House of Eratosthenes

I just mentioned over at Facebook that we were starting to watch it, and people got in my face because I didn’t include my Hello Kitty of Blogging movie review template. Of course I didn’t, we only just started watching it and I didn’t know what the movie would have in it. So now I’ve seen it, I’ll fill the template out over here.

[ ] Tits
[ ] Sex
[ ] Exploding cars
[ ] Guns Realism: [ ]%
[ ] Creatures eating people
[ ] Murder/mystery
[ ] Intrigue/espionage/complicated plot
[ ] Cool music
[ ] Swashbuckling
[ ] Good & evil wo/pain-in-the-ass hipster moral ambiguity
[ ] BigBad
[ ] Client (rich powerful sucker the BigBad is trying to rip off)
[ ] Dragon (glorious bastard)
[ ] Slimeball
[x] Pirate/ferryman/eccentric with highly recognizable cool ship
[ ] Mooks
[ ] Philip K. Dick type of alternative-reality headache
[ ] Maguffin
[x] Chase [x] foot [x] flying [x] water craft
[ ] Indigenous peoples
[ ] Good guys held captive
[ ] Following a trail of clues
[ ] Sinister plot [ ] take over world [ ] kill lots of innocents
[ ] Love triangle [ ] girl-boy-girl [ ] boy-girl-boy
[ ] Revenge [ ] protagonist [ ] antagonist
[ ] False lead/decoy
[ ] Traitor
[ ] Supernatural/sorcery
[ ] Ghost getting all pissed off because the good guys aren’t finding its body
[ ] Creepy young boy or girl
[ ] Grisly deaths for the bad guys
[-] Race against time at the end
[ ] Cliffhanger
[x] NO CONFERENCE TABLES

As you can see, it’s got all three kinds of chase scenes but hasn’t got much else. Thankfully, it’s missing any scenes with conference tables, which of course are good-movie-death, capable of transforming a decent movie into a lousy one, pretty much instantly. UNLESS Darth Vader is threatening to use the Dark Side of the Force to crush some guy’s larynx.

Tits, guns and car explosions would’ve been nice. That’s an oh-for-three…we do have Vanessa Hudgens, who is very lovely but also very young and very thin. She’s just a little girl. The plucky and annoying kid who was the star of the show should’ve brought his Mom, who should have been played by Naomi Watts or Diane Lane or someone hot like that.

There’s a bee versus bird chase. It is very silly and rather annoying. The Rock plays the ukulele, which is more entertaining than you think.

In the end, I found this less functional as a vehicle for evening post-debate entertainment, than as a meter reading of our young people and what’s going on in their lives. Let’s see…they’re growing up in broken homes, either having step dads or identifying with other kids on the movie screen who have step dads. Oh and it’s okay to be a complete butt to your step dad, he’ll just roll over and take it…we were amused imagining my kid saying stuff like this to my girlfriend. Me: How far & fast would he sail across the room with a split lip? Her: From you, or me? Me: You’d have my permission. We’d just watched Joe Biden yelling like a crazy man for an hour and a half, then we get to watch this twerp. Age gap aside, I couldn’t see much difference.

Oh yeah, and they must like Luis Guzman immediately figuring out how to drive the Nautilus within a half a second or thereabouts, much like the little girl from a generation ago doing the same with a “Unix system” in Jurassic Park. In fact, I learned something tonight. You know why they do that? The little whelps identify with it. They get up to open their presents from Santa on December 25 at 7:00, have everything all unwrapped at 7:01, by 7:02 they’re wailing “Is that ALLLLL??” and by 7:04 they have it all figured out. So if Guzman did what real people do, with “oops” and “what the–” and “what’s this lever do?”, not only would it have interrupted the rhythm of the story, not only would it have gotten all the characters killed, but the young audience would have found it alien and annoying.

When I was a little kid, I really didn’t need to do much “identifying.” My idea of identifying with people in a movie was to say “Hey, if I was doing what those people are doing, that would be cool!” So Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was great stuff. All the identifying I needed, even though those little English kids were quite weird. Well screw them, I just liked the car.

But kids today have this need to relate and say “that kid there reminds me of me” or “I would like to be that kid.” Very much like…an older kid, mid-to-late teenage years, wanting to be like James Bond. I don’t know what this means. I’d like to think kids are maturing more quickly. But I’m afraid what it really might mean is, they’ve been brought up to reject anything they might perceive to be alien, even as they and the adults around them drone on about the benefits of diversity — they only want to think about people and things who remind them of themselves, or what they would like to be. Everything else can go straight to Hell. I hope that’s not what’s happening. That would not be a good thing.

Wow. I write stuff with more checkmarks than that. Imagining one of these to be an actual film, I could count twelve plusses – guns, complex plot*, Good and Evil, a Big Bad, eccentric w/ cool ship, Maguffin, captive heroes, trail of clues, sinister plot (both halves), a decoy, a race against time, and NO CONFERENCE TABLES. On the flip side, I have a minus for music (having no talent of my own in that area, I would be unable to have anything but stock public domain stuff); and being a sci-fi, the guns would be of dubious realism.

* Well, I like to think so. It’s basically a caper story, with the hero engaging in the caper to thwart the antagonist(s).

To address your larger point: a proxy character for the audience is often a great help when you want to veer off into mysterious doings, sorcery, super-science, etc. I think here that the general laziness of the audience is working in tandem with an equal laziness on the part of screenwriters, multiplying their bad effect on the story like washing down one’s meds with a malt 40. In the culture, we see a dumb requirement: “Role Models Must Look Like Me.” It is assumed that we can’t admire a protagonist unless they are similar in gender or ethnicity – or unless said protagonist is of an Approved Class that has been declared inherently admirable. Pathetic, really, but that sort of lazy thinking has gotten all over our cool movies, with the invariable result that they are less cool: it hurts the writing, it strains credulity in exactly the medium where we are supposed to be encouraged to suspend our disbelief, and as a result the movies need to rely more on effects and gimmicks.

I’m going on at length, but this is something close to my heart. Writing has been a lifelong hobby of mine.
- nightfly | 10/12/2012 @ 10:01

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Journey 2: The Mysterious IslandThursday, October 11th, 2012

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island
Thursday, October 11th, 2012