Category: Reviews

I finished A Feast for Crows last night. It’s quite a book; slow through much of the first half and picking up in the end. My favorite character doesn’t appear at all, since he’s off in the section of the world that will be handled in the next book. Things happen. We see a lot of Dorne; I liked that a lot.

I’ll touch on some spoilers in the extended entry, but before that: I also have the Guardians of Order A Game of Thrones RPG in hand. (Put it together with The World’s Largest Dungeon and Hero Fifth Edition Revised, which I happen to be able to do at the moment, and you’ve got a hefty chunk of book.) So, campaign:

Three players; one’s a cousin of Ned Stark, one’s a cousin of Tywin Lannister, and one’s a cousin of Mace Tyrell. Possibly once-removed in any of those cases. Also possibly bastards, but if so, recognized. Either gender works. All of them are between the ages of 13 and 16; they’ve all been fostered down to Dorne a year or two before the beginning of A Song of Ice and Fire.

I’d run for a few sessions focusing on childhood concerns, letting the characters develop, letting them bond. Then I’d start running the events leading up to the War of Five Kings, without any particular expectations as to the reactions of the characters. At the start, they’d be fairly fringe. By the time the fourth book rolls around, there are enough dead people so that their place in the lines of succession might be important.

OK, spoilers follow.

In my Episode III, Palpatine’s temptation of Anakin is mirrored by Count Dooku’s struggle with his own desire for redemption. As Palpatine is to young Anakin, so Yoda is to his best student, Count Dooku. Count Dooku is the man he pretended to be in Episode II.

The movie has a tighter focus: Obi-Wan and Anakin pursuing Dooku against the backdrop of the Clone Wars. (None of this nigh-instantaneous transport between star systems.) This, too, is a mirror: this time we’re reflecting the pursuit of Luke and Leia. Dooku moves from system to system, just ahead of the Jedi, directing his grand strategy from behind the scenes. He is still Palpatine’s creature; the Clone Wars are still orchestrated. But he has potential.

Somewhere along the line, and it’s part of Palpatine’s temptation, Anakin dons the armor. It’s not because he’s horribly scarred, although he knows that use of the armor will scar him as it draws upon his life force. It’s because he can’t catch Dooku without it. He needs this crutch before he can fulfill the orders of the Jedi Council. Obi-Wan is outraged. Palpatine is smiling.

In the third act, Obi-Wan and Anakin catch up with the Count. He disarms Obi-Wan with ludicrous ease. Dooku is the best Jedi duellist of his generation, and he has a real claim to the title of the single best lightsaber duellist ever to pass through this galaxy. Obi-Wan watches, pinned, while Dooku and Anakin duel. Anakin is almost up to the task. But not quite. Anakin reaches to the Dark Side, finally, his final surrender in the face of certain death. Dooku cannot allow this: he cannot allow another Jedi to go down the path he foolishly chose. It’s the moment of Anakin’s failure and the moment of Dooku’s redemption and there is no turning back. Dooku slays Anakin rather than allow him to become a monster.

But what now? Dooku could perhaps win the Clone Wars. If he does that, he shatters the Republic. He could allow himself to be defeated, but then Palpatine wins. He cannot return to the Jedi Council, because there is no turning away from the Dark Side.

He makes the only choice. He dons the armor; he seals himself into it, knowing that he cannot be released short of death. He turns back to Palpatine, with another name. He’s the only person who could carry out such a deception; had he not already turned to the Dark Side, living such a lie would surely bring him there.

Decades later, he will gently tease Luke, the son he never had, into reaching his potential. He will, in the end, see the Emperor killed. Nobody will ever know who he was, and he can’t admit it even at the end: to do so would be to shatter Luke, after all. Yoda will die thinking that Dooku was never redeemed.

The real Episode III was pretty good. There’s one scene made up completely of cut shots, back and forth between two principles, that works amazingly well. (Then Lucas reuses the technique and drains the life of it, but oh well.) The lightsaber duels are very good. The dialogue is laughably bad, worse than anything in any other Star Wars movie. Best of the prequel trilogy by a long shot and possibly better than Return of the Jedi.

A Sundial In A Grave: 1610 is what the Kushiel books wanted to be, but less gilded. Late Renaissance, swordplay, espionage, desperate adventure, and dominance/submission games? Check. It’s possible there’s even a Mary Sue character, depending on how you look at things.

And yet A Sundial In A Grave does not over-enthuse about the joys of pain in the bedroom, it does not linger endlessly on the prowess of the hero, and it is not a morass of angst. It swashbuckles, all the while aware of the contradictions that lie at the heart of the protagonist. He is a duellist: he is a man who desires — but that would be telling.

It doesn’t quite so much beat the living crap out of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, but if you were wanting plot with your mock historical, well, this would be the appropriate port of call. The territory is similar, if more mystical. Where one plot is driven by the wisdom of Isaac Newton, the other is driven by Giordano Bruno.

I loved it.

I’m heartbroken. I wanted to watch Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow forever, dancing back and forth in slow motion, captured in the timeless rhythm of Wong Kar Wai’s directing. Despite the titles which fix the story in Hong Kong: 1962 and Singapore: 1963 and Cambodia: 1966 — despite them, there’s no chronology to it. There are panes of glass layered one on top of another, and you peer through them murkily, making out the outline of a fruitless love affair.

They are always meeting. They are always falling in love. They are always losing one another. The echoes are endless. Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung are the iconic actors of the moment, and the Amah is played by Chin Tsi-ang, who was the first female martial arts film star in the 1930s. Mr. Ho — himself played by a matinee idol of the 50s — is having an affair, so as to echo the affair of the unseen spouses. There’s always a mirror, and when there isn’t a mirror, there’s a frame.

They interact through echoes. They cannot speak of love, so they echo the affair they’ve discovered their spouses are having. One almost thinks that the violation, when it occurs, is not that one of them speaks of love; it’s more that the mirror is broken. The dance could have continued forever if, always if.

I could write about it forever, too, but I’m heartbroken. In The Mood For Love, but it’s a very literal title: a mood is a long way away from fulfillment.

Pros: Drew Barrymore, Red Sox, Nick Hornsby. Cons: Jimmy Fallon. So that was a pretty easy call. Alas, Fallon did not rise to the honorable occasion of working on a Red Sox movie. Thus, I got about what I expected out of Fever Pitch — a light, airy romantic comedy with some Red Sox bits that made me mist up.

It’s got most of the spirit of being a Boston fan about right. There’s a Boston Dirt Dogs T-shirt, they knew it was important to make a big deal about Ted Williams at the 1999 All Star Game, and so on. There’s a jarring scene where Fallon’s “summer family” of season ticket holders get all anxious about the Curse of the Bambino, though, which pissed me off something fierce. The Curse is a mythical publicity tool that mostly sells Dan Shaughnessy books. Perpetuating it at this stage of the game is hackneyed and lazy.

That didn’t stop me from getting all choked up at the important moments. We can pretend that I was more interested in how Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon were going to get back together than I was in reliving the 2004 ALCS, if we like. Certainly Barrymore was great — she’s had a really good string of romantic comedies going and she doesn’t misfire in this one. Fallon, not so much. There’s something oddly reptilian about him, which rested uneasily beneath the surface of the innocent character he’s playing. He seemed most at ease in the scene where he makes his friends dance for the privilege of attending Red Sox/Yankees games with him, which is also one of the least flattering scenes for his character.

Never mind. I liked it enough to be happy I’ve seen it, which I attribute about 40% to my fondness for the Red Sox, 30% to the Nick Hornsby source material, and 30% to Drew Barrymore. I got a kick out of seeing it about three blocks from Fenway Park itself. Some of the audience cheered “Let’s go, Red Sox” right along with the screen, and for once people talking in the middle of a movie was charming.

To my disappointment, the Boston Underground Film Festival’s copy of Able Edwards was flawed or scratched or something and they were only able to show the first fifteen minutes of the movie. It was a keen enough fifteen minutes, though.

I could have sworn I’d written about this movie before, but I can’t find the post in the archives. Able Edwards is a thinly veiled Walt Disney (Mickey Mouse becomes Perry Panda) who is cloned after an ecological disaster in order to revitalize Disney. Er, revitalize Edwards Corporation. According to other reviews, the cloned Edwards suffers an identity crisis of some sort. Regrettably, we didn’t get that far.

It’s another green screen movie, a la Sin City and Sky Captain. This is the seriously low budget version — it’s as if Kerry Conran hadn’t gotten funding for Sky Captain and had decided to go ahead anyhow. Most of the backgrounds are scanned photographs. By the time the DVD started skipping, I was sort of feeling as though the scanty live action sequences were stretched awfully thin over the technological scaffold, but the first fifteen minutes was also very expository in nature. I wouldn’t be surprised if the pace picked up later on.

Either way, Graham Robertson (the director, screenwriter, and one-man army) has done something pretty impressive. (Particularly at a cost of only $30,000.) There’s a great quote on the film’s website: “Francis Ford Coppola once said there would come a day when some little fat girl from Ohio could borrow her dad’s camcorder and become the next Mozart of moviemaking. We would like to think that Able Edwards is that little fat girl.” Maybe not Mozart; definitely a good start.

The BUFF folks were, by the by, very polite and apologetic about the problem. So no ill-feeling there, poor guys. Hopefully it’ll play at FanTasia this summer and I’ll get another chance to see it.

I was going to watch Infernal Affairs last night but then I said “whoa, Bryant. Cut back on the noir. There’s been nothing but for a while; maybe it’s time for a break?” In service of purging the noir obsession from my system, let’s get the last two movies I saw at the Brattle L.A. Noir series into one post, shall we? It’s especially convenient since they were a double bill. Sounds like a plan.

First, Criss Cross. It’s a quintessentially noir story about a big lug who’s in love with the wrong woman; he left her, and when he comes back, she’s involved with a local gangster. Nobody in a noir ever says “Well, we screwed up, and we have to live with the consequences.” These two are no exception, and before you know it the only way out is to screw up even further.

Burt Lancaster is a big dope in the lead role. That’s not really a criticism — he’s fine in the part, which isn’t too demanding. He’s got to be in love, and he’s got to be dumb enough to be duped. Yvonne De Carlo is a great femme fatal, pretty and sultry and just a little tawdry. In my book, the really good performances were Dan Duryea as the gangster and Stephen McNally as the detective trying to help his pal. (His great line: “I should have been a better friend. I shoulda stopped you. I shoulda grabbed you by the neck, I shoulda kicked your teeth in. I’m sorry, Steve.”)

What else? Structurally sound, satisfying, a really great set piece for the end of the movie which appears to be located at the end of the world. It was remade by Stephen Soderbergh as Underneath; I’m betting that’s one of the reasons it was chosen for this series. With this alongside Point Blank, you begin to see the outlines of the ways in which these noirs influenced Soderbergh.

The other reason’s got to be the astoundingly surreal robbery scene: it takes place in a cloud of poisonous gas, with all the gangsters wearing gas masks, and I almost gasped when I saw what was happening. Lancaster is without a mask, and the gangsters come looming out of the fog with this inhuman masks on their faces and guns in their hand, and the paranoid tension just hits a whole new level. It’s man facing an alien world of the future. (C.f. Point Blank again.) Awesome, awesome scene.

And then I saw This Gun For Hire. Skipping to the end for a second: gas masks play a pivotal role. Heh. And Yvonne De Carlo has a bit part. So Criss Cross was the perfect prelude, even though it’s not an exceptional movie.

That is not the case for This Gun For Hire, which left me with a warm little glow in my tummy. Yeah, it’s a grim story of a lone assassin who was abused by his aunt, but so what? It’s a great understated tale and those make me happy. It’s also the seminal grim story of a lone assassin: John Woo lifted the theme by way of Le Samourai for The Killer, Jean Reno’s Leon owes his style to Alan Ladd’s Philip Raven, and I could go on for quite a while.

So what’s so great about This Gun For Hire? Besides Alan Ladd, it’s also got Veronica Lake, who kindly defines winsome for us. She’s not really the type to wind up with her cop fiancee — she’s a nightclub performer who instinctively wants to help the stone cold killer. But hey, it’s a Code movie, what are you going to do?

Mostly, though, it’s got Alan Ladd. Touch on Point Blank again: This Gun For Hire is also about a criminal going down from San Francisco to Los Angeles for revenge. Alan Ladd’s as stony as Lee Marvin (except for one misconceived scene where he breaks down in front of Veronica Lake), but it’s a cooler, more cerebral calm. He knows he’s been done wrong, and he’s getting revenge not for the sake of revenge but for the sake of business. Unlike Lee Marvin, he gets what he wants at the end. Like Lee Marvin, he pays a price.

And despite it being a Code movie, Alan Ladd has a distinct edge. There’s a moment quite early on when I said “He’s not going to shoot that woman — ah, see, his gun misfired! It’s an out!” I was quite wrong. There’s no effort to paint him as evil: he’s just a man who happens to kill for a living. No compunctions.

Somewhere between Graham Greene’s novel and the screen, a fairly noticeable dose of patriotism crept into the movie. I wound up deciding that Ladd wasn’t motivated by the patriotic appeals, though, even if Veronica Lake was. The key was the woman and the desire to do good — not for his country, but for her. To think of him as a hitman who decides to fight for America weakens the movie by abstracting his decision.

So there you go. A whole lot of noir this week. Maybe I’ll divert myself with some classic comedies next; nice change of pace, you know?

The sterility of the computer-generated backgrounds is as repellent as the archaic gender stereotypes forced upon all the women in Sin City. Soulless excess fueled by unreasonable violence in a fantasy of a world that never should be: pah!

Nah, not really. It fucking rocked. You could get bitchy about how Rodriguez just laid the comic book out on the screen, but nobody gets snotty about faithful adaptations of Shakespeare. It’s a high-octane, note-perfect accomplishment. I dunno if I’d call it great cinema, although I think the cinematography and the use of black and white was superb… hm. Maybe I would call it great cinema. It’s easy to discount the look of the film and the skilled use of spot color cause it was filmed in digital. That’s a mistake. Filming in digital doesn’t make beauty easy. Just look at what Photoshop can do in unskilled hands for proof of that.

Really strong acting from most of the leads, with the exception of Jessica Alba, who wasn’t terrible. Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, and Mickey Rourke all shone. Each in different ways, too; it wasn’t just a bunch of cookie-cutter performances. Clive Owen got to be ultra-competent, Mickey Rourke got to be big and dumb and violent, and Bruce Willis got to be tired. So no, they weren’t working against their strengths. Still good performances all around. Rosario Dawson and Jamie King were just as good, too.

Brittany Murphy was awful. She didn’t have any sense of the rhythms of the story or of the movie. It’s pretty obvious she was supposed to be a lightweight; she went beyond that, though, into being a distraction. She’s not in a whole lot of scenes, however. All the other supporting actors were dandy. Particular kudos to Benicio Del Toro, no surprise there, and Rutger Hauer.

You could talk a lot about the gender roles. The women are all sex objects. The men are all inert until motivated by the need to protect/defend/avenge a woman. This short-changes both genders, if you want to be picky about it. Me, I figured I was watching a noir and made mental note that I wouldn’t want to be stuck in either gender role.

I was also more interested in the unabashed shotgun wedding between sex and death. Clive Owen and Rosario Dawson do it best, partially because their segment is all about hookers killing people and partially because it’s right up Owen’s alley: he has that air of violence around him, much like Russell Crowe. (Remember that first scene in L.A. Confidential?) Not to mention they’ve got Miho riding shotgun behind them, and she’s reduced her ability to communicate down to one razor-edged essential technique. It’s a very hot movie, and it’s the kind of setting where you don’t get laid unless you’re ready to die.

So there you go. Lots of essential primal urges, lots of violence, lots of velocity. Tons of velocity, in all possible senses of the word. If you’re gonna see it, be ready to wallow.

The Brattle film calendar wonders how John Boorman could make a movie as good as Point Blank and then go on to make something as lousy as Zardoz. But come on: Boorman is all about the semi-surreal fractured narrative, and you can draw a clear line from one movie to the other.

Point Blank is a ruthless reinvention of the crime movie. The skeleton is pure pulp, adapted from a Donald Westlake book. Westlake has been writing unpretentious genre books for decades, so it’s a good base. But you’re not more than 10 minutes into the movie before the chronology starts shattering and lines start repeating and overlapping and you have to start wondering if it’s a sequence of events or Lee Marvin’s deathbed dream. Trippy stuff. Now I know where Soderbergh picked up the techniques he used in The Limey and Out of Sight.

Lee Marvin’s Walker is not a killer — he never actually kills anyone in the movie — but is rather the Angel of Death. His presence brings mortality with it. The Organization he fights is criminal in nature on the surface; beneath that, though, it’s a metaphor for any corporation. The leaders of the Organization live in offices and well-appointed homes with swimming pools. Walker, for all his lack of sixties trappings, is the revolutionary trying to bring down the state — not because of principles or ideals. Just for revenge.

Given the ending, given that Walker’s simply being manipulated in what amounts to a series of layoffs, I think the implications of rebellion aren’t imagined. There’s this nihilistic implication that even the rebels are being used by the (pardon my cliche) Man. Walker’s success is as empty as his life.

And come on: he travels from San Francisco, where he was happy, to Los Angeles, where corruption lives. If that’s not the sixties in a nutshell, I don’t know what is.

Look, people are either likely to see The Big Sleep if they get the chance or not, right? But there are going to be some people with good intentions who never get around to it. To those people I say this: go see the damned thing if you ever get a chance. That’s what movie theaters are for, after all.

The plot makes little sense. Somewhere in the transition from Chandler to Faulkner (who wrote the screenplay) by way of Leigh Brackett (who wrote an earlier version of the screenplay, and who much later wrote the first version of The Empire Strikes Back), some of the connective tissue of the novel vanished. No harm, as they say, and no foul. It’s not so much the plot that matters; if you’re seeing this movie, you ought to be seeing it for the lushness of the women and the dialogue and the violence. Virulent violence, really. There’s nothing like a thug.

Lush really is the word. I mean, you can watch the actors just wallowing in the words. Doesn’t hurt that Bogart and Bacall were falling madly in love, but Martha Vickers doesn’t have that excuse and she was just as reckless with her verbiage as the rest. Ditto Dorothy Malone, but more so; ditto Regis Toomey and Elisha Cook, Jr. If Bob Steel isn’t the model for every psychotic henchman ever filmed subsequently, I’ll eat my hat.

Anyhow, go see the damned thing. It’s good to be reminded where Sorkin and Whedon and all those other snappy dialogue young turks learned how to write like that.

“I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners, I don’t like them myself. They are pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings.”

Snap!