Category Archives: Movies

Sexual Assault in Dramatic Narratives

After watching No Blade of Grass I started thinking more about sexual violence in media because this film has a nearly perfect example of a gratuitous rape which serves no purpose in the narrative and I can use that to discuss why sexual violence is so often something that should be removed from a piece.

In the story John Custance, his wife Ann and daughter Mary are waylaid by evil men who knock out John, abduct Ann and Mary and rape them. John and the other in their band of survivors find the men, interrupt the assault, and kill them, Anne killing one herself. Then the band moves on, back on their quest for the safety of the potato far.

A scene in a narrative piece needs to fulfill a function the most common function for a scene include; Advancing the Plot, Revealing Character, Motivating Characters, and World Building/Exposition. It is not only possible but also preferable that a scene performs more than a single function but it should serve at least one of those goals. So let’s look at this sequence and see what functions it may fit into.

1) Advancing the Plot. This attack and its resolution in no way advances the plot. The characters quest remains the same after the incident as before and the attack doesn’t change their approach to their goals. There is no alteration to their methods that later effect their progress. The plot is utterly unaffected.

2) Revealing Character. The Point of View character for this film is John Custance and other characters, particularly given the movie’s brief running time, are scarcely explored at all. The assault reveals nothing new or hidden from the viewers. No unexpected reaction, no dark history revelation.

3) Motivating Characters. This is an old action movie cliché, the hero’s significant other is assaulted by the bad guy or his henchmen and the hero is finally propelled into action and the third act of the movie. It is sexual assault and major trauma reduced to a motivational excuse. In No Blade of Grass  the attack doesn’t even service that purpose. It takes place about the middle of the second act and the attackers end up dead adding no revenge element to the story. It should also be noted that the assault, while it produces some changes in the Ann and Mary, these changes are give only as surface treatment and are principally shown in how they affect their respective romantic partners.

4) World Building and Exposition. I think it is fairly likely that the filmmakers thought that the inclusion of this scene dramatized the cruel and violent world born of this disaster but that is a quite naive viewpoint. Rape is a daily reality. Stranger rape and gang rapes are a reality, one that women are quite aware of. If this is meant as world building then it sadly fails to understand how our world already works.

Major trauma should only be deployed for major story elements. Such real life terrors should never be used as a motivational gimmick to get a hero moving. If you need to rape someone to give the hero motivation, then make it the hero who is assaulted and leave side characters for side quests and lesser elements.

Share

Double Movie Review: No Blade of Grass & Bird Box

This was a pretty good weekend for the number of movies I have watched but sadly not for the number of good movies I have seen.

Bird Box   based on a novel. is about a woman, Mallory, played by Sandra Bullock, and two children, Boy and Girl, taking a dangerous river trip while blindfolded in order to avoid seeing a supernatural force that drives people mad, usually into suicidal behavior or depending on plot requirements religious mania to spread the truth of what they have seen coupled with homicidal behavior. Bird Box  operates on the level of plot and really nothing more and even there is fails as it requires suspension of disbelief that I was unable to provide. A person unskilled and blindfolded cannot row a boat for days down a river without ending up on the bank, not to mention running fully blindfolded through heavy growth forest, or accurately wielding shotguns while opposed by multiple attackers. Each of the several characters that begin their siege as the apocalyptic disaster unfolds has a specific plot purpose and once they fill that purpose they die making for route and unimagined writing. Too patly constructed, lacking any characters of depth, and demanding far too much suspension of disbelief Bird Box  fails every test of effective horror.

No Blade of Grass,  also adapted from a novel, is another apocalyptic tale, this one focused on environmental destruction and the attending collapse of society. In the film a virus or blight is spreading around the world that destroys all member of the grass family, that includes, wheat, rice, corn, and other cereal grains, leading to mass starvation and anarchy as the governments of the world prove incapable of meeting the existential threat. The story focuses on the trails of the Custance family who, with advance warning of the government’s plan to seal off London, flee with a friend to the safety of a large potato farm owned by the father’s brother in the north of England. Along the way they surrender civilized norms in their fight for survival becoming hard brutal people until reaching their sanctuary and discovering that their plans are upended forcing them into even more immoral choices.

Released in 1970 No Blade of Grass,  which I first heard about from a fellow panelist as we discussed environmental disaster SF stories, is an ambitious but ultimately flawed production. Partly the film suffers from too much compression in both screen time and the passage of time for the characters. With a scant 136  96 minute, and wasting quite a few of those with set up and exposition, and with a fair number of characters, the movies doesn’t have the running time to build, explore, and transform these character in an meaningful method, leaving the viewer to watch a series of scenes that only nominally follow a sequence but lacking in emotional impact. Further more the character appear to travel for only a few days and in that short time they become murderous and hard, transformations that lack any clear baseline, we hardly get a chance to see who they were before the crisis, and as such reinforce the impression that these were evil people all along. No Blade of Grass  required a more epic format and without it the film falls far short of its intended goals.

Share

Movie Review: Captain Marvel

Yesterday my sweetie-wife and I took a few hours out from Comic Fest, a local Comic/SF convention to catch the latest release from the Marv el Cinematic Universe: Captain Marvel.

I was touched, as I am sure many people were, when the flashing scenes features the heroes of the MCU in the opening logo was replaced with flashbacks to Stan Lee’s numerous cameo throughout the franchises.

Captain Marvel,  the released after the universe shattering events of Avengers: Infinity War  actually takes place in the past, 1995, making it the second movie, following Captain America: The First Avenger,  to establish and/or retcon history in the MCU. Centered on an amnesiac Kree warrior Vers, this movie is about one woman’s journey to discovery not only who and what she is but to firmly plant her flag about the nature of heroism. Chasing about Earth after

Captain Marvel (2019) poster
CR: Marvel Studios

shape-shifting alien Skrulls, Vers, played by the talented and captivating Brie Larson, teams up with SHIELD Agent Nick Fury, played with digital de-aging assistance by the incomparable Samuel L. Jackson, and learns about herself and the slippery nature of truth until she confronts and accepts her place in the larger scheme of things.

In previous posts I have ranked the MCU films into four categories and Captain Marvelfalls firmly into the mid-grade ranking along side with Guardians Vol2, Thor, Thor: the Dark World, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Ant-man  and Iron Man 2. It is a solid movie without major flaws and a talented cast that is engaging and talented but it lacks the breakout qualities that would elevate the film into either the Honorable Mention or Top Tier categories. Well worth a trip to the theater and almost certainly a future addition to my library Captain Marvel  is fun, fast, and not without worthy themes.

The movie is not without flaws, the overall plot is fairly standard for an MCU movie, the action while fine and well performed doesn’t break out into anything noteworthy, and the digital de-aging for Clark Gregg as Coulson, while better than the digit masks for Cushing and Fisher in Rouge One   came off as plastic and nearly plunged me into the uncanny valley. These are the principal reasons why Captain Marvel  landed as a mid-tier Marvel movie and an honorable mention or high in my personal rankings.

Share

The Most Pointless Debates

Any number of debate topics are pointless; the best known among these being anything concerning politics or religion. As an aside let me lay out in my mind the difference between a debate and a discussion. In a debate the goal to is present argument strong enough, well reasoned enough, and supported by enough facts that one party ends up conceding their position to the other while a s discussion is a dialog that does not possess conversion or ‘winning’ as a goal. Today religion and politics are often matters of core identities and people rarely surrender their identity for mere fact and logical construction and so discussion of religion and politics can be illuminating debates on these topics are often nothing more than unmasked futility. I would add to this short list of futile debates and relative merits of various television shows and feature films.

Beyond the traditional divides, Star Trek  vs. Star Wars these debates where someone tried fervently to get someone to admit that a film or series is good or bad, depending on the debater’s point of view, are sound and fury signifying nothing. Art is not objective, it is inherently subjective and those pieces that speak to us or do not speak to us do so on levels that are effective by our known reason and our, often unknown, biases. It is possible to discuss why a film works or what made it so appealing to you, but climbing the mountain to getting someone who hates a movie to flip and love it is a fool’s errand. This is a debate I have witnessed over and over again. There have been films I loathed and friends have tried to convince me we worthy of love and there have been film I loved that friends have to get me to dismiss as garbage. It doesn’t happen, the heart wants what the heart wants.

Lately, as these debates have moved on line, the futility of these debates has grown with their number. I have watched as member of communities engaged in vicious and utterly meaningless debates over recent genre films. Often these debates are deeply heated because the movies themselves have become stand in for political positions and as such tokens of political identity and to love or hate a movie becomes inescapably bound up with one core sense of self. The participants in these debates rarely are aware that they are in fact debating matters of personal identity and descend into hateful attacks as the personal stakes continually rise.

I do not participate in these on line debates. I am more than happy to discuss movies, I adore movies, but I will never try to convince you that need to think of any film the same way I do.

My god if everyone did that film would be boring.

Share

Movie Review: Apollo 11 (2019)

This year is the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11’s flight, landing, and return from the moon. In celebration and in partnership with NASA a new documentary is currently playing in theaters nationwide.

Apollo 11, using footage that has never before been exhibited, chronicles the historic voyage to our nearest celestial neighbor. Omitting present day narration and interviews the film utilizes 65mm footage shot by MGM Studios for a proposed film that was never realized, 35 and 16 mm footage shot by NASA and the Apollo 11 astronauts respectively, and original audio recoding for Mission Control, Apollo 11 transmissions, and national news coverage, to create the sensation of witnessing the fantastic venture. Aside from digital process in the film restoration and brilliant on-screen titling, the only modern feature of the documentary is the music, while created on period electronics is all original composition.

I am a space nerd. I was eight when Armstrong and Aldrin walked the surface of the moon as Collins orbited overhead.  I could not begin to count the number of documentaries about the space race, Apollo, and the planets I have watched and this one is the most impact, the most emotional, and the most thrilling. Seeing this massive endeavor on an Imax screen with belly rumbling bass was an unmatched experience. Sadly if you want to see it in Imax also you will need to hurry. It plays in these large format theaters this week only and will be replace by the MCU’s next entry, Captain Marvel.

This movie is fantastic and the landing sequence surprisingly suspenseful for an event that not only happened in out lifetimes but that we witnessed live.

Share

The Old Ways Die and are Replaced

Over the weekend I have seen reports that some senior member of the MPAA are planning to introduce new rules that they hope will stop companies such as Netflix from competing in the Oscars.

To be eligible for an Oscar nomination a film, among other factors and there are many, is that the film must play for seven consecutive days at a commercial theater in Los Angeles and the film must not have been broadcast or available via home video or pay per view prior to that L.A. exhibition.

Netflix, having moved solidly into the film production as well as the exhibition business and looking for the validation that serious awards grant gamed the system to get its movie Roma  into Oscar consideration for the 2018 awards. It lost Best Picture to Green Book,  a film that upset many people and it likely to be one of the lesser-remembered Best Picture winners, however Roma’s near victory has unsettled those with a more traditionalist view of the motion picture industry, fueling this charge to change the rules.

Frankly, I am not concerned.

The distinction between television and feature films has been vanishing for decades. Movie theater attendance never recovered from the blow that was the adoption of television and now with more movies being made than ever most people get their experiences in such diverse environments as state of the art theaters with massive sound system to ear buds while sitting on a moving mass transit bus. Trying to hold to an outdated model first constructed at the start of the last century is a fool’s errand. What matters, and what has always mattered more than anything else, is that people see the features.

Art without an audience is worthless. A book has value only when it is read, a song when it is heard, a movie when it is watched.

I prefer seeing films in theaters, I love that experience but I see far more films for the first time on my television. It is the point of discovery where I learn about new voices that speak to my own.

The olds ways are dying; let them.

Share