HALLOWEEN VIEWING

by Kevin Wohlmut

 

Now that I'm back in a sedentary job where I stare at a computer screen all day, time for another frivolous post.

Does anyone even have time to watch movies and TV anymore? (Where, by "watch", I mean, find something you haven't seen before and analyze it -- rather than just putting on a new movie as background noise and not paying much attention to it while you do the dishes and pay your bills online; or, coming home burned-out after a long day at work and flicking on a movie that you've seen a dozen times before while you scrounge for a few more Doritos crumbs at the bottom of the bag.)

I will try to avoid major 'spoilers' here; if you want spoilers, you can get good summaries of all these flicks with just a little research on Wikipedia.

  1. Doctor Who -- "Blink"
  2. In theatres -- Susan Cooper's "The Seeker: The Dark is Rising"
  3. On [rare] DVD -- "Idiocracy"

Spoilers on Wikipedia: here, here, and here.

SOMETHING TO SEE:

Doctor Who (Season 3 2007): "Blink"

For anyone who doesn't know, Doctor Who is pretty much the longest-running sci-fi TV series in the world, and in England it's a cultural icon much the way "Star Trek" is in America. However, until 2005, Doctor Who was notoriously tacky. It was a cheap kid's show and didn't try hard to hide it. Of course over its 40-year history, we fans could indeed point to quite a lot of good episodes by any criteria. But the majority of the show was defined by styrofoam sets that fell over, cheesy dialogue and silly plots.

That all changed in 2005 when the BBC decided to give the Doctor a makeover. Not only do they have first-rate special effects now -- both great digital effects, and much better sets and costumes -- but more importantly, they have worked very diligently to evoke the same kind of intelligence and intensity of recent successful American sci-fi such as "Lost", "Heroes" and "Battlestar Galactica" (referring to the 2005 remake, of course). The plots and dialogue are much smarter and more focused, and they spend time exploring deeper themes that were basically taboo in the past -- such as, whether and what kind of romantic feelings does the Doctor have towards his sometimes-disposable but inevitably lovely female assistants. But still somehow they manage to keep the whimsical and optimistic atmosphere which has always set Doctor Who apart from "grittier" and more violent sci-fi that Americans like to produce.

The recent episode "Blink" is a great example of this. It's well-written and very understated horror which, with very few special effects at all, turns out to be far, far more viscerally effective than the old Doctor Who with rubbery monster costumes and firecracker explosions destroying cheap model spaceships. It is a genuinely frightening story, but the scares all come from suspense rather than gore or violence. (For example, as others on the Internets have pointed out, in this episode we have an exciting chase scene where the opponents are only inanimate objects.) Therefore, it's interesting for adults and safe for kids -- it gives you that deliciously creepy kind of scare where you shriek for just a half-a-second, and then laugh at yourself for being so foolish.

  It's a fascinating episode, partly because it is truly quintessentially a Doctor Who episode, yet the Doctor himself is barely in it. I think this makes it the best episode for a new viewer to break into the series (previously, that award probably went to "City of Death" with Tom Baker as the Doctor). And it might just have usurped the title of my favorite Doctor Who episode of all time, due to its complex but fast-paced plot and subtle humor.

Watch it if you can find it. Of course, as someone who has basically mastered almost all forms of digital media, I can aid you significantly in finding it. Just drop me a line.

 

SOMETHING NOT TO SEE:

In theatres -- "The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising"

Susan Cooper's five-part series of "Dark is Rising" novels, published in the early 1970s, was pretty much my favorite series of books of all time. Definitely in the top three if not the top. So it is with a heavy heart that I have to pan the movie adaptation and express my deepest hope that they do NOT make any of the sequels.

It would be hard to compare this series to Tolkein directly, because it's a very different type of fantasy than Tolkein or C.S. Lewis' "Narnia". The books are a tad bit dated 40 years later -- listening to the "Wireless" is big entertainment for the Stanton family, and they're not talking about your 802.11(g) LAN card -- but nevertheless they are superb young adult fiction for ages about 10-11 and up, and withstand repeated reading over and over years later. Unfortunately, unlike Tolkein and Narnia, "The Dark is Rising" received the typical Hollywood movie treatment. (Even though it was apparently shot in Romania.)

 

While those other famous fantasies were lovingly crafted to be faithful to their originals, the "Dark is Rising" movie makers systematically, purposefully and methodically stripped away absolutely everything that was good about the original books, in order to jam it into the tawdry mold of a Hollywood effects-driven action picture. Therefore, predictably, as we have seen over and over for about 30 years, even good actors such as Ian McShane were powerless to salvage this piece-of-dreck script. The writers attempted to "modernize" the script a little bit, by adding cell phones and iPods and references to the War on Terror. I myself would rather have left it as a period piece from the 1950s or 1960s, but I wouldn't have minded some degree of modernization -- Tolkein and Narnia had a few modernizing touches thrown in, yet still those were good movies -- but the problem I had with the flick was the things that the writers intentionally removed.

First and most noticeable of all, every single trace of recognizeable Arthurian legend was utterly excised from the movie. What, does Disney now own the exclusive copyright to the King Arthur storyline or something?? The novels built upon the legend of King Arthur, and used the theme of time travel to explore some of the legend's ramifications in the 20th century and why King Arthur and what he stood for are still important today. I thought they did an absolutely wonderful job of fleshing out details to a story that we all know in the abstract. Yet a movie viewer who hadn't read the books would walk out of the theatre with ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE that Ian McShane's character, "Merriman", was supposed to be "Merriman Lyon", Merry Lion, in other words, MERLIN, from Arthurian legend. In the book, Will Stanton travelled back in time and had the honor of meeting King Arthur personally. This was just one of many references to actual Celtic/Welsh legend which was completely obliterated in the movie, for reasons I'm about to explain.

You see, in Hollywood cookie-cutter action movies, there can only be one hero, one man (it's almost never a woman, except for Sigourney Weaver), one man who is Right when everyone else is Wrong. Myopic Hollywood executives were probably afraid that introducing King Arthur as a character would confuse American audiences as to who the "real" hero of the film was "supposed" to be. Hollywood executives don't trust the audience to sort through multiple complex characters and decide for themselves where their sympathies should lie. In a Hollywood film, the "hero" has to be one and only one person, marked clearly as if he was wearing a White Hat, and he's the only guy with the vision and the personal power and integrity to make the right decisions and win battles. There can never be more than one valid point of view; everyone besides the Hero is either an ancillary weakling, who supports the hero in some minor way but can't do any Leadership themselves; or else a black-hat villain; an antagonist, even if on the same "side", at minimum because they interfere with what the Hero wants to do.

(My longtime correspondents already know where I'm going with this: Hollywood is one of several influences which lead many or most Americans to fall for an individualistic "cult of the Hero" which makes people think that One Man, like George Bush or Barak Obama, will be the Answer and the Solution; to all the problems of a much, much larger, older, and impersonal System. Thus we get the political attitude today that you are unequivocally a villain if you want to impose any slight checks or balances whatsoever upon George Bush's power; we also get the opposite meme... that anyone who opposes George Bush must support Gore or Kerry or Hillary or whoever it is at the moment -- because only the Chosen One Democrat has the power to defeat the Evil George Bush.)

Never mind that many of the most successful movies in history violate this "Cult of the Hero" rule. (In Star Wars, for example, Luke Skywalker was the gifted son of a powerful father, but clearly he was still part of a kick@$$ TEAM. A team that he had to split off from, at times, but every member of the team was necessary and crucial for defeating the Empire.) There is speculation in Wikipedia that the "Dark Is Rising" screenwriters made many changes to the 1973 novel, in order to differentiate it from this century's "Harry Potter" series, but this is a sterling example of changes going in the wrong direction.

In the original "Dark is Rising" novel, Will Stanton, the protagonist, was not the One Chosen "Savior" or "Hero". He was merely the youngest of a large team of powerful Old Ones. And this, I think, was a big part of what made the books appealing, particularly to young adults. Will had to learn things as he went along, just as young adults do; rather than being handed all the power and glory on a silver platter.

In the novel, Will was indeed prophesied to complete the central Quest of the book. But first, in the novel, Will had to learn his powers, like the other Old Ones before him, from reading the ancient secrets of the Book of Gramayre. (In the movie, Will is the only person who can read the Book of Gramayre, and because he is the Chosen One, it looks just like plain English to him but gibberish to everyone else, including the viewer. The Book tells Will many of the secrets which in the original novel, Will had to puzzle out for himself. In the movie, Will can just use his fully-developed powers autonomically, without any learning or conscious thought; he never needs to weigh a decision about what power to use, when, or how, as he does in the novel. Because he's just that gifted. He is the Chosen One, after all.)

In the novel, Merriman Lyon was the most ancient and powerful of the Old Ones; he tutored and protected Will several times during conflicts, before Will could use his own powers. Other Old Ones, including the Lady of Greythorne Manor (played by Frances Conroy -- typecast from her Harry Potter role, apparently), they protected Will from their many enemies, sometimes at the cost of their own lives. Young adults can identify with this because that's how a real family [ideally] works. (In the movie, Will had all the power; the other Old Ones were basically just better-informed bystanders along for the ride, and 11-year-old Will had to protect them instead of vice versa.)

But perhaps most importantly, a major part of the original novels -- all five of them -- was the role that ordinary non-magical people played, however unknowingly, in the epic battle between the forces of Darkness and Light. Will meets plenty of "mundane", nonmagical, human characters, in the "real" world, and these people have reactions and interactions with him -- liking Will or disliking him, helping or hindering him at crucial moments -- which have a huge bearing on whether and how Will can complete his quest. Merriman Lyon explains that every decision that ordinary mortals make, even in their ordinary lives, helps the cause of either the Dark or the Light, in however small or large a way. This treatment also imbues the reader's own everyday life with a little bit of magic; by suggesting that even ordinary things that ordinary people do, can have wonderful, magical consequences.

(But in a Hollywood movie, we can't possibly tolerate the populist theme that the things ordinary people do will actually matter towards anything. Only the Hero matters. In the movie, there's just one bad guy, the Black Rider, who is the source of all Evil in the world for all we can tell; and Will is the only one who can confront him. There can't be a multitude of people who contribute to Evil just by living their own ordinary lives, because that might make movie viewers uncomfortable about their own lives, their own selfishness and weaknesses and personality faults. Nope, in a Hollywood movie, Evil comes from one and only one source, so you MUST identify with the One Good Guy, or else you're just a bit player/victim who is wasting screen time that might otherwise go towards exciting special effects.) For example, in the Harry Potter movies, the things that his normal "muggle" family and neighbors do, have a significant impact on Harry's life; but in the "Dark is Rising" novels, these impacts are even more integral and better handled, I believe.

So when you think about a typical American action movie -- a cop movie, something like "Die Hard" -- even though they're exciting stories, you might be able to discern the exact same Hollywood cookie-cutter philosophy. Just replace "magic" with "bullets and violence" and you see a story where only One Hero has the vision and the power to reach the all-important "O.K. Corral"-type Showdown with the One Bad Guy who is the source of all Evil. Mundane, "ordinary" characters can't have any real impact on the plot, because only Ahhhhnuld Schwarzenegger is strong enough to survive getting stabbed and electrocuted whereas everyone else just falls over and dies instantly after getting shot in the leg with a .22 ... James Bond never misses with his gun, while hordes of minions on either side can't hit the broad side of a barn. ... Only Dirty Harry has the vision and integrity to spot the Bad Guy's lies while everyone else, even his fellow cops or his girlfriend or whoever, is fooled. The One Hero is the only consequential character, and ultimately wins, fundamentally because he is who he is; not because he's smart or learns from his mistakes or has common sense or help from the people around him. Hollywood thinks the only story American audiences can understand, is this messianic "Chosen One" story, presented over and over again in various settings. It may be becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy.

As I have mentioned in past blog posts, I am getting really tired of movies where victory all revolves around One Hero with the appellation "Chosen One"; like the Matrix or the Phantom Menace. That plot stopped being interesting somewhere around the Highlander sequel. And to the extent that movies influence the larger society rather than vice versa, I think this Hollywood expediency -- constantly repeated, in movie after movie -- is starting to warp American society with its "Cult of the Hero".

I think this is an expediency which was in the past adopted mainly for monetary reasons: "We're paying a lot of money for this famous actor to play the lead role, therefore we have to get our money's worth and everything in the story must revolve around the famous actor." Famous actors already have a fan base that we can count on for ticket sales; a more complex ensemble-type story, with more than one 'Star', is riskier in terms of marketing -- and we don't dare take risks with a ninety million dollar movie. You could argue that "The Dark Is Rising" doesn't fit this particular mold because the lead actor is an unknown 13-year-old child actor instead of someone famous; but clearly, the book was intentionally changed to make it fit more into this Hollywood mold.

Well, the other four novels in the "Dark is Rising" sequence are even more team-oriented than this one. So I don't believe these same people can even produce a script for any of the sequels which makes any sense at all, if they continue with the above rewrites and abuses.

Therefore, sadly, I hope my deepest hopes that the rest of my favorite series doesn't get made into movies.


SOMETHING TO SEE:

Rare DVD -- "Idiocracy"

You want to see a REALLY scary movie, which is not scary due to violence, but because it's so close to being true?

Despite its extremely crude, lowbrow humor, "Idiocracy" is a fascinating movie on many levels, not least on the level of its production and promotion history in the real world. But I'll get to that in a minute.

The movie starts out by explaining, in crude layman's terms, the old theory of "Dysgenics": that stupid people reproduce "more avidly" than smart people, while smart people have other, more intellectual goals and pleasures besides reproduction. Because our modern technological civilization no longer promotes Survival of the Fittest, the stupid people are therefore destined to crowd out the "smart" people to oblivion in modern society, simply through overbreeding.

 

Luke Wilson experiences this theory first-hand when he is accidentally cryogenically frozen until the year 2505, and then frantically struggles to find a time machine so he can return to the days when humanity didn't realize we had it so good... He expertly portrays a mediocre intelligence, an underachiever, suddenly confronted with a world where everyone else is far stupider than he is.

This is the sort of thing that would appeal to curmudgeonly conservatives, right? From your grandfather, on up to Bill O'Reilly on Fox News. It sounds like the movie was written for these "You-Kids-Get-Off-My-Lawn" conservatives. You know the type: "Kids and their text-messaging abbreviations equals the End of Civilization" conservatives, "See, Rush told-you-so" conservatives, "Kids these days are so spoiled" conservatives, "Back in my day people had more sense" conservatives. But this is mainly a ruse to draw in such conservatives and then show them a far more subversive message.

As the movie progresses, it becomes obvious that genetics are not the only thing dulling the blades of American minds. Corporate logos are everywhere, people name their kids after products such as Lexus and Fritos, and the ubiquitous high-definition TV constantly blasts out the crudest, lowest-common-denominator entertainment you can imagine. Nobody seems to be able to define themselves by ideas or achievements -- only by the advertising and products that they prefer. People blurt out corporate slogans every time serious thinking is called for.

Over the course of the movie it's revealed that Gatorade and Starbuck's are on the verge of destroying the entire world, accidentally. Believe it or not, this plot development makes perfect sense at that point in the movie. The super-advanced technology of the future keeps people alive, comfortable, and employed -- without anyone ever having to solve tough problems -- right up until the looming collapse that everyone except the audience is too stupid to see.

It's not really a science-fiction movie, despite being set half a millenium from now, in the year 2505. It's a black comedy which speaks clearly to everyone who sees it today.

If you never heard of this 2006 movie before, you're not alone. A few promotional trailers were shown in theatres for about two weeks and then pulled. It opened in a grand total of 125 theatres in seven "select cities" across the country, which did not include major metropolises like San Francisco nor Los Angeles. Then it died a quiet death.

This movie starred Luke Wilson, along with Dax Sheppard (star of the popular comedy series "Scrubs"), and Maya Rudolph (comedienne from Saturday Night Live), with a bit part from Justin Long (sidekick in the latest Die Hard movie). All were proven moneymakers. Mike Judge, the director, had already made Fox boatloads of money for stuff like "Beavis and Butthead," "Office Space" and "King of the Hill".

Obviously the decision was made to intentionally kill the movie by way of insufficient advertising promotion, preventing it from any opportunity to recoup its costs. So, there's a bit of a running debate on the Internet... why did Fox Studios kill its own movie?

Mike Judge was/[is] a tried-and-true moneymaker, so the studio was willing to spend millions on making his movie. It's not a special-effects driven movie, but there were some effects in there, yeah. So how much did it cost to make? Try looking up its production cost on the Internet for yourself. It seems like Fox has eradicated all mention of how much this movie cost from the public record, probably to save themselves the embarassment of revealing how much they lost when they decided to kill its promotion. They spent almost $1.5 million making and remaking the promotional spots alone -- before pulling the promo from the public -- so I'm guessing they spent at least $20-$30 million making the movie itself, perhaps even twice that.

Yet a multibillion-dollar media company like Fox can apparently afford to crumple up $30 million and toss it in the trash, rather than piss off corporate advertisers in general with an anti-corporate subversive movie. (I'm guessing there were larger issues at play here than simply the Gatorade and Starbuck's ad accounts; Gatorade has some commericals on Fox TV, but Starbucks never seems to advertise, nor need to...)

In the end, "Idiocracy" is a dangerous and frightening film because it exposes many aspects of our nation's philosophy today as lies. We are constantly told by politicians, news media, and businessmen, that modern American Capitalism is the best way -- indeed, the only way -- to promote competition and innovation, and therefore improve our lives and that of the rest of the human race. "Idiocracy" graphically reminds us of what we all know, yet bury deep down in the back of our minds when we hear such lofty rhetoric: that in the real world, Capitalism is just as happy, and can make even more profit, in a world where everyone is a lazy stupid couch potato lacking any initiative or drive whatsoever. The movie forces viewers to question whether Capitalism in general, not just genetics, might be steering our country towards that particular outcome -- where consumers are easy prey for it. Even the most curmudgeonly viewer leaves the movie realizing that you can't just blame things on stupid kids entirely.

We are constantly told today, that free-market, unfettered Capitalism will take care of everything for us: it'll come up with solutions for environmental problems, provide us better health care, take care of our retirements if we just trust in the stock market. But anyone who sees how plausible the "Idiocracy" scenario is, realizes that there are some awful fates which Capitalism won't lift a damn finger to save us from. That implies that there's more to human life, achievement and morality, than Capitalism and markets -- and that's a message that Fox Network just can not afford to promote.

Those on the Internet who even halfheartedly try to defend Fox's decision not to promote the movie, can only offer the excuses that its "aesthetic" is "flawed" and that it's "uncomfortable to sit through", therefore it was unlikely to make money.

But hey, you could say the same thing about any of the spate of "torture porn" flicks recently -- "Saw" or "Hostel", parts five, six, seven, eight -- "aesthetically unattractive" and "uncomfortable to sit through," yet those movies were promoted nationwide and made tons of profit. Clearly, even the people who classify the movie this way, realize that those traits are intentional and that the discomfort comes mainly from "Idiocracy" challenging the viewer's assumptions, and making them ask how smart their own lives really are. "Uncomfortable" movies like Schindler's List can be very successful simply by choosing a different promotion and marketing strategy than mass-market mall-theatre release. Proper promotion can certainly ramp up DVD sales, and everyone already knew that Mike Judge's "Office Space" made several times its theatrical profit in terms of cult-favorite DVD sales. Yet the movie's promotion clearly had the rug pulled from under it.

Hence a convincing case can be made that this movie was essentially killed for asking tough questions of its audience.

And then we wonder why Hollywood keeps churning out cookie-cutter crap like "The Dark Is Rising," above. But no, no, no, there's no such thing as censorship in this Freest Land of the Freemost Free-thinking Americans. Go back to sitting on your Laz-E-Boy and eating your tub of Flaturin...

Do I worry about Dysgenics, myself? Well, I try to comfort myself when watching this movie, that intelligence is not solely determined by genetics. People can rise to the challenges of their environment; even fairly stupid people can inheirit and use wisdom written down from the past. People can learn. On the other hand, you don't have to be Ralph Nader to agree that this corporate dumbing-down of society is already well underway and has been for decades.

Can we defend against such a threat? Satire, in the form of entertainment such as "Idiocracy", is a very powerful tool in that defense. Satire rips the mask off of corporate ingratiation when corporations try to convince you that they're just another good friend of yours sitting next to you on the couch. Satire sharpens the mind and provides antibodies against a broad class of similar attacks. Perhaps that's what the killing of "Idiocracy" was really all about.

 


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