Thursday, December 16, 2010

Self-mutilating angels

I haven't seen Bill Plympton's Idiots and Angels, but it looks interesting. Here is a trailer of the animated film and a brief description below:


And here is a brief description:
“Idiots and Angels” is a dark comedy about a man’s battle for his soul.
Angel, a selfish and morally bankrupt man, wakes up one morning with wings on his back. He tries to hide them, but eventually everyone at Bart’s Bar, where he hangs out, discovers them and ridicules him about his bizarre appendages.
Angel visits a doctor to try to have the wings removed, and the doctor realizes that the wings could be his ticket to fame and fortune. But before the doctor can remove the wings, Angel escapes from his office in fear.
As Angel tries to adapt to the wings, he discovers that now that he can fly, he has greater opportunities to abuse others. However, the wings seem to have a will of their own, and they foil all of his greedy plans.
Read the full long synopsis here.

Now this reminds me of the movie Legion that came out earlier this year. Legion had an interesting premise: God sends his archangel Michael (played by Paul Bettany) to destroy the human race, but Michael disagrees with the decision and sides with the humans and cut-off his wings. This results in a showdown between Michael and a Gabriel-led army of angels in an out of the way diner in the southwest. The movie is mainstream, but it had an interesting (and very cool) premise to explore the problem of evil. The movie stays somewhat interesting (despite some plot problems) until the last 15 minutes of the film - where it just decides to cop out from addressing any hard problems. We'll have to wait for some other movie to tackle this issue well. Nevertheless, the director - Scott Charles Stewart - is definitely interested in this theme, and his next movie, Priest, is about a priest (again played by Paul Bettany) who disobeys church law to track down vampires. Okay - so he is also interested in vampires and gore in general. No, no - I still have faith (ha!) in him. I think he can make a film without a cop-out ending.

Just in case you are interested, here is the trailer for Legion:

7 comments:

Snuze said...

Thanks for the heads up on Idiots and Angels. It reminded me of the TV show Supernatural where in the battle between Heaven and Earth (not Hell, not really), angels are shown to be first class dicks. *snerk*

I enjoyed Legion; watching the trailer in your post made me realise that the version shown in my country is a heavily cropped one. I was wondering how is it the angel just appeared in the cop car, but now I have a better idea. :p

The ending was a little too pat for me, but I think that it would never have been easy to conclude such a storyline anyway. The actions were awesome and gave me a taste for zombie apocalypse fanfiction. *grin*

Salman Hameed said...

Snuze,

Ah - didn't see "Supernatural".

Yeah - I thought Legion was okay. I'm not a big zombie/vampire fan...and that may have colored my views as well. But I liked the premise and thought that Paul Bettany was quite good as Michael. Too bad about the cropped up version. That just ruins the whole movie...

Snuze said...

Paul Bettany is awesome. And I would recommend that you watch Supernatural. Two brothers going across the country killing monsters in a classic muscle car with an awesome classic rock soundtrack is just awesome.

It is easy to dismiss it as a show that panders to screaming teenagers, but the use of monsters to explore their family dynamics is an interesting trope. Not to mention that they dare to go where no other show does in depicting angels and demons.

It's a great little show. Give it a shot.

Salman Hameed said...

Okay - will check it out. I also missed out "Walking Dead" - the new zombie series. It got great reviews and was watched by more people than "Mad Men". I saw the the first two episodes, but then missed the rest in travels. Will try to catch it on DVD. But the beginning is quite similar to"28 Days Later"...

Snuze said...

Since I am a scare-dy cat, I could only watch Walking Dead while I do the subtitling. Something about concentrating to find the right, inoffensive term to substitute "son-of-a-bitch" distracts me from being frightened.:p

Reading about it is a different thing altogether. XD

Do, do find Supernatural on DVD or Netflix or just watch it online here: http://www.watch-supernatural-online.net/

I know, pimping a tad hard, but a fangirl has to spread the joy around. *grin*

Dr. M. Akbar Hussain said...

Man, Legion trailer is creepy. Is this movie similar to Constantine?

Salman Hameed said...

"Man, Legion trailer is creepy. Is this movie similar to Constantine?"

Creepy yes. But I don't think it is like Constantine (I saw Constantine a while ago, so I may be misremembering it). Legion is in the genre of horror/zombie films. But I think it has an interesting premise lurking underneath the gore.

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