Wash The Soap Away

So, yeah, I'm pretty much done with "As The World Turns".

Mind you, I'd only been tuning in to the Luke/Noah arc anyway, but...

Here's the thing. It's never easy to back down when you make a big, grandiose PR move, especially if you do it in the name of progress. When Marvel folded on the X-Statix/Princess Di storyline, it pretty much killed one of their best series dead. Why? Not just because they backed down, but because they went and made so much noise about it, about how provocative and edgy they were, and they turned tail with the slightest hint of disapproval.

Now, the fact that the Luke/Noah storyline never progressed after their second kiss all those months ago could have been attributed to slow-burn, a tactic that has always served soap operas well. But when you do a Valentine's Day episode in which every single couple gets to snog except the boys, you're not slow-burning, you're excluding. And that's a big, honking red light.

I'd been optimistic about precedents being set in the soap genre, but if this is as far as they're willing to go, I'd say more conservative minds have prevailed here. Pity.

In which I make kazekage's head explode

I'm halfway through the first season of "Torchwood".

And I like it.

Bearing in mind that for the past few weeks, my esteemed and learned friend kazekage has been waging the sort of holy war usually reserved for Joe Quesada's latest fuck-up, I was quite surprised when I ended up enjoying the show.

Yes, I'll concede that the fairies episode was crap. But "Countrycide" was effectively creepy, and I really liked Suzie Costello's comeback, especially the idea that Gwen's whole Torchwood experience might simply be walking in someone else's footsteps, and we know how that story ends.

There'll probably be a seasonal review as soon as I finish off the remaining episodes, but I've found that most of kazekage's criticisms don't ring true for me: yes, the acting's awkward, but not a dealbreaker (though I suppose that after "Bionic Woman" and "Melrose Place", my pain threshold is way up there). The characters make some stupid choices, but unlike the last two seasons of "Buffy" (or the most recent arc of "Heroes", for that matter), mistakes aren't born of ineptitude but rather curiosity, self-interest, corruption and so on. I think I prefer it that way - it could just as easily have gone the other way a la "Men in Black" where they're so super-competent and so in control that nothing fazes them, there's no risk.

In earlier posts, kazekage had designated Jack Harkness as a Mary Stu: a walking mass of contrivance designed to be universally loved and so on. But to be honest, I'm not seeing it: sure, everyone loves Jack, but that's because John Barrowman is very pretty and he's got a bit of charm to him. That's justification for why everyone loves him, and justification (or rather, the lack thereof) is what defines a Mary Sue/Stu, because what makes such characters so annoying is that they're lionized for no visibly apparent reason. At least with Jack, I can see why half the team wants him.

And it's true that things tend to fall apart without Jack, but that's been the case with every protagonist-oriented series: the Scoobies never did well without Buffy, Veronica Mars' supporting cast could never solve a mystery without her, and Very Bad Things happen to the X-Men when Xavier's not around.

More to follow once I've finished the season and gathered my thoughts...

Movie Review: Beowulf

Despite taking substantial liberties with the source material, I've found the most recent adaptation of Beowulf to be one of the more thematically faithful interpretations.

Let's start with general comments first: the CGI is very impressive, closer to reality than anything I've seen before. At first, I was curious as to why the creators would bother with CGI, given how closely the characters resemble their actors... but the story of Beowulf is, at its core, a fantasy, and a world rendered entirely in CGI (as opposed to the sort of CGI/live-action hybridization you'd find in, say, the later Star Wars films) creates a seamless visual experience, where men and women are as real as the giants, dragons and demons that menace them. The voice-acting is also superb across the board, from Ray Winstone's bellowing, blustering Beowulf to Anthony Hopkins' weakened, decadent Hrothgar. The action sequences are flawless and truly epic in scale.

Neil Gaiman's rewrite of the epic poem makes some intriguing alterations, and yet I find that the story's heart remains unchanged: it's still pride and hubris that leads to Beowulf's downfall, in that pride leads him to make a bargain that ultimately destroys him. Gaiman's version also turns the story into a cyclical narrative, as we learn that Hrothgar has made a similar compromise in his past, and Wiglaf (Beowulf's successor) is tempted to do the same as well. Much like the poem, there's a comment here on the human condition as it existed in the pre-Christian warrior culture of the fifth century: at what point do the supreme values of honor and glory become too costly to maintain?

A key element of the film is humanization, or rather, a reduction of absolutes and ideals. The movie's Beowulf is not the perfect, archetypal warrior-king-hero that he was in the poem (where his only true flaw was growing old). In fact, one layer of complexity the film introduces has to do with The Legend of Beowulf versus the man himself, and it turns out there's a bit of a gap there: we, the audience, are privy to information that contradicts Beowulf's exaggerated tales of his own heroism. He becomes an unreliable protagonist, where in the poem you never really had reason to doubt what was said about his battles and his character.

Similarly, Grendel is more than just a vile hellspawn. In the film, he is depicted as a childlike creature, his attacks on Heorot a response to the physical pain the Danes cause him. I'm on the fence about this: on the one hand, Western literature has long since made the move from moral motivation to psychological motivation, so asking us to sympathize with Grendel, even to a slight extent, is understandable. On the other hand, this drains Grendel of his "evil" context, in the sense that he's no longer a foil for Beowulf. Of course, that shift moves Grendel's mother up the hierarchy and makes her the true villain of the story, rather than just another Monster of the Week as she appears in the poem, so that's a step up.

On a final note, here's something I found particularly clever: Crispin Glover, as Grendel, speaks Old English while his mother (Angelina Jolie) has a Slavic accent. Language is used not just to separate the demons from humanity but to separate Grendel and his mother as well. Grendel's speech pattern is archaic, but still native to the land he's in; his mother comes from Somewhere Else, a place that's altogether foreign. And it's little touches like that which elevate a pleasant action-fantasy film into something more.

Movie Review: The Nines

It's been a few days now since I saw The Nines, and despite the amount of time and thought I've invested, I'm still no closer to resolving my own ambivalent feelings with regards to this movie.

Broadly speaking, "The Nines" is a rubber-reality movie in the vein of "Jacob's Ladder", "The Machinist" and "Stay", in which the world seems to come unglued around our protagonist(s) and a final twist unveils the plausible and quasi-rational explanation, causing us to look at the entire film in a new light.

"The Nines" does this... after a fashion. It presents a series of three subtly-interconnected stories in which a trio of actors - Ryan Reynolds, Melissa McCarthy and Hope Davis - play three different sets of characters, each with their own stories to tell. There's little point in analyzing each segment separately, because the pattern is the same every time: weirdness escalates until an abrupt ending materializes, at which point we're shunted to the next story without any real resolution.

When it comes to the rubber-reality sub-genre, the critical eye tends to fall most strongly on the denouement, the moment where the big twist comes into play and everything is meant to make sense. In "The Machinist", this was when Trevor finally recognized his "stalker"; in "Stay", it was after Henry's self-destructive guilt finally came to a head. Even "Donnie Darko" follows a sort of internal logic, provided you don't overanalyze the mechanics of time travel (that way lies madness and unhealthy attachments to websites promising you bigger breasts and penile enhancements).

But what happens when that ultimate explanation doesn't quite work? What if the denouement comes so far out of left field that suspension of disbelief - the mechanism that allows you to watch these movies in the first place - collapses? That's exactly what happens with "The Nines", in which the twist goes cosmic in, like, a Jim Starlin way, and I still don't know if I can accept the "truth".

Said "truth" is as follows: Ryan Reynold's character (we'll call him G for short) is "a multidimensional being of vast, almost infinite power" that has been creating, decreating and recreating the world, casting himself as a character in his own story. So Gary the actor, Gavin the writer and Gabriel the loving husband are all one and the same, and he's been doing this for so long that he doesn't remember where he came from. In comes Sarah (who is also Susan, who is also Sierra), another demigod who's come to break G out of his self-constructed prison and take him home. Unfortunately, he's become rather attached to Margaret/Melissa/Mary, a human woman who forms a connection with G in every incarnation (it's not clear whether he created this woman each time, or whether he just rewrites her identity after every "reboot").

And by the way, the film also establishes that koalas are weather-controlling telepaths, so now we know who's to blame for Hurricane Katrina. I just know that somewhere out there, Grant Morrison has woken up in a sweat, inexplicably feeling like he's missed an opportunity.

It's... a bit much, really. Setting aside the obvious question - if G creates both the world and his role in it, why is he so miserable each time? - this revelation isn't really contingent on the story that preceded it. I could've accepted a psychological explanation (because that's where the movie seemed to be heading), or even some kind of Matrix-ish "fake world" scenario... but cosmic godlings hooked on MMORPGs? Really?

On the other hand, the fact that the twist completely shatters my suspension of disbelief is partly because it's so unorthodox - I mean, of all possible explanations, I would never have guessed that particular one was the answer. And I have to admire the brass tacks it'd take to produce something so outlandish, regardless of the fact that it problematizes the film's final act - once the truth was revealed, I spent the rest of the movie in "Yeahbuhwhat?" mode and that was that.

This is what makes the rubber-reality sub-genre so frustrating: "The Nines" has a lot going for it, not least of which is its cast - Davis, Reynolds and McCarthy do a great job playing very different personalities in the space of ninety minutes. It'd be easier to write the film off had it been a complete dud, but it's not. At the same time, the denouement is so "out there" that, in my opinion, it derails the whole momentum of the story. Still, I suppose it's worth watching at least once, just for the severe head-trip that's sure to follow.

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! :)