Kurt Thomas was on the U.S. Olympic team, and he won a lot of medals, but unfortunately none were at the Olympics.² He also invented a sweet move called The Thomas Flair which many break dancers use today. You’d think that after all he accomplished in his gymnastic career he’d take some time off to rest on his laurels. Not Kurt Thomas, after conquering gymnastics he set his sights on film and totally changed the world.

Wow, that trailer is awesome! The “Game” that they’re talking about is played in a tiny country called Parmistan. No one has won it in 900 years. If you win, you get one request, if you lose, well… you get the idea. The reason the U.S. Government has sent gymnast Kurt Thomas to compete is because somehow Parmistan got a hold of a satellite station which can monitor every satellite and it has something to do with the Star Wars program. I think terrorists are involved too and they could destroy nations somehow with the station. Someone mentioned nuclear threat too. So whoever wins this game gets to request control of the station. Don’t worry though, they only mention the plot in the beginning of the movie. After that you just have to enjoy Kurt Thomas fighting people with gymnastics.

One of the best scenes is where he has to go through the village of the damned and deal with all of Parmistan’s criminally insane. For some reason there’s an actual pommel horse which he then proceeds to pommel the whole village with. I think they had to do a lot of scenes in one take because there’s one part early on in the game where they’re leaving the city on horses and a towns person totally gets plowed over by a horse on accident.

All in all I’d say this movie is a winner. It’s based on a novel from 1957 too so that gives it a little bit more class. It’s so completely inept that it’s amazing it even got finished. Here’s two more weird scenes if you need more convincing:

1. ‘Killer’ added for emphasis.

2. He probably would’ve won a few if the U.S. didn’t boycott the 1980 games.

So I finally saw The Dark Knight on the IMAX yesterday. I was blown away by the IMAX sequences. I forgot just how good 70mm film can look. This isn’t necessarily a review of the new Batman movie, you’ve probably already seen it anyways. If you haven’t seen it yet because you’ve been in the hospital or something then you’d better stop reading because I’m going to unleash some spoilers.

After I saw The Dark Knight the first time I tried to convince myself that it was the best comic themed movie ever. Batman is my favorite comic book character, and I would argue the most important comic character in history. Unfortunately this new movie must be more closely scrutinized than the rest for that reason.

I was never a Make Mine Marvel kid. I read a little Spiderman and X-Men, but Batman was where it was at. And especially Neal Adam’s Batman. Batman, along with Bo Jackson, and Mr. T were my role models. Batman had the detective skills of Sherlock Holmes, the gadgets of James Bond, the fighting abilities of Bruce Lee plus 100 ninjas, and most importantly an insane thirst for justice. Those are all things that are humanly possible if one works hard enough (except if you’re not blessed with being a billionaire I guess the gadget thing is a problem). Batman wasn’t an alien, he was never in a laboratory experiment gone awry, he wasn’t born with any super powers, he was basically a regular dude.

I loved The Dark Knight. No doubt this is the best film in the Batman series, except for maybe this one. Heath Ledger totally ruled as a Joker I’ve never seen before. The closest I can think of is the Joker from The Killing Joke, which I think the new movie borrowed heavily from since in that story the Joker tries to prove that he can make a certain someone insane from just one bad day. The Harvey Dent/Two Face stuff is great too. I hate to say it, but I think that the movie would’ve been better without Batman. His raspy voice really bothers me. Really, I think I’ll save myself some time and send you to this insightful review by Devin at Chud.com. While I don’t agree completely with him, he does bring up a lot of really good points. One of the biggest problems I had with it was the Joker. Although he steals the show, he’s also very poorly written. How can someone that claims he never has a plan seemingly pull off all these really big schemes with less that a day to work it all out?¹

And what’s with this whole thing with the Government helping Batman to spy on Gotham’s people to catch the Joker? It reminds me of Kingdom Come and Frank Miller’s Batman. It’s these half baked plot points that really bring the movie down for me. You could make a great Batman movie where he turns Gotham into a police state like in Kingdom Come. Instead they just glossed over the whole thing and didn’t even take a firm stance on whether or not it’s a good idea to spy on the population in order to take down evil.

I’ve decided for myself that as far as movies go, Iron Man is the clear winner for best all round comic book movie ever. At least until we get to see Watchmen.

1. In a recent interview with Ian Punnet on Coast to Coast AM, Neal Adams explained that the Joker is an expert planner BECAUSE he’s so psychotic, and while I agree with him on that since he knows the Joker better than most people, I didn’t see anything in the movie to suggest that was the case.

I’m not going to say what the movie is about. It’s a Pixar film, that should be enough. Fred Willard is in it too, he says my favorite line of the movie, “Space is the final FUNtier!”. 5 stars.

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Aimee said I have to say something more about the movie.

I’m a big fan of Pixar, they consistently do it right. They get wonderful talent to make their films and then they do something that no other studio has dared to ever do; they keep them around and nurture their talents so they can make more imaginative films. Brilliant! This crazy plan makes the worst Pixar movie¹ better than the best piece of garbage coming out of any other studio. I’m not just talking about CGI kids fare, I’m talking about EVERYTHING coming out today. On average² for every Toy Story, we get 100 You Don’t Mess With The Zohans. Why would anyone want to have their intelligence insulted by watching that junk is beyond me. I know, some people don’t care. They just want to watch something that they don’t have to think about. I like watching dumb movies too, but I still get more out of repeated viewings of R.O.T.O.R. than I would if I had watched the newest rehashed Dane Cook “comedy”. Gosh, I didn’t think I’d get so angry writing about Wall-E.

Ok, so I know it’s not for everyone, but Idiocracy³ is a great companion piece to Wall-E. I did a good job of avoiding the advertisements of Wall-E so I didn’t really know what it was about. And I’m not going to ruin one bit of it for you. The animation is the best ever, the sound design is just superb, and the storytelling is top-notch. Storytelling, that’s what it’s all about. If you can’t even do that then your movie is going to be terrible. I don’t really care what the story is, the art of telling a story well is enough for me.

1. I say it’s Monsters Inc. But I’ll probably change my mind if I had a Pixar marathon. Which sounds like a great way to spend my weekend.

2. I just did the math in my head, it’s correct.

3. Idiocracy definitely has it’s problems, but at least it exists.

Basically, postcolonial theory looks at racial and cultural bias towards a conquering element or against a dominated element in a text. I started thinking about Jungle Book in these terms originally because of Rudyard Kipling’s involvement with India as a British colony, and Disney’s tendency to say horrible things in the undertones of their movies. Also, I quite like Jungle Book, and I was just curious to see what I found in it that six-year-old me did not. Before I go into the postcolonial side of things, I would like to note how unashamedly horrible and hilarious the little girl’s song at the end of the film is. I remember hating it when I was a kid, I thought because it was slow instead of the jazz/beat inspired music of the rest of the film, but I think my subconscious was also reacting to the words: “When I’m grown/ I will have a handsome husband/ And a daughter of my own/ And I’ll send her to fetch the water/ I’ll be cooking in the home.” I just thought I’d share that because it’s ridiculous to have a whole song about, even if it was the state of Indian women at some unknown time in animated history.

Though I started the film intending to focus on the story, what jumped out to me instead were the choices in characterization and voicing that Disney made for the different animals. Almost all of the animals are voiced by British actors, with varying degrees of “Britishness” to their accents. The story is set in India, so this is initially bizarre considering that the filmmakers decided not to use standard American English (as they did in Mulan, which is set in China). Even if they were set on depicting character by accents, they did not use an Indian English accent, which would seem most appropriate for most of the characters. This aids in seeing some themes in the movie, as well as comments on the choice of the filmmakers to cast it this way.

The story seems to be centered on the idea that the Tiger’s opinion of how to treat Mowgli differs from the rest of the Jungle’s, but because he is the tiger, they have to give up their beliefs in favor of his position. They appear to be depicting a system of oppression where a minority’s (the tiger) opinion on the world causes everyone else to stop what they’re doing and deal with it or face consequences. Shere Kahn, of course, gets what is coming to him (delivered by an American bear, I might point out), and leaves the Jungle apparently forever (the vultures say they’ll never have to deal with him again). Ultimately it is Mowgli, a sort of symbol of the oppression of the jungle, who gets rid of him, with the help of the American bear and the British-expatriate ¹panther.

There is much to be said for the symbolism in the story itself, a lot of which I actually had to go ahead and write to get out of my system before I got to this. But though the story seems to paint a picture in support of freedom from imperial oppression, the lack of nationality and representation of Indians when the story clearly has reason to include them indicates a problem either with the casting directors or the prospective audience of the film. There are no Indian accents, even in Mowgli or the girl, who both have American accents for no apparent reason other than to create kinship between them and the American children in the audience. While the film seems to depict with it’s story the successful liberation of an oppressed jungle, it seems that the only way to depict this was to attribute success to Americans, and to a lesser degree, other white British people. The only African American voices are the monkeys, another set of bad guys, and not bad in the sense of Shere Kahn, who has different beliefs and is a sort of political extremist, but bad in the sense of amoral, rough kidnappers with intent to exploit and do away with the man cub. Further, the monkeys speak jive or use the diction of swingers (no pun intended) instead of hardworking, common dialects, alienating them as some kind of dangerous, edgy fringe group or counter-cultural movement. There is clearly a preference for the white outlook, specifically the white western-European value system. Perhaps the insinuation is that the native people could not achieve success on their own, or that if they did, they would be following American ideals of independence and freedom, and thus be more like white members of civilized society than natives who cannot speak proper English.

Another possibility is the prospect of an American audience who would not relate to the “foreign” Indian accent. This is different from the British accent, which is common in mainstream American film and television and even carries an insinuation of higher intelligence and refinement. It does seem probable that if there were Indian accents in the film, the audience would notice them as different, where the only British accent that is distinct is Shere Kahn’s, and as a child I remember perceiving it not as a British, but as an intelligent and powerful accent. So the problem could be with the audience’s perception of an “other,” where the other is not a fellow western hemisphere Caucasian, but a brown easterner, or even “Why does he talk that funny way? What kind of accent is that?” I imagine it would have been my first encounter with an Indian accent, and probably my last until I was allowed to watch The Simpsons.

Based on the themes of the plot, Jungle Book seems to be an example of an author intending to convey one idea, which is undermined by the author’s culture and experience. What is interesting in this case is the idea that the undermining subtext could be caused by marketing, which I would guess happens very often in the consumerism-art relationship. It also shows the applicability of these theories to all art and creation, including children-oriented film, books, and art. A bit scary, but being a child in a world that creates all these subtexts in the first place is also scary.

1. I call Bagheera the expatriate instead of the oppressor like Shere Kahn because, though he is similar in species to Shere Kahn and though his accent is a British one, it is not as pronounced as the tiger’s and he has sympathy for the opinion of the wolves that Mowgli is not dangerous. He is, however, the strongest supporter of Mowgli going back to the man village, the closest opinion to that of Shere Kahn, which seems to link him to British citizens sympathizing with the native “them,” in this case, Indians or wolves.

]]> http://www.readtheloop.com/2008/06/jungle-book-theory/feed/ http://www.readtheloop.com/2008/06/the-incredible-hulk/ http://www.readtheloop.com/2008/06/the-incredible-hulk/#comments Fri, 13 Jun 2008 13:27:28 +0000 Jesse Wayne http://www.readtheloop.com/?p=227

I don’t have much time, and I don’t think much needs to be said about the new Hulk movie. So I’m going to keep this one short.

If you loved the TV show like I did growing up in the 80’s then you’ll love the new movie.  It has an intro very similar to the show intro, and it even uses the same Bruce-Banner-walking-away-music at one point. I tried to find a video of the closing credits to the tv show with the song, but instead this came up.

One of the best things about Marvel having their own film studio now is that they can finally have crossovers without any legal problems. How much better would Daredevil had been if Spiderman showed up? Probably not much better, but it would’ve been neat. Starting In the beginning- and throughout the whole movie- we get a lot of crossover from the recent Iron Man movie. Very, very cool. Oh, and Martin Starr from Freaks & Geeks is in it for a second too!

So Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk are both hits in my mind (Iron Man was better though). My concern is for the future of Marvel Studios. Are they going to do it right and copy Pixar’s business model, or are they going to get greedy like everyone else and stop getting great talent to make great films? People will go see Iron Man 2 no matter what now. Marvel can get a terrible director and writer to make it for a lot cheaper than bringing back Jon Favreau to make another brilliant piece of film that will stand the test of time. We’ve seen it time and time again.

The Hulk was a blast. I had a great time. Everything is better this time around. Don’t waste your time with The Happening. I hear from trusted sources that it’s just simply terrible. Hulk Smash The Happening!

I would like to also point you to The Magician, it was a show that Bill Bixby did before he did The Incredible Hulk TV show. He was a magician that solved crimes or something. He really was a magician in real life too. I just really like magic and the Hulk. God Bless you Bill Bixby.

Back in 1981, when Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, three 12 year old kids in Mississippi saw it multiple times and became a little obsessed with it. They decided that it would be a great idea to remake the movie shot for shot during the summer. 7 summers later it was finally finished.

I had first heard about this remake 5 years ago. It was so fantastic it just couldn’t be true. I looked around for bootlegs, but it turned out to be as hard as finding a copy of “The Day the Clown Cried“. Who has that kind of patience? Who has the resources to create something so epic? It was a huge Hollywood production, how could 3 kids possibly do such a thing? A few nights ago I saw the proof. It is very real, and they totally pulled it off, and it was one of the best movie experiences I’ve ever had in my life.

You really should watch the trailer that The Belcourt put together for this screening. It looks awful, the sound is unintelligible half the time, and pretty much everything about the movie is bad. But there is so much magic in it. What these kids accomplished is nothing short of spectacular. It really reminded me why I love movies.

Obviously there are some things they couldn’t film, but they’re few and far between. For instance, they decided not to film the scene where the muscled dude gets destroyed by the airplane propeller because they thought it would “look fake” when they had to blow up a model airplane at the end of the scene. I don’t want to spoil any more of it for you because half the fun is trying to figure out how they’re going to pull off the next big scene.

The director Eric Zala was in attendance and did a Q&A session after the screening. He told us that Daniel Clowes (writer of Ghost World) is currently writing a movie about their experience during the 7 years. He told a lot of great stories about the filming. But perhaps the best story was about Steven Spielberg writing a letter to him after seeing a bootleg of it and telling him that not only did he love it, but it actually inspired him. That would be like if I was a teenager and somehow got to compete against Bo Jackson in the many things he knows and he gave me a high five after I kicked his butt. That was a really bad analogy. Man I really love Bo Jackson.

The movie can only be screened at non-profit venues. So if you want to see it then you’ll have to bug your local non-profit art house theater or college and demand that they show it. We’re lucky that George Lucas hasn’t pitched a fit and sued the pants off the filmmakers. There have been rumors since 2004 that it will one day be released in an Indy box set or something. They were filming a lot at the event, it looked like they were filming for a documentary perhaps. So maybe it will get released, but don’t hold your breath. Also it’s better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

This has been the first time in years that I’ve seen a movie with nothing but the poster to go on, I never even saw the trailer. It’s really hard to see a movie these days without being tainted by any sort of baggage. I saw the poster. It didn’t make any sense, but I’m a fan of both David Fincher and Spike Jonze. Tarsem’s only other film was the completely insane The Cell¹, a film I’ve been meaning to revisit for the past few years, but I have yet to make the time.

Tarsem is known for being really artsy. He often recreates or pays homage to paintings in his work, he’ll spend 17 years working on a film (which he did for The Fall), and he doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but it’s always really pretty anyway.

The Fall is about a crippled stunt man (Lee Pace) in a hospital in 1920’s LA. A cute little girl that barely knows English (Cantinca Untaru, who really didn’t know any English) befriends him. He starts telling her an epic story during her daily visits to him, but he’s really just using her so she’ll do stuff for him. It’s very much like The Princess Bride² in that the story frequently gets interrupted by the storyteller or listener. In fact, the interactions between the stunt man and the girl were filmed first and all improvised. The chemistry they have is the best I’ve seen in a long time. They actually dictated a lot of what happens in the story by their improvisation.

The story world scenes are spectacular. They really are epic. Tarsem shot this movie all over the world. Really. He’d been scouting locations for nearly two decades³. There’s so many amazing places in the world I didn’t know about, but thankfully Tarsem exposes many of them in this film. Palaces, deserts, tiny islands in the middle of the sea (and I do mean tiny, like only 20 wide), ancient ruins and an M.C. Escher drawing come to life.

I’ll admit it, I don’t get the movie⁴, but it still haunts me nearly a week after seeing it. It doesn’t make any sense to me. You’ve got an elephant swimming, Charles Darwin wearing a pimp coat, birds coming out of a dude’s mouth, evil black guards that sound like snarling dogs and this amazing scene. I love really great slow motion and this film really gets it right. The whole intro to the film is a long slow motion black and white sequence that’s just brilliant.

The film is rated R, but really should have been rated PG-13. There is nothing in here that warrants an R rating, I guess it might be because of the violence, but it’s no worse than Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. There is a scene that comes to mind that could be found offensive in this post 911 world, and I’m assuming that’s why they got the R rating. If it is the reason, then I’m offended.

If you like breathtaking photography then you’ll enjoy the movie no matter how weird it gets. If you like knowing what’s going on then buy a ticket to The Fall and sneak in to What Happens in Vegas.

1. I understand that The Cell was pretty much only made because The Matrix was such a hit and the studio heads finally “understood” what Tarsem was trying to do.

2. Turns out The Fall is actually a remake of an old Bulgarian movie called “Yo Ho Ho“, but who’s ever seen or even heard of that movie?

3. He was just waiting for the right little girl to come along, and when she did he knew he had to make it right away because little girls grow up so fast.

4. I think it’s a tribute to the pioneers of stunt work in the early silent films. Seriously.

I was so excited to finally see this movie.  I’ve heard so many great things about it. I really dig Hammer and Tongs as filmmakers, plus it’s about the son of Rambo(w). I must say the wait was definitely worth it.

Son of Rambow takes place in the 80’s in England, but unlike movies like The Wedding Singer it doesn’t bombard you with 80’s nostalgia (except for one amazing over the top dance party scene).  Will Proudfoot is a young boy with a healthy imagination.  He also belongs to a highly religious family (they’re Quakers or something, I never did catch what religion they were).  At school he has to leave the classroom whenever they watch a documentary because he’s not allowed to watch TV.  The school troublemaker, Lee Carter, befriends him and tricks him in to being a stunt man in a movie he’s shooting.   There’s also a French exchange student that has got to be the coolest kid in world.

Will accidentally watches a bootleg of First Blood¹, the first movie he’s ever seen. It has the same effect as giving a six pack of Mountain Dew laced with LSD to a 6 year-old.  He goes completely bonkers.  He becomes obsessed with making the movie.  What happens next is nothing short of brilliant.

This film is a total 80’s PG family movie². It can stand up next to The Goonies, Monster Squad, and The Sandlot- all movies that capture the spirit, imagination, and excitement of being a kid. I don’t want to ruin any more of the movie for you, this is something you need to see with as little preconceived notions as possible.  Just go in there with an open mind and let it get blown.

Real quick- you should really check out Hammer and Tongs other videos right now.

1. The writer/director Garth Jennings says that this was the first R rated movie he ever saw as well.

2. The Goonies was rated PG even though the language was a bit hard, PG-13 had just been invented a year earlier and was still being defined. Just like The Goonies it features kids talking like kids.

Indy is finally back after nearly two decades. Everyone wants to know: “Is it going to good? Is he too old? Is it really about aliens?” Well… Mostly, no, and yes.

Who doesn’t like Indiana Jones? I even like The Last Crusade. I don’t care what anyone says, when you mix Nazis and early Christian legends you’ve got gold my friend. That’s one of the things I’ve always loved about Indiana Jones, they always based their stories in real history, and the new movie probably packs more history in to it than all the others combined.

So the Nazis are dead, WWII is over, the red scare is in full effect, and Indy is back teaching again. The Commies are after some crystal skull that will grant ultimate power, so Indy gets to save the world again. Nothing new, really. All the things that made the previous movies great are here in full effect. Some one has to put their hand in a dark creepy hole to pull a rope that opens a secret door, there are tons of booby traps, a tribe of angry natives, insane action sequences, Indy’s fear of snakes, Indy fighting with his love while they’re both being held at gun point, more insane action sequences, more historical relics than you can shake a stick at, big bugs, surviving falls from great heights, and even more insane action sequences.

A staple of all Indy movies is the pre-credits action piece. This one is no different, but it was probably the worst one, luckily the action gets much more insane as the film goes on. It takes place in the warehouse that’s at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Keep an eye out for the ark because it makes a cameo. In my mind this is the worst Indy movie there has ever been, but that’s not such a bad thing, because it’s still actually pretty decent. The corniness factor has been upped by a notch or two, George Lucas made them throw in some useless CGI prairie dogs, and there’s a little bit of magic missing that made the previous entries so great. I don’t know what it was, but it just didn’t FEEL like a complete Indy movie.

They’ve been working on this movie for at least 15 years now. The deal was that they wouldn’t do it unless Harrison Ford, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas all agreed on a script. Harrison Ford was easy to please, he just wanted to work again, and Spielberg is a great filmmaker that knows a good story, but Lucas, oh man does that guy suck. Back in 2004 or so Frank Darabont (writer/director of The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist) worked for a whole year on a script. He had been a writer on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles so he knew what he was doing. Spielberg loved it, Lucas hated it. Spielberg couldn’t exactly do the movie without Lucas, so they did even more rewrites. Lucas has proven time and time again that he doesn’t know “good” when it comes to movies. He even says that The Empire Strikes Back is the worst Star Wars movie! He’s been responsible for some amazing advances in CGI and audio, but he should stay out of the creative process. I guess I just really wish I could’ve seen Darabont’s version instead of this one. And I really loathe George Lucas.

Go see it, you’ll have fun, but not too much. Then go see Iron Man again.