Rest easy

Vale, my dear.

I was fifteen when River Phoenix died of a drug overdose in 1993.

Here we are, over a decade later, mourning another talent lost to the same killer.

Sobering thought, isn't it?

Movie Review: Persepolis

I'm just going to come right out and say it: I don't like "Persepolis". I've never liked it, not as a film and not in its original graphic novel format. And I'm uncomfortable admitting this, given the practically unanimous support and praise it receives from critics, readers and viewers.

In analyzing my own response to the film (which, all things considered, is a fairly loyal adaptation of the source material), I've determined that my problem with "Persepolis" isn't intellectual: if I'm as purely critical and objective as possible, I can see that Marjane Satrapi's story is well-presented, that her technique of juxtaposing simplistic artwork and very complex/complicated life situations is as effective for her as it was for Art Spiegelman's "Maus". I can even give the film kudos for some amusing moments ("The Eye of the Tiger" comes to mind, as does Satrapi's depiction of puberty-related transformations).

But emotionally, it leaves me cold. And because that's a subjective issue, it's difficult for me to pin down exactly why it leaves me cold. I can certainly sympathize with Satrapi's avatar, and I can imagine how intolerable her situation must have been, but... the key to enjoying autobiographical stories, at least for me, is being able to form some kind of emotional connection with the protagonist/author. Other works like "It's A Bird", "Maus", "Pedro and Me" and even Brian Bendis' "Fortune and Glory" (written when he was far less insufferable than he is today) did just that - I began to care about the people very early in the story, and that was really what drove the reading. Satrapi doesn't provide that for me - at no point in her narrative am I ever really compelled to care about her story. And that's pretty much the deciding factor for me.

Yikes.

It's been a month since my last post.

Not much to say in my defense other than the usual "real life got in the way" - but I've got some massive blocks of free time coming up and I plan to use them wisely.

Stay tuned! :)

Best. Thread. EVER.

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http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showthread.php?t=197471

Movie Review: Ha'Buah (The Bubble)

Another "almost-but-not-quite" effort by Israeli filmmaker Eitan Fox, who - bless his little activist heart - keeps bringing up social issues in the most anvilicious and preachy ways imaginable.

Fox's movies are particularly frustrating, though, because he has a great knack for creating sympathetic and believable characters, and he always starts off so well, but his three most noteworthy movies - "The Bubble", "Walk on Water" and "Yossi and Jagger" - all implode during the final act, collapsing under the weight of the Issues (and I use that term in the Winickian Beat-You-With-A-Stick-Until-You-Get-It sense here) piled onto them.

The titular Bubble refers to Shenkin, a small area of Tel-Aviv where teenagers spend their time totally isolated from reality. This is something Fox actually depicts very well: Noam, Yali and Lulu see themselves as activists, lobbying to support the Palestinian cause and the desire for peace, but they don't actually do anything beyond staging raves which only they and their friends attend. This isn't to say that they're insincere, far from it - they just have no idea what they're talking about, because they're cut off from the real world.

The trouble starts when Ashraf, a Palestinian from Nablus, penetrates the Bubble by falling in love with Noam. It's a doomed relationship, of course - Ashraf finds acceptance and comfort in Tel-Aviv, but he doesn't belong there and he knows it, and Fox is basically using this as a vehicle to blame society for putting that wall up between them. There's no way Noam and Ashraf can have a happy ending, through no fault of their own.

Now, if that were the sum total of the plot, "The Bubble" would've actually turned out to be a much stronger movie. The problem is that, as with his previous films, the third act and the climax veer almost completely away from what had been going on up to that point. For most of the movie, we're concerned not just with Noam and Ashraf but with the colorful and interesting secondary characters (just what was Golan's deal anyway?), and suddenly we're moving into political tensions and suicide bombers and characters making decisions that don't really gel with what they'd been doing before.

I can sort of see Fox's point here - bursting our own "bubble" by interrupting the love story with some harsh reality - but while his social agendas are admirable, the resulting thud as you're beaned in the head with a bag full of Issue Bricks only leaves you with a migraine. Once the storyline turns to Ashraf's sister and her terrorist husband, I couldn't help feeling like I wanted to fast-forward through that part: again, Fox does such good work with the set-up, it makes the eventual derailing all the more annoying.

That said, I have to give the man props for finally overcoming a specific stumbling block: I'd always felt that "Walk on Water" and "Yossi and Jagger" lacked any kind of emotional impact at the end, because the Issues ended up pushing the characters to the wayside, so when they do reach some kind of psychological/dramatic climax, you don't much care anymore. But "The Bubble" ends with an especially poignant flashback narrated by Noam, and... I don't know, I thought it was genuinely touching. As though, for once, Fox managed to let the characters dig themselves out of the Issue Pit just long enough for one last glimpse.

And that'll do, I suppose. That'll do.

Movie Review: Enchanted

The name pretty much says it all: "Enchanted" is an adorable Disney film that may not breach any standards of cinematic excellence, but is nevertheless a solid, entertaining movie and a great way to spend a few hours.

I think what I liked most about "Enchanted" is the way it plays with the fairy tale formulas. Unlike the "Shrek" movies, which had fairy tale characters responding to their environment with realistic perspectives, "Enchanted" drops your stereotypical naive songbird, vapid prince and evil witch right into the heart of New York City (a transition that also moves the film from animation to live-action). The twist is that they arrive with their native qualities intact, so when Giselle, our Snow White-esque heroine, starts singing, animals respond as they do in her homeland... except, since she's in New York, she gets cockroaches, rats and pigeons rather than deer, bluebirds and chipmunks. And when Prince Edward valiantly slays a "steel beast" with his sword, he has to deal with a pissed-off bus driver.

I also appreciate the fact that the relationship between fantasy and reality is a two-way thing; the "Shrek" films were, in my opinion, wholly iconoclastic in that, by design, Shrek and his companions are always overturning and lampooning the age-old shlock Disney's been foisting on us for decades. But "Enchanted" takes a different approach: yes, we're certainly meant to find Edward's empty-headed preening amusing, and Giselle's blind faith in true love and innate goodness get her into plenty of trouble... but on the other hand, urban characters such as Robert, Morgan and Nancy don't really benefit from their realistic, sophisticated points of view. These are people who've taken practicality to its extreme, and find themselves stuck because of that choice.

It's rare to find a movie that doesn't ask you to choose sides in an ideological conflict: "Lord of the Rings" is pretty strongly biased against industry, and I can't see anyone agreeing with the Fairy Godmother that Shrek doesn't deserve a happy ending just because he's an ogre. "Enchanted" manages to pull off a nice balance between the two worlds it depicts, all the more impressive given that it's a Disney film.

Book Review: "The Children of Hurin" by JRR Tolkien

I may earn the wrath of my peers for saying this, but I'm not particularly fond of "The Lord of the Rings". By which I mean Tolkien's novels, because I do enjoy the Peter Jackson films despite their numerous flaws. But I read Tolkien's original trilogy once and never felt any compulsion to repeat the experience.

I'll give the man credit where it's due: yes, in many ways "The Lord of the Rings" is the seminal fantasy text. It's also extremely long-winded, remarkably obsessed with minutiae (is there any particular reason I need to know the entire genealogy of a tertiary character?), it's horrendously gender-imbalanced even for a pre-feminist work, it features massive tangents completely unrelated to the main thrust of the narrative (to this day, I have yet to be convinced that the Tom Bombadil section is of any relevance at all), and it commits dramatic self-sabotage at practically every turn. This was something Peter Jackson actually improved on: it's much more climactic to see Boromir's last stand against the Uruk-Hai, rather than be told about it after the fact.

So, all in all, I prefer Peter Jackson's interpretation of the text to the text itself. Granted, said interpretation has its own flaws:

And I'm not even going to talk about the subtext:



But in terms of plot, dialogue, pacing, characterization and so on, Jackson's contributions only elevate the source material.

And yet, paradoxically, I find that I'm quite partial to "The Silmarillion", a pseudo-Biblical novel pieced together by Christopher Tolkien after his father's death. "The Silmarillion" details the creation of Middle-Earth and the formative events which take place in the pre-history of "Lord of the Rings". Oddly enough, the fact that "The Silmarillion" is a patchwork text sewn together from the fragments of Tolkien's notes seems to make it more readable than Tolkien's would-be masterpiece itself. Whereas "The Lord of the Rings" is frighteningly overextended as a quest narrative, the structural scope of "The Silmarillion" allows for simultaneous exploring of the macro (cosmic wars between good and evil) and micro (the tragic tale of Turin Turambar) levels. That may in fact be what makes "The Silmarillion" so much more engaging to me than its predecessor - the fact that it's able to tell all these different stories without feeling like it's straying from the one it's supposed to be telling (well, that and the fact that unlike Sauron in "The Lord of the Rings", Morgoth is an active antagonist who actually participates in the story, and that goes a long way).

This is all a very long pre-amble to what I'm actually reviewing, "The Children of Hurin". It's basically the complete version of a fragment originally presented in "The Silmarillion", expanding one of the sub-stories - the tale of Turin Turambar, a tragic hero in the ancient Greek tradition. Tolkien the younger has done an excellent job of combining the text originally featured in "The Silmarillion" with expanded material both drawn from Tolkien's unfinished notes and from his own imagination as well: the result is a narrative that reads well and presents a consistent, enjoyable fantasy tale that stands on its own, something accessible to people who enjoyed the movies but find the heavy, laborous reading of the original novel too daunting - "The Children of Hurin" offers an alternative glimpse at Middle-Earth's pre-narrative history. Not just for Tolkienites!