Gladiator Quest
Movies from mid-2000
Originally written: June 2000
Galaxy Quest
Gladiator
Sixth Sense
Looking for Alibrandi
Mission: Impossible 2
Topsy-Turvy
Erin Brockovich
Mansfield Park
It's taken a while but at last someone has come up with a great, and hilarious, satire of the Star Trek phenomenon. A send-up which has a swingeing swipe at both the ridiculousness of the series itself and of the fan industry that has been created by it. The movie is Galaxy Quest and it is highly recommended.
The McGuffin of GQ is that a group of aliens have received broadcasts of the series of shows about the voyages of the Protector and take them to be historical documents. Meanwhile the actors from the show, hopelessly typecast by their long run in space opera, make their living by guest appearances at cons and hardware store openings.
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It was an educational and edifying experience each time I saw this film. The first time Cath and I caught it at the local (Kogarah) cinema, in its first week, with a largely youngish crowd who just did not get all the references to ST or to fandom. The second viewing was at a larger, more cosmopolitan cinema near the centre of the city and the audience appreciation level, the level of general hilarity was much higher.
The good aliens have modelled all their human behaviour on television shows. They even move like Gerry and Sylvia Anderson puppets and they are such an ingenuous lot that they do not understand the concept of acting.
The actors, faced with such an 'audience', gradually come to be more and more their characters rather than themselves. So the film balances nicely the real adventure of the quest that these adventurers are embarked on with the fact that they are actors who have no real idea what they are doing.
Nary a cliche of the ST universe (from Shatner's over-exuberance to the silliness of some of the monsters) remains unspoofed - I especially like the scene when the crew first see the new Protector. But the people themselves, the actors and the fans, are treated with more than a little respect and the use of the fans (and the complexities of the spaceship) in the climax scenes is just too precious for words.
As you'd expect Alan Rickman as the very English Nimoy substitute walks away with the acting honours, although Sigourney Weaver wears he uniform well and Tim Allen does an excellent job of playing the ham. But it's hard to find a bad performance and the script is intricately worked out. It's a rare movie these days which offers consistent belly laughs and is amusing as well. This one fits the bill. Don't miss it.
Mad Maximus
Gladiator is a very good movie. From the first scene, which is the Roman equivalent of the D-Day scene in Saving Private Ryan, it creates an interesting and nearly historically accurate Rome of the tenth century AUC. I might have some small quibbles with the characterisation of Marcus Aurelius but he soon dies anyway and his son Commodus seems to be pretty much as history tells us.
But the point of view character is a general, Maximus, who escapes imperial execution (although neither his wife nor his son do) only to end up as a slave/gladiator in a north African settlement (because Marcus Aurelius has disbanded the gladiatorial contests in Rome itself). Here Max does the usual resistance to training thing but proves himself to be best of show so that when the gladiators are called to town to play the Palace (or at least the Flavian), he's there are the head of the queue to fight and survive and meet his imperial arch-enemy in the climactic showdown. Not really an Oscar for story in that lot.
But. Russell Crowe invests Max with a great deal more gravitas and personality than you'd expect and he's well supported by a great cast of old English drinkers. Richard Harris seems an odd choice for a Stoic like Marcus Aurelius but is quite effective. Even better is Oliver Reed's turn as the gladiator school owner. It's his best performance in many a year and a fitting memorial to him. Derek Jacobi is an anachronistic Gracchus (I thought the last of that breed died out in the pre-Caesar days) but doesn't have nearly enough to do to keep him busy. In fact the whole political subplot is the least developed and least interesting aspect of the film.
Far more interesting are the fight scenes which are much bloodier than history would lead us to believe was the norm in the arena where professional gladiators were more concerned with giving a good show (and surviving) than with acrobatic hack and slash. Still it resonates with other Hollywood views of the arena and is what the modern audience expects to see, along with sister-loving, sybaritic Roman Emperors.
Ridley Scott remains one of the most artistic of the modern directors and his scene establishment and the choreography of the fights (not to mention the very well integrated CG scenes of the Flavian and of Rome itself) make this a great piece of eye candy. We had trouble with the soundtrack. Partly it was because of poor sound projection in the theatre but also because the soundtrack didn't quite work with the movie.
Mad Maximus as history and alternate history
I thought some about the movie itself, qua movie, but, in the weeks after seeing Gladiator, my thoughts were elsewhere. Considering the implications to history of the movie. As noted above Gladiator is in some ways very historically accurate. (Spoiler alert - don't read further if you want to preserve the surprise of the denouement.) But it diverts from history markedly at the end. Commodus ruled for 12 years and bankrupted the imperial treasury which had been built up by the five good emperors that had preceded him, including Trajan and Hadrian. After his death there was a succession of incompetent Roman Emperors that lasted until Constantine (or Justinian depending on your viewpoint on Constantine) and no hint of an intent to revive republican rule. In the movie Commodus dies quite soon after his succession and the implication is that he is replaced by a Senate-led Republic.
On the other hand, Gladiator could be seen as an interesting alternate history speculation. The imposition of Christianity as the state religion of Rome was from above. It was the conversion of Constantine and his declaration of the new status of Christianity that led to the triumph of that religion and hence its spread through western Europe and into the East. What if the emperors were replaced by republican rule in 934 AUC? In the absence of emperors, and Constantine in particular, how does a religion which preaches the equality of slave and slave-owner become the dominant religion of Rome?
Without that dominance the whole structure of our history changes. Can you even imagine a world in which Christianity never became the state religion of Europe but, instead, the weird amalgam of Greek/Roman deities retained its hold on the collective consciousness of the west. What would exist to stop the Moslem invasions when they occur five hundred years later?
One alternate suggestion which I find interesting is that it was the Christianisation of bureaucracy that underwrote the eventual conversion of the emperor and that Rome, empire or republic, would need to maintain an educated, literate bureaucracy and that this would, increasingly, be Christian. Thence the upper echelons of society would convert and so bring the rest of the society with them. I am not wholly convinced by this argument. Nor am I convinced by my own speculation. Odds are that any revival of republican rule in 934 AUC would be short-lived and some strong man, probably of military origin, would march on Rome and wrest the purple toga of Imperial power from the Senate and we'd be back to square one.
Still, as my stock-broker keeps reminding me, it does no harm to speculate.
Ordinary People meets Ghost
I just keep thinking about the 20 word or less pitch that M Night Shyamalan made to the studio to get his movie, The Sixth Sense, made. I wonder if it waited around for a while like I did. I cannot explain why I didn't see this movie on cinema release but it was one of those back of the brain things. The movie, for all its positive word of mouth, sounded like one of those "high concept" movies which is pitched as an amalgam of two or more previously successful movies. When I eventually got to see it, on video recently, I was sorry that I had waited so long.
This is a damned fine movie. One of the breed of 1999 movies which celebrate the return of the original and inventive script. Certainly the movie is back-built, rather like The Usual Suspects, around the ending, about which I add my silence. But, like TUS, it's a great idea well scripted. In this case, as everybody must by now know it centres on a young boy who can see and hear 'dead people', on his increasingly distracted mom and on a child psychiatrist out to help him. The three leads, Haley Joel Osment, Toni Collette and Bruce Willis are very good. In the case of kid very very good.
The last decade or so has been a fecund period for good ghost stories, including Truly, Madly, Deeply and Field of Dreams. The Sixth Sense is very much in their league.
Even though I knew from talk that there was a twist at the end, it still got me. But this is something more than a movie with a good twist: it is an interesting and intriguing idea, well developed and well filmed. And it works well on video.
Rites of passage, Italian-style
Every so often there is a very good Australian movie which makes you wonder why they are so few and far between. Looking for Alibrandi is a coming-of-age film in which a young woman discovers something of her heritage as she starts to find more about herself. Like the better of the recent Australian films, it eschews the mythical outback roots and looks at the urban, multicultural realities of out land.
Josie Alibrandi is a second generation Italian-Australian who has never known who her father is. She has been raised by her mother and grandmother and the complexities and conflicts among these three generations of Alibrandi women are well worked out. In her HSC year she confronts not only choices about her love life and her future but has to deal with the return of the man who is her father.
This is apparently based on a well-known semi-autobiographical novel which has been at times on school curricula. But, from what I can gather, the movie alters some of the dynamics of the book, particularly the father-daughter relationship which is, in the movie, more difficult to begin with than is the case in the book.
The thing is that it works. The performances are universally excellent. You'd expect that in the adult parts which include (a fully clothed) Greta Scacchi, Anthony La Paglia, Elena Cotta (simply great as the grandmother) and Kerry Walker. But the surprise is that the kids are equally as good, particularly Pia Miranda who invests Josie with a heartening level of reality.
I even liked the soundtrack compilation of contemporary rock and Italian pop.
Wooing not wisely but too well
The second Mission: Impossible film is a genuinely mediocre film. We are told that success has many parents but failure is an orphan. This film disproves that rule: Here failure has many parents: the idea, the execution, the scripting and the over-reliance on stunts and violence.
Tom Cruise was the person behind this, recruiting John Woo to direct. It appears that they determined the set pieces first and then invited Robert Towne to provide a script that linked them. The result is like many sfx films: having spent so much money on the effects, you cannot leave them on the cutting-room floor. So you use them, even at the expense of the logical development of the story.
The movie follows the pattern of a Bond movie (without the humour), from the pre-credit scene with its derring-do, through the recruitment, via sexual means, of a female operative, to the foiling of the villains dastardly scheme. Unlike the archetypal MI plot, where an intricately worked scam defeats the villain, this plot relies on the MI team reacting, rather than initiating action, and using brute force and ignorance as their major weapons. The only 'original' proactive stunt is a repeat of the central stunt in the first movie. The first half-hour or so is an exception to this - set in and around Seville and involving MI's recruitment of the female thief. This was the only really interesting part of the movie.
I find Woo's balletic combat scenes forced and unconvincing and there are so many holes in the plot that they are basically not worth enumerating. Worse, there are no genuine surprises. If you like a movie which revels in sexism, racism, misogyny, sado-masochism and overt violence, and features some reasonably choreographed but unconvincing fight and chase scenes, then this is your movie.
The flowers that bloom in the spring ...
I've talked a lot about the importance of script in the production of a good movie. There are occasions when scripting on the run can still produce a great movie. Casablanca is a prime example: Howard Koch and the Epstein brothers changed the ending part-way through the production and some of the film was made well before anyone knew where it was going. But, generally, you need to start with the words, with a plot and with some idea of the characters.
Mike Leigh works in a different way. He brings his performers together and they improvise scenes around the characters Leigh has created. Leigh then writes the script based on an accumulation of these scenes. Sometimes this works. In Topsy-Turvy it works sometimes.
This is a film supposedly about the difficulties in the partnership of Gilbert and Sullivan and the writing of The Mikado. But the actors have developed a number of other scenes in the improv stage and Leigh is reluctant to let them go. So we end up with the germ of a great film and the ideas and characters for another 10 or 12 movies that aren't further developed here. This takes away from the impact of the central narrative which loses its thrust about half-way through the film.
The acting is generally good, The staging, costume and settings are great - as a period evocation of the late Victorian era there has hardly been a better example. And there are all those great G&S songs, from Princess Ida, The Sorceror and The Mikado. If only Leigh had shown some discipline in his editing of the script after the first stages of development, we'd have had a great film rather than just a good one.
Class Action, but with Julia Roberts
Erin Brockovich is based on a true story. It is an interesting David and Goliath story where David is Jezebel. Julia Roberts and Albert Finney are both very good in their roles.
But the movie never really grabbed me. It's OK but that's the best you can say of it. It's no Insider.
Jane Austen, with comfortable shoes
Mansfield Park is the latest and probably the least of the recent Jane Austen adaptations. Francis O'Connor is a very good Fanny and playwright Harold Pinter does well as the pater familias but some of the emendations are not canonical and do not add to the movie. Worse the males are completely uninteresting, except perhaps young Tom whom we never really get to meet.
I trust that we're over the Jane Austen phase by now.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]