Category: Film and TV

Being that two of my JA.O blogmates have posted recently on the topic of super-heroes, I had to throw in my two pfennigs.

A few weeks ago our family acquired (cheap) a copy of the original (Adam West) Batman movie (1966).

Okay, I admit it… I have no taste. I like this movie better than any of the darker, more recent Batman films (except Batman Forever) and it is a guilty pleasure that I have passed on to my kids. They have really enjoyed it. One measure of the success of a film in our house is when we go around for weeks afterward inserting bits of the dialogue into our everyday speech. Batman 1966 qualifies in spades.

The movie is campy, fun, clean, goofy, brimming with Bat-gadgets and fisticuffs, and boasts the greatest cast of Bat-villains ever. Like the classic Looney Toons, the humor of the movie (as well as the series) operates on different levels. As a kid I missed a lot of the grown-up jokes and sexual innuendo, but had a blast, anyway.

For the record, in this film Batman is intensely heterosexual.

The main reason I’m posting on Batman, though, is a scene toward the end of the film, where the President of the United States makes an appearance (more or less… we see his chair and one arm from behind). He sports a generic Texas twang and, though it isn’t really a straight impersonation, it is obviously meant to represent then President Lyndon Johnson.

What’s weird is that, though it doesn’t sound like Johnson, the voice sounds remarkably, uncannily like George W. Bush.

SEE IF IT DOESN’T!

[JIMMY ADDS: If you watch this movie, don’t miss the MUST SEE (!) "Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb!’ scene. It’s hilarious!]

[JIMMY ALSO ADDS: There’s an interesting episode of the Batman TV series in which they play off Lyndon Johnson’s political misfortunes and the fact that due to his unpopularity he didn’t run for re-election when he legally could have. In this episode, Batman is running for mayor of Gotham City in order to stop a villain from getting the post, and the episode is transparently meant to be a "Batman runs for president" episode under the surface (e.g., they mention the cowboys and indians voting in the western precincts of Gotham City). At the end of the episode, after Batman has won and turned the mayorship over the the guy who really should be mayor, he is in Commissioner Gordon’s office when he receives a phone call from a major, unnamed political party asking him to be their presidential candidate. He politely declines, but he and the commissioner comment on how nice it was of "them" to ask. At this point, we have no idea which party it was that asked, but then Batman gets another call, from the other political party, asking him the same thing, and he replies, "I . . . thought your party already had a presidential candidate for 1968." ZING!]

When I saw this cover on the Drudge Report, I grimaced.

Why would The Advocate–a notorious homosexual magazine–be running a cover story asking "How gay is Superman?" and showing a picture from the upcoming movie Superman Returns?

Did it mean that the actor picked to play Superman (about whom I know nothing) is gay? Did it mean that the movie contains a homosexual theme or plot element?

The answer to those two questions is, apparently, "no," for which I am relieved.

Instead, according to the L.A. Times, The Advocate’s article dealt with an attempt to view superheroes in a homosexual light.

This is something that is not that surprising.

I don’t know precisely what to attribute it to, but the homosexual community frequently seeks to reinterpret wholesome American icons in homosexual terms.

That’s why so many men in homosexual parades dress up as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, or why the idea of gay cowboys in Brokeback Mountain struck such a note with the homosexual community. Re-reading superheroes in this light looks like a continuation of the same theme of the homosexualization of what is in itself wholesome and innocent.

I can only imagine that those in the gay community who do this kind of thing take a kind of perverse delight in reinterpreting icons of goodness and decency in this fashion. In that perverse delight, by definition, there is an element of perversity that would infuriate many in the gay community if it were labelled with a particular noun which is a cognate of "perverse" and a synonym for "perversity."

Unfortunately, those in the homosexual community who are doing this kind of thing are not without collaborators.

That explains why D.C. Comics would allow the reinterpretation of Batwoman as a "lipstick lesbian" (which, I discovered, is a lesbian who cultivates a feminine rather than a "butch" appearance). The announcement of that was particularly disgusting to me, since I remember the original Batwoman from reprints of old Batman stories that I read as a child, and the original Batwoman was created as a love interest for Batman himself.

It also explains why–according to the L.A. Times story–the marketing department promoting Superman Returns is apparently advertising the movie in homosexual venues in an attempt to pull in gay moviegoers–but without alienating the straight community that is expected to form the core audience of the film.

I can only view such efforts with contempt.

While the film itself is meant to be a thematic followup to the first two Superman movies, which were quite good, if Warner Brothers is specifically trying to get the gay community out to see this film in order to play off of a desire to subvert wholesome American images so that it can make more money then it is contributing to the subversion and homosexualization of American culture.

GET THE STORY.

The Media Research Center has an interesting new report comparing the MSM’s coverage of The Da Vinci Code compared to its coverage of The Passion of the Christ.

THERE’S A NOTABLE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO.

Is anyone shocked?

I basically don’t watch TV any more. Most TV shows–even ones that I like and intend to watch–don’t motivate me to tune in each week. So what I’ve done with such shows is to just watch them on DVD when they come out.

That way I don’t have the hassles of commercials or having to tune in each week or being frustrated by cliffhangers (except for the season finale).

That’s the up side. The down side is that I also have to wait a really long time between getting to see seasons of the show, but it works for me.

I’ve just started watching the second season of The 4400, which just arrived in the mail, and so far I’m pleased. The opening episode is two hours (well, 90 minutes) long, and it serves as an effective reintroduction to the premise and cast of the show–though  the first few minutes of it were a little rough given how long it’d been since I saw season one.

You may not have heard of The 4400 since it’s not getting that much publicity, but here are the basics: It’s a show that airs on the USA Network and–like other USA Network shows (such as Monk)–it has really short seasons (12 episodes in the second, and even less in the first). But they’re trying to do quality rather than quantity, which is what is important to me.

The show was co-created by Rene Echevarria, who was one of the best writers on Next Gen and DS9. It also has Ira Stephen Behr as a regular writer. He also was one of the best Next Gen/DS9 writers. It was their names which got me to watch the first season, and I wasn’t disappointed.

The premise is that, beginning in 1941, a bunch of people–4400 of them (big surprise)–were abducted, apparently by aliens (though we’re later told that isn’t the case) and then returned–all at the same moment–in the present day.

When they were returned, the government did the only sensible thing: It locked them up.

But eventually it was determined that they didn’t seem to be a threat to themselves or others, and so they were released. The government’s still watching them, still trying to figure out what’s up with the whole getting abducted and then being returned all at once thing. It’s a good thing that the government’s watching, because a few of the 4400 start manifesting unusual abilities that even they don’t understand or know why they have.

The writing on the show is quite good, and Echevarria and his team have avoided some of the obvious traps that a series like this could fall into. The government is not persecuting the 4400. It’s acting reasonably. We don’t have an evil government versus righteous 4400 plot. This isn’t a standard good versus evil show. Both members of the 4400 and the normal population are shown being good and bad, helpful and creepy.

That ambiguity is the stuff that human drama is made of.

Let me give you an example of a really nice bit of writing from the series pilot episode, which shows insight into the human condition:

One of the guys we see get abducted is an American serviceman in the Korean War. When we meet him, he’s not aware that he’s about to be abducted, and with an especially good reason since he has other things to worry about at the moment: He’s getting the snot beat out of him by fellow American servicemen.

Why are they doing that?

A clue is found in the fact that he’s black and they’re white and it’s 1951, just after the integration of the armed forces.

Now the standard, easy thing to do in the writing here would be to chalk the snot kicking incident up to simple, straightforward racism: They’re bigots who view him as sub-human. But that’s not what happens.

Instead, as his fellow servicemen are leaving, one of them turns to the gentleman and says: "We treated you like an equal. . . . But that wasn’t good enough for you."

All of a sudden we’re not in familiar territory anymore. They’re not the kind of simple, unadulterated bigots we were expecting. They were willing to treat him like an equal–or at least they thought they did so.

So what was it that sparked the incident?

We find out when they leave and the serviceman looks at a photograph of himself and his white girlfriend.

Now it all makes sense!

His fellow servicemen are bigots! But they’re not the simple, stereotypical bigots we were expecting. They’re a bunch of "separate but equal" bigots. Their racism isn’t simple, unalloyed hostility towards black people. It’s tempered in a way that makes them and their motives–and the writing of the show–more complex.

And it’s a fully believable moment that shows insight into the human condition: This kind of thing could and did happen in 1951. We have an example of racist evil in this scene, but it shows more subtlety and thus deeper insight into human psychology than the simple, comic book racism we’re used to seeing on screen.

There’s also a nice bit when the serviceman is returned–along with the other 4400–in the present day: As he’s sitting in the detention center with the other returnees, he’s reading a magazine and he exclaims: "What? The Secretary of State is colored!"–at which point another character, abducted years later, walks by and corrects him and says, "Black."

(What would have been even better here is if another abductee then walked by and said, "Afro-American" and then a third walked by and said "African American." That also would have showed the evolving racial situation, but the writers didn’t go in that direction.)

Once he is released from the detention center, the serviceman has culture shock at seeing a genuinely integrated society and as being treated–for real this time–as an equal and one who can cross racial boundaries and isn’t expected to remain separate. But he gets over his culture shock and is able to fit in to 21st century society . . . at least as well as a member of the 4400 can.

That shows you the kind of writing you can expect in the series. It’s more complex than the run-of-the-mill, hackneyed stuff you’d get on most shows of the type, just as Echevarria’s and Behr’s scripts were better and more complex than typical Star Trek stuff. Now that they’re freed from the (amazingly tight) shackles that Star Trek writers were under, they have a chance to spread their wings, and I’m enjoying watching the results.

It’s the same kind of situation as with Battlestar Galactica–where DS9 veteran Ron Moore got the chance to spread his wings.

The second season opener–the only ep I’ve watched so far–has some nice touches as well.

There is, unfortunately, a violent, Fundamentalist zealot in it, but I can accept that since some Fundamentalists would react negatively to the 4400 in real life (and the one in the show is able to cite a verse from Revelation that does sound like the events of the series).

(Also like Battlestar Galactica, there are interesting religious themes in the series, that I’m curious to see how and if the writers will pay off.)

Summer Glau (River from Firefly/Serenity) makes an appearance as a mental patient and does her usual excellent job playing a mentally disturbed young woman.

Jeffrey Coombs (Weyoun from DS9) also has a cameo, which may turn into a regular part. It’s nice to see him without prosthetic makeup.

And an H. P. Lovecraft book plays a significant role at a crucial moment in the plot.

CHECK OUT THE FIRST SEASON.

OR THE SECOND.

SONY hasn’t learned its lesson and has optioned two more of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon books for sequels to The Da Vinci Code.

The first sequel is the book Angels & Demons (which was actually published to no special fanfare years before The Da Vinci Code), which deals with the Illuminati and their plot against the Catholic Church and . . . are you ready? . . . killing people at the Vatican with antimatter!

Also, the pope has fathered a child out of wedlock with a nun, but to avoid breaking a vow he didn’t have sex with her instead used artificial insemination.

Obviously this pope had a degree in moral theology before becoming pope.

And a degree in canon law. (The vow is to not get married, not to not have sex; the latter is an entailment of not getting married. And it isn’t even a vow in unless he’s a religious; it’s a promise.)

And a real sense of fun. (I mean, he committed a mortal sin to have a child, and he didn’t even commit the enjoyable one.)

MORE INFO HERE.

The next sequel–based on the book Brown is currently writing–is set in America and deals with Freemasons.

MORE ON THE SEQUELS FROM A HOLLYWOOD PERSPECTIVE.

That’s the question I was asking myself thirty minutes into The Da Vinci Code.

Of course, I knew intellectually who the characters were before I stepped into the theater, but the film did next to nothing to tell me who they were and it did absolutely nothing to establish them as presences on screen who I should care about. They’re just emotionally null images who show up and start running around and doing . . . stuff.

Lots of  . . . stuff.

Like . . . y’know . . . driving around in cars backwards in traffic really fast and looking at secret messages written in ink that only shows up in ultraviolet light and talking a lot about symbolism and God and getting shot at repeatedly and . . . and . . .  and the Mona Lisa was in it, too! (For about five seconds.) . . . And there were a couple of churches . . . I think.

Oh! And the movie was set in France! Yes! I definitely remember that! France was in the movie!

The movie was a horrible, horrible mess. I mean, you may have thought that The Big Sleep was hard to follow, but that’s nothing compared to the mess that The Da Vinci Code is. The Big Sleep also has one big advantage over this movie: The Big Sleep is actually interesting.

Not Opie’s latest opus!

Man, is it boring! B-O-R-I-N-G!

Its boringness virtually overwhelmes its offensiveness. I kept yawning audibly through the whole thing.

It fails to establish who the characters are. It fails to establish their motives. It fails to establish why we should care about them. It fails to establish what they’re thinking. It fails to establish how they know what they know. It’s just a huge, sprawling, poorly-communicated mess.

And the overdramatic soundtrack is frequently shrilling overdramatically to tell you that this is a dramatic (!) movie because nothing you’re seeing on the screen is telling you that.

And somebody apparently spiked Richie Cunningham’s drink with a tab of acid, because there’s all these flashbacks and hallucinations and visions interrupting in the middle of sentences every five minutes, like when they’re going to Isaac Newton’s tomb and all of a sudden–for no reason at all, mind you–Mulder and ScullyLangdon and Neveu are suddenly surrounded by all these people from the 18th century, which only the audience (not the characters) can see.

Other film critics have talked about how there is no chemistry between Tom Hanks and the French actress who is in the Agent Scully role, but they’re not telling you the half of it! I mean, these two characters are so emotionally inert that from now on the nuclear waste management agency will be using their relationship to insulate spent uranium rods.

The only time the movie gets a little interesting is when Ian McKellan shows up as a walking anagram who hates the Church and is obsessed with the Holy Grail and injects a bit of humor into the movie.

He gets both of the movie’s intentionally funny lines.

One occurs when he is bluffing his and his manservant’s way past the police by telling them, "I’ve got a medical appointment that I can’t be late for, so if you are really that determined to stop us, you’ll just have to shoot us."

Then he jerks his head toward his manservant and says, "Start with him."

The other intentionally funny line occurs when McKellan has been unmasked as a villain (You weren’t expecting a spoiler-free review, were you?) and as he’s being bundled into a police car, he’s shouting hysterically about Tom Hanks: "That man has a map to the Holy Grail!"

Okay, you kinda have to be there for that one, but in context it was funny, and deliberately so.

That’s not the case with most of the funny lines in the movie. One of the best unintentionally funny lines is when Agent Scully is musing over the fact that Mary Magdalen’s sarcophagus has been moved and she says . . .

<overdramatic petulant French girl voice>The Church, did they finally . . . "get her"?</overdramatic petulant French girl voice>

Or when the Opus Dei cop tells another French cop who is a major character (his boss? his partner? his junior? his peer?) that he got a call from an Opus Dei bishop who told him that he’d just heard the confession of a killer named Fox MulderRobert Langdon and that’s why he’s so fanatically obsessed with catching Tom Hanks.

Some images in the movie are unintentionally funny, too, like when we get a flashback to the Council of Nicaea and it looks like a Renaissance-era, hypercaffeinated high school debate club complete with bleachers.

At what feels like the end of the movie we get a nice moment when Ian McKellan gets bundled off for being a homicidal nut job and you’re thinking, "Whew! Now that that’s over we can all get up and go home!" But NOOOOOOOOOOOO! There’s a whole nother sixteen hours in the movie that we have to sit through!

And in this sixteen hours we go back to the kind of boring, chaotic, poorly-explained, un-Ian-McKellanized . . . stuff . . . that dominated the first act of the film.

Like that conversation near the end of the film (only about three hours before the credits roll) between Mulder and Scully where Mulder is trying to convince her that she shouldn’t be so scientific and that what you believe is what is ultimately important and that if the audience claps its hands really hard then Tinkerbell will come back to life and maybe it’ll destroy or renew the Christian faith if she goes public with the fact that she’s the last surviving descendant of Jesus Christ (Sorry, if you didn’t want spoilers then you should have bailed when I outed Ian McKellan). Only he’s too convoluted for any of this conversation to make sense.

And then Scully ditches Mulder to go off with the secret sex cult that worships her (yeah, okay, I can buy that one) and he goes back to his hotel and starts shaving and he (dum! dum! dum!) cuts himself (hey, they’ve still got three hours before the credits; they have to fill it with something) and (I am not making this up!) he looks at the blood from his shaving nick and gets a VITAL CLUE (which makes no sense) to the location of the tomb of Mary Magdalen (who is buried in the Louvre, it turns out) and he goes out into the night running like a madman and . . . and . . . FAILS to find her tomb!

THE END!

Only it’s supposed to be a moving ending because he’s kneeling and maybe praying–or something–several hundred feet above her tomb, which he can’t see and only guesses is there.

And so the audience is left with bunches of unanswered questions like . . .

Why did Agent Scully decide to suddenly destroy her career as a French police woman for no good reason?

and

Who the heck was the bank manager working for when he decided to try and kill Mulder and Scully for no reason?

and

Did the evil albino who’s a hyper-religious Catholic know that Scully was a descendant of Jesus Christ–as seemed implied–or not–and if he did then why would a hyper-religious Catholic like him want to kill her?

and

Did that evil Opus Dei bishop know that Scully was a descendant of Jesus Christ–as seemed implied–and if so then how did he know it since her name had been changed and her identity masked to keep the Church from knowing that she was still alive? And why would he want to kill a descendant of his Savior?

and

Why did the French Opus Dei cop destroy the very piece of evidence that would have been most useful in a court of law to prove that Robert Langdon was the killer of the museum guy and then ruthlessly hunt him down for murdering the museum guy?

and

How on earth did the murdered museum guy have enough time as he was bleeding to death to strip nekkid and cover himself with ritualistic symbols in blood (and why would he do that, anyway?) and then think up a bunch of puzzles needed to write three secret messages in ultraviolet ink in different parts of the Louvre? And why was he carrying ultraviolet ink around with him to begin with?

and

Why would the museum guy go to all that trouble instead of just writing, "Please tell my granddaughter to go to Rosslyn Chapel and she’ll find a bunch of people who can tell her about her family. She doesn’t need to destroy her career as a cop and go on the lam from the law and put her life in danger repeatedly as she solves a bunch of superfluous puzzles. Honest!"?

and

Why would the museum guy write secret messages in ultraviolet ink on two of Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpieces, and even if he were going to do that, why didn’t he write the important message on the first masterpiece? Why write an unimportant message on the first masterpiece simply to lead his granddaughter to the second?

and

Didn’t Ron Howard realize that stories about solving puzzles are only fun if the audience has the experience of being able to solve the puzzles with the characters on the screen and that it’s no fun at all if the puzzles are so complex that the audience can’t solve them and only gets to watch the characters on screen repeatedly pulling the answers out of thin air?

and

What’s the point of telling the audience that a particular series of numbers is the Fibonacci series if you don’t tell the audience what the Fibonacci series even is? (I mean, I used to be a math major, so I knew the answer to that one, but it’s still bad filmmaking. Ron Howard was NOT making this movie with me in mind, I can assure you.)

and

At just what point did Ron Howard and Tom Hanks realize that they were giving a huge number of people a really strong disincentive to ever see a Ron Howard or Tom Hanks movie again in the future?

and

Why is the Mona Lisa so important that it’s in all the advertising for this movie, when it shows up for about five seconds and its only significance is that it got vandalized by the museum guy with ultraviolet ink?

and

Why is Leonardo Da Vinci mentioned in like two scenes in this movie when he gets title billing?

and

What the heck is the Da Vinci code, anyway?

Steven Greydanus’s review of The Da Vinci Code is up at DecentFilms.com. It has a lot of insightful stuff on it. Here’s a bit I find particularly so:

Ever since the book came out, members of the Catholic prelature Opus Dei — dismayed by Brown’s portrayal of the group as a fanatical, shadowy “sect” or “congregation” characterized by brainwashing, coercion, and self-mutilation — have been trying to get the word out that the book’s lurid fantasies have no basis in reality.

Insidiously, the film absorbs this message into the Da Vinci Worldview. In an early scene, when we meet Opus Dei Bishop Aringarosa (Alfred Molina, Spider‑Man 2), he’s on a plane rehearsing talking points intended to defend Opus Dei against critics. Opus Dei simply rejects “cafeteria Catholicism,” he says benignly, while his aide recommends he avoid sounding defensive. It sounds precisely like the message the real Opus Dei has been trying to put across — or for that matter what any serious Catholic would say about his faith. You see, that’s what they want you to think.

In a similar vein, protagonist Langdon has been subtly reworked from an outspoken proponent of Da Vinci esoterica into a more skeptical, ostensibly neutral scholar who mouths many of the objections Brown’s critics have been making, putting the burden of the Da Vinci worldview onto Teabing. Now we have Langdon arguing that the Priory of Sion is “a myth” and “a hoax,” while Teabing retorts, “That’s what they want you to think.”

A few critics have interpreted this as a concession to Christian concerns, but the actual effect is precisely the reverse: It essentially undermines critical objections by incorporating them into the film’s overall picture and then seeming to rebut them as Langdon is gradually converted to Teabing’s point of view.

Some Christians have optimistically hoped that The Da Vinci Code might provide a potential opportunity for dialogue and discussion about Jesus with people who might not otherwise be open to such discussions. Yet if anything the film seems calibrated precisely to inoculate viewers against any such discussion — to leave viewers with a skeptical agnosticism about efforts to set the record straight as all part of the conspiracy, “what they want you to think” (or “we can’t be sure”).

GET THE STORY.

Tech Central Station is not often devoted to matters of theology, but Professor Bainbridge has offered

THIS NICE POST

on the subject of The Da Vinci Code and the theological issues that it involves.

I was gratified to see that he quoted from the Catholic.Com web site and–in particular–a page from it that offers a tract of the early Church Fathers that I edited, demonstrating the early belief in Christ’s divinity.

How often do you get the early Church Fathers being quoted in a Tech Central Station blog entry?

Cool!

In the end, Prof. Bainbridge concludes:

All Dan Brown, Ron Howard, Tom Hanks, and that whole crew have
accomplished is getting richer by saying that "really foolish thing."

GET THE STORY.

Y’know . . . every time I hear about Silas, the albino monk assassin in The Da Vinci Code, I can’t help but thinking about  . . . this guy . . .

That’s my mental image of Silas, but could he be the guy I’ll see in The Da Vinci Code on Monday?

Incontheivable!

There’s a movie review site/portal called RottenTomatoes.Com that (among other things) gathers up snippets from and links to reviews of different movies.

One of the unique features of this site is its ratings system, which judges films "fresh" or "rotten" based on how many reviews of them are positive or negative. If a review of the film is generally positive, it will have a fresh tomato next to it, and if the review is generally negative, it will have a rotten tomato next to it.

These results are then aggregated together into something known as "the Tomatometer" (pictured above) that shows you what percentage of reviews are positive vs. negative. If a movie gets a minimum of 60% positive reviews then it’s judged a "fresh" film; otherwise it’s a "rotten" film.

Why 60% instead of 50%? (Everyone asks that.) In the words of the guys who run the site, "We feel that 60% is a comfortable minimum for a movie to be recommended."

Those critics who get their reviews counted toward the Tomatometer are
known, appropriately enough, as "Tomatometer critics." (And our own SDG
is one of them.)

The above is an image capture of where the Tomatometer was for The Da Vinci Code last night when I was writting this post: Only 6% positive, making the film rotten. There were sixteen Tomatometer reviews posted, only one of which (from the New York Post) was positive.

But the Tomatometer won’t stay that way.

Yesterday, when the first Tomatometer reviews were posted, the film was 100% rotten. Now it’s only 94% rotten. As more critics post their reviews, the percentage will further change.

HERE’S THE LINK SO YOU CAN CHECK WHERE THE TOMATOMETER IS NOW.

I’ll be interested over the next few days to see what the Tomatometer does regarding this film. I’m sure that the percentage of freshness will increase, but I’m dubious that it will get over the magic 60% to turn The Da Vinci Code into a fresh film.

My money would be that it’ll stay rotten, though by how much I can’t say.

I saw that in the message board on RottenTomatoes they were having a discussion of what the final freshness figure for the movie would be, with people betting (not for money) where they thought the meter would end up.

Anyone care to take a guess?