Tag: Cinema

Compass Heading.

More images from The Golden Compass emerge online, including new looks at Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards), Lee Scoresby (Sam Elliot), Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman), and Lord Asriel (Craig. Daniel Craig.) Also in the mix, Eva Green (as Serafina Pekkala) and Ian McShane (as the voice of Ragnar Sturlusson). [They’re also posted here.]

Secrets of the Hive.


Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd, the first entrant in my ongoing end-of-2006 movie marathon this week, makes no secret of its Oscar-bait aspirations. Basically the WASP version of The Godfather, as told against the creation and Cold War consolidation of the CIA, Shepherd boasts a crisp look, a grand historical sweep, high-quality production values, and a stellar cast (including Best Supporting Actor-type turns strewn all over the place, like the wreckage from a better, more interesting movie.) But it’s also a film that never lets you forget how serious and sober-minded it aims to be. As such — however well-meaning and nice to look at, with all its chiaroscuro fedoras on hand — it’s also sadly a bit of a bore. Throw in an occasionally clunky script (note the particularly egregious God/CIA line near the end, for example) and some considerable miscasting issues (Matt Damon is a good actor, but is thoroughly implausible as a middle-aged man, and Angelina Jolie is too much of a star presence to be wholly believable as the ignored wife) and you have a respectable but ultimately somewhat pedestrian night at the movies. Shepherd gets the job done, I suppose, but it takes no pleasure in it.

When we first meet intelligence analyst Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), the bespectacled Everyman and titular shepherd of the film, it’s the spring of 1961, the Bay of Pigs invasion has just gone FUBAR, and America’s new president is looking for a few heads to roll over at Langley. In this middle of this spate of job anxiety, Wilson is mysteriously sent a photo and audioreel of a couple in the throes of passion, seemingly somewhere in the Third World. As he sets to work on deciphering this arcane message, Wilson’s thoughts wander all the way back to 1939, when he — a young, idealistic student of poetry at Yale — was recruited first by the infamous Order of Skull and Bones (a.k.a. preppy fratboys gone wild) and then, after war breaks out in Europe, by the OSS. Along the way, he takes on a number of varied mentors, ranging from a Nazi-sympathizing poetry professor with then-shocking proclivities (Michael Gambon) to a congenial if hobbled general and spymaster (De Niro, playing a variation on Wild Bill Donovan) to a gaggle of fellow scions of the WASP Old Boy Network (representing the Eli’s, William Hurt and Lee Pace; representing the Oxford-Cambridge crowd, Billy Crudup with a slipping accent.) He also falls in love, with a (note the symbolism!) kindly, open-hearted deaf co-ed (Tammy Blanchard), and falls, in lust, with a needy, easy, and borderline-psycho socialite (Angelina Jolie, verging on typecasting in a terribly written role, but still quite good.) As the years drag on and the world freezes into Cold War, Wilson finds himself not only engaged in high-stakes cloak-and-dagger gamesmanship against his Soviet counterpart, codenamed Ulysses (Oleg Stefan), but inexorably ceding more of his dreams, his morality, his family, and his very soul to that hungering bastion of the Eastern Establishment mafia, the Central Intelligence Agency. And every time he tries to get out, they keep pulling him back in…

Comparisons to The Godfather are probably as unfair as they are inescapable. Still, for all the striving and sweating on display here, Edward Wilson is ultimately no Michael Corleone. In fact, Damon, while trying admirably, can’t plausibly sustain the second “middle-aged” half of the film, and portrays Wilson as too much of a blank (clearly De Niro’s decision) to garner much in the way of sympathy or empathy. More resonant in The Good Shepherd are many of the supporting turns, particularly Gambon, John Turturro as Wilson’s tough-talking (non-WASP) #2, and Alec Baldwin in a minor role as a hard-living G-man. But they’re not enough to put Shepherd over the top, and for every vignette in the film that contains real emotional power — most notably the interrogation of defector “Valentin Mironov” (Mark Ivanir) — there are two that, through a combination of directorial straining and an overly intrusive score, spill over into overcooked blandness. (See for example, the plane and letter-burning sequences at the end of the film, both of which are carried for several beats too long and which suffer from paint-by-numbers swelling strings on the soundtrack.) The Good Shepherd is by no means a bad film, but, alas, it’s not particularly a good one either. Like a veteran CIA hand, it fades effortlessly into the background, and offers little that might be considered truly memorable.

Grind, Kingdom, Prime, FF.

Another wave of holiday trailers comes down the pike: Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez let their B-film freak flags fly (again) in the full trailer for Grindhouse, with Kurt Russell, Rose McGowan, and Freddy Rodriguez, among others; Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, Chris Cooper, Jeremy Piven, and Richard Jenkins fight the war on terror in Saudi Arabia in this first look at Peter Berg’s The Kingdom; and Shia la Boeuf and the US military run from metal toy-like things in the new preview for Michael Bay’s Transformers (If you’re interested, see also the pic of Optimus Prime here.) Word is the trailer for Fantastic Four 2 is also showing in theaters at the moment, although the only thing online right now is this rather meh image of the Silver Surfer…hopefully, they do a better job with Galactus. Update: The FF teaser is now up.

Thirteen Hosts.

Another preview I haven’t seen: This time, it’s the new trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Thirteen, starring Clooney, Roberts, Pitt, Damon, and the usual assortment of Hollywood cads and roustabouts. I quite liked Twelve (and thought Eleven was so-so), so I’m up for another go.

Globes of Gold for Moviefilms.

This year’s Golden Globes nominees are announced, and it’s a particularly strange bunch, with The Departed, Bobby, Little Children, The Queen, and Babel vying for best picture and Kazakhstan’s finest up against Little Miss Sunshine, Thank You for Smoking, The Devil Wears Prada, and Dreamgirls on the comedy/musical side. (Also, lots of doubles, with Leonardo di Caprio (actor), Helen Mirren (actress, TV), and Clint Eastwood (director) all nominated twice in the same category.) Well, I haven’t seen all of these, but suffice to say, these aren’t the picks I would’ve made — even if you discount The Prestige, Children of Men, and The Fountain as genre choices, United 93 is very conspicuously absent. At any rate, it should be an interesting awards season regardless — the only real signed-and-sealed lock so far is Helen Mirren for The Queen.

Guillermo does Greystoke.

Guillermo Del Toro — director of Blade 2, Hellboy, Devil’s Backbone, and Pan’s Labyrinth — announces he’s working on a remake of Tarzan with Master and Commander scribe John Collee. “‘I’d love to create a new version that is still a family movie, but as edgy as I can make it,’ Del Toro said. ‘There are strong themes of survival of a defenseless child left behind in the most hostile environment.’”

Born out of your Frustration.


Children of Men, Alfonso Cuaron’s gritty dystopian parable of the near-future (which I saw in Nelson, NZ several days ago), is very, very close to being a great film. Boasting a standout performance by Clive Owen (other than Inside Man he hasn’t been in much lately, so I’d forgotten how good he can be), great character work by Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and others; timely ruminations on issues ranging from the War on Terror to immigration reform; a wicked streak of black humor (note, for example, the bus and pharmaceutical ads, as well as the “Baby Diego” stuff and the casual nod to the similarly sardonic Pink Floyd); cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki (late of last year’s best film, The New World) that’s both striking and muted; and some of the most visceral urban-warfare scenes this side of Saving Private Ryan, the film has a lot in its corner, and is definitely worth checking out this holiday season. (Between this, The Fountain, and hopefully Pan’s Labyrinth, it’s been a banner time for heady, intelligent sci-fi/fantasy.) Alas, the film takes a few egregious missteps in the last act — the last fifteen minutes, even — which marred the experience for me. As a result, instead of leaving the theater stunned or moved by the otherwise impressive Children of Men, I left irritated with it. It’s a very good, even a remarkable, movie, to be sure, but when it comes to the last few leaps of logic (and sentiment), Cuaron’s film can’t quite stick the landing.

Children of Men takes place in the London of the not-too-distant future, where, as part of a string of world calamities and catastrophes (including some that possibly, Cuaron coyly suggests, have their roots in the Iraq war), humankind has become infertile, western civilization is in the throes of decay, and England, true to stiff-upper-lip form, remains the one teetering bastion of order against the forces of anarchy and global chaos. In this childless city under siege, where immigrants (or “Fugi’s”) are rounded up in cages and coffee shops are bombed for no reason in particular, we meet a troubled Everyman named Theo (Owen — we know he’s troubled because he downs lugs of scotch from a hip-flask whenever possible, but don’t worry — this sort of clumsy screenwriting shorthand is generally the exception here rather than the rule.) At any rate, on his way to work one day, Theo is apprehended by several masked goons in a van, among them his activist ex-girlfriend Julian (Julianne Moore) and her #2 (Ejiofor), who, as it turns out, have a very important task for him — one that only he can fulfill, and one that might just change the shape of this post-apocalyptic world…

If you’ve seen the trailer, then you know what Theo’s charge is for the remainder of the movie. (But if you haven’t, I won’t spoil it here.) Suffice to say, his travels take him to various dilapidated locales in this babyless Purgatory (including, memorably, the hideaway of Theo’s aging drug buddy Jasper (Michael Caine)), and we get a full sense of how the demise of the future, in the form of the next generation, has caused the world to wither and rot. This culminates in some of the most powerful and immersive urban war footage to come down the pike in a good while (note the long, uninterrupted shots in the final act, which are particularly impressive.) But, as you’ll come to find, one of the escape scenarios near the end — you’ll know which one I mean — is completely and utterly implausible, to the detriment of everything that’s come before. And, coupled with the ridiculously over-the-top symbolism in the final moments, Cuaron’s film unfortunately ends on a sour note. Still, if you can forgive the movie its wince of an ending, it’s well worth it to suffer the Children. It may step away from greatness in the last act, but it’s still very easily in the top echelon of movies I’ve seen this year.