Paul

We watched Paul this week. Evan, Shaun and I went to see it at the new theatre, complete with reclining seats. You have to be a bit taller than I am to take full advantage, though. I didn't notice it as much as in TRON, though.

I got two of the three trailers, but neither Evan nor I had seen Bridesmaids before, and we hope to never see it again. I got Arthur (not on our list) and Your Highness (definitely on our list, and coming up in a few weeks). Then the credits rolled, and only two companies were involved in the making - Working Title, and Universal. Of course, the giant companies barely count, because you can't really mistake them for a movie (thanks for the joke, Family Guy). We all know the globe from Universal, or the kingdom & castle from Disney, or the lady with the torch for Columbia (although I do miss the horse from Tri Star) or the floating triangles for Alliance (I'm not sure how many Americans would know that one, since I think Alliance is a Canadian company mostly involved with distribution here).

The movie itself starts about 60 years ago, with a dog going outside to investigate strange lights, followed by a young girl. A spaceship lands - on the dog. I laughed, but I'm sure PETA wasn't impressed. It was only implied, though, not shown.

The movie skips ahead to the present day, at Comic Con. This was both funny and informative, because I've read about Comic Con on a number of nerdy news sources. And some legitimate ones, as well. There are a few gags, one involving Simon Pegg's character (Graeme) eyeing one of the many ladies dressed up in Princess Leia's bikini from Return of the Jedi (there were a bunch of those bikinis wandering around) while Nick Frost's character (Clive) eyes the girl in the Ewok costume. Snigger. Then they meet an amalgamation of every author who's sick of meeting every fan whose life was changed by his works, played hilariously by Jeffrey Tambor. Anyway, we learn that Clive won the Nebula Award in 1992, which is actually pretty good. It's the award for best Sci-Fi novel. Past winners include Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, and Orson Scott Card, who won for Ender's Game, which everyone should read. Seriously, stop reading this good-for-nothing blog and pick it up. It's one of the better books ever written.

Anyway, after Comic Con they rent an RV for a road trip to all the alien landmarks in the USA (they’re from the UK). Some of them I recognized, some I did not. After a run-in with a couple of rednecks (and denting their truck), they wind up meeting the titular alien when the car he's acquired crashes. Clive faints, so Paul explains to Graeme that he's in trouble and on the run. It eventually comes out that the government has gotten enough information out of him, and now wants to dissect him, so he understandably goes on the lam.

A short while later, they hook up with Ruth (played by Kristen Wiig), who's a hardcore Young-Earth Christian Fundamentalist. Tired of her calling him a demon, Paul imparts knowledge of evolution and alien culture via mindmeld, and her faith is shattered. "I can drink." "Yeah." "I can smoke" "Yup." "I can swear." "Probably." "I can fornicate." "Maybe later." Afterwards follows her learning attempts to curse properly. She can find the right words, and find the right times, but not the right words at the right times. Until the end, when it's used for subtly for drama.

Anyway, her equally fundamentalist father thinks she's been kidnapped, so he's after her. Also on the trail are a senior Secret Service Agent (Agent Zoil, played by Jason Bateman) who knows about Paul, and two junior secret service agents who are pretty dumb, and are recruited by Zoil to find anything suspicious. They eventually cotton on that it's an alien, but only after hilarity has ensued.

Halfway through, they go to a tavern in the middle of nowhere, where the band is playing ... wait for it ... the Cantina music from Star Wars. You have not heard it until you've heard it on a slide guitar. A perfectly understandable brawl breaks out, involving everyone that's chasing them (and the two rednecks, and a random group of sailors). They get out of it alright (except for a bloody nose for Clive) and go on there way to Paul's destination. They also pick up the girl (now an old woman) whose dog Paul crushed when he arrived.

More chasing and humour ensue ("You're not going to ... probe us, will you?" "Why does everyone always go to that? What do they think we do, harvest farts? How much can you learn from ass anyway?") as well as some references to other science fiction. Everyone in the theatre got the Cantina music, but I'm not sure how many people got the five notes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And they even managed to get a cameo of Sigourney Weaver in there, complete with Aliens reference: "Get away from her, you Bitch!"

All in all, it was much funnier than I expected. Or maybe more obviously funny. I think some of the humour in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz may not have been to American sensibilities (many of which I share). And of course, both of those movies split comedy with another style as well (Zombies and Action, respectively), so making a movie that concentrated on pure comedy may have distilled the funny. Or they got even better at writing, or they had a bunch more references to go with. Whatever it was, I thoroughly liked it. Theatre movie for sure.

As a PS, I’m pretty sure Paul (the character) was all computer generated. And fantastically done as well. People will always hold up Gollum as the epitome of CG characters, but I think Paul holds his own. Kudos to the effects department for a tremendous job on that.

Battle Los Angeles

We went to see Battle: Los Angeles this week. It's in 2D, so that saved us a few bucks. Also, even though it was tops at the box office, we still got there way earlier than we needed to. Whoops. Anyway, I got nearly all of the trailers (most of which were on our list) although Evan got Priest. The last time I threw a shut out, the movie turned out horrible, so we try and avoid that. The last time Evan got all of them was before The Last Airbender, so we know something's terribly wrong when he gets them all.

The movie opens during a helicopter ride full of marines, receiving instructions from their commanding officer as the chopper avoids anti-aircraft fire. Then it flashed back 24 hours to introduce all the members of the squad. Here's a Staff Sargeant, played by Aaron Eckhart. He's been in the marines for years (like, 20) and decides it's time to retire (after being passed on his run on the beach by a squad of much younger marines). This sets up a battle of the clichés, because the guy who's a few days from retirement almost always gets killed. However, he's never the main character. So I wondered if he'd get killed or not. Anyway, they also have the guy who's about to get married, and faking excitement about the planning to mollify his wife. There's the guy who busts everyone's balls. Here's the guy who has a joke for everyone. A new recruit, who everyone teases but also looks out for. Here's the guy whose brother was killed while serving under Eckhart's character (an interesting dynamic that gets played out). There's the guy who had some sort of psychological episode (PTSD?) and isn't cleared for combat by the doctor. Here's the guy from Nigeria, who joined the American Marines to be a doctor. Finally, here's the newly minted lieutenant, heavy on training but light on experience, saying good-bye to his very pregnant wife. There are more characters, but they don't get introductions because they come in halfway through, or they're just not that important.

They're initially about to be deployed to help with evacuation because asteroids will probably wreak some havoc on coastal cities, but by the time they report to the Forward Operating Base (FOB), they know they're up against aliens. The plan is bomb the snot out of Santa Monica, so they now need to get every civilian back to the FOB.

Their squad is tasked to get to a police station, grab the citizens that are holed up there, and get back. So off they go, into smoke filled streets, and then the action starts. The first part is a little confusing, because of the shaky-cam, and also because it's hard to tell who's who when they're all wearing the same coloured fatigues amid a smoke-filled battleground.

The team gets whittled down a little, but they make it to the police station, even offloading some of their wounded back to the FOB. Unfortunately, the aliens’ airforce makes an appearance, so they have to hoof it back on foot or by bus. Bus it is, with a few extra members from other teams that got wiped out and five civilians - a father and his son, and a woman with her two nieces.

The path back is blocked, and a few firefights ensue. It becomes obvious they won't get back to the FOB in time, so they get out of the bombing zone and hunker down. From there, the tension rises, as does the action. Fighting, moving, more fighting, more moving, much fighting ... it's all pretty good.

I really liked this movie. It was, for all intent and purposes, exciting. Maybe it was the shaky-cam combined with the excessive military jargon that seemed to put me into the moment. Maybe it was the acting. Maybe it was the writing and dialogue. Or a combination of everything. Whatever it was, I really liked it. It's been a while since I've left a movie feeling like that.

Of course, the music probably played a part. I had planned on acquiring it, but forgot until Evan emailed me the groove shark link, so I downloaded it, and added it to my list of things to buy. It's by Brian Tyler, whom I had never heard of before. Not that that's such a bad thing. I hadn't heard of Steve Jablonsky either, but he did both Transformers movie soundtracks, and they're amazing.

There are some flaws, but they seem less important than flaws in other movies. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because those things aren't given much importance in the movie. Anyway, one of them is that the aliens come to earth to steal our water. Apparently, they didn't see Europa on the way in. The second problem I found is that the ships look quite un-aerodynamic, but Evan made the great point later that perhaps the design facilitates intra-galactic travelling. The other point I actually got from Gregg Easterbrook, and is generally common to all alien movies. The chances of aliens coming to Earth being within a certain technological window of our evolution is incredibly small. The universe is 14 billion years old. A 1% increase in the rate of evolution would make them 140 million years more advanced than us. 140 million years of evolution would take them from just past single-celled organisms (the next step after amoebas) to humans. Homo Sapiens have only been around for 5 million years. The idea of anything alien being damaged by anything human is ... laughable.

Still, ignoring these (or shoving it into the bubble with all things covered by the Willing Suspension of Disbelief), there's a terrific movie in here. Highly recommended. Be aware, though, that's it's less Independence Day and more Black Hawk Down. Once the cast gets whittled down, it seems to be far easier to tell everyone apart, so that's nice. Definitely a theatre movie.

Drive Angry 3D

This is a review for a movie two weeks old that nobody saw. Why am I writing it? Because we saw it, that’s why. And we’re probably the only ones who can tell you if it was any good or not. It’s not, by the way. So there you go. You can leave now, if you want.

The whole experience did not start well. On the way to the movie, we discussed how much money the movie had made (very little). I put the over/under of people in the theatre at 7.5 and took the over. Evan gladly took the under, and nailed it. There were four people there, including us. That’s why I don’t work in Vegas.

None of the previews were in 3D, which was a little disappointing. We did get to see some previews of movies on our list (Battle Los Angeles and possibly Hanna). Then we got the title screens of the five companies that worked on it. Yes, five. It used to be only one company did a movie. Then it was two. Now it’s usually two or three. But five seems excessive. One of them was Maple, though, and they did The Expendables, so that was a good sign.

The movie opens with an obviously computer-generated car jumping over an obviously computer-generated bridge in an obviously computer-generated Hell. Then it goes to the real world, where the 3D is so obvious it hurt my eyes. Seriously. They toned it down after about five minutes (or maybe I got used to it), but that opening scene was literally painful.

And ridiculous, which is what I’d hoped for. Most of the reviews had stated the movie is bad, but full of ridiculous things. So I was expecting it to be like The Expendables or The A-Team. Unfortunately, Drive Angry did not live up (or down) to the hype. Sure, there were some over-the-top things, but the whole movie wasn’t made of those. And the title was misleading too. Maybe Drive Perturbed would have been more appropriate. It’s also possible that Nicolas Cage was acting angry the entire time, but I’m so used to fury that I mistook anger for annoyance.

There were some good thing about this movie. The lead female is hot, and can pack a wallop into a punch. She’s got a mean right hook, which isn’t very commonplace unless your Michelle Rodriguez. Not even Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft had such good boxing movies (and I haven’t seen Million Dollar Baby, so I can’t comment on Hillary Swank).

There are some good action scenes, as well as some interesting shots. 3D might hurt my eyes, but it certainly has the capacity to make standard shots completely new again. So that’s nice. But the best thing about this movie is probably a character called The Accountant, played by William Fichtner, whom you may recognize as the shotgun-wielding bank manager from the opening of The Dark Night, but who I recognize as a pilot of one of the space shuttles in Armageddon and as the leader of the resistance in the criminally under-the-radar movie Equilibrium. He’s … interesting. Always calm (in the break-your-neck-without-changing-facial-expressions type of calm) and provides some remarkably creepy lines. Almost cheerful, but creepy. Plus, he does a cool coin trick to reveal an FBI badge. He’s not actually part of the FBI, but is part of Hell’s bureaucracy, employed to track down people who break out.

There are stretches in the movie of just driving. Which is apt, based on the title, but it’s also kind of boring. Going fast doesn’t mean excitement, especially on a straight road. Twisty-turny chases make things better, and using cars as weapons definitely raises the ridiculous level.

Still, it’s not quite to my liking. If I had to give it a rating, I’d say it’s at the high end of DVD. Considering the only other DVD movies are Jonah Hex and The Mechanic , there’s not much competition. But I can’t put it in the same category as Resident Evil or Predators. There’s just not over-the-top enough to justify that. So catch it on DVD, or TV next year, when it’s licensed cheaply because it really needs the money.

Religion and Film

Religion and Film was a course I took in university, where they forced us to watch Spiderman and Star Wars. I know. What a travesty. We also got to watch some lesser known works about religion. I remember one of them about a soldier in Iran who's trying to make a movie about the time he wooed his wife. Interesting look into the politics of the region, from a different perspective than we're used to.

Anyway, what I'm writing about should probably be more entitled Religion in Film, or Religion and Culture as Portrayed in the Media, only not as pretentious.

Religion often gets a short shrift in the media these days. Either they're portrayed incorrectly, simply, or generically. My main point of reference will be an episode of Eureka. I like the show. It's usually good-hearted. It carries on some season-long story lines. It has great humour, and it pairs up nicely with Warehouse 13.

Eureka is about a town called Eureka in Washington or Oregon (the Pacific Northeast is all they're willing to specify on, but it's filmed in Vancouver). Eureka was founded to be the home of America's brightest scientists, so they could all work on making the future of mankind a better place. So there's a whole bunch of really intelligence scientists, most of whom are eccentric as well. And Jack Carter, who's of average intelligence, but he's the town sheriff. Each episode usually has an experiment or project go wrong, and Carter has to fix it, with whatever help he can scrounge from the people nearby. There's a lot of Hollywood Science in it (something like "Lets run a nuclear topology scan to find the tachyon wavelength displacements"), but mostly it's about the fun of Carter interacting with (slightly) mad scientists.

The episode in question deals with Biblical phenomenon. Water turns into blood, someone starts glowing (transfiguration), and some people are struck dumb. There is a church in Eureka, and the opening scene takes place there. It's Sunday morning, and it's almost empty. The pastor is talking about science interacting with faith. It only lasts about 20 seconds before we cut to church singing Amazing Grace and then letting out, but that 20 seconds is informative. Because the pastor has been around for a number of years, surely this sermon has been given before. In fact, it would probably be one of the first given. All the parishioners would have reconciled science and faith by now, making the sermon pointless. It's only there to provide the audience with an introduction to why faith and science come into conflict, and maybe why they don't have to. Also, Amazing Grace? Seriously, there's more than one hymn that churches sing.

Throughout the episode, there are a few mentions of the Bible, and some of God. But none of Jesus, which is weird, because he's pretty central to Christianity (it's implied that the church is some denomination of Christian). Later on, we find out that all these problems have centered around a device built by the organist for the church. She had lost her husband a few months previously, and built an inter-dimensional portal to heaven.

All of this makes me think that most atheists (or agnostics) don't understand Christianity that well. Firstly, Heaven is not simply located in another dimension (or at least, I highly doubt it). It's not a portal or gateway away. There will be no technological device to take you there.

Secondly, Jesus is a pretty big thing. You can mention him from time to time. Christianity is not a bland religion where God answers our prayers from time to time and nothing else. So please, stop trying to be inoffensive and start being honest, even if you have to piss people off.

Thirdly, Amazing Grace? Is there only one hymn in Hollywood? Unless there's a large, black church in the movie or TV show, we'll hear Amazing Grace. Never mind that there are several hundred other hymns out there. Is it the only one that the writers can remember from their childhood upbringing in the church?

As for other religions, I unfortunately don't know much about them. However, being Jewish does not simply mean wearing a yarmulke and going to Temple on Saturday. Maybe you guys should watch The Believer again. Being Muslim is not about wearing a turban (that's sikh) and even women are allowed to go Burqa-free in a majority of Muslim nations. Finally, do not get Muslim and Arab mixed up. It’s both incorrect and insulting.

Culture has almost the opposite problem from bland religion. A lot of media add to cultures to make them more interesting. This is most evidently seen in real life, actually, with the Bushido code that Samurai apparently lived by. It’s actually fictitious, having been invented as a model for people to look up to and be inspired by.

Luckily, most other cultures are portrayed more realistically. Sure, they might exaggerate the “eh’s” of Canadians, or the studiousness of Asians, or the redneck-ness of parts of American, but for the most part, it’s on the ball. The parts that writers make up are for little-known or fabricated cultures, because it opens up the plot possibilities.

As an example, say that the protagonist was searching for a homeopathic cure for his one true love, and journeyed into the heart of a remote jungle to find it, and the tribe of people who guard it. In real life, he could ask the tribe for the cure (and they might give it to him, because they’re nice), or he might trade money, gold, medicine, shiny rocks, TV’s, movies, or food for it. So he’d go there, and come back with it.

In movies or TV, he’d have to undergo tests to prove he was worthy of speaking to the tribe. This is a chance for him to prove how badass he is, because one of the tests will undoubtedly involve hand-to-hand combat (hey look, The Rundown. And Brotherhood of the Wolf). Another test might be free-climbing a mountain located conveniently close to the village (in the heart of a jungle?) and the third test will probably involved some sort of riddle, which will prove how smart the protagonist is.

I used to think that making up weird things for cultures to do was silly, until I looked at my own. How funny would handshakes look to an alien (“why do the engage their upper appendages in a vigorous vertical motion?”) or bumping fists, slapping hands, bowing, or any hundred other greetings we have for each other? Instead of shaking hands, maybe we should have short martial arts bouts. Sure, we’d all be bruised, but we’d all be more badass.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve notice about religion and culture in different types of media. Now, if you want to ask me why Christians should be Jedi, you’ll have to ask me yourself.