Submitted Without Comment

Long Story Short: Everything that Monster Movies Teach Us About Science is Wrong

Pictured: some creative license.  Somewhere.  Probably behind the lightning.

I can't be the only one super-disappointed by this.  I have but two great loves in life: monster movies and science education.  That never the two shall meet makes me thoroughly sad.  I was recently forwarded an article about the science of monster movies which basically concludes that everything they've ever told us is wrong.  And I'm not just talking about how nuclear explosions don't create Godzillas -- I mean that Godzilla's dimensions preclude his even taking a step without shattering all the bones in his leg.

What follows is a less-technical condensation of that article.

Basically, there's no way you can scale an animal up (or down) on the level that monster movies generally take it and have it look, act, and behave the same way.

Take Godzilla.  Or King Kong.  Or any creature from the Hollywood B-roll archive that's simply a massive version of some real-life animal.  King Kong swings from trees just like a regular-sized ape, Godzilla stomps villages and levels buildings like any homicidal bipedal reptile, and the giant octopus from It Came From Beneath the Sea is able to pull the Golden Gate Bridge down into the San Francisco Bay with little effort.

None of that is possible.  Physiobiology won't allow it.

It may be tempting to think that any creature worth imagining is capable of being designed, but that simply isn't the case here on Planet Earth, where physics tend to slow that sort of fun down.

Elephants are large, but they're only about as big as the laws of physics will allow.  Elephants are corralled in zoos not by high perimeter fences and electrified moats -- they're kept back by a six foot ditch.  Ever wonder why that is?  Were an animal the size of an elephant to fall even a few feet, all its impacting limbs would shatter.

So we're left with questions regarding just how an animal the size of Godzilla (167 feet tall) or even King Kong (33 feet) could take a single step without breaking all of its bones -- or how either of them could even muster the energy to inflate their lungs under the crushing weight of their several-thousand-pound pectoral muscles.

If you're thinking that we're overthinking things, I assure you we are not.  Animals do not get that big and survive on a planet with our gravitation forces.  A mouse may fall a hundred feet and receive a mild shock when it hits the ground, but a human breaks, and something the size of a horse splashes.  One can only imagine the impact of King Ghidorah's foot.

But wait!  Don't whales get to be the size of some movie-monsters?  Sure, but now we're talking about the vital importance of living in the ocean as it relates to one's size.  Whales are a lot bigger than elephants, sure, but they live underwater, where their weight is distributed evenly on all sides, rather than through just their feet, which allows them to grow much bigger than their terrestrial cousins.  Put a whale on the beach and it literally suffocates itself within hours, simply because there isn't enough muscle for it to lift its massive bulk to get a breath.

Remember the giant octopus from It Came From Beneath the Sea?  Such things might indeed do just fine living underwater, but if it ever lifted its arms up above the surface to, say, attack the Golden Gate Bridge, the increase in osmotic pressure put upon its vascular system would surely kill it.

How about big bugs?  After all, giant arthropods used to exist here on Earth, back in the carboniferous period.  Why couldn't they exist today?

The reason they couldn't is because there's less oxygen in the atmosphere today.  You can look up much more detailed descriptions of arthropodal vascular systems elsewhere online, but the long story short is that bugs breath through their skin, and with the current levels of oxygen in the atmosphere stuck at around 21%, the biggest that any bug can get nowadays is only about as big as your hand.

The giant ants of THEM! would suffocate themselves without extensive tracheal additions to their vascular systems.

Don't even get me started on the science of shrinking things.  The Incredible Shrinking Man, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, and even certain Helmacron-centered installments of the Animorphs series all present horrifically-inaccurate and problem-ridden scenarios associated with making creatures smaller.

When you shrink someone, are you removing atoms, or are you reducing the space between electrons? Either way, you're creating more problems for science than you're solving.  It's not like you can remove 99% of your atoms and still have your body functioning normally, nor can you reduce your size while maintaining all of your mass without shooting down through the floor.

Anyway, it seems that only a few pieces of fiction get any of this re-sizing business right.  Jurassic Park does pretty well -- the sauropods on display in that film are only about as big as any terrestrial vertebrate could ever get, and the brachiosaurs of that film move characteristically slow, which decreases the stress on their limbs.  If I were to ever recommend a film to prepare for a science test, it would probably be JP.

Just remember that what they called "velociraptors" were actually "Utahraptors," and T. rex was almost certainly covered from head to toe in downy feathers.

Anyway, there are many more examples of bad movie science in the article, and perhaps I'm a little sad that all I really did here was summarize someone else's work, but then again, this is only the stuff I knew before I even read the piece.

Is there a bigger message here?  Not really.  Stories and science aren't meant to do the same things.  We can't expect movies to educate us, or science to entertain, so I suppose there isn't any real harm in letting our physics get away from us when we start imagining giant monsters, just so long as schoolchildren aren't holding The Giant Gila Monster to the same standards as a documentary.  If anything, these movies serve as a launch-pad for scientific interest and exploration.  I know they did for me.

Anyhoot, consider yourself science'd.

"Skyfall" Review

I'm probably not the best person to review a Bond film.  I've only seen four, counting Skyfall, and the only one I really liked was Casino Royale, which I'm told is the most un-Bond Bond film ever made.  With that said, Casino Royale is one of my all-time favorite action movies, so it's not like I don't ever give Bond films a chance.

But anyway.  Skyfall.  Is it good?  Yes.  Did I like it?  No.

I was totally primed for the wrong movie when I walked into Skyfall.  I was expecting a sequel to Casino Royale, when in fact, Skyfall plays more like a 22nd sequel to Dr. No, building on established mythologies and assuming that the viewer has at least some understanding of the rules of the franchise, of which I do not.

For example: when Bond is shot by an MI6 agent acting under the hasty orders of M (Judy Dench) in the first ten minutes of the film, the audience is not supposed to spend the next hour wondering if Bond will take revenge on his commander -- which is exactly what I did for the next hour.

Isn't that how people behave?  Someone wrongs us, and so we weigh the subsequent pros and cons of retaliation?

Well, not Bond.  His loyalty to M is a given -- something I would've known, had I seen more than just a handful of Bond films.  I didn't even understand the significance of Bond's Aston Martin, the appearance of which elicited cheers from the audience, to my unending confusion.

I guess the moral of the story is to never decide what kind of movie you're going to see before you go and see it.  Because what film there is in Skyfall is an impressive one.

While Bond is out of action, drowning his sorrows in the wake of his assumed death, a former MI6 agent by the name of Silva (Javier Bardem) launches an attack on MI6 headquarters.  His target is M, whom he seeks to publicly humiliate before finally killing her.  Bond goes to track Silva down, he captures Silva, Silva escapes, and so Bond finally takes M and retreats to his childhood home in rural Scotland to mount a final defense.

The emotions that are there ground the picture in your heart, rather than your endocrine system, which is something that the Bourne franchise could at least try to emulate.

It's all very exciting stuff, shot under the steady direction of Sam Mendes.  Where Quantum of Solace tried and failed to be both artsy and entertaining, Skyfall is beautifully shot and exciting to watch -- whole fight scenes take place in the space of a single uncut tracking shot, which is something both Chris Nolan and Stanley Kubrick seem to prefer (and nothing that those two dudes prefer is ever bad).

Now, there are some themes that are briefly touched on in Skyfall that I wish were further explored (such as the role of the trigger-man in a world of hackers and bureaucratic red tape, to which only two brief scenes are devoted), but I also understand that at some point the film needs to move on (Skyfall clocks in at a butt-numbing 143 minutes).

With that said, the union of action and insight is a feat that Casino Royale accomplished with ease, so it's not like I'm reaching for the moon.

I'd also be remiss if I failed to mention the presence of not one but two CGI animal attacks present in Skyfall, the both of which had me wondering if I hadn't wandered into a Disney movie by mistake.

But anyhoot.  Bond is back, and he's still the best spy on the silver screen -- assuming you're primed for the correct movie.  Some people are already talking about Best Picture nominations, which I think is a joke, but Skyfall is still certainly one of the more solid entries in the Spy Picture sub-genre.

PS: Bond may have had homosexual encounters in his past.

Chew Bubblegum and Kick Homeless People: 'They Live' is the Most Awesome Movie About Urban Class Segregation Ever Made

Most people can quote the line without even knowing from what movie it comes: "I have come here to chew bubblegum, and kick ass... and I'm all out of bubblegum."  They Live (1988) really is just as awesome as the line would suggest -- perhaps the most unintentionally-hilarious film that John Carpenter ever made.

It's also got a firm grip on social criticism, however, which is what we're here to discuss.

Now, don't get all glum -- it's not nearly as boring as it sounds.  Where someone writing a term paper might come here and use words like "socioeconomic stratification" to express his or her thoughts, I'm going to spend most of my time talking about how shitty it is to be poor in LA, and how They Live exemplifies that through cheesy one-liners and five-minute fight-scenes.

But yes.  How the rich subjugate the poor.

In Los Angeles, you'll find sparkling new shopping malls bordered by staked metal fences guarded by LAPD surveillance towers.  Inner-city public libraries built to look like 14th-century fortresses.  Civil engineers will use terms like "urban renaissance" to describe publicly-subsidized architectural projects meant to create an artificial slope leading up to the richer parts of the city.  Police will block off streets and barricade the poorer neighborhoods from the rest of the city in what they will then brand the latest strategy in the perpetual "war on drugs."  With the introduction of stop-and-frisk quotas for the police over the last three decades, society has all but criminalized poverty throughout urban space.

Think I'm overreacting?  When city planners in LA noticed that homeless people were sleeping on public benches at night, they went ahead and installed arm-rests.

If you're interested in reading more about all of this, I would recommend reading City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davis, from which many of these citations are pulled.

Los Angeles is a city fortified against the poor, even more so than most other urban areas (perhaps owing to the particularly-sleazy cross-breeding of upper-class entitlement and fame).  Where the rich cannot simply exclude the poor via their fortified architecture and federally-funded glacises, they seek to make the poor mobile, which is to say, to keep them moving.

Which brings me to the film in question.  In They Live, real-life wrestler Roddy Piper plays an unnamed drifter (the romantic term for "homeless man") who lands in LA and manages to score some part-time construction work.  He also manages to find a special pair of sunglasses which, when worn, exposes the world for what it really is: a world populated by aliens who use subliminal messages in all our print media to keep the lower classes in check.

Here, watch the following clip, and prepare yourself for awesomeness:



I suppose I went ahead and already gave away the big surprise, but I think this film is very neatly capturing the conflict between the upper and lower classes that's being waged in modern urban society.  And whatnot.

When Roddy finally sees the world for what it really is, it prompts in him a killing spree (of aliens), from which that famous quote comes.  As Roddy grows wise to the growing alien threat, the shanty-town in which he is living gets bulldozed -- a scene which closely mirrors the real-world efforts that city planners use to keep the poor uprooted, even in so-called "public" space.

And so Roddy needs some help if he's going to take on the whole invading force of aliens.  He eventually seeks a confederate in fellow construction-worker Frank (Keith David), who initially wants nothing to do with him.  He wants so little to do with Roddy that the two duke it out for over five minutes of screentime, in an improvised fight that was only scripted to last a few seconds.

More important than trivia, however, is how this scene may -- if we were in an interpreting mood -- be interpreted as a visual representation of the upper-class's tendency to delight in watching the lower classes tear each other apart.

What does this tendency look like outside of the movies?  In ancient Rome, it was the Colosseum.  Today, it might look more like the media coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which focused more on post-storm looting than any recovery efforts.

Are we getting somewhere?  Does the film feel like more than just a tongue-in-cheek alien-invasion movie with kick-ass one-liners?  Good.  My work here is done.

They Live comes out on blu-ray this coming Tuesday.

The Terror of Urban Anonymity and the Masterpiece that is 'Se7en'

That awkward moment when "Where is your God now?!" ceases to be a rhetorical question

So hopefully this post will showcase the tone that the newly-branded Cinema City Pictures will seek to maintain over the next... however many years I choose to maintain this blog.  We're gonna dive into some serious film analysis here, but nobody's gonna throw out a word like "zeitgeist" or "intertextuality" to try and impress anyone.  I sniff my own farts, thank you very much, and I don't rightly care for anyone else to join in.

Oh, yeah: spoilers contained herein.  Really, the only place where I'll spare you any spoilers is in my reviews.  Anyhoot, you probably don't want to be reading film analysis without seeing the film in question first, anyway.

Se7en is one of the most terrifying films I've ever seen, and I think the reason for that is because the monster in the film is not actually a monster but rather just some dude, armed not with super-strength, or mutant powers, or even particularly remarkable intelligence, but rather anonymity.

Anonymity is the most terrifying thing I've ever encountered (besides that one alligator), because you can do fucking anything if you're anonymous.  And make no mistake: it's not Kevin Spacey's gun that does the killing in Se7en: it's his anonymity.

The killer, whose actual legal name turns out to be John Doe, is free to commit his crimes because of the ways in which cities force us to tolerate anonymity.  And I say "tolerate," because that's exactly what we do.  If you get onto a crowded bus, you have to deal with anonymous travelers invading your space.  Everyone is a stranger.  There's no such thing as private space.  If some dark figure starts walking toward you on the sidewalk, there's no space for you to claim for yourself.  Killers may very easily get within striking-distance.

Where in the countryside, or in the suburbs, such anonymous intrusion would not be tolerated, in the city, it's the norm.

John Doe operates without interruption, killing five (no, six) people until he finally decides it's high-time he turn himself in and get on with his masterpiece, whereupon the police are still at a complete loss in trying to identify him: he's got no credit history, no living family, no job, no tax returns -- he doesn't even have fingerprints.

"We're even trying to trace his furniture," the police chief says.

Remember when Detectives Somerset and Mills were closing in on Doe, when they actually confronted Doe at his apartment before shots were exchanged and Doe slipped away in the pouring rain?  The police sketch that Mills then renders is laughably nondescript.

John Doe ultimately gets the last laugh even after this frightful encounter, when Mills stumbles upon some photographs in the bathroom and learns that he had already been confronted by the killer earlier that day -- and it was John Doe's unshakable anonymity that had protected him.

You see that screencap at the top of the page?  That's as clear a look as we get of John Doe for the first three quarters of the film.

"All we know about that man is that he's independently wealthy, highly educated, and totally insane," R. Lee Ermy laments toward the end of the film.  It's pretty much the only collection of hard facts we ever get.

Now, things get played up in movies for the sake of drama, but what I believe John Doe represents (in this one particular interpretation of the film) is the creeping terror of anonymity, which positively oozes out of every inch of a big city.

It's a factionalizing, alienating force, and I wish it didn't pervade my new home quite so much.

I agree with some of the few things John Doe says: that small talk makes me sick, that there are deadly sins on every street corner and our collective anonymity makes them all-too-easy to ignore.  But his response to such pressures is inexcusable.

My advice: know how to act in the public sphere, and know how to act in the private sphere.  A train is public space.  Be respectful.  A back alley, an apartment, a cab-ride for which you've paid, is not public space.  Make it safe for you and yours.

This post brought to you by Halloween, which has always fascinated me, it being the only mainstream holiday celebrated in the States based on a negative emotion.

Criterion Corner: The Last Days of Disco (1998)

The Last Days of Disco (1998)
Written and Directed by Whit Stillman
Starring Chloe Sevigny, Kate Beckinsale, and Chris Eigeman
Releases July 24th 2012

I've only been to a few clubs, and I've hated every one of them.  I'm willing to concede that they couldn't all be horrible, but that's no consolation when you're inside of one that makes you miserable.  With that said, I'm probably just not the right type of personality for them.

The Last Days of Disco is about a group of acquaintances and frenemies whose only commonalities include a desire to be rich and at least a passing interest in disco.  When they're not miserable at work, they're trying to get into a swanky new club, which they sometimes manage to enter and subsequently make themselves miserable on the dance floor.  Either the person they like doesn't like them back or they're not making enough money to impress anyone or they're simply unable to convince anyone that they're not a yuppie.

Yes, it's a movie about whiners, sycophants, and assholes, but that doesn't mean you're not supposed to like it.

I liked The Last Days of Disco, despite its lack of a decisive plot, or sympathetic characters, because I think it's pretty clear that the film is intended to be less of a story and more of an encapsulation of an era.  I really want to use the word "zeitgeist."  Whether or not it's entirely accurate in its portrayal of the early 80s is for someone who lived through that era to determine, but I enjoyed watching it nonetheless, if only because it's essentially a film about people who are miserable in nightclubs.

There's Alice and Charlotte, two publishing assistants who are trying to navigate not only their stagnant careers but also the rapidly-changing feminist landscape.  Is it ok to hit on a guy?  How does one deal with a dude who pretends to be gay so that he can dump women without incident?

Then there's Des, the high-minded asshole who says exactly what's on his mind at all times, though the last thing you'd call him is "honest."  He's got an old college buddy who works as an assistant to the city DA, who constantly lectures the others on all their vapid fixations but was kicked out of Harvard just a few years previously for having a manic episode in the middle of lunch.

The list goes on and on.  At the very least, everyone seems to want something, even if they're not really working towards any of their goals.  But I suspect that that's the point.  They're complainers.  America was entering a new era of economic, social, and musical prosperity, and the young people had no clue what to do with it all.

The film reminded me more than a few times of American Psycho, but without all the murder.

With all of that said, the film is shot wonderfully and all of the actors involved have done well to embrace their inner whiner.  Worthy of note is Kate Beckinsale as the hawkish Charlotte, making her leading-role debut with an impeccable American accent.

Included with the Criterion release is a new high-definition transfer that was supervised by writer/director Whit Stillman, a commentary track by Stillman, Chloe Sevigny, and Chris Eigeman, four deleted scenes, an audio recording of Stillman reading a chapter from his book The Last Days of Disco, with Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards, a behind-the-scenes featurette, a gallery of stills, the original theatrical trailer, and an essay by novelist David Schickler.

This is the kind of film where, even if you don't like it, you'd do well to recognize the skills with which it was assembled.  And if you have even a passing interest in what the early 80s, and the death of disco, were all about, then this is must-see cinema.

The Dark Knight Rises Review

I remember having the same feeling when I walked out of my first screening of The Dark Knight four years ago: it wasn't at all what I had expected, and because of that it took me several days to properly collect my thoughts before I finally settled on an opinion, but once my brain had pieced together the parts of the plot that I hadn't caught during my initial screening, finally recognized the significance of every single line and every single character, I finally realized all that Chris Nolan had accomplished with a mere film, and I was stunned.

The Dark Knight Rises is not the instant classic that was The Dark Knight, but it is far more ambitious in its scope, and I can only imagine that the character motivations and plot details that are currently a little fuzzy to me will finally crystallize upon repeat viewings.

So here's something you won't find anywhere else for the next few days: a proper logline of the film.  After eight years in hiding, Bruce Wayne hears rumblings of a terrible new threat to Gotham - one which may compel him to don the suit yet again for the first time in nearly a decade.

A mysterious criminal known only as Bane is coming to Gotham to raise hell.  Wayne dons the suit and teams up with Catwoman (who is never referred to by that name) to hunt Bane down, but, upon their first encounter, Bane kicks Batman's ass, pops a vertebra out of his back, and throws him into a Middle Eastern prison to die.  Bruce Wayne (whose identity has been known to Bane the whole time) is now the one who must find the strength to return to Gotham and save the city from the ultimate threat: a nuclear bomb, which Bane threatens to detonate in order to fulfill the long-dormant promise of the League of Shadows to destroy Gotham City.

Crazy stuff, right?  Do not expect so many fist-pumping moments as there were in The Dark Knight.  This is dark material they're working with.  It's hard enough to watch Wayne find the strength to don the suit in the first thirty minutes, only to have his back snapped across Bane's knee.  To then watch him struggle to rise again to the challenge of confronting Bane is something monumental, and, if I may, Nolan doesn't quite sell the struggle as much as I feel he should.

It's one of the few integral deficiencies of the film: there's more telling than showing in the second and third acts.  A few elements of the story reek of plot-devices.  Some character motivations are a little fuzzy.  The specifics of Bane's five-month siege of Gotham are uncomfortably unclear.

But I remember thinking the exact same thing about The Dark Knight four years ago, and those concerns disappeared upon subsequent viewings.  Both films are incredibly dense.  Neither of them let up for a minute, and my brain spent a good bit of the 164-minute runtime scrambling to keep up.

As for its place at the end of the Nolan Batman trilogy, Rise excels.  The links between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight amounted to little more than a Cillian Murphy cameo, and what The Dark Knight Rises does is bring the trilogy back to its beginnings, with a heavy emphasis on Wayne's progression from scared little boy to the Cape Crusader, as both an instrument of justice and a symbolic rally-point for the people of Gotham.

In hindsight, we only got one film out of Chris Nolan chronicling the exploits of Batman, and that was The Dark Knight.  Batman Begins is about Bruce Wayne becoming Batman, and The Dark Knight Rises is about Batman becoming Bruce Wayne.

I was shocked at how little Bruce Wayne was in The Dark Knight.  Now I'm shocked at how little Batman there is in The Dark Knight Rises.  Like I said, there's less fist-pumping in this installment, but that doesn't mean it's worse.

I guess this isn't so much a "review" as it is a set of first impressions. I was greatly impressed with The Dark Knight Rises, even if it wasn't what I was expecting and I've got a few lingering concerns.  It's nothing that a few repeat viewings couldn't clarify.  And the rest is so good that repeat viewings are undoubtedly assured.

I'm not one to take note of performances very often, but I must say, this was the first Batman film that I thought delivered performances that were more than just the recitation of words on a page.  Christian Bale, Michael Caine, and especially Tom Hardy and Anne Hathaway are all to be commended.

Nolan is a filmmaker without a bad film.  With eight films to his credit (at the time of this writing), that gives him one of the longest unbroken winning streaks in the history of Hollywood, and directorial credits on three or four of my all-time favorite films.  I cannot thank him enough for elevating comic-books to the heights that he has, and hope to see many more properties commanded by his skills in the decades to come.

Sunday Inanity

Saw The Dark Knight Rises this weekend.  Expect a review tomorrow. Additionally, you can expect reviews of the Criterion titles The Last Days of Disco and Down by Law in the coming week or two.  Beyond that, we've got fourteen more installments of the Five Films Collection before this blog is shuttered.  Tune in to find out which categories are represented in the final list!

The Weekend Meme

See this guy?  Fuck this guy.  

He walks into a theater and shoots into a crowd of people, because he's sick, because he's sad, because someone else just had to feel his pain before he could sleep easy that night, because whatever, so goddamn him, and goddamn those like him.  I don't presume to know anything about him and his struggles, but I do know that once you seek to make your pain someone else's problem, you're not the sort of person worthy of anyone's sympathies.

I'm going to go see The Dark Knight Rises this weekend.  Because fuck him. You can expect a review  soon.

Sunday Inanity

So we've got nineteen posts left, plus two Criterion reviews, plus however many Sunday Inanity posts that fit into the next couple of weeks, before this blog shuts down for good.  You'll probably also get a review of The Dark Knight Rises next week.  Very exciting stuff.  We're winding down to the end.

This week, you can expect lists of my five favorite Organized Crime films, Romances, and Book Adaptations, in addition to three other lists that are yet to be determined.

And don't worry: any time I generate new video content, I'll be sure to post it here.  And any time I just have to share my opinion on the latest Jurassic Park sequel, it'll probably find its way here, too.  So it's not really a shutting down of the blog so much as an end to regular uploading.  I can't promise how often I'll post after the official end-date, but it'll probably be at least three or four times a month.

If nothing else, the Sunday Inanities will probably keep going strong.