My last two posts
(If Hollywood Were Really Brave
and Out of the Frame)
have slammed Hollywood pretty hard for cranking out preachy, boring crap
while congratulating itself on its bravery. I’ll make it a triptych by
examining some recent movies that I found truly excellent.
Tolkien fans went into these movies dreading a disappointment and
came out stunned by the power and fidelity with which director Peter
Jackson (himself a lifelong fan) brought Middle-Earth to life. It was
a revelation that a fantasy film this good and this true to its
materials could get made inside the Hollywood system at all. Most of
the credit seems to go to Jackson, who insisted on doing it
right; but kudos to everyone in the cast (except the
inexplicably unconvincing Cate Blanchett) who clearly gave these movies
everything they had and then some.
If there’s anyone out there who still thinks animated film has to
be trivial entertainment or just for children, this is the movie to
nuke that misconception into vapor. What an amazing and wonderful
work of art this was — entertaining, intelligent, emotionally
rich, morally serious without being preachy, deeply humane. And with
a tasty libertarian-verging-on-Objectivist subtext, too!
And speaking of libertarian subtexts — this movie’s punchline
is the hardest slam against coercive social engineering I’ve ever
seen on film. Along the way to it we get plenty of action, the
superb ensemble acting we’d come to expect from the TV series, humor,
horrror and a lot of plain old visual gorgeousness. Extra points for
the hot-chick-with-mad-kung-fu-skillz fight scene…
I thought this was an underappreciated gem, a superb Western in the
traditional style that even managed to extract a fine performance from
within Kevin Costner’s excessive self-regard. Robert Duvall was even
better as the tough old trail-boss Costner’s ex-gunfighter rides with.
Annette Bening barely holds up her end as the female lead, but that’s
OK; this is a film about men, and manhood, in the best sense of both
terms. There’s one scene where she serves Costner’s and Duvall’s
characters tea; the wordless moment when the two are trying to fit
their work-gnarled fingers through delicate bone-china handles is one
of the most complex and poignant bits I’ve ever seen in a movie.
I’ve reviewed this movie in a previous blog entry; go there. Alas, the trend
towards better historicals I was so happy about in 2003 didn’t
continue; instead, we got disappointments like Troy and
the mega-craptacular Alexander.
Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the whole Warner Brothers posse rock
the house old-school style. But this was no mere gag-fest; the chase
scenes running through famous paintings in the Louvre were art and
satire and satire about art of a very high order (the chase through
Dali’s The Persistence of Memory was particularly
brilliant). Marvin the Martian gets more screen time than his entire
previous career put together, especially during the slam-bang finish
set in (animated) Earth orbit that wonderfully sends up the Star Wars
movies and finally (finally!) lets Daffy be the hero.
This movie absolutely should not have worked. The plot was thin,
the maguffin was a ridiculous lift from a Disney amusement-park ride,
Orlando Bloom uttered a lifeless Errol Flynn imitation in lieu of a
performance, and Keira Knightley forgot anything she might have known
about acting (or possibly she was just stunned by the wooden quality of
the script). It was all redeemed by Johnny Depp’s incandescently
brilliant turn as Captain Jack Sparrow, proving that a good enough
actor can bring life to even the most formulaic crap. Depp didn’t
just carry this movie on his back, he spun it on one finger with an
insouciant grin.