I’ve been a cartoon fan from way back… worked at the Disney Store, collected all the Disney movies that came out on VHS; was even disgusted at my own willingness to repurchase all the same movies once DVDs became de rigeur.  I also embraced the Dreamworks feature length animated films when they came along – the more the merrier!  Hell, I even considered studying animation at one time, but went for photography instead.

Anyway, I went to see Dreamworks’, Turbo with the Small Child and I’m finding myself becoming increasingly disenfranchised with the entire genre… honestly, I’m getting sick of seeing the same characters turning up again and again and again.  Of course you’re going to have your protagonists and antagonists like any good story should, but I’m getting a little sick of the protagonists being so stereotypical.  They’re become so predictable as to almost be an identical character in different digital clothing and it’s being rolled out over and over again. The protagonist in this particular story is Theo, aka Turbo the snail, who wants to be a race car driver… err race snail. driver. thing.

Which is fine.  But it’s becoming the ONLY formula for recent animated movies.  Little creature X isn’t happy with their lot in life and wants to be/do something else… for examples see:  Nemo in Finding Nemo, Flick in A Bug’s Life, Remy in Ratatouille, Ralph in Wreck-It-Ralph, Merida in Brave, Po in Kung Fu Panda, etc. etc. etc! This list goes on and on, once you start looking for it – and they’re all the same fucking character!  Seemingly small insignificant creature decides he doesn’t like the reef/colony/rats nest/computer game/clan/noodle house it was born into, and thinks himself a special little snow flake with big dreams, and as such, aspires to travel/see the world/cook/be nice/not marry/claim martial arts fame etc,… and leads everyone on merry chase to inevitable happy ‘Disney’ ending… yes, Dreamworks do the ‘Disney’ endings too.  Blargh.

However, it’s one thing to do the same old ‘snail out of the garden’/’fish out of the reef’/’ant out of the colony’/’rat in the kitchen’/’avatar out of his game’/’panda out of his restaurant’, thing over and over… but it’s getting a little lazy when the rest of the ensemble cast are becoming completely recognizable caricatures as well.  I’m only going to give a few examples (else, I could be here all day) but once I notice them, I see them everywhere!

For example, there is always The Naysayer.  In Turbo, it is Chet, brother to Theo/Turbo, who is less than supportive of Turbo’s dreams to race… in fact, he’s pointing out the futility of Turbo’s plans at every opportunity and constantly reinforcing how it will just about be the end of snail-kind should Turbo continue on his foolish path.  He does of course eventually wind his head in and is proud of his brother in the end.

Which sounds remarkably like all the Daddy Downer Naysayers, yes?  Marlin from Finding Nemo, Fegus, from Brave, Django from Ratatouille and Triton from The Little Mermaid, Dracula from Hotel Transylvania.  Then there’s Emile, another Naysayer brother this time, also from Ratatouille and Mike Wazowski from Monsters Inc. (who both do double duty playing The Dopey Sidekick btw) as well as Atta the party line ant from A Bug’s Life, Melman in Madagascar… blah blah blah.  Too many to count.

 Also in the standard cast line up is, The Sage:  In Turbo we have a character called Whiplash with his ‘been around the block before’  street smarts. Finding Nemo has Scar with his tragic past and special brand of fishtank wisdom, Cars has a ‘seen it all before’, Doc and Ice Age has the savvy survivalist sabre tooth tiger, named Diego.  The Sage is initially dismissive and condescending towards our little protagonist snail/fish/car/mammoth… but plays his part in eventually bringing the little guys around to seeing things from a different perspective and/or balancing out The Naysayers and encouraging them on their way.

Then we have The Dopey Sidekick.  These guys seem to be in every movie!  The new one is White Shadow from Turbo, but there’s Mater from Cars – Dory from Finding Nemo – Emile in Ratatouille – The Little Mermaid has two of them, the seagull, Scuttle and Ariel’s fish friend, Flounder – Madagascar has Marvin – Donkey from Shrek – Sid the sloth from Ice Age … and so on ad infinitum.  Just pick any animated movie and you’re falling over the Dopey Sidekicks.

Old school Disney almost ALWAYS saw the main characters sailing into the sunset to marriage and happily ever after, because this is where true happiness was found in the 20thC. These days, however, animated films tend to be more focused on the ‘follow your dreams and break out of the predestined life bestowed upon you by the virtue of your birth’ plot, and less focused on the traditional, ‘you can only find true happiness with your soulmate and are heading down the socially acceptable aisle’, plot.

Not sure what sort of message this is sending to our kids…?  But it has led a decreased value on romantic achievement in kids movies and an increased value in unrealistic worldly achievements, and subsequently the rise of the Alluded to But Rarely Realized Flirty Love Interest character – Atta from A Bug’s Life, Sally Carrera from Cars, Angie in Shark Tale, Burn is the chickie of choice in Turbo… all kinda distant and patronizing and/or exasperated and condescending at first, but eventually brought around by the charming and determined ways of our aspiring ant/car/fish/snail protagonists but no more marching off to wedded bliss at the end of the movie.

The we have the The Silent Industrious Guy with the weird personality issues.  He/she never says much, but he’s ridiculously fastidious and has a bag full of mental quirks coming off mad as a cut snake half the time… Guido with the pathological shyness from Cars – Jacques the OCD tank cleaning shrimp in Finding Nemo, the deluded love sick Dragon in Shrek, and of course, Scrat the neurotic prehistoric squirrel from Ice Age.  Probably joined by a host of other mentally challenged characters if you dig a little,  because, well… poking fun at Eeyore sold plenty of toys whilst glossing over the serious issue of chronic depression!  So why not?

And I’m sure there are plenty of other way too similar characters out there as well should anyone choose to write a dissertation on the topic.  It’s starting to feel like today’s animated storytellers have maybe a dozen stereotyped caricatured characters up their sleeve, and they summarily chuck them in a box and pick out say, half of them, and use those to make the same damn story with the same damn plot!  We’ve had fish, ants, rats, cars, toys, furniture, snails, all anthropomophrized into cartoon characters… what next?  Pencils? Potatoes? Planes?

Oh wait.  That’s next week.  I haven’t even seen it yet, but over half the characters are already familiar just from the trailer!

Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night are my favourite Shakespearean comedies, which means I have read them and studied them, seen them on the stage and of course watched movie versions over and over.  When I heard Joss Whedon was doing a screen adaptation of Much Ado, there was much excitement and anticipation as the peasants (that’s us), rejoiced on the slopes.

We got a chance to go see it this week, and I say, ‘got the chance’ because it’s rather hard to come by.  None of the large cinema chains are showing it at all, and it is only the Schonell cinema, at Uni, or the Dendy, at Portside, that I could find it on in the entire city. It’s nice that the big boys down town don’t think audiences are sophisticated or cerebral enough to want a bit of Shakespeare in their diet… but it’s even worse that they are probably right as far as the bulk of the cinema going public is concerned.  🙁

Anyway, Whedon’s Much Ado, moves along at a swinging pace in an artsy fartsy black and white, boozy, contemporary summer house party, with a cast of all Joss Whedon’s favourite actor type buddies.  With the script being as superlative as it is, I don’t think you can go too far wrong – in some ways the Shakespearean dialogue provides the magic regardless of the sets or casting.  And Much Ado is as fast paced and saucy, and bitingly witty, yet appropriately poignant, as Shakespeare comes.  With a script like this and any bunch of half way decent actors who can deliver a line on cue, it’s gotta be hard to totally fuck it up.  I mean, the story/plot is just fabulous, and you know, I honestly believe this play paved the way and provided the basis for every ‘boy meets girl / boy and girl hate each other / boy and girl end up in love and live happily ever after’ Rom Com we’ve ever been fed in the last 500 years!

But even with such a wonderfully crafted script, full of delightfully meaty dialogue – for me the modern setting was really jarring and this entire production felt too slick by half (says the girl who still loves Lurhmann’s, Romeo & Juliet).  It’s Shakespeare, but with a quirky fly on the wall quality that puts the viewer in the position of feeling like they’ve stumbled into a reality show about a bunch of well spoken, well dressed, constantly half charged, horny, elitist snobs that are all stuck in the one large, and well appointed, house… and yeah, we already know Don Juan is going to be the first voted off the island.

Beatrice, beautifully played by Amy Acker (Dollhouse, Angel, Person of Interest etc), came across as intelligent, feisty and fun, just as a good Beatrice should.  However, I feel she totally overshadowed the completely forgettable dude that played Benedick, Alexis Denisof (of The Avengers, Buffy, Angel and other shit), who really needs to leave an equally strong impression on the audience.  As for the rest of the cast, were they even there?  They were a bit like suits delivering their lines to allow the movie to move on – bit harsh perhaps but I felt they left little to no impression on me at all.  Even Natan Fillion (of Firefly and Castle fame) who I was so looking forward to as Dogberry, somehow fell flat – such an awesome comedic character and yet, it just felt like we got a befuddled Richard Castle with a hangover or something. *shrug*  Unremarkable.  Still, in spite of Benedick’s failings and Dogberry’s lack of any presence, I did actually enjoy this hip and happy, bubbly, cocktail party sort of version of the play.

There is one thing though that bugged me through the whole film.  You know that feeling you get when you have a favourite playlist (or for those of us old enough to remember – a favourite mix tape) and you hear a certain song and immediately expect to hear the usual ‘next song’ come on directly after?  Well, I had that feeling throughout this entire film!  No doubt… no doubt, this is the direct result of having watched Kenneth Brannagh’s Much Ado About Nothing on DVD, more times than I could count, and as such expecting various lines of dialogue to be delivered in a certain way.  I couldn’t help but hear the lines in my head, before the actors had uttered them and would then be taken aback or disappointed even when they were delivered ‘wrong’ or somehow not in the ‘usual manner’.

Overall, if you’re a Shakespeare aficionado… yeah go see it.  If you miss it at the cinema, don’t panic, it’s not really a big screen film anyway and won’t lose anything in translation to your 40 or 50 inch TVs.  To me, it was a bit of self indulgent fluff from Joss Whedon that felt like he was trying to get ‘the old band back together’ to do something with a bit of weight behind it.

Last time I even remember thinking about The Great Gatsby was for an English exam back in Year 11 or maybe Year 12 of high school.  We were given chapters to read each week and then discussed it in class, and I vaguely remember never actually getting around to reading any of the novel – but paying attention in class was enough to get a grasp of the major themes.  So when the exam rolled around and we were given the questions two days in advance to prepare for an in class essay exam, I found it a piece of cake.  The real reason I remember this particular bit of tedious high school trivia is due to what happened when we got our grades back… I was walking out of class feeling pretty happy with myself and a fellow student asked me how I went.  I smiled and laughed and said ‘Great!  Got 32.5 out of 35, and I didn’t even read the book!’

To which my classmate promptly burst into tears.  🙁  Turns out she had read the book.  Twice.  She wrote and re-wrote her essay out, and tried to learn it off by heart, and had received a 28 out of 35 for about ten times the effort I put in.  Yeah I felt bad, but it’s not my fault that written expression is something that always just came naturally to me and that I’ve always possessed an above average vocabulary which easily impressed my high school teachers.  If it makes anyone feel better – I can’t do maths for shit!  But… I digress.

Yesterday, I went to see latest film adaptation of The Great Gatsby and want to start by saying:  Wow!  Just wow

With his, now trademark, over the top, larger than life, flamboyant and theatrical style, Baz Luhrmann‘s version of The Great Gatsby literally swept me away!  I once read Luhrmann’s style described as ‘cinematic gluttony’ and while viewers and critics alike, often love or loathe his unmistakeable style of direction, this epithet most certainly applies to this film… it was a gluttonous epicurean feast for the eyes.

It’s a roller coaster ride of visually arresting party scenes at Long Island, sparkling and debaucherous adventures into city speakeasies, thrilling and improbable car rides in fabulous 1920s roadsters and gritty and grimey industrial views of the Valley of Ashes set to an ever changing, yet strangely accessible, soundtrack of contemporary jazz interspersed with modern day rap!  The lavishly detailed and sparklingly gorgeous art deco sets and glamourous costumes display the decadent lifestyles of Daisy and Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby in full Bazamatazz Tehnicolour, and provide a veritable plethora of visual stimuli.  While it’s patently not going to be everyone’s ‘thing’, I for one, loved every carefully coiffed scene of it!

Leonardo Di Caprio (previously teamed up with Baz Luhrmann for Romeo + Juliet in 1996, shit that makes me feel old!), did a fabulous job with Jay Gatsby… I was a bit dubious at first, but it was deliciously amusing to watch him playing the usually stoic, calm, confident and supremely self assured Gatsby, turned into the bumbling and awkward beau as he waited to see Daisy for the first time years.  And equally enjoyable to watch the tension rising and rising until his explosive outburst of temper at the Plaza that is completely congruous with a the character of a man used to getting what he wants by any means necessary.  Di Caprio seems to be getting better as he gets older, if this and Django Unchained are anything to go by.  So much so, that the rumours of him playing Hamlet in the near future are not as alarming as they might once have been!

Carey Mulligan (who I’ve only ever seen in An Education but it turns out she has quite an impressive resume already) made a wonderful Daisy, even if she does look remarkably like Katie Holmes’ little sister throughout this entire film!  She’s equal parts shallow, doe eyed, self absorbed and ever so slightly soul destroyed.  Her indecisiveness regarding Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby, which as most know drives the entire plot, is conveyed perfectly by Mulligan who portrays her inner conflict while looking amazing in ’20s flapper style everything, with a razor sharp blonde bob and smokey retro make up.  She’s covered in diamonds and bling and crystals and feathers and furs and I know not what!  Kudos for the costume and set designers all round.

Joel Edgerton was positively unrecognizable as the muscular, arrogant and imposing white supremacist, Tom Buchanan.  Strangely enough I spent most of the film thinking the character of Myrtle was actually being played by Amy Adams for some bizarre reason when it was actually Isla Fisher, (I make no apologies for not being up to date on my Hollywood starlets, and am actually secretly proud that I rarely know who all of them are!). They were both well cast and well played for characters that are intrinsic to the plot but are effectively supporting actor parts.

Which leaves the only major other major player left in the script – Nick Carraway.  Played by Spiderman, err, I mean the unfortunately named Tobey Maguire (Tobey?  Who’d name their kid Tobey?).  It’s always interesting to see how directors handle first-person narrators from screenplays adapted from novels, and Baz Luhrmann doesn’t try and downplay Carraway’s narrative contributions at all.  Instead he embraces it, turns it into a plot device and has Carraway effectively writing the novel within the film.  I’m not fond of Maguire though and felt he didn’t quite convey the easy going optimism of Carraway, instead he just came off as awkward, and most of the time incredibly naive and out of his depth… but then again, maybe Carraway was all those things too.

Overall, there is so much that can be (and has been) said about The Great Gatsby that I could go on for ages.  I love Bazzle’s interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel and I just really love his style.  I definitely think it’s a big screen production and well worth seeing in the cinema.  In fact I if I find the time, I’ll probably go see it again.  But with one proviso – I saw it in 2D and there’s no way would I want to see this in 3D!  So many Baz trademark sweeping camera shots, fast car movements and rapid zooms that I think the 3D would give me a headache!  And his artistic vision is so in your face… that I don’t think you need the novelty and distraction of 3D anyway!

PS: can I get one in Cherry Crush?

Many, many, many moons ago, way back before the days of Youtube movie trailers at your fingertips, that takes some of the hit and miss out of movie going…  Myself Mr K, Eduardo, and my little sister went to see a movie called Breaking the Waves that was getting great reviews in the newspapers.  We could only find it playing at a strange little independent theatre in East Brisbane (that place is some sort of martial arts dojo now) as it wasn’t showing in any mainstream theatres in the area.  My elder sister, BigSal and her boyfriend at the time, Woliver, were supposed to have joined us but had cancelled at the last minute… lucky them!

We bought our cokes and popcorn and found some uncomfy chairs and then sat through THE most tedious three hours of cinema of our entire lives!  Well, some of us did, Eduardo had the good sense to fall asleep by about the third ‘chapter’ learning on my shoulder and occasionally snoring.  It was, and remains, one of the most bizarre films I have ever seen.  My recollections were of a disjointed and jarring narrative featuring an extremely annoying and naive quais-bipolar girl who was fond of talking to herself, that marries an indifferent, crude sort of man who works on oil rigs in the North Atlantic somewhere and is gone for long periods of time.  Readers Digest version of the plot is – he ends up paralysed and starts making unusual sexual demands of her to satisfy his lack of ability to perform for his young bride.  She in turn being very malleable and well, stupid, goes about looking for random men to fuck so she can come back to his beside and report her antics.

Being such a hideously tedious film and seeing that a misery shared, is a misery halved; we, four of us made, a pact to tell BigSal and Wolliver that the film lived up to it’s critical acclaim and was ‘amazing and unbelievable’ and that they ‘simply had to go see it’… largely because we could see no reason why we should have been tortured thus and that they had fortuitously managed to escape the horrid experience!  The following week they went to see it in due course, and apparently spent the entire duration thinking, ‘Hmmm, it’s okay… but we don’t quite understand why the others were raving about how good it was’.

Yes, it was a bit of a cruel joke but, it simply had to be done!  When we finally caught up after they had seen the film, their thoughts were roughly, ‘Well, we thought it was good… but we didn’t enjoy it as much as you guys obviously did’.  At which point we blurted out how much we hated it!  And oh my God, how tedious were the ‘chapter’ breaks that broke up the segments of the film with oddly quaint static landscape views set to ’70s rock anthems that all seemed to play just a little bit too long?!

Some fan (read: weirdo) has put the ‘chapter’ breaks together in a compilation on Youtube… that, even taken by itself, is kinda window-lickin’ special.

Ever since, Breaking the Waves has become the common benchmark around here for being THE WORST FILM EVER in our collective memory!  A film to compare all other crap films to, and an in-joke that has been periodically trolled out when occasion warrants.  Anyway, a few months ago we thought that maybe we should give it another chance (yes, this may have been an alcohol fuelled decision!).  We are all 16 years older, and hopefully wiser, so perhaps we’ll have a greater understanding and appreciation for Von Trier’s vision by now.  So we organized a movie night and decided we were going to sit through the whole thing over again, come hell or high water!  And we discovered a few very interesting things –

1) Absolutely NONE of us had any solid recollections of the storyline or the plot or any understanding whatsoever of what was driving the plot, nor could any of us even remember how the damn story ended!

2) We had little to no recollection of the background of each of the main characters, the motivations for their various actions and had completely judged all the characters totally differently back then than we did on this more recent viewing.

3) None of us remembered the heavy religious overtones of the film, instead thinking of poor Bess as some sort of brainwashed borderline personality, schizophrenic type. Rather she is someone who knew no other way of life than her heavily indoctrinated religious cult thing, AND she probably has a borderline personality disorder and schizophrenic tendencies!

4) And the most alarming discover of all… Wolliver (and to a lesser extent, Mr K), have a mysterious and inexplicable ‘thing’ for gold lame hotpants, which do NOT feature in this film in any way shape or form!

Viewing this film for a second time, with the benefit of maturity, hindsight and experience, we found ourselves coming away with a greater appreciation for the film’s complexity and the nuances of its flawed characters.  We also concurred that Emily Watson’s portrayal of Bess was actually due the acclaim accorded to it at the time, as it seems a challenging role to play someone so damaged, slightly psychotic and yet naive and sheltered in a film filled with challenging sexual practices and perceptions.

Having said all that… it remains, in my humble opinion… still RIGHT UP THERE IN THE WORST FIVE FILMS OF ALL TIME!  And I have now devoted nearly six hours of my life to it that I will never get back!