Update on "How to Train your Dragon".

I DID get a chance to get an answer from Cressida Cowell (writer of the book series) about the possible origin of the conflict between the Vikings and the Dragons, and this is her direct answer:

"I didn’t have one specific conflict in mind – although there are plenty to choose from. Unfortunately the cycle of war and conflict seems to reverberate and repeat itself throughout history.  I was interested in exploring this in the books".

Thank you Cressida.  I hope to catch up with William Davies, Dean DeBlois, or Chris Sanders, if possible.
My kids have already purchased dragon toys, one of Toothless that flaps and gapes, a very realistic looking replica, and another one that is green and horned.   Hooray!  More Asian plastic in our house.

Black Swan - 2010 - Darren Aronofsky directs, Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, and Vincent Cassel star ___________________________________________________

In the 1976 movie Carrie, we saw a girl warped by her home life, controlled completely by an oppressive and mistrusting mother who held a skewed religious belief over Carrie.  Her mother was also paranoid about boys and sexuality, and letting go of her daughter.  In Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan", these are parallel with Nina, and there are other comparisons .  But artistry in the case of Swan is far and above that horror story of yesterday.  Darren has taken suspense and psychological drama to yet another new level in this deeply haunting tale.  And it is accessible and easily understood without pandering to lower tastes, gratuity, or juvenility (although these are all critiques of the film that others have attempted to place on it). 

It is amazing, surprising, alarming, and yet also brutally honest, in the end.  It is about female sexuality, repression, possessiveness, the transference of dreams from one generation to the next, and also about the abusive state of male dominance and sexuality in yet another sphere of public life that is uncontrolled and inaccessible, except of course for the daring filmmaker.  It is also about growing up, and loss of innocence, sadly, at the hands of the social structure and pressure of misplaced, subversive, or sometimes simply diabolical expectations.  Nina eventually becomes the product of what is expected of her.

Carrie was withdrawn in an unhealthy way.  Nina is not exactly like that, but simply oppressed and backwards, needing to get out and become her own person.  She dumps her toys and rejects her mother's brooding protection.  However, we find as the story progresses that a psychosis has already wormed its way into her system, and mother and daughter are more alike than either suspects.

Black Swan is a must see for the psychologist, all men who may be struggling to understand the importance of their role with the female, and serious filmmakers and visual artists.  Women may find this story suffocating, or difficult to take, while also identifying with its sympathy-winning heroine.  It's unlikely that anyone in ballet will love this film, and in fact I've read a few negative comments concerning the ballet work, some from ballet experts and enthusiasts.  But what needs to be clear here is that this film, while placing ballet firmly in the center of the story as it's petri dish, is not about ballet.  The same story could be told about gymnastics, or sports of some kind, or anything that involves talent where a pushy parent corners a child in their world and attempts to create in them what they could not have for themselves.  It is both loving desire, and insipid self-interest, in this case, at a greater expense mother would wish to pay.

I'm going to give a more extended analysis of this film later, but for now, here is how I see it....

Brilliant: 5 stars

How to Train Your Dragon_________________

How to Train Your Dragon

Dreamworks - 2010

Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler and Christopher Mintz-Plasse 
Cressida Crowell, author of the How To Train Your Dragon series of 8 books to date, states this in her interview, unequivocally, “The relationship between Stoick and Hiccup…. is the heart of the book”.  She was glad that Dreamworks “captured that” in their animated creation of the same name, directly adapted from her books.  The film is a huge hit.

The movie, How to Train Your Dragon, is a great and fun story, with depth and pathos, and really very funny.  It moves without dull moments, the animation is top notch 3D, without being a headache to watch.  The visuals are some sort of blend of pure 3D and traditional animation that smoothes the whole thing out and makes it so visually appealing.  As far as the writing, you can’t get a better story.  There is the touching father/son relationship that Cressida talked about, which makes the father look a bit vacillating as he goes through acceptance, rejection, and then acceptance again, according to the whim of the moment.  His world is based on pride of strength.  The hero of the story is Hiccup, of course, because the secret, inside knowledge of the truth is always on the audience’s side, and because the father figure can afford to be wishy washy.  That’s how many of us have experienced parenthood from the child’s perspective, parents that screw up and change their minds, even when we know better.

But what is it we know better of here?  Early on we are privy to another level of knowledge in the story that is the great foundation of conflict, and is the much larger backdrop to the familial struggle.  What is even deeper than the healing and coming together of a father and son?  It is the ingrained, sociopathic reaction and prejudicial treatment of dragons by the Vikings.  Hiccup, with an air of sardonic passive aggressiveness delivers the line himself several times when he says, “We’re Vikings, that’s what we do.”  He is referring of course to age-old habits of social behavior, based on a misconception about the dragons.  In one conflict with his father Stoick, the classic tit-for-tat conversation occurs.  “They’ve killed hundreds of our people!” “And we’ve killed thousands of THEM!”

We find that the dragons are dictated by a much larger force that is driving them to plunder, at the heart of their kingdom, an evil and oppressive force that calls them with a siren signal to come feed it, as old as the mountains themselves maybe, and deeply hidden.   This all seems familiar somehow.  Is it political, or simply personal?  That is a question best left to the screenwriters, or maybe Cressida Crowell herself.  Often archetypes are not explained, like metanarratives they lie underneath like belief itself, driving and pushing, without a word of explanation, and surprising sometimes even to the authors themselves.  So I feel compelled to ask them, William Davies, Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders, and Cressida, if there is a political motivation that might be thinly veiled there, or a social statement.  I can easily assign one myself by asserting that the treatment of the Dragons by the Vikings resembles the WASP treatment of blacks in America, or the conflict in Ireland between Catholic and Protestant.  What I want to ask the authors, however, is if they have a particular take on this conflict in the story, its resolution, or where they might be drawing that from.

If I can get an interview or quotes from them, I’ll be back with more.  In the meantime, knock yourself out on this one, and see it with a kid.  It’s worth it!

5 stars

Wall Street - Money Never Sleeps_______________________________________



Wall Street - Money Never Sleeps
2010
Michael Douglas, Shia LeBeouf, Carey Mulligan

Known as Wall Street, Money Never Sleeps, it should also add, “but some movie patrons probably have”.  There were moments of good acting from the leads, and neat little moments of remembrance for those of us who liked Wall Street 1, but mostly Oliver Stone didn’t have it on this one.  Should have saved us all a lot of time and money and did something else.  The story is there, yes, and the conflict is there to build a good story from, certainly, but the delivery is weak, bad actually. 

If not for the effervescence and attractiveness of our 2 young heroes, Shia LeBeouf and Carey Mulligan, this would have been unwatchable.  The editing was off in timing, too long on scenes that should have been cut, and vice versa.  And the whole special scene-changing, cinema shot, “hey I’m doing retro like Taranteno” thing just didn’t work for this film.  Not to mention that most of it was just unbelievable.

I didn’t buy it when Josh Brolin (not good casting for this part anyway) takes Shia on a man-jousting motorbike ride during the financial crisis to have the whole “mentor” talk scene, and then fires him.  I especially didn’t buy Michael Douglas walking back into the young couple's lives while they’re walking together home and then purchasing back his fatherhood with a $100 million gift, and they KISS of all things.  Uh... no, sorry.  I didn’t buy that our good guy went to the bad guy and actually accepted a job, ever.  There was very little believable about this film.  I especially didn’t like the opening sequence where Shia is on his bike in downtown Manhattan and there’s the split screen thing going on and an attempt at being fast-paced and racy and getting us all pumped like some attempt at teen adrenaline surge.  Bleh.

I didn’t even like the cinematography.  Too much horizontal movement and pixellating.  Bad lighting on some interiors, on and on…..

Ok, this is one movie that's getting only a half star from me, and that half star comes at a great expense.  The only scene I liked was the expensive interior of the huge gala party with all that money floating around.  That was well shot and paced nicely, and got the plot going forward.  That’s it.  So be forewarned, unless you’re just dying to know what happened to Gordon Gecko after he gets out of prison, you’re much better off going to see MegaMind.  What a blast!  Read that review of mine next.

1/2 star barely

Agitatus

Hereafter ____________________________________________________________________

Hereafter
2010 Clint Eastwood directs
Matt Damon, Cecile de France, Bryce Dallas Howard

Motion pictures that attempt to deal with the afterlife on a more formal basis often fail.  Purely spiritual themes just simply do not play well in cinema because they are either preachy and explanatory, cerebral one would say, or they are too unbelievably unearthly and lose themselves in the fiction.  All resemblance to reality is lost.

The one exemption might be The Passion, the more recent telling of Mel Gibson’s highly Catholic and liturgically exacting version of the last hours of the Christ.  That was undoubtably a near perfect film and not likely to be equaled for the subject matter.  All other Christs before his failed in one way or another.

But what of the Hereafter?  There couldn’t be a better director today in Hollywood than Clint Eastwood.  He has come of age with his abilities.  The acting was superbly wrought under his hand, and the cinematography was incredible.  But as much as the team pulled off a great story, it was not a story about the afterlife.  Just as Wings of Desire by Wenders in the 80s was not about angels, so Hereafter manages to really be about the choice of living, and how living in the here and now is very important.

What does the hereafter look like in Clint’s film?  Not much but a shadowy and effervescent white-ish void wherein souls reside in some sort of floating condition, mirky, and also paced apart from one another.  One gets a sense of loneliness there, almost, like drowning in a sea of people all around.

But the theme could not really be more clear here.  Where the theology fails to be at all comprehensible, the humanism does shine through, and a self-interested, self-centered reality blooms.  In fact, regarding the search for the afterlife, there is a sense here that it is not even a desirable endeavor, but rather something not to be sought after, and holding forth potentially damaging information that one should likely shy away from.

The romance in the film is the bulk of the story, and is very well done.  The two main protagonists in the story, and how they meet in the end, is the story.  It is the story of the one seeking, and the one seeking to shed himself of being sought, of jaded experience meeting a virginal heart naively believing.

There could be some minus points in that there are conciliatory body shots of Cecile de France, wonderfully placed no doubt, but not really necessary.  She completely dominates any scene that she is in anyway, so partial nudity is not necessary, although I cannot blame Clint for taking advantage of that with such a completely compelling woman on board.  Something about the camera, men, and beautiful women...hmm.  Those kind of shots are often great at producing a kind of vulnerability in a character that may be a bit cold to us in a business suit, so you could call it character development.  On the other hand, Cecile in a suit…..that's still warm.

There is little I can fault this picture with cinematically, but as far as subsequent meaning, it is vacuous.  If you like Clint Eastwood’s work, as I do, then this is one to be seen for the sake of following a good film maker, and the various story lines in its multi-narrative is compelling and very well done .  But if it’s spiritual answers or a seeking after truth you’re looking for, you’ll find more under a rock.

Agitatus

MegaMind_________________________________________________________________

MegaMind
2010 Will Ferrell, Brad Pitt, Tina Fey
PG

Fantastic animated film!  Very funny.  Constantly funny in fact.  I was laughing so hard at some of the fast and furious humor, that I had to keep interrupting the last laugh with the newest one.  But one thing troubled me.  I was laughing and my kids mostly were not.  I mean there is no way that they were getting the jokes.  They were caught up in the action and the characters, and being kids, all goo-eyed at the huge figures on the screen.  They were taking so much of it seriously.  That’s just kids for you now isn’t it?  They are wonderfully and seriously made.

But there is no way they were going to get the humor of our villain changing into a mock character of Ed Kennedy, lisping away his directives, or the other tie-ins to characters past.  This is expert filmmaking, however.  Everyone knows that us adults are going with our kids to see these movies.  Like Toy Story 3, there was so much for us adults to be delighted with, mixed masterfully with the action and adventure.  It’s a no-lose scenario.

What I found most delightful about MegaMind was the consistent playing against type and the story twists that also went against convention, making it a truly amazing and original story that was fun to follow, and almost always unexpected.  This fairly short feature film is filled constantly with non-stop action and twists aplenty.  A bonus for us all is the light ending that is uplifting and fun.  Good clean fun.

5 stars

Agitatus

Dave Eggers: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Simon and Schuster, 2000

This magnanimous autobiographical novel represents a summation of the particular reflections and complaints of the 90s.  It is reflexive, self-enclosed, on the verge of stream-of-consciousness.  It is a story of deeply personal inner suffering and angst, something that 20-somethings of this particular time period can relate to.

It is a hallmark of this generation to hold nothing sacred, and have no regrets about tearing everything down, not anticipating that anything will need to be built up again.  There is no moral center, and without that, all friends and family are fare game, even Toth, his younger brother, the closest to him.  The center of the story is that which revolves around the illness and death of both parents, evolves into the aftermath of that period and into his life with his younger brother whom he must then care for, the relationship with the now far-flung sisters, and eventually the career life.  As auto-b’s go, it’s actually very acute writing, incisive to the extreme (you’re heard the phase “too much information”).  Eggers follows Kerouac in many ways with his breathless monologue and expose, exploiting the reality-show mentality in text, and slicing off a piece of American cultural pie in the process.  It’s good writing, some of the best I’ve ever read.  But it is ultimately unsatisfying, maybe disappointing is the word.  While at all points in the book there are brilliant expose’s, flurries of wisdom and insight, great moments of comedy, so much so that I choked once, there is also rage, and senseless abandon, a throwing of rocks at an imaginary police line of authority composed of the circumstances which brought so much pain into his life.

Bitter, driven by anger and fear, especially fear of death and denial of meaningful existence, Eggers takes out his confusion of purpose in words, and in a last desperate plea is asking us to kill him.  It is at last a juvenile rampage about the author that refuses to grow up and get past his past.  A picture of the 90s generation of teens and early 20 somethings that are sometimes called generation X, this portrait is at least accurate in that it reflects the angst of having no future, no heroes, no worthwhile past, an empty culture, and is swamped in media-perpetuated and flaming bouts of transpositional blame and cynicism. 

Eggers hits notes of truth, at the expense of mature sensitivity and sensibility, preferring to vent his personal anxiety on the reader, while, with great bits of humor persuade us he is right in hating himself.  We hate ourselves by the end of this tiring, albeit personal, soul-winning, almost sentimental, rant (he has the writing skill not to give way to sentimentality, but rather takes those moments that are beginning to list that way and turn them into the comedic).  The look in the mirror, or in this case Lake, brings us to the end of a man, ergo the end of ourselves, and we are wondering why someone does not just pull the trigger instead of allowing us to go on into any kind of painful ending, preferring instead to be able to toss frisbees forever in the sun. 

Eggers’ clever and often profound insights into the human nature and analysis of thoughts on death and dying, and his surgical dissection of the human condition under stress, ,would lead one to believe that he is a social scientist at heart, and definitely not a conformist.  However, one is inevitably led down the same empty path as the author, proving that he is a persuasive authoritative voice, and also at a loss as to what to do next.  If you’re into heavy angst, guilt, and giving voice to your own inner frustration with living, this is a book for you.




Agitatus.

INCEPTION was incredible.  Worlds within worlds of dreamscapes.  Spielberg had it right when he said that science fiction was his favorite genre, because in SciFi, basically, "you can do anything you want".  It's the perfect medium for playing around, and housing a great story.

Underneath Inception is a great story.  But my tendency after so much Hollywood viewing is to re-name a film like this Deception.  "To plant an idea in someone's head is worse than any Virus, because once planted it can never really be eradicated completely."  How true this is, and so can be for this story, and so many others like it.  What is that idea?  It is simply put, that living here and now is all that is primary and important, and ideas of any other kind of reality lead to delusion, superstition, self-deprecation, and denial.

And what idea was it that was planted so deeply as to cause destruction here?  The idea that the life we're living isn't real and that we are only experiencing a reflection of reality, and that something greater lies beyond.  So why stay?  Why hold on?  Why live?  Why not just move on and get to that other side?

This sounds so familiar.  I harken back to another great pair of films that is really only one film by Wim Wenders called Wings of Desire.  There was the original in 1987 by Wenders in Germany, in gorgeous black and white, typical German self-reflective noir and angst, and the later version with Nicolas Cage as the angel in 1998, full living color and characters, the girl played by the stunning Meg Ryan. In this story the angel gives up his precious eternal armor to live a real life, replete with feelings, senses such as touch, and also sadly, death.  This picture of the great beyond is one of illusion as well.  The eternal state is seen as not really being alive, or having genuine feelings, having a reality that is rock-bottom reality, the real thing.  The cold and emotionless eternal void of the afterlife, or the stuff of eternal dreams, in Inception called limbo,"the void" of Star Trek, the bottom in "What Dreams May Come", and in classical literature from Dante, Purgatorio.

DeCaprio's character states that he could not live that way.  In returning he and his wife to reality, they awaken what appears to be only hours later than they originally went to sleep, all the while experiencing a full life together in the dream.  They had constructed their own dream several layers down, and came back, for her only to find that she preferred the dream, and wanted to stay there forever with him, real or not.  What is clear is that his wife did not accept or welcome the present reality and wanted to escape from it at all costs, even denying that it was reality at all.

In the end, the reality of the moment, the today we can call today, calls us back.  And so as in Wenders' existential truth, reality is beautiful.  The smiling faces of DeCaprio's children are perfect and unimpeachable at the end of Inception, and his spinning top, called the "totem", is a reality check that assures him that this is all not a dream.  What could be more perfect to describe the all-important NOW than that of a spinning top with no definitive sides?  At the end, it is still spinning, and in cinema space, that means it still is now, in the minds of the viewers.  The last image we see in any film can be one of the most powerful images of all, and much like a dream, the part that we remember the most.  Don't you mostly remember the last part of your dream, when you awaken, as you must when you walk out into the air outside the theater?

I need to get blogging again!  It's been a long while, and I have NO viewers any more!  So, when I look at the exciting lineup of Film coming up this season, I know I'm going to have something to write about.  BUT....I need to change my format a bit.  Usually I simply give my highly "opinionated" view of the films I've seen and leave it at that.  As far as this season's lineup I'm going to approach them more as "subject" reviews, and dive into the interconnections and background noise that go into the making of great films, and hopefully offer some insight that other reviewers might miss. 

Up and coming commentary will be on the following:

Devil
BlackSwan
Tron
Hereafter
Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I'll be offering up commentary on Inception here pretty soon, if I can just get OUT and go SEE it!  Cannot believe I haven't seen that yet.

More to come.

Agitatus