The Lion King 2019

Cheetahs Never Prosper (in the Uncanny Valley)
or
A Corporation's Belly is Never Full (Mustafa Your Face)

Disney, the corporation, has been systematically making live-action versions of their beloved cartoons. Starting with 101 Dalmations in 1996. they've been doing it for awhile, but it has, in very recent years, increased in frequency to the point where it is now a veritable flood. There have been two versions of The Jungle Book (1994 and 2016, without and with songs, respectively), Tim Burton re-thinkings of Alice in Wonderland and Dumbo, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin and "Wicked" re-imaginings of Sleeping Beauty, with many more on the way including Mulan, Pinocchio, The Little Mermaid, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, even Lilo & Stitch. It's a way to increase the Scrooge McDuck-like coffers, while not really hurting the history—the animated versions are still there, after all, just as are the original stories (where there are)...for those who think they were cheapened by being "Disney-fied." It's not like anything's being replaced and the first versions aren't available.

Now, comes a version of their jewel in the monetary crown—The Lion King, which became a smash in its animated version (Disney's most successful cartoon) as well as in its Tony Award winning Broadway version directed by Julie Taymor. Who would have suspected that such a late bloomer would be its most precious commodity? Certainly not me. I was never a fan of the animated film, thinking it a step down from the Ashman-Menken days of Disney's resurgence. Audiences did not agree, as it produced a lot of revenue for Disney, despite being derivative (being based on Shakespeare's "Hamlet") and having an inferior array of songs (by Tim Rice and Elton John). I was also unnerved that the most interesting character was the villain, and that the film created a fantasy world of animals, especially in the lion kingdom where the females do all the hunting and the males...well, the males just have bragging rights.

I was also found it (oh, I hate using this word) "un-American." Hear me out. The Lion King champions the idea that power is earned the old-fashioned way—you inherit it. No room for democracy in the Pride-lands; young Simba is presented to the world as the Future King and not only do all the animals have to show up for the presentation, they have to accept it—"Here's the next King; Show some respect." Okay, who can resist a baby lion-cub, but the whole idea of the Right of Succession is what the words of the Declaration of Independence—"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..."—was arguing in the most basic words possible; the signers were declaring that you did not have to be born in the house of Windsor or Stuart or Plantagenet in order to hold positions of power over others—better that they be decided by a majority of those to be governed. But, here we are, celebrating "kingly" DNA. Fie on it!

The film opens with a nearly shot-by-shot recreation of the "Circle of Life" sequence (I'm still expecting that to be a slogan for a fast-food restaurant or the tag-line for a Soylent Green remake) as young Simba, the son of King Mustafa (James Earl Jones, the once and future...) and Queen Sarabi (Alfre Woodard), is presented to the animal kingdome as the next line of succession. This throws a bone into the craw of the King's brother, Scar (the wonderful Chiwetel Ejiofor, in a performance much more dynamic than his on-screen performances, taking much more of a Shakespearean tone—in fact, Timothy Dalton's Shakespearean tone). Simba's birth has kicked Scar down a rung from becoming King and, having previously lost in a battle for supremacy with Mustafa, sets his mind to roiling how he can supplant his decreasing fortunes—by either eliminating Simba or Mustafa.

You know how this goes—Scar uses Simba as a lure to do away with the King, sending the young Simba into exile and leaving a vacuum in leadership that Scar is only too happy to fill. 

Simba is found by two jesters Timon and Pumbaa (Billy Eichorn and Seth Rogen and both better than you'd expect) who serve as the "Falstaff" to Simba's Prince Hal/Hamlet teaching him to let go of the past and live for the moment. The odd thing about having Rogen and Eichorn as the characters is that it turns the characters into unambitious loafs rather than mere free spirits—and their directives to eat grubs comes off as very convenient as the juicy worms can't talk—or sing—in protest. Simba grows up through his awkward phase and it is only due to him being found in exile that he returns to fight what is rotten in Scar-land.

It's all very similar and familiar—although the new one's PG rating allows the word "farting" in "Hakuna Matata" (rather than "Please, not in front of the kids!") and there is some suspicious cross-promotion between Disney products.

BIG difference, though, is how the CGI-photo-realistic animals compare to the stylization of animation. In animation, you can get away with anything, like smiling prideful lions or gravity-defying suspensions in the laws of physics (or, as above, "sashaying" animals) that the CGI modelling just won't allow.* The Lion King does NOT take place in The Uncanny Valley, and so anything that smacks of fantasy will get picked apart like digital carrion. And so, director Jon Favreau, cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, and the digital zoo-keepers work overtime to make the thing look like an episode of PBS' "Nature" (I kept wondering when David Attenborough was going to chime in: "The wart-hog, although not burdened by gastric issues, will most typ-ically..."belch"—and with alarming frequency." But, as the animals are doing all the monologing, he isn't needed). It's absolutely beautiful to look at, and often breath-taking in what it presents pictorially, even bringing about a real sense of majesty in realistic settings. It's just, in very subtle ways, off-putting.

The dialog is done subtly, so as to not make it too jarring. But, it also limits the movie in its theatricality. It's a bit less eccentric and a bit less entertaining as a result, a chronic problem with the Disney remakes. The studio is going to have to find a way—a brilliant solution ala Pixar—to cross the wide expanse between imaginative line-drawing and recreating reality in their fantasies.

It's not embarrassing—like, say, what they're trying to do with "Cats." But, it's a good attempt, even if this The Lion King keeps it down to a dull roar.

* There are no plans, as yet, to do a CGI version of Fantasia. Not yet, anyway. But, before they do it, I hope they solve the issue before attempting the sequence with the dancing hippos in tutus. That's something I'd like to see.

Olde Review: Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964) 

"I can no longer allow...Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion...and the international Communist conspiracy...to sap and impurify...
all of our precious bodily fluids!"

Stanley Kubrick was sitting, working out the first draft of a screen-play based on the nuclear thriller "Red Alert" by Peter George, when he came to a scene in which the President of the United States gives out secret information to the Russians in order that they may stop a squad of U.S. B-52's before they can drop their nuclear payload on the USSR and instigate world-wide destruction. Kubrick decided to throw it out because audiences would laugh at such an implausible occurrence. But, as he went along, Kubrick found himself throwing away more and more important plot developments, and slowly peeling away his story.

A fine story it was, too. A lower echelon general goes mad and mis-uses a government-approved contingency plan that would allow him to make nuclear war decisions in the event that Washington D.C. were destroyed. It is up to the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to stop the General and obtain the code that will stop the B-52 attack on Russia.

Kubrick solved his dilemma with an almost suicidally daring decision—to treat this thriller as a comedy, a nightmare-comedy where the grins are the same as produced by rigor mortis. So, have the mad general attack Russia because of their plot to fluoridate our waters and turn the men impotent. Turn the B-52 commander into a Stetson-sporting "Hot Damn!" baboon. Make the head of the Joint Chiefs a gravel-voiced reactionary and a sex maniac. And turn almost every communication device in the film against them. Then turn the title into Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

This decision let Kubrick have his cake and eat it, too, for not only is Strangelove funny, but it is, at the same time, the skillfully realized edge-of-your-seat thriller it originally was. And the comedy aspects cast a realization of what an insane situation the nuclear "stand-off" is. Despite the characterizations, Kubrick managed to pull to present a completely factual account of a possible nuclear accident, right down to the equipment in the B-52's. It is all plausible no matter how broadly drawn the characters (and the Air Force disclaimer at the beginning of the film only adds fuel to this argument). As is Kubrick's style, the most horrendous occurrences will happen and Kubrick will sit back and watch, for his films, by this time in his career, had become cold observations taken, as some have commented, from the view of some extra-terrestrial life, not human, and unmoved by what he sees...with a definite slant, but without a heart.*

And so the comedy bill in 130 Kane is a full one--a perverse comedy of warmth and sweetness and a perverse comedy of cold and destruction--and both excellent in each other's way.

Broadcast on KCMU on Januray 7th, 1977

* That's a pretty tortured last 'graph, and I think I put it there just to have that final statement contrasting Young Frankenstein and Dr. Strangelove—the films were paired together on that night's double-bill.

I no longer think Dr. Strangelove is cold. I think it presents the case and lets the viewer decide. But that stratagem is ham-strung by Kubrick's decision to make it a comedy (he felt that it was going to be laughable no matter what he did, so making it a romp would make it, at the least, entertaining, all the hewing to fact is for naught if you have an audience resenting the lecture). But the best part of Dr. Strangelove is the coda, where plans are made to maintain the status quo, despite that policy already having lead mankind down the path of total annihilation. The scenarists in power take the situation and find out how to make the best of it (usually for them), completely devoid of accountability and conscience or any sense of responsibility for its part in the disaster. It's all about self-justification. 

And all it takes is one mad man to set the intricate death-trap in motion.

Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is timeless.

And should be required viewing every election year.

Nixon's "War-Room" from Zack Snyder's Watchmen (2009)

The Hunt for Red October

The Hunt for Red October (John McTiernan, 1989) We're grudging fans of Alec Baldwin in the BXC household, so every so often it's nice to go back and see "serious actor" Baldwin before he stretched his comic chops (an opportunity made common by this film's seeming omnipresence on cable channels these days). "The Hunt for Red October" was a dry-as-a-bone Tom Clancy novel based on a long-rumored incident involving a Russian nuclear submarine accident that Clancy turned into a cat-and-mouse game between a defecting Russian sub commander, and the American and Russian fleets in the North Atlantic. In the book, the action was sometimes intriguing, but the characters were non-existent, right down to the motivations of Captain Ramius, and the novel's Clancy-stand-in-hero Jack Ryan.

Producer Mace Neufeld (who must have had the patience of a saint given his long-term producing relationship with the late Clancy) turned it into a first-class film of intrigue top-heavy with male actors (by my count the only females are two stewardesses, Gates —Star Trek's "Dr. Crusher"—McFadden as Mrs. Ryan, and the kid who plays Ryan's daughter). So, here's the run-down: Baldwin, Sam Neill, James Earl Jones, Scott Glenn, Courtney B. Vance (making the most of a great part), Richard Jordan, Joss Ackland, Stellan Skarsgard, Peter Firth, Jeffrey Jones, Tim Curry, Fred Thompson, plus comedian Rick Ducommun and I swear I see Michael Biehn in the helicopter scene. And as the man everybody talks about, Sean Connery as the Scottishly-accented Lithuaninan Comdr. Ramius.*

It all works, as a spy/adventure story, as a detective story, a military exercise, and a submarine movie...and a character piece. Nobody comes out and says anything about their feelings, but actions define the characters, and with all the sub-time, there's a lot of celluloid of people standing around talking..and for the most part it's good functional talk that propels the movie along. Plus, you'll come away with a gloss of submarine tactics, of sonar capacities, the strategies of "arming" torpedoes, and a healthy respect for the difficulties of landing a jet-aircraft on a carrier during bad weather.** 

Respect also for Baldwin, who managed to make a human being out of the cypher of Jack Ryan through the force of his own personality--his Ryan is something of a geek, like Ben Affleck's later interpretation--and proved himself an adept for actor imitations (nice skewering of Thompson and Connery there, Alec) Plus, a crisp snap to the brim for suggesting and making good on the overhead shot of Ryan cutting his tether from a helicopter to gain entry to an American sub during a violent storm, and looking UP at the camera to make sure we all know it's actually him (pre-CGI) doing the stunt.

There was minimal CGI involved—and in fact, due to budget constraints, the filming of the underwater scenes were as low-tech as you could get—suspended model shots of subs were puppeteered through underwater landscapes filmed in a dry warehouse filled with smoke. Crude particle and wave generation was all that was needed to complete the image. But it's indicative of the back-to-basics approach to The Hunt for Red October--an old-fashioned sea-hunt that satisfies.

* The script, by Donald E. Stewart and Larry Ferguson (who also wrote himself a good part in it) is augmented by dialog commissioned by Connery from one of his favorite writers at the time, John Milius, his director in The Wind and the Lion, and Milius provided him some lovely chewable dialog throughout the thing, as in...this scene. 

** But my favorite moment in the movie is a brilliant stroke--the smooth transition in dialog from Russian to English as Firth's Political Officer reads a passage from a bible owned by Ramius' late wife: the camera moves in on Firth reading the passage--Revelation 16:15-17--(in Russian) and stops on one commonly-pronounced word--"Armageddon"--and when the camera begins to pull back, he continues...in English. It's a neat trick, perfectly strategized and played...like so much of the movie.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

The Force is Strong with this One
or
"You've Got to Start Some-where..."

Even though, as they say, I had "a bad feeling about" it, maybe this selling "Star Wars" to Disney may have been a good idea.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story comes with the hype and anticipation as any entry in the saga "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" will. But, Rogue One goes in uncharted territory: it doesn't start with the big "Star Wars" crescendo and an opening crawl to infinity and beyond, the cast is unfamiliar and made up of mostly new characters.* And the synopsis we already know—it was in the opening crawl of the first "Star Wars" movie in 1977:

"It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the Death Star, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet."

Rogue One is the story of those rebel spies, and it's a curious mixture of taking things in new directions while being devoted to the first film's original intentions. One thing that's always bothered me about the "Star Wars" films—after that first one that basically exploded a brand new Universe in a Big Bang and being so rich in detail, the sequels—all of them—collapsed on themselves. Sure, they'd visit a new planet with a singular eco-system (an ice planet, a "gas-planet," a "forest moon," a city-wide planet, a lava-planet), but they'd pretty much stage a galactic war in one place—budget considerations, probably. This movie gambit made that supposed galaxy-wide conflict pretty much a bottle-world where an event in one little corner would affect the Universe. Some "Empire."

But, Rogue One takes us all over the space-place, some new, some familiar. In fact, it jets around from one planet to another, not unlike the first film and the only other one that did, pre-tinkering, Revenge of the Sith. Those used to the usual limited-Universe view may actually become a bit confused at some point wondering "what planet is this, again?"

Before we get to the other aspect of it I liked, a brief synopsis: The building of the Death Star has fallen behind schedule and Imperial Director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendehlson) travels to the home of Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelson), one of the original engineers of the project, who has retired to a simple life of farming. Krennic's arrival is not welcome and Galen instructs his wife Lyra and daughter Jyn to go into hiding to avoid detection. Krennic will not hear of Erso's protests that The Death Star will not actually "bring peace to the galaxy" but terror. "You have to start somewhere," replies Krennic (with my favorite line of the movie).

Protests aside, Krennic takes Erso away, Lyra is killed and little Jyn goes into hiding, where her pre-arranged rescuer is Saw Gererra (Forest Whittaker), veteran of The Clone Wars and a leader of the Resistance.

It's 13 years later and the Death Star nears completion, which creates an up-tick of activity among the Rebels: an Imperial pilot named Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed) has defected, charged with taking a holographic message from Galen Erso to the Rebels. Their main base is the fourth moon of Yavin, where they bicker about strategies and have doubts about the Empire's so-called "super-weapon" (after thirteen years, no wonder!) Rook makes it to Gererra, now on the planet Jedha, and who is seen as "too radical" by the main force of the rebellion, and Jyn (all grown up to be Felicity Jones)is rescued from an Imperial Labor Camp by rebel Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and a re-purposed Imperial droid named K-2SO (voiced by Alan Tudyk, who makes the most of his lines) to be taken to Jedha in the hopes of her leading them to Galen, so the rebels can kill him.

Well, they get to Jedha just in time for an uprising against the Rebellion by the populace, aided and abetted by two "Protectors" of "the Whills,"** Cherrut Imwe (Donnie Yen), a blind warrior dedicated to the ways of The Force, but not a Jedi and his companion Baze Malbus (Wen Jiang) a mercenary sharp-shooter (when you're a blind swordsman against Storm-troopers with blasters, it's good to have one of those around!). They all get captured by a group working for Gererra, who has a complicated history with Jyn that needs going over before he can show her the hologram of her father.

In the message, Erso tells his daughter that he has been forced to work on the Death Star against his will, but has taken pains to create a defect in the system that they can find out by procuring the weapon's plans held by the Empire's version of "Iron Mountain" on the planet of Scarif.*** Jyn wants to go to the area of space where the Death-Star is being built to try and rescue her father (which the Rebels are all-too-willing to agree to, since they want to KILL her father).

Things do not go so well for both the Rebels and Krinnic: Krinnic's control of the Death Star is undermined by the knowledge that he has let slip a security breach (oh, those uncontrolled servers) and this allows the Grand Moff Tarkin (Guy Henry, CGI'd to look like Peter Cushing****) to take control of the Death Star. His first target: the rebel base at Jedha. If you've seen "Star Wars," you're all too familiar with the sequence of events—a lot of switch-throwing, reaching for dials, and SSHHHHZZZZT! But, this is not the Death Star at full-power—it's firing just enough to wipe out a city, which it does with extreme effectiveness in a mult-plumed mushroom cloud. As K-2SO says, "There's a problem on the horizon. There IS no horizon!!"

The man battle and where things come to a head is the security facility on Scarif, which features an all-out assault between the Empire and the Rebels to get hold of those plans and director Gareth Edwards (he directed 2014's austere and weirdly effective version of Godzilla), where the disparate band of fighters with aerial support from Yavin fight to get those plans against everything the Empire has to throw at them, including things we only saw in the sequels. It's a terrific sequence that has genuine moments of edge-of-your-seat direness, and in case you think there's going to be a follow-up to this movie, there isn't...unless you count the original Episode IV.

And that's one of the things I like about Rogue One: it is its own movie, to be sure, but it is so tuned to the zeitgeist on the inspiration for "Star Wars" that it seems less removed from Lucas' sources than even Lucas managed. There are strains of Kurosawa throughout this, a level of disparity among the roles, not just in ethnicity but also in background story. Some are inspired by religion, some by revenge, some just because they're bad-asses itching for a fight. This Magnificent 7 are all scruffy, none of them polished—even K-2S0 is a might rusty—and the world they fight in is smudged, lived in and full of little goo-gah's that don't call attention to themselves, but exist as if they're part of the real world, not because they serve a dramatic purpose in the story-telling. 

The TIE-fighter doesn't appear in the movie, but it sure is cool-looking, in'it?

There's a strain of seriousness in the story-telling (not that there aren't lots of laughs along the way), it's just that Rogue One plays for keeps and is a bit more mature in its story-telling and less of (as one friend puts it) "a cheese-fest" than the rest of the "Star Wars" series. This is what happens when a "Star Wars" maker gets "serious" (oh, and is talented...there are way too many serious fan-flicks out there that suck) and is faithful to the spirit but not slavish to the style of a series. Great things can come of that. 

Rogue One doesn't diminish "Star Wars" (as I think The Force Awakens does). It builds on it, makes it a bigger Universe with more potential.

And that's what the series has needed since it started making sequels.

* Oh, don't worry. There are a lot of familiar faces...and face-plates...scattered throughout the movie, some of whom may surprise you.

** "The Whills" is a piece of Star Wars arcana dating way back to the novelization of Star Wars (released before the movie came out) written by Lucas and Alan Dean Foster based on Lucas' notes, the original "Star Wars" story was taken from "The Journal of the Whills" which was a tome...like the Bible...of ancient stories of the Galaxy. I remember there was a line attributed to Princess Leia Organa at the beginning—"They were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Of course, they became heroes."

*** They might have saved a half-hour of screen-time of Galen had just said in his already super-secret message that he took pains to smuggle out: "Look there's this thermal exhaust port, right below the main port—it's about two meters wide that if you send a proton torpedo down it, it'll set off a chain reaction and blow the whole thing up!. Get a really sharp pilot, you know, like a moisture-farmer who can bull's-eye womp-rats, like in Beggar's Canyon on Tattooine." But, he doesn't say that. He tells them to go get the plans at Scarif and figure it out for themselves. What, you can only have one secret per hologram in this Universe?

****