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Shared Darkness

A Communal Life in Film, Examined

Daily Archives: August 1, 2006

Ratings Updates Help Kids Track Nudity… or Sad Lack Thereof

In random but recent ratings news, the Motion Picture Association of
America’s Classification and Ratings Administration bestowed a PG upon Rocky Balboa,
the who’re-ya-foolin’-with-that-title sixth film in Sylvester
Stallone’s pugilistic franchise, for “boxing violence and some
language.” Rated PG-13 were this fall’s All the King’s Men (“for an intense sequence of violence, sexual content and partial nudity”) and DOA: Dead or Alive (“for pervasive martial arts and action violence, some sexuality and nudity”) and next winter’s Ghost Rider (“for horror violence and disturbing images, including flaming heads”).

OK, I made that last part up, but has anyone else noticed that the
print poster explanations for movie ratings are often hilarious in
their completely earnest, poker-faced straightforwardness? If I were a kid today, I’d be scouring those for help finding big screen nudity. It was also
confirmed that  Martin Scorsese’s remake of Infernal Affairs for Warner Bros., The Departed,
will be rated R for “strong brutal violence, pervasive language, some
strong sexual content and drug material.” Yep, that sounds about right
for a Scorsese crime picture.

Route 66: The Ultimate DVD Collection

Certainly
driving semi-leisurely cross-country today takes a certain type of
spirit, but it’s still a markedly different one than in times past.
Back before short-distance air travel became ubiquitous and interstate
driving more drab and impersonal, there was Route 66 — a lively swath
of freeway that cut its way 2,000-plus miles across the United States,
and into the imagination of many who would travel it. Route 66: The Ultimate DVD Collection takes a look back at that time and that road.

Produced and directed by Christopher Lewis and hosted by best-selling author Michael Wallis, Route 66
consists of a trio of hour-long titles spread out over three discs, and
collectively delves into both the history of the highway itself and the
back stories of literally dozens of small towns through which it runs
and intersects. These are basically hosted travelogues, but Wallis and
his photographer wife, Suzanne Fitzgerald-Wallis, are the authors of
the exhaustively researched 1990 tome The Mother Road, and ergo their expertise and corresponding abundance of anecdotes are put to good use here.

This summer’s animated hit Cars partially delved into the nostalgia attached to a seemingly slower time, and Route 66
is certainly no less enamored with what it peddles almost wholly as
halcyon days gone by. In fact, this is where the title grinds down a
bit and loses its natural energy, so pompous and sometimes overly
theatrical an orator is Wallis. Those predisposed to historical yarns
will be naturally enthralled by stories of the many small Oklahoma
towns — Clinton, Foyil and Dumark, among them — that Route 66 bisects,
as well as all the other big cities, from Chicago and St. Louis to
Albuquerque and Los Angeles. But he can come off as a bit pretentious,
particularly, say, when waxing about the spilled blood of striking
Kansas coal miners in the 1930s.

Route 66: The Ultimate DVD Collection comes packaged in a
double-wide Amray case, with a separate tray for each of its three
discs. The programs are presented in 1.33:1 full screen, with a Dolby
digital 2.0 stereo audio track that provides decent if somewhat
under-mixed range for the title’s relatively sparse needs — this
certainly isn’t the release to which to calibrate your sub-woofers. The
supplemental extras include a photo gallery of images taken by
Fitzgerald-Wallis — especially great for those who’ve only flown over
vast stretches of the country — plus a pair of nine-minute interviews
with both she and her husband. There’s also a seven-minute chat with
director Christopher Lewis and his wife Linda, who detail their own
trip on the road in a 1972 Super Beetle convertible, thrown rod and
all. For those who really dig Americana and all its dusty nooks,
crannies and interstices, a set like this is a godsend. For those, on
the other hand, looking for a more streamlined and succinct history of
Route 66, this title is unfortunately a bit too meandering and
dawdling. C (Movies) C (Disc)

On Superman Returns and… Gay Marriage?

I know it seems a bit belated to still talk about Superman Returns — after all, it slipped out of the top 10 and was out-grossed by The Devil Wears Prada
last weekend, despite playing in 200-plus more theaters — but I had
another friend catch the movie (and be disappointed by it) this past
weekend, which got me thinking about it again.

The subject of the sexuality of this reborn iteration of the character of Superman and his status in the gay community has been covered to death — and quite well, too — in a variety of major media pieces, from The Advocate’s cover feature, which got the ball rolling, to stories and interviews in Newsweek and Los Angeles Times. But one un-discussed angle to me — and this is a spoiler alert — lies in the shaping of the film’s narrative by director Bryan Singer, himself openly if quietly gay.

With only a bit of an intellectual leap, the story can be read on
one level as an extended rhetorical response to the ongoing debate
about gay marriage. After all, Superman Returns is a movie about an “alien” trying to find rootedness in mainstream
society, and doing so largely by pursuing placement within traditional
familial structures. In the real world, many homosexuals have lobbied
to be part of the institution of marriage, which should delight
cultural conservatives who purportedly value above all else the
sanctity of a settled family unit. Of course, then the debate becomes
about parsing the definition of marriage, and homosexuals find out that
for some who oppose gay marriage — not all, but a decent percentage — it’s more about artfully
politically manipulated prejudice than “lifestyle choice.”

In Superman Returns, after years of having given mightily of himself, Superman tries to
reconnect with his kind, only to find he really can’t go home again. He
then returns to Earth, reengages the hegemonic culture and realizes —
despite the binding revelation that Lois’ son is his as well — that he
can never truly be one of them. Though, in his parting words, he’ll
“always be around,” Superman will always exist apart — celebrated by
many, but still vilified by some — from the mainstream. This isn’t the
dominant storyline by any stretch of the imagination, but it plays in
several of Brandon Routh’s more ruminative scenes, including the
finale.

On another tangent, while coming from an additional friend who really, really didn’t like Superman Returns (“Elektra was better because at least its badness was only 90 minutes,” he said —
ouch!), I think he did have an excellent point in that the filmmakers
blew a chance to tie together the rationalizations of Lex Luthor and
Lois Lane on the issue of why the world don’t need Superman — that
relying on Superman makes it all too easy, and thus strips us of human
struggle and identity. Luthor always suspects Superman of ulterior
motives, and that paranoia and suspicion feeds part of his own desire
for conquest. If would have been interesting to see Luthor try, however
foolhardily, to recruit Lois to his point-of-view, and then have that
legitimately feed her burgeoning awareness that maybe Superman isn’t
such a bad guy to have around. Heck, it might’ve even given Kate Bosworth something to do except be awful…

The Ant Bully

The Ant Bully, an
intermittently sweetly moralizing but rather lackluster and ramshackle animated
tale of shifted perspective in which an adolescent in shrunken to the same size
as the ants in his front yard.

Visually, the movie recalls a bit the angular precision of Antz, though a duplication of that 1998 film’s
$91 million domestic box office seems farfetched, particularly coming on the
heels of the well received, fellow animated offering Monster House, which will enjoy better word-of-mouth and engage a
broader potential audience. A more likely final domestic tally for The Ant Bully seems to rest in the $45
to $70 million range, as the film isn’t of the type that will markedly cross
over to the same young adults who partially comprise the audience for Pixar’s
successful efforts. The Ant Bully’s
simultaneous opening in the 3-D IMAX format will certainly offer niche moviegoers
a uniquely immersive perspective on its titular protagonist’s journey and help
Warner Bros. achieve additional replay value at those outlets, while a well
recognized voice cast should likewise help the film establish more credible
commercial inroads internationally.

The film’s story centers on Lucas Nickle (well voiced by Zach Tyler
Eisen), a bullied, diminutive 10-year-old who turns his aggression on the ant
hill in his front yard. To these ants, including wizard ant Zoc (voiced by
Nicolas Cage) and his kindly girlfriend Hova (voiced by Julia Roberts), Lucas is
known simply as “the Destroyer,” and his wanton devastation of their home environment
must stop. To this end, Zoc concocts a special potion.

Shrunken down to the ants’ size after his parents leave for
the obligatory vacation, Lucas fitfully joins their world, and is sentenced by
the Ant Queen (voiced by Meryl Streep) to live and work in the colony as one of
them. There he finds a landscape teeming with heretofore unseen perils, and Lucas
slowly comes to appreciate the value of teamwork before, as in the recent
DreamWorks hit Over the Hedge, having
to wage war against an overbearing exterminator (Paul Giamatti), who in this
case previously conned Lucas into signing a contract with him.

A few adventure set pieces — including a dragonfly siege of
the ants and a foray into Lucas’ house in an attempt to cancel exterminator’s
appointment — offer up some excitement in their canted perspective. Young Eisen, meanwhile, gives able voice to Lucas’ frustrations and
petulant mood swings, proving — as with the cast of Monster House — that age appropriate voices are often better
anchors for animated fare than a high-profile name merely for name’s sake. Cage, too, has a blast, injecting a few mild trademark
eccentricities into his role as Zoc.

Overall, though, The Ant Bully lacks the sort of smart,
whimsical, freewheeling, grand-scale collision of worlds that its premise might
on the surface suggest. Its story is actually fairly insular. The movie sets up and then
drops the ball on any number of details, including the differences in
personality between scouts and foragers in the ant world, which might make for
rich comedic fodder, relying instead on a few broadly sketched character types.

The real problem, though, boils down to The Ant Bully’s rather indistinct mix of logic in the action on
display. This includes some real and practical elements, some fantastical bits (ants
hang-gliding on flower petals) and some wholly magical fragments, all of which commingle
haphazardly depending on whatever is convenient for a particular scene. Zoc’s
magic — which includes the potion that shrinks Lucas and a staff from which he
fires a resin-type material — is never adequately explained.

Myriad other details, too — like the full-size Lucas losing
his glasses, to no repercussion, when shrunk, and the exterminator Stan being reduced
only half-size in the climactic showdown — seem off, and the rather off-putting
character of kooky, alien-obsessed grandmother Mommo (voiced by Lily Tomlin) is
puzzlingly rendered. She figures out two-thirds of the way through the movie
that Lucas has been shrunk, but neither abets his return to human size nor has
a shared moment with him at film’s end.

Visually, The Ant
Bully is pitched toward a young-skewing audience, and generally engaging
and successful on this level, but hardly revolutionary. Director John A. Davis
places an emphasis on retaining a broader color palette, but the film’s
backgrounds aren’t as deep and chock full of detail as similar outdoors efforts
like Antz, A Bug’s Life or Over the
Hedge, and the angles likewise aren’t frequently as provocative in their
elicitation of scale and perspective. (Warner Bros., PG, 87 mins.)

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