BuysI bought a Humble Bundle of Oni Press graphic novels, so some of them might show up in my reads sooner than later.
"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Let's get it out of the way right now. For a French speaker, no English-language adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac is ever going to be tops. That's because the playful feast of language can't be exactly replicated. That said, Joe Wright isn't really adapting the play with his Cyrano, but the musical based on the play, so he might just get away with it. The most playful uses of language are, in fact, replaced. The nose insults, the impromptu ballad, Christian's puns and the moonfall scene are either gone, or replaced with song and dance. The language of the musical is different tonally, which makes for more overt interiority, which the film uses well to showcase excellent performances from its cast, led so sympathetically by Peter Dinklage. It's less of a comedy, and more of a touching romance, which isn't a bad way to go. But while I applaud the acting and cinematography, I'm not always sure about the musical elements. I'm fine with actors using their own voices, regardless of quality, it's not that. It's just that the songs are often surprisingly poppy and the light-footed choreography a little goofy. Roxanne's solos in particular are shot like pop videos, at odds with the rest of the film. Much better are sections where songs weave in and out of dialog or montage, and when the soldiers sing about their letters home, not a dry eye in the house. And ultimately, the story is so strong, and the film keeps enough of the text, that it still resonates beautifully and tragically.
At home: Though progressive at the time, 1950's Broken Arrow is necessarily dated today. It may treat Native Americans sympathetically (which for the era means they're more than barbarian yahoos), but the principals are still played by white actors in make-up, and though there's attention paid to Apache culture, at least some of it is invention. A sometimes over-narrated, old-fashioned take on true events, the movie stars James Stewart as Tom Jeffords, the man who actually offered Cochise an olive branch and tried to bring peace between Apache and "American" forces, with limited, but definite success. The big invention is the romance between Jeffords and a Native girl, the score for which would be replicated in Star Trek: The Original Series (big Paradise Syndrome vibes), but so far as I can tell, it never happened. Though the dialog often sounds "educational", it's Hollywoodized history that means well, and it probably wouldn't be as watchable without the affable Stewart in the lead role.
The Anthony Mann/James Stewart partnership is basically the reason why I'll always press Play on either of their westerns, be they together or not. To call The Man from Laramie Shakespearean might be overstating it, but their final collaboration of certainly has the kind of tragic family set-up you'd expect from the Bard. Stewart shows up in a rather unfriendly town and almost immediately runs afoul of the brutish son of the local land baron, but we're not sure if he's sticking around to get revenge, to get the girl, or because he's on a personal mission that has led him here (though the mystery is perhaps not that much of a mystery given what villains exist to fit the bill). It's a tangled web of intriguing characters, each caught up in their own plot, and the western tropes that perhaps weren't so old in 1955, often manage a surprising twist that keeps this one entertaining even decades on.
Though modern audiences have seen worse, Anthony Mann's Man of the West is kind of shocking for 1958. The violence is extended and visceral, and there are several moments where a woman is placed in sexual jeopardy. Even almost-nudity. Now, I do think you have to get up real early in the morning to give Gary Cooper some edge, and Mann slept through his alarm clock. He's just an open-faced goof that it's hard to believe he was ever a ruthless outlaw. Yes, he needs to have grown up and found a sense of decency - to have BECOME Gary Cooper - but I'm not convinced of his disreputable past. The story has him, a con man, and a singer left in the wilderness after a train robbery. From there, he runs across people from his past who take treat him as much like a hostage as like a partner in their next crime, dragging him back down to the hell he thought he'd escaped. When Mann takes on a script, you can expect characters with interesting quirks, and twists that veer away from the usual tropes, and Man of the West at least delivers on those counts.
Sometimes, you can just tell a studio went in and screwed with a project. I won't say Jonah Hex would have been good had they not - they simply switched one B-movie director for another - but it probably wouldn't have been such a mess. When the needless origin story (which drives a hack revenge plot) is followed by narration over bad flash animation, you know there's a piece of the movie missing. Josh Brolin has complained that he had to reshoot 66 scenes in three days, and going by onscreen evidence, the new version added a nonsense (and cliched) superweapon plot right out of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (cuz THAT was a hit), and kept the origin ending in as a... dream? Impossible flashback? The third act is particularly disjointed. It's too bad, because there was potential there. That post-animation intro to the character, bringing back bounty and not standing for getting cheated, promises a fun, violent western that doesn't take itself too seriously. And Josh Brolin is a good Jonah, even if I would have liked the make-up to be more extreme. But it all goes downhill from there. The movie's essential mistake is that it so visibly wants to be a COMIC BOOK MOVIE!!!!! (If reading aloud, you must shout at the top of your lungs.) Jonah has to have a villain tied into his origin story. He has to have super-powers (WHAT!?). There's a supernatural element because the writers were obviously handed Two-Gun Mojo, but it doesn't play as a horror film like it should. There's mad science and gadget guns. The Frankenstein's monster production is probably to blame for its non-commital tone, but I can't review what might have been, only what sadly is. It's no secret I consider the WB's cinematic handling of DC Comics properties to be wrong-headed, so that a serious IP like Hex would be treated as B-movie sillybuggers, while its aspirational superhero movies are ponderous and bleak. It makes no sense. What the WB actually has, but doesn't know it, and in fact sank with this version of Jonah Hex, is the capacity to make cool, serious, high-concept westerns in a unique cinematic universe (I could say the same of DC's war strips or horror). But that's a notion that probably only works in my mind. Just watch when I become head of studio...
/1978: In the late 70s, Marvel was developing properties for television - The Incredible Hulk being its big winner - and with the decade's interest in the occult, Dr. Strange might have seemed like a good idea. The effects are fine, with a trippy slit-scan astral projection sequence and drawn-on eldritch bolts - at least, it's better than some of the acting... and Los Angeles doesn't double well for Manhattan. But where it actually fails is in the adaptation of the comics material. Peter Hooten's frizzy-haired Strange just isn't a Marvel hero! I'll explain. Instead of his hubris leading him down a tragic path and climbing back up as a better man, he's a "chosen one" who's already doing the altruistic thing at the hospital to the consternation of his bean-counting colleagues. At one point, you think they've pulled a Spider-Man on him, where his hard-headed disbelief costs the very mundane replacement for the Ancient One his life, but no, he gets better. He gets a pretty good approximation of the costume, but since it's devil-made, they replace it in the climax with a silly-looking purple number. Clea is just a victim and love interest in this, played by scream queen Anne-Marie Martin (from Prom Night), but everyone lusts after the good doctor, including the villain - and possibly the one good reason to watch this - Morgan Le Fay, played by a glamorous Jessica Walter. Which brings me to wonder what the show would have been like, week in, week out. A sort of Buck Rogers where the recurring villain tries to seduce him... his mentor (and Wong) teaching him new tricks every episode... and the cases coming through his job as a psychiatrist (another weird change), I guess. Let's just say I don't think the movie tanked just because it was opposite Roots. I think it was rather put up against Roots for a reason.
Also from that year: Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings, The Wiz
1979: King Hu's Legend of the Mountain is first and foremost about magic percussions. I'm kidding, but there's an awful lot of it. There's an awful lot of everything that's IN the film, but the slow pace still gets us places. What it IS about is a young and naive scholar going up a mountain to transcribe a sutra, but instead of the peace and quiet he's expecting, his work is interrupted by several zany characters, including the literally bewitching Melody (played by King Hu regular Hsu Feng). We're quick to realize something sinister is going on, but whether mundane, demonic or ghostly, the audience is kept guessing (not that the clues are hard to pick up... unless you're the scholar). As with the rest of the director's work, the nature photography is beautiful, with wonderful locations and the natural world somehow responding to the action. And there IS action. Not martial arts, but explosive magical battles, fairly low-tech, but they do the job. Or was I just under the drum beat's spell?
Also from that year: Rankin & Bass' Jack Frost
1980: Sometimes, on a full moon, kids playing D&D invest so much in their imaginary adventure, someone out there spontaneously turns it into a movie. At least that's what Hawk the Slayer feels like even if it doesn't have those origins (so far as I know, but the character types are very D&D Basic). Some performances are worth looking at - Jack Palance is of course pleasantly over the top as the villain, William Morgan Sheppard is great as one of the heroes, and Christopher Benjamin has a small part as a con man - but the hero himself has zero personality. I'd say even less than the robotic elf who thinks he's playing a Vulcan, but still playing it badly. It's an okay adventure, a bit too interested in the mechanics of assembling a party perhaps, but fine. It just doesn't have the means to show us its ideas. The magic looks ridiculous (a silly string spell?!), a giant is just a tall person and an iron dwarf just a shortish person, and most egregiously, the bloodless battles almost never show a hit happening. It's all "cut to result", making a hash of the editing. Not to mention the machine gun archery which just looks silly, though I don't entirely dislike it. And that disco score! The movie promises sequels that never happened, which is surprising given what DOES get sequels in the coming decade (as video changes the game for B-material).
Also from that year: Somewhere in Time, Xanadu
1981: A cocky sorcerer's apprentice (Peter MacNicol? the anxious lawyer in Ally McBeal? really!?) undertakes to kill the old dragon terrorizing a kingdom in Dragonslayer, a sword & sorcery movie that seems like family fare, but is at times a little gorier than you expect. Let me first commend the effects. They tease the dragon at first, a claw here, a tail there, and you think, okay, how cheap is this going to be? But it's so it can better surprise you when the animatronic monster actually shows up. The compositing/chromakey shows its age at times, but still makes for pretty great action, whether it's with hand-to-hand weapons or magic spells. As for the story, it's got a couple of interesting characters (like young Valerian) and twists you're not expecting, as well as a healthy dose of religious and political satire. Sure, there's a dragon, but the king's policies regarding that dragon are the real danger to the people we come to care about. It's a little slow at first, granted, and I question whether or not the "hero's journey" works (is Galen's flaw really sold to us, and does he actually overcome it?). There's a lot of stuff like this coming out of the early 80s (somehow even before Conan the Barbarian, which I would have thought would have originated the trend), and little of it is as worthwhile as Dragonslayer.
Also from that year: Excalibur, Time Bandits, Clash of the Titans
1982: My first and most important question about The Beastmaster is how it was allowed to steal a key musical phrase of the Battlestar Galactica theme for its own. Like, how?! My other questions fall into the "huh?!" category and might relate to casting (Marc Singer? Rip Torn?! I thought Tony Todd was in this - ah, only the third one? - well I can't get too made since it's fun to see John Amos playing a barbarian hero), structure (the double-climax, the deus ex machina's set-up), and - this is meant as a positive though - absolutely bonkers story. When you secure the services of Don Coscarelli, weirdness is almost a given, and this movie is full of it. Our hero Dar's origin story has him magically stolen from his mother's womb and implanted in a cow, which has got to be the reason he can assemble a party of animals as an adult. They're all cool, but the real heroes of the film are the ferrets and you can't tell me different. They even get an important kill shot. Ugly witches, gimpy beast-men, kind of sort of the weapon from Krull a year earlier... it's all quite ridiculous and fun, PG-bloodless despite its random nudity (on that score, I need to condemn Dar's initial rapeyness with Tanya Roberts, and I'm still confused, were they kissing cousins or not?). Out of 5 stars, I can only reasonably give it 3 even if I enjoyed its goofy weirdness, so I'd split the difference by at least favoriting it.
Also from that year: Conan the Barbarian, The Last Unicorn, The Dark Crystal, Mazes and Monsters
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