Author: Professor Awesome

Ever notice you never see Professor Awesome and Dr. Richard Scott Nokes together?
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Jupiter Ascending: Reboot This Movie

Last night I went to see Jupiter Ascending with Captain Skyhawk and Kat Ninetails. We were literally the only three people in the theater, which allowed us to go full MST3K (or HDTGM, depending on your tastes).

Following standard internet protocol, here is the warning that spoilers are coming, but frankly, the movie makes so little sense that it’s practically unspoilable.  Just go ahead and read this and any other spoiler-filled review — it won’t matter.

I’m not going to get into everything that’s wrong with this movie, because that would take longer than the film itself. Suffice it to say that Sean Bean plays a half-man/half-bee character, Channing Tatum spends most of the film on space roller blades, and Mila Kunis both has an incestuous engagement and gets into bestiality, attempting to seduce a half-wolf character by saying, “I like dogs.” And none of these are even the craziest and stupidest parts of the movie.

If you want a review of how terrible this movie is, you have find lots of those online. Instead, I want to offer a different suggestion here: That this movie should be rebooted.

Unfortunately, Hollywood has a habit of remaking (and ruining) good films, rather than remaking bad films that could have been good. While there are some happy exceptions to this rule (The  1941 Maltese Falcon was the third film version of that book), the Nicholas Cage remake of The Wicker Man is more representative. Oh, and just to keep with our horrible bee-movie theme, here’s a short clip from The Wicker Man expressing how we felt watching Jupiter Ascending:

Here’s the counter-intuitive thing about Jupiter Ascending: It’s trying to do big things.  Although most of the practical effects are Fifth Elementesque, the non-action space scenes are truly beautiful.  Terry Gilliam makes a cameo in a bureaucracy montage scene (yes, bureaucracy plays a major role in the film) that pays homage to his own wonderful Brazil. It introduces interesting themes that never get fully explored, on topics such as transhumanism, cross-cultural identity, and the amorality of scientism.

Here’s an example: In the beginning, we find that Jupiter (the ostensible protagonist, who is so ill-constructed as a character that she defies description) is being taken advantage of by her cousin. He convinces her to sell her eggs to a fertility clinic so that he can buy a Roomba and a big-screen TV.  Somehow, he has convinced her that he should keep 2/3 of the split, though it is unclear as to why he should get any of this money, nor why she is so stupid as to agree to this when we know she is genetically predisposed to be one of the most ruthless capitalists in the universe.

This whole subplot seems like at one time it was supposed to be a comic parallel of the darker, larger plot: A relative is exploiting her, getting her to sell out her genetic heritage for his own gain. Her cousin Vladie and pseudo-son Balem Abrasax even have parallel speeches about the nature of capitalism. The problem is that those parallel themes never get fully exploited, and are in fact hard to see in the final cut of the film.

Lots of people have complained about how many characters are introduced in the film, then mysteriously disappear without a story arc. Jupiter has a best friend who is about to get engaged to a wealthy sort-of Olympic athlete, which presumably in one draft of the script of another was supposed to mean something? Sean Bean has a daughter who in no way advances the plot, coughs in a way that seems to big significant, then never appears again. We’ve got bounty hunters who start to get developed as characters, then suddenly fall off the edge of the movie.

This flaw, however, is exactly what makes the movie ideal for a reboot. It is a horrible movie, but it has many bits and pieces of a wonderful and important film. Kat Ninetails compared it to a ransom note: A weird message pasted together out of bits of other media in a way that makes the reader feel confused and threatened. It’s as if Dune, The Fifth Element, Anastasia, and Brazil were all blended together and forced down your throat. A reboot that picked a single theme and single visual style, stayed disciplined in that, and was competently acted, could not only be a great film, but the beginning of a great franchise.

Now, before we go, I offer you Captain Skyhawk’s Jupiter Ascending prequel fanfic, which I would like to note he wrote before seeing the film, and still manages to be a better version of the first act  of the movie.

EXT. SHOT SPACE

PRESENT
DAY

[Caine]

SPACE SHIPS ARE FLYING AROUND AND ZOOMING EVERYWHERE. SPACE IS A
BUSIER PLACE THAN WE IMAGINED.

Caine
I need to land on this planet to get the plot moving.

CAINE LANDS ON THE PLANET.

INT. SHOT BUILDING
PUBLIC
BATHROOM
[Caine, Jupiter, Baron Harkonnen]

JUPITER IS CLEANING A TOILET. THIS IS HER JOB BEFORE SHE FINDS OUT SHE IS
QUEEN OF THE UNIVERSE.

Jupiter
I hate cleaning toilets. It stinks.

CAINE ENTERS THE ROOM

Caine
I have come to take you to outer space.

Jupiter
Who are you?

Caine
I am Channing… Caine. I am Caine.

CAINE AND JUPITER REPAIR TO LEAVE THE ROOM TO GO TO OUTER SPACE, BUT THE BARON HARKONNEN FLOATS INTO THE ROOM ON SUSPENSOR FIELDS AND BLOCKS THEIR PATH.

Baron Harkonnen
No! This is my story! You won’t steal it from me. (MANIACAL LAUGHTER)

Caine
Don’t worry, my queen I
shall defend you!

CAINE LEAPS IN BATTLE AND THE STORY BEGINS
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Why Jon Stewart’s Departure from the Daily Show is Good News

A cry of dismay went out yesterday when Jon Stewart announced he would be leaving the Daily Show.  Social media was filled with distressed fans. His departure, though, is good news for Comedy Central and good news for comedy generally.*

A bit of history — back at the dawn of cable channels, 25 years ago, there were two competing television comedy channels: The Comedy Channel and Ha! These two channels really were trying to get a grip on how to do comedy in the era of cable, and so were a mix of stand-up clips, old classic TV (similar to Nick at Night), talk shows, and things like MST3K. They merged to create Comedy Central.

In pulling those two together, Comedy Central never quite hit a big audience, but produced cult classics (Dr. Katz and Kids in the Hall spring to mind). It wasn’t until about a decade ago that they seemed to develop the right chemistry, with South Park, Reno 911, Chappelle’s Show, and the Daily Show/Colbert Report. Of those, South Park and The Daily Show were old standbys that had slowly built and maintained an audience, while Chappelle’s Show was a cultural juggernaut that suddenly imploded after two seasons (and Comedy Central hasn’t ever found a true heir to Chappelle since).

Here’s the problem — Reno 911 eventually faded, and that left South Park and The Daily Show franchise not just carrying the channel, but sucking the air out of everything else. Because cartoons are inherently more expensive and difficult to make than talk shows, South Park took a lot of money, but not a lot of programming space. The Daily Show, however, has become a problem.

These types of shows are addictive to basic cable channels: They are dirt cheap to make, and because the topics they deal with are so ephemeral, people are forced to watch them, well, DAILY, thus getting eyeballs on your advertisers.  Why  experiment with an ambitious scripted show with an entourage cast when you can just slap out a Colbert Report or a Tosh 2.0 for next to nothing? These shows might not be great, but cheap-and-reliable mediocrity keeps the profit margins much higher than more expensive show. Look at what Comedy Central has been doing over the last decade, and it’s clear that their programming has grown stale, the only good things being departures from The Daily Show style.

Aside from the staleness of their programming, the problem with The Daily Show is that, despite its efforts to market itself as young and hip (bringing to mind Steve Buscemi on 30 Rock) it’s a show for old people. Don’t believe me? Try watching an old episode of The Daily Show, anything more than two months old. Since the political critique rarely rises above the level of snark, and the pop culture references are so ephemeral, it’s no longer funny and often makes no sense out of the context of the moment.  This isn’t a show for binge-watching young people to stream — it’s a show for the late 1990s. And while shows like this can probably find some niche, that niche is getting smaller and smaller. Two years after its cancelled, you won’t remember The Daily Show, and if you happen to find clips online, it will seem hopelessly dated, like Laugh-In. Ten years ago, my students all watched The Daily Show religiously. Today? Meh, maybe if someone posts a clip online that will disappear from their Facebook feed in a couple of days.

Of course, The Daily Show isn’t over. Heck, Jon Stewart wasn’t even the original host. But all those 30-somethings who still think they’re young and hip will find themselves scratching their heads at whomever the next host is, and grousing about how much funnier it was in the old days. Comedy Central will be forced to search for truly fresh programming — or embrace a role as one of the dying basic cable channels.

[Feature Image heartlessly stolen from Rolling Stone]

*In the interest of full disclosure, let me confess that I've never found Jon Stewart funny. Ever. When people post clips of him and shower them with great praise, I'm as puzzled as I am when people praise Friends, a show that was almost aggressive in its refusal to be amusing. Stewart seems to be able to take the most mediocre Tonight Show-style monologue and use his delivery to beat any humor our of it. He did the impossible -- he made me long for Jay Leno to deliver the same material. For the sake of this piece, though, I'm going to pretend that Jon Stewart isn't just funny, but is hilariously so. I'm going to pretend that Jon Stewart is the Funniest Man Ever to Live, the Voice of a Generation, a Revolution in Comedy, etc. Those who know me should be aware that this is merely a rhetorical position for the sake of this piece, and that I have not taken leave of my senses.
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Juice Lee’s Final Fantasy

Nerdcore rapper origin stories tend to follow two basic archetypes:

  1. Nerds are seeking an outlet for their nerdiness, and find that outlet in rap.
  2. Rappers have a lot of nerdy interests, and begin to incorporate those interests in their music.

Often they have a conversion story, a moment that they realized what they really wanted to do with their art. Cincinnati-based nerdcore rapper Juice Lee can pinpoint his conversion moment exactly, to a 2010 meeting with legendary nerdcore rapper Mega Ran.

In Juice Lee’s debut album, Metanoia, you can hear Juice straining against the conventional topics of rap. From the opening track, “Deaf Ears,” he is hyper-aware of his difficulty in finding an audience, and in the ways he is violating the stereotypes of rap. Though it has traditional tracks like “Police State,” the stronger ones are those like “Metanoia,” calling himself to a more educated and intelligent rap. When I interviewed Juice recently, he described the experience of recording before his moment of nerdcore revelation, where the local rappers couldn’t understand what he was doing, but the nerdier sound engineer got it exactly. The entire album has a subtext of frustration.

It’s hard to imagine how Juice could have continued. He either had to sell out his voice to an audience that wasn’t interested in it, or he would have to accept his music continuing to fall on “Deaf Ears.” All that changed (not when the Fire Nation attacked) when he was introduced to Mega Ran in 2010.  Suddenly he learned that there was a name for what he did, and that there was already a nerdcore audience waiting for him.

This revelation did not just change his artistic direction; it unleashed him. His next album, The Epic of John Fong, is a rap opera fan fiction of an obscure kung fu film — about as high-concept and nerdy an album as you could imagine. Juice Lee jumped into the deep end of nerdcore, embracing long-form storytelling and relishing geeky obsessions. With Mega Ran as a mentor, he was positioned to make a serious impact.

Then, to hear Juice Lee tell it, he squandered his opportunity. He took relationships for granted, and didn’t hustle like nerdcore artists need to do to connect to their audience. His next albums, It’s Unclear at this Point and Double Dragon (with I-EL) , never caught fire like he had hoped. Juice made a lot of music (that album is huge at 30 tracks), but he assumed that things would just fall into place, and that just didn’t happen.

Here is where his love for retro-gaming didn’t just provide fodder for his music; it informs his career choices. Juice took inspiration from the story of Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the Final Fantasy game franchise. According the the myth, Sakaguchi was frustrated with how things were going at Square, where he was the Director of Planning and Development, and he had decided to quit game development and go back to school — but he decided to create just one more game, (hence the “Final” in Final Fantasy). The game was a hit, and Sakaguchi’ went from being a failed game developer to a legend.

Juice’s latest album, The Reverie, is an homage to Sakaguchi, and is his own Final Fantasy. Rather than just give up, Juice decided to pour everything into The Reverie. The first-person narrative of the album can be heard either as the voice of Hironobu Sakaguchi, or of Juice Lee himself. Using all the XP he has gained in the last few years, Juice produces tracks like “Con-Soul” that act as meditations on the role that gaming has had on him and a generation.

Although he has good single tracks like those on It’s Unclear at this Point, Juice Lee is at his best when he steps out of himself and does long-form storytelling for others, such as John Fong and Hironobu Sakaguchi. In other words, he draws his strength from roleplaying, allowing his characters to speak for him. It is through his reverie that Juice Lee finds hope for his final fantasy.

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Help Us Disney — You’re Our Only Hope!

2014 was a dismal year for film, and it bodes ill for the future. Looking at the top-grossing films of the year (and since it is show business, this is generally a good indicator of what will be made in the future), all of the top 10 were franchise films, and you’ve got to get down to #15, Interstellar, before you hit the first non-franchise movie. Of course, this is not to say that no good films were made this year – 1941 is brought to mind, a year in which the dreadful How Green Was My Valley won five Oscars, yet The Maltese Falcon came in 30th in the earnings, and Citizen Kane came in 57th.

With filmgoers (that’s you and me, folks) voting with their dollars for more franchise films, and not for great original films like The Good Lie, we can expect the next few years to be all franchises. Movies will be a lot of McDonalds, with a dismal sameness to them. Even more depressing is the sheer number of top-grossing movies in which nothing happened at all – consider, for example, Mockingjay, Part I, and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, both movies which consist primarily of reaction shocks from the protagonists because they have nothing else to do.

Great franchise films are hard to make. It’s not impossible for a filmmaker to sneak a good movie through – (1954’s Creature from the Black Lagoon is a wonderful example of using thoughtful camera work to make a great creature-feature), but it’s just more difficult.

Let’s say, for example, that you were tasked with making the next Marvel movie. The aesthetics are pretty much already set, so you can’t deviate far (a happy except this year was Guardians of the Galaxy, but it had to be set so far away from the rest of the Marvel universe to make that possible). Characters and their arcs have to be adapted from an existing body of comic book work. From the moment you sign your contract, you’re shackled in setting, character, and plot.

Five years ago, if you had said to me, “Disney will acquire Star Wars, and this will be the best film news in years,” I’d have said you were crazy. And yet, here I am saying just that myself. Although there will no doubt be a few happy surprises in the next few years, our hope for franchises lies in Disney’s Star Wars.

Star Wars still holds, I think, the opportunity to make good, even great, films. Yes, the aesthetic look and sounds of the Star Wars Universe are set, but by relegating the old Expanded Universe to “Star Wars Legends,” Lucasfilm and Disney have an opportunity for good storytelling with dynamic characters and dramatic tension. Everything is really only bound by what came before in the story, and what is to come is no longer preordained. Setting is determined, but plot and character is still free.

This doesn’t mean the films will be great; we are just as likely to get another Phantom Menace as an Empire Strikes Back. But the freedom filmmakers have open up new territory to explore sophisticated ideas, to create thematic parallels with other films, to make Star Wars films aimed at various audiences, from wacky droid adventure musical cartoons for children, to sophisticated character meditations for adults. Could it be a horrible disaster? Of course … just I like to think we’ve got a new hope.

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A Very Viking Yule

Gather ’round, boys and girls, as Professor Awesome reads to you an early 15th-century tale that tells of the ancient Viking past, set around the 5th or 5th century, The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki. In this tale you will hear of the champion Bodvar, and how he defeats a Yule-tide monster, and turns his cowardly friend Hott into the hero Hjalti.

 

Cover image shamelessly stolen from io9.

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A Defense of One Magic Christmas

Let’s be clear on this point: My love of Disney’s One Magic Christmas is definitely a minority opinion. Mostly the film was over-looked, having made less than $14 million when it was released in 1985. The dreadful Santa Claus: The Movie, released the very same Christmas season, made much more than that. No one saw this, and those few who saw it didn’t like it. Even the Rotten Tomatoes round-up of 50% is inflated – the film has only four reviews, and one of the positive ones is clearly ironic, calling it “A holiday flop destined to become a cult favorite among cynics who love it when well-intentioned, sincere family films fail miserably.” Ouch!

Ironically, I think the reason this film is so poorly treated is that it is way more ambitious than what we expect from a mid-80s live-action Disney film with the words “magic” and “Christmas” in the title. What we are expecting, I think, is something where some orphans save Christmas and ride around in Santa’s sleigh with a wise-cracking elf to guide them, with the ultimate message being some stupid, vapid thing like “be true to yourself” or “it’s important to work together as a team” or “run out and buy all our licensed merchandise!”

Beware: There be plenty o’ spoilers ahead.

Instead, we get a grittier version of It’s a Wonderful Life. It doesn’t look magical at all. The ’80s didn’t really look like a music video – it looked like this film. Snow on streets turned to slush. Cashiers wore red smocks that were neither flattering nor ridiculous. Old cars weren’t all beaters, they were just old. When I saw this in the theaters in 1985, I clearly remember being surprised to see a very real-looking portrayal of middle class life. Of course, the economy had really started to improve by 1985, so the depiction is probably a little closer to 1980, but this is what it was like.

The protagonist of the story is Ginny Grainger (Mary Steenburgen), mother of two whose husband Jack is good-hearted but unemployed. Ginny is working a job she hates as a cashier, and they are facing eviction shortly after Christmas, so not surprisingly, Ginny isn’t in a very jolly mood. Immediately we see one reason critics are puzzled by this film – we expect Christmas movies to be about kids, or the cheerful dad, not about a middle-aged woman struggling to survive in a tight economy. It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol are both about adult men, but one is almost cartoonishly generous, while the other is almost cartoonishly stingy. There is nothing cartoonish about Ginny. She has lost her faith, and her stinginess is out of desperate fear for her family’s future, not out of any meanness of heart. She’s scared.

So now Harry Dean Stanton shows up as an angel named Gideon (though it is made clear this is not Gideon from the Bible, but rather a dead soul who has become a Christmas angel). He’s not silly like Clarence from It’s a Wonderful Life, but rather quiet and a bit sad. He has come to deal with Ginny’s loss of faith, but from the very beginning we see that the path is very frightening and will require sacrifice. In one early scene, we see him miraculously protect the children from an errant hockey puck, but that miracle ends in a broken window – there are consequences.

Ginny and her husband argue about money and his dream to open a bicycle shop, and when he goes for a long walk around the block all the Christmas lights in the neighborhood go out at once. Later, we come to realize that this rather understated magical moment is an important turning point in the film.

From this point on, the stakes get higher and higher for Ginny, and she goes through real loss. Her husband is killed in a bank robbery, and when the robber flees, he steals the car the children are in. In the subsequent chase, the car goes off a bridge into an icy river, apparently killing the robber and the children.

Through previous conversations about angels, we have come to understand that Ginny no longer believes in any kind of afterlife, and so when Ginny returns to her empty house having lost everyone she loves, we feel her hopelessness as she weeps in the bathroom. Soon after, we find that Gideon spirited the children of the car before it went into the river, and we get a joyous reunion with the children, only to have that joy crushed when Ginny has to tell her children that their father has died and will never come back.

In response to learning of her father’s death, the daughter Abbie (a very young Elisabeth Harnois) runs away, and Gideon takes her to the North Pole where she goes to Santa’s workshop. Here is where we might expect more typical Disney fare, but even Santa’s workshop is marked by grief, albeit hopeful grief, when we learn that elves do not make the toys, but rather the departed souls, including the janitor of Abbie’s school.

Santa gives Abbie a letter Ginny had written to him when she was a little girl to return to Ginny. Not surprisingly, Ginny is stunned to get the letter, and responds with the first hopeful sign she has made in the entire film – she mails a letter to Santa that Abbie had previously given her, but she had neglected to send. At this point, all the Christmas lights in the neighborhood turn back on, and her husband Jack comes up the street, alive. Apparently, all of the events since the lights previously went out had been some sort of vision.

From the point on, the film is a happy one, culminating in a visit from Santa Claus. We have various scenes of Ginny making right all of her wrong choices from before, even to the point of giving her husband permission to use their savings to go after his life’s dream.

It is in these “setting the world right” scenes that we see an act of understated heroism from Ginny. She buys a camp stove for $50 from the robber in the previous timeline, thus giving him the hope he needs to resist robbing the bank. At first glance, this might seem like a maudlin moment of Ginny doing a good deed, until we remember that Ginny just experienced this very same man gunning down her husband and kidnapping her children. This isn’t just Ginny’s compassion toward some penniless beggar; this is literally loving your enemy.

Perhaps the most important part of the ending of the film is that nothing has changed from before timeline split. Santa doesn’t bring her husband a job. They will still be evicted from their home in a matter of days. She’s still working as a cashier in a job she hates. Unlike It’s a Wonderful Life, no one shows up with donations to save them from financial ruin. Scrooge doesn’t give Bob Cratchett a raise and deliver the biggest goose around to save Tiny Tim. Life is still hard; all that has changed is Ginny’s perspective.

In the end, One Magic Christmas is a film about hope, real hope in real circumstances. For a film with magic and Santa Claus, there is very little true fantasy in the film. And for that reason, I love One Magic Christmas. It’s not about visiting Santa; it’s about fixing our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

 

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