c7_assassin
3rd Level Black Feather
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Wolverine: Japolectric Boogaloo is now one of the few films which have caused me to get up and walk out of the theatre. I did not come into this film determined to hate this movie, but boy did it get me there.
Objection 1: Wolverine does not belong in Japan. Wolverine is a hirsute Canadian hick with claws and a wild haricut. His name is wolverine, which is a member of the weasel family native to the far north. He smokes, eats red meat, and drinks whiskey. He is a man without a past. In other words, he has nothing in common, nor of a familiar nature, with Japanese culture. I don’t understand the impulse we have to put him there… yet if all six films (so far) are to be taken as canon, this is at least the third time he has visited the place… so is it weird that he doesn’t speak a word of the language? Actually no, because Wolverine’s character is a gruff and uncultured outcast, a man at war with all social conventions and largely at odds with society itself... Japan is kind of literally the last place he would ever make a home. Is this the root of our impulse to put him there? Well, that’s a shifty answer, because…
Objection 2: Japophilic retconning of World War II. So, Wolverine was actually a prisoner of Japan the first (apparently) time he was there… and it appears he was being held in subhuman, torturous conditions in some kind of concentration camp. (He was in a chained-up pit; there was no way to even feed him.) Yet, when the heroic Japanese officer (?) sees the Nagasaki bombers coming in and heroically frees all the Allied prisoners (??), Wolverine’s first instinct is to save this man, (who has been at the very least complicit in his torture for who-knows how many years, and indirectly responsible for who-knows how many of his comrades’ deaths as a matter of the barbaric policy of the Japanese government) from the hellish and undeserved fire rained down from above by the white devil. (??????)
Objection 3: Seriously, Concentrate on that one a little more. What would we say about a film where some prisoner in a German death camp saved and formed a lasting bond with one of his Nazi torturers, later returning to Der Fatherland to stave off some kind of disaster at his behest? Would it be acceptable to just not talk about what was going on at the time or pretend that everything was made kosher because we saw the Nazi officer freeing some Jews beforehand?
Objection 4: I literally feared for my sanity. There was exactly one genuinely enjoyable action scene in this ostensible action movie… I’m not talking about the ball-numbing ‘action’ of shaky-cam-jiu-jitsu which we’ve come to expect of studio-produced crowd-pleasing violence-films. At one point, Wolverine takes on his opponents atop a speeding bullet-train; the speed, the wind, the overhanging obstacles, the fact that none of them should even be up there turn the battle into a desperate, high-stakes physical chess match into which the audience can giddily project itself; this is action as done by creative people. Everything else… nothing. By the terminus (I assume… I hope… I pray…) of the second act, there had been so much nothing-dialogue, so much pointless going-nowhere plotting, so much filling-out-the-running-time throwaway scenes that I was beginning to worry that I had entered a quantum sand-trap where the movie would simply never end… it would only get more and more boring until all the particles in the room slowed to zero.
So, as Logan sensuously stroked the cheek of the ostensible ‘love-interest’ while talking about god-knows what (and if he can’t heal anymore why didn’t he die from taking a shotgun blast to the friggn’ stomach or any of the life-ending injuries he’s been dealt in the last hour… is the definition of ‘basic, ordinary human’ now John McClane in Die Hard 5?), I got up, verbally noted ‘Fuck this,’ and walked out.
To anyone who made it through: feel free to tell me that I judge too harshly… but please explain to me why. (And please explain the computer-generated anime-caricature who was supposed to be helping Logan… I just found the computer animation to be so awkward, and her face to be so indefinably wrong that it pulled me out of the movie. Can somebody please explain this? Was that really a robot? Anybody?)
<a href="http://s932.photobucket.com/user/j_gallag/media/movies_the-wolverine_rila-fukushima2.jpg.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://i932.photobucket.com/albums/ad163/j_gallag/movies_the-wolverine_rila-fukushima2.jpg" border="0" alt=" photo movies_the-wolverine_rila-fukushima2.jpg"/></a>
Objection 1: Wolverine does not belong in Japan. Wolverine is a hirsute Canadian hick with claws and a wild haricut. His name is wolverine, which is a member of the weasel family native to the far north. He smokes, eats red meat, and drinks whiskey. He is a man without a past. In other words, he has nothing in common, nor of a familiar nature, with Japanese culture. I don’t understand the impulse we have to put him there… yet if all six films (so far) are to be taken as canon, this is at least the third time he has visited the place… so is it weird that he doesn’t speak a word of the language? Actually no, because Wolverine’s character is a gruff and uncultured outcast, a man at war with all social conventions and largely at odds with society itself... Japan is kind of literally the last place he would ever make a home. Is this the root of our impulse to put him there? Well, that’s a shifty answer, because…
Objection 2: Japophilic retconning of World War II. So, Wolverine was actually a prisoner of Japan the first (apparently) time he was there… and it appears he was being held in subhuman, torturous conditions in some kind of concentration camp. (He was in a chained-up pit; there was no way to even feed him.) Yet, when the heroic Japanese officer (?) sees the Nagasaki bombers coming in and heroically frees all the Allied prisoners (??), Wolverine’s first instinct is to save this man, (who has been at the very least complicit in his torture for who-knows how many years, and indirectly responsible for who-knows how many of his comrades’ deaths as a matter of the barbaric policy of the Japanese government) from the hellish and undeserved fire rained down from above by the white devil. (??????)
Objection 3: Seriously, Concentrate on that one a little more. What would we say about a film where some prisoner in a German death camp saved and formed a lasting bond with one of his Nazi torturers, later returning to Der Fatherland to stave off some kind of disaster at his behest? Would it be acceptable to just not talk about what was going on at the time or pretend that everything was made kosher because we saw the Nazi officer freeing some Jews beforehand?
Objection 4: I literally feared for my sanity. There was exactly one genuinely enjoyable action scene in this ostensible action movie… I’m not talking about the ball-numbing ‘action’ of shaky-cam-jiu-jitsu which we’ve come to expect of studio-produced crowd-pleasing violence-films. At one point, Wolverine takes on his opponents atop a speeding bullet-train; the speed, the wind, the overhanging obstacles, the fact that none of them should even be up there turn the battle into a desperate, high-stakes physical chess match into which the audience can giddily project itself; this is action as done by creative people. Everything else… nothing. By the terminus (I assume… I hope… I pray…) of the second act, there had been so much nothing-dialogue, so much pointless going-nowhere plotting, so much filling-out-the-running-time throwaway scenes that I was beginning to worry that I had entered a quantum sand-trap where the movie would simply never end… it would only get more and more boring until all the particles in the room slowed to zero.
So, as Logan sensuously stroked the cheek of the ostensible ‘love-interest’ while talking about god-knows what (and if he can’t heal anymore why didn’t he die from taking a shotgun blast to the friggn’ stomach or any of the life-ending injuries he’s been dealt in the last hour… is the definition of ‘basic, ordinary human’ now John McClane in Die Hard 5?), I got up, verbally noted ‘Fuck this,’ and walked out.
To anyone who made it through: feel free to tell me that I judge too harshly… but please explain to me why. (And please explain the computer-generated anime-caricature who was supposed to be helping Logan… I just found the computer animation to be so awkward, and her face to be so indefinably wrong that it pulled me out of the movie. Can somebody please explain this? Was that really a robot? Anybody?)
<a href="http://s932.photobucket.com/user/j_gallag/media/movies_the-wolverine_rila-fukushima2.jpg.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://i932.photobucket.com/albums/ad163/j_gallag/movies_the-wolverine_rila-fukushima2.jpg" border="0" alt=" photo movies_the-wolverine_rila-fukushima2.jpg"/></a>
