After the End of the World: Adapting Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

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The Road movie poster

 

Genre fic­tion has long resided on the wrong side of the chasm between escapism and lit­er­a­ture. But as The Atlantic notes, cult writ­ers like Neil Gaiman are cross­ing over into the main­stream while estab­lished nov­el­ists like Michael Chabon are explor­ing the genre ter­ri­tory blazed by the likes of Mar­garet Atwood. Few know these blur­ring bar­ri­ers as well as Cor­mac McCarthy, a writer with firm bona fides in the lit­er­ary world whose dev­as­tat­ing 2006 novel The Road incor­po­rated ele­ments of spec­u­la­tive fic­tion. It become a crossover hit and landed a spot in the world’s biggest book club: The Oprah Win­frey Show. Its vision of a burned world pop­u­lated by scav­engers drained of all human­ity is some­times even described as a zom­bie story, spark­ing an argu­ment over whether or not it qual­i­fies as hor­ror or sci­ence fic­tion. My own two-fold answer: of course it does, and the ques­tion is also irrel­e­vant. Spec­u­la­tive futures and fan­ci­ful tech­nol­ogy are not the true sub­jects of sci­ence fic­tion, but rather means to an end: explor­ing the here and now.

The Road made its way to the­aters shortly after a very dif­fer­ent vision of life after the apoc­a­lypse. Direc­tor McG’s Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion was the fourth entry in an escapist action fran­chise detail­ing a for­mu­laic bat­tle for the fate of human­ity. The Road is set at a time long after such heroic strug­gles can even be imag­ined, and when the drudgery of mere sur­vival is wan­ing. The world itself is ter­ri­fy­ingly real­ized onscreen, using real des­o­late loca­tions: par­tic­u­larly an eerily aban­doned stretch of turn­pike in Pitts­burgh, and the still largely life­less blasted remains of Mount St. Helens in Wash­ing­ton. The only tech­ni­cal prob­lem I noticed was the some­what dis­tract­ing tooth con­ti­nu­ity through­out. Decay: now you see it, now you don’t.

A scene from The Road“If I were God, I would have made the world just so and no different.”

I re-read the novel a few days before see­ing the film, which turned out to be a mis­take. The book remained the emo­tional, vis­ceral expe­ri­ence it was on my first read, but its fresh­ness in my mind kept me some­what detached through­out the movie. I could not help but dis­pas­sion­ately ana­lyze the par­tic­u­lars of the adap­ta­tion. I’m among those who loved the book, but didn’t nec­es­sar­ily desire the movie to be faith­ful. The mechan­ics of how it could be done fas­ci­nated me. How do you adapt a book that lives and dies on the Stein­beck­ian terse, harsh, under­stated poetry of its lan­guage? Joe Penhall’s screen­play is remark­ably faith­ful in terms of plot and sequence of events, and the few changes are mostly effec­tive. In par­tic­u­lar, a neat trick involved seam­lessly com­bin­ing three sep­a­rate inci­dents in the novel into a sin­gle sequence: The Boy falls ill, The Man loots an aban­doned boat, and they are robbed.

It’s hard to imag­ine a bet­ter direc­tor for The Road than John Hill­coat, whose pre­vi­ous film The Propo­si­tion, from a screen­play by Nick Cave, could have been the movie that Cor­mac McCarthy never made him­self. But The Road as a film some­how fails to recre­ate the emo­tion­ally dev­as­tat­ing effect of its source mate­r­ial. Another can­di­date for direc­tor might have been Alfonso Cuarón, who man­aged to trans­form P.D. James’ novel Chil­dren of Men into a gut-wrenching vision of a near-future soci­ety dis­in­te­grat­ing before our eyes. McCarthy had pre­sented Hill­coat with a sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge; The Road is, in a sense, a long dénoue­ment to a story we didn’t see. Per­haps the strongest argu­ment against genre fans claim­ing The Road as their own is that most zom­bie sto­ries con­cern the fall of civ­i­liza­tion. The Road is set far after an implied cat­a­clysm, where every­thing has been taken away, even the very names of the peo­ple and places that remain.

Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee in The Road“If there is a God up there, he would have turned his back on us by now. And who­ever made human­ity will find no human­ity here.”

That said, the McCarthy does glanc­ingly allude to a cat­a­clysmic event fol­lowed by vio­lence on a mas­sive scale, waged by tribes described as Blood­cults. There are many aspects of the back story that Hill­coat and Pen­hall opt to clar­ify (par­tic­u­larly the Man & Boy’s fam­ily life), but the mas­sive wars that swept the coun­try in the pre­ceed­ing years is not one of them. This largely unspo­ken past in cru­cial to the book, as the reader con­tem­plates how the Man, the Boy, and every­one they encoun­tered some­how lived through it all, be it through fight­ing, hid­ing, or col­lab­o­rat­ing. The Man’s strat­egy for sur­vival is to lay low and instill in his son the need to pre­serve a metaphor­i­cal “light” of basic human­ity. We see numer­ous alter­na­tive strate­gies that also worked, but which result in the destruc­tion of the soul. One such walk­ing dead man we meet is Old Man (Robert Duvall), who appar­ently col­lab­o­rated with the Blood­cults until the toxic land­scape claimed his health.

Some of McCarthy’s poet­i­cally spare lan­guage is pre­served in the lim­ited voiceover nar­ra­tion deliv­ered by the Man (Viggo Mortensen). But some evi­dence exists onscreen that the film­mak­ers feared the audi­ence might not be able to put two and two together. While being scarcely men­tioned by name in the book, “can­ni­bal­ism” is one of the first words spo­ken in the film. It presents this sav­agery as the spe­cific omnipresent threat that forces the Man and Boy to remain totally alone and self-reliant. Another clue the movie is more obsessed with can­ni­bal­ism than the book: in the clos­ing cred­its, a plump female char­ac­ter is chill­ingly named “well-fed woman”. That’s cer­tainly more humor than can be found in the text.

Viggo Mortensen in The Road“I told the boy when you dream about bad things hap­pen­ing, it means you’re still fight­ing and you’re still alive. It’s when you start to dream about good things that you should start to worry.”

Another key ele­ment I missed from the book is the real­iza­tion that the Boy has lit­er­ally never seen another child, ever, which goes a long way towards explain­ing his care­less reac­tion to glimps­ing another boy. Long accus­tomed to hid­ing from all con­tact, he explodes with the dan­ger­ous need to con­nect. Although The Boy has evi­dently known lit­tle else, he seems to have the inborn need to cling to signs of life. The boy also mar­vels at a glimpse of a bee­tle — a detail which I believe was added — whose metallic-like wings refract the gray­ish light and pro­vide one of the film’s only flashes of color.

The end­ing of the novel is some­thing that can only work in prose. A sim­ple change in verb tense hints at a pos­si­ble future, a rad­i­cal change in think­ing for char­ac­ters pre­vi­ously forced to orga­nize their lives around imme­di­ate sur­vival. Beyond an over­ar­ch­ing quest to reach the ocean, they indulged in lit­tle talk of the future, or of any kind of con­tin­u­ance at all. Life on the lit­eral and metaphor­i­cal road is a sick com­bi­na­tion of drudgery and ter­ror. Every event in their lives is sud­den, unex­pected, and never likely to recur in quite the same way. The final words in the novel are per­haps the first thing the boy hears that hints of a com­fort­ing rou­tine he might expect in his future. Trans­lated to film, Hill­coat and screen­writer Joe Pen­hall do per­haps the only thing they could do: plug a bunch of words into a character’s mouth that was silent in the book.

Charlize Theron in The Road“My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born.”

The cast­ing is pretty much per­fect, par­tic­u­larly Kodi Smit-McPhee, who so resem­bles Char­l­ize Theron that it’s eerie. Even the sup­port­ing cast is superla­tive, includ­ing Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, Michael K. Williams, Molly Parker, and Gar­ret Dil­lahunt. The lat­ter is an inter­est­ing, ver­sa­tile actor, hav­ing played an upper-crust psy­chopath in Dead­wood, a crim­i­nal idiot in The Assas­si­na­tion of Jesse James by the Cow­ard Robert Ford, a mur­der­ous cyborg in Ter­mi­na­tor: The Sarah Con­nor Chron­i­cles, and here a vile can­ni­bal. That’s a remark­able range of deranged char­ac­ters, but will he ever have a chance to play a nor­mal guy?

Offi­cial site: www.theroad-movie.com

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    Rewind & Reboot: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

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    X-Men Origins Wolverine movie poster

     

    Much of what’s wrong with X-Men Ori­gins: Wolver­ine can be traced right back to its con­fused con­cep­tion, indeed begin­ning with its clumsy title. The ungainly pre­fix is clum­sily bolted on solely for it to alpha­bet­ize adja­cent to the three pre­vi­ous X-Men films on Wal­mart shelves, iTunes, Pay-Per-View, and tor­rent track­ers. The two halves split by a colon try to have it both ways: “X-Men Ori­gins” brands it as part of a pro­posed series of pre­quels to the lucra­tive orig­i­nal tril­ogy (none else of which have yet to mate­ri­al­ize, appar­ently dis­carded in favor of the com­plete reboot X-Men: First Class), while “Wolver­ine” promises a fresh new fran­chise in and of itself.

    With the orig­i­nal tril­ogy still warm in its grave, barely a decade after it began, why rewind and start over again so soon? There’s no rea­son why a pre­quel fea­tur­ing honest-to-goodness movie star Hugh Jack­man as the fan-favorite icon couldn’t have stood on its own. One gets the feel­ing X-Men and X2: X-Men United were pre­ma­turely dis­carded. All of this is quite the pity, as direc­tor Bryan Singer’s inter­pre­ta­tion was far supe­rior than this and Brett Ratner’s weak X-Men 3: The Last Stand.

    I can under­stand the desire to cre­ate a jumping-on point for new view­ers, one that does not require a detailed mem­ory of the events of the pre­vi­ous install­ments. But if what 20th Cen­tury Fox and Mar­vel Comics sought was a fresh start, this isn’t exactly it. The nar­ra­tive con­torts itself to slot into some of the estab­lished chronol­ogy, while simul­ta­ne­ously ignor­ing or con­tra­dict­ing many other sig­nif­i­cant ele­ments of the canon.

    Liev Schreiber and Hugh Jackman in X-Men Origins: WolverineSabre­tooth and Wolver­ine demon­strate the proper pro­to­col in exe­cut­ing a man hug

    Danny Hous­ton por­trays a younger ver­sion of William Stryker, a role orig­i­nated by Brian Cox in X2: X-Men United. We learn a lit­tle more of his vil­lain­ous moti­va­tions and ties to Wolverine’s secret ori­gin, none of which really sur­prise or illu­mi­nate. Fans might be pleased by super­flu­ous cameos by a younger Cyclops (Tim Pocock) and Pro­fes­sor X (a dig­i­tally reju­ve­nated Patrick Stew­art). Then there’s the mat­ter of Sabre­tooth, whom we already met as Magneto’s hench­man (Tyler Mane) in the orig­i­nal X-Men (2000), but now entirely recast and recon­ceived as Logan’s brother Vic­tor Creed (Liev Schreiber).

    A pro­logue set in Canada’s North­west Ter­ri­to­ries in the mid 1800s reveals Logan’s dam­aged psy­chol­ogy to be the prod­uct of frat­ri­cide. He and brother Vic­tor were doted upon by a wealthy adop­tive father, but their super­sti­tious bio­log­i­cal father wanted to kill them. The best sequence imme­di­ately fol­lows: an impres­sive mon­tage of the broth­ers fight­ing side-by-side through the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War, Civil War, World Wars I and II, and Viet­nam. The word­less sequence suc­cinctly illus­trates the immor­tal war­riors grow­ing apart, as Vic­tor becomes increas­ingly unsta­ble while Logan slowly devel­ops a moral code and dis­taste for killing.

    A Wolver­ine film seemed like a promis­ing idea when I first heard of it; it could have pro­vided a neat way to shake off the detri­tus that had accu­mu­lated by the end of the orig­i­nal tril­ogy. Each sub­se­quent install­ment added too many addi­tional char­ac­ters drawn from decades of Mar­vel Comics his­tory, and quickly snow­balled to the point where the ensem­ble cast became com­i­cally unwieldy (pun intended). So, the notion of a fresh story focused around just one char­ac­ter sounded like a wise choice. But expect­ing a smart cre­ative choice from 20th Cen­tury Fox was obvi­ously too much. X-Men Ori­gins: Wolver­ine is over­stuffed with a tremen­dous num­ber of X-Men b-listers, includ­ing The Blob (Kevin Durand), Dead­pool (Ryan Reynolds), Gam­bit (Tay­lor Kitsch), The White Queen (Tahyna Tozzi), and Bolt (Dominic Mon­aghan). The lat­ter, inci­den­tally, fea­tures in one of the best scenes in the film, in a low-key con­fronta­tion with Vic­tor that approaches real drama.

    Taylor Kitsch, will.i.am, Liev Schreiber, Hugh Jackman, Tim Pocock, Ryan Reynolds, and Lynn Collins in X-Men Origins: WolverineThe Amaz­ing Adven­tures of the Uncanny C-List Char­ac­ters, com­ing soon from Mar­vel Comics

    Worse than the pro­lif­er­a­tion of sup­port­ing char­ac­ters is its menagerie of vil­lains. Like Spider-Man 3, the film fea­tures a mud­dled array of ene­mies when just one well-developed vil­lain would have suited the story bet­ter. At least three mor­tal neme­ses align them­selves against our hero here: Stryker, Sabre­tooth, and Weapon XI. The best, most iconic comic book vil­lains are flam­boy­ant char­ac­ters intri­cately tied in with the ori­gins of the hero: Bat­man vs. The Joker (Jack Nichol­son, Heath Ledger), Spider-Man vs. The Green Gob­lin (Willem Dafoe), and Super­man vs. Lex Luthor (Gene Hack­man, Kevin Spacey). But Wolverine’s most seri­ous foe here is the lit­er­ally mute and expres­sion­less Weapon XI, devoid of char­ac­ter or charisma. Worse, his moniker looks much bet­ter in print than spo­ken aloud; “Weapon Eleven” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.

    X-Men Ori­gins: Wolver­ine is directed by Gavin Hood, of the crit­i­cally respected film Tsotsi, mak­ing it unusu­ally finely pedi­greed for an escapist piece of enter­tain­ment based on kids’ comic books. Mar­vel Comics seems not to have learned its les­son from hand­ing Hulk to Ang Lee and Thor to Ken­neth Branagh. A good case study for Fox and Mar­vel would have been Warner Bros.’ dis­as­trous Inva­sion, from Oliver Hirsch­biegel, direc­tor of Down­fall. Both Inva­sion and X-Men Ori­gins: Wolver­ine are some­how fatally bro­ken, to the point where they fail to make rudi­men­tary sense (which ought to be a base require­ment for pop­corn special-effects-driven block­busters). Is it too much to ask that films like this at least be inter­nally logical?

    Stryker’s scheme sim­ply doesn’t add up. What exactly does he intend to do? Stryker is evi­dently dis­sat­is­fied with his cre­ation Weapon X (who escaped and became Wolver­ine). After what he per­ceives as a failed beta test, Stryker moves on to Weapon XI, an osten­si­bly per­fect sol­dier with super­pow­ers extracted from other mutants. So why does he go to extreme lengths to keep Wolver­ine under obser­va­tion by a fake girl­friend (Lynn Collins) for sev­eral years, when all he has to do is kill him and extract his pow­ers with his super-syringe? Even more puz­zling, if Stryker wants Logan dead, why does he trick him into sign­ing up to become Weapon X? Stryker suc­ceeds only in mak­ing an already near-indestructible man even more so.

    Tahyna Tozzi and Lynn Collins in X-Men Origins: WolverineThe White Queen and Sil­ver­fox look wor­ried as they dash through some cor­ri­dor or some­thing, what­ever, who am I kid­ding — Tahyna Tozzi and Lynn Collins are just in this movie to tit­il­late the fanboys

    The prob­lem with comic book super­hero sto­ries is that there’s a point at which your pow­er­ful pro­tag­o­nist becomes lit­er­ally inhu­man, and thus dif­fi­cult to find sym­pa­thetic or relat­able. The best exam­ple is Super­man, lit­er­ally an alien who can do almost any­thing. What kinds of prob­lems would such a crea­ture have, and how can any viewer relate to him? Here, Logan and his neme­sis Vic­tor are both effec­tively immor­tal, so there is lit­tle at stake in their con­flict. The most inter­est­ing comic book super­heroes must rec­on­cile super­hu­man pow­ers with their deep flaws and anx­i­eties, like Spider-Man’s inse­cu­ri­ties and Daredevil’s dis­abil­ity, or are nor­mal human beings with extra­or­di­nary drive, like Bat­man and Iron Man.

    A pirated ver­sion of X-Men Ori­gins: Wolver­ine infa­mously leaked online before its offi­cial the­atri­cal release. It was roundly panned, and Fox attempted dam­age con­trol by claim­ing it was an unfin­ished workprint with place­holder CGI, sound effects, and titles. Accord­ing to the Los Ange­les Times, the ver­sion finally released in the­aters was report­edly almost iden­ti­cal, an embar­rass­ment to say the least.

    The spe­cial effects are rather shoddy, espe­cially com­pared to the state of the art as seen in its con­tem­po­raries Star Trek and Trans­form­ers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. Wolverine’s claws and Sabretooth’s bound­ing and pounc­ing suf­fer espe­cially from uncon­vinc­ing cheap­ness. The only two gen­uinely impres­sive excep­tions were wasted, to show­case sup­port­ing char­ac­ter Cyclops’ laser eye-beams slic­ing large struc­tures into geo­met­ric chunks.

    Stray Obser­va­tions:

    • Two easter egg codas fol­low the cred­its. One is totally unnec­es­sary (Stryker’s fate is bet­ter left to the imag­i­na­tion), but the other is enjoy­ably campy, with a kind of sick humor that could have enlivened the rest of the film.
    • The DVD fea­tures an anti-smoking Pub­lic Ser­vice Announce­ment, no doubt penance for Logan’s sig­na­ture cigar-chomping. But where are the warn­ings against drink­ing alco­hol, rid­ing motor­cy­cles with­out hel­mets, killing peo­ple with blades, and per­form­ing uneth­i­cal med­ical atrocities?
    • The script is a non­stop bar­rage of clichés: if I had sub­tracted one star for every time some­body utters “Let’s do this” or “Look what the cat dragged in,” my rat­ing would be, well, a lot of neg­a­tive stars.

    Offi­cial movie site: www.x-menorigins.com

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      The Most Unlucky Man: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

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      The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus movie poster

       

      Terry Gilliam is bur­dened with num­ber of unfair rep­u­ta­tions. First, as a visual styl­ist more than a sto­ry­teller or direc­tor of actors — the lat­ter, at least, obvi­ously refuted by the fact that many high-profile stars will repeat­edly work with him for pen­nies. He’s also known as an unpre­dictable hel­lion and spend­thrift, which are, from the point of view of those that hold the purs­es­trings, the two least desir­able char­ac­ter­is­tics in a direc­tor. He may in fact be con­cerned more with the integrity of the work than with the busi­ness angle, as any artist should be, but he is no wastrel. In fact, all but one of his com­pleted movies came in on time and under bud­get. A bet­ter way to describe him would be as the most unlucky per­son in the movie business.

      After the mul­ti­ple calami­ties and mis­for­tunes (that even an athe­ist might char­ac­ter­ize as acts of god) that befell The Adven­tures of Baron Mun­chausen and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, Gilliam made The Broth­ers Grimm as a com­mer­cial con­ces­sion. Despite it still bear­ing his unmis­tak­able impri­matur, it remains the sole Gilliam film I actively dis­like. One good thing to come of it, how­ever, was a gen­uine friend­ship with its star Heath Ledger. Inter­ested in film­mak­ing him­self, Ledger stuck around on the set of The Imag­i­nar­ium of Doc­tor Par­nas­sus even when not needed on cam­era, serv­ing as Gilliam’ appren­tice and pitch­ing in when­ever possible.

      Heath Ledger in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus“Can you put a price on your dreams?”

      Gilliam’s fabled bad luck first reared when he was hit by a bus and cracked a ver­te­bra, as reported in Wired. Ledger died dur­ing pro­duc­tion, fol­lowed by pro­ducer William Vince before post-production could begin. If one untimely death could pos­si­bly be said to be any more of a shame than another, Ledger’s acci­den­tal over­dose at the age of 28 might be truly unfair. He was rid­ing the crest of a wave of appre­ci­a­tion for his per­for­mances in Broke­back Moun­tain and Bat­man: The Dark Knight, and had just begun to stretch his mus­cles as a direc­tor with music videos for Ben Harper and Mod­est Mouse.

      The pro­duc­tion was very nearly halted, but Gilliam real­ized it could be sal­vaged and re-conceived if Ledger’s part were par­tially recast with Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Far­rell. Gilliam stuck to one sim­ple and absolute cri­te­ria: all three actors must be per­sonal friends of Ledger, lead­ing him to report­edly turn down an over­ture by none less than Tom Cruise on the basis that he hadn’t known Ledger. Depp and Law actu­ally do quite resem­ble Ledger onscreen, at least with the aid of eye­liner and cos­tum­ing. How­ever, Far­rell most cap­tures Ledger’s phys­i­cal pres­ence and man­ner­isms. Charm­ingly, the movie is cred­ited not to Gilliam but to “A film from Heath Ledger and friends.”

      Lily Cole in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus“Voila!”

      The eerie syn­chronic­ity between Ledger’s death and the film’s themes of mor­tal­ity are, remark­ably, coin­ci­den­tal. Gilliam co-wrote the script with Charles McK­e­own (also of Brazil and The Adven­tures of Baron Mun­chausen, which this movie most closely resem­bles). Accord­ing to Col­lider, the story is based on Gilliam’s own feel­ings of artis­tic frus­tra­tion, par­tic­u­larly after the recep­tion of his con­tro­ver­sial film Tide­land, which many found not just dif­fi­cult but even offensive.

      As its title makes plain, The Imag­i­nar­ium of Dr. Par­nas­sus is set lit­er­ally in a world of imag­i­na­tion, a place we have vis­ited before in nearly every sin­gle Gilliam film. Most famously, Brazil riffs on James Thurber’s 1939 short story “The Secret Life of Wal­ter Mitty.” The few excep­tions include Jab­ber­wocky and The Broth­ers Grimm, in which fairy tales exist mat­ter of factly in the real world. In 12 Mon­keys, it remains ambigu­ous if James Cole’s (Bruce Willis) future (his present) or the present (his past) might be real or delusions.

      Tom Waits in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus“He’s come to collect.”

      It would be a huge mis­take to expect any Terry Gilliam film to make total log­i­cal sense. Such pedes­trian expec­ta­tions would weigh down an artist we love for his unique, vivid flights of fancy. But per­haps even the wildest Gilliam fancy ought to be inter­nally con­sis­tent to a degree. If some­thing doesn’t make sense, is it a tan­ta­liz­ing conun­drum left open for the viewer to mull over, or is it evi­dence of slop­pi­ness? The cen­tral ques­tion left unan­swered for me has to do with the core con­ceit of the film itself: peo­ple are drawn into the mind of Dr. Par­nas­sus through his mag­i­cal mir­ror. In his mind­scape, they must choose between enter­ing a build­ing main­tained by the Devil (Tom Waits), or… what, exactly? Of those few that reject the Devil, we see their bliss­ful, unen­cum­bered state upon leav­ing Dr. Par­nas­sus’ mind. What exactly hap­pens to them that makes them happy? Also, there’s the side effect of them shed­ding their pos­ses­sions. They may have been freed of their own earthly mate­ri­al­ism, but that doesn’t stop Par­nas­sus from con­ve­niently enrich­ing his own troupe’s cof­fers, giv­ing the whole process an air of a scammy con­fi­dence game instead of spir­i­tual awak­en­ing. Reflect­ing the theme of insin­cer­ity is the corn­ball tune “We Are the Chil­dren of the World” which appears as a ring­tone in the film, and at the end of the clos­ing credits.

      The appar­ent pro­tag­o­nist turns out to be an unre­deemable vil­lain, unlike vir­tu­ally all of Gilliam’s pre­vi­ous heroes, in par­tic­u­lar Kevin in Time Ban­dits, Jack Lucas in The Fisher King, Sam Lowry in Brazil, James Cole in 12 Mon­keys, and Jeliza-Rose in Tide­land. Which leaves us with Dr. Par­nas­sus, who ends up a lit­tle bit like Parry (Robin Williams) as we meet him at the begin­ning of The Fisher King: home­less and seem­ingly per­ma­nently locked in a posi­tion of want. Both are hobos, ren­dered apart and invis­i­ble from a world of beauty and wealth. Par­nas­sus’ long­ings are embod­ied by the beau­ti­ful Valentina (Lily Cole), whom may or may not be his daugh­ter, now seen ensconced in an envi­ously bliss­ful nuclear fam­ily. Par­nas­sus remains for­ever tempted by the Devil.

      Offi­cial movie site: www.doctorparnassus.com

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        Hey Man, It’s Your Trip: Woodstock

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        Woodstock movie poster

         

        The clas­sic fea­ture doc­u­men­tary Wood­stock cap­tures the full expe­ri­ence of the near-mythical 1969 fes­ti­val of the same name, from sep­tic tanks to traf­fic jams to brown acid. It remains an impor­tant record of one of the most peace­ful spon­ta­neous gath­er­ings in human his­tory, not to men­tion the brief-lived spirit of the hip­pie move­ment as a whole.

        The orig­i­nal ver­sion directed by Michael Wedleigh, with a young Mar­tin Scors­ese as assis­tant direc­tor and edi­tor and Thelma Schoon­maker as edi­tor, was released the fol­low­ing year and played con­tin­u­ously in the­aters for years. Oddly, it is the only film that the last sur­viv­ing human on earth (Charl­ton Hes­ton) chooses to watch repeat­edly in The Ωmega Man. A Director’s Cut added 40 min­utes of addi­tional footage in 1994, but the new 40th Anniver­sary edi­tion is a whop­ping four hours long, “Inter­fuck­ing­mis­sion” included. It’s unclear whether or not Scors­ese and Schoon­maker were involved in either of the expanded editions.

        The film is exper­i­men­tal in for­mat, extend­ing even to the aspect ratio. Nearly the first ten min­utes are win­dow­paned, lead­ing me at first to sus­pect some­thing was wrong with the DVD. But the movie then alter­nates from win­dow­pane to widescreen to splitscreen. The only other movie I can think of off the top of my head that played as loose with aspect ratios is the open­ing sequence to Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It.

        Jimi Hendrix in Woodstock

        With a leisurely four hours to fill, the first full 25 min­utes con­cern the arrival of early fans while the stage is still being con­structed. A surely ironic mural on one of the famously psy­che­delic car­a­van buses reads “even God loves Amer­ica.” One of the festival’s most iconic images — a pair of nuns flash­ing a peace sign to cam­era — may have been in fact par­tially staged (as alleged in Ang Lee’s Tak­ing Wood­stock). Based on the mem­oirs of Elliot Tiber, Lee’s film goes on to tell a con­flict­ing, largely dis­counted, ver­sion of events in which a small town mis­fit mid­wifes the fes­ti­val, which in turn frees his iden­tity and trans­forms his family.

        The first per­for­mance footage in Wood­stock is an extended unbro­ken close-up of Richie Havens’ intense solo per­for­mance. Finally, the cam­eras turn the other way around and look out at the stag­ger­ingly huge crowd. Indeed, as later scenes make clear, so many peo­ple arrived that the ear­li­est arrivals couldn’t phys­i­cally leave. That such a large num­ber of peo­ple coex­isted peace­fully while quite lit­er­ally being trapped is a minor miracle.

        Every­body knows the tale of the gar­gan­tuan crowd, but I under­es­ti­mated the scale of the con­cert itself. In my mind, I always pic­tured a tiny stage dwarfed by throngs of hip­pies, but in actu­al­ity, the fes­ti­val itself would have been a large pro­duc­tion even if the crowds hadn’t mate­ri­al­ized. Before sim­ple logic forced the orga­niz­ers to waive the ticket fee, the fes­ti­val had a multi-million-dollar bud­get foot­ing a mas­sive stage, huge tow­ers, power, food, light­ing, and sound system.

        A scene from Woodstock

        Not all the acts would nec­es­sar­ily be known to later gen­er­a­tions watch­ing the doc­u­men­tary, but there is some sur­pris­ing vari­ety in genre; Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie’s folk, Sly and the Fam­ily Stone’s funk, and Sha-Na-Na’s retro pop went a long way towards break­ing up the some­times tedious stretches of blues-rock jam­ming. Some key per­for­mances either weren’t filmed (such as The Band, at their request) or shot but excluded from the film (par­tic­u­larly The Grate­ful Dead, whose per­for­mance was com­pro­mised by heavy rain and tech­ni­cal issues), and some of the era’s top acts were absent alto­gether (most notably The Bea­t­les, Bob Dylan, and The Rolling Stones — but Scors­ese would later catch up with all three of them in his own doc­u­men­taries Liv­ing In the Mate­r­ial World, No Direc­tion Home, and Shine a Light). Per­son­ally, I most liked see­ing The Who and Jimi Hen­drix at the height of their pow­ers, and was pleas­antly sur­prised by an obvi­ously ner­vous Crosby, Stills and Nash. CSN claimed it was only their sec­ond gig, and they seemed vis­i­bly relieved to receive applause. Each act was allot­ted only 1–2 songs each, even in the extended ver­sion of the film, which for many of these artists is not enough. I would have liked to see more Who footage, espe­cially the famous moment where the often tem­pes­tu­ous Pete Town­shend famously booted coun­ter­cul­tural icon Abbie Hoff­man off­stage: “Fuck off! Fuck off my fuck­ing stage!”

        Inter­views with audi­ence mem­bers dur­ing the con­cert demon­strate that they were already self-mythologizing the event as it was occur­ring around them. A leg­end quickly spread that the gath­er­ing was the equiv­a­lent of a spon­ta­neous city. Not quite, but the actual total of 500,000 peo­ple was noth­ing to sneeze at. But they were all cor­rect that it was noth­ing less than a mir­a­cle that that many peo­ple could gather in one place and sur­vive a mas­sive storm on the sec­ond day, all with­out vio­lence. That is, aside from Town­shend again: “The next fuckin’ per­son that walks across this stage is gonna get fuckin’ killed!”

        The film includes co-organizer Michael Lang and con­cert­go­ers fac­ing hos­tile inter­view­ers deter­mined to express their bias that rock music is empty and mean­ing­less. Scors­ese empha­sized sim­i­lar con­fronta­tions in No Direc­tion Home, where Dylan is dogged by con­de­scend­ing reporters deter­mined to under­mine his polit­i­cal and social import.

        Wedleigh’s cam­era often seeks out nude young women. The bla­tant scopophilia misses the point of the bur­geon­ing equal­ity between the sexes by the late 60s — not only are the hip­pies embrac­ing free love, they’re also obvi­ously com­fort­able enough in each other’s com­pany to bathe together like chil­dren in a bath­tub. I can’t believe I’m com­plain­ing about the sight of naked girls, but Wedleigh’s cam­era is often just plain lustful.

        Aside from free love and unashamed nudity, the next most alien aspect for con­tem­po­rary post-War-on-Drugs view­ers is the prag­matic atti­tude towards con­trolled sub­stances. One of the first peo­ple seen bran­dish­ing a joint onscreen is none other than Jerry Gar­cia, despite his band not appear­ing in the per­for­mance footage. Everybody’s heard about the infa­mously dodgy brown acid, but dig this emi­nently prag­matic announce­ment issued from the stage: “Hey man, it’s your trip, don’t let me stop you, but if you feel like exper­i­ment­ing, try half a tab.” In con­trast, we see a huge crowd prac­tic­ing Kun­dalini yoga, which the guru espouses as an alter­na­tive to drugs.

        One of the most strik­ing sequences is when the doc­u­men­tary steps back from the pro­ceed­ings to take in another angle that wouldn’t ordi­nary be cov­ered in a typ­i­cal con­cert doc­u­men­tary. Wedleigh takes the time to meet a Port-O-San main­tainer with one son attend­ing the fes­ti­val and another fly­ing heli­copters in the Viet­nam DMZ.

        Buy any of these fine prod­ucts from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report:

         

          I Call First: Who’s That Knocking at My Door?

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          Who's That Knocking At My Door movie poster

           

          Mar­tin Scorsese’s first fea­ture film Who’s That Knock­ing at My Door? was shot over the course of sev­eral years, and was orig­i­nally released in 1967 as I Call First. Its piece­meal ori­gins are betrayed by two dis­crete sequences: one recount­ing the mis­ad­ven­tures of a group of slacker friends in down­town New York, and a very dif­fer­ent, more char­ac­ter and dialogue-driven love story between J.R. (Kei­tel) and the unnamed “Girl on the Staten Island Ferry” (Zina Bethune).

          Non-linear cross-cutting between the two adds up to more than the sum of their parts. J.R. is increas­ingly hes­i­tant to horse around with his gang­ster friends, a lifestyle involv­ing shak­ing down debtors, ter­ror­iz­ing each other with loaded pis­tols, and going uptown to get with — and then rob — gullible girls. His ret­i­cence is explained by a par­al­lel sequence in which he meets cute with The Girl. Sim­i­larly, their young courtship is given weight by the audience’s knowl­edge of what he’s done with his life so far, and how dras­tic a change he faces by con­sid­er­ing mar­ry­ing her.

          Harvey Keitel in Who's That Knocking at My DoorThe pas­sion of Har­vey Keitel

          J.R. is much more sen­si­tive than his brutish chums to the splen­dor of nature and to the cathar­sis of cin­ema. His idea of seduc­ing a girl is to lec­ture her on Hol­ly­wood West­erns, John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) in par­tic­u­lar. His mod­els of mas­culin­ity come from the movies, espe­cially John Wayne and Lee Mar­vin, and he divides women into two cat­e­gories: broads and girls (which is another way of say­ing whores and madon­nas). The Girl is savvy enough to know what she’s get­ting into; she clearly catches his mean­ing when he slips and openly refers to her as a broad.

          Another piece to the puz­zle was a sex mon­tage added in order to ensure dis­tri­b­u­tion. Scors­ese scores J.R.‘s fan­tasy of sex with a series of women to The Doors’ “The End”, later of course also to become a key ingre­di­ent to his peer Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s mas­ter­piece Apoc­a­lypse Now! (1979).

          Harvey Keitel and Zina Bethune in Who's That Knocking at My DoorJ.R. (Har­vey Kei­tel) knows how to romance Zina Bethune: “Let me tell you some­thing, that girl in that pic­ture was a broad”

          Hold­ing every­thing together is a fram­ing device in the form of a flash­back to young J.R. being served food by his mother (Cather­ine Scors­ese, Scrosese’s own mother). It’s an obvi­ously happy mem­ory, but we learn that the core theme of the film is that J.R. is emo­tion­ally crip­pled by the Catholic guilt instilled by his fam­ily and upbring­ing. He is unable to con­sum­mate the rela­tion­ship with the girl he loves, and who loves him back. When he finds out she’s a vic­tim of rape, he alter­nates between not believ­ing the facts and blam­ing her. Even in the end, he sees her rape as some­thing he must for­give her for. The penul­ti­mate sequence is a mon­tage of Catholic iconog­ra­phy set to the title track by The Genies.

          Buy any of these fine prod­ucts from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report:

            Champagne & Reefer: Rolling Stones Shine a Light

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            Rolling Stones Shine a Light movie poster

             

            Mar­tin Scorsese’s long his­tory with musi­cal doc­u­men­taries and con­cert films includes work­ing as assis­tant direc­tor and edi­tor on Wood­stock (1970), direct­ing an account of The Band’s final con­cert as The Last Waltz (1978), exec­u­tive pro­duc­ing and design­ing the shots for Peter Gabriel’s con­cert film PoV (Point of View) (1987), direct­ing part of the mas­sive The Blues tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­tary series (2003), and craft­ing the defin­i­tive Bob Dylan and George Har­ri­son doc­u­men­taries No Direc­tion Home (2005) and Liv­ing in the Mate­r­ial World (2010).

            Shine a Light is a lit­tle of all the above, but mostly just a straight­for­ward con­cert film fea­tur­ing the Rolling Stones in a ben­e­fit con­cert thrown at New York City’s Bea­con The­ater in 2006. The Stones are joined by spe­cial guests Christina Aguil­era, Jack White, and Buddy “Moth­er­fucker” Guy (watch the DVD bonus fea­tures for the enter­tain­ing story behind that moniker). It was orig­i­nally released in IMAX, and no doubt loses some­thing in trans­la­tion from 50-foot the­aters screens to small tele­vi­sions. U2 did them one up by releas­ing U23D in 3D IMAX the year before.

            Martin Scorsese and The Rolling Stones in Shine a LightAre you sure you want to see these faces in 50-foot-high IMAX?

            Like Gimme Shel­ter (1970), a doc­u­men­tary account of the fall­out fol­low­ing the killing of a fan at a Stones con­cert in Alta­mont, Shine a Light is some­times less than totally flat­ter­ing. Mick Jag­ger is seen to be so ruth­lessly single-minded that he will not deign to col­lab­o­rate with Scors­ese. Even when meet­ing no less than Bill Clin­ton, he only wants to talk about whether or not the light­ing will dis­tract from his per­for­mance. But to be fair, The Rolling Stones hit the big time long before either Scors­ese or Clin­ton, so per­haps Jagger’s van­ity may be par­tially excused. Let it not be said that the old codgers in the band don’t embrace new tech­nol­ogy; wit­ness as Jag­ger strikes clas­sic poses for fans in the front row to cap­ture on their mobiles.

            Keith Richards and Buddy Guy in The Rolling Stones Shine a LightKeef jams with Buddy “Moth­er­fucker” Guy

            Scors­ese is famously a fan, uti­liz­ing Rolling Stones tunes in his sound­tracks so often that Jag­ger now jokes that “Shine a Light was the only film of his not to fea­ture the song Gimme Shel­ter.” I like The Stones well enough, but I’m not a huge fan. Here’s what a sim­i­larly casual lis­tener might learn of them based on Shine a Light:

            • Char­lie Watts, also a suc­cess­ful artist and jazz drum­mer out­side of the Stones machine, comes across as quite dis­tracted, almost to the extent of appear­ing senile (or maybe even more drug-addled than Keith Richards). He behaves the same in vin­tage inter­views scat­tered through­out Shine a Light, so per­haps it’s just his nat­ural demeanor. But there’s no doubt he can still rock his stripped-down drum kit.
            • Mick Jag­ger still has the body of a pre­teen girl, albeit one with impres­sively ripped arms.
            • Every­body knows the leg­endary Keith Richards has abused his body to such an extent that he has no busi­ness still walk­ing this earth. He jokes in the film that he must come from hardy stock, but maybe he is in fact already dead, see­ing as how he barely notices a kiss from Christina Aguil­era. He still has chops, though, beyond going through the highly rehearsed motions of a typ­i­cal Stones spec­ta­cle. In a telling moment, the cam­era catches him alone, play­ing some moody blues licks to him­self as the rest of the band hobnobs.
            • Ron­nie Wood comes across the best, remind­ing fans that although Keith Richards may have co-written many of the most pop­u­lar and endur­ing rock songs of all time, he’s the one that plays all the solos.

            Scors­ese includes him­self as a char­ac­ter in his own film, appear­ing at least twice in a char­ac­ter­is­tic track­ing shot that caps the film: fol­low­ing the Stones off­stage and out of the the­ater, and fly­ing up into the night sky over New York. The world will have to wait for Scorsese’s true doc­u­men­tary on the Stones to equal No Direc­tion Home and Liv­ing in the Mate­r­ial World as a true fan’s deep look into some of the world’s most inter­est­ing celebrities.

            Offi­cial movie site: www.shinealightmovie.com/

            But the Blu-ray or DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

              Action Figures: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

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              G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra movie poster

               

              It’s tempt­ing to throw up one’s hands in despair that the brow level of source mate­r­ial for movies has dropped this pre­cip­i­tously low. To be fair, trash (escapist or just plain trashy trash) has existed since the very first days of the medium. But cinema’s early con­cep­tion as a the­atri­cal pre­sen­ta­tion made before a paid seated audi­ence asso­ci­ated it with plays, and many early nar­ra­tive silent film­mak­ers looked to plays and lit­er­a­ture for source material.

              Over 100 years later, no amount of orig­i­nal mate­r­ial, adap­ta­tion of great works, or repeated remak­ing of other movies could be enough to feed movies’ hunger for story. It took almost 80 years for Hol­ly­wood to draw upon comic books for any­thing beyond cheap seri­als. The suc­cess of Richard Donner’s Super­man (1978) rever­ber­ated for years, lead­ing directly into other seri­ously bud­gets pres­tige pro­duc­tions as Tim Burton’s Bat­man (1989) and War­ren Beatty’s Dick Tracy (1990).

              At the risk of sound­ing like a cur­mud­geon, some­thing has changed. Drunk on the pro­ceeds of a sec­ond wave of comics movies (par­tic­u­larly Bryan Singer’s X-Men and X2: X-Men United and Christo­pher Nolan’s Bat­man Begins and Bat­man: The Dark Knight), Hol­ly­wood burned hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars on failed projects based on comics prop­er­ties that even many comics fans might not be ter­ri­bly famil­iar with, includ­ing Tank Girl (1995), Elek­tra (2005), and Jonah Hex (2010). With pop­u­lar comic books exhausted for now, Hol­ly­wood is quickly turn­ing to toys and even from board games (Peter Berg’s Bat­tle­ship and Rid­ley Scott’s Monop­oly are com­ing soon to a the­ater near you).

              Lee Byung-hun and Ray Park in G.I. Joe: The Rise of CobraNin­jas: The rea­son 10-somethings played with G.I. Joes and also the rea­son 30-somethings went to see this movie

              G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is based on the epony­mous line of plas­tic action fig­ures and acces­sories mar­keted to boys in the early 1980s by toy com­pany Has­bro. No doubt it was rushed into pro­duc­tion after the mas­sively lucra­tive suc­cess of Michael Bay’s two Trans­form­ers films, which were based on a con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous toy line. The Rise of Cobra’s crit­i­cal recep­tion was all but assured as soon as it was announced; it was of course widely and justly panned. But I hap­pened to see it in quick suc­ces­sion with Trans­form­ers: Rise of the Fallen and X-Men Ori­gins: Wolver­ine. In such com­pany, it is a mas­ter­piece, if for no other rea­son than its logic is inter­nally con­sis­tent (if stu­pidly implausible).

              Although pos­sessed of a cer­tain degree of delib­er­ate camp not seen since Bur­ton and Beatty’s comics-based films, the movie seems bizarrely unaware of spoofs that came before it. Echo­ing the Mys­tery Sci­ence The­ater 3000 theme song, a title card announces the story is set in the “Not too dis­tant future” — which, as any MST3K fan knows, promises lit­tle but cin­e­matic crimes against human­ity. The futur­is­tic set­tling weakly explains away the advanced weapons and trans­port tech­nol­ogy read­ily avail­able to G.I. Joe, an élite transna­tional mil­i­tary force with seem­ingly unlim­ited fund­ing, and its neme­sis Cobra, a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion enam­ored of tele­con­fer­enc­ing. Tra­di­tional bal­lis­tics are dep­re­cated in favor of cheesy laser blasters that pro­vide for lots of death, all of it blood­less. To be fair, this is rel­a­tively more real­is­tic than the comics and car­toons, where every shot sim­ply missed and nobody was maimed, dis­fig­ured, or killed despite a con­stant state of war. The other major head-slapping moment of cul­tural deaf­ness comes when a major action set piece is staged in Paris, as Cobra dis­in­te­grates the Eif­fel Tower. Does no one involved remem­ber Team Amer­ica: World Police?

              Its struc­ture is a strange and con­fi­dent gam­ble; rather than start the story in the mid­dle, with its heroes and vil­lains estab­lished and locked in per­pet­ual bat­tle as in the source mate­r­ial, we start before Cobra even rises. The movie makes plain its inten­tions to set up a fran­chise, not even giv­ing birth to two of its most iconic char­ac­ters until the final moments.

              Saïd Taghmaoui and Rachel Nichols and Ray Park in G.I. Joe: The Rise of CobraBody armor works bet­ter if molded with faux breasts and six-packs

              The entire movie is designed as one giant ori­gin story hob­bled with numer­ous flash­backs. First off, a pro­logue set in 1641 France fea­tures an ances­tor to Scot­tish weapons dealer James McCullen (Christo­pher Eccle­ston), with lit­tle ben­e­fit beyond pro­vid­ing a fram­ing device. Other flash­backs tell us more about the rivalry between duel­ing nin­jas Snake Eyes (Ray Park) and Storm Shadow (Lee Byung-hun), and the rela­tion­ship between Duke (Chan­ning Tatum), The Baroness (Sienna Miller), and her brother The Doc­tor (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, hilar­i­ously full of him­self in pro­mo­tional inter­views, cit­ing the art of kabuki as his inspi­ra­tion for act­ing much of the film behind a mask). The Baroness and The Doc­tor (not to be con­fused with Eccleston’s most famous role) are sib­lings, Duke dated The Baroness, and was once respon­si­ble for pro­tect­ing the young Doc­tor. Got all that?

              None of these tan­gled fam­ily ties fig­ure into the orig­i­nal mythos estab­lished in the 1980s comic books and ani­mated tele­vi­sion series, which existed in ser­vice of pro­mot­ing the toy line. The ancil­lary media pro­vided char­ac­ters and sce­nar­ios for play, all with the aim of inspir­ing kids to want to col­lect the whole set and stage epic bat­tles in their par­ents’ base­ments. The sto­ries pro­vided by mar­keters arguably reduced the ele­ment of imag­i­na­tion in children’s play. But looked at another way, the entire G.I. Joe pack­age could be seen as a large-scale mul­ti­me­dia act of world-building. Over time, the brand accu­mu­lated an epic story with a giant cast, and may have helped set the stage for later ambi­tious seri­al­ized pop­u­lar fic­tion of the 21st cen­tury, like Lost.

              The story ulti­mately cen­ters around Duke and his pal Rip­cord (Mar­lon Wayans), imply­ing the film­mak­ers failed to poll fans to find out what exactly it was they found appeal­ing about G.I. Joe as kids. Ask any­one who actu­ally read the comics, watched the car­toons, or played with the toys, and they will tell you Snake Eyes was always the most pop­u­lar char­ac­ter. His unre­quited love for the Joes’ sole female oper­a­tive Scar­lett and com­plex rela­tion­ship with “brother” Storm Shadow pro­vided most of the longest-running sto­ry­lines. Som­mers’ movie min­i­mizes the dis­fig­ured, mute ninja com­mando (despite the per­fect cast­ing of Park, famous as Darth Maul), and inex­plic­a­bly cos­tumed with a mask incor­po­rat­ing a mouth. Scarlett’s affec­tions are here trans­ferred to Rip­cord, and Storm Shadow is more overtly evil, whereas I recall his loy­al­ties being more inter­est­ingly ambigu­ous in the comics. His appar­ent death is an obvi­ous homage to Star Wars: The Phan­tom Men­ace, as is an under­wa­ter sub­ma­rine bat­tle lifted from any num­ber of other George Lucas space bat­tles. In the exact inverse to Storm Shadow, the purely vil­lain­ous Baroness is here trans­formed into a fixer-upper.

              Sienna Miller as The Baroness in G.I. Joe: The Rise of CobraMod­el­ling the lat­est in ter­ror­ist fetish­wear is Sienna Miller as The Baroness

              One flaw the movie retained from the comics and car­toons: while each “Joe” has a dis­tinct code­name and per­son­al­ity, most of Cobra’s forces are name­less and face­less drones. Indeed, their stormtrooper brains have been sur­gi­cally mod­i­fied to turn them into obe­di­ent zom­bies. Some mea­ger drama is derived from The Baroness’ poten­tial reha­bil­i­ta­tion, but her vil­lainy is defused by mak­ing her another vic­tim of mind con­trol. Lead­ers Destro and Cobra Com­man­der are clas­sic exam­ples of the grotesque fig­ure in lit­er­a­ture — like Gol­lum and Richard III — where phys­i­cal defor­mity is an out­ward expres­sion of evil.

              Fol­low­ing the overt racial car­i­ca­tures in Trans­form­ers: Rise of the Fallen, I feared the worst for Mar­lon Wayans as Rip­cord. Indeed, the trailer made a point of high­light­ing his clown­ing around. Sur­pris­ingly, one of the few areas in which the film man­aged to out­per­form expec­ta­tions was its treat­ment of its non-white char­ac­ters. Wayans was given the oppor­tu­nity to be often gen­uinely funny and not nearly as annoy­ing as I sus­pected he might have been. Rip­cord gets real chances to prove him­self, suc­ceeds, and even gets the girl in the end. Fur­ther prov­ing The Rise of Cobra’s bona fides as a sur­pris­ing source of affir­ma­tive action is seen in Saïd Tagh­maoui as the heroic Breaker, finally break­ing out of his ter­mi­nal stereo­typ­ing as a generic Mid­dle East­ern ter­ror­ist / enemy com­bat­ant (q.v. Three Kings, Van­tage Point, and Trai­tor). Now if we could just do some­thing about Cobra being made up of evil Brits, Scots, Japan­ese, and East­ern Europeans.

              Why is The Dork Report cov­er­ing G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra now? Well, the trailer for the sequel just dropped, and it’s very inter­est­ing. Whether out of bet­ter sto­ry­telling or tal­ent avail­abil­ity, the large cast of char­ac­ters appears to have been dras­ti­cally scaled back:

              Offi­cial movie site: www.gijoemovie.com

              Buy the Blu-ray or DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

                A Tall Tale: Taking Woodstock

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                Taking Woodstock movie poster

                 

                Ang Lee’s Tak­ing Wood­stock is based on Elliot Tiber’s mem­oir Tak­ing Wood­stock: A True Story of a Riot, a Con­cert, and a Life, that pur­ports to be the untold story of how the Wood­stock music fes­ti­val came to Bethel, NY, in August 1969. Tiber claims he was the cru­cial go-between that intro­duced the festival’s orga­niz­ers to Max Yas­gur, owner of the farm that became the site of the famous three days of music, peace, love, mud, brown acid, and traf­fic jams.

                Even if only a por­tion of Elliot’s tall tale is true, it’s incred­i­ble that it has not been dra­ma­tized before now. In his ver­sion of events, an ordi­nary, meek kid becomes the acci­den­tal mid­wife of one of the biggest cul­tural events in mod­ern his­tory. Mix in most of the hot-button issues of the time — the hip­pie vs. square cul­ture clash, gay awak­en­ing, anti-semitism, the mafia, and fall­out from the Korean and Viet­nam Wars — and you end up with what should have been a richly defin­i­tive movie deal­ing with the era.

                Demetri Martin and Paul Dano in Taking WoodstockTrip­ping the light fan­tas­tic in the magic bus

                That Tiber’s account of the fes­ti­val is vig­or­ously dis­puted by almost every­one involved (and sober enough to recall events now) is beside the point. The story is a good one, but the film never seems to cap­ture the joy, anx­i­ety, or excite­ment of the moment. So what if it isn’t true? We already have a sup­pos­edly objec­tive doc­u­men­tary on the fes­ti­val (but more on that below).

                The biggest prob­lem is Demetri Mar­tin, who despite his suc­cess as a come­dian and con­trib­u­tor to The Daily Show, pos­sesses approx­i­mately as much star charisma as a plank. To be fair, his char­ac­ter is writ­ten to be repressed and buttoned-up, but the kid remains bor­ing even after what ought to have been a trans­for­ma­tive num­ber of enlight­en­ing expe­ri­ences, includ­ing his first gay kiss, first acid trip, and betrayal by his mother. Emile Hirsch appears in a small role as a psy­cho­log­i­cally scarred vet, and clearly would have been bet­ter in the lead role. Even Elliot’s par­ents are both more com­pelling char­ac­ters than he. His father’s (Henry Good­man) inter­ac­tions with the bur­geon­ing coun­ter­cul­ture awaken him from the vir­tual coma his life had become, and his mother (Imelda Staunton) is a self-destructive hoarder, which the film links to Holo­caust survivor’s guilt.

                Demetri Martin and Liev Schreiber in Taking WoodstockThat’s a man, baby!

                Lee’s visu­als are fairly straight­for­ward, mak­ing it rather jar­ring when split-screen sequences visu­ally allude to Michael Wedleigh’s doc­u­men­tary Wood­stock (1970). Tak­ing Wood­stock sup­ports Wedleigh’s the­sis that the mostly harm­less hip­pies that sought a week­end of peace and music instead found hos­tile locals and a com­bat­ive, con­de­scend­ing press. But other moments in Tak­ing Wood­stock serve to under­cut the orig­i­nal doc­u­men­tary, such as when Wedleigh is seen coach­ing a trio of nuns to flash the peace sign. If that iconic image was staged, what else might have been false or exag­ger­ated? Tak­ing Wood­stock may be a tall tale, but it also makes clear that Wedleigh’s film isn’t nec­es­sar­ily reli­able either.

                Tak­ing Wood­stock ends with orga­nizer Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff) about to mount another free con­cert fea­tur­ing the Rolling Stones. The Wood­stock fes­ti­val may have been chaotic, but it was suc­cess­ful inso­far that it proved peo­ple could gather in mas­sive num­bers and cel­e­brate pos­i­tively and peace­fully. Lang is ener­gized by what he achieved, but the mood is not so opti­mistic for those of us that know how it all turned out. The chaos and mur­der of the Alta­mount débâ­cle that marked the end of the Sum­mer of Love would be doc­u­mented by The Maysles Broth­ers in Gimme Shel­ter (read Matthew Dessem’s excel­lent take on the film at The Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion).

                Demetri Martin in Taking WoodstockOne of the most famous traf­fic jams in history

                Just as Tak­ing Wood­stock never quite takes off, Elliot never actu­ally makes it to the con­cert. The fact that we never see it, and barely even hear it, is part of the point. Many of the 400,000 atten­dees prob­a­bly never got any closer, either. And even those that did may have been too altered to recall much.

                Ran­dom observations:

                • There are puz­zling hints that Lang’s assis­tant Tisha (Mamie Gum­mer, Meryl Streep’s daugh­ter) is sig­nif­i­cant, but her char­ac­ter is ulti­mately super­flu­ous. The role is not sig­nif­i­cant enough to match the notable casting.
                • Like con­tem­po­raries Michael Win­ter­bot­tom and Danny Boyle, Ang Lee seems deter­mined to never make the same film twice. Seen in that light, Tak­ing Wood­stock is a refresh­ing break in tone from his grim, thor­oughly nonerotic Lust, Cau­tion.
                • Fur­ther, it’s also worth not­ing that Eliot’s homo­sex­ual awak­en­ing is much more suc­cess­ful and ful­fill­ing than that of the tor­tured cow­boys in Broke­back Mountain.

                Offi­cial movie site: www.takingwoodstockthemovie.com

                Buy the book, Blu-ray, or DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

                  Visualizing the Invisible: Bright Star

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                  Bright Star movie poster

                   

                  As an Eng­lish Major in another life, I’m not unin­ter­ested in poetry, or Keats in par­tic­u­lar. Movies about poetry are another mat­ter. It’s dif­fi­cult to imag­ine a less nat­ural source mate­r­ial for the emi­nently visual medium of cin­ema than poetry. You can mute the sound, drain the color, or take off the 3D spec­ta­cles, but the one thing you can’t sub­tract from movies is the mov­ing picture.

                  Other film­mak­ers have tried to visu­al­ize essen­tially invis­i­ble things before: scents (Per­fume), aca­d­e­mic research (The Da Vinci Code), and math (A Beau­ti­ful Mind, Pi). The hand­ful of movies about writ­ing (Capote, Fac­to­tum, Henry & June, Won­der Boys) are nearly out­num­bered by movies about not writ­ing (Shake­speare in Love, Bar­ton Fink, Adap­ta­tion, The Shining).

                  Abbie Cornish in Jane Campion's Bright Star“Bright star, would I were stead­fast as thou art”

                  When it comes to poetry, the most inter­nal and abstract form of writ­ing, it’s slightly dis­ap­point­ing that the most writer/director Jane Cam­pion makes of it is to have her char­ac­ters read verse aloud. How­ever lus­cious the cin­e­matog­ra­phy, it doesn’t help that the his­tor­i­cal Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cor­nish) and John Keats (Ben Whishaw) weren’t all that inter­est­ing as dra­matic char­ac­ters. The for­mer is a lovestruck obses­sive and the lat­ter a sickly artiste not meant for this mun­dane world. It’s the stan­dard biopic cliché: the insuf­fer­able wun­derkind and the suf­fer­ing woman that loves him any­way. At least, in this case, Keats wasn’t an addict (q.v.: Fac­to­tum, Bird, Ray, Walk the Line, Walk Hard, etc.).

                  Fanny reads Keats’ son­net about her “Bright star, would I were stead­fast as thou art” at the close of the film. She lived to wit­ness his posthu­mous recog­ni­tion, and never stopped mourn­ing him.

                  Offi­cial movie site: www.brightstar-movie.com

                  Buy the Blu-ray or DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

                    The Therapist Experience: The Girlfriend Experience

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                    The Girlfriend Experience movie poster

                     

                    Steven Soderbergh’s The Girl­friend Expe­ri­ence is a low-fi, par­tially impro­vised pro­duc­tion loosely asso­ci­ated with his peri­odic palate-cleansing exper­i­ments includ­ing Schizopo­lis, Full Frontal, K Street, and Bub­ble. Work­ing with real loca­tions and rel­a­tively cheap cam­eras, this class of thrifty pro­duc­tions allows Soder­bergh a rapid turn­around from con­cep­tion to fin­ished prod­uct. In the case of Schizopo­lis, the lower price tag allot­ted a cer­tain amount of cre­ative free­dom for uncom­fort­able auto­bi­og­ra­phy. But Soder­bergh is also able to bring time­lier sub­ject mat­ter to the­aters more quickly than most fea­ture films can man­age, delayed as they are by the mon­u­men­tal amount of fund­ing and team effort it takes to make and mar­ket one. Even the music is eco­nom­i­cal — most of it diegetic, per­formed onscreen by street buskers, but also incor­po­rat­ing a cool score by Ross Godfrey.

                    The Great Reces­sion and Bush’s Octo­ber 2008 bank bailout hang over every­thing. Soder­bergh beat other films fea­tur­ing char­ac­ters beset by unem­ploy­ment and poverty, includ­ing Wendy & Lucy, Frozen River, and espe­cially Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. The sex trade is just a tit­il­lat­ing hook for the greater theme of com­merce itself, and the way free­lance indi­vid­u­als mar­ket them­selves in order to make a liv­ing. The high-class escort Chris­tine (Sasha Grey) is noth­ing more than a small busi­ness owner, a hooker Joe the Plumber.

                    Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend ExperienceHigh-class escort Chris­tine (Sasha Grey) is a hooker Joe the Plumber

                    Ter­mi­nol­ogy is very impor­tant. “Call girl” is allowed, but “pros­ti­tute” is most cer­tainly never used. The phrase “the girl­friend expe­ri­ence” is pro­fes­sional lingo used by call girls to describe ser­vice that goes beyond mere sex. The movie depicts very lit­tle nudity or sex, and we’re thank­fully spared a humil­i­at­ing expe­ri­ence in which she trades sex for a pos­i­tive online review from a scum­bag (Glenn Kenny) who has granted him­self the power to destroy or boost escorts’ careers.

                    The film opens with an image of a mod­ern work of art hang­ing on a gallery wall, com­prised largely of dull, flat­tened, reflec­tive metal — just like Chris­tine her­self. Whether Grey’s blank per­for­mance is delib­er­ate choice or an expres­sion of her lim­ited act­ing abil­i­ties, it fits the char­ac­ter. While Chris­tine is a savvy busi­ness­woman con­cerned with self-promotion and max­i­miz­ing her income, her busi­ness is entirely in the ful­fill­ment of oth­ers’ wishes, up to a point, for a fee. She has goals and desires, but tellingly, Chris­tine defers even her din­ner orders to men. The only thing that seems to arouse her is Per­son­ol­ogy, a Scientology-esque vari­a­tion of new age hokum astrol­ogy that she uses to guide both per­sonal and pro­fes­sional deci­sions. It seems a big­ger haz­ard to her hap­pi­ness and suc­cess than her profession.

                    The eco­nomic cli­mate may be bad, but Chris­tine and her boyfriend live in a swanky apart­ment adorned with their art col­lec­tion. Her clients are mostly financiers, liv­ing luxe lifestyles but made anx­ious by the finan­cial calamity to the point of impo­tence. They vent their panic to her while she patiently lis­tens and asks soft­ball ques­tions. She always makes a point to ask her clients how their wives and chil­dren are doing; not to shame them, but out of a kind of polite deco­rum that some­how val­i­dates what they are doing with her. She has vari­a­tions of the same staid con­ver­sa­tion with her own boyfriend: “It’s good to see you too. How was your day?” Some­times her clients are so worked up they don’t even want sex, just some­one to lis­ten. So what she pro­vides might some­times be bet­ter described as The Ther­a­pist Expe­ri­ence. In the unex­pect­edly touch­ing final scene, she meets a favorite client in less glam­orous cir­cum­stances than we’ve seen before, and ful­fills his needs with a ten­der­ness she hasn’t pre­vi­ously demon­strated, even for her own lover.

                    Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend ExperienceChris­tine (Sasha Grey) pro­vides The Ther­a­pist Expe­ri­ence… for a price

                    The story is told through mul­ti­ple lay­ers of nar­ra­tion. Chris­tine keeps a func­tion­ally dry jour­nal of her appoint­ments, keep­ing track of her var­i­ous ersatz rela­tion­ships, the brands of cloth­ing she wore (down to the lin­gerie), where they dined, what movie they saw, whether or not they had sex. In a sec­ond layer of nar­ra­tion, a jour­nal­ist inter­views her for an piece he’s writ­ing on call girls. He finds her inter­est­ing in that she’s the only escort he has met that is in a seri­ous rela­tion­ship. The issue is raised as if it were the key ques­tion of the movie, but the theme falls by the way­side to make way for exam­i­na­tions of the ways that peo­ple sell them­selves in a dif­fi­cult eco­nomic climate.

                    Her boyfriend Chris (Chris San­tos) is a phys­i­cal trainer, another pro­fes­sion that val­ues youth and physique. While Chris­tine tries to expand her escort busi­ness by com­mis­sion­ing a web­site, and solic­it­ing reviews on seedy inter­net mes­sage boards. All the while she hopes to remain anony­mous so she can even­tu­ally finance and launch a legit­i­mate bou­tique. Mean­while, her boyfriend is simul­ta­ne­ously try­ing to expand his own busi­ness. Like Chris­tine, he is his own boss while work­ing in an estab­lished sys­tem that resists free agents. His most suc­cess­ful tac­tic to upgrade his clients into longer, more lucra­tive com­mit­ments is to insin­cerely cast their work together as a rela­tion­ship, a bit of psy­cho­log­i­cal manip­u­la­tion he per­haps learned from his girlfriend.

                    Like Soderbergh’s Bub­ble and K Street, some of the cast are non-actors. But Grey is one step removed from an ama­teur, being in fact a pro­fes­sional porn star. She is likely one of the few to ever fall up, as it were, from pornog­ra­phy to a legit­i­mate film career. She doesn’t seem to have extra­or­di­nary act­ing skills (which is good, for her char­ac­ter is dis­tant and chilly by design), nor does she have an espe­cially expres­sive face or voice. But she is remark­ably pretty, petite, and blessed with a lovely fig­ure seem­ingly unmo­lested by sil­i­cone. But why look to the world of porn to cast a pros­ti­tute? To put it bluntly, it’s ille­gal in most states for one per­son to get paid to pro­vide sex, but it is legal to get paid to have sex on cam­era. Did Soder­bergh imag­ine a real porn star would have spe­cial insight into the char­ac­ter of a pros­ti­tute? Per­haps he saw par­al­lels in Grey mar­kets her­self as a brand in the adult enter­tain­ment world.

                    Offi­cial movie site: www.girlfriendexperiencefilm.com

                    Buy the Blu-ray or DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.