The Strange, Silent Type (original) (raw)

SPOILERS, as usual.

Strange World – It’s weird that Disney came out with a new big-budget animated feature that just fizzled out at the box office, and I’m not quite sure why it did. I guess it was largely bad timing and probably poor promotion. I definitely saw commercials for it, but they weren’t all that clear on what it was actually about. I still didn’t know that much prior to watching it. Also, while the title fits the pulp sci-fi theme, and I don’t think people generally go to movies based on the titles anyway, it’s kind of generic and unmemorable. It wasn’t a favorite of mine; there kind of seemed just not to be enough there to carry an entire feature. That said, it was by no means bad, and I generally liked the characters and environments. It starts in a place called Avalonia that’s entirely surrounded by nigh impossible mountains. The explorer Jaeger Clade, who kind of reminds me of Yukon Cornelius, takes his son Searcher and a few others on an attempt to see what’s beyond the mountains, but Searcher fights with him and leaves his father to go on alone. Hunter also discovers a plant called Pando that provides a powerful fuel source, enabling Avalonia to have fancy airships and hover cars. (How they made them aerodynamic isn’t addressed.)

But, like his father, he expects his son Ethan to follow in his footsteps, in this case as a farmer. A lot of the movie emphasizes how similar Jaeger and Searcher really are. The President of Avalonia finds out that the miracle plant is dying, and leads an expedition into its root system to see what’s going on. She brings Searcher with her, Ethan stows away, and Searcher’s wife Meridian follows them to find her son. They all end up in a weird subterranean land of pinks and purples, where a bunch of weird organisms try to kill them.

Only Ethan gets the idea to try to befriend the creatures, particularly one he calls Splat.

The mission also finds Jaeger, who had fallen down there years ago while exploring a cave. Eventually, the Clades discover that their country is on the back of a giant animal (revealed at the end to be a turtle, a pretty standard choice for an animal that can support an entire population), and the Pando is a parasite that’s slowly killing it. There’s an obvious environmental message, although the twist kind of complicates it, because plant-based energy seems very ecologically sustainable at first. One thing that I wondered is how this civilization came to live on the back of a turtle in the first place. It’s a pretty diverse population with its own style, but still a very recognizably modern culture, apparently without any knowledge of the world outside their country. I guess it’s not really important to the story, but it’s weird when you consider that the last two Disney animated features, Encanto and Raya and the Last Dragon, made a point of giving detailed backstories to their fantastic communities. It’s also worth noting that Ethan has a Black mother and is gay, having a crush on another boy. These things are discussed enough as to make it seem like they wanted audiences to notice them, but none of the characters make a big deal out of either one, which is good. I also tried to see if there was a pattern in the character names. “Jaeger” is German for “hunter,” so that goes with Searcher; and I suppose Meridian, Ethan’s friend Azimuth, and crew member Caspian all have names that relate to navigation or geography. I’m not so sure about Callisto, the President’s name. It’s one of Jupiter’s moons and a character in Greek mythology who becomes the constellation Ursa Major, so I guess that also links with navigation, although not as directly as the others. Of course, when I started writing this, I kept calling Searcher Hunter and Ethan Jonathan, so I suppose names being thematically relevant doesn’t always make them memorable.

Silent Movie – I saw several of Mel Brooks’s films as a kid and generally enjoyed them, although I’m not sure I got all of the jokes at the time. I’d never seen this one before, though, so I figured I should. It is, as the title suggests, a silent movie, aside from one word spoken by Marcel Marceau. It does, however, have music and sound effects. It’s also the first Brooks film with him in the lead role. As with a lot of Brooks’s work, it’s very meta-referential, being a silent movie from the 1970s ABOUT a washed-up director trying to make a silent movie in the 1970s, imitating a lot of the sort of humor they had in old silents and spoofing the film industry in general. At one point, a studio executive played by Sid Caesar declares that slapstick is dead, after which he immediately takes a pratfall. It’s obvious, as is a lot of what happens in this movie, but I think it still works. There’s a fair amount I think doesn’t really work, or at least is way overdone, like Dom DeLuise always being hungry or thirsty, Marty Feldman hitting on women, and all the “ha ha, that looks gay” moments. But then, the fact that it never takes itself all that seriously and seems to fully realize that a lot of the jokes are stupid definitely helps. The gags are so rapid-fire that even when something isn’t at all funny to my mind, there will probably be something coming up soon that is. A few sign gags really worked for me. The studio Brooks is pitching his script to is just called Big Pictures, and there’s a conglomerate trying to buy them out called Engulf & Devour (motto: “Our fingers are in everything”).

I also appreciated that the scene with a malfunctioning Coke machine paid off later on; I suppose you could call it Chekhov’s Cola, or something like that. Several celebrities make cameos as themselves: Burt Reynolds, James Caan, Liza Minelli, Paul Newman, and Anne Bancroft. I guess that last one wasn’t too hard to get, as she was Brooks’s wife. Bernadette Peters also features as a femme fatale hired to distract Brooks’s character. There are certainly aspects to this that don’t hold up well, but I found it worth watching.