Livin' large

Bolt

Post

A very good, very conventional story of love and family. The inspired element is the premise: a TV dog who actually thinks he has all the superpowers his character has. In other words, this is based in great part on the actual scientific fact that dogs are loyal, brave, and moronic.

Yes, it's true what you've heard: the hamster steals the show. Waste-of-time short, "Tokyo Mater," starring characters from Cars. Oh, and by the way: if you're going to see this, there's no particular reason to insist on the 3D version: it was OK, but the story's the thing.

Cadillac Records

Post

Like every other film about the music biz, whether based on fact or purely fictional, this is about (1) the inspiration, (2) the meteoric rise, (3) the self-destructive behavior (including, as a matter of course, [A] substance abuse, [B] love abuse, and [C] professional-relationship abuse), and (4) the sad decline, but still (5) the legacy.

What makes this worth seeing, despite the clichés, are the performances, particularly by Eamonn Walker in a relatively small but thrilling role as Howlin' Wolf; Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters; Beyoncé Knowles as Etta James; and Adrien Brody as Leonard Chess. And, of course, the music.

Trailers

• Monsters vs. Aliens--Some nice stuff for us old farts, like a George C. Scott-in-Strangelove takeoff; wouldn't rule it out.
• Up--Cranky old guy's house takes off with balloons; I assume it must be based on some much-loved kids' book.
• Notorious--No, not a Hitchcock rerelease; it's about B.I.G.
• Gran Torino--I'm not one of those Clint-can-do-no-wrongers, but this looks pretty damned good.
• Madea Goes to Jail--What does it say when the "trailer" seems actually to be outtakes?
• Not Easily Broken--Good title, but I'm skeptical.

Worms' meat

The Verona project, parts IV (Romeo & Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss) and V (Romeo & Juliet: A Monkey's Tale)

Who (how old), when, how long? Animated seals (or sea lions--the filmmakers don't seem to be aware that there's a difference; in fact, mustachioed Montague appears very walrusy, while the Prince resembles nothing more than a manatee), 2006, 1¼hrs; live macaques, 2007 (Animal Planet), 3/4. As for age, it's fair to say early sexual maturity in each case, whenever that might be for the respective species.

What sort of R&J? Pinniped and simian, respectively.

Seriocomic scale for first scene? In the seal pic, the scene relies as much on West Side Story as on Shakespeare's play, with both the comedy and the danger relying on the successively stronger troops mustering on each side. The monkey pic doesn't really have that scene, only "Tybalt," a member of the temple troop in the Thai city of Lapburi, explaining the generations-long enmity between his aristocratic clan and the market moneys in the squalid slums across a nigh-unpassable road: "They did bite their thumbs at us" (shot of market monkey doing just that).

"Wherefore": do the film/playmakers know what it means? Emphatically no: in the seal pic it comes up repeatedly, always as if the word means where; in the monkey pic just once, but ditto.

Carrion flies? No, though the monkey pic probably could have worked it in, what w/ the slum's squalor and all.

Body count? In the seal pic, Mercutio seems actually to have been dispatched, but he returns at the end to prod the drugged young lovers awake; in the monkey pic, a literal plague descends upon both houses, but specific deaths are not delineated.

What (else) is missing? Actually, what's surprising is how much Shakespeare survives, especially in the seal pic. Yes, these are both (particularly the cartoon) essentially for little kids, but a lot of the language of the play works its way into both pieces. The about-to-apparently-die pinniped Mercutio (though most of his Shakespeare in the piece is random quotation from other plays) tells Romeo, "Look for me tomorrow and you will find me a grave . . . seal," and the voice of wisdom (Friar Laurence here, about which more below) tells the two seal tribes (here separated by color: the Capulets are white, the Montagues brown; and oddly, all the other aquatic species share the two groups' prejudice against mixing their blood), "We are all punished."

Much more of the narrative frame is omitted from the monkey pic--after all, they were working with actual animals, so it must have been harder to fit characters. The only named characters are the titular pair and Tybalt. Still, an apt line now and again: "These violent delights have violent ends."

What (else) is changed? In the context of the story involving pinnipeds and fish, it is odd to say that the oddest change is that the Prince (a grotesquely huge seal or sea lion with an even more grotesque schnozz), after warning off the warring parties in the opening scene, becomes a sort of Malvolio: it is he who falls repulsively for Juliet and to whom Capulet agrees to marry her, and so after having dignity in the opening scene, he is an ominous and ridiculous character thereafter. The kids do go to Friar Laurence (no freakin' idea what he's supposed to be: some sort of furry quadruped with a long tail) to get married (he makes some rather audience-inappropriate jokes about their sexual eagerness), and J gets the coma potion from him, but in this version, when Romeo kisses her, she still has enough in her system that it knocks him out too--so they have their seeming tragic death but both get to survive.

The monkey story's happy ending comes when the humans in the town have a big festival of food, which the monkeys from both sides of the street can share in peace. By this time both the titular characters have gone off to make babies elsewhere.

What (else) is odd? Gosh, tough call: the Titanic tribute (don't ask)? The shark chase? The monkey skipping town on a train? Pretty much the whole of each film is pretty odd.

End-of-the-play exposition? Nothing of the overlong and tedious nature that WS gave us, no.

Can't say I'd ever see either of these again, but Sealed is something I wouldn't mind having my 2yo granddaughter see as her introduction to the story (though, of course, she wouldn't get the parts that really rely on it). And it's always fun to see monkeys. In short, not the wasted evening I feared it might be.

If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully

The Verona project, part III

Yes, yes, I did intend to screen everything I'll be blogging this weekend--just not quite so soon; I wanted to view a few more conventional renditions before . . . well, you'll see. But Netflix mistakes were made, and once that happened, I decided to make it a sublime-to-ridiculous weekend.

And good golly, this one is sublime. Look, I know less about ballet even than I do about opera, if that's possible, and I simply chose the top-rated Nf balletic version (there are several) and the top-rated operatic version (there are at least a couple) just so's I could get a little high culcha in the mix--I certainly never expected to like the ballet, and I certainly didn't expect to be transported by it. And frankly, I don't have time for another interest in my life, so it's a little disturbing. But there you are.

Who (how old), when, how long? Wayne Eagling (33 per Wikipedia, and he looks it in close-ups but could be mid-20s from a distance) and Alessandra Ferri (20 but could pass for 13), 1984, 2¼hrs. Royal Ballet, recorded at Covent Garden, music by Sergei Prokofiev.

What sort of R&J? Appropriately passionate. His asking, near the end of the first balcony scene, "Wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?" would ring pretty false here, because they take pretty much the full serving of satisfaction. Eagling is perfectly OK, but Ferri is absolutely perfect: in her first scene with the Nurse, she is charmingly barely adolescent, simply playing with her lifelong confidante. Then her parents bring in Paris--a useful plot accelerator, given that there are no words--and she suddenly feigns adulthood, in part to flirt, but mostly, one suspects, to be a good daughter by marketing herself well. To achieve this effect, she dances entirely en pointe--until he and the 'rents leave, whereupon she reverts to her childlike danceplay with Nurse. It is one of many wonderful scenes in the ballet. Another, by contrast, is when J first dances for R, at the ball: this time she dances sometimes on her toes, sometimes in the juvenile-coded balls-of-her-feet mode: if when on commercial display for Paris, she consciously and artificially projects herself as something she's not, for Romeo she displays both the girl she still is and the woman she's becoming. Which is, of course, precisely what we (and he) love about her.

Seriocomic scale for first scene? 7ish, I guess, only because there's a stack of a half-dozen corpses at the end, though truth to tell I didn't notice them accumulating, and the swordplay (Romeo is involved in this version) struck me as thoroughly undangerous until Montague and Capulet weighed in against each other--that was ominous, but the Prince arrived almost immediately after. This scene too is much changed to accommodate the narrative needs of a wordless play: it begins with Romeo wooing Rosaline, who is unimpressed and involved with another, who draws on Romeo, cooling his ardor temporarily at least. Then Romeo, Benvolio, and Mercutio cavort with a trio of strumpets--without question the best addition to the story. It is when Tybalt and his kinsmen arrive in the square and drag the whores away from the good guys that the brawl begins.

"Wherefore": do the film/playmakers know what it means? Not applicable.

Carrion flies? Ditto.

Body count? Five: all but Lady M. (But in truth, the ballet ends when Juliet dies, so there's no mopup scene; who knows whether Lady M has died?)

What (else) is missing? Notwithstanding the loss of all that magnificent language, there is astonishingly little missing from the story that is missed. It's generally not a good idea to edit the Bard, but the cuts here come across as economical, not stinting, and the changes as useful for the narrative and perfectly in keeping with the spirit. One problem is that we see no message sent to Romeo to go awry, which relates to another problem I'll discuss below. We don't see Romeo buy his poison, but when he withdraws the vial from his belt, duh.

What (else) is changed? Well, they dance a lot more. One troublesome change: as I said, much is adapted for the sake of the narrative, and I'd say that the mythical viewer with no knowledge whatsoever of the story would have little trouble knowing precisely what's going on throughout, until . . . "How," I wondered, "does one pantomime 'This is going to make you fall asleep as if dead for 42 hours, whereupon you'll wake and I'll make sure Romeo is there'?" Well, apparently they had no answer: Friar Laurence has the dram waiting for J when she arrives (no need for her to threaten suicide with the dagger to persuade him to provide the potion), and this is one point--a key one, obviously--where if you don't know the story, you're just going to be stumped. Both the previous scene and the following one are played with Paris on hand (again, useful for the narrative), and in the latter she seems caught between resistance and muscular inability to resist, making me think she must already have downed the dram--but no, that's still to come.

Another key change, which mitigates Romeo's blood-guilt: Tybalt's fatal attack on Mercutio is cowardly and unsporting, as he stabs him in the back immediately after M has restored his sword to him rather than pressing his advantage at having disarmed him. Mercutio's death is one of the most magnificent and perfectly textual sequences of the ballet, as he balances jocularity with the grim truth.

What (else) is odd? Perhaps the oddest is the breakneck rush to the finish: the final scene, besides jettisoning the Prince's scolding and the reconciliation of the families, jettisons every character but the 3 who die--and the time between Romeo's appearance and Paris's death at his hands is (I am not kidding--I went back and timed it) 12 seconds. In fact, from R's appearance until J's death is no more than 5 minutes. In that span, though, before Romeo's fatal draught, there is one more fabulous dance, between the star-crossed lovers. Yes, that's right: that requires that she still be as dead, and indeed she is: he tosses and swings her like a rag doll, to heartbreaking effect.

End-of-the-play exposition? Nada.

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

By the book

The Verona project, part II

Who (how old), when, how long? Christopher Neame (28) and Ann Hasson (looks to have been early 20s, though the fact that her age isn't given either on IMDb or on the minibiography on the DVD suggests that she may have been older), 1976, 3¼hrs.

What sort of R&J? Very Royal Shakespeare Company--like the entire company, the performances are thoroughly competent without ever achieving transport--until III.v, the scene in which Lady Capulet comes to Juliet's chamber right after Romeo has left: from that scene on, Hasson (who mysteriously seems to have done a little TV and nothing else) raises her performance and the production to another level. One interesting element of Neame's early performance is that this Romeo seems cognizant of the fact that his lovelorn sighs for Rosaline are purely conventional--though like a good courtly lover, he follows the conventions faithfully. Oh, he bears an unfortunate resemblance to Malcolm McDowell (Alex and Juliet?); Hasson, for her part, looks a bit like Jennifer Ehle, only with Janeane Garofalo's chipmunk cheeks.

Seriocomic scale for first scene? 4--neither particularly silly nor ominous: worst damage done is when Tybalt stabs as innocent foodselling female bystander in the cheek.

"Wherefore": do the playmakers know what it means? Indubitably: Hasson delivers the speech with conviction.

Carrion flies? Yep.

Body count? The full 6.

What (else) is missing? Scarcely anything is missing; I noticed a few lines at the start of one scene, so doubtless there are handsful dropped here and there, but this is essentially the full text.

What (else) is changed? Nothing significant.

What (else) is odd? It is a distinctly un-odd production. I suppose this category's as good a place as any to observe that Capulet is portrayed as easily the most sympathetic of the adult characters--until he explodes at J's refusal to marry Paris (in that same III.v). That he is so gentle and loving until then, of course, makes his abuse all the more painful for us, as well as further ratcheting up Juliet's already abject grief.

End-of-the-play exposition? Yes, well, there's a downside to including the whole text.

A very pleasant surprise, given that the Netflix average rating is only 2.6 stars; makes me wonder what those people are looking for. (Are they the same people who give the Zeffirelli version an average of 3.7?) It's interesting that this seems to have appeared on British TV just two years before the BBC presented its version in what I like to call its Every Damn Play the Bard Wrote series. But while the leads were fairly obscure, the cast has its share of the Beeb repertory company of the time, including at least two actors who appeared in the exactly contemporary I, Claudius: David Robb (Tybalt here, Germanicus there) and Patsy Byrne (Juliet's Nurse here, the poisoner Martina there); I think I noticed a couple others, but the IMDb cast lists are incomplete.

Drove, he said

Australia

Crit

Years ago, at the Assembly Hall in Champaign, Illinois, a talented but wildly erratic Illini guard followed, as he so often did, a slick pass with an egregious turnover. "Oh, Brooks," cried a frustrated fan near me, "you do something good, and then you go and do something bad." The poignant artlessness of that complaint came to mind today. Oh, Baz. Is there a filmmaker today who works so hard with the apparent goal of making us not take him or his creations seriously? The comic-book silliness of the first 15 minutes or so had me squirming in my seat, convinced that I'd let mixed reviews trick me into a time-waster. And then he goes and does something good. I have no recollection what, exactly--the remaining 2½ hours were such a constant whiplash of pleasure and dismay that it's hard to itemize (though the first 2 [of 4!] end-credits songs represent a take-with-you-from-the-theater nadir: a simpy but blessedly short piece of sentimentality presumably written by the director [couldn't catch it in the credits] and sung, I think, by the female lead] seems like the lowest we can go, until a tell-the-story ballad by Luhrman and Elton John, among others, digs a deeper sewer).

In sum, it's a glorious mess, all over the antipodal map. The Wizard of Oz is its explicit touchpoint, but the 1939 film it leans on far more heavily is the one about a stormy romance that begins on the eve of war and then takes us into the inferno in the capital. That one, you'll recall, shares an imperative of repatriation, not because there's no place like home but because land is the only thing that lasts.

It also seems to share an ambition with the upcoming Che to be a double feature, not just in length but in coming to one perfectly plausible conclusion only to take off again on a related but distinctly different story.

Trailer

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button--I guess what I saw before was just a teaser; but the full trailer still leaves me skeptical.

I can tell her age unto an hour

The Verona project, part I

Who (how old), when, how long? Leslie Howard (42 [!!]) and Norma Shearer (33 [!]), 1936, 2hr. Juliet's age is, mercifully, not specified. Directed by George Cukor (36).

What sort of R&J? Shearer desperately tries to be girlish; Howard is, of course, girlish without even trying. It's hard to imagine how anyone thought this could be a good idea, but to their credit, they're both game. Juliet's headstrong and horny character is played down a bit, probably in service of Shearer's youth simulation, the one major exception being in the morning-after nightingale/lark sequence, when she breathily makes it clear that she wants more.

Seriocomic scale for first scene? At least a 7, as people actually seem to die in the melee (though no one identifiable, so it doesn't affect the official body count). The silliness is supplied by Andy Devine, who plays his usual goofy cowboy as Peter, servant to Juliet's Nurse. That character isn't in this scene in the play, so he stands in for Sampson to deliver the thumb-biting lines of that Capulet servant. (Very little of that opening dialogue survives.) Devine also stands in later for the unnamed illiterate servant sent to deliver Capulet's invitations to the masque (a list which, bizarrely, includes Mercutio [later: duh, that's not bizarre but simply textual: I forget that Mercutio is not Romeo's kinsman but the Prince's {as is Paris}]).

"Wherefore": do the filmmakers know what it means? The evidence is not at all conclusive.

Carrion flies? Nope.

Body count? 5 of 6: Lady M survives. Mercutio and Tybalt, incidentally, are played by John Barrymore (age 53) and Basil Rathbone (43), respectively, so we get some good swashbuckling in their duel. Barrymore also delivers the Queen Mab speech beautifully--in a single take! One suspects it wasn't the first time he'd done it.

What (else) is missing? Most notable to me are Juliet's wonderful double entendres in III.v when she seems to be telling her mother that she'd like to get her hands on Romeo to avenge Tybalt's death but what she's really saying is that she'd just like to get her hands on Romeo again. Also, when Romeo threatens suicide, Friar Laurence's scolding of him becomes politically correct: in the play he chides him as womanly and bestial, but here he calls him only an animal.

What (else) is changed? Easily the weirdest change is that Friar John, dispatched by Laurence with the crucial message to Romeo, telling him that Juliet's death has been faked, is actually shown stopping to give succor to a sick person and then being locked into the plague house; he even calls for help as Romeo's servant Balthasar rides past carrying R's letter to J. In the play, of course, John simply tells Laurence how his mission went awry.

What (else) is odd? After the wedding, a weird pullback from Juliet's balcony, then a cut to doomed Mercutio in the piazza. For the postslaughter wedding night, several sexual ecstasy clichés: swelling music, a sky full of stars, an orchard full of phallic trees. Then cut to the chamber, where they're ostensibly in full embrace--except that, the Hays Office calling the shots, Romeo has both feet on the floor. (On the other hand, a genuinely surprising amount of the play's bawdy language survives--the Hays folks must have thought "prick" couldn't really mean what they thought it meant.) Oh: and J's waking in the crypt plays as distinctly Bride of Frankenstein.

End-of-the-play exposition? No: cut from crypt to Capulet and (unwidowded) Montague reconciling before the Prince.

Overall, better than I expected, but far from great--there's very little that's special to balance the grotesquerie of the overaged casting. The masque has some interesting moments, though: an amusing "joust" between "horsemen," and then later, when J is supposed to be dancing w/ Paris, she keeps getting distracted by the new dude she's seen, and Paris has to keep leading her back. It's one of the few moments of convincing romantic transport in one of the title characters.

There are also a couple of nice shots, most notably when the Nurse is walking Juliet down the hallway to her chamber after the masque, and as they proceed, a servant comes just behind them, snuffing the candles in the hall. Poignant imagery for the quintessential snuff romance.

And lest I forget (as in fact I almost did): most surprising name in the credits? As "literary consultant," William Strunk--right, as in The Elements of Style.

Oh, and a word about the DVD. It has become commonplace to include a contemporary short and a cartoon on the DVD of a film from this era. My experience is that usually the cartoon is a hoot and the short is simply hootable. Here, though, the cartoon, "Little Cheeser," about a juvenile mouse who wants to be a tough guy, is 7 minutes or so of treacle until finally, in the last couple of minutes, we get some wonderfully surreal action. But the live-action one-reeler, "Master Will Shakespeare," is a one-reel biopic with an astonishing amount of actual nonbullshit information--and it's directed by a name that surprised me even more than Strunk's: Jacques Tourneur, younger than either of the feature's stars, and with Out of the Past and all those wonderful Val Lewton films far in his future.

Before remembering

Plus tard, tu comprendras (One day you'll understand)

Crit

What an aptly named film, because none of the three of us who saw it together understood as we left the theater, but with each contributing a question or an observation that hadn't occurred to the others, we came to a much clearer comprehension after our postcinema discussion.

It is, in essence, the story of France's grotesquely mixed record vis-à-vis the Holocaust, played out in one family, the mixture of French Catholics with Russian Jews. It is also an intensely personal mystery story, as much for the audience as for the protagonist,Victor (Hippolyte Girardot, whom I'll be seeing again in another couple of weeks in Un conte de Noël, along with Emmanuelle Devos, who plays his wife here). Jeanne Moreau, 80 now, still beautiful, is perfect as the Jewish grandmother who has her reasons for not wanting to talk about the past.

A unique Holocaust film, which has become a rare label.