BOTTOM OF THE SEVENTH

I do not, in general, believe in the phenomenon of actors being the solitary saving grace of an otherwise disposable movie, but I'll say this: Jeff Bridges is clearly the solitary reason that Seventh Son is an absolute blast of a bad movie, the kind that immediately upon departing, I wanted to start listing the names of everybody I knew that I had to force it on, and not just a slog through generic plotting and insultingly clumsy dialogue. I like to think that what happened is that they got through the first day of rehearsal, and after realising what kind of cod-Medieval RenFaire bullshit he'd gotten himself wrapped up in, Bridges decided "well fuck this", and concluded that if he could not act so well as to make the film good, at least he could act so poorly as to make the film hilarious. I have not yet figured out the proper way to describe the accent he's up to in this film, but it ranks right up alongside Dick Van Dyke's in Mary Poppins in the hallowed annals of Are You Supposed To Be From England? Because You Sound Like A Looney Tune. The closest I can come up with is that it sounds the Dude doing an impression of Woody Allen playing Sir John Falstaff. It's dumbfounding and precious and beautiful, particularly when he uses it to assault such Bizarro World dialogue as "Stone chuckers chuck stone, and cattle rippers rip cattle" or "There are witches that need killing. Fucking witches". The latter line doubling as the most wildly discordant swear word in a period movie in ages; it pleases me to assume that Bridges ad-libbed it.

At any moment when Bridges is onscreen, talking in his unplaceable drunken drawl, Seven Son is a triumph; the best comedy of the young 2015, and apt to remain that way for a long time. When he's not onscreen, things take an awfully precipitous tumble. There was some money thrown at this, no doubt, and you can see it in things like the shockingly good visual effects (not consistently so - there are some nasty, under-rendered and ill-composited beasties throughout), and Dante Ferretti's rich production design, creating a world that is physically plausible with visual hints of its own history and unexplored backstory like no high fantasy since The Lord of the Rings. It's like taking one of those hilariously crappy sword-and-sorcery pictures from the early '80s, and throwing money and resources at it that the genre had never witnessed, and no matter how rough the going gets, there's always something to look at with childlike admiration.

The going gets very rough, though. The story isn't particularly objectionable, just a by-the-numbers Chosen One story about Thomas Ward (Ben Barnes), the seventh son of a seventh son, and thus destined by God and numerology to be the ideal apprentice to Master Gregory (Bridges), the last of the "spooks", a line of holy soldiers tasked with rooting out the dark creatures throughout the land. The need for such an apprentice is dire: the once-a-century blood moon is about to rise, and it has freed from her prison in the bowels of the earth Mother Malkin (Julianne Moore), a powerful witch-queen who immediately sets to gathering her army, in order to use the power of the full blood moon to take over the world. But Thomas is a poor study, and he's far more interested in flirting with the mysterious Alice (Alicia Vikander) than do anything else, not suspecting (and probably not caring) that she's Malkin's niece and spy.

That's boring and overdone, sure, but nothing about that necessarily has to be very bad. That only creeps in because, for as much fun as Bridges is plainly having, and as ambitious and complex as Ferretti's sets go - and what the hell, let's throw Jacqueline West and her inventive Middle Ages BDSM couture for the witches - there's not another human soul involved besides those three who has anything but disinterest in the film they're all making. This is patently obvious with even a slight glance at the cast: given a chewy, flashy villain that should make for some splendid hamminess, Moore can barely be bothered to do more than spit out her overblown lines about being Evil and blood-this and blood-that; the CGI dragon she transforms into has infinitely more personality. Vikander can barely contain her disinterest in Barnes, who mistakes keeping his eyes very wide open for being innocent and overawed. Olivia Williams, in the thanklessly small role as Thomas's mother, puts in some effort to bring human warmth to the proceedings, but the proceedings do not want that, and spit her right back out.

The rot goes much deeper, though, all the way to the screenplay adapted by Charles Leavitt, Steven Knight, and Matt Greenberg from the first in a series of children's novels (there does not seem to be much of a fear that Seventh Son will end up sparking a franchise). In a stripped-down form, it seems perfectly, fine, but the way that the story ends up functioning as an aimless tour through underdeveloped aspects of its world proves to be a bit dispiriting; the effect isn't a Tolkienesque vistas-beyond-vistas feeling in which untold stories lurk behind every rock, but the sense that the writers kept throwing in unnecessary details to keep themselves from being bored. The central - in some ways, film-defining - relationship between Thomas and Alice is painfully underdeveloped, leaving an enormous hole that nothing could possibly fill.

Meanwhile, Sergei Bodrov directs with listless slack that benefits nothing and no-one other than Bridges, Marco Beltrami's score drones on in a generic fantasy mode, and Newton Thomas Sigel shoots everything in a rainy palette that almost gives a sense of dour gravity to the film, except that it lacks the dramatic weight to support that. It's outrageously dumb, reductive, and lazy, more boring than bad - but it is aggressively boring. Aye, Bridges comes along and gives exactly the right perversity to make things fun in a dippy, loopy way, and so the aggregate effect of Seventh Son is not, in fact, boredom. But it should take more than one actor trying to blow a movie up from the inside to make it worth watching.

3/10

Read More

UNHOLY MOSES

The story of Moses and the exodus of the Hebrews from Pharaonic Egypt is, when you get right down to it, one of the key works of literary narrative in the entire history of the world, so there's no reason a filmmaker shouldn't poke at it. That's what shared foundational texts are there for. So if e.g. Ridley Scott wants to make a movie based on Exodus that puts a rational materialist spin on a story that is, down to its bones, about faith, spirituality, and the immaterial, I can't immediately come up with a reason he oughtn't, outside of a distinct sense that it's probably a very bad idea.

Then again, I might just think it's a very bad idea because I have seen the result of Scott's experiment in applied agnosticism, Exodus: Gods and Kings, and it's terrible in ways that really don't seem possible. Scott is not an untalented man, and this is not his first dramatic action epic set in the ancient world - it's transparently a stab at doing Gladiator with a Biblical tang, though it ends up feeling more like the compromised, ineptly truncated theatrical cut of Kingdom of Heaven (and if Exodus is to have a similarly redemptive director's cut someday, it is well-hidden in the current footage). One can, from time to time, spot Scott the stylist waking up long enough to set the camera someplace for a the kind of immense epic wide shot that does all the things movies do best, particularly later on: the sequence of the Egyptians giving the Hebrews chase to and then into the Red Sea hogs all the best shots, whether it's the ethereal sight of an evacuated seabed, or a mountain collapsing and taking the Egyptians' chariots with it, a string of gaudily gilded ants helplessly tumbling to their death. The film is on much weaker ground the closer it gets to its characters, in all senses: the intensely sharp digital cinematography, courtesy of Dariusz Wolski, is so pristine that it gives everything an unpleasantly crisp sheen that makes the close-ups feel slightly nauseating. Though I shall concede that the punched-up realism provided by this does absolutely splendid things for Janty Yates's costumes and Arthur Max's production design, making the ancient trappings feel very physical present and new, without the distant costume drama feel of so many earlier Bible epics.

But even more than the visuals, it's the story that starts to make one's eyes bleed a bit when it attends to much to the characters. For a story that has been told so many times throughout the centuries and given such definitive cinematic form in Cecil B. DeMille's elaborately campy monument to mid-century kitsch, The Ten Commandments, the assortment of four credited writers charged with getting Exodus whipped into shape did an alarmingly terrible job of it. This is a two and a half hour brick of a movie that spends its sullen time plodding through virtually every plot point and still feels like it has to madly rush to include everything. It's one thing to compare it to the bloated DeMille picture, but this isn't even as smart or comprehensive in its storytelling choices as DreamWorks Animation's 99-minute cartoon musical The Prince of Egypt (which remains, against all odds, the most satisfying cinematic treatment of the story to date). Squatting down to watch Egyptian politicking? Oh, yes, plenty of that. The ten plagues, certainly the most dynamic part of the story outside of the Red Sea passage? The movie burns through those suckers with a haste suggesting that even with a half-committed attempt at giving physically plausible explanations for it (an spike in crocodile activity resulted in clay and blood in the water, which drove out the frogs, which rotted and bred flies...) is a bit embarrassing for the filmmakers to sully themselves with. It's so hectic that it's basically played for morbid comedy, not to the film's benefit, and it gives short shrift to the outstanding, richly cinematic treatment of the death of the firstborn, a moodily-lit dose of paranormal horror that gives Exodus a badly-needed dose of movie-like energy.

Now, taking all that as given, we could still find ourselves with an Exodus telling the durable human story at the heart of the religious parable, which I suspect was Scott & company's goal. And it is here, in fact, that Exodus is at its very worst, since even the shamed depiction of the plagues involves some terrific effects work and the director doing an outstanding job of framing things with a suitable grand, historically weighted scale. But the writing and acting is just dismal, when it comes to the humans. In the lead role, Christian Bale has observed some previously unimagined kinship between Moses and Bruce Wayne, and he plays the part with the quietly self-amused smirk that he honed in his Batman trilogy; the result brings in the wrong kind of modernism, especially when Bale is contesting with the film's oddly-chosen embodiment of God and/or Moses's post-concussion hallucination, a petulant boy played by 11-year-old Isaac Andrews. The sight of Bale looming over a snotty little deity, the both of them swapping arguments about morality in fussy British tones, is curious enough to almost work as parody, which is not apparently what the film was going for. Playing Ramses, the self-indulging pharaoh whose rage against the Israelites drives the story, Joel Edgerton's problems only begin with the well-publicised fact that he's a white dude wearing enough self-tanner that it qualifies brownface. Which is a problem, though Bible movies have been putting white dudes in non-white-dude roles for a century or more. Edgerton is just really damn bad in the part, affecting a haughty demeanor that he can't maintain or turn into plausible line readings, though with some of the lines he has to say - a particular howler is his level response to Moses's demand to free the slaves, "From an economic standpoint alone, what you're asking is problematic" - there's not enough acting talent in the world to salvage things. Still, what Edgerton is up to is a kind of terrible, wonderful experiment in playing camp straight, and leaving us with an impossibly unappealing performance in his wake.

Nobody else in an overstuffed cast gets to make an impression, meaning that among those stuck with a five or ten-minute extended cameo are John Turturro, Sigourney Weaver, Ben Mendelsohn, Hiam Abbass, and Ben Kingsley, who exudes more gravity his tiny handful of scenes than everything else happening anywhere in Exodus can manage cumulatively. The parade of wasted talent, and worse yet, talent that visibly knows it's being wasted, is the most galling part of a movie in which damn near everything is galling: the harsh digital imagery, the incomprehensible pacing, the ungainly attempt to give the ancient story a contemporary emotional feel, the noisy Alberto Iglesias score, the jagged editing by Billy Rich, lurching through scenes with no clear sense of rhythm or pacing. Somewhere at the conceptual stage, all of this had a shot at being interesting, but the execution is so wanting in so many ways that outside of some well-chosen stills of people striking poses against CGI cloudscapes, Exodus offers damn little in the way of entertainment or human interest, and lacks any interest whatsoever as a freshened-up version of one of the best-known stories ever told.

3/10

Read More

THIS IS A BITTER ADVENTURE, IF IT MUST END SO; AND NOT A MOUNTAIN OF GOLD CAN AMEND IT.

And thus does one of the most ill-considered experiments in franchise extension end precisely the way it was bound to end. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the grand finale of director Peter Jackson's three-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's 1937 children's novel, feels like a weirdly-shaped movie fragment and not a movie at all. Though it's still perhaps the best individual film of the trilogy, if only by default. It starts out terribly, finds itself by the end of its first hour, starts to lose the thread during the wandering titular battle sequence that can only boast about its mass, and not its narrative momentum nor its visual excitement, and finds itself again in the last 15 minutes or so, when it refocuses itself on the hobbit whose status of protagonist has been more nominal than actual in two of three films now. So that's a lot of losing and finding and losing, but in the aggregate, the film ends up with more satisfying material, percentage-wise, than the achingly slow-paced The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which kicked things off (barely) in 2012, or the meth-addled flitting between ill-constructed subplots in 2013's The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

The film's biggest problem is the obvious one: not, precisely, the decision to break the meager little book into three long tentpole films, but the way that decision came up so late in the game. Initially, the idea was to make The Hobbit into a two-part adaptation, and the revised concept came after the script was written and principal photography was completed, and the material had been shaped into two individually contained features. Jackson and fellow writer-producers Fran Walsh and Philppa Boyens did a solid enough job of fashioning An Unexpected Journey into a fairly cohesive thing even after chopping its end off and bloating it up with extraneous material in the middle, but The Desolation of Smaug felt at once too rushed and too aimless in all its padding, and the cliffhanger ending tacked on after its somewhat functional third-act climax made it feel needlessly unfulfilled in a way that none of the team's earlier Tolkien films had. But the worst of it is only now coming to fruition: for if The Desolation of Smaug is kind of a self-contained object with the illusion of a final act, The Battle of the Five Armies is that film's actual final act, bafflingly inflated to 144 minutes and given no first and second acts of its own. It's literally about virtually nothing but the run-up to its battle and the battle itself, trying desperately to buttress that with enough character scenes to feel like it has some kind of self-contained arc.

The movie is never worse than in its hectic opening, which abruptly picks up with the massive dragon Smaug (voiced and motion captured by Benedict Cumberbatch) flying to destroy the lake town of Esgaroth, outside of the lonely mountain Erebor where he lived for many years in evil isolation, until some dwarves riled him up by dousing him in gold from giant molten statue. Fuck alive, the end of The Desolation of Smaug was asinine. So Smaug burns the hell out of Erebor, until he is eventually taken down with an enormous black arrow fired by the brave pessimist Bard (Luke Evans), who has been prepared for just such an occasion. I admire any film with the instinct to hit the ground running like this, but Smaug's attack is not at all suited to the function the film requires it to serve, and we're never really invited back into Jackson's Middle Earth so much as we are plopped there. As the film clumsily juggles characters and plot developments that follow as the Esgaroth populace re-orients itself and marches off to Erebor to demand their share of Smaug's treasure from newly-reinstated dwarf king Thorin (Richard Armitage), the blunt-force style of storytelling only really serves to call attention to how little reason we've been given to care about any of this even slightly. Near the end of the overall sequence, a dog wandering through the bottom of the frame looks straight into the camera in a manner that suggests it's trying to get out of the movie, please, and boy, did I ever feel for that dog.

The opening sequence is the most aimless, trivial, aggravating part of a film that swoops from grandeur and the best filmmaking of Jackson's career since The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King all the way back to tin-eared dialogue and embarrassingly amateur shot set-ups and editing at a fairly regular clip. The Battle of the Five Armies is at one and the same time far too indulgent in stretching barely any narrative content out to some two and a quarter hours of movie, pre-credits, while hectically rushed in its depiction of what little bit is there. The subplot from the last movie that found the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellan, never less interesting in the role) trapped in a ruined haunted fortress is bluntly disposed of in about five minutes featuring weird cameos from Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee, and Hugo Weaving; Stephen Fry's nefarious master of Esgaroth evaporates from this movie so quickly that I kept assuming he'd show up again.

Meanwhile, plenty of lengthy, soporific time is dedicated to politicking between elves and men, between dwarves and elves, and to maneuvering armies into place before they actually start to fighting. And a great deal too much time is turned over to the allegedly comic scallywag Alfrid (Ryan Gage), who gets himself into the most hellishly unentertaining scrapes and represents the single most ill-advised choice in this series, even worse than the dismal introduction of a romantic plot between dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner) and elf Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), the latter of whom makes it almost two-thirds into The Battle of the Five Armies before devolving into a generic action grrl damsel in distress. Some of this works better than other parts, and generally speaking, the tension the filmmakers creak out of the build-up is better than the actual fighting itself, which gets to be a bit numbing. And in the case of the protracted (so protracted) battle between Thorin and his CGI orc nemesis Azog (Manu Bennett), it's both numbing and boring, since the film's obvious hope that we'll regard this as a great clash between lifelong enemies is undercut by the crappy development of Thorin over the trilogy, and Armitage's limp performance thereof, and the complete absence of any development of Azog.

Regardless of the rest, nothing is better than when Martin Freeman's Bilbo Baggins is the focus. After being rudely sidelined in The Desolation of Smaug, the ostensible lead character is back to getting enough screentime to feel like he matters again, and he's used as well here as in any other point of the trilogy. The point of hobbits, really, is to domesticate high fantasy; this was their function in both of Tolkien's novels featuring them, and it's something that Jackson & company have never grasped better than they do here, using Freeman's comic fluster as a way of lightening and humanising (hobbitising?) the clashes of battles, the ponderously portentous dialogue, and Howard Shore's emphatically epic score. Freeman, I am more convinced than ever, is the most interesting performer in the entirety of the Jackson Middle Earth franchise, playing a character whose arc and emotions he has thought about far more than the writers ever did, and making his interpretation all about Bilbo, not about the enormity of the films themselves. It is a little performance, a silly and friendly performance, and a very true performance, and because of all this, it is the absolute, clear highlight of a sloppy movie.

Sloppy, but not without its compensations. Limited to basically just three locations - the ruined city outside the dwarf keep, the dwarf keep itself, and an enormous iron hellgate - the director's tendency towards gawking at his sets is tamped down a bit, and instead of feeling like a travelogue for a CGI-aided New Zealand, The Battle of the Five Armies actually starts to use the camera to shape the action and provide a sense of scale; it is the only one of the Hobbit movies to come even close to attaining the visual sweep of all three Lord of the Rings pictures. Even some of the least interesting moments, like the Thorin/Azog fight, are pepped up by the introduction of winter, adding a harsh edge of white to Andrew Lesnie's characteristically postcard-like cinematography. And for the first time in three films, there's no obviously weak CGI: some of the close-ups of Azog and other computer-made creatures probably could have done with a bit less bright, direct lighting, but there's not a single shot that matches the tacky video game aesthetic of An Unexpected Journey, especially.

In essence, it mostly works as a popcorn movie: a fatiguing popcorn movie whose action scenes are repetitive and occasionally too ridiculous to care about (once again, Orlando Bloom's forgettable Legolas shows up to turn things into Mario game), but which are presented with a passion and gravity that feels so, so much better than the meandering idiocy of the last two movies, and punctured by Freeman's wonderful low-key comedy when it all threatens to become top-heavy with pretension. It proves that the whole idea of a three-part Hobbit was a ruinous idea for more than it ever comes close to redeeming the first two, and it still feels like a paltry return to Middle Earth that would have been better left undone. But it has its moments. And next year, when the single-movie fan edits of the trilogy are complete, I don't mind supposing that some of the loveliest stuff will be in the 20 or so minutes that come out of this last movie.

6/10

Read More

HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2004: In which new technologies and ancient storytelling forms are once again uncertainly wed

There was, to begin with, Braveheart. That film's depiction of violent, manly battles in an undifferentiated Olden Days setting begat Gladiator, and between the two of them, the five Oscars each of them won (overlapping only on Best Picture - they didn't even win the same Sound award), and the huge amount of money Gladiator made along the way, the pair managed to resurrect the old-fashioned historical action epic for the 21st Century. Add in Peter Jackson's massive box office juggernaut of The Lord of the Rings, and the surprise is not that a genre left for dead in the 1960s was revived, but there weren't more of the things (they never became quite the self-perpetuating machine of Ancient World epics in the 1960s, when they helped to kill the Hollywood system as it existed then, but they have still not died off, only slowed to reliable drip of one every year or two).

We arrive now at a particularly time-stamped version of the trend, from 2004. It was the year that the splashy failure of Oliver Stone's Alexander reminded everybody of why they'd stopped making the things in the first place; but before that could happen, the historical epic about men with swords battling other men with swords in battle scenes that look very much like the battle scenes in a lot of other movies had a major international hit with Wolfgang Petersen's Troy, a men's shampoo ad in the form of an adaptation of The Iliad that would have had to work a hell of a lot harder to miss the point of The Iliad any more thoroughly. It is, to begin with, a "realistic" version of the founding work of Western literature, one of the reasons it so clearly identifies itself as a product of the mid-'00s (and later, of course; 2014 pops in to say hi, and make sure everybody is excited about seeing Exodus: Gods and Kings), right down to the way that "realism" badly needs those square quotes. It's not just telling a heavily mythological story with all the myth ripped out artlessly; it's treating the plot and characters with a thoughtless presentism that front-loads modern attitudes into a framework that is flawlessly designed to express the mores and concerns of a society whose values were very, very different than ours. It's one thing for Troy to be a blunt-force indictment of the George W. Bush administration and its gallop towards war in Iraq; that's the kind of interpretation of classic texts through modern prisms that has been going on for centuries, with Homer's epics serving as particularly fertile fodder for such exercises. It's quite another for it to re-imagine most of its characters into such psychologically contemporary figures that the plot, hinging on ancient notions of duty, honor, and value, can barely function in the wake of it.

And so, instead of the rage of Achilles, Peleus's son, driven by the love of glory and prideful in his semi-divinity we get the sullen moping of Achilles, anachronistically obsessed with political justice and played by a disastrously out-of-his-depths Brad Pitt as a mournful, introspective sort who hates war passionately, and hates himself for being good at it. That's a fine character for a movie about a bloody, pointless war. It is not, however, a fine character for a movie about ancient Greece, and Pitt's woeful performance is merely the point of the spear, leading the way for the rest of a movie that cannot pretend, except in the solitary performance of Peter O'Toole as Priam, that it takes place in a pre-modern era. The things people say, and the way they say them, the relationships between characters, the general sensitivity and weepy psychoanalysing that courses through every performance and character, these are not the stuff of heightened historical fiction. They are the stuff of a drama about people in 2004, who happen to be wearing old-fashioned costumes and wandering around on sets that evoke something that's close enough to the ancient world that it probably doesn't matter where or when in the ancient world, specifically.

But then, the point of Troy is not to bring history to life, but to bring battles to life, which it does with impersonal efficiency. Wolfgang Petersen is not the greatest of all directors, but he was rarely if ever so mirthlessly functional in his shepherding of a movie through its paces. To have seen any of the LOTR movies is to have seen the best of Troy's action, and even that's an unfair comparison; unfair to LOTR, anyway. Between the instant-tanner hue of Roger Pratt's cinematography (taking the concept of the Bronze Age just a little too far) and the patent inauthenticity of the CGI armies, the film's action looks chintzy and far more slapdash and cheap than I am certain must have been the case. But that's what happens when you blankly copy everything without knowing why: other than their colors, the battles couldn't possibly evoke Braveheart more than they do in the rhythm of the cutting or the framing of shots, and even James Horner's score openly pilfers from his music in that film, in exactly the same places (sometimes, when he is bored, he steals a little bit from his Willow score instead). Except that, where Mel Gibson's filmmaking was driven by God knows what demons that pushed him to craft his film with an energy that vibrates right off the screen; Petersen's was driven by the observation that he could copy Gibson. Or Peter Jackson, or Ridley Scott, or pick it.

As a result, Troy has only the most desultory action, filmed with a good sense of size but none at all of drama: perversely, when we can see Greek boats filling the entire anamorphic frame, it ceases to be impressive, because there's no scale or comparison. It just becomes graphically arbitrary lines and colors at a certain point, and Troy makes a habit of finding that point and squatting there, unmoving, until it has exhausted its supply of effects animators for the time being.

Even so, the action is always, always better than the human drama, which presents a team of actors ranging from the sublimely talented to the barely adequate, all mashed down to the same level of banality by a litany of lines that strive for heroic grandeur but also want to have modernist crackly and crispness. That's a terrible thing to attempt. And mixed with the film's obviously unacceptable desire to marry contemporary morality to a story that has absolutely nothing contemporary about it, we end up with a bunch of people who feel like kids in overly expensive costumes play-acting at Greek Warriors. Thrill to a watery Orlando Bloom as Paris and Diane Kruger breathily puffing out all her lines as Helen! Delight in Sean Bean getting a rare non-villainous, non-dead part as an unnecessarily solemn and signally un-clever Odysseus! Be baffled by Brendan Gleeson's curiously pathetic Menelaus! Gape in amazement at Brian Cox's chomping down on the set with his monumentally overripe, campy Agamemnon - actually, so that last one is pretty okay. Given the film's petulant insistence on making all this a grubby little political parable about imperialists going to war on false pretenses, and its absurd hatchet job of the mythological Agamemnon as a result, the choices Cox made are very nearly the best ones. It's not a legitimately good performance, like the one O'Toole is giving, but it's fun and feisty and lively, a description that applies to very little in this movie.

Pitt and Eric Bana, who plays Hector, the hero of Troy opposite the Greek hero Achilles, certainly are neither feisty nor lively; in the two central roles, the significantly unmatched actors seem hellbent on racing towards the bottom, to determine which can more openly telegraph how sad and lonely and pensive he is. Not a great fit for a movie based on Greek myth, not a great fit for a movie selling itself on the rollicking scope of its CGI battle scenes either. It's simultaneously too airless and serious with all its glowering about history and memory, and too ridiculous with its over-the-top everything visually. It is tacky crap, and tacky crap that frequently vanishes up its own ass.

And yet! It is merely, in that respect, hearkening back to the old '60s sword & sandal films, which are today defensible mostly only on the level of spirited kitsch. Those were expensive effects showcases too, and they suffered from most of the same flaws as Troy: stiff acting, impossible dialogue, elaborate sets that only ever look like elaborate sets, costumes that are far too clean. So hooray for the explosion of CGI in the 2000s: it made it possible to re-make the mistakes that blew up an industry two generations earlier. So much for remembering history.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2004
-Michael Moore's essay film Fahrenheit 9/11 exemplifies the bitterly divided political landscape, and taps it for a stunning amount of money
-Quentin Tarantino releases the second half of his ambitious tribute to the international history of exploitation cinema, Kill Bill
-The mostly forgotten Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow blazes new ground in computer-created sets for "live-action" films

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2004
-Sembene Ousmane's brilliant Moolaadé addresses the bleak issue of female genital mutilation with sparkling visual wit and rage
-Jean-Luc Godard has the closest thing he'll ever have to a late-period popular hit, Notre musique
-The child-driven domestic drama Nobody Knows makes a major director out of Koreeda Hirokazu

Read More

BAT MAN BEGINS

There was not ever going to be a good reason to tell the secret tragic backstory of how Count Dracula, one of English culture's all-time best unrelentingly wicked bad guys, was actually motivated by love of his family and country. Let's be totally clear about that part. Secret tragic backstories for the Wicked Witch of the West and Darth Vader had already tried to ruin two of cinema's finest villains; the same treatment for Bram Stoker's merciless, charismatic vampire would be too much to bear, even if Dracula Untold was a phenomenally great piece of filmmaking in every respect. And it's not: it's piercingly mediocre and clichéd in every possible respect. Let's be totally clear about that part, too.

The film, which has been retrofitted into the first volley of the hoped-for (though I am not clear by whom) Universal Monster Universe thanks to the addition of a clumsy final scene, mostly takes place in 15th Century Wallachia, which is always and unyielding referred to as "Transylvania". Here, Prince Vlad (Luke Evans), ruler of a people that are variously depicted as agrarian or townsfolk, based on the needs of the scene, maintains as much independence as he can against the always-present threat of the Turkish Empire, where he served in the army as a boy and adolescent, earning the war name "Vlad the Impaler" for his particularly gory way of displaying his dead victims, in a form of terrifically effective psychological warfare. His childhood friend, current Turkish Sultan Mehmed (Dominic Cooper in the year's most unfortunate brownface to date, while we eagerly await Exodus: Joel Edgerton's Tanning Disaster) has decided to flex his muscles a bit demanding an unacceptable tribute of Wallachian Transylvanian boys to serve in his military, especially including Vlad's own son Ingeras (Art Parkinson). This Vlad will not accept, and so he makes a deal with, if not the Devil, than the best Devil analogue around those parts, a vile man-like creature (Charles Dance) living in a cave since ages unknown, after he made his own deal for eternal life and power. Vlad gains super-strength, the ability to transform into a colony of bats, a sensitivity to light, and a desperate thirst for human blood. If he can make it three days without ingesting blood, he'll be freed of his hunger and his powers, and so the film turns into a 71-hour countdown till he caves in and eats somebody, a development which is not remotely surprising, nor is the identity of the person he consumes surprising when it happens.

Between them, director Gary Shore and writers Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless have made a total of no features before this, which probably explains why Dracula Untold feels so calculating in its assembly from the spare parts of other movies (which, if we were talking a Frankenstein reboot, we might have something). Something like a Mitteleuropean 300 in its overall impact, only with blues instead of browns and hardly any slow-motion, it's a vampire film where vampires seem to be reluctantly added in after the fact, and horror doesn't exist other than in a couple individual flashes. Certainly, as a story that wants to play on the audience's affection for Dracula in all his guises throughout the century and change of his existence, it has absolutely none of the things that are usually associated with him: not the animalistic hunger and danger of the F.W. Murnau version in Nosferatu, not the suave European superiority of Bela Lugosi in Universal's first Dracula, not Christopher Lee's hateful cruelty in the Hammer series of Dracula pictures, not the erotic pull of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula. He's just a generic super-powered badass, whose specific paranormal traits aren't even explored until the film is most of the way over. Evans gamely tries to inject some passion and fervor into all this ahistorical claptrap, but his dominant mode is brooding and quiet, and the film demands more rage, more Gerard Butler-style barking. That's just if it's going to survive on the dubious level of being a plastic, paint-by-numbers swordfighting action film. For it to work as a Dracula film... no, that was never going to happen. I cannot imagine the performance Evans would have had to give if he was going to actually sell this lukewarm Angry Dad as one of history's greatest monsters - certainly, the script doesn't sacrifice one detail that actually suggests that Bram Stoker's iteration of the character could possibly emerge from the noble, moral man who we see sadly allowing himself to be turned into a demon for the greater good.

Surrounding this vague, uninteresting hero is an entire vague, uninteresting movie, full of powerfully dark, metallic, ugly images (somehow, this was shot by John Schwartzman, a cinematographer whose tendency towards sun-kissed Rockwellian imagery is arguably problematic in its own right, but far more attractive than anything this film has going on), and action sequences which are so ridiculously infatuated with weightless CGI that they're never exciting in even a small way. Having put all that energy into making Vlad such a well-etched generic hero, the writers have nothing left over the rest of the cast, leaving only Dance with the film's hugest gimme role to make anything like an impact. Meanwhile, people who are at least capable of being interesting, like Dominic Cooper and Sarah Gadon, drift around filling parts that require only a warm body, not any kind of acting complexity, and contributing to the overall sense that everyone involved in making the film was as bored by it as we are in the audience.

It's just so pointless: the action's not exciting, the lead character's journey is cobbled together from third-generation copies of Joseph Campbell that we've all seen dozens of times, and the frisson when he inevitably transitions into the iconic literary figure we were promised never comes, sine the script so painfully avoids making this Dracula a bad guy, or even a conflicted antihero. He's just a tragic woobie. Not as tragic as the paying customer who sits through all of this hoping for even one frame that doesn't feel recycled, or one story beat that goes for even the second-most-obvious narrative trope, but tragic.

4/10

Read More

REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - IN THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY GOD

By the time the first Daimajin film opened in 1966, it already had a sequel mostly ready to go. In fact, Daiei Film released an entire Daimajin trilogy in that single calendar year, a burst of extreme energy after which the stone daikaiju would go completely silent until a 2010 TV series created by Daiei's successor, Kadokawa Pictures.

Before I can speak about the first of these sequels, I'm going to have lay a bit of groundwork. For films that barely ever had a release in the English-speaking world, the second and third Daimajin vehicles have suffered from appalling confusion regarding their titles. The first sequel is titled 大魔神怒る, Daimajin ikaru, which translates to Daimajin Becomes Angry. But it has never been called that in English, released instead as both Return of Daimajin and Wrath of Daimajin. The second sequel is titled 大魔神逆襲, Daimajin gyakushu, and in English it has also been titled Return of Daimajin and Wrath of Daimajin (presumably owing to distributor confusion over which film was which), as well as Daimajin Strikes Again and Revenge of Daimajin, none of which are its actual, literal title, Daimajin's Counterattack. I'm going to abide by the release that I used to watch the films, the 2012 Region A Blu-ray release of the complete trilogy by Mill Creek Entertainment, which calls the first sequel Return of Daimajin and the second sequel Daimajin Strikes Again, and from this moment on, you shall hear me refer to this naming controversy no more. But for the sake of not having everybody be helplessly confused, I thought it was worth walking through all that nastiness.

So on we go to the film that I can now confidently and definitively refer to as Return of Daimajin. And oh, what a pleasure it is to report that it's very nearly up to the level of its rather impressive predecessor. Better in some ways, in fact. Other than the figure of a giant stone statue that is imbued with the spirit of a divine entity, there's nothing linking the films: technically, I don't know that it's even fair to call the statue in this film "Daimajin", which in the first movie referred to a malevolent being, while the one in this movie is rather more explicitly a protector god. But that's what Daiei wants me to do, so that's what I shall do.

The plot is broadly the same, though Return of Daimajin doesn't bring in the paranormal theatrics until later. In the region surrounding a lake, there are three feudal communities. Two of these, Chigusa and Nagoshi, directly overlook the lake and receive the protection of a god who lives on an island, which the locals worship in the form of large stone statue on that island. And it's become especially necessary for them to worship, since the neighboring Mikoshiba, ruled by the vicious Lord Mikoshiba Danjo (Kanda Takashi) has lately begun to increase its attacks against Chigusa, which has been a welcoming home to many refugees from Mikoshiba's tyranny. Lord Juro (Hongo Kojiro) of Chigusa, a longtime ally of Nagoshi and presently courting Sayuri (Fujimaro Shiho) daughter of the lord of Nagoshi (Uchida Asao), manages to escape from Chigusa shortly before Mikoshiba overtakes that village; in his rage, Lord Mikoshiba pursues Juro all the way to Nagoshi, where he takes out his frustrations on that community. As Sayuri flees to the idol of her god to pray for deliverance, Mikoshiba's men follow, and destroy the idol, pitching the rubble into the lake, which bubbles and glows red with the wrath of the deposed god. For the remainder of the brief (78 minute) film, the disembodied spirit of the god makes life hard for Mikoshiba, still trying to quell the rebellions led by Juro, Sayuri, and her brother Katsushige (Uenoyama Koichi), until eventually, as he prepares to executed Sayuri and other Nagoshi troublemakers by burning them at the stake, the god reforms himself into a living statue, its blank stone face replaced by an angry mask of wrath, and things progress as they will.

Were I going to sum up the difference between Daimajin and Return of Daimajin in the most succinct way I knew, it would be that the former film, directed by Yasuda Kimiyoshi and shot by Morita Fujio, has a much riper, omnipresent sense of uncanny energy; the sequel, directed by Misumi Kenji and shot by Morita and Tanaka Shozo, favors a great deal more earthbound realism, through we need to be awfully delicate about where we put our definition of the word "realism" in the context of a samurai epic that climaxes with a giant paranormal statue defeating an army. Certainly, Return of Daimajin isn't wanting for atmosphere, and it includes many beautiful, ornately composed shots - the image of the torii gate leading to the god's idol, emerging in bright red against the slate rocks and grey water, is legitimately one of the loveliest frames I have ever seen in a Japanese movie - which openly, pridefully acknowledge the theatricality and falseness of the film's construction. It is presentational and formalised to a greater degree than the first film, its litany of noble characters more pageant-like and detached from us. There's atmosphere to spare, it's just that it's more of a distant, historical type of atmosphere than the raging, apocalyptic energy dabbled in by the first movie.

Not that Return of Daimajin doesn't have its moments. The sequence of the titular creature rising, intact, from the lakebed, is an awe-inspiring effects sequence, with sheer walls of water forming a dramatic backdrop for the harshly lit god to stand out as though emerging from primordial waters, with Ifukube Akira's score (good lord! How did I forget to mention before that the great Ifukube scored the Daimajin trilogy?) beating out on the soundtrack with primitive intensity and just a little bit too much of his iconic Godzilla themes, adding a sense of world-ending grandeur to the sequence. Certainly the fight between Daimajin and Mikoshiba's men is gorgeously frenzied and desperate, a perfect match of the typical daikaiju fight sequence repurposed with low-tech weaponry to greater effect than in the first movie.

The closest thing the movie has to a flaw - which I'm not ready to concede it does - is that it's so rigidly trapped within the rules of a very arch, artificial variant of the jidaigeki genre that it runs the risk of seeming brittle and inhuman. But frankly, the film's performative style matches so well with its deeply precise images and its unexpectedly religious storytelling that I'm not about to blame it. Even more than most movies which end with a giant monster stomping on people, Return of Daimajin is not to all tastes, but it's hard to imagine it being a better version of the particular genre hybrid it's aiming for.

Read More

REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - THE GREAT STONE FACE

Nobody with a brain would blindly trust the internet, or at least that part of the internet that speaks English, on the subject of release dates of Asian-produced movies from a half-century ago. But what the internet tells me is that Daiei Film released both Gamera vs. Barugon and Daimajin on 17 April, 1966. This seems a least a touch unlikely to me (where's the motive for a studio to release competition for itself?), but whether we allow it or not, the two films are obviously contemporaries in the greater scheme of things, and a broader gulf in quality between two films made simultaneously by a single company in even moderately overlapping genres is almost impossible for me to imagine. Gamera vs. Barugon is a genial piece of crap monster movie that's fun to watch mostly because it's so don't-give-a-shit bad. Daimajin, meanwhile, assuming we can confidently describe it as a daikaiju eiga (and that's surely a debatable point), is one of the very best daikaiju eiga I have seen, only a slight bit less impressive than the almighty Godzilla itself.

The film comes about as a hybrid of two of the major genres in Japanese filmmaking at the era: the daikaiju eiga, of course, or giant monster movie, and the jidaigeki, which essentially describes the style that in English we'd call a period piece of costume drama, though without the implication of classy literacy that those phrases tend to dredge up in connection with American and British filmmaking. There's absolutely no two ways about it, Daimajin belongs more to the latter form than the prior: there's no explicit monster action until the last 20 minutes or so of an 84-minute film, and in the sense that some of the more boring Godzilla pictures make us wait and wait for more than a flash or two of the monsters, but in the sense that literally not one single frame of the titular creature is shown in the first hour, and depending on how you interpret the opening scene, that creature is a completely inert non-entity for that whole time.

The first scene, anyway, finds the villagers cowering in fear during a noisy earthquake-like event. The peasantry instantly blames the local majin, a word that was left untranslated in the subtitled version I watched, but appears to be something larger than a mere demon and smaller than an outright god. Whether the incident is supernatural or geological, the chaos permits Samanosuke (Gomi Ryutaro), the treacherous second-in-command to the local feudal lord Hanabasa, to execute his long-gestating coup. In short order, Hanabasa and his wife are dead, and his loyal soldier Kogenta (Fujimaki Jun) is just able to rescue the Hanabasa children, bringing them to the local priestess Shinobu (Tsukimiya Otome), who knows a cave in the mountains above a waterfall where the three fugitives can hide. This cave overlooks a large stone statue of a warrior that, legend holds, stands guard sealing the majin inside the mountain.

Ten years pass, and Hanabasa's son Tadafumi (Aoyama Yoshihiko) and daughter Kozasa (Takada Miwa) are just about the right age to serve as the focal points for a rebellion. And is much overdue: Samanosuke has been driving the countryside into ruin with his tyrannical rule. Unfortunately, in attempting to learn more about this situation, Kogenta gets himself captured, and Tadafumi manages to join him during a rescue attempt. This leaves Shinobu and Kozasa with only one solution: to pray for the mountain god to release the majin into the body of the warrior statue, to avenge the people against Samanosuke's wretchedness. As with most deals that involve conjuring up the devil, though, the release of the stone warrior as Daimajin, its blank face replaced with a snarling mask of rage, leaves plenty of room for things to go horribly wrong.

Okay, so at the level of plot, it's super generic. But as far as I'm concerned, even a generic jidaigeki starts off with some considerable advantages. Among those is the weird but persistent superiority of the genre in servicing up one dynamic and involving composition after another: I don't have any idea why, but I've never yet found a genre that seems so reliably able to use the anamorphic widescreen frame (spillover, perhaps, from those films' aesthetic indebtedness to the linear artwork of the period). Director Yasuda Kimiyoshi and cinematographer Morita Fujio - both of them already veterans of Daiei's long-running series of samurai movies about the blind warrior Zatoichi - certainly were making a quick, relatively cheap film, but within that limitation, Daimajin still looks gorgeous, with a great many individually excellent shots, be they rigid, presentational interiors, or beautifully-composed landscapes. An early sequence includes one lengthy shot of tiny humans in the foreground, vast waterfalls in the center, and the distant statue of the guardian warrior statue near the very top of the frame; the simple but unmistakable correctness of this image is absolutely breathtaking.

What's most impressive of all is that the film doesn't give up any of its artistry when it finally gets to its major action setpiece near the end, with effects directed by Kuroda Yoshiyuki. Who, it's worth pointing out, worked on exactly zero Gamera films. Too bad, because they would certainly have benefited from the ambition and skill Kuroda brought to Daimajin: it has images compositing multiple layers and requiring humans to react to Daimajin and then Daimajin reacting to the humans, all with really showy dramatic lighting (Daimajin's entire attack takes place against a burning red sky). And it's done so skillfully that it only registers as a special effect in a small handful of shots at most. It's no hyperbole, only accuracy, for me to claim that the climax of Daimajin might very well be the most technically accomplished effects sequence from a 1960s Japanese film I've ever seen, every bit as persuasive as the far more well-heeled efforts being made by the American studios at the same time. And with much greater visual drama and a sense of artistry.

In fact, both the images and the narrative in Daimajin have a sense of what I'd happily call operatic excess if this were a culturally European film. Its primary interest is in the way that human lives are at the mercy of greater forces: nature, fate, the spirit world; at the level of the script, this plays out in a story that's almost comically stacked against the heroes, who are effortlessly outflanked by the usurping warlord's forces almost by accident. It also comes out in the shots emphasising the smallness and fragility of humans against the backdrop the film provides; even when the camera moves in close and tight, it's usually so suggest how the characters are in some way trapped or confined. Meanwhile, the filmmakers present the uncanny elements of the plot with striking flair: the disorienting sight of blood dripping from the guardian statue as Samanosuke's men attack it, the freakish lighting in the "supernatural" scenes, the way that Daimajin is always shot from below, even in close-ups, to stress its imposing mass.

The biggest problem with it, really, is that compared to a Godzilla, it's shallow. That is, there's no real social engagement here, no clever metaphor like in many genre films: it's about big, grand gestures and overtly dramatic emotional states. Which is, I hasten to point out, entirely fair game for any movie to explore: not everything has to be about nuclear war or out-of-control technology (and, if you wanted to, you could even read the way that the film depicts Daimajin turning against the people who called it out as a warning against the use of last-resort weapons of mass destruction). Daimajin works splendidly enough as a straightforward drama about desperate people struggling for safety and security that it doesn't need anything else to justify it. Heck, it doesn't even need to throw a giant monster at its plot in order to be completely engaging, beautiful, and emotionally resonant, that's just a nice bonus - how many daikaiju eiga come even close to the same achievement?

Read More

MYTHED OPPORTUNITIES

Upon leaving Hercules (the, I don't know, fifth or tenth movie of that exact title, but I'm talking about the one made in 2014 in America), the friend with whom I saw it and I got to talking about why in the hell so much of recent pop culture has been obsessed with grounding fantastic characters in real-world scenarios. We came up with no solutions, but oh! so many interesting hypotheses, firmly grounded in our respective backgrounds, and the important takeaway is this: anything at all is more interesting to talk about than Hercules, a film that is most notable for how its incredible competence prevents it even from being ironic, campy fun, the way that The Legend of Hercules was this past winter.

Hercules '14 finds Dwayne Johnson as the latest unfortunate soul to take on the role of the Greek demigod, though in this version he's not: he's just a muscular mercenary with a good head for strategy, a Tragic but Mysterious backstory, and an inner circle of warrior-politician friends who help propagate the most outlandish stories of his proficiency at fighting fantastic monsters. These comrades in arms are a convenient cross-section of easily-memorised character types: the Scoundrel, Autolycus (Rufus Sewell), the Stoner Seer, Amphiaraus (Ian McShane), the Woman, Atalanta (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal), the Damaged Man-Child, Tydeus (Aksel Hennie), and the PR Man, Hercules's nephew Iolaus (Reece Ritchie). That Hercules, in this telling (as in Disney's 1997 animated feature, kind of) has a PR man speaks to its very unexpected, omnipresent tone of jokey modernism. The film winks, constantly: it's almost as much a comedy as it is a sword-and-sandal action movie, which is either its worst feature or its saving grace. I honestly haven't figured it out yet. It's a boon to the film in that the fact of a jokey, insincere, "boy, can you believe all this faux-classical horseshit" Hercules is undoubtedly preferable to whatever grave and sober-minded Hercules director Brett Ratner would have whipped up, especially with this cast - the last time Dwayne Johnson appeared in an ancient world movie and was trying to be absolutely sincere ant straitlaced about it, we got The Scorpion King, and who in all the hells that ever were wants to relive The Scorpion King.

That movie, of course, came out during Johnson's "The Rock wants to act" phase, when he was still primarily a professional wrestler; Hercules is a product of Johnson's "goofy character actor" phase, which has been a great deal more rewarding, both for him and for those of us in the audience watching him. I think it's fair to say that Hercules without Johnson would be a completely insufferable experience of shrill self-congratulation, watchable only for McShane's zoned-out sage spouting weird snark in the tone of voice that he does so singularly well. With Johnson, Hercules is at least passable entertainment: for all his serious grimacing and the ruinous shoulder-length wig meant to make him look more like a classic hero, there's something that comes through in his performance that smacks of a kid who's having the best damn time of his life playing dress-up and acting all super-serious. It's appealingly dimwitted charm in place of all the tonally inconsistent jokiness that plays too often in the rest of the film like self-mockery, and there's almost enough it to make Hercules feel, on balance, like a rewarding experience: stupid fun in place of impressive mythic action, but fun nonetheless.

Almost. Though it clocks in at a blessedly unpretentious 98 minutes, Hercules is by no means a quick-moving film, dragging itself down in a piecemeal story adapted by Ryan J. Condal and Evan Spilotopoulos from a comic by the late Steve Moore - adapted very freely, I am given to understand - as a series of disconnected narrative chunks. There's enough of an overall shape to it that I can't quite see fit to call it episodic, and yet episodes are exactly what it feels like - if one didn't know better, it would be possible to see in this a two-part pilot miniseries for a full-length Hercules TV show (though one not remotely as much trashy B-picture fun as the actual Hercules show): By virtue of having a climax that builds off the opening act, it obviously tells one story, but it tells it in parts that seem to each have their own conflict. To say more would be to court spoilers, though I can at least point out that when a film relies on a mid-film twist to suddenly reveal that the established villain isn't what he seems to be, it might be a touch more satisfying, it might then be more satisfying not to completely forget that he ever existed as a character, as Hercules does.

The thing that the movie is, as a storytelling device, is harmlessly trite: Ergenia (Rebecca Ferguson), the daughter of a warlord named Cotys (John Hurt), has been sent to hire Hercules and his band of mercs, hoping to subdue the local barbarians who've been given Cotys a headache as he attempts to unite the region of Thrace as a kingdom. And so Hercules and his crew have to train the hapless Thracians in the arts of warfare. Then comes the clumsy act break, with the second half of the film involving the actual evil that has been secretly moving events around, unknown to Hercules, all along. Fair's fair, the whole "oh, but this quest was only the prologue to your actual battle" structure is inherent to ancient myths, but Hercules is too eager to renounce mythology to rely on its narrative structures as a "get out of lousy screenwriting free" card.

Which takes us back to where we started: how Hercules purports to tell the "real story" of Hercules, without all the magic lion and multi-headed snake monster nonsense. I suppose I have no argument against this impulse, other than that it seems totally needless. Presumably it keeps the budget down to have Hercules's legendary tasks reduced to a few cameo shots (which look really shitty, incidentally; the Hydra in particular), but it also makes the film a bit less thrilling. One might hope that the film compensates for the lack of exciting fantasy sequences by doubling-down on action scenes, but these are fairly drab, all things considered, with handful of really impressive aerial shots pepping up battles that are otherwise inscrutable mires of various shades of brown and tan smashing into each other under Ratner's detached eye, and his surprisingly stiff camera movements (the film was shot by Dante Spinotti, who is certainly more talented than the chintzy monochrome on display here). I gather that the tongue-in-cheek tone that covers the whole film was at least partially aimed at drawing our attention from the more serious elements of the film, and saving the filmmakers from sinking a lot energy into impressive fighting choreography and camerawork. In effect, all it does is leave the film with an insubstantial, self-amused tone that never gels into anything consistently enjoyable to watch, and while Johnson keeps things from being a total loss, even he's not enough to push this over as more than a largely inoffensive distraction.

6/10

Read More

STANLEY KUBRICK: DO YOU LIKE MOVIES ABOUT GLADIATORS?

1960's Spartacus was the third and last feature film of Stanley Kubrick's career that he would later disown, for the best reasons of any of them. Unlike Fear and Desire and Killer's Kiss, it wasn't humiliation at a half-formed talent of youth that led him to later (and "later", in this case, means "almost instantaneously") discount the film's importance in his development, but a very real and very justified belief that it wasn't in any meaningful way "his" film. He was, to start with, the second choice to direct, chosen by executive producer Kirk Douglas as a result of their collaboration on Paths of Glory. Anthony Mann filmed the opening scene of the movie before the nebulous "somebody" (Mann himself? Executive producer Kirk Douglas? Universal?) decided that Mann wasn't up to the task of making a big sprawling massive period epic. Instead, his 1960 film was Cimarron, a big sprawling massive period epic Western. And Mann did have plenty of experience with Westerns in the preceding decade, including some of the very best examples of the genre ever made. But we are not here to to talk about Mann, other than to observe that the sequence he completed, which is quite excellent, truth be told, set the tone of Spartacus, and Kubrick felt compelled to copy that tone for everything he personally oversaw.

The greater issue is that Spartacus was never going to be its director's film; it was, forever and always, a producer's picture. The story goes that Douglas was angry to have been passed over for the title role in Ben-Hur, and wanted to stick it to MGM by headlining his own Roman-era epic about a plucky outsider fighting the system in big, glorious setpieces on big, glorious sets. His attention landed on the 1952 novel Spartacus, by blacklisted novelist Howard Fast, and he hired blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo to write the screenplay; the result of all this was that Trumbo became the first blacklist victim of the McCarthy era to receive credit under his own name after having been tarnished by the House Un-American Activities Committee for his Communist sympathies. But that was much later.

Streamlining the chronologically discontinuous plotline significantly, Trumbo's Spartacus follows how the title figure is brought from the hellish Roman mines in Libya to a gladiator school in Capua, where the slimy impresario Lentulus Batiatus (Peter Ustinov) grooms him to be a great talent, until the fateful day when the chilly wannabe dictator Marcus Licinius Crassus (Laurence Olivier) brings three empty-headed young people to the school on vacation, indulging their desire to see a pointless fight to the death; this event, and Crassus's subsequent purchase of the beautiful, kindly Varinia (Jean Simmons) stokes the fires of rage in Spartacus, and he begins a gladiator revolt that soon turns into an army full of slaves from across Italy, threatening to seriously destablise if not destroy the burgeoning Roman Republic. While this happens, Crassus butts heads in Rome with the relatively liberal senator Gracchus (Charles Laughton), whose positive merits generally begin and end with his desire that his city should remain at least vaguely driven by republican ideals and not tyrannical ones.

The stories from the Spartacus shoot do not imply a happy process. Douglas and Trumbo disagreed over the ideal political metaphor for the story (Douglas wanted it to be about Israel, Trumbo about McCarthyism, and the final product ends up having quite a bit less political bite than either of them probably wanted). Douglas and Kubrick disagreed over damn near everything, with the director not much caring for what he saw as undue moral simplicity in the main character. Kubrick and credited cinematographer Russell Metty clashed a great deal, owing to the director's micro-managing of the camera; supposedly, Kubrick himself executed the vast majority of the material for which Metty won an Oscar. Anecdotes abound about Ustinov and Laughton griping about the spotty plotting and re-writing chunks of the movie for their own ends. The whole thing took ages and ages to complete, at which point it was immediately set upon by the Decent People who would brook no hint of Communist-friendly art coming out of Hollywood, though that PR battle was lost quickly and decisively, with President John Kennedy himself crossing picket lines to see the movie.

All of that only intermittently interferes with the movie itself, which managed to achieve at least the first of its stated goals, anyway: it's a better movie than Ben-Hur, by a lot. Which, given how achingly pokey and stilted Ben-Hur is, shouldn't be much of an achievement, but none of those Roman Epics from the '50s and '60s amount to much, and even with someone like Kubrick calling at least some of the shots, there's no obvious reason to expect better. If Spartacus ends up feeling several solar systems away in quality from the likes of the soporific Quo Vadis (with which it shares Ustinov in an Oscar-nominated turn - he won for Spartacus), that can be ascribed to a few reasons, the most obvious of which is that, uniquely among Hollywood Roman epics with which I'm familiar, this is a film almost totally without religious overtones, save for an historically nonsensical observation in the opening narration that has all the feeling of a line inserted by a Communist-elating screenwriter in the hopes that people will think he's not quite so Communist. The urgent need to pull double duty as plush, costly spectacles and devotional aids was, almost without exception, absolutely deadly in the case of all those films, slowing the drama down to a crawl so that hammy actors could pull their most utterly sincere expressions in endless, dubiously "inspirational" parentheticals. Spartacus gets to commit itself exclusively to story and action; it doesn't even really stop for the humanist devotionals of Fast's novel, which is far more emphatically about class struggles than anything in the movie. Really, the only part of the entire film where outright leftism makes itself known is in the solidarity of the famous, often-parodied "I'm Spartacus!" scene.

In place of the arch solemnity of so many other Roman epics, Spartacus offers up plenty of intoxicants: lavish sets, a well-stocked widescreen frame (the film was shot in Super Technirama 70, one of the most gratifying formats for large-scale epics ever invented), crackling dialogue, whoever wrote it, for the scenes of snarling Roman politicking, magnificent action scenes shot with a level of pageantry not equaled in American cinema until Braveheart - the opening moments of the final big fight between the slave army and the Roman legions seems to go on for hours and hours as the Romans march and march and march until they get just into place, on the far side of a vibrantly green valley, the one and only place in the whole movie where Kubrick the photographic stylist seems to have really woken up and employed the implacable sense of objectivity and geometry that marks all his best work. It is easily my favorite part of the whole film, even more than the exquisite battle scene that immediately follows it.

Stretching all the way back to its Mann footage, Spartacus boasts a singularly vivid use of color (at this point, Kubrick was not yet willingly using color stock), using the natural colors of blue and green in strong counterpoint to the predominant browns found in every single frame. This is a worn, tired ancient world, a dirty, sandy, sweaty one with little spark to it. The occasional shot of blue sky here and there is a fantastic gesture that underlines the intensity of the slaves' desire for freedom and openness by doling it out even to the film's viewers so sparingly and reluctantly, only seen in slices and slivers for the bulk of the film.

All of which - on top of Ustinov, Laughton, and Olivier giving three fantastically rich performances of the sort that only unapologetic British stage-trained actors can give; Ustinov's quivering, mildly smug and easily flustered emblem of power-hungry docility is maybe the single most lively performance in any English-language Roman epic, and his interplay with Laughton the best acting of the film - gives Spartacus energy and passion that's simply not to be found anywhere else in the genre; this does not mean that it's free of that genre's built-in limitations. For one thing, Douglas is downright eager to play Spartacus as exactly the strong-chinned noble figure that Kubrick didn't want him to become; it's fine when the actor's natural tendency towards desperate, bulging-eyed earnestness meets the screenwriter's roiling passages of revolutionary prose, but eye-rollingly trite and ludicrous and instantly-dated when brought to bear on the tender scenes where he makes love to Simmons, without the ability or desire to dial things down. As for Simmons herself, I understand that the actress has her defenders, but I am not remotely one of them, and her open-mouthed brittleness throughout Spartacus feels exactly like the kind of prim, lifeless Good Woman performance given in so many of these movies; above and beyond which, she drowns in the arch, old-timey dialogue that defeats, at some point or another, everybody but Laughton.

More than anything, though, what Spartacus suffers from, when it is suffering, is an absolutely palpable fatigue behind the camera. That Kubrick was unhappy is blatantly obvious: damn near ever single interior that involves anything other than Roman politicking is shot in bland, arbitrary compositions with far too many close-ups; a quick look at the director's next (and only other) film in the same ratio, 2001: A Space Odyssey, reveals such infinitely more thoughtful, complex frames that we can't write it off as simply greater comfort making movies. That Kubrick was excited and invested in his project; this Kubrick is plainly just going through the motions, and maybe deliberately trying to make his star, producer, and chief nemesis look a little bit worse (there are surprisingly plentiful close-ups that emphasise the phoniest elements of Douglas's performance; the best we can say about Kubrick is that he made no effort to compensate for the actor's shortcomings). That Spartacus is the best of all Roman epics of its generation I take as a matter of faith; but that leaves plenty of space for it to come up short in this way or that, and while the general experience is rather more enthralling and pleasurable than otherwise, there's still a lot of stiffness that the filmmaking team couldn't, or wouldn't, entirely overcome.

Read More

TODAY WE WILL DANCE ACROSS THE BACKS OF DEAD GREEKS

There are spoiler-type things littered about this review; but boy, talk about a spoiler proof movie...

If Eva Green never does anything with the rest of her career besides take dubious roles in doomed projects and have all the fun in the world playing her character up, down, and sideways as a giant pile of fresh-from-the-oven baked ham, well I'm fine with that. Two years ago we had her as the lip-smacking villain of the sleepy Tim Burton film Dark Shadows, and now in 2014 we have her as the the reptilian race- and gender-traitor bad guy of 300: Rise of an Empire, a film devoted with almost single-minded intensity to showcasing all the reasons why her character is a wretched termagant whose evil ways - and oh, how evil they are - are directly connected to the practice of her sexuality and individuality as a female. It is in response to this character that, in an interview, Green claimed, "It's very hard today to find strong roles for women and Artemesia is the strongest, toughest, bravest character I've ever played". That she would adopt this attitude towards a character outlined repeatedly in the script as the a misogynist's worst nightmare of what an empowered woman might look like goes a long way to explaining, I think, why she is also the most interesting person onscreen by a gap of roughly the same size used to explain the distances between planetary objects.

This second entry in the 300 saga, opening a winsome seven years after the first movie, is some indescribably and unholy narrative chimera that we don't have a word for yet. Sequel it is not, prequel it is not either; it is more like a jacket. It takes place prior to, at the same time as (but in a different location) and after 300, which concerned itself almost entirely with the Battle of Thermopylae of 480 BCE, the most famous and storied event of the Greco-Persian Wars that dominated the first half of that century. Rise of an Empire - a film which depicts multiple empires, none of which could justifiably be described as "rising" - makes an earnest attempt to recount the greater context of that war's early stages as it concerned the Greek city-states beyond just Sparta, and in fact it is perhaps slightly more responsible a work of history than 300 was. Which still makes it so historically illiterate that the very phrase "historically illiterate" is almost certainly giving it too much credit. But there are fewer things that are obviously batshit insane impossibilities, once you get over the fact that Xerxes I of Persia (Rodrigo Santoro) is once again portrayed as a 10-foot-tall gilded BDSM enthusiast without a follicle of hair on his person.

Xerxes, however, spends most of the movie too busy killing an unseen (but for stock footage) Gerard Butler to spend much time in Rise of an Empire, outside of a weirdly Expressionist montage narrated by Spartan Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) that lasts for, like, 15 minutes. This explains how he came to be filled with an outsized loathing for all Greeks after Athenian general Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton) killed his father, Darius (Igal Naor). The calculating Greek-turned-Persian Artemesia fills his ears with cunning words to trigger war, and it's she who serves as the big bad when, after many years of grousing, Xerxes launches attacks against the Greeks by land and by sea. The land war we already saw; now we turn to the battles of the massive Persian armada under Artemsia's control against the rag-tag Greek ships that Themistokles, still the best Greek military mind outside of Sparta, has been able to cobble together from all the people who aren't entirely certain they want to think of themselves as "the nation of Greece".

It's busier than 300, but otherwise the film basically draws from the same playbook: medium-length scenes of people declaiming rather unapologetic sentiments about how much better it is to die a warrior than live as anything, followed by lengthy action scenes that would only run about a third as long if the filmmakers could keep their damn finger off the damn "slow motion" button. Which makes sense, given that the screenwriters, Zack Snyder & Kurt Johnstad, did the exact same job on the last movie, and Snyder is anyway clearly riding hard on a movie that he was unavailable to direct thanks to his newfound job as the Joss Whedon of the DC Comics movie universe, but still wanted to bear all the hallmarks of "A Zack Snyder Film". The rules of which were largely defined by 300 in the first place. Director Noam Murro proves to be a pliable handmaiden for Snyder's vision without any attempt to insert his own (his directorial career till now has consisted, in its entirety, of the prickly 2008 indie comedy Smart People, making him quite possibly literally the most random choice possible for this project), and the biggest difference, visually, between the two films, is that instead of golden brown CGI backdrops and digital intermediate to give a homoerotic gloss to the characters' rippling abs, we now have slate blue CGI and DI, and the weakling Athenians et alia haven't such flawless bodies. Though that comparative literally only works with 300; you could still grate nutmeg on Stapleton's stomach, so cartoonishly well-defined is his musculature.

Switching from brown land to blue sea as a guiding visual motif is clever in its way, but generally Rise of an Empire works exactly the same way the first movie did; that is to say, not damn much at all, to my eyes. Post-production 3-D and better CGI technology have generally lead to an improvement in the loving depiction of intestines and blood flying all around in thick gouts that arc across the screen as slow as molasses; it is all the tackiness in the world bottled up into one package, but if anything, the violence is ramped up enough that it starts to become unbelievable and thus magnificently silly.

Also silly: the film's remarkbly, almost refreshingly honest misogyny, viewing Artemesia as a terrifying she-man with sexual appetites indistinguishable from bloodlust (in the film's centerpiece sex scene, she and Stapleton boast O-faces that make them look more like performers in torture porn than actual porn). I do try my hardest not to let Freudian theory get too comfortable on the pages of this blog, but sometimes a sword is just an unbelievably obvious phallus which the devil woman uses to rape men to death for displeasing her in any way, and even if I'd been able to not pay attention to it till the end, the climax that finds her having her cock ripped out of her hand ("cock", by the way, makes an anachronistic appearance in the dialogue - twice) as the hero plunges his own hard steel shaft into her belly at womb-height, forcing her to fall to her knees right in front of his crotch... sometimes, giving up and acknowledging the ridiculously straightforward symbolism is the only responsible way to approach it.

And so, back to Green we return. She adores it; I don't know if she's trying to subvert the staggering bias in every inch of the movie (Rise of the Empire is even more anti-woman than 300 was anti-gay), or if she's just having a hell of a time going unhinged and glowering out of her kohl-rimmed eyes with a look of undisguised, bestial hunger, and indulging in a nude scene (which I would have expected to be way below her pay grade by this point) with madcap abandon that erases any hint of exploitation. At any rate, she is plainly having fun, and it makes her fun to watch; it is the single piece of spice that turns this 300 clone into a zestful, delightful bad movie instead of just a tedious, violence-loving slog. Admittedly, Green is not alone, though she's the only person giving anything that resembles a genuinely good performance: the bulk of the men, and Stapleton chief among them, declaim and gesticulate madly in the hopes that they can somehow deal with the copious green screen effects that they obviously can't interact with by overplaying. Compared to the functionally sedate performances of the 300 cast, everybody here looks not so much like the road show cast as the dinner theater cast, and coupled with the "FUCK YOU I AM AN AMAZING VILLAIN" turn that Green slithers around with, it's enough to make Rise of the Empire zippy and dimwitted in a pleasant way. I do not suppose that actually makes it better than 300, and God knows I can't speak to what somebody might think who actually liked that rather ghastly explosion of ugly images, gorgeous men, and vile philosophy. At any rate, Rise of the Empire is the farthest thing from boring, even if it is also the farthest thing from good.

4/10

Read More

ASH AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE

The opening image of Pompeii is an extreme close-up of a body covered in the ancient ash that exactly preserved its shape, against a black background, the sinewy camera movements letting us see every angle and the 3-D camera accentuating and exaggerating all the crags and shapes in glorious detail, using the best and brightest new technology to reach unprecedented new heights in the art of ogling dead bodies. Says it all, really.

The other thing that says it all: before the opening credits have finished running - and this is a movie without a pre-title sequence, mind - we've already been treated to two entirely different top-down shots of a pile of dead bodies all tangled up with each other.

Not that Pompeii is death porn, or anything else that might be outrageous enough to make infamous instead of merely a pleasantly crappy CGI epic. I'm more amused by the perpetual re-occurrence of the peculiar sin of dramatic works set in Ancient Roman times, which is that on the one hand, the storytellers seem downright puritanical in their zeal to condemn the Romans as unforgivable hedonists whose taste for tasteless, extravagant entertainment extended so far as to make the violent death of fellow humans ready fodder for a pleasant day at the theater. And then, of course, the work of drama we're watching (it's a trend that's older than cinema) goes out of its way to make all of the licentiousness of Rome look really exciting and lush, and frequently - certainly in the case of Pompeii - gets much of its entertainment value out of making a spectacle of people die. Hypocritical? Obviously, but not in a way that's particularly rankling. You can't go around expecting truly dumb art to have a unified, coherent ideological thrust, and there's not much whose obvious dumbness comes as pre-sold to us as a movie directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, the only filmmaker alive for whom his video game adaptations generally qualify as his aesthetic peaks.

But there's no reason to be snarky, when it comes right down to it. Anderson's films might be bad, including Pompeii, but they have a certain awareness of their own badness and refusal to live down to it, as it were. Compare it to fellow Class of '14 sword-and-sandal film The Legend of Hercules, if you want to see a genuinely awful movie with nothing to recommend it. Whatever failing he has a storyteller and chronicle of human emotions, Anderson at least knows from garish, indulgent CGI action; at the very minimum, he gives good 3-D spectacle, playing up everything that is splashy, kitschy and tacky in all the most glorious ways. We do not go the films like this for Gravity-style immersion; but there is much to be said for the direct, simple appeal of having somebody throw shit right the hell at your face, and there's not a lot of things that throw more shit with more gusto than an exploding volcano, after all.

Now, the caveat is that the actual eruption of Vesuvius and the subsequent destruction of the titular city that is pretty much the sole thing that anyone attending a film titled Pompeii is going to be interested in seeing, while pleasantly overbaked and noisy (in fact, I have to concede that the film has a pretty great if not necessarily surprising and imaginative soundscape), is buried at the tail end of a movie that is mind-blowingly dull, except for the director's zeal in staging scenes so that things are always very prominently in front of other things. The movie's nominal plot plays like a Telephone Game corruption of Gladiator: in the Roman-held portion of the distant Britannia, a venal general kills the living fuck out of a rebellious tribe of Celts; a young boy among them plays dead long enough to strike back, and is made a slave for his troubles. Years later, the boy, grown up to be a gladiator named Milo (Kit Harrington) but known only as the Celt, is the best pit fighter in Londinium, and it it in this capacity that he comes to the attention of Pompeiian gladiator promoter Graecus (Joe Pingue), away from the heart of the empire and hating it intensely. In no time at all, Milo is on his way to Pompeii, along the way catching the eye of young noblewoman Cassia (Emily Brown), daughter of civic leader Severus (Jared Harris). At this time, Severus is trying to make a deal with an important Roman senator, Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland), who only has an interest in making leering, carnivorous faces at Cassia whenever she enters the room, and it just so happens that he was also the general responsible for killing Milo's family. In the span of just a day and a night, Milo meets, antagonises, and befriends master gladiator Atticus (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), meets Cassia a second time and falls deeply in love, and comes to the attention of Corvus, who will not even let a sea of ash and burning pumice stand between him and his desire to murder Milo in the most violent way possible and clear the way to rape Cassia.

All I can say is, thank God for Kiefer Sutherland. Which I'm pretty sure is a phrase I've never even thought of saying before. His unhinged, lip-smacking venality in the role of the melodramatic over-the-top bad guy is by an incredibly vast margin the best part of the human side of Pompeii, keeping the film situated securely in the tradition of gaudy theatrical extravagance where all the best Roman-era genre pictures tend to live. Certainly, the deck is stacked much in his favor, with Harrington (looking like a dollar store Eric Bana) and Browning (looking like somebody's out-of-control attempt to make a brunette Princess Zelda on deviantART) proving the most watery and unconvincing romantic leads since... well, I've already gone and reminded myself that The Legend of Hercules exists, so I have to cool it with the hyperbole. But they absolutely suck, and it's bitterly hard to deal with the movie in the long passages where we're expected to care more about them looking blankly at each other in what the keening score promises is lust than the surprisingly adequate staging of Pompetii, with its not-unconvincing costumes and surprisingly invisible CGI. To say nothing about the emphatic destruction of same, a sequence which Anderson and his team of writers insistently keep interrupting with dramatic interludes involving Corvus's surprisingly dogged pursuit of the lovers even as buildings are literally falling down on top of him. Not since Billy Zane ran through a sinking Titanic while brandishing a pistol has a disaster movie villain been so hellbent on being the one to kill his rival in the midst of an act of God.

All that being said, though, the film is mostly just silly and dim, with just enough awareness of where to hit us with a miniature earthquake to keep things from sagging too much. And while Anderson makes terrible films, he's much more adept than e.g. your Roland Emmerich at telegraphing his own awareness that the whole thing is kind of cheesy and idiotic, and keeping the tone light that way. Pompeii is not any good, please don't get me wrong, but it understands that it order to pay for not being any good, it has to scrounge up some good moments of kineticism and just enough visual pizzazz to catch your eye as you're looking for something on TV to put off doing real work on a Saturday afternoon. Meeting the most unbelievably minimal threshold to justify its own existence doesn't sound like much, and it isn't much, but when so many films in this mold can't even manage to do that...

5/10

Read More