Revenge of the prequel
Movies seen in mid-2005.
Originally written: June 2005
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Kingdom of Heaven
The Upside of Anger
In Good Company
Coach Carter
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous
Bad Santa
The War Game
Supervolcano
Don't you really hate film reviewers who get it wrong. I'm not talking about differences in aesthetics: the days when theatre reviewers with no sympathy for film were assigned to reviews and felt they were slumming are gone. Most film reviewers are now students of film (and its history) and know whereof they speak - the stupid twats on the new SBS film show excepted. Their critical theory may differ from mine and they may get their kicks from boring and slow, but well-meaning, tosh that turns me right off, but I can respect where they are coming from. What I'm talking about are careless critics who make factual errors either about the films they are reviewing or about the aspects of the real world that are being portrayed. And the worst of these is consistently Evan Williams, David Stratton's offsider at The Australian. Case in point: in Revenge of the Sith, Anakin says to Obi-Wan, "You're either with me or you're my enemy"; but Williams gives it as "If you're not with us you must be against us" (making it more Stokely Carmichael than George Bush, who was the target of Lucas' obvious satire). A simple misquotation in that case, annoying enough, but far more egregious are the errors in Williams' review of Kingdom of Heaven. Mistaking David Thewlis' character for a Templar when he's a Hospitaller is bad enough, especially as Williams seems to think that all the Christian knights in the film are Templars. In the same review he suggests that Balian (the protagonist) is a fictional character, when he is a reworked version of an historical character who led the resistance to Saladin's siege of Jerusalem (in fact the real Balian of Ibelin was married to King Baldwin's step-mother). That suggestion is an error but not a major one. The major one is a beauty, combining ignorance with stupidity: "We know that Saladin ... was minor figure resurrected by Saddam Hussein as an inspiration to Muslims". We know nothing of the sort: Saladin was an emir whose army conquered Egypt before he became the undisputed leader of the Moslems in the fight to regain Jerusalem from the descendants of the First Crusaders who had established a Christian Kingdom in Judea. He remained the leader of the Islamic forces when the Second Crusade, led by Richard of England and Phillippe of France, tried to re-establish the Christian kingdom. That's the ignorance. The stupidity is the failure to realise that Saladin was a Kurd and, far from being 'resurrected' by Saddam, his name and deeds were used by the Kurdish enemies of Saddam as a way of uniting their people against the Baarthist dictator. Errors like that really get my goat and are far too common.
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Revenge of the anagram
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is by far the best of the three Star Wars prequels (damning with faint praise) but does not take us back to the joy and bliss of the original movies. This is a bit of a shame because, technically, Revenge of the Sith is just about the most perfect SF movie I've seen: the integration of the live action with CGI and animation; the scope and breadth of the secondary world creation; the daring and bravado exhibited in the cinematography, make-up, art direction, sound, editing and the animation and sfx; all of these elements work like a charm. The problem is - and the brilliance of the technicals throws this into stark relief - George Lucas can't write for shit and his dialog is stilted and unconvincing, especially in the mouth of a charmless amateur like Hayden Christensen. I never thought that I would utter these words but: I miss the good old days when Mark Hamill was the series protagonist. And the script does no favors to Natalie Portman either, reducing Padme to a cypher uttering banalities, a shame since Leia had been such a strong character through the original series and Padme had looked like emulating her to some extent. Most of the cast can barely raise the effort in trying to mouth Lucas' unspeakable dialog. Ewan McGregor tries really hard to achieve an Alec Guinness-like sound for Obi-wan but comes across as sententious. Ian McDiarmid's Palpatine seems barely alive early on and it is only after his duel with Mace Windu that there is any presence in his acting. Samuel Jackson lends some gravitas to the piece and only Frank Oz, still cheerily murdering syntax as Yoda, injects any sense of humor. Even the droids and Wookies are humorless throughout.
By making a trilogy that prefigures the events in the previously made series, Lucas has set himself the task of getting the story to where it begins in the original Star Wars (I find it difficult to dub it A New Hope). So we know that Padme is bearing Anakin Skywalker's twins and we know who they'll become; we're aware that the Jedi order is pretty much for the chop, with Obi-wan and Yoda the sole survivors; and we know that Palpatine will morph into the emperor and Anakin into Darth Vader. But the neatness of the various plot resolutions leaves open any number of questions that are not properly resolved or dealt with adequately. The Jedi code is supposed to be one of selflessness and commitment to the improvement of society, while the dark side stresses selfishness and personal aggrandisement. So how come the Jedi masters keep warning Anakin about the folly of his emotional commitment to Padme (isn't love a good and selfless thing?) and Palpatine can use Anakin's love as the weapon to turn him to the dark side? In any case the scene where Palpatine completes Anakin's seduction is anything but convincing: it seems way too easy and the boy's reactions, going off at the emperor's orders to kill the 'younglings' (one of the worst of Lucas' neologisms), completely out of character with the lad we've seen grow up through the two earlier movies. Similarly, when the remnants of Anakin are suited up as Darth Vader, we see the anger in him at Padme's apparent demise, but the anger is not directed at the only available target: the emperor. If the dark side is so attractive why are there so few Sith Lords? Apart from Darth Sidious (Palpatine) we only see Darth Maul in Menace and Darth Tyranus (Dooku) in Clones and Sith, until Vader of course. And Vader then seems to be the only one as well. If the Jedis are so damned powerful, how come they die so easily? Three of them bite the dust immediately in the duel with Palpatine and the precursors of the Imperial Strom Troopers have no difficulty in accomplishing their collective demise elsewhere. Lucas wrote the screenplay for Star Wars but was smart enough to realise that he needed help on the two subsequent scenarios and employed Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan to develop and write the scripts. Didn't someone tell him after Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones how bad the scripts were? Why didn't he seek some expert help in getting such important matters right? The script problems unbalance the movie in the end and make it much less satisfying than it should be. In Star Wars there was basically no time out, with action scenes following on one after the other and the scenery constantly changing in a unified way as we followed Luke over Tatooine and to the death star, the rescue and the suicide mission. In Sith, after the first big battle scene, when Obi-Wan and Anakin rescue Palpatine, there are a series of short scenes, not following a single character but switching back and forth in a complex way that Lucas seems unable adequately to handle, and nothing happens for a long time, with the various plots taking shape, especially the seduction of Anakin to the dark side, a job Palpatine appears to be carrying out without any real effort or conviction. There are some exciting set-piece battles towards the climax, especially the Obi-Wan/Vader duel over Mount Doom, with some contemporary political comment thrown in, as Anakin/Vader choruses the neo-con chant: "If you're not with me, you're my enemy". Having resolved all the conflicts, Lucas has an extraordinarily long anti-climax to cross his eyes and dot his tees and the credits roll. What could have been a great climax to a good series of films is, in the end let down by a poor script and some wooden acting. 'Tis true, 'tis a pity; 'tis a pity 'tis true.
Bloom in siege perilous
At this year's Oscars, host Chris Rock made a telling point in his monolog: why make an epic, he asked rhetorically, if you're not going to cast Russell Crowe in the lead? It's a question that Ridley Scott must be asking himself as he compares the results of his Crusader epic, Kingdom of Heaven, with that of his Roman Empire blockbuster Gladiator. Because everything in Kingdom works pretty well except for the pretty-boy lead. Orlando Bloom, who started out well in movies by playing a strong supporting Elf in The Lord of the Rings movies and assisting Johnny Depp in the first Pirates of the Caribbean, has discovered that the Peter Principle applies as much to film-making as any other industry. Being the lead is his level of incompetence, demonstrated in Troy and reinforced in Kingdom of Heaven. Leaving aside that whinge, major though it is, I'm prepared to give Scott high marks for managing to make an epic that is not laughable, with battle scenes that hint at the grandeur and tragedy of the reality of medieval combat, and for not fucking up the history all that much. As most will be aware, there have been land disputes in west Asia, at least from the time that the Romans renamed Judea as Palestina and asked the Jewish people to bugger off. About a thousand years ago, the Christians of western Europe decided to wrest the land in which their Messiah was said to have lived from its Islamic overlords. They did this with some success, while indiscriminately slaughtering Moslems, Christians and Jews, occupying Jerusalem and establishing a Christian kingdom there. They defended that kingdom with the assistance of a number of orders of crusader knights, especially the Templars and the Hospitallers. Scott's story is set a number of decades later when the Kurdish emir Saladin, having conquered Egypt, had uniting the diverse Islamic forces in an attempt to expel the Christians. The screenwriters have used as their point of view an enhanced version of one of the defenders of Jerusalem, Balian of Ibelin. Casting Bloom in this part, they have created an illegitimate noble's son who has been raised in a French village and earned his living as a blacksmith (an echo of Bloom's background in Pirates, ironic as someone looking less like a blacksmith would be hard to find). Sent to Jerusalem by his dying father (Liam Neeson in a good cameo), Balian lands in the middle of a power struggle between the moderates, led by the leprous King Baldwin and his marshal, Tiberias (Jeremy Irons), and the radicals, Baldwin's son-in-law, Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas), and the leader of the Templars, the savage Reynald (Brendan Gleeson in another role not dissimilar to his Menelaus). Joining Balian in the middle is the King's sister Sibylla (Eva Green) who is inconveniently married to Guy. There is a tepid love affair and some ineffectual intrigue but this aspect of the plot is secondary to the main game: the attempts by Guy and Reynard to provoke the Moslems into open war, an ironic echo of the modern situation where the Islamists are seen as the fundamentalists, trying to provoke the civilised West. On the other side Saladin (played with some serenity and poise by Ghassan Massoud) is having to cope with his own fire-eaters. Bloom aside, it's hard to criticise the acting, but there is one stand-out performance, by British character actor David Thewlis as a Hospitaller loyal to Ibelin. Thewlis manages to portray the commitment and humor of the warrior-monk, without resorting to any of the usual cliches. It is only after Baldwin's death and Guy's succession (something that took a couple of years in reality with one of Sibylla's pups being an interim king before Guy de Lusignan took control) that the radicals are able to foment open warfare and Saladin, after defeating the Crusader armies at the Battle of Hattin (which occurs off-screen - an interesting choice), lays siege to Jerusalem. This siege is the climax of the film and is remarkably well told, not only visually but in terms of the politics, with its modern echoes, given the place that Jerusalem holds in the three religions of the Book. Balian is the voice of moderation, and Scott's voice, in expressing the view that perhaps, for all its symbolic resonance, the city may not be worth the price in human life that is asked for it. Nonetheless the recreation of the siege is one of the most exciting and gripping pieces of cinema in some time, brilliantly merging live action and CGI shots, with catapults, siege-towers and fireballs, a wall being breached and bloody hand-to-hand combat resulting in a pile of human remains over which the antagonists meet to arrange the surrender of the city on terms. Again, amazingly enough, historically accurate. I loved the look and feel of the movie as well. It seemed genuinely medieval and genuinely Holy Land. The use of the Alcazar from Sevilla for the interiors of Baldwin's palace in Jerusalem was particularly apt: the Alcazar is a product of a blend of Christian and Moorish art and design, and the same elements would be at play in the Crusader kingdom of the twelfth century. Kingdom of Heaven somewhat redeems the epic after a few years in the doldrums; how much better it would have been with someone who could carry it off in the lead.
Ire in the blood
The Upside of Anger must be the worst title of a good movie in a long time. Neither the title nor the low key advertising campaign would have got me to the cinema, but a couple of positive reviews from critics for whom I have time did. And I found one of the more intelligent and interesting comedy/dramas of recent time. Written and directed by independent move-maker Mike Binder (who has also given himself a supporting role as Shep, a lecherous 40-something preying on younger women), the movie explores some elements of suburban angst. Joan Allen is Terry, whose anger is initiated by the desertion of her and her four daughters by a husband who has apparently absconded overseas with his secretary. Terry is comfortable enough not to need additional employment and takes to vodka as the best medicine. She is joined by a neighbor, Denny (Kevin Costner playing yet another baseballer, this one now retired and a talk-radio host who won't talk baseball), who is looking for a drinking pal and finds one in Terry. The four daughters, who range from mid-teen to late college, despair of their mother, but like Denny who sort of moves in as a man who stays to dinner, and keep the household together by taking over the cooking and cleaning and getting on with their lives: Hadley the eldest is finishing college where she's found a beau; Andy gets a job at Denny's radio station and comes under the Shep's baneful influence; Emily is a dancer trying to get into dancing school over her mother's objection; and "Popeye" is a high schooler with a boyfriend who may be gay and an obsession with the manifestations of love. All told just your typical family trying to adjust to the desertion of the paterfamilias. The script is smart and literate and the developments in the family's adjustment are well thought out. Narrated by "Popeye", the most innocent of the observers, the film opens with a funeral and then flashes back to the family home some years earlier. This opening scene sets the audience up to anticipate a death in the family in the resolution of the story and there is an interesting plot-twist late in the movie that is prefigured by this. I rather like the way in which the ending gives some additional resonance to aspects of the scenario, and I very much like the acting ensemble. Costner is at his best when underplaying a laconic character like Denny and Allen is, although under-rated, among the best actors of her generation. The four kids are played talented actresses who have had some success in either film or television, respectively, from the eldest Alicia Witt (Cybill's daughter), Erika Christensen (Traffic etc), Keri Russell (Felicity) and Evan Rachel Wood (Thirteen and The Missing). This is a comfortable family comedy with a little more oomph that most such films have because it uses its anger to underline the humor. Recommended.
Takeover with incredible twist
The corporate comedy is an idea whose time has come (and probably passed) but Paul Weitz, co-director of American Pie and director of About a Boy, has decided to use the concept and, because of a very good cast and a reasonable (if ultimately incredible) script, has succeeded to an extent with In Good Company. Carter (Topher Grace, a graduate of That 70s Show, a barely risible sitcom) is a mid-level sales-type in the employ of a corporate agglomerator yclept Teddy K. The corporate shark swallows a company that includes the sports magazine for which Dan Foreman (Dennis Quaid) is head advertising salesman and the barely adult Carter, with no experience in the particular trade of ad selling, and little experience in management, is made the departmental boss. He recognises to an extent his handicaps so he keeps on Dan as his 2IC. As is the way of such takeovers, Carter's first tasks are to increase sales and decrease staff, and Dan classically should be the first to be canned. The interesting thing about the film is that it doesn't follow the path of least resistance: it shows Carter's understanding of his own inadequacy and Dan is allowed to be more sympathetic to the corporate raider than you'd expect, becoming his mentor and almost his friend. This male bonding is set against a romantic subplot involving Carter and Dan's college-aged daughter (Scarlett Johansson in another strong supporting performance) and against the angst of Morty (David Paymer), one of Dan's co-workers, and an early victim of the downsizing. Paymer manages to convey both pathos and humor in his role as the now-unemployable victim of corporate greed. The resolution of these various story elements is where the script becomes less credible: Teddy K (Malcolm McDowell in an unbilled cameo) turns up to give one of those corporate-speak addresses to the troops which have to be endured, if not understood, and Dan contradicts the mogul. These actions lead to the denouement that, to an extent, undermines the earlier logic of the story. Nonetheless, the performances, particularly of Quaid, Paymer and Johansson, make up for any shortfall in the story arc and this is an entertaining and enjoyable flick. Certainly worth renting on DVD when available.
To scar with love
There are certain givens in the teacher/coach-reforms-the-class-through-tough-love scenario, especially when the teacher/coach is black. Samuel L Jackson follows Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington (among many others) into the whistle-blowing brigade in Coach Carter. And the film lives up to the promise of its origins. "Based on a true story", it tells the story of a successful businessman (and ex-jock), recruited to coach basketball in a slum high school, turning the team around by a mixture of discipline and belief. It features a cast of largely unknown young actors (and the odd pop diva) who respond to the coach's attitude. I don't have the ideological problem that some reviewers have with this scenario: they argue that the 'tough love' approach suggests that all the poverty-stricken and socially deprived kids of the inner city need is discipline and they'll stop the cycle of violence and failure in its tracks. But that is to misinterpret the movie's message. To me, what it is saying is that, whilever we have no expectation of success from such kids, they'll live down to our expectations; that what is needed is a culture of belief that says to the kids that they can make it if they apply themselves, despite the handicaps placed in their way by deprivation, poverty and poor facilities. This is particularly the case with young black kids who are told their 'way out' is through sports like football, basketball or boxing. Whilst they are successful in this sphere, their failure in other areas, and even their poor behavior and attitude, are ignored. So we get the generation of pampered sports stars that populate the NBA, for example: trash-talking idiot savants earning incredible amounts of money without thought to their post-sports careers. And those who don't make the grade in post-school sports, go directly to jail, without passing "Go" or collecting their $200. Which brings us back to the movie under consideration. Coach Carter is a reasonable example of the genre. Jackson gets to emote and is such a good actor that it's good to see him in such a meaty part; the kids get to play basketball; and there is a romantic subplot involving one of the team, Kenyon (Rob Brown, who was so good in Finding Forrester), and his girl, played by Ashanti. There are the usual complications arising from antithetical parents and teachers, but the coach wins over his team, if not their elders, and they have a climactic game against their enemy school. This story is played out against the background of deprivation and poverty that should shock us, given that we're talking of the inner city of one of the biggest cities in the world's most wealthy country. It does expose us to the argot of the streets, the violence and dangers thereon, and the music of the kids, all of which I found more interesting than the unfolding story. But, from the time of Greek tragedy, the joy of drama has been in the telling of the tale, not in the shock of the plot twists, so a genre story well told is worth watching.
The Americanisation of Adams
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ends with a song: "So long ...". That's how I felt at the end as well. This movie is sooooo long. And it doesn't even get to the end of the universe. This is one movie I cannot view in isolation from its source material. I've been a Hitchhiker's fan since the radio plays; not so much the television series and not so much the books (after the first one anyway), but the idea was great: so British, so verbal, so funny. So what have they done with this movie: they've americanised it. Not so much that they've used American actors, which is bad enough, particularly in the cases of Trillian, Zaphod and, especially, Ford Prefect, but that they have changed large elements of the plot - and not one of the changes has helped make the story any better. Let me whinge loud and long about what's now missing: there is no resolution of the question; no restaurant at the end of the universe; no Golgafrinchams; no fleet of sleek black battle-cruisers (although Trillian almost got eaten by a dreaded Blugbatter Beast of Trall which is how she ended in the radio plays); no Magikthise or Vroomfondel. The Vogons got turned from bureaucrats into intergalactic bounty hunters; and Marvin got turned into a cutesy robot despite the effective use of Alan Rickman's voice. (If he is a 'manic depressive robot', when is he ever manic?) None of the changes really helped the movie (except maybe the brown paper bag joke in the pub) and most derogated from the fun bits in the original. It was rather like Ralph Bakshi's cartoon version of The Lord of the Rings which ended somewhere in the middle because they ran out of time, money and inspiration. (To paraphrase Adams: let us now speak of the THHGTTG-Peter-Jackson-to-come who will return to the original for inspiration.) I liked Arthur and Slartibartfast, and was prepared to bear with Sam Rockwell's Zaphod Beeblebrox most of the time; I hated Mos Def's Ford; disliked the changes to Trillian's character; didn't think much of the newly introduced characters; and, most of all, missed so much of the humor of the "Guide" from the original. This isn't so much a movie as a desecration. It saddened me.
No Caine; not able
Miss Congeniality was a good enough movie, made palatable by two excellent performances: Michael Caine and Sandra Bullock. Caine is missing from the sequel and dearly missed. As a result of that, and of a woefully inadequate script, Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous does not come anywhere close to meeting the expectations of the second of the sub-title epithets. Bullock's fish-out-of-water routine as Gracie Hart, the graceless FBI agent forced into glamor, wears a little thin in this movie and Regina King is not given enough material to help save it. She plays another female FBI agent, Sam Fuller, unable (or unwilling) to be the sort of agent her bosses want and is therefore assigned the role of Gracie's minder. Diedrich Bader, a graduate of The Drew Carey Show, is the token gay, Gracie's fashion adviser, apparently meant to balance Caine's absence, but not in the same class. The plot, for what it's worth, sees Gracie's mate Cheryl (the pageant winner) and Stan Fields (William Shatner) kidnapped and Gracie and Sam have to save them, despite the attempts by their superiors to mismanage the case. There are a couple of good scenes but haven't we seen enough of the women pretending to be men pretending to be women trope - trotted out again to enable the agents to infiltrate a female impersonators' nightclub. If Miss Congeniality was an unexpected hit, this sequel is the expected failure. Joe Bob could have predicted it: it is just too dissimilar to the original.
On DVD
Bad Santa is bad taste buffet, and one of the funniest movies I've seen in a long time. Billy Bob Thornton is a thief, a lech and a drunk whose grift is to be a Department Store Santa who cracks the store safe on Xmas Eve. He's been doing this for some years, with the assistance of his dwarf mate (Tony Cox) whose elfishness gets them the job each year, before the store has seen the disreputable and depressed Santa. This year there are complications: Santa has been adopted by a disturbed kid (think Pugsley Addams, only a little more taciturn); has met a lecherous barmaid with a Santa fetish; and is being looked at suspiciously by the store manager (John Ritter in his last movie role) and store detective (Bernie Mac). The director is Terry Zwigoff whose off-beat humor somehow makes the various plot elements adhere in a strange and marvellous way. The script goes through some rough patches and not all the jokes work (I wasn't amused by the grandmother subplot, for example) but the finale, with its ridiculous chase scene and ludicrous resolution, makes up for much of this. In the meantime, there is the hilarious turn by Billy Bob who shows that the narcoleptic character the Coen Brothers had him play in The Man Who Wasn't There is not his metier. The kind of screwball comedy in Bad Santa and Bandits is. This film breaks most of the rules on taste and structure and is none the worst for that. You'll enjoy it.
We are alarmed
I have been reminiscing about the Peter Watkins' film, The War Game, made for television in 1965 but banned by the BBC and shown only in cinemas at that time. The recent showing of the telemovie, Supervolcano, brought it back to mind as well, and gave rise to some interesting thoughts on the differences in the mind-set between the boomers of the sixties and the Xs and Ys of today. Both movies were, in essence, docudramas that encapsulated the contemporary fears for the immediate future. In the sixties there was a fairly universal assumption that we were headed for nuclear annihilation - even the Society of Atomic Scientists had their clock almost permanently set at five minutes (or closer) to midnight; today it is eco-disaster that dominates the thinking. The movies also demonstrate a difference in approach that reflects contemporary cinema. Watkins' movie was a chilling cinema verite film, with hand-held cameras and grainy look, trying to imitate the feel of a television news report; it concentrated on the possibility of a nuclear war arising from a clash over western Europe between the superpowers. Everyone raised in the post-war era of the Mutually Assured Destruction policy of the cold war knew that we were living on borrowed time, a belief reinforced by the Cuban Missile Crisis. So a documentary about the aftermath of a nuclear war, set in Britain, was both believable and frightening. If we hadn't known it already, the film demonstrated that a nuclear war was unwinnable: the outcome was too horrible to contemplate.
Today's generations are more likely to believe that the world will end not with a nuclear climax but with a climate disaster, and the idea of a super volcano, like the one under Yellowstone, erupting is more immediate and catastrophic than the likely outcomes of global warming which will ultimately be more likely to lead to the disaster envisaged in Supervolcano. The fact that the Yellowstone super volcano erupting is about as likely today as the nuclear war actually was in the 1960s (we now know a lot more about how pragmatic both the ruling classes of the east and west were) is not allowed to stand in the way of a good story. And it was a quite reasonable disaster movie, narrated by the scientists who were the witnesses to the developing catastrophe. Like The War Game the movie delves into the survivors' increasingly dire situation as the disaster spreads. Unlike the earlier film, it is never quite as moving, nor as convincing. Equally, it is interesting that the enemy, whether it is exploding magma or maverick asteroids, has become nature rather than our fellow humans. It might be a response to our over-reliance on science and the pervading belief that technology can save us from the mess we have made of the Earth. Whatever the cause, Supervolcano and disaster movies like it, no matter how well-made, or how credible, are not going to galvanise the audience in the same way that The War Game did.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]