Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

I saw the movie Sweet Home Alabama yesterday. It was decently entertaining, but later in the evening, I started thinking about the cultural memes that it is propagating, possibly because I have been reading too many of Jessie’s posts. The rest of this post will involve spoilers so if you have not seen the movie and plan to, you have been warned.

Quick plot summary: We first meet Reese Witherspoon as a successful fashion designer in New York City, getting engaged to the New York City Secretary of Housing, who is also the mayor’s son. She tells him she wants to tell her estranged parents about the engagement personally, so she flies back to rural Alabama. There we meet her childhood friends, including her high school sweetheart and husband, from whom she was never officially divorced. Wackiness ensues. By the end of the movie, she chooses her high school sweetheart over the overly coiffed New York paramour.

It’s a bit preposterous on my part to think of such an inconsequential movie as having an agenda, but I thought it was interesting that the film centers on the rejection of New York culture in favor of a simpler, more friendly, family-oriented Southern culture. The New York mayor is portrayed as manipulative and cold, always calculating the political consequences of an action. The Alabama friends are portrayed as living in the moment, having a good time down at the bar each evening. At the climax of the film, where Reese breaks off the engagement at the wedding, the mayor tries to stop her, saying that no poor white trash can do that to her son’s political ambitions, and starts excoriating Reese’s mother. Reese punches the mayor, saying “Nobody talks to my mama like that!” as the crowd cheers this victory over the Yankees.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m a snooty New Yorker now, but this portrayal really bothers me. New York seems to represent a lot of what is great about this country. It is a true melting pot, with people of all nationalities mixing together; it’s almost more common than not to hear languages other than English being spoken. It is a land of opportunity, where people move every year in search of their chance to make the big time, whether in finance or media or theater or whatever. Everybody here is ambitious, aspiring to something great. Yes, New York can be harsh, but as the lyrics state, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere”.

Meanwhile, the stereotypical Southern culture as portrayed in the movie is far more static. Her childhood friends are all still mostly the same, living in the same town, doing similar things. Reese’s father is a Civil War re-enactor, still fighting for the Confederacy. Nothing had changed in the seven years since she had been home. At one level, it’s very comforting; “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in”. However, I could also call it stagnant. It promotes a conservative worldview where we can aspire to nothing more than what we already have. In fact, anybody that does aspire to anything more should be thought of as crazy because such ambition implies that the status quo is not the best of all possible worlds. Such ambition disrupts the comfortable community, and thus the agent of change must be treated as an outcast.

At the end, the film tries to have it both ways, by having the high school sweetheart create a business that he can then move to New York and join Reese, holding true to their past but moving forward together into the future. But I find it interesting that they were unable to carry out their dreams in their hometown. They had to move someplace new, using a new context to create a new identity, as Reese did in her initial move to New York, and as she got her husband to do later in the movie. Even in a movie where New York is portrayed as a shallow glitzy sort of place, it is still an environment of change.

And change is good. Change allows for the possibility of improvements. It can mean progress. Change is also scary and terrifying because it brings the unknown, but that can be good as well. I think we should celebrate agents of change like New York; if it weren’t for people like ambitious New Yorkers striving to make their mark on the world, we would not have made nearly the amount of progress that we have.

I find it interesting that the rest of the country despises liberal bastions like San Francisco and New York, and yet celebrates American ideals like innovation and competition, which are best exemplified by those bastions. Conservatives tend to despise the Old World of Europe for holding on to the past, and yet idealize small-town culture (or the stereotypical Southern culture portrayed in Sweet Home Alabama) which is stagnant and unchanging.

It’s interesting how I ended up with a political rant from an attempted movie deconstruction. Cultural memes are transmitted through movies, which influence people’s worldviews by reinforcing certain attitudes and deprecating others, and those worldviews influence how people end up voting. Frames trump facts. It’s also interesting how I’ve become such an intellectual leftist relativist postmodern freak, for having once had such an objective hard-science viewpoint. But that’s another story and another post.

I was apprehensive about this movie, because I really like the graphic novel on which it was based. The trailers did not inspire confidence since they were edited as if for an action movie. I also read recently that Alan Moore (the graphic novel author) demanded that his name not be associated with the film. So expectations were low, but I still wanted to see it. So I took a break from unpacking to go catch an afternoon matinee today.

Good news is that it exceeded my expectations. Bad news is, not by much.

The rest of this review will involve spoilers of both the movie and the graphic novel so stop reading now if you want to remain spoiler-free.

Things I liked: Natalie Portman was excellent. She made Evey work as more than a plot-advancing device. I liked that the Wachowski brothers agreed with me that Evey’s imprisonment is the core of the story - that arc really worked for me. I thought the guy that played Finch (Stephen Rea?) was fabulous and his story line fit together better than in the graphic novel. I liked most of the cuts they made to the plot - I tend to skim through most of part 2 in the graphic novel myself. I liked that the bollocks girl from the graphic novel was chosen as a people representative.

Things I didn’t like. I hated the Hollywood ending with the people mysteriously marching in step - I think the graphic novel ending would have been far more effective. I disliked how V was treated whimsically - his opening speech, while dizzyingly acrobatic, also made him sound insane instead of visionary. I thought that the attempts to make it currently relevant (with references to terrorists and biotech viruses) were heavy handed. I disliked the movie’s version of Gordon. I disliked the scene just after Evey gets out of prison - I preferred the graphic novel version (and thought it was interesting that Evey’s line of “I felt like an angel” was left as “I felt…”)

I also wish that the ideas that I loved about the graphic novel were even alluded to in the movie. How people need to take responsibility for themselves. I would have loved if they could have included V’s line distinguishing chaos from anarchy (chaos is “the land of take-what-you-want. Anarchy means ‘without leaders’; not ‘without order’. With anarchy comes an age of Ordnung, of true order, which is to say voluntary order”).

Anyway.

Decent movie for what it was, with a few shiver moments as they got something right. Go read the graphic novel if you haven’t. I’d lend it out, but, well, none of y’all live near me right now.

P.S. Almost fully unpacked. Still need to throw out a ton of trash, and put up a few pictures, but all but two boxes are unpacked. And everything fits! Just barely! I even stopped by the store after the movie, bought some groceries, and made dinner this evening

P.P.S. Apologies for incoherence - it’s weird writing this post from the Sidekick.

I went and saw Serenity this afternoon. Serenity, for those of you who don’t know, is a movie based in the world of, and starring the characters of, the TV show Firefly. Firefly was the brainchild of Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy and Angel. It never really worked as a TV show, as I once commented, partially because Joss took too long to set up the world and characters, and never gave the viewer a payback before the show was cancelled. (I read an interview with Joss the other day who answered the question of contrasting Serenity with Firefly by commenting that TV shows provide questions, movies provide answers, because movies have to wrap up, but TV shows that wrap up are done. It actually explains a lot about his approach, I think).

Fortunately, the show retained a cult following, and when the DVDs with unaired episodes were finally released, they sold well. And continued to sell well. Even today, the DVDs are ranked 3rd in sales at Amazon. So this huge expression of interest, and Joss’s desire to continue telling stories in the universe, got him a movie deal. And Serenity is the result.

And it kicks butt. Forced to tell a story in two hours, Joss gets back to his roots, stripping the story down to its essence, and not wasting a single shot. He sets up the world, sets up the characters, and lets things rip, with a number of hilarious one liners along the way to break the tension in that oh-so-distinctive Joss way (all the most dramatic episodes of Buffy also had the funniest scenes). I think it works even if one has never seen the TV show, but knowing the characters definitely adds poignancy to several scenes.

So go see it. Now. Pump up the box office receipts so we get more Serenity movies! Heck, I’d be psyched to go see the movie again - I’d been looking forward to it for a long time, and it was excellent. A fine sci-fi action/adventure flick, with a grrrl kicking butt. What more could you want?

When I first heard that they were making a movie out of the HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I was horrified. I loved those books. It would not be an exaggeration to say I worshipped them. I had most of the books memorized almost close to verbatim in high school, and could quote chapter and verse for a lot of my favorite quotes. I couldn’t imagine how they could possibly make a movie that would capture the wonderful tone of whimsy that Adams generated so effortlessly.

My opinion started to change when I saw this trailer, which captured that whimsy. Then I found out that Adams had written at least the first draft of the movie. So I decided to give it a chance, and saw it with Bats, Brad and Jill on Sunday night.

It was excellent. I went in only hoping for it not to be a major disappointment, but I genuinely enjoyed it. The filmmakers managed to make a movie that matches the tone of the book for the most part, while adding in some visual gags. Plus, they were wonderful about creating shout outs to utter fanboys like myself who knew the books verbatim, dropping in visual references to passages in the book, but never actually explaining them in the movie (like the jewelled crabs and gazelles on the Vogon home world). Or having Ford curse “Belgium” a couple times. Things like that.

I’m not sure how it works for the general audience, because the four of us MIT geeks enjoyed the movie far more than anybody else in the theater. We must have driven the people around us nuts, as we were chanting lines in unison with the screen, and making whispered comments to each other about the passages that the movie was referring to, but not quoting. It was surprising how much of the book I still had memorized, and it was also surprising how much it made me want to go back and re-read the book. So that’s a pretty successful movie in my book.

If you’re a fan, I recommend it. Heck, I recommend it if you’re not a fan, if you like understated British humour with a twist of scifi. Good stuff.

More posts coming in the next few days - I’ve been busy finishing up at work, and with Batman in town visiting, but today was my last day at work and I’m taking a week and a half off before starting my next job. Hopefully, that will give me time to be inspired and get back into a posting rhythm.

IMDB link

I adored this movie when it came out (as several of my friends who were dragged by me to the Parkway can attest), so I tossed the DVD version into my recently arrived Amazon order.

I rewatched it this morning, to have something mindless on while I did some household stuff. The first hour is pure comic genius. Laugh-out-loud funny. The second hour, where they get bogged down in bad visual effects, bad action, and bad drama, isn’t as good. I’ll remember that next time I watch it. Or inflict it on guests.

Oh, but the DVD has special features! Interviews with the crew! I think that might have been ever funnier than the movie itself. The director, Jon Amiel, got his start directing with various British Shakespeare companies, including the Royal Shakespeare company. So when he says things like “I wanted to make a character-driven visual effects movie”, it’s howlingly funny. Or quotes like how they wanted to show “very real people living very real lives in a very difficult surreal situation”. His commentary on the deleted scenes was excellent as well, with comments like “You know you’re editing right when you leave blood on the cutting room floor” (funny because the movie is still over two hours long, with many many many overlong bad scenes left in). At some point, I’ll have to go back and watch the movie with the director’s commentary, because somewhere in there he has to admit “Okay, you got me, I gave up on this picture about halfway through and went for the “so bad it’s good” level”.

Several members of the crew talk about the great acting involved. There are great actors (Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhart, Stanley Tucci, Delroy Lindo), but this is not great acting by any means of the imagination. Of course, they’re not helped by the writing. Check out this set of lines near the end.

Swank: “We’ve got no communication. We’re probably 800 feet down, but we might as well be 800 miles. We’re in an unobtainium cigar tube, with the sonar signature of a rock. We’ve got just enough power to make the ultrasonics burp, but no one’s listening on those frequencies anyway. And…nobody even knows we’re alive.”
Pause. Eckhart dramatically turns his chair to face the camera.
Eckhart: “Okay, give me a minute on this one.”

The resemblance to the Blues Brothers (”It’s a hundred and six miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.” “Hit it!”) is uncanny, and yet is sad because the Blues Brothers was _meant_ to be a comedy, and the line “Hit it!” is a much better payoff.

The number of people involved in this is truly astounding. Especially from the visual effects side of things. At least four companies were involved for a year. For special effects so bad that Berardinelli invoked the original Star Trek film. On the plus side, in one of the featurettes detailing the visual effects, they revealed that in the birds scene (deliberately reminiscent of Hitchcock, one would assume), that the effects guys threw a trout among all the computer-generated birds at one point. So I had to find it. It’s at 8:59, if anyone cares.

Some brilliant stuff. I’d have a Core-watching party, but I think I’d be the only attendee. Alas. You’re missing out.