the blog quebecois

I think it started with Pearl Harbor, the movie. Japanese Zeros zooming through parade grounds and barracks, wheeling and cornering like Han Solo's fighters in their final assault on the Death Star.

I noted it too in When We Were Soldiers, Mel Gibson's Vietnam epic. F-4s launching napalm strikes from the lofty distance of, oh, 15 feet. The best-forgotten Windtalkers, with P-47s screaming across the terrain at . . . 7 feet?

And now I've just seen the ad for Bruce Willis' new movie, the name of which escapes me.

The jets might as well be weed-whackers on dandelion patrol.

Hollywood, listen to me. I don't care how good it looks. Tactical aircraft do not, no -- never -- strafe, bomb, or otherwise annoy the enemy at that altitude, unless to temporarily incapacitate him with laughter when your hotshot pilot slams into that unanticipated clump of poplars. Let alone bombing it a half-second before he gets there.

War is terrible enough without your phony visual heroics. Illustrate this: During the Battle of Britain, a Spitfire pilot was tracking a badly-wounded German bomber when he spotted the belly gunner's cockpit smashed and with a pair of legs kicking out of it.

He knew what would happen to that man if the plane crashed, or if it landed and so he aimed at that point and unloaded all his machine guns and cannon at it until those legs stopped kicking.

Dramatize that, Hollywood.

Just saw a TV ad for Terminator: Rise of the Machines and they seem to be pushing the "sexy girl robot" angle of it. Schwarzenegger is there in the framing shots, but mainly as wowed spectator to Sexy Girl Robot as she chews up the scenery and many CGI graphics.

This is probably part of a well-planned marketing strategy -- Terminator demolished the competition in its first few weeks and they want to ride the wave out as long as they can. So just as revenues are starting to drop off you target your secondary audience, the Nikita/Charlie's Angels/Tomb Raider fans.

I haven't seen any of these movies. But as I understand it, the Terminator franchise involves a robot killing machine, sent from the future, to, uh, blow up cars or something.

So now there's a Sexy Girl Robot, sent from the future to, uh, blow up cars or something.

The question is, why would "the future" bother to sex its robots?

If they're advanced enough to construct perfectly humanoid machines (and conquer Time), why would they stick big zoomers on them? Wouldn't invisibility or lethality be more important considerations?

Maybe not if you've got the 'tweens in your sights.

So Bob Hope is no longer with us; but he had a good run, didn't he?

To be truthful, he was never one of my favorites. I'm a National Lampoon-era cynic, and Hope's TV appearances were to me irretrievably cornpone.

But, still.

I remember a movie he did. Let me rephrase that. I remember a scene in a movie he did, probably in the early fifties, probably one of a dozen with a similar plot, with him as the swave man-about-town (SMAT), with a beautiful babe love interest (BBLI).

For some reason, the BBLI had charge of an infant, and had to go downtown or uptown or something for a few hours, leaving said infant in Hope's care.

Men and babies. Let the comic hijinks begin!

BBLI: "Are you sure you'll be able to handle this?"

SMAT: "Relax. How tough can it be?"

BBLI: "Well . . . OK. I'll be back as soon as I can. Oh, I nearly forgot." [Hands two bottles to SMAT]

SMAT: "Uh, what are these?"

BBLI: "Baby oil, and baby powder."

SMAT: "So what do I do with them?"

BBLI (rolling eyes) "You. Put. Them. On. The. Baby. Now, I've got to run!"

[Fade out]

[Fade in to very awkwardly-diapered baby on changing table. SMAT is looking back and forth, perplexed, at baby oil and powder bottles. SMAT opens baby oil bottle, sniffs it. Pours a little bit on baby, sniffs it again, pours half the bottle, finally pours entire bottle. Shakes out some baby powder into his hand, judges its texture, sniffs it, tentatively sprinkles it on baby. Sprinkles a bit more. Unscrews the cap and dumps the entire bottle on baby.]

SMAT was massaging what looked like a madly giggling glob of wallpaper paste when BBLI arrived back on the scene.

Men and babies. When will they learn?

I couldn't tell you the name of the movie if you held a gun to my head, but I'll always remember that scene. I laughed until I cried.

It more than made up for every lame golf joke he ever told. On the strength of that piece alone, Bob Hope should enter the express lane to Heaven.

I linked to the Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics website a few days ago and The Meatriarchy picked up on it and added his own extensive thoughts (permalink isn't working, so scroll down the page about halfway) on fighting in movies.

Well worth reading -- I intuitively suspected much of it, but I'm not one with a lot of experience fighting (remind me to tell you about my one-and-only fight sometime), so it's nice to get the opinion of someone with martial-arts experience.

In fact he should consider sending it to the folks who run the ISMP website, as I don't think they really addressed the subject.

I haven't seen The Passion of the Christ and I probably won't -- I'm not a big moviegoer -- but it is certainly amusing to read critical reaction to it, which might be described as of the prissy schoolmarm variety.

Writing in The Toronto Star, Geoff Pevere called it a "lash-by-lash and nail-by-nail re-enactment" of the crucifixion. Pevere compared Gibson's film to the recently remade Texas Chainsaw Massacre, then labelled it "fundamentalist pornography. What graphic sex is to the use of the body in hardcore porno, graphic violence is to destruction of the body of Christ in this Passion."

The Globe and Mail's Rick Groen's echoed those remarks, saying the film is "is so obsessively and so graphically bloody-minded that it comes perilously close to the pornography of violence."

I don't know who coined that phrase, the "pornography of violence," but I'd like to have him shot.

Pevere and Groen weren't always quite so squeamish. Let's look at their take on Quentin Tarantino's splatterfest, Kill Bill: Vol. 1.

Pevere:

If Tarantino, the ultimate fan turned moviemaker of the Internet era, can be held at least partially responsible for a rash of smug, slap-happy and bloody-minded action blockbusters that proliferated in the multiplex mainstream in his wake, he redeems himself with this, a relatively lo-fi bone-cruncher that restores to guilty pleasure its defamed good name: If it's blood and action and profanity and martial arts and rock 'n' roll we must have, let it be Tarantino - and not, for mercy's sake, Michael (Pearl Harbor) Bay - that provides it.

[. . .]

If Tarantino's purpose was to make a movie that not only pays homage to his beloved outlaw genres like chop-socky, vigilante thrillers and spaghetti westerns, but to convey the pure joy of watching them, he's done it. Allowing that movies are like drugs, this is crack.

Groen:

So, when the picture returns to live action and the killing field shifts to Japan, who better to play O-Ren than Lucy Liu. She's next on the Bride's hit list, setting the stage for a drawn-out climax in three stages, a trio of eye-popping fight scenes, each one separately choreographed and shot and scored, culminating in a set piece as lovely as it is surprising -- in the delicate winter of a Japanese garden, death comes draped in snow and drenched in silence.

Yes, the gore is ubiquitous -- sometimes graphic, usually stylized, occasionally comic. But, thanks to the graceful pacing, it never feels assaultive. In fact, complete with that peaceful coda, the film's achievement is nothing less than symphonic.

One man's pornography another's lyrical ballet, eh?

I think they desperately wanted to hang the anti-semitic tag on this movie, but that turned out to be subjective at best,

"Pilate is too nice! Caiaphus is too mean! The mob looks too angry!"

so they fuss and pout about the brutality of it all.

Geez, Mel, you should have played it for laughs. They'd be crowning you as an auteur by now.

Time for the obligatory post wishing Americans a Happy Thanksgiving.

Eh, that's rather lame, isn't it? So I'll just say that, if you're in the mood for a holiday turkey, John Podhoretz serves up a lovely one in The Corner:

Oliver Stone's Alexander, which opens today, isn't just bad. It's Springtime for Hitler bad. I haven't guffawed this hard since I saw Airplane for the first time 24 years ago. This is one of the colossal catastrophes of all time. At a screening on Monday night, during the death scene of Alexander's lover Hephaiston, people were screaming with laughter as Alexander made a big speech while, behind him in soft focus, Hephaiston went into a conniption fit and croaked. Plus, Angelina Jolie plays Alexander's mother like she was Natasha from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. It's almost worth seeing, but don't, because if you're like me and want to see Oliver Stone utterly destroyed for his artistic and political crimes, you will make sure not to contribute to the box-office coffers of what is sure to go down in the annals of moviedom as Heaven's Gate with rampaging evil elephants (no, I'm not kidding).

I think I'll wait for it to come out on video.

Matthew Broderick, armed with a 20 baud modem and a floppy drive, accidentally accesses the military's most top secret computer when trying to hack into his high school mainframe. Yeah.

Toasted Pixel is less than impressed with Hollywood's use of computers as a plot device.

Hackers can break into any system with three wild guesses at a password. Somewhere on the Internet there's a page that spells out in excruciating detail what the bad guys are up to. Windows never crashes.

My favorite: The monitor text is invariably in a 100-point font that looks like it was created on a Commodore 64. You'd wear out your scroll wheel trying to read anything longer than a paragraph.

Via The Presurfer

Here, as if anyone cared, are my predictions for the Oscars:

Best Picture: Damned if I know.

Best Director: See above.

Best Actor: I would put money on it being some guy.

Best Actress: Isn't it sexist to call them actresses? I'm just askin'.

Best Song: Um, there were songs?

As you might have guessed, I'm not too terribly enthusiastic about the Oscars. In fact, I haven't seen any of the films nominated. That doesn't mean, though, that I don't care deeply about the filmic arts.

For example, I found especially moving the blooper outtakes from The Passion Of The Christ.

Note: I think you'll detect fairly quickly that it's a parody -- there's nothing risque about it, though some people might be offended. There's no direct link, so scroll down to the bottom of the page and you'll find it in the centre.

Note squared: You can click through the opening ad -- the second one, immediately before the clip -- maybe not.

Via grow-a-brain

you oughta be in pictures
you’re wonderful to see
you oughta be in pictures
oh what a hit you would be!

little jack little

At the recently opened (March-Sept.) Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan, visitors to the Mitsui-Toshiba pavilion have their faces digitally mapped and imposed by a supercomputer onto characters in the film Grand Odyssey, which stars two computer-animated Japanese actors.

Mind you, everybody in the film seems to be wearing some kind of space helmet, but, still.

For a bare-bones explanation of how it's done, see here.

Via we make money not art

This is a spooky Flash interactive thingy, based on the horror movie The Grudge, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar. I haven't seen it -- it came out several months ago, if I recall, and didn't exactly burn up the box office, as this is a promotion for the DVD release.

I'm not sure if it's a game or what. You can click on various things, but I'm not sure if it leads anywhere or if it's just content to creep you out.

OK, so I'm a big chicken. Satisfied now?

Warning: Sfx, screams and the cries of the damned, etc.

Speaking of strange translations, these are screenshots of a pirated Chinese copy of the recent Star Wars release, Revenge of the Sith with English (sort of) subtitles. The title itself is rendered as "The backstroke of the west." Very funny, but be warned that some of the dialogue contains profanity.

The reference to the Presbyterian Church seems mystifying, but a commenter who knows Chinese explains:

Probably the translation for the Jedi Council is "Council of Elders", "zhang lao hui". It just so happens that "hui" can mean both "council" and "church", and in fact the translation of "Presbyterian Church" is also "zhang lao hui".

I thought I'd lead this off with a quote from Sergei Eisenstein, the masterly Soviet innovator (The Battleship Potemkin, Oktober) of film-editing techniques. Surely he would have had something pithy to say about the subject, like, "Jump cuts been berry, berry good to me."

Alas, what I can find of his writings consists of sludgy Marxist claptrap such as this:

For art is always conflict:
(1) according to its social mission,
(2) according to its nature,
(3) according to its methodology

According to its social mission because: It is art's task to make manifest the contradictions of Being. To form equitable views by stirring up contradictions within the spectator's mind, and to forge accurate intellectual concepts from the dynamic clash of opposing passions.

I don't know what that's all about, but it sounds painful. Here are some clearer examples. We've all seen trailers for movies that, um, turn out to be rather less than advertised. Hey, if you had $100M invested in a turkey, you'd want the exciting bits all spliced together in a two-minute reel, too.

But it's one thing to make a film look more dramatic/humorous/glamorous than it is. It's another to make it look entirely like something it's not.

New York Times:

A few weeks back, [Robert Ryang] said, he entered a contest for editors� assistants sponsored by the New York chapter of the Association of Independent Creative Editors. The challenge? Take any movie and cut a new trailer for it � but in an entirely different genre. Only the sound and dialogue could be modified, not the visuals, he said.

Obviously this has limitations -- you aren't going to turn Saving Private Ryan into The Bridges of Madison County however you manipulate it, but a couple of the entries used clever tricks to make Titanic and West Side Story into horror films.

Mr. Riang's winning entry turned The Shining into a sappy feel-good relationship flick. You will laugh out loud at the music clip he uses about halfway through.

Also, via Hanan at grow-a-brain (who isn't sure if this was part of the above contest), Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho recut as a romantic comedy.

Update: My bad. Link to The Shining now fixed.

Reuters:

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - "Brokeback Mountain" might not have earned the best picture Academy Award, but with three Oscars to its name, including Ang Lee's win as best director, the gay-cowboy romance may have more impact on Hollywood than any other of this year's nominees.

Having already earned $127 million worldwide, the Focus Features release is expected to pave the way for more gay-themed films, and in its wake, other projects about gay characters that have long languished in development are suddenly looking more viable.

They just don't get it, do they? After the second-lowest ratings for the Academy Awards since 1987, and a pack of movies that delivered at best good (Brokeback Mountain, with ~$80M domestic receipts off a production budget of $14M; Crash, with $53M gross against a PB of $6.5M) to disastrous (Munich, which outlaid $70M to sell $46M in tickets [None of the production budgets include marketing costs, which can and often do outstrip the initial shooting budget.]) returns -- Hollywood figures: Hey! More of the same!

Don't get me wrong -- the profits engendered by Brokeback and Crash are certainly acceptable; much better than the majority of movies which never turn a profit. But compare them to, say, The Passion of the Christ, which turned $55M in production and marketing into $612M grosses worldwide.

If this focus on money seems crass -- well, it is of course only one measure of a film's worth. But it is the only tangible one. The Hollywood studio heads are well aware of that, but their stony little hearts turn to mush when it comes to pushing their pet projects.

So, as the Reuters article spells out, prepare for a deluge of gay-themed movies. The suits have convinced themselves that Middle America craves more "chick flicks without chicks" (can't remember where I read that) and are stampeding to slap their dollars down at the cashier's cage.

Is that true? Brokeback was a) from a critically praised story; b) shot by an acclaimed, innovative director; c) featured magnificent scenery (Alberta, pretending to be Montana Wyoming); d) something that generated an immense amount of buzz.

The more I look at it, though, the more this looks like a one-hit trend. Let's go to the books. Box Office Mojo (whence the above numbers were derived) also tracks daily grosses. There are no recent figures for Crash, which had dwindled to insignificance by September of last year (it will probably relaunch widely in the next few days). But Brokeback, which is still in wide release, has averaged a pathetic $225,000 (est., and dropping) over the last three days. Compare that to last year's Million Dollar Baby, which went on to rack up $36M in post-Oscar grosses. (It's not an exact comparison, as MDB won for both Best Director and Picture, but we got to work with what we got.)

Clearly, everyone who wanted to see Brokeback has seen it, with few returning for seconds.

Now maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there is a great inchoate hunger out there for Brokeback and its successors, but I'm guessing not.

Certainly it wouldn't be the first time that people have thrown good money after bad -- Woody Allen, who seems to have the most patient investors in history, reputedly hasn't turned a profit on any of his films since Annie Hall.

This, however, fits my theory that Hollywood is combatting piracy by releasing movies that nobody wants to steal.

I've never seen any of the Die Hard movies. I was surprised to find that the franchise dates back to this 1924 silent version, complete with tinkly piano accompaniment. I wish I knew what Bruce Willis's beauty secrets are. He certainly looks good for a 106-year-old man, doesn't he?

It's Christmas, 1924, and young Manhattanite John McClane visits olde Los Angeles towne to see his wife and enjoy yultide splendor. However, a few ne'er-do-wells have plans of their own, and C4.

Via Cynical-C Blog

Miramax Films is auctioning off various props and costumes on eBay, with 100% of the proceeds going to charity. They do have some neat stuff, like weapons from The Gangs of New York. Those are going for $100+. If you're more on a budget, you might be interested in [pictured] document folders carried at some point by Meg Ryan in Kate and Leopold. (Yet another movie I haven't seen.)

You're thinking -- sure, they're probably stunt folders or something that they picked up at Office Depot. No, Sir! They come with a Certificate of Authenticity, so that is your guarantee that Meg Ryan at least held them -- however briefly -- in her hot little movie star hands. And you can't just walk off with treasures like that. Unless you're willing to trump the current bid of $0.99.

Though I would easily pay twice that for a phone call where she reprised her faux-orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally.

So go on, have a look. Bidding ends on many of the items in a day or two -- if you're into collecting movie memorabilia, there are more than a few bargains to be had.

I knew there was a scientific explanation for this.

Wikipedia:

The Inverse Ninja Law is a similar phenomenon that occurs frequently in martial arts movies, and role playing games. It is also sometimes called the Anime Ninja Effect or the Rule of One.

The Inverse Ninja Law states that the effectiveness of a group of ninja is inversely proportional to the number of ninja in the group. While a single enemy ninja is often portrayed as a significant threat to the protagonists, a large group of ninja is significantly less of a threat, and as such is easily defeated. This is sometimes applicable to other close combat�oriented minions as well.

Accordingly, effectiveness, e, should be computable given the number of ninja, n, and some as-yet-undetermined proportionality constant, k, as follows:

Closely correlated:

The Stormtrooper effect, also called Stormtrooper syndrome, is a clich� phenomenon in works of fiction where minor characters (cannon fodder) are unrealistically ineffective in combat against more important characters (almost always the protagonists "equipped" with character shields). The name originated with the armed Imperial Stormtroopers in the original Star Wars trilogy, who, despite their considerable advantages of close range, overwhelming numbers, professional military training, full armor, military-grade firepower, and noticeable combat effectiveness against non-speaking characters, were incapable of seriously harming the protagonists. The effect is generally employed either to increase the dramatic tension of an action scene or to accentuate the heroes' fighting prowess.

Via Cynical-C Blog

Jay Stone, Postmedia:

The Ides of March, George Clooney's cynical drama about an American presidential election, is an entertainingly bleak story of backstabbing, betrayal, lies, corruption and sexual misconduct in the camp of a brightly idealistic politician who is running to be the next leader of the free world. Clooney -- who directed, stars and co-wrote the film -- is undoubtedly being ironic by saddling the tale with such a noble title, but the notion of perfidy is well placed.

3 1/2 stars! Hmmm-hmmm.

John Boot, Pajamas Media:

Spoilers lie ahead, but it wouldn’t be proper to write about the film without mentioning how idiotic its plot is. For all of the “insidery” goings on and the air of knowingness that accompanies the scenes inside the campaign office, we are obliged to believe that it constitutes a major scoop when Ida finds out the Gosling character had a beer with the chief (Paul Giamatti) of the rival campaign. There are all sorts of innocent reasons why these men might meet (they are, after all, both liberal Democrats), and even in the Times it would hardly constitute a major story. What would the headline be: “Political Operatives Have Conversation in Bar”? Yet this paltry item of micro-trivia sets off a chain reaction that could have historic consequences.

The other unbelievably moronic plot element involves a slutty intern (Evan Rachel Wood) who, after a one-night stand with Gov. Morris, gets pregnant — and is unable to come up with $900 for an abortion. Her dad is a Catholic ex-senator and the head of the DNC whom she dare not ask for the money (even though, back in reality, virtually all Catholic Democrats are vehement defenders of abortion). But a girl who grew up in the upper reaches of Washington must have hundreds of rich friends she could ask to loan her $900. Instead, she goes directly to Gov. Morris to ask him for the money, which threatens to derail his campaign.