2010, The Year We... Got Slimed By BP And Groped By The TSA

Well, here we are at the end of the year.  Before we proceed into the next year I would like to reflect on 2010... both the year and the movie.  This is not just a gimmicky way to start a traditional movie review this time though... in fact this is not going to be a traditional movie review seeing as how I want to get a few things off my chest, both about the movie and how the actual year is different from the vision of the future presented by Arthur C. Clarke and the makers of the film based on his novel.  Let's talk about the movie first.

The Movie

(This little editorial will assume that you have seen the movie so a warning of SPOILERS AHOY!)

First, let me say what every movie reviewer since 1984 has said a million times: this film is not the same as nor is it as good as it's prequel, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Now let me say this: none of that matters.  2010 is a good movie in it's own right and a worthy sequel to one of the greatest films of all time.  Yes, this is a more conventional science fiction film than 2001 and it is not as ambitious, but you know what?  It's all the better for it.  If any filmmaker tries to make a sequel to 2001 in the same style as Kubrick they would have failed utterly and probably embarrassed the shit out of themself in the process.  Peter Hyams was wise not to even try to make a film like 2001 but instead just straight up adapt Arthur C. Clarke's novel (except for adding the whole subplot about the Cold War which wasn't in the original book.  I guess America needs even the possibility of something blowing up in it's sci-fi movies post Star Wars.  Thank you, George Lucas).

Almost everything about this movie is underrated.  The story is actually quite good, if again more conventional than 2001.  The acting is decent enough (and they actually got some real Russians to play some of the Soviet crew!  In the EIGHTIES!).  I quite enjoyed the music score (which employs the same "blaster beam" from Star Trek: The Motion Picture - another underrated film by the way).  And the special effects match if not exceed those of the original which is no surprise considering that 2010's Richard Edlund like 2001's  Douglas Trumbull is an FX God.

One thing that tickles me pink about 2010 is how faithful it tries to be to the original 2001 even if it doesn't try to match it in tone or execution.  The fact that the filmmakers were able to accurately reconstruct the USS Discovery even though Stanley Kubrick had the original sets and models destroyed right after making his magnum opus (he probably had nightmares of Roger Corman stealing them) is a testament to the dedication and love that the film crew had for both this film and it's predecessor.  Also the fact that they actually got Keir Dullea and Douglas Rain to reprise their roles as David Bowman and HAL.  Any other hack director would have said, "You know what, fuck it.  Get some look-alike actor and a cheap voice actor and let's make this puppy" but Peter Hyams knew that anything less than the originals wasn't going to do (he did recast the role of Heywood Floyd, though.  Oh well - Roy Scheider was more interesting in the role anyway).

You know what strikes me the most about this movie though?  How eerie it is.  I remember being creeped out by this movie as a kid (Yes!  Another movie from my childhood!  I was an odd tyke).  The scene where Heywood Floyd meets Dave Bowman, the imposing monolith, even the image of the sulfur covered Discovery tumbling in space over the volcanic hell-moon Io.  This was probably the first movie to give me an idea of the vast emptiness and... cosmic deepness of space, and how cold and dangerous and truly breathtaking it is (or probably is.  I've never been myself).  Yes, 2001 was realistic with it's physics and astronomy and stuff too but that was made before the Voyager probes were launched it it was more of a space ballet and freak-out set to classical music anyway.  2010 makes you feel that you are watching an actual space flight to Jupiter....

Rant

....which hasn't happened yet.  And probably never will.  Confession:  I cry when watching the opening bit of 2001: A Space Odyssey.  No, not the part with the monkeys, the part with the space planes and the space station and stuff.  The first reason I weep like a baby is Kubrick's gorgeous cinematic choreography and marriage of beautiful imagery with Strauss' Blue Danube.  The other reason is because none of this has come to pass.  When 2001 rolled around I was depressed because we weren't making regular trips to the moon or sending manned flights to Jupiter.  And you know what?  I get misty eyed while watching 2010 too.  Not just because of the beautiful ending but also because none of this has fucking happened.  Look, I'm glad we don't have the Soviet Union or the Cold War in the real 2010 (and actually having the US and USSR near DEFCON 1 status even in 1984 was a little bit of a stretch, considering that relations were thawing and Gorbechev was right around the corner).  And to our credit, if you told someone from 1984 that in 2010 we would have a black president they would probably be shocked.  Also on the plus side the San Fransisco Giants finally won a World Series.  No one could have predicted the modern internet back then either (although Clarke and Hyams did correspond via early email).  And where is Doctor Floyd's cell phone and flat-screen TV?  But look at all the stuff we still don't have.  True artificial intelligence in computers (although admittedly our PCs aren't trying to kill us, either.  OR ARE THEY?). A massive space program.  MANNED FLIGHTS TO JUPITER.  Or Jupiter turning into a star - although I don't know if we would actually want that to happen as the ensuing supernova would kill all life in the solar system with massive radiation (one small scientific fact the Clarke overlooked - normally he was spot on with his science).

The biggest thing that sticks in my craw though is the whole space program thing.  And the sad thing is that the future of 2001/2010 presented in 1984 when this movie came out was improbable even then.  You see, when 2001 was released in 1968 there was actually some optimism about the space program with sci-fi writers and many thought that we just might make it to Jupiter by 2001.  This was because NASA was progressing rapidly towards the moon landing and it could only go upward from there, right?  Unfortunately what the scientists and sci-fi writers and filmmakers didn't count on was politicians and human pettiness.  Or maybe they did.  The sad truth us that the United States was never in the Space Race for scientific knowledge or to advance humanity or anything like that - no, we were in it to beat the Russkies to the moon, to affirm our superiority over Communism.  Thus the Space RACE - and not a race to to the future of humanity either, just a race of pettiness between two superpowers who should have realized that having differing economic systems was not an adequate reason for pointing pants-shittingly frightening nuclear weapons at each other and competing with each other to see which one could get their rocket to the moon first in the ultimate game of "king of the hill."  Well, America won that race and after about, oh, say 1975 our manned space program went right down the toilet.  Oh, sure the Space Shuttle was a beacon of hope for a while - a reusable spacecraft! - and the ISS is a small step in the right direction but the shuttle fleet was used for way too long (and look at the tragic consequences of that) and the only way we can get to the International Space Station is to rely on the Russians (insert Edvard Munch scream here).  So here we are in 2010 with basically no US manned space program.  Oh, excuse me - for a while they were talking about going back to using capsules until they could think up something else... so we were effectively not just going to stop but go backward.  Maybe we could all start wearing love-beads and go-go boots again too.  The only thing left to NASA is basically the unmanned probes.  And even they would probably stop getting launched if the politicians got their way.  All of this really hurts too and should piss off more Americans - aren't we supposed to be a nation of progress, always being on the cutting edge of technology and leading the world in engineering and science?  I guess the answer nowadays is yes only if were talking about making consumer toys and learning new ways to blow people up - the average American doesn't care about scientific progress as long as they have their reality TV and internet porn (made possible, oddly enough by science) while politicians and the military (which completely drives the aerospace industry today) care about science and engineering only enough to have them help to develop weapons systems to the point where we can accomplish the feat of allowing one US Navy aircraft carrier to single-handedly waste a third-world country.  You know what?  The horrible realization that dawns on me is that America's (and let's be fair, Russia's too) manned space program was a sham to begin with - simply another extension of nationalism and global power politics.

I know that this makes me sound bitter and disillusioned, and maybe that's just a little bit true.  Only a little bit though.  Every astronaut who has gone into space automatically earns my respect (I couldn't do it).  Yuri Gagarin, John Glenn, Alexei Leonov, Neil Armstrong and countless other explorers are still timeless heroes in my eyes.  And the engineers and flight controllers who applied their brain power to some of the most baffling problems to ever face humanity (and smoked a lot of cigarettes and drank a lot of coffee in the process) get my admiration for what they achieved.  I just wish all their hard work and sacrifices had been for something that wasn't so... petty.

You now what my problem might be? I think maybe I'm naive.  Maybe I expected the human race to actually undertake massive projects and exploratory undertakings like the space program for reasons other than greed or politics or whatnought.  Maybe I expected humans to be more evolved than our ape ancestors and actually strive for something higher with a more altruistic and noble purpose.



Now I'm depressed.  Where's a Monolith when you really need one?

And You Thought I Was Going To Do A Christmas Movie....

Very short review today, because a) my computer is in the shop for repairs (I'm using another on loan) b) today's movie is a short film (only 30 minutes) and c) I don't want to dwell too long on this short... it's too tempting to over-analyze it when all I should do is just appreciate it as a series of moving images more akin to an animated Salvador Dali painting than a traditional anime movie (yes, today is more anime - yay!).  So, without further ado, here is today's review for

Cat Soup

Short Film, 2001

Director: Tatsuo Sato

Story (What Little There Is)

A small cat tries to save his big sister's soul from being taken to the afterlife after she dies but ends up tearing it in half after a tug-o-war match with Death.  Afterwards, he and his now-zombified sister go to the circus and do stuff.  Then there is a massive flood and they do more stuff.  Then they torture a pig and do more stuff.  And then they do more stuff.  As you can see his movie is light on actual plot, though not on weird shit.

Review

This has to be one of the oddest things to come out of Japan, and I know that's saying a lot.  This is the country that gave us mutant moths, schoolgirl-loving tentacle monsters and House.  As I remarked before at the beginning of this post this short film seems to be more influenced by surrealist painters more than other anime.  What makes it even more extraordinary is that this was directed by the same man who gave us Martian Successor Nadesico, which is about as different from this as Spartacus is from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Bad comparisons aside this surreal stream-of-consciousness animated freak-out is ripe for over-analysis and hunting for meanings in the symbolism behind every weird image put up on screen, but I'll leave that to the High School English Teachers to discuss between joints in the teacher's lounge.  Personally I just love surreal imagery and someone doing something different for a change - and Cat Soup is definitely different.  Check it out.  If you love it, great.  If not, then hey, you only wasted half an hour of your time, right?

Screenshots

No attempts at funny captions today... I think the images speak for themselves.  Also, I had to restrain myself with the number of pictures... it's so easy to want to post 30 million pics up here since the visuals in Cat Soup are so fantastic (in both senses of the word).  I decided to save some surprises for the viewer and limit myself to three.  Hopefully this will inspire you to see this movie.

 

Raiding The (Not So) Divine Archive

There has been a very long delay between the last post and this one, I know.  Long story short, I'm going through computer issues right now so I'm not able to upload screenshots.  I'm still able to watch movies on my PC, but I have to do it using Media Player Classic, which is unable to capture pics at the correct aspect ratio.  Seeing as how I don't want to put warped pictures of movies up here (wait a minute, maybe I do...  maybe I do....) I figured that I could put off doing a real review for a while and do something different.  I have some time to spare; I'm working my way through the TV show Planetes right now and should be finished by the end of next week.  

Anyways, I thought I would do something amusing until I get this issue resolved and post two of my (short) old college film class papers online.  Now you can marvel at some of my earliest attempts at film criticism.  SEE!  The feeble attempts at serious analysis and criticism!  READ!  The dry and overly stilted academic language!  LAUGH!  At the fact that I was obviously watching The Prisoner for the first time while writing these and tried to find a way to work it into a college paper!

Seriously, I sincerely hope that I have progressed in my writing since I wrote these.  For those of you who are curious, these were written for a Chinese film history course, hence the Middle Kingdom motif.

Also, there are massive spoilers since I didn't have to worry about ruining the endings of the movies for the professor.

You have been warned.

 Raise the Red Lantern: A Film Review

Raise the Red Lantern, a film based on a story by Su Tong is a tale set in a wealthy Chinese household in the Nineteen-Twenties.  Specifically, it chronicles the arrival and subsequent experiences of Songlian, a young woman who has married the master of the family.  She is not the only “mistress” in the house though and shares the Master with three other concubines, each given her own house on the palace grounds.  The Red Lantern in the title refers to the lights put outside a concubine’s house when the Master sleeps there that night (and thus grants privileges to the denizen of that house).  The Mistresses are thus always trying to gain favor and the right to light the lanterns at their house.  The film deals with the relationships and politics between these four women and the tragic results.

The acting in this film is of high quality.  Actress Gong Li does a good job of portraying Songlian as progressing from an inexperienced newcomer to a vicious plotter who is on par with the other two rival concubines (the First Mistress is too old to be of importance).  The story offers a twist in that the one mistress who seems to be the nicest is in fact the most poisonous and vice versa (although it is not that surprising, at least not to an experienced or cynical viewer).  The only minor deficit to this film is that Director Yimou Zhang tends to linger a little too long in some shots on the scenery (which is beautiful though).  All of the shots in this film are static: there is no moving camera, no wipes and little to no zooming in or out.  Perhaps this was a way for the Director to portray the lack of change in the self-contained world of the Master’s House (the film takes place during a time of great change in China: ten years before this story starts the Qing Dynasty had been overthrown and a Republic set up).

The Household of Raise the Red Lantern is very traditional and patriarchal in nature (being a last vestige of the old customs of the wealthy upper-classes of China) the prime example being of course that the head of the family has concubines.  This is interesting in that nowhere in the film are the women referred to as “wives” even though they are “married” to the Master.  The Master (who’s face is never clearly seen)  is always called “the Master” as well, not “husband.”  This combined with the fact that the Mistresses have separate quarters implies that the relationship is more akin to slavery than marriage (at least marriage in the modern understanding of the word).

Much like “The Village” from the classic surreal television series The Prisoner the Master’s household is beautiful and pleasant on the surface but sinister underneath.  The concubines plot against and with each other while the servants assist in their scheming or perpetrate deviousness of their own.  The Third Mistress is even killed when it is discovered that she has had an extra-marital affair.  Thus it might be deduced that the “old family customs” of favoritism and rewards serves as indirect means of control of the women by having them quarrel amongst themselves (and thus keeping them occupied and not thinking about other things) while the harsh punishments (such as death to adulteresses and isolation to those that displease the Master) serve as very direct means of control.  The disturbing fact is that Songlian never eventually triumphs over the other Mistresses or even escapes from the place that she realizes is becoming more and more nightmarish.  She eventually goes insane after the death of the Third Mistress (which she was unwillingly responsible for).  Even more disturbing though is the ending which reveals that the Master has married yet again and that the process has started over.  The message then of the film is clear: Those who allow themselves to be manipulated and encouraged to fight amongst themselves will only be controlled and will experience death and misery.  

The Directing Style of Zhang Yimou

Zhang Yimou like most film directors has a distinct directing style that sets him apart from his peers.  This directing technique is unique in both its technical aspect and its content.  A study of two of his films, Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern illustrates this.

Technically Zhang’s direction in both films is the same. He is very static with his shots: there is very little movement of the camera (i.e. there is no panning and no following or tracking of characters except in rare cases).  Also Zhang is fond of showing lengthy shots of scenery to set the mood and build tension.  In Red Lantern he does this to show the bleak state of the inside of the mansion and to foreshadow the suffering that will take place there.  In Red Sorghum there are extended shots of the sorghum fields to set the scene for the film and to build tension at the end right before the moment in the movie where the main protagonists attack a Japanese Army truck.

The main similarity in content and the most noticeable between Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern is the heavy use of the color red.  Besides (obviously) being in both of the films’ titles, red is seen in vast quantities throughout both films.  The wine made from the sorghum in Red Sorghum is red (hence the title) and the sky at the end of the film (after the narrator’s grandmother and her companions have been brutally slaughtered by the Japanese) turns red during a solar eclipse.  The lanterns in Raise the Red Lantern are red (also seen in the title) and red light always bathes the house of the mistress chosen to sleep with the Master that night.  Red in both of these films can thus be seen as symbolizing communism (red has always been a symbol for communism).  Red Sorghum conveys a positive attitude towards communism, portraying it as the main element in the struggle against the Japanese occupation of the Nineteen Thirties and Forties. The narrator’s grandfather “sees red” after the day in which his friends and loved ones are killed by the Japanese.  A main character (the old foreman) is shown as being a suspected communist and being flayed alive.  In Raise the Red Lantern communism is hinted at as a way of controlling people with promises of comforts and dividing the people against each other while dealing out harsh punishments to those who transgress the laws (like the Third Mistress). Zhang’s view of the Communist Party then seems to have changed between the two films (Red Sorghum was released before Raise the Red Lantern).

There is also a tendency for Zhang to avoid showing the masters of households.  In Red Lantern the Master is never shown directly (i.e. there is no clear shot of his face). Likewise the old leper Master of the winery in Red Sorghum is never shown at all in the short time that he is a character in that film.  This might symbolize the remoteness and impersonal nature of the leadership in China.

The central message of both films seems to be that when human beings come together and stand against with each other they can stand against anything and achieve something no matter how small and futile-seeming.  Most of the wine workers at the end of Red Sorghum die in their assault of the Japanese Army truck but they showed that they refused to be dominated by the Japanese and that they would avenge the death of their brothers.  However, the concubines that are divided against each other at the end of Red Lantern only bring pain upon each other and will continue to do so under the arcane rules and oversight of the Master. They have achieved nothing but a petty meaningless existence.