A Mimi joint

Ok, you know what's weird? That a couple of years ago, Spike Lee made a short film about/starring Mariah frickin' Carey.



I mean, am I the only one who finds this odd, who doesn't immediately lump those two together in their head? I mean, I just find it jarring considering some of the subjects of Lee's other, feature films, no?

Oh, and ignore the bullshit about a free iPhone too. Sorry, but this is the only version of this video that I could find online.

Meh, it's ok. Provided you don't get motion sickness...

Ah, fuck it. That new Star Trek movie absolutely defies any attempt to take it seriously at all.

Also, I just want to do my part to make sure that this is making the rounds:


Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

Trekkin'

Ok, I just wanted to quickly jot down some of my thoughts regarding the new Star Trek film before I actually see it later today (I may do a follow-up post once I have actually seen the thing).

Firstly, I imagine that, judged purely on its own merits, this new film is going to be a great success indeed. I can see it being a slick, exciting and fun example of action-scifi-blockbuster fare.

However, my main issue with the film lies more at the conceptual level. In that respect, this film kind of reminds me of Gus Van Sant's Psycho: it's a perfectly good film, as far as films go, when judged on its own merits, but the real headscratcher is why the film even exists at all. Who the hell thought that the world desperately needed a remake of Hitchcock's Psycho?

Indeed, whilst a bold, new direction was very much needed in order to bring life and public interest back to the Star Trek franchise, I do wonder about the wisdom behind harking back to the franchise's Kirk-and-Spock origins, which almost seems to ask us to imagine this film in the same vein as other classic-TV-show-reimagined-as-modern-film releases of the last several years. Is that what Star Trek needs, not a Grace Park Battlestar Galactica but a Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson Starsky and Hutch?

Ok, that was perhaps an unfair comparison, I admit, but my main point remains: what does it say about the future of the franchise that the only way to bring it forward is by looking back, by fetishising the past? Is this 'reinvention' really just a way to sell us on old ideas a second time around? Will we be seeing Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Next Generation twenty years from now when the whole thing goes full circle?

Still, I see that sacrifices have to have been made in order for the money-men behind all of this to have even signed off on making this new film. The thing does have to be saleable, after all. But still, that worry is there: can this new direction actually bear interesting fruit in years to come (they're already working on Star Trek 2, you know) or will the whole thing prove to be a shiny-but-shallow excercise in wistful nostalgia taken to infinite regress?

Too angry to blog properly (probably #1 in a whole series)

God, I go away for a weekend and when I return all hell breaks loose. I'm too angry/tired for a real blog post but here are the headlines.

Texan politician says that Asian Americans should change their legal names to more Westernised ones in order to make things "easier for Americans to deal with." (I'm pretty sure that the Americans who are Asian American deal with it just fine, thanks).

Stupid films still think that rape jokes are ok.

And oh yeah, amazon.com have completely fucked up by basically lumping in books by gay authors (such as Jeanette Winterson and Stephen Fry) in with erotica and pornography and tried to make the whole lot invisible to users. This reeks of censorship and homophobia. I've been meaning to write a full-scale post on this, but things are developing too quickly for me to really dedicate a whole lot to what I think without some new detail cropping up. All I know is that amazon aren't going to be getting any medals for the piss-poor way they're handling this, either.

Man-eaters

I could go on for days about all of the nonsense presented in the first clip above. As for the second, that bell idea is so weird that it absolutely intrigues me. Imagine if they still employed that in cinemas today. It's pretty distractingly fourth-wall-breaking though, no?

"Exploring" a mall near you, soon

Ok, this is my fourth post today, so that must mean I'm eating well but infrequently (my brain goes a mile-a-minute when I'm really hungry but have otherwise been eating healthily). I just wanted to link to this post over at the best blog discovery I've made in quite some time: Sociological Images. I highly recommend reading through and pondering over their entire output, but this latest post was one I found to be of particular interest (especially when paired with this one about the gendered packaging (and, more importantly rebranding) of the charming Dora the Explorer).

Ok, so I did end up watching Watchmen...

...and hey, did anyone else notice that that's fuckin' My Chemical Romance covering a Bob Dylan song?! What the hell, people?



That's not to say I don't actually find this song not completely unpleasant, though.

Thinking too much about things that don't bear thinking about (Death Note edition)

Today I watched the two Death Note films back-to-back. I found the first one thoroughly enjoyable, the second one less so. However, something that struck me during the course of these films, and in particular the second one, was the over-reliance on completely made-up mystical rules (or as one imdb commentator put it: "the intriguing mystical lore"). Now, I can understand the appeal of universe-building, and of trying to make whatever magical/science-fiction-ey elements you're introducing make some sort of workable plot sense. Introducing limits is a very good way of controlling whatever non-real element you've introduced, so as to try and ensure you don't get into some kind of Superman II situation where absolutely anything goes, sense be damned ("and then Superman spits himself into three people...because, you know, he can totally do that...now"*). However - and keeping with American superheroes for the moment - I'm reminded of an assertation I first remember being made by David Mazzuccheli, although I'm sure it's been said hundreds of times by hundreds of different people, that the more realism you apply to something that is blatantly not realistic, the more you only serve to highlight the absurdity at the heart of the genre. You'll never see Robin in the Christopher Nolan Batman films, for example, because brightly-coloured boy sidekicks would simply jar with the more realist world that Nolan et al. have generated. All criticisms of the Schumacher films aside, it could hardly be said that Robin's was distinctly out of place in them (he was played as an infuriating, unrepentent jackass, but that's beside the point).

I guess what I'm getting at is that, with the Death Note films, I really resented the over-use of completely fictional magical rules and regulations, because the more they cropped up, the more I couldn't resist thinking about them and what might be the cause of them, only to be frustrated by remembering that, of course, there was no cause to them as they were completely made up. For those who don't know, Death Note is a manga/anime/film series that follows a young man who one day stumbles upon a mysterious note book. Whenever this young man writes a name in the note book, that person dies shortly afterwards. The young man thus decides to use said note book to help rid the world of criminals. This is actually a really interesting concept, and it all serves - perhaps fairly obviously - to lead into a neat fictionalised look at the corrupting influence of absolute power versus the possible good that might come of this form of extreme vigilante justice.

But here's the thing. I can very easily buy the central conceit, that there's this magical note book that can be used to kill people. The strength of such a concept lies in its simplicity. It's got a nice fairytale quality to it ("this lamp will grant you three wishes," "these boots will allow you to travel seven leagues in a single step," ...). What I find problematic though, is the fact that, no doubt forseeing that fans would seek to pick holes in this concept ("what if two people have the same name? Do they both die?"), the author saw fit to include all sorts of rules and caveats ("the person writing the name has to have the victim's face in mind at the time of writing, so the book 'knows' not to pick someone else with the same name"). Now, there are quite a few of these rules, and after a while they all get quite convoluted. There's this whole thing about losing your memory and regaining it once you've touched the book again (but only if you're actually holding onto the book, if it's not one you've used before...or something) that really takes the fucking overcomplication cake, as far as I'm concerned. However, my real problem isn't with these made-up rules themselves. I'm not here to pick holes in them. The problem for me really is the fact that they exist at all, as - and maybe I'm alone in this - every time these rules about the way life, death and these note books comes up, I'm left wondering where the hell these rules came from and who on Earth put them there in the first place.

Fairytale concepts thrive on their simplicity. If one wondered why the hell the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood could talk, one would likely go a bit mad (could the cows whose milk made the butter that Red is transporting to Grandma's place also talk and think? If so, what the hell were they doing being farmed in the first place?)** However, one simply tends not to think about these things at all unless the rules and the universe behind them is explored. But, as I'm arguing here, any such hard look into a completely fictitious world will no doubt ultimately be frustrating and fruitless as of course it leads into a big bottomless pit where of course, there are no ultimate solutions because it's all totally made-up; d'uh! I don't go about reading into the whys and wherefores of science fiction and fantasy concepts as I please, in fact quite the opposite is true, that's the whole point of this post. I once chewed a guy out for getting all concerned about why the mechanics of the Matrix universe wouldn't work, arguing of course that in something like The Matrix, the point of the story lies far, far away from the strict mechanics of the universe. In Death Note, however, so much of the plot involves utilising/abusing a knowledge of these rules in order to create intricate plans and schemes that take advantage of them. They're always in the spotlight. As I said, maybe other people don't think like me, but to me, all this served to do was highlight the fact that the rules made no sense. It's not so much that they were gobbledegook (the author clearly had done some thinking when coming up with them), more that the very fact of them was nonsense. Who the hell made them up, why, and how?!

Maybe all of these are addressed in the manga. I don't know. Either way, I suspect that any solution would only lead to a kind of infinite regress wherein whatever magic rule-maker exists must also adhere to some other magical set of rules or whatnot.

To summarise, whilst I enjoyed Death Note thoroughly, watching the films simply served to remind me that while establishing a set of rules to dictate fictional powers & abilities is important (otherwise you risk ending up in "My magic is stronger than yours." "No, my magic is stronger than yours; just because" territory), I wish writers would avoid relying on these rules as plot points, as focusing on them only serves to illustrate their ultimately contrived and constructed nature. Remember in Ang Lee's Hulk where he explained why the Hulk can just spontaneously grow muscle mass even though biological growth doesn't work that way, and all it did was open up a new can of worms? I guess that's my point in a nutshell. Sometimes, the magic of a concept is lost when you look at it with too analytical an eye (or more specifically, when the plot itself forces you to look at it with that critical eye).

*Not to mention the infamous "then Superman throws his suit's logo at the bad guys and it turns into a huge net, because yeah, I'm sure we meant to establish somewhere that Superman can do that. We're not just pulling random super-powers out of our collective asses, honest!"
**I'm channeling a little bit of Gregory Maguire here, who asks such questions of animals/Animals-with-a-capital-A in L. Frank Baum's land of Oz in his Wicked novels.

Quick hit

To use the modern parlance: made of win.

As a follow-up to my earlier, bitchy Watchmen movie post...

...This pretty much encapsulates my fears regarding a big-screen Watchmen adaptation...in the most hilarious way possible.

On bad films - 2009

Just a quick hit from me, paragraphs four and five in particular are right on the money when it comes to the upcoming Watchmen film.

Most of the time, I don't feel the fannish/masochistic need to expose myself to what I have no doubt will be a terrible adaptation of a comic that I love. I haven't seen a single "Alan Moore film" in the cinema since League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But then again, I can't decide where I fall when it comes to Watchmen. I may very well be tempted after all.

And incidentally, that masochistic urge is still driving me towards the upcoming Star Trek film, despite my better judgment.

Two very different takes on Sleeping Beauty

I'm a huge fairy tale geek and a Queen Adreena fan, so this music video by Daisy Chainsaw - the proto-Queen Adreena - for "Hope Your Dreams Come True" is pretty much one of my favourite things ever. The story is taken from Angela Carter's subversive take on Sleeping Beauty: "The Lady of the House of Love" aka "Vampirella," in which the vampiric Beauty is essentially asleep until a fresh, virginal victim boy awakens her.

And from the sublime to the ridiculous, here's a slightly different take on a more "adult" Sleeping Beauty:

Ok, I lied about that being my last post for today

Troma-tastic.