THE LAST OF THE 2010 MOVIE REVIEWS

And so I also spent some time at the movies during the holidays. As you do. Opinions ho!

Megamind

A twist on the superhero genre in which supervillain Megamind defeats his lifetime arch-rival Metro Man – only to find his existence meaningless without having a good guy to fight. His not-so-ingenious solution: create a new superhero.

This is better than it has any right to be, given Megamind is voiced by Will Ferrell, who I’ve never really “got” as a comic actor (maybe because I’ve never seen his SNL work or Ron Burgundy, which I’m told is his best work), and the hackneyed “villain motivated by love to become good” plot.

On the plus side, it’s deeper than it looks, with Megamind and other characters questioning their purpose in life and asking whether destiny is pre-determined, self-determined or determined by society’s expectations of you. Which is pretty meaty for a slapstick superhero comedy with a gratuitous 80s metal soundtrack. Good fun. 

Tron: Legacy

Having been a teenage fan of the first film (and a whiz at the arcade game), I went into this really belated sequel expecting to be visually impressed but otherwise disappointed. Which is more or less what happened.

The storyline – Kevin Flynn becomes a Steve Jobs-like figure at Encom, only to disappear in 1989, abandoning his young son who, 20 years later, finds Flynn’s secret lab and ends up inside the Grid, a.k.a. the virtual universe Flynn helped create, to find Flynn trapped inside and with a limited amount of time to get them both back out – is pretty straightforward. And yes, visually it looks great, taking the neon aesthetic and the game combat of the first film and upping the bandwidth, so to speak (to say nothing of making Jeff Bridges look 30 years younger). Also, bonus points for hiring Daft Punk to do the film score.

On the other hand, apart from Kevin Flynn and the overly flamboyant Zuse (a program that is basically the Merivingian from The Matrix reimagined as camp glam-rocker rather than sneering philosophical French guy), the characters aren’t really all that interesting, or at least given a chance to be more interesting. There’s also some minor plot points that bothered me (the biggest being: who would stage an IPO event like that, and why does Kevin age inside the Grid?).

All of which is too bad because there’s a potentially a good film buried under all the FX. But why try hard when yr mining 30-year-old old intellectual property for new film ideas?

Game over,

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THEY'RE BUILDING A MOSQUE NEAR GROUND ZERO. WHAT WOULD JUSTIN BIEBER DO?

ITEM: Yr Kingdom Of Pop Fear headline of the day is:



This may take a little explaining.

Andy Sullivan – one of the most vocal critics of the Not-Exactly-Ground-Zero-But-Close-Enough-Because-Islam-Is-America’s-Enemy Mosque – has been going around backing a Facebook page calling for a boycott of Justin Bieber on the grounds that he expressed support for the mosque in an interview with Tiger Beat magazine.

Only it turns out the interview was a hoax published on the satirical gossip website Celebjihad.com.

So now Sullivan is apologizing to Bieber.

All of which I find a grimly hilarious benchmark for the rest of 2011, for a few reasons:

1. Anti-Park51 people were all too eager to believe the interview was real, even though the post quoted Bieber as saying Muslims are “super cool” and Christians are “lame-o-rama”. Which you would think would be clues of a hoax. To say nothing of the fact that we’re talking about Tiger Beat here, which is to serious political discourse what Justin Bieber is to (say) Fugazi.

2. Whether Bieber actually said those things or not, these people were basically getting up in a righteous lather over the reported political opinions of a kid who hasn’t even graduated from high school yet – albeit one with millions of fans, which brings us to:

3. One reason they were so upset is because they were worried that Bieber’s influence over their own kids would countermand their intentions as parents to program anti-Muslim sentiment in their precious angels.

I’m kind of extrapolating that last one there. As far as I know, Sullivan isn’t actively telling his kids that Islam is America’s enemy. But he is clearly teaching them that Park51 is a bad and horrible thing, based on this quote (which he said back when he thought the Bieber interview was real):

"I informed them, 'Hey guys, guess what? Justin Bieber spoke out for the ground zero mosque," Sullivan explained to Salon in an interview. "My little girl took down his poster and said she didn't want to have nothing to do with him anymore. These are my kids. They're living this thing."

See what just happened there?

And as I’ve said before, opposition to Park51 is essentially fueled by ignorance and fear about Islam because it lays the blame for 9/11 squarely on Islam itself (rather than the 19 demented dingbats who pulled it off). So I have my doubts that the kids of these parents are listening to all this rhetoric and parsing the nuance that anti-Park51 people try to deploy when someone says they’re Islamophobes.

So yes. Welcome to 2011, where people are still afeared of the Islams and will believe any web post that supports their narrow worldview, and where parents are still carrying on the tradition of infusing their own fears and prejudices into their children.

Which should make for an interesting future, don’t you think?

DISCLAIMER: Not an endorsement of Justin Bieber, his music or Tiger Beat. I don’t have any real opinion of him, to be honest. I’ve never heard a single song by him, he’s not marketed at my age demographic, and I have a policy of not picking on minors.

Justin time,

This is dF

MONKEY CHEESECAKE PHOTOGRAPHER

My little contribution to the I Can Has Cheezburger subbacultcha. 



Original photo via BoingBoing.

See also: nebris , whose LOL version is here.

Say “bananas”,

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ANNE FRANCIS STARS IN ‘FORBIDDEN PLANET’ (SLIGHT RETURN)

And now she’s gone. Just like Leslie Nielsen less than two months ago.

Anyway, now’s as good a time to remind you that she was also TV’s incarnation of pulp detective Honey West. Which was good, goofy joke-shop spy fun and one of the first American TV shows to have a heroine who could not only shoot a gun but also punch people unconscious.

Respect.

PRODUCTION NOTE: That’’s an edited clip of the fight scene – which is too bad because you miss the part where the villain beats her assistant Sam with a shelf of encyclopedias.

Also, have fun spotting the glaringly obvious continuity problem.

A taste of Honey,

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