What is reality?
If you'd posed that question to Descartes when he was alive (and you weren't) you might've gotten an answer that could be best summed up thusly: "damned if I know."
We're going to have a second "Transformers" movie debut in the not too distant future. I know this because Jarrod, our beloved news editor at Mania (All Hail Jarrod!) has told us so.
That and the trailer was running on Reelz Channel the other day.
(Quick Note - "The Big Tease" needs to stop pretending they're the Siskel and Ebert of trailers. You don't review trailers, you watch them. I don't need two people getting excited or bored over a movie trailer when I can do so all by myself.)
I still find "Transformers" laughable.
Here's this big ass intergalactic space machine that goes crashing through buildings only to transform into a car that has probably one tenth of the mass (at most) of the previous incarnation of this piece of technology.
But seeing these huge hulking machines walking about on planet Earth is quite laughable. I don't care how much money the first movie made, I'm not interested in how many toys are sold. I just don't buy it, at all.
Well some might say "it's besides the point. It's all in the name of fun."
And that's fine. I've no problem with fun.
The issues of believability bend when it's an animated film, though.
I'm quickly becoming a fan of anime, namely "Full Metal Alchemist" and such. I intend to find "Bubblegum Crisis" and a few others. I also own my own beloved copy of "Final Fantasy - Advent Children."
To be fair, these are in the name of fun as well, and yet I don't find myself bitching at how unrealistic it is when Cloud Strife and his friends do battle in Migdar with the great big beastie of the skies and, eventually, Sephiroth.
Why is this?
I think the answer lies between the sheets of animation and live action. Live action suggest you went outside and saw it, or that one could see it. Animation can present any world it wants: a Parisian rat can speak English, cook, and has a French guy for his own marionette. A car can talk and manipulate its world, yet it has no opposable thumbs to create the gas tanks or design electric circuitry used to power his world. A talking moose can foil Fearless Leader and a squirrel can take flight.
All those scenarios I accept, for some reason, yet giant machines doing battle on Earth in a real live setting is both silly and yawn inducing to me. For some reason, the more unreal it is in our real world, the more ridiculous appears yet, the more unreal it is in an unreal world, the more authentic it seems to be.
Here's another dilemma of believability: should a movie be released at a particular time of the year to make it more authentic?
I posed this question after the sudden departure last summer of "The X-Files: I Want To Believe" from movie theaters. Let's be honest, I don't feel XF2 was much of a "summer movie," and it got swallowed up during the freakishly large run of "The Dark Knight" and its other competition.
(Let's be fair: TDK's success was a fluke. Fluke's happen. Testosterone fueled fan boys feel TDK's box office bonanza proves this is just the best damn movie ever made, it should've won a Best Picture or Best Director award at the Academy Awards, and so on. It made the money, but it's certainly not worth of those nods.)
I was there on opening day, at the very first showing to see what Mulder and Scully were up to. I wasn't the only one there. I also wasn't disappointed with what was projected before me. I easily got lost in the story and found myself very glad I didn't buy popcorn or a drink when the third act rolled around.
But, it's the middle of the summer, and I'm in a darkened theater looking at frozen winter landscapes. There's an incongruity there, I feel, and outside of TDK's runaway profit margin, I have wondered out loud many times if XF2 would've played better during the winter, that way it might've connected to us more effectively if we'd just driven by big heaping piles of snow.
I don't know that, one way or another. I can't prove it or disprove it, but it is a question that so far will remain unanswered.
I won't complain about XF2, except on one account: the title. Chris Carter was happy with it (or so the story goes) but I'm sure, considering how talented Carter is, that he and his crew could've come up with a title much better than that. In fact, that weak title might've been the second strike against this movie.
As for my own works, (namely "Sweet Dreams,") I wish the old fashioned drive in theaters still existed. I can't speak for other states, but in my area they simply vanished. In fact, we still have the parking lot from one that used to exist, and possibly ten years ago the screen was still up at the far end of the lot, but it had been abandoned ages ago.
I'd like to recreate that era of movie going for the eventual first run of "Sweet Dreams," but that is most likely a pipedream.
But there are possibilities - I remember "Cars" was debuted at, of all things, NASCAR, with the use of multiple screens, projection units, and an elaborate audio system. I'm sure we could come up with something similar, and far superior. Just eliminate the hick mentality, find a nice wide open space on a gentle summer evening, and let the experience begin.
It's not as crazy as it seems - every summer, up in Fayetteville, public screenings are held of previously released films up in Gulley Park, I believe. It's always free, and the organizers always tell the population to bring their lawn chairs and anything else they can think of.
As for the General Theory, it's simply that. I'm sure there are more than several exceptions to it to disprove it, but in an interesting paradox, my General Theory believes in those paradoxes and actually goes forth with encouraging them.
See you at the cinema guys and gals, wherever it may be!
