Antagony & Ecstasy

TO SEEK OUT OLD LIFE, AND FAMILIAR CIVILIZATIONS

2013-05-18T00:24:00.002-05:00

There's not much point at all in discussing Star Trek Into Darkness without employing spoilers, big huge damn spoilers. One of them is a spoiler for something that's really damn obvious and you've almost certainly figured it out already if you're actually interested in the movie enough to read a blogger's review of it. One of them is a spoiler for something that's... also kind of obvious, if you've read more than a couple of reviews, given how much they all play peekaboo with one certain plot point almost all the way to the end. Anyway, I'm going to spoil the hell out of the movie, so watch yourself.

I will not, however, be spoiling it as much as the filmmakers did when they gave it such godawful title as Star Trek Into Darkness.

So, the important thing to keep in mind is that I didn't like the beloved 2009 Star Trek, and I was certainly not feeling very enthusiastic about the prospect of a sequel that once again dragged in the screenwriting team of Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman, whose work together typifies just about all that I detest about the modern state of big-budget popcorn movies, this time bringing along Damon Lindelof, whose work has become more and more cripplingly inauthentic and gimmicky as time goes by. But really, as I am honest, there were only two things I absolutely despised about Star Trek, and Into Darkness manages to fix them both. One was the ghastly over-use of J.J. Abrams's lens flares, and while the new film surely has more than any reasonable director would feel comfortable signing his name to, it still has many fewer, and some of them are even used in a way that feels like it ties into anything at all thematically or in the mise en scène. The other thing was Chris Pine's interpretation of hotshot starship captain James T. Kirk as all the awful, douchbaggy, bro-ish things that retrograde masculinists have decided makes for a cool dude that would be worth hanging out with, where in fact he's just eminently slappable. Pine's performance this time around, though still limited by the fact that he's not a terribly good actor, is so much more layered and feeling than anything in any scene of the earlier film that he's basically playing a different character, one who isn't really any more like William Shatner's iconic performance, but is at least a hell of a lot more enjoyable to watch on his own terms than I, for one, found him last time.

I think it's fair to say that Pine's more soulful, less crass Kirk single-handedly drags Into Darkness over the hump into being an enjoyable summertime action-adventure romp, because for the most part, the film is a carbon copy of the last one, in both its strengths and weaknesses, with a few little wobbles here and a few little waggles there. Once again, the absolute best-in-show among the cast are Keith Urban as Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy, an ill-tempered southern crank, and Zachary Quinto as Spock, half-human/half-Vulcan science officer with a yen for logic and rules and priggishness; once again the worst is Anton Yelchin's no-holds-barred cartoon of a Russian that would have made Rocky & Bullwinkle blink; once again, I am mortified on Zoë Saldana's behalf that this is apparently what Orci and Kurtzman and Lindelof and Abrams thinks counts as a strong female character (if anything, she's worse this time around, being defined almost entirely as the always-worried girlfriend). Where the visual effects were, in 2009, jaw-droppingly realistic and detailed and oh-so-tangible for CGI, so again do I hardly expect to see anything more eye-popping and gorgeous in 2013 (it helps that almost everything is metallic or plastic). The action scenes supplied by those effects are once again huge and bruising and not necessarily imaginative, though they are all kinds of impressively massive. Michael Giacchino's score is again a rousing bit of populist pomp, and I'm even inclined to say it's better this time.

And once again, I simply don't fucking get J.J. Abrams. The man doesn't know what to do with a movie camera: re-watching the 2009 film just a couple of days ago in preparation, I was aghast all over again at how excitedly he flings it around the set in drunken loops and a remarkably frustrating trick where he starts the camera at a really skewed angle and then backs up and spirals until it's straight up (or a little skewed the other way, even), the kind of movement that you can't really get away with unless you're dramatising a character's complete psychotic break from reality, not just pepping up a routine dialogue scene. And the close-ups, the absolute fingerprint on every frame that yes, this man got his start in TV, and never met a wide shot he liked. Into Darkness is certainly better on all fronts than Star Trek, but it's also just as certainly a huge step backwards from 2011's Super 8, suggesting that maybe that film wasn't actually a sign of artistic creativity but well-chosen pilfering from Steven Spielberg's closet. Regardless, Abram's pixie-stix style serves mostly to drain the gorgeous visuals and emphatically grand action sequences of their energy, and while at 132 minutes, Into Darkness is already the second-longest Star Treks ever, Abrams manages to make it feel even longer.

Then there's the script. Which is, charitably, a disaster. As is not remotely a surprise, given all the "ooh boy, I bet you just can't guess who the villain is!" innuendo, the villain is 20th Century genetic superman Khan Noonien Singh (Benedict Cumberbatch), also the villain of the consensus pick for the best of all 12 Trek features, 1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. He's been changed around quite a lot - he's something closer to a terrorist than a despot this time, and he's at the center of a metaphor for the run-up to the Iraq War (the film is - gallingly - dedicated to the soldiers of post-9/11 America, tasteless overreach like you don't expect to see in a mindless popcorn movie). But Khan he still is, and that gives the filmmakers an excuse to make Into Darkness something of a fantasia on the themes of The Wrath of Khan, and the result is awful: on the one hand, the whole point of the Abrams-led Star Trek reboot is to shake of the dust and make something that's not beholden to the past (I still think that it was a terrible decision to keep the new films somewhat in continuity with the rest of the franchise: a clean break and fresh slate would have been so much easier to work with), and on the other hand, Into Darkness at times feels like nothing but a two-hour collection of subtle in-jokes for all the fans who's obsessive nitpickiness is exactly the thing that the reboot was supposed to address. Harry Mudd! Tribbles! Neutral Zones! Carol Marcus (played, blankly, by Alice Eve)! A pointless cameo from Leonard Nimoy's Old Parallel Universe Spock (I desperately hope they skip this in the next movie)! And, of course, an inversion of The Wrath of Khan's famous death scene, which falls completely flat for almost every reason: because the Pine/Quinto iteration of Kirk and Spock don't have decades of fan goodwill to draw from, like the Shatner/Nimoy iteration did; because the film has already put a Chekovian gun (Anton, not Pavel) in, about Khan's magical blood, and so Kirk's death feels completely consequence-free; because the moment is so self-conscious about mirroring the older scene - down to the fucking blocking - that it has absolutely no hint of sincerity about it, just pastiche; because the use of "KHAAAAAAAN!" here is, unbelievably, even campier and cornier than it was in the original.

It's a surreally misjudged ending that absolutely blows all the accumulated goodwill the movie was able to stir up, which for me wasn't that much to begin with: the best I can say about Cumberbatch's Khan is that he's a much more particular and menacing villain than Eric Bana's utterly milquetoast baddie from 2009, but he has absolutely no flair, no Ricardo Montalban-esque sense of scale (and if it's not fair to compare the two actors, it's also not fair to have every damn moment of this film waving its hands and calling attention to established Trek lore), just a serpentine sense of villainy that's totally one-note; hard to say if it's the actor's fault or the script's, but either way this isn't a very memorable or intense villain, just a nasty dude who manages to outwit the heroes in the most transparent ways.

What saves it, barely, is the characters; or really, not even the characters as such (just like in almost every single Star Trek ever, most of the cast ends up staring blankly with their thumbs up their asses), but Kirk and Spock and slightly less McCoy. What caught me completely off-guard with Into Darkness is that's structurally a dramatic love story: a couple that has been together just long enough to predict each other's foibles, being tried, almost breaking, but discovering through stress and conflict how much they need each other. The wrinkle being that it's a love story about two heterosexual males, one of whom isn't human, and yet the dynamic that Pine and Quinto hit from the first scene to the last is so comfortable and lived-in, turning even the strained, hack screenwriting dialogue that passes for banter into the kind of easygoing back-and-forth that feels like real people with a real history talking. Honestly, there's a depth and warmth of character here that you don't expect to see in any modern popcorn movie, certainly not one that otherwise feels so sleekly generic. There's a lot of shabby storytelling and mismanaged visuals to overcome, but the rich central relationship is what Star Trek is about, in a way I found completely lacking from the first movie: not a story about spaceships and explosions and interplanetary intrigue, but about the way that humanity still exists and thrives in the face of all those things. Whatever other flaws the movie has, its heart and soul are strong as can be.

6/10

HARRYHAUSEN WEEK: DINOSAURS AND SEXY LADIES

2013-05-17T10:41:00.001-05:00

To begin with, let us first point out that One Million Years B.C., Hammer's 1966 contribution to the caveman genre, rests its success on two qualities that are impossible for any 12-year-old boy to resist: some of the very best dinosaurs found anywhere in cinema before Jurassic Park came along with its CGI creations, and Raquel Welch at her absolute peak of physical attractiveness, wearing a pretty insubstantial animal hide bikini. Let us then confess that the author of this review, if he was not exactly 12 years old when first we saw the film, was certainly not older than 13, and these many years later is alas! too easily able to return emotionally and intellectually to that age while watching this particular movie. He shall concede the film its faults, while somewhat defensively arguing that they are plainly the fault of the caveman genre itself, rather than this film specifically - indeed, this is close to being the very best caveman movie ever made - and shall not pretend that its merits as cinema move even a little bit from the world of dubious B-pictures. But he cannot deny that watching the film is for him a thoroughgoing joy, warts and all.

The film is a remake of, and significant improvement over, the 1940 Hal Roach production One Million B.C., though the plot points involved are sufficiently standardised across the genre that "remake" in this case doesn't mean a whole lot more than the character names are all the same. Such as the character names are even a particularly important element in a movie where the dialogue consists of a made-up language with a vocabulary of maybe 50 words. But regardless, we are introduced (thanks to a helpful, English-speaking narrator) to Akhoba (Robert Brown), leader of a tribe called the Rock People, and his two sons, Tumak (John Richardson) and Sakana (Percy Hebert). The Rock People are a brutal people, led by whomever is the strongest - a reasonable survival strategy for a population so primitive that it can only hunt game by beating the animals to death with sticks - and Sakana is enough of a greedy bastard that he's prepared to overpower both his father and brother to take leadership. Thus it is that Tumak ends up exiled, chased down by a few dinosaurs (the first of them played by a magnified iguana, in what I gather to be a hat-tip to the original film), and ultimately found by Loana (Welch), a blonde member of the seaside Shell tribe of fishers and tool-users. Tumak is at first dazzled by the considerable technological advancement of the beautiful Shell tribe, and they in turn are pleased by his physical strength, impressively demonstrated in a fight with an allosaur.

But Tumak is still primitive enough in his behavior that he's eventually banished from the Shell people, with Loana willingly going with him. Eventually, they make it back to the Rock people, where Sakana and Tumak finally have their confrontation; the Shell people end up coming along to help Tumak fight his good fight, and then a volcano erupts. A volcano always erupts.

Every word is a cliché, of course, and that's not even mentioning the oft-noted elephant in the room, which is that a film titled One Million Years B.C. and presumably set in that year presents modern homo sapiens alongside dinosaurs from two separate geological periods. Which, however legitimate a complaint, is missing the point to an incomparable degree. Caveman movies include attractive white people and impossible zoology as surely as musical involve singing and dancing, and in both cases the solution to being offended by those elements is simply avoiding the genre altogether.

So taking all of that as given, the good thing is that One Million Years B.C. is just about as good as any caveman movie has ever managed to be. Still hokey and dumb, you understand. But hokey and dumb in a way that succeeds in being charming more often than not. Director Don Chaffey has a good eye for setting his actors in the sun-baked exteriors, and keeping the film clipping along (there exist both a 91-minute U.S. cut, and a 100-minute version in the film's native Great Britain that I have not seen; it's at least possible that those 9 extra minutes slow the pace down too much for comfort). More importantly, he doesn't pretend that the material is especially serious or dignified, and so he doesn't belabor the scenes of cave people grunting at each other in an approximation of character-driven dram that could be as tedious in the wrong hands as the Wookiee family scenes in The Star Wars Holiday Special. Instead, he treats the plot scenes with as light a touch as possible, foregrounding instead the action scenes, of which there are many, and not all of the good ones involve anachronistic dinosaurs.

The best ones do, of course. These are Ray Harryhausen dinos, after all, and taken as a whole, they're the best he ever did (taken individually, Gwangi from The Valley of Gwangi is his single best dinosaur, but the rest of that film's menagerie isn't up to the same level). It's the second and last film he made without Charles H. Schneer after their first collaboration, 11 years prior (coincidentally, his only other non-Schneer film in that span was The Animal World, also a dinosaur project), and whatever Hammer producer Michael Carreras had to do to entice him over was worth it: the work Harryhausen did here was of benefit both to himself and to the movie in which it appears. The giant Archelon, a sea turtle, is one of the smoothest-moving animals in the Harryhausen bestiary, and the allosaur that Tomak single-handedly kills with a spear features some of the most impressive combination of live-action and stop-motion footage of any of the effects work he ever did. Not everything is absolutely perfect (there's a ceratosaur-on-triceratops fight that's not at all up to the level of the rest), but it's as thoroughly satisfying as any collection of dinosaurs I can personally name, finding exactly the right mixture of personality and animalistic movement that make them as believable and natural as anything in the man's career.

Put that next to the crisp storytelling and unashamed willingness to be what it is and no more, and One Million Years B.C. triumphs as B-moviemaking at its most basic and effective. One needn't look any farther than structurally weird, pacey, and frequently idiotic One Million B.C. itself to see how much worse this same material could be when it wasn't handled right, and it makes the later film's triumph, however shallow the results, all the more impressive.Stupid, mindless spectacle is like anything else: it can be done well, or it can be done carelessly. Hammer was a good studio for making sure the audience got what it wanted in a high-quality form (monsters, cheesecake), and nothing Harryhausen ever did could remotely be accused of carelessness. There's nothing respectable about One Million Years B.C. (half of what makes it a timeless classic is the attention lovingly bestowed on its female lead's inordinately photogenic cleavage, for God's sake), but the integrity with which it was made more than compensates; this is some of the very finest dopey schlock ever put onscreen, lovingly hand-crafted escapism that attempts to do very few things and does them as well as anything else ever did.

HARRYHAUSEN WEEK: WALKING WITH GIANTS

2013-05-16T23:41:00.000-05:00

Jonathan Swift's beloved 1726 satire Gulliver's Travels has had such a miserable history in its various cinematic adaptations that picking one out as the "best" isn't saying a goddamned thing, other than "this version actually includes something other than Lilliput". Which, as it happens, 1960's The 3 Worlds of Gullivers does, and that's a huge part of the reason that I'm sort of inclined to suggest that it's the best movie adaptation of the book (there are fuller versions, including the 1996 TV miniseries starring Ted Danson - ah! the mid-'90s bloated fantasy miniseries trend! how I miss thee - but it's too ponderous and too Ted Danson-starring to seriously compete as a tremendously watchable piece of filmed entertainment). The other is that, in degraded form 3 Worlds actually retains some scant measure of Swift's satiric intent, however distorted: the themes of the second sequence in particular don't resemble the original book much at all, but the point is, this is a Gulliver movie in which there are themes, no matter how watered-down for the child-dominated matinee audience that Columbia had in mind for this production. The 1939 animated feature version can't claim that. The 2010 Jack Black vehicle sure as living fuck can't.

Of course, The 3 Worlds of Gulliver is still primarily a glossy fantasy of the sort that producer Charles H. Schneer had found such immense success with two years earlier, in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. Fantasy, in fact, became the chief mode of Schneer's career from 1960 onwards, as he and effects artist Ray Harryhausen - for though there were other collaborators worth talking about, it's pretty clear to all and sundry that the Schneer fantasy cycle was really entirely based on the fact that he and Harryhausen worked well together, and fantasy was where Harryhausen did his most iconic work - played in the myths of this culture and that, while stopping over to plug their particular brand of swashbuckling and movie magic into a pair of literary adaptations, beginning here (the second was Mysterious Island from 1961, a much less obvious candidate for the Harryhausen treatment, until an army of giant animals were randomly shoved into the scenario).

Truthfully, Harryhausen's particular talents had been used much better elsewhere. As far as stop-motion animation, there are only two Dynamation critters in 3 Worlds, though both of them are pretty stellar: one is a giant squirrel that threatens Gulliver (Kerwin Matthews) and his new bride Elizabeth (June Thorburn) as they honeymoon in the country on the giants' island of Brobdingnag, the other is the Brobdingnagian king's (Grégoire Aslan) pet crocodile, which he sics on Gulliver as punishment for being the face of Reason and Enlightenment in a supertitious, medieval-style country. It's impossible for me to find fault with either creature (the squirrel especially is animated, basically, to perfection), other than they are not onscreen for a very long time; so at the very least, we can safely claim for the movie that it finds Harryhausen in his usual fine form.

But I must reiterate: the film wastes his talent. The vast bulk of the movie - which, after all, finds Dr. Lemuel Gulliver first marooned on an island of five-inch tall Lillputians, and then on an island where he himself is about that proportional height to the Brobdingnagians - requires mostly a lot of matte work to combine very large and very small people in the same shot, and make it look like they're talking and, to a small degree, interacting, though there's little enough onscreen physical interaction between characters that it's always done in a showy and distracting "LOOKIT OUR AMAZING SPECIAL EFFECTS IT'S LIKE HE'S REALLY ON AN ISLAND OF TINY PEOPLE" way, rather than something simple and spare that merely underlines the reality of the situation without belaboring it.

To be sure, it's incredible matte work. Not flawless, but it's the kind of film that you could use to shut up anybody's argument about the relatively primitive effects work of the '50s and '60s being somehow less sophisticated than the present day (and let's not forget, it wasn't a terribly costly movie, either). Ray Harryhausen might be thought of as an animator more than a compositor, for that is where his most impressive and unique work was done, but he was really gifted at all elements of effects work. Still, he wasn't so much better at matte shots than anybody else that it makes sense to assign him to bringing to life a movie where that's nearly the entirety of the effects work. It's like hiring Joël Robuchon to make you an egg salad sandwich: sure, the results are great, but why?

As is usually the case in Harryhausen's projects of this period, the film surrounding the effects is more than satisfactory, though unabashedly juvenile, even with writers Arthur Ross and Jack Sher (the director, as well) replacing Swift's own broadsides against European militarism and inhumanism with slightly more up-to-date barbs against runaway financial greed and superstition; it is a film that, though only in a moderate way, espouses a charitable humanism based in a very '60s-style enthusiasm for knowledge and science (Swift, whose book included an entire segment dedicated to mocking science and the Age of Reason, would perhaps have blanched at this change to his source material). The simple fact is, though, whatever thematic depth you spy in the movie is not really the point of it at all, more the byproduct of trying to freshen up material that can't help but be a bit messagey, because of its basis in overt symbolism. The 3 Worlds of Gulliver is first and always chiefly a matinee movie, with lots of broadly funny material and broadly exciting material and broadly impressive effects-driven setpieces, all of it meant to keep children enthralled and their adult minders sufficiently amused that they don't want to kill themselves. It works at that - the adult part, anyway (unlike most films with Harryhausen effects, I hadn't see 3 Worlds except for the odd scene here or that prior to watching it for this review). It's agreeable entertainment that doesn't completely insult the spirit of Swift's book, and it keeps juggling plot points enough that even a 100-minute running time that's definitely on the long side for this kind pf picture doesn't manage to feel languorous. Bernard Herrmann's boisterous, chipper score (the same year that he composed the nightmarish strings for Psycho!) helps considerably to keep things light and fast-moving, though it's possibly the simplest of the four scores he wrote for Schneer/Harryhausen pictures.

The biggest problem with the film happens to be exactly the same big problem that The 7th Voyage of Sinbad suffers from: Kerwin Matthews, who just isn't very interesting, even by the narrow standards of '50s and '60s matinee stars. He's too blandly all-American without any sense that he's got an inner life; and his Gulliver is slightly worse than his Sinbad, for while the Arabian hero merely feels like an anonymous placeholder, the English adventurer is projecting a sense of self-righteousness that's a little more rankling than it could be, owing to Matthews's failure to base it in any kind of psychological register. Mostly, though, he's just boring to watch and listen to, which makes it good that most of the time, he's surrounded by either very large or very small cartoons being played with full plummy delight by a clutch of marginally recognisable character actors, or a couple of exceptionally well-cast child actors. With all the spectacle and frivolous comedy filling every corner of the film, we never really need to pay much attention to Gulliver until the horribly mis-written ending. It's not nearly as timeless as the better-known of Harryhausen's adventure movies, nor as visually imaginative, but for a throwaway adventure film of this vintage, it holds up pretty well as a bit of harmless entertainment with a screenplay that's quite a bit more literate than it has any real need to be.

HARRYHAUSEN WEEK: SPACE INVADERS

2013-05-16T00:40:00.000-05:00

I'm talking completely out of my ass, you understand, but I think there's a very strong possibility that the alien invasion turned back by plucky humans might be the single most common scenario in 1950s cinema, irrespective of genre, across all countries. Aye, even more common than "radiation makes animals huge" pictures. Invasion films span the gamut from the philosophical and symbolic elegance of The Day the Earth Stood Still all the way to the freakish incoherence of Plan 9 from Outer Space, though most of them are formulaic genre adventures with a relatively limited field of characters to pick from and a certain tendency towards stock footage anti-aircraft guns firing at cutaway shots of flying saucers.

Of these formula-driven alien invasion movies, I am convinced that the finest must be 1956's Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, and not only because its flying saucers are pretty much the best ever. They were created by Ray Harryhausen, of course, and it is truly the case that for the man behind Dynamation, they're not terribly complex or characteristic: no fantastic, otherworldly creatures with nightmarish feature and 98 points of articulation all moving at the same time, no roaring dinosaurs to warm every 10-year-old heart. Just pie-pan shaped discs with a band on top that spins counterclockwise, and a few bits that sometimes extend out. Harryhausen claimed this as his least-favorite among the films he contributed special effects for, and I imagine that's part of the reason why. Nobody ever mentions the flying saucers when they're talking about his career highlights, or anything like that.

Nevertheless, they are the best. I suspect that it might owe to the fact that the animation itself was unusually straightforward and simple by Harryhausen's standards, but the effects throughout the movie are unbelievable well-integrated into the rest of the film, in some of the absolute best process shots of the man's career. Flying saucers ambitiously composited into shots of the White House, into stock footage of battleships exploding, and beautifully married with the footage actually filmed for the movie itself: there's a shot early on where one saucer is on the ground, with a force shield surrounding its landing strut, as its inhabitants mill about, and it's on an army base, and all the different layers and optical effects that went into making that moment fit together so perfectly that you straight-up forget that you're looking at special effects.

And it's not just the technical quality, but the ebullience of the saucers' activity that make them and their film stand out. Even if you haven't seen the film, surely you've seen the clip of a flying saucer hitting the Washington Monument and knocking it over, or of one crashing into the U.S. Capitol dome and exploding. Those both come from this movie, in its exemplary final ten-minute attack on Washington, D.C., one of B-movie science fiction's all-time best alien action sequences, and really, that's all the argument you need: Earth vs. the Flying Saucers is the pinnacle of its genre because it has the best depiction of widespread, saucer-derived destruction, and that is deep down inside all that these films want to provide (sure, you can read all the cultural subtext you want into it; but it's the same cultural subtext from every genre film of that decade, and so it frankly shouldn't count). The one that provides the best of that is itself the best. Q.E.D.

The good thing is that Earth vs. the Flying Saucers ends up having more to offer than just those breathtaking final 10 minutes. Not a great script, exactly - a great script would have been mostly an imposition on this scenario, anyway - but an airtight one, utterly free of bullshit and padding (it's a film whose economy is such that, having established in the first scene that the two leads were married the day before, it only references this fact once more in 83 minutes, trusting that we'll understand what the emotional stakes are), with every beat contributing to the overall development of the plot. The story was adapted, from Maj. Donald E. Keyhoe's non-fiction book Flying Saucers from Outer Space, by Curt Siodmak (who did not also write the screenplay), a writer whose best work is awe-inspiringly clean and precise, so this kind of mechanical excellence really doesn't come as a surprise; but it absolutely gives the film a leg up over everything else you could name in the same idiom, resulting in a movie that lacks even the idea of lag time.

Befitting a movie made at the very first flicker of the Space Age, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers is absolutely dazzled by scientific advances: the hero, Dr. Russell Marvin (Hugh Marlowe), is a rocket expert working with a kind of proto-NASA to launch a dozen orbiting satellites (a word too fancy for the film to trot out) that will permit all kinds of wonderful research. The big narrative beats all revolve less around the military beating the tar out of them aliens, but from Marvin or an associate making some critical research breakthrough that gives them a leg up on the invaders; not until Star Trek reached the air ten years later would impressive-sounding gobbledygook be used to resolve so many crises, with such deep, passionate love for The Concept Of Science's ability to fix things. I deeply admire the film for this. It could only have come out of a singularly anti-cynical moment in American history.

Undoubtedly, the film is an acquired taste, or at least best suited to a particular kind of viewer. The human element is almost nil: Marvin's new wife Carol (Joan Taylor) avoids being portrayed as the usual '50s sci-fi female ninny only because nobody in the movie emerges with any real personal life to speak of, or shading beyond their profession. At one point, a character we've been set up to like as much as anybody in the film is turned into a brainless zombie, essentially, and while the curt brutality with which director Fred F. Sears (whose career somehow managed to include not only this shining triumph of '50s genre filmmaking, but also the humiliating disaster of '50s genre filmmaking The Giant Claw) presents this development is shocking and therefore effective, it's not really because we feel particularly sad for this man, more than we'd feel for anybody under the circumstances. Characters are vessels here; raw survivalism is the point of the movie, and only the cheap B-movie trappings keep that fact from making the whole thing dark and grim and brooding. That and the sheer movie-awesome potency of the visual effects.

It's not sophisticated, the film's meager politics are a bit confused and under-explored, and though it is a rousing adventure about the triumph of humanity, it's tech-worship keeps it from being humanist. And yet part of me loves Earth vs. the Flying Saucers a little bit; for its efficiency, and its directness, and how absolutely perfect it is at telling only exactly the story it cares to tell in the most engaging way possible. It's not any kind of B-picture gateway drug, but as a well-established admirer of the form, there's nothing about this film that doesn't please me.

BEST SHOT: THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY

2013-05-15T11:00:00.000-05:00

Following last week's "Americans in Italy" pick of Summertime for Hit Me with Your Best Shot, Nathaniel at The Film Experience has doubled-down, and assigned The Talented Mr. Ripley, Anthony Minghella's glamorously nasty evocation of '50s period cool in making an especially plush adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's thoroughly vicious thriller. It's a film I loved to pieces when I last saw it, which some quick, and quite unbelievable calculations tell me had to be more than 10 years ago now. And something awfully crucial happened in that decade-long gap: I read the book. And boy, is the movie not as good as the book.

But this is a game of choosing a favorite shot, not describing the heartbreak of finding that experience has caused one to significantly downgrade a film that one had previously thought quite highly of (and please, Minghella partisans, understand that I'm speaking relatively: we're talking about the drop from a 9/10 to a 7/10, maybe an 8/10 when I get my bearings back). So let's not dwell on it.

Luckily, Minghella and cinematographer John Seale make the task of picking a shot, if not "easy" - in fact, the very opposite of easy - then at least, extravagantly pleasurable. The films is paralysingly beautiful: beautiful sets, beautiful locations, beautiful actors, beautiful lighting. Picking something based totally on its beauty, while appropriate in its own way, quickly proved to be totally impossible, so I shifted gears a little bit, and this is where I ended up:

Point #1: it's still awfully fucking pretty. The soft light, the gentle colors, that amazing reflection. But it's nowhere near the prettiest shot in the film, and it's not just pretty. In fact, I'm tempted to say that this is the moment where the plot announces itself, which it does almost solely through the visuals and the music, composed by Gabriel Yared. The Talented Mr. Ripley, and I'm giving away very little if you haven't read it or seen any of the adaptations, is about obsession: specifically, working class Tom Ripley's (Matt Damon) obsession with son of privilege Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law), which takes on both a sexual and a classist overtone throughout. The story that starts out as a bright but oddball tale of a young con artist enjoying the luxuries of Italy with two rich people he's tricked into being his friends, gets darker and darker till you wonder if it can get any darker yet; then it does so.

In a very literal way, this shot dramatises the gulf between those two states: Tom stands looking down at Dickie and his girlfriend Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow, in what remains my favorite performance of her career), and the outside, where they are, is light and beautiful and soft; the inside, where he stands, is dark and gloomy. It's a touch foreboding, in a noir sort of way, and Damon's posture adds to it: a certain tenseness despite his casual pose, with that little tiny detail of his right foot ready to move, like he's anxious to dart forward and swallow the couple up right now, but he's restraining himself.

And then there's the weird balance of the shot: by every classical rule, Damon should be much farther to the left, given his eyeline. What the simple gesture of putting him on the "wrong" side of the frame, the filmmakers quietly suggest that he's abnormal in some way (many ways, some of which we've already seen by this point). This composition also serves to emphasise the room, stuffed with various objects and pieces of furniture, none of it Tom's - he's Dickie's guest, staying in a spare room - but all of it standing in his figurative shadow, belonging to him now: it is the first part of Dickie's life that he has colonised, and by showing the room in the same instant that we're given our first hint that Tom is much darker than just an easy liar, the film engages in some foreshadowing. Here are the tools that Tom will use to rebuild his identity; here is the base from which all his future evils will spread. Lavish, but also a touch disconcerting and creepy, and a perfect note with which to begin the film's spiral into psychosis.

HARRYHAUSEN WEEK: MONSTERS OF THE DEEP

2013-05-15T01:10:00.001-05:00

It is a sad truth that lovers of the great classic B-movies have to face, that many of them are actually bad, except for that one spark that makes an otherwise wholly unremarkable programmer seem to be more dear and unique than it really is. And so it was even in the career of the great Ray Harryhausen, whose work was, after all, mostly limited to a very particular tradition of shlocky genre fare. It's never the case that his visual effects weren't the best part of any one of the 16 features he worked on; it is, unfortunately, often the case that his effects were the only good part of those features. And here we are, with It Came from Beneath the Sea, to prove the point.

ICFBTS was the locus of two important firsts for Harryhausen: it was his first movie with Columbia Pictures, where'd he'd work for many years, and his first movie for producer Charles H. Schneer, with whom he'd work even longer. And these two things are both part of the reason that ICFBTS is, frankly, the animator's first "cheap" movie; Mighty Joe Young was made with RKO, a company that new how to treat its B-movies with respect; The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was at Warner Bros., which at no point in its history was in a position to throw less money at any given project than Columbia could. It would be a mistake to call either of them "prestige pictures", but they were both given a fair pile of resources and expected to perform at a certain level of quality. Schneer and Columbia, though, were apparently looking more to get in with the burgeoning drive-in market and the attendant boom of formulaic monster thrillers. I have never really explored that genre in any kind of systematic way, so I cannot say where ICFBTS fits in chronologically among the multitude of films about giant creatures leveling cities and endangering square-jawed heroes and their ditzy scientist girlfriends. I can say only that it adopts virtually every single cliché of that genre, and where Beast from 20,000 Fathoms - a title better-suited to this picture than to that one, incidentally - seems rigid and trite only because it establishes most of the rules that governed the next half-decade of genre flicks, and it is in fact a very good movie underneath it, ICFBTS seems rigid and trite because it lacks imagination on any but the most perfunctory level.

The film begins with a bombastic bit of narration and an even more bombastic title card that between them establish the idea that mankind's new technology has made it more possible than ever before to explore the hidden quarters of the Earth, and find God knows what there. The technology that gets this particular plot going is a first-of-its-kind nuclear sub, played by a very-much-not-the-first-of-its-kind regular sub from WWII, and here we find Commander Pete Matthews (Kenneth Tobey) and his crew patrolling in the Pacific. With 79 minutes to spare, director Robert Gordon and screenwriters George Worthington Yates & Hal Smith are given absolutely no freedom whatsoever to dick around (say what you will about '50s B-movies: they knew damn well how to get in and get back out in a swift enough running time that you never had a chance to get really bored. Something that 21st Century B-movies, with their un-B-ish $200 million budgets, would be well advised to learn), and so the film devotes just a scant measure of time to setting up the fairly banal characters of the sub crew - none of whom end up mattering as more than the faces we'll see on and off later - before throwing a Big Unseen Something at the boat. A few tricky maneuvers later, and they're free, but they've taken a chunk of animal tissue with them as a souvenir.

This biomatter is extensively studied by Prof. John Carter (Donald Curtis) and his starry-eyed admirer and colleague, Dr. Lesley Joyce (Faith Domergue), and they eventually conclude it is from an unimaginably large cephalopod, one that has been previously hidden in the deepest parts of the ocean and is now out and about in the shallow world because it has been irradiated in H-bomb tests, and its natural prey is apparently able to detect this and evade it. "Some fish have built-in Geiger counters" is Carter's straight-faced and almost word-for-word explanation. The military, of course, doesn't buy it, but sunken ships and vanished swimmers coming across the Pacific and down the U.S. coastline eventually provide evidence that the two marine biologists might be on to something, and they're able to whip together a plan to stop the animal just in time for it to come ashore at San Francisco, where it proceeds to do as giant monsters do and begin tearing apart the most famous landmarks.

Were I to list all the points where ICFBTS takes the most obvious and hackneyed way through its story, I would basically be re-writing its script, but here's a few of the biggest ones: the nuclear-spawned monster (though at least in this case, it's not a simple "nukes make animals big" formulation), frustrated scientists trying to convince the military to see the unavoidable if extraordinarily weird truth, the one-use-only superweapon that ends up misfiring, forcing the heroes to fight the monster more directly, and manfully; a lady! scientist!, with all the agog shock thereby implied; a love triangle between the lady scientist, the utterly male military hero, and the intellectual (and thus at least somewhat feminised) man scientist. At least ICFBTS has a fairly interesting lady! scientist! in Dr. Joyce (though giving her a female name for a surname is distracting; it feels like she's being called "Dr. Firstname" in a patronising way, given that we only hear her called Lesley just a couple of times), who is considerably more steel-willed than most of her species, and even manages to "win" at the end of the film, in a gag that almost seems willing to concede that it's an okay thing to have women in the work force.

Still, that's an awful lot of movie devoted to personal crises - as will happen in these things - and while Domergue is fully able to enliven her above-average part with an above-average performance, Tobey is a perfectly flat, perfectly vanilla actor whose leading man is flawlessly mediocre: not nearly bad enough to tip the movie into the red, not nearly good enough that his appearances onscreen elicit more of a reaction than "eh, wasn't there something about a massive octopus?" Again, 79 minutes really isn't enough time to seriously lose patience with a movie, but there's quite a lot of movie that consists of people talking about the problem rather than actually fighting the problem, and the people doing the talking just aren't that interesting. Nor is Gordon director enough to do much with these scenes other than get through them fast as possible: the movie is shot with a uniform flat, stagey style (the scenes aboard the sub especially), proficient but bland just like the hero. There is one really strange shot in which the camera swings weakly from close-up to close-up, as though they'd run out of time to do three different set-ups by the end of the day, and had to get a whole conversation knocked out now; that all three principals are at this point wearing face-obscuring suits makes the whole thing that much weirder.

Plenty of '50s sci-fi/horror movies have survived being just this mediocre, though; some have survived being a great deal worse, in fact. And it's always for the same reason: a great monster. ICFBTS unquestionably has that, and it's the reason that the movie, despite being completely unexceptional in very nearly every regard is still remembered as a classic of the genre. Harryhausen's giant octopus is, famously, missing two legs; the most obvious victim of Columbia's budget-pinching. But that just adds a sense of hand-hewn charm, in those few shots where it's obvious. From a technical standpoint, it may actually be the weakest thing Harryhausen had done to that point: the composite shots by which the hectapus is seen to be interacting with San Francisco are less than convincing, let's say. But the animation itself is just terrific: the animal's arms each move with slimy purpose, with personality and menace all their own, and its giant midsection has a perpetual look of violent grumpiness. The race to be the best giant killer animal of that decade is a fiercely competitive one, but the octopus can hold its own with the very greatest, both for the quality of the animation and the sense of purpose in Harryhausen's acting. It's a pity that it's not in a better overall film, like his Rhedosaur in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was, but given the number of movies like this that didn't pay off with such a top-notch monster, it is easier to forgive It Came from Beneath the Sea its various narrative, cinematic, and psychological failings.

GATZ PAINS

2013-05-14T15:20:00.000-05:00

The problem with Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby - a problem with The Great Gatsby, I had better say - there are many problems, and some of them are more debilitating than others, and some really aren't "problems", but idiosyncracies. Let me start again.

See, there's a lot of The Great Gatsby where it seems apparent that what Luhrmann wants to do more than anything else is to remake his 2001 meta-musical Moulin Rouge!, and while the results aren't terribly effective at all as far as adaptation F. Scott Fitgerald's famous, wildly loved novel goes, they're awfully great Luhrmann. But there's even more of The Great Gatsby where Luhrmann gives the stylistic craziness a rest, and just wants to tell a rich, tragic love story, which is even less effective as adapting the book Gatsby, given that its title character and his female obsession weren't really tragic romantic heroes, and that's so burned into everything about the way the story works and the world and characters it presents that it's really not possible to retrofit a soaring romance onto Fitzgerald's plot skeleton. It's also not particularly great Luhrmann, though the way that his aesthetic plays out when it's being subdued to a minor key is interesting enough that I hope he continues to develop this less-exhausting side of himself.

The point of all this being that Luhrmann (and his usual co-writer, Craig Pearce) is trying to make two different movies, largely incompatible with each other, and while he's usually able to stick with just one for each scene, that doesn't make the flow between moments and the overall emotional arc and clearer or more coherent. Also, both of the movies Luhrmann has in mind are pretty bad adaptations of The Great Gatsby - though better, in both cases, than the terminally stilted 1974 film with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow - making it hard to say why he didn't pick any of the hundreds of classic books where his operatic-romantic approach might actually have made even the remotest sense. I'm not a particularly huge Gatsby fan - it's an excellent dissection of American culture and psychology, but it's not even my favorite American novel of the 1920s - and the fact that Luhrmann's movie plays a bit fast and loose with the themes and emotions of the text isn't my concern per se, but rather the way that Luhrmann's intentions simply don't fit the story that same text has forced on him. In 1996, the director's take on William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet similarly blew up the text, attempting to revitalise it for a new generation of teenagers and restate it in a contemporary idiom - but all that film's broad, stylish experimentation, even when it failed, was still attempting in some way to explicate Romeo & Juliet. Whereas The Great Gatsby seems to view its source material as a primarily an inconvenience, relying on the most famous visual iconography (the green light across the bay, the optometrist's billboard) and its opportunity for '20s costumes and sets and all kinds of Flapper Era excess, but never resolving the fact that Fitzgerald's Daisy Buchanan is not by any conceivable stretch the tragic Juliet figure that Luhrmann and Pearce need her to be.

The good news - very nearly the saving grace, even - is that the excess is so high-quality: Luhrmann's wife and most important visual collaborator, Catherine Martin, is up to her usual good work with both the costume and production design, and her adoption of a color palette of lavish yellows and greens gives the movie a visual discipline that it might otherwise lack. As was somewhat true of Moulin Rouge!, the editing and rocket-powered camera movement makes it a little hard to enjoy the sets as much as we'd like, but the more that the script slows down to bask in the romantic half of the plot, the more that Luhrmann's sped-up aesthetic pulls back, giving us plenty of opportunities to look at Gatsby's palatial home and his infamous shirts (it's worth mentioning that The Great Gatsby was edited by Jason Ballantine, Jonathan Redmond, and Matt Villa, none of whom are Jill Bilcock, who cut the director's first three films and is the chief reason that the quicksilver editing in Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge! feels intensive and purposeful rather than just manic - Gatsby's party scenes are just manic). The film finds Luhrmann working in 3-D, and though digital cinematography suits his style awkwardly (it gives everything a certain antiseptic sheen), being able to plunge into sets and feel the world spilling out right at the audience fits his style perfectly. The biggest problem I have with this is that there's not enough of it: by the 90-minute mark of a bloated 143-minute film (just barely shorter than the '74 version), Luhrmann has largely committed to telling his story and not beating us with his aesthetic, and this is maybe the chief reason that Gatsby isn't up to the standard set by Moulin Rouge!, where the visuals were just as unrelenting as the melodrama.

Even without having to fight for attention with the style, The Great Gatsby's not even a terribly persuasive melodrama: first, because the characters aren't designed for it, and second, because the actors are, to a man, mis-cast. No not "to a man"; newcomer Elizabeth Debicki is fantastic as the sporty, sarcastic Jordan Baker, and I'm greatly eager to see more of her. But the big stars in the big roles pretty consistently don't work out: Tobey Maguire's Nick Carroway is far too much of an "aw shucks" kid, and Leonardo DiCaprio's Jay Gatsby is a poor compromise between the soulless character in the book and the weepy romantic in the script, and that's setting aside that he's visibly too old for the part. Carey Mulligan's Daisy Buchanan is a failure, though an interesting one: she tries hard as possible to make the symbolic character real enough to seem like a worthwhile part, while also implying the romantic longing that the script can't make explicit without destroying the story altogether. It's a noble attempt that ends up feeling too fussy and incoherent, though she's by far the most interesting of the leads to watch, mostly for lack of competition.

It's not that this film is devoid of merit as a romance, it's just not very compelling owing to the characters' sketchy construction. The film is always better as a spectacle, though it is not always a great one: the much-ballyhooed Jay-Z produced soundtrack isn't terribly memorable even as jarring anachronism, and there are some visual tricks that Luhrmann enjoys using that don't work (on-screen text, especially in 3-D, which looks profoundly dumb). But just enough of the glitz and glamor and exhaustive re-creation of '20s New York as a fantasyland just as rich as the director's 1899 Paris all work well enough that the film manages to be sort of enjoyable. I am not desperate enough that "sort of enjoyable" is a satisfactory replacement for "good".

6/10

HERE COMES THE JUDGE

2013-05-13T23:50:00.000-05:00

Louis Feuillade's Fantômas quintet of 1913-'14 predicted many of the aspects of future escapist entertainment, but I'm afraid that the last thing it managed to establish is one that we'd have all hoped would have been avoided. The False Magistrate, premiering 364 days after Fantômas - In the Shadow of the Guillotine (that is to say, on the same weekend, one year later), represents perhaps the first time in cinema history that the final chapter in a series would represent a decisive step down in quality from what had gone before it, and we can see its descendents, in more or less intense form, in everything from Return of the Jedi to X-Men: The Last Stand to The Dark Knight Rises.

Having said that, let me at least try to be fair to The False Magistrate. The version of the films available today come from a 1998 restoration conducted by Gaumont, the Cinémathèque Française, and Feuillade's grandson Jacques Champreaux, and considering the extreme age of the series, they're in pretty good quality; except for the fifth and final chapter. Frankly, The False Magistrate is in absolutely terrible condition: of the footage that remains, the opening scene is plagued by severe nitrate degradation, and most of the exteriors (of which there are more here than in any other Fantômas film save for perhaps the second, Juve vs. Fantômas) are so washed out as to border on illegible. That is, mind you, of the footage that remains. There is quite a bit of footage too far gone to even restore, containing at least four separate scenes, and these are recapped by intertitles. That's not nearly as exciting as actually watching a movie, of course, and it is to the film's immeasurable misfortune that two of the missing scenes are the big exposition drop in which Inspector Juve (Edmond Bréon) and Jérôme Fandor (Georges Melchior) catch us up and kick off the plot, and even worse, the final scene of the whole damn series, meaning that the ultimate fate of Fantômas (René Navarre) is told, not shown. A pretty dismally dull way to wrap up a series of such playful crime stories, and it's impossible to pretend that The False Magistrate doesn't end up seeming even worse because of a spot of awful luck years after the fact.

That being said, enough remains of the film - and let's not overstate things, with 70 extant minutes, it's unlikely that more than another 5 or 10 have gone missing - to argue with reasonable certainty that this one just isn't up to the same level of mad, proto-surrealist invention, outside of one truly impeccable scene that's as good as anything else in the Fantômas series. It's a rather low-stakes story to go out on: in brief, Fantômas's men have stolen some jewels and money while he's cooling his heels in a Belgian jail, and when he's escaped, he immediately concocts a plot to take their plunder for himself, leaving a decent handful of bodies in his wake. That escape, by the way, is entirely the responsibility of Juve: angry at the fact that his arch-enemy has been captured in a country with no death penalty, the policeman manages to trade places himself with Fantômas and permit the criminal to return to France, where he is certain that Fandor will be able to re-apprehend the criminal and the menace of Fantômas will be put to an end once and for all. I want to point out that this means that, thanks to Juve's bloody fixation on seeing Fantômas dead, the criminal is able at least three other people who would have been safe if he'd stayed rotting in Belgium. It's also worth pointing out that the early Surrealists love the Fantômas films because of what they perceived as a very subtle and perhaps inadvertent condemnation of the incredible incompetence of the authorities at doing good in the world, and there's no way to really read this otherwise. It's playfully daft, anyway.

Fantômas's plot involves impersonating the magistrate Predier (whose death on a train is a potent bit of brutality even for a series that has forced me to seriously re-evaluate how much violence could be depicted in a movie from the 1910s), seemingly the securest place for a criminal mastermind to hide in plain sight; things go wrong for him, of course, when the French police demand Fantômas's extradition pertaining to a strange, horribly baroque death of one of the criminal's associates, Ribonard (Martial), in a church, and Juve is thus shipped right to the same facility where Fantômas himself holds court. The end, distorted as it is, is a genuinely hilarious bit of table-turning that I would not dream of spoiling, though I am pleased the series ends the way it does; there's a sense of open possibility that suits the material much better than something pat would have.

I've left a lot out of that synopsis, involving Fantômas attempt to extort money from a Marquise de Tergall (Germaine Pelisse), for I find that The False Magistrate is not the better for its subplots. While the set for the de Tergall home is absolutely wonderful, fussy and overstuffed and filled with great possibilities for staging movement, the plot itself is stretched-out a little, and not nearly as weird and uncanny as the best of the series. It's still a compelling plot; but it's so normal, and that is not something the films had yet been.

The one exception is a fantastic sequence staged in the bell-tower where Fantômas traps Ribonard: presented in a wide-shot that emphasises the height of the tower by framing it with great slabs of black, and then employing a magnificent crane shot that slowly follows Ribonard up the ladder to the bell, where he has hidden the jewels, it's already pretty fantastic, ambitious filmmaking, and that's before Fantômas pulls the ladder away and leaves Ribonard hanging helplessly; when the bell is rung during a funeral service a few days later, there's a wide shot of Ribonard's body being flung against the side of the bell like a rag dummy (which...), cut with confused churchgoers below being sprinkled with what the titles horrifyingly describe as pearls, diamonds, rubies, and blood. It's absolutely phenomenal, unsettling filmmaking, top to bottom, and it's the one place where The False Magistrate reaches the level of its predecessors.

Otherwise, it's fine and somewhat unremarkable: solid enough entertainment, and a bit more modern-friendly than the sometimes presentational staging of the earliest films, but its pleasures are muted and less unique. Some well-staged exteriors of people in the country and city; nice sets without quite so much depth as Feuillade is capable of. It's impressive that a movie from 1914 is still this captivating, no doubt, but the Fantômas series was capable of more, and this definitely ends it with more of a fizzle than a bang.

Louis Feuillade's Fantômas
Fantômas - In the Shadow of the Guillotine
Juve vs. Fantômas
The Murderous Corpse
Fantômas vs. Fantômas
The False Magistrate

TEN FOR MONDAY: A HARRYHAUSEN BESTIARY

2013-05-13T14:51:00.002-05:00

Though he'd been functionally retired for over 30 years, when the great effects designer and stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen died last week, it still felt that an era in popcorn filmmaking had ended. His work was the kind that inspires the fiercest sort of passion in his defenders, for while it was not always seamless, he was basically doing it alone, and the personal, hand-hewn touch that resulted makes his films look personal and memorable. It's not realistic work, but it's deeply appealing on a level that most visual effects cannot touch.

In his memory, and to kick off a weeklong tribute to his work, I am happy to present my list of

My 10 Favorite Ray Harryhausen Creatures

Dishonorable mention:
There's no such thing as Ray Harryhausen work that isn't good on a technical level, but the mechanical owl Bubo from Clash of the Titans is such a disaster on a storytelling level that I felt compelled to single him out for condemnation. Just because you can make a filthy fucking R2-D2 knockoff look absolutely perfect using all the skills honed by a lifetime of painstaking work, doesn't mean that you should.

Honorable mention:
The giant gorilla Joe from Mighty Joe Young was on my list from the start, and pretty high, but finally, I blinked. After all, the work was a collaboration with Willis O'Brien, who created the all-time iconic giant ape in King Kong, and though it's widely-understood that Harryhausen did a great deal of the mechanical work himself, while O'Brien was busy getting other things handled, and it's really easy to tell the difference between their work, it's only right to leave this list for movies where Harryhausen wasn't playing second fiddle, even if he played it exqusitely.

10. The giant hectapus, It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)
Reviewed here

Budget and time demanded that the octopus terrorising San Francisco be shorn of two of its legs, but that just adds to the legend and charm of Harryhausen's second solo project, which found him creating one of the best real-life animals grown to abnormal size and prone to destroying things of a decade where you couldn't swing a two-ton dead cat without seeing an insect leveling Los Angeles. Not the showiest thing in his career, but a great way to understand why he was better at doing his thing than everybody else working in the same idiom at the same time.

9. Gwangi the allosaur, The Valley of Gwangi (1969)
Reviewed here

By far the best of Harryhausen's dinosaurs, the title character of his long-gestating passion project is the perfect mixture of movie monster and historical animal, with just a dash of visible personality that makes him more fun to watch than either of those things imply. And the scenes of him tearing around a desert town like the scourge of God boast some of the best matte work that Harryhausen ever did, making sure that we're thinking less about the effects' quality than the oh my god the dinosaur got loose friovlous fun of it.

8. Giant scorpions, Clash of the Titans (1981)

Some of the best giant insects ever filmed. Full stop. Flawlessly animated to move exactly like a giant nightmare beast would if it was out in the world, trying to kill you dead, they're imaginatively creepy-crawlie in a way that, if you don't shudder a little bit while watching them, then you just plain don't shudder. Far more persuasive and impressive than their 2009 descendants. (And no, scorpions aren't insects; but "giant insect" as a film trope is ancient and honorable, and it includes arachnids).

7. Cyclops, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)

The first of Harryhausen's classical mythology films includes many fantastic evocations of beasts from out of your childhood fantasies, but none are more technically impressive, or convincing as personalities, than the man-eating horned giant who is technically Greek rather than Arabian. Who's counting? The subtleties of movement, the way you can tell what he's thinking, the weight and fleshiness; though the process shots aren't as great here as in many of Harryhausen's films, that's the only reason you can ever forget that he's not real mutant.

6. Kali, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)

And here's a character from India. These are matinee movies, not anthropological documentaries. It's easy to forgive all of the cultural blindness and antihistoricism in the world when the results are this entrancing: the choreography of the six-armed living statue in its fight with several people is quite possibly the most complex in Harryhausen's entire career, and the design of the scene is one of the most giddy Old Hollywood throwbacks he ever worked with, creating a truly atmospheric sense of storybook fantasy.

5. Phororhacos, Mysterious Island (1961)
Reviewed here

Better-known as the giant chicken, though it's actually based on a real preshistoric animal, for all that matters. In the movie where the giant animal trend reached its pinnacle, the massive flesh-eating bird is barely the standout, though where giant crabs and giant bees are more squarely in the realm of B-movie fantasy, the phororacos is like something from a primeval memory of terror birds, and its genuinely thrilling in addition to being fun. Also, the moment it knocks over a fence post is one of the great moments of technical complexity in Harryhausen's body of work.

4. Talos, Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

Building on the Cyclops, and anticipating Kali, this giant bronze warrior is an achievement so complete and impressive that I hardly know where to start. Certianly, the fact that Harryhausen managed to depict such a complete personality for a creature that has an immobile face is damned impressive, and so is the way he suggests the massive weight and size of the creature. I'm also amazed at how unflaggingly metallic the giant is - the sound effects help out immensely - and yet always flexible enough to be a real threat. Sheer mastery.

3. Ymir, 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957)

Perhaps surprisingly, the only marauding alien in Harryhausen's bestiary, despite that being one of the '50s favorite kinds of monsters. As expected, he did a great job and then some of depicting the marauding, but what's shocking even now is how much of a character the Ymir is, expressing not just a sense of violent rage but also of terrified confusion, and while it's a cliché to talk about movies that make us like the monster more than the heroes, it's never been truer than here: the Ymir's inevitable death is a genuinely moving. It's such an overall great piece of work that ideas from the both the design and action would keep returning in Harryhausen's career till the end.

2. Skeleton army, Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

Pure escapist cinema. The scene in which the Argonauts square off against a sorcerer's fighting undead is so perfectly-executed, imaginatively-conceived, and element in its mythological, fairy-tale simplicity that it could make a lifelong B-movie fan out of anybody who saw it at an impressionable age, or even just those who love a good bit of movie magic. Still the go-to scene when you need to prove to somebody that, for all the advances and complexities of CGI and animatronics and whatever costly effects technology you care to name, they really don't make 'em like they used to.

1. Medusa, Clash of the Titans (1981)

I'm not sure what's more impressive: the raw craftsmanship, or the fact that the scene in which the Gorgon appears is so fast-moving and kiddie-movie terrifying that you pretty much forget that she's an effect. Complex like nothing else even in a career that favored crazy ambition - between the moving snakes in her hair, her twitching tail, her villainous expression, and her talon-like hands, the model itself must have taken forever to reposition correctly, and that's ignoring the fact that the firelight in her lair is perhaps the most sophisticated lighting in Harryhausen's entire canon - it's a phenomenal climax to a genre-defining body of work, and if Clash of the Titans had not been the last film Harryhausen worked on, I cannot imagine how he'd have topped this. Plus, it's such a perfect evocation of the mythological monster, with a perfect sense of creepy grandeur, that even now when I think about Medusa in any context, it's not a version from my imagination that I'm thinking of, but from Ray Harryhausen's.

BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: LITERARY CLASSICS WITH MR. LUHRMANN

2013-05-13T00:40:00.000-05:00

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: you'd have to have a pretty demented sense of the word "original" to claim that Australian arch-stylist Baz Luhrmann has to date made any film with an original plot, but The Great Gatsby is only his second for-real legitimate adaptation. The last time he did it was also with a wildly familiar text that everybody read in high school.

So many points of distinction for William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet! Released in 1996, it's something of a bridge between the Shakespeare boom that happened in the wake of Kenneth Branagh's 1989 version of Henry V and the short-lived but intense "updating Shakespeare for modern-day teens" craze that it largely inspired; along with Clueless, it augured in the new era of classic literature in modern dress films that lasted well into the 2000s; it accidentally made the interesting young actor Leonardo DiCaprio a teenybopper idol until he made enough auteur-driven movies in the early '00s to redeem himself; it made enough money and had enough cultural cachet that director Baz Luhrmann was able to make, on a studio budget, the insanely idiosyncratic and strange Moulin Rouge!; it is the reason for every song that got too much play on the radio in 1997; and for at least a short time in their lives, it was the favorite movie of every American girl born between 1981 and 1985.

Speaking as someone who A) saw Moulin Rouge! first, and B) loves Moulin Rouge! enough to count it among my 10 desert island movies, I will confess that I've never been able to approach Romeo + Juliet without lapsing into the idea that everything that is best about it is still not as good as when Luhrmann did it again in that subsequent film, five years later, and everything that is bad about Romeo + Juliet is bad enough to cause some serious problems. At the same time, the movie has aged well, far better than anything that shrieks "MID-'90s, Y'ALL!" so vigorously in every facet of its setting, its cast, and oh my God its soundtrack had any right to. If nothing else, the degree to which Luhrmann's favored style in what he'd eventually call his Red Curtain Trilogy (beginning with his first feature, 1992's Strictly Ballroom) has become sufficiently normalised in the 12 years since it ended that this film's bright and sassy travestying of Shakespeare feels more like an aesthetic choice and less like misfiring kitsch. I will say this: I liked the movie more this time than any previous viewing, and some of the things I had previously hated the most struck me now as being among the most effective elements.

That being said, there's plenty in the film that doesn't quite land, and the film suffers grievously from its extreme literalness, which is a strange claim to make of a movie in which Shakespeare's pair of star-crossed lovers are transplanted to a gang-decimated city on the Florida coast. But it's there anyway: having hit upon the idea of doing one of the most famous plays in the history of drama in a super-hyper-modern style, Luhrmann and co-adapter Craig Pearce don't bring that idea to its logical conclusion, but keep hedging their bets, typically in small but endlessly irritating ways: there are references to "swords" in the text, so we have to have a close-up of a handgun to see that it was manufactured by the Sword company; and there's so many bits and pieces of scenes that feel less like clever attempts to smuggle Shakespeare into the world of 1996, than the bend the world of 1996 to fit vocabulary literally centuries out of date. Of course, Luhrmann being Luhrmann, it's not only possible but likely that the "Look at me! Do you see all the weird little things I'm doing to call attention to how this is a modern-day adaptation!" trickery is 100% intentional. The dominant mode of the Red Curtain films is of calculated artifice, an attempt to push the audience away from the project through contrivance, but also use those contrivances to explore huge, elemental emotions. This worked astoundingly well in Moulin Rouge!, and it's so much less aggressive in Strictly Ballroom that it doesn't matter; Romeo + Juliet, I think, is a little bit too much of a halfway measure, and while it nails the alienation from the text, it only sporadically manages to reconnect back on an emotional level.

Or that's how I see it; those adolescent girls in 1996 clearly disagree with me. Which is more than legitimate, in this case. The film takes the signifiers of teen culture as it stood in 1996, and running Shakespeare through them, so that the very famous but very old-fashioned and very over-familiar story could be violently shaken up and recontextualised for those same teens - it's an attempt to cinematically depict the emotional anarchism of first love using Shakespeare as a tool, basically (it's much the same as the use of pop songs in Moulin Rouge!). Lord knows, I'm a fan of doing anything at all to violently shake up over-familiar stories, and there's absolutely no doubt that Romeo + Juliet does the most important thing that any Shakespeare adaptation can do: it makes the material seem fresh and unexpected (and it does the next most important thing, too: its scene structure feels more cinematic than theatrical. This is a desperately rare thing, though less so in the post-Branagh era of Shakespeare movies than before). It does this using such an extremely specific rhetorical device, though, that I think it's fair to claim that one's ability to fully engage with the material, post-shakeup, is entirely based on one's emotional attachment to same teen culture it wallows in. Put simply: you're not likely to regard Romeo + Juliet as truly great cinema unless the song "Lovefool" stirs your soul.

Shall we back away from all that, and just take the thing as a wildly stylised version of a classic play? Thanks. As far as Shakespeare goes, the biggest block that Romeo + Juliet faces isn't its urgent modernity, but its cast, very few of whom are consistently able to handle the Elizabethan dialogue without missing a stitch. The best, by such an indescribable margin that he could just as easily be in a different movie entirely, is Pete Postlethwaite as Father Laurence. Candidates for the worst include just about everyone in the cast: in the title roles, DiCaprio and Claire Danes manage their lines more effectively than a lot of people, but they have so much more to do than anyone else that even just a few slipups, where it becomes clear that they're not entirely sure what they are saying, or what it means (this happens to Danes more than DiCaprio) add up to something a little bit ruinous. I have in the past greatly disliked Miriam Margolyes's broadly wacky Latina take on the nurse, but with the gimmick being more a fault of the writing and directing, I think there's plenty of little nuance to her performance in and of itself that works awfully well. Nobody else manages to do much more than blast through with as much energy as Luhrmann could rip out of them; John Leguizamo's Tybalt, for example, and certainly Harold Perrineau's Mercutio might be variously disastrous, cartoon takes on the figures, but they sure as hell commit to those interpretations, and ride them hard as can be through the director's kaleidoscopic staging of the material.

Some moments are great - the heavily re-imagined balcony scene (they spend almost the whole time wrapped around each other, which is non-standard to say the least), or the death, which Luhrmann pushes into the tragedy red zone by having Juliet wake up before Romeo is dead are both fantastic - and some are desperately bad - the Queen Mab speech goes wrong in every way I could imagine. Overall, though, it's pretty clear that the film isn't trying to explicate any of this stuff, but use it to throw us headlong into an emotional state. Luhrmann plainly means for Romeo + Juliet to be experiential first, then dramatic; that's why we get the chaotic editing courtesy of Jill Bilcock, fragmenting the action into bite-sized pieces that are thus each emphasised as The Most Important Thing Ever. Notice the gun! Notice the thunder! Notice the neon crucifixes! the film demands, and certainly with Luhrmann's wife and most important collaborator Catherine Martin doing her usually brazen work as production designer (there are enough weird little Shakespeare in-jokes that I gave up tracking them, and the evocation of the expensive tackiness of South Florida is priceless), the things we are made to notice are eye-catching, one and all.

But the storytelling is messy, no doubt about it. Not like Moulin Rouge!, where the storytelling was simplistic but clear; this film does suffer from style that gets in the way of the plot, rather than a plot that just doesn't want to compete. The opening, for example: there's a flawless conceit of using a news broadcast of the opening lines of the play (and Shakespeare's dialogue coming from the voice of a Standard American English broadcaster lady is the most delightfully off-kilter bit of line-reading in the whole movie, I think), but then there's a crazy, text-dominated montage immediately after that exactly repeats the lines. I have no idea what the point was, but it makes the movie feel weird and aimless basically the moment it starts, and to an extent, it never recovers. The movie is dazzling, and its experiment in contrasting modern culture with archaic language is fascinating enough to make that language pop, but it's simply too busy and wearying to really feel like a fully effective version of Romeo + Juliet. I love the energy, no matter what use it's being put to - I'd watch this movie a hundred times before the stillborn 1936 Leslie Howard/Norma Shearer version - and the teen-pop iconography of DiCaprio and Danes works greatly to the film's benefit even when their performances fall short. Overall, though it's simply not focused or consistent enough to fully earn its tragedy.

Updated: All those words, and I completely forgot to mention something I really wanted to point out! Despite being the only one of Luhrmann's first four movies that wasn't an Australian co-production, it strikes me that Romeo + Juliet showcases much more than the director's later films a quintessentially Aussie sense of wacky humor: the Montague gang in general feels like they came from one of those "colorful people doing colorful things" films that were for a long time the sole cinematic export of that country (including Luhrmann's own Strictly Ballroom), and especially Mercutio, bizarrely and unsuccessfully re-imagined as a woman-hating heterosexual drag queen.

THE GANG'S ALL HERE

2013-05-12T19:53:00.000-05:00

Fantômas vs. Fantômas, the fourth movie in the Fantômas series by Louis Feuillade and the first to premiere in 1914, continues the little trend I have noticed in the series, whereby various facets of modern-day popcorn filmmaking are all seen in some embryonic form (and though we can add glossy escapist movies to the list with politicians, ugly buildings, and whores, as things that become respectable if they get old enough, a full century hasn't added enough of a patina of dignity to disguise the reality that the Fantômas series is frivolous and trashy, though in the most enjoyably giddy way). In this case, it is the broken promise of an ad campaign that heavily trumpets some really innovative or iconic or downright cool new twist in the movie, that proves to be pretty fully a bust when the actual movie revs up. In this case, both the title and the poster based on the book cover promise a duel between René Navarro's master criminal and an equally crafty Fantômas doppelgänger. While the scene of two men in black hoods meeting at a party does in fact come to pass, it's just a tiny fraction even of the film's scant 60 minutes, and while one of the two men is Fantômas, a bit of sleight-of-hand in the editing room is enough to make even that a bit unclear until after the fact.

Still, for all that Fantômas vs. Fantômas only briefly offers the sight of, y'know, Fantômas vs. Fantômas, it's a rock-solid continuation of the series doing what it does so well: offering freaky imagery and concepts in the middle of its wild, over-the-top crime narrative. True, I'll confess that if I had a mind to ranking them, it would barely scrape in as my least-favorite of the first four, but the level of quality amongst them is remarkably consistent, and in this happy respect, Fantômas is nothing at all like our modern blockbusters, where quality barely even remains consistent within a single film, let alone between different entries in a franchise.

The movie opens brilliantly: Inspector Juve (Edmond Bréon) has been doing such a lousy job of leading the police investigation of the gangleader that the newspapers have come to the idea that he's got to be Fantômas himself - no halfway competent cop could possibly be this bad at fighting crime. Given what we've seen of Juve's crimefighting skills, particularly the ridiculously easy way that his quarry escaped at the end of the last film, The Murderous Corpse, it's pretty damn easy to agree with the papers on at least the first part, and for managing to proactively make fun of all those generations of hypnotically inept movie policemen, I have to tip my hat. Juve's good friend and far more effective sidekick, reporter Jérôme Fandor (Georges Melchior), knows better and is tremendously huffy on his partner's behalf, but it's too late: Juve has already been taken into police custody under no real charges. It doesn't help that the police are being dazzled right now by a great American detective awesomely named Tom Bob, who was the first to discover a dead body hidden behind a newly installed plaster wall, and thus given whatever he needs to help crack the case. We, of course, know that Bob is really Fantômas in yet another one of his marvelous disguises (he's also the criminal financier Pére Moche, and the old-age makeup Navarre wears to play that part is quite tremendous), though what, exactly, he's up to by immediately turning over to the police the evidence of his latest murder is a bit unclear to us; nor does it immediately make sense that Fantômas would seek out his old flame Lady Beltham (Renée Carl, given an extra layer of dark eyeshadow to make her look good and worn-out), now the married Duchess Alexandra, to encourage her to arrange a "let's raise money to catch Fantômas!" costume ball. Fandor sneaks in dressed as Fantômas, to draw the killer out; a policeman does the same, and the fallout from the confrontation between these various people ends up finally setting any of the heroes on the right track to uncovering the details of this latest master crime.

Where The Muderous Corpse was a straight-up mystery, as the first two films were not, Fantômas vs. Fantômas ends up being something very much like a caper film: it turns out that just about everything the criminal does in this particular story is part of a long con, though the final reveal ends up being awfully small-scale, and that is part of the reason that I don't quite love it as much. Another reason is the somewhat slipshod script, with a couple of meandering scenes like the one where Juve is found to have the exact same wound on his arm that Fantômas does, and after making a big deal out of what would happen if that wound was found, it's essentially used as evidence why he isn't the criminal.

But it's a hell of a lot of fun watching everything play out, and there's plenty of the interesting staging that was Feuillade's great strength as a director: there's a particularly ingenious early scene that uses the view into an apartment from the hallway outside to create boxes and frames within frames. And the scene where "Tom Bob" finds the body in the wall is outright horror movie stuff, and great at it: he pounds a nail into the plaster and releases a stream of blood, the whole tableaux like a Grand Guignol take on Edgar Allan Poe, and it's every bit the match to any of the weird imagery displayed in any of the films. There's not necessarily a lot that hits that level - the staging of the party, with the two Fantômases squaring off, as the people around them dance playfully and absolutely do not pretend to care about these men dressed as a notorious killer is surreal in its own very distinct way - and the technique isn't particularly innovative, after the relatively complex Murderous Corpse, but the story being told is so ballsy, and Feuillade's visual treatment of that story so assured and exciting (it's probably the least-laggy of the movies to this point), that even if it's maybe not quite all that a Fantômas movie can be, it's a hell of a lot better than most franchises this silly can claim to be by their fourth entry. A lot of that is because it only took about 10 months to get to that fourth entry, but still.

Louis Feuillade's Fantômas
Fantômas - In the Shadow of the Guillotine
Juve vs. Fantômas
The Murderous Corpse
Fantômas vs. Fantômas
The False Magistrate

EXQUISITE CORPSE

2013-05-11T23:52:00.000-05:00

There's probably no such thing as a feature-length movie made prior to maybe 1920 or '21 that can really be suited for modern tastes, I will resentfully concede, but if we can pretend that there is, I'd like to nominate the third of Louis Feuillade's Fantômas films, The Murderous Corpse from November, 1913, as being much, much easier on a 21st Century viewer than Fantômas - In the Shadow of the Guillotine or Juve vs. Fantômas. And not just because at 90 minutes - over 20 minutes longer than any of the other four entries in the series - it's the only Fantômas that's in line with what we're inclined to think of as "feature length".

Where the dominant mode of the first two films is of somewhat aimless, non-unified incidents marked out more by their weird inapplicability, The Murderous Corpse flips that around completely: its six-part structure is very coherent and clear, with scenes that build upon each other, with foreshadowing and all, but having a crisp, meaningful story to tell comes a bit to the detriment of the sublimely bizarre. It's not entirely to my tastes, as much as the previous films - the exquisite silliness of the flaming barrel escape or the batty insanity of the boa constrictor assassination from Juve vs. Fantômas aren't matched by anything until the last seven or eight minutes of The Murderous Corpse finally inject a sense of the demented and macabre into the proceedings. But certainly, it's enough to feel more like a movie, and less like a clip real of somebody's fever dreams about a master criminal. It can be readily slotted into a generic role more easily: it is by and large a mystery, for while we're quite sure that everything happening is the work of the dreaded Fantômas (René Navarre, present less often here than in the last two), and that puts us a step ahead of the heroes, we almost never know what Fantômas has done until much later. And the film's rather grisly parade of violent acts - culminating in a final-scene reveal that's absolutely skin-crawling, made more rather than less creepy because of the limited visual effects technology permitted to the filmmakers in 1913, and only slightly ruined because the title of the sixth chapter gives away the big surprise - is certainly more readily compared to the kind of movie that we actually watch nowadays than the broad, operatic gestures punctuating the first two.

On the technical side of things, The Murderous Corpse is shockingly modern in its craftsmanship - not just by the standards of the earlier Fantômas films, but by what I thought I knew of 1913 filmmaking generally. Particularly with Feuillade being something of an aesthetic reactionary (he was slow to join the moving camera revolution of the mid-'10s), I was not at all expecting such a widespread reliance on close-ups and insert shots as we get here, with letters and pictures being presented in POV shots by the score, little details that are emphasised for our benefit in complete contrast to the more classical, withdrawn proscenium staging of the earlier movies. In one scene, Feuillade pans the camera to the left slowly, combined with the blocking to suggest something absolutely horrible just offstage: a wholly effective moment, and cutting edge stuff at that time. And did I not even see a little bit of cross-cutting? A scene in which Princess Danidoff (Jane Faber, returning from the first movie) is alone in her boudoir, unaware that Fantômas is creeping up on her, contrasting with the busy, laughing party that's happening elsewhere in her house, and while this technique was not at all new in 1913, nothing earlier in this series had touched it.

Simple, barbarically simple, but it all serves to connect The Murderous Corpse to our 2013 idea of what a movie "ought" to be, and makes it a whole lot easier to simply attend to the film and enjoy it, without constantly having one's mental copy of Bordwell and Thompson's Film Art held open to the introductory chapters, so you can be absolutely sure that what seems corny and stilted was actually some of the most creative visual storytelling of the day.

As for the story being told: as I said, it's a very sturdy mystery plot, hinging on the artist Jacques Dollon (André Luguet), framed for the murder of a baroness by you-know-who. What gets to be confusing is that in prison, Dollon is strangled to death, but when his body is to be taken to the morgue, it has disappeared, and over the next few weeks, Dollon's fingerprints keep appearing in crime scenes. The case becomes an obsession for La Capitale reporter Jérôme Fandor (Georges Melchior), who we last saw as he was being crushed to death in an explosion triggered by Fantômas at the end of Juve vs. Fantômas. In the very best serial tradition, Fandor's escape occurs offscreen and is waved away as though we could not possibly care how he managed to survive with only light injuries. Not so lucky was Inspector Juve (Edmond Bréon), who is sadly reported to have died in the collapse of the building, though no body was found in the rubble. I am not certain if that would have been as ridiculously obvious a red flag to 1913 audiences as it is to us: hoary clichés have to begin somewhere, and Fantômas is the origin for quite a lot of those clichés as they apply to melodramatic crime stories.

There are no snakes; there are no garish plots to decapitate actors; there are no detachable arms; there is a breakaway wall. But what there also is, more importantly, is a really tight and intriguing mystery narrative, and I'm not going to say anything else about what happens, because unfathomably for a century-old movie that has influenced an entire genre, it's actually a little bit surprising in spots. Certainly, it's more clever than you think it is, or than I think it is anyway: there's a long scene during which Dollon is being checked into the criminal database, which involves measuring his skull (oh, phrenology, you were the most awesome hideously biased science ever) and taking his fingerprints, and this latter part goes on forever. "Hm, ah, well, in 1913, that was something that was striking and new in the movies", I told myself dubiously, "so that's why they're showing it at such tedious length". In fact, they were doing it to imprint that moment on the viewer's brain, so that when we see an inky fingerprint later on, it's a great "aha!" moment, and even greater because a film of unspeakably ancient vintage got the better of me so easily.

And, once again, Feuillade's staging really is terrific: the scene where Dollon's body has gone missing is staged beautifully, with a door at the back of the set opening into his cell, and all the characters look into that room and are aghast; but we can't see, and it's absolutely maddening until the reverse-shot cuts in. It works exactly like the famous "door frame off Ruth Gordon" shot in Rosemary's Baby, and that was 55 years later. Also, Feuillade manages, in one exquisitely gorgeous scene, to predict Expressionism:

Or maybe not Expressionism exactly, but come on. It's a sewer that looks like a giant keyhole. That's amazing.

Still and all, I don't love it like the first two: it's all a bit normal-ish, and the alien strangeness of the others, especially Juve vs. Fantômas, deeply appeals to me. And bumping Fantômas himself to supporting status and giving Juve barely a cameo, in favor of the much less interesting (though far more competent) hero Fandor isn't exactly a trade up. But still, there's a whole lot to be impressed by, and if the first two movies somewhat demonstrated a high level of artistry for 1913, The Murderous Corpse is genuinely edgy, in its bleak content and the creative way it presents it, and that's impressive no matter what.

Louis Feuillade's Fantômas
Fantômas - In the Shadow of the Guillotine
Juve vs. Fantômas
The Murderous Corpse
Fantômas vs. Fantômas
The False Magistrate

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT: REVIEW INDEX

2013-05-11T11:00:00.000-05:00

The complete index of my reviews of the 53 original episodes of Arrested Development as aired on Fox between 2003 and 2006. The curious are invited to check out my ranking of all episodes, appended at the bottom.

Season 1 (2003-2004)
"Pilot"
"Top Banana"
"Bringing Up Buster"
"Key Decisions"
"Visiting Ours"
"Charity Drive"
"My Mother, the Car"
"In God We Trust"
"Storming the Castle"
"Pier Pressure"
"Public Relations"
"Marta Complex" & "Beef Consommé"
"Shock and Aww"
"Staff Infection"
"Missing Kitty"
"Altar Egos" & "Justice Is Blind"
"Best Man for the Gob"
"Whistler's Mother"
"Not Without My Daughter"
"Let 'Em Eat Cake"

Season 2 (2004-2005)
"The One Where Michael Leaves"
"The One Where They Build a House"
"¡Amigos!"
"Good Grief"
"Sad Sack"
"Afternoon Delight"
"Switch Hitter"
"Queen for a Day"
"Burning Love"
"Ready, Aim, Marry Me"
"Out on a Limb" & "Hand to God"
"Motherboy XXX"
"The Immaculate Election"
"Sword of Destiny"
"Meat the Veals"
"Spring Breakout"
"Righteous Brothers"

Season 3 (2005-2006)
"The Cabin Show"
"For British Eyes Only"
"Forget-Me-Now"
"Notapusy"
"Mr. F"
"The Ocean Walker"
"Prison Break-In"
"Making a Stand"
"S.O.B.s"
"Fakin' It"
"Family Ties"
"Exit Strategy"
"Development Arrested"

* * * * *

Ratings and ranking

A+
"Making a Stand"
"Pier Pressure"
"Afternoon Delight"
"Motherboy XXX"

A
"Good Grief"
"Bringing Up Buster"
"The One Where They Build a House"
"Meat the Veals"
"The Cabin Show"
"Forget-Me-Now"
"Not Without My Daughter"
"Top Banana"

A-
"Marta Complex"
"Mr. F"
"Storming the Castle"
"Spring Breakout"
"Missing Kitty"
"Family Ties"
"Key Decisions"
"Notapusy"
"¡Amigos!"
"Shock and Aww"
"Hand to God"
"Development Arrested"
"Sad Sack"
"In God We Trust"
"Out on a Limb"
"Switch Hitter"
"The Immaculate Election"

B+
"For British Eyes Only"
"Sword of Destiny"
"S.O.B.s"
"The One Where Michael Leaves"
"Whistler's Mother"
"My Mother, the Car"
"Righteous Brothers"
"Let 'Em Eat Cake"
"Pilot"
"Exit Strategy"
"Best Man for the Gob"

B
"Public Relations"
"Fakin' It"
"Beef Consommé"
"Queen for a Day"
"Charity Drive"

B-
"Staff Infection"
"The Ocean Walker"
"Altar Egos"
"Visiting Ours"

C+
"Justice Is Blind"

C
"Burning Love"
"Ready, Aim, Marry Me"

C-
"Prison Break-In"

VILLAIN AND SUPERVILLAIN

2013-05-10T23:55:00.001-05:00

In reviewing the first film in Louis Feuillade's five-part Fantômas series of 1913 and 1914, Fantômas - In the Shadow of the Guillotine, I rather snottily compared to Iron Man 3 as being "a critic-proof, and essentially quality-proof opportunity for filmgoers to spend time with a character they already knew they loved". And of course that comparison was appealing chiefly because Iron Man 3 happened to have come out so very close the the exact 100-year anniversary of the debut of the Fantômas serials, because there's actually a much better point of comparison among modern gigantic popcorn blockbusters: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and its seven sequels. Namely, we have here an adaptation of an indescribably popular piece of genre fiction that trades on the love the audience already has for the characters and stories so fully that the movie version is able to cheat a little bit and leave at least some of the plot offscreen, trusting the viewer to already know what's going on. That's obviously a little bit awkward a century after the book's popularity has run its course.

I bring this up now, in the context of the second film in the series, Juve vs. Fantômas, because it ends up being, in perfect honesty, a bit of a shambles, plot-wise. Not that In the Shadow of the Guillotine was free of weird plot holes, it's just that they announce themselves a bit more pridefully in the sequel, which starts out already behind, as it were, and is immediately forced to play catch-up a bit (I should admit, I haven't read a single one of the novels, and I have no reason to believe that the missing plot in the films actually exists on the page). The first film had ended with Fantômas (René Navarre) and his mistress, Lady Beltham (Renée Carl) having successfully staged a prison break that nearly ended with the death of an innocent man; the second film opens with Lady Beltham having been crushed to death, though the intrepid police inspector Juve (Edmond Bréon) rather doubts this. And of course she hasn't been killed at all, though why exactly her death was faked (presumably by Fantômas himself), and at which point the two of them split up (as revealed in the third of the feature's four chapters), are details that Feuillade doesn't consider interesting enough to grace with even the vague implication of an answer.

Really, Juve vs. Fantômas feels much looser and disconnected than its forebear, at times adopting little other than the merest suggestion of an overall plot in among its anecdotal subplots, and that does make it even a bit more alienating than its archaic style. But even so, dear reader, I confess myself smitten with Juve vs. Fantômas, and not even because I successfully donned my "pretend it's 1913" cap, or had to think about doing so. If the chief appeal of In the Shadow of the Guillotine is its creation of a certain air of the inexplicable, the unpredictable, and the borderline-surreal - though surrealism, as such, hadn't been invented yet - the chief appeal of Juve vs. Fantômas is that it picks up all that strangeness and runs with it, fast as can be, with an impressive evolution in technique in the mere four months separating the films. Where the first movie was largely confined to sets, Juve vs. Fantômas spends a great deal of time, particularly in its first chapter, outside on location, and the open, bright frames that Feuillade thus creates are terrifically kinetic and physical. I admire and enjoy the cavalcade of absurdities that creep into the series with this film throughout, but the first part, "The Simplon Express Disaster" is genuinely exciting to me, ancient & unsophisticated filmmaking techniques or no. It's easy to see how the character of Fantômas made such a splash with 1910s audiences; he was their version of Heath Ledger's Joker from The Dark Knight, a figure of aimless but deadly antisocial chaos, stripped of personalising details, and safely contained within the limits of genre fiction so that he could be dealt with at no risk of actual emotional danger.

"The Simplon Express Disaster" does not contain my absolute favorite bits of Juve vs. Fantômas, though overall it's easily my favorite sequence as a whole. It opens with a bit of detectiving, as Juve and his journalist buddy Fandor (Georges Melchior) pursue the archcriminal in his disguise as gang leader Loupart, which leads them to a shady prostitute, Joséphine (Yvette Andréyor), and thence to a robbery that the Loupart gang plans to stage on a moving train. And it's here that the movie gets cooking: the train robbery is unbelievable for 1913, filmed in an actual moving train and culminating in a terrific bit of cinematic trickery as the train explodes. Fantômas ends up being denied his prize, but he's able to stage revenge on Juve and Fandor, luring them to a wine warehouse where he plans to set the barrels of alcohol on fire and kill them both. The two heroes escape by hiding in a barrel and rolling it down the dock into water, a tremendous bit of what-the-fuckery that adds a great measure of warped comedy to the whole affair.

The warped comedy, that's what does it for me. All the best parts of Juve vs. Fantômas involve criminal plots so outré that delighted disbelief is the only sane response: disbelief at the their implausibility, at the fact they were staged, at the way that we still totally buy it in the moment, thanks to Feuillade's stately presentation, which is so dignified even as the movie is at its silliest that it lends a measure of gravity and sincerity to the goings-on, whether they involve a pair of breakaway robot arms, an assassin throwing a boa constrictor at a sleeping victim wearing spikes around his midsection (modern viewer beware: the ultimate fate of that snake is damnably upsetting, a queasy reminder that animals weren't accorded anything resembling the same humane treatment four and five generations ago that they are now), or Fantômas's trick of hiding in a cistern using a wine bottle as a breathing tube, while dressed in full-on supervillain regalia, skin-tight black with a menacing hood.

As before, the contrast within the film gives it a huge amount of personality that all the decades haven't erased: the spare, authentic style and the flagrantly weird content jar against each other in a way that's really fun, though the perverse anti-cohesion of Juve vs. Fantômas makes it an awfully hard sell for a modern viewer who's not already fairly well-acquainted with the cinema of the 1900s and 1910s. On the other hand, it has something that In the Shadow of the Guillotine lacks: a real, proper hero, in the figure of Juve, who becomes a much bigger, more interesting figure here (though he's not much good at his job), big enough that not only does he get titular billing over the main character, but Bréon is even introduced, like Navarre, in a series of non-diegetic close-ups that dissolve into each other, revealing the various disguises he'll wear over the next hour. It's a quick way of establishing a character bold enough to stand against the over-the-top wicked Fantômas, and the presence of two simplistic but instantly-recognisable figures, hero and anti-hero, make what little rudiments of plot the film boasts click in a pleasingly archetypal way.

Louis Feuillade's Fantômas
Fantômas - In the Shadow of the Guillotine
Juve vs. Fantômas
The Murderous Corpse
Fantômas vs. Fantômas
The False Magistrate

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT: SEASON 3, EPISODE 13, "DEVELOPMENT ARRESTED"

2013-05-10T12:01:00.000-05:00

First airdate: 10 February, 2006
Story by Richard Day & Mitchell Hurwitz
Teleplay by Chuck Tatham & Jim Vallely
Directed by John Fortenberry

A couple of stray, nitpicky points before we begin.

First, the version of "Development Arrested" - the 53rd and final episode of the initial run of Arrested Development - that you can watch on DVD or the varied streaming services, unless I have forgotten everything, has been changed for the worse. As I recall it (and anybody who knows better is welcome to chime in), in its initial airing as part of the four-part finale block, the film's opening was modeled exactly on the pilot, down to the music cues: specifically, the opening credits were just the show's name, appearing as a blast of horns sounded on the trumpet. In these latter days, it's been needlessly replaced with the show's standard title sequence, muddying the very snug relationship between the first and last episodes of the show (not that it's exactly obscure how "Development Arrested" is riffing on the pilot", and creating a slight, but noticeable judder in the soundtrack. It wouldn't bother me so much if it weren't so pointless.

Second, in the initial scheduling announcment - it had changed by airdate - the title of this episode was said to be "Harboring Resentment", which is, I'm sorry, just better, on multiple levels.

How glad I am to get all that out of my system, because other than bizarre quibbles like those, I have basically nothing at all to say against the series finale of the best sitcom of the 2000s, for while it is not an all-time legendary episode of AD, "Development Arrested" certainly ended the series on a high note, in a manner that could not have been more in keeping with the series' evolution. It broadly embraces the most absolutely nonsensical, cartoonish developments in the whole show, ends with a climax too loopy and ridiculous even for farce, and then sends its protagonist on a boat into the sunset, to finally escape this colossally strange world and find something like normalcy. Perhaps, on the whole, it lets Michael Bluth off a little bit too easy given how effectively the show had demonstrated that he wasn't any better than the people he spend three seasons claiming superiority over, but the logic fits.

Not much actually happens here, nor does it need to: really, the penultimate episode "Exit Strategy" did most of the work that had to be done in wrapping up the storyline of the show, and "Development Arrested" is permitted to exist as something more like an epilogue, or a parenthetical. The handful of plotlines still left open are tacked down in the quickest way possible (Maeby gets her job back by selling out the family; Tobias and Lindsay are united in their love of hot seamen; Gob - wildly underused in this episode - has been dating Ann since "Notapusy", and all the misdirection around "my Christian girlfriend" in the last few episodes is suddenly made that much more brilliant), and the bulk of the new plot is devoted to a trio of self-consciously big, shocking reveals: that Lucille has been the criminal mastermind behind the Bluth Company all along (somewhat blatantly hinted ever since the shredder line in the pilot), that the long-gone Annyong Bluth has been trying to bring the family down all along (hinted with extreme subtlety), and that Lindsay was adopted, and for no obvious reason had three years shaved off her age in the process (hinted only very recently). The latter development gets a lot of flak, and it's easy to understand why, but I fully disagree: with the show, in 2006, being put out to pasture for good (Mitchell Hurwitz being too fatigued to take it to Showtime, and the idea of an internet-based cluster of episodes all debuting on the same day being outright fantasy), I don't think the idea was to push some game-changing new plot development on us, but more to parody the tendency of series finales to be huge, heightened experiences, by tossing out one of the most series-breaking developments that AD could have, just because why the hell not. By this point, after all, AD had ceased even the most minute genuflect towards the idea that these were real people that we cared about.

At any rate, with a structure cribbed from the pilot and a narrative thread that barely exists, "Development Arrested" mostly exists to wheel out one last cartload of callbacks and jokes and references, and they are of exceptionally high quality: the Risky Business joke near the beginning of the episode, I hold to be one of the cleverest things the series ever did, building a joke out of isolated elements so that we can start to assemble it in our head, announcing the punchline for ourselves, and then having the show still throw in a swerve by making the last beat of the gag be the deadpan that Michael, on the phone, change the "days without an accident" whiteboard to 1. Other personal highlights: his befuddled "Can you imagine anything more inappropriate? I guess you can" when Lindsay tries to seduce him, the weird and unstressed shot of Tobias posing exactly like George-Michael in the picture next to Michael's bed, the little ways that the Oscar reveal is foreshadowed (it's a cheat, though: what happened to his hair?), and the three reaction shots accompanying the narrator's "It wasn't a turn-on". Obviously, the "I like hot sailors"/"Mmm. Me too" exchange is a highlight, but that one's a freebie.

It's more complex and clever than laugh-out-loud funny, probably, but the show had been trending that way for a while, and "Development Arrested" feels like the exact thing it sets out to be: the culmination of a television show built on complex, self-referential, obscure gags. I do not know that I could imagine a more satisfying way to close off the series: it's unserious and sincere in a perfectly characteristic mix, and it's full of sight gags and dirty wordplay. It's basically a 22-minute mind game, and especially knowing that there's more of this family yet to come (with, potentially, even weirder structural play happening), I think that's a pretty fantastic place to leave something that was always a bit of a mental puzzle, for a sitcom.

Coming Up
26 May: Season 4 premieres on Netflix
I still have no idea what I'm going to do about the new episodes, but we'll figure it out when the time comes.

TIM AT TFE: THE MIDDLING GATSBY

2013-05-10T09:00:00.000-05:00

Didn't have a chance to post this last night: my current Film Experience column is a review of the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby, which might not be as gonzo and superficial as Baz Luhrmann's iteration, but still doesn't do a very decent job of getting into the spirit of the book.

100 YEARS IN THE SHADOW OF THE GUILLOTINE

2013-05-09T23:55:00.000-05:00

On 9 May, 1913, the most popular pulp fiction character in France made the jump from page to screen, in Louis Feuillade's Fantômas - In the Shadow of the Guillotine. So the first thing we should stop to observe is that this film was basically the equivalent of Iron Man 3 a century later: a critic-proof, and essentially quality-proof opportunity for filmgoers to spend time with a character they already knew they loved. Not bad, considering that it's usually regarded nowadays as a fascinating time capsule made in an era when the basic grammar of cinema was so fundamentally different that only historians and specialists could possibly care about it; best enjoyed, that is to say, by exactly the kind of people least inclined to enjoy, or even think about watching, Iron Man 3. Pop culture is a funny thing like that.

Actually, the first thing we should have stopped to observe, perhaps, is that In the Shadow of the Guillotine is the opening film in a five-part serial that Feuillade released over the course of 1913. Because they are all feature-length (this first episode, the shortest, is 54 minutes long) it is customary to regard the complete Fantômas as a five-movie series, rather than a single movie divided into segments, as is typically done with the director's later serials, Les Vampires, Judex, and Tih Minh. Far be it from me to flaunt convention, even if this one doesn't make all that much sense to me; for this reason, my centennial celebration of the movie that invented the cinematic super-criminal will be a review in five parts, considering each individual feature in turn. I'll beg you not to mention when I lapse into desperate repetition sometime in episode three.

In the meantime, let us content ourselves with the first story in what would ultimately prove to be over five and half hours spent in the company of the most dangerous man in pre-WWI France, a thief and assassin named Fantômas, created by authors Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, played in this iteration by René Navarre, leading man at the Gaumont film company. As far as raw narrative goes, In the Shadow of the Guillotine is a shameless potboiler and predicated on a fabulous series of contrivances, and it's all too deliciously giddy for words if you're able to find a way onto the film's wavelength. Divided into three parts, the story opens with a simple introduction, not that the audience of the day needed it: Navarre, in close-up, transformed into three disguises through the power of the dissolve. It would be a lie to say that this still retains its power to legitimately startle, but something about the obvious archaism of the film stock and the editing technique works better than almost any other film I've seen of similar vintage to instantly snap the viewer - this viewer, at least - into the headspace required to appreciated something that, for all its unbelievable sophistication in 1913, is clearly the result of a much simpler time in cinema history (for context, the film Cabiria, which is typically credited with having invented the dolly shot, was still almost a full year in the future). No matter what, though, it's a strange opening gambit and it sets the viewer up for a strange film to come.

The first part is by far the most straightforward: in disguise, Fantômas sneaks into the hotel room of a certain Princess Danidoff (Jane Faber), and begins stealing her jewels. When he is found out, he very calmly hands her a blank business card, finishes up and walks out in the most casual, unhurried way. She quickly snaps out of whatever stunned state the thief left her in, and calls up the house detective, but Fantômas is able to disguise himself as a bellboy and escape. It's the obvious outlier moment in the film, but it's such a nifty way to introduce the character who the next several hours will revolve around, and to establish the weird mash-up of the prosaic and the weird that would eventually be revealed as Feuillade's stock in trade (and maybe already was by this point: I am no Feuillade expert, and he'd already had quite a full career at Gaumont by this time).

The second and third parts are more tightly linked, and tell something of an actual story: Fantômas has abducted Lord Beltham, the husband of his mistress, Lady Beltham (Renée Carl), and all of the Parisian police force is hunting for the missing noble. But no-one is looking more urgently than Inspector Juve (Edmond Bréon), aided by the intrepid reporter for La Capitale, Jérôme Fandor (Georges Melchior), and eventually Juve finds Beltham's body stashed in a trunk. He quickly susses out that Fantômas is hiding under the name of Gurn, and after a few weeks' stakeout, the killer is in custody. But the master criminal has a particularly sneaky, even karmic plan to get out: there's an actor, Valgrand (Volbert), currently starring in an opportunistic play based on the Gurn case, and Fantômas has a scheme to kidnap him in full Gurn makeup, and trade places, so that the hapless, drugged actor will be guillotined and the assassin will be off free in the Paris night.

What happens is both the most important and the least important thing in In the Shadow of the Guillotine. On the one hand, Feuillade's aesthetic is so spare that it's hard to argue with a straight face that there are stylistic elements that might command our attention; on the other, the film is chiefly best at creating a bizarre, off-kilter mood, and especially to modern eyes that aren't used to the proscenium-like staging the director favors, the film's visual appearance does, in fact, add a great deal of "what the hell am I watching?" queasiness. Quaint or not, the sequence where Valgrand is about to be execute is legitimately tense, because the film has such a foreign feeling to it that it's genuinely hard to predict where it's going.

Anyway, the easy complaint that the movie is stagey because of the way it was filmed doesn't hold up at all. It's true that it's sophisticated only by the standards of 1913, not by ours - but what sophistication it is! Frankly, even having seen Feuillade's Les Vampires, made two years later in an era when that represents almost a full generation of cinematic evolution, I wasn't prepared for how complex the blocking was going to be in Fantômas: the use of depth relative to the camera is by itself far too specific for this to be a filmed stage play. There are shots with an aggressive enough Z-axis composition that even most filmmakers today can't claim to compete: I am primarily recalling a composition that honest to God made me gasp, in which the camera is situated in Lady Bentham's box at the theater, looking at the stage and Valgrand in the background, the wall of the box cutting into the stage:

I'm almost completely certain that to get everything focused like that, the shot of the theater has to be a rear projection, which only makes the shot more impressive, but it's not just tech geekery that makes this stuff cool. It's the way that Feuillade's explosion into three dimensions creates an illusion of space, and implies an arena of action we're only partially privy to; the film being predicated on a constant sense of foreboding and mystery, this implication ends up being crucial in helping to build an anything-goes tone.

As I sit and ponder, I see this as being built off a series of conscious contrasts: between the warped and terrifyingly violent (for 1913) content, and the stately boxes in which Feuillade composes it; between the depth of spaces and the flatness of the image depicting those spaces; between the everyday settings and actions, and the uncanny narrative. This series of disorienting contrasts is at the heart of In the Shadow of the Guillotine, which has to function not just as a narrative unto itself but as the set-up for four more, longer stories to come, and so has to build a world quickly and thoroughly. Mission fully accomplished.

Louis Feuillade's Fantômas
Fantômas - In the Shadow of the Guillotine
Juve vs. Fantômas
The Murderous Corpse
Fantômas vs. Fantômas
The False Magistrate

RISE OF THE MONSTER

2013-05-09T13:59:00.001-05:00

Written in honor of the legendary stop-motion animator and special effects technician Ray Harryhausen, who passed away on 7 May, 2013, at the age of 92. With all my sincerest gratitude for the menagerie of fantastic and prehistoric animals given life by his hands, and the unimpeachable matinee-movie thrills that even now I get when revisiting his work.

To the lover of B-movies, 1953's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms represents two exceptionally significant firsts: one, it is the very first movie about a gigantic monster revived and/or created by a nuclear explosion, kicking off a subgenre that would dominate science fiction and horror for the rest of the '50s to the exclusion of virtually everything else, in at least two continents (besides the seemingly innumerable "radiation caused X" movies in the States, Godzilla is an acknowledged descendant, and even Godzilla's famous roar is similar to the cries of pains screamed by the beast here); two, it's the first movie where the great Ray Harryhausen was given credit for complete control over all elements of a film's special effects (he'd been responsible for most of the animation of the title character in Mighty Joe Young, though he was only credited as assistant to Willis O'Brien, who designed the effects).

It's not a flawless classic - pretty damn hard to imagine a flawless nuclear monster movie, when you get right down to it - but it's no surprise, to watch it, that it would have generated that kind of enthusiasm in so many audiences and filmmakers. Clumsy in some very key ways at the script level, it's nevertheless an exemplary B-picture that never slows down after a somewhat flat and expository opening sequence, and manages to remain exciting even when its creature isn't on display (the true mark of a good monster movie). But of course, it's even better when that creature is tearing it up, a fictional Cretaceous quadruped predator called Rhedosaurus that showcases all its creators talents at making something both imaginative and lifelike; if I felt a little better at categorising it as a dinosaur, I'd not hesitate a second in calling it the best one in Harryhausen's bestiary.

The film is based, barely, on Ray Bradbury's mordant short story "The Fog Horn", where the title made any kind of sense at all; in this version, the rhedosaur is not found at the bottom of the sea (though, being amphibian, that's where it wants to get to), but frozen in the arctic ice. Best not to think too hard about the science going on, it gets in the way of the fun. In brief, there's a U.S. military installation testing atomic weaponry, and this manages to revive the long-dormant beast, who proceeds to take out a scientist sent to investigate a strange radar blip, while putting project leader Dr. Tom Nesbitt (Paul Hubschmid, under the surname Christian) into the hospital and then the psych ward, after he starts babbling about the giant lizard in the ice.

In hardly any time at all, though, the best is out in the north Atlantic, sinking one ship after another, and after liberating himself from the hospital, Nesbitt begins to track down the creatures movements, with the help of paleontologists Prof. Thurgood Elson (Cecil Kellaway) and his assistant, Dr. Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond). It very quickly becomes apparent that the creature is heading straight for New York en route to its ultimate destination in the undersea Hudson Canyon off the coast of New Jersey, and that it's going to cause all sorts of damage along the way; worst of all, the animal is carrying an ancient disease that could reach epidemic proportions in the blink of an eye if it's killed in any way that would tend to vaporise it or leaves toxic ashes.

Right there, that's good meat-and-potatoes monster movie goings-on, is what that is. And, of course, that's partially because the writers (Lou Morheim and Fred Freiberger receive on-screen credit) were mostly inventing those goings-on right here with this picture. Ordinarily, the first examples of any given genre are very far from the best, but the movie gods smiled upon this Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, blessing it with unusually strong characters and a nice clean storyline that moves through all the beats that would in hardly any time become unwatchably stale (the pretty lady doctor and the manly lead fall in love; some manner of one-use-only superweapon is developed; the monster plays peekaboo until the two-thirds mark; a hubristic scientist wants to preserve the monster for research), but does so because they fit the story being told, and so they feel well-considered and fresh in a way that nothing of such advanced age possibly should.

Really, the only problem with the movie is its sometimes howlingly bad dialogue: the first words we hear are "This is Operation Experiment", and then a lengthy chat about how arctic stations work that sound like a bright but unimaginative eight-year-old riffing for five minutes; later on, the script descends into in the most obnoxiously florid, melodramatic passages that the action happily fails to replicate. Otherwise, it's smooth sailing. Director Eugène Lourié has no illusions about the movie he's making and treats it accordingly, making sure we get to the good parts as efficiently as possible and keeping the character moments in between reasonable enough that the movie hangs together when city blocks aren't being destroyed (it's easy to overstate this kind of thing, but the relationship between Nesbitt and Hunter is organic and progressive to a degree that you just don't see in '50s B-movies). Like all movies of this kind from this period, you can probably read into The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms the fear of imminent destruction, but the spectre of the Cold War isn't so pronounced that it gets in the way of being a fleet thriller: the destruction of New York is decidedly far from thorough, and there's not a scrap of hand-wringing about nuclear energy or anything. It's pure survival horror, with a punch of people we like being faced with an implacable, unstoppable force, and if that makes the film a bit shallower than a lot of the other classic monster pictures, it's also a huge part of the reason that it's so much better than all but a tiny number of the films it influenced. It lacks padding, the acting is good once you gt bast Hubschmid's out-of-place accent (the ebullient Kellaway in particular is absolutely wonderful: maybe the best example of a scientist who remembers that doing science is all kinds of fun from this generation of filmmaking).

And so we come back to the rhedosaur; for if the point of the movie is ultimately to be a quick-footed monster movie, it needs a great beastie to seal the deal, and in the flush of youth, with a relatively decent amount of resources, Harryhausen's solo debut proves is truly outstanding work; the only scene that resembles Bradbury's story in any way, where the animal knocks over a lighthouse, is gorgeously lit and emphatically violent, and it holds up against anything the man would make later on in his career. It's as fluid as stop-motion animation was going to be in '53; it moves exactly like an animal (there's a scene where, peppered with bullets and shells, it recoils irritably, exactly like a cat jerking back from an unwanted head pat - as ideal an example of Harryhausen's attention to detail and ability to instill personality in his creatures as you'll find); it is stitch together with the live-action pretty darn well, though maybe not effortlessly. The three-tiered climax, with humans on a rollercoaster, the rhedosaur attacking a model of the same structure, and flames burning up the background, shows its seams, but it's also so involving that you wouldn't necessarily notice them if you didn't want to. And this was all being done by one fussy, meticulous man, we must recall.

Speaking personally, I enjoy Harryhausen's fantasy creatures more than his more-or-less "realistic" ones, but even so, the rhedosaur is amazing.Without it, the movie is a fine bit of B-movie sizzle; with it, it's one of the all-time classics of a genre, and you couldn't ask for a stronger or prouder start to a legendary career.

DISNEY SEQUELS: ALOHA

2013-05-08T23:57:00.001-05:00

In fairness to Leroy & Stitch, it's probably less perverse than I think it is. I have not seen one second of Lilo & Stitch: The Series, which fills the narrative gap between 2003's Stitch! The Movie, and this feature-length series finale (and ultimately, between this and the 2002 theatrical Lilo & Stitch, but there's no reason we have to do that grand movie the disservice of bringing it into the conversation), and it is very possible, if not likely, that over the course of 67 episodes, the characters were developed and changed in ways that felt very natural at the time and made the end-point that Leroy & Stitch represents feel like a perfect or inevitable farewell to the franchise. But not having witnessed that evolution firsthand, all I can really ask the little blue alien at the center of the story is: who the fuck are you, and where the fuck is Stitch?

The adventure this time 'round picks up after Lilo (Daveigh Chase) and Stitch (Chris Sanders) have successfully captured the last of the 624 genetic experiments created by reformed mad scientist Jumba (David Ogden Stiers, in what is, as of this writing, the last of his many voice performances for Disney), accidentally released in the previous movie and not-so-secret pilot episode Stitch! Their rewards are handsome: Lilo is made the Galactic Alliance's ambassador to the people of Earth, Jumba is cleared of all charges and given back his mad science laboratory, his assistant Pleakley (Kevin McDonald) is made chair of Earth Studies at Galactic Alliance Community College, and Stitch is made commander of the new ship-of-the-line BRB-9000. It's exciting for everybody but Lilo, who is desperately sad that her 'ohana - the series' totemic word for a family in which nobody gets left behind or forgotten - is thus splitting up, and for myself, who watched this opening sequence with the cocked head and confused look of an inquisitive dog.

Here's the thing - the issue that basically ruined Leroy & Stitch for me in its entirety, though there are other problems with it, and things it does well: the entirety of the drama hinges on the sad thought that Lilo and Stitch might not be together any longer, because Stitch is too excited to be out in the galaxy tooling around in his BRB ("Big Red Battleship", a phrase that is genuinely funny to me as delivered in Sanders's shrill Stitch voice), and not being stuck on crappy little Earth. Like I said, maybe L&S: The Series explores that. Maybe the hunt for the other experiments slowly but steadily changed something in Stitch's mind. All I know is that the last time the character was around for me to see him, he and Lilo were as close as close could be, and given the overarching theme of the series and the first (best) movie in particular, where friendship is more lasting and stronger than anything else, the idea that Stitch's lack of investment in his relationship with Lilo could be profound enough to drive a narrative feels like outright character assassination. It should come as no surprise to any viewer over eight that Leroy & Stitch ends by reuniting the friends and restoring the 'ohana, but that's not my point at all. It's that Stitch is acting in a hugely unsympathetic and unlikable way that is of no benefit at all to the rest of the movie.

The rest of the movie finds the evil rodent-like mad scientist Dr. Hämsterviel (Jeff Bennett), escaped from prison, forcing Jumba to create a new genetic experiment, basically Stitch's evil clone (conveniently colored red just to make it even clearer), named "Leroy" by Hämsterviel. This is to be the first step in the mad doctor's new quest to sow chaos and destruction across the universe, but especially on Earth, with Leroy rounding up the experiments that Lilo so painstakingly found safe homes for, in order to exterminate them. In due course, the dispersed friends come back together - having first survived a run-in with a black hole - to defeat the evil alien monster and restore order to the galaxy, and learn important lessons about the nature of friendship and family.

But mostly to restore to the galaxy, and that's another thing that bothers me about this movie: Lilo & Stitch is a domestic comedy with sci-fi trappings; that's pretty much what Stitch! and Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch are, as well. Leroy & Stitch, though, is a sci-fi adventure first, and a domestic narrative second, or at least that's how it feels during the protracted laser battle scenes and the very weird "Technobabble will save us from the black hole!" scene that gave me the damnedest flashbacks to the strange wormhole sequence from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I am probably overstating this, but the emphasis on genre here is quite unwelcome, and unnecessary. Lilo & Stitch is a series whose charm, in no small part, involved the transposition of science fiction tropes into the peaceable, watercolor paradise of Hawai'i, but what we have here is a straight-up science fiction comedy that includes some scenes on Hawai'i, and Elvis songs on the soundtrack. It's less idiosyncratic and weird and personalised: just because these particular scenes of aliens fighting also includes the strange little Muppet-shaped girl Lilo, does not meaningfully change how akin they are to every other scene of aliens fighting in every other cartoon where it happens.

It's not exactly fair to call it a betrayal of the characters, or anything overblown like that: it's just not a very good showcase for them, and what has been my experience throughout these many Lilo & Stitch spin-offs is the stories are at their very best when they're excuses to hang out with the characters more than they are actual fully-fledged dramatic conflicts that take us away from those same characters in their awfully appealing state of repose. Stitch! was able, more or less, to tap into this same energy, and it's the main reason that I found it to be, if not remotely as enjoyable as the first movie, at least somewhere vaguely in the vicinity of the same place emotionally. Stitch Has a Glitch didn't really tap into this at all, and it's a big part of why that film mostly sucked (Leroy & Stitch is, by all means, a better film than that one; if only because Daveigh Chase feels like such a more natural fit for Lilo than Dakota Fanning. That being said, Chase's voice had grown fuller and deeper over the years, and it's the tiniest bit distracting).

There's a lot of clutter in Leroy & Stitch, but if you can dig out from underneath the trite genre theatrics - and I'm not saying that's a simple task, you understand - it's still at heart a sweet little tale of friends recognising the value of friendship, and doing it in a way whose endpoint is infinitely less artificial than the nonsensical E.T. rip-off that closed out Stitch Has a Glitch. Although the path getting to that endpoint has a lot of inauthentic character moments and strained humor for the sake of it. Anyway, a Lilo & Stitch picture that ends warmly has done its duty, though I suppose only by the skin of its teeth.

I'll confess to having no real use for the thing even so, if only because it's so damnably inessential: Stitch! extended the narrative in a relatively sensible way, and Stitch Has a Glitch at least had the courage of its gonzo heightened stakes. Leroy & Stitch feels like padding, a grand finale that needs to invent all of its conflicts out of whole cloth rather than complete the circle of the previous movies, because that had largely been done already. It's simply not a compelling conflict: not only because it's hard not to imagine that things will work out exactly as they do, but because the characters act in such unconvincing ways to get us there in the first place.

I have little, indeed nothing to say about the animation, save that it is better than Stitch! and not as good as Stitch Has a Glitch, owing to some unmistakable cheapness that limits the framerate more than I'd gotten used to as the DisneyToon features have improved (of course, that's at least partially because it's not DisneyToon Studios that made it; by virtue of being a continuation of the cartoon, and premiering on the Disney Channel shortly before its DVD bow, this was actually made by plain ol' Walt Disney Television Animation). Characters have a tendency to drift off model, mostly by virtue of something that's really, uncomfortably off with their eyes, like they were painted on the wrong perspective lines or they were digitally added to the cels later, or something.

This doesn't impact the characters whose eyes are solid-color orbs, which is thankfully a large percentage of the cast, but when it crops up, it's terrifying; the impression is that the characters are staring at nothing except the infinitude of their own madness.

Anyway, Leroy & Stitch ends up being profoundly harmless, which is good enough to meet its needs, I presume; it falls short of the one goal I had for it, which was to give me a last chance to hang out with the characters I enjoyed from before, but it would be arrogance to assume that the film cared about my goals to begin with. Nobody said it had to be more than minutely entertaining, and that is precisely how entertaining it ends up being. Not the best way to bid farewell to a franchise, but nor is it truly unpleasant. Just limp.

BEST SHOT: SUMMERTIME

2013-05-08T17:57:00.000-05:00

This week's edition of Hit Me with Your Best Shot at The Film Experience, just in time for Katherine Hepburn's birthday, is the 1955 David Lean movie Summertime, for which the actress received her sixth Best Actress Oscar nomination. I assume the fact that it is now the beginning of summertime helped Nathaniel in his selection, but perhaps not.

It's the first film in this season of Hit Me that I hadn't previously seen, despite loving both the director and the actor very much; I think I got it in my head that it was a low point for both of them, which is only - arguably! - true for Hepburn, and only then given an extremely specific definition of "low point". It's actually a rather snazzy riff on the "semi-repressed English/American tourist in Italy" genre that has been going strong for over a century now, helped out by some of the most legitimately intoxicating Venetian scenery ever filmed.

Before I get into that, though, an aside about everybody's favorite contentious subject from the 1950s: What's the Aspect Ratio? 1955 was the first year that widescreen cinematography was more or less "standard", but not quite ubiquitous enough to be the de facto choice for every single theater. So at that time (and up until around '58 or '59), movies had to be protected for two different aspect ration: 1.37:1, the old Academy aperture ratio that was virtually the only game in town before 1953, and 1.85:1 ("matted" widescreen, with bars applied over the top and bottom of the boxier frame by the projectionist), the American standard for widescreen (in Europe, it was 1.66:1, which I prefer. But let's not get on that tangent). There was also the super-wide formats CinemaScope and Cinerama and Technirama, but they're a wholly different story.

If you watch Summertime on DVD - which in the U.S. means the Criterion Collection's 1998 edition - you're watching it in 1.33:1, which is close enough to Academy that it doesn't matter. And while we like to think of Criterion as being infallible on this subject, they're not quite, because Summertime pretty clearly is meant to be seen in 1.85:1, judging from the gulfs of open space above people's heads in every damn shot. If there's a justification for this apparent lapse, it's this: later on, David Lean professed a preference for the 1.37:1 open matte version, giving it the fairly inarguable aura of authorial intent. Looking at the film, I think it's pretty obvious why he felt this way. Simply put, the 1.85:1 version of the movie is about people, the 1.37:1 version is about Venice, and as a direct result of shooting this movie, Lean fell in love with Venice for the rest of his life. I hold that he preferred the version that showed off the city to greater effect for that reason.

I've included two different ratios of my pick for best shot, to show you what I mean. Observe that the top one is anchored by Katherine Hepburn in the foreground, but the bottom, thanks to all that sky (and to a lesser degree, all that pavement), is anchored by St. Mark's Basilica.

Now, either way, my motivation for picking it as best shot is much the same, but I wanted to give everybody a little lesson in the tiny shifts that can totally alter the way movie a functions visually; and as a visual medium, that changes its emotional function as well. I liked the version of Summertime that I watched very much; but I think I might have liked the 1.85:1 version even more. Next time, trying it with the "zoom" function on my TV. Or maybe just taping poster board on the screen. Either way works. And maybe I'm wrong: the open matte Summertime sure does make Venice look unfathomably pretty, and like most "Americans in Italy" stories, it's the pictorial elegance of the buildings and art that causes the shift in the protagonist's mind from which drama springs. Take away the scale of the city, and perhaps that vanishes. I honestly don't know.

Anyway, let's take a closer look at that shot. At this point in the movie, Hepburn's Jane Hudson has been in Venice long enough to learn the classic tourist's lesson, that all of these sights and their impressive history can be suffocatingly lonely when there's nobody to share it with. Lean and his DP, Jack Hildyard, find a a great many subtly varied ways to communicate this idea, all of them isolating Jane in the frame and separating her from the glories of the city, and all of it comes to the fore in this savage composition, which is admittedly more dramatic in the open-matte presentation. Here is a sight as grand as anything Italy has to offer: a storied building in golden hour, birds flying in the air in the most opportunistically painterly and poetic way. And there's Jane, a thick slate silhouette completely separated from everything else in the frame, both because of her distance from anything else on the Z-axis, and because, obviously, she's so damn dark.

If we wanted to stretch a point, we could even point to that diagonal line slashing across the basilica, and say that Jane's isolation is threatening to overwhelm the beauty that surrounds her; she's projecting her shade across the building, if you will. But that is, maybe, pushing it; I think that the intense differentiation between planes in the composition gets the point across very neatly all by itself. The opening of the film is all about being in the one place you've always wanted to be, and finding how hard it is to enjoy it when you can't share it and talk it out with somebody. A lot of shots communicate that idea very well, but this is the one where my breath caught a little.

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT: SEASON 3, EPISODE 12, "EXIT STRATEGY"

2013-05-08T12:52:00.001-05:00

First airdate: 10 February, 2006
Written by Jim Vallely & Mitchell Hurwitz
Directed by Rebecca E. Asher

One last blast of political commentary for Arrested Development before it all came to a close: "Exit Strategy", the penultimate episode of the show's three years on Fox, is the only time that the third season played around very much with Iraq War satire of the sort that was all over Season 2, but boy, does it make up for it in quantity. Even just from the title it's pretty clear that this time, the show is going to fully commit itself to that subject, and that's before we find that the characters actually travel to Iraq in the second half of the episode, there to be nonplussed by the American attempt to mold that country into something more familiar (literally: part of the humor is that there are fundamentally identical jokes about traffic jams and mentoring programs in both countries, in addition to the mirror image Bluth home that anchors the plot). It's also the episode in which Michael realises with a shudder that his brother isn't in a regular ol' Iraqi prison, but a U.S. military prison, and there's no telling what could be going on there. The more things change, and all.

Anyway, all of this politically-tinged humor - and there is so very much of it - does have the unfortunate effect of making "Exit Strategy" feel a bit quaint; not exactly dated in the way that the Jamie Kennedy Experiment parody in "Notapusy" or William Hung references in "Fakin' It" are dated, but it rather lacks the timeless creative energy of Arrested Development at its very best. There's absolutely no denying that the moment that a Saddam Hussein impersonator suddenly apologises to his guests with a genial "I am behaving like an Uday look-alike" is terrific, one-of-a-kind comedy writing - it is maybe my favorite single gag in an episode with a good collection of one-liners - but even just a few more years down the line, and it's going to be just like all those Howard Cosell and OPEC jokes that make otherwise sparkling '70s comedies feel a bit awkward in patches. Hell, it's only eight years later, and it already triggers more a sense of warped nostalgia than anything that can fairly be called comedy (if the show had been full-throated in its devotion to satire, like Dr. Strangelove say, perhaps this would all still be fresh and hilarious; but as AD never really used satire as more than a garnish, it just ends up weird).

There's no "besides that part", because that part is such a dominant thread in the episode, but for argument's sake: besides that part, "Exit Strategy" is an intermittently great and always good episode that suffers more than its share for coming so late in the series run. One gets the impression - I get the impression, leastways - that most of the the patching that had to be done when Season 3 was sliced from 22 to 13 episodes fell upon this episode, which consists almost entirely of closing off plot arcs, whether they were short, contained little things (Buster's fake coma), or series-spanning themes of great significance (not only do we finally learn that George Sr. really was innocent of the light treason mentioned so long ago, we also get to the long-gestating emotional climax of the George-Michael and Maeby cousin love plot). That's a hell of a lot to cover even in an episode that gets to squeeze out a few extra seconds due to the weird structure of the show's four-part finale night, and not everything comes together equally well: the subplot wherein George-Michael accidentally reveals to everyone in Hollywood that Maeby is a teenager has never felt to me like anything but a desperation gambit to get that arc set up for the final episode by any means necessary, even if it does include the casual line where the narrator finally makes it pretty much clear that he's actually the real Ron Howard. The perfunctory wrap-up of the treason plot does work for me, rushed though it is, given how robustly it mocks governmental inefficiency (and makes the C.I.A. look decidedly less glamorous than the techno-hive usually presented in TV series).

As isn't unusual, the best stuff is kept safely away from the plot arcs: the somewhat on-the-nose but nonetheless funny joke about those Hollywood shows with their big production design budgets, seconds before David Cross makes a big show of looking thoughtfully through a cabinet that is virtually empty (a double joke that I didn't get at first: not only is there the obvious irony, but the one prop that is included is a sytrofoam cup that looks like what a PA would grab in a hurry when the set decorator needed "something for coffee") is one of my favorite things in Season 3, and in the same scene, we get my favorite Tobias line since the high water-mark of "Ready, Aim, Marry Me" in Season 2: "If I look like a man who made love to his wife last night, it's because I almost did." And there's some really great business with a sandwich that Lindsay rests her head on, Michael is about to throw out, and Gob takes a bite from, all of it done through purely physical comedy and great reaction shots. In fact, as I think about it, the first scene of the episode is really strong, not least because the only Iraq joke in the whole thing is a riff on heightened Biblical language. But there's plenty of other stuff that works: the inversion of the old chestnut where a television or radio is turned on just in time to see the plot-advancing news story is pretty great, for a start, and the "On the next..." joke with Maeby and George-Michael finds Alia Shawkat and Michael Cera doing impressive comic acting by not acting.

Funny as it is, though "Exit Strategy" mostly leaves me with the feeling that it's awfully plotty. That's not a bad thing; it's part of what happens with serial shows. But nestled in between the witty, complex "Family Ties" and the magnificently off-the-wall "Development Arrested", it has the feeling of a story that they had to tell, and told it as well as they possibly could; there's plenty of inspiration here (the house of Saddams is just brilliant, any way you cut it), but not enough to break into "classic episode" status.

Coming Up
10 May: "Development Arrested"

LA MISÈRE DE 1958

2013-05-07T23:52:00.000-05:00

The first thing one notices about the French-language film adaptations of Victor Hugo's Les misérables, relative to the English-language ones, is that they are much longer: indeed, the shortest of the important French versions (from 1982) is nearly half an hour longer than the longest of the English versions (the 2012 musical). This has everything to do with national pride, of course; to an English speaker, Les misérables perfect meets the famous definition of a classic as a book that everybody wants to have read, and nobody wants to read.* But it's the closest thing that to the national novel of France that exists, and thus much more important to be treated with utmost delicacy, not just as one more 19th Century book that can be run through the Prestige-O-Matic when such things are in vogue. Thus the desire to be more authoritative and faithful to the source; thus the need for extended running times, given that Hugo's text is so utterly massive that even a three-hour movie has to make cuts, sometimes savage ones.

The French-Italian-East German Les misérables of 1958 - only the second French-language sound adaptation of any longevity - manages to have things both ways: with a running time in excess of three hours, it's certainly not wanting for room to fill with bits and pieces of the book, yet it is also very much a prestige film in its own right, and not, frankly, to its benefit. It was shot in Technirama, for one thing, which tells us pretty clearly what arena it intended to fight in: this was to be a big honking epic to compete with all those U.S. imports that were such a big deal at the time, but instead of being a historical drama from the ancient world (as most the the American epics were at that time, along with their Italian knock-offs), it was going to throw lots of money and sober-minded seriousness at the most respectable book in France. And oh, how it ends up being very polished and impressive altogether! It's every inch the kind of movie that you imagine the nascent Nouvelle Vague existing in opposition to, with its somewhat stuffy, inflexible style.

But I do not come to unceremoniously bury the '58 Les misérables, no matter how stilted and square in its mid-century way. The fact is, it's a pretty terrific and comprehensive adaptation of the book, and inasmuch as that's a good thing in and of itself, this adaptation has to be counted as a satisfyingly dense, complex, and thoughtful version of the story. None of the flimsy reduction to melodrama that marks each and every one of the American-produced movies! The script that Michel Audiard (father of current world cinema darling Jacques Audiard), René Barjavel, and Jean-Paul Le Chanois (the last of whom also directs) carved out of Hugo's dense encyclopedia of French culture in the 1810s-'30s is a pretty dense, complex thing itself, going so far as to dramatise a brief portion of the novel's flashback to the battle of Waterloo (though not at the point it occupies in the original structure). It grapples earnestly and directly - and for a non-French viewer, with gratifying clarity - with the political underpinnings of the June Rebellion of 1832, while depicting with some detail (though less than the book) the social context that made that Rebellion happen in the first place. All of this is wildly exciting, coming off the English adaptations (the most recent of which was only six years old at this point), which so cautiously neuter the populist message of the novel and make it a somewhat generic uprising that may or may not be connected to anything in particular.

It is, of all the versions I have seen, even including the exquisite 1934 adaptation, the one that is truest to the book's structure: each of the five volumes is covered in more or less the same time, though it does skew a little heavily toward the first part, "Fantine". This, in turn, give it a feeling awfully like reading the book in condensed form: the story unfolds in roughly the same pace, giving roughly the same importance to each element (as compared to the custom of American and British versions to heavily emphasise the first fifth). The rise of ex-convict Jean Valjean (Jean Gabin) to become mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer, his subsequent entanglement with icy policeman Javert (Bernard Blier) and his attempt to save the life and soul of desperately poor prostitute Fantine (Danièle Delorme) is no more or less important than the experiences of the law student Marius Pontmercy (Giani Esposito) and his next-door neighbors, a family of petty thieves called the Thénardiers (who, as we all know, were holding Fantine's daughter more or less hostage until Valjean liberated her). The result is a Les misérables that breathes and flows, that gives exactly enough time to each of its plot threads that we can comfortably see the shape of them, and understand what element of a grand social narrative they contribute to, and not a second more (though the film's sidelining of Gavroche almost completely is a weird choice, and cheapens his tragic death)

Which is all as much to say: if you're looking to dodge out on a reading assignment, this is easily the Les misérables of choice. I cannot swear that it has much else to highly recommend it, though the potency of Hugo's narrative is such that any reasonably complete and accurate retelling of it can't help but capture much of its moral and spiritual impact. But there's cheating your way into it, and earning it - Raymond Bernard's version, in 1934, earned the hell out of it, and is a great film because it is a great film, not because it steals gravitas from Victor Hugo. Le Chanois's attempt is certainly not a great film: a lavish and involving film, with some truly astounding sets and costumes for a European production in the '50s, and extreme opulence fans could have a field day just wallowing in the film's immaculate sense of place and time (its staging of the barricade built by the student revolutionaries has a geographical sensibility, as revealed in several grand wide shots, that most film versions lack), and enjoying the way that the sprawling Technirama frame captures the film's fussy reconstruction of Paris.

But these things, however wonderful a spectacle they create, don't add up to a great film. There's simply not much life to the filmmaking: Le Chanois is stage tableaux rather than blocking scenes half the time, and sometimes this works well (the funeral procession for Republican icon Gen. Lamarque, the final fight at the barricades, Javert's suicide - probably the best I've seen in any version, relying solely on implication and Blier's excellent facial acting), but often it sucks all the life out of the movie, reducing the action the pantomime. This is an impression that's certainly not assisted by the exhaustive, pandering narration, delivered by Jean Topart in a richly expressive tone that doesn't disguise the fact that we're being told a story, not shown it, even when the narration is patently unnecessary. As much as the direction locks us out of the story, the narration really puts a box around the movie, insisting on its artifice and making the whole thing feel inordinately limp.

The flipside is that the film has an impressive cast, some of whom are badly treated by a dodgy sound mix and obvious dubbing. Not all of the performances are good: Silvia Monfort makes for a swoony, dim Eponine, but she looks better for the part than any other actress I can think off - not ugly, but certainly not glamorous, exactly the sort of grubby, plain girl the character needs. And some are merely not-bad: I can think of nothing particularly enthusiastic to say about Béatrice Altariba's Cosette other than that I did not find her to be a shrill ninny, but a complete, motivated woman, and that's huge for Cosette, who even in the book is a bit too much to take.

In the big parts, where it needs it, though, the film soars. André Bourvil's Thénardier (a character given unusual prominence in this adaptation) is a fascinating take on the simpering character, a comic actor giving a dramatic performance and finding in the contrast between the two states a kind of wily, sniveling register that feels awfully great for a character that never seems entirely distinct in most films. Blier's Javert is a spectacularly off-model bit of casting that works amazingly well: the chubby sad-sack appearance of the actor, and his alternation between harsh and bored line deliveries, makes for an antagonist who's not an implacable policing monster, but a particularly stubborn and unimaginative bureaucrat, a take that's so obviously baked into the character that I'm a little shocked that I would never have conceived of it.

The stand-out, and easily the best reason to see this Les misérables, though, is obviously Jean Gabin, who was the least creative possible choice to cast this part in France in 1958, but that's only because he was so damn perfect for it. The actor had been an icon in France since the '30s, and part of what makes his performance so magnificent is the accrued meaning of what "a Jean Gabin character" had come to mean by '58: an intelligent but somewhat irascible and dangerous mountain of a man locked away in his his own head. All of which describes the novel's Valjean rather perfectly. Nor does Gabin just coast on his persona, but uses it as a shortcut to making his take on the famous character seem organic and worn-in, a performance where all the years and torments of the narrative seem to radiate out of the actor rather than rest on top of him. By all means, I love and respect Harry Baur's performance in the '34 Les misérables, but I think Gabin might just be my very favorite take on the character: gruff and loving (the way he plays the final goodbye with Cosette fully justifies sitting through the whole three hours preceding it), physically strong and emotionally fragile, not remotely re-imagining the way Hugo portrayed the character, but an almost unimprovable embodiment of him, the platonic ideal of the literary icon given flesh.

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS

2013-05-07T14:35:00.000-05:00

I didn't mention it last month, because oops, but one of the perks of being a regular contributor to The Film Experience is getting to partake in a group Top 10 the first Tuesday of every month. This time around, it's the 10 best Best Actress Oscar nominees who didn't win, and while it is a little bit consensus-ey in terms of its creativity, it's still fun, and you should go check it out.

Because I view every word that drops from my keyboard as too precious to waste, I though I'd also share, sans commentary, the list I submitted:

1. Gena Rowlands, A Woman Under the Influence
2. Celia Johnson, Brief Encounter
3. Barbara Stanwyck, Double Indemnity [on the TFE list]
4. Anne Bancroft, The Graduate
5. Brenda Blethyn, Secrets & Lies
6. Laura Linney, You Can Count on Me
7. Ingrid Bergman, Autumn Sonata
8. Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine
9. Judy Garland, A Star Is Born [on the TFE list]
10. Irene Dunne, Love Affair

Just missed the cut (chronologically)
Gloria Swanson, Sunset Blvd. [on the TFE list]
Edith Evans, The Whisperers
Jessica Lange, Frances
Meryl Streep, The Bridges of Madison County
Kate Winslet, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [on the TFE list]

MISERY LOVES COMPANY

2013-05-07T11:00:00.000-05:00

Having some time ago promised that my tour of adaptations of Victor Hugo's masterpiece Les misérables would at some point extend to hit a few of the most important of the French films of that novel, I am pleased to announce that this summer, the first Tuesday of every month will see just such a review, starting tonight, with the 1958 film directed by Jean-Paul Le Chanois, starring the legendary Jean Gabin.

Why such an arbitrary "first Tuesdays", you might reasonably ask? Simple. I've been trying to get this started for a while, and as "final Fridays" became "final Sundays" became "first Sundays", all without me finding time to watch three hours and eight minutes of sad French people, I latched onto the first day I could keep open. Blogging, the eighth art.

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT: SEASON 3, EPISODE 11, "FAMILY TIES"

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

First airdate: 10 February, 2006
Written by Ron Weiner
Directed by Bob Berlinger

"It's weird on so many levels", says a shame-faced Michael Bluth at the end of "Family Ties", and there's never been a more perfect definition of Arrested Development itself. The series was always given to little in-jokes that worked outside the series as well as in, and that ends up being very much the spine of an episode whose plot - whose damn title - is all about how Jason Bateman's sister Justine Bateman (late of, yes, TV's Family Ties; note the cameo appearance of that show's theme) guest-stars as a woman that Michael thinks is his sister, but who is actually a prostitute. This is not the kind of story that the series would be telling at this point in its run just to spin out a smutty farce (though it is a good smutty farce); it is a story built around the knowledge that Justine could be snagged for a guest spot, and AD being what it was, that guest spot had to be the smuttiest, most incesty thing the writers could come up with. Building an entire episode out of a casting in-joke, and then making it super-uncomfortable for the actors involved: yes, that is weird.

"Family Ties" isn't, of course, the weirdest episode of the show as far as meta-jokes like this ("S.O.B.s" takes that in a walk) , but it's got more than its share, perhaps emboldened by the Bateman & Bateman stunt, perhaps entirely as an accident (it could even just be that it's easier to pay attention to the meta, since the whole episode is predicated on it). This is the only episode in the series run to make a joke about Jessica Walter's most prominent film role, in Clint Eastwood's 1971 directorial debut Play Misty for Me (though really, given how freely the show makes jokes about its stars' past careers, the weirdest thing is probably that it took until the end of the series run to put in a joke with Lucille holding a pair of scissors menacingly), for one, but that's kid's stuff. Really weird is how there's a joke in which George-Michael is bleeped out while mentioning Veronica Mars, which was one kind of in-joke at first (Michael Cera and Alia Shawkat guest-starred on that show in the 2005-'06 season), and then became a different, funnier in-joke when Fox demanded that the reference be stricken, which was done through the efficacy of a massive wall of text declaring that Fox had demanded the reference be stricken. Weirdest of all is an early joke that turns out to be ironic foreshadowing, but also turns out to be a callback, though you only realise that once the thing being foreshadowed is revealed. I don't even know how to describe what it is, it's that complex. Not to give things away, but "the beak on that bird" refers back to "looked like a falcon", and both of them look forward to the last episode. And it's so delicate and brilliant that the more simplistic foreshadowing about twins who can't finish each other's sandwiches, though clever in its own right, seems frankly lazy.

But, again, this isn't "S.O.B.s". Though it's the densest of the show's final four episodes (and partially for that reason, it's also my favorite", mostly "Family Ties" is typical AD humor, with strong narrative threads for most of the characters (the Buster in a coma plot never did much for me, and does even less so many years after Terry Schiavo was a major political story; though the narrator's two "...oh, my" jokes are both very good), and pretty terrific performances across the board: Walter's giddy delight at mocking her son-in-law is a major highlight, along with Tobias and Lindsay's interactions everywhere (but especially the "list of can'ts"/"list of won'ts" moment), and Gob's moment of self-disgust at his own "family discount" quips. The episode does a better job than almost anything else in Season 3 at bending the season's plot arc to its benefit, rather than allowing itself to be carried along by the plot; having established already that Michael is convinced his parents are lying about "N. Bluth", the remainder of "Family Ties" isn't trying at all to resolve that question, but to play out a conflict that Michael stumbles into as a result of that question; it's actually pretty self-contained, call-backs and call-forwards and all.

The resulting mistaken-identity farce isn't the most spectacular, high-energy script in AD's history, though that's almost to its credit: the marriage of ridiculous situations with character moments that are particularly real (for the given definition of "realistic" that we attach to this show), though it flattens the farce a little bit, leaves us with wonderful little scenes scattered all over the episode, like George-Michael's horrifyingly inept attempts to flirt with Maeby now that they are legally married and her stone-faced reactions to the same (I literally just realised: the episode's best B-material is all related to people trying to make sham marriages work, in two separate plotlines. God, this show).

Also, this episode boasts one of my favorite lewd jokes AD ever did: the play of words that brings us to "Nellie has blown them all away". Not since "Get rid of the Seaward" has so much filth hidden behind such a complicated tangle of language. It's a great moment in a rock solid episode that was, in its initial network run, the last Arrested Development episode that was beholden to nothing but itself, and being the funniest 22-minute chunk of TV it could.