Summer Blockbuster Roundup

I am at the Huntington Library at the moment, attending a course on paleography, which is not the study of dinosaur bones. It is the study of old handwriting in English, and way more fun than dinosaurs. Instead of doing my paleography homework, I decided to write a little here just so that my last entry that was specific to Mormon meeting culture would move down and people would not be so confused.

Movies:
There is absolutely nothing I can add to the discussions about superhero movies this summer, but since I have seen two of them, I'll at least say what I think:

Batman is Dark but in the new not so dark one, he rises: As much as I don't wish we spoke like people in a Diablo Cody movie, I do wish we all spoke like Bane in Christopher Nolan's new Batman and Bane. My brother-in-law Philip has already tried a half hour of Bane-speak, and I found it conducive to great conversation. The rest of the characters in the movie speak in exposition, which is another delightful manner of speaking. If we spoke this way during our daily lives, it might look something like this:

James: Kathryn, if you make dinner tonight with the chicken we bought at the supermarket today, we will be eating a bird that came from a massive chicken ranch in Eastern Colorado where they kill chickens by the thousands. And we will eat it because the powers that be have dictated that we eat it, but there is a man who did not want to eat this kind of chicken and that man had a child who knew about the horrible practice of chicken farming. That child is me.
Kathryn: I see now that you feel ambivalent about eating chicken, but if you don't your kids will wonder about things that they are not prepared to feel, not prepared to see. The themes of your upcoming action are coming clearly to me, and I see what I must do.
James: Those themes are ethical eating, the industrial-military state of the food business, and the clash of good and evil, and, of course, ambivalence about all those things. If you just put the tongs down and cook with instinct, the chicken might not have the hormone taste.
Kathryn: But I can't, because I have lived with fear, and fear is another theme that we are discussing at the moment. If I overcome my fear, then it will be through a "leap of faith," and I will probably do an actual leap into the kitchen without the tongs and with my eyes closed so you will clearly see the metaphor.
Bane: That would be a big mistake for those as naive as the people of Lambert home.
James: Udos os frii! Udos os frii!
Kathryn: You have been chanting that for days now and I still have not asked what it means.
James: That old blind man over there will tell you. Udos os frii! Udos os frii!
Old Blind Man: He has been saying, "Tongs down, eyes closed, leap!"
Kathryn nods with intensity and prepares to leap. 

 

Life in a superhero universe would be explained so much more clearly than it is now. Anyway, Batman  and Bane's Voice was a bona fide good time at the movies. It didn't make any sense, and I like to tell people that after all the good and evil, corporate vs. individual, darkness vs. light heavy philosophyical histrionics, it is still a crazy one percenter in a batsuit. I just can't take these movies very seriously, but they are fun to see in the multiplex.

Brave: I saw this with the kids, and it was solid. Not very much has been written about it that is at all interesting, but it was much better than it could have been. It is kind of a farce, which was unexpected. When it strays from being a farce, it is not as compelling, but the farcical elements are really well done. I think people went in thinking it was going to be "magical" or something just because it has Scottish highlands music and will o' th' wisps, but the new agey nonsense in it took away from the excellence of the family comedy.


Avengers: Maybe it was too late in the evening, maybe I've never been into Robert Downey Jr.'s schtick, maybe I just have a hard time enjoying a world populated by superheroes, maybe I kept expecting Megamind to pop up and whine about being bad, which would have been refreshing. Whatever it was, the Avengers was lame. I think there was a secret box or crystal or something that they were trying to get, which reminded me of the secret box or cube in the Transformers movies, and then I couldn't get the avant-garde majesty of the Transformers movies out of my head. At least the Batman movies aren't always concerned with some ridiculous box or chemical or magical elixir. The scenes that show whimsical conversations while characters are reading reports, looking at air-screen computers (that they manipulate with their hands!), and holding glass beakers with magical elixirs always give me entertainment, but any scene that has alien hogs riding their alien hog motorbikes destroying a big city gives me soda refill desires.


Prometheus: Another good time at the multiplex. It took itself as seriously as Batman did, and it had a pointless old tycoon in it to be evil and stupid, but it was still awesome. I don't have much more to say about that. I hope they make another one with the very large sinister bald Michaelangelo statues of David rather than the actual Alien aliens. The movie seemed interested in the Old Testament God as the Apocalyptic mean thing that he is often thought to be, which was kind of cool, but the humanist inclination right now is to not treat the Old Testament God with any nuance, and this movie was a part of that. I should write more about the way the Bible is configured in the new humanism of the movies, but I have strange handwriting to read.