I saw Big Fish on Saturday. I thoroughly hated it. Not even that, I loathed it. I thought it was the most evil movie I've seen. Ever. Neglect the fact that I went through absolute culture shock even setting foot on the Pavilion on 16th Street, the movie theatre and its decor makes me physically sick:
They have a machine that, "makes anyone an artist" and has a digitized voice pronouncing itself as, "Leonardo". I found it ironically convenient that "anyone can be an artist" because of the power of this Machine.... that it was so easy... you don't have to think! Plug in your money and away you go! I don't even think it was the machine that I really hate, but the ads for the machine on the machine itself feature an incredibly happy 14 year old girl, complete with beret. Is a French avant garde really still the stereotype of the artist? Is it odd to anyone else that any French avant garde type of person who totally lash out to any da Vinci-esque work!?
Before the movie, they had - ok wedged between the ads for food, ads for tv shows, ads for other movies, they had a little deal about how stealing movies via the internet is Wrong and a sob story about how it hurts the professional lives of, of all things, stunt men.
I would come to the conclusion that stunts in movies have hurt more stutmen than illegal downloads of movies featuring stunt men - but that's not the point: imagine if everything you own told you what not to do with it. The first track of your CD you just bought at... (cringe) Virgin told you the negative effects of illegally downloadable music. Doesn't it seem odd that a CD you bought would tell you that? So wouldn't it seem odd that a movie you just paid for is telling you that you shouldn't do what they're basically presupposing that you have already done before the "Feature Presentation?" Why all this protection?
The copyright model of all media now is severely outdated. Imagine it's 1904 and we have in our hands: a book. First off, how do you conveniently and economically copy such a thing?! Would you have to reset all the type in the book itself? Would you even need a Copyright notice to tell you not to? How about common sense?
Anyways, I had my Canon Digital Elph with a new 256 meg Flash card in it and was able to illegally film the entire "do not pirate films" thing. It'll be on the internet via a P2P network in minutes. It's my hacktivism for the evening.
All this pales in my absolute shock from my personal conclusion of Big Fish. Basically, it's about a dying father, who spins his life into an incredibly intricate web of tall tails which is then acted out on screen using the magic of really really expensive computer graphics and (*faint*) Ewen Mcgreggor via Flashbacks and Voice Overs:
Will Bloom is really unhappy with his father (Edward Bloom), since Will never really knew the real story of the guy spinnin' these tales (not even going into the fact that both he and his wife work for news agencies(1)). At the end of the movie, the son realizes that even though they are tale tails, there is fact within the fiction and it really doesn't matter what the father has said, since his stories will make him immortal and a source of family myth for the way way foreseeable future. You know, instead of dealing with the hurt, pain and depression that comes with losing a Father.
Awww.
No!
It really truly sucks to be so fucking sensitive about where the content (Big Fish) is being played (the setting - a movie theatre) and who sees this (the general, stupid public). I wouldn't have bothered if this story was a book I found at Capital Bookstore on Colfax - I would think it was a really neat (and just neat) story and that's about it.
But, I really truly don't think that telling a general audience of movie goers that taking the word of an authority figure about the past and just sort of glaze over the details is the way to go. Cause, hey wow, if it didn't hurt the relationship of the father to the son and of the son's son, boy I guess it really doesn't matter if a somewhat larger authority figure, say the US Government tells its citizens a highly spun story that's base upon facts to sensationalise some parts and down play others.
A stretch you say? No! People read less and watch TV/Movies more. Want proof? How many movies were watched 100 years ago by the general public? Not one. So we've recently (recently as the entire written history of the human race) gone through a paradigm shift of how we are told stories. From oral to written to moving pictures. This also means that we have a paradigm shift on how we receive our myths - you know, those thingys we use to explain Everything.
It's fairly obvious that the general public, stupid as they are, are also and oddly self-aware that the US Government lies to them all the time... and are OK with it. I'm sorry to have come to the conclusion that Big Fish is just new myth in the Movie medium to explain and deal with the present state the authority figures beyond our direct control lie to us: We should just keep up our professional smile and spiral towards oblivion.
I really really wish some of my favorite movie making types weren't tied to this P.O.S.
For instance Tim Burton, the freakin' dark icon on of unappreciated, misinterpreted and mislead youth is the director! It's really sad to see Burton's sly observation of Southern California's non-culture in Edward Scissorhands, where everyone's houses, cars, etc look exactly the same and uses the same treatment to Edward Bloom's hometown which looks exactly the same even though it's small town, USA. There's one scene where Edward's employees are mowing the lawns of all his neighbors at once in his own business during highschool. It would be assumed the Edward is OK with the fact that everyone is the same and is OK to take advantage of this position, instead of trying to change it. It's either that, or Burton is lazy and is just pasting in known theatrical treatments. And what's up with young Edward allowing Karl, Matthew McGrory's character entire servititude as a Canry freak? Is it now OK to be ridicule someone for being different in appearance? How about nationality? Race? Religion?
God, except for Ping and Ling, what a White movie. Why did Norther Winslow (Steve Buscemi's character) turn from naturalist albeit blocked poet to Stock Market creep? That's an improvement?!
And what about Ewan Mcgreggor? In Trainspotting, he played a junky so convincing, I wish they would use the movie in Highschool health classes. They didn't in my school, so I brought the movie into a English class of mine for a presentation on, "making mistakes". Mcgreggor now reminds me that what I like about Trainspotting was the book and Irvine Welsh, and not the movie.
At the end of the movie I cried.
I cried through the credits and after they brought the lights up. Perhaps for the above conclusion, but I doubt it. I cried because I missed my parents. My father has a story about working at the airport and almost kicking the crap out of Woody Allen. Allen was being an asshole and my Father told him to shut the fuck up. That really happened That's not sugar coated.
My Father also took a sailboat from Florida to New York and kept a journal of his travels. One entry is about a late night watch where he was surrounded by porpoises in the moonlight. That's true. That's not sugar-coated.
That's something to wonder about.
For someone (me) who was completely sheltered on what really happened in his family and still doesn't know some really really key parts of it, this movie was atrocious. Perhaps I'm being hyper-sensitive. For instance I hated (and still do) Fight Club. My Mother sustained a broken neck mere days before I saw that movie, which has a gratuitous amount of head and neck injuries. I was in complete shock after watching it - but Fight Club also had a ironic twist that there really isn't a reason to make a multi million dollar movie filled with sex symbol actors about how you should live sans materialism. Do you see the inside joke?
I don't know if I should be completely hyper-critical about this, but it's my right and duty about all this. Perhaps I'm just misreading all this. I could, if you let me, show you how every beloved Norman Rockwell(2) painting was just propaganda to show a strict WASP Father dominated hierarchy hand-delivered to the homes of un assuming, yet terribly already WASP'd Americans every Saturday evening.
But I won't.
Footnotes
Look, I know these are shabby and aren't in any style, but this is a sketch book
1. From: http://users.rcn.com/denebola/archives/vol37_issue1/issue/centerfold/article1.html, attributed to Debbie Bernstein
Newsweek magazine, for example, runs an entire column under its National Affairs heading called "Scandals." The March 17, 1997 issue features articles entitled "With Friends Like These..." and "Al Gore: The Good Son Stumbles," dealing with the Clinton fundraising questions.
Critics allege that lurid headlines editorialize and are not as subjective as reporting should be. In the 1988 election, Newsweek ran a cover of Bush with the negatively-connoted headline "The Wimp Factor." This was so damaging to BushÕs campaign that relations became strained between the Bushs and Katharine Graham, the publisher of Newsweek.
2. I have, in fact, been to the Norman Rockwell museum.
