tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90037170904834876482024-02-20T08:39:19.907-08:00Fan FatalesPopular and geek culture through the lens of a female film student.Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.comBlogger69125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-43311338543757777482013-12-18T13:29:00.000-08:002013-12-29T19:31:09.564-08:00Letting Go<span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've never been terribly good at
looking back in these year-end posts, not necessarily because there
was nothing to look back at but because my viewpoint's been too
muddled to make much sense of it. But </span><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2013 has been a watershed year for me
personally and I can't help but look back, despite having such a clear idea of what to look forward to, at last.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In 2010 I wrote a Post-Holiday Post detailing the things
I anticipated for the coming year. They were pretty safe bets,
frankly, but for a while I wasn't sure I had anything that
I could add to those thoughts that'd be worth the bandwidth.
Thankfully, a little time helped me realize that I'm not still stuck
in the same place I was almost four years ago; I'm leagues away from
who I was then, just looking back at my younger self from a new
vantage point. In some ways I'm closer to who I used to be than I
have been in a long time but for the first time I'm realizing that
that isn't really a bad thing. It turns out you can't bury the parts
of yourself you don't like, or run away from them, or rip them apart;
it's only in embracing them that you understand what being a whole
person really means. Maybe it's a cliché but learning to let go of
a lot of what I thought I had to control is one of the hardest things
I've ever done. It's a process and a line I'm learning to walk, but
for the first time I can see where I've come from with clarity as
well as the path ahead, and experience enough to finally make the
choices I have to to get there. My past failures and setbacks, the
sacrifices other people have made on my behalf over the years, the
hard work and perseverance it took for me to crawl out of my own
emotional wreckage have all served to put me where I am right now.
The present is more amazing than I could have possibly imagined and
I am profoundly grateful to everyone and everything that has made it
possible. Even the hard and unpleasant ones. Anything I managed to accomplish would not have been possible without you.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Just for my own edification, as a
reminder to my future self for when I backslide, and because this is
my blog and I can post what I want, here's an incomplete list of
personal accomplishments and epiphanies from the past two years.
Hopefully they're things I either continue to accomplish or move past in the coming years.</span></div>
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<li><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Important people have left my life and
it hasn't wrecked me. Sometimes their leaving wasn't their choice, sometimes it was. When it was a choice, it was as much about them as it was about me. I'm not as toxic as I'm afraid I am.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Learn to forgive my younger
self and to see her for the angry, confused person she was; love her in spite of and because of it. She needs it.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Try new things, not for the sake of
doing so but because I actually want to try them. Stop telling
myself I'm just not the type to do them: if I want to do them then I
am the type.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Come to terms with the idea that I
may want things I didn't used to want. Let myself be confused
about it without shutting it down.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Be confronted by conflicts very
similar to past ones that hurt me tremendously; realize that I have
learned from my mistakes by proving I can make better choices now.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Acknowledge that the traits I've adopted
as coping mechanisms have helped me but that I don't need them
anymore. Learn to ask for help in figuring out how to let them go
when I need it.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This moment is not forever.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Recognize when someone is a person I
want in my life; take the risk to let them know and make the
effort to prove it.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Recognize that I am worth the effort
and anyone who doesn't value me as a whole person isn't someone I
need to invite into my personal life.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Nobody is obligated to like me and if
they don't it isn't a personal failing on my part. Sometimes people
just don't get along. Don't get grudgey about it.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Learn to recognize that my standards
are very high and sometimes unfair. See and accept the
imperfect reality of a person instead of the ideal I project onto
them. They are who they are and aren't obligated to be the person I want them to be. Be as forgiving of others' faults as I hope they will be with
mine.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sometimes things like
this do happen to people like me. It's worth the risk and the
effort, even if sometimes the thing I want doesn't happen.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Learn to find the freedom in
failure. Stop being afraid to be wrong: it means I'm learning.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Own that just because I've been hurt
and just because I try hard now, doesn't mean the world owes me
anything. Other people aren't obliged to fix me or to be my inspiration to be better: that's my job.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Life is too short to waste waiting
around for it to happen to me. Go out and become the person I want
to be.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I am more kind than I remembered.
Embrace it, even when it hurts.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Remember that I am responsible for how my actions affect others, intended or not. I won't always make the right call but remember that the harder, scarier option is usually the better one.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I can't control my emotions, they
simply are what they are. What I control is how I respond to them
and the person I choose to be because of or in spite of them. Always
choose to be better.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You know that thing where I hate it when people lie to me because they want to spare my feelings? Don't do it to other people. If I want others to respect me enough to be honest with me, extend the same respect to them.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The things I'm afraid set me apart from other people usually only do so because I let them. I'm not as weird as I imagine myself to be. Life is happening, choose to be part of it.</span></li>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Enough navel-gazing. Stay safe out there and be good to each other. Here's trailers
for my favorite things I've watched from the past few years. Check
them out.</span></div>
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Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-17267233570413222812013-12-12T19:52:00.001-08:002013-12-29T19:32:58.075-08:00Bevin's Guide to Being an Internet Critic<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This is actually something I wrote somewhere else a while back but it seems pertinent enough to put up in here, too. It's as much a reminder for myself as it is a statement of my personal viewpoints on responding to things critically; generally speaking, if things are easy or natural to do for everyone they don't need to be made into rules. So in absence of a real post (which I hope to get back to but we'll see how my time off from classes goes), here's this.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The internet is an amazing thing that allows for greater contact with people than ever before in human history which, as most things are, is a double-edged sword. We can connect with the people who create the things we consume in such immediate and personal ways now but we can still forget that they're people with flaws, personal lives, work stresses, ideas, opinions, and also a lot of people scrutinizing and judging them in very public ways. It affords us the luxury of expressing our opinions on any little thing we choose to write about to the entire world; but it doesn't require that we display any knowledge, experience, or qualifications on the subject, either. It also allows for other people to judge us based on how we conduct ourselves and that can either cost you opportunities or create them. How we act on the internet affects people's lives in real ways, including our own lives, so being self-aware is important.<br /><br />To that end, I have a list of things I try to keep in mind when posting on the internet.<br /><br />1. <b>Opinions Are Not Facts</b><br />That's not to say that opinions don't matter and should be disregarded, that's totally missing the point. A fact is something concrete and provable, like having one bean and getting one more bean means you have two beans. An opinion is something that's relative between individuals; one person may think beans are delicious while another person may think they taste terrible. While those opinions are true for those individuals, they are not facts in the larger sense of the term. Unfortunately, we have a tendency to forget this important distinction when we get into topics more complicated than beans, even though it still remains true. Having an opinion is fine but that doesn't make it a universal truth.<br /><br />2. <b>Having an Opinion Does Not Make You an Expert</b><br />Liking or disliking something doesn't require any knowledge or training or effort, it's something that happens as we experience things. Saying you dislike something is not the same thing as saying something is bad; one requires no knowledge of anything other than your opinion, the other requires knowledge of the subject matter <u>beyond</u> opinion. Labeling something as "good" or "bad" is moving into the arena of hard facts and is a separate subject from whether or not you like or dislike it. Unless you have extensive knowledge of or training or experience in the subject matter at hand, "good" and "bad" are labels you probably want to avoid. Chances are very good there are people out there who know more about this stuff than you do and chances are even better that most of the people who work to create this stuff for a living know more about how to do it than the people who don't. Critiquing something is easy, creating it is much harder and requires more knowledge, effort, time and personal investment. That doesn't always mean the end result is good, but it does bear consideration.<br /><br />3. <b>Never Assume People Are Stupid</b><br />Ugh, but some people clearly are, right? Ha ha, yeah, don't do that, seriously. The second you start thinking you're smarter than the people who created something or the people who disagree with your opinion, you've shifted the point from the work itself to you and your hangups. Let me say this right now: it doesn't matter if you are or aren't smarter than them. When you start assuming that the things you don't like are created and appreciated by stupid people you're expressing far more about yourself and your own issues than anything else. You don't want to be that person. You don't have to like the thing in question, but if people are responding to it, it's better to investigate why that might be rather than writing the whole thing off as moronic. You might actually learn something or come to appreciate it in a different way, even if you still don't like it.<br /><br />4. <b>Never Assume You Speak For Anyone Except Yourself</b><br />Unless you have been unanimously voted as the spokesperson for a specific group of people who all approved everything you are about to say, you're not speaking for everyone. Why would you even want to? Trying to be the mouthpiece for a bunch of other people is hard and a good way to lose yourself in the process. Even people who share a common experience will not all feel the same way about it and putting words in their mouths isn't going to ingratiate them to you. Stick with just expressing the opinion you're qualified to: yours.<br /><br />5. <b>Keep Yourself Open to Different Opinions</b><br />You know that opinion you have? Other people have them too, and not all of them are going to coincide with yours. If you really want to challenge yourself (and a smart critic always does), actively seek out different opinions. Read everything you can find on the topic, regardless of whether you agree with it or not, and really examine where that person is coming from. Sometimes you learn something new or find a new interpretation that makes a lot of sense and adds new dimension to the work that you didn't see before. And that is a very cool thing.<br /><br />6. <b>Don't Make Assumptions About Others' Motivations</b><br />I had a teacher who used to say, "when you point a finger at someone else you have three pointing back at yourself." Sure, other people have motivations for creating the things they do, saying the things they say, and all that but unless you have psychic powers you don't know what they are unless they say so directly. Everything else is an assumption on your part and that puts you in the dangerous waters of projecting your own issues onto them. Just don't go there, there's no need to unless your goal is to feel superior to other people you've never met, or you're really desperate for other people to stop taking your opinions seriously. If you do feel the need to make an assumption, be up front about it and don't present it as a fact or common knowledge.<br /><br />7. <b>Don't Be Afraid to Be Wrong</b><br />People screw up, it's the fastest way we learn. If you make a mistake like get a fact wrong or mis-quote someone or commit some sort of faux-pas, don't try to justify it or ignore it if someone calls you on it or try to turn it back on them. Own it, admit the mistake, correct it if you can and move on, being mindful of it in the future. Learn from your mistakes, that's where all the value is in them.<br /><br />8. <b>Back Your Opinions Up With Reasons For Having Them</b><br />Possibly the least useful thing in the world is someone stating their opinion and nothing else. All that does is illustrate that you have an opinion, which everyone else does too, so big deal. Expressing <i>why</i> you have your opinion is much more useful because it requires some actual thought about the product and some level of self-awareness on your part. The more examples you can list from the work itself that back up your opinion, the stronger your argument is.<br /><br />9. <b>Be As Honest As You Can Be</b><br />If you like something, don't excuse the parts of it that have problems or don't work. That's not the same thing as arguing in favor of something that you feel is misunderstood or under-appreciated, it means if you feel that an element is off or wrong, don't try to defend it for the sake of defending the thing you like. Admit you don't like that element but that it's not enough to diminish your appreciation for the work as a whole. The same works in reverse: don't universally trash something you don't like when there might be elements you like or that work well in it. Be honest about the things you like and dislike and try to be as honest about why as you can, even if this puts you at odds with popular opinion or common assumptions.<br /><br />10. <b>There Is a Difference Between Something Being Bad and Not Being What You Wanted</b><br />Try to be honest with yourself about what you're really responding to: the work itself or your own expectations of it. This is hard to do but it's really crucial to being fair to what the creator/s are trying to say. There is a difference between honest critique of things that don't work and fan entitlement.<br /><br />11. <b>Keep Your Perspective</b><br />At the end of the day, what's really important in life? Sure the TV shows, books, music and movies we love are important because they speak to us, they move us, all the stuff art is created to do. That's not trivial but it's also not more important than being a decent person about them. That doesn't mean you have to withhold your opinions about them, it means expressing your opinions in ways that aren't petty or mean-spirited or even threatening. So somewhere in the world someone created something you don't like? So somewhere in the world someone doesn't like something that you do? The sun still comes up the next morning, the earth continues to spin on its axis, life moves on. That's not to try and invalidate people's emotions; get mad, be disappointed, care about stuff by all means. Apathy is one of the worst things on the planet. But don't let it take up a disproportionate amount of your life and remember that at the end of the day it's just a book or a song or a movie or whatever it is. It's not worth forgetting how to be a decent person. Sometimes it's necessary to take a step back and appreciate that we live in a time and place that affords us the luxury of being mad about a piece of entertainment.</span>Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-28799552183973305522013-05-19T11:10:00.000-07:002013-05-19T11:10:33.401-07:00Rev-nalysis of Iron Man 3As of last night I was officially the last person in the world to see this movie, right? Okay, good, 'cause I'm going to lay out some spoilers in here and this is one of those movies where not knowing some things when you go in is a good thing. These are just the thoughts I wrote out last night and it takes me a while to process things these days so my opinions are subject to change the longer I have to go over them. Heck, they changed during the course of my writing this so meh.<div>
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Basically this is the story of one man's trauma and how he ended up dealing with it. This is both a good thing and something that bothered me. It's good for reasons that I'll get to in a second and it's bad because every other character ended up as a prop for the main character's emotional journey instead of having their own stories. That wasn't a huge problem until the climax of the movie when it was suddenly very noticeable and detracted from the choices Shane Black made there. Honestly the story really only works if you look at it through the lens of "Tony dealing with his issues;" once you try to assign outside motivations to any other character, including the villains, things don't really hold together in a logical way. Through the trauma lens, though, this movie's pretty good.</div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I don't have a problem with most of the actual events of the movie like the attack on the mansion, the twist with the Mandarin, destroying his suits, getting the shrapnel removed, I'm totally fine with all of that. The whole movie was hinged on Stark's emotional trauma after the events of </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">The Avengers</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> and I have to say, speaking as the child of a former soldier with deep psychological and physical trauma that affected him his entire life (and not inconsequentially affected the lives of those around him), this story was very welcome for me. There's this deep-set aversion in American society to acknowledge this type of problem in former military, or even just for men in general to admit to emotional problems like this, and that aversion alone can compound the issues. It can lead to feelings of inadequacy, weakness, loss of masculinity, emotional isolation, emotional repression, and can keep them from seeking help or feeling comfortable opening up about it to anyone or even admitting they have a problem. Things are probably a bit better now than they were for my dad's generation but it's still an issue. Seeing Stark not only dealing with possible PTSD but being able to take the initiative to admit that he's having a problem to someone-- Pepper, Banner in the voice over narration and the end cut scene-- without suffering a terrible loss of pride or feeling of masculinity, even gaining something from the experience, was enormously positive. A superhero, the most popular one in Marvel's current movie franchises, doing this during a time when there are so many younger veterans living in or returning to the US was honestly moving to me; I'm hopeful that with things like this there will be more people seeking help and more help available to them. But I'm starting to digress.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">So back to Stark's trauma, here's the downside of this all-encompassing viewpoint: everything else in the film like the villains and Stark's supporting cast also seem to exist to serve Tony's emotional arc more than their own stories. I'm not sure that they even have their own stories here. Up until around the climax this isn't too big of a problem but then suddenly there's a villain about to execute the US President for very unspecified reasons; Rhodey is there basically as more of a plot device for the suit than much else, even if he does get some nice action hero moments (these are not substitutes for actual character development or emotional catharsis); Pepper is the damsel in distress until the moment where she is suddenly a superpowered "badass" (actually the least badass Pepper has been in all three movies) which rings emotionally false because there's no need for it-- Pepper's story gains nothing from this experience and it's so antithetical to what actually makes her strong that it robs the villain's defeat of actual catharsis; Happy seems to exist primarily as a catalyst to get Tony on the bad guy's radar-- not that he's ever been terribly crucial to anything beyond comic relief but he just felt more like a plot device than anything.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">I even felt like I lost my emotional connection to Stark during this big action scene, which considering how deeply invested in his emotional arc I was until then is a pretty big disappointment. Maybe they were going for "Tony gets his groove back" here, seeing him in his element after floundering for control for the whole movie but I tend to prefer action scenes where, if a character has a close call, that might register with them for a split second instead of the stare-down-certain-death-without-breaking-a-sweat thing. I got the former from most of the movie so to have that missing from the final fight was a little jarring and helped me to lose that human connection to Tony. Also, Tony was already getting his groove back before then without the suits (one of the major points of the film) so to have that be the point of the climax feels like a false note. I totally lost him after Pepper fell to her seeming death and didn't reconnect with him at all until the end of the fight. Maybe that was just me, I dunno, but it was probably the worst point in the film to lose that connection to him since he's the only character who really has an emotional arc and that scene is basically the catharsis for everything he's been dealing with. So for me to miss out on it was disappointing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">That seems like a lot of complaints but honestly, so much else from the movie worked and was so well done that even biffing up the climax only rattled my enjoyment of it a bit. The stuff at the beginning is the highlight for me, when Tony is still mister banter while also an accessible, somewhat fragile but still heroic human being. The metaphor with the armor being... well his armor to the point where it's becoming his surrogate self, sent into situations he doesn't feel like he can cope with, taking its time getting to him when he's under attack, literally giving him a hand when he's drowning, then being dead weight he has to carry, then repair, then do without, and finally let go of completely because he's finally allowing himself to heal. Not just from his most recent trauma but the one that began his need for the armor in the first place, the kidnapping in Afghanistan that literally and metaphorically damaged his heart. The narration was a bit on the nose with the "a man creates his own demons" line but it's apt. Not just with Killian who's almost a dark mirror for Tony (I always forget how good Guy Pierce is until I see him in something but man do I wish he had more to work with here) as someone physically wounded but brilliant enough to grant himself power; not just with Killian's operatives who serve as lesser "demons," like little </span>cipher<span style="font-family: inherit;"> splinters of Killian's dark mirror; but in a much broader, collective sense with the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley just killed that part), who ends up being an almost meta-textual case of presenting the villain everyone expects and so becomes the summation of and focal point for our anxieties and fears, only in the end for it to have been built up in our minds precisely because it's what we expected to see, not what was really there. If that makes sense. For a movie all about anxiety, that's not only clever it's downright relevant. And of course there's the "how you choose to use the power you have" stuff but it takes it a step further: in finally coping with our fear and anxiety and defeating our demons, we stop clinging so hard to our need for more power, our desire to control our surroundings and ourselves in order to feel secure.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">The movie takes us full circle, from the arrogant, drunken, pre-Iron Man Stark to the man it took him four movies to become. It felt like closure and yet we know he'll be back for at least one more </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Avengers</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> movie; this movie took him so much further than I expected and did so in a careful, thoughtful way that my normal hesitance about going further has taken a back seat to cautiously optimistic curiosity. Where can they take him next?</span></span></span></div>
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Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-37494457999833221562013-05-15T13:37:00.000-07:002013-05-15T13:37:04.131-07:00Hello InternetIt's been a while. I wish I could say I've been too busy with life to post but honestly it's kind of been the opposite. The current state of the economy has put me in some financial trouble and I'm just not able to stay current with much of anything that I can't watch on the internet which makes doing movie reviews feel a bit pointless. If I'm being even more honest, though, I've just been really burnt out on writing about film; I did a lot of it in school and by the time I graduated the thought of doing it on my own time made me want to scream and pull out my hair. The last several entries I made in here were definitely phoned in.<br />
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On top of that, while I feel like I learned a lot and have a good general base of knowledge about film theory I tend to feel like there's a lot of people on the internet who know a lot more than I do, especially people who have more knowledge about how to actually make a film which is probably way more relevant to understanding it than anything I know how to do. I find myself reading other blogs and feeling woefully inadequate to even try to compete with what they're doing, at least right now. If I'm going to bother writing about something I feel like I need to be saying something relevant or unique or just adding a pertinent perspective to something that I feel hasn't been touched on before or often enough. Lately I was left feeling like I didn't have much of anything to say.<br />
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And yet here I am again anyway. Maybe I'm feeling a bit less burnt out than I was, since the thought of writing an article about a piece of media doesn't fill me with the urge to take a nap anymore. Maybe it's the sense of impending outside influence on my life (I just got accepted into an animation program for the fall) and if there's one thing that spurs me to work on personal projects it's having something else I'm supposed to be doing instead. Maybe I just find myself feeling like I have things to say regardless of being out of the loop in terms of current and upcoming movies and TV or my lack of knowledge about too many things. Regardless, my updates in here probably aren't going to be terribly regular (as if they ever were) and there's probably going to be a big shift in terms of the tone. Not so academic, a bit more personal and informal-- well as informal as I can get when writing-- and probably dealing a lot more with my opinions than analytical content. Maybe. We'll just see how it goes, I guess.<br />
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Basically, I'm back. Sort of.Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-78876606150476839042011-12-29T15:48:00.000-08:002011-12-29T18:49:06.533-08:00Favorites From 2011It seems like every New Year's I find myself reflecting on the more grueling aspects of the past twelve months and looking forward with a cautious hope that the next twelve will take a sharp upturn. This proves more about my disposition than the events of the average year, but even in the midst of everything as it was happening I was aware that by and large, 2011 has been a particularly crappy year for me and most of the people I know. There have been some good things, of course, and my classes and education have been a large part of that. Even as much as I will be more than happy to see the end of this particular year, there's a part of me that remembers all the past years I've said the same thing (including the end of 2010) only to have the following year be worse than the previous one in pretty monumental ways. Still, nothing lasts forever, including the disappointments, embarrassments, failures and personal tragedies, so one of these years my oath to have a better year will finally come to fruition. That's the thing about this holiday; it's all about optimism and hoping that the big wheel you're on will swing around again and give you a break from the mire you've been working so hard to slog through. So here's hoping that 2012 turns out to be a little kinder than its predecessor was. Or if nothing else, that it'll still give us some great moments in the midst of it all.<br />
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In the meantime, I'd like to close out this year remembering my favorite movies and shows from the past go around the sun. Not necessarily the best or most innovative things, just my favorites, for whatever reason.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/SYCD1IBzzC0" width="560"></iframe>Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-42593339830055628072011-12-17T05:26:00.000-08:002011-12-17T13:07:43.700-08:00Halfway Out of the DarkThe holiday season is once more upon us, prompting much retrospective contemplation over the events and the media from the past year. Once again I feel ill-equipped to provide any sort of educated list of the best movies that have come out as there are so many people providing them that have had much more opportunity to see a great variety. The majority of the things I've seen have been through classes or my Netflix account so I'm pretty out of the loop in terms of what's current. Instead I've decided to brush off a few of my favorite old chestnuts and take a look at a few things I'm looking forward to seeing in the coming year. (Hopefully I'll see them, at any rate. I still haven't seen many of the films on my "looking forward to it" list from the last time I did this exercise.)<br />
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First off, it just wouldn't be the holiday season if I weren't nose-deep in Christopher Moore's hilariously blasphemous novel <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Stupidest-Angel-Heartwarming-Christmas-Terror/dp/0060590254">The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror</a></i>. Having read nearly all of Moore's writing (save for his last few books I've been too buried under school work to get to), this one shot to the top of my favorites for two reasons: it's one of his funniest and it's a giant crossover. I love crossovers to the pit of my sickly fangirl heart and this is a doozy. Taking place in Pine Cove, CA it combines at least one character from nearly every book he'd written up until that point, save for a few that just wouldn't fit in. It stands well enough on its own legs, providing enough back story for everyone so new readers wouldn't be too lost without bogging things down for the people already familiar with them. It's the one book I go out of my way to re-read every year-- eggnog just doesn't taste the same unless I'm reading about a broadsword-slinging former B-movie actress, her stoner constable husband, an angel who wants to be Spider-Man, a pilot with a talking fruit bat, and a group of zombies obsessed with DIY Swedish furniture. Like everything Moore writes, there's a biting ribbon of dark humor underlying the surface-level silliness-- there's considerably more homicide, cover-up, blackmail, mental illness, recreational drug use, middle-aged romance and zombie attacks than your traditional Christmas story-- so it's more like an interesting cross between black comedy and broad slapstick. If it sounds like your cup of tea, I'd highly recommend picking a copy up if your shopping takes you anywhere near a bookstore.<br />
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There also seems to be talk of a movie adaptation in the works which might be interesting provided they can get that pesky tone right. According to <a href="http://www.movieinsider.com/m7870/2/the-stupidest-angel/">Movie Insider</a> the cast includes Milla Jovovich, Crispin Glover and Cloris Leachman so it sounds like they're on the right track. (Personally I think <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Skarsg%C3%A5rd">Alex Skarsgard</a> would have made a pretty good Archangel Raziel since he's tall, blond, ridiculously gorgeous and able to do mind-bendingly stupid and uncomfortably inhuman with a straight face. But that's just me.)<br />
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The <i>Doctor Who</i> Christmas Special from 2010 is a recent but most likely permanent addition to my annual tradition. The title of this blog entry is taken from the opening and closing narration of Michael Gambon in this very cleverly self-conscious retelling of Dickens' <i>A Christmas Carol</i>, only in addition to the familiar bah-humbugging miser learning how to not be miserable it also features time travel, a crashing spaceship, a frozen opera singer, the most sympathetic celluloid shark possibly ever, and a very cool bow tie. Setting aside my ardent adoration for anything that shows a shark to be anything other than evil or terrifying, this is still a really smart, witty, funny, touching production that I cannot recommend highly enough. But seriously, sharks and time travel, come on.<br />
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<i><a href="http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/The_Hudsucker_Proxy/609937?trkid=2361637">The Hudsucker Proxy</a></i> isn't one of the Coens' more highly praised movies but it's definitely one of my favorites. It's a tip of the hat to Frank Capra and the screwball comedies of the 30s, featuring some beautiful cinematography, a snappy script and some fantastic performances from Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Paul Newman. Also keep an eye out for John Mahoney, Bruce Campbell, Peter Gallagher and the late Anna Nicole Smith. Considering the economic climate over the past few years, maybe a good laugh at the antics of big corporations shooting themselves in the foot is something everyone could use. I've seen this movie too many times to count over the years and it never ceases to be fun. It's also currently streaming on Netflix, so if you have an account check it out.<br />
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<i>Tokyo Godfathers</i>, along with anything else the late (and still sorely missed) Satoshi Kon ever did, has been written about several times on this blog already, but it's still very much a holiday tradition for me to pop this in the DVD player at least once a December. Not many holiday movies-- or non-holiday movies, for that matter-- feature three homeless people in a dysfunctional surrogate family as the three protagonists and as funny as this movie is it also doesn't pull its punches when it comes to showing some of the harsher realities of being homeless and of life in general. As grim as the reality can be, this is a film that is unflinchingly optimistic, at times even over the top in terms of the sheer number of coincidences that occur on this quixotic quest to return an abandoned baby to her mother. It's heartwarming without being cloying or too treacly which can be nice this time of year.<br />
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Moving past the nagging certainty that I've left something important off this list, it's time to look ahead to the movies I'm anticipating in the coming year. Not all of them, of course, just the ones that have trailers up. Some of them are already out but I haven't seen them yet, so on the list they go.<br />
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<a href="http://youtu.be/CdtXqMbrgwg">Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol</a><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/fBh17LM-Nrk" width="420"></iframe>Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-79365769871212140512011-11-03T22:23:00.000-07:002011-11-03T22:23:11.168-07:00Why Can't I Read Jane Austen?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZlDmW2AgDE6f8S1yVHl7x6XdMqdj0vJLn9Evj3bHHV0aFY3H8WAYkj1O-wNfej6D8s6dxrene3HTLL6AMGh2w-Sc3n5ay49JoXjif2K4lcsMw48BFmDec8Vn_25EGWywKM6trW5KTeYF-/s1600/janeaustenphone.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 315px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZlDmW2AgDE6f8S1yVHl7x6XdMqdj0vJLn9Evj3bHHV0aFY3H8WAYkj1O-wNfej6D8s6dxrene3HTLL6AMGh2w-Sc3n5ay49JoXjif2K4lcsMw48BFmDec8Vn_25EGWywKM6trW5KTeYF-/s320/janeaustenphone.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5671005330274287554" /></a><div style="text-align: left;">Two years ago I bought a copy of <i style="text-align: left; ">Pride and Prejudice</i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-align: left; ">-- the novel-- with the full intent to get over my inability to read Jane Austen's writing. I'd just finished watching some PBS miniseries adaptation of </span><i style="text-align: left; ">Emma</i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-align: left; "> and had found it so charming and delightful that I had to give her writing another chance.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>Now bear in mind here that I'm not writing this as someone who doesn't like reading or classic literature or even old prose. I've been an avid reader my entire life, who voluntarily picked up some Shakespeare when I was twelve and never stopped reading it, who burned through <i>The Iliad</i> and <i>The Odyssey</i> in three days apiece in college (and have been itching to do an adaptation of the latter ever since), and who counts e e cummings as her favorite poet in the whole world, followed closely by good ol' Edgar Allan Poe. Old writing doesn't bore me, heightened prose is like music in my brain, and subtext is one of my most favorite things in the entire world.</div><div><br /></div><div>So why can't I get past the prologue in this book?</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>It isn't the story or the characters, since I'm still stuck on page five after two years. No, it's the language. I can't get past the language it's written in and it isn't that it's too old or stuffy or full of subtext and subtlety, it's the simple aesthetics of the words in my head. I have the same problem with most writing from the nineteenth century and I'm not enough of a writer or a linguist to put my finger on what it is. Maybe it's the amount of lingering detail over what I consider to be passing background images-- I love well-described scenery as much as the next person but Nathaniel Hawthorne's pages-long descriptions of the shrubbery Young Goodman Brown is passing on his way through the forest on the way to the whole point of the story make me want to gnaw off my own arm. Maybe that's an unfair characterization of the story, since I only read it once in my early twenties. It's what I remember of it, though, and with <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, which I couldn't finish despite having checked it out to read of my own volition. There is something in the aesthetics of the language used in English and American literature from this time frame that turns me off completely from stories I would otherwise enjoy very much, which is a source of considerable frustration.</div><div><br /></div><div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBnoS2gGnJJuDQJrHlIfiw95xnHLEld5KjBcBlaMSj6IupwROmcPjwx4CK-op1INC3p7gtQ1hjHXOIGpjcYRMnN98ztX34kpRAN7vHNg6td_q7RshkDIUa_7FepZJuwT3bJAletYHpSnCF/s320/bookblahblah.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5671004120974857842" style="text-align: left; display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px; " /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span">And ten minutes later, blah.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></div><div>Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to use this as an excuse for why I'll just content myself with TV and movie adaptations of these stories. Far too often I've found myself on the opposite end of the argument, defending something I love from someone who isn't turned off by the story or the message but by the surface level aesthetics of it. Eiichiro Oda's manga series <i>One Piece</i> was the only bit of Japanese pop culture I payed any attention for nearly a decade, and did so with the kind of joy and adoration that comes along once in a blue moon. I'd go on and on to my friends about everything that I found so amazing about it, the things that moved me and why that series is pretty much the Japanese equivalent of (pre-prequel) <i>Star Wars</i> here or <i>Doctor Who</i> in the UK. Some would give it a try, but most of them couldn't get past the art. Oda's brilliant, unique, quirky art was one of the initial selling points for me because it was so different from anything I'd seen out of Japan. His character designs were and still are some of the most inventive, creative, and out of the ordinary that I've seen; it's part of what attracted me to the series. To many other people, the art is what keeps them from embracing it. This has bothered me considerably over the years, since the story and characters are so wonderful it always seemed a shame to miss out on them simply because of an issue with how "not pretty" the art is. I'd find myself wanting to tell them to just get over it and adjust their aesthetics to something less conventional, but then my thoughts would drift back to that copy of <i>Emma</i> I was unable to finish in high school and I felt too hypocritical to say anything.</div><div><br /></div><div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBCrN3idJKZHr3-arU-Qt4M2MrauM-Z4oKCuRjYidNsseI4sNxAv7VbmmbZK4kx4ExupSsWOHBt0pHH9rDT3T4wrJBlVp-RiLqqbYH4cfr6CxVx9xytXzgNEvofUYaTomvDIlXSkkVVfAi/s320/opwrongfruitoldmaid.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670952963543784066" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 234px; " /></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span">This, to me, IS pretty.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></div><div>Granted, we all have things that don't appeal to us for one reason or another and who's to decide what reasons are more valid than others? "It's not pretty enough" versus "I don't like how she writes" boil down to the same essential argument when you get down to it, and maybe that's why it bothers me so much. I don't understand why it is I don't like it, I just know that I don't. I went through the same thing with movies for years and being unable to articulate why I did or didn't like something bothered me tremendously. Learning about film and how to read it helped me learn to appreciate the entire medium more because I started to understand how deeply it can affect us and how complex it is. I may never enjoy Jane Austen's prose, just like some people might never enjoy the art of Picasso or any movie made before 1989, but that doesn't mean I can't still try to appreciate what other people see in it or what the artists in question were attempting to do. Some of my now favorite things were things I once despised as a kid; pepper, baked salmon, pink and orange together, black and white movies, subtitles, the ornateness of traditional Asian art, tea without sugar, and so on. Over time, with curiosity and sometimes even with effort, I adapted to the idea of them and learned to appreciate them in new and more complex ways. Hopefully one day I'll be able to look back and shake my head in sad wonder that I was unable to appreciate her style for so long. Who knows, by then I might have developed an appreciation for mayonnaise and/or tofu by then, too. You never know.</div>Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-33463326444268834902011-10-29T18:52:00.000-07:002011-10-29T19:33:46.593-07:00Halloween Already?<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: -webkit-left; "><span ><span >It's that time of year again, when we turn our thoughts to the macabre and spooky, dress up as the things that frighten us, and carve images into large gourds. Horror movies come out of the woodwork, even though they tend to be a constant trend these days. As always, some are bad, some are good, and some are so bad they're good if you're into that sort of thing. Here are some of my favorites that linger at the back of my mind long after the credits have stopped. Not all are supernatural or fantastical in some way; most are about the real life sorts of monsters since those scare me more than the boogeymen tend to. They aren't really fun “party” movies, more the curl up on the couch with a blanket and all the lights off sort. Some are truly horrifying, but it's the poignant melancholy and underlying exploration of human nature that keep me coming back to them. Horror isn't about gore or a momentary startle, per se, that's just </span></span></span><span style="text-align: -webkit-left; "><span ><span >momentary </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">viscera. Horror at its core is what the name implies: the things that horrify us. So here's mine.</span></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div> <p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; "><iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lGuhYQpPWhA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></span></p><p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in; "><span ><span ><span >Joon Ho Bong is one of my favorite directors working today; he also directed <i>The Host</i> and <i>Mother</i> but this is, in my opinion, his best movie to date. <i>Memories of Murder</i> is based around the first actual recorded serial murders in South Korea, events from the mid-80s. The film's atmosphere swings from actually comical in the beginning, when the small-town police force is dealing with something so far beyond their training that they can't even see what's going on. It's often funny but in a sad, uncomfortable way as they fake evidence, torture suspects for confessions, and generally blunder around in such ineptitude you can't help but laugh at the tragedy of it all. They honestly, earnestly think they know what they're doing. It isn't until a cop from Seoul joins the investigation that they make headway, inevitably along with clashing egos and territoriality, but even then it isn't enough. No matter how much they figure out, there are bigger issues at work than their small-town murders. The conflict with North Korea is playing havoc with the resources they need, more and more women are turning up not just dead but </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">mutilated, and the cops begin to realize how deep in over their heads they are. The ugliness of the killer's hatred for his victims is evident in the increasingly upsetting things he does to them. Upsetting in part because we know he doesn't hate them for who they are but simply what they are. We need to believe there are answers just as desperately as the cops do, but there's no way we can be sure of any of it. How many leads were real and how many are we clinging to simply because we so desperately want to believe them?</span></p> <p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in; "><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQs06CvNuzA41h2T3FqWxw0AuLnnwwd5htk093WIYPZOux_WrUYZS1GN4c8m4xz5N9Cf7UPNHyIj0uZKbOAfifYMSu0ojA_YrACHkb2_ci9CRcpSndYlq0oki2hOBn2bPwChmgGde-tNN9/s320/leboucher.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5669107027162394434" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 254px; " /></p><div></div><p></p> <p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in; "> <span ><span ><span ><i>Le Boucher</i> is probably Claude Chabrol's most well-known film and it lives up to its reputation. Chabrol is often cited as the French Hitchcock and it's clear the two filmmakers influenced each other, as they both play in the same arenas using many similar techniques and comparable levels of skill. They both made movies that are about much more than whatever the plot is and this film is absolutely no exception. It is a murder mystery, a romance, and a fascinating waltz with the dark sides of our own psyches that repel and attract us. The mystery is not what you think it is, and if you go into it expecting a who-done-it, you will be disappointed. That isn't what's going on here at all. We know who did it, we even know why; the mystery is not with the killer at all. Watch it very carefully, especially Stephane Audran as Helene because that knockout performance is the whole reason why this film works. I'd even go so far as to say it is the entire point of the story at all. Watch the scene with the long drive more than once and tell me I'm wrong.</span></span></span></p> <p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">(Chabrol's film <i>The Bridesmaid</i> is currently streaming on Netflix, and is also worth watching. Again, surprise isn't the point of it, but rather knowing what's inevitably coming and simply watching it unfold.)</span></p> <p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in; "><br /></p> <p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in; "> <span ><span ><span ><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/NG3-GlvKPcg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></span></span></span></p> <p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in; "> <span ><span ><span >Of course everyone knows the shocking twist to this film, and most of us have probably seen it at least once. But it's one you can watch over and over because like with <i>Le Boucher</i>, the point isn't the story itself-- it's about something much bigger and quieter and unspoken. Possibly the only true horror film Hitchcock ever directed, the horror doesn't lie in what happens onscreen; it's in the things we never really see happen at all. How many answers do we really have about the whys of Norman Bates? Are monsters born with their monstrosity or are they created from love and innocence and ignorance? How much can we really trust the answers the film tries to give us? How much does the film want us to believe the doctor at the end of the film? How much can we trust anyone's account of the Bates family and what went on in it? Norman's house gives us the only facts we can really trust and even then we're only guessing. But the real question is how much does it matter when we realize the only person there we really love is the villain?</span></span></span></p> <p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in; "><br /></p> <p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in; "> <span ><span ><span ><iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/IXCAH8eprZA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></span></span></span></p> <p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in; "><span ><span ><span >A woman who doesn't know who she is, lost in the city of dreams and new beginnings. She's running from something; she doesn't know what it is, but she knows it's terrible and it's catching up to her. There is nostalgia for a simpler, more innocent time, when we were earnest and good, where everyone got what they deserved and mysteries were meant to be solved to put our fears to rest. We forget that sometimes it's worse to know what it is looking back at us from the dark. We knew the whole time it wasn't real-- we bought the ticket, after all-- but sitting there in the dark we forgot about the real world and who we're sitting next to and even who we are. There are moments when we remember it's all an illusion but we want so badly to forget the real world that the winks from the person behind the curtain are jarring and unsettling. We have invented our own fantasy, but we're so busy enjoying the dream that we don't want to wake up. The monsters are scarier in the daylight because we know what they really are.</span></span></span></p><p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in; "><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></p><p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in; "><span class="Apple-style-span" ><iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/EqYiSlkvRuw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></span></p><p align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in; "><span class="Apple-style-span" >The distinction between reality and fantasy is drawn much more distinctly in this film than in Lynch's, but there's still plenty of ambiguity left. However, trying to decipher if Ofelia's encounters with the Faun and other creatures is actually happening is a bit beside the point. We'll all have our own opinions on the ending, of course, and that's how del Toro wants it. There is no "right" answer for it. The real meat of the film is in the relationship between innocence and, for lack of a better word, "evil," and how in some ways they are each others' doppelganger. The palate del Toro works with seems stark on the surface but the darks are rich and complex, with the lights serving primarily as a contrast. Sergei Lopez's performance as Vidal is terrifying and utterly riveting.</span></p></div>Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-18387535267558167012011-08-26T18:52:00.000-07:002011-08-27T23:31:21.357-07:00Thoughts on Catwoman, Noir and Nolan<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo4_A_iZ8I1O5e8m956wOhr20b-IYhvuvNw6ZNmOXq9SNJXABD3dj7u9XxC1RYnRd3JZIsFkpHo0cXIi6JAIrJFkGxXnUwLuwbJs_zru7gUNXiPbtlT_OAQisp-FU4fW29InrZxrBfuVKz/s1600/Catwoman_montage.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 253px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo4_A_iZ8I1O5e8m956wOhr20b-IYhvuvNw6ZNmOXq9SNJXABD3dj7u9XxC1RYnRd3JZIsFkpHo0cXIi6JAIrJFkGxXnUwLuwbJs_zru7gUNXiPbtlT_OAQisp-FU4fW29InrZxrBfuVKz/s320/Catwoman_montage.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5645758579633223778" /></a>
<br /><div style="text-align: left;"><i>I'm going to say up front that I am not an aficionado in the </i>Batman<i> comics and in fact have not read them in many years. My opinions are based largely on </i>The Animated Series,<i> the second volume of the </i>Catwoman<i> comic series and the issues of </i>Batman<i> comics I collected back when I still cared. If I say something that seems out of line with things that have been happening in current comics continuity, that's why. I also don't really care since this is essentially about why I liked the things I paid attention to.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>Having finally seen a full photo of Anne Hathaway in the Catwoman costume from Nolan's upcoming Batman movie, my feelings are a bit mixed. Not so much about the costume which I'm pretty happy with, but about this film in general. Expectations are so high for it after the success of The Dark Knight and fandom can get itself worked up into a froth over their own versions of what they want the film to be and reality, even if a well-made film, will often be a disappointment by comparison. With so much grumbling about the casting and the costume already starting I don't want any potential disappointment of failure pinned on her for the sake of scapegoating something. It's possible I won't like what they do with her character, or that she'll wind up like Scarlett Johansson in <i>Iron Man 2</i>-- set dressing with no necessity to the plot whatsoever. I think Nolan is much smarter and more talented than that, but not having seen it I have no idea what he has planned for her.<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2LOOduBhUcLFi7UxbkEG4vp-WqFwLVuO4EbU4ol0UjSDypkMFNp9Jr213wTao5yXZS24J0UD_bUXW4xG_AAEpvpgTKKH3UBWptNTK_cHnFF9o8trvgyR-E-Onm8dsnRdgyQ2HQfD4tTgr/s320/hathawaycatwoman.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5645740868228926434" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 214px; " /><div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Except I suspect at some point she rides a motorcycle</span>.</div><div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div><div>Up front I feel like I should mention that Catwoman is, far and away, my favorite comic book character ever and she has been since before I hit puberty. I recognize that I am very biased when it comes to her and that there is very little probability that I will ever be completely happy with how she's handled from writer to writer because in my head I've taken bits and pieces from her various incarnations and fused them into my personal idea of her most interesting self. Everyone is going to have different views on her and different degrees of investment in her as a character and I try not to let my own ideas color my expectations too much. Doesn't mean it won't happen, but I'm trying to be self-aware about my issues. I'm not going to waste energy fretting about the costume and will reserve my judgement for how they've handled her character.</div><div>
<br /></div><div><div>As much as I enjoyed the campier portrayal in Burton's <i>Batman Returns</i>, I'm very ready for a more complex and grounded view of her; something more than just a mish-mash of tacked-on, superficially "feminist" ideas which must, by decree of the Hollywood formula, be stripped of validity by the end of the film. It's something the crew on <i>Batman: The Animated Series</i> tried to do back in the '90s, although they were severely hampered by broadcast standards and really didn't seem to know what to do with her at all until the end of the series. Judging from her first solo comic book series starring the mediocre art of Jim Balent and the downright crappy movie starring Halle Berry, most people really didn't know what to do with her beyond making her sexy in the laziest ways possible. <i>The Animated Series</i> couldn't even get away with that much, reduced to head-slappingly bad plotlines about animal rights and sexless flirting, with everyone being so darned earnest about everything. They tried, but they just didn't flesh her out as a full enough character, which is too bad considering the amazing things they did with characters like Mr Freeze, Two-Face and the Mad Hatter. They were much more successful with Poison Ivy, whose sexuality came across more easily and whose eco-terrorism was more compelling than Selina's animal rights crusade which just came off as preachy. The show that gave us the wonderfully complex Harley Quinn could only muster a half-hearted effort for the mythos's most well-known and longest-standing female character.</div><div><div></div></div><div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div><div>However badly they fumbled her character, I still give props to that show for doing some pretty fine <i>noir</i> for an animated kid's TV show. It wasn't just the dark palate they used (they painted most of the backgrounds on black paper for what they termed the "dark deco" look), the 1940s flavor to the show's design, the heavy use of gangsters and crime plots, or the other superficial elements that leap to mind with film <i>noir</i>; you can have a <i>noir</i> film without the lighting or the mobsters. What they nailed was the moral ambiguity, the fatalism, and the dance with one's own dark urges and criminality that are at the core of the <i>noir</i> genre. For all its stunning black and white cinematography, true <i>noir</i> is all about shades of grey and that's where the <i>Animated Series</i> and Nolan's movies really work for this concept. They get <i>noir</i>. So does Ed Brubaker.</div><div><iframe width="420" height="345" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/xOgBa2Oij1A" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div><div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Pretty good example of <i>noir</i>'s atmosphere and philosophy.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div><div>In 2001, Brubaker and Darwyn Cooke relaunched the <i>Catwoman</i> comic book title with the intent to bring Selina back to this idea, as well as to try and establish a concrete world and back story for her. Too many writers over the decades never seemed to know who she was at her core or what to do with her. Sure she'd been nicknamed the Feline Fatale but at her core she's never been a killer; as a villain she was never on par with the Joker or Two Face since she's never been homicidally insane, or even a zealot like Poison Ivy or Ras al Ghul. So why her staying power? What is it about her that has made her so enduring and iconic? It can't be simply sex appeal since comics have always been brimming with sexy women characters. Why her continued place as a <i>femme fatale</i> when she's never been very ruthless and never been known for killing anyone? Because the very idea of the <i>femme fatale</i> is rooted in male anxiety-- she's dangerous not necessarily because of her intentions or her actions but because of the effect she has on the male protagonist. She is the temptation that leads him to his downfall, either spiritually or physically, whether she did it on purpose or not. She's too alluring and beguiling for him to refuse even though he knows he should, and that's exactly what Selina is to Bruce.</div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg61noBemRC53FohEF5XprdK6YCIEmkes9jwpHswTlYGNzMid4IIepMpqclKzjPgKkFYS5lxrx6J_KRkR2_XoqsvkuMLR7hnGfJ4QX0oHYOVHN_REL-iuFD1SbqcS3ZdawDR0C2kF4DOGwy/s320/OUT_OF_THE_PAST-Douglas-Greer.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5645742722554727906" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px; " /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><i>Out of the Past</i> from Kathy's perspective is more like a Lifetime movie of the week.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span">
<br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;">She isn't insane, she isn't out to hurt anybody, and in many ways they're very similar. They're just compatible enough to be compelling but just different enough in their ideologies and methods to not be able to cross that thin line that divides them. The danger isn't so much that Bruce will go dark and become more ruthless, it's that he'll forget his past and everything that set him on his personal mission, settle down and try his best to be normal. As healthy as it would probably be for him to let go of his inner demons, it's the thing he's built his whole life around (and the whole reason anyone gives a crap about all those comic books, TV shows and movies he's in). There's nothing standing between them except their own issues, so the tension is always there under the surface as they each walk with one foot on that line without ever fully crossing over.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>For my money, nobody got that better than Brubaker in his short stint on her book. Not only did he do his best to take what he felt worked for Selina from the different back stories that had been tossed out there after Frank Miller's <i>Year One</i> comic, but he also did his best to ground her character in something more concrete than just a vague idea of sexiness, heist capers and being attracted to Batman. He brought her back to Gotham, gave her a purpose more compelling than just elaborate adventures in exotic locations, and rooted her in something solid and believable. A lot of people take umbrage at the idea of her having been a prostitute in her younger days; admittedly it wasn't my favorite choice and it's one of my many issues with Frank Miller's take on her character (or most of his female characters). But Brubaker took it and gave it a purpose in her overall story instead of letting it exist simply for the sake of being dark or titillating. This gave her much higher personal stakes than if she'd been a bored socialite or the daughter of a crime boss or even a runaway orphan. It explains why she can't see the world in black and white the way Bruce does, why she can't bring herself to cross that line between them and why we should care about what she's managed to build from her life. Bruce is a character that has defined himself by one incident and built his life around it using all the advantages he had at his disposal. Selina doesn't have one single character-defining moment in her history and what she has was built by herself from nothing. She understands criminality and the things people will do to survive in ways Bruce never has because he has never been completely alone or without privilege, respect and pride. For her to cross that dividing line into Bruce's more lawful idea of heroism would take a kind of hypocritical self-denial that Selina's too savvy to trick herself into believing. She can never see the lowest people on society's totem pole as just criminals because she was one of them. She can never work strictly by the law or believe in the criminal justice system because she knows they often fail. For all their similarities and mutual respect and attraction, Bruce and Selina see the world in very different ways. Because of that, they also humanize each other.</div><div>
<br /></div><div><center><img src="http://i51.tinypic.com/27y0kzk.jpg" />
<br /></center></div><div>
<br /></div><div><a href="http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/271347.html">Brubaker wrote their relationship as a tantalizing dance between two people who knew each other's secrets</a>, who understood each other in ways no one else did, but who didn't have to come out and say any of it because they liked the dance too much to ruin it with the obvious. It was sexier than any double entendre or moonlit make out scene because he understood that the things that <i>aren't</i> said are far more tantalizing than the things that are. When done right, an exchanged glance or a charged silence can be far sexier than any graphic love scene. He also went out of his way to toss out Bruce's emotionless Machiavellian wish-fulfillment badass persona in favor of writing him as a human damn being, which practically no one else was doing at the time. <span class="Apple-style-span">(See above link for examples.)</span></div><div>
<br /></div><div>That isn't to say Brubaker's run was perfect, there were plenty of things in it I thought could have been improved or were unnecessary. But what he did right, he did damned well, especially in paying attention to the characters, making them unique, flawed, likable people you wanted to read about every month. It didn't feel like a superhero book so much as a mystery/crime story with a few eccentricities. For the first time since the 90s, Selina seemed like a real person, not some idealized, self-obsessed sex goddess who floated through life on her tiptoes. She was someone who was learning from her past mistakes, growing as a character, weighed down by her history and a new sense of maturity and responsibility. She was someone with close emotional ties to people, who remembered where she came from but who had a sense of purpose for the future. They finally let her grow as a person in a way that was believable and made sense with her past. She was someone I could understand at last, and ultimately that's really all I ask for.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>Do I think Nolan will use this rather dark personal history for her? Not really, and I'm all right with that. Not sure how the public would take to seeing a less romanticized version of <i>Pretty Woman</i> in their superhero crime thriller, and it seems more likely they'll go with the subplot from <i>The Long Halloween</i> and have her being tied to the Falcone crime family. So long as she's not just some personification of an idea with no further depth beyond her physicality, bad cat jokes and reminding the audience that our hero is an angst-ridden, tragic heterosexual man, I'll be fine with whatever back story they give her. I just want to know there's a real character in there. If they can do that much, then I'll be satisfied.</div></div></div>Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-46429406926846258942011-07-18T14:21:00.000-07:002011-07-18T16:22:29.981-07:00IDNTTWMWYTIM: "Karma"<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiORXN1jeuUvf3GgXa63Ud2G_vlkU-oU7ChASOGBmuFgD8Ks8sQa8tvuHh8upho58BZJd2oT8w7A9o94gzr05d9k_Evp4AoYH0VLV7vV78kfEWvXeihLdpr7bfHmNGsTlIatrw94q8Gz16a/s1600/inigofacesmall.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiORXN1jeuUvf3GgXa63Ud2G_vlkU-oU7ChASOGBmuFgD8Ks8sQa8tvuHh8upho58BZJd2oT8w7A9o94gzr05d9k_Evp4AoYH0VLV7vV78kfEWvXeihLdpr7bfHmNGsTlIatrw94q8Gz16a/s320/inigofacesmall.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5630836244099344306" /></a><div style="text-align: left;">Welcome back to another installment of <i>I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means</i>, where I bust out my love of semantics all over a word that I feel has been misappropriated, misunderstood, or maybe not understood at all because no one's ever heard of it. Today's word is well-known to most people, even outside Hindu and Buddhist circles, and while most people get the general gist of it, there's a certain nuance to the concept that tends to get shoved aside.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div><div><i><b>Karma</b></i> is a Sanskrit word that means "action." As in, to act upon something in a physical manner. That's the literal translation, feel free to pass that around at parties as a cool piece of trivia. However, in relation to religious/philosophical meaning, we understand it to mean "what goes around comes around" or "you get what's coming to you." It's the right idea, sure, and I think most cultures around the world have a similar concept, but "karma" sounds cool and gets the point across in one word.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>The thing most of us forget or never learn in the first place about it is that at its core it's not a super judgmental term. A lot of us, because we're human and by nature we like feeling better than other people, use it as a way to basically call other people stupid, mean, or just inferior in some way, even though all of us have probably done stupid, mean things ourselves... like, say, scoffing at other people's unhappiness and misfortune. Karma, in its basic sense, is not about cosmic judgement for doing something wrong, like we tend to think of it. It's more like the principle in physics that states "every action has an equal and opposite reaction." Karma isn't a punishment from a sentient being to put us in our place when we get out of line, it's a universal force that acts essentially like a swing: when it gets pushed in one direction, it naturally swings back the other direction. A match catches on fire when it's struck with enough friction to light it-- the burning is the karma of the act of striking it, it's the natural end result of the action.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDVW_L-2apuCDgCpMBTWlzqSojDiepuY7vUc7CobF2ZxtYGjTpHS8-PRCNFZbw5J1veMVoP8ddZXjGTJJZRQvUoiUL3TKLIPtI37ZxMKE-IH5ALvyUtnpJ-v-03FRZCTz1-KQxy2swomBl/s320/kinetictoy.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 300px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5630835235260976242" /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" >Like this, only the ball is that thing you said to your boss's wife at the Christmas party.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>Now that isn't to say that there aren't moral judgments involved in the religious/philosophical teachings of the word; the ideas of "good karma" and "bad karma" are central to Hindu and Buddhist teachings. In Hinduism, it's one's actions that determine what becomes of them in their next life-- reincarnation runs on karma, so that the more good karma one collects during their life the higher they ascend in the cosmic hierarchy; this is also where the caste system comes into play. One is born into their position because of the actions they took in their past life. Their only way out is to perform the duties of one's position to the best of their abilities and lead a moral life so that they'll be reborn into a higher position in the next life, and so on. I hesitate to use the caste system as an example since a) it's very complex and I'm hardly an expert in it, and b) it's changed significantly over the course of Indian history, particularly in the wake of British colonialism, and again in the modern age where its significance is decreasing. But I did want to illustrate that the idea of what we call "instant karma," where the effect of one's action takes</div><div> place immediately afterward isn't really what the concept was originally about. It was more about long-term repercussions that may not take effect immediately during this lifetime, but that collect over time and affect one's next life drastically.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHXMHjRD9s4sy32v8c0E2DJeKzdac6m2IPBDZ0SXr2ywtbwX_RM58nx6S5iMa-7LdW2U2kqeKwMFeQtB2WS9xc5ByWjQUMyTIb0_0SbEmF7NHDappjOrpNT0t7RPSQLNjBtCXU44jQQhFd/s320/world.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 307px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5630834638083506114" /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" >Makes you wish we thought about the long-term view a little more often.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>What I find most ironic about the majority of the people I hear using the word karma in everyday conversation is that the very way they employ it would constitute bad karma. It's usually someone insinuating that another person's misfortune is deserved because that person did something stupid at some point, but looking down on other people for making mistakes is hardly the embodiment of self-awareness. Of course I'm just as guilty of it as anyone is, and writing these sorts of posts helps to remind me to remember that. As my old band teacher used to tell us, "when you point at someone else, you have three fingers pointing back at yourself." (Back then I spent an embarrassing amount of time missing the point by trying to devise a way to point ahead while keeping all other fingers aimed away from myself.) Of course she was talking about someone's instrument being out of tune and telling us that we should all check ourselves before assuming it's someone else, but I believe the point stands in a larger context. Or, as one of my favorite movies put it, "you'll never be a first-class human being until you learn to have a little regard for human frailty."</div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDWx0tpx6yRIpwX7zXUVH3i98Zaol9jbo_ZG5eTXZQh9j-G11ZUEmhW0vaFWQD5JAkbwITnSYDYyi7dCIEZ2d5AOX7gdVMdgYcPjzeADoVhUlU0Y73TIGwiKhtR5LkBcJAWD-sLFLh3Bl8/s320/philadelphia1.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 252px; height: 169px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5630833591836059010" /><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" >Also, everyone needs to go watch <i>The Philadelphia Story</i> right now.</span></div></div>Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-84797292713704051282011-06-15T16:06:00.000-07:002011-06-15T18:37:46.856-07:00Social Justice Movements and Fantasy Media<div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">There has been a thought bouncing around in my head for a while now and I've never been entirely sure how to approach it. With the opening of <i>X-Men: First Class</i> and the upcoming premiere of the fourth season of<i> True Blood</i>, maybe now is the time to explore it briefly. There won't be any spoilers for <i>First Class</i> since I haven't seen it yet, but I will cover the X-Men as an idea in general, and there might be some spoilers for <i>True Blood</i>, since I have seen that.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div><div>Spoiler line just to be safe, la la la.</div></div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0Gj-dDKz8pqy4zb7aubgQOlU7Nk4FwBqQW39X5QFEvuJRHroZ3BQsobFd2AO9GQGttCFxqP2XA_WsvMh4zf5nwkoMyE8SErGbRM0pXGIybtw2Qzfqyuqu9TfxXHJ5qKdnaaBpJ6IDhrmG/s320/uncanny-x-men-44-iceman-defends-himself-against-mob-1-100k.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 154px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5618625607918278898" /></div><div>All right, so Southern-fried vampire soap opera and classic comic book showcasing people with superhuman powers fighting for the good of the very people who hate and fear them. What do they have in common? Well, the X-Men book started back in the 60s when the Civil Rights movement was starting to gear up. Whether or not that was the original intention is a little beside the point since by the time Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum took over in the 70s, that was most definitely the running theme of the book. The vampires in <i>True Blood</i>, as in the book series the show is based on, are also used as allegories for oppressed minorities: in the beginning they have recently "come out of the coffin" and face fear and prejudice from the general population, law enforcement, politicians, and the religious right. Both series mix different obstacles faced by various groups over the course of history, like the Mutant Registration Act from <i>X-Men</i> being analogous to the laws in Nazi Germany requiring the "undesirables" of society to be made identifiable, and the Fellowship of the Sun in <i>True Blood</i> being rather like a combination of the Westboro Baptist Church and the Ku Klux Klan. So to compare the two series on that front seems pretty fair to me.</div><div><br /></div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw-xCuQ0-Z7L3o_hcvcgIM76LiVx__fwwyJH5-ffw97PZHUGrY4E4JRu1EVsD2hN0gRmpXG6lp83OlujKi9aIsE4kRetiZ6TSDQz3U_-8gS3lMMht0HP9D-rnUX_F5Ac3K6mv-DT3QEHAM/s320/true-blood-god-hates-fangs.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 113px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5618623652472995330" /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" >From <i>True Blood</i>'s opening sequence.</span></div><div><br /></div><div>Now, as much as I enjoy both of these series and agree with the spirit of the message, here's the part where I run into a little bit of trouble with the actual practice of using fantasy/science fiction analogies for the real-world oppression of human minority groups: the basis of Civil Rights and of basic human rights is that no matter what the racial, ethnic, class, sexual preference, gender or religious background may be, these differences are superficial and pale in comparison to the similarities inherent to simply being human. There is nothing a person from one group can do to anyone that a person from another group, including the majority group, could not also do. Underneath, we're all fundamentally the same.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is not the case with mutants and vampires. As soon as you introduce the possibility of a teenager being able to blow one of their classmates' face off with lasers from their eyes, we have gone from "propaganda threat" to "that registration act doesn't seem so unreasonable." A black person being pulled over for driving a car with a white woman in it cannot, in fact, magically hypnotize the police officer into handing over his gun during a very tense confrontation.</div><div><br /></div><div><iframe width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/tOW6Mvxezgo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div><div><br /></div><div>The perceived threat from real life minorities becomes a very real and potential threat as soon as the supernatural gets involved, which changes the dynamics of the entire situation. This isn't to say that I think these ideas are stupid, but I do think this fundamental flaw in the message needs to be addressed, which also means that the people writing them need to be aware of it. Otherwise you wind up comparing a gay man who has no greater physical or supernatural abilities than a straight man would have to a man who can physically pull the iron from your blood through your skin in order to escape from prison. As well-intentioned as I think <i>X-Men</i> is, I don't think it gets this.</div><div><br /></div><div><iframe width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/cNbXq2RNyC4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div><div><br /></div><div>I do, however, think <i>True Blood</i> understands and has very subtly commented on this over the past several seasons. The imagery of a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgpCEnsppVE&feature=related">young gay, black man being chained by the neck in the basement of a blond-haired, blue-eyed vampire who at one point literally rips someone in half with his bare hands</a> speaks to this point, as does the image of a young black woman dressed in an old-fashioned nightgown trying to escape from a plantation mansion where she has been sexually assaulted by an Anglo vampire. There are things the show does that make us uncomfortable this way, and there are simply too many of them for me to believe this is a coincidence. As much as I admire this about the show-- along with its recognizing its own inherent cheesiness, its refusal to take itself too seriously, while also managing to dance along the line between funny and horrifying-- this does raise another issue: because of the very strong overt message of vampires as an allegory for oppressed minorities, what will happen as this story progresses and the subtle commentary about the unfairness of this comparison becomes more noticeable? Will it undermine the legitimate arguments from real life activists who demand equal rights by unintentionally validating the fears of the majority? I certainly hope not, and if I'm right and this commentary is deliberate on the writers' part, I have faith in them to handle this with the intelligence and delicate footwork it will require. In the meantime, it seems like a good idea to bring this subject up and mull it over as we watch our entertaining fantasy versions of the state of civil rights and public attitudes toward The Other.</div>Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-66736219091186427752011-06-08T19:36:00.000-07:002011-06-08T19:54:12.896-07:00Help a FriendHey all, dropping a note for the sake of friend and co-femme Stacy, who's hitting a big financial brick wall rather suddenly and could really use a hand. She's taking commissions, the details of which are over at <a href="http:/http://creepykitch.blogspot.com/2011/06/awkwardness-ahoy.html/">Creepy Kitch</a>. If you can't help out, maybe you know someone who can. Thanks muchly.Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-25410949587135637002011-06-07T02:58:00.000-07:002011-06-08T02:57:17.273-07:00Rambling Post On Film CriticismHello out there in internetland, sorry it's been so long. I'm currently in finals week of my last quarter of college (for now), and it's been one nutty ride this year. I have not, as you may have noticed, gotten to the many blog posts I have promised so far, but seeing as how I'll have a lot of free time on my hands soon, I'll probably get to them... eventually.<div><br /></div><div>For the time being, however, I have added massive quantities of links to the right side of this page, which should help fill your time until I can muster the brainpower to write a coherent article.</div><div><br /></div><div>I also want to comment on something that seems to be a topic of interest amongst certain circles at the moment, and that is the nature and public perception of film criticism. Some very smart people have written some very interesting things in the past several days and I thought I'd pass some of them along. Feel more than free to offer opinions and comments, I love hearing from people, even if they disagree with me as long as it's civil and in the spirit of debate-- something that gets touched on in some of these.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-04-14/news/ct-oped-0414-page-20100414_1_critics-rotten-tomatoes-thumbs">Clarence Page at the <i>Chicago Tribune</i> I think my have started this current debate</a></div><div><a href="http://filmcrithulk.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/hulk-essay-your-ass-tangible-details-and-the-nature-of-criticism/">Hulk gives his thoughts in a very articulate and intelligent piece</a></div><div><a href="http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/924952/pirates_of_the_caribbean_on_stranger_tides_and_the_state_of_film_criticism.html">Mark Harrison at Den Of Geek also offers some food for thought</a></div><div>*New* <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/movies/films-in-defense-of-slow-and-boring.html">Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott at the <i>New York Times</i> offer a perspective on what they call "slow film" and the subjectiveness of "boring"</a> (Thanks to Hulk for the recommendation.)</div><div><br /></div><div>There are more out there but these are the three I came across that I found the most thought-provoking. Honestly, I have my own ideas on the topic, and this is something that surfaces now and again as I navigate both the practice of studying film and the social ramifications of being a "movie snob" to people who don't. Let me give you an overview of why I really hate that term, and it isn't just because I hear it in application to myself or to people I happen to agree with, or even to people I may not agree with but whose viewpoint I find interesting. It's because it's a cheap way to invalidate someone else's opinion without having to engage with their actual argument.</div><div><br /></div><div>Let me tell you a secret that a lot of people don't seem to understand about film: there are very few "right" answers. There seems to be this idea that there's some kernel of absolute "Truth" at the center of anything and that if you whittle it down far enough you'll eventually discover the definitive answer. The problem with this is film is art, and like all art, its meaning and value are totally subjective to the one viewing it. Likewise, are the opinions of those reviewing/critiquing it. For me personally, a good film reviewer is not the person with whom I agree the most often, it's the one who actually thinks about the film and then writes about it in such a way that makes <i>me</i> think about it. There have been numerous films I have watched for a class or on my own that I initially disliked or was confused by, but after reading a thoughtful review or an academic article or even just discussing it with someone else, I learned to appreciate certain aspects of it that I never would have otherwise. They may be things I ultimately disagree with, or they may not be enough to get me to enjoy the film, but I absolutely appreciate having insight into it. That's basically what studying criticism allows you to do: not to arrive at the "right" answer as to whether a movie is objectively good or bad, but to aid in the ability to understand why someone enjoys a film or doesn't.</div><div><br /></div><div>Another secret: my taste in movies has stayed exactly the same since I started learning about film. There have been a few here and there that I now see in a new light, but by and large, I enjoy the same things I did before and dislike the same things. The only significant change in my discussion of the topic is my ability to articulate why I feel the way I do about a given film. That's it. Well, that and the confidence to actually express my opinion instead of trying to convince myself I like a film when I don't just because I can't figure out why, or I feel obligated to because everyone else likes it. I used to waste a lot of energy trying to justify things in films that I didn't like because I felt I should, for some bizarre reason, and let me tell you, it is such a relief to quit doing that. No, if anything has changed in regards to my movie collection, it's simply the scope. Learning the mechanics of how movies work hasn't "taken the magic out of it," as I hear some people argue, it's actually <i>increased</i> my appreciation for it. The movies I loved before, I enjoy watching even more now than I did when I first saw them because I understand them on a deeper level. I love watching movies. I <i>really</i> love watching good movies, but in all honesty there are so few films out there that I consider worthless; there's usually something I find worthwhile in almost any of them, even if I dislike the end result overall.</div><div><br /></div><div>But at the end of the day, it's all just opinion. That's all a critic has to offer: the same thing everyone else has, only with better articulated reasons and hopefully some interesting insights. Studying film doesn't teach anyone how to figure out the "right" answer, it helps inform the understanding of why a given person feels the way they do about it. That's it. It doesn't mean you have to agree with it, but hopefully it might make you think a little deeper about why you feel the way you do. Who knows, it might even make you appreciate it more than you might have otherwise, or even interest you in a film you might not have given a chance before. I think one of the greatest things I'm taking away from my film education is the really great movies I've been exposed to that I would never have heard of otherwise. Ultimately, what this blog is doing isn't just providing a platform for my opinions and ideas, but it's a space for me to share these movies with other people.</div>Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-45846548336006806062011-02-23T23:27:00.000-08:002011-02-24T00:55:53.905-08:00Oscars for the Movies of '10So the Oscars are this Sunday and I just realized I haven't said a single thing about them. Honestly, I'm not terribly hyped up about them this year. The only category I'm that invested in is Best Supporting Actress and that's simply because it's one of the very few that's actually something of a toss-up. Everything else seems pretty cut and dried which isn't very suspenseful and for someone like me who either knows the movie she's rooting for won't win or hasn't seen the vast majority of the movies in question yet, it's pretty anti-climactic. I'll still watch them because I'm a nerd that way and it's one of the very few social things I get to do all year and I look forward to making snide comments MST3K style as I secretly hope for a major upset just for the sake of some drama.<div><br /></div><div>So instead of making a list of predictions about what will/might/should win as everyone else on the internet has already done, I'll just mention briefly what I would like to see win and why it won't. Brace for extreme nerdery.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Best Picture</b></div><div>I'm not very worked up about this category since I've only seen three out of the ten nominees and found two of them to be pretty over-rated. Maybe I've been in a grumpy mood for the past three months but for the life of me I cannot understand the huge fuss over <i>Inception</i> and <i>Toy Story 3. </i>Yeah, you heard me, internet, I didn't think they were that great. They weren't awful but I failed to understand why so many people-- smart people, many of whom I know and am very fond of-- kept going on about how amazing they were. I'd want to watch them again because I feel like I missed something crucial, but frankly I don't really want to. The other one I saw was <i>True Grit</i> and while I did like it a great deal, I was left with that same feeling of empty calories after it was over. I wasn't as vaguely irritated while watching it because it entertained me more than the other two, but I was still left with a feeling of "yeah, and?" when it was over. Maybe it's me, I don't know. But it's pretty much a forgone conclusion that <i>The King's Speech</i> is going to take Best Picture, which makes this category even less interesting since there's really no debate. Does it deserve to win? Probably? I don't have an opinion because I haven't seen it or the other six nominees, so I have no idea what I consider to be the "best" amongst them. What would I like to see win? <i>Winter's Bone</i> would be fun just because it's so different from the rest of them, a true indy film that was a surprise nominee and which I've heard from darn near everyone is a really great film. No way it'll happen, but I'm really glad it's been nominated since it might entice people to actually see it.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Best Actor</b></div><div>If Colin Firth somehow doesn't win this it may be a sign of the apocalypse. I don't think there's any way that statue's going to anyone else, which frankly is okay with me. I like Firth a lot and I was absolutely blown away by his performance in <i>A Single Man</i> last year (if you haven't seen that movie, go watch it now). I knew he wouldn't win his nomination for that but I was still rooting for him anyway, so I'm glad he gets to take it this year. Having said that, I'm also a fan of Jeff Bridges (have been since the <i>Fabulous Baker Boys</i> so I'm glad he's getting recognized for the huge talent he is), Javier Bardem, and James Franco, so this is really a nice lineup for me. I wouldn't be disappointed with anyone winning, but this is definitely Firth's year.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Best Actress</b></div><div>Natalie Portman's all but got this one in the bag since she's swept darn near every awards ceremony for this role. I haven't seen <i>Black Swan</i> yet so I have no opinion on her performance in it, but I've always liked her so it's nice she's getting recognition for being more than just a pretty face. I suppose I should get snide about how anti-climactic the category is, and it is, but... that is just a damn fine lineup of really amazing actresses in <i>interesting</i> roles. I can't get grumpy about this category this year except that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often. Let's keep this caliber of work going, what do you say? (Also, I do sort of hope Anette Benning wins just because she's never won despite being a really great actress and Hillary Swank isn't up for anything this year. Curse you, Portman and your point shoes.)</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Supporting Actor</b></div><div>Christian Bale's pretty much a lock for this one from what I've gleaned and I don't have anything against the guy, so eh, whatever. Once again I find myself in a limbo of indifference since I haven't seen any of the films these guys are in. I will say, however, that I absolutely adore Geoffrey Rush and wish he were in more things, so I wouldn't be a bit sad if he took the statue.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Supporting Actress</b></div><div>Once again, what a really fantastic lineup. Everyone says this is pretty much a toss up between Melissa Leo, Hailee Steinfeld, and Helena Bonham Carter which makes it officially the most exciting category of the evening. Since Steinfeld's is the only performance I've seen yet, and it was far and away my favorite thing about that movie, she's at the top of my list (and yes, like everyone else I agree that she is a lead actress, not a supporting one-- hell she's the main character of the movie which she also narrates). But Carter's been a perennial favorite of mine for a few years now too, so I'd be happy if she won. Frankly, I'm just happy that this category is brimming with such fantastic performances that it's hard to know who to root for. I can't say I'll be disappointed no matter who wins.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Best Director</b></div><div>David Fincher is pretty universally tagged to win this one, especially since <i>The Social Network</i> was the frontrunner for the Best Picture category until <i>The King's Speech</i> came along, so this way they can still honor both films with pretty big awards. This is another category I don't feel very strongly about since it's pretty much a foregone conclusion and I've only seen the Coen Bother's film. Is there anyone who doesn't know they're good directors yet? So yeah, don't really care who wins it.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Animated Film</b></div><div><i>Toy Story 3</i>, despite being over-rated and incredibly over-sentimentalized in my opinion, is going to win this by a mile. It's up for Best Picture and Best Screenplay for crying out loud. Would I love to see <i>How to Train Your Dragon</i> or <i>The Illusionis</i>t cause an upset and take the prize? You bet I would. I'd probably do a cartwheel in the street if that happened and I'm privately cursing the incredibly poor timing that pitted these two films (especially <i>Dragon</i>) up against this juggernaut instead of the upcoming <i>Cars 2</i> where they might actually stand a chance of winning a very richly deserved award. Could it happen? Ehhhh maybe. <i>Dragon</i> did sweep the Annie Awards (the animation industry's awards ceremony for those who don't know), and has been a classic underdog since it was released, and everyone loves an underdog. Plus, I don't know if I'm the only one who finds it rather tacky that Disney/Pixar made a big show about really pushing for the brass ring of Best Picture to make a statement about the viability of animation as a medium, but when it came down to it they weren't willing to pull out of the Best Animated Feature category. Despite their bluster about respecting the work, they just couldn't bear to put everything on the line for it and give up the sure thing in the animated category, leaving the other two very fine features without Best Picture nominations twisting in the wind. It's a dick move and cheapened an effort to gain respectability that I've been hoping for for a long time. I'm probably the only one that found it tacky for them to do that, but I did, and I'm realizing that I'm starting to edge closer into the Pixar Grinch arena than I thought I ever would. In my vindictive little heart, I'd dance with glee if <i>Dragon</i> took this and left Pixar with nothing for the year. It won't happen, but I can dream for now. In less petty arenas, I'm glad <i>The Illusionist</i> took the third spot in this category since it's a lesser-known film and people might actually watch it now and I'll get a DVD release, plus I always love to see traditional animation represented. It's also very different from the other two films, and from most films that make it into this category, and that too is always welcome. It's good to remind people that animation isn't a genre.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Original Score</b></div><div>Wow, next to Supporting Actress this is the biggest toss up for me. I'm going to guess <i>the King's Speech</i> will probably take this, but what a fantastic variety here. Everything from traditional orchestra to Trent Reznor is in here and they all sound very unique, distinct, and some are downright experimental. That's really cool. Of course I'm rooting for John Powell and <i>How to Train Your Dragon</i> (in and of itself that's a score with a huge variety in it), since that's been on my playlist since the film was released and I'd like the poor thing to win something. But it's the underdog again, and pretty much anything else in the category is more likely to win than it is. Ah well, it's nice just to be nominated.</div><div><br /></div><div>Anything else I'm not terribly concerned with, at least not enough to write about. So there you go, my much anticipated Oscar predictions. You may all resume your lives now.</div>Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-12739422896375435732010-11-28T20:01:00.001-08:002010-11-28T22:12:03.943-08:00Review: "Tangled"<div style="text-align: center;">For those of the spoiler-phobic disposition, beware, I may sprinkle some rather liberally through this review. If you wish to avoid them, I'll give you the short version: I did not love this movie. I didn't hate it, either. I'd call my reaction "tepid" and occasionally frustrated at what I felt like it not only could have been but <i>should</i> have been. I will also say that I appear to be in a vast minority, judging from Rotten Tomatoes and my own online f-list. If you saw the trailer and thought it looked like a laugh riot, then go, you'll enjoy it. If, like me, you looked at the preview and thought they were trying way too hard and not hitting the mark, wait for DVD.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><div>Spoilers beyond this point, beware all ye who read past this line.</div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBgrWwTj2WmTUQ90hfoKfB-93HBzM1cpIlckLEcOkFjxRbjKdw-PP1AOU-Esmbuez4Vad5EptTV7g3ONvftzrqmtqDSeZph7TV3ql8QxVIZH9hA6sGacwKtPeCDfGwVGIKpYpgn62ic61N/s320/tangledduel.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 214px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5544843119897826946" /></div><div>Since I got home last night I've been trying to focus on exactly why</div><div>this movie fell so far short of my already hesitant expectations, and I'm still not entirely sure. In part, I felt like the character animation wasn't quite up to snuff-- the three leads look too perfect, with no blemishes, little imperfections, or quirky facial features to offer anything very interesting to look at. They came off looking more like dolls than people, and without much in the way of visual performance beyond highly repetitive slapstick numbers and not a lot in the way of internal mechanics, I found myself very aware that I was watching some very pretty emptiness. I might change my mind if I ever watch this again, but going off my first impression, the characters didn't seem to do much in the way of "thinking" or experience an emotion that wasn't telegraphed a mile wide.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>This leads to my second issue: the lack of character depth in general. Again, I'm not expecting Hamlet from Disney, but characters that feel like they had at least some thought beyond archetype tropes put into them would be nice. Rapunzel fared the best in this department, I think, and there were some interesting things done with her, but quite often she ran into trouble in terms of interesting animation that might have added that little extra depth that could have pushed her over the edge in Really Interesting territory. Sadly, she spent most of her time hovering in the Has Potential lobby. To a lesser extent, Flynn suffered from the same issue, and the Mother character was just flat as a pancake. I tried to get invested in them, but the only one I felt an even remote connection to was Rapunzel and quite often that connection would get squashed by a completely unnecessary musical sequence or series of slapstick jokes. This happened with nearly any moment where started to feel like we were finally getting into some character development/connection, which was irritating and downright annoying by the end of the movie. I get the concept of delayed gratification, but the filmmakers weren't giving me enough time to get a solid foothold into my caring about ANYTHING that was happening. It's like in their effort to ramp up the swashbuckling adventure/humor elements they cut too deeply into any real emotional resonance for the audience (or just me, whatever).</div><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh79Kl-CerRvjnfup4uajbT-P_fphD50IjV_bg5FtpSqjXIGKp-tK7WY1XkhqJEwlwRub8ktzj8akoj7uGN5rwuaWl8wSj_VYb0Ax1xqL63SM1Jg9rXlnrufKpQxYi-6Hmqr7-qo7fO6tTq/s320/tangledmother.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 169px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5544844380758648658" /></div><div>Major irritants: the musical numbers and the animal sidekicks. I'll give the horse a pass since they did a serviceable job of making him important to the plot in some small ways, but the lizard was completely pointless and just took up running time that could have gone into character development or humor that didn't involve hitting someone with a frying pan. The same goes for the songs. I'm not anti-musical, in fact I quite enjoy them when they're well-made. But I have a rule for the musical numbers: if they don't advance the plot, reveal character, or transport the audience from one level of emotion to another in the service of the previous two things, in ways that can't be done as efficiently with plain dialog, cut the song because it's dead weight and will drag the pace of the movie down. For me, that was every SINGLE song in this movie. I have never been so annoyed with musical numbers as I have been with this movie. I could be a bit more forgiving if the songs were at least catchy/fun enough to be memorable, but none of them were. They were dull, dead weight around the neck of this film, and again, that time could have been better used in the aid of character development or plot advancement.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>I've mentioned the humor several times, and it probably works for a lot of people. It didn't work for me at all. Can't say why, really, maybe it was too dependent on repetitive slapstick and abruptly halting animation and not anything actually clever or creative. This was probably the biggest mood dampener for me, since it felt like so much of the run-time was devoted to it and it just flat-out did not work for me. I gave a few half-hearted chuckles at first, but I got tired of it pretty fast and gave up. Other people seem to like it, and if there's anything that's subjective, it's humor, so eh, whatever. I do object to the filmmakers trying to use it for character development instead of actual character development in the case of Flynn.</div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1l0WRoFSuYUU1LTObOQgQj2hBrrcpPDdyad1EZa2cNdqN5TjRptwlRGFnIxUv__4Uq_JUHYSpwiZ8Hajb4wVNWYkruzYbTIIJiZvP4mELXCm2kMYCT_GU-mYId5GhbddTS7VcwQDBCjLQ/s320/tangledflynnpanlizard.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 180px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5544843573396206194" /></div><div>All in all, though, I think my biggest complaint was this nagging sense that this movie really could have been something a lot better and different than it was. It felt like I was watching something that could have been great but was hamstrung by a bunch of people who were too afraid to take risks. Elements of this would surface now and then and I'd find my interest piqued only to have it re-submerge and never appear again for the sake of banality. That was the worst of it. Don't dangle the carrot in front of my face long enough to get me excited and then take it away. You can't be brave and cowardly at the same time, either take the court or go back to the bench.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>I don't know if it was a lack of faith in the animators, the story, or the audience, but I suspect the latter. Rule one in movie-making: <i>trust your</i> <i>audience</i>. If you can't do that, do something else with your life. Trust that we will understand what a character is feeling without having to spell it out in huge letters. Those musical numbers felt superfluous specifically because they were not necessary to understand anything. It was like getting "Anakin, you're breaking my heart" on repeat for two minutes a pop every ten minutes or so. Film, and especially animation, is a visual medium: SHOW us, don't TELL us. If you don't trust the audience to understand the significance of a moment that has been built up for half the film in every conceivable way without a song TELLING us how the character feels, you have issues. The moment with the lanterns would have been so much more powerful resting on the ability of the animators to convey it on Rapunzel's face instead of the song they felt was necessary. I get it's a big moment, I don't need you slapping my face asking me if I get it yet. Give us the opportunity to figure it out for ourselves, it means so much more when we do. Other animation studios get this, it's time to step up and get with the program.</div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoNSMGpUX8BL-4Cv5QYRzNXsRC_ZyS2zcvVpZ-QMBkWzaNGLZ0tmpMOb6fDPKMkxaGY_T9LKMsKUSSSkN7lWALIHqihnmMPoUDrrMYapChyphenhyphenKfgAiR-_QW1Q-K55BqwIZu1YZKd7mKkunYr/s320/tangledlanterns.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 170px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5544845547685691682" /></div><div>Having said all that, I didn't hate it. It's not going on my "must own" list, or even my "I'll rent it when it comes out" list, but I'm probably in a minority there. Everyone seems to quite like, if not even love this movie, and that's fine. I really wanted to, heck, I paid $9 to see it on an evening when I could have stayed off the icy streets and watched a movie I know I already like. I heard friends wax poetic about how much they liked it, I skimmed reviews to the same effect, and I figured if nothing else I'd get an hour and a half of nice animation. Instead I spent an hour and a half being very aware that I was watching a movie in a theater. I was constantly aware that I had seen nearly all of this before in other Disney movies and I had a hard time trying not to directly compare them. It was like a mash-up of <i>The Little Mermaid</i>, <i>Beauty and the Beast</i>, <i>Aladdin</i>, and <i>the Hunchback of Notre Dame</i> when it would have been nice to just see <i>Rapunzel</i> without the ghosts of Disney past. Yeah, you had some successful movies back then, but don't strip their carcasses to try and pad your new movies. Figure out WHY those moments worked and go with that, don't just recycle the same ideas over and over again. In short, I was bored. I am frequently many things while watching animation, but"bored" is not one of them, even if the movie itself isn't that great. I left feeling frustrated, confused and irritated at the waste of it all. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't what it could or should have been if someone had taken the chances the film needed to really breathe and come into its own the way it had the potential to do.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>For a less clichéd version of (a surprisingly similar take on) the Rapunzel story, check out the graphic novel <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rapunzels-Revenge-Dean-Hale/dp/159990070X">Rapunzel's Revenge</a> </i>by Shannon, Dean and Nathan Hale. I read it a few years ago and found it really charming and clever in ways that fell flat for me here. Even if you liked this movie, check it out, you'll probably like it.</div>Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-30347398311117986972010-10-31T17:41:00.000-07:002010-10-31T18:18:15.494-07:00Happy Halloween!Just a quick holiday greeting to the general blogosphere. I'd been hoping to write out some ideas that have been bouncing around in my head about the popularity of vampires and werewolves right now, especially with adolescent and teen girls, but sadly I'm up to my pits in papers and reading for school right now and didn't get it done. So maybe you'll see it around Thanksgiving. Mmm, festive.<div><br /></div><div>So instead, here's a short list of some of my favorite scary movies, in case anyone out there just can't decide what to watch to get in the Halloween spirit.</div><div><br /></div><div><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/NG3-GlvKPcg?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/NG3-GlvKPcg?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div><div><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/anF5XiN8QY8?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/anF5XiN8QY8?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div><div><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/IfNg_BveIks?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/IfNg_BveIks?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div><div><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/bEVY_lonKf4?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/bEVY_lonKf4?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div><div><object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/eoA6dxLeWFo?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/eoA6dxLeWFo?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div><div><object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/EqYiSlkvRuw?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/EqYiSlkvRuw?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div><div><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/LO3n67BQvh0?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/LO3n67BQvh0?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div><div><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/TStntiiYDt0?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/TStntiiYDt0?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div><div>Anyone else want to share their favorite scary movies? Go right ahead! Happy Halloween!</div>Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-67670904139481412772010-10-19T01:15:00.001-07:002010-10-19T18:30:07.252-07:00Brenda Chapman Off "Brave"Okay, it's late and I have things I need to be doing aside from this, but I won't be able to sleep tonight until I get this off my chest. It seems the upcoming Pixar film <i>Brave</i> (formerly known as <i>The Bear and the Bow</i>) will <a href="http://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-film/exclusive-brenda-chapman-no-longer-directing-pixars-brave.html">no longer be directed by Brenda Chapman</a> as she has left the studio. For anyone who missed <a href="http://fanfatales.blogspot.com/2009/06/dresses-are-for-girls-swords-are-for.html">my commentary on the discussion around the lack of leading females in Pixar films</a>, <i>Brave</i> was kind of a big deal, not just because it marked the studio's first female lead but also because it would mark its first female director as well. And just like in live-action, female directors in animated features is a rare thing. In fact, Chapman is America's first female animated feature director with <i>The Prince of Egypt</i>. She hasn't directed another movie since then, and I'm having a hard time coming up with another female animated feature director outside Nina Paley (who was totally independent and not part of a big studio). So now, it's being directed by Mark Andrews who co-directed the Pixar short <i>One Man Band</i>, but beyond that I don't have much info on him.<div><br /></div><div>No one's saying why Chapman was replaced yet, and honestly, it could be for legitimate reasons. Directors and people in all sorts of positions get replaced in films all the time, so what makes this such a big deal? Precisely because there are so few women directors out there, especially in feature-length animation. <i>Especially</i> because it's at a studio with the prestige and clout that Pixar has. The reason this studio gets singled out for this sort of scrutiny is because they make good films, period, and people pay attention to them. Why does anyone care if Pixar has a female lead or a female director? Because it matters what they do. Because they set a standard in the industry that matters not just in animation but in live-action film as well. <i>Up</i> was the only animated film aside from <i>Beauty and the Beast</i> to break into the Best Feature category at the Oscars, and before that there was questioning amongst critics as to why <i>Ratatouille</i> hadn't made that leap as well. John Lasseter has stated that Pixar is a director-driven studio and that telling a good story and artistic vision come before anything else there, so it's especially troubling that its first female director left before her project was even finished. Said project is now to be finished by someone else, who is male. This isn't surprising, seeing as how female directors are so hard to come by, but it begs the question yet again: when are women going to be able to tell our own stories? When will this <i>not</i> be a big deal? When will we stop having to put "female" in front of "director" to clarify that it is a woman directing a movie?</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm far from the only one asking these questions, too. The Animation Guild Blog posted about this in June with <a href="http://animationguildblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/where-girls-arent.html">Where the Girls Aren't</a>; Film.com recently asked <a href="http://www.film.com/features/story/year-female-directors-make-up/41379188?pcode=film&cpath=rss&rsrc=movierss_film">In What Year Will Female Directors Make Up Half the Workforce?</a>; and Women and Hollywood reported on the <a href="http://womenandhollywood.com/2010/10/12/zero-progress-made-on-gender-disparity-in-films-targeted-at-kids/">Zero Progress Made on Gender Disparity in Films Targeted at Kids</a>. I'm sure there are others out there as well, but the point is, as much as gender shouldn't matter in terms of replacing a director on a project, frankly, it does. Not only does the director guide the cohesiveness and vision of the entire film, but in a project like this, where much of the creation of the project was helmed by the director, the loss of a rare female vision for a female-centered story is sad, disappointing, and for someone like me who hopes to break into both directing and animation, it's discouraging and frustrating. Mark Andrews may be more suited to helm this project than Chapman was, and he may do a fine job and help produce a good film with a good female lead. But it won't cease to be troubling that Chapman is one of the few women successfully blazing this trail in American animation, and that her leaving a project is causing such a stir specifically because she's a woman. Yeah, gender shouldn't matter, but it does. When half the population of the human race is considered "other" and "token" and under-represented in such a huge way, the loss of one in a position like that matters.</div>Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-42042949572383541632010-10-03T00:10:00.000-07:002010-10-03T10:40:26.004-07:00Animation Break!Well the school year is upon me again and naturally I didn't get around to making all the updates I wanted to for the blog. I'm working on my feminism in animation series still, but in the meantime I thought I'd just post up some really cool things I've collected from Youtube over the past while.<div><br /></div><div>What did I do before Youtube? I honestly don't remember anymore.</div><div><br /></div><div>Nina Paley's very creative Flash animation demonstrates her standing on the so-called "Cult of Originality" that seems to be quite pervasive at the moment. I quite agree with her point: everything builds on what came before it, and art is certainly no exception.</div><div><object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/jcvd5JZkUXY?fs=1&hl=en_US"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/jcvd5JZkUXY?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div><div>Another Paley Flash bit, this time it's the opening credits of her film <i>Sita Sings the Blues</i>. It's not only very well-designed and animated, but it conveys the Hindu version of the creation of the universe without any narration or dialog in approximately three and a half minutes. That's some visual storytelling.</div><div><object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/2nzNtHI9kPA?fs=1&hl=en_US"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/2nzNtHI9kPA?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div><div>Some wonderful traditional animation from Tony White. While I'm ambivalent about actually animating Hokusai's work, since one of the things I always found striking about it was the implication of movement-- to make it actually appear to move seems to take something away from it. But nonetheless, this is wonderful work. Also, it's very informative about the work of a brilliant artist.</div><div><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/FmFGtsG_EgA?fs=1&hl=en_US"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/FmFGtsG_EgA?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div><div>Russia has such a rich history with animation I'm a bit beside myself that I can't get my hands on more of it. If anyone used to watch the Animated Shakespeare show on HBO back in the '90s, I believe most of, if not all of the animation for it was done by Russian studios and there was a fantastic variety of media and some incredible creativity at work in those. This short was linked to me by a friend in Hungary and I can't tell you how much I love it. It's a perfect example of comedic timing at its best.</div><div><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/vpjBQgyfKNg?fs=1&hl=en_US"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/vpjBQgyfKNg?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div><div>I may be a little bit biased, since I grew up on He-Man, She-Ra, Transformers, and My Little Ponies, but even disregarding the nostalgia factor, this is some very creative stop-motion animation done by (I believe) amateurs. This is the first video I favorited on Youtube years ago and I still get a kick out of it.</div><div><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/RLh0H3qpqxU?fs=1&hl=en_US"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/RLh0H3qpqxU?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div><div>A professor of mine last year showed this in class and it absolutely blew me away. It is bar none one of the most moving, creative, and perfectly executed pieces of animation and performance art I've ever seen. If you haven't seen it, watch it. If you have, watch it again. It's simply spectacular.</div><div><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/518XP8prwZo?fs=1&hl=en_US"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/518XP8prwZo?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object></div>Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-27090028363149863902010-09-12T10:56:00.000-07:002010-09-12T11:26:01.749-07:00Review: The Expendables<div style="text-align: left;"><!--StartFragment--><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;mso-ansi-language:EN-US; mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">I love going to the movies, whether with friends or by myself. I especially enjoy watching action movies. Sylvester Stallone, along with his cavalcade of co-stars, delivers a movie that has kickass fight scenes, plenty of explosions to go around (and then some), and an array of 80’s action movie icons. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The Expendables</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> has a straightforward and somewhat simplistic plot, yet over all fun to watch.</span></span><!--EndFragment--><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> </span><img src="webkit-fake-url://1D3D49E2-F341-4396-AD47-57E8EBC7ED47/application.pdf" /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman""><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Okay, enough of the polite, semi-professional demeanor. Reviewing movies is a new hobby for me, and I want to make a good impression. That being said, I also want to make sure that what you all read sounds like me; not my knee-jerk reaction to write for my high school English teacher. Now let’s get to the review. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman""><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">As I mentioned in the first paragraph, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The Expendables</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> is a fun movie to watch…though it does lack imagination and originality. Really there’s nothing new about a group of mercenaries going off to some small country (in this case an island near South America) to over throw a dictator. Nor is there anything new about mass explosions and kickass fight scenes, no matter how cool they look. As for the array of 80’s action movie icons, well that’s just entertaining. Any pop-culture reference to my childhood always makes me smile. </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;text-indent: 0.5in; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; "><img src="webkit-fake-url://499E0661-032D-4FA1-8575-9D4A3B01625D/application.pdf" /></span></span></p><!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">What little creativity there was in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The Expendables</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> comes from the fight scenes. My favorite fight scene happens on a basketball court, and Jason Statham (Lee Christmas) is the one doing the damage. I also really enjoyed the fight scenes with Stone Cold Steve Austin, especially when he fights Randy Couture. And of course watching He-Man: Master of the Universe (aka Dolph Lundgren) as a washed out, drug addicted, soldier holds a special place in my heart; a place where childhood memories come to a screeching halt into reality when you realize a childhood hero isn't as cool as he used to be.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman""><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">As entertaining as the fight scenes were, perhaps my favorite scene in the movie was with Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone in a church. Bruce Willis (Mr. Church) is the man with a job offer and Stallone (Barney Ross) and Schwarzenegger (Mr. Trench) are the men bidding for that job. Barbs and jabs are traded between Barney Ross and Trench, but ultimately Trench leaves and Ross gets the job from Mr. Church. The whole scene lasted about 5 minutes, and it’s the only time that we see Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The thing I love about this scene is the fact that three of the most iconic action stars of my generation are standing in a room together and trading jabs at each other… well, mainly Stallone and Schwarzenegger. I suspect that the line about Trench wanting to be President is a reference to real life gossip about Schwarzenegger’s ambition of being President after he became the Governor of California.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;text-indent: 0.5in; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><img src="webkit-fake-url://20E54B25-68DE-4384-A7EF-170403A02943/application.pdf" /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; "><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman""></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Okay, so we’ve talked about 80’s action movie icons and kickass fight scenes. I’d elaborate on the mass explosions, but I’m pretty sure that’s self-explanatory. I’m positive there’s more to say about </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The Expendables</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, but I think its best that you watch the movie for yourselves. I wouldn’t want to ruin the experience, as it is a movie worth watching. </span></span></p> <!--EndFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;text-indent: 0.5in; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></p> <!--EndFragment--> </div><p></p> <!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-46713139356241034832010-08-24T15:59:00.000-07:002010-08-24T17:22:04.128-07:00Satoshi Kon: 1963-2010This news makes me very, very sad. Satoshi Kon is one of my all-time favorite directors, not just in terms of animation, but in general. His films are brilliant as far as I'm concerned, and I can't believe I'll only get a handful of them. Maybe that's selfish of me, but I never knew Kon as a person so I can't feel his loss that way, but I knew him as a filmmaker and his loss as a visionary and as a director is one I will definitely feel. For anyone who hasn't seen his films, I'd recommend them very highly, even if you aren't a fan of animation. What he did with the medium is so unusual and his films themselves are so varied, it's hard for me to believe that someone wouldn't be able to find something worthwhile in them. I've already written a post on his films, and I was planning another one for my feminism in animation series, so I won't say much here. I guess I just wanted to put my regret at his passing out into the internet-ether, and hope that maybe someone out there would be interested in giving his work a shot.<div><br /></div><div><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Katsuhiro-Otomo-Presents-Shigeru-Chiba/dp/B00014X8KO/ref=sr_1_7?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1282692218&sr=1-7">Memories</a>. </i>His contribution to the short film<i> Magnetic Rose </i>was not as a director but as a writer and designer. I haven't seen it yet, but Stacy saw it years ago and told me about it, before I knew who Kon was. Even just the story stayed with me.<br /><div><br /></div><div><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Blue-Junko-Iwao/dp/B00000JL42/ref=sr_1_4?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1282692481&sr=1-4">Perfect Blue</a></i> (1999). His first directorial film, a psychological thriller that critiques Japanese pop media and the sexualization of female public figures. Mind-bending, upsetting, and rightfully compared to Hitchcock, this movie put Kon on the map. Director<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Darren Aronofsky paid for the rights to the film so he could use a scene from it for his film <i>Requiem for a Dream</i>.</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px; font-size:large;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px; font-size:large;"><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Millennium-Actress-Miyoko-Sh%C3%B4ji/dp/B0000AK80C/ref=sr_1_2?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1282692481&sr=1-2">Millennium Actress</a></i> (2001). Widely regarded as his best film, though there is some contention to that. This is a romantic melodrama centered on a (fictional) legendary actress recounting her life for a documentary. It's really something else. If you decide to try a film, I'd recommend starting with this one. I have yet to meet someone who was unmoved by it. It also made <i>Slant Magazine</i>'s list of best 100 films of the '00s at <a href="http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/feature/best-of-the-aughts-film/216/page_8">#30</a>.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px; font-size:large;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px; font-size:large;"><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tokyo-Godfathers-Toru-Emori/dp/B0001EFTVA/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1282692481&sr=1-1">Tokyo Godfathers</a></i> (2004). One of his more unusual films and one of the most overtly humanistic. The story of three homeless people in Tokyo on a journey to return an abandoned baby to her mother during the week in between Christmas Eve and New Year's Day. A screwball comedy that nonetheless doesn't shy away from the harsher aspects of the side of Tokyo no one ever makes films about. It highlights not only the homeless but South American migrant workers, transvestites and the gay subculture as well as youth violence. Yes, it really is a comedy.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px; font-size:large;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px; font-size:large;"><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Paprika-Satoshi-Kon/dp/B000VWYJ68/ref=sr_1_3?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1282692481&sr=1-3">Paprika</a></i> (2008). An adventure science fiction film with a plot that's difficult to follow but really not as important to the film as it might seem. This one's very interesting when you get under the surface, especially when you hold it up to his previous films as a continuation of their themes and elements. Some people don't like it, I really do.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px; font-size:large;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px; font-size:large;"><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Satoshi-Kons-Paranoia-Agent-Collection/dp/B0009RQS7I/ref=sr_1_6?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1282692481&sr=1-6">Paranoia Agent</a></i> (2005). His only TV series, I'm only halfway through it but so far it's very, very good. A further continuation of his themes of fantasy and reality, media, and societal critique.<br /></span></span><div><br /></div><div><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Satoshi-Kon-Illusionist-Andrew-Osmond/dp/1933330740/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_2">Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist</a></i> by Andrew Osmond is a decent book I read for a paper I wrote spring quarter on Kon. For people interested in Kon's history and some insights into his work, it's not bad, though for scholarly papers it's on the light side.</div><div><br /></div><div><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cinema-Anime-Steven-T-Brown/dp/1403970602/ref=pd_sim_b_6">Cinema Anime</a></i> by Steven T. Brown has one article on Kon's work that I thought was quite good. It mostly compared his films to Hitchock's body of work and how certain themes and ideas related between the two.</div></div></div><div><br /></div><div><object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/3jjR_t0ikoU?fs=1&hl=en_US"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/3jjR_t0ikoU?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object></div><div>A one-minute short film he wrote and directed for a compilation of animated shorts.</div><div><br /></div><div><object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/-anabfAg06U&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xd0d0d0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/-anabfAg06U&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xd0d0d0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="640" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div><div><object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/xqg3Sw3s9Wg&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xd0d0d0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/xqg3Sw3s9Wg&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xd0d0d0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="640" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div><div><object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/jlQ4c6xMZLA&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xd0d0d0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/jlQ4c6xMZLA&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xd0d0d0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="640" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div><div>He was working on another film called <i>The Dream Machine</i>. I'm not sure if it got finished or not, but in case it gets a release, that's another one to watch for. It's supposed to be a children's movie.</div>Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-51106717886225992812010-05-29T18:08:00.001-07:002010-05-29T23:19:11.869-07:00Diversion: My Favorite Video Games<div style="text-align: center;">I'll get back to my Feminism in Animation series as soon as school's done raking me over the coals for a bit. Just to prove I'm not actually dead or something, here's a quick list of video games I like enough to play more than once. I'm hardly a gamer, but I do blow off a considerable amount of steam with my old standards here.</div><div><br /></div><div>1. <i>Katamari Damacy</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/voPx8x0-blQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/voPx8x0-blQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div><div>This and its sequel, <i>We Love Katamari</i>, are not only fun and inventive, but addictive enough to play over and over. I've been playing one or the other of these games for probably about four years now and they're still fun. It's a little hard to describe what the point of the game is, since it's so bizarre you basically have to play it to understand. Basically, you are a tiny little green alien prince, and your dad's the King of All Cosmos. You'd barely fill his codpiece, and he never misses an opportunity to tell you what a huge (ha ha) disappointment you are, even when you're working your butt off to clean up his mess. It seems one night, dear ol' dad went on a bender and smashed up everything in the galaxy, and now its your job to make new stuff to replace it. How does one go about making new stars, constellations and planets, you ask? Why, take a little sticky ball called a katamari down to Earth and use it to roll up anything you can find until it's big enough, then shoot it into the sky. You roll up everything from bugs and thumbtacks to people, houses, and even continents. Naturally there's a time limit you have to beat, and even if you win the level, chances are high your katamari won't meet the King's standards and he'll give you some backhanded compliment about how he would have done it better. If you lose... you don't want to lose. Let's just put it that way. So really, the game's supposedly about rolling a bunch of weird stuff up into a ball to make a star, but really it's all about father-son bonding and family strife, mixed up with some really fun gameplay and some catchy Japanese pop/rock music. (Yeah, I know there's more of these games out there but I haven't played them yet.)</div><div><br /></div><div>2. <i>Okami</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/CND5RvoNTQ4&hl=en_US&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/CND5RvoNTQ4&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><i>></i></div><div><br /></div><div>To list all the reasons I love this game would take me too long, so here's just the highlights. For starters, it's gorgeous. I love the stylized design for the characters, and the sumi-e look they gave everything, and some of the effects are just fantastic. Secondly, I love the inventive gameplay. Not only do you control a character in the game, but you can also control the elements as the wielder of a divine ink brush that literally draws the wind blowing or the trees blooming. Not to be left out, I love the story. It's like a giant mash-up of some of Japan's best-known folklore, and even though many of the stories have been tweaked with, it's still a lot of fun to have that moment of recognition when you figure out who a character is or what story you're involved in. It's deceivingly epic, too-- just when you think you've finished the game, you figure out you're not even halfway done with it. The premise is fairly simple: you are the sun goddess Amaterasu, on Earth in the avatar form of a white wolf in order to stop the rampaging evil that's been unleashed on Japan. You travel around smiting demons, helping villagers, solving puzzles, restoring dead trees and sacred pools, and regaining your power over nature by relearning divine brush techniques. You complete loads of mini-quests during your big one, and travel from one end of Japan to the other, encountering all sorts of people and animals along the way. It's incredibly addicting and tons of fun to play, or even just to watch. I only have it on the PS2, but I've heard the Wii version is pretty fun, too. I've also heard there's a sequel coming out for the DS, so I'm excited about that.</div><div><br /></div><div>3.<i> The Legend of Zelda</i></div><div><br /></div><div><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/uyMKWJ5e1kg&hl=en_US&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/uyMKWJ5e1kg&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div><div>I'm not sure how many times I've beat this game, but it's quite a few. Yeah, I'm talking the original Nintendo, 8-bit graphics version. I don't know what it is about this game I like so much, but I find it tons of fun. I haven't played any of the other <i>Zelda</i> games, though I know people that like some of them quite a bit, so maybe I'll get around to it someday. For now, this one's satisfying enough for me. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for the good ol' days when this was the height of video game technology, but I never played this game much back when it was new. Maybe I'm just tickled that Zelda's named after F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife. Maybe I'm just a sucker for a simple adventure story. Can't really put my finger on why I like this one so much, but I do anyway.</div><div><br /></div><div>4. <i>Space Invaders</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Now this game was a huge part of my childhood. My brother had an Atari system and a bunch of games for it, and this was the one I played the most. Followed closely by some shooting game that had over 20 different styles of games that you'd go through and select, and I discovered I was really good at one of them (edit: I believe this game was known as <i>Tank Plus</i>). But that wasn't this game. This game, in all its simplicity, was the first game I can remember getting a callus from playing so much. Part of it was my desire to outdo my brother's old scores, but part of it was I just liked playing the game. There's something so ingeniously simple about it, and all these old games, that still makes them fun to play even with their primitive graphics. Like the developers were more concerned with stuff like making the game fun and not how realistic they could make it look. Maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy.</div><div><br /></div><div>5. Lots of Games on the Atari 2600 I Never Played but that Have Awesome Names</div><div><br /></div><div>I never played <i>Tapeworm</i>, but can only imagine what the plot of that was. Or <i>Tax Avoiders</i>, which seems to be a little human figure trying to gather money while avoiding what appear to be snakes, what might be either a spider or a large asterisk, and what I'm assuming is the tax man. I can't really tell, though. <i>Plaque Attack</i> looks like a similar idea to <i>Space Invaders</i>, only instead of a cannon, you're a tube of toothpaste defending two rows of teeth from floating junk food. <a href="http://www.atariage.com/index.html">Atariage.com</a> has tons of these old games listed and I have to assume that they're probably more fun to imagine than they were to actually play, but you never know.</div>Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-28140421934976802622010-03-28T12:41:00.000-07:002010-03-29T13:44:32.788-07:00Review: "How To Train Your Dragon"<div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi6GymCG_hME5MGAAYv2qyYdT5fpVFlRzf2o96jOKEDMXatc7bykY8Mob5Sd04uZJehPxz96sY_yRnszr48J6ZWTmrFl6D2LIjzj1Ptadi2m_T0c_JsCvzg229cbCOfWH2PSbkK2bJTiIK/s1600/howtodragon01.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 250px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi6GymCG_hME5MGAAYv2qyYdT5fpVFlRzf2o96jOKEDMXatc7bykY8Mob5Sd04uZJehPxz96sY_yRnszr48J6ZWTmrFl6D2LIjzj1Ptadi2m_T0c_JsCvzg229cbCOfWH2PSbkK2bJTiIK/s320/howtodragon01.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5454156430364803186" /></a><div>Well it finally happened. Dreamworks Animation finally nailed it. <i>Kung Fu Panda</i> set the bar for the studio as far as I'm concerned, and <i>How to Train Your Dragon </i>raised it.</div><div><br /></div><div>I feel I should preface this by saying that I had no idea what to expect going into this movie. I hadn't seen many ads or any trailers for it, and barely knew it existed until just a few months ago. I knew nothing of the plot aside from the fact that there were vikings and dragons, and everything I'd seen looked pretty fun and silly. I didn't know Chris Sanders and Dean DeBloise (whose work you might know from <i>Lilo and Stitch</i>-- which I will coincidentally be writing about in my feminism in animation series) were the co-writers and directors, I didn't know anything about the voice casting (surprisingly and refreshingly skimpy on the celebrity names), and I sure didn't expect it to be so moving. Directors like Sanders and Dean, and Brad Bird (<i>The Iron Giant</i>, <i>The Incredibles</i>, <i>Ratatouille</i>) keep treating their audiences like they actually have brains and emotional intellect, and have studios capable of producing animation quality that backs those things up, hopefully more animation directors will follow suit.</div><div><br /></div><div>So, having gone into the movie with very little in the way of expectations other than maybe some silly comedy and lots of wisecracks-- it's Dreamworks, after all, that's usually what they base their movies around-- I was not prepared for the movie I actually saw. It had its funny moments, certainly, with nary a fart joke or pop culture reference to be found, but it wasn't a wacky comedy like what I'd been expecting. The story itself is really basic, and yeah there are loads of predictable tropes like 'the coming of age story', 'the geeky guy likes the popular girl', 'a boy and his dog', 'teenager emotionally estranged from parent/s who don't understand him', 'the dork who doesn't fit in because he's too different', and so on. And yeah, one of the big underlying messages of the movie is the typical 'just be true to yourself', but it's actually really underplayed in favor of something that usually gets less focus: 'learning to understand something differently'.</div><div><br /></div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHI_HiTlievf0L3ulNGUwPIG_pi_BqlMEA6Qc_pa6CEwIh8JQ3xtR0_wFb8DY8rrIaou1AMS4mPetObISr2GI7LfsjUFYpkk8zIsLtwsc3FxjYp-b5Plw6UONvN9RUPB-qZM1LdWnmfM0Y/s320/howtodragon03.jpg" /> </div><div>The main character, Hiccup, is from a tribe of Vikings (who speak with Scottish accents for some reason) who raise sheep, build houses, and kill dragons. Mostly the latter, although the house building is tied in with that as well. Their village is constantly raided by dragons who carry off their sheep, and the Vikings are experienced enough with killing them that they have some classifications and techniques for each species, and even have a right of passage tradition that involves training to fight and eventually kill them. Hiccup, a small, skinny teenager who isn't understood or respected by anyone, especially his father, the village leader and big brawny tough guy, wants more than anything to kill a dragon and earn some respect and affection. He isn't strong enough to wield his own weapon, but he's clever enough to design a catapult to do it for him, and manages to down a member of the most mysterious and enigmatic of the dragon species, the Night Fury. When he finally finds the injured dragon, he finds he can't bring himself to kill it, and instead starts observing and eventually befriending it. What he learns about dragon behavior is often at direct odds with what he's being taught in dragon training, but through his understanding of dragon behavior, he's able to rise to the top his class despite his complete lack of warrior prowess.</div><div><br /></div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRE4zClcNoBy4EwuZTb3izbUjjQtGWAp2VKE3aSZrwVmA5J8WKLtCjrvJoPvqMVIVK2P0Pa0Yn9lDETKINL5UxDWfFvep3Gfkl7rMsoTAia4t6_VBnYuGSx0I3gLdZzKFNurTy0k5JYvMM/s320/howtodragon02.jpg" /></div><div><br /></div><div>Meanwhile, he's also figured out how to repair the injury to the dragon-- now named Toothless-- which is able to properly fly again with teamwork. The flight scenes are amazingly well-done, not only because they're beautiful in and of themselves, but because they drive home the beauty of the relationship between Hiccup and Toothless. We get to experience the exhilaration they both feel at getting to fly right along with them, and the fear they both feel when they fall. Hiccup's actions have made him responsible for Toothless, and Toothless in turn helps validate Hiccup's unconventional ways and gives him a kind of freedom and perspective he couldn't have achieved on his own. Neither one can reach their full potential without the other, and the flight scenes drive that home beautifully without a word.</div><div><br /></div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRA8_fMgC_AfcUaXtcibVkCMxIAYDOzxH9dZIULvv0dPMOLHte7tQP3oWhRvdMQmPtvQykpWrO6czTrTynWyS4N1Xqxs1fptDzwvXQk5XVctS40MTM7AzSUre2EDDJfmQBx2lmr5b55elM/s320/howtodragon04.jpg" /></div><div><br /></div><div>I also really liked that they didn't shy away from the potential consequences of Hiccup's actions, and there are some surprises toward the end. In retrospect, they probably shouldn't have been as surprising as they were, but at the same time, it happens so rarely in movies for younger audiences-- or even older ones for that matter-- that it took me off guard. There's a more mature sensibility at the heart of the movie that is refreshing in general, and most certainly so for Dreamworks animation. It's a fun movie, but it's not afraid to get into some more serious issues for the sake of more emotional integrity. I highly recommend seeing it, and especially in 3D, which isn't something I typically recommend. I've never seen a movie in 3D in the theater, and I usually don't feel like I'm missing out on that much, but I do regret not seeing this one in it. I actually forgot it was supposed to be in 3D until I was leaving the theater and saw the sign on the poster that said it was in 2D only. No gratuitous things flying toward the camera for the sake of a gimmick, I get the impression this 3D was used intelligently, to heighten the experiences of the characters onscreen for the audience.</div><div><br /></div><div>So in summary, this movie will likely be compared to a lot of other movies out there. Some of the comparisons will be fair, some will not, but to take the film only on the basis of its tropes (of which there are many) leaves out how those tropes are presented. All movies and stories work with tropes, either by employing them or defying them. It's in the execution that makes the difference as to how an audience will respond to it-- whether attention was paid to the characters and an investment in having the audience care about them is paramount for me. It's clear the filmmakers here cared about Hiccup and Toothless and their bond is the biggest focus in the film. That's why it works as well as it does, and that's why any of it means anything. For me, the execution here was good. They cared about the characters, they cared about what they were trying to say, and they cared about whether or not the audience cared about the same things.</div>Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-29254047338902875282010-03-18T12:54:00.000-07:002010-03-18T13:56:15.784-07:00Wait, What's Wrong With Being a Girl, Again?<i>(Not officially a part of my series on feminism in animation, although it certainly applies. Just a quick rant.)</i><div><br /></div><div>So, as most people who might care probably already know, Disney's changed the title of its upcoming movie <i>Rapunzel</i> to the more gender-neutral <i>Tangled</i>. In and of itself, I guess not that big a deal, it's got a certain catch to it, slightly more engaging to a modern audience since it's an adjective, not a noun. Whatever. But then why did they decide to change the content of the movie too? According to the interviews I've read, they're beefing up the role of the heroic prince guy and giving him lots more action scenes. Okay, I'm all for equal character development (which is not what "swashbuckling action" means, btw), but why are they changing so much so suddenly, and especially less than a year before the movie opens?</div><div><br /></div><div>"We didn't want to be put in a box," according to Ed Catmull, president of Disney and Pixar's animation department (<a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-disney9-2010mar09,0,7034175.story">via the LA Times</a>). <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">"Some people might assume it's a fairy tale for girls when it's not. We make movies to be appreciated and loved by everybody."</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px; font-size: medium;">Translation: "<i>The Princess and the Frog</i> underperformed (ie: only made ~$220 million worldwide) and like we always do, we're blaming something totally arbitrary on the failure instead of our story department and our marketing strategy."</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px; font-size: medium;">Remember back when they announced they were closing their traditional animation studios in favor of switching to digital animation? Their reasoning there was that everyone else's CG-animated movies were making money and their traditional ones weren't, therefore it must be that traditional animation as a medium is dead and not that the movies themselves had issues. Only now, instead of blaming traditional animation for the "failure" of their blockbuster movie, they're blaming it on the fact that boys won't go see a movie with the word "princess" in the title.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px; font-size: medium;">Or, apparently, "Rapunzel". (Which the semantic in me must point out is a kind of leafy green plant people use in salads, not a fancy word for "princess".)</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px; font-size: medium;">So now, instead of the method of animation at fault, it's the fact that it's about a girl. I keep forgetting that girls aren't regular people who can be easily identified with by people of either gender, like boys can. See, when you make a movie with a girl in the lead part, and it's about "girl" stuff like romance and magic (as 99% of lead-women movies are), it means it's a "chick flick" and the only acceptable guy audience members are the ones dragged there by their girlfriends and who spend every second of its run-time in sheer emotional anguish. Because everyone knows that girl things are silly and emasculating and real men only tolerate it for the sake of sex.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px; font-size: medium;">But when a movie comes out with a guy in the lead and it's about "guy" stuff like adventure and action, it's totally cool for girls to like that, too, because when we say "guy", we really mean "everybody". Because guy stuff is the default, "non-gendered" stuff, and "girl" stuff is for sissy, fluffies who like glitter and shoes. And in case you're confused by that, "glitter" and "shoes" and everything else associated with being feminine are less important, interesting, relevant, and acceptable to enjoy because they are silly and beneath all the relevant "boy" stuff like explosions and car chases.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px; font-size: medium;">Thank you, Disney, for reminding me that girls are silly and nobody wants to watch movies about them. It's a really good thing you remembered, too, before releasing another movie that will <i>only</i> make a few hundred million dollars because there wasn't enough boy-time and we all know that the only way to relate to a girl character is to be a girl yourself. I mean it's not like they're <i>real</i> people or anything.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px; font-size: medium;"><i>(Just for the sake of clarification: I do not assume this of all males, and in fact I think it's pretty demeaning to assume they're all this shallow, but there's a lot of cultural pressure and influence out there that supports the "girls are silly and you shouldn't like anything aimed at them" mentality. I don't know which I find more insulting, the idea that all guys must think this way, or the fact that there are evidently so many who do. And they're not the only ones! There are loads of girls out there who feel the exact same way due to the same social stigma. I was one of them for a very long time. Hence the bitter.)</i></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px; font-size: medium;"><i><br /></i></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px; font-size: medium;"><i>(Another clarification: I have big issues with the so-called "chick flicks", too, and the predominance of princesses in animated movies. Not because I think femininity in and of itself is demeaning, but because of how "appropriate" femininity is showcased in them, and the almost complete lack of anything else for female consumers. I'm of the opinion that people who genuinely like the glittery princess thing, rock on. But limiting the idea of "girl" to just that is... limiting. Girls can be foofy princesses, and they can be other things, too! We have LOADS of princesses already, maybe we can explore, I don't know, something else for a change?)</i></span></span></div>Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-44239094567122134232010-03-17T03:15:00.000-07:002010-03-17T09:14:23.717-07:00Feminism in Animation: "Disney's Hercules" (the series)This series really never got the recognition it deserved when it was on back in 1998, and I'm really doubtful that it'll ever make it to DVD despite a fan following and a ton of celebrity voice talent. I found it to be a pretty clever series, especially since I'm a huge fan of Greek mythology and I love that the writers clearly studied it and involved it heavily in the plots of the series. It's not always accurate, of course, since it's Disney and an animated daytime show aimed at children, but they actually got away with a fair amount, and you can tell they went to the myths first. It's actually pretty cool, since the original myths were largely pretty woman-phobic, anyway. Don't believe me? Take a look at all the female monsters those strapping demigod heroes had to go defeat, like gorgons, sirens, harpies, dracaenae, scylla, maenades, sphinx, Amazons, and the list goes on. (Note: I'm not saying all the monsters were female, but there were a lot of them, and there's a lot of symbolism involved in terms of taming/conquering female power, especially sexuality, which actually lines up with the role and treatment of women in ancient Greek society, too.)<div><br /><div><div><div><div></div><div>The basic premise, as with most Disney TV adaptations of their movies, is setting Hercules (Tate Donovan) in high school during his awkward adolescent phase. Despite being a demi-god and the son of Zeus, he's pretty much a social outcast and his only steady friends are Icarus (French Stewart), the boy who flew too close to the sun on wax wings and who now se<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgvoEK10_MQkvB4LA7CQONIplQNnYzHKVeNUEMY29qK1DI_40Qu9yNgkC6rGlBfyOu2fr8tCtoyGhIdfIydGyI1uAgvJoMdp8vC2mq_IH0o-EhpuNiSDCp4yxVVY-7PO7xEEKSYiiKmi-n/s1600-h/hercassie2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5449547729420080370" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 263px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgvoEK10_MQkvB4LA7CQONIplQNnYzHKVeNUEMY29qK1DI_40Qu9yNgkC6rGlBfyOu2fr8tCtoyGhIdfIydGyI1uAgvJoMdp8vC2mq_IH0o-EhpuNiSDCp4yxVVY-7PO7xEEKSYiiKmi-n/s320/hercassie2.jpg" border="0" /></a>ems to be permanently fried physically and mentally, and Cassandra (Sandra Bernhard), a pessimistic, sarcastic, and downright acidic young woman who's cursed to have unerring visions of future catastrophe, but who will never be believed if she tries to warn anyone about them. Cassandra alone's a great feminist character because, as might be surmised by the casting choice, she's a smart, outspoken, independent woman with a lot more on her mind than just dating and shopping. In fact she only dates one character in the entire show and that was only for two episodes-- this is in spite of Icarus's conviction that they're a couple and his stalking and obsessive behavior towards her, while not portrayed as anything other than annoying and basically harmless, isn't touted as building up to a true love match for them, either. She rejects him constantly and never capitulates to dating him or seems interested in him in that respect at all, which is nice. In fact, the character she winds up dating is very similar to him in a lot of ways, but importantly, he's not obsessive or clingy or possessive. Of course it's played for laughs and Bernhard goes completely over the top with her syrupy lovesick voice, but I think it's interesting that it seems to be Icarus's stalker-like behavior that's his biggest obstacle with her.</div><br /><div>Icarus, for his part, is also pretty cool when not latched onto Cassandra, since he doesn't seem to pay much heed to constructed gender roles at all-- he's often shown to be more creative, nurturing, and domestically-minded, and never self-conscious about it. Of course he's also delusional and often has very bad ideas that get him into trouble, but it's still cool that he's totally at peace with his masculine and feminine sides.</div><br />There are several specific episodes that deal directly with feminist issues, especially anytime the Amazon Tempest (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is featured. One episode, <em>The Girdle of Hyppolyte</em>, dealt with Hercules having issues with his “Home Grecinomics” class (ha ha, puns) because he didn't feel like he should have to do “women's work” like cooking. He winds up following Tempest back to her home because he thinks she's in danger and winds up at odds with the Amazonian ruler, Hyppolyte (Jane Curtain). Banished to the kitchen to do “men's work”, he meets Tempest's father, King Darius (Emeril Lagasse) and learns that cooking and homemaking aren't gender-specific, nor are they inherently demeaning. They stay clear of more prickly topics like reinforcing the gender binary and its inherent struggle for dominance, and the idea that homemaking as a full-time job isn't regarded any more highly in the matriarchy than in the patriarchy, but the ideas are in there if anyone stops to read between the lines. Pretty subversive for a daytime animated kid's show.<br /><br /><div>It also takes on the Pygmalion myth, which has become popularized these days in movies like <i>My Fair Lady</i> and <i>Annie Hall</i> (which is a great movie, by the way). The basic story of the original myth is that the sculptor Pygmalion found every woman he saw to be inadequate next to his idea of what they should be, so sculpts himself his perfect woman. During his sculpting, he becomes so besotted with his creation, Aphrodite takes pity on him and brings the statue Galatea to life. The episode <em>The Dream Date</em> plays on this, even having Pygmalion be the school's art teacher with the improbably attractive wife (who is never named), but instead of a dissatisfaction with women in general, Hercules's problem is his inability to get a date for a school dance. Inspired by the art teacher's story, he sneaks into the art room and sculpts a woman out of clay, hoping to invoke Aphrodite (Lisa Kudrow) to bring her to life so he can have a date. As exacting and specific about what he wants her to be like physically, he is equally as uninterested in her personality, and just asks that she be “crazy a<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirSe5CF7-nKgixGR-SGpRyBP02mUvCsQQJTkkasMhmD9J8o_LhVRDQYS9Qbz4jUjSyy_9xCZmfY53qF2iaEhD61OMbtdo0rpmEj08sNHY7B0s6nF8NTAHqv-mFtLunevbpHlzB8epEYxV2/s1600-h/hercaphro.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5449545270581456114" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 239px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirSe5CF7-nKgixGR-SGpRyBP02mUvCsQQJTkkasMhmD9J8o_LhVRDQYS9Qbz4jUjSyy_9xCZmfY53qF2iaEhD61OMbtdo0rpmEj08sNHY7B0s6nF8NTAHqv-mFtLunevbpHlzB8epEYxV2/s320/hercaphro.jpg" border="0" /></a>bout [him]”. Naturally, things go awry when Galatea (Jennifer Aniston) is clingy, obsessive, possessive to the point of violence with any other girl who so much as says boo to him, and even winds up rigging the election for the king and queen of the dance. When Herc tries to break up with her (by restraining her and dropping her on a remote island), she's completely undeterred and makes her way back to the dance. Long story short, the dance is ruined, the building catches on fire, and because she's made of clay, she winds up hardened into a statue. Realizing his mistake with the helpful prodding of his friends (Cassandra even gets to say the word “sexist” in a Disney cartoon), he asks Aphrodite to give Galatea the ability to be her own person, which is granted; however instead of getting the real date he's hoping for, Herc instead gets the very same break-up speech he'd given her earlier in the episode right before she runs off to find “that hunky Ajax”. All in all, the message there is pretty clear, and I think the episode presents it in a fun and not-too preachy way: women are their own people, not soulless dolls for men to use to satisfy their lust with and project their fantasies onto-- and yes, that means that they might choose to date someone else, no matter how nice a guy you might be. Seems simple, right? Sadly, in the words of Aphrodite, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_doll">not everyone gets the lesson</a>.”(may be nsfw)</div><br /><div>Other notable examples from the show include:</div><br /><div><strong>Hecate</strong> (Perri Gilpin), a disgruntled Underworld employee who's sick of getting very little recognition for her work and is trying to unseat Hades much the same way Hades is trying to unseat Zeus-- frankly in some ways she may actually be more qualified to run the Underworld than he is, not the least of which because she actually <em>wants</em> the job. She creates the unique situation of putting Hades in a vulnerable and even sympathetic position at times, while at the same time, the viewer can also sympathize with Hecate's frustration at her lack of respect and power. I wish she'd been around more, she was interesting. Episode to try: <em>The Underworld Takeover</em><br /><br /></div><div><strong><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhxL4bBNgUxD_JVqnYtsj18Y-AsV9ExkndDe1HDf9XIizMoss09w_pvfePnFbOOcs4-N9G_kNPSvaeCMI4l5LetBseK97cc-bdWcZoXkLFOW5mJtSxjzHzESRHKiFi7eZbYMXFXFxbYAaN/s1600-h/hercathena.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5449547332580710290" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhxL4bBNgUxD_JVqnYtsj18Y-AsV9ExkndDe1HDf9XIizMoss09w_pvfePnFbOOcs4-N9G_kNPSvaeCMI4l5LetBseK97cc-bdWcZoXkLFOW5mJtSxjzHzESRHKiFi7eZbYMXFXFxbYAaN/s320/hercathena.jpg" border="0" /></a>Athena</strong> (Jane Leeves), as the patron goddess of Athens shows up more than once, and is always amusing since she's usually smarter than anyone in the room, and usually in a competitive relationship with her twin brother Ares (Jay Thomas). I like her because she can compete with him in physical areas (they were both patrons of war and combat), but not at the expense of knowledge, wisdom, and reason. I also like that she seems to love irritating everyone by being a smarty pants a lot. Episode to try: <em>The Big Games</em></div><br /><br /><div><strong>Artemis</strong> (Reba Macentire), as the goddess of the hunt, is only in two episodes or so, but is knee-slappingly funny most of the time. Interestingly, the writers dug out this old myth about Orion, the legendary hunter of constellation fame, and she having an affair of some sort, in contrast to her more typical virgin status. But in typical Reba fashion, Artemis is straight-shootin', down-home wisdom, and prone to raising her voice when someone isn't listening to her. Episode to try: <em>The Boar Hunt</em></div><br /><div><strong>Elektra</strong> (Jennifer Tilly), interestingly having nothing to do with her mythical counterpart, this Elektra is a goth/beatnik girl that Herc's interested in. The problem is, she hates guys like him and wants nothing to do with him until he starts trying to adopt her counter-culture lifestyle. Oh yeah, and she summons “furies” (bird-like monsters) when she gets angry for some reason. What's interesting about this is that the episode doesn't seem to come down firmly on one side or the other here; she isn't really vilified for her viewpoints, and Herc doesn't seem to learn much of a lesson beyond 'don't pretend to be someone you're not to fit in'. They butt heads constantly about their life views but neither one wins the other over, and they part still not seeing eye to eye, but it's actually a more realistic ending than everyone magically getting along after seeing the error of their ways. Episode to try: <em>The Complex Elektra</em></div><br /><div><strong>Medusa</strong> (Jennifer Love Hewett), in a big nod to <em>The Little Mermaid</em>, is a lonely soul who longs for a connection with someone without turning them to stone. When given the choice between a human makeover that lasts from sunup to sundown in exchange for doing work for Hades, or a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses that keep her look from turning things to stone from Aphrodite, she takes what really does seem like the better deal and goes with Hades. She fits in when she goes to school, has friends, gets the start of a romance with Hercules, but after a serious anxiety attack when she hears Herc talk callously about learning to kill gorgons in his training, she decides to tell him who she is. It's an interesting episode and the only one I can recall offhand that focuses more on the emotional journey of a one-shot character than the protagonists. I remember that one being somewhat controversial in the fanbase when it first aired, since some people found Aphrodite's solution to be too optimistic in the face of overwhelming cultural bias against 'monsters', but there is also something to be said for the basic lesson of not trying to pretend to be someone you aren't just to gain acceptance. It's too bad she was only in one episode, since by the end of it, only Hercules was shown to be accepting of her, and it never says what happened after that. Episode to try: <em>The Gorgon</em></div><br /><div>As noted before, this series isn't available on DVD, nor is it likely to be for at least a very long time, if ever. Fortunately, some episodes are available on at least one popular movie sharing online community, and to the best of my knowledge, it's in reruns on one of the Disney channels, although I think some of the episodes have been edited since their initial airing. It's not a perfect show; the animation's pretty hit or miss, and some episodes are definitely better than others, but I thought overall it was pretty clever, especially if you're familiar with Greek mythology and history already. If not, it's a fun introduction, and it's a great way to play 'spot the celebrity guest voice', too.</div></div></div></div></div>Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9003717090483487648.post-61008923070146255842010-03-08T22:34:00.000-08:002010-03-08T22:57:37.917-08:00Feminism in Animation: "Slayers"<em>This is basically the sum of a bunch of different thoughts I've had bouncing around in my brain for a while. For a while I've been wanting to highlight some media products from Asian cultures, most specifically Japan since it's the one I'm most familiar with, that feature strong feminist themes, and since it's International Women's Day, what better time to kick it off? There's this prevailing idea floating around that Eastern cultures are more “backwards” and oppressive toward women than we are in the West, and while there are certainly problems in Asian countries in regards to gender equality, I really can't say the West is any better in many ways. It's an unfair viewpoint, and I've been wanting to challenge it for a while now, but I also want to talk about some feminist viewpoints from Western media products, specifically in terms of animation. For the purposes of this list, I'm looking specifically at Disney products, since Disney is very often viewed as being un-feminist, which is fair, but that's ignoring the feminist ideas that do exist there as well. So this is my list. It leaves out a bunch, I'm sure, but these are the TV shows, movies, and comics that I'm most familiar with and have the strongest ideas on. My goal here isn't to compare these shows with each other and try to rate how each culture is doing, my goal is simply to examine them in their own rights and maybe provide a different viewpoint or raise awareness of a product that might be less known.</em><br /><div><div><div><div><div><br /><em><strong>Slayers</strong></em><br /><a name="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5446503871134012466"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5oHuYdx8XCwP6Nt1P_tnYRq0EM2aWS63ZaKpzHspv1pYbYEivyrkpWPTnUoLOxhkiBIRBbAS8_B6VCrEoHjO6M-ZzKb74wiBKT9Mv0jxaFXH_xYFCwy1O-Vp_F_L5hsFat6r5_N9KW3on/s1600-h/slayersgroup.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5446519389100512242" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 226px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5oHuYdx8XCwP6Nt1P_tnYRq0EM2aWS63ZaKpzHspv1pYbYEivyrkpWPTnUoLOxhkiBIRBbAS8_B6VCrEoHjO6M-ZzKb74wiBKT9Mv0jxaFXH_xYFCwy1O-Vp_F_L5hsFat6r5_N9KW3on/s320/slayersgroup.jpg" border="0" /></a>The first an<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf7EPLc7B-1B0-pHrm9RDBv3NPouUdam4PD8GIXfoEqh-6a5Pysxf9umEm9M1ktdznEGo0T7b74M-uelz3n8Q7tbLkqjW-tnpCRFC5WBh9yuGjKzuxEJOyNMrlehom88LfamwVSWDWjR-h/s1600-h/slayersgroup.jpg"></a>ime I ever saw that I actually liked, and to this day I still enjoy it, even the dated parts. Originally based on a series of novels by Kanzaka Hajime with illustrations by Araizumi Rui, <em>Slayers</em> is an epic fantasy adventure story that in part spoofs epic fantasy stories, while at the same time creating its own story with messages all its own. It's a great adventure saga, full of humor, action, at times suspense, and loads of great characters. Kanzaka really created his own world, with its own history, culture, and mythology, and even an intricate and fascinating system of magic, with sub-groups and spells that clearly do their own different things, and that interact with each other in different ways. And at fifteen original novels, and over thirty spin-off novels, not to mention the comics and anime series that spun off from those, there's plenty that gets explored. I especially love that this series is proof that the idea that 'guys don't identify with female protagonists' is bunk because not only is the lead character in this series a female, but the novels are written in first-person perspective. So not only did Kanzaka, a man, write a lead female character convincingly and uncondescendingly, but it became one of the biggest hits of the '90s in Japan, with four TV seasons (to date), countless manga spinoffs, a string of direct-to-DVD releases, successful movies, radio dramas, and hit songs, to say nothing of the merchandise that must have been produced. To this day it has an enduring fanbase, enough to warrant a fourth TV season years after the previous one aired. Lina Inverse is an anime icon because she's a fantastic character, and the series is full of many more. </div><br /><div>In the novels Lina describes herself as a petite, brown-haired, brown-eyed gir<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-ky18QYGI4lsrVts4gqLtRQPeTiluPdBpKX2Sk6Hgenxu2vrjo-eSmHprlBMpLZC0vU6h_CNZ4GeASnxh4SIztqV9rdj6SMXXsge8GHfaSKcqS5IBNvD0JSkkEBmFvZQiKxMoIfU85KUV/s1600-h/linaragnablade.jpg"></a>l of fifteen or sixteen who's been traveling for years already-- gradually her hair and eyes were both lightened to a dramatic red, which admittedly does suit her personality more. She's not on some grand quest to save the world-- although she does usually wind up doing it anyway-- she's doing it because she loves adventure, kicking the butts of roving tribes of bandits (and making herself money in the process) and building up her reputation as a sorceress. By the time she's in her mid-teens, her name is already feared far and wide and she's almost a living legend-- although not quite in the way she'd wanted, since her nickname Dra-Mata (“dragon spooker”) is less flattering than her own title of “beautiful sorcery genius”, and she's very often regarded as a public menace. She has an ego the size of a small state, but the thing is, she really is a genius. She is a force of nature to be reckoned with, both in terms of her magical power (which is portrayed literally as <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuOvbbnx1MU">an atomic explosi</a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7P2P4hKmGQuDCigqbh3b6ksPRvHmPwjvfRwv2JeP1LGnS65sAyyK8yqzSY97VgEOqNamoGLQvmGmbS0S7mjGBVOrB8EfpAMYkwZlI2C-xKSB1Q4UKwPwf8zM1I3fSYB_p_6S5CE6MuagG/s1600-h/linaragnablade.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5446520556834470882" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 286px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7P2P4hKmGQuDCigqbh3b6ksPRvHmPwjvfRwv2JeP1LGnS65sAyyK8yqzSY97VgEOqNamoGLQvmGmbS0S7mjGBVOrB8EfpAMYkwZlI2C-xKSB1Q4UKwPwf8zM1I3fSYB_p_6S5CE6MuagG/s320/linaragnablade.jpg" border="0" /></a><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuOvbbnx1MU">on </a>in the anime), but in terms of her personality. She's loud, brash, egotistical, angry, opinionated, educated, fearless, ambitious, greedy, hardworking, adventurous, confident, funny, and totally relentless. And yet, as much as she brags about how gorgeous she is, it overlays this insecurity about her figure, since she's willowy and petite and seems to be surrounded by women far more well-endowed than she is. She's awkward and shy when it comes to things like romance and tries to avoid thinking or talking about it at all, let alone pursuing it. Her temper is legendarily short, and she's been known to blow up entire villages just to let off steam when she gets riled up, which only contributes to her reputation as a menace to society in general. She's very well-versed in magical theory as well as folklore and legends, and will often explain things to less-educated people. She also loves food and has been known to put away as much as twenty helpings in one sitting, which I believe was once attributed to the amount of magic energy she channels on a regular basis. Her abilities with magic, especially black (destructive) magic are astonishing for someone of her age; her signature spell is incredibly powerful, and one only a handful of people in the world know, but there's one even more powerful that she herself managed to figure out on her own that taps into energy so powerful it can destroy the planet if miscast. She's also tactically very savvy and will use creative and unorthodox methods of solving problems and getting out of trouble.</div><br /><div>I could go on and on about how much I love her and all her foibles and shortcomings and amazing humanness, b<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh61FUPiFOnHlonkECa6VgmleptqP__I5J74tnxAzd__1gi0SaKibczX5rQUreUNQFEVFwyLhWBV7M-rMHg9ksyapvz8h5cfrEm9P6OZB8RgfMOZbu8H0F1llf2cKCZ3TR2JVljlIeNWGPs/s1600-h/slayersnaga.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5446521208288069730" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 254px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh61FUPiFOnHlonkECa6VgmleptqP__I5J74tnxAzd__1gi0SaKibczX5rQUreUNQFEVFwyLhWBV7M-rMHg9ksyapvz8h5cfrEm9P6OZB8RgfMOZbu8H0F1llf2cKCZ3TR2JVljlIeNWGPs/s320/slayersnaga.jpg" border="0" /></a>ut she's also far from the only worthy female character in this series. In Lina's earlier wandering days, she had a sometime traveling companion/rival in Naga the Serpent, another powerful sorceress looking to establish a name for herself-- the fact that the name she establishes is "goldfish poop", after the way she follows Lina around, doesn't seem to slow her down much. Naga is a largely comedic character, with m<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk_g-ATRNxp9kSZwg9tMP3hVL_fL4VjL-iigL9uS45PNGd7W712WZXiX4tNBzrOo99_kbhVvvyA-gHbTjZKvnXVlK4CnKIHN9rsf01bmprW-I7JwOa3kwMBk1NJlo_Uos-Tm077urZfLuZ/s1600-h/slayersnaga.jpg"></a>any moments of supreme idiocy (poking her own cheeks with her spiked shoulder pads while casting a spell springing immediately to mind), and an outfit that defies nearly every rule of practicality and common sense, but there's a lot more to her than that. She does come off like an idiot a lot of the time, but I don't think she really is-- she's shown frequently to also be pretty canny and proves a good foil for Lina a lot of the time. She's a skilled magician, especially with nature-related magic, and her blistering confidence and complete lack of self-doubt about anything is really pretty cool when you step back and look at her. The signature laugh that drives sane people mad at the sound is the manifestation of that confidence, and it's what drives her tenacity, her ability to wear that ridiculous outfit without shame, her ambition, and her ability to drive Lina absolutely crazy. It's never directly stated anywhere, but there are big hints dropped that she's actually the older sister of another main character, Amelia, and the crown princess of a very powerful kingdom. She left home after witnessing the murder of her mother, which is why she faints at the sight of blood, and seems to prefer the life of a wandering adventurer to that of being royalty, although she's hardly lost the viewpoint of the upper echelon of society. She is also a woman who loves her alcohol, and delights in stealing Lina's food when the opportunity presents itself.</div><br /><div>Amelia Wil Tesla Seillune is the next most prominent female character in the story, especially in the anime. Back when I was first into the series, she was widely despise<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb1Qr1WTJ06dI-kWIO2omrktP71fzphmgMj-6_qZWQH-xcB39Fj0tyMmB4cbuAWAlfGMlNA3vGIyJ1qO_aMmIEgE8Yee6wXPKaSunhsxX_MTHIAai6GtM0iy8h88j-e2tGRZZXwOfCj-41/s1600-h/slayersamelia.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5446521769346722754" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 229px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb1Qr1WTJ06dI-kWIO2omrktP71fzphmgMj-6_qZWQH-xcB39Fj0tyMmB4cbuAWAlfGMlNA3vGIyJ1qO_aMmIEgE8Yee6wXPKaSunhsxX_MTHIAai6GtM0iy8h88j-e2tGRZZXwOfCj-41/s320/slayersamelia.jpg" border="0" /></a>d by the fanbase, and I'm glad to see that's died out now because she's a great character. Amelia is a princess <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2EoW2z8vEQq1hX08IXHuBrP2zt1KQhf67SGL643zrlS3zSSuMk7JDSDIpIBnbE5w0A8Q8iSCBDKYrOy_QwZ9k56hCv2koR_A6-2nRvsZYE1kOicxdr_HFrdMDPP_W3eEDSc0vsc5x1Yis/s1600-h/slayersamelia.jpg"></a>of the kingdom of Seillune, a large and powerful country that specializes in white (protective/healing) magic. The kingdom even has a series of walls built through and around it in the shape of a protective charm. Amelia is a very powerful white magic priestess, but she also has a great deal of proficiency in shaman (nature) magic, which gives her a greater diversity of spells to draw on than Lina in some ways. She's also an accomplished physical fighter, but has an inexplicable need to climb on the top of something tall and give righteous lectures to villains about justice before entering the fight-- also she will frequently fall off the tall things and land on her head, which often ruins much of her credibility as a threat. A year or two younger than Lina, she's a bit shorter than her, but with much more curve in her figure, which a thorn in Lina's side from time to time. Like her other family members, Amelia has a love of adventure and travel, but she also feels a great sense of responsibility to her kingdom, and so frequently returns home to take up her political and diplomatic duties instead. Raised by her father after her mother was murdered when she was small, she has a very strong sense of filial duty, and takes after her father in many ways, not the least of which are exuberance and an iron-clad belief in justice. Once stated that she didn't want to be the princess who gets rescued, but rather the prince who saves the damsel in distress, and very often refers to herself as a warrior of justice. Is probably the most naive character in the entire series, but grows considerably during its course into someone with a lot of sense and diplomacy, an even temper, and a really formidable opponent in both court politics and battle.</div><br /><div>Sylphiel Nels Radha is the least like any of the other major female characters in the series. She's the epitome of the “ideal” wom<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibxYKuWWJ_hQ2K5v0wt3ahRF0FED_cC9z7jdxBacnijX9phZU192yYlB1bI3cnYwQ8xisHLg_-0E79YoR0fD1QAtq2jqywy4589yVLHLlTuU2hqXxpfJJknens2zguVhJ94aLzckfUTNiW/s1600-h/slayersylphiel.jpg"></a>an and everything Lina isn't; kind, gentle, nurturing, domestic, beautiful, graceful, soft-<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSSGSBMMNX2AgdtZ2as8l9R1C47rlAVOXzzQnZvkWS9FbuK8vsIhnxHaZY1Eyfsmia6TWAp_funbz15Jv6CcEcTXuZDGSZUV9cZ9Z9MB7SwhlwGq_T7GhX72I_ZEfsQX69ogRik9LVlbtR/s1600-h/slayersylphiel.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5446522680150548594" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSSGSBMMNX2AgdtZ2as8l9R1C47rlAVOXzzQnZvkWS9FbuK8vsIhnxHaZY1Eyfsmia6TWAp_funbz15Jv6CcEcTXuZDGSZUV9cZ9Z9MB7SwhlwGq_T7GhX72I_ZEfsQX69ogRik9LVlbtR/s320/slayersylphiel.jpg" border="0" /></a>spoken, shy, obedient, dutiful, sweet, and friendly. Lina hates her instantly, but that's likely due in large part to Sylphiel's very overt designs on Lina's traveling companion and romantic interest, Gourry, and Lina's own buried insecurities. A very powerful white magic priestess, Sylphiel lives in a legendary city that once saw the destruction of a major demon and is renowned for its holy tree that played a large part in that battle. Though she starts out as the obligatory rival character, she soon starts taking on her own life, after enduring an unimaginable tragedy and playing a very important role in the defeat of a major demon. Little tidbits of her past and hidden parts of her personality are revealed slowly, and they add a nice dimension to her, even though she's still not one of the more well-developed characters in the series. But she serves her purpose well and even offers a number of surprises toward the end of the second anime season that showcase just how far she's willing to push herself for the sake of her own dreams. A character that, similar to her namesake Radha from the Hindu tradition, is completely devoted to the object of her love, but is doomed to a life of loneliness, waiting for the love of a man she'll never get. Even though she knows this, she still doesn't back away, and even then never bears Lina any ill will or overt resentment about it. She brings out the insecurities in Lina as she would in anyone, since she is too good to be real, and yet you can't help but feel badly for her since she's lost everything she cherished and deserves much better than the lot she's been given. She is the character who seems most fragile, and yet is able to endure the unendurable and keep moving forward without losing her kindness.</div><br /><div>There are more supporting characters that are worth discussing, as the series ran for a long time and had a huge supporting cast, but these are the major female ones. I love the cast for its diversity, and for the sense of human-ness that abounds in each one of them. Some characters are tragic, some comic, some both, some tomboys, some feminine girls, but none are invalidated or made lesser because of their traits. There was clearly thought put into each of them, and while they might seem on the surface like the embodiment of long-standing tropes, each has qualities that defy their categorizations and raise them up into something more thoughtful and interesting. It's also just a great overall series, full of cosmic battles between Good and Evil, silly side-quests, giant slugs, lots of magic, a little romance here and there, complicated family ties, loads of silly gags, lots of food, and plenty of concussions. I still have fun with it even ten years after the fact.</div></div></div></div></div>Bevinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13146188375359735856noreply@blogger.com0