Sunday, November 15, 2009

Movie Review (with extra parentheses)!

So my Ferret and I were browsing the secondhand stores for movies (since The Fantastic Mr. Fox isn't out in our town yet), and we found a Stan Lee cartoon in the Anime section called Mosaic. I don't expect much out of Stan, but this was... ugh. Ferret perhaps has lower expectations than mine, because she liked it.

It's about a girl who wants to be an actress (of course) who lives with her obsessive Interpol agent dad (of course) in a New York townhouse (of course). She's blond (of course) and cute and perky (of course) and likes to inexplicably dance around in her skimpy pajamas before bed (of course) and gets her powers in a freak accident (this is Stan Lee, so of course).
I'ma make like the Count from Sesame Street here: "Seven! Seven trite tropes! Ah-ah-ah!" And that's just so far.
I won't even go into the inherent sexism, truly awful dialogue (maybe it works better on a comic book page), made-for-tv animation, and 1-dimensional characters.
Hell, I won't touch the 'heroine foils would-be rapists' scene that all superheroine movies apparently must include by law.

Ferret pointed out that I had chosen the movie in the first place. I replied that the basic premise- chameleon girl kicks ass- was kinda cool, but to win my praise requires at least some originality and technique. They put more effort into the box design than the damn movie.

I mean, good start. Girl superhero, great. So... couldn't they make her plain, an aspiring doctor, or at least brunette? Could they give Storm some company and make her a POC? Could they at least make the animation and voice work good enough (Fail, Anna Paquin) to make her a good actress? Painful. And hearing Stan yammer on about how girls can relate to this girl- cause she's pretty and fun!- made me less disposed to be impressed by it from the beginning. Having a vagina does not automatically mean you relate. You could have given her some kind of depth.

Afterward, we watched Aeon Flux. It may make an apt comparison to say that I found it to be intelligent, subversive, refreshing movie-manna for my cerebellum after the previous brain-numbing animated excretion.

So, uh, listen Stan. Dude, you're not even trying. Please to retire with your pile of money and just go sign autographs at ComicCons from now on, okay?
Please?