I’ve finally found Star Wars in a form I can relate to: Darth Vader: The Musical!
I particularly love the falsetto Luke Skywalker voice.
Really, all these YouTube remixes are convincing me to go back to my old dream of writing Beowulf: The Musical.
In the meantime, I need to overcome my YouTube addiction.
Add comment July 14th, 2006
You know how I’ve always harped on about how Hugh Jackman’s true calling is in musical theater? Someone on YouTube agrees with me! And it’s not just anyone, but rather the creators of the wildly popular “Brokeback to the Future” trailer of last winter. Here, they weave together clips from the X-Men movies with snippets of The Boy from Oz and Oklahoma.
Watch the “trailer.” Admire the Hugh.
Porpoise swears that if I made a YouTube video, this is what it would be. He’s probably right. Only I’d have to find a way to work in otters.
Add comment July 14th, 2006
Drop whatever you’re doing and read the article “Happiness Is Three Sheep and a Dog” from the New York Times.
Not only does the article title express my personal vision of happiness (though I might go for five sheep and two dogs—the more animals, the merrier), but it also gives us hope for Hollywood. Janna Duncan, a trainer for fifteen years, has taken her sheepherding classes on the road to Malibu, and movie execs, directors, and their offspring have enrolled themselves and their canines.
The dogs do get trained in how to herd sheep, but their owners learn how to be patient, hopefully slightly less self-centered people. They have to be calm and give clear commands in order for their dogs to know what to do and obey.
As pretty much everyone who knows me is aware, I adore sheepdogs (particularly Shetland Sheepdogs, the breed with which I grew up). Sheepdogs of all breeds tend to be highly intelligent, agile, and potentially neurotic if they don’t have something to engage their minds. Oh. Kinda like me.
Many people don’t understand the personality of sheepdogs before acquiring one as a household pet. So a lot of sheepdogs (especially border collies, who have all the above qualities multiplied times ten) end up being mistreated or given up for adoption. How much better to try to understand them, to learn to communicate with them.
Someday I need to write a whole essay titled “How a Puppy Training Video Taught Me the Heart of Prayer.” I am not making this up. A few years ago, my parents purchased dog-training videos produced by the Monks of New Skete, a monastery in upstate New York. The Monks of New Skete, to financially support their contemplative life, raise German Shepherd puppies, as well as running a camp to re-train “badly behaved” (in the perception of their owners) doggies.
So, at the time I visited my parents and watched this video, I was really struggling with trying to figure out the purpose of spiritual disciplines like prayer. I’d approached spiritual disciplines something like jumping through a set of hoops. I’m good at jumping through hoops, but after a while I get resentful if I feel that someone is arbitrarily making me jump through the hoops. So I was a bit grumpy with God.
Then, one of the monks explained that the benefit of training both dog and owner together was that they learned a vocabulary to communicate with each other. The point was not to teach the dog tricks. Most dogs greatly desire to please their owners, but sometimes they don’t know how. Training—even if it’s training them to jump through hoops—allows dog and owner to develop a common language.
Oh. It’s not about the tricks.
Now, if you take the analogy much beyond that, it of course breaks down, as any analogy will. But, to this day, I maintain that one of the most important spiritual lessons of my life came from a puppy training video. Talk about God adapting self-revelation to a medium we can relate to.
1 comment July 10th, 2006
I have to admit I was worried about Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. I thought the first one was delightful. I saw it twice in the theater; I bought the soundtrack and swashbuckled around the house, accompanied by my leaping cat. But the trailer for Pirates 2 didn’t look that great—and then the reviews started coming out yesterday. The first one I saw was Entertainment Weekly’s review, which absolutely panned it, giving it a D+. EW critic Lisa Schwarzbaum described the movie as ”a theme ride, if by ride you mean a hellish contraption into which a ticket holder is strapped, overstimulated but unsatisfied, and unable to disengage until the operator releases the restraining harness.” Ouch.
Most other reviews I read beforehand painted Pirates 2 in various shades of mediocrity.
I am pleased to say that the reviewers were wrong. Many of them didn’t like the first Pirates either, so they lack authority. They also must be completely opposed to fun.
Because that’s what Pirates of the Caribbean is. Fun. There’s swordfighting. There’s a pirate who struts and staggers around like a certain rocker who fell out of a palm tree earlier this year. There are great supporting characters hammed up by Britain’s best (For example, Mackenzie Crook—Gareth of BBC’s “The Office”—plays the pirate whose eyeball keeps popping out—in Pirates 2, he finds himself debating his partner-in-comedy about predestination and the etymology of mythological words. Jack Davenport—Steve Taylor in BBC’s “Coupling”—reprises his role as Commodore Norrington—with some twists.) And did I mention that there’s an undead monkey?
Yes, that was all in the first Pirates, too. But I don’t find it tiring. In fact, I think I may have laughed even more at this Pirates than at the first one. I’d been in a foul mood much of the day because bulldozers had been felling trees in sight of my window, and the movie was a very welcome distraction. And as far as I’m concerned, it gets extra points for not harming any of its animal characters (points I definitely can’t award to Superman Returns).
Speaking of Superman Returns, New York Times critic A.O. Scott, whose writing I love even when I disagree with his verdict, summarized my feelings precisely: “What is curious about the recent crop of high-tech blockbusters is how seriously they take themselves, and unlike, say, Superman Returns, Dead Man’s Chest cannot be called pretentious. It makes no claims to being about good and evil, the difficulty of saving the world in the modern era, or the inner lives of any of its characters.”
Now, as somebody who spends way too much time analyzing the movies’ ethics, I love Pirates because there are no ethics to analyze. When Elizabeth Swann says to Jack, “There will come a moment when you have the chance to do the right thing,” Jack replies breezily, “I love those moments. I like to wave at them as they pass by.” (Which actually is very similar to a quip about deadlines that Douglas Adams once penned.)
The movie does, of course, have its noble goober Orlando Bloom, who you want to pat on the head even as you laugh at his completely serious delivery of pompous lines something like, “I have promised to avenge my father, and I must.” On the subject of Orlando, I must once again quote A.O. Scott: “Mr. Bloom, as is his custom, leaps about, trying to overcome his incurable blandness, and is upstaged by special effects, musical cues, octopus tentacles and pieces of wood.”
That has to be one of the best sentences I’ve ever read in a movie review. (Sorry, Minklet—no offense to your regard for Mr. Pretty Boy.)
Anyway, don’t trust the critics on this one. Sure, Pirates has its flaws, but it’s worth them. For fun.
9 comments July 7th, 2006
In the list of Emmy nominations released today, NBC’s “The Office” nabbed spots in “Best Comedy Series,” “Lead Actor in a Comedy Series” (Steve Carell), and “Writing for a Comedy Series” (Episode: “Christmas Party”), as well as good camera editing stuff in two episodes.
Which means that–oh, no!–the two lead actors from the two American shows I watch will be up against each other. Tony Shalhoub is nominated every year for his obsessive-compulsive detective Adrian Monk, and he deserves every win (so far, 2003 and 2005). Even when “Monk”’s plots suffer from the screenwriters’ lack of new ideas, Shalhoub manages to subtly keep developing his character. And then there’s Steve Carell, who is immensely talented and who is in my current favorite TV show. But I really don’t think Dunder-Mifflin manager Michael Scott is really his best role. The heart of the show really belongs to Jim (Jim!), Dwight, and Pam. (By the way, Michael Slezak of Entertainment Weekly agrees with me that John Krasinski should have been nominated for Jim. Maybe they had a hard time deciding whether he would be classified as a “lead” or “supporting” actor. Same for Rainn Wilson’s Dwight, who, as far as I’m concerned, could deserve a nomination too).
So much internal conflict! Several people have pointed out that I can be happy if either Shalhoub or Carell win, but that’s far too easy a solution.
On a random note, I wonder . . . what would happen if you put Michael Scott and Adrian Monk in a locked room together?
Add comment July 6th, 2006
If you don’t read entertainment blogs as obsessively as I do, you may not be aware of the mini-controversy swirling around a single line from Superman Returns, in which Perry White utters the phrase, “truth, justice, and all that stuff,” irking both loyal Super-fans and political conservatives who favor the classic “truth, justice, and the American way.”
Take a look at this Cinematical post by Mark Beall, who understands that the moviemakers want the film to do well even in countries that aren’t too fond of the U.S. right now, but who questions why any version of the line needed to be in the film in the first place. Why not just leave it out completely?
I actually liked the “stuff” line, since it deflated some of the usual Super-pomposity. It doesn’t just edit out the “American” bit; it makes it sound like, “yeah, yeah, we’ve heard all this before,” pointing out that a lot of Superman rhetoric is too earnest to be appealing today. In fact, I would have liked the entire film to have that attitude. But I don’t count, because I don’t like Superman. In the film as it was, I grant that the line didn’t really fit with the tone of the rest of the movie.
1 comment July 4th, 2006
Two theater movies in two successive afternoons: Superman Returns and An Inconvenient Truth (in case you don’t know the latter title, it’s the global warming documentary starring Al Gore, who seems to have found his true calling on the big screen). And, believe me, I was much more excited about seeing the latter.
I’ve mentioned my feelings about Superman before. His boy-scoutishness and American-as-apple-pie-ishness annoy me, both in the 1978 original movie and in the current, nostalgic installment (again, I’m not discussing any other Superman media, because I haven’t seen/read them). Because of the aforementioned characteristics, I get particularly miffed when reviewers draw attention to Superman as a Christ figure. Jesus wasn’t a goody-two-shoes: he was perfect, divine, and yet more human than Superman could ever hope to be.
Superman Returns plays up the Christ angle more than the original movie, deliberately posturing star Brandon Routh in positions reminiscent of paintings of Jesus. And, of course, we have the repetition of Jor-El’s (a pompous Marlon Brando’s) pseudo-Johannine words to his Super-son: “They can be a great people, Kal-El. They wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all—their capacity for good—I have sent them you, my only son” and “You will carry me inside you all the days of your life; see my life through your eyes, as yours will be seen through mine. The son becomes the father and the father the son.” Apparently many Christians have celebrated the latter as a sort of Trinitarian expression (only, um, no Holy Spirit), but to me it just seems to be glorifying a very human sort of father-son (and exclusively father-son, not parent-child) relationship.
Then we have all sorts of lines about saviors. Lois Lane, bitter about Superman’s five-year absence, says “The world doesn’t need a savior. And neither do I.” Supes replies, “But everyday I hear people crying for one.” He hears everything with his super-ears, all the cries of suffering and distress from all around the world, and he goes around and rescues many of them—but what happens when he’s dallying with Ms. Lane? Every minute he spends with her is a minute in which convenience stores are robbed, trains derailed, and people killed. The idea of Superman as a unique savior is pretty untenable. Therefore, in Superman Returns, the screenwriters resort to the ultimate twenty-first century truism: we can all be supermen, if we look deep enough inside ourselves. We’ve got to learn to be our own saviors. Only . . . that’s not very much fun to watch, because most of us don’t have capes. So Superman lives on and on.
Of course, here the notion of a savior is very different from the Christian one. I won’t go into a discussion of soteriology, because I can’t pretend to understand it completely. But one aspect of Christian salvation that Superman does attempt to capture is that, ideally, Christ’s/Superman’s life is infectious. We just don’t really get to see the effects of that in the Superman movies.
Now . . . cut to An Inconvenient Truth. Al Gore’s voice tell us how, if you drop a frog (insert animated frog here) into a pot of boiling water, the frog will immediately jump out. But if you drop a frog into a pot of lukewarm water and slowly bring it to a boil, the frog will just stay there until . . . until . . . someone reaches down and plucks him out. It’s a surprise ending, and one that’s welcome to a person like me who can be extremely upset even by animated-animal death, but, through the laughs, you know that it’s silly—and, I would argue, un-Christian—to wait for God to magically undo all the environmental damage that we humans have wreaked. It’s not saying that we need to become our own saviors—but it is saying that we need to act. As the common proverb (cited in An Inconvenient Truth’s credits) goes, “Pray with your feet.”
In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore (or “Gore-El,” as I’ve been calling him around the house, to the horror of my Superman-fan Porpoise) does connect most powerfully to those who saw him as a savior (or at least as a much preferable alternative) in 2000. Gore introduces himself, with self-deprecating humor, as the man who “used to be the next President of the United States.” Throughout much of the film, he mentions his own failures—particularly failures to get people to hear his message about the environment. Those of us who are still in mourning over the election of 2000 are there with him, feeling we’ve failed, wondering what went wrong. The barrage of alarming—and clearly explained—facts that follow makes the failure seem all the more poignant.
And then, towards the end of the film, just after Gore has shown that the U.S. alone is responsible for over 30 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, he shows how the cumulative impact of apparently small progress—greater fuel efficiency standards, more alterative energy sources, more electricity-saving devices, etc.—could bring our carbon emissions even lower than they were in 1970. We already have all the technology. “We have everything we need,” Gore says. “Except the political will.” He pauses, then delivers the best line of the whole movie: “But in America, political will is a renewable resource.”
Oh. You mean that those of us who, since 2000, have been wearing black and muttering about immigrating to Canada could actually do something?
An Inconvenient Truth is so well targeted to get well-meaning wimpy environmentalists off their chairs and bike, not drive, to their nearest representative’s office. Unfortunately, this does mean that the movie is mostly preaching to the choir. But unlike, say, Michael Moore’s films, An Inconvenient Truth doesn’t just amuse us and make us mad: it motivates us to do something. The credits are filled with practical suggestions for ways to reduce your own environmental impact, as well as a prominently displayed web address directs you to a site with further information.
I do wish, however, that the film had greater crossover appeal. For example, I know that there are many well-meaning religious people out there who are concerned about the environment, but who believe that combating global warming would consume resources that could otherwise be devoted to the immediate needs of the poor and hungry. Gore does a good job of illustrating how the environment and world poverty—even world violence—are not separate causes, and how global warming will have the greatest impact on the poor. I just wish he would have deliberately tried to reach out to this slightly-outside-the-choir group by using language more reflective of religious and/or humanitarian motives. It’s language that could bridge the supposed red-blue divide.
To me, Gore-El, because we see and identify with his struggles and failures, has more power to inspire others to good action than Superman does. He can’t save us, and he’s telling us not to depend on him. Nor, he says, should we depend on our elected representatives to keep an issue on the agendas if it’s not on the tips of their constituents’ tongues (and typing fingers). We have to act and let them know that it’s important to us.
And I know that I, who have a tendency to curl up in a little overwhelmed ball rather than take action (I mean, beyond private actions of recycling and biking and so forth) against big bad problems, need the strength of Christ to go beyond myself. And that’s part of how Christ-as-savior works, part of how he answers prayers to save the earth.
SPOILER ALERT—Further Superman Returns Details Below!
I know there are people out there just waiting to argue that Superman displays more vulnerability than ever in Superman Returns, both physical and emotional. I agree. But it’s still not enough for me. Yes, you can see that he experiences emotional pain over the fact that Lois has a fiancé. But, because he’s good old boy-scout Superman, and he’s programmed to do the right thing, it doesn’t seem like it’s even a struggle for him to be noble and leave Lois and Richard to their life together. Superman may temporarily fail physically sometimes in the presence of Kryptonite, but, if he really struggles morally, we don’t see it. Maybe his stoicism would be more interesting if it were better acted.
There are also a number of plot holes in Superman Returns—for a summary of them, I refer you to Scott Weinberg’s post on Cinematical.
7 comments July 2nd, 2006
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