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Here’s some free advice for anyone looking to become a critic: be prepared to experience things you don’t like. If you just write up reviews of things you like, you’re a reviewer, not a critic. I know I’ve fallen into this trap, and I’ve touched on it before, in this very series, so I’ve been looking for an opportunity to encounter a film with which I’m unfamiliar but probably wouldn’t be terribly interested in watching otherwise. When my co-worker insisted that we watch Grandma’s Boy at our monthly Movie Night, and the film began as it meant to go on with stoner humor and jabs at gamer culture, I could feel myself smiling. Not at the humor, because there isn’t much of that despite this being a comedy, no – I was smiling because I was watching an atrocious movie and I couldn’t wait to tear it apart.

Grandma’s Boy, released in 2006, has absolutely nothing to do with the pioneering feature-length comedy of the same name released back in 1922. The older film was about a cowardly man who needed help from his grandmother to overcome his fears and win over the affections of a girl. The 2006 film follows Alex, a single 35-year-old video games tester, as he is thrown out of his apartment because his roommate blew all of the rent money on Filipino hookers. He eventually moves in with his grandmother (thus making him a grandma’s boy, get it? Get it?), charms the female middle manager brought in to help get the video game in production ready for release, and participates in antics related to getting stoned, making fun of the company’s resident genius programmer and getting his grandma and her girlfriends into Antiques Roadshow. If this sounds disjointed in the narrative broad strokes, wait until you see the end result.

Let’s get the praise out of the way so I can go into detail about what doesn’t work in this deplorable movie. The two people whose efforts make this movie watchable are Doris Roberts, as Alex’s grandma Lilly, and Linda Cardellini as Samantha, the middle management troubleshooter. Doris is a delight, one of the few members of the cast with real comedic experience, and her bits show a woman who loves her grandson and has learned to take everything in stride. Linda’s Samantha isn’t terribly well developed, but she’s charming and also rolls well with the punches, on top of being the kind of middle manager anybody in a day job situation would be lucky to have. She’s the kind of manager who knows well the sort of people she has working under her, and also is capable of interfacing with the superiors in the company on their level. She comes off as a true go-between interested in overall success, rather than being out for herself. I’d almost call her a positive female role-model, but given the sort of movie she’s in, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when she gets just as high, drunk and wild as everybody else the audience is supposed to care about.

Having your manager look like this doesn’t exactly hurt, either.

On the other side of things, we have Allan Covert as our “hero”. It’s not that his character, Alex, is unlikable. His jabs tend to be mostly delivered in a good-natured way, since people do need to get along with him otherwise the audience won’t buy him as a protagonist. No, what bugs me about Alex is that his motivations are more clouded than the room in his dealer’s basement. When I think of good comedies, I think of people who are in a situation where they want to do something better or make something of themselves. Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles is dedicated to succeeding when the white men in power would have him fail. Marty McFly in Back to the Future wants to fix his past to make a better future, since he’s kinda stuck there anyway. Jason Nesmith in Galaxy Quest is looking for something meaningful, a fresh start after riding his washed-up sci-fi television career just about as far as he can. Adrian Cronauer in Good Morning Vietnam wants to support his fellow troops with the truth and great music, not the stuff his superiors consider “safe”. In all of these situations, we have protagonists who are somewhat down on their luck, looking upwards and struggling to become more than they are. This doesn’t have to fit every comedy for it to be successful, but at least Ferris Bueller and Jeff Lebowski have clear motivations. Ferris is having a great day off while helping his friends, and Jeff wants his rug back. It really tied the room together.

Alex in Grandma’s Boy feels like someone tried to cross Ferris Bueller with Jeff Lebowski but the experiment went horribly, horribly wrong. Ferris was a kid who had everything together, a sense of ambition and poise, and used his smarts and charm to show his friends a fantastic time. Lebowski’s a stoner, an unmotivated deadbeat, but this plays into the events that occur in his story and remains consistent throughout. Alex waffles back and forth between being an ambitious smart guy and a pothead slacker with little to no warning. He’s trying to be a video game programmer instead of just a tester one minute, and saying “fuck it” and getting baked the next. If the writers wanted to do something with these shifts in tone and make Alex out to be some kind of manic depressive who needed to get a hold of the aimless direction his life had taken, that probably would have worked. Instead we have things working out for him mostly due to contrivance. Real quality storytelling there, Allen.

“Yeah, these assholes actually gave me money to make a movie! Can you believe it?”

Now, not all comedies should have meaning or messages or even necessarily need good characters. But if you’re just going to be a movie about stoners or gamers or race relations or family matters, then in my opinion you should pick one and run with it. The Gamers got this, and was very funny to me as a result. This flick starts with some gamer humor and then meanders into stoner territory before it begins a rather annoying habit wandering back and forth. Waffling between spheres of humor like this just makes the whole thing shamble along like a Frankensteinian construction of Half-Baked and Hackers. Or, more to the point, it feels like Half-Baked bent Hackers over a railing and went to work on its nether regions with a variety of blunt and phallic objects.

The most glaring thing for me when it comes to Grandma’s Boy‘s shortcomings, however, is its sense of time. For one thing, the sense of comedic timing necessary to good humor seems absent for most of the jokes. They either go on for too long or are delivered so poorly that you’re lucky to elicit a bit of a chuckle. And speaking of going on too long, moreso than the comedic timing problem, this movie might only be 96 minutes but the way it is shot, written and acted, it feels quite a bit longer. Good comedy knows not to overstay its welcome. Grandma’s Boy is the sort of comedy that crashes on your couch for six months, doesn’t pay you any rent or grocery money, and leaves the whole place smelling like pot.

At least Doris never failed to class up the joint.

There are so many better comedies out there than Grandma’s Boy. Any of the movies I’ve mentioned previously are much better investments of your time than this turd. The jerk programmer’s neuroses are never fully explored or explained, existing instead so we can laugh at his weirdness and inability to interact with real people – though, in fairness, if I had his office setup I’d be tempted not to deal with my co-workers either. There’s stuff that makes absolutely no sense, like Dante’s obsession with exotic animals protecting his stash or what I like to call the Giant Space Party From Nowhere. And just when you think you couldn’t be any more repulsed by the movie’s failing attempts at humor that go on for way too long and ultimately aren’t all hat funny, up pops David Spade to remind you he’s still trying to be as funny as he was in Tommy Boy. Which he isn’t. You might get a couple of laughs out of Grandma’s Boy but ultimately it’s the kind of sloppy, flaccid and almost mean-spirited comedy that Hollywood seems to think is what the slack-jawed popcorn-gobbling public wants to see. If nothing else, we see how humor in the style of Adam Sandler’s movies turns out when Adam Sandler isn’t directly involved. As much as some of his comedy falls flat from time to time, when we watch some of Sandler’s roles we feel like he’s got two things necessary to be a viable human being and a good humorist: a brain, and a heart. Grandma’s Boy has neither.

Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.

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Here’s a fun fact you might not have known about me. I grew up in house full of women. It was my mother and my two sisters, and when I was a young boy my grandmother moved in with us as well. Being surrounded by women, it’s probably no surprised I was exposed to more than my share of romance stories. A good romance is one that puts two individuals in a situation where a real and visceral connection is made, an emotional and physical attraction that’s nearly addictive in its intoxication, and then makes thing interestng by putting obstacles between the individuals. On that level, friends, let me say that Brokeback Mountain works. The individuals just happen to be gay shepherds. That’s shepherds, not cowboys.

The year is 1963. Ennis Del Mar, a downtrodden and stoic ranch hand, finds a job herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain along with former rodeo rider Jack Twist. The two bond on the long nights up on the mountain and eventually fall in love. Their summer is cut short due to their boss seeing them together and they go their separate ways, Ennis marrying his long-time fiancée Alma while Jack tries to break back into rodeo, only to meet his future wife, Lureen. The men start their families but never manage to put their feelings for one another behind them, and meet after four years for a fishing trip that becomes the first of many. As much as Jack wants to build a life for them together, Ennis refuses, afraid of the potentially lethal backlash that could occur and claim both their lives. Over the years, it becomes clear that neither man is anywhere near happy in their daily lives, and the only thing that keeps them going is those trips together up to Brokeback.

This is a story that is steeped in atmosphere. From the scenery to the aesthetic of cars and clothes, we not only see the passage of time, but we can feel it. The way in which the years roll by, while glossing over things in places which I’ll address later, helps contribute to the film’s atmospheric density. This is also helped by good writing of very human characters, which leads me to the acting.

Miss Hathaway is an actress I’ve yet to dislike in a role.

All four lead actors in this film are absolutely stellar. Michelle Williams gives real emotion to her portrayal of the wife fully aware of her husband’s true passions, and when we see her come to the full realization of her rejection, Williams shows us the depth of the wound without saying a word. Anne Hathaway, showing just how talented she is when she’s not being a princess, is a woman who gradually moves more distant from both her husband and the person she was when they met and fell in love, a very real change that unfortunately comes over more people than it really should. Jake Gyllenhal inhabits Jake with electrifying passion while the late Heath Ledger’s quiet intensity and silent angst power through the film. When these two are together, the chemistry is palpable and their awkwardness about the situation feels just as real as their feelings.

Enough gushing, as Brokeback Mountain has a few issues and I wouldn’t be able to call myself anything approaching a “critic” with a straight face if I didn’t point them out. As much as these actors give their all, the movie moves at such a pace that we really don’t experience a great deal of depth in them. Oh, they’re developed and they don’t feel as laughably two-dimensional as some others I could name, but there’s a lot more that could have been done with them if this hadn’t been a film. In other words, we’re not in the shallow end of the pool but we’re not swimming in the ocean, either. Brokeback Mountain probably could have surmounted this problem in the form of a novel, or an HBO mini-series. I doubt PBS would have touched the tent scene with a ten-foot pole. Insert pun about poles here, insert pun about inserting things here, we’re walking, we’re walking. (Sorry, Cleo, I love that joke).

While I brought it up facetiously, I would like to point out some of the hypocracy that Brokeback Mountain alludes to in terms of the attitude towards homosexuals. Imagine, if you will, that gender roles were reversed in our world. Homosexuality is the norm, and people only couple with others of the same sex. Now, imagine you fall in love with someone of the opposite sex. The impulses, emotions and conventions that many people in this world take for granted are suddenly taboo, and you are under threat of death every single day because people can’t wrap their minds around your “strangeness”. That’s the sort of world gay men and women live in every hour of every day. Now, some places are better than others, things are improving in terms of accepting these people as, well, people, but for every pride parade or happy common-law couple, there’s someone living a lie because Bubba Ray is so eager to please Jaysus he keeps a hangin’ rope in his shed next to the special belt he uses to beat his wife. And Bubba Ray’s a stockbroker who lives in a suburb and goes to church every single Sunday in a $10,000 suit. But I digress.

Brokeback Mountain is a film about passion. The vistas and scenery captured beautifully in this film are powerful, sensual images that are the perfect backdrop for people falling in love. You couldn’t ask for a more evocative setting. The score perfectly fits the deep melancholy and quiet tragedy of this situation and the lifes of these people as they slowly but inevitably unravel. Director Ang Lee is able to balance the surrealness of some scenes with very real emotional power in others, driving home the fact that these are all human beings involved in this, and none of them are unholy abominations bent on undermining the sanctity of marriage or utterly destroying the individuality or another person. They make decisions, they try to be happy, they screw up and try to deal with the aftermath of their mistakes. There’s a reason this film won three Oscars, in the areas I just mentioned.

At the end of the day, Brokeback Mountain isn’t telling us anything we haven’t heard before. The power and beauty of it, however, is the unashamed way in which it approaches its subject matter and the unflinching way its point is driven home. More than being a rather extreme interpretation of the ‘bromance’ and a taut, well-acted if somewhat glossed-over tale of star-crossed lovers and rule-abiding rebels, Brokeback Mountain is a cautionary tale. It’s one that’s been out there for some time, but that doesn’t stop it from being a damn good one. The lesson to be learned in this, dear reader, is this: Life is too short to be miserable, and if you are in a situation where you are mired in misery every day, where you are being forced to try and be someone you’re not, get out. Get out while you’re still alive.

Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.

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In the course of writing this review, things have gone on a lot longer than I thought they would. So I’m not going to waste any more of your time than necessary today, folks. It’s way too nice outside in eastern Pennsylvania, anyway. So, without further adieu, here follows my review of Dark City, or as I also know it, The Movie The Matrix Tried Really Hard To Be Only To Fail Miserably Especially Due To Two Over-Complicated And Ultimately Useless Sequels.

The film opens with a man in a bathtub, who wakes to find blood on his forehead and a complete lack of memories. He’s in a hotel room and he receives a phone call telling him that he needs to run, as someone is coming for him who should not find him. Since he also happens to find the mutilated body of a call girl in the bedroom, he doesn’t need to be told twice. He makes his way into the night-time city streets and begins a search for his own identity, which is tied to the mysterious Strangers who are looking for him. A fastidious police detective is hot on his trail, his estranged wife is confused by what’s happening to him, and the psychiatrist who called him to warn him about the Strangers clearly knows more than he’s telling.

And so do I. This is one of those “see it for yourself, that’s all I’m gonna tell you” situations. Those of you who might’ve seen Dark City before probably know why I’m being tight-lipped about the plot, and those of you who haven’t are best served going into this one cold. So rather than talk about the plot’s threads and nuances, allow me a moment to talk about Alex Proyas, the writer and director. His previous work that put him on the map was his film adaptation of James O’Barr’s The Crow. You know, The Crow, Brandon Lee’s last film, perhaps the best heroic-vengeance-from-beyond-the-grave flick ever made? Alex’s type of aesthetic and directorial style shines again in Dark City, which is an ironic choice of words considering how prevalent night-time and the shadows are. Still, it’s a vision that’s every bit as unique as The Crow, and this one sprang like a gothic goddess fully formed from Alex’s head.

One of the things Proyas does best is atmosphere, and Dark City is steeped in it. The architecture, the fog, the clothes and the set design all create a setting that is simultaneously old-fashioned and timeless, both noir and fantastical. And this is before everything begins to change. The way in which the growing buildings, altered states of people’s lives and the manner in which things are altered in this city are rendered in a way that still holds up ten years later. Other than the Strangers choosing to use knives rather than relying on their preternatural abilities, there’s nothing dated or laughable about this film or its design despite its age. Like Blade Runner, it’s going to last quite a long time.

He might not look the hero type, but just wait…

Another crucial and brilliant component of this film is its cast. Now, I know some people out there weren’t fond of Rufus Sewell’s performance in Dark City, saying he was flat and unemotional. I disagree. For the most part, Rufus’ character needs to rediscover his emotions along with his memories, and since he’s a relatively intelligent guy, he’s doing so in an analytical manner, and to me, he’s never dull and always interesting to watch. William Hurt’s detective is not just interesting, he’s a joy, the sort of smart, hard-nosed cop who just wants the truth no matter what he has to do to get it. Kiefer Sutherland shows a lot of the range that has gone unnoticed during his years as Jack Bauer, here playing a very clever if somewhat cowardly psychiatrist who’s got a particular angle on the whole situation. And Alex Proyas did the entire human race a favor by putting Jennifer Connelly in some slinky lounge singer attire for a few scenes. I mean, she’s a fine actress and I’ve enjoyed just about everything she’s been in including Ang Lee’s Hulk, but damn the girl can burn up a screen.

The real stand-out for me, though, is Richard O’Brien. Savvy watchers, listeners or readers may recognize him as the guy who played Riff Raff in the cult classic phenomenon The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But if you’re expecting camp or humor from him in this film, you are in for a shock. Mr. Hand, his character, is quiet, menacing, thoroughly creepy and disturbingly polite. He’s one of the most effective villainous henchmen I’ve seen in quite some time. He actually comes across as more interesting and more dangerous than the lead villain, Mr. Book (although Ian Richardson does give the big guy some impressive gravitas), and to this day, when he stalks onto the screen, I get chills.

Seriously. He’s extremely creepy.

I mention that this is the movie The Matrix could have been. Allow me to elaborate on that point for a moment, if you’ll indulge me. The ‘everything you know is a lie’ trick isn’t anything new in cinema. Both Dark City and The Matrix pull the trick for different reasons and while it works in both films, it feels more effective in this one than in The Matrix. I think I can explain why I feel this way without invoking the unfortunate sequels to the latter film. In The Matrix, apart from the clear post-modern philosophical influence primarily attributed to Jean Baudrillard, the dichotomy of the world in which we’re introduced to the characters and the truth behind that world serves as yet another cautionary tale against the emergence of artificial intelligence and how it will doom humanity to servitude or worse to protect humanity from itself. And in the light of the BP oil spill, can you really blame intelligent machines from thinking we’re pretty bad for the planet in general and our existence on it in particular? But I digress.

Proyas doesn’t seem to have a major philosophical influence or point to make, other than supporting a Descartian view of thought informing action and the dichotomy of the body and mind. Rather than concerning itself with delivering jargon salient to this point, Dark City simply presents its characters and themes as they are, baldly stated without hyperbole except for the whole psychic powers angle. The Strangers seem primarily concerned with trying to comprehend minds outside of their own, thus representing solipsism on one side of the debate. While they exist in harmony with what they create, they cannot be certain that those beings that exist within their creation are as real as their own mind. Meanwhile, the characters within the city who are of interest to the Strangers appear to represent a dualist point of view, where all things that exist (implying that they believe the things outside themselves are certain to exist) have a separation between concept and form, between an individual’s body and their anima or animus, to use Jungian terms. I know I’m verging into deep philosophical waters and might be losing some people, and I could probably talk for hours about this stuff, but I think I’ve made my point – Dark City is a lot more interesting than The Matrix, and The Matrix could have been just as interesting if it weren’t based on bad philosophy.

Do you think CTU would have operated better with Strangers in the ranks?

Pseudo-intellectualism aside, if you have the opportunity, see the director’s cut of Dark City. The theatrical release is by no means bad. The characters, themes, action and storytelling are all intact. What the director’s cut adds is an extra bit of depth, another layer of atmosphere and a slightly less disjointed pace. It takes its time a bit more, setting up the story on the assumption that we’re intelligent people and we don’t need to be told what we’re going to see – we just need to be shown. I get the feeling that the theatrical release was cut the way it was so that Bubba Joe McMoviewatcher wouldn’t be completely lost in the plot’s turns and spirals. But I’ve become something of a story snob since I started reviewing things seriously, so take that opinion for what you will.

I guess what I’m trying to drive at in the midst of all of this is that Dark City is a fantastic film. It ranks highly among other innovative science fiction films like Blade Runner and District 9. The director’s cut, especially, is a highly enjoyable experience in visual storytelling, and it’s not the kind of film where you need to switch off your brain. In fact, the more you engage your mind while watching Dark City, the more you’ll take away from the experience. It’s intelligent, well-shot, well-paced, well-acted visual storytelling. Get it from Netflix, or hell, buy it outright, because you’re getting a lot for your money. I mean, what else is out there that’s worth putting your entertainment money into (other than Splice, apparently)?

Another Super Mario game? A Justin Bieber album? Marmaduke?

Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.

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Back in the days of the late 80s and early 90s, when the excess of the previous decade were giving way to the ‘edgy’ goth culture that emerged to dominate a lot of the media in the next – The Crow, Spawn, A Nightmare Before Christmas, etc – America was getting its first real dose of animé. The Sci-Fi Channel, back when it was called ‘The Sci-Fi Channel’ and didn’t worry about its Google page rank because, well, Google didn’t really exist yet, ran a few animé features every year or so just to whet our whistles for what lay in store for us on the other side of the Pacific. The first round included Lensman, Casshan Robot Hunter and Vampire Hunter D, which while visually stunning and unique in their aesthetics, amounted to pretty standard but well-done action flicks. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that we were introduced to the truly introspective and headspace-violating works such as Akira and this week’s review fodder, Ghost in the Shell.

There’s also the fact that none of those three ‘early’ animé features are available on Netflix, which is a shame because Lensman is a great reworking of E.E. Smith’s novels, Casshan is one of the best treatments of a Mega Man-style protagonist I’ve ever seen, and Vampire Hunter D is… hmm? Oh, right, Ghost in the Shell, sorry about that.

The year is 2029. The world is connected by a global information network that is to the Internet what a Peterbilt 378 is to last year’s Ford pick-up. In Tokyo, the government has divided its various responsibilities into sections, and Section 9 is their covert operations and network security division. Top badass amongst the ranks of Section 9 is Major Motoko Kusanagi, who along with being a crack shot, an expert martial artist and pretty damn smart in terms of both brain and mouth, is also a full conversion cyborg, meaning that other than her brain and most of her spinal column, her body is entirely robotic. A case involving a hacker called ‘the Puppet Master’ falls into Section 9′s lap, and the investigation leads Motoko to question the nature of her own existence even as she tries to unravel the mystery as to who this hacker is and what they’re after.

Ghost in the Shell, like a great deal of animé, is based upon the manga of the same name. The manga was crafted by a guy named Shirow Masamune, and in the interest of full disclosure, I need to make the following statement: I love Shirow Masamune. This is the guy who brought us Black Magic, Appleseed and Dominion, which might be better known by the animé feature called Tank Police. His work is, in my opinion, best described as ‘camp cyberpunk’, a marriage of the mentality behind such works as Blade Runner and Snow Crash with balls-to-the-wall action and genuinely funny humor that has mechanized characters like Briareos from Appleseed acting far more human than some humans do in similar works, even his own. There’s plenty of philosophy, sociological commentary and bits of political satire woven into his stories, and they’re told and drawn well enough that you’re having just as good a time contemplating what he’s trying to say as you do watching cops with tanks blast their way through the bad guys. Ghost in the Shell is exemplary of this style, with discussions on the nature of human existence occurring almost simultaneously with cybernetic supercops doing battle against advanced walking tanks.

The big guy’s Battou. He’s awesome.
He gives us the phrase ‘standard-issue big gun’ among other things.

The action from the manga exists almost intact in the animé feature. Instead of trying to wow an audience with laser guns or giant fighting robots, Ghost in the Shell keeps the action, for the most part, on the human level. While the Major is super-strong, very fast and well-experienced in combat, when the action takes place it happens on a scale to which an audience can relate. I mean, seeing a space battle happen in, say, Star Blazers or Robotech is exciting, but a great deal of that comes from our relationship with the pilots of those fantastic vehicles. Without characters that we like and can relate to, it’d just be so much sound and fury like the opening of Revenge of the Sith. The grounding of Tokyo 2029 in reality, coupled with the interesting characters involved in the combat, lends it weight and makes it more exciting, ramping up the tension as the stakes get higher.

Unfortunately Ghost in the Shell doesn’t have the pace or the occasional tongue-in-cheek aside of its manga source material. Some bits of the film just drag, especially when it comes to Motoko’s navel-gazing. It’s like watching a tense episode of Law & Order: SVU only to have Stabler & Benson stop in the middle of tracking down a serial rapist to discuss the sustainability of the world in general and New York City in particular. It’s interesting, sure, but we didn’t come here for moral philosophy, get the hell on with the detective work. Instead of weaving these questions into the narrative, director Oshii Mamoru stops the action dead to have us ruminate on the nature of human existence.

There’s also the fact that the Major inexplicably gets naked any time she needs to use her cloaking device. “Therm-optic camouflage” didn’t require nudity in the manga, and even in the film a guy is able to use therm-optics just by pulling up the hood of his jumper – he didn’t have to whip out his junk to turn invisible. I don’t object to the idea of seeing Motoko in her skivvies, even if she is a cyborg, but the gratuity and lack of necessity for it in context kind of bugs me.

Sad cyborg is sad.

Ghost in the Shell was ground-breaking for its time. Now, “ground-breaking” is not entirely synonymous with “good”. It’s also a phrase that can get abused by people in the marketing world. Sonic Unleashed, for example, could be described as ground-breaking in that video game series because never before as a hedgehog that runs fast turned into a hulking fur-covered pile of rage and sharp bits that’d be called a ‘werewolf’ if it weren’t a complete misnomer. The DaVinci Code broke new ground for anti-Church conspiracy theorists, but the book is at its best when it’s wedged under a piece of furniture to keep it from wobbling. Twilight was ground-breaking in both its existence as genre fiction aimed at young female readers and the psychological and sexual implications of its characters, but it seemed like the flat characterizations and plodding story pace were set to drain vampires of all of their menace and mystique until the advent of Daybreakers. Incidentally, one has to wonder the fun that could be had if the aforementioned vampire hunter D came across the Cullen household. Hilarity would ensue, I’m sure.

Anyway, Ghost in the Shell is not only a ground-breaking work in terms of cyberpunk animé and post-modern information-age personal philosophy but also pretty damn good as a story. Long treatises and monologues aside, this is a seminal work of the genre and definitely worth seeing if you have any interest in well-done hand-crafted animation that isn’t afraid to be violent, sexy or intellectually interesting for adults. The thing about the film which ultimately works against it is, as good as Shirow’s work is, it tends to be dense, with layers of philosophical and socio-political commentary layered between the character development and action sequences. It’s a similar problem that we have with the recent adaptation of Appleseed, and I suspect that if Black Magic or Dominion were to be revisited as films, it’d be no different. Trying to cram everything Shirow does in his works into a two hour film without a careful hand in the editing process can leave the final result feeling disjointed and lead to some problems with pace. Ghost in the Shell is pretty much the best example of this, but it’s also a fantastic example of the counterpoint to the problem with adapting Shirow’s work to film.

Even today, scenes like this are gorgeous.

Even when there isn’t anything going on, it’s extremely well-drawn or well-rendered nothing. Even if you’re not an animé fan and just have a passing interest in things like cyberpunk action, artificial intelligence that doesn’t want to destroy the world or just characters that are both intelligent and badass, you can do a hell of a lot worse than Ghost in the Shell. And if you like it as a feature, go read the manga or, better yet, check out Stand-Alone Complex, an animé television series that stays a lot closer to Shirow’s original vision. You can expand on a lot of the themes and subjects in those inner layers when you have a dozen hour-long episodes to work with instead of a feature with a ninety minute running time. I mean, imagine if you tried to take one of the many, many themes from a tv series like Star Trek: The Next Generation, let’s say relocating a native population for the sake of governmental whims, and condense it into a feature film that’s accessible to the masses as well as diehard fans. The result would probably be a total disaster! I mean, who would be so stupid as to…

…Wait…

Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.

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Some of the best stories out there are simple stories that are well-told. A straightforward plot doesn’t necessarily make for a bad escapist experience, if there are elements of that plot that transcend its simplicity. Take District 9, for example. Aliens come to Earth in bad shape and they’re exploited by corporate douchebags. Simple, right? Yet that story is so well told, expertly executed and subtle in its soapbox moments that the simplicity of the story can be completely ignored. How about Daybreakers? Alternative energy sources are good things, we get that, but the point is made without distracting from the fact that the lack of energy in that film’s characters causes them to bite people’s throats open, and getting Willem Dafoe in a 1978 Firebird Trans Am with an arsenal of crossbows to go after cannibalistic bat-monsters is so cool I don’t care what soapbox he’s standing on.

Avatar is no District 9. Avater is no Daybreakers. Without its stunning visuals, embarrassingly good hero cast and the word of mouth given by legions of fans whose eyes were short-circuited thanks to the insidiousness of 3-D, this film wouldn’t have a blue spindly leg to stand on.

Avatar introduces us to Jake Sully, the reluctant brother of a scientist who was gunned down in a back alley mugging. Jake’s brother, a twin, was part of the research team interested in making contact and establishing relations with the native population of Pandora, a moon 6 or so light-years from Earth. Earth has become something of a strip-mined deforested smog-covered pipe-dream-of-the-military-industrial-complex wasteland, and humanity is hungry for more resources. Luckily, Pandora is home not only to a thriving, vibrant, nature-conscious sentient race of ten-foot-tall aboriginal blue feline humanoids called the Na’vi but also a universal powers-anything totally-not-an-allegory-for-oil mineral called Unobtainium. In order to mine their MacGuffinium, the corporation in charge needs to move the Na’vi off of rich deposits. Jake’s brother was part of the Avatar program, designed to reach a diplomatic solution. Right behind them, though, are butch manly gun-happy violence-for-pleasure-seeking beer-swilling cigar-chomping Americans. Okay, they’re probably not ALL Americans, but I think you can see where I’m going with this.

Anyway, Jake’s a paraplegic and he’s told that if he helps get the Na’vi to abandon their homes that sit on top of the Plotdevicium, they’ll pay for the spinal operation to restore function to his legs. Unfortunately, somebody’s been looking at way too much shiny Plotconveniencium because they didn’t realize that an avatar, a genetically grown artificial body composed of both human and Na’vi DNA, not only gives Jake his legs but also enhanced senses, a USB interface with the world’s wildlife and, oh yeah, makes him a ten foot tall warrior crystal dragon Jesus. Nice work there, guys.

“Sam, go over there and emote. I’ll stay back here and think about how much money this movie’s gonna make me.”

Before I get to what bugs me about the film, let’s talk about what works in it. The visuals, as I’ve said, are jaw-droppingly gorgeous. The eco-system of Pandora is designed to take one’s breath away, and it certainly does do that job. There’s an organic feeling to everything that belongs on Pandora. By the same token, the sense one gets from the human contraptions, from the modular buildings to the badass fighting mechs, is that these were welded or hammered together by human hands, not assembled in a graphics program on $300 million’s worth of computers.

The other really good thing about Avatar is the cast. I’m not just talking about Sam Worthington, who’s quickly becoming someone I really enjoy seeing on screen but needs to stop attempting an American accent, or Sigorney Weaver, who’s right at home being in a film like this. (Oh, and side note, thank you James Cameron for putting Michelle Rodriguez in Na’vi war paint. Rawr.) No, the Na’vi themselves are rendered beautifully. Now, I know they were pretty much designed to be appealing to a human audience in an aesthetic, emotional and sexual way, but that doesn’t stop the end result from being impressive. I think it was pretty clear from the outset that if the Na’vi and their world didn’t truly come to life, even on the flat screen upon which I saw it to say nothing of 3-D, the whole opera’d fall apart. Thankfully, Pandora and it’s flora and fauna do pull you in, and the scenes in the lush, luminous forests are some of the most immersive I’ve seen in quite some time.

This guy’s evil. You can tell because he drinks coffee while burning down trees.

But just like the fist of an angry corporate-funded gung-ho jarhead trying to punch his way to a deposit of Bullshitium, the illusion of Pandora’s perfection is shattered by so many bad story elements it’s difficult to say where one should begin. There is no way in hell this operation should run the way it does. Too many military and money-grubbing types are at the top while the scientists who might actually have a clue as to what humanity has stumbled across are treated like a nuisance rather than an asset. If it weren’t for the fact that these bozos exist for the same reason Adhominemium does, it’d be completely incomprehensible how these clowns even got off of Earth, let alone ended up in nominal control of Pandora. But James Cameron has a point to make here, and as much as he spared no expense bringing his vision to life, he pulls no punches in letting us know exactly what he’s trying to say, about whom and why it’s bad. Those bombs in the back of the shuttle in the film’s climax might as well be goddamn anvils.

The villains’ aren’t just evil for evil’s sake. Oh, no. They’re evil for America’s sake. Beyond the obvious “respect for nature” message and other aspects of the story discussed to death elsewhere in other reviews, parodies, tired internet memes and episodes of South Park, Avatar does everything within its power to underscore the major flaws in the neo-conservative movement. The villains see the worlds before them in black and white, foster a strong “us versus them” mentality, disregard a multilateral approach to solving their problems and opt instead for military intervention in the extreme. I’d say that the corporate stooges were Germans and the Na’vi Polish Jews, if it weren’t clear Cameron were going after Bush-era Americans instead of Nazis. Hell, at one point, Colonel George Herbert Walker Whatever-The-Hell-His-Name-Is uses the words “shock and awe” when discussing his pre-emptive war. It’s clear that James Cameron is underscoring the evils of deforestation and corporate greed. But hey, these are Americans we’re talking about, and they on the whole really don’t give a shit. Deforestation is only something that happens in other countries that didn’t have the good fortune to be America, and Americans love themselves some corporate greed. Just look at how our banks and real estate markets are set up.

“So wait, there’s no civilian oversight and your career military men are basically mercenaries? Come here, let me teach you the Na’vi word for ‘Bullshit’.”

The interplanetary love story is a bit trite, but it works because it’s well-acted. We do feel something is at stake during the action sequences and they’re not confusing at all, being well-shot and choreographed, but the messages that drive the action are so obvious and ham-handed you can hear the bacon sizzling when the Hometree burns. All in all, there’s stuff to like in Avatar and it’s worth seeing for the visuals and sweeping sci-fi/fantasy warfare that honestly rivals some of the set pieces in Lord of the Rings. So put it on your Netflix queue.

Oh, and don’t worry about not seeing it in 3-D. Let’s face it, 3-D’s a fad. It was a fad back in the 50s and it’s a fad right now, people are just a bit thicker than they were back then so it’ll take somewhat longer for the fad to go away this time. I mean, look at the way some people reacted to Avatar. Other than the immediate declaration that it is THE BEST MOVIE EVER and dumping piles of money and adoration on James Cameron, who probably can’t get it up unless he’s contemplating how fucking brilliant he is, some people actually fell into suicidal depression when they beheld the landscape of Pandora and had to be told it’s not real. I was personally reminded of some of the vistas from games like Aion and World of Warcraft, which makes me a pretty massive nerd in case that wasn’t clearly obvious. While I could see a lot of the flaws in this movie – I didn’t even mention the weird application of physics on Pandora, what with floating mountains and “low gravity” that operates just like Earth’s gravity – I still enjoyed it, which I guess means I’m powered by just as much Retardium as anybody else.

Spotting the flaws, though, and calling them out without mentioning all of the other films Avatar plundered like Doctor Frankenstein in a graveyard looking for fresh parts, probably means my internal derp furnace is running a bit low.

Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.