All washboard abs, set jaws and steely eyes, the 300 Spartans of 300 come off like the toughest sumbitches ever. Which is fitting, because their historical counterparts probably were—and none more so than their king, Leonidas, who stood with them against the vastly larger Persian army in the Battle of Thermopylae, perhaps the most famous last stand in recorded history.
Leonidas is played by Scottish actor Gerard Butler. Butler’s accent sounds more tartan than Spartan, but with his bulked-up frame topped off by an authentic ancient Greek beard and helmet-head haircut, he looks like a statue of Heracles come to life. He’s the linchpin of the entire film, and after the bleach-blond unbelievability of Colin Farrell’s Alexander the Great and Brad Pitt’s Achilles, he’s impressively convincing.
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With Superman Returns, director Bryan Singer pulls off a super-rescue of his own: saving a 28-year-old film franchise from campy, crappy irrelevance.
The challenge was considerable. Superman may be the epitome of the comic-book superhero, but it’s always been the idea of Superman that has captivated people. Every realization of Superman—from DC Comics to television to film—has come up against the same problem: how do you make him interesting? With his godlike powers and goody-goody attitude, he’s somewhere between Christ and the guileless hero of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. He can sustain one great film (1978’s Superman), and maybe one good sequel (1980’s Superman II). But when the ideas run out, he ends up becoming the unwitting butt of the joke, a caricature of goodness forced to act as straight man to, say, Richard Pryor (in the wretched 1983 sequel, Superman III). And by 1987’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, when he’s being taunted by Jon Cryer while duking it out with a nuclear-powered adversary, all we’re left with is John Williams’ brilliant score to remind us of the original idea of Superman. So with this remake coming 20 years later, the question that comes to mind is, “Does the world still need Superman?”
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How many times have you seen someone on the news (or more often on Oprah) telling everyone to live for the moment? Maybe it’s a cancer survivor, or maybe someone who has narrowly escaped death at the hands of a disgruntled ex, but the message is always the same: they never realized how important life’s little moments were. Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain is like one of those people, except less sincere. As both a love story and a meditation on life and death, it’s a film full of intellectual ideas in search of an emotional heart.
The Fountain stars Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz as what appears to be the same couple in a triptych of stories spanning 1,000 years. The first story, which takes place in about the year 1500, is about a conquistador who goes to the New World to save Queen Isabella of Spain from a bloodthirsty inquisitor bent on overthrowing the monarchy. In the second story, a modern-day drug researcher discovers a miracle drug while trying to find a cure for his wife’s brain tumour before it kills her. The third story is a beautifully trippy but mystifying bit of futuristic weirdness in which Jackman’s shaven-headed spacefarer zooms toward a dying star in a bubble-ship just big enough for him and a gnarled old tree that may or may not contain Weisz’s dormant body. Mixed into a nonlinear narrative, these three stories have elements that seem to overlap (and they have endings that could be considered similar), but we’re never quite clear about why or how.
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If you wanted to grossly oversimplify what Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain is about, you could say it’s about two gay cowboys in a straight world. But once you’ve actually seen it, you won’t want to simplify it at all. One of the main reasons this is such a great film is that its love-story themes are as vast and as open as the wilderness settings where a lot of the story happens. To fixate on the film’s most obvious plot point—that the lovers are both men—is to miss the point entirely.
In fact, even calling the film “Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain” is too simple. Though some of its bigger themes of love, loss and regret in a too-rigid society are reminiscent of previous Lee films like Sense and Sensibility and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback owes its modern-Western authenticity and literary texture to a pair of Pulitzer-winning writers: Larry McMurtry, who co-wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Diana Ossana; and Annie Proulx, who wrote the original short story.
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Walk the Line opens in Folsom Penitentiary, where Johnny Cash recorded his best-selling 1968 live album in front of a rowdy crowd of hollering, foot-stomping inmates. It’s an appropriate beginning to the story of a man who—in this film at least—spent much of his early life in a prison of self-loathing caused by his older brother’s early death and his daddy’s disapproval.
Whatever personal demons may or may not have driven the Man in Black until his death September 12, 2003, one thing is clear in both this film and in Cash’s real life: June Carter was as much his salvation as the God that Cash praised in his gospel songs.
In a lot of ways, June Carter is also the salvation of this good-but-not-great movie. Played with verve and steel by Reese Witherspoon (who grew up in Nashville), she’s more interesting than Joaquin Phoenix’s Cash—something her real-life counterpart probably was too, despite the man’s towering persona.
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“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”
—Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”
It’s easy to see how Sin City earned its R rating. It’s a hell of a film—dark, violent, graphic, so hard-boiled it could crack concrete. It’s also one of the most visually accomplished comic-book adaptations ever made.
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Finding Neverland is a nice film about a nice little man who befriends a nice young widow and her nice family, and uses their relationship as the basis for a nice play that ends up succeeding, well, nicely. In fact, Finding Neverland is such a thoroughly nice film, saying anything not nice about it would only make me seem like one of those curmudgeonly critics who hates everything.
The nice little man in question is James Matthew Barrie, and the play he wrote is Peter Pan. The film is set in London in 1904, just as Barrie (Johnny Depp, ripping off the mild Scottish accent Robin Williams used in Mrs. Doubtfire) begins his famous relationship with Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet) and her children (played by a gaggle of Brit brats with charmingly cute accents). Barrie is just coming off a poorly received play, to the displeasure of his producer (Dustin Hoffman, on hand mainly because he played the title role in Steven Spielberg’s Peter Pan-inspired Hook).
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Take the 1995 hit Jumanji, launch it into outer space, and you’ve got Zathura. Well, almost.
The premises of the two films are very, very similar. Kids get left alone in big house, kids find old board game stashed away, kids play board game, all hell breaks loose when the game spills over into reality. But in this case, it’s not the perils of darkest Africa the kids unleash on themselves; it’s the perils of darkest space. Meteor showers! Aliens! Stranded astronauts! Ruined furniture! As you might expect, the film also sneaks in some of the perils of sibling rivalry. And even more than superior special effects, the superior handling of the relationship between the kids is what distinguishes Zathura from its ten-year-old predecessor.
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Stephen Sommers, the writer-director who inflicted The Mummy Returns on us in 2001, has evidently decided that hacking a single classic monster movie to pieces isn’t enough. In Van Helsing, Sommers offers up an “homage” to all three of Universal’s canonical creature features: Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolf Man. The result is like Frankenstein’s monster in a china shop.
In fact, any resemblance to the Universal films is strictly limited to the black-and-white opening sequence, in which Frankenstein brings his creation to life while angry villagers storm his castle. Oh, there are plenty of other allusions thrown in haphazardly throughout the film—including The Wolf Man’s oft-quoted “wolfsbane” poem—but they stand out so glaringly as allusions that their only purpose is to give horror hipsters something to alleviate the boredom every now and then.
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Have you ever seen a movie, and forgotten that you’ve seen it within hours of leaving the theatre? That’s what happened to me after seeing The Forgotten. I’m not saying it’s a bad movie (although I’m not saying it’s a particularly good one, either); I’m just saying that there isn’t much memorable about it. It’s like a name you forget moments after hearing it, or a phone number you constantly have to re-check. It just won’t stick in your mind.
Things have a way of not sticking in people’s minds in the film. Julianne Moore plays Telly Paretta, a mother who still can’t get over her young son’s death in a plane crash 14 months earlier. What’s strange about the situation isn’t that she’s been grieving for so long; it’s that everyone around her—including her therapist (Gary Sinise) and even her husband (Anthony Edwards)—keeps insisting that she never had a son.
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