Eccentric Flower:199811/bugs and commandments

twenty-nine eleven one

bugs and commandments

A lovely filmgoing night. First they showed the Star Wars trailer unexpectedly. I hadn't seen it. Looks good - no surprise there.

Then they showed a trailer for The Prince Of Egypt - a little surprising, since we were there to see a Disney film, and Disney and Dreamworks want to kill each other right now.

The idea behind this film did not interest me in the least the last time I saw this trailer. For, lo, what is so tedious as an animated Bible story? You just know they're going to sanitize the snot out of it.

But the other night the second half of our household Cultural Exchange program took place. See, I (the Southern belle) made my true love see Gone With The Wind in a theatre recently; so, she (the Jewish princess) in retaliation made me sit down and watch The Ten Commandments last night. And, you know, it's a pretty fair swap.

Both are about four hours long. Both have lurid color and horrid miscasting and moments placed in the film for pure spectacle's sake. Both have parts which are so cheesy that you cannot help but giggle aloud. And, when all is said and done, they're both really durable movies. They are Epics - they're too big to be "good" or "bad" movies. They defy that.

Anyway, although I'm becoming something of an amateur Bible scholar with all this reading, it took seeing DeMille's extravaganza to make me actually want to see The Prince of Egypt. Go figure. It's obvious the animators have seen The Ten Commandments a few times - as was pointed out, they'd be foolish not to have. I noticed that my ear wasn't hearing something ... then I realized that whoever's doing the voice of Rameses, he's no Yul Brynner. I miss that vibrato.

We had red wine. Wine improves this film. Next time I see GWTW, I'm going to smuggle booze into the theatre.

But, back to this evening's film experience:

Then they showed a funny house piece with the Sesame Street Muppets - not the (also hilarious) one that Sony usually shows, with the Rules of The Theatre, but a special one for Sesame Street's 30th, with Cookie Monster narrating the History of Film. Really, really, funny, with some nice film jokes way over the kids' heads, like when he eats Rosebud.

And then the main attraction! But, no! Pixar has decided to add a Short Feature! Yes, they showed Geri's Game, which I like, but not as much as Tin Toy, their other award-winning short.

And finally the main event: A Bug's Life.

The reviewer for Entertainment Weekly said that there was so much going on in this picture visually that it actually distracted from his enjoyment of it - that there was literally too much going on. I wouldn't go that far, but I was bombarded enough that I couldn't stop to figure out the main thing which was bothering me about it until it was over.

It has a traditional Disney flaw: a weak center. The hero is nowhere near as interesting as the colorful supporting characters. Even the "female lead" is interesting enough - she has a lot of nervous tics that make her fun to watch (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, doing her Elaine schtick) - but the lead is just plain bland. As much as I dislike Woody Allen's whining, the protagonist in Antz was more compelling.

That said, this movie is much more visually interesting than Antz, although Antz has a darkness and ominousness to it that you'll never see in anything with the Disney label. In both movies the voice work is superb. Pixar's graphics are better - they practially invented this field, after all, and their software's been bubbling for a lot longer. Perhaps it would be appropriate to view Antz as the dark side of A Bug's Life. At any rate I do not believe their sales will cannibalize one another in the least.

Watching the audience this time, vs. the audience for Toy Story, I noticed that the discussions after the movie were as much "Wasn't that scene great?" as they were "Wow, did you see how well the computer did rain effects?" I think Toy Story had a handicap to overcome in that people had to get used to the technology. Now the way is paved. No one ever marvels at the infrastructure behind conventional animated cartoons, even though the labor is no less daunting. Not since the innovation of the multiplane camera, anyway, and that was back in the days of Snow White.

(My true love and I, and other people who have enough of a foot in the door to appreciate the geeky stuff, don't count. Yes, we were trying to speculate which scenes in Aladdin were computer-generated - check out the pillars in the sultan's throne room - but not many others were. Cartoons are taken for granted as part of our cultural lexicon. Computer animation is not - yet.)

It's sort of ironic that the idea is to do it so perfectly that one doesn't notice the infrastructure. A Bug's Life is not all of the film it could be on some points - I laugh with glee more every time I see Luxo Jr. stomp on the letter I in PIXAR than I did at any point during the movie - but it cannot be said that the computer gets in the way. I don't recall a point where I was pulled out of the movie because I was noticing process ... and when it comes to computers, I tend to see nothing but.

Pixar folks are twisted people, and I'm happy to see that Disney is comfortable enough to let them display some of that warped sense of humor. (The second grade play that is performed for the circus troupe when they arrive, for example.) OK, there were no Mutant Toys or squeezy aliens in this ("The Claaaw! The Claw is our Master!"), but there was enough that I'd go see another Pixar film in a heartbeat.

Anyway, enough tongue-wagging about that. When you see the film, and you should, be sure to sit all the way through the credits. Pixar has put some surprises in.

- - -

Not going to write about Thanksgiving or other local events now, because I wanted to dump the movie stuff while it was fresh in my mind. I'll get to the other news tomorrow or Monday.

I do want to note that another "sublet" has appeared on [old domain name], and this one's not a journal. It's a game, of sorts, Twenty Questions, and I'm one of the brains devising it. Give it a look.

End of advertisement. Time to sleep.

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