So, it's noon and I've just about put the trauma of the Green Lantern behind me. One point in its favour - it's been a remarkably easy film to repress. Today, though, I knew I needed a guaranteed sugar high, something light and fluffy and guaranteed not to leave a bad taste in my mouth.
I've actually seen G-Force a couple of times, because over a Bank Holiday weekend I'll watch anything rather than strain myself reaching for the remote. The first time was by accident; it was mid-afternoon and I caught the end whilst waiting for the news. The second time, it was the best of a bad bunch and less insufferably twee than Radio 4 tends to be in the daytime.
You don't really need to know much more about the film than that it's about a bunch of specially-trained guinea pig secret agents. That's the original concept, and that's what you get - all talking rodents, all the 88-minute running time. It's Babe, basically, except that insead of leaving you craving a bacon sandwich it'll make you fancy a Peruvian takeaway instead.
The good
The voice cast on this one is absolutely stellar, including Nic Cage, Penelope Cruz and Sam Rockwell. Steve Buscemi in particular shines in the role he was born to play as a hamster with anger management issues. The humans aren't neglected, either, with Zach Galifianakis, Will Arnett and Bill Nighy in key roles. Everybody seems to be having a good time, most especially Jon Favreau as the chubby, schlubby pet-shop guinea pig who gets inadvertently dragged along for the ride.
The talking animal effects are actually genuinely impressive, only occasionally looking fake during the facial closeups. Kudos, too, to the CGI team for creating the cutest cockroaches I ever saw. Action scenes, meanwhile, remain resolutely coherent, preventing the film from turning into a kiddie version of Transformers.
The bad
It's a shame that an otherwise-blameless film should contain such blatant racial stereotyping - the feisty Latina girl, for instance, or the comedy African American sidekick, whose guinea pig form was indeed black. It's lazy, it's embarrassing and it makes me feel just a tiny bit guilty for watching.
While I enjoyed the chorus of mice, it's been done elsewhere before and so much better, although that isn't so much a critique as an excuse to post links to clips.
The verdict
It's not Citizen Kane. It probably isn't even Citizen Toxie. It may, however, just possibly, be the Avengers Assemble of talking rodent movies.
Continuing with the theme of comic book heroes, today I bring you Green Lantern. This guy's been around in various forms since 1940, starting out as Alan Scott, a tough New York crimefighter. He was then cancelled due to a waning interest in superheroes, only to be resurrected in 1959 when sci-fi started to become a thing again. Scott, however, was never to return, replaced instead by test pilot Hal Jordan, who had been selected to become an interstellar cop as part of the Green Lantern corps when the previous incumbent for that region died.
The world of the Green Lantern is one with two opposing forces at play. The green energy of will gifts those who wield it tremendous power; the ability to fly, and to create hard-light holograms that can function as anything the wielder desires. The yellow energy of fear, on the other hand, can... okay, okay, I don't know, alright? I haven't read the comics, you can't make me read the comics, it's just really bad stuff, understood?
Just so we're all absolutely clear before we start, I don't much like DC comics. I think their heroes are overly simplistic and their treatment of the female gender is shocking - Harley Quinn, in particular, is an abomination who ought never to have existed in her present form. I know that the other big comics publishing houses are hardly any better, but at least Marvel have occasionally come up with female characters I wouldn't mind having a drink with.
I'm an optimist, though, and I was hoping Green Lantern might change my mind.
The good
This one scene where the love interest (Carol Ferris, played by Blake Lively, which is a far more interesting name) sees the Lantern (Ryan Reynolds, acceptably affable) in his mask and suit and recognises him instantly. He's bemused by this, but she points out that they've known one another since they were kids, of course she's going to recognise him. It's the first time I've seen this done in a mainstream superhero movie, and it did raise a quick grin.
The bad
Pretty much everything else about the whole damned movie. I'm not kidding.
I was going to write huge screeds about how fear is a survival reflex and not, as the movie would suggest, the enemy, but then I realised this would be giving the film far more attention than it deserves. Besides, I suffer from anxiety, and honestly? Fear's a bastard, and representing it as this giant leering cloud of tentacles that infects your mind and turns you into a raging asshole is actually pretty bloody perceptive.
On the other hand, fearlessness in the face of a giant leering cloud of tentacles is just stupid.
Unfortunately, Green Lantern seems to actively embrace stupidity - it has this really worrying streak of anti-intellectualism that goes right back to the old-school brave barbarian versus evil conniving wizard trope. Take scientist Hector Hammond, the film's primary human antagonist - we first see him as a chubby kid, being told off for always having his head buried in a book. Later on, he grows up to be a homely sort, balding, with scraggly facial hair. Still later, he becomes a drooling, wheelchair-bound monster. This is the kind of thing that Starship Troopers skewered with a grace that almost makes me forgive Paul Verhoeven for Showgirls.
What I don't understand is why the ring selected Hal Jordan to be the Lantern and not, say, Derek Zoolander.
It's interesting, sort of, that a film which uses physical beauty as a measure of character should itself be so ugly. It was designed for 3D, of course, which doesn't help, but even in 2D the colours are queasily muddy, all definition lost amidst great swathes of ill-defined CGI. The sound design is ugly, too, to the point where my brain shut down during some of the noisier action scenes and simply sent me to sleep. I did consider going back to watch the bits I'd missed, but then I came to the conclusion that falling asleep during a movie is a valid form of critique in and of itself, a nifty piece of self-justification that I'm sure will serve me well in days to come.
The verdict
Green Lantern is big but it sure ain't clever, but then, by its own standards that's possibly a plus-point. I know this is a blog about films that don't suck, but unfortunately I called it wrong this time.
When my schedule for this thing actually works (i.e. when annoyances like paid employment don't intrude), I don't watch films the same day I write about them. I'm very much a morning person, and I always prefer to make use of those precious hours between about 5 and 8am, when the world is quiet and the chances of interruption are low. That way I can write, get on with other things, and then once it gets to early afternoon I can use the post-lunch lull to watch a movie for the following day.
This works particularly well on Sundays, when there's usually a whole raft of poorly-received family films showing on TV. Invariably, I find my self spoiled for choice - last weekend I even gave myself a headstart and watched two days' films back to back.
Yesterday offered me a number of options. I immediately rejected Daddy Day Camp as being too obvious a target. Barry Sonnenfeld's Wild Wild West was tempting, but my husband, who has a better memory than I do for the flat-out unwatchable, put his foot down. I put my own foot down over Spider-Man 3.
Which left The Phantom, a 1996 superhero romp based on a thirties comic that pre-dated Batman by somewhere in the region of four months. At 4.8, its IMDB score was appropriately low, but a lot of legit film critics seemed to rather like it. All in all, it seemed like an ideal candidate for the blog, and possibly even for a pleasant Sunday afternoon.
The plot revolves around Kit Walker, the latest but not the first individual to bear the title of The Ghost Who Walks. Clad in purple spandex and a black mask, he protects a mysterious country with the aid of Devil, the wolf, and his white stallion, Hero. When a group of reportedly magical stone and metal skulls go missing, he is forced to travel to New York to try and retrieve them from the nefarious hands of sadistic industrialist Xander Drax (now, there's a name to conjure with). Complicating things somewhat, meanwhile, is his college sweetheart, Diana Palmer, plucky niece of the newspaper owner Drax has sworn to buy out.
I can practically hear the Devil's Gallop playing in the background...
The good
The Phantom comic was born in 1936, the same year as my father, and I'm sure he'd have a good time watching this one - heck, I know I did. The characterisation is strong, the location shots are beautiful and the stuntwork is defiantly non-CGI. Appropriately enough, it feels like a frozen slice of a bygone era, with all the good and bad that entails.
Certainly, I have nothing but praise for the performances. In a film that cannot be faulted for its willingness to provide strong female characters, original vampire slayer Kristy Swanson makes for a sweet, brave heroine who isn't afraid of anything, happy to travel halfway across the world to try and protect her uncle's interests. One particular scene of near-suicidal cinematic boldness even sees her eating a sandwich with visible enjoyment and (whisper it) no trace of guilt. Think about it, though, really - how often do you see a film where the heroine goes down to the kitchen, makes herself a snack and doesn't seem to think of this as some sort of big moral deal?
As Drax, meanwhile, Treat Williams provides a deliciously old-fashioned villain who seems to thoroughly favour each tiny act of spite. When he hid scalpel blades in a booby-trapped microscope, even as I shuddered in revulsion I couldn't help but want to applaud his ingenuity.
The real pleasure of The Phantom, however, comes from Billy Zane in the titular role. He has a graceful, goofy charm that reminds me of a young Christopher Reeve and, as Kit Walker, wears the kiss curl with almost as much panache. Devoid of Batman's brooding and Superman's pomp, the Phantom seems to be that rarest of entities: a superhero who does what he does out of a genuine affection for the people around him. It doesn't hurt, of course, that he's more or less entirely without superhuman abilities, relying instead on his wits, his athleticism and his mythos.
For those with an interest in that sort of thing, The Phantom is very much a true family film; there's not much here to frighten the small people or offend their parents.
The bad
There isn't really much to dislike about The Phantom, and in truth, I feel sort of churlish even raising such problems as there are. Compared to the Indiana Jones movies it seems to seek to emulate, it's a virtual beacon of moral rectitude.
Unfortunately, the film arguably suffers from being a little too faithful to the source material.
Like every male of his line for the past several hundred years, the Phantom is sworn to protect the people of the jungles of Bengalla - a fictional country whose location in the comics began around India but shifted to Africa at some point during the sixties. In the film, its precise whereabouts are never made clear, allowing for both be-turbanned manservants and tree-dwelling natives and neatly perpetrating two unhelpful stereotypes for the price of one.
True, the wealthy Western colonialists are presented as the villains, and their attempts to steal native artefacts are never portrayed as anything other than villainy. On the other hand, bringing them to justice still requires a noble white man - a noble and endlessly wealthy white man, as it happens, since this is a film where the lower social orders seem not to even exist.
Could it have been possible to find a way round these issues? I'm not sure. I think it would require a radical re-working of the original material, however, which would be a pity for such an obvious period piece.
The verdict
Lower-key than the average superhero flick, and none the worse for it. Its charm and transparent humanity meant this one definitely brightened my day.
Having enjoyed Paul Williams' songs so much yesterday, I couldn't resist seeing more of him today. The first and only film that sprang to mind was Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise, a loose re-working of Gaston Leroux' novel, The Phantom of the Opera. As has probably been noted already, I have a real soft spot for fantasy musicals, so honestly, any excuse.
Williams plays Swan, a shadowy record producer and Svengali figure who runs Death Records, and, it is implied, controls the charts in the way that Stock, Aitken and Waterman or Simon Cowell might have thought they did in their respective glory days. Swan's ambition is to open the Paradise, a sort of glam-rock version of the Moulin Rouge, but before he can do this he has to find the perfect song and the perfect performer to sing it.
The former shows up soon enough in the shape of Winslow Leach (William Finley, with Williams providing the singing voice), a nerdy pianist whose magnum opus is a cantata based on the story of Faust. Swan hears him and has his right-hand man hire him immediately, promptly stealing his material and then banning him from the Death Records HQ. Leach takes this justifiably hard, and sets about taking back what rightfully belongs to him.
It was never going to end well, was it?
The good
It's by Brian De Palma, so visually speaking, it was never going to disappoint. Phantom of the Paradise is packed with split-screen segments, tracking shots and other assorted bells and whistles. They look great, although I couldn't in all honesty say that they lent anything to the narrative. Probably the greatest effect of all is the Paradise itself, a combined theatre, nightclub and labyrinth whose layout seems to shift with nightmarish queasiness.
Performances are variable, but as Phoenix, the heroine, Jessica Harper is a consistently likeable presence. True, she isn't given much to do beyond sing a few numbers and be alternately compassionate and brave as the story demands, but her voice is glorious and she imbues the songs with genuine emotion.
Huge credit also has to be given to Archie Hahn, Jeffrey Comanor and Harold Oblong, who provide a sort of Greek chorus as Swan's chameleonic boy band. They open the film in rockabilly garb as the Juicy Fruits, parodying the death disc trend of the early 1960s, before spending some time as Beach Boys clones the Beach Bums and then finally settling down as the Undeads, Kiss clones for those lucky souls who'd never heard a Kiss song in their lives. Their verve and enthusiasm is charming, and frankly better than the material they've been given to work with here.
The bad
Looking at the IMDB, it seems a lot of people really love this one. As a lover of film in general and this genre in particular who still only heard of it a few years ago, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest both the reviewers and the people doing the rating are a self-selecting sample - this was 40 years ago, after all, so few contemporary reviews are likely to have made it as far as the internet. The people thinking and writing about Phantom of the Paradise will primarily be the people who love it, and from what I've seen, their praise for it seems to be more or less universal.
Interestingly, looking at the list of critics and commenters, I haven't seen a single name that I'd definitively associate with somebody who wasn't a white male.
I'm not going to go off on a diatribe here about overprivileged white guys because it's not the time or place, but there's no denying there's a lot here to appeal to a certain sort of nerd; they're the sort of person I spent my teens and twenties learning I shouldn't date, because beneath the romance and the shyness and the self-deprecation there lurks a truly vile streak of self-pitying rage and you really don't want to be there when it bubbles to the surface.
So we have Leach, the hero/antihero who'll throw a person through a wall for even suggesting somebody else sing his material. Let's get this straight: ignore the coke-bottle glasses and wonky teeth, the man has a dangerous temper long before he has any genuine reason to seek revenge on the world. He's disturbing for all the wrong reasons, and as a domestic violence survivor I found myself constantly on edge and waiting for the next explosion.
And then there's Phoenix, consistently kind to Leach when all others treat him with laughter and derision. She wears schoolgirl-style hairclips and is the only female in the movie who doesn't wear revealing costumes. Do I really need to spell this out?
The whole mess is compounded by a truly nasty streak of homophobia; Swan, the film's embodiment of evil, is sexually ambiguous; when he seeks to offend Leach by giving his music to somebody utterly unsuitable he picks openly queer glam-rocker Beef. Played by Gerrit Graham, it's a fun performance, but it was overshadowed for me by the underlying sentiments the filmmakers chose to express.
The verdict
Sometimes it's fun to switch off your brain and watch a movie. Sometimes, however, it's all too easy to use this as an excuse for switching off your critical faculties and even basic decency. Sure, Phantom of the Paradise looks pretty - sounds it, even, on and off - but beneath the shiny mask, the fundamental ugliness of it is much more than merely skin deep.
If you think about notorious box-office flops, certain titles spring immediately to mind - Heaven's Gate, for instance, or Cutthroat Island. Or Ishtar, for that matter, even though it doesn't appear anywhere on the Wikipedia list of box-office bombs. Nevertheless, it has a reputation as a big, expensive failure, despite some fairly illustrious self-proclaimed celebrity fans.
I've always been fascinated by the Ishtar mythos - even as a kid, when the poster depicting a cartoon camel singing in shades never failed to catch my attention on visits to the video rental shop. A look at the back of the case, however, inevitably reminded me of the absence of cartoon camels within the film (singing or otherwise) and I always put it back in favour of something where what was on the box and what was in the box seemed to match more closely.
Still, something about it evidently lingered within my subconscious, as when I first came up with the concept of re-examining badly received movies, it was one of the very first that sprang to mind.
1987 is a long time ago now, so I'll provide a quick plot re-cap for those who've forgotten, or who weren't actually born at the time. Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman play a couple of truly abysmal lounge singers who've sacrificed love and (nominal) job success in order to try and get their shot at the big time. When offered a 9-week residency in Morocco, they aren't exactly delighted but see it as the only way to keep themselves from financial ruin. Shortly after their arrival, each of them separately run into a mysterious woman (Isabelle Adjani) who manages to involve them both in a plot to overthrow the government of the fictional country of Ishtar. Comical adventures naturally ensue.
The good
Ishtar's first act is a genuine joy, with Hoffman and Beatty demonstrating an easy chemistry I thoroughly enjoyed. This is due in no small part to the songs by Paul Williams, who creates some of the most plausibly bad songs I've ever heard - they're dreadful, yes, but in a low-key way that makes me cringe in delicious embarrassment. If the entire film had featured nothing more than the two leads trying to make it big in New York, I would have been more than happy.
The bad
Once the action moves to the Morocco, however, things go downhill fast, as a witty, elegant little character piece is transformed almost instantly into a big-budget, big-thrills action comedy that tries to occupy the same territory as Romancing the Stone. As goals go, this isn't an entirely unworthy one, but the abrupt tonal shift can't help but feel like a real disappointment. It's not that I'd suggest that Beatty and Hoffman are above the material, but neither does it truly play to their strengths as actors - they're neither big enough nor stupid enough to carry such a big, stupid story.
Given that Ishtar is a comedy produced by Warren Beatty and set primarily in North Africa, I probably shouldn't have been surprised by the casual sexism and racism. In addition to being saddled with the thankless task of playing a walking, talking MacGuffin, Isabelle Adjani (of half-Algerian descent, Wikipedia assures me) plays a North African character but bears more than a passing resemblance to a young Chrissie Hynde. Now, I have nothing against viewing the odd exposed breast - I see them every morning when I get dressed, in fact - but having her character flash Hoffman's Clarke to prove she was not, in fact, a gay male, is cheap and demeaning to everybody involved.
Hoffman himself, meanwhile, is lumbered with one scene that could have been taken straight from Team America: World Police, as Clarke decides to masquerade as a specialist in nomadic dialects presiding over an arms auction. I watched through my fingers, jaw dropped in sheer disbelief that something like this could ever have been considered acceptable.
The bald truth of it is that with the exception of those scenes featuring the two leads either performing or working on their lounge act, the movie simply isn't funny - any laughs to be garnered at images of Hoffman and Beatty in the desert shooting at a CIA helicopter are born of sheer incredulity, and thus don't count.
The verdict
Somewhere deep within the overblown, overbudgeted mess that is Ishtar, there's a beautiful little character comedy that was just waiting for its own shot at stardom. Unfortunately, it gets thoroughly lost within the sound and fury, offering the audience only occasional, tantalising glimpses of what might have been.
C+ - needs more singing cartoon camels.
The list of live-action films based on kids' cartoons isn't exactly an illustrious one. Within the past fifteen years or so, the live iterations of Dragonball Z, Avatar: the Last Airbender, Marmaduke and Yogi Bear have all bombed, not to mention multiple incarnations of Garfield and Scooby Doo. I've actually caught one or two of these, owing to my predilection for watching bad family movies on TV on a Sunday afternoon, and they're mostly sugar-sweet, hyperactive, hypersaturated trash, with clumsy slapstick and a couple of gross-out gags.
Speed Racer, the Wachowski Bros' remake of Japanese cartoon Mach GoGoGo, retains the clumsy slapstick and gross-out gags, but differs from the above titles by being a sugar-sweet, hyperactive, hypersaturated diamond.
The good
Ye gods, but this movie is beautiful. Like, tears-to-the-eyes beautiful. At various points it shimmers, sparkles, glitters and gleams, with complex animated backgrounds that somehow never obscure the foreground action. The cars are sleek and elegant, while the human protagonists are as boldly delineated as though they'd just stepped straight off the pages of Archie Comics. In an era where the likes of Tim Burton and Aardman Animations have made the grotesque desirable, it's really enjoyable to see a film that eschews ugliness in the same way that Christopher Nolan movies eschew charm.
As might be expected from a live-action cartoon, performances are larger than life - they need to be, given the canvas on which they're painted. As villain E.P. Arnold Royalton, Roger Allam personifies the word oleaginous, while Susan Sarandon is charming and encouraging as Mom Racer. Credit must be given, too, to Emile Hirsch and Christina Ricci as Speed and Trixie respectively. As the young romantic leads they display a genuine, believable chemistry that stands out amidst all the visual pyrotechnics.
Plot and storytelling are sound too, for the most part, although large parts of the Casa Christo Rally during the second part appear to have ended up on the cutting room floor. While the central narrative remains coherent and (reasonably) compelling, the racing sequences are the film's strongest and despite the two hour running time, I'd have relished the chance to see more of them.
The bad
A lot of critics really, really hated this one and I'm genuinely not sure why - in many instances, after all, these are the same individuals who lauded Moulin Rouge!, and the two films share a surprising amount of common ground. They both deal in visual and emotional excess; substitute racing sequences for musical numbers and the only real difference is the target audience.
The fact remains, however, that Speed Racer is not a subtle film; it's almost as heavy with the down-home sentiment as it is with the CGI. Stylised and stylish, it might leave even those raised on or accustomed to Pixar's technicolor odysseys reaching for the migraine tablets.
I didn't especially appreciate the slapstick, either, but I'm pretty sure this is the sort of thing the under-ten set love; likewise the multiple gags where a pet chimp flings its faeces. More to the point, I'm not delighted by the use of a chimp as a performer at all - even lower primates can never be truly domesticated, and regardless of the original material I'm sure little would have been lost by using, say, a dog instead.
The verdict
Visually stunning, Speed Racer delivers on almost every level. You owe it to your kids to show them this film because if you don't, they'll be raised by Disney and eventually grow into Michael Bay fans. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Left to my own devices, I'd be happy to pretend to myself that Prince's predictions were right and the world really did end in 1999 - back when Prince was still calling himself Prince, in fact. It's not that my cinematic choices absolutely always reflect this, it's just that over the past fifteen years or so I've had time for my critical faculties to properly develop;
most of the movies I've seen over the past five years or so either haven't been sufficiently reviled as to merit a mention here, or they've been so crashingly, teeth-gnashingly awful that I've avoided giving them any further thought. Sure, I could take pot shots at the likes of Sucker Punch or Pain and Gain, but why would I want to subject myself to films like those in the first place?
Life After Beth, however, was a different proposition entirely. A zombie comedy starring Aubrey Plaza from Parks and Recreation, the most likeable show in television history? True, the reviews were mediocre at best, but that was a whole lot of things I liked in one place. Obviously, people simply weren't getting it; it was nothing more than a catastrophic taste failure on their part. That was it - it had to be.
The good
There's no denying that Life after Beth has a clear aesthetic vision, with its muted palette and naturalistic speech. It's determinedly downbeat and moves at its own pace, which is fairly refreshing in a subgenre that tends to assume that more is always more. There's a lot to admire about the tight focus and small scale, which give the audience a chance to really empathise with the characters and care about their eventual fate. The soundtrack, too, is superb, claustrophobically tight whilst never becoming intrusive.
Aubrey Plaza, of course, is a joy, gradually falling to pieces in every sense of the phrase. We never get to know the character of Beth before her untimely demise, and we probably don't need to - the film paints her as an ordinary teenage girl, still sporadically lucid even as her higher faculties evaporate and leave her as a creature of pure appetite and emotion. I was left thinking about the trope of the zombie as a metaphor for Alzheimer's disease, which is an interesting idea, but probably not one the production team intended. John C Reilly is another reliable performer, who unfortunately disappears for large chunks of the running time.
So, with the zombies dealt with, what about the actual comedy? As can probably be surmised, this is a film to evoke wry smiles rather than belly-laughs, and it's probably all the better for it. The humour comes primarily from the offbeat characterisation such as Matthew Gray Gubler's teenage gun-nut, although special mention has to be made of the equally special relationship between zombies and elevator music.
The bad
It's an unfortunate truth that modern zombie comedies (are there any other sort?) live and die under Shaun of the Dead's very, very long shadow. In my opinion, Shaun is one of the tightest, tidiest, flat-out classiest pieces of storytelling ever to make it to the multiplex, so it's hardly surprising that subsequent genre offerings have never quite measured up.
That said, Life After Beth doesn't necessarily do itself any favours - the first act in particular is so understated as to threaten to fade into complete nonexistence, and it's only once Beth begins her transformation that the film really kicks into gear. Even then, the plot is desultory and the jokes are thin on the ground, and I'm ashamed to admit I found myself dozing off every fifteen minutes or so.
As Zach, the male lead, Dane DeHaan seems uncomfortable with the comedy, faring far better as the grieving boyfriend than the likeable comic hero the later parts of the film seem to require.
While I'm on the topic, is it really necessary for every male actor under 30 or so these days to look as though they haven't slept in half a lifetime? I don't know - maybe the whole dark circles thing is a hangover from the world of fashion and the days of heroin chic, or something. The only desire these types inspire in me is the desire to cook them a good hot meal, which is a reminder I really don't need of the facts that I'm a) fat and b) 37. Who knows, if Sebastian Stan had looked as healthy as Chris Evans, I might even have been prepared to give Captain America: The Winter Soldier a second look. Or, y'know, maybe not.
The verdict
Much as I might have loved to crack open my trusty stock of no-brainer puns, that would be an unfair assessment of a subtle, stylish piece of nonsense. As waifishly slight as its romantic leads, this is the sort of thing you're sure to like, so long as you like this sort of thing.
