Movie Reviews: Cinematic Titanic: Doomsday Machine; Star Wars: The Clone Wars; The X-Files: I Want To Believe; Mamma Mia!; The Dark Knight; The Love Guru
Cinematic Titanic: Doomsday Machine
Created by Joel Hodgson
[www.cinematictitanic.com]
Mystery Science Theater 3000 was one of the truly magnificent achievements in television comedy. For ten years the show's writers and performers filled up a two-hour show with an astounding variety of jokes related to whatever horrible movie they were watching that week. Creator Joel Hodgson walked away from the show halfway through its run, leaving his two wisecracking robots, Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo, in the capable hands of replacement Michael J. Nelson; gradually, other cast members left the fold, including Trace Beaulieu (who played the dual roles of evil Dr. Clayton Forrester and Crow) and Frank Conniff (Forrester's hapless assistant, TV's Frank), until MST3K belonged to Nelson, Kevin Murphy (Tom Servo) and Bill Corbett (the new Crow). After the series ended its run, most of these people pursued careers behind the cameras, although Hodgson did turn up in a few episodes of the short-lived series Freaks & Geeks. Recently, Nelson, Murphy and Corbett returned with a quartet of direct-to-DVD, movie-riffing comedies under the name The Film Crew, whose stated goal is to provide commentary tracks to every movie that doesn't have one; naturally, every movie that doesn't have one is a piece of crap. Unlike MST3K, though, there are no silhouetted performers in the corner of the screen, which I have to admit I kind of missed.
Now, Joel Hodgson has resurrected his visual motif in a new comedic venture. Cinematic Titanic is Hodgson's triumphant return to his pioneering concept of making fun of crummy movies, but the return is not his alone: joining him is Trace Beaulieu, Frank Conniff, Mary Jo Pehl (a writer on MST3K and performer of such characters as Dr. Forrester's mom and Jan In The Pan, from the memorable episode The Brain That Wouldn't Die), and J. Elvis Weinstein (the original Tom Servo in MST3K's little-seen first season). Like The Film Crew, the Cinematic Titanic efforts are direct-to-DVD, but unlike The Film Crew, who secured a retail distribution deal with Shout! Factory (they also recently acquired the rights to MST3K episodes), Joel and company are hawking their wares on those internets all the kids are talking about, available as either a physical DVD or a digital download [www.cinematictitanic.com] (And let me just take a moment to apologize for the unnecessary use of the term "digital download", since there is no such thing, to the best of my knowledge, as an analog download. Unless childbirth counts). After a somewhat lengthy delay following their inaugural release -- The Oozing Skull -- which was attributed to the writers' strike, Cinematic Titanic recently returned with Doomsday Machine, a jaw-droppingly godawful picture made watchable by the group's Very Large Array of verbal gags; the performers gather around the lower corners of the screen and let 'er rip. It might seem that five people would clutter things up, or make for an awkwardly confusing experience, but each of the performers is given plenty of opportunities to make with the yuks without stepping all over the others' lines, and none of them seriously obstruct the view of the movie. Rather a shame, really, because Doomsday Machine has sucking written all over it: a space voyage to Venus finds half of its male crew replaced by women, presumably because spies found out that the Chinese have created a doomsday machine that will destroy the Earth, and someone kindly considered the possibility of jump-starting the human race on Venus. So the co-ed crew boards their absurdly roomy spaceship and takes off, but of course everything goes wrong in an appallingly unentertaining manner. Featuring Bobby Van as one of the astronauts, and of all people Casey Kasem at NASA mission control (Casey: "Ground control to Astra -- everything is A-OK from here!" J. Elvis: "Now here's Steely Dan!"), Doomsday Machine makes far too much use of space program stock footage, and eviscerates the very notion of science fiction as a plausible cinematic genre; how any of these people had the stomach to go through with this tripe after Kubrick's 2001 is a mystery that may never be solved. But why ponder the mystery when we can just sit back and let Cinematic Titanic make mincemeat out of it instead? Kudos to Joel Hodgson and his co-horts for returning to active duty and make awful movies fun again. These folks put the "FU" in "awful".
West Anthony
Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Directed by Dave Filoni
Warner Bros., 2008
When we were kids, we made our own popsicles by pouring Hawaiian Punch into an ice cube tray, covering the tray with Saran Wrap and poking toothpicks through the Saran Wrap to use as popsicle handles; back and forth we paced in the kitchen, until we tore open the freezer door and enjoyed a cool and refreshing Hawaiian Punch popsicle. Of course, it was only a matter of time before you sucked all the flavor out of it, until all you had left was an ice cube with a toothpick sticking out of it.
And THAT'S what this picture is. Star Wars used to mean something special; now The Clone Wars is the sucked-on, flavorless ice cube that George Lucas is handing us, and we're supposed to act like it's manna from heaven. Having at long last dispensed with human beings altogether, the completely computer-animated Clone Wars tells the story of what happened between episodes two and three of the Star Wars saga. (Not that we asked.) So there's Anakin Skywalker, and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Count Dooku, and the droids, and there's a lot of anonymous fighting and space battles and whatnot, and a scheme to kill the son of Jabba the Hutt and pin it on the Jedi, and what's the point? There isn't one frame of this frippery that is in any way resonant or involving. And there's something vaguely creepy about the portrayal of Jabba's inexplicably fey, lisping, Southern-accented uncle, Ziro (they might as well have called him Truman Capote the Hutt). This so-called movie is supposed to pave the way for a TV series, but I don't know how they're going to squeeze an entire season of shows out of The Clone Wars -- there's more going on in Grand Theft Auto than there is in this dud. What the hell's the matter with George Lucas anyway? What is he doing? It's not like he needs any more money; if he has anything more to say through Star Wars, I can't hear it. First Indiana Jones, now this -- Lucas' Hawaiian Punch well has officially run dry.
West Anthony
The X-Files: I Want To Believe
Directed by Chris Carter
20th Century Fox, 2008
After the X-Files TV series went off the air in 2002, I was so disappointed in the way the show's creators wrapped up nothing, answered no questions and solved no mysteries, I promptly turned my back on it and went on with my life. (The unsatisfying conclusion to the series was the sole reason for my decision never to watch the current series Lost... just in case they wind up pulling the same crap, which, from what I've heard, seems increasingly likely.) My bitterness has since subsided, so I assure you that I am being completely objective when I tell you that The X-Files: I Want To Believe is a surprisingly mediocre film, so listless, uninvolving and devoid of genuine cinematic aspirations that it plays as little more than an elongated version of one of the series' lesser episodes. After six years, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson finally reunite as FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, respectively, to take on a case involving Russians, kidnapping, and a disgraced former Catholic priest having psychic vision thingies. Joining the duo is another pair of feds played by Amanda Peet and rapper Xzibit, and while I didn't mind Peet as much as I usually do, somebody made an enormous mistake casting Xzibit, who is about as plausible an FBI agent as I am a rapper (that's entirely implausible, by the way); Mos Def is the finest actor in the hip hop community by a wide margin -- if that's the vibe they were going for, couldn't they afford him? As the psychic ex-priest, Billy Connolly is called upon to do little more than be very quiet and sad and vaguely mysterious, which didn't seem to be a big problem for him, but it wasn't very compelling for the rest of us. Perhaps because co-writer/director (and series creator) Chris Carter wanted to ease everyone back into his world gently, the movie is devoid of the series "mythology" -- apart from a couple of oblique references here and there, we don't even get so much as a cameo appearance from the Lone Gunmen -- but by stripping away so much of the off-kilter flavor of the show, I Want To Believe appears not much different from any of a dozen recent law-enforcement thrillers. Where it all winds up should give viewers a big-time case of The Willies, but even the big reveal fails to impress (the picture's PG-13 rating is a real liability in this regard). I don't know if I Want To Believe is meant to lay the foundation for more and bigger X-Files movies, but if the lackluster results of this one are any indication, I believe they should quit while they're ahead.
West Anthony
Mamma Mia!
Directed by Phyllida Lloyd
Universal, 2008
THIS was a hit Broadway musical? A bunch of goddamn Abba songs that infect your brain like a singing Ebola virus, draped haphazardly over an emaciated plot, performed by a cast of actors who have apparently had the word "shameless" wiped from their brains like the Manchurian Candidate, and helmed by someone who has never directed a big-screen movie before, and had bloody well better not try it ever again... if there is a movie theatre in hell, Mamma Mia! will be playing there round the clock. (Get ready, Dick Cheney.) Meryl Streep slums it in a big way as Donna, a free spirit type running a dilapidated hotel on a Greek island; Amanda Seyfried, the adorable co-star of HBO's Big Love, is Sophie, Donna's daughter, who has invited her three potential fathers to her impending nuptials. (I did mention Donna was a free spirit, right? Well, it don't get much freer than that, kids.) The three dads are played, with varying degrees of unwatchability, by Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard; complimenting this inept trio is Donna and her two gal pals, played with substantial volume by Christine Baranski and Julie Walters. Now, all of these people are called upon at one time or another to sing a goddamn Abba song, and this only makes the experience of watching the film worse; the womenfolk more or less acquit themselves capably without leaving excessively deep scars, but the men... oh, the men. Why did any of them sign on for this travesty? Firth looks lost in some private torment, and should probably stay there; Skarsgard, the best actor of the three, comes closest to retaining his dignity -- but not close enough; and Pierce Brosnan just comes across as a complete jackass, singing what is required of him as though he were having a knees-up down the pub instead of performing in a multi-million-dollar Hollywood musical. (Really, in keeping with the hyper-cheesiness of the whole project, shouldn't they have cast David Hasselhoff instead?) Everyone performs as though nobody told them cameras were running -- loud, shrill, hyperactive and shallow. But ultimately, the blame for this turkey must be laid upon alleged director Phyllida Lloyd: maybe this crap passes for quality on the Great White Way, but when it comes to filmmaking, Lloyd has NO timing, NO idea where to put the camera or who to follow when it's turned on, and NO familiarity with the concept of editing. I don't even know if there was any way that a capable director could have made Mamma Mia! any better, but it certainly couldn't have hurt. The whole trend of taking a musical artist's catalogue and vomiting it onto the Broadway stage never sounded like a good idea to me -- and never will until Roky Erickson gets his own musical -- but I had no idea it was going to be this lousy. I didn't want to even HEAR "Dancing Queen" ever again, much less see a trio of middle-aged women singing it in glam-rock outfits. See that girl. Watch that scene. Kiss my ass.
West Anthony
The Dark Knight
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Warner Bros., 2008
"I've been thinking lately... About you... about me. About what's going to happen to us, in the end. We're going to kill each other, aren't we?"
-- Batman, The Killing Joke (DC Comics, 1988)
"Why so serious?"
-- The Joker, The Dark Knight
Perhaps it's better not to think about it.
For many people, the Adam West TV-show version of Batman is still a beloved figure, and the accepted notion of what the character should be -- a silly, kitschy joke of a superhero that was never meant to be taken seriously. But dig a little deeper, to the origins of Batman as originally created by Bob Kane so many years ago, and kitsch is pummeled into the ground with a cartoon "ka-pow": a young boy stands helplessly as his parents are brutally murdered by a cheap hood with little more ambition than snatching the money from your pocket. Gunshots ring out in a darkened alley; in an instant, the boy's mother and father are dead on the ground before him. As the boy grows to manhood, tormented by guilt, and consumed by an unquenchable thirst for vengeance, he undertakes the only course of action he can conceive: using his inherited fortune to develop sophisticated weaponry and advanced forensic technology, training his mind and body until they are at the peak of their capabilities, he will dress up as an enormous bat, stalk the darkened streets of Gotham City, and beat the holy living crap out of evildoers large and small.
It doesn't get better. When he's not the rampaging vigilante, he's gadding about town as a billionaire playboy, an inconsequential wastrel senselessly squandering a fine family fortune on sports cars, supermodels, and all the yachts he can eat. But it's all a cheerless facade: like one of the character's more obvious antecedents -- the masked avenger Zorro, whose alter-ego, foppish dandy Don Diego de la Vega, threw suspicious minds off the trail -- the jet-setting jerkoff persona is just an act, a mask he wears so no one will suspect him of being the guy who... well, wears The Mask. It has been pointed out that while other superheroes wear costumes to hide their normal identities, Superman is different because normal-guy Clark Kent is the costume, but Superman himself -- a/k/a Kal-El from the planet Krypton -- is the real person. But the guy we're dealing with here is, I believe, another matter altogether... for if the playboy-by-day is a mask, and the crimefighter-by-night is a mask... then where's the real guy?
As I said, maybe it's better not to dwell on it. But if you do -- if you stop to consider, however briefly, just how this fellow has chosen to work through his psychological trauma, and how he has chosen to use his considerable wealth to benefit society -- there is but one conclusion to draw: Bruce Wayne is one supremely fucked-up man.
It was perhaps inevitable that none of this would be found in the mid-60's television series, in an era of such alleged entertainment as F Troop and That Girl, where The Prisoner was about as far-out as the medium got (which, come to think of it, is still pretty darn far-out). So most of us from a certain generation grew up thinking of the Caped Crusader as a vaguely self-serious dude who had a questionable relationship with his sidekick, who danced the Batusi and climbed buildings occupied by Sammy Davis Jr. and Dick Clark. Frank Miller brought Batman, in effect, out of the light and back into the shadows with his seminal 1986 graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns; that same year, Alan Moore exploded the traditional notions of the superhero mythos with his visionary masterpiece Watchmen, and in 1988 furthered the Caped Crusader's restoration by creating The Killing Joke, a stand-alone tale that is generally regarded as the best Batman/Joker story ever told. This paved the way for Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, which took a decidedly darker approach to the legend, but was nevertheless infused with a warped sense of humor; still, it didn't spit on the Dark Knight like the TV series did, so a franchise was born, and was followed by many a faithful fanboy, until director Joel Schumacher effectively shifted the movies directly from fourth gear to first and blew the transmission all over the Hollywood Freeway with his schlocky Batman Forever (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997).
And there Batman remained, until Christopher Nolan (Memento, the American adaptation of Erik Skjoldbjaerg's Insomnia) brought forth a genuinely black, brooding, neo-noir reboot in Batman Begins. With this 2005 film, Nolan and actor Christian Bale created cinema's most authentic version of Gotham City's exterminating angel, but as good as that picture was, it is now clear that they were merely laying the foundation for The Dark Knight, a picture superior to that first effort, a magnificent and astonishing exploration of the Batman/Joker relationship, and the boldest and most subversive action movie of the year. As the story picks up fairly closely to where the last one left off (Cillian Murphy returns in a brief appearance as Scarecrow), Batman now finds that his intentions -- frighten the criminal element, inspire the citizenry to take back their city -- are having unexpected consequences: he's inspired the citizenry, all right, but half of them are inspired to call for his head, and the other half are inspired to dress up as copycats (copybats?) and play vigilante themselves, with questionable results. But although Batman has severely damaged the organized crime apparatus in Gotham, a new and far more menacing threat has waltzed into town with a smile on his face and a song in his heart: The Joker.
I feel confident in saying that most of you have seen and enjoyed Jack Nicholson's take on The Joker in Tim Burton's film, as I did. Forget him -- those days are over. The character is now completely owned and operated by the late Heath Ledger, in a performance of fearless daring and hypnotic malevolence, two parts Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, two parts Alex in A Clockwork Orange, and a shot of Richard III, flicking his tongue like a reptile and speaking in a greasy, mocking voice that sounds vaguely like a cross between David Lynch and Cliff Robertson's ventriloquist dummy in that Twilight Zone episode where the dummy takes over the man. Which is entirely appropriate, for The Joker has come to take over Gotham City, only to grind it into dust; his is no criminal mastermind's scheme, no lust for power and glory, no hundred-year occupation or new world order -- his only goal is to destroy everything we hold dear, for no other reason than because everything was there, and we were holding it, and it looked destructible. Ledger's Joker is our fear of terrorism visited upon us in its worst possible manifestation; people fear terrorists because they don't want to be killed, while governments fear terrorists because -- and governments really don't want you to consider this -- if the terrorist can keep it up long enough, eventually he will get what he wants. But what if the terrorist wants nothing? What if his goal is neither reform, nor revolution, nor even anarchy, but pure grade-A nihilistic ruin? Organized crime was a tough enough nut for Batman to crack, but at least it was organized; The Joker is a nut of a different color.
Of course, our Caped Crusader has his helpful backup: Lt. Gordon (Gary Oldman) is still trying to keep the streets safe through the usual channels while keeping his police brethren off Batman's caped back; wily scientist Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) is still handy with the gadgets and armor; and Michael Caine wryly continues to hold fast to what's left of Bruce Wayne's tenuous humanity as his devoted manservant Alfred. This winning ensemble is joined by Maggie Gyllenhaal, taking over the role of Rachel Dawes from non-entity Katie Holmes; and Aaron Eckhart as new district attorney Harvey Dent, who, as many Batman aficionados are aware, has an unpleasant destiny all his own. (Let me point out now that while there is already much in The Dark Knight to discourage parents from bringing young children, even I was unprepared for the unsettling extent of Dent's metamorphosis; if I haven't made things clear enough for you by now, dig it -- this ain't your father's Batman.) Nolan, who also co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Jonathan, makes plenty of room for all of these actors to excel -- perhaps not such a big accomplishment, given the picture's 2 1/2 hour running time -- but the project belongs to Bale and Ledger, and it is to their credit that neither is able to entirely upstage the other. Which makes perfect sense, for one of the subtexts of The Dark Knight, hinted at throughout the character's mythology but more explicitly borrowed by the Brothers Nolan from Alan Moore's Killing Joke for this movie, is that Batman and The Joker are two sides of the same coin, not so much a Yin and Yang -- for that would make them opposites -- as a Fat Man and Little Boy, a pair of monstrous creations devised for similarly ghastly purposes. Both are, according to the letter of the law, criminals; both clearly have troubled pasts, although The Joker's is unclear in the movie (he tells a gangster the story of how he obtained the scars on his face, yet later he tells Rachel a completely different story -- as he put it in The Killing Joke, "If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!"); both seem to have no qualms whatsoever with the destruction of public property, although that's kind of standard operating procedure for the superhero set; and both appear prepared to go to unreasonable lengths to accomplish their goals. When The Joker tells Batman "You complete me", it's more than an ironic bitch-slap to Jerry Maguire -- he's telling our hero more than perhaps any of us want to know. And in the film's climactic showdown, it is significant that The Joker's retribution at the hands of Batman does not appear fatal; could it be that the Dark Knight has not merely an understanding, but a compassion for his foe, despite the obvious truth that in an already irrational world upon which we are desperately struggling to impose order (with increasingly unsuccessful results), such an unrepentantly chaotic individual such as The Joker could never be allowed to draw breath?
And yet somehow, in the end, it is The Joker who wins. Through a series of cataclysmic events, lives near and dear have been taken, law enforcement has suffered brutal setbacks, Gotham's health-care system has been dealt a severe blow, heroes are tarnished and fallen, and Batman is on the ropes. It is frankly unclear how Nolan and company are going to pull him out of this downward spiral in the next installment (and with the passing of Heath Ledger, there's no telling if they'll bring The Joker back for an encore); but considering how far they were willing to take Batman this time round, it may be more appropriate to ask if they're going to pull him out. What The Dark Knight suggests is that, while every era gets the heroes it deserves, maybe the hero this era deserves is not a hero at all, but some kind of monster that we must let loose among us, until it has served its terrible purpose... and then must be destroyed. And if that is the case, then Bruce Wayne is doomed as doomed can be, for if you take away the crimefighting mask, and you look under the billionaire playboy mask, I suspect that all you've really got is a little boy in a darkened alley. Serious, indeed.
West Anthony
The Love Guru
Directed by Marco Schnabel
Paramount, 2008
The curious thing about The Love Guru isn't that it turned out to be a great movie; somehow, I knew that it would not. And it's not that it turned out to be a gargantuan atrocity of a movie, although I had heard that it was, from several people. No, the curious thing about The Love Guru is that it didn't turn out to be a movie at all. It felt in no way, shape or form like any recognizable cinematic experience. It did not move me toward love or hate, toward laughter or tears, it neither attracted nor repulsed me -- it was just something on a wall that I looked at for 90 minutes, like one of those pictures that, if you stare at it long enough, is supposed to turn into something else, but this picture never turned into anything. Mike Myers, who was never as funny as he clearly thinks he is, stars as the titular hero Guru Pitka, a self-help huckster who greets people with the words "Mariska Hargitay". (I didn't think it was funny, either, and I actually get it. Look it up if you don't.) The diaphanous wisp of a plot involves Pitka trying to reunite a hockey player with his estranged wife at the behest of the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, who is rather improbably played by empty-headed non-entity Jessica Alba. (Seriously, how does this dame keep getting work?) Verne Troyer, aka "Mini-Me" of the desiccated Austin Powers franchise, sails well past his fifteen minutes of fame as the Maple Leafs coach, which also isn't funny, and Justin Timberlake plays a French-Canadian goalie with an accent slightly more ludicrous than Laurence Olivier's in 49th Parallel, but not nearly as entertaining. (And that is the first, last and only time Justin Timberlake will ever be compared to Laurence Olivier. My place in history is now secure.) Filling up the remaining 89 minutes of this movie are dick jokes, urine jokes, dick jokes, midget jokes, dick jokes, elephant sex jokes, dick jokes and a distinct absence of laughter and entertainment. The only person who appears to be having a good time through this chore is Myers, who obviously fancies himself the second coming of Peter Sellers, but is sorely lacking Sellers' supernatural ability to completely erase himself from the characters he played; Sellers never let the seams show, while Myers comes across as little more than a pre-adolescent showoff playing dress-up. And Peter Sellers had the distinct advantage of being genuinely, hysterically funny -- all Myers can do is laugh at his own feeble jokes to clue you in on what you're supposed to be doing. It doesn't work. Judging from The Love Guru -- to say nothing of the last couple of Austin Powers craptaculars -- Mike Myers ought to return to Saturday Night Live from whence he came; he doesn't seem to have enough left in him for more than a five-minute sketch these days. Did I mention dick jokes?
West Anthony