An Unmovable Force?

I've been saving this story for a few weeks, thinking that somehow it would come full circle. Today it did.

I was in Minneapolis a few weeks ago and had the chance to catch the "Star Wars" exhibit at the Minnesota Science Museum. Basically there were a bunch of props from the movie (the original droids, Darth Vader's mask, etc.) some retrospectives and other attractions. It was an extra $8 past the admission, plus a 45-minute wait.

A bit of background: I've spent a good 20 years of my life in the firm spell of George Lucas' "Star Wars" movies. I saw Jedi 7 times when I was 7 (see how that worked), I watched the OT whenever I was sick during grade school and in college I ate Taco Bell until I puked collecting those damn disks that came with their value meals containing characters from "The Phantom Menace." Even after that turd was deposited (and yes, you could dig up my apologetic review in the pages of the Kearney Hub if you MUST, but I've since come to see the light), I made it to a midnight screening for each of the new trilogy. I might still defend "Revenge of the Sith" while damning the entire new trilogy if you get a beer or two in me. Then there's the LEGO Star Wars games, the Little People Millenium Falcon set...I own a shirt or two. If 1 is someone who's seen the movies and forgotten them and 10 is that guy in Michigan who changed his name to Obi-Wan Kenobi, I'm about a 3 or 4.

But somewhere along the line I made a decision: George Lucas had enough of my money. I think it was the glut of interviews I've read where he basically shows no regard for the people who love his property. His faux apathy borderlines on disgust as far as I can tell. It was cemented this year when he did an interview for the latest and lamest Indiana Jones movie, and said (and I'm paraphrasing), "people are going to hate it no matter what it is. It's only a movie!"

No long Internet rant needed. He just doesn't get my money anymore.

And, the Science Institute was my first real test: See the C3-PO used in one of my favorite movies of all time or save 8 bucks, $45 minutes and see the rest of the museum. The decision was surprisingly easy. Mr. Lucas didn't get any more of my money.

But the decision sort of bothered me because I hadn't drawn clear distinctions in my mind. Was Lucas simply banned from my wallet for being a hack who wasn't able to pull off a three movie ark while at the same time disrespecting those who made him famous, or was Star Wars dead to me on a whole? If Star Wars was dead, what about all that time we'd spent together? What about all the midnight screenings, the late night quotations, the times I was comforted when sick by the Imperial March? What about puberty being explained to me in terms of Luke Skywalker's maturation process or that time my girlfriend was over and we watched "The Empire Strikes Back" and...

No, it couldn't be "dead," could it? I decided to find out.

The best way to do this, I figured, was to filter out all the stuff that killed Star Wars for many movie goers, namely the shitty dialogue. The best way to do this, I've found, is to play this amazing little special feature that came with the soundtrack to "Revenge of the Sith." Basically its a series of 20 or so music videos covering the major themes of Star Wars (the Republic, the Empire, the Rebels, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, etc.) with visuals from the movies, dialogue nowhere to be found and John Williams beautiful theme heavy score playing over the top. I decided to give it a spin when I was jogging to see if I felt anything.

At the end of the 37 minutes and 24 seconds (4 miles on a speed of 6.4 miles per hour), I can say my worst fears on the subject were not realized. In fact, I think things are OK. I don't feel nothing when confronted with Star Wars imagery and a swelling score (on a different note, I'm kind of a bitch when it comes to a swelling score. It can make totally hollow or unearned emotion connect with me in some odd way. See the end of Dragonheart and tell me the score doesn't make that thing work. Anyway) but I don't feel great either. Any time the New Trilogy showed up, there was considerably less emotion. During a couple of scenes replayed to music, it seemed I had forgotten scenes from the New Trilogy. "Oh yeah," I said to myself. "There was a big Jedi battle at the end of "Attack of the Clones." The neural dent it made must have been very small.

But, Han Solo, Princess Leah and Luke Skywalker still do it for me, at least on a small emotional scale. I'm not saying Star Wars was ever like The Elephent Man in terms of emotional bombs, but what can I say? I have a history with those movies and I think that history is keeping me a fan for the time being. I'm not going to check out the new "Star Wars" movie coming out this summer (coincidentally, I felt nothing but dread at the LucasFilms logo that used to invoke such unabashed joy), and I have no plans to purchase anything Star Wars stuff for a while, but it's nice to know that initial connection is still there.

At least for now.

Picture Monday: MY WRATH IS TOTAL!!!

Again, I go back to the idea of who designs, prepares and manufactures pieces like this? I don't know, but if anyone can explain to my why this is aesthetically appealing (or, for that matter, why those "tree nymph" faces you can put on a tree are aesthetically appealing) please let me know.

Other than that, does this give off a wrathful feeling to anyone else?

A Cinematic Misunderstanding

A couple statistics from the "Get Smart" movie I finally got around to seeing this afternoon.

Number of times Steve Carell directly quotes Don Adams: 4

Number of times Anne Hathaway shows her underwear: 3

Number of lines Terrence Stamp has: 20 or so

Number of lines deserving an actor of Terrence Stamp's stature: 0

Number of kicks/slaps/paintball pellets to the nuts: 5

Number of staples to the head: 2

Number of fat jokes: Lost count

and finally...

Number of people Steve Carell kills: 5

Huh? Yeah. Steve Carrell guns down four people and sets another character on fire before a train hits him. Is it just me, or is this a major misunderstanding of the basic premise of the movie?

No one says action and comedy is easy, and all in all "Get Smart" was a decently entertaining if extremely light weight piece of summer fare. But the first time Maxwell Smart draws his gun and SHOOTS A GUY, I was a little shocked. I didn't know this movie was prepared to go that far, but that's the thing - it's not. It doesn't push any spy conventions, doesn't go anywhere unexpected or do anything to threaten the goofy aesthetic except have Steve Carrell casually gun down some bad guys. Given he spends the first fourth of the movie trying to get his superiors to understand "bad is what they do, not who they are" concerning their enemies, the movie betrays itself with a hero murdering in the line of duty.

It makes me think that audiences don't give that sort of thing a second thought.

Rotten Wish Fulfillment

I'm about 20 minutes out from seeing the movie "Wanted" and can't get a certain bitter taste out of my mouth.

A word about the movie: As a brain dead piece of summer entertainment, you could do a lot worse. The action "kicks ass" as it were, completely with flipping cars, bullets that travel in a round pattern and Morgan Freeman as an assassin. James McAvoy proves an extremely capable lead and Angelina Jolie is monosyllabic and shows her butt (I'd prefer she had more dialogue and her butt more screen time, frankly). Like I said, you could do worse.

But there was an element to the film that, the more I think about it, I find flat out despicable. The movie opens with a quick introduction to the life of Wesley Gibson (McAvoy), an office droan whose boss yells at him, whose girlfriend cheats on him with his best friend and who thinks about how he can't "feel anything" all the time. He calls himself a loser, a nothing, a nobody. Then he's recruited by a fraternity of assassins (except for Jolie who cannot be in a frat, can she?) and begins extensive assassin training and begins shooting a bunch of people.

Wesley is involved in an initial shoot out before he decides to leave his life as an office droan and undertake killing people in the name of a magic loom that spits the names of people who need to be killed "in the name of fate" in binary code (that's the plot, I swear to God). After the shoot out he goes back to his office and feels "different." His vulgar boss, whose girth is played for laughs, pushes him to the breaking point where he swears at her and informs her everyone would feel sorry for her if only she were nicer to them. Instead they hate her. His best friend, the one who's boning Wesley's girlfriend, goes in for a high five only to be smashed in the face with Wes's keyboard. Letters fly off the keyboard and spell "Fuck You" with one of the man's tooth substituting for the second "u." Attention to detail and all that.

In the context of the movie as a hypstylized fantasy about shooting people, it's completely in line with the rest of the movie. Things started to go south for me when folks in the crowd started to cheer the in-office violence. A couple people whooped. The dude in front of me (the one with his baseball cap on backward) stood up and pumped his fist like his inner monologue had FINALLY been expressed in celluloid, like the director had reached into his soul and expressed his deepest longing.

I have to admit, I grinned. Like I said, in context it fits in a movie where you flip your car in order to shoot a guy through his sunroof or where a curved bullet goes in a circle and kills half a dozen people on its flight. But no one cheered any of those scened. They cheered the use of violence to deal with something they could relate to (betrayal, office boredom, a feeling of powerlessness).

I was ready to let it go until the last scene in the movie where Wesley provides a voice over as a bullet flies an impossible distance through his best friend's energy drink can, through the hole in his boss's doughnut and into the head of the big bad guy. He says "this is me taking control of my destiny. What the fuck have you done lately?"

Well, I haven't saved the world from an evil syndicate of killers, but I've resisted the urge to punch people I disagree with on a fairly regular basis, so lets call it a wash.

Here's my problem - people responded to fixing a situation they relate to with violence instead of any of the other guilty pleasures in the movie. I remember when I saw "Knocked Up" people cheered when Seth Rogan finally stood up to Leslie Mann's nosy sister, who was trying to force him out of the delivery room. That was an instance where a man took control of a situation and firmly (but with great vulgarity) asserted himself. He didn't knock her teeth out. I love that scene in the flick and I clapped when I first saw it in the theater. I was the only one. Maybe if he's punched her in the boob...

The thing is we WANT to be violent. It's in our DNA to resolve things by hitting them, and it's why society has created laws saying if you do that, you go to jail. That's something we've always contended with. But I've noticed this sort of post Office Space hatred for the day to day work we all do that is rooted both in entitlement and ego. If someone gives us shit over the course of our day, as happens to absolutely everybody, we've gone from fantasizing about destroying the copier to kicking some ass. It's on the Internet in major proportions. It's spoken aloud in bars after work. And now guys are standing up and cheering when it happens in our pop entertainment.

Part of it stems from ego but another part stems from the awful corporate cultures cultivated in this country. When it's made clear to you that you're either expendable or not appreciated you feel powerless and when you feel powerless you want revenge on those who have the power. That's as human as dwelling in houses.

But it's a shift toward violence as a solution in the name of sophistication that bothers me - it's the worker saying I'm brilliant and misunderstood and deserve to be treated like royalty and if not I reserve the right to fucking kill you. That's the mentality that manifested in that reaction to the first 20 minutes of "Wanted." It's ego to a massive degree, and if research and trends are holding true it's going to get worse before it gets better. I just hope, for the sake of keyboards and dentists everywhere, we have less hitting and more, I don't know, talking.

A Gem Uncovered

I ended up working just shy of 12 hours today, so as the fireworks pop basically right outside my window, I had no desire to go see them. My skin is crispy and my brain is fried and I wanted to veg on something decent but not too challenging. I picked "In Bruges," which I had wanted to see for a long time and never got around to.

What a fooking brilliant movie.

I use "fooking" because In Bruges is about an Englishman (Brendan Gleeson) and an Irishman (Colin Ferrell) who both kill people for a living and both affect accent so thick they darn near drown in them. After a hit goes horribly wrong they are sent to Bruge, a tourist enclave in Belgium and told to lay low. Gleeson loves it. Ferrell is too itchy to appreciate anything much less the quaint charms of an old city. Plots twist, women and dwarfs are involved and what was meant to be a casual movie watching experience turned into full throttle yelling at the screen.

In Bruges is absurdest to a high degree...maybe absurdest isn't the right word for the first two acts. How about gleefully strange. Example: Ferrell meets a drug dealer and they go out on a date. Just when things begin to get thematically heavy, the Irishman blurts out "oy, they're shooting midgets over there," or something like it. Turns out there's a movie set with a dwarf on it and it's his favorite thing in Bruges. Like everything else, it turns out to be essential to the plot.

Speaking of the plot, this sucker gets very twisty without ever once for a second betraying characters. I guess that's what's most enjoyable about the movie - the way it ties everything together but never strays from the characters it loves.

It's not often I come across a gem like this anymore, as my movie going has dropped off considerably in the past few years. Even though I'm fried and am not articulating it well, this movie is fantastic and worth the view. Maybe more than one.

He's a Good Guy. Congratulations.

So my sister Katie is getting married next year.

The news broke last week as I was driving back from Minneapolis where I had been at a conference. I was in the middle of a conversation about the philosophic mission of museums when my dad called and broke the news. To call me "taken aback" doesn't cover it. I was floored.

A little bit of background is necessary, so please indulge me. My sister and I are five years apart and sometimes it feels like a generation. I think she's agree that we're not overly close for a number of reasons - mainly me being a jerk for large parts of my teens. I never really "took her under my wing" so to speak, because I'm just now realizing I didn't have wings back then and am just now grown them. We never really fought, but never really shared, you know? I always got the feeling that if I weren't her brother, she wouldn't have hung out with me.

I'll site one example and move on - in Junior High I got the crap beat out of me a bit (just like a lot of people) and got bitter and hateful toward certain groups at a young age. At one point when I was ranting about something (I forget what) she cut me off with "when did you start hating people." It said "I'm sad for you" and "shut the hell up" all at once and she was exactly right. But that's kind of where we were.

But I think things have changed as we've both gotten out on our own. I think we like each other. I like her. She's beautiful and ambitious and more "adult" than I was at her age. She's got a really tough road going - job and school (and now engagement), but something inside me knows she's going to handle it. Somewhere out there, she found some pretty amazing strength and it doesn't take long to see it. She's no nonsense yet warm and I love her.

Flash forward to her getting married. I don't want to go too much into the topic of the guy she's marrying, other than to say he's a guy with his poop in a group. I like him, though I get the feeling he wouldn't hang out with me if he didn't desire my approval on some level. So it is. But not being the kind of brother who calls all the time, I guess I wasn't aware of how deep their relationship was.

But it's strange the feelings that come rushing over a big brother when his little sister gets engaged. For the first time in a long time I want to be protective. I want to sit her down and say "do you really want this" even though she's even tempered and smart and I'm positive she knows what she's doing. I wish I'd been more up front with her about how I messed up with women so she won't make the same mistakes. I want to tell her how great it is to have someone but how miserable it can be if you play it wrong. I want to tell her this commitment is one where pride swallowing is daily, and sacrifices can be great but the rewards greater.

I suddenly want to be the big brother I never have been for her. Ouch. I read that sentence back and my chest constricted, but it's the truth.

Then, there's happiness. Her wedding is going to be great. She's going to be beautiful. They'll be great together but she won't be one to back away from a challenge or a fight.

I'm so happy for her.

Movie Review: Hancock

There are a couple ways you can frame Will Smith's "Hancock." One way is to call it a mess of irredeemable proportions, a movie with so many half-baked ideas, so many different moods that fluctuate at a whim and so confused with its own identity that it dies a thousand deaths in its 135 minute run time.

If you're the type who comes to praise film instead of bury it, you could call it a bold move on all involved, a real risk that doesn't quite pay off, a well acted ensemble piece that suffers from a script that could of used another pass, a movie that tries so hard to please the audience you can see the veins bulging and hear the grunts.

"Hancock" is all these things, but not more. It's a whole lot of everything that equals a big nothing, unfortunately.

The premise: Will Smith is a superhero with amnesia named Hancock, who is an a-hole. The people he saves call him an a-hole. Children on the street call him an a-hole. Even his new friend Ray (Jason Bateman), a PR rep and "good guy" calls him an a-hole. Using broad comedic strokes, director Peter Berg spends the first 20 minutes of the flick making sure the audience feels the same way. Then, the first of many radical tonal shifts kicks in and it's established Hancock is an a-hole because he's lonely. He lives in a trailer a la Riggs from the Lethal Weapon movies. He drinks to kill the pain inside, you see.

Then it's back to the funny, as Ray persuades Hancock to go to prison for being an a-hole in order to rehabilitate his image while Ray's wife (Charlize Theron) looks at Hancock so long and hard that a neon sign flashing "THEY HAVE A HISTORY" every few seconds on the bottom of the screen would have been about as subtle. Hancock goes to jail house AA. He sticks one inmates head up another inmates a-hole. He stays in jail even though he could break out at any time. Ray's kid loves him and gives him a plastic dinosaur.

The third act I won't reveal other than to say THEY HAVE A HISTORY and that history has holes big enough make an average movie goer cringe. The tone shifts from a comedy superhero fight to actual heroics to sacrificial drama and ends with a good old fashioned axe murder played for laughs. Seriously.

I'm honestly not sure if "Hancock" wreaks of studio interference, star ego or what, but when the filmmakers can't commit to a tone, an audience can't commit to laughing or cheering for the hero or any emotion other than casual interest. It's amazing how this movie kills momentum. Whenever the laughs start to roll, the flick gets morose - whenever it builds dramatic intensity, there's a fart joke.

The shame of "Hancock" is if the flick had found a tone, most of the ingredients to deconstruct the superhero genre are right there on the screen, waiting for someone to come along and harness them. Smith gives it his all and Jason Bateman transplants his "Arrested Development" dry wit into the proceedings. He's good, but it doesn't help. Charlize Theron is hot and vapid. If they'd been on the same page, watch out.

But "Hancock" misses and misses big. The flick isn't without it's pleasures, but it's more of a mess than anything else.