The Ark and The Dove

Did the Clone Wars Advocate Water Boarding?

I just watched Episode 30 of the Clone Wars (unfortunately titled "Brain Invaders") on Cartoon Network.

In the course of the episode Anakin's padawan is trapped on board a supply frigate where alien parasites have infected the entire crew, including another Jedi. When Anakin receives word that his padawan is at risk of being infected herself, he tortures a captured enemy combatant to learn how to destroy the parasites.

Interestingly enough, this might mark the chronologically first use of the force choke by Anakin in Star Wars. Creepy Vader music plays in the background as he does so...but the results are effective. He is able to alert the Republic to the cure for the parasites and, more immediately, explain to his padawan how to save herself and the infected allies.

The other major moral conflict of the show is when the infected Jedi begs to be euthanized by Anakin's padawan, who refuses, hoping that she can be cured. Later, the padawan asks Anakin if she should have killed her friend...and Anakin says that he doesn't think the friend would think so now that the cure was effective. No doubt, Anakin justifies his use of torture the same way -- people whose lives were saved as a result of the information discovered by torture will most likely not condemn the person who rescues them.

Unless, of course, they are Democrats in the Obama administration.

Al Gore - Renaissance Man

Drudge linked to an article in Vanity Fair highlighting the climate change poetry of Al Gore.

Here's a snippet:

The shepherd cries
The hour of choosing has arrived
Here are your tools

Of course, it misses the real reason the shepherd is probably crying. Most likely his entire flock was just slaughtered after Al Gore determined they were emitting too much methane.

Any Way You Slice It

Thinking about the Tiger Woods scandal actually gives me some hope that, as talented as he is, I might be able to surpass him in at least one aspect of life.

Up-date

I was thinking about Mike's comment about how The Incredibles argues that real heroism occurs in the domestic sphere. This triggered a similar reading regarding Up. I'm just going to go ahead with the spoilers, so feel free to stop reading now if you haven't seen it.

The movie ends with a series of snapshots of the old man and the Wilderness scout. The snapshots appear in the scrapbook that the old man's deceased wife had been keeping since childhood. It was meant to be her Book of Adventure. As far as we know, the last page she entered was the picture of their house being impossibly relocated to the top of Paradise Falls. Mr. Frederickson lived his life thinking that was the adventure she always wanted, but, in one of the most catharsis inducing scenes in the movie, we find out that she had (on the sly) been using the book as a photo album throughout their married life. Marriage was the adventure.

By inserting the pictures of the Wilderness scout after the pictures of his wife, the film suggests that children are the subsequent adventure.

But I think the film is suggesting more than this Hallmark card style worldview.

Mr. Frederickson leaves in his balloon house because a court order has required him to enter a retirement home (after he bludgeons a high-rise construction worker who accidentally knocks over his mailbox). He doesn't want to go to he retirement home, but he has no children, friends, or relatives to shelter him. It's a pretty big problem in our society today--the way our elderly are becoming increasingly marginalized by our nuclear families and private lifestyles.

But there is another problem in our society--divorce and the threat of abandonment. We find out that the Wilderness scout's father has divorced his mother and remarried. The stepmother (in true fairy tale fashion) is not interested in the kid and has been discouraging the father from spending time with him. At the end of the film, when the Wilderness scout is getting his final merit badge, his father is nowhere to be seen. Mr. Frederickson mounts the stage and becomes the surrogate father. Next comes the series of snapshots of the two engaged in various paternal (or grandpaternal) activities.

This, I think, is the most provocative fantasy of the film--even more compelling and moving than a fling house. The writers detect two social problems--abandonment of the elderly and abandonment of children--and fantasize a solution that essentially kills two birds with one stone. Both ends of the spectrum of life are feeling ostracized and being pushed out of focus. Why shouldn't they reach out to one another?

Or maybe it's not so much of a fantasy. More and more families are coming to rely on grandparents to raise children, after all...so much so that there is even a government Website to offer assistance.

Up, Up, and Away!

Isabel and I just watched our first Netflix rental last night: Pixar's Up.
This was easily the best movie we've seen in a long time--and it was definitely the best movie of the summer.
But watching most of Up was something of a downer--at least for Isabel, who pretty much cried her way through about two-thirds of the movie.

I'll admit I got pretty weepy, too.

It's impressive how much Pixar pretty much blows away every other computer animation company on the scene at the moment -- and even blows away its own parent company Disney. For instance, we watched Dreamworks big-budget B-movie parody Monsters vs. Aliens last week and were bored out of our minds. Isabel decisively fell asleep about half-way through it. MvA's story was weak, loose, and contrived. We felt nothing for any of the characters, and the film reduced itself to slapstick crudity. Up, like its predecessor Wal-E, compelled emotional attachments to characters that didn't even speak.

I don't want to say too much about the movie's story as I wouldn't want to sap any of the catharsis for those who haven't seen it yet. Nevertheless, you can't expect me to blog on a work of art without some kind of critique...

The movie has at least one significant flaw (and this is something of a spoiler): it's the first Pixar movie I can think of with a bona fide villain. It's also the first Pixar movie I can think of where a villain has a classic villain's demise. This was a little disappointing to me. It felt a little cheap, especially since I've been impressed so far with how well Pixar has managed to keep caricatures of evil out of their movies. They had been following the formulae of Hiyao Miyazaki, the Japanese animator behind Studio Chibli's Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. In his films, villains are either completely absent or they have conversion experiences. People can do horrible things in his stories, but he almost always extends an olive branch and lets them become reconciled to their victims. This wasn't the case in Up where a murderous villain appears to meet a murderous end. I was rather hoping that the bad guy hunting the rare bird would have realized the error of his ways and become a conservationist or something. The villain, however, was really only a part of a subplot--and his demise functions primarily as a foil for what the protagonist was at risk of becoming. (That being said, the villain also marks the movie's largest plot hole...if the adventurer was an adult when the protagonist was a boy, how old is he when the protagonist goes on his trip to South America?)

The only other possible critique I can give the movie (other than obnoxiously the pointing out the cartoon physics necessary to lift a house with helium balloons) is that it essentially boils down to The Wizard of Oz for old people. The protagonist is lifted away through the clouds to a strange and unusual land. He has to follow a path to a geographical destination. He has three goofy sidekicks each with a quest to achieve something (wilderness scout / a merit badge, Doug / a new master, Kevin /motherhood). At the end of his journey, he discovers that the seemingly larger than life figure whose footsteps he has been following is nothing like the heroic if not magical figure he has followed. And does it matter that the "wizard" figure even flies around in a balloon? The only thing missing are the ruby slippers (I half expected the house to land on the adventurer at the end).