Tag Archives: Ridley Scott

A Clash of Faiths: Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies

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Ridley Scott

Body of Lies movie poster

 

Rid­ley Scott’s fol­low up to the gen­tle com­edy of A Good Year (read The Dork Report review) and the crime drama Amer­i­can Gang­ster (partly mod­eled, I think, on Michael Mann’s epic Heat), returns to the politically-themed yet still action-oriented ter­ri­tory he first vis­ited in Black Hawk Down. The key dif­fer­ence here is that, like Peter Weir’s The King­dom and Pete Travis’ Van­tage Point (read The Dork Report review), Body of Lies is set in a fan­ta­sy­land safely divorced from the very, very real events that inspired Black Hawk Down. All of these films have the air of gritty real­ism, but still indulge in the wish ful­fill­ment of a very cin­e­matic war on terror.

Body of Lies can be seen as com­plet­ing a kind of Mid­dle East tril­ogy for Scott, after the afore­men­tioned Black Hawk Down plus the Cru­sades epic King­dom of Heaven (read The Dork Report review). Screen­writer William Mon­a­han wrote both King­dom of Heaven and Body of Lies (adapted from the novel by David Ignatius). But of the three, Body of Lies is clearly the least serious.

Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio in Body of LiesMesopotamia, and step on it!

No doubt movie stu­dio exec­u­tives have cal­cu­lated down to the last cent that world audi­ences are still too sen­si­tive to actual ter­ror­ist attacks like Lon­don and Madrid in order to buy tick­ets for dra­matic recre­ations on the big screen. Instead, most main­stream terrorism-themed movies are basi­cally enter­tain­ments that only have the feel of seri­ous import, and none of the sub­stance. Body of Lies invents anal­o­gous ter­ror­ist attacks such as a sleeper cell blow­ing up their Lon­don flat, and later, the bomb­ing of a U.S. marine base in Turkey (I hope O’Neal — Demi Moore — from Scott’s G.I. Jane — read The Dork Report Review — wasn’t sta­tioned there). Van­tage Point is a lit­tle more cre­ative in imag­in­ing a worst-case-scenario of a pres­i­den­tial assas­si­na­tion, but has no inter­est in the reper­cus­sions beyond a Rashomon-like recount­ing of the imme­di­ate aftermath.

So audi­ences get films like this, where shad­owy CIA oper­a­tives sneak around Iraq and Jor­dan, sav­ing the world from Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ism. They have seem­ingly lim­it­less resources but no gov­ern­ment over­sight, and any­thing is pos­si­ble with a lit­tle com­puter hack­ing. Mean­while, more seri­ous and real­is­tic movies are ignored, like In the Val­ley of Elah (read The Dork Report review) and the truly excel­lent but emo­tion­ally dev­as­tat­ing United 93. In com­par­i­son, Scott’s Black Hawk Down was unafraid to recre­ate actual events still raw in the Amer­i­can public’s mem­ory: the cat­a­strophic marine incur­sion into Soma­lia in 1993. And even to limit the scope to Scott’s own oeu­vre, King­dom of Heaven is a much smarter con­sid­er­a­tion of the clash of faiths in the Mid­dle East.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Golshifteh Farahani in Body of LiesLeo meets cute with an Iran­ian nurse (Gol­shifteh Farahani)

Body of Lies is Rus­sell Crowe’s fourth film with Scott, fol­low­ing Glad­i­a­tor, A Good Year, and Amer­i­can Gang­ster. Here, he packs on some seri­ous poundage to enter the same schlubby mode he debuted in Michael Mann’s The Insider, sea­soned with a lit­tle of the crass bas­tard he played in A Good Year. Leonardo DiCaprio, on tem­po­rary loan from Mar­tin Scors­ese, sports a scrappy beard but still looks like a teenager. The pretty boy is con­stantly get­ting beaten up, cut, bruised, and los­ing fin­gers. But he meets cute with pretty Iran­ian nurse Aisah (Gol­shifteh Fara­hani), so that’s alright, then.

Offi­cial movie site: www.body-of-lies.com

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Ridley Scott’s A Good Year

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A Good Year movie poster

 

Scott returns to France for the first time since his 1977 fea­ture film debut The Duel­lists (read The Dork Report review) for the fluffy souf­flé A Good Year. Max­imil­lian Skin­ner (Rus­sell Crowe) — hardly the most sub­tle of names — is a self-proclaimed ass­hole that inher­its his uncle’s wine­mak­ing estate in Provence. His Uncle Henry (Albert Finney, who also appeared in The Duel­lists) raised him there, but evi­dently failed to impart the kinds of life lessons that would have moulded Skin­ner into a decent human being capa­ble of savor­ing the joys of life. The ideal life as defined in the film is essen­tially every­thing that a life of leisure in Provence pro­vides: namely, wine and women. But Skinner’s life in Lon­don is made up of much of the very same, so the solu­tion to fix­ing Skinner’s poi­soned soul is not to add some­thing that is miss­ing, but rather to sub­tract some­thing: his ass­hole­ness. Skin­ner does some­times man­i­fest some self-awareness; one moment he seems to gen­uinely rel­ish his life as the most venal of Lon­don stock­bro­kers, but the next he pro­fesses a love we’ve never before seen for his uncle and the sim­ple life of Provence.

Marion Cotillard and Russell Crowe in A Good YearRus­sell Crowe views his hand­i­work, writ large upon Mar­ion Cotillard’s derrière

Skinner’s waver­ing char­ac­ter com­ple­ments a num­ber of con­fus­ing plot holes. A run­ning mys­tery is the mys­te­ri­ous prove­nance of an excep­tional “garage wine” (lim­ited batches by tiny oper­a­tions, some­times lit­er­ally in a garage). Didier (Fran­cis Dulot), the long­time ten­der of the Skin­ner vin­yard, admits to delib­er­ately pro­duc­ing undrink­ably vile wine under the vinyard’s ban­ner, in an attempt to run down the value of the place and hope­fully dis­in­ter­est Skin­ner in sell­ing it. But is he simul­ta­ne­ously direct­ing his real tal­ents into the mak­ing of the mys­te­ri­ous garage wine? The plot thread is dropped and we never learn for sure. The cool clos­ing cred­its make the film seem more enter­tain­ingly screw­ball than it actu­ally was, and there’s also an utterly bewil­der­ing coda involv­ing Skinner’s snarky assis­tant Gemma (Archie Pan­jabi) meet­ing a rap­per and his agent. Huh?

Marion Cotillard and Russell Crowe in A Good YearRus­sell Crowe learns what’s impor­tant in life: hot French girls

I’m not sure if Crowe has the same sort of Cary Grant-like appeal for women that George Clooney has in spades, but there is plenty of eye candy for male view­ers. The lus­cious Cal­i­forn­ian back­packer Christie (Abbie Cor­nish) appears on Skinner’s doorstep claim­ing to be his only blood rel­a­tive, and thus a rival to his inher­i­tance of the estate. French actress Mar­ion Cotil­lard would later dis­guise her­self very unflat­ter­ingly to play the frail, sickly Edith Piaf in the turgid biopic La Vie En Rose, but here she uncorks her full-on Gal­lic gor­geous­ness as Fanny (again, another of the movie’s unsub­tle names — for she rather spec­tac­u­larly lifts her skirt in an out­doors café, to the delight of the entire town and, admit­tedly, this Dork Reporter). One of the fun­ni­est recur­ring gags is the pri­apic Skinner’s help­less dou­ble­takes to any of many dis­plays of ripe breasts and bums. But unfor­tu­nately, one of the other recur­ring jokes is his repeated invol­un­tary expo­sures to ani­mal dung.

Abbie Cornish in A Good YearAbbie Cor­nish as the cousin Skin­ner wishes he didn’t have, for more rea­sons than one

A Good Year takes quite a long time to get going, but does seem to pick up some comedic energy once Skinner’s cold Lon­don heart defrosts while court­ing Fanny in the sec­ond act. Rid­ley Scott can always be counted for fine art direc­tion and cin­e­matog­ra­phy, but here he wields his tal­ents bluntly. Even the color tem­per­a­ture is clichéd, lest any view­ers miss the point; Provence is amber-hued, and Lon­don is steely elec­tric blue. The right choice for Skin­ner is never in doubt; liv­ing on a wine­mak­ing estate in Provence with a beau­ti­ful French girl is a fan­tasy prob­a­bly every human being on earth shares, ass­hole or not.

Offi­cial movie site: www.agoodyear.com

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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

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Ridley Scott’s G.I. Jane

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G.I. Jane movie poster

 

Rid­ley Scott has made his share of testosterone-laden Hol­ly­wood flicks, rang­ing from his very first fea­ture The Duel­lists (read The Dork Report review), through Black Rain (read The Dork Report review), and finally blow­ing the top off the scale with Glad­i­a­tor. But unlike many of his con­tem­po­raries (Michael Mann and Michael Bay come to mind), a sur­pris­ing num­ber of feminist-themed films with strong female char­ac­ters are scat­tered amongst his oeu­vre: Alien, Thelma & Louise, and G.I. Jane.

Demi Moore in Ridley Scott's G.I. JaneDemi Moore sports the chrome dome look that failed to take off in the 90s

For Alien’s pro­tag­o­nist Rip­ley (Sigour­ney Weaver) to be female was not just a bold choice for a hor­ror / sci­ence fic­tion film, but an utterly appro­pri­ate one. Alien is loaded with sym­bolic fer­til­ity imagery and metaphor­i­cal child­birth. Rip­ley grap­ples with the themes of repro­duc­tion (and, arguably, abor­tion) anthro­po­mor­phized as a car­niv­o­rous mon­ster with an erect penis for a head. Thelma & Louise had an explo­sive impact upon its release, and this Dork Reporter recalls see­ing it on the cover of Time Mag­a­zine. A com­mon theme in the press’ cov­er­age of the con­tro­ver­sial film was that such a story of female empow­er­ment was in fact directed by… gasp… a man! To over­sim­plify, the film con­sid­ered the rel­a­tive moral­ity of vio­lence when per­pe­trated by an oppressed sex. Thelma & Louise packed pis­tols a decade later than Rip­ley aborted her alien baby with a phal­lic flamethrower.

Demi Moore and Viggo Mortensen in Ridley Scott's G.I. JaneViggo Mortensen dresses down Demi Moore with his eyes

Thelma & Louise may have raised hack­les and inspired count­less op-ed pieces about gen­der equal­ity, but I recall Scott’s G.I. Jane not being taken seri­ously at all. Its premise was its worst fea­ture, and indeed one might com­pare it to Goldie Hawn’s Pri­vate Ben­jamin, except for the minor detail that it’s not funny. Craven politi­cian Lil­lian DeHaven (Anne Ban­croft) talks a ris­ing female Navy lifer Jor­dan O’Neill (Demi Moore) into com­pet­ing against a bevy of men in the most gru­el­ing and gender-segregated type of mil­i­tary train­ing ever devised: the Navy SEALs (in the real world, the SEAL train­ing is expressly lim­ited to males, and no woman has yet been allowed to attempt it). DeHaven manip­u­lates the resul­tant media cir­cus to gain votes and save the mil­i­tary bases in her state from clo­sure. O’Neill faces off against Mas­ter Chief (Viggo Mortensen), a clos­eted sen­si­tive guy who repur­poses a D.H Lawrence poem to ini­ti­ate his stan­dard rit­ual of humil­i­a­tion and dehumanization.

Demi Moore in Ridley Scott's G.I. JaneHands up, who doesn’t want to watch Demi Moore do one-armed push ups?

Beyond the con­trived premise, G.I. Jane was obvi­ously a van­ity star vehi­cle for an over­reach­ing actor known more for her con­sid­er­able beauty and fit­ness and than her act­ing chops. It didn’t last long, but recall that Moore was one of the biggest Hol­ly­wood stars of 1997. Here, she shows off her mus­cu­lar physique in porny work­out and shower sequences, and famously shaves her head live on film. It’s a weak form of fem­i­nism for O’Neill’s great­est tri­umph to be her tri­umphant excla­ma­tion “suck my dick.” She trans­forms her­self into just one of the guys rather than prov­ing her­self as a human being of equal stand­ing, be she male or female.

Now hav­ing seen G.I. Jane as part of The Dork Report’s Unseen Rid­ley Scott Film Fes­ti­val, the best I can say is that it’s not as bad as I would have imag­ined. If Black Rain found Scott in Michael Mann ter­ri­tory, G.I. Jane places him squarely in Michael Bay coun­try. SEAL train­ing is shown in great detail, with all the fetishized mil­i­tary hard­ware and wind­blown Amer­i­can flags one would expect in a Bay hagiog­ra­phy. But most shock­ing to a viewer in 2008 is a sequence in which O’Neill is sub­jected to water­board­ing. It cuts through the nau­se­at­ing patri­o­tism like elec­trodes to the genitals.

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Ridley Scott’s White Squall

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Ridley Scott

White Squall movie poster

 

By 1996, Rid­ley Scott had worked in almost every typ­i­cal fea­ture film genre: most notably his­tor­i­cal drama (The Duel­lists — read The Dork Report review, 1492), sci­ence fic­tion (Alien, Blade Run­ner), and police thrillers (Some­one to Watch Over Me — read The Dork Report review, Black Rain — read The Dork Report review). But White Squall strad­dles sev­eral gen­res, some­times all at once: coming-of-age melo­drama, adven­ture, court­room drama, and dis­as­ter on the high seas (like later peers Titanic and The Per­fect Storm).

White SquallThe Alba­tross boys enact The Lord of the Thighs (and torsos)

Aside from the rare excep­tion of the fan­tasy Leg­end (read The Dork Report review), Scott’s films are always about adults. But White Squall fea­tures teenage char­ac­ters and is rel­a­tively mild in terms of vio­lence, pro­fan­ity, and sex (no bloody gun­play or slimy extrater­res­tri­als here). The fre­quently shirt­less young male cast, includ­ing star-to-be Ryan Phillippe, pro­vided lots of beef­cake that prob­a­bly attracted a large teenage girl audi­ence at the time. But the core of the story is still about male bond­ing, duty, and honor, plac­ing it some­what out­side the bounds of a chick flick.

It’s also unusual in Scott’s oeu­vre for being based on actual events. The screen­play by Todd Robin­son is based on the non­fic­tion book The Last Voy­age of the Alba­tross by Charles Gieg Jr. and Felix Sut­ton. In the 1950s, Cap­tain Christo­pher “Skip­per” Shel­don (Jeff Bridges) and his wife Alice (Car­o­line Goodall), a doc­tor, ran a series of boat­ing excur­sions on the Caribbean Seas for young men. The trips, for school credit, pro­vided a kind of high seas lib­eral edu­ca­tion focus­ing on self-reliance, team­work, and lit­er­a­ture. An onboard Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture teacher (John Sav­age, who resem­bles Rid­ley Scott) was always on hand to be gen­er­ally annoy­ing and pompously spout quo­ta­tions. Unbe­knownst to the boys’ par­ents, Sheldon’s con­cept of lib­eral edu­ca­tion also included shore leave with abun­dant alco­hol and the oppor­tu­nity to meet hot young female exchange stu­dents the boys would never have to see again. This was a quaint time when sex­u­ally trans­mit­ted dis­eases were more of a rite of grow­ing up than a life-threatening risk.

Jeff Bridges in White SquallJeff Bridges pleads, “This aggres­sion will not stand, man!” Alter­nately, the mast really held the boat together.

The phys­i­cal task of oper­at­ing the boat could be seri­ously dan­ger­ous, but one par­tic­u­lar trip in 1960 became espe­cially so in more ways than one. The Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis erupted while they were out to sea, and they were boarded by mil­i­tant Cubans. After a nar­row escape allowed as much by chance as by Sheldon’s quick think­ing, they encounter an even big­ger prob­lem: deal­ing with a spoiled rich kid (I can’t fig­ure out the actor’s name, but he looks for all the world just like Cil­lian Mur­phy). The seem­ingly cursed voy­age ends in a myth­i­cal “white squall,” a freak weather event in which a sud­den wind­storm appears with­out the tra­di­tional warn­ing signs such as dark clouds. The voy­age ends in utter tragedy, and segues into a court­room drama bogged down in lame speechifying.

The end titles reveal that Shel­don over­came his per­sonal grief and pro­fes­sional dis­credit to become the first Peace Corps Direc­tor in Latin Amer­ica, before dying in 2002 (read The New York Times obit).

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Ridley Scott’s Black Rain

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Ridley Scott

Black Rain movie poster

 

Rid­ley Scott’s police thriller Black Rain (1989) opens in New York City at a time when The Meat­pack­ing Dis­trict actu­ally was a meat­pack­ing dis­trict. Tough cop Nick (Michael Dou­glas) is a ridicu­lously aggres­sive, foul-mouthed tough guy who tools around the city astride his crotch rocket. The despised Inter­nal Affairs depart­ment sus­pects him of being a bent cop­per (spoiler alert: rightly, it turns out!), and pres­sures him to name names. By sheer acci­dent, he and rookie part­ner Char­lie (Andy Gar­cia) wit­ness a Yakuza assas­si­na­tion in a Meat­pack­ing Dis­trict bar. After a thrilling chase through some vin­tage Man­hat­tan loca­tions since replaced by night­clubs, lux­ury con­dos, and The Apple Store, they man­age to appre­hend the per­pe­tra­tor. The Yakuza assas­sin Sato (Yasaku Mat­suda), being Asian in a Hol­ly­wood movie, is of course a mar­tial arts expert. Con­trived plot machi­na­tions result in Nick and Char­lie escort­ing Sato back to Japan, where­upon they imme­di­ately and embar­rass­ingly lose him. By this point, the plot has been con­structed in such a way as to raise Nick’s stakes to the high­est level pos­si­ble: the only two things that mat­ter to him, his honor and job secu­rity, depend on one task: catch­ing or killing the bad guy. If he returns to the States empty-handed, he’s almost cer­tainly to be disgraced.

Andy Garcia and Michael Douglas in Black RainAndy Gar­cia refuses to pass the edamame

In his Tokyo down­time, Nick enter­tains an uncon­sum­mated romance with gai­jin Joyce (Kate Cap­shaw). The sub­plot is a bor­ing dis­trac­tion. Joyce is a mere love inter­est in the worst sto­ry­telling sense: her char­ac­ter is not inte­grated into the main thriller plot as is the female lead in Scott’s Some­one to Watch Over Me. It strikes this Dork Reporter as some­thing of a copout on the part of Scott and screen­writ­ers Craig Bolotin and War­ren Lewis that their pro­tag­o­nist Nick goes all the way to Japan but doesn’t do as the Japan­ese men do (which is to say, Japan­ese women).

Nick and Char­lie part­ner with upright Japan­ese cop Masahiro (Ken Takakura). Cul­tures clash, and the suave Char­lie teaches the uptight Masahiro to party hearty, beat­ing the Japan­ese at their own game (that being karaōke). When Nick’s moral ambi­gu­ity becomes known, the right­eous Masahiro seems to con­vince Nick that theft of any sort is shame­ful. But in the end, it is Nick that teaches Masahiro that it’s OK to steal from crim­i­nals (in the moral uni­verse of this film, at least). I’d never say that any work of fic­tion has an oblig­a­tion to present morally-correct behav­ior (the kind of cen­sor­ship that Hol­ly­wood the­o­ret­i­cally left behind with the demise of the Pro­duc­tion Code). But Black Rain seems to present Nick’s amoral behav­ior as The Right Thing, instead of the com­pli­cated actions of an inter­est­ing com­plex character.

Michael Douglas in Black RainA back­lit Michael Dou­glas con­tem­plates a new hairdo

Scott stages a huge shootout sequence at a refin­ery, seem­ingly cho­sen for max­i­mum visual appeal (pic­ture the clouds of steam, show­ers of sparks, bursts of flame, etc.). In a kind of self-referencial closed cir­cuit, Scott’s aer­ial shots of Japan look just like Blade Runner’s futur­is­tic dystopian Los Ange­les, which was itself inspired by Tokyo. Another direct lift from Blade Run­ner: Nick dis­cov­ers sequins from Joyce’s dress at a crime scene, recall­ing the sequence in Blade Run­ner in which Deckard tracks down the ori­gin of syn­thetic snake scales — belong­ing, of course, to one of cinema’s most famous femmes fatale.

The open­ing cred­its state “In asso­ci­a­tion with Michael Dou­glas.” Dou­glas is of course a suc­cess­ful pro­ducer (for instance, One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest), but Black Rain has the feel of an ego trip. More trivia: the direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy Jan de Bont was later to direct Speed.

One final cheap shot before I go. I don’t know what has dated more: the cheesy music or Michael Dou­glas’ big hair.

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Ridley Scott’s Someone to Watch Over Me

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Ridley Scott

Someone to Watch Over Me movie poster

 

Rid­ley Scott’s Some­one to Watch Over Me (1987) is more of a drama than a police thriller, refresh­ingly focussed on its char­ac­ters over sus­pense and action alone. Mike Kee­gan (Tom Berenger) is a salt-of-the-earth Queens detec­tive assigned to pro­tect mate­r­ial wit­ness Claire (Mimi Rogers) from assas­si­na­tion. Kee­gan is a mod­est fam­ily man, recently pro­moted to the sec­ond rung of the police hier­ar­chy. It’s no glam­orous job; he spends most of his work­ing hours just sit­ting around not fin­ish­ing cross­words. He’s utterly unlike the over-the-top testosterone-laden cop char­ac­ter played by Michael Dou­glas in Scott’s other police thriller, Black Rain.

Tom Berenger in Someone to Watch Over MeAny dame what lives in a spread like this is outta yer league, pal.

Kee­gan is more-or-less hap­pily mar­ried (to Lor­raine Bracco as Ellie), but a man like him would never oth­er­wise come into con­tact with a beau­ti­ful uptown girl like Claire. Cooped up in close prox­im­ity to each other every night, they inevitably lapse into an affair. Her effem­i­nate but wealthy and pow­er­ful hus­band senses that Kee­gan is a roman­tic rival, but he is an effec­tively impo­tent char­ac­ter and fre­quently dis­ap­pears from the film alto­gether. Also notable is song-and-dance man Jerry Orbach already type­cast as a detec­tive in a small role as Keegan’s tough Lieutenant.

Mimi Rogers in Someone to Watch Over MeWhen Mimi Rogers heard Direc­tor Rid­ley Scott was big on visual spec­ta­cles, this isn’t what she had in mind

One of the guar­an­teed plea­sures of any Rid­ley Scott film is the visu­als. Some­one to Watch Over Me’s open­ing cred­its fea­ture the name­sake song by George Gersh­win sung by Sting over beau­ti­fully sleek aer­ial shots of New York City at night. The final shootout is per­fectly staged in a claus­tro­pho­bi­cally enclosed space, with huge mir­rors placed for max­i­mum dra­matic impact. The prin­ci­pals stalk each other in near silence, punc­tu­ated by the wide dynam­ics of sound design. Per­haps Scott was com­pet­ing with that other upstart mas­ter of cin­e­matic shootouts, Michael Mann (in par­tic­u­lar, the sim­i­larly explo­sive con­clu­sion to the con­tem­po­rary thriller Manhunter).

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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.

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Ridley Scott’s The Duellists

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Ridley Scott

The Duellists movie poster

 

Rid­ley Scott’s first fea­ture film The Duel­lists (1977) is based on the Joseph Con­rad short story “The Duel.” Fer­aud (Har­vey Kei­tel) and D’Hubert (Keith Car­ra­dine), two French sol­diers serv­ing under Napoleon, become loyal ene­mies locked in a life­long adver­sar­ial rela­tion­ship. D’Hubert, eager to appease his supe­ri­ors and advance his career, vol­un­teers for a mis­sion in which he obliv­i­ously humil­i­ates Fer­aud. Both men are at fault: D’Hubert for his ambi­tion, and Fer­aud for obses­sively nurs­ing his per­pet­ual griev­ance. Their per­sonal bat­tles super­sede French his­tory, with even the reign and fall of Napoleon a mere back­drop to their per­sonal feud.

Harvey Keitel in The DuellistsDon’t let the frilly sleeves fool you, Fer­aud (Har­vey Kei­tel) will frite your pommes and manger your croissant

The Duel­lists is respected for the his­tor­i­cal authen­tic­ity of its French mil­i­tary uni­forms and depic­tions of period wartime con­duct, but Kei­tel and Carradine’s flat Amer­i­can accents threaten to undo its achieve­ments in verisimil­i­tude. Luck­ily, the impor­tant bits, the duels, are staged silently. Scott, with his back­ground in adver­tis­ing, films every­thing beau­ti­fully, although one does catch glimpses of the occa­sional lamp and smoke machine. The land­scapes dur­ing the final duel are espe­cially breathtaking.

Keith Carradine in The DuellistsKeith Car­ra­dine is a comin’ ta getcha, Mr. White!

I’ve seen hardly any of Carradine’s movies, but I do have great respect for his bril­liant por­trayal of one of America’s first celebri­ties, Wild Bill Hickok, in the HBO series Dead­wood. And Kei­tel gets to show off his seri­ous mus­cles in a gra­tu­itous arm-wrestling sequence.

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The Andromeda Strain (2008)

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The Andromeda Strain

 

Michael Crichton’s orig­i­nal novel The Androm­eda Strain was first adapted into a fea­ture film in 1971, and now into a tele­vi­sion minis­eries from exec­u­tive pro­duc­ers Rid­ley and Tony Scott. This 2008 incar­na­tion is part feel-bad thriller, part wish ful­fill­ment. As we thrill to the spec­u­la­tive illus­tra­tion of how civ­i­liza­tion might sud­denly come to an end, we also can only hope the gov­ern­ment does in fact have such an elab­o­rate and high-tech pro­ce­dure in place for iden­ti­fy­ing and con­tain­ing new con­ta­gious dis­ease outbreaks.

The Andromeda StrainGood times, good times

The orig­i­nal book is only nom­i­nally about a super­virus, evi­dently of extrater­res­trial ori­gin, that threat­ens the human race. It is actu­ally more about how intel­li­gent, well-meaning peo­ple can make sub­tle errors of judge­ment that may cas­cade into cat­a­stro­phe (Chrich­ton would also employ Chaos The­ory as a key theme in his Juras­sic Park nov­els). But the minis­eries com­pli­cates this inter­est­ing theme with added gov­ern­ment venal­ity (a basi­cally hon­or­able pres­i­dent is under­cut by a cor­rupt chief of staff), the media (a drug addicted reporter breaks the cover-up), and the envi­ron­ment (strip min­ing of the ocean floor leads to the cri­sis). To give but one exam­ple of the dimin­ish­ing returns: in the book, a sim­ple unno­ticed glitch in a sup­pos­edly per­fect com­puter sys­tem causes a dan­ger­ous com­mu­ni­ca­tion black­out at the worst pos­si­ble time. It’s both more plau­si­ble and more sus­pense­ful than the minis­eries ver­sion of events, in which Gen­eral Mancheck (Andre Braugher) delib­er­ately cre­ates the black­out, to everyone’s mild and tem­po­rary frustration.

The book is not with­out its flaws, par­tic­u­larly an undra­matic end­ing in which the con­tin­u­ously adapt­ing virus even­tu­ally mutates into harm­less­ness. But the minis­eries dis­ap­points by giv­ing the virus a defin­i­tive ori­gin, indi­cat­ing it is expressly tar­geted towards humans, and show­ing its defin­i­tive defeat.

The Andromeda StrainThe cast checks in for the long haul

Mis­cel­la­neous other thoughts:

• Mikael Salomon’s direc­tion is very bor­ing and staid, except for a wildly over-the-top decon­t­a­m­i­na­tion pro­ce­dure that is filmed in a styl­ized, almost erotic fashion.

• The minis­eries is prob­a­bly one of the talki­est sci-fi movies and/or TV shows I’ve ever seen. The bulk of the action is set in a sin­gle inte­rior loca­tion, and nearly every scene com­prises heated con­ver­sa­tions in lab­o­ra­to­ries or over teleconferences.

• The minis­eries is laden with even more pseu­do­sci­en­tific bull­shit than Crichton’s orig­i­nal novel: wormhole-enabled time travel and nan­otech buck­y­balls from the future are the order of the day. The whole thing ends in the kind of tem­po­ral para­dox that typ­i­cally makes a plot point in shows like Doc­tor Who and Star Trek.

• The minis­eries updates the book’s euphemism of “unmar­ried man” into “don’t ask don’t tell” ter­ri­tory. It seems fab­u­lous Major Keane (Rick Schroder) is a friend of Dorothy.

• Spot the homage to Hitchcock’s The Birds!

• Why does the under­ground facil­ity begin to dis­in­te­grate dur­ing the run-up to set­ting off an atom bomb? Wouldn’t there just be a count­down and then an explosion?

• This Dork Reporter, a long­time fan of the TV show Lost, is happy to see Daniel Dae Kim in a star­ring role. But the Korean actor is unfor­tu­nately cast as a Chi­nese stereotype.

• Ben­jamin Bratt is really ter­ri­ble, giv­ing the prover­bial phone-it-in per­for­mance. He deliv­ers every line with the same into­na­tion, whether it’s say­ing good­bye to his fam­ily for pos­si­bly the last time or announc­ing humanity’s first dis­cov­ery of an alien life form.

Offi­cial movie site: www.aetv.com/the-andromeda-strain

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