Hooray for Earthling Cinema for taking on the very recent 6 Academy Award-winning Mad Max: Fury Road. As is their usual pattern, the first part of their look walks through the plot of the film in humorous ways, often hitting on keen insights pitted within mistaken assumptions about a long dead (to them) culture.
Then they get into the meaning-making, exploring the film as part of the Dieselpunk genre and then digging into the objectification of women and men in the Wasteland. As always, the short video leaves the viewer feeling entertained and edified.
The premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens is less than two weeks away, and it appears the anticipatory celebration of all things Star Wars has begun for reals. Like, the cool people finally showed up, and they’ve dimmed the lights for proper party conditions. For their part in the synchronicity, Earthling Cinema, still too classy to address the prequels, finishes their look at the original trilogy in their most recent episode. I’ve posted about Earthling Cinema’s take on Star Wars: A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. The results are pretty fantastic.
Unsurprisingly since ROTJ is considered a subpar entry into the franchise compared to the first two, EC does mock it more mercilessly than the first two, and their analysis is likewise somewhat thinner. But as a fan of the film since its theater premiere, I can attest that the mockery is both cathartically satisfying and the analysis is intriguing.
In the video you’ll learn about musical leitmotifs, the connections between Endor and the Vietnam war, and the theme of technology vs. the natural. You’ll also get to enjoy the mockery of Star Wars as a one-woman show, the send-off of Boba Fett, and the reuse of plot elements from A New Hope. Plus lots of other lovely jokes I wouldn’t dare give away.
Welcome back to Frozen Friday! A few days ago, Wisecrack released an Earthling Cinema analyzing Frozen, and we can’t pass up the opportunity to share.
As with all Earthling Cinema, the video starts with our alien host, Garyx Wormuloid, summarizing the film with various humorous askew interpretations, then he goes on to discuss the deeper motifs and themes of the film. Bonus: What Frozen has to do with Game of Thrones.
Personal note: Although I appreciate the attention to the cisgendered love interests, I would have loved some recognition for the asking consent prior to the Anna-Kristoff kiss.
I’ve posted about Earthling Cinema’s funny and insightful short videos mock-analyzing films before, but recently they took on Star Wars: A New Hope and followed it up with their own sequel looking at The Empire Strikes Back. The results are pretty fantastic.
As one would expect from this series, they mix together some good-natured mockery of the films with some true insights about the philosophies, motifs, and themes of the films. For instance, Earthling Cinema taught me something new about Empire–that Luke hangs upside down three times in the film, each time using the Force, equating him with the tarot card The Hanged Man.
Also connections to Joseph Campbell, Akira Kurosawa, Taoism, fascism, and Carl Jung.
One of the first tasks I give my film students is to create a top 5 of the greatest films they’ve ever seen. It’s meant to be a personal list. Inevitably, they want to know what my favorite film is, and that’s a question that causes my brain to freeze up and give the blue smoke of death. But when I do get rebooted, I often start talking about a few favorites, and one of them is always The Big Lebowski.
It’s often difficult to detail exactly why Lebowski is so beloved–by me and millions of others. It has inspired conventions–Lebowskifest–and even a religion–Dudeism. It’s endlessly quotable, absurdly hilarious, remarkably acted, and beautifully shot. And after all of its plotted antics, it deconstructs itself into meaning not much of anything. But watching this film feels like coming home. It’s cozy and warm, familiar and comfortable.
This week Wisecrack released a video analysis of The Big Lebowski as part of their Earthling Cinema series, in which an alien discusses the significance of visual artifacts from Earth after the planet has been destroyed. As was the previous entries on Pulp Fiction and Fight Club, the perspective on the film is at turns hilarious in its parody of the film’s meaning and impact and spot on in its analysis. Included is a comparison between the Dude and Jesus, an examination of the pull of the past on different characters, a comparison of The Big Lebowski and The Big Sleep, and a look at the deconstruction of various sources of meaning for characters, like religion and success.
If you’ve seen/love The Big Lebowski or wondered why your friends won’t shut up about it, check this out.
The set-up shares much with Thug Notes–an ironic persona for a host, a summary of the text, followed by analysis of its meaning. Rather than literature, it’s film. Rather than a gangster, it’s a space alien named Garryx Wormuloid examining the artifacts of now extinct Earthlings. Like with Thug Notes, the delivery is comedic, but the analysis is insightful.
Thus far Earthling Cinema has taken on a film a week: Fight Club, Pulp Fiction, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Mean Girls. Of course, the outsider’s take on the characters and events of these films is amusing, full of malapropisms, mispronunciations, and alien absurdities while also pointing out the absurdities of Earthling (mostly American) culture. In the Pulp Fiction episode, the host explains that “Jules consumes processed animal carcass, reads from the Bible, then does some team-building exercises with Vincent.” 2001‘s story gets boiled down as the classic story of “ape meets ape, ape meets monolith, ape meets tool, tool meets ape, tool meets spaceship, spaceship meets spaceship, spaceship meets boy, boy meets supercomputer, boy meets star-gate, baby meets planet.” According to Wormuloid, Mean Girls is set in “the American high school, one of the most terrifying and dangerous places on Earth.” Word, dude.
Come for the comedy, stay for the analysis. On Pulp Fiction: “Much of the humor comes from a cavalier attitude about human on human violence.” The Fight Club episode explains how the quick-spliced pornography undermines the catharsis at the film’s end. The 2001 episode actually makes sense of 2001 while also explaining the significance of that famous match cut.
Earthling Cinema is worth checking out for both entertainment and edification.
The Dinglehopper 