“Call of the Mild” a good family adventure despite lacking male nudity, animal cruelty, indiscriminate slaughter, graphic disembowelment, and French Canadian bastards

Call of the Wild is so different than the book that it’s almost a new story entirely, but this is unavoidable. It doesn’t depict dogs starving, being shot, drowning, killing men*, or even killing each other. It shows a dog hit with the club once. Otherwise the extended beating and whipping necessary to the story is merely implied or described in voice over. It’s been meticulously scrubbed of any ethnic or racial controversies by re-writing and casting. The only slurs that remain, rather than being racial, are simply a tragic characteristic of Harrison Ford’s inebriated speech.

Ford delivers a stunning performance as a sad drunk living in constant fear of an imaginary dog knocking over his glass or stealing his whiskey bottle. It’s almost as if he’s not even acting. I’m not sure he realized that a CGI dog couldn’t really stop him from drinking or that he knew they were filming when he hid his bottle in the rafters of the cabin. I have a theory that the cabin is just where Harrison Ford lives, and a film crew showed up one day to interview him. Realizing they had hours of him drunkenly planning a quest to find gold with his invisible dog, they adroitly constructed the rest of the movie around this footage.

I got some strange looks as we were leaving the theater and I was explaining to my daughters that “the male character should have removed his clothes, then taken off the woman’s clothes and held her directly against his body.” I felt impelled to deliver this impromptu cold water safety lecture due to a somewhat irresponsible scene. After a character experiences near drowning in ice cold water, it cuts away from her situation entirely while the male character is foolishly concerned only with one of his dogs. The woman would have been at immediate risk of death in the remote wilderness with no readily available shelter or heat source.

That man had a moral responsibility to let his dog drown while he removed the unconscious woman’s clothes and held her against his naked body. His failure to do so sends the wrong message to children. Since being submerged in cold water is dangerous, being removed from cold water must be a complete solution. This dangerously stupid and oversimplified “logic” makes sense if you see it enough times. Why couldn’t Harrison Ford stumble onto this scene and once again shove a hypothermic person into the freshly killed carcass of a large animal, perhaps a seal? I have to take off a few points for missing the obvious opportunity for a good disemboweling. Isn’t The Empire Strikes Back a cherished family adventure featuring a classic and beloved graphic disembowelment scene? Search your feelings. You know it to be true.

Call of the Wild has many positive elements and it is apparent that talented people worked hard on it. It’s not lazy. We get to see excellent set design, creative shot composition, great lighting, some good acting, appropriate and understated music, and cowboy guns (lever action rifles, single action revolvers).

It suffers from bad editing in the beginning, some terrible acting, and one unforgivably terrible shot at the climax of the action. The antagonist’s motivation was strange and unclear because the script condensed too many characters from the book. My 8 year old daughter, who knows the book, was confused and asked me about this afterwards. There was one overly cartoonish and childish action sequence. There was a better and I think obvious way the antagonist could have been defeated. It was very off-putting that the man who was cruelest to the dogs appeared to be distinctly Appalachian. Where did he come from? The film has a mysterious and unfortunate dearth of French Canadian dog abusers.

I acknowledge they could never depict the ending from the book in any movie but I wanted to see Buck become not just hardened and dangerous, but legendarily so. In the book, generations of people won’t venture to the place where Buck took his revenge and they consider him to be a demon. We see nothing like this in the movie.

I dreaded this movie because of the terrible CGI dog in the trailer. But after seeing it I’m going to partially defend the CGI dog. Yes, it’s far too Scooby-Doo at times. I think the concept was to have Buck be silly at first, then become hard by the end, and they could do this much more effectively with a CGI dog. It is a smart idea and it generally worked. They just slightly mis-calibrated. I also think they might have planned to show much more violence towards the dogs, and again the computer generated dog makes mores sense. The quality should have been better, but it was not nearly as bad as I had feared. In contrast to Buck, the white she-wolf was done well. I appreciated the realistic depiction of this white bitch, an area where many family movies fail.

See it with your kids if they like dogs. Otherwise watch Togo, a much better sled dog movie, starring Willem Dafoe and real, living dogs. I also thought it was odd that Willem Dafoe didn’t remove his clothes in several scenes of Togo. Not because the scene called for it, but just because it’s Willem Dafoe. When you hire Willem Dafoe, do you need to pay him more or pay him less to remain fully clothed? It’s quite difficult to say.

Call of the Wild is decent family movie, but like almost all “family” productions, it is at war with itself because it’s made for at least 3 different target audiences. You can always tell these movies were stepped on and can just feel the meetings while watching them. This one is better than most and it had much potential. If only the suits would have unleashed their creative team and allowed them to run wild rather than forcing them to do the heavy pulling for the marketing department.

I would have liked to see this much effort dedicated to an R rated, 2.5 hour Call of the Wild that is more true to the source material. The theater we went to was pretty full for a sunny Sunday afternoon, and there were only one or two children other than mine there. I think there is a good market for hours of realistic violence towards innocent dogs followed by a triumphant, one-sided slaughter of First Nations people. But maybe it’s good that people like me cannot be put in charge of such decisions. Perhaps the bean counters and focus groups got it right once again and Scooby-Doo on Ice is the best of all possible worlds.

I Have Forgotten how to Read

An outstanding article by Michael Harris in the Globe and Mail.

Out for dinner with another writer, I said, "I think I've forgotten how to read."

"Yes!" he replied, pointing his knife. "Everybody has."

"No, really," I said. "I mean I actually can't do it any more."

He nodded: "Nobody can read like they used to. But nobody wants to talk about it."

For good reason. It's embarrassing. Especially for someone like me. I'm supposed to be an author – words are kind of my job. Without reading, I'm not sure who I am. So, it's been unnerving to realize: I have forgotten how to read – really read – and I've been refusing to talk about it out of pride.

What we'll have to look out for is how cynical – how efficient and ruthlessly algorithmic – that next thing is going to be. "A book," one author told me, "is really just a reverse-engineered TED Talk, right? It's a platform that lets you do a speaking tour."

For many writers, this is the new wisdom. A cynical style of reading gives way to a cynical style of writing. I've watched my own books become "useful" as they made their way into public conversation. I never meant them to be useful – in a self-help sense – but that was how they were often read. I say this with less reproach than surprise: Almost every interviewer has asked me for tips and practical life advice, despite the fact my books offer neither.

Preventing Stunted Conversations

Two interesting rules presented around 1:52 into Dave Rubin's interview with Brett and Eric Weinstein.

1. A very smart person saying something obvious should be assumed to be saying something subtle until proven otherwise.


2. An intelligent person who is saying something wrong should be assumed to be saying something counterintuitive until proven otherwise.

Now, how to identify "really smart" people?

Whatever happened to pork bellies?

I started wondering why you never hear about pork bellies anymore and thought maybe it's become some underrated investment with tons of potential. I found this article in the NY Times that explained what happened. It contains one hell of a paragraph:

Still, the demise of the futures means something else is really gone now, too — a unique belly culture and its hard-charging, daring cast of characters who, decades ago, made their fortunes in the high pressure of the belly pit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/us/31porkbelly.html

Passion II

I'm not excited for Mel Gibson's sequel to the Passion of the the Christ.  Passion is much closer to being a bad movie than it is to being a great movie. I simply do not understand the following for this film. The most glaring problems are the lighting and the awkward scene when Jesus invents the kitchen table, but the entire thing is "off".

Also, Jim Caveziel is now too old for the role.

On the other hand, Gibson's Apocalypto is almost perfect. If he wants to go biblical he should do an old school sword & sandal movie with the action sensibilities of Apocalypto. I suggest a remake of The Robe from 1953, one of the few movies that ought to be remade but has been ignored in the remake era.

Pa Ingalls is a real jerk

Someone on facebag took one of those intrusive "which character are you" tests and came up as the Charles Ingalls. This touched a raw nerve and set me off:

Pa Ingalls is a loser. Ma should have traded him for an extra horse or a rifle and went back to the woods.

He moves his family away from the woods that have abundant resources and friends and family close by just because he likes to see wilder animals or needs to find himself or some nonsense. The family are nearly drowned crossing the frozen water as the ice breaks up less than 12 hours after they cross. He doesn't allow Jack in the wagon to ford the river so the girls think the dog drowned. His wife is seriously injured when she is forced to build the cabin. They are surrounded by wolves and he does absolutely nothing to scare them away or discourage them from holding the family prisoner in the cabin. He builds a chimney that almost kills his family while he is off in Independence doing who knows what. And why is he going to town all the damn time if he wanted to move away from people in the first place? He allows hostile Indians into the house and just watches as they steal his belongings. At least Jack has some damn sense and is protective of the house and family but Pa leaves him chained to the cabin 24/7 so as to not trouble the Indians! Then the Indians decide to massacre the family and terrorize them for days with their war drums. This wasn't some random kill the white people attack. Pa was such a jerk they had to have tribal council and really plan this thing. The Ingalls only survive by dumb luck when one Indian who happened to have some authority changed his mind at the last minute. But it would have been something like 200-1 if they put it to a vote. Shortly after this they have to abandon their homestead anyway and start over since U.S soldiers are coming to roust all the white settlers. That's when Pa decides to leave? He is so stubborn he thinks he's just going to hunker down and power through a war with the Indians but leaves before the soldiers even come to kick them out. I doubt the soldiers would have outright murdered them and would have been somewhat sympathetic but he doesn't even think about trying. Great year, thanks Pa.

DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism

I somehow missed this excellent essay until today:

https://www.edge.org/conversation/digital-maoism-the-hazards-of-the-new-online-collectivism

"The question isn't just one of authentication and accountability, though those are important, but something more subtle. A voice should be sensed as a whole. You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning"