Now You See Me (Louis Leterrier); Dr. Who Season 7 Part 2 (Bells of St. John, Rings of Akhaten, Nightmare in Silver, The Name of the Doctor)

(Warning: plot twists and surprises discussed in detail)

Slight of hand

Louis Leterrier's Now You See Me starts off intriguingly enough--four talented young magicians/escape artists/confidence men are recruited to become the Four Horsemen, with all the ominous and apocalyptic connotations deliberately (though not very effectively) evoked.

The four announce a series of crimes; Mark Ruffalo's FBI Agent Dylan Rhodes declares his intention to stop them. The four are constantly a step ahead of Agent Rhodes, and ultimately disappear in a flash of light and puff of hard currency.

On Leterrier--seems to me he's a stylish filmmaker of the Luc Besson school of filmmaking (lots of gliding camerawork, lots of bright lights and loud explosions) doing not very much at all. His Incredible Hulk was a dully conventional disappointment, having followed Ang Lee's nuttily unconventional take (easily the best work of Lee's career); his Clash of the Titans is a glossy digital bore, the monsters uninspired  thuds with only a fraction of the personality and charm of the Ray Harryhausen originals.

Along the way Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman briefly step onstage to essay amusing character roles--one a ruthless multimillionaire, the other a sleazy debunker of magic tricks. Frankly if the movie had focused on these two sly veterans then maybe it would have something, but no--

Is the movie about the four youths? Not really; we follow their exploits, we don't really get to know them, or how they achieve their tricks. Is it about Rhodes? Better guess, but the plot twist at the end reveals how little we know about what's really going on (and as it turns out, what's really going on is disappointingly conventional Hollywood showmanship: a twist of Harry Potter's wand, and the promise of revelations ends with some rock-concert spotlight choreography and a boring dollop of digital effects).

Takes some time--almost the end of the picture, in fact--to realize that the whole movie is a scam--you'd just been watching the scriptwriter jerk you off, pretending to present a story when all along it's just distracting patter to direct your eye away from the real trick: making you waste a hundred and fifteen minutes of your time watching not much of anything. Nice hustle, folks.


Ding ding ding went the bell

I can barely remember any of The Bells of St. John; can't believe I'm saying that of a Steven Moffat episode.

I can remember the prequel, a sad little vignette featuring the Doctor on a swing with a child--nicely features Matt Smith's easy charm with children, who he likes and who seem to like him. The episode itself starts scattershot: man pleads for help through a computer screen; Clara (Jenna-Louise Coleman) has trouble logging on to the internet; the Doctor is meditating the loss of his companions in a 13th century monastery. The script ties it all together with the use of a single phone call: Clara calls for customer support and gets the Doctor instead, just as she's about to be swallowed up by the internet herself...and then the episodes slides from "huh!" into "eh."

Part of the problem I think are the spoonheads: yes the idea of being physically kidnapped by the net is a disturbing concept, yes the sight of these figures (with most of their head scooped out, as if for dessert) is unsettling; problem is it's hardly fresh territory--Joss Whedon's Dollhouse suggests a faster, far less clumsier way to upload and download a human soul; Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Pulse suggest far more disturbing implications behind all the disappearing people. 

Coleman is a lovely girl and makes for a lively companion, but she's basically playing a cipher, and a confusing one at that; she's easy on the eyes and easy to get along with (unlike most other companions when she's ordered to stay put, she actually stays put), but without much more to go on, she's in danger of becoming deadly dull. 

The episode itself is a lively enough affair, leaping from TARDIS to plummeting airplane to motorbike running up the side of a building. I don't know what more to say--less bike running, more story plotting? Unlike say The Eleventh Hour, which is another elaborate setup for another elaborate story arc, Bells promises to be as if not more elaborate (who is Clara and why does she keep dying on us?) without delivering the wit and magic  found in the Doctor and Amy's first meeting (fish fingers and custard anyone?).


Sing a song

Looked at The Rings of Akhaten again and it really comes together for me the second time.

What ties it together is the opening sequence, summarized thusly by the dad: that this leaf hit that face, creating this girl. The story is neatly reprised by the Doctor later in the episode, when he talks of atoms from supernovae coming together in random combinations to create young Merry--basically Clara's story (which the Doctor witnessed firsthand), from a more cosmic perspective.

Then the showdown. The Doctor told one story (the supernova atoms) to persuade Merry to save herself; tells another to explain what the God was all about--basically, an eater of souls or stories, which to the Doctor are equivalent. Then he offers up his story, in an effort to bust the God's gut (how to deal with someone's bite on one's arm? Feed the bite).

It's not enough. Up steps Clara with her solution--the story of the leaf that starts the episode, only she gives her interpretation: that the leaf represents not one story already told (Clara's mom), but the countless stories that could have been told but were not. She's offering infinity, in effect, which if you listen closely to the Doctor is what he was really talking about all along.

Love doesn't save the world in this episode, stories do;  the struggle involves differing interpretations of stories, differing versions of what's really happening. The Doctor in this episode talks the God to death, yes, with help from Clara's crucial input, but all this is to affirm the importance of controlling the narrative.

Pretty good, actually and, I'm surprised to say this, better than Moffat's own starting episode.

The cloud in every silver lining

It's been a relatively lackluster half-season so far with Moffat delivering a weak beginning episode (The Bells of St. Mary), then episodes long on suspense and sensation (Cold War, Hide) and short on--I don't know what to call it: Moffatism? Timey-wimey? Inventiveness? The voice of a distinct sensibility?

I'll welcome the season's penultimate episode, Neil Gaiman's Nightmare in Silver, as being the best response to date to that last complaint. The Cybermen truth be told are for me the dullest villains in the Whoniverse: emotionless and rather clunky (at least the Daleks are allowed to be surprised, terrified, display anger by waving their plungers and rolling around in brief, agitated arcs), they moved so damned slow you're thinking even a tortoise would run circles round them.

Moffat did something about that in The Pandorica Opens: suggested that a Cyberman's arms and head could move independently of the body, show that "upgrading" a human can be a grisly process. Gaiman's attempt at scarifying this overfamiliar monster is if anything even more effective: now there are Cybermites that can suck the humanity out of you like metallic leeches, and a process of upgrading that afflicts half your face with a silvered rash.

Maybe even more frightening is the fact that these armored cyborgs--always-eerie parodies of the human figure--replicate the human condition even more closely by evolving at an even faster pace than their biological models. Hit a Cyberman once, and you slow him down; hit him a second time and he has adapted to your weapon and moved on. This episode captures the unstoppable feel of a wave of Cybermen invading a castle (at a relatively small budget at that)--a feel that makes your skin do that unmistakable crawl. Whovian history records a number of cries that remain in memory, including "Geronimo!" Allons-y!" "Exterminate!" Add to this illustrious if modest collection the latest Gaiman contribution: "Upgrade in progress!"

Gaiman gave us a great Whovian character in Idris, or Sexy, or the TARDIS incarnated in fetchingly human form ("Did you wish really hard?") and as a result nearly brought us to tears; this time he doesn't make us weep but does give us a great Whovian villain--and who could be more villainous or more brilliant than the Doctor himself, upgraded into a Cyberplanner? What I love is that upgrading doesn't drain the Doctor of his emotions; if anything it lifts the Cyberman's rather soulless manner to the same manic high as the Doctor's--Mr. Clever (as the Doctor calls himself) is a mad, marvelous wonder, who gets giddy at the brilliance of his own mentalworks, the same time he chortles at the malevolence of his machinations. He's the Doctor's dark side, able to articulate the buried attraction he has always had for Clara (which is, of course, a giveaway: the real Doctor would rather die than admit to any such attraction), and a chilling addition to the select gallery of great Whovian villains.

A rose by any other name

I'd written before that it wouldn't be such a bad thing to put an end to the Doctor--and, mind you, 'put an end' as opposed to simply 'ending' the Doctor are two totally different concepts. 

Seems I'd written more presciently than I thought I did, a season too early.

Moffat finally tackles the Doctor's demise in The Name of the Doctor; typical of Moffat to throw in a few clever conceits of his own: that the Doctor for instance wouldn't just be a dead body lying in a bier but a gaping wound in time he calls "the tracks of my tears"("Less poetry, Doctor. Just tell them"). Cleverest thing about it is that it is less poetry--it's literally the gashes he rips open in the fabric of time when traveling--and yet more. Time travel (Moffat suggests) causes pain and suffering and doesn't really, definitively resolve anything; on the contrary it leaves everything open, vulnerable, subject to interference and change. 

This is where Moffat puts paid to all the naysayers, Michael Corleone style: Clara useless and incomprehensible? Now she's The Impossible Girl, Born to Save the Doctor. The episodes seem mostly like fillers, marking time till the '50th anniversary special? Now we know when and where the Doctor dies, and who the real villain is. The Great Intelligence relegated to background figure, a mostly useless one? Now he's The Doctor's greatest threat--determined not just to kill him (remember, the Doctor's already dead) but destroy him; again two markedly difference concepts. 

Love the moments which for once (Moffat's mojo really working now) come on strong and plenty, not so much a snowfall as asnowstorm--

Madame Vastra, Strax, and Jenny brought back, with Jenny saying: "Sorry, ma'am, so sorry, so sorry, so sorry--I think I've been murdered." 

The Whisper Men hissing, their Moray Eel fangs bared like a formidable knitting needle collection.

The giant TARDIS. "When a TARDIS is dying sometimes the dimension dams start breaking down," the Doctor explains. "They used to call it a size leak--all the bigger-on-the-inside starts leaking to the outside...when I say that's the TARDIS I don't mean it looks like the TARDIS, I mean it actually is the TARDIS."  

The Victorian trio confronted with the Doctor's remains: "It's beautiful..." "Should I destroy it?" "Shut up, Strax!"

River Song's computer-generated image, meeting the Doctor one last time: "Why didn't you speak to me?" "Because I thought it would hurt too much." "I believe I could have coped." "No, I thought it would hurt me. And I was right."

...a moment please while we brood over River Song. I'd mentioned before how Moffat seems to have taken a page from the relationship between Arthur and Merlin in T.H. White's The Once and Future King (Merlin weeps when they first meet because this is the last he'll see of his dear friend). Don't think much of Silence in the Library/The Forest of the Dead except for River--she'd not only given her life to save the Doctor but actually knew his name! Who was she? Why was she? It was an intriguing way to introduce a character, and I got the sense that Moffat himself didn't know all the answers.

Flesh and Stone/Time of Angels was a less satisfying sequel to Moffat's brilliant Blink only again Dr. Song kept dropping all sorts of fascinating hints--for one she could operate the TARDIS even better than the Doctor can ("Of course we've landed. I just landed her." "But it didn't make the noise!" "What noise?" "You know the 'wooOOOoughfff! wooOOOough! OOOough!'" "It's not supposed to make that noise. You leave the brakes on." "Yeah, well it's a brilliant noise. I love that noise"). For another she does have a heedless love for the Doctor ("Now if he's dead back there, I'll never forgive myself. And if he's alive, I'll never forgive him. And--Doctor, you're standing right behind me aren't you?" "Yeah." "I hate you.").

She always seems to be teasing, and Moffat can never resist encouraging her ("Are you married, River?" "Are you asking?" "Yes--?" "Yes." "No--hang on. Did you think I was asking you to marry me or asking if you were married?" "Yes." "No, but was that yes or yes?" "Yes.").

Apparently even nine-hundred-year-old Time Lords are no good at multitasking. 
 
If I seem to be doing little more than quoting Moffat dialogue to describe Dr. Song's relationship with the Doctor, think about it: is there a better way to do it? She seems to have been created specifically to speak his dialogue (and well golly by gum, when you think about it--she was).
 So on and so forth, up and down the spirals of time to this strangely appropriate, strangely sad farewell. Oh it's possible Moffat'll insert her in a few more episodes down the road--she's that timey-wimey--but basically her story's finished. In the meantime she's done everything from halt reality on its tracks (The Wedding of River Song) to fracturing her own wrist (The Angels Take Manhattan) just to save or please the Doctor. She justifies what she does--sums it all up, really--with three words she learned from her mother ("It's called marriage"), and while the sentiment may seem trite (remember, Moffat once wrote a swinging sexy comedy series called Coupling that ended in a wedding) the length and breadth and depth she will go to affirm that adage is a bit breathtaking, not to mention psychotic. Which I suppose is the point to her. 

So so long, River Song; it feels short (despite all the time travel), but oh so sweet.

The episode, by the way, ends on a cliffhanger shocker--did I in talking about Gaiman's episode mention that the Doctor was  his own best villain...? 

Best single thing in this weak half a season--but strong enough that it can compare with the best of any of the seasons, I think. Now if it were November already... 

6.9.13

Busong (Palawan Fate, Auraeus Solito, 2011)

Chrysalis

First published in Businessworld, 5.23.13

Auraeus Solito's Busong (Palawan Fate)--which is enjoying its international release--is arguably a failure--but what a failure! At first glance it's incomprehensible, slow, apparently confused; it's also ballsy, impassioned, impossibly beautiful.

The film's first half is the most difficult to sit through. We are introduced to Punay (Alessandra de Rossi), whose skin is speckled with mysterious boils and open lacerations (it's not clear whether they are some form of disease or inflicted wounds), and whose feet are so raw they literally cannot touch the ground--she's borne aloft on an intricately woven hammock (with a delicate mosquito-netting canopy, no less) by her brother Angkarang (Rodrigo Santikan), and she seeks a cure.

We eventually meet a woman (Bonivie Budao) who helps carry Punay for a while, telling her story; at one point the woman is warned that the sacred Amugis tree growing nearby--an impressive evergreen that grows to the height of around seventy-five feet--should not be harmed (besides the spiritual significance its bark and sap have medicinal properties). Of course her husband is a logger, and his chainsaw roars hungrily for hardwood to chew on...

The pacing is leisurely--perhaps too leisurely; Solito's attempts at a mysterious air (Who is she? Why is she so afflicted? What does she intend to do about it?) are rigorous to the point of asphyxiation--you hunger for even the tiniest crumb of exposition, maybe a relaxed moment between the two siblings, even a vulgar joke or two.

What sustains the viewer and keeps his eye drinking in the film (in heavy, gasp-inducing draughts) is Solito's unblinking camera lens, capturing the unbelievable beauty of Palawan. It's not just photographing the surrounding greenery--any Travel Channel cameraman can do that--but Solito (with the invaluable help of cinematographer-filmmaker Louie Quirino, who also lensed Rico Ilarde's Beneath the Cogon and Altar) captures the infinite variety and expressiveness of the landscape, a mystery and majesty that gives this film (would give any film I imagine) more magic than it can handle, almost. At one point a character crossing the screen stops, presumably startled by the richness of the verdant growth and deep blue sky, and you can't help but nod silently in agreement. Shakespare once described Cleopatra thusly: “age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety;” one can imagine the Bard confronted with Palawan, and struck speechless.

The film comes into its own with the third story, told by the fisherman Lulong, whose boat was confiscated because he fished in private waters--he and his son must cross from sandbar to shore on foot, and the waters are filled with poisonous stonefish. Lulong of course knows the fish's true name, which protects him from its venom; he's left unprotected however from abuse by the bodyguards of the rich man who now owns the area...

Solito stages the moment with surprising speed, and one appreciates the venom with which he expresses his anger at the landowner; in one of his previous works, Basal Banar, he documents the abuse wealthy landowners in Palawan often inflict on both the environment and the indigenous tribespeople. If anything the venom is perhaps too intense--what this and the previous story lacks is some kind of empathic imagination for all the characters of the story, including the villains (the landowner here is painted in effective if broad strokes; we do feel sympathy for the logger's wife, but barely understand the logger himself).

If, say, Solito were to fill out the landowner's character--give us the man's point of view, not necessarily endorse it but give it the same intense sympathy he gives the fisherman--it would give the ironic resolution to that storyline more bite. Likewise if the logger and his wife were more thoroughly fleshed out (when you think about it, they have the most complex predicament: they make their livelihood from destroying the surrounding forest that is their home) it would give their storyline more resonance, more relevance.

One doesn't really need to outline what one means--full empathy is amply demonstrated in Solito's fourth story, that of Aris, a shaman's apprentice who left to live in Manila and has come back to his native land. Aris (a thin disguise for Auraeus Solito himself) is easily the most richly realized figure in the film, with his ambivalent straddling of the modern and the traditional, the urban and the rural, the rational and the mystical. He's abandoned his culture at one point, has come back with happiness and at the same time regret, having lost loved ones in his absence.

He meets Punay and in the single loveliest moment in the picture attempts to cure her: her boils and lesions bloom with hatching chrysalis, actual dormant creatures swelling out of their hardened shells to bloom into butterflies. It's an amazing moment--if Solito's many loving shots of nature evoke Terence Malick (with Malick's sense of reverential awe), this is Solito's Malick-crossed-with-Cronenberg moment, a monstrous miraculous mutation of both prosthetic art and actual biology...no you can't fake that delicate pulsing, the insistent pushing out and spreading of fragile, not-quite-dried wings.

This, finally, is the Solito we've been waiting for; the Solito of miracles and wonders, effortlessly produced; this is the Solito of his animated short Suring at ang Kuk-ok, arguably his most extraordinary work to date, a low-budget yet effective cross between the enchantment of nature, and the enchantment of imagination. One draws in one's breath (the way one doesn't in Hollywood superproductions and their ridiculous digital effects nowadays) and wonders: how did he do that? And can he do it again?

Busong is as noted before not a complete success; it is flawed, it is difficult to follow; it is, on the other hand, the genuine expression of a genuine artist, bounding forward in his art and not looking back; it is a stumble and step, more courageous and thrilling than any number of less flawed, less ambitious films I've seen in the past few years. I look forward to the full blooming of this chrysalis, and await his next work. 

 

5.30.13

Star Trek Into Darkness (JJ Abrams, 2013)

Everything old is new again

(Warning: plot twists and story developments to be discussed in detail here)

So what about the movie? Had a blast. Loved coming back to a largely familiar-looking crew (largely because they were chosen and dressed and made up to look familiar), the way the performances either played with our knowledge of the series (Spock arguing with McCoy, Scotty fussing over warp engines, Chekov flubbing his Russian accent (weirdly Anton Yelchin is Russian-born, in an in-joke might be a touch too elaborate)) or wrung surprising variations, this being a whole other timeline (Christopher Pike giving Kirk fatherly advice; Kirk and Scotty butting heads over photon torpedoes--torpedoes, for crying out loud!). 

Love the new incarnation of Carol Marcus (Alice Eve--see above and tell me you disagree) and the retooled Khan Noonien Singh. As played by the preternaturally intelligent Benedict Cumberbatch, Khan doesn't blink much, or shift weight, or even recognize the itch in his crotch (I'm assuming he has one--all men do--and that it must be maddening). He's sleeker and more intimidating, even if his evil master plan doesn't make a lick of sense.

Jolico Cuadra (1939 - 2013)

Never really thought I'd be writing this, but:

Jolico Cuadra, 1939 - 2013 

Best known for his poetry, particularly this poem--

"Wing hard, white-stallioned time:
The whirlwind sun upride
Where no sheerer
The crude bird dies.
Hanged in the mind’s eye, hold
Fast—shake out
The canines of God
The manbird locked in God’s bones
Him dogstar till the phoenix hour
The manbird locked
Till the phoenix hour. "

Dogstar

--but I'd known him for almost everything else.

I'd first met Jolico in the offices of the Manila Chronicle back in the '90s, when I practically lived in their editorial office, tapping away on one of their computers long after everyone else had gone home. He had an art column where he alternately terrorized and championed local artists, praising those he thought deserving, holding none sacred, raising a ruckus in his distinctly poetic prose.

We talked for hours. He told me of encountering artists and filmmakers (I remember a few of the names--Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Orson Welles, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gerardo de Leon). He had wild stories (a friend once regaled him with a blow-to-blow sexual encounter with Pauline Kael ("they made love standing up")) and even wilder opinions (Pasolini was "filthy--a filthy man!" Gerardo de Leon was "an idiot!" which he later qualified: "you don't need to be an intelligent man to be a gifted artist"). 

Are any of the stories true? I don't know. But I had a grand time listening to them.

Even more interesting was what he loved. He thought Philip K. Dick was the greatest writer America ever produced--borrowed my copy of Dick's The Valis Trilogy and never returned it ("I'm rereading it for its ideas" he told me when I asked him about the book some years later). He loved Chiqui Gomez (also known as 'Auggusta de Almeida'), poet and stunningly beautiful woman: they met in '74 and started living together in '75, and she was at his side till the end. 

He didn't think much of our best Filipino filmmakers--Brocka, Bernal, Mike De Leon (for the record, I begged to disagree), but: "there is one I like--Mario O'Hara." 

This was in 1996, when the filmmaker's career was in a bit of a lull (two films made in a period of eight years), and his best known work Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos (Three Years Without God, 1976) largely forgotten (both his and the film's reputation would be revived by a screening at the "Pelikula at Lipunan" festival around that time). Cuadra had never seen Tatlong Taong, but did see Insiang, and when he had the chance to talk to O'Hara criticized the film for being set in Tondo.

 O'Hara wasn't offended; he nodded in agreement. He had originally set the teleplay in Pasay (why Pasay is better than Tondo is explained in the article). 

On Bagong Hari (The New King) he had this to say: "(Dan Alvaro) was perfect. So quiet! Real killers are like that. The loud man walking down the street, threatening death, I don't notice. I'm afraid of the quiet man." 

When he finally saw Tatlong Taong--I'd arranged to have him attend a screening--he said it was "a great film." He pointed out that Peque Gallaga's Francis and Christopher De Leon's Masugi were probably lovers ("they don't look at each other's dicks when pissing") and loved how the women circling Nora's Rosario at the end of the film mirrored the children circling in the playground at the beginning of the film.

Cuadra, I had to admit, was more perceptive about and responsive to O'Hara's films than I was.

He was a wonderful man, an incredible asthete, a for the brief time we'd spent together good friend. I'd finally gotten hold of Auggusta only last year after a long time spent out of touch, and asked for news of him; she replied that he's been struggling with Parkinson's the past three years, and was wondering if I could send money.

I tried; I couldn't. I sent her a message apologizing, said I'll send something as soon as I can afford it. I planned to send something this end of May.

Too late.

Death happens all the time; it happens to friends, to family, to people we care for and admire and (even if we're only fooling ourselves) we believe are going to outlast us, be around forever or at least long enough for us to meet again, to help in some small way. 

I know, I know; I should've known better. Doesn't mean I have to like it.      

May 17, 2013 

Iron Man 3 (Shane Black); The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann)--re-edited

(Warning: plot twists and story developments discussed in close detail)

Stark raving

And the celebration continues with Iron Man 3, where billionaire industrialist (only in comic books--and by extension the movies--can this be considered a respectable appellation) Tony Stark has his toys taken away from him and he's reduced, so to speak, to playing with the cardboard box.

It's an interesting situation--a way of upping the drama for this second sequel, without upping the scale of conflict from the previous Marvel movie's worldwide alien-invasion menace. Stark's forced to think literally on his feet, to cope with an enemy that's the opposite of what he is--functioning ubermen who are at the same time walking time bombs. No super machines, just super biology.

Director Shane Black (who cowrote the script with TV writing and producing veteran Drew Pearce) almost manages to get away with it, only the fight sequences don't quite emphasize the qualitative difference between Stark's exoskeleton armor and people who are themselves living weapons (you'd think said living weapons would be more agile, or graceful, or adaptable). 

I do like the quick-repair ability, that seems to make sense: as these people are basically speeded-up metabolisms, their healing is also speeded up. The exothermic reaction is silly tho--where does that come from? And why is Stark's armor unable to deal with it (Surely a heat sink or thermal pump of some kind would be basic to his suit's design?)? 

(Gratuitous aside: surely Stark would do better taking his cue from Neil Gaiman's latest take on Cybermen (warning: plot details discussed))

Arguably the best image from the film is the sight of Stark dragging his armor--stolen I suspect from Django. Feel ambivalent watching that: on one hand Black is channeling a far superior action film (suffers in comparison, of course); on the other I've been here before. At least Black's theft is more emotionally resonant than Tarantino's (where's Foxx's coffin/armor on a leash?). 

That's about it for me. Black's a sometimes funny writer-filmmaker--his Kiss Kiss Bang Bang I remember (barely) to be a darkly comic amusement, and possibly the highlight of his career to date--but the action sequences both there and in this picture are your standard-issue shaky-cam footage, cut ADHD style: hardly coherent, much less comprehensible. The script comes up with half a dozen interesting premises--Stark without his toys, the mecha vs. bio thing, and so on--but fails to develop them in an interesting way. The Mandarin's soldiers (for example) are barely fleshed out, which is a real shame: theirs is the most interesting situation (what would a man think and feel and say, knowing he's doomed to explode at any moment? And what would motivate him to pledge his loyalty to the one who put him in this predicament in the first place?).

Then there's this article, which tries to make the case that this third installment is really a feminist tract in disguise. Must be one helluva disguise, because I don't see it: the Maya character is mostly a smart egg seduced and exploited by the real villain; Pepper is a largely annoying hostage who manages at the last minute to kick some butt. 

Whedon in comparison is more overtly for women's causes, has produced at least two TV series with women protagonists, and has consistently put strong women characters front and center in his work (in one film she's the single strongest character). The Wired article mentions The Avengers as failing some silly test, which is frankly nuts: Whedon wrote Black Widow as a major character, with her own (fairly complex) inner conflicts and motives, her own character arc, and her own kickass scene--all the more impressive for being sans superpowers, or (for the most part) digital effects.

...actually would love to have seen Maya reveal herself to be the real villain: someone from Stark's crowded bedroom past, who he betrayed or rejected and who's out for his bal--blood. Simpler, more elegant solution to a needlessly overcomplicated problem, based on the oldest conflict of all...

Maybe the movie's biggest failing: Stark running out of worthy adversaries, not just physical but verbal; as played by Robert Downey Jr. he's the quickest wit around and for most of the picture his only sparring equal is himself, which quickly gets tired. Guy Pearce, who can be villainous, is strangely unthreatening here; would love to see Ben Kingsley take a crack, but of course Black quickly tosses that possibility out the picture window (I incidentally guessed the Mandarin's true nature twenty minutes in--Kingsley pops up again and again and not once speaks an unscripted line?--which doesn't speak much for the twistedness of Black's plot). In Whedon's The Avengers (which I wrote about at length) Stark has to deal with a Norse god, an earthbound titan (who doubles as the only brain able to keep up with him), a one-eyed badass--there's no end of inflated egos to bounce off against and that (not the largely digitized action) is what made the movie interesting.

Maybe the movie's even bigger failing (this and every other recent comic-book franchise): its inability to create a distinct look for the film, a stylized, parallel world where superheroes can convincingly exist--or a stylized enough world to at least hold our attention, maybe even fire our imagination (Tim Burton managed with his Batman films, Guillermo del Toro with his Hellboy series and--further back--Robert Altman with Popeye and Mario Bava with Diabolik!). Maybe what's needed isn't a recalibrated script, or better cast of actors, or more on-camera special effects; maybe what's needed is a filmmaker with a vision, and the talent to properly realize it. 

So--what? Not a lot of kiss-kiss, mainly digitized bang-bangs, and an outsized admittedly talented star, standing alone on the big stage. Yes, he is Iron Man. The real question is: why on Earth should we care?

Grate Gatsby

First thing you hear from naysayers is: "I can't stand the hip-hop." Lovers of the picture ask that people be more open-minded, that they realize jazz was the hip-hop of its day, as shocking an affront to American ears with perhaps (since plenty of the great jazz singers and performers were black) the same undercurrent of racist indignation.

I get it; I can take the anachronism and move on, I see where rap is meant to dynamite one's complacency and allow the introduction of an unwelcome idea or two (though I'd reply that there are a few lesser-known, period-appropriate jazz and classical pieces that could serve just as well, and using "Rhapsody in Blue" to announce Gatsby is about the laziest choice for introductory song I can possibly imagine). 

What I can't take--what makes Lurhman's Gatsby the visual equivalent of a cheese grater applied to the knee--is how loud Luhrmann's movie is, in every sense of the word. How it shrieks out plot points in advance, heavily underlines them, highlights them several times over with a screaming bright-pink marker, and--for good measure--floats the relevant text in man-high letters across the big screen. 

...not an enemy of voiceover narration per se, far from it--Bresson and later Scorsese have shown us how it can be properly done--but Luhrmann in his self-declared respect for the novel uses Fitzgerald's prose extensively to the point where it functions as a crutch, telegraphing what should have been subtleties: the moment, say, when Daisy tells Gatsby that she loves him without directly saying so, right under her husband's nose; or the moment when Daisy decides to betray Gatsby (for the former Luhrmann uses Cliff Notes excerpts from the book; for the latter DiCaprio is asked to do an Al Pacino-style freakout, and then Luhrmann uses Cliff Notes excerpts). 

The famed blinking green light at the end of the pier--so neatly introduced in the book as an enigmatic signal from across the bay--comes across here more like a Close Encounter of the Third Kind, with the camera swooping close enough to make First Contact. When Myrtle is hit by a car she flies across the air, flashing her pantied crotch at the giant Dr. T.J. Eckleburg's baleful, bespectacled gaze ("Oh, you impudent tart!" you imagine him whispering with delighted outrage). 

The parties are overscaled carnivals with Gatsby as reclusive ringmaster (giving some bite to Tom Buchanan's quip that Gatsby drives a "circus wagon") but the real glory of Fitzgerald are the dinner and party conversations, the way the talk seems to pingpong in different directions yet somehow converge with eerie precision (like filings in a faint magnetic field) into a grand design, an insignia of the decadent '20s--on presenting this aspect the movie is an absolute failure, with barely the patience to sit still enough for one verbal exchange to register, much less a gaggle of em. 

Does Fitzgerald write about vulgar excess? Yes, but there's nothing vulgar or excessive about his prose: he suggests where others might explicitly state, omits where others might indulge (in this he shares something with fellow contemporary Ernest Hemingway: an unstated lust for simplicity, an equally covert fascination with the unwholesome). One wonders what antics occurred in the other rooms of Gatsby's mansion that Nick failed to visit, or what enterprise Gatsby is involved in that even common acquaintance Walter Chase (confessing to Tom) is "afraid to tell me about." Fitzgerald leaves details of Gatsby's wealth and criminal activities to dissolve into the dark and distance, allowing our imagination to take over; the result is bigger than the book itself, an outsized portrait of a self-made man--one of the most memorable in American literature.

Luhrmann's problem is he can't do elegant to save his life--he dives right in and luxuriates like a pig in a cesspool (apologies to all pigs; all cesspools too). This is American literature as reimagined by Michael Bay only, I suspect, worse--at least Bay doesn't aspire to art, is upfront about doing it for the money.  

Luhrmann presents the eponymous man as unabashed romantic hero, for the most part ignoring signs and indications in Fitzgerald's novel that Gatsby may also have been a naive fool. Or rather, the signs are present (Luhrmann is that faithful to the text) but the preponderance of evidence--from "Rhapsody in Blue" to DiCaprio's intense line readings to the heart-on-sleeve music--urges us to root for Gatsby because (gag) He Is Us.

DiCaprio's mouth struggles to push the mush of an upper class New England accent past his lips (he gives the impression of having hired a diction coach only weeks before); he has the guarded eyes and studiedly relaxed pose of an infiltrating outsider, a deep-penetration agent high on overconfidence and desperate bluff, only a step ahead of exposure (is this really Fitzgerald's Gatsby? I don't know; I just know it's compulsively watchable). Carey Mulligan is anxious in a different way: she seems seems timid, out of her depth in dealing with her character--and rightly so, as Daisy is The Love of Gatsby's Life, and she's not up (as she herself exasperatedly informs him) to the demands of the role.

Luhrmann ends Gatsby's life with a shot stolen from the opening of Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, then glosses over the father's visit--the little reveals from Gatsby's childhood and past that help clarify (or complicate) his character--to go straight for the tragic-heroic funeral (all that's missing really are a drifting Viking boat in flames and perhaps an erupting volcano, neither of which are in the book and neither of which, surprisingly, Luhrmann is able to cram into his Dagwood Sandwich movie). He does the ending in a straightforward manner, or as straightforward as anything he's ever done: Nick Carraway (a largely disheveled Toby Maguire, channeling Fitzgerald by way of William Faulkner) solemnly intones the closing lines ("So we beat on, boats against the current...") while the words flash like digital displays against dark water. Not for Luhrmann the simplicity of John Huston's masterful adaptation of James Joyce's great short story The Dead, where Joyce's words are spoken quietly against a snowblown darkness--Luhrmann, apparently, has no confidence in the magic of Fitzgerald's words, no confidence in his own ability to depict that magic on the big screen. He simply must have his digital. 

Who could have done a valid take on Gatsby? Robert Altman's overlapping dialogue I submit would have been perfect for the parties. Bob Fosse directed a lurid '20s crime melodrama on the theater stage (Chicago), dealt with the death throes of the period on the big screen (Cabaret). 

Max Ophuls has done Hollywood films, has done films depicting elaborate parties, has done period pictures portraying the upper classes, has tied them all together with gorgeously sinuous long-take tracking shots. Orson Welles entered films by way of radio--you hear it in the way his characters' dialogue overlap, how it's overheard before the start of one scene, spills like champagne into the next; you hear it in the music and sound effects that bridge his sequences, the aural transitions that whip his film into higher velocities. Gatsby might have been filmed in the manner of The Magnificent Ambersons only with a less gracious upper class, the conversation nevertheless glittering like a crystal chandelier.

Anyone alive? Woody Allen, if he could be persuaded to do someone else's material, might inject a welcome dose of comedy (Gatsby for all its gaiety lacks a sense of humor). Alan Rudolph has visited the period a few times (The Moderns; Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle); Michael Apted did a lovely little thriller once (Agatha).

David Fincher doesn't flinch from period work (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button); neither does Brian De Palma (The Untouchables). Both have a gliding camera style that (like Ophuls') allows Fitzgerald's characters to talk to each other properly (their defining characteristic). And if you want some really offbeat young Turk to do the honors, I hear Mulligan has Nicolas Winding Refn's number on speed dial.

Meantime you have this, and this to put it mildly stinks. Jack Clayton's 1974 version (with Robert Redford as Gatsby and Mia Farrow as Daisy) may have choked on its own good taste; Luhrmann goes the other extreme, shoving his arm so far up his ass he could grab hold of his tongue and pull himself inside out. Don't know which is the greater horror, don't much care; I'm just waiting (possibly forever) for a proper adaptation of the novel.

5.11.13  

Crash of a Titan--a kind of tribute to Ray Harryhausen

Harryhausen's big guy, meeting his blind date for the first time

First, there's this sad news.

Then, there's this, one of my older articles comparing one of Harryhausen's lesser works with the more expensive digital remake. Just to remind us what we've lost, and how good he can be.

Let the bloodletting begin.

Crap of the Titans

You'd think they'd get one thing right; you'd think they could take a so-so movie, Ray Harryhausen's 1981 valedictory opus Clash of the Titans (Desmond Davies is the director on record, but let's not kid ourselves--this is Harryhausen's baby all the way) and make a halfway decent picture out of it. Walking out of Louis Leterrier's 2010 remake, though, all I could think was: “I miss Harryhausen.”

By no stretch of imagination was the original good, much less great--Harry Hamlin looked ridiculous in sandals and miniskirt, and the chemistry between him and starlet Judi Bowker was so underwhelming you kept looking sideways for the Marx Brothers to leap in and save the show. I remember Ursula Andress and Claire Bloom (beautiful actresses, both) being stiff as Greek statues; I remember thinking the mechanical owl was so blatant a rip-off of Artoo Deetoo that George Lucas ought to sue (and later--when Artoo took to the air in ridiculously tiny rockets--wondering if maybe it was the other party that ought to sue).

But, strange to say, the years have been kind to this Titans. Laurence Olivier's Zeus--who was so salty you could fry him in a pan, add coffee, and come up with red-eye gravy--goosed the picture to life whenever he was onscreen. Olivier has his 'thespic' moments--even in a production where he's obviously there for the paycheck he never simply phones in the performance--he's constantly on and ebullient and chewing with much gusto on the badly designed scenery.

Then there are the creatures. Bubo has, finally, become charming (while Artoo through the years has become mean-spirited and annoying); the monstrous Calibo (Neil McCarthy) achieves a sort of tragic stature; Medusa slithers with gravid grace, and has a suitably evil glare; the Kraken, unmistakably modeled after the alien Ymir in Harryhausen's 1957 20 Million Miles to Earth, possesses a grandeur that gets grander every time I see him again (he looks as if he had swallowed an umbrella that had snapped open).

And that, for all the stillborn drama and cheesiness of the overall production, is what I remember about the movie--its considerable flaws now forgivable, its virtues considerable. I suppose what John Huston as Noah Cross once said still applies: “Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” Harryhausen's Titans is an old building whose time has apparently come.

Keith Phipps of the Onion A.V. Club wrote of the Leterrier remake: “If Clash were a meal, it would come in a paper bag and have some grease stains near the bottom.” I disagree; I don't think Mr. Phipps appreciates the virtues of a greasy burger, the fulsome flavor of properly charred meat on toasted buns, the juices (red from a medium-rare patty) oozing thickly out the sides and staining one corner of the bag. Harryhausen's Titans is a bar burger, a diner's special, a one-of-a-kind creation that's too fatty to be good for you, but makes for a satisfying snack; what Mr. Phipps must be thinking of is a McDonald's Happy Meal, which to my recollection has never stained the corner of anything--it's too dense and flavorless and dried out, as Morgan Spurlock once put it, for any self-respecting bacteria to touch.

Yes, Leterrier uses the latest in CGI techniques, and yes both Medusa and Kraken move smoother than before--the Medusa skittering over rocks like a frightened gecko, the Kraken lifting his head (and for a while there you think he's nothing but head) out of the ocean, then baring an impressive set of ginzu knives. But Harryhausen's creatures for all their clunkiness had personality--the Medusa dragged her serpentine body painfully across the rocks, and her face held this look of aggrieved fury partly because, you think, she'd been thusly accursed (she almost didn't need that green glow of power emanating from her eyes, the expression was arresting enough). Leterrier's Medusa is a babe with snake hair, and the way she would slither here and there you wonder--why does she kill? If I had that much mobility I'd take a month off and backpack through the Amazon jungle, maybe visit Machu Picchu.

Then there's the Kraken (which, by the way, is Scandinavian, not Greek at all--I can understand the creature vacationing at the Greek Isles to get a tan, but why this sideline involving virgins?). The Leterrier Kraken is an animal (a rather tasty-looking one at that; give me a lemon wedge and tartar sauce and I'm all over that creature), and presumably looks at Andromeda (Alexa Davalos, who to her credit actually manages to look more interested in her eventual fate than Bowker) strictly as food. Harryhausen's Kraken has the whiskers of an old man, the leer of a lecher, and tentacles to match; when he climbs out of the sea, you don't know exactly what will happen--dinner, or the most hideously outsized date rape in recorded history?

And that's pretty much it except I might add that Liam Neeson, who plays Zeus, says the line “Release the Kraken!” as if he was hoping the command would slip by without anyone bothering to obey; fact of the matter is, he looks like he'd rather let the entire movie slip by without anyone bothering to notice he was there...on the whole, he'd rather be somewhere else altogether. 

Now why bother showing up to collect a paycheck if you can't get some kind of satisfaction out of said paycheck? Olivier knew better: if the picture was going to stink (his was like day-old fish; the remake was more like week-old fish (okay, I'm being unfair to week-old fish)) then he was going to, if not save it, at least derive some kind of pleasure from it. He was going to have fun, Zeus damn it, and he'll give his equivalent line of dialogue a snap and roll and punch that Neeson would have been wise to emulate (“LET LOOSE THE KRAKKEN!!”). Not exactly great acting, but definitely great hamming.

First published in Businessworld 4.8.10

Beware: Bed Sins (Mario O'Hara, 1985) now online - a continuation of the weeklong O'Hara retrospective

Sinned

O'Hara's entry into the '80s softcore porn sweepstakes isn't quite the bare-bones classic that, say, Peque Gallaga's Scorpio Nights is; possibly one might make the case that less story and not more improves an erotic film's chances at actually working, the heaving breasts and pumping behinds speak speaking louder and more eloquently than any mere screenplay (written in O'Hara's case by the usually excellent Frank Rivera). Gallaga far as I can see had at most a scenario (housewife and student have an affair, behind the bodyguard husband's back) with the barest whiff of dialogue, and the minimalism turned his work into a sexual allegory about defiance in the face of of fascism (in this case, the Marcos administration).

Possibly there are other reasons: the producers at Seiko Films interfered with the production, to the extent of inserting explicit genital shots into the lovemaking--a practice O'Hara vehemently condemned; the budget was so small (especially for zombie makeup), O'Hara's actors look more afflicted with a debilitating case of eczema than any mere voodoo curse.

That said, the film does have the sensuality, the dark sensibility of true noir. Carla (Sarsi Emmanuelle, arguably loveliest of the era's 'softdrink beauties,' and one of the most talented), a high-class prostitute, has many clients--some mere jerks, some out-and-out psychopaths; one is out to kill her. Simple enough premise (though not as simple as some, as we've noted), O'Hara complicates matters with a series of flashbacks, flash forwards, fantasy sequences and outright hallucinations that cause the narrative to be every bit as unreliable as the handful of suspects stalking Carla (Is it really happening? Has it already happened? Will it happen soon?). Sergio Lobo continues the noir camerawork he did for O'Hara previously (in Uhaw sa Pag-ibig) and gives us angled shadows, deep colors, a variety of skin tones; Jaime Fabregas manages, within limits of the synthesizer so often used for Filipino soundtrack music at this time, to give us a moody score with (thanks to a button that switches to 'pipe organ' mode) distinct Gothic flavors.

Sarsi almost isn't acting here--she hardly ever does. Her huge, lustrous eyes are as naked in their emotions as her body often is, and unclothed she has a frankness and unselfconsciousness about her that's breathtaking. She's ably matched by her co-stars--Joel Torre as a hotheaded lover, Rafael Roces as her detective protector, Liza Lorena as her fanatically religious friend, and even Fabregas himself as one of Carla's more eccentric clients. 

Not one of O'Hara's best, but give the film a chance and it's a fascinating head (and groin) trip. 

4.22.13