After Earth

So now that both Lady Geek Girl and I have reviewed the trailer for this movie (here and here), I figured I’d subject myself to it, because why the hell not? As it turns out, “why the hell not” seems to be the driving motivation behind just about every scene in the movie, so yeah, why the hell not? I can’t say that I had that many high expectations for this film, and so I wasn’t disappointed in the least. Sometimes, I was remarkably surprised at hints of, dare I say, good writing. Other times, I was torn between laughing and cursing at myself for paying to go see this thing.

Obviously, there are going to be spoilers in this post. But before we begin, M. Night Shyamalan likes to work with twist endings. Some of you may be asking yourself what the twist is for this movie. Lady Geek Girl speculates that it’s that the movie takes place in a utopia where The Last Airbender movie didn’t suck.

If only.

The twist is that there is no twist. There’s some fear monster that Jaden Smith is terrified of, but at the climatic ending, he learns how to not be afraid of it. At just that right moment. He and Jamie from Rise of the Guardians seem to have a lot in common in that regard, except that Jamie wasn’t an annoying caricature.

Trailer Tuesdays: After Earth

Yes, I know this movie just came out recently, but I haven’t seen it yet, and it only came out a couple days so I think I’m still within my blogger rights to review the trailer.

It’s summer time and Will Smith is in an action movie. That seemed to be the norm for a long time, but now that I think about it, I haven’t seen Will Smith in many movies lately, or at least many action ones. But this time it seems like the burden of providing most of the action actually is on Will Smith’s son, Jaden Smith. In After Earth, Will and Jaden play a father and son team that crash lands on… Earth? So apparently one thousand years ago humanity left Earth for… reasons, but now Will Smith and his son have crash landed there, and they need to retrieve some sort of beacon in order to get home. But there’s a twist: everything on Earth has evolved to kill humans now. Again because of reasons… reasons that I assume will be connected with some surprise twist ending about why humans left the planet in the first place. Maybe the plants killed people? No, wait, it’s all actually Jaden Smith’s dream, or it’s faeries, or normal people dressing in yellow robes to scare everyone and hide the fact they live in modern times. Or maybe the twist is that it’s set in a world where Avatar: The Last Airbender didn’t suck.

As you may have guessed from my thinly veiled sarcasm, this movie is directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Which leaves me in something of a conundrum when it comes to whether or not I should see this movie. You see, almost all Will Smith movies are good. That is just fact. Even if it’s not good in the sense that it has a good plot, it’s always at least entertaining and enjoyable to watch. But M. Night Shyamalan has, in recent years, been a terrible director, but his early movies were so good I think I just want to always given him a chance to redeem himself. The movie looks exciting. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, the movie stars two characters of color, which is something movies don’t often do, especially sci-fi movies. That alone might be the reason I see this movie, even if the plot seems to set itself up with one too many twist endings.

We’ll have to wait and see if this will be an exciting movie or another M. Night Shyamalan failure at making a comeback.

Ghibli Month: Howl’s Moving Castle (Part 1)

Tsunderin: Within the Ghibli library, I would argue that there’s a specific trifecta of films that stand out as the Ghibli films to the general, movie-going American audience. There’s the breakthrough hit, Princess Mononoke, the award winner, Spirited Away, and the one everyone loves, Howl’s Moving Castle. Seeing as we’ve already discussed two of them, I think it’s pretty obvious which one is the topic of today’s discussion. (That and it’s also the title of the article. Duh.)

While this film perpetuates much of what audiences have come to love about Miyazaki’s directorial style, it also takes many risks with its script, one of the most looked over or ignored being that this movie is based on another person’s work. Author Diana Wynne Jones penned the original Howl’s Moving Castle in 1986, but to fans of Jones’s work, Miyazaki’s Howl is only sibling by name and nothing else. We’ll get into that later, however.

For now, let’s start at the charming little hat shop in a stereotypical, adorable European town—in Jones’s novel, the setting is the imaginary kingdom of Ingary, which I can only assume looks just about the same—where our protagonist, Sophie, works. Sophie, finding herself unexciting and bland, especially in comparison with her more vibrant sisters, has resigned herself to living a quiet life of solitude and hatting, until she is suddenly scooped up into a political and magical plot by the womanizing sorcerer, Howl. Well, it doesn’t start out that bad, but he does rescue her from some of the henchmen belonging to the nefarious Witch of the Waste before dropping her off back at home. Unfortunately, the Witch is madly in love (lust?) with Howl and also extremely jealous. Taking Sophie’s five minute interaction with the sorcerer as competition, the Witch curses Sophie to live in the body of a ninety-year-old woman for the rest of her life.

Star Trek and the Distinct Lack of Gay Characters

Star Trek is yet another show that faces a difficult challenge. You might even say that the Powers That Be of Star Trek are up against a potential no-win scenario. This challenge the PTB (particularly the writers) have is that Star Trek has been often up held as this utopian society. In the midst of many dystopian futuristic sci-fi shows, Star Trek, though filled with many alien conflicts, presents us with a universe where the problems of earth have been resolved. In the Star Trek universe there is no more racism, classism, ableism, or sexism.

The reason this can be viewed as a no-win scenario is that it’s hard to create a utopian society when the writer exists in an imperfect world and is influenced by all those -isms that Star Trek claims to have gotten rid of. However, Star Trek has done surprisingly well—yes, there have been some problems, but, for the most part, Star Trek does a pretty good job.

Oh, wait—there is still one problem. There have never been any queer characters in any Star Trek TV show or movie—not one. And no, Kirk and Spock don’t count.

When it comes to marriage and gender, Star Trek has addressed tons of different views on marriage and many different interpretations of gender. Hell, there was even a canon male pregnancy in one episode. There have been polygamous relationships, interracial relationships, and interspecies relationships. There have been tri-gendered species and androgynous races, but gay characters? None at all.

Movie Review: 42

Since we frequently talk about minority issues on this blog, I think writing about a Jackie Robinson movie is under our purview.

42 follows Jackie Robinson’s first two seasons in ‘white’ baseball, where he played for Montreal and then the Brooklyn Dodgers. In the movie, he faces racism from all sides. However, his boss, Mr. Rickey, makes Robinson take the high road and not fight back. Robinson is forced to keep his head held high and take every jibe and fastball at his head in stride. This proves hard for Robinson, but once his teammates recognize Robinson as more than just some black guy he gets better at overcoming these obstacles and helps his team win the pennant.

I watched a bootleg version of this movie, so I’m really not going to go into certain details because I couldn’t get a full grasp of some things. I can tell you what the ceiling of the movie theater looked like, but that’s not why you’re reading.

As something of a history buff, I’m actually surprised that there wasn’t more racism in the movie. There was a lot of racism, don’t get me wrong, but I was shocked that so many white people, especially the higher ups of the Brooklyn Dodgers, didn’t care he was black. Even many of the players weren’t bothered by it. Not that any of the players were really looking to be his BFF, but they weren’t as offended as I would have thought they would have been.

I also have a problem with the portrayal of Mr. Rickey, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers. The movie makes Mr. Rickey out to be a sort of hero, that he could do no wrong and everything in his life came for the love of baseball. When Mr. Rickey hired Jackie Robinson, he said he did it to get more black people to buy tickets. Later in the movie, Mr. Rickey told Robinson the true reason he hired him, and it wasn’t for the money. I would have found the money reason much more realistic of the times than some sort of sob story (that honestly wasn’t all that sob-worthy). While I don’t know the exact history behind the movie, as someone who has seen and read plenty of stories from the late 40s early 50s, Mr. Rickey’s portrayal was too holy-roller to be realistic.

In short, 42 was a good movie. I’m not a baseball person by any stretch of the imagination and I still enjoyed it because I’m a history nerd. However, if you don’t like history, baseball, or minority issues, this probably isn’t the movie for you.

Ghibli Month: An Aside

As Ace and I have been going through these movies—some for the first time, some for a review—the trends and tropes that are specific to a particular director really start to stick out. For all intents and purposes, the more trope-y of the two directors is certainly Miyazaki, but again I feel as though that has more to do with his intended audience than his lack of creativity or inability to simply write a different story.

For a younger audience, it’s certainly easier to equate a message or a lesson with a certain set-up, and with so many of his films being about coming of age, Miyazaki had to have known that. Reading our previous review on Spirited Away, you’ll remember that I’m not particularly fond of the “everyone’s gotta be in love” trope and Ace’s peeve is the “strong females have short hair” trope (from the Princess Mononoke post); however the trope I’m going to discuss today is a little less overt and has much less to do with the perception of gender. Rather, it’s much more intertwined with the actual emotional state of growing up.

Art by hyung86 @ Deviantart

Usually, character-wise, the set-up of a Miyazaki coming of age film is laid out as follows: protagonist has lengthened exposure to one person (the friend/love interest) while strengthening familial bonds or creating bonds with their pseudo-family, then a smattering of secondary friends and acquaintances (with the ‘antagonist’ usually being a situation rather than an actual person). However, to add a dash of the fantastical even in a completely normal setting, and to set the tone of the protagonist’s maturity journey, Miyazaki employs a character that is readily found in many other forms of media: the animal sidekick.

Ghibli Month: My Neighbors the Yamadas

Tsunderin: Previously in the series I had mentioned a movie being something out of the norm for Ghibli; a film that was seemingly an outlier in terms of artistic direction. I was so naïve back then.

Yes, call it the folly of shortsightedness, but I have been thoroughly corrected at the hands of Isao Takahata. I have seen My Neighbors the Yamadas. This isn’t necessarily a negative thing, nor is it a positive thing, it’s merely a different thing and something that I happen to like despite not understanding some of the choices that the director made. Takahata has simply presented us with a film that tries to be more like art than an actual film and in many ways this movie is comparable to modern art in particular: some people will draw more meaning from it than others, and others still will find it completely worthless as a film. I can see both sides—especially the ‘modern art’ side, since my high school-inherited bullshitting sense is going off the hook at all of the haikus separating some of the story.

So for those of you keeping tabs on this series, you should know that this is where I usually start the plot synopsis. This movie doesn’t have a plot. Thank you all for reading, have a nice day.

What the Puff: Pipes in Pop Culture

I smoke tobacco pipes. I’ve enjoyed them since I turned 18 and even make them. So, I am pleased when I see television or movies including characters smoking their pipes. You’ll never know where pipe smokers are going to turn up in these things, from Colonel Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds to Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean. Even the First and Fourth Doctors in Doctor Who were seen smoking pipes. However, I’m almost always infuriated when I see how they smoke them. This is because many times the characters smoke their pipes wrong. Typically, these characters seem to be most interested in making as much smoke as possible. This isn’t wrong because of arbitrary etiquette, but rather is wrong because it ruins the taste of the tobacco, burns the mouth, and can ruin a pipe over time.

Ghibli Month: Porco Rosso

Tsunderin: One upon a time many years ago, Adult Swim was hosting something they called the ‘month of Miyazaki’: a month of showing Miyazaki—I can’t remember if they threw in some Takahata to shake things up—films ass-early in the morning. I was bound and determined I was going to watch every single one. Every. One. I started out well, made it through Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, but the film that followed them just couldn’t keep my attention at all and I conked out.

…Looking back, that wasn’t exactly impressive of me. Oh well, I’ve never been a hardcore movie watcher.

After giving it another shot though, I’ve found that Porco Rosso has really grown on me. Perhaps the reason I didn’t like it was because of the deeper intricacies that went right over the head of younger me or the fact that it didn’t star someone particularly likable (not as likable as Miyazaki’s previous heroines/heroes, at least). Or maybe it was because it starred a pig, because seriously, what would even make you think of that?

Oh, My Pop-Culture Jesus: The Catholic Clergy and Pop Culture

Sometimes you watch TV shows, or movies and you see priests, bishops, monks, or nuns and often the portrayals of these people aren’t very favorable. Sometimes they are portrayed as downright evil.

Pictured Above: Pure evil!