1. This post was originally going to come out a couple weeks ago, before the shadow intervened. So, back-date every reference by a couple weeks.

Only update is that I’m back in Arizona and back to work. The main persistent after effect is that I’m very tired most of the time.

2. Movie night the other week was Disney’s Tarzan, which I hadn’t seen since watching it in the theater when it first came out.

Oddly enough, my opinion of it has remained pretty much exactly the same after revisiting it. Which is to say, it’s very middle-of-the-road, with some things that are very good and a lot of things that aren’t.

3. Some things I really liked about it: their take on Jane was excellent, and the romance was very well done; the filmmakers showed some real respect for the fact that this is a story that has a long history of film adaptations, so things like the Johnny Weismueller yell and the “Jane…Tarzan” scene get respectful inclusions (the yell in particular was deployed in a pretty much perfect manner); I will always support having Lance Henrikson, Glenn Close, and BRIAN BLESSED in any film whatsoever; the animation, especially in the action scenes, was really good and beautifully fluid; I appreciate that the camp-trashing scene tries hard to capture some of the classic Disney animation magic of scenes like the ‘pink elephants’ sequence; I liked the opening with Lord and Lady Greystoke, done entirely without dialogue; I thought Jane’s father was both very book-accurate and very funny, and I appreciated that they actually have a real relationship with some playful back-and-forth (“Shall I leave you and the blackboard alone for a moment?”); the jokes surrounded Tarzan’s unfamiliarity with human society and attempts to imitate it are mostly very funny, especially when involving Jane.

4. Some things I really didn’t like: aside from Professor Porter, the comic relief side-characters were lame and mostly just annoying; having the elephant be a cowardly wimp is an obvious and very stale joke that didn’t land at all (and it’s pretty much his whole character); Clayton might be the single weakest villain in the whole Disney Renaissance, for all that he’s voiced by BRIAN BLESSED; Tarzan gets manhandled by human adversaries much too easily for someone who can put a silverback into a submission hold; much of the plot, themes, and moments are painfully routine and by-the-numbers – the “why am I different?” trope (though that does lead to some good moments, like young Tarzan trying to cover himself with mud to look more gorilla-like), the goofy sidekicks, the third act low-point in the rain, the comedic action sequence in which the sidekicks dispose of the sub-villains, followed by a high-altitude struggle between the hero and villain, etc. (they seem to have basically taken the last few pages of Beauty and the Beast and swapped the names around…except BnB was smart enough to remember how thoroughly the hero should be outclassing the villain physically, which this one forgets); Lance Henrikson’s gorilla dad isn’t given nearly enough to do apart from being the stock ‘disapproving father figure’ who gets bested in everything by his adopted son (though at least he’s shown to be more or less correct in his fears of the humans); and lastly, I don’t like Tarzan staying in the jungle, especially since it kind of renders Jane’s contribution to the relationship moot (what’s the benefit of introducing him into humanity and civilization if he’s going to reject it?), and in the process kind of undermines one of the fundamental themes of the story – the civilizing role of woman. Although I understand that they way the film is structured it would be hard to show him doing anything else, but then they should have written it to account for that, as it’s sort of the heart of the story (in the book, as I recall, being with Jane taught Tarzan compassion and protectiveness, which he hadn’t really had use for in the jungle. But here he’d already learned that from mama gorilla, so…).

Though at least the man taking up rulership over the apes – man ruling the beasts – is thematically correct, so they got that right.

5. Regarding Clayton, the problem is that he’s just an evil poacher. He’s about as close as you could get to a pure ‘type’ character: like they just copied a page from A Standard Guide to Stock Villains and called it a day. Just a heartless, narrow-minded English hunter who wants to get rich off of endangered species, and that’s it. There’s no cunning to his plan, and no surprise that he’s evil: he’s practically wearing a sign that says “BAD GUY.”

The obvious point of comparison is McLeach from The Rescuers Down Under, who was also a classic ‘evil poacher’ type, and even more mustache-twirlingly evil (since his attempted crimes went well beyond illegal hunting). But McLeach was not only much more convincingly menacing and dangerous that Clayton, and written to be legitimately clever, but he was absolutely bursting with personality (“Home, home on the range! Where the critters are tied up in chains…”). It helped that McLeach was central to the plot, while Clayton is very much periphery (he pretty much just exists to create a third-act crisis), and that he had his own sidekick, Joanna the Goanna to bounce off of.

6. And on the note of danger, that’s another problem: McLeach very obviously outclassed all the heroes on a physical level, even without his gun (the heroes being a little boy and a few mice), but there is no way Clayton should be a serious threat to Tarzan. By the time they have their showdown, Tarzan’s already beaten a leopard and a gorilla in hand-to-hand combat: an Englishman with a gun should barely be an inconvenience to him.

Returning to Beauty and the Beast, as noted, Beast was obviously physically superior to Gaston. But the film mitigated this by establishing ahead of time that Gaston was very good at killing things, and they staged the fight so that he got several essentially free shots in on the Beast before he starts fighting back. Even then, the Beast dominates him pretty easily.

Comes down, as noted, to the film being far too lazy and paint-by-numbers in this area.

7. My Juniors are reading The Great Gatsby. As I go over it again, this time I found myself, to my surprise becoming much more drawn to Tom’s character.

If you’ve read the book, you may be raising an eyebrow right now, so let me clarify: Tom’s a horrible person, there’s no doubt about that. He’s pretty much the original incarnation of that “entitled, hypocritical white conservative” stock villain type which has become so ubiquitous in the subsequent years (and thank you very much for that, Mr. Fitzgerald, though I doubt he imagined the trope would become what it has become).

But the interesting thing that I noticed is that, even though Gatsby is without doubt the more likable of the two, whenever they meet Tom blows Gatsby out of the water when it comes to force of personality. Tom basically dismisses Gatsby out of hand until he realizes what’s going on, and then he dominates him pretty easily, even to the point of just declaring that they’ll swap cars for the ride into New York, which Gatsby can’t offer more than a flimsy counter to. Gatsby never once gets the better of Tom (unless you count having an affair with Daisy).

The reason for this is simple: Tom may be a horrible human being, but he’s real. He actually is what he presents to the world: a rich, selfish, arrogant jerk. His confidence is backed up by the truth of what he is. Gatsby, on the other hand, is living a fantasy of being a globe-trotting Oxford-educated businessman from the American aristocracy. But it’s all show and naturally it crumbles the moment the real thing pushes on it, like trying to use a prop sword to block a real one.