I happened to see a bit of the first Harry Potter movie on TV the other day. It was about as I had remembered: too faithful to the book, to the point where it got dull. (An explanation of the rules of Quidditch is funny and entertaining on the page. On the screen, it is boring.)
For whatever reason, I decided to also watch the last Harry Potter film as well afterwards–mostly just to see how the cast aged. But what I noticed, due to the discussion of color in my last post, was how different everything looked from the first film to the last. I’m not talking the actors here–I’m talking about everything.
Apparently, Voldemort’s rise resulted in a change in how light is reflected. The colors in the first movie–while still relying heavily on orange and blue–were nonetheless fairly vibrant and distinct from one another. By the last movie, everything looked completely washed-out and greyish brown. It appeared that someone had applied a desaturation filter to everything except the magic spells.
I’m guessing they think they were doing a good job matching the darker tone of the story in the last movie by doing this.
They were wrong.
The movie was so visually uninteresting that it physically hurt to watch. That’s not good film-making, and it’s not a good way of matching the tone of the story with the scenery. It can be, sure; but it is not automatic.
The first Harry Potter film was by no means a triumph of cinema, but it was fairly decent visually. The last one was borderline unwatchable because of how uninteresting it looked. I might not have thought too much more about this though, except that I then happened to watch a couple scenes from the movie Apocalypse Now a few days later. Now, I don’t think it’s an especially good movie, because the story doesn’t make any sense, but it does have awesome cinematography. If you couldn’t tell from the title, it is a rather thematically “dark” film as well, and yet the ending scenes where Martin Sheen goes to assassinate Marlon Brando have plenty of vibrant color.
Here is a still from the climax of Apocalypse Now:
Here is a still from the climax of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:
How is it that a picture of a camouflaged man standing in a muddy lake at night is more visually compelling than a wizards’ duel?
I first noticed this with video games, whenShamus Youngpointed out how Mass Effect 3 overused this palette. Once you notice it, you realize it’s everywhere and it makes it hard to watch modern movies.
They’d been advertising this movie “The Interview” constantly during the football games–otherwise I’d never have heard of it. But now that Sony caved to pressure from threats of hacker attacks, it’s going to get a lot more publicity. Personally, I wasn’t planning to see it before, and even if they do figure out some way to release it, I won’t see it then. I don’t go see many movies.
My first question on hearing about this was: since when does North Korea have hackers? I honestly didn’t realize they did cyber-warfare–I thought they spent all their money on bombs.
My second question was: why are they all upset about this, and not about that one movie with the marionettes that came out about ten years ago mocking Kim Jong-il? Is it just because this is live action?
And now even the President has said Sony made a mistake, saying “I wish they (Sony) had spoken to me first”–and I guess he is in a better position than anyone to assess the level of the threat. Still, even that in itself smacks of censorship in a way–are all movies now going to have be run by the government to see if they pose a security risk every time hackers threaten them?
All in all, I think this is kind of a bad omen–it’s just going to embolden every hacker to threaten every movie to see if he can get it banned. The trolls are running the show now. That said, I was getting sick of seeing the ads for the movie, so I guess I can’t complain that they’ve been pulled.
I loved Lego toys as a kid. (Who didn’t, really?) They were awesome. I still occasionally see ads for the new and improved sets that come out and think to myself: “why didn’t we have that when I was 10? The fun I’d have had!”
So, I watched The Lego Movie hoping for a nostalgic love-letter to a great toy. And I was not disappointed, either. It was a very cute movie, and they did a pretty good job of keeping the “look” of Lego intact. It was awfully fast-paced but I suppose that’s par for the course for a children’s movie. And it managed to be a film that adults could enjoy without having innuendo and double-entendre jokes thrown in. (Well, except for one line, but it was fairly mild.)
The only issue I had with it was that the name of the villain who wants to glue all the Lego-people in place forever, was “Lord Business”. It seemed like an odd name for the character, given that Lego is, itself, a business. You see, the movie has sort of a “meta” narrative, in which at the end, the characters are revealed to be the playthings of a child, who is basing the story on his father’s refusal to let him modify his carefully arranged Lego dioramas. So, his father is “Lord Business” wanting to keep everything “just so”, and the good characters are rebelling against this. Do I even need to say that it all ends happily and valuable lessons are learned?
As for the “Lord Business” name–I guess they were saying “business” as opposed to “play”; but all the same, it seemed peculiar. I read that a lot of conservative types complained about it–they felt it was an anti-capitalist message. I don’t think it was, though–it was just a poor choice of words.
That aside, I thought the movie was very clever and entertaining. Morgan Freeman, Will Ferrell and Liam Neeson all give very funny performances. The jokes are all too rapid-fire to really mention them–it’s more the cumulative effect than one joke. But I think my favorite bit was this (which was also in the trailer):
[The villains are attacking a gathering of assorted Lego heroes]
Batman: “To the Batmobile!”
[Villains blow up the Batmobile]
Batman: “Dang it!”
Wonder Woman: “To the invisible jet!”
[Villains blow up the invisible jet]
Wonder Woman: “Dang it!”
Batman: “Every man for himself!”
Something about hearing a superhero say “every man for himself” is pretty funny for some reason. All in all, a very entertaining flick.
It’s a good story of the protege who has turned against his mentor–it’s practically the stuff of High Drama. I don’t know how much stock to put in the Wikipedia articles on this (Noory’s Wiki page in particular does not follow the Wikipedia guidelines for how an article should read) but the Coast article claims:
The Commonsense show [Don’t know what that is–has Thomas Paine got a show now?–MM] has described Noory led Coast to Coast by the following: When Art Bell relinquished control of his program to corporate interests, Premier and ultimately Clear Channel, Coast to Coast was never the same as the show took a turn and became reflective of “the corporate message”
I have no idea if this accusation is true, but the program is definitely owned by Clear Channel Communications, which syndicates, through its subsidiary Premiere Networks, shows like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck. (Interestingly, Clear Channel itself is owned by Bain Capital–Mitt Romney’s old company. Like any good Coast-to-Coast conspiracy theory, this one has a trail you can follow pretty far up!)
My point, though, has less to do with the political machinations, real or imaginary, that may or may not lie behind the change in the program’s focus. Rather, I want to revisit eurobrat’s original point that Coast now “sounds like everything else out there”.
As I alluded to in my other post on this topic, “Diversifying” is generally considered a sound strategy, and yet the logic here seems to have been “homogenizing”. But more and more, I realize how common this is, and to some extent this transformation does suggest Clear Channel is responsible, because it’s exactly the sort of thing a big company does when it takes ownership of something. It’s sort of like what I wrote about regarding the saga of Electronic Arts and BioWare’s Mass Effect: they acquire something unique and successful just to turn it into a knock-off of something else.
Contrary to what many of you may think, I do not listen only to Gilbert and Sullivan. I occasionally listen to musical artists whose works were written as recently as this millennium, if you can imagine that. One of my favorites is the late Warren Zevon. He was not a very nice person, to put it mildly, as I discovered from reading his ex-wife Crystal’s biography of him, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. But he wrote some great songs–here is a list of my ten favorites.
“Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner“. (1978, with David Lindell) This tale mixes two of my favorite subjects: mercenaries and ghosts, and is coupled to a well-crafted narrative of war and betrayal. The opening notes give me chills every time I hear them. It was fitting that it was the last song Zevon performed publicly, during his final appearance on the David Letterman show–I think it is his greatest.
“Mohammed’s Radio“. (1976) I go back and forth on whether I prefer the studio version or the live version that appeared on Stand in the Fire. The former has better lyrics, but the latter has better energy. Either one is brilliant, however.
“Transverse City“. (1989, with Stefan Arngrim) This song is also the title of Zevon’s most unjustly neglected album. For the life of me, I don’t know why people didn’t like it. (Maybe the horrible cover art?) In any case this song is a very unsettling journey through a cyberpunk landscape.
“Mr. Bad Example” (1991, with Jorge Calderon) Again, this was also an album title, and this song was definitely the standout (though it’s a very fine album). An amusing saga of outrageous misdeeds that probably didn’t seem quite so outrageous to the late Mr. Zevon himself.
“Ourselves to Know“. (2000) This haunting song will creep into my mind at the oddest times. I am not a religious person, but I do find the Crusades imagery the lyrics evoke to be curiously powerful. Zevon at his most reflective.
“Hit Somebody! (The Hockey Song)“. (2002, with Mitch Albom) I played hockey as a kid–not very well, though. Like the enforcer hero of this song, I “wasn’t that good with a puck”. It’s one of the few inspirational sports stories I don’t find tedious.
“Turbulence“. (1989) Another one from Transverse City. I love his topical political songs, and this one also contains some very nice Russian singing.
“The Envoy“. (1982) Note that this is the title track of what is by far Zevon’s worst album. There are only about four songs that are not awful on it, and this is the only one that is really “good’. I half suspect he made the whole album just to get this gem published.
“Bad Karma“. (1987) This is a great song for when you are feeling down. It won’t make you feel better exactly, but it will kind of make you laugh.
“My Ride’s Here“. (2002, with Paul Muldoon) It sums up Zevon’s body of work perfectly; capturing both his witty, humorous side and his melancholy gloominess. I suspect you don’t get the full effect of it unless you are pretty familiar with his other stuff going in.
I received an absolutely wonderful book as a gift from a friend today. It is called The Empire Striketh Back, a re-telling of the story of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back as if it were written by William Shakespeare. It is actually written by Ian Doescher, and I must say he did a marvelous job translating the film’s script into the language of the Bard.
There are so many things to love about this–it had me hooked from the “Dramatis Personae” page, done perfectly in the style of the plays. And then the language–well! Let me quote a little bit of the first scene, just to give you an idea:
LUKE: If flurries be the food of quests, snow on,
Belike upon this Hoth, this barren rock,
My next adventure waits.
It is really quite splendid. Probably would have made the movies better if Lucas’s rather awkward dialogue had been re-written this way. I highly recommend it to anyone who has seen the movie (and who hasn’t?) I haven’t enjoyed a parody of Great Literature this much since reading The Classics Reclassified. I highly recommend it.
I never thought I’d see the Twilight movie. But I never thought I’d read the book either, and I did last year. So here I am, like a boat borne back ceaselessly into lame teenage vampire fiction.
The movie was not as dull as the book, though it was still far from good. I thought that Robert Pattinson, who plays the main vampire, did quite a good job with the role– in fact, the performance he gave was probably better than the role deserved. Everybody else was nondescript. It is a pretty faithful adaptation of a fairly lame story, so it is doomed to be fairly lame itself.
The strangest thing about this movie was that the geography made absolutely no sense. I’m not the sort of person who ordinarily notices this in movies, but it was obvious here. At one point, the heroine goes into a rickety-looking bookstore seemingly perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean and accessible by a narrow alleyway that leads into a small city. Then a paved road suddenly appears from somewhere so the hero can show up in his car and save her from a group of thugs. The layout of the place is impossible for me to understand.
The parking lot at the high school which the main characters attend seems to have no road leading into or out of it. Moreover, the cars in it are parked seemingly at random with no particular regard for lines or direction. Also, the school itself is evidently located directly at the base of a massive and heavily forested mountain range. The only reason for this seems to be so that couples have an easily accessible romantic location for their dates.
There is also a strange scene where the heroine and her father are eating by a window in a restaurant. The light outside looks to be the light of early morning. Maybe it could be the light of evening, but it really looks more like early morning to me. But the father alludes to it being “Friday night” and says something about going to sleep soon. It was really quite weird. Also, the father’s car is parked out side the window for most of the scene (seemingly halfway inside a shrubbery, but that’s really nothing unusual for parking in this movie) but then I swear it disappears in the last shot.
My impression of the movie was that the normal laws and logic of geometry do not apply in the town of Forks where the story is set. Which would make for a much cooler premise than the one that is used in the stories–that is, that a family of immortal, demigod-like beings have chosen to spend eternity attending high school.
The point about ‘Game of Thrones’… is that conscience and fear of judgement are entirely absent from the lives of all, and that this is most evident in the deeds of the most successful characters. Compare Hamlet’s self-torture over whether he can kill Claudius , when Claudius is at his prayers. Or the genuine horror of the English people at the alleged murder of the Princes in the Tower by Richard III.
Two things:
One, Hamlet was a fictional character written in the Renaissance, not the Middle Ages. Thus, his behavior is at best an indication of what Shakespeare thought a Prince would behave like, not what they actually did.
Two: okay, so the English were properly horrified. But I want to point out that Hitchens is undercutting his own point by bringing up the idea that Richard III would do that. Game of Thrones is about the medieval elite and their ruthless power grabs–just exactly like the real-life power grabs of people like Richard III, Henry II, Henry VIII and so on! He complains “conscience and fear of judgement are entirely absent… in the deeds of the most successful characters”, and yet, by his own showing, the most successful people in the actual Middle Ages were the same way! Nice guys, by most accounts, finished last in the Middle Ages.
Remember, I have no wish to defend Game of Thrones. I’ve never seen it, and for all I know it may be the worst and most loathsome thing ever to darken a television screen. I just have issues with Hitchens claiming that “the society it describes is far worse than the Middle Ages”.
(Act II is here. Many thanks to YouTube user John Burrows for posting it.)
As I have mentioned before, I really like Gilbert and Sullivan’s last operetta The Grand Duke. Historically, this is the operetta most G&S enthusiasts like least. And, I suppose, they have a few points in their favor, as in the sometimes very bad rhyming on Gilbert’s part. (e.g. “chooses/shoeses”) Some of the scenes, especially in Act II, do seem like they are badly in need of editing. Also, while he is a good character, the Prince of Monte Carlo in Act II seems to arrive out of nowhere.
But Gilbert’s talent for clever, clear and witty lyrics is not entirely absent, for surely Ernest’s memorable plea
If the light of love’s lingering ember
Has faded in gloom,
You cannot neglect, O remember,
A voice from the tomb!
That stern supernatural diction
Should act as a solemn restriction,
Although by a mere legal fiction
A voice from the tomb!
must rank with Gilbert’s wittiest. And even if it is a groaner, the ingenious lines: “In the period Socratic every dining-room was Attic/(Which suggests an architecture of a topsy-turvy kind)” is probably more amusing than any of the labored puns in H.M.S. Pinafore. Even second-rate Gilbert lyrics are, after all, still very pleasing.
However, I have always felt that Gilbert showed himself off at his cleverest as a writer in Grand Duke, if not as a poet. In fact, the whole premise of the “Statutory Duel” is as good an idea as Gilbert ever had for poking fun at the legal system. If Gilbert’s lyrical talents are a ghost–or rather, “ghoest”–of what they once were, he more than makes up for it with his inventiveness in plotting (Monte Carlan antics aside) and clever dialogue. (If you want to see Gilbert really being lazy, try Utopia, Limited)
As for criticisms that the text is overlong, well, that may be the case. It is possible that Grand Duke is very difficult to perform well, but certainly its story is quite enjoyable to read. Perhaps, that is Gilbert’s major sin here; crafting a story that was, in some ways, not suitable to his medium. As we shall see, however, in many ways Gilbert uses the medium’s conventions to marry form with thematic content in a very ingenious way.
I think it is one of Gilbert’s single best comedic stories; and (contrary to what you may think) a kind of culmination of his works. It is something of an irony that Gilbert and Sullivan, renowned for their “topsy-turvy” whimsicality, should have arguably their topsy-turviest piece ranked as a failure.
One of the major themes of Gilbert’s plays and poems is his annoyance at hypocrisy and artifice. His love of legalistic quibbles is only one manifestation of this, but really it is everywhere. Certainly, a major point in all his collaborations with Sullivan often draw on the idea that “Art is wrong and Nature right”, as Utopia Ltd. put it. But never is artifice and illusion more consistently targeted than in The Grand Duke.
Everything in The Grand Duke is about illusion, from Julia’s play-acting at “loving” Ernest as per contractual obligation, to the “legal death” mandated by the statutory duel, to Ludwig’s faux-Greek court, to the commoners pretending to be Noblemen in the pay of the Prince of Monte Carlo.
In this way, The Grand Duke attacks illusion and hypocrisy in a way no other G&S operetta ever did. From a thematic point of view, it is coherent; though admittedly a different kind of coherence than one might have been expecting from Gilbert. But it marries Gilbert’s dislike of society’s hypocritical conventions with the conventions of theater itself. Having satirized everything else, Gilbert is now mocking the very medium he’s using, often by having characters break the fourth wall, as Gayden Wren thoroughly lists in A Most Ingenious Paradox.
As to the characters, is there really another female role in all of the Gilbert and Sullivan canon as funny as Julia Jellicoe? Ruthlessly ambitious, cynical, calculating and bold character who also serves to lampoon stage convention. I’d argue she’s one of the best female roles Gilbert ever wrote.
When I first heard her Act II song, “So Ends My Dream”, I thought it seemed melodramatic and over-the-top, out of place with circumstances, considering she didn’t even really want to be the Grand Duchess that much. Then I realized that’s the point. Julia is a prima donna in every sense of the word; and so she only knows how to react in a theatrical way. She could actually be a tragic character, someone who doesn’t know how to have real emotions because they are so skilled at faking them. (It’s played for humor, but Julia’s claim that her love for her and Ernest’s hypothetical children will be “a mere pretence” is pretty chilling.)
All the other characters are amusing enough–Ludwig, the amiable everyman, Ernest the theater manager and the miserly Grand Duke Rudolph all have some good songs. And even secondary characters have much to recommend them, as in the notary’s dry wit, or the costumier and his hired “peers” bantering.
The Grand Duke is probably my next favorite of their comic pieces after Ruddigore, in spite of its flaws.
