Retro Review: X-Men: First Class (2011)

The following is part of a series where I bring back some of my "older" reviews (those written during my 2004-2011 tenure at the now mostly defunct The Cinematheque) and offer them up to a "newer" generation.  In honour of Marvel Comics marrying off one of their X-Men in the first ever superhero same-sex marriage (well, one of them is a superhero, the other his non-superpowered lover), I give you my review of last year's X-Men origin story.  Sure, Northstar, the aforementioned superhero groom-to-be, is not in the film, but it is as close as I could get.

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Sure, director Matthew Vaughn may play a bit fast and loose with the origins of everyone's favourite team of superhero mutants (as did Bryan Singer before him, and for that matter all the folks who have been tinkering with Marvel Comics lo these past few years) but continuity with the comics aside, this latest superhero reboot (or genesis project if you will) is, thanks to a nostalgic comic iconography and subtle (and not-so-subtle) winks and nods to those of us in the know (don't call me a fanboy!), quite fun indeed. All this and one of my favourite actors, the splendid chameleonic Michael Fassbender (that Inglourious Basterd who knew his Wiemar period cinema but not how to gesture the right number three) playing my all-time favourite comic character, that Master of Magnetism himself, Magneto (yeah, I'm one of those people). I suppose one could say that I have my cake and I can eat it too. 

Actually this is not so much a reboot (a popular way of going about blockbustery franchises these days) as it is a prequel, going back to 1962 and the Cuban Missile Crisis - here secretly concocted by Sebastian Shaw, head of the Hellfire Club (played by Kevin Bacon with an especially campy glee that perfectly suits the setting and makes us wish he had more to do in the film) and therefore we get to see several of the characters from the original trilogy as younger, very different characters. Perhaps this is just a way for the filmmakers to put their superheroines in skimpy, mini-skirts and gogo boots (not that I am complaining about that - though a little research would have told them the miniskirt would not make its debut for another three years) and therefore cash in on the nostalgia craze for this period that was started by AMC's Mad Men. But then again, this is where the story began (Stan Lee and Jack Kirby debuted their X-Men in September of 1963) so it too must be where an origin episode must begin. 

Here we get the steely determination of a young Erik Lehnsherr (the aforementioned Mr. Fassbender) making his way from the concentration camps of his youth (played by Bill Milner as a boy) to his anger-fueled revenge on those responsible for such atrocities (an early scene set in Argentina and done mostly in German reminds one of a certain scene in the belly of Inglourious Basterds) and finally to his inevitable turn toward the supposed dark side and evolution into the man known simply as Magneto. One of my reasons for finding this character (in comic and movie both) so fascinating is the inherent emotional turmoil brewing inside of him. He is neither a villain nor a hero, but at the same time he is both (in fact for a while in the comics he Magneto actually led the X-Men in Xavier's absence). Originally this film was meant to be one in a series of origin stories, following up X-Men Origins: Wolverine, that would tell the tale of Lehnsherr/Magneto just like the previous film had told of Logan's early life. It would eventually evolve into this tale, but still the torment of Magneto is at its core. 

Here we also get a young Charles Xavier (the always fun-to-watch James McAvoy) before he became the austere professorial type played by Patrick Stewart in the original trilogy. We find this pampered rich kid at Oxford in the beginning days of the "swingin' London" era, made out to be a rather snarky player (wooing coeds with his brainy charms) as well as quite vain and cocksure (inside joking about how much he likes his hair). This vanity (and the fact that he looks no different than regular humans and therefore, unlike those whose mutations have taken on more physical attributes, has no qualms about coming out as it were) is what drives a wedge between Charles and those close to him. Playing Martin Luther King to Magneto's Malcolm X, Xavier wishes to become unified with the non-mutant population and coexist peacefully while his angrier counterpart says "peace was never an option". Of course an argument can be made for either side and in truth it needs to be a combination of both viewpoints (not the stubbornness of both Lenhnsherr and Xavier for their causes) to make any sort of future work. This basic moral war is what is at the base of this story. 

McAvoy and Fassbender actually play perfectly off of each other (almost as if they really were the two sides of the same coin they are portrayed as in the film) and it is in this friendship and eventual betrayal that Vaughn's film finds its strength. The rest of the cast, though some are very good, never quite reach this level of compatibility that McAvoy and Fassbender seem to have. Playing the blueskinned shapeshifting Raven Darkholme, aka Mystique (previously portrayed by Rebecca Romijn), Jennifer Lawrence, Oscar nominated for Winter's Bone last year, never gets the chance to stretch too much (she has many poignant emotional dilemmas but still gets overshadowed in them by McAvoy and Fassbender). As for the others, January Jones (didn't somebody mention Mad Men earlier?), looks quite spectacular in the iconic outfit of the White Queen, Emma Frost; Rose Byrne as Moira MacTaggart (here, unlike in the comics, made to be a CIA agent) is also meant as mostly eye candy (baring almost all while sneaking into the Hellfire Club as a paid escort); and English actor Jason Flemying as the redskinned teleporting demon Azazel (and eventual father to stalwart X-Man Nightcrawler) is a hell of a lot of fun to watch go bamfing all about. But then again, it is less the portrayals than those being portrayed that throw this comic book nerd off his kilter. 

As a not-so-secret fanboy (didn't I tell you not to call me that!?) I must admit to a few quite nerdy disappointments in the film. First and foremost of course being that these are not the real first class at Xavier's Academy - the one's represented in that now quite expensive first issue of X-Men from September of 1963. Well okay, Hank McCoy (aka Beast) is here, but no Cyclops nor Iceman nor Angel nor even every young schoolboy's fantasy, Jean Grey. Yeah yeah, you don't have to tell me - the continuity (the integrity if you will) was already skewed from day one of the first trilogy and therefore would not allow certain characters to be here in 1962 where it all began. We do get Cyclops' little brother Havok, which again musses with any sort of coexistence between the Marvel Comic Universe and the Marvel Movie Universe - but there I go being a nerd again. Actually one can easily put aside these notions of foul play as merely an alternate reality from the one we comic book nerds grew up with - something the comics themselves play at all the damned time. Of course, as someone with more than a bit of Irish in him, I may never forgive the inexplicable Americanization of Banshee (wow, I am a nerd, aren't I). But I digress. 

What it all comes down to though (comic purism aside) is whether one has a good time watching or not. This isn't meant to be Antonioni or Tarkovsky (although just the prospect of one of these auteurs, in some obviously alternate reality, making an X-Men movie fills this cinephile and comic book nerd with quite a giddy sense of glee). This is meant as pop entertainment and therefore should be graded as such - so the question remains, did I have a good time watching X-Men: First Class? Well of course I did. Perhaps it isn't in the upper pantheon of the genre (the heft and depth of Nolan's The Dark Knight helps it lead that realm) and maybe it doesn't have the inherent charm brought to Iron Man by Robert Downey Jr., but it is  as rich, perhaps even richer in many ways, as the first two X-Men movies (we can all forget number three), and the combined one-two punch of McAvoy and Fassbender, the early sixties setting, the splash-inducing finale wherein Magneto gets his oats and finally accepts his destiny, and the best damned superhero cameo ever (involving the perfectly-dropped lone F-Bomb of the film) make for a very fun movie indeed. Now let's bring on Chris Claremont to write the next film in the series and see what happens then. If you have no idea of whom I speak, then I suppose that makes you safely one of the non-nerds. If you do know, then you know what great things could come of it. Mutant and proud.

[Originally published at The Cinematheque on 06/04/11]

Battle Royale #1: Battle of the Beautiful Swedes

Welcome to the first Battle Royale here at The Most Beautiful Fraud in the World.   It is an ongoing series that will pit two cinematic greats up against each other - and you can vote for who is the greater by clicking your choice over in the poll at the top of the sidebar.  

For our inaugural Battle Royale we travel to the land of the smörgåsbord and the midnight sun.   Okay, technically Norway is the Land of the Midnight Sun, but close enough, because we are traveling to the beautiful Scandinavian country of Sweden.   The land of the, um...lingonberry?  Yeah, Land of the Midnight Sun just sounds better.   Anyway, we are off to Sweden.  Well, Sweden via Hollywood that is.  So it is time to make your choice.  Who is your favourite beautiful Swedish icon of cinema?  Is it the enigmatic Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, better known as Greta Garbo?  Or perhaps it is the spectacular Ingrid Bergman who strikes your cinematic fancy.  Who is the best of these two talented and lovely Swedish born icons?   Only you can tell - with your votes.

So in one corner we have the woman who vanted to be left alone.  She is the great Garbo whose exotic mystique in the silent era exuded a strange and beautiful sexuality and whose throaty voice and infectious laugh in the golden age of Hollywood only managed to ratchet that sexuality into high gear.   And boy could the woman act!  In films ranging from The Temptress, Flesh and the Devil, Anna Christie, Camille and The Painted Veil; her performances as Anna Kerenina, Mata Hari and my personal favourite Queen Christina with (of course) John Gilbert; the Oscar winning Grand Hotel and her role as the Russian agent softened by Melvyn Douglas in her penultimate farewell film Ninotchka.  Garbo went from icon (she was the highest paid star at MGM for several years; more stars than the heavens, and she was the biggest) to legend to cult figure when she retired from acting in 1941 and became one the most famous recluses until her death in 1990.  Garbo is such a legend that she is actually going to be on money in Sweden (the 100 Krona note) beginning in 2014.  Bette Davis, not one to hand out compliments lightly, said this of the actress: "Her instinct, her mastery over the machine, was pure witchcraft."

And in the other corner we have the stunning powerhouse actress Ingrid Bergman.  One of the finest actresses ever to work in cinema, Bergman, the winner of three well-deserved Academy Awards, brought to Hollywood a Nordic freshness and vitality unseen in anyone else at the time.  Her performances in Intermezzo, Gaslight and The Bells of St. Mary's are legendary.  Her films with Hitchcock and those with her lover Roberto Rossellini cemented her iconic status.  Later in life she would play a more mature woman in comedies like Cactus Flower and mysteries such as Murder on the Orient Express, but still never losing any of her sexual energy or youthful exuberance.  And of course there is her performance as Joan of Arc and her role as the internationally longed for Ilsa Lund in Casablanca.  Falling in and out of favour with America due to her affair with Rossellini, Bergman never once stopped being the glamorous natural beauty and talent that she always was and always would be.  With songs written about her (most notably a rather erotically-charged ditty by Woody Guthrie) and praises heaped upon her, Bergman was the epitome of natural womanhood.  George Cukor said of the actress: "Do you know what I especially love about you, Ingrid, my dear? I can sum it up as your naturalness. The camera loves your beauty, your acting, and your individuality. A star must have individuality. It makes you a great star. A great star."

Now I personally am having one hell of a time coming up with who I choose between these Stockholm-born actresses and super stars.  If I were to make up a list of my ten favourite actresses, both of these talented ladies would be on there.  Perhaps you are having a difficult time as well.  But difficult choice or not, it is a choice you must make.  Okay, you don't have to, but hey, that is why we are gathered here today.  So go ahead and vote vote vote.  And please feel free to leave any comments you wish to on the subject, but please remember that in order to have your vote (and your voice) counted, you must go over to the poll in the sidebar and actually vote.  No votes listed in the comments section will be counted.  But please go ahead and comment anyway - after you vote. You have just under three weeks to vote.  After that I will announce the victor and we will move onto Battle Royale #2 - whomever that may include.

Film Review: Chernobyl Diaries

I really have no one to blame but myself.  No one assigned this film to me.  I was not paid by any outlet to review this movie.  No one challenged me to see it.  No one dared me either.  No no no.  Not me.  I decided of my own free will and rather stupid volition to pay good money to see this film - knowing full well that what I was going to get would inevitably be something in the range of terrible to godawful.  Well guess what?  Yeah, I only have myself to blame.

With expectations quite low (and again, only myself to blame) I went to see this film and believe me when I say my expectations were indeed met.  This is the story of a group of genre-appropriately stupid twentysomethings who decide it would be a good idea to get in a van with a shady Ukrainian guy named Yuri and sneak into the abandoned Chernobyl nuclear facility for a tour.  Well guess what?  Yeah, that's right.  Let's just say it doesn't go quite as planned.  All the tricks and tropes of the genre are here.  Van doesn't start when they try to leave.  Creepy shadows in windows.  Strange noises that the characters go toward instead of run away from.  Creepy tour guide goes missing.  Dissension in the ranks.  A brother trying to prove himself.  More creepy shadows and noises.  Flesh-eating beasties.  It is all here, as is the eventual picking off one by one of these aforementioned genre-appropriate idiot twentysomethings, but none of it ever manages to scare and/or titillate for even a quick token moment.

We never get anything new or fresh here.  It is all pretty standard boilerplate stuff.  And therein lies the problem with the film.  A better script, with some more interesting characters and more interesting ways to die could have saved this film from the mediocrity it currently wallows in.  Sure, we can get past the inherent stupidity of the characters.  Kids are supposed to do stupid things in the horror genre.  They are supposed to go into the creepy attic.  They are supposed to split up and head to the woods to have sex.  We expect nothing less.  But the problem here is not the stupidity of breaking into a radioactive-laden abandoned nuke plant - we would be disappointed if they did not do such - it is how ordinary everything that comes after ends up being.  With no real imagination, first time director Bradley Parker and writer Oren Peli of Paranormal Activity "fame", hand us the blandest horror movie West of the Pecos.  Well, like I said earlier - I only have myself to blame.

Film Review: The Dictator

The comedy stylings of Sacha Baron Cohen can be easily explained off using the obvious but still quite appropriate metaphor of a tornado zig-zagging its way through the countryside like a whirling dervish of death and destruction.  It hits a farmhouse here and a trailer park there but completely misses a school house and a grocery store.  Never sure which way it will go.  Blindly blustering its way through the world.  This too is how one best receives the films of Mr. Baron Cohen.   Sometimes his jokes hit, and other times they do not.  The man's comic death and destruction (the old comic adage, he killed 'em) is as blind and blustery as any tornado.  This was the case with the pseudo-mocks Borat and Bruno, and it is certainly the case with the more straight narrative form he uses here in The Dictator.

The story of a North African dictator, who through some nefarious dealings, finds himself exiled to Brooklyn, Baron Cohan plays the character for laughs (of course) and sometimes goes low and sometimes high.  The comic can be a sly and even witty purveyor of jokes at times, and I think he does that more often here than in the rather inexplicably overrated Borat.  There are some legitimately laugh-out-loud moments here, and even though it is wildly uneven (par for the course for the comic) it has more going for it than against it.  Hitting like the aforementioned comic tornado, Baron Cohen peppers his film with both political satire, albeit of the most basic kind (some would call it racist or offensive, but then offensiveness is what the man is after, after all), and cheap dick joke laughs pretty evenly.  Never one for the more high brow end of things, Baron Cohen makes out better than usual here.

What we get is much less of the documentary-esque reality TV antics of Borat and Bruno, and more of a straight forward comedic narrative.  We do still get a lot of humour based off of uncomfortable situations, but here it scripted and not real people who invariably get pissed off and attempt lawsuits for the way they have been portrayed in Baron Cohen's films.  But still, the film is funny, and not just in the cheapened state that Borat was supposedly funny.  As for director Larry Charles, who was also at the so-called helm of the aforementioned Borat and Bruno, he puts in his two cents, but in actuality he is more window dressing than anything else.  These films are Baron Cohen's puppies and no one elses.  His films either live or die based on his jokes and his antics and his balls.  For the most part, The Dictator lives pretty well.  For the most part.  It sure as hell ain't rocket science when it comes to Sacha Baron Cohen, but when push comes to shove, The Dictator is pretty funny.  Imagine that.

And the LAMMY Nominations Are Out.....

So here we are again true believers and faithful readers.  The LAMMY nominations have been announced.  This is my second year of eligibility for the awards (voted on by my peers and handed out by the fine folks over at The Large Association of Movie Blogs, aka the LAMB) and this is now also my second year of receiving exactly zero nominations.   Now to be honest, I wasn't really expecting to get any nods (my comments are so disastrously low that sometimes I wonder if anyone at all is even out there reading these damn posts), but still I had some rather high hopes (as can be sen by one of my FYC ads to the left), and I had my eye on at least Best Movie Reviewer and/or the Brainiac Award.  But alas, twas not to be.

Now I am not saying I deserve a nomination ahead of those that did receive them.  Many great sites were nominated.  Duke and the Movies, Garbo Laughs, The Hollywood Revue, Dan the Man's Movie Reviews, Deny Everything, Where Danger Lives, French Toast Sunday and a place I actually do some writing for, Anomalous Material, were all among the nominees, and they are all most deserving of such accolades.  Still though, it would have been nice to be among them.  But I do whole-heartedly congratulate each and every LAMMY nominee.  And meanwhile, I suppose I need to network my site a bit more.  As I parenthetically mentioned above, it seems like no one is out there listening - and that is something I need to change.

I see some of my favourite cinematic sites (Glenn Kenny's Some Came Running, Farran Smith Nehme's Self-Styled Siren, Marilyn Ferdinand's Ferdy on Films, Kim Morgan's Sunset Gun, Stacia over at She Blogged By Night, Dennis Cozzalio's Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, Rod Heath's This Island Rod) are just lousy with comments - almost as if a community of sorts.  So I suppose my goal for 2012 is to stop my whining and get to that level of followdom.  Then no one will ignore me dammit (insert maniacal laughter here please).  Seriously though, congrats to all the nominees and good luck in the final voting round.  I hope to be joining you next year at this time.

Bon anniversaire à Jean-Pierre Léaud

From childish stealings, wheelings, dealings
Arms stretched out to grasp what Cinema gave

Running, running, running toward nowhere
A lost youth, grown up into cinematic dissidence

May 1968 and the Cinémathèque Française
Shouting for freedom as pretty girls clung to the gates

Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!
Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!

Stealing kisses for amour, stealing for bed and board
A child of the New Wave, an icon of a cinematic left

Marked with permanent defiance, the most natural
A born actor, arrogant but affectionate, a born leader

For François, for Jean-Luc, for Rivette too
A boy, a man, a symbol of Gallic irreverence

Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!
Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!

Thirteen hours, the mystery of Balzac unraveled
A mother, a whore, two pretty English girls

Night, day, a legend growing up, on the run
A film with his idol, but never able to meet

A Godardian detective story, Midas without the touch
Godfather to a post new wave generation gap

Putting girls in skin-tight leather for silent art
Dangling from rooftops in homage to Feuillade

Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!
Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!

Giving Louis his cigarette flip, his eyes and mouth
Giving his wink and stare, his walk, talk & bravado

A boy grown up like Peter Pan, his scream intact
His shadow pinned to the great wall of cinephilia 

A man-child of je ne sais quoi, stealing, wheeling
Growing up in bohemian Parisian savoir faire

Born unto Les quatre cents coups, wheeling, dealing
Eternal icon of the New Wave and beyond 

Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!
Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and How Preston Sturges Had to Marry Off Betty Hutton, and Quick

Poor Preston Sturges.  All he wanted to do was to make a movie about a girl who gets pregnant and then proceeds to convince the boy next door (not the father!) to marry her before her father finds out.  Simple enough.  Now if this had been done in the precode days before the Production Code was put into effect in 1934, he would have probably been able to do it.  If it were made today, he of course would have had no problem.  But in 1942 Hollywood?  No way José!  When the director handed in his script to the PCA (Production Code Administration), as was the required course of action in these days, the censors, always such progenitors of sensibility and taste, he said tongue firmly in cheek, stopped Sturges short when it came to the possibility of of an unwed mother being shown to all of America up on the silver screen. 

Sturges was told he had to marry the girl off before she could become pregnant.  Because, as everyone knows, a girl cannot get pregnant without the sanctity of marriage in their hearts and a gold ring on their finger.   This quite ridiculous and outdated attitude (at least by today's standards) of course would be countermand to the story Sturges had written, but if he wanted to get his movie made in 1942, he had to go through the PCA to do it.  Even a director like Sturges, who at the time was one of the biggest name filmmakers in Hollywood, was still subject to the puritanical whims of the dreaded Production Code.  But this temporary impediment was nothing for a writer as slick and as sly, and as willfully antagonistic as Mr. Preston Sturges.   

Sure, this age of censorship may have been a bane in writers and directors' existence, but it wasn't all bad.  One thing the Production Code did was make screenwriters more creative.  As opposed to the precode days, when sexuality and criminality could be shown and discussed without ramifications (well, other than the ramifications that would eventually lead to the Hays Office and the Production Code and all that, but that is another story altogether), the Hollywood of the mid 1930's through when the code began to crumble in the late 1950's, was a place where writers and directors had to weave their way around such so-called ethical problems, and in doing so perhaps created more subtly damning works of sedition.  Works of sedition that went right by the rather ignorant blind eyes of the censors and onto the silver screens of the nation's movie palaces.  This is just what Sturges did with The Miracle of Morgan's Creek.

What Sturges did actually, was to create for this oh so important marriage, the most ludicrous of circumstances.  The writer/director/producer gave his main character (the wonderfully named Trudy Kockenlocker, played with great feminine bravura by Betty Hutton) a night of promiscuous partying with a gaggle of departing G.I.'s.  Originally Sturges' intent was to "show what happens to young girls who disregard their parents' advice and who confuse patriotism with promiscuity" but since the censors were wary (and Paramount Studios as well), Sturges had poor simple Trudy getting married while wonky with the most convenient case of amnesia this side of screwball.  Now, with plucky Trudy's purity kept safely intact (though c'mon, a wedding night in a state of relative blackout is not exactly any more pure than Sturges' original idea) the movie could finally go on.  At least that was the plan.

With just ten or so pages of a script that were deemed appropriate, Sturges began filming in 1942.  Barely keeping ahead of the filming schedule, Sturges wrote furiously during the shoot.  Yet, even with winding around the problems brought on by the censors, and creating a screwball comedy that would go down as one of the director's best works, Paramount held the film until 1944.  Sturges would eventually leave the studio over problems such as these.  Upon the film's release though, critics praised the proverbial high heaven's out of the damn thing.  Many of them questioning how such a script got through the censors in the first place.  James Agee wrote of the film "the Hays office must have been raped in its sleep."  In the end, even with the censorship battles and the studio's changes, the film was heralded as a snarky masterpiece of depth and deception.  I will leave you with the words of New York Times über-critic Bosley Crowther: "Sturges has hauled off this time and tossed a satire which is more cheeky than all the rest."

Film Review: Battleship

Prior to actually seeing the film, I had some sort of peculiar notion that I was going to start this review off by comparing Battleship to the Eisenstein classic Battleship Potemkin, stating similarities in style and structure and how this new film lives up to the legend of the silent masterpiece, before pulling the plug as it were and coming clean as to it being nothing more than mere fanciful falderal, and that in truth, Battleship is probably one of the worst films of the year.  But then something happened - I saw the movie, and realized that it wasn't half bad.  Now I am not saying it indeed should be compared to a classic work of cinema, any classic work of cinema, for that is most certainly not the case, but at the same time, it is a far cry from the shipwreck many, myself included, expected it to be.  In other words, the movie, though silly and quite ridiculous at times, is a rather enjoyable popcorny summer flick, and as far as movies based on board games go, it most certainly has its moments.

Now granted, these moments are intermingled with the cheesy dialogue, wooden acting and spot-on predictability that have harangued viewers of pretty much every Michael Bay film ever made - from Armageddon to Pearl Harbor to the Transformer series - but unlike the flatulent Bay, director Peter Berg gives his supercilious summer blockbuster something that Bay has never been able to - an adventure tale that you may actually care about.  Sure, the lines the actors give ring loud with a rather puerile, b-grade resonance, and the in-story situations are something akin to cheap theatrics, and the film falls quite deep into the dark waters of over-sentimentalized schmaltz, especially in the third act, but still we are given a sci-fi, action-adventure, call-to-arms motion picture spectacular that manages to rise above many of these inherent problems, and become the big ballsy meat-and-potatoes creature it so happens to be.  For better AND for worse, this is what we get from Battleship.

As far as the story goes, we have all the typical archetypes for such a tale.  The brash, fuck-up who everyone watching knows will eventually stand and deliver the day's winnings.  The good-hearted but frustrated older brother who must force some well-needed tough love on the aforementioned fuck-up, and probably pay some sort of price for it.  The beautiful woman back home who must find her own courage to help save herself and others.  The grizzled, disabled ex-military man who must battle through his own personal scars to once again save the day.  The tough-as-nails Admiral who must confront adversity in military matters, but through the love between his daughter and said fuck-up.  The Japanese captain who of course must make amends with his perceived enemy and together with them, learn to fight as a team.  The cocky ship's female gunner who can hit as hard and as fast as the big boys.  The hippy technician who must brave his own lack of courage.  Played with varying degrees of in-over-their-head to so-above-all-this by Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgård, Brooklyn Decker, Gregory D. Gadson, Liam Neeson, Tadanobu Asano, Rihanna and Hamish Linklater respectively, they are all here in all their resplendent action-movie cliche glory.

When all is said and done though, to use a vernacular from the original game itself (a version of which is rather smartly embroidered into the movie's narrative), there are more misses than hits most certainly, but the hits are fun enough to if not make you forget the misses, at least perhaps forgive them.  After all, this is a big budget summer blockbuster and they are supposed to full of blunderbuss and codswallow, and tubthumping, chest-pounding bombasticy, and no one is ever going to be able to realistically accuse this movie of strong narrative or character growth or anything even slightly resembling originality, but when the guns get to blasting and the bombs get to bursting and the heroes get to heroing, the movie actually ain't half bad.  Yeah, a satiric comparison to Eisenstein's masterpiece may have been a fun way to start things out, but in the end, I just didn't have the heart to tear down a movie that despite its oh so obviously preposterous and laughable Michael Bay-esque über-schtick, is a legitimately fun, all-out beginning of summer rompadoodle-doo.

Retro Review: 300 (Zack Snyder, 2006)

The following is part of a series where I bring back some of my "older" reviews (those written during my 2004-2011 tenure at the now mostly defunct The Cinematheque) and offer them up to a "newer" generation.

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From the very first moment, as the Warner Bros. logo flashes and slashes its way across the darkened screen, as if forged by mighty Hephaestus himself, we instantly know that Zack Snyder and his X-Box-weened posse of computer geeks, graphic novel junkees and comic book fanboys are about to mightily thrust upon the unsuspecting public a vast and mighty display of ultrasupercoolawesomeness to the very freakin' tippy-top apex-eroding grody-to-the-max. Of course, for those of us who are not brought to the very precipice (or beyond) of orgasm by the thought of a CGI-created universe full of rabid bare-chested oiled-up steroid-pumped half-men half-beast warriors led by a pompous half-man half-pariah (all bad actor) who is just one note (and a lot less work-outs) away from a certain White House residing war monger of our own, fighting an equally rabid über-army of glimmer-masked marauders, gigantic Frankensteinian monstrosities and a few big-ass battle elephants led by some sort of mascara'd crossbreed of Marilyn Manson and Rupaul, way beyond Thunderdome, this film, full of lusty vim and vigor and spewing ultrasupercoolawesomeness out its proverbial watusi, gets real tired real soon - and I got real pissed off real freakin' fast.

Now to begin, please allow me to say that if your artistic sensibilities are not totally grossed out within the first ten minutes or so, as if someone had just thrown-up big fat chunks of falafel and moussaka all over you, then this is surely the movie for you - vacuous, demeaning, completely devoid of any substance whatsoever, replete with all the idiotic, brain-numbing, Nietzsche-praising video gaming geekocity one could ever dream of while sleeping snug and cozy at age 37 in their mommy's basement rec room, copy of Maxim under their pillow and thoughts of Pamela Anderson floating like sugar plum fairies throughout their heads. If this is you, then nothing I can say or do will ever sway your opinion away from the ultrasupercoolawesomeness of this computer designed crypto-movie atrocity that blatantly spits in the face of cinematic integrity, and perhaps you should just stop reading right now and go finish that saved game of World of Warcraft you've been so buggin' to get back to. Meanwhile, everyone else, my faithful readers perhaps, please read on, for I truly scathe only very few and far between and you wouldn't want to miss any of the mordacious tongue slathering that is sure to follow.

Based upon Frank Miller's graphic novel about the 480 B.C. Battle of Thermopylae, where the King of Sparta led his meager army of 300 strong against the interloping throng of the mighty Persian horde, which in turn was apocryphally based by Miller upon the 1962 film, The 300 Spartans, he saw as an impressionable (if not a bit ADHD) child, Zack Snyder, who gave us all quite the surprise with his quick-witted Dawn of the Dead remake a few years back, tries to have his cake and eat it too by attempting to recreate the feeling of cinematic overzealousness and pop-pulp flim-flam that was the last Frank Miller penned adaptation. Yet Sin City, even with all its many flaws, still managed to hit its intended target at least half the time, while Snyder's overwrought mega movie just falls deeper and deeper into the inevitable chasm of CGI-induced banality, ending up nothing shy of a deadened, terrifically dull, plodding slab of man meat-cum-action figure tableaux, perfectly in tune with the Maxim reading machismo of modern "man".
 

Snyder's film may indeed have its momentary visual exaltation of larks, but once one gets beyond such slapdash smattery and one-dimensional eye porn, one must surely see 300 for what it truly is - a simultaneously homoerotic and homophobic testosteronic monkeyshine, full of so much hokey ham-handed faux pixilated battle scenes, one trick pony actors-cum-glistening torsos, slathered in enough body oils to simultaneously and permanently ejaculate each and every last gay porn connoisseur from P-Town to the Golden Gate, naked writhing slave-girl oracles straight off of a Maxfield Parrish calendar and enough level-ending melees with every fanged, clawed and muscled monster this side of the Khyber Pass, to nearly eradicate the ever-blurring fine line between modern mass market movie making and the benighted art of video games, not to mention giving every person over the IQ of drooling monosyllabic Spartan, a headache the size of the Persian Empire at its glorious behemothic height.

As our mighty Spartan heroes, led by the churlish Gerard Butler, not even attempting to disguise his thick Scottish burr, form an "impenetrable phalanx at the hot gates" and the equally mighty 8-foot-tall man-muffin god-king Xerxes sends wave after wave of circus sideshow lallapalooza at them, one can not help but notice the totally ludicrous identity crisis this movie has in spades. Both sexually confused (this entire freakin' shama lama ding dong is full of enough beefcake bunnies and chest-piercing blood-n-gore for both the leather-boy and the frat boy to be both aroused by and bothered by) and politically metaphored (aka macho jar-headed white guys vs. interloping terroristic golden brown guys), Snyder has pounded every square peg into every round hole he could find and in doing so has let loose a Pandora's box of phallic Freudian psychobabble and right-winged rhetoric spin-doctoring unto an already applesauce'd burlesque of inanity.   

Ultimately, Snyder's sophomore (and sophomoric) film, though with nothing short of a twisted train wreck of an aura that makes even someone that would write this scathing takedown, unable to turn his head away in a strangely happy horror, forcing him to scream "By the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth!" with every demented twist and turn (a possible so-called guilty pleasure in our future perhaps?), plays out as an excitably unexciting yet hilariously hysterical (as Nathan Lee of The Village Voice has called it) mélange of utter flapdoodle and mad cow-riddled absurdity - all fried up in a synthetically manufactured landscape of digital drudgery.   Run, don't walk from the blob that is 300. 

[Originally published at The Cinematheque on 04/01/07] 

Been Wondering What My Favourite Films Are? Thought So.

For all those oh so regular readers (and for all you irregulars too) that have taken the time to peruse the various tabs poised near the top of this, your favourite site in the whole web wide world, I am sure you have come across the one titled "My Favourite Films."  I am also quite sure that for near six months now, these inquisitive visitors have been stymied by a nearly blank page, with just two tiny words to unceremoniously greet them - coming soon.  Otherwise just a page full of nothing.  Nothing at all.  Nothing.  Nothing.  Nothing.  Nothing at all.  Well guess what true believers?  If you will excuse the purposely poor grammar - it ain't nothing no more.  In fact, it is decidedly something.  Something.  Something.  Something.

What it is, is just what it says - or wysiwyg for those acronym minded among you.  It is now a bonafide page of my favourite films.  Twenty-five of them to be exact.  My 25 favourite films.  These are, according to yours truly here, the creme de la creme of the film world.  Twenty-five damn fine works of cinema indeed.  But why just twenty-five you may ask.  Good question.  Actually this is just a start.  I plan on periodically expanding this list throughout the rest of the year until I reach a top 1000.  Yeah, you read that right - a top thousand.  That of course will not come to fruition until I finish My Quest in November.  For right now, it is a top 25.  Eventually a top 100 - in preferential order.  After that, I will extend it to the aforementioned 1000 - this time in chronological order, though with the top 100 still being highlighted. 

Anyway, I suppose you probably want to know what is on this list, huh?  Of course you do.  Well for starters, yes Citizen Kane is on there, but guess what?  It is not number one as it is in so many other lists.  But it isn't all that far down the list either.  There are a few surprises on the list, but none really shocking - even if my lovely wife questioned my number three choice (I believe ridiculous was an adjective she used during this questioning).  The big surprise is what is not on the list.  At least it came as a surprise to me.  No Wilder.  No Griffith.  No Fellini.  No Truffaut.  No Rossellini.  No Minnelli.  No Lubitsch.  No Keaton.  And stranger than strange - no Howard Hawks!?  Really?  I guess not.  Though a certain Girl Friday may be coming as soon as the list is expanded into a top thirty.

Anyway, as they say, perhaps it is about time you check out the list yourself.  And remember to periodically check back (at the tab titled "My Favourite Films" of course) as the list will be growing throughout the year.  And of course please give any feedback you wish in the comments section of the page, because I am sure there will be many disgruntled naysayers out there - and we always love hearing from them. 

Film Review: The Deep Blue Sea

With his dark, somber colours and foreboding cinematographic style echoing the emotional state of his smouldering-at-the-edges heroine, Terence Davies' latest haunting, seething melodrama-cum-subversive post WWII betrayal drama, the director's first feature film in eleven years, is something on par with his earlier works, only perhaps a bit smaller in context - a bit more intimate one might say.  Now this is not to say his earlier films (Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes) are not intimate portraits of their respective characters, because they most certainly are, and with The Deep Blue Sea, this intimacy is even more contained in smaller spaces and more personal moments of fear and angst and implied tragedy than the aforementioned earlier films.  Let us face facts, this new film is pure Terence Davies, and once again the oh so English auteur has brought his characters into a terrifyingly up close and personal state of being.  But then, this is what the director does best.

Written by West End legend Terence Rattigan in 1952, Davies, who has said that it frightened him to adapt a play, has taken this already powerful work and molded it into the epitome of a Terrence Davies film.  Taking off from his younger self, Davies' has left the children of his previous films behind and instead focuses on the adults that would have been from the director's parent's generation, those who came of age as war began to spread its evil yet eager wings throughout the bubbling cauldron that was 1940's Europe.  Set in 1950, Davies shows us the tragedies not of war itself, for actual physical battles are never shown, but of what war leaves behind in its inevitable wake.  Hester, played admirably (and a bit more low key than normal) by Rachel Weisz, is a woman heading toward forty, who finds herself out of love with her older, well-to-do husband, and in essence her staid upper middle class lifestyle, and obsessed with the sexually desirous Freddie, a younger former RAF ace who has been floating lost since the end of the war.  Like many of these lost boys - these forgotten men - Freddie has come home from the terror and excitement of war to find a dreary, destitute London, still in financial and emotional shock from The Blitz.  It is this thrill of the exuberance of youth that lures Hester in but it is also this longing for a life unlike what he has fallen into that begins to rip asunder Hester's dumb blind love for her Freddie.  He is not her knight in shining armour, nor does he have any desire to be such.

Tom Hiddleston, the fine English actor who is currently best known for playing the Asgardian prima donna Loki in Thor and The Avengers, does a smooth, almost too-real-to-be-acting kind of performance as the brash, befuddled Freddie (and I mean that in the most complimentary manner), a performance that may remind some old classic Hollywood heads of someone like Douglas Fairbanks Jr. or even the sadly forgotten David Manners, but this is Hester's story, and therefore it is Weisz's picture.  The actress, usually more vocal, hands in a subtle and tragic performance as a woman for whom everything has fallen apart, and while her scenes with Hiddleston are electrified with mislaid passion, her scenes with stage actor Simon Russell Beale as her stoic, yet cuckolded husband, are things of quiet beauty.  Beauty between two people who are not out of love with each other, no matter how hard at least one of them tries to hide it.  But no matter the performances, in the end, as has been stated more than once here, this is a Terence Davies film - and a disarmingly honest one at that - even with its inherent melodramatic flare.   With allusions to the 1950's weepies of Douglas Sirk the director grew up with, as well as David Lean's wartime classic of disillusionment Brief Encounter, Davies goes about his business of building intricate characterizations around the misleadingly simple moments of a landlady handing out mail or a group of frightened Londoners huddled in the shelter of the tube, singing quietly amongst themselves as bombs blare above ground (and this is done with the most elegant of tracking shots).  In other words, this is a Terence Davies film - and that is more than enough.

Anomalous Material Weekly Feature: 10 Movie Moms You Do Not Want to Cross

Here we are once again true believers, with my latest weekly 10 best feature written for the fine folks over at Anomalous Material.  For those of you not in the know, those same said fine folks have given me a (possibly foolish on their behalf) regular gig as feature writer.  It is a series of top ten lists on various cinematic subjects - and anyone who knows me can attest to how perfectly suited I am to such an endeavor (yes I am a  list nerd).  This week's feature, my twenty-seventh such feature, in honour of Mother's Day happening this past weekend, is a look at movie moms.  The best moms, the worst moms?  Actually a little of both.  These are the movie moms with whom you do not want to mess.   Whether they are protecting their children from school bullies or outer space creatures, or whether they are a bit miffed over some ill-placed hangers or the devil roiling around inside their virginal daughter, these are the mothers of all mothers.  Find out who these ten (eleven sorta) movie moms are at the other end of the below link.

Read my feature article, "10 Movie Moms You Do Not Want to Cross" at Anomalous Material.

Below is a shot of one of the ones that did not quite make the list.  No, she's not crazy at all.  Just a sweet cookie-making mama who wants to save her daughter.  Okay, she's batshitcrazy.  And yes, I kinda felt bad kicking her onto the cutting room floor as it were (she is in one of my favourite films), but hey, someone had to be sacrificed, so why not this wicked ole witch.  But here she is now, so please enjoy.

A Poem in Hitchcockian Meter

Below is my humble poetic contribution to the wonderful, all-important and quite spectacular world wide web event known as For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III.  This blogathon is actually spread wide through three different websites, all amazing and unique in their own respective ways.  From the magnificent Marilyn Ferdinand at Ferdy on Films, to the sensational Self-Styled Siren herself, Ms. Farran Smith Nehme, to the razzle-dazzle of Roderick Heath over at This Island Rod, this six day event, meant to help financially with the online restoration and accompanying musical score of a 1923 film called The White Shadow, where a certain Mr. Hitchcock cut his teeth as assistant director, among other equally uncredited positions (hence the subject matter of this post), is sure to be filled with dozens and dozens of superb pieces on all things Hitchy - and some things not so Hitchy.  And remember cats and dolls, you too can be part of the fun by donating whatever you can spare to this great cause.  So, with silly nonsense poem in hand (I once considered myself a poet ya know, having had over a hundred pieces published in various magazines and such before turning my eye toward film criticism and the ilk), let's get on with the show...

A Poem in Hitchcockian Meter

There once was a man named Sir Alfred
Whose demeanor was so Rich and Strange
The dread in his soul, this Shadow of a Doubt
He knew he could never make change
So with Murder! in his eyes and full of Suspicion
This man he made way for the coast
North by Northwest he did so travel
A Notorious Bon Voyage he did toast
So taking up residence at the Jamaica Inn
He found himself with The Farmer's Wife
A woman of Easy Virtue in her Pleasure Garden
The one for who he had been searching all his life
Her name it was Rebecca by day
But he called her his Marnie at night
Ever fearing he was The Wrong Man
The Lodger he did suffer from Stage Fright
But our hero he so wanted this girl
Danced Waltzes from Vienna all day
Through the Rear Window he handed her a Topaz
And at night, The Skin Game they did play
Sir Alfred was surely Spellbound
He plied her with Champagne and such
Acting the Young and Innocent
He was secretly The Man Who Knew Too Much
And one day he did suspect Sabotage
As The Lady Vanishes without note
But it was The Manxman who did take her
Sailing away together in The Lifeboat
Sir Alfred was put into a Frenzy
To rescue her from doom so certain
This Saboteur he vowed to find
Searching behind every Torn Curtain
He enlisted the aid of a Foreign Correspondent
Who once helped him on The Paradine Case
Searching high and low To Catch a Thief
But Sixteen times they were slapped in the face
It was Number Seventeen where they did find a clue
But what it meant these heroes did not know
In the corner of the room sat the Secret Agent

A man with a bad case of Vertigo
He told them that it was a Family Plot
After Mr. and Mrs Smith they did marry
The cousin did not want any part of it
That was always The Trouble With Harry
So Sir Alfred and his friends moved on
Climbing The 39 Steps to the top
Aventure Malgache yelled the Frenchman
But our intrepid hero he would not stop
Downhill he would search Under Capricorn
Where The Birds chirped all round the clock
I Confess was yelled from the treetops
By none other than Juno and the Paycock
Elstree Calling for a stop to this Blackmail
The villains in The Ring could not touch
Sir Alfred he was named the winner
Once again The Man Who Knew Too Much
So tied together with Rope our lovers reunited
High above the city on a swinging steel girder
No longer Strangers on a Train to each other
They pick up the phone and together Dial M for Murder