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Getting It Right — and Wrong — on Film

Getting It Right — and Wrong — on Film

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braveheartThe film spares no trick in getting the celebratory atmosphere just so — for the court is alive with news that an entire treasure fleet of the hated Spaniards has been captured, the funds diverted to her majesty’s treasury, the ships scuttled or pressed into privateering service for the Crown. Elizabeth herself blushes in anticipation of receiving the hero of the hour, the man whose name is on every tongue (and has been for quite some time, truth be told), Vice Admiral Sir Francis Drake. The tension builds, the courtiers grow restless, the lavish entertainments are ignored. All necks stretch, even the alabaster column of the monarch’s herself, when the herald announces the great man’s arrival and the doors swing open.

Francis Drake strides confidently forward in ripped jeans, bowling t-shirt, and backwards pointing baseball cap.

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Twilight

Twilight

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I finally saw Twilight.

Even with the aid of my snarky spouse and the Rifftrax team it was still tough going. I ended up downing an entire bottle of red plonk to help things along.

Of course I don’t expect teenage girls to get excited by the boys of Glengarry Glen Ross and I am glad they’re reading something and I’m all in favor of the local jailbait exerting a modicum of sexual self-control but cripes. This? It’s flippin’ Smallville with candy-cane vampires.

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Who Watches the Watchmen? I Watches!

Who Watches the Watchmen? I Watches!

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Watchmen (2009)
Directed by Zack Snyder. Starring Patrick Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley, Billy Crudup, Malin Akerman, Matthew Goode, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Carla Gugino.

In the 1980s, two graphic novels (ah, I remember when I first heard that term in junior high) changed forever the perception of serial art as a form of literature: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller, and Watchmen by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons.

Appropriately enough, less than a year after a film called The Dark Knight (not based on the graphic novel, but showing its influence) helped shift viewer’s perceptions of what sort of movie a comic book hero can appear in, a long-awaited adaptation of Watchmen also hit the screen. We have entered a new era in the comics-to-film genre, and this double-punch will raise the bar for all future movie versions of graphic novels and superhero tales.

A significant difference between The Dark Knight and Watchmen, however, is their relation to the source material. The Dark Knight draws off a character with an enormous history and multiple interpretations, and it uses this variety to create an original story. With Watchmen, the movie has a singular source which fans hold with the same reverence as other people—depending on their orientation—hold the Torah, the New Testament, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Qur’an, Hamlet, The Lord of the Rings, or Atlas Shrugged. (If your name is Rorschach and you wear a constantly shifting inkblot mask, I guarantee it’s Atlas Shrugged.) A Batman film can do many different interpretations, while Watchmen has to adhere to one… with variations for the new medium.

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The Wizard Howl

The Wizard Howl

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Animator Hayao Miyazaki is one of my favorite directors, and Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) one of my favorite movies of all time. Princess Mononoke is also wonderful, and My Neighbor Totoro a sublime children’s film. Packing for Dubai, with extreme space limitations, I made room for the smallish plush catbus a friend brought me from Japan.

Diana Wynne Jones is one of of my favorite fantasy authors. I had originally intended to devote this week’s post to her work. Then I watched Howl’s Moving Castle for the second time–the first since reading the DWJ novel it is based on. I should love it, right?

The movie Howl has many excellent qualities. Like Mononoke and Sprited Away, the animation is beautiful and well worth seeing on the big screen. The war footage, with the monstrous dreadnought airships and wizards in the shape of winged demons, is accomplished with the usual Miyazaki flair with all things aerial. The love story between Sophie, transformed by the Witch of the Waste into a 90-year-old crone, and the literally heartless Wizard Howl, seemed reasonably satisfying the first time around. The moving castle is just plain fun, and Billy Crystal does an OK Calcifer, if you accept that Calcifer is a cute, friendly little fire demon. (And that’s Lauren Bacall as the Witch of the Waste.) If you haven’t watched it, do so, but also check out Miyazaki’s other, better movies. To be fair, Miyazaki only came on board after the initial director bailed on the project, so its flaws may not be all his doing.

For me, though, the book tells a far more interesting story. …

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On DVD: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

On DVD: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

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First things first: Happy Birthday, Clark Ashton Smith!

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008)
Directed by Rob Cohen
Starring Brendan Fraser, Jet Li, Maria Bello, John Hannah, Michelle Yeoh, Luke Ford, Isabella Leong, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang

On my own blog, I’ve done a set of weekly reviews surveying all the movies in Universal’s classic Mummy franchise. Just as I finished up this lengthy project, the most recent entry in the second Universal Mummy franchise, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, arrived on DVD, so it seemed an ideal time to take a look at it.

Except… no mummies appear in this “Mummy movie.” The film earns the first part of its title because it features ongoing characters from the two legitimate Mummy flicks that proceeded it, The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001). But there’s no Egypt aside from a bar called “Imhotep’s,” and no mummified anything. We instead have an immortal Chinese Emperor/Wizard who breaks free from a terracotta shell, but that isn’t a mummy in my definition. The visual effects try to give him a mummified appearance when he’s still in his clay-like form, but sorry, still not a mummy.

But then, the second series of Universal mummy movies were never about the particulars of the classic horror-movie undead Egyptian, but about copying Indiana Jones, old adventure serials, pulp magazines, and adding wiseacre humor to attract the widest audience possible. Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is perhaps the most pulpish of the four films in the series (I’m including the 2002 sword-and-sorcery spin-off The Scorpion King), and fans of pulp fantasy will find it interesting.

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