Insuferable Duchebags

I got a freelance editing job (“job”) a few days ago. Today, I went to go get the footage from the guy who directed it. I should mention that he graduated from my MFA program in May. On the phone he seemed like a nice enough guy. The fact that he wasn’t really willing to coordinate with me at a point when he wasn’t in the Hollywood Hills and instead expected me to drive my ass up there (an hour drive) should have been a little red flag, but hey, I’m a good sport. Then I spent some time with the guy.

Holy shit.

The file transfer took almost twenty minutes. This meant twenty minutes of talking, and the first thing he says to me is something to the tune of “You know, most students in your position would pay to pick my brain. You know, film school, the industry.” My GOD this was some shade of cocky, I wouldn’t have expected from anyone in my program, but given the reputation USC students have, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. He proceeded of course to list his accomplishments, which to me (no matter how hard he worked for them) seemed about par for the course for a recent grad. He gave me a copy of his thesis, and bragged that he’d gotten a manager right off from that thesis. My only real questions for him (until I switched gears into brownnose mode; I’m really bad at that) were about his debt; he said he’d racked up somewhere in the neighborhood of two-hundred thousand.

I suppose this was noteworthy to me because I felt like I was seeing this black, horrible, twisted image of the future. Not necessarily of me; I’m not saying I’m incapable of such arrogance, who knows? Maybe someday I’ll grow a pair and be one of those Hollywood ball-buster types. But if you’re arrogant, at least have the good sense to be conniving about it. Dealing-with-people 101 is pretty simple, and this fellow failed it pretty hard. Guys, when you want to succeed, DO NOT TALK ABOUT YOURSELF FIRST, no matter who you’re trying to impress. You’ll get much further in life if you make others feel awesome (do as I say, not as I do.)

But I also thought about my classmates. let me get this straight; I LOVE my classmates. Well, most of them. I never thought I’d have such affection for a group of people, let alone so many people (there are about fifty of us). But needless to say, the majority, or at least the plurality, want to be directors. I don’t aspire as intently as some of my colleagues, but I haven’t ruled it out yet. I can’t imagine that these guys (and girls), who are by and large not only talented but generally personable folks, would flaunt their assumed superiority and success over their peers so brusquely. But this guy’s big argument, I think when he saw my thinly-veiled disgust at his own self-aggrandizing, was that if you want to make it in such a competitive, ungrateful field, you HAVE to be an arrogant bastard. You HAVE to believe that your way is the only way, because when you open yourself to other possibilities, everything just falls apart like an undercooked bundt cake.

Allow me to posit an alternative;

Before I moved to Los Angeles, one of my friends was studying at the Actors Studio at Pace University, and always attended James Lipton’s interviews, and the one she got me into was Conan O’Brien, just before he, too, made the jump out to LA to host the Tonight Show. What he said would always stick with me, but one of Conan’s most defining traits is his self-effacing nature, modest, even self-deprecating. One can sense that air of confidence on him, that he doesn’t mean it when he criticizes his appearance or performance, but he doesn’t push anything; he lets his talent speak for himself. And this was what he told Lipton’s students; don’t panic, don’t try to push yourself. Just be present, do what you love, do what you’re good at. Be unassuming, and endear yourself to people, but more importantly, know what you’re good at. Don’t pimp yourself when you don’t really have anything to pimp (this guy’s film, incidentally, while he’d clearly sunk a lot of money into it, wasn’t anything more than technically good). At the end of the day, if you have talent and, more importantly, believe in that talent, it will speak for itself when you take the opportunity to show it. Screenwriting 101; show, don’t tell.

A lot of people would argue that in the cutthroat world of Hollywood this isn’t a realistic way to go about things. That may be, but hey, Conan O’Brien too popped up here in the late 1980’s with nary a thing but a bachelor’s degree and a job at a leather shop in West Hollywood. It seems that some can get pretty far without being a douchebag.

Big damn public statement

It’s been a pretty wacky week indeed.

I suppose I should say first off that the “rape rap” skit was actually what inspired TFTF in the first place, not the date with Doug.  That said, it was the first shot and I had planned to be the last release, but since they wanted us to be more on a concrete schedule, I decided to go ahead and finish that one.  Now here’s the thing, it had gone through reshoots after the first initial bout, and, as I am wont to do, I rushed through the edit only to find myself a bit uneasy with that first cut.  Now, I find I’ve had pretty good intuition about what people will and won’t like, and with that one I wasn’t quite comfortable with releasing it, even though I uploaded it to the FTP (TGWTG usually works through and FTP; I don’t upload my own videos as when I do that they look pretty crappy because I don’t have a flash converter).  So, I told the admin not to release that one, period.  He agreed, and the Spooning with Spoony bloopers went up that week, instead.  Everyone rejoiced.

Now, more recently, indeed there has been a sharp dropoff with my contributions to the site. This is for a myriad of reasons, biggest of which being that I haven’t stayed in the same place at all and am currently bouncing around the country like a tumbleweed in a Toyota Camry.  But there are other reasons as well, part of it being related to money and the time it takes to make a video, part due to interpersonal crap, and a part having to do with some of the creative outlets by the boys over at 4chan (much appreciated, guys) and my general befuddlement over the whole thing.  But the guys at TGWTG knew that it would be a while before I put something up again, take it or leave it, so imagine my surprise when while getting out of the subway I find a voicemail from Bargo telling me that the rape rap video has gone up.  Gasp and shock! I call him immediately and tell him to TAKE THAT SHIT DOWN, as  at the current edit, I did not intend for that thing to be seen by human eyes.  This wasn’t Bargo’s call, and it wasn’t anything done out of malice, this I know, but I didn’t know the thing had been up until almost eighteen hours after it had gone up.  So yeah, needless to say, I was a bit cheesed, but the general consensus at the Chicago end was that if we took it down now, it would cause something of a fiasco.  Whatever, says I.  I wash my hands of this, this was not my decision, all I know is that I have every intention of staying away from whatever fallout it has caused.  The mood and sense I get from my friends and collaborators, ranging from righteously indignant to straight out embarassed, only enforces that inclination.

I want to say that the posting of the video itself stems from miscommunication and misunderstanding; I wish I had been asked before anything I make gets posted without my knowing it, but I also should have been clearer about that edit and my desire for it not to go up on the site.  Or I could have been less of an idiot and, you know, deleted the damn thing from the FTP so that wouldn’t have happened.  But it just slipped my mind.  Live and learn.

Bargo called me about a day later telling me they’d gone ahead and deleted it, and by that point I was totally indifferent as to whether or not they did.  Whatever this supposed fallout was, I don’t really care.  As for the content itself, however, I feel no inclination to apologize for it as I had no autonomy in it being made public, but joking about rape is not something either I or any of my compadres feel bad about.  I knew the reception might not be that great, which is why I wanted to sit on it for a while and give it another edit, but by no means do I feel bad about it or the content.  If we can’t joke about sexual abuse, genocide, kiddie porn and all measure of unpleasant run of the mill bullshit we have to deal with on a daily basis, I think I’m about ready to jump ship on the Western Hemisphere.  Get off your cross.  We’ve all got it bad.   I could go into all measure of cultural implications here, the reception of this v. the reception of Spooning with Spoony, but again, it doesn’t really matter.  That one just wasn’t ready, nor was this site’s demographic ready for it.

I had planned on waiting a few weeks before posting again regardless, and I’m still planning on sticking to that. Unless something else goes awry, I do still plan on contributing, but it will be a little while.

Until then, don’t stop believing, streetlight people.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

I have a thread on my forum at TGWTG where people can ask me questions, and usually they’re of a rather irrelevant nature, as questions to the tune of “What’s it like being an extremely minor Internet celebrity?” get old pretty fast. (Answer: it’s okay.)  Sometimes they’re of a rather…erm… interesting nature, but I had a few people ask me my thoughts on Michael Jackson’s death.  I don’t imagine my comments should have surprised anyone; I don’t care. It doesn’t affect me, I don’t know the guy.  I was at the mall when I found out, buying falafel, and I was fare more preoccupied with the falafel at the time. It was very good falafel.

But aside from the celebrity fixation our culture has which I find more than a little disquieting, the whole 24-hour news culture and all that disconcerting jazz, people do feel personally invested in this guy. It’s hard not to; he wrote “Thriller”, for Christ’s sake.  He wrote the soundtrack to our childhoods.  Sure, we made fun of him.  We were dissapointed in his ever-changing appearance, we shook our heads at his outrageous narcissism, and we turned a dissapointed blind eye to his pedophilia.  But he was a part of us, known to everyone to our generation for all of our lives.

And no, I felt nothing. I continue to feel nothing.

It’s not that celebrity deaths never affect me.  You want to know my secret? When Eartha Kitt died, I bawled. No, I bawled. I was crying all night.  And I think that, to me, in my head she was still very much alive.  But death is not something I’m at all unfamiliar with. I come from a very large family, so I’ve seen more than my fair share of death strictly by laws of probability. But I also have a lot of great aunts and uncles.  My family has a bad tendency towards senility on both sides, and every time one of my great aunts or great uncles has died, it was always preceeded by years of senility.  By the time they died, they hardly knew who anyone was, and the general feeling among the rest of the family was Thank God…

To us, they’d been dead for years; this was just their physical body calling it quits long after it should have.  And this more or less sums up my feelings on Michael Jackson; to me, he’d been dead for a long time.  He’d ceased to live in this sphere a long time ago.  He was an addict of the purist, most insidious form, and nothing was ever going to save him.  He didn’t want to be saved.  I think this is why I feel like he’d been dead for so long.  When I found out, my initial internal reaction was “He’s still alive?”

More than anything, his deterioration makes me wonder how capable those of us who really are that outrageously talented are of living among the rest of us and retaining their sanity, even their humanness, all at the same time.  Sometimes it feels like the Powers That Be simply equipped Michael and his ilk with too much for them to handle, making their early departure something of an inevitability. Michael Jackson’s childhood had been very rough, to say the least, and as a result he surrounded himself with enablers and indulgences.  For whatever reason, for his talent or his self-perception, he felt entitled to do so.  So many people do now, and that inclination, that self-gratifying narcisism, seems to only be proliferating in our culture.  Whether you’re the King of Pop, a fifteen year old girl with 19,000 MySpace friends, or the Goddamn Nostalgia Chick. Considering reality is all we know, it is remarkably difficult to maintain a hold of.

Comic Diamonds from Cinematic Rough

I’ve started collecting some of my favorite quotes relating to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Here’s a sampling:

“This is the first time a movie has attempted to teabag an audience.”

“And why couldn’t an Autobot translate these symbols?
Because Bumblebee is mute and the Racist Twins are poor black robots from the slums of Cybertron who never learned how to read. It’s a sad commentary on Cybertronian society. Like The Wire, actually.”

“So the Decepticons made a slutty robot to attend his college and enrolled her in classes and put her in on-campus housing just in case Sam ended up being important at some point in the future?
Apparently. It was an elaborate plan, but it sure paid off.”

“Michael Bay used a squillion dollars and a hundred supercomputers’ worth of CG for a brilliant art movie about the illusory nature of plot.”

“LaBoeuf projects a pathetic, wall-eyed dorkhood, when he’s not babbling like a tumor removed from Woody Allen’s prostate that somehow achieved sentience.”

“In a sense, it’s the first war movie ever to convey a real sense of the fog of war, the confusion that comes with battle. Somewhere around hour nine, you will understand why friendly fire happens in wartime.”

“It’s as if Michael Bay looked at Jar Jar Binks and said “Oh, fuck no. Really? People find THAT offensive? Fuck that, I’ll show them a fucking stereotype they’ll never fucking forget!” “

“If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together.”

“Their accents are Brooklyese, British and hip-hop, as befits a race from the distant stars. “

“A giant, lumbering idiot of a movie.”

“It’s like sticking your face inside an electric can opener and your finger in a wall socket. And those are the good parts.”

“I’ve lost faith in humanity. There is no God. No purpose.”

Ushering in a New Era

When I was a sophomore in college, I saw a film that changed my life. It utterly changed the way I looked at cinema.  Some know it as a landmark for the ratings system, a veritable train wreck in how-not-to-make-a-movie.  Most know it as Showgirls.

I actually saw that movie for a class, and I have this vivid memory of walking out of the film center, through the dark streets of Greenwich Village, unable to remember the last time I’d felt so dirty. Showgirls would later grow on me for the over-the-top camp classic it is, but I never felt so mentally assaulted, so cinematically violated by an initial viewing of a film again.  I must have misunderestimated the potential of Michael Bay.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is transcendent.  Transcendent may not be an adequate term for how much this film is going to change the face of cinema. It is beyond post-modern.  It’s post-intelligent.  Yes, I believe this film is simply the flagship of a new era; we are entering the era of post-intelligence.

Bay has a special way about him that some might describe as pure id, and perhaps this is a key to his success; after all, the id seeks pleasure and rejects logic, and I’ve never seen a Michael Bay film that accepts logic as a warm and welcomed colleague to a screenplay rather than the pretentious waste of time he seems to think it is.  But more than that, the thing that always struck me about Bay films is the venom with which he defies logic; it’s not just that he thinks we’re stupid, he outright accuses us of being stupid, and dares us not to enjoy his movie despite the leaping gaps of nonreality.  I understand that this film takes place in a reality where girls like Megan Fox wear midriffs to high school and black men greet friends to the door by screeching at their grandmamas.  Large scale city destruction is cover-up-able.  Thirty foot robots can climb around on Griffith’s Park and be seen by no man in broad daylight.  I understand that.  But why, Bay, do you have to be so hateful about it?

The thing about the first movie was it did manage to cling enough to this reality to not go beyond the pale of the completely irredeemable.  I found the final sequence in a major city rather odd (let’s take the doomsday device into a hugely populated area!), but there was enough in it that wasn’t pointing a self-assured finger of superiority at its audience (especially the non-white audience) to make it not completely irredeemable.

But despite all that, Bay’s id-driven mode of filmmaking is present in that first film, if not in such potent, undistilled unpleasantness as it is in Fallen. And moreover, why does Bay’s id graft towards such horrible, unpleasant, unenjoyable things?  Where in the name of God did he declare that these two minstrel show twins would be a good idea, and no one said, “Hey, you know, maybe this is just my opinion but that sounds like pan-fried anal lesion”?  So we saw John Turturro’s boxers in the first one, who decided that upping it to a g-string and seeing his poor, withered ass was a good ante to up for the sequel?  Who wants to see Julie White high on pot brownies? What focus group demanded this? I want to know!

In a way it’s stunning and telling as we basically have come upon a person so powerful that he has no compunctions showing us his 200 million dollar worldview, now in theaters worldwide. But more than, so many accept it, even relate to it.  In the theater I was in, empty though it was, there were definite laughs at the twins when we first see their faces, their monkeyed, grillz-encrusted faces, and those were not the laughs of horrified disbelief that I’m fairly sure I made; they laughed.  They found it genuinely amusing. Not for the first time in my life, I was a bit ashamed of my species, which Optimus Prime tells me is not so dissimilar from his. I wonder if Cybertronian directors dared their audience to turn off their brains (or processors) for their entertainment. Hell, maybe that’s why they’re fighting. Clearly this advanced alien species isn’t all that bright.

I understand that there always has been a large contingent of people who graft to genuinely unintelligent fare, but I’ve never seen anything so brashly awful be accepted and enjoyed by the masses.  The Batman and Robins of history are generally accepted by people as cinematic dreck, and in many ways this one is so, so much worse.  Oh yes, I went there.

When I say post-intelligence I do include some evidence that testing, in America, is showing signs of slumping, and I can’t help but feel like the Internet and web-speak is largely contributing to that.  Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen doesn’t feel like the symptom of an ever-dumbening populace; it’s like a cinematic dare, a hundred-and-forty minute lewd gesture in celluloid, and the people are embracing it.

People read?

I’m seriously going to try to start updating this thing regularly now.  Seriously.

Since joining TGWTG, I’ve flirted several times with doing something with Twilight, even going so far as to film one after I saw the movie.  Two of them I flaked out on because either I had too much to do, or I was too shy to confront Twilight fans in their own environment (believe it or not, I’m actually quite shy.)  But I still have yet to create any venemous, Twilight-related opus.  I can’t help but feel like I missed some opportunity after that first attrocity of a film, directed by a woman, starring a woman, and adapted from a novel written by a woman, for a primarily female audience, made so goddamn much money.

But I find myself equally fascinated, if not more so, by Meyer’s first “adult” novel (as in, marketed towards adults), The Host. Why does this one not get any credit for being equally awful?

So while Twilight is a painful, unoriginal book about vampires in which the main characters spend roughly five hundred pages brooding about each other (when the female is falling down/being rescued, of course), The Host is about alien invaders that takeover human bodies, and one in particular that kind of starts to empathize with the humans and their wacky human emotions. Basically it’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers from the point of view of one of the body snatchers. Sounds kind of cool, right? I won’t say I was disappointed, coming in with a severe bias by looking for the things that so offend me about Twilight.  Female main character with a martyr complex? Check.  Violent and possesive male love interests? Check.  Weird villification of all other female characters besides the main (and the voice in her head)?  Double check.  And what is this ultimately, that thing that SciFi had better have a damn good reason to ever be?  A romance novel. Gee.

This one’s especially curious to me, as, though it is in no way stylistically different from Twilight, right down to the God-awful first person female narration replete with fawning over hot boys with dull names, it is billed as “adult” fiction.  But even if she does have all this clout now, does she really have no editor? Does no one tell her these things what they teach you in Writing 101, things like, “Adverbs and adjectives aren’t your friends. Really! They’re not!” and “Sentence variety can be fun!” and “SHOW DON’T TELL” and “I’m serious about those adjectives/adverbs. Really, you think you need them, you probably don’t.”   Meyer has all of the amateurish mistakes of a middling fanfiction writer; how to her editors let this slide?

So, a while ago, to make myself feel better, I took a red pen to the first few pages of The Host. Maybe it will make any other aspiring writers out there feel better, too.

I feel better now.  Just a little.

But we have luff! The Day The Earth Stood Still

I never understood the knee-jerk disdain for remakes. As far as I’m concerned, a remake is no more invalid than an adaptation of a book or a play, it’s simply another interpretation of a body of work that people are already familiar with. But the remake always gets the shortest end of the stick, and as people tend to be working from nostalgia goggles rather than understanding that this is simply another form of adaptation, remakes tend to see a lot of vitriol. At least, I must assume this is at least part of the reason why The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008) is currently hovering around a 22% tomatometer and falling. I have to assume a lot of this is kneejerking, especially in a world where the likes of Hulk hover around 60% and Twilight is sitting pretty around 45%.  Come on, guys.

I am familiar with the original 1951 version, and strange as it might sound the new one actually gave me a new appreciation for it. Does the new one succeed? In some ways, no, but that’s not to say that there aren’t any successes. I think the basic new route they took, Klaatu as judge and executioner rather than simply messenger, was a smart one and at times very effective. In the 50’s we were only just starting to touch the precipice, now we’ve pretty much flown off it and are going at an intertia that we know we can’t stop, despite knowing that we’re killing ourselves in the process.

I hadn’t intended on seeing this one right off, but there’s something that goes off in my head, something visceral and primitive that must root in when my great great great ancestors were abducted by alien robots that tells me, when a movie comes about about aliens, or robots, or especially alien robots, to go see it now! And if for nothing else I can safely say that I have beheld the most assidasical, crapfuckstic theater in America. Seriously, the theater on 181st St. in Manhattan has got to be the worst theater in the city, so the fact that the movie was overlaced with the slight echo of a radio station coming from the same (shitty) sound system as the movie’s sound in addition to the fact that the film was projected onto a screen that wasn’t much bigger than a plasma flatscreen with about half the quality didn’t help matters. Hell, maybe it was these factors that distracted me from how weak the first portion of the movie is.

And the beginning really is the weakest link, followed by the ending, which I suppose is why I actually found myself somewhat impressed by the middle parts in which Jennifer Connelly’s character comes to realize Klaatu’s purpose on this Earth and subsequently takes it upon herself to change his mind. The beginning starts with a mad plethora of “Why?!”s. In the time it took for you guys to round up all of these scientists, you could have probably evacuated a fair chunk of Manhattan. Why did you not even bother? Why then did you subsequently bring in your scientists to presumably die with the Manhattanites? Somehow I doubt being above the ground in a big military helicopter is going to provide much protection from an asteroid. And why do the scientists get to go in first while the military guys run around like chickens with their heads cut off? Like yes, I realize we have a poorly-run and often times silly military, but surely they’re not that bad. Come on, guys!

Which brings us to our not-president, Secretary of Defense Regina Jackson (Kathy Bates). I had actually been wondering earlier about the lack of females in these kinds of positions in films, especially as the Secretary of Defense, and never imagined that we’d see a female one. Still, the idea seems still to be prevalent in today’s action movies that our figureheads are no longer the president: Dick Cheney-lite as the veep in The Day After Tomorrow, Jon Voight’s bad-idea-bear Secretary of Defense in Transformers, and now our first ever chick Secretary of Defense in The Day The Earth Stood Still. I wonder if in the new administration we’ll start seeing the president again? Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that we do get a president in Roland Emmerich’s upcoming 2012. And he’s black. Prophetic, or ironic? You decide.

The movie finally finds its legs once Klaatu gets out of the silly government custody. Perhaps we had a better view of ourselves in the 50’s, but it is kind of curious that the government was much more courteous to Klaatu in that version. His landing choice actually makes more sense in the remake as well; why does he land in the capital of all creation, Manhattan? It sports the UN, which is right nearby. Why did he land in DC in the original? Because… well… America is the capital of humanity? Plus then the all-American boy can take him around to all the national monuments and we can look up at the statue of honest Abe Lincoln, gee whillikers!

And here’s where the fundamental difference is; Klaatu isn’t here to get to know us, as far as he’s concerned, he already does. He’s not going to be endeared by playing baseball, or express wonderment at the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln, or offer to take your boy to the movies. He’s seen what we do and what we’re capable of, and he’s not interested in sentimentality, which almost causes a ripple in the film’s logic. There’s a scene towards the middle where Klaatu meets up with a contact of his who has spent an entire human life on this planet in the form of an old Chinese man that actually addresses sentimentality as the saving grace of humanity (and we won’t go into the fact that when he’s dissing us, he’s speaking Chinese, but when he’s talking about how awesome we are they switch to English). By the logic of what he’s learned and was sent to report back on, yes, humanity is a destructive force on this planet and should be wiped out. However, as he’s spent so much time on this planet he’s gotten attached to his Earth-sprog, and chooses to die with them. Why? He can’t really explain it, and doesn’t really try to, but the basic jist he gives is that human life is a difficult thing to endure, and that is in part why humans are the way they are, and if you live as one, it’s kind of hard not to get attached to them.

Which brings us to our “luff”. So often in movies involving an alien God-being that is sent to Earth to judge us, The Abyss, The Fifth Element, the original The Day the Earth Stood Still, even more unintentional God-characters like in The Iron Giant and Transformers, when the question as to whether humanity is worth saving and why pops up, the only thing we’ve got going for us is our luff. And these are ultimately difficult questions to answer, because in some way you have to come down on a specific meaning to life. There is a very good scene (that is way too short, in my humble opinion) between Klaatu and John Cleese’s Professor Barnhardt where the two discuss ingenuity, and humans being allowed to have the chance to allow their ingenuity to rise them above their current predicament, which seems to be the turning point for Klaatu and his views on what humanity should and should not have the right to do (There was also a missed opportunity for a very endearing math-off between Klaatu and the Professor, one of many missed opportunities). But the thing about ingenuity is it is very subjective, and it seems that from the point of view of an eco-obsessed alien the only kind of ingenuity that would be worthwhile would be the scientific variety that lifts humanity out of its current predicament. Very few people possess true ingenuity, but all, arguably, possess the ability for “luff”, and if we aren’t going for universals there’s not much we can say about the whole species.

This is the lofty nature of this kind of speculative fiction, and this is why it so often falls short. Films like this that bring in otherworldly characters and attempt to place a tangible value on the meaning of life are tangling with issues that have lacked answers since before philosophy as a study even came to exist. If you must place value on human life, what can you say it is? Is it possible to even do so without getting super-subjective and, dare I say,  sentimental? Is it fair to even assume that aliens would be moved by our kind of sentimentality? Well, yes and no; yes in that it’s safe to assume that any species that could evolve sapience would have been a social species and very likely to develop social attachments, as is the case with all of the more intelligent species on Earth, no in that it’s also fair to assume that such an advanced species would, at least on a cultural level, probably not have as much need for sentimentality as we do in our “difficult” lives and would probably much prefer empiricism.

He's walking on water. Offscreen.

And by God, is he God.  It’s almost as though this film is trying to come up with new creative ways to outdo the original in ways that Klaatu was Jesus.  You could argue it’s more overt, you could also argue it’s more subtle.  In the original Klaatu calls himself “Carpenter” while he’s getting to know humanity, preaches a message of peace, not war, and is rises from death.  In the new one, he walks on water and suffers from occasional stigmata when people are trying to shoot him with missiles.  He also performs a Lazarus on a cop and brings him back from the dead (after killing him first, of course, traumatizing the shit out of poor Jaden).   But most importantly for both of them is that they, of course, die for our sins.

Although the screenwriting mostly favors Klaatu in terms of what’s interesting and engaging, Jennifer Connelly did well with what she had as the I’m-a-scientist-at-Princeton Helen Benson, whose (step)son is now a first grade pain in the ass rather than the all-American, “fine boy” we got in the original. Jacob Benson, Jaden Smith’s character, is basically our thinly-veiled allegory as a species, which works less well than I imagine they’d have hoped as he is not so much a character as a, well, thinly-veiled allegory. He’s violent, xenophobic, and a right bitch to his stepmom, and it’s only when Klaatu shows him some mercy and helps him out that he starts to realize the error of his ways. Ah, is that more wasted opportunity I smell? Towards the end of the film Klaatu and Jacob spend some time together getting to know each other. Were but Jaden not an obnoxious little shit and the screenwriting more engaging!

Can't... move.... gah

But then there’s Gort. Poor Gort. In the original, by our beefy CGI-obsessed now-standards, Gort is pretty damn silly looking. I imagine by 1950’s standards he was pretty imposing, but the fact remains that even silly-looking silver platform-shoed Gort from the original was way more imposing and scary than this Gort (or should I say GORT). It was kind of impressive that this massive thirty-foot robot thing looked so unreal (and by that I mean not real at all), especially the year after a movie full of thirty foot robots that actually did look real came out, but poor Gort never looks like he’s sharing the same reality with the people in his scenes. When he steps on the ground, an environment which looks almost as fake as he does, the dirt doesn’t give like it’s being crushed under the sheer weight of this massive thing. You just never got the impression that he’s sharing the same space with the human characters. The only time you see him share a shot with any are when he’s in this deep Area 51 lab in a scene that is also strange and frustrating. And silly.  Maybe we could have made him less, I dunno, huge?

And that ultimately seems to be the crux of our film and its problems, as many have pointed out before, as as with any film that deals with such heavy themes as the value of human life while trying to be a blockbuster at the same time, and the problem is there are so few universals about humans that everyone can agree on that would be interesting and relevant to Joe Schmo in the first place, so with what they had, I think they at least introduced enough of these ideas to make the movie feel engaging and thoughtful at times. There’s just such kneejerking against remakes, environmental themes and Keanu Reeves that it seems to send this movie from what normally would have been described as “mediocre” or “lost opportunity” into “horrendous” and “oh God my eyes they burn!” I think this is a movie of lots of missed opportunities, yes, but it did try to introduce some interesting dialogue that we haven’t seen in SciFi movies before, and a lot of people miss that and get angry about it, and that I don’t quite understand. It’s adaptation, it needs to adapt.

Although the way the film ends left me with little more than a good sense of “Oh my God, hello? Famine? Famine? Massive famine? 6 billion people on the planet and no automation? Famine?” Also… how? I mean… laws of physics? Nevermind. Perhaps the ending does indeed surpass the beginning for weakness. Ending, you are the weakest link. Goodbye!

And I liked Keanu.  So there.

But finally, is the film’s message relevant? It’s all well and good to label humans a destructive species and claim that they are not worth sparing for the sake of a planet capable of supporting complex life, of which there are only few of the cosmos, but is this true? I’m sure a lot of people thought this was hokey and over the top, and maybe it is, but I do wish viewers wouldn’t brush that off so lightly. I do think it’s inevitable that our planet will get a good bit hotter, and that weather patterns will change as a direct result of our consumption, but is it possible for us to render the planet completely uninhabitable? Well, according to Mr. Stephen Hawking, yes, it could. We could literally chew this planet up so much that no one can use it anymore, ourselves included. So, knee-jerkers, try to jerk your knees less. Call it propaganda if you like, but remember, just because you apply that kind of terminology doesn’t mean there isn’t some truth to the message.