Mary and Max

I fell asleep after work - something I never do - and woke up at 6:00 thinking it was morning.  When I realized it was evening, it felt like I had found an extra 12 hours of free time that I had previously lost - like finding a 20 in an old coat!  In this surreal state, I watched a delightful bit of claymation called Mary and Max.  Warning:  I'm not going to tell you how to raise your kids, but give it a watch before letting the littluns partake.  It gets dark, and not in an obscure way that they might miss - more in an awkward-questions-you-don't-want-to-answer way, like, "Why does she have a rope around her neck, mummy?"

The movie is reminiscent of Lars and the Real Girl and Elling, and it made me think of The Zoo Story as well with a few nods to Muriel's Wedding.  It's about the loneliness of difference and our profound need for connection.  A pen-pal relationship develops between a young girl and a middle-aged man with Aspergers.  They're both a bit off, and both terribly lonely, and they find a way to connect over chocolate.     It's a lovely bittersweet story.

It's weird, but in a good way. 

Some Visually Demanding Films

I picked a bad two movies to sew curtains to.  I don't have a sewing machine, so I had to sew by hand which is slow tedious work necessitating a good movie to keep me awake.  The movies were great, but they were too visually demanding to get much done.

The Illusionist is a cartoon with almost no talking.  With a clear nod to Mon Oncle, it's a film about a man who manages on his own as a travelling magician, but ends up with a tag-along.  The one film deals with technology taking over humanity, the other with rock stars getting in the way of more traditional entertainment.  Either way, it's sometimes hard to cope with change.



The girl cleaning his room has broken shoes, so he kindly buys her a new pair.  That dynamic solidifies as she follows him on the train and expects him to pay for her ticket.  She cooks and cleans for him, and for a few other entertainers travelling in the same circles.  It's painted as a tragic, difficult existence, but she brightens it up considerably.  Unfortunately for our hero, it means taking a real job to help pay the additional expenses because he can't seem to stop buying her everything she wants.  It's a sad, funny film.

Then I watched Chaplin.  Another sad, funny film with the theme of women taking everything they can from an older man.  I remember watching Chaplin as a kid, and it was a delight to see Robert Downey Jr. do him justice.  For me, it was worth watching just for that.  And I got most of my sewing done in the horrible flashback scenes as an elderly Chaplin discusses his biography with a fictional editor.  The movie could have been so much better with a ruthless editing.

Then I watched this...

We Can't Make It Out of Here Alive

I started the year off with two films about impending doom.

I woke up early to watch Melancholia, a film about a depressed woman who gets married a few weeks (months?) before another planet is possibly going to collide with Earth. Of course the depressive is the only confidently realistic one in the bunch.  Happy people are happy because of the illusions they foster.  It's a very stressful ride as we near the deadline and hope the planet will just pass by.  It's reminiscent of Last Night, a Don McKellar film about how a variety of people deal with the end of the world - mainly they search for connections, that one last kiss.  In this film, they scramble for hope.  But no matter how you slice it, death is imminent.  Life is short, enjoy it while it lasts!



I love Kirsten Dunst as she wavers between cute as a button and completely dead inside.  Her face and eyes change dramatically from scene to scene.  And I've loved Kiefer Sutherland since Bay Boy.  But most of the rest were irritating.  It's hard to tell if the people were all acting strangely because death is potentially at their doorstep, or if they were all just strange.  It wasn't a good strange, an interesting strange with a glimmer of brilliance.  It was just weird and mean.  But Dunst was captivating.

Every year on New Years Day I take my kids to a movie.  It's a tradition that's shifted over the years from the older ones to the youngest.  So today we treated ourselves to a cab to check out Happy Feet 2.  It's got some of the characters of the first one, but the mood is substantially darker.  At one point when it appeared that all was lost and hundreds of penguins were going to perish, my little one said, "I hate this movie!"  Yikes.

But of course all creatures large and small pitched in to save the day.  Whew!  



There are philosophical krill that make a few jokes about free will that don't work on any level except that they rhyme with krill.  And they argue about their purpose in life which also doesn't work because, well, they're krill.  But the animation was amazing.  The snow sparkled like diamonds, and the underwater scenes were a delight.  The singing and soundtrack was a lot of fun too.  I had to restrain myself from singing along to this...



And this...



And this....



And, maybe (?) this.

It's got that whole don't try to rise above your station thing going on.  Accept yourself and your limitations, like penguins can't fly and krill are at the bottom of the food chain, but don't be afraid of challenges along the way.  We can do anything if we all work together.

But the kiddies need a warning before hand that it's all going to be alright.

Don't we all.

With Nine You Get Spoilers

I saw 9 last night with my two teenagers. I left the little one at home despite her protests. In the first five minutes I was glad she wasn't there for this particular cartoon. There were some great monsters. It was, in brief, enraging because it's so close to brilliance.

Spoiler Warning

The first hint that this movie has strong religious overtones is that the safe place our heroes use to hide in is a church. Nevertheless...

It's 1939 and war has broken out, but it turns out differently than we might remember. An intelligent nuclear driven machine was created for good but used for bad. Standard. Just like in The Matrix, the machine took over and killed all the people. But the inventor of the machine realized the problem is he didn't give the machine a soul. The atheists in the group might say "a conscience" or "the capacity for ethical determinations." So he makes nine little machines that look humanish and finds a way to impart a portion of his soul in each. He dies making the last of them, 9, because his soul gets completely used up.

What I loved about the film is the idea that each of these nine creatures is part of the inventor. Among others, there's a superego who's obsessed with safety at all costs, little curious dudes, a brutish stoner, an intellect, and a woman - his anima. As a hermeneutical allegory, it was really cool. But that concept falls apart at the end and a few times before.

A few of the creatures get sucked up by the monster machine. They called out from the machine because they were trapped inside. But the machine doesn't ever sway its course. If the inventor was right, that it lack soul, then sucking up the creatures should have altered the machine's agenda - making it goofier after one, and smarter after another, etc. And the solution would be for the others to allow themselves to get sucked up to add to the kindness of the beast. But they don't.

Instead they find a way to kill the machine, and get the dude out. But they come out like souls and fly up to heaven. "Now you're finally free!" Barf. Somehow they should have all stuck themselves together to re-make one full person. But they don't. It ends with 9 and the female and the two little dudes together: a nuclear family reminiscent of the Teletubbies. And they comment that they've got the place to themselves. But what the hell will they do stuck there together? How long before they realize hell is other sentient beings?

It was all still very entertaining to watch. It's just unfortunate that it didn't go all the way - well, that it didn't go in the direction I was hoping. God is such an easy out.

On Sequels

The first three Star Wars were amazing (from memories of grade 7 at least), then it should all have stopped there.

I'm still loving Harry Potter. For that one, I think a series of seven will be just fine, if the last two can do justice to the first five, that is. Well that's hoping the fifth lives up to its reviews.

And one of my favourite movies of all time was a sequel:  T2.

I loved the first Pirates of the Caribbean. I liked the second one despite the weak reviews. But the third one blows goats. It's an attempt at Man Ray meets Disney, and it fails miserably – unless you're on acid.

Beyond the little men in Depp's mind, the sexism bothered me. I was annoyed by the stereotypes perpetuated in the film.

First off, when Elizabeth is escorted in to see the gang-lord dude, only she is made to wear a tiny little robe. And then her own people, pirates in her crew, are under the floor boards sneaking a peak up her wazzoo. To me, it was positively creepy. My kids didn't give a hoot. They were oblivious to the opportunistic voyeurism of her "friends."

Then she gets to be the head honcho only because Depp deferred his vote to her. It seemed a strategic play on his part. But bottom line, she certainly didn't win by merit of any kind, but by a man's allowance. Not a great victory, that one.

But what's really bugging me today is Bambi II. My daughter begged for it, and the writers have merely re-written the entire Bambi story in a slightly different way and called it "new." And they did the same thing for Lion King II, which is entirely unwatchable.

But whenever I watch a money-making movie that's so clearly plagiarized and full of crap and/or portraying archaic gender norms, it gives me hope that one day I'll actually publish something.

Go me!