"The Menu" (2022)

 

This post has spoilers for the movie "The Menu" (2022).

"The Menu" (2022) is not a perfect movie but it had more than a few elements that appealed to me. My expectations were low; the movie surprised me.

I liked the idea that cooking should be about love, and what "the chef" loved most of all was to make good cheeseburgers. And in a sense, the movie had a riddle and the riddle was what could penetrate this cold heart. I liked the premise that the world is made of two classes, a privileged elite and the slaves/workers who serve them. I liked the idea that even one of the best rewarded slaves resented being made a whore instead of doing what he did for love. A fallen romantic, you see. I liked that while (most) everyone dies, you die by class: the workers meet one fate, the rich another. And so it was important to know who the young woman was in order to determine which group she belongs in. Ah, a hooker with a heart of gold, then you deserve to die with the workers. I liked the idea that the assistant sous chef attacked our heroine saying (approximately) "I am not going to be replaced! I did not forget the barrel!" I liked the s'mores. I liked the conceit of the cheeseburger as an unpretentious gift of love. I liked the practical fluid dynamics on the fatal neck wound of the betrayed assistant. I like any movie with catfights, and this movie definitely has a catfight. So all in all, not a brilliant movie, but certainly a movie worth seeing.

Note on Thor Ragnarok

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I went to the local premiere of Thor Ragnarok. The screening that was most convenient was IMAX so I saw the film in that format, which I regret.

There are spoilers here for the movie.

I watched all available trailers before seeing the film but the filmmakers had reserved enough plot points from the trailers that I did not really know what was going to happen.

As expected, the movie was very funny and good humored. But it turns out that there are some reasonable character development points and even some very dark themes, but you do have to pay attention.

First, Loki's actions to usurp Odin's throne not only was an act of tremendous disloyalty to his step-father, it results in the return of Hela, the banished daughter and step-sister to Loki, and ultimately the destruction of Asgard and most of its citizens.

Second, the remaining citizens of Asgard are now homeless refugees. Take note you haughty, this might be you in the future.

But the final dark theme is also the most important. Hela reveals that Asgard, and Odin, as positive and noble people are living a fraud. They have covered up the conquest of the 9 realms by Odin, and the violence and wars that this entailed. As part of the cover up, Hela, Odin's first born, is banished and forgotten. But she returns and knows where the bodies are buried, literally.

By far the best moment of the movie is when all this is revealed and Hela, in the throne room, asks Thor “where he thinks all this gold came from?”

Technically, it is very good, well-art directed and the art and science of computer generated green rage monsters continues to advance.

The whole time I was watching this IMAX presentation, I thought I was watching some sort of cheap uprez with a sharpening filter. For a while there, the audio was too loud to tolerate but it got better, thank Odin!

And yes, for those who really want to know, our remaining Valkyrie is either gay or bisexual, it is not entirely clear.

The cast of Thor did a live spoof at an early screening of the movie in Los Angeles at the Grove theatres. It is a little goofy but good spirited and fun,.  You can see it on youtube here.

For more information about green people in our society and how they are marginalized, please see here.

The Flawed Approach to Man From UNCLE (2015) or Will They Ever Learn?

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About half way through the Warner Bros film “Man from UNCLE”, Illya Kuryakin tries to make the case for a Russian architect having designed and built the Spanish Steps in Rome. It seemed out of place somehow in the movie I was watching, but when the movie was over I realized where this anomaly had come from.

It would seem that the one character trait unique to any of the characters in this film that actually had its origins in the original TV series was this particular running gag. Whenever some invention, or creative work, was part of the story, Illya would always explain how it had actually been composed, or invented, in Russia. This running gag, used once, the names of some of the characters and the title of the movie itself were the only references to the original show to be found in the movie.

You might think that if you were going to bother to do a reboot of a 1960s TV series, that you would want to carefully review and select elements from the original and use them in a reboot, doing a best of, as it were, and make a contemporary entertainment product that properly also captured and moved forward what it was that made the original show notable.

Furthermore, you might choose to do this and do it well not for the sake of creative integrity but for hard core business reasons. The success of your roughly 100M $US investment depends on creating a powerful version of this property, to both get the original viewers, the teenage viewers, and as many of the inbetween that you can. There are models for this sort of thing, where it has been done successfully, and where it has not. And what we learn is that where it has not been done well, the movie has flopped. But when it has been done well, the marketing has been straightforward and the movie has been successful.

The lesson is, do it well or not at all.

The good news is that a certain amount of this can be checked before production begins. You can make use of a time honored but now sadly neglected feature of the traditional cinema which is called “the script”. Yes, you can write a script and have it reviewed by people who know the original, as well as by people who know modern action movies.

Having done this, it is also useful to cast actors who bring the script to life, and for that matter, a director who has a feel for the property. This is your job, I emphasize, your means of making a livelihood, and it is always good to remind the studio executive of their supposed expertise.

So what do we get instead? What we get is a script that ignores UNCLE, has the conceit of being a backstory to the TV show which if that is the plan, they badly fucked it up. It uses none of the anticipation and recognition, setup and payoff, available to them. The actors cast are boring, unlikeable, uninteresting. It is in places beautiful, yes it looks like a yacht advertisement from 1960s Italy, but who the fuck cares? Thats nice and all, and it would be a wonderful touch if they had a script and some actors with passion, but without them it is just a bunch of pretty pictures.

But if every silver lining has a cloud, the reverse is also true, and there is some silver lining here. Because the lead actors are so fucking boring, the women of this piece completely capture the movie. We have exactly two of them, one is a 20 year old who is completely hilarious in a scene where she tries to get Illya drunk, to dance, and to sleep with her. The other is 40 something Italian billionaire and femme fatale who jumps Napoleon Solo and then drugs and tortures him.

Yes, the parody of effete Italian manhood is entertaining, but whats the point?

Almost none of the elements that were notable about UNCLE were in this movie. No NYC tailor shop with a secret door, no THRUSH bad guys, nothing.

Its not enough to say that you are going to reboot a property, you have to actually do it well or you should save your money and make another Die Hard movie or something. As it is, it is all a giant waste of effort, of money and of an opportunity.

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1. You may wonder, as I have wondered, what the word THRUSH stands for. If UNCLE stands for United Network Command Law Enforcement, then surely THRUSH stands for something as well. At a Westercon years ago I came across a “bible” for the original UNCLE. A bible is the guide issued to all the writers of a TV series to give them enough background to write, or propose, a story for the series. In it we learn that THRUSH stands for Technical Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjection of Humanity. Well it sounds a little forced to me, but its ok.

For Helen Donahue, "The Force Awakens" is All About Who She Wants to Fuck

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You may notice that the formatting of this post changes in mid stream on occasion.  This is a feature with Blogspot, and it is very hard to get rid of.  Sorry.

It is a sign of our strange civilization that it has no greater cultural event, no more momentous historical moment, than the release of a Star Wars movie. A million refugees in Europe, the insanity of the ongoing presidential campaign or the very strange weather which may indicate our doom through global climate change, all of these must yield to Star Wars.

But if Star Wars is our preferred form of denial it may also be a form of cultural Rorschach test which reveals our innermost desires and fears. But do we really want to know what is in the mind of the great unwashed? If they are shallow or deranged, how can we preserve our illusion that these other biped mammals are in fact conscious and intelligent actors on the stage that requires their enlightened self-interest?

So many religious faiths, like belief in the free-market system, require it. And so if western society and civilization requires rational actors, it is our responsibility to look with interest and concern to see what our little psychological experiment reveals. So much is riding on it.

Consider the case of a prominent Social Editor for Vice.com (www.vice.com) a leading web site of all that is trendy in our ever-changing society. Our social editor, by the name of Helen Donahue, has written a review of “Force Awakens” from the point of view of someone who is 25 years old, a leading member of her society, and who has never seen a Star Wars film before.

Lets have Ms. Donahue introduce herself in her own words while you can read the entire review

here where you must scroll to the end of the page.  The end of the page, the bottom of the barrel, as it were.

She introduces herself by saying

So first we learn that she is shallow as a piece of paper as she dismisses the entire pre-color cinema as beneath her contempt and unworthy of her time. Next she tells us that she was not interested in seeing the earlier movies because Mark Hamill is a blonde and she was not interested in blondes. We might call this self-deprecation or Ms. Donahue may be signaling here who she really is and that would be unfortunate.

Next we have a little overt ageism as she comments on Han Solo's introduction and his moment when reunited with Leia.

"Next old-ass Harrison Ford walks in as Han Solo and, while he's a total dick, the crowd goes apeshit over his dad jokes."  

and

"Leia shows up with something called the Resistance -- people and creatures opposing the First Order -- and she and Han exchange a lot of banter and old-person sexual tension. They apparently have a child together, but he's gone rogue. I realize their son is the dude the film had panned onto in the first few scenes.  He looks like Darth Vader, with the same weird asthma inducing helmet, except he's wearing Hood by Air."

But her favorite topic is sex, in particular sex between people who hate each other. So now she goes into introducing us to Rey, Ren and Finn and who should fuck who and who she would fuck.

"About an hour in we meet some dude (spoiler) with an overwhelming Scottish accent. While its pretty hot, I'm left wondering how a Scotsman got to whatever galaxy they're on.  I guess the Force really is awakening."

and

"When he kidnaps Rey I initially couldn't tell if they were going to get it on or not, but her ability to harness his power when he attempts mind control should have been a clear and instant turn-on. This says a lot about my relationships, as I clearly envision unbridled hatred sparking an immediate sexual connection between two people easier than love between Rey and the dude who's working his ass off to save her." 

and

"The movie ends with Rey fighting Driver (instead of fucking him .... booooring), and running up a hill, where she finds a disgruntled old man in a hooded burlap sack that is, of course, a super run-down Mark Hamill. I cant say I expected much else after 30 years, but he looks kind of like Yoda." 

A more narcissistic, arrogant, vulgar, shallow and sex-obsessed creature would be hard to imagine. She could easily be a character from one of the works of acclaimed fiction that people like so much these days.

But we must be positive about something and so here is one positive point. Given what we have to work with here, and if the old adage that those who talk about sex do not do it is false in this case, then we can only hope that Ms. Donahue is sharing with the world the best of what she has to offer, at least with men who abuse her or whom she hates.  At least for a while.

Perhaps this review does elicit Ms. Donahue's better nature but if so that would be bad for the “intelligent actor”model of rational decision making that is so prominent in justifications of our unfair and deeply fucked up society.

Thus we must act like any economist or political scientist and reject data that does not fit our model and hope that no one notices.

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The Wikipedia page on the Rorschach Test is at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test

Hypnotic Mind Control in Cinema: The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T (1953)

We now turn from the topic of the use of rocket launch attempts as a mood elevator to a highly related topic, "hypnotic mind control" in cinema.

Hypnotic mind control is the process of forcing a person to do something against their nature under the commands of some, generally evil, person through the process of hypnotism. Hypnotic mind control is rarely used to have this person do something beneficial against their will, sadly, as that might be an interesting twist on this established but regrettably underutilized plot device. (1)

Of course, hypnotic mind control is a subgenre of a larger body of mind control techniques, including being enslaved by a vampire, demonic possession, the use of drugs to destroy the will of the victim, cult religion or voodoo, to name just a few of the most popular. Zombie films are a related but different genre, because although the personality and will of the victim is suppressed, the victim is not really controlled by anyone, except perhaps the compulsions of his own degraded brain, or what is left of it. Hypnotic mind control is distinguished from the others by being based on a process in which the subject is gradually placed into a receptive state in which ideas and compulsions are placed into the subconscious and keyed to various hand gestures and words, and yet the real personality is not destroyed, it is underneath, latent, and can be restored.

Of course this all has something to do with sex, but that will be the subject of another post.

Each of these different processes of mind control has a different mechanism from the others and has different methods of prevention and cure which become important plot points in their respective sub-genres.

"Cartoon Realism" is a term of art that I use to describe the use of live action, set design, costumes, animation and visual effects to create an apparently real, live action, cartoon world.   Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) is the poster child for this genre but there are others as well. 

Today we feature an important but little known film, Dr. Seuss' 5000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953).

Here is an excerpt from our featured movie in which the widowed mother of our protagonist and hypnotism victim is recaptured by the evil Dr. Terwilliker through the process of hypnotic mind control:

The work for the Happy Finger Method must go on!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSm57EGetRM&feature=plcp

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T is the only feature length film written by Dr. Seuss. It is a comedy, of sorts, in which a little boy (played by a wretched child actor who I hope lived his life in shame because of his performance in this film) is being forced to learn to play piano. His piano teacher is played by one of my favorite comedic actors, Hans Conried, in the role of Mr. Terwilliker, aka Dr. Terwilliker. The boy is so bored with learning to play piano that he falls asleep at the keyboard and dreams the rest of the movie.

In his dream, his piano teacher becomes the evil Dr. Terwilliker of the Terwilliker Institute who is using hypnotic mind control to control the minds of mothers throughout the country to force their children to learn the "Happy Finger Method" to learn to play piano. The evil Dr. T has built a piano with 5000 keys which he will use to force 500 annoying little American boys to perform piano at the Grand Opening of the Terwilliker Institute, thus demonstrating even vindicating the Happy Finger Method.

As Dr. T himself admits, he is a villain who is executing a fraud on the mothers of America, he hypnotizes them and takes their money to pay for fraudulant piano learning technique. He keeps a dungeon for people who play other musical instruments and those who would oppose his evil plans. Here is the brief musical number with which the dungeon is introduced. There was originally a third floor, but the cowards who made this abomination of a movie were too spineless to leave it in.

Notice Hans Conried's  hand gesture instructing the executioner and elevator operator to go down a level.

http://youtu.be/G70dcCx-YP8

How can a movie with such a great premise fail so badly? Well, since you asked: bad casting, performances, direction, characters and script.  The horrible direction and performances of all of these actors, except of course the brilliant Hans Conried, condemns this film to the dungeon of "Films that throw away their promise and will never be forgiven."

Nevertheless, Hans Conried is memorably over the top in his performance, and it is worth seeing for that.  Well, maybe not the entire film, which is dreadful, but a few scenes are worth seeing.

I think that we should give them credit for attempting to create a "cartoon realistic" world using set and costume design and only a very few what we would today call effects.   There are a few matte paintings or similar technology, but very few, I think.   Too bad the movie is so bad.

Which brings us to the point of this lesson: : "Interesting design, sets, costumes and effects will not save a bad movie."

Nevertheless, the work for the Happy Finger Method must go on.

The IMDB and Wikipedia page:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045464/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_5,000_Fingers_of_Dr._T

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(1) I have a vague memory of there being some film or TV show in which someone is hypnotized to do something good against their will, but I do not recall what it might be. Perhaps some reader will remember and send me email.