fire and forget

George Clooney / Cate Blanchett / Tobey Maguire
Stephen Soderbergh (dir)

Chinatown with uniforms.

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This is probably the greatest review I have ever read. I’m going to write like that all the time now.

That dude Neill Cumpston should be the head of film studies at all film schools ever, and lectures would consist of projecting movies onto writhing super-hot hula girls with SAS-trained rottweilers writing out your lecture notes and then flame-throwering to death any tutors that give you a bad mark.

BTFW I went to see Hot Fuzz a while ago or whenever, and it kicks arse like a copper’s size 10 to an old lady’s fucking face, and, and… cor, it’s quite hard to keep this up.

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Nicolas Cage / Eva Mendes / Sam Elliott
Mark Steven Johnson (dir)

This is the sort of film where someone in a Matrix-style long coat stands in a darkened church staring broodingly at the candles, and when challenged by the priest, replies “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I’ve sinned a lot!” and turns into a demon. Says it all really.

Ghost Rider isn’t bad, like, just not great. The big draw is the visuals, and it would be pretty hard to cock up iconography as strong as a leather-clad avenger with a flaming skull for a head. Whether riding his fearsome hell cycle up the side of a skyscraper, lassoing a helicopter with a fiery chain (!) or just standing there doing that Elvis open-fisted pointing thing, the Ghost Rider himself never looks less than dead cool. And if that image doesn’t sound like your cup of jellybeans, then, hell, Music and Lyrics is just starting in the next screen, you big girl’s blouse.

Just kidding. It’s pushing it to hang a whole feature just on how cool the lead looks, so hey, at least this film is pretty short. The Ghost Rider is the devil’s bounty hunter by night, stunt cyclist Johnny Blaze by day. In between jumping over helicopters Blaze flirts with childhood sweetheart Roxy, gets advice on stopping the devil’s son from a mysterious gravedigger, and has a couple of slightly dull paggers. And that’s about it.

It’s all quite charming, if not compelling, suffering from such a workmanlike, origin-of-a-superhero tick-box plot: guy gets superpowers, guy tests superpowers, guy reveals superpowers to sceptical girlfriend, guy has showdown with police that has everyone convinced he’s bad (except girlfriend), guy has it all explained by mentor figure, guy’s girlfriend gets kidnapped, guy has big showdown with assorted baddies over some kind of ultimate weapon, guy sets up sequel.

The Ghost Rider even takes on a purse-snatcher, for god’s sake.

That’s not to say this film is wholly without imagination: there’s plenty of nice little touches around the edges, mostly in the performances. Mendes, Cage and Elliott are all down with the silliness, and seem happy to just relax and have fun, and they’re all fun to spend time with.

An unexpectedly lean Cage is astonishingly restrained – I expected him to be bouncing off the scenery with his head on fire, trying to do the role without special effects. Instead there’s lots of little character beats like listening to The Carpenters and casually mentioning that he’s thinking of becoming a motorcycle cop.

Elliott is perfectly cast to lend proceedings a bit of gravitas, and nicely anchors the urban/Western/Texan gothic setting. Mendes is luminous but has nothing to do, except for a nice bit of comedy in a restaurant.

The villains are less successful: Peter Fonda is a casting coup but would probably be more menacing without the distracting CGI inserts (see DeNiro’s Louis Cyphre in Angel Heart), while his devilish son Blackheart, played by Wes Bentley, is just laughably lame. Blackheart’s goons, a demon for each element, each have an OK signature CGI trick and might get by in a Marilyn Manson video, but they’re absolutely rubbish in a scrap.

The fights should have involved more running each other over with lorries and less interminable scenes of two CGI demons screaming at each other. Let’s face it, the smoky, wraith-like CGI demons peddled these days lack the physicality, the menace, the downright implacable sinisterness of Harryhausen’s stop-motion skeletons, no matter how many times they come snarling and roaring right up close to the screen, woooohhh, scary!

So a bit more depth in the Ghost Rider/Johny Blaze character would have been good, more of a Jekyll-and-Hyde thing, but hidden depths are probably a bit too much to ask for in a film so shallow. ‘Nice flaming skull’ really says it all.

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dir. Roger Allers / Rob minkoff

So just how does The Lion King perpetuate an insidious right-wing ideal of patriarchal hegemony (a society ruled by men and based on cultural values that keep it that way)? While Clare was working on her dissertation, an analysis of femininity in Disney films, I watched The Lion King for the first time, and I’ll tell you right now, I saw straight through that ‘circle of life’ rubbish.

I first posted this argument on the IMDb message board (but it’s gone now) and got a bit of stick from some quarters (“It’s just a kid’s movie, dude!”) but to me that’s exactly why we should think about them, analyse them, and tear apart the subconscious meanings that they contain. It could be shaping your kids’ whole worldview!

That said, this is a pretty extreme reading of Disney films, and there is an element of tongue-in-cheekness about some of the points. So don’t take it too seriously (and remember I’m discussing negative stereotypes, not endorsing them). But think about this: how many Disney films are about a young character who hates their life, but discovers that things go bad when they fall in with the wrong crowd, and therefore finds a happy ending by returning to and embracing the very life that made them so unhappy in the first place? In fact how many children’s films in general are about that one thing: your parents are right all along.

Princes and prides

The Lion King tells the story of Simba, a young lion prince on the African veldt. When his father, Mufasa, is killed through the machinations of his villainous uncle Scar, Simba enters a self-imposed exile from the lush pridelands where he lives. He later returns to the now-blighted pridelands, where he defeats Scar and belatedly fulfils his monarchical destiny, becoming the new lion king.

Dealing as do so many Disney films with kings, queens and royal offspring, The Lion King reinforces the same patriarchal hegemony. As with Aladdin’s Princess Jasmine, Simba yearns for freedom from predetermined monarchical destiny and enjoys a brief transgressive period, before not only assuming monarchical mantle but realising that that was what he actually wanted all along. Unlike Aladdin, The Lion King deals explicitly with the transfer of masculine power, positing the birth of a male royal heir as a guarantee of future security and good times for all who inhabit the pridelands.

The second act of the film even posits a dire warning of the perils for society of the absence of strong male governance. During Simba’s self-imposed exile, the bountiful pridelands are blighted under the rule of the craven, cowardly Scar and his equally ineffectual – unless in sufficient numbers – hyena cohorts.

(more…)

“Why is Spiderman in a black suit? Does he turn bad or something?”

No, his suit turns bad. It’s called Venom.

“What? His suit turns bad?”

Yeah, in the comic he goes off into space or something and gets a new black suit, but it comes alive and goes bad. It’s called Venom.

“Oh right. His outfit comes to life. Cause that’s plausible.”

Any more plausible than a man getting bitten by a radiocactive spider and gaining superpowers?

“Oh that’s perfectly plausible. Isn’t it a documentary?”

Yeah. Fly on the wall… arf!

Edward Norton / Paul Giamatti / Jessica Biel / Rufus Sewell
dir. Neil Burger

A magician clashes with a rival for the affections of a woman whose death locks the pair in an obsessive battle of wits. Sounds a bit like The Prestige, although The Prestige sounds like a bit more fun than this lush but dour affair.

The problem with on-screen magic is that CGI renders it a bit hollow. The film never seems to make up its mind whether Eisenheim, Norton’s magician, is actually magical, despite his repeated assertions to the contrary. We never get a real sense of how he does it, but maybe that’s the point.

We don’t get much of a sense of what’s going on behind Eisenheim’s guarded stage persona either. Norton is as watchably intense as ever, but the chemistry between Biel and Norton never really ignites as they seem to keep a mannerly distance between them. Biel doesn’t get to do much beyond be doe-eyed and luminous, and we never really get a sense of her personality or the restrictions of her privileged position.

By contrast, Giamatti, here a genial but pragmatic police chief, is always a pleasure to spend time with. Rufus Sewell is the stand out as the diamond-eyed, callow prince. Watch out too for all the British TV who-theys? wandering about glowering in top hats.

The Illusionist is structured as an illusion; we see something happen and wonder what we’ve just seen, and how it’s done. Unfortunately this means that the film is only as good as the payoff we wait impatiently for, and sadly the payoff is a bit rubbish, aping The Usual Suspects and – well, I don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll just say that this particular pair of star-crossed lovers settle for the oldest trick in the book.

Not exactly a magical experience then, but not a bad parlour trick.

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Daniel Craig / Mads Mikkelsen / Eva Green
dir. Martin Campbell 2006

The hype may have it that this is a complete departure from Bond series style, tone and lore, but it’s not as far removed from the Bond heritage as you may have heard: just a bit beefier, louder - and seemingly longer. The free-running sequence is the Goldeneye grab-you-by-the-tits-in-the-first-ten-minutes dam jump ramped up to 11, with the ensuing embassy shoot-out a retread of the sequence in which Pierce Brosnan escaped his Russian interrogators. Royale also shares with Goldeneye a knowing cameo from a ‘60s Aston Martin. Unsurprising perhaps when you consider that both films were helmed by Martin Campbell.

There’s the standard deformed villain, sumptuous global locations, and a (continuity-bending) appearance from M. There’s no Q, but there are plenty of gadgets.

And a couple of girls. However, Bond doesn’t actually do the deed with any of them, even running out on one mid-clinch to chase a potential lead. She asks him if he is with her to get at her husband, suggesting the erotic and sadistic fascination the men of Bond’s world have with each other – witness the infamous testicular torture scene. The women are mere props (Bond tries to distract Le Chiffre by getting Vesper to dress up and make an entrance) and possessions (Bond takes Dimitrios’ trophy wife just like he takes his trophy car).

The plot (Bond, slightly extracurricular, falls in love while executing a plot to bring down a supervillain who is himself operating outside the usual destroy-the-world remit) is closest to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but then that film is unfairly maligned because of the presence of George Lazenby and is actually rather good.

In fact, for my money, the best of the Bonds are those that depart from the Goldfinger formula and actually have a plot: From Russia With Love, OHMSS, and For Your Eyes Only.

Strangely, Royale also borrows from some of the weaker elements of Bond’s past. The ‘world’s biggest airliner’ is pure Spy Who Loved Me/Moonraker bombast – which is strange, as Bond was at his worst when operating in the States/in the 70s and 80s.

But there’s no Moore-style karate chops; Craig’s pumped-up body is the ‘blunt instrument’ M refers to: when a free runner leaps gracefully through a tiny gap, Bond smashes squarely through the wall.

Royale certainly keeps you guessing by departing from the standard action/espionage plot beats, although the impact of the false ending is blunted by the fact that the film has already been on too long.

The poisoning scene is totally superfluous; it provides a nice glimpse into MI6 procedure but that’s what DVD bonus footage was invented for. In fact every scene involving Bond’s car, pretty as it is, could have gone (it sits in the Casino car park most of the time).

Bond spends far too much time pursuing Dimitrios and what on earth is the bit in the BodyWorks exhibition about?

The charismatic bombmakers deserve far more attention than the slimy Dimitrios and the cardboard cut-out African warlords; their machete/stairwell fight, while claustrophobic (ie Bourne-influenced) can’t match the intensity or invention of the earlier scraps with the bombmakers.

Finally, the filmmakers don’t seem to know what to do with the final twist: an attempt to shoehorn in the novel’s devastating final line only throws it away, in a Venice-set coda that feels more forced than tour de force.

Betrayal is expected in this kind of film, but softening the betrayer’s motivation doesn’t make much sense – Bond’s climactic transformation into armour-plated killing machine is blunted. And what happened to the boyfriend?

This final reel cop-out is a bit of a let-down when the film had thus far done a good job of evoking the world of espionage as a tapestry of shifting allegiances and hidden agendas. M manipulates Bond rather than directly ordering him about; even in MI5 agents have a degree of independence and ambiguity of motive that harks back to the days of Fleming, LeCarre and Deighton, and seems lacking from the cardboard cut-out motivation of contemporary (ie American) spy flicks.

Casino Royale is much like it’s new Bond, then: solid, muscular, and assured.