Ryan
wrote a thoughful post about catching a 35mm print of Lynch’s
“Dune”) at the Alamo
Drafthouse. He notes that despite arriving “DOA” in
1984, it was, today, “a bit of a cult movie.” I thought I would take a few
moments to write down why I am a member of the “Dune” cult following. In short,
the reason I love “Dune” is because it is an artistically rich disaster.
The Critical Response
For a standard opinion on the movie, I refer to Roger
Ebert’s
review of January 1, 1984:
This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless
excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of
all time. Even the color is no good; …David Lean solved that problem in
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, where he made the desert look beautiful and mysterious, not
shabby and drab.
The Financial Response
“Dune” cost its production company, de Laurentiis Productions, approximately
$40M to make. It grossed ~$30M. A $10M loss before DVD, resale, and licensing
agreements was a staggering loss.
So I can make neither the argument that “Dune” was misunderstood by audiences:
they voted no with their dollars. Nor can I say this was an artist’s movie, a
beautiful avant garde that only the critics grasped. Yet nevertheless I
admire and respect this movie. Why?
Why I love “Dune” anyway
Filming the Dune Universe is a Grand Dream
The Dune universe is so expansive and thoroughly-concieved that it is like the
vast desert of Arrakis itself. When your imagination finally collapses,
dehydrated, cooked and lost in the middle of a sand sea, you realize just how
engulfing Frank Herbert’s vision was, and that you’re nowhere close to any
respite from its expansivenes.
With all the negative press and deep soul searching occasioned by the release of “The Green Lantern,” it seems like this might be an opportune moment to suggest that a tiny film, made on a tiny budget, set in a tiny land, might be worth your attention: “Submarine.”
I was always skeptical of the Dreamworks movies: they always seemed like noisy, cloying, poorly characterized, imitations of Disney / Pixar animated features with scatalogical jokes Walt wouldn’t have allowed. It was only during Lauren’s recovery from an appendicitis that I was able to get around to seeing “Kung Fu Panda” which I wound up enjoying very much.
I had held off because a little Jack Black goes a long way, and the notion of Black taking himself “over the top” in an animated form was a bit too much to bear. But Black’s Po was subtle (as Black can be, when he wants) and while geared for children was a character I enjoyed seeing grow to be the hero he had always dreamed of.
The artwork of KFP2 shows great maturity within the Dreamworks SKG art-technology. The CGI world occasionally brings in other styles of animation: cel-style animation for flashbacks, Chinese-style puppet shows. The real stars of the film are Po, Tigress, and the beautifully lethal villain peacock, Shen (voiced perfectly by Gary Oldman). Po, the dragon warrior from the first film, is fighting raiding bandits when the insignia borne by one reminds him of his childhood before being adopted by his lovable goose father Peng. Unsurprisingly the answer to this question draws him nearer to the evil he must destroy (Shen) and requires him to reflect and absorb the Kung Fu lesson granted at the beginning by his master Shifu.
It’s a real visual treat with a great story and wonderfully animated crowd scenes (a cart chase, a scene where our heroes sneak through town beneath the cover of a Chinese dragon). My only complaint is that many of the characters didn’t get much of a chance: Monkey, Viper, Crane, Shifu, and even Peng are strictly supporting cast and the audience doesn’t benefit from the fact that their voices are Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu, Dustin Hoffman, and James Hong.
Even the formidable Tigress (voiced by tigress Angelina Jolie) gets very little screen time. What she does get, with Po, counts, but the speaking parts are Po, Shen, and the soothsayer billy goat voiced by kung fu legend Michelle Yeoh.
When I saw that Marvel was making a movie around Thor I was intrigued because it’s just so ridiculous as a premise. First, my earliest associations with Thor were via the annoying sister in Adventures in Babysitting, so the Asgardian hero was starting at a deficit.
Private Pyle, please kick this kid…
But more important than the influence of Elisabeth Shue vehicles is the narrative idea of a Norse God (ça veut dire: immortal) versus some sort of evil and powerful thing (pick anything from the Marvel universe up to and including Galactus) seems silly. When you get to comparing gods to men, even highly mutated men, aliens or sentient robots, the plot’s conflict seems silly: the god is going to win (barring some MacGuffin to hold back the immortal). With annoyance and nullification of narrative jeopardy in mind walking in, I came in with fairly low expectations.
Handling annoyance concern was deftly done by Chris Hemsworth. To his great credit, Hemsworth understands that his role as the gorgeous lunkhead need not be without humor. The best scenes are where he plays up his overly “Jr. High Kids Mock Shakespeare” dialog, or mis-applies Viking custom or his royal lineage for maximal camp. A particularly funny scene about wanting more coffee smashingly applies all three of these facets to great comedic effect. It’s quite possibly the best scene in the movie.
The screenwriters rightly understood the danger of the nullification of jeopardy problem presented by having a god as a protagonist and side-stepped it by keeping the essential battle away from Thor and forces external (barring obligatory popcorn-fare CGI battles with Frost Giants), but rather sets up the battle to be internal: Thor v. Himself, Thor v. Family.
Thus the framework for the movie is solid, but the plot internals and the character interaction turn it from a strain on the suspension of disbelief to being flat-out dumb. On the up side, the movie is dumb like the characters Chris Klein plays, or Amanda Seyfried in Mean Girls: it’s not an evil dumb like Pearl Harbor but more of an “Oh Brother!” kind of dumb.
The first killer to the difficult-to-believe story was the characterization and character interaction arcs. Nothing sums up this difficulty so much as the non-existent romantic chemistry between Jane (Portman) and TarzanThor.
These two have as much sexual chemistry as my whiteboard eraser and 0.5 mm. lead. I can, for no reason, think of any reason Thor should admire her, be in lust with her, be fascinated by her, be entertained by her, or be humored by her. She’s pretty enough, I guess, but there’s no juice in their on-screen chemistry.
Let’s think of it this way, you have an immortal perfect-10 of a man (judging by the sighs of ladies in my audience and others). How is a researcher going to hook his eye and heart? She’s going to have to be unorthodox: funny, exciting, intelligent, passionate, a good dancer, something. Our Jane exhibits none of these qualities. I could never see any part of their interaction which would make Thor want to be anything but “just friends” with her. On the other hand, the indie-sexy Kat Dennings manages to seem exactly like the kind of a quirky researcher that Thor might be amused, humored, and then felled by (referring to the hammer Mjolnir: “What’s meow-meow?”).
That’s my “meow-meow”
This is something Margot Kidder got right in her portrayal of Lois Lane: she could never be tough as Kal-El in the physical world, but she could have sass and allure, brains and guts and somehow seem a fitting balance to him for the audience. Portman never gets this right.
Speaking of Margot Kidder, the famously bad “Can you read my mind” scene from Superman is a great litmus test for Thor. When we see that scene of Lois (a mortal) and Kal-El (effectively, a god) flying through the sky we see both her body and her heart alight on this super man. When we see Thor explain the Yggdrasil to Jane (“you had my heart at ‘nine realms’”), I think we’re supposed to have the same reaction. But instead of Thor and Jane’s night under the stars being dopey, dream-filtered, and sweet like Lois and Superman’s night above the clouds, it seems dopey, period.
The way hokey romance should be done
Jane’s desirability in terms of a female is completely undone by the appearance, on Earth, of Sif, Thor’s battle buddy. Fierce, beautiful, brave, also immortal, also seeming of Asgardian royal lineage. She’s a much better catch than the research scientist bore.
Speaking of boring, the nemeses are boring. Loki is boring as a Lex Luthor principled evil nemesis driven by “Thor is too tempestuous to rule.” The big metal baddie is boring; as far as summer popcorn movies go I expected a much cooler final battle between a Mjolnir-wielding Thor. The Ice Giants are boring. Actually, not just the antagonists were boring, the good guys were boring too. Odin was boring. Heimdal was pretty boring too. The Asgardian back-story was boring. The team battles of Thor and his buddies were boring. I’m too bored of them to even write about their failings.
Further the Norse myths have so much richness (and not-boring-ness) in them: Odin trading an eye for wisdom, runes, Loki’s suspension under the poison snake, etc. All that richness was untouched and smushed into the explanation that “clever aliens are indistinguishable from (gods or) magic.” Come to think of it the director, Branagh, inserts Arther C. Clarke’s direct quote about sufficiently advance science being indistinguishable from magic as a ham-handed bit of dialog. While Branagh is wiling to be ham-handed in references that demote magic into science, he is unwilling to draw some imagination-stoking parallels that hint at our science scratching the surface of unleashing magic. Let’s remember that movies, especially fantasy movies, should inspire dreams and imagination. If magic and science are one where Thor comes from why not be explicit with something like:
THOR: You say this One Stone of yours…
JANE: [_interrupting_] Einstein.
THOR: Einstein, right, discovered light, mass, and energy were one? That is the start of _our_ science as well. Look in the sky Jane, see the aurora? What is it?
JANE: It’s light, multi-colored light.
THOR: And the rainbow?
JANE: It’s light.
THOR: And so it happens that we of Asgard come to Midgar — Earth via your amusingly named “Rainbow bridge.” In time, your science will unravel the secrets of our magic, provided you stay safe from the many dangers as yet unknown to you of the Nine Realms?
JANE: Dangers?
THOR: Yes, like the Ice Giants. But we of Asgard are sworn to protect the peace my father has set among the Nine Realms. The peace that I may have broken for good.
JANE: You broke it?
THOR: Yes, in my pride (etc.)
or remind us how integrated Viking life is with our own
DARCY: _To Jane_ The MacGuffin will occur on (look to clock) Friday at noon
THOR: Appropriate that the gate will close on the day named for her, she always had a taste for destruction! I am amused by this.
SELVIG: Damned Norse sense of gallows humor. Help me put this anti MacGuffin in place!
Here’s a bad sign. Somewhere around the third act I looked at Lauren and we started laughing. I don’t remember why, we just did.
Mjolnir, forged in the heart of a dying star, might be able to knock back Ice Giants, but it couldn’t shake off the boulders of boring that held back Thor from ever getting any energy or bounce to it.
Here’s what’s good:
Kat Dennings
Chris Hemsworth is funny
Stellan Skarsgård as Erik Selvig is a real Scandinavian and his gravelly, accented voice reminded me of the coolness of “What if the Norse myths were real”
We’re closer to an Avengers movie
Marvel keeps continuity
Hints at the Marvel character universe
Bow and Arrow Sniper tracking Thor in the Mjolnir-containment camp: That’d be Hawkeye-to-be?
Selvig: “My friend, the foremost researcher on gamma radiation.” Hmm, Hulky.
While not a lover of the works of Whit Stillman unto the extent of JimD, I have to say that I always enjoyed the vaguely blue-blood, post-prep school and Ivy League musings of “Barcelona.” When we noticed that the Criterion Collection’s edition of “Metropolitan” was now available for streaming on Netflix, it seemed like a good amusement.
It’s a delightful movie.
It’s the story of young men squiring debutantes to “deb dances” and the conversations that happen afterwards in the debutantes’ parents’ East-side apartments in the wee hours. The movie’s plot is chiefly the story of poorer Tom Townsend who, by accident, becomes swept up in a debutante clique with the scions of older and wealthier families. In time he must handle his own perceptions about class, decide which young lady is most worthy of his attentions, and face down a Mr. Wickham-grade slimeball replete with a continental aristocracy title.
In the larger sense, like “Barcelona,” the movie is about being young and hopeful and enjoying the possibilities of good friends, and sifting out those who seemed good but were not and keeping those treasured few that remain. Other than that, it’s just about the conversations you have while you go through that process.
I’ve recently been thinking about the influence of Southern folk traditions on my aesthetic appreciation of the world. I had not though of them for quite some time, but there they were comfortable, threadbare and familiar as a cabin heated by pot-belly stove in the depth of winter. I recalled those mountain tales and their fierce Biblical Naturalism and their warnings of the broken bond of blood to blood and man to woman.
Watching “Winter’s Bone” brought all those tales and sensibilities back in a rush. The film is the story of Ree Dolly, a girl forced to be the man, woman, and only adult in the house to her two tiny siblings far too early. Told on one bleak winter morning that her tiny homestead was put up as bond collateral for her her meth-cooking father’s freedom, she knows she has to find him and make good on that bond.
Her story works like “The Odyssey” with Ree traveling between her home and the backwoods archipelago of barb-wire fenced properties whose borders you disturb on pain of summary shotgun judgment. She visits her meth-addled uncle, her married and pregnant early best friend, her family’s timber land, the home of the last woman her father “took up” with, any many other mysterious and dangerous places in an effort to find the man who, while absent, has defined the predicaments that form her life.
The film is set in the bleak
hills of the Ozarks where silence, blood feud, and poverty blanket the hills
like the hundred-year trees that are nearly never escape director Debra
Granik’s lens.
Ree’s story and the reticence of her kin and county is deafening
in its silence and Jennifer Lawrence’s work as Ree is engaging, shocking, and
heart-rending.
If stories such as those dark folk tales move your interest, this is a movie
for you.
In Pixar’s “Wall-E,” we encounter an adorable robot who is left to clean up the mounds of trash associated with the global spread of the consumerist lifestyle across the planet. Ancillary thereunto with the disregard for the natural world is the disregard of one’s own body and one’s own wellness. Pixar seems to be sugesting: “Hey, stop buying stuff and eating neon-colored food, get back to the basics and enjoy living as an able bodied human.”
In Pixar’s “Toy Story 3,” heart strings are tugged as toys are left behind, subject to jeopardy, or wage petty internecine battles. All of this tugs at our emotional response as they toys seem to say “Remember to play, and play with us, don’t get rid of us — don’t throw away your sense of childlike wonder by scrapping us.”
And so I am confused, Pixar, what am I to think about the acquisition of gizmos and geegaws of plastic and metal?
Over at The Signal Watch, Ryan takes a few moments to talk about the latest cash grab from Darren Star enterprises: “Sex in the City 2.”
I think SATC2 suffers from a bout of ill-timing and age. Accordingly, these make it seem tone-deaf to the mood of the country. It’s not the case that this latest offering was exceptionally bad, it’s just that the scales have fallen from our eyes and the inherent ridiculousness shines through.
A certain someone I know told me that she loves “Confessions of a Shopaholic.” I understand why, Isla Fisher is cute and funny (Exhibit A: Wedding Crashers). The movie failed and failed hard. If there was any message the world didn’t want to hear as the mortgage bubble was bursting, retirements were being be-Madoffed, and venerable banking institutions were requiring infusions of tax dollars, it was “sometimes I buy too much pretty stuff!” So perhaps that movie got an unfair shake owing to the vicissitudes of the release cycle.
Yet “Shopaholic’s” message has always been the message of SATC. In 1998 as we danced at the peak of the tech-bubble, that a newspaper columnist’s primary concerns would be a good lay, a good stiff drink, and fancy shoes on her inexplicably inexhaustible bank account (I can imagine Carrie Bradshaw bankrupt and back in Mom’s basement after her 19 credit lines forced her to file for bankruptcy looking at heaps of shoes going: “What the hell was I thinking?”) seemed to be an avatar of the zeitgeist. And contrary to expectation, as real-world NYC went to hell in a handbasket, her lifestyle aligned with the post-9/11 advice of the buffoon, George W. Bush who encouraged America to, in a time of crisis, “go shopping.” Because the terrorists hate our freedom to buy lo-rise pants and belly tops, slap them on nubile jailbait, apparently.
Roger Ebert hit the nail on the head with:
Their defining quality is consuming things. They gobble food, fashion, houses, husbands, children, vitamins and freebies.
In a time when America is generally tightening its belt, to keep promulgating this message takes their lives and actions from “wouldn’t it be great if…” fantasy to “get a grip you bobblyhead” reality. Most of the criticism I’ve read is from those wondering just how entitled Charlotte is to feel that she barely makes it with hired helpor what sort of an ungrateful woman doesn’t like that her husband, reformed skirt-chaser wants to spend time with her in their opulent (of course) home — oh right, Carrie.
Anecdote: Success
Bono once said that if you were successful enough in the music business, you eventually become a parody of that (young, hard charging, awesome, gritty, great band) you once were. Ironically, he said this at the opening of Zoo TV.
Or, as Peter Hartlaub of the San Francisco Chronicle said:
A little background for our younger readers: U2 is a band that was cool throughout the mid-1980s, then it briefly sucked, then it became cool again, then it sucked for a much longer time — and then it got sort of cool for a third time but the band members sold their musical souls in the process. This video was taken right at the beginning of their first period of sucking.
I think this has a lot to bear on the SATC universe. SATC clever:
Miranda Hobbes: The only two choices for women; witch and sexy kitten.
Carrie Bradshaw: Oh you just said a mouthful there sister.
not the dubbing of a certain vigorous male “Lawrence of my Labia. (SATC overwrought)”
Question: Why does Kim Cattrall deliver all her lines like Snagglepuss?
Lauren and I, when encountering a situation which is SATC-like, and which calls for a ham-handed double entendre (see above) often deliver it with a:
<span style=”voice:snagglepuss; referenceto:SamathaJones”> Mmmmm, Carrie, you could say that it wasn’t a ham-burger, but a man-burger.</span>
Anecdote: The Gay Vote
I think I knew there was a sea-change afoot on Friday. I went to get a slice of pizza at Marcello’s at Castro and Market and as I walked past the beautiful Castro movie house I overheard three men walking ahead of me one of whom said:
“…God he was like a horse, speaking of horses, we’re all skipping “Sex and the City 2”, right?”
I have never seen a film that captures dramatic tragedy better than Chan-wook Park’s Boksuneun naui geot or, to us non-Hangul speakers, Sympathy for Mr. Vengance. This film has all the epic tragedy of something by Sophocles or Shakespeare; and it has all the concomitant blood and tears. I grit my teeth throughout, except for the moments where I was taking sharp in-breaths in the “a-ha” moments as threads collapsed together in a symphonic story-path.
Simply put, a poor factory worker arranges to sell a kidney and give 5million won to shady organ harvesters so as to acquire a kidney suitable for his ailing sister. The harvesters double-cross him, a miracle organ arrives for his sister and he is now short a kidney and broke. This leads him to kidnapping and from there it goes horribly wrong. The father seeks his vengeance, the “hero” seeks vengeance against the harvesters who instigated the long causal chain that lead to greater tragedy than could be limned in a short review.
In a fascinating direction, the one who loses truly has to take on the life of his transgressor. In so doing he resolves the mystery, grows to understand he who did him wrong, grows to understand himself, but despite this he cannot forgive the transgression and its resultant loss. The plot threads are rich and every character, no matter how small or non-relevant plays a part in facilitating a horrific and tragic resolution.
The screenwriting is painfully tight. Everything works with everything else so flawlessly you’d think it was surgically broken down from something that would have been organically grown.
Park explores the familial blood obligation in a way that is unrelenting and probing with a relentlessness that I’ve not felt since I read Antigone. Everywhere there is desperation, everywhere there is loss, everywhere there is remorse, and everywhere is the thrumming blood-law whose thirst is never satiated. It is a very, very hard movie to watch but very rewarding for people who love the craft of film.
On top of it all the acting is top-notch all the way through. While the story setup might be a bit far-fetched, seeming contrived and designed to falsely ratchet-up the intensity, the movie delivers the experience of tragedy, really Greco-Roman tragedy in a way I’ve never seen before.
I am stunned.
“If you want to live, just leave”
Yes, but what if you’ve been so wronged, you don’t?
Recently released on Netflix is “Playing Shakespeare,” a program that aired on PBS in America in the early 80’s. The series features John Barton, director, and his cast of thespians from the Royal Shakespeare Company. Many of us will recognize X-Men heavyweights Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, British luminaries like Judi Dench and Ben Kingsley, as well as a host of other actors of note.
Barton will set up an aspect of performing Shakespeare and call forth the performers to illustrate the concept under discussion. Occasionally other actors of the company toss in observations and methodological notes. In that capacity the actor Alan Howard had come to notice as a particularly reserved if not nebbishly. In his collar and sweater and large brown plastic frames he was almost reminiscent of a mid-career Jarvis Cocker.
But then Mr. Howard was called forth to demonstrate his solicitation to the widow of his slain enemy, Queen Anne, in the guise of Richard III. Free of smoldering cigarette and spectacles the camera comes in on a tight close-up of another man: his body was crouched, his eyes glinted with malice, and his tonguue turned into a triangle, like an arrow’s point. He hobbled, crab like to his quarry and professed his love.
While this was noticable, the moment of truth is that the lady Anne spits on Richard, square in the face and Howard betrayed no wince, no flinch as her saliva sat fat on his face. Oddly, his eyes seemed to burn slightly brighter, this facial defilement being nothing but a mere annoyance on the hatiching of his plan.
He was stunning to watch.
In any case, the show, thus far, has been a joy to watch and I recommend it.
Let me leave with a review of Howard’s performance in this role:
Alan Howard’s Richard must surely rank among the few truly outstanding interpretations of this fascinating and exacting role seen during the last decade or so.
This Richard, the very epitome of bitter malevolence, heaves and wrestles his twisted body about a dark cavern of a stage, his vicious tongue as sharp and menacing as the dagger that is rarely far from his hand, and with which he points his vicious verbal barbs.
His mind as twisted as the body he so loathes and resents, he weaves his verbal spells around his victims with the cunning of a snake and the devilish impishness of a medieval Quilp.
