Amy Nicholson... The Problem is You

For the second entry in a row, we're gonna play my favorite game: Completely Unfounded Political Message Extrapolation! Except this time, we're gonna confront something an awful lot of people are saying about Slumdog Millionaire. And it's not actually a political message, but it's close enough.

I didn't like Slumdog as much as most other people, but I certainly liked it a lot better than Amy Nicholson,, who we last found gushing over Bride Wars.

Heavy Slumdog spoilers are abound.

John Carpenter, the first grand prize millionaire of the USA’s Who Wants to be a Millionaire was showered with (momentary) fame. In Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan’s noisy fictional drama, India’s parallel 20-million rupee winner Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) was tortured for the implausibility of being a bottom caste brain when his superiors bottomed out at 60K.

This is a noisy intro, but whatever. Ha, dude's name was John Carpenter. More like Big Trouble in Little Millionaire!

Complicating things, Jamal isn’t particularly bright—a credibility deficit screenwriter Simon Beaufoy overcomes by showing precisely which traumatic events etched random facts about movies, religion, and British geography into his mind--

Yes. I'm certain Beaufoy's train of thought was this exactly: "Ah jeez, I really wanna make a story about a slumdog who wins the millionaire game, but how do I do it?? I know! I'll think of the actual premise of the movie!" Yes, it's the premise of the movie, and you're gonna call it a copout. If there's any point to the fact that he does so well, it's simply to show the dichotomy between tuition and experience. It's one of the central themes of the movie. Because it's the premise. Of the movie. Well, half the premise, anyway.

coincidentally, in the chronological order game show host Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor) will later ask him as questions.

GET OVER IT. Everyone who dislikes the film has used this argument. There has to come a point when you're watching the movie and you realize that the Indian Regis is an evil and cunning villain. It's at this point where you also realize that you're not really supposed to take this movie so seriously. It's a fable. It's a fairy tale set against a modern backdrop. It's not supposed to be believable, just like Cinderella isn't supposed to be believable.

There's also the fact that there were like four or five questions he either didn't know or he used his cleverness to figure out. Jerk.

In these scenes (for which child actors Tanay Chheda and Ayush Mahesh Khedekar play the younger and youngest Jamals), MIA’s “Paper Planes” blasts, adopting the credibility of desperate, money-hungry street living it didn’t get when layered over Seth Rogen toking up in Pineapple Express.

Oh jesus, come on. What?
1. "Paper Planes" never played in Pineapple Express. It was only used in the trailer.
2. Who the fuck cares about the song's credibility? Review the movie you're reviewing.
3. Why is 16% of your review about an MIA song?

This should be a furious story about strata; instead it tries to sell us a bogus romance between Jamal and his childhood love (Freida Pinto), now the mistress of the gangster who employs his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal). When they kiss at the ending, we roll our eyes—that’s not going to solve the problems that now infuriate us. Why, when Boyle has for half a film been such a devastating purveyor of social class suffering, would he turn as glossy as a Disney cartoon?

GAAAAAAAH.

What the hell was with the ending of Cinderella? All that happened was she got to live happily ever after… but there were no new laws passed about stepmother meanness! Nothing!

Amy, and everyone else who argues with this argument, stop it. It's a movie about a guy who faces insurmountable odds to be with the woman he loves. That's his one goal, throughout the entire movie. It's a love story. Remember love stories? And how they're allowed to exist? Bride Wars is somehow plausible, but this… this is an outrage! What should Danny Boyle have done? Change the script so Jamal and Latika become king and queen of India and bring fairness and prosperity to all the land? He actually could've done that, and you still would've hated it, because it's unrealistic enough as it is. We don't roll our eyes, because it DID solve the problem—Jamal and Latika were in love but could not be together. They eventually got together. Along the way, bad things happen, and in the end, Jamal finds a way to overcome the bad things that happen to him, because of his love for Latika and the fact that "it was written," and, you know, everything else about the movie.

This is a real problem in criticism, I think. Critics who just want the movie to be something that's the complete opposite of what the movie is. Slumdog Millionaire is a fairy tale romance set against a violent backdrop. Like Romeo and fucking Juliet. A critic worth their salt would be able to judge it for what it is, and how successful it is at achieving what it sets out to achieve. A bad critic would look at it and say YOU KNOW, I REEEEEALLY WISH IT WAS ABOUT SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT or IT REALLY DIDN'T MAKE ME LAUGH ENOUGH or WHAT WAS WITH THE STRANGE LACK OF TALKING ANIMALS? Amy Nicholson, you are a purveyor of this awfulness, and it's a problem that now infuriates me. Prepare to be solved.

Jeremy Heilman, the Problem is You

I'm normally not gonna piss on a critic for disagreeing with the crowd; after all, a lot of those movies with RT scores in the 90s were hyped into the heavens, and critics are often hype's loudest victims. And of course, you always have your critics like Armond White, who disagrees because it's probably his fetish or something (known to scream "I'M NOT HAVING SEX WITH YOU" during sex), but that's a different story.

In this entry, I'm gonna piss on Jeremy Heilman for disagreeing. He gave The Incredibles (97%), a 15/100, which, according to his his RT profile is the second-worst score he's ever given a film (out of 746 reviews). This normally wouldn't be SUCH a cause for concern—I'm not gonna yell at any of the other six critics who gave it bad reviews—but 15/100? For The Incredibles? A Pixar film? For kids? 15? Yeah, there's no way he disliked the movie THAT much, which leaves only one possible explanation: COMPLETELY UNFOUNDED POLITICAL MESSAGE EXTRAPOLATION! I love this game!

Pixar, the golden boy animators of the moment, return this season with The Incredibles, another entry in their series of dubious crowd-pleasers.

If by "of the moment" you mean "from their first feature film to the present, and then probably for at least the next ten years," then yeah, they're pretty fucking golden. But the point is, Jeremy Heilman doesn't like Pixar, and he understands that it's a good decision to admit bias as quickly as possible.

It follows the tired formula as their past films. To follow up their tales of domesticated fish, domesticated monsters, domesticated insects, and domesticated toys, they now present domesticated superheroes.

It would've been really, really awesome if A Bug's Life was just about normal, non-domesticated insects. And if Finding Nemo was a $150 million CGI nature documentary about fish. Or if Toy Story was just two hours of lifeless dolls.

I really hope Jeremy Heilman never has kids, because those will be the saddest children in America.

The plot this time out is as conventional as in any of the past Pixar films, borrowing liberally from the Spy Kids franchise, Alan Moore’s “Watchmen” comics, and James Cameron’s far superior True Lies.

Spy Kids: Really? You can steal plot from Spy Kids?
Watchmen: There are certainly similarities, yes, but I'm pretty sure the fact that The Incredibles is a KID-FRIENDLY CARTOON makes that point moot. Does anyone honestly expect a Pixar-produced superhero movie to not wear its influences on its sleeve?
True Lies: "Daddy, why is the girl naked and dancing? I'm scared!"
"Jesus, you kids have NO TASTE."

It has to be said that CGI spectacle is less the order of the day here than it has been in past Pixar films (Thankfully. After a while comes the realization that real water is more impressive to watch than any that is fabricated.).

They wanted to make a movie about fish. They make cartoons. I'm sorry there was water in it and I'm sorry they tried to make it look good.

Additionally, the voice acting is more restrained than the non-stop yelling that has marred several of the studio’s past efforts

Hey, does anyone else remember how nothing about this is true?

At first, while watching The Incredibles, I was frustrated by its seemingly shortsighted lack of superheroes outside of its American borders.

Alternate review: You know what really pisses me off about Toy Story? It was COMPLETELY oblivious to the Armenian Genocide.

You are watching a PG-rated comedic action movie about a family of superheroes. This is not a thought that is supposed to cross your mind. And just because it did cross your mind, it doesn't make you any more socially aware. You're actually actively looking for these things in a children's action movie. This isn't like Armond White being lazy and judging a film's sociopolitical message on the one or two scenes he decided to watch… Jeremy Heilman is going to deconstruct the shit out of every scene in The Incredibles, and he's going to make you sad.

Only as the film developed, did the omission reveal itself as an intentional one. Director Brad Bird, whose Cold War-era Iron Giant was carried a very political message of anti-violence is clearly aiming this film at an Americentric, post-9/11 world.

CLEARLY.

This is the part where I piss on Jeremy for disagreeing with the crowd, because I'm pretty sure he's the only one who believes this, and the only one naïve enough to believe everyone else is gonna get the "message." He's going to spend the rest of the review lampooning a movie for delivering a message that was received by no one but him. And I'm gonna get angry about it.

Strong, irresponsible imagery evokes the horrors of those attacks repeatedly. There are sequences showing a mother shielding her children from pillars of fire from above and exploding plane debris. There’s an extended shot of a plane flying into the southern tip of Manhattan island. There’s the constant reminder that the events in the film are about to end fifteen years of peace.

Jeremy, MOVIES HAVE PLANES IN THEM. Especially action movies, which involve a lot of explosions and traveling! Dude honestly takes out two scenes with planes and decides that they evoke 9/11 "repeatedly."

Oh, sorry, that's not all the evidence for this controversial case: the events of the film end fifteen years of peace! You know the best way to make a movie that ISN'T secretly about 9/11? Make absolutely certain it begins in the middle of a war, and not in the beginning. And make sure there aren't any peaces that last 15 years, because even though there was only 12 years between the Gulf War and the Iraq War, you're dumb and Jeremy hates you.

And then he rants for a paragraph about how it's too violent, which culminates with this buffoonery:

At first glance, you might wonder why The Incredibles was an animated film at all , but that’s probably because its carnage and insane politics wouldn’t be comic in live action.

No, you big dummy. No one ever wondered that. No one except you, and I'm not sure you're saying you wondered it at all, so I don't know why you brought it up. No one ever thought, "why isn't this Pixar movie live-action?" Because people know that Pixar makes animated films. That is the only reason it's animated. If it weren't animated, it wouldn't exist, because it was created by Pixar and unless 1906 ever gets made, they only make animated movies.

But yes, the "carnage" probably would've been harder to swallow in live action. I would love to hear your thoughts on Looney Tunes.

How the actions of the Parr family are supposed to translate into commentary on the post-9/11 world that The Incredibles invokes is beyond me.

What!? You're actually saying that you don't know how the main focus of the film conforms to the complete mess of a "commentary" you pulled out of your ass? YOU DON'T SAY

Its attempts to be politically relevant are hopelessly muddled at best and offensive at worst.

God, I cannot believe the fact that Toy Story, a movie about the Armenian Genocide, completely left out any allusion to the Adana Massacre of 1909. Its attempts to be politically relevant are hopelessly muddled at best and offensive at worst.

Bird’s sloppy obliviousness to the imagery that he employs is worse than outright propaganda,

Now this is just silly. Are you implying that the director and writer of the film inserted all of this 9/11 stuff without knowing it? You're saying that even the guy who wrote the film was unaware of the political message the film was "clearly" trying to convey? You do know Brad Bird actually wrote the film, right? And that it wasn't farted out by the government? I'll assume you know this. I have to assume that, by this point, you're starting to get it… you're the only one who read the film this way. The problem is you.

Since there’s not much indication that the slightly fascist family is being satirized, and since it’s too much a crowd-pleaser to be critical of the violent payoff that it delivers, it’s tough not to take its apparent message seriously.

It's actually quite easy, Jeremy. Incredibly, incredibly easy.

Hey friends!

Long time no etc

So remember like a month ago when we ribbed on Thom Fowler's review of Monsters, Inc.? Well, the guy was cool enough to respond to a few jerks making fun of something he wrote like ten years ago. I didn't think anything like that would happen until we were internet-famous! Here's what he wrote:

"I'm honored to have been your premier target.

I was amused by your close reading and careful deconstruction of my comments on Monsters, Inc.

I'm surprised you took the time.

My favorite quote from your manifesto:

"We also like to make fun of things."

I'm still alive.

And I look forward to attending more of your literary barbecues.

You might be catching on if you keep reading. (!: the most pointlessly overused punctuation mark in the field of film marketing.)

"How to Write A Seven-Paragraph Review for Dimwits and Numbnuts"

Exactly.

Re: Auschwitz - I had to at least give the reader /something/ to really think about. The Monster culture tortured and exploited humans and potentially exterminated them. Two of their members suddenly have pathos for the "other." And thus you have the emotional impetus for the way the plot unravels.

Of course, if Boo had actually been afraid of Sulley, she would not have implicated herself so naturally into an emotional landscape which she did, in fact, share with Sulley and Mike. They discovered a shared meaning-making process which enabled a different kind of relationship to emerge - one based on empathy, rather than disassociation.

But who cares about all that stuff. It's MONSTERS and CUTENESS!

Small Soldiers is another "kid's movie" that is essentially a morality tale with similar themes of a fear-based response manifesting as violence at odds with a love-based response manifesting as care and empathy.

Anyway. Thanks!"


Thanks for the clarifications, Thom! (and also for not hating us!) Very awesome.


Anyway, we're sorry for the lack of updates (I AM, ANYWAY). We've all been incredibly busy or just lazy. But I promise that starting tomorrow, we'll go back to updating 5 times a minute.