Star TrekWarsThulhu

Zachary Quinto's Spock turns on the geek sex appeal.

If you haven’t yet seen the new Star Trek movie, then you obviously weren’t contributing to its staggering $148 million box-office weekend worldwide. Reaching out to old fans and new recruits alike, the film offers not only a fascinating insight into how one resumes control over a powerful franchise on the big screen, but also how saturated with dedicated generic references such franchise films have become. Star Trek (2009) is, according to a close friend of mine who runs a comic book shop, unabashed “geek porn:” an astonishing array of references, insinuations, cool gadgets and eye candy made specifically for geeks to feel, well, awesomely sexy. I am more of the opinion that it’s “geek foreplay” – here’s why:

****SPOILERS ALERT!! SEE THE MOVIE OR BE… UM, SPOILED?***

The Sheik & Social Mores part 2

Initially, I had envisioned part 2 (part 1 here) as comparing and contrasting the continuum from reel–>read–> real. In the future I’d like to steer back in that direction with some other silent film, perhaps The Lost World or Phantom of the Opera. In the meantime I’ve gone off on a bit of a literary bender related to the Near East, chewing thorough numerous online references, Persian Pictures (1892) by Gertrude Bell, and Winter in Arabia (1937-38) by Freya Stark. I wasn’t that impressed with Pictures, but Winter in Arabia is an excellent companion piece to Nicholas Clapp’s Sheba.

A lot of people have gotten mileage off the Sheik-Valentino mythos, particularly on sociological topics including race, class, gender roles and the taming of otherness. These have been covered in professional literature, which I’ll leave to you to look up. Despite my earlier dismissal of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, there’s actually a lot more alike than dissimilar between the two novels, but LC is consistently included on the ‘banned books’ list while The Sheik is remembered as an early popular romance. Why the contrast in notoriety?

The authors (E.M. Hull and D.H. Lawrence) were contemporaries, both with a Derbyshire connection, but from different social classes. Each novel deals with an intimate relationship that was disturbing to the prevailing mind set (LC class reasons, S racial/colonial issues), involving blunt, passion-driven men and women described as remote or cool to emotion. Both also deal with sex as something that happens, this touch of directness in Hull’s writing I wasn’t expecting, given the dense layering of purple prose in places, but Lawrence is even more direct, which is probably the reason LC is stuck on the banned books list. That and the conflict in LC was resolved by a pregnant Constance Chatterley running away to British Columbia—leaving behind a crippled aristocratic husband and a large estate—to marry a lumberjack. The solution to Diane’s problems were a bit more deus ex machina (He’s a Spaniard! Aristocratic even! Raised by wild desert tribesmen the way talking apes raised Tarzan Viscount Greystoke!) I was actually looking for this b/c the movie was my first introduction to the idea of anti-miscegenation laws and the Hayes code.

The two novels definitely don’t match up in the development of the female protagonists. Constance grows into herself, while Diane suffers a psychological break and decides she’s perfectly happy being carted all over the back of beyond by a guy whose idea of foreplay is making her cry. *Bleh* The Ahmed-Diane relationship in book has hallmarks of Stockholm syndrome, and he’s totally open about the fact he grabbed her off the street because he hates the English, and she was conveniently English, blue-blooded and vulnerable in one hot package. Freud must have had a field day with the horse breaking scene if he read a German translation. It’s interesting that the male author (Lawrence) writes about a woman finding more of herself and the female author (Hull) goes the subjugation route. Have to wonder what the rationale for each of them was since they were both seeing the same changes in society, broadly speaking.

The Sheik, Changing Social Mores and French Algeria: A Semi-free Association Writing Exercise Part 1

Last week I was browsing YouTube for clips of Rudolf Valentino, which got me thinking about The Sheik, Hollywood blockbuster of 1921 and the movie that made him an icon. I first saw the film in my early teens and it went straight to my limbic system. Instead of New-Kids-on-the-Block, I was the classroom eccentric who was into Weird Al Jankovic, Dvroak’s New World Symphony and film star who’d been dead since my grandmother was 4 years old.

That phase passed, and I hadn’t really thought about either the film or actor in at least a decade, when the idea came to me that YouTube might be a source for bits of silent movies. I set out to look for Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera and The Shiek. Both films having been major productions in their day, I figured the odds would pretty good that clips from them as well as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis would be available. I needn’t have hedged my bets, though, since along with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and a Danish film from 1923 I hadn’t heard of (Vampyr) were readily available, mostly as music video-style tributes. A couple were even offered as full length downloads posted by some serious connoisseurs.

7 things The Dark Knight taught me about democracy

Okay, the hype’s over. They’ve made their billion. (As I write this in mid-September, Batman remains the number-three movie in the country, having dipped below 4th place for exactly one of the last 60 days.) Our pulses have slowed and we can all take a deep breath.

And start overanalyzing. Finally.

Watching the Watchmen Trailer Being Watched

Watching the Bloody Watchmen...

OK, so if you’ve been hanging out in geeky circles and in chat-rooms the past several weeks, you’ve obviously been hearing about the same awesome thing over and over again, with rave reviews and ululations of delight emitting from people’s oral cavities and keyboards.

That thing, of course, is Joss Whedon’s mini-series Dr. Horrible, which hopefully you caught while it was free between July 13th and July 20th.

Seen it? Good. There’s also that other awesome thing you’ve been hearing about over and over again, etc., which is the Watchmen Trailer and the topic of today’s blog.

“Watched” it yet? Great!

Before I get into the content of the trailer itself, a word on the discourse of its reception. “Discourse!?” you yell, arming yourself against the approaching Foucauldian logic of Ivory Tower cultural studies. Fear not! Discourse is merely the socially accepted boundary of what can be said about any given word and/or topic. The word itself is actually derived from the chariot racetrack in Roman arenas which served also as the boundary between spectator and spectacle, demarcating what is to be within the bounds of the games and what is out-of-bounds. It is perfectly OK within the socio-linguistic discourse of “movies,” for example, to say “I like all movies” or “those movies all suck bad” or “I haven’t seen movies in my life” or “You only find that in the movies,” whereas it’s outside the discourse to say “I would like to wear a size 32 movies for pants this summer.”

So, the sensible discourse of the Watchmen trailer among geek circles seems to revolve around two particular positions. These are the following:

Yasukuni Documentary

I’ve written about the Yasukuni Shrine in Japan before, and all the controversy it causes, especially every year when the prime minister decides to go or not to go to pay respects. I was therefore very interested to read this article on the BBC yesterday all about a documentary that has been made about the shrine, simply called “Yasukuni,” by a Chinese director. It sounds fascinating to me, especially its attempts to understand what the shrine represents to differing groups:

In all, Li Ying has spent 10 years, on and off, making the film.

During visits to Yasukuni he says he was at times threatened, abused, and on occasion had his equipment confiscated. Newspapers here have reported that he has received death threats.

He says he set out to try to understand better what the shrine means to Japanese people.

[...]

To many it is one of the most sacred places in Japan. To others it is a place they feel glorifies war.

10 Things I Hate About You

In honor of Friday, something frivolous for all of us:

Today I have been pondering the mystery of why, out of all my favorite movies, I can’t seem to get enough of 10 Things I Hate About You. No matter how much I love a movie, I usually hit some kind of limit for how often I’m willing to see it. Not so with 10 Things. I once watched it 3 times in one weekend, which is unheard of for me. Even the soundtrack is addictive. But why?

Yes, it’s got the lovely Julia Stiles, who I generally adore, and the even more lovely Heath Ledger, who really needs no further explanation. There’s even the cute guy from 3rd Rock from the Sun, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Allison Janney, in a hilarious departure from her more staid West Wing role. Fine recommendations, all, but there must be more to it.

Brad Bird, Todd Haynes and the real audience of Barack Obama’s race speech

For me, the most striking part of Barack Obama’s uberspeech about race Tuesday was the extent to which he seemed to be talking directly to the individuals in the media, and not just in a facile “okay, this is a chance to change the weekly narrative” way.

Did That Critter See His Shadow?

If you’re in the U.S., it’s not unlikely that a certain rodent crossed your path this morning. Like most celebrities, he’s put on a few pounds in his old age and is getting ever more difficult to hoist in the air when that all-important premonition proclamation is made by his inner circle. Yes, that’s right: it’s Punxsutawney Phil’s day to shine . . . just like the early-morning sun, which cast a long shadow behind him and means six more weeks of winter. Phooey.

The holiday’s roots go back to the European tradition of Candlemas, when candles were blessed and distributed and the day’s weather was used to foretell the coming of spring. Imported by German settlers, Groundhog Day has been officially celebrated in that small town in Pennsylvania since 1887, though real interest in attending the ceremony didn’t take off until the Bill Murray/Andee MacDowell film highlighting the holiday and the town was released in 1993 (need to jog your memory?).

Unless you like a media circus, you’re better off visiting Phil any other day of the year when you’ll have his full and undivided attention. The town has developed a small number of groundhog- and weather-related attractions which can be enjoyed year-round. Your pilgrimage must include a stop at Phil’s home, a terrarium called “Groundhog Zoo” at the library building on Punxsy’s town square. Before leaving town, pick up a Phil-shaped cookie cutter and bake a few groundhogs in his honor every February ever after. Punxsutawney is approximately 80 miles northeast of Pittsburgh and 150 miles southeast of Erie in west-central Pennsylvania.

Warning: Paprika contains “dream sequences”

I did indeed spend my Monday night entertainment hours on the Duke campus, but not at the Karl Rove speech. Instead, Mark and I went to a screening of the anime movie Paprika. It came out in 2006 and has been one of those movies that everyone I know has heard of and has been asking if I’ve seen it. Up until Monday, I hadn’t, and it was starting to bug me. So, when I saw that it would be showing as the final movie in the CineEast series at Duke, I made a note to go.

What I knew about the movie before I went: Many people were comparing it to Appleseed, another sci-fi anime movie that came out in 2004. Mark also thought he remembered hearing that Paprika was actually set in the Appleseed world. The description of the movie in the email announcement I got opened with, “Following its own brand of dream logic, Paprika is an eye-opening mind trip that never fails to dazzle.”

I am now developing a theory, which becomes more robust with each test, that any movie advertised as having “dream sequences,” “dream-like sequences,” “dream logic,” and other related “dream”-y properties can have its description more accurately translated to mean “will look and feel like you’ve heard acid trips described.” I’m not really saying the movie was bad, just really, really weird. (And no, it doesn’t have anything to do with Appleseed, other than the fact that they are both anime movies with pretty animation and good soundtracks.)

In what follows, I will give a more in depth review of the actual movie and its content, but I’m warning you now that I’m not worried about spoilers, because honestly, the plot isn’t particularly important to the movie.