I just finished playing Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. I was a huge fan of the The Secret of Monkey Island and later played both the third and fourth games, but somehow I missed the second one, and after being reminded of the games by Ed recently, I decided to hunt it down.
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I generally try to stay away from politics on this blog these days, but the one issue I’ll always support is environmental awareness. Al Gore has a cartoon PSA for An Inconvenient Truth, featuring Bender from Futurama.
I probably wouldn’t have seen Cars in the theater had a friend not called me and invited me to go. Well, to be fair he suggested we see a movie, and I suggested Cars, as there was nothing else particularly appealing, though I do feel some obligation to see An Inconvenient Truth, if only to remind myself of what I am already all too aware of.
In any event, as we went into the theater, it occurred to me that I had seen every single Pixar film since Toy Story. My next thought was to organize them by my opinion of their quality, but other than deciding The Incredibles was my favorite and Toy Story 2 was probably the best one, I abandoned the enterprise as the worthless nerd speculation that it was.
I will say that I think Cars is one of the lesser Pixar movies. It’s on par with Monsters, Inc., which I also found just a bit underwhelming—though in both cases, I think Pixar may be a victim of their own success. Cars is a much better animated film than a lot of recent releases, but it’s not as good as their best work.
On the roads of Cars, there are no passengers and no drivers—just cars. Cars with shiny Fisher Price-like paint finishes, vaguely creepy eyes, and (in some cases) even more creepy back tattoos. While the film looks beautiful, I’m not sure the design of the anthropomorphic cars quite works, especially around the eyes.
The story is straightforward and, for anyone who watched a lot of television as a kid, very familiar. Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) is a hotshot rookie race car with an ego bigger than Bigfoot (the monster truck, not the cryptid). While traveling across the country to an important race in California, he gets lost on the famous Route 66 and ends up in a two-car (well, dozen-car) burg, where his resulting freak-out causes so much property damage that the local judge forces Lightning to repair the road before letting him resume his cross-country trip.
During his time in town, he makes new friends (such as sleek Porsche Sally Carrera, played by Bonnie Hunt, and the rusted-down truck Mater, voiced by—this is how he’s billed on IMDb.com—Larry the Cable Guy), discovers an incredible secret about the judge, Doc Hudson (Paul Newman), and discovers that maybe, just maybe, there’s something to caring about people—eh, cars—other than himself.
It’s very standard children’s stuff, and it’s indicative of an overall issue with Cars—much more than its predecessors, it feels like a film for children. There’s a dearth of the adult in-jokes that peppered the previous Pixar films, leaving a very stripped-down storyline. It almost feels like a Disney animated film from the 1950s or ’60s—a major change from the futuristic milieu of The Incredibles. There’s just not a lot to chew on here. The film provides some good, if simple, lessons about selfishness, egotism, and hard work.
What’s perhaps a bit more troubling is the preachy nostalgia about the “lost paradise” of 1950s-era middle America. More than anything else, this feels like slight pandering to a middle American audience. Between young children and middle America, this may be the most demographically-targeted of the Pixar films thus far, and that’s unsettling.
Story aside, I must admit that Pixar continues to improve artistically and technologically. There are many breathtaking landscapes in this film, and plenty of small touches, from the completely believable way a tractor flips over (“tractor-tipping”) to the smooth, shiny look of a new-paved road. Those Pixar folks are getting very, very good.
The voice work is, as usual, very good, with Larry the Cable Guy channeling the late Jim Varney for the voice of Mater, a broken-down truck who steals much of the film. I also enjoyed Jeremy Piven’s cameo as Lightning’s unseen agent and Pixar staple John Ratzenberger as Lightning’s carrier truck, Mac.
Pixar’s next film is Ratatouille, about a French rat obsessed with gourmet food. After that, I hope they bring us Brad (The Incredibles) Bird’s long-postponed animated project Ray Gunn, a noir about a futuristic private eye (think Blade Runner meets The Maltese Falcon).
My friend John of PulpLit pointed me to this article on Slate, “Mac Attack: Apple’s mean-spirited new ad campaign”, which basically rehashes the same arguments I made in my blog post a month ago.
Good to know the monolithic media catches up eventually…
Recently a Doritos ad has been running that features footage from the 1998 American Godzilla film. The first time I saw it, I had to ask: WTF mates?
GINO stands for Godzilla-In-Name-Only—the derogatory nickname given to the Americanized Godzilla by fans of the Japanese version who loathed the American abomination (such as me). The film did well at the box office but was a critical bomb, reviled by most Godzilla fans, and was more or less forgotten about except by those who follow the careers of Matthew Broderick or Jean Reno.
So what is he doing in a Doritos commercial eight years after his instantly-forgettable debut? All I can think is that whoever owns the film footage was looking for a way to build some equity and Doritos bit. I hope this doesn’t become a trend…I don’t need to see the aliens from Independence Day hawking burgers, or the Predator shilling for Nabisco.
Since I currently find myself with excessive amounts of free time, I stopped by my parents’ house yesterday with the intention of retrieving my old comicbooks. My main period of comic collecting (aside from Hellboy in the last year or so) was 1991-1992; it began with Wolverine #41 and ended with X-Men #20, from what I can tell. In any event, I knew my old comics were buried somewhere in our terrifying cluttered attic. I went up there, fully expecting to spend the next two hours climbing over boxes and generally making the attic an even worse mess, when, to my shock, I discovered my father had cleaned the entire attic. At first I thought this might be a bad thing; I’d had a vague notion of where my comics had been. To my surprise, it only took me about thirty seconds to find the comics box.
Looking over those old comics was an interesting experience. I was a fan dead-center in the period where artists were very much trumping writers; the comics I was reading were being plotted and even written by the likes of Rob Liefeld and Todd McFarlane. Bleh. Some of these comics had decent writers—Larry Hama on Wolverine, Chris Claremont on X-Men, Peter David on Incredible Hulk—but for the most part this was a very style-over-substance era. I’ve also been reading old collections of 1960s comics, where Stan Lee ended every line of dialogue with an exclamation mark, but the dialogue in many of these comics is much worse—like a buffoonish caricature of Lee’s expository-heavy style.
In light of my recent resurgence of interest in comics, I’ve started flipping through some recent Marvel and DC comics, and even picking up a graphic novel or two. My feelings are mixed. On the one hand, the writing is definitely better, now that we’re in the Writer’s Age of Comics (Warren Ellis, Brian Michael Bendis, Neil Gaiman, Joss Whedon, Mark Millar, Grant Morrison, and so forth—I leave out Alan Moore only because he hasn’t written much lately). But my God, are these companies obsessed with their superhero worlds, what with the Infinite Crises and Civil Wars. Every comic has ten characters in it, be they villains or heroes.
Am I old-fashioned because I’d like to read a story where Batman foils a normal human terrorist, or Wolverine, say, sneaks into Iraq to save a Canadian captive? I’d like to see some small-scale stories and some good characterization. Maybe that’s happening in some places…J_Stone informs me that DC has been quite good lately. I’m not as fond of the DC characters, except maybe for Batman and/or Superman, but I could try them. Unfortunately I don’t really like the concept of the Ultimate Marvel universe…I can’t really say why, other than I just prefer the mainstream world.
Of course, I really haven’t bought many comics lately. I keep telling myself I’ll buy various series when they come out as trade paperbacks, and in the meantime I’m enjoying myself more by reading old 1960s and 1970s comics alongside my goofy 1990s ones. But for a good perspective on why people like me have mixed feelings about today’s comics, check out this excellent article by Greg Hatcher: A Friday Spider-Epiphany. Hatcher’s theory is that
There’s two groups of fans reading superhero comics right now, the illusion-of-change fans and the real-change fans, and each one is absolutely convinced that the other group is going to destroy their beloved superheroes. And it terrifies them, because they both love comics fiercely, and neither can stand the idea that they might get taken away. So each group is constantly yelling at the other to for Christ’s sake STOP it, d’you have any idea what you’re doing? I suspect that this underlies a lot of that free-floating fan anger out there. This is why so many comic book message boards have the social niceties of Mad Max’s Thunderdome.
I think Hatcher may be on to something here. For instance, the only Marvel or DC comic I’m reading regularly at the moment is Wolverine: Origins, which I’m trying out solely because it features Wolverine back in the brown costume I first encountered him in. So where does that put me? I suspect I prefer the illusion of change to real change. I agree with Hatcher, if you want to make real changes, create a new character (as Mike Mignola did with Hellboy) and maybe even a new universe (like Ultimate Marvel or All-Star DC). (That said, I loved what Peter David did with the Hulk during his run—joining the three personalities into one—and I always thought it was a shame they brought back the dumb savage Hulk, cool as he is.)
Usually I’ll be posting new reviews on the main blog, but since this movie came out three years ago, I simply added it to the review category. You can read the review here: The Rundown.
Yes, this movie came out three years ago, but I missed it then and didn’t see it until two years later on video. I happened to catch it on cable the other day, and again I was reminded of how damned fun the movie is and decided to review it.
I grew up watching the action films of the late 1980s and early ’90s. This is generally considered a pretty good era for action movies, falling smack-dab in the middle of the Schwarzenegger Epoch. Movies like Commando and Predator are great guilty-pleasure classics, while Total Recall and Terminator 2 rise above the genre enough to mitigate some of that guilt.
Action movies in the 1980s tended to be military-based; in the ’90s we got a lot of police thrillers. What we didn’t get is the “adventure” action film—something that George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg had singlehandedly rejuvenated with the Indiana Jones films. Sure, we had a Romancing the Stone here and a Medicine Man there, but the adventure flick was quickly abandoned in favor of countless John Woo-style crime thrillers and science fiction flicks.
Of course, “adventure” films used to be the only type of action film there was—movies like King Solomon’s Mines. Movies with charming leading men, beautiful but still tough leading women, and exotic locations. That’s the sort of film we get with The Rundown.
If you’ve never seen it, go and rent it. If you demand a plot summary first, it’s this: the Rock plays a mob enforcer trying to get out from his contract with his mob boss. The boss agrees to free him if he performs just one last job: track down his son, who’s running around South America looking for a priceless ancient artifact. But there’s a problem: a corrupt businessman, played by Christopher Walken (who is allowed to run riot, acting-wise), is also after the artifact.
Really, I can only list the pleasures of this movie. There’s the Rock, a competent actor with great screen presence and an even better sense of humor, who plays a marvelous straight man to Sean William Scott. The Rock, unlike Schwarzenegger, understands exactly how to play the straight man, and more importantly, he seems to know it’s a better role for him than being the funny guy. (My friends and I are eagerly hoping that Blowback, a buddy flick starring the Rock and Ryan Reynolds as cops, gets made.) He also handles the action sequences with more aplomb than Arnie and finds just the right balance between taking it all seriously and keeping a touch of self-consciousness. What I’m saying is this: the Rock may not be the next Olivier, but he is the best action movie star I’ve ever seen. I’m no wrestling fan and I found The Scorpion King a little dumb, but The Rundown made me a lifelong fan of Mr. Dwayne Johnson.
Scott does a good job too. Like Keanu Reeves and Ashton Kutcher before him, Scott has escaped his initial second-banana role (in American Pie) to become the most successful star of that film. He’s a great foil for the Rock.
Other pleasures: the beautiful jungle scenery (El Dorado by way of Hawaii, but still beautiful). The beautiful Rosario Dawson. The guide with the incomprehensibly thick Scottish accent. The monkeys (“Get outta here, monkey!”).
And of course, Walken’s wonderfully insane acting. There is some seriously vintage Walken in this movie, which reaches a new peak with this diatribe:
I feel like a little boy who’s lost his first tooth, put it under his pillow, waiting for the tooth-fairy to come. Only two evil burglars have crept in my window, and snatched it, before she could get here…wait a second, do you understand the concept of the tooth-fairy? Explain it to them…wait. She takes the god damned thing, and gives you a quarter. They’ve got my tooth. I want it back.
The Rundown is easily my favorite action film of the last ten years. Or, heck, probably since Terminator 2. No, it’s not quite the classic like King Solomon’s Mines or The African Queen, but it’s the epitome of a good, fun action movie, and I hope the Rock is smart enough to make more like it.
No, this isn’t a commentary on the Mark of the Beast—rather, it’s a birthday shout-out to my good cousin and friend Ed of The Ed Zone. Ed turns—well, I don’t actually know but I assume it’s in the early– to mid-thirties, meaning he is now firmly ensconced in the life decade associated with 1980s television dramas (that’s thirtysomething for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, which, since I never watched the show, arguably includes me).
Growing up, Ed was always one of my coolest cousins. He had a bedroom with spaceship wallpaper (it may even have been Star Wars), lots of toys, and he introduced me to what would become a lifelong passion: cheesy Godzilla movies. He also gave me a very awesome 2-foot-high Godzilla toy, which I had the pleasure of returning to him a few years ago at his wife Andrea’s first baby shower.
Other fond memories of Ed include watching his high school performance in Annie and trading Simpsons references ad nauseum at countless family gatherings. And of course there’s the infamous bath story, which has livened up many a family holiday.
So today, Ed, I offer you the toast I saw last night on Good Eats: May all your joys be pure joys, and all your pain champagne.
I spent the greater part of the day adding a library of my old movie reviews to the site—reviews that go all the way back to my college days in 1999. I did it all rather quickly, so I’m sure there will be some broken links and other errors–please leave a comment if you see one so I can fix it.
Reading them now, especially the older reviews, I can see that they’re in some places a bit naïve, but they make for good reading and practically doubled the amount of site content. Included are my infamous negative reviews of The Matrix, Fight Club and The Phantom Menace (all of which I still stand by), as well as some puzzlers—I saw Anywhere But Here? and Drop Dead Gorgeous? and Arlington Road? I can’t remember anything about Arlington Road except that Tim Robbins was in it.
Feel free to comment on the reviews, but realize that I may not be willing to go to bat for them anymore—again, I was never a professional reviewer (well, except for a couple months in summer ’03), and I was even more clueless then than I am now.