Film Review | Fifty Shades of Grey

Entertainment Voice

I Am Curious--Grey

by Thomas Delapa

How’s this for a red-hot color scheme? Start with a kinky romance plot as your base, daub in “9 1/2 Weeks”, and a streak of “Secretary,” add on a tony veneer of “Jane Eyre,” and you’ll likely churn out “Fifty Shades of Grey,” a bastardized S&M stew pot that’s equal parts icky, drippy, and sticky.

Birthed from the runaway 2012 erotic best-seller by British author E.L. James (actually 40-something mom Erika Mitchell)“Fifty Shades” was slyly delivered into theaters on Valentine’s Day. It should have been stamped Return to Sender, borne out by the U.S. box-office jilting since its opening week. “Girl meets boy, girl falls for boy, boy ties up girl,” isn’t exactly the old-fashioned formula for screen romance, but then you must bear in mind that we live in a luridly blue world in which Internet-delivered porn has metastasized into the mainstream.

Whereas James’ sensationally steamy novel—now trilogy—had readers bound up tightly in all-in-your-head erotic fantasy, this turgid screen version is hung up firstly by a casting palate that’s strikingly bland, if not totally vapid. In light of the controversial sex, nudity, and raunchy talk, it’s no surprise that name actors were shrinking violets when it came time to signing on. Perhaps they haven’t forgotten the case of one Elizabeth Berkeley, whose short-lived “Showgirls” notoriety quickly dropped a curtain on her film career.

From a self-published book hatched from the vampire-fiction “Twilight” saga, it’s no earthly surprise that James’ erotica follows the footsteps of a virginal (but hot) girl who’s romantically captivated by a mysterious, even sinister (but hot) outsider with a terribly big secret. This particular U.S. Northwest lady in waiting is Anastasia (Dakota Johnson), a graduate English student whose small world is instantly lit up with bodice-bursting fireworks upon meeting Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), the inscrutable young tycoon behind Seattle’s Grey Enterprises.

If Ana is searching for love and romance a la any bookish Jane Austen heroine, the enigmatic Mr. Grey harbors desires that merge the Marquis de Sade with Howard Hughes. Christian has not only created a Telecom empire, he’s also set up a high-rise headquarters staffed with so many curvaceous females that even Mad Men would be green with envy.

Despite the supposed Seattle-area settings, Ana’s torridly up-and-down romantic adventures have almost nothing to do with the known world—except perhaps for the sort of folks who fancy “Game of Thrones” as realistically medieval. This is paint-by-numbers hack erotica, crudely drawn with crayons and mascara.

It’s telling then when the gentlemanly Christian escorts Ana to his pulpy-red S&M dungeon he calls it his “playroom.” Though coyishly reluctant and naive, Anna enters and quickly warms to her role as submissive girl-toy because, hey, the sex is awesome. With Mr. Grey in executive control of his armoires of whips, ropes and silk ties, Anna lets herself go. Naturally, this liberates her from the ties that bind her to her fuddy-duddy sexual morals. No longer the mousy grad student in plaids and ponytail, Ana is transformed into a walking G spot.

Ana’s orgasmic liberation is echoed in her high-flying trips aboard Mr. Grey’s fleet of helicopters and gliders, as well as in his chauffeur-driven luxury cars. There’s nothing like being seduced by a hunky, filthy-rich and single CEO to make a girl want to get down and dirty. Jose (Victor Rasuk), Ana’s earthbound classmate and suitor, pales in comparison to the splendidly expensive hues of Christian’s phallic hi-rise world.

James, director Samantha Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Kelly Marcel want their fantasy both ways, serving up kink and ample horizontal nudity—almost all Johnson—on a plate while at the same granting their heroine a girlish willfulness that rebels against Christian cocksure dictates. The burning question is whether Ana will sign his ridiculously explicit, X-rated contract laying out, as it were, their binding relationship in black and white. As she dithers, she toys with him outside the playroom, leaving him on pins and needles. James’ pseudo-feminist ruse is designed strictly to lend a patina of independence to her heroine’s regression into a living, heavy-breathing sex doll.

Will these two live happily ever after, bound together by lust, transgression, and Italian ties? Shades of the interminable “Twilight” and “Hunger Games” series, captive audiences may have to slog through 49 more colorless shades of Grey before they’re let out of this dungeon.
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Fifty Shades of Grey opens nationally Feb. 13

Film Review | Unbroken

To Hell and Back

by Thomas Delapa, Entertainment Voice

While film crowds across the U.S. have practically given “American Sniper ” a ticket-tape parade, the producers of “Unbroken” must be asking themselves why audiences for their valorous World War II drama are in retreat. Cynics might say that trigger-happy screen violence is always a sure shot, while a simple, disarming story of wartime heroism and endurance is likely to miss the box-office bull’s eye. Both pictures recoil from the non-fiction world, but it’s Angelina Jolie‘s directorial breakthrough that merits the longer salute.

What informs Jolie’s deft direction is her obvious passion and empathy for the subject matter—one of the great, if still largely unfamiliar, wartime U.S. survival sagas. Not only did the 26-year-old U.S. track star Louie Zamperini live through 47 dire, shark-infested days clinging to a tiny raft in the Pacific, but his “rescuers” were the Japanese navy, who promptly sailed him off to a succession of some of the most horrific POW camps in the Pacific War. Commendations for bringing Zamperini’s incredible exploits to a new generation’s attention first went to acclaimed author Laura Hillenbrand (“Seabiscuit”) with the 2010 publication of her best-selling biography.

Over the years, a squad of screenwriters made a run at Hillenbrand’s 500-plus page book, the baton ending up with the unlikely team of Oscar winners Joel and Ethan Coen. Serving their source with honor, the Coens zero in on the human drama and jettison their characteristic ironic ballast. Universal also joined up to the tune of a reported $60 million, certainly one of the biggest budgets ever commanded by a female director.

“Unbroken” has taken on some fair flak for echoing a volley of inspirational POW dramas—from “Bridge on the River Kwai” spanning to the uncelebrated “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.” However, it rises above the potshots, primarily because Jolie keeps her hand steady as she goes towards the truth. She’s also brave in her casting, ditching Hollywood brass in favor of talented unknowns.

Of course, the critical role is Army Lt. Zamperini himself, and the young Brit Jack O’Connell valiantly executes the arduous physical scenes demanded of him. However, there’s an intangible weapon that Jolie brings in, and that’s a wrenching sense of empathy that Louie displays for his battered brother-in-arms. “Lucky” Louie is no beefy John Wayne—or Clint Eastwood—packing a Spartan detachment from the pain of others. He winces when he sees (and hears) his comrades suffering their injuries and imprisonment, even more so than when his own scrawny body is on the line.

Jolie and company can be forgiven for humanely limiting the atrocities they actually portray, and surely worse were meted out in the camps. However, further turns of the screws might have been warranted to counterattack our own superhuman penchant for burying the atrocious shrapnel of the past. As Louie’s whispering Grand Inquisitor camp commander, the Japanese musician Miyavi strikes a memorably savage note (his sadism has a sexual charge) that ranks with the Oscar-winning Sessue Hayakawa in “River Kwai.”

Broken up by flashbacks to Louie’s checkered past as both Italian-American delinquent and 1936 Olympic star, structurally “Unbroken” is nothing to write home about, and might have been sturdier had the supporting characters been built up. There’s no doubt that this is Louie’s epic story, to a fault, while his band of brothers generally stand at attention in the background.

In a Hollywood so incestuously devoted to over-the-top action and the girls-not-allowed club of blockbuster digital effects, Jolie charts her own course, delivering a heady sense of both realism and humanity, ably served by the veteran Roger Deakins’ pristine photography. That “Unbroken” was only decorated with a few minor Oscar nominations is at least a little heartbreaking.

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Film Review | The Unknown Known

The Madness of King Don

by Thomas Delapa

 

AlterNet, April 5, 2014   

 

 

 

 

So what do we know now that we didn’t after documentarian Errol Morris’ 100-minute Q&A with Donald “I Don’t Do Quagmires” Rumsfeld in “ The Unknown Known”? Only that the former U.S. secretary of defense is still a master strategist of evasion, contradiction, misdirection and malapropism.

As a footnote, here’s what we do know to date about that dirty little Iraq War that “Rummy,” the George W. Bush White House and their nincompoop Pentagon neo-cons cooked up and spoon fed to the omnivorous American public: more than  4400 U.S. military deaths and 32,000 wounded, at least  100,000 to as many as 500,000 Iraqi fatalities, millions more displaced, and an estimated price tag of  $3 trillion, give or take a few hundred billion. 

Yet like most of the questions that Morris tosses—gently—at his subject, any such factual horrors are sidestepped, parried and danced around by a fitfully nimble Rumsfeld. Relaxed, nattily dressed and imperiously self-assured as ever, Morris’ hollow yet overstuffed man does his imitation of “Hogan’s Heroes” Sgt. Schultz (“I know nothing, nothing”) while implausibly denying personal culpability for any stink that blew back from the Iraq War, whether the phony Weapons of Mass Destruction raison d’être, prisoner torture or the fictitious links between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. 

In his Oscar-winning “ The Fog of War,” Morris at least got Lyndon Johnson-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to shoulder some of the blame for the Vietnam War quagmire. But Rumsfeld is impishly unapologetic, even as his own words are shot down by Morris’ juxtapositions with TV news footage culled from the run-up and catastrophic letdown to the 2003 Iraq invasion and subsequent U.S. occupation. Yet it’s clear that Morris’ mission isn’t to catch his subject in a Captain Queeg-style meltdown that would cause Rummy to shout “Good gracious” or “Henny-penny” and storm off the set. 

Rather, Morris is chiefly interested in the infernal meta-narrative of how those in the pinnacles of power can delude themselves for so long and so often that—perhaps—they don’t even know what the truth is anymore. This is a man seemingly without an ounce of introspection and one who surely sleeps well at night, confident he did all the right things, from his time as the youngest (44) secretary of defense, during the Gerald Ford presidency, to his Freddy Krueger-like return to the Pentagon as prime architect of the shock-and-awe Iraq and Afghanistan U.S.-led invasions.

Morris goes out of his way to humanize Rumsfeld, including humdrum details of his marriage while tracing his long career as Republican White House insider and go-to warhorse who trumpeted “peace through strength” and other hawkish mantras. We hear Morris’ off-camera questions, but the slippery answers are challenged only indirectly via news footage and period headlines, not by contrary interviews that would offer known arguments to Rumsfeld’s self-serving explanations. 

The film’s title is a quote from one of the enormous number of official memos Rumsfeld generated over the decades. In one wacky rumination from 2004 (Subject: What You Know), he writes of the “things that you think you know that it turns out you do not.” For Morris, this is a four-star analogy for his subject, a polarizing public figure who indeed is a riddle wrapped in an enigma—and cloaked in an impenetrable armor of Orwellian double-talk. As running metaphor, Morris cuts back and forth to images of a deep blue sea, significantly more fathomable than Rumsfeld himself. 

As to any possible policy misfires during his Washington tenures, Rumsfeld blithely chalks them up to the unintended consequences of war, executive decision-making and the inevitable inability for leaders like him to anticipate everything, for Pete’s sake: i.e., heck, Stuff Happens. This expedient philosophy can rationalize pretty much any horrors stretching from Abu Ghraib to Gitmo. If only Emily Littella were still on active duty, I know she’d just say, “Never mind.” 

And so it goes in Rummy-speak, as Morris sends his cameras down the rabbit hole into an upside-down universe where government morality and mea culpas have no standing, yet mad tautologies like “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence” do. In the question of those well-known phantom WMDs, such inane statements can justify anything, including interminable wars in which bodies are still piling up, peace is not won, and mass Mideast destruction marches on.

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Film Review | Anita: Speaking Truth to Power

 AlterNet,  | March 29, 2014  | By Thomas Delapa 

'Anita: Speaking Truth to Power' Reignites Fury Over Sexual Harassment and Political Might

Two decades after Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Freida Mock documents the confirmation of Clarence Thomas.

  

There she was, polite and poised in her smart, turquoise dress suit, facing off against a murderers' row of aging, not entirely august, white men, an ebony Joan of Arc versus a court of incredulous grand inquisitors. To a bitterly divided 1991 America, University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill was either witch, scorned woman, martyr or feminist heroine. In any case, when the smoke cleared it was Hill who was burned at the Senate stake.

Twenty-plus years after the most incendiary and indecent Supreme Court confirmation hearings in U.S. history, filmmaker Freida Mock flips through the sensationally lurid pages of Anita Hill v. Clarence Thomas in Anita: Speaking Truth to Power, a documentary sure to re-fan the flames of righteous indignation among anyone, man or woman, sitting to the left of Strom Thurmond.

If, as legendary attorney Clarence Darrow argued, “almost every case has been won and lost when the jury is sworn,” Anita Hill was toast as soon as she sat down to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee that steamy October weekend in 1991. Chaired by now-Veep Joe Biden of Delaware, the all-white, all-male committee wasn’t quite a kangaroo court, but it resembled something from Down Under the Mason-Dixon Line, circa 1930. Rather than hostile witnesses, this was an open-and-shut case of hostile politicos, aghast and appalled that a Supreme Court nominee and “pornography,” “pubic hair” and “penis size” could be publicly uttered in the same sentence. 

For investigative reporter Jane Mayer (then with the Wall Street Journal), the televised hearings—“Judge Judy” crossed with the Playboy Channel—were just a smokescreen for Democratic and Republican senators alike: “It wasn’t about the truth ... it was about winning.” Despite a majority of Democrats on the committee, Hill was largely led to the dogs alone. Ted Kennedy sat mostly sullen and stone-faced as a bit player.

An Oscar winner for the superior documentary, Maya Lin: A Strong Vision, Mock may not win votes from the pro-Thomas minority, but she pointedly sets out to give Hill back her voice, free of the clumsy, tedious and badgering questions posed by Biden and company. Between long, still-shocking reruns from that R-rated C-SPAN sur-reality show watched by millions in 1991, we are presented with evidence that Hill has moved on, literally, leaving her beloved small-town Oklahoma life for the greener (and far bluer) pastures of Massachusetts and Brandeis University after years of death threats, hate mail, vicious phone calls, and public confrontations.

As for Thomas himself, not surprisingly he’s nolo contendre except for his infamous, scenery-chewing costarring role as self-professed victim of a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.” Through all his indignant denials to the committee and the nation regarding any hint of sexual harassment toward Hill (Coke? Never touch the stuff) while she was his assistant at the EEOC and the U.S. Department of Education in the 1980s, Thomas didn’t just play the race card, he dealt the whole deck to the committee members, who promptly folded under pressure. Only Sen. Paul Simon from the Land of Lincoln objected to Thomas’ nomination, while a few days later the uber-conservative Thomas eked out a win in the full senate 50-48. In one of American history’s most unjust ironies, Thomas replaced the revered Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court justice and the victorious voice behind the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Civil Rights decision.

But from the ashes of Hill’s public humiliation, a new wave of female empowerment rose up from Phoenix to Washington, D.C., and beyond: witness the 1992 “Year of the Woman” at the ballot box, renewed political vigor by females of all parties and races, and a new awareness of sexual harassment in the workplace. Today Anita Hill lives on as both a woman and a symbol. For her legions of admirers, she’ll always be standing on the mountaintop.

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DVD Review | Stories We Tell

Capturing the Polleys

by Thomas Delapa

For critics and serious filmgoers who’ve given up on the Academy Awards, especially after last year's Seth MacFarlane fatuous hosting fiasco, here’s another reason to shrug and say "I told you so": Despite being one of the best and most talked-about documentaries of 2013, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell was shockingly shut out of the Oscar nominations.

The Canadian actress/director may take cold comfort in the fact that the Oscars have regularly been on the wrong side of cinema history. Leading the nominations for worst Oscar snubs: Alfred Hitchcock (nil directing awards), Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather (loser to Cabaret’s Bob Fosse), and the snub of all snubs, Orson Welles’ nonpareil Citizen Kane bested by How Green Was My Valley. Vice versa, does anyone outside of Robert Osborne remember the lachrymose Luise Rainer, winner of back-to-back best actress Oscars in the 1930s? And post Y2K, let’s just fugetabout The Departed, the noxious 2006 best picture winner that should be left to sleep with the fishes.

Almost as myopic in Oscar oversights have been the erratic, often obscure choices over the decades in the Best Foreign Film category. Since the Academy only allows one entry per country each year, voters are forced to dole out the nominations in globally “let’s all share” fashion, not so unlike ribbons handed out to all the kiddies on Field Day. While films from major directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson and Japan's Yasujiro Ozu have never been nominated, most of the nominees—and more than a few winners— have faded out in movie memory. 

Polley can also take some solace in her own award for Best Canadian Film (and the $100,000 prize that went with it), while U.S. audiences can now see her extraordinary narrative recounted on DVD. In our era of one-sided, deceptively manipulated “docu-fictions,” Polley lyrically reconstructs (and deconstructs) an extremely personal story, generously bringing in a kaleidoscope of disparate, sometimes contradictory viewpoints.

In a near oedipal odyssey, Polley documents her search to uncover a maternal secret that lay hidden in her family's closet for 28 years. The main character in the mystery is Polley’s mother Diane, a onetime Toronto casting director and actress. While not literally present to tell her own story, Polley mere nostalgically appears in a series of glowing home movies (some actually recreated). At the other end of the Freudian spectrum is Polley’s dad Michael, a British-born actor who settled in Toronto in the 1950s to marry and raise a family.

A la Charles Foster Kane, the life of Diane Polley is reconstructed, in jigsaw-puzzle fashion, by those who knew her best as well as by those only on the family’s borders. Vivacious and rebellious, Diane was a woman before her time, unhappy with the rigid roles of middle-class marriage and family, yet also, by most accounts, a loving if mercurial wife and mother.

A clever raconteur, Polley reveals key facts of her chronicle in measured doses, never letting us know too much of this remarkable, often touching saga at once. A 3-D puzzle of sorts (without those silly glasses), the film is skillfully glued together with a complex array of stylistic devices, from competing voice-overs (one from a prepared script read by Michael Polley) and disjunctive dubbed dialogue to standard talking-heads interviews, punctuated with lingering close-ups that speak volumes.

Polley is also smart enough to realize that “truth” is often, um, relative, particularly when people have something to gain or hide—Rashomon told us that. But in this meta-home movie that continually examines its own assumptions (sometimes to a fault), Polley unveils not simply the small story of one woman’s family secret, but by extension poignantly leads us to bigger, roomier stories about marriage, motherhood, love and life itself.  

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2/4/14

DVD Review | Blackfish (2013)

Blue Water, Black-and-White Death

by Thomas Delapa

Oceans away from the feel-good New Zealand fable Whale Rider, Blackfish swims in the same roiling documentary school as The Cove, the Oscar-winning 2009 exposé about the grisly annual slaughter of dolphins at a seaside Japanese village.

But Blackfish strikes closer much to home and lands like a punch to the gut. Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite methodically reels us into her fact-heavy investigation that fatefully begins with the much-publicized death of a SeaWorld Orlando orca trainer in early 2010. “Death” is an innocuous term for what happened to Dawn Brancheau, who was caught and shredded by Tilikum, a six-ton, twenty-foot killer whale. 

Cowperthwaite—a TV sports documentarian—is never sensational in recounting the gruesome details of this and other attacks by Tilikum since he was captured off Iceland in the 1980s. The darkness lurking at the heart of Blackfish is that the attacks were suppressed by SeaWorld officials, if not altogether deep-sixed, at least according to the gallery of former SeaWorld trainers interviewed for this scathing tract. The sheer number and sincerity of these testimonials will likely convince audiences that this is no mere mammal-hugging fish tale. And those still not hooked need only note the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s 2012 ruling and fine against SeaWorld in the wake of Brancheau’s horrid death. 

Cowperthwaite constructs her tract as equal parts horror story, mystery and marine-biology lesson. Few recent documentaries have so deftly utilized video and film footage to make such a devastating, if didactic, case. In our sea-to-shining-sea world of security and surveillance cameras, seeing is believing, and we’re afforded compelling replays of the events in chilling detail. It’s almost as if Cowperthwaite were on the trail of a cold-case murderer, as the life of “Tilly” is traced from his capture to his stay at a low-rent Canadian sea park and finally on to Florida, where his aggressive past was ignored and he became the “big splash” at Shamu Stadium.

SeaWorld visitors on any coast know that these majestic creatures (called blackfish by Native Americans) are the stars of the show, performing with their trainers in a revue of risky tricks and stunts in big-top outdoor pools. To the casual observer, the whales are happy, docile, gentle giants—Flipper’s super-sized cousins. But the ex-trainers and experts testify to a dark side, speaking candidly about the volatile nature of these massive, intelligent predators that can turn on their handlers in a heartbeat. From a natural habitat of the wide blue sea, living in tight matriarchal family “pods,” these captured orcas are torn from their kin, trained (mostly by amateurs) through strict behaviorist discipline and housed essentially in underwater cages—the net long-term result often being neurotic and aggressive behavior.  

Of all the chilling footage featured by the filmmakers, perhaps none plunges deeper into the shadowy sea-park abyss than the sight of trainer Ken Peters as he’s helplessly dragged underwater like a bathtub toy by an angry orca. Adams survived to tell about it, but Brancheau and several other mangled victims weren’t nearly as lucky.

Audiences may well agree that the tagline hook for Blackfish could be lifted from a poster carried by a recent SeaWorld animal-rights demonstrator: "Free Tilly."

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Blackfish, a Magnolia Pictures release, will be available on DVD Nov. 12, 2013.

Young Frankenstein revived at Denver's Historic Elitch Gardens Theatre

Historic Elitch Gardens Theatre "Film on Fridays" Fun Fact

Did you know that YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN utilized the very same laboratory props (we're talking serious beakers and electrodes) that Universal Studios used in its classic 1931 Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff?

So walk this way to the Historic Elitch Gardens Theatre in Denver and watch on Friday, Sept. 14, as it revives Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder's monstrously funny comedy that put a side-splitting jolt into the Hollywood horror movie. In the final film of  Elitch's electrifying summer season, Wilder is Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, reluctant inheritor of his grandfather's ungodly experiments to bring back life from the dead.

This 1974 classic also stars Teri Garr, Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman, Peter Boyle, Gene Hackman and Elitch acting alumna Cloris Leachman. Young Frankenstein is one spoof that never gets old! Rated PG. We're "Keeping it Reel" with a 35mm print.

An Elitch Theatre Advisory Board member, Ms. Leachman appeared on the Elitch stage in both 1983 and 1986 and won an Oscar for her supporting role in 1971's "The Last Picture Show." She's also won an amazing eight Emmy Awards for her TV work, more than any other performer. In "Young Frankenstein," our own last outdoor picture show of the summer, she's Frau Blucher, the mad-cap doctor's loyal housekeeper whose very name strikes fear in any nearby horse.

Lawn seating begins at 6:30 pm, with the show at dusk, preceded by live music (the Denver Soundtrack & Take That!) and theater tours. Latest Translyvanian weather report for Friday: a high of 76 and sunny.

Suggested donation $5+, with kids under 14 and members free.

Historic Elitch Theatre's "Film on Fridays" series is curated by Thomas Delapa.

4500 W. 38th Ave (at Utica), Denver, CO 80212.
Phone: 303-623-0216 (messages only)

Historic Elitch Gardens Theatre on Facebook

Film review | Moonrise Kingdom

The Emperor’s New Khakis

By Thomas Delapa

Well, at least one critic got it right.

“This summer’s sleeper hit” proclaimed Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post of director Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom.

As an aside from the popcorn gallery, I’ll just say, “My kingdom for a No-Doz.”

An arid heir to recent Anderson live-action films like The Darjeeling Limited and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, this Kingdom is anything but wild. Set in 1965 (for no apparent reason) on a mythical New England island (for no apparent reason), it’s the soporific study of an runaway boy scout who teams up with a misfit girl. Imagine a kiddie Badlands or a washed-out Blue Lagoon. However you picture it, it’s no good.

After showing such sparkling promise in his 1996 Bottle Rocket debut and reaching the heights in The Royal Tenenbaums, Anderson’s talent and imagination have fizzled. Sure, he’s still crafting his meticulously composed vignettes of wry Americana, but his story sense—never much more than plebian—has lately been a dud. When you’re watching a Wes Anderson movie, you keep looking around wondering if anyone else (besides his actors) is in on the joke.

Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola (scion of the Francis Coppola house) dream up “New Penzance Island,” a bucolic backwater where adults act like kids and kids act like adults. At Camp Ivanhoe, upright, uptight Scoutmaster Ward (Edward Norton) is in charge, browbeating his boys with quaint threats and exclamations like “Jiminy Cricket!” All of them get in line except one: Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman), a precocious bespectacled boy in a coonskin cap who goes AWOL from his pup tent and embarks on an oddball odyssey into the wild.

But this movie deserves no merit badges, except for Pretension and Quirkiness. It’s dressed up with nowhere to go, accessorized with Anderson’s typically overstuffed tableaux, photographed in long, gratuitous dolly shots. Abetted by bloated budgets for art design, Anderson fills his frame with trinkets, doodads, graphics and decor that refer back to nothing in particular, except maybe his own airy, flea-market imagination. His and Coppola’s dialogue is equally arch, composed of non sequiturs fit for only a king of smug indie obscurity.

Sam’s journey leads to a romantic rendezvous with Suzy (Kara Hayward), his sulky, eye-shadowed queen in this L.L. Bean-flavored land of plaid and khaki. While adults in the fairy tale are sappy and tree-thick, at least Sam and Suzy are accorded a royal treatment.

Don’t be blinded by the glittery star court that Anderson has assembled—Bruce Willis, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, and Norton, as well as frequent star Bill Murray—as they are all overshadowed by the aimless and lackluster story. While Anderson wants to give us a preppie, pipsqueak riff on Adam and Eve, his career now looks like a fool’s paradise.

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6/26/12

Film Review | 300 (2007)

Greek Rush

by Thomas Delapa


If you're talking tough love, nothing beats the wives of ancient Sparta. When Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) sends her husband Leonidas (Gerard Butler) off to fight the Persians, her adieu is short and not-so-sweet: "Come back with your shield—or on it."

Pumped up with fab abs and a legion of computer effects, 300 takes no prisoners in its visceral and feverishly visual retelling of the legendary battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. Armed with every high-tech weapon in today's filmmaking, director Zack Snyder has kicked your father's sword-and-sandal movie back to the Stone Age.

Based on the graphic novel by Sin City author Frank Miller, 300 far outnumbers anything in theaters right now for cinematic and sinewy audacity. On the other hand, it's heavy in collateral damage. If you had to pick one movie that would bring a round of salutes from Hitler, Mussolini and Alexander the Great, this is it.

Temporarily sidestepping the film's racist and xenophobic streak, this may be the best adaptation of a graphic novel to date. Snyder (2005's Dawn of the Dead) and company keep Miller's neo-mythological tone and look intact, winging us to an ancient Greece that floats between reality and imagination. It's an Olympian feat, but it's also afflicted with an Achilles heel of Western jingoism.

Acting as sentinel for the European Aryan nation is Sparta, a city-state of 24/7 warriors led by the brave and bellicose King Leonidas. Only 300 Spartan warriors stand in the way of Persia's Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) and his hordes. A bald and semi-androgynous giant of a tyrant, Xerxes is a scary guy, beginning with a face full of piercings that would make even Hellraiser's Pinhead say ouch.

In this tale of arms and the man, poet-soldier Dilios (David Wenham) joins up to add an epic narration, resounding with mythical embellishment that hearkens back to the great storytelling traditions of Virgil and Homer. On the Spartan home front, waffling politicians debate whether they should send reinforcements to back up Leonidas' band of brothers. The king's feisty wife fights her own battles, firstly with the sleazy and treacherous leader of the council.

Grecian history formula aside, 300 gangs up to sound a clarion call to protect the Indo-European frontier in whatever continent. The barbarians are at the gates, and they've brought their "tyranny and mysticism" along with elephants. It's an army conscripted with slaves, giants, deformed freaks, harem harlots and veiled, bomb-throwing cowards. In 480 B.C., Persia (read: Iran) was still pre-Islamic, but there's nothing like a pre-emptive Armageddon to get the blood running.

And what a lovely war it is. On Snyder's sepia-toned killing fields, wave after wave of Persian minions run headlong into Leonidas' handful of gallant men, who grant no mercy and expect none. Boldly choreographed with slo-mo flourishes, it's a bloody good show—accent on the blood. But in Miller's gory holy war, there are no winners and few survivors. "I have filled my heart with hate," says the Captain (Vincent Regan) after his son is killed in one skirmish. To which Leondias smiles and replies, "Good."

By Zeus, where do I sign up for the Crusades?

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Originally published in Boulder Weekly, 3/15/07

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Film Review | War Horse & The Adventures of Tintin

War and Oats

by Thomas Delapa


Less is often more in Hollywood movies, but don’t tell that to screen general Steven Spielberg, director of two, count ‘em two, major holiday releases. In the case of War Horse and The Adventures of Tintin, Spielberg had an uphill battle before the first shots.

According to the Associated Press, Hollywood’s 2011 box-office numbers will hit a low not seen since 1995. With no blockbusters on the scale of Avatar or The Lord of the Rings, few summer smashes and most A-list directors taking a holiday hiatus, election-year adult audiences ought to be asking themselves, “Where’s the beef?” Instead of hefty films with bite, Spielberg and fellow auteur-in-arms Martin Scorsese (in Hugo) served up candy-coated corn.

Based on a children’s novel by British author Michael Morpurgo that grew into a hit play, War Horse is a handsome but skittish crossbreed between Black Beauty and All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s a boy-and-his-horse story about young Albert (Jeremy Irvine) and Joey, a spirited colt who marches from the green fields of Devon to the bloody World War I battlefields of France. Forcibly separated from Albert, Joey passes from one owner to the next, finally arriving in the beastly trench warfare of the Somme.

Perched in the no-man’s-land between kiddie-lit and anti-war tract, Spielberg’s dramatic terrain is tricky, and he never quite finds his footing. As a plow horse, Joey saves the family farm from a mean landlord (David Thewlis), the melodramatic load lightened by Disneyfied comic touches and John Williams’ mickey-mousing score. Though Spielberg aims at making a heartwarming family film, War Horse only pulses during the few battle scenes, led by a David Lean-like British cavalry charge, bayonets drawn, against the Germans.

In the novel, Joey himself narrates his story as he’s yanked along under the reins of a string of good and bad owners. But with that voice gone on the screen, we’re left with the anthropomorphized sight of woeful, mistreated Joey, a mute Mr. Ed. Except for a kindly captain (Tom Hiddleston) who drafts the horse as his mount, Joey’s human co-stars have even less to say, surrendering to a script that comes up lame in the backstretch.

Whether affixed with bumper stickers that say War Is Hell or Be Kind To Animals, War Horse plods through a well-trod turf. Throughout Joey’s journey, we watch his human handlers making and breaking promises to each other and him, resulting in separation, loss, and death. The nadir of the fable is a mawkish vignette that drops Joey into the arms of a French farmer’s sugar-sweet granddaughter who seems airlifted in from a 1930s Deanna Durbin movie.

By the time the climax is dragged in, the battle for the audience’s minds, if not their hearts, is over. In the thick of a battle between the British and Germans at the Somme, Joey becomes the catalyst for the most improbable wartime plot turn since McHale joined the Navy.

For the bottom-half of his 2011 double feature, Spielberg drafted the Eurocentric Tintin comic-book series written by Belgian author Hergé. Like Scorsese in Hugo, Spielberg takes his first flying, in-your-lap leap into the world of 3-D fantasy, enhanced with motion-capture visual effects. If War Horse might claim partial victory on looks and animal magnetism, the retro charm of Tintin is conspicuously missing in action. For all the millions spent on this production, it’s hard to picture how anyone could generate such a generically lackluster teen hero. Only HAL 9000 might warm up to Tintin, a carrot-topped boy journalist who stumbles into a mysterious plot thick with thieves, treasure and ships in bottles.

Despite his G-rated retorts ("Great snakes!"), this kid also bizarrely packs a handgun, setting off a slew of frenetic chases and shootouts befitting a low-caliber action movie. For a director who went so far as to digitally delete the guns in his E.T. re-release, Spielberg seems to have sailed off into a weird new dimension, and a shallow one at that.

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1/4/12