John Carter

I was all set to give John Carter a fair shot.  I like and respect the previous work of its director, Andrew Stanton, I’m always up for a science fiction adventure, and the love interest is pretty.  For its part, John Carter did its best to wow me.  It had all the elements of an exciting story, it introduced cool creatures and civilizations, and it ended in a rousing battle of good vs. evil.  Unfortunately, the film felt flat.  It put me off right at the beginning, and I never could bring myself to invest in what was happening onscreen.

John Carter begins with two false starts.  They make sense by the time the closing credits roll, but they made me hesitate to commit once the main story got underway.  Once the story does get moving, we’re introduced to the eponymous Carter, realize it’s a year or two after the close of the Civil War, and learn that Carter was a Confederate cavalry officer in that war.  Judging by his conduct toward the U.S. Army officer who wants his help for something, we gather that he has a deep hatred for the Union and the soldiers who fought for it.

Ok, you lost me right there.  The Confederate cause, which they labeled “states’ rights,” was actually the right of states not only to choose to enslave human beings, but to extend the Peculiar Institution to newly chartered states and territories.  Screw anyone and everyone who was on board with that program.  [Personal aside #1: I have children in Florida public schools.  The Ellermann family position on the Civil War does not go over well.]  [Personal aside #2: I can’t wait to leave.]  John Carter didn’t bother to give its protagonist exculpatory dialogue, so I began the story in opposition to him.  When he finds himself on Mars and clapped into chains, I thought, “Serves him right.”

Dominic West, whom everyone who has seen ‘The Wire’ thinks is a great guy, plays the antagonist.  He’s a Martian warlord who’s supposed to be really evil, but is no more evil than any number of other conquerors in history.  Had John Carter allowed him to Rickman it up and have some fun, we might have enjoyed him.  He plays the material straight, however, which made our only grounds for opposition the fact that he meant to unify his planet. 

Unfortunately, I never had a reason to oppose his conquest beyond a general sense of “conquest is bad.”  The “good guy” city-state, led by the great Ciaran Hinds and represented by the remarkably attractive Lynn Collins, didn’t show me why it was better than Westville.  In fact, it was led by a moron and had a princess who was willing to sacrifice untold numbers of her subjects’ lives to avoid marrying someone she didn’t like because “that’s no way to live.”  Sure thing, lady.  Tell it to the widows and orphans of the men you sacrificed on the altar of your quality of life.  The other sentient race we met, which also feared Western domination, was brutish and nasty and could have used a little Baltimore justice.

And away we go, I guess.  John Carter does a fish-out-of water thing when Carter first arrives on the planet, then kicks over to a reluctant hero narrative with space monsters and a princess whose costume design could have used a little more Frazetta and little less drapery.  It has sword fights and laser beams and betrayals and heroics and all the hallmarks of a grand adventure, but I never had a dog in the fight.

I’ve seen Stanton run rings around stories like this in Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and WALL-E. Next time around, here’s hoping he returns to form and gives us heroes we can root for, villains we can love to hate, an adventure we can get into, and some depth of meaning.  Unfortunately, John Carter simply does not deliver.

WALL-E

Pixar is in an interesting place. When we sit down for a Pixar film, we expect beauty and thought and humor. We expect to be dazzled, and anything short of that disappoints us.

Fear not. WALL-E is dazzling - it entranced my 2-yr old, my 8-yr old, my wife, and me. But it's also disturbing.

One of the film's sequences follows an obese person in a floating chair, gorging on visual media and wasting time discussing inanities such as what he thought of some movie or tv show he'd recently seen. It's all part of the film's message about consumerism, physical and virtual, and I couldn't help but see it as a shot at me.

You see, I'm a guy who likes to spend his time thinking about entertainments. I find watching movies and writing little snippets about them to be recreational, certainly moreso than the mind-numbing tedium that is fishing or planting stuff. And I do that writing on a nifty little computer, while sitting on a comfy couch. Granted, I'm fit, but I'm pretty sure that Jack LaLanne could kick my ass, and he was born in 1914. In other words, I'm almost exactly the kind of guy at whome WALL-E is taking a shot.

Which is fine. Good art has the power to confront, and I resolve that confrontation by noting that this isn't *all* I do, but that I also spend a considerable amount of my time doing actual jobs that actually make people's lives better here in the real world. But while I accept that film's thesis that a passive life is a live half-lived, I take issue with the agrarian utopianism it presents as an alternative. While the agrarian utopia has long held a place in the western imagination, anyone who has spent considerable time around farmers can report that they aren't the healthiest people on Earth. They live a hard life, the kind of life that looks great when you're stuck in a cubicle writing code, but the kind many would trade in a minute.

Jeez. Looking over the last couple of paragraphs, it seems like a wrote an nigh-incomprehensible mishmash of ideas. Perhaps it's time to go for a run.

Finding Nemo

Oh, how I adore "Finding Nemo."

My two-year-old has just discovered it, and it's now on nearly constant rotation on the enormovision. I never tire of the film, and I suspect that's because of three reasons: compelling story, fine performances, and beautiful images.

The story is delightfully dad-centric, a rarity in this or any other genre. Marlin the clownfish is overprotective of his little Nemo and his worst fears are realized on the very first day of school: Nemo is captured by scuba divers and taken far away, and it's up to dad to find him and save him. As a dad, how can I not respond to that? How can I not relate to the conflict between Marlin's desire to shield his son from harm and his duty to expose him to risk? How can I not relate to his desperation, his determination, his no-choice-but-to-see-this-thing-through? And when Nemo learns that his dad is, in fact, supercool, well, what father doesn't want to be a hero in the eyes of his children?

This story is brought to life through well-written situations and dialogue, performed by first-class actors such as Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres, Willem Dafoe, and Geoffrey Rush. They hit not a single sour note, and they manage to immerse me in the goings on from start to finish.

And speaking of immersion, "Finding Nemo" immerses us in a beautiful world with a stricking color palette. It's bright and rich and endlessly interesting, and when it's on it lights up the whole basement. In fact, I have one of the DVD's special features, a virtual aquarium, going right now. This world is so captivating that it makes me want to dust off my old scuba card, fly somewhere nice, and take a plunge. This is a beautiful, beautiful film. I don't think I'll ever tire of it.