Movie Bitch: Chronicles of Riddick

I've been sitting on this one for a while...but...

           Flashback. It’s 2000, the internet is still shiny enough for AOL to be a ISP option and not an allergic reaction, MP3 is what you get when you throw phone keys and scrabble tiles together into the same bag, and a movie called Pitch Black has just hit theaters. And it’s, you know, a pretty okay movie. I didn’t see it in the theaters and I don’t know anybody who did, but I did eventually see…half of it.

So “okay” I mean not actively broken. When I can’t sit through or read through all of whatever it is, that’s usually a bad sign. By combining what I remember of it with what I read on IMDB and Wikipedia, I know I probably would have been disappointed because I got attached to the kick ass girl captain, and…well…she didn’t make it.

 But one thing I remember was Vin Diesel. Not because he did a good job in Pitch Black—though he did—but because after that movie he was everywhere. The Fast and the Furious came out the next year and you could not walk into anything resembling a theater without seeing his face and hearing his deep, rich voice come over the speakers. Then he did xXx, and while that’s the laziest title I’ve seen in a while apparently it was a rousing box office success.

Anyway, Hollywood never being one to miss a chance to ruin a pretty good thing, they eventually decided to make The Chronicles of Riddick. Which I had to watch recently.

This is my therapy.

Movie Bitch: Armageddon

So my brother put Armegeddon in the other day, and because I like to pretend I have good taste in movies it's been a really long time since I've watched it.

Having watched it, I've made the three following, seemingly contradictory realizations.

1. Micheal Bay is a very talented story teller. And I'm not being sarcastic. He manages to hit every note just right, to convey all the information you need to become attached to characters, involved in a story, and afraid for the life and livelihood of every person involved. But he's hampered by a severe handicap.

2. Micheal Bay is a total moron.

and finally,

3. Armageddon is a very polished, well put together, extraordinarily well structured turd. See ya after the break.

Movie Bitch: Megamind

I. love. this. movie.

I just wanted to get that out of the way. It is not awesome like Fight Club, or Oh-Fuck-This-Is-My-Head-getoutgetoutgetout like Black Swan. It is the sweet, gooey center of loveyness that I must watch at least one more time for my life to be complete. And it will never be complete because I can always watch it again. :D

And it's weird, because I should hate it. Will Ferrel is not quite movie Kryptonite like Tom Cruise is for me, but I have NEVER (up till now) seen a movie with him in a starring role that I actually like. I don't like him. I don't like his face, his mannerisms or his acting style, mostly because it's based almost entirely on Embarisment Squick and Stupid. And yet here? I want to take Megamind home and snuggle him for a while. Everything in it is perfect. The voice acting, the character design (why is the fish wearing a gorilla suit?) the plot, the character arcs, and the little details that make everything in it come alive. It's like taking the back off a clock and finding all the little gears that fit together. I just want to watch them tick.

(Seriously. Why is the fish in the gorilla suit?)

We open with a CGI sunset, and Megamind is falling to his death. I am not hot on this opening because, personally? I don't think it's that necessary. Basically Metro-Man=Superman, Megamind=Alien!Lex Luthor. Metro-Man got the privledged upbringing of being handsome and rich, Megamind landed in prison from day one and nobody ever really gave him a chance. He became "evil" because he wasn't any good at being good, and he's going to spend the rest of his life in time out in the corner, he might as well get credit for it. He also has a minion named Minion. Who is a fish. And he spends the majority of the movie wearing a robotic gorilla suit.

I cannot figure this out.

So we open with Megamind escaping from jail so he can crash Metro-man's celebratory museam opening by kidnapping his reporter friend Lois Lane Roxanne Richie, voiced by Tina Faye. She gives the most sickeningly sweet intro I have ever heard, and her cameraman Hal makes fun of it until he realizes that Roxanne wrote it herself. Then he starts buttering her up and flirting with her.

Hal is probably the best written character in the entire movie, but I'll get on to him later.

Then Roxanne gets kidnapped by Minion (Fish. In. Gorilla. Suit.) and held captive by Megamind. And the banter between them is that trade-marked, "We're going to be screwing by the end of this movie" stuff. And yet it does not annoy me, because it works perfectly with these characters. Megamind is a kid having fun because he's bored, Roxanne knows she's not in any danger at all, and Metro man kind of acts...bored with the whole thing.

Also, Megamind mispronounces a lot of words. Metro City becomes MeTROSity. Revenge=ReVANGE. Spider=Spiey-der (I cannot spell the mispronounciation phonetically, just take my word for it). It is the most brilliant character touch I've ever seen (or heard) and it was all Will Ferral. Because, guys? I do that. All. The. Time. I read words and never have to say them, so they become their own sweet little critters in my head and when they come out it's all weird. It's one of those subconsious things, like Lonnigan's Limp, that tells you more about the character in two seconds than you'd learn in six hours. It means Megamind reads a lot, and is smart, but he doesn't talk a lot, which implies that he doesn't get out and socialize a lot. There is a scene later on in the movie where Roxanne says "You don't get out much, do you," and because you already know this, you're like "NO DUH!!!"

It's great.

So instead of getting rescued, Roxanne watches Megamind blow up Metro Man. And Megamind just kind of stands there, looking at the skeletal body that flew through the window attached to Metro Man's cape, and you can totally see it going through his eyes: Oh shit. Now what do I do?

After a montage showing him try and fail to occupy himself--'case the whole point of being the bad guy was him getting his butt kicked, for him as well as everybody else--he decides to re-create Metro Man, and in the process disguises himself as a regular guy and falls in love with Roxanne. One result of this? he winds up picking Hal as the new hero, Titan.

And this is why I heart Hal.

This movie has already ditched its hero figure, so the struggle is not the archetypical Good Vs. Evil. In fact, I think the movie is saying that the archetypical Evil is not really evil. It's basically Yang-Interpreted-As-Evil-Because-We've-Got-Nowhere-Else-To-Put-It vs. HEY STUPID THIS IS WHAT EVIL REALLY LOOKS LIKE.

Hal is a nerd and he likes Roxanne. And I don't mean likes as in "Crush" I mean likes as in "Edward Cullen". He's one more news broadcast away from creeping into Roxie's bedroom and watching her sleep. He is creepy. You get the sense something is "off" about him for his first scene. His second scene, you realize that if he were real, you'd never want to see him again. I remember thinking, "what are they doing with this guy?" because I couldn't figure out why he was there.

Then Megamind gave him powers and I got it. Because this dude? Not a hero. The only reason he was not a bad guy pre-power is, it's too much work. And it's hilarious watching the powered-up Hal hit on Roxanne, because it's basically what non-powered up Hal did. Evil is small minded, self-centered and apathetic, and it only acts in its own best interest, which oddly enough (for the purposes of this movie, anyway) means not fighting. There is a hilarious scene where Titan-Hal tells Megamind "Hey, we should team up", and he gets all offended, "YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE THE GOOD GUY", and then has to actually provoke Hal into the fight, which totally backfires because now Hal wants to kill Megamind and destroy the city, because hey, now he can and it isn't much work with all these cool powers and all.

Also, when Titan-Hal burns his name into the city, he spells it Tighten.

So Megamind and Roxanne go off to find Metro Man's hidden fortress, which turns out to be their old school house, because they need to find out Titan's weakness, and the copper that defeated Metro Man ain't workin' here, man. Well, they don't find Metro Man's weakness. Instead, they find Metro Man. He faked his death. Sorry. The whole, super-hero thing got boring.

Roxanne gets it. Megamind, you can kinda see the gears in his head go "sproing".

And yes, Megamind becomes the good guy, gets the girl, Hal goes to jail and goes back to being powerless and creepy, and the movie ends in a burst of pretty color that lasts however long it takes for me to find the remote and start the movie all over again.

The writing is so awesome, so very, very, very awesome, that I think anybody who wants to write hero/villian stuff ought to take a look at it. Also: PROACTIVE PROTAGONIST. Even if 99.99999% of the time, it backfires on him, Megamind is the first person to move in the story. He's also reactive (this is one of the defining traits of an archetypical hero protagonist. They are by definition reactive) but he's reacting to his own dumb choices. It's a "I fucked up. I fix it" kind of story. Also-also, villian who is co-dependant on the hero. OMG I just realized this myself, and I am suddenly very very happy and IDK quite why.

I HIGHLY recommend it to everyone with a pulse.

Movie Bitch: Vanilla Sky

So last week (or it will be last week by the time I get this posted) (I hate my job) (I love my job, but I hate my job) I referenced Vanilla Sky, a god-awful boring crap-fest of a movie that tried really hard to be arty and interesting and instead was insulting to anyone with two brain cells to crack together. And I thought, "Well, why not recap it for the blog?"

Then I thought, "I'd have to watch it again."

Then I realized that I saw it so many times when it was on HBO, back when I had HBO, that I can remember it well enough for my purposes. Which are ranting and funny commentary, and not exactly "being accurate".


Here we go.

Movie Bitch: Fight Club

Sometimes whether or not you like a movie is determined by how you feel about it.

For example, the most disappointing movies I've seen are usually ones that I got kind of excited about. Star Wars prequels. Dolan's Cadillac. Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Why in the name of God did they have to shoehorn a religious plot into a movie that already had a fucking religious plot? Explain, movie! Explain!)

On the other hand, I went to see District 9 and expected a movie other than what I got. Generic Bruce Willis Movie without Bruce Willis was the gist of it. That was not what I got. Black Swan, I expected Single White Female meets Center Stage (I had a dance movie phase. Shoot me.) and got, well, Black Swan. A glorious, beautiful mind-fuck of a movie with ballet shoes on top.

Fight Club, I expected what I was marketed. Guy movie. Beat-em-up (this is there), fuck the establishment (this is there) guns and explosions and sex (there, there and there) and absolutely nothing that could appeal to anyone with two X chromasomes. Rocky, basically. Only illicit.

So after sitting through the completely rocking opening song, and the this-is-what-I-expected intro scene (Tyler Durden sticking a gun in the unnamed narrator's mouth) I find myself sitting, mouth wide open, eyes wide, mind completely blown, when the next scene chronicles a man's journey into support group tourism.

Trying to explain what watching this is like is roughly similar to trying to explain what Niagra Falls is like by bringing home part of the water in a teacup. The Narrator, whose name is never given, has insomnia complicated by narcolepsy (he falls asleep and wakes up in strange places) and his doctor refuses to give him sleeping pills.

I want to point one thing out: The whole movie could have been avoided if this doctor had pulled the stick out of his ass and given Narrator sleeping pills. It might still have happened, but further down the road and probably not in the same way. Instead Dr. Sarcastic Asshole tells Narrator to go drop by a support group for testicular cancer to see "real pain". During which Narrator discovers that if he goes to the support group and cries, he can sleep at night. So he starts going to a different support group every night: cancer, parasites, blood diseases.

I grew up in a world where AA and NA meetings were a daily occurrence and roughly as important as church. My mind. was. blown. Support group tourism.

One thing that the movie didn't seem to make entirely clear, that the book did (yes. I have bought and read the book already) is that Narrator is not having some kind of contact sorrow high. Rather he's allowing himself to realize that his life is pretty much a hopeless mess, and thus giving up hope and sobbing. Same thing everyone else is doing, except they're crying because they have testicular cancer and he's crying because he has a pulse.

Another faker upsets the applecart, a woman named Marla Singer, they split up the days, and ... this is never exactly resolved. The book explains why Marla's presence has such a deep effect on Narrator (and Tyler Durden) but the movie just kind of ... goes with it?

I realized at the "Punch me as hard as you can" scene that this movie was marketed as a testosterone-fuled violent beat-em-up because the marketers had no idea what else to do with it. Realize for just one second that actually selling a story is much harder than writing a story. When you tell a story, hell, you just tell the story and do whatever it takes to make it work. When you sell a story you have to summarize it in a way that is brief, interesting, and coherent. Sometimes, you can do this really well. Sometimes you have to forget what your story is really about, pick the two or three elements that can most easily summarize themselves and then attempt to wing it without actually lying. Selling a story and telling a good story have absolutely nothing to do with each other, and the resulting confusion is one reason why I have never seen this movie before.

After Narrator moves into Tyler Durden's world, things go from "Gee, this is a weird movie" to "What." really quickly. About the time they make soap (from liposuction leftovers, which they then sell back to the women who had lipo to begin with) I realized we were about to have a very strong shift in tone, and I was pretty much right. I also began to realize that this movie has pretty much created internet culture, and is probably the reason why Anon. and trolls are the lovable god-kill-it-with-fire-now-please creatures they are today.

The only "disappointing" thing is, I pretty much knew that Tyler Durden and the Narrator were one person with MPD really, really quickly. I think I must have read something about the movie and then forgotten all about it. That said, though, it almost made the movie more enjoyable, which IMHO is a sign of good writing. Anybody can pull a left-feild plot-line out of their ass. Half of "Anybody" can probably make it work. It takes a writer of incredible skill to make the movie just as good once the plot twist is known.

Also, this is usually the plot twist I most hate. But what made the "it's all in your head" plot work in Fight Club and fail in just about every other book and/or movie I've seen it in is, it wasn't a last-minute left-field twist. Like how in Vanilla Sky (Which, BTW, the Narrator should have watched to cure insomnia) you find out at the last minute that Tom Cruise is in cryo and this is all a dream? Imagine how it might have been if this happened twenty minutes away from the end, and in the last twenty minutes Tom Cruise had to deal with the consequences of choosing to wake up and live in an unknown future. It works in Fight Club because it sets up the finale, and sets up a nightmarish question that it doesn't (quite) answer. How do you fight part of yourself that you not only can't control or even access, but part that is much, much smarter and far more amoral? At this point I was already pretty wigged out. This created so many levels of untold creepyness that I probably would have screamed if I could have stopped watching for a couple of seconds.

The Narrator tries turning himself in to the cops (Which Tyler has already countered) shutting down the movement that grew out of Fight Club (Countered!) and finally shooting himself in the head. Which...kind of works. Except the Narrator survives by blowing out his own cheek. Honestly, the only reason this made any kind of sense to me is, one of my Dad's favorite movies is The Fisher King, and he once spent several hours explaining what abreaction is (the moment the fragments of personality become aware of each other and recombine. Usually a violent and uncomfortable moment) and how it applies to people with MPD. This is also why the many (many. Many) scenes of Narrator grousing about listening to Tyler and Marla have sex made sense, and why I had no trouble believing that Narrator thought he and Tyler were in two different rooms when he was not. Co-consciousness is not completely unheard of (I think), and if you're in deep denial about having MPD, well, you created a whole 'nother person in your head. Making a trip to the basement when you didn't really go isn't that hard.

So yes. I have finally seen one of the great classics of cinema. And read a great piece of literature (whose writing style drives me batty, but that's just me). And this post is little more than me gushing about discovering a new favorite movie for the first time.

So what? It was awesome.

Mary Sue Pt 3: Skyline and District 9

Point Two on the Mary Sue list is as follows: 2. She is a character so poorly constructed that her inadvertent negative character traits overshadow her intentional positive ones.  Her intentional negative traits, which in a good character would balance out the intentional positives are not credible and thus do not register with the reader.

This is where things stop being easy, and also, IMHO, stop being something I can back up with my own actions, as I am unpublished and thus cannot prove that I know what I’m doing. However, I firmly believe what I am about to explain is true. This is another of CW’s Magical Writing Theories (Consume with Grain of Salt), so get comfy.

Movie Bitch: Black Swan

So my brother and father sat down one evening to watch The Big Lebowski (or however you spell it). I have never seen it. I want to. I just, you know, never found the time. Anyway, at one point my brother turned to my Dad and said "Holy shit. This is the inside of your head."

Black Swan is the inside of mine.

Seriously. It's as if someone sat down, made a list of all the things I wanted, dreamed about and was afraid of and put them into a movie. A beautifully scored, wonderfully costumed, well acted, holy shit did that just happen kind of movie. Everything that has ever been important to me, with the notable exception of religion, appears in it. I was in tears when it ended. I'm not entirely sure why. Probably because it opened a couple of very old wounds along the way.

I also am very glad that when my Dad and I were planning on seeing it, we dodged into Tron: Legacy instead. I love it, but I do not think I could have watched it with my father.

First off, the film is marketed as a dance story, which it is, and as a fatal-attraction, Single White Female sort of story, which it is not. I expected to see Nina and Lily have a catfight halfway through the movie over who got the lead role, lots of backbiting and name caling, mean pranks and some dangerous, deadly finale during the opening night preformance. Which I got. Sort of. In reality, Black Swan is the story of someone haunted by themselves. It's also a story about Self Injury. Consider this your official trigger warning. Which, BTW, they ought to put on the DVD cover.

Movie Bitch: Skyline

So I'm mixing things up a little bit, but I absolutely HAVE to write about this movie.

It wasn't ... bad. It was entertaining, in a mindless kind of way, and PARTS of it were definitely engaging ... the first time around. I am not sure I can sit through it again without rolling on the floor laughing.

First off, it was written, produced and directed by the special effects company that did the aliens. And while I firmly believe one of the reasons District 9 was not just awesome but AWESOME is because Neil Blomkamp had 3d graphics experiance, this really REALLY should have been my first clue and I wish to god I had known this before I went to see the movie. And I will sport the team that did it. They had a very small budget (ten to twenty mil, according to Wikipedia) the effects are good and they may be okay at directing and editing. No one who worked on this project should ever be allowed to write anything, ever again, because the story is so flawed the movie cannot even function. It tries really hard to be an alien invasion/sci-fi movie and it's not. It's a monster movie in all possible respects and the monster is a fucking lens flare. They spend the entire movie running away from a Photoshop filter, guys.