Girl Detective

Entertainment Weekly’s article ( part of which is here) on the Indiana Jones movies said, “Relive Raiders.” I did, and I enjoyed it. It also said, “Stop Underrating the Sequels”:

Doom is one of cinema’s greatest sequels–and one of Spielberg’s most underrated efforts–precisely because it’s so black and daring.

Fair enough, I thought so I revisited Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.. I had only ever seen Doom once, in the theater 24 years ago. I didn’t like it then, but things change. Alas, I feel about the same as I did the first time I saw it; Doom is overlong and repetitive, plus Kate Capshaw is a shrew.

Karen Allen’s Marian was hardly portrayed as a strong woman in Raiders–yes, she owned her own bar and won a drinking contest, but she also trusted a monkey who betrayed her, failed to escape from the villain, and spent much of the film shouting for Indie to save her. Capshaw’s Willie Scott was even worse; hardly the characterization I’d hope for from a future husband. She was shrill, foolish, greedy for diamonds, and worried about breaking her nails. Some critics believe this role killed her career.

EW is right that the dark humor and daring child-labor plot are points in the film’s favor, as are its winks at the Bond films, given that Spielberg had initially envisioned this series along that line. What sinks the film are its tired stereotypes and poor filmmaking. There’s too much repetition, e.g., cutaway shot after shot of alligators chomping down bad guys at the end. Also, its timing is off. The underground mine ride toward the end goes on so long that I went through all the Kubler-Ross stages of grief:

1. Denial: this isn’t so bad; it’s kind of fun
2. Anger: why is this going on so long; why can’t it end?
3. Bargaining: maybe if I stare at the ceiling and yawn, it will end
4. Depression: nope, still there. I wonder if this was conceived from the get go to be a ride at Universal Studios?
5. Acceptance: oh, thank goodness, the scene is over. I’ll never have to watch it again.

In conclusion, Entertainment Weekly was wrong. This isn’t a strong sequel. For that, see The Bourne Supremacy, or The Godfather II, or Aliens. Or even The Empire Strikes Back. But you can skip this. Any fun, dark moments are completely overwhelmed by poor character, story and editing choices.

In anticipation of the May 22 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I re-visited Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time in a long time. Entertainment Weekly did a good feature on the series, and had this to say:

Raiders obliterated those wheezy old rules [of beginnings, middles, and ends] by plunging headfirst into the good stuff. In fact, it is a movie entirely made up of good stuff–115 minutes of unrelenting climaxes stacked up on top of one another.

It was good in the theater when I was thirteen; it’s good at home now that I’m forty. This is such straightforward, pure entertainment that Spielberg and Lucas made it look effortless, though this is belied by its near inability to be duplicated.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped is another from the GQ lesser-seen guy-movie list my husband and I have been checking out lately. It’s a modern noir-ish tale about a charismatic young criminal who becomes haunted by his good past as a pianist, rather than by some dark secret, though that element emerges, too. Romain Duris as Thomas is magnetic and marvelously fluid; his appearance shifts as he weaves in and out of the different roles of his life: thug, son, out-of-practice musician, and lover. Perhaps the film is a little too cool, at the expense of some emotional truth, yet it was still very enjoyable, as was director Jacques Audiard’s thriller Read My Lips. His previous films, See How They Fall and A Self-Made Hero, have been well reviewed, too.

The Last Detail was another film from the GQ little-seen guy-movie list, and another one recommended by our friend The Big Brain. Jack Nicholson and Otis Young are two “lifers” in the navy, selected to escort a young sailor, Randy Quaid (resembling a young Peyton Manning), to prison. Quaid got an eight year sentence and a dishonorable discharge for a trifling event; this endears him to his captors, who decide to show him a good time before he starts serving time. Nicholson is magnetic, and Quaid sympathetic, in these roles. Carol Kane is given a brief but poignant role. Gilda Radner appears briefly, and I struggled to place a non-speaking Nancy Allen, who later starred in Carrie and Robocop. It’s thankless work, being a girl in a guy movie.

The film is by turns funny and sad. It’s most certainly a guy movie; this is not one I would have enjoyed by myself or with girlfriends. The ending can only be abrupt and unsatisfying, which points to an underlying theme in many of these guy movies: it may be fun to be a guy, but after a while the Peter Pan syndrome wears thin, and the illusions of fun and cool are stripped away.

Rescue Dawn is Werner Herzog’s fictionalized film based on Little Dieter Has to Fly, the documentary he did on Dieter Dengler, a German-born American airman shot down in Laos and taken prisoner in North Vietnam. Though it features some gruesome torture and survival scenes, it’s a stirring tale, all the more for the performances of Christian Bale and Steve Zahn, who were snubbed this award season. This movie shoot had to be gruesome–heat, jungle, starvation, bugs. Everyone involved deserves credit for this overlooked film.

For all the films I’ve seen, and for those that I think I want to see, visit my library at Gurulib.

12:08 East of Bucharest was one of the New York Times‘ film critic A.O. Scott’s top ten films of 2007. Scott is a critic I trust, but I didn’t connect with this satiric film that wonders whether a revolution took place or not in a small Romanian town. I found it more dead than deadpan. My husband fell asleep, and I had to struggle not to. I don’t find alcoholism funny, so many of the film’s jokes at the expense of a main character fell flat with me.

Point Blank–not to be confused with the Keanu Reeves/Patrick Swayze Point Break–is one of GQ’s top ten little-seen guy movies, and it’s recommended highly in the back pages of Ed Brubaker’s excellent comic series, Criminal. Lee Marvin is Walker, the man done wrong. In what is perhaps one of the best movie opening sequences ever, we see Marvin double crossed by his partner (John Vernon) who later played Dean Wormer in Animal House. This was the first movie filmed at at Alcatraz after the closing of that prison. Angie Dickinson is sultry and lovely as Chris, the sexy sister-in-law; Marvin is scary and intense as a man whose old-school revenge is curiously ineffective in the new, credit-card age. Here’s how badass Marvin was–in a rehearsal, he hit Vernon so hard he made him cry. My favorite exchange of the film:

Chris: What’s my last name?
Walker: What’s my first name?
[silence]

Point Blank was remade as Payback, which is widely denigrated by noir snobs. About 30% of it was reshot for the theatrical release when the director, Brian Helgeland was replaced. The director’s cut is supposed to be an improvement, and something of a redemption.

Miss Austen Regrets, this past Sunday’s entry in the PBS Masterpiece series, The Complete Jane Austen, received decidedly mixed reviews. I enjoyed it, though. Like the better adaptations, it made me want to learn more.

Those who didn’t like the production, like Maureen Ryan, said it relied too much on details of Jane’s life. This would help explain why MAR seems to have been better received by the readership at Austenblog, who name Olivia Williams’s performance and the letter-burning scene at the end as particular high points.

I enjoyed Gillian’s Anderson’s prefatory remark that so little historical record remains of Jane that we can only imagine her life. I thought Olivia Williams made an interesting and complicated Jane, and I really liked the scene where Miss Austen sees her books on display at the Prince Regent’s, and where she tells her niece that the only way to have a man like Mr. Darcy is to make him up. I also appreciated how the adaptation highlighted how Austen’s novels are more than romances–they’re each a different investigation into the social and financial pressures to marry, among many other things.

I did dislike some things, as well. There was shaky, handheld camera work, which should have stopped being in vogue, and is hardly needed to convey life in Austen’s time. There were long-held shots on domestic and outdoor images, which indicated to me that the creators were hard-pressed to extend the few known details of Austen to 90 minutes. This is an interesting contrast to the recent versions of Persuasion, Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park, which tried to long, complex novels into an all-too-brief hour and a half.

I’m noticing a trend that the adaptations Janeites like are not liked by critics, who don’t get all the details that were right, while the adaptations that take the most liberties annoy those who know better, but end up delighting those who don’t. In Entertainment Weekly this week, Becoming Jane gets a B+ while The Jane Austen Book Club, based on Karen Joy Fowler’s well-detailed book, only gets a C+. This was the reverse appraisal of Richard Roeper when the films came out, and he seemed rather more well informed on Jane than I would have thought.

Miss Austen Regrets seems to have been better received by lovers of Jane than by critics in general, perhaps because it was attentive to details like the order of the novels, if not her hats.

I loathed the 2007 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, shown on PBS’s Masterpiece theater as part of The Complete Jane Austen. Dr. Who’s Billie Piper is miscast as Fanny Price, whose characterization seems to consist almost entirely of her chasing wildly after someone or something, or pouting at or about Edmund. Austen’s Fanny is ethical to a fault, self-effacing, and quiet. Piper’s voluptuous blond prettiness would be much more suited to the role of Harriet Smith in Emma. The movie’s 90 minutes condenses Austen’s complex story to a caricature of itself, leaving out many critical plot points, like Fanny’s return to her family at Portsmouth. This adaptation glosses over much of the subtleties of Austen’s humor, while the scene at the end when Edmund realizes his love for Fanny is played so broadly that I cringed.

I’ve enjoyed the two other adaptations in the PBS series–Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. Persuasion was distinguished by the tense pauses in conversation that conveyed much of what had to go unsaid because of the conversational conventions and constraints of the time. Northanger Abbey did an excellent job of portraying Catherine’s romantic imagination, and alluding to the timelessness of teenage hormones. It did a good job with Austen’s sense of humor and propriety. Both these adaptations weren’t as good as their sources, but reminded me fondly of the books, and made me want to read them again.

Mansfield Park (2007), though, made me want to flee to the book, if only to get away from such a poor representation of it. Read the book, or rent the Patricia Rozema adaptation. It takes some broad departures from the text in Fanny’s character; this earned the scorn of ardent Jane-ites. But it is a well-made, well-cast film that does more justice to what many consider Austen’s most complex novel. The learned ladies at Austenblog didn’t care for Rozema’s Mansfield Park, so on that we’ll have to disagree. But they’re a wonderful resource for all things Austen if you want to learn more.

I’ve set out to learn more about film noir, so I watched Out of the Past, with Robert Mitchum as smart detective with flexible morals who gets stupid around Judy Greer’s femme fatale. Kirk Douglas shines as an oily criminal.

Time Out Film Guide says it’s “once seen, never forgotten.” It’s beautiful and haunting. I hoped for Mitchum’s escape, even while knowing, as his character did, that he was doomed.

My husband and I were surprised to see the original of a scene we’d just watched in episode 2, Gnothi Seauton, of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. In Out of the Past, Mitchum fights with his former partner, then Judy Greer shoots him. Mitchum asks why she did, and she replies, “Because you wouldn’t.” This scene appears almost verbatim in the Terminator episode, between Sarah Connor, who had been threatening an old acquaintance, and Summer Glau’s Cameron, who shoots him. I’ve submitted this trivia to IMDB, and will wait to see if it’s accepted.

Paprika, a Japanese anime film from last year, is wild and visually stunning. I wanted to like it, but the more I think on it, the more it bothers me. Ultimately it’s a fanboy fantasy, and a feminist nightmare.

In the near future, psychotherapists have technology to record and enter dreams (think Until the End of the World, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). The team responsible is headed by an attractive but buttoned down woman and a gluttonous geek boy. The woman’s alter ego in dreams is the Paprika of the title. Someone steals and subverts the technology, and dreamworlds collide, then intrude disastrously into reality. My favorite part of the film is the parade of dreams–the color, image and music all combine for a walloping sensory experience. What happens to the female doctor, though, is beyond apology for me.

She is threatened multiple times by men who say they are going to play rough with her. One tries to rape her, and submerges a dream hand inside her, then rips off her skin from the inside, so she is naked and unconscious when another character rams tentacles down her throat. Later, she becomes a child, and drinks the dark dream stuff spread by the huge, nude male villain , which I found too close an allusion to fellatio. Finally, she rebels against her dream self and rescues the glutton-geek, declaring her love for him, then later saying she’s going to marry him and take his name.

The plot is murky and while the images are provocative, too often I found them offensive.

I enjoyed the new version of Persuasion on PBS last weekend. It kicked off The Complete Jane Austen. My enjoyment, though, may be because it’s been some time since I’ve read the book. Additionally, I never saw the 1995 version that many book bloggers, like Book Moot, champion. I thought Sally Hawkins was realistically pretty. And while Rupert Penry-Jones can’t really be called realistically handsome, I am able to overlook that in an Austen leading man. Heh heh. The story was shrunk very small to fit into 90 minutes. I didn’t care for Anne Elliott’s meaningful looks to the camera. I did very much enjoy Anthony Head’s turn as Anne’s vain father, though.

I plan to seek out the 1995 version after I’ve re-read the novel, most likely in the summer, when PBS’s spring of Jane has finished.