Airs – Ian Lance Taylor

I’m sure I’m not the only person troubled by the loose geography in the Shrek movies. In the first movie Shrek takes a couple of days to get to the dragon’s castle. In the second movie Shrek and Fiona appear to take a few days to get from Shrek’s swamp to Far Far Away by coach. However, in the fourth movie, Shrek walks from his swamp to the dragon’s castle and then to Far Far Away all in a single night. There is no explanation. How is this possible?

Even allegorical fairy tales are weakened by a lack of internal story consistency.

A few thoughts on Iron Man 2.

I liked it.

How odd to see a decent romantic comedy mixed into a superhero movie. Most recent romantic comedies have been terrible. Forgetting Sarah Marshall wasn’t too bad, but the last one I can remember as being solidly good was Fifty First Dates.

The movies was much more like a comic book than most, with a few scenes of subplots tossed in every so often. In comic books it works because you get more of the story every month. Can they really make that pay off in other movies which are at best a year later? Or is it mainly aimed at people who read the adaptations?

Don Cheadle and Scarlet Johansson did good jobs with minor characters, which shows the importance of getting good actors. Samuel L. Jackson was amusing as always. Mickey Rourke was excellent.

The final scene, after the credits, sets up for Thor, which according to IMDB is going to be a movie next year. Thor is everybody’s favorite Norse god, but he’s a much weaker character than Iron Man. He has no character weaknesses, except for a tendency toward bravado which becomes rapidly uninteresting. His difficulties are all structural: take away his hammer and he turns back to human. All the best Thor comic book stories are very long, very cosmic, and concentrate mainly on the characters around him. The very best one, the multi-year epic by Walter Simonson, starts off by finding a character who is an even better Thor than Thor himself, and has a whole issue in which Thor does not appear at all. None of this suggests a good movie to me. IMDB does list Kenneth Branagh as director; he’s made some great movies (my favorite is Much Ado About Nothing) and some very weak ones (Frankenstein).

I didn’t expect to like the recent remake of Clash of the Titans much, but I was pleasantly surprised. Most movies of this sort have a simple underlying theme. For this movie the theme was going to be that humans could stand on their own and did not need help from the gods. But, due to either horrible or inspired writing, they botched the theme, even admitting it in the final scene. This gave the movie a refreshingly strange feeling in the middle of the usual monster fights.

Particularly strange and quite wonderful was the short sequence in which the intrepid band rides along in howdahs strapped to giant scorpions which grew from the blood of the hero’s mother’s husband who had been given strange powers by Hades. That one was surely bad writing trying to rework an idea which sort of made sense in the original movie, but while failing turning it into something weirdly original and striking.

I’m not sure I should recommend seeing this movie, but if you go in with low expectations I think it should be quite enjoyable.

Coincidentally, I saw the movies The Road and The Book of Eli just a few days apart. They are two different and yet oddly similar visions of what the world will look like after civilization collapses. Men will be predators. Women will suffer. Roads will be left covered with cars. Cannibalism will rise. People will dress in mismatched clothing and gather canned food.

The Road is a far better movie. It is also very sad, which seems a not inappropriate response to the fall of civilization. The Book of Eli has a couple of major story flaws. It also has a character who is obviously under the care of a skilled post-civilization beauty salon that they somehow omitted to mention in the story, a jarring presence in the otherwise apocalyptic landscape. Still, I enjoyed both films.

The zombie film has become a way of metaphorically imagining our fears, which is also what we see in a film like 2012: this is the way the world could end. That doesn’t describe these post apocalypse films, in which the collapse of civilization is only alluded to very briefly and is not shown at all. What are these films about? They both seem to be trying to say something rather than just be a generic action movie.

Both films wind up being about faith. The Road is about faith in humanity, a faith which the protagonist has lost. The Book of Eli, as the name suggests, is about faith in God, a faith which the protagonist has but everybody else has lost. The films are about what you can believe in, who you can trust, after society has fallen apart.

Tying this idea back to my own bête noire, perhaps these films are trying to investigate faith without society because we are lacking faith in society. When you don’t believe in civilization, it seems reasonable to write a story in which there is no civilization, and you explore what you actually do believe in. Of course I’m overthinking this, driven by the coincidence of two such similar movies arriving in the theaters at close to the same time. I doubt there will be another serious post-apocalypse films for several years.

The metaphorical nature of these films is clear when you consider what a collapse of civilization would really be like. It would be nothing like what these films portray. We’ve seen Dark Ages before, and we may again. People didn’t wear mismatched clothing.

I can’t close a post about The Book of Eli without mentioning that it clearly draws on the beginning of The Canticle of Liebowitz, a still-excellent post-apocalypse SF novel.

OK, yet another comic book movie post. The Daredevil movie. It was bad. Don’t watch it. What I want to mention here is a particular way in which it was bad.

Daredevil was a not one of Stan Lee’s greater creations, and for many years was not a very interesting character. The reason Daredevil is well known today is that Frank Miller took over the book in 1981. He made it the best comic book on the market, and ever since then Daredevil has been a home for good writing and good art.

Unsurprisingly, the movie is loosely based on Frank Miller’s first overall story arc, a story which included the Kingpin, made Bullseye into a dangerous villain, and introduced Elektra. Parts of the movie are actually a shot-by-shot recreation of Miller’s panels (an idea which is done in much more detail in the Sin City movie, also based on a Miller comic book).

The problem is, the movie inverts the story, so that it makes no sense. In the comic book, Daredevil is a pretty straight superhero, a good guy. By day he is a lawyer who defends clients who need help, by night he protects people as a superhero. In Miller’s story, he meets Elektra, a college girlfriend who has become a ninja assassin (these things happen). There is a conflict between his feelings for her and his feelings about what she does, and as it is moving toward resolution Bullseye kills Elektra. Daredevil can’t really make sense of this, and slowly loses his judgment and his self-control. Daredevil eventually causes Bullseye to take a long fall, which puts him paralyzed in a hospital. The long story arc ends with Daredevil sitting next to the hospital bed, playing russian roulette with Bullseye with what turns out to be an unloaded gun. Going through this lets Daredevil prove to himself that he won’t kill Bullseye for what he (Bullseye) did, and he (Daredevil) regains his emotional stability.

That was a very short summary of a lot of comic books. In the movie, on the other hand, Daredevil is out of control from the start, acting impulsively and dangerously. He meets Elektra, falls in love, Bullseye kills Elektra, and this shock makes Daredevil act more sensibly and responsibly. Huh?

So the movie story is the reverse of the comic book story, and the movie story doesn’t make sense. Lord knows there have been lots of terrible book adaptations, but most of them at least try to keep the main point of the story in the book.