THE DARK KNIGHT

“Do I look like a man with a plan?”

This film very definitely has a plan. A big plan. It wants to be taken Very Very Seriously Indeed. THE DARK KNIGHT is a follow up to BATMAN BEGINS, Christopher Nolan’s reboot of the franchise that had previously been destroyed by Joel Shumacher’s appalling entries, BATMAN FOREVER and BATMAN AND ROBIN, the films that became notorious for adding nipples to the batsuit. Nolan’s chief contribution to the series is a labored High Moral Importance, as Batman/Bruce Wayne struggles, oh so mightily, to live up to his father’s memory and banish crime from Gotham City. BATMAN BEGINS had a lot of nonsense about an assassin squad known as the League Of Shadows and some nattering about history and the decline of the west, but mostly the film was an excuse for bludgeoning an audience senseless, delivering brutal violence while shaking a finger in your face for enjoying it. It set a bold standard for sheer self-righteousness, even muscling in a reference to one of Bruce Wayne’s ancestors having been involved in the Underground Railroad. It didn’t even deliver an interesting villain, just Liam Neeson spouting mutilated Lucasisms about how you must become fear to overcome fear. All in all, there’s more fun in Auschwitz footage.

THE DARK KNIGHT doesn’t exactly lighten the tone, the occasional daylight scene notwithstanding. The story is terribly busy, too busy. Batman has been cleaning up the organized crime in Gotham City, and the Mob is getting unhappy. The Joker offers to lend the mob a hand. Okay, but there’s a lot of other stuff involving District Attorney Harvey Dent, some Mafia High Finance and a wicked accountant who knows where the money is buried and it clunks and thuds along, never more pointlessly than during a completely expendable sidetrip to Hong Kong. There’s a girl in there too, Maggie Gyllenaal taking over for the chick from the previous one, but basically, you just sit there waiting for more of the Joker.

I loved Heath Ledger’s Joker. He’s very funny and very shocking, going for an unbridled sadism that is unique in this kind of film, where villains are all too often too coy to scare, much less perform lethal sleight of hand with pencils. This Joker is the real thing straight out of nightmareland. It’s an oversize performance, one that manages somehow to match the oversize pretensions of the rest of the film. He's the driving life force of the movie, the pulse and energy of the film much more so than all the stunts and CGI. All the explosions and gimmicks never once impress as much as the sight of the Joker standing in the middle of a Gotham City street daring Batman to run him down, knowing he won't. He's even got a wonderful moment leaning out of a car window in the early light, enjoying the wind in his green greasy hair, a la Fredric March's Mr. Hyde ecstatically drinking falling raindrops. Ledger is also, by the way, the only actor who manages to put over the overt speechifying that mars so much of the rest of the film. When the Joker monologues on his ideas of chaos, he speaks with a demented conviction that poor Michael Caine’s ceaseless pathetic prattling about What Batman Means can’t come near. Gary Oldman and Aaron Eckhart manage to make something of their roles, which is more than can be said for Morgan Freeman and Caine, neither of whom have broken a sweat in years: their performances are strictly by the numbers and for the paycheck.

Someone should alert the authorities about the block of wood passing itself off as Christian Bale, getting roles and collecting paychecks. Yeah, I know, Batman/Bruce is almost inevitably played as a stiff. Sometimes for laughs, as Adam West’s hilariously pompous goodytwoshoes, or as Psychologically Damaged Goods by Michael Keaton. But no one approaches Christian Bale’s performance for sheer inertness. He just sits there and broods, or stands there and broods, or broods there and broods. Boy does he brood. Brood brood brood. Brood Bruce, brood. I found it impossible to do anything other than root for the Joker, who at least shows some signs of life. This lack of energy on Bale's part, and the nailing home of each and every Serious Point, are the least welcome holdovers from the first film.

THE DARK KNIGHT does go to some lengths to try to show us that there is after all something in Gotham worth saving. BATMAN BEGINS’ Gotham was a charnel house, a vision of urban hell akin to those in BLADE RUNNER and SEVEN, and it is hard to imagine why anyone would want to save it from the Joker’s chaotic demolition performance pieces much less actually live there. This at least partially explains the glimmers of hope that are shoe-horned into the plot, some bits of faith in simple human decency that were completely missing from DARK KNIGHT’s Bleak Chic prequel.

I can’t say I liked the film very much, except as a vehicle for Ledger’s Joker. I think I’ve finally outgrown this Batman stuff, except for Burton’s BATMAN RETURNS, to me still the only Batman film worth seeing, to watch Michelle Pfeiffer deliver probably the greatest performance by an actress in 90s Hollywood Cinema. It never gets stale, unlike the strained seriousness of Nolan’s movies, which fade from the memory almost immediately. They can do the inevitable follow up to THE DARK KNIGHT without me. Unless of course, they find something really interesting to do with Catwoman. Ha. Yeah, right. Not with this joyless batch of filmmakers.

MAMMA MIA!

A Supposedly Fun Film I'll Never See Again

MAMMA MIA is a musical play that takes the songs of ABBA and plugs them into a story line. Simple enough, right? The story isn't much: a Girl lives on a Greek Island with her Mother. The Girl wants to marry her Shirtless Boyfriend, but wants her Father to attend the wedding. She doesn't know who her Father is, because her Mother isn't entirely sure who the Father was. So the Girl, unbeknownst to her Mother, sends invitations to the three most likely candidates, and FUN ensues. That's the plan, anyway. On Broadway, a certain degree of FUN did ensue. The show was mostly charming, it didn't take itself too terribly seriously (one poor actor had to sing ABBA's song SOS as if it was a serious relationship song and came off looking rather foolish) but hey it was over mostly painlessly. I didn't want to hunt down and kill everyone associated with it. And compared with others that have come since, like GOOD VIBRATIONS, MAMMA MIA comes off like PRIVATE LIVES.

So now there's a movie, with Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters, Stellan Skarsgard. A really good cast, by any standard. So what goes wrong?

The material is so incredibly feather light that everybody seems to work harder than they've ever worked before to keep it light. The vastly over-qualified cast seems so afraid of coming off as too good for the movie that they all over compensate: they play the FUN with a seriousness that quashes the fun entirely, and the SERIOUS moments are played with a level of honesty that the material just can't bear. The fun-induced panic that hovers around Meryl Streep is particularly oppressive: America's Dowager Actress Goddess lays it on like a CEO at an office picnic glad-handing the janitors. She hasn't worked this hard since SOPHIE'S CHOICE. And nobody else fares any better: the usually magnificent Julie Walters at one point steps into a small dinghy, and of course falls off into the water, but the process by which she loses her balance and falls in is so blatant and overdone that any slight amusement I might feel is quickly stifled. It becomes kind of a metaphor for the entire film: what should be effortless as falling off a boat becomes labored and obvious, too much damn work.

I could go on about the disparity between the obvious location shooting and the obviously studio-shot scenes, and Pierce Brosnan's really appalling attempts at singing (a male Marni Nixon was direly needed here). But I won't bother. I feel like I'm kicking a puppy here. An obnoxiously overcute puppy.

IN BRUGES

"If I was retarded and grew up on a farm, it would impress me. But I wasn't, and it doesn't."

I saw a movie many years ago a first film that I thought showed great promise, about a group of criminals preparing to execute a heist. It was a fascinating movie, filled with very fine acting, a great twisty story, and a fine bitter aftertaste: it really felt like it was on to something about the real darkness lurking in the crime film genre. The movie was called RESERVOIR DOGS, and I couldn't wait to see what the director/writer would do next. Since then, of course, Quentin Tarantino hasn't really progressed: the genuine darkness of DOGS was replaced with the smirking hipness of PULP FICTION and the flat-out silliness of the KILL BILL diptych. Crime films in general have taken a decided turn for the worse post-PULP FICTION, all hip slick attitude and narrative gamesmanship: it took Steven Soderbergh to restore humanity to the mix with OUT OF SIGHT, a movie that seems to have slipped from the general radar.

Tarantino only comes to my mind these days when I see the work of Martin McDonagh, an Irish playwright and now filmmaker whose work I am becoming helplessly addicted to. McDonagh's play THE LIEUTENANT OF INISHMORE is shocking and hilarious and vastly entertaining on the subject of the sheer stupidity of violence and the violent, exactly the kind of work I was expecting from the Tarantino of RESERVOIR DOGS. I saw LIEUTENANT twice on Broadway and started kicking myself for having missed his earlier work like THE PILLOWMAN. When I heard McDonagh was making a feature film, I started counting the days.

And it was worth the wait. Martin McDonagh's IN BRUGES is a fascinating little movie that managed to slip through the cracks when it was released earlier this year. It tells the story of two hitmen played by Brendan Gleason and Colin Farrell who are on holiday in Bruges. Gleason wants to sightsee, and Farrell wants to do anything but. There's a good deal of very entertaining bickering, Gleason and Farrell playing beatifully off of each other. It gradually surfaces that Farrell is dealing with a significant burden of guilt over a hit that went hideously wrong. It isn't long before a phone call comes from their boss (played by Ralph Fiennes with all the vicious madness that is so sorely lacking in his Voldemort) with some instructions. There's some fun involving a film being shot on location, too.

A reasonably alert audience member could probably forecast a good deal of what comes after, but McDonagh keeps the story lively and the talk livelier. There's a certain leisure to the storytelling that might keep folks wondering what the hell is going on, but this isn't a tightly constructed heist flick. These guys are on vacation, they're taking stock of their lives and aren't exactly happy with what they find. The action might slow down a bit here and there, but it does so in the interest of good old fashioned character development, in showing me who these people are and why they are doing what they are doing. I found it irresistible and even moving.

A cool little movie. I can't wait for McDonagh's next work. I'm counting, starting now.

SEX AND THE CITY -- THE MOVIE

Carrie Bradshaw's opening narration in SEX AND THE CITY tells us that women come to New York in search of two things: labels (as in designer) and love. In that order. When I heard that narration, I knew pretty much what I was in for. Evidently the rampant psychotic greed that typified Carrie's adventures was going to be very much front and center. And I wasn't wrong: the labels came fast and furious and faster and furiouser.

What love there is in the film is largely distributed among the four women and their intimate relationships with each other, their bank accounts, their closets, their favorite department stores, their favorite designers, and their dogs, not necessarily in that order. There are some men in there too, but they are completely beside the point. Big and Carrie finally decide to get married, almost as an afterthought after a scene of apartment hunting that nets Carrie her dream apartment (paid for, of course, by Big). The impending nuptials prompts a Nero-esque orgy of wedding dress fittings and preparations that would have shamed Malcolm Forbes. Big feels rather understandably left out of the whole deal, and winds up bolting. Carrie must, with her friends' help, put the pieces of her life back together.

That's the main set up for the film, and it is Carrie's story, after all. As far as the supporting characters go, more questions are raised than are answered, and it gets very frustrating. There's nothing like equal time spent on the lives of the other three characters, and nothing like equal time given to their men, who don't register at all. Samantha's partner Smith has gone from being a hunk with a soul in the series to a mysteriously chilly cipher in the film. Charlotte's husband Harry is only shown so that we can all marvel at how wonderful he is. Miranda's husband Steve fares a bit better, but the only one of the men to get anywhere near the screen time that the ladies get is Carrie's partner Big, evidently named for the really astonishingly huge size of his financial portfolio.

Ultimately, Steve and Miranda's relationship is the only relationship in the film that seems to have any resemblance to life as it is lived by more than one percent of the human population since the beginning of time. It is also the most frustrating, because I kept wanting to know more about what had gone wrong with them, and the motives behind their behavior. But no, this isn't that kind of a movie. The movie sacrifices character development for fashion shows. On at least three occasions, the movie screeches to a halt for a display of some of the ugliest clothing ever, outfits that would only make sense worn by Divine in some abandoned Fellini film. But not as tasteful.

I can't help feeling that way too many of the problems faced by these characters could have been headed off at the pass simply if the people involved ACTED LIKE ADULTS. Yeah, yeah, the show is a sitcom/fairytale, and the movie follows that tradition, but both show and film keep pretending to be more than that, raising some fairly serious issues about relationships while resolutely ignoring others, and it never seems to be aware of the paradox. It wants to be a fabulous frothy cocktail of shopping and sexy punny talk AND a serious comic examination of the lives of women in the Big City. The balance between the triviality of a lot of their pursuits (cosmos and bars and $550 shoes, oh my) and the seriousness of their relationship issues is a precarious one. And occasionally the magic in the series worked. Miranda's often confused feelings for Steve, Samantha's growing attachment to Smith, and Charlotte's attempts to get pregnant were generally very interestingly and movingly handled. But it wasn't long before the scales would tilt back to the trivial: another dress, more shoes, another shopping spree...

My reaction clearly isn't typical. I just have a hard time relating significantly to the lives of people who spend $300 on a single throw pillow. A pillow, I might add, that winds up as a sex partner for a dog that doesn't realize she's been neutered, which seems like something of a metaphor for at least one of the female lead characters. At least Jennifer Saunders' ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS made a point of the thick-headedness of its heroine who steadfastly refuses to learn anything at all, while SATC, in general, wants us to applaud and admire these women who so often behave so badly while dressing so fabulously.

To be fair, the film seems to address some of the uglier issues of the series. Carrie's pathological self-centeredness, for example: it is to her credit that she finally does recognize her own selfishness regarding the whole outlandish wedding fiasco. But like all of the lessons learned by these characters, it vanishes in a shrieking orgy of self-congratulation and a dinner at a surprisingly unfabulous restaurant near City Hall, the only time I can think of where all of the characters appear onscreen together. The narration even tells us that we have to look past the labels to find the love, in what we're supposed to see as a reversal of the opening line. That little message is flatly contradicted by the film's final moments: the ladies are shown, without their men, disappearing into a fabulous nightclub, velvet rope lifted to accommodate their fabulousness, all attired in clothes so resolutely hideous that they can only be designer originals.

IRON MAN

"Let's be honest, this is not the worst thing you've caught me doing."

Tony Stark, played with a hip insouciance by Robert Downey Jr., is a multibillionaire playboy weapons manufacturer industrialist. When he is captured by the very renegades his weapons are being used against, he gets some first hand realization of the reality of what his empire is built upon (i.e., violence death horror). He manages to escape his captors using a handbuilt suit of armor, and upon his return to CA decides to make some amends by streamlining the suit and becoming IRON MAN, defender and all that.

IRON MAN the movie manages the unique feat of being an entertaining comic book movie that doesn't suffer from Tortured Hero Syndrome. Yeah, IRON MAN's Tony Stark goes through some ugly times and all, but he isn't burdened with the Survivor Guilt and High Moral Quandaries of BATMAN's Brooding Bruce Wayne or SPIDERMAN Self-Pitying Peter Parker. Director Jon Favreau brings a light touch to the proceedings that is sorely missing from franchise films in general and the current incarnation of BATMAN in particular. We're not talking Lubitsch here, by any means, but the assorted mishaps attending Stark's development and use of the Iron Man outfit, and Jude Law's cool voice issuing from the improbably advanced computer aiding him in the process are genuinely amusing in a way that nothing in recent action franchise movies have been.

Good fun, for the most part.

SATAN'S MULTIPLEX



MADEA'S FAMILY REUNION

Yes. I saw it.

MADEA'S FAMILY REUNION is one in a series of films by Tyler Perry. Perry made his name on the so-called chitlin circuit, producing and directing and starring in touring plays targeted at African American audiences. If you live in a big city you've probably seen TV ads for some of them, things like BEAUTY PARLOR, stuff like that. Perry's films have been wildly successful with African American audiences, while getting a good deal of contempt from just about everybody else. When I mentioned that I had seen the film, nobody could quite believe that I had actually bothered with it. (Full disclosure: it was a beautiful Saturday, I was in a shitty mood at not being able to think of anything to do but stay at home and watch TV, and lo and behold MADEA'S FAMILY REUNION appeared on cable.)

And yeah, it is a pretty lousy movie. The best that can be said is that Perry has surrounded himself with competent staff. The movie is slickly produced, certainly better than a lot of other films I can think of, and Perry has at least mastered the apparently difficult art of putting the camera where it needs to be so that we can see what needs to be seen. But his sheer competence (or probably more accurately, the sheer competence of his production crew) can't disguise the fact that the film is a predictable batch of dramatic family drama moments, easy enlightenment cliches, snappy one-liners, hand-on-hip payback moments, and racial empowerment platitudes.

For all the huffing and puffing and laughing and weeping and fighting and payback and abuse and one-liners, there isn't a single moment of recognizable messy humanity in the entire film. Everybody's got perfect teeth, everybody dresses perfectly and is always gorgeously made up, the eligible males are all dazzlingly handsome and conspicuously muscular, the elegible women are ravishing and slim. The characters are just barely one-dimensional, but with some rather devastating backstories that hint that something interesting could have been made of the people and film in the right hands.

The story, such as it is, involves two sisters. One is a Single Mother who is being pursued by Mr. Right and the other a Beauty being pushed by her Monstrous Social-Climbing Mother into a clearly ill-advised marriage to Mr. Wrong, a really abusive but fabulously wealthy and very handsome control freak. The Monstrous Mother is really monstrous, more than just a social climber. It is revealed that, years before the film begins, she was so desperate for comfort and security for herself and her daughters that she actually allowed a specific ex-Man In Her Life to have sexual relations with one of her daughters.

Oy, the drama. The relationship between the two sisters and their mother could have been elevated into something really powerful and interesting, in the hands of a talented writer/director. Unfortunately, Perry goes for the quick and easy Big Scenes For Actors kind of thing. Will Single Mom put aside her past emotional injuries and recognize Mr. Right for the Embodiment of Black Masculine Perfection that he all too clearly is? Will Beauty come to her senses and dump the Control Freak and tell off Monstrous Mom? Will Monstrous Mom reveal exactly why she is so Monstrous? Will everybody throw off the shackles of past oppression and be EMPOWERED? Will there be payback for all?

What the hell do you think?

Perry plays Madea, who is apparently related to the sisters and their mother somehow. She's a larger than life creation, a no-nonsense Gramma who dispenses Folksy Wisdom. When that doesn't work, when someone foolishly answers back or doesn't heed her, she quickly resorts to Ass Whupping. She's every elderly woman from your childhood who seemed to hold you to unhuman standards of behavior while threatening you with medieval torture if you disobeyed She's like Oprah crossed with Mike Tyson. When she isn't intimidating her singularly unimpressed Brother Man (also played by Perry) or having heart to hearts with the two sisters in her kitchen, Madea is helping a poor foster child she finds herself stuck with as punishment for breaking house arrest. No, really, that's what happens.

Yes, there's actually a Family Reunion, where more pro-family platitudes are served up, most emphatically by Maya Angelou and Cicely Tyson (God in heaven, Cicely Tyson!!) as matriarchs who twinkle for all they are worth as they Approve of the Good Chirren (the ones getting married and who are a credit to their families and their race) and frown and shake their heads and go "mmm mmm mmm!" as they Disapprove of the Bad Chirren (the ones who gamble and disobey and talk on the phone even after having been instructed not to). It gets really choking when Ms. Angelou even gets to deliver one of her poems at the film's climax. It goes something like this:

I tell you things you know already.
I tell them to you repeatedly.
I tell them to you in exagerratedly clear dic-tion.
I will repeat myself.
I will vary my emphasis to make sure my message gets across.
I will do it like this:
I will repeat myself.
I WILL repeat myself.
I will REPEAT myself.
I will repeat MYSELF.
Now that I have repeated myself:
Live happily ever after.
Live HAPPILY ever after.

And so on. My diabetic friends are warned to leave the room when she's onscreen.

There are plenty of other howlers. Mr. Right takes Single Mom to what seems to be some sort of open mike jazz/poetry/painting nightclub. He signs them up to perform, and she recites a poem entitled The Courage To Love. No, really, she does, with full jazz trio accompaniment, before an appreciative audience, while Mr. Right creates a spontaneous painting of her. I'm not making this up.

The actors generally do their very considerable best to put the cliches over. But they're mostly defeated by the sheer vapidity of the script. The big showdown between the sisters and their mother is particularly annoying, lots of tear-brimming eyes and tremblingly intense voices, the cliched acting matching the cliched writing. Here's one memorable bit of dialogue:

Single Mom (thinking that Mr. Right just wants her for sex): Every man comes around for something.
Mr. Right (exhibiting pure Christian manly virtue and decency): Some men come to restore.

Sometimes they're defeated by the apparent lack of a script: Madea's monologue advising Beauty to whup Mr. Wrong's abusive ass with a pot of grits comes off as improvised, and not well improvised. Tyler Perry is no Richard Pryor.

There are also some icky moments. One scene begins with Madea's Brother Man deeply moved while watching a scene from GOOD TIMES showing an abused young girl (played by pre-nosejob Janet Jackson) begging her mother not to burn her with an iron. His eyes fill with tears and he wonders aloud why anyone would treat chirren like dat. Shortly thereafter Brother Man is watching Madea putting down her own iron and whupping the foster daugher's ass for cutting school. The scene feels like an answer to possible criticism about Madea's gleeful readiness to resort to violence (she corrects rather than abuses, get it?) but what am I to make of Brother Man's getting all excited at the punishment, muttering strangely sexual things about something shaking like jello?

I guess this is in keeping with the air of cluelessness about the whole enterprise, including that title. MADEA'S FAMILY REUNION. Even spelled as it is, the name Madea carries some mythic associations about which Tyler Perry seems utterly ignorant. Maybe a second draft of the script was in order, one that addressed the discrepancy between the ceaseless platitudes about the Importance of FAMILY versus the fact that everyone's problems come from that same FAMILY that we're continually supposed to be running to.

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

"Do you fear me, Rochefort?"
"Yes, Eminence. I fear you. I also...hate you."
"I love you, my son, even when you fail."

Charlton Heston died over the weekend. I have surprisingly mixed feelings about him. Yeah, his politics were generally repulsive, we know this. Yeah, he could suck big time. But we seem to owe him big time for Orson Welles' being allowed to direct the masterful TOUCH OF EVIL.

There is one Heston performance I like. I think he's splendid as Cardinal Richelieu in Richard Lester's films based on Dumas' THE THREE MUSKETEERS. His Cardinal is smart and wicked, running an entire nation at war while organizing plots to discredit the Queen of France. There is even one single instance, all the way at the very end of THE FOUR MUSKETEERS, where Heston displays something like a sense of humor. His recognition that he has been out-maneuvered, and a final little "go away, boy" dismissal gesture he makes towards D'Artagnan, are the most human moments I ever saw him deliver as an actor. Richard Lester did what no other director, not even Orson Welles or William Wyler, could do: he got Heston to deliver a sustained performance of intelligence and humor that lives onscreen.

Yeah, he could be as bad as everyone says he is. He seems to have been very willing to settle for the easiest, simplest solutions. When he plays noble, he plays NOBLE. When he plays angry, he plays ANGRY. When he plays happy, he plays HAPPY. And that's about it. He's the King Of One-Note Sincerity.

This can be seen most clearly in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, the great mad camp classic from Cecil B. DeMille. Surrounded by actors like Yul Brynner and Edward G. Robinson having a wonderful time chewing the scenery, camping up a storm, and apparently competing to see who can best get away with the outrageous overheated dialogue, Heston alone plays it not just straight but STRAIGHT. Robinson's Slimy Little Traitor and Brynner's Hunky Pagan Pharoah Ramses, for example, manage to hit something real and recognizably human for all their cartoonishness. Heston's Moses just can't compete: there's no joy or even basic humanity in him, either as a character or as a performance. Moses' reaction to Ramses' final capitulation, a loud solemn prayer of thanksgiving to the Eternal God, is written and played in such a way as to make you want an 11th Commandment about winning gracefully.

I almost forgive all the solemnity and High Authority when Heston parts the Red Sea. Not God, not the John P. Fulton's special effects men. Heston does it. The Red Sea parts because he damn well tells it to. I can't imagine it doing otherwise.

And I'll say it: Heston doesn't entirely suck in BEN HUR, a movie I seem to be alone in finding to be more than an excuse for a chariot race. While Heston is all too often acted off the screen by the likes of Jack Hawkins or the sublime Hugh Griffith, there are occasional arresting little moments of humanity that surprise. His amusement at Hugh Griffith's perfectly delivered joke about monogamy being "ungenerous" seems genuine and unplanned, a rarity for Heston. This may have been the result of working with William Wyler instead of De Mille, of course. There's a lot of gossip about the alleged "gay subtext" that uncredited script doctor Gore Vidal claims to have added to the relationship between Heston's Ben Hur and Stephen Boyd's Messala, which apparently was kept secret from Heston because he wouldn't have been able to handle it. It certainly seems that Boyd is playing that thwarted romantic vibe for all it is worth, while Heston settles for basic tears-in-the-blue-eyes joy at seeing a dear childhood friend. And there it is: no one would ever accuse Heston of adding an extra level or playing a subtext. He just couldn't handle it.

ANTHONY MINGHELLA R.I.P.

So he’s gone. The director of some of the worst crap ever to soil the big screen: I understand his stage work was well-received, but then a monumental turd like THE ENGLISH PATIENT won 9 Oscars. I will never forget or forgive the time I wasted writhing through PATIENT and the unspeakable COLD MOUNTAIN. THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY at least has some moments largely involving the glories of Jude Law. But I cannot and will not forget that RIPLEY serves to reinforce more negative gayness-as-misery stereotypes than any film in my experience, transforming Patricia Highsmith’s darkly witty novel into a bloated two and a half hour Guilt Trip about a Fag Who Kills The Boys He Loves. It makes BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN look like THE BIRDCAGE. Although I can’t complain too loudly about a movie where Philip Seymour Hoffman gets his head bashed in.

Bye bye Tony. In purgatory you’ll be watching some good films (NOTORIOUS, THE GENERAL, SHOP AROUND THE CORNER, THE GODFATHER I and II) and realizing what crap your film work really is.

R.I.P. and all that. Better luck next life.

MICHAEL CLAYTON

"Do I look like I'm negotiating?"

Watched it on DVD last night. Hadn’t had any interest in seeing it. At least now I can say that I saw all five films nominated for Best Picture Oscars this year, and Tilda Swinton’s winning performance. Otherwise it was pretty much a waste of my two hours.

The film centers on Michael Clayton, a bummed-out guy who works for a Big Old Law Firm, running around cleaning up messes, helping big clients get local representation when they’re involved in hit and runs, etc. Michael has some problems of his own: he’s a divorced dad, he has gambling problems and a bozo brother who has ruined a business that Clayton set up for him leaving Clayton holding the financial bag, and so on.

Clayton’s Big Old Law Firm is handling a Gigantic Multi-Billion Dollar lawsuit, representing a bunch of people who are suing a Big Old Chemical Company for damages having to do with a toxic pesticide. The Partner handling the Gigantic Lawsuit loses his mind, and Michael has to clean up the mess, which he soon realizes is a lot messier than he had imagined.

I’m breathing a lot more life into the film’s cliched storylines than the filmmakers manage to. It takes very nearly an hour for the two paragraphs worth of plot above to get established onscreen, believe it or not. There’s also a flashback device that feels rather like it was added post-production in an attempt to get some kind of energy into the proceedings, but winds up being counter-effective.

There’s no denying that the film overall is well-intentioned. It seems to want to transcend the legal thriller genre, to be more than just a bunch of courtroom/legalistic shenanigans, but it just doesn’t have anything particularly interesting to transcend the genre with. This is a Serious Movie, make no mistake. We get lots of sad character information about Michael Clayton, all of it grim grim grim, and nobody else seems any happier. There’s a lot of mood lighting and overcast skies and involved corporate legal jargon stuff. Even the obligatory Big Finish is muted, as Michael’s Triumph Over Corporate Evil nets him only a cab ride into an uncertain future. There’s just none of the life and energy (the entertainment value, in short) of even the most exhausted Grisham knockoff. I’m not saying I wanted shoot-outs and bizarro Tarantino dialogue, but I would have given a lot for the film to have been directed by a Sidney Lumet or a pre-OUT OF AFRICA Sidney Pollack.

The actors try their best to make all this work, with Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson being only the most recognized of the generally good cast. Even Denis O’Hare gets some good fun going as a pissed-off client, who inspires one of Clooney’s best slow burns. But without a director able to consistently keep the pacing lively and get some (metaphorical) blood flowing, MICHAEL CLAYTON is DOA.

THERE WILL BE OSCARS

“I see nothing worth liking.”

Right, whatever. I can’t be surprised that this year’s Oscar telecast was the lowest rated ever. It had been so clear for so long that NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN was going to win the Big Prize that there was just no reason to watch. It certainly did continue the current Oscar tradition of honoring the Safest Picture rather than the Best Picture.

For my money, THERE WILL BE BLOOD was the best and most interesting and effective and memorable of the nominated films that I’ve seen. MICHAEL CLAYTON is the only one I haven’t seen, due largely to a long-standing allergy I have to George Clooney, way too much of whose performances seem to depend on him peering out from under those admittedly gorgeous eyebrows while he sets somebody straight about something. For the rest of my money, SWEENEY TODD was the film of the year. Tim Burton’s non-nomination as Best Director, and consequent non-win, is yet another in an apparently endless series of Irrefutable Proofs that these Oscar things are just a waste.

Worse movies than NO COUNTRY have won more awards. Of course, better movies than NO COUNTRY have won fewer. The whole fuss over the film continues to amaze me: what was the big deal? Don't get me wrong, a perfectly fine movie, easily the Coens' best film since RAISING ARIZONA, well made and acted, and with only glimmers of the stylish smartass nonsense that has made so much of the Coen Brothers work so chokingly awful over the years. I remember enjoying watching Tommy Lee Jones’ sherriff putting all the pieces together, and Javier Bardem’s performance as an apparently unstoppable hit man has really stayed with me. His final scene with Kelly McDonald as a potential victim who turns the tables on him is easily the film’s high point. Stylish but not too stylish, you could feel the Coens backing off from their usual excess in what was apparently intended as a return to the cooler style of their first film BLOOD SIMPLE but which, as with the surrealistically over-rated FARGO, ultimately comes off more as Bleak Chic.

It wasn’t long before I started to find the film's ongoing parade of carefully convoluted but not too convoluted events rather tiresome, and was ready for the end long before Tommy Lee Jones’ final Salute To His Father’s Memory. Was I really supposed to give a damn about that Llewelyn guy? And are the Coens really so shocked, shocked! to find that there is evil in the world? I think I might have shared their assumed horror if I’d seen a little more actual evil in the proceedings. I got more out of Tommy Lee Jones’ monologue about the casual murderer he sent to the chair; there seemed to be more of the abyss in that little bit of voice-over narration than in the plots that tie up the film’s running time. The fact that the evil in the film is consistently presented as being the actions of non-white non-Americans seems to have been overlooked in the rush to acclaim this movie a masterpiece, which reminds of the wild acclaim that seems to follow the films of Clint Eastwood. I have to say that I just don’t get it. I enjoyed the film well enough, I guess, but a masterpiece it just plain ain't. I don't think it has anywhere near the weight of Tim Burton's SWEENEY TODD, or the brainsmashing impact of THERE WILL BE BLOOD.

As for THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Basically, you get to sit and watch Daniel Day-Lewis hit bold new lows of human awfulness for nearly three hours, and impossibly it never gets boring. The action is lively and focused, as opposed to the Altmanathons of crisscrossing storylines and characters that director Paul Thomas Anderson has churned out before. Day-Lewis' performance as the impossibly driven Daniel Plainview is one for the ages, a harrowing picture of a man who has no loves lusts or appetites apart from the ruthless acquisition of oil properties, but who finds himself frantically trying to paper up certain emotional cracks when things don't quite go his way. There's a lot more to this performance than an extended John Huston impression. All in all, the film is a hugely ambitious, wildly exhilarating film that at first glance feels like a major statement about Greed and the costs thereof, sort of TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE without the bandits, and with Charles Foster Kane instead of Fred C. Dobbs.

But what exactly is it a major statement about? It doesn't necessarily have to be a Major Statement, I guess; it is certainly enough for it to be a beautifully executed portrait of a man so incredibly driven that he manages to destroy pretty much everything in his life, a la RAGING BULL. But there's none of the redemption that Scorsese manages to suggest in his film. BLOOD ends with a now-notorious sequence that feels somehow inevitable and tacked-on at the same time.

I can’t quite banish a certain distrust of the film. I’m concerned that I’m so dazzled by the very very high quality of the acting (not just Daniel Day-Lewis’, there isn’t a weak performance in the film) and the brilliance of the production itself that I’m missing out on larger problems that I’ll catch on to later. After all, THERE WILL BE BLOOD is the work of Paul Thomas Anderson, the Altman protégé/wannabe whose earlier films include the vile BOOGIE NIGHTS (a film that only gets more repellent with each passing year) and the epic self-indulgent compendium of Big Scenes for Actors-in-search-of-a-subject MAGNOLIA. If THERE WILL BE BLOOD is as good as I think it may be, it will be the biggest turn-around in a previously dreadful director’s work I’ve experienced since Fincher’s ZODIAC.

As for the show: I thought it was as close to ideal as we're going to get. Swifter, with none of the nonsense of irrelevant self-congratulatory montages and Chris Connelly leading in to each commercial break by telling us what we've just seen. I like seeing Robert Boyle get an honorary Oscar, and hope they keep going with honoring people behind the scenes with Lifetime Achievement awards.

And John Stewart can come back as permanent host, as far as I'm concerned.

SUNDAY IN THE FRIDGE WITH GEORGE

"No life."

At one point in the chilly current British revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE, a pair of grossly conceived and tastelessly performed Stock Caricature American Tourists (complete with big fluffy creamy pastries) wonder aloud "Where's all the passion? This is supposed to be Paris." I was brought up short by the remark, as I had been wondering much the same thing myself. Whatever else there was on that stage, there was nothing in the way of passion, or even very much in the way of emotion at all.

The play is basically a pair of connected one acts. Act One centers on the painter Georges Seurat and his struggles to complete his painting SUNDAY AFTERNOON ON THE GRAND JATTE, while juggling a relationship with his model Dot. It takes place on a series of Sundays, as Georges sketches assorted people who wind up occupying places in his great work. Georges' relationship with Dot deteriorates because he can only concentrate on his work, she leaves him, and all that. Act Two centers on Georges' great grandson George, who is an artist himself and is having something of a meltdown of his own: his artworks are becoming sterile and repetitive.

As I remembered, the big problems with this show are pretty straightforward. In Act One it is perfectly plain that Georges and Dot do not belong together. The point is made over and over again that Dot will never come first with Georges, and that Georges is struggling with his feelings for Dot versus his need to work on his painting. I need to find something interesting and maybe even likable about these people if the first act is going to be anything other than a bunch of Dysfunctional Relationship Cliches. Also, the other little storylines of the assorted people in the park need to be played with some kind of energy, or they are just needless distractions. Act Two can just seem completely irrelevant except as a meditation on the difficulties facing artists today, trying to find funding, keeping work fresh and alive; you know, all those things that you just can't wait to see a Broadway musical about.

For this to work at all, you need to have really exciting people in the cast, and this revival simply does not have them. British actor Daniel Evans plays Georges Seurat like a particularly strident schoolmaster from the Harry Potter films, brisk and efficient with Teddibly Precise Enunciation; I kept expecting him to take ten points from Dot. His George in Act Two is just plain bizarre, all bright eyed and bushy tailed, like some giant over-eager chipmunk. Jenna Russell seems to have been directed to play Dot like one of the maids in MARY POPPINS: cutesy British sitcom "ooo-er guv" energy and not the barest whisper of anything even remotely resembling the slightest possible whiff of sexuality. There was not a single moment of chemistry between these two actors, and Dot's Act One pregnancy had me awaiting the arrival of Three Wise Men. And the rest of the cast, unforgivably in a supposedly major revival, fade into a blur of costumes, with only Michael Cumpsty standing out for the really first-rate Jim Broadbent impression he uses to walk through Act One.

All of this is terribly disappointing, especially to one who saw the original production which featured the sublime Bernadette Peters and such splendid actors as Dana Ivey, Nancy Opel, Charles Kimbrough, and Barbara Bryne. Even Danielle Ferland made an impression as the little girl. No one but no one in this production comes within several hundred miles of approaching the original cast. This is appalling but it must be said: I never ever thought I would compare anyone unfavorably with Mandy Patinkin.

And to make matters even worse: the orchestra for this revival has been reduced to a mere 5 musicians. What should be gorgeous is now merely tinny. And the vocals are no help, generally flat and uninspired. For my money there are few things in this world as beautiful as the great Act One closer "Sunday," but it simply didn't come together here. The singing was muddy, the lyrics were too often unintelligible, and what should have been a tear-inducing marvel was a flat combo of tableaux vivante and fancy digital projections.

As for the digital projections: they're pretty cool, yeah. The stage is basically a white box with some vaguely period French-looking design details, and through the magic of computer technology and the wonders of animation we can see Seurat's painting gradually come to life on the walls. Seurat-style rowers go by on the river, little animated dogs frolic on strategically placed canvases, things like that. It works quite well, for the most part, but it can start to get arch: at one point the real George pours a digital projection of himself a glass of champagne.

A shame, overall.

SWEENEY TODD

"I've come home again."

Let me be clear. Tim Burton's film of SWEENEY TODD is magnificent. Funny, terrifying, deeply moving and deeply disgusting. I felt the way I felt when I saw RAN or TITUS or THE GODFATHER PART II or PSYCHO. I felt purged. I felt pity and terror. It is not everybody's cup of tea. It is the absolute cinematic embodiment of My Cup Of Tea. I love every single fucking frame of it.

I'd been dreading this film. I didn't know if Tim Burton had the real chops to make this film what it needs to be: a rip-snorting blood-gushing tear-wrenching High Musical Tragedy Slaughterhouse. Could Burton handle SWEENEY TODD, getting the right balance between Blood and Tears? His films tend to either really really work (EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, ED WOOD) or really really not work (BATMAN, MARS ATTACKS, PLANET OF THE APES) and sometimes both (BATMAN RETURNS, CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, SLEEPY HOLLOW). SWEENEY TODD is his least compromised, most assured film to date. And it is also the single finest live action musical film made in, well, at least as long as I can remember.

Burton does what no other filmmaker of the current alleged Musical Renaissance has done: he has put the focus back on the characters, the story, and the songs. When Sweeney Todd sings the heart-rending ballad "My Friends" to his razors, Burton actually allows me to see Johnny Depp sing. And then he does something even more astonishing. He allows me to continue seeing Johnny Depp sing. And then, to cap it all off, he lets me see Johnny Depp sing with Helena Bonham Carter. Two people sing. At the same time. And you can see them both! Singing! Burton keeps the camera in tight, creating an intimacy that is quite simply lacking in the other recent musicals that have gotten so much attention. This is a film, after all, that is set in a series of small, cramped rooms: a barber shop, a pie shop, a basement bakehouse, an insane asylum rather than the series of showbiz stages, imaginary or otherwise, in CHICAGO, DREAMGIRLS, HAIRSPRAY, or PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.

Tim Burton is reminding the world of how to make a musical. There's none of the hyper-caffeinated gonzo MTVwannabe editing and incompetent framing that demolishes the sense and feeling of the songs in CHICAGO (really now, didn't that film look like the work of a blindfolded babboon?), or the fear of singing on display in DREAMGIRLS (where someone beginning to sing is a cue for a cut to a shot of the back of the singer's head) or PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (where the drapes get as much screen time as the actors), or the appalling miscasting that finally sinks HAIRSPRAY. Where these other films make the mistake of laying on the "cinematic" trappings of Attention Deficit Editing and Over-Ornate Camerawork, Burton strips it all down, creating a lean mean musical machine.

That isn't to say that the film is cinematically inert, though. There are plenty of fluorishes, including a wonderful opening credit sequence, a marvelous journey through nocturnal London, spectacularly gory throat slashings, etc. I mean, really, this is Tim Burton after all. Burton, however, knows when to go for broke, and when to back off and let me watch these people do their stuff. There are plenty of small spine-tingling pleasures, among them Sweeney's lovingly careful shaving of the area on Judge Turpin's throat that he is hoping to slash open. Just imagining what Rob Marshall would have done with a song like "Pretty Women" makes me nauseous.

Johnny Depp makes a splendid Sweeney Todd, the only actor I've seen apart from Len Cariou (the Broadway original) to capture the pain behind the rage. Helena Bonham Carter's Mrs. Lovett is a marvel, showing me a woman who grinds corpses into pie filling in one moment and whose eyes fill with tears over the fate of a young boy the very next. Alan Rickman's surprisingly dashing Judge Turpin and Timothy Spall's repellent Beadle Bamford work beautifully. Not the least of the performances comes from the young boy playing Toby, who delivers possibly the most moving "Not While I'm Around" I've ever heard. I hope this film banishes once and for all the complaint that Burton doesn't deal effectively with actors.

I could go on and on and on. I loved it. I'll leave it to you to discover the joys of the color scheme, the art direction and costume design, and all of the other elements I haven't got space to mention, because just when I get something down here a thousand other delights come flooding back to me. I can't wait to see it again. And again. And again.

THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT AUDIENCE-MEMBER

For years I have lived under a curse. The Bad Audience Curse. I've posted on this before. Whenever I go to the theatre or movies or any place involving mass spectation, I can always count on being surrounded by only the most annoying people. Plastic Bag Rattling Morons, Loud Talkers, Cellphone-Equipped Vermin, they all seem to seek me out. This is no fantasy. My partner has remarked, more than once, that he had never had such a problem with difficult audiences as he had when we started seeing each other. Over time I've come to mostly accept this as just part of my life, c'est la vie, hey, I wonder what I did in another life to get this curse thing.

The other night was the last straw. We had tickets to see a revival of Harold Pinter's THE HOMECOMING. Really great seats, organ-donor quality tickets. Bob and I, our good friend Scott and my brother. We settle in to our seats, the lights go down, the play begins. I gradually become aware of a very faint electronic sound, like a sustained beep that varied in frequency. It sounded like a smoke detector had gotten stuck somewhere in the building. As the play continued, the sound got gradually louder, and it became clear that it was coming from the gentleman sitting directly behind me, who was wearing a pair of those infra-red hearing device headphone things (it turned out later that the sound was feedback caused by his failure to turn off his hearing aid while using the headphones). The gentleman's wife at least once told him that the headphones were making noise, but he didn't do anything about it. He also managed to compound the electronic distraction by talking out loud, ruining one of the highlights of the play, when a woman takes a particularly symbolically loaded drink of water, by talking out loud, full blast, remarking on the similarity between the woman's behavior and his wife's family.

So there we were. Watching a play by an author famed for the importance of his SILENCES, being distracted by audience noise.

Over the years I have developed a way of dealing with the type of moron who disturbs at the theatre. I say politely but very firmly, "Excuse me, but (your plastic bags, candy wrapper, talking, etc.) is making a lot of noise. Can you please keep it quiet." At the intermission I and my friends let the gentleman know that there was a real problem. He was apologetic, got up and went to have the headphones adjusted, The lights went down, the problem seemed to have been dealt with. Then of course it started again, very faintly but gradually getting louder. The feedback continued and got more and more distracting. I turned around and asked again for him to deal with them, and it got better, and then got worse.

I was sitting there writhing, feeling like piano wire was being wrapped around my head. Finally the noise reached an unbearable level. I turned around and noticed that the old bastard had taken the headphones off, and had them in his lap. I snatched the headphones out of his hands, wrapped them in my jacket, and shoved them under my seat. The old bastard tapped me on the shoulder, offering to turn them off. I told him to just sit back in his seat.

And blessed silence reigned. I and my friends could concentrate on the final quarter of the play. But. 40 plus years of audience horror was demanding to be avenged. There was just no way I could let this go, it had been too serious a series of irritations. When the lights came up, I stood up and made a show of unwrapping the headphones and dropping them into the old bastard's lap. I told him that he owed me money, that he had completely ruined my enjoyment of the play. He was getting kind of flustered, clearly not being used to being called on his bullshit, and then I delivered the final stroke: "I hope that for the rest of your life, whenever you go to the theatre or to the movies, that someone does to you what you did to me this evening."

Glowing with self-satisfaction I left in a justifiable huff. I no longer have to worry about What Goes Around in this regard, as I have finally been the deliverer of That Which Comes Around, and it came around all over that old bastard. I have worked the curse through, it is now done and has been passed on to someone else who can spend the next couple of lifetimes paying it off. The Albatross of Hateful Audience Behavior is now rotting around the neck of a nearly deaf 87 year old bastard. Good riddance! Hello bold new era of blissful silence and proper audience behavior!

Yeah, right.

THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER is amazing. I'd seen bits of it on TCM on occasion, but never really sat down and watched it until I saw it at Film Forum in an excellent print. It looked like it had beenshot the day before, very sharp and clean. I wasn't prepared for how really excellent this film is.

I knew thebasic outlines of the plot, the famous device of the pen-pal lovers who don't realize they know and dislike each other in real life. This was handled beautifully, with real feeling and humor byLubitsch, Sam Raphelson, and most especially the actors. I don't think I'd ever seen Margaret Sullavan before, and was very taken with her. James Stewart blew me away all over again. Neither one of them makesa single false move.

But the real surprise for me was finding the darker shadings in the story. This is not a sweetness and light romantic fantasy. Well,yes of course it is, but what am I to make of a sweetness and light romantic fantasy in which a long-established marriage goes belly up, driving the husband to attempt suicide, winding up hospitalized with a nervous breakdown? These darker elements are handled with an honesty and directness that never overwhelm the joy of the film, and don't come off as cheap attempts at seriousness, but actually serve to make the experience more profound and ultimately moving.

Frank Morgan's performance is flat-out brilliant, moving from comic bluster to genuine pathos. For his performance to have not been Oscar-nominated is, to me, one of the more grotesque oversights in Oscar history. A great film and a great movie, no more no less. The kind of movie that makes one look around and bemoan the current sorry state of cinematic affairs.

BEOWULF

"I!! AM!! BEOWULF!!!!!!"

Yeah, right, okay. You're Beowulf, I'm happy for you.

It was inevitable I suppose, considering the incredible success of Peter Jackson's adaptation of LORD OF THE RINGS, that the American Fantasy Meisters would have to show that they can make big fantasy extravaganzas as well as any New Zealand guy. It was also inevitable that they would fail pretty drastically, considering the general immaturity of the American Fantasy Meisters, people who are, as I write, preparing yet another Indiana Jones film. Zemeckis' BEOWULF is a disaster, to be sure. But it isn't quite the disaster I was expecting.

The easy stuff first. The film is very very weird to look at. The much-touted motion-capture technology that is supposed to make the computer-generated characters more "life-like" is a dismal failure. Character motion is terribly stiff, facial expressions only occasionally register any sign of life. The characters look kind of like the actors providing the voices. That certainly seems to be Anthony Hopkins and John Malkovich, and a good deal of time has been spent on making a CGI version of Angelina Jolie's naked body. There's been some dickying around with their features and physiques, to be sure. The Beowulf figure looks less like the voice actor Ray Winstone and more like the actor Sean Bean (a memorable Boromir in Jackson's trilogy), but Beowulf's body is right out of your local video store's gay porn section. The lingering loving shots of Beowulf's muscular torso are worthy of the equally conflicted 300. I'm not really sure what they were after with Grendel. He looks like something that lumbered off a disturbed pre-schooler's sketch pad: Frankenberry as reimagined by George Romero. And what on earth am I to make of the fact that Grendel's Mother is shown to have not just a prehensile ponytail, but high heels as well?

The figures and faces just don't really work, they don't convey enough emotion or even just plain life. They flounce around a lot, to be sure, and there's a lot of activity, but there's something missing. I was reminded of Travolta's appearance in HAIRSPRAY, that he was plainly visible under a lot of unlifelike latex, he seemed weighted down with unexpressive dead weight. It all just seems off. Compare any moment of any character in BEOWULF with any single frame of Peter Jackson and Andy Serkis' Kong and you'll see what I mean. Ultimately, BEOWULF looks like a marginally more realistic version of SHREK. The technology is a failure, and I simply don't understand why any director would settle for such results. Does Peter Jackson own the only existing copy of the software to make convincing human/animal figures?

There are some cool 3-D effects, to be fair. There's one particularly cool scene involving a dragon's sudden appearance that was startling and very very effective. But way too much of it exists for the Whoa! 3-D! Whoa! effect, the "camera" goes to a lot of trouble to move around a lot to make sure the image is very very layered. One particularly elaborate moment is a long shot beginning in a rowdy hall and pulling back and back and back and back over hill and dale through forests and into a mountain lair where Grendel sits tearing his flesh in frustration over the noise.

Now for the weird hard part to write about. It has been a long time since I read BEOWULF, and I don't remember it terribly clearly. But I do remember that the story is a lot simpler than the story in this film, which adds a lot of other elements from other sources. Grendel's Mother comes off as a combination of Macbeth's witches, Morgan le Fay, and Mephistopheles. She makes a pact with Beowulf: in return for a specific golden cup and a night of good procreative sex (she needs to replace Grendel, after all) she will ensure that he reigns unchallenged and undefeated as king.

This sets up a very drastic switch in the film's tone. The schoolboyishly enthusiastic violence and sexuality (mostly latent homosexual during Beowulf's extended nude scenes, more overtly heterosexual during Angelina Jolie's notorious scenes) of the first half falls mostly away, and there's some nattering about the growing influence of Christianity and how it has affected the poor "hero" who now can't get any attention because of all the "weeping martyrs" that the Church is supplying. Poor hero, he's not getting any attention. Make no mistake. Beowulf has a need for attention that is downright Paris Hiltonian: when he arrives to destroy Grendel, he says in no uncertain terms that he is after glory, and glory alone. Little things like removing a pestilential evil from an undeserving populace are beside the point. So now we get King Beowulf feeling kind of bored and listless. Uneasy lies the head and all that. Then, to supply a big rousing finish, (Arthurian legend fans, get ready) his kingdom is threatened by a dragon, who turns out to be Beowulf's own son by Grendel's Mother, a la Mordred.

It seems that Mordred/Beowulf Junior can turn from Gorgeous Golden Youth to Dragon at will. Why Grendel couldn't pull this trick is never explained, nor are Dragon Boy's motivations for attacking Beowulf's people. Evidently being raised by a single Mom has left him with some serious Daddy Issues.

So the big climactic battle scene is Big, and Climactic, and Battle-y, in the manner of works by Hollywood Fantasy Meisters. Beowulf's very real guilt, his willing collaboration with the evident evil represented by the monstrous (if big-titted) Grendel's Mother, his responsibility for the deaths of a lot of his people at the hands of the monstrous offspring of his hellish pact, is mentioned but never really dealt with beyond one character's use of the phrase "The Sins Of The Fathers!!!" and the occasional furrowed Beowulfian brow. Okay, the point is made that Beowulf isn't humping his mistress as enthusiastically as he used to, nor does he sleep very well, but that's about it. We are meant to mourn the passing of the Great (Action) Hero and little things like moral ambiguity can't be allowed to be get in the way.

There is however one tantalizing final moment that hints at what the film has been rather desperately trying to be, and actually seems to think that it is: a serious exploration of the impulse to acquire power and use it, by fair means or otherwise, and the results of these impulses. Alas, that tantalizing hint remains only that, and is overwhelmed in the inevitable big Power Ballad over the end credits.

BIBLEMAN -- DIVIDED WE FALL

"How could they do that to Mr. Funky?"

A DVD of BIBLEMAN -- DIVIDED WE FALL, an episode of a religious program for kids, came into my possession through the good services of my soon to be ex-good friend Kent, who demanded that I post on it forthwith. BIBLEMAN stars Willie Aames, who was on EIGHT IS ENOUGH and CHARLES IN CHARGE, as millionaire religious zealot Miles Peterson (Peter Son, upon this rock the church is built, get it?) who has:

1. A pair of protegees, one African American guy nicknamed Cypher and a white girl named, what else, Biblegirl. They've all got spiffy ill-fitting uniforms, featuring Biblical Superhero Accessories like the Helmet of Salvation and the Shield of Belief, and my personal favorite: the Shoes of Peace. The attempts to impose muscular definition upon Willie Aames' distinctly non-buff torso is among the most amusing elements of the show.

2. The full Bruce Wayne set up. A big mansion with what appears to be an extensive series of caves below it, filled to overflowing with "high-tech" impossible computer equipment.

3. An apparently endless series of ideologically loaded supervillains. The villain in DIVIDED WE FALL is known as the Wacky Protester. No, really. The Wacky Protester is a probably legally actionable ripoff of Jerry Lewis' Dr. Julius Kelp, with really hideous prosthetic teeth and ill-fitting clothes. There are some other villains as well: secular children's television programming, disobedience, and disrespect for authority figures, for example. One of the lowpoints of the episode is a gratuitous clip from a Saturday morning TV series called Mr. Funky's Wild Time, an inane animated comedy with vaguely anti-Semitic overtones.

DIVIDED WE FALL centers on the Wacky Protester's attempts to drive a wedge between the members of the Bibleman Team, so he can Divide And Conquer and take over Mr. Funky's Wild Time and use it as a mouthpiece for his own evil designs, which has something to do with destroying the Bibleman Team because um, well, who wouldn't want to destroy these guys? See, the Bibleman Team is never at a loss for an appropriate Bible quote, which they supply at the drop of a hat including book chapter and verse. They don't just do this blindly, though. Bibleman himself warns that they must take care that the Scriptural tags they ceaselessley use are "relevant to the situation, and they apply." They also engage in badly written banter, designed to show that you can have a sense of humor and be self-righteous, too.

The show is pretty idiotic on pretty much every level. It has PLAN NINE level production values. It borrows pretty blatantly from the worldly entertainments that it works so hard to denigrate. The whole silly thing would be hilarious and disturbing if it just wasn't so completely lame. I'd bring up how odd it is that the villains all seem to have New York connections (the characters on Mr. Funky's Wild Time and the evil computer Luci all speak with broad Noo Yawk Accents, and the Wacky Protester is from Hackensack) if I felt it was worth the effort.

But there's a problem. Like the equally idiotic 300, this idiotic Bibleman thing has a following. There is a Bibleman website, complete with Bibleman tour dates for the Bibleman Live show, and there's a list of Bibleman Personal Appearances at local Christian bookstores around the country. I guess I'm just way too insulated and corrupt, as a cinephilic gay man living in NYC, to understand how any even remotely media-savvy kid wouldn't collapse in hysterical laughter at the general ineptitude on display in BIBLEMAN -- DIVIDED WE FALL.

BLADE RUNNER

"Gosh, you've really got some nice toys here."

Once again I have cause for gratitude for living in NYC, as NYC is apparently one of only two cities to have gotten full-out screenings on big screens of the (probably and hopefully last) Final Director’s Cut of BLADE RUNNER, which is coming out in a big old multi-DVD package in December. They've done a final digital clean up, erasing little problematic bits, like visible wires holding up supposedly airborned police cars, etc. They even added Joanna Cassidy's face to the body of the stuntperson who runs through all those big sheets of candy glass, and it actually works. I was worried that there'd be even more serious tinkering with the story, but no, Ridley Scott hasn't done to his magnum opus what George Lucas did to his. So BLADE RUNNER is back, its visual and sonic beauty undimmed and even enhanced, and its problems still unresolved and in some ways even magnified.

1. BLADE RUNNER really is something from a purely technical standpoint. It is one of the most gorgeously made films ever. And it really really really can only be appreciated on a BIG FUCKING SCREEN. DVDs of this film are a waste of DVDs. It is like LAWRENCE OF ARABIA or BRAZIL or 2001 or BARRY LYNDON in that regard. This cleaned up version looks great, sounds great, and is just a joy to behold, especially in these days of hand-held camera quick cut nonsense. And the recent big-screen engagement at the Ziegfeld is a marvel: crystal clear digital projection, great sound, goodness gracious me and mine, just an ecstatic orgy of sight and sound and gorgeousness and gorgeosity made cinema.

2. BLADE RUNNER is not a very good movie in pretty much every other way. Harrison Ford's performance is lackluster to say the least, he seems completely lost, veering from existential despair in one scene to low-comedy mugging in the next, and not in a good way. The character remains enough of a cipher for the director to be able to claim, 25 years after the fact, that he isn’t even a human being. The story is pretty well dumbed down from Philip K. Dick's remarkable novel DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP, replacing Dick's satiric edge with a world-weary noir aesthetic that was really horribly cloying when the film was burdened with a tiresome narration.

3. It struck me this time that the movie's attitude toward women is not particularly positive. They are either replicants or repulsive. The only two (apparently) human women with speaking roles in the film are an aged Asian woman who gives Deckard information about snake scales and a thickset woman with an eyepatch who sells Deckard a bottle after he retires Zora. The three female leads are all replicants, all three of them are murderers, all three of them are used rather degradingly for sexual purposes. Zora is a performer in a sleazy nightclub whose routine involves a snake (“watch her take the pleasures of the serpent that once corrupted man!”), Pris is referred to as a standard pleasure model for military recreation. Rachael starts the film as a bold, confident woman, but her self-realization as a replicant is combined with a chilling descent into mechanization: she is finally turned into a sex toy with no will of her own. She can't even speak for herself during that really hideous rape scene (I’m afraid it can’t really be called anything else) and in her final appearance as she and Deckard run off into the elevator. Now this could be part of the point about the woeful way in which the replicants are treated, purely as things, but it never really comes across as the point, somehow.

4. Ridley Scott has gone on the record claiming that Deckard is a replicant, that he was always a replicant. And there are assorted little clues scattered throughout the film, to be fair, but they have always felt more like an attempt to draw a parallel between Deckard and the replicants he is hunting, more as an attempt to add some moral ambiguity to the story. There is one little clue that sticks out like a sore thumb, a waking vision that Deckard has of a unicorn, which is apparently intended as a piece of installed memory in Deckard's artificial memory banks, and I'm sorry but it is just plain bullshit. If Deckard is a replicant, Scott should have shot something somewhere to indicate this just a little more clearly than he does.

And anyway, if Deckard is a replicant the whole film goes out the window. It is like having Victor Fleming say that Dorothy is a witch, that she was always a witch. Actually, no, that really makes more sense, as Glinda seems to recognize some kind of magical powers in Dorothy ("Are you a good witch or a bad witch?"). Bottom Line: If Deckard is a replicant, Mr. Scott might have made it into an actual part of the film itself, not something that one can only recognize by reading an article in the New York Times 25 years after the film is released.

So what is the thrill of BLADE RUNNER? Well, for me it is purely the visuals and the soundtrack. I don’t “prefer” technique to story or emotion, by any means, but I’ll admit to being fairly susceptible to the seductions of pretty pictures on a big screen, and to needing some time to overcome the initial “whoa!” factor. My father pointed out to me many many many years ago that I am a sucker for spectacle, and I can’t entirely disagree. I’ll get carried away by the pretty pictures, I’ll admit it. I don’t think I’m as bad as I used to be about it. I could see through the pretty pictures in drivel like BARTON FINK and THE HUDSUCKER PROXY to the gaping empty derivative disasters that they are when they were first released. I still watch HUDSUCKER sometimes when it is on, just to look at the prettiness, and there is a lot of it, but the film is a train wreck. I’ll see a movie for the technique alone, hey, why not, but I ain’t going to pretend even for a moment that a film like BLADE RUNNER, as radiantly gorgeous as it is, is anywhere near a 2001 or LAWRENCE or NASHVILLE or or or or or or or, and could never be a RULES OF THE GAME or a 400 BLOWS or IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE.

HARRY POTTER AND THE WEIRDLY UNEVEN FRANCHISE

"I solemnly swear that I am up to no good."

I haven't been entirely untouched by the Harry Potter phenomenon. I read the first book, and enjoyed it thoroughly as a good brisk read with some genuinely moving moments. I started the second book, and put it down when I found myself wanting some kind of literary Fast-Forward button. On the advice of my great friend Kent, I've started reading ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, and have been getting good fun out of it. I'd seen the first film in the theatre, largely out of curiosity, and mostly enjoyed it, but had missed the second one because I just didn't care. I finally saw it on DVD, and still didn't care.

I saw the third film, HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN, when it got a lot of glowing reviews, and I agreed with them all: it remains the best of the franchise, hands down, no question, period full stop. It is still the only film in the franchise to aspire to being anything other than a sort of cinematic Cliff's Notes. Alfonso Cuaron manages to capture the funky energy of Rowling's world, the messy little details and and the more than healthy respect for transgression, the willingness to occasionally do the wrong thing for the right reasons. I keep remembering the glorious charm used to activate a certain magical map: I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.

I keep wanting to slow the film down and look in the shadows for the little things that might be lurking (and they are there: at one point a tiny electric train can be spotted running through a big piece of astronomical machinery). Like the similar flourishes in CHILDREN OF MEN, these aren't slapped on to the movie in a desperate bid for attention; they feel completely integrated to the story, and help keep things interesting. This is no mean feat: the story is, when you think about it, pretty damned unwieldy. But Cuaron pulls it off, scoring some real triumphs along the way. A scene of panic in a room full of living paintings is particularly wonderful; there hasn't been anything like it in the series before or since. I mean really: Cuaron's film even features fascinating end titles.

Cuaron's film also features some of the most moving moments in the series, especially those featuring Daniel Radcliffe's scenes with David Thewlis and Gary Oldman. And any film that has glorious actors like Timothy Spall, David Thewlis and Gary Oldman onscreen at the same time, turning into animals, is my kind of movie.

My hopes were high for the next film,HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE, or as I've come to think of it, HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF NYQUIL. There's the occasional bit of largely computer-generated energy (one big scene involving a dragon is particularly impressive), but mostly it just lies there onscreen, never more lifelessly than during the big scene at the end showing the regeneration of Lord Voldemort, as played by Ralph Fiennes, who herewith wins my vote as the Least Terrifying Villain In Film History.

Rant: the Lord Voldemort in this film is a big fat pussy. He prances around in a Martha Graham shroud, with his head all shaven and his bad teeth and no nose, and I just sat there wondering what the fuck everybody was so scared of. This little nancyboy has the entire magical world so terrified that they daren't even say his name aloud? Why didn't Indiana Jones come along and just shoot him? He's a near total-waste. Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West would kick his sorry little ass. Darth Vader would pinch his fingers together and say "I find your lack of nose disturbing." Dr. Mabuse would glance at his watch and fire Voldemort for being late. Hannibal Lecter would eat him for a mid-morning snack. Tony Soprano would snap that pencil neck. Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestley would purse her lips over that outfit, and little Voldy would just evaporate. Lady Kaede in RAN would have Voldemort's head and balls, not that I really believe he has any, on a plate in nothing flat. A certain little boy in CITY OF GOD would etc. etc. etc. etc.

Who's to blame for this sorry state of villainy? Surely the director, one Mike Newell, who seems to be able to create engaging romantic comedies but is just out of his depth at getting fear flowing. Think about it. Compare this big scene in GOBLET OF BOREDOM with anything in Peter Jackson's LORD OF THE RINGS films, and you'll see the difference. The comparatively minor scene in FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING where the hobbits are attacked by the Nazgul on Weathertop is far more upsetting than this would-be apocalyptic moment, upon which a lot of the future of the franchise depends. It just flat out doesn't goddamn work.

So I was not looking forward to ORDER OF THE PHOENIX. I had made up my mind to wait for cable. But I literally had nothing else to do one Saturday afternoon, so I decided to check it out. I had a free pass, so why not?

ORDER OF THE PHOENIX puts the focus back where it belongs: the characters and what they do and why. Gary Oldman and David Thewlis make a more than welcome returns, with Oldman getting some particularly good scenes as Sirius Black. But the biggest impression is made by the sublime Imelda Staunton as Delores Umbridge. Umbridge is the teacher you had in grade school who worked very hard to appear very very sweet and couldn't be trusted in any way whatsoever, you know you had her, possibly as a guidance counselor. She's monstrous and marvelous, far more threatening and dangerous than Fiennes' flouncing Lord Whoopdedoo. A child sitting near me said about Staunton's character: "I hope she dies."

The Big Scenes are suitably big and effective, and the climactic battle between Fiennes and Michael Gambon almost makes up for the lackluster climax of the previous film. But the biggest scene of all, the biggest and most dangerous conflict takes place inside Harry Potter's head as he struggles to deal with the growing influence of Lord Voldemort's supposedly EVIL presence within him. That director David Yates manages to make this both convincing and effective makes me relieved that he will be doing the next entry, but not as relieved and excited as I'd be if Alfonso Cuaron were at the helm.

"Mischief managed."

HAIRSPRAY

"Ah'm tryin' to ahrn in here!"

HAIRSPRAY is the best of the recent spate of musicals based on Broadway shows. That may not sound like the highest praise, but trust me, it is. HAIRSPRAY eschews, mostly, the atrocious Cuisinart editing and fatal miscasting that have characterized such recent horrors as CHICAGO, DREAMGIRLS, RENT and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.

Mostly.

So here's the good news: the movie has moments of real infectious fun. The story centers on Tracy Turnblad, a young girl in Baltimore in 1962, who is a rabid fan of the local TV program, The Corny Collins Show, a sort of Baltimore Bandstand. She manages to overcome prejudices based on her weight and low/no class origins, and winds up one of the dancing teen regulars on the show. Tracy is soon flirting with the hottest boy on the show, the tasty Linc, and lobbying to have the show's monthly Negro Day turned into outright integration, a position that puts her election as Miss Hairspray of 1962 in jeopardy.

The plot largely downplays the realities of the civil rights struggle as being the kind of thing that can be dealt with successfully by a good beat that can be danced to, and I feel kind of churlish even bringing the matter up. The real subject of HAIRSPRAY is the pure joy of music and dancing and stopping to sing a big song. There's a lot of good fun in the film, which includes most of the Broadway score intact, and a really catchy score it is. And for a change, the cast is up to it, with one latex-covered big-starred exception. Nikki Blonsky makes the most of her film debut, handling the singing and dancing with great aplomb. Michelle Pfeiffer is convincingly wicked as the monstrous station manager whose daughter is Tracy's main competition, and she even succeeds in making her signature song, "Miss Baltimore Crabs," one of the film's highlights. James Marsden, as Corny Collins, takes his million dollar smile and amps it up to a real vision of TV hyper-eagerness, one of the funniest running jokes in the film. Allison Janney can't be on screen for more than 5 minutes, but gets more laughs per moment than anyone else.

There are a lot of changes from the original John Waters film and the Broadway show, many of them for the better. The story feels a bit tighter and better organized, but I miss the sense of wild triumph that characterized the Waters film and the show on Broadway. The sexual charge is also missing: where Rikki Lake in the original and Marisa Jaret Winokur on Broadway made no secret of their intense physical desire for Linc, there's an odd chastity to the film's Tracy and Linc. They don't even really kiss until their big final embrace. The only convincing sexual charge in the film comes between a young black man named Seaweed and his white girlfriend, the "permanently punished" Penny Pingleton.

Okay, I'll just cut to the chase. I thought Travolta SUCKED, except for one big cool moment he has at the very end which seems to be cool enough to make everyone ignore how just plain DREADFUL he has been up till then. As Tracy's mother Edna, Travolta is almost but not quite entirely unrecognizable beneath what has to be the worst prosthetic makeup job in the history of prosthetic makeup. He also uses a really overdone accent that seems to be the way that some people in Baltimore might actually speak or might have spoken, but it just feels fake and overdone, like the makeup. I was reminded of Wallace Beery in GRAND HOTEL, who is the only person, in a film populated with German characters, to bother putting on a German accent.

There's more, alas. The screenwriter and director have updated the story to make Edna something of an agoraphobic with severe body-image issues, hammering these points home very clearly in a way that makes Edna more of an object of pity than anything else, and it just brings the story to a halt. They've also re-arranged the story so that Edna's rejuvenation doesn't really happen until the end of the story, where the show made it clear that Edna's rescue is complete purely by getting that fabulous makeover in the "Welcome To The Sixties" number, about a third of the way through the show.

I don't want to dwell to completely on Travolta, but he is a huge distraction. If they'd only been able to get a star of similar bankability who hadn't felt it necessary to wear hideously disfiguring makeup and adopt an outlandish accent, the film would have been nearly perfect.

RATATOUILLE

You probably already know the basic premise: a rat with culinary talent winds up the secret genius in a Parisian restaurant. Not the most promising of ideas, right? Mercifully, director Brad Bird (THE IRON GIANT, THE INCREDIBLES) keeps the story lively and the characters interesting, but there's an intimacy to RATATOUILLE that was completely missing from Pixar's last outing, the dismal CARS. The epicurean rodent Remy's relationship with his human friend, the hapless chef's assistant Linguini, never descends into the kind of tired sidekickery that characterizes the SHREK franchise, and the little romance that develops between Linguini and his kitchenmate Colette doesn't feel shoe-horned into the story.

The animation, as usual with Pixar, is wonderful. The character animation is terrific, lots of wonderful little gestures abound. One little moment keeps coming back to me, a little shake of the finger that Remy delivers to himself when he remembers a missing ingredient to a soup recipe, a sort of "ah-ha!" gesture that beggars description. Think about it: they actually capture the look on somebody's face when they smell something delicious. And there's no shortage of Cool Big Scenes. There's a lot of fun to be had in watching Remy scurry through the kitchen, using ladles for a ladders and dodging giant cleavers, and a sequence involving Remy learning how to transmit his directions to Linguini by turning him into a sort of living marionette would have delighted Buster Keaton.

And so on. I liked the film a lot. A lot. The film is also just plain GORGEOUS. It doesn't go for the visual gusto the way that CARS did, with its lingering views of the car-inspired landscapes and neon-lit night scenes. The world of RATATOUILLE is different from any Pixar has done before, the light feels more like Vermeer than anything else. But there are plenty of gorgeous views of Paris, and some jaw-dropping camerawork, especially one particularly wonderful sequence following Remy's journey through the walls of a building, as he samples the goings-on in assorted apartments through holes in the masonry.

One thing about the movie is bugging me, though, and I don't want to go into too much detail about the plot lest I give away any dread Spoilers. The film seems to deliver a rather carefully worded rebuke to critics toward the end of the film, telling us that even the most sloppily created work of food (or art) is more important than any work of criticism written about that work of food (or art), and I'm sorry, I just don't see it at all. I'll need to see the film again to get a better handle on what it means in this regard.

Do I think you should see it? Absolutely. See it in a theatre with the best possible projection and sound. Go now.