The Whole Package

Following on vaguely from last week's themes of marriage and equality, today I would like to talk about why I believe Rick O'Connell and Evelyn Carnahan (later Carnahan O'Connell*) from The Mummy and The Mummy Returns** are cinema's most perfect couple***.


I'll start off by admitting that I love these movies so I might be a bit biased. I essentially wrote every single one of my university essays with these two movies on a constant loop in the background to keep me from flipping out or leaving the room.
But despite my almost Stockholm Syndrome level of regard for them as entertainment, I maintain that the points I am about to make stand on their own.

Why Rick O'Connell And Evelyn Carnahan/Carnahan O'Connell Are Cinema's Most Perfect Couple by Ricochet, age 28

• They're Not Perfect And They Get To Stay That Way.
  When we meet Rick and Evie, Rick is a jaded and disillusioned soldier who doesn't have the best of luck and Evie despite her academic achievements hasn't achieved much success or regard and is somewhat unworldly. This is a fairly normal introduction to people involved in a romantic movie storyline but what isn't entirely normal is their continuing characterisation. They each have their own areas of knowledge, skill, insecurity and ignorance that form their personalities and their relationship isn't shown to artificially fix or negate these the way a lot of movie relationships seem to. They get to keep their imperfections as well as their strengths and therefore get to keep their personalities. They're not 'fixed' now that they're in a relationship, they're just in a relationship.
  
  
• They Are Self-possessed Enough To Stand By Their Own Convictions And Don't Back Down Or Defer To Each Other During Arguments.
  They don't always agree and when they disagree they do so vocally and confidently. There's no hushing up to avoid trouble or condescending false agreements, they stick to their guns. For the purposes of the movie this was done for drama and comedic effect but in terms of a relationship it is a healthy airing of emotions and shows that they are individuals who are determined to have their say. There is compromise and sometimes they agree to follow one person's suggestion rather than the other but there's none of the simpering or suppressed fuming that is usually put forward as normal in heterosexual relationships.

• They Aren't Afraid To Show Fear, Vulnerability Or Doubt In Front Of Each Other.
  When things are going completely bonkers-nuts-bad, Rick feels free to look completely terrified and admit that he has no idea if they're going to live, there's no putting on a false front of bravado in order to impress anyone. When their son is in danger the second movie they both show a completely understandable level of fear and concern. This allows an emotional honesty and a deep connection that gives them the opportunity to support each other. When Rick grieves in The Mummy Returns it feels very natural and honest.
  
  
• They Respect Each Others' Individual Strengths And Don't Harp On At Each Other About Individual Failings.
  Rick is good at general jumping around, heavy lifting, navigation, reading situations and getting them out of tough spots. Evie is good at translating, problem solving, archaeology, thinking under pressure and prioritising. They're both good at other things but I'm having a nice lazy generalise here. The point is that they each play to their strengths and don't start yelling at each other when the other person doesn't share the same level of competency in every situation. They complement each other and in The Mummy Returns we get to see that they have managed to build a life together that allows them both to do what they're best at, neither of them having to give that up in order to allow the other partner to follow their interests.
  
  
  
• They Maintain A Passionate And Romantic Love For Each Other Even After Years Of Marriage And Raising A Child.
  One 'trick' I really despise in movies is the '1st movie has a happy ending, 2nd movie opens up with bickering and recriminations and over the course of the 2nd movie they learn to love each other again' ploy. It's annoying, it feels lazy and it teaches kids that no matter how much you love a person, you'll eventually end up screeching at and belittling each other. They didn't pull that trick with The Mummy Returns and I will always love them for it. After at least 10 years of marriage Rick and Evie still love each other and still treat each other as individuals. They don't swap between being people who are in love to parents when they interact with their child, they are those same people who just happen to be parents. It's the most hope-inspiring depiction of having a relationship and a family and still getting to have a distinct identity that I have seen in mainstream cinema.
  True getting to have athletic battles with intruders/aggressors interspersed with public and genuine declarations of affection add a bit of spice and aren't everyone's experience (except in The Incredibles, also a great movie) but their dynamic remains good.
  
  
• They're Ready To Risk Everything To Save And Protect Each Other And Their Family.
  Rick and Evie have their priorities all sorted out. They travel, they have work they love, they have an insanely nice house and a slightly annoying precocious son. And when someone tries to threaten their family, they don't give a damn that their nice house has been shot to shit, they drop everything and they rally together to protect their loved ones.
  
  
  
• They Don't Selfishly Protect Their Knowledge/Specialities.
  In The Mummy Returns we get to see Evie kicking fairly impressive amounts of ass and wielding a sword in a fairly competent fashion because Rick cares enough about her to teach her how to defend herself. We get to see Rick involved in and more knowledgeable about Egyptian lore, history and archaeology because Evie has shared her passion with him. Instead of keeping their strengths to themselves so that they have 'one thing that they're good at that the other person needs them for' (something that can unfortunately be seen in far too many real life relationships), they offer their skills and knowledge to each other in order to expand each others' experience and capabilities.
  
  
• They're Able To Function Separately And Confidently Without Each Other When They Need To.
  When they have to split up to get things done they do, no questions asked. They don't shilly-shally, there's no screaming or wailing or hesitating. They aren't co-dependent and that is something that is rarely explicitly demonstrated. Even though they ultimately are trying to reunite, they aren't scrambling to get back together because they are freaking out or can't manage without each other which seems to be the case with many action or action/comedy or even romantic/comedy couples.
  
  
• They Love Each Other.
  This might seem a fairly 'well duh' thing to say but the amount of movie couples who only seem to get together as wish fulfilment for the audience, whose only points of compatibility are artificially created by the crisis they've endured together are the ones who end up bickering in the sequel. Rick and Evie have inherent similarities and compatibilities that are demonstrated before they met and which are brought out during their shared crisis. And once the crisis is gone, they still love each other. I mean look at them!
  Who rubs their nose on somebody else's nose if they don't love them!?
  Nobody that's who.
  

I rest my case!



*See? Even Evie kept her original surname in her name after marriage!

**I don't include The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor because I have thus far refused to watch it. No Rachel Weisz, no my eyeballs. You're probably lovely, Maria Bello, but you are not Evie!

***In the category of movies that I've seen and can remember right now at this very minute.

The Empty Space

I can get kind of obsessed by little things.

Something will occur to me once and if the wind is blowing in the right direction, the stars are aligned just right or I've consumed exactly the right amount of sugar it'll stay with me.

Not as a constant presence but as a recurring association.

The most enduring example of which was born when I first watched Inspector Gadget.

Sure I enjoyed the show, but at the back of my mind was one persistent and ever-present question.

WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED TO PENNY'S PARENTS?

Why was she living with her uncle at all? Were they out of the country? Did they die in a car crash? Were they locked in an insane asylum? Did he find her in a box somewhere and forget to turn her in? Were they mad scientists? Was that where the computer book came from?

Even at a young age I could understand that having a niece meant that Inspector could have a young relative following him around with his best interests at heart without having him look like a bad parent.

Later on I also realised it meant the viewer wasn't confronted with the idea of him having Go-Go-Gadget-Sex.

No matter my age, I couldn't shake the question. Where did these missing relatives go and why weren't we told?

That particular focus then transferred itself to the next obvious target: Disney movies.

What happened to Ariel's mother? Did she get caught in a tuna net? Did she get eaten by a shark? Did she squirt out one cloud of eggs too many and fade away?

Did Belle's mother get caught in an invention explosion? Leave her no good, dreamer husband to strike out on her own? Die in childbirth trying to deliver Belle's somewhat less aesthetically pleasing and ultimately doomed sibling?

How did Snow White's mother die? When did her father cark it? Where was the Grand Vizier when you needed someone to point out to the king that maybe this woman was a bit off in the brain-pan and that the king should instead look at this hypnotically glinting jewel?

The only two Disney films I can think of off the top of my head where the protagonist had both parents are The Lion King* and Mulan.

I know there are others, Sleeping Beauty for instance, where the parents exist but are removed to let the kids run around doing their own thing in a watered down sugar-coated bildungsroman.

Because apparently Disney didn't think that having your parents save you is as awesome as having some random dude do it.

To which I have a one word rebuttal: Taken**.

I know these characters are left out or side-lined to make the story simpler and make it somewhat more believable that the protagonist would end up running around by themselves but unfortunately for me, it hasn't worked.

I will spend my entire life watching the characters who don't appear in movies.

Which is OK.

Some of the missing pieces have an interest all of there own.



*Well, at least for a while. Depressing...

**Oh, also The Mummy Returns***

***Shut up, you loved it****.

****And by you, I mean me******.

******So shut up!

Crawling Out Of The Comfort Zone

I avoid certain movies like the plague.

War movies because they're always emotionally crushing and visually jarring.

Certain romantic comedies because they always feel so false and oversimplified.

Horror movies of a certain calibre because my brain doesn't need any more help imagining strange things lurking the in shadows thank you so very much.

And that was all well and good and I felt fairly OK with that.

But then I started avoiding a lot of other movies and when I tried to work out why, I was embarrassed to find that the explanation that popped up in my head was that they were 'too much work'.

"How much work can it be to sit on your ass and watch a movie?" a person would be justified in asking.

I didn't mean 'work' work but emotional and mental work.

I'd been rewatching old movies in a half-arsed way that allowed the familiar scenes and dialogue to wash over and past me whilst I tried to do other things (eg. write, draw, email).

The problem was I was doing those things half-arsed as well.

Instead of devoting two hours to really paying attention to a movie or really paying attention to a piece of writing or drawing, I was spending two hours not really paying attention to either and coming away feeling irritated and not at all like I had accomplished anything.

Instead of multi-tasking I was multi-tanking.

So as recorded in my New Year's Resolutions I have banned myself from watching movies I have already seen and am only watching new movies.
This has led to a sharp decrease in amount of movies actually watched but the associated sharp decrease in hours staring goggle-eyed and useless at a square of moving colours has been a welcome side effect.

And the movies I have watched so far have already made the experience worth it.

Not all have them have been quality but they've been fresh, they've got my brain moving again and I'm being less of a movie and cinema wuss about the 'hard work' movies.

My brain needs more hard work, it has been slacking off for years.

Silver Screen Surfer

I don't often have a lot of luck getting out to see movies when they're playing at the cinema.

Either I'll agree to see them with someone and we can never go on the same day or I lose track of time and by the time I get around to it the local cinema has stopped playing the film in question.

This isn't always exclusively down to my poor organisational skills or vague grip on temporal reality, the local cinema can be a bit of a moody bugger when it comes to screening runs.
The Karate Kid (aka The Kung-Fu Kid) has been screening for over a month but Predators ran for a maximum of two weeks before they gave it the boot.

So when a swag of movies I was interested in all came around at once I decided that I was damned if I was being cheated again and I went - to put it quite bluntly - completely nuts*.

~~~

FRIDAY 9:10pm - SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD

Synopsis: Scott Pilgrim is a 20-something slacker who finds himself having to battle 7 evil exes in order to be able to date the girl of his dreams. Scott Pilgrim is accompanied in this quest by a selection of amusing and sometimes unsympathetic friends in a world that blends regular reality and computer game tropes in a way that messes your brain up fun times.

Ricochet's Bonus Blather: I was already going out with friends for a farewell dinner (for one of them) so when they said 'Hey you wanna go see Scott Pilgrim after?' I cursed them out for being the dirty temptresses they are and immediately said yes. This clashed with my Nerdy Senses which were tingling and saying things like 'But you haven't read Volume 6 yet, you fiend!' but I shouted them down, assuming correctly that I would be able to hold the movie separate in my mind from the graphic novels.
I loved the film for it's timing, the use of effects to simulate comic panels and for Kieran Culkin as Wallace Wells - the whole thing was very well cast.
Of course there is no way you can make a feature length film from six graphic novels without having to cut out and compress a lot of the story telling, so if you haven't read the graphic novels you might come away a wee bit confused.
I had avoided reading Scott Pilgrim for ages as the whole premise of a man having to fight a girl's ex-boyfriends in order to date her seemed so... misogynist but on the urgings of a Canadian friend I gave them a go and found it hard to see them as such when reading them. I still think Ramona should have just told them all to go to hell and given them a good frying-panning to the face but the exchanges and actions were so entertaining and the 'computer game reality' so removed from regular life you couldn't take it entirely seriously on that level.

~~~

SATURDAY 9:00pm - INCEPTION

Synopsis: In a near future which has developed the technology to access people's dreams as a means of removing information, a skilled practitioner of this art is given a chance of redemption if he can achieve what is thought impossible - to place an idea within the mind of another.

Ricochet's Bonus Blather: I had decided to see Inception today but hadn't gotten around to it by the time I went out to dinner with my parents, so I decided that not only was I still going to see it, I was going to carjack my parents and take them with me. And I did.
It was astoundingly good.
Astoundingly.
Good.
And honestly if it had just been 2+ hours of Cillian Murphy looking vulnerable and Joseph Gordon-Levitt being tipped off chairs I would have been perfectly happy but it also had a plot!
The depiction of the movement of time and the mouldable reality and how it reacted were very engaging and it didn't hurt that pretty much all the dudes in it were fairly easy on the eyes.
For all the people who were complaining that they found it hard to follow or confusing I'm going to assume you spent the whole movie picking your nose and molding the resultant finds into a miniature statue of the Venus of Willendorf because my mother - who usually has to be reminded who people are part way through murder mysteries - followed it easily**.

~~~

SUNDAY 11:00am - THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

Synopsis: A disgraced journalist and an antisocial hacker are brought together as the investigation of the 40 year old disappearance of a young girl leads to evidence of crimes more wide-reaching and recent than anyone suspected.

Ricochet's Bonus Blather: The books have divided some people as they couldn't get past the 'Fellowship of the Rings' style character infodump at the start of the first book but I found that those sections helped me get a better idea of the society/culture they take place in and it gave me a context in which to see everything else.
The movie was a fantastic realisation of the book and managed to fit most of the important scenes and themes in without having to alter too much of the story, apart from tweaks to the time-line and some reduction in the roles of some characters.
Having read the books I was able to brace myself for the more confronting scenes but think they would have been equally if not more effective if I hadn't known they were coming.
One of the things I liked best about this screening was that apart from me, the audience was almost exclusively ladies in their 60s (and over) in home-knitted cardies, nodding in appreciation any time Lisbeth smacked anyone or tattooed anything on anyone. As we were walking out I heard one lady remark to her friend "I would have been tattooing it a damn sight lower, I can tell you that!"

~~~

SUNDAY 7:00pm - THE EXPENDABLES

Synopsis: A bunch of mercenaries suddenly get a conscience about one of the messed up countries they're asked to do a job in and go completely banza crazy setting shit right yo!

Ricochet's Bonus Blather: I'm sorry, I couldn't write a 'serious' synopsis for this one. Mostly because it doesn't really have one. It was enjoyable as a collection of quips and cliches from people we're used to seeing quip cliches at us but it was so over the top that it was a send-up of its own genre which I assume was the aim. Well, I hope it was.
The banter between the characters was so exaggeratedly familiar it seemed like a polyamorous commune of old married men.
One thing I did like was the fact that the characters spent a bit of time reflecting on how that sort of lifestyle can really mess you up, that you can't just brush it off and that maybe some of their number should get some counselling.
I took along my friend Awesome with whom I watch all the most explodingest movies and we did enjoy it as a complete break from reality with extra violence sauce but I couldn't help but think that part of the reason for that is we've been conditioned to enjoy these sorts of tales.
Of course it is quite possible I am just feeling super pretentious after having seen three very good movies in quick succession just before this one***.

~~~

And somehow, despite the fact I spent almost the entire weekend sitting on my ass, at the end of it all I came away with a sense of productivity****!

Whee!



* That is 'nuts for a person who usually seems a maximum of 3 movies a year at the cinema'.

** Of course, it probably helps that at the cinemas you can't wonder off to put a load of washing on or make a cup of tea and come back after something very important has happened but really all you had to do was watch the screen.

*** But honestly, it is in no way a clever movie. Amusing but no surprises.

**** I guess it did count towards my New Year's Resolution to watch at least 52 new movies this year...