Books Lying Open
¤ What Liberal Media?, Eric Alterman
¤ The Scientists (A History of Science Told Through the Lives of its Greatest Inventors), John Gribbin

Soul-Devouring Worry:
¤ Theatrically-declining standards.

Question of the Day:
¤ Why sleep when there are movie reviews to write?

Curse of the Day:
¤ May the Iron Chef become your new favorite TV show, for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the program itself.

The subplot seems to revolve around Garfield being himself, getting in trouble with Jon for knocking Odie around, and being banished to live outside for some time. He sings, and if you've been waiting and waiting for a movie roll that Bill Murray could at last open up and sing in, your decision-making privileges are being revoked for the next 24 hours.  I was going to blast the movie plot for being so stupid, and doing something that's never been done in the strip and never would be, since there Jon is clearly subordinate to Garfield in every way. That's what most of the jokes are based on, even.

However, after a moment I realized that movies are often bashed for being too literal and boring because of it. True, most of them are too literal and it makes them boring. I'm not arguing that, but if we're going to pick on films like Harry Potter 1 and 2 that just regurgitate the source material with no interesting additions, don't we have to cut films a break for trying something new? It's difficult writing an adaptation, since it's a double-edged sword. If you change nothing, it's boring and too familiar. If you change lots of things, people say you've ruined everything that made the story/comic/whatever interesting in the first place.  This sort of thing is why I hope to be writing, or at least consulting, on all of the movie projects that derive from my original fiction. (Assuming that ever happens, etc, etc.)

So I'm not going to bitch about Garfield suddenly being a simple pet who gets kicked outside for being a dick to the other pet in the house. It's not how I would have written the movie, but maybe it works in the script. What I am going to bitch about is how they decided to format the movie. Basically, Garfield is a sort of low budget Smeagol. Or Roger Rabbit. He's a cartoon, obviously. There's no effort to make him look like a real cat; he looks like a semi-3D version of his 2D cartoon self. The weird part is that nothing else in the movie is a cartoon. It's like they didn't have the budget for that, so they had to make due with trained dogs and humans emotion frustration towards thin air.

One of the major problems with this is that a major selling point of Garfield is the cartoon violence. He mauls Jon, he beats and punts Odie, he eats until he's about to explode, etc. All that's fine in a cartoon, and even with a person, but due to the odd "We eat 50,000,000 tons of chicken/beef/fish a year but can't stand to see an animal get pretend hurt in a movie." psychology of American cinema goers, there's no way we're going to see Garfield actually send Odie sprawling and crashing into a wall, or tumbling end over end, etc. Even though all of us have laughed at similar scenes when enacted by our own pets, or on a Funniest Home Videos" type show. Oh, we'll see Garfield get squashed and trampled and damn near killed numerous times (or so I predict), but nothing like that will ever happen to the real animals.

There's an example of this in the new clip, where Garfield fights with Odie. Garfield shoves Odie off of a footrest, and it's done with bizarre editing. We see them together on the hassock, Garfield shoves Odie who becomes a CG'ish blur to the side, and then we see a shot of the dog playing Odie sliding a foot or two sideways across a hardwood floor. He stops and runs back, totally calm, and then the shot cuts to Garfield, just as a pillow hits him and sends him flipping over into a bone-crushing landing.

Now if Odie were a cartoon also, we'd have seen him land and squash and get up and come back fighting. Since he's not, we just see a little dog that someone slid sideways, and then we see a pillow thrown from offscreen strike a cartoon cat.  So you're thinking to yourself, "How the hell did that little dog throw a pillow? It's not physically possible." rather than enjoying the playful fight scene. Garfield then smacks Odie with the pillow, and again we see a blur of CG something, rather than the actual dog being struck. It's weird. Totally unconvincing.

I really wonder how well this will work in the movie. Technology has come a long way, and cartoon characters are now able to interact with real ones pretty smoothly. Smeagol in the LotR films is the best example, but virtually every action movie now has extensive CGI something. Special effects that don't exist in reality, if not entirely fake characters/monsters. But in Garfield it's just so obviously fake, with one animal a cartoon and everything else real, that it's sore-thumb'ish. It's as if Donkey were a real live donkey, standing there and braying every now and then, while Shrek and Fiona run around, and a cartoon dragon blows heart-shaped smoke rings at him.  That would clearly never work. Will Garfield?  I doubt it, at least for adults, though the 4-8 y/o age range the film appears to be targeted towards may enjoy it. Then again, kids at that age enjoy pretty much anything with bright colors and lots of fast motion and loud voices. Eighty minutes of Jinx fetching her mousie, doing leaping backflips when the mousie is throw right over her head, and racing around with Dusty could make $100m, if it had a loud soundtrack and lots of commercials on Nickelodeon.

he Day After Tomorrow.

(AKA, The Land Without Snowmobiles, despite the fact that they'd come in really, really useful about now.)

I was surprised by this film. Not by the content, since from the trailers and reviews I'd read I knew pretty much everything I'd be seeing. What surprised me was the fact that not only did it not suck, but that it was actually pretty damn good. And not just for the scenes of destruction, which were pretty cool, but for the acting and plot, which weren't that bad either.

My quick score, before I get into the body of the review, which will contain a few minor spoilers. And yes, this is a pretty much spoiler-proof movie, since if you know anything about it or basic Hollywood plot conventions, you know just about everything that's going to happen at least 30 minutes before it does.

Malaya suggested it and I liked the idea, so I've added a "Must See on the Big Screen" category to my rating list. It's pretty self-explanatory, but when I thought about it some it turned out to not be all that self-evident, so I'll use it for now, on movies that are actually still playing in theaters.  (There's obviously no point in me rating that aspect of a film that's already on DVD.)

The Day After Tomorrow:

Script/Story: 5
Acting: 6
Action: 7
Eye Candy: 8
Replayability: 3
Must See on the Big Screen: 5
Overall: 7

I enjoyed it more than the other big summer movies thus far this year, (except for Kill Bill 2, which was a great film) but that's probably another example of the curse of expectations. I expected Shrek 2 to be great, and when it was just okay I was disappointed. I expected Troy and Van Helsing and Hellboy to be mediocre, with great action, and when all 3 were mediocre with mediocre action, I was disappointed. I expected TDAT to have astonishing action and dreadful acting, and when it had very good action and pretty okay acting, I was impressed.

Funny how much expectations taint your enjoyment (or not) of a film. I love watching trailers in advance and knowing about movies before I see them, but at the same time I so seldom get any good surprises in the movies themselves that I sometimes regret it, even though it does help me avoid some of the real clunkers.

It's not doing that well on RT, just 47%, with 59 positive and 67 negative, but I think it's all about expectations and desires. If a critic wanted to find the disaster acting cheesy and chose to get hung up on the "but this is pseudo science and couldn't really happen" aspects, then no, it wasn't a great movie.  The acting is debatable, but since when are summer popcorn movies graded on their adherence to reality? About 90% of the action in the usual popcorn action movie is impossible, but if you harp on that you'll never enjoy any action films.  Guess what? Robots don't really rule the world and we're not all really lying in tubs of pink goo, hooked up to an interactive virtual reality. You don't have to give The Matrix a negative review because it's all a lie.

There's also been a lot of commentary on it for the alleged left wing environmentalism of it all, but I think that mostly exists in the minds of people who want to see it there. Yes, the movie presents the dawning of a new ice age, brought about by excessive ice melt stopping the North Atlantic Flow, and yes that's due to global warming, but that's just one of the hooks the movie's plot is hung from. Objecting to the entire movie on that premise seems silly to me. Is Men in Black not worth watching since there really aren't thousands of aliens living in New York? Are James Bond movies bad since the gadgets he uses don't really exist?

They're movies and it's fiction. Suspend your disbelief enough to get into the basic plot of the movie, or you might as well not watch it at all. If afterwards it proceeds to violate all laws of physics or its own internal consistency that's fair game to criticize, but try to keep movies and documentaries separate in your factual analysis model.

There really isn't very much environmental stuff in the film, and most of what's there is required to set up the plot. Dennis Quaid's scientist character has to explain how global warming works, how the Transatlantic Flow functions, how the super storms form, etc, for the movie to make any sense to non-meteorologists. I was actually impressed that they explained so much weather stuff, and then followed it up with movie events. It was educational, sort of. Of course the movie isn't reality, and I don't think it's intended to be. It is somewhat cautionary about how humans continue to burn the fossil fuels that apparently contribute to the greenhouse effect, but the opening scenes about that set up the plot and the characters, so they're not gratuitous. There is a closing speech by the president that's a bit of a tacked on, preachy message, but still, the movie is far from the rabid diatribe that some amateur critics are portraying it as.

I honestly don't know what he's talking about here. This is way, way off the wall, and this quote says far more about the prejudices and presuppositions of the review author than the movie he's reviewing. (As I suppose my reaction to it says about me.) I can easily imagine a scientifically-ignorant, Rush Limbaugh listening, "there ain't no global warmin'!" redneck enjoying the movie, even if he didn't give a second of credence to the basic plot.

More on the above-quoted review later.

TDAT was written and directed by Ronald Emmerich. His name has no real resonance to me, but he's done several very big films. Not that they were especially good films, but you've probably heard of them. Universal Soldier, Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Patriot. Universal Soldier was mediocre trash that I saw part of on cable years later. I've never seen The Patriot. Stargate was somewhat interesting and original, but absurd in execution and logic. ID4 and Godzilla are his most famous films, setting his "massive destruction" style of story that TDAT continues and improves upon (in terms of body count). I've seen parts of Godzilla on TV several times, and I wouldn't argue with anyone who said it was the worst big budget movie ever made. It's up there with Episode 1 and 2 in terms of horrendous script and acting performances. ID4 wasn't as bad, I also only saw that one once, in theaters, and don't remember much about it besides the aliens blowing up cities in an astonishingly-inefficient war technique, ridiculously fake plane dogfights, and Will Smith doing his Tom Cruise from Top Gun battling aliens impersonation.

My point is that I have no love for the guy or his past movies, and I had low expectations going in to TDAT. But as I said in the introduction, I enjoyed the movie quite a bit more than I thought I would. To cover the points in some more detail:

Script/Story: 5
I might have been a bit critical on this point, since even though there's virtually nothing surprising in the movie, a lot of that is based on knowing so much about it from the trailers. You know that the story/plot in a movie like this is just a series of hooks from which the action set pieces are hung, and considering the type of movie this one was, the hooks worked admirably. I cared, somewhat, for the various survivors, even though I recognized them all as ridiculous stereotypes or heart-string tugging mechanisms, there was a narrative thread, there was a sort of rising action and a climax and a resolution.

Acting: 6
Nothing the Academy will be remembering next awards season, but what the hell, it wasn't bad. There weren't any actors who seemed grossly out of place or over the top or who stunk up the screen when they appeared. This was largely due to them almost all being unknowns who could be cast on talent, rather than famous B-listers, and the casting was well done. Of course, like most movies, white people did virtually everything of importance. The only Asian was a brainy-but-attractive-but-asexual female scientist, the only blacks were 2 nerdy sidekicks and a homeless guy, the only Hispanic (despite major scenes taking place in Mexico) was a janitor in LA, the women served as baggage, emotions personified, or motivation for men to do heroic things, etc. But there was a mixed marriage, and it wasn't entirely white, as most Hollywood products are.

Action: 7
This one is hard to grade, since while there wasn't any real human action; no fight scenes or car chases or other things of that ilk. The action was all weather-related, and all man vs. nature. Nature won. So yes, the spectacle of things was glorious, but despite what the trailers might lead you to believe, I don't think more than 10 or 15 minutes of screen time was devoted to actual footage of tornados, storm surges, ice storms, etc. A 7 is probably a bit high, given the amount of action, but since so much of it was of the colossal type, it gets a bonus point or two.

Eye Candy: 8
The disaster scenes get a 9 or even a 10, but there aren't really that many of them, and much of the rest of the film was mediocre and pedestrian, in look. Nothing bad, but nothing all that imaginative or amazing in the library fireplace room, the field hospital, the oval office, etc.

Replayability: 3
The only reason anyone would watch this again is to see the special effects. The story wasn't awful, but it was predictable the first time. It would be very boring on a second viewing.

Must See on the Big Screen: 5
My newest rating category, and the least important, in the larger scheme of things. I'm giving this one a 5, since while the destruction stuff looked great, and was fun to see on the big screen, the half-full theater audience didn't really add anything to the viewing experience, and there weren't really that many shots of glorious destruction.  The rest of the movie was very TV-show quality, though you'd miss out on some of the visuals if you were watching it on your TV.

Overall: 7
My overall score is a lot higher than the average of the individual categories, and I don't have any real explanation for that. All I can say is that the movie was more than the sum of its parts, and the parts don't even hold up real well, upon closer inspection. This one is based a lot on my low expectations going in, and since the movie was a lot better than I expected, I'm rewarding it, and my own misplaced cynicism.  Perhaps the secret to enjoying movies is to expect to hate everything?

Basically, the plot was a lot better than I thought, and after a bit of a lull after the first big scenes of destruction, the remainder of the plot continued to keep me involved, both for the ongoing action, and just to see how things were turning out. How did the US get all those people into Mexico? How was the world going to change in the new ice age? Would that homeless guy's dog survive? It was pretty to look at, the dialogue and acting wasn't actively awful, and it held my interest. TDAT is miles from a masterpiece, and if I hadn't already seen several far more mediocre summer movies I doubt I'd give it more than a 5, but it worked for me, the time I saw it. I'm not planning on ever seeing it again though, and I wouldn't pay to own or rent the DVD.