Let us take a great leap forward into the present day of film-making, and the bleak future of science fiction.
Sorry, what was that? Did I say bleak? Are ALL the movies I'm going to watch from now on going to be bleak ones?
Huh. Well, maybe so.
Ender's Game is so new we went to see it at the movies. So if you haven't seen it - CAUTION, SPOILERS!
The movies = a big long taxi drive all the way out to the mall in District 7, where on Saturday night they had Entertainments in the form of a PA system turned all the way up to 11 and plugged into a local singer. She was on the ground floor, and the not-so-dulcet tones were still bouncing strongly off all surfaces even inside the pizza hut on level 5. DATE NIGHT!!!
Lo, and I ordered unto myself a very small pizza in order to reserve room for sugar popcorn.
We chose Ender's Game because we had watched the trailer and it had Han SoloIndiana Jones Harrison Ford in it:
Poor Harrison. He got bit by the same dog as Gordon Ramsay:
Gordo
Han
So about the movie: we didn't realise it was actually a kid's movie until we were in it. But, in the league of movies for kids about kids with power, this one is really just coasting on the slipstream of the Hunger Games. Although it's better than those ones about vampires.
The good:
Space! I do like a bit of zero-gravity. What fun. There was no explanation as to how the big spaceships simulate gravity - which was probably for the best.
Aliens! Though there wasn't all that much good alien stuff, mostly just animations of space ships - there was a bit of aliening at the end.
Telepathy! One of my favourite tropes. Again - not all that much of it, but a bit, towards the end.
Game theory! OK, a lot of the supposedly amazing strategies presented in the film were actually not all that amazing or complex. But still! How philosophical!
The Maori! Ben Kingsley has a role as a Maori. He has a quite good moko, and a really weird accent. To me, it didn't sound like a kiwi accent all that much, but it gave me great insight into what the rest of the world probably hears when they hear us talking. Weird!
The bad:
Army brats! The justifications presented for children being the main military personnel in the film are this: children are faster than adults and make better decisions under pressure. Everybody with a teenager in your household - does this ring true to you?
Children are morally pure! Ender's sister Valentine is the moral compass for this film - she has an innate sense of right. Ender himself, when compelled unwittingly to a morally compromising decision is angry, resentful and determined to make right. The Khmer Rouge could have written this.
Girls are weak! Having one strong female character doesn't make good on all the other gender stereotyping.
I think that if I was a young boy I would seriously think this movie was cool. Maybe even philosophically deep. Maybe a little aspirational. And, it has absolutely no sex, which is appealing to the under 14 year old male psyche.
But I'm not.
In summary:
Bechdel test: There are two or more women in this movie, but they don't talk to each other.
Repeat line: I can't remember! So if it was used, not memorably so.
1984 was my first year of school. I was five years old, and the big news in our community was that some Kampuchean refugees had just arrived. Miss Wyber showed us all a children's book from Kampuchea with funny writing and told us: In Kampuchea, the pages go backwards and you read from right to left. It stuck very much in my mind, since the left to right of English was still arbitrary to me at that time. I could already read and write, but I hadn't yet picked a favourite hand to do it with, and these first few days of school were an introduction to the rules. I've since been to Cambodia, and I can even pick out the Khmer script from a line-up of squiggly alphabets, so I know that Miss Wyber had it wrong. But she also had it very, very right. I don't know where that book came from but thinking now about the situtation in Cambodia in the time it seems a miracle that she had anything Cambodian at all to help introduce our new, very different classmate to a conservative, monochrome school environment. Everybody loved Miss Wyber.
I don't really remember very much about our Cambodian refugees. I remember that the little girl in our class couldn't speak English at all. Not one word. I remember that she had short, straight, black hair and old looking clothes, and I thought for years that Kampuchea was an African country. My mother once told me that the Cambodian kids came to school on the first day with no shoes. My home town is cold all year round - and nobody wears no shoes if they can help it. I didn't stay at that school for very long, so I couldn't tell you what happened to that family, but I can say that the absolute best Khmer satay in the world comes from the stall in the Octagon in Dunedin - real street food, cooked on the street, hot and fresh and delicious. That stall was in the same place for years. I don't know if it's still there, but I'm sure my mother will comment...
By 1984 the damage had been well and truly done in Cambodia, but I daresay most people at home were oblivious to it, until this film came out and woke everybody up. Mr Martin and I watched it again last night. I'd seen it before, but probably nearly 20 years ago, and couldn't remember any of the details apart from of course that scene where the main Cambodian character literally stumbles across one of the famous killing fields, and plunges chest-deep into a mass grave.
Don't look away. This is one of the scenes that writer Bruce Robinson and Director Roland Joffé desperately want us to observe, and remember.
"The Khmer Rouge gave up love and affection . . . They encouraged
children to turn against their parents, to have them killed. It is so
puzzling. Pol Pot and the leaders were intellectuals who had studied in
Paris, who had had contact with civilization. It is they who conceived
of this. Those intellectuals lost their sense of reality, and built one
of their own. This was not genocide to them, but a purification."
Puzzling is the right word. What happened in Cambodia, and to a lesser extent* in China and Vietnam,is utterly baffling. There is a scene in the film as the final evacuation from the embassy in Phnom Penh is taking place, where young Khmer Rouge soldiers are in the streets just destroying everything of value. Cars, fridges - everything is smashed up. It makes no sense. Why destroy all your economic assets?
I think it is probably easy to get the uneducated and poor to hate the educated and rich. There's a scene in the movie where a Khmer Rouge soldier is examining a confiscated passport - he's holding it upside down. He can't read, he's not interested in what it says, he's just looking for something of value. What's not easy, what makes me so uneasy, is the fact that intelligent, educated people were behind it. As they were in Vietnam, and in China, and in Germany. I prefer to think that education will prevent this kind of thing ever happening again. But I could easily be wrong about that.
Or this scene, towards the end, when Pran is in a re-education camp, and we see a classroom. A child is called to the blackboard and is shown a picture of a stick-figure family in front of a house. It is a test. The child crosses out the parents, and erases the lines so the parents and children are no longer holding hands. Applause. She passes. And yet, a few minutes later, the camp leader asks Pran to love his child. It is incomprehensible.
There are a lot of notable children in the movie. The countless corpses, the injured bodies. The child soldiers with huge guns - longer than the child is tall. Children with guns is a common trope in Vietnamese propaganda even today. It's like a kind of gruesome misappropriation of The Emperor's New Clothes - the idea that a child is uncorrupted and pure. If a child professes it, it must be true.
The child who pointed out suspected traitors on the road. The children riding a tank through the streets on Phnom Penh.
The commander's child, who met his death via one of the most devastating legacies of this conflict in Cambodia - a landmine in the middle of nowhere. Pran's children, relocated to the United States as refugees and not knowing their father, believing him to be dead.
Or the one who sticks most in my mind - the young girl trying to sell a Mercedes logo** to the foreigners for a dollar. She's persistent. All the children who try to sell you stuff you don't want for a dollar in Cambodia are persistent.
In summary:
Bechdel test: Fewer than two women in this movie (named. All I can think of is Pran's wife).
Repeat line: Not used.
Believable characters: Everybody. Devastatingly so.
Music: One memorable song - not written for the movie.
Tears: Yes.
Plot: Careful - faithful - chronological.
Star rating: 10/10
* The devastation here and in China is just as real, especially for the victims. Only, there weren't so many graves (per capita).
**One of those things that stick up on the hood of a car - there's a word for it, but I don't know what it is.
Starring Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal - Love Story was made in 1970 -
shortly after sex was invented in the movies (but before the existence
of nipples).
Where do I begin? Any review of Love Story should probably start with THAT SONG but I'll come back to it.
And
first, let us assassinate the female character. If we could have done
so and thus hasten her demise, perhaps the whole thing would have been
slightly more bearable to watch, because by the third act and the
character had still not developed at all or done anything remotely
interesting we were really really ready for the deathbed.
So, meet Jenny.
It's
not easy to find an image of Jenny on the interwebs where she isn't
draped on Preppy, or next to Preppy, or admiring Preppy from a
distance. But there are at least 3 scenes in the film where Jenny gets
some action on her own, although in each of those 3 scenes Jenny is
being intensely observed by Preppy, so I'm not sure if it counts.
Firstly, the opening library scene. Jenny is at work, and hits on a customer by acting like a complete bitch.
"I hate rich people in general, and you in particular.
Now - fall in love with me."
Nice
glasses Jenny! The glasses appear in this scene, and in the next
solo(ish) scene, where she is playing a small interesting looking
harpsichord ... and never again, although Jenny is often depicted
reading.
Jenny is happy because Preppy is clapping.
Jenny
has several jobs during the course of the movie. She works in the
library. She is a camp counsellor. She teaches singing to children. All
of this working is purely for to get money. As soon as Preppy is
bringing home a paycheck large enough to pay rent and expensively furnish
an expensive apartment, Jenny is in the kitchen, where she should be.
Also, she runs, skips and hops everywhere. Just like Christopher Robin. Hoppity hoppity, hoppity, hoppity, hop!
Jenny
loves Preppy because he puts up with her sass. And, presumably because
he is good at hockey. And also because he isn't flabby. Jenny says only
horrible things to Preppy, and this makes him love her passionately. I
can report from personal experience that this tactic doesn't work in real
life.
What is wrong with you Preppy? Why do you love bitchy Jenny so? Let us count the ways:
Poor
Preppy doesn't know anything about love, for he was raised by
gold-plated popsicles called Sir and Never Addressed Directly.
Therefore, bitchy emotional games make him go all woozy?
Those
eyebrows. I mean, they'd make anyone swoon, right? Imagine, it's a
normal stressful school night and you're just trying to get access to a
library book, and those eyebrows get raised critically at you behind the
ridiculous glasses. Activate weak knees.
She goes to his hockey games.
I got nothing. WHY DOES HE LOVE HER SO?
Jenny is studying music, and when she graduates she is offered a
fabulous scholarship to go to Paris and study some more. Which was all
the catalyst Preppy needed to propose to her. When she asks why, as in: why do
you want to marry me, Preppy - we are left wondering exactly the same
thing. He says Because. Unsaid: Because I want to own you and have you spend all your energy admiring me, since Mommy and Daddy won't.
So,
let us examine the rest of Preppy's character. He is immeasurably
rich, which makes him angry. He expresses his anger by driving too fast
and refusing to set foot in the Hall aka the family's legacy to
Harvard, and Preppy's ticket to any qualification he desires. The only
desires Preppy has for his own career inconveniently MATCH EXACTLY with what
Sir desires for him, leading to a baffling kind of conflictless
conflict, that becomes central to the plot because Preppy decides that
the only way he can resolve this unconflict is by refusing any of Sir's
money ever again. Poor Sir is confused. As are we.
Luckily for Preppy, Because is all the persuasion Jenny needs to give up
her career, marry, work to put her man through college, and develop no
further personal desires beyond the obvious: BABIES. Which brings us to the central plot arc and THAT AWFUL SONG. Like most things in life, it's better with Miss Piggy:
The first line in the script is: What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died? So
we know she's gonna die, just not exactly how. I thought probably by
car crash, but by the time we get to the doctor's office in the 3rd act
we realise that the reason for the death is going to be medical. The
doctor is cagey about what exactly is wrong with Jenny - but it's
obvious to the audience, she has a bad case of gynecological earworm. Riddled with it!
The
refrain, is played with many trills on piano all the way through
the movie. I suppose it might have been OK in 1970 when nobody had
heard it before. Now - it's cringingly awful.
There's
only really one other thing to discuss about this movie - it's annoying
tagline/soundbite. Probably this is the claim to fame that gets it on
the best movies list, because there's nothing that best-ever-list-makers
like more than non-sensical tripe.
Love means never having to say you're sorry.
Let's
gloss over the fact that it uses that awful repeat-line plot device so
beloved of Hollywood - where one character says something profound, to
another character, and then the second character repeats it back to them
later in the film after circumstances have changed. Love Story uses the
repeat-line-pay-it-forward variation of this tactic: Jenny says the
line to Preppy at the end of the second act, and Preppy repeats it to
Sir as the final line in the script.
What the hell does it mean?
The
best I can come up with is as a kind of denial of love. A person, who
is supposed to love, apologises. The apologisee says: love means never
having to say you're sorry - as a way of pointing out that if the first
person really loved them, they would never have caused the situation
that precipitated the apology in the first place. So in this case,
"love" really means "loving".
This certainly seems to be how Preppy is using it with Sir at the end, and it's a pretty high fucking standard if you ask me.
The
other way, and the way it seems to be used by Jenny the first time we
hear it, it seems to mean: if you really love someone, you would
forgive them anything. If you are loved, you never have to say you're
sorry, as you will be automatically forgiven. So where "love" in this
context, means "being loved".
Which I interpret as "love means being a noble martyred doormat".
Seriously, people? This is our standard of best ever romance?
In summary:
Bechdel test: There are two women in this movie, but they don't talk to each other
Repeat line: Used
Believable characters: None
Music: Earworm
Tears: OK a couple. What? I'm not made of stone!
Plot: Stuff happens
Star rating: 4/10
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