Archive for May, 2008
392 – I’m Not There.
Posted by frothy in I'm Not There. on May 31, 2008
To appreciate I’m Not There., you need to fully buy into its somewhat-implausible premise; in it, six actors represent various aspects of Bob Dylan throughout his many decades in the limelight. If you buy into this premise, then this is a unique, thoughtful perspective of an almost-unknowable individual, a man who famously played things close to the vest, a man who shunned introspection. But if you don’t immediately buy into this premise, then the movie just feels like a long experiment that isn’t entirely successful, and in the end you don’t feel you know much more about the man, the myth, the legend than you knew going in. Which might be the point, who’s to say?
And that’s sort of where I land on the whole I’m Not There. issue.
Here’s one big problem right off the bat. The six various characters, each representing part of Dylan, have different names. Some of them are named after real-life people, like Woody Guthrie and Arthur Rimbaud. Some have fictitious names, like Jude Quinn (an amalgam of Jude from “Hey Jude” and Dylan’s own “The Mighty Quinn”), Jack Rollins, and Robbie Clark – the latter being an actor playing one of the aspects in a movie. And then it gets confusing.
The first gimmick for this movie is that each aspect is played by an actor you wouldn’t expect to see playing Dylan. Okay, maybe not all of them, but some of them. Cate Blanchett is one. She’s female, in case you were unsure, and she is by far the best Dylan in the movie. She plays Jude, the latter-day, piss-off-everyone Dylan. Another is Marcus Carl Franklin, who plays “Woody Guthrie” – here, a young version of Dylan, riding the rails across the Midwest. Franklin is African American. Then there’s Heath Ledger and Christian Bale, who are Australian (as is Blanchett) and Welsh, respectively. The problem with those, though, is that the only difference between them and the real Dylan is Dylan’s particular linguistic tendencies, so you wind up with just some guys acting Dylanesque. You know, the perpetual cigarette dangling precariously, the hat, the whole nine yards.
It would have been more effective, for me, if each of the aspects was played by completely different looking people – because in order for them to be identifiable as Dylan, they would have to sound like him. Otherwise you’re left with some folk-singing iconoclast who’s rebelling against everyone, and you don’t know why. So there’s one issue. And that would have been a clever, but not too-clever, way for each supposed aspect or time period to be represented. Even if two aspects were on the screen simultaneously, big deal – at least we could tell who was who.
But added to this gimmick is the fact that some non-Dylan characters – and some situations – are based on real-life people, like Allen Ginsburg, and retain their counterparts’ names, and others are clearly supposed to be real people but have … different names. And some situations definitely did occur (such as Dylan’s getting booed at the Newport festival, a huge turning point for him), but did all of them? Were any of them made up to highlight that particular aspect of his personality?
One of the characters is Arthur Rimbaud. No, not the poet, he just has that name. Anyway, the entirety of his screen time is spent giving testimony or something to officials (or a jury, I’m not sure). And his speeches are of the deep philosophical sort, the kind that Dylan was apparently fond of – ways to get into people’s minds, but I’m not sure what the soliloquies add in terms of exposition and revelation.
Then there’s also Richard Gere, who plays Billy the Kid, another “aspect” of Dylan. Apparently here Billy is mythologized as this hiding loner at the end of his career, just sort of like Dylan, only Dylan’s not even now at the end of his career, unless he keels over tomorrow, or something. Gere’s good, and I don’t say that often, but I think the aspect, such as it is, is too abstract and unreadable to be worthwhile.
The intermittent narrator (Kris Kristofferson) is marginally helpful; perhaps he could have been used to tie all these aspects together. Instead we get two hours of ego feeding and idol worship. To me, though, it felt more like idle worship than anything else, a waste of time even if you’re willing to grasp whatever deep insights the film pretends to offer to you.
**1/2
The Seventh Veil (1945)
Posted by frothy in Seventh Veil (1945) on May 30, 2008
1945′s The Seventh Veil is a psychological thriller along the lines of Gaslight (1940, 1944*) but lacking the frightening tone and twists of the classic. But it’s very well acted, particularly by its leads, Ann Todd and James Mason, two Brits who were largely unknown in the States at the time.
The movie opens with an attempted suicide of a former concert pianist, Francesca (Todd), who’s now mute and (obviously) despondent. A psychologist, played by Herbert Lom, places Francesca under hypnosis in order to determine what has put her in the state she’s in, and much of the movie is told in subsequent flashback, from Francesca’s discovery of her musical talents as a schoolchild to her being looked after by a distant cousin (Mason) to falling in love (then out, then in again). Somewhere along the line, she developed a neurosis so acute that she couldn’t even look at a piano without flinching. What’s happened to her?
Todd is wonderful. She’s not naturally beautiful; her Francesca is painfully shy, often answering her cousin Nicholas’s questions with one word, and consequently she’s tough for other people to understand. She feels she’s alone, but her musical abilities make her feel alive and a part of something, and it’s this talent that Nicholas helps to nurture, either for her benefit or for his own.
Mason is equally elliptical in his treatment of Francesca; he is at times brutish and selfish. I’m reminded of the old line, “Is it for His glory, or for yours?” – it applies here, as Mason is sort of Pygmalion and Machiavelli combined. The suave Mason never lets you assume he’s either bad or good; his honest intentions aren’t completely known until the movie is over.
The ending feels kind of like an Occam’s Razor ending – the easiest solution, in other words. It’s not as twisty as I’d have hoped; when Francesca must make a choice, she makes an unsurprising one. But that is sort of in keeping with her character, who is fairly humdrum and predictable herself. The difference is that Francesca, and by extent Todd, is enigmatic even within her quietude.
You could classify this, perhaps, as minor Hitchcock, from an era that he dominated. Another to see, along with Gaslight, would be Dead of Night (1945).
*There were two versions of this scissors-mad story. The 1940 version is the British one; the movie was remade four years later in Hollywood with Charles Boyer and Angela Lansbury.
Indiana Jones and the Plethora of Errors
Would you believe the new Indy Jones movie has 57 mistakes in it? 57? Well, sure, some of them are your garden-variety continuity errors, like hair that’s parted one way in a shot and another way the next shot, or different levels of liquid in a glass. But there are also a buttload of factual errors. The movie was set in 1957, and …
“During the movie somebody brings out a gun a point Indy close to the neck; you can notice it as a Glock pistol. Its was made by first time in 1963.”
“The movie supposedly is taking place in 1957, yet the motorcycle that Mutt rides is based on a 2000 or newer Harley Davidson softail, showing the modern day controls and Twin Cam motor, instead of the panhead motor that would have been the period correct engine of 1957.”
“Indy and Mutt fly to Nazca, Peru. Nazca is only 4 hours away on bus from the capital Lima, yet the city they show on the movie is Cuzco, which is 24 hours away from Lima. Cuzco is on the east side of the country, Nazca is on the west coast right next to Lima. Also, back in 1957 only Lima had an airport, yet they show a Nazca airport that didn’t exist.”
Nosferatu
Posted by frothy in Nosferatu (1922) on May 27, 2008
You know how people sometimes say “If you like vampires, you’ll like such and such”? Or zombies, or chick flicks, or Scientology, or CT scans, or marmalade? Well, if you do like vampires, there’s no way you should NOT see Nosferatu, the grandaddy of almost all of them.
Nosferatu was released in 1922. It’s really old now. So old that – get this, kids – there’s no dialog. There’s no sound other than the soundtrack itself, and that was only added recently. And for an old horror movie, that actually is how it oughta be, to my thinking; if you dress up the movie with music and effects, you tend to mask the actual horrific nature of the movie.
Nosferatu, as you might have guessed, is basically Dracula. F. W. Murnau, who directed, couldn’t get the rights from Bram Stoker’s widow, so he made do – everyone’s name has been changed. But it’s the same story. Man is sent to the faraway lands of some place or another to meet with an eccentric old fella who wants to buy a house in town. The old man, a Count Orlok, is actually Nosferatu the vampire. Then there’s a psychic connection between Nosferatu and the young man’s left-behind wife, and there’s a wacky guy who worships his new master, and there’s a sequence where Nosferatu travels by boat, in a coffin, and so on.
Playing the role of the sinister bloodsucker (as if there could be innocent bloodsuckers, right?) is the exquisitely ugly Max Schreck; this was the extent of his exposure to American audiences, but it’s a powerful and lasting impression indeed. Missing is the elegant charm that Bela Lugosi would later bring to the role, and in its place is a seamy malevolence steeped in debauchery and decrepitude. His Count Orlok is terrifying, both physically and pyschologically – you can’t stare at him too long, but you can’t help not staring.
For a good companion movie to this, check out 2000′s Shadow of the Vampire, a fictional film about the making of Nosferatu, with Willem Dafoe as Schreck and John Malkovich as Murnau. The kicker is that in this film, Schreck is an actual vampire – various cast and crew disappear during the filming.
***1/2
Sydney Pollack
Sydney Pollack, one of the few directors who could also act, has died of cancer at age 73. Pollack was nominated for six Oscars during his career, winning two (as producer and director of 1985′s Out of Africa, which I haven’t seen).
Let’s take a look at some of his most important films.
1. The Swimmer (1968). Frank Perry was the credited director of this existential drama about a man in a midlife crisis in southern California, but Pollack took over after Perry was dismissed (creative differences). This is an underrated gem, with a particularly wonderful Burt Lancaster in the lead; atypical for Lancaster, the role is more introspective than chest-beating.
2. Jeremiah Johnson (1972). Pollack directed longtime partner Robert Redford in this actioner about a man who leaves civilization behind to be… well, a mountain man. Granpa Walton (Will Geer) shows up as well, as a Native American, though back then they were called Indians. Like the best Pollack films, this one was pretty in its quietude.
3. Three Days of the Condor (1975). Redford again, this time as a CIA agent whose entire station’s been wiped out by someone. Sort of set the standard for innocent-guy-on-the-run thrillers. Believable and fun, but it’s a little off putting to see Redford browbeating Faye Dunaway.
4. Absence of Malice (1981). This time, Pollack turned to Paul Newman as a businessman whose reputation is destroyed by an article written by Sally Field. This has more to do with libel charges than anything else, but it’s still entertaining – if only because it’s Paul Newman.
5. Tootsie (1981). Here, Pollack hit the jackpot as a director. This comedy about a struggling actor (Dustin Hoffman) who dresses as a woman to get work was nominated for ten Oscars, winning for Best Actress (Jessica Lange). A top-notch cast, including Geena Davis, Teri Garr, Dabney Coleman, Bill Murray, and Charles Durning, turned this from a slight film into a real blast.
6. The Firm (1993). One of the earlier John Grisham adaptations. Tom Cruise is the usual callow lawyer who’s been set up by someone or other to take a fall. Because he’s naive, you see, despite being a lawyer. Anyway, great cast as always (Gene Hackman, Wilford Brimley, Hal Holbrook, Ed Harris, Holly Hunter).
7. Sabrina (1995). Sometimes (okay, often), the remake doesn’t work. The original 1953 movie starred Bogie, Holden, and a waifish Audrey Hepburn; this one had Harrison Ford, Greg Kinnear, and Julia Ormond, and none of them looked happy to be there. The former trio was much more believable, unfortunately.
8. Random Hearts (1998). Ford again, this time paired with Kristin Scott Thomas; they’re the surviving spouses of people who died in a plane crash, and wouldn’t you know it, they fall for each other while digging up their past loves’ secrets. Not a good movie.
9. The Interpreter (2005). I was one of the few who enjoyed this thriller about a UN interpreter (Nicole Kidman) who overhears a plot to kill her country’s president; Sean Penn and Catherine Keener are the Secret Service agents who believe/don’t believe her. Again, Pollack showed he could handle big-name talent deftly.
10. Michael Clayton (2007). Pollack was a producer for this legal thriller, and he had a key role as a senior law partner, but ultimately the movie was kind of lame and gimmicky.
391 – Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Posted by frothy in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on May 24, 2008
For all practical purposes, the long-awaited fourth Indiana Jones is solid, gutsy, sincere entertainment, successfully placing an aging, breaking-down hero against a backdrop of wild locations, living-dead assassins, evil Commies, and returning love interests. Harrison Ford, looking every one of his 65 years (but that’s okay – because that’s how old Dr. Jones is, too), is really terrific as the intrepid professor/archaeologist; it looks like he’s hardly been away from the role he last played in 1989. And his supporting cast is also top-notch, with one notable exception.
The year is 1957, and as the movie opens a Russian commando has infiltrated a US base in New Mexico. Seems the Russkies – led by Cate Blanchett, in a cold, despicably evil performance – are looking for a certain crystal skull that can commute the usual incredible powers to whoever returns it to its rightful place. Of course, Jones quickly is involved, and his travels take him to the jungles of Peru (somewhat surprisingly, cocaine trafficking is not even mentioned as a plot device). Oh, but not before paying homage to a relic of the late 1950s, atomic-bomb testing. Yes, it’s Indy Jones in the Atomic Age! Unfortunately, we don’t get a sudden fifty-foot Dr. Jones with one eye.
Indy’s not alone, naturally, that would be boring. Gone is Marcus Brody, since Denholm Elliott died in 1992, and Henry Jones Sr., since Sean Connery is retired from acting. Indiana has with him his partner Mac (Ray Winstone) and a new friend, a greaser (remember, 1957) named Mutt who insists his mom told him to find Jones, and since he hasn’t heard from his mom, who was looking for another friend, Dr. Oxley (John Hurt), Mutt believes he and Indy have to team up to find out what’s going on.
First, let’s look at Ford. There are few actors who have had the monumental pop-cultural impact that Ford’s had. He’s been Han Solo, Jack Ryan, and Indiana Jones. He’s been in nine movies with just those three characters, and his movies have made billions – and yet the man himself has exactly one Oscar nomination (for Working Girl). His wry looks and grim determination haven’t faded much over the years, and he makes this role work simply because you can believe Indy would look just like that after two decades have passed. Ford knows what makes for effective acting; you want your audience to completely buy into everything your character does, as if they were in your character’s shoes. And one thing that the Indiana Jones films do that other action films don’t is that they eschew most action-guy bon mots and stunts that stretch plausibility past its breaking point. And remember, Harrison Ford does most of his own stunts, too.
His supporting cast gels quite nicely, all things considered. Karen Allen returns as Marion Ravenwood, whom we haven’t seen since the original Raiders of the Lost Ark. Allen’s been out of work for four years now and didn’t have much of a career even after RotLA, but she looked good here, and more importantly she had excellent chemistry with Ford. Winstone and Hurt, both fine actors, are pretty good here as well – although Winstone’s rough British accent is indecipherable at times, and Hurt’s character has very little to say (he’s mad, you see) until very late in the film.
Perplexing is the decision to cast Shia LaBeouf has bad-boy Mutt Williams, though. LaBeouf was entertaining in Transformers, but he has the face of an innocent little lamb, not Vinne Barbarino. So more like Arnold Horshack. He can’t act tough; he can barely imagine tough. LaBeouf looks like he’s trying to play dress up at a particularly lame Halloween party, but then our luck changes; in South America, he’s suddenly Awesome Lad, able to help Old Man Jones fight off those nasty Reds.
Any fan of the series will recognize some running gags – Indy’s fear of snakes, for one thing. And a fight at the edge of a cliff! And Indy getting interrupted while lecturing to his class, by the school’s new dean (Jim Broadbent)! There’s even a nod to Indy’s insistence that old stuff belongs in a museum, as Blanchett’s evil minx Irina Spalko tries to entice the unwavering scientist with visions of gifts to museums. She’s quite touching, that Irina.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is far brighter and flat-out fun than 1984′s Temple of Doom, and it’s more actiony and dramatic than 1989′s Last Crusade; the only movie to which it pales in comparison is the original, and there’s nothing Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, or George Lucas could do to prevent that. The fourth installment is genuine adventure, complete with a cohesive cast and some jaw-dropping action sequences.
So there you have it. Not pedestrian, not lame, not boring. Quite good, really. An outstanding effort that’s (as usual) best appreciated on the big screen, although with so many large-screen TVs about nowadays, watching at home should be just as intense.
***1/2
390 – Iron Man
Many comic-book movies like to take the approach of just blowing you away with crafty CGI or nifty special effects, eschewing plot complexities almost entirely. I’m happy to say that Iron Man doesn’t go that route, and it’s all because of two things: fantastic effects, yes, and – get this – excellent acting.
Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) is a rich industrialist who makes and sells weapons for the U.S. military. While giving a demonstration for troops in Afghanistan (!), his convoy is attacked by terrorists; he’s captured and is forced to make the very missle he’d been showing off to the American brass. Instead, he makes a robotic suit, which he then uses to escape his captors.
But something’s happened to Stark – he’s finally come to the realization that making weapons might not be the most philanthropical enterprise he could undertake. He will use his mind for good from now on! He will become … Iron Man!
Okay, so he doesn’t say the latter part. The “Iron Man” appellation isn’t even used until the end of the film, after all. But you could say that Stark’s heart, previously two sizes too small, had grown. Well, not literally; in fact, as a result of the convoy attack Stark must use an artificial heart patterned after the very reactor used by his company to power its headquarters. So it’s a heartwarming story of a man’s change of heart.
Stark has a Girl Friday, as most Youngish Rich Industrialist(tm) do; her unlikely name is Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), and she handles all of Stark’s (nonsexual) affairs. (A computer, of course, handles his huge techcentric mansion.) Potts would be about the only nubile young lady Stark hasn’t bedded – he’s the love ‘em and leave ‘em type, the kind to wonder why a girl’s still there the next morning.
Also on Stark’s side – although perhaps not quite a friend – is Col. Jim Rhodes (Terrence Howard), a military man who’s been the beneficiary of Stark’s genius for years. Added to the mix is Stark’s longtime business partner Obadiah Stane (an almost-unrecognizable Jeff Bridges), the more business savvy of the two. And it’s a little odd to see Bridges with a shaved head; it took me a minute to realize it was him. He has that unmistakable Bridges way of talking out of the side of his mouth in a half-drawl, or that squinty thing he does when he’s looking off camera while talking to someone. You know, idiosyncrasies that mark him as Jeff Bridges.
Since superheroes have become the craze, our standards for them have been suitably elevated. It’s not enough to see some doofus zooming around a Gothic cityscape at night, saving the townsfolk from ne’er do wells. We demand more. We want explosions, nifty gadgets, and appealing characters. In Iron Man, I gave a crap about Tony Stark and Pepper Potts. The movie, for me, wasn’t just about making my jaw drop – which it did, sometimes – it was about making me care about obvious computer enhancements. And Iron Man did that, and more; it had wit and soul. It also didn’t contain goofy catchphrases or clinically proven Bad Guy throwaway phrases. All points in its favor.
The downside, if there truly is one, is that some of the plot just plain doesn’t make sense. There’s no need to harp on them, because those holes aren’t all that relevant to the movie as a whole, but let me just wonder this much: How can Pepper Potts, who’s just been Stark’s personal assistant, possess all the knowledge she has at the end of the movie? She seems smart and practical and organized – just like a real personal assistant – but not technically oriented in the teeniest, so what she does near the end seems more than a little implausible. But again, nitpicking.
The acting is almost universally superb, rare for a superhero movie. Downey Jr. is perfectly cast as the debaucherous Stark who finds a new lease on life after nearly losing his; Downey Jr. brings a real panache and verve to what could have been a docile role. Paltrow is elegant, charming, and utterly beautiful, but most important is how her character interacts with her boss: believable and endearing. And one of the very finest actors of his generation is in this as well. No, not Bridges, who’s pretty good (in fact, better than the role might indicate), but Howard, who is spectactular in the few scenes in which he appears. Howard, in particular, is a huge boost to the movie, because without him the friendship between Stark and Rhodes wouldn’t be all that believable.
***
389 – The Savages
Although it features two galvanizing performances, by Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, The Savages is a little too despairing and bleak, wallowing in a murky sea of negativity and even stooping to manipulate the bejeezus out of its audience near the end. It’s difficult to watch, sort of like 1998′s Affliction only without the grizzled crankiness of Nick Nolte to soften the grim viewpoint.
Wendy Savage (Linney) is 39 years old and works various temp jobs as she struggles to gain footing as a playwright; older brother Jon (Hoffman) is a philosophy professor. Neither has been close to their father in many years, so when Wendy gets a call from the Arizona desert that Lenny (Philip Bosco) has been smearing his own feces onto walls, they have to hustle out west. Where, of course, they find out that Dear Old Dad’s longtime girlfriend has just keeled over, leaving him homeless.
If you’re at that age where you’ve figured out that your parents aren’t gonna live forever, the next reel of the movie is both poignant and grueling, although it’s also a bit vicious and unsettling. Wendy and Jon have to find a place for Lenny to live, and he’s obviously showing early signs of dementia. One of their escapades involves a transcontinental flight, just Wendy and Lenny. Hilarity ensues, just the wry, perhaps-familiar kind. Lenny drifts in and out of reality, sometimes conflating his life with those of movie characters. Sometimes he thinks he’s in a hotel, and sometimes he doesn’t recognize his kids. Oh, and the siblings! There’s a tiny bit of resentment and bitterness there, you see. Jon is successful; Wendy is not. Wendy has feelings of inadequacy around her brother, and both of them were (verbally) abused and then abandoned by their father long ago. So there’s a strong undercurrent of raging subtext in this journey into hopelessness.
So the story isn’t so much about the two grown-up kids dealing with the incapacitation of their father as it is about sibling rivalry and dealing with long-forgotten slights and neuroses they didn’t realize they had. Adding to the complexities is an affair that Wendy is having with a married man (she even gets to trot out the “I’m not married, but my boyfriend is” witticism). Then there’s a cloying bit about an old dog, and a feisty cat … and let’s just say that the most exciting part is when Lenny’s smearing feces on the wall in the first scenes of the movie.
Nothing against either Linney (who was nominated for an Oscar here) or Hoffman, because they both gave more to the picture than it gave to them. Without their effort here, the movie would have been even muddier and depressing. But unless it strikes you in the right mood – perhaps introspective, perhaps schadenfreude – you could find yourself weighed with self-doubt and self-pity, grasping at threads of your life that you thought had long vanished.
**
388 – Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
Posted by frothy in Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay on May 6, 2008
A while ago, I had a slightly different grading system for movies. The lowest possible rating, you see, was BOMB. As in, it’s explosively awful. I changed that because it was a direct ripoff of Leonard Maltin’s system. So now the worst rating a movie can get is simply one star (*).
Movies like the Harold and Kumar sequel, though, make me wish I had the old BOMB system again. The movie isn’t just juvenile, uncreative, and pathetic; it’s sort of a clinic on how to suck as a movie. It’s extremely predictable, which would be fine if the jokes and raunch were any interesting. It’s also viciously mean spirited – and not in the broad, over-the-top blunt (no pun intended) humor of the 2004 original, either. Back then, everything that the titular duo did was wrapped in a drug-induced haze, and that justified the lowbrow comedy. Hey, it’s funny because they’re stoned, man! Get it?
But not so with this one. Sure, drug use figures prominently into the plot, but there aren’t nearly enough drug scenes to save the movie. Harold and Kumar do things that can be obliquely traced to drug use, you see, but most of their problems come from their unimpaired decision making, and that makes for a dull, pointless film.
Originally, this was titled “Harold and Kumar Go to Amsterdam,” but eventually the filmmakers figured out that our buds (no pun intended, I swear) don’t actually make it to Amsterdam. As the trailer showed, they’re mistaken for terraists and are deposited in Guantanamo Bay. Well, the prison, not the actual bay. And then, as you might have been able to predict, they escape. Wild shenanigans follow, including a visit to a “bottomless” party (which was clever), a run in with nonstereotypical denizens in Alabama (not bad), an encounter with a stereotypical inbred hillbilly couple (including that “Hemi” guy from those old Dodge commercials), and a mixup with a Klan gathering. The latter was funny back when Chevy Chase did it in Fletch Lives, and no so much now.
And of course there’s the obligatory appearance by Neil Patrick Harris as himself. His was a huge boon to the original movie, and he’s back, fortuitously showing up to save the lads from the Klansmen. And that’s about the only time that the movie has any spark at all; Harris wolfs down mushrooms while driving to a whorehouse, and at one point he sees a unicorn. It’s the exact kind of trippy awesomeness that helped make the original movie a cult hit, and there’s so little of it here.
Aside from that, the movie’s pedestrian. Kumar wants to get to Texas and, in a staple of generic teen comedies, break up the wedding of his ex-girlfriend to the world’s biggest douchebag – no offense to you other douchebags out there. Adding a complication we would NEVER have forseen, he’s also the One Guy who can get Harold and Kumar out of the mess they’re in. And Harold wants to get to Amsterdam (eventually) to meet up with the girl he met at the end of the first movie (she’s there on business; won’t she be surprised? If so, it would be the only surprise in the movie.)
At its heart, the movie’s problem is that Kal Penn and John Cho don’t have nearly the degree of on-screen chemistry that they had in the first movie, for whatever reason. The two kids from Superbad covered similar ground, and they were infinitely more believable and funnier. Harold and Kumar are bitter jerks to each other at various points in the story, and it’s not the wild exaggerated-for-comic-effect kind of bitterness, either, which makes it a little uncomfortable to watch at times. Quite a disappointment.
Constipating the humor even further was a howlingly awful performance by Rob Corddry as some deputy Homeland Security canker sore who’s out to get Harold and Kumar. There’s broad performance, and there’s one-note. Corddry can be funny with a good script to follow, but if the writing’s terrible, so is he. What should have been hyperbolically funny was instead discomfiting and annoying, huge debits for such a big role.
I want my $10 back, to paraphrase the delivery boy in Better Off Dead. Harold and Kumar Escape from Gunatanamo Bay is a rip off, best enjoyed (if that) at home, ironically, with many friends who pay you to see it. Which would be illegal, I think, so don’t do it.
*
387 – The Golden Compass
Posted by frothy in Golden Compass on May 4, 2008
Although it didn’t do particularly well in U.S. theaters, thus imperiling sequels, I found The Golden Compass to be highly entertaining and imaginative; it represents all the reasons I watch movies in the first place. It’s fast paced, managing to pack in hundreds of pages of narrative into about 110 minutes of movie. On the downside, the movie ends a bit earlier than perhaps it should have (i.e., not at the same point as the end of the book on which it’s based), leaving the viewer wanting more.
The movie (based on the Phillip Pullman book) is set in a sort of alternative universe, one in which humans’ souls exist outside their bodies, manifest as animals. Before adulthood, these souls, called daemons, can take any number of forms (kitty cat, ferret, tiger, bug, bird), but once the human experiences Changes in the Body, the daemon settles into one form. Also, although the time and place seem to be comparative with 18th century Britain, there are technological advances that would seem out of place in our universe, such as jet-fueled zeppelins and flying boats and whatnot.
Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards) is a young girl attending a private school within the prestigious Jordan College. She’s an impish mischief maker, but she also has some nobility within her, earning an unspoken respect from her peers. At any rate, Lyra, through her uncle Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig) learns of the existence of Dust, a particular matter that her uncle believes helps determine the psychological makeup of all humans, by way of their daemons. Ah, but this goes against the teachings of the church, aka the Magisterium, which states that all rights and will derive from the Authority, aka God. (Yes, this is an antireligion book.)
Asriel heads north to research Dust further; Lyra’s left behind but soon finds a new ally: Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman), a “friend” of the college, who is also heading north and wishes Lyra to accompany her. But is Mrs. Coulter as perfectly awesome as she seems?
Lyra’s not completely without resources, though. The Master of Jordan gave her an alethiometer, a curious device that allows the holder to learn Truth about something, provided he or she can read it correctly. This would be the Golden Compass of the title; it’s not really a compass, although it’s kind of goldish. At any rate, there are only a handful of these things left in the world, and very, very few people possess the skills to interpret their symbol combinations. It’s the sort of thing that takes decades for people to master, so of course Lyra learns she has the innate ability to read the alethiometer. Meanwhile, kids are disappearing; the rumor is that they are being taken to the north country, up where the armored (yes, really) bears live. Lyra encounters bears and witches and gypsy pirates (known as gyptians) and a cowboy named Lee Scoresby (Sam Elliott).
And so ends my verbose plot description. So you can see how much plot’s being thrown in there, but here’s the cool thing – it all flows very smoothly; you don’t have to stop and wonder why people are doing what they’re doing, why these two are fighting, and so on. The exposition, so crucial to the story, is gently eased in; you hardly even know it’s there. Which is great, because who wants a movie that gets all thinky on you?
If Harry Potter and Narnia aren’t your cup of tea, you’ll dislike this movie, but for me it a great feel-good movie. First, you’re able to identify with Lyra, even if you’re NOT a twelve-year-old girl. Second, the movie is wholly creative and inventive, creating an alternately beautiful and terrifying world that seems as real as our own. And third, the movie is exceptionally well cast, particularly Ian McKellen as Iorek Byrnison and Eva Green as Seraphina Pekkala. Oh, and Kidman and Craig are equal to the task.
It’s not known at this point whether a sequel (The Subtle Knife is the second book) will be made, owing to a perceived lack of interest at the box office, but if there’s any flaw in the movie it’s in the ending. Now, I’m certainly not going to spoil the ending here, but I will point out that the movie ends at a different point than the first book ends, and it’s not necessarily a good stopping point. Apparently the makers of the movie needed a “happy” ending; the book’s ending is a bit more downbeat. Hopeful, perhaps, but definitely not a crowd pleaser. Still, the movie ended abruptly for me, since I’d read the books, and I was left feeling a little unsatisfied (and dissatisfied).
***
386 – Michael Clayton
Posted by frothy in Michael Clayton on May 3, 2008
Michael Clayton, despite wonderful, sincere performances by George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, and Tom Wilkinson, is alternately confusing and overwrought, and once the bells and whistles of the extraneous plot devices are stripped it’s no better or worse than a standard John Grisham adaptation. There, a nice run-on sentence to start things off. And a sentence fragment.
Michael (Clooney) is a high-powered law firm’s fixer, i.e, the guy who solves the myriad problems that the firm’s clients and partners encounter on a daily basis. He knows people who know people, see? He’s got people to make your issues go away. Clayton’s sent by his boss Marty (Sydney Pollack) to Milwaukee, where Arthur Edens (Wilkinson) has just freaked out. Arthur has been working on a huge case for sixteen years, one involving a class-action suit against a weed-killer manufacturer. (Arthur’s on the defendent’s side.) In the middle of a deposition being given by one of the victims, Arthur suddenly begins ranting and stripping naked. He’s cracked from the pressure, you see, the pressure of defending a huge company whose product has killed over 400 people. Allegedly.
Now, knowing this little, you can make a good guess as to how this plays out. Michael is there to prop Arthur up, make him just presentable enough to placate the company their firm is representing (Unorth). But Arthur will have none of that, and he goes rogue. I bet you can predict that at some point Michael Clayton will figure out that Arthur’s NOT crazy, even with a manic-depressive history, that the evil conglomerate manufacturer really IS killing people. It’s not a great leap of faith to come to this conclusion.
Meanwhile, Michael has other troubles. He’s trying to buy back the restaurant he and his brother used to own, and he’s coming up short. He has partial custody of his young son, and although his ex isn’t the steretypical screaming harpy you see in most movies, she’s not falling over herself to help Michael out. Oh, and his other brother is a very slowly recovering alkie and druggie. So there are home issues. All this while Michael has to run around putting out fires.
I always enjoy watching George Clooney act. He’s sympathetic while not seeming to be a victim; he seems real and genuine, but not a superhero or righteous crusader. He continues to seem like a guy you wouldn’t mind hanging with, or being the godfather to your kids, or maybe serving frappucinos at Starbucks. You know, a reg’lar fella. No fault, really, with his work here, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. He’s overworked and completely consumed by stress and anxiety, which happens to a lot of us. With Michael, though, he can’t throw himself into one thing (e.g., family) to deal with the stress of another (e.g., work), because each offers plenty o’ stress.
By contrast, Swinton (who won Best Supporting Actress) give a much less-nuanced performance, what little we get to see of it. She plays the lead counsel of the Big Evil Company, and I figured we’d see her being all conflicted and stuff. There was some ethical conflict there, yes, but not nearly enough. Her Karen Crowder isn’t very well developed at all, and she doesn’t really even seem like a decent (i.e., decisive) lawyer. Karen’s unsure about everything, and although that may have been meant to illustrate to us how she’s terminally conflicted defending an evil company or something, it certainly didn’t come across that way. Still, I’ll blame these shortcomings nore on the script than on the acting, which wasn’t bad.
Bookending with Clooney in terms of awesome performances was Wilkinson as Arthur Edens, a man who has finally decided to do the right thing after only sixteen years. Bitter, but only at himself, Arthur spends a good portion of the movie trying to figure out what to do – confront UNorth, confront his bosses, run away, kill himself, and so on. Arthur is passionate in finally acknowledging his complicity, and Wilkinson offers more emotion in his stubborn off-his-meds behavior than in the prim, stiff am-I-good-enough doubtings of Karen. Wilkinson, like Clooney, was nominated for an Oscar but didn’t win. Wilkinson makes you give a rat’s ass about the story a lot more than Swinton does, and that’s the key difference here.
In all, Michael Clayton is slight entertainment, but it’s basically just a typical big-bad-corporation legal “thriller” that manages to not be terribly thrilling. The one thing it has going for it, other than the excellent acting, is that some of the events in the movie are not told sequentially. This is good and bad; good that it helps fill in gaps later, bad that those gaps had to be filled in.
**1/2
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