Tag Archives: fantasy

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

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

 

Coraline

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Coraline movie poster

 

I saw Cora­line on its open­ing day in my favorite movie the­ater, the best pos­si­ble venue to see any remotely visu­ally ambi­tious movie: the Clearview Ziegfeld in New York City. Fit­tingly, my tick­ets were mis­printed “Car­o­line,” a mis­nomer that is a recur­ring plot point.

Cora­line was writ­ten and directed by stop-motion ani­ma­tion genius Henry Selick, whose patient and pre­cise hands also cre­ated the utterly mad plea­sure The Night­mare Before Christ­mas (often erro­neously cred­ited to Tim Bur­ton, who pro­duced). As if Cora­line needed any finer pedi­gree, it was based on the fine novella by Neil Gaiman. Gaiman is a long­time Dork Report favorite, at least since my buy­ing the very first issue of The Sand­man new off the rack in 1989 (read my account of hav­ing books signed by Gaiman and Ray Brad­bury). Cora­line and his later The Grave­yard Book are both osten­si­bly aimed at “young adults,” which I guess means whomever is old enough to under­stand most of the words. Such a cat­e­go­riza­tion is more about mar­ket­ing and the con­ve­nience of know­ing where to shelve titles in book­stores and libraries, any­way. As is also the case with his chil­drens’ books The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Gold­fish and The Wolves in the Walls (both illus­trated by fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor Dave McK­ean), they’re all basi­cally for any­one that likes to read.

Dakota Fanning in CoralineCora­line tra­verses the por­tal into John Malkovich’s brain

Gaiman, once famous for pos­si­bly hav­ing the record for most unpro­duced projects in Hol­ly­wood, has been tear­ing up the movie biz of late. Just to name a few high­lights, he wrote the script for McKean’s sump­tu­ous film Mir­ror­mask (read The Dork Report review), had his fan­tasy novel Star­dust (orig­i­nally illus­trated by Charles Vess) adapted into a film by Matthew Vaughn, and co-wrote the bril­liant script for Robert Zemekis’ Beowulf with Roger Avery. As is his cus­tom now for all his pend­ing projects, Gaiman has been blog­ging and Tweet­ing about the Cora­line adap­ta­tion all along, a process rudely inter­rupted by his win­ning the New­bury Medal for The Grave­yard Book. His man­tle is now offi­cially groan­ing under the weight of all his tro­phies, medals, Very Impor­tant Prizes, and suchlike.

Gaiman was not directly involved with the mak­ing of Cora­line (beyond being on good terms with the film­mak­ers and mak­ing the occa­sional con­sul­ta­tion), but was pleased the fin­ished prod­uct and espe­cially with how well it was mar­keted by Weiden+Kennedy. Fre­quent read­ers of his blog will be famil­iar with how he blames Stardust’s rel­a­tively dis­ap­point­ing box office (in the US, any­way) with a mar­ket­ing cam­paign that mis­rep­re­sented what the film was actu­ally like (the pre­cise anal­ogy he used went some­thing like “more Princess Bride, less Ella Enchanted”). But I feel that this kind of height­ened level of com­mu­ni­ca­tion between artist and audi­ence made pos­si­ble by the inter­net might some­times be too much infor­ma­tion. Close to the release of Star­dust, I recall Gaiman urg­ing read­ers to see the film on open­ing week­end or even open­ing day if at all pos­si­ble, the nar­row win­dow that in today’s movie indus­try deter­mines the per­cep­tion of suc­cess or fail­ure. This time around, he made a point of men­tion­ing that Coraline’s pro­duc­tion com­pany Laika had basi­cally bet the entire farm on the film. I have been work­ing for movie com­pa­nies for years and am famil­iar with per­pet­ual job inse­cu­rity. I was happy to go see the film right away any­way, but I would have rather not wor­ried about whether or not I was pro­tect­ing someone’s job. Thank­fully, Cora­line appears to have per­formed above expec­ta­tions on its open­ing week­end, and all is well.

John Hodgman in CoralineThe Other Father gives us our 3D money’s worth

Apolo­gies for the ram­bling pre­am­ble. On to the movie: Cora­line (voiced by Dakota Fan­ning) and her fam­ily move into the ground-floor apart­ment of a crum­bling rural house. Her par­ents are busy gar­den­ing writ­ers with­out the time to actu­ally gar­den, let alone to pay much atten­tion to their only child. Coraline’s biggest prob­lem is that she’s unhappy at being so often left alone. I sus­pect that most over­pro­tected kids whose par­ents take them to see this movie will have trou­ble iden­ti­fy­ing with a kid who has too much freedom.

The res­i­dents of the neigh­bor­ing apart­ments are at least as eccen­tric as those of The Sandman’s The Doll’s House. Russ­ian acro­bat Mr. Bobin­sky (Ian McShane), may or may not be train­ing roden­tia to take part in a Mouse Cir­cus. Cora­line gets off on the wrong foot with unloved odd­ball Wybie (Robert Baily, Jr.), who takes his name from “Why be born.” British com­edy duo Dawn French and Jen­nifer Saun­ders appear as Misses Spink & Forcible (two Gaiman-esque names if there ever were any), a pair of well-aged actresses liv­ing in the basement.

Cora­line dis­cov­ers a long-forgotten door­way hid­den behind fur­ni­ture and lay­ers of wall­pa­per. Not unlike the very sim­i­larly diminu­tive door in Being John Malkovich, it is a gate­way to another world. Whereas the por­tal to Malkovich’s brain resem­bled the gross inside of a diges­tive tract, this one is part cob­webby cave and part glow­ing fun­house tun­nel. On the other end of the door is another, bet­ter ver­sion of Coraline’s milieu. In the real world, no one gets Coraline’s name right, but in the Other World, every­one knows her. She is well fed, the gar­den is a lux­u­ri­ous Eden sculpted in her image, her bed is made, and her toys are new. But alas, her Other Mother (Teri Hatcher) has con­structed this entic­ing sim­u­lacrum just to ensnare her. Cora­line is about to aban­don the real world for this cod­dled exis­tence, when she is given the price: she must sew but­tons over her eyes. This is point in the film when adults squirm and kids squeal with delight. Creepy, creepy, creepy!

Teri Hatcher and Dakota Fanning in CoralineThe Other Mother serves Other Omelettes for breakfast

Roughly the first three-quarters of the film is genius-level set­ting of tone, char­ac­ter, and atmos­phere. It fal­ters only when a rigid plot struc­ture appears out of nowhere and forces the nar­ra­tive onto fixed rails. Cat (Keith David), the only other crea­ture that can travel between worlds, tells Cora­line that the Other Mother likes games. This key char­ac­ter­is­tic would have been bet­ter shown than told, for Cora­line is able to turn the tables by sim­ply chal­leng­ing her to a game. The Other Mother imme­di­ately acqui­esces, and is appar­ently unable to resist a game in the same way that the mytho­log­i­cal Sphinx can’t resist a rid­dle (a plot point that also fig­ures in Mir­ror­mask). Coraline’s chal­lenge is equal parts game and bet: if she can find the five souls The Other Mother has trapped before her (her par­ents and three other chil­dren), she must release them all. Find­ing three hid­den objects hid­den in dif­fer­ent vir­tual worlds is a clas­sic video game sce­nario. Cora­line has no short­age of other MacGuffins to lose and recover, includ­ing a key and an Eye Stone (a mag­i­cal jewel for­tu­itously pro­vided by the actresses). Indeed, a tie-in videogame exists, which no doubt doesn’t have to stretch the story to struc­ture its own narrative.

Also dis­ap­point­ing are the three chil­dren the Other Mother has already cap­tured. Their trio of cutesy voices that com­pli­ment and encour­age Cora­line are the most con­ven­tional aspect of the film, not in keep­ing with the rest of the film’s enjoy­ably macabre tone. But actu­ally, maybe this all makes sense… the kids are def­i­nitely not as bright and spunky as her, for she alone has the brains to escape and defeat the creature.

Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders in CoralineThe com­edy stylings (and alarm­ingly large bosoms) of French & Saunders

Stop-motion ani­ma­tion is one of the old­est film­mak­ing tech­niques, but Laika (based in Port­land, Ore­gon) and Aard­man Ani­ma­tion (mak­ers of Wallce & Gromit and Chicken Run) are still mak­ing films more daz­zling than the most advanced CG. The rea­son is quite sim­ple: you’re look­ing at mov­ing pho­tographs of phys­i­cal objects crafted by human hands. Like Beowulf, Cora­line is being shown in many the­aters in 3D. If pos­si­ble, the tech­nol­ogy seems to have improved even since U23D (read The Dork Report review), let alone since the 1950s. But as ani­mated movies such as The Incred­i­bles (read The Dork Report review) and WALL-E (read The Dork Report review) have proved, all the tech­nol­ogy in the world must play sec­ond fid­dle to a good story.

Gaiman has been say­ing in inter­views lately that his books for kids are creepier than his nov­els for adults (includ­ing Amer­i­can Gods and Anansi Boys). In keep­ing, Cora­line the film is won­der­fully deranged, weird, and twisted. By far the eeri­est sequence is the open­ing cred­its, fea­tur­ing the hands of a crea­ture we later learn is the Other Mother, rit­u­ally dis­em­bow­el­ing a pup­pet and recon­fig­ur­ing into a sim­u­lacra of Cora­line. Watch­dog site Kids-In-Mind nearly goes into melt­down count­ing the dis­crete instances of vio­lence and dis­turb­ing imagery, and expect to read a great many reviews cau­tion­ing par­ents to keep sen­si­tive kids away. But I sus­pect most kids will love this film, and will prob­a­bly be bet­ter off for hav­ing their imag­i­na­tions poked and prod­ded in ways that safer pap wouldn’t. One of the rea­sons I love movies is to expe­ri­ence the mad visual imag­i­na­tions of direc­tors like Selick (and Bur­ton, McK­ean, Terry Gilliam, Michel Gondry, Tarsem, etc.), and it’s a good thing “kids’” movies like Cora­line are here to warp young­sters minds early.

Offi­cial movie site: www.coraline.com

The Fall

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The Fall movie poster

 

Tarsem Singh’s The Cell (2000) was one of the best-looking bad movies I’ve ever seen. It cer­tainly wasn’t helped by the pres­ence of Jen­nifer Lopez or the rou­tine ser­ial killer plot pos­si­bly meant to cap­i­tal­ize on the suc­cess of David Fincher’s Se7en (both hav­ing come from the same stu­dio, New Line Cin­ema). But it was trag­i­cally obvi­ous that Tarsem (as he is sim­ply known) was a wildly tal­ented visual styl­ist on a par with Terry Gilliam or Jean-Pierre Jeunet. So now, financed by his own money, in pro­duc­tion for over four years in 20 coun­tries, and pre­sented by Fincher and Spike Jonze, Tarsem gets a chance to tell one of his own sto­ries. He achieves a high level of spec­ta­cle with­out an osten­ta­tiously high bud­get. Apart from a scene in which tat­toos ink them­selves upon a man’s torso, there is lit­tle appar­ent CG. If there is any more, it’s good enough to be invis­i­ble. And one of the best sequences, a night­mar­ish surgery, is exe­cuted as stop motion ani­ma­tion like some­thing by The Broth­ers Quay.

Tarsem Singh The Fallinside the Grate­ful Dead t-shirt factory

The Fall opens in the after­math of a sur­real acci­dent: a horse is lifted by crane from a deep gully after hav­ing appar­ently fallen off a bridge. That we even­tu­ally learn that this strange scene is merely a Hol­ly­wood West­ern movie set does not lessen the enjoy­ably dream­like weird­ness of the imagery. The real theme of the movie is of the power of sto­ry­telling through the intense visu­al­iza­tion of movies, or even bet­ter, the imagination.

Amer­i­can stunt­man Roy (Lee Pace) recu­per­ates in a South­ern Cal­i­forn­ian hos­pi­tal. Alexan­dria (Cat­inca Untaru), a lit­tle girl mend­ing a bro­ken arm, attaches her­self to the bedrid­den mope. She had fallen from a tree while pick­ing fruit with her Indian immi­grant fam­ily in nearby orange groves, and now finds her­self alone in the strange hos­pi­tal, iso­lated not only by her age but also by the lan­guage bar­rier. She has never seen a movie and doesn’t really under­stand Roy’s job. But she is drawn to him, per­haps partly out of an inno­cent crush and partly out of her real­iza­tion he, like she, is unusu­ally imaginative.

Justine Waddell in The FallJus­tine Waddell’s fash­ions in The Fall will put your eye out

The slightly pudgy Untaru is a refresh­ing cast­ing choice for a child char­ac­ter, endear­ing but not cloy­ingly cute or espe­cially pre­co­cious. The phys­i­cally and emo­tion­ally trau­ma­tized Roy is bemused by her at first, and shortly finds him­self enter­tain­ing her with a seri­al­ized tale of epic derring-do. Roy’s fan­tas­tic adven­ture of the strug­gle between The Black Ban­dit against Gov­er­nor Odi­ous (Daniel Cal­t­a­girone) over the beau­ti­ful Eve­lyn (Jus­tine Wad­dell) becomes a movie-within-the-movie, visu­al­ized through the fil­ter of the girl’s mea­gre expe­ri­ences but rich imag­i­na­tion. When the Amer­i­can describes an “Indian,” she pic­tures a man from India, and his “squaw” is an Indian princess. She casts her ver­sion of the story with Roy and peo­ple from the hos­pi­tal. In the most Gilliam-esque image, the enemy knights resem­ble the hospital’s crudely armored X-Ray technicians.

Tarsem Singh The Fallour heroes wisely keep their distance

But it turns out Roy is a failed sui­cide case, heart­bro­ken over los­ing the love of a beau­ti­ful star­let. The acci­dent in the begin­ning of the film was his; both he and she are lit­er­ally fallen peo­ple. Like Gilliam’s The Adven­tures of Baron Mun­chausen (read The Dork Report review), the seem­ingly child-like tale he tells is shot through with dark under­cur­rents. Alexan­dria can just barely sense the pain embed­ded in the story, and is unequipped to truly grasp Roy’s deep anx­i­eties that love and life are doomed. Is he being cruel by telling her this story, or is he try­ing to teach her his grim life lessons?

The con­clu­sion has the feel of being tran­scen­dent and excit­ing, but lacks real punch. In a rapidly accel­er­at­ing crescendo of cut­ting and music, Roy and Alexan­dria heal (phys­i­cally and emo­tion­ally) and leave the hos­pi­tal. As she grows up, she imag­ines Roy exe­cut­ing every stunt in every movie she sees for the rest of her life. It’s incred­i­bly cal­lous of me as a viewer to sug­gest that the story might have taken such a turn, but just imag­ine the impact this sequence would have had if Roy had killed him­self after all… she would keep him alive for­ever in the movies in her head.

Offi­cial movie site: TheFallTheMovie.com/

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

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button movie poster

 

This Dork Reporter is slowly cool­ing on for­mer favorite David Fincher. His under­rated first fea­ture Alien3 is highly com­pro­mised, but eas­ily the next most the­mat­i­cally inter­est­ing entry in the Alien fran­chise (after, of course, Rid­ley Scott’s rich orig­i­nal). Se7en is one of the most gut-wrenchingly dis­turb­ing movies ever made, notable for hav­ing vir­tu­ally no vio­lence appear onscreen, despite its rep­u­ta­tion. Fight Club is per­haps the movie of the nineties, an eccen­tric blast of coun­ter­cul­tural fury. But almost every­thing that fol­lowed seemed a dis­ap­point­ment. The Game was wildly implau­si­ble with­out the pop and siz­zle that car­ried the sim­i­larly over-the-top Fight Club. Panic Room was an empty exer­cise in style, seem­ingly con­ceived solely for Fincher to exper­i­ment with new dig­i­tal tech­niques that would allow him to cre­ate impos­si­bly con­tin­u­ous cam­era moves through the walls and floors of a city brown­stone (and pos­si­bly also as another vehi­cle for star Jodie Foster’s per­sona as a sin­gle par­ent to be reck­oned with). Zodiac was highly praised both as a tight pro­ce­dural thriller and as a tour-de-force of still more bleeding-edge dig­i­tal spe­cial effects (so good that most view­ers wouldn’t sus­pect that many sequences were not tra­di­tion­ally shot in cam­era), but it did absolutely noth­ing for me. I’m won­der­ing if I missed some key aspect of it that would open it up to me — and that per­haps I should reap­praise it now that a director’s cut is avail­able on DVD.

Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonYou’re only as old as you feel

The advance mar­ket­ing for The Curi­ous Case of Ben­jamin But­ton excited me at first, but I was appre­hen­sive when I learned the screen­play (loosely based on a 1921 short story by F. Scott Fitzger­ald) was by Eric Roth, the writer of For­rest Gump. Indeed, it did turn out to be con­structed in a sim­i­lar vein and tone, even mim­ic­k­ing some of the corni­est devices of Gump: the famous dig­i­tal feather twirling in the wind has been replaced by an unlikely reap­pear­ing hum­ming­bird; Forrest’s mother’s apho­rism “life is like a box of choco­lates; you never know what you’re going to get” has its ana­log in the less mem­o­rable “you never know what’s com­ing for you”; even For­rest Gump’s parade of cameos by famous or infa­mous Amer­i­cans is here con­tin­ued with an appear­ance by Teddy Roo­sevelt. Against my will, this cutesi­ness did suc­ceed in draw­ing me in for most of its run­ning time. I was engrossed for much of it, but its leisurely three-hour run­ning time hon­estly strained my patience by about the two-hour mark.

Fincher and Roth relate the decades-long story via the fram­ing device of Benjamin’s (Brad Pitt) one true love Daisy (Cate Blanchett) on her deathbed, intro­duc­ing her adult daugh­ter Car­o­line (Julia Ormond) to her bio­log­i­cal father through a dra­matic read­ing of his diary, with gaps filled in from her own mem­ory. A soon-to-be infa­mous hur­ri­cane brews out­side the Louisiana hos­pi­tal room, shortly to erase much of Ben­jamin and Daisy’s milieu. The mul­ti­ple lay­ers of sto­ry­telling result is no less than three speak­ing voices to nar­rate the tale in voiceover. One fram­ing device too far?

Cate Blanchett in The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonCate Blanchett is a beau­ti­ful woman, but it’s eerie to see her appear to be in her 20s

The cen­tral con­ceit of the story is a fan­tas­ti­cally unfor­tu­nate dis­ease that afflicts one Ben­jamin But­ton. His body is born aged and decrepit, and ages back­wards while his mind matures nor­mally. As he aptly puts it when still a boy, he was “born old.” Tak­ing this story as any­thing other than a para­ble or fairy tale would be to miss the point, but the pho­to­re­al­is­tic spe­cial effects place the movie firmly in believ­able real­ity. So this viewer’s mind (when not dis­tracted by the high-tech visu­als) wan­dered into logis­tics. Some of the rules don’t seem to hold up: as a chrono­log­i­cal ado­les­cent, he man­i­fests the typ­i­cal sex­ual desires and self-centeredness. But his aged body strangely has the phys­i­cal fit­ness and stamina/potency to act them out (we see him preen­ing in front of a mir­ror, seem­ingly only aged from the neck up). Also, pre­sum­ably, Ben­jamin can be assured to die when his body regresses to infancy. So, given his phys­i­cal state at birth, is his death date pre-ordained? If he had been born with an infan­tilized body of a 20-year old, could he have been assured of only hav­ing two decades to live? Is he imper­vi­ous to harm? Indeed, he some­how man­ages to sur­vive being stepped on as a new­born, and later, is one of the few sur­vivors of a Ger­man sub­ma­rine attack on an out­classed tug­boat dur­ing World War II.

Ben­jamin is adopted by Quee­nie (Taraji P. Hen­son), an unfor­tu­nately stereo­typ­i­cal African Amer­i­can char­ac­ter, and spends his youth and old age (and vice versa!) at the nurs­ing home she man­ages. There, he meets his one true love Daisy, the niece of one of the ten­ants. Benjamin’s curi­ous con­di­tion pre­vents him from hav­ing any kind of nor­mal friend­ship or rela­tion­ship with her, so he leaves home to find his way in the world. He has his first seri­ous rela­tion­ship with Eliz­a­beth Abbott (Tilda Swin­ton), an older woman who thinks she’s younger than him (later, we learn that meet­ing him helped her change her life). Even­tu­ally, Ben­jamin and Daisy do meet at roughly the same phys­i­cal age and con­sum­mate their mutual love. When Daisy quite rightly asks Ben­jamin if he will still love her when she’s old and wrinkly, he jok­ingly turns it around and asks if she will still love him when he has acne. But what first amuses even­tu­ally comes back around to become one of the most painfully emo­tional sequences in the whole movie: Ben­jamin does after all regress into senil­ity (or per­haps even Alzheimer’s, before it was iden­ti­fied), trapped in the body of a pim­ply teenager. As always, the point is that the bell curve of a human life can be seen as a mir­ror image of itself: here, the impetu­ous­ness, aggres­sion, and mood swings of senil­ity are equated with the tumult of ado­les­cence. Like­wise, extreme youth and old age both are char­ac­ter­ized as the ulti­mate states of depen­dence and vulnerability.

Tilda Swinton in The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonTilda Swin­ton as Benjamin’s first lover, an older woman whom he allows to believe is younger

The spe­cial effects that allow an aged ver­sion of Pitt’s face to be super­im­posed over another, diminu­tive actor are light years in advance of the still-creepy dig­i­tal roto­scop­ing ani­ma­tion style used in Robert Zemeckis’ The Polar Express and Beowulf (although the lat­ter is an excel­lent film in spite of the inef­fec­tive effects). But no mat­ter how eerily fluid and seam­less the effects, I could not shake the feel­ing that I was watch­ing some­thing largely actu­al­ized by ani­ma­tors equipped with a giant com­puter server farm. These obvi­ously cut­ting edge tech­niques are more com­pre­hen­si­ble to me than what­ever the makeup and/or CG wiz­ards did to make 44-year-old Pitt and the 39 Blanchett appear to be in their smooth-skinned and limber-limbed 20s. Also, it must be said that an arti­fi­cially aged Pitt in his hypo­thet­i­cal 50s and 60s is a dead ringer for Robert Redford.

There must be some­thing in the bot­tled water film­mak­ers have been drink­ing recently, for I’ve noticed a decided trend towards movies about aging recently. Sarah Polley’s Away From Her (read The Dork Report review) and Tamara Jenkin’s The Sav­ages (read The Dork Report review) both look at the senil­ity than often comes at the end of life, and how it may affect the lives of those still liv­ing, for bet­ter or for worse. But another pair of movies dealt with mor­tal­ity and the fear of unfin­ished busi­ness through the lens of fan­tasy: Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Youth With­out Youth (read The Dork Report review) and Char­lie Kaufman’s Synec­doche, New York (read The Dork Report review). All of these movies tap into most people’s fear of aging: not only of los­ing phys­i­cal health and thus inde­pen­dence, but also of the reli­a­bil­ity of one’s own mind.

Offi­cial movie site: www.benjaminbutton.com

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

Girls and Their Unicorns: Ridley Scott’s Legend

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Ridley Scott

Legend movie poster

 

Rid­ley Scott’s 1986 fan­tasy exper­i­ment Leg­end fea­tures a very young Tom Cruise (before he was “Tom Cruise”), costar­ring oppo­site vats upon vats of glit­ter. Cruise’s per­for­mance is bizarre and high-pitched, com­posed of crouched poses and unfo­cused stares. But to be fair, how else would any actor por­tray an unciv­i­lized wild-child with a weirdly mun­dane name like Jack? Mia Sara is unmem­o­rable as Princess Lily, save for the spec­tac­u­larly plung­ing neck­line she sports in the sec­ond half of the film (dur­ing which many par­ents were no doubt cov­er­ing the eyes of their innocents).

Tom Cruise in Ridley Scott's LegendThat nice Cruise boy

There is plenty of very pretty cin­e­matog­ra­phy to be enjoyed, but This Dork Reporter regrets to report that Leg­end is awful and almost painful to sit through. I recall lov­ing the roughly con­tem­po­rary fan­tasy film The Dark Crys­tal (1982) as a child, but ruined the pleas­ant mem­ory by watch­ing it again as an adult and dis­cov­er­ing it to be tedious and con­de­scend­ing (with, granted, some incred­i­ble pup­petry and art direc­tion). Per­haps if I had seen Leg­end as a kid I might feel similarly.

The entire plot hinges on the kinds of typ­i­cally arbi­trary rules that char­ac­ter­ize the fan­tasy genre. Pay atten­tion, kids: only a vir­gin can touch a uni­corn, it seems, but alas, they should never do so, lest the sun set for­ever and the world be con­sumed by The Lord of Dark­ness (Tim Curry). What’s a vir­gin, you ask? Shush. Not incon­sid­er­able run­ning time is taken up with awk­ward slap­stick involv­ing midgets, de rigueur in every movie fan­tasy since Terry Gilliam’s Time Ban­dits. Speak­ing of, Gilliam’s dark romp is by far the best of the 1980s hey­day of fan­tasy movies – a genre not to return to promi­nence for almost two decades until the lucra­tive fran­chises Harry Pot­ter, The Lord of the Rings, His Dark Mate­ri­als, and The Chron­i­cles of Narnia.

Mia Sara in Ridley Scott's LegendGirls and their uni­corns! This can only end in tears.

Even the old-school opti­cal spe­cial effects are crummy, for which it is no excuse to say the film came before the age of CGI. The uni­corns’ rub­ber horns vis­i­bly wob­ble, and a flut­ter­ing Tinkerbell-like fairy crea­ture is a painfully obvi­ous lit­tle light­bulb mounted on a wire dis­cernible even on a low-resolution TV screen. No inch of skin is left unpainted with glit­ter, and never have bub­ble machines worked so over­time since The Lawrence Welk Show. But per­haps the most puz­zling detail of all is in the sound design: uni­corns sing whalesong, evidently.

All sorts of ques­tions arise as screen­writer William Hjortsbertg’s plot comes to its train­wreck con­clu­sion: What hap­pens to The Prince of Dark­ness’ evilly goad­ing mother? Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman’s bril­liant Beowulf script did not fail to explore the vast Freudian story poten­tial of a monster’s manip­u­la­tive mother. And where did the last sur­viv­ing uni­corn find its mate at the end? Did the uni­corn killed ear­lier in the film revive some­how, and if so, why? Even Disney’s Bambi didn’t chicken out by resus­ci­tat­ing the mur­dered mother.

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

 

Dark City (Director’s Cut)

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Dark City

 

I recall Dark City being one of my favorite films of 1998, and I would have rated it quite highly had I been keep­ing score at the time. Dark City is a bold sci­ence fic­tion film noir most obvi­ously indebted to Blade Run­ner, but also to Dork Report favorites Brazil (espe­cially the sequences of build­ings sprout­ing up out of the ground), Metrop­o­lis, M, and City of Lost Chil­dren (read The Dork Report review). In each of these films, a pro­tag­o­nist sur­vives in a hos­tile, often name­less dystopian city, often with the sus­pi­cion that his depress­ing exis­tence is some­how not real. Alex Proyas, Lem Dobbs, and David S. Goyer’s screen­play explores the same fla­vor of para­noid schiz­o­phre­nia that also fig­ures in the lit­er­a­ture of Franz Kafka and Philip K. Dick.

Dark City was over­shad­owed at the box office by Titanic like all its con­tem­po­raries, but like its later odd­ball dis­tant cousin Don­nie Darko, its extended life­cy­cle included becom­ing a cult hit on DVD. In the mean­while, direc­tor Alex Proyas fur­ther raised his bank­a­bil­ity with later com­mer­cial suc­cess I, Robot. So for Dark City’s tenth anniver­sary, New Line Cin­ema financed Proyas’ com­ple­tion of a Director’s Cut for a spe­cial edi­tion DVD. Watch­ing it for the first time since 1998, it all nev­er­the­less seemed famil­iar to this Dork Reporter, who found it dif­fi­cult to spot any­thing new from memory.

Dark CityThe worst loo in The City

DVD bonus fea­tures are dryly referred to by movie stu­dio home enter­tain­ment exec­u­tives as “value-added con­tent.” Repur­posed elec­tronic press kits typ­i­cally fea­ture film­mak­ers con­grat­u­lat­ing them­selves on how won­der­ful a film they’ve made and how bril­liant all their col­leagues were. In con­trast, the Dark City DVD squeezes in an inter­est­ing and fairly can­did feature-length doc­u­men­tary on the mak­ing of the film and its impact upon numer­ous philoso­phers and film crit­ics. No less a mar­quee booster than St. Roger Ebert praises the film and con­tributes and entire com­men­tary track. Ebert has long cham­pi­oned the film, even includ­ing it among his series of Great Movies. Among other excel­lent insights, he points out it pre­dated the similarly-themed The Matrix by over a year.

Proyas describes his Director’s Cut as “more com­plete,” and blames the audi­ence test­ing process for New Line Cin­ema pres­sur­ing him to add an explana­tory voiceover. As he put it, the process under­mined his con­fi­dence as a film­maker and thus com­pro­mised the film. As was the case with the 2007 reis­sue of Rid­ley Scott’s Blade Run­ner, Proyas has now removed the open­ing nar­ra­tion, spit-polished the spe­cial effects, and extended some scenes.

Dark CityHappy Birth­day, Mr. Murdoch

The film­mak­ers relate their amus­ing strug­gles with the MPAA. Shown a rel­a­tively inof­fen­sive cut of the film, they nev­er­the­less wanted to give it an “R” rat­ing, the best ratio­nale they could give being its over­all weird­ness. So, faced with receiv­ing an R no mat­ter what, the film­mak­ers actu­ally decided to add more nudity and vio­lence. But there is still no pro­fan­ity in this anti­sep­tic uni­verse. Dark City is a film noir of the sort where even hook­ers say things like “Aw, shoot.”

Of the cast, only Rufus Sewell par­tic­i­pates in the doc­u­men­tary. He’s noth­ing like I would have expected; actu­ally kind of goofy and ani­mated, in direct con­trast to his moody seri­ous­ness in the role. Kiefer Suther­land overeggs his per­for­mance with a limp, facial defor­mity, and speech defect. His char­ac­ter is a remorse­ful col­lab­o­ra­tor that turns on his mas­ters, inter­est­ing enough with­out all the actorly accou­ter­ments. Jen­nifer Con­nelly is as lumi­nously beau­ti­ful as ever in Dark City, but seemed a bit more… how do I put this politely… soft than usual. Was she preg­nant at the time? A strik­ing shot of Con­nelly stand­ing on the end of a pier matches my mem­ory of a sim­i­lar shot in Requiem for a Dream.

Offi­cial movie site: www.darkcity.com

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

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

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The Adventures of Baron Munchausen movie poster

 

Terry Gilliam’s mad, bril­liant yarn The Adven­tures of Baron Mun­chausen is a strongly anti-war fable that every kid (and adult!) ought to be exposed to. What must be the most ironic cap­tion in cin­ema his­tory, “The Late 18th Cen­tury: The Age of Rea­son,” is fol­lowed imme­di­ately by har­row­ing imagery of war­fare that wouldn’t be out of place in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. Fur­ther dri­ving the point home for the slower mem­bers of the audi­ence, a trip to Hades finds Vul­can (Oliver Reed) forg­ing ICBMs out of hell­fire. In a theme straight out of Noam Chom­sky, the mil­i­tary indus­trial com­plex (per­son­i­fied by Jonathan Pryce’s hilar­i­ously accented bureau­crat) impris­ons the peo­ple within the walls of their own city with a sham state of per­pet­ual war. In the end, the Baron defeats these vil­lains not with more vio­lence, but by inspir­ing the peo­ple to throw open their doors and thus their minds.

Sarah Polley in The Adventures of Baron MunchausenOops, we threw the bud­get pro­jec­tions overboard…

Like the best of its kind (includ­ing Rata­touille and Gilliam’s own Time Ban­dits) The Adven­tures of Baron Mun­chausen works on mul­ti­ple lev­els and is acces­si­ble to all ages. The Adven­tures of Baron Mun­chausen was rated PG in another era, one in which tobacco, decap­i­ta­tion, and brief nudity (of the young Uma Thur­man vari­ety… thank you, Terry!) were A-OK for kid­dies. Spe­cial men­tion must also be paid to the spir­ited per­for­mance by a very young Sarah Polley.

Uma Thurman in The Adventures of Baron MunchausenUma comes out of her shell

Must read: Los­ing the Light, a book on the trou­bled pro­duc­tion by Andrew Yule (Buy from Ama­zon)

Must read: The Adven­tures of Baron Mun­chausen fun facts from Dreams, the Terry Gilliam Fanzine

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

The Lady in the Water

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The Lady in the Water movie poster

 

I don’t know where to start with this one. I’ve been a M. Night Shya­malan fan from the very begin­ning, even when the role was bet­ter described as apol­o­gist. Even to a fan, nearly every film comes with a “yeah, but…” dis­claimer: The Sixth Sense is an excel­lent piece of slight-of-hand with some gen­uine emo­tion, but let down by an extended mon­tage at the end recap­ping events recon­tex­tu­al­ized by the already-clear Big Plot Reveal. Unbreak­able, my per­sonal favorite, is a remark­ably mature char­ac­ter piece on a real-world Super­man, but whose comic-book ori­gins prob­a­bly alien­ated a main­stream audi­ence that wants its comic book movies clearly sign­posted by gar­ish cos­tumes and action set pieces. Signs is a per­fectly crafted sci-fi thriller that dou­bles as a wildly funny com­edy (an inten­tional one, I should be clear… more on that later), but the deli­cious sus­pense is nearly ruined in the end by the film­mak­ers’ over­con­fi­dence in their shoddy CGI alien.

The Shya­malan back­lash started as soon as The Sixth Sense, per­haps in direct cor­re­la­tion with its box office take, with peo­ple falling over them­selves claim­ing to have detected the Big Plot Reveal well ahead of time. But with The Vil­lage, the time for fans’ dither­ing began: if not nearly as bad as its crit­i­cal recep­tion, it was a dis­ap­point­ment. A promis­ing scernario sat­i­riz­ing the con­tem­po­rary sit­u­a­tion in Bush’s color-coded police state is sti­fled by a lack of humor unchar­ac­ter­is­tic for the direc­tor, not to men­tion an under­whelm­ing twist end­ing with­out the emo­tional punch of The Sixth Sense.

The clas­sic Shya­malan film is a schemat­icly con­structed jig­saw, which in itself is a great plea­sure. But in The Lady in the Water, the tail wags the dog to an even greater degree than The Vil­lage. Humor­less, pre­ten­tious, and forehead-slappingly… well, sorry for the cheap shot… stu­pid.

The Dark Crystal

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The Dark Crystal movie poster

 

Oops. I should have let The Dark Crys­tal live on in my child­hood mem­o­ries as a Good Movie. See­ing the bril­liant Mir­ror­mask reminded me how much this movie affected my child­hood, but see­ing it again as an adult I find it has not aged well. The spe­cial effects of course can­not rival con­tem­po­rary dig­i­tal epics, but I was sur­prised to find the sto­ry­telling stilted and overly dumbed-down. Recent kids’ movies are pitched at a more sophis­ti­cated level, not feel­ing the need to start with a lonnnnng open­ing expos­i­tory nar­ra­tive and pause every 15 min­utes or so to do a plot recap.

Still, you have to admire Jim Henson’s sheer blood­y­mind­ed­ness at spend­ing five years pulling off this difficult-to-make film. And it scores points for just being so weird.

And a quick word about the dvd: cheap menus and a hor­ren­dous print. What’s up with that?