Last night the 500th episode of The Simpsons aired on Fox. 500 episodes; over 20 years worth of Doh! and Ay carumba! It's sort of quaint now to look back at the earliest episodes of and think about how much controversy that yellow, four-fingered family stirred up. Remember when Bart telling a grown up to eat his shorts was big deal? Gasp! My mom hated the fact that I loved the show and I was mostly forbidden from watching it (only mostly because I would of course sneak a watch if she wasn't around...as if she didn't know that).
But I'm not here to write about The Simpsons controversies or it's place in TV history and how it paved the way for all the other "adult" cartoons--none of which, by the way, are even remotely as good--or it's significant impact on the culture, pop and otherwise. I'll leave that to the professionals like Alan Sepinwall. For the record, if you love TV, you should be reading Sepinwall at HitFix.com.
I thought about doing a list of some of my favorite moments (an idea I stole from Sepinwall), but it would be an almost impossible task to keep this post at a readable length if I did that. So I had another idea. I've always loved the musical numbers The Simpsons cast of characters have put on. They're the perfect blend of absurdity, movie musical homage, and surprisingly good music. Here's a few of my favorite ones (that I could find on YouTube) and a couple other random clips involving Mr. Burns. Just because.
Who Needs the Kwik-E-Mart - After Homer gets Apu fired from the Kwik-E-Mart, the Simpsons try to lend him a helping hand at finding the bright side. Homer's rhyming skills are, not surprisingly, sub-par.
And the lonesome reprise:
Monorail - Springfield's salute to The Music Man. Not only is this a great musical number, but this might be the best episode ever. It has Leonard Nimoy! And once again Homer's musical timing leaves something to be desired.
No show made better use of pop culture spoofs than The Simpson's. Sure, Family Guy probably has more pop culture winks per square inch than any TV show ever, but The Simpson's are usually able to weave the reference fairly seamlessly into the story, where as Family Guy throws it out there just for the sake of doing so. Which isn't all bad, but still.
Planet of the Apes as a Broadway musical? Yes please! Featuring the great Troy McClure (RIP Phil Hartman), star of such educational films as Two Minus Three Equals Negative Fun and Here Comes the Metric System? Double yes please! The pinnacle of The Simpsons musical spoofery, in this blogger's humble opinion. I give you, Dr. Zaius! And yes, the very beginning dialog is in Spanish, but stick with it.
And just because you can't post about The Simpsons and not mention Mr. Burns...
My wife and I probably use this line on a weekly basis. Still makes me laugh every time.
And one more....
One more thing before I go. Aforementioned TV critic Allen Sepinwall has asked his readers to list their single favorite episode, character, and quote from The Simpsons on his blog. If you're a fan, it's well worth checking out. A very fun trip down memory lane.
Terrific! That's the most apt way to describe The Artist. The word both perfectly captures how you feel while watching it and fits the time period of the movie (because really, who says "terrific" anymore?). It's 1927 and silent films are king (and also all there is). But not for long. The rise of the talkie spells doom for silent action/adventure/romance star George Valentin (fantastically played by Jean Dujardin), who blows off the advent of sound as a fad. As his star dims, the young starlet, Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo), to whom he once gave a break lights up the screen more brilliantly than even George in his prime. The studio head Al Zimmer (John Goodman, as great as ever) turns his back on George, so George pours his life's savings into financing his own comeback epic. There is only one problem. Well, two actually. It's a silent movie and no one goes to see it and the stock market crashes on the day of the premier. George is ruined. He sinks into a pit of despair, self-pity and self-destruction. With only man's best friend at his side--a scrappy Jack Russell terrier name Uggie--George hits rock bottom and hits the bottle while he's down there. Will he find his way again? Can he swallow his pride and take the helping hand from his former protoge'? Why was George so afraid of the rise of talkies?
Oh yeah, and it's a silent movie in black and white (in case you hadn't heard).
It would be easy for a movie like this to simply rely on it's gimmick to carry the day and just throw out a cream puff story to show off it's tricks. The Artist certainly does show off its tricks, but in service to the story, which would be great with sound, color, 3D, or any other technological film trick could think of (smell-O-vision?). It manages, pretty remarkably actually, to find that perfect pitch between homage to a melodramatic bygone era and current sensibilities. Yes, the actors mug for the camera and over-emote physically, but never to the point of parody and always feeling somehow authentic. It's a silent film, afterall, so more has to be conveyed with a look or a gesture rather than an explanation or dialog.
Everything about the movie feels authentic, actually, to the point where you almost forget this movie wasn't made in 1927. The costumes and sets are exactly right, even down the tchochkies on the shelves in the background. The film making itself is true to the era, even beyond the silence and lack of color. The kinds of camera work and editing give it that level of realness. The soundtrack--there was always music during movies of the silent era--is wonderful as well, and I've read that composer Ludovic Bource borrowed cues from classic movies for portions of the score.
Jean Dujardin is perfectly cast as the dashing George Valentin. He's like Clark Gable with better ears, a 1000 watt grin and an icy glare. He conveys every emotion with his eyes and you can feel his pain when his world starts to crumble. Dujardin is equaled by Berenice Bejo as the perky Peppy Miller. She has a smile to match Dujardin's and is exactly who we would all picture if told to imagine a 1920's film starlet. Then of course there is the dog. John Goodman and James Cromwell also play prominent roles and, of course, are really really good.
The movie is directed by a Frenchman who's name I can't pronounce, Michel Hazanavicius, who does a fantastic job of keeping what could have easily become a gimmicky straight parody on the right track. He gives us a film that does everything we want a movie to do. It makes us laugh, it makes us feel, and it's just a whole lot of fun. There's a great payoff at the conclusion, though that's all I'm going to say about that so as not to ruin the surprise. If you don't already have plans--or even if you do--plan to see The Artist today. It's pretty much the perfect Valentine's Day movie.
Red Tails, directed by Anthony Hemmingway, is the tale (word play!) of the Tuskeegee Airmen, African-American fighter pilots, who during WWII overcame the racial bigotry of the era to become one of the most celebrated air squadrons of the war. At the time, most of the Army Air Corps brass considered African-Americans unfit both mentally and physically to be effective aviators. It literally took an act of Congress for the Air Corps to form an all-black aviation unit. In an effort to limit the number of acceptable applicants, the Air Corps set the standard for application so incredibly high--higher than it had for white applicants to the Air Corps--that only the university educated or those with previous flight experience were eligible. Proving the law of unintended consequences, this uber-stringent application process was a major contributing factor to the great success of the Tuskeegee Airmen.
It's a great story and one that deserved to be told. It just deserved a better movie to tell it.
From the opening titles, Red Tails has the feel of a big-budget TV movie. It's clear the filmmakers (George Lucas is the executive producer) weren't interested in making a heavy, super serious war movie, a la Saving Private Ryan, and were shooting for something like a throwback to old Hollywood war films. But the end result falls short of homage and ends up more like ho-hum. The movie is rife with every possible war movie cliche' imaginable and every downed German plane apparently must be accompanied with a (not so) witty quip. Example of said quips: "Take that Mr. Hitler!" Yikes.
As a pseudo-historian myself, it drives me nuts when filmmakers load up historical dramas with recycled characitures and story lines, more so than in non-historical type films. Usually, the reason someone wants to make a movie about a historical event is because there is already a great story in place. And I can guarantee that the actual real life characters involved are a whole lot more interesting than the one-dimensional retread archetypes we've all seen 100 times. So why add all the fluff?
Example: not to be too spoilerish, but there are at least two events in Red Tails that are clearly set up just to elicit contrived emotional pay offs down the line. One is the all too common love story; soldier falls in love with foreign beauty and keeps her picture pinned to his cockpit console. Guess what happens? In the other, a downed pilot is captured and locked up, Great Escapestyle. Along with his new found compatriots, he escapes, also, in a stroke of creative genius, Great Escapestyle. Whether he truly gets away or not is left ambiguous, until one of his fellow escapees arrives at the Tuskeegee base to present his commanding officer with the pilots dog tags. Both of these plot lines resolve themselves in the last few minutes of the movie at opposite ends of the emotional spectrum, and if you've seen more than three movies in your lifetime, you should see the "payoffs" a mile away.
Another example that a great many war movies fall prey to--even good ones--is the cookie cutter cast of war movie characters. Everyone in the unit has a role to play. There's the funny guy, the religious guy, the rebel with a heart of gold, the flawed leader (usually a drinker), the one that plays a musical instrument. Like I said, almost all war movies are guilty of this to some degree, though the good ones are able to add a little nuance within those stereotypes. And don't even get me started on the scar-faced lead German pilot. Why not just have Hitler himself flying point?
Ok, enough bashing. The positives. The dogfighting scenes are pretty cool. When making the original Star Wars, George Lucas used actual combat footage of WWII dogfights as a model for the X-wing/Tie-fighter battles of the Death Star attack. In Red Tails, the dogfights are very much like high-definition versions of those old combat movies and are fun to watch. They would be even more fun without the corny pilot-to-pilot dialog...wait, this is the positives part of the review! Uh, yeah, the dogfights are neat.
Also, as a big fan of The Wire, it was nice to see some familiar faces on the big screen, I just wish they had better material to work with. If it was your first time seeing them in action you wouldn't know how good Tristan Wilds, Michael B. Jordan, and Andre Royo are in The Wire as Michael Lee, Wallace, and Bubbles respectively.
I suppose I should cover at least some of the plot. The Tuskeegee Airmen, dismissed by their white superior officers as not fit for combat, are relegated to pedestrian patrols and small convoy raids far behind the front lines, and are itching for some real action. Finally, after much intercession by their commanding officers (Terrance Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr.) the Red Tails (so called, because the tails of their planes are painted red) are given a chance to escort bombers on raids into enemy territory. They distinguish themselves and soon earn the respect of the white bomber crews. There's some tension between the flawed leader (Nate Parker) and the rebel with a heart of gold (David Oyelowo), and there's the aforementioned love story and Great Escaperedux episodes, but it's a pretty straight forward story.
It's not that I didn't enjoy myself (and it helped that I only paid matinee prices) and seeing the dogfights on the big screen was cool, but the potential was there for a much better movie. Even without being a heavy handed war drama, there is a good movie in this story, but unfortunately now that this territory has already been mined we're unlikely to see that movie anytime soon.
Bloggers Note: New feature! 5 Things... will be a regular feature on Critical Error. It will consist of 5 Things about something that make it something. For instance, 5 Things that Make Grey's Anatomy A Pretty Terrible Show. I will then list those five things. Got it? Good. Proceed.
My wife and I recently took in the latest installment of the Mission Impossible franchise, subtitled Ghost Protocol. Do you realize the first one came out 15 years ago!? Think about that for a second. A child born the year after it came out is now driving. Blows my mind. Anyway, here are 5 Things...TM that make Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol a Great Action Flick.
1. Gadgets/disguises: This is the kind of stuff that makes a movie like this that much cooler. Who doesn't love spy gadgets? Magnetized suits, false limbs, contact lenses that do facial recognition and photocopying, lasers that cut glass, reversible jackets that are Marshall Zhukov on one side and Fonzi on the other, retinal scanners, secret computer terminals hidden inside old Eastern Bloc pay phones, nuclear brief cases, the list goes on. Oh, and the coolest iPhone/iPad apps ever.
2. Tom's Tower Stunt: If you've seen any of the trailers, you've seen glimpses of Tom Cruises scaling the worlds tallest building in Dubai, the Burj Khalifa. This is an amazing feat of stuntery. Yes, it's pretty amazing that Cruise did the stunt himself, but even more amazing at whoever figured out how to make it work so ol' Tom didn't plunge to his grisly death. Though I imagine that it wouldn't actually be that grisly as falling from that height the body would probably break up in the earth's atmosphere or vaporize once it hit the pavement. That or he may just get caught in the towers gravitational pull and Tom would spend the rest of his days orbiting it like a Maverick shaped moon. That would probably appeal to the Scientologist in him. Anyway, to see it on the big screen is incredible. It's so dizzying, my wife literally got sick. Like, threw up into her bag of popcorn. Ok, not really but that does provide a nice segue into...
3. My Wife's Reactions: Watching an intense action movie with my wife is entertainment that rivals what's on the screen. No, she didn't vomit into her popcorn bag, but she was visibly dizzied from the scene. Her gasps at each death defying leap and fall were pretty hilarious. At the end of it she held her head in her hands and finally exhaled. A few other scenes had her face palming and jumping in her seat. She actually gets stressed out. We should all surrender ourselves to the power of cinema in this way.
4. Tom Cruise Running As Fast As He Can: I am convinced they could make a movie that is nothing but Tom Cruise running as fast as possible for an hour and a half and it would be the year's top comedy. Tom, make this happen.
5. Actors Who Can Act: I think a question that deserves deeper thought is, what separates a good action movie from a bad action movie? Is it the size of the explosions? The quality of the kung fu? Certainly not the plot? Some, would make the case that its that you care enough for the characters that the action sequences that put them in peril cause you to emote a greater concern for their well being, thus ratcheting up the tension and excitement. Maybe. But, without really giving it much thought, I do think it has a lot to do with the actors, though less in how we care for their characters than in how convincing they are in doing whatever it is they are supposed to be doing. Not just the action sequences, but the in between stuff too. You know, like the 15 minutes of total dialog. So, its not so much that you care for the characters, but you believe them. Yes, it does have to do with the quality of the action also. The editing, sound design, and all the technical aspects play a major roll, but let's be honest, a lot of great looking action movies have been lousy snoozefests (I'm looking at you Avatar).
So, back to MI: GP, it had quality actors. Cruise, for all his weirdness, is good. Jeremy Renner is terrific and Simon Pegg is comic relief that is actually comical. No ones going home with a statue or anything, but it works.
Conclusion: Another winner from JJ Abrams, producer. The movie was directed by veteran animation director Brad Bird, who directed the best of all the Pixar movies (which is saying something), The Incredibles. Fun, exciting, thrilling, everything going to the movies should be.
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