Apple Foot

An Inconvenient Truth

Saturday I went to the Coolidge Corner to see An Inconvenient Truth. I hate PowerPoint more than words can say, but Al Gore really does a helluva presentation. In fact, I'd have been perfectly happy to see a film of nothing but Gore doing his Carl Sagan-esque climate crisis slide show. I could've done without the bits of the documentary in which Gore ruminates on his personal tragedies (the sister who died from cancer, the son's near-fatal accident) and then stares thoughtfully into the middle distance (the one exception is Gore's explanation of how he got turned on to global warning way back in 1968 or so by Harvard geochemist Roger Revelle).

Apparently, Gore gets the science more or less right, and his facts are up-to-date. Is he convincing? Ask former skeptic Michael Shermer, who writes in Scientific American that Gore's presentation "shocked me out of my doubting stance." I've been reading a lot of scary, "the end of the world is here" kind of things about global warming in the New Yorker over the last couple years; Gore lays out the same story, but says it's not too late. His message is: we've made a mess of the planet, but we can fix it if we all get together now and tell our legislators it's important. Gore is a wonk, yes, but he's also an optimist and a patriot.

I wasn't the only one getting the message this weekend. Sunday night, my five year old nephew told me, "I am the Lorax! I speak for the trees!"

X Men: Last Stand

I had Friday off, so I went to an early matinee of the latest installment of X Men.  I really admire the choices made by the screenwriters throughout the trilogy: after 40 years of serialized story, many of these characters have Byzantine back stories; the Dark Phoenix story contains some Silver Age (an age without irony) plot elements which the screenplay wisely abridges or entirely avoids. And yes, I know the Dark Phoenix saga was after the acknowledged end of the Silver Age--but Lilandra and the Imperial Guard? So Silver.

At its best, X Men is not just a cheesy superhero comic-- it's about something, it says something about the society we live in. The screenplay for X3 deftly incorporates those ideas. Magneto draws parallels between the Cure (for mutants) and Hitler's Final Solution, while on the other hand Rogue welcomes the cure so she can touch other people.

The cast is generally excellent. Stewart and McKellen, of course, make much more of their roles than is in the script. They make the most of the "two sides of the same coin" dynamic, to the point where I thought it wouldn't be much of a stretch for Xavier and Magneto to be lovers. Ellen Page does some nice work as Kitty Pryde. I can't decide whether Kelsey Grammer as Beast is brilliant casting, or stupid; I do know that "Oh my stars and garters" should've been a big applause line, and wasn't when I was at the theater. Storm has some exceptionally lame dialogue, particularly her memorial speech.

Whoops! Apparently there's a scene after the credits, and I didn't stick around for it!

Brick

Brick may be a film you admire more than you enjoy. That said, there is a lot to admire here. Director Rian Johnson has had the brilliant idea to set a film noir in high school, and he's cast the excellent Joseph Gordon-Levitt as his antihero. For those of you who know him from Third Rock from the Sun, Gordon-Levitt looks a lot taller here, and he does an excellent Bogart, sulkily watching the world from under a shock of bangs rather than a fedora's rim. As the cool, deadly beauty who may or may not be helping the detective, Nora Zehetner is all wide eyes and expensive clothing, and Meagan Good is a drama club queen who apparently aspires to being a role model to drag queens. The cast in general is excellent, and the film pays witty homage to film noir, right down to the completely incoherent bit about three-quarters of the way through, and the occasionally impenetrable dialogue. Most delightful, though, are the ways in which the seamy underworld of high school merges with the noir worldview: while trying to find out what's troubling the girl-next-door, Brendan Frye repeatedly asks others "Where is Emily eating lunch these days?", which in high school tells you everything about who a person's hanging out with and what they're doing with their time.

Murderball

I really like documentaries, and I've been wanting to see this one.  So today I hauled myself out to the Coolidge Corner Theater to see Murderball.  Ironically, this film about quadriplegic rugby players (not that they are quads because of rugby, which you might expect, but that they're quads who now play rugby) is in possibly the least accessible screening room in Boston, a city not well known for ADA compliance.  Well, ok, the Coolidge is in Brookline-- whatever.  I happened to follow some poor woman in a walking cast up the flight of stairs to the second floor, down three steps, and around a winding corridor into a room seating approximately 40, mostly upstairs from floor level.

The film is about a bunch of jocks who are quadriplegic, and play a full contact sport officially known as quad rugby, and affectionately called murderball.  You might expect some inspirational moments (either from the athletic angle or from the overcoming-adversity angle), and you do get those.  Mostly, though, the point is that these are regular guys: the film opens with footage of Mark Zupan, one of the players, removing his pants and putting on a pair of shorts-- one leg at a time, as it were.  The three people on whom the film spends significant time are Zupan, apparently one of the top players, Joe Soares, whose years playing are over, but who now coaches Team Canada, and an aspiring player named Keith Cavill.  These three men have been paralyzed for 10 years, 43 years, and 4 months, respectively, and are obviously at very different points in life. The movie packs a lot of personal growth into about an hour.

Zupan is a blonde, muscled, tattooed, goateed twenty-something with a foul mouth and a lot of personality.  He and his teammates talk rather openly about sex, and this is where we get to the part of the movie that I can make into something All About Me, something I can brood over all the way home.  A couple of the guys are shown with their thin, pretty, able-bodied girlfriends, or are shown picking up girls in bars, etc.  Zupan's girlfriend speculates that women are attracted to disabled men because of mothering instincts, and because the men seem vulnerable.  One player admits to wondering when he first meets a woman if she sees him or the chair.  I wonder-- would any of these guys go out with a fat, ugly woman?  And do quadriplegic women have GQ boyfriends, or boyfriends at all?

I feel ashamed of myself for coming away from this film feeling sorry for my overweight, socially inept self-- my only consolation is that the guys in this film would be really pissed if I felt sorry for them instead.

Oh, and did I mention I forgot to take my meds today?