"Accomplishments"
At home: I'm afraid that for me, Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood is a rare crash and burn for Richard Linklater. The premise could have been adventuresome and amusing - a boy of 10 is asked to go on a secret Apollo mission because the first lunar module was accidentally built too small - but as soon as it's set up, we get a full 45 minutes of over-narrated (making full use of Jack Black) nostalgia about being a kid in Houston in 1968-69. Linklater (if these are his memories, they might be composites) name checks every TV show and movie he saw, every game he played, everything in his diary, until you're stamping your feet, impatiently waiting for him to return to the story. The second half intercuts between Apollo 10½ and Apollo 11, by which point you realize the boy is really seeing himself as one of the astronauts, imagination as memory, but that's an idea that could have been done as a short. My particular interest in the Apollo missions means I didn't learn anything new either. We're left with an animation style I like - Linklater helped develop this process of drawing on video frames in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly; these images are much less gooey - capturing well the actors' expressions. The family has a lot of fun characters. But ultimately, for long stretches, it just feels like an itemized list of childhood memories. I guess it's right there in the title, but what a waste of a neat premise.
While it's in line with Alain Resnais' style, Last Year in Marienbad (L'Année dernière à Marienbad) feels much more like it's its writer Alain Robbe-Grillet's show. It certainly has all the hallmarks of his "nouveau roman", which I'd hate to reduce to "deconstructionism", at least uses the novel's narrative elements in strange and unusual ways, often as overtly mechanical devices, revealing the under-structure of writing itself. We might interpret Marienbad as a romance where the interior is made exterior, or a ghost story whose dirge-like music promises to reveal a tragic tale, but nouveau roman isn't really about that. It is a play on structure, pure and simple, and the effects derived, while potentially pregnant with meaning, are a side-effect and not a goal. Filled with repeated images and text, Marienbad is set in a dream-like, baroque hotel where characters stand transfixed until robotically activated (I don't think I can use the word "needed"), a woman (Delphine Seyrig) is trapped in the narrative controlled by a would-be lover (Giorgio Albertazzi), a sort of narrator with the role's attendant powers, an author trying to wrangle the ending he wants from characters by amending history, repeated, modified, unclear memory. All style and the substance is left to the audience, but happily, the film's rich ambiguities gives us what we need to impose our own narrative. Whether this is an authorial violence like the one on the screen is debatable.
/2005: Like Dave McKean's Sandman covers come to life, MirrorMask is an Alice in Wonderland-type story directed by McKean and co-written by Neil Gaiman, and it's something you can watch over and over and catch new details every time. Helena (the engaging Stephanie Leonidas) is being a difficult teenager, rejecting her parents' circus life, when her mother falls ill and the guilt sends her spinning into a strange nightmare that looks like her own artwork (really, McKean's). Though produced by the Jim Henson company, it doesn't really have any "muppets" per se, though McKean does put on a sock puppet show at the top of the movie that's meant as a tribute. Rather, its fantasy world is created with virtual sets that look like the director's golden-hued collages. The obvious CG works within the context of this multi-media world (where it wouldn't pass muster in photo-real narratives), and there's just so much imagination and whimsy on show, the technical flaws hardly matter. Gaiman's dialog is cracking, the production design sparkling, the metaphors interesting, the surrealism arresting.
Also from that year: The Chronicles of Narnia begin
2006: A meditation on the transformational power of stories, and their cost, on and for their teller AND their audience, The Fall is an impossibly gorgeous piece of cinema, shot all over the world in incredible locations, seamlessly incorporating effects to enhance the image-making. It looks AMAZING. The frame tale has a little girl from India, at the turn of the 20th Century, spending her time in hospital listening to Lee Pace spin his yarn. Delightfully, her own culture informs how she imagines it, inspires parts of it, amends it in her mind and pushes those revisions on him. It's a very clever device and little Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) is a DELIGHT, her relationship with Pace rivetingly natural, and ultimately, touching. It's like she's just reacting to the script, hearing (or sometimes mishearing) it for the first time, because that's exactly what's happening. The frame tale is a huge piece of semi-improvisation that then inspires the lavish fantasy. For Pace's character, the story is personal, but we're denied its truth until the end, and even there, we don't abandon the girl's point of view. An incredible achievement through and through - why don't more people know about it?
Also from that year: Pan's Labyrinth, Strange Than Fiction, Night at the Museum
2007: While Stardust: The Movie retains much of the world-building of Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess' illustrated novel, in the final analysis, I think Matthew Vaughn was the wrong adapter/director for it. It's really the attempts at comedy that do me in. Sometimes they work, as with the ghosts of the murdered brothers acting as a chorus with no skin in the game, but otherwise, it's booby jokes, Ricky Gervais essentially playing himself, or Robert De Niro as a surprisingly gay sky captain. That's not in the book, but De Niro playing gay, that's funny, right? Right?! Sigh. Speaking of De Niro, he's not the only American in the cast, but he's the only one who doesn't affect a British accent, which is odd. In terms of casting, I always struggle with Claire Danes too, and don't really think she's a great fit for the living star Yvaine. Young Charlie Cox as the hero is better, Michelle Pfeiffer as the witch queen very cool, Mark Strong as the (other) villain up to par. I hate to give this only a passing grade because it really does have a good mock-Tolkien/Lewis story, beautiful evocations of fairy tale logic, and the sense that this could be an actual folk tale. Vaughn's irreverence and casual tone switching (here, the animal violence is at odds with the comic turns) would be much more at home in Kingsman, improving on Millar where he could only drag down Gaiman.
Also from that year: Enchanted, The Golden Compass
2008: The best bits of Sita Sings the Blues for me were the ones where three unscripted Indian narrators argued over how the Ramayana goes and whether different parts of the story make sense. I could have done with more of that. Unfortunately, the structure of the film requires that everything happen in triplicate. First the cross-talking explanation, then the agreed upon story, and finally a musical number using archival Annette Henshaw tracks, all in different animation styles and rather attractive (though the latter part isn't quite ambitious enough in terms of choreography), but the repetition eventually drags things down. I said "and finally", but the story is also intercut with autobiographical segments in the style of Nina Paley's feminist comics, at once the most primitive looking in terms of animation, and as an "origin" for the rest of the film, less than useful. Like putting jazz and blues tracks over an Indian story, it smacks of cultural appropriation. I enjoyed Paley's comics back in the day, and was disappointed to read her comments regarding her support of JK Rowling; the thoughtless politics at the heart of Sita unfortunately fall in line with those comments. The movie looks cool, but it makes me grumble.
Also from that year: Ponyo, The Forbidden Kingdom, Twilight begins
2009: Wow, is there a They Might Be Giants song in Coraline?! There is. Another Laika Studios winner, anyway, though it would feel fresher if I hadn't also watched MirrorMask this week - it's a spin on the same idea. Coraline (one of several references to Shakespeare in the film, though how it connects to anything escapes me) just moved to a new town, in a creepy old house, and she's pissed at her parents. In her dreams - or is it reality? - she crawls into a cubby-hole and finds another house, with other parents, and is lured into the life she thinks she wants. I really like the knitted aesthetic of the other world and clearly see inspiration for each element in the real world, though I still find "reality" a bit random at times. The acrobat living on the top floor with trained mice? The stuffed dogs? The neighbor's Ghost Rider mask? They pay off, fueling Coraline's living nightmare, but I find their presence in the first place dubious. Still, with all the little details, I'm sure this is a perennial (yes, that's a pun) favorite for many, finding new connections on subsequent rewatches.
Also from that year: Into the Void, The Lovely Bones, Where the Wild Things Are
2010: Though quiet and lyrical, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is the kind of film that stays with you. We are introduced to a man who undergoing dialysis on his farm in rural Thailand, convinced he's not long for this world and wondering what the next might bring. Long takes, no score, natural conversation, mundane stuff, and then a spirit shows up and if that's normal and everyone sort of takes it in their stride. We're in what Western audiences call magical realism - karma, reincarnation and ghosts are taken for granted and don't really disturb the film's realism. Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul has spoken about reincarnation as running parallel (I'm grossly oversimplifying it, I'm sure), quantum mechanics as spirituality, and it shows up twice in the film. The first is in a flashback(?) to what feels like an old legend of a princess and a catfish, which the modern-day time frame does not address in any way. Is this one of Boomnee's former/parallel lives? And if so, which character is he? The second is the enigmatic ending. What I'll remember most, however, is the subtle relationship between Boonmee and his sister-in-law, a lot of things unspoken there, about lives not lived and choices not made, and perhaps that's how we explain the ending after all.
Also from that year: The Secret World of Arrietty, How to Train Your Dragon, Troll Hunter
2011: Though I have a hard time recognizing Jason Momoa without a beard, he makes a pretty good Conan the Barbarian. Unfortunately, in his film outing as the Cimmerian, he's saddled with the king of requels, Marcus Nispel. It's not a bad story exactly - we spend a quarter of the film in Conan's childhood, which was interesting (as was Ron Perlmand as his dad), and the rest combines a revenge story with a "stop the bad guy from assembling his devil-summoning kit" - but it's treated in the most ordinary, modern B-movie way possible. Clichéed Morgan Freeman narration, over-edited action that makes it hard to follow and/or disengaging, ugly violence and gore, and a real lack of quiet scenes to get involved with the characters. Despite being a household name, I don't know what it will take to make him a movie success again, but this isn't it. I would love to see a great movie about him in his pirate days, playing opposite Bêlit the pirate queen, but as long as new Conan movies are barely okay, we're not likely to see much variation on the theme.
Also from that year: Midnight in Paris, Thor, The Smurfs
Books: Set in the margins of Sandman's great(est?) storyline, "Season of Mists", Death: At Death's Door show Death and her sisters in the Endless dealing with all the souls being loosed out of Hell. The draw is that Jill Thompson writes and draws the story in the a bubbly Manga style, with plenty of jokes and references to popular anime fare like Sailor Moon and Pokémon. We get to see Death in various costumes, and Delirium and Despair get good parts too. It's certainly cute. Unfortunately, the book is intent on retelling the high points of Season of Mists, spoiling it for those who are using At Death's Door as an entry point, and pretty redundant for veteran Sandman fans. These are pages that might have been better used filling in Despair's romance with a historical character (Desire's role remains ambiguous) or showing more of Death working things out. I might also have cut the Dead Boy Detectives stuff, as it also feels like an extended inside joke for fans of the original books. I'm fine with a fluff piece set in the Sandman universe, if only they'll let it be its own story.
Though Something to Declare purports to assemble Julian Barnes' essays on France and French things, the last two-thirds are really about Flaubert or people whose lives intersect with Flaubert. I'm not against it, but even Barnes realizes the imbalance, quoting Sir Kingsley Amis in the preface and on the back cover among the usual praises: "I wish he'd shut up about Flaubert." Well, that's his specialty, and I could read Barnes wax biographical about mid 19th-Century French artistes all day (and have). Some of the other articles collected here could have found a berth in Keeping an Eye Open (essays on art) or The Pendant in the Kitchen (on cookery), but there's no repetition of text, and little in the way of content. Barnes seems to have revised all the articles anyway to make them flow more smoothly into a single volume. And then there are essays on France's great songwriters (Brel, Vian, Brassens), the Tour de France, motoring through the country, and the French New Wave; it's not all the same few obsessions. Except France, of course, and Barnes' connection to that country, especially its past, is always keenly felt.
Prelude to this review... When I was a kid, Time-Life Books was constantly running commercials for THE SECRET WAR, a tell-all about WWII espionage and part of their World War II collection. Order now and you'll get a book each month! Well, I was obsessed with it so my mom sent out for the subscription. The Secret War, a later volume sent first, was pretty much the only one I ever read, and after a bit less than a year, my mom noticed and cancelled. Getting to them now, I don't think they were for my 10-12-year-old self. Not just because I lacked the context for a dive into history, but also because the pictured (the Life part of the package) included nudity, dead bodies, etc. The first book in the series (if not the first one they sent you) was Prelude to War, which details the political and military events that took place between the two world wars, or just the continuing conflict, if you like, as many modern historians consider them just one (a reasoning this book totally justifies). I expected fairly dry text, but not at all. The inter-war period is chock-full of anecdotes and small but memorable details that make these stories come alive. The copyright is 1977, so a few elements are dated (the USSR would not fall for a long time, for example), but remarks that would age like this are rare. In fact, with war pointing its ugly head in Europe again, there are many parallels to be made, whether it's the behavior and policies of fascist countries then and the rise of the hard right now, or the reasons behind invasions in either time frame. You know what they say about not knowing your history...
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