Film Friday: Sausage Party (2016)

This is going to be short. That is all this movie deserves. I was looking forward to this one. The commercials were brilliant at making this look like a clever and funny film. It’s not.

The idea behind this film is quite promising. All the things you buy in the grocer store are conscious. They think people are gods and that Heaven is where you go when people buy you. They are about to find out, however, that life with humans is a hellish horror movie as they will find themselves cut up, baked alive, used to wipe butts, etc. A great idea.

It’s too bad nobody competent worked on the film.

Do you want to know what this film is like? Imagine six of the douchebag-iest teenagers you’ve ever met. These are the kind of retards for whom low-hanging fruit is unobtainable Shakespearian brilliance. Now imagine said douchebags deciding to take this idea and work it into the raunchiest thing they can come up with. Yep. Every sentence is flooded with hate-filled cusswords. Every “idea” – I hesitate even to use the word here – is about sex... but not sex in the sense that normal people know it. Imagine a gang of uneducated Mexicans standing on the street corner shouting obscenities at hookers.

There you have it. This was Sausage Party.

Oh look, he’s a hotdog. Did you know that means he’s shaped like a penis? Ha ha ha! Fuck dude, that’s fan-fucking-awesome-tastic. Fuck. Hey, she’s a bun. “Get it? And she’s sooooo fucking tight.” Fuck that's brilliant, you c*nt bitches! That’s fucking hilarious, motherfucker. Fuck, dude. That’s fucking comedy gold, fuckers.

We turned it off after five minutes.

You know, I can’t help but compare this to South Park. South Park the movie was genius. They were known for pushing the envelop on television. And when they got to do the movie (Bigger Longer and Uncut... a circumcision joke in the title that most people miss), everyone expected they would swear a lot. So they did. But they didn’t just swear. No, they turned the idea of swearing into a social statement. Their characters swore with purpose and with panache. It was clever. It was funny. You couldn’t help but laugh when they swore. Heck, you went home singing the “Uncle Fucker” song. Every swear word in South Park was chosen for a particular purpose.

Sausage Party is just a bunch of retard douchebags trying to say something their little minds think is cool. It is Mexican day labor swearing at you on the street. Pathetic.

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Zootopia: Not the Allegory You Were Expecting

by tryanmax

I’ve got to hand it to Disney. I think they’ve really pulled one over on the identity politics crowd. With their latest smash-hit Zootopia, the studio has given the usually unquellable race-baiters, gender-warriors, and plain ol’ Disney haters an allegorical placebo to shut them up. So satisfied are they that Disney finally “gets it” that one outlet went so far as to regard the new film as an apology for Song of the South, a film known almost solely by distorted reputation alone.

Spoiler Alert

All Disney really did, though, is recognize identity politics as a thing. The only message they conveyed with Zootopia on the matter is probably the best one that anyone can actually offer. Simply, “It’s complicated.” Let’s take a look at what they did.

I won't be discussing the plot, which is a twisty noir-ish tale, directly. As such, this article assumes the reader has already seen the movie. For a film synopsis, see here.

Lookin’ Good

In more than one way, Zootopia is all about appearances. For one, it is a visual treat to the eyes. Disney imagination is on full display in creating a world where animals of every species, from tiny hamsters and mice to giant giraffes and hippos, live alongside one another in an urban landscape. I remarked more than once how the characters looked so fluffy on screen that I wished I could reach out and touch them.

That’s a good segue for how Zootopia creates the appearance of handling identity issues. In one scene, a fox does just that, grabbing and handling a sheep’s bouffant while delightedly remarking how fluffy it is. His rabbit companion admonishes him that he can’t do that. This is clearly a reference to the supposed problem of white people always touching black people’s hair.

The script is peppered with little nods to so-called “micro-aggressions” such as this. The police force has a “Mammal Inclusion Initiative” which is clearly an affirmative action program. Judy Hopps, the beneficiary of said program and the first-ever rabbit on the force, asserts that she is not “some token bunny.” In another instance, she informs a cheetah that it’s okay for rabbits to call other rabbits cute, but not for other species. There’s a scene where an elephant store clerk asserts his right to refuse service to a fox. The assistant mayor believes she is only on board to court the “sheep vote.” The terms “articulate” and “patronizing” are conspicuously dropped into a conversation. The list goes on.

All of this is meant to signal that Disney is in-the-know on issues that virtually everyone is already aware of anyway. Otherwise the gags wouldn’t play. So, because Disney can demonstrate their consciousness, some have assumed that Disney is actually addressing the issues. But like the (literal) political animals in their film, Disney actually dodges the question entirely by re-framing it.

It’s Funny ‘cos It’s True

Probably the most memorable scene in the entire film is the one that takes place in the DMV. Judy Hopps is in a hurry but, to her chagrin, the entire office is staffed by sloths. She actually exclaims, “They’re all sloths!?” because she naturally assumes all sloths are slow and, well, they are. It’s actually amazing how well this works for laughs, not just once, but over a dozen times in the course of a couple minutes. At the same time, it totally reinforces that stereotypes do have a basis in real trends. Later, the film also breaks the stereotype when the main sloth is pulled over for street racing, but this is still in service to the same gag. Sloths are funny ‘cos they’re slow, but they’re even funnier if they’re fast.

Again, Zootopia is full of these types of gags. Being a rabbit, Judy has 225 brothers and sisters. Her sidekick, Nick, is a fox and a street hustler. Judy tries questioning an elephant who can’t remember anything. The city’s mayor is a lion. The mob-boss Mr. Big is revealed to be a tiny shrew. A group of lemmings mindlessly follow each other in buying popsicles. A hippie yak is unwashed and swarming with flies. This is Blazing Saddles style humor in a form that can slide past trigger-warning and safe-space sensibilities.

The very makeup of Zootopia (the city within the movie) itself is a gag. It is as much a theme park as a city and it is deliberately segregated by species, just as if it were a human-run zoo. Districts such as Tundratown and Sahara Square provide appropriate habitats for different species, while a neighborhood like Little Rodentia scales the urban landscape to its tiny residents. It’s both humorous and sensible, but it pushes aside any pat solutions to identity issues.

Where da White Bunnies At?

If there is one thing about Zootopia that has the identity politics crowd grumbling, it’s that they can’t quite figure out which animals represent which group of humans. I think that’s by design. Even though the animals of Zootopia inhabit a world very much like ours, even featuring similar political issues, it’s impossible to say that certain animals represent certain groups of people. Rather, all the usual signifiers are jumbled up.

At first, it looks like rabbits and other prey are the oppressed minority. After all, historically they suffered at the hands of predators, as the opening scene points out. But that isn’t the case. It turns out that Zootopia is 90% prey, and they are often openly prejudiced against predators. Yet, somehow, the mayor is a lion and predators occupy positions alongside prey everywhere. In most cases, it actually appears that size matters most, with large species like buffalo and bears filling the police ranks and big mammals generally throwing their weight around. Driving this home early in the film, the assistant mayor buddies up to Judy to say, “Us little guys have to stick together.”

The more you parse the animal groupings in the film, the more complicated it gets. Any attempt to draw straight lines between Zootopia and the real world is going to get uncomfortable really fast. As I already laid out, in Zootopia, minority = predator = savage. That equation ends careers if brought into the real world.

As I see it, the point is not to draw lines between the cartoon world and the real world, as tempting as it may be. Instead, by sidestepping the usual identity markers Zootopia is actually able to tell a compelling story while inserting a non-polarizing message of mutual respecting in a way that is better than simply mirroring current events.

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Film Friday: The Good Dinosaur (2015)

Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur is not doing well with audiences, and I’m not at all surprised. There is a fundamental problem with The Good Dinosaur, and that is that the film mixes a main character who is too cutsie with a plot that is anything but cutsie. The resulting mishmash satisfies neither those looking for a mindless baby distracter nor those looking for a more compelling story.

Plot

To put it simply, The Good Dinosaur is a western that uses dinosaurs instead of humans as the main characters. In fact, this is a very, very clichéd western, right down to the use of Sam Elliot to do voice work. The story involves the weak son of a noble farmer who must prove that he can live up to his father’s expectations and ends up in a survival film as he must find his way home through a dark and evil wilderness.

The story opens with the birth of the main character, Arlo, and his sister Libby and brother Buck. Their parents, Henry and Ida, are Apatosauruses. They live in a world where the dinosaurs were never wiped out and continued to, uh, evolve I guess (this is part of the problem with the film... it’s not clear what changed except that these particular dinosaurs are farmers).

Arlo is the runt of the litter and quickly proves not only to be incapable of doing the work required on the farm, but is a coward. He is afraid of basically everything. His father is patient with him however, though he simultaneously pushes Arlo to stop being such a whiny bi— uh, to become less of a coward. One of the tasks Henry gives Arlo in this regard is to trap and kill a pest that has been eating their corn... which they need to feed their chickens, who terrorize Arlo. The pest turns out to be a cutsie baby human! Oh goodie.

Arlo, of course, can’t bring himself to kill the human, and the human escapes. Henry then takes Arlo and chases after the human cave boy. They chase him up into some evil looking mountains, which end up flooding. The flood kills Henry and leaves Arlo stranded far away from home. Arlo then finds and befriends the human, who acts like little more than a puppy (he can’t even speak). The rest of the story is Arlo’s journey to find his way back to the farm.

Why This Film Doesn’t Work

This movie has a lot of problems, quite frankly.

The first problem is the simple blown potential. The trailer to this film was intensely clever. It asked, what would happen if the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs missed the Earth? And then you see the asteroid shoot by the planet and all the dinosaurs who had looked up at its approach return to their grazing. This trailer offered limitless potential. It opened the door to anything. It promised a world where dinosaurs had evolved to something beyond just being dinosaurs. It promised a world where man and dinosaurs co-existed in some friendly or hostile way. It promised something you had never seen before. The film even skips a few million years at the opening, suggesting that we would see dinosaur society evolved into the modern world... whatever that would look like.

But none of that happened.

Instead, you get a world that is indistinguishable from dinosaur times except for the presence of one cave-boy and the existence of one dinosaur farm. That’s it. What a waste.

The next problem probably tells us why the first problem exists: the filmmakers never bothered to lay down the rules that guide their new universe before they began. Is there really a dinosaur society or not? There’s the farm. There are three T-Rexes who are herding the dinosaur version of cattle. But that’s all you see. There is no sense if there are cities or if there is an economy – does the farmer sells his crops? Do the T-Rexes sell their cattle or just eat them? The other dinosaurs they run into seem to be standard feral dinosaurs. So is there a society or not? They never say, and the result is that it’s unclear what kind of world Arlo really lives in and everything feels ambiguous and confused.

As an aside, I was also personally bothered by the sense that much of what they encounter felt vaguely stolen. The human reminded me of Mogli from Jungle Book; he even has a similar storyline – leaving for human companionship at the end. The nyctosaurus and pterodactyls reminded me of the vultures from Jungle Book. The T-Rexes reminded me of a combination of Bagheera and the elephants from Jungle Book. There's even a seemingly hypnotic horned dinosaur (a Styracosaurus), right at the end of a snake scene, which is clearly Kaa from Jungle Book. The scene chasing the human felt like the apes rounding up the humans in Planet of the Apes. The whole Arlo story felt like a number of westerns involving a weak son who must avenge his father’s death. And so on. This is the first Pixar film where I felt I could pick out things that were copied from other films.

The real problem, however, is that the film is a mishmash of concepts. For whatever reason, Pixar chose a main character who is better suited for the preschool set. He’s cute and whiny and stupid and whiny and seems made for backpacks and plush toys. Put him in a story with his imaginary friends and magic tree houses and he would feel right at home. But then they rammed him into a story that has a truly adult storyline in the sense of being dark and not at all funny, and about the subtle goal of proving one’s worth to oneself. This is a farmer western combined with a survival drama like The Grey or The Edge. It is not a plot that in any fits the childish Arlo.

The result of this is an entirely unsatisfying story. The preschool crowd will not like the dark, very unfunny plot. The people who might like the survival story will find the whiny, child that plays the lead to be too annoying and unbelievable for this kind of story. And people who come in having seen the trailer are going to wonder how this movie managed to ignore the entire magic the trailer promised.

Pixar is an amazing company that does a great job with its movies time and again, but this one is a total miss. This one is entirely unsatisfying. It’s boring, indifferent, and just out of place. And that’s too bad given the amazing potential the backstory suggested.

Thoughts?

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Film Friday: Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015)

Let me be honest: this movie was made to make money and it sucks *ss... to put it kindly. I seriously wanted to climb over the bored-looking children halfway through this film and demand my money back. My napping wife said I couldn't. Then, as we hit the highly obnoxious and politicized ending, my attitude changed and I went from wanting my money back to wanting revenge. F*ck you, Adam Sandler... die in a fire. Let's get this over with.

Plot

Please, let me outline the ultra creative and interesting "plot." //rolls eyes

Count Dracula's (Sandler) obnoxious daughter marries the surfer asswipe from the first film. They have a baby named Moneygrab. Moneygrab is human (think gay), not a monster (think rotten religious types who can't stand gays). Obnoxious daughter decides that she wants to raise gay boy in California because clearly living with monsters in Kentuckyvannia is somehow wrong even though Moneygrab seems quite happy in Kentuckyvannia. So she goes to California to see if she likes it and we are treated to her rocking a trick bike at midnight in a skate park with a bunch of unsupervised awesome f*cking three-year old children, dude. Awesome. Oh, and she drinks a lot of slurpees all at once! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha f*ck you, Sandler.

Meanwhile, her father tries to turn gay boy into a monster by having each of the monsters take him into the woods and incompetently show him how scary they can be because... well, because. They end up burning down a summer camp for vampires run by a homosexual bureaucrat vampire. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha f*ck you, Sandler.

Obnoxious daughter sees this on youtube and races home to take gay boy back from the Count. They argue and then have a party where she invites Mel Brooks (Dracula's father) so the film can have a final conflict. Mel's servant HATES gays. Servant decides to kill gay boy, but suddenly gay boy turns into an invincible super monster and violently stops all the religious zealot monsters. Everything works out and the mass of contradictions turning this film into bullsh*t get overlooked! Hurray! Roll "credits."

Why Adam Sandler Needs To Be Sodomized With A Weed Whacker

This film was so bad it was insulting. I'm not kidding. As I watched this film, it became obvious to me that Sandler didn't care, either as a writer or an actor. He didn't care about the story, the characters, the dialog or anything else. Let me list this film's sins:

● First, the jokes were clearly written without the slightest interest in making them funny. They were basically lines you would expect presented in a joke format without any real reason for them to be jokes. Most brought a sense that a joke was being told but no real ability to understand what was supposed to make this "joke" funny. To give you a sense of this, consider the scene when obnoxious daughter says to the dirty Arab who runs the Kwiki Mart (yes, he was drawn to look dirty), "This place is open all night, right?" And then they show the Arab standing in front of a sign that says, "Open All Night." He then responds... wait for it... "Yes." Careful, don't laugh too hard.

● Secondly, the dialog is sh*t. Every single line is exactly what you would predict would be said at that moment. There was nothing clever or interesting. The word choice was about as dumbed-down as you could get. The sentence structure of every line was brutally simple. Most of what was said was said for the moment and did not match the plot or the character saying it... they all spoke in the same voice. I suspect they actually let Sandler (Dracula) ad lib his lines. That's the quality of what he said.

● Third, the characters are assh*les. Obnoxious daughter is obnoxious. She's the kind of character who is strongly opinionated and ignores everyone else around her because she's a self-righteous turd, but we're supposed to see her as the wise heroine. F-that. The surfer dude is a reflex character who exists solely so Dracula and obnoxious girl aren't doing soliloquies throughout the film. He's spineless, pointless, and such a retarded surfer that you feel dumber just for listening to him talk. The monsters exist to be the butt of Dracula's personal attacks. The bad monsters exist only at the end to show us how insanely hateful people who don't like gays are. The humans are all California valley/tech stereotypes that might be clever if you live in California and deal with these people regularly, but come across as simply annoying to the rest of us.

Then there's Dracula who gets about 90% of the lines. The problem with Dracula is that he's so intensely stupid and pathetic. He comes across as a 1990's television dad who needs to be skooled by his smarter daughter. He knows nothing and is constantly cowering and apologizing because he's incompetent and his beliefs are wrong and out of date; by the time of the 50th "how do I use technology" joke, you're ready to drive a stake into Sandler's liver. Oddly, Dracula actually embodies the movie's overbearing message of TOLERANCE FOR GAYS and hipsters, yet, the film wrongly treats him as out of touch and lets everyone else lecture him on how wrong he is to lack tolerance... which makes him the film's straw man character.

● Fourth, there isn't an original moment in the plot or the animation.

● Fifth, the story is a contradictory mess. So the theme is tolerance as told to us by moralizing obnoxious daughter. Yet, she doesn't care about the feelings of gay boy, her husband, or her father. In fact, she has no tolerance for their views. She even gets pissed at the humans in California because they tried to make her comfortable by showing her that many human-monster "mixed couples" already exist. This upsets her for no apparent reason that makes sense. Of course, the behavior she displays is the exact behavior she complains about in her father, who by the way had much more tolerance for both monsters and humans than she does even as the film assures us that he's closed-minded about humans. For the record, the reason she wants to move is to raise her son with his own kind (gay boys) rather than monsters. Yet, we're told the father is the bigot for wanting to raise him in a place where humans and monsters live in apparent harmony just because he hopes gay boy becomes a monster. So who's the bigot? The film tells us repeatedly that it's not her.

Then we're told that you need to be gay to be good... monsters suck, unless they are reformed to be gay-like. Indeed, the crime Dracula commits is wanting gay boy to become a monster. That is evil -- though it's not evil to want him to be gay instead of a monster. But then gay boy turns into a monster to save the day an everyone celebrates him becoming a monster. Huh? So the happy ending is exactly what the character we've been told is evil wanted. How does that make sense? How can it be evil to want him to be a monster, but the happy ending is that he turns into a monster? What's more, the evil grandfather (Mel Brooks) suddenly decides he loves people because his grandson saves the day (something Dracula or Brooks could have done without him), but only after becoming a monster. In other words, Brooks hates that he's a human, but the kid turns into a monster so now Brooks loves humans. Nonsense.

What this film is, is a 1990's hypocritical feminist film with cliche characters, nothing interesting or original, dialog generated by a retard, and an in-your-face political message that will piss you off near the ending as it gets beaten into you how evil you are for being a bigot because you won't tolerate somethingsomething hey gays! It's poorly written, poorly voiced, and utterly lacking in creativity. It was made to make money and it feels like it was slapped together over a weekend by a very cynical group who don't mind sh*tting on their audience.

Thank you, Adam Sandler... assh*le.

Don't see this film.

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Toon-a-rama: Minions (2015)

We’re taking a break from the 1970’s tonight.

Let me start by saying that I enjoyed Minions quite a bit. It was a solid movie with some good laughs and a few memorable moments. It did some clever things and it made me like the Minions even more than I did after the Despicable Me films. Now let me tell you what disappointed me, and let me do it by comparing Minions to Wreck-It-Ralph.

For my money, Wreck-It-Ralph is the best animated film in a very long time, if not ever. It is nearly perfectly written. It is beautifully drawn. And it does all the things the best stories ever do. Indeed, let me explain what makes it such a special film.

Several things make Ralph such an amazing film. What underlies them all, however, is the nearly perfect writing. First of all, the story idea is brilliant. The idea that video characters have these real lives once the arcade shuts down is super creative. The only thing I’ve ever seen with a similar concept is Toy Story, but the characters in Toy Story are much narrower because their lives revolve around being toys, whereas the characters in Ralph are more like real people, complete with neuroses and infighting and different levels of self-awareness. This makes for a much richer world with many more possibilities. They are also capable of a much wider range of emotions, which make them more interesting.

Indeed, Ralph is much more interesting than Woody because Ralph is not the archetype Woody is. Ralph is a flawed character who is unhappy with himself and must figure out what he truly believes. By comparison, Woody just needs to protect the other toys. Because of this, there is never a moment where you feel genuine emotion for Woody, but I guarantee you that you will cry when Ralph decides to sacrifice himself and he repeats the Bad Guy Affirmation with a whole new meaning to let the audience know what has motivated him:

“I’m bad, and that’s good. I will never be good, and that’s not bad. There’s no one I’d rather be, than me.”

Minions sadly, doesn’t have great characters. Yes, the three lead minions are funny and you like watching them, but there’s little you get out of them in the way of emotions. (The humans are, frankly, dull.) Why? Because they don’t grow. Ralph began as a villain with a hole in his soul. He tried to fill that hole in all the wrong ways and found himself a failure, seemingly doomed to be the same miserable Ralph forever. But then he finally comes to realize how to fill that hole, but doing so requires him to give up his life to save a little girl. His moment of epiphany is also a moment of tremendous tragedy. That’s why you cry.

The Minions never have that. There is no hole within them. There is no epiphany. And there is nothing to suggest that any losses they suffer matter in the least. So while the characters are fun and funny, they are ultimately emotionally empty.

Just as importantly, the humor in Ralph is just perfect. Every joke seems to fit the situation perfectly. And what helps cause that is that the culture references are done right. Cultural references have become the go-to form of humor, but few do them right. To do them right, you need to do what Ralph does.

In Ralph, the references are much more personal in nature. These references tended to be shared experiences rather than generic cultural references, e.g. recognizing the way characters slid along walls on the PS2 or the secret code on the Coleco or the difference between low rez and high rez worlds. All of those were things that gamers got because they were things we laughed about along the way. By comparison, bad films simply provide cultural references that anyone can get from watching a History Channel or MTV show about the particular period. They are the most obvious iconic moments of an era, so everyone can get the joke, but they means nothing to anyone. The Ralph references, on the other hand, invoke the hours of game play we experienced and the things we laughed about with our friends. It is the difference between a loving trip down memory lane versus a dull read through a history book.

Minions, unfortunately, is full of these generic references. For example, the film takes place in the 1960’s, so you will see a reference to a much referenced Beatles album cover. You will recognize it immediately, as will everyone else, but it will have no personal meaning to you. What’s more, these references aren’t even tied to the story in any meaningful way, they just appear. It’s a lot like a David Letterman joke where he makes some reference, smirks like a jackass, and let’s his gullible audience pretend that he told a joke when all he really did was make a reference... the Emperor’s New Clothes phenomena.

Ralph never does that. Its references fit the action perfectly and they always result in a punch line. They become how the point to the scene gets across, rather than just appearing as an aside.

What’s more, the jokes in Ralph are deeply layered. Consider the line where Ralph angrily denounces Pac-Man as “that cherry chomping dot muncher.” To kids, the visual speaks for itself as Pac-Man eats dots and cherries; indeed, Ralph has previously stolen a cherry from him. But adults also recognize this as a double reference to giving oral sex to a female... something the kids will never get. Notice too how perfect the reference is too that it describes Pac-Man entirely accurately yet uses virtually the exact words used for the oral sex reference. This reference is so perfect that it’s almost as if Pac-Man’s choice of foods was intentionally chosen to make the sexual reference. That is inspired writing!

Putting all of this together, in Ralph, you can laugh at the reference, if you get it, or at the joke if you don’t. And if you get the reference, then you can also enjoy the cleverness of how they worked the reference into the story, how they often twisted it slightly to fit the film, and the cleverness of how they turned the reference into a joke the kids get even if they don’t get the real reference. That’s a lot of humor packed into each joke. Minions had none of that. You either got the reference or you didn’t. There was no joke to go along with it, except that the Minions inserted themselves into the reference. There was no dual meaning either, with maybe only two exceptions (both visual jokes). Ultimately, the difference because of this is that you will laugh for many reasons at everything Ralph pokes fun at, whereas you will just recognize the things Minions references but you will feel no attachment to them.

This is what bothered me. Minions was fun and interesting, though it had the air of an Austin Powers copy, but it was ultimately very shallow and unsatisfying. It was good, but not great with only a couple memorable moments and nothing that raised emotions. Ralph on the other hand, grips you, makes you smile, digs deep into your memory and pulls out strong emotions.

Studying Ralph could have helped Minions a lot.

Thoughts?

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The Lorax Teaches The Wrong Lessons

I had the misfortune of watching The Lorax (2012) the other day. In particular, I found myself shaking my head at the lessons it imparts. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but it still annoyed me. What lessons? Read on...

Throughout my life, I’ve discovered something interesting about the human race: we are a bell curve in all things. I’ve seen this over and over in every field I’ve encountered. I’ve seen it in early adopter rates, grade distribution, IQ distribution, and even advertising theories on how to influence the public. It’s everywhere. And where it has been most interesting to me is in the discovery that the human race can be broken into three groups when it comes to societal benefit, for lack of a better phrase. The theory works like this:

● 10% of the human population are good people who drive humanity for the better. The most obvious example of these people are inventors, artists, writers, and others who provide things that enrich or improve other people’s lives. But this category isn’t limited to those people. It also includes people who start businesses, early adapters, the rare teachers who inspire their students, and even just average people who become mentors to others and make the world a better place. Big or small makes no difference, these are just people who make things better.

● At the other end, 10% of the human population are malicious people who do bad things. Interestingly, only some of these people realize that they are villains. The majority of these people think of themselves as the good 10%, even though their instincts are malicious and their actions and ideas are highly destructive. You can see an example of this, believe it or not, with Hitler. If you ever see interviews of his staff, you will be shocked to learn that Hitler genuinely thought he was the good guy. You see this sometimes with serial killers too, who think they are doing God’s work, with busy-bodies who delude themselves that their desires to control others come from their “deep sense of caring” about others, and with people who just get off on causing problems.

● The other 80% of the human population are essentially sheep. They do what they are told by the people they recognize as authority figures. Interestingly, however, these people often think of themselves as independent thinkers who “make up their own minds,” and they react very poorly to any suggestion to the contrary, even though they never actually think for themselves... as an aside, these people are the reason so much advertising simultaneously combines the ideas of keeping up with the Jones while ridiculously claiming that buying certain mass-produced products is only for “people who think for themselves.” Disturbingly, these people have a hard time spotting the difference between the good and bad 10%ers and will just as slavishly follow a vicious negative 10%er as they would a good 10%er if they come to see them as the authority.

So what does this have to do with The Lorax? Well, The Lorax very clearly demonstrates these groups and how they work. Unfortunately, it presents the wrong lessons in doing so.

The Lorax is the story of a 12 year old Ted Wiggins. Wiggins lives in a walled city made of plastic and metal. It contains no trees. The reason it doesn’t have trees is that the mayor, Aloysius O’Hare, sells bottled oxygen. He knows that trees provide oxygen for free, so he works hard to make sure there are none in the city. What destroyed the trees originally was a man called Once-ler. He was an entrepreneur who cut down the trees to make his product. In so doing, he ignored the objections of the Lorax, which was a being who protects the trees. Once-ler didn’t intend to cut down all the trees and he came to realize his mistake, but he did it nevertheless... all except for one seed. He gives that seed to Ted, who tries to plant it.

As Ted tries to plant the seed, the mayor tries to stop him. The mayor even warns the people that what Ted is trying to do is dangerous because trees produce sap and other pollutants. Upon hearing this, the public turns on Ted and essentially forms a lynch mob. But then Ted denies the charge and one of the locals decides that Ted is right. He states his support for Ted. Suddenly, the mob declares Ted to be right and turns on the mayor. The story ends happily.

Here’s are the problems.

First, this film clearly breaks into the three groups. Ted is a good 10%er who wants to make the world better. He sees a way to improve it and sets out to do so. The mayor is a bad 10%er. He knows he’s the villain and he thinks nothing of using evil means to get what he wants, which is profit and control. Once-ler is also a bad 10%er, though he is one who doesn’t understand his own evil. He thought he was the good guy, making use of the trees in a way he thought was responsible to produce a product that people wanted and employ people who needed jobs. It was only later that he learned his mistake. Finally, the public are exactly what the 80% are like: fickle, stupid, and mindless followers of whomever they see as the authority figure in their lives.

It is interesting to see a film break down these groups so clearly. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t know what to do from there. Thus, for example, rather than pointing out that Once-ler is a villain, it essentially sells him as a victim. It shows him suffering at “the mistake” he made and being imprisoned for what he has done. It also let’s him protest over and over that he never intended to kill all the trees, without ever requiring him to explain why he ignored the obvious warning signs and took no care to prevent the problem that was so obvious. In effect, it removes his villainy and makes him a helpless victim of a mistake and thereby forgives his villainy without true remorse or even understanding. This teaches the wrong lesson as it eliminates the element of personal responsibility so long as you had good intentions. But good intentions are not and should never be considered an inoculant to criminal or evil or immoral or stupid behavior.

Compounding this, the film then sells the audience the standard comfortable view of evil through the mayor. Essentially, the film tells the audience that evil is easy to spot because it knows it is evil and it knows that it’s actions are wrong. This is absolutely the wrong lesson to teach. Basically, rather than teaching kids that you need to watch all of your actions regardless of your intent, lest you act in an evil or rotten manner, the film sends the message: “Don’t worry, evil is obvious and unless you set out to be evil, you’ll be fine.”

Finally, you have the 80%ers. This is the truly obnoxious message. These people mindlessly followed the mayor for years. Once someone pointed out his crime, they absolutely failed to rationally assess the claim and to decide if they had been mistaken in supporting him. Instead, they turned into a lynch mob, determined to silence the dissident. This failure should have been highlighted in a major way to the audience. But the film didn’t do that. To the contrary, it excused the 80% by having them switch sides moments later when the worker announced that he had decided to back Ted.

But this represents yet another horrible lesson. Whether Ted was right or not, the 80%ers undertook no independent investigation. They never thought through what he said, looked at his claim or even demanded answers. They simply switched sides because they felt the herd had changed horses when the workman announced his decision to switch his support. This is a horrible lesson. The 80%ers need to be taught to conduct an actual analysis, not merely to follow whomever they see as the most authoritative person at the time. For all they know, Ted is an even bigger villain or fool and they are about to make things much worse. They don’t know because they never stopped to investigate. And the film rewarded this kind of false reasoning by letting audience know that Ted is right. Essentially, the message remains: just make sure you follow the nicer guy, when it should be to truly think for yourself for once. That’s how Hitlers get made, because evil, which is never bounded by reality or reason, makes much better promises.

This is my problem with this film. The film correctly identifies these groups but then acts as a sedative to calm the 80% into thinking that evil will be easy to spot and fixing evil is as easy as watching to see whom the crowd prefers. These are ridiculous messages to send.

Thoughts?

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Is Disney’s Princess and the Frog Racist?

In its whole history, Disney has never had a black princess, at least until 2009 when it released The Princess and the Frog. But The Princess and the Frog is not a cause for celebration, claims the aggrieved-left, because the film is racist! Only, it’s not.

The Princess and the Frog is the story of Tiana, a black woman from New Orleans circa 1930s. She is a talented cook with dreams of opening her own restaurant, a dream she got from her father who has since passed. The story opens with Tiana working hard in a restaurant to save up enough money to buy an abandoned building to start her restaurant. She has finally saved enough! Hurray! Only, she's told that another buyer has appeared and she has only twenty-four hours to raise her offer, something she cannot do. Boo!

Tiana's friend is a spoiled, rich white girl named Charlotte, who wants to marry a prince, and it just so happens that a prince has come to town. This is Prince Naveen, who has been cut off by his family because he’s worthless and lazy. He and Charlotte are a perfect match -- he has the title, she has the money. However, the next time Tiana meets Naveen, he has been turned into a frog by a Voodoo witch doctor, who is plotting with Naveen’s servant to replace the prince, marry Charlotte and steal her fortune. Naveen convinces Tiana to kiss him to change him back into human form so he can prevent this. In exchange, he promises to buy her the restaurant. She agrees, but when she kisses him, she turns into a frog herself.

At this point, Naveen and Tiana must venture into the swamp to find Voodoo priestess Mama Odie so they can become human again. Accompanying them are Ray, a Cajun firefly, and Louis, a trumpet-playing alligator who wants to play jazz with the humans. Trying to stop them are the witch doctor and his army of shadow creatures.

All in all, this was an excellent Disney film, easily the best after a miserable decade for Disney. The story is fast paced and relatable despite being both ethnic and deeply Louisiana. The art work is beautiful. Bits of the film are clever. And the songs are well done in a Broadway sort of way, which is greatly appreciated after Disney’s two decade use of ultra-bland, entirely forgettable corporate pop, like the song Elton John and Phil Collins kept passing off as different songs throughout the 1990s.

So what could possibly be racist about this? Well, that’s a good question. Several attacks were made on this front. Some argued that it was racist that Disney's first and only black princess wasn’t born a princess and had, instead, to marry into it. Others argued that the film used black stereotypes. Neither argument is valid.

That Tiana isn’t a princess is a key plot point which makes the story work. It isn’t meant as a sleight or to devalue her character either. To the contrary, her character is easily the most noble in the story. Nor is there any suggestion of a racial component to her lack of princess status. In other words, there isn’t a single suggestion, spoken or implied, that her race is the reason she isn’t a princess to begin with. And it’s not like all Disney females are princesses (see e.g., Penny, Jenny, Alice, Eilonwy, Meg, Jane). Essentially, the only way to see the decision to start her as a commoner as being a decision based on race is to assume that based on her race alone.

The stereotype argument is even worse. For one thing, there are no negative black stereotypes presented. Each of the black characters is presented as smart, capable, and (except for the villain) strongly pro-family and pro-community. Nobody is living on welfare, selling drugs or having kids out of wedlock. Nor are there any presentations that fit the “Uncle Tom” mold. The closest would be Tiana’s mother, but she’s not a servant; she’s an ultra-talented seamstress and business owner.

Indeed, the more you look, the harder it becomes to find any black stereotypes. What you see instead are Louisiana stereotypes aplenty. You have toothless Cajuns, everyone being a jazz player, voodoo princesses and witch doctors, corrupt-but-lovable parish politicians, gumbo-lovers, etc. Similarly, you have all the trappings of New Orleans: the bayou, gumbo, riverboats, the light rail, gators, etc. Everything in this film is regional rather than racial.

I think where the “racist” argument springs from is the idea that it’s somehow racist to show blacks in roles they occupied historically if they are shown to be happy and not the victims of white oppression. Hence, the fact that Tiana doesn’t struggle against white oppression offends the aggrieved left as a whitewash. That is ridiculous, however. In fact, if you think about it, this argument would relegate every black story to being about white racism, and blacks could never tell their own stories without the focus being on whites. Now THAT would be racist!

Thoughts?

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Summer of Films: WALL-E (2008)

WALL-E is a great film. On the surface, it’s a cartoon about a silent robot which falls in love with another robot. But it’s really so much more. In fact, WALL-E is the first Pixar film to truly show me the depth of their storytelling prowess.

Plot

Here’s the plot. In 2105, the Earth is ruled by a single corporation, Buy-n-Large Corporation (BnL). Because of pollution and garbage, the Earth has become uninhabitable. To solve this problem, BnL shoots the population of the Earth into space aboard luxury starliners, where they live in great comfort and happiness. Unfortunately, having nothing to do, as the starliners are automated and robots wait on their every need, the humans become morbidly obese and essentially incapable of movement as they become dependent on the machines.

Meanwhile, robots like WALL-E are left behind to clean up the garbage as everyone waits for the Earth to become habitable again. BnL, however, concludes that the Earth cannot be saved and it orders the automated starliners to take care of the humans in perpetuity.

WALL-E takes place seven-hundred years after the Earth was abandoned. WALL-E is one of the garbage robots, and the story begins when WALL-E discovers a small seedling on the Earth. He nurtures it, only to have it found by EVE, a robot sent from the starliner Axiom to search the Earth for signs of life. She reports her discovery, but when she does, the ship’s automatic pilot Auto, suppresses her discovery and tries to have her reprogrammed. WALL-E, who has fallen in love with her tries to save her, and she, WALL-E and the figurehead human Captain must fight Auto to free the humans from their gilded cage. At the end of the movie, they return to Earth where they discover millions of seedlings, and like Noah, they set about rebuilding the world.

Why This Film Excels

WALL-E is an amazing story. Why? Because it’s really several different stories, all told simultaneously and beautifully. For example, on the surface, WALL-E is a love story in which a robot which cannot even talk thoroughly convinces the audience that it has fallen in love with another robot. This is truly an impressive achievement. Having an audience believe that two characters are in love is already a difficult challenge. Making them cartoons doubles the challenge. Making one of them mute ups the challenge exponentially. And putting them into a story that is not a love story makes this a nearly impossible task... yet, Pixar pulls it off without a hitch or hiccup.

Next, WALL-E is an allegorical version of the story of Noah’s Ark from the Bible, but that’s just the beginning. Consider that Noah’s story is not exactly a strong story when it comes to filmability. Not to mention that Pixar doesn’t even get to use the spectacle of the flood to pump up the story. Further, the film takes place in the future, and it cannot be overtly religious. Again, these are serious hurdles that make Pixar’s ability to pull this off pretty incredible.

But there’s more... WALL-E is essentially Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” brought to film. Yes, it is. Whereas Orwell warned of a brutal, oppressive government crushing freedom, Huxley provided a similar warning in “Brave New World,” only he pointed out that government need not be heavy-handed to be insidious. Instead, it can use hedonistic pleasure to control the people just as easily as it uses violence. WALL-E delivers this identical message. Consider this:

On the surface, the humans seem happy. They have food and entertainment. They want for nothing. Notice also that the “government” is not inspired by evil. Indeed, Auto genuinely believes he’s looking out for the welfare of the people. His job is to protect the humans by keeping them on the ship, and that is all he wants to do. There is no better example of a benign dictator on film.

But first impressions are misleading or at least incomplete. The idea that the humans are happy is shown to be a mirage when they realize how helpless and dependent they’ve become. This awakens something inside them, something which drives them to regain their freedom despite everything they will lose.

The idea of Auto as a benign dictator falls apart as well. First, note that Auto suppresses information which runs counter to his mission. His motives may be good, but this is tyrannical behavior which strips people of the freedom to make their own choices. He even tries to destroy EVE, because he sees her as a danger to his mission. Suddenly, Auto’s methods are those of dictators the world over. Then, when the Captain orders Auto to set the humans free, Auto ignores his orders and fights the Captain to keep the humans prisoners. Essentially, in the name of doing good, Auto hides the truth, eliminates those who know the truth, and use his power to deprive the humans of their independence.

This is a truly subtle and difficult story to tell, yet Pixar does it and it does it without any false shortcuts, such as making Auto defective or secretly programmed to be evil. Evil just becomes natural to him because he has absolute power. Pixar lays this out without adding fake motives to try to explain away difficult truths. That's a hard sell for a cartoon. Add in that at the same time it does that, Pixar tells the Noah story and the love story, and you have a true achievement here.

Truly impressive.

Thoughts?

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Guest Review: Fantasia (1940)

Fantasia and its sequel are like nothing else Disney, or any other major American studio, has ever made or attempted and is today widely hailed as a pinnacle in animation. However, when it was released, though the critical reception was mostly positive, audiences were less than thrilled, in fact Walt Disney later said in an interview that Fantasia “nearly broke us”, but defended it as an “artistic masterpiece”. He is right.

Fantasia is an art film. There is no other way to describe it. It has no overall story, linear or non-linear, instead it is a series of vignettes with each one centered around a particular piece of music, each introduced by Deems Taylor with the music performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski. They are, with summaries, in order:

—Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach:
—The Nutcracker Suite by Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky:
—The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Paul Dukas: A sorcerer
—Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky
—Pastoral Symphony by Ludwig von Beethoven
—Dance of the Hours by Amilcare Ponchielli
—Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky & Ave Maria by Franz Schubert

The first two feature absolutely no plot or story and are largely images to fit the music, especially Toccata and Fugue, which is here played on the strings rather than the usual organ, where the visuals can only be described as “impressionistic” in that they give a visual “impression” in animation of the music you are hearing. You “see” the violin strokes, you “see” the music played. In The Nutcracker Suite you have mushrooms and flowers dancing to the various tunes you hear in the suite.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is the most famous, with Mickey Mouse as titular apprentice to the sorcerer, Yen Sid (Hint: spell “Yen Sid” backwards). You probably know the story, the sorcerer having told the apprentice to fetch pales of water goes to bed leaving his magic hat behind. The apprentice then uses the hat to make the brooms do it for him but soon finds he can’t control it.

Rite of Spring uses Stravinsky’s most famous ballet, and one of my personal favorites, to tell the story of Earth from its birth in the cloud of dust around the sun and the volcanic eruptions of its early days to the ultimate rise and eventual extinction of the dinosaurs.

Pastoral Symphony features various “pastoral” creatures of Greek mythology such as centaurs and faun dancing and frolicking with the Greek god Bacchus in the day until Zeus appears and scatters the partying flock with his thunderbolts. This one is mostly light-hearted after the dark Rite of Spring.

Dance of the Hours, famous for providing the music for Allan Sherman’s “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” is even more light-hearted and comical with dancing ostriches, hippos, and an alligator chasing his hippo, not because he wants to eat her but because he has fallen madly in love with her.

A Night on Bald Mountain & Ave Maria is the final one and tells of the slavic god Chernabog (read: Satan) calling the ghosts and demons to Bald Mountain where he holds a terrifying black mass until the morning church bells chase him away. Fantasia then ends on a chorus singing Schubert’s Ave Maria.

What is Good About It

The animation and the music. Each one is genius in its own way and will have you watching and re-watching again and again. From the stunning strings of Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor to the beautiful chorus at the end the music is fantastic and needs little praise. The presentation is fantastic whether its the dramatic death of the dinosaurs, the terrifying demon Chernabog on Bald Mountain, or the hopeful, heavenly chorus of Ave Maria that closes the movie out.

But splendid animation and music does not a great film make. The true genius of the movie is that it never tells you what to take from it. There is no dialogue and Deems Taylor’s narration only gives a basic outline of what you are going to see, so the interpretation of it is largely up to you. You are never told how to feel about the events of the movie. You are never explicitly told how to feel about the dinosaurs dying out. It is shown, it happens, and the emotional response is up to you.

This means you cannot watch it like a normal movie. You can’t listen to dialogue and say. You have to free your mind and let the movie, and its images, music, and emotions wash over you. You can’t watch it, you have to experience it.

If Snow White is prose, this is poetry.

I will acknowledge, however, that certain moments are rather dull, for example, the Nutcracker Suite can drag on too long. And the movie, as you might have guessed, may be too adult for young children. But its an “artistic masterpiece” and one that is definitely worth checking out.

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Summer of Films: The Hobbit (1977)

One of my favorite animated films is The Hobbit. This classic blows away the sluggish, misguided six-hour bore-a-thon in theaters today. This one had heart. It fit the book perfectly, both in terms of content and feel. It was so well done, in fact, that once you see it, it becomes impossible to separate from the book.

Adaptations of books are always difficult. Should you do a straight up adaptation or should you only use the book as a guide? And even if do you a straight up adaptation, how do you handle the things that work well in books but simply don’t translate to film? These are all common problems, but none of these affected The Hobbit. Indeed, The Hobbit did it all perfectly.

● The Plot: Unlike the Jackson film(s), which use The Hobbit as a base to make a completely different film, the 1977 The Hobbit follows the story very closely. In many ways, watching this version is the same experience as reading the book, and that is a good thing. In fact, not only does this version follow the plot as written, but it even gives you a similar feel. To me, this is the most remarkable aspect of this adaptation. When you watch this film, you get the same sense of timing, of tension, and of adventure that you get reading the book. That is rare indeed. By comparison, the modern film is nothing like the book in any of these categories.

● The Images: Interestingly, the images presented in The Hobbit fit the story so well that it becomes impossible to separate the movie images from the book after seeing them. What the animators have done which helps them in this regard is that they’ve taken the time to make each named character distinct, they’ve paid attention to how they are described in the book, and most importantly, they’ve avoided the urge to “be cool.” This is the problem with Jackson’s interpretation. Jackson wants everything in his films to seem cool, so he basically copies the style of other modern films and comic books. The Hobbit copied nothing. The result is unique characters who appear as imagined rather than unrecognizable characters meant to compete with other action and superhero flicks.

● The Characters: The best thing about The Hobbit is that it maintained the character arcs throughout the film. Bilbo has a brave imagination, but lives as a cowardly ninny. As the story progresses, he must learn independence and how to endure discomfort and the unexpected. From there, he must find confidence, cunning, and finally bravery. None of this remains in the Jackson version, but it’s all here and it truly makes this Bilbo’s journey from what he was to what he becomes, which is the point to the books. Similarly, the dwarves are selfish blowhards who need to learn to be better people. Again, Jackson skips this and makes them all accomplished warriors. This film doesn’t. The end result is a movie with characters who actually grow before your eyes, rather than just move from scene to scene.

● The Music: Interspersed throughout the film are several songs. Some are sung by the dwarves, some by the elves, and some by the goblins. The songs in the Jackson version are overproduced and uninteresting. But the songs in The Hobbit are amazingly memorable. Indeed, I can still sing parts of each even when I haven’t seen the movie in a decade. Not only that, but they add a feel to the film that the Jackson songs do not. When the goblins sing, it feels ominous. When the elves sing, it feels wistful. When the dwarves sing, it feels mischievous. And the reason is that these songs are simple but telling of the inner-character of the characters. Since Jackson’s characters have no inner-character, those songs are just entertainment.

The one downside I would say with The Hobbit is that the animation is a bit stark. It’s a lot like Charlie Brown where a couple squiggles pass for a battle. But ultimately, that’s not much of a flaw because the story is so strong and the rest of the animation is so spot on. If you haven’t seen this one, you absolutely should.

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