Ridley and Russ, together again
Movies seen autumn 2010.
Originally written: June 2010
How to Train Your Dragon
Iron Man 2
Robin Hood
Madagascar and Madagascar Escape 2 Africa
Unconditional Love
When a concept has so entered the zeitgeist that it forms the basis for a panel discussion at a Melbourne Sf convention, then you know that it has become an accepted trope. A report on the recent Continuum noted a panel on remakes, sequels and re-imaginings, a panel based on the assumption that, somehow, movies were these days less creative than they were because they are more derivative. I think this fails on two grounds: the use of derivative themes, characters and plots has been a major part of film-making ab initio; and there is nothing inherently uncreative about the re-use of an established concept, provided that you find a new angle on it. Literature can suffer from the same problem, and the same accusations, with the rise of the multi-book series. Again, the assumption is not necessarily true. Yes, there are second-rate sequels or series stretched beyond belief, but equally there are imagined worlds in which more stories can be told without derogating from their entertainment value. In the world of film: the established Star Trek movies had outlived their usefulness, whether set in the original or next generation but JJ Abrams found a way of using that tired world to tell a new story and re-invigorate the franchise. For every Iron Man 2 that doesn't quite live up to the verve of the original, there is The Dark Knight, which surpasses it. The second version of The Front Page (His Girl Friday) was the best, but there have been several further attempts to re-interpret the plot in contemporary terms. Commercial film-making is conservative, relying on either established stars or established ideas; and it can work, as Burton's Alice is showing. It looks like being only the sixth movie to gross a billion dollars. But there is a vibrant independent stream of film-making as well - with fresh ideas, or fresh interpretations of tired ideas. There are many bad movies made; there always have been. But, even in the re-use of old plots and remaking of old movies, you can still find the occasional unexpected gem.
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Berk worse than bite
Cressida Cowell's "Dragon" books are apparently very popular. For that reason it is quite surprising that the writers of How to Train Your Dragon have changed the basic storyline quite radically. Instead of the get-to-know-your-dragon scenario, the movie is an us-versus-them, with the Vikings of Berk perennially fighting off saurian attacks until Hiccup, the chief's teenage son, befriends a young dragon and learns something more about their kind. The resulting animated feature is good fun but not quite as good as it might have been had the makers stuck to the McGuffin of the successful literary franchise. Basically they have hollywoodised Hiccup and his contemporaries, and introduced some young love, as a way of leavening the dough. As a result the animated film is a bit of a dog's breakfast. The early scenes of dragon attack, and Viking defence, are good, as are the climactic battle scenes, even if they are a little derivative of the slew of movies that have followed the air combat trope first perfected in Wings and seen subsequently in countless fighter ace movies, even unto Top Gun. Hiccup is the odd bod: the thinker amongst the more visceral and overly muscled Viking fighters. So he's invented a ballista-like weapon, which has some success in bringing down a dragon, whom he soon befriends, naming him Toothless (which might make some sense in the books but a little less so here, given his well-dentated mouth). So while Hiccup and his contemporaries are being initiated into the dragon lore by Cobber, Stoick and his fighters are off trying to take the fight to the dragons' lair. Talk-show host, Craig Ferguson, has the right Scottish brogue for Cobber, and Gerard Butler matches his accent as Stoick. On the other hand none of the younger (American) cast, voicing the kids, have attempted to match them, so there is some ruining of the suspension of disbelief. I quite liked the dragons, which come in various shapes and sizes, none of them really traditional, and the antics of the kids are quite good as well, faced with Cobber's method of training, which largely involves exposing them to death in the hope they'll survive. America Ferrara provides the voice for Hiccup's love interest, Astrid, and Jay Baruchel is Hiccup. I quite liked both characters (and his dragon). But it is the leavening of humor, together with the mystery of the dragons and their motivations, which provides the main impetus to continued watching. This is evanescent fun.
Stark adventure shows rust
Joe Bob Briggs argued that when audiences go to see a sequel, they really expect to see the same movie all over again. To an extent, the makers of Iron Man 2 have ignored Joe Bob's dictum. They have not quite either hit the right tone or constructed the right plot to replicate the success of the original. Robert Downey Jr is back, to good effect, as Tony Stark, seemingly the only superhero with no regard for protecting his secret (or not-so-secret) identity. He's the best thing in the movie. Gwyneth Paltrow has less to do as "Pepper" Potts, with Scarlett Johansson popping in as a second girl Friday. Don Cheadle is the new "Rhodey" Rhodes and, while his character is given a number of action sequences, there's not much in the way of character development involved. On the other side, baddie duties are divided between Mickey Rourke, as a seriously alienated Russian physicist, and Sam Rockwell, Stark's opposition in the armament's game. All of this is somewhat promising, with a mystery to solve, baddies to fight and a world's fair to run, but the plot never really goes anywhere. Nor do the action scenes add up to a whole hill of beans. The central McGuffin is that Stark is dying, being poisoned by the device that keeps him alive. His actions are predicated on the assumption that he'll soon die and so he is prepared to ignore good advice. He is abrupt with a Senate committee (Gary Shandling is not very effective - which is a bit of a theme for the not-Stark side); drives his own F1 car at Monaco; and hands over his company to Pepper. Mickey Rourke plays the super-villain with some over-the-top relish but Rockwell demonstrates that Rourke hasn't found the real top over which to go - Sam really does make a meal of his role. Which leaves us with a brace of good iron men and a plethora of automata representing the bad iron men - as well as Rourke super-bad iron man. The film is OK and the action scenes well staged but neither the story nor the attempted altercations between the various antagonists work well as drama. [Semi-spoiler] There is one scene that gets close to the feel of the original: when Stark, inspired by a message from the grave, seeks to create an element to replace the deadly palladium that powers his artificial heart. He does what any nerd-hero-scientist would do: he builds a particle accelerator in his basement lab; a sort of mini-Hadron-Collider. That scene was fun; the rest of the movie, with its faux confrontations and uninteresting fight scenes, not so much. Still Robert Downey Jr is good enough as Stark and again has shown that he can carry a movie and make it a box-office success (already over $550 million worldwide) and director Jon Favreux does OK with some inferior material. Enjoyable but not as enjoyable as the first in the series.
Boyz and the hood
Before we look at Ridley Scott's latest movie itself, we need to deal with the legend of Robin Hood and how you don't have to replicate Errol Flynn in order to tell the tale. The Robin Hood legend has undergone a number of changes over the ages, yet people now think that the wronged-noble-Saxon-turned-outlaw-saved-by-Richard's-return is the only possible one. Robin was a yeoman hero (and not necessarily tied to Richard and John, or Nottingham) well before later writers ennobled him, using the story to push their own ideas about the superiority of the upper classes and how the robbing-from-the-rich-giving-to-the-poor subtext demonstrated the generosity of the rich (an early version of the trickle-down economy). Many of the misguided reviews of the new movie, leaving aside those that arise from a tin ear for accents, are derived from the assumption that Scott has done something wrong in revising the legend and placing Robin in the context of the brewing baronial revolt. And both sides of politics have found a reflection of their view in the film (as they have in previous disparate interpretations of the Robin Hood story): Robin is both an anti-tax tea-bagger, and a socialist revolutionary. Some critics are citing Richard Lester's equally revisionist Robin and Marian, one of my favorite interpretations, as an example of the sort of traditional Robin against whom Scott has committed some sort of offence. That's the version where Robin goes crusading after being an outlaw and returns a decade later to find Marian is now a nun (and the Sheriff has learned how to fight). In its time Robin and Marion drew exactly the same sort of scathing reviews for its revisionism that Ridley Scott's is drawing now.
Leaving aside one howler in the new Robin Hood (the film starts around 1200 but the opening credit places it at "the turn of the twelfth century") and the odd inclusion of "the Lost Boys" (Loxley orphans who have taken to the forest like it was a medieval Never Land), the film fits well as a 'prequel' to the adventures of Robin and company in Sherwood. All the favorite characters are there, in one form or another: John Little, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlett, Alan a'Dale and Marian. The Sheriff of Nottingham, now a town rather than a walled city, is somewhat neglected but, by way of compensation, we gets the Loxleys, Kings Richard and John, and a lovely Eleanor of Aquitaine. The story starts with Richard's death and ends with Robin in Sherwood; in between there's intrigue, adventure, revolting barons, dastardly French and an England paupered by the Lionheart's crusading. In Brian Helgeland's literate and historically interesting script, Russell Crowe's Robin returns to its yeoman origins and the link to the Loxleys, a later emendation to the legend, is nicely conceived. Our Russ is a little contained, without the expressiveness that has marked the better Robins, including Flynn and Sean Connery. But he is not without humor: it's just a little more dry than usual. But his merry men provide more than enough humor to keep the tone light, especially Kevin Durand's Little John and Mark Addy's Tuck. Mark Strong has the Guy of Gisborne role - except he serves both Roi Philip and King John - as Robin's direct nemesis. Strong is once again very good: following his evil turn in Sherlock Holmes, he is becoming another reliable Pommy villain. But outshining them all is Cate Blanchett's Marion (sic). She has taken the character from its roots as the damsel in distress and given her a place in society familiar to medieval scholars: the wife/widow who keeps her lord's holdings together while he is off serving his king as a man at arms. Her scenes with Crowe are convincingly good, although I wasn't as convinced by her later Jeanne d'Arc appearance. The fact that the prime example of this sort of woman was Eleanor of Aquitaine, who virtually ran England while Richard was off chasing glory, and is here portrayed in old age by Eileen Atkins, adds to the fun. So too do Oscar Isaacs (John) and Lea Seydoux (Isabella, but about 10 years too old), who, for once, actually help keep the story moving and make sense in the light of their known historical characters. Again leaving aside the Lost Boys, and making allowance for a baronial quasi-revolt that's about 15 years too early, and Robin's "liberty" speech that's a cross between William Wallace and Mad Maximus, the film is damned enjoyable, a fun medieval romp and as good a re-interpretation of the Robin Hood legend as has been around for a while. Highly recommended.
Seen on DVD
I neglected to review Madagascar, which is an animated feature we caught up with on DVD. I'd neglected it on cinema release but, when Cath caught the sequel one afternoon when she was hiding from the world in the local cineplex, we decided to look to see if the original was as good as the second film. That was about a year ago. I quite enjoyed the original film, the adventures of a lion, a zebra, a hippo and a giraffe washed up among the lemurs of the eponymous African island. The best thing about the film was a posse of penguins plotting the free themselves from zoological confine in New York. I have now also caught up with Madagascar Escape 2 Africa, the sequel, also on DVD. The same four protagonists are at the centre of the plot, which sees them leave Madagascar only to crash in the African savannah, together with a couple of the lemurs (especially Sacha Baron Cohen's king), the four penguins and a couple of superior monkeys. There is a plot here, a sort of Lion King pastiche, largely centred around Alex, but it is again the Skipper and his penguin allies who steal the show. There is even a romantic subplot for those who need one. Both films end up being quite good fun, largely because of the penguins and the lemurs, not so much because of the more conventional leading foursome.
Unconditional Love did not get theatrical release but is on its way to becoming a "cult classic" since its release on DVD. It's a product of the Moorhouse/Hogan writer-director team, with PJ Hogan directing. Like Muriel's Wedding and My Best Friend's Wedding, the film is littered with musical numbers, even if not formally a musical. Like MBFW, some of the musical numbers become ensemble pieces, but they don't work quite as well as "I Say a Little Prayer" did in the earlier film. Also like MBFW, Rupert Everett plays a lead role and, surprisingly, he's gay. At a time when there is again debate about whether gay actors can play straight roles, Everett never really seems to try. Here he is the surviving lover of a late Welsh torch singer (Jonathan Pryce showing why he has had leads in Broadway musicals). Into his life comes Grace (Kathy Bates), whose marriage is falling apart, but who is the moral centre of the film. The third lead is Meredith Eaton, a dwarf, who plays Grace's daughter-in-law, Maudie. The far-fetched plot sees this threesome hunting down the serial killer responsible for the singer's death and, thereby, finding themselves. The humor is broad (Julie Andrews makes a couple of telling comic relief appearances) and the supporting characters generally poorly drawn, but the three leads are great, especially Bates, and Pryce's songs provide a good counter-point to the outre plot. You can understand why the film was not released originally (it is a fine example of the sort of movie that is truly original but which distributors think will not put bums on cinema seats) and, equally, why it is now finding an audience that appreciates it merits. You'll either love it or hate it. I'm in the former category.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]