Friday Movie Rant

Can I just say how awesome TV has been the last few years? Lost, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Friday Night Lights (which I've kind of gone off, but still a good show), Dexter, Battlestar Galactica, Californication, Bill Maher, The Office, Daily Show, Colbert Report, and many more. Every time I reach the point where I think I've watched everything, along comes another show. The Walking Dead, a zombie series! Why hasn't anyone done this before? And on top of that, Sherlock. There's only three episodes, but they're good. I haven't read the original books, but I think I will. Oh, and I haven't watched one episode of The Wire yet, which it seems is everybody's choice for Best Show Ever. Dunno, it can't be better than Babylon 5, can it? Anyway, I'll always have that to fall back on in lean times, but at the moment there's no need.
I watched Inception the other day, too. Blown away. Great Movie. Kind of like the Matrix where I was never confused enough to totally lose track of what was going on, but I still can't bring myself to sit down and think it through totally. I do think Dicaprio should cool it with the stressed-out guy with the crappy wife characters, though. Three in a row, by my counting.
I was web surfing the other day and I came across The Independant's list of Top Ten Sci-fi films. Before the list had a chance to load I closed the browser and wrote down my own top ten first. Here it is - mind you, I put in all 5 minutes of thought into this.
1. The Empire Strikes Back
I love this movie. It's so good. The characters are so defined, and so cool. I saw this in the cinema before I saw Star Wars, so I must have been 6 or 7, and I didn't get it. I thought Luke killed Darth in the tree on Dagoba, so then he meets up with him again in Bespin, and then beats him again, but then Darth shows up again, and Luke keeps beating him until Darth cuts off his hand. I thought there must be a whole army of Darths. Now I know that Darth was just messin' with Luke, hiding, taunting, testing him. And the tree was Luke's own fear made manifest. But I was confused after the first time I saw it. C3PO is hilarious in this movie. Such a bitch! When he interupt's Lea and Han's first kiss with "Sir! Sir! I've isolated the main power somthing!" When he gets all upset after Han calls him the professor. When he meets that other protocol droid in Bespin and the other droid tells him to fuck off ("Etchutta") and C3PO says "How rude!" (which Lucas has Ja Ja Binks say TWICE in the Phantom Menace. WTF is up with that?) What else? Walkers, Yoda! Asteroids, Luke and Darth battling, Han with the lightsaber slicing open the Tan-tan guts! Lea: "I love you" Han: "I know". You see Darth with his helmet off for a moment. I could watch this movie again and again.
2. Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
I must have watched this two or three times with my dad growing up. The last half an hour is incredible. You forget that this guy ditches his kids and flies off with the aliens because you get so wrapped up in it. The lights and the clouds that form whenever the big mother ship comes and the music. I love it.
3. Star Wars
Just a part of my childhood. I've always had Star Wars. I was 9 when the Star Wars movies finished, and it was guys like me and my friends, all over the world, who kept it going when it could have just faded away like the Matrix movies or Lord of the Rings. Stickers, figures, games, books, anything to do with the movies we ate it up. And when the videos came out, we watched it again and again.
4. ET
Lucas, Spielberg, Lucas, Spielberg. Grew up in the 80's much? This is the only movie that makes me cry. When ET's sick, and Michael finds him in the river all white and weezy, I tear up every time. The menacing adults with their fucked up lives, and you know that if they get their hands on ET, they will kill him. The BMX chase was huge for me. So much Spielberg in this. The missing father, the humour, the perfect ending. Real endings, nothing left untied for a possible sequel.
5. Couldn't think of one. Needed a gap to seperate the top four from the rest. because the next five movies are movies I saw as a adult, and are just movies.
6. Contact
When I saw this I was deep into my degree and thinking about stuff like how and where meaning is created, and this movie kind of tapped into that, so when the alien appeared as her father, I thought, exactly. Some people felt ripped off, but the point is, how can you conceive of something totally outside your realm of understanding? You can't. The alien had to appear to her as her father for her to be able to see it. All through the movie she is battling the religious characters in the movie, asking them how they can beleive in something they can't perceive, becasue she can't, and the alien honours that. A really, really, smart movie. Had me from the first scene when they start zoom in from the edge of the universe into the girl's eye. There are some technical shots in this movie involving mirrors that I can't work out how they did.
7. Alien
I could have put Aliens in here instead, but I don't think it's necessarily a sci-fi movie. It's just like Predator, but in space. Or maybe Predator is a sci-fi movie. Dunno. Seems more like action-horror to me. There's no real sci-fi motifs in Aliens, just hunter and prey. Alien was really creepy though. I have liked all the Alien movies, though I wish they'd keep control of the brand. The other day in the video shop I saw a DVD called "Alien vs Cube". Yep, the alien is in the cube. Here's a movie for you. "Alien: We Need To Talk". Alien, aging and alone, discovers she has a teenage daughter, and together they explore love, sadness, and finally, acceptance. Then she punches through her daughter's skull with her internal jaws.
8 to 10. Terminator, Galaxy Quest, Moon, District 9, The Fly, Total Recall, Robocop, Enemy Mine, Starship Troopers, 2010, Matrix 2, War Of the Worlds (the new one).
Any of those, and a lot more. Moon was good, Starship Troopers is just so clever, Disctrict 9 was the best movie of last year, all good.
So here's The Independant's list.
1. Blade Runner
2. 2001
3. Star Wars
4. Alien
5. Metropolis (the old one)
6. The Day The Earth Stood Still (the old one)
7. Terminator
8. Planet of the Apes (the old one)
9. ET
10. Solaris (the old one)
Couple of things. First, boring list. Why bother? Anyway, hands up if you've seen Metropolis. Solaris. The Day the Earth Stood Still? And can some one explain to me why Blade Runner is always up there? Which Blade Runner? The one that was released in the cinemas, or one of the many versions since? It looks great, and I like the premise, but god it's boring. I have never been able to sit through it. Metropolis. Another one no-one has seen. In the hundred years of cinema since, only 4 SF movies better than it. Really? I liked Planet of the Apes. Did you know the guy who wrote the book was a prisoner of the Japanese during WW2? Makes sense. 2001, okay, I liked the start.
The best sci-fi makes you think about the present or past from another perspective. Can you watch Planet of the Apes and not think about how we treat animals? When you watch Moon, are you just waiting for that robot to double-cross him, because everyone knows you can't trust a machine? Can we behave ethically towards beings that are not human? That's a tough one. If you don't think of someone or something as fully human, then you can own them as slaves or exterminate them in ovens and think nothing of it. Have you ever felt for a zombie? What is it about zombies that makes it okay to randomly slaughter them for laughs? Why are clones in movies always searching for their original? Why are originals so threatened or repulsed by their clones? And that's why, in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Lucas had a CLONE army fighting a ROBOT army, and that's why nobody in the world gave a shit who won. Clones with New Zealand accents no less! I still don't know who won the clone wars. Apparently it's still going on TV.
I think CG has done a lot to hurt sci-fi. I can still spot it. It's bland, flat, and rather than freeing up the director to do anything they imagine, it makes them lazy. The Star Wars prequels will always be exhibit A. Ridiculous how much crap Lucas squeezes into each scene in these movies. Can't just have a CG beast of burden walk across the shot, it's also got to do a shit, and then a robot has to step in the shit, and then it has to say "pu do" or some other rip-off from the original trilogy. Thirty years ago, the beast would have cost a million to make and operate, and if it walked at all, that was a stunning achievement. Normally they wouldn't have bothered, and they would have had to think of something else. But now it's a guy at a computer scared that if he doesn't have his beast do something eye-catching, Lucas won't notice, and he'll lose his job. If you watch the making of the prequels documentaries, it's computer artists competing against each other to catch Lucas' attention. And you can see that in the movies. Crap!
But also, all aliens look like bugs or lizards now, because bugs and lizards are easy to do CG. And they compensate for the inhumanity by putting in big, wet eyes, which can't be done properly yet. They look like transluscent glass balls.
Dinosaurs, sure. They look great. The gophers and monkeys in Indy 4, garbage. Garbage! Young Jeff Bridges in the new Tron trailer = absolutely shithouse. They still can't do a living creature with any soul, so they shouldn't even try. Gollum looked great, but they could have starved a midget who can act and it would have looked better, and his eyes were a problem. And we are talking about one of the greatest fictional characters in literature, so they had something to work with. There is an explosion in the new Rambo movie that is laughable. They still can't do smoke. Avatar looked okay, but the CG characters have no mass. They can't touch each other. It doesn't look real.
I think there will be a return to models and puppets and suits. Not robotics though. Too troublesome. Facial recognition, like Gollum and Avatar, obviously has great results, and work for humanoid faces, but never human faces. It's called the Uncanny effect. Our brains are so good at identifying and interpretuing human faces and movements, that anything remotely false ruins the whole thing.
In my ideal movie, I don't want to see CG explosions or smoke, bug or lizard aliens, or WIRE WORK! God I hate wirework! It looks shit. If a stuntman or woman can't do it, then it can't be done. Just because you have erased the wire doesn't mean we can't see it. No CG critters (fuck you Indy 4, with your gophers and monkeys), no fake blood spurts (Rambo). No camera wobble when something flies past the camera. Who thought of that? I never saw that before GC. Imagine that famous scene in Star Wars when we first see and hear tie fighties as they fly past the camera in a shot establishing the Death Star. No wobble. It would have one now though. And it would probably have seven Star Destroyers in the background, and a hundred other tie fighters, and an animal having a shit somewhere in there.
No unrealistic camera positions. Yea, CG frees up the camera, but that doesn't mean the camera is free. You can't be zooming and flying and moving around all over the place, because it would be impossible with a real camera. Again, Lucas in Attack of the Clones, and Jackson in LOTR. As soon as they start doing that, I look for little CG men running around like a PC strategy game, with their fake capes billowing out behind them. Another example, though a little more interesting, is Panic Room, where the camera moves through the handle of a kettle. Clever, but jarring.
I guess what I'm saying is this: If a film uses CG the way I want it to be used, then it would not be noticed, but from the filmaker's point of view, if it is not noticed, then what's the point of using it? That's the dilemma, isn't it. The filmmaker who says "Look! CG!" is a poor filmaker, not sure of his capabilites as a storyteller. There needs to be some restraint.
Probably the most diasspointing CG I have ever seen is the zombies in I Am Legend. Who let that happen? They looked ridiculous. Ruined a good movie.
I like what Zack Snyder is doing in his movies. He uses CG really well. 300 and Sin City look awesome. It's kind of an uber-reality. More real that reality. That's fine. Use CG for what it's good at. If they are trying something new, like Gollum in LOTR or the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, fine too. What I want is not to be able to tell. The first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan, awesome. If I can tell that it's fake, it pulls me out of the movie, and reminds me that I'm watching something manufactured. If you are going to use CG smoke instead of real smoke because it's easier and cheaper, then you damn well better do it right, or I will be insulted, and pissed off if I have paid to see the movie.
So the next big CG movie is Tron Legacy, and I have heard that executives are having fits about the Jeff Bridges face. So they should. Just get someone who looks like Jeff Bridges! Or put some makeup on the actual Jeff Bridges! Or do what they did with Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button, which I heard looked really good. Sucker Punch looks awesome as well, and I like the samurai in the trailer. But then I saw the trailer for Clint Eastwood's new movie with Matt Damon, about a psychic or something, and just in the trailer I saw the shitiest CG I have seen since watching the Discovery channel. Rubbish. If I had seen any hint of wirework in that amazing scene in Inception in the hallway, that would have been so dissapointing. But I didn't, and I was sold on the movie. That's quality. There is still a "Wow, how did they do that?" factor in movies. You can only get it by spending a shit load of money and building special stuff and doing it right.
A word about Indy 4. I loved the first three movies. I loved the third one, which for some reason it is cool to shit on. "And ziz is how ve say goodbye in Germany, Dr Jones." Brilliant. Well, bring me Indy 4 and I will lay a steaming turd on that one, becuase it is TIOLET!
Before seeing it, I followed it's progress. Lucas pushing and pushing until Speilberg threw up his hands and said "fuck! OK!" Then I read the reviews and heard about monkeys and aliens and shit like that. The trailers looked okay. But I wasn't looking forward to it. And then I saw it, and I hated it. Outside the cinema, a friend of mine, way into his Star Wars and like a brother to me (like all my friends back home) said that it was like I wanted it to be shit for some reason, and though he said it wasn't great, he enjoyed it. I didn't deny that there might be a grain of truth in that, though I was surpised that after the energy he spent sticking up for the SW prequels he was going to stick up for this too. But since then I have wondered, "Was it really as shit as I thought it was?", so last week I got it and tried to watch it again with an open mind.
It's hard. First shot is of a CG gopher. Reminds me of Caddyshack, except Caddyshack is good. Then there's the suicidal kids in the hotrod. Okay, not a good start. And it doesn't get much better. The Russians are okay, Kate Blanchet looks wierd when she should have looked a little bit alluring, and her mind trick falls flat as a brick. Then there's the CG gun powder. Anyway, it redeems itself with the nuclear test scene. Except that Indy survives being hurled five kilometers in a fridge. And then when he gets out of the fridge (unharmed) to watch a really cool nuclear mushroom cloud, hey guess what? The gopher is there! My god. It's just like watching the prequals again.
Then I started to enjoy it a little. But every time I started to enjoy it, something happened! Indy's boss walks into the middle of Indy's class while he's teaching, and basically fires him in front of his students! Holy shit! I enjoyed the motorcycle chase, the funny line in the library, and the searching for the skulls. Why did Mutt bring his motorcycle? No idea what happened to that. And then they found the skull, and the Russians came, and the crazy guy, and I had stuff to do so I turned it off, and I never had the urge to go back to it. So I'm sticking by my initial impression. It wasn't me. I was right. The movie is shit.
I've heard Lucas is pushing for another one. I don't understand. Sometimes I try to imagine that if I had a billion dollars, and someone said, you do this and you'll get fifty million dollars, and I feel like, meh, would I do it? Why would I waste my time doing anything I didn't passionately want to do? Whatever I did would not be for the money. So either he's doing it for the money, which is hard to belileve, or he really wants to do it and this is the best he can do. I watched the Making of Phantom Menace with this is mind. He makes terrible decisions, but seems so sure of what he's doing, and everyone around him so scared of him, and so scared of saying the wrong thing. It's horrible to watch. Like when he says to Speilberg, we've got these robots, and the Jedi just cut them down like butter, it's so cool. Cool if you're a Jedi, but really boring if you're in the cinema watching it. But wait, not only are they inneffectual, they also behave lilke buffoons! "Roger, Roger," all that shit. Is that an ode to Flying High? I remember watching it the first time and thinking, did that piece of shit robot just make a joke? My god.
I'm betting Indy 4 changed Speilberg's and Lucas' relationship. After all of the good and interesting movies Speilberg has been making for so long, I bet the whole Indy 4 experience sucked for him. The question I asked myself the most while watching Indy 4 is "Why?". Why did they make it, and why am I watching it? Why? Why!?