Sponge Out of Water; Mr. Turner; Kingsman; Jupiter Ascending

Call it my intertext--uncommissioned notes on movies I saw and have no immediate intention of turning into articles 

The good sponge

Someone challenged me to articulate my fondness for this bizarre animated creature, not just the two full-length animated pictures (the latest out only this year) or the longrunning series but the character himself, which with his bright lemon hue, gigantic freckles, and cross-between-dolphin-and-cheesegrater laugh, is hardly most people's idea of 'endearing.' Yet millions of kids love him--don't ask me why; I'm not a kid, much less millions of em. I can only answer for my own opinions. 

Let me put it this way: what does Stephen Hillenburg do better than Fyodor Dostoevsky? 
 

Comic book fare (X Men: First Class, Kung Fu Panda 2, Thor)

Charles and Erik share an intimate moment

Multiplex munching

"You're Thor? I could hardly walk!"

Kenneth Branagh's Thor is a disappointment--but, come to think of it, what can one expect from Branagh? His best work was arguably his Shakespeare pictures, his single best film--a 1989 adaptation of Henry V--cribbed its very best scene (the St. Crispin's Day defeat of the French) from the Battle of Shrewsbury that Orson Welles shot for his Harry Bolingbroke adaptation (Chimes at Midnight (1965), in my opinion one of the greatest films ever made) at a fraction of Branagh's budget and many times its impact.

Thor captures some of the epic soap involved--the God of Thunder (Chris Hemsworth) acting arrogant and being banished to Earth for his pains; Loki (Tom Hiddleston) scheming desperately for his father's approval; and so on. Perhaps the movie's highlight is a clash between the God of Thunder and a metallic 'Destroyer'--an oversized, modernized version of Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) complete with death ray, devastating a small town.

The town's crucial, I think; it helps provide a familiar background against which two powerful beings can come to grips. Also helps that when Thor strikes The Destroyer you hear the vast metallic clang of metal under extreme stress--goes a long way towards selling the idea that you're witnessing titanic forces at work. When the stakes are raised--when Thor finally ascends to Asgard and takes on his Asgardian brother--the dramatic impact feels paradoxically diminished. Hard to care about a shiny kingdom you've never seen before (approached by what looks like a psychedelically lit and painted polyurethane bridge), hard furthermore to care about godlike beings whacking at each other without any apparent harm. 

Could barely stay awake throughout Thor; the special effects are bland, the hero's bland (only Hiddleston and Anthony Hopkins as Odin look as if they're having any real fun), most of the battles save for the sparring in the small town are bland; there's little actual (as opposed to digital) substance for me to hold on to emotionally, much less form any interest over. They would have been better off releasing the Kraken--at least that creature (along with a hundred-foot lemon wedge) might have kept my interest. Kept me salivating, anyway.

"Let it flow, let it flow, let it flow"

Thor had one thing going for it (that small town melee, possibly inspired by a similar scene in Richard Lester's Superman II (1980)); Kung Fu Panda 2 has--oh, maybe one and a half: the lovely mixed-media animation design (2-D animation, the use of Chinese motifs, even shadow puppets), and the unlikely image of Gary Oldman's voice coming out of an evil peacock's throat. Oldman's Lord Shen sounds on paper like an unlikely choice for a supervillain, but the combination of a vividly written and realized backstory (he's the son of a royal clan sent into exile for committing atrocities), a collection of deadly blades hidden in the wing feathers, and Oldman's inimitably reptilian delivery help sell the menace.

Jennifer Yuh does better than Branagh with the action--for one she understands the concept of 'flow;' for another, she understands that setting the action against a background of familiar locations helps enormously (villages, caverns, Daoist temples--locations fans of wushu movies will swiftly recognize and appreciate).

It's not a great movie--too much time spent on psychoanalysis, too much angst about lost parents. Where the original focused on a fat loser who aspires to eat his dumplings with a pair of chopsticks (a wonderful scene probably inspired by Jackie Chan's gift for turning everyday objects into weapons and bits of unexpected comedy), the sequel is about a hero seeking to resolve childhood issues and achieve 'inner peace.' Give me the dumplings and a pair of chopsticks any day.

"They're just kids."

Finally: Matthew Vaughn's X Men: First Class doesn't have the brash violence of his Kick Ass (2010), nor does it have the wit and startling sweetness of his Stardust (2007), but it does give new life to a franchise that in the hands of hack extraordinaire Brett Ratner was on its terminal stages.

It helps to have a young and attractive cast, to have above all James MacAvoy and Michael Fassbender (as Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr (a.k.a.Magneto) respectively) play out their budding bromance with youthful flair (the electricity crackling between these two could sizzle bacon), and to set the whole thing during a vivid moment in American history (the Cuban Missile Crisis).  

Also helps that Vaughn--as evidenced in Kick Ass and this picture--has the filmmaking chops to exceed even original X Men director Bryan Singer, at least in the action sequence department.

What the movie's missing--what it lacks to make it memorable, maybe even great--is the sense of urgency that Singer brought to the first two pictures. X Men and X Men 2 seethed with the fury of the marginalized, the dispossessed; Magneto may not be right about how to achieve what he wants to achieve, but when he tells us "...there is no land of tolerance. There is no peace. Not here, or anywhere else" he does so not with the malevolence of a supervillain, but with the weary despair of someone speaking from long experience.  

"The war is still coming," he informs us; "I intend to fight it, by any means necessary." More than the shock of invoking Malcom X for its closing lines, there's the sense that Singer's X Men movies were a political statement, a declaration maybe not of war, but of defiance: we are here, we're alive, you're not ridding yourselves of us so easily. You don't get any of that in X Men: First Class.

6.7.11

Iron Man 2 (Jon Favreau); Kick-Ass (Matthew Vaughn)

Ironic, man
 
Prefer this sequel over the original and here's why: it's soapier. All that nonsense about Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) self-destructing, and Pepper Pott (Gwyneth Paltrow) worrying like a mother hen over him, and James Rhodes (Don Cheadle, taking over from Terence Howard) glowering from the sidelines like some forgotten authority figure--all that lingers in the head much longer than the mecha figurines flying around and shooting up the landscape. Metal junk bashing each other? That's so Mazinger Z. That's old, man, and the last time I enjoyed it was when Neon Genesis Evangelion was replaying on Cartoon Network. 

Stardust (Matthew Vaughn, 2007)

Twinkle, twinkle

The trailers of Stardust (2007) didn't look promising--"secondhand Narnia," I thought; "maybe third-hand Lord of the Rings," and forgot about it. When I heard enthusiastic praise from enough people though, my curiosity was aroused, so I went for a look.

I wasn't wrong in thinking it looked like a third-hand Lord of the Rings ripoff--Matthew Vaughn (he directed the gangster flick Layer Cake, which looked and felt like secondhand Guy Richie (and in fact Vaughn, a friend, produced two of Richie's pictures)) has included one too many horse chases edited to look spatially disjointed (see the similar chase between Frodo and the Ringwraiths in Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring), not to mention a heroine that makes the viewer want to bend his head low and cough "Gah-ladriel! Gah-ladriel!" And the sky pirates--did the filmmakers see Hayao Miyazaki's Tenku no shiro Rapyuta (Castle in the Sky, 1986) with its airbag ship filled with ostensibly vicious pirates that at one point sails through a lightning storm? One wonders.

It doesn't help that much of the CGI effects look cheap, that the light-and-sound show that accompanies the climactic duel seem (as do most magical confrontations nowadays (I'd throw in the latest Harry Potter movie, while I'm at it)) especially underfunded, and that the cast seems composed of actors that have been picked out of a hat.

All that said--it's not bad; not bad at all. I'm not being sarcastic; the picture just about won me over when it introduced the seven fratricidal princes (Jason Flemyng and Rupert Everett, among others) and their senile father-king (Peter O'Toole); "now that," I told myself as one brother pushed the other off a high balcony, "I haven't seen in a fantasy pic yet; or at least not recently (I'm thinking of Jean Cocteau's 1946 La belle et la bete (Beauty and the beast), with its trio of shrewish sisters and a buffoonish suitor)." The brothers take on the appearance they had at the moment of their deaths (one looks darkly toasted; another has an axe sticking out the side of his head; another has distinctly flattened features (he's the high diver); another--but you get the idea), and if they're not lucky--if, say, an heir to the throne is not chosen from one of their bloodline before they're all eliminated--then I suppose they'll be stuck in this world as wraiths, looking the way they do for all eternity.

Stardust as it turns out, was adapted from the novel-length fantasy written by one Neil Gaiman; the moment I heard his name, the dawn broke--I was wondering who could be so openly, cheerfully macabre, so eccentrically humorous this side of Roald Dahl. If you've read any of Gaiman's graphic novels--he's best known for his stint writing Sandman--you'd in all likelihood recognize his voice in this picture, that combination of deadpan whimsy, mordant sadism and the odd, steady whisper of dark melancholy.

Gaiman is a welcome, fairly new voice in fantasy (fantasy cinema, at least). We've heard from him a few times before--bits of wayward humor found in his translation of Miyazaki's Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke, 1997--yet another chain linking Gaiman to the animator's works), the screenplay to a rather beautiful (in my opinion) oddity called MirrorMask (2005). This may be the first time we've seen him working on a relatively conventional narrative (by "relatively conventional" I mean--well, you have to see MirrorMask); all the familiar elements from the classic tales are present: the youth longing for adventure; the brothers sent out on a quest one at a time (each in his own unique way failing); the inn whose occupants are in magical disguise; the princess under a curse; so forth and so on. Stardust isn't as radical and disorienting a feature as MirrorMask--one reason I suspect that film failed to find a large audience was that its very strangeness is rather off-putting--so the former has done better business (relatively speaking; it's not doing Harry Potter-sized business).

MirrorMask is possibly the purest dose of Gaiman I've yet experienced on the big screen; in it you feel Gaiman's love for the grotesquely poetic, for (among many other sources) both L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz and Charles Dodgson's Alice books; you also feel the disdain for easy emotional payoffs. The protagonist's ostensible quest--to find the eponymous mask and save a queen in enchanted sleep--is the merest slip of an excuse to present a monstrous, Borgesian menagerie of dream creatures, one more bizarre than the next, with (as dream creatures are wont to do) not-so-immediately-discernible analogues in real life. In Stardust Gaiman takes the opposite approach; he throws up a storm of fantasy elements--Babylon candles, fallen stars, magic threads, walls between worlds, seven mistrustful brothers, three evil witches--that act as garish distractions, that eventually fall away as if in a striptease, leaving behind the love story at the heart of the film.

It's hard to pin down the nature of Gaiman's appeal, actually; like a half-remembered scent--half-remembered not because it wasn't memorable but because your mind was never allowed to focus on it exclusively--you struggle to recall the effect, a combination of modern-day cynicism and anachronistic romanticism and brief bouts of bizarre violence, whipped vigorously together to give a temporary semblance of coherence. The mix isn't for everyone--Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum, for one, disliked what he described as the movie's "cruelty," and there are even knowledgeable connoisseurs of fantasy who can't stand Gaiman's work--but for others it's like stumbling onto your favorite fix lying across the road--for all you know (or care), freshly dropped out of the sky.

So--how, finally, to put it? I enjoyed this far more than the most recent Potter movie--well, more than every Potter movie ever made save Cuaron's (always better when a real filmmaker is directing); I enjoyed this more than Jackson's hugely overrated Lord of the Ring trilogy (unlike the "Ring" pictures it's got sex appeal and (more important to me) sexy repartee, it's free of even a whisper of pretension, and it doesn't take more than a third of a day to watch); I enjoyed it more than Narnia (the one movie in this little group based (in my opinion) on truly great material (if only it had a filmmaker to match)). Like I said--not bad; not bad at all.

(First published in Businessworld, 10/12/07)

Stardust (Matthew Vaughn, 2007), Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, 2007)

Stardust is not (to get that out of the way) great fantasy filmmaking. Too much CGI for my taste, some of the action scenes seem clearly modeled after the Peter Jackson house style (lots of circling shots and mismatched landscapes), and the music could be more original. I hear Gilliam was first offered this, and I wish he did take it; for first half hour I kept thinking he could do wonders with the material. But then 1) Gilliam's done this before, and 2) I can see where it doesn't present too many sides to capture his interest.

Then I learn it's Neil Gaiman, which explains a lot. The script has a macabre humor all its own (seven fratricidal brothers; three witches out to cut out and eat a girl's heart; a sky pirate with a deep, dark secret), and the kind of inventive, tightly paced plotting that betrays Gaiman's comic-book background (writing for comics isn't completely without its virtues--Alfred Bester learned how to tell a story this way, for one). The cast certainly agrees, because they throw body and soul into the project (at the very least it's obvious they're having a great time). Easily outdoes the past two Harry Potter movies in the enchantment (the emotional kind) department.

Herzog's Rescue Dawn--did someone say The Bourne Ultimatum was the best action film of the year, of several years? Beg to differ; there's this film, and Michael Mann's Miami Vice, just off the top of my head.

This is more of an escape picture than an action film, I suppose, but the pleasure here is in Herzog being granted the giant toy train set that's a Hollywood production, and seeing how far he runs with it. I think he can play with the best of them--unlike, say, Greengrass, he knows when to do a shaky-cam (immersive shots where the camera takes on the character's point of view, emphasizing his helplessness) and when to go for smooth crane shots (objective POV, where the point is to create suspense, or a sense of approaching menace). The plane crash--the single most spectacular sequence in the film--glides by with a touch of unrealism: the plane comes down, flames and smoke, breaks apart, and hatches Dieter into the rice fields, like some kind of mosquito larva, all in what almost seems like a single smooth motion. I can imagine Herzog playing with our notion of emergency landings, turning it into some kind of unstated joke, a quick wink at what Hollywood plane crashes are supposed to look like (at the same time outdoing the standard-issue crash with careless grace and skill).

Then there are the touches uniquely his--the great, slow, downward pans from the tips of mountains to their base, filling the whole screen, showing us the immensity of nature; the little cameos of insects, from a beetle whirling on string to a huge butterfly on someone's limb, wings flapping lazily to a caterpillar on a leaf, doing its level best to clamber onto Steve Zahn's face.

There's the sense of heat, humidity, of sheer mass of foliage pressing all around; sometimes the jungle seems like a thousand-fingered hand, reluctant to release Deiter (Christian Bale) and Duane (Zahn), the two Vietcong prisoners making their bid for freedom.

And I love some of the lines, which are pure Herzog. "This is not a village;" "no, it is a village." "I dreamed there was a fire." Herzog's heroes struggle under extreme conditions, and as a result of all that suffering they've lost their grasp of reality, must assert or debate it out loud; Zahn is so unsure of what happened he has to tentatively suggest he only dreamed there was a fire, there, of course, was--yet another of Herzog's sly pranks on his characters.

The American flag-waving seems a tad much, but for some reason I can actually see Herzog buying into that; it's just something I sense in him, a need to want approval from a country whose commercial cinema has had little use for his own work, save for the occasional plagiarism (see Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now with reference to Aguirre the Wrath of God). He seems to want to take the relationship to a whole other level. 

That said, he does give one a sense that the Laotians aren't stereotypical Asian tormentors or merely sadistic prison guards (check out Cimino's odious The Deer Hunter, or even interestingly enough John Woo's Bullet in the Head). They're people with a sense of real anger (not unjustified) at the United State's unadmitted bombings of their country.

And I love the little details--the question of toilets and defecation in a jungle prison (always an important question, but one you never hear from Rambo), of food and water, and laundry (I love it that they're shown actually doing their laundry). I love the dynamic between prisoners, how emotions of trust and affection and anger flow freely between them, intense and open like irrigation canals. I love how physically expressive Herzog makes Bale and Zahn, always touching each other, putting head on shoulder, cuddling against each other for warmth. That's how people who've spent time--months and years--in prison behave, even stay sane.

It's not Herzog's best, and I can see where the argument that he's sold out might stick, but if he is selling out, I wish he'd done so decades ago; it's head and shoulders better than anything from Hollywood nowadays.

8.28.07