Well, at the very least, I’ll say this: Martin Scorsese’s fun but flawed gothic-noir Shutter Island is much less of a disaster than the other big budget, mid-February dumping of late, The Wolfman. True, despite a smart and engrossing first hour or so, Scorsese’s film eventually wears out its welcome, and its (very-telegraphed, even in thetrailers) Twilight Zone-y ending goes on for several beats too long. Still, it’s an unsettling and reasonably entertaining mind game for awhile, and probably worth a rental if you weren’t among the many visitors to the Island this past weekend.
Admittedly, the opening moments of our tale are more than a little creaky, as Scorsese — as per his 1991 remake of Cape Fear — perhaps over-telegraphs the fact that we’re in noir-homage territory here. The year is 1954, and as a rickety ferry chugs along beneath an ominous, very cinematic-looking gray sky, a seasick US Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonardo di Caprio) fills his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) in on all the requisite exposition. To wit, these two seafaring gumshoes are checking out a mysterious disappearance on a creepy Island for the Criminally Insane. Teddy’s beloved wife (Michelle Williams), whom he still sees in visions, has passed on account of smoke inhalation after an apartment fire. And — wouldn’t ya know it — one of those Gimongous Storms that fill the nearby Gloucestermen with dread is bearing down on this remote Massachusetts madhouse, right at about the time our two heroes will disembark.
This is all rather ungainly revealed in the first ten minutes or so. But, when our two fedora-topped detectives are met by the officious and strangely aloof deputy warden of the complex (John Carroll Lynch), Shutter Island starts to find its nightmare-at-Arkham groove. It helps that we then meet a few old pros to move things along in that regard. First, the benevolent-seeming Man of Science running the asylum, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley). And then his avuncular, hail-fellow-well-met, and vaguely sinister colleague (old pro Max Von Sydow), who happens to have a Teutonic tendency toward slipping consonants. And that, coupled with the waifish cheekbones of the missing patient (Emily Mortimer), sets off all kinds of unpleasant memories for Teddy of W-W-eye-eye, and the liberation of Dachau…
It is in this first seventy-five minutes or so where Shutter Island really works best. For awhile there, with its melancholy remembrances, plush smoking rooms, fifties detectives, and lurking horrors, the movie is a real triumph of atmosphere. I felt like I’d settled into a really good noir text-adventure like Deadline, Suspect, or even Maniac Mansion, where the crimes are sordid, the suspects range from kindly to malevolent, the atmosphere is gothic through-and-through, the backstory is ever-so-slightly overripe (there may be Nazi-style experiments funded by HUAC going on), and the environment is finite and well-bounded — Nobody’s getting off the island in this here Storm of the Century. And there’s a nightmare at one point, involving Dachau and Ms. Mortimer, that set my teeth on edge as much as anything I’ve seen this side of the Grady sisters. (Some borrowing from The Ring here too, quite frankly.)
Unfortunately, the increasingly aimless Island doesn’t manage to sustain this splendidly eerie vibe throughout its run. Instead, it starts to pile incident upon incident, until the rotting manse of cards eventually tumbles over. When Elias Koteas and Jackie Earle Haley turn up as horribly scarred prisoners of the complex an hour or so in, I thought, ok, this could be creepy. When Patricia Clarkson pops up as a haggard escapee half an hour later, I was thinking ok, but it’s a bit late in the game to be introducing all-new characters like this. And by the time Ted Levine of Monk gets his turn as the exceedingly weird Chief Warden who, in this day and age, would probably relish gladiator movies and the Discovery Channel, I wondered if Shutter Island was actually building toward anything at all.
The answer is, yes, but it too takes awhile. [Some spoilers ahead.] As you may well have expected going in, there’s a Shyamalan-style ending to the case that takes us in a new (but not entirely unforeseeable) direction. The problem is, this ending takes about 25 minutes to play out when it should’ve taken five, including a long digression into a past event that we have fully pieced together on our own by now. I wouldn’t call this ending a cop-out, really, although several earlier scenes (and most notably Ruffalo’s behavior in them) don’t make a lot of sense once we’re privy to the new intel. The problem is more that, like an aircraft taxiing to the gate, it just takes far too long to close the story once this final act is set in motion.
Still, as I said, Shutter Island has its moments. As far as exercises in noir cinema go, I’ve definitely sat through worse than these two and a half hours of Scorsese playing with his haunted mansion playset. If nothing else, you can tell that Marty has a deep and abiding love of the crime-noir genre. And, for at least a good hour or so, his madness is contagious.
Put briefly, and while adding a frisson of Funny Games‘ Aryan youths-gone-wild to the mix, The White Ribbon attempts to do for the rise of the Nazis in Germany what Haneke’s Cache did for the French-Algerian conflict. But, at least for me, lightning didn’t strike twice. Perhaps it’s due to either knowing the trick this time ’round or having a greater familiarity with the history at hand, but I thought the allegorical content of Ribbon started out rather didactically, and only got more obvious and belabored at the movie churned along. And, shorn of its historical musings, the story here doesn’t really hold up on its own — It’s mostly just long, meandering takes of (usually) unfortunate things happening to German peasants.
First, the story. The year is 1913, and in the (fictional) village of Eichwald, a German doctor (Rainer Bock) is thrown from his horse and gravely injured, apparently due to a tripwire someone — one of the Black Hand? — placed across his path. And before this event can even be fully processed, another tragedy takes place: A worker for the local Baron (Ulrich Tukur) falls through some rotted boards to her death. Yep, Eichwald is having a frozen run of luck like you read about.
As suspicions and recriminations deepen throughout this hamlet, more troubling events ensue. An aggrieved farmer ruins the harvest festival by slaughtering all the Baron’s cabbages. The Baron’s young son is taken by unknown parties and brutally horsewhipped (for some reason, and as in Doubt, nobody ever thinks to ask the kid who did this to him.) Fires are set, folks disappear (or leave while they still can), birds are mutilated, and, perhaps most frightening, even souls are in peril: For example, the son (Leonard Proxauf) of the local reverend (Burghart Klaubner) puts his eternal salvation in doubt by indulging in a nasty habit of onanism. To be sure, this evil must be beaten out of him, and his siblings, as soon as possible. In other words, we must destroy these children in order to save them.
Narrating this tale throughout (as an old man, years on) is the local schoolteacher (Christian Friedel), who, as a relatively young newcomer to the village, stands between its feuding generations. When not courting the Baron’s young nanny (Leonie Benesch), he watches the events unfolding in town with growing unease, and tries to figure out who is responsible for all the incidents driving the citizens of Eichwald mad. The problem is, he’s already tipped what’s actually going on in the very first scene of the movie, when he says something along the lines of “This is not just the story of a random German village, but the story of my nation.” Ooh, really? Allegory time.
Pretty soon thereafter, we are regaled with a scene where the Reverend’s children are taken to the proverbial woodshed and unduly punished for their transgressions, real and imagined. Given both the time I’ve spent on this subject in recent years and the schoolmaster’s “time to play German History Jeopardy!” warning in the first scene, this set off Versailles Conference bells and alarms right away, and especially so once these children are then forced to wear white ribbons as symbols of purity. Hmm…who else in 20th century German history ran around wearing armbands? Let me think on it.
The rest of the story pans out as you might expect. For various reasons, predominant among them the Sins of the Father(s), these kids go terribly wrong, eventually even going so far as to attack a developmentally disabled boy (i.e. the local minority in their midst.) Also, for some reason, the movie is constructed like a mystery, even tho’ — even if you didn’t pick up on all the hints in the last paragraph — one of the kids basically confesses to the schoolteacher what’s going on in the first reel. Uh, can we speed this along? Bitte?
I’d like to say The White Ribbon remains engaging despite all of its allegorical ambitions. But it doesn’t, really. When you’re not playing spot-the-German-history as it goes along — Is the Baron supposed to be Kaiser Wilhelm? Are we gonna get a Beer Hall Putsch? Hey, look, Pius XII! — Ribbon mostly just offers long, intermittently interesting digressions on agrarian village life, like harvest festivals, courting carriage-rides and the cruelest break-up of the German pre-war period. (Some of this plays a bit like Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven — A period film, told in period (B&W) style, with then-taboo subjects like incest, sexual assault, and the aforementioned onanism now thrown in.)
Simply put, there’s not enough story to sustain interest in this enterprise without the allegorical content that’s driving the movie. And, since this allegory was tipped in the opening half-hour, I pretty much just spent most of The White Ribbon waiting for all the various little Nazi shoes to drop. Without either the ambiguity or the open-endedness of Cache, I found The White Ribbon on the pedantic and stultifying side, and I can’t really recommend it. It’s not terrible or anything, but it is rather long and uninvolving, and I have to think one of the other Foreign Film contenders probably puts on a better show.
On one hand, the film makes for an interesting moral counterpoint to The Fog of War: Ellsberg’s actions put the lie to a lot of McNamara’s convenient post-hoc rationalizing therein — clearly, SecDef could’ve done more at the time to end the war in Vietnam.) On the other, Ellsberg also works as a prequel of sorts to All the President’s Men — to say nothing of a generation of seventies paranoia epics like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. But in the end, The Most Dangerous Man in America probably works best as an eloquent testament to the words of the late Howard Zinn (who appears here as an old friend of Ellsberg): “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”
Like Man on Wire, Ellsberg starts here in media res, and at the scene of the history-making crime. Furtive eyes scan back and forth as an old-school Xerox copier whirrs in the dark, its green light illuminating maps of Southeast Asia and the ominous words “Top Secret” from below. With no zip drives or electronic files to speak of, analyst Daniel Ellsberg is forced to copy the 7000 pages of the Pentagon Papers page by painstaking page. It’ll take months (and eventually he enlists the aid of his kids.) As the Xerox churns, we get up-to-date on the ramifications of the document being processed — bombs fall from the sky over North Vietnam and Cambodia, weary troops patrol the hot, fetid jungle, and Nixon and Kissinger obsess over the leaks in their war machine (with Kissinger giving Ellsberg his moniker: “the most dangerous man in America.”)
Cut back to several years earlier, when the future leaker of the Pentagon Papers seemed quite a different man indeed. A fresh-faced young ex-Marine with a crisp, no-nonsense Kennedy era haircut, Ellsberg began his tenure in government as one of the Best and the Brightest, with an enthusiasm for his 80-hour workweek matched only by his hawkishness. As one of McNamara’s boys, Ellsberg concedes to helping massage the data to create a casus belli for the war. His first day on the job is the Gulf of Tonkin incident that wasn’t, and he spends subsequent weeks trying to dredge up some, any, horrible atrocities in the region that might involve Americans.
But, over time, the scales fall away from Ellsberg’s eyes. In part because he makes the acquaintance of a luminous lefty-leaning journalist named Patricia, who eventually becomes his fiancee…twice. (Ellsberg has a great line about a guy he meets at a peace rally who’s a Trotskyist. He asks this fellow how in Hell he ever became a Trotskyist. The answer: “The same way anybody becomes anything. I met a girl.”) And in part because, driven with an analyst’s overriding compulsion to find the right answer, he starts going to Vietnam himself to lead recon missions on the side and get a better sense of the situation on the ground. Simply put, the Ground Game is not going well.
The rest, as they say, is history. Moved to throw a shoe into the gears of the war machine he had helped nurture into existence, Ellsberg goes rogue and decides to publish the top-secret history of the war. But, even if you feel like you know the story of the Pentagon Papers pretty well, and I thought I did, there are some fresh and intriguing insights here. For example, I’m not really one for Freudianism or overthinking coincidences, but it turns out Ellsberg suffered a tragedy at the age of 15 that made him uniquely primed to play the role in history he ended up playing. (His father fell asleep at the wheel during a road trip, prompting a crash that sheared the car in two and killed Ellsberg’s mother and sister. In other words, watch the authority figures at the wheel verrry carefully.)
And then there’s the man himself, who’s an engaging presence throughout (if perhaps with a touch of monomania — I could see him being a hard guy to get along with.) If The Most Dangerous Man in America has a flaw, it’s that the movie is quite one-sided in the end — Ellsberg even narrates much of the story, and you get the sense at various points there may well be some whitewash being applied. (Ellsberg has an ex-wife, and kids, that aren’t even mentioned for the first 45 minutes or so.) Still, I’m inclined to give Ellsberg — and Ellsberg — the benefit of the doubt (and not just because the man loves his movies.) Ever since George and the cherry tree, we’ve been smoothing the edges of our patriotic tales. And, whatever his misdeeds as a man, Daniel Ellsberg, the film makes clear, is a patriot, through and through.
I use this Cornel West quote rather often, but that doesn’t make it any less true: “To understand your country, you must love it. To love it, you must, in a sense, accept it. To accept it as how it is, however is to betray it. To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that in it which shows what it might become. America – this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of the no into the yes, needs citizens who love it enough to reimagine and remake it.”
Daniel Ellsberg is one of those citizens. He saw an obvious crime being perpetrated by our government across multiple presidencies, and he did his part to help put a stop to it. In many ways, the story told in The Most Dangerous Man in America seems quaint: Johnson actually asked Congress for authority to bomb Vietnam? The press wasn’t rolling over like a lapdog in the wake of obvious propagandistic lies? (In fact, the media types who show up late in Ellsberg clearly possess some of the narcisstic sense of self-entitlement that has been our undoing of late. Ellsberg the civilian sweats blood and tears to get this 7,000-page document out in public, and the press poobahs act like they’re both the knowing gatekeepers and the heroes of the story.)
But just because Ellsberg’s brand of patriotism has fallen out of fashion in the era of Judith Miller and the chattering class doesn’t make this story any less relevant. It makes it more relevant. If we’re going to keep our young republic through its third century, we need more men and women of Ellsberg’s stripe. Men and women who will buck the trend, risk the ridicule and wrath of their well-connected peers, and stand up against injustice done under our collective name when they are party to it.
Presidents will get their due on this and every subsequent Presidents Day to come. But, now and again, it’s good to honor those patriots who, through non-violent principle and sheer, dogged determination, help to keep our leaders in check when the separation of powers fails — ordinary folks like you, me, and Daniel and Patricia Elllsberg.
“‘I thought the name was a horror,’ he told The Press Enterprise of Riverside, Calif., in 2007. “Terrible.” (Before perfecting the Pluto Platter in 1955, Mr. Morrison had called earlier incarnations of his disc the Flyin’ Cake Pan, the Whirlo-Way and the Flyin-Saucer.)” And millions of dogs howled in lament: Walter Frederick Morrison, inventor of the Frisbee, 1920-2010. (By way of FmH and The Late Adopter.)
A very happy Valentines Day to you and yours. To keep tradition going for its sixth year here at GitM — ’05, ’06, ’07, ’08, ’09 — time for the yearly musical valentines from yours truly.
First off, in keeping with the usual once-a-year romantic status-update, you’ll be happy to know that this 2010 post actually comes with 44% less whining than usual. (Yay, and there was much rejoicing.) I am still single on this end, as per the norm, which means my trusty sheltie sidekick is once again holding down the official valentine spot. (Aw, he got me Bioshock 2. How did he know I wanted it?) But, having at last escaped the egregious emotional, financial, and general personal sandtrap that is late-term gradual school, it’s safe to say I’m in a much happier place these days. And, since returning to DC, a town that’s been swell to me so far, I’ve at least been taking a few swings at the plate lately. So, no wallowing this V-day. I’m in a pretty good place, all in all, and hope springs eternal. In any event, on to the music:
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“Hang with me in my MMO, So many places we can go!
I’m better than a Real World quest You’ll touch my +5 to Dexterity Vest.
What role do you want to play? I’m just a click away, night or day. And if you think I’m not the one, Log off, log off and we’ll be done…”
But can she kite the adds? First off, as always, I offer some quality cheese: Singlehandedly raising unrealistic expectations for gamergrrls the world (of Warcraft) over, The Guild‘s fetching Felicia Day scored a massive (multiplayer) online hit last summer with the supremely catchy “Do You Wanna Date (My Avatar)?” In some ways a peppy, poppy update to Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love” (which led off the order in ’06) this was one of two songs I heard in the past year that I knew — immediately — would make it into this post.
Now, having spent more than my fair share of time MMO’ing over the past few years — everybody say hi to Jacklowry — it’s safe to say that the bubbly, infectious enthusiasm that drives this track isn’t really a huge part of games like Warcraft. (In fact, everyone usually seems vaguely depressed — There’s a reason why some of the biggest facets of WoW-life are “grinding” levels and “farming” mats. If you take it seriously, it sorta becomes a day job.) But, all that being said, Day and The Guild crew know their WoW — how ’bout a little tank-and-spank? — and they’ve delivered a ditty that works as both a fun and knowing riff on the MMO life and a silky, effervescent pop song all on its own. Great job, y’all…Lvl 80 rogue lf healbot pst?
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“You told me you loved me, Why did you leave me, all alone?
Now you tell me you need me, When you call me, on the phone.
Girl I refuse, you must have me confused With some other guy Your bridges were burned, and now it’s your turn To cry, cry me a river.”
Don’t it make you sad about it? This song probably needs no introduction — most everybody knows it, and I’m sure a lot of people are totally sick of the durned thing. Still, since the last song, however cheesy, is already a gamer standard and perhaps not nearly as embarrassing a guilty pleasure as I’ve tended to offer in years past, I give you JT’s “Cry Me a River.”
It’s easy to playa-hate Justin Timberlake, and to be honest, I think I can only name three or four songs of his anyway. Still, I’d argue this well-crafted track and “SexyBack” put JT as the truly deserving 21st century pop heir to, say, Stevie Wonder or Michael Jackson. He’s got the pipes, he’s got the beats, he’s got the production values, the dance moves, and the marketing savvy, and to my mind “Cry Me a River” just holds it own as a classically catchy pop ditty. And when the scorned lasses of this world roll out Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” as their peppy post-break-up standard on the dance floor, I in turn will call forth this track, Pokemon-style. Game on.
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“I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm,
your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm.
Yes, many loved before us, I know that we are not new,
in city and in forest they smiled like me and you.
But now it’s come to distances and both of us must try,
Your eyes are soft with sorrow, And I know when to say goodbye.
When he’s at his best, as he is throughout Live in London, Cohen’ sheer rawness — his naked, direct emotion — cuts like a knife. He’s not one to dabble in misdirection, or to try to obscure his feelings with extended metaphors. He just goes right to the heart of it, every time.
With that in mind, I much prefer this version of “That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” to the original 1967 version. At times, the young Cohen sounds too callow to me. It took years, even decades, for his voice to catch up to the power of his poetry. And the slight change in lyrics here — Now it’s “I know when to say goodbye” — helps push this ballad from petulance to poignance. It’s one of many transcendant moments on this superlative album.
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“Well I could sleep forever But it’s of her I dream.
if I could sleep forever
I could forget about everything…“
And, really, who doesn’t love sleep? As a love-song sorbet of sorts, here’s The Dandy Warhols’ “Sleep.” Like Brian Eno’s “By this River” and Hot Chip’s “Crap Kraft Dinner” (written up in ’09), this is one of those songs I find endlessly soothing. It could just play on and on like this for twenty minutes and I’d be blissfully content…perhaps eventually nodding off, fading away into the wilderness of dream…
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“I’m so tired, of playing Playing with this bow and arrow
Gonna give my heart away Leave it to the other boys to play Been tempted for too long
Go on, give me a reason to love you Give me a reason to wanna be your man Give me a reason to love you Give me a reason if you can.”
As I said back when hyping Third in 2008, Portishead’s Dummy was one of those ubiquitous albums for a few years there in the mid-nineties, with the most memorable track therein possibly being “the second single, “Glory Box.” I include the late guitarist John Martyn’s cover of “Glory Box” here not because it’s an improvement on the original — they’re both amazing — but because it captures so well that song’s hothouse sultriness, while managing to sound quite different in the end (and switching the gender dynamic.)
Also of note on this subject: Portishead’s “Scorn,” the ice-cold B-side version of this same song. I love how it completely inverts the sensation of the original tune, just by switching the beats involved. Now, the whole song plays out atop that sensual, brooding oil-tanker rhythm only heard when everything goes wobbly in the original version. And, conversely, only in the climax of this mix are the original lyrical strings heard, like a moment of clear-thinking grace before the hammers descend anew. (The Youtube of “Scorn” below cuts out the end, unfortunately, although you can hear the whole mix here.)
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“A love-struck Romeo sings the streets a serenade Laying everybody low with a love song that he made. Finds a streetlight, steps out of the shade Says something like, ‘You and me babe, how about it?’
Juliet says, ‘Hey, it’s Romeo, you nearly gave me a heart attack!’ He’s underneath the window, she’s singing, ‘Hey la, my boyfriend’s back.’ You shouldn’t come around here singing up to people like that… Anyway, what you gonna do about it?”
You and me, babe, how ’bout it? Now, if forced, with a gun to my head, to pick the Dire Straits’ absolute finest hour, I’d have to go with “Sultans of Swing”, that testament to resolute keep-on-keepin’-on long after the crowd’s gone home and all the midnight oil is burned. Still, their brief retelling of “Romeo & Juliet” is an unabashedly lovely song indeed. (Full disclosure: This was, in fact, the favorite tune of one of my former ex’s, a long, long time ago. But, no plagiarism here. I ended up earning this streetlight serenade’s stripes myself…the hard way. Anyway, let’s move on.)
There are a lot of covers of “Romeo & Juliet” floating around — Indigo Girls, The Killers, Edwin McCain — but none of ’em really do the simple beauty of this song justice. Also, the original Dire Straits video is also online, but frankly it’s so bad and ridiculously Eighties-ish that it detracts from the timelessness of the tune. No wonder they later plunked down big dollars for “Money for Nothing“…
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“Looking from a window above, It’s like a story of love Can you hear me? Came back only yesterday Moving farther away Want you near me…
All i needed was the love you gave All i needed for another day, And all i ever knew, Only you.”
As I’ve said ’round here many times, I’m a big Depeche Mode fanfrom way back. (Their “Here is the House” went up here in ’06.) And I think they became a better, darker, richer band in 1982 with Vince Clarke’s departure after Speak & Spell, when Martin Gore took over the songwriting full-time.
Still, with all due respect to melancholy Marty, Vince Clarke always had a way with a happy three-chord love song that the minor-key-obsessed DM never ever really got back to. Case in point: Yaz’s “Only You” (as well as almost all of Erasure’s many hits over the years.) There are no regrets or guilt or religious allusions or teenage scared-stiff-of-sex angst or black cars driving around in the distance. It’s just a simple, very pretty ode to that one special person.
There are a lot of very good tracks on the better of Yaz’s two albums, Upstairs at Eric — “Don’t Go,” “Situation,” and “Winter Kills,” for example. Still, I’d put “Only You” as the pick of the litter: It’s the perfect blend of Vince Clarke synth-pop and Alison Moyet soul.
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“Love is a delicate thing, It could just float away on a breeze! (he said the same thing to me)
How can we ever know We’ve found the right person in this world? (he means he looks at other girls)
Love is a mystery, It does not follow the rules! (this guy is a fool) (he’ll always be a boy, he’s a man who never grew up) I thought I told you to shut up…”
The first time you get dumped, it feels like a tragedy. It just plain sucks. The second time, it…well, actually it’s even worse. And by the third or fourth time, you start to really wonder what’s wrong with you. But, after enough iterations of the dismal cycle, as the Conchords’ “Carol Brown” points out, it does become farce. And a really funny one, for that matter.
Along with Felicia Day at the top, this is the other song I knew I was going to post here this year as soon as I heard it. The Flight of the Conchords’ second season included a lot of really hilarious tunes: “Hurt Feelings” (and its reprise), “Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor,” “Fashion is Danger.” But “Carol Brown” is, imho, their magnum opus. It’s funny on its own terms (as well as a great riposte to Paul Simon’s smarmy “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.”) But, more importantly, it’s just a funky-sweet song with truthiness to spare. (The Michel Gondry video is great too.)
I’m sure most of y’all out there know the old Annie Hall joke: “This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, ‘Doc, uh, my brother’s crazy; he thinks he’s a chicken.’ And, uh, the doctor says, ‘Well, why don’t you turn him in?’ The guy says, ‘I would, but I need the eggs.’ Well, I guess that’s pretty much now how I feel about relationships; y’know, they’re totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, and…but, uh, I guess we keep goin’ through it because, uh, most of us…need the eggs.“
That’s the gag that “Carol Brown” gets so well. The whole song is a litany of ugly dumpings for most of its run. But every time that peal chimes (at 1:15) and the angelic chorus kicks in for the first time (“He doesn’t cook or clean…“), you can hear exactly why Jemaine — and so many others of us, for that matter — keep leading chin first regardless. Carol Brown took a bus out of town…but I’m hoping the next gal sticks around.
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That’ll do for ’10, I think. Have a safe and happy Valentines Day, everybody. I’ll see y’all on the flip side. And, until next year…
Well, I was just riffing on Nick Lowe’s “The Beast in Me” in my review of 44 Inch Chest a few days ago, and perhaps I should’ve saved it for this film, which takes the same idea all too literally. And yet, Lowe’s exemplary tune deserves better than to be linked to this severely flawed retread, so I probably made the right call. With all due respect to my man Berkeley — no offense intended, l’il buddy — sadly, Joe Johnston’s take on The Wolfman is a bit of a dog. In short, it’s exactly the sort of big budget, never-gelling misfire one would expect to get dumped in mid-February. (Let’s hope the same doesn’t hold true of next week’s Shutter Island.)
I should say up front that, while I’m the first to admit the vampire genre is completely played out at this cultural moment, I’m usually more of a Team Edward man when it comes to the classic movie monsters. With the notable exception of An American Werewolf in London and arguably that saucy, vaguely spastic Shakira video, I’ve never really been one for the lycanthropes. So, when it came to this top-of-the-line, period-faithful reboot of the werewolf fable, I wasn’t really looking for anything more than a passably entertaining B-movie out of the affair. (Put another way, I had no real wolf in this fight.)
Unfortunately, Joe Johnston’s Wolfman doesn’t get the job done even by that measly standard. I was hoping it would at least possess some of the ribald, over-the-top, campy fun of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, which also featured Anthony Hopkins — there at his absolute hammiest. But this somehow turned out more like Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein — staid, stilted, and dull. This is in no small part due to the sloppy Andrew Kevin Walker/David Self script (the former of Se7en and Sleepy Hollow, the latter of Road to Perdition), which seems to be missing quite a bit of connective tissue — The movie just jumps haphazardly from beat to beat.
Moreover, as per Walker’s m.o. in particular, everybody’s far too grim-faced through this retelling. Ok, sure, if done well, this would be a horror story through and through. But this Big Bad Wolf is never once frightening, and all the entrails and viscera attending each graphic disembowlment can’t make up for that unfortunate fact. And yet, the movie doesn’t swing far enough in the other direction either. I mean, we have Anthony Hopkins and his Sikh manservant here, for Pete’s sake. And yet, even when the story moves to a Victorian-era asylum run by a Paul Reubens lookalike, there is no Joy in Mudville — it’s all sloppy dream sequences and abject medical horrors out of From Hell or a Cronenberg movie. So the film fails to find its camp side either.
Part of the overarching problem with The Wolfman is the stakes are unclear. Who exactly are we meant to be rooting for here? On one hand, we have thespian Lawrence Talbot (Benicio del Toro — he’ll flip ya for real), who — at the behest of his late sibling’s fiancee (Emily Blunt, phoning it in) — has returned from America to the moors to investigate his brother’s horrible death, and maybe reconcile with his whos-more-grizzled father (Hopkins) in the process. Spoiler — Talbot eventually becomes the wolfman (as back in 1941), and is none too happy about his midnight prowlings.
But then we have Detective Abberline of Scotland Yard (Hugo Weaving), who missed out on the Ripper and now wants to stop this rumored beast before he kills again. But he’s just enough of a jerk, particularly later on in the story, that one kinda wouldn’t mind seeing him on the wrong end of the fangs regardless. Other than that, and aside from Geraldine Chaplin showing up to offer a touch of class to the proceedings, there’s just a bunch of peasants and villagers out of stock British casting — sometimes even with torches and pitchforks in hand — who are basically little more than werewolf fodder.
The upshot being, every time the wolf must feed, there’s no real fear or excitement to be had, since we’re not particularly concerned about anyone’s well-being here. So, to review: The film isn’t scary, it isn’t fun, and it isn’t even exciting. And by the time [sizable spoiler, albeit one fully indicated by the trailers] it turns out Pa Talbot has a touch of the moon-madness too, the overarching story has become quite stupid. In fact, the final lobo-a-lobo — think Ang Lee’s Hulk — may constitute a new low for the werewolf kind, were it not for Underworld and likely whatever embarrassing shirtless shenanigans are going on over in the Twilight-verse.
So, anything good here? Well, the gaffers definitely brought their A-game, and power to them for that. (I’m not even being flippant — there’s some great work with shadows here.) Even the lighting aside, the movie does look quite good, although the recent Sherlock Holmes reboot stole much of The Wolfman‘s Victorian-era thunder in that regard. Joe Johnston nicely frames some very iconic shots of the werewolf in question (even if, sadly, the CGI and Rick Baker make-up often don’t mesh so well), and I liked that the movie played up the “lunatic” angle — the moon is a harsh mistress here, no doubt.
Finally, while I expected going in that Hopkins would be in full-on Pacino mode in terms of scenery-chewing here, and that Weaving would turn out to be the film’s secret weapon, it turns out I was quite wrong. Frankly, Weaving seems bored here, even coasting somewhat. While Hopkins, to his credit, actually even underplays his thankless role at times. Unlike most everyone else involved, he sometimes manages to give this otherwise-forgettable iteration of The Wolfman real claws.
Well, that and Malcolm Venville’s very theatrical-seeming 44 Inch Chest, a play-like disquisition on primal, wounded masculinity-in-early-winter brought to you by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, the writers of Sexy Beast. (In fact, by the transitive property of fandom, I could’ve opened this review instead with 2/3rds of Beast + 2/3rds of Paris, 1784 + a very ornery Winston Smith, most definitely post-Julia, and the math still works out.) Put in brief, this film was aptly summed up by David Edelstein in one sentence: “It starts to feel less like a thriller than an actors’ workshop.” That’s very true, but, ah, what actors they are.
Edelstein is entirely correct that 44 Inch Chest is mostly all dressed up with no place to go. More than anything, this film just tries to convey a mood of wallowing in the wounded male id for 90 minutes, and the movie ultimately has so little to do that it eventually starts adding random, ill-thought-out dream sequences and clips from the 1944 version of Samson & Delilah just to pad the running time. Still, much like The Men Who Stare at Goats, I’m inclined to forgive a movie some serious flaws if I enjoy the company of the actors involved. And, in that sense, I’ll concede to having a better time at 44 Inch Chest than it probably deserved.
The story here is very simple: Colin Diamond (Ray Winstone) is a broken man. His beloved wife of 21 years (Joanne Whalley) has not only fallen out of love with him, but betrayed him with a handsome French waiter (Melvil Poupaud, who took the same situation much more sanguinely in A Christmas Story.) And now he’s a weeping, blubbering, suicidal, homicidal mess. So much so that his four best mates — amiable Archie (Tom Wilkinson), suave Mal (Stephen Dillane), the happily out Meredith (Ian McShane), and the vindictive Old Man Peanut (John Hurt) — decide to take drastic action.
They capture “Loverboy,” throw him in a wardrobe in the aforementioned rundown flat, and wait around for Colin to exact his revenge. And if he won’t “man up” enough to get the dirty deed done, well, somebody else will have to step in to do it. Because, in this day and age, and men being what they are, cuckoldry is a crime against nature that simply cannot go unavenged. As this crew tell us time and time and time again, usually using even more colorful language, “you just don’t f**k another man’s wife.” But, to paraphrase the inimitable Lloyd Dobler, if these guys know so much about women, how come it’s 3am at the London equivalent of the Gas-and-Sip, and there are absolutely no females around?
If this all sounds like a Harold Pintery, foul-mouthed cockney version of those egregiously mook “men under the gun” Superbowl ads we were regaled with last weekend, well, maybe we’re sorta in the same ballpark. But I would qualify that. First off, just as NIN’s Pretty Hate Machine or, say, (500) Days of Summer capture some of this angst on the young-man side, 44 Inch Chest is really less about misogyny as a dubious lifestyle choice and more just about Men of a Certain Age being burned alive in the horrible flames of thwarted love. Put another way, this movie is a pretty exact cinematic equivalent of Tom Waits’ towering “Make it Rain” or Nick Lowe’s “The Beast in Me” — which, as you know if you have one, is “restless by day, and by night, rants and rages at the stars…(God help the Beast in Me.)”
And speaking of the Beasts in Us, the Sexy Beast influence is pretty strongly felt throughout this movie, and not just because Winstone, McShane, and countless iterations of the C-word are back. Most obviously, John Hurt is now in the over-the-top Ben Kingsley role (also appropriated by Ralph Fiennes in In Bruges), and he has a good deal of fun with it. But other elements of Sexy Beast also came to mind throughout Chest — the dream sequences (better executed in Beast), the men-writhing-underwater bank heist (surely a good visual metaphor for the delving into the male id here), and, maybe most notably, Gal’s memorable profession of love over the phone from London: “I love you like a rose loves rainwater, like a leopard loves its partner in the jungle, like…I don’t know what like.” (And, come to think of it, Sexy Beast has a cuckolding subplot too, with Aitch, Don, and Jackie.)
To be clear, Sexy Beast is, by all accounts, a much better and more interesting film. (It made #29 on my Decade top 100.) But, even though this movie doesn’t really work on its own, I enjoyed 44-Inch Chest as sort of an extended, actors-studio riffing on the same themes. For all the posturing machismo in both movies, Chest and Beast are really both about closet romantics bottling up their feelings behind a tough guy veneer, and the awful consequences that arise when those feelings finally, irrevocably spill out. (In addition, both films feature crimes of passion, and here Winstone is even more tortured by his horrible deed as he is his initial predicament.) To put it another way, 44-Inch Chest is Sexy Beast with its leg caught in a coyote trap, gibbering and howling into the wind in primal misery.
Now, if you haven’t seen Sexy Beast, and don’t much feel like dwelling at length about the similarities, I’ll leave it at this: 44 Inch Chest is basically a filmed play about manliness-gone-sour that’s far too meandering after awhile, and it completely loses the thread in its last half-hour. Still, to my mind, there are worse ways to pass the time than seeing Ray Winstone sweat out several choice monologues, a snarling John Hurt getting to chew the scenery for once, Ian McShane deadpanning a few choice quips, and Stephen Dillane stealing several scenes just by his very presence. (Wilkinson, for his part, should’ve been given more to do.)
This, by the way, is the same trick Dillane often pulled on poor Paul Giamatti in John Adams. Give Mr. Jefferson his due — he might just be operating at a Tony Leung threshold of cool right now. The guy needs more parts and stat…and he’d make a great Doctor when Matt Smith retires the police box…
…or not. Also in the trailer bin, Michael Fassbender, Dominic West, Noel Clarke (i.e. Doctor Who‘s Mickey Smith), and a host of other Roman legionnaires find themselves behind enemy lines and surrounded by angry Picts of some kind in the new trailer for Neil Marshall’s Centurion, also with Olga Kurylenko (who really should’ve gotten Scarlett Johannson’s part in Iron Man 2.) Well, ok then. Here’s hoping Marshall squeezes in a good Asterix and Obelix cameo.
Old toys never die, they just lose their accessories. In the trailer bin, Buzz, Woody and the gang suffer the inevitable indignities of castoffhood in the brand-new trailer for Lee Unkrich’s Toy Story 3. So far, so good, and Pixar hasn’t really led us astray yet. Still, it could be the concussion talking, but I’m finding the pastel color palette of this flick really rather headache-inducing.
