Someday I will watch a movie or TV show that is well-made, and I will enjoy it deeply.
Today is not that day.
1. This morning, I posted my newest Abridged Classic, which gives you the astoundingly ridiculous, astoundingly shirtless, astoundingly racist Pathfinder. If you are one-tenth as appalled as I was when I was watching this movie for the first time, then I’ll be happy.
2. This afternoon, I wrote up the pilot of Defying Gravity for Tor.com. I wish I could have snarked it harder, or really dug into the underlying hilarity, but it’s so dull that trying to snark it meaningfully would just be like those infomercials where some poor disembodied pair of hands tries to cut a tomato with a conventional knife and nothing happens, and then you just worry that somehow the tomato knows what you did and will try to come after you when you sleep. Or something. I’m not watching it again, is what I’m saying. You are not even worth my ire, show!
(I mean, eventually there has to be SOMETHING good, right? Right?)
So, in A Night at the Movies, I mentioned Pathfinder as an appalling example of racism in cinema. I promised to write it up more fully. And I meant to, I really did!
But the problem with this movie is that writing about it doesn’t do it justice. It’s one thing to write, “The Native American characters are useless.” But it really doesn’t capture the true flavor of a director who said, “You know who needed saving by a white guy? Those Native Americans who let themselves get killed because they were a bunch of helpless whiners!”
And thus, Pathfinder was born. Because if there was anything that would have stopped that genocide, it was one white dude who Just Wanted to Belong.
And yet, even this picture of a tribe full of childlike, passive Native Americans cowering before the mighty sword of the white man doesn’t give the full effect. (Fun fact: this is the only promotional photo that even shows a Native American, so basically it’s a movie in which the Native Americans are only important to give Karl Urban something to save.) The full effect is that of slackjawed, creeping horror.
Luckily, it looks like we can’t blame this on Karl Urban. He’s giving us serious Hostage Eyes in this picture. (Oh, Karl, you had better have lost a bet or something. Seriously.)
There is some comfort, I guess, in knowing that the movie is shitty on every possible level, and is not simply a well-executed movie with weird racial undertones. This is the kind of movie where a blond, blue-eyed twelve-year-old can grow up to be Karl Urban.
This is the kind of movie where every line is delivered with all the portentous, ponderous clunking of a steel-tipped fortune cookie. This is the kind of movie where someone cuts someone’s eye out and we get a five-second close-up on the bloody eyeball rolling around in the mud!
This is the kind of movie where the bravest, most skilled warriors in the tribe are entirely wiped out because they fail to recognize one of Karl Urban’s traps – a trap that they would have had to teach Karl Urban how to make in the first place. A trap that Karl Urban somehow made overnight, despite the fact that it’s about ten feet by ten feet and in a wooded area far away from his cave hideout, and also he really doesn’t look like the Viking kid he was when they picked him up when he was twelve and where did he get the eye makeup and OH GOD, MOVIE, WHAT THE HELL.
While it takes the full two hours to really understand how horrible this movie is, I tried to get it in under the seven-minute mark.
To get right to the cringing, enjoy the Abridged Classic below.
(Check out more Abridged Classics at Defenestration, ’s joint, and home of Eileen who makes me watch Shakira videos.)
So, occassionally I will get a bee in my bonnet about a particular actor and go on a fevered quest for everything they’ve ever been in, which is how I end up paying eight thousand dollars for a VHS of The Linguini Incident, and paying a small smuggling operation to get me a copy of I Am Dina to round out my collection of weird-ass Marie Bonnevie movies.
A while back, I got caught up with Queer as Folk (UK) and fell like a sack of bricks for Aidan Gillen. In a fit of glee, I bought up everything of him that I could. “Why,” said I, “if he’s that good in this role, he must have amazing taste in movie parts!”
So I bought Lorna Doone. Used. Which, I would like to point out, is five dollars I will never see again.
(Later, I found out in an interview that Aidan Gillen takes roles based on where they’re being filmed, so he can see different parts of the world, something I wish he’d have let me know before I spent my five dollars.)
I Abridged it. It’s a little over five minutes, down from two and a half hours that feel like five hours. Five, like my dollars.
Il Fantasma. Long and winding road blah blah blah blah blah this thing is nearly eight minutes long, and that’s because of the editing I gave the ratsex. I’m not sorry.
That’s right; while other people were holding vigil for religious things, I was worshipping at the altar of Cinema. And of Windows Movie Maker, which, let’s face it, is only slightly more useful than a stick when it comes to editing.
