Terrence Briggs wrote:
>
>>> Congratulations to "Ratatouile":
>>> Wow, I'm impressed with all the nominations this movie has received.
>
>>Oh, it's cute and all, and it's nice to see cooking finally treated as
>>something worthwhile--
>
> Uh...
> Eat Drink Man Woman?
> Like Water For Chocolate?
> Big Night?
> No Reservations? (Ratatouille's live-action competition )
> The Cook, The Thief... eh... maybe not...
Let's just say it was the first time in years...YEARS...I'd seen a
character's interest in cooking (even if non-professionally) treated as
a real obsessive-dream interest, and not as the usual lame Frasier-style
"metrosexual" joke:
When Remy compares cooking to jazz, and every taste is an instrument,
those who were cursed with cooking expertise felt our control-freak
obsessions at long last vindicated--
D'oh, why didn't anyone ever explain it to the laymen like THAT before? :)
>>With all the box-office bashing, I was afraid to say in public that Cars
>>felt like "generic bar-code Pixar",
>
> There is no fear in this dojo, Mr. Treasure Planet :-)
(Hey, you'll never know the hard work and orchestrated tact of PR-spin,
until you try to steer knee-jerk animated-flop discussions back onto the
real world of seasonal-box-office-scheduling pitfalls...Like trying to
put leashes and collars on a dogfight.
Consider that indirectly, if it had never been for Eisner's
theater-pulling "Planet" tantrum teaching studios the value of holding
out for December school vacation, "Alvin & the Chipmunks" would never
have made HALF its box office, six years later. If you want to look for
evil, look there.)
>>but when all of a sudden the rats
>>started saying "Keep moving forward", I felt like somebody had gotten
>>their movies mixed up at the studio.
>>
>>The public liked "Ratatouille", but theory: Is it possible the reason
>>the critics are going excessively and inexplicably wild over it is
>>because we have a nice cuddly ending about the humanity of *critics*??
>
> Not theory, hypothesis. And don't go there, DJ. "There" is surely
> the road to madness.
>
> For example, forget what AO Scott said about Anton Ego ("Ce moi!")...
> Why did the critics like Incredibles so much, then?
Well, that was just it--
Incredibles was cool. Ratatouille was...cute. :/
>>
>>Ask the average mainstream non-fan to name ANY other scene in the movie
>>besides "Spider-pig, spider-pig..."
>
> Ugh. And that one wasn't even funny in the trailers.
Seems to be the only line anyone ever quoted when they explained why
they thought it was funny...
(Gosh, and we were SURE those "President Schwarzenegger" jokes woulda
wowed 'em in Pittsburgh.) 9_9
>>(And when you stop to think that even *that* scene may have found its
>>way into Fox's movie because every other studio with a big flagship
>>movie that summer was throwing pissy schoolyard in-jokes at a certain
>>Sony comic-book movie we all THOUGHT was going to be the unstoppable
>>blockbuster juggernaut of Summer '07...)
>>
>>(kind of a historical relic, now)
(Caught a May rerun of Nicholas Cage on Jay Leno trying to promote
"Next" with a snarky Spidey diss, and...oh, you just have to look back
and laugh. Had we but known.) :)
> Well, like many lame pop-culture references, it also works as all-
> purpose stupidity. In 20 years, people will STILL laugh at stupid
> Homer humor, even if all they can remember is the theme song to the
> 1970s (?) Spiderman TV series.
I'll still raise the banner that Fred Flintstone had sufficient
intelligence of being perfectly capable of saying funny things
INTENTIONALLY.
Let Groening claim any "legacy" he wants, he's still a sham pretender.
Derek Janssen
ejanss1@
verizon.net
