Spontaneous Musings

Just finished watching X-Men: Days of Future Past, which basically rebooted the series after the mistakes of X-Men: The Last Stand. The writers had written themselves into such a corner with Last Stand that they ended up having to go back in time to reboot the entire series. There really was no where they could go after Last Stand. Days of Future Past ...makes it possible to restart it all.

And in some respects this was a far better movie than the last five or six they've made. I haven't seen the latest Wolverine. It's less action oriented and more character focused, also they use the talents of the actors - in which they have several top-notch ones involved. This was well cast. Peter Dinklage was a perfect choice as Trask. (Amusingly enough, Wolverine in the comic books is actually close to Trask's height, he's not a tall man in the comics. Hence the name Wolverine.)

I can see why they chose to focus on the relationship between Xavier and Magneto - they are the strongest characters in the films. Not necessarily the comics. I loved the X-men comics. Can't say I liked the other Marvel characters all that much.

In the DC verse - I was a Batman fan. In the Marvel Verse? X-men. Everyone else? Eh, I sampled from time to time, but mostly they just bored me. I did however find Spiderman 2099 interesting. So, not really much of an Avengers fan. The films are okay. But they lack the thematic depth and character layers of the X-men.

Don't read either now. Stopped back in 2001. Picked up the Whedon Astonishing X-men arc, then gave up again. Comics are a bit like Daytime soap operas, they like to retcon and reboot storylines indefinitely. After a bit, they start to either repeat themselves or
become farfetched. I did however love he 1980s-1990s run. My particular favorite - was the Ages of Apocalpyse, and the arc where Xavier was the bad guy.

But enough on the comics. I enjoyed the film. And the message at the end, about how peace can be achieved through helping each other, not killing each other. That humans do just want to help one another. It was actually an anti-war/anti-violence film. And it took place during the Vietnam War - which was an apt metaphor. With the weapons manufacturers - the villains.

Some nice plot twists. And Jennifer Lawrence is perfect as Mystique/Raven, one of my favorite characters in the comics.

Did not expect the ending at all. It surprised me. Definitely want to see the next one.
Wonder if it will be back in time or present day?

At any rate - this is by far the best film that I've seen based on a Marvel comic book.
(Yes, I know everyone thinks the Avengers is amazing, I thought it was busy -- too many action scenes, not enough character moments. And at times head-ache inducing. Not a fan of busy action films. Apparently Avengers 2 is even busier? Iron Man is good only because of Robert Downy Jr. Although I did enjoy Captain America - Winter Solider quite a bit, it was a classic superhero story.) So right now, my favorite Marvel comic films are:

* Guardians of the Galaxy
* X-Men Days of Future Past
* Captain America - The Winter Solider
* X-Men First Class

I don't tend to enjoy serial novels. Serial tv shows yes, serial novels and films? Not so much. I think the reason for this is that with tv shows - there's no more than a gap of about a week between segments. At the most? Three-four months. If you get the whole thing on DVD? No gap at all. At least for most tv serials.

But with movies and novels? You have to wait at the very least a year, if you are lucky, if not, upwards to ten years for the next segment. And by the time you finally get that next chapter, it rarely lives up to the long-ass wait or expectations. Which can be aggravating.

Add to this the tendency to forget what came before. Oh sure, you could always re-watch the prior movie or re-read the prior books before you read the next installment, but that I find rather exhausting, particularly if it is a long book or movie. (ie. The Lord of the Rings triology or books, or worse, the George RR Martin novels.) I can see why publishers and film producers tend to love them - you can get a devoted fan base that will buy everything associated with the product. Serials get devoted fan bases, non-serials not so much...because you need the promise (at the very least) of new content to keep a fan-base interested and/or enthralled. The moment you stop promising more content, they lose interest. Note - I stated "promise" - this doesn't have to happen immediately, it can just be a proverbial carrot you hang out there for a bit. ( Read more... )

1. Watching this insane video series on MTV called Ridiculous which so far has managed to make me very happy I've never tried the pogo bouncing stick. And saw a turtle having an sexual orgasm. Stopped when they decided to show a video of some guy beating up some other guy and shouting at him and his girlfriend or they were all shouting and beating on each other - which was giving me headache. Off now.

( boring personal stuff )

2.At the laundry mat, I read an article in EW about Sarah Michell Gellar-Prinze's new show Ringer. She was on the cover of it. ( Bits about the SMG interview and the difference between tv and movies... )

Regarding Ringer? ( about Ringer, with very very vague spoilers )

3.Been thinking redemptive stories, in part because there have been a few posts on it on live journal, and often posts by others, regardless of whether I comment, will percolate for a bit in my own head until I post myself on it.

( Where I attempt to explain what I like about redemptive arcs and where they work and where they really don't work. OR what makes a good redemptive character arc. Hint - it's not the actual redemption. Lots of spoilers - Being Human, The Wire (although very very vague for The Wire, Dexter & Being Human), Doctor Who, Farscape, Angel, and Buffy  )

Okay enough rambling...off to watch either Fringe or Mao's Last Dancer, before tonight's Doctor Who, which is most likely another horror episode - sans Doctor Song. My difficulty with Who, is that I don't tend to like the stand-a-lone episodes that much, with a few exceptions.

[Ugh this entry was filled with typos - am going to attempt to edit it because it is bugging me, even though I realize it is close to impossible to successfully proofread stuff solely on a computer screen, you have to print it off.]

Lovely day, if a bit on the chilly side. Wouldn't say it was exactly bitter or really cold - not like last week. But then I hail from the midwest - where temperatures often sank to below 0 with windchills in the double digits. Course - in the midwest we could happily stay inside with limited exposure - driving to and from everywhere on the planet. One does not walk to places in surburbia - not because one does not want to, but because it is often physically impossible to do so without getting hit by a car. Ironic that. You'd think it would be easier to walk around in surburbia than an urban environment - after all there is more grass. But it's not. I remember trying to walk to the movie theater once when I lived in Johnson County, Kansas (one of the biggest surburbs in the US), the movie theater was within viewing distance of my apartment complex. I could literally see it. But I could not walk to it without being hit by a car. Why? I'd have to cross four, four lane streets, all with racing non-stop traffic, no sidewalks, or walkways but the street and the narrow curb and busy parking lots. Sure if I could walk it - it would take ten minutes tops, but I couldn't. I had to drive and deal with parking - which with traffic usually took thirty minutes. Here? I can walk to the theater in less than twenty minutes, no problems. In fact it is easier to walk than drive to it.

Saw the flick Juno today. It's okay, I guess, wasn't impressed by it. Not as good as Waitress, which also dealt with an unwanted pregnancy but felt more innovative and oddly more realistic and authentic. Oddly, because of the two, Waitress is filmed in a surrealistic manner and is not trying for realism, while Juno is clearly trying to be realistic and failed miserably in my opinion. May not be fair to compare the two - since they are very different films. I don't really care about the Oscars and other award nonsense, learned a long time ago that the Oscars and other "awards shows" aren't about quality or talent so much as industry politics. (If Ghandi's win didn't teach me that, Titantic did. I stopped taking them seriously after Titantic.)

At any rate, Juno's a sweet if somewhat trite little story about a pregnant teen who finds a pair of parents to adopt her kid, things don't quite go as well as planned but still turn out nice and rosy in the end, with quirky music filtered throughout. The first half was entertaining, the middle drug so badly that the lady next to me decided to start text messaging her friends during the film and did not stop until the guy behind her, aided by me, politely asked her to stop. She sulked for about twenty minutes, then packed up her things and stormed out of the theater, never to return.

Pause for a public service announcement: IF YOU CARRY A CELL PHONE TURN IT OFF WHEN YOU SIT IN A MOVIE THEATER or ANY TYPE OF THEATER THAT OTHER PEOPLE ARE IN WITH YOU. AND BY OFF I MEAN COMPLETELY - NOT ON VIBRATE, NOT ON BUZZER. IF YOU CAN'T BEAR TO DO THAT, EITHER DO NOT BRING IT OR DON'T COME.

Even without the mad text messeger, I can't help but think that this would have been a better film to watch on tv than on a movie screen. It really doesn't require a big screen - it's a small film, without much cinematography to speak of, mostly dependent on close-ups and quirky dialogue, both of which work far better on a smaller screen and within the comforts of one's own living room.

( Review of Juno with sporadic and potentially major plot spoilers )

Just finished watching Syriana, the fim about the oil industry. Before I watched it, I read a review in a friend's journal about Ian McEwan's Atonement, in which she states that the book is brilliant, but not a world she wishes to inhabit and was a bit painful to read. Watching Syriana reminds me a little of reading Atonement. Except for the fact that I know I inhabit this world. I may not see it on a daily basis or have a direct involvement with it, but unlike the worlds depicted in fantasy shows or films such as Superman Returns, Pirates of the Carribbean, or X-Men Last Stand, these worlds are real ones. Fictionalized perhaps, but they exist. And not just in the author's head, the author is acting as camera lense that we see the world through or say a bunch of fun house mirrors. The mirrors exaggerating those bits and pieces we would prefer not to see.

Before watching Syriana and reading the friend's review of Atonement, I spoke with a friend who had just seen Pirates of the Caribbean. She didn't like it. Felt it was over-long and silly. I replied that I enjoyed it for its absurdist humor and while I love the absurdity of the sequence where the captives are pushing their cages to the other side of deep ravine, I admit the film would have worked far better if this sequence and the bits that proceed and follow it on the island of cannibals had been edited out. Both my friend and I ignored the offensiveness of the sequence, but now that the film has become the cultural phenomena it currently is or blockbuster, I'm thinking society as a whole would have been better served without it and maybe the filmmakers need to be a tad more sensitive to such concerns. Like sexual violence, misogyny and gay bashing, racist portrayals of minorities is not something we can just throw around and sing la la la with fingers poked in our ears if anyone criticizes us for it -  there are dangerous consequences to such portrayals in art, particularly in a society that is struggling to overcome its own absuses and crimes regarding such minorities and in fact, in many areas, is still committing them. We can not risk condoning such things in popular arena of art and culture not without appreciating the consequences. Every action or non-action has a consequence.  But that is a discussion that I think has been exhausted for lack of a better phrase. At any rate, what I told my friend was that films like Pirates do well because people want to escape the pains of life, not think about them. They don't want to analyze, ponder, worry, or get angry. They just want to have a little fun in a cool movie theater on a hot and sticky summer day.  (Even more reason why such things probably should be left out of entertainment that on its surface  at least is meant as little more than a bit of fun in the sun.) Life is hard enough. Why worry about things you can't change or control? Why deal with folks in a movie that are nasty and don't get punished - we see enough of that in every day life. If you want to think and ponder about the world - you go see Munich or Syriana, I told her.

Munich made me angry at the middle east, primarily Israel. Syriana makes me angry at the US corporations. Although I realize it is not that simple. As the commentators state in the special features section on the DVD, there are no bad guys in the film or rather there are no good guys either. The line between good guy and bad guy in real life is surprisingly thin and blurry.

I remember reading Atonement a little over a year or so ago. I read it quickly. Scanned most of it, not because it was not well written, it is, but because I I had a violent reaction to the main character or protagonist, whose point of view you are in through the majority of the novel. She is a little girl when the novel starts and we follow her and her sister and her sister's lover through World War II.  When I discussed the book with the book club I was in at the time they did not understand why I was not sympathetic towards the little girl. "She's just a little girl," they stated. "Can't you understand why she did it?" "It was a mistake that she clearly regretted and tries to atone for through writing, as a writer, you must understand that?" Ah, yes, perhaps that explains the reaction - I felt and I think McEwan fully intended me to feel this way, that the protagonist, who is a writer in the novel, was using her writing to twist events to make herself look good and be remembered fondly. She was using writing in a way that I had always run away from and feared. To promote oneself and for one's own personal gain at the expense of someone else. The writer as monster. And I think, more than a year later, still haunted by the novel and I've read many novels in between that I cannot remember nearly as well as this one, that may be the root of my discomfort with it. It hit upon a my own fears and dark desires. McEwan is interested in exploring the dark side of human nature. 

What does this have to do with the film Syriana? Ah.

Syriana like Atonement also talks about the dark side of human nature. It explores what people are willing to do to get oil. And how they justify these actions to themselves. The justifications are important, and it is in fact the justifications that McEwan explored in Atonement that continue to haunt me. I think the reason people are able to hurt one another and still sleep at night is those justifications. In Syriana, they justify the assaignation of a political figure based on the view that he is "evil", they demonize him. He's evil. He wants to take our oil away from us. He's disrupting his country. We are protecting it. When in truth, he merely wants to create a democratic government, give women the right to vote, and provide a strong economic infrastructure instead of continuing to allow foreign interests to suck his country dry of its natural resource. It's tempting to see the foreign interests evil, but they aren't - they are equally worried about the people in their country, the unemployed in Texas and other states due to an encroaching oil crisis. 

The answer, if there is one, is to find another resource other than oil. Not to depend so much on your car. To use public transportation more. But it's not that simple. It's not like Superman, where the evil Lex Luthor is trying to destroy the world and Superman flies in to stop him. The oil barons are not monsters, but men attempting to provide jobs to other men and women, attempting to protect their way of life, just as the arabs are trying to protect theirs and both sides are willing to do anything for that to happen.

Watching Syriana makes me want to crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after me. It is not a world I wish to live in. Any more than McEwan's world is.
But I know that both will haunt me and that I can't hide from them. Or ignore them. Any more than I can ignore the discomfort I feel when I think I enjoyed the absurdity of the island of the cannibals in Pirates. It's easier to ignore it. To avoid such unpleasantries. Focus on things of beauty. But much like the closeted and sheltered Victorian poet who leaves the taunting party crowd that insists on throwing these things in his face, only to get attacked in an alley by demon, I'm not sure I can afford to put my head in the sand either.  Or I risk inadvertently joining the demons I'm working so hard to ignore.

The question then becomes how does one combat such things? Do more volunteer work? Join the peace corps? Watch more films and read more books on racism, terrorism, ethical journalism, gender politics, or whatever else comes up?  

I think the answer isn't so simple or clear-cut. I think it is a matter of being aware. Of constantly challenging one's views and opinions. Opening up to new ones which may make one feel uncomfortable or uneasy. And to give up things. That whole statement - "do no harm" - is not as easy as it sounds. I think sometimes its impossible not to.

Syriana is a film that makes one think. It is not an easy film to watch. Many storylines built on top of each other. And the film has the same scattered narrative structure as Crash and Traffic. Lots of interlinking characters, some of which never really meet. The three stars, for instance, Clooney, Jeffrey Wright, and Matt Damon never speak to one another, but each one's thread affects the other. It is a sprawling story told more in dialogue and meetings than with visuals. It requires one to listen, more than I wanted to, and to think. It acquires attention to detail. I missed many things when I watched it and I found it slow at certain points. It is not a film I would say I enjoyed,  almost put me to sleep tin a few places to be honest, but like McEwan's Atonement, it is a film that I think is worth watching, because it is one that you come away from with your perspective alterred in some small way.