Words are inadequate

After two seasons, I am saddened to report that Burn Notice is not My Show.

( Why not? )

Ralph Fiennes (dir.), Coriolanus

( Imagine Ian McKellen's Richard III with no sense of humor. )

It's no Muppet Movie, but it'll do.

80s Robot was absolutely perfect. Ditto Neil Patrick Harris. Jack Black, being somewhat Muppet-like himself, was acceptable.

The Muppets themselves are... not quite right, in a way that's both more subtle and more jarring than if they were actors fifty years older than their first performances. (Mostly noticeable in Kermit's singing, but bits of voice and characterization are off for many of them.)

Occasionally the self-referential humor felt heavy-handed. "We'll travel by map" worked for me; "This is gonna be a short movie," not so much. I think The Muppet Movie got away with it because it was a film-within-a-film.

Mostly it needed the human characters to not be the main focus. Also more Statler and Waldorf.

Good times. Recommended despite the nigh-Muppetless first twenty minutes.

(One of these days I'll get back to books. I'm currently about halfway through Anathem, which is sort of like the thinky bits of the Steerswoman books set in the New Sun universe, and is also nine hundred pages, so it'll be a bit.)

uilos and I watched Iron Man on Tuesday night, and were pretty underwhelmed. (It's been a very long time since I saw someone hack into a computer by using the simple command "Access secret files.") Evil bald Jeff Bridges was pretty awesome. Other than that. . . it snapped my disbelief suspenders at the point where the bad guy sees Stark testing some sort of flexible leg armor and neither kills him immediately nor demands to know what the hell he's doing, and I never really recovered. I don't require those hours of my life back, but I'm pretty sure I could have come up with a better use for them.

I mention this because I saw Iron Man 2 last night with nixve and am now of the opinion that the first one was a cinematic masterpiece. Yow. I can't recall ever seeing a movie quite that relentlessly mediocre. Explosions and robot fights and pseudoscience that was an order of magnitude worse than in the previous film ("Congratulations! You've just discovered a new element! I've analyzed it and it can serve as a replacement power source!") and just very very little to recommend it. You'd think it's hard to go wrong with giant flying robots beating each other up but Iron Man 2 manages it.

I'd like to think that a movie like this lives or dies on the strength of its supporting cast. . . but Samuel L. Jackson was a great Nick Fury, and Sam Rockwell did an amazing job as the slimy and barely-competent industrialist Justin Hammer, and I'm tempted to nominate Garry Shandling for the Senate because he would fit right in at any hearing, and even they couldn't make it worth watching. And evil bald Jeff Bridges has been replaced by evil scruffy Mickey Rourke ("so, just Mickey Rourke"), and Don Cheadle is utterly wasted as Stark's sidekick, and Scarlett Johansson exists solely to traipse through hallways beating up security guards for a scene.

As a two-hour trailer for The Avengers. . . it makes me not want to see any more superhero movies.

Jamin Winans (dir.), Ink

Every so often I get completely floored by something visual. The first time I noticed it, I was at an Ansel Adams exhibit a few years ago. It's also been known to happen with sunlight and fog coming together just so, or twisty art-glass, or even a particularly arresting turn of phrase (Ezra Pound's In a Station of the Metro, for instance).

Those are all static images. They give me time to sit and drink them in and have my attempts at right-brain processing be overwhelmed. Something dynamic can do this too but it's much harder: my brain can shrug the image off and move on to the next one. Certain effects in Metroid Prime will do it, or the goldfish from Dark City.

Or Ink, from about the third scene on through to the end. Seriously. As soon as the first Storyteller appeared (and I do mean "appeared") on the screen, I was hooked. Transfixed. The sheer visual artistry. . . this, to quote Douglas Adams, is total adjective failure.

There's a plot. It's a good one. There's a mythos, and it's a bit weaker than the visuals deserve, but only a bit. (A world with so many literal hues deserves better than black-and-white Good and Evil.) There are characters. They have depth, and grow, and carry the story quite well.

I'm being deliberately vague, because a great deal of the fun, after the first two scenes, is trusting that the movie will tell you what you need to know, and being carried along on the ride.

See this. It's on Hulu for free, or for purchase on DVD direct from the producers (who are the director and his wife).

Drew Barrymore (dir.), Whip It

There's a video game called Darkened Skye that's based on, of all things, Skittles. Somehow the developers managed to make it better than a video game based on candy has any right to be, through a combination of acceptable platform/action gameplay, witty self-aware banter, and a kick-ass heroine.

Whip It's kind of like that for sports movies. The plot: Bliss's mother wants her to do beauty pageants. Bliss discovers roller derby and joins a losing team, propelling them to the championship by her sheer awesomeness. Hijinks and teenage angst ensue. There's a boy from the big city, a fight with her best friend, the obligatory tension with her mother, and the possibility of missing the big championship match. And despite all that, it's so much better than any movie based on a sport (even roller derby) ought to be.

It has Ellen Page ("Juno") being awesome, and Drew Barrymore being kinda spacey, and a couple of deaf characters that aren't played for laughs but are just there. The fairly pedestrian plot has a bunch of interesting bits around the edges: a love story with a non-stupid resolution that doesn't take over the movie, parents that act like real parents, teenaged drinking and sex shown in a non-judgemental way. and some good characters. And it's just plain fun to watch.

Also, I think it's the first movie I've seen that fails the reverse Bechdel test, which makes me happy. There's some very brief interaction between Bliss's dad and the dad next door, but that's about Bliss. The coaches from two of the teams have a brief conversation during a match, but since the teams are all-female, this is arguably two guys talking about women. (Also, I don't remember if the other team's coach had a name or not.) And other than that, there aren't scenes of two guys talking to each other.

The sheer small-town-Southern atmosphere overwhelmed me for awhile. The movie does a very good job of evoking the desperation and dead-end-ness of life in such a place, to the extent that I spent the first fifteen or twenty minutes squirming in my chair. It got better once Bliss got to Austin for the first time, but still. . . yeesh.

(The internets inform me that the screenwriter based the screenplay on her novel Derby Girl, which one reader summed up as "Too much boyfriend. Not enough roller derby." I am happy to report that she adjusted the proportions in the film version.)

Armando Iannucci (dir.), In the Loop

This is a comedy about going to war. Not war itself, but the process of getting there, through the eyes of British ministers and US State Department functionaries. In particular, it focuses on the naive and bumbling MP Simon Hunt, the vicious communications minister Malcolm Tucker, and Simon's new assistant Toby, with dozens of supporting cast members on both sides of the Atlantic.

It's very very funny. Lines like "I will marshal all the media forces of darkness to hound you to an assisted suicide" and "I am, however, going to have to read you excerpts from the Riot Act" pop up everywhere. (Many of the best lines are in the trailer, which I recommend unreservedly.) There's a bit of 'embarrassment comedy,' where the nominal amusement comes from watching people put in impossible situations, but it's kept to a minimum and manages to be genuinely funny.

It's also sort of a political thriller, with lots of double-crossing and manipulativeness. That part was still pretty well done, but felt a bit. . . off, towards the end. Alliances break and shift as the war planning lurches on, and careers are made and ruined. That part was. . . less funny, and more painful to watch.

Two scenes with Linton (the warmonger in the State Dept) in particular come to mind. In the first, he's altering the minutes of a meeting so that they reflect the "truth" of the situation; in the last, he's being an intensely control-freakish jerk for the sake of being a control freak. Both of those, but especially the last, pushed him from "amusing" over to "downright evil," and sort of broke past the "funny" part into "deeply uncomfortable."

Recommended if you're looking for a comedy that ends on a discomfiting note. Also, "Difficult, difficult, lemon difficult" has now entered my vocabulary.

(Wiki sez it's a spin-off of a BBC-TV series. I'm not sure if I want to see the series or not.)

John M. Ford, The Princes of the Air

An early work. The cover looks like bad late-sixties space opera. It's actually really really good early-eighties space opera wrapped around several cons and a lot of political intrigue. There's no knock-yer-socks-off OMG moment, just constantly building action and tension and joy in the ease with which the characters plot and carry out their schemes.

The book is hardly perfect, even for what it is. The main antagonist is introduced late in the book (a flaw it arguably shares with the otherwise transcendent _Dragon Waiting_), and only one of the three around-for-more-than-two-pages female characters is much more than a cipher. But it's a fun quick romp.

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Gus van Sant (dir.), My Own Private Idaho

I'm not sure I would have been able to figure out that this was based on _Henry IV_ if I hadn't known that going into it. Van Sant stripped out all the plot in the play and turned it into a character study of Prince Hal. Which works alright; he's basically slumming until such time as he's ready to assume his role in upper-crust society, at which time he discards all his previous friends.

Including River Phoenix's gay prostitute who's searching for his mother and in love with the Hal character. I guess adding in the unrequited love story gives Hal a bit more dimension to his utterly cold calculation? It's definitely necessary for Hal to have someone other than Falstaff to play off of if you're removing Hotspur from the script entirely.

It's a neat idea, and it mostly works. It doesn't always make sense if you try and analyse it from the perspective of having a coherent plot but if you can relax and watch the characters unfold, you get some perspective on parts of human nature.

I'm about ninety-five percent certain that the scene in which River Phoenix and Udo Kier meet for the first time takes place on Capital Hill . . . the slope and the waterfront and the houses are just too familiar. But since the movie was made in 1991 I didn't actually recognise anything.

Joan Slonczewski, A Door Into Ocean

Feminist spec-fic, and quite good. Shora's an ocean planet occupied entirely by raft-dwelling women (yay parthenogenesis), who are in imminent danger of being absorbed by the Patriarchy (yes) of Korr. The first half of the book covers a young boy's absorption into the culture of Shora; in the second half, the war begins, and ends.

I don't really know how to write about this book; everything I think of to say is trite plot summary, nothing about the details or the ideas (and o are there ideas). Gandhi, and fear as the root of all evil actions, and forgiveness and a refusal to become corrupted. The interconnectedness of all things, the Shoran's lack of any distinction between (e.g.) the verbs 'I talk' and 'I listen.'

The more I think about it the more I can see the plot gears grinding. In places something's introduced solely so it can be used as a plot element ten pages later; despite their lack of curiousity the Shorans are required to have advanced biological knowledge and laboratories; if one of the women didn't fall in love / lust with the boy there wouldn't be the emotional connection needed to keep him there.

It works, though. At the moment of reading it's compelling enough that you overlook those flaws; afterwards there's enough interesting stuff that's gone on that they can be overlooked or handwaved. I'm not sure that it's any competition for Ursula K. le Guin, but it's a fine entry in the canon.

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Christopher Nolan (dir.), The Prestige

Well. The bones of the story are still there, and a good deal of the musculature. But the skin and some of the shape have been bent and discolored out of recognition. What we have here is a book that's made the transition to movie by taking the neat things that work in print and changing them to a bunch of other, equally neat, things that work onscreen.

The character conflicts are a bit more melodramatic: Angier's wife, instead of miscarrying, dies herself, and Angier's vengeance on Borden starts an ugly escalation of a feud that more or less destroys them both. (But you knew that from the first few minutes of the movie.) (Digression: I could have stood to see a bit more emphasis of the parallels between the Edison/Tesla rivalry and the two magicians: there's some of that but not quite enough to make me happy. Or maybe I just want more Tesla.) In general the melodrama works well with the constraints of a movie, showing more in less time. It felt contrived to /me/ but then I knew more or less the whole story going in.

All the performers are of course excellent. Christian Bale and Michael Caine seem incapable of giving poor performances, and Hugh Jackman and Scarlet Johansen seem intent on becoming a Real Actor and Actress. (The woman playing Borden's wife also did a fantastic job. I feel kind of bad for having no idea who she is.) And David Bowie's Tesla steals every scene he's in. ("What you ask is not impossible; it is simply expensive." "Because exact science, Mr Angier, is not an exact science.")

The end of the movie has closure and resolution, unlike the book (at least on first read). I felt like a bit much was spelled out for the audience in the closing monologues but they still work. (I suspect I demand that my movies be smart enough that I don't get everything on first viewing, and complelling enough to watch again. Easier to do with books, I suppose.)

Like Memento and The Sixth Sense, certainly worth watching if you don't know the gimmick, and probably worth watching if you do know it to see all the ways it gets used.