Winter of discontent: sequels
Movies seen in Winter 2006.
Originally written: August 2006
X-Men: The Last Stand
Superman Returns
The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Dead Man's Chest
Deadwood - seasons 1 and 2
My Man Godfrey
Now is yet another winter of our discontent. Contemplation of the American summer movie, those what come to us in our cold season, would be enough to have Gloucester send forth the Cat, the Rat and Lovell the Dog in search of some sacrificial victims. Admittedly Shakespeare, the auteur responsible for our image of the hunch-backed Richard slouching all over the place in search of some villainy, was not averse to writing some sequels. The success of Henry IIII, naturally led to Henry V and Henry VI. It's too bad that all prints of Henrys I, II and III are gone, because Willie's version of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine would have been worth the price of admission. Not that contemporary movie-makers offer us anything in that class. What we have instead is a decline in inventiveness, and a further rise in the number of sequels, prequels, re-imaginings and uninteresting speculations. Comedy has become more and more infantalised and the idea of humor based on sharp-writing and dialog, and situations other than toilet-humor, seems further and further away, in an era when Jim Carrey (at his worst) and Adam Sandler have become the touchstones for comic 'genius'. In between many other things occupying us, we have managed to drag ourselves infrequently to the cinema to confront a series of inevitable sequels.
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The X-Men's cinematic adventures have reached their third filmed episode and about the end of the penny section. X-Men: The Last Stand may or may not be an accurate description of the future of the series, particularly if it makes money, but it should be the last. The directorial duties have passed from Bryan Singer (who was busy with Superman Returns) to Brett Ratner, whose previous ventures, including the Rush Hour films and the inferior Red Dragon remake, did not augur well. The film has several competing subplots that sort of meld: there is a purported "cure" for mutation; the rise of the Dark Phoenix as Dr Jean Grey comes into her full power; and the revolt of the extremist wing of the mutant population led by Magneto. This means that, in addition to almost all the characters from the two earlier movies, there is a slew of additional mutant characters. Almost too many. And there is way too much plot. As a result some characters are used in an off-hand way (Rogue and Mystique come to mind) and many others are not allowed enough time to develop. The action is good and the effects well-done, and the movie raises some truly interesting questions about the contemporary world. The 'cure' for mutation parallels the questions raised by genetic engineering and by stem cell research: how much should we interfere with the 'natural' order? The tactics employed by Magneto throw into relief questions about terrorism and the use of violence as a tactic for redressing perceived social inequities. But director Ratner is rather too busy with the action to worry too much about developing any answer to these conundrums. And the number of mutants (and their respective powers) continually ups the ante on the action. Out of this confusion a number of the actors emerge with some distinction. Hugh Jackman's Wolverine remains the most compelling of the mutants, although Ian McKellen's Magneto is not far behind. The most successful of the newer characters is Kelsey Grammer as Hank McCoy (the Beast), a scientist co-opted as the Secretary for Mutant Affairs. Neither Famke Janssen nor Halle Berry get enough to do (and both Cyclops and Xavier disappear rather early from the tale). [SPOILER ALERT] There is a sting or two in the tail, one right at the end of the credits, suggesting both that the end is not as final as you'd been led to believe. There is enough in this movie to entertain and amuse but the producers have gone to the well sufficiently to suggest that it has about run dry.
The son also rises
As noted above, Bryan Singer wasn't able to do the third X-Men movie because he was working on Superman Returns. Singer has had a long list of successes behind him, including The Usual Suspects and the two mutant movies, as well as helping develop House MD, but he is unable to repeat those triumphs in his attempt to revive the Superman franchise. Filmed largely in Sydney, the film suffers from a limp story, some incredible plot developments and a charisma-free lead actor. This is supposed to follow on from the four Christopher Reeve Superman movies and takes up after Superman has been away for five years, apparently visiting Krypton. Lex Luthor has been sprung from jail and commenced yet another land scam. In fact, many of the elements of the plot are eerily reminiscent of the first Reeve movie including the presence in the Luthor gang of a moll with a heart of gold. And the land scam plot itself doesn't make any sense. After all, Luthor has seen the Fortress of Solitude and has to have some idea that the land formed by the crystals from there will not be very attractive, nor very habitable. But logic is not the long suit in this movie. There is Lois Lane's son: I don't think I am spoiling the plot when I mention that the child is in fact Superman's (he has somehow overcome the "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" difficulty posed by Larry Niven and discovered a way of interbreeding between Terrans and Kryptonians) nor that, for a half-Krytonian, he is strangely less than super, being both asthmatic and weedy, until required to be something else by the exigencies of the plot. Then there is the whole he-flew-to-Krypton thing: after all, Superman's powers are granted only by the yellow sun and lesser gravity of the Earth - he'd have no invulnerability nor any powers in the environs of Krypton. How does he get back? Brandon Routh is the name of the actor given the lead role and he looks the part. Pity about the lack of acting ability. Even Kevin Spacey is less than successful as Luthor. Unlike Gene Hackman, who played him with gusto and humor, Spacey is unable to get a handle on the part - never sure whether to play him as pure evil, or more realistically. The plot gets in the way of any of the other characters being developed to any meaningful sense and, despite the scene where she gets to save Superman, Kate Bosworth's Lois is not assertive enough. In fact, only Parker Posey (the floozy with heart) and Frank Langella (Perry White) emerge with any credit. There are some good scenes but the effects are never quite convincing, despite the money thrown at them. Idiotic plot, with plenty of holes in it, and some dull acting - not a formula for success, as the box office receipts have demonstrated.
Following Joe Bob's rule
Far more successful is the sequel to The Curse of the Black Pearl. The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Dead Man's Chest brings back all the main players from the original movie (except Captain Barbossa). As I noted in my review of the earlier film, in Captain Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp has created one of the truly original screen pirates. This film adds further nuances to the part. Again he is the main driver of the plot: this time he is seeking the eponymous chest, now in the possession of the legendary Davy Jones. Depp manages not to wear out the part but to add extra depth to it. Faced with a series of choices, he inevitably acts as if he were the sort of pirate captain everyone expects him to be, but manages to imply that there is something more - some nobility of character that he is trying desperately not to let out. Like the other sequels reviewed here, the film is replete with plot, but in this case this hardly interferes with the helter-skelter on-rush of the narrative. The young lovers are also back; and their stories, separately developed from Captain Jack's, provide a number of focuses for the movie until all the plot strands start to intersect and the main plot takes over. Keira Knightley has grown into the part of Elizabeth Swann and is much more a force in the unfolding of events this time, rather than the passive pawn she was in the first outing. If she can be said to value add to the movie, I am not sure that the same can be said for Orlando Bloom, except perhaps in the action scenes. I begin to suspect that pretty-boy Bloom, who was so effective as Legolas, is not really strong enough to carry the lead. The plot machinations visited upon young Will Turner in this film, particularly the stirrings of strange emotions within Miss Swann, indicate that the writers of the films felt much the same way. Will is the character called on mainly to interact with Davy Jones and his crew - another lot of the undead, but this time more akin to half-human hybrid monsters than to the ghost who sailed the Black Pearl. "Bootstrap Bill" Turner is among those on Davy Joes' ship, which is why young Jack spends much time here. One of the new characters, Davy Jones, is rendered by motion capture (like Gollum in the Rings and Sonny in I Robot), and is voiced by Bill Nighy in a very effective way. Nighy's playing of him is reflected in aspects of the CGI face given to the character - a sort of humanoid octopus - but it doesn't give him the scope for coarse villainy that Rush's Barbossa had. In a way, the main weakness of the second movie (and it is a minor quibble really) is the absence of the completely over-the-top hissable villain. Jack Davenport's Commodore Norrington has returned, although in somewhat straitened circumstances, and he is joined on the dark side by Tom Hollander as the representative of the mercantile corporation out to rule the world. They are too ordinary a pair and too much in the movie mainstream to drive the evil elements of so fantastic a story. The ghostly pirates have gone (except for the comic duo of Mackenzie Crook and Lee Arenberg who add the element of the rude mechanicals) but the elements of fantasy are reinforced through the movie. So are the elements of swashbuckling. If the first movie owed much to The Crimson Pirate, among other avatars, here there be references to half a hundred earlier pirate yarns. The apotheosis is one of the great sword-fight scenes in movie history. It involves a three-way duel between Captain Jack, Will and Norrington that spills over several terrains and ends on a revolving run-away water wheel. It joins scenes from Scaramouche and The Princess Bride in the list of all-time favorite duel scenes. There are special pitfalls present in movies that form a bridge between an original movie and the completion of the trilogy. The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Dead Man's Chest is obviously such a bridging movie and the resolution leaves enough plot strands to be resolved in the finale that you can anticipate a rousing conclusion. But it avoids most of the pitfalls and remains a very good, and fun, movie and an excellent sequel - and its excellent box-office returns, epecially in comparison to the X-Men and Superman sequels, show that occasionally the vox populi is spot-on.
Hardware boys make good
By not subscribing to pay-TV we miss a number of good show, particularly those produced by HBO in the US that, I assume, are available to those who pay for their television via the cable. We have seen some on free-to-air: Angels in America was eventually shown on the national broadcaster and The Sopranos and Curb Your Enthusiasm are seen on commercial television here but late at night. Band of Brothers got an airing but Arli$$ does not appear to have had mainstream primetime airing here nor have I seen such award-winning shows as Warm Springs or The Lakawanna Blues advertised for broadcast. And of them all, the one that seems least likely to be shown on free-to-air may be the best of them all: Deadwood. I have recently had the opportunity of watching the first two series of this show (24 episodes) on DVD and they would have to rank as among the best 24 hours of television I have ever seen. It goes straight into the top ten television shows ever made and I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it. With one major caveat: do not view it if you are at all squeamish about overt violence or have a low threshold for obscenity. Although it has many of the trappings of a Western, I am not sure that John Ford, Sergio Leone or Clint Eastwood would recognise it as such. The moral certainty that has always been a concomitant of the view of the world promulgated by Westerns is not here present. Yet the series, for all its invention, rings more true than the long list of its predecessors. This is partly because it is based on real events and people in the eponymous Dakota mining settlement in the 1870s, although the writers take some liberties with historical characters and introduce some complete fictions to supplement them. One of the fun aspects is trying to work out where they left reality and went into their own meta-reality. The first series starts around the time that Seth Bullock and Sol Star came to Deadwood to start their hardware business. Al Swearengen is already in place, running the Gem Saloon, and by extension the township. Wild Bill Hickok rides into town around the same time. The events that play out over the twenty-four episodes I've seen pretty well follow the historical facts. The first season centres around the events leading to Hickok's murder and the events that follow from that, with the clashes between Swearengen and Bullock being at the centre. The establishment of the Bella Union Saloon as a rival to the Gem and the possibility of the township being absorbed into the Dakota Territory, together with the arrival of the Hearst mining interests, give impetus to the events in the second series. Creator David Milch, who appears to be primarily responsible for the look and feel of the program, for its successive story arcs and for its orotund, almost poetic, language, has moved away from the spare vocabulary that has long been the metier of the taciturn cowboy as portrayed by Gary Cooper, John Wayne and Eastwood. Milch's westerners are almost Shakespearian in their use of the tongue, if you can imagine Shakespeare laden with four-letter words and with a tendency to describe every inimical being as a 'cocksucker', a term that is employed more than somewhat in just about every episode of the series. The flights of linguistic fantasy complement the establishment of a series of memorable, if outlandish, characterisations. Former British pretty boy, Ian McShane, who has gone a little Oliver Reed in looks and body shape, and who has developed into an interesting actor, stands out as the manipulative Swearengen, who tries to dominate the township from his lair above the Gem. Also outstanding are Brad Dourif as the town's drunken physician and moral centre, William Sanderson as the repellent hotelier, EB Farnum, John Hawkes (Sol Star) and Jeffrey Jones as the editor of the local newspaper. On the distaff side, the majority of characters are whores, particularly Trixie (Paula Malcolmson) and Joanie (Kim Dickens), supplemented by a prospector's widow (Molly Parker) and by the drunk and dyspeptic Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert, who is truly a stand-out). But there is hardly a weak link in the writing, acting, design and presentation of the series. It is occasionally laugh-out-loud funny and always edgy, especially in the confrontations between the main characters. There is enough disease and discomfort to keep you from being relaxed about any part of it, particularly for me the story arc that sees Swearengen with kidney stones. HBO are currently making a third series and I am upset that this is to be the last they'll make. I am also upset by the fact that the Australian editions of the DVDs omit the supplementary material on the making of the series and the historical background that is available on the Region 1 disks. But those are the only slight negatives from a very positive experience.
From our DVD collection - reviews of good and great movies not previously reviewed
The screwball comedy is a product of pre-WW2 US moviemaking, when the directors had to get around the censors by using a series of conventions that disguised the fact that the comedies were basically about sex and how to get it. My Man Godfrey is an archetypical example of the genre. Directed by Gregory La Cava, the film is set slap-bang in the middle of the Depression - in 1936. The Bullock family are examples of the nouveau riche of New York. The hard-working father, working at some unspecified firm that he owns, oversees a household that includes a scatter-brained wife and two obnoxious daughters in their early twenties, as well as a cook-maid who has survived the vicissitudes of Bullock life, whereas there has been a constant turnover in butlers. They have been riding out the Depression in some comfort but come up against it when, as a part of a society party, they engage in a treasure hunt in which they need to find a forgotten man. Irene, the younger daughter, decides to adopt Godfrey, the forgotten man she has found, as her new project, and installs him as butler in her screwy household, thereby setting up an enmity with sister Cornelia, who sets out to ruin Godfrey. Elements of screwball comedies include class conflict (usually, but not always, an idle rich woman slumming with a working-class guy - The Lady Eve is a rare example of the sex roles being reversed), romantic trysts between couples who are opposites (like in Bringing Up Baby - a scientist and a socialite - or It Happened One Night - a journalist and a socialite), fast-talking repartee (think His Girl Friday), farcical situations (looking after the leopard in Bringing Up Baby), mistaken identity (My Favorite Wife, The Awful Truth) and gender power reversal (usually in movies with Katharine Hepburn or Rosalind Russell). My Man Godfrey has each of these elements in a fast-moving farce - it's all over in 93 minutes. Like many of these farces, the leading man is vaguely epicene, William Powell in this case rather then the even gayer Cary Grant or Clifton Webb, and the leading lady, Carole Lombard, is the one who moves the plot forward. One of my favorite character actors, Eugene Pallette (Friar Tuck in the Flynn Robin Hood), is the father, who, like Powell holds the serious centre around which the others revolve. Alice Brady is the ditzy mother and Mischa Auer is her protegeŽ, the talentless Carlo. They provide most of the laughs. Gail Patrick is the other sister and Jean Dixon the cook. La Cava was a journeyman director in the 1930s and has been largely ignored by film historians. He was a drinking buddy of WC Fields and made lots of movies in the Silent era. His best-known talkies are this one and Stage Door, one of the first dramedies and the showcase for some of the best female talent in the business. My Man Godfrey is now 70 years old and its age is seen in some scenes, but it holds up remarkably well. In an era when comedy is all too frequently achieved through stupidity and crudity, the wit of screwball comedies, the rapidity of the dialog and the use of situation to create comic characters and scenes are all worth remembering.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]