(Yes, I know it's been the best part of a year since I posted here. No, this probably isn't the start of a resurgence in posting. Sorry to disappoint.)
As a fully certified geek, it is not at all surprising that I'm entirely familiar with the Star Wars universe. I hear and recite quotations from the films frequently, I own two of the video games, I can give you a potted summary of the "Han shot first" controversy at the drop of a hat — I have certain credentials here, is what I'm saying.
So I was rather surprised to realise recently that not only did I not own any of the films in any format, it had actually been well over ten years since I had seen any of them. (We're talking the original trilogy here, of course — my geek cred extends far enough to know that the recent prequels, aka abominations against the very concept of cinema, don't count.) So, taking advantage of the January sales, I headed into London to pick up the DVD box set, and spent a reflective couple of hours the other night watching Episode IV.
It took me a while after finishing watching it to decide what I thought of it. Given that the established wisdom of...well, pretty much everyone I know, with the exception of my mother, who wanted to take a tin-opener to C-3PO when she first saw him...is that the original films are classics of modern cinema, masterpieces that soar above lesser films like an X-Wing twisting between bursts of turbolaser fire, it's difficult to have any kind of unbiased viewpoint here. Nevertheless, for what it's worth, here are my conclusions. (One note on formatting in this post &mdash I'll use the italicised Star Wars to denote Episode IV, as that's its original theatrical title, and plain Star Wars to denote the franchise.)
1. Good grief, this is EPIC.
From the opening shot, as an Imperial cruiser (I don't think the term "Star Destroyer" is mentioned anywhere in the first film) slides almost endlessly across the top of the screen, to the climactic battle above a space station the size of a moon, Star Wars has a sense of scale unlike almost any other film. This continues almost everywhere &mdash our heroes move between entire star systems, at speeds greater than light, landing on worlds that consist entirely of desert, fighting an Empire that, we're told, spans the galaxy. Lucas went all-out to create this compelling atmosphere, and he pulls it off admirably.
2. Intergalactic Planetary Planetary Intergalactic
An essential element of the sense of scale throughout Star Wars is John Williams' score. It's utterly beautiful, moving from urgency to wonder to triumph to shock with ease. I was surprised that even after having so long over the years to become sick of it, the mournful theme as Luke looks out over the desert he's so desperate to leave behind was still really moving. As with his score for Jurassic Park, Williams came up with something at once unique and yet very obviously his own.
3. It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know
As Ben Kenobi strode onto the screen, I began to wonder "how did they persuade Alec Guinness to appear in as large a gamble as this?" I think the answer has to be that Guinness could tell he was among people who knew what they were doing. All the casting is inspired — Mark Hamill probably wouldn't thank me for saying that he really looks and sounds very ordinary in this film, but that's precisely what was required for the role of an everyman farm boy, caught up into something larger than himself. Carrie Fisher is as Princessy as you could wish for (in looks, if not in character — more on that later). Even the Rebel fighter pilots and the various generals on the bridge of the Death Star are well-portrayed. (And, as Eddie Izzard is fond of pointing out, they're all British.)
As for Harrison Ford, well, it's a shame that he picked up the "action hero" stereotype in this franchise, because he really can act. There's a scene towards the end, when Obi-Wan has just died (or been absorbed by the Force, or whatever — the film's intentionally ambiguous here) and Luke is sitting on board the Millennium Falcon, stunned and unable to take it in ("...can't believe he's gone."). Han Solo comes down the ladder to find Luke, as he's going to need him to fend off Imperial fighters, and he says just one thing: "Come on buddy, we're not out of this yet." It's a simple line, over almost immediately, but Ford's delivery of it is pitch-perfect, conveying kindness without being at all sentimental, and still maintaining the urgency required by the situation. It's worth noting here that the script is also better than one might expect from a sci-fi blockbuster — I'm not certain, but I think this is the first time Solo refers to Luke as "buddy" rather than "kid", and the quiet character development signalled by that tiny change is significant.
4. My Explanations, Let Me Not Show You Them
One of the most surprising aspects of Star Wars, for me, was the extent to which it doesn't fall into the trap of so many bits of sci-fi, that of over-explaining everything. We're treated to practically no backstory for any of the characters, at no point does anyone tell us just how a lightsaber works, the Force is vague and mysterious. The most stunning example of this was when Han Solo talks to Greedo and then Jabba — there are no subtitles, despite both the characters he meets speaking completely alien languages, and we're left to decipher what they must have said from Solo's side of the conversation. (Come to think of it, my DVD-playing setup is a little ropey, so the subtitles may simply have been broken. If that's the case, then feel free to disregard this point!) This general attitude towards the viewers — that they are intelligent enough to figure out what's going on, and that the story is more important than explaining the fine details of the setting — is refreshing, and really helps to move things along.
5. I Am No Man
Speaking of subverting expectations, I was really impressed by the role of Leia. The word "princess", when applied to a film role, is usually code for "fairly drippy character whose involvement in the plot is restricted to a) getting captured and/or rescued, and b) falling in love with the male lead". And yet our first sighting of Leia is when she is confronting the 7-foot tall, half-man-half-machine-all-evil Darth Vader. And it is a confrontation — she chews him out for boarding a diplomatic vessel, threatens him with the wrath of the Galactic Senate, and shows no fear whatsoever. This kind of can-do attitude isn't a one-time thing, either — she's the one who gets them out of the detention levels, she's the only character who cottons on to the fact that their escape from the Death Star was too easy, and she's pretty handy with a blaster too. Even though there is a romantic subtext between her and Han, it's never over-the-top, and she maintains the upper hand throughout — note that in the ceremony at the end, it's Luke and Han who have to walk up to Leia to receive their reward, not the other way around.
6. Aaaaaaaagh I'm Running Out Of Time
And so we come to the only thing I really didn't like about Star Wars. At the end of the film it took me a while to put my finger on why, though I'd enjoyed it a lot, I'd also found it a bit disappointing. I think the answer can be summed up in one word: Pacing.
The impression throughout the film is that, much like me when starting to write one of these epically long posts, Lucas thought he had all the time in the world. We spend seemingly forever in and around Luke's home, meeting Obi-Wan, and following the droids. Oh, man, the droids. Is there any particular reason why we had to go through the whole "R2-D2 and C-3PO go off in opposite directions, complain for a few minutes, get captured by the same set of characters and have a glorious robotic reunion" storyline? It has precisely no bearing on any of the rest of the plot, and could equally well have been done by simply having the Jawas find the escape pod as soon as it landed. As it stands, this and other scripting and editing decisions mean that the first half of the film moves glacially slowly.
Now, there's nothing wrong with a film that runs slowly to give the audience time to take in the atmosphere. Nor is there anything wrong with a film that builds pace throughout. But Star Wars does this to a ridiculous extent, such that it takes at least a good quarter of the film before we've met all the main cast, while the final battle, from the Millennium Falcon landing on Yavin to the destruction of the Death Star, takes place in-universe in less than half an hour.
Even the pacing within some of the scenes is odd. Take the destruction of the Death Star, for instance. Luke drops his bombs into the shaft, he and Han fly off, Vader spins away, we cut to the people on the Death Star looking unconcerned, and then it immediately blows up. The whole sequence has taken a couple of seconds at most. No anticipation, no time to wait for it, just BOOM. For me, at least, that took a lot away from what should have been the climactic shot of the film.
For much the same reason, the final ceremony is unsatisfying, because it feels forced and tacked-on, leaving completely unresolved the question of what the Rebels are going to do next, how the Empire is going to be destroyed (it's only lost one of its weapons, and is far from powerless) or even how the various character relationships are going to work. From a position of knowing that there were two more films, it's not so bad that things haven't been resolved — we know there's more story to come. But if you're going to do that, you surely have to either do an explicit "to be continued" type of ending (as the Lord of the Rings films did) or make the films stand entirely on their own (as the Matrix films would have done, had there been any sequels). Star Wars, however, doesn't know what it wants to do and it ends up falling between two stools, with a rushed and unsatisfying ending that leaves too many questions open.
Obviously, given that I've just spent 1800 words discussing this film, I found a lot to enjoy, and I'm certainly glad I came back to revisit this touchstone of geek culture. If you agree or disagree with me, feel free to argue violently in the comments. And maybe — just maybe — come back soon when I re-watch The Empire Strikes Back...
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
Anyone who even thinks of the word "midichlorians" is not welcome here.
Tuesday, 11 August 2009
Typing this up was not as cathartic as I'd hoped.
Time for a quick warning before we get into this post — it will be about swearing and bad language in general. Given that I don't normally swear at all, either in text or in speech, that's going to present some problems. My general position is that I want the front page at least to be entirely suitable for all ages, so I could simply avoid saying anything throughout the post that might be offensive. However, it's going to get really confusing if I start using constructions like "that word that starts with an 'f' and is very offensive", and I consider it an intellectual cop-out of the highest order to blank out words with asterisks. Anyone who reads the post is going to be entirely aware of which words I'm actually talking about, so I'm not going to insult your intelligence by pretending that blanking it out is any better.
So, the only real solution is to quote these more objectionable words in full, and to hide the rest of the post behind a cut. So here's the warning: The rest of this blog post will contain extremely strong language that you may find offensive. If you're the kind to be offended by it and would rather not read the rest, then feel free to go on your way. Please accept my apologies, and enjoy this video of adorable kittens instead. (For those on the RSS feed or reading this post anywhere but the blog's front page: the cut will not work for you, so anything after the video is unsafe.)
Awww. How sweet. OK, those of you who are still with me, and haven't been completely overwhelmed with kitteny joy (and if not, go and take a look at Cute Overload), let's get into it.
Certain parts of language have been deemed unacceptable for polite society for thousands of years, probably since the first caveman's wife threw the first caveman out his cave for saying "oog" too many times. Shakespeare was sailing pretty close to the wind with some of his language — "zounds" appears rather a lot (source) and is short for "by God's wounds"; "gadzooks" means "God's hooks". Both are references to the Crucifixion, and in a very Christian society (like the one in which Shakespeare lived), both of those words were very offensive. Go back further to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and you'll see the same thing, as the Parson scolds the Man of Law for using expressions like "for Goddes bones" and "by Goddes dignitee".
As you can see, religion has long been a source for swearing. That must go back at least to the Ten Commandments, the third of which forbids misusing God's name. Even so, faith-based swearing (to coin a phrase) is clearly not the only way that people could swear in Biblical times. The book of James goes on at some considerable length about how words can be harmful ("out of the same mouth comes praise and cursing", for example), and Paul had similar things to say in Ephesians 5:4: "Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving."
It's pretty clear from a Christian perspective, then, that despite swearing's long heritage, it's not necessarily a good thing to exercise one's entire vocabulary all the time (and whatever the circumstances, misusing God's name is right out). However, does that necessarily mean that there are no circumstances in which some forms of swearing may be acceptable? How about the place where it's most often controversial, in art and media? Let's take a look at a few case studies, to see how language tends to be used and what its impact is.
Stand-up comedy
I may as well come out and say right now that I'm a huge fan of Eddie Izzard, but if I'm going to do a post on swearing there's no way I'm going to avoid talking about him. Here's a clip from his show "Glorious".
In case you weren't counting, that clip contained 14 "fucks" or variations thereof, two "bastard"s, two "bloody"s, and a "Jesus Christ". And yet, I don't find Izzard remotely offensive. Obviously I'm not about to quote his work verbatim in mixed company (I tend to strategically miss out words, of which more later), but I'm more than happy to watch him for hours despite the near-constant barrage of four-letter words. I think the reason is that the swearing isn't the point of the joke. In the above clip, for example, it serves as little more than punctuation — his miming and observational humour is considerably funnier than the fact that he's saying "fuck" a lot, but the swearing does also help to give him a rhythm and a recognisable vocal persona.
Now, contrast that with Billy Connolly. (OK, this is a little unfair, as this clip is Connolly on the subject of swearing, but still.)
Don't get me wrong, that's still funny (and Connolly does make a good point, which we'll come back to in a bit). However, because the swearing is the point of the joke — note how everyone's in raucous laughter after the first bellowing "FUCK OFF!" — I don't find it nearly as entertaining, and I certainly wouldn't be happy showing it to anyone else. (Apart from all of you, of course.) When swearing gets you a laugh, regardless of what else you might be saying, it must be very tempting for comedians just to sprinkle a few swearwords in and leave it at that.
Films
The first time I watched the classic The Silence of the Lambs, I don't think I knew what certificate it was. I wasn't left in any doubt, however, when about three minutes in, Miggs, one of the prisoners in Hannibal Lecter's cell block, snarled "I can smell your cunt!" at Clarice Starling. Bang, instant 18 certificate. Now, The Silence of the Lambs is not a nice film anyway, and the violence later on would push it well into 18 territory regardless of the language used. Nevertheless, the tone is set very early on. Having seen very little of the film, we're already aware of the kind of person that Miggs is, and (by extension) the kind of person that Lecter must also be, to be locked up with him. It's very clever writing, which works because of the choice of language rather than despite it.
On the other hand, we have films like Wanted, on which I made my opinions abundantly clear some time ago. A quick search of an early draft of the script reveals 25 uses of the word "fuck" (again including variants), 18 uses of "shit", and (somewhat surprisingly) only a single "dick". This is a film that is trying very, very hard to be edgy and controversial, but completely fails on every level by being utterly ridiculous. As such, the swearing doesn't add anything to it, and simply feels like it's overdoing it to no great effect. (And in case you were wondering, The Silence of the Lambs makes it to a comparatively clean eleven uses of "fuck".)
So far, then, it seems that swearing can be a valuable tool for creating an atmosphere, but because of its potency it requires good writing and acting to then back up that atmosphere with something more meaty. Get it wrong, and your atmosphere becomes a load of hot air, and becomes offensive not only for the swearing but only because you can't believe you just paid money to see something quite so poor.
Books
As words are obviously the key medium for carrying information in books, far more than for any other medium, this is a pretty huge topic. As such, I'm not even going to try to cover the whole thing. Instead, let's look at just one example of how swearing can work with not swearing to create something very impressive.
The example I'm going to use is from Terry Pratchett, one of the authors I read more than anyone else when I was younger, and who still sits comfortably in my list of favourite writers. He has a real gift for language, but doesn't go in much for lyrical word-pictures. His speciality is more that he picks the right words for the task, and brings about the effect he wanted in just a few words. He also tends not to swear at all in his writing, and in fact turned that very fact into a joke in his novel The Truth, in which one of the characters constantly left gaps in his speech, such that the other characters kept remarking on what the word "___ing" could possibly mean. So it was quite a surprise to suddenly hit this near the end of the book Hogfather:"Worlds of belief, she thought. Just like oysters. A little piece of shit gets in and then a pearl grows up around it."
That use of "shit" shocked me when I reached it, not because the word is inherently shocking, but because the whole book is about children and how their beliefs shape the world around them, and the language tends to match that. Having had nothing that could be remotely construed as offensive for page after page, that one word was a jolt, and one that gave the metaphor being used a lot more potency.
Perhaps more importantly, there is no word that could have been used in that metaphor that would have had quite the same impact. Evoking an extreme of distaste shortly before swinging it back to beauty with the word "pearl" is a very clever construction, and serves to turn something that was horrible into something wonderful.
Music
So, was Billy Connolly right? Are there situations where you just don't get the right effect unless you're swearing? I would suggest so. One of my favourite musicians, Mark "E" Everett of American rock band Eels, penned a song that illustrates this perfectly. Do me a favour — hover your mouse over this link, close your eyes so that you can't see the title of the song (the link takes you to Youtube), and click. Listen through the beautiful piano-and-strings introduction, and pay attention to the lurch that the opening line of singing produces. Go ahead, I'll wait.
For those who didn't follow those instructions, I'll just plough ahead anyway. I'm entirely aware that the word "motherfucker" is extremely unpleasant. The word doesn't even sound nice, even if you don't pay attention to its connotations. And yet, E has used it brilliantly here. He's taken the depth of feeling that the word evokes (and it's pretty deep), but instead of directing it into anger, he's made it melancholy. The overall effect is one of incredible sadness, giving us a feeling of great loss and tragedy, and he's done that in hardly any words. Once you take into account that E has had a very difficult life (and he wrote that song mere months after his mother died of cancer, practically in his arms), you begin to feel that (to quote E way out of context) "if anyone knew that it is, indeed, a motherfucker", it's him.
The same effect is present on other songs, too. Radiohead's "Creep" is a prime example; when Thom Yorke sneers "I wish I was special / You're so fuckin' special", it turns what could be an expression of admiration into a sarcastic dismissal. Other words don't quite cut it — the radio-friendly version replaces "fuckin'" with "very", which still kind of works, but doesn't have the same bite to it. Conversely, I almost always skip over REM's "Star Me Kitten" if it comes up on shuffle, because of the chorus:You, me, we used to be on fire
I can't pretend to completely understand Michael Stipe's lyrics (in any of his music, come to think of it), but this seems like a very bleak song. I can't detect any love in what's being said, and the use of "fuck" here just seems cold and empty. It's unnecessary, and adds nothing to the song, which allows its inherent offensiveness to take over again.
If keys are all that stand between,
Can I throw in the ring?
No gasoline
Just fuck me kitten
You are wild and I'm in your possession
Nothing's free so, fuck me kitten
The mention of "Creep" above takes us into the final thing I want to talk about, which is censorship of swearing. Because it has been decided that certain words are not for young ears (a concept that seems fine in principle, but leads to some strange effects in practice), music producers have come up with a number of ways of making sure that young people can still buy their songs. The first is simply to blank out swear words, either by beeps, or by cutting the volume of the vocal track at that point, or even by playing the swearword backwards. I have very little time for this tactic — as I said in the introduction to this post, anyone who hears a bleep is certain to be able to work out from context what the word actually was, and therefore has experienced the swearing just as much as someone who hears the unbleeped version. Worse than that, even if the bleeped word was actually not that offensive, they're now imagining the worst. If you don't believe me, have a look at this, and see what your brain fills in.
Alternatively, artists sometimes record a completely different version. We've covered "Creep" already, which at least doesn't do too much damage to the song; it can, however, get ridiculous. The worst offender I've seen recently was Katy Perry's "Hot and Cold". The song itself isn't bad, as songs go — fairly chirpy dancy pop, with pretty funny lyrics and a good hook. However, a couple of lines in the first verse caused trouble with the censors:"You change your mind
Not even that offensive, really. Perry gets away with making a PMS joke by virtue of, well, being a girl, and also because she does so in a self-deprecating way. The meaning she's going for is "you act like a cranky bitch, and as I'm a cranky bitch myself, you'd better believe me."
Like a girl changes clothes,
And you PMS
Like a bitch - I should know..."
Once the censors got their hands on it, though, the word "bitch" was replaced with "girl". Suddenly, not only does it become way more offensive, implying that all girls are cranky and irritable, but it also makes absolutely no sense. "You act like a cranky girl. I'm a girl too." Yes, Katy, we had noticed. You're wearing a dress. It was fairly obvious, really.
So, after nearly 2,500 words, we come to the conclusion. Unfortunately, I don't know what it is. Is swearing something we should probably try to cut out of everyday language? Yeah, I think it probably is — for the most part, it doesn't really do a whole lot of good. Are there times when it is necessary? Also yes. Now and again, a swearword is the only one that could possibly fit with the concept you're trying to evoke (Margaret Atwood makes a very good case for her use of "fuck" in The Handmaid's Tale, for example). And can you frequently get into difficulties when trying to remove bad language from art? Most definitely.
So how do we reconcile those ideas? Probably not with hard and fast rules. What's offensive for one person may not be for others (I'm guessing that if you're still here and didn't abandon ship shortly after the kittens, you're not easily offended), so give and take is definitely going to be required. And this is the important part — give and take doesn't mean that one side only gives and the other only takes. If you're not comfortable with swearing in media, that's fine, but please understand that there are those of us who don't mind it and think it can be useful without being offensive. Likewise, if you swear like a longshoreman, be aware that someone who doesn't like hearing certain words is not actually trying to infringe upon your human rights.
You know, I wish my posts didn't end so frequently with the equivalent of "so basically we should all be nicer to each other," but seriously people, isn't it a message worth hearing?
Sunday, 18 January 2009
I will call him Squishy and he will be mine, and he will be my Squishy.
Ahem. I'm aware that rather a lot of recent posts have opened with an apology for not posting enough, and leaving a month since the last one is something of a record. So, sorry. But hey, it's the Internet, where the vast majority of people who ever read this will be doing so by reaching it through a Google search for something hopelessly vague, several months after I post it. (The number who get here by Googling something like "hypothesis on beauty" is remarkably high.)
We're well out of the Christmas season, and into what certain members of my family term "Winterval", which is essentially an excuse to have open fires every night until Easter and watch old episodes of The West Wing. Not that I'd usually be complaining about this, but as it happens this is the first year since Winterval was founded that I've been living in a completely different city, and I am therefore going to have to console myself with fake open fires and episodes of CSI.
What was I talking about? Oh, yes, Christmas. My younger sister (notable on these pages for her slightly snarky comments recently) received the Pixar box set for Christmas, which has meant that the whole family has been basking in what are pretty much the only good animated films that Disney has released for about the last 12 years. They're also some of the only ones with original stories, Disney having exhausted their stock of family-friendly fairy tales some time ago. However, just because they have new stories, that doesn't mean that they can't use Disney's oldest and best-used storytelling trope: deeply broken families and desperate tragedy.
That might seem strange. Disney films are explicitly aimed at children, after all, and they do have something of a reputation for being saccharine and schmaltzy. However, that's only ever the case towards the end of the film as the happy resolution is approaching. Looking only at the opening premise, the number of on-screen families where something is badly wrong is just astounding. Here's a relatively recent selection.Film (Year) Setup The Little Mermaid (1989) Ariel's mother doesn't appear throughout the movie. That said, maybe mermaids reproduce like fish and Ariel is one of five million offspring of King Triton. Who knows? Beauty and the Beast (1991) Belle's mother is not only absent, she's never even mentioned. And although the Beast clearly has rather more pressing problems than just having no family, he apparently has no living parents either. Aladdin (1992) Aladdin is an orphan, and Princess Jasmine has – you guessed it – no mother either. The Lion King (1994) Mufasa and Sarabi may be a happy pair of lions at the beginning of the movie, but it's not long before Mufasa is being trampled to death in an unusually shocking scene. I don't recall corpses of major characters being shown in any other Disney film, even if Mufasa's looks rather less buffalo-trampled than you might expect. Pocahontas (1995) Oh, this is getting ridiculous. Guess who's dead as this movie opens? Yep, Pocahontas's mother. Toy Story (1995) Now we're into Pixar territory, with the world's first CGI feature film. And things have changed enormously. Yes, this time it's Andy's father who is conspicuous by his absence.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. So with that context, let's have a closer look at the extremely impressive 2003 Pixar effort, Finding Nemo. Nemo, our little clown fish hero, is not only without a mother (who, predictably, dies horribly in the film's opening scene), he's also disabled. Oh, and he lives inside an anemone to protect him from the thousands of fish who want to eat him. Life's hard for him from the word go. Marlin, his father, has some deep-seated emotional issues that manifest in extreme over-protectiveness. And then we have Dory.
Dory is definitely my favourite character in this film. She gets some of the best lines, including the whole "you can speak WHALE?" scene (Ellen DeGeneres voices her superbly, by the way) and the way the script deals with the character's short-term memory loss is hilarious without laughing at the medical condition itself. Well, not too much, anyway.
Dory's hilarity, though, distracts from the fact that her situation is terribly sad. We get that the first time we meet her, with the line "No, it's true, I forget things almost instantly. It runs in my family. Well...at least, I think it does. Umm..hmm. Where are they?" In a way, that's worse than the way the above-mentioned characters have lost one or more members of their family. If they had simply died, Dory could find a way to cope with that (even if, like Marlin, it's a very bad way). However, she knows they're somewhere out there in the ocean, but has no idea where. Her memory loss cuts her off in a very fundamental way from everyone around her. (More on that in a later post.)
It's towards the end of the film that we get the worst part. It's the low point for the main characters anyway: Marlin has just seen what he thinks is Nemo's dead body and is slowly heading home, defeated. Dory can't bear to see him go, and pleads with him not to leave her:"Please don't go away. Please? No one's ever stuck with me for so long before. And if you leave... if you leave... I just, I remember things better with you. I do, look. P. Sherman, forty-two... forty-two... I remember it, I do. It's there, I know it is, because when I look at you, I can feel it. And-and I look at you, and I... and I'm home. Please... I don't want that to go away. I don't want to forget."
For my money, that's pretty close to the saddest thing any character says in any Disney film. Dory has finally found a way of tenuously re-connecting herself to a world that she has effectively lost (the mention of "home", connected with the earlier revelation that Dory has no idea where her home actually is, serves as a particularly effective twist of the knife), and now that's disappearing, literally in front of her eyes. And Marlin – possibly understandably at this point – does absolutely nothing to help.
One of the reasons why Disney movies have passed into film legend – and particularly why pretty much all the Pixars have – is that they end well. Unlike Steve Spielberg, who clearly has some horrible mental illness that causes him to add between ten and thirty completely unnecessary minutes to the end of every film he directs, Disney directors know that they have to wrap up all the loose ends in a happy and fulfilling way, ideally taking us back to the situation we saw at the start to show how it's changed, and then just stop. So in Beauty and the Beast, the final shot is in the same stained-glass style that we saw in the prologue, The Lion King ends with Rafiki holding up Simba's daughter on Pride Rock in the same way that he held Simba in the opening scene, and Finding Nemo closes with Marlin chivvying Nemo off to school, in a neat role reversal from a similar scene near the beginning.
I think that's why Disney gets away with putting so much tragedy into their films. Kids watching them may be scared at the appropriate points (I knew someone who, at the age of 18, was still unable to watch Mufasa's death in The Lion King without crying), but they know that when they reach the end, the villain will have received his suitably violent and frequently deliciously ironic comeuppance, the comic relief will be heading off into the sunset to do something wacky and/or zany, and the guy will get the girl. It's a simple formula, but one that works, and that nearly guarantees a good story.
Oh, and most importantly, they all live happily ever after.
Sunday, 21 September 2008
Playing "Dr. Evil" by They Might Be Giants did not help me write this as much as it should have.
Channel 4 has been showing the Lord of the Rings trilogy over the past couple of Saturdays (The Return of the King is on next week, if you're interested). Although I love these films – I think the books are great, and I have the extended edition DVDs – it seems that I can't take them remotely seriously if I come in half way through. Watch from the very beginning, and you get drawn completely into the story, which is on an incredibly epic scale; come in an hour or so into it and you have a bunch of beardy people wandering around making vague and incomprehensible statements. And sometimes they say "Tell me, where is Gandalf, for I much desire to speak with him?", which makes me dissolve into giggles every time.
Once you get into it, though, The Lord of the Rings is a great example of a very old storytelling technique: Good in a titanic struggle with Evil. Sometimes the Good characters are flawed or questionably ethical, sometimes the Evil characters are doing the wrong thing for good reasons; nevertheless, some form of this conflict drives a pretty high percentage of storylines in film, literature and other media. (And most of the rest are some variant of "boy meets girl, boy smooches girl, boy and girl live happily ever after.") What I find particularly interesting in this framework is the flexibility with which you can portray evil.
Probably the most prevalent type of evil character is the "greed driven to manic proportions" type. Whether they're after money (Die Hard's Hans Gruber), power (Star Wars' Sith) or both (pick a Bond villain), the pattern is clear – these guys (and it's almost exclusively guys) want something so very badly, they will stop at nothing to get it. I suspect that they're used so much because it's very easy to identify with them. Humans are naturally greedy, and most people can point to at least one occasion when greed pushed them to do something that they knew was wrong and that they wouldn't otherwise have done. The "greed villain" is simply an extension of that concept.
Then we have the "altruistic evil" character, the one who is trying to correct a major injustice, and is now committing his own injustices to do so. The Die Hard trilogy comes in again here with its second installment, trotting out the "disgruntled ex-military official sticking it to his even more evil superiors" trope. Interestingly, this kind of evil is one that is very, very close to the characteristic of "one man breaks the rules to bring great justice", which is reserved solely for heroes. Not that it should be, of course – I've written at some length about this – but I find it interesting that the same traits can be used equally for a wholly good character and a wholly evil one.
Thirdly, we come to the "just plain evil" character. These are rare, probably because it's impossible to identify with them unless you are willing to admit that you are also completely evil and carrying out atrocities for no reason other than that you wanted to. This loops us back round to The Lord of the Rings, with Sauron; although he has elements of "greedy evil", he's supposed to be the Satan character of the story, and as such is simply out to destroy all that's good. Everything touched by Sauron's influence becomes corrupted; the men who take the Nine Rings become Ringwraiths, fulfilling the human desire for immortality while removing the free will and capacity to do good that would give it any meaning, while the Elves (beautiful and pure creatures in the books, instead of...well...Orlando Bloom) become the Orcs, hideous and crude characters bent on destruction.
These categories often have fairly indistinct boundaries, but once a character is fixed in one of them they don't often move out. That's a shame, as stories are often vastly improved when this does happen. Take the Sean Connery/Nic Cage vehicle The Rock. At first, the villains are all obviously from the second category, attempting to restore recognition to Marines that have been "disappeared" by their government. However, it later becomes clear that only two of them actually fit that description, with the others having only come along for the money. That sets up a much more interesting situation, in which our villains come very close to crossing into hero territory, despite having actively participated in brutally slaughtering a large number of people.
The same thing happens in webcomics. In Rich Burlew's Order of the Stick, key baddie Xykon has consistently been painted as something of a fool – an evil fool, undoubtedly, with all the trappings of a standard Dark Lord (he used to live in a dungeon filled with goblins, for crying out loud), but a fool nonetheless. Even though he clearly enjoys performing acts of evil, his heart (or his chest cavity, at any rate) is not in it, and he's only really doing it for the theatrics. Even when Xykon kills Roy, the key character of the strip, he gives him the chance to back out of the fight and go off and train for a bit, just so that they can be on level terms. Although he does want to win, he also wants to make it interesting; the real evil planning and methodical destruction is left to his sidekick Redcloak.
Burlew has clearly noticed that Xykon's comedy value has been damaging his position as key antagonist of the strip, and he's fixed that by releasing a prequel book (Start of Darkness) telling us about Xykon's origins and motivations. (Plenty of spoilers ahead, so OotS fans who haven't read it may want to look away now.) In this book, Redcloak is portrayed as a clear second-category villain, doing everything for the good of his people and his god. He may be evil, and he may be responsible for the destruction of entire cities (and destabilising the universe), but he has an internally consistent reason for all that he does.
Xykon, on the other hand, is just flat-out evil all the way. He double-crosses his own men, makes people work for him by threatening their entire families with death, magically rips off all of his own flesh in order to become more powerful, and finally tricks Redcloak into murdering his own brother so that he can be certain of his loyalty. This is not an "oops, I appear to have accidentally yet joyfully killed someone" evil character, this is a monster without any saving graces whatsoever. His comedy role has been completely overtaken by the Monster in the Darkness, who, incidentally, is very similar to the Xykon from the online strip: despite its own considerable power, it doesn't actually care what it does so long as it gets tasty food.
Given that a lot of art is to do with reflecting reality, should we be worried that evil characters are so popular? Probably not. It's incredibly unlikely that anyone is going to watch Darth Vader choking someone to death for their incompetence and say "hey, I know, Billy over there didn't do what I asked him to - I think I'll strangle the life out of him!" Indeed, we have more to worry about with the portrayal of heroes, given that much of the US's current policy on human rights for terrorist suspects seems to be based on Jack Bauer's opinions. Villains are an acceptable outlet for our own less-than-wholesome sides, and let's face it, they're just damn cool.
Thank you for reading. I will be retreating to my Dark Tower to cackle and plot your downfall momentarily.
Tuesday, 29 July 2008
Buses are under-represented in both films and music. Except in Speed.
Although they have a bad reputation in this country, trains really are pretty cool. That's not just the ten-year-old version of me talking either, the one who spent entire summer holidays carefully counting how many trains he saw at level crossings and so on (the record was 20 in six weeks) and once made his entire family wait beside a railway line for about half an hour until one came past. No, this is current me, the one who lives in the least car-friendly city in the UK and who likes being able to fall asleep halfway through a journey and have a reasonably decent chance of waking up again.
I don't know what it is about them – perhaps the speed, perhaps their size, perhaps the fat blue sparks that leap off the overhead lines and make you really nervous – but for the most part, I do really enjoy train travel. It's surprising, then, that for most songwriters it's cars that get all the love.
Most genres of music seem to be oddly car-fixated. Hip-hop is the most obvious – although back in the days of Run-DMC it was fine to just rap about your shoes, nowadays that's not nearly enough, and you have to be rollin' in your BMW with blue neon lights underneath to be taken remotely seriously. (Apparently.) Cars are seen as a sign of affluence, and therefore importance – the humble train is just not cool enough.
Modern country music is heavily into cars too. Here, though, they're less a sign of wealth and more the embodiment of ordinariness. Country, as the name suggests, has its home out in the wide open spaces, where it's simply not practical to go anywhere without an engine. That means that if you want to evoke an image of space, freedom and salt-of-the-earth folk (an expression that, surprisingly, doesn't mean "sharp, gritty and leaves you with a nasty aftertaste"), you can't go far wrong by singing about beat-up pickup trucks. Trains are the things them city folk use.
It wasn't always this way. Listen to any older country – American roots music, if you like – and this emphasis is entirely missing, simply because back then the situation was reversed. Cars were rich men's playthings, the railway lines ran everywhere, and if you needed to get out of town and be free, you hopped on a train in the dead of night. This kind of atmosphere made it through roughly to around Johnny Cash, whose "Folsom Prison Blues" starts with a train a'comin' and rollin' round the bends, and even today peeks through sometimes to evoke images of distance and life passing one by (REM's "Driver 8" and Eels' "Railroad Man" spring to mind).
Film-makers, on the other hand, have no qualms about sticking their heroes on board trains whenever they feel like it. It's a ready-made metaphor for a journey through life, an easy way of throwing people from different walks of life together, and a plausible way of containing and isolating the characters from any outside influences. Oh, and they make a terrible mess when they crash, so either the hero of the piece can save everyone (or at least his cute girlfriend), or the villain can kill hundreds while laughing maniacally.
Trains even pop up when they're not the main focus in films, but this rarely happens in songs; I suspect this is to do with the relative lengths of each medium. A song, like a car journey, can be as long or as short as you want (within limits), but unless you're in a very urban environment, the train is reserved for relatively long and important trips. You take the train off to war, or to go and have a deep personal revelation, not when you're condensing a few moments of life into music.
Although there's a fair amount of exceptions to this rule, the general idea still seems to hold: the longer the format of your work, the longer the journey you can fit in it. I think that's a shame. Songs are more than capable of covering vast sweeps of time, mostly metaphorically, but also literally once you hit prog rock. Likewise, the road movie is a shamefully underdeveloped film convention, having been pushed into teen road trip movie and schlocky horror territory. Of course, sometimes their efforts won't work, and we'll be left with bizarre and pretentious experimental work. But at least it'll be new bizarre, pretentious experimentation.
All of which means that I can leave you with one of those rare things: a song that breaks the conventions, and carries it off brilliantly. Here's The Who's "5:15".
By the way, Pete Townshend screaming "Girls are fifteen, SEXUALLY KNOWING!" was a biting comment on the society of the day 35 years ago. When he did the song again in 2000 at the Royal Albert Hall, it was just creepy.
Wednesday, 2 July 2008
Marc Warren is also in this film. Punching James McAvoy in the face repeatedly. Seriously, that's all he does.
Just in case any of you were considering going out to see Wanted, the new action movie starring James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie, please take my advice – don't.
Now, that's not because it's not enjoyable. On the contrary, it's perfect summer fare, ideal for letting your brain cells atrophy while your eardrums are gently caressed by explosions and endless gunfire. This does not, however, save it from being without a doubt the most ridiculous film I have ever seen.
Let's start with the basics (and I am going to spoil pretty much every major plot point here, so if you must go and see it don't read on). The film is ostensibly about an ancient society of assassins, their quasi-mystical powers, and their mysterious machinations to do with our hero, Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy). Poor Wes is a mess, with a dead-end job, a horrible boss, no money, no life and no prospects. It therefore doesn't take very long before he's happily training away as a super-mystical-assassin.
...wait. What? His life sucks, so therefore he's going to go and kill people? I have to say, pleasant though my life has been so far, I cannot imagine any circumstances in which I would prefer to be a merciless hitman. Now, it's just about possible that if I had the right motivation – say, if I was told to hunt down major gangland bosses or something, for which I would be given vast amounts of cash and matching amounts would go towards alleviating child poverty in Africa – I might lean towards perhaps being persuaded. Let's see what motivation our Wes has, shall we?
Morgan Freeman shows him that cloth that he's just woven on a vastly oversized mechanical loom has a secret code with the names of people that he needs to go and kill.
Yes, that's all. Not only does the plot require us to believe that the ancient mystical society were bright enough to discover a binary system of encoding text in the weave of cloth, it also requires us to believe that they were stupid enough to take it seriously. Oh, and the massive, gaping plot hole? The one where Wesley should just have turned round and said "So who actually supervises the loom in this room that only you are ever allowed into?" The one where it should be painfully obvious that someone is deliberately encoding these names themselves?
Yeah, that one just swishes right past. So Wesley ends up on the roof of a train, curving a bullet through the window of an office block to shoot some poor businessman in the chest.
What's that? "Curving a bullet?" Oh yes, didn't I tell you about that? About halfway through his training, Wesley is taught how to make bullets swing round in curves. Now, I know that this is physically impossible. That's not a problem – people do impossible things in films all the time. The problem is that the scriptwriters were clearly too lazy to come up with a way of explaining this, handwaving it away as "using your instincts". In practice, that means that apparently, if you take careful aim with your gun, you'll have pretty good accuracy, but if you pull the gun out from behind your back, swing it wildly in the general direction of your target and pull the trigger, you'll pull off a perfect shot even if Angelina Jolie happens to be in the way.
Even this would be manageable, if it weren't compounded by some of the most jaw-droppingly silly stunts ever seen. Observe, as The Daily Show's Jon Stewart introduces a clip of one of the more ludicrous moments.
Do watch the rest of the interview as well. Obviously I disagree with Stewart on this one – I thought the film's silliness didn't manage to redeem the fact that it also sucked – but you really can't dispute that merely watching that clip made you marginally stupider.
Moving on, although the semblance of a plot rattles along fairly entertainingly, it goes completely off the rails at roughly the same time that an entire train also goes off the rails and plunges into a huge canyon in a blaze of spectacular but rather unconvincing CGI. Partly because Wesley is inside the train and somehow survives with little more than bruises, but mostly because it's at that point that the film reveals its Major Shock Twist™, which would be more shocking if it hadn't been stolen from The Empire Strikes Back. This leads into a denouement that, although brash, loud and violent, is also meandering and unconvincing.
At the end, there's a last-ditch attempt to convince the audience that the film was actually all about standing out from the crowd and making your life mean something, but unfortunately this is little more than a too-small figleaf on an ending that is actually surprisingly bleak. Rather than the violence (which is very graphic) having at least led to something important and worthwhile, the audience is left with a nasty taste in the mouth, and a feeling that this violence was more of an end than a means.
There are some good things about the film. McAvoy is excellent, especially in the accent department (I'd forgotten he was Scottish until I saw the interview above), as is Freeman, and Angelina Jolie at least makes for a pleasant viewing experience, even if she's a little stilted. And, as I said before, it is fairly enjoyable, most of the time at least.
The reason I would advise against going to see it, though, is that you really don't need to. You've seen the violence before in other, better films. You've seen stunts as daft as this, if only in a Looney Tunes short. And you've seen all of these actors in much better films (with the possible exception of Jolie, for whom this is a major step up). Most importantly, though, you need only wait a couple of years, and this film will end up where it really belongs - at 9pm on a Wednesday evening on Channel 5.
Saturday, 24 May 2008
Public Domain Theatre: Stunt Compilation
Any time spent browsing around Youtube will generally turn up several videos made by some kid with too much free time and very little sense of self-preservation. People throwing themselves off roofs, small buildings and ramps are very common; skateboarders and inline skaters upload videos too, apparently in an attempt to show the world that they, too, can suffer grievous injury while on wheels.
This is by no means a new phenomenon. If I were to tell you that I'd found a video online that showed people skating on top of a 16-storey building, jumping from motorbikes to cars, strapping themselves to windmills and doing all sorts of other incredibly dangerous things, you would probably assume that I was talking about something like Jackass, or one of its many imitators.
However, this being part of my Public Domain Theatre series, that's not quite the case. Instead, all the stunts that I'm talking about were carried out in 1918. And, fortunately, the news organisations of the time were around to film it in glorious, grainy, black and white silent footage.
Quite apart from the frankly jaw-dropping nature of some of the things being done in this film (are those people actually standing on the wing of a biplane in flight without any kind of harness?), I love spotting the things that are the same in modern culture. I'm particularly interested to see that Fox News was entirely capable of being self-righteous and pompous even 90 years ago (see the title card at 00:35), and that the "transfer from motorbike to car" stunt really hasn't changed at all since its invention. In some ways, people were doing much more impressive things back then — how many modern stunt performers would agree to be dragged down a road by a plane while they hung on for dear life?
The dedication of the cameramen themselves is very impressive. In an era when film cameras were unwieldy and temperamental — and, more to the point, required their handle to be constantly turned manually — filming from a plane, or from a moving car, was more difficult by orders of magnitude. No-one involved in making these films is alive today, and yet this work that they made is still impressive today. I think that's a pretty awesome legacy.
Wednesday, 14 May 2008
Even if it is clichéd, having a gunfight on snowmobiles is pretty badass
I was watching Die Hard 2 last night with my sister (I'm slowly working my way through the quadrilogy), and we slowly realised that there really aren't that many elements in your average action film. Really, once a bunch of things have blown up, some people have shot some other people, and there's been a car chase the length of Los Angeles, you have a film that everyone has already seen fifty times, and yet is compelling viewing.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing — indeed, it means you know what you're getting — but it does rather lend itself to people coming up with daft things to do during the film.
In a plot twist that absolutely no-one will be surprised about, my sister and I managed to come up with such an activity, and I coded up a simple version of it today - Action Movie Bingo! Get yourself a bingo card, watch out for the recurring elements in the film you're watching, and try to get five in a row.
My implementation of Action Movie Bingo is now up on Ballpoint Banana - go and have a look (reload the page to get a new card, click an element to mark it off) and play along to your heart's content. Any comments are very welcome. Unless they're along the lines of "You have far too much free time", because I already knew that.
Monday, 5 May 2008
Now, videogame sequels are a different kettle of fish. But then, the story does tend to take second place to blowing stuff up.
Spoiler warning: I'll be going into quite a lot of detail about a number of films in this post. Basically, as soon as you see that film's title mentioned, bear in mind that I might well reveal key plot points. Fortunately, most of the films I'll be talking about either don't have major plot twists, or they really, really suck. Be warned, though.
It wasn't that long ago that the cinema was dominated by major trilogies of films. The Lord of the Rings movies stormed the box office throughout the first few years of the new millennium, around the same time as the Matrix films, and action series like Die Hard and Terminator have had new instalments reasonably recently. In some cases, these are pretty good; in many more, they just suck. So why the variability?
One of the major reasons has to be whether the original film was meant to be part of a trilogy. In the case of The Lord of the Rings, there was already a three-part narrative structure in the books, and although it didn't lend itself perfectly to film adaptation (interleaving the stories in The Two Towers was the most obvious structural change in the films), the story was so clearly mapped out that Peter Jackson simply didn't have the option to do much in the way of sweeping changes. Or take Kill Bill, which was, to all intents and purposes, a single film cut in half because audiences don't like sitting still for four hours. The sequel works because it continues precisely the same story.
In contrast to this, take a look at The Matrix. The Wachowski brothers claim to have planned all three Matrix films ahead of time, but production didn't go ahead on the second two until the first one had been a popular and critical success. That meant that The Matrix had to stand by itself as a coherent story without its sequels, making it that much harder to blend in new elements later on. It's worth mentioning that having no overarching structure isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as the later films are sufficiently different - for example, Terminator 2 is an excellent film, despite being a sequel, because it tells a new story in the same universe.
Another of the keys to successfully pulling off a sequel is not to go overboard with whatever made the original film a success. The Die Hard films tend to work because they don't change very much - John McClane gets into a bad situation, fights against overwhelming odds, and shows just how much of a maverick he is by blowing up lots of stuff and swearing at authority figures. If a Die Hard film tried to push the formula too far — made McClane save the entire world from a terrorist ring who had kidnapped his eight-year-old niece, for example, à la Commando — the audience would reject it because it simply doesn't fit the formula, and pushes McClane's character past what we expect of him.
As before (and, sadly, somewhat typically), the way not to do it is typified by the Matrix sequels. It happens with a lot of elements (Neo's somehow able to control machines in the real world thanks to some bizarre explanation that makes midichlorians look reasonable? Seriously?), but the most egregious is the Christ analogy. These were present in The Matrix, but they were treated a lot more subtly — Neo dies, only to come back with considerably more power, and proves himself to be the saviour of the humans. It's not a hugely obvious parallel to draw, and it won't do more than just gain a bit of emotional resonance with the audience.
In The Matrix Revolutions, however, the analogy is drawn well past breaking point. By this time, we've met the Matrix's "father", who gave rise to the One, we've seen that he is aware of everything that happens throughout the Matrix, and we've seen Neo die again (because the first time clearly wasn't quite enough). And at that point, a gigantic golden cross explodes out of his chest.
In the end, the audience gets incredibly tired of the scriptwriters hammering the same bits of symbolism into their heads again and again, and it detracts from the film. Coming after two entire films of bad philosophy and insufficiently awesome fight scenes, it's just too much to bear.
It's not just the characters that have to be maintained throughout sequels — the entire concept of the films must be preserved, too. This is related to my first point (because films planned as trilogies from the word go have an overarching structure anyway, and therefore keep a consistent set of underlying assumptions), but films without this structure are perfectly capable of maintaining ideas. The Batman films, throughout their many variations, always manage to preserve the basics — Batman is a secretive crime fighter, who always tries to do the right thing, and doesn't kill if it can be avoided, while Gotham City is a mob-run den of villainy.
On the other end of the scale, we have Terminator 3. What made Terminator 2 so good was that, despite the sense of the weight of the future, there was always hope, and a possibility that maybe the future war could indeed be averted. All three films constantly mentioned the "no fate but what we make for ourselves" slogan. And then Terminator 3, for no apparent reason other than to get the audience really depressed (and, of course, set up another sequel in the future), made the war start anyway. All that hope, the tiny spark that meant that maybe that slogan might just be true after all, gets crushed for the sake of the effects department getting to show off their ability to do mushroom clouds. The film itself isn't that bad, but as part of the Terminator series, it's about as awful as it could get.
One more key to making a successful sequel: know when to stop. Alien was great, Aliens was good, and Alien3...wasn't. At all. I haven't even seen Alien: Resurrection, mainly because the very idea of it is enough to scare me off. Toy Story 2, contrary to expectations, was really good, but I'm holding out precisely no hope for Toy Story 3. And the less said about the apparently endless Lion King straight-to-video sequels, the better. Sadly, as long as someone thinks that the franchise can be milked just that little bit further, the never-ending sequel factory will continue churning out some of the worst films ever to grace a cinema screen.
Gives me something to complain about, though...
Tuesday, 1 April 2008
This is not a rickroll in disguise. Although that would be funny too.
I made this video a while ago, but never quite got round to putting it online. It would appear to be appropriate to post it today. If you have ever wanted to watch the ultimate disaster movie - the kind of thing that would have people flocking to the cinemas - this is my take on what it would look like.
The material used in this video is probably copyrighted by a number of different people. I reckon that this kind of use of it should be reasonably OK, but just in case, the video's not here under my CC licence.
Confused by the title? Want to know what a rickroll is? Here.
Thursday, 6 March 2008
We haven't had a long self-righteous essay on here for a while, have we?
There's a fairly major trend within film and TV, among other media, to glorify the concept of the vigilante, the man (or woman) who has to step outside the law to deliver Justice™ to the masses. Just last night, for example, ITV served up the latest US crime drama import, Dexter. Although this show does share some characteristics with the other procedural dramas (CSI, to name but three), its major difference is that it isn't a procedural drama at all. Instead, it's completely character-driven. Specifically, it's driven by the extremely creepy blood pattern analyst/serial killer of the title, who narrates every scene as an internal monologue.
I'm not going to dispute that Dexter makes for some pretty good TV. Michael C. Hall does an excellent job in the central role, and looks just baby-faced and innocent enough to convince us that he really is capable of doing horrible things with cleavers to the victims duct-taped to the table in his garage. Working with Dexter's lack of emotion - and seeing where that leads him, in his work and personal relationships - is a really interesting idea, and turns what could be a cheap shock tactic into a three-dimensional character.
Despite all of this, though, we keep coming back and running into the central premise that this man is brutally murdering a different person each episode. Even if his actions aren't explicitly condoned by the storylines, they're certainly neither condemned nor likely to be stopped any time soon (it brings in the viewers, after all). This is worrying, because this concept - that sometimes the rules have to be broken to provide justice - is both extremely appealing and extremely dangerous.
Imagine, for a moment, a situation in which the police don't have to get a search warrant before they break into your house and look for evidence that you've committed a crime. In fact, you don't have to imagine it, because it's already happened and continues to happen in a number of countries around the world. Stalinist Russia and Communist China come to mind immediately, and there are many more examples. In short, procedures such as search warrants are there to protect the public, because they bring transparency, judicial oversight and accountability to the authorities.
Once you accept that this sort of rule has to be in place, it becomes obvious why it isn't acceptable to subvert them, even for minor infractions - that man who is "obviously" guilty and "got off on a technicality" must be released if the rules weren't followed, because anything you do in the legal system creates a precedent. If he gets convicted anyway, it is suddenly much, much easier for a corrupt police officer to get anyone he wants convicted of any crime.
The counter-argument to this is that there are hardly any corrupt police officers. That's true, thank goodness. Consider, though, that a single police officer may handle thousands of cases in a career. The consequences of their actions could be so vast, even if the risk is low, that it is well worth putting apparently over-the-top safety procedures in place.
The same argument can be applied to those who complain about the "nanny state", one of my least favourite phrases in the English language. The sale of firearms is heavily restricted, for example, not so that the government can stop us all from having any fun, but because the consequences of one person having a gun who shouldn't have could be incredibly serious. It's the same with speed limits, health and safety at work, and any number of other measures.
Essentially, then, to suggest that sometimes we have to "go outside the law" - a nice way of saying "flagrantly and deliberately break the law" - not only weakens the legal structure, it also makes us less safe. If you disagree with a legal decision, appeal against it. If you disagree with a law, campaign for its repeal. Direct action should be reserved for very, very few occasions, when the entire structure is so badly wrong that these legal pathways are simply unavailable. If your complaint with the law is on a lesser level than, say, slavery or apartheid, direct action is not the way forward.
So why does this storyline get so much traction in TV and films? Not only is it already overused, it also tends to lead to extremely depressing stories. Take, for example, the 2004 film The Punisher (also on TV last night). Forgetting, for a moment, the casual sadistic violence, the atrocious acting, the poor excuse for a script and the lack of any furious kung-fu battles which might at least add some fun to it, the entire idea of the story was unremittingly bleak. Towards the end, our square-jawed American hero delivers the following line to his main adversary (this is absolutely word-for-word)."Made you kill your best friend. Made you kill your wife. And now I've killed you."
Good grief, man. Rubbing salt into the wound much? Our hero doesn't even get any form of closure from this act - he's so depressed by the endless killing that he gets within a couple of seconds of shooting himself as well. Now, I'm sorry, but that's not a story about a hero battling against the odds, that's a story about a mass murderer who's killing people for no apparent reason other than that "they needed killing". There's no redemption, no balance, not even any sense of justice - just a huge heap of dead bodies.
(As an aside, although The Punisher is based on a comic book, comic books as a whole don't use this kind of theme as much as you might think. Batman may operate outside the law, but he's in almost constant contact with the police and tends to do no more than proving villains' guilt, allowing the legal mechanisms of justice to deal with them. Superman does much the same thing, and it's seen as a major flaw in a superhero to kill anyone, even if they are guilty.)
To be honest, then, I don't know why this type of story is popular. I do know, however, that it's already starting to be seen in real life as well. Consider the situation over in Guantánamo Bay, where an entire camp of prisoners has been locked up in clear contravention of the Geneva Conventions because they're actually "illegal combatants". Or the concerted effort by the White House to give telecommunications companies immunity after they spied indiscriminately on domestic US citizens, because of "national security". For that matter, look at the entire international community's refusal to do anything about the genocide in Darfur, despite an international legal requirement to stop genocide wherever it occurs, because it isn't personally convenient.
Life imitating art, or art picking up themes developing in real life? I don't know. I wish they'd stop it, though.
Tuesday, 26 February 2008
Unrealistic Life Ambitions #3: Appropriate Audio Camouflage
It's a standard element of the action movie. The square-jawed, all-American team of soldiers are creeping up on the nasty Arabic/Vietnamese/Russian/German (delete as applicable) mercenaries/terrorists, moving through the landscape in absolute silence. Apart from when they exchange patriotic encouragements, of course. Once they're in position, they ready themselves and prepare to fill the screen with some good old-fashioned explosions.
But wait! How can they know when to attack? They're silent and invisible, after all, so they can't exactly shout to each other. Well, this is where the famous Soldier's Bird Call comes in. Performed by cupping your hands around your mouth and bellowing "too-WEE!", this call that sounds absolutely nothing like any bird I have ever heard in my life is nevertheless capable of carrying vast amounts of information in a perfectly innocuous fashion. Within minutes, hapless goons are being gunned down to the sound of stirring music, and the world is close to being safe again.
The Soldier's Bird Call may be effective in the jungle - after all, there may well be birds in the jungle that do sound like that. However, it just isn't practical in pretty much any other situation. Consider urban combat. The only birds you're likely to see in a major city are sparrows and starlings, and they tend to just burble and twitter away instead of making any appropriate signal noises. Or how about when our heroes are infiltrating a bunker complex, probably through the air ducts? Any bird noises would trigger a hail of bullets from even the stupidest of evil overlords.
This problem can be solved remarkably easily, however. There's no reason why birds should be the default option for signal noises - humans aren't even very good at producing them. My unrealistic life ambition, therefore, is to create a successful movie in which people signal covertly to each other by simply imitating sounds appropriate to the environment. One day, we will see films in which the Marines landing on a quiet shore carefully imitate the sound of a coconut falling to the ground. One day, the agents infiltrating the base will simply shout "EVERYTHING IS FINE, NO NEED TO PANIC" in Russian when the bombs should be detonated. And one day, the policeman sneaking up on the house with the hostage taker inside will produce a perfect rendition of a washing machine with a handful of change in the pocket of someone's jeans. Surely we can bring that day closer.
Tuesday, 5 February 2008
Bananas are a Communist plot put in place by the Illuminati! WAKE UP!
If your time on the Internet is restricted only to the major news sites and Hotmail, the likelihood is that you're blissfully unaware of the wonderful strand of nutcaseness that runs through it. (Then again, if they're the only sites you visit, how on earth did you get here?) The nutcaseness takes several forms, but one of the most obvious is the vast weight of conspiracy theories. The "documentary" Loose Change, for example, has received wide viewing on Google Video and Youtube, feeding the obsession that certain people have with asserting that the US Government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks.
The comments section on video sites nearly always produces a rich vein of conspiracies and wild claims, and generally includes vague exhortations to the public to see the "truth" that has been covered up, probably by The Man or someone similar. My problem with these theories is not so much that they're entirely without evidence (or indeed logical coherence) - although generally they are - it's more that they're so incredibly unoriginal. If you're going to try to tell us that all we ever knew is a lie, why on earth are you doing it with turns of phrase that we've seen a hundred times before?
Much of the blame for this can be laid on The Matrix. Although a great film, it had the unfortunate side-effect of causing conspiracy theorists to take it as tacit confirmation of everything they'd been saying. Yes! The world is a construct! We've all been fooled into submission! If you would only see for yourself what is really happening, you would be free like me! The specific problem is that The Matrix used three specific pieces of imagery to denote humanity's slavery. They were:
- Being asleep/unconscious
- Being like domestic animals
- Needing to "free their minds"
My hatred of this phrase comes from several sources. First, "sheeple" is an incredibly ugly word, in the same league as "edutainment". Secondly, as described above the imagery is overused and old. Thirdly, it's extremely insulting. When did it become reasonable to suggest that anyone disagreeing with your position does not have a functioning brain? Or that they're not even human? What at first glance looks like an inspirational battle cry is really little more than a thinly-veiled crack at perceived stupidity.
I can't solve all of these problems, but I can at least help out with the unoriginality element. If you're going to insult me, you can at least mix and match the imagery that you use. To that end, I have crafted the Wake Up Sheeple Alternative Generator. It comes pre-loaded with a plethora of exhortations, on the themes of waking up, freeing minds, breaking shackles and many others; it also comes with plenty of descriptions of the person to be insulted, from various animals through to good old-fashioned idiots. Please feel free to experiment (and improve the code - it's in this page's HTML source code). Let us start the insult revolution here, comrades.
Monday, 28 January 2008
Public Domain Theatre: Fantasmagorie
What with all the fuss over illegal downloading of music and films, copyright law has been very much in the news recently. It's easy to forget - at least, it is if you happen to be a Hollywood executive - that copyright has two parts to it. It was put in place in order to protect the creative investment that the content creator puts into their work, but it was also time-limited so that everyone could benefit from that investment directly. In other words, it is just as important for copyright protection to end as it is for it to begin.
Copyright law is an absolute mess, inconsistent across countries, types of media and any number of other factors. There is agreement on one thing, though: once a creative work falls out of copyright protection, it is fair game for anyone to use it, share it, remix it and turn it into something better. This is what "public domain" means, and it's a fantastic concept.
(While we're on the subject, Creative Commons licensing offers a halfway house for content creators, so that they can maintain some creative control while giving opportunities to the public to use their work. Definitely worth a look if you're any kind of content provider.)
In the spirit of celebrating public domain work, I'm starting a new feature on this blog, with the startlingly original title of Public Domain Theatre. This is going to be an irregularly-recurring feature, pointing out the best or most interesting public domain stuff out there, and possibly adding to or changing it in an attempt to make it even better.
I'm told that it makes sense to begin at the very beginning, so for the first installment we'll look at what may very well be the first fully animated film ever made, Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie. Produced entirely by hand in 1908, this film is a milestone in the history of the cinema.
No, there's nothing wrong with your speakers, it's supposed to be completely silent. Fantasmagorie is, as I'm sure you've noticed, one of the oddest little films you're likely to see. It is also surprisingly sophisticated. The early sequence in the cinema is not only funny, it also displays a good knowledge of physics (notice the slight "boing" in the woman's head as the man pulls out each feather). Moreover, it introduces comedy tropes (such as sitting behind someone with a huge hat) that are still used today, and dissolves into a brilliantly surreal section almost worthy (in concept, at least) of Monty Python.
Other elements in this film have been echoed throughout animation history. If we go right up to the other end of the timeline, with Alan Becker's Animator vs Animation (2006), we can see it begin in exactly the same way as Fantasmagorie. The "protagonist trapped in a surreal nightmare" is yet another trope used in later films - the latest example that I can think of is the memory-erasing dream sequence in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which has a very similar feel.
While obviously this film is not brilliant by today's standards, it's easy to forget quite how incredible it must have been to its first viewers. Even taking into account the fact that film itself was in its infancy, this was still the first time that anyone was able to see something on the big screen that they could never have seen in real life. No more was this form of artistic expression limited by what you could get an actor to do - now, anything you could imagine, draw and sculpt could be filmed. Without this step in thinking, there would have been no Harryhausen creatures, no unconvincing elephant attacks in The Return of the King, and definitely no Toy Story. We have an awful lot to thank M. Cohl for.
Friday, 11 January 2008
I haven't mentioned The Polar Express or Beowulf, and for a good reason. They are creepy.
The use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in films has come a hugely long way since it was first introduced. Obviously, that was a long time ago - the first use (according to Wikipedia) was in 1973's Westworld. Given the general speed of development in the computing industry, a hypothetical alien who has just landed on our planet might assume that by now, CGI has advanced to being completely perfect and realistic. (Whether such an alien exists, and why he'd be particularly interested in technological advances in film and TV, are questions that are somewhat beyond me right now).
Sadly, our alien friend would be disappointed. Although CGI has been enthusiastically taken up by studios throughout the industry, it can be just as unconvincing as it was back in the day. So why is this? To find out, let's look at some examples of good and bad practice in CGI use.
Jurassic Park (1993) - The T-Rex attack
For my money, this is not only the best scene in the movie, it's one of the best scenes in any film that I've ever seen. Notice how the scene isn't about the T-Rex - it's shot almost entirely from the perspective of Alan (Sam Neill) and the children (Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello), meaning that they're the characters we focus on. The scene is also completely unscored, letting the rain and the thunder do all the work that music might otherwise ruin. (The sudden crash of thunder right after the goat's leg hits the jeep is far more effective than the orchestra hit you might expect.)
Understatement of this type is the main reason why this scene works so well, and the same thing is true of the CGI. A lot of the work is done with puppets - despite several shots of the T-Rex being completely synthetic, these shots are short and don't require much in the way of movement. The result is a completely convincing scene that still gives me goosebumps 15 years on.
The Abyss (1989) - Trailer
I couldn't find the relevant scene anywhere online, but you get a couple of fleeting glimpses of the watery alien creature in the trailer (drag the slider to 1:40 and 1:54, for example). The Abyss is quite a good movie in its own right, despite a few horrible clichés (notably Ed Harris's ability to bring his wife back from drowning by screaming "FIIIIIGHT!" at her from about 3 inches away), and given that it was made in the '80s the CGI work is incredible. Again, it's not overused - you see one creature, whose defining feature is that it has no defining features, being made entirely of water. By not overreaching themselves, the special effects unit have created something which, although technically not outstanding, looks convincing and just eerie enough to be accepted as alien.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) - Fleeing through Moria
Watching the first 30 seconds of this clip will be enough for our purposes, but feel free to watch the rest if you like a bit of silly yet epic cinema. Now, if you're going to have your characters run across a gigantic underground hall, the likes of which has never been seen in this world, it might be tempting to spend a lot of time on the hall itself. This is, apparently, what the film makers chose to do. Unfortunately, this means that they were not concentrating on less grand things, such as good motion animation of the main characters. And as all eyes at this point are on the main characters, it becomes really rather obvious that they are waddling at high speed with exaggerated arm movements. Maybe this sequence was actually an extended advert for Lord of the Rings Action Figures.
Constantine (2005) - Demon-slaying
The weird thing about this scene (apologies for the awful quality, by the way) is that it would have been superb as a cut-scene in a videogame of Constantine. For all I know, maybe it was. As it is, the use of a CGI Keanu Reeves almost all the way through, even in little shots where they could easily have used bluescreen, produces an oddly shiny and rubbery look to the scene. Especially at the moment (at about 0:25) where "Reeves" spins the magazine on his shotgun, there's something very wrong about his hands - I think it's that they look too solid and meaty. I saw this movie at the cinema, and I think I was laughing all the way through this scene; even in a film where plot consistency, theology and even basic physics go right out the window, you just can't get away with vastly over-egging the CGI pudding and expect the audience not to notice.
Casino Royale (2006) - Final scene
Don't play this clip unless you've already seen the film! It spoils the ending, and whoever stuck it on Youtube has also inexplicably put the Pirates of the Caribbean music on top of it. If you have seen the film and don't mind inexplicable piratey music, read on.
I wouldn't normally say anything bad about Casino Royale, because not only is it a brilliant film, it's also excellent when it comes to CGI use. When Bond drives a JCB through a fence and his enemy has to run up a wall to evade him? They actually did that. When they jump from crane to crane 200 feet up? They did that too, with safety harnesses but no other tricks.
The CGI in this sequence is fairly subtle, and you may not have noticed it. Watch it again if you didn't. For those too bored or lazy to keep guessing, I'll tell you - the house on the lakeshore is entirely built in CGI. Even though it's not obvious unless you're looking for it, as soon as you realise that it's not real, you start to notice the flaws. The motion of the car is too perfect. The camera movement is too smooth. The lighting is too crisp. All of these little things, hardly noticeable in their own right, add up to an effect that just spoils the scene for me. It's entirely possible to do buildings successfully in CGI, and in fact Batman Begins, another film which generally does everything for real, pulls it off extremely successfully. I'm not sure why Casino Royale doesn't manage it, but for me it's an annoyance that detracts from an otherwise brilliant film.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) - Legolas vs Huge Elephant Thingy
Now, this one is just silly. While it was obviously great fun to script (and would have made a supremely fun addition to Tolkien's original writing, had he been given to writing awesome stunt sequences), it was just too much for the special effects boys to handle. Once again, we're stuck with a sequence that looks like a cut scene from a videogame, complete with unconvincing movement, plastic-like skin tone and a synthetic actor that manages to be even more wooden than Orlando Bloom. I have to admit, it does still look fantastic; there is a definite problem, though, with any sequence that causes you to say "well, for an entirely impossible action it looked good". The whole point of special effects is to make you believe the impossible; this doesn't.
There are several other scenes and films that I could have mentioned here (the unconvincing wolves from The Day After Tomorrow, the unbelievably poorly done Jar Jar Binks from Star Wars Episodes I & II, the excellent motion-captured Gollum from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and so on), but I think you get the picture already. So what makes a good CGI scene? I think we can list some ideas...
That's a list that could be extended enormously, but I think I'll leave it up to you to do so. In the meantime, I'll leave you with one of the most shockingly brilliant stunts in the history of cinema - Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Copyright notice: All video clips, with the exception of the Steamboat Bill, Jr. clip (which is public domain), are copyright their respective owners. I believe that their use in this context - comment and research - constitutes fair dealing, but in other contexts this might not apply. None of the clips are released under my Creative Commons licence.
Friday, 21 December 2007
Today, a simple blog post. Tomorrow, THE WORLD!
There's been something of a glut of superhero movies over the past few years. On the whole, this has been a bad thing - comic books thrive on having short, simply-told stories in each issue, which makes it a bit difficult to both introduce the character and tell that story in the same film. (This is, incidentally, why sequels to superhero films can be better than the original. I found X-Men 3 to be much more fun than the original movie, largely because we didn't have to be walked through the interminable backstories of what felt like fifty different characters individually.)
One of the good things about superhero films is that they generally have the I-want-to-be-them factor. All it takes is for one character to have an incredibly cool ability, and suddenly the film has an effect way beyond its running time, as the audience gets to imagine what they would do with that ability. The film producers are almost certainly aware of this (it's the key to selling vast quantities of merchandise), but this doesn't explain why they always give certain types of power to certain roles in the film. There are some pretty subtle reasons for this - I'll go through them one by one.
(By the way, I'm aware that most of these creative decisions are actually made by the writer of the original comic book. I'm focusing on the films because my experience of comic books is precisely zero.)
Super-Strength/Apparent Invulnerability (Good/Evil)
Possibly the simplest type of power, this can be possessed by either heroes or villains. The difference between them lies in the way in which the power was obtained. Heroes have intrinsic strength - either they were simply born with it (Superman), or they got it accidentally (The Incredible Hulk, or Spiderman - he gets increased strength as a side-effect of his other powers). Either way, they're taking control of a power over which they had no control in the process of getting it. Villains, on the other hand, generally become super-strong through deliberate mechanical or chemical means. Bane from the Batman series is completely off his face on the Venom drug, for example; Mr Hyde (yes, this counts - see the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) is another result of a chemical, while Doc Ock (from Spiderman) uses mechanical arms.
I think the reason for this difference is to equate "naturalness" with goodness. Bizarre though Spiderman's abilities are, the fact that he didn't deliberately obtain them is contrasted with villains who are constantly trying to become better, faster, stronger than everyone else. This is quite a weird attitude, given the American Dream ethos that pervades the whole idea of comic book heroes. I think it may be trying to suggest that yes, the aim of improving yourself is paramount - but there are things that you do not do to get there.
Increased Intelligence (Evil)
Although some heroes are intelligent (Batman is a great detective), having abnormally good intelligence is universally a sign of evil, especially when mixed with insanity. Edward Nygma (The Riddler) becomes immensely clever by draining other people's brains into his own; Lex Luthor (from Superman) is a criminal megalomaniac whose machinations would just never work if he was thick as two short planks.
Many good characters, on the other hand, go right to the other end of the spectrum. Frankly, anyone who fails to realise Superman's identity after so many years' contact with Clark Kent must surely be a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic (naming no names, Lois). Superman himself, although immensely fast, usually punches his way out of trouble or brings a bigger weapon to a fight rather than coming up with a more intelligent solution. This anti-intelligentsia attitude is quite strange coming from the US of its time (you'd expect it more from a Communist country) - but it does seem oddly prescient, given some of the attitudes around today. (See this post for some more hopeful recent news on this front.)
Insanely Stupid Powers (Good)
Villains may sometimes have daft gimmicks, but with a few exceptions it takes a hero to have an impressively stupid power. Cracked (warning: text not really safe for kids) says this far better than I could...
Invisible Pain (Evil)
Yeah, sure, heroes will sometimes beat villains into a bloody pulp, but they do it in a way that's entirely visible - probably some kind of back-handed way of saying that they're honest and wholesome, although I'm not sure the villains involved would see it that way. If you want real comic-book evil, look at any character who's capable of causing immense pain without any physical contact or outward signs. This one is surprisingly wide-ranging, actually. The main person-to-person attack from Independence Day's aliens? Terrible pain inside one's head as your brain is taken over. The most painful spell in the Harry Potter universe? The Cruciatus curse, which leaves no trace whatsoever. For that matter, the Avada Kedavra curse leaves its victims unmarked, too. Even Darth Vader, the ultimate in cool villains, was capable of Force-choking someone in a completely different room.
Yes, like that.
Flight (Good)
We'll skip over using mechanical means to fly here, as that's not really a superpower per se. Being able to just fly, without apparent aid, is almost entirely restricted to heroes. Superman's the obvious candidate, but there are more recent versions, too (Nathan Petrelli from Heroes, for example). Interestingly, characters who have the intrinsic means of flight because they have wings or flying magic aren't necessarily good; look at this Order of the Stick for an (admittedly non-movie) example. This may be another example of heroes being "natural" and wholesome - flight is undoubtedly an incredibly cool power, but it has to be from the right source.
Shapeshifting (Evil)
Not a very popular power, for some reason (I don't know why, I think it's awesome), shapeshifting is almost entirely the preserve of villains. Mystique from the X-Men is thoroughly evil, as is the T-1000 from Terminator 2 (a movie that isn't based on a comic book but looks exactly as if it was). This one is at least pretty easy to understand - heroes are supposed to stand up for truth and justice, neither of which can happen if you can't be sure of everyone's identity.
Telekinesis (Evil)
Now, this one I just don't get at all. Telekinesis is undoubtedly the power I'd choose if I could, and yet the vast majority of characters with it are evil. Magneto of X-Men fame effectively has this power, albeit only over metal, and is entirely devoted to taking over the world; even he pales into comparison to Sylar (Heroes) and Phoenix (also X-Men), both of whom are murderous psychopaths. Bizarrely, when we go outside the world of comic books this doesn't apply at all - the Force from the Star Wars series has a major telekinetic component, as do many Harry Potter spells. Even stranger, the mechanical form of this power (antigravity) is not only a staple of science fiction, it frequently pops up as a good or neutral element of comic books. Quite why an intrinsic power should be evil in this case, while a mechanical one is acceptable, is very unclear.
As it happens, I don't think I'm likely to end up with any of these powers any time soon. However, if I did, the world would have to watch out - as with film characters, the evil ones are just more interesting than the good ones. Now if you'll excuse me, I just have to take a few gold bars out of the Bank of England while looking like Elvis...
