“Super 8″ and the Line Between Homage and Rip-Offs

by Michael Neelsen

ABRAMS: "So listen, Steve, I'm gonna rip off every movie you ever made in the 80's and 90's and call it something else. Cool?" SPIELBERG: "Not only is it cool, but let me in on this cash-cow as producer!"

SPOILER ALERT: The following article goes into detail on certain elements of the new film Super 8, so if you wish to know nothing about the movie before seeing it, read no further until you’ve seen the film.

I have been looking forward to Super 8 ever since I saw the first trailer some time ago. I have never been much of a J.J. Abrams fan, but Steven Spielberg’s work from the 80′s and 90′s was supposedly the primary influence behind this film and I adore those films (E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, Jurassic Park, etc.). Super 8 was going to bring me right back to my childhood and, according to critics, remind me “why I go to the movies” in the first place. It was going to have that magic feeling that you felt watching the ending to Close Encounters for the first time, or when E.T. first started to fly.

I began to expect something of a Quentin Tarantino-ization of Spielberg films. When Tarantino made Kill Bill (or almost every other movie in his oeuvre), he was taking elements of past films he loved and forging them into something new. For example, there’s a shot in Kill Bill Volume 2 which is taken right out of The Searchers, but it’s given a new context and new life in Tarantino’s universe. Everyone is inspired by things. Seems natural to pay homage to those who paved the way for you.

So I was pumped to see Super 8.

I’ll start with what I liked about the movie (because if you haven’t anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all, right?). It got the 80′s Spielbergian tone down pat. This movie genuinely feels like a lost movie from the 80′s that’s been locked away in a vault all this time and just discovered, dusted off and tossed into multiplexes. I think the acting by the children is wonderful. It isn’t a small thing that these child actors can act genuinely well on camera, and then when they are acting within the film for their own little movie, they act terribly like any normal kid. That actually takes some talent. I thought the cinematography was very nice (not counting those horribly invasive lens flares every five minutes). Overall, it was a perfectly entertaining way to spend an evening at the movies. It’s certainly better than the majority of crap that comes out of Hollywood today.

But I wasn’t transported back to my childhood. I wasn’t reminded “why I go to the movies” as the critics have promised. In fact, I was reminded why I don’t go to the movies as much as I once did.

J.J. Abrams doesn’t seem comfortable merely paying homage to the Spielberg universe. He wants to take all Spielberg’s films, toss them in a blender, and literally pour out the exact same ingredients in a different order – but make no mistake, they are the same ingredients. Nothing new. And they don’t taste nearly as good as the original recipe.

Have the filmmakers ever seen a train crash before? It doesn't resemble Armageddon and last for a solid minute.

As I was watching Super 8 as an embodiment of the film’s target demographic (film geeks and Spielberg fans), my brain kept interrupting the action on the screen and whispering to me, “Okay, we’re doing Jaws now. Okay, now we’re doing E.T. Now we’re doing The Goonies.” Once the inciting incident of the insanely masturbatory train crash everyone has seen (and laughed at) in the trailer takes place, as a fan of Spielberg films, you can’t stop seeing the ingredients pop up in every scene – and not in a good way. It’s like you’re on “Steven Spielberg – The Amusement Park Ride”.

Look! There’s a group of flashlights in the distance running towards us through tall grass (E.T.). Oh, haha, that family of kids is so chaotic, just like the family in Close Encounters (only on steroids – the Close Encounters family was never this obnoxious). Listen to the wind blow through those tree branches as that man stands by the telephone wires and we hear giant footsteps in the background – it’s just like Jurassic Park! Oh, watch that cop run around town, talk to angry townspeople and resist the authorities in his quest to “find out what’s going on” just like the sheriff in Jaws! Oh, now the kids are in some creepy cave and putting together childish plans using toys to trick the baddie – just like in The Goonies!

I felt like Abrams was sitting next to me elbowing me in the ribs every scene and whispering, “Remember this one? Remember that?” After a while, I wanted to punch Abrams in the face and say, “Dude, if I wanted to watch those movies, I would just go watch those movies.“

In my opinion, this is not an homage to Spielberg films. This is a ripoff of Spielberg films. Let me explain using the example of Kill Bill again.

Quentin Tarantino has mastered the art of the homage. He takes elements from different films and filmmakers and forges them into something which bears the stamp of those influences, but stands anew as its own work. Kill Bill is fused together from spaghetti westerns, kung fu films, American pop culture, etc. Using the example I stated earlier about the shot taken from The Searchers, Tarantino doesn’t literally lift that shot. First, he makes his black-and-white (The Searchers is in color). He doesn’t have cowboys in the frame – rather, he has a pregnant woman in a wedding dress. He doesn’t have “The Sons of the Pioneers” playing on the soundtrack — instead, he uses the score from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Tarantino knows how to pay homage.

My point is, he has mixed the shot from The Searchers with various other elements from other films along with his own new additions to the work. It now stands as a uniquely Kill Bill moment. You don’t watch that scene and feel as though Tarantino is nudging you to remember The Searchers (if anything, you feel as though Tarantino would rather you didn’t notice the reference at all).

This is not the case with Abrams and Super 8. Abrams is taking all his ingredients from one filmmaker, one genre, one era in cinema, and trying his hand at replicating it. And since its roots are so easily traced, in our minds we are constantly comparing them, and it’s just flat-out not as good as the original stuff, which then begs the question, “Why do it in the first place?”

As the SlashFilm review points out, Spielberg’s films are so much more focused and simple than Super 8, and they allow us more time to become endeared to the characters and their struggles. When Super 8 tries to cram more plotlines than are necessary into the running time, we start to question why things are the way they are. We start to ask ourselves, “What does Abrams take us for?” I don’t buy for one second that the father character is that uninterested in the well-being of his only child to be more concerned with the townspeople during a massive military takeover of the town and a mysterious (but not too mysterious) monster attack. He actually needs to be reminded that he has a son by a friend? Please. Give me a break. Abrams may be trying to create a child’s perspective on parents in his treatment of this character (that parents don’t really care about kids), but it insults our intelligence and gives the whole story the stench of childishness.

And oh, Lord, the humor in the film (or at times, lack thereof). I’ll sum up the entire approach to comedy in this film in one word: inappropriateness. That is the core of every single joke. “Oh, that guy just asked the kid if he’d like to buy pot from him. It’s funny ’cause it’s inappropriate!” “Oh, that child is beating the hell out of the kitchen table with a bat. It’s funny ’cause it’s inappropriate!” “Oh, the kid calls his friend fat in front of a waitress. It’s funny ’cause it’s inappropriate!”

Also, the ending to the film makes ZERO sense. Again, spoiler alert. So this monster/alien has been trapped here on Earth, a’la E.T. right? And we know that all he wants is to go home (like E.T.). The way we know this is because whenever he touches someone, that person feels the alien’s feelings and can read its thoughts (like E.T.). Okay. But then in the end, all that it takes to get the monster/alien to leave Earth is a little boy yelling at him, “Just go!” and having a ham-fisted meeting of the hearts with lines like, “Sometimes bad things happen. I understand. But you have to go on living.” (Psst! He’s talking about his mom! Do you get it yet?! Huh?! Huh?!)

Don't forget to have plenty of Spielbergian "kids looking off camera in awe" shots!

After this exchange, the alien just decides it’s time to leave and builds his ship out of all the metal in the town in, like, thirty seconds and just takes off. Wait… WHAT?! I thought the alien’s number one objective was to leave Earth. So why didn’t he just leave before the movie even started? What’s the purpose of all the kidnapping, killing and destruction? Obviously, the creature was more interested in destroying humanity than leaving, or else he would’ve just assembled his ship and left before the movie even started. I can almost hear Abrams’ response… “But then we wouldn’t have a movie.”

Exactly. Abrams, what do you take us for?

Oh, and of course, the ship can’t be completed without the boy’s little locket left to him from his dead mother. The whole town and ship stands in silence and waits as the boy desperately holds onto his locket, not sure if he wants to let go of it (or the memory of his mother, in case Abrams’ heavy-handedness didn’t get the message through to you). Finally, the boy lets go of the locket and as soon as it joins the hunk of junk that makes up the alien spacecraft, it is then fully operational and launches into space. I’d like to see the movie that happens if the boy refuses to let go of the locket and the alien is forced to hang around and convince him to let it go (Alien: “Dude, it’s just a freakin’ locket. I can’t finish my ship without it.” Boy: “No! It reminds me of my mommy!” Ad nauseam).

All this said, overall the movie is still a lot of fun. But I can’t call it a really good movie. It’s far too content just ripping off the elements from past works of the producer for a new audience that may not be Spielberg-literate enough to understand that they’re literally being fed last night’s reheated meatloaf (and it never tastes as good as the first meal).

What Happened to “South Park”?

by Michael Neelsen

The warrantless three-part "Imaginationland" series was one of the show's worst over-reaches.

What the hell happened to “South Park”?

As it turns out, a couple of things. Number one: the show got too big.

I don’t mean too big in terms of popularity. I mean their stories got too big. It seems like every episode now climbs to a life and death situation on the cusp of Armageddon (or at least the end of the town). I mean, seriously… Imaginationland? Cthulu? This is not the same show that used to be about building club houses, bad parenting and learning to read. It’s gotten all wacky on us, and this is nothing new.

I would argue we’ve been on this path for the past four-and-a-half seasons, ever since Season 10 and the killing of Chef. In retrospect, Chef’s death symbolized the death of something else – the show we all used to love.

That brings me to the second problem with the show: It isn’t genuine anymore.

Remember back when the boys got all freaked out because they found a joint in the woods and nobody wanted to touch it for fear of becoming an addict? Or when they were convinced they had to build a ladder to heaven to find Kenny and get their ticket back for the candy shopping spree? And who can forget the countless classic Terrance and Phillip fart jokes? This was a simple show about simple characters executed with simple animation. One of the best elements of the show was that it depicted children as children really are!

Good luck doing that with episodes about battling a monster version of Tooth Decay or stopping a Comic Robot from destroying the planet. Those premises are too massive to allow any time for genuine moments between the boys. It all just devolves into, “Quick! We gotta stop them!” and “Oh, my God! Look out!” After a while, I think creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone forget they’re supposed to be funny, not creating genuinely perilous situations for their construction paper characters to survive.

The whole Cthulu thing was just boring and stupid.

The worst offender had to be the Britney Spears episode from Season 12, entitled Britney’s New Look. In it, the boys meet Britney Spears who soon kisses the barrel of a shotgun and blows her head off. She survives however, and her handlers pressure her to perform with only her lower jaw attached. The “message” of the episode (every episode needs a message now) was obviously that the industry and fans don’t know the stress they put on their pop culture idols. But if Trey and Matt would get off their soap boxes for thirty seconds, they would re-watch that episode and realize that literally half of that 22-minute episode is devoid of any humor whatsoever. It’s just making points. This show didn’t use to be about making points.

All of this is so disappointing as a long-time fan, because I remember hearing Trey Parker admit over and over again that his favorite moments of the show are always the moments in which they can watch and say to each other, “That’s a real kid. That’s the way a kid would be.” I can’t remember the last time I had that thought go through my head during a South Park episode.

The third and final problem with the new “South Park” in my opinion is that they got lazy. Three-parters? Really? Are you guys that strapped for content? In the past four seasons we have seen at least two three-parters on subjects that hardly warranted one episode, an episode criticizing the film Inception by plagiarizing another criticism of the film from an internet video (Trey and Matt later said they hadn’t even seen Inception before criticizing it – stupid – because they couldn’t find a theatre in Los Angeles that was playing the film – even more stupid), a 200th episode celebratory two-parter in which they literally rehash every old joke ever and the reinvention of tons of characters (from turning Kenny’s death every episode into a “superpower” to the Chinese owner of City Wok actually being a Caucasian man with multiple personality syndrome).

Not to mention the fact that every new episode nowadays basically consists of mercilessly beating the same two or three jokes over the head over and over again until you start to almost resent Trey and Matt for snookering you into watching their show again.

The show we used to know as “South Park” isn’t on television anymore and I don’t think it’s coming back. The last episode of that show took place in Season 9. After that, the show became a spotty, if sometimes very funny but mostly bizarre, cartoon that makes you completely forget about what once was and what geniuses Trey Parker and Matt Stone once were.

Why Do We Like Watching Terrible Movies (Even When NOT Trapped on the Satellite of Love)?

From the $3.99 bin.

by Dan Wohl

Most cinephiles I know like to watch bad movies. At least, they think they like to.

The $3.99 supermarket movie bin never fails to be oddly alluring. I speak from experience. My good friend and former roommate once acquired a VHS with a flimsy holographic cover called King Cobra at a Cub Foods in Minnesota. The cover promised “30 FEET OF PURE TERROR.” The back cover informed us that the man-eating beast of the title had a hilariously benign proper name: Seth. For months, possibly years, it laid near our TV, unwatched, but not forgotten.

We toasted King Cobra at parties. We practically sung paeans to it. We looked ever forward to finally watching it, but we put it off until about a week before we left and moved to New York. We had sold many of our possessions, said our goodbyes, and finally realized the time had come. We sat down, popped the tape in, and finally experienced King Cobra.

Guess what? It was not very good. There were definitely moments of incredible, breathtaking cheesiness. But was it really worth 90 minutes of my life? Maybe…but probably not.

The compulsion to not only accept but revel in the worst examples of a given art form is more or less specific to film people. It’s true that the Museum of Bad Art exists, but I am sure that music lovers, for instance, don’t derive the same kind of pleasure from, say, “Freaxxx” by Brokencyde as film lovers do from Plan 9 From Outer Space.

If Grindhouse, the Found Footage Festival and the fact that Armageddon is included in the Criterion Collection tell us anything, it’s that filmmakers and film scholars have a respect not just for the great films but for everything else too. Anyone can write a terrible short story, but the complexity of the filmmaking process makes every movie a small miracle.

I suspect this is why people watch bad movies. It’s astounding to witness the basic elements of film production—the use of expensive cameras, the consumption of precious film stock or digital memory, the recitation of lines from a screenplay someone wrote, special effects of any kind—in the employ of something so unworthy. I think there’s a sense that the work it takes to make a film at all is deserving of respect, and when a filmmaker squanders that work in a spectacular way, something entertaining (if not a little sad) comes about.

That’s my main problem with watching the supermarket bin film, or the Salvation Army-bought VHS, or the made-for-Syfy film of the week: At a certain point it stops being funny and starts feeling sort of depressing. That’s where Mystery Science Theater 3000, the sublime show about a man and his robot friends being forced to watch (and make fun of) terrible movies, comes in.

Got somethin' in your eye, there, Jack?

I won’t spend time talking about how funny it is—that’s already been done by everyone from Steven Spielberg to Neil Young. What I think is really significant about the show is how it makes watching bad movies not just fun but comfortable. Once the comical novelty of watching a bad movie (alone) wears off, you’re left with…well, watching a bad movie. But watching it with the company of Joel (or Mike if you must) and his robot friends puts everything in what I find to be an unexpected and pleasant context: where the films’ badness, ironically, is not the point as much as how we’re allowed to wallow in a cinematic arena we usually can’t stand spending much time in.

The theme music that opens MST3K included a line that I always found a bit odd:

If you’re wondering how he eats and breathes

And other science facts

Then repeat to yourself, “It’s just a show,

I should really just relax.”

It may have never been revealed how Joel or Mike ate or breathed, but to say the show didn’t care about its internal mythology would not be right. The living quarters of several characters are shown. Tom Servo being carried into the theater is explained by the fact that an air vent at its entrance that disrupts his hovering mechanism. Their ship travels through time and to the end of the universe on occasion.

Just like the B-movies it gleefully skewers, MST3K is a low-budget story that still cares about being a story. That kind of earnestness is at the heart of why Ed Wood is remembered, MST3K is so appealing, and the supermarket DVD bin remains so strangely tempting.

Turning Left When They Think You’ll Turn Right

Writer/Director Shane Black is one of the most outspoken proponents of writing more turns and reversals into modern screenplays.

by Michael Neelsen

“No scene that doesn’t turn.”

Such is the motto of Robert McKee’s bible for storytellers, Story. Until I read his book a couple years ago and started hearing more and more screenwriters refer to “turns” and “reversals” and “turning left when they think you’ll turn right,” I had no idea how important a concept this was for screenwriting.

If William Goldman is right and “screenplays are structure,” then scenes are turns.

The next time you watch a film, really pay close attention to the structure of the individual scenes. Nearly every movie that follows classic Hollywood storytelling conventions will construct every scene around at least one turn. The beginning of the scene will present one situation, and by the end of the scene, that situation will turn to something else. The character will start happy and turn sad. The hero will be losing the battle and suddenly summon the strength to win. The girl will be making a fool of herself in front of the boy, but the boy will actually find this cute instead of foolish.

An extreme type of turn is called a reversal. These are 180-degree turns from one extreme to its polar opposite. Alive to dead. Attraction to repulsion. Kill to rescue.

One of the best reversals I’ve seen comes in Shane Black’s noir-comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. In the scene, Robert Downey, Jr. is about to play Russian roulette on a prisoner in order to convince him to divulge information. We’ve seen this scenario play out a thousand times, and Black knows it. Downey puts a single bullet in the chamber of a revolver and aims it at the prisoner. He cries out, “Where is the girl?” and pulls the trigger. Since we’ve seen this scenario play out before, we expect it to go the exact same way as it always has: click, click, and finally the prisoner can’t take the fear of being shot anymore and gives up everything. But in Black’s film, before the prisoner can even deny knowing anything, the first pull of the trigger sends the only bullet in the revolver into his head, killing him. This always gets a rousing response of uproarious laughter from the audience, because we weren’t expecting it to go that way.

Another great example comes in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges. Brendon Gleeson enters the scene wanting to kill his longtime friend played by Colin Farrell. But when he approaches Farrell with his gun drawn, he suddenly sees Farrell pull his own gun on himself in attempted suicide. Gleeson’s friend instincts kick in as his motivation goes from wanting to kill Farrell to wanting to save Farrell.

While you don’t need a reversal in every scene, it’s good to have as many as you can come up with. It keeps us on the edge of our seat. It’s the quality that makes us all say, “I had no idea what was going to happen in that movie.” It’s even better if you can play on previous cinematic convention like Black does in Bang Bang, making us expect something we’ve seen a trillion times only to deliver the exact opposite.

My acting teacher, Ben Taylor, recently wrote a hilarious scene that takes place in a gay strip club. It shows a drunk, middle-aged man stumbling around, seemingly infatuated with one of the boy dancers on stage. When another one of the employees at the bar tries to escort the man away, he cries out, “I’m his father!” Everyone freezes. Shock. A father has come in to a gay strip club and discovered his own son as a performer. This is the scene’s turn. But then the boy dancer shouts from the stage, “You’re not my father!” The drunk man replies, “Okay, I’m not his father.” This is a reversal of the initial turn, and got tons of laughs.

You can fold this on itself as much as the logic in your narrative allows. But there is a danger in placing too many turns and reversals in your scenes. It can start to come across as absurd coincidence. I just made this mistake in a scene I wrote for class. In my scene, a man returns home to his apartment, drunk, to find that all the furniture has been changed (turn #1). He also finds a woman he doesn’t know lying on his bed, beckoning him to stay with her (turn #2). When he starts to give in to her, thinking it’s just his lucky day, she mentions her husband (turn #3). Our hero asks her what apartment number this is. She says 304. Our hero freaks and proclaims, “I’m on the wrong floor! My key opened your door!” (turn #4). When he tries to leave, there’s a knock at the door. It’s the woman’s husband (turn #5). When the husband enters and sees our hero, it turns out they are old college buddies! (turn #6). Instead of kicking him out, the husband invites our hero to stay for dinner (turn #7). While I got decent notes on this scene in class, there’s no question that it is absolutely absurd, and I feel adequately displays the risk of implanting too many turns in a single narrative (for an example of a movie that does this, look no further than 2005′s inexplicable Best Picture winner, Crash, in which a select number of characters continue to conveniently bump into each other multiple times in a single day in a city of nearly ten million people).

The opposite extreme, of course, is writing a scene with no turns. If there isn’t a turn in a scene or narrative, you will quickly get bored and wonder why you’re watching it. Think of a scene where a character starts happy and ends happy. Or a narrative where a family is living a nice, quiet life in the suburbs and in the end still lives a nice, quiet life in the suburbs. Stories are change. To quote McKee’s fictional depiction in Adaptation., “Your characters must change, and the change must come from them.”

Amen.

Hyperreality, the Impossibility Gap, and the Film-Theme Park Axis

by Dan Wohl

Concept art for "The Wizarding World of Harry Potter"

One of the only dreams I still remember years and years after I had it involved me being on a theme park ride. I was in some sort of boat floating on black water in a tunnel with a forest scene painted on the side. I don’t remember if I jumped out voluntarily or if I was somehow bumped out, but I ended up with my face pressed against this fake wall…where I saw that the forest scene was actually painted with unimaginable detail and realism. I felt like I could fall right through it. It was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time.

I’ve always been fascinated by theme parks, though I hardly think I’m unique in this respect. What I think is great about that childhood dream I had is how it reminds me of the one-paragraph short story by Jorge Luis Borges about a map so giant and real that it blended into reality. On Exactitude in Science is often mentioned as part of the definition of the concept of hyperreality, and hyperrealist philosophers have always singled out theme parks as prime examples of the idea: that in a media-soaked age like our own, the fake can seem as real, or realer, than reality.

I’ve been thinking about this (and my dream) recently because of the impending opening of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Islands of Adventure in Orlando. There will be Ollivander’s Wand Shop. There will be Hagrid’s hut. There will be butterbeer (though despite rumors, there will apparently be no alcoholic variant). There will be plentiful and exorbitant opportunities to purchase merchandise. On the website, Daniel Radcliffe says the Wizarding World fulfills the wish that the Harry Potter universe “could be real, and [parkgoers] could be a part of it.” Emma Watson says it’s the result of kids saying “I wish Hogwarts could be real, I want to go myself.”

Well, I do want to go myself. But does going to a chunk of Universal Orlando themed like it count? I guess it’s obvious that the answer is, marketing aside, no. But then why am I still so excited to go there?

No theme park attraction can possibly live up to the standard pitch of “stepping into the world” of a movie. But theme parks keep building them, and people (myself included) keep being, depending on how you look at it, enthralled by them, suckered by them, or both.

I’d like to believe that in the Wizarding World I could do more than ride rides, buy stuff, and look at the elaborate façade they’ve constructed. I wish I could hop a fence and discover the gritty parts of Hogsmeade that aren’t meant for tourists, instead of support buildings and a visit from security. But I’ve found that being in a place that even allows me to imagine such a thing has surprising power. That’s why when theme parks add even a drop of unexpected reality, it can be startling. Did you know, for instance, that the very Seussian palm trees at Universal’s Seuss Landing are real living plants (curved by Hurricane Andrew and then uprooted and replanted)? Or that tucked into an unassuming corner of Disney World’s Main Street USA lies an operational period-appropriate barbershop?

Theme parks are hyperrealist capitals because they promise something impossible yet deliver something that seems slightly less than impossible. That impossibility gap is everything. When we walk through the eminently fake streets of Hogsmeade at the Wizarding World, we’re in Borges’ map. We let the fake become realer than the real.

What’s interesting is how theme parks seem to know that there is no stronger medium to tie this myth into than film. This is evident nowhere more than at Walt Disney World, where the powers that be have been busy converting almost every stand-alone ride they have into something related to a film, even when it’s quite awkward. The Enchanted Tiki Room is now “run” by Iago from Aladdin and Zazu from The Lion King. The uncharacteristically terrifying Alien Encounter, which simulated a ferocious extraterrestrial spitting blood at you and breathing on the back of your neck, now uses the same mechanisms for a benign show involving Stitch. The river ride in Epcot’s Mexico, which used to be comprised simply of videos of Mexican life, now involves the Three Caballeros being animated on top of the same video in a manner not unlike a rap song that samples an older track.

Even when the film in question is one that is guaranteed to have been seen by virtually no children—such as the racist Song of the South—Disney still has enough faith in the magic of film to base a ride, in this case Splash Mountain, on (the non-racist parts of) it.

It all makes me wonder whether our love of films will one day lead to a virtual reality where we truly do not need to accept the fakeness of theme parks. An artificial world so complex and interactive that I actually could jump over my semi-proverbial Hogsmeade fence. In short, a holodeck. If you ask me, it’s going to be this, and certainly not any ridiculous fad like 3D, that will be the next revolution in cinematic entertainment.

An immersive, photorealistic world, imbued with cinematic depth, that adapts automatically to how the user interacts with it: It would stretch the impossibility gap to a breaking point and make hyperreality indistinguishable from reality in every way except for its fantasticalness. We are a long, long way from that point. But if theme parks let us feel that way for even a moment, then I’m all for them.

The Importance of Trey Parker & Matt Stone

They really are just a couple of sweet boys.

by Michael Neelsen

As filmmakers and film enthusiasts, you can assume we here at ATA have some very firmly held beliefs on the subject of censorship and the first amendment. We artists cling to our words and images like conservatives “cling to their guns and religion” (oohh, weren’t expecting a political reference, were ya?).

For the past eighteen years there has been a comedy duo on the front lines of the eternal “freedom of speech” battlefield, and their manifestations of foul-mouthed third graders, Mormon porn stars and cannibalistic cowboys have fought the good fight, tasting victories and defeats for the good of artists everywhere.

I’m talking, of course, about Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

(PLEASE BE ADVISED: THE VIDEO BELOW IS ONE OF THE MORE EXTREME MOMENTS IN SOUTH PARK HISTORY, SO IT IS VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY NSFW, AND IT CERTAINLY SHOULD NOT BE VIEWED BY THE EASILY OFFENDED.)

Many people would argue that Parker and Stone are nothing more than unintelligent scribes of toilet humor and fart jokes, as well as the more than occasional offensive jabs at religion.

But what those people don’t understand is that we need people like Parker and Stone out there showing us images of a stingray-skewered Steve Irwin mere days after his death and Jesus Christ defecating on the American flag, especially in these politically-correct times where freedom of speech has to be defended on a nearly daily basis due to somebody somewhere getting offended by something.

In 1999, Parker and Stone showed up at the Oscars dressed like Jennifer Lopez and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Imagine the first amendment as an elastic rubber band. Everything within the band is material deemed acceptable and appropriate by everyone in society, and everything outside the band is considered “crossing the line.” Every time Parker and Stone make a joke about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas raping Indiana Jones or show an image of the Virgin Mary “bleeding out her ass,” they stretch that rubber band wider, allowing more and more edgy material to be encompassed within the circumference of acceptability. Without them, the band would remain tight and constricting, and more and more things could and would be censored and slapped with the label of “obscene.”

To quote the poster tagline from perhaps the single best movie ever made about the defense of the first amendment, The People v. Larry Flynt, “You may not like what he does, but are you prepared to give up his right to do it?”

This is the question you must ask yourself if you’ve ever wished shows like South Park or Family Guy off the air, or if you’ve ever thought a movie shouldn’t have been released because it was too violent or sexually explicit. We mustn’t legislate based on personal taste. Freedom of speech is too important, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone fight for it every time they put pen to paper.

Tune in to the season premiere of South Park on Comedy Central one week from today, Wednesday, March 17 at 9:00 PM CST.

Tim Burton: Spuriouser and Spuriouser

Your glasses are a lil' crooked, sir. Oh... wait... I guess that's the point.

by Dan Wohl

(Note: contains mild spoilers of Alice in Wonderland (2010))

Back around the period in which I was Marilyn Manson for three consecutive Halloweens, I used to dream about a dark, weird film version of Alice in Wonderland. I pictured a gray-tinged poster with a vacantly-staring Alice and a real-looking flamingo riffing on this illustration in the Lewis Carroll book. I foresaw a trailer that built to a climax before the soundtrack went silent, a quick zoom went to a closeup of an evil-version-of-Cate-Blanchett-in-Elizabeth-like Queen of Hearts and she growled, “off with her head!” I imagined a film that would retain the genius of Carroll’s world while injecting the character depth and robust plot his stories lacked.

But that’s not what I got. Instead I got Tim Burton’s cinematic brain aneurysm called Alice in Wonderland.

The plot that Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton came up with leads Alice to defeat the Jabberwocky, which is all well and good and reminiscent of the climax of the computer game American McGee’s Alice, one of the biggest “twisted Wonderland” influences on my adolescent mind. But things unraveled for me quickly once we learned exactly why Burton’s Alice has to slay the Jabberwock. Apparently, a scroll (don’t ask where it came from) foretells that Alice will do so on a day called… “The Frabjous Day.”

Clearly you’re meant to pat yourself on the back in you recognize the phrase from the Carroll poem:

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

The brilliance of the poem Jabberwocky is the way it proves that because of taken-for-granted linguistic norms, even nonsense words can make perfect sense. Burton and Woolverton don’t get it. The father’s happy exclamation—O frabjous day!— works only in context. If you take it out of its place to somewhere where you aren’t already expecting words like “fabulous” or “joyous,” it’s rendered meaningless, and that’s exactly the point.

It’s a minor point, but I think it’s a perfect representation of Burton’s massive failure in this film, and I’d say, most of his career. Transforming a context-reliant whimsical phrase into a solemn proper noun is exactly the sort of style-above-substance-at-all-costs move that Burton has displayed for a long time. And the worst part is, his style choices seem to be getting worse and worse.

Burton directs Mia Wasikowska on the set of "Alice."

Take the characters in the Alice in Wonderland. Calling them one-note would, for some of them, overstate by one how many notes they’re given. Anne Hathaway’s White Queen does nothing the entire film. I might have completely forgotten Crispin Glover’s Knave of Hearts except for how revolting his real-head-digital-body pastiche was.  And I’m not sure if I have ever had the displeasure of experiencing a film character as lacking in humanity as Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter.

Look at him. He looks like a combination of Madonna and Tim Curry in It wearing the Joker’s suit and the Cat in the Hat’s tie. And what do we know of his character? He confirms that he’s a hatter. It seems fair to say he’s mad. For some reason his accent jumps from one end of Great Britain to the other and back. And…what else? He isn’t a film character; he’s a piece of expressionist art.

Take a look, if you will, at the first minute or so of the video for Avril Lavigne’s tie-in song, “Alice,” directed by Dave Meyers. It might not be a masterpiece, but I think Meyers has exactly the right idea where Burton doesn’t: A live action remake/sequel to Disney’s original Alice in Wonderland should be more, probably much more, unsettlingly real than a cartoon from the ’50s, not less. Especially when its director accepts the mantle of Hollywood’s go-to “goth” director.

Allow me to make a bold statement: I think Tim Burton is the worst thing to happen to goth culture. Ever. No one is more responsible for its Hot Topicization. In its classic form, goth ideology was about romanticism, artistic intellectualism, and an awareness of the earthly, supernatural and existential horrors humanity finds itself facing. Burton’s work hasn’t seriously explored any of this since what I’d say are his two best films, Beetlejuice and Ed Wood. Since then, he’s had one success (Sweeney Todd) and a slew of high-profile adaptations that were either disappointing (Sleepy Hollow) or catastrophic (Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland).

Depp and Burton have collaborated on seven features, including 2005's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."

Burton’s rule of making only adaptations of previous work is the reason that I think he’s a corrosive cultural force rather than merely a poor director. Because of his role as THE goth director, he gobbles up most of the remake projects flagged as waiting for a dark, twisted spin, and they end up instead with Burton’s immature drivel when other directors might have done something legitimately interesting with them.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is, aside from Alice, the other perfect example for me. Everyone knows the 1971 original has its tremendously disturbing moments. It’s safe to say that the horrifying boat ride scene is the only G-rated movie sequence to inspire a Marilyn Manson video. Many would argue that a remake was unnecessary, but an entire film more in the vein of the boat ride did seem appealing. But Burton’s 2005 version somehow delivered considerably less dark weirdness, or substance at all; it delivered Charlie living in a house designed by Dr. Seuss and a Willy Wonka who recoils from human contact in one scene and asks for high fives in the next.

That kind of contradiction in internal logic is one more thing endemic in Burton’s films. Look at Depp’s Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow; in one scene he’s a sniveling scaredy-cat terrified of a spider and in the next he’s a suave detective who orders everyone around.

To go back to Alice for a moment: At the beginning of the film, Alice talks to a crazy old aunt of hers who talks about a prince coming to marry her. Then Alice falls down the rabbit hole into a place where flowers talk, caterpillars smoke hookah and fish breathe air and stand erect on their tails. In a big climactic moment, Alice is informed beyond any doubt that Wonderland is real, not a dream. Fair enough, I guess. But then when she returns to our Earth, she is suddenly imbued with wisdom that she imparts via one-sentence morsels of advice to each member of her family. And what does she say to her aunt? “There is no prince. You really need to talk to someone about these delusions.”

The stunning nonsensicality of this made me want to take a vorpal sword to my ears. Maybe I need to talk to someone about my delusions that the general public will one day agree with me that Burton is not a good director. If it ever happened, that would be, for me, quite the frabjous day.