June 2003 / Peiratikos

There aren't enough action movies with female stars. Cameron Diaz, Lucy Liu, and Drew Barrymore do well in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, and I hope they get some better action roles sometime. I wouldn't say Charlie's Angels is a bad movie. Bernie Mac's Black Irish scene is pretty funny. The action scenes are ridiculous and fun--the characters take great advantage of their ability to go into slow-mo and move with superhuman speed and agility. The way the villain is finally defeated (ah, spoiler), along with Diaz's preceeding one-liner, is amusing. One thing I didn't like was the Thin Man (Crispin Glover) subplot--what the fuck?

I realized halfway through this movie that I couldn't remember the Angel's names. It's that kind of movie. Like I said, Diaz, Barrymore, and Liu deserve to be in better action movies.

Warning: spoilers ahead.

But what did I think of the movie? Roger Ebert already said it, better than I:

It is not so much about a green monster as about two wounded adult children of egomaniacs. Banner (Eric Bana) was fathered by a scientist (Nick Nolte) who has experimented on his own DNA code, and passed along genes that are transformed by a lab accident into his son's hulkhood. Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly) is his research partner; they were almost lovers, but it didn't work out, and she speaks wryly of "my inexplicable fascination with emotionally distant men." Her cold father is General Ross (Sam Elliott), filled with military bluster and determined to destroy the Hulk.

These two dueling oedipal conflicts are at the heart of "Hulk," and it's touching how in many scenes we are essentially looking at damaged children.

The movie alters the continuity of the comic to bring the paternal conflicts into focus. I believe there's a storyline in the comic about Hulk's psychological origins in the childhood trauma of Bruce's father murdering Bruce's mother. The movie incorporates this (although it makes the killing accidental) and ties it even more closely to Hulk's origin by making Bruce's father also the cause of Hulk's gamma-induced physical manifestation. Continuity purists will protest, but I think the superhero-movie tradition of connecting the hero's superheroic origin story to eir psychological origins is a fine idea. It certainly seems more dramatically effective here than in Daredevil, though admittedly I haven't yet seen Daredevil. (Comic Matt Murdock is blinded and gains superpowers as ey heroically saves a blind man from an out-of-control toxic waste truck, movie Matt is blinded etc. as ey runs blindly from the scene of eir father's murder. This change connects superpower origin to psychological origin [Daredevil is inspired by vengeance for eir father's murder], but it loses the endearingly goofy parallelism and heroism of the comic's origin story.) I'm not sure how important Betty's relationship with eir father was in the comic, but it's a major subplot here, which really helps make the movie cohesive. General Ross seemed like a bit of an asshole in the Marvel Masterworks reprint of The Incredible Hulk's first six issues, but in the movie ey's much more sympathetic as a dad who loves eir daughter but doesn't know how to communicate. Ross mocked Bruce for being a milquetoast in the comic, but not here. Ey does distrust and dislike Bruce, which is pretty understandable after Bruce starts eir Hulk smash! routine and Ross learns Bruce is eir father's son (I just realized Bruce's dad doesn't have a name in the movie, that's odd [edit: R says Bruce's dad's name was David. IMDB lists em as "Father," though.]). You see, General Ross was in charge of Father's secret military genetics experiments which led to Bruce getting the Hulk gene. Father destroyed the military base with a gamma bomb after eir experiment was discontinued, and General Ross fears Bruce, coincidentally researching something similar to eir father, will follow in eir father's villainous footsteps.

(It's a good thing the Marvel movies aren't in a shared universe, because it could get awkward that the move Bruce Banner could be considered a mutant. Actually, I think maybe you have to have some special X-gene or something to be a real mutant, so maybe ey'd be OK. I'm not sufficiently well-versed in Marvel Universe lore to know this stuff.)

The visuals are brilliant. Ang Lee borrows the concept of panels from the comics, breaking the screen into multiple overlapping images, sometimes showing multiple events simultaneously and sometimes showing a single event from multiple angles. This is an effect you'll probably either love or hate. Lee gets several neat images out of it, most notably a shot of Nick Nolte's eyes, slowly fading from color to grayscale, floating above the San Fransisco skyline. Lee also uses multistage, superfast zooms to take successively closer looks at details in the desert settings, usually closeups of lizards.

There is some goofiness in the movie. In the silliest scene, the army has captured Bruce and is ready to destroy em with an EMP bomb the moment ey gets even slightly annoyed--and then they let eir father, a convicted felon recently released from prison and probably the person most likely to piss Bruce off, pay em a visit. Hmm. The other scene that didn't quite work for me was the climax. Bruce's father apparently absorbs all of Bruce's Hulk energy and turns into a giant energy blob--and then a nuclear bomb apparently destroys em. Why didn't ey just absorb the bomb's energy? Maybe ey'll turn up in the sequel.... Also, why wasn't Bruce harmed by the bomb? Neither of these scenes work well logically, but both are effective in terms of the dramatic conflict between father and son, so I'm OK with them.

Hulk isn't heroic for most of this movie. Bruce Banner begins as emotionally repressed and kind of a jerk, but gets more sympathetic when ey starts having to deal with turning into Hulk. Toward the end of the movie, Hulk begins the transformation from raging monster to raging hero as ey saves the drivers on the Golden Gate bridge from an out-of-control fighter jet. The movie's final scene is great--not only is Bruce/Hulk firmly established as a hero for the next movie, the incorporation of Hulk's catch phrase is a great comedic moment.

Actually, other members of the audience seemed to find several comedic moments that I missed. I suspect some people were fooled by the Hulk Smash! marketing and didn't know what to do with the heavy drama they got instead. People, apparently expecting a pulpy action-adventure they wouldn't have to take seriously, laughed inappropriately at several key dramatic moments. There were also some kids in the audience who seemed confused by the lack of Hulk smashing. The movie seems to have done pretty well last weekend, but I hope it finds a more appreciative audience quickly before attendance drops off. I know I'm going to see again as soon as possible.

This is going to be commentary on some reviews of Hulk as well as on Hulk itself. Let's start with Salon. Actually, let's start with an confession: I've read few issues of The Incredible Hulk comic. I've read the first couple issues in the Marvel Masterworks reprint of the first six issues. I have read some comics featuring Hulk (e.g. The Sentry), and Rose, who has read much Hulk, has told me enough about Peter David's epic run that I think I have a pretty good secondhand understanding of the character.

Now. Charles Taylor begins with a mini-review of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, in which we learn that the problem with Ang Lee is that ey doesn't have a sense of humor. You see, low comedy is essential to Asian martial-arts movies. Uh huh. I have two problems with this criticism:

1. I remember several moments of humor in the movie, e.g. the scene in which Zhang Ziyi fights a restaraunt full of thugs. None are moments of low comedy, though, so I guess they don't count.
2. It seems pretty stupid to me to expect Lee to adhere slavishly to some supposed ideal of what a martial-arts movie should be. You can't criticize Lee for failing to place eir movie in the genre you prefer. Well, you can, but why?

I'm all for deconstructing the high-art/low-art dichomotomy, but it's just silly to denounce Lee for having "no taste for the low." Low-art snobs are no better than high-art snobs.

Now, on to The Hulk. "Lee seems to be under the impression that he's working from myth instead of a good pulpy premise," sez Taylor. I'll ignore the myth thing (why can nobody write about superheroes without mentioning myth at least once?), but I have to point out that the weighty thematic stuff of the movie comes directly from the pages of the comic book. To make the movie an action-packed pulp adventure would have been a betrayal of the source material. When Taylor snickeringly informs us that "Lee and his screenwriters, John Turman, Michael France and James Schamus, have conceived of the story as -- no fooling -- an Oedipal tragedy," we learn ey hasn't done eir homework. The Oedipal conflict is lifted intact from the comic. Taylor does make a good point that Universal Pictures inexplicably marketed the movie as nonstop "Hulk smash!" action, but fails to understand that this will probably cause the "inevitable disappointment audiences will feel," not "deflect" it.

I don't have much more to say about Taylor's review. Ey thinks the actors were bad--well, OK. I thought the acting was decent at worst and intensely affecting at best, but OK. No accounting for differing tastes, or some shit. Taylor thinks the CGI Hulk was bad, that "you feel no connection between the Hulk and Banner." I guess it doesn't matter that Hulk's face looks just like Eric Bana's face, only huge and green. And I guess Taylor was unmoved by the beautiful scene with Hulk and Betty Ross outside Betty's cabin the woods. Is it still trendy to hate CGI? OK, Taylor admits Gollum was brilliant, so it's unfair of me to accuse em of anti-CGI curmudgeonliness. Roger Ebert, in eir much more positive review, says

...the Hulk himself is the least successful element in the film. He's convincing in closeup but sort of jerky in long shot--oddly, just like his spiritual cousin, King Kong. There are times when his movements subtly resemble the stop-frame animation used to create Kong, and I wonder if that's deliberate; there was a kind of eerie oddness about Kong's movement that was creepier than the slick smoothness of modern computer-generated creatures.

Realism is not necessarily an absolute virtue.

A. O. Scott of The New York Times didn't like the movie either, for somewhat different reasons, and Ebert, as noted above, did like it, but I have no more time to comment (I'm posting from work). I'll write more of my own thoughts on the movie later, as well as, possibly, some response to Scott and Ebert.

OK, not really. A new designer baby, genetically selected to be able to provide stem cells to cure eir older brother of a life-threatening form of anemia, has just been born. Jame's British parents, Michelle and Jayson Whitaker, had to have em in the US because the UK doesn't allow embryos to be genetically selected for the benefit of others--the UK does, however, allow embryos to be selected to prevent genetic disease in the child. I think procedures like this demonstrate that there's more to genetic engineering than evil clones and eugenics, although opponents do raise important points even about these procedures. John Smeaton, director of the UK's Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, says:

"Human beings who were not the perfect match were simply discarded and a child has been created with the primary purpose of benefiting his elder brother. This does not conform to Jamie's human dignity."

Have the Whitaker's parents violated Jamie's human rights? I don't really know how to answer that question.

If you use peer-to-peer downloading software, Orrin Hatch thinks copyright owners should get to destroy your computer. Seriously. Without the benefit of a criminal trial, as far as I can tell. Ey thinks the computer-destroying technology should warn copyright violators twice before summarily destroying their computers, so that's nice of em. I guess Senator Hatch is a little rusty on The U.S. Constitution:

No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law....

So says Israel's Antiques Authority, according to this CNN article (and a bunch of other articles, courtesy Google News).

"The ossuary is real. But the inscription is fake," the director of Israel's Antiquities Authority, Shuka Dorfman, told Reuters.

"What this means is that somebody took a real box and forged the writing on it, probably to give it a religious significance," Dorfman added.

Shockingly, the box's owner disagrees.

The Chrstian Science Monitor wonders what this hoax--and another hoax piece owned by Oded Golan, a forgery of the Yoash Inscription--could mean for Christians, Jews, and the Mideast antiques trade.

For Christians who believe in the historical truth of the Bible, the ossuary was a rebuttal to skeptics.

Huh? Even if the box were real, how would it be a rebuttal to skeptics? It's not exactly news, even to skeptics, that Jesus was probably a real person.

The Matrix has much to teach us about being human, according to this interview in the Manila Times with Juan José Muñoz Garcí­a, professor of anthropology and ethics at Villanueva University Center in, I think, Madrid.

Q: Why do you think that we are like Cipher, the character in The Matrix, who despite his knowledge, prefers to remain anchored in appearances and to abandon the struggle for truth?

Muñoz: To discover truth and allow it to possess us is a journey that is not made only with the support of the intelligence. As Plato and Aristotle pointed out, and psychologists tell us about the emotional intelligence, to arrive at truth requires effort and ethical habits.

Unfortunately, there are many in our postmodern era who are satisfied with weak thought: mere opinions or simple facts. Like Cipher in The Matrix, they say that ignorance is bliss. And immediately, they make decisions that attack human dignity, such as killing the unborn or terminal patients, or give their consent to the freezing and manipulation of human embryos.

I think that the main character in The Matrix lets us observe how truth and ethics go hand in hand. By denying the first, to stay with appearances, Cipher denies the second, and immediately betrays his companions. This is why it is so dangerous to say that there are no certainties, only subjective opinions, as in this way we open the doors to the arbitrary will of the strongest--be he a scientist, a communicator, or a politician.

There you go, folks. All the moral problems of the world are the fault of postmodernism. But wait, what's this? "This is why it is so dangerous to say that there are no certainties, only subjective opinions...." Now, that's an odd thing to say when talking about postmodernism. Last I checked, subjectivity fares no better in a postmodernist worldview than in an anti-postmodernist worldview. Here's a helpful hint for dealing with postmodernism, folks: it's not about subjectivity! (At least, good postmodernism isn't.) Instead, you could say postmodernism is a deconstruction of the dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity. Garcí­a here is telling us we need to purge our cultural dialogue of subjectivity and focus on "the fullness of [presumably objective] truth, goodness and beauty." I, a vile postmodernist, am telling you now that according to postmodernism, reality is neither an object existing independently of human perception nor a subject existing only somebody's mind, but a thing constructed by social consensus. The point: using postmodernism as a scapegoat for societal abnegation of moral responsibility is dumb. A postmodern worldview doesn't free you from responsibility--it switches the source of your responsibility from some supposed objective moral truth to the social group you belong to.

By the way, what Garcí­a means when ey says movies are anthropological is:

I only try to remind the reader that we have all learned what it means to be a good son or a good brother by listening to stories. Thanks to stories, we learned what it means to be a person, and how we should behave in life.

There you go. Art is didactic. Yay. Good for it.

Well, it's Alan Moore, which means two things: 1) fucked-up sex and 2) gore (Moore's third trope, mysticism, is absent). Moore loves to give us humanity at its worst. That's fine in From Hell, which is after all about one of humanity's worst villains of recent centuries. It worked less well for me in Watchmen, as I began to wonder just what point Moore was trying to make with eir Superheroes + Nastiness formula--I never quite figured it out. Now we have Victorian pulp + Nastiness, and I wonder again what the point is. Campion Bond has some interesting lines in the first pages of the book: "We live in troubled times, where fretful dreams settle upon the empire's brow. If England's to survive them, then your work is vital. Be about it vigorously and without delay, for the shadows of the century grow long...." Reading here about the closing years of the 19th century, I thought The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen might be an interesting companion to From Hell, looking at the birth of the 20th century from a different direction. Having finished the book (except for Moore's prose story about Allan Quatermain), I think this is not actually the case. In From Hell, Moore uses Jack the Ripper--inspired by Jack's famous boast that "one day men will look back and say that I gave birth to the 20th century"--as a vehicle for a meditation on violence in the previous century. Ey doesn't do anything like that with pulp literature in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It's just pulp, albeit with a lot more sexual assault and dismemberment than you'll probably find in King Solomon's Mines. And I love a good pulp story, so no problem there--but just what's Alan Moore's deal, that ey can't write a good rousing adventure story without throwing in a couple rape scenes?

OK, it's probably in-character for Hawley Griffin to go around raping women, but it seemed excessive to have em hiding in a girl's boarding school and assaulting students in the guise of the Holy Spirit (see, the girls get pregnant and think it's immaculate conception). And what's up with the school being a front for crazy S/M? And having Mina Murray attacked by villainous Egyptians just so Allan Quatermain can rise out of eir opium stupor to rescue em--whatever.

Other than the sexual assaults and the gore (which doesn't bother me as much), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is good fun. I don't appreciate Alan Moore nearly as much as other comics readers do (From Hell is one of my favorite comics, but I found Watchmen rather laughable as a deconstruction of superheroes or whatever it's supposed to be), but I do think ey's a good writer. I think the use of Victorian literary characters and plots is a neat idea. I hadn't known The League was so steampunk. It doesn't add anything other than some interesting cityscape images of London and Paris, but I guess it makes the more fantastic pulp elements more plausible to have them in a steampunk version of industrialized London rather than real 19th-century industrial London. It also makes the mysterious car in the movie trailers slightly more explicable, although I still don't see why it looks like a 1930s-era car.

I always like what Moore does with panel layouts. Ey tends to stick with a basic grid pattern, six or nine panels to a page, occassionally breaking out of the pattern by combining two or more of the panels into one larger panel. The comics have a measured pace, a regular, metronomic rhythm that gives the stories a meditative tone. Moore uses this to great effect in From Hell, especially in the chapter about Mary Kelly's murder. Ey uses it in The League as well, but to a lesser extent--ey also uses pages laid out with four horizontal panels, as well as many more big dramatic splash panels than is usual for em. It's flashier and much less strictly disciplined than Moore's usual layouts, and it works well with the pulp story material.

I really hope my employer doesn't monitor my web activitiy. The article can be found here (I have no idea if that's a permanent link, sorry--I'm sure it's not). [edit: This link comes courtesy Amy Reiter's excellent Salon.com column The Fix. Sometimes it's written by somebody who's not Amy Reiter, though, so be warned.]

LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. pop star Britney Spears is to get a pair of inflatable, throbbing breasts that will pulsate in time to her dancing -- at least her waxwork model will at Madame Tussauds museum in London.

"There are plans to make a new figure of Britney Spears," a spokeswoman said on Friday. "She'll be very sexy and she'll have heaving bosoms. But this is only in the very early stages of planning."

She said the model would be based on one of Britney's videos, in which she dances breathlessly around a pole, and would be accompanied by professionals who would teach museum visitors the tricks of the trade.

The initiative is the latest by the museum to make its models not just visual but tactile.

"Brad Pitt has got a squeezable (latex) bum, but Britney would be the first with heaving bosoms," added the spokeswoman.

I'd add commentary, but what more is there to say, really? I worry about just what sort of motion we'll be seeing here, though. At first I thought the Britney statue would have simulated heavy breathing to move the breasts--but what could they mean by "pulsate in time to her dancing?" What are they going to do, expand and contract like balloons? I take it this isn't a place one would take one's family during a trip to England. Unless you wanted your kids to get a pole-dancing lesson from a professional.

The Americans, Russians, French, and British join forces against an evil more important than both the Free World and the glorious socialist revolution! The respectable, (somewhat) celibate, and retired Sir James Bond (David Niven) is persuaded to return to the spy game. The new 007 (Terrence Cooper, I think) is trained not to respond to the advances of women. Eventually, MI6 begins calling every agent in the field James Bond to confuse the enemy organization SMERSH. Evelyn Tremble (Peter Sellers), famous baccarat player, now also James Bond, must battle the fearsome gambler/magician Le Chiffre (Orson Welles) at the baccarat table to deprive SMERSH of funds. Sir James's nephew Jimmy Bond (Woody Allen), ineffectual as a spy and a lover, is more than he seems.

Casino Royale does some fun things with two of the big tropes of the Bond series: 1) sex and 2) multiple Bonds. The movie seems like almost nonstop sex, with only occasional breaks for action sequences--the notable exception is the climactic finale sequence, in which Bond is not quite rescued from SMERSH by American military reinforcements in the form of cowboys and injuns. Sir James is a gentlemen and despies the oversexed image of the replacement MI6 found for him, but that doesn't stop him from (mostly inadvertently) wooing the ladies with that Bond charm. There's a funny scene with the newly tamed new 007 in a training room, doing martial arts moves on women as they try to seduce him. In a turnabout, Evelyn Tremble is seduced into becoming James Bond.

The multiple Bonds joke couldn't have been too intentional, since I think Sean Connery had been the only movie Bond before Casino Royale, but in retrospect it's a good joke. We have here the original Sir James Bond, a replacement 007, Evelyn Tremble/James Bond, Jimmy Bond, Mata Bond (the illegitimate daughter of Sir James and Mata Hari), Lady James Bond (the secret sex weapon trained to seduce... I have no idea why), and eventually every British spy is renamed James Bond to confuse the enemy.

If all of this sounds needlessly confusing, that's because it is. I was going to write that the plot is pointlessly complex, but it's not complex--it's just disjointed and nonsensical. It seems to exist only to provide excuses for funny scenes. Casino Royale had ten writers and five directors, and it shows. It's a jumble of ill-fitting parts that never come together into a cohesive whole, but those individual parts are often brilliant. The movie begins as a spy spoof with sly pokes at Cold War politics, then veers abruptly into an insane sex farce/Scottish sports thing (they call it wrestling, but it involves throwing cannonballs at each other). [edit: according to Rose: "I think the Scottish sport is either hurling or tossing the caber (sp?), which differ in how the boulder is held and flung. I went to a Scottish festival with sports once. Scary."] Then it becomes a parody of James Bond sexiness, with detours for a sort of Near Eastern dance sequence and a trip to Mata Hari's Berlin spy school with deliberately false sets and acting. Orson Welles shows up, does some magic tricks and plays baccarat with Peter Sellers. Then everybody ends up in SMERSH's bizarre psychadelic hideout for a couple good scenes with Woody Allen as an evil leader with an unusual take on world domination. Then the cowboys and injuns show up. The movie spins out of control and ends abruptly as Jimmy Bond/Dr. Noah explodes (he earlier swallowed a pill that turns his body into an atomic bomb), destroying the hotel and everybody inside, including all the major characters of the movie. I guess the writers ran out of ideas there.

What was Charles K. Feldman hoping to accomplish when he got the rights to Casino Royale? A goofy spy spoof? It's certainly that, but what's up with the Berlin spy school scene and the final battle scene between SMERSH and the Wild West? At any rate, the many producers, writers, and directors of Casino Royale certainly accomplished something. I'm at a loss to say what, but it's pretty fun.