Over at Fantasy Magazine today, I cast my granny-eye across the room and tackle some of Fantasy’s Weirdest Relationships. Jareth the Goblin King gets first pick, but he’s far from the only creeper on this list.

Obviously this is not an exhaustive list; if I tried to make an exhaustive list of all the questionable relationships in fantasy movies, I’d be here twenty years from now. This is the Whitman’s sampler of uncomfortable dynamics, with one exception: The Sea Prince and the Fire Child. That movie is one of the best examples of weird relationships ever. It is just an endless cocktail party of interactions that are Not Quite Right.

This is one of those things, like The Red Shoes or The Linguini Incident, that I spent my childhood thinking no one else had ever seen. (To be fair, that might be because whenever I said, “Have you seen [movie]?” the other person would pull a face and say, “What? No.” in that tone you reserve for people who ask you if you’ve ever eaten a roach.)

If you’ve seen this movie, you know what I mean when I say that this movie messes with you. For those of you who are new to it, be prepared to make one or all of these faces:

Let’s do this thing.

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I swear I am working on very long posts about movies and TV shows and narrative structure and how poor Ron Perlman’s skin must be like titanium by now after all these years of pancake makeup.

In the meantime, however, I wanted to post something that is:

1) the best part of my day so far, and
2) what most of my first drafts look like: corpse- and transposed-letter-heavy.

So, today’s Fair Food Fight Film is Chocolat!

This one seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it movie: either you love it for being gentle and comforting, or you hate it for being predictable and treacly. I don’t have a dog in this fight whatsoever, mainly because this movie is so useful for Supporting Actor Bingo that I’m just pleased it got made because now I can get from Nina Foch to Miranda Richardson like THAT.

I will, however, put up a fight that Chocolat is a great food movie, because food plays such a main role that it’s hardly even a metaphor any more; without any of the conflict in which chocolate plays a part, you’d still have a perfectly good short film about a lady in a snappy cloak who comes to town and makes awesome goodies in a big gorgeous montage of mole sauce and hot chocolate and almond cake, and the village loves everything and parties forever, the end.

Plus, I’m just a sucker for a nice mise-en-scene every once in a while.

Johannes Vermeer, Juliette Binoche with Milk Pitcher, 1658

Just saying.

So, doubtless ill-advisedly, I’ve started a Tumblr: Questionable Taste Theatre!

No worries about cross-posting; as with my Twitter, I try to limit overlap. On the other hand, this Tumblr will probably have stuff like one-off movie costume commentary QTT movies I abandon (like the one I tried where Alec “Maud’Dib” Newman is a stockbroker-slash-jazz-pianist and Amy Adams stands on the street corner and sings with him every night even though They Are Strangers and He Must Find Her and I just couldn’t, you guys, seriously), which this LJ probably won’t have. So, if you’re dying for a picture of that movie that I scribbled all over in MS Paint, tune in to Tumblr! (It deserved it. It was awful.)

In other news I couldn’t discuss until now, I got called up for jury duty! I heard a lot about the importance of being fair and unbiased, and then they piped in Fox News all day long. (Oh, court system, you’re a gas!) I didn’t get chosen for an actual jury because I had past circumstances that rendered me ineligible, etc. However, I was one of the last called for this jury, so I got to watch the selection process for a good long time. Turns out, you can practically see a Sims diamond appearing over the heads of those who will eventually be chosen.

Unrelated anecdote: I was walking home last night, catching up with my parents, and a cab did an illegal U-turn in the middle of the intersection and nearly hit me (like, “I had to jump backwards to avoid being struck by his rear-view mirror” nearly). I proceeded to give him an incredibly loud and colorful* explanation of pedestrian right-of-way; he sheepishly tried to take his foot off the brake and roll out of the situation (hilariously), but was too nervous to actually hit the gas, so I just walked alongside him until I was finished.

Then I remembered I had been doing the Nun Point with my phone hand, and my parents were still on the line.

* I would like to pretend this was badass-profanity colorful, but it was mostly, “Do you know what a WALK sign looks like? It looks like someone walking! Like I’m walking after you right now because YOU ARE TRYING TO ROLL AWAY FROM ME.”

This weekend I saw Repo Men so I could review it for Tor.com.

I know there had been some internet chatter about how this film stole its premise from Repo! The Genetic Opera. Since futuristic body-as-commodity stories are not singular, I didn’t worry about it. (Plus, if you ask me, someone is welcome to make a movie off Repo!s premise, since it would be nice to see a movie with that concept that didn’t completely suck, but that’s a different argument.)

Anyway, long story short, it doesn’t steal much from Repo!. Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, and about a dozen other sci-fi films, however, should probably be looking askance at Repo Men.

I tried to give a pretty spoiler-free review, not that you can spoil a movie like this anyway. So, LJ-cut for those of you who are desperate to let this cinematic gem unfold before you unspoiled. (None of that sentence will ever happen.)

So, aside from the bad plot and the awful dialogue and the hamfisted voiceover and the hyperviolent fight scenes and the frenetic editing, this movie pulls a Total Recall and has the happy ending be all a dream in Jude Law’s head. In fact, the movie’s entire last third has happened entirely in Jude Law’s head! Surprise! How will you ever know what’s real now, huh? BLEW YOUR MIND, DIDN’T I?

When this happens to you in the theatre, it’s just the worst. It’s especially the worst because the only foreshadowing is that when Forest Whitaker slams Jude Law in the head with the enormous cargo-lifting-hook he’s using and we hear the standard Dolby Surround Squelch, I said out loud, “Now he’s dead and the rest of the movie is a dream.”

Here’s the thing: despite seeing about 320,398 movies in my lifetime, I’m still not good at picking the murderer in a mystery. I’m better than I used to be, but mostly I’m like, “I love this dialogue!” and “Look at those curtains!” and “This shot of the empty shed is ineffective” and when they reveal the killer I’m like, “…Oh man, there was a murder!” I am not hard to fool, is what I’m saying.

However, this movie is such a horrible, badly-broadcast, suspense-free mess that it would have been obvious to a petri dish of bacteria that he was now dead and the rest of the movie was a dream. Two people GOT UP AND LEFT after that moment, because they clearly knew that the main character had died and didn’t want to sit through a 40-minute dream sequence.

Also, the happy ending was a dream and the world is unchanged – fine, whatever, I prefer that in a movie like this, anyway. However, the dreamy happy ending we sit through is Jude Law saying “We’ll go to Headquarters and erase the database and free EVERYONE!”, getting there and realizing that will be difficult, and then deciding to just save himself and his girlfriend. YOUR HERO, LADIES AND GENTS. I laughed out loud, and I’m not sorry.