand that this was part of the marketing, and they felt that keeping it a secret was a cool plot twist. But they were telling this lie in direct response to people figuring out that Cumberbatch was Khan and making accusations of whitewashing, which is so not cool. This is really the equivalent to what Shyamalan did, ie avoiding accusations of whitewashing by pretending the character wasn't a person of color in the first place, with the added fun of direct, provable lies. DICK MOVE, ABRAMS. I'm reminded of a Bob's Burgers episode, because I've been watching the hell out of that show lately, where the main characters set up a dinner theater with a really shitty play that opens with the main character telling the audience they have to figure out who the murderer is, but that it's absolutely not her. The performance ends with the audience incorrectly guessing the murderer, and being told that it IS her.
Audience member 1: What? You explicitly told us at the beginning of the show that you weren't the murderer!
Linda: That's right! It's a twist!
Audience member 2: No, it's a lie. A lie is not a twist.
On an unrelated matter, but also a major problem: their cute little game of including Leonard Nimoy as future!Spock. Who, it's implied in this installment, basically tells young!Spock how to defeat Khan and therefore completely undermines Spock's character arc and any credit he would normally get from his actions. WTF?
The previews were a largely mediocre lot, sadly (see my previous point about wide-release films sucking). The only thing I'm really interested in is After Earth, which is Will & Jaden Smith's new thing. The preview looks great. I'm disappointed to see it's directed by M. Night Shyamalan, but hopefully he won't suck it up too much. I'll have to see what the RT rating looks like when it comes out.
World War Z looks like a big basket of crap. This should shock no one, as anyone who's read the book can see that its strength is not in its originality of plot (zombie plague topples the human race, human race triumphs over adversity) but in the structure and presentation: the story is told through a series of retrospective interviews with survivors. Anyone can see that kind of thing's going to be hard to capture on film, but judging by the trailer they decided to not even bother and just filmed "Independence Day With Zombies" instead. Also if you believe the production history referenced by wikipedia, it sounds like the whole thing has been a real shitshow and there's been serious studio interference with the film to keep it as non-threatening as possible. Awesome.
Speaking of Independence Day (I forget if the AP style guide calls for italics for films but I'm too lazy to check), one trick pony Roland Emmerich is once again going back to the widescale-disaster well with White House Down. The problem I'm having with this movie is that one of the main characters is the US president, who is black, and that he seems to be set up as both the sidekick and the comedic foil for the main character, who is of course a white guy. I'm not exactly an expert on race and the media, but there seems to me to be some very troubling takeaways from a scenario in which the (black) president is reduced to the level of a comedic sidekick for a (white) action hero. Of course, maybe the movie itself will not carry the same overtones as the promotional material- it wouldn't be the first time.
Another film that will get NO favorable judgments from me, however, is The Lone Ranger. I picture this conversation, although I'm not a film industry expert either:
Studio guy 1: Okay, great news, we've signed Johnny Depp to play Tonto in The Lone Ranger. Up high!
Studio guy 2: Yeahhhhh, aren't we at all concerned that we're hiring a high-profile white actor to play a high-profile Native American character? I mean, given the reputation the film industry has for whitewashing characters, particular in the context of the western genre, doesn't this have the potential to piss people off? Sure, Tonto was voiced by an Irish guy back in the day, but it's not the 1930s any more. People are going to notice that Johnny Depp is white.
Studio guy 1: They noticed that M. Night Shyamalan turned all the Asians in Avatar into white people, but The Last Airbender made a shitpot of money even with all the whiners.
Studio guy 2: Yeah, but Avatar was based on a cartoon, so they could get away with claiming the characters were "ethnically ambiguous." Tonto isn't ambiguous. I mean, the 50s was hardly a hotbed of racial sensitivity but even back then they cast a Native guy as Tonto. Well technically he was a Native Canadian, but still.
Studio guy 1: Wow, really?
Studio guy 2: Yes.
Studio guy 1: Well there aren't any fucking Native American actors that are going to get us as many asses in seats as Johnny Depp, I'll tell you that.
Studio guy 2: Just please tell me we're not going to paint brown makeup on him and hope no one notices.
Studio guy 1: Omigod THAT'S IT. Indians wear war paint, right? So we just put Depp in war paint through the whole thing. Problem solved!
Studio guy 2: Um. People are still going to know Johnny Depp is a fucking white guy under the paint.
Studio guy 1: And we'll make the paint WHITE. So it's like we put a white guy, in whiteface! Edgy!
Studio guy 2: ....Is 9:15 am too early to start drinking?
Iron Man 3 gets an A from me. Definitely better than the 2nd one, and I think as good as the first. It was a very busy film, as these tend to be, but I didn't feel like the action was overcrowded. There was a good character arc for Tony, and I thought the way they handled The Mandarin was very clever. The two major problems I have with the film are: 1, it didn't do an adequate job of explaining why none of the other supers got involved. I consider this a major narrative failure because it's something I kept thinking throughout the film, which means the script wasn't doing a good enough job of keeping the plot hole closed. Yes, this is an Iron Man film and you need Iron Man to be the star, you don't want to turn every Marvel film into The Avengers from here on out. But once you've crossed the streams, you can't just ignore it and hope no one notices.
They tried to explain why Shield wasn't involved by claiming that stuff was happening at a very deep level etc. And while exploding super-soldiers is definitely within Shield's remit, this film is taking place in the space where the threat isn't fully conceptualized and it just looks like a series of regular old bombs. Avengers ended with the team scattered and temporarily decommissioned. But they spent a lot of that movie building up relationships between those characters, and there's no indication in this movie that the other Avengers were aware of what was up with Tony or really gave a shit. Wouldn't one of those assholes at least call and say "Hey, way to taunt terrorists into targeting you, douchebag" or "Pepper, I'm so sorry, is there anything I can do to help?" Even from a purely pragmatic viewpoint (and the man is nothing if not pragmatic) I would think Nick Fury would at least TAKE AN INTEREST when a paramilitary attack of terrorist origin murders one of the Avengers in his own home on American soil? Isn't Shield part of Homeland Security? What the eff?
The other issue is one I thought of afterward. I really liked that a lot of Tony's character arc was about him dealing with the aftermath of his experiences in The Avengers, and learning to rely on himself and separate his self-image from the suit. I really liked that they gave him a lot of symptoms of PTSD and made dealing with that a part of his journey in the story. It interfered with his life and relationships and hampered him at key moments, which was realistic and made his character more relatable and his problems more immediate. (I know Tony explicitly denies that he has PTSD, but it's in character for him to do so, particularly at that moment, so I don't consider that denial dispositive.)
So what's the problem I'm complaining about? Basically I think that the ending made it a little too easy. I understand the significance of Tony destroying the various armors at the end, and that's an important step and statement about his growth. It's not that the ending is...tacked on...exactly, and I don't necessarily have a problem with the way the narrative is framed. But the way it ties up all the loose ends with a few lines seems a little too neat. Like when you play a video game and at the end they sum it all up in a couple paragraphs accompanied by black and white sketches. It feels like a bit of a cockslap. And while we'd have to see the next film with Iron Man (Avengers 2, I think) to know for sure if they've completely resolved the PTSD-or-PTSD-like-thing he's been dealing with, the way they wrap it up implies that he's completely closed the book on that problem, which is...not right. Regardless of whether it's PTSD or a PTSD-like-thing, you can't overcome it in a couple days by sheer force of will. Conscious steps taken towards resolution are important but not the whole story. And I feel that by wrapping it up this way, they've prematurely ended a character arc for Tony that started extremely promisingly and a lot of effort was put into.
Christ, I'm tired and I haven't even started on Star Trek yet.
It's hard to speak about these films from equal footing. While I have no experience with the source material for either, I have more grounding with the movieverse Iron Man (due to the prior 2 movies) than to the Star Trek reboot (I didn't see the first Abrams film). Plus I've made no secret of the fact that the only reason I was interested in the movie was Benedict Cumberbatch. So I'll keep my comments brief. This film was fun to watch, and the pacing and structure were good. I adored Cumberbatch, not least because his voice is like some sort of subsonic orgasm machine, and the emotional arc dealing with Kirk and Spock's friendship was well-executed throughout. The acting was really superb across the board, and I must say that I enjoyed rampage!Spock.
HOWEVER, I would say that as a whole this film is not as successful (as a film) as IM3 and gives me more serious pause. The whitewashing thing is a problem. Even as someone who is not a Trek fan, I felt betrayed when it became clear that Cumberbatch was in fact Khan. Don't get me wrong- Cumberbatch is a great villain, his voice and his presence are incredible, and I'd like to see him in more "evil" roles in the future. But Khan isn't white. Do we really have to take the few solid, historically non-white characters in film history and turn them into white people too? There are two weirdly contradictory claims about how this happened. Bob Orci claims that there was a concern about portraying non-white people as villainous, but the writers also claim that the villain wasn't originally Khan, they just sort of shoehorned him in. Both these explanations sound suspect to me, particularly Orci's.
See, the problem of portraying non-white people as villainous comes about in two ways- in the aggregate (when the only roles non-white people are cast in across a large range of movies are villains) or when your non-white villain is portrayed as villainous BECAUSE of his race or if he becomes such a caricature of villainy that he has no personal characteristics outside his race. With the aggregate issue, there's not much you can do in the specific context of a Star Trek film project, because all the characters are well-established as being of particular backgrounds, unless you want to change it up and make everyone black or something, but this franchise has already established a pattern of maintaining the ethnicities of the characters from the original work. When you've established that pattern, you can't fix anything by suddenly making the non-white characters white- you just fuck things up worse. What fixing the aggregate problem really requires is more original works making the decisions that place non-white characters in key roles, both heroic and villainous. That's not to disclaim the responsibility of individual films, but a legacy project like Star Trek is a different situation than an all-original project. (And of course we have to remember that the original tv series was well ahead of its time in terms of promoting non-white leading roles.)
The second problem is easily, easily solved by competent writing. Villains should be a product of their backgrounds to the extent that their ethnicity may help shape their life experiences, but they should in no sense be cardboard cutouts. If your villain turns into a stock character like "the terrorist Arab" or "the opium-smuggling Chinese" or whatever, it doesn't necessarily make you racist, but it DOES make you a lazyass motherfucker. A proper villain is human, and should be at least partially sympathetic. His motives should be a reflection of the kind of person he is- if you're stuck on him, think about his minions and how he recruited them and why they're there. If the answer is "because they like to kill people" then stop and start over. This isn't a WW2 propaganda film and your villain is not Hitler. "Because he's evil" is not a motivation.
The reason I think Orci's explanation about not wanting to characterize non-whites as villainous or other is horseshit is because the writers actually did a fantastic job with Khan. They downplayed his "otherness" successfully to the extent that even once you learn that Khan ISN'T part of Starfleet and never really was, you sort of forget that. He's alien in the sense that he's distant and cold and ruthless, but he's completely humanized by his backstory. I can't seriously believe that having his skin be a different color would have undone that work. Furthermore, Khan was far from a caricature of a villain and he was utterly sympathetic. His explanation for why he went after Starfleet's commanders made total sense and even made his action seem fair under the circumstances. You feel kind of glad when he kills Admiral Marcus because really, fuck that guy. When the torpedoes detonate on the ship he's commandeered and he screams in anguish as (he believes) his entire crew is destroyed you can't help but feel sympathy for him. Sure, he's a genocidal maniac, but all he wanted was to save his friends! It's obvious that the writers deliberately elicited this sympathy in part by developing a parallel between Khan's actions and Kirk's, and they did it very well. My point is that all this excellent character work would more than compensate for any othering inherent in casting a non-white person as the villain.
Finally, everyone swore up, down and sideways that Cumberbatch was NOT KHAN, omg, where did you people even get that. I understand that this was part of the marketing, and they felt that keeping it a secret was a cool plot twist. But they were telling this lie in direct response to people figuring out that Cumberbatch was Khan and making accusations of whitewashing, which is so not cool. This is really the equivalent to what Shyamalan did, ie avoiding accusations of whitewashing by pretending the character wasn't a person of color in the first place, with the added fun of direct, provable lies. DICK MOVE, ABRAMS. I'm reminded of a Bob's Burgers episode, because I've been watching the hell out of that show lately, where the main characters set up a dinner theater with a really shitty play that opens with the main character telling the audience they have to figure out who the murderer is, but that it's absolutely not her. The performance ends with the audience incorrectly guessing the murderer, and being told that it IS her.
Audience member 1: What? You explicitly told us at the beginning of the show that you weren't the murderer!
Linda: That's right! It's a twist!
Audience member 2: No, it's a lie. A lie is not a twist.
On an unrelated matter, but also a major problem: their cute little game of including Leonard Nimoy as future!Spock. Who, it's implied in this installment, basically tells young!Spock how to defeat Khan and therefore completely undermines Spock's character arc and any credit he would normally get from his actions. WTF?