Thoughts on Star Wars: The Last Jedi (ALL Spoilers)

May as well put this all in one place on a blog post, because I hate digging through social media to find what I've said.

I will include spoiler warnings in the text, but generally, if you haven't seen The Last Jedi yet, maybe put this post off for later.

Even though it's crappy writing, let's put this in Question and Answer format:

Did you like it, Rob?

Yes.

Come on. Get in the weeds a bit.

OK. The Star Wars Films in order:

1. The Empire Strikes Back
2. A New Hope (the original)
3. Return of the Jedi
4. The Force Awakens (could have been 3 if it hadn't mostly been a remake of A New Hope)
5-6. Rogue One and The Last Jedi (could have been 3 if it were 30 minutes shorter and lacked an extended commercial for the new Christmas toy)
7. The Last Half of Revenge of the Sith
8-9. The other prequels make me feel dirty.

On Facebook, I'd put The Last Jedi above Rogue One, but thinking back, Rogue One had a much leaner story, a clearer objective that better defined and guided all the action in the film. I like action films that move in a straight line, most of the time.

That's a little low, for The Last Jedi, isn't it?

For perspective... my favorite Marvel Cinematic Universe films (Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor: Ragnarok, Civil War and Spider-man: Homecoming) ... I don't think I liked any of them more than #5 on this list. My favorite Superhero films ever, The Dark Knight or Spider-man 2 (Doc Ock) might be between 4 and 3. I really like Star Wars. It's magic.

Rogue One?
Well... if Rogue One had been less meandering in the first half, it would definitely have been 5. The final sequence of Rogue One, from the tower invasion on, was one of the most exciting sequences in a star wars film. On the other hand, if The Last Jedi had slimmed down the subplots, character bloat and toy ads, they could have taken that spot easily, as their main cast has a clear advantage over Rogue One's. But neither of those things happened, so I'm not making a call right now. I'll watch each of them one or two more times before deciding for sure.


SPOILERS FROM HERE ON

So what were the little things you liked?

Luke's crowning moment of awesome was truly awesome (and much needed after how low he'd been brought through the rest of the film.)

The best scene in the film was Snoke's throne room, and Kylo and Rey vs. Snoke's guard was everything we've been waiting for, while the twists and turns of who is offering what and who is willing to throw down with whom is fantastic.

Kylo Ren is a great villain, as I said last time I talked about Star Wars. That he is conflicted makes him more interesting and less predictable. The way he will derail an entire battle plan to chew on one of his obsessions like a dog on a toy makes him interesting... but he (like Luke Skywalker) understands the power of a symbolic moment. (which is why he was able to be baited). That he is trying to PROVE to himself how evil he is gives him a higher ceiling of evilness than Hux. Hux is smart enough to create a successful battle plan and accomplish more evil overall by taking over the galaxy for his evil purposes, which is scarier from five thousand yards. But Hux wouldn't derail a battle plan for the sake of being especially mean to this person over here, just because fuck them! He's too calculating. When they're in a room with you, Kylo is more likely to do something cruel or horrifying than Hux, just because, so for the purpose of an interesting scene in a film, Kylo Ren is more interesting than red-haired Hitler.

Rose Tico was pretty cool, and it's about time we saw an Asian face with speaking parts in the Star Wars universe, she had one of the best lines in the film about saving what we love rather than fighting what we hate, but her and her plotline slowed the story down... and was a waste of a perfectly good Benicio Del Toro.

Rey was pretty great. After TFA she was in a dead heat with Poe and Finn and Kylo, but now she and Kylo have separated themselves from the pack, and she gave me chills a couple of times. Finn's subplot felt shoehorned in at times, and Poe was reckless: as likable as he was, he was dangerous and wrong and deserved worse than he got as a penalty for his mutiny.

I like that they batted away the fan theories about Rey's parents. And the conversation where they addressed that was devastating. I was ready to go to the dark side for Kylo at that point.

Best line in the film:

Rey: "If you see Finn before I do..."
Chewbacca: "GGGrrrrRRRRAAAWWWWwwwWWW"
Rey: "Perfect. Tell him that."

The fact they replayed the twists and turns of the Return of the Jedi throne room in Episode 8 means that we're in uncharted territory for episode 9. Who knows what will happen now that Kylo Ren is without his big bad. I predict the rivalry between him and Hux playing into a few crucial moments, as Ren and his urge to be dramatic continues to get in the way of Hux's sound military strategies. In fact, I'm gonna go on record saying that The First Order's undoing is going to be Hux stabbing Kylo Ren in the back, or vice versa, as they decide they can't stand each other and can't work together. Mark it down.

What is great about Star Wars? Are there problems built into the basic premises of the Star Wars Universe?

Yes, there are.

First, what's great: Good star wars movies have always made you care about the characters -- the heroes and the villains, or at least understand what they want. That makes THIS space opera different from the others. Star Wars stories live and die with likable characters, so the casting is really important, and the two good trilogies (Original and VII and on) have really nailed the casting with leads that are fun to watch and easy to care about. The Star Wars juggernaut will start to falter when they start flubbing the casting. This is why people say Star Wars has "heart." Because they make us care about the characters.

The original Star Wars used a couple of brilliant storytelling devices as well... but two of them also have the seeds of problems the audience will have as we see more and more Star Wars.

The droids as storytelling devices 1

R2D2, and droids that bip and squeak, as well as Wookies, are great foils for exposition. You get to talk about what's going on and what you have to do without it seeming cloying, and then you get to respond to their reactions even though the audience doesn't understand them. It is a way of downloading information to the audience without getting tiresome, because the audience is still filling in gaps even during bald exposition. R2D2 and Chewbacca stood in for the audience so that we got the information we needed, in a way that wasn't annoying.

Meanwhile, the droids and wookies were all very technically accomplished, meaning that instead of dropping a load of technobabble (see: star trek) on the audience, we could have a growl, or R2D2 could shove a plug into a panel, beep, whistle, and the alarms would stop ringing. Basically... authorial intrusion in the form of robots and wookies that could do anything the plot required to bloop over in order to get to the next action scene. The conversation between Finn and Rose about how to stop the First Order's tracking device on The Last Jedi is the first time I can remember a technobabble conversation in Star Wars.

Chewbacca and the droids were seriously underused in this film, which means we had things explained with technobabble instead of blipped over. More of that and Star Wars will have the same problem as other Space Adventure Shows.

The droids as storytelling devices 2

C3P0, on the other hand, basically operated like a little golden Greek Chorus, (a group that underlines the scenes' importance and explains the action to the audience, but doesn't take part in the plot) reminding us of what's at risk, how dangerous the thing is they're about to do ("Never tell me the odds") and adding little commentaries that, while annoying, let us see the story through his eyes... in which the events appeared bold, thrilling, and terrifying. The Greek Chorus doesn't factor into the plot, neither did C3PO. He was just there commenting on stuff.

The fact he didn't operate this way is why K2S0 was a character in Rogue One, and fit into the story differently than C3PO does.

So far it's worked, but C3PO barely figured into The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi. Are audience stand-ins and Greek choruses absolutely needed in Star Wars? I'm not sure. But that might have contributed more than we thought to the way the old Star Wars had that epic, massive, sweeping feel to it. Visiting new planets doesn't necessarily accomplish that same feeling (or Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets would have had a different reception), though there are other ways to do it that don't necessarily have to use droids. "Freaking out at everything Finn" did that in The Force Awakens, for example.

Lightsabers are awesome, but... the problem of melee weapons in space sagas:

The four awesomest types of action scenes are (in no particular order):

1. Aerial dogfights
2. Chase scenes (especially car chase scenes)
3. Swordfights
4. Martial arts style hand combat

The rarest of these is sword fights, because they can only plausibly appear in swords and sandals and martial arts films. George Lucas' idea of space wizards with lightsabers is genius because it lets us put sword fighting into the same universe as aerial dogfights -- not just aerial dogfights, but SPACE dogfights! A universe where all four awesome kinds of action scenes can plausibly appear in the same film is pure genius!

The fact is audiences like to see battles come down to hand combat scenes, two heroes going at each other with melee weapons. Seeing armies swoop across a field from an eagle view just isn't as gut-exciting as seeing two warriors punch it out, even though most real battles or wars aren't decided by Winston Churchill and Adolph Hitler getting into a knife fight. Even great battle scenes that are mostly about maneuvers on a battlefield feel more satisfying when they end up close and personal. This is better when it ends with this (Game of Thrones, Battle of the Bastards).

The problem is, in a space epic where everyone's flying around in space ships, it's hard to get people together in a room to swing lightsabers and vibrating bludgeons at each other. There are only so many plot devices that accomplish that, and we're close to having seen them all now. I worry that it'll start to be like the James Bond movies where Bond has (yet again) been captured and the villain explains himself (yet again), puts Bond in (another) slow-acting, easily-escapable death device, and (predictably) walks away: it worked, and then it didn't, and then suddenly it was self-parody. There are only so many times we believe a hero would turn themselves in to the head villain before we start smacking our foreheads and updating the evil overlord list. Why on EARTH (why IN THE GALAXY) would Snoke allow Rey in a room with him and lightsabers, knowing what happened to Palpatine?

Getting Finn in a room with Phasma took a 40 minute subplot that turned out unnecessary. Their fight was too short anyway. Getting Rey in a room with Kylo Ren was a little too easy, but involved inventing a new Force Ability (Force Skype) that we haven't seen before. Neither was a satisfying way of moving the characters from place to place, in my opinion.

What didn't you like about this film?

NO DISNEY! BAD! You get ONE toy craze per trilogy (cf Ewoks-bad enough in their own right), and that was BB8. Don't be greedy.

Snoke's throne room was ridiculous. A red scrim cloth? It looked great burning, though.

Snoke was ridiculous, too. Vamping in a Hugh Hefner robe was NOT what I expected from the buildup he got in The Force Awakens. Yes, I get that you have to make him different from decrepit, creepy, creaky Palpatine, but Snoke was not doing it for me.

Snoke was underused and a letdown after the buildup he got in TFA. So, basically, everything about Snoke was bad. Except when Rey tried to call her lightsaber and Snoke made it hit her in the head. That was awesome. If he'd had a sense of humor like that all through I'd have been down with mischievous, petty evil Snoke. That wasn't what we got though.

Finn didn't have enough to do and wasn't nearly as fun as last time, and the thing he did get to do turned out to be mostly plot wheel-spinning, little but a pretense to get him on the bad guy spaceship.

Poe was an idiot. Likable, but an idiot in this one.

It was the longest Star Wars film, but one whole subplot was mostly unnecessary and a waste of Benicio Del Toro, who is a limited natural resource.



The Big Thing: Pacing

It felt like they were cramming as many "ooh!" scenes as possible in. The final act had enough of them for any two films. I counted three storylines going on at once for most of the last half of the film. Revenge of the Sith and Return of the Jedi gave us jump-cuts between multiple storylines, but this was the most crowded finale yet.

With such hectic pacing, and so many subplots, all the story had time for were the characters' big motivations and desperate needs. We never got to just hang out with them. The situation was a good one to see the characters strain under the pressure, too. Cornered, running out of fuel... that could have shown us (better than it did) what they were each made of. Instead we got a tour to a casino planet, as if this were a James Bond film!

This film lacked little, personal moments like Han offering Rey a job, or Maz giving Rey advice in The Force Awakens. Those moments let us see what Rey wanted, what kind of a person she was, and start liking her. The little jacket bit between Finn and Poe was a touch of color that humanized both men (not to mention the lip bite that launched a thousand 'ships). The reunion between Leia and Han didn't advance the plot, but it let us see who they had become, with so much unsaid between the lines they said. Our old friends were back!

This film never gave the characters time to stretch their legs, and that stuff matters. Star Wars "A New Hope" played like a slow burn, with lots of slow spots where we got to know the characters - little "Let the wookie win" moments don't make the highlight reel, but that's where the quotes come from, that's where we feel like the world they live in is real, and they are real people.  I am starting to like the characters less when all we see of them are their desperate needs, and not How They Normally Are. Show me Finn and Poe playing cards together. Show me Rey and Chewbacca learning to work together piloting the Millennium Falcon.

Most of all: let us spend some time with Chewbacca, Luke and Leia as they grieved Han Solo! He deserved at least that.

That said... being beaten over the head with different characters' desperate needs is better than getting static cutouts bouncing off against each other the way we're getting now with the established characters in the MCU, so...

All in all, I'll take Star Wars over any other franchise going, but the distance between Star Wars and Marvel, the second best extended universe still going, is getting smaller.

Force Skype and New Force Abilities

The scenes where Rey and Kylo could talk to each other from far away were cool in this film. They were. But we're now nine films into the Star Wars universe, plus a TV series or two. How far in do we get before The Force's powers are pretty much set?

I mean,  storytellers have always nerfed or buffed existing powers to serve a story (Superman gets weaker or stronger from storyline to storyline, but he always has super strength), but storytellers aren't inventing NEW powers for Superman anymore, and for Batman or Iron Man to invent a new gadget the story has to build up to it. If you're pulling "Bat-Shark-Repellent" out of your ass, your storytelling is shit.

So how long before we say "No. It helps the story, but inventing more force powers is now bullshit" -- because looking back, Force Skype would have been really handy during the execution of Order 66. Yoda was super strong in the force: if Snoke and Luke could both do it in this film, SURELY he could have used it to save some Jedis from Order 66. Freezing Blaster bolts, as Kylo Ren did in TFA would have been an incredible move for young Anakin or Darth Vader when they needed to intimidate an enemy, and his way of raiding someone's memory would have been much more effective than Palpatine's "I feel your anger" kind of stuff.

In storytelling terms, it made sense for Harry Potter to be learning new spells because he was a student. It also made sense for Luke to be... and we were learning about the force too. But we've seen enough force users now that it strains credibility to think that Yoda couldn't have done Force Skype, or frozen a blaster bolt, if he'd wanted to, and if he could, why didn't he? It would have been handy in a few tight spots where we saw him NOT use those abilities. Why have we never seen a Force Ghost do something other than appear, shimmer, and talk before - then suddenly Yoda called down lightning onto the Jedi Temple as a Force Ghost?

What is the nature of force powers anyway? Are force abilities like X-men powers -- different users have a different "suite" of force powers? This would explain why Rey picked up a few of the skills so easily, and why Kylo Ren is the only Force user we've seen freeze a blaster bolt in the air, even though Yoda and Palpatine were (presumably) both powerful enough to do it. This accounts for the way Force Lightning and Force Choking are dark side powers, and why nobody on the Jedi Council in the prequels could simply look into little Anakin's mind, which would have been handy, and the kind of skill the Jedi Council would probably have recruited for.

Or are force abilities like spells in Harry Potter -- anybody can learn them, but learning them takes work, and there's nothing to say a clever enough force user couldn't develop a new power if s/he worked at it, just like Hermione or Dumbledore could invent a new spell?

Or are force abilities like a Green Lantern ring, where anybody who puts one on (has the sensitivity) gets access to the same set of powers, (accounting for training and natural ability)?

But mostly: how far into the Star Wars universe do we get before we say "Storytellers should no longer make up new Force Abilities that aren't plausible combinations of other abilities we've already seen"? I'm reaching that point now, myself, as cool as the Force Skype scenes were, I don't want The Force to be the site of a bunch of storytelling ass-pulls and deus ex machinas.


Final Word on Super Franchises

Film Franchises, in order of "Knowing What They Are And Delivering What They Promise"

1. John Wick
2. The Fast and the Furious
3. Star Wars
4. Mad Max
5. Marvel Cinematic Universe
6. Pirates of the Caribbean
7. Transformers

Every other movie that ever got a sequel

162. Justice League/DC Extended Universe

Of these, Star Wars is in the toughest spot because new Star Wars movies are competing against two generations of fans' nostalgia of seeing the other films as kids, so expectations are ridiculously high, storytelling is most important, and how do you add more "heart" in postproduction? Justice League has the hardest spot because they've decided they want to compete with Marvel, choosing to play a near-insurmountable game of catch-up, while starting from the back foot because of bad creative choices at the outset. Marvel has done an amazing job of threading the needle between story continuity, fresh looks at superhero films, rotating in new heroes, while warding off superhero film fatigue, showing respect for the heroes and their storylines, and giving the films mass appeal also for non-comic reading fans. The question is how long they can keep all those plates spinning. Every new film where they continue this streak increases the difficulty rating.


Transformers is in the easiest position because they can just throw money at digital effects artists, cast a few stars from foreign markets, and make half a billion in China, and Pirates is in the second easiest position because Johnny Depp likes big paychecks and Jack Sparrow is good at selling pirate zombies, and again, global audiences seem to eat it up. Fast And The Furious looks like it's in a good spot, but more than you think depends on audiences believing in the vision of family that Dominic Toretto talks about, and the cast being believable as a cohesive unit built on loyalty and love. John Wick films could keep being good for as long as Keanu Reeves' body holds up and the fight choreographers have a free hand. But I have a feeling after three or four they'll walk away and leave John Wick as a perfect series of films preserved in amber. I really hope they don't beat it into the ground like Taken did.

But Star Wars is great. Laser swords, space adventure without technobabble, and oh mercy, that music always gets my blood going! They've had more "punch the air awesome" moments per film than any other series, by a far sight, and as long as they keep nailing the casting, people will buy tickets to see laser sword fights. They just will.

Comment moderation is on but I'll let everything pass through except spam; I'm always up to chat, but be patient please: it's grading period.

See you all at Episode 9!


EDIT: Here is a great article that sums up why TLJ had to be the way it was. More later, maybe.

Part 1: Batman v Superman v Zack Snyder

Following up my Star Wars review in January, once again a movie has put a bee in my bonnet, and I'll write about it way after the point. Batman v Superman underwhelmed me, or rather overwhelmed me in the wrong way. Fridge logic was jumping at me way before I had a chance to find a fridge, and that's a problem.

It is weird when people call a film that made over 800 million worldwide a failure, but that 28% Fresh rate on the Tomatometer stings. The yardstick for cinematic universe launchpads, Avengers, outdid it in box office (780 mill to 1519 mill worldwide), and acclaim (28% to 92% Fresh on the Tomatometer - all figures at time of writing), and achieved that with a cast of characters not nearly as well-known and iconic as Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. In fact, Marvel is eating DC's lunch even without access to many fan favorites like Wolverine, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four and Deadpool (and Spider-man, when Avengers came out), because other studios had those film rights. They beat Superman and Batman with their hands tied behind their backs. Soundly. Bottom line: Batman V Superman is a much weaker launchpad for fifteen years of related tentpoles than Avengers was.

However, before I am dismissed as a hater, and before I take a crap on Superman's lawn, I want to be clear about this:

I was primed to love this film. I wanted to love it. I maximized my chance of loving it: I saw it as early as I could, and avoided reading reviews, so my take would be unsullied by other opinions. I’ve always been a DC guy, and would have loved to be looking forward to all DCEU's phases, from now until the reboot. All my biases worked in this film’s favor. But then, I had to watch the actual movie.

From here, expect Spoilers. A lot of them. So if you plan to see it yet… move along.


Here is The Guardian's very funny "Everything Wrong with Batman v Superman."


There were things I liked about this film, in case three paragraphs ago isn't enough to show I'm not some kneejerk, butthurt nerd, or bandwagon pot-shot-taker.

• Only Christian Bale is a better film Batman so far than Ben Affleck
• Only Michael Keaton is a better film Bruce Wayne so far than Ben Affleck. 
• Other than swinging Superman around like a wrecking ball, this Batman's combat scenes were the best we've seen in film. Batfleck is also closest to the Batman we saw in The Animated Series, the amazing 90s cartoon, which might be the definitive non-comic Batman treatment so far. Christian Bale's Batman was a ridiculously tough act to follow, and Chuckie Sullivan pulled it off. Zack Snyder gets what's cool about Batman... and let's be real: this is a Batman story.
• Jeremy Irons' Alfred is also great, though he had too little screen time and it'll be hard to supplant Michael Caine as the best Alfred we've seen. 
• Wonder Woman looks great so far 
• Her music and her entrance were completely fist-punching-the-air awesome. Best twelve seconds of the film. 
• If he had been written better, I would have said we have an extremely interesting, and definitely very original Lex Luthor, which is a very good thing in a villain. But I have reservations more to do with his writers and director than the performance itself. 
• I even think Henry Cavill's Superman is still salvageable, but probably not while Zack Snyder is directing.

On to the problems, the biggest first:

1. Zack Snyder and His Writing Team Does Not Understand How to Make Superman Interesting, Who Likes Superman, What Kind Of Story Superman Stories Are, Why We Like That Kind of Story and just, basically, Superman.

I'm a Superman guy from way back. Watched every episode of Smallville, many with my Dad, who is also a Superman guy. I know Superman's dramatic limitations: he's just too powerful. Rooting for the guy who punches harder than anyone else is like rooting for gravity. The only way to make him interesting again is to put something on the line outside of the realm of raw power.

Really good Superman stories put the idea of Superman, his motivations and principles, into conflict. Christopher Nolan's first two Batman films were great examples of raising the personal stakes beyond mere punch-ups. The choices Batman made in dealing with Joker, Two-Face and Ra's Al Ghul tested the very ideas on which Bruce Wayne based his Batman. Those choices mattered. To make Superman interesting again the meaning of Superman has to be tested in the choices he makes -not just by things people say about him (of which there's a lot here). In two films so far, Superman made a surprisingly small number of choices: most of the time he just kind of watches, broods, and then reacts to events.

Here's an actual choice:


Other than that moment, for two whole films now, here are the times Superman takes initiative: 1. Saving the bus of kids even though his father told him not to show his powers. 2. Wanting to write a story about Batman for the Daily Planet. 3. Finding Batman and telling him to stop Batmanning! I think that's it. The only other choice he makes is "Should I keep being a hero, or not?" ...which is basically masturbation in a film that is a superhero movie. In fact, all that existential fuzz reminds me of a different hero than Superman.

The comic book movie Zack Snyder did before Man Of Steel was Watchmen, which features another all-powerful blue hero, Dr. Manhattan. Dr. Manhattan started out human, and got turned into a matter-manipulating demigod in a lab accident. Once he becomes capable of seeing protons, he slowly disengages from humanity, and eventually leaves Earth because he can't relate to us anymore, and likes atoms better than humans anyway.



"Should I Superman or not?" seems more like Dr. Manhattan than the Superman I know. So does the entire public discussion of/backlash against Superman (which also shows up in The Dark Knight Returns). However, the Superman I know does not lose his connection to humanity: he dives into it. A job, a secret identity, a girlfriend, visits to Smallville for Thanksgiving. His entire motivation to be a hero springs from his effort to connect with humanity, which is why the scenes where Martha Kent says, "You don't owe the world anything" ring wildly false. That's the exact opposite of Superman's entire heroic makeup. The best thing about Superman is how he embraces his adopted planet, and the best scenes in Man of Steel and this film were the ones where we see his connection with humanity: the scenes with his parents. The reaction when Zod threatens his mother in Man of Steel is one of the realest moments in the film. (It happens just before the famous The Smallville Esso/7-11 Product Placement Throwdown [brought to you by IHOP] - great scene!)

There's stuff you can change about a hero, and stuff you can't, or they won't be recognizable anymore. Take away the red underpants. Whatever. Bat-nipples... oookayyy. But Batman doesn't kill, and his parents were murdered. Spider-man's Uncle Ben dies. And Superman is good for the sake of being good because of his upbringing. That's the nature of the character. If you give Daredevil back his sight, or take him out of Hell's Kitchen, he's no longer the Daredevil we know. If Captain America starts cussing like Negan on The Walking Dead, he's not Captain America anymore. If Superman is a petty jerk who can be provoked by a mug of beer, who considers abandoning humanity because they graffiti'd his statue... then Lex Luthor is in the right, Superman is too alien to be trusted with all his power, and Batman should kill him. The innate decency is an inextricable part of Superman. It is the whole reason Batman should withhold his killing blow. Because Zack Snyder goes a different direction, he has to ass-pull the dumbest contrivance in comic movie history to justify why Batman didn't finish things off right there.

Source Dumb. dumb dumb dumb.

Without his moral compass shining bright, the reversal where Batman decides not to kill Superman falls from flat to ridiculous.

Now, who likes Superman? Kids like Superman. If you ask 100 five-year-olds to invent a superhero, 96 of them will invent a hero that is basically Superman and 4 will invent a Power Ranger, or a princess-robot-dinosaur-pony version of them. To grown-ups, Superman is kind of dorky and dramatically inert, because he's too powerful, and inevitability is no fun to watch, but to kids, that's awesome, because kids often feel powerless and wish they could fly, too. It makes absolutely no sense to make a Superman story that kids won't be able to enjoy, because that's his main demographic! A kid gets SO excited watching a Superman story, because the whole story is a build-up to the moment when The Super-Punch flattens that bad guy! Yay super-punch! Kids don't care if inevitability is less dramatic, because Super-Punch, daddy!

The other people who like Superman like him for childlike reasons: because sometimes it's fun to slip back into that innocence where good guys are good guys and bad guys get super-punches. We get tired of pyrrhic, morally ambiguous or bittersweet victories after a while. I didn't buy superhero film tickets to have difficult thoughts: I can get those anywhere! Ghost Pa Kent's story about how saving the farm drowned the Lang's horses violates the basic tenet of the moral universe in which Superman exists, and has always existed: one where good guys can win, because that's why we go see movies, gosh darn it! In a moral universe where every act of heroism might have a horrific consequence (like drowning horses), Superman's only responsible choice is to leave the planet. Goodbye, story. Sometimes I don't want a cynical Watchmen ending, where Dr. Manhattan looks at the Ozymandias and Nite Owl and says "Maybe we made the world a little less shitty at this horrific cost... but maybe not! Maybe this was just a bunch of really awful stuff that happened," and then abandons earth and humans to their own shittiness. Sometimes I want to escape, and see the bad guy get flattened with a super-punch, OK? Sue me. I know that the Christopher Reeve Superman cannot exist in a 2016 film, but there must be a way to make a Superman that is suitable for 2016, but is still recognizably Superman. Marvel has amply demonstrated it's possible to make a superhero film kids and adults can enjoy.

Different heroes are different types of stories. Iron Man is a story of redemption (from a wrecked personal life) through heroism. Captain America is a story about keeping moral clarity in a world full of grey areas. Daredevil explores the gap between law and justice. Batman is everyman reaching full human potential: we love stories like that: that's Rocky, Luke Skywalker, and Katniss Everdeen. It's The Karate Kid and Kung Fu Panda and the Last Girl in every horror movie. But Superman is not the story of surpassing limitations: Superman has no limitations. Superman takes the limitless -- the demigod -- and brings him down to us, and the things that humanize Superman make him interesting. That is the kind of story Superman is, and it's why we like him more than Martian Manhunter. He grew up on a farm in Kansas. He gets reamed out by his editor and given crap assignments at The Daily Planet. "Haha. Even Superman has deadlines and a ball-busting boss," makes us feel better about our crap days. It's no wonder the scenes with Ma and Pa Kent were the best parts of Man of Steel: as I said above, they are his strongest tether to humanity. And nothing is more fun in a Superman story than the contrivances he must go through to maintain his secret identity: dealing with Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane, hiding his secret identity from them in the 1978 film were some of the best parts of the movie. That punching hard stuff? Superman's got that covered. But when Lois Lane is trying to trick Clark into taking his glasses off... that's where the fun of Superman is, because now the ultimate person-without-any-limitations, has to act within constraints.



Zack Snyder leaves all that potential for fun on the table. He scurries past it with eyes averted like the kid who snuck an extra dessert. Jimmy Olsen dies in the first scene of BvS, and Lois has always known he's Clark Kent. In the film's last scene, Clark Kent is declared dead in the newspaper (in the Superman's death saga, Kent was declared missing, not dead). Without Clark or Jimmy, and with Lois being in on it, Superman's entire fun side is wasted, and all that remains is the overpowered, inevitable super-punching bore.

TL:DR: Zack Snyder doesn't understand anything about Superman or why anybody likes him, and doesn't seem to care, either.

EDIT: Turns out his writer, David Goyer, is equally myopic on Superheroes who aren't anti-heroes. This article corroborates a lot of what I intuited here. Nice!


More in Part 2!

Part 2: Batman v Superman v Just Making a Two Hour Trailer

Continued from part 1.

2. Zack Snyder's Best Talent Ruined This Movie

What are Zack Snyder's two best talents? He can make a trailer that stops the world. He is so so good at making action look really good. So darn good. The problem is, entire sequences of the film, and whole scenes, seemed designed more to provide setup for some killer snip that went into the trailer, than for actually being part of a scene that was good as an effective scene. The dream sequence with Trenchcoat Batman. The crayon "You let your family die" on a newspaper clipping (which, misleadingly, resembled the scrawl on Robin's empty uniform in the Batcave... seeming to reference a Joker who did not appear in the film). "The red capes are coming" (a line which didn't even make sense in the context of the scene) "The oldest lie in America is that power can be innocent" (good line, but untrue: it's easier to find records of the idea that the price of liberty is constant vigilance). The trailer-bait took me out of the movie, and frankly, it's hard to pull me out of a movie. I try to get carried away.

The films that got Zack Snyder this job were recreations of Watchmen and 300, which worked exactly insofar as they hewed closely to the original graphic novels. Dawn of the Dead was also a very good remake: it might be my favorite zombie movie. When he takes a story that is already laid out for him, and his only task is to make it look absolutely great, he completely nails it. Ask him to create a believable reality and set a story within it, and you get Sucker Punch.

Read that Critics Consensus summary twice.

Watch the movie again, with an eye for this: every scene in the first half of the movie scans the way you tell a joke: with a setup, and then a punchline. The punchline is either a zinger of a cool line (trailer bait), or a revelation of new information (clumsy plot advancement). Again and again and again. Many of the lines work, and the some reveals make you go "ooh!" ... but that isn't enough to comprise a good scene, and a story with great characters like Batman and Superman needs a good scene writer.

UPDATE: Here is a nice video I found after writing this, that hits exactly on the nose what I'm trying to say here.
 

What Snyder is doing would probably work on a comic page: the Walking Dead comics I'm reading also have a lot of scenes that seem written as build-ups to a good line or a reveal, but what works on a page doesn't work in film. I just watched Netflix's Daredevil, Season 2, with scenes full of revelations, surprises, and characters at plausible and interesting cross-purposes, with reversals that make sense. Seeing all that great writing just underscored how cheesy the few exchanges between Batman and Superman were.


Terse cheesy tough talk out of an 80s movie is a huge waste of two actors who, I think, could deliver very interesting performances of the characters. But not with Zack Snyder directing them like a movie trailer crossed with an MTV video.

And when he DOES try to write an actual exchange between them...



 It's hilarious. For all the wrong reasons.

I am incapable of watching a movie without noticing the music. Not that it was possible not to notice the music in this one. The entire score here also seemed made for a two-minute trailer. When the action was flying, those dramatic close-ups and slow-motion and ponderous music stuff made it feel like something Important was happening... but that portentious music never let up, to the point that everything was getting "Hey! Pay attention! This is profound!" treatment. As any student studying from a used textbook knows, when everything is underlined, nothing stands out anymore. The whole movie comes off as relentless and exhausting.

What I wouldn't have given for one clever, quiet scene as witty as this one, just for a break from Hans Zimmer launching BWAAMs at me.

One more thing about the music: when Hans Zimmer's overbearing score wasn't playing, for the background music in the mall where Lois got kidnapped, and for Lex Luthor's party, the music was done by a spoof lounge singer called Richard Cheese. Yes. A singer named Dick Cheese provided two songs for the Batman v Superman film. Now, the first time Dick Cheese worked with Zack Snyder it was in Dawn Of The Dead, where the song "Down With The Sickness" was the perfect meltdown song for a montage of claustrophobic people slowly going mad, while the song slowly disintegrated into f-bombs. These are substandard versions of jazz classics: even these would have been a step up. And a character even quotes one of them while threatening Martha Kent, as if they have thematic importance. If Zack Snyder is putting his buddies' crappy songs into the soundtrack, and nobody higher up put the kibosh on his bad choices, not only is Zack Snyder completely the wrong person for this job, but I'm beginning to doubt the whole extended universe's creative oversight. You'd think they'd have learned their lesson after giving Superman maybe a son in Superman Returns. This bodes very ill for the DC Expanded Universe.

Ben Affleck is an actor who is better or worse depending on what kind of writing he is working with. The only case more extreme is Nicholas Cage. So let's get the man an effing writer, and a director who understands how to do a scene, please!

PLEASE find a better show-runner for the DC Expanded Universe. Superman and Batman deserve it! I suggest Brad Bird, but I'm open to other ideas.


Conclusion in part 3 (yes, I get worked up about this)

Part 3: Batman v Superman v Prospects for A Successful Expanded Universe

Final installment: continued from part 1 - Zack Snyder vs. Superman, and part 2, Batman Vs. the Two Hour Trailer..

3. Grim and Dour Doesn't Work For Most Superheroes...

Everybody writing a script that breaks the fourth wall, because Deadpool made a lot of money, is going to discover soon that Deadpool didn't make a ton of money because he broke the fourth wall. It made a ton of money because it was exactly the kind of movie a Deadpool movie should be. It was as perfect a fit for that character as Christopher Nolan's films were for Batman. When other heroes who are not Deadpool try to be in a Deadpool movie, they will fail. If you tried to give Spider-man the same treatment Daredevil is getting on Netflix, it would be a train wreck and everyone would hate it.

Grim and dour works with a few superheroes. Batman. A nice, gritty Daredevil film could be really good, though unnecessary with the netflix series on. Ditto for The Punisher, if it's allowed to have an R rating. A gritty Wolverine could be awesome, depending on who plays him. The television Green Arrow is really working. Other superheroes will never fit into that tone. Thor is just too silly. Nobody wants to see a The Flash do an Oldboy-ish hammer fight scene. But for Daredevil, it's completely awesome. Warner had a ton of success, and made a ton of money, and got a ton of acclaim, for those bleak and gloomy and dour Dark Knight films. Because that's the kind of character Batman is. But Superman just isn't, and trying to play him that way was ill-advised at best, and a fatal mistake at worst. A grim Flash won't make it. I'm not sure if Wonder Woman will, but an Aquaman film that isn't even fun will be a really tough sell, because Aquaman's a tough sell to begin with. As Avengers 1 was the proof of concept for "phases," DC's film launching phase one cannot avoid comparisons with Avengers, and people came out of Avengers wanting to watch nine more films like that, thinking they'd probably be entertaining enough, because the actors were fun and watchable enough to fill in the scenes between the action set pieces. Nobody came out of BvS thinking it'd sure be awesome to endure eighteen to twenty more hours of loud, dour, and dumb.

You can make a movie for adults about Batman, because adults get the "he's only human" thing and appreciate the idea of human ability overcoming. Little boys like Superman, because nobody can tell him what to do, but he helps people anyway. To adults, Superman is kind of goofy, and adults are smart enough to recognize that Superman is too powerful, and sucks the drama out of a battle. A Superman aimed at adults is never quite going to work.

...And It's a Terrible Choice in the Long Term

But by making a Superman that doesn't appeal to kids, that I'd hesitate to bring my son to see, Warner Brothers is making a really, really stupid blunder. First, because that's not how Superman works, and they're turning their back on Superman's core demographic, and second, because kids today are the nerds of the future, and frankly, kids are way more loyal than nerds. Nerds are loyal to their characters, but they also have a very clear and specific idea of how their heroes should be portrayed on screen, and if you venture too far from that, they'll abandon you in the time it takes to record a butthurt youtube review. It is really really hard to build up goodwill among nerds (in such a way that general audiences will see your film too), and it is really easy to squander that goodwill. Compare that to kids, who, if you impress them, will beg their parents to bring them out to see the sequel in IMAX 3D, and want the entire set of toys and related merchandise for Christmas, and the halloween costume, and the underpants, and the coloring book, and the birthday cake, and then all that stuff again but slightly different when the sequel comes out.

Yeah, saying "Marvel is fun, DC is dark" is clearly a method of differentiating the two hero brands, and differentiation is good, I guess. But right now, the nerds of the future, with all their future disposable nerd income and future fierce nerd loyalty to their favorite nerd characters... are running around in Iron Masks and Hulk fists and Spider-man t-shirts and swinging Mjolnir hammers and Captain America shields, just like today's adult nerds ran around with toy lightsabers and Darth Vader masks and Superman capes. DC is not just leaving all that money on the table but surrendering it and future dollars to Marvel, by saying they're going to make superhero films for grown-ups. The farther you follow down the timeline, the worse an idea this is.

4. Setting Up an Entire Expanded Universe In One Film Is Simply Asking the Film to Do Too Much

This film introduced a new Batman, introduced him to Superman, required them to fight AND THEN become allies, introduced a new Lex Luthor, developed three antagonists for Superman - Batman, Lex, and Doomsday, as well as a new ally, Wonder Woman, while consolidating the universe's tone and introducing three new superheroes for future films, and giving Batman a reason to muster the Justice League while killing Superman. No wonder the film was bloated as anything: they gave it way, way, way too much to do. They crammed three or four films' worth of world-building and explaining and plotting into a single film.

Is Marvel's "Phase One" the only way to set up a cinematic universe? It's hard to say. But Marvel used four films -- Iron Mans 1 and 2, Thor and Captain America, to set up The Avengers. Four films of world building and character introductions, so that when Avengers came along, we could enjoy the ride instead of having to sit through reams of exposition. Particularly for characters like Thor, whose origins are kind of goofy, it helped not to have to explain that in the middle of setting up another car chase. Batman and Superman didn't need too much background explanation -- Superman already had his origin story and everybody knows Batman -- but does the casual fan care enough about Aquaman anyway? Or Cyborg? Letting Wonder Woman click through their clips was a clumsy and dumb way to tease future movies. That's the kind of stuff Marvel would have put in a post-credits stinger or a DVD easter egg.

Avengers knew they had something good when Iron Man did well, and Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark left everybody wanting more. Only when Iron Man was a smash did they know they could swing for the fences with Avengers. Who is the insanely watchable sparkplug that will keep Justice League team scenes popping? There'd better be one, because a lot of people only go to films that give them characters they actually want to hang out with. From what I've seen so far, Superman's not that guy.

If I were in charge of the DC universe, there would have been a Batman solo film before BvS to establish Batman. Maybe also either a Wonder Woman or Flash film. There would have been a Batman vs. Superman film where they slugged it out, and gained each others' trust. THEN there would have been a Dawn of Justice film where they meet Wonder Woman, and Lex Luthor starts trying to lead a public backlash against superheroes. Maybe Flash or Green Lantern is the surprise reveal when Doomsday attacks instead of Wonder Woman. IF or AFTER fans have bought into the idea of a justice league film series, maybe Green Lantern (who has SO much backstory about the Green Lantern Corps to cover he's a difficult hero to put on film) gets a film, and if we can find someone who is as fun to watch as Robert Downey Jr. to play The Flash and/or Green Lantern, and send sparks around the room to drive Batfleck nuts the way Iron Man antagonizes Captain America... then we've got the basis for a nice, fun string of films I'd pay money to see. If the Batman solo film is completely huge, then Flash's film goes before BvS instead of after, or between BvS and Dawn of Justice.


Now, I’ll just check off the complaints I’ve read in other places, but I definitely agree with.

• First half was fragmented and nonsensical
• Dream sequences didn’t serve the story in any way (I hear it hints at sequels... I don't care. Sequel-hints are only allowed if they also advance this story.)
• Lex Luthor’s motivation was never made clear
• Lex Luthor’s entire exploding wheelchair subplot was extraneous: seeing Metropolis in ruins was already plenty motivation for Bruce Wayne to go after Supes. Lex could have vanished from the first half of the movie, and the movie would have been shorter, but not poorer. He could have vanished from the second half and only Doomsday's appearance wouldn't have happened. Which would have been OK, because it's Batman v Superman, not Batman v Superman v Doomsday.
• Lex Luthor is dumb. Using special bullets that can only be traced to Luthercorp in a move to set up Superman, and then using a special fancy wheelchair that could surely also be traced to him, in his bomb plan, seems to me like a detective skills test for Batman. Which Batman failed.
• Batman, The World’s Greatest Detective, wouldn't have failed that test. He'd have figured out what Luthor was up to faster than Adam West’s batman figuring out one of The Riddler’s riddles by playing word association with Burt Ward. This is the one big hole in the portrayal of Batman in this film: he's a meathead.
• The writing on the returned insurance checks resembled the writing on Robin’s costume, which seemed like a connection in the trailer, but wasn’t. I hate misleading trailers. Really hate them.
• Why did Lois Lane throw the spear in a pool?
• How did Lois Lane know she had to retrieve the spear...which she had just thrown into the pool?
• Why would J Jonah Jameson (just kidding I know it was Perry White) refuse Lois Lane a helicopter for a story, but give it to her when she said it was NOT for a story?
• Why could Batman find Martha Kent, but Superman couldn’t? Especially when he could locate Lois in half the time it takes to fall off a building.
• When did Lex Luthor figure out Superman was Clark Kent, in order to kidnap his mom?
• Why does Superman waste 20 seconds smooching Lois Lane while Batman and Wonder Woman are in mortal peril from Doomsday?
• Many of the scenes in the first half of the film could have been re-edited in any order without changing the movie significantly.
• Could teasing the upcoming justice league movies have been more clumsy and heavy-handed (click click click)?
• Why didn’t Superman give the Kryptonite spear to Wonder Woman, who doesn’t get killed by Kryptonite?
• Why didn’t Batman make something deadlier and easier to handle than a spear out of the kryptonite? Like a brass knuckles knife? Or some bullets?
• Why did Lex Luthor think making an unstoppable death monster would be a good idea in any way whatsoever? A smart Lex Luthor would have gotten control of that ship and then hidden it, and learned every secret of Kryptonian tech he could from it.
• If Batman had killed Superman, could Wonder Woman and Batman have beaten Doomsday on their own, and if not, how fucked would the entire planet have been? Lex is way too reckless here to pass as the smartest human alive.
• Nobody in America says that power can be innocent, or has for long enough that it is the oldest lie in America. Nobody ever says that. Except Lex Luthor, in order to say it is a lie. Zack Snyder or his writer is just writing whatever shit comes into his head.
• A plot as clumsy, and easy to connect back to Luthor, as kidnapping Martha Kent? The Lex Luthors I love are way more subtle than obvious tricks like this and the exploding wheelchair.
• Lex Luthor is more frightening if he is more clearly in control of his faculties, more calculating, in my opinion. He'd scare me more if he were together enough to actually deliver a 40 second speech at a gala in his honor.
• How is it that Superman seems to be finding out just now about the existence of Batman, who appears to have been doing his thing for a long time?
• Batman is killing people. Nobody could have survived a few of those explosions.
• What about Superman and his behavior (vanishing, sulking, brooding, wrecking entire city blocks) would make people want to build a giant statue of him after the people looking for him destroyed a whole downtown, instead of, say, a memorial to the thousands of people killed in the battle of Metropolis? That Superman allowed a statue of himself like that to go up and overshadow the dead, explains to me why many people don't like him.
• Seriously, Superman didn’t even clean up the Kryptonian ships he smashed? No wonder there’s a public backlash against him.
• This article is on the mark as to how badly the film treated its women.
• The ways they referenced The Dark Knight Returns did not have enough respect for that piece of comic history. Bruce Wayne tosses off the line "We've always been criminals" as a throwaway rather than as the pivotal moment of the end of the age of costumed heroes. There is no context for the lines he says to Superman about "the world only makes sense if you force it to"... many of the tricks he used to fight Superman were from that series as well, but Zack Snyder just didn't demonstrate that he understood what made that story so good, when he copped its ideas.

We are having some serious fridge logic issues here. You know, as well as those fundamental ones. I’m even going to go as far as to say George-Lucas-misreading-Star-Wars-fans-level problems, where he misunderstands what these heroes are about so badly that fans are going to turn on him.

I've predicted before, and I haven't seen anything to change my mind yet, that I still think when the world gets sick of comic book movies, DC is going to catch the backlash, the same way DiCaprio caught the Titanic backlash, but Kate Winslet didn't. When fans abandon superhero films en masse, it still looks like DC will take the biggest hit. And that'll be a shame, because Batman looks great on film, and Wonder Woman deserves better, and little kids around the world deserve there to be awesome Superman films being made every few years.

OK. It's all out of my system now. Carry on as you were, fellow fans!

Kingsman, the Preposterawesome Scale, and The Welcome Return of Cufflink Lasers

I just watched Kingsman: The Secret Service, the film responsible for the surge in popularity of double-breasted suits in Korea (it was HUGE here).

I enjoyed it a lot. It's everything you want a silly escapist spy film to be (though with more F-words than the 007 franchise led us to expect). A movie like this will always have a chance of doing well, because as James Bond, and every major male film star of the last century except Bruce Willis shows us, people look awesome when they do awesome things in formal wear. (Clickbait list: the 30 best suits in film).

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Kingsman is also a great demonstration of what I call the preposterawesome scale.

The principle of the preposterawesome scale is similar to How I Met Your Mother's "Hot/Crazy Scale," as explained by Barney Stinson in his send-up of an incorrigible ladies' man.



Basically, the positive quality of "hot" must outweigh the negative quality of "crazy" when Barney calculates if he wants to date someone. Disclaimer: Barney is a satire, and also a character in a sitcom, and I don't recommend actually thinking of dating prospects in such a dehumanizing, reductive way (sorry, THIS GUY, you're doing it wrong).

But in evaluating an action movie that is being consumed for entertainment, it's a little more OK to be reductive. And my own theory about silly and unbelievable things in movies is the preposterawesome line. Basically, the more preposterous a thing is, the more awesome it has to be, for viewers to forgive the silliness.

Star Wars's laser swords and the idea of monks with telekinetic powers defending the galaxy from villains who build moon-sized ships with planet destructo-beams is forgivable, because light sabers are awesome and so are Jedis and space ship dogfights.

We (or at least, enough of us) forgive the ridiculous idea of giant robots from space that transform into vehicles and then transform back into giant robots carrying huge laser cannons... but who still prefer to beat the hell out of each other with fists and blades and grappling holds, because because giant robots grappling and punching and swordfighting is awesome! 

And of course the best way to steal expensive goods is with a fleet of supercars going at high speed. We went to seven movies about that, and counting (I think the Fast Furious brand might be the next James Bond -- if they manage the brand right, the well might never run dry) because car chases are awesome! Lightsabers are awesome. Neo dodging bullets is awesome, and the Agents are awesome, too. Liam Neeson romping through Europe killing people is awesome. Everything is awesome!



James Bond spent four decades -- from the 60s to the 90s, above the preposterawesome threshold. There are simple reasons for that. Take 18-35 year old men, whose tastes marketers care about more than any other, for some reason, and ask them to brainstorm all the awesome stuff they want to see in a movie, and you'd come out with the elements of a James Bond film. "Uh... spy stuff. Yeah. Spy tech is cool." "Yeah. And like, sweet sweet cars with like, lasers and missiles in them" "Oh yeah. That's awesome. And exotic places." "Yeah. Exotic places FULL of hot women." "Easy hot women." "I thought that went without saying. Hurr durr." So... when Q introduced the newest Aston Martin that turned into a spy satellite and cooked omelettes and washed your cat in the back seat while jetting out oil slicks at baddie cars, and was invisible and also actually an airplane, we loved it, because that's just plain awesome.

The preposterawesome scale is also why Austin Powers almost killed the James Bond franchise -- by doing the loving satire they did, they also sharply underlined just how preposterous James Bond films were from Sean Connery to Pierce Brosnan, and at the same time digital effects sucked a lot of wonder out of special effects, because instead of going "Wow! An invisible car!" We went, "meh. It's all digital these days." The preposterous rating went up, the awesome rating went down, and suddenly Pearce Brosnan style 007 films were below the preposterawesome line. Jason Bourne showed them a way out of the woods: finding the awesome in believability and good writing and visceral action and good acting rather than cool cars and exploding pencaps, but without that, Austin Powers would have been the satire that killed the franchise.

And since Jason Bourne, the preposterous end of the preposterawesome scale was dominated by superhero films and the occasional Mission Impossible sequel. Which is great if you like tights.

and who doesn't?
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But as MacGuffins in superhero movies (I'm looking at you, Marvel) keep getting loopier and loopier  (gems that make The One Ring look like a paper airplane have been the power items driving the plots of Thor 2, Avengers 1, and Guardians of the Galaxy. This is what they're building up to. This.



Expect the remaining Infinity Gems to appear in future Marvel universe films, before Thanos, who looks like this, tries to collect them all in future Avengers sequels and end-credit teasers. Credit to Marvel for pushing back the line of what is too ridiculous for live action films slowly enough that nobody noticed that suddenly power scepters and infinity gems were part of a superhero's day's work.

Whether or not superheroes are your taste though, it's fun to see Kingsman, where the evil megalomaniac is regular old human being, with a regular old doomsday device that isn't a jewel that comes from comic books, eventually to be wielded by a twelve foot tall alien with grey skin. It has been long enough since Austin Powers that we are allowed to make silly spy films again without people saying "Oh, come on!" and I'm glad about that, as much as I enjoyed Daniel Craig's 007.

Kingsman delivers, and that's the best thing I can say about it. It is highly preposterous, but also highly awesome, and I am glad to have double breasted suits and battle umbrellas and cufflink lasers and microchips and secret underground fortresses full of henchmen and recipes for martinis back on the preposterous end of the preposterawesome scale again, rather than just charismatic actors wearing silly hats. So... watch Kingsman. It's fun.

Side note: in keeping with the preposterawesome line, I suppose you could also create the funnyffensive line for jokes -- people are a lot more forgiving of offensive jokes if they're actually funny (and if the comedian shows they're not on the side of the assholes). You are welcome to leave a comment and suggest other areas where thresholds like the preposterawesome and the crazy/hot line exist.

Ten Things About The Last Godfather: An Expat in Korea's Movie Review

So, after ripping director Shim Hyung-rae's last major feature-film, D-Wars, or Dragon Wars, on my blog, and taking another shot this week, it's fair to give him a shot at redemption.

Disclosure: I didn't pay for these tickets: I got them through Cynthia, the head don of Nanoomi.net. She's awesome. She has a small face.

Now, Shim Hyung-rae cut his teeth in the comedy genre, which might partly explain why D-Wars was so bad. Maybe. Then again, if D-wars becomes a cult classic - a Plan 9 from Outer Space with high production values, maybe it deserves it, in the "so bad it's good" way. never been a fan of that myself.  Wait  minute... I like zombie movies.  Sure I am! - but usually not with comedies.

So Mr. Shim has made "The Last Godfather" - a gangster flick about Harvey Keitel doing an impression of Marlon Brando's Vito Corleone trying to hand his mob family over to a fat, Korean version of Lloyd Christmas.

(image source)

The character is named Yonggu, who was a popular comical character on Korean television back when people my age were kids.  That, of course, will be lost on non-Korean audiences -- think of him as Korea's Mr. Bean.  Broad, physical comedy, kind of dumb - the premise of this movie, to Koreans, would be about like a movie called "Mr. Bean Joins the Mafia" to Brits (but in a language other than English, because The Last Godfather isn't in the native language of most of Yonggu's fans).

Here's Yonggu in a TV commercial, from back when he was popular in Korea, I guess.

I watched Dragon Wars, and as I said, it kinda sucked.  Frankly, it was a great method of expectation management: my expectations were about as low as they are when I head into a Nicolas Cage movie I've heard nothing about (funny video about that).

Rather than give you a full-on 4000 word prose-down, as I am wont to do, here are ten things about Shim Hyung-rae's The Last Godfather.  Spoilers ahead.

1. It's not a movie for people like me  I wasn't the movie's main audience.  If you're a fan of Gangster movies by way of Goodfellas, The Godfather, and Donnie Brasco, don't see this movie.  If you're a fan of screwball comedies, and like stuff like stinky feet jokes, some bits about baseball bats, and people doing funny walks; if you believe bird noises is a perfectly good sound effect for demonstrating just how hard somebody got hit on the head, you might like this movie. More on the movie's audience later.

2. It's not two hours of kimcheerleading  To the movie's, and Mr. Shim's credit, this movie didn't come across at all as another attempt to win the world over to Korean culture.  It wasn't draped in a Korean flag the way Dragon Wars was, Arirang didn't play at the end, nor did a paragraph about how great Mr. Shim is (as did at the end of D-wars, in Korea) and that's good: the naked ambition of D-Wars, given how bad as it was, raised it from simply a poor movie to a vainglorious farce.  Yeah, the Wonder Girls appear in one scene of this film, but the whole movie doesn't come across as a miscalculated attempt to win the world (and especially america) over to Korean culture.  They weren't sneaking Janggu's into scenes for the sake of promoting "Brand Korea:" Mr. Shim is just trying to make a movie; not to promote Korea to us under the guise of presenting us with a movie.

3. Good thing it isn't, because that would reflect poorly on Korea It's a good thing this movie wasn't another attempt to introduce Korea and Korean culture to the world, because the only Korean character in the movie was a buffoon of the highest order, and if he were presented as a representative of the culture, it would have been extremely insulting and trivializing to Korea; it would also have shattered the suspension of disbelief required to believe a guy could grow to the age of "Yonggu" and still be so dumb and unreflective.  It's good the movie didn't go there.

4. There're a lot of cliches, stereotypes and silliness to wade through The best way to enjoy this movie is by doing these two things:  1. count the cliches - particularly those common to gangster movies (fugeddaboutit; people carrying baguettes in paper grocery bags; tommy guns; pinstripe suits and wide-brimmed hats; very fat people with Italian accents; New York Italian stereotypes).  and slapstick comedy tropes  (things falling on people's heads, farts, round cartoon bombs with sparking fuses, people who get blown up appearing in the next scene with their clothes and faces blackened, but no injuries to their bodies, fat people using belly bumps during fights).  2.  Imagine it's animated by Warner Brothers (the people who did Bugs Bunny, Roadrunner, Daffy Duck et. al.) - the way the action is done and the gags are delivered is more reminiscent of these cartoons, or the old silent films, than the kind of comedy you see in movies today.  Or imagine it in black and white: during one of the closing scenes, Mr. Shim is seen wearing short pants and oversized shoes, carrying suitcases in a side-to-side walk that's reminiscent of the little tramp.  Taken as an homage to the little tramp and his kind, the movie makes a little more sense.
(source)

5. Spot the Expat Easter Eggs There are a few easter eggs (maybe not intentionally put in, but there nonetheless) that expats living in Korea would appreciate: 1. there's a ddongchim, which anyone who's taught kids in Korea (or reads my blog) will recognize. 2. The Wonder Girls show up, performing in a building that, from the outside, seems like it generally stages more, um, adult shows.  3. There's a cute segment that will bring a smile to the face of anyone who's had a conversation with one of their Kimcheerleading friends about how Koreans invented everything before anybody else (for examples of this phenomenon: sarcastic; in earnest, and another) -- "Yonggu" (Shim Hyung-rae's character) accidentally invents the beehive hairstyle, the miniskirt, and the Big Mac in a single afternoon.  Maybe he's Forrest Gump rather than Lloyd Christmas.  [Update: I forgot one: I smiled during the dinner scene, and thought of Mr. Pizza's mayonnaise, honey-mustard, sweet-potato, shrimp tempura and ketchup pizzas, when Yonggu ruined his pizza slice with about a pint of ketchup, to the disgust of the Italians at the table.]

6. This is a children's movie.  The take on gangsters is mostly innocent (when a bomb goes off, we see the characters standing next to it, in the next scene, with soot on their faces and their suits torn.  Nobody dies, except a few faceless wide-brim-hatted mobsters in shootouts, who might have just lost their balance and taken headers off fire-escapes, and in moments where a real gangster would probably end somebody, these gangsters flee the scene.  The type of comedy, the type of story, the way the characters are presented, show that this is a children's movie.  If it's marketed as anything else, it's not aware of what it is, and if it's pretending to be a comedy for adults, or a straight-up gangster movie, it's insulting its audience.

7. It's a kid's movie, but... But for a children's movie, there are some reasons I wouldn't want to bring my kid to it, or put it on the children's shelf at the rental store, beside Cars and Monsters Inc..  1. waaaay too much gunplay.  If the movie were about ten minutes shorter, and those ten minutes they took out were all the parts referring to deadly violence, death, assassination, and one patch with a joke about simulated sex that fits better in a movie like American Pie than this movie, as well as the climactic gunfight, it would be a much better fit for the audience that will enjoy it.  2. The jokes and storytelling are for kids, but the gangster talk would lead to my kids asking me some uncomfortable questions. I DON'T want to bring my kids to see a movie where a character tells the hero to whack someone... several people, and several times, or where I have to explain what extortion is, after my kids ask "Why were the people giving him money when he went to their store?"  If they'd made it two shades lighter again, than it already was, it would have been a fantastic kids' film, instead of a children's movie with a caveat.

And that's to say nothing of the moral confusion of yonggu's intentions during the movie: he wants to make his father proud, by becoming a coldhearted mobster.  He tries to impress his father by shaking down local shopkeepers, and by climbing a fire escape with a rifle to assassinate a rival mobster.  Throwing my kids into a world of such ambiguity is not my idea of a fun family afternoon.

8. Jay, from Jay and Silent Bob, (yep: this guy) plays one of the bad guys.  The fat mobster looks like a cartoon character... in fact, he reminds me of Big Boy (from Big Boy Burgers)

image

 and below, John Pinette (the actor) for your comparison (image source).

9. Harvey Keitel :(... dear Harvey... you are, far and away, the most watchable actor involved in this project.  But why are you involved in this project?  Why not any old extra from Sopranos who needs work?  Are you trying to get on this kind of list (seriously)?  Why not someone who's already kind of a self-parody, and a comedian anyway, like Danny Devito or somebody, anybody, that won't make me think "what a waste of talent"

I want to see you kick ass, Mr. Keitel.  I want to see Harvey Keitel the Wolf (see below).  I don't want to see you lying on your back and kicking your feet when you think your half-wit son, whom you've never met until two weeks ago, but have decided to make new don of your mafia family, is dead.  I really don't.

That's right.  Lying on his back.

Mr. Keitel, give me this:


Not this.


10. Shim Hyung-rae gets the girl? Really I suppose it's director's prerogative to do this, if he's starring in his own movie, but Shim Hyung-rae has reached an age where he should no longer be casting himself in roles where he gets the girl.  Much like Woody Allen in the 1990s, it strains credibility to think that the movie's token hottie would be hankering for some simpleton ajosshi.  Maybe he didn't trust any other actor to deliver the jokes he'd imagined, and yeah, he IS Yonggu, but still...

Anyway, the movie is what it is: not really a movie for my demographic, but a reasonably entertaining film for someone with kids about between age five and ten.  Unfortunately, the gangster content and gunplay makes it less family-friendly, but that's the only audience I think this movie will really resonate with.  The jokes are mostly a throwback to the silent era of slapstick, which is generally delivered well, and occasionally made me guffaw, but some of which I saw coming from a mile away.  Somebody go see it and count for me how many times somebody walks into a tree or a light pole.

It ends up neither here nor there... it's miles better than D-wars on almost every level, and it's been clipped of the kind of ego-tripping and flag-waving that made D-wars so ripe for ridicule; on the other hand, most of my readers probably won't jump out of their chairs to go see it, and it shoots itself in the foot (see what I did there?) as a kids' film.  As for Korean filmmakers bringing Korean film to the world?  Well, Shim Hyung-rae made an OK kids' film, but he shouldn't be the one carrying the flag of Korean cinema to the world. Let's see Park Chan-wook take a movie - the kind of movie David Fincher or Cronenberg, or Darren Aronofsky would make, and hit it out of the park with Hollywood backing.  Or Bong Joon-ho.  You know.  Somebody who deserves to be the poster-boy/girl.

I'm happy to hear, in the comments to my last post about Shim Hyung-rae, that other, (sorry to say, but...) more talented Korean directors (Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho, and Kim Ji-woon were mentioned by commenters) are getting opportunities to helm western-made films now, too; I hope they deliver something really interesting to movie screens in the US, and I hope that they give American audiences a better inkling of just how excellent, varied, and original (a word that never crossed my mind during this film) Korean cinema really can be.

So, Avatar was OK, I guess.

So now that everybody's gone primate poo over Avatar, I've gotta say a few things, too.



I've seen it three times now... so I guess you'd have to say I'm strongly in the "liked it" camp.

First: here are the plain facts, sir. If you paid money to see Transformers 2 (I did - Craptacles are one of my guilty pleasures) then you're morally obligated to go see Avatar in the cinema as well. Morally obligated, sirs and madams.

See, if those money-grubbing filmmakers are willing to insult us with their complacent storytelling, their clumsy directing, their filling the screen with crappy actors who are basically good-looking set-pieces that lead the audience from one big explosion to the next... that's one thing. And you know, I'm not going to judge you for spending money to see junk like that in the theater... you better see it there, because anywhere else, and it's horrible, but at least in the cinema, with digital sound and everything, it'll clean out your ear wax.

But here's the other thing: if we're saps enough to give money to the cynical sputum-suckers who make movies like that, apparently out of sheer contempt for their audiences, then we owe it to ourselves, and to the film industry at large, to also give our money to people who are trying to make something that will actually chock us up full with wonder. So if movie spectacle doesn't do it for you anyway, if you didn't bother seeing Transformers 2 in the Cinema, don't bother seeing Avatar either... I guess. But if you did see Transformers 2, because you DO like movies that ought to be seen on the big screen, that are impressive and awesome and make you say "wow," then go see Avatar, too. It's the movie of the decade, and indeed an incredibly powerful expression of regret for humanity, and especially America's vainglory, and specifically the Bush administration.

It's also the movie of the decade: the last decade. And what I mean by that is that there are echoes in the imagery and content of this film that sum up a big part of the major headline news of the decade...

The first way this works is looking at the reason the humans are in Pandora: the indescribably precious and rather obviously named "unobtainium" - a macguffin, perhaps, and also a pretty good stand-in for oil. The language the soldiers use to go to war with the "Navi" (which sounds like Nabi, the Korean word for butterfly) echoes the Bush White House's: pre-emptive strike, shock and awe, fight terror with terror. There's even a scene ... I don't want to give any spoilers here, but there's a certain scene where something starts falling, and one of the shots is totally evocative of the cloud of dust that billowed out when the twin towers fell, and during htat same scene, something is fluttering down in a way that totally evoked all the looseleaf paper floating around the World Trade Center when the office buildings crashed.

It's also a movie that encapsulates the issue that has swollen from small potatoes to big cojones during the decade: the 2000s will be remembered as the decade that the world finally really became aware of the precarious state of the environment. One of the very first images in the film is of a disgusting strip-mine -- an even bigger blight when one sees the beauty of the forest that must have been cleared to make way for that mine. The Navi live in a world of ridiculously rich foliage, of every imaginable color and shape of life-form; the forest flares up with phosphorescence at night, to create one of the loveliest imaginary worlds ever seen on film. Show me a nicer one. The "Aiua" - the life force of the planet, is a direct echo of the Gaia myth - earth's environmental life force, and the idea that all living things are connected. The contrast between the grey, ugly industrial compound the humans built, and the breathtaking foliage of Pandora is startling.

So Avatar is the movie of the naughty oughties, in its political undertones as well as its environmental ones. Another is in its technological concepts. The name Avatar, as we internet people know, is what we call the character I create in an online game, and that character acts out my actions inside the computer game. The idea of acting through a created body is straight out of computer gaming... but then, the Navi people on the alien planet have their own technological correlative: all the Navi have long braids coming out of the back of their heads, which they can use to connect to a similar organ on some of the creatures on pandora, and even to communicate with certain trees. That organ looks a eerily like a fiber-optic cable, as do the strands of the trees which communicate with the Navi. That idea of connecting with a universally compatible port is remarkably similar to those USB ports that every computer has, which you can use to plug into just about anything. Not to mention the way the cords go into the base of your skull, not unlike the Matrix, which was actually 1999, but a series which found its cultural niche (and had a few sequels) in the 2000s. Think again about the difference between those two movies - Matrix, in 1999, introducing you to a world through virtual reality, a movie of violence, of grey, drab design, lots of guns, and a really bleak, dystopian future, and then think about Avatar, where you can plug an entire world into your brain, rather than interacting with a world that has been taken over by ruthless robots. Interesting change indeed. While I'm not one to go in depth into what this might reveal about changing attitudes toward technology and connectivity, it's an interesting idea to bat around, if you happen to get a few nerds in the same room.

See, this is why I love science fiction. The way a person conceptualizes his/her futuristic world reveals so clearly what a person sees in the world around them: that's WHY we use science fiction: as a mirror that is different enough from our world that we can recognize stuff, while still agreeing silently with each other to continue pretending it's a story. It's also interesting seeing James Cameron make connectivity, using fiber optic cables, no less, an integral part of his amazing alien race, especially given the unease with technology he earlier demonstrates in his Terminator movies.

Finally, one must also note that, right down to the bow-and-arrows and long braids, the Navi most resemble some band of First Nations North Americans, crossed with a blue cat - the long ponytale and bald sides to the male warriors heads, a race of people living close to nature: say whatever else you want, but yeah, this is also the noble savage myth retold... but then again, James Cameron's films have always been that way: his Terminator films were straightforward action films - down to the formula, but excellently done. Terminator 2 was the most nuanced film he ever made, thematically, and that had a kid shouting "You can't kill people!" and a narrator saying, "if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too" - way to go for subtle. Titanic was also a pretty typical love vs. money, poor kid vs. rich jerk love story - thematic nuance isn't something James Cameron does... but then, when he can create a world as beautiful as Pandora, who cares if he doesn't?

So go see it. Take off your irony glasses, take a "gee-whiz" pill, and let him blow you away with a real treat for the eyes. Plus, if you paid money for Transformers 2, you'll be thrilled by this one: the action sequences make visual sense, the story is coherent, the characters are likeable, and there actually ARE themes, rather than just running gags and racist stereotypes!

Heh heh heh. That's exactly what I thought the first time I saw it. Roboseyo's Untimely Film Reviews, part II

"My Sassy Girl," Jeon Jihyun's breakthrough film role (though really, the Samsung commercial and the Giordano commercial will be the reasons she's remembered), was a huge hit in Korea, and remade into a Hollywood film staring Elisha Cuthbert and something something something.

The Korean movie's Trailer:


The Hollywood Remake's Trailer:

(IMDB page)

The Hollywood version tested so poorly with audiences they cut their losses and sent it straight to video. Article here.

"My Sassy Girl" — a smash hit in its native South Korea in 2001 — went straight to video in the US because men rejected its premise of a male character putting up with a bossy love interest in American test screenings, Lee said Friday.

Here's my summary of the movie:

Guy meets beautiful girl.
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!*
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!**
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!***
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
Jeon Jihyun dances. She's hawt.
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
A limp excuse for her ridiculously self-absorbed behavior is half-heartedly presented.
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!****
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
She treats him horribly, but he dotes on her dutifully, because she's just THAT DARN BEAUTIFUL!
Some sad stuff happens. They can't be together for some stupid reason.
Long after he's given up hope of meeting her again, they meet again, through a coincidence that strains credulity, then bursts it, stomps it, and poops on it.
She finally realizes he's the man for her.
Movie over.

* at this point, I'd stopped buying the film.
** by this point, I had not even a single shred of respect for the male lead anymore, and wanted to punch him and tell him to grow a pair.
*** beauty nothin': by this point it could have been Audrey Hepburn and I'd have kicked her to the curb for constantly treating me like a turd
**** heavens to betsy they're still stretching this garbage out?

I KNEW this movie wouldn't fly in North America. Knew it. No man would watch another man be treated like such a sap for the entire duration of a movie. Meanwhile, many Korean women I've met love this movie, and think it's touching how the guy dotes on the girl, without ever thinking about how completely emasculated he's been -- degraded to a level reserved for discarded cellphone accessories -- and wish a guy would dote on THEM like that. To them, I usually answer, "Do you want a boyfriend, or a puppy?"

And every once in a while, I meet a young lady who seems to have taken this movie as a how-to-guide on how to attract a man. And I lose interest about the way you do when you realize that the chocolate bar you saw on the table is actually cat poop.

(kinda like this)


Doesn't. Work. (unless you want a man you can't respect)

There's another movie that sets an even WORSE pattern for young women's behaviour in Korean society. . . but only one I can think of, and I'm saving my write-up on that one up for a proper, spittle-flying frothing rant-down.  

Sure, there are cultural reasons why Korean women might gain some vicarious pleasure from seeing a woman treating a man like poop for ninety minutes, in a culture that is still recovering from having sexism institutionalized pretty much at every level possible, and if a movie like this is part of the recovery process, fair enough. . . I don't have enough sociological background to explore that in depth, but I can understand the movie's existence, from that perspective.

(update: on the comment board, James Turnbull, who is eminently qualified to expand upon these points, provides some context for what I mean, but ultimately dodge, here.)

However, I still don't have to like it, and whatever the movie represents aside, as a matter of personal taste, I found the movie charmless, and the characters unlikeable (the cardinal sin for me watching movies).  I just didn't want to spend time with these people.

Anyway: here's to North American girls NOT having this crap model of femininity foisted upon them.

(PS: For another rant/review I wrote back when nobody read my blog: Here's what I said about D-War back in January!)