A Bug-Eat-Bug World

 

A Bug’s Life

1998

D: John Lasseter

**********

Pros: Cute Style, Entertaining Enough, Some Humor, Solid Villain

Cons: Some Tiresome Cliches

          As I mentioned before, this movie’s rivalry with Antz was the source of much drama.  As I also mentioned before, I don’t particular care who ripped off whom because A Bug’s Life is clearly the superior movie.  However, like its rival, it benefited largely from the novelty of being one of those new-fangled 3-D animated movies without music.  Ultimately it was a presentable but lackluster entry in Pixar’s filmography.

           Unlike this company’s more imaginative fare, A Bug’s Life adheres to the “[insert classic title here] except with talking animals” genre.  Many have called it “Seven Samurai with Bugs,” but considering that the protagonist mistakenly hired a group of performers who in turn didn’t know that actual hero work was expected of them, it’s really more like a less funny version of ¡Three Amigos! with bugs.  Naturally this misunderstanding results in mutual rejection followed by the dreaded Third Act Mope, which is a rather tedious trope.  I’m not sure if A Bug’s Life was already riding on a cliché, but it might have inspired a slew of Third Act Mopes, which I’m afraid is worse.

           The movie's conflict revolves around an ant colony that’s regularly coerced into paying tribute to a gang of Grasshoppers.  This references Aesop’s fable of The Ant and the Grasshopper and the common stigma of the predatory locust.  The beating of their wings obviously evokes images of marauding motorcycle gangs, although that’s a bit on the nose.  The leader of the grasshoppers, Hopper (Kevin Spacey), is a compelling enough villain.  He’s charismatic and intimidating, and his only inkling of humanity is his sparing of his buffoonish brother Molt (Richard Kind) due to a promise to their dying mother.  He’s even willing to threaten children in a cold-blooded manner.  His high point is when he murders two scoffing henchmen to make a point about the potential the ants have if they had the nerve to resist.  I will add that “Hopper” is a pretty unintimidating name for a villain, unless it’s referring to the Anglo-Saxon surname.

            Problems arise when our quirky outcast hero Flik (Dave Foley) accidentally destroys the ants’ tribute with one of his inventions.  His character type is a cliché that gives the movie another similarity to Antz, and he even ends up with the princess of the colony as a love interest as well.  An enraged Hopper demands twice the food for compensation, which is unwise since he’s already pushing the colony to starvation just to get his share back from the disaster.  Simply murdering Flik on the spot would have been a more effective way to send a message.  Facing the inability to feed the grasshoppers, let alone themselves, the ants send Flik away to retrieve a group of heroes.  Flik finds a colony of other insects (another Antz similarity) and recruits a quirky circus troupe led by P.T. Flea (John Ratzengerger), who is immediately pushed off into the sidelines.

            The troupe consists of a theatrical praying mantis named Manny (Jonathan Harris), a walking stick named Slim (David Hyde Pierce), a gypsy moth named Gypsy (Madeline Kahn), twin Hungarian rollie-pollies named Tuck and Roll (Michael McShane), a black widow named Rosie (Bonnie Hunt), a dim-witted rhinoceros beitle named Dim (Brad Garrett), a ladybug named Francis (Denis Leary).  Francis’s gimmick is that he’s a testy guy who’s constantly annoyed at being mistaken for a female.  I would find a realistic, non-cute faced masculine ladybug more interesting. Finally, there’s a German caterpillar named Heimlich (Joe Ranft), presumably because they wanted a plump jolly German stereotype and because “Heimlich” was apparently the first German would that popped into their heads.  While he is an animal with a human face à la Antz, he’s not off-putting because of his simplified design and lovable, rosy-cheeked plumpness.  In the end he pupates into a butterfly only to come out as a more colorful version of himself with negligibly small wings.  I think it’s just spoiling a good reveal for a silly joke.

             The movie makes good use of voice actors and characters actors, contrasting with Antz’s faddish use of celebrities.  Other cast members include Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Princess Atta (who struggles with the responsibility of being acting queen for practice), Phyllis Diller as the Queen, Roddy McDowall, Edie McClurg, Alex Rocco, David Ossman, Carlos  Alazraqui, Jack Angel, Bob Beren, Kimberly Brown, Rodger Bumpass, Anthony Burch, Jennifer Darling, Rachel Davey, Debi Derryberry, Paul Eiding, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Lee Unkrich, and more. 

            The animation is colorful and the character designs are cute.  My one problem is that when the movie needs to be dark and frightening, the style falls short.  My Little Pony: Frienship is Magic has a similar problem.  This is only really an issue when the songbirds come in.  The animators tried to put us in the bugs’ shoes so that we could find them just as horrifying as they would, with the deafening shriek of their voices and their jerky movements. I do, however respect that they tried to make the effort without cheating.  Don Bluth would have given them fangs, glowing demonic eyes, and…probably horns.  Birds are the only thing Hopper fears, and he ends up being caught by one and fed to its babies.  They could have made those things look gross, as baby bird actually are, but they miss this opportunity by depicting them as adorable, downy chicks.  The movie does, however, do a good job making rain intimidating, realizing that its surface tension can momentarily imprison a bug as well as harming it with its impact.          

              Humor is acceptable.  There are a lot of lame bug puns (especially one in which a mosquito asks for a “Bloody Mary”), but there are some good jokes.  The high point of the movie is the hilariously dark performance put on by the young ants led by Dot (Hayden Panattiere) which makes the circus troupe realize what they’re actually in for, as well as the awkward admission that follows immediately afterward.  There are moderately amusing fake bloopers, a relic of when Pixar didn't take itself seriously enough to reach its full potential.  I don’t particularly remember much about Randy Newman’s score.  Overall A Bug’s Life is a good cartoon for children that’s watchable enough for their parents.  In retrospect in represents a lot of the clichés that we didn’t mind when 3-D cartoons were a new thing.

#NotAllAliens

 

They Live

1988

D: John Carpenter

**********

Pros: Some Style, A Memorable Fight

Cons: Terrible Political Themes, Shallow Strawmen, A Peevish Metajoke, Not Very Entertaining

     I’m generally a fan of John Carpenter's better works.  However, I generally don’t agree the hype that surrounds the one released 30 years ago today.  I’ve already covered Carpenter’s most criminally underrated movie, and now I’m going to discuss his most criminally overrated one.  Whereas Inthe Mouth of Madness is a perfect movie for those of us who shake our heads at the insanity of our current political atmosphere, They Live is a movie for those of us who attack trash receptacles and shout “That wasn’t real socialism” while dressed like Technicolor possums.

       Roddy Piper plays John Nada, a construction worker who has trouble finding a job because he’s a victim of the system.  He meets up with another builder named Frank Armitage (Keith David), and they arrive at a shanty town.  They come in contact with a priest (Raymond St. Jacques) who has been smuggling experimental sunglasses which reveal the true nature of the world.  As it turns out, color is an illusion, and advertisements contain direct subliminal messages spelling out messages like “CONSUME,” “OBEY,” and “REPRODUCE.”  It makes for good meme fodder.

My contribution.

 After a police raid on the rebels, Nada makes off with a pair and begins confronting the hidden aliens that secretly run the world and enslave humanity.  He begins to murder (unlike many online reviewers I do not use the term lightly) multiple ghouls left and right.  It’s pretty disturbing that the movie revels in the type of violence based on the logic of a mass shooter, but Rowdy Roddy Piper does say a LOL-so-random line before slaughtering unarmed people in a bank, so I guess it’s ok.

Picured Above: Heroism.

        What’s disturbing is the extremly dualist treatment of these enemies.  They’re aliens, so all aliens must be evil and therefore shown no mercy (he spares a human police officer).  While Carpenter emphatically denied the alleged Anti-Semitic themes, it’s hard not to read that in a movie in which an oppressive race controls society secretly.  It’s also hard not to see such themes as encouraging the fanaticism I’m seeing from the Left today.  There's also an appeal to Trumpism here, as well.  Forgiving a movie like this is difficult when you observe the hellhole our discourse has become in recent years.  There are problems with society that make us feel helpless, and these problems need to be fixed.  That doesn’t mean we should encourage whatever knee-jerk “solution” that just might make the world an even worse place.  The actions of They Live’s “heroes” could only be justified as pure escapism for a frustrated audience. 

        During his spree he briefly encounters assistant director of a cable network Holly Thompson (Meg Foster).  He later converts Frank after an iconic six-minute fistfight (a representation of “false consciousness?”), and the three embark on a mission to destroy the transmitter that emits the signal that dupes humanity.  They succeed, but not before Holly betrays them and all three die.  The movie ends with humanity's finally seeing the world as it is. 

        The movie is obviously a populist tract.  Despite its obvious appeal to the Left, there is a shot at unions at one point.  While it does tap into legitimate frustration at the difficulties faced in a rather broken and unequal society, its Manichean extremism approach is off-putting to say the least.  I understand the Millennial frustration; we were not well prepared for a more stringent job market.  Still, the outsourcing of jobs has produced a higher quality of living overseas while capitalism in general decreases poverty.  Our generation may just be taking a slight hit for Team Humanity, and should acknowledge it.  Complaining about white privilege doesn’t mean much when you’re complaining about how you’re not cashing in on yours.

        They Live also features human collaborators.  While I understand that collaborating with oppressors is terrible, there’s also a Horseshoe Effect between that and Identity Politics.  Nowadays an ideology’s “owning” demographics to the point where individuals in that group are no longer allowed to form their own opinions is rampant to the point where the Category Traitor has become a poisonous trope in fiction.  A good distinction to tell one extreme from the other is that the traitor sells out for his/her own gain while the idealist stands up for others outside his/her group, even at the expense of being rejected for it.  Cultural support or lack thereof is also an important factor.

         To make things seem even more shallow, Carpenter’s commentary was based on some rather faddish pet peeves, such as Reaganomics.  The black-and-white “reality” was inspired by Ted Turner’s colorization of classic films.  However, the most aesthetically unprofessional moment in the movie is at the end when two film critics, obviously representing Siskel and Ebert, are revealed to be ghouls while complaining about how Carpenter’s (specifically mentioned by name) movies are “too violent.”  It’s understandable because most of his films up to this point were good (The Thing was treated particularly unfairly by critics), but the temptation should have been resisted.  We didn’t let M. Night Shyamalan get away with this in Lady in the Water.  This aesthetic fecklessness would later be seen on a greater scale in Escape from LA, which reduces the dystopia to a farcical parody of the Religious Right.

         Now you’re probably thinking that I’m not being no fun, and I apologize for being didactic while critiquing a didactic film.  In fact, I might find They Live’s themes forgivable if the movie was more, well, fun.  The best way to describe They Live is that it’s everything wrong with The Matrix without any of the style or fun.  I think it’s fair to point out that just because something did it first doesn’t mean it did it better.  In addition to the better visual style and action, it had a more complex depiction of the antagonists.  Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) is oddly relatable because, like most of us, he doesn’t like his job, and his disdain for the humans’ sensory experience is an interesting inversion of this trope.  As much flak as the sequels get, they did address the extreme dualism by eventually treating the Machines sympathetically.  The ghouls in They Live are just strawmen and nothing more.  I’d acknowledge that They Live has a more positive treatment of Christianity, but it’s ambiguous and seemingly at odds with the movie's extremism.

        Still, I have to give credit where it’s due.  The movie clearly took some passion and creativity to make.  There is an interesting mix of Carpenter’s nostalgia for 50’s alien movies and his own contemporary style.  The idea behind the movie is praiseworthy, but the "heroes'" actions ruin it.  This makes the movie a sort of microcosm of The Left: good at identifying problems, but not always good with solutions.  The black and white cinematography is effectively stark and the ghouls look appropriately grotesque in it.  John Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s soundtrack does a good job capturing the tedium and frustration of the status quo but sounds somewhat similar to Ira Newborn’s soundtrack from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.  However, I can’t really give a pass to a movie that enables our most negative reactions while not being fun enough to boot.    

QUOTES

NADA: A long time ago things were different, man. My old daddy took me down to the river, kicked my ass, told me about the power and the glory. I was saved. He changed when I was little. Turned mean and started tearin' at me. So I ran away when I was thirteen. He tried to cut me once. Big old razor blade. Held it up against my throat. I said "Daddy please"... Just kept moving' back and forth... like he was sawin' down a little tree... Maybe they're always been with us... those things out there. Maybe they love it... seeing us hate each other, watching us kill each other off, feeding on our own cold fuckin' hearts...