Galaxy Quest

GALAXY QUEST is one of those movies that never get old. There's always something more to see, and this time around I grooved on the performance of one Alan Rickman.

This guy takes what looks like a simple couple of lines, "By Grabthar's Hammer! What savings!" and turns it into a symphony of self-loathing and resignation. While doing so, he manages to maintain a certain reserve that reminds that, yes, this is supposed to be a comedy. Later, when when he means a "By Grabthar's Hammer!" exclamation, he pours enough real passion into the reading that we, as the audience, buy his character's embrace of, well, his character.

It's great stuff, in a movie full of great stuff. By Grabthar's Hammer, I expect to see this movie over and over again.

TMNT

TMNT is too busy to bother with a proper title: an acronym will have to do. Unfortunately, it's also too busy to develop backstory, flesh out characters, or bother to entertain anyone over the age of ten. The result is a horrifically dull action-adventure that will serve the dual temporal purpose of speeding time up for the young 'uns and dragging it out for any parents unlucky enough to wander into this movie.

Here's the setup: the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have broken up. Paradoxically, Leonardo has gone off to Central America to learn leadership by working alone. Raphael has stayed home in New York, where he also fights crime alone, but this is somehow bad because, well, the never really explains. The other two, whose names I forget, have regular jobs, and all this is, somehow, very, very bad. When Leonardo returns, he essentially has to get the band back together so they can do battle with (a) a band of Ninja that are led by a white woman with a Chinese accent, (b) a bunch of monsters, (c) the reanimated statues of ancient warriors, and (d) a guy whom I assume to be Tiglath-Pileser I.

This could be fun, except for three movie-killing errors. First, TMNT never sets up the turtles properly. It assumes that its audience is already vested in their unity and well-being, which I was not. Consequently, I found the first act to be plodding and dull - this was the character stuff, and I didn't care about the characters. Things picked up a bit in the second act and actually got interesting for a few minutes near the end, but the climax suffered from the next error: computer-generated martial arts fight scenes just aren't interesting. It's fun to watch stuntmen fight, in the same way it's fun to watch dancers perform. But who wants to sit around and watch a CGI Swan Lake? Lastly, the film's third error laid in its choice of aesthetic: the women are so wasp-waisted that their girdles must make breathing impossible. The men are so top-heavy that they shouldn't be able to balance on two legs. And the world is just not interesting. Sorry. It just isn't.

If I had to sum up TMNT with an acronym, that acronym would be SUCKS. Sorry, no time - you'll have to figure out what it stands for on your own.

How to Marry a Millionaire

HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE strikes a blow against the commodotization of women by telling a story about the commoditization of men. While some complain that the film is, in reality, arguing for the former, that notion is subverted by the film's infamous fashion show / Thai whorehouse sequence, in which the lone man in the room is so overwhelmed by the raw power of female sexuality that his only possible response is an emasculated retreat.

In the world of popular culture, women were (and are!) nothing more than the sum of their parts. In HOW TO MAM, the men become nothing more than the sum of their monthly paychecks. Gone are considerations of their intrinsic worth, their honor, or their intellect, or any of the uncountable (in)tangibles that make a man a man. In a bold move that would go unanswered until 1997's IN THE COMPANY OF MEN, women boil men down to the one thing about which the (What's the opposite of fairer - uglier? Harumph!) sex is most insecure - the size of their bank accounts. These women dare to express what every creature on the planet knows: it really all comes down to "What can you do for me?"

Some may argue that HOW TO MAM breaks down at the end, when Lauren Bacall winds up marrying a grease monkey, only to discover that he's a proficient exploiter of the workers of the world's petroleum industry. I say those people focus on the text, the sacrifice and reward, when they should be focusing on the subtext, the alpha female's ability to spot that member of the pack most likely to give her what she needs and to home in on that individual, consciously or no. The film's resolution both rewards that instictive ability while slyly acknowledging its women's understanding of the dynamic and the men's fatalistic acceptance of it.

In a world in which the strong eat the weak, HOW TO MAM reminds us just who is which, and what the stakes are. What a brilliantly subversive little picture.

And don't get me started on that overture.

Hellboy Revisited

I've been on a Hellboy kick lately, mostly because I'll reinforce pretty much anything that gets my kid to read. That said, I revisited Guilllermo del Toro's live-action HELLBOY film over the weekend. I enjoyed it much more this time around.

When I saw HELLBOY during its theatrical run, the comics were fresher in my mind. This, of course, led to constant comparisons between what I was seeing and what I'd read and, while I liked what I was seeing, it simply couldn't compare to my imagination. That, and there was no Lobster Johnson.

This time around, the comics have faded in memory and I was able to enjoy the film more on its own terms. The audience surrogate -character doesn't grate, the throwaway references don't feel underdone, and themes of Hellboy really carry through. You see, HELLBOY is all about choice: it's just the thing to appeal to believers in the Leibnizian monadic soul, like me. In the film, as in the comics, Hellboy was created to be the Antichrist and unleash cosmic, Lovecraftian horror upon the world. He was brought into the world by evil forces to do evil deeds, but gets an early exposure to the good guys. Ultimately, he chooses sides, and his self-determining choice defines him more than all the external factors that combine to force his hand.

This is great stuff, and HELLBOY delivers it in a package filled with slimy monsters, catchy one-liners, and a double helping of fun.

Still no Lobster Johnson, though. Perhaps in HELLBOY 2.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY is consistently amusing, occasionally hilarious, and always gorgeous.

Here's the setup: Arthur Dent's home is about to be destroyed, and there's nothing he can do to stop it. Sure, he lie down in front of the tractors positioned to destroy his house, but that won't stop the Vogon demolition fleet positioned to annihilate the Earth. Though it's a bad day for Earth, it's a great day for Arthur, however. His strange buddy, the one who doesn't quite fit in, turns out to be an alien. To make matters better, he's an alien who writes for _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_, and he shows up just in time to help Arthur hitch a ride to, well, the galaxy.

The next 80 minutes or so bring us the horrors of Vogon poetry, a new definition of the technicolor yawn, the best extended riff on our sitting President I've yet to see in a motion picture, and the Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Oh, and we find out who made the fjords. He won a prize.

Though the movie breaks down a bit during the second act, it pulls itself together admirably well and closes on a very strong note. I expected this movie to be reasonably amusing, but it wound up making my day. Have fun.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

PS While watching this movie, I couldn't help but compare it to I HEART HUCKABEES. IHH purported to be an existential comedy, but it was really a comedy about self-importance. THHGTTG is the real thing.

The Comedians of Comedy

Netflix is getting into the business of producing its own material, and one of its first products was THE COMEDIANS OF COMEDY. It's a documentary about the Comedians of Comedy tour, a show that unites a number of (unknown to me) comics and has them play nonstandard venues, such as rock clubs and town social halls.

The documentary's premise and the comedians' self image is one of cutting edge -itude, of people who refuse to sell out while they probe the limitations of their art form. In other words, they haven't hit it big and they say "fuck" a lot. I thought their sets were amusing, and I even chuckled once or twice, but there isn't an Eddie Izzard among them. Ah, well.