Getting back into the groove.

Greetings readers, It is my pleasure to resume writing to you. A political post is in the works but for now some movie reviews:

Brave (Pixar):
I was rather pleasantly surprised by this movie. It's Pixar, so I expected high quality, but I was rather impressed by how memorable they managed to make each character.
When you look at most movies, the main characters tend to have a basic introduction of who they are, but most often that barely makes it past a job description.
Think about it, what do you know about McClane from Die Hard? He's a cop....and that's about it. How about Jake Sully from Avatar? Well, he had a twin brother who died, and he used to be a marine. No idea what his dating life was like back on earth, no specific details about how he lost the use of his legs, Hell we don't even know anything about his parents. Did he get along with them? Are they still alive? Totally unanswered. Because it's generally not important to the plot.

In Brave, the characters Are the plot. The movie is less about What happens, than Why it happens. The plot itself is simple standard fantasy. Things are kindof annoying, magic gets involved, things get terrible, heroes triumph, heroes realize "kindof annoying" is waaay better than "Horrifucking-awful".

The important part is the personal growth that happens to each and every character in the movie. I swear, every frigging character, even characters that aren't even named. There is a character that I can best describe as ridiculous bad-ass composed entirely of steroids. He's not a named character, he's mostly there for comparative humor. But even he gets to experience some personal growth and gets in touch with his softer side.

Aside from the interesting character growth, it's everything we've come to expect from a Pixar film. It's cute, funny, and memorable.

The Secret world of Arriety:
A Miyazaki film (Howl's moving castle, spirited away, etc) that branches out from it's own genre.
Most Miyazaki films focus heavily on Asian mythology, this one specifically focuses on western mythology. So that by itself was a startling change, but the movie was good so it's ok. Same as Brave it has all of the qualities you expect from a Miyazaki film. The only thing that concerns me about these two movies is perhaps they are staying too true to form. Miyazaki films always follow the same structure. Namely normal person interacting with the supernatural and exploring a different world.
Pixar for quite awhile was following a similar standardized formula (I.E. What if _____ was real and could talk?) In Cars it was that the cars replaced people, yet, were still cars. In Monster's INC it was "What if the monsters in your closet were real and had their own society?". Toy Story is almost the standard for their format "What if toys were alive and could talk?".
The one major shift from this format was Wall-E. In Wall-E everything did what they were already capable of doing. Robots did robot stuff, humans lounged around, and super-computers were evil. But the movie managed to tell an amazing story with very little dialogue, almost all of which had little to nothing to do with the plot. I hope that Pixar continues trying to break out of the mold that it's gotten itself into (UP was another good example of deviation.), and I really hope that Miyazaki gets himself out of his formula, because his movies are becoming very predictable.

John Carter (Disney):
This is a case of the Disney marketing dept dropping the ball off of a skyscraper.
John Carter is based off the book "Princess of Mars" by Edgar Rice Burroughs (The creator of Tarzan). Princess of Mars is an incredibly important piece of science fiction because it sets the tone for science fiction for the next century. Asimov, Heinlein, Roddenberry, etc. All of the modern Sci-Fi writers based much of their work off of Princess of Mars.
So you'd think that re-introducing modern culture to this historic piece of work would be easy? Well, apparently Disney Marketing can't figure it out.
The movie itself is rather good, not exactly the same as the book, but adjusted slightly to make it more acceptable to modern viewers. At the time it was written, absolutely no-one knew anything about Mars. Now we've sent probes and such, we know about Mars. So the story needed to be adjusted to account for that. But as far as the plot itself is concerned, it remained very true to the original plot. With the only exception of combining multiple story arcs from the John Carter book series into the movie (Which most movies based on books do).

I am actually currently in the process of reading the books to compare everything, but because it was written back before we had CGI the book is heavy in descriptions. Which at the time it needed to be. Nobody had any concept of what an alien might look like. Now the genre is saturated with various aliens so our collective consciousness can fully form what an alien might look like.
Another important concept to consider is that some of the aliens in the book are non-humanoid. (I.E. would have to be a puppet or CGI if they appeared in modern TV/Film) and that was a major first in science fiction. Before then it was assumed that people from another planet would look very similar to people from this planet. Various creatures appeared in fantasy books before then, and that's where Burrough's drew inspiration from. What if life on another world was different than life here? A novel concept that launched the mass of Sci-fi works we have today.

Final comments on John Carter: It's a good movie, and an important piece of Nerd/Geek history. Unless you'd rather read an extremely detail-heavy series of books, I recommend the movie instead (which will likely make you want to read the rest of the books just so you can find out what happens next).