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Airplane Movies

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When trapped on a plane, one can find themselves sitting through schlock that they never would on their couch:

Star Trek Beyond

Plenty of time to catch on email while watching this movie.

This movie is notable both because it was the least bad of the bunch, and so memorable that I had to use Google to find it because I couldn’t remember it at all (I knew I had watched a movie…).  Through the whole thing there are moments of great creativity and incredible stupidity (such as when the story uses the most contrived circumstance imaginable to cram a play back of the Beastie Boys Sabotage in yet another Trek film).

 
X-Men: Apocalypse
Blue without you…

That first X-Men movie from years ago was the best of the bunch, and even then it was just OK.  In this, yet another reboot, a bunch of characters no one cares about half destroy the planet in a quest to do…something.  The ten second cameo of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine almost stole the film; the only reason anyone shows up for X-Men is Wolverine.

Jason Bourne

Matt Damon’s face through the whole film.  No kidding, check Goggle images.

Really?  After all these movies there’s still CIA guys left alive that want to kill Bourne?  This is essentially a repeat of the second and third movies, which weren’t all that good to begin with.  There’s lots of entertaining chases and fisticuffs, but not enough to fill the empty void that is the rest of the movie.  (As a note the movie ends with yet another mix of Moby’s Mysterious Ways, which at this point is every bit as worn and tired as everything else Bourne related, fitting).

Terminator Genisys

Probably better in a language that you can’t understand.

WTF?
It’s kind of like the movie Clue, but with more Terminators and less humor.  Two sandmiches because the plane landed before I could partake in the entirety of this travesty.

The Force Awakens

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This post has some mild spoilers and catches on one of my primary complaints with the film: that it’s a rehash of the first Star Wars, only not quite as good.  The spoiler fight for this movie has been so successful in part because about five minutes in, even obtuse movie watchers like me have the whole movie pretty well figured out.  Announcing that people shouldn’t relate spoilers for Force Awakens would be like Warner Brothers announcing that spoilers should not be divulged for a Road Runner cartoon.

A TIE fighter-Millennium Falcon battle on a sand planet?!?  Mind: blown. 

There were some story and sci-fi quirks that I got hung up on as well (which is saying something considering the Star Wars reputation for ignoring both), but my big hang up was with the bad guys themselves.  Through the first two movies it was enough to know Empire: Bad, Rebels: Good.  Even by Jedi though this was starting to wear thin and into the newer Lucas trilogy one gets the impression that this whole galactic imbroglio is just some Skywalker intra/inter clan warfare writ large and Awakens does the franchise no favors by failing to resolve the whole good versus evil issue.

It would be rather easy to craft a narrative around a society’s never ending struggle to balance freedom (rebels) and security (empire).  However this narrative falls apart since the Empire doesn’t seem to have a desire to rule over anyone: they’re all about blowing up planets and building more crap with which to blow up planets.  If they wanted to rule over the galaxy it would be simple enough to use .00001% of the budget from one of their many Deathstar fiascos to buy off every politician in every governing body in the Galaxy (the Saudis have been doing it here for decades so that’s proof positive that it works).

Barring that, the only thing that seems to hold up is the Japanese anime view of the darkside consisting of evildoers whose only goal is to accelerate entropy or to embody entropy itself.  The only problem with this (and you may have noticed this), anime is not very popular with general audiences because this tact is stupid.  Bad guys who want to destroy the planet/galaxy/universe in order to “end suffering” or “eliminate the plague that is life” are not bad guys anyone outside of Japan can find any relation to.

This anime character wonders why his dreams can never come true.  Methinks that it might have something to do with, you know, trying to destroy the whole planet that everyone is living on.  Maybe he should start small, with a lego village or something.
Even for the worst of the 20th century’s tyrants they had a goal that they were trying to achieve.  It’s only when the bad guy has a goal that there can be an “anti-goal”, some motivation that drives the good guys and helps you sympathize with them.  There was one point in Awakens when I thought that the whole Republic/Rebel/New Order bit was going to come into focus: the rebels, abandoned by those that they fought so hard to free, are left to try and mop up the remnants of a technologically superior Empire with a mix of old war era equipment, older personnel, and reformed clones.  This would have been intriguing and would have given the audience something (anything) to relate to.  No dice though, that window closed in a matter of seconds and my brief look into a movie that could have been was gone.Three sandmiches: two for production values and one for one last race around the old track.

Extra Credit…
  • Black people came to the showing I was at and made a point to cheer on Black Jedi Dude.  It’s a shame because this character had the most complex possibilities but was pressed into a two dimensional form; good enough for some I suppose…
  • Some back and forth between friends about how Star Wars became a series of films even though it’s plain to see that it was never meant to be.  I thought this contrasted interestingly with Star Trek which could make a movie about the main characters (or even different characters in the same universe) playing poker all day and it would raise nary an eyebrow; at least if it was done properly (it certainly wouldn’t be the worst Star Trek film).
  • Hollywood has sadly gotten rather adept at crafting films like this that have no good or evil.  Liberalism would dictate that the bad guys are the freedom loving guys while the good guys are puritanical tyrants that want to force the galaxy to pay for midnight basketball on planet Brotha 9.  Well that doesn’t work, even for sympathizers, and the opposite would mean introspection of the horror of one’s ideals so…best to make an epic empty movie about nothing.  In the end this may have less to do with the Star Wars universe than the idiots tasked with creating the films.
  • There was a couple in the theater that stayed until the end of the credits.  I was hanging around out of site by the door waiting for Mrs. Sandmich when I heard the guy say “they nailed it”.  I wanted to ask him, “Nailed what?  The intro text?”.  Maybe this movie wasn’t made for me.  It did remind a bit of the Harry Potter films where if you aren’t enjoying it in the first few minutes then you’re watching the wrong movie.

Chick Flix

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Bunny Love

Not a movie, but first we have this offering from a Chinese version (of sorts) of Amazon:

The best thing that can be said for these is that they’re significantly less disturbing than the other animal heads on there which look to be made for bizarre Adult Swim bumpers.

Cinderella

The entire time that I was watching this I puzzled over why this movie exists; it’s not as if there’a dearth of live action Cinderella knock-offs.  The answer of course is in the movie theater full of cheering women: printing cash for Disney.  Women apparently can’t get enough of the “loser babe scores alpha male” story which is refreshing in it’s own way since such sentiments run so counter to PC “mores” and feminism generally.  So hooray for Cinderella and the Disney money machine that helps keep lefty extremism at bay despite their own efforts.  But as a guy, yeah, I don’t need to see another Cinderella movie again, ever.

The Snow White Murder Case

Quick: pick out the ugly one, the pretty one, the one that was murdered, and the killer, and some are one and the same.  It’s easier than you think.

This Japanese movie was sold to me by Sally as being a real plot-twister of a murder mystery.  Fifteen minutes in though I was reminded of when Memoirs of a Geisha came out ten years ago and there was much consternation over the fact that Japan couldn’t field any decent actresses so Hollywood had to go with Chinese actresses (“All you people look the same to me”).  The accusation at the time was that the animated form had stunted the ability of the Japanese to put together live-action productions.  I made this remark to Sally and she asked what was wrong with the movie and I said “well, the acting,…the directing, um, the cinematography, the script, and, well, yeah it’s like an over-funded high school movie project”.  I can capture the movie’s faults in one screen grab, where, in a rather important scene someone thought that it would be a good idea to put a color-shifting bowl of rotating water, a transparent LED toilet of sorts, in the background:

It doesn’t help that the bowl is more interesting than the actors

The movie did have a few strengths.  For instance, what was of mild interest, and what the movie should have concentrated more on, is the absolute pettiness that can accompany large groups of women working together.  Lots of ‘fun’ was on display such as women putting each other down for their clothes, making efforts to steal the office alpha-male (or what passes for one in a Japanese office), petty thefts, backstabbing, exaggerating stories told in confidence so that they can be crafted into a self esteem killing barbs, etc.  Yes it’s all in there and it goes to show that for as much as women may love the workplace, they rarely like working with, or especially for, other women.

It’s a shame that a movie that was so close to succeeding in being a cautionary tale on workplace feminization turned into such a hot, unfocused mess.  (Actually the movie could have just been about any one of the four things it tried to be about and it would have been better).

Empresses In The Palace   

The costume drama to end all costume dramas

While in China I may have mentioned that there was a historical soap opera of sorts that played nonstop on one of the channels.  Weighing in at a hefty 76, 45 minute episodes, it is a lot to take in, perhaps…

I bring this up since the series can now be viewed on Netflix in a truncated format: 6, 90 minute episodes.  Talk about a hatchet job!  How one edits this down without translating the whole thing I don’t know, so I’m unsure what the point of the exercise is.  The series is meticulous with their set design and costuming and is filmed on a set which is a recreation of the Forbidden City and is a tourist attraction in its own right.

The problem with the native series, not that I could understand any of it, is that at least 90% of it is women talking back and forth and back and forth and back and forth about palace intrigue BS (the other 10% is women boring men to tears with palace intrigue BS).  “No wonder they were always overrun by barbarians”, I thought while watching.  Sally complained that the Netflix series doesn’t make sense in its heavily edited format, but I can easily believe that a version of this series could be trimmed down to an even hour for male viewers.