I intend to do a big spoilery detailed piece on Inception here later, but for now I’ve got another review to tend to.
Available here.
When heading to the theater, I normally restrict my knowledge of the movie I’m about to see to a) its title and b) where it’s playing. Even then, I get the theater wrong about once a year. I don’t like reading other reviews beforehand; I don’t even like having a general idea of what other people thought of it. I want my reaction to be as uninfluenced as possible. There are downsides to this–it’s much easier to over- or underrate something when your only perspective is the one from inside your own bug-riddled head–but I think it’s also much easier to see things about a movie the consensus overlooked, whether for good or bad.
The Last Airbender released on a Wednesday, meaning by the time I saw it Friday, my consciousness had been permeated by a general understanding it sucked things man was never meant to suck. As the credits opened, my approach was “Okay, let’s see if this is really as bad as everyone says.”
“Nope,” I thought after the first ten or fifteen minutes, “this is all right.” Another ten minutes after that, I thought “Oh, right. This does blow.” The blowitude increased steadily from there until I expected the whole audience to be whisked away to go help a scarecrow find his brain and a lion find his courage.
Two good things came of the experience: I finally watched The Sixth Sense, the only one of The Last Airbender director M. Night Shyamalan’s movies I hadn’t seen, oddly enough. It was pretty good, but after what we’ve all seen of Shyamalan since then, its flaws are probably a lot more obvious than they were at the time.
I’ve also started watching Avatar: The Last Airbender, the cartoon the movie was derived from. It’s not knocking my socks off yet, but I’m liking it pretty well, and I’m excited to see how it develops its supposedly epic story.
I, like many others, loved The Matrix. Then I saw the sequels.
Like fewer others, I didn’t outright hate them, or see them as a destructive waste of a brilliant first entry. They were obviously–I thought–mishandled, and seemed to lose the unbreakable grip the Wachowskis had on the first film. Still, I liked chunks of them, and appreciated moments, like the Cave Rave, others hated. I thought they stumbled hard, but still crossed the finish line with some semblance of being satisfying, if nowhere near as gracefully or as swiftly as we all thought they would.
I just finished this thematic interpretation/apology for Reloaded, and, as soon as I finish this post, will dive right into the followup for Revolutions. It’s…amazing. Suddenly the sequels are entirely coherent. Even the bits that made no sense at all, or made sense, but felt like philosophical wankery.
At the very worst, given this dude’s read on them, you can accuse them of being thematically satisfying while remaining narratively unsatisfying. (Unsatisfying as a modern Hollywood blockbuster, anyway; as myth, well…) It’s brilliant.
Best of all, it feels like a web throwback, like something from 1996 (or earlier–that’s just as far back as my firsthand web usage goes; this kind of reads like old Usenet stuff, too), when the tech geeks Neal Stephenson writes about would post essay-length, intelligent analyses to their personal sites with no motivation beyond “Hey, this is interesting, and here’s why.” Sometimes, I miss that internet. With absolutely every aspect of the internet commercialized at this point, this reminder of the past is deeply refreshing.
And fucking brilliant.
Here is an example of a movie I imagined could not possibly be good. Tom Cruise doing the spy thing again. Cameron Diaz doing.. whatever it is she does. Possess breasts separated by about two yards, I guess. On the other hand, it’s directed by James Mangold, who did 3:10 to Yuma, Cop Land, and others, but still. I don’t give a damn about the Scientology and the couch-jumping, but Cruise does nothing for me. Except in Top Gun. Even then, I’m probably just transferring my unending love for Val Kilmer.
But Knight and Day is kind of awesome. It has some very, very funny scenes and some pretty good dialogue. Parts of it even satirize the “Tom Cruise kicks ass until no unbruised asses remain on planet Earth” thing. A couple moments are a little sitcommy, like when Diaz screeches around machinegunning the entire set, but the missteps are rare. Somehow, impossibly, this movie entertained me really hard.
About 3 times out of 4, my read on a movie (given its cast, crew, trailers, etc.) prior to seeing it is pretty much on the mark. Of the remaining quarter, I usually just have my doubts moderately overcome, or my expectations moderately dashed–what I thought would be at best a C movie ends up a B-, say, or something I thought would pull at least a B could only manage a C+.
Once in a while–somewhere between 5-10% of the time–my pre-judgment is just totally, totally wrong. Most of the time, something I thought would blow turns out to rock. Knight and Day is one of those times.
Roger Ebert, who’s great, has a pretty great article about the temptation and folly of snark, the international language of the internet. The piece is over a year old, but so are a lot of great things, like me.
I’m pretty worn out on snark, too. I’m sure I use it in my columns sometimes, but I try to pull most of the humor there out of nonsense, absurdity, wordplay, and self-insulting jokes rather than snark. Except in the case of stuff like College, which deserves to be assaulted with every weapon in the critical arsenal, including several prototypes designed specifically to reduce College to a smoldering pile of shit-smelling ash.
Elsewhere, I’ve unfollowed people on Twitter (I’m sure they miss me) for excessive snark. One guy would watch movies–good ones–and snark-attack them in real time; over two hours, my stream would flood with 50-100 tweets of varying amusement that did nothing but make fun of the film. A few were genuinely funny. Most, eh. After the second or third movie he subjected this to, I unfollowed. It got old. Too bad. He’d usually tweet some interesting links, too.
I don’t read internet message boards anymore. I used to do a lot of this at jobs where I had access to a computer and some downtime; something like the AV Club’s boards, especially these days, is essentially a nonstop user-generated content mill, perfect for killing a few minutes behind the counter or a desk. But same deal. It got old. I decided I’d rather be learning something, or creating it myself, than reading an undammed torrent of clever insults.
I’ve been housesitting for my brother across the state this week, and fell off the comment board wagon. Got all my reviewing done, but not nearly as much fiction as I wanted to write. But it’s been a good reminder of what I’ve been missing the last year or so: not much.
Because, genital-smashing aside, of scenes like this.
I alluded to this in the review, but The A-Team was much stronger than I expected it to be. It’s big, dumb, and overblown, but in a funny, anarchic way that caught me by surprise.
Reminds me a lot of stuff like Con Air and The Rock, which I expect were widely panned at the time but are recognized, these days, for their very high Good Times factor. I think time will treat The A-Team the same way; my B+ might be a + too high, but I really enjoyed myself with it, so what can you do.
Available here. Some spoilery content to follow.
About halfway through Splice, I wrote in my notes “There is something seriously wrong with this.” Little did I know just how much more wrongness was yet in store. You want monstery semi-incest? Oh, Splice has got monstery semi-incest. For me, that actually improved the movie, which till that point had been one long slog of unpleasant characters doing fairly insane things.
This appears to be one of those “critics love it, audiences hate it” movies. It’s pulling a 73% at Rottentomatoes; Keith Phipps of the AV Club gave it a B+. Meanwhile, the reader reviews peg it a full grade lower, at a C+.
I just never connected with it at all. The characters are bozos. As for the plot, I’ve seen more rising action in matzo bread. The creature struck me as silly, overacted and cliched. By the climax, I had my full-on clinical detachment going strong. What could have been a creepy, shuddersome finale just looked cat-swingingly crazy.
This is a case where the grade scale needs some context. At a D+, it may look like I thought Splice was worse than Transformers 2 (C-) or The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (C). Au contraire! Those movies failed in very boring, average, unentertaining ways. Splice failed in fun, messed-up ways. If you’re gonna fail, fail big.
Stephen Parrish tallies up some numbers on rejection over at SF mag Electric Spec‘s blog.
His numbers–200+ rejections spread over four novels and 25 stories–are nothing unusual, or even surprising, for people in this business, and he’s got a nice illustration of how much rejection even someone like Jackie Gleason endured before breaking into entertainment. Even once you’ve made it you still get rejected all the time, for heaven’s sake.
I’m starting to sell with some regularity, but I got and continue to get my share of rejections, too.
When I started learning kung fu, each trip to the dojo would leave bruises up and down my arms. Big purple lumps from blocking incoming strikes with palms, forearms, and elbows. I’d be lucky if the first set faded next week when I returned to absorb two more hours of punishment.
My knuckles used to get raw to the point of bleeding after a handful of punches into the rice bag, or lightly smacking the concrete as I sat on my front porch.
At some point, my arms stopped bruising every week. I punched things and did knuckle-pushups until my knuckles got so tough Mr. T himself wouldn’t say rude things about them in their company. I still get a few bruises and scrapes, but they’re rare, only when I take an odd shot or we’re training especially hard.
4+ years back, I used to trunk short stories (literary fiction, back then) after one or two rejections. Part of this was due to literary fiction markets taking 6-12+ goddamn months to reply (if you’re writing a lot in your early 20s, a story you wrote a year ago is probably going to look like amateurish buffoonery in light of your new experience), but that was all it took for my untrained little ego to bruise up and go home crying.
It’s closing in on two years since I started learning kung fu; it’s been the better part of three since I started writing and submitting sci-fi/fantasy stories. A few of my sales have come on the first or second submission, but others have racked up five or six rejections before an editor (venerable and wise! Or wise beyond the age of their pretty, youthful faces) picked them up.
I still lose faith in some stories; looking at my submission log, I tend to give up on a story after it hits 10-12 rejections. Just as often these days, I’ll reread it, think “Hey, this is genuinely rad, despite all the turning-downs it’s gotten,” give it a little tweaking, and send it back into the world. And sometimes, rejections still hurt, like when I know a market had the story under serious consideration, or an editor replies with the dreaded “We liked this story, there’s nothing wrong with it, it was just edged out by other stuff we like more.”
But for the most part, I wake up the next day unbruised. Getting rejected is like fighting the wooden dummy. It hurts you and the dummy doesn’t notice. Fight for long enough, though, keep returning to the dojo and striking away, and eventually the dummy won’t be able to hurt you, either. Then you can train without fear.
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Rob Dunbar is the world's best history professor. And with good reason: he's been alive for three thousand years, keeping his existence a secret since...
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