Indiana Jones, the Crystal Skull, Angels and Demons and Cyrillic: A Random Drunk Post

It may look like I’m being very lazy not updating my blog, but nothing could be further from the truth. Behind the scenes I’m working away at my final “Space Gods” images, to the point where RSI from delicately tracing a life-size skeleton has almost crippled my hand.

Here is my mini-review for the new Indiana Jones film, in the form of free verse:

Crystal skulls, elongated heads,
how could this film not be fun?
Cate Blanchett’s pretty cool
she was in The Life Aquatic,
I’m indifferent to Shia LeBoeuf.
I work with a Ukrainian, she doesn’t sound

like that.
You can’t survive a nuclear explosion

in a fridge.
About 40 minutes in
I started to wond when it would end.

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I was thinking about Angels and Demons by Dan Brown yesterday, and that I liked it better than The Da Vinci Code. Okay, they were both pretty dumb, but Angels was a bit more up-front about it’s schlocky campness, whereas its sequel tried to be all clever with its references to feminism and Christian opression. The worst part was the way that Brown casually threw away the ethnic love interest in the first book (Vittoria Vetra) for an almost identical, equally undeveloped ethnic love interest in the second (Sophie Neuveu). You know what? I say he should have ditched his authorial stand in, Robert Langdon, with his invented expertise, and made Vittoria the heroine, and she and Sophie could have fought the Catholic Church and its wicked albinos together. A stunning Italian Lara Croft-type physicist/biologist/yoga master studying psychic powers in dolphins (or something) and he threw her away at the end of the book. All that fluff about the ‘Sacred Feminine’ was completely empty coming from an author who doesn’t believe in 3-dimensional female characters. Cut the bits about her Italian ancestors calling for vendetta and she’d have made Da Vinci twice as interesting.

***********

If you want to impress your Slavic friends, learn Cyrillic. You will also be able to sound out things written in Russian, Serbian and Ukranian, and even if you don’t know what it means, it will give you a feeling of accomplishment. This is the site I used to learn it, it’s incredibly simple, elegant and fun:

http://www.alphadictionary.com/rusgrammar/alphabet.html

lion, witch & prince caspian

The Lion, the Witch on the Wardrobe has just finished on Channel 9, to be replaced by a programme about Alaskan crab fishing (the most dangerous job in the world, apparently,), and I saw the premier of Prince Caspian last weekend, so I was inspired to write an impromptu post.  They’re both pretty good films in my opinion; the first one didn’t quite live up to recent epic fantasy but on a second view I was able to chill out and enjoy it a bit more.

I grew up watching the old BBC dramatisations and reading the books (although I never liked The Horse and His Boy , or got round to the apocalyptic Last Battle), so it was always going to be hard for me to accept a new version.  Aslan doesn’t seem majestic enough, and while the BBC Aslan of my memory spoke in a regal growl the new Disney/Walden one sounds suspiciously like Liam Neeson.

Tilda Swinton makes a great White Witch though, one minute androgynously sexual and the next eerily maternal towards the boys in the movie.  I was trying to figure out why the designers had chosen to give her dreadlocks and braids though; to give a whiff of ethnic, pagan wickedness in contrast to the very English heroes? Still, she’s a fun villain, and when she tries to persuade Prince Caspian to resurrect her to fight his uncle in the second film I (and probably most of the audience) was hoping he’d do it.

But of course, Prince Caspian was written before moral ambiguity was acceptable in kid’s storytelling, and we have to wait until the too cutesy Lucy decides to put her faith in Aslan and asks the lion for help… like the dad in Arrested Development he’s busy teaching the kids a lesson, something along the lines of “That’s what happens when you try to do things yourself!” It would probably have been more narratively satisfying if they had called on the Witch for help, and more true to life; war in the real world is at best a moral grey area, and Hiroshima and Dresden are more White Witch than Aslan.  Lewis, a great writer, seems to have a number of blind spots, and the casual (bloodless) killing throughout the Narnia films is one of them.  (Another one is making all his Scottish characters cantankerous old bastards.)

So if Aslan is Jesus, then the White Witch is the devil; My gender studies class must be getting to me, because it seems like quite a lot of depictions of Satan are female these days- The Passion of the Christ, The Last Temptation of the Christ, Bedazzled. Maybe the temptation to conflate the two villains of Christianity- Eve and Satan, is increasingly irresistible.

Another thing that occurred to me was Santa; isn’t he a human? And if so, shouldn’t he be a king of Narnia too? Then I realised that he was Father Christmas, so probably more like a pagan god… which in Lewis’ stories tend to be good guys, like his satyrs and centaurs, as long as they don’t get worshipped like the capital-G God.  I’ve been reading a bit of Lewis recently, so I could see a few themes from other works: his idea of the Tao, a universal law of nature, from the Abolition of Man, is echoed in the Deep Magic of Narnia; and his concern with believing despite lack of evidence, or at least lack of unambiguous evidence, is the central theme of Til We Have Faces. As a prolific pop-apologist, Lewis was very much concerned with why people believe, or don’t believe; I wonder if he ever got to the bottom of it.

Where am I going with these ramblings? Nowhere really… Prince Caspian is a good film for the kid’s fantasy it is.  The moral message is a bit confused, but less heavy handed than in the first story;  The effects and action are great, the characterisation satisfying.  The producers do a good job of juggling their audience’s expectations; Christians get subtle admonitions to “believe”, skeptics get a cynical dwarf not all that impressed with the patronising kids and lion.  I miss the old giant Reepacheep, along with Doctor Who and Monkey one of the heroes of my childhood,  but I can forgive it for the cool griffins.  I award this film 7.5 talking animals out of 10.

Iron Man Review- Is it awesome?

About a week ago I got a call from my friend who works at Greater Union cinemas, asking me if I wanted to see the premier of the new Iron Man film. I said yes (followed by about 20 exclamation marks). I should probably start this review off with a confession- I love comics. I love superheroes. And I love films based on superheroes.

Only problem is that most superhero films are, basically, crap. They’re guilty pleasures for me- Spiderman was okay, The Hulk was interesting, X-Men started well but nose-dived at 3- the problem is that when it comes to live action, it’s hard to avoid something that looks like a big budget version of Power Rangers. In my opinion, the most successful adaptations have been animated- The Incredibles and Bruce Timm’s Batman and Justice League series and- wait, before I get into my uber geeky dissection of the film I should tell you it’s awesome. Probably the best live action superhero film I’ve ever seen, and my friend (not a comics fan, although she has been known to enjoy a bit of R Crumb) loved it too.

Why was it the best? It’s partly the concept- the idea of a superhero in a robotic suit is more plausible than gamma rays and spider bites and kids from Krypton, and translates beautifully on the screen, the visuals inspired by the very excellent art of Adi Granov. The special effects are fantastic, with action scenes that reminded me of the awesomeness (expect a lot of that word, I had a big weekend and I’m running on caffeine) of Transformers and the Terminator films.

But unlike those blockbusters, this film has both a heart and a brain. Iron Man was originally written in 1963, the year that America entered the Vietnam War; as Tony Stark he was a millionaire playboy, inventor and arms dealer who created his suit after being captured by the Viet Cong during a weapons test. In 2008, with America is embroiled in the eighth year of a war many are comparing to Vietnam, this film has a very contemporary subtext.

Superheroes are an especially American mythology, combining that nation’s superpower status with its earnest desire to do good; Iron Man turns what was a straightforward comic about one man battling the Red Menace into a surprisingly nuanced meditation on the arms industry and the great responsibility that comes with great power. Stark is a lone dreamer in the mould of Thomas Edison, whose idealistic genius is contrasted with the amoral corporation which sells weapons to terrorists behind his back. He represents the American interventionist dream, fighting only to save lives and undo his past wrongs, using über-advanced computer targeting to take out hostage-grabbing villains with their guns to children’s heads; but living in the shadow of the nuclear bomb his father created.

But if that’s not your thing, don’t worry, the film never bashes you over the head with its point, and there’s plenty else to enjoy

If you’re a geek like me you’ll love the references to SHIELD (no Samuel L Jackson Nick Fury unfortunately), an appearance by the butler Jarvis as a computerised voice, the Moneypenny-esque tension between Pepper Pots and her boss- a little love story that walks the line between too much and too little very nicely, the cover story involving Iron Man as Tony Stark’s bodyguard, and a cameo by Stan Lee, without which no Marvel adaptation would be complete. (And I may have seen Condoleeza Rice in the background in a ballroom scene, but that can’t be right, can it…?)

For non-geeks, the plotting is tight, the pace is gripping and cast is… um, awesome. Robert Downey Jr puts his charisma to good use in the title role, alternately as a loose-living playboy with foreshades of alcoholism and a brooding hero out to do good while he still can. In several scenes he convincingly delivers dialogue to robotic arms, which is something of a feat. Gwyneth Paltrow is a nice counterpoint as Pepper Potts- haven’t seen her in anything in a while, but she gets some of the best scenes, and avoids being the token Love Interest for the most part. Jeff Bridges, The Dude from The Big Lebowski, is miles away from that role, but makes a great villain.

I was going to attempt a deconstruction of the themes in the film, but I think it’s getting too late for that, and they’re not too hard to spot. So I’ll just give you my final thought and rating.

FINAL THOUGHT

I’m not much of an Iron Man expert- I knew him mainly from The Ultimates- but I’ve taken advantage of my Marvel Online subscription in the last few hours to read the first dozen or so comics with him in them, and the film is very faithful to them- updating the action from Vietnam to Afghanistan, of course, even reproducing the original hulking, grey armour as Iron Man Mark I. Unless director Jon Favreau was lying to me, the screening here in Sydney which I just got back from was one of the first in the world; and I think there’s something fitting given the similarities between Iron Man and Australia’s favourite outlaw, Ned Kelly.

Iron Man and Ned Kelly- Separated at Birth?

RATING: 9/10

Being in the same theatre as Robert Downey Jr, Naomi Watts and Rove McManus is probably responsible for some of my gushing, but I’m hard pressed to think how this film could have been better, something that is very rare for me. I’m happy that I finally have a live-action superhero movie which delivers on all levels. If the public at large loved it half as much as I did, I’ll still love it twice as much. And I’ll be able to look forward to a sequel.