Life on Queen Street

Someone should write an essay about The Bang Bang Club and District 9 - both movies made by white South African-Canadians, both deal explicitly with Apartheid and township violence and implicitly with the problem of addressing Apartheid as a white South African (male).

It's significant that both films are made by expatriots and that both films deal with Apartheid at a double remove - The Bang Bang Club follows the photographers who documented the township violence in the years between Nelson Mandela's release from prison to the 1994 elections; we see the violence both through the dramatization of their experience and through the narrative device of reproducing their photographs. In District 9 the remove is both allegorical - real world problems of poverty, violence and transient underclasses placed into the science fiction frame of an alien landing - and the faux-documentary narrative device recurring throughout the movie.

Both films portray horrific acts of casual violence but rarely place the audience in the position of empathizing with either victim or perpetrator. We, along with the protagonists, are instead bystanders, as complicit as we are impotent, unable to either share in the suffering or end it.

The Cohen Brothers' True Grit is a great movie, far superior to the John Wayne original - although before I saw the movie, I'd have said that was impossible.

Except for one thing...

( Spoilers and fic rec )

1) I spent the last four days sick in bed and then came to work today, surprised to discover myself woozy, light-headed and without focus. Just when I thought I was being a big, ol'faker my body comes along and tells me "no, honey, you were sick in bed for a reason & you are still not entirely well." Go figure.

2) I'm now in Season 9 of STARGATE SG-1 having somewhat abandoned my "watch only when I workout" plan, what with being sick and all. I'm going to be sad when I get to the end of SG-1.

3) Interestingly, when Ben Browder and Claudia Black are on-screen together in SG-1, it's easier to see them as Cam and Vala rather than 'Not-Crichton' and 'Not-Aeryn' than watching either character alone.

4) Ben Browder is really good as Mitchell. I never watched him on SG-1 beyond the first couple of eps (and "Unending"). I like the way he gradually steps up Mitchell's giddy enthusiasm for SG-1 as the character becomes more and more comfortable within Stargate Command.

5) Sam Carter continues to be awesome.

6) Teal'c continues to be awesome. And his awesomeness is not nearly celebrated enough (I nearly killed myself laughing over the scene in "Lost City" where Daniel fanboys Teal'c's depth - despite it being immaterial).

7) Ellen Ripley is awesome.

I wrote post-Alien Ressurection fic a while ago and I want to write more. *sigh* Add it to the list, I suppose. The literal apotheosis of Ellen Ripley was a really weak idea, antithetical to the character's innate every-person quality, but having turned Ripley into a superhero (that's Joss Whedon for you - loves strong women. Real and/or realistic women characters, on the other hand, seem to be a foreign country to the poor lad) there's fun to be hand in the juxtaposition between Riply 8's self-awareness and her memories of being Ellen Ripley.

8) I want to rewatch RED DAWN. It was one of those movies I wasn't quite old enough to watch that was a staple of sleepover parties in those halcyon days before video stores started carding kids wanting to rent R-rated movies. It was cheesy and early 80s commie-paranoid but I was 12 and the subtext mostly passed over my head. I recall the undefined fear that we were going to be nuked out of existence (I attribute the vogue for apocafic, be it Terminators, Zombies, Goa'uld, etc, among my generation of fans to that vague sense of potential armaggedon permeating early adolescence and childhood) and there was something resonate in the idea that "we", as embodied by the photogenic Teenbeat youth of the USA, could survive and go onto to win World War III.

They've remade it with China in the role of bad guys and I'm just not sure that it's going to play at all. While RED DAWN original flavour seems to me like a fairly harmless artifact from a bygone cultural age, I hope that the remake will one day be porved to be as cluelessly alarmist about the future (and xenophobic) as RISING SUN.

9) The more I think about the ending of TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES, the more I want to hit Josh Friedman with a copy of anything written by Alice Munro. He probably doens't deserve it, though, I should probably be focusing my ire (and my copy of Too Much Happiness) on some unknown suit at FOX who didn't understand that, no, really - The Terminator is a romance wrapped in a killer robot story; it's the characters, stupid, not the killer robots.

SHERLOCK HOLMES is an offensively stupid, written-by-committee piece of shit that deletes, ignores or rewrites all the elements of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character that made him worthy of interest in the first place.

I would suggest anyone who

A) Has read any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, or

B) Has even the barest familiarity with the Victorian Era, or

C) Has the shallowest appreciation of the operation of Her Majesty's Government

avoid this Americanized garbage entirely.

Those who do not meet the above criteria may, at their own risk, hazard a viewing.

Personally, I've had more fun preparing my tax return: I spent the last hour-and-a-half of the film's two-hour running time desperately wishing for a book to read. Preferably in the lobby.

The trailer for the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET remake is out.

The combination of that God-damned creepy rhyme and Freddy made me want to wet myself. Like it was 20 years ago.

ANOES was one of the few horror movies I've ever seen that stayed scary - not only through to the end of the movie but long into the night. The long, long sleepless nights that followed.

Saw JULIE & JULIA tonight and was charmed and amused and, well, to be frank - bored. Meryl Streep consumes the scenery with a gusto that Madame Child would surely have appreciated and Stanley Tucci is wonderfully understated and solid as Julia's husband, Paul. Together they create a portrait of a marriage that doubtless idealized nonetheless felt solid and real in spite of a script that more or less reduced Monsieur Child to a supportive, adoring cypher.

Julie Powell's story, on the other hand, was less compelling and possibly parallels my own frustrations a little too closely to make for an enjoyable fiction. On the plus side, I have resolved to cook more, since I've gotten terribly slack in that area lately, and possibly take MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING for a spin. I learned to cook from watching my mother, who is a very good cook, and like most children of good cooks, have a diffident attitude towards the art myself. My last great step forward was learning to blanche tomatoes to make a tomato pasta sauce from scratch.

Then I decided that blanching tomatoes was a pain in the ass and there were probably good nutrients in the skins, so now I just dice the tomatoes, skin and all, and throw them in the frying pan.

I wonder whether or not Julia would approve... .

---

Meanwhile, for the amusement of those who care, a list of things I hold to be categorically wrong, based on my last reading of random fanfic:

( Wrong, wrong, wrong and WRONG! )

DISTRICT 9 is not the movie you think it is.

I'm not sure what movie it is exactly. It would take me a week to unpack the movie's thematic baggage. What it is not is the same old Hollywood crap. But nor is it entirely original.

It is however the gooiest movie I've seen in a long time.

Recommended but with a caveat - DISTRICT 9 is rated R for a reason.

First of all, when mourning your favourite TV show, heading to TWoP to read episode threads to see if there are any insights there that you might have missed is not the best idea.

It fills one, it filled me, with a sense of melancholy and loss that is most unpleasant. There are ways in which I am glad that TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES has ended as it has - on a high note, having done honour to the characters of Sarah and John Connor; having added to Jim Cameron's story and, in some ways, surpassed it by demonstrating that you can stay true to the story without being beholden to it.

I thank Josh Friedman and his writers and Lena Headey and the cast and crew for giving Sarah Connor (and John) back to me. TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES reintroduced me to a favourite story I had lost. And the care and attention and respect Josh Friedman and his cast and crew gave these characters is something that FOX cannot cancel. As the song says, even if we never meet again on the bumpy road to love, this is something that I'll always have the memory of...

Looking ahead (and I find it terribly ironic that, in canceling TSCC, Kevin Reilly has created the type of fan movement that he credited, however mendaciously and facetiously, for encouraging FOX to renew DOLLHOUSE), the next TERMINATOR movie, and there will be another (I'll get to that in a moment), has the potential to be something truly extraordinary if Halcyon and McG have the wisdom to look at how Josh Friedman and his writers room pushed the boundaries of what makes a TERMINATOR story beyond an endless series of chase flicks and explosions.

And if they have the wit to solicit a pitch from Ashley Miller & Zack Stentz, who surprised me by becoming the franchise players of the TSCC writing room (and are the sort of major league TERMINATOR fanboys you need to make these movies work), even better.

And in the meantime, can anyone tell me what the hell Catherine Weaver's game was? And why did Cameron go back to the future? Anyone? Anyone?

Bueller?

---

A gaggle of friends and I went to see TERMINATOR SALVATION last night.

Going to see the soulless big-screen version of your dearly-loved, character-driven TV show is also not a good way to mourn the latter. But, contrary to what you might have heard, TERMINATOR SALVATION is not a terrible movie.

Unfortunately, it is not a good movie, either.

The theatrical release of TERMINATOR: SALVATION falls into the great, mediocre middle-ground of summer movies: far better than WOLVERINE, failing where NuTREK succeeded in making well-traveled characters seem fresh and, more importantly, relevant, but visually arrested and genuinely thrilling in a 'wave your hands in the air and gasp' way.

For all that, I have never seen a movie that has been quite so aggressively or obviously edited to death. Action sequences flow with a deft flare that is better than anything in either Wolverine or NuTrek: surprising coming from McG, who's aesthetic work on Charlie's Angel's was unremarkable at best. The movie's look at feel is so good that it's hard to believe the character stuff is so bad. It makes me wonder if, like Ridley Scott's KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, there is a better movie, about 20 minutes longer, that the studio wasn't prepared to release - possibly terrified that, after the similarly grim WATCHMEN failed to break wide, they needed to get as many asses in seats in that all-important first weekend.

Still, there is stuff to like about TERMINATOR SALVATION (and I want to make clear that TS is a far, far better movie than the ponderous WATCHMEN): unlike TERMINATOR 3, TS takes the TERMINATOR story seriously. In addition to the best action sequences I've seen this year, TS lacks the self-referential winking, irony infesting so many action films like Athletes Foot these days and that's a good thing: this is a story about people facing extinction and it takes that idea seriously (something NuTREK with its 'don't worry, feel happy' approach to surviving genocide would have done well to consider). It also takes the machines themselves seriously - McG conjures up a few scare moments as the machines go after the human characters, making me jump in my seat and gasp (and then grin).

Sam Worthington, Anton Yelchin and Moon Bloodgood all acquit themselves well, although Christian Bale and Bryce Dallas Howard seem to have had their roles cut to the bone, making judging whether or not they're good in their roles a bit like judging a skeleton in a beauty contest. Without the flesh, good bone structure and bad bone structure look a lot alike.

Would I see TERMINATOR SALVATION again? Yes, I would. As I said, it's generally thrilling in places and the current edit actually makes a movie that you can take your nine or 10-year-old to see and which they, probably far more than I, would find thrilling.

No, it's not THE TERMINATOR and it's not TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES but it's not TERMINATOR 3, either.

So, am I the only one seeing the potential for absolutely massive racefail in Disney's The Princess and the Frog.

I mean, it's possible that I've come down with a case of well-meaning white-girl-itis but... well, watch the trailer. You'll see what I mean.

That plot twist might be... ah, awkward.

I mean, it's a Disney movie, so I'm already expecting to feel disrespected for my gender but... yeah.

PS - so Jake Gyllenhaal's supposed to be the Prince of Persia, right? Hmmm. Yeah, that movie hasn't been Airbender'd at all.

If you wanted to find the opposite of "good" in the dictionary or a movie that made Fast & Furious seem Shakespearean in scope or one that made Watchmen seem a paragon of linearity, then Wolverine is the flick for you.

Otherwise I have one word for you: don't.