Short New Year’s Reviews!

OK, I lied – these have nothing to do with New Year’s, except for the fact that I have lots more free time around this time of year and my parents like to watch movies, so I have a lot more filmic contributions this time.

Porco Rosso (Studio Ghibli, 1992) – I generally enjoy Studio Ghibli films, and this one was no exception. During the rise of Italian fascism, sea-plane pirates pose a threat to ships all around the Adriatic, and only one bounty-hunter pilot is good enough to stop them. They call him Porco Rosso, and, a long time ago, he was cursed with the appearance of a giant, man-sized pig. The pirates hire a young American hotshot to blast him out of the skies. Porco’s new rival also takes an interest in the woman for whom he bears a silent torch. Can Porco defeat him in the air and on the ground?

What I like best about this film is it doesn’t actually answer either of those questions, but it’s still extremely satisfying. There are the familiar Hayao Miyazaki motifs: funny, fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants pirates,  antagonists who turn out to be decent people, cool flying machines, a real enemy that turns out to be much worse than any of the characters we’ve met so far. I enjoy how Miyazaki trusts the intelligence of his viewers: he explains how Porco turned into a pig, but never exactly why, and it’s up to the audience to realize what happened and what it means for him to turn back into a man. Anyway, the characters are engaging, the plot is just clear enough (by turns realistic and zany), and there are plenty of cool action sequences, engaging characters, and tension-filled moments.

various Nero Wolfe books (Rex Stout) – I know I said a while ago Nero Wolfe, best and fattest fictional detective in New York City during the early-to-mid twentieth century, is one of my favourite fictional characters, but he’s starting to wear a little thin (no pun intended). Maybe it’s because I’ve started watching a couple episodes of House, M. D., and having two characters with similar attitudes has just put me over the top. Look, I like characters who are a**holes when the story acknowledges that the things that make them a**holes are sometimes bad.

What bugs me about Nero Wolfe and Gregory House is the reasons in real life why we think some of the a**hole things they do actually are a**hole things is that they don’t always work: for instance, the reason we have things like search warrants in the first place is because otherwise you might end up searching other people’s homes WHEN THEY HAVEN’T DONE ANYTHING AND IT DOESN’T HELP YOUR CASE. But when Wolfe (or House, for that matter) illegally searches someone’s home, he’s ALWAYS right. The implication is that he knows what’s best for you, and if you don’t like it, that’s because you’re not smart enough to see that he’s right. But I can’t disagree more – I might think that you’re stupid to smoke cigarettes or bungee jump or not be the same religion as me, but the point is, I don’t get to make that decision for you. Or, if I do, it’s as the result of a long, deeply examined, public process where your arguments count as much as mine, not because I am naturally a superior genius and everyone must do what I say. In other words, just once it would be nice to have one of Wolfe’s clients say, actually, I’d rather have the right to my personal privacy than find out who the murderer is, and Wolfe not immediately call them a moron. Especially because any of his concerns about his own personal privacy, sometimes equally relevant to the case, are not debatable, and that’s that.

Also, as much as I love the voice of Archie Goodwin (when he’s not being overtly sexist and racist, anyway), some of the stories just don’t make sense, so it’s hard to believe Wolfe is going on anything but intuition. Like, if you’re an impostor who’s trying to squeeze money out of someone, and you want to avoid discovery, the best way to avoid prison that is NOT to flagrantly murder the three people who could tell that you’re an impostor!

It’s a Wonderful Life (RKO, 1946) – Of course I’ve seen this before, but, hey, it was something I watched over the past week. On one hand, it’s such a sappy movie, and it embraces a lot of awful 1946 attitudes. (OMG, you mean if George had never been born, his wife Mary would have been AN OLD MAID????!!1one!!! Call out the army – no woman should have to waste her life by living without a man!) On the other, something in it still resonates with me. I think it’s because both my parents have a George-Bailey attitude: they raised my sister and me to think that your responsibilities to others come before your ambitions for yourself. And I do like how George is shown to be not a saint: he shouts at Uncle Billy that he’s not going to be the one who goes to prison for the missing money; he yells at his daughter’s teacher; and he blows up at his family for no reason. Besides, it always makes my mom cry and then harass the rest of us for not crying – what could be more fun than that?

Son of Rambow (2007) – In 1980s Britain, a naive young boy who belongs to an anti-technology religious sect known as the Brethren makes friends with a budding filmmaker who is also a jerk, and together they make a hilarious sequel to Rambo: First Blood. I expected a little more from this movie on the comedy and creativity front than I got – the themes are fairly familiar and rather superficial, and while there are some hilarious gags, in an understated British fashion, most of them aren’t laugh-aloud. Still, it’s a well made film with an interesting story and likable characters (and it totally helps that the two boys are excellent actors – now I’m especially excited to see Will Poulter as Eustace in Voyage of the Dawn Treader.) Watch for the flying dog.

World of Goo (2D Boy, 2008, PC) – I’ve just recently got into video game reviews and even sort of into buying and playing video games (hey, many cost about the same as a book these days, but they last longer and you can’t get ’em at the library for free. Well, not legally). So bear with me. World of Goo is a puzzle game for the whole family in which you find yourself stuck with a bunch of chirruping balls of goo. The goo balls want to get to a pipe, which is somewhere in the level, usually guarded by obstacles. To get the goo balls to the pipe, you’ve got to build bridges and towers from the goo, roughly in the same way you might build those structures in real-life with toothpicks and marshmallows. Trouble is, the goo balls also obey realistic laws of physics – build your bridge too long or your tower too high without adequate support, and it’ll fall down. Once your structure gets close enough to the pipe, the remaining goo balls crawling around on it get sucked up, and that’s your score.

The game is really pretty to look at and listen to, really easy to control, and delightfully quirky. What seems to be a simple concept gets complicated (and addictive) pretty quickly, as new types of goo, pipes, and obstacles are introduced. The game is never very difficult, and there’s a clever feature that lets you skip any level you can’t manage – you won’t find yourself doing the same puzzle over and over and over again, not even close to the end, but sometimes you will have to think outside the box. If you want a harder challenge, you can try to complete every level to Obsessive Completion Distinction (OCD) criteria, usually specifying the number of goo balls you need to save but sometimes setting restrictions on time, moves made, etc.

Did I enjoy this game? Heck, yeah – my one complaint is that the puzzles can be a little too easy, but the OCD part remedies that. Besides, how can anyone of any age not enjoy a game where every time you build closer to the goal, one of the things you’re building with shouts, “Yippee!”?

Star Trek: Nemesis (Paramount Pictures, 2002) – This is why I’m kind of scared for the new Star Trek movie coming out next year. The director has said that it’s going to be action-oriented, and I can’t help but think that action isn’t what makes Star Trek work. Nemesis is chock-full of action, and while it’s cool to see our heroes drive an ATV off a cliff into the aft bay of a waiting shuttle, what ultimately makes this movie sag is its lacklustre elements of mystery and introspection. This movie doesn’t ask seriously why and how a political body would make a clone of Picard and what that clone might do if it survived. It doesn’t have anything interesting to say about identity. (Unless there no identical twins anywhere else in the Star Trek universe…) It asks how a movie can attract new fans to a series with dwindling popularity. There isn’t a heartstring it doesn’t try to tug, or a really nifty special effect it doesn’t try to cram in.

Which is cool, if that’s what you’re after. And of course, it’s terrific fun to watch Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner, Michael Dorn, and the rest reunite. But I guess I wish these most recent movies were a little less like Star Wars and a little more like the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation I liked best – you know, like the one where Data was lying about how many days had passed and the crew couldn’t figure out why; or where people kept disappearing, and only Dr. Crusher noticed; or when Data started having crazy dreams and it turned out that the ship was giving birth to a parasitic creature; or when Q sent Picard to three different times to save humanity… </nerdiness>

Star Trek Phase II (fan series) – Let’s get this out of the way: the acting gets better with each Phase II episode, but it misses the mark with surprising regularity. There. But if you’re a fan of the original Star Trek – if the lines “You Klingon b*****d, you killed my son!” or “He’s worse than dead… his brain is gone!” mean anything to you, then this shouldn’t matter very much. OK, so Scotty’s accent sometimes slips and Ensigns Freeman and Kirk (Peter, that is, not James T.) sometimes look frankly uncomfortable with their romantic scenes (to be fair, this may be because their costumes make them look like Mario and Luigi), but this is a solid script with a thought-provoking story and excellent technical values (especially considering it’s 100% not-for-profit and fan-made).

One of the things that’s best about Phase II is its ability to delve into themes and issues that couldn’t (and often still can’t) be considered during the actual series. Because it’s fanfiction, they can (gasp!) have storylines about characters other than the three white males who are the linchpins of almost every Star Trek episode. (I love Kirk, Spock, and McCoy as much as the next Trekker, but the focus on them does get a little overwhelming). They can have overt homosexual romances. They can end stories the way that best suits the theme (eg. allowing a main character to die; keeping a story element that would be troublesome to deal with in a weekly series) because purposeful non-continuity is OK in fanfiction.

So, yeah, if you like Star Trek, I highly recommend Phase II. You can download most of the series at www.startreknewvoyages.com , though I’d start with the third episode (the script of which was nominated for a Nebula, if memory serves) and work your way from there. If you don’t like fanfiction, try it – it just might change your mind.

And last (because I wanted to mentioned a spoiler at the very, very end – but it’s marked!) but not least…

The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman) – I was saving this to read as a reward when I was finally done my work. In doing so, of course, I learned that a) work is NEVER done, and, b) you’re never quite as excited to read something when you have only until the end of winter break as you are when it first arrives in an amazon.ca package and you have five essays to do.

Still, I am a sucker for ghost stories about nurturing, loving, and/or helpful ghosts AND for books by Neil Gaiman,  so I really enjoyed this novel. Gaiman’s writing is, as always, mind-drainingly absorbing, and his characters are interesting, too. The Graveyard Book is the jungle-book-like story of Bod, a boy who’s raised by a graveyard full of ghosts (and various other supernatural beings) after his parents and sister are murdered in the first few pages by the man Jack.

I have but two pieces of advice and one caveat to the potential reader. The first piece of advice is, if you are the sort of person who gets really upset when any story, regardless of its tone, neglects details like “Where the heck would this kid go to the bathroom for fourteen years?”, then maybe you should avoid this book.

Happily, the second piece of advice is, if the first didn’t apply to you, and the caveat doesn’t turn you off (don’t worry, it’s not a big deal), then, gosh, run out and grab a copy!

The caveat is this: part of what makes this story so interesting is the mystery inherent in the events of the first chapter. Part of the fun comes from knowing that Bod, who doesn’t know the name he was born with, is somehow extremely important to this sinister homicidal maniac. More of the fun comes from the knowledge that eventually, the reader and Bod will find out why. But the answer, when it comes, is mildly underwhelming. In other words… (spoilers follow the spacers)

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… NO MORE PROPHECIES! Seriously, fantasy writers! It’s the least entertaining solution, usually because a) there’s almost always a better, non-prophecy motivation for the characters’ actions; and b) the reader can almost always make up the idea of a prophecy on their own. It’s neither creative nor surprising. (see: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe)

And that’s all she wrote! Happy new year, everyone, and see you in 2009!