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Reviews
Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001)
Decent film, questionable teaching
John A. Davis et al.'s JIMMY NEUTRON: BOY GENIUS is a well-done film that older viewers may find funnier than kids do: There are a number of nice little sight gags the kids will miss. What bothers me is that kids will see the film on their own and not discuss it with elders, for the film has a strong "MORAL" (like the moral of a fable), a debatable one that they should start debating.
The film teaches children that, with cops the only exception, strangers are not to be talked to-not even intergalactic strangers trying to make First Contact. Or, especially not strangers who are truly alien, since aliens will kidnap your parents, possess them, and try to eat them. Such a message may make some kids safer, but it's dangerous for community: community is based on trust, and for any community beyond a very small village, that means trusting strangers.
Older kids might follow JIMMY NEUTRON with renting TERMINATOR II, for the suggestion that even cops can be a threat-and older kids and younger should be talked with about the necessity for both caution and trust, in dealing with cops and other strangers. Younger children should watch E.T.: THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL. There is an SF tradition, most famously shown in THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951), that if aliens did arrive from space, some American would try to shoot them. Americans aren't more xenophobic than most people, just better armed than most people. "Don't talk to strangers" is one lesson kids must learn. But the Jewish morning prayers rank "Welcome the stranger" as an obligation right up there with "Honor father and mother," and there's a whole lot to be said for welcoming strangers, too. JIMMY NEUTRON is a good place to start discussing with kids such conflicts.
O (2001)
The Story in _O_ as Anti-Kid Propaganda
OTHELLO and _O_: CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Kid-Bashing, and the Generational Struggle
GENERATIONAL WAR CONTEXT In _The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents_ (1996), Mike A. Males cites the film KIDS (1995) as a cinematic embodiment of the generational war of US adults against teens. One could cite also CRUEL INTENTIONS: in _Dangerous Liaisons_, the horrible people are aging grownups; retelling the story with teens suggests that contemporary US teens can be-or are-as nasty as corrupt French aristocrats of the bad old days just before the French Revolution. I've suggested and am looking for a student or two to do a literature search and write up for publication the thesis that Antony Burgess's full, 21-chapter _A Clockwork Orange_ is a kid-bashing book in its concluding, non-sequitur assertion that ultraviolence and such = just a stage boys go through and outgrow. (As Males notes, guys don't outgrow violence so much as take it indoors; in any event, the adults in the first 20 chapters of _Orange_ have not aged out of ultra-nastiness.)
OTHELLO VS. _O_ In Shakespeare's _Othello_, Othello is significantly older than Desdemona, and this is one of the reasons he concludes that she is cheating on him. In America of the 1980s and 1990s, one popular idea had oversexed teenage boys knocking up promiscuous teenage girls for an epidemic of teen pregnancy. That was not the reality. In terms of the statistics Males presents, at least half of the "raging hormones" involved in teenage pregnancy belonged to men in their 20's and older. A realistic, modernized _Othello_ would have an 18-year old Desdemona hooking up with an "Other" man who was Black, important, noble, and at least in his late 20s (maybe a younger, darker, Collin-Powell figure).
_O_ AND THE GENERATIONAL BATTLE Setting _O_ in a prep-school/high school is additional evidence for what at least two over-30 film producers have noted as the dominance of relative youngsters as the consumers and makers of recent movies. That far it is a legitimate example of Kid Power. _O_ is also an esthetically respectable look at kids both good and pathological, well-written and directed, and very well acted by its young stars. At the same time, _O_ functions in its cultural context as anti-kid propaganda. If you know _Othello_ well, _O_ can say, truthfully, "Kids can be as messed up as grownups." Most film-goers hardly know _Othello_ at all, and part of the message of _O_ for them will be that US kids are screwed up: drug-abusing punks, with some psychos loose among the boys, and deceiving victims among the girls. In Odin James in _O_ do we have "the noble Moor whom" the "full Senate" of the United States could "Call all in all sufficient?" No, we don't. Nor in Desi Brable do we have the poetic force and ideological significance of Desdemona's perfect love. For most viewers, _O_ is another example of messed-up kids: one more fictional justification for US adults' hostility toward US kids.
U-571 (2000)
Portrait of the artist as a young Yank submariner
If you want history, get a decent book on Enigma, Ultra, and submarine warfare during World War II. If you want to see a great World War II submarine movie, rent DAS BOOT; if you want another Coming of Age During WWII movie--with death replacing sex--you can do worse than U-571.
The "thesis," or, you should pardon the expression, "surface" level of U-571 is a gung-ho propaganda flick (and if you're under 30, and don't know WWII US propaganda, and might be surprised by the-kid-from-_______-who-is-too-young-to-die actually dying, what follows might include a SPOILER). Matthew McConaughey's Lt. Andrew Tyler must learn that it's not enough to be willing to die for his men; it's not enough for him to be willing to kill for his men; it's not even enough to allow his commanding officer (Bill Paxton's Lt. Commander Mike Dahlgren) to sink to a watery grave--he didn't his skipper much anyway; no, a real naval CO must be willing to send to their deaths men he loves like kid brothers, men who love and respect him like an older brother. If the mission or the boat or the Navy requires it, you send your sailors to their deaths.
Okay, but "Semper Fi, do or die! Gung-ho, gung-ho, gung-ho!" is US Marine Corps jive, not Navy, and there's a (sorry!) deeper level, if you want to see it, with a more subversive antithesis.
Lt. Tyler learns that a submarine in wartime is not run democratically. He learns to take command and act as if he knows all. He learns that to achieve a crucial mission in a crucial war, he has to use the love and respect of one of his young sailors to get a job done, one where the sailor does "do _and_ die" (to quote Lord Tennyson correctly).
Lt. Tyler learns the art of war and enters military manhood, doing what must be done in a Just Cause.
Still, these Yanks at sea are in a U-boat, a German sub, dressed in German uniforms. In fighting for that Just Cause, they take on the appearance of their enemies and two crucial doctrines of their enemies: that democracy is dispensable when really serious issues are at stake and that the individual may and should be sacrificed--killed off--if necessary for the greater good.
According to the movie (SPOILER COMING), Tom Guiry's nice young Trigger is the kid too young to die who bloody-well _will_ die to save das Boot--sorry, the Boat--and do much to win the war for the Allies. Where U-571 surpasses your average propaganda piece is that it subtly but surprisingly strongly suggests that we count the costs of this crucial victory. To defeat our enemies, we may become uncomfortably like our enemies.
American Psycho (2000)
Bale's Patrick Bateman: A villain for our time
I assume I'm not original in this (but I comment on Shakespeare, so I couldn't be too hung up on originality)--but I'd like to nominate Christian Bale, in his American Psycho incarnation for Iago for the first great early 21st-century production of William Shakespeare's OTHELLO. Bale's Patrick Bateman's got the youth--Iago is 28--he's got the looks (with some adjustments), and, most important, he's got the attitude.
OK, you gotta punch him around a bit, cut his hair, and have him lose about 8 years of schooling, but he looks about 28 and obviously can do just about any English-language accent you ask him to. (Our American Psycho is played by a Brit.) And he can do a villain for our time. The Beatles are dated, I think, and it's no longer Oswald from KING LEAR and "I Am the Walrus" for Our Devil. It's Patrick Bateman, at least as Bale plays him: very darkly comically, the psycho-pathology behind and underlying the US of A during the triumphal decades of American capital. A Bale/Bateman Iago might work to destroy those around him not so much because they reveal the ugliness of his life but because they _are_ in ways he just is not.
Bicentennial Man (1999)
Social Fiction Minus Theme Yields Boredom
THE BICENTENNIAL MAN comes from Isaac Asimov's US Bicentennial story "The Bicentennial Man" (1976, naturally), and Asimov's and Robert Silverberg's 1992 expansion _The Positronic Man_. "Bicentennial Man" was a political allegory about race and slavery and defining "human"--it was maybe what Asimov called a "social science fiction story," definitely a story qualifying as Asimov's "social fiction."
The story was pretty bad as an allegory, featuring a robot, Andrew, with what's been called "a Pinocchio Complex" or "Spam" ("metal on the outside, meat on the inside"). More relevantly for the film, like THE WIZARD OF OZ's Tin Man or _Star Trek: Next Generation_'s Mr. Data, Andrew wants to become human and be recognized as human; and he is willing to die to achieve his goal.
Human chuzhpah! It's arrogant to assume that intelligent machines would want to become organic so they can be like The Crown of Creation ("Fanfare for the Common Man" for background, please): us.
In terms of the racial allegory, "The Bicentennial Man" was and is worse, with the message that Blacks should strive for assimilation, getting their humanity accepted when they became basically White (Spam/Robots Oreo/Blacks).
"The Bicentennial Man" was a wrong-headed story, but it was a serious story, and an interesting story. The film, THE BICENTENNIAL MAN, removes the allegories of slavery and race, leaving us with a love story between Andrew and a human woman and the story's subsidiary point that if "All men are mortal" and Andrew wants to become a man, Andrew must take on human mortality. Love stories are nice and mortality as essential to humanity is philosophically interesting, but in BICENTENNIAL MAN there's little development, no conflict, and not much plot or action.
I was rather offended by Asimov's "Bicentennial Man"; by the film I was mostly bored.
Animal Farm (1999)
Censored again: another "kinder, gentler" version of another great work in English.
The "frame" around the latest version of George Orwell's ANIMAL FARM is indeed a problem. The surface message seems to be that humans should avoid again pushing the animals to rebellion, but there is hope that the new owners of Manor Farm--Americanized modern folk--will be kinder, gentler exploiters of the animals. About 2 mm. below the surface is the message that good, smart people fled Stalinist Russia until "Ding, dong, Joe Stalin's dead!", and Communism has fallen and the New Capitalists have taken over and should be given their chance to exploit the workers in a modern, scientific, post-1950s way.
In 1680, Nahum Tate "adapted" Shakespeare's KING LEAR for the tastes of the age, and gave it a happy ending--and this was the version of LEAR produced up to the 19th century. According to reliable sources, the 1955 British-release version of _1984_ was given an upbeat ending, with Orwell's compromised, broken, degraded, and doomed protagonists getting to (at least) go down fighting in what might be the start of a real revolution. And even the 1984/85 film version of _1984_, allows ambiguity in John Hurt's "I love you" at the end of the movie. Orwell's Winston Smith loves Big Brother--Period: "The End"; the latest version allows us to think he still Julia.
And so forth through softening of the 1950s cartoon version of ANIMAL FARM to BLADE RUNNER in most versions to the attempt to give Terry Gilliam's BRAZIL a happy ending to Anthony Burgess's committing one of the great "Non sequiturs" ("It doesn't follow") in literature by showing us his CLOCKWORK ORANGEd Alex going from thug to responsible adult in the 21st chapter of his version of the story.
Especially in well-done films, let's have Orwell straight. The ANIMAL FARM pigs did become human and the humans pigs: an exploiter is an exploiter is an exploiter. And the current rule of the real-world "farm" by technocrats and kleptocrats--policy wonks and thieves--is much better than rule by Stalin's thugs, but it's still nothing to celebrate.
The "frame" seems to be politically correct and optimistic, but that's about the best you can say for it. Try viewing the movie without it.
Performance: King Lear (1998)
Depoliticizing Shakespeare--Again
In the 138-minute version I saw and heard, this is a fine production of the tragedies of the Lear family and the Gloucester family but less good on theology and politics.
Two of the major productions of _Hamlet_ in the 20th century, the 1948 version by Laurence Olivier and the 1990 version by Franco Zeffirelli, follow Ernest Jones and make _Hamlet_ a mostly nonpolitical, Oedipal family drama. The 1997 _Lear_ follows the simpler expedient for depoliticizing a play of simply cutting or muting lines.
So in this (shortened?) production we don't have to take too seriously the possibility that the gods are dead or apathetic or politically irrelevant, or even the retained suggestion that "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport" (4.1.36-37). Nor are we explicitly invited to think subversive thoughts about wisdom and folly, Nature as Divine Order vs. Nature as Machiavellian (or Hobbesian) competition--or about authority or justice in a secularized world.
Still, the emotional appeal of the play remains, and Ian Holm's Lear runs a brilliant course from despotic king and father to a gentle human being. Indeed, all the acting is quite good; and the set design, costuming, and camera-work are a good deal more interesting than we're used to on television.
So this is a very good _Lear_, but just a bit more of Shakespeare's play, at little extra running time, could have produced a very great _King Lear_. I hope that more subversive version was what people in the UK got to see and will make it to America when we're ready for theologically and politically unbowdlerized Shakespeare.
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999)
Michael Hoffman Is No William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare's _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ is a funny play with some serious themes, lightly handled; Michael Hoffman's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM is a slow and pretty somber affair that misses much of the comedy and almost all of the seriousness.
In English stereotypes ca. 1595, Thebes was the city of passion and Athens the city of Reason. In Anglo-American stereoypes ca. 1585-1999, Italy is a land of romance and passion. Setting the play in a fairy-tale Athens, once upon a time (when legendary Theseus was a medieval duke), was Shakespeare's serious joke: Athens, city of Reason, is the general setting for this passionate nonsense; eminently sensible Theseus won't believe in "antic fables" when he bloody well *is* an antic/antique fable! Setting the film in 1890s Italy gets rid of all that.
Hoffman runs on and on with the opera and crowd shots and giving Kevin Kline's Bottom a wife and a psychology, and cuts almost all the lines that make _MND_ a serious look at love and reason. Most notably, in a key moment in the play, Titania declares her love for the ass-ified Bottom and Bottom replies that she has "little reason for that. And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays. The more the pity some honest neighbors will not make them friends. Nay, I can gleek"--make satiric comments--"upon occasion." And Titania responds, "Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful." Bottom is ugly and stupid, but he says very wise things here, and to Titania he looks good. So ... --So we have an important speech. Hoffman leaves in the "gleek" line that few will understand and cuts "The more the pity" line: which is a very bad decision on Hoffman's part since life would be better if reason and love *did* go together.
Similarly for Duke Theseus's lines on "The lunatic, the lover and the poet," where "poet" includes playwrights; Hoffman cuts most of the speech. And that's a bad idea 'cause that linking of madness, love, and art justifies the Pyramus and Thisbe playlet as more than mere farce. But in Hoffman's MND Pyramus and Thisbe isn't even good farce.
It's a shame; the cast is good, and God knows Kevin Kline can do very funny serious comedy. And Hoffman at least understands intellectually that _MND_ is an erotic and disconcerting dream, even if his direction doesn't make the film very sexy or even a little scary.
Well, Shakespeare's play will survive. Maybe Hoffman should try _Coriolanus_ or some other Shakespearean work that hasn't been done to death.
Election (1999)
Ferris Bueller meets John Calvin--Morals, Ethics, Election
A very smart colleague once told me that one of the most important distinctions to make was "ethics" vs. "morals." For most of us, the words are interchangeable; for him, _ethics_ = a system for values and behaviors that you work out intellectually, and _morals_ = a system handed down by Authority, like the MORALs of old fables, or Christian morality.
ELECTION asks what the difference is between morals and ethics and asks us to think about what we elect to do.
What bothers me about the film is the alternative possibility, voiced-over by the overachieving antiheroine, that what counts is Election: your destiny (in secular success and failure) as it is handed down from ... whomever or whatever, and which you accept--or resist and destroy yourself. More exactly, what bothers me is that the film may *endorse* this Calvinist view.
Matthew Broderick's high school teacher may fail so utterly not so much because of his choices and self-deception but because he's unElected natural man, like the proto-humans in the museum he ends up at. His guilt is his desire and his struggling against the dull, boring life in which he finds himself.
I hope I'm wrong, but I think MTV just funded something fairly rare: puritan satire of the Zero Tolerance/"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" variety, only without God. The fate of Mr. M. would be a just punishment for an aging Ferris Bueller, but it seems like cruelty to some poor schlemiel of a high school teacher (schmuck, to be more exact, if IMDB will use the word), a guy whose misdeeds are far less than those of characters in the film who end up much better off.
The Thin Red Line (1964)
Some psychological moments in C. Company, U.S. Army Infantry on Guadalcanal
This version of _Thin Red Line_ might be useful for seeing what was possible for Cinemascope, mainstream (if black and white) war movies made for a North American audience ca. 1964. A _Dr. Strangelove_ or _Paths of Glory_ it ain't. It is a kind of initiation story for Keir Dullea's Pvt. Doll: going crazy to replace Jack Warden's Sgt. Welch as an appropriate soldier. (If war is madness, it's best fought by the mad.)
Psychology wins out over politics, but at least this _Thin Red Line_ makes clear that the land fight for Guadalcanal (from an Allied point of view) wasn't all done by US Marines.
Save your money and rent the late 1990s remake. In the recent flik, metaphysics wins out over politics, but the visuals are a whole lot more interesting.
Aelita (1924)
A visually-interesting "satura" (mish-mosh).
_Aelita: Queen of Mars_ is a visually-interesting satura ("mish-mosh," "stew"), bringing together soap opera, political drama, romantic comedy, crime-drama + farce, science fantasy, and, finally dream-vision.
The sequences set on Earth tell some rather, well, mundane stories of jealousy and political corruption, interesting for being set in Moscow during the hungry years around 1924 and having the villain a minor Soviet official.
(Caution, though: the villain's name is spelled "Erlich" in the titles on the Kino re-issue of the film. If that is a correct rendering, that's the Yiddish word for "righteous" and a Jewish name, so Comrade Erlich may be oddly Jewish--if aristocratic _and_ Bolshevik--and the film engaging in some old-fashioned Russian antisemitism [where confused categories aren't surprising]. If the name is "Ehrlich," Comrade Minor Official may be of German descent and the film more newfangled in trashing insufficiently Russified German-Soviets [who are also aristocrats and Bosheviks].)
The scenes on Mars are much more interesting, visually.
As David A. Cook states in his _History of Narrative Film_ (a standard film-course text), the Martian sets are "designed completely in the Constructivist style." They follow the principles of Vsevelod Meyerhold in trying to create "a machine for acting": which works here in producing a futuristic vision that was to go on to the FLASH GORDON series and other visually classic works of High Modernism.
There's also imagery of a Mechanized Underworld and Mechanical Hive: ideas that don't go back beyond H. G. Wells's _Time Machine_ (1895) and _First Men in the Moon_ (1901) and E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909)--and visual and thematic possibilities that were going to go on to works from Fritz Lang's _Metropolis_ (1926) to George Lucas's _THX-1138_ (1971) and beyond. And there's a revolution on Mars, which is something neither Lang nor Lucas could/would pull off.
Ideologically, _Aelita_ is about as sophisticated as _Birth of a Nation_ or _Metropolis_ or _Gone with the Wind_, and less offensive (even to a viewer named "Erlich"). It should be seen for the same reason as we see _Wizard of Oz_ and _Dune_: to see the visuals. Just Fast-Forward through the dumb parts, in all of them.
Antz (1998)
Different movie for da older guys ....
Conservative parents worried that their children will be corrupted by the "dirty" words in ANTZ might be more appropriately concerned about spelling. If their kids look up the "Z" in ANT-Z, they might discover that it is the name of a 1969 movie by Constantin Costa-Gavras: a beautiful and beautifully effective attack on the fascistic (or downright fascist) regime of the colonels ruling Greece at the time. Leftist parents should teach their kids about "Z!", the symbol, and about the songs in ANTZ and try to get their kids to ignore the placements for Mountain Dew and other products. ANTZ is inspiring debates about its politics and in that way it is earning its social keep more than most politicians in my part of the world. Z! And long live the individual citizen in a human community!
Soldier (1998)
SOLDIER has problems, but it is a serious movie.
SOLDIER is too long for the plot; the pacing gets too slow in places; the shots of Sgt. Todd's suffering face get old fast. Still, for any American male who carried around a "1A" draft card (immediately available for service) there is poignancy to Todd's story and some effective commentary on "Selective Service" and the dream of creating the perfect soldier. SOLDIER is also a serious, if flawed, study of the moral issues facing a man inside so perverse a system. Todd has a code, and he makes ethical decisions in terms of it, muddling through as best he can.
SOLDIER is not Joe Haldeman's THE FOREVER WAR--the antidote to Robert A. Heinlein's STAR SHIP TROOPERS--and it's definitely not ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT or PATHS OF GLORY or FULL-METAL JACKET. But released around the time of a periodic US governmental review of US military planning, it is a worthy attempt to get people, Americans especially, to look at some assumptions on the individual's obligation to the State, and what the State owes individuals. Raising such questions, and raising them in a Kurt Russell flik to boot, may be a source of some not-so-legitimate dislike behind some of the very legit. complaints about the movie.
Pi (1998)
In 1990s New York City, a numbers theorist may have discovered the ultimate pattern in the universe, which would include the pattern behind the apparent chaos of the stock market, and would be the True NAME
PI is an independently produced art film (Sundance festival winner) that is, generically, an SF mathematical mystery, plus thriller. Summarized by Vince Moore, with editing by Rich Erlich for the CLOCKWORKS-2 PROJECT: a list of WORKS USEFUL FOR THE STUDY OF THE HUMAN/MACHINE INTERFACE IN SF.
The significantly named Maximilian-always called "Max"-Cohen (Kohen Gadol High Priest = Max. Priest) is a theoretical mathematician who believes in pattern in everything, yet he is still subject to inexplicable and incurable seizures and hallucinations (apparently from some variety of migraine). He has focused his talents on patterns that may predict complex, apparently chaotic phenomena, with the stock market as his main, purely theoretical, interest. Just before his home-made computer (Euclid) crashes, it spits out some apparently random digits and highly unlikely stock predictions. Cohen throws away the printout and goes to complain to Sol Robeson: his current confidante and Go partner, and apparently Cohen's only male friend (he rejects friendship or even colleagueship with women). Sol was once Cohen's mentor; and Sol once sought patterns in the transcendental number pi, perhaps finding them and suffering a stroke in consequence-and being wise enough to quit. (Pi = ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, the ratio itself = 3.1416+ a nonrepeating series that can be extended indefinitely.) Sol asks if the random number(s) the computer generated contained 216 digits.
Cohen is soon told by a Hassidic Jew who works with Biblical numerology that his group of Hassidim are looking for a 216 digit number (which, translated from numbers to Hebrew letters, gives the true NAME-of God). Simultaneously, an organization combining elements of a think tank, Wall Street brokerage firm, and espionage operation aggressively solicits Cohen's help on stock investments. Cohen goads Sol to reproduce the 216-digit number, which Sol does, has another stroke, and dies. Sol's earlier theory was that the 216 digit number was the product of computer consciousness as the computer "died."
PI is significant for the study of the human/machine interface primarily for the imagery of Cohen sitting in the midst of Euclid, which Robert Denerstein, the Scripps-Howard reviewer, saw as "a giant computer that lines the walls of his apartment like a high-tech web" (_The Cincinnati Post_, 7 Aug. 1998: 3B). Euclid is literally a very small main-frame but Denerstein does well to note the web imagery: at the center of the computer, destroying its main chip, are ants, secreting a mucoid substance that "kills" Euclid, perhaps bringing it to consciousness and generating the NAME. Cohen rebuilds his computer, around a superchip supplied by the mysterious Wall Street organization. The imagery of Cohen inside the computer elements suggests strange juxtapositions of postmodern cybernetic space-but definitely not cyberpunk cyberspace-enclosing the human and insectoid, the natural and secular, along with the ultimately spiritual. Cohen within his computer may be a new Kohen Gadol in a new Holy of Holies, bringing about the Last Days, in an apocalyptic crash of the stock market, or with the Messianic era. Or he's another mad scientist, another nut venturing into areas reserved for High Priests or Messiah.
Cf. and contrast Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 short story, "The Nine Billion Names of God," wherein computers are used to list God's 9 billion names, at which time the work of the universe, and the universe, is finished (collected in Clarke's THE NINE BILLION NAMES OF GOD [New York: Signet-NAL, 1967]).