I'm Not In A Good Mood...

...and I'll tell you why.

First and foremost, politics infuriate me. I get so fucking angry (and yeah, this is going to be profane, so you're warned) when I see how many Democratic voters didn't show up at the polls yesterday. I don't argue that there are problems in this country. Of course there are. There were before Obama took office, and there will be when he leaves in either 2012 or 2016. The idea that registered Democratic voters are showing Obama how they feel by not voting is so ridiculously wrong-headed and offensive to the ideals of the country. I know this is what some people chose to do yesterday. In 2 years, tell me how much of an impact it's made on your life.

I'm also frustrated at the reaction of the media to the political news, and--as always--their shortsighted reaction to the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. How dare Jon Stewart tell the media how to do their job, right? It's almost like he's got a point when he points out, via the use of clips and quotes, how shitty the mainstream media (or, sorry, the LIBERAL media, because that's what's involving Andrew Breitbart in ABC News' election coverage would have been had they not realized how fucking stupid that idea was) really is at their job. I certainly agree with one aspect of the argument: Jon Stewart really shouldn't be pointing out the media's flaws. He really shouldn't be, and he really shouldn't have to. And yet, the world will turn, the sun will rise, and the media will continue to blow.

I'm frustrated with the state of the country, and the state of the state. Essentially, it's hard to re-immerse myself in the world of entertainment when I know how badly the world is going. I could go on, but if I do, it's going to drive me crazy. Just a bit of venting. That's what blogs are for, right? Right.

Leaving My Brain At The Door

"Head them off at the pass? I HATE that cliche!" -- Blazing Saddles

It's cliche to say so, hence the epigram, but the phrase "leave your brain at the door" needs to be stricken from the record, and fast. This phrase has permeated popular culture, most specifically films and television shows, to the point of ruining most of the work that comes out of Hollywood. It used to be that the phrase would be used when describing movies--mostly genre films, like horror, science fiction, or action--that are fun, but if you think about them for too long, they fall apart. Because of that, it's best for you not to think about all the implausibilities, so just...well, you know the rest.

I don't know when this realization came to me, but I know this much: not only do I hate that phrase, I'm just about done with movies and TV shows that choose to operate under the principle of leaving one's brain at the door. What I mean by the latter is that some movies and TV shows are not made with any intelligence. The people behind this stuff essentially throw up their hands and say, "Who cares if this makes any sense? People should just leave their brains at the door!" What is more annoying, then: that a lot of successful movies are made without anything remotely close to intelligence, or that people eat them up? It's been proven this summer that audiences do very much enjoy movies that aren't a) stupid and b) think the people watching them are stupid.

Once a year, of course, Pixar releases a movie with more brains, wit, and emotion than most movies in the past decade. (Quick side-rant: anyone bitching about Toy Story 3 getting a Best Picture nomination at the expense of live-action fare should think about how many other live-action movies this year, or any year, are nearly as good as what Pixar makes. Blame the people who make live-action movies, not Pixar.) But we also had Inception this summer, and it's one of the brainiest blockbusters of recent memory--oh, and it's just finished up its ninth weekend and hasn't yet left the top ten at the box office. You and I can get into a long argument about whether or not the movie lives up to the hype (the answer from my end is an affirmative one), but the movie's not dumb.

And don't get me wrong: I like action movies, and sci-fi, and some of the movies in the genre don't have to be for Rhodes scholars to get the job done. The new Star Trek is one of the slickest blockbusters I've ever seen, so perfectly set up in the script and direction that it never fails to be anything less than a great bit of fun. As with anything J.J. Abrams touches, the timeline's a bit convoluted--OK, in this case, very convoluted--but it's not hard to get. The movie was a big success and managed to not feel condescending or purposely stupid.

This is the problem. Movies and TV shows--obviously, I find it happens more with movies, but TV writers, producers, and executives aren't innocent--just choose to be dumb. There have, of course, been stories told second- and thirdhand about how executives think audiences are stupid. Are audiences getting off here? No, of course not. Until Toy Story 3 mercifully passed it on the worldwide records, the new Alice in Wonderland was not only a big success, it had made more than a billion dollars across the globe. If you have lived through that movie, try not to pass out in shock. Alice in Wonderland was, at least in my opinion, an embarrassment and a blight on the careers of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp--and I'm a Burton apologist, for the most part. This was a movie that was made to make money, and shamelessly. This was a movie made with no thought or ounce of cleverness, and when you're adapting something by Lewis Carroll, those are necessary elements. But it's cool, kids! Johnny Depp's doing a silly dance! Isn't that amazing! Of course it is, now give me your money and put on these glasses.

Movies didn't used to pander so obviously, so meanly. Even back in the studio system, the movies that are considered classics (and those that aren't) did not condescend. The phrase "Leave your brain at the door" used to be a way to mock certain movies and those who made them, offhandedly. Now, it's a warning: this movie or TV show has been made with only the assumption that you are stupid enough to pay for it. Try your very best not to give in, no matter how good the ads are or how famous the people are (the last goes for movies like Salt, of which the positive reviews could be summed up as the following: "This movie is stupid, but isn't it fun to watch Angelina Jolie kick ass?"). If you leave your brain at the door, leave your whole body there.

What You Need to Do Tomorrow

What you need to do tomorrow is this. If you have Turner Classic Movies on your TV, you need to watch A Matter of Life and Death. It airs tomorrow, for the first time in quite a few months, at 2:45 P.M., Eastern Standard Time. It will air again in December, but after that, who knows how long it will be? More than likely, you have not seen this great film, even if the title is a cliche to end cliches. You need to watch this movie, and fast.

Why do you need to watch A Matter of Life and Death? Do you like movies? Do you ever feel like, as hoary an idea as it may seem, they don't make them like they used to? This is the movie for you. I won't ruin it too much, but say that it is a whimsical, supernatural romantic comedy about a man who gets a second chance at life and love. Yeah, that sounds like something you've heard and seen a hundred times before--in some ways, it is, but this film was the beginning of the idea. From filmmaking duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, A Matter of Life and Death is one of the most charming, enjoyable, sentimental, sensual, funny films I've ever seen.

I have and will continue to tell you about the Archers (Powell and Pressburger, that is) and their brilliant films; in the 1940s, few filmmakers could match their unparalleled brilliance. TCM is not particularly perfect about getting the word out. The Archers' most famous film is 1948's The Red Shoes--and make no mistake, it is a masterpiece--but it's very rare for the network to show any other of the Archers' films. The Criterion Collection has been doing a sterling job of bringing their work to DVD and Blu-ray, but this is mostly work you have to do for yourself. TCM is making it a little easier on you tomorrow. If you're at work, use your DVR. If you have a VCR, tape it. Do whatever you have to, to watch A Matter of Life and Death. It's one of the best films of the 1940s, one of the best films the Archers made, and one of the best experiences you'll have with a movie. This is what you need to do tomorrow.

In Memoriam

I was not Hermione's favorite. If you own a pet, or you know someone who does, or you've mentally ingested any popular culture, you don't need a further explanation. In the same, nearly childish way that most people favor a pet, so too with the pets and their owners. For some reasons that are easy to explain--I would often treat Hermione less like a cat and more like a dog, which means I was too rough to play with a Siamese cat--and reasons that I'll never know--maybe she was equally annoyed by a male figure in the 3 years of her life before Elyse and I adopted her--Hermione favored my wife. Hermione, as you have pieced together by now, was a Siamese cat, one of the most beautiful I'd ever seen. Her fur was long enough, but not too long. Her eyes were captivating, her meow at once obnoxious and pretty, and she passed away on Monday.

Hermione had been sick for a long time, as any living thing tends to be after a certain point. When Elyse and I adopted her from the local humane society, she was 3 years old. This was in 2006, right after Elyse and I, then engaged, moved in together while I attended graduate school in Flagstaff. Elyse was raised in a family that loved, or was obsessed with, cats. Sculptures, paintings, photos, everything. Think of a common household item, and Elyse's family had the same item, only with a cat adorned somewhere on it. I'd always wanted cats, but my family had to give back our only cat after we found out my mother was deathly allergic. Hermione was a major milestone in our relationship.

We had scanned the humane society's website on a Friday night and spotted two Siamese cats, sisters. One was 5; one was 3. Both looked adorable, and we figured it'd be best to get one as soon as we could. Siamese cats, as I would imagine even a non-cat person knows, are an upscale breed, and to find two of them in a humane society, especially two who looked perfectly normal for the breed, is rare. The next day, we found them both in one of the larger cages in the cat adoption area. I forget if it was just a whim that came to us or something more particular, but we wanted to look at the younger of the two. This would end up being Hermione.

She was shy from the get-go, but too beautiful and sweet to let go. Siamese cats are known, among many other things, for having low immune systems. We had lots of trips to the vet, both in Flagstaff and in Phoenix. With Hermione, we were able to tell our friends brightly that she had herpes. No, it wasn't contagious, but a mere example of how Hermione--potentially because of how she was brought up before we owned her or because of mistreatment at the humane society--was a cat who needed to be constantly eyed. Though I'd often play the devil's advocate, 99% of the time, when Elyse thought something was wrong with her, something was wrong.

The worst news for a while came last May, when lymphoma was found in an X-ray of Hermione by our cat-only vet. Surgery came, but just before, I found myself in the strange position of putting Hermione back in a cage. Because of our schedules, I'd had to relay the vet's news via phone and had to sign off on a weekend surgery while we went off to Disneyland. For the most part, I was unemotional about it, thinking more of the multi-thousand-dollar surgery Hermione would be subject to, with us merely hoping it'd work. When the vet asked if I wanted to say goodbye to Hermione before I left for my vacation and I saw her scared, vulnerable, stressed-out face and teary, wide eyes, I found myself nearly shaking with emotion.

As the vet technician consoled me, almost confused at my outpouring, I tried to explain that I was about as baffled as she was. Why the hell was I crying this much? The cat was going to be fine, right? Even if the surgery didn't go off swimmingly, it wasn't like she wouldn't wake up. What got me then, and still grabs me, is the image of Hermione, backed up as far as possible in a dark, dank cage. She looked frightened; all I could imagine was her thinking "You are doing this to me. Why are you doing this to me?" I never wanted her like that again, never wanted to see her in that kind of fright again.

It turns out the final decision on seeing Hermione like that came suddenly, this past Monday. The surgery had worked about as well as it could; though I don't remember being briefed on it, our vet told us that the best-case scenario from the surgery is that she'd be relatively healthy with chemotherapy medicine for 18 months. We've just past 15 months since the surgery, and only days ago did Elyse notice anything was wrong. Of course, what Elyse noticed had been staring us in the face for a while. The obvious: Hermione, never the most active cat, but not a complete slouch, was lethargic. Actually, that assumes some form of movement, which Hermione wasn't exhibiting. She would sit in a few designated spots, and just sit or sleep there. What was more disturbing in the short term was that Hermione was not eating.

When we first got Hermione, she was the kind of cat who would not only get hungry, but make absolutely certain that you knew it. Howling, mewling, regular meowing; Hermione tried every trick in the book and tried each one multiple times, but it hadn't happened for a long time. When Elyse waved treats and new food in front of Hermione's face, there was no reaction. When we put Hermione in front of the food, she didn't react. For a period, Hermione would either eat the food or walk up and paw at it, but now, she barely moved. Elyse was rightfully concerned, so we brought her into the vet Monday afternoon. From the beginning of the appointment, it was clear that our vet was worried. One thing quickly led to another, and we were presented with two options: put the cat to sleep or put her through more intensive chemotherapy.

In this case, "more intensive" meant weekly trips to an oncologist, and far more serious treatments. On the one hand, it would help out Hermione--whose cancer had not only come back and spread to other parts of her body, but who also had a collapsed lung--to live a few more months. But, on the other hand, the treatments could stop working, and fast. The vet had a dog who'd gone through pretty much the same thing, except he chose the aggressive chemotherapy. Elyse and I were already on the brink of making the difficult decision, but when she asked the vet what he'd do, he didn't hesitate: "I'd put her to sleep." This made the decision harder and simpler.

In part because I still don't want to think about it, I won't talk too much about the rest of the day, except to say that what happened next was agonizing, painful, and made me cry far more than the day when I left her for her surgery. Elyse keeps telling me something that most of me knows: Hermione is better off now, now that she's not in pain, now that she doesn't have to worry about going to the vet, or having medicine every day. I know this, but it's the little things of the last minutes she spent in this life that kill me. What gets me most, though, isn't the gradual feeling of her falling asleep on my lap for the last time (the process began with one shot, then she could sit in my lap for a time, and a second shot would follow), nor is it the fact that her eyes, her beautiful eyes, remained open long after she passed away. What gets me most is that the last thing she ever saw was the face of the one who wasn't her favorite.

Elyse was barely able to be in the room--something she'd never done before with any of her family's cats who'd passed away--but she was there. I wish Hermione'd gotten a last look at her, knowing it was her last look. I'm happy that Hermione's better, but it's not the kind of happy you feel immediately. It's especially hard today to feel anything aside from lingering grief: while Hermione passed away this Monday, today, September 2nd, is her birthday. She would have been 7. She will be missed.

Reflections on a Sunday Evening

I love Twitter, am on it every day, and always get a kick out of interacting. Having said that, at least once a week, I am privy to conversations that have no reason to be in a public forum. I have no examples to provide here--partly because I don't recall the specific instances, and partly because it would be hypocritical to rehash things I shouldn't be seeing to begin with--but it's always borderline obnoxious when I read, for example, various film writers sniping at each other in ways that should be kept to face-to-face conversations or phone calls. Hell, use IM if you want to bitch at someone else. Twitter's not the worst place for this kind of thing, but it always makes me feel uncomfortable.

...I know it's common every once in a while for there to be backlashes against popular culture standbys, but after watching some 1980s-era animated movies this weekend, Pixar needs to be kept out of it. Yes, if you read this blog, you know I am a Pixar apologist (well, not completely; I have little love for Cars and cannot muster up excitement for its sequel), but the movies I've seen this weekend--including Balto, The Land Before Time, and Oliver and Company--prove that Toy Story is not only a clearly influential film on a new type of animation, but is a truly unique, special, and brilliant film. The animation in the three older films is flat and dreary; the scripts are catered to children only, and stupid ones; the characters are bland. Nothing in these films is worth pointing out. Clearly, things changed with The Little Mermaid in 1989, and last year's The Princess and the Frog proved that great animated films don't have to be done by computers all the time; still, these three movies filled me with more respect for Pixar than ever before.

...It is incredibly disheartening to think that nearly 30 days will go by with nothing in multiplexes that I want to see. There's The Town and The Social Network, but that's it for the next 8 weeks or so. And the arthouse cinema is too far to justify a casual drive. Pity.

...The same goes for television. Aside from Mad Men, Louie, and Childrens Hospital, the TV world is slow going for another month. Doldrums of August indeed.

The Kids Are All Right

I don't like Julianne Moore or Annette Bening. Not as people, of course, but as actresses. While they are two of the better-known actresses over the age of 40 these days, I find them both to be extremely mannered on screen. To put it simply, when I watch them, I can see them acting. There are exceptions, of course--I love, love, LOVE Far From Heaven--but for the most part, these two are like nails on a chalkboard. So put them together as a lesbian couple with two teenage kids, as the main characters of their own movie, and you can imagine how excited I am. But, as I referenced in my previous post, the film of which I speak, The Kids Are All Right, is getting rave reviews, has done well at the box office, and will likely be a contender for Best Picture at next year's Oscars. I rarely avoid Oscar-bait movies, even if I'm not excited, so it was with trepidation that I saw the film last night.

While I was relatively lukewarm on the overall movie--mainly thanks to the funny but weak script by director Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg--I'll say that, with no reservations, Bening and Moore were both excellent. They played characters who I'm pretty sure I wouldn't ever want to spend time with, but they were great. The entire cast of the film--specifically Bening, Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Josh Hutcherson, and Mia Wasikowska--is great, but they are woefully underserved by the script. The plot of the film is high-concept, very 21st century, and also nothing more than a high concept: Bening and Moore play Nic and Jules, a married couple with two kids, Joni and Laser. Laser wants to know about the man whose sperm was used to conceive both kids, so Joni, who's older, gets in contact with him. Paul, a charming, rumpled restaurant owner, is the man in question, immediately charms his way into the family and ruffles Nic's feathers in the process.

I don't have a problem with a slight plot; what I have a problem with is how poorly developed each character is. Nic is a doctor, but she's mostly identified by being dominant in her relationships to the point of nearly coming off as a monster in some scenes. Jules is a flighty person, flitting from job to job; now, she's starting a landscape design company but even that may fall through. Paul owns a restaurant and likes to talk about himself. Again, one-dimensional characters aren't uncommon to Hollywood movies (and make no mistake, indie cred or not, this is a Hollywood movie through and through), but it's hard for me to buy some of the decisions the characters make with bare-minimum backstories.

Still, mostly thanks to some well-timed humor throughout and the sheer charm oozing from the five leads, The Kids Are All Right nearly manages to gloss over its flaws. Ruffalo has always seemed like something of a troublemaker in the movies he stars in--a notable exception is his performance in the superb Zodiac--and the role of Paul provides him plenty of room to make mayhem; it's subtle, but he's wreaking havoc with each move he makes in this family. Moore does a better job than expected as Jules, someone who's known better for being pretty than for being smart and has just realized it. Bening is also remarkable, but not surprising, as such a hard and harsh mother. Wasikowska and Hutcherson are both very good, but they lose out most of the five characters, having been given subplots that go nowhere. Joni, we are told by her friend, likes a certain boy, but that doesn't even get out of the gate; Laser's saddled with a friend who's a jerk (and wants to urinate on dogs, which is just charming), and his parents thinking he's gay. Wasikowska and Hutcherson do a great job acting like siblings, but they've got far too little to do.

There's no question that The Kids Are All Right is a movie that's worth watching; whether it's worth you paying money in the theater is up for debate. If you're turned off by gay people--well, get over it, please, it's the 21st century; having said that, this movie is barely about gay marriage and never flaunts Nic and Jules as a standard for being the right way to have a gay marriage work. The Kids Are All Right isn't as good as some people think it is, but it's also not as bad as I'd thought it would be. Movies don't often exceed our expectations, so it's nice that it happens once in a while.

In Which I Memorialize the Summer Movie Season

Though it's become something of a cliche to say so, the 2010 summer movie season was, for the most part, a complete wash. I say it's a bit of a cliche not because people have been saying this about the last few months' worth of films (though they have). It's a cliche because someone feels the need to say this about ANY summer movie season, at least within the past decade or so. I post this on a day when five--count 'em, five--new movies were released at the box office, and if one of them makes more than $15 million, it'll be lucky. The summer season is officially over, and it went out whimpering.

Of course, there were highlights. Most summer movie seasons aren't perfect--2005 and 2006, if I remember correctly, were particularly boring--and 2010 had three truly great films, films I'm going to be thinking about years from now: Toy Story 3, Inception, and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Each offered something different; two of them are among the most successful films of the year, while the latter is going to be a box-office dud. None will be forgotten--though it could be successfully argued that Scott Pilgrim won't be forgotten because its most ardent fans (by which I mean geeks) won't let you forget.

Unfortunately, based on where I live and where all the independent films get shown, I can only cop to having seen one of the big indie films of the last few months in theaters, and I did so just last night--The Kids Are All Right. I went in knowing that this was a movie I am supposed to see. Why? A) I'm a movie lover. B) I'm liberal and, what's more, a supporter of gay marriage and gay families. C) Relating to the first reason, this is a movie that's probably going to get nominated for Best Picture at the next Oscars ceremony. So why was I dreading it? Over the years, with few exceptions, I've come to loathe two of its leads, Annette Bening and Julianne Moore.

I'll get into a more detailed opinion of the film in a following post (short answer: Bening and Moore were much better than I've seen them in a while, but the movie is just...well, all right), but movies like Cyrus, Winter's Bone, and Get Low (all of which I want to see) will probably have to wait for Netflix. Maybe the worst realization I came to this summer, one that was a gradual notice, is that I am officially an old man. I saw, really, a handful of movies at the multiplexes: Iron Man 2, Get Him To The Greek, Toy Story 3, Inception, The Other Guys, and Scott Pilgrim are the ones I can remember off-hand as being, at the very least, OK. Movies like Eclipse or Robin Hood or even Salt have just not stoked my interest.

The problem is simple: there was nothing to get excited for this summer save for the three movies I loved and the latest installment in Marvel's attempt to make movies out of every comic-book hero they've ever invented. Iron Man 2 was good, but it wasn't close to the first film, something I came to accept in the days after seeing it. In the next few summers, there will be major tentpole films that I can't wait for: the next Star Trek film, the final Harry Potter film, the third Batman movie, pretty much anything Pixar makes, and so on. But a large majority of the movies that hit or were supposed to hit big this year were so drab, so dull, that they left me cold.

The advantage there, of course, is that those movies not only pale in comparison to my three favorites of the summer, but they also elevate those films in my mind. We always say that, with each subsequent entry from Pixar Animation Studios, the bar is set too high for them to reach. How can a movie hope to equal the emotion of the opening sequence of Up? The answer is provided in the final 15 minutes of Toy Story 3, a movie that had me doing something I don't ever do at movies: cry. It's a testament to the film's director and writer, Lee Unkrich and Michael Arndt, respectively, that the landfill sequence--and yeah, spoilers--is as emotionally taxing as the following scene where the toys are played with for one last time by Andy.

It's a Disney movie. It's beloved characters like Woody and Buzz Lightyear. There is, of course, absolutely no way that they're going to get incinerated in a fiery pit at the end of the third installment of one of the most popular franchises of the past 20 years. But damned if I wasn't freaking out in my seat, wondering how the hell they'd get out of it. Of course, the solution is not only fitting to the series, but one of the great movie moments of the year, as rousing and satisfying a moment as Joseph Gordon-Levitt's zero-gravity fight in Inception. What Toy Story 3 did was something no other third movie in a trilogy can say it's done: stuck the landing without any problems.

Inception is completely different, an electrifying, dazzling film that's able to entertain without being idiotic. People have complained about the dreams not being dreamlike enough (the answer to which is clearly spelled out in the film--if the dreams ARE too dreamlike, the mark's subconscious will realize it and attack the dream thieves), about there either not being an emotional core or it not being emotional enough (a problem I did not have, and one that I find interesting--how often do we complain about our summer movies not having enough heart?), and about the characters not being fully drawn (a fair point, but there's a reason for it, I think). What the naysayers are ignoring is the sheer audacity Christopher Nolan has to create a full-blown spectacle with the mind of a low-budget psychological thriller. Folding cities in half, snowbound gun battles (and yeah, that scene works very well for me), zero gravity, spinning tops, and another soulful Leonardo DiCaprio performance; where else do you get a movie with a huge budget that's about solving the problem of spousal guilt?

I've explained in a recent review at Box Office Prophets about how much I love Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, but a quick recap: you don't have to love comic books, you don't have to love video games, you don't even have to love Michael Cera. Do you love movies? Watch this one. It's made by a man who is clearly in love with the art of filmmaking, and it's also a film that can tip its hat to popular culture in many ways without being just a pastiche of movies, music, video games, television shows, and graphic novels. Edgar Wright is as impressive here as Nolan is in Inception or, reaching further back, Paul Thomas Anderson is in There Will Be Blood in being a confident, assured, and wildly talented director who's finally made the movie he's been working towards for a long time.

The summer movie season, yes, is a wash. That the three films I've just highlighted got greenlit by studios, and were made without any studio interference, is lucky for all of us. You may not love the three films I've gone over here, but they made my summer movie season worth sticking around for. Fingers crossed that the fall movie season picks up the slack.