Category: Film

Movie Review: The Scorpion King 3: Battle For Redemption (2012)

In 2002, my father took me to see The Scorpion King because I loved wrestling and, in 2002, to a wrestling fan, there was no badder man on the face of the planet than The Rock. Had I known that The Scorpion King represented the beginning of the end of the Rock’s tenure in the WWE, I’m sure I would have felt differently, but The Scorpion King wass the sort of dumb, fun action movie I’m still cool with, where the action scenes are comprehensible and the one-liners aren’t too stupid. Believe me, though: replacing the Rock is an impossibility, a task so Herculean that even the mighty Vince McMahon, possessed of untold promotional genius, realized almost immediately the the only way to start down that particularly foolhardy road was to wait until the Rock’s disinterested, Clark Kentian double—Dwayne Johnson—was ready to descend from Witch Mountain, willing to speak about himself in the third person again. Sadly for Universal Pictures, Johnson will probably never return to the movie that made The Tooth Fairy possible, but, like Vince McMahon, they seem to have accepted that, turning the Mummy spin-off into a direct-to-DVD, Redbox-friendly franchise.

The Scorpion King 3: Battle For Redemption is somewhat successful in that sense, the sort of time-waster determined not to bore, but without the ambition necessary to rise above its station. The one-liners are piled-on, the sidekicks oafish, the villains flamboyant and/or borrowed from a video game franchise, and the ninjas plentiful; if Scorpion King 3 were dinner, it’d be prison meatloaf. Sure, it lacks the refinement of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol or the inventiveness of Attack the Block, but cabbage and ground chuck function perfectly well as a meal, no matter how horrible it ultimately tastes.

Some years after the first Scorpion King, Mathayus (Victor Webster) is a broken man. Due to unseen circumstances, his kingdom is smashed and his queen is dead. As the helpful narration has it, Mathayus lives for mercenary gold and a good way to die, which lands him in the employ of Horus (Ron Pearlman), a king whose brother Talus (Billy Zane) hunts for the Book of the Dead and a queen worthy of his libidinous lifestyle. That Pearlman and Zane, dressed respectively like a monarch in a community theatre version of Shakespeare and a Halloween pirate, are as Egyptian as Abraham Lincoln is unimportant, especially considering that the Book of the Dead (“Book of the Dead” often prefaced with “Egyptian”) appears to be under lock and key somewhere in the lush jungles of Asia. If Talus gets the book, he gains the ability to summon three warriors (Dave Bautista, Kimbo Slice, and Selina Lo) of untold power. In stopping them, Mathayus is joined by the Germanic barbarian Olaf (Bostin Christopher) and Silda (Krystal Vee), the object of Talus’ infatuation.

The plot, if you can call it that, is an endless series of double crossings and feigned double crossings. Mathayus and Olaf are working for Horus, then Talus, then they’re in it for themselves, and there’s a chance that the ghost warriors could turn on Talus as soon as they got tired of taking orders from a tacky pirate. None of Mathayus and Olaf’s schemings get beyond Mathayus insulting Olaf’s smell, but, as Adam West once said, criminals are a cowardly, superstitious lot, and hearing Olaf’s choice responses to Mathayus (his best: “I smell delicious”) is worth putting off the ultimately underwhelming throwdown between Mathayus and Zane’s scenery-chewing Talus for. Olaf, in fact, does much of the film’s heavy lifting, bashing in heads, hugging dudes, and peeing on enough ninjas’ heads to keep things moving along.

Zane’s relentlessness is also a thing to behold. In a movie where ninjas join forces with a guy who becomes an insanely powerful mummy, his Talus is the only thing popping from the film’s immutable, all-pervasive blandness. He’s got his finger in a lot of dams, too: world domination, artifact hunting, ghost soldier commanding, Mathayus hunting, Silda seducing, and being a doer of acts most villainous. The fun Zane appeared to have making Scorpion King 3 is noticeable, but not quite viral. Victor Webster, wearing a hobo beard and hoping he looks enough like the Rock to pass as him from long distances, plays Mathayus as a bump on a log, and while Krystal Vee reminds him again and again that he’s battling for redemption, it becomes clear that too many people involved in the making of this movie were battling ennui.

And that’s the whole problem with Scorpion King 3, really. This is the third movie in a franchise spun-off to explain the origins of a bit villain from the second movie in another franchise. When The Mummy returned for another installment, it skipped out on Mathayus and the pyramids in favor of China and abominable snowmen. Granted, nobody was going to pick this up expecting something above mediocrity, something consistent and somehow significant to a franchise that’s liked enough, if not universally, but the hollowness of this particular effort really stands out. I went to a Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurant once, and wandering from table to table was a man who was hired to impersonate Forrest Gump. There was an airshow that day, so the poor guy had to talk a lot about how the planes reminded him of Vietnam, which, of course, is where he got shot in the buttocks. I realized, finishing my meal in the awkward silence between my group and Forrest, that there are few jobs worse than inhabiting a character created for somebody else. The sadness of celebrity impersonation permeates Scorpion King 3, and Billy Zane is powerless to save the film from the scruffy-headed impostor who, unfortunately for him, spends much of his time moping about how he used to be a legend. Victor Webster may be jacked and he may be tan and he may be wearing something similar to what the Rock wore in the original, but put the Rock’s words into his mouth and, as one would expect, the result is schoolyard imitation, not particularly inspired, even by a need for attention.

Rating:

The Scorpion King 3: Battle For Redemption. Directed by Roel Reiné. With Victor Webster (Mathayus), Billy Zane (Talus), Bostin Christopher (Olaf), David Bautista (Argomael), Kimbo Slice (Zulu Kondo), Krystal Vee (Silda), and Ron Pearlman (Horus). Released January 17, 2012, by Universal Pictures.

January 17, 2012
Movie Review: The Devil Inside (2012)

On a purely fiscal level, I understand why studios acquire movies like The Devil Inside. Shot on digital cameras with a nothing budget, starring nobody, and pre-packaged with the promise that something will eventually happen—something cool and perhaps frightening—they represent the kind of low-risk/high-reward gamble that, after Paranormal Activity, an executive would be foolish to blink at. It’s just that they’re all the same, right? Somebody sets up a bunch of cameras and waits and waits and waits for signs of the supernatural in every day life: an angry ghost or, as the case is here, a squatting demon. The signs are the same, too. Something floats, then someone floats, then things get violent. Yes, these pseudo-documentaries posit, there are things that go bump in the night. At this point, though, they’re bumping very quietly.

Instead of documenting a haunted house, The Devil Inside concerns itself with the familial history of Isabella Rossi (Fernanda Andrade), whose mother (Suzan Crowley) murdered a nun and two priests when Isabella was a young girl. Official reports have it that Maria Rossi just went crazy–and the Hoarders-like house she kept about confirms that diagnosis–but, three days before his death, Isabella’s father tells her the truth: Maria killed those people during an exorcism, which explains why she’s been confined to a mental institute just outside the walls of the Vatican for the past 20 years. Knowing all this, Isabella packs her bags and heads across the ocean with a documentarian to find out the truth about exorcism and her mother. Why she agrees to this is beyond me, but I guess I was raised to know the difference between family business and documentary fodder.

The Devil Inside‘s plot is straightforward enough at first. Isabella, like every pseudo-doc protagonist, has her doubts about the veracity of demonic possession/ghosts/the Blair Witch. If the seeing her mentally ill mother some 20 years after murdering a couple of priests and a nun carries any emotional weight, it sure doesn’t register. Rome for her, like many other cinematic doubters in the ongoing struggle between good and evil, is pretty much a paid vacation. Before seeing the school the Church educates its exorcists in, she tells the camera she hopes it isn’t just some crazy Catholic joke. You know, the kind of joke her mother would murder three people over. Exorcism, of course, is not quite what Isabella expected (not enough pea soup), but that comes later.

The movie is presented as a reel of found footage, put together without the help of the Church, who don’t like releasing film of exorcisms to the public. This set-up allows our other heroes, the priests Ben (Simon Quarterman) and David (Evan Helmuth), to rage against the machine a bit. In this new era of lawsuits and YouTube and science, the Church doesn’t exorcise people unless they’re absolutely sure a person is suffering from something more than bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Ben and David, renegade clergy that they are, take on many cases the Church ignores, buries, or otherwise lets slip through the cracks. Using their limited knowledge base and years of experience, they’re not only able to determine if a person is possessed, but they’re capable of expelling the possessive demon. After Isabella meets with her mother, cameras in tow, she shows the footage to them and they agree that Maria is possessed. Until they finally meet her, it really seems like they’re reaching: She’s got inverted crosses cut into her skin. Instead of speaking different languages or even in tongues, she takes on an accent. She likes to swear at priests. Typical stuff.

Once these two strands of plot are joined together, The Devil Inside looks to marry them in a way that is fresh and interesting. It fails for a few reasons. The exorcism scenes aren’t anything close to shocking, relying on contortionists and levitation and the aforementioned curse-hurling as a precursor to the possessed escaping restraints, climbing the walls and attacking everybody in the room. The only people this behavior is new to are those on the screen. Worse, The Devil Inside telegraphs everything that happens mere minutes after introducing the premise. For example, there’s no reason anybody seeing this movie needs to be told by the documentarian himself that cameras will be running in the car at all time. And it’s really convenient that Isabella walks in on exorcism class right at the point when the professor starts talking about Multiple Demonic Possession and the demon’s ability to pass from host to host. There are four leads in this movie. Can you guess how many demon’s Maria Rossi is possessed by?

But enough about the humans in this movie: they’re all very pretty, and if you feel pity for nice looking people trying to make a quick buck off of a mentally incapacitated woman, this film’s for you. Me, I’m curious about the devil inside Mrs. Rossi. Movie demons who their eternities locked eternally in scripted conversations that have the same outcome, every time. Some demons, like Crocell, merely teach liberal arts and sciences when summoned. Some, like Abraxas, become Santana records. The ones we’re most acquainted with inhabit spinsters and teenage girls and wait for the coming of a film crew to let loose with an ever-stagnating routine of blood, spit, and the moderately inexplicable. I wonder: is the demon crippling a woman in a cell somewhere in Rome chosen because he or she is really, really good at telling priests off, or did they merely drew the short straw some millennia ago? It’s an interesting paradox–they seem to enjoy promoting the Devil’s work, but they’re too selfless to issue even a press release. Somebody go document them, for a change.

Rating:

The Devil Inside. Directed by William Brent Bell. With Fernanda Andrade (Isabella Rossi), Simon Quartermain (Ben), Evan Helmuth (David), Inout Grama (Michael), and Suzan Crowley (Maria Rossi) Released January 6, 2012, by Paramount Pictures.

January 7, 2012
Movie Review: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

In two movies now—The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Social Network—director David Fincher has made something exciting out of the mundane. Not that the mystery at the heart of this remake isn’t engrossing, but the way its protagonists set about solving it, in the hands of just about any other Hollywood director, would be the film’s nadir. Like The Social Network‘s sequences involving long, impenetrable sequences of code, much of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is spent researching, blowing up photographs, looking through slide shows, the Bible, and, in 2011, a card catalog.

This meticulous combing through of old evidence should be boring, but it draws the eye in, asks the viewer to pitch in and solve the mystery with the detectives. It works, even if you can solve the mystery; even, I suspect, if you’ve read the original novel or seen the 2009 Swedish adaptation of it. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is beautifully crafted and well-paced. Clocking in at well over two hours, containing three seemingly unwieldy plots that don’t converge at the center until midway through the movie, Fincher manages to cast familiar territory (even if you haven’t read the novels, the set-up is pure Agatha Christie) as dark, ominous and full of dread. It’s obvious the characters in the movie are walking through a minefield. The suspense is waiting for one of them to make the wrong step.

After being brought down by a Swedish tycoon for a supposedly libelous article in Millennium Magazine, disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is hired by the millionaire Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to investigate the 40-year-old case of his murdered niece, Harriet. The circumstances of the day—a family reunion/company board meeting on a private island, the bridge to which was cut off by an automobile accident—means that Harriet was murdered by one of her own family members, all of whom lead reclusive lives on the island’s various houses. All of the family members appear unbalanced, some of them were Nazi sympathizers during the war. The mystery, for all intents and purposes, seems indecipherable; Blomkvist has been hired to chase after ghosts at the edges of old photographs.

He is eventually assisted by Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a damaged, abused young woman who, like Blomkvist, is an expert investigator, though she comes from an entirely different school of detection. Where Blomkvist relies on personal interviews and the old trick of posting suspect’s names on the wall, Salander is a search engine savant, an obsessive observer, and not entirely pleasant company. A ward of the state, Salander’s guardian suffers a stroke and is no longer able to handle her case. She is given over to Nils Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen), a sadistic bureaucrat who’ll only give Salander an allowance should she be willing to trade in sexual favors. These scenes are gross and horrifying in ways unrivaled by films whose sole purpose is to be gross and horrifying, and Salander’s revenge is appropriately brutal and torturous. More importantly, they give her the necessary motivation to join Blomkvist. She is a victim chasing an abuser, a woman capable of great violence hunting men who hate women unable to fight back.

The great success of this film, beyond Fincher’s obvious talent for style, is in the performances. Even at the end, when the movie is plodding through the detritus of the investigation that saw Blomkvist disgraced, Lisbeth Salander is a captivating human being. She lives in the margins of other people’s lives. It becomes obvious that she doesn’t always want things to be that way, but the big mystery, bigger still than the one on Henrik Vanger’s island, is how she’ll become something more than the fetishized object of men like Bjurman’s—even Blomkvist’s—desire. Blomkvist, indeed, seems currently incapable of looking at Salander as something more than object. She does her job well and one presumes he finds her enjoyable in bed, but his tastes run mundane (his editor-cum-mistress Erika (Robin Wright)) and, as a romantic interest, Salander’s a bit of a reclamation project.

The plot strands Salander and Blomkvist in a cottage on Vanger’s island, connected nominally to the mainland by a bridge but, in fact, worlds away from either person’s idea of normalcy. The Vangers, whose business ventures have faltered since the sudden disappearance of Harriet 40 years ago, are an odd assortment of shut-ins, misanthropes, and Nazis. Even the two nicest members of the family, Henrik and Martin (Stellan Skarsgård) don’t seem quite right, as their lifetimes of isolation and power have effectively knocked the family from orbit. Most of the people encountered by Salander and Blomkvist are evil or under the direction of evil people, and the Vangers are so varied, so rough, so unlikable, that it’s quite possible any one of them murdered Harriet.

That, ultimately, is the problem with the mystery at the heard of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: The film spends so much time obsessing on Salander, Blomkvist, and the minutiae they’re wading in that much of the plot carries itself out, a precision timepiece ticking away in the background. On its own, the Vanger plot is engrossing material, one of a couple of plotlines that probably could have sustained its own film. While it’s effectively juggled, for the most part, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is nevertheless guilty of some wonky storytelling, if only because it is so taken with its leads. There’s good reason for all that, not the least of which being that the movie doesn’t take many liberties with the original plot. It’s just that I can’t imagine antagonists much more brooding and mysterious than the Vangers, and their coming and going in one film seems all too easy, even if their purpose is to prove our heroes capable. They are, and they’re worth returning to. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo effectively sets the table—I just hope what’s next justifies leaving the island.

Rating:

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Directed by David Fincher. With Daniel Craig (Mikael Blomkvist), Rooney Mara (Lisbeth Salander), Christopher Plummer (Henrik Vanger), Stellan Skarsgård (Martin Vanger), and Robin Wright (Erika Berger). Released December 20th, 2011, by Columbia Pictures.

December 28, 2011
Movie Review: The Sitter (2011)

After The Sitter and Your Highness, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the only projects David Gordon Green finds worth his time are stoned in-jokes spitballed between he and his friends in his smoke-filled basement, over a soundtrack of early-90s hip-hop. This is a director who has previously displayed immense talent but, perhaps egged on by the commercial and critical success of Pineapple Express, which is still quite good despite representing the nadir of the buddy stoner flick, he keeps going back to the well despite ever-diminishing returns. The Sitter, which is a 90-minute assemblage of uncomfortably bad jokes, bad characters, and bad set pieces, is a bad movie, and it’s badness is on another level than even that of Your Highness. Sitting through that movie, you wonder how its stars and its director convinced a studio to finance the shoot. Sitting through this one, you wonder why they bothered.

For Jonah Hill, this represents a precipitous drop-off from Moneyball, a drop-off that even rivals the one James Franco took between 128 Days and, well, Your Highness. In The Sitter, he plays Noah, a sex-obsessed chubster who doesn’t get much action. He’s got no job, no goals, and no car. His dad left he and his mom high-and-dry for the babysitter years ago and owes something like ten years of alimony. His “girlfriend,” if you can call her that, invites him over so he can go down on her, then pushes him out the door so he can go to a party. If you’re thinking to yourself that it’s not possible for Noah to navigate three insane children through a minefield of drugs, overlords, exploding toilets, jewel heists, racial stereotyping, stolen cars, and cheating parents while teaching them (and himself) valuable lessons about the importance of being/respecting yourself, then you’re not giving The Sitter enough credit for trying harder than most movies do to heap sugar into an otherwise vile concoction.

Does it work? Not even close. The Sitter isn’t aided any by the kids Noah is forced to babysit. There’s Slater (Max Records), a headcase who carries with him a fanny-pack full of pills and a promise that, if given any responsibility, he’ll snap; Blithe (Landry Bender), who is obsessed with celebrity and “hot gossip” and smearing make-up on her face; and Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez), an adoptee who dabbles in explosions, the needless destruction of property, and “running away,” which is so literal a threat that he has a GPS tracker sewn into his jacket. Why these kids are this way is never really The Sitter‘s concern, but Noah, while stealing money from a bat mitzvah or crashing the minivan because Blithe farted, has the time to make crucial, insightful observations into their young lives. The speech Noah gives Slater is as close as The Sitter comes to genuine sentiment, but for two issues: 1. Slater’s outburst is practically lifted from Little Miss Sunshine, and 2. Noah’s message that it’s OK to be gay comes with the promise that Slater will, after enduring a torturous high school career, land a sweet gig in the entertainment industry, where he’ll be organized and smell nice.

The other scenes like the one between Noah and Slater work similarly, and are clearly meant to cut the film’s otherwise bitter, jaded aesthetic. They just don’t work, though, as Hill is pretty much talking to two of the worst child characters yet conceived. Blithe’s crime is that she’s a subplot delivery device in a movie that barely has a main plot to begin with, her “hot gossip” being that her dad is sleeping around with some guy. She wears a lot of badly-applied make-up and talks about celebrities so Noah can tell her that celebrities and women who wear make-up are whores, thereby realizing that his “girlfriend,” who used to date a cagefighter, is just that. Rodrigo is plopped into the script to speak Spanish, because it’s funny when the white guy doesn’t understand another language and makes threatening suggestions in response. He blows things up and steals things and acts mischievous, and it’s not clear if that’s because he’s a kid or because he, like the black dudes at the pool hall or the gay dudes lifting weights, is a caricature, a modern-day Frito Bandito who only wants to be loved.

Eventually, Hill builds an impressive rap sheet and forms a bond with the kids, not that any of it matters. This is the kind of movie where an eccentric drug dealer (Sam Rockwell) employs a gang of homoerotic bodybuilders because it’s meant to look funny, where the white hero wins over a gang of clichéd street thugs by getting punched out and bumbling through cribbed street lingo, and where a potential love interest hears the hero admit that his girlfriend really isn’t his girlfriend, only to indignantly ask “So you have a girlfriend?” a minute later. The street thugs exist to save Noah’s ass, the bodybuilders because a gay villain can’t be a gay villain without gay henchmen, and the love interest so Noah has somebody to move on to after he’s been properly beaten up and abused for his karmaic sins. So much of this movie happens separate from the narrative because someone thought it’d be funny. One of those things: an in-joke cameo of James Franco, doing his thing on an episode of General Hospital. He looks happy. He should be: he’s not in The Sitter.

Rating:

The Sitter. Directed by David Gordon Green. With Jonah Hill (Noah), Max Records (Slater), Landry Bender (Blithe), Kevin Hernandez (Rodrigo), and Sam Rockwell (Karl). Released December 9, 2011, by 20th Century Fox.

December 16, 2011
Movie Review: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part I (2011)
Edward and Bella meet.

Assuming you, like me, somehow missed out on of the middle chapters of the Twilight saga, what happens next?

Anything is possible, but if you want a logical ending, see another movie.

A. Edward (Robert Pattinson) and Bella (Krirsten Stewart) get married and, as Edward is the vampire son of a couple of rich vampires, the two can afford to jet set across the world to a private island off the coast of Brazil, stopping in Rio for the obligatory 360° shot of Christ the Redeemer. The Cullen clan, of course, have an opulent mansion on the island, where Bella and Edward can play house and smile at one another in leisure, safe from the responsibilities inherent to being successful high school graduates. As newlyweds, the two mutually experience, for the first time, the joys of marital relations and lead long, fulfilling lives. Eventually Bella dies. Edward is sad, but so it goes.

B. Edward and Bella’s future coital plans are interrupted because, as a vampire, Edward is naturally much stronger than Bella, and one wrong thrust can render the poor girl a puddle of gore. Despite—or perhaps because of—this danger, the two moon-faced newlyweds consummate their vows. Bella wakes up the next morning to a destroyed bedroom and Edward asking if he’s hurt her badly. She is shown the bruises on her own body. He apologizes for harming her, though it seems more like he’s apologizing for her inability to handle his sexual aggression. Bella, who has, at some point, expressed her desire to be as strong, courageous, and passionate as the husband who wrecked the room and left bruises, wishes to try again. She attempts to seduce him like a woman new to the idea of seduction. He, similarly new to the idea, gives in easily. You’ll notice how cold Edward is when he lifts Bella’s shirt to reveal her bruises. You’ll note that, in any other story, Edward’s attitude and actions would not be unlike those of an abuser. There are paid servants who are shipped to the private island to clean up Edward and Bella’s mess. They notice, too. Edward and Bella continue on, playing chess on the beach. Edward, being a vampire, has hundreds of years of experience on his bride. When he takes her king, he does so aggressively. Bella eventually tires of this, but, being dutiful, never lets on to Edward, who constantly makes a show of his superior strength, knowledge, and beauty. Bella ages, and eventually dies.

C. Edward and Bella consummate their marriage and, by some miracle, conceive. Bella begins foisting ridiculous names upon the unborn child, but there are complications. The child, being the spawn of a vampire and a human, is half-vampire. She begins killing her mother, but can’t help her nature or ridiculous name. Thus springs a debate: Should the child stay, or should the child be ejected? There are two schools of thought:
1. Bella keeps the baby. This is championed by Bella herself, and some in Edward’s family. It is Bella’s hope that, as soon as the child is born, Edward’s father (Peter Facinelli) can turn her into a vampire as well, thus saving everybody. The odds? Never tell Bella the odds.
2. The child is aborted. Edward, not wanting to lose Bella, is for this. He has support from an unlikely ally: Jacob (Taylor Lautner), a werewolf and Bella’s best friend (beyond her new husband, of course).
In either scenario, the likelihood of Bella’s survival is slim, but things do not proceed as they do in choice A. If Bella aborts or keeps the baby and dies, Jacob will kill Edward. If Bella has the baby and is successfully turned, a needlessly complicated treaty between the werewolves and the vampires will be broken, and there will be war. Neither much matters to Bella, who is so focused on the child’s health that she drinks blood from a Styrofoam cup. She also looks terrible, and will not wear make-up. Her’s is a large cross, but she bears it.

D. Edward and Bella have sex and, seeing as Bella is 18 and Edward has been playing 18 for centuries, neither are prepared for the consequences of their act. The two attempt to make it on their own but struggle. Eventually, their marriage falters. Edward, who can’t stop noticing Bella’s small but growing flaws, grows interested in somebody else. Bella can’t take her mind off of Jacob, who hangs around town, often shirtless, to make sure Bella can’t get past him. Everything capitulates, and the two divorce. Bella gets custody of the child, who will outlive her for centuries, and she eventually marries Jacob, who bears an obvious resentment towards Bella’s daughter. They have several children of their own and almost don’t notice that the daughter grows up feeling neglected. The alimony Edward pays Bella will eventually go to a therapist. Edward, meanwhile, will start high school in another town and, having submitted to his carnal lust, becomes an insatiable sex addict. It’s a hollow, endless life, but Jacob and Bella eventually die, and he eventually forgets them.

Which option is closest to the reality presented by Breaking Dawn doesn’t matter, as its target audience, still split in the Team Edward/Team Jacob binary, have neither the time nor the patience required to understand that neither man—Jacob with his snide comments, or Edward with his vacant, awkward pauses—are really right for her, or anybody. Their cruelty, I suppose, is tempered by that of Jacob’s pack, who wish to eradicate the Cullens and the abomination in Bella’s belly, and the shadowy guild of vampire lords, seen here in a nightmare where they wear black to a White Party, but Bella’s really only tied to anybody here because she still lacks the ability to self-identify. As Bella’s best friend (Anna Kendrick) points out at the wedding reception, she’s not a member of the volleyball team, student council, or really any club. All she’s got to distinguish herself is Edward, who has found in Bella a woman perfectly willing and able to tell him how great he is. If Bella didn’t have Edward, she’d have nothing.

To be fair, this is a much better effort than any film in Twilight cannon. The young cast around Edward, Bella, and Jacob, chosen primarily based on how good they look either in tight shirts or completely out of them, are horribly crippled in terms of any real acting ability. Director Bill Condon seems aware of that fact, directing his sheep through a pasture where they only need to look pretty in the background while the franchise’s triumvirate stumble their way through activities and dialog that are either laughable or the very height of romance, depending on where your interests lie. It’s not a good film by any stretch of the imagination, but Breaking Dawn had within it more genuine laughs than many comedies released this year. At least a few of those laughs were in spots I’m sure were intended.

Rating:

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part I. Directed by Bill Condon. With Kristen Stewart (Bella Swan), Robert Pattinson (Edward Cullen), Taylor Lautner (Jacob Black), Billy Burke (Charlie Swan), Peter Facinelli (Carlisle Cullen), and Anna Kendrick (Jessica Stanley). Released November 18, 2011, by Summit Entertainment.
December 16, 2011
Now This is Podracing

I saw Hugo last night, and beyond the fact that it’s the first 3D movie I’ve ever seen that won’t, in retrospect, make me regret paying the extra movie ticket it costs for the “right” or “privilege” to wear those lame plastic Ray-Bans over my unaccommodating pair of prescription lenses, I suppose the big “news” coming from the movie is that Hollywood has pretty much run out of animated kids movies/lifeless horror films/questionably greenlighted action vehicles to spuriously retrofit and up-charge and rub their fingers greedily over, so early next year we’re going to see our multiplexes occupied by re-releases of James Cameron’s Titanic (erroneously billed as the most loved and acclaimed movie (*dramatic pause*) of all time) and, as the first in a series of six planned re-releases, George Lucas’ Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

For the sake of clarity, I don’t particularly know if the version of Phantom Menace hitting theatres in February is going to be updated, changed, or modified from its original theatrical release, nor do I particularly care. At this point, I’ll accept that Han was lucky to survive his encounter with Greedo, that Hayden Christensen is digitally ghosted over the dumpy guy who originally played Anakin Skywalker, and that Darth Vader will forever reprise his world-shattering cry of “Noooooooooo!” as the Emperor hurls lightning at a helpless Luke. Around the time Lucas was re-releasing the original Original Trilogy in unscrubbed, less-than-remastered form after millions of voices cried out over a new round of changes and edits (Han and Greedo shoot at the same time! Wookie Life Day is celebrated at the end of Jedi!), I came to the realization that my Star Wars and George Lucas’ Star Wars are two entirely different things. Whereas I was and always will be satisfied with Obi-Wan’s less-than-intimidating Tusken Raider alarm, a few less Sandtroopers at Mos Eisley spaceport, and an utter lack of Jabba the Hutt (my favorite Star Wars character) in A New Hope, George Lucas, for as long as he lives, will attempt to achieve perfection with what is, at best, an imperfect narrative. What’s more, as long as he keeps chasing perfection, there will be endless legion of people who’ll mope and upload hour upon hour of YouTube video complaining that Boss Nass’ fat rolls jiggle more than they used to. No, I’m not in the business of writing an exhaustive list of complaints. Star Wars is George Lucas’ baby, his toy, and he’s free to bend and pose it in whatever way he wishes. I merely want to point out two things about the trailer for Phantom Menace, and then I’ll shut up about it for the time being.

First, and perhaps most importantly: These 3D re-releases weren’t the dramatic upgrade to the franchise we were promised, and I’m angry about it—at least as angry as I can be over the somewhat laughable idea of “updating” a movie from 1977 to be shown in the 3D of 2015. When I was a kid, the former Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village opened up an IMAX theatre and, living in Dearborn, our school often took field trips to see documentaries projected with such intensity that, if the projectionist felt like pointing the thing at the Moon, we could watch them among the stars. This was well before big tentpole movies and every Disney flick under the Sun was released in IMAX or, as is usually the case, “IMAX,” and well before I went to a movie theatre advertising an IMAX screen, only to wonder what happened to the rest of the screen. I don’t remember much about those movies I saw in IMAX as a child, but I remember the slide claiming the projector could show a movie on the moon, and I remember that, since IMAX was new then, still justifying it’s existence, before every movie they played a trailer for the format, and this was always the first thing I saw:

The aged and ill-adjusted often assert that my generation has never had a moment like the opening of A New Hope, but I disagree—I had that moment every time I saw an IMAX movie, a moment where I knew that movies, specifically a movie that I had known and loved for as long as I could remember, were going to change forever. For the record, Kid Me was wrong, as Kid Me has often proven to be, but the shot of the Star Destroyer chasing after the Tantive IV on a 62 by 84 foot screen is something that will always stick with me. I’ve been waiting for the Original Trilogy to come out in IMAX since I was a kid, and, for some cruel reason, it looks like I’ll be waiting for the rest of my life. Worse, these new 3D re-releases make it clear that, to Lucas, the wonders of 2D filmmaking are now small potatoes. Here’s an image from the trailer:

Yes, that image of Luke looking out wistfully to the universe beyond his desert squalor is officially small and meaningless, unless you see it as George Lucas intended it way back in 1977: RealD 3D. See these movies again, the trailer argues, and you’ll forget everything you ever knew about Star Wars.

Yes, according to the above trailer, you’re going to forget all about goofy battle droids, unthreatening trade viceroys, “Are you an angel?” and “This is podracing!” In this new, perfect society, Boss Nass is a jovial, fair-minded ruler of a proud, brave race of men and women best represented by this picture…

…and is not, under any circumstance, the cruel, witless leader of a band of frowned-upon Noble Savages known most notoriously for sharing a common gene pool with one Jar Jar Binks, Bombad General. In 1998, which, according to the number of moments given away by this clip, was before people learned how to make a proper trailer, Jar Jar was practically promised by Lucas to be the world’s new best friend.

Jar Jar Binks, so universally reviled that his role in the prequels diminished and diminished to the point that only the trivia-hungry will notice it’s him giving the Emperor the right to rule over the galaxy, was pretty much the face of Phantom Menace. He was a Taco Bell toy, a Lays pitchman, a Pepsi addict. He was there when Anakin met Obi-Wan, when R2-D2 met C-3P0, and, for all we know, may actually be the biological father of Luke and Leia. Believe it or not, when the hype for Phantom Menace was at fever pitch, it was Jar Jar Binks who wound up mugging on the cover or Rolling Stone, his name taking prominence over Tom Waits, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Columbine, and Kosovo.

I might be the only person in the world who feels this way, but it’s practically a crime that Jar Jar Binks doesn’t warrant a single frame of the new Phantom Menace trailer. No joke, ladies and gentlemen. As much as you may like or dislike him, Jar Jar Binks is the face of Phantom Menace, not merely the reviled face of Everything That’s Wrong With the Prequels. The sad fact is that Binks isn’t even the fifth worst thing about Phantom Menace, and much like midichlorians, virgin births, and the stick up Samuel L. Jackson’s ass, he, too, will be given a chance to suck in the third dimension. But, unlike all that, the only hint of Jar Jar’s existence is the brief clip of the Gungan army hurling superballs at battle droids.

This is revisionist history, and, in a way, it’s worse than spending a few million dollars to make sure that Ewoks can blink. Yes, it’s also a cloying admission of guilt on Lucas’ part, and the fact that the guy owns up to such a colossal misfiring is, in a way, worth note. At the same time, Binks is conspicuous in his absence. Re-releasing any movie is an obvious cash grab, and, outside of Disney’s first few shots with The Nightmare Before Christmas, most don’t have much lasting impact. But Phantom Menace represents something much larger, a six year plan that likely represents a huge chunk of change for both Lucas and 20th Century Fox. Now that all six live-action films are out in the wild, it’s necessary to start at the beginning, despite Phantom Menace‘s poor standing as the worst in the saga. No whiff of its stench can be wafted to those in the theatre for Hugo or any other movie this plays before, especially considering that a new generation is due to be introduced to Star Wars and, unfortunately, this is their first shot that isn’t toy or Cartoon Network related.

If we accept that Jar Jar is the face of Phantom Menace, and that that’s exactly what George Lucas wanted, then it follows that his taking Binks out of the trailer and replacing him with pretty much every explosion in the film represents Lucas acknowledging that everybody who saw the movie deemed his version unworthy. James Cameron, at least, has the stones to put “My Heart Will Go On” in the new Titanic trailer, not to mention his willingness to expose the film as one where Leonardo DiCaprio pretty much stands on things and yells about how great the experience of standing on them feels. It’s a cash grab, but it’s an honest one. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace is trying to present itself, once and for all, as the beginnings of a cultural milestone and, in redefining itself, looks more boring and pretentious than the grab bag of rehashed cultural stereotypes and Laurel and Hardy gags no digital editing or 3D surcharges can blind an audience to.

This is naïve, but I expect a creator to stand by their decade-old work, especially while holding out the collection plate. The trailer for Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son didn’t try to convince anybody that it wasn’t a cinematic black hole, and it’s not fair that Lucas is trying to hide Howard the Duck by pretending to present The Empire Strikes Back. What’s worse is that the dude has an advantage: we now live in a society where everything we spend money on is automatically great because we don’t want to look stupid for consuming it. I don’t think anybody paying to see Phantom Menace in February will do so under the assumption that it’s a misunderstood masterwork, but you’ll be hard pressed to find any grown man in a Jedi robe that weekend willing to admit his folly. Hell, put it in IMAX, and I might just break out my Darth Vader voice changer. But unless this is the Phantom Edit, let me do so knowing full well that I’m seeing Phantom Menace, warts and all.

December 16, 2011