The Legend has Returned!...maybe; Beauty beating up the Beast

Oy, it's been many moons since last I posted here. Not that I was ever very good about frequently updating this blog, but it's been over six months since I put down any new words here. My thoughts have turned to the blog many times, and I've thought of a lot of different topics I could go on about, but somehow I failed to ever actually post. I got married May 7th (so far, still no regrets; I am very, very happy with that aspect of my life) and this past summer also started a one-year grad program to get an Masters in Education. My duties in that program included taking several education classes and interning as a student teacher in the morning. On top of that I still work part-time at the trophy shop. So I have do have quite a bit on my plate.

On the other hand, though...I do still have quite a bit of free time. I still manage somehow to spend hours upon hours of time on the internet (and, of course, blogging here would fall in that category), so obviously I do have time to work on ambitions of mine (another category which this blog would also fall under), but I keep on failing to do so. I want to actually write short stories and novels and get them published (especially now that my brother has self-published his own novel) and I want to do more free-time reading and expanding of my knowledge. And yet I keep on wasting time on this blasted internet thingie.

Well, I guess this post has been kind of aimless, but I wanted to tip my toe back in blogging waters again and hopefully reestablish the habit. I think part of the reason it's been so hard for me to get back to blogging is that I feel compelled to write long posts and any time I had an idea for a post I got intimidated about writing about it from all the angles I envisioned. I'm hoping I can learn to do shorter posts, but more frequently. So, here's a little morsel to chew on for today:

Devin's List of Movie Cliches that Need to Stop Now- Item 1: Anorexic Wisp of a Woman > Man Roughly the Size of a Tank

Alright, I get that, post-feminist revolution, a goal for movie makers and writers is to create empowered female role models who are actively controlling their own fate and not simply damsels in distress waiting for Prince Charming or Mario to come save them. But, I'm sorry, I just can't quite get rid of that itch of disbelief in my head when I watch a girl who looks like she maybe weighs 100 pounds wet holding her own with a 6 foot plus muscleman. Often in movies such female characters are supposed to have had special martial-arts/sword-fighting/assassin training before, but then they end up facing guys who also have had fight training and weigh twice as much as them, which would seem to neutralize any advantage the girl may have had against a regular Joe Schmoe.

It just ends up feeling like lazy feminist pandering to me and destroys my suspension of disbelief. It's not that I don't believe that there are women that could beat up men, particularly if the opponent were to be someone like wimpy me. In fact, I absolutely believe there are tough women out there that could hold their own in a fight; I just don't think they look like Angelina Jolie (see picture above). Seriously! Look at that bone of an arm there! And I'm supposed to believe she's capable of beating up trained CIA operatives (I don't know if she does any hand-to-hand combat in the movie Wanted but I know she does it in the movie Salt).

I do make exceptions if we're dealing with females who are supposed to be superhuman or have magical abilities (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer), but outside of that it really bothers me, especially now that it's been done over and over and over.

I'm all for strong female characters who are not constantly needing a man to save them, but I have two requests:
(1) Make them capable and active through their cleverness and courage (ala Elizabeth Swan in the first Pirates movie, not the sword fighting Elizabeth Swan of the sequels).
(2) Cast women who actually look like they could throw a punch and make you feel it.

One objection to my objections, though: I have a problem with the unrealistic portrayal of high school cheerleader-petite women tossing around barrel-chested thugs, but I don't have problems enjoying movies where the male hero is able to take on and defeat scores of bad guys in close combat (Bourne Identity) or guys twice as big as himself. These male heroes at least have visible biceps and muscle-definition, but is the latter scenario any more realistic than the first? Am I being consistent?

Food for thought.

PS: Oh, and my idea of doing a shorter post here: fail.

A Plethora of Good Music; Dr. Sowell Explains it All; Plus, thank you, Mr. Janitor

So my sister Jamie and I have both shared for many years the sentiment that the Japanese are a very peculiar people. That said, they have made some great animation, or anime. In particular I love the Hayao Miyazaki-directed films "Castle in the Sky," "Princess Mononoke," "Spirited Away," and "Howl's Moving Castle." However, I have also been tempted at times by their anime tv series. The cool thing that the Japanese peopled do is that they actually do long-form story telling with their cartoon series, with complex story lines that stretch across a season. They also do not relegate animation to just children-targeted stories or comedy. They do any genre, and I mean ANY genre, in their animation, and not just for kids but plenty of stuff for adults. On the bad side though, besides the sometimes bizarre, so-far-over-the-top-you-no-longer-even-know-what-the-word-"top"-means humor, they also may include not-so-Mormon-friendly stuff in their toons, such as nudity, swearing, or graphic violence.

The anime that now most tempts me (but which I shall probably never watch in its entirety) is an (intentionally) one-season anime from 1998 called "Cowboy Bebop." I remember a specific friend in high school really loving the series, but I never looked at it at the time (this was a common situation for me at high school; a number of my friends were big-time anime fans, but I never really got into it). Since then, though, I've looked up some clips from the show, and recently got on a kick of watching tons of clips from it after reading a recent Orson Scott Card-penned column that recommended the show.

It's a cool sci-fi show following a group of bounty hunters as they track down bounties and deal with other problems across the solar system in the late 21st century. It's real genre-bender, with sci-fi, film noir, western, and martial-arts action influences all rolled together. From the pieces I've watched of it, it seems like one of the most artistically impressive shows ever put on TV: the plots, the characters, the animation, and the action are all engrossing and extremely well-executed. However, it does contain some swearing, some very revealing costumes on the main female character (though no nudity), and the violence can be pretty graphic. So I don't know that I'll ever pick up the DVDs and watch it all. There is one element from the show about which I have no guilt indulging in: the music.

The show has "Bebop" (a kind of jazz) in the title, and the music does indeed play a huge part in the show, lending a unique mood and atmosphere to the proceedings. And while the soundtrack does contain a lot of jazz, it also does music of lots of other genres, like blues, rock and roll songs, and even classical-influenced choral pieces. What is so impressive to me about all this is that I think it's all composed and written by one composer: the Japanese female composer Yoko Kanno. It blows my mind at how well she's able to write music in so many different genres. So I thought I'd share with you some of my favorite pieces of music from the show and demonstrate the variety that is on display.

Tank!
This is an expanded version of the opening theme of the show. Pretty dang awesome, if you ask me. I've listened to this over and over.

Goodnight, Julia
Here's another sweet jazz piece, though of a much more somber mood.

Rain
A cool organ-dominated rock ballad from the show. It plays during a lead-up to a showdown between the main protagonist, super-awesome Spike, and a bunch of baddies led by his arch-nemisis, Vicious, in a big cathedral.

Spokey Dokey
Epic country-blues harmonica.

Call Me, Call Me
Just a nice, well-written rock song.

Green Bird
For me, this is such an amazingly beautiful choral-piano piece. It got stuck in my head for quite a while. As an example of how the show likes to juxtapose the actual onscreen events with music, this serene piece of music plays right after a wounded Spike is violently thrown through a stained-glass window. The music plays as he falls in slow-mo, surrounded by shards of broken glass, with random visions of his past flashing before his eyes and as the cathedral-level he was just thrown out of explodes (Spike left the man who chucked him out the window a nice gift in the form of an about-to-detonate grenade).

***

Also, Paul Simon just came out with a new album this past Tuesday: "So Beautiful or So What." Paul Simon is one of my all-time favorite singer-songwriters, certainly in my top-5. I already had two of his albums, "Graceland" and "Rhythm of the Saints," and I intend over the course of my life to purchase several others. I think there are not may songwriters out there that so consistently write songs, from their famous singles to their lesser-known tracks, that I like so much.

I'd been eagerly anticipating this album ever since hearing about it some time towards the end of last year. So I broke down and purchased this one online off amazon, and...at 69 the master's still got it! His songs remain very lyrically and musically creative and interesting. His voice still sounds great, too. I read an interview where he said he's given up smoking, dairy, and caffeine to protect his vocal cords. As such, I think it is time we have some Mormon missionaries ambush this guy. C'mon, he's prime material for baptism now. This album even includes a lot of mentions of God in these songs (though often in kind of a humorous way). Here's two of the singles he released from the album.

Getting Ready for Christmas Day

The Afterlife

So there's some cool music for y'all to check out. Your welcome, America.

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Here's a dead-on quote from one of my favorite political commentators/economists/philosophers, Thomas Sowell: "Someone once said that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. That may have been true when he said it, but today taxes are mostly the price we pay so that politicians can play Santa Claus and get reelected."

The whole column that that quote is from is a great read, laying out why increasing taxes on those evil, greedy rich people actually decreases tax revenue, and why the class warriors still want to do it anyway.

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Also, I should give a shout-out to the really awesome janitor (whose name I sadly never got) who found the labtop that I had stupidly forgotten and left under my desk during my evening Wednesday class, and Fernando, who stored it in his office. For a time I seriously feared my labtop had been lost forever, but these two wonderful members of the human race preserved my labtop in safe keeping till I could come to reclaim it. Perhaps I shall write an ode to them sometime.

Rango: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

So my Lovely just took me this evening to see the movie Rango. The new animated film, made by Industrial Light and Magic (George Lucas' and Steven Spielberg's effects people) and directed by Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean guy), had been on my "I really want to see that movie" list since I first saw previews towards the end of last year. I like it when movie makers try for something original and visually different, and Rango looked like one seriously original animated movie.

And now, having seen it: yep, it is one seriously original, unique movie (the bare bones of the plot aren't really original; it's a conglomeration of scores of western tropes, but the presentation sure is original). In fact, it may be the strangest movie I have ever seen in my life. I kind of have mixed feelings about it. Let me break it down for you according to a good old western cliche:

The Good

The visuals are good. No, not just good. FLIPPIN' OUTSTANDINGAMAZINGGEORGEOUSBEAUTIFUL! Really, I think this is the most visually stunning animated film I have ever seen, and that includes all the Pixar and Miyazaki canon. The desert scenery, the superb character animations and detail applied to every single animal character that's on screen. It's almost worth the price of admission alone just to admire the artistry of the animators here. As my Lovely said to me, they did an amazing job of having each character be recognizable as the animal it was while still also maintaining very cleverly done human qualities and expressiveness. Rango, with his crooked neck and shifty eyes, the crow indian, the spider under-taker, the villainous Rattlesnake Jake, etc. Even the dirt looks amazing.

Hans Zimmer also does a really awesome western score here. Very near the beginning of the movie I was already thinking to myself, "I want this soundtrack." And there's a fantastic medley of country-meets-ride-of-the-valkyries-meets-waltz in one scene.

Johnny Depp is wonderful as the title character. We've already seen from Pirates of the Caribbean that's he's awesome at mumbling hilarious nonsense and he does much the same here (though now in a cowboy accent instead of a pirate one). The rest of cast does a great job.

The imagination and strangeness here do make the movie very memorable, and it has plenty of hilarious gags (I loved the bits with the mariachi owls in the trailer and they did not disappoint in the film).

The Bad

While it's funny and visually stunning, I have to agree with a few reviews that I've read of it (though most critics very much like the film) that the movie does seem to lack a certain warmth or heart. While there were several characters that entertained me, I still wasn't as emotionally invested in the characters as I've been in other films (like anything Pixar has done or How to Train Your Dragon).

There are some plot holes in this movie. I allow for a larger suspension of disbelief with animated films, but sometimes characters' actions in this movie really made no sense.

Also, sometimes weirdness is just weird. This movie was downright trippy at points. Which isn't always bad, but I think it does kind of make it more difficult to get that emotional connection with the story and characters as I was talking about earlier. I have a feeling that this movie might become a favorite of people who are stoned or high.

The Ugly

The frequent potty humor and/or adult innuendo. Really? I know a lot of this stuff goes over children's heads, and I'm not saying that Americans can't make more adult-minded animated films like the Japanese (and Pixar) often do, but you know this movie is being marketed to children. As one innuendo or crude joke piled onto another, I kept feeling myself become sadder and sadder. Regardless of whether kids are going to understand it or not, it's inappropriate.
Even without the child-angle, it's just boring and off-putting to me. Crude humor is NOT hard. Continually usually scatological terms does not show any real wit. I think a lot of film makers feel that, along with being "edgy" and "rebellious," they're being hilarious by putting crude humor in a kid's film-just the fact to them that crude humor is being put in a format usually meant for children amuses them greatly. But it's not really edgy or particularly innovative anymore. It's been done, and it's tired and lazy writing.
It reminds me of a professor I had who seemed to swear more and more towards the end of the semester. He really didn't swear much, but he started to interject a naughty word occasionally towards the end of the semester. And everyone would laugh (to my shame I may have even, a couple of times). But then I think, "How is this funny? All he's doing is saying a crude word. Ok, so the surprise of the first time or two might make you laugh, but really? We're going to award somebody with laughter just because they can use their vocal cords and articulating muscles to say a vulgar word."
I want to take these filmmakers and point them towards Pixar: "See, this is how you do it. This is how you make movies that appeal to all ages and are consistently laugh-out-loud hilarious while almost never going for the cheap joke." Perhaps, that's why other filmmakers resort to crude humor; they just don't have the talent and genuine wit that the Pixar filmmakers/writers do.

And in the end, this is what really dragged down my enjoyment and the lasting entertainment value of the movie for me. I still admire the artistry, visual wit, the performances, music, and, at times, bits of dialog that managed to be hilarious without being crude. I'll retain many fond memories of certain moments of the film. But I doubt I'll ever buy the movie. I don't think it's appropriate for children, and I think in any rewatches I would just end up continually being annoyed by the very unnecessary "Haha! Can you believe we just said that in a kid's movie! Hey, let's throw in a poop gag here!" jokes that keep popping up.

So, there you have it, I guess. When's Cars 2 coming out?

Plan for Peace, Movie Ad rundown, and my most recent Genius Idea

First off, I would like to confess to the world: I really suck at keeping an up-to-date blog. Are we clear on that? (pensive pause as the indifferent world answers with silence) Alright, moving on...

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So while biking between work and home I noticed a couple of cars with stickers like "End War" or "War is not the Answer," and I felt sorry for my peace-loving brethren. Obviously their message still hasn't been effectively communicated to this battle-scarred world of ours. I think it's time they try a different tactic. Instead of displaying their pacifist sentiments here in the USA, a program should be established to transport all our peace-loving brethren to the Middle East. There they can use their bumper-sticker summations of wisdom, peace-sign t-shirts, and John Lennon music to turn the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and various other Islamist insurgents from their violently coercive ways. I'm sure that a simple multi-cultural dialogue between idealistic college students and bloodthirsty zealots is the missing ingredient we need to add to the hopes-and-dreams stew to finally bring about an age of planetary Kumbaya.

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So during the superbowl (which, good Mormon as well as uninterested-in-sports-geek that I am, I did not watch) a veritable plethora of advertisements for new movies came out. I watched several of these half-minute montages of thrills, explosions, and stirring music on youtube. My thoughts:

Rango: LOVE THE MARIACHI OWLS! Looks beautifully animated, really original, and pretty dang funny. Love the bits of Johnny Depp's voice performance that you hear. Ever since I saw the first trailer towards the end of last year I've been really psyched for this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKbFcEHM4I0

Cowboys and Aliens: I have been very vocal about my excitement for this movie to my less enthused peers. Come on, it's Indiana Jones and James Bond in a cowboy movie, with FLIPPIN' ALIENS! This movie may have been #1 on my most-anticipated-for-2011 list, and now that I've seen the new sights from the super-bowl spot: I admit, I think it took my excitement down just a notch. Never fear, I shall stay faithful and fervent in my support for the film, but I kind of liked it better in the first trailer where I didn't see the space ships. It's true that the power of imagination almost always trumps the actual product. Still looks pretty awesome though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXNbpqc1gLE

Captain America: Looks pretty dang good and thrilling. They did a great job with the costume; it's the kind of thing that you wouldn't be sure of translating to the screen well, but the glimpses of it in action here all look glorious. I'm excited to see a superhero movie set in World War II, which hopefully should lend a distinctive spin and atmosphere to the superhero-origins genre that has become quite well-worn over the past decade. I just hope they don't water down Captain America's patriotic America-ness. The director's already made some comments that have rubbed me the wrong way; the trend in Hollywood now seems to be that America needs to act apologetic to the rest of world and that any suggestion of American exceptionalism must be wiped off the screen. But look, it's his name and his costume is the stars-and-stripes. I think it would make for a much more interesting chemistry-dynamic among the Avengers (basically Marvel comic's Justice League; Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and Hulk are all gonna meet up in the same movie in 2012) if they let his character stay old-fashioned in his love of country, letting him bounce off the more jaded personalities of the modern-set superheroes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnE4uzT7sro

Kung Fu Panda 2: The du-du-clap! of We Will Rock You totally got stuck in my head after watching this. I loved the first one. Hopefully the sequel can maintain the breezy fun of the first one. For some reason now I keep feeling the urge to exclaim "Shashapooi!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ote5aOIPpJQ

Thor: Well, this movie does have Anthony Hopkins in it so that automatically gives it some entertainment cred. It could be a lot of fun; it's got some awesome visuals anyways. Thor's gonna be the trickiest character to work in with the more grounded (for comic books, anyways) super heroes who will make up the Avengers. I hope it all works well. I wonder if the super hero genre's gonna run completely out of steam in a few years; we've just been bombarded with so many superhero movies and even superhero parodies over the past decade.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTTGL-OxzGY

Super 8: They're going the Inception route with their advertising for this one, showing you barely nothing of the plot but just quick glimpses in the trailers. The plot details that have been announced is that it's about these kids in the late 70s making an amateur zombie movie with their Super 8 camera (hence, the title) by some train tracks when a military train transporting an alien gets derailed. ET breaks loose and apparently some creepy shenanigans follow. I might actually be more psyched about this movie than any other coming out this year. This movie is produced by Spielberg, directed by the JJ Abrams (who, after directing Mission Impossible 3 and Star Trek, in my mind can claim the popcorn throne as Spielberg's heir), and the glimpses from the trailer (combined with the very John Williams-esque music) does give it the feel of a vintage Spielberg fantasy film.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yu5dLtRnaOY

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Also, I just recently realized what would be the perfect, non-sinister application of memory-erasing technology should it ever be invented. Here's a real-life scenario: I watch a movie trailer and get really excited about the movie because the trailer is so awesome. As a devoted movie geek, I watch the trailer again and again. So, now I'm excited about the movie, but I've also now made myself very familiar with a lot of the "wow" moments and possibly even the plot points of the upcoming movie from its trailer. As such, my movie-going experience will be slightly-less-than-it-could-have-been as I ruined some of the element of surprise by watching the trailer. Now comes the sci-fi scenario answer: Thanks to memory-erasing technology I watch the trailer, get super-psyched for the movie, get my ticket for the movie, and then get mind-wiped just before I see it. I'll know, since I bought the ticket, that I was excited about this film, but I'll really have no idea what's about to come and thus can enjoy my first-time viewing experience to the fullest. Heck, I'd also use this stuff to keep wiping my mind before watching Star Wars movies (that way, when Vader drops the "I'm your father" line, I could really have my mind blown).