2013 Summer Blockbuster: Imploding in on itself?

by Christopher Barr

Filmmaker Steven Spielberg at a panel at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, along with his long-time friend and filmmaking collaborator, George Lucas, spoke on the future of film at the cinema, “There’s eventually going to be a big meltdown, there’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen of these mega-budgeted movies go crashing into the ground and that’s going to change the paradigm again.”

Spielberg said this early in the year and now we see a number of big ‘event’ movies crash and burn at the box office like; After Earth, The Lone Ranger (which lost a whopping $141,100,000), R.I.P.D and White House Down, all bad to horribly bad movies respectively.

This summer movie season, I think has, for the most part, been uneventful.  There have been a couple of highlights but for the most part, forgettable.  Starting the season off was Iron Man 3; this movie was pretty good but that’s about it.  The action was fun and Robert Downey Jr. is always enjoyable to watch.  Essentially the first two Iron Man films were about Tony Stark finding Iron Man, then becoming, then living with the fame and in some cases, misfortune of being Iron Man.  But the third one went the other way; it was about Iron Man finding Tony Stark.  It was also about turning a beloved comic book villain into a farce for cinematic laughs.  Over a billion dollars later, look out Joker, you may end up being the Riddler disguised as the Joker to misdirect Batman in the up and coming Superman sequel.
 
Star Trek Into Darkness was an adequate sequel.  Len flares anyone?  It was fun and adventurous and had a boring villain.  Too bad the Klingons weren’t able to stick around longer.  But overall the movie was enjoyable popcorn fun.   

The Great Gatsby was all style and no substance, which is shocking.  Not really.  The filmmakers clearly didn’t actually read the book.   I am a fan of Leonardo DiCaprio in spite of his performances being all too similar, but even he couldn’t save this mess.  Jay-Z is in the house!

The Fast in the Furious 6 is one of my guilty pleasures of the summer.  Sure they all weren’t superheroes but tried to behave as if they were, defying the laws of physics.  But as a street racing turn heist franchise, they keep getting better.  And I dare you to find a better, after credits scene this summer, than the one at the end of this glossy bromance flick.

Like The Hangover Part 2, Part 3 just fell flat, losing every bit of charm Part 1 had.  These sequels try, or in a lot of cases don’t try, (shame on you Part 2) to recapture the magic of the first film.  But unless you are The Empire Strikes Back or in recent years, The Dark Knight, good luck trying.  This franchise should have never been made, leaving the first film unharmed from the history of great comedies.  Unlike The Dark Knight trilogy, The Hangover Trilogy was simply a way to make more money, that’s it.  TDK Trilogy along with The Bourne Trilogy, made loads of money, but both sets of films maintained a high level of quality in their respective productions from the ground up.

After Earth was boring and I don’t really get bored.  That’s how boring this ‘Smith dynasty’ movie was.  And I wasn’t the only one; Will Smith looked bored to tears, cooped up in that crashed ship for over half of the film, - run, Jaden, run.  At least in last summer’s Men and Black 3 he looked like he was actually having fun, along with all his cast mates.  M. Night, please stop making movies.  It’s not funny anymore.

This is the End was a much needed relief from a movie season starting out on the rocks.  This movie was funny as hell with one of the great cameos of the year thanks to Michael Cera.  The Backstreet Boys thing at the end was the only downer for a movie that had a great concept, and some pretty hilarious bromance scenes between these long time acting buddies.

Man of Steel was exciting and I did like the costume, even without the shorts.  Now who’s having the bromance?  I found that this flick started out damn good but ended like a sledgehammer to the face, which isn’t always a bad thing if you are a sadist but I would have liked a much more calming conclusion, or at least less relentless.  Maybe I’m just getting old, who knows.

World War Z was one of the blockbuster highlights for me this summer.  I enjoyed the story, the action and the special effects, but also the characters, which is often hard to flesh out in big blockbuster movies.  I’m looking up at you Man of Steel.  Brad Pitt did some pretty good work here, obviously come awards season, this movie will be nowhere to be found in the acting categories, but don’t count out the technical awards like sound and visual effects.

The Heat was actually pretty funny, derivative I know, but give the people what they want, right?!  Melissa McCarthy is one of those ‘love her or hate her’ type of funny actresses, I personally subscribe to the former.  I thought she was hilarious in Bridesmaids and I thought she was in this one too.  Sandra Bullock held her own up against McCarthy which was nice to see.  McCarthy was quite funny in a scene she was in, in Hangover 3, one of the very few funny scenes in that movie, mostly you just felt bad for them.

White House Down was a remake of Olympus Has Fallen.  No, not really, but I’m convinced in a few years time, people may think it was.  In the near future, moviegoers will be far more use to movies vampirically feeding off other movies with far less time in between the old and the new.  Like rebooting Spider-man just five years after the horrible third installment of the Raimi trilogy, reboots of the future may be as little as a year apart, or in the case of Superman vs. Batman due out in 2015, just three years after Christopher, do-no-wrong, Nolan’s own Batman trilogy concluded. (Theory: When Bruce climbed out of that pit in India or where ever he was in TDKR, maybe that plot hole of how he got back to Gotham without anything could be later filled with….yes you guessed it.  Superman?)  Where was I?  White House Down, right, anyway, wait I already forgot.

The Long Ranger was, well, I walked out of the theatre a hour in.  I felt that if I stayed any longer my ears might begin to bleed.  This movie was a horrible, predictable, dumbed down, mess of a movie.  Johnny Depp couldn’t have saved it if he tried, which I’m pretty sure he didn’t.  I long for the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas days when Johnny was cool and far, far less predictable, dumbed down, you get the point.  Don’t see this movie, trust me, it’s not your father’s Lone Ranger.

Grown….Ups….2, my god.  I saw less than a half an hour of this crappy movie on a computer at my work. (I know, for once I should have been more responsible at work and read boring work emails that are more dull than Will Smith’s performance in After Earth.)  No way was I paying one red cent to go to the theatre.  The problem is, do we blame Adam Sandler for dumbing down his movies or do we commend him as a business man for seeing that there is a huge market for these types of stupid movies in the first place?

Titanic Robots fighting gigantic sea monsters in Pacific Rim.  What’s not to love, the people in the movie for starters, with the exception of Charlie Day and Ron Perlman, both playing obligatory roles, but doing a damn good job at it.  Besides, they were the only two characters in the movie that were having a blast, as actors and as their characters.

Red 2 was not as good as the first one but it was a fun and welcomed addition to the original.  The characters were fun and the actors playing them looked like they were having an awesome time.  I loved the action scenes and John Malkovich was hilarious to watch.

The Conjuring was an unexpected thrill ride into the paranormal.  The film was successful because of the well told story but also the performances.  This is one of those movies I’m glad is making lots of money because hopefully the stupid studio execs will clue in on upping the quality level of their future projects.  Who the hell am I kidding; of course they won’t, duh!

The Wolverine, as fun as it was at times, was ultimately forgettable, along with most of the movies out this summer.  As a matter of fact, I had to look up a list of 2013 movie releases just to remember what I saw this summer in order to write this article.  Hugh Jackman made women cream and men feel like shit with that body of….sorry, back to the bromancing and getting off topic.  Yeah, the movie was good.  The scene after the credits was better.

2 Guns.  There were two guys with each a gun, hence 2 guns.  Moving on…..

Meet the Millers was hilarious.  Dumb fun at the cinema, with almost every scene better than the last one, but I must admit, as a man, the three way kissing scene in the camper was my fav….

Elysium was a pretty good action movie about the one percent of inhumane white people, except for the Pakistani president, who was the only one that cared about the 99 percent on earth, orbiting the planet on a space station.  Matt Damon, raised by Latin people, wants to save his dying ass but must go to the big resort in space to get the job done.  White people try to kill him while the Latin people help him.  I always find that interesting, if the roles were reversed people would have flipped out.

Kick-Ass 2 was a violent mess of a movie that sheds a pretty shitty shadow over the much more fun and clever original.  Damn sequels suck, with the exception of the above mentioned.  It’s like getting back with your high school sweetheart in your thirties and expect all the newness and freshness to return.  Good luck.

Mud, Before Midnight and Blue Jasmine were the real exceptions of the summer and I think for the whole year.  Come award season, each one of these three remarkable films should be acknowledged with nominations if not wins, Mud for supporting actor, Sir Matthew, Before Midnight for writing and Blue Jasmine for best actress for Queen Cate.

All three of these films expertly dived into the human condition with cinematic realism.  Whether it was in the US south with Mud or the Greece landscape with Before Midnight or the hills of San Francisco with Blue Jasmine, these film were superbly written and directed, all the performances were top notch and long lasting, unlike the forgettable mess the rest of the summer was.

Spielberg’s quote spoke of a paradigm shift which I think he was right up to that point.  He optimistically believes that this ‘implosion’ will be a lesson for the studios to change what they’ve been doing.  Oh, look the cynic’s in the room, I don’t think they will learn shit because they are out of ideas; they’ve lost all imagination on the productions of creative films.  We are certainly at a crossroads, and unfortunately  Spielberg is referring to long term, so I’ll give in a little to optimism, hopefully the studios will realize that making good movies will draw crowds just as much as bad movies, but at the end of the day, it’s the movie business, business being the key component in that equation.

Kick-Ass 2 and the Increase in Super Violence

by Christopher Barr

“I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”  - Mahatma Gandhi

The 2010 carnage filled comic book movie, Kick-Ass was a fun and exciting flick with interesting and colorful characters.  But it also advocated violence without any real consequences and promoted vigilantism.  It’s a movie about a teenage boy who gets picked on to a point of having enough.  He decides to push back, not as Dave Lizewski but as his new found alter ego, Kick-Ass.  He meets up with a father and daughter alone his journey and teams up with them to fight crime.  To me, one of the more disturbing aspects of the movie is the relationship and actions of the father and daughter duo, Big Daddy and Hit-Girl.

I can easily confess that Hit-Girl was my favorite.  She was funny and she could kick-ass more than Kick-Ass could.  So as a throw away popcorn movie, I found this part to be the high light.  But that doesn't excuse the fact that Big Daddy and Hit-Girl were a violent, unforgiving duo.  They maliciously murdered without remorse and laughed about it.  The problem is the discourse left the safety of comic book page and was translated into a very real looking authentic portrait of actual violence.  The movie created vigilantes and unleashed them on a crime boss and his goons to such an extreme, that one might become confused when discerning who the bad guys really were.

There is something disturbingly odd about an 11 year old little girl, skillfully, expiring a slew of baddies with a boastful smile and a pretty face.  Part of that gag was that she remains a cute little girl and a violent murdering assassin in one.  But all this real world violence is masked by the fact they are wearing costumes and are acting as real life superheroes.  Matilda was a 12 year old little girl in the film The Professional that was taught by Leon, a skilled hit-man in the art of assassinations.  But yet in that film, there were real consequences and there was no joy in what they were doing.  It was a story about redemption and revenge, revenge for Matilda and redemption for Leon, but in Kick-Ass its revenge for the father and ultimately victim-of-circumstance for the little girl, who was lead into an assassin’s life style without ever really knowing better.  Great parenting, Big Daddy.

Despite the fact that the Kick-Ass films are all good and fun, they don’t get the concept of what it is to be a hero.  Peter Parker as Spider-man never resorted to excessive violence to catch and stop the villain.  He used his wit and skills to catch the bad guys and leave them for the authorities to prosecute. Batman left the Joker hanging from the side of a building in The Dark Knight for the police to arrest in spite of the Joker killing his long time love Rachel Dawes.  He did this because he’s a moral man, he believes that, like the philosopher Desiderius Erasmus, ‘If the blind lead the blind, we all end up in the ditch.’

It’s important to note the obvious; movies don’t kill people.  Quentin Tarantino films are all violent, but his films play with violence, cartoon-like as in the case of The Bride mowing through 88 assassins with a Hattori Hanzo sword in the middle of Kill Bill Vol.1.  Then there’s the scene where Mr. Orange shoots Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs for violently torturing the cop they had tied up for questioning. Oliver Stone can’t be directly blamed for real world murders that followed the release of his ultra-violent 1994 film, Natural Born Killers.  Fight Club was violent but promoted a moral philosophy that I’m sure many over looked for the fight scenes but never the less, consequences were defined.

Kick-Ass 2, like most blockbuster sequels, opted for the bigger, louder, less awesome than the first one, route.  The movie added more ‘superheroes’ to the fold, illustrating more people seem to not have any faith in the police to clean the streets up.  These heroes approached criminality like an immature joke.  Laughing and joking how cool it is to be a fantasy in the real world.  The body count in this sequel was high like the first one, where taunting and torturing the ‘bad guys’ was equally as popular, if not more.  The movie bounced schizophrenic-like around its moral philosophy like a pin-ball machine.  Never really focusing on whether what they were doing was wrong or necessary in a society with increasing violence.  It seemed to focus more on looking cool when they avenged the so called innocent.

Jim Carrey took a stand against the film in the wake of the Sandy Hook killings.  Back in June, Carrey tweeted, “I did Kickass a month b4 Sandy Hook and now in all good conscience I cannot support that level of violence … my apologies to others involved with the film.  I am not ashamed of it but recent events have caused a change in my heart.”  Carrey, playing Colonel Stars and Stripes, certainly had his fair share of violent scenes but I think after seeing the end product, a near-rape scene by the character The Motherfucker with goons laughing about it, the outright slaughter of eight NYPD officers,  he decided that maybe it’s better to step back and bow this one out.

The problem is we live in a hyper-violent society where morality often gets side tracked for the humiliation and the inhumane brutality of other human beings.  There is something oddly liberating for some of us to see or be directly involved in hurting others.  I think the reason why this mentality of violence is so pervasive is because we are becoming more detached from the emotional connection we all possess for one in other.  I think like a push-and-pull, without nurturing one, the other inevitably rises.  In this case, the atavistic desires that we all checked at the door to form a civilization without violence, has resurfaced like a sharks dorsal fin slicing the water as it approaches, killing innocents and intellectual progress in its path.

The Butler: The Help and Social Inequality

by Christopher Barr

“America is war and you are on the other side.  How’s a black man ever going to get a fair trial with the enemy on the bench and in the jury box?  My life in white hands?  You Jake, that’s how.  You are my secret weapon because you are one of the bad guys.  You don’t mean to be but you are.  It’s how you was raised.  Nigger, negro, black, African-American, no matter how you see me, you see me different, you see me like that jury sees me, you are them.  Now throw out your points of law Jake.  If you was on that jury, what would it take to convince you to set me free?  That’s how you save my ass.  That’s how you save us both.”  - Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Carl Lee Hailey from the 1996 film A Time to Kill

The Butler is a film about a African American boy, who grew up on a cotton field in the southern part of the United States and went on to become a butler at the White House for several decades, serving under a number of presidents.  But it’s mainly about the Civil Rights Movement that was going on, predominately in the south but in most parts of the United States, between the years 1954-1968.  The focus of the movement was on noted legislation and organized efforts to abolish public and private acts of racial discrimination of African Americans and other disadvantaged groups.

The real célèbre for the civil rights movement was the senseless murder of 14 year old Emmett Till in 1955. An African American boy from Chicago visiting family in Mississippi, who was kidnapped, brutally beaten, shot and then dumped in a river for allegedly whistling at a white woman.  Two white men were arrested for the murder and later acquitted by an all-white jury.  Later that same year Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger at the front of the ‘colored section’on a public bus.  After her arrest for defying the southern custom of blacks sitting at the back of the bus, a bus boycott, led by Reverend Martin Luther King. Jr., lasted more than a year.  In 1963, about 200,000 people joined the March on Washington where Dr. King delivered his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech, leading to President Johnson signing the Civil Right Act of 1964 which prohibits discrimination of all kinds, based on race, color, religion, or national origin.

The Butler culminated with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, solidifying an equal chance at a future for all races.  As I watched this film, I was horrified at how one group of people could treat another group of people.  The thing about racism is it’s grounded in such ignorance that it can’t be easily defined by those that practise it.  Psychologically speaking, there is no logic in it.  But yet groups like the Ku Klux Klan felt completely justified at harassing, ritualistically burning crosses and murdering African Americans.  Attitudes like this are something that people are taught and not born with.  Young children, before racist’s mommy and daddy begin to brainwash them into thinking they are a superior race, don’t discriminate.  Young children don’t care about race and who is supposed to be ‘better’.   The problem with racism is it’s birthed out of socio-political agendas that are powered by economics and elite capitalist.  It’s also birthed out of fear, the original fuelling force behind all that’s wrong with the world.

Religion is also responsible for limiting a person and groups ability to overcome their fear of death.  The granddaddy of fear, lingers in the minds of mostly every man and woman on this planet in spite of what race and group they are from.  Our narcissism powers our egos and convinces some of us that we are better than others; we are not going to die.  It deludes us into thinking we are superior, so we stay within groups that follow such delusional beliefs.

But white people are not the problem and black people are not the problem, the problem is our psychological inability to understand our brains beyond the capacity of our narcissism.  We need to see the world beyond our very limited understanding of it.  This is way Albert Einstein advocated using your imagination so often, when he spoke about intelligence and understanding the world and universe.  He knew like, Ludwig Wittgenstein, that ‘the limits of your language are the limits of your reality’. 

Why does this kind of thinking persist in a time in our history where many, more than ever, are of the belief that every person is born with inalienable rights.  The right to live their lives with liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Knowing that civil rights frees us from discrimination against all forms, whether it’s gender, religion, race, sexual orientation, or disability and it helps define that proclamation by ensuring a person’s physical integrity, safety and well being.  Yet thanks to a lack of education and a nurturing global understanding, there are many of us still living under medieval notions of superiority.

Films like The Help, 2011, educated its audience of a time in our history that discrimination was a daily practice by groups of people, for the most part, that seemed like they didn’t even know better.  They just did what they were told.   That film spoke of a time when the white people of the south inherited the tradition of whites ruling blacks.  It was just the way it was.  Stick with what you know mentalities we pervasive at this point.  Hopefully the film reminded people that this problem is one that still exists today.  Like The Butler, The Help wants us to get the picture and stop this way of thinking for the good of this generation and future generations.  Both films are quick to point out the absurdity, stupidity and danger of thinking this level of ignorance.  But I argue that this problem isn’t a racial one but rather a mentally narcissistic one.  Put frankly, we need to grow up and get over ourselves.  We need to actually learn from these embarrassingly stupid mistakes in our history and elevate human consciousness to new level of understanding.  We need to overcome our stereotypes by cutting down the mental borders that we and our environment have so solidly built up in our minds.  We need to be free from discrimination against our gender, race and religion, but more importantly, for the sake of the future of the human race, we must not define ourselves solely based on these differences.

“A vast family of human beings generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life.”  The civil rights activist and historian W.E.B. Du Bois said this while defining race.

Elysium and the Widening Wage Gap

by Christopher Barr

“ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS”

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.  He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits.  Yet he is lord of all the animals.  He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.”            - George Orwell, Animal Farm

Social stratification is a concept involving the classification of people into groups based on shared socio-economic conditions.  Elysium is a film about the widening gap between the very rich and the unfortunately poor.  Elysium is a technological habitat for the white rich and powerful to dwell in luxury while the horrifying state they made of earth is left to the sick, poor lower worker-class.  This lower class fight and fend for the last bits of resource left on our decaying planet.

Elysium, mythologically speaking, is heaven.  The Elysian Fields is an oasis where the fortunate reside in the afterlife.  Hades (hell) is where everyone else lives.  In the film hell is on earth.  Passage to Elysium, a space station orbiting earth, is left for the Rothschild’s and Rockefeller’s of the world, a very elite group with all the technological advancements there with them to help maintain their health and prosperity.

On dystopian Earth there is an over-populated polluted mess.  People of poor ancestry and misfortune reside in deprivation and despair in urban packed, police states, where Homeland Security robots maintain a firm marshal law over the residents of Los Angeles 2154.  Medicine and food are hard to come by, leading to millions of malnourished and sick people living in dilapidated shanty-towns or stacked high in brittle apartment complexes.

Throughout the history of civilization, the well-to-do have always exploited the poor.  The poor have been kept strategically dumbed down and god fearing in order for this form of exploitation to flourish.  There are times I feel members of society are so naïve to the control over their lives that they would help manufacture guns and bullets, without ever realizing that they are creating the very tools to which their deaths will come about.

We truly live in a fantasyland.  People have been so misdirected and to mention otherwise can often be seen as an act of lunacy.  People seem generally convinced that they are in control of their lives and the choices they make as they navigate through consumer overkill and sociological detachment.  While their illusions of personal freedom prospers, the elite capitalist see this planet as a dead salvaging site, where machines destroy the planetary surface and pump oil from within it out.  Devastating this planets eco-system for profit and killing any wildlife that happens to be in the path of economic progress.  This once thriving planet has had its resources and life force technologically exhumed from its vast rich lands and its clear blue seas, leaving an almost unrecoverable mess with very little hope to stop or reverse this impending calamity.

It seems that the wealthy elite are on a greed-fueled train with their bags of money and the rest of us in tow, speeding down a hill with a cliff at the bottom, without any interest in stopping or spreading the wealth.  I guess in the case of Elysium, they have their way out while the rest of us fly off the cliff.

Obviously the elitists don’t fully succeed in the film because it’s a fantasy, where the poor represented by one man, overcome the corporate, governmental Goliath.  We can’t go see a film where this doesn’t happen because in the real world the elite and powerful do win at the end of the day.  So the film provides us with a fantasy of hope.  A dark place we can go with our popcorn and our M&M’s and sit with a group of like-minded strangers.  While we collectively delude ourselves into momentarily believing that this idea of the poor finally beating the rich and winning the planet back is actually achievable.

Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.  – Martin Luther King Jr.

The Wolverine: A Ronin on the Road to Mortality

by Christopher Barr

To live forever is to live without meaning.  Does a person need to become aware of death, one's own death before learning to live their life with meaning, like in the case of the Buddha?   Can the Wolverine finally become the Buddha and be remembered as the one who woke up, or will he be doomed to be a Ronin without a guiding master?

The Wolverine is one of the most interesting comic book characters today. A character born with a mutation that accelerates his healing abilities, this mutant healing factor, and regenerates damaged bones and destroyed tissue well beyond the capabilities of an ordinary man.  His body heals but the healing factor doesn't suppress the pain he endures during injury.

Also he was subjected to a clandestine US Government military project, the Weapon X Program, to artificially and involuntarily assist his mutation.  His skeleton was reinforced with this indestructible metal alloy known as adamantium.   Wolverine was to be the first test subject of this program and was kidnapped and taken to the Canadian facility, where he was exposed to a brutal process of bonding the adamantium to his skeleton.  Wolverine recovered much quicker than expected and slaughtered most of the remote facilities personnel upon escaping.  

His mutation also consists of natural animal-like adaptations of his body, including three sharp retractable claws housed within each forearm. Wolverine's hands don't have actual openings for the claws to move through, thus cutting through his flesh every time he extrudes them.

So what is it to live a life of immortality?  This phenomena is often portrayed mythologically as unpleasant and undesirable.  Do we need to be aware of an ending to life to enjoy it?  What about boredom without a time limit on opportunity.  Does death and the knowledge of death actually give meaning to life?

The problem with Wolverine is that all our existing institutions, all that's considered meaningful is based on the assumption of mortality, for the most part, Religions (the denial of death) notwithstanding.  We make meaning in our lives because we are the only species that possess knowledge that we are going to die. Achievement and the desire to make and leave a mark all come from the anxiety that accompanies our imminent departure.  

Everything is changeable, everything appears and disappears; there is no blissful peace until one passes beyond the agony of life and death.   - Buddha

Is Logan suffering from anti-thanatophobia?  Why is his fear, a fear of living?  My grandmother before her death, spoke to my mother about being okay with her inevitable death, she felt a solace in knowing she was close to dying.  So was her desire for death a result of weakening muscles and heath or was it a culmination of disappointments and realizations?  

We must begin this journey to enlightenment with suffering and Logan has suffered.  The Supreme Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, who lived about 2,500 years ago, asks that you accept that you will one day die but while you are here and now you should embrace the natural world and learn.  This is the path to the fulfilling life.  Knowledge of death breathes life into those who have allowed it.  The idea of waltzing with death is a plight Wolverine can only imagine.  Impermanence, suffering and death, as seen by Siddhartha in his late twenties was to wake up the young prince, who has only lived a life of pleasure and luxury, sheltered from the reality of existence.   It was during these little treks outside the palace, in Northern India, that Siddhartha came to the conclusion that he will also become sick, become ill and one day die.  Wolverine doesn't know what it feels like to fear death for he is a body out of time.

No knowledge is won without sacrifice and like the Buddha, Wolverine left what he believed to be his family, those that cared for him and looked out for him.  In order to gain anything you first must lose everything.  Logan goes on his pilgrimage to seek out inner peace and in some cases closure.  He has lived many lives, not in the circular sense of reincarnation, he has lived as himself.  Born in Alberta, Canada, and living through history, through wars and disease, he's suffered the deaths of those who were once young but have grown old and died as nature in its powerful evolutionary force intended.  It’s certainly no wonder that he's preferred the life of a nomad, a traveller of the earth, a wanderer.  

Wolverine is a man seeking enlightenment but is unable to because with enlightenment, in the Buddhist sense, one must seek death and embrace death.  He cannot, or in his case not for a very long time which is believed to be over 400 years.  A Buddhist quality that Wolverine possesses is the knowledge of the world suffering a constant rebirth of ideas and adolescent knowledge.  Wolverine has achieved what F. Scott Fitzgerald hoped one would achieve in his short story, 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button', not to be confused with the Brad Pitt film that completely overlooked the primary theme of the story.  Fitzgerald was troubled by wasted youth, vitality and knowledge often missing a synchronistic equilibrium.  He felt that if one was born old and gained wisdom through life experience that one might be able to achieve this happy medium of knowledge and youth coexisting.  One doesn't need to grow old before one achieves an intellectual enlightenment.  Wolverine in the fictional sense has achieved what Fitzgerald could only dream, youth, knowledge and wisdom of the world.

Wolverine has suffered many injuries to his body, through various battles, but yet he heals.  Scares remind us that the past is real but yet he doesn't have any.  He does suffer, phantom limb syndrome with his injuries though.  To achieve enlightenment one must reconcile with the body and the pain one suffers as a result of their body, by doing so, one doesn't allow the inevitable pain and suffering of the body to alter one’s state of mind.  

Buddhism is not about being special; it’s about being normal and doing normal things.  In the case of Wolverine, whether he likes it or not, he's special, he's not normal and he knows it, hence his failed quest for enlightenment as he roams the earth.

Wolverine can attain Nirvana in his mutated state, for Nirvana is within us all and just needs to be seen with a heightened elevated mind.  Like Jacques Lacan's 'Order of the Real', transcending language, transcending meaning and attaining reality is a journey that most - never travel.  The point is not to debate with reality for reality is.

Firefly: You Can't take the Sky from me

by Christopher Barr

“We’ll never make Firefly again, because that was a thing that existed and is now gone.  And Serenity isn’t Firefly, and whatever comes next won’t be either.  But I would love to tell more stories of this universe…”    Joss Whedon

Firefly was this TV show that had a very unique tapestry of characters and locations and visual themes.  These themes certainly were familiar in some cases but Joss Whedon and Co. were able to display them in a very original and refreshing way.  Star Wars was clearly an influence but Star Wars was an influence on most things science fiction.

My first encounter with the space western drama Firefly was through the 2005 film Serenity.  I can’t recall if I was aware at that time of the TV show or not.  I did enjoy the film and the crew of Serenity but at the time of that viewing it felt like something was missing.  I would later learn that Joss used his film to tell this thrilling story as a film but also close off a lot of loose ends from the unfortunately short lived TV show that was cancelled in 2002.  So a couple years went by and a friend recommended that I watch the show.  I bought the Complete Series on DVD and started to watch it and was hooked immediately.  Unlike the misfortunates the ‘Browncoats’ (loyal Firefly fans) and other viewers had during the time it was aired, I was able to watch it all in order and the movie again after, which is now one of my favorite sci-fi flicks.  For some absurd reason Fox Entertainment didn’t air the pilot show Serenity first and subsequent episodes were aired out of order as well.  Douchebag TV execs.

According to then, Fox Entertainment President Gail Berman it “was a numbers thing”, never really stating why they were aired out of order.  It’s unfortunate that all the politics got in the way for a show that could easier have gone on to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, seven seasons status.   

The War to Unite the Planets was six years done, and the victorious Alliance was spreading its control further and further throughout the galaxy. Those who had fought for independence and so bloodily lost had no choice but to live by Alliance law. Some never would, and those few found themselves drifting--flying to the furthest reaches of the galaxy, to the worlds less civilized, some barely settled, where the Alliance might not control their lives. These were hard worlds, and work was where you found it. Those who got by lived by a simple creed: Any job, anywhere. -- Intro, "Serenity"

The year is 2517 and mankind since developed the technology to boldly explore the stars and the endless depths of space.  China and United States, the only two surviving superpowers, joined forces into a central federal government known as the Alliance.  This pan-Asian and Western fusion resulted in their cultures melding into one English-Chinese linguistic ethos.

The rebel crew of a Firefly-class spaceship called Serenity live on the outskirts of space avoiding the governmental authority of the Alliance as they fight for survival.  The Alliance has forcibly unified various colonies in the star system into a central government.  The crew of Serenity consists of nine iconoclasts that were on the losing side of a civil war, the Battle of Serenity Valley sealing that loss, against the Alliance.  They travel from job to job, maintaining their aging ship and avoiding capture.  They smuggle illegal goods from varies outlying terraformed  moons and planets taking aboard passengers that would like to keep a low profile for whatever reason.  Captain Malcolm Reynolds tries to balance his ship’s crew and their various clandestine jobs as they move from place to place avoiding the Alliance, space pirates and the vicious atavistic Reavers.  These Reavers are a group of nomadic, cannibalistic humans that have become savagely animalistic and like zombies, don’t negotiate with their victims, they’re only interest is hedonistic barbarism.

 

The amazing crew of Serenity has its captain, Mal Reynolds and then there is Zoe, who is a Browncoat, along with Mal, who both were Independence fighters in the Unification War.  She is his second in command and married to the head pilot of the ship, light-hearted, Wash.  Then there is Mal’s muscled, mercenary on the ship, Jayne and the ships engineer mechanic, the lovable Kaylee.  They comprise of the ships operating crew.  Devastatingly gorgeous Inara is a ‘companion’, a very classy escort who resides on one of two of Serenity’s small shuttles.  Sheppard Book is a permanent traveller on the ship and serves often as Mal’s moral and spiritual compass and military tactical advisor.  Simon is the ship’s doctor and is on board to avoid the Alliance who are after him but mainly his little sister River, who is a gifted prodigy and government experiment, with psychic ability.

In the third episode of the series, ‘Bushwhacked’, an Alliance Commander says to Mal, “Seems odd you’d name your ship after a battle you were on the wrong side of.” and Mal confidently replied, “May have been the losing side.  Still not convinced it was the wrong one.”  I thought what he said was very telling about the heart of the government control side of the show.  The government believes what they are doing is right or at least for the greater good and the people beg to differ.  This show and its characters represent the very small, awake side of society that question the government’s actions and are the ones willing to fight for their freedom in spite of laws and rules.  They would rather not die but are willing too rather than be colonialized and assimilated into the Alliance’s agenda for intergalactic domination.

Mal is not just a man in himself.  He is a man that suffers and strives for happiness in a world that his utilitarian brand of ethics isn’t entirely welcomed.  He’s a man intelligent enough to see that good and bad exists in a gray area when dealing with human rules.  He’s able to be a strong man with conviction because he knows what’s good and bad is often relative to those in power at that time.  So he stays in the shadows of space and lives the life he chooses to live, in spite of the suffering involved.  He’s a man in between one massive group who are ethically bound to the rules and regulations of the Alliance and on the other end he has the Reavers who are themselves morally and ethically bankrupt.  These binary opposites are brought together beautifully in the climactic scene at the end of the film Serenity.  Pure brilliance on his part, as a captain, as a man and as a utilitarian.  Mal knows, especially in the case of the Reavers, allowing that kind of madness to spread is not acceptable, his life and the lives of his crew are worth dying for if it means preventing the spread of such insanity. 

This is what we hope to get from a TV show, something that speaks to our humanity and our idealism.  Our desire for a better place to live with the people we care about, without having to worry about the insanity in the world.  We all just want a piece of serenity. 

From the film Serenity

Mal: "Ain't all buttons and charts, little albatross. Know what the first rule of flying is? Well I s'pose you do, since you already know what I'm 'bout to say."

River: "I do. But I like to hear you say it."

Mal: "Love. Can know all the math in the 'verse but take a boat in the air that you don't love? She'll shake you off just as sure as a turn in the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughtta fall down...tell you she's hurtin' 'fore she keens...makes her a home."