Unless you disagree, help me out

[sovay]

This weekend. A lot of stress. Which is why on Saturday I booked an hour in the Japanese wooden hot tub at Inman Oasis for myself and derspatchel, which we bracketed with dinner at the Friendly Toast and a successful look in at Lorem Ipsum (rushthatspeaks THE CLERK SOLD ME THE IAIN SINCLAIR POETRY ANTHOLOGY FOR LESS THAN HALF THE STICKER PRICE THAT SORT OF THING NEVER HAPPENS EXCEPT I GUESS WITH IAIN SINCLAIR), and last night we watched another double feature of misunderstood film with Titan A.E. (2000) and Mystery Men (1999).

I don't see the stress letting up any time soon, but it would be nice. A lot of things are fun to do even when they aren't coping mechanisms.

Comments

[sovay]

I actually liked both films, Titan AE was the weaker of them, but I felt that Mystery Men rocked!

Mystery Men is wonderful and completely, catastrophically missed the superhero deconstruction boom of the last ten years; I'm not sure there's anything I dislike about it except the fact that it's obscure even for a cult film and misrepresented even by people who supposedly liked it. Fantastic character-actor cast, time-skewing worldbuilding that doesn't feel the need to explain itself, like Walter Hill with Streets of Fire (1984) or Jeunet and Caro's Delicatessen (1991) and La Cité des enfants perdus (1995), a script that does all the right things without ever turning into formula, and a stupidly high level of quotability. You just kind of sit around afterward running your favorite lines. Titan A.E. needed one last pass on the script so that its characters would say less clichéd things to each other, but it packs a surprising density of grimy, plausible worldbuilding into its animation: I have very rarely seen any space opera take the realities of zero-g physics into account, much less introduce them first for comedy and then repurpose the gag into action, and the handling of sequences like the cat-and-mouse in the ice rings was amazing. It suffers from the disjoint between animation styles, but I got used to it. And I liked some of the things it leaves out. It doesn't matter, for example, how Cale's father died. No one could ever believably tell him, anyway.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

The casting was wonderful on Mystery Men, and I thought the recruitment sequence with its "its gotta be a boy" thinking was so well done.

I have the novelization of Titan AE, and it does a bit better in the explanations. I did feel that they could have left out the joke of naming the planet Bob though.