Corrupt at the core

[ritaxis]

It's very late, so I'm not going to go into detail, but I had to take Gloria to the movies today. Summer is not my movie season. It's full of car chases, explosions, and dumb cartoons. We ended up watching "Cars.' This movie is really well done. For once the cg is luminous and colorful, not weirdly grey and muted. It's also visually and kinetically very complex and rich and layered.

But it's corrupt at the core. It's essentially a pandering movie. The teamwork and true love gloss is just a surface polish. What the movie is really about is celebrating all the ick of the 20th century -- the monstrous petroleum gluttony, the insane drive to pave everything (yes, I know, the movie champions the old Route 66 over and against Highway 40, but look what we're supposed to be nostalgic for! Pavement and neon and what amounts to vast swathes of desecration of the desert).

At this point someexasperation can be heard and somebody says "It's just a movie for dog's dake. You're over analyzing and politicizing something that's really only innocent cartooning."

There's no such thing as an innocent Disney movie, okay? There's something to this movie, with its establishing shots of the huge Southern Nascar race track, and the opening dialog heavily emphasizing the Southernness of it all (dang, I don't want to cvome out against the ideas of a "southern culture," but why do they keep piling dreck on the the feast? Do I have to accept this crud in return for The Oxford Magazine and good music? What if I don't want to accept it?). There's something to it, with innocent, cute automobiles guzzling their oil and gas. There's something to it, with the racial stereotypes -- racial stereotypes? on cars? Can't they give these cars personality without racial stereotypes?

So, corrupt at the core. And, after all that, it still has a lot of car crashes and car chases.

On another front, Frank tickled the printer settings so I can print from Word Perfect again, so the ms of The Conduit is printed out and ready to go to its new destination. I have a cover letter almost finished.

And last: I have what Frank assures me is a mosquito bite most likely begind my right ear. It's so painful I can't describe it. It's just a hard place right under the skin, at about where the skull and the neck join, and just an inch or so behind the right ear. Did I say it hurts a lot? And, finally, to bed.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I saw the trailer and thought "I will never understand Americans".

If she wants to see another movie, and if it's on near you, Z and I just saw The Lake House which is a serious time-paradox romance. We enjoyed it.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Funny, that was the movie I had chosen, but she couldn't wait long enough to get out of the house for the 1:45 showing and she couldn't get out soon enough for the 11:15 showing. It has terrible reviews, and it has Keanu Reaves who might be the worst actor ever though he's cute enough that if he doesn't have to do much he's okay anyway: but it looks like it ought to be enjoyable anyway.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Keanu Reeves does a very good slightly bumbling slightly confused very genuine guy in this one, well within his range -- I agree he really he can't manage anything outside his range.

I wonder if some of the reviewers had trouble following it. It seemed perfectly pitched to an-SF reading audience to us, and therefore much more complex than one usually sees in movies.

Of course, this might mean Gloria might have trouble following it... I hadn't thought of that.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

The WashPost critic, who has never understood an SF movie, as near as I can tell, said "Indeed, the movie itself doesn't take time travel very seriously, or it doesn't take science fiction very seriously. In fact, there seems to be no proscription against sending time-sensitive info or even objects through the metaphysical mail."

""Lake House's" variation on the absurd premise is as follows: What would happen if a rural mailbox turned into a wormhole in time so someone from 2004 could communicate with someone from 2006?"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/15/AR2006061502040.html

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

you know, i seriously don't understand the claims that keanu reeves might be the worst actor ever. he has a narrower range than really good actors, but within it he isn't at all bad, IMO. and yet he gets named all the time over people whose range is even narrower, such as steven seagal, arnold schwarzenegger, sylvester stallone, tom arnold, william shatner, pauly shore, jean claude van damme, ashton kutcher, rob schneider, ben affleck ... oh, the list goes one -- these are all actors who i think are considerably worse than keanu reeves; some of them will cause me to not see a movie at all if they're in a leading role. i've yet to avoid a movie because of keanu reeves, and i am not all that sensitive to teh cute.

i might go and see lakehouse in the cinema; it sounds like it has an relatively decent sfnal plot.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

In my case, most of those other actors are completely out of my radar because they're in boomboom-zoomzoom-bangbang movies which I don't go see. Stallone did well in the very first Rocky and in Paradise Alley, but he's never been in another movie I was ever interested in seeing. I've never seen the Bill and Ted movies which are supposed to be Keanu Reaves's masterpieces. I saw My Own Private Idaho which was a really irritating movie in many ways and he was good enough in that, I guess, except when he was delivering Shakespeare lines, which was an annoying conceit anyway but not his fault, I suppose.