How about this?
I won’t try to deny that “Blade Runner” has had an inestimable impact on tech culture, but I find it crushingly dull as a movie. It’s beautiful, sure, but the narrative is patchy and repetitive … and there’s not nearly enough of Rutger Hauer’s energy to balance the droning performances of Harrison Ford and Sean Young. (I know the actors’ monotones are intentional, but it still means the characters end up being very dull.)
I’m still looking forward to the new editions, because Ridley Scott is turning out to be a fairly successful post-facto filmmaker; the expanded “Alien” didn’t do any real harm to that film, unless you’re one of those nerds who argues that the restoration of the cocoon sequence renders invalid James Cameron’s explanation of the xenomorph life cycle in “Aliens”, and I found the recent restoration/expansion of “Kingdom of Heaven” a substantial improvement over the choppy, uninvolving theatrical cut.
So letting him go back to “Blade Runner”, which he’s been trying to do for a decade or so anyway, and a movie about which I’m ambivalent at best, seems like a good idea. It’s his movie, anyway.
It isn’t something I dread on the scale of the next wave of “Star Wars” revisions. And speaking of “Star Wars” and revisionism, don’t even get me started on Lucasfilm using 1993 laserdisc masters for September’s original-trilogy DVDs instead of locating a viable print source — that’s just pudu of the highest order. Imagine the geek cred in being the guy who gives up his prized collection of interpositives, and gives the movies back to the fans in all their pristine, unaltered glory …
… I mean, surely that’d be worth a message on the Jedi listserver, right?
Mary-Margaret, a friend in meatspace as well as on the internets, writes to ask how the Swaziland movie was, and opens a modest can of worms.
The Swaziland movie — which, if you didn’t click the link, is “Wah-Wah”, the directorial debut of the actor Richard E. Grant — doesn’t open until Friday. And I’m reluctant to discuss any movie in detail before it opens … not because I’ve signed some devil’s pact with the studios, but because the detail comes when my review runs, and the review runs on opening day.
This can be awkward. I don’t want to get into those blind-item games where I start a post with something like “I’ve just seen the YEAR’S WORST MOVIE” and let all y’all wonder what the hell I’m talking about. (Besides, with any luck the year’s worst movie is already behind us .)
On the other hand, “Wah-Wah” has been fair game for months now, having played the Toronto film festival last fall and opened in regular release around the world. Does that mean there’s an exemption for festival films? Should there be a conditional pass if a movie’s already been released on DVD elsewhere in the world?
I have a feeling that part of the problem, at least as it applies to “Wah-Wah”, is that I don’t feel particularly passionate about the movie. Don’t take that for anything more than it is; with apologies to Theodore Sturgeon, the horrible truth of art criticism is that five percent of anything produced for any medium will be great, five percent will be crap, and the remaining ninety percent will be, well, neither great nor crap.
I guess I’ll elaborate further in Friday’s review.
Isn’t it always the way?
Toronto’s public-transit workers walked off the job on what looks to be the hottest day of the year, plunging the city into gridlock and generally screwing up everyone’s day.
(Breaking news: The strike’s been resolved, and by this evening it’ll be like the work stoppage had never happened, except for all the glaring passengers filing past the bus and streetcar drivers.)
Sure, it was kind of fun to walk straight through Queen’s Park Circle on my way to the Varsity this morning without breaking stride — just a matter of weaving around several dozen gridlocked cars — but really, a nice air-conditioned subway car would have been preferable. One is not supposed to show up for a morning screening in a dripping sweat. It’s unprofessional.
On the upside, though, the movie was set in in Swaziland, so at least I was suitably acclimatized to the atmosphere by the time the film rolled.
Funny thing: Over the last week or so, I’ve done a number of TV news hits to discuss the “amazing success” of The DaVinci Code, and been asked more than once whether its awesome” $77 North American opening demonstrates is indicative of the public’s rejection of the harsh critical response.
I’ve long argued that box-office success is no indication of a movie’s subjective quality — the backlash for The Blair Witch Project nicely illustrates the radical disconnect beween tickets sold and audience enjoyment, while the numbers for any Michael Bay project before The Island demonstrate the disconnect between bums in seats and aesthetic accomplishment.
Turns out none of that matters. It’s all about this guy.
DaVinci opens to $77 million. The X-Men threequel kicks its underdeveloped ass. And just you watch: Tomorrow, Brian Grazer starts telling anybody who’ll listen that people flocked to X3 because his movie gave them a taste for Ian McKellen as a duplicitous, calculating mastermind.
The downside to reviewing movies for Metro is that I only get about 300 words per piece — enough to discuss a couple of performances, address a key metaphor, if there is one, and maybe hint at the plot. The idea of placing a film in its proper context, well, that’s kind of a pipe dream.
For example: I’m working on my X-Men: The Final Stand review, and it occurs to me that the mutant superhero franchise is a perfect mirror of the original Star Wars trilogy. The first movie had a certain ragged quality, but it was energetic and impressive; then, the incredible sequel took the series to a whole new level of dramatic resonance and emotional impact. And the third film … well, the third film recycles a lot of elements from the previous pictures (a political standoff here, an exploited young mutant there, a climactic confrontation on an American landmark), while the new stuff seems sort of slapped in and illogical — the product of someone’s marketing instincts, rather than an organic evolution of the script.
Because we’re fond of the characters, we put up with a lot of it; the spin I’ve been hearing, and to which I myself have probably contributed, is “wow, it’s a Brett Ratner movie that doesn’t suck.” And it’s certainly true that Ratner doesn’t crap all over the world so lovingly established by Bryan Singer in the first two films. But he doesn’t honor the logic of the movies, either, slapping in stuff from the comics that actively works against the characters as they’ve been defined in the previous films. (Patrick Stewart’s Charles Xavier may be a lot of things, but he’s never been short-tempered; when he snapped at someone early in the picture, I started wondering whether he’d been impersonated by Mystique.)
The sudden alterations of key character traits — mainly so we can get Jean Grey to hook up with Magneto’s evil Brotherhood, and stand around looking all veiny in the final reels — brings to mind Lucas’ desperate rewriting of the Skywalker family tree in Jedi: “What I told you was true, from a certain point of view.” Suddenly, Obi-Wan goes from a kindly mentor into an equivocating dick, telling Luke that the truth about his heritage comes down to what the meaning of “your father he is” is. It’s not as stupid as making the Force a blood disorder, but still. It just says Lucas doesn’t care about the emotional stuff; he just wants to get the talking stuff out of the way so we can move on to the next big special effect.
Ratner’s the same. I think Singer would have forced a couple of additional script drafts, or worked with the actors to shape the performances into something that felt more consistent, and worked to support the big action scenes, rather than push against them. The great thing about Singer’s X-films is that the dialogue and character development has always felt more important than the action scenes; the conversations in X-Men: The Final Stand had me feeling that Ratner was sitting behind the camera, knee bouncing restlessly, until he could call cut.
Hello.
Or, more appropriately, hello again.
If you’re reading this, then you’ve read my final video column for Starweek, and you’ve probably read a few others before that, so I’d like to start by saying, very simply …
Thank you.
Thanks for being my reader. Thanks for letting me praise the stuff that I’ve loved, and thanks for letting me rant about the stuff that I hated, and thanks for telling me, on several occasions, that my column was the first thing you turned to in Starweek every Saturday.
And for the three or four of you who were kind enough to say my Starweek column was the only reason they got the Star on Saturday … well, feel free to cancel your subscription. (Hi, Mom.)
I’m hoping to resuscitate the column elsewhere in the not-too-distant future — syndication’s a possibility, but anybody with a newspaper is certainly welcome to contact me. And in the meantime, I’m still very much around; if you live in Toronto, Vancouver or Ottawa you can find me in the pages of Metro newspapers, and I’m still reviewing DVDs at Tribune Media Services’ entertainment site Zap2it.com .
Oh, and if you have Rogers Digital Cable, turn on channel 01; the odds are pretty good you’ll see me reviewing movies for Your World This Week. (If you see Vanessa Farquharson doing it, it’s my week off.)
And now I have this blog thing. This is version 1.0, and I’m still not sure what it’s going to be when it grows up. But I hope you’ll be a part of it. I hope you’ll help shape the conversation.
So, again, thanks for following the column, and thanks for coming here.
Thanks for reading, is what I’m saying.
