SHINING AT THE END OF EVERY DAY

There has been some effort online to stress Damon Lindelof's presence as co-writer of Tomorrowland and thus somehow save the reputation of the film's director and other writer, Brad Bird. Which presumes in the first place that Tomorrowland is bad enough to justify insulating the beloved auteur from it, and I think that's far from an objective truth, even though it's obviously the worst of his five features. But more to the point, there's no separating Bird from Tomorrowland: it might share the name with a large segment of the Disneyland and Magic Kingdom theme parks and thus be part of the Disney corporation's endless game of "brand extension", and it might be a phenomenally overpriced summer tentpole, but this is no director-for-hire job; this is absolutely a movie made by the director of The Iron Giant, and much of what some people find annoying about it thematically derives directly from that fact. What people find annoying about the story structure is vintage Lindelof. I'll spot that part of it, not least because I absolutely agree with it.

That structure gets off to an inordinately rocky start, with one of the most damaging and irritating framework narratives I've seen in a long time. Damaging, because when it returns at the end of the movie, it sets up an implied relationship to those of us in the audience that Bird and Lindelof couldn't possibly have actually intended. Irritating, because it feels like a filmed improv exercise circling around the drain for endless agonising minutes, as two characters we'll eventually learn to be Frank Walker (George Clooney) and Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) bicker mindlessly about the right way to tell the story and the right place to start (and, incidentally, Frank's attitude in this scene also feels profoundly miscalculated given where it ends up arriving in the film's overall chronology). Eventually, they get out of this rut to open on the story of young Frank's (Thomas Robinson) experiences at the 1964 World's Fair in New York, where he introduced a semi-working jetpack to a glum fellow we'll later know as Nix (Hugh Laurie), and is invited by Athena (Raffey Cassidy), a girl about Frank's age, and despite her youth apparently an adviser to Nix. She's the one who gives Frank a pin that allows him access to a teleporter that takes him to a fantastical world of high technology, and then we trot ahead to 2015, our appetites having been presumably whetted.

Whetted, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, and Tomorrowland makes the strategically baffling decision to simultaneously align itself at an audience of children and their families, while also basing virtually all of its appeal on nostalgia for the Space Age - something that not merely the children, but even their parents are largely too young to possesses, except secondhand. And this is the element of the film that directly recalls The Iron Giant: the wholehearted belief that things were better when there was more optimism about the future and less terror, and the promise of space exploration made everything seem bright, shiny, and futuristic. This sits comfortably right next to the film's thesis that the biggest problem with contemporary life is that we've gotten tremendously good at identifying everything rotten, and then putting exactly no effort into fixing it. Which I think is entirely true, though the movie's somewhat pie-eyed idea for solving this human shortcoming largely through the power of wishing and reminding everybody how much we all used to want jet-packs is not entirely true. Maybe not even mostly true.

So the movie is in 2015, where we find Casey, a high schooler who has been instilled with the very same belief in choosing optimism over fatalism by her dad (Tim McGraw), a NASA engineer. Casey's gung-ho attitude is so pronounced, it brings her to the attention of Athena, who hasn't aged an hour since 1964, and who gives the older? younger? girl a pin that, when touched, transports her into a strange high-tech world full of, wouldn't you know, jet-packs and such other chrome-coated signs of mid-century futurism. And her tour of this world, once she figures out how to use the pin safely (when in Tomorrowland, for that is this place, she still interacts physically with the real world), is the film's outright highlight, a synthetic long take that moves through one of the most impressive CGI landscapes ever put into a movie, craning around to catch every last detail. It is the perfect cinematic mechanism to put us in the exact same place of dumbfounded awe and childlike excitement that Casey feels, and if that was the solitary triumph of Bird and cinematographer Claudio Miranda's work on this project, I wouldn't be able to reject the film outright.

It triggers a quest, and that's exactly where Tomorrowland collapses. It's not worth going into all of the movie's odds and ends as Casey and Athena hunt down angry grown-up Frank, and Casey learns the secret of Tomorrowland, a place where all of the most gifted geniuses of the 20th Century gathered to make the world a better, kinder place, until cynicism and hopelessness caused them to lock it away and watch it decay into a husk of its former self (it's an unambiguous though maybe unintentional parody and subversion of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged - the best and brightest hiding in a gulch, only here the geniuses are presented as moral failures because they refuse to freely share their knowledge and achievements with all of humanity. This has not prevented the film from being used as further evidence of Bird's crypto-Randianism by people with nothing more interesting to do with their lives than willfully misunderstand movies). The biggest flaw of the movie, in fact, is the fascination it has with those odds and ends, and the greedy way it dolls them out, piecemeal. It's the whole "mystery box" shtick that was pioneered by J.J. Abrams, mentor in different ways to both Lindelof and Bird, and it doesn't work in Tomorrowland at all.

The film is a punishing 130 minutes, and most of that is taken up with the endless second act, in which Casey drives from Florida to Texas to New York all while failing to learn things that could speed the film up considerably. That's not fair, actually. I mean, it absolutely is fair - the movie would be cleaner, faster, and more engaging if Athena and Frank would just fucking tell Casey what she eventually finds out. And we'd have a sense of the conflict sooner than 90 minutes into the movie, which would be nice, in this children's film from Disney. But it's not fair because the film also suffers from unneeded bloat: there's a trip to Paris that could be written out of the script with the barest amount of work, and several other moments that could be snugged up and shortened. The film could fly and get to the collapsing Tomorrowland well before the one-hour mark; instead it creeps and drags, with the heftiness of an epic but the simplicity of message movie for kids and parents to share. It's a terrible combination of flavors, and it makes a solid 40 minutes of the film seem to exist for no reason other than to keep the good parts as far separate as the filmmakers dared.

It's a pity that the script is so puffy, because a lot of Tomorrowland is really quite lovely: the design is terrific, Bird's adoration of mid-century science fiction is so palpable that it almost veers into self-parody (at one point, it does just that: there's a trip to a curiosity shop selling geek-friendly trinkets that's very little more than a delivery system for in-jokes), and the ingenuity of some of the setpieces both at the level of conception and visual execution is fun and playful. Clooney plays a snappish old man well enough, and Robertson and Cassidy are two absolutely indispensable discoveries - neither of them a "discovery" per se (it's not even Robertson's first leading role - she was in the Nicholas Sparks adaptation The Longest Ride earlier in 2015. Though I imagine that Tomorrowland probably shot first), but given exemplary showcase roles her that make a strong argument for how much we should all want to follow both actors in the future.

All of the ingredients of the film are there, and many parts of it are beguiling summer movie candy; it's just not a great story. The beginning I liked, even for all its saccharine sentiment; the end I liked, even for its contrivance and one hellaciously stretched-out death scene. The middle, though, is nothing but an endurance test. I'm not even sure that the middle is what there's the most of it, but God knows it feels that way, and that's exactly the problem.

6/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: DISNEY THEME PARKS AT THE MOVIES

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Disney's latest effort in brand-mining, Tomorrowland, takes the name (if nothing else) from one of the most famous attractions at Disney's various theme parks. Journey with me back to the beginning of this particular game.

The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish violation of known natural law seemed certain at the outset.

-H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

The Country Bears goes wrong fast, and it goes wrong hard. The film's opening scene is a concert in 1991, the final one given by the titular group before their inglorious retirement, and every last thing about it conspires to be as hideous in combination as remotely possible - the lighting is perfectly designed to accentuate everything that looks horrible about the main characters. For the main characters are people in extraordinarily complex bear costumes with state-of-the-art puppetry faces. And the first time we see them, they look like there was no room left in Hell, and so it began to vomit forth the dead.

Setting aside the ursine abominations inhabiting all the main roles - though we cannot help but return to them later - The Country Bears is a disgusting moral failure of a different sort. This is, depending on the exact set of definitions you want to use,* the very first movie released by the Walt Disney Company as a tie-in promotion to one of its theme park attractions. This was back in 2002, when the company's film division was starting to lose its way again after roaring back to life in the early 1990s, and any terrible idea that could plausibly be defended as a branding exercise could make it through the gates. 50 weeks and two movies later, this misbegotten experiment would finally result in a critical and commercial success, with Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl; but before that happened Disney had to embarrass itself a couple of times (The Haunted Mansion was the second effort; I haven't seen it, but the rumor is that it's the worst of the trio).

Really, though, calling The Country Bears an embarrassment is being nice (and also a shameful waste of a pun: it's a veritable embearassment!!!!!). This a stare into the black void of corporate shamelessness and inartistic savagery, a movie whose technologically audacious and unforgivably off-putting animatronic bears are merely the most visible example of the movie's overriding lack of anything beautiful or interesting. The story the producers settled on - Mark Perez is the credited writer and Peter Hastings directed (an animation story artist making his solitary theatrical film), but it hardly seems fair to blame them for getting their names slathered on what's unambiguously a company affair first and foremost - is as musty as it gets, trading on the sadly too-common belief that if you're making a movie for kids, you can get away with any number of clichés, since your pre-teen target audience hasn't encountered them yet. Herein, Beary Barrington (voiced by Haley Joel Osment, sung by Elizabeth Daily, physically performed by Misty Rosas and Alice Dinnean - this is going to turn into an all-parenthetical review if I keep up like this, so let's just acknowledge that the bears were all played by puppeteers working their asses off), a tween bear adopted by humans, has started to feel the pain of being different, goaded by his dick adopted brother Dex (Eli Marienthal). So he runs away to make a pilgrimage to Country Bear Hall, the home of his beloved Country Bears before they disbanded eleven years ago. I allowed myself to assume from the dates that it might turn out that one of the Bears would prove to have fathered Beary, because I somehow managed to expect that this would at least invest itself in some fancier dumb clichés.

Country Bear Hall is, alas, about to be torn down by the over-enthusiastic (human) developer Reed Thimple (Christopher Walken, in the role that exemplifies the "can't say no to a paying job" aspect of his career). But Beary has a great idea: if the Bears get back together for a benefit concert, surely the hall's owner and the band's manager, Henry Dixon Taylor (Kevin Michael Richardson) could raise the $20,000 to save the historic site. So the two of them go on a road trip to recruit the divided bears: brothers Ted and Fred Bedderhead (Diedrich Bader and Brad Garrett), Zeb Zoober (Stephen Root), Tennessee O'Neal (Toby Huss), and Trixie St. Claire (Candy Ford). Given that all of them are suffering som kind of enormous dysfunction and bad blood lies between many of them individually, this proves to be most difficult task. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't prove insurmountable, because this is a Disney picture.

The absurdly insipid, pedestrian storytelling could never have resulted in a movie worth keeping, though it's honestly the strongest thing about The Country Bears; hoary, trite stereotypes at least have the benefit of being road-tested. Even without leaving the writing, the characters are a much bigger liability, being as they are a collection of cheap redneck jokes weirdly sanitised for the sake of the kids who make up the sole audience that can be honestly supposed to enjoy this. The actors are totally helpless to combat this problem, owing in no small part to the tripartite acting (voice, body, face). Frequently throughout, and especially in the critical case of Beary, there's no obvious relationship between the physical performance and the line readings, and it makes the characters feel like emotionless monsters, even without accounting for the terrifying design and execution of the bear suits. They do not provide any illusion that they're connected to the story at all, simply floating through the world without interacting with it except arrhythmically, in the fashion of an alien being clumsily mimicking human behavior.

But let's go ahead and account for the bear costumes, anyway. They are marvels, produced by the Jim Henson Creature Shop and clearly serving to show off that company's best and brightest doing some of the most complex work imaginable. The bears have incredibly precise, flexible, nuanced faces; it's always possible to tell exactly what they're thinking just from a still image. But even so, they are pure, high octane nightmare fuel, the spiritual heirs to the four-year-old talking and walking snowman that the Creature Shop built for Jack Frost. The bears aren't quite as viscerally unacceptable as that character - bears, after all, exist in the world, and even at their most grotesquely malformed, none of them have any feature as individually upsetting as Jack Frost's arms. But dear God, I do not like to look at them. Their heads are all weirdly big for their bodies, and they look not quite like bears, even less than the original audio-animatronic creatures in the Disney attraction. Incidentally, I won't have a better moment to compare the movie to the show; as a Disney parks lifer, The Country Bears strikes me as a most generic and soulless attempt to spin off the Country Bear Jamboree (it's not clear at all from the script, but I think we're meant to understand the movie as a kind of sequel to the show; though it is a sequel from an alternate universe). The big problem is the music: the show has a soundtrack made up of goofy bluegrass music on the '50s model, the movie is larded up with that godawful country rock that started to become popular in the late 1990s, taking the folksy heart out of the whole genre of music. Another problem is ineptness: giving fan favorite Big Al (James Gammon) a slot in the film, and denying him his fan-favorite song? Shoddy multi-platform synergy, that. And for Christ's sake, not including the talking mounted game heads in any capacity is just proving that you didn't wanted to make a movie from this material in the first place.

I had not finished my low-grade freakout over the bear designs, though; hadn't even gotten to the worst part. Which is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, their tremendously detailed, realistic mouths, with their incredibly specific teeth and almost tangibly damp tongues. And somehow, Hastings always seems to make them the centerpoint of every close-up. David Cronenberg couldn't have put more unsettling organic terrors into a movie if his life depended on it.

The film was a disaster at the box office, proving that sometimes we do live in a just universe. I feel sorry for the Creature Shop folks, honestly: the bears are miraculous machines, ugly or not. But they had the misfortune to show up in a badly-written and cloddishly-directed exercise in corporate intra-marketing. This is a commercial, and it's a remarkably bad one; and with Beary proving to be such an awful protagonist, alienating in every way, it's even worse as an inspirational tale of believing in your dreams and sticking by family, in various more or less figurative senses of that word. I would say that, if there were justice, this would have brutally murdered Disney's attempt to make movies out of theme park rides, but then, the first Pirates is at least worth the indignity of The Country Bears. And, indeed, the first Pirates - hell, all four Pirateses - seems that much more precious in light of how utterly craven and artistically uninspired its peculiar subgenre can so depressingly prove to be.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: YOUR A.I. WANTS TO KILL YOU

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: the Walt Disney Company is about to make a ridiculous sum of money on a movie about an artificial intelligence that goes violent, using the best and brightest visual effects available, in Avengers: Age of Ultron. They've done this before, absent the "ridiculous sum of money" part.

The whole matter of Disney's desperate attempt to court a teenage audience in the wake of Star Wars resulted in some of the most batty movies in that studio's history, but even within that company, 1982's TRON is particularly weird. It's brazenly marketing-driven: the conceit was transparently to tap into the new vogue for science fiction and simultaneously the even newer vogue for these "video games" that were apparently a big deal. And if that's not hook enough, the film is also a self-conscious landmark in the history of visual effects: it was the first feature with extensive use of computer-generated scenery and objects, about 15 minutes' worth. It was as shameless a piece of bandwagon-hopping and spectacle-first filmmaking as you could hope for then or anytime in the intervening three decades and change, blindly commercial in every way. And yet it's so deranged in every aspect of its conception and execution that you'd never, for a minute, think that the people who made it had even the smallest commercial designs.

TRON is a baffling mixture of tech arcana with computer science so far off the charts that it's infinitely more fair to call this a fantasy than anything else, grafted onto a script that's at its best when it's ridden with clichés - at it's worst, you can't even make out what the story is meant to be. The opening 15 minutes, for example, throw a seemingly random collection of moments at us, first diving inside the circuits of an arcade cabinet to show the gameplay affecting the software inside as a real life-and-death struggle, and then zipping rather recklessly over to a hacker, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), using a computer program named CLU to dig into some unspecified files, which consists of a humanoid CLU - who looks just like Flynn - interacting with a three-dimensional environment representing the interior of a computer system. Or maybe it really is three-dimensional, only you have to be microscopically small to perceive it. By the time we even start to process what's going on, we've arrived at Ed Dillinger (David Warner), former software engineer and current head of ENCOM, speaking to a self-aware program he's developed called the Master Control Program (which talks with Warner's voice) about Flynn's intrusions into their network. And then we stumble into ENCOM engineers Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) and Lora Baines (Cindy Morgan), without having received any idea of what's going on or how things fit together. That's not an unfair strategy, of course: the idea, I'd imagine, was to pique our interest by making things just unclear enough that we wouldn't be able to contain our sense of curiosity.

But the effect is nothing remotely so elegant: the opening quarter-hour is a murky mess that at once explains things in far too exhaustive detail (using the good old "let's discuss this thing that we both know about already" trick) while leaving everything that's actually important for a single exposition dump delivered by Bridges at full speed with minimal artfulness. It's difficult to put into words the perplexing way that TRON mixes incredibly blunt explanations with maddeningly obtuse loose ends - the kind of film that establishes the villains are evil by letting them swap lines like "You're becoming brutal, and needlessly sadistic." / "Thank you.", but never actually clarifying out what the villains do, other than run a dystopian dictatorship for the hell of it. Director and co-writer Steve Lisberger, an independent animator who originated the idea when he hit upon the world and visual effects concepts, had the exact sort of career before and after TRON that equips one to do many things that aren't tell a story or communicate ideas clearly, and his film suffers mightily from those flaws. It's easy enough to say that a world in which computer programs of every sort are sapient humanoids in a physical space of buildings and canyons doesn't "make sense"; but even once you've bought in to that as a requirement of the film's plot, TRON's world is perplexingly inconsistent in some of the places where the plot depends on it the most. Particularly regarding how much the programs know about their Users, and vice versa. The film ends up as a rather off-kilter religious allegory, on top of all its other quirks (it even updates the idea of throwing the faithful into a gladiatorial arena, in more or less precisely those terms), and failing to clarify what relationship the characters have to their gods makes it immensely hard to take that part seriously.

That's a lot of energy devoted to proving the thesis "TRON has a shitty script", which is about as uncontroversial a claim about this movie as I could possibly have made. That's not to say that the film is without its charms, though they're not as pronounced as in its 28-years-later sequel, TRON: Legacy, which is better at being a Daft Punk music video than TRON is at being anything. Still, while its visual effects have aged laughably poorly, the original movie can be quite lovely to look at, particularly since its CGI isn't trying to represent anything more realistic than 1982-era CGI. That is to say, it makes sense that the virtual world inside an early '80s computer would look rather monotone and blocky. It even seems right that the characters (shot in black and white with hand-colored details on their costumes) would feel so jerkily disconnected from their setting (animated backdrops, for the most part) - it adds to the synthetic feeling. If nothing else, TRON does a splendid job of presenting a disconcerting otherworld, one that poor Flynn never quite figures out - oh, right, Flynn ends up getting zapped by a laser while he's trying to hack the Master Control Program, where he meets up with Alan's anti-MCP security program TRON and they journey through a computer hellscape to get some kind of uplink with Alan. But mostly production and costume design happens, interspersed with visual effects, and given a disconcerting sonic texture by some really impressive sound work and a wonderfully unnatural electronic score by Wendy Carlos, as obvious a choice for this job in 1982 as Daft Punk was in 2010.

At a certain point, TRON's eerily smooth surfaces and harsh contrasts of primary colors simply end up working as purely abstract experience: colored shapes interacting with each other in a network of oddly soothing sounds, considering how grating they are. Given the inventive, strange workarounds the filmmakers had to go through to execute their ideas, workarounds that would almost immediately become unnecessary, no film has ever been obliged to look like this, so no film ever has (certainly not its own sequel). Most films that rely on their outdated visual effects tend to benefit from being seen through a certain haze, but not this: the bleedingly crisp delineations of lines and colors available in high definition end up leaving TRON look quite beautiful, for all its limited palette and omnipresent darkness. Don't think of it as a story, but an exercise in hue, geometry, and textures ranging from ethereal glossiness to intense grain, and it's downright pleasant.

That doesn't excuse how much of a life-sucking slog it is to get to the point that Flynn gets sucked into the computer. It is a deathly long first act, with nothing but Bridges's demented energy and Warner's ever-reliable voice to provide anything that even marginally distracts from how stupid and aimless everything that we're watching is. That's the problem with style-driven movies: you can't ease up on the style for even a second, and TRON spends so much time wallowing in the most utterly boring tripe that it's largely burned off any possible reservoir of audience goodwill even before it does anything to earn it.

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BLANDERELLA

The unbridled imaginations at Disney have managed to do it again, creating a fantasy beyond belief. With its new live-action Cinderella, the studio has managed to do the impossible, and portray a version of the classic fairy tale heroine who's even more of an insipid doormat that the one in its 1950 animated classic. For all that the animated Cinderella is probably the blandest and most inactive of Disney's princesses, there are still flickers of activity here and there. At the end of the film, after her vile stepmother has cruelly figured out one last trick to keep Cinderella from her happy destiny, she's got that moment where she waits till exactly the right moment to whip out her back-up glass shoe as Ilene Woods delivers the line "You see, I have the other slipper" with exactly the right amount of smugness that the addendum, "did you hear that, bitch?" can be plainly detected. That's more autonomy than Lily James's noble martyr is ever permitted by Chris Weitz's script. This Cinderella doesn't even cry inconsolably when she's locked in an attic; she simply dances in happy little circles and resigns herself to the belief that, anyway, at least she gets to be alone with her pleasant memories now. I mean, what the actual fuck.

There's the debate to be had about the social implications this all has, but frankly think that's a higher-order conversation than Cinderella deserves. This is a straightforward dramatic problem, it is. Make a protagonist who's so all-fired passive as this Cinderella for the 21st Century, and you end up with a story full of frustrating anti-moments: scene after scene of a terrifyingly skinny girl beatifically permitting herself to tremble her chin for a moment before she recalls her mother's (Hayley Atwell) dying admonishment to be nice Cinderella, good Cinderella, and to always retrench to her fantastic visions of life as it could be, not as it is. And so she allows herself to soak up abuse from horrible people without a murmur of complaint; she doesn't even complain in the privacy of her drafty garret to her little CGI mice friends, who are the most transfixingly awful mix of not-quite-right compositing and not-quite-realistic design, and generally feel like something that, were this a David Cronenberg or Catherine Breillat film, would be our first clue that our heroine was suffering from schizophrenia. I'm honestly not confident that it's not true of this Cinderella; the relentlessly upbeat tone and bright colors feel like they could imply some irony, even though they turn out not to. And the talking-to-mice bit feels soldered in artlessly to what mostly tries to be a fairly realistic fairy tale.

Having such a bauble of a lead turns out to be just about right. Cinderella makes no claims on depth or complexity; unlike Disney's last cartoon brought to life, Maleficent, this isn't even minutely interested in challenging or re-conceiving the original animated feature it occasionally nods too. It's not even really a remake; the shared elements between the films are commonalities between all Cinderellas, for the most part, and there are no design elements carried over. One song from the original film makes the briefest cameo during the movie, and two others are covered in the end credits, but that's just about as far as it goes. And so we get the ominous line in the credits that this is based on the Charles Perrault fairy tale, and on "Disney's Cinderella properties". If we are to have brand extensions, it's nice for them to at least be honest about it.

The result, unsurprisingly, is about as straightforward as an adaptation of the story could possibly be. Weitz's primary concession to modern tastes is to give Cinderella and her prince (Richard Madden) a meet-cute out in the woods, so that it's not such a regressive fable of finding one's soulmates based on purely physical criterion. Beyond that, the only real draw - above and beyond "come see something wherein you already know exactly what will happen and how", which I'm sorry to say is certainly the film's biggest selling point - comes in the form of seeing how Disney's money has been used to flesh out this version of the story with the most opulent Dante Ferretti production design and Sandy Powell costumes. And those things are, I concede, quite marvelous: the costumes especially are spectacle of the first order, and when they are garish and campy, it seems absolutely clear that the film knows and loves this about them. Director Kenneth Branagh, making what might very well be the most impersonal movie of his career, does a satisfactory enough job framing this sumptuously (it's easy to believe this is the same man who brought Thor's Asgard to the screen), if not with too much energy; the ball scenes are disappointingly small in execution, which seems like a particularly odd missed opportunity. But at least he puts a lot of pep and effectively florid touches in the magical transformation scenes.

With James being pinioned by the script and her corsets, and Madden being just plain dull, there's not much to anchor this tour of a stylish fantasyland, but at least the film is blessed with two wildly overqualified villains. Following in the tradition of Glenn Close and Angelina Jolie in doing a great job bringing a brilliant Disney villain to physical life, Cate Blanchett's stepmother, Lady Tremaine, is the obvious highlight of the movie, with enough depth and nuance to her portrayal of an unrepentant abuser that I'd have given just about anything to see a movie about her, instead. Making the most out of a handful of lines that imply the shape of a backstory without coloring it in, she suggests the hopeless competition with a saintly dead wife and mother, and the lifelong frustration with her own dull-minded daughters that might explain the character's savagery without trying to excuse it. It makes for a wicked stepmother who is unmistakably human, and thus far more threatening than somebody whose evil is simply innate, because she's so easy to believe in a real-world setting. The same is actually mostly true of the secondary bad guy, Stellan Skarsgård's scheming politician who comes across, in the actor's quiet, unmelodramatic performance, as a sensible pragmatist and not a sneering monster.

Between them, they give Cinderella enough of a backbone that it feels, by the end, like there was something at risk in all this, which is far more than the banal lovers can claim. And they justify the film in a slightly more concrete way than "you can tell that it was expensive!" does. Neither the design nor the villains are actually enough to make it worthwhile, but they're enough to keep it from being completely frivolous. And for something that could not possibly telegraph any more strongly its solitary desire to sell toys and dresses to little girls to not be completely frivolous is at least kind of impressive.

5/10

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IT TAKES TWO OF US

We take Stephen Sondheim very, very seriously around these parts. One doesn't become objectively the best creator of stage musicals in history without earning the right to have one's work treated with the gravest respect and unbridled love. This has not, to date, been the attitude shared by Hollywood, which has largely manhandled and mistreated Sondheim's musicals in adapting them to cinema. There haven't been very many attempts, of course, but when one of those was the ghastly 1977 version of A Little Night Music, a viewer has the right to be gun shy.

This means, at any rate, that the new film version of Sondheim’s Into the Woods comes laden down with Baggage for the present reviewer. Lots and lots of Baggage, of a sort that makes it virtually impossible to get a handle on it alone. Which is why I'm not going to.

Please join me in welcoming back to the blog Zev Valancy, Chicago theater professional regular commenter, and my occasional co-author of conversations about the thorny world of stage-to-screen adaptations. He and I last joined forces to joylessly gawk at Julie Taymor's film of The Tempest, and the arrival of the first cinematic treatment of Sondheim since Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd in 2007 seemed the ideal opportunity to pick things back up.

And so, let me hand things off to Zev, to sketch out the history of the show and share his own thoughts on the musical before we get into the whole matter of what the movie does with the source material.


ZEV: Thanks so much, Tim! It's a pleasure to come out of my self-imposed blogging retirement to talk with you about Stephen Sondheim!

There are three ways to look at Into the Woods, the fairy tale musical by Stephen Sondheim (score) and James Lapine (book), which premiered on Broadway in 1987 and has been seen in every high school in America every year since: the aesthetic, the historical, and the personal.

The Aesthetic

The musical's plot interweaves several beloved fairy tales (Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Rapunzel, primarily), with the newly invented story of a Baker and his Wife, who are sent on a quest to retrieve four magical items (sing it with me: "the cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, the slipper as pure as gold") by the witch who has cursed them with infertility. The first act end with every "good" character getting their wishes, while the second explores the ways in which their wishes didn't live up to their hopes, and the unexpected consequences of their at-all-costs pursuits of their desires.

Now here comes the controversial part: I think Into the Woods is a flawed piece. Several of the songs are brilliant (the opening is a remarkable piece of musical theatre storytelling, and I will never not cry upon hearing "No One Is Alone"), and none are outright bad, but the score as a whole doesn't reach the heights of Sondheim's greatest works. Lapine's book is more troubled: the first act feels hectic and jokey, the second overly preachy.

The essential problem, to my mind, is that the fairy tale plot structure means that an awful lot of the show is given over to songs and scenes in which the characters spell out the specific lesson the audience should be learning at that particular moment. Each of the individual moral-presenting songs or scenes works, but the sheer number of them gets a bit wearing, at least to me.

It's still a wonderful show, and an album I listen to once in a while, but when ranking Sondheim shows, I'd place it in the second tier.

The Historical

At 765 performances, Into the Woods had the longest original Broadway run of any Sondheim musical other than A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. It won Tonys for its book, score, and Joanna Gleason's performance as The Baker's Wife (losing pretty much everything else to The Phantom of the Opera), went on tour, was produced on the West End, was taped for broadcast on PBS, and has since been revived repeatedly on Broadway, in London, in a wide swath of regional theatres, and in countless educational and amateur productions. The show has been seen everywhere, and I'd posit that its opening marked the tipping point in Sondheim's transformation from "cultishly adored but too complex for the mainstream" to "unquestioned culture hero".

The Personal

The remarkable success of Into the Woods has had another effect: this is a show that matters to people. Nearly every musical theatre lover between the ages of 20 and 35 has seen at least one production, whether the video of the Broadway cast, a professional production, or a high school or community theatre (I'm pretty sure I've seen ten separate productions since I was in third grade or so). Most everyone who acts in musicals has done at least one production. (I played Cinderella's Prince at age 16. I wasn't half-bad.) The chance that the average musical theatre freak can do a significant portion of the score from memory, on demand, is high. The combination of the ubiquity of the show, the age at which people first see it, and the emotional potency of its best moments, make it a treasured piece, and one that carries significant meaning to a lot of people. (It ranks up there with Les Misérables on my anecdotally-compiled list of Musicals That Make Straight Guys Cry.)

I could go on (I assure you, I could go on), but I should really throw things back to our distinguished blogger: Tim, what's your experience with Into the Woods? What do you feel about the musical? And how do you feel about the nominal subject of our review, Rob Marshall's film adaptation?


TIM: I think that we are going to be ripped apart by an angry mob, because as you point out, this is a show that people loooooove. And I'm right with you in thinking that it has some decent-sized problems. In fact, I like it even less than you do: I wouldn't just put it in the bottom half of Sondheim's output, I might even call it my least favorite of his stage musicals (of the ones I know well, which does eliminate some of the likeliest contenders for his worst). It's a little show-offy and pretentious for me, the only one of his shows I'd level that accusation at. The music I find to be willfully complex and difficult for the material, and especially the rather blunt lyrics which, as you say, just out-and-out tell us what the themes are. If I'm going to have that kind of HERE IS THE MORAL BECAUSE THIS IS A FAIRY TALE preachifying, I want it to come in the form of something a bit more toe-tapping and hummable.

Still, low-grade Sondheim is still Sondheim, and there are some wonderful, wonderful moments in the show. Which, to answer your other question, I have previously only known from the 1987 cast recording and the 1991 PBS video with mostly the same cast (for I was not a theater kid in school). As far as the new movie goes, then, the problem for me was always going to be that I have some pretty clear expectations for the performances: it's not just the Witch, it's Bernadette Peters's Witch. It's not just the Baker's Wife, it's Joanna Gleeson's Baker's Wife. Which is probably why Meryl Streep and Emily Blunt, taking over those roles in the film, were the biggest disappointments to me.

Outside of Johnny Depp as the Wolf, of course. That was just awful in every way: the pain in his voice as he sang, the stupid make-up that screamed "theater convention!" in a movie that otherwise made everything take place in a realistic setting, the hairy zoot suit.

But mostly, even the people who let me down still did a really great job with the material: as a collection of musical performances, the Into the Woods film is pretty terrific. The orchestrations are nice and rich without being too runaway "big", or losing the musical thread (I mean, no surprise, it's Jonathan Tunick and he's a genius). The singing is rarely weak - I was a little nervous about Streep during the prologue, but she quickly won me back, and nobody else was even that big of a problem - and it's frequently quite excellent. All the performers nailing their big moments, or multiple big moments, and I was knocked flat at least a couple of times: Streep's despair in "Stay with Me", Anna Kendrick's measured flightiness as Cinderella in "On the Steps of the Palace". Of course, not everybody still had their big moment left intact. But I am sure we'll turn to that.

So that's the good part. The not-as-good part is, unsurprisingly, good ol' Rob Marshall himself, and the filmmaking generally, which is mostly just... fine. Fine and flat. There's a repeated problem, one that threatens to torpedo the very lovely and well-acted prologue especially, of cutting on musical beats in the most literal, obvious way, to make sure we can always see the singer, even when that results in awkward collisions of images. There's a moment in, I think, "It Takes Two" when the film cuts from a two-shot of the Baker (James Corden) and the Baker's Wife, to... a different two-shot of the Baker and the Baker's Wife, and it made my soul cry. I don't know that we can blame Marshall or editor Wyatt Smith for this - the hurricane of shitty cutting that comprised Marshall's 2002 adaptation of Chicago makes me want to throw this at the director’s feet - but it strips the energy from the numbers in a bad way.

And as for the story, well- but I've gone on for a bit. And I think we're going to have a whole lot to talk about story structure. So do you want to take the reigns on that? And do you have any other thoughts on the performances, or things you disagree with me about, before we move too far past that point?


ZEV: For the performances: I would rate them as mostly strong, if rarely spectacular. Nobody exceeded my expectations aside from Chris Pine, of all people (more on that in a moment). Otherwise, I'd rank Blunt, Kendrick, and Christine Baranski (dreadfully underused) near the top. Depp was no worse than I expected, and I'm glad they didn't beef up the part to match his stardom. The biggest disappointment for me was Streep: she was transparently giving a campy "star turn", playing tics and eccentricities rather than a fully realized character. I'd have preferred it if she had actually chosen to dig into the character or, at least, gone full-throttle loony with it. This just felt lazy.

Okay, one more thing on the cast: It's really exhausting, in 2014, that filmmakers still default to all-white casting. It's a fantasy, so there's no "historical realism" to defer to, and it's absurd to contemplate that the most talented person they could find for every single role just so happened to be white. Blunt and Kendrick did strong work, but can you imagine how terrific the film would have been with Audra McDonald as The Baker's Wife or Anika Noni Rose as Cinderella? For a film about the power of stories to use only white people to tell its story is dispiriting, at best.

Now, on to the adaptation (and fair warning, this includes spoilers for both the movie and the play):

One of the great strengths of live theatre is how it allows actors to use their connections to the audience to speak or sing directly to them. There's nothing wrong with an unbroken fourth wall (I wouldn't trade the best of theatrical realism for anything), but narration, soliloquies, and subtle acknowledgements of audience reactions are part of what makes theatre uniquely theatrical and, to me, more engaging than images on a screen could ever be.

And the stage version of Into the Woods has a ton of audience engagement. The Narrator is a very present and active character, who ends up pulled into the story in the second act, and at least half of the songs are delivered more to the audience than to the other characters. It would take a remarkably nimble screenplay and creative director to find a suitably cinematic way to translate this material.

And James Lapine and Rob Marshall's work is... not bad? The adaptation is certainly not the hideous botch that Nine was - few of the choices are wrong - but it's not very creative. The Narrator is gone entirely (with the bare minimum of his lines going to Corden, in voiceover), and a lot of the songs are cut. The soliloquy songs that can't be cut are mostly awkward - what on earth was going on with the shadow puppet stuff during "I Know Things Now" and the random blocking and camera movement during "Giants in the Sky"? The only really creative choice was for "On the Steps of the Palace": setting the entire song inside Cinderella's mind, in one moment as she flees the ball, was a strong choice, and one of the best parts of the movie.

Additionally, the play cleaves quite cleanly into two acts: about a year passes during the intermission, and Act II has a markedly darker tone than Act I. The film removes that elapsed time, which both undercuts the theme (there isn't time for the characters to get disillusioned with their wishes) and makes the tonal change a lot more jarring.

As for all of the choices around the removal of The Mysterious Man, the (wasted) Simon Russell Beale as the memory/ghost of The Baker's Father, and the cutting of "No More", I can only offer a heartfelt shrug of confusion.

Essentially, though, here's my problem with the film, which I found generally respectful, well-made, and well-acted and sung: it didn't feel like it needed to be a movie. The production design and costumes are undistinguished--nothing here can't be seen in the dozen other "dark fairy tales" that have been released this year. There's almost nothing you can get from this movie that you can't get from a decent stage production, and a lot is lost or made awkward in translation.

The was one exception: "Agony". The song, in which Cinderella's Prince (Pine) and Rapunzel's Prince (Billy Magnussen) pine for their unreachable loves, was filmed as a demented parody of romance novel covers and perfume ads, complete with conveniently placed mountain streams and ripped-open shirts. For two and a half minutes, the movie was doing something only movies can do, and it was the best part of the film by far.

Well, except for that musical quote from A Little Night Music. That was a tasty bit of fan service. I'm pretty sure that me, my husband, and our friend were the only ones in the theatre who got it, but we guffawed.

What are your thoughts on the adaptation, Tim? Is there anything you disagree with, or anything I missed? Any other things about the film that must be said before James Lapine puts a curse on us?


TIM: See, now you go and remind me of "Agony" - easily the best part of the film, and Pine in it is the best acting in the movie (and Magnussen does a great job playing off Pine, to be fair) - and all it does is get me all sad that the "Agony" reprise was cut, because how good would that have been?

But then, it sort of had to be cut, didn't it? There might not be a good way to make the second half of Into the Woods happen in a film: the very concept of the show is structured to have two acts with an intermission to allow the audience to step away and recalibrate. With that taken, away, we end up stuck with the confused, madcap pacing of the film's... back half? I don't know what to call it. But the plot gallops and jerks along, and half the cast just sort of fizzles into oblivion. The rewritten Rapunzel conclusion, in particular, not only turns her into a completely pointless character, it robs the Witch of everything that makes her interesting in the second act. The themes are painfully undernourished, since the carefully developed links between the two halves of the show are all ripped to hell, and the closest it has to a mission statement is the gallingly out-of-place Meryl Streep voice-over singing that closes things out on a needlessly minor note.

Incidentally, between this and the 2007 Sweeney Todd, I think I have learned that Sondheim shows have very theatrical, tableaux-like endings rather than actual dramatic conclusions, because that's two films now that have ended by cutting the final ensemble number and as a result basically evaporated their way over the finish line.

I mostly like the first half. But the second half is terrible. The flow is bad, the characters make no sense, and it's ugly, with Marshall and his go-to cinematographer, Dion Beebe, slathering everything in a grimy blue filter that is the most boring thing to watch for what feels like a solid hour of unchanging imagery. And so that brings me back to the filmmaking. A mutual acquaintance of ours, who is welcome to take credit in comments, shared with me his immediate thought about the film: "Rob Marshall is still figuring out why you point cameras in particular directions for specific lengths of time, huh", and that's as concise a description of the problem with the film's directing as I can imagine. It's so cloddish. You called out "Giants in the Sky", which is absolutely the worst of it (which especially upset me, since that song makes a solid claim to being my favorite in the show), but there are so many places where the shot choices do everything in their power to rob the music of its life: the conclusion of "Last Midnight" is confusing and busy, "A Very Nice Prince" is bland and flat. "Agony" and "On the Steps of the Palace" are the only numbers where the filmmakers seemed to even have a visual concept, let alone put it into practice.

"There's almost nothing you can get from this movie that you can't get from a decent stage production", you say, which I think errs on the side of generosity: I think a decent stage production would acquit itself better. The film has been presented with such slack technique that I think it actually ends up looking cheap and thin, with its fake-ass woods and the frequently terrible make-up (it's easy to pick on the Wolf, but he's so bad) and the unnatural crispness of the costumes. It's easy to imagine the whole thing being packed up and rolled away at the end of every night's shooting; there's no sense of an actual reality that we're peeking into.

Anyway, all those problems being very real and very dreary, I did actually kind of like the movie. The material works even with Marshall trying to smother it, and I'm charitable towards the performances, though the farther I get from it, the less I understand why Streep is the one with awards heat, because she's definitely one of the weak links. You know who shocked the hell out of me? Lilla Crawford as Red Riding Hood. After Sweeney Todd, I was a bit hostile to the idea of casting actual children, and Daniel Huddlestone's Jack is definitely rough (the way the film ruins his big number doesn't help), but her super dry staccato singing was, I thought, actually pretty terrific.

So I liked it, -ish. It's not Nine. But it definitely doesn't understand what makes the show work, or find effective cinematic replacements for what can't be ported directly from the stage, and I'm more than a little annoyed that the half-measures of Sweeney Todd are still the best adaptation of Sondheim to screen that we've got.

That's all I've got. Final thoughts, complaints, praise?


ZEV: With all we've just dissected it, I'd still call this one of my favorites of the recent crop of stage musicals adapted to film. "Has a good amount of worthwhile stuff, and doesn't botch anything too horribly" shouldn't place a movie in the top tier of its genre, but...

And the fact that it made nearly $20 million more in its opening weekend than Mamma Mia gives me a little bit of hope for the genre's future. And according to that same article, the opening weekend of the movie had four times the number of attendees as the Broadway run and the revival combined. Exposing all of those audience members, many of them young, to Stephen Sondheim...overall, I'd call it a win for our culture.

Tim’s Rating: 6/10
Zev’s Rating: 7/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2003: In which sufficient willpower, marketing, and blind luck can sell anything, no matter how unfashionable

Pirate movies were dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

The pirate movie had died many times since its heyday, from the early-'20s through the mid-'50s. It had a very high-profile death in 1986, with Roman Polanski's long-gestating Pirates, an enormous flop; it had another in 1995, with Renny Harlin's tormented Cutthroat Island, a flop so gargantuan it bankrupted a production company and ended several careers. And from that death there could be hardly any recovery at all.

None of this seemed to matter to the Walt Disney Company, which in the early '00s engaged in one of those horribly ill-advised adventures in live-action filmmaking that it frequently gets caught up in, spending gigantic piles of money on projects that will plainly never pay off. Before this, TRON; after this, John Carter. Just Disney doing what it does: making fortunes and then pissing them away on the most unfathomable nonsense. It was, in this particular case, an exercise in brand extension: after years of basing its theme park attractions on its hit movies, the company had finally decided to try and base some hit movies on its theme park attractions. The obvious badness of this idea should be obvious, and to those of us following this new scheme back in those days, it was; but we are not the executives in charge of Walt Disney Pictures. And so it was, that what we can arguably call the three most iconic brands from Disneyland and Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom were thrown into development as motion pictures: the Country Bear Jamboree, the Haunted Mansion, and Pirates of the Caribbean.

The first and last of the films that resulted - 2002's The Country Bears and Thanksgiving, 2003's The Haunted Mansion - were precisely what you'd expect, and audiences and critics responded accordingly. But despite having perhaps the most marks against it on paper, being a dead genre and a theme park adaptation and all, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl fared better than its siblings. A lot better, in fact. So much better that I don't have an appropriate way to quantify it. The Curse of the Black Pearl - a subtitle cunningly added when it seemed that there might be a franchise to milk from this picture, and oh! such a financially robust franchise it did turn out to be - is a genuinely surprising film, where nothing seems particularly special or interesting about it until you're actually watching the thing, and finding it to be one of a handful of legitimately bold, original summer tentpoles of the 2000s. Not that summer tentpoles as a class are all that bold or original to start with, but that's exactly why we need more movies like this, and fewer movies like... like this very movie's three (so far) sequels, for one thing.

It is the most obvious thing in the world to glance at the film and propose that it's effectiveness begins with the live-wire performance given by Johnny Depp in what becomes, retroactively, the central role. But sometimes things become obvious because they are demonstrably true. Depp has since burned through more goodwill than many actors will ever receive, and his character creation has become mechanical shtick: half of his characters subsequent to 2003 feel like they were created by filling in a Mad Libs. And with that being the case, it's hard to recall just how extraordinary fresh his Captain Jack Sparrow felt when it was new, such a chaotic, unexpected high-wire act that even the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose hatred of both genre films and comedy is as unyielding as a mountain range, was obliged to throw an Oscar nomination his way. He serves the function here that Bugs Bunny or Harpo Marx does: infiltrating a closed system and throwing it into complete disarray with his total disregard for the rules governing the behavior of characters in movies. An 18th Century pirate swanning around like a coked-out rock star, with a whole makeup counter on his face? Why not? This totally changes the texture of the film: what should be a perfectly generic action-adventure movie about a heroic prettyboy chasing an unattainable hot chick who has been kidnapped by the bad guys can never manage to find its genre footing, because there's Jack Sparrow, wandering along with his physically erratic comedy and slurred line deliveries, decompressing the film and turning it into something else completely. There's still so much inventiveness, a clear sense of getting away with something absolutely delightful, underneath every moment of Depp's performance, even after his three subsequent performances as the same character should have curdled everything that made him interesting. Jack Sparrow in Curse of the Black Pearl is just as exciting now as he was in 2003, in defiance of all good sense.

Whether Depp came up with that on his own, or whether he was guided to it by Gore Verbinski, it's certainly the case that this was a flawless meeting of actor and director. Verbinski had, at this point, made three features: the first, Mousehunt, was a live-action movie made with the physics and logic of a Tom & Jerry cartoon; the third, The Ring, was an exercise in probing the limits of terror available to a PG-13 horror movie (the second, The Mexican, is a film that nobody in the world has ever seen, despite it starring Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts). And with The Curse of the Black Pearl, he apparently decided to exactly split the difference between those two, and throw swashbuckling action into the mix just for the hell of it. The film is a cartoon, no two ways about it: there are physics-defying falls and fight scenes, wacky visual jokes ("wouldja look at that! He got a fork stuck in his eye!"), and snazzily-timed cuts that function as punchlines all over the place. The film is also a creepy-as-fuck story about zombie pirates skulking about in the moonlight. It never seems to occur to Verbinski to separate these two modes: there isn't another movie this side of Army of Darkness to make so much out of slapstick involving skeletons.

Verbinski's wild, erratic juggling of seemingly incompatible tones fits perfectly with Depp's thoroughly contemporary, chaotic performance of Jack Sparrow, and between them they manages to make The Curse of the Black Pearl a weird, dazzling display of energy and comedy piercing through terror as the terror curls around high-spirited action sequences that add a sense of grandeur to the comedy. The film can so readily tap into this energy that even its many apparent flaws simply don't find a foothold to disupt it. These include its lumpy shape - after an opening 40 minutes that pile action atop action almost nonstop, the film suddenly drops into a lumbering quest which decides, about 90 minutes in, to start over again fresh - its terribly bland lovers played by Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley (the latter of whom, at least, is capable of much better than the feisty damsel this film asks her to be, though I do adore her one-on-one moments with Depp), and its messy climax, the one point in the whole film that the generally sharp cutting by Stephen Rivkin, Arthur Schmidt, and Craig Wood lets us down. Honestly, it always occurs to me (but only after I'm done watching it), that the film really shouldn't work at all: that it does is testament to the devil-may-care attitude animating it, among other things' things like Dariusz Wolski splendid cinematography, which can be spooky as a campfire story in one moment, and a gaspingly gorgeous advertisement for the visual grandeur of the Caribbean in the next, and the wonderfully invigorating score by Klaus Badelt and a bunch of other composers who pitched in here or there (prominently among them Hans Zimmer), which includes what I'd likely call the last great piece of franchise theme music. Or just the wit and banter of Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio's script, which manages the weird assignment of capturing the sensibility of a theme park boat ride inside a Spielbergian adventure romp.

This is all the things popcorn movies should be: fun, energetic, simple enough to quickly grasp but full enough to not seem stupid, anchored by strong personalities among all the side characters (Geoffrey Rush's florid villain is a great bit of acting in its own right, unfairly overshadowed by Depp), and a cohesive world with a sense of history and depth. And that, coupled with the unmatchable scale of the Disney marketing machine and Jerry Bruckheimer's laser-like instincts for what audiences want to see, is what allowed The Curse of the Black Pearl to break a greater curse still: the matter of what audiences like. And yet, there was more to it than that: Depp and Verbinski and Disney's marketing all joined forces again ten years later to make another marriage of horror, action, and cartoon physics, The Lone Ranger, and it came nowhere near overcoming the contemporary audience's distaste for Westerns; we can say that it simply wasn't as good (because it wasn't), but then, why wasn't it?

Well, that's the alchemy of it. Everything came together at exactly the right time in exactly the right balance, just when the world was ready to be receptive to it, and there you go: the blockbuster landscape changed just that little bit, and now pirates are cool again. Sometimes, all of the parts of the Hollywood machine click together just perfectly, and magic happens, and one has a renewed love not for cinema, and not for filmmaking, but for the splashy, transformative power of The Movies.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2003
-The most eagerly anticipated sequels of the 2000s very quickly become the most despised sequels of the 2000s, as the Wachowskis' The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions underwhelm
-After years of cranking out largely unliked genre pictures, Clint Eastwood returns to everybody's good graces as an Important American Director with Mystic River
-The grand era of horror remakes begins with the Michael Bay production of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2003
-Kim Ki-duk's Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring and Park Chan-wook's Oldboy are among the most prominent emissaries of the new South Korean cinema to international film culture
-Sylvain Chomet directs the captivating, charmingly warped animated film The Triplets of Belleville
-The ensemble-based romantic comedy is invented by the British Love Actually, so feel free to blame it

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DISNEY SEQUELS I MISSED IN 2014: I TINK, THEREFORE I AM

The once-proud DisneyToon Studios, formerly a mighty machine ceaselessly cranking out sequel upon sequel to the films of the Walt Disney Feature Animation canon, has of late been reduced to listlessly cranking out Planes and Tinker Bell movies at a slow drip. And between these two points, we run almost the whole gamut of the company's output: Planes and Planes: Fire & Rescue have been middling-to-awful, where as the Tinker Bells, when they are not busy telling pre-teen girls that science is stupid and a waste of time, have included some of the most thoughtful, nuanced stories in the entirety of the Disney direct-to-video program. And yes, that means we're talking about only a little bit of thought or nuance, but it's not nothing.

All of which is as much to say: I had expectations for The Pirate Fairy, the fifth feature in the Disney Fairies line, that were totally out of bounds for anything that it conceivably could have delivered. And it doesn't meet those expectations, though it's shockingly decent all in all: a considerable improvement over the somewhat idiotic Secret of the Wings from 2012, the last full-length film in the franchise. If it is a disappointment, it is a disappointment mostly at the level of theme: the whole deal of the series has been to expose young girls to what should be commonsense truisms about life and being a member of society, but are regrettably not. And The Pirate Fairy has no real theme of that sort: it does look for a while that it's trending back in the "oh, science, that's terrible stuff" direction of Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue, but the final scene so thoroughly muddies any kind of overriding message in any direction that the whole thing ends up being very little more than a straightforward adventure with pirates. And given the state of American animation right now, "girls can be the protagonist in adventures" actually does count as progressive messaging, which is the most depressing thing I can think of right this moment.

The story this time hinges on a new character, Zarina (Christina Hendricks), a fairy with radical and untested ideas about using experimentation and research to expand the possible uses of pixie dust. When one of these experiments goes wrong, she banishes herself from the fairy world for a full year, returning as the captain of a human pirate ship, to steal the fairie's precious blue pixie dust and continue her experiments, while also using the powers of the dust to aid in her career of piracy. The series standby heroes happen to be the only ones to avoid being walloped by Zarina's attack with sleeping dust, and so they head off to stop her: Tinker Bell (Mae Whitman), and the Southern one (Megan Hilty), and the bitchy one (Pamela Adlon), and the quiet one (Lucy Liu), and the nervous one (Raven-Symoné), and the nice one (Angela Bartys). Against them are Zarina and her human first mate, James (Tom Hiddleston), an excitable human pirate who can understand the fairy language.

The pirates form a more explicit link to Disney's Peter Pan than has yet been seen in any of these films, and it's not always a perfect join: there are details that do not line up at all concerning the relationship of that film's Captain Hook (whose identity is meant to be a shock here, and I suppose it might be to someone, somewhere, but the literal first shot in which the future Hook showed up got me to thinking, "oh, well I bet I know who he turns out to be...") and the crocodile who ate his hand. But then again, if the film didn't commit that continuity error, we'd have been deprived the sight of that same crocodile as a baby, and I would not give that up for anything whatsoever, because good God damn, is it cute.

The story itself is pretty basic and entirely functional, ushering the characters through the ginned-up conflict by which Zarina swaps out all the heroes' natural talents, and they have to spend almost a whole scene figuring out how to adapt. It's pleasantly entertaining by kids' movie standards, mind you, and it breezes by at a crisp 78 minutes, almost ten of which are credits; there's little depth, and the shift by which the pirates go from being Zarina's jolly crew to scurrilous traitors (because of course they do) is disappointingly abrupt and ill-motivated; the film had a chance to do something complex and make the process by which villains are formed feel more organic and aware of human desire and psychology, but it just plugs in a stock reveal by which we find out that they were terrible, wicked beasts all along. Subtlety and complicated morality isn't this film's strong suit, which is too bad: it is one of the things the Tinker Bell movies have done best.

As a shallow adventure movie for children, though, I can say nothing bad against it: the characters are likable and given more flexibility in their personalities than has elsewhere been true in the series, though five protagonists was definitely two more than director Peggy Holmes and her coterie of writers had the ideas to deal with. But there's a generosity with which even the most easily-forgotten of the characters is handled, and with which their in-group relationships are teased out, that makes it all very nice and easygoing. The result is a lived-in and familiar feeling that compensates for how rushed it all is.

Better still: the film looks pretty terrific. For the first time in the franchise, the characters don't feel like plastic toys: they have a flexibility and ranginess to their expression unknown in earlier films. Their faces evoke emotions other than revulsion; that's a huge step for this series.

The lighting and backgrounds are also quite lovely; this is not new for the films (they've always had better backgrounds than character animation), but the ambition of the dusty and foggy lighting here is at a whole new level.

It is, dare I say it, a Tinker Bell film that is pleasurable to look at: not up to the standards of the best feature animation, but an enormous improvement over the rest of DisneyToon's output to date. And that, coupled with the pleasant storytelling and character building, makes for a movie that ranks right up near the very best of the its franchise and thus the very best direct-to-video Disney movies ever. Even if it doesn't the thematic resonance of its forebears, it's enough fun as a simple, colorful yarn with genial broad comedy and energetic characters that it's surprisingly beguiling in its little way.

7/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1997: In which there's no rule that says a dog can't play basketball

Not that one expects much out of a movie like Air Bud, but I still wasn't expecting it to reveal itself to be quite so vile quite so quickly. Very nearly the first thing that happens in the entire movie is a series of comic close-up shots of a little yellow bird, sitting on a tree, watching in amazed confusion as a truck with a giant clown head on its roof barrels down the road of a little town in Washington state. This bird never matters; it is not a character in the film, its opinions on the clown truck do not serve a purpose. It is simple an opportunity for actor-turned-director Charles Martin Smith to show off that he knows a thing or two about how editing works, and that the Kuleshov Effect can be used for evil as well as for good.

But anyway, Air Bud, a film whose considerable formal elements are not what I've gathered us here to discuss. You are perhaps wondering exactly what I have gathered us to discuss, given that Air Bud is not, I will boldly suggest, an especially important or interesting film. You know what is, though, is durable. Durable as a motherfucker. Not only did the film kick off four sequels, it also triggered a spin-off series and a spin-off of the spin-off, and we're now at the point where, sometime in 2015, the Buddiverse will welcome its 15th feature-length title. This feels kind of insane for a franchise whose target audience tops out around seven or eight years of age, but the Walt Disney Company doesn't play around when it comes to mining brands for extra revenue.

Like so many live-action Disney productions, Air Bud feels sort of like it was lab-created out of bits and pieces of already hidebound family comedies, and given a wardrobe and vocabulary that the middle-aged creators thought would be enough to freshen the whole thing up for The Kids These Days. In this particular case, we've got the classic "boy and his dog" scenario applied to a sports drama, with some very wobbly results. The situation goes thus: a golden retriever (Buddy, also of the execrable sitcom Full House, who died of cancer the year after Air Bud was released. If I just ruined your childhood, I am pleased, because these are some terrible things to have nostalgia for) runs away from his abusive clown owner, Norm Snively (Michael Jeter, weirdly receiving first billing for a teeny role), and hides out in the underbrush near an abandoned church. It is here that he's found by junior high student Josh Framm (Kevin Zegers), whose widowed mother (Wendy Makkena) has just moved the family into town while finding her footing. Thanks to the clown's training, Buddy - as Josh names the dog, whom he smuggles home before very long - is a whiz at handling a basketball, and this turns out be a boon when the school basketball team, for which Josh is manager, and later a player, needs itself a mascot. Of course, having a mascot dog that can shoot hoops is one thing (and it's a thing that drags Norm Snively out to reclaim his property, in a subplot that eventually involves a clichéd '30s-style "who are these kooks in my courtroom!?" finale), but having a dog that can actually play basketball in a competitive environment is another, and at no point has any human being ever started watching Air Bud in the ignorance of what was going to happen in the third act. Okay, not the courtroom scene. That came as quite a surprise, actually. But the scene of Buddy being a sports hero and saving the big game, that's pretty much the sole reason this film exists.

While we're idly waiting for Air Bud to get to the good part, Paul Tamasy & Aaron Mendelsohn's script flops around, flying through some plot developments and delaying others and stretching out moments randomly. I honestly don't know if it's the writing or directing that's responsible (though Smith's direction is so boringly competent, with the cleanliness and visual uniformity of a TV production, that I can't see how he could have gotten things off the rails just by himself), but Air Bud has legitimately awful pacing. It gets to the reveal that Buddy can play basketball almost immediately, and then makes absolutely no attempt to utilise that development for several reels; the return of Norm Snively happens at the worst time for the development of the "Josh learns self-reliance, teamwork, and discipline from playing sports, and from the wise black janitor/coach played by an obviously bored Bill Cobbs". For the last third of the movie, it's quite impossible to tell whether the film is a tween sports drama with a lengthy, distracting feint towards becoming a thriller about dog kidnapping, or if it's a family drama about protecting Buddy that rather oddly includes a lot of boilerplate sports movie nonsense while the plot is busy spinning its wheels.

The writing is so messy and aimless that when the film retrenches to generic kid flick mediocrity - like the slapstick dog bath scene, set without shame to "Splish Splash", or a slapstick car chase that ends with a truck plunging into water in a sequence that Smith's skills as director cannot manage to sell as funny in any way - it actually counts as a relief. For in those moments, at least Air Bud seems to have some awareness of what it is, and pursues its one goal with stronger focus than the inept balancing act between scenes and plotlines that leaves the film feeling directionless and overlong.

It's really astonishing just how terrible an innocuous kid's movie can actually be. Air Bud really is dreadful. It moves too arrhytmically to settle to a groove where it can be boring, and so it just keeps on being freshly irritating. The actors do the best they can with reedy material, and Zegers makes for a perfectly sturdy, it a little bit too sad-sacky protagonist, and the dog tricks are amusing enough once they start up (the "dog playing basketball" scene, with its dumbfounded reaction shots and befuddled dialogue, is legitimately enjoyable, though it comes about 70 minutes to late to do much good for the movie as a whole). But Air Bud is a toxic combination of blandly cheery aesthetic and stupid, sub-functional writing, and it ends up being a massively irritating pile of junk that isn't merely generic, disposable children's entertainment, it actually seems hellbent on making children less intelligent.

Meanwhile, I suppose you are wondering what in the hell this has to do with the development of American cinema between the years 1914 and 2014. Here's my pitch: the 1990s, that is to say the period from 1993-2001, seems to me a period in transition. The formulas that had fed the first Blockbuster Age in the 1980s had gone stale, the institutional memory of the 1970s kept prodding at the studios, which still at this point would fund midlevel dramas with some social import and character nuance for reasons other than hunting down Oscars, and there's a sense of trying to figure out a new vocabulary of big-budget popcorn cinema that could be sustainable over the long run. It is, in essence, a stretch of years where every Hollywood production, from top to bottom, seems to be looking back over its shoulder, and asking "what about this? can we make money doing this?".

And if there's anything that evokes the spirit of throwing shit against the wall just to see what happens and hope like hell it turns a profit better than the first entry in a low-budget 15-film Disney franchise of low-budget films about real-life dogs playing sports and having adventures, directed with sitcom-level artistry by a former member of the American Graffiti ensemble, I cannot imagine what it might possibly be.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1997
-James Cameron resinks the Titanic, makes enough money to have himself crowned King of the World
-Face/Off is the only film American-made John Woo film that anyone even pretends is any good
-Warner Bros. releases the terrible superhero movie Steel, starring basketball player and horrible actor Shaq, a relic of the days when feature films based on DC Comics properties were embarrassingly mismanaged clusterfucks

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1997
-Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, and its daunting ending, pisses off almost as many cinephiles as it delights
-Pedro Costa begins what will prove to be a trilogy of docu-narrative films set in the poverty-blighted Fontainhas district of Lisbon, with Ossos
-Bowing to complaints that the final episodes of the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion were inscrutable, studio Gainax and director Anno Hideaki replace them with The End of Evangelion

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1979: In which everybody wants to be the new Star Wars

Star Wars made an enormous shit-ton of money in 1977. We've clarified that already, but it's worth bringing it up over and over again, because it was the definitive truth in American filmmaking in the latter half of the 1970s, basically until E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial finally proved that a movie could make an even more enormous shit-ton of money in 1982.

Now, enormous shit-tons of money are the one thing absolutely guaranteed to get everybody's attention in Hollywood, and after Star Wars made one, every other studio immediately started figuring out the best way to leach onto its success with a furious sucking intensity. The most direct and famous example from 1979 - the year that the rip-off machine's efforts began to explode across the screen - was when Paramount realised, "what the heck, we have a preexisting franchise with 'Star' right there in the title", and attempted to copy George Lucas's fluffy, boisterous space adventure with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in which we spend something like six hours watching William Shatner travel in a shuttle pod through space dock. The most openly pathetic has got to be Moonraker, the movie where producer Albert Broccoli double-dog-dared us to believe that James Bond was in space and had a space laser now.

The particular wannabe Star Wars we're here to talk about now, though, is The Black Hole, which does double-duty as being the film where, out of the clear blue sky, the Walt Disney Company abruptly decided "fuck it, we're going to start doing movies for teenagers", after having spent its entire post-WWII existence peddling entertainment for children. And not even real children: increasingly, after around 1962 or so, the kind of sanitised conceptual children that Walt Disney himself believed that all children should be. I do not apologise in my affection for Disney's cinema and theme parks, but oh my, did their live-action films start to get fairly awful and pandering and smarmy there in the desperate years after Walt's 1966 death.

Walt Disney Productions deciding it wanted to be in the business of "edgy" big-budget adventure films (by Disney standards, meaning that The Black Hole probably doesn't make a list of the 100 edgiest wide-release American films of 1979) does not automatically equal Walt Disney Productions knowing what the goddamn hell it was doing when trying to make a film that would appeal to teenagers. Three years later, when the company tried again with TRON, it had figured out how to avoid the most obvious mistakes made in The Black Hole, which rather desperately tries to fuse Disney's characteristic kiddie funtime japery with Star Wars-style action and world-building, and - this is the really fucked-up part - a go-for-broke psychedelic final ten minutes that suggest what they really wanted to make most of all was a laser guns 'n' zombie cyborgs version of 2001: A Space Odyssey for the whole family to enjoy. It is a bizarre grab bag of concepts from all over the place that have been stuffed firmly into one by director Gary Nelson, a TV veteran who, to his immense credit, at least manages to massage The Black Hole into something that feels more or less contiguous, no matter how badly it lurches from tone to tone.

That said, Nelson wasn't very much equipped to make a big effects extravaganza; indeed, it's characteristic of the gibbering insanity that was Disney under the management of Ron Miller, Walt Disney's son-in-law who tried to mimic that man's hands-on producing style without having much of a sense for how movies work, that The Black Hole would include among its creatives almost nobody with any business making a concept-driven sciience fiction adventure: between the director, the producer himself, and the four men credited with cobbling together the story and screenplay from spare parts culled from '50s genre films, only scenarist Richard H. Landau (who, a lifetime earlier, co-wrote The Quatermass Xperiment for Hammer Film in the UK) had any kind of experience in this style of storytelling, which might have been a useful prerequisite for anyone asked to take on the job of shepherding the studio's big bid to take a seat at the grown-up table with one of those big space pictures of its own. And Miller had to work to assemble that shallow bench of talent: I had always assumed, without checking, that The Black Hole was put together by the usual roster of Disney contractors who cranked out all the studio's other live-action pictures, but in fact, there aren't really any meaningful Disney connections in any of those writers' filmographies. The crew heads are a different story: from editorial to sound to VFX to costume to set design, the actual work of putting the movie together was handled by a consortium of Disney lifers.

And perhaps that fact explains why, for all its unquestionable failures as a sci-fi adventure, or as any kind of self-contained work of dramatic fiction whatsoever, really, The Black Hole is impossible for me to actually write off. Not for the first time nor, I am sure, for the last, I find myself writing a review for a movie where all the script problems in the world can't disguise how unbelievably gorgeously the thing has been designed: everything else could have gone wrong (and only some of it does), but production designer Peter Ellenshaw, art directors John B. Mansbridge, Robert T. McCall, & Al Roelofs, and set decorators Frank R. McKelvy & Roger M. Shook would still have created one of the most perfect visual settings for any genre film in the immediate post-Star Wars era. And the several different visual effects teams - animators, matte painters, model builders, and so on, making up a solid half of the end credits - executed the realisation of the most fanciful, extreme elements of the film's design with great aplomb. Oh, you can see the seams pretty easily in some isolated cases (the titular black hole, for example, which always appears to be in a box separate from the rest of the universe), but usually the sheer magnitude of the effects overcomes the handful of places where it's 2014 at the time of this writing, and the movie came out in 1979 and there's an awful lot of evolution in the art form that went on between those points in history. Granting that, it's still not the state of the art: in the class of '79, Star Trek certainly had more accomplished VFX, and Alien presented a far more plausible, lived-in, functional world. But if I had to pick the one that I just wanted to look at, I honestly suppose it might be The Black Hole. For if it is not a very satisfying Disney film in any other way, it presents marvelous, fantastical vistas to gawk at.

I could go on and on about that, but at a certain point, it does to at least nod in the direction of the film's plot, if just for a moment (much like the filmmakers themselves). Sometime in The Future, an American spacecraft, the USS Palomino, is wrapping up a deep-space exploration mission, her population consisting of four actual crewmembers - Capt. Dan Holland (Robert Forster), Lt. Charles Pizer (Joseph Bottoms), science officer Dr. Alex Durant (Anthony Perkins), and Token Woman Dr. Kate McCrae (Yvette Mimieux) - and one tagalong journalist, Harry Booth (Ernest Borgnine). And, we must certainly not forget, one robot, V.I.N.CENT. whose name improbably stands for "Vital Information Necessary Centralized", voiced by Roddy McDowall. He's - it's? - kind of the only important entity on the ship, either to its operation or to the film's plot; he's also the thin pretext for Dr. McCrae's presence, since she communicates with him telepathically. Not, you might think, the kind of skill that could conceivably be necessary, but that's why you didn't get to write The Black Hole, isn't it?

V.I.N.CENT. is, anyway, the most aggressively Disneyish and awful part of the whole movie: he's a round floating grey thing with a huge red drum for a face with great big googly eyes on it, an obvious attempt to make an even more kiddie-friendly R2-D2, for those audiences who managed to walk out of Star Wars somehow feeling that the biggest problem with the droids was that they didn't supply enough goofy comic relief. I will say this: the technique used to create the robot is gorgeous: at no point did I ever stop to notice that he was not, in fact, floating of his own power and fluttering around, and while I loathe with burning hate the design details that make him look so broad and cartoon-soft, there's no way to deny that his big, open, stupid fucking face is tremendously fully of personality. Which personality I also loathe, FYI. Anyway, the film lives and breathes V.I.N.CENT. While the rest of the crew spends the middle of the film with their thumbs up their collective asses, he's the character primarily driving the plot forward, and his pissy little quips, delivered in the most exasperated voice McDowall can dredge up (so imagine how very exasperated it is), are the sole source of merriment in a film that otherwise mostly consists of people discussing astrophysics in serious tones. If the goal was truly to appeal to a wider audience than just the kids that were Disney's bread and butter in the preceding decade especially, V.I.N.CENT. was a drastic miscalculation: he's the quintessence of a distressingly cutesy side character who ends up sucking all of the film's attention and energy while providing absolutely nothing of value for a viewer whose age runs to the double digits. And before the film is over, he encounters a beaten-up older model version of his line, B.O.B., voiced with equally one-note comic frippery by Slim Pickens, proving that the only thing more disgustingly cute than a round robot with enormous googly eyes is the same robot but all smooshed in and crushed with carefully harmless comic pathos.

Back to the story, which finds the Palomino encountering the long-thought-lost Cygnus, an enormous research vessel that disappeared 20 years prior, holding impossibly steady just inside the event horizon of a local black hole. Though it should be pointed out that "event horizon" is a phrase much too scientifically precise for a script with the intensely ponderous fake science words The Black Hole trots out. This physical impossibility is thanks to the genius of Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell), the only human left alive on the Cygnus (which, when it went missing, also included McCrae's father among its crew, a fact that does not end up informing any element of her character arc, nor Mimieux's blank performance); he's described by a conveniently knowledgeable Booth in terms that make him sound ideally suited to be a long-lost genius mad scientist, immediately piquing Durant's icily scientific interest. And so, of course, when the Palomino crew runs into Reinhardt, he immediately starts playing the part assigned to him, he and his army of robots and especially the enormous, crimson-red knife-wielding thing he familiarly calls "Maximilian".

In every conceivable respect, The Black Hole plays like a '50s science fiction movie, from the tiny detail that the modern nations of Earth remain unchanged centuries into the future, to the frank anti-science bent of making Reinhardt's quest for knowledge indistinguishable from his psychotic disregard to human life, and making Durant the hapless apologist for the psychopath on the grounds that, "but... but learning!" Mixing wheezy old narrative tropes with modern filmmaking technique is about as classically Disneyesque as it gets, of course, and Star Wars itself openly pilfered from the '30s pulp rulebook in filling out its script. The difference is that Star Wars understands itself to be a throwback, while The Black Hole is obviously trying to do new, challenging things - if there was any reason to believe that the filmmakers or the company had anything near that much creativity, I'd be willing to call it a deliberate attempt to recapitulate the entire history of science fiction in cinema from the early '50s to 1968, beginning with the dry "let's talk science!" tone of Destination Moon, moving into the horror/sci-fi hybridisation of the later '50s, and ending up with its odd, explicitly Christian riff on the metaphysics of 2001's finale. But it's probably safer just to all it a dog's breakfast of lazy stortyelling crutches all serving to justify, however feebly, the extraordinary effects work that was meant to make The Black Hole stand tall among the glut of amazingly awesome future epics.

Oh, how it wants to be an amazing epic! It even opens with two and a half minutes of overture, a very brassy move for a picture that runs less than 98 minutes with that overture. It helps that the music, composed by John Barry, is just plain terrific: especially the main credits theme (which is totally different from the overture), a slightly threatening, insinuating piece of jagged spacey music that suggests both mystery and exciting danger, sounding precisely like the James Bond composer trying to do a Jerry Goldsmith impression, but ending up sharing the best of those dissimilar worlds. It feels like the music for a grand epic, just like the sprawling visuals look like they came from an epic, with their gloriously complex spaceships and dramatic lighting and enormous, rich starfields. And for all that, The Black Hole just can't carry it off. The story is convoluted and yet embarrassingly thin at the same time, the characters range from reedy stereotypes to aggravating comic robots, with the single, striking exception of Schell, who doesn't care at all what kind of movie he's in, and plays Reinhardt with frazzled mad-prophet edginess, glaring with a real sense of inhumanity in his enormous eyes. He's great, the film looks great, and it's a terrific technical accomplishment by every measure, but the lax directing and storytelling don't do anything with that: it's not "boring", but it goes absolutely no place, the kind of movie for which reading its "The Art of" coffee table book would be precisely as enjoyable, and for precisely the same reasons, as watching it.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1979
-Francis Ford Coppola releases the insane, enormous beast of Apocalypse Now, the last New Hollywood film generally agreed to be great
-Robert Altman releases the insane, not so enormous Quintet, a coke-fueled odyssey that absolutely not one goddamn person agrees to be great
-Woody Allen makes the gorgeous widescreen valentine to New York, classicism, and having sex with teenagers, Manhattan

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1979
-Having fought through a bitter, messy divorce, Canadian David Cronenberg overreacts a tiny bit in his "the female body is a pit of Lovecraftian horrors" flick The Brood
-Well-regarded Japanese animator Miyazako Hayao has the chance to direct his first feature film, Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro
-Insane director Werner Herzog and psychotic movie star Klaus Kinski start making Woyzeck literally the week after completing the arduous shoot of Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht

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