The cemetery is supposed to be symbolic of something...I haven't quite put my finger on it...
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a beautiful, no-holds barred impressionistic masterpiece. If Monet and Picasso had had a love-child, and he/or she were alive today, had been given a camera and told to make a motion picture about a war between giant robots, this is the film they would make. Mr. Bay abandons plot, convincing characters, or any of those contrivances that we, puny mortals, consider to be important and instead produces a film that staggers the imagination, defies belief, and leaves the viewer completely and totally charmed by its boisterousness and good will.
You see, Mr. Bay enjoys the idea of the giant-robot-action-movie far more than he does an actual movie. He teases us, magician-like, by only revealing so much of his glorious metallic creatures, before ripping us away and taking us in a completely new direction. We see them in brief, fleeting shots, often through smoke or in silhouette – yet over the course of the film, Bay allows our minds to build up a picture of what his robots look like – his is a cubist vision, abstract and incomplete on purpose; we never get the tangible pleasure of watching these creatures as a whole, but we understand intellectually what they are.
Moviegoing is a communal experience. This year’s crop of Toronto International Film Festival posters shows us what we already know: if you’re going to sit in a dark room and stare straight forward at a giant image for two hours, nothing is more important than the person who’s sitting next to you and to whom you’ll be paying no attention throughout the show because god dammit shut the hell up, I didn’t pay my ten bucks to hear you yap about how great it is to Twitter! And you god damn well better not be Twittering during the movie!
But why is it only we humans who deserve to see a film with a friend? For the occasion of the 35th TIFF, I have taken the liberty of assigning moviebuddies to the films themselves; each of the films I saw between September 10th and 19th will get another film they could enjoy sharing a cupholder with and maybe trying out that smooth yawn maneuver on … and I might just drop a tidbit or two of what I thought about each one. Could be useful in your own moviegoing future.
This is another one we all knew was coming at some point or another: client gets obsessed with Doll, client wants to keep Doll forever, mayhem ensues. Despite the fact it’s obvious, it’s still a good premise, so of course the trick would be to do it properly so that it didn’t seem rote. Oh man, did they do it properly. This was the first episode to actually make me feel . . . emotional about the characters – Priya’s tragic story, Victor’s pure and simple love, Adele and Topher’s moralizing and the choices they each end up making, Boyd’s cold efficiency vis a vis the moral ambiguity of his position right now. It was extremely effective, even if you don’t mention the further strides that Echo continued to show in her ‘development.’ Basically — wow.
Another episode where what I was expecting made me roll my eyes, and where we ended up had me do something congratulatory. You might have been thinking the same thing, at first — crazy guy needs ‘people dolls’ for his family-fetish fantasy, he hires Echo, something goes wrong yadda yadda. Thank Mr. Universe that didn’t happen (guess I shouldn’t have doubted Tim Minear — guy knows what he’s doing, red herrings and all). This episode was everything that was needed right now: important, twisty-turny and funny. This is what every episode that’s not pure ‘arc’ needs — a little bit of arc with a good, intriguing story. So while they don’t seem capable of pulling it off every week (see last week), at least we do get it (mostly) regularly.
Before I begin: if anyone out there still had any doubts that porn had not gone 100% mainstream, the opening of this episode should relieve them of such; when a prime-time network television show can use subtle allusions to ‘squirting‘ and know that its audience will understand those allusions, and then use that ‘understanding’ to make a little joke afterward, well — that’s mainstream.
Anyway, aside from the raunchy/funny beginning, this episode was not so good. Not only was it not so good, it was exactly what Dollhouse didn’t need right now — another momentum killer. This felt like a first-season episode, and one of the lessor first-season episodes at that; plus, it was confusing. Let’s trudge on.
And we’re off – with probably the most unlikely season of television to hit the air in a while; it was a tense opening to the summer, wondering if this show was going to return or not, but then a happy conclusion with the news it would and the release of Epitaph One, that brilliant scattering of the time-line that makes every moment of this, and all future, episode(s) bleed with anticipation. Or makes us bleed with anticipation. Not literally, of course. You understand, I’m sure.
If there’s one thing Joss Whedon is good at, it’s slowly building a story. Plotting. Structure. He is an expert at . . . how can I put this delicately . . . not blowing his wad too early. We saw that through the first five episodes of last season (and those who were impatient, well, they’re simply losing out now); here, with Vows, we’re seeing it again. What needs to happen in episode one of the second season happens, but nothing much more. And that’s all and plenty good.
The Ghostbusters game came out a couple of weeks ago a month ago I’m lazy. You all knew it was coming. And you knew I’d be all over it. So I have to assume you’ve been waiting to find out what I think. Those infinitudes of reviews out there mean nothing; it’s my opinion and mine alone that matters. On this, I am sole arbiter of taste.
I’m seen the first Ghostbusters movie more times than I’ve seen my mother. I wrote my first highschool essay on the subtextual differences between it and Ghostbusters 2. My prized souvenir from my trip to Japan is a skwooshy little Mr. Stay Puft. And it still burns me today that my glow-in-the-dark peace sign/2 ghost logo T-shirt disappeared sometime in grade 7. So I’m qualified to judge.
The verdict is: Not guilty! Of being not as good as we’d hoped.
Now you can either decipher what I just said, or read on.
It’s taken me over a month to find this one online; maybe the Angel series isn’t popular enough for the scanners to get to in a hurry. Can’t say it was really worth the wait; it’s not bad, but it’s just a bridging issue to get us to a new spin-off series focusing on Gunn and Illyria.
There’s not much to talk about; all the standard Buffy/Angel-verse themes are here in abundance: guilt, morality, the struggle with the ‘evil’ inside oneself, the struggle with the humanity inside oneself, etc. The issue ends off with both Gunn and Illyria having the same problem — inner conflict — but from different angles; Gunn is dealing with the pain of both his guilt and loss of power, and Illyria is dealing with both her lust for power and Fred’s legacy, which she will always have to carry around with her. They seem to be set to make amends by brining wayward demons into the Mosaic Center (from Spike: Asylum), which will probably be the focus of the aforementioned upcoming new spin-off series Angel: Only Human.
The way it was all done was okay — bringing Non back to facilitate the action was decent, and Kenny the T-Rex was funny. Brian Lynch knows these characters so well now; I guess another good thing about this issue was that it finally felt like an actual Angel story again, what with Lynch’s writing, after Aftermath. Thankfully he’s back at the helm full-time again for a little while now, both for Only Human (pretty sure he’s that one, anyway) and a new two-part Drusilla story. After that there’s a new guy coming aboard though, so we’ll have to see how that goes. It’s kind of annoyng that Angel seems to get less respect than Buffy; Buffy: Season 8 gets all the writers from the show, and Angel only has Lynch as the one main guy, then brings on a bunch of random people. Kinda disrupts the flow. Well, we’ll see how it goes.
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Labyrinths
Jorge Luis Borges
Borges is a perfect addition to the Shorty series — it’s literally all he ever wrote.
“Why take five hundred pages,” he asks, “to develop an idea whose oral demonstration fits into a few minutes?”
Fair enough, except that five hundred pages give the reader a certain amount of mental time and space to ponder complex and unfamiliar ideas; when instead, in this regard, what you’re dealing with is a six page short story the literary equivalent of a can of sardines, there are times where your brain just gives up and you find your eyes floating over the text without really reading it. Hence the quite apt title of the book, and also the title of this post.
Yes, I sometimes found myself wayward in Borges’s constant onslaught of erudition and scholarship. The opening passage of The Sect of the Phoenix provides a good example:
Those who write that the sect of the Phoenix had its origins in Heliopolis and derive it from the religious restorations following upon the death of the reformer Amenophis IV, cite texts from Herodotus, Tacitus and the monuments of Egypt, but they ignore, or prefer to ignore, that the designation ‘Phoenix’ does not date before Hrabanus Maurus and that the oldest sources (the Saturnales of Flavius Josephus, let us say) speak only of the People of the Custom or of the People of the Secret.
Obviously I had to read this a few times before I could get somewhat of a grip on it. I didn’t find it annoying, though — more like tiring. Some famous writer once said (forgive me for being unable to remember whom — might have been Gertrude Stein, or maybe Alice Munro) that short stories should be read singularly; that is, read one and then put the book down and do something else. I’ve never quite followed that rule, but with Borges you have to, otherwise you’ll either have an aneurysm or fall asleep. Once you get used to him, however — once you see his tendencies and patterns — reading him actually becomes (mostly) enjoyable.
Yes Yes Yes. This is how you do it.
I’ve thought before about a show that has two different timelines going at the same time (although maybe this has been done before and I’m just not aware of it); anyway, regardless, this is a brilliant idea for Dollhouse, and vindicates what I’ve been saying all along: that the premise of Dollhouse is not the premise of Dollhouse. That there was always going to be something more.
This episode is the equivalent to a teaser at the beginning of a novel: it creates anticipation for what is to come, setting us up beautifully for Season 2 (and perhaps even further than that). We know the apocalypse is coming — now it’s just a matter of when, and we get to see everything that led up to its happening.
