In Oz the Great and Powerful, carnival magician Oscar Diggs visits the Land of the Plot Holes.

Faced with an incomprehensible quest, Diggs musters his power of suspending disbelief, which enables him to float over dark bottomless pits of implausibility, held aloft by only a wink, a smirk, and determination to hold onto his top hat. His reward is wealth, power, redemption, kisses with the one hot chick who doesn’t hate him yet, and the opprobrium of people who got as far as the second volume of Frank L. Baum’s classic series.

Come with me into the spoiler-filled Land of the Plot Holes… but first, learn the magic phrase that will get you from point to point over this rough terrain.

No, it’s not “there’s no place like home.” It’s “wait, what?” Say it with me. “Wait, what?” (If no children are present, “WTF?” will also work.)

Here come the credits, delightfully in black-and-white turn-of-the-century clip art, so try your utmost to disassociate this look from Monty Python’s Flying Circus… Read the rest of this entry »

Appropriately, my lunch at the Angel’s Trumpet Ale House before seeing $ellebrity (the acclaimed indie movie about the celebrity photo industry) was invaded by participants in the No Pants Light Rail Ride.

This latter event is what it says on the tin: participants ride light rail while not wearing pants. Since highs today barely scraped 50, many of them were wearing parkas, mittens, scarves, and Viking helmets… but no pants. They merrily took photos of one another to distribute via Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. But most — or at least those who were still sober when I got done with the movie — would probably have been freaked out if I’d started snapping shots on my iPhone to post on my Facebook, blog, or Twitter. Pantsless candid images under their control were fun and funky. Pantsless candid images without their consent quickly shift over the line to creepy.

The rise of microcelebrity is one factor that director Ken Mazur omits from his exploration of the relationship between celebrities and paparazzi, but I think it has something to do with how we got from the days of the glamorous photo op to today’s norm that there are no boundaries, and that it’s somehow selfish and inappropriate for celebrities to resist living every moment in the spotlight.

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My freshman year of high school, I had to read Les Misérables twice, first in French, than in English. It wasn’t easier on the second go.

The memory is so traumatic that my first act upon getting home from seeing the movie of the musical (official site) was to Google the dude who’d been the one other freshman in second-year French. It turns out the reason we didn’t form a life-long friendship birthed in shared literary agony was that his family moved away at the end of that school year… and these many years later, his personal web site still bitches about how much he hated my hometown. Well, at least that made him easy to identify.

Had we known that Les Miz is essentially Lord of the Rings set in early 19th-century France and gone horribly wrong, the novel might have been easier to endure. We know it’s secretly LOTR because all big scenic shots are composed in CGI Swoopy-Cam, where we have to look down from a vast distance on the crawling impersonal bulk of Mordor… I mean, Paris. See, Frodo has these legal papers he needs to drop in a pit of flame… well, come along, and we’ll discuss the 12 lessons of Les Misérables-the-movie-of-the-musical. Read the rest of this entry »

I went to see Trouble with the Curve because it’s a baseball movie, forgetting that baseball isn’t just men hitting a ball with a stick. It’s not even just men hitting a ball with a stick when the ball is thrown at them, then running around — a specification needed to distinguish baseball from, say, hockey. Or golf.

Baseball is a vehicle for traditional American values, including but not limited to motherhood, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevro — no, wait, it’s Ford that paid for a product placement in this movie. Motherhood is significantly missing, and I can’t swear to the presence of apple pie, but hot dogs play a minor yet important role in the plot.

The insinuating romance of baseball was what gave Moneyball its internal tension: we were supposed to root for the statisticians, but there’s something about a hot summer night with the smell of roasting peanuts and the thwack of the ball against the catcher’s mitt that puts reason on mute.

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There are movies that love music more than people, and Sparkle (official site) may be one of them.

Sparkle works best when somebody’s singing, which fortunately is enough of the time that it’s possible to root for these characters as they attempt to make it in the music industry whilst struggling with the handicaps of vestigial dialog and perfunctory plot development. It also does well when Whitney Houston is on screen, mostly from the sheer weight of her Whitney Houston-ness.

This is actually a fun movie in a pretty-lights, pretty-noises way, and it would take a harder heart than mine to not cheer for Jordin Sparks as the titular Sparkle when she’s being spunky. Sparks blossoms into a capable actor the minute she’s given anything with any complexity to play against… but the script does its utmost to hamstring her.

The fundamental problem with the script of this version of Sparkle is that it plays like ascended fan-fic. Although there’s truly literate fan-fic out there, I don’t mean this as a compliment. I also don’t mean the sort of fan-fic where Hermione is paired with Draco for lustful frolics or even the sort where Harry is paired with Draco for lustful frolics. I mean the kind that centers around a Mary Sue.

Mary Sue roles are presumably well-meant to lure the audience into identifying with the character… but they thwart actors. (Warning: if you keep reading, there will be spoilers. Lots of them.) Read the rest of this entry »

The 2012 remake of Total Recall (official site) is one of the most educational films I’ve seen in a while. It’s the 121-minute primer on How Not to Build Your Crapsack World, with bonus appendices on Assuring We Really Don’t Care About the Characters.

Since I’m in the midst of world-building for a nice dystopic novel about the music industry [insert crack about that not being science fiction here], I spent much of the movie mulling the profound lessons embedded therein. And I’m going to share them.

What I’m not going to do is dig up the original Philip K. Dick source material… as none of the movie-makers using it ever pay much attention to it. So if the movie does something annoying that’s also in the short story, it’s probably by accident and should have been changed anyway.

The Rule of Cool is Not Always Your Friend.
Premise: working-class hero Doug Quaid has such a crapsack life in a crapsack world that he seeks escape by paying Rekall to implant artificial memories of something livelier. Read the rest of this entry »

Rousseau, meet Hobbes.

Beasts of the Southern Wild (official site) is told from a six-year-old’s perspective with such thoroughness that the adult mind struggles to retreat to safe conceptual categories.

Quvenzhané Wallis (who was only 5 when she auditioned) is allowed — indeed, encouraged — by director Ben Zeitlin to act like a real child in her role of Hushpuppy. A real child. Not the wise-cracking miniature adult of sit-com fame, nor a cherub wide-eyed with exaggerated wonderment.

A real six-year-old takes for granted the most bizarre things — because they’ve always been part of her world, or because adults do them, and whatever adults do is, by definition, normal. So to see from the point of view of this child in an isolated bayou community is to accept without question a world that runs on principles foreign to urban Americans.

It’s tempting, in that context, to retreat to Romantic Primitivism and supply the wonderment ourselves. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Hushpuppy is about six. There’s a Catholic tradition that 7 is roughly the age at which people become capable of discerning right from wrong. So a six-year-old is on the cusp from being innocent and savage as the beasts of the field to accepting the responsibilities of being fully human. This is the coming-of-age story I believe we’re led into.

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The Dark Knight Rises is arguably the coolest exploration of political philosophy that I’m likely to see this decade.

It also works fine as a boom-boom action-adventure movie, too.

Back in 2008, I’d had mixed feelings about The Dark Knight, not least because the comic-book portrayal of Harvey Dent’s horrible injuries seemed out of place in Christopher Nolan’s landscape of dreamlike urban hyper-realism. I read later that Nolan had originally given Dent the more realistic scars I wanted, and test audiences had reacted badly. So I’ll give him that.

My reactions to The Dark Knight Rises went like this:

“That’s stylish.”
“Well, all right, but–”
“That’s such a clich–oh, no it’s not.”
“WTF?”
“Oh, maaaaaan, that was cool!”
“That was even cooler.”
“I really like this movie.”
“I really like this movie.”
“I must write mash notes to this movie in purple prose.”

So of course I want to explain why it’s cool. If I promise to avoid spoilers as much as possible, will you join me? Read the rest of this entry »

My hamburger at Studio Movie Grill arrived within 45 seconds of my remembering that the Men in Black franchise relies heavily on gross-out humor.

Seeing Men in Black 3 had climbed my to-do list after sylvanaire, who enjoyed it, was dismayed by complaints about plot holes. Let’s review the trappings here:

1. Aliens.

2. Neuralyzers.

3. Time travel.

4. Prominent inclusion of holy fool alien sidekick who sees all possible futures and dresses like the 9/11 tourist meme dude, which I don’t believe isn’t on purpose.

Shouldn’t we be grateful the plot makes any sense at all? That the dénouement poses a particularly fraught existential question is pure bonus. Or dessert. So let’s talk about burgers, monster movies, and what-all happened here. Read the rest of this entry »

The vengeful ghost of Neil Postman goes on a rampage against popular culture in God Bless America (official site), a dark comedy written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait.

As a recognized hipster, I think I’m supposed to wallow in self-congratulatory agreement with the premises of the movie with the same gusto as I lap up the faux butter on my small-no-I-will-not-upgrade-to-a-large-no popcorn. And as protagonist Frank enforced the values of “niceness” by shooting people, there would every now and again splatter out a sentiment I agreed with. Yet on the whole, I ended up more uncomfortable with my moments of being seduced by this movie than with an early scene in which a snuffling baby is dispatched like a skeet (and that came close to being a walk-out-now deal-breaker for me).

Read the rest of this entry »

Smash is cute. Smash is cuddly. Smash will curl up on your lap and lick strawberry ice cream from your spoon. Smash has big, winsome eyes, only two of which belong to Katharine McPhee.

Smash is coming to your local NBC station on February 6, after the Super Bowl. As the aptly adorable takeaway to the left implies, I’ve already seen the pilot episode.

Smash is what would happen if a brightly colored 1940s musical were to be remade by a team who’d gotten giddy from the fumes of spray-painting 19 gold top hats for the finale of A Chorus Line. There’s the odd feint at gritty realism, but our heroine is written as a wide-eyed naïf from the sticks, trying to get her lucky break in the Big Apple.

When she turned out to literally be from Iowa, I decided the writers must know perfectly well every cliché and trope that they’re trotting out, and they’re having fun with it. The result is great fun and may well deconstruct itself into something more complicated than “brown-eyed Mary Sue takes Broadway by storm.” But let’s talk about why it’s fun. Read the rest of this entry »

Men with paunches and wrinkles evaluate potential first basemen according to whether they have good bodies, fine moral character, or hot girlfriends. (A girlfriend of ordinary attractiveness is, so the major league scouts say, a sign of lack of self-confidence, rather than of fine moral character.)

The results on the playing field are, as one might expect, random. Baseball doesn’t give style points. Baseball is about hitting the ball and getting on base.

Moneyball sets itself up as the economics nerd’s heartwarming come-from-behind story. Faced with a tight budget and the loss of key players, Oakland A’s GM Billie Beane (Brad Pitt) assembles a team of the lame, the halt, the clumsy, and the over-the-hill, then… uh, then… well, then not quite what one expects. Real life is so friggin’ inconvenient to work into a story. Read the rest of this entry »

My date bread was too jittery to pose for more than one photo. That’s because it contains coffee, making it a recursive coffee cake.

This was the easiest practice run of all my Arizona State Fair entries, as the recipe (found at AllRecipes.com) worked the first time. If you’re wondering how I could use an existing recipe with minimal alterations… there are essentially two types of cooking competitions. The Pillsbury Bake-off kind requires an original recipe. The State Fair kind assumes you’ve been using grandma’s recipe for the past three decades, so it focuses on how you execute it.

What I did two nights ago was go see Contagion, rather than listen to music, so let’s talk about pandemics! (Don’t pick food off my plate!) Read the rest of this entry »

Hélène is an archetypal middle-aged wife-and-mother, stuck in a dead-end job, stuck with a husband who has little to say to her, stuck with an ungrateful daughter, and literally stuck on a Mediterranean island where she moved upon marrying the uncommunicative husband.

Then, while trudging through the drudgery of her job as a hotel cleaning woman, she sees a couple playing chess on the terrace of their room. It’s one sensual chess game, not least because the luminously lovely woman is wearing a satin slip, and it reaches its climax when the woman wins.

This is the set-up of A Queen to Play. Now, if Steven Spielberg were directing, Hélène would next discover a budding chess champ among the island’s youth, take him under her wing, and cheer him to victory. Read the rest of this entry »

I sort of had popcorn for dinner, if we assign “sort of” to the value of “definitely.” In my defense, it was a small.

The mission was to see Source Code, which is essentially the movie that would happen if Philip K. Dick had been hit by a taxi in Anaheim, leading Disney to hook his brain to life support and mine the result for plots.

Oddly, none of these players was involved. However, the movie was directed by Duncan Jones, son of David Bowie, which would seem to add a dimension of fabulosity all its own.

You wake up on a train. You have no idea why you’re there or who the attractive stranger seated across from you might be. Read the rest of this entry »

This pizza, like revenge, is a dish best eaten cold.

It’s from Gasper’s, which serves the only really good Italian food in Phoenix, along with the truly addictive Vesuvio pizza. I hied myself hither following an afternoon at the most adorable little movie theater in the Scottsdale hinterlands, where I saw Henry’s Crime, which is arguably a comic caper movie about revenge, lightly refrigerated.

Or is it? Read as a caper film, the movie is light amusement. Read it as a parable of the relationship between audience and entertainer — and Keanu Reeves’ legendary perpetual deadpan becomes a slyly brilliant symbol. Read the rest of this entry »

Like The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, these lemon-blueberry-chocolate biscuits suffer from a surfeit of conflicting intentions.

These biscuits come from the same template as the Hot Cross Biscuits, only with lemon zest, blueberries, and chocolate chunks as the key add-ins. The faint resemblance to hot cross buns suggests religious parallels that really aren’t there (I simply like candied orange peel). Along not-dissimilar lines, the Dawn Treader movie is very much like the book on which it’s based, except that psychological drama has been replaced with a quest for magic swords, while religious parallels that Lewis himself dismissed as non-allegorical are turned into a Sunday School lesson about personal salvation. Read the rest of this entry »

Morning glory pancakes were the obvious response to scoring free tickets to Monday’s pre-release screening of Morning Glory, in which media theorist Neal Postman returns as a zombie to terrorize Fox News.

Well, not really.

It’s a chick flick. It’s even a rom-com. Becky Fuller, a morning show producer with the manic winsomeness of a chihuahua, falls in love with a diamond in the rough. Then Neal Postman terrorizes Manhattan.

Do you want to hear about these pancakes or don’t you? They are yummy and sweet and spicy and about as good for you as a pancake can be because… they contain carrots! This is not quite as virtuous as a pancake that contains zucchini, broccoli, or brussels sprouts, but what do you want at breakfast time?

That’s the fundamental question of the movie. Since morning shows always feature cooking segments, let’s get cooking! Read the rest of this entry »

Here we see the early stages of Buffaloed Chicken, an appropriate accompaniment to The Social Network for several reasons, notably: (a) the number of people in the movie who get buffaloed; (b) the plot’s intelligent deployment of a chicken; (c) that I got the recipe through social networking on TheKitchn; and (d) that as is reputedly the case with Facebook, the results are weirdly addictive.

Should you be itching for a music connection: the movie’s soundtrack was written by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails. There is a free 5-song EP sampler download here, as well as a full soundtrack available for sale.

In considering the movie’s story, it may be appropriate to start with a line from the junior counsel in the lawsuits that frames the tale. To paraphrase: “When considering witness testimony, I assume 85% is exaggeration and the rest is perjury.” About the chicken, however, I will tell the truth, however damning.  Read the rest of this entry »

This pear relish is dietetic because it is not pie. It was going to be pie until I read the pie crust box, which states that a single serving (1/8 crust) is 110 calories. No big, right? Except that on a double crust pie, a slice is 1/8 of two crusts. I’d intended to make turnovers, at 1/4 crust each. 440 calories on dough? Not a chance.

In line with the theme of simple recipes going awry, today’s topic is MacGruber, which a girlfriend and I belatedly watched on Pay Per View because hauling ourselves to a theater for the serious new action-adventure movies on offer seemed like too much trouble. A key point of characterization occurs when Our Hero hops in his red convertible — to the swell of the usual sort of overwrought action-adventure “rock me like a hurricane” music — and then switches his car stereo to the Adult Contemporary listen-at-work station. Every time the movie wants to imply “we are being deliberately cheesy, wink-wink, nudge-nudge”… cue soft-rock hits of the 1980s. Read the rest of this entry »