joedunphy

[joedunphy]

Kingsman: The Golden Circle

I saw this sequel on Saturday. I wasn’t sorry to have gone or to have paid full price, though I probably should have gone to an earlier show. At 11 pm, the theater was almost empty. Comedies don’t benefit from being seen in a dead house. Perhaps that will color my views a little, as I say that while this movie was worth the full admission cost, it didn’t come close to measuring up to the original. If you didn’t see that original, stop here.

There is a line in the original that other reviewers hated so much that much strawmanning of it followed, but I loved.

“Being a gentleman isn’t about being better than other people. It’s about being better than the person one used to be.”

or something like that, which at least one reviewer distorted into “looking down on one’s former self”, as if any attempt at self-improvement were inherently snobbish. At whose expense, one might ask, as I probably would have had I not been locked out of my account when “Secret Service” was in the theaters (long story), but with confidence, I’ll say that I won’t have any such controversies relating to this movie to address. There’s nothing in it as memorable.

Not that it’s without interest or relevance. Consider the president’s coldblooded willingness to let the victims of Poppy’s poison. It’s horrible, and yet it’s precisely the policy that would be seen if the “tough love” espoused by many repectable grass roots conservatives guided the government’s actions. Have we not heard people we know say things not so different from what the president says in this movie? We are left with the question “if it woiuld be morally repugnant as a policy, how can endorsing it be compatable with respectability.” At this point, the movie holds a mirror up to us and maybe gets us to shudder almost as much as we should, and ask ourselves just how tolerant a decent person can be of hateful attitudes.

Then the movie, having raised a thought provoking question, will fail to do much thinking itself. Consider the sight of the soon-to-be-impeached president in handcuffs - one would be pleased to see it happen, at that point, but what exactly is he being charged with? “Genocide”, one hears in the movie, though Poppy’s actions wouldn’t fit the definition of that word, and those of the president, even less. Under the American system of law, as we all know, one can’t be arrested for being an evil person, one can be only be arrested for doing supposedly evil things of the sort that have been written into the criminal code. Not yielding to terrorism and suspending the enforcement of the laws against drug possession certainly would not qualify, no matter how vile the motivation of the president who refused to act might be.

Having Elton John take down some of Poppy’s henchmen might have been intended to please the crowd, or maybe Mr. John in order to get him to do the movie, but come on. Since when is Elton John a martial artist? Plausibility was being stretched past the breaking point in order to get applause which I did not hear on Saturday.

Aside from Fridge Logic concerns (though that last one was really more of a “shifting in one’s seat” logic concern), Poppy is poor successor to Samuel Jackson’s Richmond Valentine from the first movie. Valentine was a monster who the heroes had to stop, but he was a strangely likable monster, with motivations that weren’t purely evil. We could enjoy watching him on the screen. Poppy, on the other hand, is little more than a psychopath with an entitlement mentality, somebody who feels deeply offended that she can be rich and yet not get a presidential pardon as a reward for her wealth, somebody who has one of her own associates fed head first into a meat grinder for reasons which we never learn, and which one can’t help be guess don’t exist - she had him killed for the lulz.

There’s nothing compelling about a character that self-absorbed. One might well wonder how she got as far in her illicit trade as she did, given that the sociopathic president she tried to blackmail is right about her - she’s a dumb ... female dog. She’s smart enough to run a criminal syndicate (that somehow less than a dozen men guarding the headquarters), and yet so stupid that she can’t figure out that poisoning her own customers would be bad for business. Let us say that the president compassionately yielded to her terrorism and signed the demanded executive orders. After the artificial plague and the horrible deaths, what would happen to the demand for her product? She’s be pardoned, but she’d be without a revenue stream, at a time when literally millions of people would want to see her dead because of what she had just done. On those terms, she’d want to move back to America? She wouldn’t live long.

No presidential order would keep her from being sued into oblivion, “wrongful death” being a tort that comes rapidly to mind, and without money, she isn’t even going to be able to maintain the token security force we saw taken out within minutes, let alone the massive presence she’d need after that. While this is true to a psychopath’s nature - they aren’t noted for their ability to think or care about the consequences of their actions - this is precisely psychopaths (as the term is usually defined online) don’t get far in life. In one sense or another, they wander into traffic and get run down. They don’t run multi-billion dollars businesses or syndicates. The sociopaths do that.

While she’s not completely a cartoon, totally divorced from reality (her comparison of drugs to white cane sugar being something I’ve heard in real life), she’s still difficult to believe.

But having vented about that, I’m left thinking that you’re going to wonder how I could enjoy such a poorly written sequel. To that, I’ll say that Golden Circle had its moments and that maybe I’ll write about them later on, and that the original film was a tough act to follow. Also, I hadn’t been in a movie theater for a very long time.

Maybe my standards are slipping?

[joedunphy]

Original Icon for this blog (not counting the friendly octahedron)

[joedunphy]

The Delivery Man / Vince Vaughn Edition (review under construction)

You were wondering when I was going to talk about a movie on this supposed movie blog, weren’t you? Was I going to spend the whole thing talking about what I saw on Cable or on whatever I could find on DVD? In fact, I came very close to doing so a few times. I almost did a review of “Up in the Air”, which I felt deserved a review - maybe even needed a few online, given the way in which it seemed to get savaged by other amateur reviewers who seemed determined to not get it, but I got distracted, time passed, and the memory of the film ceased to be fresh in my mind. I then vacillated with rare style, asking myself if I really was still prepared to write that review, until the movie left the theaters, leaving any review I would have written of that film on a level with a review of something I had just rented out. Not that I won’t do some of those, too, but a blog of nothing else would leave the reader with the stifling feeling of entering into the mental world of a recluse, vicariously living the life of somebody who has forgotten the scent of fresh air. Do not most of us get too much of a taste of that life on our own, even though we might be loathe to admit it?

Tonight, I will try to do a little better, having left the 115 minute movie about two hours ago, at this point, but perhaps without as much success as I would wish, because my memories of this film were already losing their freshness the moment I stepped out of the theater. I didn’t dislike the film, and the Saturday Night audience I was with seemed to be having a good time. I laughed … OK, smiled … frequently throughout the film, frequently enough that I didn’t mind spending a piece of my weekend and the full ticket price to see this. But, that having been said, something seemed missing, something that kept the film from being as good as it could have been, something that meant that this would be one reasonably pleasant evening that I’d have to work to remember the next year.

Part of that something might have been originality. Sam Allard, in his review “The Delivery Man is a Carbon Copy of ‘Starbuck’ … Except Much Worse” on Scene and Heard, presents us with official trailers for the Delivery Man and another film which I had not heard of until tonight, one called Starbuck.  That I had not heard of it is no great wonder, as it was released in Canadian French and its first week box office receipts totaled about $13,000. As I watched that trailer, I found the scenes in it very familiar, and was wondering if what I had witnessed tonight was a nicely crafted piece of plagiarism. I don’t know, yet. I’ll see the (presumably older) film later, when my memories of its supposed copy have faded a little more, and I can do the foreign film a little more justice.

For now, I’ll focus on what I was dissatisfied with in what I saw, putting aside discussions of the ethics of the making of this film until I know more about the matter. Spoilers follow, as the name of the blog and the cut would suggest. You’ve been warned.

What I didn’t like about the movie is that, as an audience member, I found that it sometimes didn’t seem to tell me the truth, even when it should have known what the truth was, when the truth was about how life works instead of how the lead character functioned.

Consider, for example, the sequence in which Vaughn meets his bitter would-be actor son (by in vitro fertilization), who is working as a barista, and is angry that he couldn’t get out of his shift to audition for the role of a lifetime. I won’t say that there is no truth, or no humor to be found in it. As anybody who has ever worked food service knows, like acting, it looks so easy until one tries to do it. The overconfident and undercompetent David Wozniak (Vince Vaughn), meaning as well as a would-be father ever could, tries to help his biological son by covering for him during his shift and the script embraces reality … up until the end, when it flinches. Wozniak ends up over his head, as he should have, and as one might expect, the owner shows up, apparently trying to find out who this person is who is reducing his establishment to a shambles and why he is doing so. At this point, the writer (whoever that is, see comments above) is appropriately heartless toward his character. The owner does as an owner probably would, and fires the son whose absence has damaged his livelihood. The author lets the owner be something other than a saint, having him rant about how the son is nothing but a failure who couldn’t possibly have been offered a part, displaying the sort of undercutting of confidence a not very pleasant employer might use to hold onto his work force, by persuading it to not seek more interesting employment possibilities. There is some potential in that character, but before he manages to become even mildly villainous, he vanishes from our screen, not to be seen again.

So, with the best of intentions, this father whose son does not know he is the father, has engineered a disaster for his brusque and bitter son. Who knows when the kid will find work again, or if he will, given the reference the owner is likely to give him after this incident. We wait with David (Vaughn), waiting for the blowup that will turn Wozniak’s ill conceived attempt at getting closer with the son he did not know he had into a sad, embittering and estranging irony. The script should be honest enough to accept the presence of an obstacle it has to work past to get to that happy ending it seems to want, if it is to go on seeking that ending, but it does not. Instead, we are presented with a sort of deus ex machina, in the form of a successful audition.

This is not to say that successful auditions never happen, or that no actor ever gets the part of a lifetime. If I recall correctly, Vaughn himself could tell us a lot about such a role, himself. But then, people also manage to draw winning lottery tickets. Wild strokes of good luck happen, but they don’t happen frequently, so in real life, if one puts oneself in need of one or is put in need of one, generally speaking one gets hurt, because rare events happen when they want to, and the likelihood of that rare, random moment falling into a time slot we’ve set for it is low, indeed. Much as would be the chance of the cavalry just happening to be ready to come storming over a hill, the moment a wagon train on the other side is about to be wiped out by the restless natives. Deus ex machina, in any form, is something that some of us don’t care for, I think, because of a gut level understanding of probability, and of an instinctual understanding that Fate really does not look after the welfare of those who engage the real world without preparing for it.

[joedunphy]

Caprica

(Originally posted on another, apparently defunct, blogging host)

Miscellanious ramblings … If you’re looking for an essay that holds together, you’re going to be in the wrong place, today, because I’m in no mood to write one. I’ve just gotten done banging my head into the proverbial wall trying to set up a mirror to this blog on the not always so very well documented Tumblr system, and am frustrated, stressed, tired and hungry. But blog.com is determined to keep its servers clean of blogs that haven’t been updated often enough, because at ¼ of a cent per meg, diskspace is far too expensive to waste. 

A meg, for those who don’t know, works out to be about 66 pages of printed text, meaning that if you have written 660 pages of blog posts - the equivalent of a thick, university sized tome’s worth of posting - the service will free up 2.5 cents worth of diskspace by wiping out your work. Think of it. If they did this to a mere 60 users, each of whom would lose a few hundred pages of work, before they knew it, they’d have saved up enough to buy themselves a snicker’s bar. Not just any snicker’s bar, either, but one of those large ones, the kind that can take one back to many happy hours spent in train stations across this great land of ours, waiting for connecting rides. Sure, they’d have to go to Walgreens to get it - in a movie theatre, we’d be looking at something more like 60 or 90 users who’d have to lose a decade or two of posting before the staff could reap the collective fruits of their disk clearing labors, in all of its nougaty goodness - but if you’ve ever been in a computer lab, you know how much those snack foods mean to the programmers. So I’d better get going, whether I’m up to it or not, and if the quality of my writing should suffer as a result?

Dude, we’re talking nougat and peanuts. It’s nothing to be trifled with.

If the reports I’ve heard about Caprica’s ratings are accurate, then this show probably won’t be on for much longer. Does it deserve to be? Should one catch it before it is cancelled, knowing that short running shows don’t tend to find their way into syndication? Maybe. I will say that I find it greatly superior to the vast bulk of what Syfy produces, but then that isn’t very high praise. We are talking about the same channel that brought us “Mansquito” and “Termination Shock”, that movie about the girl who shoots starship destroying fireballs out of her chest. Have they done better, this time? Something that a grown up can watch without hoping that nobody will catch him watching it?

Again … maybe. It’s deeply flawed. At times, the dialog has made no sense. 

Consider Joseph Adams / Yussef Adama’s ramble about there being no flowers on Tauron - “not a one” - and how he burst into tears the first time he saw them growing on Caprica, when asked if he would bring his wife and daughter back from the grave, if he could.  Is that the kind of tangent a grieving widower would go off on, leaving the listener to wonder what on earth was its relevance? Yes, yes, they’ve emigrated from the horrible place, and just as their lives are finally sweet, mother and daughter are no longer to be found living them? That’s the reason for the otherwise mystifying speech?

But then think about what he tells his son, as he confronts him about his having skipped class in “Tauron school”, explaining that showing up is about being proud of who he was, of being Tauron. Then think of the immigrants in your own family. Yes, the lives they left behind were hard, that’s why they were immigrants, but were they as bleak and gray as the one people were living on Tauron, if we accept the above explanation of Adama’s otherwise pointless speech? If so, then what was there to be proud of? In the real world, there was real beauty mixed in with the hardship that our forebearers left behind, some collective creation that the people could point to and say, this is what we did. Life was hard, but it wasn’t joyless. That joy is what we see altogether absent in the fictional Tauron culture, aside from that moment of dark humor when the grandmother says that  the Tauron children play jacks with the bones of the children who lost at jacks, deadpanning the joke until she gets the desired level of terror in Joseph Adama.

What do Taurons eat? They seem to be a vaguely defined combination of every Mediterranean, Latin and Middle Eastern culture known, a fair number of these cultures having cuisines so developed that one can fill libraries with books about any given one, yet as the young William Adama shows up with lunch for an abusive friend of his uncle’s, what we see is a sandwich, something called “fritos”. Really? That’s it? They couldn’t spend a few dollars, and hire one of North America’s thousands of financially strapped and desperate chefs to do some kind of fusion thing, just to give a little color to the setting? No, they couldn’t. What music do Taurons listen to? Again, starving musicians are in plentiful supply, the real world source cultures have rich traditions - just think of the words “Latin Music” or Verdi or Vivaldi or … surely we’ll at least hear a few folk songs coming?  No, we never hear a note. What stories do they tell? None are ever told. In every way, those creating this culture fail to create it, and don’t even seem to try, or even to farm out the effort to those who’d be happy to try, and do so for a pittance.

These may seem like little things, trivia not worth commenting on, but the absence of those little things are one of the reasons why science fiction doesn’t tend to really be literature. Those little things that a writer shares … the snatch of song, the scent of beignets sizzling in the oil, the reddened shadows cast by the setting sun across the columns of a synagogue - it’s those little, “unimportant” things, the things we hardly think to notice, that make a place seem real, like more than a cartoon, and that becomes doubly important when the place we’re looking at isn’t real. If one says “Sicilian” and one’s audience has grown up in New York or Chicago, life gives the writer a boost up as he reaches his listeners, because we all have associations with that word that it will conjure up - but not if one says “Tauron”, because there are no Taurons. That feeling is something that the writers and their coworkers on the set have to create from scratch, and what kind of feeling do they create?

We see the Tauron people being treated like dirt, stereotyped, robbed and scorned, and some of us will start out liking that, because in a fictional setting, in which the viewer will habitually let down his guard, it puts on display something that the population of an Anglo-Saxon dominated country has been very good at not letting itself see. As many have observed, in the America of today, it’s OK to be very, very white, and OK to be very, very not white (ie. Black), but not so OK to be anywhere in between. One can watch the same people who would fawn over a member of the Gangster Disciples, just to prove how “sensitive” they were, think nothing of talking about Mexicans, or Arabs, or Italians in a manner not at all unlike that we see Taurons being spoken of, on the show. Doesn’t look so pretty when it’s fictionalised, does it?

Or does it? Even as we watch the Tauron characters simmering in a stew of resentment and humilation all too familiar to all too many of those of Mediterranean descent in this country, we don’t see them doing anything to earn better for themselves. The “hero”, Joseph Adama, is a crooked lawyer who forgets to talk to the judge before having a bribe sent to him, and asks his brother to kill his new found friend’s wife, to “even things out”, after watching his thug brother beat up the friend, who seems to be the Bill Gates of 150,000BC - and yet never seems to think of resenting this, and maybe pulling a few strings to get the matter taken care of, using the influence his wealth would offer him, even at a politically awkward moment. The hostility to be found in racism isn’t a hellish thing for those it oppresses, merely because it is hostility, but because it in unearned hostility, something that the one to whom it attaches can do nothing to escape. It is a tragic thing for those around them, because those it drives off into the shadows have something to offer, their companionship at the very least, and often far more than that. Caprica fails to get that, and in doing so, having passed on any opportunity to make the Taurons seem like flesh and blood, declines to even make them into even slightly lovable cartoons. We don’t know them, and hope that we never do.

Which, as far as that part of plot goes, leaves us with no story to tell. Real stories are about characters, these constructs with whom something resonates in our subconsciouses, letting us connect with those who aren’t really there. Even the villains have to have a few virtues, some reason for us to feel what they are feeling, or for us, they won’t be there at all. The Taurons just aren’t, at least not at the moment. But, perhaps, if the show should linger, they will be.

The show seems to do better with its more white bread characters, especially Zoe, who is played by Alessandra Torresani, who is playing a piece of software in this world in which Italians (Taurons) can only be played by Mexicans, and a pair of light featured yuppies can have a dark featured daughter without anybody asking awkward questions about the mailman’s love life. The character has seemed to be the target of a significant amount of mockery in the blogosphere, judging from my recent skimming, much of it undeserved, I would think.

Zoe does seem to take herself with lethal seriousness, but as we are talking about a 16 year old - who seems to have slipped down to being 15, now - that would be what we would expect of her, were she real. Can we believe in a 15 year old suicide bomber (her boyfriend) being driven by religious fanaticism? Picture a chorus of voices echoing out of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem yelling “yes”. Children younger than that have done worse, in real life. The scene I’m thinking of, most of all,  is the dancing scene, which I’ve seen some describe as a puppy dog flirtation between a young technician and his hardware, the authors finding this most strange, calling it a “ratings killer”. I think that they’re misreading the scene.

The robot contains the reconstructed personality of a young girl, whose consciousness lives on through the ill conceived magic of artificial intelligence. She is trapped inside, her internal self-image (which we see in the shorts in which Ms. Torresani appears) having not caught up to her external reality (that of a one ton piece of equipment). The scene she’s living and the scene the technician are living aren’t one and the same, and the disconnect between the two has the potential to drive her even crazier than she probably is about to become.

The technician has cause to suspect that somebody is present inside that robot body, not in the sense of an actual human consciousness being present, but that of there being some sort of self-awareness. Consider the scene in which the robot, having been bound in place. One doesn’t really see a steam shovel panicking because it’s been bound to a flatbed on a train; this is the behavior we’d associate with a living being who had been left bound and immobile, panicking at her own helplessness. “Her?”, one might ask, much as the technician’s soon to be defingered friend did, as he asked why the hardware was being feminised, but men have been feminising inanimate objects for centuries in real life. Consider the pronoun we use for ships. It’s an expression of affection for that which is created by its creator, and such affection seems instinctual, a part of the drive that pushes us to create, even when we know that that which is created can’t possibly return the affection. But an actually conscious entity? Those who created that would move from merely being artists to adopting a more parental role.

I’ve read comments that while Zoebot would resent the crudeness of the technician looking at her chest and praising it, Zoebot seemed to “eat it up”, but again, let us consider the circumstances: Zoebot isn’t letting the technician know that there is any literal femininity about her at all. As far as the technician knows, all that he is looking at is a metal plate, one that he is responsible for maintaining and will be needed by this machine that he is seeing pass the Turing test. We might see Ms. Torresani’s look of dismay as he utters those words, but he doesn’t. As for the dancing that follows … from Zoe’s point of view, she’s a young woman, trapped where she doesn’t wish to be, and the technician is a boy about her own age, who is giving her what she hasn’t had for a while and hasn’t had enough of, ever - attention, as they dance. To the technician, what is happening is that he is bringing the robot to life, because he has no idea just how alive it already is.

So, again, the problem is the same as before - a failure of the imagination - but the failure is on the part of the reviewers and some in the audience, not on the part of the writers. They’re succeeding admirably in exploring the natural consequences of an unnatural situation, and we need only be open to noticing that. If one if to watch this show, while it last, I think that this is what one would watch it for. But few viewers probably will, insisting on watching that sort of scene with a literalness it doesn’t call for, and so if you want to do your viewing, I’d recommend that you do so, soon. I give this one a season before it is cancelled, and look forward to being proved wrong.

[joedunphy]

It’s about time …

You might have noticed that I seem to have given Flixster the heave-ho. That appearance might not be deceptive - I am seriously considering doing just that, as I write this. That site’s hyperaggressive “viral marketing” practices are no secret, and would seem to have been stepped up, recently, I find. On going to my page there, I found that my profile could only be viewed by those who had signed up, facing a signup form that all but demands that one yield one’s password to Yahoo or Google (this can be skipped) and will mass email one’s contacts, in one’s name, if one is so unwise as to violate the TOS at one of those services, and comply.

Not cool. As I’ve said elsewhere, I write to be read, not to help somebody else’s spam campaign, and this didn’t help. I certainly found myself glad that I hadn’t put Spoiler Alert on any rings, yet, because the lockdown effectively snipped my link back to Webring. The two reviews I had posted hadn’t found their way into the Flixster feed, which only accepts “new” reviews - and never mind the fact that the land of the lost review was posted only two months before I set up the Mybloglog community for that Flixster account, which found itself with nothing in the feed. The whole experience had become quite annoying by this afternoon.

So I went looking for a new place to post, and found my annoyance growing, as a series of places I found had signup procedures that, in one way or another, failed to work. Finally, I found blog.com, and saw only one problem with my plan to use it to replace Flixster - to do so would be a waste of a lot of good functionality. To have pages on a blog is a wonderful thing. I decided, instead, to use Blogs.com to replace IGN, and IGN to replace Flixster.

This might be slightly confusing for my subscribers, for about two to three seconds, but I think they’ll understand why I had to do this. As for Flixster - I’m not fond of kicking anybody to the curb, or throwing anything out that is of value. If Flixster chooses to improve its business practices, I’ll be glad to find some use for that old page, but really, that’s up to them. Or would that be “him”?