Attack of the Clones
For no particular reason, I threw on Attack of the Clones tonight.
Unsurprisingly, the best transfer to DVD of any movie I’ve seen, with the exception of, perhaps, Finding Nemo (which was, of course, created entirely on computers and not in need of transfer in the traditional sense.
For Clones, the same joys and disappointments as before. You could name them as well as I could.
But I found myself thinking about the tall, skinny aliens from the Camino system (Caminans?). They have a whole planet, covered in water and dotted with clone factories. “Cloners, these people are” says the crusty cook from the ’50s diner to Obi-Wan.
Well, I’ve never heard of a whole planet’s population identified by their profession, and it stuck out weird. Really, is the entire population of Camino involved in the production of clones? Are there no truck drivers, no bricklayers, no doctors, lawyers, bookkeepers on Camino, except those connected to the cloning industry?
It’s sort of like someone saying “Los Angeles, filmmakers those people are.” I mean sure, LA is a company town, but I often go weeks on end without running into a single filmmaker. I meet housewives and grocery clerks and doctors and accountants and locksmiths and librarians and swim coaches and short-order cooks and all kinds of things. But no, apparently on Camino all they do is make clones.
But wait: in all the Camino scenes, we meet a grand total of — well, let’s see — two Caminans (Caminists? Camisoles?). One is a female greeter of some sort and the other is identified as the Prime Minister. Now, Prime Minister implies that there are quite a few Caminans running around, but where are they? And where are their belongings? The rooms we enter into are completely uncluttered and sparkling clean. No piles of magazines or half-eaten doughnuts sitting around. I know that we never get inside the living quarters of a genuine Caminan, but they must eat and sleep somewhere, something. They have clothes, which they must keep somewhere, but what do they eat? Fish? Plankton? Where do they go to the bathroom? And where are they all?
Who built those factories? It must have been contract work from another planet, because the only things the Caminans do is clone. Cloners, those people are.
And then it struck me: maybe the female greeter and the Prime Minister are the only two Caminans on the planet. Maybe that’s all there are, and all the cloning and clone-training is done by machines.
But wait — if there are only two Caminans on the planet, why is one Prime Minister?
And suddenly the whole movie turned into some sick charade. There are two creatures on a planet, and they’re surrounded by these artificial people that they make, and there are so many of them that they start to think that they are actually the leaders of some great society, instead of just a couple of cloners running an automated factory. And in the extremity of their isolation and loneliness, they start to refer to each other as Prime Minister and, who knows, Vice-Prime-Minister or something.
Maybe they trade off from week to week, calling each other Prime Minister.
They’re smart, that’s for sure. They built those factories and they figured out how to clone hundreds of thousands of clones, so they must be pretty sharp. But no one visits, no one “drops by,” even the Jedi who ordered the clones never stopped back to check their progress. Little do they know their planet has been erased from the Archives on Coruscant.
I can imagine the two of them sitting around wondering what happened to tourism on Camino.
MALE CAMINAN: “We put up the billboards, we sent out the emails, how come no one comes to rainy, water-covered, windswept clone-factory-town Camino?”
FEMALE CAMINAN: “People just aren’t interested in cloning any more. Hey, can I be queen next week?”
Oscar Special
My thoughts on the Oscar ™ show:
This was the first Oscars that my son Sam watched. He’s 4.5 years old, but he made it through the whole show. Of course, we’re in Santa Monica so the show ended only at 8:30.
I had to explain the whole idea of the Oscars to Sam, but he caught on pretty fast. I don’t think he understands how many people it takes to make a movie, and he was unfamiliar with most of the nominees this year, but George Clooney got his attention early in the evening when Clooney mentioned Batman twice in his acceptance speech.
SAM: You mean, he made a Batman movie?
DAD: Yeah, a few yeas ago, he made a Batman movie.
SAM: What’s it called?
DAD: It’s called Batman and Robin. We’ll rent it sometime.
Sam, of course, was familiar with March of the Penguins, which I think was the only nominated film he saw this year.
He was glad that Crash won best picture, because Crash had the song with the burning car in it, and he liked that part of the show.
However, it seemed unfair to him that Crash won two prizes and King Kong (which he hasn’t seen) didn’t win any.
In the middle part of the show he went off to his own room to watch The Spongebob Squarepants Movie, then he came back for the end. But he remembered who everyone was and what movies were competing.
As for me, all I can say is that, for the first time in memory, I liked the set.
I noticed that Loreal was a “proud sponsor” of the Academy Awards. It made me wonder how many reluctant sponsors there were, or perhaps sponsors who were downright ashamed.
I’m sure there are many political things to be read into the competition, but it’s late.
Matchstick Men
Tonight’s film: Matchstick Men, Ridley Scott’s 2003 comedy/drama/caper movie.
He’s a genre-buster, that Ridley Scott.
In the past month I’ve watched every movie he’s made except for 1492, which for some reason is not available on DVD in the US.
Usually in a Ridley Scott movie, the stakes are pretty damn high for the protagonist. Usually lots of people will die if the protagonist screws up. This time, the stakes are smaller but more personal.
You know it’s funny, Ridley Scott’s movies often have a “happy ending,” but he seems to define “happy” differently than most Hollywood directors.
***SPOILER ALERT***
For instance, the happy ending of Thelma and Louise is that they drive into the Grand Canyon.
The happy ending of Gladiator is that Russell Crowe dies, and so finally gets to join his family in the next life. Lucky thing, there being a next life.
The happy ending of Kingdom of Heaven is that after a fierce battle, the protagonist surrenders Jerusalem to the Muslims and prevents further bloodshed.
The happy ending of Hannibal is that the cannibalistic maniac gets away and the wheelchair-bound sicko gets eaten alive by ravenous boars.
The happy ending of Blade Runner is that Harrison Ford and Sean Young make it out of the apartment alive.
Anyway, you get the point.
***END SPOILERS***
Ridley Scott, it should be obvious to most, loves to explore a world, usually a world that isn’t often presented to us. And the thing that he seems to love the most is The Rules. The protagonist of the Ridley Scott movie is often thrust into a strange world with peculiar Rules that he or she must learn to follow, or else, more often than not, people die. When the protagonist learns to bend the rules to his or her advantage, he or she triumphs, even when the triumph involves their own death.
Well, enough of that.
Alison Lohman is terrific in Matchstick Men.
Also tonight, the first 30 minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I miss Karen Allen.
Empire of the Sun update
ps: I had forgotten that Ben Stiller was in this movie. How strange it is to see him show up.
Production design on the picture is staggering, as is Christian Bale’s performance
And now he’s Batman.
Does that mean in 10 years Haley Joel Osment will play Batman?
TONIGHT’S FILM REPORT
Just watched a double feature of 1941 and Empire of the Sun.
It’s quite a dramatic juxtaposition, try it at home if you’ve got five hours to kill.
Both are about World War II, war hysteria, Japanese soldiers and obsession with airplanes, but they couldn’t be more different in tone, in spite of being separated by eight years.
And only six years later, Spielberg would make another movie about war and its affect on civilians again, Schindler’s List, which is even better. Those three would make a terrific triple feature, but perhaps another day.