Category: Cinema

Lyra, daemons, and bears, oh my!

Another big fantasy trailer comes in the wake of Harry: New Line plays the LotR card to help sell audiences on the new teaser for Chris Weitz’s take on Phillip Pullman’s The Golden Compass. Well, the actors and the polar bears look pretty good…I’d like to see more of the daemons.

But he breaks like a little girl.

She’s got everything she needs, she’s an artist, she don’t look back. (Although if I had to guess, she’s been watching the heck out of Don’t Look Back lately.) With (a non-levitating) Bruce Greenwood in tow, Cate Blanchett channels Blonde on Blonde-era Dylan and meets never-nude Allen Ginsburg (David Cross) in this brief You-tubed clip from Todd Haynes’ forthcoming I’m Not There. Other Dylans in the production: Christian Bale, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and Ben Whishaw.

The Dark is Rising.


Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, director David Yates’ take on the fifth installment of J.K. Rowling’s (soon-to-be-completed!) series, is, I’m happy to report, a somber, suspenseful return to the increasingly dire matters at Hogwarts, and well in keeping with the higher standard set by Alfonso Cuaron and Mike Newell in the past two movies. While I think Newell’s Goblet of Fire remains my favorite film outing thus far, this one is right up there in my estimation, and given how much less Yates had to work with, that’s rather impressive. (For all its girth, Book V felt basically like a holding action to me — the wider narrative arc didn’t progress all that much from the end of Goblet to the end of Order, and the story suffered from a wham-bang action climax that didn’t really work on paper (it comes off better on-screen.)) Indeed, Yates’ Order not only captures my most prominent impressions of the book — Harry’s burgeoning teenage moodiness, the growing sense among the students of grim times ahead and important events already set in motion — but also significantly streamlines and distills Rowling’s most-sprawling tome into two-and-a-half hours of sleek, well-paced cinema. No mean feat of magic, that.

By the start of Order, Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) is loose, Cedric Diggory is dead, and Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), once more at the mercy of the Dursleys for the summer, is poised on the verge of adolescent rebellion. He hasn’t heard a pip from friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) for months, nor has he heard any news of goings-on in the magical world. So it is with no small amount of surprise and consternation that Harry finds himself first attacked by Dementors one gloomy evening, then expelled from Hogwarts — by authority of the Ministry of Magic — for using his wand to defend himself. Brought back into the magical loop by these events, Harry discovers that many of his former allies, including godfather Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), have banded together to re-form the Order of the Phoenix in preparation for Lord Voldemort’s next move. More troubling, it seems Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge (Robert Hardy) is not only not inclined to believe Harry that You-Know-Who has returned, but also views Harry and his mentor Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), as a political threat, and has turned the general public and popular press against them both. Finally, to further complicate Potter’s prospects, Fudge dispatches one Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) to Hogwarts with a ministry mandate to stamp out both dark sarcasm and Defense against the Dark Arts in the classroom. Thus hemmed in, Harry, Ron, and Hermione find once more they need to take matters in their own hands, and begin to defiantly assemble what they call Dumbledore’s Army, a student organization dedicated to preparing for the worst. But, all the while, Lord Voldemort is up to his own tricks…and what good is Dumbledore’s Army if its young, bespectacled leader is already hopelessly compromised by his still-unexplained connection to the Dark Lord?

As the paragraph above attests, there’re a lot of balls in the air this time around, but Yates, screenwriter Michael Goldenberg, & co. do a solid job of keeping everything moving without doing grievous harm to any of the many included subplots. (Several have been excised regardless, such as this year’s Quidditch match. No real loss, imho.) And throughout, what Order of the Phoenix gets most right — in fact, one could argue it’s actually done better here than in the book — is the feeling that things are simmering to a boil. Hermione, Ron, and especially Harry have grown from wide-eyed, trusting children to gawky, hormonal teenagers (and better actors, for that matter), seething with imminent rebellion against the powers-that-be, and their world has similarly gone from a colorful, fantastic, and ever-so-occasionally dangerous realm of magical delights to a gray, ominous land of hidden agendas, political propaganda, fallible adults, and fatal consequences. In the last movie, Harry’s Hogwarts cohort were on the threshold of early adolescence, and had just begun to discover the tantalizing mysteries of the opposite sex. Here, slightly older, they come to another classic teenage rite-of-passage: finding that the world — and, more often that not, the people in charge — aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and that they may even actually be out to get you.

Of course, Yates is helped out tremendously in bringing Order to life by his ever-expanding Dream Team of British thespians. Imelda Staunton, as the main new cast member, is note-perfect as Umbridge. A pink-festooned, unholy cross between the Church Lady and arguably the real You-Know-Who of Rowling’s books, Margaret Thatcher, she’s like something out of a Roger Waters fever dream (and continues the “The Tories are Coming!” subtext I noted in my review of the last movie.) Even with Staunton aside, tho’, Order is packed to the brim with quality actors reprising their roles from the first four films — Oldman, Hardy, Brendan Gleeson, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Emma Thompson, Jason Isaacs, Robbie Coltrane, etc., and particularly Fiennes and Alan Rickman. They’re all excellent, and frankly it’s good fun just to see so many of them around again to help further flesh out the Potterverse. (Although, having seen Naked and The History Boys since Goblet, I’m slightly more concerned about Harry hanging around the likes of Remus Lupin (David Thewlis) and Vernon Dursley (Richard Griffiths)…what would the Umbridges of the world have to say about that?)

Good v. Evil, Rock v. Spear, Naughty v. Nice.

Appearing before Harry yesterday, another spate of new trailers: Al Swearingen (Ian McShane) and Ruth Fisher (Frances Conroy) join forces to help a young boy defeat the insidious Evil that is Christopher Eccleston in the first preview for The Dark is Rising (from the fantasy series by Susan Cooper, which I borrowed from the library around the age of 12 and can barely remember, other than the “seventh son of a seventh son” schtick.) Independence Day director Roland Emmerich stages his own quest for fire (among other nouns) in the new teaser for 10,000 B.C., starring Stephen Strait, Camilla Belle, and Omar Sharif. And Santa’s deadbeat brother (Vince Vaughn) comes home to screw up the family operation in the trailer for the christmas comedy Fred Claus, also starring Paul Giamatti, Miranda Richardson, Kevin Spacey, Elizabeth Banks, and Rachel Weisz. (The joke mainly seems to be that Vaughn is tall and elves are short, but that is a pretty good cast.)

Give him the whip.

Professor of archeology, expert on the occult, and how does one say it? Obtainer of rare antiquities…Via AICN (and in case you missed the pic a few weeks ago), Harrison Ford suits up as Indy once more, this time on video (and George Lucas seems to fess up — finally — that Han shot first.)

Facing the Android’s Conundrum.

(I know, I know, they’re not androids. Sorry, that song‘s been in my head all week.) Well, I kept my expectations low and didn’t really look for anything other than two hours of air conditioning and some big dumb summer fun. But, even by that low standard, Michael Bay’s Transformers is less than meets the eye. Mind you, I didn’t go in with a litany of fanboy complaints on hand…just as car culture somehow bypassed me as a kid, I never much grokked into Transformers back in the day. I did see the cartoon (and the cartoon movie with Orson Welles) a few times, and tried to reassemble the occasional Decepticon over at one friend or another’s place. And, before seeing this 2007 incarnation, I would’ve thought it was a pretty perfect match of director and material: True, Michael Bay movies generally tend to be terrible (although I didn’t mind The Island so much), but he’s definitely in love with the strict machines, and, if nothing else, has a knack for filming sleek, impressive car chases (cf. Island, Bad Boys 2.) But, this…well, this is about as dull and unengaging a movie about gigantic fighting alien-robots as you can imagine. Sure, the special effects team earn their keep with a few brief, shining moments, but the movie as a whole is a badly paced, surprisingly boring affair…It’s an hour and a half of interminable set-up, long, needless digressions, and military-industrial gobbledygook that eventually descends into stuporous, standard-issue Bayhem. If you were going to see this movie, you likely already have. But, if you’ve been on the fence…abort, retry, ignore.

As Transformers begins, the voice of Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) booms forth the backstory: An ancient cataclysmic war between an alien race of good robots (Autobots) and bad robots (Decepticons) over the whereabouts of an all-powerful MacGuffin (The Cube) has finally spilled over to our planet, Earth. Uh, did I say our planet? I’m sorry, this is in fact Michael Bay’s Earth, where cameras endlessly flit around people like wayward moths, the NSA hires hot Australian coeds to be their top computer experts, and extended scenes involving nothing but pseudomilitary babble is considered compelling. Anyway, while the bad guys play hell with US army units stationed in Qatar, the good guys (for reasons left unexplained) already know to track down one Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBoeuf), a quirky, Cusack-ish eleventh-grader who, when he’s not trying vainly to woo the quarterback’s girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox), hawks his Arctic explorer great-grandfather’s personal effects on Ebay. Sam initially encounters these well-meaning alien life forms in the form of his first ride, a bitchin’ Camaro known as Bumblebee (Arguably the movie’s best non-robot-scenes come from the car’s early, Christine-like behavior.) But, soon, he’s met the bad guys too, in the form of a killer cop car known as Starscream. And, before you can say “My, that felt lifted from Terminator 2,” Sam and his new potential ladyfriend (who’s, conveniently, an amateur mechanic) have been irrevocably caught up in the intergalactic-robot melee, a fracas which, it turns out, the MIB-like government suits known as Sector 7 have known about since the days of Herbert Hoover. (Hmm, interesting. Is this dissertation-worthy?)

You may think I’m being too hard on this film — this is a movie based on twenty-year-old toys, after all. (One shudders to wonder if Voltron, My Little Pony, Care Bears, Cabbage Patch Kids and Teddy Ruxpin are all getting the live-action treatment in due course.) But, like I said, I’m willing to sit through a lot of deadly-dull exposition in a July 4th movie such as this to witness big robots beating on each other…but not this much exposition. After its Qatar debut, Transformers takes entirely too long to move out of first gear, and even then, it downshifts for bizarre, barely diverting digressions. (See, for example, Sam trying to hide his giant new friends from his parents.) Conversely, by the time the final battle happens in a city somewhere near the Hoover Dam, it includes so much vehicular carnage packed into fifteen-to-twenty minutes that it barely registers. Throw in the occasional blatant message moments like Sam discussing the car not taken, or the revelation of Mikaela’s checkered (flag?) past, and the movie starts to feel like a straight-up stinker. (I haven’t even mentioned John Turturro, who’s more over the top here than he was in Lebowski, and about one-twentieth as entertaining.)

The only thing that redeems Transformers in the end, is the impressive work of ILM — when two robots tumble, skate, and slide across an interstate highway, a scorpion-shaped Decepticon leaps out of the sand behind terrified troops, or Starscream lunges from car to robot back to car in one sweeping arc, Transformers offers a few tantalizing moments of real visual grandeur. In the end (and no disrespect to La Boeuf, who’s actually a pretty appealing presence throughout), it’s the number-crunching machines at Industrial, Light, and Magic that are the real stars here, however brief and flickering. But I guess that makes a certain amount of sense.

Old Gods and Little Children.

In this week’s trailer bin, 9/11 meets The Blair Witch Project (and maybe even a dash of Cthulhu?) in the cleverly low-fi teaser for J.J.Abrams’ 1-18-08, a.k.a. Cloverfield. Freddie Highmore (of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) discovers his own Pan’s Labyrinth of sorts in the new trailer for The Spiderwick Chronicles, also with Mary-Louise Parker, Nick Nolte, and David Strathairn. And Ben Affleck directs his brother Casey in a Boston missing child case in this look at Gone Baby Gone, by the author of Mystic River and also starring Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, and The Wire‘s Amy Ryan (Beadie) and Michael Williams (Omar).

Live Free or Meh Hard.

I find Len Wiseman’s Live Free or Die Hard, a.k.a. Die Hard 4 or “Die Hard in the Chesapeake,” a difficult movie to review (which is perhaps why it’s taken me an extra week to spend any time on it.) As a long-awaited fourth installment in the Increasingly Unlikely Trials of John McClane, I’d say it’s probably better than Die Harder (about which I only really remember Fred Thompson as an ATC exec) and Die Hard 3 (which brings to mind Samuel L. Jackson in Malcolm X glasses doing jug-of-water problems), and it’s a considerably more enjoyable movie than I expected from the director of Underworld. But it also doesn’t make much sense, it traffics in action-movie cliche, most of its boldest setpieces were telegraphed in the previews, and it doesn’t hold a candle to the still-quite-impressive first film, which ranks deservedly high in the Actioner Hall of Fame. In short…well, it is what it is. I was intermittently amused and diverted by about half of Live Free or Die Hard, restless and somewhat bored by the other half. Bruce Willis has always been an easy actor to root for, and it’s definitely fun to see him back in the saddle as America’s favorite Working-Class Hero, but in the end I thought this Die Hard didn’t really pay the nostalgic dividends of, say, Sly Stallone’s recent return as Rocky Balboa. Willis doesn’t embarrass his franchise by any means, but he doesn’t really add much of note here either.

So what’s the doomsday scenario this time? Well, as the movie begins, we watch various teenage computer hackers, geeks, and webheads out of Fanboy Central Casting report in to the comely villainess Mai (Maggie Q) with their various h4xor pet projects, then — thanks to their sabotaged PCs — get rubbed out in an explosive fireball of Playstation parts, computer cables, Red Bull cans, and collectible figurines. Escaping this awful fate — but only barely — is Mac Guy (Justin Long), who was fortunate enough to have had NYPD Det. John McClane in the nearby Rutgers area, troubling potential suitors to his daughter (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and asked by the usual consortium of concerned government NSA-types to pick the kid up. Soon, McClane and Mac Guy are on a road trip to DC to see these aggrieved Feds when the real cybermachinations begin: all traffic lights go green, all fire alarms go off, all stocks plunge. And, we come to discover, pulling the strings is an even more aggrieved Fed, one Thomas Gabriel (Tim Olyphant), a cyberterrorism expert whose Richard Clarke act got him fired and buried by the blase powers-that-be. Now a private citizen, he’s out to make them, and all America pay, unless McClane can work his analog mojo to stop Gabriel’s digital devastation…

Uh, Mac Guy? McClane’s all-grown-up teenage daughter? And yet, one of the bigger surprises in this otherwise regular-as-clockwork movie is how well it sidesteps what at first look to be really obvious pitfalls. For example, sidekick Justin Long doesn’t come off half as irritating as you might expect, and in fact acquits himself rather well. And while Winstead is given some predictably schlocky “Baby Badass” moments — a la Katherine Heigl in Under Siege 2 — they’re thankfully few and far between. (As for the baddies, Olyphant’s Seth Bullock seethe is put to good use here, but he’s still no Hans Gruber…although I think I’ll take Maggie Q and a parkour henchman or two (a la Casino Royale) over Alexander Godunov.) And, for his part, Bruce Willis is still convincingly tough, crazy, and disgruntled as the man of the hour despite himself….one hopes Harrison Ford holds up as well for his upcoming stint in Indy IV.

Nevertheless, what Live Free or Die Hard is really missing is the narrative economy of the first film, which all took place within the increasingly claustrophobic confines of the Nakatomi Building (thus spurring the “Die Hard on a *blank*” genre in the first place.) Instead, this movie is sprawled out across the mid-Atlantic, with McClane & co. actually driving off to West Virginia and back at one point. Perhaps as a result, the tension in Live Free or Die Hard often goes completely slack, as McClane and Mac Guy have nothing to do but trade clunky exposition or thinly veiled movie-message pablum while driving from place to place. And unlike in the first movie, when, say, McClane is forced to do unsavory things like pull pieces of broken glass out of his torn, bloodied feet, there’s never much sense of any real danger or menace in this film. Perhaps it’s progress, I suppose, but dying hard here doesn’t seem half as troubling as it used to.

Hitmen, and Solar Power.

Another slew of trailers: Tim Olyphant goes Wild Bill (to the strains of “Ave Maria”) in the teaser for Hitman (which I appropriately saw before Live Free or Die Hard yesterday — review on the way), Jason Bourne wants answers from Stiles, Allen, and Straitharn in the full trailer for Paul Greengrass’ The Bourne Ultimatum, and astronauts Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh and others attempt to reignite the sun in a spoileriffic “synopsis” trailer for Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (I’m linking to it ’cause it’s there, but if you have any interest in this flick, I probably wouldn’t watch it.)