It's just like being in SoCal

We woke up this morning to the smell of smoke -- thankfully nothing immediately dangerous, nothing in the house.  As it turns out, the smoke wasn't coming from anything in the neighborhood, city, county, state or country.  The smoke from wildfires in Quebec are blowing down into VT, NH, ME, and MA, casting a haze over Memorial Day and creating a mild danger for people with respiratory problems.  

Mamma Mia! (2008) and It's Complicated (2009)

The marvelous Meryl Streep is awash in aging men!  And lucky her, they're all younger than she is!  (save for the well preserved Steve Martin, 4 years her senior)

So... the best part of Mamma Mia! is when the elder women sing "Dancing Queen" and "Waterloo" just before and then during the end credits.  Amanda Seyfried and her beau are charming, but the actors cast as her potential fathers aren't very good singers, and this is particularly problematic in the case of Pierce Brosnan.  There's also an issue with the setting; at times I feel like we're in the Greek islands, and at times I feel like we're in the Caribbean (especially when Christine Baranski goes down to the beach and sings to the bartender).  Overall it feels like a story whose thinness works fine as a stage production but doesn't really make it as a film.

To clarify: it's not just that the plot is simple -- It's Complicated also has a relatively simple plot, but the script, the story, is not just a vehicle to get to the next musical number (or plot point), but gives us human reasons why the characters act the way they do without unnecessarily vilifying anyone... except perhaps the 5 year-old.  Yes, Agness gets vilified by Meryl's friends (and it was nice that in both this and Mamma Mia! that Meryl has a posse of aging women friends), but that's natural in the context of those characters in that moment; what I mean is that the script doesn't make her "the bad guy (gal)" and so you can actually feel some sympathy for her when she finally learns she's being cheated on.  Yeah, Meryl's ex is a jerk, but human.  We get to see a lot of him over the course of the movie, so we've seen his sleazy charms that attracted her to him at first and slowly experienced the behaviors that drove them apart.

Two other things of note:

• We thought John Krasinski, who plays Meryl's future son-in-low, was fabulous and did a great job supporting the "big three" in this movie.  Turns out he's a regular on the Office, so now I've convinced Sarahmac we should netflix it.  w00t
• It's interesting to note that Steve Martin acting as if he's high is identical to pretty much every video of Steve Martin from the 70's.  At some point he learned how to act reserved, and now he basically has two modes.

Scooby Doo (2002) and Monsters Unleashed (2004)

Connor came home from school a few weeks ago asking about Scooby Doo, which he heard about from his friends, so we figured we should netflix the original Scooby Doo: Where Are You? mysteries to let him see first hand what it was about, and while we were at it, we pre-screened the two live action movies to see if they were appropriate.  In short, no.


There are all sorts of problems with the movies that I could complain about: that Daphne is basically Buffy in purple (I mean, they didn't even bother with a red wig, much less a decent dye job!) only more of a "Buffy" than the actual Buffy; that they hint at unresolved feelings between Velma and Fred in the first half of the first film and then back waaaay off and pretend it never happened; that the second movie in general essentially ignores the existence of the first; that the characters ,who are pretty two-dimensional in the original series, are further flattened to embody a single aspect of their personality taken to the extreme; but really, all of that would be nitpicking when the creators of the movies show a much more basic misunderstanding of their source material.  So:


Scooby Doo is not just some goofy series chronicling the adventures of a group of "groovy" kids and their talking great dane, it's about the triumph of the rational mind over superstition and mysticism.


In the original cartoon, every time the gang unmasks another villain, they reaffirm that there are no ghosts, there are no monsters, and there's a logical explanation for the strange things they've seen.  In essence, they are carrying on the good work of Mr. Holmes.  The Scooby Doo movies betray this heritage, as do a number of direct-to-video incarnations.  The jury is out on whether the 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo should be pardoned.  Thankfully the creators of Sherlock Holmes did not.

Reports of the novel's death are greatly exaggerated...

In the last couple of months I've read Michiko Kakutani's "Texts Without Context" NYT article and Laura Miller's "Yes, the Internet is rotting your brain" Salon.com article, which are thematically related riffs on how the Internet is destroying our culture.  


They make me wonder: <tongue-in-cheek>Didn't the printing press and widespread literacy destroy the oral tradition?  I like to think that society's storytellers took to the streets to declaim hysterical rants against the "book" and its deleterious effects on culture.  It even harmed the way we think, for people no longer needed to remember all of a story but could simply look it up in a book!  Worse, they choose by and large not to read (much less memorize) the Iliad, but these "novels" of highly questionable authorship (so many, especially the females, seem to write under assumed names) and value.</tongue-in-cheek>

But seriously, echoing Miller's concerns, what did we lose "socially, politically, civilly, scientifically, psychologically" when the majority decided that widespread literacy and the written word were superior to the oral tradition?  Are we in a worse place?  Oddly enough, I discovered Ursula Le Guin's "Off the Page: Loud Cows" essay in her the wave in the mind collection last night, which begins thus:

What happened to stories and poems after the invention of printing is a strange and terrible thing.  Literature lost its voice.  Except on the stage, and it was silenced.  Gutenberg muzzled us.

Despite this bleak beginning, Le Guin argues that ultimately, literature rediscovered its voice and (so I interpret) recapture some of the lost magic of the oral tradition.  This makes me hopeful, nay, almost certain, that the depth of the novel will not die completely, but be rediscovered, reborn, and cherished by a new generation of readers (another nagging question left unasked and unanswered by Miller's article: is there any part of the brain that is exercised by surfing the net, or does the whole thing go flaccid?  It would be nice to know if this is a tradeoff or a complete loss).

Of course, it took a few hundred years for the book to transform society, while it has taken movies, radio, television, and the internet only a few generations, so we feel the transition more acutely.  Frankly, I would say that the situation is in some ways better now, precisely because anyone can contribute to the soup, and we don't have to sit passively and eat what Doubleday/RKO/MGM et al think they can sell to us.  

With more direct access to potential customers over the internet, the number of comics have exploded.  You have a very good chance of coming across bad webcomics when browsing for something to read, but then again, you have a 100% chance of reading dogs like Blondie and Hagar the Horrible in the newspaper.  Would XKCD and Dinosaur Comics ever have made it in a print-only world?  No.  Are they demonstrably better than all but a few of the comics that run in newspapers?  Hell yes.

I don't think novelists have quite figured out how to sell their work through the new medium.  They're marketing themselves fairly effectively, but have yet to take control of the means of distribution.

Fleming on simple economic principles

See the Mr. Micawber, Meet the Enemy post at Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche (or better, add it to your Reader).


Let's see... I do believe there was a presidential candidate back in the 90's who articulated these principles.  Perhaps he wasn't a politician of "repute", but perhaps that's the kind of person we should be electing.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)

Doctor Parnassus, like The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, is a Terry Gilliam film in the service of a few wonderful visuals that doesn't quite hang together as a storytelling device.  But Gilliam has made movies with the same elements that work: why does Brazil succeed while Parnassus fails?  At first blush, I can't quite put my finger on it.

They both have surreal dream sequence-like scenes interspersed with the action in the "real world", and both feature love stories set against near-impossible odds.  Could the difference really be as simple as:

1. in Brazil, Sam and Jill love one another, we are invested in that relationship, and we (and they) understand what is keeping them apart, while
   
2. in Parnassus, there is no appreciable mutual love between Anton and Valentine; it's all one-sided, and neither of them understands the danger from Mr. Nick through most of the film.  For that matter, I don't really feel like I understand the history between Parnassus and Mr. Nick well enough.  There's a scene in which Parnassus starts to tell Valentine of his history with the devil, but is interrupted, and Valentine complains that he never tells her the rest of the story.  I have the same complaint.  

Films headed in opposite directions...

We recently netflixed Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009).


All I'm going to say about Mr. Fox is that I have no desire to check the Dahl book out of the library to see the differences.


Sherlock Holmes, on the other hand, makes me want to go back and reread all the original source material.  I haven't liked Doyle's detective this much since Young Sherlock Holmes.  This is a tight, dense, fast-paced script which, like most mysteries, is impossible for the viewer/reader to untangle because Holmes has information that you don't, but there are a number of "mini-reveals" throughout the movie in which certain events and pieces of the overall plot are explained (as opposed to, say, the first Mission Impossible movie in which you're kept in the dark about everything throughout and simply don't care what happened by the end).  This is a reasonably clever way of making us feel enlightened enough to be engaged in the plot while saving the big reveal.


I also really enjoyed this movie's take on the Watson/Holmes friendship.  Growing up, I was given the impression by most adaptations that Watson was a fat bumbling dullard who would be of no interest to someone like Holmes.  Here they are partners.  Holmes is still the genius, but Watson is very sharp and actually contributes to the friendship.  Of course, even with the strong script, none of this would work if Jude Law and Robert Downey, Jr., didn't do a superb job of pulling off this relationship.  Rachel McAdams and Downey, Jr., are also good together onscreen, but suffer in comparison to the chemistry between Downey, Jr. and Paltrow in the Iron Man movie.  We might even actually go to the theater to see the sequel!

Raising the next generation of book snobs

Sarah took Connor to see the Theatre Sans Fil production of the Hobbit -- that's right, life-size puppetry in the service of Tolkien storytelling.  What could be better?  Well, apparently a lot of stuff was left on the editing room floor, to the point where Connor wanted to know where the third troll was, and what happened to the elven king of the wood elves, and why Bard fought Smaug with a sword instead of shooting him with an arrow**.  His final analysis was "I liked the book better," but he still enjoyed the show.  We couldn't be prouder -- he's ready to tackle the Peter Jackson films!  (uh, once he's old enough to not find them scary)


** Sarah was more disheartened because the troll hoard was dropped entirely and Orcrist, Glamdring, and Sting  were given to the party by Elrond.  Beorn was, of course, dropped (as in the Rankin and Bass version).  More amusingly, Sarah was shocked during the show that they didn't call Bilbo's sword Sting, but something that sounded like Dard.  Well, upon reflection, the troupe is Québécois, and Dard is French for Sting.