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May 08, 2011
Thor! god of Hoopla
I've had a Thor t-shirt since last year's Comic-Con. Many people have remarked that my shirt has a name tag stuck to it. (It says Donald Blake, MD on it - its a replica of the shirt Jane gives Thor to wear in the movie, except in the movie it has long sleeves and in the cheap world of Comic-Con freebies, it's a t-shirt.)
So, needless to say, I've been waiting for this movie for awhile. Watching the pitches in Hall H, I was convinced that Marvel has it right: focus on the story, while DC is annoying: focus on the "cool characters nerds want to see." And yes, I have a grudge against DC for axing Joss from Wonder Woman.
So I was a bit surprised at the end result. I really wanted to like Thor, but it was disjointed and (a)I had no interest in the ethereal world scenes and (b)the writers weren't interested in character development.
I thought it was just me, but Joe Morgenstern agreed with me.
On the other hand, I think Kenneth Turan simply doesn't get genre flicks. People like that the Marvel universe is interconnected. We like that we get previews at the end of the credits. We like seeing Clark Gregg play the straight man. We like the idea that someone in the government knows all these superheroes and mythical men are romping around Earth. The best thing about Thor was that it had humor. I enjoyed that it didn't take itself too seriously in the Earth scenes - that made it enjoyable to watch.
But here's why I thought it was going to be so much more than it was: Natalie Portman is a thinking woman's actress. She's incredibly smart (and not just for actor standards). So, I thought 'yay! The smart girl's going to get the hot guy in the movie for a change!" Except, all she did was go giggly every time she was in a scene with Thor. Their entire romance boiled down to two points: the man is ripped and he can tell her about worm holes. Really? That's all it takes to make a super intelligent woman turn to mush? Puh-leeze.
I didn't hate the movie the way I hated Transformers 2 or G.I. Joe. But I wanted it to be wonderful, the way Iron Man was. But there were too many disjointed plot points and too little character development for me to be able to get behind the movie. And I guess I've seen too many sci-fi fantasy t.v. series and movies to be willing to suspend my disbelief of one-sided females who swoon the minute a handsome man walks into their lives. Man, do I miss Buffy.
Posted by cj at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)
May 01, 2011
LA Myth & Memory @LAT FOB
Patt Morrison: Sometimes there seems to be only myth and no memory about LA. Panel is all experts:
William Deverell
D.J. Waldie
Leo Braudy
Lawrence Culver
Culver: Hollywood and the Hollywood sign - rivals Coca-Cola as a brand name. The sign itself was not considered significant...Originally, was not connected to the movie movement. It was a temperance movement of rich people who wanted to tend their gardens in rival with Pasadena. If they did have rooming houses, they would have signs 'No Jews, dogs, or actors allowed.' [laughter] The 'land' part of the sign was taken down in 1949. In the lates 70s it was reconstructed. The sign was supposed to be temporary. I can only liken it to the Eiffel Tower which was also supposed to be temporary.
Morrison: Deverall expanded on the multiple layers of mythology about California.
Deverell: In some ways, Los Angeles has profited by making it seem so easy. That this metropolis exists in nature - but we really shoved nature around. We really tested the limits of placing this many people in a basin this big. Just pull it back a little bit, Los Angeles comes into being by one of the most aggressive campaigns of control of nature. It's a rubber band that can be stretched only so far, and eventually nature will snap it back.
Los Angeles does something that other cities have not figured out how to do - it advertises itself, Los Angeles, as the attraction.
Waldie: Selling of Los Angeles began after the original Mexicans lost their property to the banks of San Francisco in the middle of the 19th century. Selling us off to others has been part of the history of the city...part of what we're talking about today is why is that the case? Why do we persist in understanding that Los Angeles is a product to be sold to someone else...This was famously called a fragmented metropolis and it remains a desperately fragmented metropolis that lacks in the social glue, cultural glue that other metropolis has.
I believe, as Bill does, that the past provides a window into our present discontents. The builders of Los Angeles, all of those players in the making of Los Angeles, regarding this place as a consumer product to be packaged, sold, and walked away from.
Morrisson: the frontier of leisure sounds positive, but ended up making LA very segregated in many ways...the idea that resort living was in opposition to public parks that other cities have.
Culver: LA willed itself from a town of a couple thousand people to the second largest city in the United States. On the one hand, Los Angeles sold leisure in a way that people really like - that you could go to the beach and the mountains and live in a bungalow and celebrate the fact that you liberated yourself from Iowa. Likewise, was the effort to make leisure restricted and controlled. Public pools were restricted.
Leisure came to be something controlled at private resorts, private hotels. And encapsulated by private families in private homes - backyard swimming pools rather than a public pool.
Braudy: Wanted to bring the myth back into this as well. We've been talking about the negative history but there's a dialectic between the myth and the reality that happened after WWII. The solidity of the myth continued. As long as people believed the myth, it was bigger than what happened on the ground.
Deverell: We tend to think of myth and reality at the opposite ends of the spectrum, but they're in a circle. The privatization of Los Angeles, it's certainly not the only place in the country that understood that privatization was comfortable. We can trace that across the country in suburbs that were not fenced and then were fenced. During the Cold War, people did retreat to the privacy of their domestic space. LA offers people that, in part because they could be outside.
Braudy: The size of the city has been discussed since it was created. Say you came from some specific neighborhood, but the farther you go from here you eventually say you come from LA; maybe not the city of Los Angeles. ...When we move into the marketing of small houses on small lots...they were buying into the relief of depression and war. My neighbors, many of my neighbors had grown up in oil camps in Bakersfield and Los Angeles delivered safety to millions of people.
Culver: It's strange how the myths that LA was selling and inventing and broadcasting through Hollywood, on the one hand offered something that was the realization of a dream for people who had lived lives of privation and at the same time those houses were restricted by incredibly racial covenants, and that continued long after the Supreme Court overturned the legality of racial covenants.
Braudy: Branding makes you more visible, but it is incredibly reductive at the same time. This effort to create a mythology about this great, sprawling place has really become a template...an amorphous, urban world - and how do we represent it? Even though it has very little to do with the kind of people who live in Los Angeles, it's just shorthand.
Morrison: California is famously negligent about its history. I remember that when I wrote my book about the LA River, people were surprised that it was a river.
Deverell: There's a difference between memory and amnesia. We also forget, willfully forget the history of this place. What LA has done, brilliantly, is structure memory brilliantly. We remember a mission period that was sunny. We remember a certain lifestyle of the late 18th century that was hazy. What we forget is that LA came of age in a bloody way and with racial and ethnic violence that was dark and grim.
We have to be careful about making LA stand alone as such an exceptional place. New England history for example, is a landscape of dire and deep native and white conflict and that's not part of the story that New England constructs.
Waldie: Important to remember that the political structure of Los Angeles...the leaders of the city of LA devised a system of local government, designed to put the citizens of Los Angeles as far away from the messy business of running the city as possible - that technocratic utopian view that government could be perfect...corporate efficiency. If true politics is driven out, we have what we have today in LA which is something different from that.
Morrison: We have 88 cities in the county of Los Angeles, no wonder we can't get regional transportation.
Waldie: [Someone wrote about] that We need to be loyal to imperfect places.
Culver: Frontier - possibility and also danger and violence. The frontier is not a carefree, happy place but it is also a place of opportunity. Palm Springs does have this history of becoming a gay tourist destination and community. Algua Caliente band of Indians whose land occupies most of the land of Palm Springs and spent a long time trying to hold onto the land. Through the alchemy of Indian gaming, they're now not only one of the most powerful players in Palm Springs, they're one of the most powerful players in California.
Braudy: Some of the kinds of problems. There's a coalescence...it was a myth of independence, of individualism. There was an old song 'what was your name back in the United States?' ...The kind of collision between entrepreneurial individualist California that doesn't want to have very much to do with neighbors except maybe barbecues. And those trying to create a cohesive society. The things that made you free and made you want to come here for.
Deverell: A vast number of people view LA as a place of rejuvenation. Look at the poeple arriving in LAX - it's magnetic. A lot of people don't come for the reasons they used to come. Once you introduced Hollywood, fame, and money into the equation - for every person that comes to start life anew, another comes to become famous. It has a real tight hold on all of us, I suspect. There's an underbelly to the myth.
Braudy: The upside is there are a lot of pretty people in Los Angeles. There's still something about the place itself. Now there's an ideal of rejuvenation.
Morrison: I see the map: Silicon, Silicone.
Braudy: We're tired of the Hollywood sign in a sense. All of the people really interested in preserving the sign are people who came here. ...A sense of the outsider investing more in these iconic images, rather than the insider. Hardly any industry people put up money the first time the sign was recreated.
Posted by cj at 12:26 PM | Comments (0)