Fear is the Mind-Killer, Mediocrity the Brain Cell-Killer

Disclaimer: like all of my other trailer impressions (which I keep telling myself I'm not going to do anymore), they are only impressions. None of what I'm about to say comes from any sort of insider knowledge and certainly not any kind of advanced screening, much as I wish I carried that kind of clout. It's entirely possible the final film will differ from the trailer and alleviate the concerns I have about it. That said, one of the reasons I started doing more trailer analyses is because I like to work under the premise that a trailer is a movie's first impression, and like in any first impression, you should put your best foot forward. You can call my bluff without showing your hand. When a trailer gives an impression of a movie that turns out to be different than what's on screen come the debut, I feel it's valid grounds for criticism. It's a fine line between piquing my interest and lowering my expectations. 

The trailer for the new version of Dune dropped a few days ago. I've watched it, and my reaction is, "It looks fine." Were I to be pressed for additional adjectives, the most affirmatively I could answer is "Adequate" with alternatives and/or additions consisting of "Competent." I hate to use a term like "Unnecessary" because as Oscar Wilde taught us, all art is fundamentally useless and that's the point. Art should never have to be defended and it certainly should never have to defend its own right to exist. It looks like someone split the difference between the David Lynch take and the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries (from the before time, back when they could spell). Unfortunately, in splitting the difference, the whole seems to have become less than the sum of its parts. Gone is the wonderfully mesmerizing mastery of color and light from the miniseries, traded in for a dull array of grays and browns even in what looks like midday with a clear sky. The cast seems closer to the David Lynch film in terms of star power and potential to play it larger-than-life, but they are notably understated in delivery, almost tired. Also, raise your hand if you thought Jason Mamoa was playing Gurney instead of Duncan. 

It's all very minimalist, which is where Denis Villenueve shines, but just like Dune 2020 and its earlier iterations of 20 and (good grief) 36 years ago, he seems at odds with his own sensibilities. I've seen two of his movies, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. I adored Arrival and think it's one of the best thinking man's science fiction films since Under the Skin or The Europa Report. By contrast, I couldn't tell you a damn thing that happened in Blade Runner 2049 except some above average visuals that you can recreate at home. Simply watch the new Dune trailer, but hold up any and every piece of colored glass you can find, swapping them with every new scene. I've got a similar trick for James Cameron movies involving a strobe light and cobalt glass, but we're getting off-topic. 

Here's the complicated relationship I've had with the works of Frank Herbert: I never got into the books, and it's for the same reason I don't actually hold the past adaptations in higher regard beyond technical achievements. The WORLD of Dune, the setting, the lore, the cultures, and the history is all monumentally fascinating. The STORY of Dune, as in the one story that's now essentially been told 3 times (4 including the first book), is painfully dull. At its core, the story of the Atreides and the Harkonnen is a mafia revenge movie set in space and with gently messianic religiosity because that's how science fantasy/planetary romance rolls.

If I were in a more cynical mood, I could make an infographic drawing lines of comparison between Dune and Get Shorty since The Godfather is too obvious. Just pretend John Travolta is House Atreides and Dennis Farina is House Harkonnen, Hollywood is Arrakis, Gene Hackman is a Mentat, Danny DeVito and Rene Russo are Fremen... Okay, I'm not pretending it's without its stretches, but even this mental exercise isn't meant to knock it. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion, and my thoughts have acquired a lot of speed. Out, out, damn lip stains!

The best versions of any stories are the ones that make me not care about how many times or ways I've heard it before. It's not diminishing it to say it all comes down to the neat little package you doll up your plot with. That's how mythical worlds have worked from the cave painting we used to symbolize the word go. 

Excalibur is your father's lightsaber is my Gom Jabbar in a Weirding sort of Way that surrounds us, penetrates us, and in the darkness binds us.

There is no one story, and it is all the same story, 36 plots all asking, "Who am I?" It may all be tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury signifying nothing, but I can't stand the silence and I think all of you feel the same way. I'm not being any sort of iconoclast when I offer the following advice to those poor players who strut and fret their hour upon the stage. When you hold all that hostage for the sake of that one story, you're doing it wrong. You've gone from putting the cart before the horse to putting the cart on the horse's back and then kicking it impatiently when it can't get up because you put a damn cart on it. Also, the cart is full of vegetables and the horse is named Just Desserts because Ben & Jerry got out of the horse racing business after the Jolly Green Giant bought them out. 

Speaking of bad business dealings nobody wins from, let's talk about Spider-Man. 

• Bitten by a radioactive spider, 
• misused his powers at first resulting in the death of Uncle Ben, 
• now fights out of a renewed sense of personal responsibility. 

Even if you never picked up an issue of the series or watched any of the near-endless cartoon adaptations, we've had at least 3 cinematic versions of Peter Parker by 3 completely different actors, helmed by 3 completely different directors, and all under the supervision of 2-ish production companies that sort of get along except when they don't and Civil War has to be re-written at the last minute and he's not really Spider-Man more like Iron Man Jr. because marketing guys don't know asses from elbows, among other problems. Regardless of these rocky starts and repeated reboots/retoolings/reworkings/reanimations, by the time we got to Into the Spider-Verse, that initial setup, that origin story, was practically a running gag.

The shorter version of what I just described goes like this: We had to endure 5 garbage Transformers movies before we got Bumblebee. 

For as much as the two visual adaptations of Dune thus far differ and how closely they do or do not adhere to the source material, the overall beats of  

• Loverboy Meets Spice Girls, 
• Loverboy Loses Spice Girls, 
• Loverboy Gets Spice Girls Back by declaring war on an intergalactic empire while riding giant sandworms and blasting TOTO from a boombox over his head. 

are all still present and accounted for in this New Kid on the Block and it's all so NSync with itself I crave a Social Distortion. This should not be old hat by now. I should not be bored by Sand People upgrading their Banthas to steroid-infused Sarlaccs to take down Sandcrawlers and Jedi Masters who can Force-choke space itself. Look, I get this is all new for some people, that not everyone absorbs, dissects, and compartmentalizes operas of the outer space persuasion the way I do, but that's not my issue here. My issue is that we keep hitting the reset button and assuming it's a form of time travel had it been invented by Big Brother. Couple this with the fact Frank Herbert by his own admission wrote Dune to be Sci-Fi that was as light on the Sci-side of things as possible to make it more approachable and accessible, and you can see why I'm nowhere near as excited for a third adaptation as I probably should be.

I don't want The Dunefather for the 3rd time.
I want Rogue Dune... Atreidebee... Into the Foldverse... The Fremenorian... Okay, I'm done. 

I also want House Ordos. I couldn't begin to tell you who they are in Get Shorty. Might have to bring Be Cool into the mix. 

So many movies (Transformers & Watchmen)

This really has been the time for me to catch up on movies.

Oct 29th:
Seed [link]

Nov 4th:
Wanted [link]

Nov 6th:
Watchmen [link]

Nov 8th:
Transformers [link]
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen [link]

Nov 9th: (will sit down and watch in a few hours)
The Island [link]
Hero [link]
Able Edwards [link]

I had already seen Transformers (at the second run theaters... I felt I owed it to my inner child who ambivalently remembers being scared at the original animated feature to such an extent that I stopped watching after Starscream was disintegrated by Galvatron. That was just infuriating; I mean, they killed Starscream, he was my favorite. Oh, well, luckily he's turned out to have an immortal spark.) and while I was loath to give Revenge a go, my roommate thought the scene from the trailer where Sam tells Bumblebee about going to college was cute and wanted to see it almost purely on the power of that. I also thought it would make for an interesting experiment as she'd never followed Transformers as a kid (she was a My Little Pony fan) and had virtually no prior understanding of the source material. I don't think it really worked out as she was actually vicariously running a little experiment of her own to try and fathom, while we were watching, just what I'd hated so much about the first movie.

Watchmen was really good. In fact, at the risk of utter blasphemy, I almost prefer the movie to the comic. Don't get me wrong, if you've never read a comic book in your life and decided to read just one, it would at least be in my top five recommended titles (along with the Spawn/Batman crossover by Miller and MacFarlane and David Mack's contributions to Daredevil, which edge Watchmen out of the top spots).

I had a lot of problems with Wanted, much to the chagrin of my roommate, who's a huge Angelina Jolie fan. I'll write a full review and analysis on my Blogger page. Here's a preview of the introduction:
(movie ends)
Roommate: Well?
Myself: Hm?
RM: What did you think?
MY: It was slightly better than I thought it would be.
RM: Oh?
MY: I was expecting a zero, and I got a three.
RM: Oh... kay...?
MY: The scale's out of one hundred.
RM: Tsh! Matt! It wasn't THAT bad.
MY: That's just it... (and that leads into the review)

One of the big problems of using a projector is that, unless you can dedicate an entire room to using it or black out all your windows, you're at the mercy of the time of day and the inherent lighting, so I have to wait to watch the other three movies (I'd watched Watchmen on my computer, which I really regret doing; it deserved better).