Iron Man

Iron Man
an action movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 7/10
Meets Expectations: +1 (which is amazing considering the hype)
Apparent Rating: 8/10

If there can be said to be long-time readers of a months’ old blog, let me say that long-time readers should know that I have an immense love for superhero movies. Iron Man is no exception. I really enjoyed it. I think the live action version is superior to the cartoon version I saw recently too.

So much of this movie is funny, like when the S.H.I.E.L.D. guy says the whole name every time and every time, the person says, “Ya needa new name!” and he says he gets that a lot. It’s one of those things that’s funny because of the repetition.

The Pepper Potts woman was less of a caricature than I expected, but still managed to hit all those character identifying notes that I’d expect from the woman who is the personal assistant to her playboy boss. It was a little less successful in terms of me believing she was really witty and really in love with him because the line about trash was a bit off-rhythm and  she was way more squicked about saving his life than grateful it had worked. Considering that the role was entirely a caricature in the original stories and in all previous versions, the actress did a tolerable job. But I didn’t feel her devotion or understand her rationale for it and that would have helped sell the movie to me.

Tony Stark was good. I think there could have been a bit more exposition, but we’re meant to think he’s shallow. That shallowness would have worked better if it hadn’t been played in a flashback after he’d gotten taken hostage, because I sort of felt like he deserved to have some fun after the hellish experience…. intellectually I realize the kidnapping was supposed to look like Karma, but because it was out of sequence…. I didn’t like how casually he dealt with the hostage situation. He’s got all that money and doesn’t think to go back for the pieces of his creation? The helper translator guy story bothered me and it seems like anyone who has gotten that far in life would not have just accepted it at face value. But what I did really like about Tony Stark is even in the midst of his shallow playboy lifestyle, it’s completely clear how brilliant he really is. He didn’t just inherit the company, he inherited the brains to make something of it.

Overall, I can’t say if the actor, Robert Downey Jr, was good in this role; I’ve read reviews saying he was, but I thought some of it looked like acting—especially the parts where he’s supposed to be brilliant. I remember him from the nightly news where they kept showing the perp walk when he’d been arrested on drugs use and drunk driving and some other things that show really bad judgment.  So when Tony Stark is driving like a maniac in a quarter-million dollar car through magically empty Los Angeles streets, I kept expecting DUI behavior. I think he was probably adequate and it really is unlikely that Hollywood has anyone who can seem brilliant, since being actually smart is such a taboo societally that even brilliant people can have no practice looking smart. It was still vastly superior to the “I’m like totally stoned right now!” performance from Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man. Comparatively, since they’re supposed to both be roles of brilliant men, RDjr turned in a much superior performance.

One thing I enjoyed, from a humorous angle, was that Tony Stark and Obadaiah Stane and several other people had beards. Normally one can discern the villain immediately because he is a blond man with a beard.

Some of the most amusing parts were the construction robots with the fire extinguishers.

I would really like to see sequels to Iron Man.  If they’re all of this quality, I could see a sequel beating out X-Men for my favorite superhero movie.

Sanctuary: the place for speculative fiction in a modern world.

Why are all science fiction shows chock full of the scary business? I had been seeing ads for the new show Sanctuary for months before it appeared, so my anticipation was high. I couldn’t watch even 30 minutes of the pilot. Too much darkness with things jumping out. Hollywood seems to think of science fiction as a haunted house and I read science fiction and fantasy to explore interesting ideas like interactions between vastly different cultures. So I think of sff more like anthropology or politics or history. You don’t hear anthropologists and historians going around passing judgement before they have researched or talked to people. Assuming things that are different are going to be scary is a very non-sff concept, one I think is bad for society as a whole. Many people who read science fiction want to become scientists (despite the way scientists frown upon fictional science and its readers, there are a lot of people who treat their reading preferences as a dirty little secret) because they want to know more. If the books were all about how scientists’ need to know destroys the Earth and kills everyone, wouldn’t that discourage some of the brightest people? Many people who read some of the great modern fantasy absorb tolerance— I don’t know anyone who has read and liked Lackey’s Valdemar series who really thinks being homosexual is a killing offense, there are some who are still skeeved if they think about it too much, but we all got to know Vanyel and it’s hard to think he deserved to be tortured because he wasn’t attracted to women.

Personally I’ve read books that started from an Islamic basis, the story wasn’t about that, but there was an underlying premise. I got to know a little bit about what the differences are compared to my own upbringing. I find it impossible to assume every Muslim is inherently a terrorist. Because the fundamental core beliefs are not about that.  But if the story had been about being a woman in Saudi Arabia, I would have been too angry to keep reading and then I would have no connection to the characters.

Science fiction and fantasy differ in what powers everything, but they are both fundamentally about exploration of the human condition, regardless of shape or color or background or belief.

Hollywood’s tendency to make all science fiction and fantasy scary enough to be horror really undermines the globalization of society. Hollywood is trying to make us afraid of each other by making everything that is different jump out of the darkness with guns blazing.

It makes the title of the new show Sanctuary rather ironic.

Black Velvet Gown

Black Velvet Gown
an historical melodrama movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5
Meets Expectations: -1
Apparent Rating: 4

This was another movie where the title has very little to do with what happens and the description of the movie even less so. The summary of the movie says it’s about a widow who takes a housekeeping job and the master falls for her and then leaves her the house but society around her is very intolerant of jumped up servants aping gentry.

If you’re interested in this movie stop here. There will be spoilers. If you’re reading from the RSS feed, you won’t see the fold I inserted here.

Once

Once
a foreign drama movie
IMDb | Netflix
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: -3
Apparent Rating: 3/10

I know there is often a disconnect between the summary describing a movie and what the movie is really about. Some of that has to be not spoiling the viewing experience. Some of it might be the translation from Irish English to American English. But this is not a movie about two people falling in love with each other.

The songs in this have a lot of catchy bits to them but they are annoyingly repetitive. As I get older, I find even popular music from my teenage years to be inane and repetitious, but most of these songs had one verse and a 3-verse-long chorus. There’s one song that says “When your mind’s made up/there’s no use fightin’.” fine. It’s part of the chorus, and most songs repeat the chorus several times, but there were more than a dozen instances of that couplet. Even that does not convey the irritation. The guy sings it in falsetto. In a minor key. As a duet with the girl even though the drama bits of the musical indicate it wasn’t about her. And she chooses the minor-fourth harmony. It was the accoustic power ballad dirge love song set on “Repeat1″. 15 minutes of 85 minutes. Seriously. It was the song that never ends. It says on the movie jacket that the actors wrote the songs and won an Oscar for it. Must has been a low-competition year.

Bad subtitles that didn’t include the important bits.

The movie skims over the parts that made their relationship (as non-lovers and non-friends) by showing a silent clip sequence.

But the whole movie is supposed to be upbeat, showing how a man who works in a vacuum cleaner repair shop can find a girlfriend and record a demo disc— supposedly so he can “make it big”. But he was just helping his dad out in the shop, it wasn’t like he didn’t have a career before then. The girl was at least a decade younger than him, a foreigner, married, with a child— so she wasn’t for him. And by the time the one song of doom ended, I’d rather punch the guy than listen to him play.

Ireland looks beautiful when you see it on travel programs, but it looks like a hellhole in this movie. Apparently they  saved big bucks on filming rights by shooting at 4am in back alleys. Everything is grim and dark and underlit and overlaid with this miasma of filthy despair. It was odd because I couldn’t imagine anyone living there making any strides toward success, but that was the premise of the movie. I think someone put a camera filter on because a story that’s about people working hard to make themselves happy can’t be of artistic value, only suffering and pain can have artistic value, so they had to artificially make Ireland look like Tartarus.

The story might have been interesting if I could have identified with the characters.

The female lead was… what do you call it when someone moves to a country but has no intention of staying and becoming a citizen? that’s not immigration. Anyway, one of those. She doesn’t have a regular job, she accosts people on the sidewalk to sell them junk like homeless person magazines and dead flowers.  She meets this guy who is busking on the street. (I hate that too. The world is loud enough without people deliberately adding noise to it in public.) They make friends with each other and eventually she brings him home, she’s so young she lives with her mother, but she has a toddler. So we’re supposed to feel sorry for her because she’s in a strange country with a child and no husband and trying to keep a roof over everyone’s head when she can’t find a real job. But I don’t believe that. I think if you take a chance with your life, you don’t bring your vulnerabilities and try to use them as a shield. I think you don’t emigrate to a country where you barely speak the language without a job lined up. So I’m a hard-hearted person, but I had zero sympathy for her.

To sum up, I hated the guy. I hated the girl. I hated the music. I hated the setting. I might have liked the story if they had used other characters and it had been set somewhere the sun still shines and the music was less annoying. But then again, I didn’t especially like Music and Lyrics, which is exactly what I just described wanting this movie to have been.

Dreamkeeper

Dreamkeeper
a docudrama movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations:+1
Apparent Rating: 6/10

There are some movies that meander and seem rather opaque that still end up entertaining, Dreamkeeper was one of them. It was a close call though. I thought a lot of the forced parallels between the legends and the journey were blindingly obvious most of the time and astonishingly inapplicable the rest. I kept getting lost as to what was a flashback, what was story, and what was now.

The “now” part of the story was uninteresting and just next to worthless. I think it existed solely to be a framework for telling these other parables, but generally if I can see why something was done that way it seems like a staging failure. In my own writing, I call that, “Excuse me, your plot is showing.”

Some of the stories were really good. They were well told and interesting. Some of the stories relied upon outside knowledge I didn’t have and those were less successful. The stories were from a variety of tribes, even though the main characters were at one point “Sioux” and at another point “Lakota”– perhaps that’s a variant of Sioux, like when the Pawnee woman added, “Wolf Clan”. None of the Indian parables told failed as badly as the main storyline. The flashbacks, which were supposed to help the viewer sort out the rationale for the main storyline, did not start until late in the movie and by then I’d already written the characters off.

In summary, “Too bad they had all that wasted time with Grandpa and Shane.” It’s a 3 hour movie and at least half of it was very boring. I did not like the resolution in the end either. We’re supposed to see this as a happy ending, but really, the movie would have been a lot better if it had been a dozen little movielets that were just telling the stories.

Overall if you like “Native American” mythology, then you will probably enjoy this movie at least moderately. It was not terrible, but certainly a movie to have your knitting nearby to keep your hands busy.

Dragon Tiger Gate

It was filed under superhero movies. I claim that the renting of Dragon Tiger Gate was completely not my fault. I love superhero movies. My DH loves kung fu movies. Clearly this would be an amazing together-activity, right?  Not so much. We did watch it together and we did bond over it. But that moment of shared experience was thinking “What were they thinking?”

The movie jumps around a lot in the timeline. It’s based on Manga, so you just know there are whole issues that are flashback. But there is no cohesion to the flashbacks, so they go from current to recent-past to long past to possible future to current in some random order at intermittent times.

The plot is that two brothers are separated in early childhood. There was a conflict between the spoken English and the subtitle English, but it seems to have been that Dragon and Tiger are half-brothers and their father Two Wrong FuHu  (or something like that) cheated on Dragon’s mother, so they were thrown out of their home and replaced by the new and improved family while Dragon’s mother went to live in the ghetto slums. Tiger tries to keep his brotherly bond, but Dragon is having nothing of it. Then Dragon’s mother dies and Dragon is adopted by a complete stranger instead of returning to his father.

But the premise of the plot is that Dragon owes fealty to his father and must return to “The Gate”. Dragon feels he cannot because he has dishonored his kung fu.

But even now after watching the whole thing, I have no clue who the bad guys were. At first it seemed like this gang. Then it was a traitor within the gang who was Dragon’s bit of fluff. Then it was this escapee from the Power Rangers.

Oh, and a huge part of the plot is that no one seems to believe Dragon and Tiger are related because they don’t look alike. Maybe if I were Chinese I would be able to tell, but to me it looked like that ancient Parent Trap movie with Halley Mills and Halley Mills.

All the fight scenes are completely ludicrous. They look a bit like the car-fight scenes in Speed Racer where jump-jacks can shoot the car straight up and into a barrel roll. By the time we get to that part though, we’re on our fourth evil mastermind and this one looks like a cartoon reject, so I just assumed this was supposed to be hilarious and a parody. (I wonder if I might have liked Coughing Tiger, Hidden Moron if someone had told me it was all tongue-in-cheek?)

The story is all over the place with technology. Cell phones, but no one has a powered vehicle.

Some parts of the story were interesting. Love interest. Foreign Family Values. Etc. But it really was written by the three faces of Eve or something. Just completely incoherent.

Deja Vu, Thy Name is Eleventh Hour

Somewhere in the ether I have bits and drabs of a post about the British series Eleventh Hour (starring Patrick Stewart) which I got from Netflix this last Summer. I remember thinking that it was more a series of one-hour movie specials than a series, kind of like one of the Miss Marple movies on PBS (where she goes somewhere different each mystery, sees entirely different people, and the friends she talks about are disjoint from the friends mentioned in other movies). I thought some of the Eleventh Hour stories were vaguely interesting, but Patrick Stewart was not especially believable as top of the game at most major sciences. (Scientists, in my experience, tend to get stentorian as their grasp on the cusp of discovery laxes.) Some of the stories were blatantly offensive, especially the first one about human cloning.

Now, fast forward out of flashback, Eleventh Hour was remade for American audiences and the premiere episode aired this week. It’s starring Rufus Sewell, famed in song and dance as being eye candy to a lot of my female friends of a certain age. He was more believable as the scientist because his knowledge was more of the “You would need X years of specialization to do this, so it cannot be this suspect.” type. Plus he doesn’t bring that stage actors’ tendency to play to the rafters.

However, the show was almost word for word the exact same script as the first episode of the British version. They changed the main character’s name from Ian to Jacob— but surprisingly he hasn’t gone all Biblical yet (that’s the only reason I can think of to make the change, to make his character more Christian seeming.) And there was a lot less dialogue and interplay between supporting characters. But they preserved all the diatribe about how cloning humans is an abomination before God but cloning sheep is not. And they preserved all the plot about how the surrogate mother is willing to risk her life so her son is not taken away from her, even though he would undoubtedly be better off with adoptive parents. (She’s 19 in the show, her son is 4, she doesn’t have parents in the picture, you know she has zero prospects.)

I found it was hard to sit through a show I’d already seen. Deja Vu the whole way through. The second problem is that I really didn’t understand why the man who lost his son would spend a billion dollars trying to have him cloned. Perhaps because my expenditures are all the other way, toward preventing pregnancy, I find myself completely flummoxed by the concept. Why on Earth would someone want a child enough to waste a billion dollars cloning it? Wouldn’t the world be better off if the rich dude had spent the money funding a private orphanage to creche 10,000 unwanted babies? Or traditionally adopting 10 and actually being their dad?

It’s a bizarre story to have started a show with unless you wanted to get your show cancelled.

Wrist Cutters: A Love Story

Wristcutters: A Love Story
a comedic movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +2 (because my expectations were artificially lowered)
Apparent Rating: 6/10

Sometimes a movie I was not sure I wanted to see works its way up in the queue. This was one of those, because really, who wants to watch a movie about suicidal teens? But it was kind of cute, kind of funny, and kind of epic (on a small scale). I liked the resolution to the story. I even liked the cinematography, despite the atmospheric washout. The subtitles did not suck hugely. Pretty much there wasn’t anything wrong with this movie.

It was well done, it was what it promises to be (a love story about suicidal teenagers).

And I still cannot believe I watched it.

Given a choice, I prefer this a lot more than I did Juno, but they’re kind of the same premise where someone young and powerless screws up hugely and attempts to deal with it. Wristcutters is better than Juno in a few ways, there aren’t logistical faults like wondering how someone without a job can afford a case of tictacs. There are some bizarre logistical faults in this, but they’re intentional, plot-relevant, and funny— for example, the car they take their road trip through the world of the “offed” has a bermuda triangle kind of thing under the passenger seat, so things are lost forever if the passenger drops them. The main character in this has a job, he works at Kamikaze Pizza. I thought that was hilarious.

The story in Wristcutters was tight. The writing was solid. That’s why I found some parts of it funny. If something is slapped together, I am never sure if it was supposed to be funny.

If I were younger, I think I might have enjoyed this more than I did.

Wolf’s Blood

I finished the last book in Jane Lindskold’s wolf girl series. This is definitely an epic fantasy series and I enjoyed all the books. The final book in the series was a fairly satisfying conclusion to the series overall.

My favorite is still the first book, because of the potential. But the plot arc in the final book was better than any of the others. The series suffers a lot from its epic scale and fantasy tropes being super-imposed. The first book reminded me of that first Jacqueline Carey book, where the first part was really interesting when we met the characters, but then there was this random half a book crammed in the middle where they go off to have a war. I didn’t bother reading any of the other Carey books because I hated her main character.

Lindskold’s main character is my favorite character in the series; clearly the books should have been centered around her. That is a tremendous accomplishment in and of itself. Usually I feel like a series should be orbiting someone else. Harry Potter was the loser doofus in that whole series and he’s pretty much the same guy at the end. He goes through 7 books to be mostly unchanged. There’s an authorial rule of thumb that says the story belongs to the character who changes the most. So Rowling really fell down on that aspect. Then there is Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series. (She really limited herself with that name, eh? Kind of like Sabrina the Teenage Witch when Sabrina was 24.) I loathe Anita. I think honestly if the series was set around anyone else I would like it better. Anita doesn’t really change either, she’s come up in the world through no efforts of her own (just coattail politics) but she’s still got the same hangups and quirks she started with, so I don’t know why the books are about her.

Lindskold’s Firekeeper is an honorable woman who makes her way in 5 different human societies after having been raised by wolves. She’s strong, but she got that way from chasing down food to eat, not because of some otherworldly gift. She gets along with people even when she doesn’t understand them because she is able to see how her life-rules can be applied and adapted for the situation. Other people see her as taking the hard way to live by her own rules even when no one would know if she cheated, so she gets respect for her honor and for her hard-won abilities. Throughout the series, Firekeeper gets stronger, but she’s grown from being 8 or 10 years old to being 22, so we would expect some physical improvements.

I really enjoyed reading her story. The half a book of random war stuff that kept appearing in each book was extremely annoying, but many fantasy novelists cannot let go of that “one big crisis” plot arc. I think all the books are worth reading, but the series did add weight to that argument that plot really sucks if you’re a character in a book. And the concluding volume resolved most of the outstanding issues with characters without making the final chapter feel like a clip show.

High Society

High Society
a musical movie
IMDb | Netflix
Overall Rating: 2/10
Meets Expectations: -4
Apparent Rating: 0/10

Guh. My complaints about Philadelphia Story and its bizarre need to refer to the Hepburn woman as “Red” even though the movie was black and white generated a recommendation for High Society, which is a musical remake.

There are a number of really crushingly bad things about this movie. First, the subtitles do not include any of the musical lyrics even though roughly half the conversation in the story is sung. Second, the music in this is the dreaded jazz type that sounds like the musicians are making shit up as they go along and the lyricist thinks Dr Seuss is a god among poets… every song in this movie is pure doggerel with cacaphony. Third, they managed to rip the soul of the story out of it to the point where no one cares if the stick woman marries the stick man and everyone just wishes the house would get firebombed so we could go watch something else.

This managed to make the characters of the story completely unsympathetic. I wasn’t rooting for things to work out “the way they should”. If we had had to choose, this is the movie that should have been made in black and white, preferably before movies were “talkies”, and the previous version should have been shot in Technicolor.

The movie opens with Louis Armstrong sitting in the back of a bus. That’s a pretty good metaphor for the whole thing.

If you have not seen Philadelphia Story, I would recommend you see that instead. Even though it’s in black and white. That was the movie that convinced me classic movies could be classics for a reason. The story is excellent, but High Society seems to have lost that.

Rating is minus infinity for ruining a good story.