Star Wars, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace in 3-D

Episode I: The Phantom Menace is back in theaters for a 25th Anniversary (Really? That long ago?) and it's doing really well at the box-office, beating out NEW movies. And I've been hearing "buzz"...like an NPR report on "All Things Considered Weekend" that damned with faint praise (hardly the "reconsideration it promised).

But, it did raise some issues, that led to some actual...thoughts. So, I'm re-running my review of The Phantom Menace when I viewed it in its 3-D version.

Star Wars, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (in 3-D) (George Lucas, 1999/2012/in perpetuity) "Star Wars" is the one series I was curious to see in 3-D—the clean, simple lines of force (pardon the pun) from the first immersion into those films (a long, long time ago in 1976) was along a line that extended from behind our heads to points close to the center of the screen: the opening titles that flashed, then crept into a distant infinity; hyperspace travel that zipped into that same bulls-eye quadrant; the cavernous, warehouse spaces of the Empirical HQ's; the approaching death-spirals of various death-stars; slaloms through asteroids and skimming over ice-fields. The movies already seemed yearning to stretch 2-D images into three-dimensional spaces, and although Lucas' spacial sense and action lines became increasingly complicated, and precise cutting more extreme, he always kept that sense of background/foreground busyness that leant itself to three-dimensions without (literally) rubbing our noses in it...or poking our eyes with it.

Naturally, they'd start with Episode 1 this time. After all of Lucas' tinkering over the years, 3-D seems like a natural place to go, especially for the reasons already listed, and there's been enough time out of theaters to make projected images seem unique (plus, there's a ready-made audience already grown up on all six films, who may actually prefer the prequels to their predecessors...despite the sneering of their fathers--"Shut UP, Dad!").

But, whatever the design sense going into the films, they were still SHOT flat.  Yes, there's a lot of post-production digital imagery that can be manipulated, but the actors—the live ones, anyway—are still forever tied to the backgrounds on location, and any cutting/pasting/shifting is going to make those portions look as fake as those late-model View-master pix that weren't taken with stereo-cameras on location, and looked instead like cardboard standees in front of a shifted background.

Not sure how they did it—I suspect it's the adding of shaped shadows to facial features and bodies—but, the 3-D effects are convincing and seamless, and although the picture loses some luster due to the lower light-levels (and those damn glasses), they're the same minor annoyances one finds in any 3-D presentation-it goes with the depth-of-territory.  And, as most of the SW films, pains had already been made to make things multi-planed enough to justify the conversion. Some of the speedier foreground elements tend to go rather unmenacingly phantom-like, but those are on rare occasions. 

Some random thoughts:

—The big vista shots, especially with the Naboo city-scapes, tend to look a bit more miniaturish in 3-D—although the sky-scraping Coruscant scenes play very well.

—I also got the impression that some shots which resisted conversion were just replaced with closer shots—the main ones being Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson, who seems to have made the best choice in underplaying his radical Jedi ideologue, although it tends to undermine the character's importance) clucking a Tatooine beast-of-burden into motion, which I was under the impression was done in a fuller shot than the close-up this has, and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor, who had the best acting arc of all the actors in the prequels) doing a spinning lightsaber move seems to have been moved a bit closer than the original.

—I don't remember The Phantom Menace moving as fast as this viewing seemed to. It's still pretty amazing to see how precise the editing is, and yet manage to get all the visual information necessary to follow what's going on, something not helped by the sound mix, which tends to prefer effects impression over clarity.

—Interesting how Keira Knightley blends in the role of Queen Amidala's decoy/hand-maiden with Portman's more formal Queen acting (although, considering Knightley is probably a full foot taller than the miniaturish Portman, shouldn't the instinctual Jedi have noticed the subterfuge a little earlier?).

—The last 20 minutes work like gang-busters with the cross-cutting Battle for Naboo on four fronts—the Gungan invasion by battle-droids, the Padme-led attack on the palace, the attack on the droid-command ship, and the three-sided lightsaber duel, and it's helped immeasurably by John Williams' "Duel of the Fates," which after consisting of a subdued omnipresent sonic wallpaper for most of the film, kicks things into high-gear. 

—Haters are still going to hate it—and, indeed, the fan-boy line has been staunchly adhered to in 3-D reviews—but, the Trade Federation plot resonates a bit more after the NAFTA kerfluffle and the bank meltdowns, and I still like the midi-chlorian idea making Anakin a "virgin birth"—leading me to the thought at the time "what if Jesus Christ turned out to be an asshole?"—even if it was all revealed to be a bio-engineering project by Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith.

No, it ain't perfect—it's a little stiff, with shots of smiles for smiles' sake, and the dialogue clunks along, even if some vital bits of information are slipped in under the radar, along the way. But, as one friend remarked after seeing a student-remixed version of Episode IV, "God, I forgot it was such a cheese-fest." It is. The thing is based on old "Flash Gordon" serials and embraces the sensibilities of that style of ham-fisted major-key film-making. It's a fantasy film, not a Guide For Living, and subtlety was never in the blue-print. It is a small, quaint little conceit-film-series made Epic by the adoration of its fans. 

Yet, for some reason, George Lucas is to blame for the pushing of "product" (I haven't read any of the 3-D reviews, but the word "greed" keeps popping up in them), when it's the marketplace that drives these things. If people stopped buying this stuff, he wouldn't keep tossing it out there, revamping, tinkering, and attempting to make the films transition across the decades and technologies. We have met the Sith, and they are Us. And, boy, are we dumb!

2024 "Reconsideration"

As Roger Ebert said in his review of The Phantom Menace, "If it were the first 'Star Wars' movie, 'The Phantom Menace' would be hailed as a visionary breakthrough. But this is the fourth movie of the famous series, and we think we know the territory."

Just so. 

But, there were a couple things that Lucas hadn't really addressed in his Universe filled with exotic creatures and wondrous sights.

One of them was fashion, not only in apparel, but also in architecture. The previous films the former was dominated by uniforms and casual wear, and for the latter—other than the cloud-city of Bespin and the militaristic gloss of the Death Stars—everything else was supposed to suggest an improvised environment cobbled together with wire and spit.

Now, there had to be vast functioning cities of well-engineered design with an established history. And the clothes, for the higher end of dignitaries and royalty, had to have an air of regality and authority, where no one was allowed to dress like a scruffy nerf-herder. Nobody really complained about that.

The other was ethnicity. In a bio-diverse Uni-sphere, it was a little improbable that everybody would sound either American of British (the only exception being Millennium Falcon co-pilot Nien Nunb, who spoke in Kenyan). And so, for the sake of diversity, understand, accents were provided for the Gungans, the Trade Federation, and for Watto, the junk dealer on Tatooine. Character accents (that is, the way they speak)—eschewing the very recognizable French, German, and Italian kind—were treated as if they were racial slurs (they are considered offensive, still, in that NPR "reconsideration" above). But, the binary Yank/Brit accents are a bit limiting for such a Universe, don't you think? Shouldn't it be a bit more diverse? To American audiences, apparently not. It's not in our comfort zone. As I said at the end of the piece above, boy, are we dumb.

But, hey, it's just a movie. It's not like anybody treats it like a religion or anything.

Right?

That's right. "We think we know the territory."

 

What we don't know is how damn sensitive we are.

I Love You, Phillip Morris

"The Many Lives and One Life-Term of Steven Russell"
or  

"Hold me, Kiss me, Make me Write Bad Checks..."

 

I can see why Jim Carrey wanted to do this, although the box-office returns might not be up to the block-busting weekend standards his films are used to. The writing team of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (who also directed) had previously written one of the most ribald Christmas movies ever made—Bad Santa (they also wrote the first Cats & Dogs, but let's not stray there). For anyone who doesn't like Christmas movies, Bad Santa was a tonic, a mean-spirited slash & burn of every sentiment and cliche associated with the Holiday. It's so black-hearted that, to this day, it is tough for me to watch a Christmas movie now with any sort of innocence, so caustic and toxic is that movie. That it ended up with a jaded heart of gold somewhere amidst the bloody gristle was an astonishing accomplishment, and made me anticipate what they might foist on the innocent audience next.

Their latest, I Love You, Phillip Morris, has the proverbial "something to offend everybody." And it is relentless in its attempt to shock. That the story is, essentially, true (and chronicled in the book "I Love you, Phillip Morris: A True Story of Life, Love and Prison Breaks" by Steve McVicker, about the mis-adventures of Steven Jay Russell) only proves the adage that truth is stranger than fiction. Especially when the truth involves a lot of fiction. The writer-director team only have to find punch-lines in the various scenes in order to push it into the comedy realm. Absurdism rules. Love will do that to you.

The film begins with Steve Russell (Carrey) flat-lining in a hospital bed, his life passing before his eyes, and thus, too, through the projector aperture. His normal life turned upside-down when he learns that he's adopted, he starts living his life as a non-person, as one who doesn't exist. But, existing with a 163 I.Q. means you have a lot of time on your hands to think things up to do. It's a bit like the wondrous aspect of Groundhog Day—what would you do with the time you have if every day had a "Reset" button at the end? Steve Russell has his own "Reset" button, and just one life to live, so he spends it as a completely self-absorbed unit, grabbing at the possibilities of life by any means necessary, including lying, cheating and stealing. A complete sociopath, the only thing limiting him is what he hasn't learned to get away with yet. He starts as an ordinary family man, becoming a policeman, a church organist and living a lie. Then a near-fatal car-crash at a crossroads snaps him into an epiphany: he's going to live the life he's always wanted out in the open, as long as how he does so stays in the background. He openly leads a gay lifestyle, leaving his wife and child, bankrolling everything through frauds of one type or another, until it all lands him in prison.   

Then, the real fun begins.

For the secret of Steven Russell is to find the weak links in society's infrastructure and take advantage of them. In prison, he meets and falls in love with Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor), who might uncharitably be called a 'weak link"—as he "sees the good in everybody," and for Russell, that's finding his soul-mate, easy to admire and easy to be false to. 

 
So much lying, deception, robbing, stealing, impersonation and chicanery goes on in this film that, finally, it is a bit numbing. By the time Russell pulls off his biggest deception (and it's a doozy, not only in the difficulty of pulling it off, but in the harm that it can inflict), nothing surprises...or shocks. So much time has been spent in the red-line of your sensibilities, that your meter emerges pretty much pegged. It's going to take a lot of time looking at puppies in order to Brillo the sourness out of your skull. 

Except...I Love You, Phillip Morris is kind of sweet. Despite being a lying sack, Steven Russell is a pretty devoted guy, going to extremes for those he loves, and...yes...even dying for them. It's horrifying. But, its heart is in the right place.  Ficarra/Requa can be counted on to find the silver linings in the dark clouds, as well as peeing in the punch-bowl. Every scene has a 90° swerve on what its about—sweet to sour, darkness to light. One of my favorite scenes has Phillip bribing a cell-neighbor to play "Chances Are" (Johnny Mathis, natch')—because the thug has the only cassette player—so that he and Steven can dance and snuggle in the cell they share. We watch as they dance slowly in silhouette, the song warbling through the cell-block until the guards yell "lights out" and start screaming at the thug to turn off the music, which he refuses to do. Pretty soon, there's a small riot outside the cell as the guards run in en masse, beating and tasering the yelling music-provider, merely heard in the background, as we focus on Steven and Phillip lost in their dance and each other—the world has gone away.

Nice. Creepy and violently funny, but nice. And smart. And tells you all you need to know about Steven and Phillip's devotion. The film-makers got their act down, but the yin and yang of extremes don't help Carrey and MacGregor, who struggle to maintain a consistent tone in their characters scene-to-scene. At times, Carrey is so arch you wonder how anyone could be conned by this cartoon character, and MacGregor veers from teeth-jarringly sweet to pathetically whiny. But, when the comedy turns to drama, the two seem to snap into place to make it work...as a real scene, which tends to nullify the comedy that has gone before. It's a tightrope-walk to be sure, but there's an awful lot of nervous-making swaying going on.

I don't say this very often, but this is one of those movies you worry about recommending because there is so much material that could give frail audiences "the vapors," but if you steel yourself—maybe get a speeding ticket on the way to the theater, pay your taxes that day—you might have a darkly good time.

The Real Steven Russell (I think)



Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Swimming Upstream
or
The Fish, The River, and The Games We Play

You look at the title and already the questions start. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen? What's up with that? It sounds quixotic—salmon fishing in a desert environment. Impossible. Useless. Theoretically possible, certainly. "Like a manned mission to Mars is theoretical," says Professor Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor), but not very practical. But a rep agency has a sheikh client (Amr Waked) who wants to do it. It will generate a lot of things: money into the coffers of the fisheries and wildlife people; publicity for the P.M. (as orchestrated by Patricia Maxwell, played with a vibrating steeliness by Kristin Scott Thomas); electricity for the sheikh's kingdom. So it has its practical side—it gets bureaucrats functioning, people working, so who cares about the feasibility, even if its a crap-shoot (or more properly, a carp-shoot). Like fishing.

Even Jones, the functionary put in charge of the project, needs some luring to wrap his mind around the project. "I have a standing with the scientific community—a reputation!" "A mortgage.." counters his wife in a practical marriage. He thinks everyone spear-heading the project needs a net. And his demands start to loom large, asking the sheikh's representative, Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt) to get the engineers who designed the Three Gorges Dam in China to do the blue-printing and then "get two of those big Russian transports—Antonovs?—One for the fish and another for all the money we'll need."

He gets the engineers (which impresses), but a little research and a talk with the sheikh and a tour of the building site gets Jones hooked and convinces him that it just might work—a blind cast, to be sure, but he's made a lot of those. And like angling, it takes a lot of patience. As his benefactor says, you've got to have faith. Any faith will do. Even if it's the faith one has putting your hook in the water.

Not unlike the faith you have to have going into any Lasse Hallström movie. He burst onto the international film scene with My Life as a Dog (a film I still haven't waded through, despite sitting on my desk for a month*) and he became Miramax's "go-to" guy for prestige pictures for "blue-hairs"—a director of such discriminating taste, that one could actually accuse him of avoiding the subject, so as not to offend.**  The effect can either be good or bad, and I approach a Hallström chronicle with caution. For every The Shipping News, there's a Once Around. Every What's Eating Gilbert Grape is matched by An Unfinished Life. Something to Talk About isn't, really, and Chocolat feels a bit hollow. "Yeah, it was fine," you say when it was over, "but..." Not exactly thrilling. Tamped down. Safe. Unexceptional. The story gets told, but it doesn't move the senses or the emotions. The movie gets made, gets seen, but disappears from the mind like spun sugar in water. But every few movies, the elements jell.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is one of his better efforts, but is still very restrained, though the elements of terrorist drama that pop up tend to disrupt the generally genial tone of the thing. And like a fine day of fishing, it all comes down to the casting. McGregor is terrific here, lilting accent intact, and feeling more genuine than he has since The Ghost Writer. Blunt is given a bit more emotion than she's been allowed her last few movies, and Waked is a sage, calm presence. And as far as the movie goes, one is charmed with the conceit of the film as a love metaphor—of taking a flyer in relationships, and committing to something beyond yourself, even if the odds are long and the obstacles high. But, ultimately, it's in one's nature to swim upstream, to rise above, because it is our nature.

* Actually, I did make it through it. My review is here.

 

* I always remember conservative commentators talking about what a fine film The Cider House Rules was—because it was about an abortion doctor who established an orphanage for "unwanteds"—most probably because they hadn't seen it, for if they had they might not have had such high praise for a film dealing with child and sexual abuse and incest.

The Ghost Writer (2010)

"Brilliant...in a Horrible Kind of Way"

From the first jolting burst of rain on the soundtrack to the last exquisitely planned-out shot (and indeed to the thudding end of Alexandre Desplat's Herrmannesque score), Roman Polanski's film of The Ghost Writer is one of the most intricately mapped out paranoid-thrillers since the heady post-Watergate days when they were in vogue. But, more than those austere films of plots, counter-plots and figures in shadows, this film has wit, wisdom and a sorcerer's command of the English language. In fact, it feels more like a Hitchcock film than any of Polanski's other thrillers.

And that's due to the precision of the writing—as it should be, since the film is about writing and word-choice and the differences between truth and artifice. Co-scenarists Robert Harris (who wrote the movie source "The Ghost") and Polanski, set up an intricate puzzle to be solved, ala Hitchcock, that is both visually compelling and haunting.

For those of us who live in the Pacific Northwest, it's a familiar story: a ferry pulls into dock, and the off-load of vehicles is stopped by one lone vehicle with no one behind the wheel. Already, there's a story there with several possible outcomes. Did the driver forget he had his car and walked off the ferry? Are they still on the boat, say, in the bathroom?

Or did they fall overboard? Or, for that, were they pushed?

A simple story line—common, really—but it creates the question: where did the driver go? And for a movie it's a natural, because it can be presented in purely visual terms.

Turns out the missing man was a writer—a ghost-writer, specifically, named Mike McAra, and, within days, he's found washed-up on shore with an extremely high blood-alcohol content. McAra, at the time, had been working anonymously on the memoirs of the once popular former Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan, never better *) A new ghost-writer is hired (Ewan McGregor), and is given access to the top-secret manuscript (and the former PM) only by traveling to the high-security compound owned by the publishers to which Lang and his small staff have retreated to work on the book. The new ghost (he is never named, as he wouldn't be on the book) is de-briefed, patted down, scanned, searched and only then is he allowed to read the draft, which is under lock and key and never to leave its present sequestered location.

To his horror, he finds the book a snoozer—he doesn't like political memoirs, anyway—and he's determined to beat it into some kind of readable shape, given a time-limit of only four weeks.

The compound he's staying at on Martha's Vineyard is a concrete nightmare that looks more suited to one of the villains Brosnan battled in the Bond series—high-tech-gadgeted, and constantly surveilled. The minimal staff includes Lang's assistant from the No. 10 days, Amelia Bly (a smart, sharp Kim Cattrall), and overseen by Lang's wife Ruth (the wonderful Olivia Williams from Rushmore and An Education). Soon, complications set in and the building goes into crisis mode as it is revealed that Lang, in his dealings with the U.S. on the war on terror, was involved in the kidnapping and torture of terror-suspects, and may be brought up on charges as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court.

Suddenly, the compound is in a state of siege and that memoir becomes a hot topic: The publisher (Jim Belushi, unrecognizable and nicely brusk) wants the book in two weeks before the headlines get cold, Lang leaves to go on an image-building trip to Washington, the press is bombarding the compound ("the pack is on the move" as Amelia puts it), protesters chant outside the gate, and The Ghost is left there with a few mysteries to unravel. Both he and Lang are nicely metaphored by the compound's gardener trying to keep the dead grass he's just raked into a wheelbarrow on a blustery day.

Leave the exposition at that. But it calls to mind past Polanski films of protagonists walking in the foot-prints of people who have come before, and in danger of losing their own identity to them—not that hard for The Ghost, as he has no identity in the film (Lang merely calls him "man," because he has no head for names).

There are twists and turns, but where it is enticing is the way Polanski mines the material for suspense and humor. No detail goes unused—not the security, not the weather, not the language, not the technology, not the sound. Small glances through slitted curtains may be significant, as are muffled conversations in the next room, or the insistence by a staff-member to use a car on the island, rather than the bicycle. It COULD be innocent. He really MIGHT be concerned about the weather. But, then again...

Then, again. Along with the paranoia are moments of perverse comedy where The Ghost's stealth make him stick out like a sore thumb, or just makes things more difficult for himself. Aware of his position as a replacement, he soon finds himself retracing his predecessor's steps, having to both live up to the trusted writer's reputation, but also to do right by him to find out what happened. If he can escape the same fate.

The performer's are uniformly excellent: McGregor is a perfect protagonist, veering between deer-in-the-headlights and the wily hubris of the Man Who Knows Too Much, Brosnan and his character share a theater background, and the actor allows the arrogance and The Act of being a politician look believable in equal measure. Olivia Williams is by turns steel and rubber in her role, and Cattrall is efficiently perfect—you suspect her immediately. There are also nice turns by Timothy Hutton, Eli Wallach and the ubiquitous Tom Wilkinson, and by Robert Pugh as one of Lang's political rivals.

But it's Polanski's show—he's the Puppet-Master, the audience-conductor like Sir Alfred, and effective enough that you leave the theater with a heightened sense of awareness, looking around corners, at things out-of-place, that the world is a more dangerous place.

And the most deliciously perverse irony is that Polanski had to complete the film in the place that informed the sensibility and interests of the young Hitchcock's film career: a prison cell.**

* Despite his hard-scrabble up-bringing Brosnan has always been better at playing effete characters. It's why his James Bond was something of a bore—Brosnan seems more suited to knocking someone out with a nerve-pinch than a karate chop.

** "I must have been about four or five years old. My father sent me to the police station with a note. The chief of police read it and locked me in a cell for five or ten minutes, saying "This is what we do to naughty boys." Hitchcock/Truffaut p. 17