As I was preparing a tomato/yellow pepper/basil bruscetta tonight I was reflecting on this question : “Why did I love the movie Julie & Julia more than Star Trek, more than G.I. Joe?”
I mean, I am a bona fide sci-fi geek and I am definitely a guy.
I’m not a sports fanatic, gear-head, mr. fixit kinda guy… but I am also thoroughly convinced and comfortable in the fact that you can love art and beauty and still be all male, regardless of what our culture may imply or say.
As an aside - my heroes include Michelangelo, Camille Pissaro, Leonard Bernstein, Gene Kelly, James Galway, Luciano Pavarotti, Emeril Lagassi and other men who are manly and involved in great art.
Back to the original question...Well, apart from getting older, there are a couple of reasons.
Here they are in order of importance:
3. Location: NY & Paris. In the immortal words of Eric Idle: "say no more!" Even Lord of The Rings was accentuated by the breath-taking scenery of New Zealand. I once read an interview with a graphic artist who said that graphic artists cannot compete with "real" nature because the best that they could do would not be believable.
2. Plot – as great as any sci-fi/fantasy/blow-em-up/CGI-FX-fest can be, it will never beat a great plot. Moreso when that plot is based on a great book. And even moreso when it is based on actual events.
My growing list of favorite flicks includes: Amazing Grace, Amistad, Braveheart, Schindler's List, Walk the Line, and Gods & Generals.
Now I realize that any movie “based on a true story” or “based on actual events” is embellished (and perhaps cleaned up a bit), but that such a story exists in reality is compelling due to the fact that some part of it it actually did happen.
The real events of Julia Child’s life are remarkable. Paul's and her time in the OSS. Their adapting to French culture. Her rise from a nobody housewife to a television star given her quirky personality, odd way of talking and her non-glamorous appearance are all the ‘underdog’ elements that are that much more heart warming and inspiring because they are not just the imaginings of a screenwriter, but they are true.
And I used to laugh watching Julia Child on TV growing up. "Make sure you add the fish head back to the broth because that's where a lot of flavor is!"
Julie Powell’s story is somewhat interesting, but nowhere near as captivating a story of Mrs. Child.
Apart from her ‘blog experiment’, it was refreshing to see a married couple who love each other stay true to each other even through difficult times.
1. Acting - Seriously, even though this was a quirky role, Meryl Streep should be up for an Oscar nomination. To convincingly pull off the range of emotion from eccentric and silly to the heartbreak of not being able to bear children to the sobbing elation of getting her cookbook published is quite a feat. Not only does Meryl Streep do this well – she draws the viewer in and you are rooting for Julia Child as though she were a dear friend. Another reminder as to why Merly Streep is considered such a great actor.
Amy Adams does a fine job... but let's face it - Meryl Streep sells this. Stanley Tucci is good too.
I loved it because it was a real story about the real lives of real people pulled off with a realism that was both entertaining and inspiring.
Star Trek and G.I. Joe were "fun" movies… but Julie & Julia was an artistic, worthwhile film. It was no Capra film, and it will most likely not get huge publicity, but it was the best thing I’ve seen at the cinema so far this summer.
I grew up a GI Joe fan... comics...figures... the animated show. Between this franchise and Star Wars, I daily kick myself for not having invested in Hasbro when I was 9.
While not knowing all the Joes, I was pretty familiar with the storyline(s).
NUTSHELL:
- high body count (both combatants and civilians) most of it wince inducing and on-screen
- lots o' language
- female heroes and villians are dressed to entice
- lot's of CGI & high tech gadgetry
- it's fitting that the end credits' song is "boom Boom Pow" with all the explosions
- if you love Paris, be prepared to say goodbye
This is not a movie to take your kids to. I think the PG-13 rating was generous, and while it's not 'R' material, this 'summer blockbuster' - like Transformers and Terminator - should NOT be targeted to kids. But Hasbro is marketing all the way down to the pre-school level with toys.
The old animated series was laughable in that everyone was constantly shooting at each other but it seemed no one ever got hit. At least no one of great importance... and if they did they got medical attention and you could be sure of their return. The comic books were similar but since their story arcs covered months and years the healing time was extended. And yes, in the comic stories - sometimes people died.
This movie's body count is high, with both combatants and non-combatants dying frequently. This often happens off screen (cars blown up and down a street, offices and storefronts and busses getting destroyed with the implication that their visible occupants are affected) - and yet much is on screen... and some of it pretty grisly. It's a military flick though right? Perhaps. But the body count here is not like that of 'Private Ryan' - serving to detail the horrors of war. Joe's body count is done for entertainment value. Many of the COBRA soldiers get impaled through the eye, there is at least one fairly noticeable decapitation and one character ends up looking like Freddy Krueger after a mishap with fire.
I should mention that the last film I saw (rented) was "Hotel Rwanda". It is (or should be) nearly impossible to go from that gut-wrenching disgust of the casualties of war to the killing glee-fest of this movie. Also it is just tough to go from a film of that brilliance, depth and artistic nature to G. I. Joe.
Also in the disturbing violence category, Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes are shown fighting as kids. Not in a Sandlot kind of way, but in a no holds barred, martial arts, fight-to-kill sort of way. I get the rivalry, but given the original storylines the hatred from SS to SE reached it's zenith when the two were much older than 9 or 10 years old. How many copycat fights are there going to be because the kiddos saw this type of fighting on G I Joe?
Finally in the violence category, I am not a fan of women trying to kill each other. I have never understood the sick draw of a 'cat fight'. Moreso when blades and chains and pipes are involved.
Speaking of the women - Scarlett and the Baroness are both mostly dressed in outfits to induce male arousal - and not in clothes that would be worn in those type of combat settings. And really - if you need body armor is it going to be that formed to your body or draw attention like that? C'mon! Yes, the comics always had busty females, so I knew this might enter the mix. The one other female 'main' character 'Covergirl' is dressed in fatigues, but she gets axed pretty early on in a nasty way.
So that leads to the Joes armor & costumes. The comics and TV show were vibrantly colorful, because each Joe was unique and their clothes (often times completely impractical) demonstrated this. Here - everybody gets black, or white when we reach "Hoth" (more on that later). The Accelerator suits were cool.
My main beef with costuming? Who decided to give Snake Eyes lips??? Seriously?? He doesn't need them.
Which leads to storylines.
Snake Eyes - did not take a vow of silence when his master died! He was horribly wounded while saving Scarlett's life! this caused him to be horribly disfigured (the need for he mask) and irreparably damaged his vocal chords.
(POSSIBLE SPOILER: In the comics, Snake Eyes' Master was killed by Zartan - NOT Storm Shadow)
Scarlett & Snake Eyes (in the comics) were a serious item / or Scarlett and Duke. The movie hints (barely) at a relationship between Scarlett and Snake Eyes, but quickly dumps it to pair her up with... wait for it... Ripcord. Uh... Ripcord? Read his Wikipedia page. He's about as minor a character as you can get in the comics. Sheesh.
Duke & Baroness - totally not in the comics, but it worked for me except that if this truly is going to be a trilogy of films, let her 'turn' at the end, not 5/6 of the way through this film! And don't reveal her brother's fate until that last film!
Cobra Commander - wha??? backstory - nope. waaaaay too stupid. I won't spoil it here. And the mask at the end. um.. people at Universal and Hasbro - this was so silly as to make it laughable. Just give him the hood!!!!
Storm Shadow - Without ruining things, I'm not sure how they could bring him back in a semi-believable way. I loved that in the comics he eventually came around and became a Joe.
Nanomites - whatever. biggest disappointment of the film and utterly preposterous.
They threw in Dr. Mindbender, but let's pray that the shark that killed G.I.Joe (Cobra-la & Serpentor) never enters the film adaptions.
and..erm.. G.I. Joe was an American special ops team. The film says they are made up of the best and brightest from 10 allied nations. Uh... anybody explain to me why a multi-nation special ops team has a decidedly American name? General Infantry Joe (slang for American soldier).
What's with the 'Hoth" comment? Once the Joes track the villians to their secret hideout, it really reminds you of Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back... and the heroes daring escape? It is at times almost frame for frame the escape route of Lando Calrissian and Nien Nunb from Return of the Jedi. *Sigh* *yawn* - I saw that before... in 1983!
SUMMARY: Some good thoughts, but if this is a trilogy... I'll watch the next ones on DVD. The altered storylines bugged me, but the body count moreso. And again, I come back to this: movies with this level of graphic violence should never be marketed to kids. The comics and animated TV show were not this rough.
The movie swings back and forth from "gritty realism" to "cartoonish" subplots and dialog. So it's got enough eye-rolling moments. "Knowing is half the battle" is actually a line... as well as "Yo Joe!"
oh - and can someone explain to me how ice can sink and destroy underwater military complexes?
Let me set down a couple of fervent beliefs that animate everything I do and everything I say.
I believe that God created heaven and earth and every single individual on the planet.
I believe that the God who gave us life gave us liberty and that freedom is our birthright.
I believe that the States created the federal government and not the other way around. And that the power that the States gave to the Federal Government – they can take back.
When we were colonists, and the King and the Parliament needed money from us, and they always seemed to need money, they devised ingenious ways to tax us. One of them was called the Stamp Act. The Parliament decreed that every piece of paper that the Colonists had in their homes; every book, every document, every deed, every lease, every pamphlet, every poster to be nailed to a tree had to have the King’s stamp on it. You think going to a Post Office is bad? You had to go to a British Government office and buy a stamp with the King’s picture.
Question: How did the King know that his picture was on every piece of paper in your house? The Parliament enacted a hateful piece of legislation called the Writs of Assistance Act which let the king’s soldiers write their own search warrants, and bang down any door they chose to look for the stamps or anything else that they were looking for.
It was the last straw.
We fought a revolution. We won the revolution. We wrote the Constitution. The constitution doesn’t grant power, it keeps the government off our backs.
When they were debating the Constitution in the Summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, there were two great arguments – one by the Jefferson and Madison crowd and one by the Adams and Hamilton crowd. Jefferson argued, though he wasn’t physically there in Philly, as he did in the Declaration of Independence that our rights are ours by virtue of our humanity. That as God is perfectly free, and we are created in his image and likeness, we too are perfectly free. The big government crowd – yes they had them even in those days – argued that you can’t have freedom without government, and that government gives us our rights, and therefore, that government can take them away. This is not an academic argument. Jefferson and the natural law argument prevailed because the Constitution was written to keep the government from interfering with our natural rights.
And so, your right to think as you wish, to say what you think, to publish what you say, to travel where you want, to worship as you see fit, to keep and bear arms to defend yourself against a tyranny. And, after the right to life, the greatest and most uniquely American of rights – and I say this in front of the seat of the government – is the right to be left alone.
We wrote a Constitution to ensure that the government would never interfere with these rights. Think about it – if rights come from the government, then the government, by ordinary legislation, or presidential decree can take them away. But if the rights come from our humanity, then unless we violate someone else’s natural rights, the government cannot take our rights away.
This is not just a democrat, upper case D, or a republican, upper case R, problem. It’s a problem with government today.
There’s a republican version of big government just as assaultive to our liberties as there’s a democrat version of big government.
We fought a revolution because British soldiers could knock on our doors and demand that we house them, and demand that we turn over property to them because they could write their own search warrants. In the Patriot Act, the most hateful piece of legislation since the Alien and Sedition Acts, a republican congress and a republican president authorized federal agents to do the unthinkable – to write their own search warrants. And the republican administration didn’t even let members of the House of Representatives read the Patriot Act before they voted on it.
Why should the government be able to spy on us? We should be able to spy on them!
When some judge is rationalizing away our liberty, or some congressman is plotting to take away your freedom or your tax dollars, we should know what they do every minute that they do it.
I was speaking to a group of congressman from a neighboring state – I won’t tell you which state it was, but they don’t play football there – and they came up to me and said “this is the first time we have heard that the Patriot Act allows federal agents to write their own search warrants.” Remember, in the Constitution, we put in the 4th Amendment, the right to be left alone, to make sure that if the government had a target, no matter how guilty the target, no matter how widespread is the belief in the guilt of the target, no matter how dangerous is the target, the government has to go through a neutral judge with a search warrant before it can get to that target. These members of Congress said, “we didn’t know that the Patriot Act allowed the government to bypass the courts and write any search warrant they wanted.” Then I asked them a question I knew the answer to already – did you read the Patriot Act before you voted on it? The answer – no. What were you voting on? A summary we received. Let me guess who wrote the summary – some lawyers in the justice department, right? Of course.
Would you hire anybody to run your business that committed you to a violation of the very reason you’re in business if they didn’t even the document by which they were making that committment? Of course not.
The camera is the new gun. There’s nothing that government dislikes more than the light of day, and cameras recording what the government is doing, whether it’s on a street corner, or in there, or in Washington D.C., we have the right to know everything that they do and why they do it, and when they do it, and how they are taking our freedoms.
[PART 2]
I have another one of my basic core beliefs. The individual has an immortal soul. Every individual is greater than any government.
Your government is based on fear and force. You don’t have to take my word on it. The 2nd president on the United States, John Adams, said “Of course the government is based on fear.” And the first president, George Washington, said “Government is not reason, it is force.” I think they knew what they were talking about.
Now fast-forward to modern times. Whenever the government wants something, it scares us. During the civil war, Lincoln tried civilians in this state where no battles occured, by military tribunal. After he died the supreme court invalidated everything the military tribunals did. During the first world war, the Wilson administration locked up 2000 people called anarchists – same thing as enemy combatants. No trial, no charge, just jail for the duration of the war. In world war II, FDR locked up 150,000 Japanese Americans, people born in the United States, who got no trial and had no charges, and when the war was over were given $25 and told to go home.
Today we have federal agents. You know I get in arguments with my friends at Fox News, and one of them, I don’t have to tell you who it is, but is truly the most irascible person there. And he said to me, you know you have a problem with Guantanamo Bay, and you have a problem with the Patriot Act, what will you do if I get sent to Guantanamo Bay, will you visit me? And I say, Bill – no, because they’ll probably keep me there as well.
Government likes to say that it’s taking an oath to uphold the Constitution. In the years that I was on the bench, it seemed that every time government lawyers were in my courtroom, if the government was prosecuting someone who was legitimately guilty or whether it was a mistake, or whether somebody was suing the government because government contractors or government doctors, or government workers made a mistake – the government doesn’t come in to the courtroom to enforce the constitution, it comes into the courtroom to evade and avoid it. That, ladies and gentlemen, must be stopped.
This is a great moment in our history. A crowd of this magnitude on a beautiful day, in the boiling sun, in the most middle-American of great middle-American states…comes together not because the president is a democrat, not because his predecessor was a republican, not because a war is just or unjust, not because the Fed is stealing or printing – you’re here because you believe in human freedom.
It is the essence of our existence that we should be free. But remember this: the government hates freedom. It is an obstacle to every one of their designs. Whenever they write laws, whenever they take your tax dollars, whenever they regulate your private behavior, whenever they tell you how to spend your money, whenever they tell you what medicines to take, whenever they tell you what food to eat, whenever they tell you with who you may or must associate, they are taking away your freedom and they love to get away with it. And they cannot get away with it any longer.
In the long history of the world, very few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its maximum hour of danger. This is that moment and you are that generation! Now is the time to defend our freedoms.
Jefferson was no saint but he was the greatest of our American presidents. He believed that the individual was greater than the state. He believed that the states were greater than the federal government. And when he wrote that our rights come from our creator, and that our rights are inalienable, he forever wed the notion of natural rights to the American experience and the American experiment. We must be vigilant about every right that the government wants to take away from us.
You’ve heard the president say, present president and his predecessor, “my first job is to keep you safe.” He’s wrong! His first job is to keep us free. It is his only job to keep us free.
Shortly before he died, Jefferson lamented, that in his view of the world that is was in the natural order of things for government to grow and freedom to be diminished; how ardently he wish that that wouldn’t happen. And in order to prevent it from happening he had a very simple remedy, “When the people fear the government, that is tyranny. When the government fears the people, that is liberty!”
As I was preparing a tomato/yellow pepper/basil bruscetta tonight I was reflecting on this question : “Why did I love the movie Julie & Julia more than Star Trek, more than G.I. Joe?”
