The new Stephen “The Mummy” Sommers-directed G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra movie marked the end of the 2009 summer blockbuster season. And what a summer it wasn’t.
In, oh, about April of this year, my brother suggested to me that we had a lot of big movies to look forward to this summer. We’re talking Star Trek, Terminator, Transformers, even G.I. Joe. The first two would be the returns of two mega-franchises, hopefully to glory. The last two brought the supreme favorite toys of every young boy of the 1980s to the big screen. A big summer, for sure.
Until it wasn’t.
I’m not a movie reviewer, but feel free to gander at the hyperlinks above for comprehensive coverage. Rather, I’ll give my short takes in an attempt to understand why on earth I took for granted that this was a summer for the ages, when in fact, it was a summer for ages 4 to 12. (And yes, I know I skipped one or two of your favorites; what can I say, except that I can’t be bothered to see every movie that gets you panting, and even if I did, it probably wasn’t worth my writing about.) There will probably be SPOILERS henceforth.
I thought Star Trek was a great movie, full of emotion and relevance. The summer started big, maybe setting expectations too high for the rest of the cinema season.
Terminator Salvation was about as painful as self-flagellation. Maybe it was the mishmash of bad influences, from Mad Max to War of the Worlds, and I think I even tasted a dash of Red Dawn in there (Patrick Swayze, rest in peace in your great big road house in the sky). Or maybe it was the fact that the only good thing about the movie, Sam Worthington’s Marcus Wright, ended up sacrificing himself (with no logical justification) for the overshadowed and unapproachable Christian Bale’s John Connor at movie’s end.
I could legitimately have expected Terminator to be good. I like Bale, and director McG, unfortunate moniker notwithstanding, did some good work on TV’s The O.C. and my recent favorite show, Chuck, though that in itself should have made me skeptical. He should probably know his place and stick to tales of angsty young males, not somber treatments of tortured middle-aged sci-fi warrior males.
But what the Wreck-gar possessed me to think that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen would be enjoyable? The 2007 Transformers was a real looker, but it was emotionally stillborn, and though the tone of the teaser trailer for the sequel made it seem like a “darker” movie was in the works (maybe following the brooding example set by The Dark Knight for superhero/comics movies), by the time the movie came out, the promotion clearly marked it as more of the same. And yes, it was brutally awful. Between the obnoxious Lebeoufian schlub-stick and the skull-grinding battle sequences, I felt bludgeoned from both sides.
I cannot be one of these Bruckheimer apologists content with deafening explosions, somebody’s daughter in mortal peril, a helicopter, and a scruffy dog leaping to safety just in the nick of time to dodge a firestorm and/or river of lava. No, no, no. Substance is style, though not all audiences agree with me.
G.I. Joe was far better than it had any right to be, and it salvaged a pretty meager summer for me. It wasn’t the G.I. Joe I remembered from my childhood, lacking the mythology in particular, and substituting its own half-baked origin story. But it was fun and breezy, and it made me want a sequel. In short, it was everything that Transformers wasn’t, even if it didn’t necessarily do right by the original cartoon. Memo to the eighties: Stay just the way you were.
Interspersed in the four months of summer were other gems like Harry Potter, the Johnny Depp and Christian Bale-starring Public Enemies, and Pixar’s Up. All dogs. Am I alone in thinking that the shine is wearing off of Pixar’s “can do no wrong” image? And were it not for the assurance of another Batman sequel, I’d be very worried about Bale becoming the next Russell Crowe, intense actor turned misanthropic nutjob. As far as Harry Potter, I didn’t understand half of what they were saying in the movie, so I just kept playing over and over in my head my own fanciful rendition of Harry as a Dickens novel. (Dumbledore dragged the whelp by his ear, saying, “Harry! Harry Potter! Bring me my dinner, Harry! Heed my words, or it’ll be the stables for you tonight!”)
The summer’s best movie stood far outside the blockbuster paradigm (“no duh, Sherlock” you’re probably thinking, but just stay with me here). (500) Days of Summer, starring Joseph “Cobra Commander” Gordon-Levitt and my blue-eyed heaven, Zooey Deschanel, won me over with its charming understanding of that old hand – the “failures of the human heart.” It had moments of flippancy and a few comedic misfires, but throughout, it maintained its focus on the quiet way that love can break your heart.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
And your bird can sing
In a previous life, when shaggy hair and round-framed glasses were more my bag, I received two of the odder, more flattering comments I’ve ever received.
The first was from a girl I met through ballroom dance. One day, without prelude, she told me I reminded her of someone, but she couldn’t remember whom. “Someone famous and very good-looking?” I fished. I got it half right. After dance class, she finally conjured the name: “John Lennon.” She suggested that it went beyond the glasses and hair; there was something in my demeanor.
The second comment came after I had parked on the street one night, on my way to the Casbah for a show (undoubtedly, it was a sub-Beatles-caliber band). Just as I stepped out of my car, a (presumably homeless) man approached me, crying, “Hey, hey! You got a cigarette?” I was mildly alarmed, but right when I turned to face this figure emerging from the shadows, it was he who was taken aback. “Whoa! You look just like . . . that guy!” I shook my head, “Who’s that?” “The Beatles guy!” he said. “John Lennon?” (There’s not much chance of people mistaking me for Paul.) The guy seemed very pleased, but unfortunately, I couldn’t pay him back for his compliment, seeing that I tend not to pack death sticks.
This coming just a few weeks after the comment from my dance friend, I wondered if I had subconsciously been cultivating Lennon’s look. I certainly had him on the brain, having recently seen a TV documentary about his death and life. This was also around the time when the Working Class Hero two-disc compilation of Lennon’s best was released – my first serious exposure to Lennon’s post-Beatles work.
Hearing the music 30 years after it was made, I marveled at how humane it sounded, especially compared to most of the mindless aggression that clogs the airwaves today. In his songs, I heard a man obsessed with personal freedom and in love with love itself; fitting, since between love and freedom, when one is absent, the other soon withers.
Some time after my two interesting encounters, I had a chance to travel to New York, and I visited Strawberry Fields, a small garden on the western edge of Central Park, just across the street from the Dakota Apartments, where Lennon lived and died. Strawberry Fields commemorates his life and dreams, and on the day I visited, the Imagine mosaic at its center was particularly inviting:
Without any premeditation on my part, I think I just naturally gravitated to John more than the other Beatles. I’m not saying his songs were the best in the band (not all of them anyway), but only that I empathize most with the way he seemed to be. I think of how much we miss him now, not just his music, but the hopeful vision it fostered, and I hope that my similarities to him go beyond looks.
As much as I admire John’s solo work, he’ll always be a Beatle first in my mind. Today, September 9, 2009, is the big release day: all of their original studio albums REMASTERED(!) in two sets: 1) a stereo box set, and 2) a mono box set containing those albums that were originally mixed in mono sound. (Oh, and a little thing called The Beatles: Rock Band also comes out today.) It’s fitting that a band that took 22 years to remaster their music should issue it exclusively on a dying technology – the compact disc. (To be fair, the original 1987 CDs were “remastered”; it’s just that the 1980s tech sounded older and worse with every passing year.)
I bought the stereo box today. It may be the first time I’ve ever purchased a CD on the release date. It’ll also be the last; these are the last CDs I’ll ever buy. Well, until I can get my hands on the mono box.
The first was from a girl I met through ballroom dance. One day, without prelude, she told me I reminded her of someone, but she couldn’t remember whom. “Someone famous and very good-looking?” I fished. I got it half right. After dance class, she finally conjured the name: “John Lennon.” She suggested that it went beyond the glasses and hair; there was something in my demeanor.
The second comment came after I had parked on the street one night, on my way to the Casbah for a show (undoubtedly, it was a sub-Beatles-caliber band). Just as I stepped out of my car, a (presumably homeless) man approached me, crying, “Hey, hey! You got a cigarette?” I was mildly alarmed, but right when I turned to face this figure emerging from the shadows, it was he who was taken aback. “Whoa! You look just like . . . that guy!” I shook my head, “Who’s that?” “The Beatles guy!” he said. “John Lennon?” (There’s not much chance of people mistaking me for Paul.) The guy seemed very pleased, but unfortunately, I couldn’t pay him back for his compliment, seeing that I tend not to pack death sticks.
This coming just a few weeks after the comment from my dance friend, I wondered if I had subconsciously been cultivating Lennon’s look. I certainly had him on the brain, having recently seen a TV documentary about his death and life. This was also around the time when the Working Class Hero two-disc compilation of Lennon’s best was released – my first serious exposure to Lennon’s post-Beatles work.
Hearing the music 30 years after it was made, I marveled at how humane it sounded, especially compared to most of the mindless aggression that clogs the airwaves today. In his songs, I heard a man obsessed with personal freedom and in love with love itself; fitting, since between love and freedom, when one is absent, the other soon withers.
Some time after my two interesting encounters, I had a chance to travel to New York, and I visited Strawberry Fields, a small garden on the western edge of Central Park, just across the street from the Dakota Apartments, where Lennon lived and died. Strawberry Fields commemorates his life and dreams, and on the day I visited, the Imagine mosaic at its center was particularly inviting:
Without any premeditation on my part, I think I just naturally gravitated to John more than the other Beatles. I’m not saying his songs were the best in the band (not all of them anyway), but only that I empathize most with the way he seemed to be. I think of how much we miss him now, not just his music, but the hopeful vision it fostered, and I hope that my similarities to him go beyond looks.
* * *
As much as I admire John’s solo work, he’ll always be a Beatle first in my mind. Today, September 9, 2009, is the big release day: all of their original studio albums REMASTERED(!) in two sets: 1) a stereo box set, and 2) a mono box set containing those albums that were originally mixed in mono sound. (Oh, and a little thing called The Beatles: Rock Band also comes out today.) It’s fitting that a band that took 22 years to remaster their music should issue it exclusively on a dying technology – the compact disc. (To be fair, the original 1987 CDs were “remastered”; it’s just that the 1980s tech sounded older and worse with every passing year.)
I bought the stereo box today. It may be the first time I’ve ever purchased a CD on the release date. It’ll also be the last; these are the last CDs I’ll ever buy. Well, until I can get my hands on the mono box.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Quiet Desperation
The other day, I was driving through the Parkway Plaza shopping mall (a Westfield joint) to get to the movie theater, when I passed a spot that had burned itself into my memory about five or six years ago.
It was, let’s say, the Christmas season, and I was driving down the back alley behind the mall, when I saw a huddle of burly cops tackling a guy on the sidewalk behind the JC Penney. Three of El Cajon’s finest pinned the schmo down while a fourth bruiser called it in. Called for what, backup? I don’t know. That poor idiot chewing concrete wasn’t exactly built like a pro football player (speaking of criminals), unless we’re talking about the punter.
The guy was clearly nabbed for shoplifting (which, according to shopping mall operators, is the second most heinous crime in the history of the world, after what Hitler did). I couldn’t tell how far he had run or how long he had been chased, but it ended the way these things inevitably end: the guy was dogmeat.
Not twenty feet away stood a woman, probably dogmeat’s wife or mistress, shopping bags dangling from hands that had risen to cover her quivering mouth. Tears rolled down her cheeks and her body trembled with fear for her man. She looked like a wrecked, heartbroken puppy dog in “beg” position. As shocking as it was to see someone being put down and more or less bagged like a trophy kill, I was far more disturbed by the sight of the woman, powerless to help him or herself, and probably caught between the twin agonies of “Why’d he do it?” and “Please God don’t let them hurt him.”
What could this guy have possibly stolen that was worth this violence? Maybe a pair of Arizona jeans, or something from the Izod collection? No, judging by the universe’s sick sense of humor, it was probably a 14k gold electroplated necklace for the lady in his life. A Christmas tale worthy of Dickens, or maybe O. Henry, if one of them would deign to come back to life and write it.
To quote another writer, Thoreau states in Walden that “thieving and robbery . . . take place only in societies where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.” I think Thoreau’s blunt idealism may be a bit much, but I do see his point.
Whatever it was that this man so desperately needed or wanted, I can’t help but think that it might not have seemed so important if only there were more things going right in his life.
It was, let’s say, the Christmas season, and I was driving down the back alley behind the mall, when I saw a huddle of burly cops tackling a guy on the sidewalk behind the JC Penney. Three of El Cajon’s finest pinned the schmo down while a fourth bruiser called it in. Called for what, backup? I don’t know. That poor idiot chewing concrete wasn’t exactly built like a pro football player (speaking of criminals), unless we’re talking about the punter.
The guy was clearly nabbed for shoplifting (which, according to shopping mall operators, is the second most heinous crime in the history of the world, after what Hitler did). I couldn’t tell how far he had run or how long he had been chased, but it ended the way these things inevitably end: the guy was dogmeat.
Not twenty feet away stood a woman, probably dogmeat’s wife or mistress, shopping bags dangling from hands that had risen to cover her quivering mouth. Tears rolled down her cheeks and her body trembled with fear for her man. She looked like a wrecked, heartbroken puppy dog in “beg” position. As shocking as it was to see someone being put down and more or less bagged like a trophy kill, I was far more disturbed by the sight of the woman, powerless to help him or herself, and probably caught between the twin agonies of “Why’d he do it?” and “Please God don’t let them hurt him.”
What could this guy have possibly stolen that was worth this violence? Maybe a pair of Arizona jeans, or something from the Izod collection? No, judging by the universe’s sick sense of humor, it was probably a 14k gold electroplated necklace for the lady in his life. A Christmas tale worthy of Dickens, or maybe O. Henry, if one of them would deign to come back to life and write it.
To quote another writer, Thoreau states in Walden that “thieving and robbery . . . take place only in societies where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.” I think Thoreau’s blunt idealism may be a bit much, but I do see his point.
Whatever it was that this man so desperately needed or wanted, I can’t help but think that it might not have seemed so important if only there were more things going right in his life.
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