Astro Boy, or Review of a Review

Reading my local newspaper’s movie reviews (Raleigh News & Observer), I was a little perturbed to see that the Astro Boy review was mainly about how it was or was not appropriate for children.

Am I too distanced from childhood to determine this? Or too far away from adulthood/parenthood to think this was appropriate?

Okay, I haven’t seen Astro Boy yet, and I probably won’t, but that’s not the point here. I am wondering do we need disclaimers in reviews about children’s movies?

My personal experience as of late with “children’s movies” and little kids is, I saw Coraline in theaters, sitting maybe three seats away from a three year old girl who spent the greater part of the movie crying or whimpering.  Almost all of the print reviews I came across had to mention how inappropriate it was as a film for little kids, which irked me. For film as an art form, the reviewers job is NOT to give age disclaimers. That’s not the reviewer’s job, that is the MPAA’s job. Coraline got a PG rating, and after that it is the parent’s job to read the fine print and determine whether or not their child is ready for the movie.

In the Astro Boy review, I just don’t see why their reasoning for parental caution was necessary. It talked about Dr. Tenma’s original son’s death and some of the violence. But let me think: An important death, featured in the early part of the movie? FINDING NEMO! There are so, sooo many deaths of characters that exist in children’s films, whether it’s on screen or just implied, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. Sometimes that becomes a greater part of the plot, THE LION KING.

And this is my same  point that  I gave for Coraline. It’s the parents job to determine these things.  You might think you are helping the parents by listing x or y reasons because they are the ones who will be reading the reviews, but that’s not the  point of a review.

I’ve reached that point where I’m not sure if I’m too distanced from childhood to determine what did freak me out as a kid or whether I’m too far away from parenthood ethics to figure out whether or not I should care.

But maybe it’s the imposed mentality of parents that later influences kids?  I know some people think The Nightmare Before Christmas is too spooky for little kids, but I saw it when I was 3 and loved it.  But then I meet people my age who have never seen that movie or already base it as “Scary” when they were little, even though they’ve never seen it.

I’m entering a weird place.  But this is bugging me!  I don’t think parents or adults realize that kids are resilient.  If something freaks them out, it will rarely haunt them into adulthood, and if it does, then that kid probably needed a shrink even without that movie’s effects.  Yes, parents have the right to determine whether or not a movie is appropriate for their kids, but that is not a film reviewer’s job.

Okay.  Rant over.  (Aren’t you glad I didn’t launch into my alternate, but related rant of “Why do they always think animated movies are just for kids?!”)

Kinky Boots

image from http://www.troyangrignon.com/KinkyBoots.jpg

I liked it!

But it had the effect of making me list all of the songs I want to see drag queens sing before I die.

Now that’s a risk worth taking!

I Feel Like I’ve Caught Up With Things

Finally saw the Star Trek reboot, finally saw Inglourious Basterds.

The movie that opened this summer alongside the film that closed this summer, seen in one weekend. Both are excellent films, but for extraordinarily different reasons.

Inglourious Basterds will be the classic, while Star Trek will probably become the next dull movie franchise  in the coming summers. But as summer movies, these both succeeded at what the movie market needs right now, which is damn good entertainment.

On Star Trek:

Art by my Friend Natalia! You should check out here gallery!

(Um… in case the link with the picture doesn’t work, http://theartslave.deviantart.com )

1) Has anyone else noticed that we can’t have straight-up action movies anymore? It’s all action movies-cum comedies. Of course, I couldn’t figure out if we were laughing because it was funny or we were laughing because it was Star Trek.  The thing is, this is happening in a lot of movie franchises, such as Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, and, well, Star Trek.

2)The Fandom, She Grows. From my own reaction, but also from my friends, the Reboot has created so many new trekkies. It helps that the Original Series is now on Youtube and SyFy has been showing some of the various series as well. I can’t speak for what the fandom was like before, because I never had personal friends who were trekkies, but it seems to have grown a little.  Who knows, maybe I’m just seeing people who have always liked Star Trek before really freaking out over this?  But I think not, or at least, not entirely.

Is this important? It depends on who you are. Obviously to my Trekkie friends, yes, it’s all really important. To me? It’s interesting, but because the end of the reboot is entirely cruxed on the belief that we’ll be getting a sequel, this isn’t going to be a classic. Outside of the new trekkies, there will be those who will love it now, hate it six months from now. That’s sad because it’s excellent, but movies don’t have as much staying power in the public psyche as much as we might like.

Inglourious Basterds

From http://www.screenhead.com/reviews/tag/inglorious-bastards/

1) It flails around and screams “TARANTINO!” from the top of its lungs. But it works, because that’s how Tarantino movies work. I really liked it. I feel like it’s one of his strongest films to date. Everything ties up in a very bloody, historically inaccurate way, but it has that possibility of existing in the future as a classic.

2) Staying power: Not a movie you forget easily.  Again, pretty much a trademark of Tarantino projects.  The staying power reflects with, a) me waking up this morning and remembering some Brad Pitt’s dialogue from the last scene, but also b) this is a movie that can have people still talking about it ten years from now.

3) It’s shot beautifully.  There were a few great scenes where I was dragged out of the story going “That looks really cool. Most of the time I don’t notice these mise-en-scenes unless they are really eye-catching, so worthy of note.

4) Yes, I am a language nerd: When the characters were French, they spoke French!  The German soldiers spoke German!  The English and Americans… well, so it follows.  I love that the languages were matched for once.  It was important to the plot and it worked and damn it, things like having people speak their own language makes me happy!  Word to those with bad-eyesight though: because of this, it’s very subtitle heavy.

5) Why I liked it: It’s fun.  It’s World War II, but it’s a revenge story– unlikely, coincidence prone, but good to watch.  Funny in parts, an example of shock-value in others.

So the door opener and door closer for summer movies are worth a watch if you haven’t seen them, especially if you feel like autumn has come too soon.

October! Which can only Mean Halloween!

I love October. I think it’s my favorite month, since in North Carolina that’s when the autumn weather starts hitting us and the leaves start to change color, but also:

Halloween specials!

I’m such a sucker for these– especially Halloween cartoons and random Halloween movies.

In cartoon terms, you can’t go wrong with the old, 90s-era Nicktoons like Hey Arnold, which I think had a creepy episode every season anyway, but the specific Halloween episode is really nostalgic to me.

I have better memories for the Cartoon Network specials probably, but I also watched that channel a bit more as a kid (helps that CN had anime).

One feature length Halloween movie that I don’t think gets enough cred is The Halloween Tree. It’s an animated version of the Ray Bradbury novel, but it’s very true to the spirit of Halloween, which is a really hard to grasp, whispery ghost of a thing. It reminds me of why Halloween has such a great, creepy atmosphere around it, especially for children.

And of course there’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, but I’ll probably end up doing a blog post proper about that (sometime in the future…)

I actually don’t have a tradition of watching Horror movies for Halloween. I maybe watched a Friday the 13th sequel one afternoon while I waited to go trick or treating, but I dunno. Maybe I should start?

So yeah: Halloween. Autumn. Generally an awesome season full of awesome, cartoon memories. I would say “Let’s have a Halloween themed month!” but damn, not sure I could swing that. Unless you guys want to be bombarded by the pseudo-spooky movies. Well, let’s try that and see how it goes.

(Also, ABCfamily’s “13 Nights of Halloween” looks more like “13 Nights of Tim Burton”. I am not against this.)

Future Plans

I’m thinking of another Visual Movie coming up, probably from “Brideshead Revisited”. If anyone has any suggestions for future Visual Movie posts, please leave a comment!

I’m considering “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, “Chocolat,” “The Fall” and “Swing Kids” for other Visual Movie Posts.

Sunshine Cleaning

One of those movies that reminds me how much life can suck while making me laugh at the same time.

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Albequerque . Current Day.  Amy Adams is a maid with an adorable (if public-school challenged) seven year old son!  A Rebel Rebel younger sister!  A shennanigan-y father!  An affair with her married high school sweet heart!  And it kind of… really… sucks.

So here’s an idea!  New job!  Cleaning up after dead people.  Ick.  Have to afford that private school somehow!

I really liked Sunshine Cleaning, but it was also one of those movies that reminded me how low that life can become.  The film suitably opens up with a suicide and is later marked by two others.

While the cleaning company is the major plot device, the movie is really about the relationships Rose (Adams) and Norah (Blunt) have with other people.  Rose is trying to hold onto the life she had in high school with the affair and her desperation at a baby shower to show that she is a success.  Norah finds herself caught up in a friendship of a daughter of one of their decomp clean up jobs, always getting caught up in who these people they were cleaning up after were as people.

Sometimes the film relied on hijinks to move the plot along, making their sad business seem quite funny, but with the sad effects after death, especially after suicides, the grimness of their jobs and life seep through the celluloid.

Because I’ve Been Listening to Them Instead of Watching Movies

Made of Fail is a ridiculously awesome geek/nerd/dork podcast about almost everything.  Okay, so I zone out when they talk about video games.  I originally heard about them from Cleolinda Jones’s Livejournal and occassionally she guest-hosts.  I would say if you’re starting out with these guys, listen to some of their later stuff before you venture back into their earlier podcasts.

Although No. 4, which is the Superhero recording has really good reviews of The Dark Night and Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog.

So I hope you guys have fun with that!  I know I do.

Not Quite Out of Those Film Classes Yet

For my seminar, I’m taking this great class about Avant-Garde Cinema. That’s actually where I saw The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Oh, how I love that movie). Part of the class is blogging about the movies we see, so if you guys are interested, here is the link:

http://projectorroom.blogspot.com/

Everyone in this class is pretty much hyper-smart, and they have a lot of really cool things to say, so check it out.

Now as more of a me-centric thing, I wrote another Caligari entry on that website that 1)defends the framing technique, since everyone seems to hate it in my class and 2) argues how and why Caligari started horror as a film genre and also helped to create a modern Gothic aesthetic.

If your interested, here’s that link:
http://projectorroom.blogspot.com/2009/09/caligari-as-early-horror.html

I’ll also be putting the class blog in my blog links thingummer (I do know the word for it, I do, I do!). Yay for easy finding solutions.

Video Library

Looks like I’ve just discovered UNC’s video library.

My grades might take a turn for the worse, but at least I’ll have plenty of material for this blog.

Random TV Post

Somehow over the summer I got addicted to the re-runs they were playing on most of the major networks. SO LET’S SEE WHAT I’LL BE WASTING MY WEEKNIGHTS ON, SHALL WE?

Monday, aka I have no idea how I will manage this

8pm: How I Met Your Mother/House

HIMYM was something I had to check out after seeing Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. In related news, I’m also going to start watching Firefly, Castle, and Dollhouse.

House needs no explanation (what? It’s House).

9 PM: Lie to Me/Greek/Castle & 9:30: The Big Bang Theory

While Greek is probably my college drama fever dream and about as close to sorority life as I’m going to get, Lie to Me will probably win priority. It’s a mixture of storyline and hot old men, so I’m hoping that the lead in from House will add a boost to the word-of-mouth (ratings are good, but I have Fear Monger friends who every once in awhile tell me it’s going to get cancelled).

Not sure how I’ll watch The Big Bang Theory. I really like that show, mostly based on what I’ve seen from the summer re-runs. And I always secretly rejoice when nerd culture becomes main stream like the internet.  Similarly, no idea on how I’ll be watched Castle. A good friend of mine really likes it and I just watched an episode of it last night, so I know that it’s going to be interesting.  I just don’t know if I’ll want to become a devoted water or whatever.

Wednesday

9 pm:  Glee

Um… I hear Glee is good?  So good that based off of one episode from earlier this summer and it already has a devoted fanbase.  And that’s considerable word of mouth while Fox is also marketing it like Whoa.

Thursday

9 pm: Fringe

Yay for mad science.  Fringe hooks me on the weird story and interesting characters, etc.  It’s well written enough for it to be a quality science fiction-horror movie, but you get it in hour long bites every week, which makes me appreciate it a lot more.

Friday

9 pm: Dollhouse

I’m really just curious right now.  I’ve been hearing some good things, but also the Fear Mongering of OMG it might be cancelled!

And my other random notes:
Am late to the game for Torchwood; This also means I need to watch Doctor Who, doesn’t it?  I don’t have BBC America now, so I’ll be dependent on the internet or I’ll be shelling out some serious bucks for Torchwood season one.
Ugly Betty. Similar notice as for Greek, but the fashion fever dream of the unfashionable.
Grey’s Anatomy (GOD, I don’t even KNOW. It’s just a soap opera, but the thing is, it’s THE SOAP OPERA.)

I don’t even know for the new shows coming up this season.  I haven’t been seeing too many ads for new shows actually, but I’ve also been watching the networks that have really popular shows already and are gearing towards promoting them.  I’m not so much watching ABC or NBC and I don’ t have Entertainment Weekly either, so I don’t know what’s coming up.  Anything interesting?  Anything look really, really cool?  I heard a rumor awhile ago that ABC was going to adapt Fables into a TV series.  Not sure if that’s coming out this season or next or not for a long time.  Maybe it’s just a rumor.

Now what does this have to do with movies?  Good question.

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(It’s got that title for a reason people!)