Deeds & Words

Yesterday I saw the spendid adaptation of Steig Larsson’s Girl Who Played With Fire.  The film had the same cast and director as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. (A couple left the theater ahead of me and the man said, “Well, she wasn’t the girl with the dragon tattoo, was she?”  And the wife said–from behind her I could practically see her rolling her eyes–”Of course it was!  Didn’t you see the big tattoo on her back?”  And he said, “Well, I couldn’t tell what it was.”)

I’m wondering if the production crew made one seven-or-eight hour movie comprising all three books, and then edited them for separate release.  The absolute consistency and faithful adherence to the story suggests that.

Noomi Rapace plays Lizbeth Salander, the girl who has a dragon tattoo, an uncanny ability to hack any information technology, poor socials skills and an eidetic memory. In the first book, Salander worked side-by-side with Mikael Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist), a crusading journalist facing disgrace after he failed to check some sources in a story he published. Salander also had her own issue in the first book (and movie) and that was gaining control of her corrupt government-appointed guardian.  At that time, it seemed that the appointment of the guardian–that particular one–was just an unlucky coincidence for Salander.  However, we find out early in Fire that it was no coincidence at all.

At the end of Dragon Tattoo, Lizbeth had, um, well, let’s say she’d come into a lot of money.  In Fire, she returns to Sweden after a year of travel.  She confronts her guardian, and almost immediately is implicated in his murder and the murder of two young journalists who are working on a human trafficking story for Blomqvist’s magazine Millenium.  Lizbeth’s fingerprints are on the murder weapon, and her case history shows a propensity for violence since childhood.  When I read the second book I got very restless during the middle third, when Lizabeth was basically missing from the book.  In the movie we spend far more time with Lizbeth than we do with Mikael and his editorial team. That’s all to the good.

Rapace correctly plays Salander in a minimialist style; most emotion is evoked with her eyes and a quirk of her mouth.  The movie runs over two hours but it doesn’t drag, nor is it self-indulgent, but the director creates multi-layered scenes that give us moments of Lizbeth’s emotional isolation (her sitting against the wall in one of the rooms of her palatial multi-room penthouse); and the brief flickers of joy; such as the tiny curve of a smile when she is riding amotorcycle.  Blomqvist, in contrast,  is emotionally open, and feelings cycle across his face like shadows from clouds.  A strength in the series is that Blomqvist is a different model for Salander of how to live, and the films stay faithful to that.

Sweden looks gorgeous in the movie, too.

I don’t know much about Swedish history, but somehow they missed the whole Puritian thing, so they aren’t as confused and twisted about sex as we Americans are.  In the Girl saga, this particularly means that they don’t confuse rape with sex.  In Dragon Tattoo there is a horrifying rape scene that is crucial to the plot of not only the first, but all three, books.  I confess I worried that the movie would eroticize it–because most American directors would.  The scene was not erotic at all. It was terrifying. It hurt to watch.  It was supposed to do that.  In contrast, scenes of sex between equals are made very beautiful and erotic.  It’s nice to watch sex in a film that’s been addressed by grownups.

I have no idea if you could follow the plot of Fire without having read or at least seen Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Apparently the gentleman ahead of me who didn’t even know who Salander was didn’t have any trouble.  It is definitely easier if you’d read the books first.  The movies are subtitled.  I hope they leave them subtitled and don’t dub; the original actors’ voices add a degree of richness to the experience.

In my opinion, there is no need for any American film studio to take on this franchise (even I know someone will if they haven’t already).  The European versions are compelling and true to the books in a way no American film ever is.  I recommend reading the series and then seeing both of these movies.

Well, my one burning question is answered.  Jonah Hex is steampunk, sort of.  Jonah has two mini, semi-automatic Gatling guns mounted on his horse’s harness (apparently no cranking required).  The villain, General Turnbull, builds a secret weapon, a “nation killer” that is catalyzed by orbs filled with a glowing golden plasma.

 It’s also dark fantasy because Jonah can reanimate the dead and talk to them. 

It’s a comic book. 

A brief bit of background; the time is shortly after the American Civil War.  Hex and the Turnbulls, father and son, fought for the Confederacy.  General Turnbull chose to kill civilians, so Hex betrayed them to the Union; the General’s son Jeb was killed by Hex.  Turnbull took a terrible revenge upon Hex, including branding his face.  Hex nearly died and in the twilight lands between death and life picked up this talk-to-the-dead thing, which could, I guess, come in handy. 

The movie has that excellent comic-book-to-big screen look.  It’s sweaty and gritty when it has to be—Josh Brolin as Hex is sweaty and gritty most of the time—lush and colorful when it has to be, and imposing and Victorian when it wants to be.  Establishing scenes could have been lifted straight from splash-pages or centerfolds (I’m sure that’s not the technical name for a close-up that covers two pages).  Most of the action sequences involve blowing stuff up, but there’s a weird prize-fight scene that’s kind of cool.  Nothing blows up, but a lot of stuff burns.  For a man whose family burned to death and who was branded, Hex is remarkably comfortable around fire.

 The movie’s fine cast and good looks can’t quite lift it into the Success category.  John Malkovich plays General Turnbull with a fine, measured malice.  For me, 40% of a Malkovich performance is voice, another 40% is eyes.  Eyes and voice get a workout here, but there’s only so much he can do with the material.  In the early sequences when he is taking his revenge on Hex, he is a compelling villain; the rest of the movie he’s an Evil Overlord.  The screenplay never bothers to tell us what drives Turnbull.  The death of his son?  The failure of the Confederacy?  Maybe, but in the movie’s “real time” plot, Turnbull is willing to blow up anything and anybody, attacking towns in former Confederate states.  What’s that about?  The screenplay tries to address this by calling him a terrorist.  Sorry, not good enough. 

Lilah, or Talullah, played by Megan Fox, is the cleanest prostitute anywhere in the whole wild west.  Even though she sees many sweat-and-whiskey soaked men in the course of her profession, and works in a dusty two-horse town, her hair and clothes are always perfect.  Even at the end, when she is running through the steam-powered warship, shooting and cutting people, her cute white cotton batiste bloomers and camisole remain pristine.  I find when I’m thinking, “Gosh,she’s so clean,” every time a character appears, that I’m not very engaged with the story. 

The movie is short.  The plot is linear, with no surprises.  Michael Fassbender is entertaining as Turnbull’s second villain.  He has Maori tattoos, an Irish accent, and no backstory.  Brolin, of course, is good and growly as Hex. Aidan Quinn does a nice job as president if he is some generic president.  If he is meant to be U.S. Grant, then not so much. 

The film is 90 minutes long.  If you see it at a matinee you will have invested exactly enough money and time in it.  If you wait for Netflicks, you’ll be getting a bargain.

It’s not your mother’s Sherlock Holmes. It’s not Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, or Gene Wilder. Robert Downey plays the world’s most famous consulting detective as a rock star, analytical and unstable, brilliant and self-destructive, self-aware and vulnerable. And he’s an action hero. He and Watson both are thinking action heroes. It’s refreshing.

Jude Law’s Watson is as close to the character from Conan Doyle’s stories as any I can remember. He is very smart, practical, brave—and he knows how to handle Holmes when Holmes slips into the funk that follows a successful case, when that razor-sharp mind turns in on itself, when boredom and a fear of irrelevance drives Holmes to drugs and destructive behavior. As the movie opens, Watson is planning to move into a new place preparatory to his marriage to his fiancé Mary. Holmes is not-so-secretly terrified of this development, because he knows that Watson is his lifeline to sanity.

This gives the movie complexity and slows it down too much in the beginning. After a thrilling action sequence opening, we bog down for a bit in this kind of emotional exposition. It makes the movie not too long but too slow. The audience quickly realizes that the villain in that opening sequence is not going quietly to the gallows and that Holmes isn’t going to like Watson’s fiancé no matter what kind of person she is. After a while, though, a mysterious woman—”the woman,” Irene Adler—shows up and we all breathe a sigh of relief. If Adler’s on board, things are going to be exciting.

One interesting bit is Holmes’s mental rehearsal of fight sequences. We see this twice. It’s nice to see Holmes’s mind at work, not just in collecting data but in physical campaigns as well. It’s also nice to watch the relationship between Watson and Holmes. Watson isn’t a lackey. He’s an equal. Even though he and Holmes are fighting, they work together with the instinct and rhythm of the team they are. Whether it’s Watson immediately starting a forensic review of some burned pages found in a dead man’s laboratory, or Holmes murmuring “Meat or potatoes?” as the two of them face three adversaries, one of whom is a giant, we see the years of experience these two men share.

The plot will seem reminiscent of several other movies or books, particularly From Hell. This doesn’t matter. It’s Holmes’s deductions and how he turns the tables on his adversary that matter. CGI of the Thames and the sweeping panoramas of London are beautiful, as are Adler’s (Rachel McAdams) glamorous costumes. Sets are darkly lit and luscious, evoking the feeling of Victoriana (I have no idea how accurate the sets are). The movie is chock-a-block with mazelike scenes—a street carnival when Holmes follows Adler after she leaves Baker Street; the slaughterhouse before its devastating explosion; the shipyards; the underground of Parliament. An added bonus for some of us, Celtic music, vocalized by the Dubliners, shows up now and then!

The movie is entertaining. I think the critics probably won’t like it. I hope audiences will. Three smart strong characters exchanging witty dialogue, leaping across chasms and dodging through labyrinths, disagreeing about many things but ultimately loyal to one another, while Celtic fiddles play in the background; what’s not to like?

While I’m waiting for AMC to refund me the 6 hours of my life I spent watching “The Prisoner” I thought I’d jot down a few of the things that confused/disappointed me about the remake. This is not a coherent critique . . . just questions and complaints. Oh, and a few positive remarks as well.

Beachball
The predatory beach ball that guards the boundaries of the village was perfect—irrational and scary, just as it should be.

Designations
How come they pronounce the boy’s designation of 1112 as “Eleven Twelve” but the little girl, 1100, as “One Thousand One Hundred?” Is this the Village’s version of cultural diversity?

Location Shoots
The guy known as 6 believes he came from a city called “New York.” Couldn’t they have filmed a couple of scenes in the real New York? The city was so very not New York that even I could tell, and I kept thinking that the scenes in “New York” were actually part of the Village mind game. Geez, you couldn’t use file footage even?

Just Annoying
Why does 313 wear that silly headscarf?

How come the comatose woman doesn’t get to sit in a chair once in a while? She’s not that comatose.

Wait, there are bad motorcycle guys in the Village? How did that happen?

Commentary
No matter how many Oscar-nominee actors you pack into your cast, you won’t be successful if you don’t have characters people care about, and a real story.

How It Should Be Done
“Where am I?”
“In the Village.”
“What do you want of me?”
“Information.”
There’s a story!

Where’s Eric Roberts When You Need Him?
Jim Caveziel (for which I started substituting “Jim the Weasel”—no fault of his, I just liked the sound of it) looked so much like a younger Eric Roberts that I started wishing they had cast Eric Roberts and then used their digital magic to un-age him. I was actually pursuing a concept that convoluted while I was watching the second night. Perfect proof that I was not engaged.

More Annoying
What is 313’s purpose?

Is it supposed to mean something that many/most of the Village people (sorry!) wear vanilla and sherbet colored clothing and 6 wears stylish dark jeans and a dark T-shirt?

Perplexities
What’s with the hand grenade?

Disappointments
What’s with 1112? He makes about as much sense as the hand grenade. He could have been an interesting, powerful character—instead he’s a retread of the guy from Brideshead Revisited. Do better!

Good Stuff
I read that it was filmed in Africa. That’s a cool thing. That and the beach ball; two cool things.

But Why?
Somewhere in the second episode, 6 cracks. He looks at the guy who he thinks is his brother and says, “You’ve shown me nothing but kindness, I’m sorry I’ve doubted you,” blah blah blah. The guy then says, “Don’t tell anyone but I’m really not your brother.” Why would he say that?? The scam was working!

Do the numbers mean something? They’re not prime. Are they a Fibonocci sequence? Are they. . .oh, wait. I’m thinking of Lost.

Who Cares?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, if you rotate the story 180 degrees and understand that 2 is “the prisoner” then it makes more sense. Only, who cares? Two isn’t a character, he’s a collection of tics. Ian McKellen tries to make him real by dint of some diligent acting, but even he can’t quite do it.

Commentary
Good writing can almost save a pathetic story, but almost nothing can save bad writing. The scene with 2 advising 1112 to dance the night away with some sweet young thing is making me cringe again just thinking about it.

My favorite scene, which did nothing to advance the so-called plot, was the one with 2 and the store guy smoking cigarettes in the third episode. That’s good writing.

How does the comatose woman eat, in either reality? I never see an IV stand or a can of Ensure.

Most Annoying
I never cared for 313.

Lifestyle
I wish they’d named 415 420 instead. Some people will know why. Quentin Tarantino, for instance.

And
Why didn’t AMC just run the original show?

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Tom Felton
2009, Directed by David Yates

“It was Snape. It was always Snape.”
Harry Potter

CAUTION: May Contain Spoilers

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is about a boy trapped between a code of honor and his own conscience. He is part of a group of wizards who have been under attack by a powerful enemy for several years. Some of them have been imprisoned, and some have had to hide to protect themselves. Only recently has the boy been accepted as a full equal. Now, the leader of the group gives this boy an impossible assignment. To fail could cost him his life and the life of someone he loves. To succeed, he must join forces with a man he knows is aligned with his enemies.

Unfortunately, the boy isn’t Harry Potter. He’s Draco Malfoy.

There’s something a little odd when one of the villains of the Hogwarts cycle engages more sympathy than the titular hero. A lot of the blame, or more accurately, the credit for this problem goes to Tom Felton, the actor who plays Draco. In Half-Blood Prince, Malfoy ceases to be the traditional spoiled bully of boarding-school novels and becomes a man, facing the ultimate consequences of his toxic belief system. Felton expresses Malfoy’s conflict, fear and rage with economy and virtuosity. It doesn’t hurt that he is now over six feet tall. Draco commands attention whenever he is on the screen.

Daniel Radcliffe, in contrast, doesn’t get the showcase in this cinematic outing. Harry is a subdued, obedient soldier to Dumbledore, never questioning, never rebelling; in short, never acting like Harry Potter. He moves passively through this movie, facing no conflict until the very end, and even then, without much emotional reaction.

Some of the problem here is structural. The movie does not have an A storyline, or a plot. The subplot of Draco and his nefarious assignment is the most compelling conflict in the movie, until the end.

In fairness to the film, it’s hard to pull a 150 page through-story out of a 600 page novel. Rowling used this slow book to serve up several large, steaming helpings of backstory. The “plot” of the book largely concerns the dark wizard known as Valdemort, but we get backstory information on Snape and even Dumbledore. In the book, Harry confronts the reality of his father as a teenager and learns, against his will, the reason for the animosity Snape holds for him.

The movie skips over all of that, giving us one scene of the child Tom Riddle. Harry’s charge is to draw an accurate memory from the mind of the new Potions Master, Professor Slughorn. Slughorn collects celebrities and is susceptible to flattery, and long ago had a telling encounter with Riddle, the boy who became Lord Valdemort. To avoid facing the truth of his own carelessness and moral cowardice, Slughorn has altered the memory. Harry, however, spends almost no time pestering him for it. The scene where he finally evokes his mother’s memory, and Slughorn surrenders, is emotional and well-played. It’s one scene in a two-and-half hour movie.

The film is beautiful, the acting just fine and Felton is awesome. The special effects used for the Death Eaters on their rampages is visually compelling, but the lack of true conflict for our heroes meant that I never fully engaged with the movie, even with Dumbledore’s death.

No studio would ever do this, never risk their market share and the ire of their built-in billions of fans, but wouldn’t it have been cool if they had taken a chance on Half-Blood Prince, and made Draco’s story the main one? Felton could have totally pulled it off. Grint, Watson and Radcliffe would have been able to display their acting chops by playing the characters the way Draco sees them, not the way they see themselves. Audiences would have been on the edge of their seats, chewing their nails. “What is he doing? Is he going to succeed? Don’t let him succeed! But I feel bad for him! I want him to have success. Wait, no, I don’t!”

Never happen. Never, never happen. But it would have been so cool.

Angels and Demons
Starring: Tom Hanks, Ewan MacGregor
Directed by: Rom Howard, 2009

(Warning; May contain spoilers)

Oh, no! A [a) terrorist; b) disgruntled ex-employee; c) fanatic] has stolen a [a:) nuclear warhead; b) deadly neurotoxin; c:)canister of anti-matter] from [a) Starbuck's; b) a secret government lab; c) the CERN Large Hadron Collider]. He plans to [a)kill everyone at the Superbowl; b) release it into New York City's water supply; c) destroy Vatican City]. Only a [a) disgraced ex-cop; b) jaded science geek; c) sarcastic academic nerd] can decipher the [a) last cell phone call; b) fifty-year-old blueprints; c) cryptic archival documents and arcane symbols] within the next [a) twenty-four; b) two; c) five] hours. The villain turns out to be [a) the person you least suspected; b) the hottie in the red convertible; c) the person you knew you were supposed to least suspect, so you immediately suspected them].

If you answered C to all of these, you don’t have to watch Ron Howard’s adaptation of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons.

You might want to watch it anyway though. Here’s why.

My friends Greg and Mary introduced me to the concept of watching bad movies, not as a waste of time, but as sport. They used to host bad-movie parties. Angels and Demons almost—almost—makes it as a beautiful, big-budget, blow-out, wrap-it-up-in-a-velvet-ribbon Bad Movie. It falls short because it’s too pretty and the story is too somber, as if the movie’s hijinks really have something important to say about science and religion, courage and faith.

But it’s so very close!

The movie is gorgeous, with glorious exteriors that look like they really are Rome, (the royal palace at Caserta acted as stand-in for the Vatican), and exquisite sets full of marble columns and floors, replicas of famous artwork, and lush color, like the line of cardinals in their reds filing up to be locked in the Sistine Chapel for the Conclave. Each frame has deep shadows and rich “magical hour” lighting. The action sequences are good. There’s a great, suspenseful scene in a Roman fountain, and I think maybe the scenes set at the particle accelerator were really filmed there.

Tom Hanks is good, of course, although Robert Langdon isn’t the most demanding character he’s ever played. It’s, basically, academic and perceptive, academic and sarcastic, academic and irritated, just irritated, and angry. All the other actors do great jobs too, but for Hanks this has got to be practically a paid vacation.

The plot is a trifecta; preposterous, implausible and yet predictable. How predictable? I’ll show you. Four cardinals have been abducted from the Vatican. One will be killed each hour. Quick—how many cardinals will Robert Langdon be too late to save? That’s right. Three. It’s that predictable. Here’s another one. The Vatican archives have airtight low-oxygen reading chambers walled with bullet-proof glass. Quick—what’s going to happen?

There’s a woman. Her name is Vittoria. She wears black slacks and a black pullover. At the end she gets to wear a black dress. She explains about anti-matter and “the God Particle,” and translates some Latin for Langdon—even though she’s a physicist. She defaces a book, and from then on she might as well be the dead Pontiff’s pet cat for all the forward motion she gives the plot.

Oh, and remind me later to talk about PG-13 versus R ratings.

What did I like? As I said, the action sequences, even when stupid (“Quick, let’s split up!”) were well done. The single biggest fun–even though I’m sure it’s inaccurate–was the imagining of the Vatican archives. It was awesome. I could have watched six or seven more scenes set there.

A&D is really pretty and it tries really, really hard, so I give it honorary Bad Movie status. A few months from now, when you’re buying salsa and chips for your A&D Bad Movie Day, here are some things to keep in mind to get the ball rolling:

The branding irons. They’ve in English!

The whole helicopter scene.

“Illuminatus! Illuminatus!”

Enjoy.

Star Trek
Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana
Directed by: J J Abrahms
2009

(May contain spoilers. Probably not, but don’t say you weren’t warned.)

Saw Star Trek. Wow! Like a long roller-coaster ride with lots of light and loud noises. Lots of lights. Lots of loud noises.

Casting? They nailed it. Zachary Quinto as Spock is shivers-down-your-spine accurate, especially in that first scene with his mother. Karl Urban—Bones! Chris Pine incarnates James T Kirk’s swaggering braggadocio, especially in the laugh-out-loud-hilarious Kobayashi Maru sequence.

Enough Trek jokes and one-liners for everybody.

In this “reboot,” Kirk is a fatherless rebel with big authority issues. He never backs down from a fight, which pretty much means he gets pounded when he picks fights with six or seven people at a time. Spock is struggling to choose between human emotion and the iron discipline of Vulcan logic. Uhura is smart, assertive, fiercely competitive. Watching these alpha males/females learn to bond as a team is perfect summer fun.

But I did have a few quibbles. . .

Just a few, really.

Like, okay, two-thirds of the way through the movie, when Scotty and Kirk are beamed aboard the Enterprise, what’s with the human-sized HabiTrails © filled with water, and the thing that looks like a giant margarita blender? Seriously, what’s with that?

And the time-travel thing. So, after the Romulan villain appears out of the black hole in a ship that’s got to be the space-travel equivalent of a HumVee and kills Kirk’s father, where does he go for 25 years? Does he just wait by the singularity, poised like a cat over a gopher hole, for his quarry to emerge? And wouldn’t someone notice that big honkin’ ship just parked out there in that sector?

He has a crew. Wouldn’t his crew mutiny? I mean, wouldn’t they be thinking, along about, I don’t know, year five, that maybe their time would be better spent going to the planet Romulus and warning them about what’s coming up in their future? After ten or eleven years, don’t you think they’d mutiny just to go someplace where they could drink beer and meet chicks?

Then there’s the super planet-killing drill. Okay, the drill is kinda cool, but it has the long, wicked, barbed chain that hangs from the ship into the atmosphere to support it. Why a wicked barbed chain instead of a tractor beam or some really cool monofilament thing? Because it’s an evil, evil, bad drill! That’s why!

Picky points, I know, and they didn’t really detract too much from my enjoyment of the movie. Okay, the giant margarita blender did.

I have to get serious for a moment, about some relationship quibbles. This is important because, like the casting, they came darn close to nailing the relationships 100%, except for a couple of little things. . .

Two of these characters have an intimate relationship. They engage on a physical level twice in the movie—once in an elevator and once on the transporter pad. I’ll give them the elevator; not because it was character-accurate but because we, American audiences, are to blame; we are so jaded that we don’t believe people can have strong physical feelings for each other unless they are clinging to each other and panting. I won’t give them the transporter scene though. Not buying it. The dialogue, yes, it was pitch perfect for these two, but not the embrace; not in those circumstances, not those two people.

The second quibble worries me more. This James Kirk respects no one. At the beginning of the movie he certainly doesn’t respect Spock. At the end of the movie, it becomes clear that he has learned to respect him, for real.

When did that moment happen? When did Kirk realize how much there was to admire in Spock, his contemporary—not Future Spock or Some Abstract Spock or We’re Great Friends in the Future Spock? Somewhere, I missed that moment. And somewhere amid the lights, the noise, and the laughter, I really want to see it.

“Well, Tosca isn’t for everyone.”
One opera-goer to another
Quantum of Solace

Quantum of Solace
Daniel Craig, Judi Dench
Directed by Marc Forster

Bond is back! First we had the “franchise reboot” movie, Casino Royale, and now we have Quantum of Solace.

Three reasons to get this DVD:

Bond as played by Daniel Craig.
M as portrayed by Dame Judi Dench
Tosca.

Yes, that’s right, Tosca, the opera. About 40 minutes into this globe-trotting actioner, the movie takes us to Bregenz and a production of Tosca. I was planning to write, “If this isn’t an actual staging of Tosca, it should be.” And it is, the Himmelmann version from 2007, as I found out from mostlyopera,blogpot.com. (Any errors in the preceding sentences are mine, not the website’s). The opera sequence is the best one in the movie. The staging, the music, the strategic use of silence, Bond’s tuxedoed violence—it’s all wonderful. Tosca also provides a signpost for the journey Camille, this movie’s Bond Girl, must take.

The second best thing in the movie is one scene, where one of the villains, Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalic) gets off a private jet, into a waiting limousine, and gives the two men who were on the plane with him a look. Wait, I’m sorry, I’m not doing it justice. It’s A Look.

The third best thing in the movie is a tie; every scene with M; and a woman named Corinne whispering, “Thank you,” to Bond.

The. . . well, you can’t call it a plot, exactly. . the framework on which the scenes are hung is just sturdy enough to hold things together until the next car chase/horse race/boat chase/opera/fistfight/shooting/plane chase/plane crash/party/murder/ action adventure sequence. I’m not saying the writing isn’t smart—it is—it’s just that most of us watch a Bond movie to see men in tuxedos do spin kicks and head butts, and the creators of this movie know that.

Some things are nonsensical. A luxury hotel that bursts into flames if a guest basically sneezes too hard? Please, that’s just bad design, people. The evil pocket dictator-wannabe who ties up women for his sexual gratification . . . (yawn). These are minor quibbles that don’t annoy long enough to derail your enjoyment of the movie.

There is a curious purity in Bond’s relationship with Camille. Although there is a hint, near the end of the movie, that they may have had sex, on screen they barely kiss. Bond does get a girl because, dude, he’s Bond, but it isn’t the Bond Girl. When Camille explains to Bond that by “rescuing” her during the speedboat chase he in fact robbed her of vengeance against the man who raped her mother and killed her family, Bond pauses, and says, simply, “I apologize.” The relationship between these two is almost mentor and apprentice.

Throughout the movie, Bond has been haunted by the memory of Vesper, the woman he loved who betrayed him, and who killed herself in order to keep from betraying him completely. At the end, the very end, Bond confronts the man who manipulated Vesper. He finds a way to forgive her and free himself from her ghost. He is not yet completely free, and we see, in this Bond universe, how the loss of Vesper shaped Bond the man, but we believe that he has gained, at least for a moment, a quantum of solace.

The Fall

Lee Pace

Cantinca Untaru

Directed by Tarsem Singh (as Tarsem)

            The Fall is all about the power of the image.  Don’t believe me?  Watch that opening sequence again.  Note how the Beethoven music wraps around each shot.  Pay attention to the trestle and the train.  Watch the light glance off the woman’s heart-shaped locket, the locket you’ll see again.

            It’s all about the image, and, like Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Adventures of Baron von Munchausen, and Don Juan DeMarco, it’s all about story-telling.

            The movie is set in 1920’s LA, in a Catholic charity hospital.  Alexandria, a little Persian immigrant girl, is recovering from a broken arm.  Because she is otherwise healthy, she has the run of the place and knows everyone from the priest and the nurses to the man who delivers the ice.  She meets Roy, a stunt man in the fledgling movie business who was injured and probably permanently paralyzed when a stunt went wrong.

            Roy starts making up stories to entertain Alexandria, and the stories play out before us in vivid, candy-coated colors, a different palette than the creamy peach, cream and olive tones of the hospital scenes.  Alexandria is a fierce editor—she doesn’t want a pirate story, she says, and the five story characters on a deserted island immediately become bandits—and soon she and Roy are collaborating, weaving characters from hospital life into the “epic” tale Roy has set.

            Alexandria is an innocent, so she is unaware of the depths of Roy’s despair, and his hidden purpose in befriending her.

            I think the movie spends about half the time in 1920’s hospital world.  These scenes evoke a time and place without the fussy attention to period detail you sometimes see.  As we watch Alexandria’s peregrinations we begin to understand more about her.  Meanwhile, Roy’s story grows increasingly darker.

            In an early scene Alexandria, who is not a Catholic, brings Roy a communion wafer she took from the chapel.  Roy asks her if she is trying to save his soul (a word five-year-old Alexandria doesn’t even know).  The question is playful but it resonates through the rest of the movie.  Souls are, in fact, at stake here.

            Tarsem, the director, is best-known for music videos, which might explain how he knew about all the fabulous locations he uses.  He also directed one of the most beautiful and most awful movies I ever sat through—The Cell, with Jennifer Lopez.  Roger Ebert described The Cell as “a Vogue photo-shoot in hell.” In The Fall, Tarsem doesn’t feel the need to junk up his intimate story with sadistic serial killers and science-fictional bodysuits.  He just shows us what happens.

            The movie is beautiful, but the relationship between Roy and Alexandria grabs us and holds us.  Pace’s work here is more layered than his turn as the magical pie-maker on Pushing Daisies, and Untaru—she is a little miracle.  Her genuineness saves the film’s sentimentality from becoming gummy.

            Days later, though, it’s the images I remember.  I remember a keyhole in a door creating a camera oscura, Alexandria’s paper mask and the mask of the blue bandit.  I remember the trestle, the train, the heart-shaped locket, and mostly I remember the elephant, swimming, swimming through the brilliant blue water as it carries our five heroes off the deserted island and into the heart of our story.

If you didn’t see Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog on the internet, you should get it from Netflix now.  Right now. 

This is the only DVD I’ve ever seen where the viewer has to watch the FBI warning because it’s part of the production.

            This project—a three-act mini-movie that showed on the internet—was created by Joss Whedon and completed during the 2008 writers’ strike.  Neil Patrick Harris plays Dr. Horrible, a super-villain wannabe who dreams of two things; acceptance into the Evil League of Evil, and the love of his secret laundry-day crush Penny.  His dreams are routinely stomped by his nemesis, the superhero Captain Hammer.  Hammer is overplayed perfectly by Nathan Fillion.

            Because it’s Whedon (and we all know about his secret addiction) it’s a musical, and because it’s Whedon, it goes from hilarious to heartbreaking in zero-point-four seconds. Because it’s Whedon, it’s good, funny and very weird.

            And Neil Patrick Harris can really sing.