Monthly Archives: August 2018

Movie Review: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

I decided to see Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdombefore it vanished from theaters.

That was a mistake.

Spoilers ahead.

Hands down this was the worst of the Jurassic Parkfranchise. The movie fails at the script level and crumbles further from there. The story opens several years after the disastrous events of Jurassic World. A team has come to the island, now in ruins, to get a sample from the magical dinosaur from the last movie. Despite being on an island full of voracious always hungry carnivores characters character work alone in the dark and when in the water don’t even use simple ‘fish finders’, you know Hooper had one in Jaws so it’s not unheard of technology, to warn them of approaching massive wildlife. This level of character idiocy permeates the entire script from front to back.

The plot of the film is that the island containing the park is soon going to be destroyed by a volcanic eruption, killing all the dinosaurs. The U.S. government, despite having no sovereignty over an island near Costa Rica decides to do nothing and that means no one is going to do anything and even just going there is illegal. (Don’t think too hard about it; even the movie ignores this stupidity after mentioning it.) Luckily as Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) is giving up on saving the animals, Lockwood, Hammond’s silent partner, so silent he was not even mentioned in any other film, is willing to fund a rescue out of pure and noble concern. (To quote Wash from Firefly“Curse your suddenly and inevitable betrayal.”) Claire is forced to reunite with Owen (Chris Pratt) from the last film, their Happily Ever After ending in Jurassic World having been derailed because he didn’t let her drive the van. Gathering up a couple of NPCs with vital and specialized skills, they fly to the island to rescue ‘Blue’, the super solider variant of velociraptor. A rescue op is already underway on the island but they needed Claire handprint to unlock the abandoned computers network and Owen to track Blue. Once this is achieved the rescue team is revealed as bad guys doing this to sell the dinosaurs to weapon and drug manufacturers. (Because in this world nothing is more evil than capitalism, weapons, and making pharmaceuticals. Remember the villainous corporate backed storm chasers in Twister?)  Leaving our heroes and one NPC on the island to die, the villains load up their ships with dinosaurs and the NPC veterinarian to save the wounded blue. Heroes being heroes they escape certain death and get surreptitiously stow away on the bad guy’s ship by jumping a full sized truck from the dock to the departing vessel. (I’m not joking, apparently no aboard noticed a several ton truck jumping into the well-deck.)

There was nothing about this movie to hold my attention. Throughout the run time I was bored and never engaged with plot, story, or character. Luckily I used one of my three free movies per week to see this so I was out no additional funds.

I fully expect The Meg to be better, make of that what you will.

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Classic Noir Review: D.O.A. (1949)

Recently I discovered that there are a few Roku channels showing public domain Film Noir movies. Many of the films made by smaller and independent productions fell into the public domain when the companies failed to file for a renewal of the copyright and one such movie was 1949’s D.O.A. The 1988 Remake starring Dennis Quad and Meg Ryan borrowed the central conceit of the film but invented its own plot and mystery.

1949’s D.O.A. centers on Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) an account who is unwilling to commit, that is marry, is long time girlfriend and secretary Paula (Pamela Britton.) Frank scampers off to San Francisco without Paula for a hedonistic vacation. The fun transforms into fear when he discovers that he has been poisoned and has at most a few days to live. Utterly at a loss to understand who would do such a thing or why anyone wants him dead, Frank begins a desperate search for answers as his hours dwindle.

With a strong compelling premise D.O.A. should have been a better movie, and certainly I have better memories of the 1989 remakes than I do for the original production. While boasting a good cast with the talent Edmond O’Brien carrying the weight of the film, the execution of the movie is flawed and undercuts what could have been a true classic. The directions are not up to even journeyman standards. Scenes of composed of shot/reverse shot that center frames the subjects robbing the sequences of emotional heft and power. The soundtrack carries an unfortunate element when Frank arrives in San Francisco looking for female fun and has not yet been poisoned. Each time Frank gives a woman his up and down elevator stare the score lampshades the emotion is an intrusive slide-flute ‘wolf call.’ The unpleasant sound pulled me out of the film every time it played. Worse yet that terrible tone was utterly uncalled for, Edmond O’Brien fully convened his character lecherous leer with conviction that required no assistance from the soundtrack much less such a ham-handed one.

Aside from the intriguing concept D.O.A. also has good cinematography with several night shoots that were not day-for-night but shot at night on the city streets giving those scenes a reality that enhanced the Frank’s danger as he dodged criminals and assassins.

Over all I enjoyed watching D.O.A. but ultimately this represents a good candidate for being remade as the original contained enough flaws to warrant taking another bite at the apple. After all it took Hollywood three tries to The Maltese Falcon right.

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Relativism, The GOP, and Me

 

For most of my adult life the Republican Party has claimed the mantel of belong to the philosophical school of moral objectivism while accusing their political opponents of belonging relativists.  As a quick thumbnail sketch of the two points of a view a relativist would agree with the statement that right and wrong, good and evil, are products of culture and can only be judge within a culture, that one should never describe another culture’s practice are wrong or right as you would only be giving a judgment based upon your only cultural prejudices. Objective morality, which is quite distinct from Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, argues that right and wrong exist independent of culture and some thing trans all cultures as wrong. During the cold war this point of difference often came up when discussing the Soviet Union, it’s client states, and it’s aggressive push to spread its totalitarian system throughout the world. It is the basis for Ronald Reagan’s famous pronouncement of the USSR as ‘an evil empire.’ Sentiments I did and still do agree with. The political system of the Soviets and other communist nations created a system of de facto slavery yoking entire populations to the state.

Over the last 17 years the GOP, driven I believe by a belief that winning matters more than anything else and a power negative partisanship have abandoned their morality for whatever they believe will win. And not all of this can be laid at the feet of Donald Trump. Trump had nothing to do with the GOP embracing torture, but it certainly invited him and his ilk into the tent.

Winning has pushed aside all other considerations. This is best illustrated with the following photographs.

Copyright Jeff Widener AP

Given a choice between supporting the men who ordered the tanks into the square are the man who stood in their path, the GOP and its base has thrown their admiration for the man sympathetic to the butchers not the protesters.

copyright Jeremy Pelzer; Cleveland.com

Given the choice between our geopolitical opposition and our own people these men have proudly proclaimed their preference. Yes, these are just two men, but they felt comfortable enough to make the shirt and wear to a GOP event. Polling has shown that among the GOP as Trump has gained the presidency the rank and file member have grown in their admiration of strong man Vladimir Putin. A man who uses the resources of his state to manipulate our elections and does so with challenge from our President.

Is this worth it? Is your tax cut so valuable that you side with dictators and butchers? Is your fear of gun control so great that we must consort with such governments and men? Is that seat on the Supreme Court so valuable that the principals of self-rule and human rights must be abandoned?

What great crisis forces such drastic and damaging deals?

None, that I can see.

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The Schrödinger Trope

The following post has moderate spoilers for the film The Atomic Blonde starring Charlize Theron and Directed by David Leitch.

There are lots of tropes in writing and popular media but an interesting effect takes place when a character occupies several tropes at once. In Atomic Blonde Theron’s character Lorriane while on an undercover mission to East Berlin works with and has an affair with Delphine a French agent also working a mission in Berlin. Delphine, played by Sophia Boutella, is very inexperienced as an intelligence officer but her and Lorrain form a close sexual relationship. As the film moves from the second to the third act Delphine is killed.

Delphine and her death occupy possibly three different well-worn cinematic tropes.

The Junior Partner:

Often in spy and action movies the main character will receive vital assistance from a less experienced character with the protagonists acting as a mentor for the novice. Very often as the situation escalates and after the junior partner has obtained vital information for the plot and as the writers raise the stakes the story’s antagonists will kill the Junior Partner. Over the long run of the James Bond franchise he has left a trail littered with expendable Junior Partners.

Bury Your Gays

This one, in my opinion, divides into two major categories. During the period of the Motion Picture Production Code when gay and queer character could not be clearly identified as such, characters that were understood to be gay came to bad, usually, lethal ends as ‘punishment’ for the sinful lives. After The Code was abandoned and replaced with the Motion Picture Rating System the treatment of gay character changed from condemnation of the characters to condemnation of the society that ostracized them. Often the gay characters still came to bad and usually lethal endings but now it was meant as a tragic statement on their abuse at the hands of uncaring society. Either way gay characters came to repetitious, clichéd deaths.

Now It’s Personal

In action adventure movies the protagonist is often a reluctant one. He, and it is nearly always a he with this trope, wants to avoid the trouble of tackling the antagonist and simply wants to live his life. When this happens usually at the end of the first or second acts someone close to the protagonist will suffer terribly at the hands of the antagonist or their minions. Now with the stakes having become person the protagonist is motivated and propelled towards the conflict. (And too often sexual assault of the love interest in a common second act motivator.)

In Atomic Blonde Delphine’s death can clearly fit into the first two tropes. She serves as the junior partner to Lorraine, obtaining vital plot information, and then, no longer serving any real plot function she is dispatched to raise the stakes. As she and Lorraine became lovers over the course of the film, and Lorraine is clearly marked as bi-sexual by her relationship with male characters earlier in the film, Delphine certainly fits into the gay character doomed to death trope. The third trope applies less clearly as Lorriane is fully motivated throughout the film.

What I find curious is how a person’s personal filter colors their perception to tropes. Delphine fit cleanly into The Junior Partner and Bury Your Gays but people rarely mention both, it is nearly always one or the other and which trop they cite as the active trope, usually irritating them for it presence, is nearly entirely a function of their lived life. This better than almost anything else typifies by often repeated comment that ‘no honest critique can be wrong.’ Art is an alchemical reaction between artist intent, random circumstance, and each person in the audience own lived life; that is what makes art so magical and transcendent.

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Thinking Beyond the Gun

The issue of 3-D printed guns is once again making news. This has naturally provoked a lot of talk and heat from the usual opposed corners of debate. The Trump administration dropped the government’s opposition to Defense Distributed file sharing the 3-D printer instructions for making firearms but a Federal judge has stepped in and made a fresh injunction halting the process.
Both side of the debate seem to focus on the firearm element of the issue. That’s to be expected, gun rights, just as is the case with abortion rights, is primarily an issue of culture, emotions, and tribalism. However I want to look at the underlying principals and what that could mean.
At issue is spreading knowledge and if the government can preemptively, for the public good, forbid the dissemination of knowledge.
When the Obama administration first forbid Defense Distributed from placing the files on the Internet they did it through a national security rationale. There are laws, and these laws are not bad ones in my opinion, that make the sharing of some technologies internationally illegal. Some knowledge must be kept from the hands of our adversaries; this applies to both classified and non-classified information. Now I think, and this is purely opinion, that the Obama administration used the as a justification but that preventing 3-D printer instructions for common firearms was a bit of a stretch. Defense Distributed challenged the government in court and the new administration ceased defending the Obama’s administration’s position.
The essential argument is that printer instructions for making firearms are too dangerous and therefore the government has a compelling interest in control the flow of such information.
Consider this what other information might be considered detrimental to the public good and therefore subject to the government’s prior restraint? How far are you willing to allow the government to go on this? Is it only firearms? Certainly other actor, if this action is allowed, will push the envelope and make all sorts of logical arguments as to why this or that must be restricted for the common good. Do not create a governmental power that you are not willing to hand over to your worst political opponent.
This is not an argument that unlimited anonymous guns are a good thing or even unavoidable but be careful about jumping on the first obvious remedy. You want to be sure it is medication and not a poison pill.

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The Oddest Dream I Ever Had

There was a bit on twitter the other day where someone asked others to describe their weirdest dream in five words. This followed describing favorite books and movies also with the five-word limitation. This prompted me to remember a dream from 1977 when I was sixteen and spending the summer with my older sister,

My niece Heather was an infant and as is the way of infants rarely slept through the night. By a quirk of chance the times that I went to sleep, rather late, synchronized with Heather’s cycles in such a manner that when she awoke in the night it often interrupted my middle of the night dreaming. People dream on a roughly 90 minute cycle and those dream from the middle of my sleep are particularly odd.

I remember bits and pieces of those strange phantasms but this one I think is the strangest. First off I am not in the dream. I do not know how common this is for other but I will occasionally have dreams in which I never appear. In these I am a spectator, much like watching a fully realized film that happens to carry smell, taste, and touch in addition to visuals and sound. In fact I have had dream that really were movies, complete with known actors in some of the parts. This dream had no named actors.

The situation is a newly wed couple. The husband has come home from work and they have seated themselves to the dinner she prepared, a whole roasted chicken. Their conversation slides from loving to sniping and arguing. As the scene progresses it becomes obvious, though I could not say how, that the chicken, the dead and cooked bird centered in the table, is manipulating their minds with its own psychic powers. The couple’s disagreement turns to shouting but on the cusp of becoming violent they recognize that it is not their own will at work but the chicken’s. (My, that’s a strange sentence all by itself.) Before they can do anything about the foul fowl the chicken reveals further psychic abilities and takes control of their bodies, forcing the couple to grab a broom handle and feed it into the kitchen’s garbage disposal. Unable to release their grip on the shaft the pair struggles in horror as they are drawn down into the strangely deadly device.

And that’s where I woke up to Heather’s cries for a feeding. I laid there in the dark waiting for Rod Serling to step out of the corner and begun to post episode wrap up. It would have been nice if someone explained that dream.

There were other weird dream that summer, humanoid aliens with glowing spots in their forehead invading New England but stopped by the alligators and so on but nothing as odd at the mental, mad chicken.

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Casablanca and DREAM

Recently I have started listening to various podcasts, political; entertainment, and writing are the most represented subjects. One of the writing podcasts is Writing Excuses and it features a number of established writers discussing in an abbreviated format, just 15 minutes or so for each episode, various subjects and approaches to improve one’s writing. An episode I listened to recently concerned character arcs, the emotional trajectory and changes a character undergoes through the course of a story. Author Mary Robinett Kowal presented a tool for charting a character’s course through the arc and she put it in the form of a mnemonic; DREAM.

D: Denial. The character is in denial about the needed change, the aspect of their personality that is damaged or missing.

R: Resistant. The character, presented with evidence of the subject of their denial, resists the evidence, doubling down on their denial.

E: Explore. The character begins exploring the missing aspect of their nature, moving tentatively away from their denial.

A: Acceptance. The character accepts the truth of the flaw or missing elements that they need to change.

M: Modify. The character’s actions are modified by their acceptance and this expresses the new ground state for the character.

I thought it would be an interesting exercise to apply this tool to perhaps the most well know character arc in cinema, Richard ‘Rick’ Blaine’s transformation from self-centered cynic to Romantic fighter in the 1942 classic Casablanca.

Denial: The film starts with Rick, by way of his actions, expressing his denial of any need for personal relationship or any ideology other than his own self-interest. He dismisses romantic attachments existing only in the moment. “Where were you last night? – I can’t remember that far back. Will I see you tonight? -I never plan that far ahead.” When Ugarte begs for help Rick is plain that he ‘sticks his neck out for no one.’ However we, as the audience, are given glimpses that this is not Rick’s true character. Captain Renault probes Rick’s character, speculating on what brought him to Casablanca and Rick’s evasive lies are evidence of a different character hiding inside the cynic. Rick’s holding the transit letter stolen by Ugarte and not turning them over to the authorities is also an indication that there are things he may think are more important then himself and he will not willingly assist the Nazis or their puppet government.

Resistant: Rick is confronted with his facade when Isla Lund comes back into his life. He tries to shows that she doesn’t mean much to him when he effectively calls her a prostitute and dismisses any possibility of any love lingering in his heart. Sam, another character utilized to reveal truths that Rick will not admit to himself, gives voice to Rick desire to run away. Rick insisting that Sam play As Time Goes Byis Rick proving that he and Isla’s former love means nothing now is his resistance given voice.

Explore: After Rick sobers up he seeks out Isla and tries to get her to tell the story he rebuffed while drunk but she refuses. When he goes to her this is Rick exploring the concept that he hasn’t gotten over Isla. He doesn’t say so overtly, he still wears an armor of cynicism but it is still merely a facade.

Acceptance: When Isla comes to him and threatens to kill him for the transit letters and Rick does nothing, inviting her to shoot him, he is accepting that he has never stopped loving Isla. The self-centered armor falls away and he leaves himself open to death. Isla’s collapse and inability to kill him forces Rick to accept the truth about their love and himself.

Modification: At the end of the film Rick convinced Isla, even though they love each other deeply, to go away with Victor. He has given up his gin joint and joins the resistance fighting to Nazis. He has changed his actions, committing himself to a cause larger then his own petty interests.

I have to say I think this tool works pretty damn well.

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