Tag: film

Blowing Stuff Up With Mr. Science

If you’re about my age, you grew up with an endless series of school science movies, narrated by soporific baritones, with muzak/porn 70s soundtracks, introduced by professorial types in their studies. Disney did them, everyone else did.

In a wonderful homage to this, Sega has made an ad site for their game “Full Auto” called Sega Labs.

They have the whole thing down, even the slightly out of sync sound and bad cuts. Plus, explosions. What’s not to like?

He put his disease in me

David Lynch is doing a medicine show tour for the TM people with a stop in my town. Lynch is a great film director and a fascinating weirdo, and just watching him talk is a delight. I can’t stand TM, though.

Meditative techniques I think are awesome. Transcendental Meditation®, though, was the original expensive New Age cult that sold basic meditation through an authoritarian hierarchy. It faded from public notoriety after the 1970s but a core group carried on. Most notably, a physicist named John Hagelin ran for president in 2000 as the candidate of the “Natural Law Party”, which is a TM creation. Hagelin believes that world problems like war and terrorism must be solved by broadcasting peace consciousness from our brains while gathered in large peace-causing assemblies that will send loving energies everywhere. The best part of this is that it’s accomplished by “Yogic Flying” which is done by hopping into the air while sitting cross legged. His other plans for saving the nation and the world include legislating Vedic architecture for all buildings to bring us into harmony with Natural Law.

The Maharishi himself recently excommunicated the entire country of England from training and support because he… …didn’t like them. He is meanwhile planning a Peace Palace on a couple of islands off Nova Scotia that he recently bought.

I think David Lynch is a cool guy. I love his movies. I’m honored to have been the guy who took dictation for his comic strip 20 years ago. But I can’t go to this lecture. It’s like Tom Cruise shilling for Scientology almost. Sticks in my craw.

Eustace Clarence Scrubb died for your sins

There’s a film adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ classic children’s fantasy The Chronicles of Narnia on the way, and already people are fighting about it.

The books are explicitly Christian allegory. The Narnia universe is parallel to ours and has a creation narrative, a Savior, stories of temptation and redemption, unbelievers, resurrection, an apocalypse, and an opposing faith that’s an obvious parallel to Islam.

It’s also a kids’ fantasy book with talking animals, magic, an evil ice witch queen, ordinary children who become powerful adults in a different universe, dragons, and magical sea voyages to the end of the earth. So this isn’t The Passion of the Christ, here. I read the entire series many times as a kid and remained a loyal secular humanist agnostic intellectual liberal.

Naturally, atheists are annoyed by the arrival of this film and evangelicals are delighted. I’m sure the churchy folks will press the opportunities they get as hard as possible, and lots of us will be invited to see the movie and have a “discussion” afterwards. I think you have to be pretty hardcore antireligious to object to that.

The more serious problem is Lewis’ pseudomuslims. They seem culturally to be Turkish or Persian, and their God is a terrifying war-daemon. It’s as though he conflated the Ottoman Empire, the Persian Empire, and Thuggee into one generic Eastern Challenge to Christianity. For his time it was an awfully enlightened picture of the Mysterious East; the worshippers of Tash aren’t bad people, their cultural differences are shown as interesting rather than abhorrent, and there isn’t any over-the-top Fu Manchu racism. But it’s not very helpful in 2005 to imply that nonchristian turban-wearing people from the Mediterranean area are demon-worshipping empire-building militarists. I have no idea if this part of the story is addressed in this first movie; it won’t be if it’s just a filmed version of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe so that will be a future problem for the filmmakers to work out.

For my own part I hope they didn’t castrate Lewis’ story and make it less of a Christian allegory. The temptation to make it easier to swallow for a large audience must be great, but it would be doing the works and the author a terrible disservice to “improve” this into a sword & sorcery romp without a point. As a lifelong Lewis fan and ex-Christian I’d rather be bothered by a simplistic Bible analogy than patronized with meaningless Masters of the Universe quality entertainment.

If you read Lewis’ autobiography, you can see him as a child completely absorbed in the Norse myths, reliving the doomed and noble fight of the Gods against evil. He didn’t grow up to practice Viking religion, but he wrote some damn fine myth-based kids’ books. Leave the myth in there, whether you believe in it or not. Please!

Private Ryan and the Skyscrapers of Fire

Hollywood flagshmerz.

Hey I got a better idea. Let’s put Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal together in Kickboxer Under Siege: Nevar Forget 9/11. Or CGI John Wayne in a green beret into news footage and have him save the day. Or make an art film in which Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson walk around New York philosophizing while bodies and chunks of burning crap fall around them.

Oh oh oh.. here we go. Flight 93 on Ice! Someone get Wynn on the phone this was made for Vegas…

I hate you, milkman sixteen_shells!