Gushing About Stuff I Like

Gonna try something new today, because I can't think of anything serious or thoughtful to talk about today (also, posting several days late, MY BAD, YOU GUYS.) So instead I'm going to talk about a movie franchise that I really like. 

Today I want to talk about Predator. 

Lauded as one of the manliest movies ever made, Predator is about a group of mercenaries, led by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who find themselves in a jungle being hunted by an alien. 

For the technical stuff- the movie wasn't given great reviews at first, panned by most critics as a mindless shooter with a paper-thin plot. I won't argue with any of those points- the first time I saw the movie, I didn't even realize there was a plot, and it took me two further viewings to realize what the plot actually was in its entirety. Nonetheless, the movie managed to make $98 million dollars at the box office, and remains quite popular to this day.  

What Predator is, is a mindless action flick with an alien. It doesn't pretend that it isn't and it doesn't try to be anything more than that. The pacing is perfect- it's fast enough that it both never bores and never gives you a chance to actually think about how the plot is mostly non-existent. There's a great sense of location- you can almost feel the muggy heat rolling off the jungle, and the forest itself feels both too close and too huge. It doesn’t do a great job of letting you know where the jungle is exactly (I always thought it was in Mexico) but you really get a good feel for the jungle.

What's also brilliant is the predator itself. The visage of the predator is iconic; not as iconic as, say, Darth Vader's mask, but definitely up there. In the first and second Predator movies, the predator is played by the late, great Kevin Peter Hall. Before Predator, it never really occurred to me that the person in the suit was particularly important- they got the body from point A to point B, and then the animatronics and CGI did the rest. 

Boy was I wrong. Hall adds a lot of character to the predator, managing to make it seem powerful physically, but also adding a sense of grace to it, a lithe ease that really makes you believe the creature in front of you is real. One of the most startling things for me was watching Alien vs Predator and seeing how different the species as a whole comes off without that sense of grace. With Ian White under the mask, the predator felt more bulky, more like a walking slab of muscle- really strong, but also a little too stiff and awkward, the little movements of the hands and head feeling more like a man in a suit than an actual creature. I found that a little distracting, and a little disappointing. 

My biggest complaint for this movie is how little they actually show the predator. In Alien, they show you bits and pieces of the xenomorph, never giving you too big of a picture at any one time. And for that movie, it works. It helps to set up the atmosphere, and lets us feel the same terror and bewilderment the characters feel. 

In Predator, they try to do the same thing, or at least something similar, and... well, it doesn't exactly work. It's not that big a deal at first, when all we see of the predator is a camouflaged, indistinct figure, or we see stuff from the predator’s point of view. But then we start seeing it do some really cool stuff, like ripping spines out of corpses, and applying alien first aid and suddenly that becomes way more interesting than whatever the hell the humans are doing. 

I find the constant bait-and-switch of "thirty seconds of predator for every ten minutes of human" really frustrating, to the point where I almost prefer Predator 2 if only because the predator got more screen time in it.

Speaking of the humans, remember how I said this was considered one of the manliest movies ever made? Yeah. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Bill Duke, Jesse Ventura, and Sonny Landham. It also has Richard Chaves and Shane Black, but they aren’t as manly and anyway Black is more of a screenwriter than an actor so he doesn’t really count. This movie practically bleeds machismo, and it helps (or doesn’t, depending on your point of view) that the actors were all trying to out-manly each other off screen. No, really. Jesse and Arnold had a bicep measuring contest (Arnold won).

The manliness is also helped along by the fact that there’s only one (1) woman in the entire movie. Interestingly enough for a movie like this, she’s neither a romantic interest nor incredibly hot. Instead, she’s actually relevant to the plot! No, really, she has lines and is a catalyst for events and everything! There’s the bit about how they find her in a camp full of Russian guys who are preparing an invasion onto US soil (or maybe it’s just a country the US is friendly with, it’s never really clear) and it’s never explained why she was there and I never really could figure out why they didn’t just shoot her instead of bringing her along.

Overall though, it's a great movie, and I love it to bits. The fight scenes are fantastic, and there’s this one scene where they shoot the shit out of the forest in a really memorable and totally kickass scene.  It's one of my favorite movies, both for the brainless fun the action provides, and for the awesome look of the predator itself. 

If you haven't seen this movie yet, you should- if only because it's one of those really iconic movies all the cool kids are referencing. 

Oh and guys, I promise I will post more than twice a year. I promise. I'll try and make Tuesdays my posting days, but I'll try and get something up at least once a week.

Disney's Cool, Guys

I'm starting to get really sick of people tearing into Disney. I'm sick of people calling it evil and ripping apart every movie they make as designed to put evil messages into the minds of small children and undermine their self-confidence and instill hetero-normative ideals in them before they have a chance to make up their own minds. Mostly I hate it because people seem to do it not because they actually hate Disney, but because it the "in" thing to do nowadays.
Like people who claimed that Disney was bad for making the Princess and the Frog movie because "they're only making a black princess so they can make money!"
Um...duh? Disney is a company. Companies do stuff to make money. But a rant about the concept of "selling out" is a topic for another post. I'll use lots of words like "pretension" and... well, "pretension". I'll use that word a lot.

Anyway. Disney hate. It's a little unwarranted, in my opinion. I will allow that some of the movies had some weird values and not-that-great messages when you looked at them closely- Ariel leaving everything she's ever known for a man she's spent all of five minutes with, Belle never getting to go on those adventures in far off places like she wanted. I'll admit that. Disney isn't perfect.
And you know what? I went through that phase. I hated Disney with the best of them. I went on long, feminist rants about how the princess films were instilling in girls the idea that her only goal in life was to find a man and get married.

Then I watched Beauty and the Beast with some friends, and I remembered.
I remembered the first time I ever saw that movie, the first time I ever saw Belle. The realization that the hero of this movie was a girl with brown hair and brown eyes, and who loved to read more than anything? I remember the emotions I felt as if it was yesterday- I like to call it the "Disney feeling". A feeling of pure and undiluted joy and excitement, the feeling that I could do anything or be anyone.

Belle was my hero. She was the person I wanted to be like more than anything. She was brave, she was confident. She didn't take shit from anyone, whether that person was a bone-headed jerk who only wants to marry you because you're pretty or a ten foot tall beast-man capable of ripping you limb from limb if he feels like it. Let him rant and roar and threaten to break the door down- you stick to your guns and you stand up for yourself.

I remember watching these movies and it never once occurred to me that marriage was supposed to be my goal in life, or that my place was subservient to men or whatever else it is people think these movies teach young girls. I learned to be brave. I learned that even if an entire village full of people sings about how strange you are, you can still be confident and love yourself.

People need to give small children more credit. They aren't little blobs of clay molded only by what they see on the bright flashy box in front of them. They're influenced by the books they read, the people they talk to, their parents, their friends... No one work and no one medium is going to corrupt a child beyond repair. Watching a bunch of movies where the girls get married at the end is going to convince a small child that her only goal in life is that and only that. Children are humans. They think, they dream, they form opinions that don't necessarily conform with the opinions of the people around them- lord knows I have.