Tag Archives: Edward Norton

Pride and Glory

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Pride and Glory movie poster

 

Pride and Glory was one of the last New Line Cin­ema pro­duc­tions made while still a semi-autonomous com­pany, before being evis­cer­ated by par­ent com­pany Warner Bros. in 2008. For the mor­bidly curi­ous, Van­ity Fair recently related the sad tale in its lat­est Hol­ly­wood issue. Dis­claimer: I worked for New Line Cin­ema through its end times, but had absolutely noth­ing to do with actu­ally mak­ing or mar­ket­ing its movies, and nobody there cared what rank-and-file employ­ees thought about the artis­tic merit of their prod­uct anyway.

For still undis­closed rea­sons, Pride and Glory was com­pleted in 2006, but sat on the shelf for almost two years. Direc­tor Gavin O’Connor (Tum­ble­weeds) pub­licly blamed New Line (and co-head Bob Shaye in par­tic­u­lar) for bury­ing his movie. Stars Edward Nor­ton and Colin Far­rel also spoke out about it in the press, clearly dis­ap­pointed but yet more under­stand­ing (per­haps these sea­soned actors were more jaded, and unsur­prised by stu­dio machi­na­tions). New Line coun­tered that the slid­ing release date was intended to avoid the lead actors’ com­pet­ing projects from dif­fer­ent stu­dios. It was even­tu­ally sched­uled for March 2008, but not actu­ally released until late 2008.

Colin Farrel and Ed Norton in Pride and GloryColin’s a bent copper

This atten­tion helped it become a minor cause célèbre among online movie afi­ciona­dos that couldn’t resist the bait: a scan­dalous tale of a sup­pressed mas­ter­piece. But the sad truth is that Pride and Glory is a god-awful, depress­ing, point­less mess of a movie. Actu­ally, that’s not fair; it’s not poorly made from a tech­ni­cal stand­point. Not to go out of my way to defend the stu­dio, but it now seems likely there was no actual con­spir­acy to bury a mis­un­der­stood mas­ter­piece. Per­haps New Line sim­ply couldn’t slot the film into its slate, fig­ure out how to mar­ket it, or was forced to shunt some projects aside dur­ing the stress of the immi­nent destruc­tion of the entire com­pany. Or maybe even, most unlikely of all, New Line had the sense to real­ize Pride and Glory just wasn’t a very good movie.

Also con­tribut­ing to the aura of con­tro­versy was the bun­gled film­ing of a police funeral scene at the actual cer­e­mony for New York City offi­cer Eric Her­nan­dez, acci­den­tally killed by friendly fire in 2006. The pro­duc­tion report­edly promised the fam­ily they would be respect­ful and stay out of their way, but reneged and clum­sily intruded on the sen­si­tive affair. Hav­ing seen the com­pleted scene, I don’t see any rea­son why it couldn’t have been effec­tively staged with a com­ple­ment of extras in full dress uniform.

Pride and Glory was writ­ten by broth­ers Gavin and Gre­gory O’Connor. As the sons of a police offi­cer, they had unusual access to the New York Police Depart­ment. If their film is sup­posed to be a trib­ute to hon­est cops, its cor­rup­tion plot must feel like a slap in the face. The movie’s fic­tional cor­rupt cops are wholly, utterly evil, with no gra­da­tions of char­ac­ter or moti­va­tion. Jimmy Egan (Far­rel) and a clutch of fel­low cops have been skim­ming money off drug busts for years, and have grad­u­ated to mur­der and sell­ing drugs them­selves. Egan’s brother-in-law Ray Tier­ney (Nor­ton) finds him­self in a posi­tion where he could turn Egan in. Com­pli­cat­ing mat­ters, Tierney’s pop Fran­cis Sr. (John Voight) and brother Fran­cis Jr. (Noah Emmerich, brother to New Line exec­u­tive Toby Emmerich, and type­cast as a cop after his role in Lit­tle Chil­dren) are also in the force. Fran­cis Jr. also knows about the cor­rup­tion, but doesn’t have the courage to man up. If Ray does the right thing, it will not only tear up his fam­ily but the New York Police Depart­ment itself. But events con­spire such that the good guys don’t have to act; three crooked cops self-destruct of their own accord, and the story reveals itself to the press. Jimmy and Ray are freed to set­tle their per­sonal griev­ances as two stereo­typ­i­cal movie Irish cops ought: fisticuffs in a pub.

John Voight in Pride and GloryCheese it, it’s the fuzz!

I sus­pect O’Connor had pre­ten­sions to mak­ing another L.A. Con­fi­den­tial, but his result doesn’t mea­sure up to the stan­dards of such a supe­rior film noir. Note the super­fi­cial resem­blances: police cor­rup­tion, drugs, fam­ily pride. Pride and Glory’s plot only seems com­plex, but is actu­ally stupid-simple. Expo­si­tion scenes basi­cally lay out the plot quite early, drain­ing any sense of mys­tery or sus­pense. The dia­logue is pep­pered with a tor­rent of names that are chal­leng­ing for the audi­ence to con­nect with faces, a tech­nique that pro­vides only a super­fi­cial com­plex­ity to a sim­ple plot.

The tone is absurdly grim and totally humor­less, and devoid of any human emo­tion beyond Ray’s grim sense of duty. The clas­sic film noir ele­ment most notably lack­ing in this boy’s club pro­duc­tion is any hint of women or sex. What few women there are in the cast barely fig­ure into the plot. The most sig­nif­i­cant female char­ac­ter is cancer-stricken Abby (Jen­nifer Ehle), whose sole pur­pose in the plot seems to be to human­ize hus­band Fran­cis Jr. Pride and Glory utterly lacks the sense of verisimil­i­tude of the tele­vi­sion series The Wire, sim­i­larly set in the worlds of inner city drug and police cul­tures. Now is as good a time as any to state that The Dork Report does not apol­o­gize for tak­ing advan­tage of any oppor­tu­nity what­so­ever to evan­ge­lize The Wire.

The set­ting is a ver­sion of New York City that may or may not actu­ally exist. In fact, there’s an unusual dis­claimer before the end cred­its stat­ing its char­ac­ters and events are totally fic­tional. Obvi­ously, if there was an actual case of such mas­sive cor­rup­tion in the NYPD, we’d have heard about it. After the cred­its, there’s yet another dis­claimer I’ve never seen before, stat­ing that no one con­nected with the pro­duc­tion took any money to pro­mote the use of tobacco prod­ucts. This Dork Reporter don’t smoke, and never has, but is offended by the notion that movies are influ­en­tial in this way. Granted, movies are a pow­er­ful art­form, and can affect people’s hearts and minds. The ills of soci­ety are real prob­lems that require com­plex solu­tions, but cen­sor­ing movies is not one of them. It’s a cheap and easy way for right­eous fools to believe they are com­bat­ing a prob­lem. Where’s the cor­re­spond­ing worry that lit­tle kids will watch this movie and be inspired to grow up to be cor­rupt cops?

Offi­cial movie site: www.prideandglorymovie.com

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

Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven

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Ridley Scott

Kingdom of Heaven movie poster

 

Rid­ley Scott’s video intro­duc­tion to the Director’s Cut of King­dom of Heaven claims it is more than a merely extended ver­sion of the film. The Director’s Cut rep­re­sents his inten­tions, and is “the best ver­sion” of the film. The most sig­nif­i­cant restora­tion he sin­gles out is a sub­plot involv­ing Princess Sibylla’s son. This ver­sion is long, yes, but always engross­ing and inter­est­ing. It’s incred­i­ble that this much mate­r­ial was shot for one movie. It must have been clear from the length of the script that much of it was going to have be cut, but the expense and ded­i­ca­tion was there to shoot more than was needed in order to be able to shape the story later in the edit­ing room. I might have lost my patience with a three-and-a-half hour long movie in the the­ater, but it’s per­fect for home viewing.

Eva Green in Kingdom of HeavenGal­lic God­dess Eva Green

King­dom of Heaven opens in France in 1184. At the time, Jews, Chris­tians, and Mus­lims were shar­ing Jerusalem not quite in peace, but in rel­a­tive sta­bil­ity. The wise King Bald­win IV and the cyn­i­cal but basi­cally decent Tiberias (Jeremy Irons) are barely pre­serv­ing the frag­ile stale­mate. By and large, Mus­lim char­ac­ters are pre­sented as more sane and civ­i­lized than the Chris­tians. Inter­est­ingly, Jews are men­tioned but are absent from the pro­ceed­ings — evi­dently to this Dork Reporter unschooled in the rel­e­vant his­tory, they had lit­tle polit­i­cal power at the time. Indeed, Chris­t­ian holy men come across the worst of all. Early in the film, a preacher in a ram­shackle Euro­pean lay­over camp along the route to the Holy Land pro­claims to prospec­tive Cru­saders that “To kill an infi­del, the Pope has said, is not mur­der. It is the path to heaven.” Later, as the Chris­t­ian army is about to be over­run by the Mus­lim army, one priest advises every­one to “Con­vert to Islam. Repent later.”

Balian de Ibelin (Orlando Bloom) is a wid­owed French black­smith swept up in vast his­tor­i­cal events. Bloom’s per­for­mance as the real-life his­tor­i­cal fig­ure isn’t bad, exactly, but he’s deadly dull. He is cer­tainly earnest and hand­some, but with­out the sym­pa­thetic star­power of a true lead­ing man. Balian is a largely pas­sive man caught up in key moments of his­tory by the arbi­trary whims of birth and luck, not unlike For­rest Gump. A plot not dri­ven by the actions of the pro­tag­o­nist could be seen as a sign of bad screen­writ­ing, but I’m pre­pared to accept the basic arc if it means it can hold such an inter­est­ing core con­cept together.

Orlando Bloom and Liam Neeson in Kingdom of HeavenLiam Nee­son teaches his young padawan Orlando Bloom the ways of the Force

Balian dis­cov­ers he is the ille­git­i­mate son to the Knight of Jerusalem God­frey de Ibelin (Liam Nee­son). He inher­its the man­tle and is launched on a jour­ney that makes him a knight, friend and coun­selor to the wise King Bald­win (Edward Nor­ton), lover of his beau­ti­ful sis­ter Princess Sibylla (Eva Green), and leader of the doomed defense of Jerusalem. But what’s most implau­si­ble is his sud­den emer­gence as a mas­ter swords­man, mil­i­tary strate­gist, archi­tect of fortresses, civil engi­neer of irri­ga­tion sys­tems, and hon­or­able lord who treats his sub­jects fairly. True, he is estab­lished early on as an “enginer” who despairs have hav­ing fought in mean­ing­less con­flicts and designed war machines for the slaugh­ter of inno­cents. But it is absurd for this largely une­d­u­cated man to wield such knowl­edge and wisdom.

More­over, Balian arguably causes more harm than good. His pride in being a good knight (as per his father’s dying instruc­tion) leads to the slaugh­ter of an entire army and to an evil man becom­ing king of Jerusalem. His piety doesn’t stop him from sleep­ing with a mar­ried princess, but he later hyp­o­crit­i­cally decides sleep­ing with her is no longer morally accept­able when her hus­band Guy of Lusig­nan (Mar­ton Csokas) becomes king. And what kind of man would kick Eva Green out of bed?

Eva Green in Kingdom of HeavenThis review can’t have enough pic­tures of Eva Green

The vil­lain­ous Guy is car­toon­ishly fey and sneer­ing, and prob­a­bly not coin­ci­den­tally the most obvi­ously French of all the char­ac­ters (per­haps for the best, few other cast mem­bers attempt to affect French accents). It is sug­gested that he knows his son has lep­rosy, and cal­lously banks on him dying and thus allow­ing him to be king. But what exactly does he want? If power, he gets it. So why then spark a holy war? The film­mak­ers’ inten­tions may have been to draw an ana­log to Bush’s mis­ad­ven­tures in the Mid­dle East, but Guy doesn’t seem to be the pious sort who believes it is his duty as a Chris­t­ian to purge the Holy Land of infi­del Muslims.

Spe­cial men­tion must go to Edward Nor­ton, excel­lent as King Bald­win IV, whose advanced lep­rosy left him a face­less man in an iron mask. I don’t mean this praise as a back­handed slight to Nor­ton; he expertly con­veys intel­li­gence and wis­dom through his voice and body lan­guage alone.

Edward Norton in Kingdom of HeavenEdward Nor­ton as the orig­i­nal man in the iron mask

Inter­est­ingly for a Hol­ly­wood epic, King­dom of Heaven actu­ally fea­tures very few of the grand bat­tles usu­ally required for the genre. The tension-and-release struc­ture of William Monahan’s screen­play is almost musi­cal. After a long buildup, the first con­flict is cur­tailed before it begins. King Bald­win can­nily nego­ti­ates for peace by per­son­ally show­ing up despite his advanced (and known to the enemy) ill­ness; also, his rep­u­ta­tion as in intel­li­gent man pre­cedes him. The sec­ond bat­tle hap­pens mostly off-screen. Finally, very late in the film, we see the spec­tac­u­lar defense of Jerusalem against the Mus­lim army. Other direc­tors might not have been able to resist wow­ing us with spec­tac­u­lar bat­tles for so long, but Scott and Monahan’s inter­ests are admirably else­where: in the characters.

On release in 2005, King­dom of Heaven was lumped in with Wolf­gang Petersen’s Troy, only inso­far as they were both his­tor­i­cal epics. It’s a dou­bly unfair com­par­i­son in that Troy, a far infe­rior film, is set hun­dreds of years ear­lier and based on a work of lit­er­a­ture. King­dom of Heaven was inter­preted as a direct com­men­tary on US incur­sions in the Mid­dle East, not least because one of George W. Bush’s most breath­tak­ing gaffes (in a pres­i­dency full of them) was to cast his war on ter­ror as a “cru­sade.” If he ever screens King­dom of Heaven, per­haps he will gain a lit­tle per­spec­tive and be inspired to read up on the long, com­pli­cated three-way reli­gious con­flict in The Mid­dle East.

Offi­cial movie site: www.kingdomofheavendvd.com

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

 

The Incredible Hulk

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The Incredible Hulk

 

The Incred­i­ble Hulk is Hollywood’s lat­est inci­dence of what has become known as a “reboot.” The term, I believe was orig­i­nally coined in the comic book world, with fur­ther deriva­tions in com­puter ter­mi­nol­ogy. When a fran­chise begins to show its age with stalled cre­ative energy and declin­ing sales, its own­ers may opt to check it into surgery to be refreshed with a new cast, cre­ative team, and updated plot par­tic­u­lars. Warner Bros. and DC Comics kick-started their valu­able but stag­nant Bat­man and Super­man fea­ture film prop­er­ties, mak­ing them rel­e­vant to 21st cen­tury audi­ences, and now it’s Mar­vel Comics’ turn. Embold­ened by recent suc­cesses with Spider-Man and The Fan­tas­tic Four (and con­ve­niently ignor­ing the fail­ures Dare­devil and Elek­tra), Mar­vel has obtained fund­ing to inde­pen­dently pro­duce its own films with greater cre­ative con­trol and, pre­sum­ably, a larger chunk of the finan­cial return. The mas­sive suc­cess of 2008’s Iron Man seemed to prove their instincts correct.

Remark­ably, The Incred­i­ble Hulk comes only five years after Ang Lee and James Schamus’ Hulk, itself a reboot of the comic book, car­toon, and tele­vi­sion series. Even before Mar­vel announced it was to start over from scratch, the orig­i­nal Hulk film had already been seen as a crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial fail­ure, even though the reviews were not actu­ally ter­ri­ble (54 on Meta­Critic and 61 on Rot­ten Toma­toes, both about the same as what The Incred­i­ble Hulk scored) and it earned $245 mil­lion worldwide.

The Incredible HulkNORTON SMASH!!!

This Dork Reporter fully real­izes his is the minor­ity opin­ion, but the Lee/Schamus ver­sion is a far, far bet­ter film, not only in com­par­i­son with its suc­ces­sor but also on its own terms. To para­phrase a review I recall read­ing at the time, “only the direc­tor of Eat Drink Man Woman and Sense & Sen­si­bil­ity would look at ‘The Hulk’ and see ‘sprawl­ing fam­ily melo­drama.’” Lee and Schamus saw the core story as more than a sim­ple Strange Case of Dr. Jeck­yll & Mr. Hyde retread, and instead chose to tell a deeper tale of fathers and sons. The Hulk him­self was cre­ated using motion-capture tech­nol­ogy using Ang Lee’s own body lan­guage, and real­ized on screen as a giant green petu­lant baby (which is both absurdly funny and oddly mov­ing, like the orig­i­nal King Kong). I still main­tain it is one of the most bril­liantly edited films I’ve ever seen, the clos­est in flow and visual style to a comic book a film has ever come. It’s also just really fuck­ing weird, in a good way.

With Mar­vel in total charge of its own intel­lec­tual prop­erty at last, The Incred­i­ble Hulk had low artis­tic ambi­tions and was unsur­pris­ingly crafted with comic book geeks in mind. In harsh con­trast with art­house main­stays Lee and Schamus, it was directed by action film spe­cial­ist Louis Leter­rier (of Trans­porter 2 and Danny the Dog) and writ­ten by Zak Penn, who has appar­ently cor­nered the mar­ket on super-hero scripts (includ­ing X-Men 2 & 3, Elek­tra, and the upcom­ing Avengers and Cap­tain Amer­ica). The backwards-facing film gives the fan­boys a nod with admit­tedly fun cameos from Lou Fer­rigno (who also voiced The Hulk’s few lines, and who also seems not to have aged one bit) and orig­i­nal Hulk co-creator (with Jack Kirby) Stan Lee. But the CG is sur­pris­ingly uncon­vinc­ing for a film that should have been state-of-the-art; the Hulk looks like he’s made of string cheese and quiv­er­ing gelatin.

The Incredible HulkIt’s show­time at The Apollo

Truth be told, I was actu­ally rather enjoy­ing the film, until one nig­gling fault grew to an unig­nor­able degree that ruined the entire expe­ri­ence for me. Key char­ac­ter Emil Blon­sky (Tim Roth) remains trag­i­cally under­de­vel­oped. Any screen­writ­ing stu­dent (hell, any film fan) should know the sto­ry­telling mantra “show don’t tell,” and yet Blonsky’s moti­va­tions are only hinted at in one or two lines of dia­logue: he’s a career sol­dier grumpy about turn­ing forty. Blon­sky even­tu­ally evolves into the Hulk’s neme­sis The Abom­i­na­tion, a hideous beast that lives to destroy. As the two crea­tures smash Harlem to bits in the final reel, there was no sense that the Abom­i­na­tion was once a man. What drove him to this? Inter­est­ingly, Roth plays a not entirely dis­sim­i­lar char­ac­ter in Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Youth With­out Youth: a man who uses up his youth in pur­suit of an unat­tain­able goal. In each case, the oppor­tu­nity for a sec­ond chance is a mixed blessing.

Rumor has it an alter­nate, sig­nif­i­cantly longer cut of the film will even­tu­ally be released on DVD, pre­serv­ing more of Edward Norton’s reported script doc­tor­ing, so this Dork Reporter hopes he will be able to revise his opin­ion at a later date.

Must read: Peter Bradshaw’s review of The Incred­i­ble Hulk as told to him by… The Hulk (spot­ted on Kottke.org)

Offi­cial movie site: www.theincrediblehulk.net

The Illusionist

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The Illusionist

 

The Illu­sion­ist per­haps suf­fers from being released in prox­im­ity to The Pres­tige, a far supe­rior period piece shar­ing the use of magic as a sto­ry­telling con­ceit. How­ever, The Illu­sion­ist has two strong assets to point out:

  • The cin­e­matog­ra­phy is truly beau­ti­ful, com­prised of sepia images (seem­lingly pro­jected by oil lamp) and old-school iris out tran­si­tions. These are no doubt dig­i­tal approx­i­ma­tions of the real thing, but lovely (and less dis­tract­ing than it sounds) nonethe­less. In a brief moment of meta-commentary, the solu­tion to a magic trick is decon­structed on screen as involv­ing an early movie camera.
  • As if Paul Gia­matti still needed to prove any­thing after his recent run of top-shelf per­for­mances, he is extra­or­di­nary here; not merely con­tent to affect a real­is­tic Vien­nese accent, he trans­forms the entire tim­bre of his voice.