Two Hours a Movie

One of the hazards of writing about, or making a film about, a horrible experience that you never actually experienced yourself is allowing too much of your feelings as an outsider to influence the behaviour of the characters. This is the central flaw in 2013's 12 Years a Slave, a film lauded for its authentic portrayal of slavery that is yet almost exclusively filled with people who would have been abnormal for the time and place. It's nicely but academically shot and features some good though overenthusiastic performances.

I like Michael Fassbender a lot, particularly in the films he's made with Ridley Scott, but in 12 Years a Slave he goes to late career Al Pacino levels of ham as the plantation owner Edwin Epps. A man, we're told, with a reputation for breaking slaves. I suspect the real life counterpart of Epps was not in the habit of constantly putting his arm around a slave's shoulders and laughing or crying.

This is the sort of thing an actor does when he gets carried away, though, and director Steve McQueen, whose film Shame delivered a no-holds-barred performance from Fassbender as a self-loathing sex addict, is the sort of director who would encourage this kind of performance from an actor.

12 Years a Slave is based on a real, 1853 slave narrative by Solomon Northup, a free man who was kidnapped and forced into slavery for twelve years. Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Northup who was a musician, an artist, which may be the justification for the ease with which Ejiofor portrays Northup expressing his anguish. I haven't read Northup's book but one of the important things I've noticed in the slave narratives I have read is how they render the normalcy of society built around the institution of slavery. The amazing thing about Frederick Douglass' accounts is that he possessed the imagination required to break his perceptions out of the reality imposed on slaves for them to dwell in throughout their lives. He recognised that the crime of slavery was bigger than the extravagant acts of violence like whipping or even the gruelling physical labour. It was a system that repressed even the cognisance in the slaves of the rights they were being denied.

We don't get to know any slaves like that in Steve McQueen's film. All the slaves Northup interacts with seem like people from 2013 who were pulled back in time and put in slavery. Every one of them seems shocked at the basic injustices of the system that had been in place for hundreds of years. There are slaves in the background who seem like they might have been born into the life but Northup, for all the time he spends with them, never once has a dialogue that shows the differences in world perception between someone who grew up free and someone who grew up a slave.

Benedict Cumberbatch as William Ford, the first plantation owner to whom Northup is sold, gives one of the few restrained performances in the film but unfortunately he's not in the movie for very long. Most of the performances in the film, like McQueen's direction, seem too caught up in feelings about the thesis to present the argument or the story.

Like I said, the film is nicely shot, with some lovely shots of Louisiana wilderness. But there is a distracting cleanliness to it. Something Terry Gilliam is fond of complaining about in period films is present here--everyone has perfect teeth.

Everyone has better teeth than the average adult to-day. Certainly better than my teeth. Applying a little discolouration doesn't seem like it would have been difficult.

Aside from whip scars, everyone has perfect skin, clothes rarely have stains, the floors and walls are usually spotless. It's like the JC Penney catalogue version of the old South.

Apparently two Academy voters have anonymously admitted they voted for 12 Years a Slave for Best Picture without actually seeing the film. That's just the two who admitted it--I'm not sure I'd blame it on the particular content of the film. I suspect this sort of thing happens quite a lot, it's hardly a revelation at this point to say the Oscar voting is primarily motivated by politics. But I can almost guarantee you at least twice as many voters saw Django Unchained.

In interviews, Steve McQueen has mentioned more than once, "The second world war lasted five years and there are hundreds and hundreds of films about the second world war and the Holocaust. Slavery lasted 400 years and there are less than 20. We have to redress that balance and look at that time in history."

Well, that was exactly the line on Django Unchained, both from Tarantino and his detractors, like Spike Lee, in discussing the film. Germany constantly has to face the Holocaust in film but the U.S. almost never has to face the reality of slavery as it existed in the U.S.

Somewhere in the political superbrain, Hollywood said, "Oh, shit, we need a Django Unchained that isn't weird." And so 12 Years a Slave happened. Mind you, it may have been somewhere in the pipeline before Django. But there are thousands of films in the pipeline that have no chance of ever getting made. 12 Years a Slave owes its existence, and its Oscar, to Tarantino's film.

Bird Food

Here's a dove Tim and I saw at the mall yesterday in a nest on the sign for Shakey's Pizza.

And here's one of the two or three ravens I saw early on Friday getting the worms.

And I mean literally, for some reason there were earthworms wriggling up from the grass. Maybe it's because I'm not used to getting up early--worms actually do this? I actually got to school very early on Friday and so watched the ravens leisurely picking through their buffet. I wish I'd gotten more pictures.

I had French fries at the mall, not pizza. The best potato I'd had in weeks--for some reason all the grocery stores have been selling lately have been really disgusting, green, sprouting potatoes. Last night I made turnip fries which turned out rather delicious.

Twitter Sonnet #608

Frost gathers on a spider basket now.
No city told how the wan bak'ry broke.
Thin blankets hid the big camouflaged plough.
One midnight will relent the final stroke.
Hard headphone shells pinned to the bow draw blood.
Slim afterburn cables pinch the broke cloud.
Shoots infiltrate the neighbouring stock bud.
Old peelers squeak and scratch the turnip shroud.
A cesspool stenography course taught scratch.
Free flowers for the yakuza soon slept.
Another cop sleeps by a pumpkin patch.
A popsicle key goes where guns are kept.
Clean postcards of disaster slide through gold.
Tears vaporised fall as vague stories told.

The Brain's Clock May Rust

What does a dying man really need escape from? Time? Jakub is dead in his home country but his body is in a place where time endlessly loops and he lives. Or at least, his life occurs, kind of all at once. Or perhaps it's the life of his son. 1973's Sanatorium pod klepsydra (The Hourglass Sanatorium or The Sandglass) is a beautiful, ghoulish, and fascinating film about the human soul stripped bare by an unnatural state of time.

The film begins in a dark train car filled with people who barely seem alive. Several of the women sit with their blouses open. A blind conductor (Mieczyslaw Voit) tells the protagonist, Jozef (Jan Nowicki), that they are nearly arrived at the sanatorium where his father, Jakub (Tadeusz Kondrat), is staying.

Even before reaching the place, things seem dreamlike and fantastic. It's possible everything we see, including his father, are aspects of Jozef's psyche. He finds the sanatorium apparently deserted and crumbling. The first person he meets is a nurse whose blouse is open.

Almost every woman he comes across in the film has exposed breasts and every woman only sometimes seems aware of it as though the breasts are more a reflection of the heterosexual man's thoughts rather than something that occurs external to him.

The nurse tells him everyone sleeps in the sanatorium but she finally takes him to the doctor who shows him what appears to be the corpse of his father.

But as Jozef wanders the house over the course of the film, he does encounter his father apparently alive, occupied with various activities.

Jammed together with their subconscious relationships revealed by the surreal nature of the film are manifestations of death, money, war, race, sex, and government. When Josef encounters a room of dancing Hasidic Jews, he ponders heaven as being the place at the end of the ladder. He and several men in the room climb the ladder to kiss the window of a woman's bedroom, Adela's (Halina Kowalska). She's half naked and pulls a reluctant Jozef into the room, laughing about how she turns men red.

She gives him a fireman's helmet and a pile of newspapers, telling him how she wraps his father's meat in the papers. Jozef later, usually unsuccessfully, tries to convince everyone he meets that the papers hold the "source", the secret to life. He seems to use them as money.

Adela is the sexually mature, lusty woman. Later, Jozef encounters the "infanta", Bianka (Bozena Adamek), who lives in a wax museum and seems to be his idea of appealing female innocence. Though she, too, turns out to be another manifestation of his own lusts, of course.

But she's introduced in a scene where he peeps through a hole in her garden gate and sees her motionless mother in the distance. About her mother, Bianka tells him a story about how she's watched by a perpetual traveller with long legs.

The small opening through which he hears her tell this story perhaps reflects the tiny space through which another person's perceptions and interests can enter Jozef's own crowded reality.

A lot of the movie seems to deal with the difficulty of immigrants dealing with life in a foreign land, perhaps Polish Jews adjusting to life in the U.S. after fleeing during World War II. Jakub talks about how he runs a business out of a stall that would have been beneath his dignity back home but that no-one respects even established merchants here. In one scene, Jozef tries to convince his father that he's mad when Jakub and several other men seem excited to have a tablecloth filled with maggots. An image like that seems to imply a concentration camp. Jakub as both the immigrant and the man in captivity seems perhaps to be an embodiment of an old Poland.

At other times, Jakub tries to instruct a child-like Jozef on the importance of memorising the names of various exotic birds. Meanwhile, Jakub isn't impressed by the papers Jozef got from Adela--there is a continual conflict present between the institutional and the sexual even as one seems to have been created by the other. In this way, the film loops with its themes much as the way time seems to be looped for Jakub or Jozef.

The Kittens and Guns of Christ

How much responsibility should one feel for others? How much should you allow yourself to be pushed before you hurt the one causing you pain? Luis Bunuel's 1956 film Cela s'appelle l'aurore (This is Called Dawn), like most of his films, is critical of the upper class but this film isn't as surreal as his best known works and specifically examines the relationship between the ruling and working classes. It thoughtfully explores the damage one class can cause to the other by following self-interests and the harm that can be done to oneself by ignoring one's own interests. It's an effective film, humanising broadly political topics. And it's filled with kittens.

In one of the first shots, Angela (Nelly Borgeaud), wife of the wealthy protagonist of the film, Doctor Valerio (Georges Marchal), seems slightly repulsed by the sight of a small child watching kittens feeding on a dead fish. She doesn't like living in the poor town in the south of France though her husband displays an inexhaustible commitment to caring for the locals. Finally he agrees to move with her to Nice as soon as he can find another doctor to replace him--which seems to be almost impossible. In the meantime, he sends Angela on vacation and she's absent for most of the film.

Choosing a doctor as a protagonist, a wealthy one who cares for the poor, seems like it may be an attempt to create a moral authority, someone who stands apart from the sides of the conflict but with vested interests in both. But it's not that simple. The central problem of the film involves the rich owner of a vineyard, Gorzone (Jean-Jacques Delbo), firing the caretaker of his vineyard, Sandro (Giani Esposito), because Sandro neglects his duties in order to care for his sick wife, Magda (Brigitte Elloy).

Valerio becomes a vehement ally of Sandro but his sympathy for the man is explicitly connected to Valerio's love for Clara (Lucia Bose), a wealthy widow whom he meets when he's called to care for a small child who was raped by her grandfather.

Valerio and Clara fall deeply in love but both are reluctant to cause pain to Angela. Perhaps it's no wonder when they're surrounded by the damage caused by insensitive people taking what they want though it's an important point that the man who raped his granddaughter was poor. Valerio's loyalty Sandro may be founded more on an impression of Sandro's love for Magda putting him at odds with society, much as Valerio's love for Clara runs against custom. The aristocratic Angela and her disgust for the impoverished town is not terribly different from Gorzone.

And again and again in this movie we see kittens. What do they mean? They're certainly linked to the working class. They could imply helplessness, creatures inspiring others to care for them. Yet in one striking scene, a poor man holds a gun in one hand a kitten in the other. Perhaps it's that kittens are both loveable and chiefly concerned with their own interests.

This bizarre picture of Christ, which seems as though it might be at home in one of Bunuel's collaborations with Salvador Dali, hangs in Valerio's home. When one of the vineyard hands, shocked, asks Valerio about it, Valerio explains that he got it in Italy during the war. When the poor man says he feels the painting is too extreme, Valerio tells him, "You just don't understand the beauty of war." Valerio isn't really a part of the lives of the townspeople--their suffering compels him on a private, aesthetic level.

Bunuel's portrayal of Gorzone is of a man grotesquely short-sighted. He flirts with Valerio's nurse, telling her she's too pretty to be caring for sick people. He doesn't understand why Sandro can't get someone else to take care of Magda and uses this to justify firing Sandro. But one could easily argue the working class rapist is worse.

This is close to Bunuel's statement with his later film Viridiana, a film which makes this statement much more strongly. But Cela s'appelle l'aurore does effectively portray the uniquely human demon and the failure of attempts to tame it with money or institutions.

The Emperor of Pizza

After I took a test in my health class to-day about nutrition and calories and proper diet, I treated myself to possibly the greasiest lunch I've had in twenty years at Napoleone's Pizza.

The picture above is from when I went there a few months ago on a day when the place was closed--I didn't take any pictures to-day. I felt too many surly eyes on me from the patrons who were more appropriate for the very place where a teenage Tom Waits pushed a broom in the 60s than I'd expected. When my sister told me the place was listed among trendy spots in a magazine, because Waits had worked there, I expected it to be filled with college aged hipsters. Maybe it was because I was there before noon but the only people I saw were a glum, attractive young couple (man and woman) in military fatigues in a booth, three quiet over-50 cops, and a couple of old men whose discussion about the music industry soon distracted me from reading the Nibelungenlied in my booth.

"My daughter told me this Lady Gaga," said one. "She isn't just one of them pop stars. She writes her own songs. She's not like one of them pop stars like they have every year. You know."

The other one started talking about a "producer who always put himself in the artist's shoes. They all loved him. If David Bowie wanted three hundred doves to fly out of the stage he made it happen. Didn't ask questions. And he'd get artists bookings they'd never have had before. Lady Gaga, he got her playing in Barcelona and Rio De . . . Rio Deja Nero."

Napoleone's eating area is divided by a wall. On my right hand as I walked in all I saw was a deserted room with long tables with empty white table clothes. On the left was the sparsely crowded room with tables and cheap red upholstered booths. Most of the light was coming in from the windows and I could barely make out a couple cooks standing behind a kitchen bar in the back. "You dining in?" a short, middle aged red headed waitress asked me but I was seated by a slightly heavy blonde middle aged waitress with too much makeup. No-one working there looked under 50.

The menu was a folded piece of brown paper that said the place was opened in 1958. I ordered a ten inch vegetarian pizza and waited about ten minutes for it. "Pizza time," said the waitress when she brought it out. It was good--I generally like a thicker crust but while this was thin it was still fluffier than the cracker crusts that seem to be popular nowadays. It was light on the green bell peppers and had a lot of black olives which is just how I like it.

Twitter Sonnet #607

The dog-eared furnace gulps a hard scraped fist.
White broken wrists twine across five leg bets.
Gold bullets stain a burnt and ancient list.
False collars hook arms as appetite whets.
Thumb jigsaw carpet patterns touch the sole.
Brain wrinkles clutch minds in an arabesque.
Straw feeding the broth brooks no gentry goal.
Red acid drizzles on the doughnut-esque.
A beaded net adorns the blinded catch.
Blue keystones lock prohibitive arches.
The recycled foil holds a weak Fetch.
Clean announcers cavort in the larches.
Time arrives in chiaroscuro sauce.
The folding desk slips closed on a floor gloss.

Bloodthirsty Christians and a Polish Beaver

Here's a movie I can't imagine has ever been very popular in Germany--1960's Krzyzacy (The Teutonic Knights) concocts a fantasy around one of the many wars between Poland and the Teutonic Knights, in this case the war where the Christian military order was permanently crippled in the Battle of Grunwald, one of the largest battles of the mediaeval era. Over 15,000 extras were employed in a decent depiction of the battle but most of the movie concerns a more romantic, fictional story of a young nobleman and his attempts to rescue his beloved from the hands of the Teutonic Knights. The characters are charming if somewhat broadly performed and written--the film's greatest virtue is in some beautiful visual compositions.

Shot in colour, the lighting for interiors is often bright but with a great deal more shadows than the Hollywood colour film of the time which typically attempted to obliterate shadows entirely, regardless of whether or not it made sense.

Whites in Krzyzacy tend to have a faint blue light giving everything a sort of otherworldly iciness. This is contrasted with a lot of muted reds, like the bricks of castles and the linings of the knights' cloaks.

Filmed just over a decade after the end of World War II, the film seems to be a Polish rallying cry against the Germans. It plays like propaganda--its heroes so absolutely good and the villains, the Teutonic Knights, invariably evil. Except one, the aged head of the order who appears in just one scene and urges his brethren not to go to war with Poland (again) because, "Christ converted with a word not a sword." But then he dies apparently from being frightened by a rather disturbing looking Fool at a banquet.

If you search for "Polish-Teutonic War" in Wikipedia, you end up at this page asking you which of the nine Polish-Teutonic Wars you might be referring to--all of them took place between 1308 and 1521. The one Krzyzacy is concerned with began in 1409 and is distinguished by an alliance between Poland and Lithuania cemented by a Polish Duke marring a Lithuanian Duchess, these two being minor characters in the film.

It's the Duchess Anna Danuta (Lucyna Winnicka) who seems more sympathetic to the protagonist, Zbyszko (Mieczyslaw Kalenik), possibly because the woman Zbyszko is in love with, Danusia (Grazyna Staniszewska), was lady-in-waiting to the Duchess. The Duke (Tadeusz Bialoszczynski) seems reluctant to believe plot points of the knights kidnapping Danusia or murdering officials for some reason. It seems unlikely given the apparently perpetual two century animosity but this gives our young hero an obstacle.

The movie begins with the knights sacking the town ruled by Danusia's father, Count Jurand (Andrzej Szalawski), and murdering Danusia's mother by putting a rope around her neck and dragging her from horseback. The violence in the film isn't usually very convincing but sometimes the frequent use of dummies is actually effective. When the Count goes to the Teutonic castle to try to retrieve his daughter he faces a council after being relieved of his weapons. When it looks like he's not going to get anywhere through talk, he picks up a nearby knight and throws him at the council, a genuinely badass moment that gets off the action sequence that follows to a nice enough start you don't quite notice the too slow choreography and guys falling dead from swords clearly not hitting their marks.

Danusia spends most of the film held captive so Zbyszko finds another love interest in Jagienka (Urszula Modrzynka), a canny huntress who works with him to track bears for their fat which they needs as a salve for Zbyszko's wounded uncle.

After not having any luck finding bears, Jagienka says beaver fat might work too. She kills one and sneaks off to disrobe before swimming to retrieve the beaver's body. And that's how we get this image:

So it's a naked woman with a beaver. I think I'd better stop there.

The Magic is Barley

Tim spotted this doorway outside the Macy's when he and I were at the mall yesterday. Doesn't it conjure the optimism and wonder of working in retail? It looks more like, "To-day, the magic will swallow me."

In the evening, I went to my parents' house and had dinner with them and my sister. They were having some kind of beef thing so I got the vegetarian plate from the nearby Greek restaurant and drank Jameson while we watched The Quiet Man.

I had three glasses of Jameson--not full glasses, I'd say 1.5 fluid ounces each, or one "jigger", a term I just learned from Nutrition Value.org, a site I need to use for my health class homework. One of the few interesting things to come out of the class.

Looks like I consumed 45.3 grams of alcohol last night. Except Jameson's 80 proof, not 86 proof like the only example of "whiskey" on the web site. Considering Bourbon whiskey is made from corn and Irish and Scotch whisky are made from barley you'd think that would make some difference in nutrition information.

Anyway, no fat or cholesterol from "whiskey", so that's nice.

Though in class to-day the teacher told everyone that alcohol is addictive. Did you know that? She also told us addiction, physical and psychological, was characterised by compulsive consumption. This class. If I were to liken an alcohol to water percentage to a interesting information to common knowledge percentage I'd say this class is about 95% water.

Here's a bee I saw at school this morning:

Two Sides to Every Straw

An article at io9 a few days ago called "A Strong Contender for Weirdest and Most Subversive 80s Movie" is about 1989's Split. Based on that article alone I figured it was a movie I had to see. Now that I have seen it I would say, no, it's not a strong contender for weirdest or most subversive. It's good, though, it's entertaining and at times wonderfully sweet. It feels a bit like a cross between Terry Gilliam's Brazil and late 1980s Doctor Who--both of which are significantly weirder and more subversive.

Split follows a guy named Starker (Timothy Dwight) who's somehow gotten wise to the fact that he, along with everyone else in the country, possibly the world, is being watched by a secret organisation. They build profiles on everyone based on recorded visits to the supermarket but Starker has thus far eluded their databanks by wearing a variety of disguising and eating only from dumpsters and occasionally diners.

The concept here seems to be, "What if a common paranoid fantasy of homeless people turned out to be true?"

He meets an artist when he wanders into an exhibition for the artist's work to steal hors d'oeuvres. Intrigued by Starker, the artist takes him home where Starker tells him about his plot to release a placebo into the city's water supply while spreading the rumour that it will heighten everyone's sense of individuality and awareness of the universe. The artist scoffs but then has an hallucinatory journey through a seaside cave that turns into a naked woman who almost gives him a stone.

So I really loved this movie's attitude.

My favourite scene, though, is where Starker goes home with a waitress called Susan (Joan Bechtel) who tells him she has a husband called Jack. She's hesitant to bring the seemingly crazy man home but for some reason she relents after he pleads with her, telling her people are watching and following him and he needs to lay low for a while.

It turns out that there is no Jack, he's a sort of security blanket Susan has dreamed up to deal with her otherwise crippling fear of life. She and Starker bond over their feeling of overwhelming, constant terror which makes them both seem curiously nonchalant.

There's something real, insightfully human about the way they connect.

And the movie's very funny with a lot of clever lines. I liked how, just before they have sex, Susan asks Starker, "Have you read The Joy of Sex?" He says, "No," and she says, "Good."

I wouldn't say the movie comes even close to being subversive, though, beyond the subversion that comes naturally with any good piece of art. I think most of us agree the individual should have more freedom than granted by the all-seeing evil organisation shown in the film but the movie doesn't make any particular argument to that point beyond simply bringing up the topic. Certainly it's not as articulate on the subject, or as weird, as Brazil or almost all of David Cronenberg's movies from the decade. But it's a good movie.

. . .

Happy Saint Patrick's Day, folks.

Twitter Sonnet #606

Marble tests array across a dry beach.
A plastic curtain smiles at the eye.
Curious coral scrapes the out of reach.
Bald, cancerous tigers hunt for the lie.
A tapered fan clutched the wind for a time.
The dehydrated compass man points north.
The ancient bubble gum was sold as slime.
It coats the river bottom by Thief's Berth.
The cold clover shades the upturned barrow.
Similar men stand sentinel in spring.
Cracked fingernails scrape gold from the marrow.
Pilloried skeletons at sunset sing.
Green Face watched the unwary traveller.
The bull's dry leather honed the leveller.

The Cooked Nutrients

My most experimental dinner yet--clockwise from the top; steamed broccoli and cabbage, roasted daikon, and baked turnip. I roasted the daikon in extra virgin olive oil with rosemary for around 40 minutes at 450 degrees, turning them over once halfway through. They were really good, succulent. I baked the turnip at the same time in the oven, wrapped in foil, but I left it in twenty minutes longer. I'd read online to bake turnip at 400 degrees and roast daikon at the same temperature but I'm learning my oven, perhaps because it's electric, seems to want an extra 50 degrees to do any job. The turnip came out well, nice and soft. I added fake butter and some basil and oregano.

With Saint Patrick's Day coming up, shouldn't I be eating potato with my cabbage? Well, no one in Ireland heard of a potato when Saint Patrick was alive in the fifth century--the potato came over from the New World. But they did have turnips. I love eating like it's the Dark Ages sometimes.

While eating it, I watched the season finale of Breaking Bad's third season, an improvement over the second season finale which was more focused on plot turns than character. The third season sagged a bit in the middle due to artificial manipulations of character but I liked how the final arc of the season carried forward the creator Vince Gilligan's idea of a "from Mr. Chips to Scarface" character.

The finale begins with a flashback to Walter and his wife moving into the house familiar to us as their home from the series. The contrast between the brilliant chemist with the promising future and the increasingly ruthless meth cook is nice. Not just for the contrast but in how the rosy future young Walter saw for himself motivated his thirst for power later.

In this, as an indictment of capitalism which fosters dreams of conquest in men, I see the show at its finest. Though I think the real reason so many people root for Walter even though he's a "bad guy" is that circumstances on the show rearrange things so that Walter really isn't that bad. Everyone he's hurt so far has either been someone who's been trying to kill him or, like his wife, has been emotionally hurt by the unexamined hollowness of their relationship manifesting in unrealistic expectations and inability to empathise. The third season finale is the first time Walter's in a position to intentionally hurt someone, Gale, who really doesn't deserve it. The show seems like it might be backing away from it--it ends with a cliffhanger.

In a way, Walter White is like Batman--people say that what distinguishes Batman from other superheroes is that Batman doesn't have super powers. But that's not really true, Batman just doesn't have explicit super powers. What Batman has is the power of the writers wanting him to live so they stretch the truth far past probability.

Walter White lives in a similar fantasy world where becoming a gang lord is more of a taboo than something that genuinely requires someone to compromise their morals.

Regressive Mutation

Reading io9 this morning, I found myself watching a whole episode of the newest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, which is called simply TMNT because to-day's youth with their short attention spans haven't the patience to take in the full majesty of the title Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I watched because the io9 article mentioned the episode features the characters going to an alternate dimension where they encounter their 1980s counterparts from the original animated series.

The visual style of the old series is faithfully emulated for these scenes except for the fact that it's not completely lousy. Voices don't occasionally come out of the wrong characters and the characters aren't bound by over recycled animation cells with numerous visible painting errors.

The new show is very badly written, filled with stupid jokes and stapled to limp plotting. But it was better written than the old series.

I sure liked Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when I was a kid. It's hard to say why. Well, maybe it's one of those things you have to be a kid to understand. I think a lot of the appeal it had for children was that adults didn't understand it, and a kid could vaguely identify with being this weird mutant thing that likes pizza.

This is why the reboots will never work, of course. I found myself thinking it would be kind of interesting if someone made a rated R Turtles. I know I'm not the first to imagine this. But I don't mean just Ninja Turtles with sex and violence. I mean Turtles who share extensive knowledge of the New York sewer system featuring realistic portrayals of accidents revolving around sewer gases, encounters with dying and drunken homeless people. A Donatello whose technical knowledge is as intensely realistic and researched as an Isaac Asimov story, an adherence to historically authentic ninja codes, a Michelangelo who has a vast bong collection and a laid back, zen attitude when talking to a woman whose children have just been massacred by Shredder. A Leonardo who's faced with having to allow some buildings in New York to collapse on his friends and kill them so that he can get some people to a shelter which also collapses and kills them. A cynical, bruised Raphael with a liver problem who contributes to WikiLeaks. Maybe that's what my generation needs.