2009-01-13 10:10:07

NARNIA, WE HARDLY KNEW YE

Filed under: Craig Detweiler, Movies, Prince Caspian, The Wrestler
Posted by: John

Does it feel like the end of an era or what? It wasn’t so long ago that the Narnia movie franchise, produced by Walden and distributed by Walt Disney, promised a new age of faith-based movies for faith-hungry audiences. Cultural prognosticators and studio executives foresaw a series of Christian-themed tentpole pictures to rival Lord of the Rings, a wave of money that would advance the fortunes of smaller fry and encourage religious audiences to return to the theaters from which Hollywood creep and rot had theoretically banished them.

Instead, we get the bad news today from the Good News Daily that Disney is dropping the franchise for purely financial reasons, a sure sign that the idea of a massive “faith-based audience” is being reevaluated. The planned third film in the series, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, has been shelved. On the one hand, that’s too bad. For my money, Dawn is one of the better books in the series.

On the other hand, as my Purple State counterpart Craig Detweiler, implies in his insightful new book about the intersection between faith and the movies, Into The Dark, maybe it’s a good thing.

Most Christians tend to like good movies, Detweiler says, no matter what their overt faith persuasion, often finding theological meaning in pictures that have no obvious theological message. Detweiler had lots to say, for instance, about No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood, though both are exceedingly downbeat and neither could conceivably have been produced by an operation like Walden.

Over at the Good News Daily, Ted Baehr tells us that the Disney decision had nothing to do with concerns about faith. It was about money, as it almost always is. It may also be about quality. Prince Caspian, quite simply, stank. It may have made money, but it was made by hacks who had none of the apparent passion for the material that Peter Jackson evinced in the making of the Rings movies. I would argue that The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe suffered from the same wan commitment to the source material. It was better than Caspian, but mostly thanks to the casting of Tilda Swinton as the White Witch.

If I’m right, and box office receipts as well as critical reception tell the same tale, isn’t it interesting that the Tolkien films were made by an artist, Peter Jackson, who went out of his way to repudiate the Catholic dogma of the books, focusing instead on the magic and wonder in the storytelling, and somehow produced an enduring popular masterpiece of the cinema? And isn’t it intriguing that the Narnia movies, produced specifically to appeal to a faith audience, which might be expected to care just as much about the quality of their cinema as non-faith audiences, turned out to be fairly routine Hollywood blockbusters with nowhere near the appeal or artistry?

It’s probably time for Christian producers, and I’m talking about the money people here, to get real. If you want to make great movies, you have to love great movies. Loving Jesus isn’t nearly enough. In fact, in terms of making persuasively wonderful works of the cinema, loving Jesus too much, or thinking you do, may hurt the cause. Rigid dogma, and even more rigid demographics, have never been much of a friend to art.

As the Dawn Treader sails off over the celluloid and/or digital horizon,  believers may be forced to turn back to those dark and pagan shores where the damned, the lost and the spiritually dead continue to put marvels on the screen.

May I suggest The Wrestler?

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2008-07-23 08:11:18

TITAN ARUM, OR THE CORPSE FLOWER

Filed under: Indiana Jones, Iron Man, John Marks, Movies, Prince Caspian, Speed Racer, The Dark Knight, Wanted
Posted by: John

Not long before I went to see the biggest box office smash of the summer, the second installment of the new Batman franchise, I dropped by the Smith College Botanical Gardens to see a natural special effect. My neighbor had dropped by and told me that I had one more chance to see the titan arum, also known as the corpse flower, before its giant petal closed.

I was grateful for the advice. The plant delivered on its reputation. A native of Sumatra, though resembling a creature from a space movie circa 1965, the flower rose four to five feet high in a far corner of the hothouse. Its single vast petal was pale yellow on the outside, meat red on the inside, and poking from the semblance of flesh grew a pollen-covered column that had given the flower the ancient name of amorphophallus titanum, or misshapen giant penis. Its modern name, the corpse flower, coined by Sir David Attenborough, comes from its stench. The plant gives off the smell of rotting meat to attract the beetles and flies that will pollinate it. I leaned close and smelled the artificial putrefaction, impressed and aghast.

One hour later, I had almost the same experience at Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. In the darkness, I thought I could smell the amazing death of the American movies.

But let me go back. We live in an age of cinema marvels. Forget about the flicks themselves. Watching the trailers for coming attractions like Hellboy II or the latest Mummy or this fall’s Eagle Eye is itself a breathtaking exercise. At times, hypnotized by flipping eighteen wheelers, writhing three-headed dragons and pavement-smashing giants, I’m tempted to say we live in an age of cinema-destroying marvels, medium-killing machines that are so wondrous, so stunning in their vistas and feats that we can no longer speak of going to the movies. We must say instead: “I went to the marvels last night”. Movement is now the least of the accomplishments of films like The Dark Knight and Iron Man. Calling a movie like The Dark Knight a movie is like calling a human being a walkie. There’s a lot more going on than just forward motion.

Watch the special effects vehicles of earlier eras, and maybe you’ll see what I mean. Recently, with my son, I had another look at Michael Korda’s The Thief of Baghdad from 1940, followed by a much less exalted flick, Ray Harryhausen’s The Golden Voyage of Sinbad from 1974. Both of these films still have their charms, and my son, after an initial reluctance to see beyond the cheap effects, became engrossed in them. On their own terms, in other words, they still work.

They no longer function as special effects movies, however. Back in 1974, when I first saw The Golden Voyage of Sinbad on the big screen, it was still possible to go back to a movie like The Thief of Baghdad and feel a sense of wonder. With their uncanny sense of movement, Harryhausen’s magical monsters were a step forward, but they didn’t obliterate the earlier achievements. There seemed a continuity of craft between the enchantments of 1940 and those of 1974.

In our own time, that thread has snapped. The continuity between the past of movies and the present no longer exists. As recently as the late 1990’s, a movie like James Cameron’s Titanic could still be appreciated in the context of earlier disaster movies, as an advance. Now even that quantum leap seems quaint. It’s often said that Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park was the motion picture that changed everything. In hindsight, the moment of truth came two years later in Pixar’s seemingly innocuous Toy Story, with its iridescent gorgeousness, its depiction of a hyper-reality on steroids. We knew then—and so did our children—that complete transformation of the image was on the way, and it would leave behind celluloid. This summer’s Wall-E, yet another startling leap forward in narrative art by Pixar, merely underscores the achievement.

Welcome to the future. When we see the preview for next year’s Watchmen, the long-awaited screen adaptation of the most groundbreaking of graphic novels, and the tag line says, “In 2009, everything we know will change,” we know the marketers aren’t just talking about plot mechanics. They are talking about our lives as moviegoers.

I’d like to offer one correction, though. Everything won’t change in 2009. Everything already has. Even when I enjoy a mediocrity like The Incredible Hulk at the drive-in or a disaster like Speed Racer, I see the vast distance that now lies between what we consider our last cinematic golden age, the 1970’s, the era of non-special effects blockbusters like The Godfather, Chinatown, Nashville, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and The Last Picture Show, and the current moment. I’m not talking about quality here. I’m talking about the nature of the medium.

It’s not just a question of the technology. In styles of acting, in the importance of the written word, in the tools and aesthetics of editing, in the elements of design and costume, there now lies as much road between our time and The Godfather as once existed between that era and the period of the silents, though we continue to look back at the period between 1967 and 1975 as our measure of greatness. In some sense, we are reentering the period of the early silent movies, a time when visuals were everything, when for the mass of the audience the astonishment at the medium itself, its technology, its grace, its aliveness, defined the moviegoing experience.

Try this experiment. Turn down the sound and watch any one of the recent superhero movies, and see if lack of audio is a major obstacle to enjoyment. Even when the acting is phenomenal, and in many of these movies, it rises to the level of the technology, the performance hardly needs words. Every gesture throws an enormous shadow. Each plot point exists at a gigantic level. Even the memorable last line of Iron Man—”I am Iron Man”—becomes redundant. All we have to do is look at the schematics of the scene, the relationship of the actor Robert Downey Jr. to everyone and everything else around him, and we know. We may like our dialogue; we no longer quite need it.

As an art form, movies once bore a superficial resemblance to novels. After the extra fat had been trimmed, the narratives of novels, in everything from Gone With The Wind to Lord of the Rings, had spines that made sense in cinematic terms. These days, the art form most resembling moviemaking is architecture. I see The Dark Knight, and I don’t think of graphic artist Frank Miller. I think instead of Frank Gehry and his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. The Dark Knight is that kind of experience. My mouth drops open. What am I witnessing? Is it a ship? But it’s on land! How is that possible? I’m in the presence of the marvelous.

Of course, we still have our old school cinema. Last year’s crop of traditional films suggested how much life may be left in the art form, and yet I can’t wondering if we aren’t watching a sunset before such material once and for all migrates to the small screen. When the most successful of those traditional recent movies, say, No Country For Old Men, generates a total worldwide box office of $160 million, $40 million less than the opening worldwide weekend of The Dark Knight, which grossed $199 million last week, the economics of non-special effects adult fare on the big screen ceases to make much sense.

Christopher Nolan’s Batman epic doesn’t just redefine the genre. It makes an evolutionary leap, turning one character, the Joker, into a living, breathing history of the graphic form, and at the same time, demonstrates that film language has finally managed to fully inhabit the visual style of comics. More than that, like almost all of its predecessors, this superhero movie is the ideal vehicle for a celebration of the power of the technology that makes it possible. Superhero movies aren’t first and foremost about the awesome power in the human body and mind. More than anything else, these millennial entertainments help us work out how we feel about our collective technological, political, economic and military might in light of the fact that most of us don’t feel powerful at all.

As individuals, we are Peter Parker. As Americans, we are Spiderman. Help us out, Sam Raimi.

I don’t see The Dark Knight as a heroic myth or fable, as a tale of profound moral ambiguity about a hero forced to make horrific compromises in order to uphold his sense of justice. That’s just the thinly disguised surface text. Instead, I see this marvel of the screen as a two-hour expression of our own fear and trembling before a national mythology that has raced so far ahead of our intelligence and ethics, and at every level, that we can no longer do anything in its presence except gasp. Yes, there are shadows of Abu Ghraib and 9-11 in this movie, but its impact is rooted in less definable conflict. We are being transformed by choice, because we choose to buy, elect and embrace the things that are transforming us, and we are being transformed against our will, because even if we do’t buy, elect or embrace these things, the people around us do, our children do, and we become them.

Think of us now as Edward Norton in The Incredible Hulk, hit by those gamma rays, aware of the alterations in our personal chemistry, believing ourselves to be in control until the moment when we change.

So The Dark Knight astonished and nauseated me. Ledger’s accidental suicide and the nature of his performance emit the corpse-flower scent. His raw line deliveries made an impression, but made me suspicious of audiences, critics and myself. We enjoy a dark and dirty glamor in the spectacle of a dead guy playing a psychyopathic monster, don’t we? It may be the movie of the decade, as one enthusiastic reviewer has suggested, but in only one sense. If the first ten years of this century have been an echo of the 1930’s, “that lowdown dirty decade”, as the poet W.H. Auden called that era, a time when people everywhere had become exhausted by the demands and frailties of democracy and excited, even aroused, by the spectacle of mass movements, state violence and dictatorships, then The Dark Knight strikes me as an apt reflection of our own seduction by similar forces.

I wish the film were better and less preachy. The script tells us again and again that the movie is important, that it is dealing with large moral issues, that we aren’t watching just another comic book flick, but we are. Comic books can be more than fun. They can also be awe-inspiring, full of haunting images and heart-wrenching melodrama, and they can, at their best, reach profound depths of feeling and intellect. A lot of the time, however, they can be heavy-handed and bloated, wearing their morality on their sleeves, pretending depth rather than achieving it. Comic book art revels in the grand declaration, the overwrought, undercooked machination, the flare of a cape that passes for the shadow of death.

In The Dark Knight, we’re in the presence of sham complexity. The Joker’s thrice-recycled victories and defeats, his ridiculous and illogical escape from prison, his ultimately tedious speeches about how he and Batman are alike—for the love of Thor, how many more times will we have to hear a supervillain or a bad guy say to the hero or the good guy, “We’re not so different, you and I”? as if we don’t know that from the opening frame of the story—and the piling up of set pieces that don’t follow any other logic but that of spectacle. I wanted to lose myself in the labyrinth of the Batman’s tormented psyche. Instead, I got speeches on that subject.

The movie’s success speaks for itself. My disappointment hardly matters. We’re in the grip of a movie bubble as relentless and doomed as our tech and real estate bubbles. These superhero flicks get more expensive to make, requiring ever larger budgets, seeking ever greater audiences around the globe; the success of the Dark Knight, trumping that of the Spiderman movies, now requires its own successor. In addition to next year’s Watchmen, we can expect Frank Miller’s The Spirit, another X-Men, this one about the character of Wolverine, and on and on. Personally, before the crash, I’d like to nominate David Cronenberg to direct Deathlok, David Lynch to do Warlock, and Forrest Whitaker for The Black Panther. Eventually, the superhero pipeline will implode, as budgets exceed even the most optimistic box office projections, and we’ll see what’s left alive in the wreckage. The smell of cinematic death may be just an illusion, but you could have fooled me.

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2008-05-19 06:17:21

I HEART SUSAN

Filed under: Movies, Prince Caspian
Posted by: John

Everyone who ever read the Narnia series by C.S. Lewis knows that Susan is the bad girl par excellence. Not for her a lifetime of infantilized relationships to the Big Banging universe. Not for her the denial of wordly pleasure in the service of a deep-voiced plush toy. Not for her the bow and arrow. Susan likes make-up. Susan likes nice clothes. Susan likes—Satanic concubine that she is—boys.

So the decision by the makers of Prince Caspian, the second movie in the Disney Narnia franchise, to have her give the titular royal a farewell smooch, accompanied by a breathy, Hilary Duff-style love song, does have its roots in the books. Yet somehow I know that C.S. Lewis, if he is sentient, complained to higher authorities. There isn’t a shred of disapproval in the movie kiss. Susan doesn’t come off as the whore of Babylon in a leather jerkin. She comes off instead as the indifferent object of a corporate decision to give the Hanna Montana crowd something to long for.

That about sums up the movie, which falls well below the quality level of the first in the series, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, which was saved only by Tilda Swinton playing the White Witch. With ferocious relish, Swinton made you believe she wanted to keep Narnia below zero. Too bad she didn’t succeed.

In the second, we get a lot of bad Eurotrashy accents, a swelling, nondescript score, a despondent Peter Dinklage reduced to playing a dwarf in a fantasy epic as if his groundbreaking turns in Living in Oblivion and The Station Agent never happened, and a Prince Caspian who has the zesty siesta charisma of a Venezuelan soap opera star trying not to look like a weight-lifting adulterer. Swinton appears for the best five minutes in the movie, and all of our suspicions are confirmed. This Narnia is pure product, and it sucks.

Get out while you can, Susan! Somewhere in the American South, Elvis Presley is already shaking his hips. Jazz is in full swing. It’s the front edge of the beatnik era, and northern California is starting to look and feel a lot like Narnia. You’re going to have a much better time in Big Sur than you ever would in Cair Paravel, trust me, and by the time you’re grown, you may actually be able to run your country.

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