Video Review: Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman’s always been a problem. Either because her origins are just a little too “weird,” or just because editors and writers keep botching her (probably some of both), she has the odd position of being officially placed in DC Comics’ “big three” while simultaneously being far less “iconic” than Batman or even the increasingly-unpopular Superman. A Wonder Woman feature was always going to be a challenge, and with Joss Whedon being fired from the project, it’s likely to be a challenge that Warner Bros. will fail at (either by making nothing or by making something like Halle Berry’s Catwoman).

Instead, if you’re interested in a decent Wonder Woman feature, you’ll have to satisfy yourself with this direct-to-video, 75 minute-long release. If you’re at all familiar with the celebrated Justice League TV series produced by Bruce Timm, you might be forgiven for thinking, based on the similar character design and the participation of Timm, that this video ties in with that series in some way, but no, this is part of the “DC Comics Original Animated Movies” line, which retells classic DC storylines from the last 20 years or so, this time with PG-13 rated violence.

Of course, you’ll be forgiven if “direct to video animation” makes you want to throw your computer out of the window, especially if you’ve seen even the billboards for the Disney efforts in this category (Cinderella II?!). Fear not; this would be a solid if unremarkable effort as television, and with a little upgrade in script and some voice acting, it could probably fly on the big screen (honestly, most super-hero action would look better in feature-quality, hand-drawn animation).

Wonder Woman’s origin was last revised (this happens to the best of them, including Superman) in a 1987 relaunch of her title, and this film more or less follows that plot (albeit in our present day). The story swiftly moves from the mythology-lite origin of the Amazons, to the birth of Diana, to her introduction to first to a man and then to “man’s world,” and finally to a whole lot of fightin’, culminating in an apocalyptic battle in the National Mall (most of the monuments we see are older, but I found it especially remarkable that one duel took place in front of Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial wall!).

Voice-acting is a mixed bag, mosty due to the usual C-list celebrity stuntcasting that this kind of animation is now subject to; Firefly’s Nathan Fillion inevitably shines as male lead Steve Trevor, but Kerri Russell, while adequate, is obviously inferior to her Justice League counterpart, Susan Eisenberg (an actual voice actress, mind you). Some of the briefer parts are much worse, honestly.

Despite this, I quite enjoyed it, although I suspect you have to be at least favorably disposed to comic books to respond to it in the same way. As a project that only fanboys (and fangirls!) will probably be aware of, it makes less concessions to “normal” audiences than the theatrical adaptations tend to, but the characters are still engaging. Finally, the film looks beautiful on Blu-ray; the backgrounds are carefully drawn with vivid color, and the characters are simple but crisp. Action scenes are dynamic and “dramatic” scenes are convincing. You might well be surprised to see a non-theatrical release look this good (if you’ve got hi-def, that is).

In the end, I can’t deny that it falls short of the best Justice League episodes, but if you’re looking for more animated DC, it’s definitely worth a Netflix rental (and if you’re just curious about a well-known but under-promoted superheroine, it’s certainly much more self-contained and tightly focused than the Justice League saga). And it definitely beats Batman: Gotham Knight, the only other release I’ve seen in this “line.”

Who ya gonna call? Not the feds…

Ghostbusters
Ivan Reitman, USA, 1984

I finally decided, after seeing it “sweded” in Be Kind Rewind and hearing so much about the latest video game adaptation, to watch this mainstream comedy “classic” once more, as my childhood memories of it (from a home-recorded VHS, possibly a censored broadcast airing) were vague at best, the better to be renewed by checking out the brand-new Blu-ray release, which looks great, grain and all. It’s hard to really make a unified comment on this film, so I will just take it piece by piece. There are some spoilers, in case you haven’t yet seen the film, or have forgotten it as I did and would like to see it again before being reminded about everything.

The movie works, but only despite itself. The structure is quite haphazard. Their first attempt to capture a ghost is shown in a very long sequence in which the Ghostbusters cause massive, unnecessary property damage due to their terrible aim. This leads to a montage of magazine covers and appreciative crowds watching them carry traps; apparently the effects budget did not allow for any further ghost-catching sequences until the “final battle,” which is itself a different animal. This is sloppy at best, but of course, as a kid I never noticed any of this; the disjointed nature of the “plot” may actually appeal to children.

For a mainstream film, the comedy is actually quite understated (I guess I’m used to the cameo-ridden affairs that are produced today, in which each walk-on tries to steal the show). Bill Murray is really the only person who is funny in this movie, as Pauline Kael noted (although she seems to think the sequel was better, an opinion that apparently no one else holds). The problem is that although his persona involves a certain laziness, Murray himself seems to only really wake up about halfway through the movie. At the beginning, he’s lifeless, but by the end, he’s finally quite funny.

Murray doesn’t only distinguish himself by his comedic skills, however. While Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis portray sexless nerds (Stantz and Spengler), the one childish and the other deathly serious, Murray’s character, Venkman, is a raging pervert, who, in the film’s first scene, is thwarted in his deceitful seduction of a blonde undergrad by Stantz’s juvenile enthusiasm at a ghost-sighting. Quite inexplicably, Stantz is much later interrupted while sleeping by a female ghost, who unzips his pants and performs oral sex on him. Huh?

Venkman’s greatest moral triumph comes when Dana (Sigourney Weaver) discards her previous, entirely understandable reticence and offers him sex, but only because she’s been possessed by the demon that Venkman failed to stop, largely because he was more focused on getting her to sleep with them (although this, like many things, is not entirely clear). In turning her down, Venkman turns out to have some kind of sexual ethics after all, although it may be more of a self-preservation thing (would she kill him after they were done, for instance?). That said, once the Ghostbusters have somehow saved the day, Venkman awkwardly kisses Dana, who gives us a vague feeling that, now that she owes her life to him, she feels that she is no longer entitled to say no.

The demonic villain, Gozer, is terrible, as she looks like a reject from a David Bowie video, and herself is dispatched quite easily (sorta). The iconic Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man is cool but often poorly animated, especially when his foot seems to turn transparent as he attempts to step on someone. (by contrast, the pre-digital laser effects and stop-motion animated demon dogs were sometimes quaint, but mostly effective). Indeed, I believe that the true villain is the EPA agent Peck, played by William Atherton. It did not at all surprise me that this film, in 2008, was officially sanctioned by the conservative movement, or at least the business conservative branch of it (obviously, the religious right would not be amused… or would they? hard to say)

you have to like a movie in which the bad guy (William Atherton at his loathsome best) is a regulation-happy buffoon from the EPA, and the solution to a public menace comes from the private sector.

Yup, this was enough to declare the film number 10 in the list of “The Best Conservative Movies of the Last 25 Years” I mulled this aspect of the film over with my friend Tanner, and he said that I shouldn’t place so much importance on plot decisions in what is obviously a disjointed comedic film. Actor and screenwriter Harold Ramis agrees:

Well, it seemed logical, like who would be involved in regulating the Ghostbusters? I think we actually picked it because it was so counterintuitive, because we think of environmental protection as such a good thing, which it is, but the Environmental Protection Agency is not always the most efficient. Here we were dealing with a completely new area. It wasn’t so much that the EPA was the bad guy. There was a bad EPA guy, who was the bad guy.

(For the record, Dan Aykroyd, the other screenwriter, also identifies himself as “a died-in-the-wool Canadian liberal.”)

The problem is, not only is the face-off with the “bad EPA guy” the arguable climax of the film (everything after they defeat him becomes more and more dreamlike and arbitrary, but the conflict with him is very clear-cut), but the Ghostbusters triumph over him by appealing to the mayor of New York City. The superiority of local government over federal government is a key article of faith in right-wing ideology, and the notion of “environmental protection” is one of the things they hate the most. I’m just going to imagine that Aykroyd and Ramis, in spite of what they remember, got swept up in Reaganism (tons of Democrats voted for him, after all).

It just shows that you’re not always in total control of what you write… on the other hand, it’s tempting to say that the EPA guy was right in spite of himself (clearly, he’s motivated by petty revenge and hidebound skepticism more than anything). You see, the apocalyptic event was itself triggered by the opening of the containment unit, ordered by Peck, but if the Ghostbusters had never placed all those ghosts in one place, it’s not clear that the event could have been triggered otherwise. Of course, the film never acknowledges this, and one gets the feeling that we’re not supposed to notice, but with such irresponsible characters, it’s inevitable that the contrivances which get us from point A to point B also inadvertently raise the question of their own complicity in the catastrophic events that occur.

My last thought is that, in some of the throwaway lines about the demonic apocalyptic threat, I feel like the seeds were planted for the many “library scenes” in the early seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There seems to be a common thread in the kind of overblown demonic rhetoric they find in their texts, combined with the nonchalant fashion in which they respond to it. Of course the two works might share a common inspiration instead. I might look into this further.

Blu-ray roundup

In my prior blogging life, I compulsively reviewed every film that I saw between January 1, 2006 and September 11, 2008. Just four days later, I watched Burn After Reading and I guess it must have defeated my critical capabilities, because I stopped blogging at that point. Of course, I also practically stopped watching movies, as I only saw two more films in 2008 (both of which I was more-or-less dragged to).

Various factors contributed to a gradual increase in movie-watching, the latest of which was my recent purchase of a used PlayStation 3, which as you probably know, can play Blu-ray movie discs. I’ve decided, then, to make that my arbitrary cut-off point for some retroactive capsule film reviews. I’m also gonna talk a bit more about my reasons for seeing these films. We’ll see how this goes:

Kung Fu Panda (Mark Osborne & John Stevenson, USA, 2008), June 9

I saw this back when it came out and reviewed it at the time. Of course, when you upgrade your digital home viewing capabilities, your first test has to be the most digital thing out there, which is obviously a CG animated film. Also, my girlfriend hadn’t seen it in very ideal circumstances the first time around.

As I said last time, I was skeptical that this would be good, but in fact it was surprisingly entertaining and visually impressive. Perhaps it was the high-definition presentation that saved it from becoming less impressive on its second viewing, or perhaps, without a heavy layer of suspicion to poke through, I was just more open to the film’s charms, but honestly it was better than I remembered it. I’m still skeptical that the inevitable sequel will be worthwhile, though, because something else I noticed on this viewing is that the film is entirely self-contained. There is no real need to learn more about the vaguely defined “Furious Five,” who have are merely foils for our hero Po (there are five of them so that some can be more sympathetic to him, while others can be more hostile). Elaborating upon anything in this film will probably just reveal its structural weaknesses.

Also, it’s a little hilarious that they found such famous actors to deliver such few lines. Does anyone really care if the snake is voiced by Lucy Liu?! Oh, there were plenty of features, but most of them seemed to be kids-oriented, unsurprisingly.

Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, USA, 1974), June 14

This one was recommended to me some time ago, but I should have been more skeptical. Mel Brooks has always been hit (Blazing Saddles) or miss (The Producers) for me, and after this one, I think I’m gonna take a long, perhaps indefinite break from Brooks. Sure, it doesn’t help that I have no familiarity with the classical Hollywood horror that he’s parodying, but it also really doesn’t help that the film climaxes with a rape joke (the joke being that she enjoys it… yeah, my girlfriend and I were not amused). Some might enjoy it, but not us (it’s not to say there weren’t flashes of comedic brilliance). There seemed to be a ton of features, but we didn’t really care.

Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, USA, 2008), June 18

Conventional critical wisdom suggests that it’s all been downhill for Gondry without the writerly talents of Charlie Kaufman, with whom he collaborated on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Of course, he had a suitable muse in the form of Dave Chappelle for Block Party, but The Science of Sleep seemed to bear this out (my threadbare review) was probably as overly generous as it was underdeveloped… this is what self-imposed obligation does to you sometimes).

In fact, I only really gave Gondry another chance because, having joined a free trial, I discovered that Blockbuster is not even remotely serious about Blu-ray, and my selections were quite limited). Despite that, I now think that you should give Gondry another chance as well. This is important, because if you saw this film on cable, you would in all likelihood change the channel within the first 15 minutes, which drag terribly and seem to confirm that Gondry utterly lacks direction.

For one thing, the whole premise of the film – Jack Black’s character magnitizes (don’t ask) the VHS-exclusive video store (no, this is not a period piece), and then along with Mos Def’s character, they remake the movies with a video camera and become local heroes) – doesn’t even kick in until somewhere around that point. I used to try to writer my reviews so that they never spoiled anything that transpired so far into the film, but Be Kind Rewind is a good example of instance in which the PR people basically had no choice; if they didn’t give anything away, absoltuely no one would even think about renting this film.

I can sum it up best in this way: the film is pointlessly weird before the premise finally kicks in, and terrifically, excitingly weird once it does. The Ghostbusters parody (if that’s the right word for it) is genius, and the film just seems to expand from there. Give it a shot

My girlfriend, of course, had to point out that it was really bizarre that had rented a film about independent, VHS-only rental store on Blu-ray from a corporate chain store (the likes of which is parodied in the film, of course). Maybe Blockbuster felt that the film undermines itself too much to be a threat?

If you rent this, you should at least watch the “conversation” between Jack Black and Michel Gondry. At one point religion comes up, and you might be surprised by how much cleverer Black’s thoughts on the subject are!

Chungking Express (Chung hing sam lam, Wong Kar-Wai, Hong Kong, 1994), July 2

I saw this back in January 2005 on a Miramax non-anamorphic DVD, but the Criterion Collection has since done a new DVD edition in addition to this Blu-ray disc. Special features are now sparse rather than non-existent as they previously were, which means, I suppose, that there’s just not much out there. The picture quality was much improved, of course.

Alright, so Wong Kar-Wai makes arty films in which people don’t say too much, and certainly not what they are really thinking. Oh, and usually the ending is quite melancholy. Ever since I saw In the Mood for Love Wong has become my favorite art film director, although I have always had trouble explaining just why.

This film of his, at least according to this Criterion essay, was his main attempt to be accessible to his home audience, by providing more accessible characters and a good dose of zaniness into the proceedings. There are actually two discrete segments of the film, one headed by a lovesick Kaneshiro Takeshi, the other by an endearing, pixie-like stalker (yeah, it’s problematic if you actually think about it) played by Faye Wong. The second part is better, but I think it needed the first part, for some reason.

The point, really, is that this is the only Wong Kar-Wai film that I can confidently and enthusiastically recommend, and all the moreso after finally watching it again. If you find yourself liking it, you might check out some of his other works, but it might well be the only film of his that you can get into. Rent it, though; Criterions are too expensive to buy!

Milk (Gus Van Sant, USA, 2008), July 7

Some online critics (I read this guy a lot, although I don’t always agree with him) really hate the standard biopic, seeing it to be ultimately an irredeemable formula. Personally, I understand the hesitation (I don’t usually rent these films) but I save my hatred for formulas like “blood-and-guts slasher” or “fart comedy.”

The other question this film raises is whether it “uplifts,” and whether uplift is enough to justify a film. It’s hard to deny that Harvey Milk’s story is worth telling, especially compared to the various musicians who inspired many of the perfunctory biopics. To be honest, though, I had decided to view the documentary that, from all reports, including the Milk end credits themselves, very directly inspired this narrative feature. Unfortunately, I got this disc anyway due to a Netflix mix-up, and I decided not to return it unwatched.

Perhaps in a few months I’ll try the documentary, as I can’t help but think that is a more fitting medium for this story. Of course, I know well enough that the average viewer does not feel that documentaries are at all worth watching, so ultimately this seems to be a conversion that is very much necessary, but for all the wrong reasons, at least artistically speaking.

Anyway, I have to withhold judgment until I’ve seen the “original,” but don’t worry, I will revisit this subject when or if that time comes. Heck, I’m more curious now that I’ve blogged so elliptically on the subject!