Reviews

The concept is very clever; the execution seems deliberately designed to obscure the concept and prevent the viewer from making any sense of the movie. I don't know whether Charlie Kaufman habitually and deliberately includes things from his adaptation sources without the context needed to make sense of them because he things it's cool, or whether idiot producers and editors mangle the film so it doesn't make sense anymore; but it's a common problem with Kaufman's movies.

Tulsey Town is a nickname for Tulsa, Oklahoma. That name doesn't appear in the book. Just another red herring Kaufman threw in for no good reason.

I watched the entire first episode, but there wasn't a trace of intelligence anywhere. All signs point to a mindless good-versus-evil smash-up, with less nuance than a Marvel movie, and lacking the meditative moments, character studies, and life outside of combat that made Samurai Jack great. The animation is a comedic, childish style calling back to the 1940s, which stylistically rules out any serious stories. Yet there's no humor here, not even the gentle humor of Samurai Jack. Copernicus, a "good guy", is probably guilty of several counts of manslaughter by the end of the episode, yet his recklessness is treated without either serious or comedic irony. The writer and director seem to be unaware that anyone might actually be /thinking/ about what's happening.

TL;DR: A bizarre mash-up of childish ideas about absolute good and evil, antique comedic animation devoid of humor, and nothing the least bit interesting or original.

... Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is beautiful and boring. Visually brilliant at times, with much thought put into integrating arcade game tropes into the story, but no thought put into the story itself. The only remotely likeable character is Wallace. Scott is stupid, selfish, and cowardly. Ramona is arrogant and uncommunicative. Their relationship is completely unbelievable. There are a few slightly funny lines and incidents, but none that made me crack a smile. It's worth seeing some of the movie for the innovative visuals, but you can stop once you've gotten its flavor, 'coz it has no nutritive value.

I felt, after watching Goodbye Solo, like I'd never seen a real movie before. I can't at this moment think of anything that matches it at exploring human nature and human experience, both the good and the bad, realistically enough to be anthropological rather than didactic--and yet not boring.

Then I came to IMDB and saw its dismal ratings. That made me sadder than the movie did. I read some of the poor reviews, to try to understand why most people didn't like this movie. I'll try to explain why I did, in a way they might understand.

I don't think this is a case of "pretentious art film" versus "unwashed masses". I think that most people who hated this film ground their thinking in spiritual metaphysical assumptions, where by "spiritual" I mean any ideology that requires the behavior of animals, groups of people, or organizations to result from its essential nature, rather than materialisticaly, as the result of mechanistic interactions; and that imagines it already knows what causes life's problems, and already has all the answers to them. So "spiritual" includes, for instance, Jacobins, Marxists, Nazis, and the Social Justice movement.

Humans are, and always have been, bad at noticing the good. We tell our own histories as a series of wars and tragedies, presenting even our greatest achievements (say, the industrial revolution) in a negative light, never mentioning the millions of small moments of joy that more than make up for the periods of destruction.

In fiction, this manifests as the Milton effect--we make our villains more interesting than our heroes, and it is they, rather than the heroes, who are the "protagonists", the first movers, in our stories, to whom heroes merely react. There are no villains in Goodbye Solo, but William is the negative element, and the (technical) protagonist to whom Solo reacts.

But Solo is not merely reacting to William. His response to William is part of his whole personality, and we see him enact optimism and generosity in every aspect of his life. William is a fascinating negative character, but Solo, the positive character, is even more fascinating. It 's so rare to see fiction where the positive character outshine the negative without falling into false oversimplifications.

In any other story, the conflict between William and Solo would be the focus of the story; we would watch the movie to "find out what happens". In this story, that conflict is just the handle by which we first grasp each character. We learn only a little more about William, but a good deal more about Solo.

And here's where audience worldviews collide. Spiritualists believe in a simple world with simple answers. Every person is an instance of some universal type ("the elect", "sinner", "Jew", "Volk", "proletariat", "bourgeois", "awoken", "racist", etc.), and differs only in what Aristotle would call "accidental properties" from other members of that type. Groups likewise are instances of types, and history is the working-out of conflicts between these groups, as understood by conflict theory.

Spiritualists expect a movie to resolve its problems, because they think all problems can and should be resolved. They want only the emotional catharsis of seeing another problem resolved, whether successfully or tragically. They aren't thinking deeply about any of it, because they have no reason to; they think their religion or ideology already gave them all the important knowledge and wisdom about life. So this movie, which is about the particular characters of William and Solo, holds no interest for them once they think they've figured out what type to cast each of them as, and what social class to categorize them as.

Whereas true materialists understand the world as full of complex, unique individuals, unbounded by "essential natures", and are always looking for more insight into what kinds of people can exist and how they might interact. A movie, to them, is not merely a cathartic validation of their own preconceptions. It is an experiment, in the same sense that Emile Zola used to explain naturalist fiction in the 19th century.

To a scientist, the most-satisfying experiments are those which succeed, validating a new theory. But the most-interesting experiments are the experiments that fail--the ones where you don't get the expected result. That's what Goodbye Solo gives us. It isn't meant to pat you on the back and congratulate you for being a good person in harmony with the Right and Proper beliefs which always win in the end. It's meant to disturb you, and give you new data that doesn't fit your expectations, to think about.

There are two theories of what art is, which have opposed each other violently for thousands of years. One is the rationalist, idealist, religious school of art, in which the artist claims to already know all important truths, that truth is universal and fundamentally simple, and that the purpose of art is to represent these truths using clear artistic styles and depicting only generic character types. This is the art of the ancient Egyptians, medieval Europe, and modern artists.

The other is the empirical, naturalist, scientific school, in which the artist is puzzled by the complexity of the world, and doesn't claim to know everything, or to be able to stuff all reality into a few pigeonholes. These people believe the point of art is not to answer questions, but to ask them; and that to do this, you must preserve the complexity of the world in your art, and not presume to summarize it.

The Boy and the World is in the former school. Its characters are types, not individuals; and it's a generic, blunt "criticism" of industrialism and "consumerism". But it isn't even good at that; the menial drudgery it depicts to represent industrialization is precisely that type which was eliminated by industrialization, and its "critique" of "consumerism" is similarly backwards, as for instance in the scene where a man has nothing in his cupboards but dozens of cans of the same exact disgusting stew. But that was the state of things pre-industrialization and pre-consumerism, when people ate only local foods, and generally the same thing every day for every meal.

Though some parts, taken by themselves, are quite good, the movie is stupid and damaging taken as a whole. This movie spends its entire length beating the viewer over the head with one message, and that one message is: Everything that happens, happens because of racial prejudice. That is the only motive behind any human action.

This is only made worse by the simplistic, extremist, overt notion the filmmakers had of what racism is.

I'd complain more about the number of astonishing coincidences the plot requires, but that's a trivial problem by comparison.

The episodes in this series "tackle" serious problems by simplifying them all to the point of absurdity. No attempt is made to understand or even really perceive the world as it exists today, why the problems "addressed" exist, or what the different opinions and worldviews that created them are. Whoever made this series believes they have all the answers to all the big questions, and their way of teaching these answers shows that they presume that anyone who doesn't agree with them is obviously stupid, and so the proper approach is to whack them with a heavier hammer.

Heinlein was a great writer, so I suspect he didn't write much of this preachy and vapid story. Fiction is interesting when it makes you think, not when it tells you what to think. To make you think, fiction must raise some question whose answer isn't obvious. This, instead, preaches messages that are either self-evident and not disputed, like, "Using people as expendable minesweepers is wrong;" so biased that they're stupid, like "Rich people are all stupid;" or so cynical that they're stupid, like "what makes people human is their nastiness".

People have been duped into thinking that a film is realistic if each thing in it, taken by itself, is realistic. But the selection and assemblage into a whole is what makes a film, and Roy Andersson's selection is not a realistic look at life. It is a relentless montage of death and despair. Life is better than this.

In context, it is just another dreary product of the post-modernist highbrow elite trying to convince the masses that their lives aren't worth living, in the hopes that they will destroy their culture so that they, the elite, can build a new utopia on its ashes.

(Also, it's extremely boring. If Andersson had eliminated all of the disconnected scenes, including most of the ones at the start of the film, it would just be boring, which would be a great improvement.)

By most standards, FGT is an excellent film. Ninny, Idgie, and Evelyn are all interesting and endearing characters. The acting is excellent; every aspect of the production is above-average. The story is an efficient tearjerker.

Dwight MacDonald wrote a pompous essay called "Masscult and midcult" in which he claimed mass culture was the watering-down of art until it was innocuous and inoffensive enough to be acceptable to stupid people. I detest that sort of snobbery, so it pains me to admit that FGT is a perfect example of it.

Reviews of FGT say that it "examines" issues of racial and gender prejudice. An examination, however, would look at why people do what they do. It would reveal things. There would be some element of surprise.

FGT is rather a predictable series of tropes that continually congratulates us for our own liberal social prejudices: "White men are bad; women, blacks, and extremely poor people are good. Society is bad; rebellion against it is good."

So, if you want a movie that is to drama as Flash Gordon is to science fiction--a series of tropes for emotional manipulation and self- congratulation--go ahead and watch it; you'll probably enjoy it. But don't pretend that it's art.

I was excited when I heard about this show--I grew up in a religious family, and I was looking forward to a little holy cow hamburger. Why hasn't anyone done this before? South Park can only do so much--they've got lots of other religions to puncture! If parody is like deer hunting, making fun of conservative Christianity is like cow hunting. I've got so many crazy stories that should be shared--the herbal store that got picketed because people assumed it must be for witches, the woman who got thrown out of Bible study for practicing yoga, the church that wouldn't pay their bill because "they were doing the Lord's work"--and I haven't even mentioned creationism or the Republican party.

But Moral Orel (it should be Oral! Can't they even get that right?) is like a cow hunter that keeps coming home empty handed. I was stunned. How could they miss? How could they fail at making fun of conservative American Christianity? It was obvious the show's writers had never seen the inside of a church. They didn't know the things Christians do that are funny, so they made stuff up, and parodied their imaginary conception of Christians. But... that's not funny. Silly, yes, but not funny. It ain't parody if you just make it up. And with such an easy target. Watching it is like listening to somebody trying to make fun of Rush Limbaugh, only they've never heard his show.

Another reviewer wrote, "it really does open your mind to what the world is coming to, what we're doing to the Earth, and in time what we could do to ourselves if we succeed in perishing our world. People who appreciate art, and appreciate a profound storyline will enjoy Salad Fingers: contrary to the belief it's an absurd cartoon with little meaning."

Art is a slippery concept. There are artistic elements here: the character quirks and gentle psychosis of salad fingers, the dream-like, minimalist animation. But mere creation of a mood does not, in my mind, rise to the level of art. I don't mean to condemn the attempt with my low rating. Experiments must be made. But this is a failed experiment, and because it lacks any structure, conventional narrative, or beauty, there's nothing left to like after that failure. There is no profound storyline. Salad Fingers does not speak to human experience, not even the experience of delusional psychotics. There is no reasonable, interesting, apparent interpretation of the events, no way to make sense of it. (And don't tell me that "not making sense is its sense!" Kafka did that right. This is not Kafka.) It's a bunch of random creepy stuff thrown together, made independently without any story or plan.

One of the reasons MLP:FiM is so superior to, say, earlier incarnations of My Little Pony, is that the plot of each episode isn't about some boring bad guy or scary thing, but is about the ponies - their characters and their relationships.

Everything in a MLP:FiM episode serves two purposes: It advances the story, and it develops the characters and their relationships with each other.

Well, this episode breaks that rule, spending its time showing us how nasty this Gryphon is. Yawn. And that's why it's the weakest of MLP:FiM season 1.

It really isn't fair for me to review this movie without finishing it. I hope to finish it someday and go back and finish this review. But I'm having a hard time wanting to finish it - and it's mostly because of blocking problems.

The scenes in the movie might have worked perfectly well in a book. But when transferring action scenes to the screen, they haven't paid attention to the question, How can we block this scene out so that it makes sense? Where should people stand? What should they be doing? So we have action sequences where most of the actors are standing around looking lost. The people being captured have plenty of chances to run away, and instead they run and hug each other, or stand in place, or deliver monologues. The ruffians stand around watching the good guys almost escape. They brandish guns and knives vaguely, without conviction; and the good guys don't seem intimidated by them. It doesn't make sense.

Not to mention, why is it the reader is on the run from a violent gang of criminals for years, and he doesn't have any kind of plan for when they show up? Doesn't carry a gun, hasn't warned anybody, doesn't try to escape. It's hard to stomach.

It seems, from the audience demographics, that I'm the only person under 60 who listens to PHC. Do I have any business reviewing what is, apparently, an older person's movie? Does one's tolerance for excitement diminish so much with age that I myself would consider this watchable 20 years from now? Can I ever trust IMDb user reviews again, after seeing an average score of 7.7 for this most awful of movies? And can I ever enjoy listening to PHC on the radio again, after suffering through the two most tedious hours I have ever spent in a movie theater?

I went to see it with my girlfriend. She wanted to see The Lake House. I pointed out that it had gotten terrible reviews, and it wasn't on for 2 hours, and said that she could trust the Prarie Home Companion people. I've been a fan of the show since Reagan was in office.

You would think that a 2-hour PHC movie could be at least as good as a 2-hour PHC radio show. But the movie suffered some major flaws relative to the radio show:

1. You couldn't get up and iron clothes or file bills or do whatever you do during the musical parts of the show.

2. The funny parts of the radio show, like the monologue and the skits, weren't in the movie.

3. The movie didn't set any boundaries between reality and fantasy. In the radio show, you always know where the boundaries are between truth and fiction. The sketches are fiction; the actors are real. The movie was presented as if the sketches were real. Guy Noir is a real detective; Dusty and Lefty are real cowboys. A mildly amusing sketch about an orangutan, a rottweiler, a flock of geese, and a letter from an ex-lover - much the sort of stuff you might hear on the show - was presented as if the ex-lover bit was reality, so that it was not so much funny as pathetic.

4. The movie couldn't decide whether it wanted to be slapstick or drama. Really serious things would happen to or be talked about by the actors, and I couldn't tell whether we were supposed to sympathize with them, or laugh at them. When Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep are talking about their family woes while Lily's daughter reads her bad poems about suicide, the stories are just outrageous enough that you can't tell if it's supposed to be a comic piece or character drama.

5. I couldn't reconcile the supernatural elements of the "plot" with the familiar background of the PHC radio show. Not to mention that everything that happens, makes no difference, and you don't know what happens in the final scene. Also, a tip to GK for any future screenplays: Introduce the first plot event LESS than one hour into the show.

If they had just presented a PHC show without the distracting and uninteresting "plot", they could have fit in more interesting stuff. If they really wanted to go with a plot, they should have cut 5 or 6 musical numbers out to give them a little time to do something with it. Instead, they gave us a pseudo-movie, pseudo-radio show with a pseudo-plot and pseudo-characters not developed enough to be called 2-dimensional. I writhed in my seat waiting for it to end, knowing that I would owe my girlfriend big-time for this. If I'd been there alone, I would have walked out. I tried to read a book, but she didn't have one and said I had to suffer with her.

I have to look on the bright side. It was much worse for my girlfriend - she hates folk music.

I read many reviews that basically said, "Come on, it wasn't ALL terrible" and gave it 8 to 10 stars. Does their dial go to 11?

I feared this movie would suck when I saw the previews, because they had nothing but CGI scenes, with no dialogue. That was a bad sign about where Lucas' mind was. Watched it anyway. It had nice CGI.