Deeds & Words

Syfy ran multiple showings of a movie from 2006 last weekend; The Wicker Man. After seeing part of it, I am putting out a plea to America. Can we please have a bake sale, or a car-wash, or something, to help Nicholas Cage get out of his tax difficulties?  Because, really, he has got to stop doing stuff like this.

(Two warnings:  I didn’t watch the entire movie, so there may be some brilliance in the middle. And, spoilers abound.)

A Sticky Wicket

The original Wicker Man, back in 1973, was… well, original. It was true horror. The 1973 version is set in Scotland, and puts a devout Christian believer up against an ancient pagan cult.  The effect of a true-believer who isn’t saved by the “true religion” made the seventies version of this movie unsettling, disturbing and scary.

The remake is faithful to the original except for changing the location, changing the gender of the cult leader and eliminating the element of religious belief for the Nick Cage character. Other than that, it’s almost exactly the same.

Our story begins… here

Nick plays Edward Milus, who is some kind of cop or highway patrolman in the desert somewhere. I’m going to saw Arizona, because I don’t know. Early in the movie, Milus fails to save a cute little blond girl and her mother from dying in a fiery car crash. There’s an implication that if it weren’t for the bratty behavior of the little girl, who throws her doll out the window (Milus goes to fetch it) Milus would have been killed in the same crash. That’s never developed though. After the crash, on leave and recovering, popping pills like a fiend, Milus gets a letter from his former fiancé Willow, who says her daughter has disappeared and no one will help her. Willow lives in a place called Summersisle (Summer’s Isle), in Puget Sound.

Summersisle is privately owned and sells honey. Apparently that’s the only source of income to the island, although there are some pretty gorgeous homes for a simple organic farming operation. Milus tries to get to the island, (riding on a ferry that is a type the Washington State Department of Transportation doesn’t use in the Sound) only to discover that you can’t get there from anywhere. He finally bribes an old man with a float plane who delivers supplies –Edward Woodward, in a cameo, since he played the policeman in the original – and barges onto Summersisle. Two mean-teacher old women meet him and are unwelcoming. A parade of pregnant women waddle past him, smiling coyly. The few men seem subservient and kind of dim, but not as dim as Milus. Milus apparently doesn’t quite grasp the concept of “jurisdiction” as he flashes his Arizona badge around right and left claiming that his search for a little girl is “a police matter.”

Milus finds Willow, who is virtually incomprehensible. I mean the character, not the actress. She says Rowan, her daughter, is missing, even though other women say various things; that there never was a Rowan, that Rowan is fine, or that Rowan is dead. An hour in, Willow drops the Reveal – Rowan is Milus’s daughter! What a shocking revelation that none of us saw coming since the point where Milus opened Willow’s letter back in Arizona!

There’s no way off the island. There is no cell reception on the island. (Most of the subservient men hang out at “the tavern,” but since there’s no satellite reception, this is not paradise for them because they can’t watch sports.) Milus peddles around on a stolen bike, jerking and twitching, flashing his useless badge, gulping useless pills, asking useless questions and finding carefully planted clues. The harvest last year was bad. There is a ritual festival that involves a pretty little blond girl. There’s a book called The Ancient Rituals. Lots of things are burned. Milus flashes back to the fiery car. The scenery is pretty.

Who’s In Charge Here?

Eventually he has a conversation with Sister Summerisle, matriarch of the island, played by Ellen Burstyn, looking just great. I know Nick owes about $14 million and therefore will do anything that offers a paycheck. What do they have on Burstyn? Milus rags on her about how men are called “drones” and are subservient and Sister Summerisle smiles faux-sweetly and mouths all the usual platitudes about how they honor and respect their men, but they have their place in the world and it’s a specific place. (Get it? It’s social commentary! How funny!) Milus wanders down to the beehives, gets stung, and now we find out that he’s allergic and carries an epi-pen. Why didn’t we know this? Why didn’t Milus think about this problem before coming to Summersisle? Not that is matters –in the final cut of this movie, any significance this life-threatening allergy had is removed.

Rule of Four

Now, we reach the part of the movie where Cage, as Milus, says everything four times. He’s yelling at Willow about Rowan’s doll, which he found. It’s burned. “How did it get burned?” he yells. “How did it get burned? How did it get burned? How did it get burned?”

Later he hijacks Sister Rose’s bicycle, threatening her impotently with his gun. “Get off the bike! Get off the bike! Get off the bike! Get off the bike!”

Later still he crashes through Sister Summerisle’s beautiful craftsman mansion, hurling open doors and finding strange things, just not the sister. “Sister Summersisle! Sister Summersisle! Sister Summersisle! Sister Summersisle!”

Nick, I speak from the heart when I say this to your character, “Milus, shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

It’s Unbearable

Having come to the inescapable conclusion that the cult intends to sacrifice his little girl, Milus knocks out a woman and steals her bear costume—yes, that’s right, her bear costume – and, in disguise, joins the parade to the lovely meadow where the sacrifice is held. It’s like a Renn Faire gone wrong; all the woman have pretty floaty dresses and antique-lookin’ masks and nobody thinks anything about the guy in a bear costume galumphing along with them. He finds Rowan tied to a structure. He frees her and they run into the woods. His cell phone rings! He answers it while running and yells, “Tom, Tom, help me!” Tom’s a guy back in Arizona.  Spoiler alert: Tom’s not going to help him.

Rowan leads him through the woods… back to the meadow where all the women stand waiting. Because… surprise! Rowan isn’t the sacrifice! Milus is! Rowan and Willow were in on it! The whole time! Sorry to spoil it for you.

Lost in Translation

There is no movie so horrid that Syfy can’t make it worse by bad editing for commercials, and Wicker Man is no exception. Midway through the movie, Milus confronts Sister Rose and a group of students (girls) in the rustic little one room school-house. Outside, Sister Rose tells him that Rowan died. The dialogue goes like this:

Milus:  How did she die?

Sister Rose:  She burned to death. (Walks past Milus)

Milus: What did you say?

Sister Rose: (Turns at door) What I meant to say.

Okay, so… huh? What’s that about? Well, when you check Wikipedia, you find out that the uncut scene reads more like this:

Milus:  How did she die?

Sister Rose:  She’ll burn to death.

Milus:  What?

Sister Rose:  She burned to death. (Walks past Milus.)

Milus:  What did you say?

Sister Rose: (Turns at door) What I meant to say.

A clue! A threat! Suspense! Syfy can’t leave any of that in place, so the ominous, “She’ll burn to death” line gets cut. I am not good at math, but even I can see that if they shaved one iteration off of each of Cage’s Group of Four incantations, they could have left the scary line in.

Spoiler Alert

Milus dies. They sacrifice him. It’s not all a dream.

Possessed?

The scariest thing about Wicker Man isn’t in Wicker Man. It’s that this director, Neil Labute, adapted one of my favorite books, Possession, into a movie. I will never be able to watch it. I can’t see that story and those wonderful characters tortured in the hands of this director.

Last week I saw two good movies, and one of them, Cabin in the Woods, was horror. In that movie, what characters did mattered. Actions carried through, advanced the plot or revealed character. If someone had popped pills in Cabin, there would have been a reason. Cabin, like Wicker Man, is a movie about the horror of sacrifice. In Cabin, the sacrifice matters. In Wicker Man, it doesn’t. Neil Labute, who directed this monstrosity, should watch Cabin in the Woods. He might learn something.

Mini-Spoiler alert:  there are two bonus scenes in the credits of The Avengers.  The first one is half-way through the credits, and opens the door for a future movie. The second one is at the very end.

(And, by the way, a bonus for me! Last Monday I went to the Sebastopol Cinema to see Cabin in the Woods. Today I went to the same theater to find out — it’s the Rialto! The old Rialto, Ky’s Rialto, the one that closed in Santa Rosa about two years ago. In addition to first run movies, they’ll show indies, classics and international films just like they used to when they were on Summerfield Drive.)

Back to Marvel’s The Avengers. This is a very long movie, running nearly 2 1/2 hours. Lots of things blow up and get crunched. And I have to say that while I have seen Ironman and Thor, I don’t remember reading The Avengers when it was a comic book — although I did read Thor — and I’ve never seen Scarlett Johansson in anything before today. So those are my credentials, or lack thereof.

I whole-heartedly enjoyed this movie. I’m still trying to figure out how writer/director Joss Whedon managed to pack so much story and so many relationships into a movie where everything is also blowing up and people are punching each other. Or, in the case of the Hulk, hurling each other about.

Basically, there are six Avengers plus Nick Fury. And they are:

Ironman — Arrogant, irreverent genius Tony Stark in a suit of his own devising.

Captain America –a WWII science experiment who got frozen in the ice somewhere, but has super strength and a giant metal Frisbee weapon that doubles as a shield.

Thor — an Aesir, or a god from Asgard, with awesome blond hair and a hammer.

Black Widow — Natasha Romanoff. In addition to probably being a descendent of the Czar, she is an accomplished spy and an assassin. That last occupation got downplayed in this movie.

Hawkeye — Clint Barton. He is a solar-system-class archer.

Hulk — David Banner is a scientist almost as smart as Tony Stark, with some major anger management issues.

They are arrayed against Thor’s adopted brother Loki, played by Tom Hiddleston. He is perfectly cast for this role and a superb performer. You will love to hate him.

When Loki breaks into a top secret laboratory in New Mexico and steals SHIELD’s tesseract (a really pretty glowing blue cube), the lab implodes and Nick Fury puts out a call for the six extraordinary individuals he had started to pull together for the Avengers Initiative. A few of these players are reluctant, and one, David Banner/the Hulk, doesn’t even know he’s on the team.  Hawkeye is  not very interested in working for them  for at least the first half of the movie.

When they do get together, there’s quite a bit of tension. Captain America is a soldier, used to following orders, big on duty and sacrifice. Stark is an irreverent loner. Thor knows that Loki is evil, but he still bristles at the thought that mere humans might dare to attack him. He also still has brother issues with Loki. David Banner mistrusts himself, fearing that the Hulk will break out. The beauty of these conflicts is that they happen  while the action is happening.

It takes a shocking event to cohere this group of eccentrics into a fighting force and when they do, they have their work cut out for them. New York City is under attack from the mercenary army Loki is bringing through  a portal created by the tesseract.

Scarlett Johansson was great as Natasha, even if her accent doesn’t make sense. Is she American? Russian, but raised as a spy from a very young age so that her accent was erased? I don’t know. Her best scene is with Loki. Her second-best scene is with David Banner, but her opening is pretty good too. Robert Downey is almost old-shoe comfortable as Tony Stark, but the surprise here for me was Mark Ruffalo,  completely convincing as Banner.

The story melds cataclysmic special effects with powerful characters and convincing dialogue. This is what super-hero movies should be like.

Another mini-spoiler. If you don’t already know what schwarma is, Google it before you see the movie, just for the fun of it.

I almost can’t write about Cabin in the Woods without giving away Cabin in the Woods. It’s a horror movie. It’s a conspiracy movie. It’s a horror movie about a conspiracy.

Yeah, I think it’s that last one.

Five smart, carefree college students decide to take off for the weekend, going “off the grid,” at a cabin in the woods. They are:

The Nice Girl—Dana (Kristen Connolly)

The New Guy—Holden (Jesse Williams)

The Slut—Jules (Anna Hutchison)

The Jock – Curt (Chris Hemsworth)

The Conspiracy Theorist – Marty (Fran Kranz)
Guess who dies first. Just guess.

You guessed right because you already know the horror movie rules. The sexually active girl dies first. And the movie follows the rules, completely, while from somewhere else, two middle-aged guys in a high-tech lab watch every move our five lambs-to-the-slaughter make on a series of screens, controlling the environment in order to influence our five. The rules, it turns out, are important. And they’re old.

The internet ads for this movie made much of the rules. There were taglines like, “They’re after us. Let’s split up,” and “We’re being watched. Have sex.” Let’s include a couple more.

 Go down into the dark cellar by yourself.

If there’s anything with an enigmatic Latin inscription, read it out loud.

If the creepy local at the derelict gas station calls your girlfriend a whore and makes frightening remarks about what’s ahead, go on ahead anyway.

The creepy local, Mordeccai, makes a phone call to the guys in the lab later. As the two lab guys, Hadley and Sitterson (Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins, making evil seem as ubiquitous and banal as stale coffee in an office break-room) and Lin, the gal from Chem (Amy Acker) choke back their giggles at his ominous monologing, he says, suspiciously, “Am I on speaker phone?”

Our five primaries seem slightly brighter than the average horror-movie fodder, at least at first, but there is some tension in the ranks, and at least two of them are not behaving normally. Pothead Marty tries to discuss this with Dana. He asks her, “Since when is Curt such an alpha male? And since when does Jules act like a celebutard?” Dana says that they’re just drunk, but Marty isn’t so sure.

The pivotal scene, of course, is in that creepy earthen cellar. The cellar is filled with horror-movie stuff. There are weird porcelain doll heads; a canister of movie film; a jewelry box with a dancing ballerina inside; a dress form with a faded lace dress and a strange pendant; there is a conch shell, a mosaic orb that is a puzzle box, and then there are the more usual things; rusty cutting and slashing tools, animal traps, cobwebs. Each of the five is drawn to something, until they are distracted by Dana, who starts reading from a diary she’s found; kept by the daughter of a family of twisted pain-worshipping cultists who tortured visitors, and finally each other. And the diary ends with… an enigmatic inscription in Latin.

The cellar scene is important, but what is going on under the cellar is even more important. This is a movie about levels, vertical and horizontal; we on the other side of the 4^th wall watch the watchers, and through the watchers, watch our primaries. “I’m rooting for that kid,” Hadley says, as Dana thrashes away from a twisted-pain-worshipping-cultist-zombie who’s swinging a bear trap on a chain. The lab-coat guy starts a monologue about her courage, her heart, her purity –and then gets distracted at the thought of making margaritas.

The final act of the movie plays out in scenes so blood-drenched I thought I’d wandered into a “Blade” movie by mistake. That’s okay though; it’s intentional. I wouldn’t have thought that there was a fresh sight gag left with elevators. I was wrong, and the gentle chiming of the elevators in the monolithic facility acts as timing for the catastrophic final sequences, as we reach the big climactic scene at the end. This is also one of the best pro-drug movies I’ve seen in a while. Marty, the pothead, who lights up constantly, (his bong collapses into a coffee travel-mug) is the only one who even comes close to figuring out what is happening. (“I’m on a reality show,” he marvels. “My mom’s going to think I’m such a burn-out.”) But the basic question is, “Why?” Why is it only young people who have to suffer and be killed in this particular way?

Joss Whedon co-wrote this film and directed the second unit. It has Whedonisms all over it; which is to the good as far as I’m concerned. Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel will see many familiar faces on the screen. The final sequence is reminiscent of the UC Sunnydale season of Buffy, with the Initiative. Being Whedon, he can’t resist the whole destiny/free will question. As influenced as they are, do our five employ free will? By doing so, are they heroic, or selfish, since their deaths are purportedly part of a bigger purpose? Are they like Spartacus, or Iphigenia? Well, I don’t know, because I was covering my eyes and peering out between my fingers at that part.

If you like horror movies, I recommend this one.

Some commenters on the internet were worried about whether there were rape scenes. There are not. There is a pretty and sexy sex scene that ends badly (because, let’s review… who dies first?). One internet commenter stated that there is a sexual assault against a dead, taxidermy-ed wolf, but I will leave you do draw your own conclusions.

As a review or a critique or anything, this is completely unfair, because:

1)      I haven’t read the book(s); and

2)      I’m not going to; and

3)      I haven’t seen the movie all the way through; and

4)      I’m not going to do that either.

There, that’s out of the way.

FX is showing the movie Twilight in continuous loop, obviously a marketing tie-in to the release of most recent Twilight movie, Book Three Part One or Book One Part Three or something. (I shouldn’t make fun. They did that with the last Harry Potter book-to-movie transition and it worked there.)

Because FX is showing it virtually nonstop, any time I surf and click onto FX, I’m at a different part of the movie. This means I have never seen the entire thing, and I’ve never seen it in sequence. My sense is that this random-shuffle version of viewing only improves the film. You would think that watching snips of a movie here and there would limit your ability to follow the story, and my response in this case would be, “What story?”

The story is this: Bella falls in love with a vampire. That’s the story. Hard to mess that one up by watching it out of sequence. Sure, there are some obligatory “bad” vampires who pop up to create fake tension by trying to bite Bella, but that really isn’t the plot. Sure, Bella has to figure out that her enigmatic new friend/crush is a vampire, but that really isn’t a plot either. There really isn’t a plot. It’s just that simple.

The Pacific Northwest never looked better than in this movie. The northwest epitomizes the word “twilight” so it works beautifully here; lush evergreens, snowcapped mountains, verdant meadows and moss-carpeted logs; twining shimmering waterways, twinkling lights on rain darkened pavements. All gorgeous stuff. Kristen Stewart stands out here as an actress who can make this implausible character seem like an authentic teenager (more on this in a bit). I believe that Robert Pattison is probably an excellent actor as well, but he is slathered in white-face makeup and completely imprisoned by this appalling screenplay. “Your blood is like my personal heroin,” he says to Bella, in an intense, smoldering way. (Believe me, I looked for a said-book verb to plug in there and couldn’t find one. “Your blood is like my own personal heroin,” he smoldered. You see?)

“Then say the word!” he commands Bella when they’re standing out in the forest in the fully-clothed, both-standing, no-touching scene that first substitutes for sex in this sexless romance. She is turned away from him, looking all intense and vulnerable. Say the word. Why did Allison Hannigan, from American Pie, shouting, “Say my name, bitch!” leap into my mind? Unintentionally hilarious.

The word, by the way, is “vampire.”

“Hold tight, spider money,” he says later as they leap through the trees a la Tarzan. I would give more examples of his dialogue, but really, this humiliation is unfair. It’s not like he wrote the stuff.

The vampires live in a really cool glass-and-sharp-angles house because the vampires are rich. Vampires sparkle in the sun. Vampires play baseball during thunderstorms. Apparently vampires are not worried about getting struck by lightning which is odd, because burning is the one sure way to kill them. Why, then, do they play baseball during thunderstorms? Because they hit the ball so hard it breaks the sound barrier. Really.

When the bad vampires show up and get a whiff of Bella, literally, the “good vampires” leap down into combat poses, looking exactly like they’re setting up for the jazz-dance number in West Side Story. I was waiting for Edward to start snapping his fingers. (“Got a rocket/in your pocket/ Turn off the juice, boy!”)

Bella is what fan-fiction writers and others call a “Mary Sue.” A Mary Sue is the fantasy-wish-fulfillment character of a beginning writer. She is beautiful, brilliant, clever, beloved by all; in short, perfect. Bella is a biology wizard, can identify any piece of classical music, is friendly with the one Native American kid in her small-town high school, is beautiful, and knows the square root of pi. She does have a fault, she does! She doesn’t dance.

Her other real fault is that she falls in love with a guy who wants to drain her body of blood. I’m sorry, I think that’s a failure of judgment on her part.

The smart girl who knows the square root of pi must behave stupidly at the end of the movie in order for the suspenseful scene to work—because if Bella used her brain for two seconds, she would think (yes, spoiler!) “Since my mother lives in another state right now, it is unlikely that the bad vampire ran there and kidnapped her in the past ten minutes, so I am not going to agree to meet him, alone, at the dance studio.”

The actor who plays Bella’s father does a good job, and their chemistry is good, but one clever bit about pepper spray is so good that it is used twice, with no changes. It’s clear why Edward would like her—hey, free heroin!—but not clear at all what Bella would see in this weird boy. Either she’s an adrenaline junkie (“Every time I’m with him I’m putting my life at genuine and immediate risk! Awesome!”) or worse, she’s a masochist. And from the bits I saw, I think masochism wins.

FX will probably be showing the movie twenty-six more times. If you want to see it, I’m thinking maybe watching it with the sound off would be the best way to go.

Spouse and I walked down to our downtown cinema to see Thor on Saturday.  We opted for plain 2-D. It was pretty clear which scenes would be breathtaking in immersive 3-D, but the film is entertaining and beautiful in flatland version, too. 

Kenneth Branaugh did a fine job of directing, bringing just enough comic book sensibility to the screen.  Like the original Ironman, the movie bit off just enough story, not more than it could chew.  Thor’s character development is credible within this time-frame, and the arc of the villain is plausible.  The movie has a complex villain worthy of hero, and worthy of the special effects. 

Casting-wise, this is an interesting mix of new talent and award-nominee heavy-weights, with Anthony Hopkins as Odin, Rene Russo looking elegant and politician’s-wife-like as Frigga, and Natalie Portman doing a fine job as Jane, a geo-physicist. (Yes, I know in the comic-book she was a nurse.  That wouldn’t have worked here.  Get over it.)  Chris Helmsworth, who isn’t exactly an unknown, navigates the thunder god’s rough road to maturity in a naturalistic way that convinced me he should get his hammer back.  Tom Hiddleston as Loki, however, was compelling, giving a layered and emotionally piercing performance, which is good news for the continued franchise.  

In Asgard, Thor has four warrior friends, and I had that annoying experience of going, “I know who that is. . . who is it?” every time the big eater would show up or speak.  Thank goodness for imdb.com!  That was the actor who played Pullo in the HBO series Rome. 

The elements of this movie balance.  The Asgard and wormhole scenes do not overpower, although they are stunning. The action sequences are broken up appropriately with quiet moments and humor, and little bits of homely life as when Thor carries home Eric after a few too many in the local bar. Hemsdale plays Thor correctly as arrogant and brash, loving and vulnerable, and ultimately honorable. Stellar Skarsgard delivers a disciplined, understated performance as Eric, and it’s easy to take the character for granted and not see how much he powers the earth portion of the plot. 

SHIELD is appropriately ambiguous here.  They are the good guys, doing a bad thing, and doing it in a calm professional way that makes them annoying.  Perfect call! In Thor, the shadowy government group (who truly are good guys) do not have to be stupid to make the plot work.  I appreciated that.

Special effects range from pretty to stunning.  Like any big effects/action movie, I have several plot quibbles that occurred to me after I left the theater (the Odinsleep?  Now?  Really?). While I was watching it, I was conscious only of enjoying it.  The first summer movie of 2011 is two hours of fun and thrills.

Syfy movies:  Highlander; the Source; Incomprehensible and incoherent. 

There Can Be Only One—And There Should Have Been 

For those of you who don’t watch fantasy movies or TV shows, here is enough to get you started.  In the original movie, Christopher Lambert played an immortal.  There are more like him.  They all have cool swords and they meet up, over the centuries, and challenge each other to duels.  The only way to kill an immortal is to cut off his head—and it will always be his head, at least in the first movie, since they are all male.  They are also all sterile (good thing too—immortal and fertile?  Recipe for trouble).  Anyway, there is a slogan among the immortals; “There can be only one.”  All the immortals are in a tontine. When all but one of the immortals has been killed, something wonderful happens to the survivor.  I won’t spoil the surprise by telling you what. 

Then there was a basic cable TV show based around a different immortal character, Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod.  We presume that the TV show was a “reboot” since there are dozens of immortals around, and more begin popping up like mushrooms after a good rain. 

Time passes, the show goes off the air, and then sometime later they made this thing called Highlander III; the Source.  It is the TV storyline the movie chooses to follow. And Syfy can’t wait to show it; over and over. 

Somewhere in Eastern Europe. . . 

Generally speaking, a movie that relies on voice-over narration is not a good movie.  There are exceptions; for example, The Usual Suspects.  The Source is no Suspects.  

A woman, speaking over the action, tells us that the world has fallen apart, in some unspecified way, while the location card on the screen lets us know we are Somewhere in Eastern Europe.  Somewhere in Eastern Europe; that’s always a good place to set a movie. There’s a guy running down a dark street, dodging the occasional listless looter (it appears the streets have been like this for months; these must be underachiever looters).  He has a sword.  He does something—I missed what.  The scene shifts to a nicer venue and two guys are talking to each other virtually with nifty spectacles that project hologrammatic images.  One of them talks about how all the planets in the solar system are shifting out of their orbits into some kind of mystical alignment.  “This goes against celestial mechanics!”  one of them shouts.  They’re both immortals.  They know this planetary lineup means the immortals must find The Source. 

Elsewhere, a guy in monsignor’s robes and a Billy Idol bleach-job is also talking virtually to the first guy with the sword, about the location of the source.  Then the first guy gets killed by a guy wearing patches of armor and sporting a very bad attitude.  Next we see a guy in a shearling coat crouching on the top of a building, like Batman.  It’s Duncan MacLeod!  And the VO narrator tells us that she was married to him, so it’s an immortal domestic drama. 

Time passes; the surviving guys all get together somewhere.  There is Methos, an ancient Roman, who used to be on the TV show, and Giovanni, the bleach-job monsignor, a guy with a cockney accent, MacLeod and a regular human guy, known as a Watcher, named Joe. They go into the woods and try to get entrance to a rustic-spa-monastery to meet with The Elder.  They are refused but a mysterious woman (guess who!  Can you guess?) scales the wall.  The monks let her in, and then let the immortals in.  It’s MacLeod’s wife and our narrator!  She has had visions about the planets and the half-armored guy and a bunch of other stuff.  Nobody wants to talk to the immortals, but everyone wants to talk to her, including the gross Elder, who explains that the immortals must go find the Source; that she has to be the leader, that they’ll be challenged by the Guardian—that’s the bad attitude guy—and the only one of them can find the Source. If they find the Source, something will happen.  Maybe it’s good; I was never clear on this. 

Jupiter Aligns with Mars 

Meantime; bad attitude guy kills Joe.  Immortals hire a freighter and sail somewhere.  They confront a bunch of bad guys on land.  Then the movie jumps forward to show them driving into the forest, and suddenly, under Queen’s incandescent harmonies (“Here we are, born to be kings, we’re the princes of the universe. . .”) we get a flashback to the battle with the bad guys.  You know, the scene they could have just shown to us in real time.  Why the flashback?  It’s a mystery.  They find an abandoned cottage.  Methos and Giovanni squabble about religion. MacLeod, the woman and the cockney guy go on watch.  MacLeod and his ex have a heart-to-heart talk that soon involves unbuckling belts and unzipping flies; and bad attitude guy fights the cockney guy, but he doesn’t cut off his head.  The cockney guy dies anyway.  Oh, no, this is bad!  The immortals are becoming mortal.  

Then they’re captured by a motorcycle gang that lives in the woods.  Why would a motorcycle gang live in the woods, instead of near pavement?  I don’t know.  They have a two-story-high wicker man kind of thing and all the immortals and the woman tied up on a platform.  Giovanni gets his hand free and escapes.  Instead of helping the others, he shouts, “There can be only one!”  and runs into the forest. We don’t like Giovanni. Bad attitude guy appears and takes the woman, telling her that the Source wants to talk to her.  Off they go.  MacLeod and Methos escape.  The motorcycles roar into life and come after them.  Whatever may have caused the collapse of the free world, it wasn’t a dearth of fossil fuel.  Methos tells MacLeod to go on, find the woman and the Source, because MacLeod “is the best of us.”  

Oh, and by the way, these planets?  They’re not only bailing out of their orbits right and left, but they’ve grown closer to earth.  Much closer; like, earthquake and tidal wave close; like, bumping into the moon close; much too close for comfort. 

A Bundle of Joy 

Of course, McLeod has to fight with the Guardian, he of the bad attitude and partial armor.  While the woman stands on a stairway (to heaven?) they duel, moving superfast, equally matched until somehow MacLeod tricks the Guardian into cork-screwing himself into the ground.  But MacLeod won’t kill the Guardian; he shows mercy.  Screen goes black. 

Ah, you think it’s over.  Wrong!  In a two-minute montage, all the action scenes play back for us while the woman narrates again about how the message of the source isn’t death, it’s life and the “one” who remains survives because he is pure of heart. And that’s MacLeod, pure of heart.  His prize is that he gets to have a child (and grow a beard in the last scene).  Well, actually, we assume that human biology has stayed pretty much the same in spite of this miracle and that she will be the one bearing the child. This child will save the world.  The last frame of the movie is a fetus-face, smiling, very Two Thousand and One; A Space Odyssey. 

Why?  Oh, I get it; a child who is half human, half immortal.  Why, it’s almost like being the child of a god!  Kid, get those planets back in order, would’ja? 

The movie played as if half the cast had to go back to their real jobs after three days of filming, so they cut the script in half and hoped the woman talking over the action would cover that up.  Then they scrounged around and found some random action edits that had been cut out of other movies, and stitched them into the narrative and hoped no one would notice.   The movie may not be quite as bad as I think, because I was doing dishes through part of it.  It’s still a long way from coherent. 

Even Queen couldn’t save this. My suggestion; when it comes on again, go to your computer and find a YouTube video of Queen singing “Princes of the Universe.”  Play that instead, and then go for a nice walk or something.

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?