I’ll Have Won Tons with That

I have been a busy little person.  I’m preparing something that I’ll show you – maybe next week?  And reading manuscripts and studying code, and all kinds of really brain-breaking things.  I was going to do a random collection of pictures here today, but I’m also now the official New Media maven for the studio and have been farming my Rosewood Recording page hard as I can.  Does that mean I have a part time job?  No.  You’d have to get paid before you could say that.

But I have been goaded into writing today because Chaz and I went to see a movie.  In the theaters.  Not Netflix.  Not On Demand.  The real deal – except maybe we paid matinee prices and we did NOT do 3D.

Laugh if you will, but we just saw the 2nd Kung Fu Panda – and we were utterly blown away by it.  I have written here about How to Train Your Dragon, and my wonder that DreamWorks has departed from the flatulence jokes and movies that are not a whole lot more than strings of gags.  Which does not mean they have abandoned gags altogether – which they never will (and I don’t want them to) – and slap-stick.  But their story lines have grown up, and their new underlying foundation of family and honor and courage and friendship and hard work and sacrifice is solid as a rock.

The movie was funny.  It was great.  We laughed easily and openly, tricked, punned, surprised and delighted.  The characters were complex and interesting.  But as the story progressed, it darkened – in a bearable (no pun intended) and graceful manner – and ended with a tremendous exercise of mercy, honor and triumph.  We wept through the entire end of it.

The artistic elements are stunning.  The opening and the credits are all rendered in traditional Chinese paper silhouette style, elegant and compelling.  The hero is, again, so very approachable that you have to walk away from the story with new faith in your own power to meet life – if he can do it, so can I.  And the music was perfect – I was only aware of it twice, and only to note how beautiful and absolutely organic it was.

I wouldn’t take little kids to this.  As in the other animated movies we’ve seen in last years (not excluding Snow White and Cinderella), there are dark and villainous characters that would have frightened the pants off me as a kid.  And yeah – yeah – I know that kids now have probably, sadly, seen far worse on both large and small screens.  But I wouldn’t make them go through it.  I found this a satisfying and compelling theater experience as an adult, and didn’t have to worry about the kids’ hearts as I did it.

It’s funny, but I find that we just don’t spend much money on live action movies anymore—while we’ve found the animated ones we’ve picked to have been amazing, engaging, charming, moving and satisfying on so many levels.

Anyway, we sat all the way through the credits because the art just continues – and because we were emotionally blown out and still buzzing.

Understand, it’s just the same old heroic story.  But you can tell me that story a million times and I will love it.  The honorable-in-spite-of-being-riddled-with-flaws character whose greatest battle is with himself.

Tolstoy once said that happy families are all the same, but unhappy ones are all unhappy in their own ways.  I think he was totally up in the night.  I think unhappiness is easy – an easy story to tell.  When you watch something like the So You Think You Can Dance auditions, you can see this on stage: young dancers tend to dance their angst, and all those dances look the same – the grabbing of the hair, the clawed hands, the hugging of self, the throwing of the body to the floor.  That stuff is easy, and it palls on the audience quickly.

But when you get a dancer who dances joy, or gratitude, or triumph – then you see complexity – because it isn’t gravity pulling them down to the floor – it’s joy lifting them into amazing flights and leaps, and forcing their arms and chests and faces open.

It’s happiness that is so complex – happiness that is hardest to capture in art – joy that burns like a fire, and honor that is, perhaps, the hardest for someone who is not in the middle of it to explain artistically.  And really, since so much art tends to turn inwards (self-expression), how could it understand the things that abandon the self and turn completely outwards?  I think, in joy and gratitude, we actually vanish – we disappear into light.  We burn with it.  And a fire like that is worth ten thousand words.

So anyway.  There’s my movie review.  Five stars.  News at ten.