Occam's Razor

For Trekkies waiting to satisfy their craving for the latest incarnation of Star Trek it’s been four nail biting years. It’s been crazy long. It took longer to produce a sequel to the last movie than it took for the whole original Star Trek series to run on television! It’s infuriating. Can’t director J.J. Abrams put out a new episode at least every year or two, like the Harry Potter franchise?

Abrams definitely has the magic touch when it comes to Star Trek, but it is torture to make fans wait four years between movies. Perhaps new movies will now come out at a faster rate. Since Star Trek, Abrams has become a hot commodity. He has been asked to direct the next series of Star Wars movies. Whether the director of the next Star Trek movie will have Abrams golden touch remains to be seen but perhaps we will at least get movies cranked out quicker. Fortunately, at least with Star Trek Into Darkness, Abrams delivers a fine sequel to the original movie, albeit way too late.

Trekkies are finicky lot. Delivering the goods in just the right dose is hard. You have to get the seasonings just right. There has to be plenty of action. There has to be plenty of character development even while the characters don’t really change that much. The characters have to mix it up just right and of course Spock has to be pulled from all sides. He sure has a demanding girlfriend. (Yes, he and Lieutenant Uhuru are an item now). Even when he is seconds away from being obliterated by an active volcano he has to worry whether he is sensitive enough to the communication officer’s feelings. There must be backstory. You got to work in Leonard Nimoy in there somewhere, at least while he is alive. He is making ancient look young, but at least one member of the original cast is still around. Scotty and Bones are gone, and William Shatner would no longer fit into the captain’s chair, at least not without significant widening and probably steel supports. And there must be plenty of violence, even though of course the Federation is all about peace and respecting the Prime Directive. Except, of course, this version of Captain James T. Kirk played by Chris Pine is just as bad about respecting the Prime Directive as the last one. That’s made clear in the first few minutes of the movie.

One of the curiosities about Star Trek is that despite all the 23^rd century technology, the plot has to pivot around actions by people, stuff only humans can do, like a good old fashioned fistfight. It may be the 23^rd century, but no one has developed a robot to go inside warp cores to realign them. What’s up with that, Scotty? The Enterprise, of course, has to get severely beat up otherwise what’s the point in spending all those millions on a blockbuster? Actors must do impossible physical acts and just in case seeing the Enterprise get all shot up isn’t enough special effects for you, why not lay waste to parts of London and San Francisco as well?

When you look at it objectively it’s all more than a little bit crazy but heck, this is entertainment! We need our fistfights and our petty interpersonal squabbles. We need Dr. McCoy to tell us he’s a doctor not a [fill in the blank]. We need Scotty to obsess about his engines. We also need candy for the longtime fans. Allude to Nurse Chapel. Reintroduce Carol Marcus (Alice Eve) who will probably eventually give Kirk an heir in this incarnation too. And reintroduce a classic Star Trek villain, Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch). Khan may have gone all British now but he is still evil. It’s unlikely Cumberbatch will ever be selling Chrysler Cordoba’s for extra cash. He’s too hot an actor right now to have time for commercials anyhow.

But what about the movie, Mark? Oh yeah, sorry about that! Star Trek Into Darkness gives us just the right blend of those special seasonings, proving Abrams hasn’t lost his touch with this franchise. If you have to wait four years between Star Trek movies, you had better get an A+ product, and Abrams delivers. It’s the actors though who really come through, losing none of their abilities to subsume themselves in their characters over four years. The special effects are all window dressing now anyhow. We’ve seen all these tricks before and they fail to impress. What really matters is the story. It is all fun, frenetic and gritty. The props and backdrops are mere window dressing. The franchise is pretty much how Gene Roddenberry envisioned it: a western shot in space. Khan is the bad guy, with elements of civil behavior. Kirk is the local marshal also with a few dents in his badge and his personality. It’s all entirely logical, as Spock would say, except of course it’s not that much. This is Star Trek and it’s far more about emotions and people interacting and tiffs and screaming and fistfights and heartfelt platonic love between Kirk and Spock than it is about a very coherent plot.

Regardless, you won’t care and you will be too entertained to be pissed that we get Khan appearing yet again in a Star Trek movie. Instead, you will be enjoying having Admiral Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) giving Kirk another slap down or watching Spock and Uhuru get in a tiff in a shuttle.

A few things though have changed. Uhuru is much more assertive and kick ass, particularly in this movie, than the modest miniskirted black wallflower that Nichele Nichols portrayed. Cumberbatch is terrific as Khan, even if he is British instead of Hispanic or Occidental. The U.S.S. Enterprise, however, seems doomed to keep getting shot through and blown up. But, like Sherlock Holmes, you can’t kill that spirit of Enterprise. And speaking of enterprise, this franchise continues to keep the profits of Paramount healthily in the black, with your pocket is picked clean by the $16 a person tickets to see it in IMAX. Ca-ching!

Well, at least you got your money’s worth!

3.4 on my four-point scale.

Rating:  

It’s been forty years since the long running British TV series Upstairs, Downstairs first débuted here in the USA on a rather new and largely unwatched network called PBS. Upstairs, Downstairs would do much to reverse PBS’s image, for it was a classy show with each episode feeling like a movie. For most of us Americans, the series was also a revelation in British culture, with lords and ladies living privileged and opulent lives while a working class of servants obsessively catered to their every need. Like Upstairs, Downstairs the British ITC series Downton Abbey also immerses the viewer in the world of English social class on a large Yorkshire estate in Edwardian England. Like Upstairs, Downstairs, it is a hard series not to like.

Beginning on the Downton Abbey estate shortly after the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, this series traces the life of the fictional Lord Grantham, his wife, his three daughters, his cranky mother the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith) and a crew of servants. Lord Grantham is of course just a title. His real name is Robert Crawley. With his well moneyed American wife Cora (Elizabeth McGovern) who provides the wealth to run the estate and their three daughters Mary, Edith and Sybil, Lord Grantham gets to live the surreal life of an English gentleman. You could not really count yourself a gentleman unless you were so filthy rich that you had nothing to do. It’s a world entirely of leisure and luxury and features being obsessively fussed over a devoted staff managed by the butler Charlie Carson (Jim Carter).

Late to the series as always, I have been playing catch up and have almost finished the first season, consisting of just seven episodes. At first it is hard to understand the appeal of the series. It doesn’t take much viewing though before you realize what the series really is: a fancy and elaborately staged soap opera. Because it deals with earls and ladies, buttoned down people, starched collars and fox hunts it is easy to forget that there is little substance to this series, other than to revel in its characters and the tensions between them. It looks way too fancy to be a soap opera, but that is its essence.

If life is a stage as Shakespeare wrote, Downton Abbey makes a great stage for character actors to strut their stuff. The real world does intrude from time to time on Downton Abbey, but mostly Downton Abbey exists to keep its family isolated from the real world, including that of its servants. It’s a world where your family dinner demands formal dress every night, where invitations arrive by mail on proper stationery and where gentlemen callers flirt politely with Lord Grantham’s daughters. Everyone has a role to play and no one more so than Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville). It’s a world where people have jobs that seem surreal and unnecessary. What exactly does a footman do? There is no equivalent here in the United States, but a footman’s job seems to be to keep his gentleman from ever having to lift his finger. It’s a world of suits, white gloves, stovepipe hats, gourmet dining and so much leisure that the Dowager Countess cannot tell weekdays from weekends.

The most interesting parts of Downton Abbey thus are mostly found in the kitchen, the back stoop where the staff smoke cigarettes and in the austere servants’ quarters. It too is a strange hierarchy, overseen by butler Charley Carson and Housekeeper Elsie Hughes (Phyllis Logan) and it too has its own strict peculiar social order. Footmen obsess over becoming valet someday, the valet hopes for butler, or even assistant butler. Housemaids aspire to be head housemaid and even an assistant cook someday aspires to be cook. It seems surreal, pointless and ultimately without value, but this is a world that Lord Grantham feels entirely devoted to preserving. To the extent that he works it is to make sure that Downton Abbey always has future generations of Crawleys to be obsessively catered to by an omnipresent staff.

In short, if you are a Lord or a Lady, Downton Abbey is kind of like heaven on earth except there is not much to do. You have staff to do the heavy lifting. They make sure the food is always great, the bed sheets are replaced every day, the fireplaces are well stoked, the chandeliers are immaculately dusted and you only have to lift a hand to have a footman refill your glass with wine.

And yet there is a price. The staff is stiff and surreal, at least until they are behind closed doors when the backbiting can begin in earnest. Lady Mary, the Earl’s eldest daughter, feels trapped in her comfortable web, doesn’t quite want to be there, but doesn’t know what else to do and sure doesn’t want some distant cousin who actually works for a living to inherit the estate. It’s a world where ladies must always be beautiful, chaste and well-mannered. It’s a world where a lady is not allowed to succumb to the charms of a roguish Turkish ambassador, but finds herself human enough to do so anyhow. It means being resentful when Lord Grantham’s army friend is appointed valet to the position long aspired to by one of the footmen.

Ultimately, interest in Downton Abbey is sustained purely from these tensions and conflicts, and it makes for a surprisingly entertaining time for us to observe it all. It is a fun show to watch, but also is an eye opening perspective to a period largely in our past. Living a lavish life made possible through unearned wealth seems so vapid and meaningless. Titles, dowries and inheritances ultimately sap a society of its creative energy. It’s not surprising then that at the end of World War II that Great Britain was bankrupt and its empire destroyed. It happened in part because families like the Crawleys were wasting their lives in unproductive pursuits upholding customs that deserved to die centuries earlier. In places like America this talent would be unleashed for more useful purposes.

It seems kind of nervy to take on a classic movie, however indirectly. Perhaps the seventy four years which have elapsed between the release of the classic movie The Wizard of Oz makes it easier to accept a new Oz movie. This is particularly so when the director Sam Raimi seems to be going out of his way to prove that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Imitation in this case means ensuring that all these scenes in Kansas are filmed in black and white but those in Oz are filmed in color. Some technology changes were made. While in Kansas the aspect ratio is a tight 4:3, in Oz we get wide screen color rich enough to be Technicolor, except the movie was shot digitally and made to look like Technicolor. Also this version can be seen in 3D at selected theaters.

The world of Oz is actually quite richly detailed, both in this movie but also in the original source material. L. Frank Baum wrote eighteen Oz books, although only one is widely read. Consequently there was plenty of source material for Raimi to work with in this movie, which is a prequel of sorts to the 1939 classic. It details how an ambitious but second-rate sideshow magician makes his way from a dusty carnival in Kansas to Oz, and sets himself up as the great and powerful wizard of the Emerald City.

Surprisingly, I found Oz the Great and Powerful to be quite satisfying, and generally a fitting prequel to the original movie. The original movie was frankly not quite as great a movie as it subsequently became. It never won Best Picture. The same is true with Oz the Great and Powerful. Both movies are at their hearts B movies, just done well enough so that you felt well entertained regardless. You sort of expect to find stereotypes as characters instead of flesh and blood people. That’s largely true in this version too. Oz, played by James Franco, has no particular depth but seems a genuinely nice and harmless guy, albeit a bit full of himself. He is a magician with ambition but mediocre talents. His act gets few customers but he does attract a new and comely assistant May (Abigail Spencer) and a third rate assistant (Zach Braff). He also feels he has to spurn the love of an old flame Annie (Michele Williams) to feed his nebulous ambitions. He ends up in a balloon when a wrestler with a grudge tries to beat him up and vertical escape seems his only option for escape from this hulk. The tempestuous weather foments a tornado and soon Oz and his balloon finds himself in a land with the same name. He is quickly accosted by the witch Evanora (Rachel Weisz) who proclaims him as the likely new wizard of Oz, a post sadly vacant since the passing of her father. Almost as quickly he helps a winged monkey escape from a tangled vine and a lion, and thus gets Finley the monkey (also played by Zach Braff) as a dutiful assistant for life.

The movie has a lot of ground to cover and it doesn’t waste any time moving quickly between plot points. As with the original movie, characters back in Kansas seem to have alter egos in Oz. Annie shows up as the good witch Glinda, Frank shows up as Finley and the pathetic girl in the wheelchair shows up as the China Doll. Both Finley and the China Doll quickly become characters that follow Oz around.

Sorting through the politics of Oz quickly becomes confusing, to both Oz and the viewer, but it quickly becomes clear that Oz is on Dorothy’s quest, and to establish himself as a wizard he is expected to kill the Wicked Witch of the West. I won’t spoil what suspense there is in this movie, except to note that not everyone is who they appear to be. Oz himself is uncomfortable in his role as savior, and quickly confesses to Finley that he is a fraud. The wicked witches, and there are more than one of them, quickly demonstrate their mojo by wreaking havoc on Oz, including the little village where they find the small China Doll and her broken legs, which Oz quickly repairs with glue that he keeps in his bag.

The characters are all pretty one dimensional, but they are all strangely memorable and perhaps no more so than the wonderfully heartbreaking and digitally rendered China Doll. Moreover, despite their one dimensional natures, they all make great eye candy, particularly the witches. We get three of them in this movie: Theodora, Evanora and Glinda. All are sisters with personalities, tempers and of course magical powers. Oz’s only real magical power comes from illusion, and it’s something he will use as the movie moves toward a quick climax.

Oz is best characterized as a charming movie. You probably will feel charmed and amused by this well realized adaptation, even if the plot is largely piffle, as was the original movie. In this sense it is faithful to Victor Fleming’s original directing. Director Sam Raimi proves that sometimes faithful imitation is a virtue, and it is here.

Enjoy. 3.4 out of 4 stars.

Rating:  

Better late than never. Here are three more films I saw over the last few months that I didn’t remember to review at the time.

Life of Pi

This movie had a lot of buzz even before it was released. Director Ang Lee won Best Director for the movie. This is not surprising if you see the movie because it is an amazingly intimate story of a marooned young man and a tiger adrift together on a boat at sea. Many of the scenes with the tiger were done digitally, only it’s impossible to tell, which speaks volumes about the state of modern CGI today. Presumably the same is true of the other animals in this lifeboat, but it’s sure not big enough to be a Noah’s Ark. The hungry tiger finds the other animals easy meat, and has his eyes on Pi Patel (Suraj Sharma) as well.

Pi has a curious tale to tell as an Indian boy, including a story about his unusual name. He is obsessed with religion and seems to move easily from one religion to the other, without being committed to any religion. He also does not believe in animal’s violent nature and is willing to put his life in danger by offering meat to a tiger to prove it, all without protection. This alarms his secular father (Adil Hussein) who tries various things to change his son’s mind, none of which work. His father jumps at the opportunity to take a job in England, but the freighter his family takes capsizes in a storm. Pi is one of the few to survive. His journey with the tiger on a boat quickly takes on metaphysical aspects while also being one of survival. The whole story sounds preposterous which raises the question of whether Pi is telling the truth or not, and whether the truth even matters.

This is the heart of the movie, which is certainly well done and brilliantly directed. Whether you find this idea worthy of pondering in detail for two plus hours depends on your philosophical disposition. The movie tries hard to challenge you to think on whether there is a meaningful difference between reality and allegory. In Pi’s eyes maybe not, and you may walk away from the movie a bit more mystical, if not misty eyed, by seeing the world through Pi’s eyes. At all times he seems half in reality, and half in the spiritual world. I found the movie interesting, but a bit overbearing at times. It is certainly not a product of Hollywood. If nothing else it is refreshing to see yet another talented non-American director bring us a story outside our insular American perspective. Kudos for that.

3.2 on my four-point scale.

The Way Back (2010)

This movie looked very promising from the trailers, but seeing that it was directed by Peter Weir (who I greatly admired for Dead Poets Society) cemented my decision to rent it. If you like real adventure movies (unlike pseudo-adventure movies, such as the Indiana Jones series) it would be hard to top this one. It details the true story of a group of prisoners at a Soviet labor camp in the middle of Siberia who escaped from the camp in the dead of winter and somehow walked more than four thousand miles to freedom.

My God but Siberia is a cold and snowy place in the dead of winter. Hell has to be better because it is at least warm. The conditions in the labor camp are austere, to say the least, the food incredibly bad and it is hundreds of miles from anywhere. Labor consists of working in filthy coal mines, otherwise you spend your life huddled in overcrowded barracks trying to stay warm. Escaping sounds crazy but a group of them with some extra bread, a knife and not much else but their clothes escape and keep heading south sans map and survive by their wits. In such harsh conditions you might expect not all would make it, and they might be imitating Hannibal Lecter when they get hungry enough. Their immediate destination is Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake in southern Siberia. When the survivors finally make it there they cannot stop. They are still escaped convicts. They must keep going south, through Mongolia and its endless deserts, and eventually through the Himalayan Mountains to freedom in northern India. Yes, some do actually make it, and it’s the journey that is worth witnessing. Wier succeeds in making their journey painfully realistic.

For the most part the actors are unknown, but you will recognize Ed Harris as Mr. Smith and Colin Farrell as Valka. Around Lake Baikal they encounter a woman who joins them, Irena (Saoirse Ronan) who is not quite who she seems and has a complex story to tell that slowly unravels. An adventure you will definitely get, but it’s an adventure in grisly survival. You should also glean an appreciation for the enduring human spirit and its determination to live another day. Along the way you will see some of the worst of mankind and some of its best. Mostly what you get is a lot of painful reality and a lot of beautiful if not cruel nature wholly indifferent to human concerns. It’s good stuff, if you have the stomach for a real-life drama, but to not expect any new insights into human behavior. 3.3 on my four-point scale.

Chocolat (2000)

It’s curious that in small French villages everyone speaks English, at least in movies produced elsewhere. At least they usually do it with a French accent. Even today rural France is a pretty conservative place, and it is more so in this somewhat dated movie of village life starring Juliette Binoche as Vianne Rocher, a divorcee who blows into the village where everything revolves around its Catholic church and its obsessively virtuous priest. Vianne’s implicit job is to breathe some life and reality into the stuffy town, and her mechanism is to open a chocolate shop. She compounds her sin by making sure it is open after mass on Sundays, to the great consternation of the village’s devout. Vianne is a mischievous charmer and is quickly perceived by the cleric as a moral threat to the village. Father Henri (Hugo O’Conor) is particularly upset by the woman, as it is Lent and he must fast and yet her chocolate demons are so conveniently across the street. He organizes a moral crusade to castigate her and force her to move elsewhere. Vianne is not easily intimidated, and she has a teenage daughter Anouk to look after as well.

The movie has occasionally serious undertones, but it is mostly about Vianne’s tweaking the sensibilities of the townspeople, and particularly its priest by having the audacity to be her liberated and secular self. There are a number of great supporting actors in this movie, some of who were just getting fully established in their careers at the time. These include Johnny Depp as the morally dubious Gypsy named Roux, who runs a riverboat that sells dubious goods and seems full of vices. Carrie Anne Moss plays her friend Caroline. One actor who was not just getting established is the wonderful Judy Dench, here portraying Armande, a woman with a horribly abusive husband who feels strangled in her marriage because Catholics aren’t allowed to divorce. Vianne is nice enough to befriend her.

The movie has an impish feel to it and Vianne is its ringmaster. She is charming, disarming, and confident in her supposedly immoral ways and like Roux she seems party Gypsy. She is in town mostly to turn up the soil and see what crawls out, and I think you will enjoy seeing what she unearths. This heartfelt movie has already become something of a foreign film charmer and won plenty of awards. Mostly it is just a movie to sit back and enjoy, full of flawed but very real people mostly bumbling through the roles they were assigned in life but secretly wanting to break free. Vianne is their catalyst.

3.3 out of four-points.

Want to see a good movie but don’t know which ones to pick? Picking some best pictures that you never got around to seeing may be the way to go, which is what I have been doing. Curiously two of these best pictures had Henry Fonda in them and the first happened to be made in the year I was born.

12 Angry Men (1957)

This early film by director Sidney Lumet helped earn him a reputation that extended to many more movies and TV shows that he would direct over subsequent decades, such as Serpico (1973). 12 Angry Men is a film chock full of well-known actors as well as many established character actors of the time. It includes Henry Fonda, who specializes in playing even-tempered men, and he is perfect here for his role as Juror #8. Some even temper is much needed on this all male jury as it is asked to decide whether an 18-year-old man should be convicted and likely executed for killing his father. It’s understandable that these men would be angry, as they are locked up in a hot and stuffy jury room and Henry Fonda is the only one of them who thinks there is reasonable doubt that this man killed his father. One juror is pissed because he thinks he won’t make his ballgame tonight.

It turns out the men are not so much angry as hurt. Almost all of them bring their prejudices into the jury room, but none more so than Juror #3 (Lee J. Cobb), who kicked his sixteen-year-old son out of the house and channels his anger on the young man he must render a verdict on. Each juror is a study of a complex man in microcosm, including Juror #5 (Jack Klugman, who recently passed away) who grew up in the tenements, to the seemingly imperturbable Juror #4 (E. G. Marshall) who seems incapable of sweating, to Juror #11 (George Voskovec), who has felt the pain of discrimination from being in the minority. Overseeing the zoo is the affable Juror #1 (Martin Balsam), who really looks like he wants to be somewhere else. Slowly Juror #8 (Henry Fonda) is able to convince others there is sufficient reasonable doubt in this case to acquit the accused, but in this case acquittal requires reaching each man as a person, not always easy to do with such a prejudiced group of men.

What makes this movie memorable is how well it is acted, something you did not see much of in 1957, as well as its raw honesty, an even rarer commodity in a time when movies were heavily sanitized for family viewing. It becomes an intimate study in human psychology and persuasion. The film is relatively short (1:37) and in black and white but hard to forget. Today it would probably not merit Best Picture but for its time it was raw, realistic and honest moviemaking. 3.3 on my four-point scale.

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

I am not much for westerns, but how can one resist a movie claimed by many to be the best western ever made? This movie may live up to that claim, not just for its acting and finely drawn characters, but primarily because it feels faithful to the west as it actually was, not the one we imagine on reruns of Gunsmoke or Bonanza. The real west included lots of Hispanics and Indians. Working on the railroads meant there was lots of Irishmen and in town the Chinese were running the laundries. The railroad is central to this western because Brett McBain built a ranch called Sweetwater on what turns out to be the only watering station near the planned railroad route in this part of Arizona. This means that Sweetwater is an excellent investment.

The movie takes established characters and puts them in unconventional parts. Henry Fonda, almost always given good guy roles, plays the convincing bad guy Frank. And bad guy he certainly is. He is supposed to persuade McBain to leave Sweetwater so the railroad can get his property at a bargain basement price. Instead Frank kills him and his whole family. He missed his recently acquired wife from New Orleans who arrives just in time to see the whole family laid out for display in the front yard. Jill is played by Claudia Cardinale, and one thing Jill has learned from her bawdy New Orleans upbringing is not to be easily intimidated by evil men. It helps of course to have a good guy on your side, but you would not expect him to be Charles Bronson, whose harmonica precedes him and gives him his name. Harmonica is really out to avenge the death of his father by Frank’s hands when he was still a boy. As with 12 Angry Men, the cast is populated by popular actors of the time, including Jason Robards as Cheyenne and Jack Elam as the gunslinger Snaky.

What viewers get is not so much a shoot ’em up Western, although there is the requisite amount of gun violence but a tense character drama principally between Cheyenne, Frank and Harmonica, with Cheyenne’s relationship with Jill helping to break up the tension. You also get glorious music by Ennio Morricone. This western has style, grit and authenticity as well as memorable acting, but does move a bit slowly. It’s no particular surprise it was singled out for the best picture award with its combination of scenery, authenticity and first class acting. 3.4 out of four stars.

Schindler’s List (1993)

This was an easy movie to skip for two decades given its grim focus on the Holocaust. Despite this, it is also easy to see how it won best picture because of how horrifyingly accurately the Holocaust was rendered and because of Liam Neeson’s faithful portrayal of Oskar Schindler.

Schindler used his fortune made in part by manufacturing items with slave labor to rescue some small percentage of Jews from Nazi extermination. Neeson plays Schindler almost reflexively, and it’s a tough role to carry off, as it requires someone who is a steely businessman, comfortable schmoozing with the Nazi power structure and yet at his core a humane person. Working for slave wages sounds terrible, but it was better for the Jews than the alternative of living in concentration camps.

Schindler finds it necessary to have his business follow the concentration camps since he depends on the cheap labor to make a profit, but also because he feels loyal to his Jewish bookkeeper Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) who is forced to go to a concentration camp. It’s easy enough to see the crematories at work from his factories or find the white ash of incinerated Jews on the grounds of extermination camps. Working for Schindler buys, at least for a time, some reasonable odds at avoiding extermination. As much as he can he protects those who work for him, but he mostly depends on Stern to keep the business afloat.

No expense is spared to accurately depict Nazi Germany and the concentration camps where Jews and many other persecuted minorities were exterminated. The movie is uncomfortably intimate in its depiction of hell on earth. It’s amazing that director Steven Spielberg was able to coax the voluminous extras to perform in some of these scenes, such as women marching naked into mass shower stalls. Perhaps the most horrifying character is Amon Goeth, who runs the local concentration camp and shoots Jews for sport from his house while keeping a Jewish mistress he clearly cares for.

It is deeply disturbing to see such inhumanity toward man on such a scale. Yet there is not an off note in the entire movie, which is completely convincing. The hardest part is simply finishing the movie, which is worth the journey to your queasy stomach. It is hard to imagine how this movie could not have won Best Picture. 3.5 out of four stars.

It’s hard to understand why it took more than twenty-five years for the musical Les Misérables to make it to the screen. Perhaps Cameron Macintosh (producer of the theatrical musical) thought it was more profitable simply to keep the musical continuously on tour, and it almost always is on tour, including most recently here in Washington, D.C. for its umpteenth appearance. (In fact it debuted in America at the Kennedy Center before moving to Broadway.) I remember first seeing the musical in the early 1990s. The stage bill announced it would be coming to movie theaters soon. Clearly that deal fell apart. Perhaps Macintosh finally realized he could have it both ways. This movie, Les Misérables, will simply stoke interest in seeing the musical on stage, and visa versa.

If you haven’t seen the musical on the stage, you can at least now see it on the screen. If you have seen it on the stage, prepare yourself for the considerable shock of seeing it on digital film. The transition can be a bit rough at times, particularly if you are used to powerful operatic voices. You won’t find much of that in the movie, and you may find yourself cringing at times by just how badly some of the singing comes across. In particular, you may find yourself wishing that Russell Crowe had the male equivalent of Marnie Nixon, the woman who actually sang the part of Eliza Doolittle for Audrey Hepburn in the movie musical My Fair Lady. Russell Crowe’s singing should have been dubbed.

In fact, one of the few things to dislike about this movie is Russell Crowe’s portrayal of the obsessive Inspector Javert. Javert is definitely a stiff upper lip type, and Crowe at least has that aspect down correctly. But his performance is too flat and unemotional. Fans of the musical will cry, from anguish and not from joy, when Crowe tries to sing songs like “Stars” and it just falls flat.

Director Tom Hooper, who gave us the academy award winner King’s Speech, gets to flex his directorial mojo tackling this challenging musical. One of his key decisions was to record the singing live and then go back and add the orchestration. The benefit is that this allows the performers to act without worrying about matching a prerecorded score. The downside is that this sort of singing is less operatic and more breathy. When an otherwise fine actor like Russell Crowe simply cannot sing, the result is like an over-modulated sound; it is just grating. The same is also true with Isabelle Allen, who plays the young Cosette. It’s forgivable in the case of a child. In the case of a lead actor like Russell Crowe, it is not.

Is this a reason to give the movie a pass? Not really. Aside from these minor imperfections, Hooper does a great job of transitioning the musical to the screen. The acting in some parts is so overwhelmingly good that you can overlook the Russell Crowe miscasting. Hugh Jackman is terrific as Jean Valjean, but the real scene-stealer is Anne Hathaway as Fantine, Cosette’s mother. Here Hooper validates his approach of recording the singing live, because through the intimacy of a close up you can get a much richer acting than you would otherwise.

Paris in the 19^th century is realized quite well, although it was actually shot in an English studio. The poverty and filth of the time is also captured with uncomfortable authenticity. You can almost smell the shit as Valjean carries the wounded Marius through a Paris sewer. Hooper provides an amazingly intimate look into the life of the poor people of France, with the necessary comic relief provided by the Thenardiers, played by Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter. Baron Cohen and Bonham Carter are perhaps logical choices for these parts, as they can easily ooze the sliminess these roles require, but perhaps they were too easy a choice. There have been so many fine Thenardiers’ on stage that certainly one of these actors could have done an even better job.

The ancillary parts are stocked with terrific character actors, most of whom I have no quibbles with their performance. My only concern was one I see frequently in Eponine: she is played by too pretty an actress, in this case Samantha Barks. Gavroche, the spunky street urchin, is a hard role to get right. Fortunately, Hooper made a terrific choice casting Daniel Huttlestone. Overall, Hooper does a great job with directing this tricky work, supplementing songs somewhat, providing a gritty and authentic feel to the movie, and casting hosts of ancillary characters that fluidly and realistically move through their numbers, such as the women in Valjean’s factory. The intensity of the students in their doomed parts as revolutionaries is also appreciated. We get energetic and deeply humane portraits of pivotal characters like Marius (Eddie Redmayne) and the leader Enjolras (Aaron Tveit). We also get plenty of chemistry when Marius meets the adult Cosette (Amanda Seyfried).

Whether seen in the theater or on the screen, this is a tearjerker. It left me crying at the end, even though I certainly knew all of the plot and the songs. To those few who are not familiar with either the story or the musical, it should come as a great treat. You would be wise to pack an extra handkerchief. It seemed to wow our audience, who applauded at the end of it.

Still, Russell Crowe does grate and is simply miscast in this movie, so impartiality requires me to dock it a couple tenths of a point. 3.2 stars on my four-point scale.

Rating:  

I haven’t read The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien’s first book on Middle Earth in at least three decades. I have read The Lord of the Rings at least a half dozen times. Frankly, The Hobbit is simply a far less compelling book: relatively slim and oriented toward children. It would have been a great book to read with my father at age eight or so once I was past the Dr. Seuss years, but not so much as an adult.

Unsurprisingly, movie producers skipped right to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. That The Hobbit was turned into a movie at all was due to the success of the three rings movies and Peter Jackson’s eventual willingness to both direct and produce the movie. The movie? I misspoke. The Hobbit (as a movie) will become a trilogy of its own. This will involve a lot of padding and stuffing it with materials from the appendices and other source material developed later by Tolkien in The Silmarillion, plus undoubtedly some poetic license. There is plenty of the latter in this first of The Hobbit movies: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

Jackson must have gotten the note: don’t mess with the formula. To make this movie as palatable as possible to fans of the Rings movies, the same music that framed the Rings movies is used, with the exception of one new tune. Also, as long as you are not messing with formula, why not invite back much of the cast from the Rings movies? That’s not to say that they are all back, at least not yet. Gandalf at least is central to The Hobbit book, and Elrond had an ancillary part, but rest assured the white wizard Saruman was not in the book, or the elven queen Galadriel or Radagast, a wizard of the forest, who was only alluded to in the Rings books. Frodo is back as well Ian Holm as the elder Bilbo, both only briefly at the start of the movie. There is no sign of Sam, Aragorn, Legolas, Boromir or the rest, although there are two movies to go. My bet is Peter Jackson will find a way to slip them in somewhere.

For all practical purposes, Thorin is Aragorn in this movie. The resemblance is so striking that I initially mistook Richard Armitage for Viggo Mortensen, as he uses the same poses as Aragorn and even holds his sword the same way. Aragorn was the dispossessed King of Gondor. Thorin is the dispossessed dwarf king under the mountain. Both have major challenges. Aragorn has to summon the will to be king and defeat Sauron. Thorin has to reclaim his kingdom and kill the dragon Smaug. Aragorn is one prominent member of a fellowship. Thorin is the leader of thirteen dwarves. Bilbo Baggins enters the picture at the start of this movie as the dwarves converge on the Shire and because the wizard Gandalf chooses Bilbo as their burglar, a duty the homebound Bilbo does not seem to eager to take on.

Oh, but it’s great to be in the Shire, which is eternally peaceful and bucolic, and in particular it’s great to be back in Bag End, Bilbo’s home, even if it is quickly taken over by dwarves who monopolize both conversation and his pantry. Martin Freeman, who I first knew as John Watson in the BBC’s latest series Sherlock, plays a younger Bilbo. It is clear that he studied Ian Holm’s interpretation because much of his acting here is imitating Ian Holm. Nonetheless Freeman proves an apt choice for Bilbo and brings just the right mixture of sincerity and naivety to the role.

Ian McKellen (Gandalf) looks ten years older, which he is, but actually does a more satisfying job of portraying the wizard than he did in the Rings movies. You might say he has fully mastered the part now, and he does so effortlessly and to delightful effect. Otherwise those brought back from the Rings movies don’t look any older, including Cate Blanchett as Lady Galadriel, Hugo Weaving as Elrond and Ian Holm as Bilbo. Holm actually looks younger, if that is possible, and Blanchett doesn’t look aged a day, which is good if you are portraying an immortal elf.

As for the dwarves, they don’t all look as weathered as Gimli did in the Rings movies. Thorin in particular looks more human than dwarf, which is good because we have to relate to someone in the movie and there are no parts for actual humans. They all make a memorable introduction at Bag End near the start of the movie where poor Bilbo plays unexpected host to all thirteen of them, plus wizard. Jackson earns the big money in these early scenes, because their exposition unfolds so comically and seamlessly. It is unlikely that any other director could have pulled it off. And Freeman is just so excellent as the befuddled Bilbo. His casting was inspired.

This earlier version of Middle Earth is older and a bit more fun than the one we saw in the Rings movies. That was one of the problems with the original movies: Middle Earth was changing, but not so much in The Hobbit, except giant spiders are inhabiting the Greenwood, trolls have come down from the mountains, and orcs are on the warpath. Jackson seems determined to integrate it with the Rings movies and to portray a Middle Earth that is subtly changing for the worse. As for the dwarves that Bilbo belatedly joins as its burglar, it’s hard for them to go a day without some hair-raising adventure: trolls, orcs and stone giants are just some of the perils they have to encounter. There is also, deep in the Misty Mountains, a peculiar creature called Gollum that Bilbo must encounter for the first time. It’s peculiar but pleasurable to encounter Gollum again. He should be thoroughly unlikeable, but Andy Serkis does such a good job of portraying him that you look forward to the encounter.

The movie feels quite padded, but in a good way. Middle Earth is a huge tapestry. In the Rings movies Jackson had to be very selective about what to show of Middle Earth. Finally he has a chance to imbue us wholly in Middle Earth. Probably half an hour could have been trimmed from the movie at no appreciable loss, except for us Tolkien-heads for who these movies were really made, and there are millions of us. We can’t get enough!

So parts feel formulaic, but also in a good way. The dwarves and Bilbo escape all sorts of improbable disasters. Jackson has wholly mastered adventure movies and we get lots of rickety catwalks, collapsing bridges and drops from crazy heights. Middle Earth is dazzling, more so than in the Rings movies, and it is a comfortable place in spite of all its perils. It’s quite a pleasure to walk in Rivendell again and although meetings with characters like Saruman and Lady Galadriel seem quite contrived, you won’t care. Middle Earth has never felt quite so homey.

Good job, Peter Jackson and crew. I’m not sure how you will pad out this slim book into three three-hour movies, but if the other two are as good as the first, we Tolkien addicts are going to be happy. Meanwhile Peter Jackson, how about starting preproduction for The Silmarillion? Thanks.

3.4 on my four-point scale. A good time for all.

Rating:  

These days, it’s rare to see a movie that accurately depicts history. It is rarer still to find one that is quite excellent. Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln is thus quite a precious gem of a movie, one that fully succeeds in making you believe you are in Washington D.C. in 1865 and which is filled to the brim with memorable characters, each of whom deserves a movie of their own.

What’s that? You thought this was just a great movie about Abraham Lincoln? Why, it certainly is, and Daniel Day Lewis does such a great job of channeling Lincoln that he seems like a man wholly possessed by his spirit. From the crooked nose to his poor grooming to his unnaturally high voice, he has Lincoln nailed. No actor has done a better job pretending to be Lincoln and likely none ever will. And while Lincoln is certainly at the nexus of this story of the passage of the 13^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (which made slavery unconstitutional), he does not own the movie. Rather, he complements the movie as a whole cast of memorable and now largely forgotten cabinet officials and legislators provide equally impressionable performances in this often-riveting two and a half hour movie. Such exquisite care was made to render a historically accurate and plausible movie that you truly feel in the 19^th century.

Ironically, Richmond Virginia substitutes for Washington D.C. This is ironic if you know your Civil War history, because Richmond, two hours south by car from Washington was the capital of the Confederate States of America. Since I have a daughter at university in downtown Richmond, I can attest that much of it looks like was around in the 19^th century. There are many blocks of aged and rather ugly row houses. They made for a ready substitute for a 19^th century version of Washington, D.C., courtesy in part by the taxpayers of Virginia, which helped subsidize the film. This makes the film more ironic, since there is a large Confederacy museum within blocks of where the movie was filmed in Richmond, and there are plenty of Virginians who still wish the state was part of the Confederacy. So in a way I had to see the movie just to ensure that my investment as a taxpayer got sufficient return.

The movie begins more than three years into the Civil War, as its outcome was becoming increasingly clear. While Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves, it did not free all of them, only those who lived in slave states, and was no guarantee that slave states would not bring in more slaves. Anticipating the readmittance of the Southern states, he knew the Civil War might be in vain if slavery were not first forbidden by constitutional amendment. However, getting there was hard. Constitutional amendments require two-thirds approval by both houses of Congress, and Democrats in Congress were hanging tough.

Do not expect a movie about the Civil War, but rather a movie that concentrates on Lincoln’s Herculean task of trying to round up the votes to pass the amendment in the House of Representatives. In the 19^th century, the House of Representatives is a wild and raucous place, where fistfights could easily break out and decorum was even worse than it was today. The movie shows representative government in all its ugliness and frankly this kind of government is hugely entertaining, sort of like watching Storage Wars. If legislating were this interesting, C-SPAN might be the most watched cable channel. Lincoln had a boost, having won reelection. His coattails include more Republicans in Congress as well. Still, passage of the 13^th Amendment seemed a long shot at best, given the implacable opposition by Democrats who simply could not see blacks as equals.

The result is Washington that is depicted as a chaotic menagerie of 30,000 people or so, the actual size of the city back then. There is Mary Todd Lincoln, the president’s wife played by the excellent actress Sally Field, obviously in need of therapy and antidepressants that did not exist, and driving poor Honest Abe nearly nuts with her tantrums, crying spells, sniping and moodiness. There is his Secretary of State Seward (David Strathairn), trying to delicately negotiate an end to the war through third parties. There is the eloquent Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), the nexus of Republican power in the House trying to corral his party and coax mostly hostile Democrats to support passage of the amendment. There are many, many others who even with their limited screen time are the fully fleshed out characters they should be.

Lincoln is all this plus it has an eye for authenticity to the time that is flawless. The White House is depicted as it was: a largely dark place where kerosene lamps and fireplaces provided limited light and enhance the feelings of brooding. The desks are piled with books and papers, and the walls are hung with War Department maps. There is the dark paneled telegraph office across the street from the White House where Lincoln often hung out, awaiting the latest news from the battlefield. The heart of this movie though feels not in the White House, but in the House of Representatives where an ineffectual speaker tries to control his zoo of passionate, partisan and crass legislators. If for some reason you tuned out civics in school, see it in all its ignoble glory in Lincoln. You might come away with the notion that democracy is actually quite interesting.

The result is a gloriously realized and fascinating look at perilous times for our nation one hundred and fifty years ago. It’s a movie so well done that I feel it demands not a sequel (since Lincoln is assassinated) but prequels, so we can learn so much more about these people and their times.

Stephen Spielberg has produced a masterpiece, and considering his illustrious career that includes other movies like Schindler’s List and The Color Purple, that says a lot. It will be criminal if Lincoln does not win Best Picture this year. While Daniel Day Lewis certainly deserves best actor, you would have a hard time choosing the best supporting actor as there are so many candidates in this movie worthy of that award.

Thanks Stephen. This Civil War buff cannot begin to express the depth of his gratitude for this lovingly rendered masterpiece. 3.5 out of four stars.

Rating:  

Musical composer Frank Wildhorn is one of the few composers to have had two shows running on Broadway at the same time, specifically Jekyll & Hyde and The Scarlet Pimpernel. Of the two, the older is Jekyll & Hyde, first produced on Broadway in 1997. This predictably dark musical has had a number of revisions over the years. The one that appeared Thanksgiving evening at the Opera House at the Kennedy Center feels very much like the latest, and not necessarily best revision.

It is hard for me to say for sure, of course, since this is the first time I have seen it staged live. I did watch a pay per view performance with David Hasselhoff playing, of course, both the humanist Dr. Henry Jekyll and his alter ego, the murderous Edward Hyde. I was disappointed both because I find Hasselhoff very annoying and because the musical had been toned down from the much darker version first tried out in Houston, Texas that I have on CD. This version is gratefully darker and brings back numbers that did not warrant disappearance, and maybe made it off limits for children like the bawdy “Bring on the Men”. But it also feels more jangled and rock-like. While not a rock musical, it feels like it is experimenting with it a bit on the edges. Moreover, some of the notes have been changed making the songs less fluid and a bit off key. It didn’t help that the acoustics in the Opera House were less than ideal, with the sound dramatically over-modulated and frequently excessively loud.

The result was an uneven performance that had some merits but many detractions. Constantine Maroulis, a fine actor, does not have the best voice, at least for the songs he has to sing here. He sounds breathy when he sings. It turns out that the musical’s true flaws lie elsewhere: with its script. It must have been good enough to survive four years on Broadway, but at least with this version produced by Nederlander Presentations it simply lacks plausibility and heart. And that’s a shame because all the murders that Edward Hyde wreaks don’t mean much if the characters he kills are all cardboard, which is largely the case here. One thing is for sure: you won’t be living long if you are a member of the St. Jude’s Hospital Board of Governors, and if you are a member then you are a flaming hypocrite that maybe deserves to be slashed and/or strangled to death.

Granted, it’s hard for a musical that is mostly about killing other people to have heart, but in this case you have to believe that Henry Jekyll is the passionate humanist he claims to be. I didn’t feel it in Maroulis’s performance. John (played by Laird Mackintosh) is supposed to be Henry’s best friend and his lawyer, but there simply isn’t enough dialog and interaction for us to feel that any friendship exists. “Look behind the façade,” the actors sing in one of the opening numbers. The audience though is left with the feeling that the musical is a façade, flashy but not terribly engaging and ultimately not terribly compelling.

Not that there aren’t some good performances. Deborah Cox landed the role of Lucy, the harlot with a heart who is drawn to Jekyll because he is the only good man she has ever met. Cox is a great actress and has a voice to match. To the extent that this version is worth seeing, it is probably for Cox’s portrayal of Lucy. There is also the music, which when it is good is quite memorable. Wildhorn and lyricist Leslie Bricusse can put together some memorable show tunes that rival some of Andrew Lloyd’s Webber’s best. In Jekyll & Hyde we get “Take me as I am”, “Bring on the Men”, “This is the Moment”, “Alive”, “Dangerous Game” and “Confrontation” that are all compelling.

The direction and staging are competent but not particularly compelling. Jekyll’s laboratory has been redesigned so we get fluorescent flasks of bubbling chemical concoctions delivered into Jekyll’s veins via tubes instead of flasks. Special effects, such as they are, are saved for the song “Confrontation”, which are well done but do not really redeem the musical’s many faults.

I don’t feel that ripped off, however. Tickets were only $49, a good deal for the Kennedy Center, but were perhaps priced so low because word had gotten around that this production was less than stellar. If you have a hankering to see the musical and can snatch any of these tickets, it is probably worth seeing, but you had best hurry, since it’s last performance at the Kennedy Center is on Sunday. If you paid full price, well, I’m sorry. You are likely to feel disappointed.

While this production does have some merits and I have seen much worse at the Kennedy Center, it is probably not Jekyll & Hyde at its best. You might want to wait for a better and more compelling production.

If you are the Wachowski Brothers* and you have produced three extremely popular Matrix movies, what do you do for an encore? The Matrix movies, perhaps the ultimate dystopian movie trilogy, developed a cult following and was a reasonably weighty philosophical treatise on the nature of reality as well. It’s a good bet that the Wachowski Brothers would not be directing any light comedies. They have their reputation to protect, which means they had to attempt to outdo their Matrix movies with an even deeper topic. Fortunately this time they chose to build on someone else’s work. This would be the book Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

The trailer for the movie Cloud Atlas was great, so I knew I would want to see it. As a part time metaphysician, I am quite curious about ideas like reincarnation as was happy to pay $10 for a matinee to see it expanded into a full-length feature film. And yes, Cloud Atlas is quite a feature-length film, as in long. As in kidney-busting, run-several-times-to-the-restroom-during-the-movie long. It clocks in at nearly three hours in length and there is no intermission. So easy on the high fructose sodas because you are not going to want to step out. There are too many complex plot points to puzzle through.

Okay, go ahead and hit the restroom if you need to. Even film critic Roger Ebert gave up on connecting all the plot points. To really understand this movie thoroughly you will have to own it, and watch it repeatedly. And even then I am not sure you will still not be scratching your head. It’s perhaps the most imponderable movie since What the Bleep Do We Know? Thankfully, Cloud Atlas has a virtually all-star cast, but Tom Hanks and Halle Berry are the two main anchors of the movie. Both are fine actors but Hanks is the one really stretching as an actor. For Cloud Atlas is six movies for the price of one, and the directors constantly cut between story lines.

Essentially the movie is all about reincarnation: one soul traveling through multiple lives, generally with other souls they have interacted with in previous lives. The only twist here, doubtless done so we could at least attempt to keep it all straight, is that one soul may span multiple lives, but seems to have the same body. So we get Tom Hanks as the evil ship surgeon Dr. Henry Goose and much later as Zachry, a Hawaiian native in the 24^th century living a primitive life in a dystopian future. (You knew I would get “dystopian” in there again, didn’t you? This is a Wachowski film, after all.) Sometimes these transitions seem to work, and sometimes they don’t. Where they don’t work very well is seeing Hugo Weaving in a dress playing Nurse Noakes, something I did not expect to see again from him. He will make you long for comfortable Nurse Ratchett.

It seems we are chasing the same demons and people in multiple lives, and our enemies and to some extent our loves follow us from life to life too. Progress into the light sure is a slow process, which is why it helps to reincarnate, and real progress seems only possible during periods of great stress. We progress through acts of human kindness, particularly the really daring ones.

The six stories all have compelling elements to them. But mixing them up into short snippets, while necessary for the plot, arguably detracts from the overall story. And yet despite all the inspired acting and directing, the underlying theme of this movie is not hard to discern. In fact, it is rammed repeatedly into your head, principally by Sonmi-451, a “fabricant” manufactured to serve people, and living in Neo-Seoul in 2144. If there is a pivotal character in this movie it is Sonmi-451, played by Bae Doona, certainly a fine if not mesmerizing actress. I won’t spoil the plot (since it is in the trailer) to tell you its great metaphysical lesson: we are all connected not just in this life but also in multiple lives.

Critics’ reactions so far have been to either like or loathe the movie. I find aspects to both like and loathe. What I loathe is its length. It reminded me a bit of Reds (1981), Warren Beatty’s bloated attempt to prove he was a serious actor and director. The largely all star cast are also working hard to give their various parts their all, and it sometimes feels strained, such as Tom Hanks as the Hawaiian Zachry. There is also a sometimes unbearable heaviness and preachiness to the film.

What’s to love? There is the overall fine acting, not just by the main stars but also by various well known supporting actors including Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Hugh Grant, James D’Arcy, Susan Sarandon and Jim Sturgess. Each of the six stories is well done, and Neo-Seoul is particularly well done, having a Blade Runner feel to it. It’s something of a rarity in cinema: a thinking person’s movie, even if its overall theme is easy to discern. I haven’t seen one of these in the theaters since Inception.

Alas, Cloud Atlas is not quite as good as Inception. Like Reds it reaches for the stratosphere. Nice try, but despite all the great acting I don’t think they quite made it. If you can deal with its ponderous nature and length, you will probably enjoy it despite these detractions.

3.2 on my 4-point scale.

Rating:  

* Okay, technically it’s the Wachowski siblings. Lana Wachowski identified herself as a transgender female, although she was born Laurence.