Ringing the Changes
Movies from late 2001, seen in early 2002
Originally written: February 2002
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Monsters Inc
Ocean's 11
The Score
Serendipity
The Man Who Wasn't There
Spy Game
Evolution
The Limey
Lastish I spoke about Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the first of two fantasy movies that were going to define for some time where the current state of non-animated fantasy stands. The most interesting criticism of HP&tPS was that it was too close to the book, an interesting reversal of the usual whinge about how the movie is not the book. Which begged the question: how was Peter Jackson going satisfactorily to adapt JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, an epic fantasy which (almost) everyone had read but which all had different images of?
For me, a dramatisation of Tolkien's work is something that is both familiar and frightening. At university (and after) I had been a loyal member of the Sydney University Tolkien Society (later the Australian Tolkien Society) which had put on an annual Tolkienfest, an adaptation for amateur stage production of excerpts from the Tolkien canon. (Mostly we used tLotR but later fests and performances at cons included productions of Farmer Giles of Ham, The Hobbit, and The Homecoming of Beothnoth, culminating in the egregious production at the 1988 Natcon of Sauron the Musical.) My own contribution to dramatic adaptation was, in the year after The Silmarillion had been published, to unleash on the world A History of the Ring, incorporating material from The Hobbit, tLotR and The Silmarillion. I was rather fond of my dramatic structure which opened with the Council of Elrond and told everything up to then, the Ring's forging, Gollum, Bilbo, the journey from the Shire to Rivendell, in flashback. The second act took the Ring from Rivendell to the Cracks of Doom. So I was more than a little interested in how Peter Jackson would handle the problem, condense the books and still present a strong filmic tale.
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On the good ship Fellow
The answer, from the first of his three films, The Fellowship of the Ring, is that he has done it marvellously. Amazingly. Satisfactorily. So far. I might quibble with a few things where he's altered the tale, particularly the way Jackson drags Merry and Pippin in to the Quest without preamble, explanation or good reason and the way he handles the Council of Elrond, but, generally, what is on the screen is a good film version of the first of the three books.
The thing about tLotR is that it is a story told in the epic way. As a good jongleur would do, Tolkien describes the scenes is sumptuous detail. The cultural background to the tale is equally well-developed and demonstrated in the book by the constant telling and retelling of the legends through poetry. Such lavish description is a thing of literature and is translated into a filmic discourse through the camera. Here is one of the great charms of the movie. If Melbourne was an ideal place to make a film about the end of the world, New Zealand is blessedly perfect for a film about an underdeveloped land, with a myriad of different settings. And the film makes assumptions about its audience (it assumes most have read the book and are familiar with the legendary background and do not need this repeated). Without getting too high-blown, it's like the way in which the Ancient Greeks treated drama: the thing was not in the narrative nor the characters - after all everyone knew the stories being told and were familiar with the character of Oedipus or Orpheus or Odysseus - but in the dramatisation of the familiar events.
Jackson avoids much of the chunkiness of Tolkien's narrative by speeding the transition between key scenes. There is no 17 year gap between Bilbo's departure and Frodo's. We quickly segue from the Shire to Bree and fairly quickly from Bree to Rivendell. I, for one, did not miss the Old Forest and Bombadil, although I missed some of the character development of the hobbits other than Frodo. It took most of the film to get any sort of hold on Merry and Pippin, even though the book clearly distinguishes between the thoughtful Merry and the much more precipitate Pippin. Similarly the film skips merrily through to Moria and Lorien and on to the sundering of the fellowship with nary a break for air. I also liked the bringing of the narrative into some chronological cohesion, by placing the Gandalf-Saruman duel where it belongs. (I wonder if the other two movies will adopt a similar chronological cohesion, rather than the split narrative of first things in the west, then things in the east, that is the format of the second and third books.)
I like Elijah Wood's Frodo and was prepared to accept Sean Astin's Sam, even though he is too young. Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn) is good, but I await his emergence as Elessar before confirming that view. Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee make good (and bad) wizards, respectively, and most of the other characters are OK. I especially like Orlando's Bloom's Legolas. My one reservation is with Hugo Weaving's Elrond but he is handicapped by some god-awful dialog, little of it from Tolkien.
The film emphasises the conflict elements, sometimes to the detriment of the narrative flow, but it does rely on the familiarity of the audience with the story and the characters. This is a very good film and, shockingly, a very good version of the first book of the trilogy. If Jackson can maintain the flow in Books 2 and 3, we may end up with a goddamn classic series. And there are few enough classics in the live-action fantasy film genre.
One-eyed fans
There's been no shortage of good animated fantasy in the last decade. Starting with Disney's Beauty and the Beast (1991) and passing through several great Pixar productions (A Bug's Life and both Toy Story movies) to Dreamworks' recent Shrek (maybe the best of them all), the standard has become very high indeed. So when I say that Monsters Inc is good but not all that great, you'll understand that it is a very long yardstick I'm using. MI is Pixar's latest. The brainchild of Apple-maestro Steve Jobs, Pixar has been developing more and more life-like animation (although not to the extent that, say, Final Fantasy went to simulate reality) using computers, while ensuring (unlike, say, Final Fantasy) that the script was equally as strong. MI, because it features a whole pile of fanciful monsters, does not follow the same pattern of believable animation but does have a reasonable script. The problem is, in a way, the people who provide the character voices. While Sully, the champion scarer, voiced by John Goodman as one of his good-natured shambling klutzes, is good and Jennifer Tilly's Celia (with her medusa-scalp) damned good, the point of view character, Mike, a one-eyed walking beachball, is Billy Crystal. As annoying as Billy Crystal. And the main villain is Steve Buscemi, whose hard to take in the flesh, let alone as a chameleon. The story about energy crises in Monstropolis and the need for more scaring of kids by cupboard-monsters (how very American - ours were always under the bed, even if today they are just a personification of 'the other' demonised by the adult population) and the danger to the monsters posed by an 'innocent' child, against a fairly predictable background plot by the baddies, is OK but it doesn't really sustain the action, so we rely more and more on Crystal-schtick. There is one really great sequence, a chase scene through a plethora of doors on a pulley/roller-coaster system, in and out of reality, and the Sully character is a great creation. But this is Pixar and, for once, it has made a film that leaves you just a little flat, especially in comparison with that other recent monster flick, Shrek.
Heists
Two recent movies underscore a Hollywood return to some of the successful tropes of the past, one a remake, the other a proto-classic, both in the nail-biting heist tradition. Ocean's Eleven is the remake, another revival of a sixties production - if they're not picking over the bones of old television programs better forgotten, producers are searching through vaults for good movies to cash in on (Planet of the Apes, as an example of a rotten remake of a good original) or inferior movies to do better with. Steven Soderbergh's version of the Sinatra-Dino-Davis-Lawford-Rat Pack original leaves its precursor in the shade. I'd remembered the 1960's movie as something I'd rather forget and the first hour of it recently on television reminded me how dire it was. Soderbergh and his crew have rewritten the story, saving really only the McGuffin - a plot to steal millions from Las Vegas casinos. This time the crooks are crims, rather than bored former commandos. And it's as much a con as it is a heist. The cast is uniformly good, surprisingly so in cases like Brad Pitt and Matt Damon and expectedly in the case of George Clooney, Carl Reiner and Don Cheadle (here unbilled as a Pommie 'tea-leaf'). As you'd expect from a director on a roll (Out of Sight, The Limey, Traffic, Erin Brockovich), Soderbergh handles this all with aplomb. Mind you, most viewers are going to pick most of the twists and turns in the heist (although one echo of the original movie - involving the death of a central character - was so well used that it got me). The dialog is crisp and the humour sharp. It's well worth seeing for a diverting night out.
The Score is more of your standard heist movie with a great emphasis in screen time on the robbery itself. It's also a three-generation movie: with Marlon Brando, Robert de Niro and Edward Norton playing the key roles. Brando who managed to do all right in The Freshman and in Don Juan de Marco, does not come off well here. Where those movies traded successfully on a pastiche of his Don Corleone persona, here a more measured performance was needed, but the old master is no longer capable of anything approaching the ordinary and former Muppeteer Frank Oz is not the director to pull such a performance from him. There are some similar problems with Edward Norton's playing of his character's character but not nearly to the same extent. De Niro is, as you would expect, excellent as the Montreal Jazz club owner cum thief, inveigled by his fence/mastermind (Brando) into helping Norton with a heist in Montreal itself. (There are echoes here of the Voight-de Niro relationship in Heat.) The heist itself, filmed in Topkapi/Rififi style (ie no music and with detailed precision), is OK but spoiled by constant cutting back to the actions of the Norton character, removing some of the suspense being developed. There are some good bits and a fairly predictable denouement but film doesn't quite work as well as it should. A qualified success.
In brief
Serendipity is one of those films that you know is going to be annoying even when you're enjoying it. It's a more than a little predictable love story where boy meets girl, they sort of fall in love over one romantic day and, for what seems, to her, good reasons, separate. Her theory being that, if they were fated to be together, fate would bring them together. So there's a $5 note with his phone number and an unreadable book with hers floating around, to, inevitably, bring them together. Well, it's a little more complex than that and Marc Klein's script, which in its dialog is much more literate that you'd expect, is replete with nice touches, ironies, co-incidences and quirks. John Cusack is, as always, good and Kate Beckinsale does well. This is one that will not suffer from waiting until video.
The Man Who Wasn't There should be better than it is. A Coen brothers film, with all the weird that that implies, it has a good cast, and a film noir fifties setting. It takes the archetypal innocent man and puts him through the hoops, until he is rightly convicted for the wrong crime. Unfortunately as the central character, the usually excellent Billy Bob Thornton so successfully plays the dull and uninteresting title character that you lose any empathy and much of your interest in the film. A shame because there's some good stuff here, including Michael Badalucco's turn as the brother-in-law and Tony Shalhoub's shyster. But, the film does not work. The Coen bros make some great movies but they've missed the mark on a couple of occasions as well.
Spy Game was better than expected, with all sorts of interesting echoes. Set in 1991, it tells an episodic story in a series of flashbacks, relating Robert Redford's recruitment of Brad Pitt into the CIA, his training and a number of their capers. But that's the back story. Up front it's a mind game between Redford who's about to retire, and a couple of other CIA operatives who are prepared to sacrifice Pitt for the good of the Company and the good ol' UsofA. Redford's character is almost a mature, hardened version of the young spook/analyst he played in Three Days of the Condor and Pitt plays a character called Bishop (the name of Redford's character in Sneakers which is further alluded to by some anagrams being used in the title sequence.) The support roles are mainly played by lesser known character actors, although Catherine McCormack (so good as the Venetian courtesan in A Destiny of Her Own) gets a good part and Charlotte Rampling and David Hemmings are effective in cameos. I went expecting a Tony Scott all-style-and-no-substance film and got a measured performance from Redford, another good part from Pitt and a script that was well put-together. Enjoyable.
We caught up with Evolution on video. Ivan Reitman is cannibalising his own work: this is a rework of Ghostbusters but not so successful. The problem is that David Duchovny (who was either Mouldy or Skulker in The X Files - I could never bother to learn the difference), Orlando Jones and Seann William Scott are no match for Dan Acroyd, Bill Murray and Harold Ramis and Julianne Moore does not have Sigourney Weaver's x factor. On the other hand, I loved the fast-evolving alien and its myriad of different form. If only the writers and director had managed to avoid so many sphincter jokes and given a bit more thought to the dialog, this could have been a contender. The Duchovny film career seems to be about as successful as that other David, the red-headed bloke from NYPD Blues (David Caruso).
Also seen on video was The Limey, Soderbergh's film between Out of Sight and Erin Brockovich. A mannered but interesting crime melodrama bringing a British villain way off his own manor and into LA, which is the patch of an avaricious record producer (Peter Fonda) who may have been involved in the crim's daughter's death. Terence Stamp, one of the more interesting British actors of the sixties, who has (apart from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) has been ill-served of late, is a rivetting central character, ably assisted by Luis Guzman and Lesley Ann Warren. This is violent in parts, and somewhat disjointed in the first twenty minutes but rewards a video viewing, if only for Stamp's masterful performance.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]