Thinking Out Loud

Category: Movies

Movie Reviews

Sass and Kick Ass: James Bond: Casino Royale

Paradoxically for one of the freshest James Bond films ever made, Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale (2006) is actually the third adaptation of the character’s debut in Ian Fleming’s 1953 novel. After a largely forgotten 1954 TV movie in which “Jimmy” Bond was awkwardly Americanized, the same premise was parodied in a 1967 farce bearing the same name, a expensive all-star disaster featuring good sports David Niven, Peter Sellers, Orson Welles, and Woody Allen. Meanwhile, the parallel and ongoing flood of proper Bond films abandoned the tainted Casino Royale, leaving it never satisfactorily presented on film. For most, Bond seemed born fully-formed as Sean Connery’s supremely suave secret agent in 1962’s Dr. No. But where did Her Majesty’s most ruthless servant come from?

By 2006, the James Bond franchise had endured 20 movies and five lead actors (and that’s just counting the canonical installments), testament enough that it has been no stranger to innovation. The most recent overhaul was Goldeneye (1995), which introduced Pierce Brosnan alongside an incrementally more progressive attitude towards women. New-style “Bond Girls” like Michelle Yeoh were still dangerously sexy, but as adept with salty dialogue, grappling hooks, and AK-47s as the title character himself. Bond could no longer cheerfully ignore his stuffy bureaucratic boss M when played by the imperious Judy Dench, and Miss Moneypenny (Samantha Bond) was no longer a frump longing for Bond from afar, but rather a sassy foil rocking the sexy secretary look. Significantly, the one thing that didn’t change much at all was Bond himself. The many women in his life may have gained greater leeway to sass and kick ass, but he himself was still the same old sexist dinosaur. In retrospect, the Brosnan films now look like just more of the same.

Say hello to my little friend

Proper Bond films enjoyed many high points over the years, but the franchise was very nearly rendered obsolete by two very different spy trilogies: Austin Powers (whose satire was wholly redundant after the 1967 Casino Royale) and Jason Bourne. Starting in 2002, the latter did Bond one better, permanently supercharging the secret-agent genre with visceral urgency, persistent action, moderately realistic psychology, and most crucially, granting the main character a capacity for love. Bourne (Matt Damon) was a man of conscience, wracked by crippling self-doubt and guilt. He may have been capable of spectacular feats of killing, but resented the circumstances that forced him to use those skills in order to survive, or more importantly, to protect or avenge his loved ones. He didn’t manipulate women for intelligence and sexual gratification as Bond routinely would, but rather formed an emotional attachment with one in particular that would motivate his actions for an entire trilogy.

Once the definition of high-gloss action thrillers, Bond was now on the defensive. The time was right in 2006 for its most radical reboot yet. The producers retired Brosnan (The Man With the Golden Parachute?) and underwent an extensive retooling of not just the series’ visual style but its core characters and mythos. But how much can you tweak Bond until he’s no longer the spy we love?

The traditional pre-credit action sequence still exists, but Casino Royale discards candy-coated Technicolor for a grainy, stylized black-and-white noir style. Starting chronologically at the beginning, we see Bond execute his first two kills, fulfilling his final qualification for “double-oh” MI-6 status. Longtime Bond fans were also mollified by another grand tradition that immediate followed: a motion graphics title sequence featuring a bevy of semi-nude female silhouettes. This particular animation, with its stark red and black vector graphics, may have provided inspiration for the opening titles of the 2007 television series Mad Men. Unfortunately, Chris Cornell’s lame, tuneless song “You Know My Name” nearly ruins it.

“You noticed…”

Further comforting continuity with the previous installations comes via ridiculous amounts of high-end product placement (cars, watches, sunglasses, etc.) and a globe-trotting series of locations (Uganda, Madagascar, Bahamas, Miami, Montenegro, and Venice). Casino Royale also doesn’t fail to over-egg the pudding in terms of its villain. Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) is scarred and asthmatic, with chronically irritated tear ducts that seep blood. It was enough to signify evil in the old days that the baddie merely have metal teeth or a fluffy kitty cat.

But that’s where the concessions to Bond tradition end. To discuss what’s new, let’s start with Bond himself. No matter how much testosterone fan-favorite Sean Connery exuded, he could still be slightly effete, fussing over vanities and creature comforts like a well-prepared martini. The Roger Moore era played up the tongue-in-cheek aspect of the series, but gorgeous women falling into bed with the frankly rather old, limp Moore was implausible at best. The suave Brosnan was born to play the classic version of Bond, but he wasn’t getting any younger as his films became as overblown and science-fictiony as the worst excesses of the Moore period. (I haven’t seen any of the Timothy Dalton or George Lazenby films, so I can’t comment on them.) Daniel Craig may not be the most macho Bond (Connery remains fandom’s favorite, for good reason), but he is clearly the most brutish and masculine. Younger, furious, and buff, he’s a giant slab of man. In a hilariously clever inversion of tradition, Bond now bares more flesh than any of his female companions, especially in an instantly iconic shot of him striding out of the ocean just barely wearing a scanty swimsuit. This Bond is almost absurdly physically fit, a parkour expert, and gets painfully bruised and scarred in fights. The days of Bond walking away from fisticuffs and fireballs with nary a hair or bowtie astray are over.

Wait… there was another Bond Girl besides Eva Green?

21st Century Bond Girls are smarter and more proactive than ever, but not at the expense of being drop-dead gorgeous and at least half the age of the current lead actor. In this blogger’s estimation, Eva Green as Vesper Lynd ought to go down in history as one of the greatest yet. She may not be as physically adept at action as Michelle Yeoh, but she is one of the most beautiful. Best of all, she’s enjoyably conceived by writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Paul Haggis as a true foil for the naughty double-entendres that still roll off this Bond’s tongue. She made such a strong impression on me, that when rewatching the film on DVD, I realized I had forgotten all about the other Bond Girl, Caterina Murino as Solange Dimitrios. Her character provides for a quick throwback to retro Bond; he flirts with her solely for information and then cruelly abandons her to certain death.

The thrilling film downshifts for a long poker sequence, with no mercy shown for anyone who doesn’t understand the game (like, say, me). There does seem to have been a miscalibration however, during one scene where even I could sense Le Chiffre was double-bluffing an oblivious Bond.

Dench is the only returning player from the Brosnan era, but her character is now part ruthless boss and part tough-love mother figure. The one convention of the classic, sillier Bond stories that I do miss is Q (Desmond Llewelyn) and his wonderful inventions. The highlight of every Connery, Moore, or Brosnan film for me was always the customary stroll through Q’s lab as his latest prototypes malfunction in amusingly lethal manners. I would cheerfully recite along with Q’s scolding catchphrase “Oh Bond, do pay attention.”

Whenever I see any Bond film, I’m always surprised at how enthusiastically he lives up to his “license to kill” reputation. The body count is always high, but Casino Royale is even more violent than most. What differentiates it is the time spent dwelling on the aftermath, including Bond having to hide bodies instead of simply strolling away from the carnage without repercussions. There’s also a fleeting dash of crude morality rarely if ever seen in the series; Bond must awkwardly comfort Vesper, traumatized by her culpability in one of Bond’s kills. And whereas old-school Bond villains would merely threaten bodily harm with laser beams and tarantulas, Bond must now must face ugly, raw torture (which is A-OK with the hypocritical MPAA’s notion of PG-13 movies, apparently – but that’s a rant for another time).

October 2, 2009
Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon-ho’s Tokyo!

Tokyo! is a portmanteau film comprised of three shorts set in the eponymous city, all by directors not themselves from Japan: Michel Gondry and Leos Carax from France, and Bong Joon-ho from South Korea.

Gondry’s “Interior Design” is based on the comic book Cecil and Jordan in New York by Gabrielle Bell, with the action transposed to Tokyo. At first, her low-key love story doesn’t seem to bear Gondry’s characteristic whimsical surreality, but by the end her collaboration with Gondry makes perfect sense. Young couple Hiroko (Ayako Fujitani, daughter of Steven Seagal) and Akira (Ryo Kase) move to Tokyo, with the hope of finding audiences for Akira’s pretentious films. Without prospects, they crash on the floor of a childhood friend’s miniscule flat and quickly outstay their welcome.

Their optimism to find jobs and an apartment is quickly dashed – only Akira is suited to menial work, and they can’t even afford the city’s dingiest rat traps. Like April (Kate Winslet) in Revolutionary Road, Hiroko doesn’t have much ambition of her own beyond supporting her artist partner. After going to extraordinary lengths on Akira’s behalf without feeling appreciated, Hiroko undergoes a fantastical transformation and winds up literally supporting a different artist. The significance of title comes clear as she literally becomes part of the scenery.

Hiroko and Akira in Tokyo

In Carax’s scatological “Merde,” Tokyo is terrorized by a madman with a twisty ginger beard and a rigorous diet of flowers, yen, and cigarettes. The “sewer creature” (so named by the media) is relatively harmless until he discovers a cache of grenades in a forgotten World War II-era bunker buried beneath the city. Only after he uses Imperial Japan’s own weapons against them in a terrible massacre is he tracked down in his sewer lair and apprehended. At this point, Carax’s short film becomes a courtroom drama, in which eccentric French magistrate Maître Voland (Jean-François Balmer) claims to be able to interpret the terrorist’s ravings, not least including his name: Merde (“shit”).

His scandalous speeches incite Japanese self-loathing and racism, but the populace curiously fails to question whether Voland is some kind of mad ventriloquist voicing his own prejudices through the mouth of an idiot. Merde becomes a pop icon; dueling gangs of picketers chant “FREE MERDE” versus “HANG MERDE.” Merde is sentenced to a Christ-like execution (which also very much resembles a similar sequence in Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark), followed by a caption that threatens a sequel set in New York.

“Free Merde!”

Bong Joon-ho’s “Shaking Tokyo” is the tale of a unnamed hikikomori (shut-in) living alone in a totally ivy-covered house, financially supported by a father he hasn’t seen in years. The agoraphobe (Teruyuki Kagawa) has become accustomed to a life of loneliness and rigorous routine. One day he meets a cute pizza delivery girl (Yu Aoi), out of his league, but apparently with her own share of crippling emotional issues.

She passes out in his foyer during an earthquake (not uncommon in the volcanic islands of Japan), and the hikikomori reboots her using her self-tattooed buttons on her body that appear to literally control her mood and health. The smitten loner escapes his self-created prison to seek her out again. He finds a city full of shut-ins, for whom even another earthquake isn’t enough to keep them out of their own homes for long.

August 4, 2009
An Act of Journalism: Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir
Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir could easily be filed away under any or all of the following genres: documentary, autobiography, memoir, journalism, and nonfiction. If there’s one thing all of these have in common, it’s that none make for natural cartoons. The exception that proves the rule is Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, which began life as a pair of graphic novels before being adapted into an animated feature film. Waltz With Bashir takes the opposite route, starting as a film and ending up as a book. Could animated versions of Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale be far behind?

Folman has lost his memories of a key experience during his service in the Israel Defense Forces during the 1982 war in Lebanon. A conversation with a friend sparks a fragment of memory involving the Sabra and Shatila massacre. The Israeli Defense Force surrounded Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, but stood by as the Phalangists, a Christian Lebanese militia, entered and massacred a still unknown number of Palestinian civilians. Was he really there, as he now seems to recollect? Did he have anything to do with it?

Folman speaks of memory as “something stored in my system,” as if his brain were merely a computer, disassociated from any culpability in the massacre. He merely witnessed it, but it was enough for him to subconsciously erase his memories over the intervening years. He seeks out old comrades in the search of someone else who served with him and may help fill in the blanks in his memory. Like a detective story, the search for clues provides a useful storytelling device while providing an episodic narrative structure.

The title refers to a fellow soldier that madly waltzed with a machine gun while surrounded on all sides by Lebanese fighters. “Bashir” is Bashir Gemayel, the assassinated Phalangist commander lionized by Lebanese, and a celebrity on a scale that one Israeli likens to how he felt about David Bowie.

Folman is an artist as well as a filmmaker; at one point he asks one of his old friends if it’s OK to sketch his family during their interview. His visual sense manifests in Waltz With Bashir‘s stunning images, composition, and color. Like Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, it features stiff, simplified characters atop fully-rendered 3D environments. Human faces are crudely rendered with small looped expressions, when not totally still (note that the 2D vector animation is not the same technique used in Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly). They contrast sharply with the fluid movement of the detailed, complexly lit vehicles, backgrounds, and weapons. If such stylized human figures were a deliberate artistic choice, what is to be gained? A few possible explanations:
- As recent CGI movies like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, The Polar Express, and Beowulf have proven to their detriment, the uncanny valley (the point at which a simulation of a human becomes almost, but not quite, realistic and thus creeps audiences out) is a very real problem facing animators as technology progresses. All three of these are technological marvels, but the human characters are still just one step away from dead-eyed zombies.
- In the most practical sense, animation is useful to create images of historical events where no cameras were present. Folman does recount seeing journalist Ron Ben-Yishai boldly film the aforementioned firefight in which his friend had his machine-gun-waltz with Bashir, so perhaps some actual footage existed for reference.
- The dreamlike unreality of animation plays into Folman’s theme of the mutability of memory.
- Like Isao Takahata’s stunning Grave of Fireflies, animation makes it slightly easier to watch painful events. Takahata’s emotionally draining film involved a little girl slowly starving to death after the World War II firebombing of Japan, and Waltz With Bashir features such images as a field full of dying horses and the corpse of a child buried in rubble. The end of the film snatches away this distancing technique; we finally see archival footage of the massacre’s aftermath.
Is it fair to criticize the film for taking the Israeli point of view in a story about the Sabra and Shatila massacre? Save for one woman that appears in the actual footage seen at the end, Palestinians literally don’t have a voice in the film. But neither, for that matter, do the Phalangists. In the case of this historical event, Israelis were passive bystanders, neither victims nor oppressors. If to bluntly ask what Waltz With Bashir is for, it does three things: First, it’s a meditation upon the complexity and unreliability of human memory. Second, it’s an act of journalism; returning the Sabra and Shatila Massacre to the public consciousness. Third, it’s one man’s personal coming to terms with his past.
July 26, 2009
George Lucas Cedes Control, in Star Wars: The Clone Wars

After writing and directing three Star Wars prequels between 1999-2005, it’s easy to forget that back in the 1980s, the series’ godfather George Lucas opted out of directing The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Now Lucas appears once again to be ceding control over his most famous baby. He’s back to shepherding along splinter projects like The Clone Wars in the more aloof role of Executive Producer.

For anyone else confused, as I certainly was, Star Wars: The Clone Wars is a feature-film sequel to the 2003-2005 Cartoon Network television series Star Wars: Clone Wars, which was in turn followed by a second series with the same name as the movie. Got that?

There are much bigger differences than swapping a colon for a definitive article, starting with the visual look itself. The best thing about the original series was its bold, striking visual style, realized in a hand-drawn line-art look similar to Genndy Tartakovsky’s previous show Samurai Jack. From what little I understand of the process, CGI animation created in 3D can still be rendered in a flat 2D style, giving it the look of traditional hand-drawn cell animation. So the characters in the original at least appeared hand-drawn even though they almost certainly weren’t.

Anakin trains a young propellerhead, Ahsoka Tano.

However, the feature film sequel looks like director Dave Filoni opted to skip that step and render the characters with full 3D shading. The result resembles a rough animatic or a throwaway videogame cut scene. Filoni gets kudos for not aiming for photorealism, which becomes very creepy when approaching the uncanny valley — the point where animated characters look almost, but not quite, like real humans. Look with fear upon the nightmarish zombie horrorshows Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, The Polar Express, and Beowulf (the latter being a huge step forward, but still not quite there yet). But The Clone Wars‘ particular brand of stylization just seems cheap to me; I would have preferred the cool-looking 2D characters as they appeared in the TV series.

The Clone Wars is canon within the Star Wars universe, but no one (probably not even Lucas himself) would ever consider it as primary as its six older siblings. One advantage to being relegated to the second tier is a freedom to violate venerable Star Wars traditions. The classic opening crawl is gone, replaced with a Citizen Kane-style newsreel catching the audience up with the key facts needed to make sense of what’s going on in between all the ‘splosions.

That particular change is a shame, but brace yourself for some heresy when I admit I find another change rather welcome: Kevin Kiner’s very non-John Williams-esque score. As much as Williams’ music was the soundtrack of my childhood (my entire generation can sing the Star Wars, Jaws, and Indiana Jones themes a cappella, on cue), I had long since tired of him. The point at which I lost it was the wall-to-wall blanket of redundant music that threatened to drown out the already almost overwhelming Saving Private Ryan.

The Clone Wars series and movie are both set chronologically between the events of Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, a razor-thin slice of time in which nothing of import really happened in Star Wars continuity. The movies already showed us how the war began and ended, so The Clone Wars movie and series are basically war stories. This is actually a good thing in light of how the prequel trilogy often became bogged down in tedious political procedure involving interplanetary trade routes. The series was by its nature a string of vignettes, but the feature film still feels like an episodic tour through a number of spectacular battles.

A particularly gripping and exciting battle takes place on a vertical cliff face, “shot” with a hand-held “camera.” Lucas was sure to conceive of his two armies as droids and masked clones, allowing for carnage and huge body counts without a drop of blood (not to mention the economical reuse of costumes, and now, digital models). I remain puzzled, however, how clones and droids can have names, ranks, and varying skill sets. This writer grew up with the original trilogy, and still has trouble accepting stormtroopers being on the side of the good guys.

Yoda’s looking more “kitten” than “turtle” today

The TV series focused mostly on the battles, but the movie squeezes a fragment of a plot in between the action set pieces. Anakin Skywalker is inconveniently charged with training Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein), an annoying teen “padawan learner” (a Lucasism for “apprentice” that still sounds very much like a George W. Bush malapropism). I still find it difficult to accept that the Anakin we see here and in Episode III is so close to the tipping point to absolute corruption that he will soon betray the Rebels and become the embodiment of evil, Darth Vader. At this point, he still seems a merely moody and impetuous kid horny for the girlfriend he left behind on Naboo. Being responsible for the spunky, goodhearted Ahsoka certainly does little to help him attain the state of emotional detachment Lucas equates with goodness.

Even though there’s no doubt a great deal of very expensive technology behind this kind of animation, it’s still cheaper than mounting a live-action production. Animation, where anything is possible, is also the best way for the Star Wars franchise to expand the stories of its existing characters, when the original actors have aged, become too expensive, disinterested, or passed away. So why focus only on the prequel characters? Why not tell more tales starring the trinity that everybody really loves: Luke, Leia, and Han?

Perhaps Lucas fears that messing with the canonical heroes that generations of fans have taken to heart is to risk fatally wounding their deep emotional connection to the mythos. Or to be cynical, he is legally able to utilize the various masked characters (Chewbacca, Boba Fett, Jabba the Hut, Darth Vader, C-3PO, R2-D2) in anything at any time without clearing actors’ likenesses. That said, some of the original cast do lend their voices to The Clone Wars, including Samuel L. Jackson, Anthony Daniels, and Christopher Lee. James Arnold Taylor does an excellent impression of Ewan McGregor’s excellent (in turn) impression of Alec Guinness.

One last thing: it wouldn’t be Star Wars without at least one offensively characterized alien. Jabba’s uncle Ziro the Hutt (Corey Burton) is inexplicably voiced as an old Southern queen.

July 23, 2009
Nothing to Say and No Way to Say It: Revolutionary Road

The first few minutes of Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road feature one of the boldest jump cuts this side of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April (Kate Winslet) meet cute out of a crowd of Beatnik hipsters at a loft party. Like any flirting young couple, how each chooses to introduce themself comprises a promise as to whom each will become should they grow up together. The glamorous April simply says she is studying to be an actress, as if that is all Frank needs to know. He in turn cracks wise about toiling in nothing jobs holding him back from vaguely-defined great aspirations.

After this very brief scene, Mendes jump cuts to several years later to find Frank and April married in suburbia with two kids. An older Frank privately cringes during April’s weak debut in a community theater production. It turns out she’s not a great actress after all, but cursed to be just smart and sensitive enough to know it. Her sense of definitive failure and his frustration at her frustration combusts into a blistering roadside argument on par with any of the cataclysmic rows between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

“You were just some boy who made me laugh at a party once, and now I loathe the sight of you.”

Frank and April’s all-consuming pride escapes as barely-veiled condescension toward their peers in the office and on their suburban street. They both share mutually incompatible senses of superiority, feeling destined for something great without knowing what, or having any obvious natural talent to nurture. It provides no satisfaction when Frank does eventually manifest an aptitude in marketing, something they both view as disappointing and beneath them. Who or what propped them up with this sense of superiority?

Are we to read their hubris as a critique of the Greatest Generation (Frank is a World War II veteran, an experience he romanticizes even while acknowledging his sheer terror at the time)? This generational theory would be supported by how the older Givings family views them – but more on the Givings later. Or were Frank and April’s egos boosted by overpraising parents? We hear much of Frank’s late father, who toiled in obscurity for years at the same firm where Frank now finds himself trapped, but any other relatives are wholly absent from their lives. Perhaps if Frank and April had been born a few generations later, they would be the sort of overconfident personalities drawn to compete on reality TV shows.

“No one forgets the truth, Frank, they just get better at lying”

After April gives up on her dream of acting after her disastrous debut, she latches onto a fantasy of moving to Paris and supporting Frank so he may find his. But Frank is even less evolved than she; he never specifies what he imagines himself becoming. Writer? Politician? Artist? He has nothing to say, and no way to say it.

Their Gallic escape plan is not fully thought through, and Frank never really commits anyway. He’s clever enough to excel amongst the duller coworkers with whom he shares daily steak and martini lunches. He becomes further ensnared by success in the business world, as measured by income, the sexual availability of naive office girls, and a step above his father on the ego-stroking ladder of promotion.

One flaw of the film is dialogue that sometimes strays from naturalism into the novelistic. Even in the midst of the fiercest of arguments, April is still poised enough to deliver zingers like “No one forgets the truth, Frank, they just get better at lying” and “You’re just some boy who made me laugh at a party once, and now I loathe the sight of you.”

“Hopeless emptiness. Now you’ve said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.”

I promised to return to the Givings family, whom I believe are the key to understanding the film. Helen Givings (Kathy Bates) gently teaches April how to be a good housewife, offering passive aggressive critiques of such fripperies as lawn maintenance. But she slowly reveals a longing admiration for the Wheelers as an ideal American nuclear family: a nice, good-looking, successful, model young couple in love. The relatively coarse neighbors the Campbells also idealize the Wheelers.

Helen hopes that some of their pixie dust might rub off on her troubled son John (Michael Shannon), a mathematician and intellectual brought low by mental illness and electroshock therapy (whether it is the disease or the cure that ails him most is a question that bleakly amuses him). John proves to have the coldest, clearest, starkest view of reality, and cuts right through all the subterfuge and doublespeak with which these American nuclear families delude themselves. Everything he says is correct, but tragically, Frank and April interpret the bitterly damaged man as a kindred spirit and not as what he is: a holy fool (in the sense of idiot savant) that damningly illustrates their faults.

Helen admires the Wheelers’ splendid picture window looking out on Revolutionary Road

In some ways, the final scene is the most devastating, and it doesn’t even feature the Wheelers at all. The Givings chat at home alone, long after the Wheelers revealed themselves to be fatally fractious and tortured. We witness Helen rewrite history, belittling the Wheelers in terms of their ability to maintain the value of their home (read: their family). As she’s busy erasing her emotional stake in the Wheelers, her husband Howard (Richard Easton) turns off his hearing aid to literally drown her out. He gazes at her emptily, dispassionately, dead inside. We might imagine their marriage survived the kind of emotional flashpoint that destroyed the Wheelers, but trapped them in a cold, loveless life together.

July 19, 2009
A muggle tries to make sense of Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince

As Pottermania began some years ago, I recall being amazed at how similar it all seemed to Neil Gaiman’s Books of Magic, which predates J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter novel by about five years. In it, boy wizard Tim Hunter, equipped with broken glasses and an owl, is prophesied to be an immensely powerful wizard. The forces of good and evil each seek to manipulate his upbringing in an effort to claim him for their own. For Gaiman fans, it was tempting to cry plagiarism. But subtract the glasses, and substitute the owl for a cute droid or two, and you could just as well be describing Luke Skywalker.

The generation that grew up with the Harry Potter books will just as surely sit rapt through the movies as they will quibble about the compromises made in their adaptation. Beware what follows is from the perspective of an older non-fan, who’s read the first book and seen the movies, but doesn’t hold them deep in the heart as the Harry Potter generation does.

Alan Rickman and Maggie Smith demonstrate to the upcoming generation of British actors how it’s done.

David Yates’ Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince is very, very long, and demands that the audience has retained an awful lot of lore from the previous movies (but again, the counterargument stands: you can say the same about Star Wars and Star Trek). I found the trailer totally incomprehensible, and the movie at times befuddling. I longed for a less novelistic and more movie-like narrative.

When a MacGuffin is finally introduced late in the movie, it adds a much-needed dramatic spark to drive the story, giving Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) a clear quest. But for those of us without a Potter wiki stored in our brains, what they seek — a Horcrux — is not clearly explained, despite reams of exposition from Dumbledore, plus a recap from Harry and Hermione (Emma Watson) at the end. Apparently there is more than one, two have already been found, and a third turned out to be counterfeit?

Helena Bonham-Carter plays her baddie with relish.

It must have been quite a gamble to cast such a large troupe of child actors, trusting that they would grow into the acting profession over the course of several years. I wouldn’t say any of the child actors are bad, but they’re all unsurprisingly outclassed by the large complement of veteran British actors.

Timothy Spall and Helena Bonham Carter both play baddies with relish, but I can’t say I recall much about who they are and what motivates them. Nor whether returning characters played by Emma Thompson, Gary Oldman, and David Tennant are still good and/or evil, alive and/or dead. Didn’t Oldman appear in a fireplace in one of the previous movies? I guess he’s feeling better now. I can’t keep this stuff straight.

Alan Rickman is superb as always, every line reading a delicious mixture of humor and menace. As with Ian McShane in anything, Rickman is doing Shakespeare while everyone else is in a soap opera. His character Snape turns out to be the titular Prince, which I suppose raises two questions for the next installment: was his dangerously annotated potions textbook deliberately left to fall into Harry’s hands? And: what’s the significance of the nickname? He appears to be some kind of double-agent.

Emma Thompson excitedly explains all the Potter lore to non-fans like myself.

Recurring villain Draco (Tom Felton) remains a wet noodle. Every movie sets him up as Harry’s nemesis at school, as well as cosmically fated for evil as Harry is for good. But he always winds up spanked and running away crying like a baby. It’s unclear to me if we’re supposed to consider him a real threat, but perhaps I’m overthinking things, and it is simply childish wish fulfillment that the school bully always get his embarrassing comeuppance.

Most of the rest of the movie is concerned with the teens’ romantic lives. I don’t happen to recall Ginny (Bonnie Wright) being a significant character in the previous movies, so the mutual infatuation between her and Harry seemed to have developed offscreen between movies.

But what has always puzzled me the most about this whole epic is Harry himself. What makes him so special? He’s not necessarily the most clever (Hermione of course), brave, or powerful. From what I recall from the backstory, his biggest claim to fame is that he survived an attack by the Dark Lord Voldemort. But the world’s most powerful wizard Dumbledore apparently trusts Harry more than anyone else. Surely there’s any number of more experienced wizards he could have brought along with him to look for the Horcrux; why did he specifically need Harry?

July 15, 2009
Lean, Tailored, and Ferociously Fit: Jason Statham in Transporter 3

Transporter 3, produced by Luc Besson and directed by Olivier Megaton, is an international product tailored for the American market. Despite its French locales, German cars, and adorably freckled Ukrainian hottie, the hero and villain are both quite American.

The titular Transporter is Frank Martin (Jason Statham), a fighter and driver par excellence who earns a luxurious but lonely existence as an ask-no-questions courier. The events of his two previous misadventures have reformed his amoral ways and loner habits, as evidenced by his collaborative friendship with former nemesis Inspector Tarconi (François Berléand).

So in order for there to even be a Transporter 3, its plot must corral this reformed man into a caper full of opportunities for carnage and lawbreaking. The villainous American Johnson (Robert Knepper) is conceived as Martin’s evil, less evolved twin: a mercenary like him, but unleavened by conscience. His ill-defined plan involves blackmailing Ukranian politician Leonid Vasilev (Jeroen Krabbe) into allowing a giant corporation to import a tanker full of barrels of toxic waste. At one point Martin is menaced by a truck full of the stuff on land, but the tanker hasn’t docked yet. Confusing.

Natalya Rudakova in Transporter 3.

Statham is this generation’s Jean-Claude Van Damme or Steven Segal. He’s already been typecast as the tough loner in a constant series of b-movies (some more B than others, but The Bank Job is a step up), but usually lightens things up with a hint of Jackie Chan-esque self-deprecation. He’s impeccably tailored, lean, and ferociously fit, looking and moving more like a gymnast than the previous generation of slow-moving bodybuilder action heroes. A good drinking game for any Statham film is to drink a shot every time his shirt comes off. You’re likely to get alcohol poisoning in this case.

One of the reasons I enjoy producer Luc Besson’s Transporter franchise is that I dislike being expected to applaud the typical movie action hero that stands back and shoots bad guys from afar. This applies to pretty much any Stallone and Schwarzenegger film, but is also true of even James Bond (in which his fabled license to kill often translates into mowing down rooms full of extras with machine gun fire — or in the case of Moonraker, laser pistols) and Indiana Jones (audiences applaud him for shooting a scimitar-wielding baddie in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but really, is that fair?).

In stark contrast, Martin almost never uses any weapon other than his own physicality. Most of the violence in the Transporter films is in the acrobatic, bloodless rock ’em sock ’em style of kung-fu flicks, liberally seasoned with impressive automobile carnage. The first few minutes of Transporter 3 feature a signature sequence in which Martin dispatches a room full of armed baddies using no tools save his own suit jacket. But I was startled to see Martin actually execute a few evildoers later in the film, something I don’t recall him doing in the previous two. It’s wholly out of character, and spoils the fun.

It’s never long until Jason Statham’s shirt comes off.

What dooms Transporter 3 to be the worst of the franchise is that there are simply not enough action sequences, and what few there are are uninspired. I recall only two more notable action sequences: in one, Martin is tethered to his car by an explosive device (just roll with it), and must catch up to it on foot after it is stolen. Later, he launches it off a bridge onto the top of a speeding train, and then from there smashes it into the body of a detached passenger car. For a movie so concerned with car chases, it doesn’t help the audience when most of the vehicles are dictated by product placement to be the same brand (Audi) and color (black with tinted windows).

The awkward, eyebrow-raising ending to Transporter 2 left it up in the air as to whether Martin is gay or just an extreme loner. Surprisingly, Transporter 3 actually revives that question and makes it its key subject. When Vasilev’s hot freckled daughter Valentina (Natalya Rudakova) comes on to him, Martin protests he’s “not in the mood” but certainly, absolutely, positively, no way no how, definitely not gay, how could you even ask, good grief. Well! I guess that settles that question, albeit in a rather disappointingly conventional manner.

So the end of the film finds Martin not only reconfirmed as a good guy, but also in a steady heterosexual relationship. A key component of both the James Bond and Jason Bourne characters is that their greatest loves were murdered, so they choose to be emphatically alone. Where can Besson take Frank Martin in another sequel? Don’t expect Valentina to last long into Transporter 4.

July 7, 2009
Keanu Reeves Comes to Save the World, in The Day the Earth Stood Still

If the least one expects of the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still is that it merely fulfill the promise of its title, then please move right along, for the earth stands still for only a few brief moments.

It is, however, a far bigger production than the 1951 original directed by Robert Wise, even accounting for the inflation of filmmaking technology and audience expectation for spectacle. As if to overcompensate for the original’s now admittedly amusing implausibilities and the silly giant robot and flying saucer, it tries too hard to impress with too many unconnected ideas and excessive hustle and bustle. It’s even rather inappropriately macho, with more unconvincing digital helicopters and military hardware than a typical Michael Bay movie. At least it’s much, much better than the disastrous Invasion (the third official remake of The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers).

It does get off to a good start with a prologue in which a lone mountain climber (Keanu Reeves) discovers a glowing orb in 1928 India. The sequence is mysterious and interesting, but ultimately unimportant to the plot. We later learn that the orb was an alien probe that copied the climber’s DNA, from which to grow a surrogate body for the alien Klaatu (Reeves again) decades later. Even the most basic plausibility is violated as humans dissect his alien body without biosuits or any kind of quarantine at all. One wonders if earlier drafts of the screenplay involved Klaatu’s captors initially misidentifying him as a missing person from 1928. A missed opportunity would be a scene in which the aged original adventurer comes face-to-face with an alien mimicking his youthful self. But as it stands, this whole subplot acts as a distraction.

The original movie simply presented the alien as humanoid (if a little unusually tall and angular) and that was enough. The notion of a alien being reborn in a new body is interesting but an unnecessary complication, one that only raises questions unrelated to the central themes. Klaatu is lucky his template was the handsome Reeves, who can wear anything — at one point, Klaatu steals a schlumpy guy’s suit and it fits as if it were tailored just for him.

Supposedly this body is human, but he exerts superpowers including the transmutation of electricity into some kind of sketchily-described life force. In this respect, the original is better; Klaatu outwardly looks like us, period, end of story. Isn’t that enough? Another extraneous idea, superfluous to the core story: Klaatu’s giant omnipotent robot companion Gort is now comprised of a swarm of nanobots. Why have both a giant robot and itsy-bitsy nanobots? Pick one idea and stick with it.

Keanu Reeves in The Day the Earth Stood Still

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves; first we must fulfill another genre cliche. The Day the Earth Stood Still lines up after the likes of The Happening, The Day After Tomorrow, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Deep Impact, Watchmen, and Cloverfield (the list goes on, and on…) to take another stab at decimating poor New York City. When humanity detects an unidentified object set to strike Manhattan, Dr. Michael Grainer (Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm) assembles a crack team of diverse experts including astrobiologist Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) to fly around in black helicopters and gawp helplessly at all the special effects. Luckily, for the moment at least, the object turns about to be a spacecraft.

In 1951, alien emissary Klaatu (Michael Rennie) went to Washington like Mr. Smith. In 2008, this Klaatu figures the place to make a grand entrance is Manhattan’s Central Park (never mind that the United Nations headquarters is on the East Side). Fans of computer-generated destruction of the sort in which Roland Emmerich traffics will be pleased to see Central Park forcibly landscaped before the movie is over. During the final climax in the Park, I’m pretty sure the principals hide under the exact same footbridge as the survivors at the end of Cloverfield.

Like the original, it’s credited as being based on the 1940 short story “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates. Its cinematic touchstones include The Brother From Another Planet and The Man Who Fell to Earth. But it shares a critically flawed plot element with the more recent Watchmen. In the latter, mortal heroine Silk Spectre must convince Dr. Manhattan, an ambivalent nonhuman that couldn’t care less, to save the world. Klaatu arrives on Earth to receive the report of an earlier agent, who confirms humans are self destructive by nature. That’s enough for Klaatu to begin to purge the planet, but the agent goes on and tries to impress upon him human’s complexity. Klaatu is unswayed.

Helen and her son Jacob (Jaden Smith, son of Will and Jada Pinkett-Smith) try to do the same and succeed just as Silk Spectre did, but in both cases the audience can’t quite understand how their arguments go through to superior beings one step away from godhood. Because she’s pretty, and her kid whines so much that Klaatu caved in just to shut him the hell up? Personally, if I was an alien judging humanity, and I met such an insanely annoying kid, I would purge the planet too. The movie would merit at least one more star if the kid hadn’t been in it.

Jennifer Connelly in The Day the Earth Stood Still

Jennifer Connelly is sadly wasted, again. As in Ang Lee’s otherwise underrated Hulk, she’s relegated to second-billing below the computer effects. The great Kathy Bates fares even worse in a role anyone could have played. As for the legendary John Cleese’s cameo as a mad scientist, I assume the idea was to cast a slightly kooky personality with a British accent to project intelligence to dumb American audiences. But the formerly manic Cleese has mellowed out so much in his later years that they could have just cast any old Brit.

The original Day the Earth Stood Still was quite obviously a Cold War parable, if a little muddled in its particulars. This version skirts the politics of war, choosing instead to recast the basic premise as an eco-parable. Much like M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, New York’s Central Park is ground zero for an ecological catastrophe. Part of Klaatu’s mission is to save samples of the Earth’s biosphere, which the Secretary of Defense (Bates) explicitly equates to the Biblical tale of Noah’s Ark.

Wikipedia notes the film was a largely green production, in which the crew recycled or donated props and costumes, and utilized an intranet to reduce paper waste. But within the story itself, for an alien concerned about cleaning up the Earth, Klaatu is quite content to ride back and forth from Manhattan to New Jersey in a gas-guzzling SUV (the manufacturer of which no doubt provided product placement).

Finally, some questions: exactly how much of the world is decimated in the end? How does Klaatu expect humanity to clean up the planet when he’s already destroyed most of the infrastructure? Imagine all the homelessness, starvation, chaos, rioting, and looting that must be dealt with before any government could even begin to think about ozone holes or carbon collection. Also, Klaatu’s species has the technology to disintegrate all manmade materials on an entire planet, but he totally dismisses out of hand the idea of cleaning up our pollution for us, or at least lending us the technology? The original Klaatu had more faith in humanity.

July 2, 2009
Klaatu barada nikto: Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still

Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still is one of the few essential science fiction movies that has lasted, overcoming dated special effects, acting styles, and the end of the Cold War — the provider of subtext for many a horror story. In the company of Forbidden Planet (Shakespeare’s The Tempest in space), The Blob (an invasive species consumes the population), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (smalltown America succumbs to the ultimate conformity), it continues to resonate decades later, even being reimagined in 2008 as an ecoparable.

Immediately striking is the dissonant score by Bernard Herrmann, of Psycho fame. The evocative piece over the opening credits sounds just like an outtake from Brian Eno’s ambient album On Land, thirty years early.

Michael Rennie as Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Evidently they have Brylcreem in space.

Wise shows us humanity’s first alien contact through the quaint filter of period radio and television; rest assured, “scientists and military men” are on the case. Klaatu (Michael Rennie), a suave caucasian humanoid male alien, and his pet robot Gort (Lock Martin) park their UFO on a baseball field on the Mall in Washington D.C. His polite request for an audience with the United Nations goes rebuffed, for during the height of the Cold War, not even a flying saucer, an alien in a silver jumpsuit, and a giant robot is enough to convince the nations of the world to sit down and talk. Klaatu’s flying saucer is surrounded by hilariously lax security, and he is briefly taken into custody before handily escaping into the D.C. suburbs.

Klaatu has learned mid-Atlantic accented English from radio and television broadcasts, and outwardly appears perfectly humanoid right down to his slicked-back hair (they evidently have Brylcreem in space), so all he needs to blend in with the masses is to simply steal someone’s dry cleaning. He checks into a spare room, with some shots directly quoting Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 classic The Lodger. He befriends young Bobby (Billy Gray) without a hint of suspicion, dating the film more than anything else.

Klaatu tries to get his message through to a pacifist scientist, but he’s discovered, shot, and dies. Gort, programmed to activate in such an event, threatens to exact an unspecified violence upon humanity. But Klaatu has already taught his interspecies ladyfriend Helen (Patricia Neal) the robot-mollifying fail-safe codephrase “Klaatu barada nikto.” Gort ceases his hostilities, and instead revives Klaatu using machinery on their ship. Klaatu claims his new lease on life is only for a limited time, for true resurrection is only the domain of “the Almighty Spirit”.

The remarkable fact that he believes in a God goes unremarked upon; both he and the humans to whom he’s speaking simply take it for granted they’re talking about the same deity. This line stands out for a reason; the dialogue was reportedly inserted at the request of the MPAA, who objected to Klaatu’s godlike powers of resurrection. Failing to reach the world’s leaders, he settles for the next-best thing: an assembled group of scientists (all, of course, white males). Message delivered, he leaves Earth in a huff.

Lock Martin as Gort in the Day the Earth Stood Still. Klaatu barada nikto! Don’t tase me, bro!

So, let’s recap: an otherworldly visitor with a message of peace-or-else is executed, rises again, and ascends into the heavens. Do I have to spell it out?

But if Klaatu is analogous to Jesus, let’s take a closer look at his message. He claims Earthlings’ warlike behavior is of no interest to the spacefaring species of the universe, as long as it’s contained to one planet. But the interstellar community is beginning to fear that Earthlings are about to discover interstellar travel, and they will not permit humanity to bring their atomic weapons with them. Klaatu is the representative of other societies that have already passed through this phase, whom, unable to curb their violent impulses on their own, came up with a solution to police themselves: a fleet of lethal robots programmed to eradicate anyone that violates the truce.

So they use weapons to deter the use of other weapons? What kind of message is that to a Cold War audience living under the nightmare of Mutually Ensured Destruction? To the 21st Century viewer, the immediate worry is whether or not we could ever trust an artificial intelligence to impartially keep the peace. Indeed, whole science fiction franchises have been built upon that very theme, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, The Terminator, The Matrix, and Battlestar Galactica.

But perhaps I’m being too literal. It’s a simple movie, but is it a simple analogy? Is the army of Gorts a symbol for Earth’s nuclear arsenal? No, because that’s exactly what Klaatu wants humans to put away. According to The New York Times, producer Julian Blaustein “told the press [the film] was an argument in favor of a ‘strong United Nations.’” But the U.N. is denigrated as petty and ineffective in the movie; they won’t deign to merely listen to Klaatu’s speech. The overall message is very cynical: even more advanced aliens aren’t able to curb their violent impulses on their own. Klaatu is here to threaten, not save us. If we embark out into space bearing weapons, we’re toast.

The Day the Earth Stood Still is based on 1940 short story “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates. Walter Trevis’ 1963 novel The Man Who Fell to Earth (filmed in 1976 by Nicholas Roeg, starring David Bowie) shares some plot elements (the alien Thomas Newton too bears diamonds as seed money), but veers off into another direction altogether. Newton has no interest in steering humanity’s course. He’s here on a secret mission to save his own people, but falls prey to his own all-too-human weaknesses.

June 29, 2009
Kristin Scott Thomas is unshowy but brilliant in Philippe Claudel’s I’ve Loved You So Long

Writer / director Philippe Claudel’s I’ve Loved You So Long is a textbook exercise in the dramatic withholding of narrative information. Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) is released from prison after serving 15 years for an unspecified crime, and is unwillingly housed with her sister Léa (Elsa Zylberstein). Léa is initially her only ally, and her husband Luc (Serge Hazanavicius) is distrustful for what turns out to be very good reason.

Léa and Luc have adopted two children (a big clue to the central mystery of the movie), including their precocious older daughter P’tit Lys (Lise Ségur, a rare movie tyke that is actually endearing). As part of her probation, Juliette is required to sign in weekly with a lonely cop (Frédéric Pierrot) with even more psychological issues than she. The slow drip of information ramps up the drama, but we’re told just enough to see that the movie is actually about Juliette’s gradual, sometimes painful reentry into life, not her mysterious crime.

Elsa Zylberstein and Kristen Scott Thomas in I’ve Loved You So Long

Thomas’s unshowy performance is acting of the highest degree. The British actress already proved her fluency in French in Tell No One, although a line of dialogue here explains away her accent. She doesn’t distract by inviting the audience to be constantly impressed at how talented she is.

But that said, there were a few moments where I marveled at the complex emotions she conveyed. Two scenes in particular stand out: Juliette almost physically recoils when introduced to Léa’s colleague Michel (Laurent Grévill) and when reunited with her estranged mother. Also watch for the almost indescribably complex expression that plays across her face when she meets a sleazy bloke in a pub shortly after her release.

Elsa Zylberstein and Kristen Scott Thomas in I’ve Loved You So Long

Only two factors kept me from considering the movie more highly. There’s a seemingly extraneous and unresolved subplot about Léa ignoring a student who appears to have a crush on her, and claims he’s a subject of prejudice. Was the point merely that Léa is an attractive, sympathetic person? Secondly, the movie arguably descends into talky melodrama at the very end; without revealing too much, we learn the truth about what motivated Juliette’s crime, and why she stubbornly kept her silence for so long.

June 21, 2009