Movie Week!
Dec. 26th, 2009 03:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaI seem to get to big screen movies less and less often, but during the holidays I do manage to go to theaters. I usually hate the crowds at the megaplex but at xmas the packed theaters have a shared sense of pleasure--everyone luxuriating in a few days away from work and school, a treat, a bag of bad popcorn, and splosions. It gets dark so early; might as well head to the warmth and the lights of the movies.
So yesterday I saw The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus and Sherlock Holmes and tonight is IMAX Avatar. Herewith some comments.
Much ink and a few crocodile tears have been spilled over the fact that Heath Ledger died before Imaginarium was complete. It doesn't matter. Gilliam is a unique filmmaker, and when he's brilliant no one can match him. His solution to the loss of a key actor is ingenious and adds all sorts of fascinating layers and games to his story. Spoiler here (if you missed the endless coverage about it in the press): The use of three actors, all hearthrobs, to portray the fantasy version of Ledger's character, Tony, is wonderful. All three are in the same stylistic universe as Ledger, and offer wonderful, off-the-cuff riffs on the character and his vanities and self-love. It's all so quick that it's hard to capture at one viewing. I look forward to seeing this movie again, and I hope it will inspire other directors to explore the use of multiple actors in a single role. The only other movie I know of that does this is Todd Haynes's "I'm Not There." Gilliam does it very differently, but it's equally compelling. The audience last night laughed delightedly with each new incarnation of Fantasy!Tony.
But the interest of this trick and the loss of Ledger shouldn't draw attention away from the core of the film itself. In a year of visually marvelous movies, this one wins my prize. It is so rich in images that it made me a little drunk. The core image is hauntingly magical: a traveling horse-drawn theater of marvels plodding at night through the streets of modern London, with an older London just beneath the shadows. There is a book in one scene, a sort of history of the world or of magic, that is all based on amalgamated snippets of recognizable works of art--a sort of ledger (pardon the pun), of visual magic.
Gilliam is a believer in the power of Story. Like Roberto Calasso and Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade, he knows that Story is the motive force of the human world. His best heroes are all bards, from the madmen in The Fisher King and Baron Munchhausen to the lost and desperate men seeking escape from a terrifying reality in Brazil and Twelve Monkeys. The River of Story is the theme of this movie, and so the viewer must expect to step into it and go with the flow. (Not coincidentally, real and imaginary rivers feature prominently in the film.) To enjoy it, be prepared to abandon the traditional film formulas of fixed, steady pacing, linear narrative line, and bright lines between what is fantasy and what is real.
Nothing new for Gilliam fans in this; but be prepared also to abandon the distinction between comedy and tragedy, moral tale and farce, genre and epic. As Norman Maclean writes, in the closing lines of A River Runs Through It: "Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it." Imaginarium is lighter than Brazil, more charming, occasionally silly, but never without its dark side, like all good fairy tales. It's less plodding than Time Bandits; but it's every bit as rambling and messy. And for Monty Python fans, there are a bunch of egregious shout-outs that are worth the price of admission by themselves.
A couple of last notes: I've been a fan of Tom Waits for years, from his earliest days as a troubadour to his more recent work in movies. Here, he plays the best Devil, hands-down, since Peter Cook sat on a mailbox in Bedazzled. ("Everything I've ever told you's been a lie, including that.")
Christopher Plummer joins the ranks of Wizards with Beards, and delivers a very respectable version. Someday, I hope to see a good mashup of Ian McKellan's Gandalf, Michael Gambon's Dumbledore, and Plummer's Dr Parnassus. It seems to be a Trend.
So, Sherlock Holmes.
Well. First of all: Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey
OK, now that I've got that taken care of, the 10% of the movie that is not about Teh Robert Downey deserves a bit of attention, if only because of the predictible (indeed, deliberately provoked) debate raging between Conan Doyle Fans Who Hate It and Conan Doyle Fans Who Think It's Fine and oh, Those Other Folks Who Haven't Read Conan Doyle. The movie does away with some beloved Holmes shibboleths--the deerstalker and that weird meerschaum pipe and the Inverness cloak. It offers a few joky explanations for this (at several points Holmes acquires other sorts of hats). Less cleverly, it dodges the slashiness of the Holmes/Watson relationship as much as it can, though Downey and Jude Law are smart enough to play the slash card as much as they can within the confines of the script. And it cravenly ducks Holmes's addiction to cocaine as being unplayable in the malls of suburban America, which are apparently up to their eyeballs in crystal meth. Makes me want to see The Seven Percent Solution again.
I don't really care about the lack of fidelity to the original; after all, Holmes has been reinvented by generations of plays and movies; like Elizabeth Bennet and the plays of Shakespeare, he survives all bastardizations and even the most egregious reworkings. My own great favorite in the long list of Holmes reinventions is the monk William of Baskerville and his ingenuous sidekick Adso in the novel The Name of the Rose. (In Italian, the names Adso and Watson sound quite similar if spoken aloud.) There, Eco turned Holmes into a theoretician of semiotics and a heretical theologian, both of which conceits are easily absorbed by the porous Holmes character. Saturday afternoon movies of the 1940s turned him into a Nazi hunter. This movie turns him into a brains-beats-brawn action hero somewhere between Dirty Harry and that guy from the Die Hard movies whose name I forget.
At least, the script does, and the director tries. But Downey is too clever to let them do it. He bases his characterization very directly on two of Johnny Depp's best personations: Sweeney Todd and Jack Sparrow. To say that Downey's Holmes is Jack Sparrow without the dreadlocks is no reflection on the actor's ingenuity. It works perfectly: Holmes is by turns beautiful, sexually confused, brilliant, scheming, far-seeing, touched with magic, socially inept, falling-down drunk; a trickster and a fool. It's a wonderful, eternally intriguing character, and I never tire of seeing it done well.
Can I just say that Guy Ritchie is a terrible director? He has larded his movie with swashbuckling fight scenes--sword sticks, winding staircases, electric prods, and Giant Rolling Wheels--in short, the whole traditional bag of tricks--and manages to ruin them all by not holding the camera still enough for us to see them. The art of filming a fight scene has nearly been lost. The apogee was Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in Robin Hood, with its long tracking shots and easy mid-distance allowing the choreography and the actors' athleticism to shine. This is replaced (in the age of stunt doubles and CGI) with endless short jump-cuts and jiggling handheld shots, all designed to render the idea of action without actually showing much of it. A pity, because Downey and Law are both perfectly competent at physical acting--indeed, Downey is a master of it (as seen in Chaplin). POTC returned to the tradition of showing a fight scene in long, clear tracking shots. And Gore Verbinski was less addicted to random, intrusive splosions than Ritchie is.
And the writers are hacks. Not trusting audiences to be interested in an Evil Nemesis with anything less than World Domination in mind, they foolishly went for a Dan Brown Masonic cult thing that is ludicrous and implausible even within the loose terms set by the movie itself. I guess the thought is that if the Evil!Badguy is not absolutely huge, the hero's heroics will not look impressive. It's a common mistake. It was the ruination of Pirates of the Caribbean II and III.
What Holmes needs to look large is an Evil Nemesis with his own brain-power. Since this movie is entirely set up as (to quote A. O. Scott in the NY Times), an extended trailer for a future franchise in which Moriarty will appear, they had to cook up Some Dumb Badguy to be shot down efficiently and never seen again. Ah well. All now depends on who gets cast as Moriarty. I fear it will be no one with Downey's command of the screen, and will therefore fail. (Good writing--if there were any--alone would not do the trick.) The only two actors I can think of who might be a match for Downey are Willem Dafoe (if he can be convinced not to phone in one of his pay-the-rent stock badguys) or--be still my heart--Depp.
I want to see Downey and Depp together onscreen, with sword sticks; I want to see them locked in a big-budget battle of wits and dueling frock-coats. Or dueling in frock-coats. Either way, it would probably melt the screen. It wouldn't hurt for the movie industry to notice that a whole lot of women go to Robert Downey movies, and are less interested in splosions than in unbuttoned cambric shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Blood, gore, and things dropping from the roof are fine; so are grime and cleavage; also dead rats. But lose the car chases and lose the endless pyrotech blahblah. Sorry, boys, but them's the facts. In the wake of the Twilight juggernaut, Hollywood take note.
A couple of last notes: The CGI was put to good use in this movie: Olde Timey London looked great. (The guy sitting next to me remarked during the previews, "Well, there'll be a lot of mud, because Victorian England always has a lot of mud.") Piccadilly Circus, the half-built Tower Bridge, Westminster and the Thames reach all are nicely imagined circa 1880. Parliament was, as usual, filmed in Waterhouse's fantastic Manchester Town Hall. The woman playing Irene Adler was a dud, but it didn't much matter.
* * *
It was fun seeing these two movies back to back. Imaginarium, though by far the better and more ambitious film, was not injured by proximity to Holmes. Though they have little in common, both rely upon the idea of a sexy, mysterious, changeable, tricksterish anti-hero, a slippery many-masked fellow whose powers of ratiocination and addiction to fantasy are either their salvation or their undoing.
Oddly, both movies have a running gag about the difference between a dwarf and a midget--a hoary joke that was scarcely funny back in the day and is now just cringeworthy. (Gilliam nearly always scripts a dwarf or two into his movies; at least he has some excuse, I suppose, as it's part of his "One of Us" vocabulary.) Someone please tell the movie industry to give this one a rest.
So yesterday I saw The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus and Sherlock Holmes and tonight is IMAX Avatar. Herewith some comments.
Much ink and a few crocodile tears have been spilled over the fact that Heath Ledger died before Imaginarium was complete. It doesn't matter. Gilliam is a unique filmmaker, and when he's brilliant no one can match him. His solution to the loss of a key actor is ingenious and adds all sorts of fascinating layers and games to his story. Spoiler here (if you missed the endless coverage about it in the press): The use of three actors, all hearthrobs, to portray the fantasy version of Ledger's character, Tony, is wonderful. All three are in the same stylistic universe as Ledger, and offer wonderful, off-the-cuff riffs on the character and his vanities and self-love. It's all so quick that it's hard to capture at one viewing. I look forward to seeing this movie again, and I hope it will inspire other directors to explore the use of multiple actors in a single role. The only other movie I know of that does this is Todd Haynes's "I'm Not There." Gilliam does it very differently, but it's equally compelling. The audience last night laughed delightedly with each new incarnation of Fantasy!Tony.
But the interest of this trick and the loss of Ledger shouldn't draw attention away from the core of the film itself. In a year of visually marvelous movies, this one wins my prize. It is so rich in images that it made me a little drunk. The core image is hauntingly magical: a traveling horse-drawn theater of marvels plodding at night through the streets of modern London, with an older London just beneath the shadows. There is a book in one scene, a sort of history of the world or of magic, that is all based on amalgamated snippets of recognizable works of art--a sort of ledger (pardon the pun), of visual magic.
Gilliam is a believer in the power of Story. Like Roberto Calasso and Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade, he knows that Story is the motive force of the human world. His best heroes are all bards, from the madmen in The Fisher King and Baron Munchhausen to the lost and desperate men seeking escape from a terrifying reality in Brazil and Twelve Monkeys. The River of Story is the theme of this movie, and so the viewer must expect to step into it and go with the flow. (Not coincidentally, real and imaginary rivers feature prominently in the film.) To enjoy it, be prepared to abandon the traditional film formulas of fixed, steady pacing, linear narrative line, and bright lines between what is fantasy and what is real.
Nothing new for Gilliam fans in this; but be prepared also to abandon the distinction between comedy and tragedy, moral tale and farce, genre and epic. As Norman Maclean writes, in the closing lines of A River Runs Through It: "Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it." Imaginarium is lighter than Brazil, more charming, occasionally silly, but never without its dark side, like all good fairy tales. It's less plodding than Time Bandits; but it's every bit as rambling and messy. And for Monty Python fans, there are a bunch of egregious shout-outs that are worth the price of admission by themselves.
A couple of last notes: I've been a fan of Tom Waits for years, from his earliest days as a troubadour to his more recent work in movies. Here, he plays the best Devil, hands-down, since Peter Cook sat on a mailbox in Bedazzled. ("Everything I've ever told you's been a lie, including that.")
Christopher Plummer joins the ranks of Wizards with Beards, and delivers a very respectable version. Someday, I hope to see a good mashup of Ian McKellan's Gandalf, Michael Gambon's Dumbledore, and Plummer's Dr Parnassus. It seems to be a Trend.
So, Sherlock Holmes.
Well. First of all: Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey Robert Downey
OK, now that I've got that taken care of, the 10% of the movie that is not about Teh Robert Downey deserves a bit of attention, if only because of the predictible (indeed, deliberately provoked) debate raging between Conan Doyle Fans Who Hate It and Conan Doyle Fans Who Think It's Fine and oh, Those Other Folks Who Haven't Read Conan Doyle. The movie does away with some beloved Holmes shibboleths--the deerstalker and that weird meerschaum pipe and the Inverness cloak. It offers a few joky explanations for this (at several points Holmes acquires other sorts of hats). Less cleverly, it dodges the slashiness of the Holmes/Watson relationship as much as it can, though Downey and Jude Law are smart enough to play the slash card as much as they can within the confines of the script. And it cravenly ducks Holmes's addiction to cocaine as being unplayable in the malls of suburban America, which are apparently up to their eyeballs in crystal meth. Makes me want to see The Seven Percent Solution again.
I don't really care about the lack of fidelity to the original; after all, Holmes has been reinvented by generations of plays and movies; like Elizabeth Bennet and the plays of Shakespeare, he survives all bastardizations and even the most egregious reworkings. My own great favorite in the long list of Holmes reinventions is the monk William of Baskerville and his ingenuous sidekick Adso in the novel The Name of the Rose. (In Italian, the names Adso and Watson sound quite similar if spoken aloud.) There, Eco turned Holmes into a theoretician of semiotics and a heretical theologian, both of which conceits are easily absorbed by the porous Holmes character. Saturday afternoon movies of the 1940s turned him into a Nazi hunter. This movie turns him into a brains-beats-brawn action hero somewhere between Dirty Harry and that guy from the Die Hard movies whose name I forget.
At least, the script does, and the director tries. But Downey is too clever to let them do it. He bases his characterization very directly on two of Johnny Depp's best personations: Sweeney Todd and Jack Sparrow. To say that Downey's Holmes is Jack Sparrow without the dreadlocks is no reflection on the actor's ingenuity. It works perfectly: Holmes is by turns beautiful, sexually confused, brilliant, scheming, far-seeing, touched with magic, socially inept, falling-down drunk; a trickster and a fool. It's a wonderful, eternally intriguing character, and I never tire of seeing it done well.
Can I just say that Guy Ritchie is a terrible director? He has larded his movie with swashbuckling fight scenes--sword sticks, winding staircases, electric prods, and Giant Rolling Wheels--in short, the whole traditional bag of tricks--and manages to ruin them all by not holding the camera still enough for us to see them. The art of filming a fight scene has nearly been lost. The apogee was Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in Robin Hood, with its long tracking shots and easy mid-distance allowing the choreography and the actors' athleticism to shine. This is replaced (in the age of stunt doubles and CGI) with endless short jump-cuts and jiggling handheld shots, all designed to render the idea of action without actually showing much of it. A pity, because Downey and Law are both perfectly competent at physical acting--indeed, Downey is a master of it (as seen in Chaplin). POTC returned to the tradition of showing a fight scene in long, clear tracking shots. And Gore Verbinski was less addicted to random, intrusive splosions than Ritchie is.
And the writers are hacks. Not trusting audiences to be interested in an Evil Nemesis with anything less than World Domination in mind, they foolishly went for a Dan Brown Masonic cult thing that is ludicrous and implausible even within the loose terms set by the movie itself. I guess the thought is that if the Evil!Badguy is not absolutely huge, the hero's heroics will not look impressive. It's a common mistake. It was the ruination of Pirates of the Caribbean II and III.
What Holmes needs to look large is an Evil Nemesis with his own brain-power. Since this movie is entirely set up as (to quote A. O. Scott in the NY Times), an extended trailer for a future franchise in which Moriarty will appear, they had to cook up Some Dumb Badguy to be shot down efficiently and never seen again. Ah well. All now depends on who gets cast as Moriarty. I fear it will be no one with Downey's command of the screen, and will therefore fail. (Good writing--if there were any--alone would not do the trick.) The only two actors I can think of who might be a match for Downey are Willem Dafoe (if he can be convinced not to phone in one of his pay-the-rent stock badguys) or--be still my heart--Depp.
I want to see Downey and Depp together onscreen, with sword sticks; I want to see them locked in a big-budget battle of wits and dueling frock-coats. Or dueling in frock-coats. Either way, it would probably melt the screen. It wouldn't hurt for the movie industry to notice that a whole lot of women go to Robert Downey movies, and are less interested in splosions than in unbuttoned cambric shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Blood, gore, and things dropping from the roof are fine; so are grime and cleavage; also dead rats. But lose the car chases and lose the endless pyrotech blahblah. Sorry, boys, but them's the facts. In the wake of the Twilight juggernaut, Hollywood take note.
A couple of last notes: The CGI was put to good use in this movie: Olde Timey London looked great. (The guy sitting next to me remarked during the previews, "Well, there'll be a lot of mud, because Victorian England always has a lot of mud.") Piccadilly Circus, the half-built Tower Bridge, Westminster and the Thames reach all are nicely imagined circa 1880. Parliament was, as usual, filmed in Waterhouse's fantastic Manchester Town Hall. The woman playing Irene Adler was a dud, but it didn't much matter.
* * *
It was fun seeing these two movies back to back. Imaginarium, though by far the better and more ambitious film, was not injured by proximity to Holmes. Though they have little in common, both rely upon the idea of a sexy, mysterious, changeable, tricksterish anti-hero, a slippery many-masked fellow whose powers of ratiocination and addiction to fantasy are either their salvation or their undoing.
Oddly, both movies have a running gag about the difference between a dwarf and a midget--a hoary joke that was scarcely funny back in the day and is now just cringeworthy. (Gilliam nearly always scripts a dwarf or two into his movies; at least he has some excuse, I suppose, as it's part of his "One of Us" vocabulary.) Someone please tell the movie industry to give this one a rest.
