Antagony & Ecstasy

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE MAN OF TOMORROW?

2013-06-18T23:50:00.001-05:00

And so, after all the hype and the best trailers for any tentpole of 2013, it turns out that the movie directed by Zack Snyder and written by David S. Goyer feels like a Snyder/Goyer collaborations. This should be neither surprising nor disappointing, and yet it's both, somehow. Man of Steel is a basically fine movie, when the dust has all settled, but it's was supposed to more than that: a grand pop-opera that would revitalise the superhero genre with a sense of majesty and scope. Which is sort of vaguely does, though not terribly well. The good and grand things outnumber the bad, but the film works as hard as it can to keep that from being the case.

It was also supposed to be a movie that did well by Superman, which it most certainly does not, and that's ultimately the most upsetting part; upsetting enough that I am not at all sure whether to call this a bad movie that does an awful lot of good things, or a good movie that does an awful lot of bad things, and it's only by conceding that if it had any other title and was about any other super-powered alien, I'd feel at least marginally warmer towards it, particularly towards its final 30 minutes.

Still, you don't use the name and iconography of a genuine pop culture legend if you don't plan to engage with that legend's mythology in a respectful way. And while Snyder and Goyer (and Christopher Nolan, who produced and co-wrote the story) demonstrate some idea of what makes Superman Superman, particularly in the first half of their unreasonably long movie, the deeper it gets into the plot, the more that Man of Steel drifts into something generic and unworthy of its subject, until we finally end at a long, noisy, well-animated, but not terribly interesting city-destroying final setpiece that might as well be called The Avengers: Dark and Moody Edition. Screw the big climactic moment that has so many people chattering about whether or not it's in character (not really, but Henry Cavill is stupefyingly good, and he makes the scene play well); it's much worse that Superman should be the source of so much devastation to such a large city as happens so blithely, and while the final ten minutes might raise the question of whether or nor Snyder and Goyer actually understand the character, the half-hour preceding them answered that question already with a resounding, building-crumbling "No they fucking well don't".

But enough prattling about the ending, for it is after all such a short part of such a massive damn movie. Man of Steel is a super-modern take on the Superman origin story (how super-modern? The word "Superman" is only spoken twice, in one scene, with an ironic flair), which means that the action opens on the planet of Krypton, where scientist Jor-El (Russell Crowe) is failing to convince the high council that their planet, abused for its resources, is about to collapse into rubble. One person who did listen was commander of the Krytptonian military, General Zod (Michael Shannon), who uses this imminent crisis as the excuse to launch a rebellion against the government. It doesn't go well, but Jor-El and his wife Lara (Ayelet Zurer) use to chaos to launch a small ship with their son Kal-El to the planet Earth, whose yellow sun and dense atmosphere will provide their boy with an environment in which his anatomy will leave him the next best thing to a god.

And so it goes: Kal-El lands on Earth, is adopted by the Smallville, Kansas couple Jonathan (Kevin Costner) and Martha Kent (Diane Lane), and with this being a darker, grittier, more pointedly realistic take on the mythos, Clark Kent ends up being plagued with doubt and worry, and so he goes a-questing. Eventually, he ends up at an ancient Kryptonian vessel buried in the Arctic, and activating it acts like a beacon that brings Zod and his fellow Kryptonian exiles - the only other members of the race to survive the planet's destruction - straight to Earth, to recruit or kill the son of Jor-El.

For such a long movie (143 minutes, which is still less than Superman Returns), Man of Steel has very little actual plot: most of the first hour is strict character-building, in which Cavill's Clark Kent is pensive and full of self-awareness, and yet at the end of it all, it's hard to say with a straight face that much character has been built. Certainly, nobody besides Clark himself ends up emerging as a person: the perfectly-cast Amy Adams is totally wasted on a Lois Lane whose character is dismally familiar from every one of Christopher Nolan's own movies, where women are steely, determined, and very boring, Zod suffers from Shannon's intense but not particularly nuanced performance, and absolutely nobody else is around long enough to make an impression. As the two fathers of Superman, Crowe and Costner are easily best-in-show, but this is not a very people-driven movie, which makes it weird that so much of it moves with the stateliness and sobriety that indicates that it wants to be watched that way.

That being said, at the single task of portraying a deep, complex Superman who isn't just a gung-ho Boy Scout, Man of Steel at least has the sensitivity to make for a character who's going to be pretty great to watch in some other movie, as long as Cavill - whose shallow handsomeness and limited range are a great fit for this character - comes back, and Snyder, Goyer, and Nolan all don't. He is a genuinely introspective, thoughtful figure, wasted on a movie with such a rattletrap plot and lugubrious shift into a very long, very tedious series of battle scenes that resemble every other urban sci-fi action film to come out since Transformers.

Very little about the film is inspired in any way: it's Snyder applying his adoration of flashy violence to the po-faced aesthetic Nolan used in his Batman movies, and this is great insofar as it means that the director has to let up on his wretched slow-motion, but the whole thing feels like it was cranked out of a factory; it's as determinedly impersonal as any summer movie you could name, the result of a magpie copying his producer's style without understanding the reasoning beneath it. The only that keeps it from being entirely mirthless, save for a few very serious jokes, is Hans Zimmer's fantastic score, the best thing he's ever done for a big summer movie, with a plaintive "Young Clark" motif to give the film a stirring emotional backbone alongside his soaring, pummeling action cues that are frequently the only reason that scenes play as exciting rather than morose.

The one thing that absolutely, invariably works are the flashbacks to Clark's Kansas boyhood, roughly crammed into the narrative but always wonderful while they're there: Cooper Timberline and Dylan Sprayberry, who play the character at 9 and 13 years respectively, have tremendous chemistry with Costner and Lane, and the film's implication of how the plain middle Americans that raised Superman left him with a straightforward, noble soul works terrifically well, while also being great scenes in their own right. There's a muted sensitivity in the visuals that exists nowhere else in the movie (or in the director's entire career), and some moments are tender enough that, God help me, I got misty-eyed (especially the last flashback, with its casually iconic shots of a young superhero running around at sunset with a makeshift cape).

So what are we to do? Some parts of Man of Steel are absolutely great, a tiny number of things are actively irritating, much of it is totally bland and routine, just one more superhero movie that mostly acts like every other one. Hopefully it will follow the pattern of other superhero origin stories, and lead in to a sequel that can use this character to better benefit, with more excitement and more humanity, the two most important ingredients in any Superman story, and two things mostly missing from the great bulk of this movie. There is much to love about this iteration of the character; just not the movie in which he currently finds himself.

6/10

BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE LAST SON OF KRYPTON

2013-06-18T02:38:00.001-05:00

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Man of Steel has brought the grandaddy of all superheroes back to pop culture life, 2013-style. For, of course, every generation has its own Superman.

Superman, the nigh-invulnerable alien protector invented by Jerry Siegel and Joel Shuster, premiered in Detective Comics' new title Action Comics in June, 1938; barely a year and a half later, the instantly-beloved character made his dramatic debut in a radio show produced by New York's WOR station. The following year, the character made his filmed debut in a wonderful series of 17 animated shorts produced by Flesicher Studios (later Famous) between September, 1941 and July, 1943.

It wasn't until a decade after his groundbreaking introduction that Superman was finally dramatised in live-action, and this came in the form of a black and white 1948 serial simply called Superman, a 15-part adventure produced by Columbia Pictures (the studio that was mostly synonymous with serials in the '40s and '50s). If this incarnation of the character hasn't remained alive in the popular imagination (despite being a monster hit in its day) as much as the Fleischer cartoons of the 1950s TV show starring George Reeves, I suspect that has a lot to do with the weirdness of the serial format itself; something of a forerunner to television, these Saturday matinee program fillers were little ten or fifteen or maybe even twenty-minute chunks of story that combined to form one single plot arc, ending with cliffhangers in which a oh-so-square but oh-so-urgent narrator reminded us to come back to the same theater next week to find out how our hero managed to survive whatever death trap the villain sprung on him at the last minute.

They were pretty unabashedly kiddie fare, which certainly hasn't helped them find an audience: there's not much of an audience for what amounts to a three-hour children's movie anymore. And even calling it a three-hour movie is dodging the point: they're weird things to watch. It was never, ever the intent to watch a serial straight through; they were little weekly nibbles crammed in between the cartoon, the news reel, and the feature, and while I have never personally watched a matinee serial straight through, I've heard stories of people who have, and apparently it gets tedious fast. As it would, when every fifteen minutes the plot literally stops for a moment to harangue us about oh my God! the tension.

I'm sure you found all of this context desperately necessary.

Now, I would dearly love to say, "and Superman is so good as to make all those quibbles totally moot", but it's simply not true. Oh, there's no doubt that Superman is absolutely charming, and as I think that it's absolutely essential for everybody who has even a passing interest in post-WWII American filmmaking to see at least one Columbia serial in their life, this is a perfectly fine candidate (for one thing, it's far closer to modern expectations and tastes than the studio's befuddling 1943 Batman). But let's not pretend that it's anything but what it is: a time-waster made in a rush and on the cheap with no more aim than to keep a mostly undemanding audience diverted for a quarter of an hour at a time. It's a low-quality production all-around, just harried enough that there are maybe a half-dozen moments across the fifteen episodes where an actor straight-up flubs a line and they simply didn't have the time to redo it. And while any reasonable viewer learns, quickly, to adjust to the filmmaking technology of different periods, such that only a real dick writes off classical fantasy and sci-fi for the unforgivable sin of not having top-of-the-line CGI, Superman suffers from more than simple '40s visual effects technology. In fact, the flying effects that are such an important part of Superman's mythos are achieved here by replacing Kirk Alyn, the actor playing the hero, with a literal cartoon. Now, let me be this respectful to a bit of cinematic fantasy older than my own parents, and concede that the effect doesn't look pasted-on at all: in fact, it looks wonderfully like a crappily-animated Superman really is interacting with the buildings and clouds and such, better even than what Walt Disney's Technicolor extravaganzas of the same period were able to attain. And the transition from Alyn to the cartoon during the take-offs is astonishingly well-done. It's still a crappily-animated Superman instead of Alyn on a wire, is the thing.

But enough of harping on the limitations that the film was absolutely not, under any circumstances, going to escape completely. Charming I called the series; charming it is. Charming and really damn weird, for while in my head I understand that the sci-fi trappings of the Superman comic were, sure as can be, invented during the Depression, the kind of stately, geeky world-building that goes into Superman's back story just feels more... contemporary, somehow. And yet there we are, in the first episode, "Superman Comes to Earth", right there on the planet Krypton, where illustrious scientist Jor-El (Nelson Leigh) patiently explains that Krypton's sun is about to destroy it, and sending his precious son Kal-El out into space to be the only survivor of that holocaust when the Kryptonian council laughs him off. And all of it shot using the very distinctive lighting vocabulary and acting styles of the 1940s, with a remarkably pedestrian concept of Krypton architecture, and the whole thing feels unpleasantly like the Kryptonians are holed up just down the hall from Humphrey Bogart or Tyrone Power.

In fact, "Superman Comes to Earth" is very much the worst of the 15 episodes, cramming a whole mess of backstory into just a little bit of time, but doing it all within the more leisurely scene-structure of a '40s movie, where such rat-a-tat exposition is wholly out of place. Kal-El's boyhood in middle America is sped through faster than a speeding bullet, with the poor Kents (Jonathan being oddly rechristened "Eben") barely showing up long enough to drop dead so that their adopted son Clark can head off to the big city to become a reporter for the Daily Planet. And here, the episode finally starts to be enough of a story and not so much a précis that it actually feels like you can watch it without feeling motion sickness.

Most of the plot gets set up over the first four episodes, and it's here that we find the arch-criminal Spider Lady (Carol Forman) plotting to steal a devastating weapon newly created by U.S. government scientist Dr. Graham (Herbert Rawlinson), just at the same time that Superman is parading around Metropolis, saving the day constantly. Right about this time, Superman learns that his almost complete invulnerability has a single exception, in the form of irradiated chunks of the planet Krypton (a place that he's deduced was once his homeworld from absolutely no evidence to speak of), and in a spectacular spot of bad luck, the Spider Lady learns of this too.

Thus do the remaining 11 episodes settle into an awfully comfortable rhythm: Superman, as Clark Kent, uses the resources of the Daily Planet to hunt for the Spider Lady, alongside ace reporter Lois Lane (Noel Neill, a fun and snappy take on the stock figure of the overreaching newswoman good enough that she played the part on the later show) and eager fresh-faced photographer Jimmy Olsen (Our Gang alum Tommy Bond, the most ancient-looking 22-year-old in human history). In the Golden Age Superman universe, you see, the newspaper was basically a replacement for the police (late in the serial, this actually turns out to be the actual truth). So each episode finds the Spider Lady hoping to capture Superman and kill him with kryptonite, the Planet crew falling for her scheme to end up as bait, and Lois ending up two inches away from a bomb as it explodes. The next episode, we find Clark, in Superman regalia, just barely saving her, so that she can truck off to the next obvious death trap.

Simply put, there's not enough plot to cover four hours and four minutes; I suppose that's probably not as noticable if you take the recommended fifteen weeks to watch it all, but even managing to stretch it out over five days, I was getting a bad case of the "please, do something different" blues. And yet, stock situations are just as vital a component of the serial as of the comic book itself, and I will claim for Superman this merit over the later feature film incarnations: it watches very much like a Golden Age comic book reads, with the same whiz-bang gutsiness of its heroes that rather badly outstrips their intelligence, and the same middling plots by the villains (for by this point, the supervillain as we now conceive him or her was still in its infancy in the '40s, and the grandiose schemes we now associate with them largely an invention of the yet-to-come Silver Age).

Not exactly a robust comfort while you're watching it and wondering how someone as unfathomably dim as Lois Lane could possibly be a well-regarded writer, when it seems like she can't meet three sources without one of them pulling a gun on her. But Superman is, when all is said and done, mainly a delivery system for watching Superman fly in and punch out the bad guys, a repetitive enough process as it is; nobody really cared how or when or where Superman would finally catch up with the Spider Lady, since he obviously would - shit, he's Superman - the point is to hang out with him and bask in the all-American earnestness of a much less troubled hero than future generations would be granted to enjoy.

Obviously, we're not all going to have the same tastes, but the combination of the resolutely uncomplicated staging by directors Spencer Gordon Bennett & Thomas Carr, the bare-bones plotting, Mischa Bakaleinikoff's bombastic main theme, and Alyn's jovial performance (including his super-hammy delivery of the oft-repeated line "This looks like a job for SUPERMAN!") all combine to perfectly evoke a simple, happily naïve impression of how gosh-darn terrific a superhero would be to have around. This is an uncomplicated Superman to help make sense of an era that had very suddenly gotten very complicated indeed; an inherently conservative response to a changing world, but also a comforting, friendly one - Alyn's rather silly, suburban dad-looking Superman does a great job of capturing the idea that this is a straight-up good guy, and he's here to make things better. It's pleasant to recall that comics were, at one time, just a way for kids to get a handle on things that were maybe a bit confusing and scary, and while the Superman serial is undeniably a bit shitty and tedious and has more wooden dialogue than I know what to do with, all of that is directly related to its great, overriding innocence. It's a simple, earnest story, pitched at a simple, earnest audience, and hokey as it plainly is, there's something irreducibly sweet about it, too.

SUMMER OF BLOOD: THE HEART OF THE MATTER

2013-06-17T00:46:00.000-05:00

1981 - I have said before that it was the best year for slasher movies, and I see no reason not to go right ahead and say it again. It was the year of Friday the 13th, Part 2, probably the best entry in that unmatchably important, though confessedly poor franchise; it was the year of Hell Night, a most uncommonly logical story for killing abnormally well-characterised young people; it was the year of The Burning, which I grow more certain every year is my absolute favorite slasher movie ever made. It is also the year of Halloween II, because if we wanted to have nice things, we'd have to be fans of a different artistically decrepit subgenre.

More to the point, since we are talking about Canadian horror in its many guises here, it is the year of My Bloody Valentine, which describes alongside The Burning the alpha and omega of the slasher movie. While it is all but indisputable that the Friday the 13th movies are the most archetypal '80s slashers, The Burning and My Bloody Valentine "add up" to a single F13 movie, with just about everything that goes into the formula found in one or the other (with one huge, key omission: neither of them has anything like a classic Final Girl or Final Girl sequence). The important difference that The Burning and My Bloody Valentine are both better than any height the F13 franchise ever reached; the final 15 minutes of Friday the 13th, Part 2 alone reach the level where The Burning and My Bloody Valentine spend nearly their entire running times.

For My Bloody Valentine, this is due to a number of factors (including an inordinately well-constructed story that actually permits its characters to behave like halfway intelligent people), but the most important, and almost the first one that shows up, is a sense of place matched by literally no other slasher film I have seen. Oh, sure, the various summer camp slashers sometimes do a fine enough job of capturing the flatness and claustrophobia of being in relatively wild North American forests, and there are fine examples of the '70s proto-slasher doing, as a '70s film will, a lovely job of documenting the physical reality of a space. But My Bloody Valentine is the only slasher I've seen that dabbles in what Werner Herzog so wonderfully called "the voodoo of location". Telling its story against the inextricable backdrop of a coal mining community, the film was shot entirely in the town of Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia, and the honest-to-God coal mine that provided the bulk of that town's economy.

There's simply no replacing what this does for the movie's atmosphere and sense of honesty - and if there's a word that you should never even flirt with attaching to a slasher movie, it's "honesty" - and the leveling effect this has on the contrived, generic scenario is nigh-indescribable; leastways, if I could describe, I almost would not want to, because it really must be seen. The grubby bar, the chintzy but lovingly maintained storefronts, the shrill cheerfulness of the mine's above-ground employee common area, and even just the old-fashioned industrial texture wafting off of every establishing shot: these are not things that you'll find in any "psycho killer in the woods" movie. Frankly, the fictional Valentine Bluffs of My Bloody Valentine is right up there with the Bodega Bay (playing itself) of The Birds and the Amity Island (played by Martha's Vineyard) of Jaws, situating the mechanics of a genre film in a blue-collar setting whose veracity is so comprehensive and profound that it has an invisible but omnipresent legitimising effect on the whole of the film: why yes, I am quite ready to believe that inexplicable bird attack/implausibly large shark/gimmicky killer dressed in a miner's suit. Look how humble and realistic the town is!

All that comes later. The film opens with a very different exploitation of its location, in an opening scene that sets the mood even if it takes a little bit of generosity to fit it into the later story logic. We start in the mine in Valentine Bluffs, at the end of a long corridor, and the camera is at an exceptionally acute angle. That's it; just a nice, simple canted angle. There's not, as I remember, another one for the rest of the movie. But the location and the music and the lighting (lighting the inside of the mine was a real problem for the filmmakers, who were constantly running the risk of massive, deadly explosions; the compromise was a lower-lighting situation than you'd be trained to expect from other cheesy '80s thrillers, and my God, does it ever work well) all conspire with that canted angle to put us ill at ease from the very first frame of the picture; and so it's not all that surprising, even without knowing that we've signed up for a slasher movie, when the opening scene finds a lady miner (we're later told that there are no lady miners) and her miner boyfriend trysting right their in the mind, except that the boyfriend turns out not to be, and quicker than you can say "Oh, you saw Friday the 13th, too", she's impaled on a pickaxe that comes right through the front of her body, emerging through a heart tattoo over her left breast, in what is either a cute touch of a tremendously cloying one, I have never quite decided.

Incidentally, before I go on, a word about gore: My Bloody Valentine was cut by some three minutes, nearly all of it trimming gore scenes (or removing material that made no sense without the context of gore) by a few seconds each time. It wasn't until 2009 that Lionsgate restored the material for home video, and that's the version I watched for this review (I have seen the cut film, but not for years); and I have to say, the violence effects, though not really out of control in the pornographic vileness depratment by '81 slasher standards, certainly does not betray what I am sure was a fairly low production budget, and are almost uniformly used to good horrifying effect rather than just freakish gross-out effect. It is a real frustration that almost all of the reinstated material looks so bad compared to the rest of the film, but it's better than nothing.

So, we've got a hell of a location, and satisfyingly queasy, disturbing violence; about time to dredge up the important holiday that falls on a traumatic anniversary, right? As we'll learn eventually, Valentine Bluffs suffered a pair of tragedies 20 years ago: on 14 February 1960, a mining accident caused when a pair of supervisors rushed through the closing procedures in hopes of getting to the town's big Valentine's Day dance (it being rather natural that Valentine's Day would be a big deal in a town of that name. The methane explosion trapped several miners in the dark for several days, and only one man, Harry Warden, was left alive when the rubble was finally cleared, having gone insane and survived by cannibalising his co-workers. He was hospitalised, but on 14 February, 1961, he escaped to kill the two men whose negligence caused the accident, tearing out their hearts with his bare hands in a gruesome celebration of the holiday.

In response, the city fathers agreed to ban all Valentine's Day celebrations forever after, but time heals all wounds, and in February, 1981, Mayor Hanniger (Larry Reynolds), and Police Chief Newby (Don Francks) have concurred that enough is enough, and assigned local business owner Mabel Osborne (Patricia Hamilton) to revive the Valentine's Day Dance with a level of zeal and civic pride never before seen. This despite receiving a very strong warning on Thursday, 12 February (which makes the next day...)* that they really should think about cancelling: the dead lady miner's heart, delivered to the mayor in a shiny candy box.

They don't cancel, not with the town's young folk so excited about the dance; and given that Valentine Bluffs is clearly a company town, with every able-bodied male we ever meet putting in his back-breaking day at Hanniger's mine, keeping the troops happy is a major priority. And with that, let's focus on the human interest story designed, in true slasher fashion, to make the expendable meat seem a little more real and likable: Hanniger's son, T.J. (Paul Kelman) has come back from trying to make it on the west coast (so... Vancouver?), doing what we never quite learn, though he failed at it. He was gone long enough for his girlfriend Sarah (Lori Hallier) to hook up with his friend Axel (Neil Affleck), and that sets up a little triangle which would already make T.J.'s homecoming a real pisser even without his brand new job working as a cog in his dad's mine, the perfect dream-crushing profession for a young man who couldn't hack it doing pursuing his goals.

These three twentysomethings are at least slightly better-etched than the normal slasher fodder - less so their friends, except for the wonderful Hollis (Keith Knight) and his "I was a 25-year-old Wilford Brimley" mustache - but i'faith, delicious character psychology is not something that My Bloody Valentine really wants to waste time on. It is content merely to avoid the slasher pitfall of having thoroughly inhumane characters; nothing happens that's truly unbelievable, with people generally behaving in a way that feels like how someone, not someone hugely intelligent, would act in that situation. For example, after a particularly horrible death, Mayor Hanniger actually cancels the dance, one of the most responsible acts ever taken by a civic authority in a horror movie. And in turn, the disappointed young adult males decide to peacock for their young adult ladyfriends by holding their own illicit party at the mine, not understanding why this is exactly the worst possible decision, because they have no knowledge that there's a killer on the loose. Even the single most baffling action taken by anyone in the whole film - three professional miners agreeing to take their girlfriends hundreds of feet underground for a sightseeing tour - can be at least comprehended, if not entirely defended, on the grounds that young men will e'er be guided more by their genitals than their sense, when the two are in conflict.

But this is all the film aims for: plausible human behavior, not rich, personable human behavior. It's still ultimately a mechanism for massacring young people (and a few less-young), not really a storytelling device.

And yet: a pretty great mechanism. Director George Mihalka may or may not have much talent to speak of - I've seen nothing else in his television-dominated career, of which this was just his second project - but for this one film, he was in pretty immaculate control of how to stage scenes for maximum impact, and while My Bloody Valentine can't break through the barrier that no slasher film after <i>Halloween
could ever truly be scary, it does attain the heights of being one of the small handful of slashers that are pretty effective thrillers, punching up the adrenaline through cheap, but effective tricks (in contrast with the hundreds of films that use cheap tricks poorly). It's easy to outthink - the film is so dogged in setting up a escaped, vengeance-filled Harry Warden as the killer that only a truly innocent genre virgin could actually suppose he's really responsible - and ultimately a tacky, somewhat tasteless excercise in rousing the viewer through nasty violence, because how could any slasher not be? But it never feels crass or hacky, instead feeling very much like the work of filmmakers who wanted to make something worth watching, maybe even more than they wanted to make something profitable. With the slasher formula having been firmly established even as early as 1981, My Bloody Valentine doesn't reinvent the wheel, and the usual caveats about the genre apply; but oh! - that every wheel was so flawlessly rounded to the smallest magnification! - that they all rolled so smoothly and confidently and gracefully!

Body Count: 11, a good strong number that even manages to surpass any Friday the 13th picture made up to that time. Perhaps a good reason to revise that old "the higher the body count, the worse the film" rule for '80s slashers. I am not counting the five dead miners of 1960, for other than an arm, we do not see aught of them.

DAYS OF BLOGGING

2013-06-15T13:00:00.000-05:00

Here's a weird and perhaps overly-fussy milestone, but one that I liked too much to pass it by: as of this date, 15 June, 2013, I have been operating Antagony & Ecstasy for exactly one-quarter of my life. It's obviously become a bigger part of me than I'd ever intended at the start, and I want to thank all my readers, whether you comment or not, for being part of this community that has meant such a lot to me for such a long time. I look forward to many more years of this, and I hope you do too.

DISNEY SEQUELS: NOT JUST ONE MORE SILK IN DADDY'S CARAVAN

2013-06-15T01:28:00.001-05:00

Really, how is anybody supposed to cope with something titled Disney Princess Enchanted Tales: Follow Your Dreams? It sounds like the direct translation from the Japanese of an anime series that finds the Disney Princesses joining forces to fight their robot doppelgangers on a floating island in outer space. Or at least like Disney's long-forgotten attempt to break into East German children's entertainment.

What is actually is, is the first in an aborted attempt to create a new series of cheap-even-by-the-standards-of-cheapquels videos in which short stories about the various princesses from the Disney canon were paired according to some thematic overlap. It was, depending on which rumor you pick, the specific project that so appalled John Lasseter that, almost immediately after being appointed Chief Creative Officer over all animated products released by the Walt Disney Company, immediately halted any and all DisneyToon Studios sequel projects that weren't too far along to prevent (and for this reason we were spared Dumbo 2, Pinocchio 2, Chicken Fucking Little 2, among others), and arranging for DisneyToon President Sharon Morrill to be knocked down from her position, a move that at the time seemed like good damn artistic sense, but now has a somewhat unfortunate "Lasseter doesn't like women with creative authority" tang to it.

Anyway, this left the poor little orphan with its ghastly-ass title - DPETFYD? Now it just looks like a Latin alphabet transliteration of a Soviet farming bureau - and no other Enchanted Tales to teach all our little girlchildren largely useless moral lessons about how gosh-darn hard it is to go princessing all the time, no matter what the honey-voiced narrator (Susanne Blakeslee) promised at the end, even showing flashes of other Princess adventures as the book flipped shut.

Let us restore a bit of its dignity, and simply call it Follow Your Princess Dreams (a big of its dignity. Not all of it), and further point out that the lessons being taught are so very close to "follow your dreams" that I'm almost willing to let that title slide; but it's actually more like, "when you have been assigned a job and doing it well will prove your worth to the authoritarian male who controls all aspects of your life, do that job as best you can, and never give up or take the easy route". But hey, the princesses are under the impression that this is empowering, so let's not spoil things for them.

The film is a blessedly quick 56 minutes, and when we take out the end credits, that leaves almost exactly 25 minutes for each of the stories, which being with freakish expediency once you hit the DVD "play" button, the dialogue of the movie proper literally overlapping with the DVD menu dashing out of sight. The first of these episode-length stories finds one of just two un-sequeled princess (as of 2007) finally getting a story to expand her narrative universe: hooray, it's Princess Aurora (Erin Torpey)! ...Aurora, you know. Aurora. The princess from Sleeping Beauty. Yes, yes, I know that she was only, like, the seventh-most important character in her own movie, and even at 25 minutes, a sequel would be better-served by sticking around the festering remains of Maleficent-Dragon's corpse than pretending that anybody gives a tenth of a fuck about a character whose first and last lines of dialogue are separated by something like a quarter of an hour of screentime, and whose introductory feature is famously "the gorgeous but chilly one that nobody liked best as a child". But she's so eager to tell us her story, with her insistent, serial killer grin, rampaging right on through the fourth wall.

Also, not that I want to be a lookist about a cartoon character, but seriously? Girl's got herself one hell of a lazy eye.

(Also, she looks better in blue, but that battle was lost long before this DVD).

Aurora's story, "Keys to the Kingdom" (named for a terrible, terrible song by Amy Powers and Russ DeSalvo, in which she brags about being in charge of everything with a peasant chorus line), is about that one time that her father, King Stefan (Corey Burton), left her in charge of the kingdom while he and his kingly buddy King Hubert (Jeff Bennett, who voiced a truly massive number of characters in this double-feature) and Aurora's... husband? fiancé? Prince Phillip (Roger Craig Smith) are all attending the kings' conference. Conference, cross my heart, is the actual word that's used. So the princess, aided by an impenetrably nervous Duke (Bennett), gets to carving her way through a stack of paperwork, but when her attempts to solve all the problems of the kingdom's commoners starts to bog down, she decides that it wouldn't hurt to just use a little of the magic wand that the good fairy Merriweather (Tress MacNeille, who sounds like she's doing a John Fiedler impression) left when Aurora sent the three fairies on a mission. Because sure, send the fairies packing. All the better to make it absolutely clear that this is the Aurora Show.

The magic backfires, of course, but Aurora is able to quickly right things before anybody ends up finding her out and getting disappointed, because there must not be even a smidgen of dramatic conflict in either of these stories.

Oh, I give "Keys to the Kingdom" shit, but you know what's the absolute best part of Follow Your Princess Dreams? Too short to get bored. Almost nothing "happens" in the Aurora short, and most of what does happen doesn't have any kind of ramifications, but honestly, 25 minutes isn't even enough to get over the novelty of seeing the famously sharp, angular designs from one of Disney's most stylistically aggressive movies being copied by an animation studio trained to exactly mimic the much softer, rounder style of Disney's 1990s output. It never stops being a little bit horrifying, but for the same reason, it never settles in, and the sequence as a whole zips by quite readily. Even with the weird decision to make the realisation of princess life consist primarily of bureaucratic chores, which itself is still more weird than boring.

Not quite as good, where "good" means "so weird that it has its own magnetism": "More than a Peacock Princess", also named for a Powers/DeSalvo song, that's at least a bit more flavorful, given its troubling Orientalist orchestration. "Peacock Princess", you see, is the story of Princess Jasmine (Linda Larkin) from Aladdin, who unlike Aurora, had been extensively depicted in the 15 years separating her first feature from Follow Your Princess Dreams: the first-ever Disney DTV sequel, The Return of Jafar, as well as another sequel and a sequel TV series. You might suppose that this means that there are really no groundbreaking Jasmine stories left to tell, and in this, you would be almost entirely correct. The groundbreaking part, I guess, is that "Peacock Princess" decides that there's no functional difference between Abbasid Baghdad and 21st Century Europe's tourism monarchies, and opens up by showing how Jasmine is getting sick and tired of waving from parades, opening shops, and presenting camels at trade shows. Which, okay, anachronistic humor, but that was never the Aladdin franchise's shtick, it was the Genie's shtick specifically (who, like Aladdin, makes not so much as a cameo appearance). I'd expect this from a Hercules spin-off, not an Aladdin one. Also: camel trade shows? So princess are now cheap models in addition to heads of state?

The point, anyway, is that Jasmine wants more responsibility, so her father, the Sultan (Bennett) puts her in charge of the local school. This proves so daunting that she nearly bails after one day, but wakes up the next morning to realise the value of responsibility, launching herself into sticking with it - hey, just like Princess Aurora! - and going back to the task that she knows needs doing-

-rescuing her father's prize stallion from the desert, after Abu the monkey accidentally lets him free.

It's not that monstrous a shift; the schoolroom comes back at the end. But there's a disconnect between the story that "Peacock Princess" shapes itself to tell and the one that it actually tells, and it never seems like the actual narrative is that much more interesting than the one that's abandoned (in fact, I'd be inclined to suppose that it's exactly the opposite).

Still, the bit where Jasmine must find and tame a pissed-off horse is distinctly more incident-filled and exciting than Aurora's inability to phrase simple instructions for a magic wand, and it also ends with the awesome moment that visually implies that Jasmine and the horse are about to make beautiful love.

It's also, honestly, not that bad looking: the animation is incredibly cheap, a rude awakening after the general rise in quality of the DisneyToon Studios films, but there's nothing as eye-watering as "Keys to the Kingdom", and for the first time in all of these damn Aladdin sequels, Jasmine actually looks halfway decent, and not like a Lovecraftian death's head. As this Disney sequels marathon draws to an end, might I remind you of where we began?

Jasmine looks downright acceptable here, compared to that nightmare, even when she's meant to look bad, like when she's wearing the terrifying green outfit that gives the story its title.

By no means is Follow Your Princess Dreams representative of animation at its best, or even at its relatively tolerable - not even for DisneyToon. It's still strangely video-quality; for the first time in a couple of years or more, I get the definite impression that none of it was animated on the ones, a cost-saving measure that makes things look stiffer that DisneyToon had largely moved away from as its films were more and more successful.

But still, I cannot entirely hate this dreadful little cast-off. It's too short; it's too ebulliently random; and it might very well be the reason that the Disney sequels were finally strangled to death. How can you not feel warmly inclined towards that?

I was totally not kidding about the DVD menus.

THAT'S GREAT, IT STARTS WITH AN EARTHQUAKE

2013-06-14T01:46:00.001-05:00

There is literally zero reason for This Is the End to work as well as it does, and I say this as someone who has entire run out of anything except for sullen tolerance for tat least three members of its six-man lead ensemble. For anybody that can hear the name "James Franco" and not involuntarily shudder, I imagine that the film must seem even better.

For This Is the End is a powerfully self-indulgent tale of bros being bros: it stars Franco, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, and Craig Robinson (who, Pineapple Express notwithstanding, doesn't feel like part of the same crew as the rest, does he? Or am I just that unobservant?) as themselves, or at least parodic extensions and/or subversions of the popular impression of their persona. That on top of a mindblowing list of cameos from several of Modern Hip Comedy's best and brightest names, also playing themselves (Michael Cera's game turn as a coke fiend and general sex-addicted asshole being easily the best), in a film that, unbelievably, is at its very best when it consists of nothing but wildly specific in-jokes that, in all probability, nobody outside of the cast and crew understands down to the smallest detail. As for the places that it starts to be about the story it tells with these meta-performances of each actors' personae, well...

This Is the End never improves over its opening 10 minutes, which finds Baruchel arriving in his much-hated Los Angeles to spend some time with good old buddy Rogen, whereupon they both end up at a party at Franco's ludicrously fancy new house. Having never been terribly fond of Baruchel (though also having not gotten as deeply tired of him as I have been with Rogen, Franco, and Hill), I was not prepared for how damn good he could be in a well-appointed straight man role; he's basically the film's protagonist, and insofar as the first act's litany of excited self-reference and random name-dropping manages to work at all, it's because Baruchel makes for such a solid point of contact between the viewer and the world; we are, to a certain degree, watching the party through his eyes, and the dubious feelings he has about all the nonsense spinning around him are thus allowed to buffer the viewer from the inside baseball that might otherwise be totally intolerable and narcissistic (not that narcissism can possibly be entirely banished from a movie like this, but it's surprisingly mitigated, and there are even some genuinely nasty barbs made at Rogen and Franco's expense, though not really anybody else's).

Written by Rogen and longtime friend and writing partner Evan Goldberg - the pair of them also making their directorial debut, to uncertain effect - This Is the End relies on a lot of the exact same humor that tends to crop up in their other work, and the output of the Judd Apatow's Friends and Freaks & Geeks Colleagues filmmaking consortium generally (though Apatow's name shows up nowhere in the credits): lots of low-controversy drug humor, references to '80s and '90s pop culture, an all-consuming fascination with male genitalia. Even in the very best part of the movie, this is the bulk of what's happening, and there's only just enough character-driven observational humor to keep it afloat, if you're not the sort of person who can tolerate pot and dick jokes in more than tiny doses (and if you actively enjoy them: rock out. This Is the End was made for you). Even so, the character material is peculiarly effective: the sense of unspoken fear between Baruchel and Rogen that they don't know how to be friends anymore is even better than the same theme being played out in the Rogen/Goldberg script for Superbad, and it gives the film a solidity that serves it well as it careens through its somewhat weird plot.

That plot being: the Biblical Apocalypse. At a certain point, the party is interrupted by the End Times (the Rapture, in which all truly Christlike people are bodily removed to be with God, skips over each and every one of the partygoers), and the rest of the film consists of the only six survivors (briefly joined by Emma Watson, as herself, in survivalist mode) trying to survive until whatever help comes that's going to. There's some insightful stuff about celebrities' life in a bubble; there's even some decent end of the world humor. But the longer the film goes on - at 107 minutes, it's plainly incorrect to call it a "long" film, but it still feels awfully padded - the more it begins to wander, losing sight of anything that's even putatively comic in favor of driving its plot forward.

Weirdly, it's only once the film shifts from "let's make jokes about ourselves and people we've worked with!" to "let's make an action comedy about Revelation!" that it starts to be really self-indulgent, though only intermittently. Actually, it's only anything intermittently. Some of it is really funny, some of it is not, some of it goes from being funny to not through sheer wearying length (I am chiefly thinking of a conversation about ejaculate that goes on for what feels like 20 minutes longer than it has to). There's a downright clever parody of The Exorcist, and there are moments that honestly don't even feel like they're trying to be gags. If there's a constant, is that the film as a whole begins to ever so slowly deflate, and though some of the best moments come in the back half, the film plainly ends in a far more strained, uninspired place than it began (the last scene is just plain awful). Also, the mileage that can be gotten from "moderately famous comic actors playing themselves" ceases to pay dividends around the 40-minute mark, because really, how many ways can you make the same "James Franco is a prima donna, Jonah Hill is actually a delightful teddy bear?" joke.

God bless Rogen and Goldberg for setting up a fun time for themselves and their buddies, and for making it breezy enough that it's not very hard to enjoy it for what it is (it's always seemed that they make movies they'd like to have seen as teenagers), though I'll confess myself absolutely mystified that there are apparently people who love it. It's stretched out and there frankly aren't enough jokes in it. Nonetheless, it has fun, if hardly revolutionary things to say about the way movie actors live, and the visual effects are infinitely better than they had any particular reason to be. Always nice to have your Apocalypse look convincing.

7/10

TIM AT TFE: BULL DURHAM

2013-06-13T22:10:00.002-05:00

My column this week: an appreciation of Bull Durham, greatest of all baseball pictures and top-notch romantic comedy, on the eve of its 25th anniversary. Which seems like an impossible number, but time waits for no Kevin Costner vehicle.

PURGEATORY

2013-06-13T01:22:00.001-05:00

There is one thing worse than a generally bad movie, and that is a bad comedy; because you can laugh at a bad sci-fi action picture, or a bad historical drama, or whatever, but a bad comedy, by definition, isn't funny. And now I find that there's something even worse than bad comedy, which is bad satire. Because the violent home invasion thriller The Purge, whatever else it might be, is hella eager to be a satire, and this is a huge problem. Not because I don't think that violent genre pictures can't be satire; they can be great satire, as RoboCop and Death Race 2000 prove. No, it's a problem because The Purge is just dreadful. Totally, unceasingly awful in all respects, both related to its intelligence as regards its social commentary, which is minimal, and to its mechanical function as a horror-thriller, which might even be worse: it's easy to fuck up satire, but it really oughtn't be quite this easy to fuck up something as bog-standard as a home invasion thriller quite this thoroughly.

A lot of that has to do with The Purge's inordinately high concept, which is much too specific and complex to be dealt with as ineffectually as it is here. The notion is that in the future, America comes to the brink of almost total, irrevocable economic collapse, and to combat this, a group of elected politicians, called in later years "The New Founding Fathers", instituted an annual event called the Purge, where for 12 consecutive hours, all crime is legal. By giving a chance for every American citizen to vent his or her anger and rage in a safely circumscribed period, crime has diappeared almost completely, and so has unemployment, currently relaxing at a static 1%. Already, we're in the red zone: how, exactly, does giving America a 12 hour span in which to loot, rape, and murder without consequence achieve these things? There are a lot of possible explanations: it makes employers try a lot harder, so they don't get killed by disgruntled ex-employees; enough people have been murdered to level off the the number of people relative to the possible number of jobs. How it's supposed to have almost completely eradicated crime, I can't even hypothesize, but the movie says something about psychic cleansing - sure, whatever. The point being, when a movie is based on a concept to the degree that The Purge is, the viewer shouldn't be obliged to launch into a chain of "what if?" scenarios. The film should indicate what's going on, particularly when the film is as invested in cultural commentary as this. You can't, after all, comment on a culture you've insufficiently defined.

Here's another big problem I found: the movie takes place in March of 2022. In footage of previous years' annual Purges (they're all videotaped, of course, which is so obviously a parody of our love of violent news and reality programming that the movie doesn't even bother to stress it), we see that one of them took place in 2018, so that gives us an earliest possible date for the first Purge. The New Founding Fathers were elected; that's definitely stated. And if their plan was active by March, 2018, they had to have been office following the 2016 elections, no later. So in three and a half years - let's be generous and say four and a half, they shot the movie a while ago -the movie is predicting a "quadruple-dip recession", which doesn't fit in even the most morbidly pessimistic economic analyst's predictions. It simply can't happen that fast! Three downturns in three years isn't a series of downturns, it's a straight-up depression, and that's clearly not what the movie wants to have us believe took place.

It's not very honorable to nitpick like that, but The Purge brings it upon itself. It is a movie about world-building; it wouldn't include all of those little tossed-off details if they weren't meant to help create the reality of the society the film depicts. So it had damn well better get those details exactly right, because double-checking the script's reality is, after a fashion, the most important thing the audience is there to do. And I didn't even bring up the film's indication of technical stagnation; other than some glasses that broadcast a video feed, the characters are all using suspiciously normal-looking phones and tablets.

Anyway, it's not like there's anything else better to do than nitpick. The Purge is dreadful: ill-paced, dull, predictable, and it seriously mismanages the thrills of the back half. The situation is this: James Sandin (Ethan Hawke) has gotten spectacularly rich, even more than he was to start, by selling Purge-proof security systems. When the big night comes, therefore, he and his family - wife Mary (Lena Headey), resentful daughter Zoey (Adelaide Kane), autistic-seeming son Charlie (Max Burkholder) - are all ready to cosy down in a home so insanely big that we never remotely get a handle on how it's all laid out. Or maybe that's just a sign that director James DeMonaco can't do his job. Hard to say. Once the home is on lockdown, with thick metal sheets covering all the windows and doors, Charlie sits and stares at the security monitors while the rest of the family putters around, being alienated from each other; he's thus the only one to see a wounded African-American man (Edwin Hodge) staggering down the street, asking for help, and so he makes the obviously dumb choice to open the gates long enough to let him inside, to escape from the gang hunting him.

Meanwhile, Zoey's boyfriend Henry (Rhys Wakefield) has snuck into the Sandin home, to "talk to" James about not being such a hard-ass about Zoey's dating life. Talk to him with a gun, the first of a number of twists the movie hides so inexpertly that it's hard to say whether we were meant to be surprised by it or not. Panicked, James shoots and kills Henry, which puts an even worse damper on the evening than having a wounded man skittering about, terrified.

And then, the plot finally decides to begin: the gang hunting the wounded man arrives at the Sandin house, and the very articulate young man leading them (Tony Oller, who I don't suppose was cast entirely because of his uncanny resemblance to Brady Corbet, of the American Funny Games, though it surely didn't hurt) informs the family that if they don't turn out the refuge, all the security systems in the world won't stop hell from raining down on them. Thus does a vague, meandering, deeply ineffective satire coalesce into a fast-paced, also deeply ineffective home invasion picture, in which nothing is intense and we are never terrified, at least in part because we don't like any of the characters.

The point of all this is obvious: so damn obvious. The Purge is a economic satire for people who found The Hunger Games maddeningly inscrutable. "DO YOU SEE HOW THE RICH VIEW THE POOR AS LITERAL ANIMALS TO BE ROUNDED UP AND SHOT?" screeches the film, loudly and repetitively, while only giving one single speaking role to a black person, that of "Nameless poor victim of the psychopath whose clothing literally references his Ivy League education". The metaphors could not be more obvious, drawn-out, or insulting to the viewer's intelligence. I'm even sympathetic to the message the film believes itself to be communicating, but there's nothing clever or effective about the way it's being presented here: outside of a sense that Society Is Unjust, the filmmakers have given no thought at all to the way things are, the way things are headed, or why any of it; it marries a juvenile understanding of politics to a juvenile love of violence, and harangues its way through, making up in screaming what it cannot achieve in sophistication.

If it were smart, I could forgive its failings as a thriller; if it were thrilling, I could forgive the lead-footed, obvious satire. As it is neither smart nor thrilling, I just hate the holy shit out of it, and while I admire the production design, and the way that the cast mostly does interesting things with what they've been given, I really hope I don't stumble across a more singularly misconceived film for the rest of 2013.

2/10

DISNEY SEQUELS: ALL BECAUSE I FIT A SHOE

2013-06-11T23:43:00.000-05:00

Call it Stockholm Syndrome, poor judgment brought on by lowered standards, or a boiling rage against all of Disney and a desire to see it burn to the ground. Whatever the reason, I was actually quite taken with Cinderella III: A Twist in Time. To save my very soul, I don't think I could say if it's for ironic reasons or not. None of which is necessarily all that shameful: A Twist in Time is generally regarded as one of the better DisneyToon Studios sequels, even as it came out in the twilight of their existence (released in February, 2007, it was the last such release prior to John Lasseter's official announcement that he was shuttering the DTV sequels program). The shameful part is that I honestly think I even like it better than Cinderella itself.* Not, Lord knows, because it is better, for it isn't. But it is considerably more fucked up; it is among the most fucked-up animated movies that Disney ever put its name to, in fact, and as some of us are inclined to respond a bit too positively to certain things mostly because they are so invested in their own weirdness that they don't even seem to register how weird they are, I think I kind of love A Twist in Time not for its animation (which is troublesome), its songs (which are insipid), or its story (which is utterly daft), but because of the incredibly vigorous shits it does not give about whether any of these things are working or not.

Completely disregarding the events (though not all of the characters) of Cinderella II: Dreams Come True - and this is an unmistakably good decision to have made - A Twist in Time opens on the first wedding anniversary of scullery maid-turned-princess Cinderella (Jennifer Hale) and her deeply uninteresting Prince Charming (Christopher Daniel Barnes), with Cinderella narrating about how excellent her life has been. To us, apparently, though it quickly becomes clear that her narration is diegetic, and at no point does anyone break the fourth wall in the whole movie. So perhaps she just walks around the castle all day every day prattling to nobody about how totally amazing her life is. God knows she's full of herself enough for that, based on the first 30 seconds of the movie in which she describes her life - in song! - as "perfectly perfect", and flashes the smuggest little grin you could imagine right at the camera, just to rub it in that she is that much better than we are.

And it's also within that 30 seconds that it becomes absolutely clear how very far we are from 1950. Hale, having at least pretended to do an Ilene Woods impression in Dreams Come True, has catapulted into "hey girl, it's the 21st Century" mode, chatting at us with a laughing, self-aware tone that she's willfully stolen from Paige O'Hara's Belle, of Beauty and the Beast. And it doesn't end there: the opening song, "Perfectly Perfect" (written, like all of the film's originals, by Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner) is an overt attempt to copy the "build a world through song" Broadway number that, in Disney, is exemplified by "Belle". And so it is that we learn just how nauseatingly happy Cinderella is, and so are her little mice friends Jaq (Rob Paulsen) and Gus (Corey Burton), and so is her fairy godmother (Russi Taylor). Not remotely happy are her step-sisters, Anastasia (Tress MacNeille) and Drizella (Taylor again), who can't stand having to do their own housework now, though it's not clear to me why they can't just hire a maid; it's not like having Cinderella serve in the household was a cost-saving measure, it was all about humiliation. Least happy of all is Cinderella's wicked stepmother, Lady Tremaine (Susanne Blakeslee), whose fury at knowing that the girl she hates more than all other beings put together - and since she is made out of pure hate, that's quite a lot - is in the palace has sat ill with her this past year.

All of it in song! A big ol' production number that hopes that by using music to blitz through the plot set-up, we'll be too wrapped up in the self-conscious artifice of the singing to stop and wonder just how apocalyptically stupid the fairy godmother must be, in order to drop her goddamn magic wand right in front of Anastasia, who has crept into the woods to watch Cinderella and the prince have their magical anniversary party. This doesn't work, mostly because the tune is grating and trite, and the lyrics are banal, with the tone of the whole song - the tone of the whole movie, really - set by the opening lines:

"What a perfectly perfect life
It's a fairy tale come true
I'm a princess and a wife"

You know, just in case you somehow haven't noticed the lessons that Disney wants to impress upon our daughters.

Having witnessed the secret of Cinderella's abrupt transformation from miserable, abused servant girl to prettiest girl at the ball, Anastasia does as a slovenly handmaiden to a domineering mother must, and hands the wand to Lady Tremaine. And here is where the movie becomes awesome. Apparently realising that the only thing keeping her from the very tip-top of the Disney Villain Leaderboards is that Maleficent, Ursula, and the Wicked Witch are all magic users, Tremaine steps into her birthright as Disney Villainess, and so does Frank Thomas's extraordinary triumph of animating a totally human character whose wickedness is of an entirely, horrifyingly relatable sort, turn into a ridiculous, over-the-top parody.

That sounds like I'm being judgmental, so let me walk that back: though obviously, the villainy here is of a monumentally different and lesser sort than in Cinderella, I kind of adore the new, magic-wielding Lady Tremaine. A Twist in Time is so damn eager to be every Disney movie other than Cinderella, it's kind of delightful, in fact, and the ludicrous injection of supervillain sorcery is a perfect fit for the movie this is, rather than the movie we might have expected it to be.

Case in point: Tremaine's plot is the most overworked, complicated thing it could possibly be. Instead of just, for example, turning Cinderella into stone and making the Prince fall in love with one of her daughters (and we know that it can do that; the fairy godmother herself is accidentally made a statue), she decides to go back a year and a couple of weeks, to the day that the Grand Duke (Paulsen again, not hiding his voice all that well) went door to door, trying the famous glass slipper on various women's feet. Instead of Cinderella arriving after her stepsisters have bombed out with her own spare slipper, Tremaine enlarges the first show to easily slide over Anastasia's grotesquely oversized feet.

So it is that the more tender-hearted of the stepsisters - a complete retcon from the original, but one consistent with the now-discarded Dreams Come True - ends up engaged to the prince, who is put under a bit of a spell anyway, once he realises that, faulty memory or not, she's certainly not the girl he danced with the night before. Only the three Tremaines have kept their memory from the original timeline, but Cinderella and the mice know that something has gone wildly wrong, and start to assemble the pieces.

I will not further belabor the plot, because it gets awfully repetitive, but I have to say this much: it never stops being fucking bizarre; the idea of a Cinderella sequel function as a Back to the Future spin-off was already quite enough to put us in one of the most peculiar Disney sequels this side of "all-dog country band", but A Twist in Time certainly does not rest on its laurels. It remains a strange, frequently inexplicable romp through concepts that have absolutely no place in the Cinderella universe, the most syrupy, pink ribbons 'n tea cakes-besotted of all the Disney Princess sub-franchises. Thank God for it, too: it represents what I would consider a positive step in the direction of self-awareness that the company would willingly apply one of its most valuable brand names to a film that includes images such as this one:

The bonkers anything-goes feel of the movie carries it a long, long way; it might not be an effective movie in its own right, and it's decidedly awful as a sequel to Cinderella, but it's as delightfully, memorably bent as all of its DisneyToon colleagues put together. It is, at a minimum, fun to watch; occasionally because it is clever, frequently because it is dumbfounding. But it's never, ever boring, and that is something rarely true of these sequels.

All of this is not quite the same as calling it "good", because it isn't necessarily. It has a lot of problems: the joylessly anodyne songs, for starters. The look of the thing is also really difficult to get one's head around, far worse than Dreams Come True. Basically, A Twist in Time finds Disney's '50s aesthetic mashed up with its '90s aesthetic, and no middle ground is ever struck between the two points. Some characters (Anastasia, Drizella, the mice) are left largely unchanged from their original character models, but given the sort of emotional expression uncharacteristic of such comic figures in a Silver Age Disney movie; others (Cinderella especially, Lady Tremaine less so) are more or less redesigned completely to take advantage of the different priorities of latter-day Disney animation. There's a lot of Ariel and, surprisingly, Esmeralda from Hunchback in our new Cinderella, and it makes her look ineffably weird, to anyone who has the original incarnation of the character memorised.

Nothing can even start to compare with the poor, deformed prince, who combines the worst of the bland original character model and the worst of the new, marginally less bland princes of the '90s; that he's voiced by the same man who played the especially tedious prince in The Little Mermaid only emphasises the connection. All of this collides in a monstrous failure of design and animation that looks like a nightmare of a walking, talking Ken doll.

There's still quite a lot of polish on the film's visuals, though, and for once, DisneyToon's insistence on oversaturated, poppy colors feels more or less in keeping with the world of the film. No longer a Mary Blairvian world of gentle Euro-inflected watercolors; A Twist in Time takes place in the physical embodiment of the Disney Princess franchise, all grand, glossy interiors and eye-searing lighting and bright, show colors.

Or maybe not that bright, not always. The film looks like a cartoon, I guess I mean to say, and not remotely "an animated feature", but it looks like a cartoon in a generally rewarding way. The film is, when all is said and done, basically a sugar rush: dizzy nonsense in the plot, totally un-nuanced imagery, flighty vocal performances that at no point take anything remotely seriously (except for, at times, MacNeille's Anastasia). It has a hell of a drive to it, though, and even if making Cinderella an action heroine, which this film does, makes no damn sense, its failure to make sense is arresting and joyful. Can't say that for nearly enough Disney sequels, now can we?

BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: UNEMPLOYMENT COMEDIES

2013-06-10T20:07:00.001-05:00

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: when it's not busy blowing Google, The Internship attempt to draw broad, crowd-pleasing laughs out of the very real suffering of the unemployed and underemployed in a down economy. This might seem tasteless on the surface (and The Internship certainly isn't looking to called tasteful), but it is part of a tradition stretching back to a much more debilitating economic collapse than our own.

The next time you get into a fight over what movie has the best opening credits - if you're like me, this happens at least four or five times a month - I want you to make sure to keep in mind My Man Godfrey, a film whose overarching theme contrasting the stylish, empty world of New York's high society of the 1930s with the weary life of the "forgotten men" of the Depression (the high-minded euphemism for "unemployed and homeless" at the time) is introduced even before a single character or plot point shows up. A simply terrific model suggesting an Art Deco/Impressionist hybrid of lights of Broadway flickers on and off with the name of the film crew, the actors, and so on, the camera panning across this incredibly inventive approach to listing the people who made the movie, before ending on a matte painting of a shantytown on the river; a dissolve elegantly brings us into the living, steaming version of that same shantytown, and it's here that we finally enter into one of the Depression's best movies about itself. For there were many, many comedies about the well-dressed, witty inhabitants of the upper crust in those years, all the better to escape the crushing reality of life; but barely any of them are as open in their admission that, beneath all the class and glamor, things really were bad all over, and that idolising the rich classes certainly wasn't helping matters.

All of which sounds awfully serious, so let me clarify right away: My Man Godfrey is a hilarious movie, as satisfying a screwball comedy as they ever made, with one of the best performances in the career of the legendary comic actress Carole Lombard (maybe even the best, give or take Twentieth Century). It's an emphatically grown-up movie from a time when film comedies anticipated a more sophisticated viewer, one who was invigorated by getting some uncomfortably insightful moral barbs in the course of a breezy romantic farce.

The barbs start first. In the riverfront dump where the action begins, we find a scruffy, bedraggled man named Godfrey (William Powell), one luckless man among many. His luck is about to change, for a pair of rich society girls have just arrived: the Bullock sisters, Cornelia (Gail Patrick) and Irene (Lombard). They're playing a scavenger hunt, in which the final object to find is a "forgotten man", and Cornelia haughtily offers Godfrey five dollars to be her trophy. This offends him at such a deep level that he offers instead to go with the much kinder - and much flightier - Irene, just to keep Cornelia from winning. Intoxicated by this first-eve victory over her sister, Irene spontaneously offers Godfrey a job as the Bullocks' butler, a position that has just vacated with the resignation of their old butler that morning.

And so begins an immensely quick-footed screwball comedy of manners, in which Godfrey obverses first with amusement and then with alarm the strange and dysfunctionally wacky Bullock household, overseen by the impressively airheaded Mrs. Angelica Bullock (Alice Brady), and paid for by the grumbling, irritable Alexander Bullock (Eugene Pallette). In 90 minutes, Godfrey becomes the object of Irene's affections, the source of Cornelia's wrath, and is outed as the fallen son of a rich family of his own, while trying to keep some measure of sanity and dignity in the face of an addle-headed clan so off-putting that the family maid Molly (Jean Dixon) is visibly impressed when Godfrey survives his first 20 minutes in the household.

All that being said, My Man Godfrey is light on plot and heavy on character-driven comedy, in which all of the principals play, more or less, the characters they always played in everything, and simply watching their comings and goings is in and of itself held to be amusing. One's ability to engage with the movie much at all is thus entirely a function of how much patience one has for '30s-style humor (though My Man Godfrey is such a top-tier example of the form, with all the actors at or near the top of their game, that it's exactly the sort of film that could make a fan of '30s comedy out of just about anybody). Alice Brady is at her idiotically antilogical, self-satisfied, flute-voiced Alice Bradiest; Eugene Pallette is at his most impatient, passively angry, gravel-voiced Eugene Pallettest; Mischa Auer, as a Russian pianist hanger-on of the family, as it is most floridly cartoon Russian Mischa Auerest.

And for all that I love those actors, they are none of them the best reason to watch My Man Godfrey (though any of those performances, or Patrick's flawlessly bitchy antagonist, would be a reason to suffer through a much worse movie). Powell and Lombard are the stars of the film in every regard, with Powell in particular giving a fascinating variation on his usual persona of the well-bred literate gent with the carefully veiled sarcasm, letting some true outrage into his portrayal of a downtrodden man offended to his soul by the ludicrous extravagance of the rich, a deep human emotion of a kind that Powell virtually never taps into in any of his glossier society pictures. In Lombard's case, it's the unimprovable execution of a '30s stock character that impresses, with the tremendously gifted comic chameleon taking the '30s favorite kind of screwball heroine, the one who might actually be dangerously insane, and run far closer to the edge of actual depravity, pushing Irene further into the alienating self-centered delight that even as great a performer as Katherine Hepburn took one step back from in even as great a film as Bringing Up Baby. More than any other screwball heroine, Irene Bullock is truly unstable, and having gone so far with her character, Lombard walks right back, making the character genuinely funny, and keeping her flirtiness firmly within an appealing, charming register, making this most dangerous of comic heroines also a singularly likable one. It's a tremendous comic performance, as inexhaustible as the best of the best: Hepburn in Holiday, Dunne in The Awful Truth, Stanwyck in The Lady Eve.

The other irreplaceable member of the creative team - besides writers Eric Hatch & Morrie Ryskind, who got the whole thing going - is director Gregory La Cava, one of the great "lost" directors of the '30s. Not every one of his films is equally successful; not everything he does in My Man Godfrey works completely (there are some deeply questionable blocking decisions in the early dialogue scenes). But what he does here to keep the comedy light and speedy - 90 minutes is a compact running time, less by 1936 standards than our own, but it still seems impossible to me that My Man Godfrey can possibly be even that long - and to mix the serious cultural comedy with the more generic "silly rich people" screwball comedy, is one-of-a-kind brilliant. There's a piercing, perfect touch that ranks La Cava's work in this film right up along with the best comedy direction that you could find in that period, which includes some of the best-directed comedies in the English language; it's thanks to him that My Man Godfrey is such a blast, and so effective in its high-minded criticism. That kind of delicacy wasn't any less rare in '36 than it is now, and the unflagging energy that La Cava brings to the scenes and draws out of his top notch cast leave this film at the top of the heap, a funny movie that's also a well-made film, and a message picture that hasn't lost an ounce of its thematic resonance even after all these decades.

SUMMER OF BLOOD: I KNOW WHAT YOU DID SIX SUMMERS AGO

2013-06-09T02:25:00.002-05:00

There is something irreducibly special about slasher films from the year 1980. It is the one totally innocent year of the genre: prior to that, there simply weren't enough of them for it to register as a distinct genre instead of just a narrative skeleton that a few scattered horror films had employed to largely good effect, and afterwards, all you have are Friday the 13th clones, each trying to be crasser and bloodier to scrape the most cash out of a low budget and undiscerning fanbase. That most 1980 slashers are not as good as most 1981 slashers is a quirk of history that should not take us away from the point that there's just a certain something about that year, in which so many people all decided at the same time, "hey, there might be money in this..."

After Friday the 13th itself, the best-known slasher film of 1980 is almost certainly Prom Night, which I take to be because its first two credited actors are Leslie Nielsen (who had just begun making the shift from strait-laced B-actor to parody specialist: Airplane! was his film immediately preceding this one) and Jamie Lee Curtis. Certainly, it is not because it is the best slasher film of 1980; it's not even the best Canadian-produced slasher starring Curtis from '80, an honor I would unhesitatingly bestow on Terror Train. Yet there is something unfathomable about Prom Night, something that has very little to do with quality, and more with some X-factor that it attains largely through circumstances utterly beyond its control or creation.

In many early slasher films, you see, there's a kind of tension between the extremely musty clichés that weren't clichéd yet, and jaw-dropping breaks from formula that weren't jaw-dropping then because there wasn't a formula to break from. That conflict might be more present in Prom Night than in any other slasher film I can name, which is confident and proud in presenting exactly the elements which would become the most overdone and annoying in the years to come, while also presenting in the most casual, unthinking way a narrative structure, and to a great degree characterisations that are just plain weird. Lose sight of the historical context, and it's just as easy to overrate it as to underrate it, though for totally opposite reasons.

Anyway, we should just get into it. Prom Night opens in summer, 1974, with three young siblings following some peers - "friends" would be an outrageous exaggeration - into an abandoned convent. Two of them turn back almost immediately, but 10-year-old Robin (Tammy Bourne) gets tangled up in a tag-like game called "The Killer Is Coming", whose rules seem to consist of four 11-year-olds getting together to gang up on the frightened kid, chanting "kill" at her and freaking her out so bad that she backs up through a window, falling to her death. The four horror-stricken bullies agree on the spot that they will never, ever tell anybody what happened, but they don't see that somebody was watching the whole thing.

Six years later, we arrive at the week of senior prom at Alexand Hamilton High, in the good old U.S. of A., where the cars all have Ontario license plates. Robin's elder sister, Kim (Curtis) has recovered from the trauma to become the most popular girl at school and the newly-elected Prom Queen, even making good friends with three of the guilt-ridden manslaughterers: the nervous, virginal Kelly (Mary Beth Rubens), pleasantly ditzy Jude (Joy Thompson), and Prom King, and Kim's new boyfriend, Nick McBride (Casey Stevens). This last relationship is the one that has thrown all the principals into a tizzy of petty high school melodrama, for the fourth secret-keeper, and the bitchy ringleader of them all back in '74, is Wendy (Anne-Marie Martin, under the name Eddie Benton), Nick's not-quite-ex, who is furious as hell at Kim, and pretty much everybody. Even as this pot boils over, we're well aware that the sexual jealousies of a bunch of 16-year-olds don't add up to a hill of beans: not when there's an unseen figure making threatening calls to the gang of four (Wendy instantly becomes my favorite by sarcastically shutting down what she thinks is an obscene call), cutting their faces out of a copy of the yearbook, and generally acting like a psycho killer in a movie where a cast of one-dimensional teenagers are slaughtered one at a time.

One of the first things that sets Prom Night apart is its ambition to be more than just cheap body count thriller, but a right proper mystery: for our delectation, it presents no fewer than five possibilities for the eventual killer. In the order that they're presented, we have Robin's dad, Mr. Hammond (Nielsen), whose shocked face and the heavy misery he carries around him makes him a prime target for vengeance, and whose role as principal of Hamilton gives him all the access he needs; better yet, the seasoned genre watcher will note that he's the film's biggest name (in '80, at least), the first-billed, and by the time the killing starts up, he's barely been in the movie for five minutes. There's also Robin's brother (it's not exactly clarified, but I think we're meant to infer that they were twins), Alex (Michael Tough), who has not recovered from his sister's death nearly as well as Kim, but has instead turned into a sad sack loner; Leonard Murch, a convicted sex offender who was apprehended by the police as the most obvious possible candidate for what was treated as a violent sex crime back in '74, and who has conveniently just escaped, undoubtedly nursing a grudge against the real perpetrators; Sykes (Robert Silverman), the school's new caretaker, a developmentally disabled man that several of the girls think they've caught peeping in the locker room; and Lou Farmer (David Mucci), the school's foremost delinquent, who pretty much hates all of the characters enough to cause them any harm at all, though the movie ends up finding that to be a lot of red herrings to juggle, and ends up making it pretty clear pretty early that Lou isn't the killer. Instead, he and Wendy team up to play some kind of awful prank on Kim: dousing her at prom with a bucket of blood drained from the bodies of her friends! No, not remotely, but in all the years of Carrie knock-offs, I'm a little disappointed that nobody ever saw fit to introduce that little frisson.

The other thing that serious separates Prom Night from very nearly every other movie that ever earned the description "slasher", is that the killer is unusually focused on his one goal: killing the people responsible for the death of Robin Hammond. Every other person who dies is collateral damage whose death is completely unavoidable: it's noteworthy that only one of the girls' dates is killed deliberately, with the other being allowed to leave before the murderer strikes. It is, and I am very concerned with using a phrase like this, psychologically grounded: the killer's actions make sense, at least they do if we concede that the killer is a crazy-ass loony toon with a definition of "making sense" that we are not all going to agree with. He's also particularly human: capable of being duped by some very obvious feints in the long, genuinely tense stalk sequence with Wendy (the only character to be stalked, and perhaps the only one clever enough to stave off the killer for so long: God help me, she might be a one-note bitch, but I do love Wendy), and no more physically resilient than you'd expect from the person he turns out to be. Given that elsewhere in 1980, Friday the 13th was trying to convince us that a middle-aged woman in a sweater was a nigh-invincible superman, this marks Prom Night out as being in the tradition of Cassavetes-like realism.

And then, there is one more thing, and it's here that we start to hedge our bets: Prom Night is unbelievably slow. Not even by the standards of our modern-day, fast-paced killathons, either; all of the seminal slashers and proto-slashers before it generally start to pick up around the halfway point. Halloween is rocking and rolling with its barely-seen Shape within the first third of the movie, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has already killed the majority of its cast by the two-thirds point, Black Christmas is one nice long boil of tension. Prom Night, now, is 89 minutes long. The third death in the movie, and the first that can reasonably be called a body count death, happens at minute sixty. And I wouldn't necessarily hold this against the movie - might even count it a strength, in fact, if those first 59 minutes were being used to good effect, deepening the characters, building up their world, pulling us into the film, all that jazz.

That's what the movie is doing, kind of. Honestly, I think that William Gray's script, from Robert Guza Jr's story, has a really fascinating character-driven slasher film in it, though it would require two things to get there: somewhat more focused directing, and massively better acting. Snip Jamie Lee Curtis out of the film (and she is absolutely, titanically wonderful: every bit as good as she is in Halloween in creating a likable, realistic, recognisable high school girl), and you have taken with every genuinely solid moment of dialogue delivery; some of the actors manage to cheat their way into seeming decent by being extremely well-cast according to their physical appearance for the part - Thompson especially - but just because somebody looks right for a character doesn't mean they're actually performing that character in any compelling way. Given that Prom Night stakes a lot on our feeling the society of Hamilton High as a real, living entity, the generally inhuman quality of everybody onscreen is a major problem.

Meanwhile, director Paul Lynch, ruining far too many well-blocked scenes by cloaking his sets in too much darkness, abetted by DP Robert New, doesn't make any attempt to keep things tight and tense as he's building us to that two-thirds release point: the only time he comes alive, visually, is during the prom itself, when we discover that Jamie Lee Curtis really wanted to be in a disco movie. I have no fucking clue what to make of this. It's a really well-filmed sequence, danced with more enthusiasm than skill, it is lovingly detailed and it has fuck-all to do with the fact that there's a psycho on the prowl, and it's a sterling momentum-killer at the worst possible moment to kill momentum.

Also, the music is really bad. Not just the disco music (though the original songs are hilariously awful: "Prom night! Everything is alright! Prom night! No more feelin' uptight!"), but even the Paul Zaza/Carl Zittrer score, which feel more like somebody hitting all the bass keys on their synthesizer at once, than actually composing music on it.

All that being said, the movie becomes completely amazing when the last third finally gets going, saving its only big gore scene for the last death, and instead relying on tense cat-and-mouse scenes and the very real incongruity of seeing all this carnage play out in the corridors of a school, back when schoolbound horror movies were incongruous. The film starts cross-cutting in interesting ways, and the sound mix is used in tremendously clever ways to situate the locations relative to each other; the actors' limitations are immaterial when all they're asked to do is scream and react. Honestly, if the film had manage to land the first 60 minutes, and the characters and setting were interesting in more than an abstract way, the last 30 minutes of Prom Night would rank among the best slasher sequences ever. As it is, there's simply no investment in it, no real interest in how this situation plays out, since only an unusually forgiving viewer will still care about the actual content of the movie by this point. Mechanically, it works; emotionally, it's a bit limited.

Even with all that, the film's still got one card up its sleeve: time capsule appeal. This is a movie that could only have been made in 1980: on the one hand there's the music, the hair, the clothes (Why did teen girls in the '80s dress like middle-aged businesswomen? Is there some sociological study explaining this?), and on the other the strange mis-emphasis relative to how slasher movies "ought" to work, the greater interest in plausibility, the unashamed use of dipshit plot contrivances that don't need to be coated in irony to go down. Like I said up top: a special movie. Not by any means a great one; only barely and inconsistently a good one. But I'm tremendously glad it exists, regardless.

Body Count: 8. Not all of those "count": one is off-screen, one is the movie-starting accident, and one is the killer, assuming the killer dies; the editing is a little murky, though the storytelling intent is clear.

THE MAGIC TOUCH

2013-06-08T01:10:00.000-05:00

Now You See Me opens with a wonderful gambit that could not possibly fit the movie any better: arrogant Chicago-based street magician J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg) asks a woman just off screen to pick a card as he flips extremely quickly through a deck. A moment later, he apologises for flipping through so fast and slows down a bit, offering to let her pick again, but the editing has already done its work: the first run through, a bit of post-production manipulation left a single card on for just enough frames that the film viewer is already thinking about it, and so, when Daniel inevitably reveals that exact card (in a big, zany way), the viewer, like the mark in the magic show, has been played by the most ancient sleight-of-hand tricks, and even if it's pretty obvious that the 7 of diamonds has been "forced" on us, the sheer magnitude of the film's glitzy chutzpah is utterly precious.

That's basically what the film is going to be for the rest of its running time: an exercise in constant misdirection, announcing itself loudly enough that, in honesty, it's not really hard to see the general shape of what's going on (though I will freely admit that I was tripped up by the details of the ending, having been willing enough to give into the ride that I stopped trying to get ahead of the movie early on, because where's the fun in that?), and certainly, any movie about magicians - magicians who rob banks, in particular - is so clearly going to have nothing but twists in its last 30 minutes that you can't help but be a little deflated by the reveals when they start happening. At least some of them are going to be predictable, even to a dreadfully inattentive viewer. But the enthusiasm and bouncy energy with which the film rockets through its plot, and the having-a-good-time performances of the entire cast, are enough to keep it peppy and fun despite (or, rather, because of) how utterly shallow and trivial it is.

Openly admitting its desire to be an illusion-themed Ocean's Eleven, Now You See Me opens with an unseen man in a hoodie gathering four talented but mostly unknown magicians together to show them - via anonymous hologram, no less - the plan for an amazing trick that will blow everybody's mind. These four are Daniel, drifting con artist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), Los Angeles-based violence specialist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), and Brooklynite grifter Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), and when we next see them in Las Vegas, headlining a major new show funded by insurance entrepreneur Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine), they're going as the Four Horsemen, and the ending of a terrific debut show involves the apparent theft by transporter of a bank in Paris.

This illusion brings them to the attention of both the FBI, in the form of the easily-bamboozled Agent Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo), and Interpol, in the form of magic enthusiast Agent Alma Dray (Mélanie Laurent). With the condescending help of professional magic debunker Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman), they perpetual end up just a few steps behind the Horsemen as they embark on a quick but intense tour of shows in New Orleans and New York to perform a modern-day Robin Hood act while showing off their talents in CGI-speckled but gleefully colorful and kinetic stage magic.

In other words, authentic the film really isn't. Presumably, many of the things we see could be achieved onstage, with enough money and technical know-how, but it's frequently very obvious that it isn't, and that's certainly a bit of a problem, though the drive of the movie isn't the tricks being depicted, but the agents' harried attempts, after-the-fact, to deconstruct them. And this, at least, doesn't require that those tricks be plausible in the moment.

Another thing the film isn't: ingenious. Some caper films (the aforementioned Ocean's Eleven leaps to mind) are so delightfully assembled that when the game has played itself out, you can't wait to get ride back in and watch all the mechanics slide together with the most graceful of ease, and this was not, I found, the case with Now You See Me: having figured out the way everything fits together, there's no hair-raising "aha!" moment, just a satisfaction that there are no film-breaking holes to speak of (other than a dippy penultimate scene), and that everything we saw served some deliberate purpose that's only clear in retrospect. But it doesn't have the giddy champagne sense of fun of an Ocean's picture, or The Sting, or Inside Man, and I will frankly confess that having seen it once, I can imagine no real need to ever see it again.

Inasmuch as rewatchability is a good, quick 'n dirty way to judge the general quality of a popcorn-type movie, this doesn't speak very highly of Now You See Me, of course; particularly since the notion of a good twist is that it re-frames the story in a way that makes it feel like revisiting is an absolute necessity. But a solid story isn't the be-all and end-all, and what the film does has is all kinds of razzle-dazzle, directed by Louis Leterrier with his customary speed-freak flying cameras and high-speed editing (though the massive crane shots and the quick cuts don't happen simultaneously, thank God), and it's the perfect kind of eye candy for an undemanding summer afternoon. It also has a fairly great, and distinctly over-qualified, cast (Caine, Freeman, and Ruffalo? One of them slumming is a regular annoyance, all three doing it at once is jaw-dropping), being thoroughly un-serious about anything they're doing, particularly Eisenberg with his strange little beard, and Freeman, who's having far too much fun being smug at everybody.

It's a cocktail, pretty-colored and bad for you and refreshing as far as it goes. It's true to its concept, making the idea of magic tricks seem spectacular and mystifying and too cool to make looking for the explanations really very rewarding. There are many better movies that are very similar, but this one's fun enough when you agree to meet it on its own level, and besides, Rififi isn't playing in movie theaters right now, anyway.

6/10

THE ONLY LIVING GIRL IN NEW YORK

2013-06-06T23:40:00.001-05:00

Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha is a love-letter to his girlfriend, indie darling Greta Gerwig, and in this respect it is easy to admire it: for Gerwig is a natural-born movie star, and though we've had evidence of that before, there hasn't yet been a film so carefully designed in so many details to showcase the actress's talent and visual magnetism. It is also a love-letter to the fumbling yearning of twentysomething creative class whites in New York City, and though it is plainly the case that different viewers will have a different response to this, and find a different balance between how much Gerwig's skill and charm offset or accentuate the culture being depicted, I an only report my own response. To wit, I spent the first third of the movie wishing I could set myself on fire, if that would make it end faster.

The quick 'n dirty version of the story: Frances (Gerwig) is living a perfectly satisfying life of bohemian poverty, working as apprentice to a contemporary dance company, and living with her all-time best friend, Sophie (Mickey Sumner), who is herself trying to break into publishing. Life couldn't be more pleasantly non-challenging for Frances, but then Sophie drops the bombshell: she's going to move in with her boyfriend, Patch (Patrick Heusinger), of whom Frances completely disapproves, and coming right on the heels of Frances's own relationship coming to an apparently overdue close, this leaves the 27-year-old adrift and alone. The movie charts her quest over the next several months to find a new social support group, find a place to live, and figure out what she's doing now that she's just about to the point where it's no longer charming to be absolutely non-committal about one's future plans. At a certain point, she returns home, and the movie starts to take on a much clearer shape, but it's still mostly loose and observational and as in-the-moment as its protagonist.

Some parts of this work, some do not, and about some I remain undecided, but this much is easy to say: the huge problem with Frances Ha is that it's about generally unlikable, self-indulgent people who conflate "choosing to borrow the smallest amount of money from their rich parents" with "being poor", while pursuing aggressively non-commercial artistic interests. This is not a new genre of film, having to some degree dominated "serious" American indie films in the last ten years or thereabouts (the prototypical film of the form, Funny Ha Ha, debuted in 2002 but wasn't widely seen until 2005), and Gerwig herself was first thrust to prominence as the title character in Hannah Takes the Stairs, directed by the artistically barren Joe Swanberg. Taken as an exemplar of the style, Frances Ha is a massive improvement on almost all of the films that used to be lumped together in the so-called "Mumblecore" movement: Baumbach knows where to position a camera to make the activity within it seem organic and lively, rather than pin it down like an amateur entomologist crushing a bug between two glass slides. When he and cinematographer Sam Levy film the whole thing in black-and-white, it is quite evident that they're doing it for particular reasons (to increase the abstract romanticism of the piece, chiefly; there's a hell of a lot of Manhattan in the film's visual DNA), and not just because it was done in a film they admire. When the film overtly cribs from the style and storytelling devices of the French New Wave, it's not out of some bland, "I like the New Wave" impulse, but because that's an extremely useful touchstone for a story about insular young people (it does, however, hurt the film that its best moment is an out-of-nowhere direct copy of a scene from the much better neo-New Wave film Mauvais sang).

So, what I'm saying isn't that the film doesn't work. I'm saying that it works, sometimes very well, in service to a story that had no reason to be told. The particular strata of humanity being explored here has been more fully documented in cinema, relative to its actual merits or points of interest, than any other culture of the 20th and 21st Centuries, and other than being well-made, Frances Ha adds virtually nothing to our collective understanding of New York hipsters that hasn't been gone over, and over, and over. It's agonising, in a certain way, because this isn't the first time that Baumbach has set his sights on post-collegiate drifters who'd rather live in their heads than deal with the world: his debut, Kicking and Screaming, addressed the exact same kind of young people, when Baumbach himself was in his mid-20s, and unlike Frances Ha, that film was sharply critical of its characters (though not as savage in its criticism as Baumbach's films would become later on). The Baumbach who is dating Gerwig is a mellower Baumbach, a nicer Baumbach, a Baumbach who can poke a bit of fun at his characters' pretensions, but refuses to pull the trigger on actually calling them out for it. At one point, Frances, the closest person in the film to legitimately being broke, is asked by another character if she understands that she's not really poor, a moment that I've been waiting for in any of these Mumblecore or Mumblecore-adjecent movies since they started, and no sooner than the question is raised, it evaporates away. Baumbach and Gerwig seem dimly aware that there's something fundamentally wrong with the navel-gazing cluelessness of the people they're putting onscreen, but not something definite enough to actually draw it out of the lowest level of subtext, and there really aren't any characters in the film's litany of ennui-soaked post-adolescents who drift in and out of Frances's life that aren't presented as basically likable, though their likability hinges entirely on the viewer's willingness to concede that yes, aspiring artists in Brooklyn probably are the most interesting possible stand-ins for their entire generation. The film's buzzy reception indicates that a great many viewers even believe that; privately, I hold something extremely close to the exact opposite of that viewpoint, and spending time among the uniformly unpleasant cast of Frances Ha was an endless frustration.

The one thing that manages to hoist the film over into being watchable - though by God, it is not by much - is Gerwig's perfectly amazing performance (that, and a Rohmer-ish structure in which each movement of the story is named for the address Frances then resides at). Frances might be a human being that I'd do anything to avoid meeting in real life, but as a movie character, given breath by Gerwig, she's nothing shy of fantastic: the actress's peerless comfort in her own skin and ability to plunge herself in the most awkward, self-unaware moments without feeling like she's using the moment as an acting exercise brings Frances to life like few movie characters, in both charming and sometimes intensely itchy ways. Impressively, the actress both problematises the script's somewhat reductive view of Frances - the performance is considerably more critical of the character than the writing or directing are - while also making the best argument for the appealing free-spirited elements that the writing keeps promising is there, but wouldn't necessarily land without an immeasurably appealing actress portraying her. Gerwig, beyond a doubt, is immeasurably appealing, and Frances Ha is tailor-made to showcase her gifts better than anything she's ever been in; I deeply wish that the actress and the character were situated in a scenario that had anything more interesting to do with her than show her off, but maybe next time.

6/10

THESE ARE THE VOYAGES: MY LIFE IS MEANINGLESS AS LONG AS YOU'RE STILL ALIVE

2013-06-06T02:17:00.000-05:00

Star Trek: Nemesis was built, more or less explicitly, to be the final story to feature the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, trumpeting its overbaked finale-ness in everything from the first scene (excluding a prologue) to the climactic death of a main character which, in best mainstream sci-fi tradition, is implied near the end to maybe be not quite so permanent as all that. It is big and imposing and self-consciously epic, designed to bid farewell to these characters in a moment of unbelievable, operatic grandeur. It also feels, unmistakably, like Paramount and everybody involved was trying to get through it as fast as possible, dumping the series in an alley to let the rats gnaw at the body. One cannot do better to suggest the esteem in which it was held than to quickly analyse its December, 2002, release date, while Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Die Another Day were still fresh and vital, and just one week before The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers dropped. Because if there are any franchises with absolutely no overlap in their natural audience, it's Star Trek and The Lord of the Rings.

Anyway, all this suggests to a certain degree Paramount's disinterest in doing much with Nemesis beside sweeping it under the rug, but the really galling thing is that even in its teeny window of opportunity, it was only the #2 film at the U.S. box office in its opening weekend, behind Maid in Manhattan. Thus, instead of giving the second generation of Star Trek adventurers a beautiful send-off, Nemesis buried them under a pile of rubble, in the process killing of the franchise almost completely (the perpetually under-performing TV series Enterprise was able to hang on a couple more years), rendering the very brand name toxic until J.J. Abrams came along in 2009 and made his Star Trek broadly successful largely by transforming it into Star Wars with different terminology.

I'm no fan of the Abrams film, either as a cinephile or a former Trekkie, but by God, Nemesis really is the kind of all-encompassing, soul-despairing bad that makes the idea of junking a 43-year continuity beloved with rare ferocity by its fans and starting entirely fresh seem entirely reasonable and judicious. There's almost nothing right with the whole damn movie, which is full of lead-footed fan service executed by a director who was avowedly not a fan, and a villain who couldn't be more obviously cobbled together out of executive notes. The nicest thing I can say about it is that, in two very key ways, it's a massive improvement over Star Trek: Insurrection, from four years prior (a gap that was, in and of itself, a major part of the reason that Nemesis ended up feeling like such a trivial footnote): the computer-generated visual effects are vastly improved, with only a few scattered shots that clearly show their age, and there's a stunning action setpiece, one of the all-time best space battles in any iteration of Star Trek, right alongside Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and one of the very few truly great space action sequences in the age of readily-available CGI. Starships flail around in all three dimensions; and in the indisputably coolest moment of space combat in all Star Trek, the Enterprise rams another vessel in lovingly-rendered metallic carnage. That's nestled alongside quite a few poor action sequences, mind you, but as ill-suited as the Next Generation cast was to anything resembling the swashbuckling norm of most sci-fi action films, one top-notch battle scene (running almost to 20 minutes!) is better than nothing. And happily, we have plenty of evidence for that nothing in the form of Insurrection and Star Trek: Generations.

Oh, and Jerry Goldsmith's score is pretty fine, with an interesting motivistic orchestration for the Romulans on synthesizer, rather than a specific musical theme. Not at all his best work in the franchise, but big enough to carry the action and sonically intriguing.

I really want to stress, though: that's everything the movie has to offer. And it comes after more than an hours of storytelling so dumb and hyperactive as to very nearly give Star Trek V: The Final Frontier a run for its money as the most ludicrous of all the series' big screen adventures. The prologue is fine, though a little bit inside-baseball: if you don't know who the Romulans are, prepare to be thoroughly confused. Anyway, it's only there to set the mood of resolutely, joy-starved darkness that will occupy the next two hours of the viewer's life (with literally not one single over gag, this is easily the least funny movie of all twelve: less funny even than the po-faced Star Trek: The Motion Picture), including what remains the most disturbing death sequence in the Star Trek universe.

After that, the film face-plants, and never entirely recovers, over a scene that serves absolutely no function other than to demonstrate how definitively this is meant to be the end of the line, in a wedding between William Riker (Jonathan Frakes) and Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis), crew heads of the U.S.S. Enterprise-E. It's meant to be all sorts of nice things: a moving character moment, a nice bit of closure for a storyline that the television series had largely abandoned by the middle of its seven-season run, a chance to gather together a bunch of characters we like (and also Wil Wheaton's despicable Wesley Crusher, reduced in the final cut to a non-speaking cameo) in one celebratory moment. Because given how grim the movie is going to turn, there's not going to be any better chance to celebrate.

All it really does, though, is lard the film up right at the start with a drawn-out sequence that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the narrative, and feels so pointedly insincere in its execution that any emotional attachment even the most devoted fanboy could feel to this moment must be severely strained (incidentally, it's the scene that caused this particular devoted fanboy to turn in his Trekkie card: "Wow, this is how we're starting?" I remember asking myself on that cold December night. "Fuck this"). Insincerity will remain a huge problem for the film: the script by John Logan (from a story he co-wrote with series guardian Rick Berman and co-star Brent Spiner) trades heavily on our pre-established investment in the characters (to an impressive degree, really, given Logan's complete lack of previous involvement with the franchise), while the direction by the top-notch action editor Stuart Baird - making the third and final film of rather anemic directorial career - betrays a constant, obvious confusion as to what is interesting about each character or why we like them: it's surely no accident that the film's few bright spots are when Baird can stop trying mash together people that he manifestly doesn't care about, and can instead do the same thing with starships.

When the plot actually kicks in (on the wings of a deeply frivolous cameo from Star Trek: Voyager's Kate Mulgrew), the film shifts into a mode of outright cliché from which it will never emerge. The Federation's greatest enemy has made overtures of peace, and only the great Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) can possibly carry off the mission with the necessary tact and caution. Only, it turns out that this is secretly a trap by a madman who wants to destroy Earth and free the Romulan slave-race called the Remans (there is no defensible excuse for that name), and now only the great Picard can possibly save humankind from a technobabble MacGuffin. I glossed over a lot in the middle that is pretty arbitrary and even more stupid, but since it is the core of the reason why Nemesis is neither good cinema nor good Star Trek, I shall now fill in the gap.

There's an A-plot and a B-plot, naturally enough revolving around Picard and Data (Brent Spiner), because the hard work done during the series run to flesh out five other characters had not as yet informed any of the TNG features; at least Nemesis manages to trump its three siblings by giving Riker, Troi, and Worf (Michael Dorn) anything at all to do, though Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton) is downgraded from Insurrection and Dr. Crusher (Gates McFadden) ends up going 0-for-4. And these A- and B-plots comment on each other, in a dumbfoundingly obvious way that Logan spells out in little words near the end, in case we're too stupid to breathe. Basically, both Picard and Data have to deal with doubles: in Data's case, because of an android found on a desert planet, quaintly named B-4, who looks precisely identical to him, but is much stupider; in Picard's case, because the Romulan government has been taken over by an enslaved clone of himself named Shinzon (Tom Hardy), who looks absolutely nothing like him except in the ears, and the bald head. Because, as a photograph makes clear, Picard already had a bald head as an adolescent.

The B-4 plot is just nonsensical padding, impossible to square with the series' established Data mythology but too trivial to care much about. The whole bit about Shinzon, though, is totally deranged: a freedom-fighting leader of an arbitrarily made-up race of space vampires (don't like the light, need blood to survive, look like Max Schreck in Nosferatu; the pieces are all there, though they're assembled confusingly, and not a damn interesting thing is done with the possibility) I'll almost buy, but the clone angle is transparently mechanical bullshit, there to give the movie's big star and only truly great actor something interesting to play (and sure enough, Stewart is the only member of the cast other than an overly-emotive Hardy who expresses anything other than a palpable desire to just finish up this movie and get on with the rest of their lives), and to provide a Wrath of Khan-like obsessed villain to make the action personal. Amazingly, the one-off villain with no actual personal history with Picard, a Frankenstein monster dredged out of the tritest sci-fi tropes possible, does not provide this personal touch.

The film is handsome, I guess - the cinematography by Jeffrey L. Kimball is much the most carefully-shaped in the four Next Generation movies, and the effects look pretty good. But it is stupid and tedious, briefly exciting for one glorious burst of action, and then pandering in a nominally beautiful character death that Baird undersells brutally, and the script undercuts by building in an obvious escape route. There's so little of actual merit here, and such a strong disrespect for the fans, who are clearly seen by the filmmakers as stupid little kittens eager to pounce at anything that resembles a major shift for the characters, no matter how cheap or contrived, that even the fact that it's the lowest-grossing film in the franchise doesn't feel like punishment enough.

Reviews in this series
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Wise, 1979)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Meyer, 1982)
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Nimoy, 1984)
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Nimoy, 1986)
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (Shatner, 1989)
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (Meyer, 1991)
Star Trek: Generations (Carson, 1994)
Star Trek: First Contact (Frakes, 1996)
Star Trek: Insurrection (Frakes, 1998)
Star Trek: Nemesis (Baird, 2002)
Star Trek (Abrams, 2009)
Star Trek Into Darkness (Abrams, 2013)

APOCALYPSE BLAH

2013-06-05T17:32:00.001-05:00

There's nothing respectable at all about beating up on a 14-year-old in print, and it is the inalienable right of Jaden Smith to be 14 years old, something that most of us were at some point. But this leaves us at something of an impasse, because Smith is the chief problem with After Earth, a movie that is unrelievedly terrible, but might very well have been simply mediocre with any other lead performance. It being impossible to really discuss everything that is horrible with the film without saying some very nasty things about the performer, and it being impossible to say nasty things about the performer without feeling like an asshole - even if one of the most privileged, wealthy adolescents in the history of mankind can probably stand up just fine to a few bullying bloggers - I've run smack into a wall.

After Earth, as ginned up by God knows how many script doctors from a story originating with the film's producer and co-star Will Smith, takes place an ill-expressed number of hundreds of years in the future, a millennium after humanity was forced to abandon our home planet by a thing, probably to do with environmental catastrophe. Exposition isn't a strong suit here, with the movie plunging us right into a staccato-edited montage of a spaceship crashing and a survivor being flung out into a field as Jaden monotonously reads some voiceover that sets the scene in the murkiest possible way: there are evil fear-smelling alien monsters called Ursa that the assembly of the opening suggests were part of the reason humanity fled, but then it's also the case that the Ursa have only been a problem for a couple of generations, and whatever, it doesn't matter. Earth is a ghastly wasteland, humanity lives on a far off-planet, and Kitai Raige (Smith fils) is the son and only surviving child of the war hero Cypher Raige (Smith père), whose daughter Senshi (Zoë Isabella Kravitz, seen as an inspiring memory) was killed by the Ursa about five years prior. The relationship between the elder and younger Raiges has been clipped and official ever since then, with the boy attempting to join the Ranger Corps commanded by his father in an effort to prove his independent masculinity and also win his father's love.

He fails to do any of these things, but his mother Faia (Sophie Okonedo, spectacularly wasted by a two-scene role in the first movie she's appeared in since 2008) leans upon her husband to take Kitai with on a routine mission, Cypher's last prior to retirement. Now, routine missions that happen right before retiring can only go spectacularly wrong, which is how the Kaiges end up being the only survivors of a crash-landing on a planet that proves to be the long-abandoned Earth, having been damaged in a freak asteroid storm. There is absolutely no part of this that suggests that the screenwriters - of whom only director M. Night Shyamalan and Gary Whitta receive credit - understand how big space is, even granting the need to tell a pulpy B-movie story. There's no reason for asteroids to be that close to a planet, or for Earth's solar system to be directly between the new human homeworld and their destination, or for space travel across the galaxy to take, seemingly a day trip, and no reason that the movie requires any of these things to be true in order to tell exactly the same story. But let's not start marking up the script with a red pen, or we'll never get to the movie's myriad other failings. Anyway, the remaining bulk of the film is a survival story: Cypher has been terribly wounded in the crash, and he needs Kitai to trek 100 kilometers to the other piece of their broken spaceship to launch a distress beacon. The two Raiges will be linked by a wrist communicator that will broadcast images of Kitai's trek, and which Cypher stresses must absolutely not be lost or damaged, to make sure we understand that it will be later on.

When the film gets to this stage of the plot, it honestly does improve enormously: the opening act is so dismal and leaden in its establishment of threadbare emotional stakes, crudely and confusingly building its world, and showcasing the very worst acting that either Smith will indulge in for the rest of the movie, so "improvement" is a relative concept. Rising up to the level of Shyamalan's last film, the rancid The Last Airbender would have qualified as "improving". But, in fact, After Earth ends becoming even better still than that, for it not only stops requiring Jaden Smith to express complicated emotions, it also allows Shyamalan to do just about the last thing that he's still capable of, putting the camera up in places to make a big, sprawling world of amazing sights seem indefinably menacing; it's probably his best film since The Village, in fact, which would be a really mean thing to say about anybody who wasn't the auteur behind Lady in the Water.

True, After Earth is never less than bone-stupid, even at is most visually inspired: most of Kitai's trek is something like Avatar on a budget, tromping through the strangeness of post-apocalyptic Earth and finding a mesmerising array of exotic species, a mere thousand years in the future; looking at the rate that speciation has happened in the last millennium, it seems rather dubious that entire new big cat and giant bird species would emerge so soon, but let's blame ecological tampering. It's even less likely that the continents would be as dramatically different as they're suggested to be during the end credits, but let's blame... nukes. The point being, After Earth fails completely to earn its title, presenting a fantasy world of Earth that only introduces logical objections that wouldn't arise if it was just a random alien world, while failing to present any post-apocalyptic ruined cities or signs of human habitation that would justify the Terran setting in the first place. Certainly, the only decent monster design is the Ursa that naturally shows up just in time for the climax, instead of providing a constant threat that the movie could use to build tension.

The empty spectacle here is thus even emptier than usual, though poor Shyamalan dodges most of the responsibility, I think: he leadenly and mechanically shifts out from one survivalist setpiece to the next, with little ingenuity but just enough skill that you can squint and see the remains of a solid popcorn director reduced to playing a good little director-for-hire. The chief failings are conceptual, and can be blamed mostly on Will Smith; and in charcterisation, and can also be blamed on Smith, who allegedly took the lead on directing his son, and is thus probably the reason for the awful Carib-Pacific accents that everybody has in the future! even as they are all still members of various modern-day ethnic races, and for the hellishly earnest, dusty, dead performances given by both himself and his son. They are miserable dour people, these Raiges (and seriously, Cypher Raige? Sounds like the villain in an '80s Van Damme movie), and though the film's overt plot is about overcoming your fear, Jaden doesn't have nearly the range to imply that fear is a thing he ever feels to begin with. The result is a bland adventure film spoiled on dreadful, unlikable characters, in a movie not nearly fun-bad enough to mock, or to get any sort of accidental pleasure out of whatsoever. It's a vanity project of the most pinched and mirthless sort, and very little can be imagined that's duller than that.

3/10

LA MISÈRE DE 1982

2013-06-05T02:18:00.003-05:00

First, the caveat that looms over the rest of this review like a symbolically-laden pair of candlesticks on the mantel: the 1982 film of Les misérables directed by Robert Hossein, from an adaptation he wrote with Alain Decaux, is an absolute bitch to find in an English-subtitled version. At least, I couldn't find one, after months of looking, and thus I was obliged to watch it in French, a language that I'm not as good with as I used to be. And I used to be far from fluent enough to follow every little turn of any movie that wasn't based on a novel I know by heart. So at a minimum, I am certain that I missed some subtleties, though this is by no means the talkiest of Les misérables films, and I am promised that its dialogue closely tracks to the language of the book.

This particular adaptation has the distinction of being the very first that was made in the wake of the musical by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg that has been the most visible iteration of Victor Hugo's 1862 novel by far in the interceding decades; it is even more distinct in that Hossein was also the director of the first French stage production of that musical, two years prior. Taken together, those facts clearly suggest that this film was consciously the "musical knock-off" movie version, going so far as to copy the distinctive typeface of the stage version, and includes a cameo appearance by the music Schönberg wrote for the song "Le faute à Voltaire", a verse already present in Hugo's book.

(It's familiar to English-speaking audiences as "Little People", and if I may drift rather badly off the point: anyone whose exposure is strictly to the English version of the show, I can forgive them for despising this number, as I have always done and continue to do. But the immensely superior quality of the French original is so profound as to beggar description).

If the musical was the excuse for this Les misérables, though, it doesn't otherwise cast its shadow over what is, for the most part, a pretty terrific adaptation of the book and damn solid movie in its own right, neither of which conditions necessarily apply to most cinematic tellings of the story. I'll admit that I don't know Robert Hossein from a hole in the ground - his career as an actor is considerably more impressive than his work behind the camera - but based on the evidence of this one film, he knew a thing or five about making a movie. This Les misérables easily threads both of the needles that challenge any and all adaptations of the book: capturing its literary conceit, dense plot, and symbolic representation of society without getting airless and self-involved (the flaw which damned the last French theatrical version before this, the Technirama epic from 1958); and navigating the torrid melodrama of 19th Century plotting without turning into something too ripe to survive the physical realism of cinema. Overall, this is an unexpected naturalistic adaptation, in fact, more concerned with depicting something like the actual textures and sounds of 1820s and 1830s France than most literary adaptations of any stripe, and if that naturalism isn't quite as invigorating visually as the Expressionist elements in the 1934 French or 1935 American versions, it's surely light-years better than the artificial staginess of most other adaptations. Hossein drops the ball a little bit, at key moments: the first assault on the student barricades is done in relentless slow-motion, a saccharine gesture to begin with, but even so, surely better-suited to the second assault; and the final scene, which is changed from Hugo to be even darker and more painful (unnecessarily so, I might add), and involves some indefensibly ridiculous touches of exactly the same melodrama that the rest of the three-hour film has comfortably dodged.

A few weak spots, even one as precariously located as that final scene, simply isn't enough to seriously challenge the effectiveness of a film where so much goes so right: the beautifully-lit rural towns in the first third, the efficient, silent-film approach to quickly demonstrating the degradation of prostitute Fantine (Evelyne Bouix), the terrific grain of the film stock that gives all of the urban settings a layer of tactile, almost documentary-like realism, without the showy artifice of documentary camerawork. The emotional tenor of all the scenes plays true, and the structure is at least as self-contained and satisfyingly dramatic as any version post-'34 that I can think of; especially in the early scenes, the flow works unusually well, skipping over holes in the narrative without leaving their absence feeling obvious, bookending the entire movie with a terrific pair of almost-matching lines (my French is at least good enough to translate "You are free" and "Now, you are free"), and including the best dramatisation of the coin stolen from le petit Gervais (Jacques Blal) as I have found.

It's also, across-the-board, the best-acted Les misérables I have ever seen, a pleasing change of pace from most versions, which pretty much stop caring about the rest of the characters as long as Jean Valjean, the venal crook turned tragic Christian hero and Javert, the mercilessly brittle police inspector turn out alright (or in the curious case of the 2012 musical, flipping that situation around: a generally terrific supporting cast standing behind a Javert who can't sing and a Valjean who's weirdly choosing not to). Hossein's film isn't flawless in the acting department: the seemingly insurmountable role of Cossette here claims Christiane Jean, who responds to the character's frivolous, 19th Century girly-girl qualities by doubling down on icy seriousness and coming across like she has no personality at all. But that's the only apparent weak link in a cast that goes to some hugely unconventional places, but sees all of them pay off: Jean Carmet's César-winning take on Thénardier as more of a shell-shocked victim of fate than a cruel and calculating operator is easily the most offbeat performance of that character I can name, and while it's not exactly what the book called for, it's fascinating from a dramatic standpoint; Bouix's Fantine is much less of an innocent martyr than the stock version of the character, much more of a terrified bird, trying and failing to be hopeful and happy.

The more conventional roles are equally strong: Franck David's Marius fleshes out the earnestness of his student revolutionary just fine, but also nails the prickly impatience that so many screen Mariuses prefer to leave out, the better to have an unsullied character, Candice Patou's Eponine is pathetic and grubby in ways that very few actresses through the years committed to, without seeming like a sad puppy, Louis Seigner's Bishop Myriel is easily the best one I've ever seen, a warm, grandfather of a character whose kindly behavior seems to glide right from his smiling face.

All that being said, the two standouts are the usual suspects: Michel Bouquet's Javert is a terrific mixture of the unconventional (soft features and a much older, wearier man than usual) and the well-executed standards (his barked-out speech, his iron-faced expressions), and the result is an atypically human Javert, or at least a more accessible, natural one. Best in show, as is often the case, goes to Jean Valjean: Lino Ventura, a frequent collaborator of Jean-Pierre Melville, whose performance is just shy of the great heights of Harry Baur in '34 and Jean Gabin in '58, but could not possibly be better for this version of the story, so much more grounded and earthy than theirs. The earliest scenes of a "respectable" Valjean, in his M Madeleine persona, are a little jarring: the craggy Ventura of the opening scenes is still too present in the refined gentleman he's posing as, and not in a way that the script entirely supports. But by the time the action arrives in Paris, any disconnect between actor and part has been erased: Ventura is mesmerising, a far sadder Valjean than I think I've ever seen, haunted by his sins even in his most joyful moments (unsurprisingly, this approach to the character pays off hugely in the scene where Valjean elects not to let the dimwitted Champmathieu take the fall for him).

All in all, it's a wonderfully consistent, coherent version of the story, held back only because Hossein's direction tends to be immaculately proficient rather than stylistically adventurous. But it's a singularly involving take on the material, finding an excellent mixture between fidelity to the source material and functioning as an independent entity, and bringing Hugo's social themes to life without playing at being a tearjerker. It's more alive and direct than any other Les misérables I can name, and surely an essential adaptation of the book if ever the last half-century has produced one.

FOUR-COLOR CINEMA

2013-06-04T19:15:00.000-05:00

This month's Team Top 10 11 at The Film Experience, perfectly (if accidentally) timed for the recent Cannes win of Blue Is the Warmest Color, is a list of the best comic book/comic strip adaptations ever filmed. As distinct from the best superhero movies, which means something a little bit different.

I was rather badly off-consensus with this one, though the final list is difficult to find fault with (outside of Ghost World, which I like less than just about everybody I've ever discussed it with). Please go check it out, and in the meanwhile, here's the ballot I submitted. You'll notice an absence of The Dark Knight; a lot of Batman and I wanted to put on the brakes somewhere, it's not my favorite of Nolan's trilogy, and whatever its merits as a movie, it's not nearly the best Batman picture as a comics adaptation.

1. Superman (1978)
2. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)
3. My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999)
4. When the Wind Blows (1986)
5. Batman Begins (2005)
6. Oldboy (2003) [on the TFE list]
7. Danger: Diabolik (1968)
8. Spider-Man (2002)
9. Dick Tracy (1990) [on the TFE list]
10. Persepolis (2007) [on the TFE list]

Just missed the cut (alphabetically):
Addams Family Values (1993)
Batman Returns (1992) [on the TFE list]
Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)
A History of Violence (2005) [on the TFE list]
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) [on the TFE list]

THESE ARE THE VOYAGES: THEY ALL SMELL THE SCENT OF DEATH ON THE FEDERATION

2013-06-04T15:54:00.001-05:00

In the month prior to the opening of 2009's Star Trek, I set myself to the task of re-watching all ten extant Star Trek features. Not to blog about them - a rare movie marathon that I didn't see fit to document for all time just to prove that I did it - but to refresh my memory after quite a few years without any Enterprise-based space adventures in my life. It went well for many films: some I loved, some I hated, all of them served to get me back into the peculiar rhythms of the Star Trek film franchise. Finally, I got to Star Trek: Insurrection, which I had not seen since its December, 1998 theatrical release, and recalling that I did not enjoy it, I sat down without much enthusiasm for the first eight or ten minutes. After waking up and discovering I was looking at the last 30 seconds of the movie, and had slept through the entire movie without even twitching, I decided to consider that a bullet well-dodged, didn't bother resuming it, and skipped Nemesis altogether. Sometimes, you shouldn't fight it when the universe sends you a message.

This story is useful because it fairly clearly demonstrates what I believe to be the most irreducible quality of Insurrection: it is boring. Typically, that's not a very useful word, being as it is so necessarily subjective, but the small-scale tediousness of the movie defines it it is the movie that deliberately attempts to strip out all of the bigness of the Star Trek movies and do something light and ultimately trivial. Every beat of the story is defined by being pointedly low-key in a way that sucks it of all dramatic tension. That is its most salient aspect: as The Voyage Home is the comic Star Trek movie, as The Undiscovered Country is the military thriller Star Trek, so Insurrection is the boring Star Trek.

You'll frequently run across the opinion that Insurrection is basically a two-part episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation produced on a feature budget and put in movie theaters, and that's giving unforgivably short shrift to the TV show. Some of the actual TNG two-parters include "Unification" (which brilliantly reintroduces Spock into the "present-day" universe), "Descent" (one of the best "artificial humanity" stories of many), and the much-beloved "The Best of Both Worlds", a ubiquitous fixture on "Best Star Trek Episodes Ever" list, and a better feature-length story than any of the 12 theatrically-released Star Trek features. So let's please not say that the problem with Insurrection is that it's like a two-part episode. The problem is that it's like a one-part episode that was more than doubled in length without having nearly enough drama to make that work.

In fact, it is like several specific one-part episodes, in which the crew of the Enterprise encounters a beatific, technophobic society, and pull out all the stops to protect that society's innocence. This is undoubtedly partially owing to the fact that the script was written by TNG showrunner Michael Piller, from a story he developed with Trek overseer Rick Berman, and Piller's instincts as a storyteller in all the Trek shows he contributed to were unflinchingly conservative. There exists an unpublished book, Fade Out, in which Pillar describes in some detail the series of compromises and stalled ideas that ended up going into the final script (I owe reader Smorb and Friends great thanks for pointing me in its direction), and in Piller's defense, the story he tells there makes it clear that a lighthearted, hang-out show version of a Star Trek movie was forced on him from different places (Patrick Stewart, with his shiny new producer credit, wanted something a bit less onerous for Picard to do this time around, for example). But that doesn't excuse the final result being so lazy: it is not a film that smacks of compromise, but a lack of inspiration.

In order to carry a 45-minute story, huffing and wheezing, over the 100-minute mark, there has to be some padding, and it involves the Enterprise-E hosting a diplomatic event to welcome a new culture into the Federation. Captain Picard (Stewart) is wildly unexcited by this, and he jumps at the chance to escape when a report crops up that his android science officer, Lt. Cmdr. Data (Brent Spiner) has malfunctioned while on loan to an observation mission. Lightly dusting off orders - foreshadowing! - to travel to the remote spatial anomaly nicknamed the Briar Patch, Picard and his crew find that Data has gone nuts while investigating a pre-technical race called the Ba'ku, a joint mission overseen by Starfleet Admiral Dougherty (Anthony Zerbe), and Ru'afo (F. Murray Abraham), of a race called the Son'a. Incidentally, you know how J.J. Abrams defended the title of Star Trek Into Darkness by proposing that colons in titles represent everything non-fans resent about the Trek franchise? I would like to argue that meaningless apostrophes in the middle of words are much worse.

Let's skip ahead a bit: the Son'a and the Federation have teamed up to move the Ba'ku off-planet, in order for the Son'a to extract a type of radiation from the Ba'ku planet's rings that will leave the planet uninhabitable, but can be used to regenerate cells. It's the Fountain of Youth, basically, with the Ba'ku having all lived in peace for 300 years, not only not aging, but all aging backwards until they settle in somewhere around their late-'30s in appearance. Data suffered his shutdown as a result of learning this, and furious by the outright immorality of the act, Picard and his crew, all of them enjoying the effects of being restored to youth and health, agree to fight the Federation to save it from itself. To stage an insurrection, if you will, and I hope you will, because I won't (in his book, Piller admits that Regeneration was the subtitle everybody wanted, but Star Trek: Generations was still too recent).

There's a problem that the film doesn't come close to surviving, and not matter what else goes wrong, that was going to kill it: this isn't a big enough conflict for a feature. Sure, fighting the greedy bad guys and saving a population of 600 beautiful agrarian people was the meat and potatoes of The Next Generation, but movies aren't TV shows, and if a conflict is good enough for a 45-minute character-driven episode, that's all the evidence you need that it's not enough for a 103-minute film, character-driven or not. It's the same reason that The X-Files: I Want to Believe was such a wet fart of a movie, ten years later: if you want to justify bringing these character back to life on the scale of a movie screen, it had damn well better be for something bigger than the show could contain. And this was the exact opposite of the philosophy that went into the making of the film, which went along the lines of, "We've pushed these characters into such extreme places in Generations and First Contact, let's just give them a chance to be themselves now". It's not clear to me who's supposed to get off on that: the general audience who has no idea who these people are? The fans who could just as easily watch a few episodes of the show that, in 1998, was still easy to find in reruns? The Star Trek films get a lot of grief for the number of times that they put the planet Earth in danger from some giant alien force, but at least that's something you can easily grasp as high stakes. Insurrection's tale of 600 people whose culture is tied to a planet isn't nothing (like a lot of Piller-driven Trek, it's an overt metaphor for the treatment of Native Americans by the United States), but it's also pretty meek and indifferently-expressed.

That's the overarching problem; the little problem is that the movie is written like an episode of the show, and not even a good one, like "The Best of Both Worlds" or "The Inner Light" (which it superficially resembles). It's one of the cheesy ones, with far too much technobabble (easily the greatest weakness of The Next Generation compared to other incarnations of the franchise) that glosses over plot points and action, and ill-structured scenes that eschew the great film rule of "start after the scene begins, and end before it stops": the beginning of scenes are uncommonly likely to be one person walking up to another with something on their mind, and the endings typically involve two people making a decision and then standing there, waiting to pull it off in the space of a cut. Insurrection is the shortest of all 12 Star Trek movies, but it's almost certainly the slowest-moving, talkiest, and most stagily-paced outside of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and it was being done there on purpose.

Pinioned by its story, there's probably no chance that Insurrection could have ever been as entertaining as First Contact, or even Generations, but the fact that it's not really trying to be doesn't help. The film adopts exactly one flavor of broad humor, based in subverting our expectations of character rather than building out of them (except for a small number of Data scenes): most of what makes this second-most-comic of all Trek features ostensibly funny is not watching characters we like react to situations (as in the most-comic, The Voyage Home), but in lightly mocking them, especially poor Worf (Michael Dorn), who is present almost solely to be the brunt of jokes about Klingon acne, or warriors singing along to Gilbert and Sullivan (I'll confess, his discomfort at singing is very much the joke that works best for me in the whole movie). The film even know it: where First Contact made some slightly contrived excuse to get Worf off of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and into the plot of the movie, the writing here basically mounts the argument, "There's definitely a reason, but who the fuck cares what it is?" Because Trekkies are known to be people willing to let the details slide by.

In fairness, the comedy isn't that awful, though it's not even as funny as the comic relief bits in the genuinely good Trek movies, and there's so much more of it. But Insurrection, as a whole, is not very much fun to watch: Jonathan Frakes, directing for the second time, doesn't have anything nearly as interesting to work on as the lurches towards horror in First Contact, and the film's limited writing tends to exacerbate his TV-trained directorial skill, making all the emotional moments seem hollow and insincere. Moreover, while most of the regulars knew their characters well enough to go on autopilot (and in the case of Frakes himself and Gates McFadden, autopilot is exactly what it feels like), the new actors are all dismally let down by their director: Abraham's bad guy is snappish and petty, without in any way rounding out his character's tragic, obsessive back story, and Donny Murphy plays her love interest character as all breathy, zen-like statements that could be as easily delivered by a wooden post as a human being.

The film is further let down by some truly godawful CGI, the first time in Trek history that there were absolutely no motion-control model shots of space ships; Industrial Light & Magic was unavailable at the time, and the production had to rely on a cluster of effects houses led by Blue Sky Studios, the same one that became the kind of shitty animation house behind kind of shitty movies including the Ice Age series. I do not recall how it looked in 1998, but in 2013, it's perfect evidence for the case that CGI doesn't age nearly as well as practical effects: Insurrection looks worse than any of the eight films preceding it.

Just about the only element of the whole that actually works on the level of a popcorn movie, or even on the level of a somewhat pedantic Next Generation story, is Jerry Goldsmith's really quite excellent score, racing up and down and sideways trying to convince us that what we're watching is exciting, thrilling, interesting, meaningful. It is not any of those things: it is a bunch of characters being marginally utilised in a story that everybody involved could have carried off in their sleep, it is as low-stakes as a movie in which that many space ships explode could possibly be, and the advances in television production quality in things like Battlestar Galactica mean that saying that looks like TV is an insult to TV. It's too bland and milquetoast to be truly "bad" Star Trek - no space hippies, no fake God aliens - but of 12 features, this is absolutely the one I enjoy watching, or thinking about, the least.

Reviews in this series
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Wise, 1979)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Meyer, 1982)
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Nimoy, 1984)
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Nimoy, 1986)
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (Shatner, 1989)
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (Meyer, 1991)
Star Trek: Generations (Carson, 1994)
Star Trek: First Contact (Frakes, 1996)
Star Trek: Insurrection (Frakes, 1998)
Star Trek: Nemesis (Baird, 2002)
Star Trek (Abrams, 2009)
Star Trek Into Darkness (Abrams, 2013)

MIDDLE-AGED LOVERS

2013-06-03T21:29:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, artistic genius sneaks up on you before it clocks you upside the head, and that is exactly what happened to me about one-third of the way through Before Midnight. For whatever reason, the third installment of the every-nine-years study of evolving romantic feelings and the different ways that men and women view the world beginning in 1995 with Before Sunrise and continued in 2004 with Before Sunset, was frustrating me. It felt off, it wasn't what I wanted, it felt like the three collaborators responsible for making the first two movies such masterpieces had lost the thread a little bit. And what occurred to me, at the one-third mark, was that I wasn't frustrated with the movie, I was frustrated with the characters. Moreover, I wasn't frustrated with the characters in the way that you find movie characters to be a bit over-written and artificial, I was frustrated with them in the way that one is frustrated by a friend who is transparently making the wrong decisions and you've got absolutely no right to tell them you think they're on the wrong track.

That is to say, I wasn't upset with the story that writer-director Richard Linklater and writers-actors Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke were telling, or the way they were telling it, I was upset at the place that Celine and Jesse's lives had ended up, as if they were real flesh and blood people capable of getting themselves in a rut that isn't necessarily going in a pleasant direction. And that is the best short version I can come up with for why the three Before... movies are such terrific masterworks of psychological cinema. They made me genuinely aggrieved for how things were going for two people that I love. Two people that, I want to reiterate, don't exist.

The films in this series have a tendency to get the viewer's incredibly personal investment like that, based on the widespread adoration for the first two that has accompanied pretty much every casual mention of the new film since it was shot on the sly last autumn. At this point, we've been watching these two grow and mature for 18 years - and I won't swear that Before Midnight is useless to you if you haven't seen and loved Sunrise and Sunset, but I can't imagine why anybody would decide to come into this one blind - and it's just so easy to watch the shifting elements of their relationship and see in it the actual evolution of people just like you or I. American cinema has only rarely produced a pair of entangled lovers as flawlessly lived-in and carefully observed, implying years and years of backstory in the way a single line - a single word! - is delivered.

Midnight is all that and more, and now I really am going to have to start talking about specific details if I want to get anywhere with this review, so if anybody out there is as sensitive to being spoiled in any degree as I was beforehand, it's time to go away now.

The first thing we learn is that Jesse did in fact miss that plane out of Paris, for he is introduced saying goodbye to his 14-year-old son Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick, giving an excitingly casual performance for a child actor), sending the boy back home to his mother, who lives in Chicago and nurses an apocalyptic grudge against her ex-husband and the woman who stole him away. Meanwhile, Jesse and Celine - who are not married, but have been happily living together the last nine years - and their 7-year-old twin daughters (Jennifer Prior & Charlotte Prior) are wrapping up their summer vacation in the Peloponnese islands of southern Greece, where they've been staying with a writer (Walter Lassally) who liked Jesse's three novels (the first two of which were based directly on his experiences with Celine), and wanted to invite the couple to join his group of intellectual vacationers. Slightly less than half of the movie follows as Celine and Jesse dine and chat with the rest of the party; the remainder puts us securely back in the territory explored by the earlier films, as the couple walks and talks about deep things in awesome long takes, finally arriving in the hotel room that was given to them as a going-away present, and here they descend into a marathon-length fight that... ah, well, there's no point in trying to explain how it plays out, when an entire act of the film depicts it in nauseating real-time.

The disappointing part is that, alack, Midnight isn't as good as Sunrise or Sunset. And of course, you'd have to be pretty spoiled as a cinephile to demand that it absolutely must be. Still, there's a shagginess here that is on the one hand, an absolute perfect fit for the new state of the characters: this is the first time we're watching them having spent a lot of off-screen time together in the past, so there's no more "getting to know you" material, and the comfort that 41-year-olds feel with their place in life is reflected in the new film's significantly less hurried pace. The downside is that, even more than the first two films' explosions of philosophic monologuing, there's quite a lot of... dare I say, pointless material? Not "a lot", that's a grisly exaggeration. There is one scene that, try as I might, I can't make it seem like it serves any purpose, in which Jesse and the other men of the party discuss his new idea for a novel about perceptual psychology at great enough length that I'm pretty sure most viewers would be able to write the damn thing for themselves. There's another scene that needed some trimming, badly: a great long dinner scene in which four couples of four different ages hash out theories of what a healthy relationship should function like, and while the free flow of dialogue and the passionate energy that all of the actors involved bring to their performance are electrifying, it takes only a little bit of time before we figure out that the other three couples are symbolic extensions of Jesse and Celine, and the whole thing gets to be just a bit too schematic for words (that said, the final beat of the scene, delivered by Xenia Kalogeropoulou in the role of Aged Wisdom, could absolutely no be improved upon).

But you know what, a whole lot of messiness could happen before it started to chip away that the titanic excellence of the film's back half, where Delpy and Hawke get to return to the rhythm that they've perfected thrice over, deepening their characters and finding new and even more interesting ways to play them (Delpy in particular inhabits the role so fully at such an elemental physical level that it blows her terrific previous turns with the character totally out of the water). The easygoing flirtation of two people who know each other well, passive-aggressive sniping, bracing sexuality - Delpy has a topless scene that is, simply put, the most mature and necessary film nudity that has come along in literally years, exploring the way that people live in their bodies in a way that American-made movies try hard not to do - and a screaming match in which two people use deep-seated knowledge of exactly what the other is thinking to say the most hurtful possible things.

It is a masterpiece of a fight. We can see it coming for the whole movie, built up out of the little attacks that made this viewer cringe in embarrassment and discomfort, the barbs that pick up steam as the movie goes on. And when it arrives, it is the most raw, and unadorned and truthful cinematic marital spat since Ingmar Bergman threw Liv Ullman and Erland Josephson at one another in Scenes from a Marriage. The perfect flow of the arguments, the role that each partner decides to stake out - Celine will be Passionately Self-Righteous, Jesse will be Smugly Cool - the moments where you can see in the actors' faces the characters' decision of how much to twist the knife: it is savagery, and while I will not say where the film ends, it manages to feel exactly right for how two people who don't really want to split up would deal with the fallout from such a point-of-no-return battle, it gives plenty of space for 2022's Before Teatime to expand in at least a few different possible directions, and it has a final line very nearly as perfect as "I know" from Sunset.

There are little problems, little points where it feels like the film got away from Linklater a bit: the film is definitely more weighted towards Jesse's point of view than the previous movies, making Celine - who is clearly being presented with more depth and complexity than 99% of the female characters in English-language cinema these days - something of the Inscrutable, Emotional Female that the film would have been much better off avoiding. And though I love where the final scene arrives, I don't quite by that it would have arrived there the way we see.

But there are only quibbles to have with a movie that is as emotionally rich and revelatory as it gets, a movie that examines with profound insight the ways that long-term relationships are made up of compromise and the ability to tolerate the rough patches that come in between the golden-hour romance of a breathless Parisian afternoon. The actors are as comfortable in these parts as any actors ever could be (I don't get how Hawke can be so great in these movies and so... iffy, in everything else), the glowing photography of Greece is drop-dead gorgeous, and the claustrophobically intimate scale of the drama is as instantly involving as it ever was in the previous movies. The accumulation of tiny flaws is enough to make this my least-favorite of the three movies, but that was a ridiculous bar to clear anyway, and damn me if this didn't come close.

9/10

JUNE 2013 MOVIE PREVIEW

2013-06-03T11:00:00.000-05:00

This is quickly turning into an exciting, unpredictable summer: somewhat because of the films that are more and less interesting than you'd suppose, and especially because the box office is behaving like it had a massive stroke and is throwing out successes and failures in random, even arbitrary ways. That's not exactly something we should have to care about as cinephiles, but as somebody who wants to be a fan of big popcorn movies but very often finds them to be too buffed and test-marketed to be at all interesting or unique, I consider anything that forces to studios to concede that they don't actually know as much about creating simplistic mainstream fare as they like to pretend to be an absolute good. More random personal projects, fewer franchise entries, please.

And having said that, the two wide releases I'm looking forward to this month are franchise entries. But then, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

7.6.2013

In case you were wondering: neither of those movies - emphatically comes in this traditional dead zone of a release weekend, though if I were forced to pick, I'd say that The Purge, with a strange but unique sci-fi/horror premise is going to be objectively better, and more up my own alley. Because The Internship, in which Google product placement money pays for Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn to recite jokes that might have been socially relevant as recently as five years ago, doesn't like like any kind of competition whatsoever.

12.6.2013

Speaking of things not up my alley: This Is the End is notable primarily for how many people in the Seth Rogen-Evan Goldberg sphere of influence appear as fictional versions of themselves. Given that the total number of people in the ensemble that I'm still excited to watch doing anything at all doesn't add up to a full integer, I have to confess myself wholly out of the movie's target audience or even the audience adjacent to it, and move on.

14.6.2013

I am not dumb. I swear it. But I am failing, with increasing desperation, to keep myself from getting excited about Man of Steel, the new Superman movie, with the absolute no-two-ways-about it best ads and trailers of any comic book movie for a couple of years or more (the posters have almost uniformly sucked; that's helped keep the edge of). The presence of an untrustworthy actor as the iconic central figure, and even more the fact of Zack Snyder's directing the project - you'll perhaps recall that this blog is a vigorously and redoubtably anti-Snyder zone - should be bigger problems than Amy Adams as Lois Lane and Kevin Costner as Jonathan Kent are pluses; yet they are not. Increasingly, I find myself giving up and assuming that I'll totally love the shit out of it, so watch this space for a thoroughly disappointed blogger the following Monday.

21.6.2013

Zombie movies are getting over-exposed; zombie action movies really never worked in the first place. I usually trust Brad Pitt, but no, World War Z does not feel like a film of any presumptive merit.

But the other wide release: ay me. Cue to usual hand-wringing about how Pixar ain't what it used to be, and Prequels, why are they making prequels now, and The trailers are just so bland, don't you think? The fact will remain that Pixar is making Monsters University, and that theoretically means that sight unseen, Monsters University has a better shot at being the best wide release film of the summer than anything else. Even now, they still have the benefit of the doubt from me - that's all there is to it.

28.6.2013

The Heat certainly should be good. Melissa McCarthy has a good sense of comedy, so does director Paul Feig, and Sandra Bullock is at her best when she's being the most silly. But I cannot persuade myself that anything that has been thus far shown from The Heat is going to be good; it looks like a totally generic cop comedy, with the strait-laced prig and the loudmouth wreck, and the blind of swapping out genders is not enough to make this seem any less paint-by-numbers.

Meanwhile, Roland Emmerich continues his multi-decade quest to do terrible things to the White House in movies, with White House Down. Emmerich is as reliable a so-bad-it's-good blockbuster director as we've got right now, and while I'm not expecting 2012-level inanity, I feel like Emmerich and Channing Tatum is a pairing of filmmaker and star that I can ironically support with maximum enthusiasm.

BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: NOTHING UP MY SLEEVE

2013-06-03T00:57:00.001-05:00

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: combining two things that go together pretty well, all things considered Now You See Me combines the showy world of magicians with the twisty world of the con artist, These two discrete forms of professional liars have been paired many times throughout cinema history, but the best iteration I have seen takes us as far from glossy summertime fare as it is possible to go.

The Magician (a far safer and blander title than the Swedish original, Ansiktet, "The Face") is something of a forgotten Ingmar Bergman film, or at least an overlooked one. Coming out in 1958, just a year after the career-making one-two punch of The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries will do that to a film, preventing it from developing the insta-reputation that accrued to many of the director's A-list films in the '60s and '70s. It's also a weird outlier given the direction the famously dour auteur's career headed in the wake of Wild Strawberries, into searing dramas about unhappy people not believing in God and waiting on their own death: there's a strain of blowsy humor running through the whole picture, and it's bookended by scenes that avowedly traffic in horror film imagery, though it doesn't entirely follow that they can therefore be described as "horror".

It is still, in its way, a movie about the loss of faith, though that theme is explored in a completely different way than the director's celebrated trilogy on that subject beginning with 1961's Through a Glass Darkly, and the faith being shattered isn't even centered around religion (unless it be metaphorically). In fact, the second-tier crisis of faith is suffered by a resolutely irritable man of science who is thrown, at least briefly, by the possibility that there are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in his philosophy. But the greater crisis is that undergone by the magician of the English title (and it's probably his face that the Swedish title refers to), Albert Emanuel Vogler (Max von Sydow), a conjurer driven to muteness from some unspecified sense of psychic weariness,* traveling around Europe in the mid-18th Century (near the end of the movie, it's specified to be 1846), touring with his magnetisk hälsoteater, "magnetic health theater", which appears to be something of a hypnotism show. Vogler, which I believe to be the first character to boast that highly significant and frequently repeated Bergman surname (most famously attached to fellow traumatic mute Elisabeth Vogler of Persona), is typically read as being a largely autobiographical figure, in which the film and theater director explores and to some degree apologises for the truth inherent to both of his beloved artforms, which is that they are complete bald-faced lies.

This is something that many artistically inclined filmmakers have confronted throughout the history of the medium, though usually with recourse to the idea that the outrageous fiction of cinema is in service to a greater emotional truth, or just by being playful and frivolous about it. Neither of these approaches apply to The Magician, which is playful and frivolous only by the standard of Bergman's other movies. Taken by itself, there's a great deal of brutality in the way that Vogler's anxiety and depression at the thought that he really is the cheap charlatan his enemies accuse him of being is depicted without being analysed in any cathartic way. None of this, by the way, is spelled out in the script; it's mostly communicated by recourse to close-up shots of von Sydow's face (the title again! Why the hell did the English-language distributors call this The Magician, anyway?) with its look of unmitigated sorrow.

What separates The Magician from many films - particularly those of, say, Jean-Luc Godard, who made a career out of calling attention to the inherent artifice of narrative cinema - is that Bergman isn't remotely interested in exploring the fact of the lies that dramatic art tells, but the impact of those lies on the teller and the viewer. What's most fascinaiting about it is the way that it implicates its own audience, in a roundabout way, by demonstrating that in order to appreciate the art being presented (e.g. Vogler's magic show), the audience has to elect to believe in it. Hence, Vogler's assistant Aman (Ingrid Thulin), plainly a woman from the first frame when we see him/her, but nobody onscreen seems to realise that until somebody walks in on her in a state of undress. Hence an otherwise totally unnecessary narrative parenthesis, where for a solid 20 or 30 minutes smack in the middle of the drama, all of the principals are kept offscreen in favor a random B-plot. Here, we see Vogler's aides Tubal (Åke Fridell) and Simson (Lars Ekberg) flirting with two servants of the town leader, Sara (Bibi Andersson) and Sofia (Sif Ruud), and for a long time it seems absolutely trivial, until the shape begins to emerge of a story in which Simson uses a completely fanciful love potion to seduce Sara, trying to trick her into believing his cock and bull story and not entirely noticing that by playing along with him, she's actually in charge of the situation (Andersson, a Bergman regular, gives possibly the film's most sophisticated and delicate performance, even more impressive because it's situated in broad, bawdy comedy, rather than the more complicated and showy dramatic A-plot). The argument being that if we are to get anything meaningful out of art, be it Vogler's sideshow or Bergman's ascetic investigation of the same, it's because we've agreed to give ourselves up for it: we are playing the slutty maid to the film's horny coachman, and if it is able to use its fiction to move us, that's only because we've agreed to treat the fiction as real for the purposes of getting on with it.

This isn't the only way that film makes this argument: there is, for example, the way that it opens in a tremendously atmospheric, otherworldly place of horror, except is nonsensical and not scary; generically, it has only the value we agree that it has (the later horror sequence near the film's end has a totally different meaning, and I'll get there shortly. Of course, Bergman and the second-best cinematographer he frequently collaborated with, Gunnar Fischer, do such a good job of crafting the haunted glen feeling of the movie's early night sequences that buying into the idea that it's horrifying is fairly easy.

The argument isn't just about appreciating art, though, it's about using knowing fiction as a way to survive life. The primary conflict in The Magician is between the self-doubting liar Vogler and Dr. Vergerus (Gunnar Björnstrand), the local minister of public health who is keenly anxious to prove that Vogler's antics are harmful trickery. Vergerus is also an intense, dedicated atheist, and the film's excellent climax consists of Vogler playing a tremendously convincing trick on him, designed solely to unsettle his certainty that nothing exists which cannot be rationally explained. It's for this reason that the final horror sequence functions so differently than the first: Vergerus is our analogue, for where we stand coolly and intellectually removed from the material, so does he, until the sequence where Bergman/Vogler uses all his skill to thoroughly unnerve Vergerus in a horror scene that is much deeper than the spooky woods of the opening, using deep black underlit images and confounding imagery to make us just as thrown by the sudden shift into the uncanny as the doubting doctor is.

The film ends, mostly, with Vergerus asserting his superiority once again, but we don't quite believe it; The Magician has successfully made its claim that we can know something to be false but still find it effective at moving us, even if we want to pretend otherwise (which the film encourages with its tremendously fake last scene, in which everything ends much too happily and cleanly, though the ironic final shot - or, more particularly, the ironic sound mix accompanying the final shot - makes it clear that the movie doesn't buy it any more than we do). Vogler's art is meaningful because people want to believe in magic; Bergman's art is meaningful because people want to believe in aesthetic transcendence. And, if we place the film within the context of Bergman's deconstruction of religion at this time in his career, belief in the supernatural (a Christian God or otherwise) might be believing a lie, but it's a lie that gives a shape and support to our life. There's an ambivalence that underpins everything in the film: its uncertain switch from genre to genre, its presentation of character as fully-formed personalities who nonetheless frequently lack stable identities (Vogler's obviously fake beard, making him look uncommonly like the Jesus Christ that von Sydow would play seven years later in The Greatest Story Ever Told, is particularly important in this context), its self-consciously artificial plot. And this ambivalence exactly maps onto the religious uncertainty of a post-war society of semi-intellectuals who wanted to believe in a traditional God that they were fairly certain did not exist. For so effectively creating a parable for that development, The Magician can only count as tremendously important Bergman, even it it doesn't have the instant cachet of his more famous and direct movies.

SUMMER OF BLOOD: VACATION, MEANT TO BE SPENT ALONE

2013-06-02T01:54:00.000-05:00

The operating theory that we'll be sticking with for the foreseeable future is that Canadian horror films, taken as a whole, demonstrate a certain maturity and honesty about character psychology that's mostly absent from their U.S. counterparts, taken as a whole. That might not apply to each and every movie made on either side of the 49th parallel, but it's a good rule of thumb to explain in a succinct way why e.g. Black Christmas is better than e.g. Silent Night, Deadly Night. It's also a theory which can be defended with an unusually strong case study in Death Weekend, a 1976 production perhaps better-known under the subtler but also more derivative title The House by the Lake. For Death Weekend, in no small part, wanted a little bit of that sweet Last House on the Left action for itself, as so many movies did in the mid-'70s, and this brings me to the very heart of my contention: there's nothing quite as relentlessly crass as the Last House on the Left cash-in picture, but Death Weekend is, within that dubious company, almost certainly the best one that I've ever seen, owing in huge part to the seriousness and complexity of its central character, played by the comically overqualified Brenda Vaccaro, whose Oscar nomination for Once Is Not Enough happened right around the time that this film was in production. That must have led to some weird on-set conversations.

Let's hold onto that thought for a little bit, and consider Death Weekend for what it is: it begins on a shot of undulating, rural highway, where fashion model Diane (Vaccaro) and oral surgeon Harry (Chuck Shamata) are out for a drive. Incidentally, in best cheap horror movie style, character names don't necessarily come until long after you've gotten used to whatever cute nickname you'd assigned to them, and if I tell you that for the beginning chunk of my notes, Harry was marked down as Rich Douche, I believe I have successfully implied the chief element of his personality that the film wants you to care about.

So, these two are ambling along in the quieter, less-populated corners of Ontario, when a red car full of probably intoxicated young men breaks into their idyll, following them with a menacing closeness that rather niftily recalls the vehicular threat of Steven Spielberg's five-year-old Duel. Harry starts to freak out immediately, but Diane, adroitly noting that his mindlessly expensive sports car can easily outrun the hooligans' battered-up piece of junk, and proceeds to drive with a recklessness that would be terrifying if she weren't so good at it, good enough to eventually send the assailant into a ditch. Cars being an extension of the soul for such thuggish bros as these four plainly are, it's not much of a surprise that the group's apparent leader, Lep (Don Stroud), or "Denim Jacket" immediately promises to get back at the pair.

We subsequently find out that Harry is taking Diane to his gigantic house on 10 acres of woodland, right next to a pristine private lake; we further learn, as he swaps the sports car out for something a bit more rugged at the local gas station, that this is very nearly a weekly ritual, and it's never with the same gorgeous piece of eye candy twice. Suffice it to say that by the time the romance is meant to begin, Diane has firmly concluded that Harry is a colossal prick, and she'd much rather leave, thank you. And that's without knowing that he has the place rigged up with two-way mirrors, with which he took photos of her showering.

Surly and cock-blocked, Harry tells her that she can walk, and he storms out to the boathouse. That's where he's sulking when who should finally arrive but Lep (having convinced the more soft-brained of the old salts at the gas station to tell him where the rich guy and the hot woman went) and his three cronies, Runt (Richard Ayres), Frankie (Kyle Edwards), and Stanley (Don Granberry). How I wish, beloved reader, that I knew for certain which of Long Hair, Dweeb with Glasses, and Fourth Guy matched which name and actor, but there does come a time when any research into Death Weekend is more than you can conceivably justify according to any code of responsibility or ethics. But as I was saying, the four pissed-off brutes are looking to make things as unpleasant as they possibly can for Diane and Harry, and they do so with great relish.

One finds that Death Weekend is frequently called a rape revenge thriller, but that's not accurate. There is an act of rape, but only by one of the men, and it's not unfair to say that, as depicted within the film, Diane permits that rape to go on as far as it does in order to get the rapist in perfect position to use the knife that she's managed to smuggle into bed with her. That is, the revenge actually precedes the rape. What the film really turns out to be is a home-invasion thriller along the lines of Straw Dogs, and like that film, it adds a measure of sexualised violence to make everything nice and slimy. Though in its defense, Death Weekend's rape is fully clothed and shot without a trace of exploitation.

Sexualised violence in a home invasion thriller is still pretty grotty stuff, even if Death Weekend ends up being one of the classiest films ever made that could be described that way. One thing you could never successfully accuse it of being, then is feminist, or female-empowering. That being said... The most striking difference between this movie and every other film I know that shares broadly the same narrative structure is that the "good guy" male character, Harry, is every bit as reprehensible as the four murderous thugs that break into his house, though in a completely different way. Like them, he has no ability to recognise women as having any kind of agency or real worth, though since he is rich, that means he is able to treat women as acquisitions to play with in whatever warped, psychosexual manner he wants to. But even if he never comes closer to raping Diane than by taking unwitting dirty pictures of her, he's still unambiguously conflating sex, money, and power into one impulse: have the biggest house, fuck the prettiest women, treat everybody who can't match you with contempt. Meanwhile, the invaders are plainly lashing out from a place of masculine shame and impotence: Lep can't stand that "a broad" outdrove him, and that, even more than the damage to his car, propels the movie.

A sleazy movie with an opportunistic rape it might be, then but the really shocking thing is that Death Weekend connects rape with the desire to dominate and control rather than with lust, which simply isn't done that often in movies of this sort. It's not a message movie, or anything, but it's surprisingly intelligent about how distorted, angry masculinity can be destructive and venal in more and less obvious ways.

And then there's Diane herself, or more correctly Vaccaro's performance of Diane: a willful, resilient fighter who remains able to think and act at all times, but with enough obvious desperation that she doesn't come across like a bland superhero. It's a better performance, frankly, than the movie deserves, though I'm not sad that Vaccaro pushed herself this hard in what could easily have been a routine bottom-feeding grind house flick. It's the strength and intelligence that the actress, as well as writer-director William Fruet, invests in the lead character that mostly sets Death Weekend head and shoulders above its tawdry origins.

That's not the same thing as declaring that Death Weekend is, accordingly, a great thriller, just one that is more intelligent and dignified than you would ever imagine, sight unseen. Greatness would require a bit more discipline in the construction of the opening sequence, a hatchet job of erratic editing probably designed to hide the film's low budget in the big car chase bit; greatness would require a middle section that either moves faster or feels more like a slow burn and less like a failed attempt to build a cat-and-mouse situation between the attackers and the victims. Greatness would definitely require that any of the actors besides Vaccaro feel like they're playing a person, and not a single characteristic. Lep, maybe, is a strong adversary, but the other three don't have a personality trait between them, and Harry is so transparently scummy that it's hard to see why the opinionated, outspoken, self-respecting Diane would have ever thought for a half-second that going on a weekend trip with him was anything but a monumental mistake. Fruet isn't half a bad director: the very opening of the car chase, when the red car is still just a low-key threat, and most of the final act, when Diane is finally able to break free and start to figure out how to survive until daybreak, are classically tense; he is not, however, much of a screenwriter, not based on this.

Ultimately, this is a moderately decent, frequently chintzy, always tacky thriller that happens to have a dynamite central character and performance that makes it all seem like it should be better. It's at least as frustrating as it is exciting that Vaccaro's Diane couldn't be in a more consistent movie than this, and though it is an impressively complex invasion/revenge thriller, it's surely not a transformative one. Still, it puts enough pressure on its genre to be better than its lowest common denominator that it doesn't deserve the relative obscurity it suffers from, in comparison to some of its slimier cousins.

Body Count: 7, a rather impressive percentage of the total number of people who show up onscreen.

TIM AT TFE: RESTLESS NIGHT

2013-06-01T13:00:00.000-05:00

In the midst of a fairly chaotic end-of-week, I totally forgot to mention my latest article for The Film Experience: a historical study of one M. Night Shyamalan, and his long descent from one of the many Next Spielbergs to that jackass what makes the twist endings.

YOU'LL HAVE A GAY OLD TIME

2013-06-01T10:23:00.001-05:00

And so, what kind of a career-defining statement is the last feature-length movie to be directed by Steven Soderbergh, until he changes his mind and starts making them again? None whatsoever, thankfully. The thought of the curtly unconventional Soderbergh making a pat "this is my theory of everything, good night" gesture is anathema to his entire career, so in a way, it's gratifying that Behind the Candelabra is so pointedly out of place in the director's canon, carried on the wings of a last defiant "fuck you" to Hollywood baked right into its distribtution (he couldn't get financing because it was "too gay", HBO ponied up the money, and then it premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival).

And so it is that Soderbergh rides into the sunset with a biopic, about the outstandingly camp piano player Liberace (Michael Douglas). It's not exactly the director's first foray into the genre, though it's the first time that he's played it this straight by the biopic rules: Erin Brockovich was a legal thriller biopic, The Informant! was some weird triangulation between biopic, caper, and farce. Behind the Candelabra, with a script by Richard LaGravenese, is as classically-shaped as they come: it's about the lifespan of the romantic relationship between Liberace and one of his many sexy young protégés, Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), whose memoir formed the basis for the film. From 1977 to 1984, Liberace and Thorson fucked and flirted and quarreled, till in a galling act of betrayal, the pianist threw Thorson over for a younger, sexier new model. In and of itself, there'd be absolutely no reason to tell this story, except in a massively pandering "see, the homosexuals have ill-advised romantic lives just like the rest of us!" way (though certainly, for presenting a legitimate homosexual love affair without loudly announcing its progressive slant, the movie is a social good), but the relationship between the middle-aged man and the kid (Damon's casting notwithstanding, Thorson was 17 at the time the story begins) was fraught with the kind of insane, narcissistic behavior that we all secretly hope is true of all celebrities. The most overt gesture was when Liberace demanded that Thorson receive plastic surgery to make the two look closer, but it is not the only one, by any stretch.

Behind the Candelabra is thus two different things at once: the story of a love affair that ages and sours and breaks apart in acrimony and lawsuits; and a wallow in the perverse need for constant validation and satisfaction that drives the fame-starved - and very few people in the history of gaudy Las Vegas acts so plainly wanted fame so badly and so constantly as Liberace. It's not remotely obvious while you're watching that the film is secretly serving two thematic masters, which owes a lot to the way that Soderbergh shoots it (as with most of his recent projects, the director also served as cinematographer and editor, under his reliable pseudonyms "Peter Andrews" and "Mary Ann Bernard"), in a cold, objective style - no mean trick, given how virtually all of the shots in the film are from Scott's point of view - that gives the whole film an observational feeling, positioning us outside a messy situation, watching with clinical fixation as it plays out to its tragic end. Perhaps it's best not to say what the movie is Capital-A "About" when it is simply about a pair of human beings whose uncontrollable behavior got the better of them.

Behind the Candelabra is an excellent example of what it is, crisply made and hellaciously great acting: Douglas and Damon perfectly navigate the entire lifespan of a relationship from giddy freshness to screaming fights to the even more terrifying clipped professionalism of their legal fight at the end, and doing it while mimicking an incredibly famous live-action caricature in Douglas's case, or playing a man less than half his age, in Damon's, and doing it so well that it ceases to register after a scene or two that these gimmicks are part of the performance. Both of them are aided, certainly, by excellent, grotesque make-up effects (and as much as "the make-up appliances were great!" feels like fake praise, the make-up appliances here are great, and then some), and by LaGravenese's punchy dialogue, but these are tools, not crutches, and the net effect is as scrupulous and comprehensive a document of lovers evolving as movies or TV have borne witness to in quite a while.

The only problem I can see with any of this, in fact, is that I honestly don't see from the final product why Soderbergh wanted to make it. And wanted it he most certainly did: he's been nurturing this project for years. Which would, theoretically, mean that there's some passion driving his association with the film, and by any imaginable yardstick, it's a well-directed movie: the best American-made biopic in a half a decade or longer, and in no small part because of how cleanly Soderbergh presents the material. But nothing in the director's career has ever felt only like a story well-told: there's always some stylistic flourish or at least a conceptual angle (like Erin Brockovich and Ocean's Eleven plus its sequels, which are in their ways referendums on the idea of a movie star vehicle), and I'm probably an idiot, but I don't see that here. The closest thing is its structure, ruthlessly jolting from scene to scene in a ragged flow where chronology is deliberately obscured and the space between scenes and moments is reduced to the smallest portion of narrative that remains even a little coherent. Given that the film is totally yoked to Scott's POV, it's irresistible to suppose that this is a means of dramatising the memory of an intense romantic relationship, as a series of peaks and valleys whose connection is more emotional than classically dramatic. That's something the film does inordinately well; but other movies have done it well.

I suppose I mean to say that this is pretty nearly the best version imaginable of a story that I didn't realise needed to be told, and I truly don't see why Steven Soderbergh had to be the one to make it. In that it is a classy, no-bullshit piece of smart mainstream filmmaking for a smart adult audience, it's certainly a respectable "last" film. Sloppiness and all, though, I wish he'd gone out with the formal and thematic edginess of Magic Mike or Side Effects.

8/10

THESE ARE THE VOYAGES: THE LINE MUST BE DRAWN HERE! THIS FAR, NO FARTHER!

2013-05-31T08:39:00.000-05:00

In comments recently, reader Brian Malbon forwarded a theory that's probably been expressed before, somewhere, but I'd never really thought about it, and I hope he'll permit me to paraphrase: the best Star Trek movies are the ones that are least like Star Trek, but which use the Star Trek universe as a springboard to explore other types of narratives. That may or may not entirely hold in every case, but it could not possibly be any truer in the case of Star Trek: First Contact from 1996, the second of four films featuring the cast from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the best of them by such a lopsided margin that it's a bit embarrassing to talk about it. It also breaks away from the tone and even, in important ways, the narrative continuity of the series to such an extensive degree that I honestly don't know whether it was designed for the fans or in defiance of them. And it is, above all else, an honest-to-God horror movie wedged into the Star Trek universe, and that alone is enough to make it very nearly without precedent in all the decades of the franchise's existence.

It's a bit self-conscious about this, in fact, and if you stare at the concept for more than a few minutes it becomes really obvious how calculated it all is. The time-travel scenario, as it did in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, helps to make a stand-alone film with increased appeal for non-fans: the choice of villain especially allows for the most intense action that could be brought to bear on the talkiest and action-light of all iterations of Star Trek. At the same time, that villain was one of the most famous and popular among fans of anything from The Next Generation, and the time period being visited was sufficiently important in the series' timeline as to suggest something of the epic to the hardcore fanbase. It was a win-win situation, and Paramount won: without adjusting for inflation, First Contact was the second-highest-grossing Star Trek film before the 2009 reboot.

If the film itself is a little bit generic, more of a popcorn sci-fi action film than a faithful adaptation of the characters from the series, that's probably all to the good: Star Trek: Generations demonstrated pretty clearly what hewing too closely to the paradigm of the series looked like in movie form, and it's not the sort of thing you'd like to have two of. First Contact absolutely does not feel like a Next Generation story, and the characters are frequently "off" in some way, but it's also deeply entertaining and quick-moving, two things that no other Next Generation movie can claim to be.

The differences from Generations are apparent immediately: where that film opened with a prologue, and then a languid, go-nowhere "meet the cast" sequence, First Contact plunges right into its freaky PG-13 body horror with an unusally well-timed "it was a dream!" fake-out in which Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), late of the U.S.S. Enterprise-D and now finishing his first year aboard the Enterprise-E, has nightmares about the time he spent six years earlier a prisoner of the cyborg zombies calling their collective identity the Borg. These nightmares have been triggered by the recent arrival of a Borg attack ship, which fairly quickly manages to decimate the defense force put in place to protect Earth, and the Enterprise arrives just in time for Picard's tactical knowledge the save the last scraps of the fleet, while allowing a single sphere-shaped vessel to escape and create a time vortex. No sooner does it disappear than Earth is transformed into a mechanical hell, and the Enterprise is just able to sneak into the temporal slipstream to go back to whenever and stop the Borg from doing whatever hideous thing they did to humanity's past.

Getting to this point takes less than 15 minutes. That's already as much plot as is contained in the first two-thirds of Generations (with markedly better time-travel mechanics, to boot), and considering that both films were written by the same team - Ronald D. Moore & Brannon Braga, who co-wrote the story with franchise overseer Rick Berman - it's kind of amazing that one film could be so brutally abrupt with its exposition and set-up (to the point where I wonder if a neophyte viewer would actually have figured out what in the hell the Borg are by the time that it matters that we know), when its immediate predecessor was such an aimless, low-impact slog through a plot that has no real dramatic stakes to speak of. Sure, First Contact is yet another "the Earth itself is in danger!" plot, but it's exciting, and bombastic, and presented so quickly that you get to give up on following the nuances of the plot closely and just dig in for the the thrill of it.

The rest of the film doesn't entirely pay off the way the opening sequence promises: on the other end of the time vortex, it's 4 April, 2063, the day before humanity's first faster-than-light spaceflight and first contact with an alien race. The Enterprise crew quickly figures out that the Borg plot involves sabotaging this historic event, and they arrive just too late to prevent an attack on the Montana camp where Zephraim Cochrane (James Cromwell), inventor of the warp drive, is about to make his legendary flight, though with the timeline already having been massively screwed over, they dive right in to fix things. Unfortunately the surviving Borg have managed to sneak onto the Enterprise, shutting its systems down with a portion of the crew on the planet surface. For most of its running time, then, First Contact is two movies running in tandem: on Earth, Commander William Riker (Jonathan Frakes), chief engineer Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton), and ship's counselor Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) attempt to fix Cochrane's vessel, the Phoenix, while also getting the craven drunk ready to accept his role as godfather of humankind's future. On the Enterprise, Picard, Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) and acting security adviser Worf (Michael Dorn, brought back from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in a way that very nearly seems natural) lead an attempt to stop the Borg, while science officer and android Data (Brent Spiner) is captured by the Borg, with the attempt made to bring him over to their side by offering the promise of hybridising him with organic materials just as they are. A femme fatale Borg Queen (Alice Krige) figures into all this, in a way that you really just can't square with the earlier depictions of the Borg at all, but Krige is so great in the role that I take the approach of not caring.

One of these films is much better than the other, not because the scripting is especially bad, but because Frakes, joining Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner in the annals of Trek actors turned movie directors, is palpably less interested in the earthbound material. It's perfect serviceable, with some of the finest character moments in any of the Next Generation films, but for all the loving care lavished on the shipboard action scenes, the character drama revolving around Cochrane feels bland and perfunctory, with the three regular cast members stranded down in Montana giving considerably worse performances than the four who get to be part of the A-plot (in an especially weird twist, this happens only when they are thus stranded: Frakes is vastly better in his early scenes on the Enterprise bridge than he is anywhere else in the movie). Not that the cast of The Next Generation was full of great actors, Stewart obviously excepted, but even so, there's some troublingly dodgy work happening here, from Sirtis especially.

But up on the ship; ah! now that part of the movie is handled monstrous well. Somebody - Frakes, or cinematographer Matthew F. Leonetti, or maybe even production designer Herman Zimmerman - was terribly excited to turn the corridors of the Enterprise into a haunted house, and the best part of First Contact lies primarily in feeling the slow burn of tension as the crew creeps around the familiar locations (mostly familiar: the new ship design is more metallic and militaristic than the TV Enterprise-D, and the contrast between its pre-Borg and post-Borg states isn't as severe), perverted and made into something muggy and evil. I wasn't kidding about calling it a horror movie: it is an unusually pure horror film, in fact, given that most of its emotional impact comes from watching the encroachment of something sickening and hideous into something normal, and it's certainly a credit to Michael Westmore's extensive redesign of the Borg makeup that they look as appallingly necrotic and moist as they do, which vastly increases the film's horrific touches.

When the film is trafficking in that kind of atmosphere, it's absolutely fantastic (there's a shot of several Borg emerging from a dark room, in which we first see only the lasers from their cybernetic eyepieces flashing in the blackness: it is maybe my single favorite shot in any Star Trek feature); when it is merely an adventure in fighting space zombies, it's still pretty great, thanks to one of the most brazenly cinematic scenes in the Star Trek films (a zero-gravity fight on the exterior hull of the Enterprise), and some kinetic, Bourne-style camerawork years before it became standard. When it is a character study, it works mostly because Stewart and Alfre Woodard (as a 21st Century woman who ends up on the ship to act as Picard's angry conscience) are two extremely gifted actors, and they can make melodramatic shouting seem genuinely hurt and wounded (even given his well-documented talents, it's impressive that Stewart could land the film's big "I AM SHOUTING THE FILM'S THEMES AT YOU" scene without it feeling unendurably campy - instead, it's possibly the best part of the movie). When it is a light planetside drama that feels awfully like an episode of the TV show, it is... fine. Even the Cochrane scenes, however less invigorating than the rest of the movie, are still better than the other three Next Generation films. But it's immensely clear that nobody's heart was in it, and given how much this plot feels like vintage Star Trek, while the Borg hunt feels like a sanitised version of Aliens involving Starfleet officers, that's an even bigger problem than it would already tend to be, structurally.

It is, by all means, fantastic popcorn movie: Jerry and Joel Goldsmith's score hits the sweet spot of pounding intensity and muted sentiment, the effects work, barring a couple of obvious CGI shots, is far better than you'd think based on the budget and the 1998 release date, and when he's bothering to come alive, Frakes finds some really excellent ways to capture the action and the character moments using an exceptionally kinetic camera (given the vastly indifferent quality of most Star Trek directing, his work here is comfortably above average). Nor is it the first Trek film that sacrificed fidelity to the source material to work better as an independent adventure movie. It is, however, the first Trek film that seems to be actively rejecting the feel of the source material, and that, plus the massive imbalance in quality between its two subplots, keeps First Contact just barely outside of the very top-tier of the film series. Good as it is, it's still not perfect, though none of the movies to follow it would come remotely as close to that benchmark.

Reviews in this series
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Wise, 1979)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Meyer, 1982)
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Nimoy, 1984)
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Nimoy, 1986)
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (Shatner, 1989)
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (Meyer, 1991)
Star Trek: Generations (Carson, 1994)
Star Trek: First Contact (Frakes, 1996)
Star Trek: Insurrection (Frakes, 1998)
Star Trek: Nemesis (Baird, 2002)
Star Trek (Abrams, 2009)
Star Trek Into Darkness (Abrams, 2013)