Ubuntucat

I know I’m in the minority opinion on this one, but I found Wall-E disappointing. It wasn’t a bad movie. I don’t think it’s possible for Pixar to make a bad movie. It was, however, disappointing.

See, what’s great about Pixar movies is the whole package. Pixar movies (Wall-E excluded) tend to have it all. They have a good story, engaging scenes, refreshing humor, appeal to all age groups, stunning animation, character development, and proper pacing. When I see a non-Pixar movie, I expect something to be sacrificed. If the special effects and pacing are good, maybe the dialogue is awful or the jokes unoriginal. If the character development is good, maybe the plot is disjointed or the pacing is off.

Whether it’s only great movies (Cars, Monsters, Inc.) or amazing movies (Toy Story 2, The Incredibles), Pixar never sacrificed anything… until now. Wall-E is engaging. It’s funny. It’s cute. The animation is the best I’ve seen yet. That’s about all I can say for it, though. It isn’t a typical Pixar movie. The character development, almost nonexistent. The plot is lopsided and resolved too quickly. The conflict is mainly an external one. There is too much suspension of disbelief required (yes, even within the framework of the story) of the viewer.

Well, will people care? No, they’ll still see it. I still saw it. I still enjoyed it. I just hope that it’s a blip on the otherwise clear radar of Pixar greatness. I’m hoping the next Pixar movie won’t sacrifice plot and character development for special effects and humor. They’ve shown us many times that you can have your cinematic pie and eat it, too.

The New York Daily News recently published this article: ‘Wanted’ man Roman Polanski dodges legal bullet. Let me translate some chunks for you.

Polanski was, and remains, a brilliant film director. But to many people, particularly in America, he is most famously remembered for fleeing the country after pleading guilty to “unlawful sexual intercourse” with a 13-year-old girl who was modeling for him.

In case you’re wondering, the pedophilic rapist in question only pled guilty to this “crime,” and it doesn’t matter anyway, since he’s good at his normal job.

The original judge, Laurence Rittenband, was a publicity hound and celebrity sniffer who cared more about how he looked in the press than what happened to either Polanski or the 13-year-old girl.

Both the lead prosecutor and the defense attorney explain in great detail how the case was about to be resolved, with a guilty plea and no hard jail time. But Rittenband thought that might make him look bad, so he ignored judicial protocol and went back on his own promises, declaring instead he wanted Polanski in prison.

Ordinarily society will let someone who’s good at his normal job off the hook for raping a 13-year-old, but one judge decided a rapist of young girls should get some kind of actual punishment. He must have ulterior motives for doing so.

The fact that this film focuses more on the court than the crime will understandably bother some viewers, since offering drugs to naked 13-year-olds and having sex with them is conduct the average American finds repugnant.

Perhaps to balance this, the film talks extensively with the victim.

Her biggest frustration, she says, is that no one believed her, or that people felt she or her mother, who set up the photo session, must have done something wrong.

Yet the case clearly didn’t break her. She’s frustrated with the system, but she settled a civil suit against Polanski and publicly forgave him. She’s a mother of three who’s been married for 18 years. She seems OK.

In case you’re tempted to have a normal reaction to this horrendous crime and don’t really care for Roman Polanski’s films, let me try to justify the crime. It’s not really a crime. After all, the supposed victim seems okay. Life went on. It’s not like she committed suicide or anything. Geez.

It does note, however, that many of his greatest films, like “Chinatown” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” suggest there sometimes is no justice. Which would be a curiously dispassionate coda to a case and a life marked by so much fire.

C’est la vie.

Poor, poor brilliant pedophile rapist filmmaker. No justice for him. People should just leave the poor guy alone.

If you’re a rapist, you’re a rapist. If you’re a pedophile rapist, you’re a pedophile rapist. Or that’s the way it should be. Perhaps we should go find all the sex offenders in prison and see which ones of them might be brilliant performing musicians or innovative entrepeneurs if we just let them out of prison. After all, their victims might seem okay. Their victims, after thirty years, might be married and have kids. Right? And the judges in their cases might have had ulterior motives for sending them to prison. After all, raping 13-year-olds isn’t an offense that warrants a prison term… at least not for people who are good at their jobs.

Let’s take a look at the girl Polanski raped thirty years ago. From a 2003 article:

“Everything was going fine; then he asked me to change, well, in front of him,” she says. “It didn’t feel right, and I didn’t want to go back to the second shoot. But I didn’t at that time have the self-confidence to tell my mother and everyone, ‘No, I’m not going to go.’”

During that second shoot, Polanski’s motives became apparent.

“We did photos with me drinking champagne,” Geimer says. “Toward the end it got a little scary, and I realized he had other intentions and I knew I was not where I should be. I just didn’t quite know how to get myself out of there.”

Polanski sexually assaulted her after giving her a combination of champagne and Quaaludes.

Let’s see. It didn’t feel right, but she lacked the self-confidence to refuse (maybe this is why statutory rape laws exist?), and then he gave her alcohol and drugs and sexually assaulted her. What’s not wrong about this? Seriously.

I’m a male who is more than a decade younger than Polanski was at the time of the rape. I’m not a brilliant film director, but I’m pretty good at my job. I work in an admission office at a high school. Can you imagine if I told a 13-year-old applicant to take off her clothes, gave her drugs and alcohol, and then raped her? That would be awful. Since I’m not an Academy Award-Winning director, I’ll tell you what would happen. I’d be fired immediately, or at least temporarily suspended pending further investigation; ostracized from my church, family, and friends; given divorce papers immediately by my wife; and probably sent to prison for over a decade if not several decades, during which time I’d be tormented and raped by other prisoners. Yes, that’s what happens to pedophile rapists. And I doubt anyone would believe my defense if I said, “Uh, she seems okay now.”

Much as I loved Death and the Maiden, I can’t believe that not only is Roman Polanski walking free, but the the media is defending him. Yes, of course, the woman he raped when she was only 13 has been unbelievably strong and managed after thirty years to move on with her life, but that doesn’t make what he did any less wrong.

I always read film reviews. Sometimes I read them beforehand to try to gauge whether I want to see the film or not. Other times, I go into the film blindly and then read the reviews afterwards to see if they would have helped me to decide on whether to see it or not. In the case of Persepolis, I was glad to have gone in to the viewing “blindly.”

The user (not professional) reviews seemed to be a battle of variations of “I’m Iranian, and this makes America think worse of Iran” and “I’m Iranian, and this seems to be a pretty accurate picture of what it was like.” As always, with something that purports to be autobiographical, it was attacked as twisting history or being inaccurate in this or that way.

As someone who knows very little about Iran apart from 1980s US propaganda that generally portrayed all non-Israeli Middle-Eastern countries as windy deserts full of dark-skinned, angry, violent terrorist types (yes, I’m that American); I found it to portray (accurately or not) Iran and Iranians rather positively. More importantly, I don’t think the narrative of the film (I haven’t read the graphic novels yet, so I can’t comment on any difference there) in any way tries to put in a master narrative that says “This is what really happened.” The story is clearly told in its entirety from the point of view of the protagonist. When recounting her experiences in both Europe and Iran, she is honest about the limits of her perception. Either way, it portrays (accurately or inaccurately) Iran as a beautiful country that has gone through a lot of strife, with most people just trying to get by while governmental powers, both within and without, screw them over.

If I had any criticism of the film, it wouldn’t be of the film itself but of the protagonist—much as we sympathize with her because she is the main character, she is still a brat, in the end. She comes from privilege. Her parents and grandmother are a godly model of love to her, way beyond what she deserves. When she ends up destitute in Vienna, it appears to be fully her own fault, so it’s a little difficult to feel sorry for her… same with just about every “tragic” situation in the movie that doesn’t involve someone dying.

The brat can be cute and funny sometimes, though.

Last night I saw Beowolf 3D—quite a technological feat. Most of the movie looked “real”; even the movement of the characters was very smooth. The nudity in the film was interesting, though. I think most people are familiar with the Hollywood nudity double standard, but in Beowolf it was pronounced to the point of being laugh-out-loud comical (to me, at least—I may have been the only one in the whole theater laughing).

There’s one scene where Beowolf spends a considerable amount of time jumping around naked while fighting Grendel. The way they planned the storyboards, there was always something covering his penis, though: his other leg, the table, someone else, Grendel’s arm, a sword, the smoke from an explosion. It seemed as if everyone item and being in the room was in a joint conspiracy to say, “Quick! Hide Beowolf’s penis!” And yet when Angelina Jolie’s character appears, they have no qualms about showing her every inch… multiple times even.

Really, what is so threatening about a glimpse of an animated penis? Why can’t the MPAA get past this? Well, at least the makers of Beowolf made a good spectacle out of the double standard. The film would be a great archaelogical find for a freer society centuries from now.

P.S. Robert Redford, this time the AMC theater did not show me any commercials beforehand, and yet they managed not to charge an extra $3 per person for such an “amenity.”