Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)
Hellboy II is loose, confident and surprisingly-purely-delightful: one of those pictures that occasionally threatens to tarnish the bad name of sequels. Essentially, when you really get down to it, the picture is the movie you longed for while watching the original-which was stranded between personal kinks and impersonal obligation to be all things X-Men to all people (inevitably canceling itself out in the process). Hellboy II doesn’t add up to much-the plot alternates between derivative (resurrection, baby, etc, etc) and non-existent. But it’s an empowering movie-nothing. The picture is monster vaudeville-and it has-most importantly-a tasty, easy-going tone. This is sugar on sugar, and I confessed that I loved most every minute of Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Some will probably dispute this, but this may be, truly, the picture the Mexican wizard Guillermo Del Toro has always wanted to make-this is the film that drives his hidden, deep down, insecure-gifted-dork’s dreams. The fleeting reference to Bride of Frankenstein isn’t accidental-this picture represents a similar departure in tone from its original, but it even more honestly recalls the difference between Ghostbusters and the more lackadaisical Ghostbusters II. The effects are fine, but Del Toro’s love for movie monsters and comedy bits and characters and throwaway vignettes trumps the requisites of the blockbuster and gets to something more personal and groovy-it’s all fun, no more, possibly less-but you won’t care.
Del Toro’s approach is, after several films, familiar, and it’s become clear that he shares with the old Tim Burton, another obsessive maestro of shadowy creepy-crawlies, a certain weakness: a fundamental inability to weave much in the way of story-his creatures are the entire show. Del Toro’s pictures are, in construction, extremely primitive, episodic and stop and start. Del Toro clearly recognizes this liability and built it into the captivating-anyway Pan’s Labyrinth; he doesn’t have Spielberg’s gift for delirious-seamless plot soars that leave you breathless yet. Del Toro’s pictures never quite take off like we hope from our great fantasies; but they work anyway out of unbridled will and id-out of his illustrator’s brilliance of imagination, out of his ability to forge new monsters out of old and make the costumed man sexy and funky and funny again. Ironically, Del Toro’s most seamless bit of storytelling is probably his least personal, the underrated kung-fu vampire blow-out Blade II.
On paper, Hellboy II is basically Blade II all over again-only warmer- with Del Toro’s character for character’s sake approach softening things. Luke Goss has returned from the Wesley Snipes picture to again assume duties as the villain, and he has essentially the same aim as Prince Nuada that he did as the pallid, heroin chic-ed Nomak in the prior picture-a desire to return his species to the glory that the humans have repeatedly denied them. The Prince is a hunkier, healthier version of Nomak-a Nomak who’s kicked the junk and gone to the gym, and received extremely effective hair care treatment. I can see why Del Toro has returned to Goss-he’s a raspy, unusual, threatening object-and he has a conviction in the material that can’t be faked or laughed off-he wants fairy tale creatures’ rights dammit, and, while Goss is on the screen, you believe little to nothing else. Goss also has chemistry with the other players that might be overlooked, his hatred for Blade and Hellboy registers, and it lends both films a little bit of authentic danger, which they desperately need. (Nuada threatens to kill Abe Sapien at one point, and you, against your knowledge of formula, nearly believe it.)
But, as effective as Goss is, this picture is about the good monsters clowning around and embracing in their inner freak. Del Toro has made a romantic-comedy for the nerds, a rare feel-good outcast fantasy. Many pictures, most Tim Burton and the first Hellboy included, cater to our self-pity bone-our secret fear that the world is rigged against our eccentricities. It’s nice then that The Golden Army drops all of that-it’s saying, whether it even knows it or not, that life goes on and even the ugly have their own pursuits which they even occasionally get to realize. It’s a give and take for everyone kinda picture-everyone gets a moment or two, and most everyone, eventually, wins a love or two. This is a very human, unforced, minor subtext but it gives this new Hellboy a lift.
Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and Liz (Selma Blair) are still involved, but now a bit troubled-the blazing French-kiss that ended the first movie has given way to disappointment and confusion. These two, the fire-proof man and his burning, elemental, uncontrollable woman, don’t really have much to do together; they only seem to be at odds because it would be boring if they weren’t. Perlman and Blair give it something, though it may be an unintentional something, I can’t tell. I felt for both characters the way I feel for many character actors who should be getting more work-I had a sympathy that might not have anything to do with the movie I was actually watching (Paul Giamatti has inspired similar reactions). Both characters are more poignant than they have any right to be-but there’s also a spacey humor between them that keeps things afloat and unpretentious-Perlman and Blair may be actors engulfed in makeup and CG, but they have something (which is why you don’t believe they’re drifting) that stirs your inner fantasy of discovering that weird-cute-girl reading the same comics as you.
Abe Sapien (Doug Jones, in outfit, and also filling in for David Hyde-Pierce’s vocals), our endangered fish-man, (he suggests The Creature from the Black Lagoon crossed with an iguana), also finds love in this picture, with Princess Nuala (Anna Walton), Nuada’s identical twin. This conflict isn’t brought to much fruition either, but Abe gets two of my favorite moments in the picture, a meet-cute with the Princess where she questions his name (Abe, in a bit of self-deflation, acknowledges the ridiculousness of it) and a betrayal that, blinded by love and loneliness and heartbreak, he can’t help but make. Abe was unfortunately sidelined in the first film, and his expanded role here underlines what’s so appealingly flim-flammy about this picture. We also have some sort of vaporous creature called Johann Krauss that resides in what appears to be an old deep-sea diving suit, voiced by Seth McFarlane of the television show Family Guy in an inflection that I’m assuming is meant to recall Col. Klink from Hogan’s Heroes. We also have Jeffery Tambor returning, in yet another role that’s been thankfully expanded since the first adventure.
You may think me haphazard, all over the place-highlighting random bits and performances with no particular rhyme or rhythm. This is the primary problem, and appeal, of Hellboy II: The Golden Army. The picture doesn’t really fulfill much of anything in the way of conventional adventure payoffs, and the episodes feed into one another awkwardly, but this is one of those films where the flaws and the merits walk side-by-side, hand-in-hand, and you get to a point where you really can’t tell the difference anymore (and you don’t want to). Hellboy II is composed of those little character moments you imagine in between the boring plot scenes of most big movies; it has an airy-just-in-it-for-the-fun quality that many of our expensive entertainments lack; so many of our B-movie four hundred million dollar enterprises are so deadly serious; and so determined by their self-doubting creators to be more than they ever could actually be. Hellboy II knows exactly what it is-it’s imaginative kids playing in the yard right after getting out of a big movie-filling in the gaps, floating on impulse-in love with giddy-crazy nonsense.
★★★
WALL-E (2008)
WALL-E is probably what most movie lovers pictured (and hoped for) when Steven Spielberg announced he was going to take on Stanley Kubrick’s long gestating Artificial Intelligence. The possibility of Kubrick’s controlled-chilly-distrustful sensibility mingling with Spielberg’s pop-genius-empathy was too rich for it to be anything other than troubled and disappointing. A.I. is a fascinating picture, and a powerful one-but that power comes partially from the friction of watching a misguided picture try to take hold. A.I. lacked Spielberg’s flair and confidence-it’s yet another of his apologies for being entertaining and profitable for so long; and also, less surprisingly, lacked Kubrick’s dry-comic ambiguity, that charge that comes from his elitist scold-his mastery of the triviality of the damned. A.I. was, in short, a summation of two master filmmakers’ weaknesses. What many of us wanted from A.I., whether it was C.C. (Cinephilically Correct) or not, was for Spielberg to return to the blissful wish-fulfillment fantasies of the late 1970s-early 1980s, to the pictures that had a sense of mystery and fullness-his pop miracles.
WALL-E promises, and just may be, that sort of pop wonder. The picture’s beginning gives us Earth hundreds of years in the future-an Earth that has finally succumbed to our distinctly American self-absorption-magic-bullet-quick-fix-pass-the-buck-supersize-my-fries entitlement. (WALL-E doesn’t acknowledge other national ideologies; this is a purely in-house reaction.) Earth is a tattered shambles: a ruined, still oddly beautiful series of cities of garbage; hopelessly tended to by one remaining robot, Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class), an achingly small little contraption who clearly doesn’t grasp the impossibility of his aim. Wall-E, a love-child of E.T. and Johnny Five, scoops trash up into his belly, cubes it like a miniature crushed car, and spits it out-adding it to a column that will eventually yield yet another skyscraper of debris.
Summer films have become so hectic, so joyless, so overstuffed with incident and McGuffin, that you may find yourself quietly floored by WALL-E, particularly the beginning. The film’s resemblance to Kubrick, even counting the satire of the later acts, is superficial-a few jokes here and there and little more. WALL-E is a lotta Spielberg, a little Chaplin, a little Tati, but I’m shocked, and pleased, to write that the picture most clearly recalls the delicacy, patience and wit of Ernst Lubitsch’s romantic comedies, particularly The Shop Around the Corner (remade, awfully, as You’ve Got Mail).
This picture approaches the romance that develops between Wall-E and Eve, (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), a robot monitoring Earth’s progress towards inhabitability (she looks like a storm-trooper crossed with a Mac computer), with a Lubitschian grace and interest in minute gestures that speak volumes. The robots, one a labored little scuttle-bug hundreds of years in age, the other a sleek, armed new thing, play out a variation of the classic situation where a man is hopelessly enthralled with someone leagues above him. Eve, initially thinking Wall-E a menace, fires lasers at him until his gentleness, and complete lack of pretense, win her.
Robots in love. It sounds like kitsch, and could be, and, I’m sure, has been. Director Andrew Stanton understands the strength of the premise though, which is that you can go elemental. Robots aren’t human (obviously), and don’t have humans’ quirks and intangible hang-ups, so they can be allowed to stand for pure love without seeming mawkish. (The picture is remarkably, with only a few exceptions, un-cute.) With robots we can believe what we always want to believe in human romances without talking ourselves out of it and breaking the spell. The robots simply are, and that plain subtext-free way of being is allowed to be poetic here. There’s a scene early in Wall-E and Eve’s courtship where Wall-E shows her the various gadgets that he’s kept from the rubbish, unable to let go. We’ve already seen Wall-E’s collection, and his idea of what these objects are, but Eve, of greater power and knowledge, actually understands the use of the some of the knickknacks. She holds a lighter and produces fire; she holds Wall-E’s light bulb and produces light. This is among the most moving scenes in the film, because Stanton and the Pixar team have found, in pop-movie terms, an analogy for how we hope to discover ourselves in our lovers. The opening half of WALL-E is a lean, classical, melancholy daydream-a parable of finding something wonderful amidst an unrelentingly banal nightmare. Wall-E is, really, when it comes down to it, an indomitable working class stiff.
Then the picture takes us to space and to the future humans, who’ve become a surprisingly disgusting parody of our current ravenous addiction to techno-consumerism. At this point, around the halfway mark, WALL-E becomes considerably more conventional-it’s sharp and funny and sprightly, but that first half haunts the second half in a way that isn’t entirely beneficial. The picture is preaching against the ravages of Earth, but you find yourself ironically missing the ravaged Earth (this is somewhat intentional)-and missing the romance that was beautifully unencumbered by plot mechanics. Pixar breaks through in the opening passages, achieving the quiet, nearly existential power they’ve been flirting with for some time (most memorably, until now, in Toy Story 2).
The second half is simply a damn good Pixar movie (I’m risking ingratitude) and perhaps that opening isn’t possible to sustain, but I’m not so sure. There are still many moments even here that come through though: a kiss, a “dance” in space, as well as the humans’ discovery of fleeting, fleshy pleasures. Jeff Garlin eventually turns up as a Captain, and sketches an unexpectedly moving characterization of befuddled loss. And there’s the ending. The ending is a pure, authentic, cleansing, stunner. Wall-E and Eve remind one of the myth of the bumblebee: an insect that isn’t supposed to be able to fly, but, well, does anyway. Wall-E and Eve aren’t supposed to yearn, to care, to crave, but someone-thankfully-forgot to tell them.
★★★½
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
The tangible relief of again seeing a modern action-fantasy through a master filmmaker’s eyes carries us through a few minutes of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Master shots! A sense of rhythm and pace! Punches that sound like shotgun blasts! The Wilhelm scream! I had forgotten how starved I was for a true escapist picture that feels apart from reality, that isn’t (or doesn’t fancy itself) an auteurist superhero film or a cynical commercial for toys that turn into other toys or whatever other nonsense litters our screens. The title sequence of Crystal Skull is witty and beautiful, and hints at a touch of knowing, sad humor. The object that the Paramount logo always famously fades into is, this time, a groundhog burrow, which promptly gets mowed over by a speeding roadster as Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” plays in place of the familiar John Williams score. It’s the 1950s, twenty years since Indy rode off into the sunset with his father and friends, things have changed, and these first few moments establish that with something resembling grace.
Or graceful, at least, when compared to the desperate, depressing, miscalculated picture that follows. I could delay the inevitable for a few more passages (and did, in the first draft) celebrating Spielberg’s past and present gifts: his peerless, musical sense of play and action and reaction; his organic, nearly supernatural instinct for pure cinema storytelling, his uncanny (see how I struggle to continually produce words for Spielberg’s craft that imply “above normal human capacity”) ability to set-up and pay-off beats in hushed seconds without the slightest hint of strain, but you know all of that already. I could celebrate and/or mourn Harrison Ford, one of the greatest movie stars of all time, a warm, funny, idealized superman Humphrey Bogart for the next generation who lost his way after The Fugitive, but you already know that too. You want to know how good the new Indy Jones movie is, or, if you’ve already seen it, you want to know if it’s okay to feel let down after pretending to like it for a few hours. I’m giving you permission, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the worst Jones movie by far, that’s easy, but this new picture is also the worst Steven Spielberg movie.
There are bits here and there that remind you of Spielberg’s brilliance, that imply a possible struggle within the filmmaker to give a shit about a genre he’s long left behind (we really, in retrospect, should have known that already, after the chilly-scary deconstruction of the genre in the more effective than its generally admitted to be nightmare picture A.I.) but they are few and far between. Crystal Skull does have one legitimately inspired moment that has Jones stumbling into a suburb that happens to be something else entirely. This brief scene conjures that fear of the breakdown of the commonplace that Spielberg can portray so well when in his groove, and it establishes the time and place of the picture effectively, but the rest is a wash. Even the title sequence becomes icky after seeing the entire picture, portraying not sadness and knowing and regret, but contempt (there’s another creepy, tasteless joke in this vein-involving a statue of Marcus Brody, who must have shit Spielberg’s bed after Raiders of the Lost Ark).
Crystal Skull is lazy and misguided and lifeless throughout, with only the occasionally vigorous action sequence (or inspired camera beat) to pull it out of the muck. I would like to be able to say that the script, by David Koepp, the mad libs of hack screenwriters, (with an obvious Lucas influence-this is dead exposition as only that man can deliver), is his usual impersonal, connect the dots mish-mash, except it lacks even his pedestrian ability to connect the dots. The exposition in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the moments that explain to us the nature of the Ark of the Covenant are giddy, moody, but, most importantly, they project not the tedium of reading cue cards (until we can get to the next bit of labored physicality) but a sense of awe.
Ford also appears to be as bored as he’s been for the last several films, having failed to “come back” here as some would have you believe, but Spielberg, like Robert Zemeckis in What Lies Beneath, is canny enough to work around the current Ford persona. Jones’ lack of heartbeat here is moving and thematically apt, he’s been beat down by one too many obscure artifacts, lost one too many important to him. Crystal Skull, aping Last Crusade, is also a family reunion picture, only with Ford now in the Sean Connery role. That is a ripe, original idea for exploration, but that would, again, interfere with Lucas’ inhuman obsession with expositional bric-a-brac.
We should also acknowledge that Spielberg probably hasn’t totally, fearlessly, dived into his own head since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (maybe A.I. too, for both better and worse). The recent Spielberg pictures have much to recommend them, particularly Munich (one of the best films of 2005), War of the Worlds and Minority Report, but they are also uneven and self-conscious, too eager to please, and feed into Spielberg’s desire to be an “important” as well as successful filmmaker. What else could Steven Spielberg possibly have left to prove? In an interview for Minority Report Spielberg said he felt he’d earned the right to make a picture for himself, and I agree, but he appears to say that without actually knowing it. How long can Temple of Doom’s myopic reception be permitted to punish Spielberg, and us? Temple of Doom is imperfect, with an especially mean, juvenile sense of humor (though Crystal Skull makes that humor look positively Lubitschian by comparison) but it’s an exciting, original action picture, one of the most visually assured ever made, with an emotional transition in its hero that subtly holds together (and comments on) the physical beats that run through the picture like a locomotive, but that’s often unacknowledged.
So, lest anyone get offended, we got Last Crusade, which is dull but saved by Sean Connery and Ford’s byplay, and now Crystal Skull, which is dull but saved by nothing. Shia LaBeouf, more watchable than anyone could possibly expect in Transformers last year, again gives his part as much as anyone could given what he’s been handed to work with. LeBeouf and Ford have authentic chemistry, and it could have possibly salvaged a bit of Crystal Skull, but the script continues to strangle them, perhaps like one of those snakes Indy fears so much (and that gets a tip of the cap here that’s embarrassing).
The reunion with Marion (Karen Allen) is the film’s low point though: a crushing, dispiriting letdown that’s about nothing more than cynically “giving the fans what they want.” Allen and Ford look desperate and uncomfortable, two vaudevillians determined to appease the drunken fans so they can shuffle out the side-stage exit. The heat between Allen and Ford has gone, and once again, that, in itself, could have been something had it been acknowledged, but Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is in the business of self-delusion and unoriginality.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a failure, but it’s an undeniably interesting failure that’s poignant unintentionally and, sometimes, in spite of itself. The character of Indiana Jones is too rich, despite the filmmakers’ indifference, for the film not to occasionally carry a whiff of something greater and older. The sight of Indiana Jones, now grandfatherly in appearance, teaching classes in a building where he was once the subject of feverish underage admiration, is unavoidably moving. The sight of Jones snatching his hat, that beloved symbol of irrepressible adventure, from the younger generation is too loaded with movie love, no matter how hard the fanatical Lucas may try to deny us conventional emotional satisfaction. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is an embarrassment, but it is, in a strange way, also life affirming. It will take more than the biggest disappointment of the year to tarnish a character that has given us years of pleasure and has very undeniably earned his rest. Spielberg, probably the greatest living pure filmmaker, has certainly earned the legacy he’s apparently terrified of pissing away. Here’s hoping Spielberg one day discovers the inner peace he half-heartedly blesses his hero with here, and again becomes the filmmaker he always has been and can always be.
★★
A Little Princess (1995)
Director Alfonso Cuarón excels in the types of pictures that tend to stump even the otherwise most considerable of directors. Cuarón’s films are sensual; they have a tingly heat, an otherness that immediately sets them apart from anyone else’s work. Cuarón gets sex, his Y tu mama tambien is one of the sexiest pictures ever made, and he gets the imagination, particularly of children. It makes sense really, why a filmmaker might understand how to portray both of these very disparate aspects of human nature so well. Sex and play are both very withheld and personal, and it takes a major talent: a humane, empathetic artist, to dramatize them to their fullest without succumbing to the cheap or maudlin.
I would have confidently written the above of Cuarón on the strength of Great Expectations, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Y tu mama tambien, and Children of Men, before taking the opportunity to see his English language debut, A Little Princess, a picture that was released early summer nearly thirteen years ago to critical acclaim and little else, a small film that was probably eaten up by louder, more obvious fare. Have you noticed how distressingly loud the children’s pictures have become? How determined they are to teach lessons of independence so long as its the sort of independence that entails buying a figure of whatever the most obnoxious character happens to be?
It’s unlikely, then, that many children bought dolls of Sara Crewe (Liesel Matthews), the name doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like a Transformer or a (damn, were these things of ever acceptable?) Power Ranger. Sara isn’t a super being but an intelligent girl of privilege, growing up in a storybook India with her father, Capt. Crewe (Liam Cunningham). As lush and ideal as the India of this film is, Sara still nurtures a considerable inner world, and the film opens as Sarah shares part of this world with her friends, the story of Prince Rama and his quest to save his wife Sita from the evil Ravana. The Prince’s story is dramatized for us, in a groovy series of peyote flavored episodes that begin to bear more and more similarity to the story of Sara herself.
We, of course, have to leave the mythical, painterly paradise of India. A Little Princess is a fairy tale after all, and the heroine, like most people who read fairy tales in the real world, is going to have to face a test of character. Capt. Crewe enlists in the First World War, and Sara is sent to a boarding school in New York that immediately arouses suspicion. It’s clear that the school isn’t going to understand Sara, and that the other children have forcibly bought in to the hysterical control that Miss Minchin (Eleanor Bron) wields. There’s hope at first, Sara’s money serves as a convenient bypass of the more extreme rules, but something awful soon happens that flips Sara’s world over, leaving her not only without her possessions but her schooling as well, forced to serve the girls who were her friends the day before.
We’ve certainly walked this walk before, A Little Princess is a simple story, the kind of story that depends more than any other on the craftsmanship of the filmmakers. Familiarity breeds contempt, but in the movies it can also breed a deep affection. We know Sara will find a way out of this fresh misery, right? We know she will be reunited with her father, and that retribution will land on the doorstep of the awful, unforgiving Miss Minchin, right? We know, but in the right hands, we never know, because most of us, like Sara, are looking for a good tale, an opportunity to suspend disbelief and revel in problems that rise and die before we’ve finished our popcorn.
There’s more to A Little Princess than just hitting the right storytelling marks though, Cuarón, even in his second film, exhibits a master’s touch with the material. The film is rapt and poetic, probably one of the more visually amazing films to be released in the 1990s. As in Cuarón’s other films, the visuals exist for more than their own beauty, they comment on the action, on the characters’ dreams or lack thereof. One scene, late in the film, ranks as one of Cuarón’s finest: Sara, lonely in her attic accommodations, looks out the window to the apartment next door to see the mysterious Indian man who just might be her savior looking back at her. He emits a light, and soon Sara finds herself in a spotlight of stars, an otherworldly appreciation that she has desperately needed since her father left.
Richard LaGravenese and Elizabeth Chandler’s script, lean and delicate, also plays fair with the character of Sara. She may be the star of a fairy tale, but she’s also a truthful portrait of a smart little girl who has that familiar to smart little girls’ habit of thinking she knows everything. Watch the opening moments with Sara in the boarding school, Miss Minchin is an undeniable pill, but Sara does her part too, stepping on toes, breaking rules, knowing that her father’s money will be the ultimate tie-breaker. Sara might not know this, but she certainly knows this. Minchin, likewise, is allowed a speck of sympathy. Sara asks Minchin if her parents ever told her that she was a princess, and the pained, twisted look tells us all.
A Little Princess is a wonderful film, perhaps the most purely consistent thing that Cuarón made thus far. The film doesn’t have the convolutions of the Harry Potter novel to contend with, nor the disappointing third acts of Children of Men or Y tu mama tambien. Princess is confidently about one thing and one thing only, and that can be found on the back of the DVD box: Every girl everywhere is a princess. What a wonderful thing to believe.
★★★½
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