9: The Worst Movie Ever.

I know, I know.  Worst movie ever?  Is this worse than, say, the Sci Fi originals Rock Monster and Ice Spiders?  In terms of production values, well, obviously not.  They clearly spent a lot of time and effort on 9.  It's also no G.I. Joe, happily basking in its own popcorn stupidity.  No, 9 takes itself seriously.  That's what makes it so dangerous.  It's not "ha ha" bad.  It's "tearing the arm rest off the theater seat so you can throw it at the screen" bad.

First off, I have a bad track record with Tim Burton, who produced this movie (it's directed by some film school protege, Shane Acker).  I have seen, not including this one, five Tim Burton movies.  I have only liked one, and that was Mars Attacks, which I will always defend as brilliant.  This is what Mars Attacks did not suffer from: preciousness.  There's no other way to put it.  Tim Burton's movies are "precious."  Just because your characters don't have eyes and you dress them in black clothing and you talk about "being dead," does not mean you are not still "precious."  You know.  Like Hot Topic.  Precious Moments in goth clothes.

So when I was on my way to the theater and was reminded that Tim Burton had something to do with 9, I was like, "fuck." 

And 9 sure is precious.  It's the sappiest movie that Tim Burton has ever produced.  Like, I'm talking Disney level of sap.  It even has a "princess" (the "doll" with the whitest skin, she's the only girl), and because this is a nice modern movie, she's even a warrior-princess!  OOOooOOOoOOh.  No, there's no lovable pet, but there are two child-like dolls that don't talk and seem to just exist for the sake of generating "aw"s from the audience.  And of course, there's the hero, the boyish and courageous 9.  Spoiler that shouldn't really need to be a spoiler: the princess, hero, and lovable pets all survive.  So no need to be scared here, kids! (although I'd be seriously surprised if kids form any attachment to the little burlap fuckers - yes, all the good guys are three-inch voodoo dolls, except not really, because that would have been cool)

The kids can be scared of other things, like the evil monster-robots left over from the big humanity-killing apocalypse, alternately named "The Beast" and "The Machine" (as my friend said, "subtle.").  There's also a bird monster-robot and an ultra-scary zombie slug monster-robot (has to be seen to be believed, but I think this thing actually gave me nightmares).  These evil monster-robot designs are really very good (though in a few cases clearly "borrowed" from War of the Worlds), and it's a shame that they're wasted on a movie this bad.

The design of the little burlap fuckers, however, is not so good.  Acker calls them "stitchpunks."  I just call them FAIL.  And I can kick anybody's ass at anthropomorphizing, okay?  If they had been telephones with faces I probably would have felt more for them.  As it is I think they fall in that deep dark Uncanny Valley.  Either that, or we're just never given a reason enough to care what happens to them.  This approach is validated as the movie goes on.  The movie really tries to import to you that these characters are your lovable friends, your heroes, and gosh-aren't-they-so-cute and aren't-you-gonna-miss-'em-when-the-movie-ends, and it's like, no.  No, I am not going to miss any of them.  They're one-dimensional pastiches.  They're like walking prototypes of the Five-Man-Band that people laugh about in shitty epic fantasy.  I'm talking zero character development, possibly even negative character development.  It's worse than Disney.  It's worse than NEW Disney.

Then there's the humans.  Well, there's only two, really, and they're both dead and only appear in convenient antique film reels and narrative flashbacks.  First there's the scientist that made all the little burlap fuckers and the main monster-robot (though why he thought that thing could be used for progress, I will never understand; it hardly looks like usable equipment).  He's Ye Olde Mister Nice Crazy Scientist Whose Inventions Are Used For Ill, you know, see, oh, EVERY MOVIE EVER.  Then there's the evil politician who fucks it all up, and he is literally an Evil Communist Nazi.  He's "the Chancellor" and he calls people "Comrade."  It was when they introduced Mr. Evil Communist Nazi that I could no longer take this movie seriously.  I was surprised they didn't throw in that he was Muslim just to accurately complete this profile of Being Evil In America.

But the worst part of the whole thing is the plot, or lack thereof.  In the trailers, and even in the movie, there's a lot of talk of "joining the fight" or "saving the world."  This is false advertising.  Here's the real plot: 9 (the little burlap fucker, not the movie) is a dumb fuck, over and over and over and over.  If he had never woken up, the world would be better off.  His big accomplishment at the end?  Wouldn't even be necessary if he hadn't done a certain something in the beginning.  And yet - and yet! - he's the unambiguous hero, and everybody that opposes him is "stepped on or cut up, or simply disappeared," to take a line from Evita.  The ending plot arc is a totally asinine plunge into metaphysical gobbledy gook in which the characters spend even more time and energy trying to "set free" the souls of their dead friends - who would not even be dead if not for 9.  And of course somebody who hates 9 sacrifices himself for 9, because 9 is just that awesome, I guess.  So anyway, it's the classic "oh, it doesn't matter that they're dead, because they are happy in the afterlife" claptrap that makes me want to vomit all over the theater.  And what do we end up with?  Some garbled message about life continuing on, because apparently plants and water grow from souls.  Listen, I am all for metaphysical gobbledy gook if it's done well.  A lot of anime is actually really good at metaphysical gobbledy gook (you know, the classic power of love stopping the force of entire armies, etc.).  It can work.  But not with something this shallow, this unsympathetic, this un-emotive. 

There's no ingenuity here.  The "important messages" of the movie are nullified by the movie's own narrative.  People who think the apocalypse scenery is somehow worth praising have clearly never seen any post-apocalyptic anything.  The characters are unlikable cliches.  The obligatory laughs are totally forced and awkward, as is the sadness and grimness.  The only good things about it are the evil monster-robots, and please, do not pay $10.50 to watch monster-robots.  Not when you have to suffer through so much crap to get glimpses of them.  If this passes for dark and edgy these days - and I assume it's supposed to, since it is a Tim Burton movie after all - we are all doomed.

Do not see this movie.  Also, I'm apparently allergic to Tim Burton.  I can't wait for what he does to my poor Alice in Wonderland.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Oh yeah, I should also say that this old Werner Herzog cult movie is awesome and powerful and pretty much insane.  It's "based on the true story" of Lope de Aguirre, who was himself pretty damn psycho, and in the movie Aguirre is played by Klaus Kinski, who is just as psycho as Werner Herzog, so, yeah.  There was some urban legend about Kinski shooting a crew member and Herzog threatening to shoot himself and Kinski if Kinski walked off the set, which was authentically enough, Peru.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God is about Spanish conquistadores (speaking in German) trekking through the Amazon in search of El Dorado, the city of gold.  They're led by a basically reasonable guy, Ursua, and for no good reason have with them Ursua's mistress, Inez, and Aguirre's daughter, Flores.  There's also a somber monk and a pompous nobleman and a black guy and an "educated" Indian and a whole bunch of slave Indians who are tied together and have to haul Inez and Flores around.  It's a splinter group off a larger group of explorers, which is always a foreboding sign in a Herzog movie, and sure enough things begin to go crazy when Ursua decides they should turn back and Aguirre stabs Ursua, telling the other conquistadores that they need to seek out El Dorado and claim greatness for themselves.  What's more, they should reject Spanish rule and form their own empire!  Yes!  They'll conquer the rest of the Amazon and then sail all the way to Spain and take the Spanish throne too!  Ha ha ha! 

Meanwhile the Indians are shooting poisoned darts at them and they're raiding the Indians back, making the black guy run around because supposedly the Indians are scared of black people, and the pompous nobleman becomes emperor of their new little empire and has his own special outhouse and makes them shove the horse into the water because it's bothering him, and Inez walks off into the jungle, and they all float around on a glorified raft getting fevers, and they see a ship stuck in the trees but the monk says it's a hallucination, and then monkeys overrun the raft and Aguirre has a long monologue with a monkey and needless to say, the expedition ends in disaster, as so many of these colonial expeditions did. 

There's not much I can say because it's a Werner Herzog movie and there's nothing more you need to say, really.  It's a Heart of Darkness kind of movie, except even more psycho and eerie than Heart of Darkness.  You get a real sense of alienation and "fever dream" and the end result is really very hypnotic.  Pretty much exemplifies the insanity and delusion and absurdity and death that went into early colonialism.  So I'll just include the trailer.  It's English dubbed, but you should watch it in German with subtitles, obviously.

You may ask what I'm doing watching 9 if my kind of movie is Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and I would respond: yeah, I don't know either.

how to live with yourself and continue to be an avid reader

It's actually pretty easy.

What I think is really interesting about students refusing to read an assigned book and everybody getting over-excited is why they refuse to read it.  Example:  I was friends with a girl in high school who refused to read Lord of the Flies because her older sister read it and got nightmares (this was a pretty tight-lipped, religious family), i.e., my friend was scared of Lord of the Flies.  In the case of Mari Mercado and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle's graphic sex (who knows, I haven't read it), the why is:

"It's not fair that I have to read something that I'm totally against," she said. "If I have to drop out of IB, that's something I have to do. I'm not going to read the book."

Marí acknowledged that some people might consider her closed-minded. But that's not her problem.

She wants to be able to live with herself.

"I read a lot. I'm an avid reader and I have an active imagination," she said. And when it comes to the passages she saw in her school assignment, "I'd rather not try to imagine it."

I get that she's a high schooler, but "It's not fair that I have to read something that I'm totally against"?  To me this implies that she thinks books are screeds/manifestos, and she shouldn't have to read anything whose "message" she objects to.  Which has always struck me as pretty odd as a pro-censorship argument, since it's usually sex or violence that's being objected to.  That's not really a message, it's a content issue.  She objects to phone sex?  I really doubt the book is a big argument for phone sex either.  And then there's the hyperbolic statement about being "able to live with herself."  It's not like anybody's making her perform phone sex, right?  She's just looking at words on a page?   Does she read the news about war or animal torture, I wonder (I'd give the example of history textbooks, but mine was so ridiculously and literally white-washed that I won't).  Reading something doesn't mean you've taken part in it, ya know.

But I'll tell you what, Mari: I'm not a big fan of graphic sex in books either, and I was an avid reader at your age too (at your age!  I sound so old).  Catch-22 is full of that shit, all from the perspective of military men.  I pretty much just ignored it, and Joseph Heller turned out to have written a really awesome, important book that really won't be remembered for its sex.  That's clearly not what Heller was most concerned with, and it's not where his writing packs its punch.  That comes at the end.  That comes when Heller finally shows us Snowden dying in the plane, when Nately dies, and finally when Aarfy rapes and kills a maid, and the military arrests Yossarian instead, for going AWOL.  It's actually one of the more bluntly moral books I've read.  And I would have missed out on it, and all its paradigm shifts, if I had refused to read it.  It's one of my favorite books now. 

As for your fear of imagining "it"... come on.  If you're seriously vividly "imagining" every word you read I'm surprised you have the time or focus to be the ultra-good student that this article says you are.  So either you've got some issues to work out, or you need to learn to SKIM, child, and not take everything you read so seriously.