Identity, the Internet, and the Dollar Movies

It seems that a couple of strong themes have run through most of the TV, books, and movies I’ve consumed this fall, and I think they’re related to some of our current societal anxieties, as is usually the case.

One is identity, and how it relates to society at large. How do we define ourselves in a world where we know better than ever that all we are is DNA and firing synapses? It would seem that we’re more able to let others know who we are than ever, but at the same time there’s this fear that we have no control, that someone else is pulling our strings. Maybe this is part of the fear that the Glenn Becks and Michelle Bachmanns of the world tap into, that we have no control over our lives. And to an extent it’s true: never before has every detail of our lives been visible to our bosses, our government, and our enemies in the way it is now. This is the price we pay to make the world traversable in an instant, to have friends and business partners on other continents, to live in a world where anyone can be instantly famous.

Which brings us to another theme, that of our relationship to the media and the internet. Something is reaching critical mass, I think, and we’re now quite literally in Andy Warhol’s future, at least in America and Europe and a few other places. At the same time, we’re seeing objectivity disappear in our news media, replaced by opinion. This may not be a good thing, but what I think this environment of blogs and Fox News has given us is one huge conversation, a huge town hall meeting about everything all the time, rather than speeches by talking heads at set times. What does that mean? And is fame, more easily attainable for the average joe than any previous time in our history, one of the only ways to make your voice count more than someone else’s? And what is the price for that?

This is all brought on by a handful of stories, some of which are spectularly good and some of which are pretty awful. I’ll write about some more of the books I’ve been reading another time. As for TV, there are a large number of shows on right now, but I think the one that makes me think the most is “Dollhouse”. The show is not going to last beyond its current 13 episode Second Season, but that is fine, and it is worth enjoying while it is here. The show, which I’ve reviewed here before, had the best episode of its season so far this past week, focusing on Dichen Lachmann’s character, Sierra.

The episode, and to a certain extent the show itself, is about rape, and what it does to us on a personal and societal level. There is a scene near the beginning where the man we met in “Needs” who put Sierra in the Dollhouse prepositions her. She refuses and tries to leave. He physically prevents her. The entire party (which is mostly made up of Dolls) stands around and does nothing. The Dollhouse is (metaphorically) about how society inexorably “programs” us to take on certain roles… in a way are we all responsible when things like this happen? Of course, there’s more to the episode than this, it’s full of spectacular performances and feels like a step forward for the show’s mythology. io9 has a detailed review here: http://io9.com/5389040/rape-is-one-tick-short-of-armageddon-on-dollhouse

At the dollar movies, where movies usually appear not long before they go to DVD (a window which closes a little further every few months), I saw two SF movies this week. The first was “District 9”, which gives itself a sense of reality by appearing at least part of the time to be some sort of documentary. The story is about a group of aliens (refugees?) that appear above Johannesburg, and are settled in a camp known as District 9. Those familiar with South Africa will notice strong parallels with apartheid and the more recent influx of refugees to the country from Africa’s more impoverished areas, which has led to some violence. The film is cast almost entirely with local South Afircan actors, with unknown Sharlto Copley cast in the lead role, a petty bureaucrat who gets involved in events beyond his control.

The film’s biggest strength is Copley’s character, Wikus van der Merwe, who, as one “talking head” notes, “took the choices available to him.” He’s not really a good guy by choice. When we see the aliens, they’re a lot like people, subject to depravity, violence, and pointless addictions. There are good aliens, but they seem to be few and far between… the implication is that we are the same way. The film observes all this dispassionately, helped by the documentary format. Except it seems to really want us to hate Nigerians, for some reason.

The issue of identity comes up because (POSSIBLE SPOILER) van der Merwe finds himself infected with an alien “fluid” that is gradually changing his own DNA from human to alien. He finds himself fitting in nowhere, both a pariah and incredibly valuable in the view of the both “sides”. (END SPOILER) The media is omnipresent throughout the film, as it seems to me it now is in most people’s lives.

The movie is extremely well made, with the CGI aliens completely photorealistic with distinct personalities despite a budget of “only” $30 million (the film made this back and then some on its first weekend). The “documentary” style is used to serve the story rather than distracting with overly swirly shots. However, the film’s villains (especially the Nigerians) can be a little too over the top at times. Also, the third act turns into one long action sequence, which is not really what I was looking for from such an intelligent film.

Tonight’s film was “Gamer”, a fitting cap to a week where the two really memorable stories for me were “The Hunger Games” and “Dollhouse”, as the film strongly contains elements of both without managing to be nearly as good as either one. In the near future, the big popular media phenomenon is games where people control other real people. A weird southern guy played by Michael C. Hall (chewing large bites of scenery throughout) invented “Society”, which is essentially “Second Life” if your avatar was a real person. As Hall’s character, Castle, notes, people pay both to be controlled and to control, though it seems that at least some of the “I-Cons” are there because they’re desperate and they’re getting paid. Now Castle has invented “Slayers”, in which gamers control death-row inmates in pitched “battles”… a FPS with real deaths. These battles are incredibly popular just to watch, and the top gamers make millions.

And that’s pretty much it. The movie is from the writer/director team that gave us “Crank”, and it has the same feel of gratuitous sex and violence being presented in a way that shouts “Look how gratuitous this is!” I enjoyed “Crank” because it was so ridiculous and completely unexpected. “Gamer” has more there there, so to speak, but not that much, and while here the boobs and blood seem to actually have a further message behind them, the movie is still an exploitative violent media offering of nearly the same kind it is critiquing.

The action sequences are presented with the camera shaking crazily, completely preventing us from having any sense of the geography of any of the action sequences. Perhaps fortunately, this took away some of the effect of the violence for me. The movie feels like an extension of this, presenting its concept so frenetically we are prevented from caring or even being impressed. There are, however, two sequences I will remember for a long time. One is the opening minute or so, in which we get a sense of this future world, with “Slayers” advertisements writ large across skyscrapers, even on the Great Pyramid, all set to Marilyn Manson’s cover of “Sweet Dreams”. (“Some of them want to use you/Some of them want to be used by you.”) The other is the climax, which (SPOILER) includes a completely random musical number just when we’re expecting a big showdown. I’m not sure it was a good idea, or even well executed, but by that point I was very happy that they tried it.(END SPOILER).

Interestingly, both “Dollhouse” and “Gamer” deal with the concept of the powerful literally reprogramming the less powerful, and both of them come to the conclusion that this means the end of everything. Of course, since both take the concept literally, both show it leading to the literal apocalypse, when, at least today, this takes place more in a figurative way, so what these are both really saying is that what this does is rob our lives of their beauty and meaning.

Movie Reviews for People Who Go to the Dollar Movies After Work: Tropic Thunder

This is the first movie I've reviewed in this series that was actually successful, but that doesn't mean you should pay top dollar for it! Tropic Thunder is a middling Hollywood comedy that gets quite a bit of its appeal from its A-list talent. It's directed by the actor Ben Stiller, and he got a bunch of his friends, including Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, Matthew McConaughey, Nick Nolte, Steve Coogan, and yeah, Tom Cruise, who has a ball as the new modern stereotype of a movie mogul, to appear in it, not to mention a myriad of cameos and in-jokes.

The basic premise is that a bunch of actors making a Vietnam movie end up stranded in the jungle. They think the cameras are still rolling (even after their director (Coogan) steps on a land mine and blows up in front of them), and when they stumble across a bunch of heroin traffickers their movie turns into real life. Stiller's character is an over-the-hill action star, making a bid for mainstream credibility. Downey Jr. is an Australian actor, a five-time Oscar winner who doesn't break character when the cameras stop rolling. For this movie he's had surgery to make himself black... Yes, in the era of the Obama presidency, blackface is apparently finally acceptable comedic fodder. Black is a comedian best known for fart-joke movies who spends most of the movie in heroin withdrawal, which we're also now apparently able to play for laughs.

Rather than a lot of huge laughs or really great lines, this movie generally just does everything with a smile on its face. It has several swear words per sentence, but the movie it reminded me of the most might be, weirdly, another Stiller film, Zoolander. But there's nothing here on the level of "How are they supposed to learn to read if they can't even fit inside the building?" There's a lot of little, tonal jokes given to us rapid fire. The audience wasn't nearly as into it as some other comedies I've seen recently, even Get Smart. That said, this probably required a higher level of skill from everyone involved than a silly spy comedy, as a lot of it depends on timing and how swear words are delivered. This may have had a higher percentage of unintelligible dialogue than any other mainstream comedy I've been to, and I'm not sure if that's a good sign or not. Probably not.

There are a lot of good things here, but I'm not sure they ever come together into anything real. Downey Jr. got a lot of the press, and deservedly so. He just goes on these extended, nonsensical riffs, and they're probably the best thing in the movie ("I know who I am! I'm a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude!"). Nolte, playing the soldier upon whose story the movie is based, has fun pulling out every military cliche in the book, but becomes less interesting once we learn the real truth about him. Black's character just seems superfluous. It's like he was added to create chaos, but he doesn't create enough chaos to justify his existence.

This review feels disjointed, but this is a disjointed movie. I think it probably got better reviews than it deserved. It has some funny moments, but it has too many swings and misses. If you were smart enough to skip the big movie theater, make this a dollar movie.

Movie Reviews for People Who Go to the Dollar Movies After Work: Swing Vote

I went to the discount theatre today with the vague intention of seeing Brendan Fraser's Journey to the Center of the Earth, but when I got there I decided to go with my gut and saw Swing Vote. This isn't a bad movie, necessarily. It's an okay movie stuck with Kevin Costner as its star, and that just brings down the whole proceeding. Costner has had good movies before, but even in them he was the stoic rock around which the action moved. Here he's just a dumbass, and the movie seems to think we like dumbasses because we're dumbasses, too.

Costner plays Ernest "Bud" Johnson, a drunk and a nobody. He's a single dad to a fifth-grade-or-so daughter who's much smarter than he deserves ("What do you want to be when you grow up?" "I go back and forth between veterinarian and chairman of the Fed."), making me seriously wonder how his sperm produced this bright little girl, especially when we later see her mother is even worse. Bud is the sort of guy who responds to his daughter telling him she registered him to vote through the mail with "That's just great. I could get jury duty now!" He seems to love her, but then forgets about her repeatedly. I hate Bud. Even when Bud is theoretically redeemed at the end, mostly by admitting that he's a dumbass, I still hated him.

Through some arbitrary plot mechanics that the movie knows better than to dwell on, an entire presidential election comes down to Bud's vote. The state of New Mexico is tied, and due to a voting machine malfunction that caused Bud's "vote" to not count (I'm gonna skip over a whole part here made more complicated than it needs to be, involving how Bud didn't really try to vote), he gets to re-vote ten days later. The global news media (Aaron Brown, Chris Matthews, Arianna Huffington, etc. all have extended cameos) descends upon Bud's tiny hometown of Texico, New Mexico, as do both candidates.

This is where the movie finds itself as much as it does. The candidates include the republican President Boone (Kelsey Grammer), and a democrat from Vermont named Donald Greenleaf (Dennis Hopper). Neither of these men is given much of personality, though Greenleaf, probably unintentionally, reminds viewers of John McCain. A lot. Maybe it was just me, I dunno. Anyway, both of them sycophantically try to please Bud in whatever way that they can, which Bud buys hook, line, and sinker but his daughter Molly immediately sees through. We also spend time with the candidate's advisors, with Stanley Tucci as the President's ruthless Rovian operative and Nathan Lane (perhaps the most restrained I've ever seen him) as an idealist democrat who is just so sick of losing it hurts.

The best parts of the movie come when the candidates fall all over each other in an attempt to conform to Bud's every whim, with the Republican coming out in favor of gay marriage and the Democrat denouncing abortion rights based on off-hand remarks. The campaign commercials in which they do so are absolutely hysterical. We also see each of the candidates questioning, in his own way, whether any of this is right, and how far he's willing to go. Though a bit earnest, all of that works. There's also a fairly worthless side plot involving a pretty hispanic reporter and her boss (George Lopez, who is totally pointless but at least doesn't have time to ruin the movie), but it's also fairly inoffensive.

Where the movie runs into trouble is in the relationship between Bud and his daughter, and the fact that it's front and center more than we really want it to be. Normally, I appreciate character development, but it just doesn't work. There's also a truly bizarre shaky-cam drama detour at the top of the third act that definitely didn't need to be there... it's as if the film-makers think it's the key incident in the film, but the audience just wants it to go away. In the end, Bud gives a long, vaguely poetic speech on national television that is Costner's best moment in the movie by far, but it doesn't feel earned and I was left wondering if we were supposed to think his daughter wrote it for him.

This is a movie with some thought behind it, that manages to comment on our system without seeming like a polemic for one side or the other. However, it runs into trouble trying to make those ideas into a movie. We're left with a comedy with many funny moments, but also moments like that when the Secretary of State and Attorney General of New Mexico show up at Bud's trailer to tell him about the situation. He assumes they're social services and pleads with them not to take his daughter away. I was left not sure whether this scene was supposed to be funny or not. And that's why this is definitely a dollar movie.

Movie Reviews for People Who Go to the Dollar Movies After Work: Babylon A.D.

Our movie reviews here at the WalrusFile are going to be a little bit different. It’s so expensive to go to a first-run movie these days that I know that there are a lot of people like me who decide to wait, either to rent the DVD or order it from Netflix or, like I usually do, go see the movies once they arrive at the discount theater down the street. But there’s a lot of choices, so we’ll try and weed out the duds.

Babylon A.D. is the most completely nonsensical movie I’ve seen in a long time. I don’t mean it’s weird, though it is, or that it’s brainless, though it’s usually that too. I mean it literally makes no sense. I could use words to describe the plot to you, but they would be meaningless. We are given a series of vaguely interesting pieces here, but there is little to no explanation of how they fit together. That said, there are redeeming qualities here. The movie is entertaining. We’re given a halfway interesting vision of a sort of coherent future (well, visually coherent, anyway). And Vin Diesel is always good for a laugh.

We are shown a brutal mercenary. A girl with the brain of a computer (which somehow means she’s psychic) who may be carrying a “viral bomb.” A nun who knows kung fu. An insane cage fighter (“He is a lost soul”). A crazy scarred boss guy (Gerard Depardieu!) in a tank limousine. Televisions that “you can’t turn off, but you can change the channel.” A vaguely creepy religion. Biker gangs with heat-seeking missiles. Drone aircraft set to blow up refugees. A virgin pregnancy (with multiracial twins!). Computer systems that read your memories by temporarily killing you. Moving robotic walls. “Double Clone” Siberian Tigers. Bombs going off with zero explanation (more than one!). Sexual tension out of absolutely nowhere. And, most especially, Vin Diesel doing a back flip over a missile with a snowmobile. I’m forgetting a lot here.

The basic story is that Vin Diesel (whose character, I think, is named “Toorop”) has to transport this girl named Aurora who has supposedly spent her entire life at a convent in Kyrgyzstan to New York, along with a nun played by Taiwanese actress Michelle Yeoh. This is a fairly standard Sci-Fi plot, actually. But the explanations of the hows and whys that we’re given are what make this all extra trippy. It’s set in a sort of “this goes on” future, chaotic and overpopulated, overrun with refugees, with video screens and advertisements on every available surface. Global warming is mentioned but we don’t really see the effects. The special effects are convincing, especially the gleaming ultra-city of New York. There’s a nice joke when they’re flying on an airliner and we pull back to see “Coke Zero” written on the side in huge letters. At least I think it’s a joke. It could be extremely ham-fisted product placement. And no, the title has no relation that I can see to anything in the movie… except, I suppose, that it does theoretically take place after the birth of Christ.

This movie’s pedigree is, somewhat randomly, mostly French. It has a French director, Mathieu Kassovitz, a French actress playing Aurora (meaning her dialogue often slips into incomprehensibility), and it’s based on a French Sci-Fi novel called Babylon Babies. In a few places it’s reminiscent of that far superior, far more joyous French Sci-Fi classic in English, The Fifth Element. A few places. But in place of garish color everywhere we have black and metal gray, and in place of plucky Bruce Willis we have Vin Diesel, who is not asked to show a single emotion for the entire film. And that’s why this is definitely a dollar movie.