There’s a lot more going on at The New TRC. Go and find out for yourselves.

-Ryan and Tom, Co-Founders of The Red Circle dot Com.

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Andy Diggle took the great Robert Kanigher’s team of misifts known as The Losers’ and re-imagined them as modern ronin amidst the War on Terror. They were betrayed by their handler the mysterious Max, who may or may not be a “George Kaplan”. Ready for revenge and the opportunity to remove their names from a secret CIA death list, the Losers regrouped to steal their lives back. As the series progressed it became clear nothing was what they thought it was and revenge was anything, but simple.

Below is the trailer for Joel Silver’s adaptation of Diggle’s series  that ran from 2003 to 2006 at Vertigo Comics.

Editor’s Note: Not to mention that once again, in some way this is another
comic project that involves Jack Kirby.

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Editor’s Note: TRC will return to normal soon, we promise (don’t hold us to that). Just 15 years from now when the technology of this world can bring to life every idea in our wild high school fantasy trapper/notebook of  ideas that we ripped directly off of famous (and trendy) sci-fi authors. Till than you will have to abide with any and every lame AVATAR thing we here at TRC can find.

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I have no words. Wish I did. So instead a quote from George Carlin: “If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.”

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In a perfect world, James Cameron’s Avatar would have died like a quiet fart in the dark night of the director’s imagination. Instead, we live in the depressingly “post-Avatar” world where late night hosts are tossed aside like so much Avatar-related promotional material, catastrophic earthquakes bring systematically oppressed island nations to their knees, and American economic policy is held together by bits of tape and chewed gum. It didn’t set in after the opening weekend numbers or even the third to be honest, but the director of Aliens is currently riding the tidal wave of a fifth straight weekend at the top of the box office right through the fabric of America and the essence of what makes film great. For all their summer-tentpole-style promotions (James Cameron’s Avatar Big Mac Meals! James Cameron’s Avatar Coke Zero Cans!), it seems like it’s the perfect storm of TV shows on hiatus, lackluster competition, stay-cations and the public’s growing interest in the new 3D movie technology that is driving Avatar towards beating James Cameron’s previous highest grossing film of all time, Titanic.

That’s right America. We have given this asshole the TWO highest grossing movies of all time. We live in a country where directors whose vision, ambition and follow through have created incredible depictions of events, true or fiction, that exceeded the limits of our very imaginations. And the guy who made your two most popular movies phoned in a script, sat on it for fifteen years to wait for technology that could make up for his lack of technique and in the meantime somehow got lucky on the world’s riskiest bet: a movie that made one of history’s most intriguing disasters into one of its most predictable movies. I think that’s why we (and I’m using “we” here because I too am guilty of buying into “event” entertainment, not because I’ve seen this abomination) support these guys. We love a gambler, win or lose. We’ll vote for the guy who bombs a country on a hunch even AFTER we’ve figured out that he was wrong. We’ll sit our fat asses down on the couch night after night to watch people humiliate themselves on American Idol auditions. We’ve somehow sustained Kenny Rogers for decades now on the shoulders of one novelty “story song.” (“Islands In The Stream” doesn’t count because that could’ve been anyone and Dolly and it would’ve been a hit. He’s the Peabo Bryson to her Roberta Flack.)

And we’ve basically just written James Cameron a blank check to make his next recycled braintrash into the the next thing we’ll slap down fifteen dollars to see in hyper-real 5-D (I skipped a D because Dreamworks will have figured out the fourth one by the time he dusts off whatever other script he finds in his high school writing assignments.) Though I can’t say I’m not disappointed in our new cultural depths, I think the film’s record setting profits make a strong and definitive argument for how to get the American economy back on track. While Barack Obama promised to revive our troubled financial system by “harness(ing) the energy and ingenuity of the American people,” his first year in office has passed and there are no new financial regulations in place. The U.S. is still hemorrhaging jobs. James Cameron has doubled half a billion dollars in five weeks inviting us to see his distinctly American mediocrity. Like many of our American heroes (and presidents), James Cameron’s success came because the American people don’t want “exceptional.” They want “middle of the road. “ They want a plot that they understand because they’ve seen it before. They would rather look at Avatar’s half-human half-puma Navi and “exotic” (read: colorful) locales because then they don’t have to think about whether life that formed from a different set of primordial oozes would look anything like any life we’ve seen. Even the film’s proper nouns lack imagination: Pandora. Unobtanium. Jake Sully.

Mining well-worn ideas isn’t the end of the equation though. Washington hasn’t stopped doing that. What they lack is James Cameron’s magically unceasing sense of self-importance. The kind of mind that writes an eighty page treatment and then abandons it because he honestly believes that he’s ahead of his own time has to be coupled with the will to revive and create it fifteen years later on a reportedly almost half-billion dollar scale. Finally, when the moment comes and the big reveal occurs, you’ve got to keep up a strong front regardless of how many holes your idea has. Remind your angry elitist friends that the nifty idea and the technology make up for the flimsy plot and crude execution. (I say “crude execution” because no matter how realistic everyone claims Pandora looks, it will never make most rational people care if the Na’vi will save their planet the way one could care if William Wallace will defeat the English at Stirling or if Tom Hanks will ever find Private Ryan or run with leg braces on. Also, Americans generally don’t care about planets. Or races other than their own. Sorry, Slumdog Millionaire, it just wasn’t gonna happen no matter how many Oscars you won. You too, Spike Lee.

Which brings me to the end of this rambling mess. James Cameron’s Avatar already won the Golden Globe for Best Picture, a prize that these inbred third cousin to the Oscars had to share with a slightly more heartening success story, the relatively amusing 2009 box office smash, The Hangover. James Cameron was named the “Best Director” by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Allow that to sink in. Now remember that genuinely beautiful, moving and provocative films like Inglorious Basterds, Moon and The Fantastic Mr. Fox were released this year. Films that engaged audiences with their depth of imagination and creative vision and were all relative box office flops. The American people have spoken time and again. We’re so desperate for simplicity and escapism that we’ll flock in droves to every intellectually bankrupt 3D movie (or Tea Party) because it allows the viewer to focus on the shiny objects and never consider its obligatory morality. We’ve just given James Cameron the two highest grossing movies of all time. Let’s just declare “film” dead, give him another Oscar and hope the band knows how to play whichever songs the Black Eyed Peas have won Grammys for while America tries to rearrange its deckchairs.

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[201]0 // 005 Pootie Tang [2002] dir. Louis C.K.

Wow.

I’m not even really sure what I just watched. I mean, it all made sense. There was a plot, and there were characters. They deliver lines, and there’s sort of a theme here. I can totally understand why this is almost universally regarded as one of the worst movies of all time. I don’t agree with that sentiment, though. It’s not a bad movie. It’s an off-its-rocker-balls-insane-ridiculous movie. It’s aimed at  only a certain taste, and those who don’t dig the entirely absurd won’t dig this.

There’s no point in trying to sum up the plot. Its just something that needs to be seen. But let me break down what you’re in for. This is not a blaxploitation spoof. It’s not even a 70’s spoof. It is the story of a man named Pootie Tang who is so cool, he doesn’t even need to speak real words. So, when you hear the words “Sine your pitty on the runny kine,” you know that you’re either gonna get your ass whipped by his magic belt (“You can whip anyone’s ass in the world using just this belt,” says his dad), or you’re in the running for some Pootie loving.

The movie is notable for making Wanda Sykes tolerable, even though she really only just dances the entire time, shooting off half-yelled dialogue. That sounds a little worse than it actually is. Her character is almost more of a narrative tool. She, along with the actual, real narrator, co-tells the story that we’re watching. It’s not a supremely effective way of getting the point across, and it seems like the whole thing was invented just so we could get a not-so-good narrator narrating his own conversation joke later in the film.

And I guess that’s sort of the problem I have with Pootie Tang. There are so many completely wild, unexpected sources of humor that its actually a little sad that some of the jokes are so painfully obvious and unfunny. But, as often as there are groaners (“Pootie was rejuvenated. Rejuvenated! He was juvenated, lost it, and got juvenated again. Rejuvenated!” Ugh.), there are sublime physical jokes and David Cross in blackface.

I’d like to thank Louis CK for that last one. The man’s been a huge force in stand-up for years, despite people’s complete ignorance of him, and his efforts bring a lot of nice comedy cred to this film — almost all completely miscast for effect. David Cross as a black man? Dave Attell as a corporate stooge? I’d also like to thank CK for giving Kristen Bell her first screen role. You’ll have to wait till after the credits though. The man has devised a completely whacked out premise that would confound and anger most normal viewers. I can’t believe it took his wife this long to divorce him.

Honestly, just like the car jumping scene in Transporter 2, this movie has tons of “you’re with it or you’re not” moments. I can’t fault anyone for switching off when one of Chris Rock’s three characters gets killed in a freak gorilla mauling accident. I just don’t want to be friends with that person. This movie holds so much brilliance, that is worth sitting through some of the garbage it throws at you. Chris Rock is a highlight throughout. So is Jennifer Coolidge. It’s also slightly offputting to see two future The Wire actors cheesing it up in a movie like this. Especially when one of them is Reg. E. Cathy. Lance Crouthers has no career after playing Pootie. He doesn’t even have a wikipedia page. Seriously. That’s how deep this man went after whipping 100 men with a pimp belt.

This movie features some of the oddest structuring ever committed to film (You are not watching a movie called Pootie Tang. You are actually watching an 85 minute clip of a movie called Pootie Tang in Sine Your Pitty on the Runny Kine.), some of the smartest bits of stupid dialogue ever written (“Pootie Tang whip your ass so bad, you can write it off on your taxes!”), and the single best send up of the “drawing guns at noon” archetype I think I have ever seen.

There is no way that everyone would sort of love Pootie Tang the way I do. It’s got some shameful writing in it, but it is balanced out by a consumptive love for the insane and the unexplainable. It is a singular film, not tied to anything before it. Plus, it has a cow and a stalk of corn giving life advice. There is nothing else out there like Pootie Tang, and that is a mixed blessing.

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[201]0 004 // Daybreakers [2010] dir. The Speirig Brothers

Dammit. This movie was so close to being GOOD.

Daybreakers introduces us into a world run by vampires. And by run, I mean run. There are vampire governments, with elected officials. There are vampire companies, who cater to vampire needs. There are vampire agencies, that provide underground walkways so vampires can get to work in the daytime. Hell, even Chrysler is catering to the undead set. It’s this part of the movie that is genuinely good. The filmmakers have really, really created world with history. One that makes sense, and is actually interesting. Unfortunately, where all of this falls apart is in the details.

Ethan Hawke plays a hemotologist vampire. The company he works for harvests human blood for distribution to the vampires of America (the world?), and underpopulation and overhunting have caused a massive human blood shortage. Hawke is charged by deliciously evil Sam Neill to create a human blood substitute. You see, the vamps only have about one month of blood supply until it’s all out. And it turns out that a lack of human blood causes a rapid and violent de-evolution in vampires. The turn into mindless batlike creatures that will attack and eat anything, even corpses and other vampires. The vamps in charge have to deal with both the blood shortage and the ever-increasing population of these “underdwellers.”

Needless to say, humans aren’t an endangered species. They are food. Plain and simple. Humans caught out in the open will be harvested. There are some, like Ethan Hawke, who won’t drink human blood out of principle (for him, it was because he was born a human – most other vamps don’t have this ethical concern), and others who are out to help keep some fragments of humanity alive. But, after meeting a man who claims that he has found a way to reverse the vampire “disease” (Willem Dafoe), Ethan Hawke attempts to turn his blood substitute into a cure.

I said something about the details being the breaking point in Daybreakers. It’s half true. There are some brilliant touches put on this world of bloodsuckers. For one, virtually every vampire smokes. Constantly. Even better, not a single one mentions anything about the whole “can’t get cancer, can’t die, so fuck it” situation. It’s a smart addition to a pretty smart concept.

But all of this world building  comes to a retarded head in the third act, where blatantly obvious reveals are treated as if they were truly capable of pulling the rug out from under even the most remedial audience. Combined with a series of ridiculous action pieces (which generally revolve around a whole bunch of vampires killing lots of other things in waves), and the set up of a real world with real issues kind of gets ignored. It’s nice to bring up underdwellers, surround them with a sense of dread, and then use them effectively. Although that last part was apparently not apparent to the filmmakers.

There’s a lot to like here, and one of those things is not Willem Dafoe. His character, named Elvis, seems to be a redneck at heart but Willem Dafoe has no idea how to play that character. He plays him as an oddly spiritual gruff guy, with a really annoying speech-giving habit. His introduction is so mind numbingly stupid in context, that the character never fully recovers. He summons Ethan Hawke to meet about a cure to vampirism, and greets him with a completely ridiculous speech about how vampires are like trees. He does the same thing later in a badly presented third act reveal.

What follows next is a complete and utter ruination of the end of Daybreakers. If you care, please read on. If not, here’s a nice little sum-up: Daybreakers is an uncommonly smart straight up horror film that sort of sullies its well thought out and presented premise with a slightly silly third act, and characters that never quite seem to work. It’s certainly a lot better than a lot of movies in the same genre, but it just doesn’t quite summon the strength to be actually interesting or good.

SPOILERS: THIS WILL RUIN THE END OF DAYBREAKERS.

There is a cure. Actually, two. One is to expose the vampire to the sunlight for just the right amount of time. Apparently, right before it kills them it strips away the virus. It’s a little silly, but I chose to believe in it. The second cure is the blood of the “cured” vampires. Drinking it causes the virus to be fought off by the “cleansed” blood, and those vampires go back to being human. Ethan Hawke is cured the with the first method. The biggest problem in the movie is that the main conceit – there is a blood shortage, and a possible cure – comes to a perfectly tied-up conclusion in the third act. AND THE MOVIE COMPLETELY IGNORES IT.

You see, one of Ethan Hawkes hemotologist vamp friends creates a viable substitute. Evil Sam Neill shows Hawke the vial containing the liquid. And then tells him that this vial is going into mass production the following week. You see where this would go? A newly cured Ethan Hawke with a body full of vampire-cure, could simply fill that vial with his blood and get it shipped off. Thereby curing most, if not all of the vampires in the world – which is what he has been trying to do the entire movie. Instead, he kills Sam Neill by allowing himself to be bitten. This turns Neill human, and Neill is then attacked by a vampire army. Turning them all human. And then they are attacked by more soldiers. Turning them all human. And then everyone gets gunned down (except the main characters, who go on a cross country trip to cure vampires).

Not only would that have totally tied up the story were there to be no sequel, it would have set up a second film where the remaining vampires are holding out against the previously persecuted humans. But, making a logical film within the rules established with the promise of a good second film (currently they’re planning a prequel which is rubbish) was not something on the Speirig Brothers to-do list.

There have been reviewers that have compared the vampires to Americans – people who have been on top for so long, that they don’t see the oncoming fall – and this isn’t an unfair comparison. Plus, the Speirigs have certainly created an interesting vampire mythology and universe. But I sure wish the whole movie would have explored that theme instead of ignoring good plotting in favor of a good ole U.S. of A machinegun bloodbath.

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WHEN I was in tenth grade, I won a $250 gift card to Best Buy through a city essay contest. The awarding of the prize was held in the morning, and before my dad drove me back to school, I made him take me straight to Best Buy so that I could spend every dollar. This, of course, was in an age when “recession” and “Suze Orman” were not ingrained in the area of my brain where everyday decisions concerning the satisfaction of wants are made. Were I to stumble upon a windfall like a $250 gift card to Best Buy today, or even a $20 gift card to Chili’s that someone bought for me at CVS along with his cough drops, I would deliberate prudently as to how I could optimize the return on those dollars.

This prize, it turned out, became the seed money for what is now my unwieldy DVD collection. I bought about fifteen movies that day—movies that, to a mind exposed only to American cinema of the 1990s and later, were the greatest of all time: American History X. Requiem for a Dream. Dumb and Dumber. Jerry Maguire, once my number one pick. I did venture a little out of this territory to get The Graduate and also Citizen Kane, which I’d seen once on VHS after it topped the American Film Institute’s first “100 Movies” list. These films, along with the bare-bones Annie Hall that I’d previously bought at a Suncoast store for almost thirty dollars, formed the cornerstone of a library that I would drag with me each time I moved to a new place.

From 2002 to the middle of 2007, I only purchased movies that I truly enjoyed and wanted to be able to watch at will, like Being John Malkovich, the two Kill Bills, and Boogie Nights. This, I assume, was the most common intention when a consumer in the first half of this past decade bought a DVD: to own a certified classic, whether in his eyes or those of the international film community; a childhood memory, the repackaging of some indelible coming-of-age theater experience; or maybe a warm and fuzzy favorite, or a puzzle that had to be revisited. In short, DVDs were not meant to be watched once, and they surely weren’t meant to sit shrink-wrapped in a pile on a random side table at home with their $9.99 price tags intact.

But something happened in the middle of the decade, perhaps as early as 2002 for some people—but for me it was 2007, as I started my first full-time job and lived in my own place: home movies became ridiculously affordable. Consumers could blind-buy new releases, watch them once, and not worry about the inventorial consequences. A DVD is light, compact; its digital content degrades infinitesimally compared to the tape of a videocassette. It is a beautiful product, sure to be a cherished relic of the ’00s. No longer did you have to be a cinephile collecting Criterion laserdiscs to boast a decent film library. Digitizing home video has democratized film education in the same way that digitizing the production, post-production, and distribution of film (with flash-memory HD camcorders, video editing suites, and YouTube, respectively) has democratized filmmaking. Quentin Tarantino and some of his contemporaries famously learned their craft by watching myriad films on VHS, but it’s clear that our present technology makes it even easier today. Thanks to digital media, we can all learn film, and we can all make film.

After my final exams in 2007, I was looking for something to do in the downtime before commencement. Not one to participate in pub crawls, I found, on sale on Amazon, Fellini’s Amarcord and Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (the former an excellent reissue; the latter a sumptuous box set for less than thirty dollars!), and my world thenceforth was never the same. In a mere two and a half years, I blind-bought so many classic films through Amazon sales that I bloated my modest Jerry Maguire collection tenfold. I have amassed an inventory so large that a queue of movies was implicitly formed; I will be halfway to retirement before I can find the time to wade through all of them. And that’s assuming I stop collecting DVDs now.

I DID not expect that cessation to occur so soon, but it mostly has. With my very late adoption of Netflix two months ago, there has been another epochal shift in how I watch movies, in what it means personally to collect. At first, I bought the movies I loved. I would pop in my first DVD, Annie Hall, just to hear Diane Keaton sing “Seems Like Old Times” over the wistful final sequence. During the next phase of DVD buying, I acquired movies that I thought were canonical, significant enough to have to be referenced. Imagine the delight to my fledgling-moviegoer mind when I watched Raging Bull and found out that Paul Thomas Anderson had paid homage to its final scene in his own last shot of Boogie Nights. Equipped with my movie arsenal, I could compare “I’m the boss” to “I’m a star” immediately. But the Netflix paradigm goes further for me. I don’t have to reconstruct the film canon in my apartment. I don’t need the physical media cluttering my shelves to make straightforward comparisons. Furthermore, the ability to stream movies obviates the need to even insert a disc into a player, let alone to buy a disc. Netflix is there to collapse my DVD library into a virtual presence, a dynamic list of titles, a collection of bytes.

Need to catch up on the films of Michael Haneke or Jacques Audiard? Rent them all! Aching for a season-four marathon of Punky Brewster? Not a problem! (No, there’s nothing wrong with Punky Brewster. TV on DVD is a marvel unto itself. There’s an episode of The X-Files called “Triangle” that I’ve been dying to see since its first air date in 1998; TV on DVD and Netflix make it possible.)

The digitization of media extends beyond my favorite realm of film. Advances in digital music collapsed a CD and record collection into a pocket-sized iPod filled with mp3 files: long gone are vacations encumbered by a flipbook of CDs, a disc player, and enough AA batteries for a hurricane preparedness kit. The Amazon Kindle and other e-readers are poised to try the same for books and print media. But there are portentous implications and difficult questions that come with all this digitization. It’s still hard for me to imagine the obsolescence of the tangible book, the extinction of dust jackets and deckle edges, the fading magnetism of a well-designed trade paperback. But if we ever get there, what can adequately succeed the first edition/first printing of a book, a form of media that has survived so much longer than the DVD will? Will it mean anything to have a Kindle edition of Philip Roth’s latest novel downloaded on release day versus ten years after? I have been buying Pynchon first printings on the chance that my grandchildren will inherit them and think I’m cool. My coolness won’t be on display with an undifferentiated e-book.

For the music industry, in which the transition started long ago, circa Napster days, we might wonder what has become of the conception of the album as a cohesive musical whole. But sadly the album has been dying for a while, as the current business model revolves exclusively around producing a hit single. Look at a list of the number-one singles in any of the past few years and grasp the shrewd efficiency of making money this way: I find it hard to believe that it actually took more than twelve minutes to concoct “3” or “Right Round.” And nowadays the album—that antiquated, lofty notion—can be retooled with “deluxe” or “platinum” editions after the fact to promote a new single not in the original studio release. So what remains of the integrity of the album? Do we really need an upgrade, upgrade of I Am…Sasha Fierce just so that somebody can cash in on her slapdash Lady Gaga remix? Picture Bob Dylan releasing Blonde on Blonde – Deluxe Edition just because he had visions of Rihanna that he wanted to add as a bonus track.

AT THE beginning of the decade, we are on the precipice of what may be an extraordinary expansion of our digital media. Already corporations are coming to grips with the financial ramifications. Warner Bros. recently struck a deal with Netflix to delay the rental availability of its titles by one month. How that will increase the revenues from their home video sales, I don’t know. I don’t really need to watch The Hangover the day it appears on Blockbuster and Best Buy shelves. I think distributors simply need to stop worrying and love what is actually an astonishing innovation, and a boon to anyone who loves film. It is an inexorable transition.

There will always be the theater to enjoy that communal moviegoing experience, which Manohla Dargis described recently in regards to Avatar. (I’m proud, for instance, to have screened Antichrist at the Chicago Film Festival, just to have shared in the “experience” of genital mutilation.) And there will also be physical media like Blu-ray or its successors for those who cannot accept anything less than the highest quality at home, unless we can develop the technology to affordably stream the huge amounts of data contained on these discs, too. Incidentally, I am still collecting Criterion DVDs and Blu-rays, which are lovely anyway, “Watch Instantly” be damned.

But my dream is that, by 2020, I will have the option to stream all of my home movies. Film lovers around the world would be able to access some global digital repository to watch The African Queen or Pather Panchali or the restored Metropolis at three in the morning if they wish. We will have made a copy of the corpus of film history from museums, universities, studio vaults, and art houses and pasted it into our homes.

For more of Joel’s writing go to his blog Canny Management.

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First time I [finished watching Avatar] and got that strange depressed feeling. That forced me to go to the cinema the next day. Again I got that feeling, even got it after the 3rd time. Now i think I’m an addict of this depression, and i like it, it kinda makes me a better person, or something like that. That’s why I’m here, writing. – KalaKuival, posted on Avatar-Forums.com

I want to preface all this by telling you that I am not going to make fun of these people, or make fun of Avatar. If people are depressed, they need to find the best way out of that depression. If that happens to be writing about it on a message board, so be it. What is a little confusing to me is that cinema as a storytelling device has been around for over 100 years. I had assumed we all knew that movies were fake by now.

As much as it pains me, people typically pay to see movies for escapism. Nothing in their lives looks and sounds like it does in the cinemas, and they’ll pay some money to forget that they have a presentation in a couple of days, or that they just had a really irate customer. It’s a constructive way of memory loss, just like alcohol. But, once again, it’s not real. How many times have your parents or friends had to remind you “it’s only a movie,” when things get a little intense on-screen?

So why now? Certainly Avatar has the best special effects ever put to screen, but what about the movies that feature real people in real environments? I’ve never heard of a Star Wars related phenomenon. Nor even a Star Trek. Do people get depressed that there are no Evil Dead deadites running around for them to go all Ash on? Fans of those series seem to celebrate their fandom – collecting toys and memorabilia, making their own costumes and props. They take the experience they had in the theater and translate it into a positive, albeit possibly unhealthy, lifestyle. Movies, especially gigantic blockbusters, are supposed to have a positive effect on the audience. Apparently there is a subsection of Avatar fans that need genuine counseling because the imaginary world presented in the film remains that way upon their exit.

How do 75 pages of posts about the hardships of living life outside of that planet moon crop up in less than two weeks? Maybe it’s a little harder to dress up as a Na’vi than it is to rush out and buy a lightsaber, but the same principle applies. Unless Avatar is the first movie ever seen by this group of people, I am at a loss as to why its revelation as a fictional universe is so gutwrenching. Films can transport you. But, a film like Avatar, lush in its presentation, lousy in its characterization, seems an odd choice to get all wrapped up in. Having a breakdown because a movie is fake is like throwing a tantrum about how your kid doesn’t actually become an orange when he puts on the costume for the school play. Haven’t we progressed just a little in the century that movies have been around? It’s understandable that the first audience to see a moving train coming at them inside a cinematheque might be a little terrified. We live in an era of mass communication and content from cell phones, television, YouTube, and movies in the theater and the home. LARPing was supposed to be the cure for all of this.

I’m certainly not the biggest advocate of professional therapy. I can see how it’s helpful, and I can see how having an educated point of view can pinpoint the problems and make things a little easier to get a grip on.  At the same time, why pay for the things your friends give you for free? And why take the time to sit with someone and talk about changes instead of making the changes from your own desire? Yeah, yeah. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. Trust me, I know.

…It’s unfortunate that we live in a world where, just by pulling a trigger or making a corporate decision, one single greedy human being can wipe out the hard works of love of many people. But this is why we need to stop focusing on money and start focusing on our environment. Because we have the intelligence to kill ourselves, but not the wisdom to stop it. What will our money buy, when everything that is worth having is destroyed? The only way you can fill the emptiness you feel after this movie, is to jump on the leonopteryx. – Neytiri, posted on Avatar-Forums.com

But the thing that slaps me around the most is this post. Essentially, it’s every self-help mantra ever assembled, clothed in references to people, animals, and places that are set in that universe. It’s a good thought to tell people to get out and do stuff, but why the reliance on the movie’s characters? If you are feeling bad, the best way to overcome is to change something about either yourself or the situation. How is it possible that people can be affected by what is almost directly a Joel Osteen quote but with “Let Jesus In” replaced with “Jump on the leonopteryx.” I should also make it known that this specific task is one of the easiest things that Jake Sully does in the movie. He has a harder time shooting a bow, riding a horse, and bonding with one of the tiny dragons than mastering the most powerful being in the sky. It’d be nice if the people using the movie as a motivator actually watched it.

Overcoming depression and making a change is a lot more difficult than falling off one animal and onto another. It seems that these are people that truly need help, even if the cause for the depression is a little on the ridiculous side. There is a lot of work to be done on the Earth in general. If they were (and I don’t know how) clued into the environmental issues plaguing the planet solely by this movie, then part of that post-partem recovery could be spent volunteering at green charities. Who cares if you’re doing it because some fictional bink told you to? This is a measurable difference being made, and the filmmakers would be much more proud of their fans and their film for affecting a change.

I am aware that films are a cultural force. They truly move people, and in the best scenarios, they can change the world for the better. But, after 100 years of narrative storytelling, the last thing they should cause is a fit of depression over their fakeness. You are a lucky human if your saddest hour comes when you realize that you will never be able to ride a direhorse. Be depressed that the situations so hamfistedly portrayed in Avatar are actually happening, for real, on the planet. Be depressed that there are people starving because they were born the wrong color, and a couple thousand miles too far East. Be depressed that blatant corporate greed only leads to bailouts.

And then, fight against it. If Avatar could actually have a positive effect on the real, physical world through all of this sulking-cum-compassion, I may even like the film a little more.

The messageboard  in question can be found here.

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[201]0 // 003 Moon [2009] dir. Duncan Jones

Wow.

The worst part about Moon is how impossible it is to explain it without spoilers. I’m leaving the comments open for discussion about the movie for those who have seen it. So, if you want to see Moon unspoiled, DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS. Onward.

It is the future. Helium-3 pockets have been discovered on the moon, and a large company is mining these resources to provide cheap energy to 70% of the planet. Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, a mining supervisor of sorts who is ending his three-year contract on Moon Base Sarang. He’s been watching over the base and the mining robots for all that time all by himself. His only companion is a robot named GERTY who is pretty much there to run the higher functions of the base while providing Sam with anything he needs to get the job done. Despite this, Sam is a lonely guy. Direct communication with the Earth has been disabled by some solar flares, so all he has is a pseudo letter correspondence with his wife and young child via recorded video. But, it’s only two weeks until his contract ends and its nearing time that he leave the moon to rejoin his planet. But the effects of a thee year tour with nobody else around are starting to take their toll, and Sam starts seeing some weird shit.

And that’s all you get. To say any more would be to deprive you of all the impact of one of the best films of last year. There aren’t any twists, per se. It’s just that to dissect this film thematically would require me to talk about the plot past the setup, and the thrill of seeing that plot unfold is much more interesting than me talking about it.

It’s a wonderful, small movie. Sam Rockwell gives what is almost assuredly the best performance of his career as Sam. We get to see him play the man ready to begin his three year isolation on a foreign body, and play the tenured man who has dealt with that isolation for the past almost 1,000 days. It’s a remarkable performance, and its one that will be outright ignored at awards time because of both the size and performance of the film at the box office (small, and mediocre) and the fact that the role of Sam Bell has no “actorly” moments that remind you “this is a great performance, dear Academy.” What I’m trying to say is that Sam Rockwell doesn’t Sean Penn this performance.

What he does do is capture the spirit of humanity, both thematically and emotionally, while stranded alone on an orbiting rock. There is nuance to spare here, and the movie demands multiple viewings to sort out the subtleties after the story has been experienced once. Just as nuanced is first time director Duncan Jones’ view of the future. Besides an artificially intelligent robot and a fully formed lunar base, there’s not a lot of tech innovation here – just a world that works. Jones and his production design crew fill the Sarang interiors with tons of detail, none of which are flashy, and all of which make sense in context. The movie is beautiful in a hollowed out sort of way, and Clint Mansell proves without question that he is the best small movie composer working. His score is as sparse as the landscape, but exponentially more beautiful.

There is so much to love about Moon. It’s a wonderfully conceived, acted, designed, directed, and scored movie. And, just like the comparable District 9, the effects work is nigh upon seamless for such a tiny budget. I hope Duncan Jones and Neill Blomkamp (and Primer auteur Shane Carruth, for that matter) continue to work in sci-fi for a long time. They’re single-handedly restoring the faith that George Lucas, McG, and James Cameron have so delicately pissed away this decade. Leave it to the Spawn of Ziggy Stardust and a stupefyingly young South African to tell two of the best tales the genre has seen in years.

I would be exceeding my place to declare Moon a masterpiece. I’ve seen the movie one time, less than six hours ago. But it’s a film that I think I will find myself watching more than twice in this calendar year, and maybe at that time I will be able to give it the title that it may end up deserving. Regardless of that fact, Moon is a near perfect film, an assured debut of a hopefully prolific filmmaker, and one of the best films I have seen in the last 365 days.

Science Fiction is nothing more than the use of the fantastic to tell us about the things that are ultimately very personal and human, and Moon is one of the few movies that manages to transport us to another time and place to remind us why being a human is so unique and important. We are lucky to have Duncan Jones and Sam Rockwell. We are better for having movies like Moon.

UPDATE: According to this article at CHUD, Sony Pictures Classics is not even sending screener copies of the film to awards affiliated folks. I can’t say I’m shocked, but their attempt to pass off the dropping of the ball on internet piracy rather than “we just don’t wanna,” is a little dumb. Either way, this virtually guarantees that Sam Rockwell will be getting zero nominations outside of the useless Saturn awards.

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