Friday, August 6, 2010
Merde Allegro non troppo On Fantasia!!!!! ,or Di Allegro merde di Troppo non sulla fantasia!!!!!!!
Don't know if you any of you guys have seen or heard of this one, but I watched it last night and it's pretty good. If you want a healthy does of easy to swallow modern classical foreign psychedelia with a pretty severe twist of self deprecating reflexivity then this ones for you. The ending is pretty brutal for a film that is said to be a reaction piece to Walt Disney's Fantasia, but I guess it's deserved. I mean none of it is really anything that we don't already know or take for granted, but timing I suspect is somewhat relevant to it's magnetism. Wikipedia apparently thinks it's either a parody, or a challenge to Fantasia, but I'm not so sure either of those categories really fits the bill. The film definitely has teeth, but I'm not so sure that they're straight enough to be challenging, or soft enough to be parodying. If anything they seem to be some razor sharp crooked jagged motherfuckers that obviously have some childhood issues ol' Walt that they never really got over. Either way it seems to me, to be a film worth seeing.
Here's a pretty tame sequence that's heavy on "big picture of it all" stoner appreciation and lite on the self-aware shitfest, but I think it'll give a good idea of what it's about.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Toy vs. God
So I saw Toy Story 3 yesterday...* and no one has pointed it out yet I don't think, not in a serious way, so here goes:
Toy Story, especially this new one, is a big metaphor about the Judeo-Christian's relationship with God.
The antagonist of this film, a big purple stuffed bear, repeatedly asserts that toys are just junk waiting to be thrown out. In the climactic scene, he betrays our heroes, asking, "where is your precious owner now?" and sending them hurtling towards fiery destruction (which is resolved with a Deus ex Machina that is actually a machine from the sky.) His back story is that his owner abandoned him, just as the characters from the Toy Story franchise have now been abandoned by Andy.
The story seems to be telling us that when bad things happen to good people, those people sometimes lose faith and become nihilists. The bear doesn't believe in that intangible, nonscientific quality that humans have in real life just as toys are imbued with in the world of Toy Story. The "I am what is" of the Old Testament is the same thing that allows Woody to flop around like that or the Potato Heads' disparate parts to move around autonomously.
This quality could also be called God, the only idea of God we can have and depend on to not, as it were, go away to college. Thus the bear's belief that "toys are junk" leads to his imprisonment of and attempts to doom our heroes to death by furnace-- imagery that isn't necessarily meant to reflect the Holocaust, but definitely evokes human atrocity in a way that is probably scarier for adults who know history than it would be even for kids who don't.
And it's fucking "Toy Story!"
Joseph Goebbels via Teddy Ruxpin.
*I want to add a disclaimer here, that this post isn't a joke, nor is it meant to be one of those "unnamed narrator and Tyler Durden are Calvin and Hobbes" memes, but anyone who's seen WALL-E should get why that's not really necessary...
Toy Story, especially this new one, is a big metaphor about the Judeo-Christian's relationship with God.
The antagonist of this film, a big purple stuffed bear, repeatedly asserts that toys are just junk waiting to be thrown out. In the climactic scene, he betrays our heroes, asking, "where is your precious owner now?" and sending them hurtling towards fiery destruction (which is resolved with a Deus ex Machina that is actually a machine from the sky.) His back story is that his owner abandoned him, just as the characters from the Toy Story franchise have now been abandoned by Andy.
The story seems to be telling us that when bad things happen to good people, those people sometimes lose faith and become nihilists. The bear doesn't believe in that intangible, nonscientific quality that humans have in real life just as toys are imbued with in the world of Toy Story. The "I am what is" of the Old Testament is the same thing that allows Woody to flop around like that or the Potato Heads' disparate parts to move around autonomously.
This quality could also be called God, the only idea of God we can have and depend on to not, as it were, go away to college. Thus the bear's belief that "toys are junk" leads to his imprisonment of and attempts to doom our heroes to death by furnace-- imagery that isn't necessarily meant to reflect the Holocaust, but definitely evokes human atrocity in a way that is probably scarier for adults who know history than it would be even for kids who don't.
And it's fucking "Toy Story!"
Joseph Goebbels via Teddy Ruxpin.
*I want to add a disclaimer here, that this post isn't a joke, nor is it meant to be one of those "unnamed narrator and Tyler Durden are Calvin and Hobbes" memes, but anyone who's seen WALL-E should get why that's not really necessary...
Yo-Landi Vi$$er Turns Down THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO
David Fincher, from the beginning, wanted Yo-Landi Vi$$er from the hipster rap group Die Antwoord to play Lisbeth in his American remake of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. However she broke his heart today with the news that she wasnt interested in doing the film.
Here is the official quote:
“They contacted my agency in L.A. but we said no because it’s not something I want to do.”
... amazing.
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