A Night At The Home Cinema
Thanks to the little man who can get you a DVD of virtually any new film for 2 quid and a 5 minute wait while he runs one off on the DVD burner, I have been seeing some relatively new films. Here in my cultural vacumn in Thailand I have virtually no critical context by which to choose movies: I just have to go with whether I like the look of the sleeves, the plot, who’s in it, etc etc. This actually makes watching movies more fun because you don’t weigh them down with critical expectations.
It doesn’t stop them being shit though. Quite why I squandered another 2 hours of my life on the truly appalling Spiderman franchise I can’t quite recollect now - but here’s a tip for the scriptwriters: if you’re going to make a film about Spiderman, how about having Spiderman actually in it. The masked webweaver must have been on screen for about 10 minutes of Spiderman 2’s running time - the rest was taken up with shit-awful romantic agonising, leaden dialogue and a truly atrocious attempt at high drama (”you killed my father but you’re my best friend!”) , turning the film into nothing but a soap opera with explosions. Alfred Molina as Doctor Octopus was fantastic, and his scenes were genuinely filled with menace and charisma - but they were only about another 10 minutes of fun and the rest was just staggeringly banal teen angst.
We don’t go to the cinema to see Peter Parker being a dork and wondering if he’ll get to snog the girl next door - we go to the cinema to see Spiderman swinging past skyscrapers and doing battle with bad guys. The dork stuff is just the set up for the superhero stuff, not the main story. How did this get forgotten? I know development hell often murders films before they’ve even begun, but the fact that neither Sam Raimi or Kavalier and Clay scriptwriter Michael Chabon could inject any wit or excitement into the script - fuck, even just some editing to make the whole painful experience less long - is deeply disappointing.
As always, it all boils down to the script. Just as with The Incredibles, no amount of clever CGI or state of the art animation can rescue a film that’s got a vacuous script. There was a little bit of a discussion of my rant about The Incredibles on Animation Nation, a web board apparently for animation professionals - but all of them missed my point that the script’s the thing. Spiderman 2 is just so boilerplate generic it’s a wonder they bothered crediting scriptwriters - and this trend to follow the template just continues to grow and grow in movies. I knew what to expect when I sat down to watch Spiderman 2 - and disappointingly, that’s exactly what I got.
Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow, on the other hand, was a cracking piece of comic book adaptation from a comic that doesn’t actually exist. (I don’t think, anyway - I know nothing about the background of this flick). From the beautiful stylised grey hues of the film’s aesthetic through to the brilliantly conceived killer robots and general 1930s shiny techno chic, Sky Captain is a film that’s evidently one person’s labour of love. (It was written and directed by the same guy I think). The film is an entertaining romp that has wit, sarcasm and genuine laugh-out-loud moments scattered through it (thanks to a particularly arch Jude Law), all the while stringing you along with a marvellously preposterous pulp plot. Clamouring for reality would clearly be churlish with this film - from the opening moments, you know you’ve entered another universe - and that’s what film should do for you when it’s dealing with the fantastic.
Fantastic in a different way was George Clooney’s Solaris, which I finally got to see recently. I found it hard work to begin with, and it’s certainly not one for watching after a night down the boozer, but as basically a filmic essay on the nature of love and identity (where’s my beret?) it was quite accomplished. That look of horror on the girl’s face as Clooney’s character sends her away in the pod for the first time will stay with me. And that’s precisely because of the strength of the script.
More generally, I’m impressed with the way Clooney and his mate Stephen Sonderbergh have recognised they have a finite window of opportunity to get these sort of projects done while they command power in Hollywood - and I especially like the fact that they don’t give a crap about making money. Indeed, Ocean’s 11 and 12 have apparently financed all the rest of their loss making films through their production company Section Eight. Clooney is the only actor, besides Johnny Depp, whose interviews I bother reading. They’re both intelligent men but also they have lives and ambitions beyond what they do for a living, and their enthusiasm is obvious and infectious. The Hollywood machine clearly bores them. Plus Johnny Depp was on The Fast Show, which makes him a god.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Eloge De L�Amour Just seen Jean-Luc Godard�s l…
- The Incredibles Are Satan’s FuckBeast
- Film Fest If you’ve always wanted to write a sc…
- FreeCinema �Charting these Fair Isles
- Starship Troopers Just taken delivery of th…
