But as one of our founders is a Shakespeare nut I thought this might be of some interest to at least one of our readers.

Two Gentlemen of Lewbowski

Check out his ascension from a lowly driver all the way up to the Big Guy Upstairs.
(Questionable ladder though… shouldn’t a driver rank higher than an inmate?)

Whether you agree with it or not, it’s definitely worth the read!

You can click here to see it on his site or I’ll post it below the break for those too lazy to click a link.

How Twilight Works

A few weeks ago I had the miserable experience of reading Twilight. A friend bought it for me and I took it with me to read on a long flight from Seattle to Houston. I knew it was going to be crappy, but I thought it would be a guilty pleasure kind of crappy – where you know it’s bad but you still get enjoyment out of it. I actually managed to power through around 400 pages until I gave up and started reading Sky Mall. I’ve been seeing Twilight everywhere lately, especially with Vampire Teens II New Moon’s release, so I thought I’d break down why chicks go apeshit for it.

First off, the author creates a main character which is an empty shell. Her appearance isn’t described in detail; that way, any female can slip into it and easily fantasize about being this person. I read 400 pages of that book and barely had any idea of what the main character looked like; as far as I was concerned she was a giant Lego brick. Appearance aside, her personality is portrayed as insecure, fumbling, and awkward – a combination anyone who ever went through puberty can relate to. By creating this “empty shell,” the character becomes less of a person and more of something a female reader can put on and wear. Because I forgot her name (I think it was Barbara or Brando or something like that), I’m going to refer to her as “Pants” from here on out.

So after a few chapters of listening to Pants whine about high school, sucking at volleyball, and being the center of attention, the second major character is introduced. Imagine everything women want in a man, then exaggerate it by ten thousand – and you’ve got Edward Cullen. The level of detail that the author goes into while describing Edward’s appearance is remarkable. At one point while reading I started counting the number of times the author used the expression “Edward’s perfect face,” and it was far into the double digits. The author excruciatingly details his muscular pecs, clothing, hair, eye color – even his goddamn breath (I’m not joking).

Edward intensely listens to everything Pants has to say, even if she’s bitching about she had diarrhea on Christmas or her preferred method for cutting a sandwich in half. As far as the reader is concerned, Edward cares about nothing in the world more than Pants. What the author has done is created a perfect male figure – a pale Greek statue which the reader can worship and in turn be worshipped by.

So what about men that like Twilight?
If you’re male and you like Twilight, you’re gay. I don’t mean that in the derogatory sense, I mean it in the “you want to put your testicles against another man’s testicles while gripping handfuls of chesthair” kind of way.

And the movie?
The movie is just the same uninspired crap shat out onto a film reel. If you like the taste of horse manure on your bologna sandwiches, you’re probably gonna like it on your birthday cake as well. The same principle applies with Twilight.

Beyond that, it’s just a romance novel with the occasional vampire teen drama bullshit peppered here and there. It doesn’t really break any new ground in the realm of vampire fiction, other than portraying vampires as a family of uncomfortable retards who prance around the woods eating deer and bunny rabbits. There’s lots of nervous lip-biting, tender kisses between Pants and Edward, and lengthy descriptions of every feature of Edward’s body. Pants is a static character who never really progresses beyond being an insecure vampire fangirl who obsesses over Edward. Whether her character grows beyond that is unknown to me, I’d stopped reading by then and shifted my attention to an electric butt-massaging chair in Sky Mall.

First up (due February 12) is Chris Columbus’s Percy Jackson & the Olympians: Lightning Thief, based on the first in Rick Riordan’s series of children’s books about a 12-year-old demigod. Then on March 26, Incredible Hulk director Louis Leterrier takes on Clash of the Titans, a remake of the 1981 mythfest with Sam Worthington stepping into Harry Hamlin’s sandals as Perseus and computer-generated giant scorpions filling in for Ray Harryhausen’s unmistakable stop-motion versions.

The question is, can box-office lightning strike twice in less than two months? There are some serious names in the Clash cast, but my money’s on Percy over Perseus. Harry Potter meets the gods and monsters of Greek mythology? You don’t need the pitch meeting to know that’s an irresistible idea.

Please let me know when you will allow me to return to you.

I miss you.  I hope you miss me too.

Sincerely yours,
Your Dignity.

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.

Because the film is based on history, we get the backstory mainly through bits narrated to us by the same character who will eventually narrate it to the rest of Sparta. But because the film is also based on a graphic novel by comic-book auteur Frank Miller, historical accuracy is hardly the point. This film isn’t aiming for documentary realism; it’s aiming for Miller’s particular brand of pulpy fanboy fantasy, and it hits that mark as accurately as a Spartan-thrown spear. In Miller’s hands, the story becomes a mythologized Homeric version of Herodotus’s historical account. Our 300 heroes aren’t up against mere men: the Persian elite unit known as the Immortals are more like monsters. As if that weren’t enough, the Persian ruler Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is an eight-foot-tall demigod decked out in sharp fingernails and head-to-toe gold jewelry. It’s the kind of thing the ancient Greeks would have appreciated.

The film’s other influences are clear—Miller’s graphic novel was inspired by the 1962 film The 300 Spartans, and the writers borrow from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator to deepen Leonidas’s relationship with his wife, Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey)—but the computer-generated visuals take the sword-and-sandal epic to new heights of bronze-toned glossiness. Like Robert Rodriguez did in his brilliant 2005 adaptation of Miller’s Sin City, director and co-writer Zack Snyder draws storyboards and dialogue directly from the graphic novel. Unlike Rodriguez, however, Snyder doesn’t pull off a seamless integration of Miller’s distinctive artwork into the moving medium. When it’s not in Matrix-style battle scene mode, the film is less like a motion picture than a graphic novel writ large, a series of stunning images suitable for freeze-framing on wall-mounted widescreens.

But when it is in motion, 300 is a hypnotic dance of blood-spattering ultraviolence as the disciplined Spartan phalanx impales and amputates its way through wave after wave of Persians. The bodies literally pile up; in one scene, the Spartans use them as “mortar” in the wall they’ve rebuilt to keep the Persians bottlenecked. Speaking of “hypnotic dance,” there’s also a scene in which an all-but-naked female oracle does a spasmodic back-arching number, presumably to help her predict the battle’s outcome. There’s also a steamy interlude between Leonidas and Gorgo in which bums and breasts figure prominently. (In Miller’s world, the only thing harder than the men are the women’s nipples.) When sex and death are this brazenly stylized, it’s hard to decide which is sexier.

***~ (3/4)

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?”

Singer, who showed with the first two X-Men films how well comic-book characters can be adapted to the screen, solves this super-problem in three ways.

First, he turns the question of whether we need Superman into a question of whether Superman needs us. The film begins by telling us that Superman (Brandon Routh, who manages to make Superman his own while delivering a pure Christopher Reeve homage as Clark Kent) has been gone for five years, searching for survivors of his alien race after Earth astronomers discover what remains of his exploded planet, Krypton. We later learn that Superman took off for home without bothering to say goodbye to his sometime girlfriend, Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth). He also left without showing up in court to testify against his nemesis, Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey). These uncharacteristic oversights both matter to the story, but they’re more important as a way of giving Superman a sorely needed enigmatic side.

Second, Singer gets the whole unnecessary-remake issue out in the open. In fact, he and co-writers Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris turn it into a major theme in the film. In Superman’s absence, Lois wrote a Pulitzer-winning editorial entitled “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman.” Not only has she gotten over the Man of Steel; she’s also shacked up with another man (James Marsden, who played Cyclops in the X-Men films), and she has a young son who may or may not be Superman’s.

What happens to that damaged relationship between Superman and Lois after he returns dictates the film’s soft, understated tone. Slow-paced and deliberate in its allusions to both Christian and ancient Greek mythology, this is not a film for those expecting a slam-bang effects extravaganza. There are some great action sequences—especially the rescue of a crashing airplane that announces Superman’s return to the world—but the emphasis here is more on who Superman is than on what he does. (That said, watching a bullet bounce off Superman’s eyeball has got to be about the coolest thing you’ll see in an action flick this year.)

The third thing Singer does right is Lex Luthor. The misguided dame (Parker Posey) is still with him, but the oafish sidekick Otis is thankfully gone. Due respect to Gene Hackman, but does anyone do callous, offhanded evil better than Kevin Spacey? This Luthor finally has the murderous menace to go with his diabolically ambitious scheme—in this case, a Promethean plan to use Kryptonian technology to build himself a new continent and kill a few billion people in the offing. That kind of villainy makes Superman as needed in his world as he is, still, to everyone in our world who ever dreamed a man could fly.

***~ (3/4)

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.

So what’s the deal? Is this pair of star-crossed lovers immortal? Are they reincarnated? Is the whole thing a messed-up dream Jackman’s character is having? There are some cryptic clues seeded throughout the film: an unfinished book that modern-day Weisz is writing; an ancient Mayan myth about where people go when they die; and a tree that may hold the secret of eternal life. But these clues are ambiguous; this is not a film for people who like their movie meanings served up plain (and that includes anyone who goes in thinking the film is sci-fi). Aronofsky want us to do the intellectual heavy lifting.

Unfortunately, that intelligence works against the film’s one obvious point. Aronofsky, whose previous two films (1998’s Pi and 2000’s Requiem for a Dream) also combined moments of powerful intensity with moments of incomprehensible strangeness, is a strong technical director, and clearly a guy who lives in his head a lot of the time. The ideas driving this film are big ones, and a certain scene is repeated enough for us to get the drift that it has something to do with living in the moment instead of obsessing about the past or the future. But thinking about living in the moment is not living in the moment—and that’s the problem with the film.

Jackman and Weisz both give impressive performances (and both spend a fair amount of time with tears in their eyes). They don’t have the kind of chemistry that starts Hollywood rumours, but chemistry isn’t the issue here. There’s a sterility to the proceedings, a clinical distance even in the super-extreme close-ups of the peach fuzz on Weisz’s skin responding to Jackman’s touch. The Fountain is ultimately a love story we observe objectively, without emotion. It’s all head and no heart, a film that shows us a lot of brilliantly photographed moments but never finds the life in them. At least when those grateful people on TV say it’s best to live every moment, you know they mean it.

**½~ (2.5/4)

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.

Actually, the basic plot is pretty simple. In 1963, two young ranch hands in Wyoming get hired to mind a herd of sheep for a summer. Alone together on the titular mountain, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) alternate roles: one spends nights on the mountain with the sheep, while the other cooks and maintains their camp. One night they get drunk, too drunk for either of them to ride back to the sheep, and the cold forces them to share their small tent.

That first, violently passionate sexual encounter sets the tone for the ambiguities that define both the central relationship between Ennis and Jack, and the film as a whole. (”You know, I ain’t queer,” Ennis tells Jack the next morning. “Me neither,” Jack replies.) Eventually, their relationship spans decades. Both men lead the “normal” life expected of them, complete with wife and kids. But as often as they can, they use the guise of fishing trips to escape back to literal and figurative nature.

But like much of Ennis’s stoic, man-of-few-words personality, his physical unavailability leaves Jack wanting more. Where Jack is the dreamer who can imagine a life for the two of them despite everything, Ennis is the earthbound realist whose daddy once made damn sure Ennis knew what can happen to ranchers who shack up together.

That vital difference is clear enough in the characters’ dialogue, but the actors lend it a whole other level of depth. That’s especially true of Heath Ledger. He looks and sounds exactly like the kind of fellow you’d expect to find herding sheep in Wyoming (or for that matter, raising cattle in Fort Macleod, Alberta, where the film was actually shot). Squinty-eyed and tight-lipped, he mumbles half his lines and grunts the other half—and I mean that with the awestruck respect of someone who has just seen the guy from A Knight’s Tale deliver a portrayal that is better than Oscar-worthy. (None of this is to detract from Jake Gyllenhaal; it’s doubtful that Ledger’s Ennis would have been as effective without Gyllenhaal’s wide-eyed, idealistic Jack as a counterpoint.)

It falls to Ledger to utter the film’s cryptic but crucial final line. I won’t tell you what that line is (you already know if you’ve read the short story), but I will say that it makes for an ending as perfect as it is profoundly tragic. This film is one of the rare ones. It will hit you hard, then quietly haunt your mind for days. See it. You’ll love it, I swear.

**** (4/4)

Walk the Line

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.

Nevertheless, that indelible but somehow elusive persona is the point here, and Phoenix never quite captures it. Reportedly hand-picked by Cash himself, the actor gives an admirably earnest and hard-working performance (he and Witherspoon even learned to sing and play the instruments they use in the performance scenes), but it only hits perfect pitch during the Folsom scenes. His “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash” sounds authentic, but it never really feels authentic. (In fact, the 30 seconds or so that Shooter Jennings appears onscreen playing his old man Waylon might make you want to watch that biopic instead.)

Phoenix doesn’t get much help from director and co-writer James Mangold, whose standard-issue biopic plot is more about toeing the line than walking it. See Johnny nearly blow his Sun Records audition until he plays his own stuff instead of recycled gospel! See Johnny get turned on to speed by Elvis! See Johnny self-destruct at the Grand Ole Opry! Mangold could just as easily have given us these well-documented talking points in a VH1 Behind the Music special.

Come to think of it, maybe what makes Walk the Line fall short of greatness is the same problem that plagues most biopics about musicians. Maybe it isn’t the actors or the filmmakers; maybe it’s the musicians. It seems that no matter how singular the personality—Ray Charles and Jim Morrison have also been well and famously portrayed—the life story inevitably descends into the rock-star clichés of sex, drug addiction, failed marriages and burnout. Cash the musician was undeniably great, but his music itself will always be the finest testimonial to that greatness. As for Cash the man, well, maybe it’s not this film that’s a tad generic; maybe it’s the subject.

***~ (3/4)