Witty Analogy Title Goes Here
Wednesday, February 26th, 2014 08:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
retsukoI was talking with my Mom today and lamenting the fact that out of the Best Picture Oscar nominations, I've only seen two, American Hustle and Gravity. Before R. came along (and before there were 10 Best Pictures nods), I tried to make it a point to see all of the nominees because, so, if for no other reason, I could at least sound educated in my snobbery. But now that there are so many movies, and we have to arrange expensive babysitting almost every time we go out, seeing all 10 is just not in the cards. And not to mention the fact that I just can't handle the "tough" movies that I used to think were important. The me of ten years ago would say, "Boys Don't Cry was a tough, sad movie, but I'm really glad I watched it because it's compelling, and precisely because it is tough. That was a version of someone's life." Whereas the me of now says, "Augh, I spent all afternoon watching my son like a hawk at the playground and trying to squeeze work in during the twenty minutes he wasn't running around. I cannot handle violence and sadness and all I want is puppies, beers, and The Lego Movie." (This second statement is slightly simplified, but I have said some variation of it in the very recent past.)
But then I started mourning the loss of the old, pre-mother, rabble-rousing, political me, and tonight I decided that I would watch a "tough" movie on Netflix to prove to myself that I still could. I chose "Blackfish" because I've been on the fence about it for a while, I think it's about an issue I should know about as a San Diegan, and it was ironically next to "American Horror Story" on our instant queue. And it turns out that the ironic placement turned out to be not far from the truth: "Blackfish" is an American horror story, and it's one that everyone should watch once so that the narrative it tells stops being real and fades into the nation's collective memory as "a really stupid thing we used to do, like discrimination of various sorts, disco, and aspics."
The stupid thing I'm referring to is, of course, SeaWorld the Corporation's handling of its creatures and their care. And I would like to get this unpleasant opinion out of the way, so here it goes: FUCK YOU, SEAWORLD. FUCK YOU FOR PUTTING PROFITS AHEAD OF YOUR TRAINERS' SAFETY AND ANIMALS' WELL-BEING. FUCK YOU FOR SPREADING LIES ABOUT SO MANY THINGS. FUCK YOU AND EVERYTHING YOU STAND FOR. YOU WILL NEVER GET ANOTHER PENNY OF MY MONEY AGAIN.
As is probably obvious, yes, this movie got me all riled up. I'm glad I watched it, because it shed a great deal of light on things I'd only heard about in passing: disturbing things happening right in my city and the truth being shunted aside as quickly as possible so that profits wouldn't stop rolling in. I'm also a little sad to learn such disturbing things because it's the site of a few of my favorite childhood memories. I watched the Shamu show that appears in a few of the video clips interspersed through the movie; I loved the penguins and the Shark encounter tank is just stunning; and because I once got to touch a juvenile manta ray and it was so amazing that I seriously thought I would grow up and become a marine biologist. But after seeing this, I will never visit that park again. The cover-ups, and the treatment of the orcas (with multiple sources attesting to it) are beyond deplorable.
I am aware that this is a highly one-sided movie, but... well, there's a reason for that. When SeaWorld declines any opportunity to speak, then I can't help but think that silence = complicity. Really, I don't know what else to say about it.
This movie is in sharp contrast to "The Wolverine", which Yebisu and I finally got around to watching last night. It was a really frustrating movie: parts of it were really good, and parts of it were so embarrassingly bad that I caught myself cringing more than once. For the record, I think anyone writing a movie set in Japan (or any part of Asia, realistically) should go through their script in pre-production and substitute the word "stereotype/-ical" every time the word "dishonor/-able" appears. Seriously. It would highlight so many problems.
Allow me to slice--ha ha ha--through those problems. But OMG where to begin? Let's see:
1) No Japanese citizen who I've ever met would point at some tattooed baddies and announce to all and sundry, "Those are YAKUZA!" Every person I met while I lived there for three years said that word the way actors say "Macbeth" in the theater. And speaking of those yakuza, what was with their language? It was so polite--no swearing, not the kind I'd expect from those sorts of characters. I kept expecting one of them to say in English, "There! It is that foreigner we are pursuing! Stop that villain!" If you're going to have them called Logan gaijin, then go all out, and add in all the things the yakuza would really say, like kono kuso gaijin (this shitty foreigner!), or shine, kisama! (die, you bastard!). They were the most mannerly yakuza I'd seen since the thug in Tampopo.
1a) I think the scriptwriters were under the impression that the yakuza are sort of like gangs in L.A. and aren't taken particularly seriously. Uhm... yeah, no.
2) OK, and let's talk about Logan's general gaijin behavior: some of the script sounded almost word for word like a training video for a company employee about to be transferred for a year: "Don't jam your chopsticks into your rice so that they stand up straight. It looks like incense sticks at a funeral, and is considered highly rude." Yeah, movie, we get it: Logan's a troubled loner who doesn't play by (any) society's rules. But did you have to go with such a textbook example of gaijin stupid? I think there are much better ways to show that Logan doesn't fit in, namely because HE DOESN'T FIT IN. You could have shown him bumping into lower level furniture, or snarling at a vending machine and scaring a small child, and it would have been so much more funny and effective.
3) Hiroyuki Sanada, please get yourself a better Western agent. You're starting to get typecast as "Bad Father Figure/All Around Douchebag" and I really, really hate that. D:
4) As usual, the fight scenes, especially those towards the end, were edited in such a way that I couldn't keep track of what was going on. I even got a little bored and dug out the iPad until some of the stuff was over, never a good sign.
I don't mean to make this sound as if it were a total waste of time. I really liked the female characters in this. Out of the three, not one of them was ever a damsel in distress, and all three were distinct and different in their motivations. To top it all off, the female villain was actually pretty badass, and the final fight scene between her and another character was properly thrilling. I also loved the fact that the movie was shot in Japan, and not somewhere in L.A. that looks vaguely like Japan. There is one hilarious sequence that takes place in a love hotel, and it never got squicky or stupid, just stayed uniformly funny the whole time. The final scene that sets up the next X-Men movie was a little tacked on, but it wasn't too over the top and worked fairly well with the rest of the story. Yebisu was also particularly impressed with the opening sequence, and I liked how deftly one character's personality and background were set up in a matter of brief scenes. Maybe watch this movie with some beers and cheap sushi, celebrating its good and bad points simultaneously.
But then I started mourning the loss of the old, pre-mother, rabble-rousing, political me, and tonight I decided that I would watch a "tough" movie on Netflix to prove to myself that I still could. I chose "Blackfish" because I've been on the fence about it for a while, I think it's about an issue I should know about as a San Diegan, and it was ironically next to "American Horror Story" on our instant queue. And it turns out that the ironic placement turned out to be not far from the truth: "Blackfish" is an American horror story, and it's one that everyone should watch once so that the narrative it tells stops being real and fades into the nation's collective memory as "a really stupid thing we used to do, like discrimination of various sorts, disco, and aspics."
The stupid thing I'm referring to is, of course, SeaWorld the Corporation's handling of its creatures and their care. And I would like to get this unpleasant opinion out of the way, so here it goes: FUCK YOU, SEAWORLD. FUCK YOU FOR PUTTING PROFITS AHEAD OF YOUR TRAINERS' SAFETY AND ANIMALS' WELL-BEING. FUCK YOU FOR SPREADING LIES ABOUT SO MANY THINGS. FUCK YOU AND EVERYTHING YOU STAND FOR. YOU WILL NEVER GET ANOTHER PENNY OF MY MONEY AGAIN.
As is probably obvious, yes, this movie got me all riled up. I'm glad I watched it, because it shed a great deal of light on things I'd only heard about in passing: disturbing things happening right in my city and the truth being shunted aside as quickly as possible so that profits wouldn't stop rolling in. I'm also a little sad to learn such disturbing things because it's the site of a few of my favorite childhood memories. I watched the Shamu show that appears in a few of the video clips interspersed through the movie; I loved the penguins and the Shark encounter tank is just stunning; and because I once got to touch a juvenile manta ray and it was so amazing that I seriously thought I would grow up and become a marine biologist. But after seeing this, I will never visit that park again. The cover-ups, and the treatment of the orcas (with multiple sources attesting to it) are beyond deplorable.
I am aware that this is a highly one-sided movie, but... well, there's a reason for that. When SeaWorld declines any opportunity to speak, then I can't help but think that silence = complicity. Really, I don't know what else to say about it.
This movie is in sharp contrast to "The Wolverine", which Yebisu and I finally got around to watching last night. It was a really frustrating movie: parts of it were really good, and parts of it were so embarrassingly bad that I caught myself cringing more than once. For the record, I think anyone writing a movie set in Japan (or any part of Asia, realistically) should go through their script in pre-production and substitute the word "stereotype/-ical" every time the word "dishonor/-able" appears. Seriously. It would highlight so many problems.
Allow me to slice--ha ha ha--through those problems. But OMG where to begin? Let's see:
1) No Japanese citizen who I've ever met would point at some tattooed baddies and announce to all and sundry, "Those are YAKUZA!" Every person I met while I lived there for three years said that word the way actors say "Macbeth" in the theater. And speaking of those yakuza, what was with their language? It was so polite--no swearing, not the kind I'd expect from those sorts of characters. I kept expecting one of them to say in English, "There! It is that foreigner we are pursuing! Stop that villain!" If you're going to have them called Logan gaijin, then go all out, and add in all the things the yakuza would really say, like kono kuso gaijin (this shitty foreigner!), or shine, kisama! (die, you bastard!). They were the most mannerly yakuza I'd seen since the thug in Tampopo.
1a) I think the scriptwriters were under the impression that the yakuza are sort of like gangs in L.A. and aren't taken particularly seriously. Uhm... yeah, no.
2) OK, and let's talk about Logan's general gaijin behavior: some of the script sounded almost word for word like a training video for a company employee about to be transferred for a year: "Don't jam your chopsticks into your rice so that they stand up straight. It looks like incense sticks at a funeral, and is considered highly rude." Yeah, movie, we get it: Logan's a troubled loner who doesn't play by (any) society's rules. But did you have to go with such a textbook example of gaijin stupid? I think there are much better ways to show that Logan doesn't fit in, namely because HE DOESN'T FIT IN. You could have shown him bumping into lower level furniture, or snarling at a vending machine and scaring a small child, and it would have been so much more funny and effective.
3) Hiroyuki Sanada, please get yourself a better Western agent. You're starting to get typecast as "Bad Father Figure/All Around Douchebag" and I really, really hate that. D:
4) As usual, the fight scenes, especially those towards the end, were edited in such a way that I couldn't keep track of what was going on. I even got a little bored and dug out the iPad until some of the stuff was over, never a good sign.
I don't mean to make this sound as if it were a total waste of time. I really liked the female characters in this. Out of the three, not one of them was ever a damsel in distress, and all three were distinct and different in their motivations. To top it all off, the female villain was actually pretty badass, and the final fight scene between her and another character was properly thrilling. I also loved the fact that the movie was shot in Japan, and not somewhere in L.A. that looks vaguely like Japan. There is one hilarious sequence that takes place in a love hotel, and it never got squicky or stupid, just stayed uniformly funny the whole time. The final scene that sets up the next X-Men movie was a little tacked on, but it wasn't too over the top and worked fairly well with the rest of the story. Yebisu was also particularly impressed with the opening sequence, and I liked how deftly one character's personality and background were set up in a matter of brief scenes. Maybe watch this movie with some beers and cheap sushi, celebrating its good and bad points simultaneously.
